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I have grown a thick skin to climate change alarmist news from UK media. They seem so defeatist instead of trying to fix the actual issue.

ryanmercer 7y ago
>They seem so defeatist instead of trying to fix the actual issue. Because fixing it would be the greatest engineering project mankind has ever attempted. Y Combinator even admits that it is a daunting task via their http://carbon.ycombinator.com/ http://carbon.ycombinator.com/ If we look at the desert flooding idea http://carbon.ycombinator.com/desert-flooding/ http://carbon.ycombinator.com/desert-flooding/ >Moving vast quantities of water - 9 trillion m3 per year - is the main energy requirement of the project. Desalination, at this scale and its current rate of energy efficiency, would itself require 10.8 tw of additional solar capacity, compared to 6.4 tw of total global power capacity in 2016. While this energy requirement dwarfs the energy of constructing and maintaining the system of reservoirs, the millions of drones necessary to do this will add significant additional energy requirements. Comparison for the water - an Olympic size pool is 2,500 m3. That's 3.6 billion Olympic size pools, annually, for that proposed solution to the problem and would require more energy than we current produce just to pump the water and handle the necessary desalination. And like I told Sam last summer when disagreeing about this as even a remotely plausible idea - this solution is almost certainly going to cause drastic global weather pattern changes and it is worth noting the Sahara actually fertilizes the rain forests of South America so this project could have potentially devastating consequences on its own. This is arguably the simplest solution that we currently have on paper and likely the 'easiest' to do. However simply producing the materials needed would add a staggering amount of CO2, the concrete you'd need to pour for the thousands of power plants to power it would, you'd have to do something with all of the brine from the desalination process and dumping it back into the ocean would absolutely destroy any local habitats, you're going to change weather patterns and likely start dumping a lot more rain somewhere, you're going to stop fertilizing the rain forests of South America, and you're going to have to do something with the insane amount of algae you are growing to actually sequester the carbon (plus you'll have to be introducing enough minerals into the water to allow the algae to grow, something that would require massive strip mining). Unless a fleet of alien trade ships show up in orbit soon and go "hey we have these machines, they'll process the carbon out of the air and make solid carbon cubes, don't worry they have power cells that will last centuries. But, in exchange, we'd like extrasolar rights to your greatest sitcoms and 3/4 of the carbon cubes" then, we probably aren't going to fix the problem. To even retard the problem, we need to immediately stop using all fossil fuels. Instead China is still getting 70%~ of its power from coal, is still building hundreds of coal power plants, is putting millions of new drivers on the roads each year and is building an insane number of new roads and bridges that are using insane amounts of concrete and asphalt. Not to mention all of the other countries. It's just not realistic to cease all greenhouse gas emissions short of perhaps a CME forcing us to by frying most of the world's electronics. It is a gloomy situation and it is going to likely require tens of revolutionary inventions in the very near future if we want to get back to even how it was 10 years ago.
- merpnderp 7y ago
  It’s because if people were actually serious, they’d either stop using 90% of the power they use or be investing heavily in nuclear power, both making it cheaper and safer. There’s no short or mid term solutions for large scale batteries that will make renewables a viable alternative. But if we’d started moving from coal to nuclear when this crisis first was understood, it’d already be over.
  - ryanmercer 7y ago
    It's not simply people being serious. The world has billions of people that don't know the first thing about climate change or the dangers of global warming. There are billions of people that simply do not know how much greenhouse gasses are produced as a byproduct of their daily choices in life, or what the consequences are. Even talking to some incredibly wealthy people that want to try and solve this, you quickly realize they just do not understand. Take YC, YC came out with the page I linked in my previous comment last year yet they continue to fly founders out for in-person 10-minute interviews when they could do it via skype. One round-trip flight from New York to Europe or to San Francisco creates a warming effect equivalent to 2 or 3 tons of carbon dioxide per person, a 10-minute skype chat would be insanely less as 1GB of data transfer is roughly 1kg of CO2. YC knows carbon is an issue but then prefers in-person interviews for 'finalist' startups as they've stated it works better than video for their needs and this goes for many other companies, individuals, agencies, governments etc. People are like 'yeah, I drink free trade coffee, I recycle, I ride share to save the environment' then you pull up their dating profile and/or social media accounts and here they are in one photo with penguins, three photos later they are in a jungle with an elephant, 2 photos later they're on a ski slope with a caption "3rd country this year, 17 total!"... !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The problem is, people aren't going to care until it is already too late (which is in the next 5-10 years if we don't drastically change). When multiple seasons of crop failures drive up food prices, when heat waves kill millions, when droughts and water shortages start affecting millions, when flooding seriously hurts crops... Wait, Australia was about 20% light on grains last year. Most of the midwest has had insane rains this year which is directly impacting crop planting. Cities in India are literally running out of water. Heat waves in France are threatening to shut down a nuclear reactor as cooling water runs out. Oh. It's already happening. Most people don't know and don't care. :/

ryanmercer 7y ago

>They seem so defeatist instead of trying to fix the actual issue. Because fixing it would be the greatest engineering project mankind has ever attempted. Y Combinator even admits that it is a daunting task via their http://carbon.ycombinator.com/ http://carbon.ycombinator.com/ If we look at the desert flooding idea http://carbon.ycombinator.com/desert-flooding/ http://carbon.ycombinator.com/desert-flooding/ >Moving vast quantities of water - 9 trillion m3 per year - is the main energy requirement of the project. Desalination, at this scale and its current rate of energy efficiency, would itself require 10.8 tw of additional solar capacity, compared to 6.4 tw of total global power capacity in 2016. While this energy requirement dwarfs the energy of constructing and maintaining the system of reservoirs, the millions of drones necessary to do this will add significant additional energy requirements. Comparison for the water - an Olympic size pool is 2,500 m3. That's 3.6 billion Olympic size pools, annually, for that proposed solution to the problem and would require more energy than we current produce just to pump the water and handle the necessary desalination. And like I told Sam last summer when disagreeing about this as even a remotely plausible idea - this solution is almost certainly going to cause drastic global weather pattern changes and it is worth noting the Sahara actually fertilizes the rain forests of South America so this project could have potentially devastating consequences on its own. This is arguably the simplest solution that we currently have on paper and likely the 'easiest' to do. However simply producing the materials needed would add a staggering amount of CO2, the concrete you'd need to pour for the thousands of power plants to power it would, you'd have to do something with all of the brine from the desalination process and dumping it back into the ocean would absolutely destroy any local habitats, you're going to change weather patterns and likely start dumping a lot more rain somewhere, you're going to stop fertilizing the rain forests of South America, and you're going to have to do something with the insane amount of algae you are growing to actually sequester the carbon (plus you'll have to be introducing enough minerals into the water to allow the algae to grow, something that would require massive strip mining). Unless a fleet of alien trade ships show up in orbit soon and go "hey we have these machines, they'll process the carbon out of the air and make solid carbon cubes, don't worry they have power cells that will last centuries. But, in exchange, we'd like extrasolar rights to your greatest sitcoms and 3/4 of the carbon cubes" then, we probably aren't going to fix the problem. To even retard the problem, we need to immediately stop using all fossil fuels. Instead China is still getting 70%~ of its power from coal, is still building hundreds of coal power plants, is putting millions of new drivers on the roads each year and is building an insane number of new roads and bridges that are using insane amounts of concrete and asphalt. Not to mention all of the other countries. It's just not realistic to cease all greenhouse gas emissions short of perhaps a CME forcing us to by frying most of the world's electronics. It is a gloomy situation and it is going to likely require tens of revolutionary inventions in the very near future if we want to get back to even how it was 10 years ago.

merpnderp 7y ago
It’s because if people were actually serious, they’d either stop using 90% of the power they use or be investing heavily in nuclear power, both making it cheaper and safer. There’s no short or mid term solutions for large scale batteries that will make renewables a viable alternative. But if we’d started moving from coal to nuclear when this crisis first was understood, it’d already be over.
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  It's not simply people being serious. The world has billions of people that don't know the first thing about climate change or the dangers of global warming. There are billions of people that simply do not know how much greenhouse gasses are produced as a byproduct of their daily choices in life, or what the consequences are. Even talking to some incredibly wealthy people that want to try and solve this, you quickly realize they just do not understand. Take YC, YC came out with the page I linked in my previous comment last year yet they continue to fly founders out for in-person 10-minute interviews when they could do it via skype. One round-trip flight from New York to Europe or to San Francisco creates a warming effect equivalent to 2 or 3 tons of carbon dioxide per person, a 10-minute skype chat would be insanely less as 1GB of data transfer is roughly 1kg of CO2. YC knows carbon is an issue but then prefers in-person interviews for 'finalist' startups as they've stated it works better than video for their needs and this goes for many other companies, individuals, agencies, governments etc. People are like 'yeah, I drink free trade coffee, I recycle, I ride share to save the environment' then you pull up their dating profile and/or social media accounts and here they are in one photo with penguins, three photos later they are in a jungle with an elephant, 2 photos later they're on a ski slope with a caption "3rd country this year, 17 total!"... !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The problem is, people aren't going to care until it is already too late (which is in the next 5-10 years if we don't drastically change). When multiple seasons of crop failures drive up food prices, when heat waves kill millions, when droughts and water shortages start affecting millions, when flooding seriously hurts crops... Wait, Australia was about 20% light on grains last year. Most of the midwest has had insane rains this year which is directly impacting crop planting. Cities in India are literally running out of water. Heat waves in France are threatening to shut down a nuclear reactor as cooling water runs out. Oh. It's already happening. Most people don't know and don't care. :/