6 ms·

Is that really practical though? I mean, it makes sense financially and in terms of how we usually do transition, but we’re frankly running out of time, and may

Is that really practical though? I mean, it makes sense financially and in terms of how we usually do transition, but we’re frankly running out of time, and maybe we need to be radical rather than practical. I’m old, I’ve seen how we’ve ignored the warnings for the past 30 years. Worse yet, if you ask people on when sollutuons can be ready, they say 10-20 years, and we only have one decade left to stop our own destruction.

thrower123 8y ago
The radicals fucked us all over by agitating against nuke power in the 70s. Free love and climate change, man.
- throwaway12iii 8y ago
  The ocean is filled with nuclear waste world wide from one plant leaking. You can't eat food grown in huge areas of Europe. The last generation plants were a military money hack. The plants that got funded interestingly were good at producing materials used for bombs. Not good designs that are financially viable without military money. Or even designs that are safe. They are too expensive to close down properly. That's why not one has been closed down in the USA. That's not a safe design. If the military jerks didn't hijack things so the power plants were designed wrong we would probably have had better designs made and more research going into the right directions. Instead we have a sea of toxic waste and bullshit plants to clean up. Blaming environmentalists is fucking stupid. What's your counter argument? Something like... War is peace, hate is love, ignorance is strength? Bullshit.
  - thrower123 8y ago
    We effectively stalled development at those shitty plutonium makers because the greens got a hair across their ass and protested so much that they made it impossible to build better designs.
    - paganel 8y ago
      As things stand right now nuclear power is a single point of failure because (as the OP rightly points out) it has been used and is still being used by different military organizations in order to build nuclear bombs, which nuclear bombs can literally wipe us all at this very moment, not in 10 years’ time, not in 20 years’ time, now. Yeah, I know the whole talk about how nuclear bombs have stopped a possible WWIII in its tracks (which is only proof of how schizoid we are as a species at this stage of our societal development) but I also know that single point of failures are really, really bad.
      - thrower123 8y ago
        I can make a truck bomb from commercial fertilizers, or I can grow a whole bunch of wheat and corn. Just because you can fuck things up with a particular technology isn't a great reason for disallowing the positive usages of it.
        paganel 8y ago
        It’s pretty hard to blow up the entire world with commercial fertilizers while we can literally make the whole world un-habitable right now with “the help” of the existing nuclear arsenal. Scale matters.
        AlexCoventry 8y ago
        In terms of pound-per-equivalent-pounds-of-TNT, the most powerful nuclear weapon is 7 million times more powerful than ANFO. That's a lot of fertilizer! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent#RE_factor_examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent#RE_factor_examp... See the ANFO and the "B41 nuclear bomb" entries in the tables linked there.
        pjc50 8y ago
        > I can make a truck bomb from commercial fertilizers .. which is why in many countries they're either a semi-controlled substance, or deliberately adulterated with substances to fizzle the explosion. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6548961.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6548961.stm
  - Flip-per 8y ago
    > You can't eat food grown in huge areas of Europe. Do you mean Tschernobyl? It depends how you define 'huge areas in Europe', there is a good overview on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#National_and_international_spread_of_radioactive_substances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#National_an... According to this table, 10 % of Austria is contamined with 37–185 kBq/m2 (lowest contamination of this table). You can eat food grown anywhere in Austria, I do not know where 'food not edible' starts. But just the fact that you now have to discuss such things is wrong enough.
- dang 8y ago
  Would you please stop posting to HN like this? It breaks several of the site guidelines. Please read and follow them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - thrower123 8y ago
    I'm not sure what that means? Posting facts that oppose common narratives? I'm not going to do that.
eej71 8y ago
I'm old too and I truly believe that we will continue to be here 10-20 years from now with roughly the same world we've always had.
- krisdol 8y ago
  10-20 years ago places I lived and remembered being quite heavily snowy in the winter just get a bit of dusting at best now. New England has lost over 600 ski areas. There are fewer and fewer places with good enough conditions to grow coffee (a shame as I feel like the culture around fine coffee is just now coming into existence in the US). Enjoy oysters, clams, and scallops while you can as ocean acidification is killing them in droves. As soil heats due to global warming, it releases carbon dioxide, accelerating these effects. I don't think the world is the same for anyone working in these industries or in tourism. Folks on HN are also generally isolated from the effects of the kinds of droughts that caused the Arab Spring, or from having to home refugees of climate change whose islands are disappearing to the rising sea levels.
  - thrower123 8y ago
    At least with the ski areas, gross mismanagement had a significant part to play. Saddleback mountain doesn't get any less snow than Sugarloaf or Sunday River, but it has been repeatedly run into the ground.
- gglitch 8y ago
  I'm up for a bet on whether Miami will be the same in 20 years.
  - eej71 8y ago
    As in you think it would be "underwater" like venice?
- pjc50 8y ago
  Same world in most of the non-coastal parts of the West? Probably. Same world in a lot of low-lying or heat-sensitive third world countries? Probably not. It has been argued that Yemen is the first resource exhaustion war - the country has extremely limited water supplies. The West is going to have to look at the possibility of a lot of refugees in the future, with the option of taking them in or watching them die.
goatlover 8y ago
Why is it destruction and not just it will be more costly to adapt? Why suppose that we can't figure out a way to scrub C02 from the atmosphere, or offset it some other way? Why can't humanity, who managed to survive an ice age with stone aged tools, figure out a way to survive a warmer planet with modern tech?
- nradov 8y ago
  Cold is easier to survive than heat. Humans can't do any useful work outside or even survive once the web bulb temperature reaches a certain point. For example at 90% humidity the temperature limit is 35℃. Some tropical areas will become essentially uninhabitable. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02082017/heatwaves-deadly-heat-humidity-wet-bulb-human-survivability-threshold https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02082017/heatwaves-deadly...
  - fooker 8y ago
    >For example at 90% humidity the temperature limit is 35℃. This seems weird. A lot of tropical places are both hotter and more humid than this limit, and people seem to have adapted.
    - mrob 8y ago
      >A lot of tropical places are both hotter and more humid than this limit Where? As far as I can tell, the highest wet-bulb temperatures are around the Persian Gulf, and although they sometimes come close to the human survival limit, they do not yet exceed it. https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2017/12/22/humidity-may-prove-breaking-point-for-some-areas-as-temperatures-rise-says-study/ https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2017/12/22/humidity-may-prove-...
      - fooker 8y ago
        https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/india/kolkata/historic?month=5&year=2018 https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/india/kolkata/historic?m...
gwbas1c 8y ago
Flow batteries, where charged electrolyte can be stockpiled, are under heavy development. These would allow us to finally make the grid 100% fossil fuel free. Also, I firmly believe that we can figure out how to make things like methane and oil from biological processes; it's just that extracting it from the ground is cheaper. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I think we're quickly getting to a point where this is a political problem instead of a technology problem.
- nine_k 8y ago
  Making methane and oil from known biological processes is quite inefficient, even if a lot of energy input comes just from exposure to sunlight. We have to either bio-engineer organisms to make them better producers (as we do for producing medicines, etc), or use any of the non-biologic processes for fuel synthesis, like Fischer-Tropsch.
  - gwbas1c 8y ago
    "it's just that extracting it from the ground is cheaper"

thrower123 8y ago

The radicals fucked us all over by agitating against nuke power in the 70s. Free love and climate change, man.

throwaway12iii 8y ago
The ocean is filled with nuclear waste world wide from one plant leaking. You can't eat food grown in huge areas of Europe. The last generation plants were a military money hack. The plants that got funded interestingly were good at producing materials used for bombs. Not good designs that are financially viable without military money. Or even designs that are safe. They are too expensive to close down properly. That's why not one has been closed down in the USA. That's not a safe design. If the military jerks didn't hijack things so the power plants were designed wrong we would probably have had better designs made and more research going into the right directions. Instead we have a sea of toxic waste and bullshit plants to clean up. Blaming environmentalists is fucking stupid. What's your counter argument? Something like... War is peace, hate is love, ignorance is strength? Bullshit.
- thrower123 8y ago
  We effectively stalled development at those shitty plutonium makers because the greens got a hair across their ass and protested so much that they made it impossible to build better designs.
  - paganel 8y ago
    As things stand right now nuclear power is a single point of failure because (as the OP rightly points out) it has been used and is still being used by different military organizations in order to build nuclear bombs, which nuclear bombs can literally wipe us all at this very moment, not in 10 years’ time, not in 20 years’ time, now. Yeah, I know the whole talk about how nuclear bombs have stopped a possible WWIII in its tracks (which is only proof of how schizoid we are as a species at this stage of our societal development) but I also know that single point of failures are really, really bad.
    - thrower123 8y ago
      I can make a truck bomb from commercial fertilizers, or I can grow a whole bunch of wheat and corn. Just because you can fuck things up with a particular technology isn't a great reason for disallowing the positive usages of it.
      - paganel 8y ago
        It’s pretty hard to blow up the entire world with commercial fertilizers while we can literally make the whole world un-habitable right now with “the help” of the existing nuclear arsenal. Scale matters.
      - AlexCoventry 8y ago
        In terms of pound-per-equivalent-pounds-of-TNT, the most powerful nuclear weapon is 7 million times more powerful than ANFO. That's a lot of fertilizer! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent#RE_factor_examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent#RE_factor_examp... See the ANFO and the "B41 nuclear bomb" entries in the tables linked there.
      - pjc50 8y ago
        > I can make a truck bomb from commercial fertilizers .. which is why in many countries they're either a semi-controlled substance, or deliberately adulterated with substances to fizzle the explosion. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6548961.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6548961.stm
- Flip-per 8y ago
  > You can't eat food grown in huge areas of Europe. Do you mean Tschernobyl? It depends how you define 'huge areas in Europe', there is a good overview on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#National_and_international_spread_of_radioactive_substances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#National_an... According to this table, 10 % of Austria is contamined with 37–185 kBq/m2 (lowest contamination of this table). You can eat food grown anywhere in Austria, I do not know where 'food not edible' starts. But just the fact that you now have to discuss such things is wrong enough.
dang 8y ago
Would you please stop posting to HN like this? It breaks several of the site guidelines. Please read and follow them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- thrower123 8y ago
  I'm not sure what that means? Posting facts that oppose common narratives? I'm not going to do that.

eej71 8y ago

I'm old too and I truly believe that we will continue to be here 10-20 years from now with roughly the same world we've always had.

krisdol 8y ago
10-20 years ago places I lived and remembered being quite heavily snowy in the winter just get a bit of dusting at best now. New England has lost over 600 ski areas. There are fewer and fewer places with good enough conditions to grow coffee (a shame as I feel like the culture around fine coffee is just now coming into existence in the US). Enjoy oysters, clams, and scallops while you can as ocean acidification is killing them in droves. As soil heats due to global warming, it releases carbon dioxide, accelerating these effects. I don't think the world is the same for anyone working in these industries or in tourism. Folks on HN are also generally isolated from the effects of the kinds of droughts that caused the Arab Spring, or from having to home refugees of climate change whose islands are disappearing to the rising sea levels.
- thrower123 8y ago
  At least with the ski areas, gross mismanagement had a significant part to play. Saddleback mountain doesn't get any less snow than Sugarloaf or Sunday River, but it has been repeatedly run into the ground.
gglitch 8y ago
I'm up for a bet on whether Miami will be the same in 20 years.
- eej71 8y ago
  As in you think it would be "underwater" like venice?
pjc50 8y ago
Same world in most of the non-coastal parts of the West? Probably. Same world in a lot of low-lying or heat-sensitive third world countries? Probably not. It has been argued that Yemen is the first resource exhaustion war - the country has extremely limited water supplies. The West is going to have to look at the possibility of a lot of refugees in the future, with the option of taking them in or watching them die.

goatlover 8y ago

Why is it destruction and not just it will be more costly to adapt? Why suppose that we can't figure out a way to scrub C02 from the atmosphere, or offset it some other way? Why can't humanity, who managed to survive an ice age with stone aged tools, figure out a way to survive a warmer planet with modern tech?

nradov 8y ago
Cold is easier to survive than heat. Humans can't do any useful work outside or even survive once the web bulb temperature reaches a certain point. For example at 90% humidity the temperature limit is 35℃. Some tropical areas will become essentially uninhabitable. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02082017/heatwaves-deadly-heat-humidity-wet-bulb-human-survivability-threshold https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02082017/heatwaves-deadly...
- fooker 8y ago
  >For example at 90% humidity the temperature limit is 35℃. This seems weird. A lot of tropical places are both hotter and more humid than this limit, and people seem to have adapted.
  - mrob 8y ago
    >A lot of tropical places are both hotter and more humid than this limit Where? As far as I can tell, the highest wet-bulb temperatures are around the Persian Gulf, and although they sometimes come close to the human survival limit, they do not yet exceed it. https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2017/12/22/humidity-may-prove-breaking-point-for-some-areas-as-temperatures-rise-says-study/ https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2017/12/22/humidity-may-prove-...
    - fooker 8y ago
      https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/india/kolkata/historic?month=5&year=2018 https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/india/kolkata/historic?m...

gwbas1c 8y ago

Flow batteries, where charged electrolyte can be stockpiled, are under heavy development. These would allow us to finally make the grid 100% fossil fuel free. Also, I firmly believe that we can figure out how to make things like methane and oil from biological processes; it's just that extracting it from the ground is cheaper. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I think we're quickly getting to a point where this is a political problem instead of a technology problem.

nine_k 8y ago
Making methane and oil from known biological processes is quite inefficient, even if a lot of energy input comes just from exposure to sunlight. We have to either bio-engineer organisms to make them better producers (as we do for producing medicines, etc), or use any of the non-biologic processes for fuel synthesis, like Fischer-Tropsch.
- gwbas1c 8y ago
  "it's just that extracting it from the ground is cheaper"