8 ms·

How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong

27 points by deegles 7y ago

areoform 7y ago
I suspect that the problem will end up being something quite 'simple.' Our time didn't have the horsepower nor know how to accurately compute feedback loops in our environment. We didn't understand the numerous and unforeseeable tipping points that we tipped. We didn't understand the dance of nature and how disparate events tied into the pattern of our actions. The deliberations, however, are over and the verdict is in. We have done fucked up. There's no point in lamenting our failure. We've made the mess and now we need to fix it. The only real question facing us is how. Whether it's carbon sinks in the form of olivine and 20 million trees, new methods to suck carbon out of the air, or some desperate act of geoengineering. Humanity needs to come to grips with the situation and act quickly and decisively. Like we did with nuclear weapons and space races. An Earth Race (so that we don't regress), if you will.
- kiba 7y ago
  What does "quickly and decisively" mean in term of timeframe?
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    The IPCC's 2014 AR5 WG3 report is the latest to provide a detailed mitigations response. That would be the concensus view. There are a wide range of others. I've only just now looked it up, so while I can't answer your question directly, it's all but certainly the most comrepensive concensus answer you'll find. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg3/ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg3/ For the Paris accords: net negative emissions by 2050, now 30 years away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming#/media/File%3AMitigation_pathways.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming#/media/File%3AM...
    - javagram 7y ago
      When people riot in the streets and demand their luxuries back, what will you do to stop it? Authoritarian repression? Massacres? Yellow vest protests in France were caused by a modest increase in fuel taxes. Serious belt-tightening to stop global warming is going to be far worse in most countries - heck, France already generates most of their energy from nuclear and renewables so they are way ahead of the US and others.
      - Gibbon1 7y ago
        > Yellow vest protests in France were caused by a modest increase in fuel taxes. Ans: Stop with the neoliberal rubber hose type solutions to problems.
      - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
        Meanwhile in the UK, nearly half of Conservative voters and a majority of the country think we should be aiming to decarbonise far faster[1]. Namely by 2030 and not kicked off into the long grass of 2050 as the government committed to. Committed to purely because they don't have to _do_ anything. Apparently even their voters aren't properly signed up to the denial hymn sheet. Yellow vest protests were far more about inequality than a modest increase in fuel taxes. If government makes an equitable policy that spares the poorest in society the disproportionate impact that would naturally fall on them, there need be no riots - especially if they had a warm, well insulated house for the first time. The middle classes don't, generally speaking, riot. So what luxuries are you expecting to be taken? Decarbonising doesn't mean deindustrialising. It means winding back some of the excesses of capitalism and consumerism. Done properly we should expect better made, longer lasting but sustainable products. Which I suppose should have the multinationals rioting if we take away planned obsolescence... :) [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/07/majority-of-uk-public-back-2030-zero-carbon-target-poll https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/07/majority...
        javagram 7y ago
        In terms of luxuries being taken away, I’d point to electricity and transportation as the #1. For those calling for immediate decarbonization, that would mean shutting down all our coal, gas, and oil burning power plants and scrapping our gas burning cars. Electric heating costs more than gas heating, electric cars cost more than gas cars, and so on. All of these costs hit ordinary people directly in the pocketbook. Economists estimate a carbon tax high enough to force fossil fuel plants offline in a couple decades would need to be quite high. Meanwhile, in democratic societies like the USA it’s very difficult to even raise the gas tax a few cents to fund needed repairs to bridges and other infrastructure. To get people out of their SUV’s and into Teslas, for instance, you’d need to put multi-dollar taxes on gas to make it make sense (e.g. Norway where Tesla is doing well because they put a 100% tax on normal gas cars). Democratic elections often result in the rejection of such taxes because voters value their immediate standard of living over that of future decades (e.g. WA state initiatives for carbon taxes, which were soundly rejected at the ballot box in 2016 and 2018). And to do all this without affecting the standard of living of the poor and middle classes, and without slowing down the growth of developing countries and China - I think it’s a bit of a dream. There’s a reason market-based societies selected to use fossil fuel technology and it’s because it’s cheaper than other energy generation tech. Transitioning off of it is now a massive capital investment and will hurt. You say the yellow vest protest were about inequality - but the result of them was that the fuel tax was put on hold and the speed limit was kept high.
  - lancewiggs 7y ago
    Now. Work on solutions now. There are lots of them and we should all be doing our part.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Along those lines, but more than that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21511026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21511026
rb808 7y ago
I dont think anyone really cares what the scientists predict. Its the tragedy of the commons, no one will really change their behaviour anyway, even when it becomes unbearable to live in many parts of the world.
- dyslexit 7y ago
  You're talking in generalities. Even if it's not the majority of people, some people will change their lifestyles, or at least parts of it (buying eco friendly cars, using less AC, eating less meat, etc.) But in general, you're right, most people won't do enough. That's why there need to be institutional changes, like investments into green energy/tech and incentives for companies to pollute less.
- mc3 7y ago
  It is worse than that, the incumbent politicians don't want to be seen as 'lefties', and there is a lot of people with money with a vested interest in burning more oil and coal. I think individuals changing behaviour is hopeless, but taxes that make doing the wrong thing expensive (and vice versa) is probably the only way, but politicians don't want to do that.
daenz 7y ago
Meta: Why are paywalled articles doing so well on HN lately? I know about the "web" link, but it never works for me. It's frustrating to want to participate in the comments on a subject, but not have access to the specific content that everyone seems to be discussing (and no, I am not paying for an NYT subscription).
- madacoo 7y ago
  I suspect HN users are likely to be either a) willing to pay or b) able to circumnavigate paywalls by using private windows, blocking cookies, disabling javascript, or whatever else works. I wonder how long before paywalls aren't so easy to get around.
- javagram 7y ago
  The NYT has 4 million digital subscribers, and they’re probably concentrated in the type of demographics that read HN. (I don’t know the WSJ numbers, but since it’s included in apple news that’s probably another one where a lot of HN readers have the subscription)
- danzig13 7y ago
  Reader view on iPhone gets past New York Times paywall for now
  - greenyoda 7y ago
    Or use the uMatrix browser add-on to block cookies and JavaScript on NY Times domains.
  - PacketPaul 7y ago
    I’m on an iPhone and can not get past :-(
smitty1e 7y ago
As the Instapundit has it: https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/?s=%22i%27ll+believe+it%27s+a+crisis%22 https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/?s=%22i%27ll+believe+it%27s+...
- javagram 7y ago
  An individual person has basically zero individual effect on climate change, even if they are a prince and spend millions of dollars lavishly on air travel and so on. These criticisms of people taking airplanes fall kind of flat in my opinion. Unless collective action is taken there is no point in ruining your own enjoyment of your individual life. That seat on the plane you give up will most likely just be put on discount and sold to someone else. And if you do something like Greta and take a sailboat across the Atlantic, it doesn’t seem to inspire people to do anything more than make fun of you. Economists generally suggest using taxes to price the externalities (e.g., cap and trade or a carbon tax). This leads everyone to take collective action as they now have a financial incentive to do so. Unfortunately the politicization of climate change and the incorrect connection between “climate change” and environmentalism has led to a lot of problems with this as well, e.g., environmentalists opposing nuclear power plants, or even solar/wind farms being blocked or slowed under environmental regulations!
  - smitty1e 7y ago
    So, just kinda look past the rich and powerful gathering in Davos annually to gin up fresh means of rooking the masses?
    - javagram 7y ago
      30,000 people flying to Davos once a year is not a major or substantial driver of global warming. If you calculated the carbon dioxide released by that action, it would be a very small fraction of all human activity (there are 7 billion of us after all) Not sure what “rooking the masses” refers to, but if you’re talking about policies that would lead to increased fossil fuel consumption by the world at large, that would be the correct target if you’re focused on global warming.
ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
There is no going back, our entire way of living is unsustainable, climate change is going to happen. Good news is, planet Earth will be fine, give it a few thousand years, it has survived far worse.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  It is sustainable, barely, with major reinvestment into nuclear, renewable and electric battery storage, for about 300 years. (Taking into consideration countries catching up on development and increased demands for air conditioning and water purification. This is a conservative time estimate, there are more nuclear fuel sources.) That's not too long of a time, but maybe enough to solve these problems in any number of available ways, from biotechnology through cybernetics, nanotechnology, new advanced energy sources (some of which are being developed right now), even perhaps space travel or mega structures.
dredmorbius 7y ago
An element of this story and challenge is the nature of technology. I've spent a few years on the problem of what technology is, or more specifically, what technolgical mechanisms are. There several obvious ones: new fuel sources, materials, better understandings of processes, and information flows -- acquisition, processing, storage and retrieval, transmission, and controls. I've come up with a list of eight. It wasn't until some time that I hit on a ninth element, what I've called "hygiene factors", in that the address the overall health of a system or the human technosphere and environent. They're based on unintended consequences, a term introduced in 1936 by the sociologist Robert K. Merckton, which he describes (I'm just realising) using the same term I'd landed on: manifest and latent functions and dysfunctions.[1][2][3] Hygiene factors tend to be saturation of sinks, exhaustion of sources, or disruptions of endogenous or exogenous systems on which we rely -- say, urban filth and public health (endogenous) or ecosystem disruption affecting resources, food supply, or disease reservoirs (external). A specific technology might be thought of as some cluster of effects, both positive (or intended) and negative (or unintended), both manifest and latent. A specific technology -- a device, technique, management method, practice, convention -- approaches some theoretical physical limit of efficiency, also introducing unintended consequences. We're pretty good at choosing technologies which have manifest positive effects, and at rejecting those with manifest negative effects. We're less good about adopting technologies with latent positive effects or rejecting those with latent negative effects.[4] We can think of an entire technosphere as the set of interactions between all technologies and the environment. As both our technology and role within the environment extend, we find ourselves running up against inherent limits. That is, the capacities of either fixed-capacity or rate-based sinks to absorb effluents, of fixed-stock or flow-based sources to provide resources, or disruptions of either our own endogenous or exogenous systems on which healthy function rely. The problem is that as we start hitting one set of limits, we tend to spill over to others. In agricultural science, there's the notion of Leibig's Law of the Minimum: "growth is dictated not by total resources available, but by the scarcest resource (limiting factor)." It seems that this should have some reciprocal principle, that health is dictated not by the total sinks available, but of the most currently binding one. As the first contraint(s) are lifted -- low-hanging fruit -- subsequent constraints of greater effect, or more difficult mitigation or management, emerge. (I'm not aware of any named principle matching this, though I strongly suspect it exists.) We also end up with interactions between the consequences -- one system interacts with another, producing their own sets of effects. It's the latent negative consequences which catch up with you. Since they're not apparent, they're not evident and available for planning or modeling when looking at future direction. As systems generally become more optimised, the odds of any further change tends to fall -- you've exhausted most of the good interactions, the remaining ones are bad. And the worst of all is a set of compounding, latent, negative 2nd and higher-order interactions. These are conceptually, and probably statistically, inevitable. We can't point to them specifically, as we don't know what they are. There's a tremendous tendency in human nature to dismiss and minimise future and latent risks (though yes, also benefits), especially where personal or private interests are served by optimism bias. The result then would be that increasingly complex circumstances in which the tolerances of multiple systems are stressed to their limits, an apparent zone of stability is actually an illusion as still-fermenting latent negative interactions are developing, beyond the realm of detection. Which seems to be exemplified in the global warming case. I struggle with whether this is tremendously insightful or blindingly obvious, or possibly a case of overfitting to available information. Responses have been rather all over the map, though the "blindingly obvious" criticisms frequently seem to come from those afflicted with blindness to latent benefits and risks. But I'm fearful. ________________________________ Notes: 1. Bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_K._Merton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_K._Merton 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_and_latent_functions_and_dysfunctions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_and_latent_functions_... 3. I'd been working with the notion of "manifestation", though I'd not settled on a good term for its opposite. "Covert", "emergent", and "latent" were optons. And this is a reason why I research and footnote my HN (and other) comments and posts. I'm learning. 4. For concreteness, some possible examples: - Manifest positive: Movable type, water wheel, medical anaesthesia. - Manifest negative: Hydrochloric acid skin treatment. Taunting lions. - Latent positive: Medical hygiene, handwashing. Seismic building standards. Limiting building to above the Tsunami line. - Latent negative: Lead plumbing, asbestos insulation, CFC refrigerants and aerosol propellants, residential laundry chutes. 5. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27s_law_of_the_minimum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27s_law_of_the_minimum
mc3 7y ago
https://outline.com/BX3pHp https://outline.com/BX3pHp
jeremyjh 7y ago
Just as a thought experiment, suppose the best prediction that could be made right now would see the earth's carrying capacity drop to under a billion people in the next 50 years. What would you expect to see different, in media, in papers in top journals, in public discourse, than we see right now? I think the world might look just as we see it today.
rayiner 7y ago
I really don't understand. We're told the scientists have a consensus and we must believe them. (I'm inclined to do so!) But at least the IPCC has projected changes that weren't so bad. Is there a new consensus? Were the scientists who were supposed to be right actually wrong? Who are we supposed to believe? This is not denialism. I’m firmly inclined to believe the IPCC consensus. But it’s disconcerting to see a new narrative where those same scientists are incorrect. It seems to amount to “panic even more than the scientific consensus warrants.” Maybe that’s true but it’s an odd argument. > More likely, a separate United Nations report concluded, we are headed for warming of at least 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit. That will come with almost unimaginable damage to economies and ecosystems. Unfortunately, this dose of reality arrives more than 30 years after human-caused climate change became a mainstream issue. 5.4F is 3C. The cost of 3C change is projected to be up to 13% of GDP relative to keeping to 1.5C. See: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/23/hitting-toughest-climate-target-will-save-world-30tn-in-damages-analysis-shows https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/23/hitting-.... Over the 30 year time horizon of the calculation, world GDP will grow by 140%. (Climate change will cost just 1/10 of total growth by that time. )
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Bear in mind the actuality has tended to come far faster than the IPCC predictions. The IPCC, being a UN body of government appointed scientists, economists etc, consistently take an overly conservative view. There's been criticism of this over the years. From seven years ago: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-ipcc-underestimated-climate-change/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-ipcc-unde... IPCC includes representatives from the oil and coal states, and those reports require unanimity. What gets published tends to the blandest interpretation possible so that the oil states, coal exporters and the couple of countries pretending it isn't happening can agree too. Saudi has tried to significantly tone down reports to protect their oil interests to name but one. It's far from the sole incident: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/may/15/ipcc-un-climate-reports-diluted-protect-fossil-fuel-interests https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/m...
  - repolfx 7y ago
macawfish 7y ago
My understanding is that many climate scientists want to avoid a kind of paralyzing alarmism/catastrophic fatalism, and that this might be where the conservative consensus comes from.
orev 7y ago
I really hate this headline and I don’t think it should be rewarded with clicks. NYT knows that a certain population is going to read that headline, and nothing else, and then take away that “they were right all along and climate change isn’t real”. It does absolutely nothing to help move things in the right direction and just further fuels the fire of false “debate” over the issue.
- PleaseLoveMe 7y ago
  I hate clickbait as much as the next person but in this case... aren't the people you're talking about the people you want to read the article?
  - pintxo 7y ago
    I guess the fear is they will not read the article at all. Just twitter the title along. Which is probably a reasonable assumption.
  - orev 7y ago
    Most people don’t actually read the articles. They just scan the headlines and take away whatever they want from that. This would have been much better if the headline was more like: Scientists grossly underestimated the impact of climate change. That would have been sensationalistic while also conveying the main point of the article to those people.

27 points by deegles 7y ago

I suspect that the problem will end up being something quite 'simple.' Our time didn't have the horsepower nor know how to accurately compute feedback loops in our environment. We didn't understand the numerous and unforeseeable tipping points that we tipped. We didn't understand the dance of nature and how disparate events tied into the pattern of our actions. The deliberations, however, are over and the verdict is in. We have done fucked up. There's no point in lamenting our failure. We've made the mess and now we need to fix it. The only real question facing us is how. Whether it's carbon sinks in the form of olivine and 20 million trees, new methods to suck carbon out of the air, or some desperate act of geoengineering. Humanity needs to come to grips with the situation and act quickly and decisively. Like we did with nuclear weapons and space races. An Earth Race (so that we don't regress), if you will.

kiba 7y ago
What does "quickly and decisively" mean in term of timeframe?
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  The IPCC's 2014 AR5 WG3 report is the latest to provide a detailed mitigations response. That would be the concensus view. There are a wide range of others. I've only just now looked it up, so while I can't answer your question directly, it's all but certainly the most comrepensive concensus answer you'll find. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg3/ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg3/ For the Paris accords: net negative emissions by 2050, now 30 years away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming#/media/File%3AMitigation_pathways.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming#/media/File%3AM...
  - javagram 7y ago
    When people riot in the streets and demand their luxuries back, what will you do to stop it? Authoritarian repression? Massacres? Yellow vest protests in France were caused by a modest increase in fuel taxes. Serious belt-tightening to stop global warming is going to be far worse in most countries - heck, France already generates most of their energy from nuclear and renewables so they are way ahead of the US and others.
    - Gibbon1 7y ago
      > Yellow vest protests in France were caused by a modest increase in fuel taxes. Ans: Stop with the neoliberal rubber hose type solutions to problems.
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      Meanwhile in the UK, nearly half of Conservative voters and a majority of the country think we should be aiming to decarbonise far faster[1]. Namely by 2030 and not kicked off into the long grass of 2050 as the government committed to. Committed to purely because they don't have to _do_ anything. Apparently even their voters aren't properly signed up to the denial hymn sheet. Yellow vest protests were far more about inequality than a modest increase in fuel taxes. If government makes an equitable policy that spares the poorest in society the disproportionate impact that would naturally fall on them, there need be no riots - especially if they had a warm, well insulated house for the first time. The middle classes don't, generally speaking, riot. So what luxuries are you expecting to be taken? Decarbonising doesn't mean deindustrialising. It means winding back some of the excesses of capitalism and consumerism. Done properly we should expect better made, longer lasting but sustainable products. Which I suppose should have the multinationals rioting if we take away planned obsolescence... :) [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/07/majority-of-uk-public-back-2030-zero-carbon-target-poll https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/07/majority...
      - javagram 7y ago
        In terms of luxuries being taken away, I’d point to electricity and transportation as the #1. For those calling for immediate decarbonization, that would mean shutting down all our coal, gas, and oil burning power plants and scrapping our gas burning cars. Electric heating costs more than gas heating, electric cars cost more than gas cars, and so on. All of these costs hit ordinary people directly in the pocketbook. Economists estimate a carbon tax high enough to force fossil fuel plants offline in a couple decades would need to be quite high. Meanwhile, in democratic societies like the USA it’s very difficult to even raise the gas tax a few cents to fund needed repairs to bridges and other infrastructure. To get people out of their SUV’s and into Teslas, for instance, you’d need to put multi-dollar taxes on gas to make it make sense (e.g. Norway where Tesla is doing well because they put a 100% tax on normal gas cars). Democratic elections often result in the rejection of such taxes because voters value their immediate standard of living over that of future decades (e.g. WA state initiatives for carbon taxes, which were soundly rejected at the ballot box in 2016 and 2018). And to do all this without affecting the standard of living of the poor and middle classes, and without slowing down the growth of developing countries and China - I think it’s a bit of a dream. There’s a reason market-based societies selected to use fossil fuel technology and it’s because it’s cheaper than other energy generation tech. Transitioning off of it is now a massive capital investment and will hurt. You say the yellow vest protest were about inequality - but the result of them was that the fuel tax was put on hold and the speed limit was kept high.
- lancewiggs 7y ago
  Now. Work on solutions now. There are lots of them and we should all be doing our part.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Along those lines, but more than that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21511026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21511026

rb808 7y ago

I dont think anyone really cares what the scientists predict. Its the tragedy of the commons, no one will really change their behaviour anyway, even when it becomes unbearable to live in many parts of the world.

dyslexit 7y ago
You're talking in generalities. Even if it's not the majority of people, some people will change their lifestyles, or at least parts of it (buying eco friendly cars, using less AC, eating less meat, etc.) But in general, you're right, most people won't do enough. That's why there need to be institutional changes, like investments into green energy/tech and incentives for companies to pollute less.
mc3 7y ago
It is worse than that, the incumbent politicians don't want to be seen as 'lefties', and there is a lot of people with money with a vested interest in burning more oil and coal. I think individuals changing behaviour is hopeless, but taxes that make doing the wrong thing expensive (and vice versa) is probably the only way, but politicians don't want to do that.

daenz 7y ago

Meta: Why are paywalled articles doing so well on HN lately? I know about the "web" link, but it never works for me. It's frustrating to want to participate in the comments on a subject, but not have access to the specific content that everyone seems to be discussing (and no, I am not paying for an NYT subscription).

madacoo 7y ago
I suspect HN users are likely to be either a) willing to pay or b) able to circumnavigate paywalls by using private windows, blocking cookies, disabling javascript, or whatever else works. I wonder how long before paywalls aren't so easy to get around.
javagram 7y ago
The NYT has 4 million digital subscribers, and they’re probably concentrated in the type of demographics that read HN. (I don’t know the WSJ numbers, but since it’s included in apple news that’s probably another one where a lot of HN readers have the subscription)
danzig13 7y ago
Reader view on iPhone gets past New York Times paywall for now
- greenyoda 7y ago
  Or use the uMatrix browser add-on to block cookies and JavaScript on NY Times domains.
- PacketPaul 7y ago
  I’m on an iPhone and can not get past :-(

smitty1e 7y ago

As the Instapundit has it: https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/?s=%22i%27ll+believe+it%27s+a+crisis%22 https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/?s=%22i%27ll+believe+it%27s+...

javagram 7y ago
An individual person has basically zero individual effect on climate change, even if they are a prince and spend millions of dollars lavishly on air travel and so on. These criticisms of people taking airplanes fall kind of flat in my opinion. Unless collective action is taken there is no point in ruining your own enjoyment of your individual life. That seat on the plane you give up will most likely just be put on discount and sold to someone else. And if you do something like Greta and take a sailboat across the Atlantic, it doesn’t seem to inspire people to do anything more than make fun of you. Economists generally suggest using taxes to price the externalities (e.g., cap and trade or a carbon tax). This leads everyone to take collective action as they now have a financial incentive to do so. Unfortunately the politicization of climate change and the incorrect connection between “climate change” and environmentalism has led to a lot of problems with this as well, e.g., environmentalists opposing nuclear power plants, or even solar/wind farms being blocked or slowed under environmental regulations!
- smitty1e 7y ago
  So, just kinda look past the rich and powerful gathering in Davos annually to gin up fresh means of rooking the masses?
  - javagram 7y ago
    30,000 people flying to Davos once a year is not a major or substantial driver of global warming. If you calculated the carbon dioxide released by that action, it would be a very small fraction of all human activity (there are 7 billion of us after all) Not sure what “rooking the masses” refers to, but if you’re talking about policies that would lead to increased fossil fuel consumption by the world at large, that would be the correct target if you’re focused on global warming.

ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago

There is no going back, our entire way of living is unsustainable, climate change is going to happen. Good news is, planet Earth will be fine, give it a few thousand years, it has survived far worse.

AstralStorm 7y ago
It is sustainable, barely, with major reinvestment into nuclear, renewable and electric battery storage, for about 300 years. (Taking into consideration countries catching up on development and increased demands for air conditioning and water purification. This is a conservative time estimate, there are more nuclear fuel sources.) That's not too long of a time, but maybe enough to solve these problems in any number of available ways, from biotechnology through cybernetics, nanotechnology, new advanced energy sources (some of which are being developed right now), even perhaps space travel or mega structures.

dredmorbius 7y ago

An element of this story and challenge is the nature of technology. I've spent a few years on the problem of what technology is, or more specifically, what technolgical mechanisms are. There several obvious ones: new fuel sources, materials, better understandings of processes, and information flows -- acquisition, processing, storage and retrieval, transmission, and controls. I've come up with a list of eight. It wasn't until some time that I hit on a ninth element, what I've called "hygiene factors", in that the address the overall health of a system or the human technosphere and environent. They're based on unintended consequences, a term introduced in 1936 by the sociologist Robert K. Merckton, which he describes (I'm just realising) using the same term I'd landed on: manifest and latent functions and dysfunctions.[1][2][3] Hygiene factors tend to be saturation of sinks, exhaustion of sources, or disruptions of endogenous or exogenous systems on which we rely -- say, urban filth and public health (endogenous) or ecosystem disruption affecting resources, food supply, or disease reservoirs (external). A specific technology might be thought of as some cluster of effects, both positive (or intended) and negative (or unintended), both manifest and latent. A specific technology -- a device, technique, management method, practice, convention -- approaches some theoretical physical limit of efficiency, also introducing unintended consequences. We're pretty good at choosing technologies which have manifest positive effects, and at rejecting those with manifest negative effects. We're less good about adopting technologies with latent positive effects or rejecting those with latent negative effects.[4] We can think of an entire technosphere as the set of interactions between all technologies and the environment. As both our technology and role within the environment extend, we find ourselves running up against inherent limits. That is, the capacities of either fixed-capacity or rate-based sinks to absorb effluents, of fixed-stock or flow-based sources to provide resources, or disruptions of either our own endogenous or exogenous systems on which healthy function rely. The problem is that as we start hitting one set of limits, we tend to spill over to others. In agricultural science, there's the notion of Leibig's Law of the Minimum: "growth is dictated not by total resources available, but by the scarcest resource (limiting factor)." It seems that this should have some reciprocal principle, that health is dictated not by the total sinks available, but of the most currently binding one. As the first contraint(s) are lifted -- low-hanging fruit -- subsequent constraints of greater effect, or more difficult mitigation or management, emerge. (I'm not aware of any named principle matching this, though I strongly suspect it exists.) We also end up with interactions between the consequences -- one system interacts with another, producing their own sets of effects. It's the latent negative consequences which catch up with you. Since they're not apparent, they're not evident and available for planning or modeling when looking at future direction. As systems generally become more optimised, the odds of any further change tends to fall -- you've exhausted most of the good interactions, the remaining ones are bad. And the worst of all is a set of compounding, latent, negative 2nd and higher-order interactions. These are conceptually, and probably statistically, inevitable. We can't point to them specifically, as we don't know what they are. There's a tremendous tendency in human nature to dismiss and minimise future and latent risks (though yes, also benefits), especially where personal or private interests are served by optimism bias. The result then would be that increasingly complex circumstances in which the tolerances of multiple systems are stressed to their limits, an apparent zone of stability is actually an illusion as still-fermenting latent negative interactions are developing, beyond the realm of detection. Which seems to be exemplified in the global warming case. I struggle with whether this is tremendously insightful or blindingly obvious, or possibly a case of overfitting to available information. Responses have been rather all over the map, though the "blindingly obvious" criticisms frequently seem to come from those afflicted with blindness to latent benefits and risks. But I'm fearful. ________________________________ Notes: 1. Bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_K._Merton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_K._Merton 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_and_latent_functions_and_dysfunctions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_and_latent_functions_... 3. I'd been working with the notion of "manifestation", though I'd not settled on a good term for its opposite. "Covert", "emergent", and "latent" were optons. And this is a reason why I research and footnote my HN (and other) comments and posts. I'm learning. 4. For concreteness, some possible examples: - Manifest positive: Movable type, water wheel, medical anaesthesia. - Manifest negative: Hydrochloric acid skin treatment. Taunting lions. - Latent positive: Medical hygiene, handwashing. Seismic building standards. Limiting building to above the Tsunami line. - Latent negative: Lead plumbing, asbestos insulation, CFC refrigerants and aerosol propellants, residential laundry chutes. 5. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27s_law_of_the_minimum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27s_law_of_the_minimum

mc3 7y ago

https://outline.com/BX3pHp https://outline.com/BX3pHp

jeremyjh 7y ago

Just as a thought experiment, suppose the best prediction that could be made right now would see the earth's carrying capacity drop to under a billion people in the next 50 years. What would you expect to see different, in media, in papers in top journals, in public discourse, than we see right now? I think the world might look just as we see it today.

rayiner 7y ago

I really don't understand. We're told the scientists have a consensus and we must believe them. (I'm inclined to do so!) But at least the IPCC has projected changes that weren't so bad. Is there a new consensus? Were the scientists who were supposed to be right actually wrong? Who are we supposed to believe? This is not denialism. I’m firmly inclined to believe the IPCC consensus. But it’s disconcerting to see a new narrative where those same scientists are incorrect. It seems to amount to “panic even more than the scientific consensus warrants.” Maybe that’s true but it’s an odd argument. > More likely, a separate United Nations report concluded, we are headed for warming of at least 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit. That will come with almost unimaginable damage to economies and ecosystems. Unfortunately, this dose of reality arrives more than 30 years after human-caused climate change became a mainstream issue. 5.4F is 3C. The cost of 3C change is projected to be up to 13% of GDP relative to keeping to 1.5C. See: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/23/hitting-toughest-climate-target-will-save-world-30tn-in-damages-analysis-shows https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/23/hitting-.... Over the 30 year time horizon of the calculation, world GDP will grow by 140%. (Climate change will cost just 1/10 of total growth by that time. )

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Bear in mind the actuality has tended to come far faster than the IPCC predictions. The IPCC, being a UN body of government appointed scientists, economists etc, consistently take an overly conservative view. There's been criticism of this over the years. From seven years ago: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-ipcc-underestimated-climate-change/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-ipcc-unde... IPCC includes representatives from the oil and coal states, and those reports require unanimity. What gets published tends to the blandest interpretation possible so that the oil states, coal exporters and the couple of countries pretending it isn't happening can agree too. Saudi has tried to significantly tone down reports to protect their oil interests to name but one. It's far from the sole incident: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/may/15/ipcc-un-climate-reports-diluted-protect-fossil-fuel-interests https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/m...
- repolfx 7y ago

macawfish 7y ago

My understanding is that many climate scientists want to avoid a kind of paralyzing alarmism/catastrophic fatalism, and that this might be where the conservative consensus comes from.

orev 7y ago

I really hate this headline and I don’t think it should be rewarded with clicks. NYT knows that a certain population is going to read that headline, and nothing else, and then take away that “they were right all along and climate change isn’t real”. It does absolutely nothing to help move things in the right direction and just further fuels the fire of false “debate” over the issue.

PleaseLoveMe 7y ago
I hate clickbait as much as the next person but in this case... aren't the people you're talking about the people you want to read the article?
- pintxo 7y ago
  I guess the fear is they will not read the article at all. Just twitter the title along. Which is probably a reasonable assumption.
- orev 7y ago
  Most people don’t actually read the articles. They just scan the headlines and take away whatever they want from that. This would have been much better if the headline was more like: Scientists grossly underestimated the impact of climate change. That would have been sensationalistic while also conveying the main point of the article to those people.