5 ms·

What should we do?

by blhack 7y ago

What should we do?

kjar 7y ago
Get a time machine
egloo 7y ago
Throw as much engineering and innovation at the problems as possible. Conservation alone is no longer sufficient. And I meant problems. As in, protecting the food supply chain, protecting the electronics supply chain, adopting a defense posture to prepare for a far more desperate global population, finding ways to save coastal cities or quickly relocate people, throwing everything at the wall for innovative new exotic energy generation and storage systems (far past nuclear) and, most importantly, preserving the knowledge and means of humanity. We're past the point where pretending this will get fixed politically is reasonable. We need to assume it won't and work to protect the future in spite of the horrors to come.
- seiferteric 7y ago
  I wonder why ocean fertilization isn't talked about much anymore? All the articles I found about it were from ~10 years ago, with some vague conclusion that we shouldn't do it because it might be bad for the life on the ocean floor or something. There are no good solutions though, nothing will be perfect.
  - Blackthorn 7y ago
    Haven't read anything about it in a while but I believe the conclusion was it wouldn't work, basically because it would take way too much iron to even start to make a dent.
    - Robotbeat 7y ago
      That wasn't the conclusion. It'd make a dent, but not sufficient by itself. The real reason is people are skeptical of the wisdom of geoengineering in general. But I think we will almost certainly have to look at it.
      - seiferteric 7y ago
        This is what I read as well. Couple this with planting 1e12's trees, maybe aerosol injection and possibly buy some time.
    - mdorazio 7y ago
      There wasn't a real conclusion because the tests were always small. Governments became afraid of triggering toxic blooms and otherwise messing up coastal ecosystems and then being liable for damages, so they put a moratorium on testing [1]. Then in 2012 someone illegally tried it again anyway, with mixed results [2]. Basically it's like most geoengineering projects - everyone is too afraid of negative consequences to really try anything at scale, so instead we get endless inconclusive studies. Personally, I think we're going to pretty quickly get to the point where we need to make decisions about what negative consequences are acceptable to prevent complete environmental catastrophe. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/453704b https://www.nature.com/articles/453704b [2] http://www.planetexperts.com/two-years-russ-george-illegally-dumped-iron-pacific-salmon-catches-400/ http://www.planetexperts.com/two-years-russ-george-illegally...
falcolas 7y ago
Use technology to survive in an inhospitable atmosphere. Probably without any dependency on the atmosphere outside our cities in the long run. Cleaning the atmosphere is harder when you’re just trying to survive. EDIT: Inhospitable atmosphere, to my mind, includes weather, drought, flash floods, etc. Not just the chemical makeup of the air.
- pdonis 7y ago
  > Use technology to survive in an inhospitable atmosphere. Oh, please. The atmosphere will be perfectly hospitable. This is just FUD.
  - falcolas 7y ago
    Really? Everything I’ve heard indicates a fairly dramatic change in the weather patterns as our global temperatures rise by even 1-2 degrees. The atmosphere is not just the chemical makeup, it’s the weather it creates. The droughts. The flash floods. The unnaturally cold winters, and unnaturally hot summers. Or vice versa - neither is very good for us.
    - pdonis 7y ago
      > Everything I’ve heard indicates a fairly dramatic change in the weather patterns as our global temperatures rise by even 1-2 degrees. These are not predictions based on data. They are predictions based on models--the same models that have been overpredicting warming for several decades now. The actual data says that extreme events have not been getting more frequent. Their consequences have been getting more severe because so many more people live in areas that are primarily affected by them. That's not a climate change problem: that's a problem of mismanagement and politics. The southwest US has been a desert for centuries if not millennia--now all of a sudden lack of water is a problem? Anyone with half a brain could have seen that coming. Coastal cities are finding problems with drainage? Sea levels have been rising since the last Ice Age ended, and if your coastal city in a hurricane zone suddenly has a problem with a storm surge, that just means you've been ignoring the problem for too long. Yes, the climate is changing; it's always been changing, and it will keep changing. People need to be given accurate information about risks and the tools to adapt to change.
tanilama 7y ago
Nothing. Too late. Our current global political structure can't coordinate such action. So what will left to be done is dealing with the mess. Big countries will have a lot more room to weather this, but small countries are on their own.
abootstrapper 7y ago
I don’t mean to pick on you, but this question comes up in every single climate change post. Answering it is exhausting. We need a climate change FAQ. The simple answer is end fossil fuels. How do we do that? Vote, eat less meat, bike ride, strike, protest, invest in solar, boycott, reuse, buy less, telecommute, etc. Use your imagination. Do something, do everything, the end goal is we all stop releasing sequestered green house gasses into the atmosphere.
- rewgs 7y ago
  > eat less meat While eating less or no meat is a big part of it, it's more nuanced than it's often presented. For instance, this talk provides a very, very good argument for keeping livestock. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI Not disagreeing with you, only replying to you for visibility/to add on to what you said.
- pdonis 7y ago
  > The simple answer is end fossil fuels. How do we do that? Build nuclear power plants. All the other things are fine, but if you really want to end fossil fuels, you need a non-fossil-fuel source of reliable base load power. Nuclear is the only one we have. Other sources are fine, but they can't produce reliable base load power. And, btw, I think we should end fossil fuels even if it turns out not to make much of a difference to climate change (which might well be the case since all of the models that have a high sensitivity to CO2 built in have been over-predicting warming for several decades now).
  - daenz 7y ago
    >Build nuclear power plants. And to all the people who say "they take too long there isn't enough time": the best time to start nuclear power plant construction was 10 years ago, the second best time is now.
    - zaroth 7y ago
      Except by the time the plant is done being built (10 years late and 10x over budget) renewables will have surpassed it in terms of cost for deployed GW, and grid-scale and consumer batteries will be at the point where we can store and demand shift enough power to use all the renewables we can bring online. Renewables has already surpassed nuclear in the US. I think the new reality is the best time to build a nuke plant is never.
pdonis 7y ago
Methane is a valuable resource, so it should be cost effective for somebody to capture it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dougmwne 7y ago
  Certainly not. Methane may have some value, but it is quite plentiful and fracking has made it cheap. Oil drillers already flare it off when it's inconvenient and uneconomical to capture. You're talking a methane release spread across continents, then dispersed into the atmosphere in parts per billion.
dv_dt 7y ago
Green new deal applying financing to scaling known replacement tech like wind solar batteries and electric vehicles. Also separate programs to identifying war scale R&D to identify topics and research them widely. Adjust contracting criteria for ability to pass scaling gates instead of financial or other criteria (this is the war terms for us). Labor programs for rapid training and factory capital deployment.
mirimir 7y ago
Well, cutting CO2 and CH4 emissions won't have much impact on decade scales. But we should still do that, to mitigate longer term damage. What could help shorter term is adaptation. Moving cities to higher ground, away from oceans. And building dikes, where it's workable. But not in Florida or New Orleans. Maybe not even for New York City. Also moving populations to areas that require less air conditioning. And moving farmland from areas that are becoming more arid. So generally, poleward. And then there's immigration. As others move generally poleward. Targets could block immigration, and build walls where feasible. As the US and UK are doing. Or they could focus on integrating immigrants, as some EU nations are doing. That seems like the best long term strategy. Otherwise, you're going to have huge refugee camps, near borders, and probably end up killing lots of people. And then we have social and political implications. I have no clue about that. Except to extrapolate current trends. So socially, that would be increased concentration of wealth, with the wealthy increasingly isolating themselves from the poor. And politically, increased authoritarian control, with associated surveillance. Interesting times, for sure.
iikoolpp 7y ago
Nothing. We're fucked. The world will die in the pursuit of expanding growth and profit.
torpfactory 7y ago
Geoengineering is really the only realistic option if this is the case. Sulfate aerosol injection is by far the most promising. And cheap - maybe 5-8b per year [1]. I'm not claiming this is a good idea in any way. As they say: desperate times call for desperate measures. We could buy ourselves several decades to sort our (as humans) shit out. We don't understand the unintended consequences very well, but at least this technique mimics natural processes (volcanic eruptions). [1]https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/3/034019 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/3/034...
- strainer 7y ago
  I've a hunch that a Lagrange point sun shield is becoming quite affordable with recent reductions in cost of launching to space. A sunshield consisting of many self orientating mirror bearing craft would have the advantage of being able to be quickly attenuated if required, even filtering more or less light on particular continents or weather systems.
- jaakl 7y ago
  It could win you some time to resolve real issues, wont work as permanent solution as stopping would have quick devasting results.
unsignedchar 7y ago
Document our failures as a species for the next one that attempts to ‘civilize’?
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Or for our next time around the cycle. At which point I think of Mote Prime[1]. Their "museums" were to document tech for rediscovery each time around the cycle, after their civilisation crashed. [1] Mote in God's Eye, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

What should we do?

by blhack 7y ago

What should we do?

kjar 7y ago

Get a time machine

egloo 7y ago

Throw as much engineering and innovation at the problems as possible. Conservation alone is no longer sufficient. And I meant problems. As in, protecting the food supply chain, protecting the electronics supply chain, adopting a defense posture to prepare for a far more desperate global population, finding ways to save coastal cities or quickly relocate people, throwing everything at the wall for innovative new exotic energy generation and storage systems (far past nuclear) and, most importantly, preserving the knowledge and means of humanity. We're past the point where pretending this will get fixed politically is reasonable. We need to assume it won't and work to protect the future in spite of the horrors to come.

seiferteric 7y ago
I wonder why ocean fertilization isn't talked about much anymore? All the articles I found about it were from ~10 years ago, with some vague conclusion that we shouldn't do it because it might be bad for the life on the ocean floor or something. There are no good solutions though, nothing will be perfect.
- Blackthorn 7y ago
  Haven't read anything about it in a while but I believe the conclusion was it wouldn't work, basically because it would take way too much iron to even start to make a dent.
  - Robotbeat 7y ago
    That wasn't the conclusion. It'd make a dent, but not sufficient by itself. The real reason is people are skeptical of the wisdom of geoengineering in general. But I think we will almost certainly have to look at it.
    - seiferteric 7y ago
      This is what I read as well. Couple this with planting 1e12's trees, maybe aerosol injection and possibly buy some time.
  - mdorazio 7y ago
    There wasn't a real conclusion because the tests were always small. Governments became afraid of triggering toxic blooms and otherwise messing up coastal ecosystems and then being liable for damages, so they put a moratorium on testing [1]. Then in 2012 someone illegally tried it again anyway, with mixed results [2]. Basically it's like most geoengineering projects - everyone is too afraid of negative consequences to really try anything at scale, so instead we get endless inconclusive studies. Personally, I think we're going to pretty quickly get to the point where we need to make decisions about what negative consequences are acceptable to prevent complete environmental catastrophe. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/453704b https://www.nature.com/articles/453704b [2] http://www.planetexperts.com/two-years-russ-george-illegally-dumped-iron-pacific-salmon-catches-400/ http://www.planetexperts.com/two-years-russ-george-illegally...

falcolas 7y ago

Use technology to survive in an inhospitable atmosphere. Probably without any dependency on the atmosphere outside our cities in the long run. Cleaning the atmosphere is harder when you’re just trying to survive. EDIT: Inhospitable atmosphere, to my mind, includes weather, drought, flash floods, etc. Not just the chemical makeup of the air.

pdonis 7y ago
> Use technology to survive in an inhospitable atmosphere. Oh, please. The atmosphere will be perfectly hospitable. This is just FUD.
- falcolas 7y ago
  Really? Everything I’ve heard indicates a fairly dramatic change in the weather patterns as our global temperatures rise by even 1-2 degrees. The atmosphere is not just the chemical makeup, it’s the weather it creates. The droughts. The flash floods. The unnaturally cold winters, and unnaturally hot summers. Or vice versa - neither is very good for us.
  - pdonis 7y ago
    > Everything I’ve heard indicates a fairly dramatic change in the weather patterns as our global temperatures rise by even 1-2 degrees. These are not predictions based on data. They are predictions based on models--the same models that have been overpredicting warming for several decades now. The actual data says that extreme events have not been getting more frequent. Their consequences have been getting more severe because so many more people live in areas that are primarily affected by them. That's not a climate change problem: that's a problem of mismanagement and politics. The southwest US has been a desert for centuries if not millennia--now all of a sudden lack of water is a problem? Anyone with half a brain could have seen that coming. Coastal cities are finding problems with drainage? Sea levels have been rising since the last Ice Age ended, and if your coastal city in a hurricane zone suddenly has a problem with a storm surge, that just means you've been ignoring the problem for too long. Yes, the climate is changing; it's always been changing, and it will keep changing. People need to be given accurate information about risks and the tools to adapt to change.

tanilama 7y ago

Nothing. Too late. Our current global political structure can't coordinate such action. So what will left to be done is dealing with the mess. Big countries will have a lot more room to weather this, but small countries are on their own.

abootstrapper 7y ago

I don’t mean to pick on you, but this question comes up in every single climate change post. Answering it is exhausting. We need a climate change FAQ. The simple answer is end fossil fuels. How do we do that? Vote, eat less meat, bike ride, strike, protest, invest in solar, boycott, reuse, buy less, telecommute, etc. Use your imagination. Do something, do everything, the end goal is we all stop releasing sequestered green house gasses into the atmosphere.

rewgs 7y ago
> eat less meat While eating less or no meat is a big part of it, it's more nuanced than it's often presented. For instance, this talk provides a very, very good argument for keeping livestock. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI Not disagreeing with you, only replying to you for visibility/to add on to what you said.
pdonis 7y ago
> The simple answer is end fossil fuels. How do we do that? Build nuclear power plants. All the other things are fine, but if you really want to end fossil fuels, you need a non-fossil-fuel source of reliable base load power. Nuclear is the only one we have. Other sources are fine, but they can't produce reliable base load power. And, btw, I think we should end fossil fuels even if it turns out not to make much of a difference to climate change (which might well be the case since all of the models that have a high sensitivity to CO2 built in have been over-predicting warming for several decades now).
- daenz 7y ago
  >Build nuclear power plants. And to all the people who say "they take too long there isn't enough time": the best time to start nuclear power plant construction was 10 years ago, the second best time is now.
  - zaroth 7y ago
    Except by the time the plant is done being built (10 years late and 10x over budget) renewables will have surpassed it in terms of cost for deployed GW, and grid-scale and consumer batteries will be at the point where we can store and demand shift enough power to use all the renewables we can bring online. Renewables has already surpassed nuclear in the US. I think the new reality is the best time to build a nuke plant is never.

pdonis 7y ago

Methane is a valuable resource, so it should be cost effective for somebody to capture it.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dougmwne 7y ago
Certainly not. Methane may have some value, but it is quite plentiful and fracking has made it cheap. Oil drillers already flare it off when it's inconvenient and uneconomical to capture. You're talking a methane release spread across continents, then dispersed into the atmosphere in parts per billion.

dv_dt 7y ago

Green new deal applying financing to scaling known replacement tech like wind solar batteries and electric vehicles. Also separate programs to identifying war scale R&D to identify topics and research them widely. Adjust contracting criteria for ability to pass scaling gates instead of financial or other criteria (this is the war terms for us). Labor programs for rapid training and factory capital deployment.

mirimir 7y ago

Well, cutting CO2 and CH4 emissions won't have much impact on decade scales. But we should still do that, to mitigate longer term damage. What could help shorter term is adaptation. Moving cities to higher ground, away from oceans. And building dikes, where it's workable. But not in Florida or New Orleans. Maybe not even for New York City. Also moving populations to areas that require less air conditioning. And moving farmland from areas that are becoming more arid. So generally, poleward. And then there's immigration. As others move generally poleward. Targets could block immigration, and build walls where feasible. As the US and UK are doing. Or they could focus on integrating immigrants, as some EU nations are doing. That seems like the best long term strategy. Otherwise, you're going to have huge refugee camps, near borders, and probably end up killing lots of people. And then we have social and political implications. I have no clue about that. Except to extrapolate current trends. So socially, that would be increased concentration of wealth, with the wealthy increasingly isolating themselves from the poor. And politically, increased authoritarian control, with associated surveillance. Interesting times, for sure.

iikoolpp 7y ago

Nothing. We're fucked. The world will die in the pursuit of expanding growth and profit.

torpfactory 7y ago

Geoengineering is really the only realistic option if this is the case. Sulfate aerosol injection is by far the most promising. And cheap - maybe 5-8b per year [1]. I'm not claiming this is a good idea in any way. As they say: desperate times call for desperate measures. We could buy ourselves several decades to sort our (as humans) shit out. We don't understand the unintended consequences very well, but at least this technique mimics natural processes (volcanic eruptions). [1]https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/3/034019 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/3/034...

strainer 7y ago
I've a hunch that a Lagrange point sun shield is becoming quite affordable with recent reductions in cost of launching to space. A sunshield consisting of many self orientating mirror bearing craft would have the advantage of being able to be quickly attenuated if required, even filtering more or less light on particular continents or weather systems.
jaakl 7y ago
It could win you some time to resolve real issues, wont work as permanent solution as stopping would have quick devasting results.

unsignedchar 7y ago

Document our failures as a species for the next one that attempts to ‘civilize’?

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Or for our next time around the cycle. At which point I think of Mote Prime[1]. Their "museums" were to document tech for rediscovery each time around the cycle, after their civilisation crashed. [1] Mote in God's Eye, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle