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> 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 collap

by 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.
    - dnautics 5y ago
      > 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. This is probably the opposite of what is likely to happen, warmth is likely to enrich the food productivity of more northerly countries which tend to be politically more stable and have less distribution and corruption problems, resulting in more net food production, not less. > See the problem of soil depletion. Not related to the carbon dioxide issue. If you poison the carbon dioxide issue with unrelated or poorly-thought out assertations, you risk discrediting it.
      - me_me_me 5y ago
        >This is probably the opposite of what is likely to happen, warmth is likely to enrich the food productivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertification Have you seen the size of Africa? You are literally a character from futurama proposing to drop a giant ice cube into sea to cool it down.
- BobbyJo 5y ago
  This is kind of a refutation of the parent, no? We knew things would work themselves out one way or another with COVID, so it was ok that we messed up. We know climate change won't work like that, so how then is COVID a good demonstration of our resolve and problem solving ability with respect to climate change?
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > We know climate change won't work like that, so how then is COVID a good demonstration of our resolve and problem solving ability with respect to climate change? It's not perfect. A better test would be a bona fide alien invasion. But the similarities were in: - High stakes - millions of lives are as high as you can get outside an actual existential risk - Global coordination needed for effective response - Cooperation of every individual needed for effective response In a way, COVID was a more pressing situation, and to the degree we've failed at both global coordination and individual cooperation, it suggests we'll do even worse with climate change. Some of the things the pandemic revealed are: - People don't trust the experts and authorities, way beyond the extent of reasonable doubt. - There's an infinite supply of pundits willing to sow doubt about the seriousness of the problem. - We can be staring death in the face, seeing our kin fall left and right, and many of us still reject effective means of mitigating the problem, seeing them as an "attack on their freedoms".
Etheryte 5y ago
This is a pretty misleading take on what happened. DARPA awarded the grants to research mRNA based vaccines in 2013. These vaccines were many, many years in the making before the pandemic hit and practically unlimited resources were poured into them to push the final stretch out. Even then, it required dropping many best practices around safety and validation just to get some kind of results out the door as fast as possible. So perhaps a better wording is that we got incredibly lucky that this specific grant was awarded over other similar ones and that it happened to bear fruit. It could've just as well been a different kind of pathogen and we would've been out in the cold. Saying we can just invent a fix when a problem comes up is not the right takeaway here. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27359269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27359269
- graeme 5y ago
  What best practices were dropped? The vaccines moved quickly because everyone gave them priority, and because there were many cases in the wild so the trials could amass the needed events quickly. mRNA vaccines have been great. But multiple conventional vaccines were developed about as fast and we’d probably do fine just with those.
- Lammy 5y ago
  Luckily we wouldn't be starting from zero here either since DARPA has been doing climate research for thirty-plus years, and if the global climate situation turned dire I'm sure it would get more resources than even COVID did: https://web.archive.org/web/19970429012543/http://www.au.af.mil/au/2025/volume3/chap15/vol3ch15.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/19970429012543/http://www.au.af....
thamer 5y ago
mRNA vaccines were not "invented" to beat the pandemic, nor do the current vaccines use technologies invented in 2020. The technology was there, and ready enough that Moderna even reportedly designed their vaccine in "2 days" in January 2020 after SARS-CoV-2 was fully sequenced.[1] There's a bit more to making a Covid vaccine than cutting off the ~3,000 nucleotides (~10%) that encode the S protein and printing them + packaging them into nanolipid particles, but the rest is mostly a set of known tricks to do things like keeping the mRNA from folding onto itself and increasing its GC-content for easier transcription.[2] The ~11 months between January and December were spent testing and getting approvals, not developing new technologies. [1] https://globalnews.ca/news/7492076/moderna-coronavirus-vaccine-technology-how-it-works/ https://globalnews.ca/news/7492076/moderna-coronavirus-vacci... [2] https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...

by 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.
  - dnautics 5y ago
    > 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. This is probably the opposite of what is likely to happen, warmth is likely to enrich the food productivity of more northerly countries which tend to be politically more stable and have less distribution and corruption problems, resulting in more net food production, not less. > See the problem of soil depletion. Not related to the carbon dioxide issue. If you poison the carbon dioxide issue with unrelated or poorly-thought out assertations, you risk discrediting it.
    - me_me_me 5y ago
      >This is probably the opposite of what is likely to happen, warmth is likely to enrich the food productivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertification Have you seen the size of Africa? You are literally a character from futurama proposing to drop a giant ice cube into sea to cool it down.
BobbyJo 5y ago
This is kind of a refutation of the parent, no? We knew things would work themselves out one way or another with COVID, so it was ok that we messed up. We know climate change won't work like that, so how then is COVID a good demonstration of our resolve and problem solving ability with respect to climate change?
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > We know climate change won't work like that, so how then is COVID a good demonstration of our resolve and problem solving ability with respect to climate change? It's not perfect. A better test would be a bona fide alien invasion. But the similarities were in: - High stakes - millions of lives are as high as you can get outside an actual existential risk - Global coordination needed for effective response - Cooperation of every individual needed for effective response In a way, COVID was a more pressing situation, and to the degree we've failed at both global coordination and individual cooperation, it suggests we'll do even worse with climate change. Some of the things the pandemic revealed are: - People don't trust the experts and authorities, way beyond the extent of reasonable doubt. - There's an infinite supply of pundits willing to sow doubt about the seriousness of the problem. - We can be staring death in the face, seeing our kin fall left and right, and many of us still reject effective means of mitigating the problem, seeing them as an "attack on their freedoms".

Etheryte 5y ago

This is a pretty misleading take on what happened. DARPA awarded the grants to research mRNA based vaccines in 2013. These vaccines were many, many years in the making before the pandemic hit and practically unlimited resources were poured into them to push the final stretch out. Even then, it required dropping many best practices around safety and validation just to get some kind of results out the door as fast as possible. So perhaps a better wording is that we got incredibly lucky that this specific grant was awarded over other similar ones and that it happened to bear fruit. It could've just as well been a different kind of pathogen and we would've been out in the cold. Saying we can just invent a fix when a problem comes up is not the right takeaway here. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27359269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27359269

graeme 5y ago
What best practices were dropped? The vaccines moved quickly because everyone gave them priority, and because there were many cases in the wild so the trials could amass the needed events quickly. mRNA vaccines have been great. But multiple conventional vaccines were developed about as fast and we’d probably do fine just with those.
Lammy 5y ago
Luckily we wouldn't be starting from zero here either since DARPA has been doing climate research for thirty-plus years, and if the global climate situation turned dire I'm sure it would get more resources than even COVID did: https://web.archive.org/web/19970429012543/http://www.au.af.mil/au/2025/volume3/chap15/vol3ch15.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/19970429012543/http://www.au.af....

thamer 5y ago

mRNA vaccines were not "invented" to beat the pandemic, nor do the current vaccines use technologies invented in 2020. The technology was there, and ready enough that Moderna even reportedly designed their vaccine in "2 days" in January 2020 after SARS-CoV-2 was fully sequenced.[1] There's a bit more to making a Covid vaccine than cutting off the ~3,000 nucleotides (~10%) that encode the S protein and printing them + packaging them into nanolipid particles, but the rest is mostly a set of known tricks to do things like keeping the mRNA from folding onto itself and increasing its GC-content for easier transcription.[2] The ~11 months between January and December were spent testing and getting approvals, not developing new technologies. [1] https://globalnews.ca/news/7492076/moderna-coronavirus-vaccine-technology-how-it-works/ https://globalnews.ca/news/7492076/moderna-coronavirus-vacci... [2] https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...