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The Newsroom said it best, "your house is burning to the ground, the situation is dire; your house has already burned to the ground, situation's over." [1] I d

The Newsroom said it best, "your house is burning to the ground, the situation is dire; your house has already burned to the ground, situation's over." [1] I don't see a way that we plausibly reverse course, when nearly every government, the people running them, and the private sector leaders are all just doing an end-run to accumulate as much as they can, planet be damned. Every "climate target" gets re-evaluated and pushed back every five years, and nobody seems to be held accountable for it. Barring moonshot tech breakthrough or militant scaling-down of consumption worldwide, how can we survive? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM0uZ9mfOUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM0uZ9mfOUI

nelox 5y ago
What makes you think we deserve to survive?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
chillwaves 5y ago
After the coming resource\migration wars, some of this will sort itself out. Don't worry.
- jay_kyburz 5y ago
  I just realized that perhaps the problem is not global warming. Perhaps the problem is that we are having children. If we all just decided to stop having kids, nobody would care what the weather was like at the end of the century.
  - screenbreakout 5y ago
    With the right partner, kids (depending on how you see it) make you work less,(if you decide to take time to help them grow) enjoy life more (hilarious situations) and grow as a person (suppress your ego) The good thing is they grow up fast and are the closest thing to positive change we can potentially actively have a hand in... also according to book quoted on HN the upper limit of human population is 1 trillion... so all we really need to do is work less, stop useless packaging and wasteful bureaucracy, enjoy life more and eat better by transforming the junk food (glucose syrup, wheat, rye (beer u and meat agriculture into a refugee(from work) based garden of nuts fruits and veg Try watching a french film called Demain (Tomorrow) ...plenty of immediate great solutions out there
    - jay_kyburz 5y ago
      Yes sorry, I was attempting to be facetious. We have 2 kids and loving every moment. They give my life meaning in a way nothing else can.
kragen 5y ago
The article says of Ted Schuur, "He and his colleagues estimate that permafrost emissions might make up five to fifteen per cent of the I.P.C.C.’s allotment." So I guess we need to cut our greenhouse gas emissions 5–15% below where we would have otherwise needed to. We did need a moonshot tech breakthrough, namely scalable affordable renewable energy. But that breakthrough has already happened: both PV and wind are cheaper than fossil fuels now in much of the world, and PV definitely can scale up to replace fossil fuels, and wind probably can too. So in 8–16 years we enter an era of unprecedented energy abundance, similar to the First Industrial Revolution. There are relatively straightforward ways to use this abundant energy to capture atmospheric CO₂. I outlined one in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29327736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29327736.
- abathur 5y ago
  The problem, as I try to breadcrumb when I find these (most-recently in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29218174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29218174) isn't necessarily the technology--it's the people. It's a complex adaptive system where different regions/countries have already drawn their own geologic, solar, and atmospheric straws. Just because PV and wind are pushing back fossil fuels at market rates now doesn't mean entrenched fossil-fuel-deposit-rich nations will throw up their hands, turn off the pumps/mines, and go all-renewable. If wholesale fossil remains unit-profitable to extract and burn for some purpose (say, converting into crypto--or just because 40% of the value of your oil reserves minus cost is still greater than what you have in the bank), there will be a reason to burn it. On the other side, too, there will be people whose livelihoods come to depend on a different kind of extraction.
  - kragen 5y ago
    There are surely economic niches where fossil fuels will survive for much longer than the 8–16-year transition period I'm talking about, for example in submarines and circumpolar research stations, but I think the picture for fossil fuels is considerably less rosy than you suggest. Burning fossil fuels requires not only continuing operational expenses to extract them from the ground but also capital expenditures to build machines to burn them with, unless you're just heating your house. And nowadays either the opex or the capex costs more than PV in many places. Yes, undoubtedly ExxonMobil and Mohammed bin Salman will try to arrest this trend, just as Peabody Coal did. They'll fight like the devil. But they can't force their customers to pay them more than those customers would pay to get the same energy, ammonia, or Bitcoins from a renewable-energy-powered source. If it costs less to replace coal with solar power than to dig it out of the ground, it will stay in the ground. And that's why Peabody went bankrupt and ExxonMobil has been losing money since 02019.
deanCommie 5y ago
Except the situation isn't over when your house has burned to the ground. Taking the metaphor literally... You have a family and you need shelter. You need to figure out how to survive without shelter. You need to see what you can salvage. Which means still trying to put the fire out so that some of your things or some of the materials can be salvaged so you can consider rebuilding. You need to start clearing out the rubble so that you can think about eventually rebuilding your house on that land. Yes, it's discouraging, yes it's demoralizing. But humanity (and individual humans) has faced all sorts of extreme adversity over our history. As living creatures we have a survival instinct that requires us to continue fighting. Yes, this particular crisis is our own creation. Yes, it will damage the Earth and our specific ecosystem more than any other action we've ever done in our short time here. Yes, we might have a generation or several generations globally who will have a worse quality of life than the previous one for the first time in several hundreds of years. Yes, it's frustrating that this was caused by selfish greedy humans who will never be held accountable for it, and who will most likely have to coexist with, and collaborate on solutions when they finally decide when it's too late. Nevertheless, we persevere, and we each do what we can to minimize the damage, to innovate solutions that may protect that what remains, and we think long-long-term. Our ancestors frequently knew that they were a part of something much bigger and that the impact they could have had on the world or improving the lives of their children were miniscule. Yet they did so anyway. We have been brought up in a generation of boundless optimism thinking that we would all change the world for the better, while living in continuously growing prosperity. Not all of that turned out to be true. That's okay. We still keep going. Understand, I did not start out with this point of view. I'm not an optimist by nature. I spent years being depressed and fatalist as you might be. I chose this mindset as a survival tactic. But I do believe everything I wrote.
- jay_kyburz 5y ago
  I think its both valuable and important to recognize that the climate change is inevitable so that we can stop talking about how we might prevent it, and start talking about how we can sustain our civilization regardless of the weather. (How would we sustain ourselves if we lived in a satellite orbiting the sun?) I also think neither democracy or capitalism is well equipped to ask people to make large sacrifices for the benefit of future generations. I think we should stop talking about people making sacrifices, and put effort into engineering our way out of this problem.
baybal2 5y ago
> Barring moonshot tech breakthrough or militant scaling-down of consumption worldwide, how can we survive? Just bare with it? The frequent storms, and severe weather frequenting USA in recent years are nothing special in East Asia. 1m Downpour rainfall is an annual event in much of India. Snowstorms where you see no more than a few meters are also very survivable, and people can adapt to live with them. Kilometers long storm surges, and multi-decade coastal errosion are also something people learned to live with.
- FreeFull 5y ago
  What about temperatures up to 49 degrees Celsius, like the heatwave in India back in 2019? If the air is moist, it can become literally impossible for even healthy humans to survive without some external way of cooling off.
  - baybal2 5y ago
    I survived +50 in Doha... for around 10 minutes.

nelox 5y ago

What makes you think we deserve to survive?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

chillwaves 5y ago

After the coming resource\migration wars, some of this will sort itself out. Don't worry.

jay_kyburz 5y ago
I just realized that perhaps the problem is not global warming. Perhaps the problem is that we are having children. If we all just decided to stop having kids, nobody would care what the weather was like at the end of the century.
- screenbreakout 5y ago
  With the right partner, kids (depending on how you see it) make you work less,(if you decide to take time to help them grow) enjoy life more (hilarious situations) and grow as a person (suppress your ego) The good thing is they grow up fast and are the closest thing to positive change we can potentially actively have a hand in... also according to book quoted on HN the upper limit of human population is 1 trillion... so all we really need to do is work less, stop useless packaging and wasteful bureaucracy, enjoy life more and eat better by transforming the junk food (glucose syrup, wheat, rye (beer u and meat agriculture into a refugee(from work) based garden of nuts fruits and veg Try watching a french film called Demain (Tomorrow) ...plenty of immediate great solutions out there
  - jay_kyburz 5y ago
    Yes sorry, I was attempting to be facetious. We have 2 kids and loving every moment. They give my life meaning in a way nothing else can.

kragen 5y ago

The article says of Ted Schuur, "He and his colleagues estimate that permafrost emissions might make up five to fifteen per cent of the I.P.C.C.’s allotment." So I guess we need to cut our greenhouse gas emissions 5–15% below where we would have otherwise needed to. We did need a moonshot tech breakthrough, namely scalable affordable renewable energy. But that breakthrough has already happened: both PV and wind are cheaper than fossil fuels now in much of the world, and PV definitely can scale up to replace fossil fuels, and wind probably can too. So in 8–16 years we enter an era of unprecedented energy abundance, similar to the First Industrial Revolution. There are relatively straightforward ways to use this abundant energy to capture atmospheric CO₂. I outlined one in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29327736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29327736.

abathur 5y ago
The problem, as I try to breadcrumb when I find these (most-recently in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29218174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29218174) isn't necessarily the technology--it's the people. It's a complex adaptive system where different regions/countries have already drawn their own geologic, solar, and atmospheric straws. Just because PV and wind are pushing back fossil fuels at market rates now doesn't mean entrenched fossil-fuel-deposit-rich nations will throw up their hands, turn off the pumps/mines, and go all-renewable. If wholesale fossil remains unit-profitable to extract and burn for some purpose (say, converting into crypto--or just because 40% of the value of your oil reserves minus cost is still greater than what you have in the bank), there will be a reason to burn it. On the other side, too, there will be people whose livelihoods come to depend on a different kind of extraction.
- kragen 5y ago
  There are surely economic niches where fossil fuels will survive for much longer than the 8–16-year transition period I'm talking about, for example in submarines and circumpolar research stations, but I think the picture for fossil fuels is considerably less rosy than you suggest. Burning fossil fuels requires not only continuing operational expenses to extract them from the ground but also capital expenditures to build machines to burn them with, unless you're just heating your house. And nowadays either the opex or the capex costs more than PV in many places. Yes, undoubtedly ExxonMobil and Mohammed bin Salman will try to arrest this trend, just as Peabody Coal did. They'll fight like the devil. But they can't force their customers to pay them more than those customers would pay to get the same energy, ammonia, or Bitcoins from a renewable-energy-powered source. If it costs less to replace coal with solar power than to dig it out of the ground, it will stay in the ground. And that's why Peabody went bankrupt and ExxonMobil has been losing money since 02019.

deanCommie 5y ago

Except the situation isn't over when your house has burned to the ground. Taking the metaphor literally... You have a family and you need shelter. You need to figure out how to survive without shelter. You need to see what you can salvage. Which means still trying to put the fire out so that some of your things or some of the materials can be salvaged so you can consider rebuilding. You need to start clearing out the rubble so that you can think about eventually rebuilding your house on that land. Yes, it's discouraging, yes it's demoralizing. But humanity (and individual humans) has faced all sorts of extreme adversity over our history. As living creatures we have a survival instinct that requires us to continue fighting. Yes, this particular crisis is our own creation. Yes, it will damage the Earth and our specific ecosystem more than any other action we've ever done in our short time here. Yes, we might have a generation or several generations globally who will have a worse quality of life than the previous one for the first time in several hundreds of years. Yes, it's frustrating that this was caused by selfish greedy humans who will never be held accountable for it, and who will most likely have to coexist with, and collaborate on solutions when they finally decide when it's too late. Nevertheless, we persevere, and we each do what we can to minimize the damage, to innovate solutions that may protect that what remains, and we think long-long-term. Our ancestors frequently knew that they were a part of something much bigger and that the impact they could have had on the world or improving the lives of their children were miniscule. Yet they did so anyway. We have been brought up in a generation of boundless optimism thinking that we would all change the world for the better, while living in continuously growing prosperity. Not all of that turned out to be true. That's okay. We still keep going. Understand, I did not start out with this point of view. I'm not an optimist by nature. I spent years being depressed and fatalist as you might be. I chose this mindset as a survival tactic. But I do believe everything I wrote.

jay_kyburz 5y ago
I think its both valuable and important to recognize that the climate change is inevitable so that we can stop talking about how we might prevent it, and start talking about how we can sustain our civilization regardless of the weather. (How would we sustain ourselves if we lived in a satellite orbiting the sun?) I also think neither democracy or capitalism is well equipped to ask people to make large sacrifices for the benefit of future generations. I think we should stop talking about people making sacrifices, and put effort into engineering our way out of this problem.

baybal2 5y ago

> Barring moonshot tech breakthrough or militant scaling-down of consumption worldwide, how can we survive? Just bare with it? The frequent storms, and severe weather frequenting USA in recent years are nothing special in East Asia. 1m Downpour rainfall is an annual event in much of India. Snowstorms where you see no more than a few meters are also very survivable, and people can adapt to live with them. Kilometers long storm surges, and multi-decade coastal errosion are also something people learned to live with.

FreeFull 5y ago
What about temperatures up to 49 degrees Celsius, like the heatwave in India back in 2019? If the air is moist, it can become literally impossible for even healthy humans to survive without some external way of cooling off.
- baybal2 5y ago
  I survived +50 in Doha... for around 10 minutes.