5 ms·

If our global reaction to Covid is any guide, we'll ignore the warnings about Climate Change until they're undeniably upon us – at which point people will say,

by gdubs 5y ago

If our global reaction to Covid is any guide, we'll ignore the warnings about Climate Change until they're undeniably upon us – at which point people will say, "how did no one warn us about this?" Unfortunately, barring any yet-to-be-invented technologies, by that point the worst effects will be irreversible. I'd love to be wrong on this one. But the sky turned orange for a week last year, as wildfires tragically demolished entire communities just 35 minutes by car from where I sit. EPA didn't know how to classify the air quality. There were so many fires up and down the West Coast last year they started simply numbering them, or labeling them as whole collections. Here in the PNW we've had a shockingly hot and dry spring, with ominous implications for this summer. I'll leave you with this: check out 'The Carbon Farming Solution'. It's an incredibly well-researched book. It's in my wheelhouse, but I think it would appeal to a lot of you here (and yes, I've mentioned it a bunch of times before.) It goes both wide and deep on many aspects of land-use change, and is sober and realistic in what we can hope to achieve through better land-stewardship, and rethinking our food system. 1: http://carbonfarmingsolution.com http://carbonfarmingsolution.com 2: Please don't waste time arguing with me about how 'there have always been wildfires'. What we're facing now is incomparable to the annual burns that used to happen here hundreds of years ago – though prescribed burns to reduce fuel load are certainly something we should be trying to do.

UncleOxidant 5y ago
> If our global reaction to Covid is any guide, we'll ignore the warnings about Climate Change If global reaction to climate change is any guide we'll ignore warnings about climate change as we have since the 70s and earlier. > There were so many fires up and down the West Coast last year As someone living in Western Oregon I'm really afraid what our air is going to be like come September given that the drought is worse this year than last. I have air filters at the ready.
- rodgerd 5y ago
  There were a number of big public policy successes in the 70s/80s/90s around smoking, lead pollution, and ozone destruction. And having seen that, megacorps have been refining their playbooks to make sure that it never, ever happens again.
acchow 5y ago
> If our global reaction to Covid is any guide We invented new vaccine technologies to beat the pandemic. Yes, many people died but civilization did not collapse.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  This is different. With COVID, we knew the problem would solve itself in a couple years, even if we did nothing. We were in a race to save lives, not civilization. Climate change will not solve itself like this. It will keep reducing food supply and habitable land, causing mass migrations that sooner or later will end in wars. Trying to wait it out is suicide.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    "Climate change will not solve itself like this.' Well, it will but in 10,000 years, so noone will be around for that except neo-cavemen or something
    - ben_w 5y ago
      Worse, 100ka — without CO2 scrubbing, we’re likely to skip the next ice age entirely, possibly the one after too. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16494 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16494
  - spikels 5y ago
    > It will keep reducing food supply The global food supply is increasing: * See production numbers for key crops - all are still increasing. * See famine and hunger numbers all are still decreasing.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      Yeah, it's increasing, because we're strip-mining the soil. It won't last. I'll counter your points with two of mine: * See the problem of soil depletion. * Consider that crops are temperature-sensitive, and continued warming of the planet will be turning currently food-rich areas into zones where crops cannot be grown.
kbelder 5y ago
It would be wonderful if we could solve global warming as easily and as cheaply as we did Covid. And I think we might, once we start trying.
- graeme 5y ago
  Yeah I’m increasingly optimistic we might actually succeed with carbon sucking solutions. Stripe Climate is a very exciting program, for instance. And I’ve been quick pessimistic on this issue. In 2010 I determined our society was default dead. It still is….but it’s looking more and more likely we move the cost curves on carbon capture and can actually just pay to remove the excess and solve the problem.
  - elbasti 5y ago
    Sorry to burst your bubble but this optimism is just completely unfounded. Carbon removal is clearly a piece of the puzzle but if and only if we get to zero emissions first. This is basic thermodynamics. It takes more energy to remove carbon than it did to put it in the air, so getting all of that carbon out will take, basically, some multiple of all of the energy output of every power plant, every mile driven, every building built, in the past 200 years. We basically have to "undo" the past 200 years of civilization a few times over. In no way does carbon removal make sense if we don't stop pushing that stuff in the air first. I'm glad Stripe is investing in it, and it makes perfect sense for them to do so and it's amazing of them, because we WILL need it, but only if the world doesn't end first. The world is like a guy with advanced cancer. He has let his cancer grow rampant for two decades and he's now infested. Doctors say he has a few years to live. He needs chemo and surgery NOW. Maybe, just maybe, with extreme luck and the most skilled doctors, he'll make it. Like cancer, emissions reproduce and grow and every minute counts (growing cancer → arctic methane emissions). Carbon removal is... his gym membership. Yeah, it will be great for him to get in shape in order to have a healthy and happy future...but the miserable bastard has to survive first.
    - hellbannedguy 5y ago
      And we can't talk about people having less, or no babies here. I know HN's stance on overpopulation. Yea, industrialized societies supposedly need copious amounts of young people for the economic system to function, but how about just less young people until we find an answer? (I won't be back to debate. I'm not an expert on anything. It just seems like more people in the world add to the global warming problem, especially in industrialized countries.)
not_jd_salinger 5y ago
> until they're undeniably upon us We're undeniably impacted by climate change right this very second. You can take a drive along the Eastern coast of the United States and see water flooding the yards of homes that are all for sale. Likewise everyone I've heard of buying costal or near sea-level property has had a hell of a time getting a mortgage because it's hard to find flood insurance. You can watch the Arctic melt almost before your eyes [0]. If that doesn't shock someone right now, then I doubt the first blue ocean event will make a difference either. Coral reefs are being critically threatened right now from ocean acidification, you can watch them die. Arctic winds leaking out of the North as the polar vortex fails wreaked havoc across Texas. The Sierra snow pack, essential for the maintenance of the fresh water supply for both California and Nevada continues to worsen and worsen with what are becoming rare years of it returning. Record drought in the West causes continually devastating wildfires which are also sources of massive CO2 emissions. All these are just a few off the top of my head that I've noticed. Just like pandemic, which still has its fair share of deniers, there will be non-trivial subsets of the population that adamantly deny that climate change is happening even if the entire Midwest were to turn into a dust bowl again. Demagogue after demagogue will emerge to point the finger at some group of people. But I full agree with your sentiment. Compared to climate change, solving pandemic should have been a cakewalk. If we had solved pandemic quickly I would still be skeptical about climate change because it is so much harder to stop. But since we utterly failed to address pandemic, it is already far too late to image we have any change to alter the path climate change is taking. Maybe denial is ultimately the best approach for those that can't move towards horrific acceptance. [0]. https://www.arcticdeathspiral.org/ https://www.arcticdeathspiral.org/
danielodievich 5y ago
I have similar perspective and it is very depressing to see the world marching towards destruction of the modern civilization. I was speaking about this to a friend and he recommended to read book called Drawdown to lift me out of despair. The book is published in the library and all of it is available at https://drawdown.org/ https://drawdown.org/. It was great to see that the work to fix or at least slow things down is already underway. But of course by no means guaranteed to succeed. Especially since that collection of essays did kind of dance around the biggest challenge of industrial rapacious capitalism really being incompatible with caretaking of the entire planet in a fair and balanced way. On that note, somehow right after reading The Drawdown I stumbled on (I think via HN maybe?) Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future) which I swear takes a lot of the stuff from The Drawdown and lays out a path to turning things around that includes a lot of people saying no to the current way of doing things and finally caring for the environment. It was interesting to see the pleas of Mary to the bankers who the book makes a great case are actually the rulers of the world with the quotes of USA's central bankers from just a couple of days where they explicitly state that climate is not within their purview. I don't know. I got children and I get really depressed about shit they will have to deal with. My parents were similarly depressed when they were my age now, and I was my children age now, and nothing got done. Wishing us all lots and lots of luck.
handrous 5y ago
There's no short-term solution effective enough to make much difference, that doesn't reduce the standard of living in rich countries, and/or cap the standard of living in developing countries. It's not happening. Rich countries aren't gonna say "OK, everyone, you get a lot less stuff and can't travel as much now" and developing countries aren't going to accept that they can't aspire to a "Western" quality of life. Hell, an abrupt decline in standard of living is one of the surest ways to get political unrest, violence, and revolutions, even when the reduction is from "very, very high" to "very high" (and even "very high" would probably still be too high, in this scenario).
- soldehierro 5y ago
  Climate change reduces to an international prisoner's dilemma, and there are surely countries and constituents thereof that won't want to stomach the sacrifices that it would entail. That's why I find it extremely improbable that the human species will ever "fix" climate change.
- jasonlaramburu 5y ago
  Not true at all. Biochar and soil carbon improve soil health and crop yield, all while sequestering carbon for hundreds of years.
redis_mlc 5y ago
Your comment is mostly drivel, but I'll make a comment then add something useful at the end. > But the sky turned orange for a week last year, as wildfires California doesn't and can't manage its forests properly, so orange skies are expected annually. Very little to do with climate change. The useful part in the article: What's interesting in the article is that CO2 levels increased during a pandemic shutdown. That should be investigated to see why. Climate scientists dream of the chance to collect measurement samples during cessation of human activities like this pandemic (same with the grounding of US aircraft during 9/11.)

by gdubs 5y ago

UncleOxidant 5y ago

> If our global reaction to Covid is any guide, we'll ignore the warnings about Climate Change If global reaction to climate change is any guide we'll ignore warnings about climate change as we have since the 70s and earlier. > There were so many fires up and down the West Coast last year As someone living in Western Oregon I'm really afraid what our air is going to be like come September given that the drought is worse this year than last. I have air filters at the ready.

rodgerd 5y ago
There were a number of big public policy successes in the 70s/80s/90s around smoking, lead pollution, and ozone destruction. And having seen that, megacorps have been refining their playbooks to make sure that it never, ever happens again.

acchow 5y ago

> If our global reaction to Covid is any guide We invented new vaccine technologies to beat the pandemic. Yes, many people died but civilization did not collapse.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
This is different. With COVID, we knew the problem would solve itself in a couple years, even if we did nothing. We were in a race to save lives, not civilization. Climate change will not solve itself like this. It will keep reducing food supply and habitable land, causing mass migrations that sooner or later will end in wars. Trying to wait it out is suicide.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  "Climate change will not solve itself like this.' Well, it will but in 10,000 years, so noone will be around for that except neo-cavemen or something
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Worse, 100ka — without CO2 scrubbing, we’re likely to skip the next ice age entirely, possibly the one after too. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16494 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16494
- spikels 5y ago
  > It will keep reducing food supply The global food supply is increasing: * See production numbers for key crops - all are still increasing. * See famine and hunger numbers all are still decreasing.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Yeah, it's increasing, because we're strip-mining the soil. It won't last. I'll counter your points with two of mine: * See the problem of soil depletion. * Consider that crops are temperature-sensitive, and continued warming of the planet will be turning currently food-rich areas into zones where crops cannot be grown.

kbelder 5y ago

It would be wonderful if we could solve global warming as easily and as cheaply as we did Covid. And I think we might, once we start trying.

graeme 5y ago
Yeah I’m increasingly optimistic we might actually succeed with carbon sucking solutions. Stripe Climate is a very exciting program, for instance. And I’ve been quick pessimistic on this issue. In 2010 I determined our society was default dead. It still is….but it’s looking more and more likely we move the cost curves on carbon capture and can actually just pay to remove the excess and solve the problem.
- elbasti 5y ago
  Sorry to burst your bubble but this optimism is just completely unfounded. Carbon removal is clearly a piece of the puzzle but if and only if we get to zero emissions first. This is basic thermodynamics. It takes more energy to remove carbon than it did to put it in the air, so getting all of that carbon out will take, basically, some multiple of all of the energy output of every power plant, every mile driven, every building built, in the past 200 years. We basically have to "undo" the past 200 years of civilization a few times over. In no way does carbon removal make sense if we don't stop pushing that stuff in the air first. I'm glad Stripe is investing in it, and it makes perfect sense for them to do so and it's amazing of them, because we WILL need it, but only if the world doesn't end first. The world is like a guy with advanced cancer. He has let his cancer grow rampant for two decades and he's now infested. Doctors say he has a few years to live. He needs chemo and surgery NOW. Maybe, just maybe, with extreme luck and the most skilled doctors, he'll make it. Like cancer, emissions reproduce and grow and every minute counts (growing cancer → arctic methane emissions). Carbon removal is... his gym membership. Yeah, it will be great for him to get in shape in order to have a healthy and happy future...but the miserable bastard has to survive first.
  - hellbannedguy 5y ago
    And we can't talk about people having less, or no babies here. I know HN's stance on overpopulation. Yea, industrialized societies supposedly need copious amounts of young people for the economic system to function, but how about just less young people until we find an answer? (I won't be back to debate. I'm not an expert on anything. It just seems like more people in the world add to the global warming problem, especially in industrialized countries.)

not_jd_salinger 5y ago

> until they're undeniably upon us We're undeniably impacted by climate change right this very second. You can take a drive along the Eastern coast of the United States and see water flooding the yards of homes that are all for sale. Likewise everyone I've heard of buying costal or near sea-level property has had a hell of a time getting a mortgage because it's hard to find flood insurance. You can watch the Arctic melt almost before your eyes [0]. If that doesn't shock someone right now, then I doubt the first blue ocean event will make a difference either. Coral reefs are being critically threatened right now from ocean acidification, you can watch them die. Arctic winds leaking out of the North as the polar vortex fails wreaked havoc across Texas. The Sierra snow pack, essential for the maintenance of the fresh water supply for both California and Nevada continues to worsen and worsen with what are becoming rare years of it returning. Record drought in the West causes continually devastating wildfires which are also sources of massive CO2 emissions. All these are just a few off the top of my head that I've noticed. Just like pandemic, which still has its fair share of deniers, there will be non-trivial subsets of the population that adamantly deny that climate change is happening even if the entire Midwest were to turn into a dust bowl again. Demagogue after demagogue will emerge to point the finger at some group of people. But I full agree with your sentiment. Compared to climate change, solving pandemic should have been a cakewalk. If we had solved pandemic quickly I would still be skeptical about climate change because it is so much harder to stop. But since we utterly failed to address pandemic, it is already far too late to image we have any change to alter the path climate change is taking. Maybe denial is ultimately the best approach for those that can't move towards horrific acceptance. [0]. https://www.arcticdeathspiral.org/ https://www.arcticdeathspiral.org/

danielodievich 5y ago

I have similar perspective and it is very depressing to see the world marching towards destruction of the modern civilization. I was speaking about this to a friend and he recommended to read book called Drawdown to lift me out of despair. The book is published in the library and all of it is available at https://drawdown.org/ https://drawdown.org/. It was great to see that the work to fix or at least slow things down is already underway. But of course by no means guaranteed to succeed. Especially since that collection of essays did kind of dance around the biggest challenge of industrial rapacious capitalism really being incompatible with caretaking of the entire planet in a fair and balanced way. On that note, somehow right after reading The Drawdown I stumbled on (I think via HN maybe?) Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future) which I swear takes a lot of the stuff from The Drawdown and lays out a path to turning things around that includes a lot of people saying no to the current way of doing things and finally caring for the environment. It was interesting to see the pleas of Mary to the bankers who the book makes a great case are actually the rulers of the world with the quotes of USA's central bankers from just a couple of days where they explicitly state that climate is not within their purview. I don't know. I got children and I get really depressed about shit they will have to deal with. My parents were similarly depressed when they were my age now, and I was my children age now, and nothing got done. Wishing us all lots and lots of luck.

handrous 5y ago

There's no short-term solution effective enough to make much difference, that doesn't reduce the standard of living in rich countries, and/or cap the standard of living in developing countries. It's not happening. Rich countries aren't gonna say "OK, everyone, you get a lot less stuff and can't travel as much now" and developing countries aren't going to accept that they can't aspire to a "Western" quality of life. Hell, an abrupt decline in standard of living is one of the surest ways to get political unrest, violence, and revolutions, even when the reduction is from "very, very high" to "very high" (and even "very high" would probably still be too high, in this scenario).

soldehierro 5y ago
Climate change reduces to an international prisoner's dilemma, and there are surely countries and constituents thereof that won't want to stomach the sacrifices that it would entail. That's why I find it extremely improbable that the human species will ever "fix" climate change.
jasonlaramburu 5y ago
Not true at all. Biochar and soil carbon improve soil health and crop yield, all while sequestering carbon for hundreds of years.

redis_mlc 5y ago

Your comment is mostly drivel, but I'll make a comment then add something useful at the end. > But the sky turned orange for a week last year, as wildfires California doesn't and can't manage its forests properly, so orange skies are expected annually. Very little to do with climate change. The useful part in the article: What's interesting in the article is that CO2 levels increased during a pandemic shutdown. That should be investigated to see why. Climate scientists dream of the chance to collect measurement samples during cessation of human activities like this pandemic (same with the grounding of US aircraft during 9/11.)