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Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

• fbn79 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Climate_Change#Criticisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Cli...
• chiefangel1 5y ago
  big facts covid vaccines are also only being used for emergency use “protocol” = save humanity right now that is lol
• dang 5y ago
  Related ongoing thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28113821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28113821
• Yuioup 5y ago
  Getting rid of bitcoin would be a start.
  • a_humean 5y ago
    Nothing of value would be lost
  • eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 5y ago
    Let's instead get rid of private air travel. Has caused a pandemic and millions of deaths. And the emissions are very likely larger than those of Bitcoin. People can go on vacation by train instead. If you demand people use slow legacy money then I can demand slow legacy travel, ok? ;)
    • inter_netuser 5y ago
      people on this forum love private jets, but hate bitcoin. why? ppl that travel on private jets can travel commercial, or are some people exempt from climate change damage somehow?
      • detaro 5y ago
        ... the GP didn't argue for getting rid of "private jets", but for getting rid of commercial air travel.
        • sokoloff 5y ago
          They literally said “Let's instead get rid of private air travel”, which I interpreted (reasonably I think) to mean private aviation (where you know the other passengers) not public airline (Delta, KLM, British Air, etc.)
          • detaro 5y ago
            Because private planes are relevant travel amounts to "cause a pandemic", and "People can go on vacation by train instead" makes sense when talking about private planes (vs "can fly commercial"?)?
            • sokoloff 5y ago
              I agree their conclusion was ridiculous. However, it seems equally ridiculous to conclude “even though they specifically said white, they must have meant black, and for you to read white into their argument is a willful misconstruing of their argument.”
    • pmg101 5y ago
      I see you're getting downvoted but maybe "get rid of" isn't the best approach. Certainly taxing air travel at a chunky rate would reduce unnecessary flights.
      • eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 5y ago
        Parent suggested "getting rid of bitcoin" so I dare to suggest getting rid of something else as well :)
      • wiz21c 5y ago
        Taxing it means : the rich will be able to continue to fly while the poor, not being able to travel anymore because of the tax, will support the burden of climate adaptation. That's not justice. And that's the issue : climate change requires a global effort and if we want to have the masses to adapt, then we must have the elite to adapt equally.
        • corney91 5y ago
          A frequent flyer tax would help here. Everyone gets a tax-free flight, then a low tax for the next one, and it keeps increasing for more flying. ~23 minutes in this podcast describes it and explains how it'd make a huge impact: https://www.cheerfulpodcast.com/rtbc-episodes/fair-miles https://www.cheerfulpodcast.com/rtbc-episodes/fair-miles The key stat is it'd be enough to reach the UK's target on carbon emissions from flying by 2050, at a cost of 0% for the first flight and 9% on the second (going up steeply from there). Of course, other countries may have different data but the principle should be the same.
        • QasimK 5y ago
          The rich will support the burden of climate adaptation because the income from the tax can be used directly to help mitigate climate change. The vast majority of flights are taken by a small minority of people; they're taken by the richest. Take the United Kingdom as an example: 70% of all flights were taken by 15% of people [0]. It certainly isn't the poorest taking these flights. So taxing flights will have less direct impact on the poorest than one might think. Having said that, I think a charge on carbon is more fair than taxing flights directly. [0]: https://fullfact.org/economy/do-15-people-take-70-flights/ https://fullfact.org/economy/do-15-people-take-70-flights/
    • JCWasmx86 5y ago
      I frankly don't think this would make sense. Imagine explaining the people of a country, that they aren't allowed to fly to e.g. Mallorca anymore. The acceptance would be somewhere between low and zero. Maybe private air travel in one country, e.g. from Munich to Berlin could be reduced, but not international flights without any resistance
      • gambiting 5y ago
        They should be allowed to travel, of course - but the carbon tax on flights should mean that a flight to Mallorca is a £1000 per person each way.
      • de_keyboard 5y ago
        This is why we are screwed. I think deep down majority knows the climate is changing, but they are not prepared to make any personal sacrifices.
        • thevagrant 5y ago
          I know people making changes in their lives but it does appear hopeless right now. I drive much less and will look at solar panels eventually an electric car. I know some who already did move in that direction. I can plant some trees in my yard and make better choices with consumption however, what's to stop countries who still build coal power plants or coal still being mined? I despair. Many ppl are switching to electric cars thinking they did good, and yet they charge those same cars using energy supplied by burning fossil fuel. I'm not completely convinced solar panels or electric cars are produced cleanly. More needs to be done about that. How do we know for sure the energy used to make these are not adding to the problem. Even worse is that old petrol cars will usually be onsold to other countries, so emissions can't be falling? An individual can only do so much. Most people will bury their head in the sand. Those who take action may be pissing in the wind without realizing it.
    • mtekman 5y ago
      Emissions from aviation contributes 3% to greenhouse gasses.
      • adrianN 5y ago
        That's a fairy big chunk. Especially if you take into account that globally almost nobody can afford to fly.
      • aenario 5y ago
        *historically contributed Will contribute 6-10% of yearly emission in the coming years
      • QasimK 5y ago
        The emissions from aviation are increasing every year, the majority of flights are for holidays rather than business, and only a very small minority of people globally actually take flights. However, I belive the parent commenter was more pointing out the unfairness of picking and choosing what to ban rather than imposing a blanket charge on carbon. This seems to have been missed by most, even when considering that the parent is likely correct that flights have a greater, and increasingly greater, impact on climate change than bitcoin does.
    • _Algernon_ 5y ago
      At least remove subsidies from all air travel, and add a carbon tax on top. Would make train much more competitive on many routes.
  • avnigo 5y ago
    Here's an informed article on bitcoin's energy use [0]. [0]: https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actually-consume https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...
    • ealexhudson 5y ago
      "The vast majority of Bitcoin’s energy consumption happens during the mining process. Once coins have been issued, the energy required to validate transactions is minimal." Honestly, that doesn't seem particularly well-informed. I wonder how this person thinks transactions are committed to the blockchain, and how this is separate from the mining process? Unless they literally mean "the energy required to consult the ledger of previous transactions", which doesn't seem a useful metric.
      • avnigo 5y ago
        The quote you referenced makes the distinction between committing (mining) transactions and validating. The energy used to validate transactions is indeed minimal. The energy used for validation is a useful metric because it's how the bitcoin network can afford to stay decentralized.
      • tromp 5y ago
        The confusion comes from how the miners are compensated for their energy burning. Currently, it's mostly by the block subsidy, which is independent of the amount of transactions in a block. But in a decade or two, that will be dominated by transaction fees, and we can actually attribute the energy cost to the transaction amount.
  • wesleywt 5y ago
    We should have more bitcoin.
  • fighterpilot 5y ago
    Just tax carbon instead of trying to pick winners and losers
    • veidelis 5y ago
      On what evidence is your opinion based?
      • adrianN 5y ago
        That a carbon price is a good idea is pretty well known among economists. I believe there was a Nobel price for the idea.
      • fighterpilot 5y ago
        It's economics 101. If there's an externalized cost it leads to over-consumption. By correcting the price you make consumption levels optimal.
        • whoaisme 5y ago
          Funny the only thing I got out of taking econ classes was the fact that everything they teach undergrads is simplified bullshit. A carbon tax would never work, if only for the fact that it's too late in the game for a carbon tax to have any meaningful impact. Also I think it's hilarious that you had time to snidely point out how firm your grasp is on economics but a tax on bitcoin eluded your wisdom. You can correct the price on carbon but not on bitcoin? LOL
        • tsimionescu 5y ago
          Economics 101, like all Science 101 courses, is simply wrong and doesn't reflect the world except vaguely from afar. Trying to understand the economy through the lens of economy 101 is like trying to launch a rocket to the moon using only Newton's laws of motion. Successful governments pick economic winners and losers all the time, and don't let chaotic market forces decide if they need an agriculture sector or R&D. For a simple example of just how misleading econ 101 is, look at the effect of a minimum wage: by all accounts, it slightly increases employment, the very opposite of econ 101's prediction.
• RandomLensman 5y ago
  If some things "are irreversible on timescales of centuries to millennia" then really just going carbon neutral etc. sounds like a pretty weak approach as it would create costs now and large benefits only far in the future. Maybe this really needs geoengineering (and more spending on mitigation)?
  • brylie 5y ago
    Has any means of geoengineering been demonstrated as feasable? Given our track record, it would probably be best for us to scale back our consumption while promoting re-forestation. Nature can likely heal itself far better than our wildest geoengineering ambitions.
    • RandomLensman 5y ago
      Clearly feasible, as demonstrated by anthropogenic climate change. Going back to a different life style is an option, but will be strongly opposed by a lot of people (and not without justification). Planet was much hotter, much colder etc. So as a species we need to learn to cope and tackle this anyway, why not start now?
      • de_keyboard 5y ago
        > Clearly feasible, as demonstrated by anthropogenic climate change. No that only shows we can change the climate, not engineer it to best suit humanity.
        • RandomLensman 5y ago
          Like any engineering project, it could fail, succeed, or be "meh"
          • GekkePrutser 5y ago
            Or it could cause many unintended consequences by messing with a super complex system we don't fully understand. "Stop doing what broke it in the first place" (e.g. stopping CO2 emissions) sounds like the sanest option.
• bjarneh 5y ago
  Seinfeld was correct, the only warning we are afraid of is "dry clean only".
  • Zenst 5y ago
    Minefield warnings kinda usurp clothing labels from experience.
• charlesmunger8 5y ago
  Edit: bad boy
  • wesleywt 5y ago
    I prefer we don't do anything, so that people such as this can suffer so that future generations can learn from their foolishness.
    • dead-snake 5y ago
      If you're wishing for people to suffer, do you ever wonder if you might be on the wrong team?
    • VyperCard 5y ago
      Thanks for this amazing quoteable.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • fifafu 5y ago
    > World crisis! Quick! Give your money to or help elect these people! Save the world! Do it for the children. Stupid. Nothing about this is quick. Climate scientists have told us for > 20 years. But sure let's post stupid bullshit on the internet and continue to do nothing.
    • tephra 5y ago
      I agree with everything you say here but feel the ">20 years" hides something. We can easily say 30 years, there are very good arguments to say ~50 years and to get truly technical we could say 70-100 years.
      • disgruntledphd2 5y ago
        I remember worrying about this as a child, and I'm in my forties now. It's been a long, slow process.
• matco11 5y ago
  > This pact aims to keep the rise in global temperatures well below 2C this century and to pursue efforts to keep it under 1.5C. It seems to me that continuing to communicate just the average temperature increase is a missed opportunity to engage with a greater portion of the population. 1.5 or 2 degrees do not seem like much, but once one understands that’s an average made out of much bigger positive and negative swings in temperature, one gets a much more dramatic picture. I suspect focusing on the widening of the temperature range, rather than the average temperature change would work better with communications to the wider public
  • headmelted 5y ago
    Also people need to be presented with the consequences. I still know a lot of people who genuinely believe it means slightly warmer summers. They think I'm a crazy person when I mention the never-ending storms and lack of drinking water. Also just dropping this link here as I remember watching it at the time and thinking isn't it great we're not there yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CXRaTnKDXA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CXRaTnKDXA
    • dkdbejwi383 5y ago
      Yeah, I don’t mean to be disparaging but the average person doesn’t really seem to grasp this beyond: it’ll be slightly warmer. And in a cold European climate, most people seem to think that’s a good thing. Warm summers are enjoyable when you’re swimming in the sea and having barbecues in the park. Maybe there should be more focus on the frequency and intensity of storms, floods, extreme heatwaves, etc. Although to be honest if this is lost on people up until now anyway, what hope is there? A significant number of people just don’t seem to care.
      • disgruntledphd2 5y ago
        It's difficult to care about long-term problems like climate change, when you are struggling to provide for your family in the present. That's some of it, although some others seem to emotionally reject any information about climate change, which is more concerning (especially when those people end up in positions of political power).
• marsven_422 5y ago
  Only one world communist government can save us!!!!
• tgz 5y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqTanhErR_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqTanhErR_E
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    You might want to clarify the relevance, and perhaps relevant sections, of that 11-hour video.
• helsinkiandrew 5y ago
  > Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity' What almost alarms me more than the thought of a climate apocalypse is that I don't think this (a UN report) is going to have any effect on the opinions of 40% of the public who see climate change as some kind of job destroying conspiracy. Nothing short of Florida disappearing under the sea is going to make any difference, perhaps we (as a species) don't deserve to continue.
  • gfodor 5y ago
    It seems fairly obvious that climate change is going to be solved before the bigger existential risks we face, which are for the most part unknowable or largely ignored. There are a lot of people working on climate change now, it's well established in the public's mind, and there are many incentives in place to accelerate solutions.
    • headmelted 5y ago
      there are many incentives in place to accelerate solutions I don't believe this to be true. If you look at the incentives currently in place they're well short of what could be considered the minimum recommendations of any of the previous reports. This is not an indicator of a world that takes climate change seriously: [Saudi oil giant Aramco sees profits soar by almost 300%] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58141607 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58141607
    • GordonS 5y ago
      I presume this is missing a /s ?
    • hef19898 5y ago
      It also seems companies are moving faster than politics. E.g. deprecating ICEs by 2030/35, without any policies forcing them. The mere discussion about increasing CO2 prices triggered coal power plant operators to think about phasing those put before any policy enforced coal exit. The pessimist in me will only believe any of that, and any positive impact, once it happened. Not sooner.
• skinkestek 5y ago
  So now we can get rid of fast fashion, mandate reusability for products, reintroduce basic woodworking, metalcrafting and sewing/repair work in school and with that get rid of a huge chunk of the needless shipping? Or are we still going to go after individuals eating traditional food while thought leaders fly across the globe in private jets (no kidding) telling us we need to change our diet? PS: I'm already a enthusiastic carbon cutter even if it historically has been because it correlated very well with cost cutting and self sufficiency.
  • qeternity 5y ago
    > cost cutting Do you mind elaborating more on this? Is it just a matter of consuming less == fewer costs?
    • skinkestek 5y ago
      Also buy higher quality products, ideally used instead of cheaper products new. Repairing instead of throwing away. Avoiding unnecessary consumption, choosing what I prioritize. Edit, another: Thinking smart wrt transport, haven't used car to get to work since maybe 10 years ago.
      • mschuster91 5y ago
        > Edit, another: Thinking smart wrt transport, haven't used car to get to work since maybe 10 years ago. The problem is, outside of urban areas there simply is no alternative to owning a car because public transport has never been built or torn down.
        • skinkestek 5y ago
          Speak for yourself and your country. I live in the countryside in Norway - a famously long and sparsely populated country - and I either work close enough to home to go by bike or I work far enough away that I can manage to pick up my laptop and get some work done while in public transit. And yes: I get to the train station by bike, bus or by feet, if necessary it is just 30 minutes brisk walk. Edit: not every Norwegian can do this, but far more than today. I guess this is true for a number of other countries as well.
• nathias 5y ago
  The responses in this topic alone are enough to see the chances of success are very low.
  • sammalloy 5y ago
    One of the biggest problems I've come across are older people who say or think "I've got mine, I won't be alive when the shit hits the fan, so I don't care." If you can address that aspect of the problem, then you're probably half way there to solving it.
    • nathias 5y ago
      I'd say that a reduction of systemic issues to personal responsibility is a much bigger problem than that. Global warming is a problem of externalities and can only be solved as such.
    • Aerroon 5y ago
      To me it looks more that people from rich countries got theirs, but people from poorer countries aren't allowed to have theirs. The people from rich countries will stop them because of climate change. It's easy to demand that others change their behavior.
      • sammalloy 5y ago
        With respect, climate change is impacting poorer countries far worse than than rich countries. The projections from India are particularly dire.
        • Aerroon 5y ago
          Sure, climate change will have a worse effect on poorer countries. But what's going to lead to greater suffering: climate change in the next few decades to a century or 10-15 years lower average life expectancy in India? And not only a shorter life - a worse quality of life too. The US has a GDP of $65k per capita. India has $2.1k per capita. If we took the US GDP, add India's GDP and then divide the sum by the sum of India's and US's populations we get a GDP per capita of $14.3k. That would be a drop of almost 80% for the average American. You can imagine what they would lose in their quality of life over that.
• poorjohnmacafee 5y ago
  > But there is new hope that deep cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases could stabilise rising temperatures. How is this possible when you have water vapor in a positive feedback loop, which is a far more potent, prevalent ghg that increases with any rise in temperature. "Water vapor reduction" has to be part of the message at this stage, not just carbon reduction.
  • GekkePrutser 5y ago
    I don't really see how this is possible for humanity at a scale that affects global warming. Most water vapour by far is generated by nature itself. We couldn't make a dent in that. The CO2 is what upset the balance and we are by far the biggest contributor there so it makes sense to address that.
    • poorjohnmacafee 5y ago
      The point is reversing the CO2 does not reverse all that proportionally much larger increase in water vapor... eg. we have no choice but to address water vapor as well as CO2 if we want to have any chance in fixing global warming.
  • Aerroon 5y ago
    Water vapor also means more clouds which reflect sunlight. Are you sure that it's a positive feedback loop? Edit: this is a genuine question. The last time I read about it the result was inconclusive whether it caused or hindered warming.
    • flavius29663 5y ago
      It's both, actually. Water vapor is positive no matter what. Clouds can be both positive and negative at the same time, depending on cloud type, altitude etc. This is one of the things that are hard to model. Get this wrong and you can swing from a mere +1 global warming (what CO2 alone would do in 100 years) to +3 or more.
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
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• wiz21c 5y ago
  The article, and many like it, does a poor job of explaining the consequences we will face. 1.5°C doesn't mean much to the lay man. Explain that uncertain harvests, tied to speculation on risks, will much likely lead to an increase in the price of bread. Add to that an increase in oil will also lead to a price increase. Heatwave in Greece ? Greece is usually hot in summer so one doesn't care. Now explain how many houses were burnt in fire, how many people died, how much it costs to rebuild houses, where that money will be taken from, etc. Consequences... Not prediction. Interestingly, my kids have hard time understanding the word "consequence". It's a difficult concept to get.
  • Bellamy 5y ago
    Wildfires in Canada and Russia. Floats in Germany. Etc, etc... We have known 40 years what will happen and now for our leaders those consequences seem to come as a surprise. I hope the Germans will vote for the Green party in the September's federal elections and other countries will follow the example.
    • dantheman 5y ago
      Didn't Germany b decide to dismantle their nuclear power plants?
      • lucb1e 5y ago
        Yes, and it's not a topic they like to talk about. I have yet to meet a person from Germany that isn't outright in favor of abolishing nuclear, the best I've gotten out of one is to agree that it might have been better to do it after shutting down coal plants.
    • longtom 5y ago
      I dearly hope the Greens will not win. Reducing consumption is an extremely tricky problem, and likely unfeasible without creating large amounts of poverty. I'd rather live in a rich, powerful nation with strong workforce and military rebuilding after each storm than being stripped my last rights and eating worms while a tiny elite still enjoying the freedoms we once had. Please do not fall for the propaganda.
• dakra 5y ago
  I really liked Bill Gates new Book: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster[1]. I liked that it shows what we have to do to get to 0 greenhouse gas emissions. What's the current state of technology and what's still left to do to get there. I often find suggestions like "Meatless Monday" or "Only fly when really necessary" etc, while probably good, not really useful advice. In Gates book he talks about that transportation and "building things" is good and we should not stop it, but instead find a way to make it emission free. [1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/My-new-climate-book-is-finally-here https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/My-new-climate-book-is-fin...
  • gspr 5y ago
    I very much agree, and as a bonus, these more optimistic solutions – solutions where we do something instead of (just) stopping doing something – seem easier for people to swallow too.
    • rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
      We have the means to stop the catastrophe. We don't need more solutions, just to comprehend that our behavior is destroying our ecosystems and pick the right solutions for the right behavior. We just need to act on it. Also, no one pretended that violence can be annihilated when we collectively decided to swallow that killing one another is not a right and we outlaw it (except in some context that is defined by laws and treaties).
      • lucb1e 5y ago
        > We don't need more solutions Ah, I see you have not read the book. No no my friend, we are not all there yet. Some things are easy like energy production (mixed sources including nuclear) and transportation (batteries and electrofuels, though the latter is still too expensive for poorer countries so we'll need to improve those even if we technically could do it). But for example steel and concrete, things we need insane amounts of to house a few more billion people until 2100 and to build those nuclear/wind/etc facilities with, we don't really have solutions for those yet. I would recommend checking out the book.
• mytailorisrich 5y ago
  As usual the elephant in the room is the global population. We can't eradicate poverty, protect the environment, and maintain the human population we currently have. Bikeshedding is always easier than facing hard issues so people focus on marginal things, like air travel or plastic cups, rather than facing the root cause of it all. Do we want all humans to have a good life with high living standards among a thriving natural world? If the answer is yes then we need to be lucid enough to realise that this is not doable on this planet if we are 8+ billions.
  • nmca 5y ago
    Most models forecast a 10bn max pop due to decades long trend of richer countries having lower birth rates.
  • gspr 5y ago
    > As usual the elephant in the room is the global population. No. Thankfully, the global population is more or less levelling off. We know the recipe by now: lift people out of abject poverty (wherein children are the only ones providing for you at old age), combat child mortality (under which people have far more children to be sure that at least some grow up), and give women control of their own bodies and education (so that they no longer have to be child-bearing machines). We've seen this work again and again, most strikingly in Asia. We know it works. If the same process happens for Africa, the world population will certainly level off. There's plenty of problems ahead for humanity, but it seems that we don't have to panic about the global population anymore!
    • mytailorisrich 5y ago
      Levelling off at 8-9 billions is unsustainable if poverty is eradicated and probably even if it isn't. The demand on resources is simply too great. Global population is a key problem for humanity.
      • gspr 5y ago
        I don't think that's true. We know how to produce all the energy we need with almost no GHG emissions. Do that, and put greenhouses everywhere, switch everyone to a purely plant-based diet.
• thewhitetulip 5y ago
  Climate change is bad. Govt are not doing anything. But has any model taken into consideration about covid deaths?
  • h4kor 5y ago
    Covid put a minuscule dent into the carbon emmision, but we are basically back to normal. Death don't have a great effect as the general carbon production (oil, coal, gas) are still rising.
    • thewhitetulip 5y ago
      True. But I was thinking that since a million people have died there would be some dent in carbon
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • _Algernon_ 5y ago
        A million deaths assuming they reduce carbon emissions equally would only be 0.0125%. In reality considering that vaccines are unevenly distributed in favor of countries with high CO2 emissions, it's likely much less than that.
        • rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
          Most deaths are of old people who had few years to live. They were also not consuming much. And they would not have more children. The CO2 impact of these deaths is negligible if not positive (in the bad sense) because the disruption of Covid will end up emitting more CO2 than business as usual (a lot of investment could have been used to fight climate change but were diverted to fight Covid and to support the industries that are the most in troubles (which are the most polluting ones).
      • InsomniacL 5y ago
        4,300,000 covid deaths[0] 7,885,000,000 world population [1] 0.05% of the world population has died from covid. Numbers may be wildly wrong but would have little overall effect. [0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ [1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
• adrianN 5y ago
  Project Drawdown has a nice overview with things we could do and what their respective impact would be: https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions
  • Bellamy 5y ago
    This is great. Every decision maker should read that list.
• h4kor 5y ago
  We are running head first into the Great Filter.
  • walton_simons 5y ago
    This has been my pet theory for a while. What if the actual great filter for an intelligent species is the difficulty of escaping your home planet _before_ you've consumed all of its resources? I will — naturally — have a human-centric view of this, but it does seem like a very hard thing to do, given the physical and technical challenges of getting out of the gravity well, and actually surviving for extended periods in the harshness of space. Not to mention the travel time of getting anywhere worthwhile! It seems pretty clear to me now that we're not going to make it. We need to cut global emissions by 15% a year, every year, starting in 2020[1]. As a species, we aren't capable of the kind of global organisation and foresight it will take to achieve this. I'll suspect we'll continue hurtling headlong towards the edge of the cliff (although there's a good chance we're already over it, and currently hanging in the air like Wile E. Coyote) until there's a war over the last dwindling resources, or a simultaneous worldwide failure of food production. I've wondered a few times that if we were to go back in time to the start of human civilisation, knowing what we know now, would we be able to direct our energies more appropriately, and make it off earth in sufficient numbers to enable us to become a spacefaring species? Then I remember that science predicted all of this back in the 19th century[2]. We did nothing then, and we're doing nothing now. Alok Sharma says it's a catastrophe, but "also insisted the UK could carry on with fossil-fuel projects."[3] We're in real trouble. [1] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/1/3/21045263/climate-change-1-5-degrees-celsius-target-ipcc https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/1/3/21045263... [2] https://daily.jstor.org/how-19th-century-scientists-predicted-global-warming/ https://daily.jstor.org/how-19th-century-scientists-predicte... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/07/were-on-the-brink-of-catastrophe-warns-tory-climate-chief https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/07/were-on-...
  • guilhas 5y ago
    The stupidity filter
  • nonbirithm 5y ago
• ur-whale 5y ago
  Every one is focused on climate change. But climate change is just a symptom, and absolutely not the disease. No one seems to want to discuss or even mention the actual root cause of climate change, namely: there are simply too many people on the planet. Go back to less than 1B human on planet earth, and climate change will stop being a problem in a heartbeat. But the implications of such a drastic population decrease are simply impossible for any politician to even consider, much less discuss openly. Not to mention the swath of folks for whom "be fruitful and multiply" is still a basic moral tenet.
  • automatic6131 5y ago
    Yeah, how do you think planning the largest genocide in history sounds to people? Do you even hear yourself? Do you want to go to 6 out of 7 people and tell them they cannot breed? What will be the punishment if they do? Or will you forcibly sterilise them?
    • axelroze 5y ago
      World population will decline in any case if/when climate catastrophe happens. People will drown, drop dead from heats, die from starvation, etc. It's the Lotka-Volterra model where the predator is the environment. Climate catastrophe is created by humans. Climate catastrophe kills humans. Conclusion: Humans kill humans. The genocide (mass scale murder) is already here (assuming climate change will be as bad as worst predictions are) Only the strongest will survive. That is the cornerstone of Nazi ethics. That will also be the reality of everyone when food and water gets scarce. Damned if you sterilise 6B people, damned if you don't and they die from heat or fighting each other for food. Moral theoretisising aside, population will decline before the total climate collapse. The current ethical beliefs of feminism, harsh economic conditions for young people (inequality and foreseeable end of growth), depressing reality how we will die horribly from ISIS, China or Climate Change. All of them bring about to less pairs creating children. But humans will survive. We are worse than cockroaches. Nothing can destroy us. Mars might happen. Singularity maybe. But human race will persist in any case as long as earth persists in any livable state (-60 to +60 degrees C, somewhat fresh Air and uncontaminated water). Humans will downscale to a couple millions but will remain.
• hootbootscoot 5y ago
  The actual report https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/ https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/ I suspect that bad-faith-social-actors will attempt, as always, to undermine this report and minimize the obvious need to act in reality on Earth circa 2021. I suspect that we must come up with social and economic mechanisms for making ALL pollution the problem of the polluter, versus an externality for everyone to absorb. I suspect that we had better find such mechanisms NOW, vs a later that is too late.
• malwarebytess 5y ago
  At some point we need to consider ramping down mass production no matter the consequences. This is getting out of hand.
  • Aerroon 5y ago
    And do what? Cause even more human suffering by preventing others from reaching a better standard of living? What do we ramp down? Electronics? Clothes? Food? Transport?
    • malwarebytess 5y ago
      Yes. We managed before mass production and we will manage again. It's either the inevitable collapse of civilization or a deliberate controlled ramp down, globally. There will not be some magic technology to fix this and we clearly are not going to be able to finesse this. It's time to start considering and planning for a global slowdown of production and a radical shift in the way we live. If we don't do it the biosphere is going to do it for us.
      • Aerroon 5y ago
        >Yes. We managed before mass production and we will manage again. Sure we did. We managed 10,000 years ago as well. But I would bet that going back to live like people did 200 years ago would cause more harm to humanity than unabated climate change in the next 100 years.
  • m4rtink 5y ago
    Mass production and deployment of clean technology is the only realistic way to get out if this. It's not like there are not options available, many states are not exactly poor and past experience has shown we can scale production insanely fast if there is an important reason for it.
  • keewee7 5y ago
    Yes only America and Europe should be wealthy.
• c01n 5y ago
  Rastafarians where right: - Don't eat meat - Don't use plastic - Don't use cars - Grow your own food - Love the earth And yes Babylon is literally burning.
• perryizgr8 5y ago
  > "We will see even more intense and more frequent heatwaves," said Dr Friederike Otto, from the University of Oxford, UK, and one of the IPCC report's authors. > "And we will also see an increase in heavy rainfall events on a global scale, and also increases in some types of droughts in some regions of the world." According to TFA these are the consequences to expect if 1.5 degrees rise occurs. Doesn't sound like "code red" to me.
  • matzab 5y ago
    According to TFA (a few paragraphs above your quotes, even) we won't stay at 1.5 degrees.
• karol 5y ago
  We still cannot be sure if it is anthropocentric climate chance but that doesn't really matter. If we want to "return to baseline conditions" - what we try to show on graphs, then we need to cool down the atmosphere using aerosols: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160519120731.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160519120731.h... Realistically there is not and there isn't going to be in the current decade an agreement between nations on CO2 reduction. Whatever we change in EU China and India is going to undo by mining coal. So geo-engineering negotiations should start now.
• baxtr 5y ago
  The world's population was at around 5.3 bn in 1990 and is now approaching 7.7 bn. This ain't a popular opinion on HN, but I think a key factor to getting climate change under control (whatever that means), is to reduce the growth and to stabilize the population.
  • ggm 5y ago
    It's stabilising. Look at the curve. Increasing wealth in Africa and Asia correlates strongly to a drop in birthrate. The problem isn't unconstrained population growth, it's the energy budget inherent in the population we have already, as standards of living rise worldwide. 30y and we didn't double. We probably won't hit 10b
    • danparsonson 5y ago
      10b would be just over 25% more people - therefore even if we manage to reduce per-capita environmental impact by 25% (which is evidently no mean feat), we'd still just be treading water.
      • danparsonson 5y ago
        Duh, can't do maths - 25% population increase requires 20% impact decrease to stay still. Still seems unlikely to me across a 30 year timeline.
  • adrianN 5y ago
    The best way to do that is probably improving the education of girls in developing countries: https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/health-and-education https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/health-and-education
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • rory 5y ago
      This is likely true to some definition of best (which is not exactly most effective).
• dangfang 5y ago
  Al gore proven right once again. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/mar/02/facebook-posts/fact-checking-claims-al-gore-said-all-arctic-ice-w/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/mar/02/facebook-p...
• NickBBBBB 5y ago
  A.E. Currie's Utopia 5 series of books are well worth a read. They are speculative fiction, describing how the world burns over the second quarter of the 21st century. But frankly terrifying as each year passes and they align with reality.
• rich_sasha 5y ago
  It’s just so hard to know what actions have what impact on CO2 production. Some are high-pain, low-gain (switching devices off instead of standby?), some are opposite (cycling instead of driving when possible etc). For that if for no other reason, I’d rather if consumer prices included an explicit CO2 tax. The here can be a rebate for poorer people, or personal allowance, whatever, but there would be a fixed yardstick for measuring your personal impact. Off the top of my head, I have no idea which if my activities generates the most CO2. My car? Energy use? Diet? Going skiing once a year? No idea. Newspaper articles only help a little, they usually present an incomplete picture, and optimising against an incorrect utility function is often counterproductive. I’m imagining something like VAT, where “value added/carbon” adds up over the lifetime of product/service production.
  • shadowfaxRodeo 5y ago
    Even if every person on the planet did what you reasonably expect of yourself, we would still not even be close to reducing CO2 production. By all means do those things. But if you want to make a real difference you need to look beyond your own activities. Change your community, your company, your industry. What can you do that changes the defaults for everyone else? Try and find low-hanging fruit. Join your local climate activist group e.g. 350.org — they'll be full of people with solutions.
    • rob_c 5y ago
      Not sure what solutions that group is supposed to be espoucing but they're mostly just a political lobbying group. Frankly until the shouting and arguing stops and someone who can make a difference comes to the table I'm out. There is was too much posturing which makes no difference and is bad on both sides from plastic signs complaining about pollution to politicians who travel from ecological disaster to ecological disaster via private jet, and that's even before you realise just how in the pocket mainstream politicians of both sides are to the current status quo.
      • shadowfaxRodeo 5y ago
• roguesupport 5y ago
  I know this will just haul in the downvotes, but I just want to point out the EVERY IPCC report, EVER, has been dead wrong. Every single one of them.
  • clydethefrog 5y ago
    You are right, but your premise is probably different. They were indeed wrong. They were too conservative. Some historical perspective: 1990: 1st Assessment Little observational evidence for a detectable human influence on climate 1995: 2nd Assessment The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate 2000: 3rd Assessment Most of the observed warming over the last fifty years is likely* to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations * > 66% chance 2007: 4th Assessment Most of the observed increase in global average temeratures since the mid-20th century is very likely* to to the observed increase in anthopogenic greenhouse concentrations * > 90% chance 2016 It is extremely likely** that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. ** > 95% chance 2021: It is indisputable that human activities are causing climate change, making extreme climate events, including heat waves, heavy rainfall, and droughts, more frequent and severe.
    • flat-bird 5y ago
      > extreme climate events, including heat waves, heavy rainfall, and droughts, more frequent and severe None of that is true. Not more frequent, not more severe. Not hurricanes, either, nor floods. Nor is loss of life due to any of those things increasing.
• fnoof 5y ago
  Most of the comments here are opinions on what other people should do to stop climate change. For those that have read up on it, What are the highest impact things the average hacker news reader can do over the next few years?
  • m4rtink 5y ago
    Get involved in carbon free energy sources getting better and more widely introduced as well as current energy using devices being more efficient ? Any improvement by an andividual of this kind that gets deployed in scale eclipses any changes of lifestyle of a single.individual can have.
  • zejn 5y ago
    For direct emissions: Stop burning stuff. Do you call it fuel? Stop burning it. Or at least burn it as little as possible. EVs and heat pumps solve two of biggest personal direct emissions sources: transportation and heating living spaces. Beyond that, if you own a roof, get solar panels. Those are a modern miracle at capturing 20% of the Sun's energy, when photosynthesis for crop plants is about 1% to 2%. Grow your own food, if you have a garden.
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    Change policy. This isn't a problem solved by individualism.
• dunslandsboo 5y ago
  How many doomsday predictions do we need to see not coming true before these people finally give up.
  • danparsonson 5y ago
    I'm not sure what rock you've been living under lately but it sounds comfortable.
• holografix 5y ago
  I have this overwhelming feeling that it’s over. Are there publications and articles or studies etc about how the rich are preparing for the impact of climate change? Are there large swaths of Alaska being bought up? Farms in California being sold cheap? Mega security mansions popping up in New Zealand? Fresh water supply chains suddenly being consolidated under the same biz? Is this part of the reason why China is getting half of Africa in debt? To secure a food bowl and have a legitimate reason to deploy force when needed?
  • perfunctory 5y ago
    New Zealand https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-rich-new-zealand-doomsday-preppers/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-rich-new-zealand-doo...
  • longtom 5y ago
    The propaganda and media cooptation is just staggering. It's extremely suspicious that very little attention is paid to the fact that reducing consumption will likely increase poverty. If you trace, for example, the supply chain of some medicine you might use, or might depend on in future: The machinery, chemical refinery, transport, sourcing or resources, management, markets, and infrastructure below all that. All of this will get orders of magnitude more expensive if we reduce carbon emissions. You will not be able to afford medicine if you need it, and possibly die of a horrible death, e.g. from an infection and without painkillers. In the meanwhile, anyone raising these issues is defamed as climate change denier.
    • scrollaway 5y ago
      You have a kernel of truth there which isn't talked about enough (the fact that CO2 consumption brings advantages which reduce death and misery AND potentially reduce further CO2 consumption as well, in a "you gotta spend money to make money" way). Unfortunately you are wrapping it in delusional hysteria such as "you will die of a horrible death from an infection without painkillers". So you're getting down voted because you are completely ignoring how things such as subsidies work.
• truckerbill 5y ago
  Out of curiosity, who here is trying to make a change? Through either lifestyle or lobbying. If not why?
  • skinkestek 5y ago
    Have been doing a lot of the right things for a couple of decades already, mostly because it is also the smart thing to do from a personal economic perspective though. - reuse / repair instead of throwing away - buying used - put effort into maintenance - avoiding wasteful activities I actually enjoy it and I have a good life.
    • truckerbill 5y ago
      It's really satisfying to me bypassing the consumer cycle, I agree. Woodworking and electronics is fun and useful.
  • Gigachad 5y ago
    Recently moved to the city and got rid of my car. I now walk everywhere. I feel like this has cut out a fairly significant chunk of my impact.
• contravariant 5y ago
  For those interested, here's a link to the report that was released today: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-i/ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-g...
• hasa 5y ago
  We should reduce pollution, not panic about weather. Seas are full of plastic and organic waste, dry land too, rain forests are burned down to make more field. I don't claim that human would not affect to climate, but it is extremely difficult to prove statistically when the data we have is something like 100 years from the full 5 billion years of existence of earth. How can you take all factors into account in this kind of statistical analysis?
• jimworm 5y ago
  For all the carbon capture that the Devonian/Carboniferous period did over 100 million years, humanity undid a large part of it in 150 or so years. And now to preserve human civilisation in some form, the most direct way is probably to rebuild that carbon sink within a much shorter time. Much shorter than 150 years, not 100 million. Current carbon emissions are over 10 billion tonnes per year, so the capture speed will have to exceed that by however much required, probably something like 10x as much. If a process could be scaled to capture 100 billions tonnes of carbon per year, it could be a viable way out of the mess. Is it even possible with current technology given unlimited funding and political will? For example, if insoluble carbonates could be synthesised from atmospheric carbon dioxide, that could be a form of long-term carbon storage.
  • cnity 5y ago
    In theory, a sink large enough to bring the Earth back to carbon neutral would be possible if the Sahara were reforested[0]: > The team's calculations suggest the forested deserts could draw down around 8bn tonnes of carbon a year, about the same as emitted from fossil fuels and deforestation today. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/nov/04/forests-desert-answer-climate-change https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/nov/04/forests-d... Edit: > if insoluble carbonates could be synthesised from atmospheric carbon dioxide indeed, if only there was a highly efficient process that could convert the carbon in the atmosphere into hydrocarbons, using energy purely from the sun...
    • jimworm 5y ago
      Trees with their own conversion capacity are indeed a good interim solution, but in the long term this form of carbon storage isn't as permanent as rocks, especially given how prone trees are to dying and decaying in the biosphere of today. The Devonian didn't have that problem. For example, parts of the Amazon have become greenhouse gas emitters even when human-caused deforestation is discounted. There's also the very real possibility of forest fires releasing huge amounts of carbon at once. Even dead trees preserved in peat bogs could burn and release carbon in this manner. Rocks have their own weaknesses such as ocean acidification, but relatively speaking they're much more stable.
• keewee7 5y ago
  How is the world preparing for millions of climate refugees? According to the latest estimates Southern India will not be inhabitable for humans by 2050. 250 million people live in Southern India.
• shadowfaxRodeo 5y ago
  The internet causes around 5% of global carbon emmissions. It's invisible, and difficult to measure, so little gets done about it. But if you're a developer who wants to help. Check out: https://sustainablewebdesign.org/ https://sustainablewebdesign.org/ Pretty much all the solutions to making a greener web would make the web better in general. - Send less data (efficient video, images, fonts, etc) - Make fewer requests - Use a CDN (the greenest one you can) - Stop collecting vast amounts of personal data - Better bot blocking - Use PWAs when appropriate - Change the culture, foster competition for doing the above. I'm sure there's a thousand more items you could add to the list.
  • Gigachad 5y ago
    Something that almost the entire population uses all day is only using 5%? Sounds incredibly efficient. Repacking fonts to be smaller sounds about as useful as plugging a hand crank generator in to the power point.
    • shadowfaxRodeo 5y ago
      Solutions to the climate crisis can all be broken down into smaller and smaller parts — small enough to be ignored — or small enough to be easily fixed. For web developers that 5% is our responsibility, and we have the means to change it in ways many people cannot. As for fonts — yes I'm sure it would make a big impact. Font files are a decent chunk of average page weight.
      • Trasmatta 5y ago
        You're pretty much guaranteed to make an immeasurably larger impact by spending your time researching and donating to climate charities, action groups, and politicians than you are doing any of the things you listed. Put your effort and money towards things that actually make a difference, not these tiny drops in a vast ocean.
  • carrolldunham 5y ago
    >*Stop collecting vast amounts of personal data* This is why I left and denounce green movements. It's always (on an individual activist up to organization level), a front for completely unrelated ideological agendas. Edit: 'A front' is too strong - a convenient vector. But you poison the well by failing to restrain yourself from slipping that stuff in.
• thendrill 5y ago
  Can someone please explain why should a middle class, middle aged blue collar worker care about this? How does any of this make his life better or worse?
  • zer0tonin 5y ago
    Do they like access to cheaply grown food? Enjoy a summer without a 50°C heat spike? Don't want their kids to get enrolled in a war over resources? If they answer "yes" to any of that, they should maybe care.
  • walton_simons 5y ago
    Does he care about anyone but himself? Does he have children or grandchildren? Nephews or nieces? Does he care about their safety and welfare, and want them to have good lives?
• titannet 5y ago
  I don't understand the underlying argumentation. Going "net zero" would require changing the live of every human on the planet, that's just not going to happen in a controlled manner. How about some achievable goals like not building new coal plants? And slightly less BS along the lines of replacing (houses, cars, whatever) with new slightly more efficient variations.
• okokwhatever 5y ago
  People, it's easy. If we are having difficulties to reduce our consumption because the lack of preparation let's first reduce how many people are living in the world with a worldwide One Child policy. Obviously this will produce future issues that will have to be addressed but it's a necessary step (temporally?) to gain some time.
  • 542458 5y ago
    That would not work. Ignoring the mass revolt that would occur in most western nations, it would also be wildly insufficient, destroy the economy, and take a very long time to make an impact. There are much better uses for such a massive amount of political capital.
• paganel 5y ago
  I fail to see the same climate-related apocalyptic messages coming from the mainstream media exactly one year ago. It's either the situation has gotten exponentially worse in this last year (unlikely) or that the focus has turned from one apocalypse (covid in the wealthy countries) to another one (climate change). At this rate only a big regional war can shift the focus again from this specific subject.
• jokoon 5y ago
  I'm still very skeptical how the measures will take into effect if they ever happen. In france the yellow vests protest was caused by a planned carbon tax increase on gas. Car dependent citizens rioted. A carbon tax will reduce the living standard of everyone, and it will take time for society to readjust. I really think the economy will tank and take a lot of time to adjust to a green economy, as it's not only electricity, transportation and meat: it's also the production of cement and steel, landfills, chemical production, crop burning and deforestation, rice. There are tens of little things that once combined, emit a lot of CO2. Road transport is only 12% of co2 emissions. So to be clear, electric cars are nice, but they're solving almost nothing. Since humans generally compete against each other for everything, and since we live in an age of individualism and not collectivism, I'm quite pessimistic about humanity reducing their emissions, because the air is the single thing that is collectivized. Edit: fixed grammar
  • qeternity 5y ago
    > Only 12% of ROAD TRANSPORT emits co2. Road transportation accounts for ca. 12% of global emissions. Nearly 100% of road transportation emits CO2.
    • lucb1e 5y ago
      Also "only 12%" as if that's nothing. If other things are both easier to tackle and make up >50% then there might be a point ignoring this eight of the problem for now, but it's not.
  • TaylorAlexander 5y ago
    > Only 12% of ROAD TRANSPORT emits co2. So to be clear, electric cars are nice, but they're solving almost nothing. I just want to add, that so many people buy in to the idea that the solution to gas powered cars is electric cars. But I feel like the significantly climate friendlier solution is bicycles and trains. The latter requires us to really go outside of our comfort zones (in the USA anyway) and we just don't want to do that. Which is too bad because I would find a bicycle friendly city to be much more livable. I lived in silicon valley for 15 years and it was remarkable how hostile it felt to bicycles for how flat it all is. But I wonder what are the other problems like this. Where we think the solution is an electric car (and lithium mining, and working long hours to pay off the price tag, and emissions when manufacturing it) when a better solution would be adapting to a bicycle-focused world. I think plastic pollution is one area where we think bioplastics or recycling are the solution, but a better one would be standardized glass bottles with municipal washing systems. And zero waste grocery stores. We really need those. I have collected so many jars to reuse and its amazing what we keep buying and throwing away with every container of food.
• loopz 5y ago
  Can air-conditioners capture CO2, collect fuel while keeping you cool as the world heats up? [1,2,3] Humans added fossile fuels into the atmosphere and oceans already. This won't disappear completely for a thousand years [4], so we need to find ways to remove it. [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90342957/what-if-every-air-conditioner-was-stopping-climate-change-as-it-kept-you-cool https://www.fastcompany.com/90342957/what-if-every-air-condi... [2] https://duanetilden.com/2019/05/18/using-building-air-conditioning-systems-for-carbon-capture-and-synthetic-fuels/ https://duanetilden.com/2019/05/18/using-building-air-condit... [3] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/may-4-2019-brain-resuscitation-hippos-supply-algae-skeletons-slug-surgical-glue-and-more-1.5119885/how-air-conditioners-could-keep-you-cool-and-capture-carbon-1.5119911 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/may-4-2019-brain-resuscitati... [4] https://skepticalscience.com/why-global-warming-can-accelerate.html https://skepticalscience.com/why-global-warming-can-accelera...
• nikkinana 5y ago
  We used to change the world, like the Hoover dam and the Erie canal. Now we tax the world. And nothing changes because taxes don't solve anything except make people rich.
• Throwaway197401 5y ago
  Anyone who claims to be "following the science" knows that there is no such thing as "code red" in science and lo and behold it's not what the IPCC report says but a UN representative. This is a media and ideologically driven narrative and have absolutely nothing to do with reality yet it's used to scare people who can do absolutely nothing and will only be used to push draconian and anti-human decisions on the energy front. Anyone who wants to actually understand what the IPCC is finding should go read the actual report and they will find just like all the other IPCC reports that things are not even close to what the media and environmental organizations want you to believe, in fact, the IPCC reports are getting less concerned not more and you will find there is a lot more uncertainty with a lot of metrics. There is no scientifically demonstrated consequence of climate change we don't know how to deal with today let alone in 80 years from now. Yes the use of fossil fuel have externalities, some of them negative luckily most of them positive.
  • AstralStorm 5y ago
    Yeah? Tell me how you deal with displacement of millions of hungry people and I'll give you a Nobel peace prize. Well, the monetary amount of, we'll do a Fig or something.
  • clydethefrog 5y ago
    I saw the IPCC press conference this morning. I don't recall the scientists getting less concerned, in fact, it was quite the opposite. I am interested in where in the conference or in the report where they claim thing are less severe than they thought. Also the positive sides seem interesting, could you also link the section in the IPCC report?
    • Throwaway197401 5y ago
      Read the report. It doesn't matter what they say at a press conference which is created to push a certain political agenda. The only thing that matters is what can be scientifically demonstrated, not just speculated. From that make your own assessment.
  • lawn 5y ago
• Tycho 5y ago
  1. That the planet is warming and we can accurately measure that 2. That we can accurately model the effect of CO2 on temperature and sea levels 3. That we can accurately model increasing levels of 'bad weather' and disasters based on temperature increase 4. That we can translate these climate forecasts into socioeconomic repercussions well enough to make global policy decisions that should be enforced at great cost My credulity decreases with each successive layer.
• tedk-42 5y ago
  The nuclear solution has been there this whole time. Too many solar / wind dummies getting in the way of this being a viable replacement claiming 'oh yeah these green sources can cleanly swap into coal/gas plants' while completely ignoring base load / growth requirements which nuclear can fill without being dependent on external variables.
  • DrBazza 5y ago
    > The nuclear solution has been there this whole time. Yes, but it's more subtle than that. Despite the naysayers, and those that don't accept science and fact, nuclear, is clean, is safe, and is available right now. Deaths due to nuclear power station (construction, accidents, Amongst the many problems with uranium-based nuclear power is: government legislation and control, government obsession with also producing weapons grade fuel, preventing other countries (Iran, North Korea) from having it, and lastly cost, as a consequence of all of these things. And because of the weapons grade part, and other reasons, thorium has never been pursued. But China is, https://www.livescience.com/china-creates-new-thorium-reactor.html https://www.livescience.com/china-creates-new-thorium-reacto..., and it seems like the West is going to be in China's pocket again, if it is successful. As for fusion. That's still 30 years away as usual.
    • tedk-42 5y ago
      Fusion isn't a commercially viable solution I agree. The focus should be on traditional nuclear fission reactions. Indeed China are leading the development, but the USA still remains the number 1 producer in nuclear power followed by France. While you do mention governments, it's really a popularity issue that prevents widespread acceptance and adoption. Similar to COVID vaccinations, people need more education on Nuclear as a safe and real solution to replace carbon based energy generation technologies. My country Australia is an example of how ineffective governments are in educating people on what the right thing to do is. You mention cost as an issue, but it's only an issue due to man-made red tape and systems put in place by interest groups to force nuclear out of the public and make it so difficult to attain. People pandered on the same rhetoric about lithium batteries and look where we are now. The economics will work themselves out once things are placed into motion in that direction. At the end of the day, we should be willing to pay rather than being cheap about the environment and letting natural disaster after natural disaster continue.
• jsonne 5y ago
  If there is anything covid has taught me its that collective action isn't something we can rely on and is a lot more wishful thinking about the state of humanity rather than a sober look at the reality. Governments need to tax CO2 emissions on the business side and pour the money into carbon capture technology in the private space through investment and perhaps some sort of bounty program (you get $x for each ton you capture). The greatest hope I see for the future of humanity is the incentive for a brilliant mind/leader to become the next Bezos/Musk via climate change technology and to do that the incentives have to be setup to make it happen. I'm past hoping for people to do the right things en masse.
  • Chris2048 5y ago
    And if a country doesn't, are we willing/able to go to war? Given that some countries will burn down forests that pollute their airspace, and the airspace of their neighbours it's pretty likely there will be those that refuse the tax.
    • pas 5y ago
      Maybe not straight to war, but taxing cross border trade, embargo, etc. are all effective.
      • Chris2048 5y ago
        That was always the assumption. How effective was/is it against China? There's an "tragedy of the commons" wrt international trade.
        • pas 5y ago
          Do you mean Mr. Art of the Deal's trade war? That was basically already lost in the 1990s, right after the Tienanmen Square massacre, when the US continued to treat China as WTO good guy (Most Favoured Nation), instead of acting swiftly to connect the negative economic consequences of human rights abuses to. (But US big farm lobbied against it, and eventually no one with power really gave a shit. Just like nowadays with Hong Kong or Xinjiang.) On the other hand the embargo against Cuba, Russia, North Korea, Iran are pretty devastating for their economy. (Which might help absolutely zero percent in terms of human rights, but if the goal is to reduce GHG emissions, probably a lot of countries are willing to make pragmatic deals about technology to benefit from free trade than countries that are willing to change their whole political system.)
• andy_ppp 5y ago
  Is there any sign something will happen at COP26? Or will we just carry on with the same? Can you imagine what the anti-vax nut jobs will do when confronted with the reality of extremely expensive everything and less of it? For example moving the food system over to local produce with very little meat would help a lot but there is no political ability to make such a change.
• madis 5y ago
  How about building more nuclear electric stations? The nuclear energy production hasn't increased in the US for past 30 years, while oil and gas have exploded. Retards. Saame thing in EU - closing down the plants in Germany and Spain
• heurisko 5y ago
  I find messaging like this on climate change poor, and possibly counter productive. There need to be concrete solutions offered, be that nuclear, wind, solar, electric vehicles etc..
• database_lost 5y ago
  I still don't see how our individual actions can have a widespread impact regarding climate change, sure, it will have some effect, but I'm willing to bet it would add up to fractions in the end. Pushing political and economic leaders to take action by tackling just the top mega polluters on the other hand seems like it would have significant impact https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac13f1 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac13f1
• ciconia 5y ago
  This is not only a question of transitioning to "green" energy. It's also a question of values. For me, humanity is at a cross roads, all possibilities are open, and we need to choose, individually and collectively: short term growth or long term sustainability, consumerist delirium or happy sobriety [1], mission-to-mars escapism or this-planet-is-our-only-home realism. [1] http://www.lejournalinternational.info/en/pierre-rabhi-interview-1/ http://www.lejournalinternational.info/en/pierre-rabhi-inter...
• spodek 5y ago
  More science doesn't hurt, but we lack leadership. Scientists are trained to research, report, and expand knowledge, but not the social and emotional skills to influence behavior. If we want other people to change, we have to recognize that information, however accurate and valuable, and telling people what to do is of limited effect. If we want different outcomes we have to do different things. Yes, still research, but don't expect it to change people's behavior. There are things that do, more like listening, role models, vision, empathy, stories, images, and what leaders do. I work on creating role models, stories, and vision. I started my podcast, originally Leadership and the Environment, now This Sustainable Life https://joshuaspodek.com/podcast https://joshuaspodek.com/podcast, to bring leaders and leadership to the environment. Maybe it's for you, maybe not, but it's what I wish was around before I started acting. The first episode https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episodes/000-what-leadership-and-the-environment-is-about https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo... describes the strategy.
• whiddershins 5y ago
  The notion that humanity would go extinct from any of this is absolutely unrealistic. What we are talking about is at worst massive economic damage and loss of life, similar to a very serious war. Which is horrible, but really not the threat it is made out to be. Moreover, since these changes happen relatively slowly (compared to bombs and such) much of the loss of life can be mitigated. So we are talking economic damage and loss of property and infrastructure. Primarily. Let’s be honest that the most likely course through all this is to adapt to the changing planet. I think that would be so much more refreshing than all the hand wringing.
  • baliex 5y ago
    I'm not sure you'd take the same position if you were one of the people who was going to be immediately and directly affected by the change that's coming. I expect at some point some change will happen which does affect you and you won't like it. That moment has already come for some people, spare a thought for them.
    • whiddershins 5y ago
      I am. I’m saying let’s reduce the impact to them, which is likely doable. Help them. Prioritize dealing with the effects of climate change over ‘fighting’ climate change.
  • brbrodude 5y ago
    The instabilities that come from it may very well put us into a full blown dark age, the economic & societal stresses may bring dialogue to a halt, civil & military conflicts most certainly will rise along with it and with it the world would accelerate in the way of catastrophe instead of moving towards adapting or fixing. It won't go down well, you're deluding yourself if you think it won't propagate to the rest of reality. It would be a self-reinforcing loop of tragedies, downward spiraling.
  • kumarvvr 5y ago
    >The notion that humanity would go extinct from any of this is absolutely unrealistic Why not? With the current societal focus on materialism and luxury, perpetuation of greed and glorification of power, climate need not do much. Wipe out some fraction of the population is all it needs to do. The rest will be done by us. The last two people will fire bombs at each other and kill each other for sure.
• juanani 5y ago
  What's 'code red' mean? Did we pass amber? Is purple the next stage? I love our obsession with coloring our alarms. I wanna see indigo on there next if you're listening designer.
  • frockington1 5y ago
    Reminds me of the homeland security threat level chart. When its orange, we're serious. When it's red, we're super for real serious
• josh_today 5y ago
  If the Sahara and Grand Canyon once flowed with water before civilization What makes a paper straw the solution so our polar ice caps have less thaw? This is a serious question and not denying climate change. What’s our ultimate end goal after everything has gone green if we cannot change the planet’s cycles?
  • awestroke 5y ago
    * Plastic pollution is orthogonal to climate change * It sounds like you are implying that there is no man-made climate change, only natural cycles. This is 100% false. We are facing extinction as a species, and it's due to greenhouse gases we emit.
    • josh_today 5y ago
      I’m not denying man made climate change. I’m challenging the status quo and looking for a response with our solution when the climate will, evidentially, change.
• stragio 5y ago
  If you are looking for an overview of future climate scenarios of each country worldwide: https://www.howhotwillitget.com https://www.howhotwillitget.com. The coming months I am going to update the website with the new data and fix some running issues. Follow my Twitter if you want to stay updated.
• iamfbpt 5y ago
  I'm surprised that after that many decades of complete BS propaganda, corruption and misleading information, people still take UN studies seriously.
• realce 5y ago
  Where is the company that specializes in retrofitting combustion vehicles to electric?
• dangoor 5y ago
  If you're in the US, now is the time to contact your representative and senators. This is possibly our last chance at real climate action for a decade: https://www.volts.wtf/p/crunch-time-this-is-americas-last https://www.volts.wtf/p/crunch-time-this-is-americas-last
• ihuk 5y ago
  We bought an expensive washing machine 3 years ago thinking it will last us a long time. It already broke down twice. It's been broken for almost a month now waiting for parts and whatnot. There's a good chance we'll have to get another one. Does Electrolux/AEG care? No. They don't care about the environment, their only obligation is to their shareholders. But frankly neither do I anymore. Next time, I'll buy the cheapest one and when it inevitably breaks down I'll throw it away and get another cheap one. It's absurd that in the world where planned obsolescence, cruising industry and fast fashion exist, ordinary people are tasked with saving the planet. This is like trying to improve performance of a program using naive algorithm with O(n^2) complexity by rewriting it in assembler.
  • jstsch 5y ago
    That's not normal. Both my Siemens washer & dryer will reach 10 years this December and both are working like new. Price wise in the 75th percentile models (of Siemens). The dryer is a heat pump model, which was quite a bit more expensive than other models at the time. The salesperson at the local MediaMarkt even recommend against it, since you would never 'make the money back' in energy costs from it. This is quite wrong. In fact, with EU energy prices you recoup the difference within 2 years using it twice a week.
  • dangoor 5y ago
    I completely agree and think pricing should reflect more of the externalities. Side note: I do not consider myself a "handy" person. Never cared much for fixing things around the house. However, thanks to YouTube and (at least in the US) RepairClinic, I have found that certain kinds of repairs to appliances are actually easy and I can get them done much more quickly than when calling a repair service because RepairClinic has the parts in stock. (I have the added benefit of living ~30 minute drive from RepairClinic.) Also, I haven't personally found a correlation between price and reliability.
  • bradleyjg 5y ago
    > ordinary people are tasked with saving the planet I can’t read minds, but my sense is that much of what individuals are asked to do is knowingly conservation theater. If you want to put a positive spin on that, you can say it makes them feel more committed to supporting the regulatory changes necessary by building a sense of shared sacrifice. The cynical version writes itself.
• kumarvvr 5y ago
  It is time that the people of earth build a consensus and prepare for stagnant growth. It is clear that the ever present pressure of capitalism to show "growth YoY" is a major cause of pollution. The incentives are wrong. Sustainability should be paramount and carbon tax should be handed down heavily.
• truthwhisperer 5y ago
  Covid is almost gone in the western world so we need another stick to hit the people
• Dumblydorr 5y ago
  Isn't it time to block the sun's radiant energy? What is the real disadvantage to trying to lift a giant solar umbrella that blocks light from hitting the Earth? It may be pricy but we spend billions per climate disaster, if we could use a few falcon heavy launches and reduce incoming energy by 1 or 2%, we could buy ourselves the time to fix our emissions and ramp up carbon capture. The other alternative could be increasing cloud cover by releasing aerosols into the upper atmosphere. This would be like an artificial volcanic eruption, a purposeful but temporary hazing which would buy us a little time and let the planet cool off for 50 years before we're ready to go au natural again. Can someone give me the critiques of these? They seem much simpler than crying about disasters and reports to GOP foot-draggers and all those who don't care about science. The sad reality is around 10,000 government and business officials have 90% of the power on climate, I don't see convincing all these power brokers to help the biosphere, they want profits not environmental restoration. So, let's have them block the sun's energy until we've transitioned our energy system.
  • quenix 5y ago
    How about the multitude of life on the planet that relies on photosynthesis? And our own bodies? We get most of our vitamin D from a biosynthesis pathway that requires UVB exposure. Systematically depriving all of humanity of vitamin D could be disastrous. And our circadian rhythms? The human circadian rhythm is mediated by two processes, denoted "S" and "C", of which C has evolved to rely on daily exposure to sunlight. The circadian rhythm affects almost all parts of our humanity.
  • LeifCarrotson 5y ago
    Sure, I'll take a crack at the first one, involving 'a few' Falcon Heavy launches. Falcon Heavy can get (very roughly) 16 tonnes to L1. Ignoring critical station-keeping and rigidity issues entirely for the sake of simplicity, and assuming the sail is a single sheet of aluminized mylar at 10 g/m^2, that's 1.6 square kilometers of coverage. To put the planet in shadow would require about 100 million such shades. More importantly, people who won't do anything about the problem now while it's getting worse will not do anything if we had a temporary fix in place. This should be obvious from human nature, if it's not obvious, you can observe those temporary fixes permanently installed as infrastructure and business operations all over. We don't need more time to think about it, we just need to get started.
• hikerclimber1 5y ago
  Hopefully we don’t solve climate change.
• 10x-dev 5y ago
  Brilliant minds of HN, serious question: what needs to happen for us to be able to extract CO2 from the air and place it in containers somewhere? What's the root problem there? (I'm guessing off-planet, but that can come later).
• tibiahurried 5y ago
  Still, it is so sad to see companies who could avoid their employees commuting and polluting, fighting to get their employees back to the office! This shows how overall businesses and people don’t really care for climate change.
  • kuraudo 5y ago
    I do find it odd that, given the reported reduction in carbon emissions from covid, that governments are not outright mandating work from home for compatible jobs as an easy win to this problem.
    • tibiahurried 5y ago
      Exactly! It annoys me so much reading about big tech co, pledging on becoming carbon negative, produce zero waste, etc ... but still force thousands of people everyday to commute and pollute just for the sake of it. They really don't care.
• throwaway098763 5y ago
  As someone else pointed out, this is a huge collective action problem that we don't seem to have the institutions and social structures to solve this. Some people are willing to make sacrifices to solve this but many are not. We don't have means or willingness to force the non-cooperating people to cooperate. I'm surprised we haven't seen more terrorism targeted at carbon emitters. But then I see that recently a huge pipeline and a beef processing plant got hacked. That got blamed on Chinese or Russian hackers. It makes me wonder though, if those had been hacks by climate activists would the government tell us? The public discussion sparked by that would be quite different and might lead to an increase in that type of activity. This also is straight up a plot line from The Ministry for the Future which.
• notjes 5y ago
  ... HN: WE ALL GONNA DIE! THE END IS NEIGH! HN is infected with a severe case of tinfoilery. Time to call Dr. Johnes and order some happy pills.
• signaturefish 5y ago
  Possibly-relatedly, I'm in the process of getting some retrofit work done on my house to improve its insulation and reduce the carbon costs of heating it. I absolutely had not appreciated that a place like this, an 80s brick-built terraced house in southern England, could be responsible for 3.4 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year in heating costs alone. The necessary retrofit work is expensive, on the order of £50'000 over the next ten years, which makes it pretty much out of reach for the huge majority of people in the UK, but will take that down to 0.2 tonnes/year (narrowly missing net-zero because of the concrete-slab construction of the floor). We really need to be subsidising retrofit work like this, so that ordinary people can afford to have it done, because it makes a huge difference to what must be millions of similar houses in the UK alone.
  • kieranmaine 5y ago
    I think it will be more feasible to decarbonize the heating instead. If feasible heat storage technology can mature and lower the cost of electric heating then it becomes financially viable. Out of interest, what work are you getting done?
    • signaturefish 5y ago
      The whole bill of work is as follows: * Full external-wall-insulation (180mm thick) with brick slip dressing so it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb amidst all the brick houses in the road. * Triple-glazed windows and doors throughout, replacing single-glazed original units which are at end-of-life. * 300mm deep loft insulation, replacing poor-quality and patchy 80-100mm insulation. * Full airtightness sealing (i.e. the house should leak almost no warm air to the outside world), ...with heat-recovering mechanical ventilation so we don't all suffocate. * Air-source heat pump to replace the gas boiler, driving underfloor heating in place of the wet-circuit radiators. * 12-panel solar photovoltaic install on the roof (plus batteries etc). Fully agreed on decarbonizing heating, but it's not an either/or thing, both approaches work and are to some extent necessary. Any heat you're not losing to the outside world doesn't need to be replaced by the heating system, is the theory. Here in the UK, I'm working to AECB (Association of Eco-Conscious Builders) standards: we cant quite hit PassiveHaus without knocking the whole thing down and rebuilding, but we can get pretty close. There's a whole separate argument to be had about subsidy of electric heating vs subsidy of gas heating, if I recall correctly. A good electric heating system should be just as effective as a gas system, but in the UK it can cost up to four times as much to run because of the current mess of subsidies. That needs sorting out, as well, as telling people they have to pay much more for a somewhat more eco-conscious system isn't going to fly with the general population.
• habosa 5y ago
  Just. Tax. It. We have warmed the earth because we love comfort and money. We will never stop loving those things. So instead let's use the same systems to fix this (or at least slow things down). As an individual my largest carbon impact is air travel. I like to go places, it's one of the main things I work to afford. Every single plane ticket I take should have a tax which is used to offset or capture the carbon emissions of my flight. I will pay it. Anyone not willing to pay it will have to fly less. Any airlines that can't operate under the tax will not operate. Now do the same thing for corporate polluters, packaging waste, etc. If a country won't do this for domestic goods we can at least impose climate tariffs at borders. The only other thing that could work is some fantastic new technological solution, but let's not wait for that.
  • blhack 5y ago
    How do you make the major polluters pay the tax?
    • triceratops 5y ago
      I don't understand the question.
      • ThalesX 5y ago
        Let’s say I’m from Netherlands and create dozens of companies, local, nearshore and offshore to both reduce the taxes I pay and to top up my carbon emission quota.
        • ranma4703 5y ago
          each company doesn't get it's own quota. There is one quota, and companies bid to buy parts of it; higher demand, higher prices.
        • triceratops 5y ago
          Clearly we're talking about different interpretations of "taxing carbon". I'm quite uninformed, but the simplest thing would be to tax fossil fuel companies per unit of raw fossil fuel they extract from the ground. That's it. They can't lie about how much they extracted: that's securities fraud. Splitting into smaller companies, offshoring, IP licensing or other elaborate tax avoidance mechanisms don't work because you aren't taxing "net income" or anything else that can be gamed. If a country refuses to impose the same tax on its domestic fossil fuel extractors, tariff or embargo all of its exports until it complies. This will only work if the biggest importers start doing this right away.
• zug_zug 5y ago
  Interestingly, if we add an offset tax to gasoline it'd only be 30 cents a gallon for inefficient capture (a lot, politically, but not harsher than living in your house for a year). With newer capture technologies it could be closer to 4 cents a gallon, which is less than the price difference between gas stations. The second-order effects are that once you build thousands of these capture stations there's huge financial upside to making them even better. Tax actually seems very feasible.
  • qeternity 5y ago
    Do you have a source for these numbers?
• docmars 5y ago
  Here come "climate" lockdowns
• rglover 5y ago
  No, it's not. https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1424712163281694725 https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1424712163281694725 This is more media fearmongering. Edit: Threadreader link https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1424712163281694725.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1424712163281694725.html
  • ripdog 5y ago
    I don't understand any of that. Any chance of an acronym dictionary for us laymen?
    • rglover 5y ago
      The official report the original BBC article is based on is available here: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_Full_Report.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6.... Definitions are inside, but the big ones he mentions are Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), AR6 (Annual Report 6), and WGI (Working Group I). Essentially what he's saying is that the conclusions in the report are based heavily on the more-extreme, though less-likely outcomes (i.e., exaggerating the truth of the impact of climate change based on observational data by using extreme models/predictions). The report also ignores his (Roger's) own heavily-cited research in favor of a less-cited resource that confirms their biases. Edit: this is problematic because it generates headlines like the one this article is using and sends people into a panic spiral (as opposed to focusing on long-term solutions and actual science).
• honkycat 5y ago
  The genie is out of the bottle. We have been talking in circles for the last three decades and nobody has done anything to address the corporations who represent the majority of the greenhouse gas emissions. And every time I talk to my parents or meet someone new who is my age: "so are you planning to have kids? No? Why not?" I am so tired of living at the end of the world. At this point the question is not "is it going to get bad?" It is "how bad will it get?" Mass deaths from famine, drought, and plague do not seem out-of the question.
• darepublic 5y ago
  It's hard for me to believe humanity will get it's act together. Shit will hit the fan and then every man for themselves. Due to luck of the draw some will get hit much harder than others
• etoulas 5y ago
  Why isn’t there a metric like: Cumulative CO2 emissions per capita, per consumption, etc. Would that give us a better sense of how much more the developed countries have emitted so far vs the developing countries.
• zelienople 5y ago
  Too. Many. People. The corporations do bad things because you give them money. Your lifestyles are horribly wasteful because you buy too much stuff that you don't need, and for the wrong reasons. Then you throw it away. You buy new clothes not because you need them but because it makes you feel better about yourself and because you think the other monkeys will be impressed. In turn, the other monkeys feel like they have to buy new clothing. Then you throw it all out when fashion changes and you buy more. The end result is that tonnes of clothing are discarded annually in my small neighbourhood. I gather so much of this for my clothing bank that the homeless people don't want it any more. They are overwhelmed with clothing. We run a clothing exchange for everyone and we still can't get rid of it. We try to ship it to other countries but they already have mountains of it. It has to be sent for industrial re-processing or put into landfills. Your consumer goods last about one month after their already-short warranties expire and then you throw those out, too. Over 80% of what comes into my e-waste program is working or can be easily repaired. You don't even bother; you just throw it out. Several groups in my neighbourhood have active campaigns against me because they feel like it is beneath their dignity to repair and recycle what they call "garbage". These people are defective monkeys who feel that they are better than others because they can afford to waste more and destroy the planet faster than everyone else. Then you reproduce unrestrictedly and teach your little monkey babies the same ridiculously wasteful lifestyle. "You're a princess; you're a beautiful and unique snowflake; everything revolves around you. Go out and destroy the animals and pollute the oceans and kill the insects and wipe out the wetlands because you're worth it!" No, you are monkeys who have gotten uppity. You have a few successes in technology, but you are actually horrible monsters who care only about themselves and maintaining your idiot social order by force. You need to control your own numbers and stop the horrific waste of your idiot monkey lifestyles before you choke on your own exhaust and drown in your plastic refuse.
• blondie9x 5y ago
  The only way to stop this catastrophe is global population reduction and consumption limitations. Nothing so far. No effort by anyone has flattened the curve. CO2, CH4, SF6, and N20 are all consistently growing linearly with human consumption. https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ We have to do everything possible to flatten the curve and that will take sacrifice and changes today.
• mark_l_watson 5y ago
  My gut feeling is that a combination of naturally recurring chaotic weather cycles, together with human produced damage will either be fatal to humanity, or cause huge problems. I also believe that the Universe is teaming with life, intelligence, and love, and in the grand scheme of things, how important really is human life on this one planet. As individuals people tend to over emphasize their own importance, and I would argue that as wonderful as human culture is, an asteroid or weather knocking us out is sad, but that is about it.
• phreeza 5y ago
  I recently learned about the idea of the "global carbon reward", which is an idea to create a monetary (meaning not fiscal) incentive to reduce or capture carbon emissions. Kind of like a gold backed currency is based on gold mined from the ground but based in carbon "mined" from the air. And through the monetary route it doesn't create any direct expenditure or debt on govt balance sheets, a bit like quantitative easing that is happening anyway. There is a summary video here: https://youtu.be/Kmd2TSHsdoM https://youtu.be/Kmd2TSHsdoM
• happynacho 5y ago
  When COVID isn't alarmist enough anymore, time to switch topics.
• fouric 5y ago
  There's a chart in the article from the IPCC report showing observed vs simulated global average temperature changes. How are the scientists making these models guarding against overfitting? I am not a climate change skeptic - I am simply asking an honest question that I don't know the answer to (which will be useful for dispelling the common argument that I hear some of my friends make). I also shouldn't have to place this kind of disclaimer in my post in the first place.
  • ksdakfasdf 5y ago
    In principle, these models can be run a la 'ab initio' (from first principles) so no fitting is required. Of course, there are subtleties and unknowns, so some fitting is needed, but overfitting can be checked in the usual ways.
• BallinBige 5y ago
  Climate science has advanced quite a bit since the last IPCC assessment in 2014. We're also seeing far more impact in the real world in terms of more frequent storms, floods, droughts and wildfires. Previously it was more difficult to prove these were related to climate change as there are natural variations.
• throwaway5752 5y ago
  The good (and bad) news is this will solve itself: if we don't act, humanity will die off substantially and technologically regress. Without dense and easily extractible energy source like hydrocarbons we're unlikely to achieve this level of technology again, and famine, war, and disease will take their natural courses when we can't fertilize our crops like we have in the past, are fighting new weather patterns, and don't have the research base to create sophisticated medicines. We can avoid it and become a post hydrocarbon energy based world, but given the last 5 years, I don't think collectively people are intelligent enough to pull it off. It is a shame, it would have been nice to discover more secrets of the universe and to colonize the solar system.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• merpnderp 5y ago
  If anyone actually believed it was "code red for humanity" they'd be pushing nuclear power. There is zero chance of moving off carbon energy sources without causing catastrophic mayhem, unless we use massive amounts of nuclear. For instance, the last 4 years my state has averaged 37% production of total possible installed wind generation capacity. This is a very windy state which is in the top 2 for installed wind capacity and number one per capita. But throughout a day wind power can very from nearly zero to close to max capacity. Those periods of near zero production can last non-trivial amounts of time no realistic battery could provide for. The only solutions are continue with our gas turbine/wind power mix where we build enough gas turbines to handle 100% of the load for when the wind production is bottoming out, or replace everything with nuclear. Nuclear gets us to net carbon zero fastest and with technology easy to export to developing countries in desperate need of plentiful, reliable, cheap electricity.
  • ptkd 5y ago
    I see this take a lot, and it’s kind of misinformed. The primary drawbacks of nuclear are: 1) incredible slow to build. A typical plant takes ~20 years from decision to productionized 2) extremely expensive, with a massively frontloaded cost. By contrast, solar and wind are fast to install and now cheaper. > wind power can be zero at some parts of the day There are a few solutions to this actually. First, having a more nationalized grid can amortize variant weather conditions (very unlikely it’s not windy everywhere, for example). Second, there actually are long-duration battery solutions coming out. Look up “energy tower” for a very weird one, and “form energy” for a more traditional model. Finally — I will agree that nuclear is probably some piece of the pie in the future. But analysts think we can get to 80% renewables with currently existing tech: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.technologyreview.com/2012/06/20/255704/the-us-could-run-on-80-percent-renewable-electricity-by-2050/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.technologyreview.com/2012/0...
    • bpodgursky 5y ago
      If it was actually code red, we would waive literally all safety regulations and environmental policy reviews, and break ground on new plants tomorrow. And cost would be no object.
• ttobbaybbob 5y ago
  Climate engineering is obviously incredibly fraught for a variety of reasons (unintended consequences/etc) but at what point do we start to consider it ? start developing and evaluating technologies related to it ? it seems like it would be something we want in the toolbox since its a solution orthogonal to consumption of carbon
• cannabis_sam 5y ago
  There is absolutely no way in this world that any politician can get elected on the promise to increase gas prices and electricity costs. If only we actually properly taxed the parasites who hoard wealth at the expense of our very existence..
• cdcadmits 5y ago
  1967: ‘Dire famine by 1975.’ - Source: Salt Lake Tribune, November 17, 1967 1969: ‘Everyone will disappear in a cloud of blue steam by 1989.’ - Source: New York Times, August 10 1969 1970: Ice age by 2000 - Source: Boston Globe, April 16, 1970 1970: ‘America subject to water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980.’ - Source: Redlands Daily Facts, October 6, 1970 1971: ‘New Ice Age Coming’ - Source: Washington Post, July 9, 1971 1972: New ice age by 2070 - Source: NOAA, October 2015 1974: ‘New Ice Age Coming Fast’ - Source: The Guardian, January 29, 1974 1974: ‘Another Ice Age?’ - Source: TIME, June 24, 1974 1974: Ozone Depletion a ‘Great Peril to Life’ - 1976: ‘The Cooling’ - Source: New York Times Book Review, July 18, 1976 1980: ‘Acid Rain Kills Life in Lakes’ - Noblesville Ledger (Noblesville, IN) April 9, 1980 1978: ‘No End in Sight’ to 30-Year Cooling Trend - Source: New York Times, January 5, 1978 1988: James Hansen forecasts increase regional drought in 1990s - Source: RealClimateScience.com 1988: Washington DC days over 90F to from 35 to 85 - Source: RealClimateScience.com 1988: Maldives completely under water in 30 years - Source: Agence France Press, September 26, 1988 1989: Rising seas to ‘obliterate’ nations by 2000 - Source: Associated Press, June 30, 1989 1989: New York City’s West Side Highway underwater by 2019 - Source: Salon.com, October 23, 2001 1995 to Present: Climate Model Failure - Source: CEI.org 2000: ‘Children won’t know what snow is.' - Source: The Independent, March 20, 2000 2002: Famine in 10 years - Source: The Guardian, December 23, 2002 2004: Britain to have Siberian climate by 2020 - Source: The Guardian, February 21, 2004 2008: Arctic will be ice-free by 2018 - Source: Associated Press, June 24, 2008 2008: Al Gore warns of ice-free Arctic by 2013 - Source: WattsUpWithThat.com, December 16, 2018 2009: Prince Charles says only 8 years to save the planet - Source: The Independent, July 9, 2009 2009: UK prime minister says 50 days to ‘save the planet from catastrophe’ - Source: The Independent: October 20, 2009 2009: Arctic ice-free by 2014 - Source: USA Today, December 14, 2009 2013: Arctic ice-free by 2015 - Source: The Guardian, July 24, 2013 2013: Arctic ice-free by 2016 - Source: The Guardian, December 9, 2013 2014: Only 500 days before ‘climate chaos’ - Sources: Washington Examiner
• shreyshnaccount 5y ago
  why is the main focus on CO2 and not sulphides and nitrogenous gasses that cause a helluvalot more greenhouse effect than CO2 and are released by industries all around? am I missing something or is this fact ignored?( not saying that nothing should be done about CO2 tho)
  • philipkglass 5y ago
    It's because CO2 is by far the largest contributor, accounting for 80% of warming emissions from human activities in the US: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases Some gases containing sulfur and nitrogen are far more potent per molecule than CO2, but they are emitted in much smaller volumes. They collectively account for less than 10% of warming emissions.
    • shreyshnaccount 5y ago
      makes sense, thanks!
• darepublic 5y ago
  So why I am still manipulating html documents forty hours a week. I guess I should be getting involved in activism or just plain disaster prepping. Time to bone up on gardening
• daxfohl 5y ago
  Was there anything about food supply? I see that as the biggest concern. We can deal with heat and floods and such. But when the world's bio ecosystem starts looking like the Great Barrier Reef's, then that's when we start talking about collapse or extinction.
• hbscharp 5y ago
  The Energy Transition Show podcast is a resource that should receive more attention. It is subscription based, but a free-as-in-beer "best of" episode was released recently. https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-151-best-of-ets/ https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-151-best-of-ets/ I shared many of the attitudes popular on HN regarding technology and climate change. ETS has convinced me that: 1. We don’t need to utilize nuclear power to account for the intermittency of solar and wind. 2. Carbon capture and storage technology doesn't need to exist in order achieve decarbonization. I used to despair about climate change. I'm still quite worried about displacing the centralized incumbent interests. This podcast and its associated resources has gotten me off the couch and thinking about how to apply myself to be part of the solution.
• Phileosopher 5y ago
  Why does everyone keep talking about carbon? If I remember correctly, there's plenty of science to validate that water movements have more bearing on accurately gauging climate change (rainfall, sea levels, water temp, cloud formation, etc).
• Tiktaalik 5y ago
  In Canada our so called environmentalist parties BC/AB NDP and Fed Liberals are still insisting we can meet our climate goals while expanding the oil sands and developing liquified natural gas for export. It's like they're conducting the train, saying that only they can stop it, while continuing to shovel coal in the furnace. We need someone that has the strength to pull that emergency brake instead.
• lcall 5y ago
  While it is important to be good stewards and not pollute etc, and I respect & admire the scientists and others working to help us do better -- I don't think we are competent to solve climate issues as a whole, when we can't trust each other to keep our word (so much of the time), and especially when we have rejected much specific advice of the planet's Creator. At the same time, things can be OK for us in the long run, if we really try to learn what we should do, and do that. I would include praying, honesty, kindness and humility (willingness to learn) among those things. Really there is good reason for hope for the best; these problems are expected now. (Edit: thoughtful comments appreciated, with any downvotes; thank you.)
• hikerclimber1 5y ago
  Good. Hopefully natural disasters destroy major cities.
• briantakita 5y ago
  If this was really "code red for humanity", the global elite jetsetters, China, & military should set the example & drastically reduce their emissions to be in line with the average population. Otherwise, it's another case of "rules for thee but not for me".
• hbornfree 5y ago
  Given how impossible it is achieve global consensus on policy, I'm pretty inclined to believe that a technological breakthrough is the only solution. Maybe a series of them. In the best case, carbon removal and sequestration tech. In the neutral case, clean and efficient energy tech. In the worst case, climate-catastrophe coping tech.
• chris_va 5y ago
  (disclaimer, I work in a Climate&Energy group) - There are a number of technical solutions for climate change. - There are a number of technical entrepreneurs who would love to implement those solutions. ... there is no market to pay for it. I will echo other folks in this thread in calling for a carbon tax (or Carbon Dividend, possibly the most politically feasible option) to create such a market. Please call your representative! The number of people that have asked me how they can help, but haven't called their representative is driving me crazy! Such legislation is not intrinsically complicated. If we can just get that passed, I would go to bed at night knowing that the majority of the problem is basically solved.
• rationalist2948 5y ago
  So, the IPCC says "code red"? I will guess: This is about carbon, CO2, in the atmosphere, from humans, causing global warming and climate change. Okay, let's look at the observational data: There was a movie, An Inconvenient Truth. With data from Antarctic ice cores, the movie showed, for the atmosphere, a graph of temperature and CO2 concentrations going back about 800,000 years. As I watched the movie, it appeared that the claim was that the graph showed temperature and CO2 concentrations going up and down together. Then the movie concluded that the higher concentrations of CO2 caused the higher temperatures. Then there was a claim that currently more CO2 from human activities would rapidly cause significantly higher temperatures. But, we could look at that graph more closely, and doing that we will see three situations: (1) When temperature started to increase, CO2 (concentration, here and below) was low, not high. So, something caused the warming, but it was not high CO2. (2) About 800 years later, CO2 had increased. Presumably the cause was more biological activity from the higher temperatures. (3) Some thousands of years later, while CO2 was high, the temperatures fell again. There was a cause, but it was not low CO2. Indeed, the high CO2 did not keep temperatures from falling. Net, from that 800,000 years of data, there is no evidence that high CO2 caused high temperatures. It would be more accurate (though of course still wrong) to say that the data supported that CO2 caused LOWER temperatures. For some more recent data, there was some significant warming during the time of the Roman Empire and during the Medieval Warm Period, and there is no evidence that the cause was high CO2. There was some significant cooling during the Little Ice Age from roughly 1300 to 1900, but there is no evidence that the cause was low CO2. There was some cooling from 1940 to 1970 and concerns in the media about another ice age, and those years were when there was more CO2 from human activity from WWII and the post-war economic boom. So, in those years, with more CO2, we got some cooling instead of warming. Again it would be more accurate (though of course still wrong) to say that the data supported that CO2 caused COOLING. For some details, can start with "Global Cooling" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling#1974_Time_magazine_article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling#1974_Time_magaz... which discusses the two famous magazine stories, the 1974 <i>Time</i> story and the 1975 <i>Newsweek</i> story, worrying about "global cooling" and asking if we were entering a new ice age. For more on these magazine stories, at https://longreads.com/2017/04/13/in-1975-newsweek-predicted-a-new-ice-age-were-still-living-with-the-consequences/ https://longreads.com/2017/04/13/in-1975-newsweek-predicted-... can see the April 28, 1975, <i>Newsweek</i> article “The Cooling World”. So, net, there is no data on temperature and CO2 from the past that says that CO2 will cause warming. Yes, CO2 is a <i>greenhouse</i> gas. This means that it absorbs some light in the infrared but not the visible. In the case of CO2, it absorbs light out in the infrared in three narrow bands. The absorption spectrum is given at https://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/cbook.cgi?Spec=C124389&Index=0&Type=IR&Large=on https://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/cbook.cgi?Spec=C124389&Index=0&... Part of the mechanism is Planck black body radiation. We have had some warming since the Little Ice Age. It may be that we are still pulling out of the Little Ice Age, e.g., it can take a long time for the oceans to warm up. But even with this warming, it's cooler than in the Medieval Warm period and the Roman times when the polar bears didn't go extinct, the ice in Greenland and the Antarctic didn't melt, the oceans didn't rise and flood the coasts, and humans didn't suffer. Apparently the main effects were greater agricultural productivity, e.g., in England, grapes were grown for wine. Could the warming since the Little Ice Age be due to CO2? No: The warming is at the surface, and CO2 absorbs high in the troposphere with definition at Google: <blockquote>the lowest region of the atmosphere, extending from the earth's surface to a height of about 3.7–6.2 miles (6–10 km), which is the lower boundary of the stratosphere. </blockquote> which, from MIT climate scientist Richard Lindzen, Alfred P Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, Emeritus, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has gotten cooler, not warmer. Several attempts were made to model the atmosphere and calculate and predict the effects of human sources of CO2 on temperature. Nearly all the efforts predicted temperature increases that were rapid and significant. It has now been some years since the times of the predictions, and the predictions and reality are compared in the graph at http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg Summary: Nearly all the predictions were way too high. Result: The prediction have no meaningful credibility. Current Summary: There is no credible evidence from either the 800,000 years of the earth or the climate models that human sources of CO2 have had, are having, or will have significant effects on temperature or climate. As a result of this lack of evidence, there is no scientific reason to attempt to lower human sources of CO2. In particular, wind and solar power are intermittent and, thus, challenging for use in our electric grid.
• teslaberry 5y ago
  if climate change is code, red it's time for ww3 so those with a plan for code red can murder everyone who won't submit to it. code red! team ramrod?
• c7DJTLrn 5y ago
  There's a lot of nonsense in these comments that doesn't hold up to the most basic scrutiny. >Humanity is going to go extinct There's no evidence for that. A temperature rise of 2 degrees celsius is by no means a threat to the human race. It is a problem, but not an extinction event. >We should invest in nuclear Nuclear is extremely expensive and prone to going wrong. It's not a valid argument to state that "nuclear has improved and now it's safe" because nothing is 100% safe and the Fukushima Daiichi disaster is a perfect demonstration of how even recent iterations of the technology with multiple redundancies can go wrong. >Wind/solar doesn't work because it's intermittent There's no reason we can't have a distributed network of wind and solar farms around the world that can fulfill demand at all times. >We should tax carbon Taxing carbon could reduce output, sure, but the fact is that humanity is dependent on fossil fuels right now. How can you possibly suggest we start punishing consumers for their carbon footprint when there is no viable alternative? Besides, reducing output at this scale won't have any impact now, it's too late for that. We need to be reversing output. >We need to stop eating meat on Mondays Sorry but these schemes have no purpose other than to make one feel good about themselves. Most people are not interested in giving up meat at all, let alone for one day a week, so the demand for meat isn't budging. Meat alternatives are promising but won't take hold unless the consumer has an incentive to switch. >We need to capture carbon from the atmosphere This kind of technology has been debunked by Thunderf00t and many others. To grab that carbon you need to spend at least as much energy as you got from the combustion. So, effectively we need AT LEAST as much energy as we have used since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Trees are good at gathering carbon but they're not good as a long-term carbon sink. >We need to use electric cars ...this solves nothing. The energy still needs to come from somewhere, the carbon is still in the atmosphere, and moreover we need to build everybody a new car which is a carbon-heavy and environmentally unfriendly process in itself.
  • matkoniecz 5y ago
    > Humanity is going to go extinct Yeah, this is about as fact-based as "there is no global warming" > ...this solves nothing. The energy still needs to come from somewhere It can come from renewables, unlike with combustion engine > There's no reason we can't have a distributed network of wind and solar farms around the world that can fulfill demand at all times. cost, energy losses, political issues (nothing making it impossible but I would not describe it as "no reason") And power loses from Africa to say Poland would be quite unfun. > because nothing is 100% safe Duh. > Nuclear is extremely expensive Waive nearly all regulation and it would be cheaper. (yes, we would get some meltdowns - but if people actually believed "extinction threat to humanity", "red alert" etc then it would be preferable. And likely still less radioactive than carbon power.)
• BigKahuna1 5y ago
  I see a future where Carbon Capture Utilization and Sequestration (CCUS) will allow the transition to renewables and sustainability (without nuclear). There are significant advancements in CO2 Capture and when there is a commitment to innovation (R&D$s) to develop new commodities that permanently sequester the captured CO2, we will learn how to integrate the environment with profit motivation. The Green Industrial Carbon Cycle will enable the transition.
• kottaram 5y ago
  Humanity has basically evolved with the innovation in technology in the last 50 years. Of course there's gonna be a 2 degree change in climate. I cant believe the author of the article is trying to compare the last 50 years with every other 50 year period in 2000 years lol.
• tomrod 5y ago
  This drives so much existential angst for me. We utterly and abysmally failed at collective action with COVID-19. How can I anticipate that we achieve anything when people are left to their own devices?
• isoblvck 5y ago
  it was code red YEARS ago when the first report came out. what you thought they were just joking the first time around
• marvoronc345 5y ago
  https://padlet-uploads.storage.googleapis.com/1259088247/c1706348d095adb1f528d3673183a0cc/fanfiki_pro_parnya_i_devushku_poshlye.pdf https://padlet-uploads.storage.googleapis.com/1259088247/c17...
• marvoronc345 5y ago
  nice