9 ms·

‘Apocalyptic’ scenes hit Greece as Athens besieged by fire

77 points by montalbano 5y ago

alexose 5y ago
If this is 1°C, what's 2° going to be like? 3.5°? I fear the only possible way through this by deploying solar geoengineering-- soon-- in order to buy us enough time to scale up carbon capture. In addition to transitioning our energy infrastructure and transportation. It can be done. Letting these conditions continue will almost certainly result in destabilization that make an organized response even less tenable.
- magicalhippo 5y ago
  This is why 1.5C is such a bad slogan. Here in the media we've heard politicians and environmentalists etc talk about the 1.5C goal all the time. But it's not like getting a pay rise, with each day getting just a tad warmer. The average tells you nothing about the extremes.
  - alexose 5y ago
    Yeah. I grew up in Seattle. The thought that it was 108F there this summer is just horrifying.
    - cryptoz 5y ago
      94 in the forecast for Seattle this week ~Friday, again. Forecast was 90 earlier, now 94, been rising for the past few days. (99 forecast in Tacoma)
      - jacquesm 5y ago
        That's harsh but not as bad as some places right now. Ironically, the only thing it will lead to is people turning up the AC closing the feedback loop.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Exactly. It's 1.5 degrees Celsius to heat 5x10^15 tonnes of atmosphere. That's a mind-boggling amount of energy and it has to go somewhere, all that power is available to disrupt our 'normal' weather systems. The laypersons interpretation of 1.5 degrees change is 'so what, it will be a little bit warmer'. The difference between those two views is very hard to reconcile, simply because of the scale.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Solar geoengineering is unproven technology; is there even any estimate on how much it will cost and how long it may take? Lots of things can be done. Most of them won't. People prefer denial - not everyone, but enough to sabotage progress. The pandemic has made this abundantly clear.
  - alexose 5y ago
    It's generally agreed to be highly cost effective. Via Wikipedia: > The annual cost of delivering 5 million tons of an albedo enhancing aerosol (sufficient to offset the expected warming over the next century) to an altitude of 20 to 30 km is estimated at US$2 billion to 8 billion. In comparison, the annual cost estimates for climate damage or emission mitigation range from US$200 billion to 2 trillion.
    - pjc50 5y ago
      > delivering 5 million tons of an albedo enhancing aerosol (sufficient to offset the expected warming over the next century) to an altitude of 20 to 30 km ... How much CO2 is that going to emit? Is that achieved by aircraft or rockets?
      - mc32 5y ago
        Rail cannons?
        pjc50 5y ago
        Another experimental technology! How many MJ/tonne does that take? How many sites do you need? How many more nuclear plants does it take running continuously to manufacture and launch all this? Who pays for this? How do you persuade them? How do you protect it from getting cut by the denialism faction as soon as they get elected?
        hnthrowaway9721 5y ago
        What exactly is your point? Things are difficult, let’s not bother doing anything at all? Just let the world burn?
- jacquesm 5y ago
  > If this is 1°C, what's 2° going to be like? 3.5°? Lots of dead people.
cryptoz 5y ago
Footage from a ferry escaping the fires https://twitter.com/dinosofos/status/1423916668116418560?s=19 https://twitter.com/dinosofos/status/1423916668116418560?s=1...
- dylan604 5y ago
  From the thread: "All of the catastrophic movies authors are gonna have super hard time coming up with something that exceeds reality" No kidding. That's pretty epic footage.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  I watched that this afternoon in a mix of sadness, disbelief (though I know better) and worry about the fate of the people who did not manage to get on that ferry in time, either because they were stubborn or simply because they weren't mobile enough.
doitLP 5y ago
More like ‘Acropolyptic’
xyst 5y ago
I am not looking forward to the future “resource” wars as we begin to see significant decreases in habitable land; water scarcity; food shortages; and decreases in oxygen quality (clean air).
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Effectively they have already begun. Many people are on the move now because their original location has become uninhabitable. 55 million people last year alone, for some perspective.
- alexose 5y ago
  This is already happening in poorer countries with less of a safety net. Somalia comes to mind. Expect the refugee crisis to continue to escalate. Edit: In the meantime, please act. I'm calling on everyone in the tech community to exercise your agency. Get politically active. Invent new solutions. Change jobs if you need to. This is the most important problem to be working on right now, and will continue to be until we achieve gigaton scale carbon capture.
cmurf 5y ago
Denver worst among international cities for air pollution today, smoke plus ozone. We've had 34 straight days of warnings, with recommendation to only drive ZEVs, not go outside if you're in a vulnerable category which happens to include young children. Local politicians have rejected all mandatory actions, and only support voluntary solutions. As a result of EPA policy, we'll get a new mix of gasoline... next year.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Wonder how anti-maskers feel about people wearing masks to keep from breathing smoke particles?
Benjamin_Dobell 5y ago
> On the ground, there are tales of heroism > His wife and child safely evacuated > I hid when the order arrived to evacuate This isn't heroism. This is complete and utter stupidity. Whoever wrote this article should be fired on the spot. The advice is there for a reason. People die doing this all the time. I know someone (a child at the time) whose parents went back to try protect their house. That child was raised without parents. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  People are generally not equipped to see their life's work annihilated in a couple of minutes and will quite literally die to protect it. That's human nature and you should not be too harsh on them.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Yes we should as harshness is required to counteract that human nature.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      Good luck with that. You can't tell people a life long that their possessions and their future are entwined and then yank that away from them and expect them not to - briefly - be in a state of confusion. It's pretty easy to be all rational from a couple of thousand miles away but these scenes play out over and over again in the face of imminent natural disaster. Berating those people is not going to solve it, and I suspect as these stories become more common people will give up their possessions more easily once realization sets in that their attempts are futile and only endanger them. But we are not there yet, and in some ways that is fortunate. The time when that sort of feeling becomes more commonplace will be harsh.
throwaway984393 5y ago
Regardless of any heroic action on climate, the trend will probably continue. I think it's time to stop hoping for "a solution to climate change" and start considering mitigations. The problems of excess heat, from heatstroke to infernos, can be partially addressed by water management. We know we are already approaching shortages of fresh water. So one big mitigation we could do is a new strategy to conserve and distribute water where it's most needed due to climate change. I imagine massive engineering projects to identify sources of fresh water and start distributing them over populated areas. The Romans built their aqueducts over hundreds of miles to bring water into their cities. Well, imagine a nation-wide distribution of water. Unless we want to completely abandon formerly-habitable swaths of the planet, we may need to start "plumbing the world" to share what little water remains. Imagine root-like networks of fresh water that can be activated to tamp down on the spread of fires into cities, or accessed for cool drinking water by anyone who needs it on a hot day. More acquifers to collect and process rainwater. Tighter regulations and enforcement around the dumping of harmful material into waterways. Additional regulations or taxes on excess commercial uses of water. Desalination plants to contribute more water (regardless of cost, it will probably be necessary due to increasing lack of fresh water). Development of new technology to reduce the need for water. And finally, regulations to eliminate wasteful use of water in general (we can't keep watering lawns forever).
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  Another idea is desalination plants. There's plenty of water in the world, but most of it is salt water from the oceans, so if we can desalinate it that will go a long way towards solving the water crisis -- particularly in areas near the shore. It would be interesting to hear what a per-capita price of a gallon of desalinated water would cost, especially when the cost is brought down by having lots of desalination plants all around the world.
  - throwaway984393 5y ago
    Right now desalination is too expensive. I think that we will eventually reach the point where it's necessary regardless of the cost. But I also think we shouldn't bet on them entirely; we should have a much larger water management plan where desalination merely fills gaps rather than provides the bulk of our water. Even if you got desalination cheap enough for local production, transportation would make it even less affordable, so we really need to max out the efficiency of existing watersheds, water tables, and snow melts. And we could further increase efficiency by redirecting water from other parts of the country, the way we (sort of?) do with energy.
DoreenMichele 5y ago
The appearance of firefighters minutes later and his own heroic efforts saved the entire neighbourhood from being reduced to cinders. Like many, Rizos believes the climate emergency will only get worse. “We’re ecologists, we love nature in my family and we want to protect the environment, not install air conditioners that will destroy it. But with temperatures of 45C, that’s going to be hard. We have to adapt. For sure, I’ll be replacing pine trees with other trees that don’t burn so easily.” We need more people thinking like this. I don't know how we get people to take things seriously and act. It needs to be local. It needs to be wise more than smart. We need more small solutions to push back against the effects of our top-heavy world where money and power and the like often sweep in with no respect for local traditions just because they can. I don't know how we get there from here. I know it doesn't help to presume it is a foregone conclusion that we can't make a meaningful difference at this point and we are simply doomed.
- alexose 5y ago
  I hear you, but it's not possible to mitigate our way out of this. It's simply happening too fast. Of all of the carbon that's been released into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, half of it has come in the last 30 years. Over the course of a millennium, sure, maybe even a couple of centuries. But we're looking at a single generation to get this done. And that's without burning a huge amount of oil to make it happen.
  - DoreenMichele 5y ago
    “While they were saying among themselves it cannot be done, it was done.” -- Helen Keller My incomplete BS is in Environmental Studies. I have trouble believing we are doomed to failure and there is no point in trying. If you don't bother to try, that sounds like self-fulfilling prophecy to me, not proof that we couldn't have accomplished something if we had tried.
    - alexose 5y ago
      For sure! For the record, I do think there's a path to success here (see my prior comments), but it's fairly top-down in its approach. Still, everyone has a role to play in demanding that their governments take immediate action. Some mitigation is absolutely necessary. But mitigation alone can't prepare us for 3°C. Billions of people will die.
optimalsolver 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire
state_less 5y ago
We need a CO2 tax to account for this devastation. Folks that want to save money today by not introducing a CO2 tax ought to consider what precious little that saved money will buy if crop land turns to desert and the world is aflame. Folks can’t spend money if they end up in an early grave. So put the CO2 tax money toward EV credits, solar, wind, batteries, carbon capture and power-to-gas tech, etc... This isn’t a consequence free world we live in. If we forsake the earth, I’m afraid we will be forsaken.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  >So put the CO2 tax money toward EV credits, solar, wind, batteries, carbon capture and power-to-gas tech, etc... It's a pretty well known meme that "the government shouldn't pick winners and losers" (specific technologies). Sure, maybe it's not always true, maybe you disagree, but couldn't you at least address how/why? Why can't we have a CO2 tax and not choose what to subsidize, because we (some would say) will surely get it wrong and if anything matters, that matters.
  - state_less 5y ago
    I think a tax should be added to discourage the behavior and the money put toward cleanup (CO2 reduction) in order to remove the risk of further damages. I don’t think much of the clean tech spending is speculative at this point. I’m not as worried about us getting it wrong because I think we are already well wide of the mark and have plenty of opportunities for improvement. We’ve continued down the cheap and easy route of fossil fuel extraction and haven’t been looking to make the seemingly more painful choices. It’s not too hard to imagine how we could ween off a good quantity of fossil fuels. One could justify the spent tax money with high expected CO2 reduction choices. This would, in my view, gets us to a better outcome faster. Here’s my opinion on a some of the consumer side products that can help today. The tax money could go towards credits for purchase of products like 30-50% off EV, solar, battery, insulation purchases. Government side decisions like replacing coal plants are also high expected CO2 removal projects. We might ramp up more speculative tech based on the needs (e.g. carbon capture and power to gas). Hope that helps explain where I’m coming from. With any luck we have more margin for error, though I’m not wanting to count on it.
Rzor 5y ago
Climate change is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Rd6n6 5y ago
I listened to a podcast once about somebody wanting to build a mr burns style sun blocker, except in space and extremely far away from us. The idea was to reduce the amount of sun that hits the earth by a couple of percentage points. It wouldn’t even be visible in the sky they said The podcast might have been called “moonshots”?
SquibblesRedux 5y ago
Does anyone know how the current situation compares to the fires of the 2007 Greek forest fires? [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Greek_forest_fires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Greek_forest_fires

77 points by montalbano 5y ago

If this is 1°C, what's 2° going to be like? 3.5°? I fear the only possible way through this by deploying solar geoengineering-- soon-- in order to buy us enough time to scale up carbon capture. In addition to transitioning our energy infrastructure and transportation. It can be done. Letting these conditions continue will almost certainly result in destabilization that make an organized response even less tenable.

magicalhippo 5y ago
This is why 1.5C is such a bad slogan. Here in the media we've heard politicians and environmentalists etc talk about the 1.5C goal all the time. But it's not like getting a pay rise, with each day getting just a tad warmer. The average tells you nothing about the extremes.
- alexose 5y ago
  Yeah. I grew up in Seattle. The thought that it was 108F there this summer is just horrifying.
  - cryptoz 5y ago
    94 in the forecast for Seattle this week ~Friday, again. Forecast was 90 earlier, now 94, been rising for the past few days. (99 forecast in Tacoma)
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      That's harsh but not as bad as some places right now. Ironically, the only thing it will lead to is people turning up the AC closing the feedback loop.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Exactly. It's 1.5 degrees Celsius to heat 5x10^15 tonnes of atmosphere. That's a mind-boggling amount of energy and it has to go somewhere, all that power is available to disrupt our 'normal' weather systems. The laypersons interpretation of 1.5 degrees change is 'so what, it will be a little bit warmer'. The difference between those two views is very hard to reconcile, simply because of the scale.
pjc50 5y ago
Solar geoengineering is unproven technology; is there even any estimate on how much it will cost and how long it may take? Lots of things can be done. Most of them won't. People prefer denial - not everyone, but enough to sabotage progress. The pandemic has made this abundantly clear.
- alexose 5y ago
  It's generally agreed to be highly cost effective. Via Wikipedia: > The annual cost of delivering 5 million tons of an albedo enhancing aerosol (sufficient to offset the expected warming over the next century) to an altitude of 20 to 30 km is estimated at US$2 billion to 8 billion. In comparison, the annual cost estimates for climate damage or emission mitigation range from US$200 billion to 2 trillion.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    > delivering 5 million tons of an albedo enhancing aerosol (sufficient to offset the expected warming over the next century) to an altitude of 20 to 30 km ... How much CO2 is that going to emit? Is that achieved by aircraft or rockets?
    - mc32 5y ago
      Rail cannons?
      - pjc50 5y ago
        Another experimental technology! How many MJ/tonne does that take? How many sites do you need? How many more nuclear plants does it take running continuously to manufacture and launch all this? Who pays for this? How do you persuade them? How do you protect it from getting cut by the denialism faction as soon as they get elected?
        hnthrowaway9721 5y ago
        What exactly is your point? Things are difficult, let’s not bother doing anything at all? Just let the world burn?
jacquesm 5y ago
> If this is 1°C, what's 2° going to be like? 3.5°? Lots of dead people.

cryptoz 5y ago

Footage from a ferry escaping the fires https://twitter.com/dinosofos/status/1423916668116418560?s=19 https://twitter.com/dinosofos/status/1423916668116418560?s=1...

dylan604 5y ago
From the thread: "All of the catastrophic movies authors are gonna have super hard time coming up with something that exceeds reality" No kidding. That's pretty epic footage.
jacquesm 5y ago
I watched that this afternoon in a mix of sadness, disbelief (though I know better) and worry about the fate of the people who did not manage to get on that ferry in time, either because they were stubborn or simply because they weren't mobile enough.

doitLP 5y ago

More like ‘Acropolyptic’

xyst 5y ago

I am not looking forward to the future “resource” wars as we begin to see significant decreases in habitable land; water scarcity; food shortages; and decreases in oxygen quality (clean air).

jacquesm 5y ago
Effectively they have already begun. Many people are on the move now because their original location has become uninhabitable. 55 million people last year alone, for some perspective.
alexose 5y ago
This is already happening in poorer countries with less of a safety net. Somalia comes to mind. Expect the refugee crisis to continue to escalate. Edit: In the meantime, please act. I'm calling on everyone in the tech community to exercise your agency. Get politically active. Invent new solutions. Change jobs if you need to. This is the most important problem to be working on right now, and will continue to be until we achieve gigaton scale carbon capture.

cmurf 5y ago

Denver worst among international cities for air pollution today, smoke plus ozone. We've had 34 straight days of warnings, with recommendation to only drive ZEVs, not go outside if you're in a vulnerable category which happens to include young children. Local politicians have rejected all mandatory actions, and only support voluntary solutions. As a result of EPA policy, we'll get a new mix of gasoline... next year.

dylan604 5y ago
Wonder how anti-maskers feel about people wearing masks to keep from breathing smoke particles?

Benjamin_Dobell 5y ago

> On the ground, there are tales of heroism > His wife and child safely evacuated > I hid when the order arrived to evacuate This isn't heroism. This is complete and utter stupidity. Whoever wrote this article should be fired on the spot. The advice is there for a reason. People die doing this all the time. I know someone (a child at the time) whose parents went back to try protect their house. That child was raised without parents. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

jacquesm 5y ago
People are generally not equipped to see their life's work annihilated in a couple of minutes and will quite literally die to protect it. That's human nature and you should not be too harsh on them.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Yes we should as harshness is required to counteract that human nature.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Good luck with that. You can't tell people a life long that their possessions and their future are entwined and then yank that away from them and expect them not to - briefly - be in a state of confusion. It's pretty easy to be all rational from a couple of thousand miles away but these scenes play out over and over again in the face of imminent natural disaster. Berating those people is not going to solve it, and I suspect as these stories become more common people will give up their possessions more easily once realization sets in that their attempts are futile and only endanger them. But we are not there yet, and in some ways that is fortunate. The time when that sort of feeling becomes more commonplace will be harsh.

throwaway984393 5y ago

Regardless of any heroic action on climate, the trend will probably continue. I think it's time to stop hoping for "a solution to climate change" and start considering mitigations. The problems of excess heat, from heatstroke to infernos, can be partially addressed by water management. We know we are already approaching shortages of fresh water. So one big mitigation we could do is a new strategy to conserve and distribute water where it's most needed due to climate change. I imagine massive engineering projects to identify sources of fresh water and start distributing them over populated areas. The Romans built their aqueducts over hundreds of miles to bring water into their cities. Well, imagine a nation-wide distribution of water. Unless we want to completely abandon formerly-habitable swaths of the planet, we may need to start "plumbing the world" to share what little water remains. Imagine root-like networks of fresh water that can be activated to tamp down on the spread of fires into cities, or accessed for cool drinking water by anyone who needs it on a hot day. More acquifers to collect and process rainwater. Tighter regulations and enforcement around the dumping of harmful material into waterways. Additional regulations or taxes on excess commercial uses of water. Desalination plants to contribute more water (regardless of cost, it will probably be necessary due to increasing lack of fresh water). Development of new technology to reduce the need for water. And finally, regulations to eliminate wasteful use of water in general (we can't keep watering lawns forever).

pmoriarty 5y ago
Another idea is desalination plants. There's plenty of water in the world, but most of it is salt water from the oceans, so if we can desalinate it that will go a long way towards solving the water crisis -- particularly in areas near the shore. It would be interesting to hear what a per-capita price of a gallon of desalinated water would cost, especially when the cost is brought down by having lots of desalination plants all around the world.
- throwaway984393 5y ago
  Right now desalination is too expensive. I think that we will eventually reach the point where it's necessary regardless of the cost. But I also think we shouldn't bet on them entirely; we should have a much larger water management plan where desalination merely fills gaps rather than provides the bulk of our water. Even if you got desalination cheap enough for local production, transportation would make it even less affordable, so we really need to max out the efficiency of existing watersheds, water tables, and snow melts. And we could further increase efficiency by redirecting water from other parts of the country, the way we (sort of?) do with energy.

DoreenMichele 5y ago

The appearance of firefighters minutes later and his own heroic efforts saved the entire neighbourhood from being reduced to cinders. Like many, Rizos believes the climate emergency will only get worse. “We’re ecologists, we love nature in my family and we want to protect the environment, not install air conditioners that will destroy it. But with temperatures of 45C, that’s going to be hard. We have to adapt. For sure, I’ll be replacing pine trees with other trees that don’t burn so easily.” We need more people thinking like this. I don't know how we get people to take things seriously and act. It needs to be local. It needs to be wise more than smart. We need more small solutions to push back against the effects of our top-heavy world where money and power and the like often sweep in with no respect for local traditions just because they can. I don't know how we get there from here. I know it doesn't help to presume it is a foregone conclusion that we can't make a meaningful difference at this point and we are simply doomed.

alexose 5y ago
I hear you, but it's not possible to mitigate our way out of this. It's simply happening too fast. Of all of the carbon that's been released into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, half of it has come in the last 30 years. Over the course of a millennium, sure, maybe even a couple of centuries. But we're looking at a single generation to get this done. And that's without burning a huge amount of oil to make it happen.
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  “While they were saying among themselves it cannot be done, it was done.” -- Helen Keller My incomplete BS is in Environmental Studies. I have trouble believing we are doomed to failure and there is no point in trying. If you don't bother to try, that sounds like self-fulfilling prophecy to me, not proof that we couldn't have accomplished something if we had tried.
  - alexose 5y ago
    For sure! For the record, I do think there's a path to success here (see my prior comments), but it's fairly top-down in its approach. Still, everyone has a role to play in demanding that their governments take immediate action. Some mitigation is absolutely necessary. But mitigation alone can't prepare us for 3°C. Billions of people will die.

optimalsolver 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire

state_less 5y ago

We need a CO2 tax to account for this devastation. Folks that want to save money today by not introducing a CO2 tax ought to consider what precious little that saved money will buy if crop land turns to desert and the world is aflame. Folks can’t spend money if they end up in an early grave. So put the CO2 tax money toward EV credits, solar, wind, batteries, carbon capture and power-to-gas tech, etc... This isn’t a consequence free world we live in. If we forsake the earth, I’m afraid we will be forsaken.

perl4ever 5y ago
>So put the CO2 tax money toward EV credits, solar, wind, batteries, carbon capture and power-to-gas tech, etc... It's a pretty well known meme that "the government shouldn't pick winners and losers" (specific technologies). Sure, maybe it's not always true, maybe you disagree, but couldn't you at least address how/why? Why can't we have a CO2 tax and not choose what to subsidize, because we (some would say) will surely get it wrong and if anything matters, that matters.
- state_less 5y ago
  I think a tax should be added to discourage the behavior and the money put toward cleanup (CO2 reduction) in order to remove the risk of further damages. I don’t think much of the clean tech spending is speculative at this point. I’m not as worried about us getting it wrong because I think we are already well wide of the mark and have plenty of opportunities for improvement. We’ve continued down the cheap and easy route of fossil fuel extraction and haven’t been looking to make the seemingly more painful choices. It’s not too hard to imagine how we could ween off a good quantity of fossil fuels. One could justify the spent tax money with high expected CO2 reduction choices. This would, in my view, gets us to a better outcome faster. Here’s my opinion on a some of the consumer side products that can help today. The tax money could go towards credits for purchase of products like 30-50% off EV, solar, battery, insulation purchases. Government side decisions like replacing coal plants are also high expected CO2 removal projects. We might ramp up more speculative tech based on the needs (e.g. carbon capture and power to gas). Hope that helps explain where I’m coming from. With any luck we have more margin for error, though I’m not wanting to count on it.

Rzor 5y ago

Climate change is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Rd6n6 5y ago

I listened to a podcast once about somebody wanting to build a mr burns style sun blocker, except in space and extremely far away from us. The idea was to reduce the amount of sun that hits the earth by a couple of percentage points. It wouldn’t even be visible in the sky they said The podcast might have been called “moonshots”?

SquibblesRedux 5y ago

Does anyone know how the current situation compares to the fires of the 2007 Greek forest fires? [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Greek_forest_fires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Greek_forest_fires