7 ms·

Then there is this: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66256101 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66256101 >in fact I'm very pessimistic

by jmclnx 3y ago

Then there is this: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66256101 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66256101 >in fact I'm very pessimistic about achieving even 2C In the US, the GOP refused to do anything and held the US hostage so they could cash in by taking bribes from the fossil fuel industry. The other party was too afraid to stand up to the GOP and fossil fuel industry, so nothing at all was done except talk. All the hot air from the pols taking about climate changed, probably contributed to the raising ave temp. So here we are, baking in a pot where temps are raising slowly, like a lobster.

srgpqt 3y ago
Like the boiled frog, perhaps we have not even realized that we are already cooked/doomed.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  I don't know, I feel like it's already pretty obvious that we're "cooked/doomed", with some caveats: 1. Even in the worst case I haven't seen any level-headed scientists argue that the Earth will be uninhabitable a la Venus. We'll get a hotter planner, sea levels will rise considerably inundating coastal areas, the current anthropocene extinction event will accelerate, storms will be a lot more intense, etc. Obviously a major set of problems, but I think it's important to be specific about what those problems will be as opposed to "we'll all be dead". 2. Whenever someone even remotely argues that we'll be able to stick to some reasonable emissions targets I like to show this graph, https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions#global-co2-emissions-from-fossil-fuels-global-co2-emissions-from-fossil-fuels https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions#global-co2-emission.... That is, it's good news that global emissions have largely stabilized over the past decade, but we're still pumping out over 35 billion tons of carbon every year. We need to find a way, somehow, to bring that to near 0, and while tech may get us there eventually I don't see that happening in my lifetime (I'm middle aged).
  - snarf21 3y ago
    Agreed .. A lot of people will die as places become uninhabitable for a very very long time .. Access to clean water will become a major issue and the poor will lose (even more than they already are) .. Humans are a greedy species and this planet just can't support 8B+ (and counting of us) .. I don't know what it can support but we'll soon find out .. We are still decades away from near zero fossil fuels globally and yet we are still growing crops in the desert and watering it so people can have fun hitting a white ball .. Even if we can get to near 100% wind/solar/battery, we'll be busy polluting anything and everything with rare earth minerals as we churn through batteries like candy .. I don't see life being very fun in 50 years, even for the richest people
    - ericd 3y ago
      On your last point, lithium ion battery packs are supposedly extremely recyclable, and it’s cheaper to recycle them than to make a new one, so it seems likely that they will be recycled.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        They'll have to be, because there isn't enough lithium on the planet (that we know of) to meet the expected demand.
    - oceanplexian 3y ago
      > Humans are a greedy species and this planet just can't support 8B+ This seems like a pretty bold statement. Let’s assume the only constraints on population are energy, water, and space. If you do a back of the napkin calculation on much Uranium exists on Earth, how much power we could produce by fissioning it, then how much water is in the oceans, and then assume everything else is an engineering problem? I think the number wouldn’t be 8 Billion, but much more. That’s not even getting into mining asteroids, space-based energy, vertical hydroponics, living underground or in the oceans. I think the limits could be extraordinarily high
      - 3y ago
- WeylandYutani 3y ago
  Nah we realise. But there's nothing that you can do about it. Reminds me of Dutch Jews in WW2 who tried to live a normal life until the police came to collect them.
- pastor_bob 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - netsharc 3y ago
    And if your area's electricity grid goes down? Even France had a problem with keeping their nuclear power plant running last year, the rivers didn't have enough water for cooling, and they weren't allowed to dump overly heated water because it would hurt the environment, so the only solution was to reduce production...
- paganel 3y ago
  We weren't cooked/doomed for about two years recently. Sometimes I miss the pandemic and those two years only because that apocalypse at least had an end in sight when it came to the "educated" public's reaction to it, this climate thing is the new year 1000 hysteria [1], it's just unfortunate that it will spread over the next decades. [1] https://www.bu.edu/history/files/2011/10/11.Fear-of-an-Apocalyptic-Year-1000-Speculum.pdf https://www.bu.edu/history/files/2011/10/11.Fear-of-an-Apoca...
  - anon25783 3y ago
    The ten hottest summers on record happened in the last fifteen years. The number one hottest is this summer we're experiencing right now. And you call this "hysteria"?
    - paganel 3y ago
      Like I said, those stats had been forgotten about between 2020-2022, when the discourse was about another type of “new normal”, but one related to public health. Yes, it’s the very definition of apocalyptic hysteria.
      - anon25783 3y ago
        Presently in Nebraska we are bracing for a heat index of 117°F, a situation with no precedent here in 2020, '21, or '22. I contend that what you describe as "apocalyptic hysteria" is the only reasonable and appropriate response to such a morbidly inhospitable climactic state of affairs. It's no more "hysterical" than screaming and banging on the windows when trapped in a hot car with no way out.
bugglebeetle 3y ago
It’s not the GOP, its an entire economic system, defended at nuclear gunpoint, by the one of the world’s largest carbon emitters, who both parties reward with ever-expanding, fraud-ridden budgets, while their citizens starve and die on the streets, go bankrupt from illnesses, etc. I’m sorry to tell you, but there is no one in the halls of US power steering the ship away from the worst outcomes of climate change because the entire thing is bought and sold by the people profiting from it.
- femiagbabiaka 3y ago
  Yeah the GOP is like the useful boogeyman, but most Dems are no better. Hell, the most powerful parts of the Dems include folks like Joe Manchin, who's right in the bag of coal. Even in a world where Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election and followed through on her policy goals, they were still too timid to turn the tide.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    Why is Joe Manchin’s vote more powerful than the other Senators’ votes? If you need 50 or 60 votes to do something, and you do not have it, then is the 50th or 60th vote more powerful than the other 49 and 59? And what about the other 49 and 39 votes that will not compromise? Kind of ridiculous to pin this on a party that has not had enough votes to make a change. Especially when the states making the most progress towards reducing carbon emissions are Democrat led.
    - AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
      [dead]
    - esotericimpl 3y ago
      [dead]
    - femiagbabiaka 3y ago
      Manchins vote matters more because it is the tiebreaker that matters.. we have to live in the real world. Here’s some questions: Have Democrats never had the political power to make change? Did the Obama presidency not exist? Let’s be real.. the Dems have explicitly made it a policy to move towards the right in order to appeal to GOP voters. This isn’t just some conspiracy theory, it has been explicitly stated by dem officials at conventions, in interviews, and covered at length in liberal venues like the infamous Pod Save America episode on the Clinton campaign strategy. If democrats were as militant about their positions as the GOP, maybe they’d have more than one major liberal policy win made through legislation in the past 50 years.. but they’re not, and they don’t.
jdminhbg 3y ago
US carbon emissions peaked in 2000 and have been falling since, even without a per capita adjustment: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carbon-co2-emissions https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carb... Different politics in the US might have made some difference on the margin in lowering them more, but it's not really the main issue.
- la64710 3y ago
  Yet all the CEOs are screaming in unison - get back to office get on with your commute and pollute the earth more. Neither the government or the politicians or the CEOS or even the common people are willing to reimagine a more sustainable way of life. They are more willing to find reasons to maintain the status quo.
  - netsharc 3y ago
    No one (or very few people) wants to give up luxuries like beach holidays in Thailand, electronic gadgets, steak. And if they do and someone else still get to enjoy them (e.g. billionaires, or just the wealthier Westerners), they get resentful - I think India got quite mad about "The West" dictating that people should travel less, "How fair", they say, "Westeners have been having good food and seeing the world for decades, and now when it's affordable to the poorer nations, Western leaders say 'how about we make it more expensive (e.g. by Carbon tax) so less people do it'."
    - valval 3y ago
      I imagine people will resent you when you go about claiming that meat is a “luxury” indeed. It might just be you, not everybody else.
    - t0bia_s 3y ago
      Recent prices of meat are lower than prices of cheese for example.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
nancyhn 3y ago
[flagged]
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  Yep, all the oil/gas not used by USA/EU will be used by other, poorer countries, probably at lower prices than we are paying now for that gas while switching to even more expensive alternatives. We still have nuclear as an option, but the 'greens' are somehow too stupid to even think of nuclear as a solution to many of our problems.
- V__ 3y ago
  Why do people always try to equate climate-neutrality with poverty? Or that escaping poverty has to be co2 intensive? Those aren't related at all.
  - nancyhn 3y ago
    Because they are focused on fossil fuels, which are responsible for both CO2 emissions and increasing standard of living, including reduction of climate related deaths. The real solution is to use a better base load fuel source, which would be nuclear, but they're not pushing for that. That necessarily means they are advocating poverty.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - V__ 3y ago
      It is a solution. Just like wind/solar/hydro/geothermal/batteries are ones. None of which require poverty. I agree, that fossil fuels increased the standard of living, but that doesn't mean that it's/was the only way or that other countries have to follow suit to increase their standards of living right now.
      - willcipriano 3y ago
        > None of which require poverty Quite the opposite they require a great deal of money
willcipriano 3y ago
[flagged]
veave 3y ago
[flagged]

by jmclnx 3y ago

srgpqt 3y ago

Like the boiled frog, perhaps we have not even realized that we are already cooked/doomed.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
I don't know, I feel like it's already pretty obvious that we're "cooked/doomed", with some caveats: 1. Even in the worst case I haven't seen any level-headed scientists argue that the Earth will be uninhabitable a la Venus. We'll get a hotter planner, sea levels will rise considerably inundating coastal areas, the current anthropocene extinction event will accelerate, storms will be a lot more intense, etc. Obviously a major set of problems, but I think it's important to be specific about what those problems will be as opposed to "we'll all be dead". 2. Whenever someone even remotely argues that we'll be able to stick to some reasonable emissions targets I like to show this graph, https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions#global-co2-emissions-from-fossil-fuels-global-co2-emissions-from-fossil-fuels https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions#global-co2-emission.... That is, it's good news that global emissions have largely stabilized over the past decade, but we're still pumping out over 35 billion tons of carbon every year. We need to find a way, somehow, to bring that to near 0, and while tech may get us there eventually I don't see that happening in my lifetime (I'm middle aged).
- snarf21 3y ago
  Agreed .. A lot of people will die as places become uninhabitable for a very very long time .. Access to clean water will become a major issue and the poor will lose (even more than they already are) .. Humans are a greedy species and this planet just can't support 8B+ (and counting of us) .. I don't know what it can support but we'll soon find out .. We are still decades away from near zero fossil fuels globally and yet we are still growing crops in the desert and watering it so people can have fun hitting a white ball .. Even if we can get to near 100% wind/solar/battery, we'll be busy polluting anything and everything with rare earth minerals as we churn through batteries like candy .. I don't see life being very fun in 50 years, even for the richest people
  - ericd 3y ago
    On your last point, lithium ion battery packs are supposedly extremely recyclable, and it’s cheaper to recycle them than to make a new one, so it seems likely that they will be recycled.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      They'll have to be, because there isn't enough lithium on the planet (that we know of) to meet the expected demand.
  - oceanplexian 3y ago
    > Humans are a greedy species and this planet just can't support 8B+ This seems like a pretty bold statement. Let’s assume the only constraints on population are energy, water, and space. If you do a back of the napkin calculation on much Uranium exists on Earth, how much power we could produce by fissioning it, then how much water is in the oceans, and then assume everything else is an engineering problem? I think the number wouldn’t be 8 Billion, but much more. That’s not even getting into mining asteroids, space-based energy, vertical hydroponics, living underground or in the oceans. I think the limits could be extraordinarily high
    - 3y ago
WeylandYutani 3y ago
Nah we realise. But there's nothing that you can do about it. Reminds me of Dutch Jews in WW2 who tried to live a normal life until the police came to collect them.
pastor_bob 3y ago
[flagged]
- netsharc 3y ago
  And if your area's electricity grid goes down? Even France had a problem with keeping their nuclear power plant running last year, the rivers didn't have enough water for cooling, and they weren't allowed to dump overly heated water because it would hurt the environment, so the only solution was to reduce production...
paganel 3y ago
We weren't cooked/doomed for about two years recently. Sometimes I miss the pandemic and those two years only because that apocalypse at least had an end in sight when it came to the "educated" public's reaction to it, this climate thing is the new year 1000 hysteria [1], it's just unfortunate that it will spread over the next decades. [1] https://www.bu.edu/history/files/2011/10/11.Fear-of-an-Apocalyptic-Year-1000-Speculum.pdf https://www.bu.edu/history/files/2011/10/11.Fear-of-an-Apoca...
- anon25783 3y ago
  The ten hottest summers on record happened in the last fifteen years. The number one hottest is this summer we're experiencing right now. And you call this "hysteria"?
  - paganel 3y ago
    Like I said, those stats had been forgotten about between 2020-2022, when the discourse was about another type of “new normal”, but one related to public health. Yes, it’s the very definition of apocalyptic hysteria.
    - anon25783 3y ago
      Presently in Nebraska we are bracing for a heat index of 117°F, a situation with no precedent here in 2020, '21, or '22. I contend that what you describe as "apocalyptic hysteria" is the only reasonable and appropriate response to such a morbidly inhospitable climactic state of affairs. It's no more "hysterical" than screaming and banging on the windows when trapped in a hot car with no way out.

bugglebeetle 3y ago

It’s not the GOP, its an entire economic system, defended at nuclear gunpoint, by the one of the world’s largest carbon emitters, who both parties reward with ever-expanding, fraud-ridden budgets, while their citizens starve and die on the streets, go bankrupt from illnesses, etc. I’m sorry to tell you, but there is no one in the halls of US power steering the ship away from the worst outcomes of climate change because the entire thing is bought and sold by the people profiting from it.

femiagbabiaka 3y ago
Yeah the GOP is like the useful boogeyman, but most Dems are no better. Hell, the most powerful parts of the Dems include folks like Joe Manchin, who's right in the bag of coal. Even in a world where Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election and followed through on her policy goals, they were still too timid to turn the tide.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  Why is Joe Manchin’s vote more powerful than the other Senators’ votes? If you need 50 or 60 votes to do something, and you do not have it, then is the 50th or 60th vote more powerful than the other 49 and 59? And what about the other 49 and 39 votes that will not compromise? Kind of ridiculous to pin this on a party that has not had enough votes to make a change. Especially when the states making the most progress towards reducing carbon emissions are Democrat led.
  - AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
    [dead]
  - esotericimpl 3y ago
    [dead]
  - femiagbabiaka 3y ago
    Manchins vote matters more because it is the tiebreaker that matters.. we have to live in the real world. Here’s some questions: Have Democrats never had the political power to make change? Did the Obama presidency not exist? Let’s be real.. the Dems have explicitly made it a policy to move towards the right in order to appeal to GOP voters. This isn’t just some conspiracy theory, it has been explicitly stated by dem officials at conventions, in interviews, and covered at length in liberal venues like the infamous Pod Save America episode on the Clinton campaign strategy. If democrats were as militant about their positions as the GOP, maybe they’d have more than one major liberal policy win made through legislation in the past 50 years.. but they’re not, and they don’t.

jdminhbg 3y ago

US carbon emissions peaked in 2000 and have been falling since, even without a per capita adjustment: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carbon-co2-emissions https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carb... Different politics in the US might have made some difference on the margin in lowering them more, but it's not really the main issue.

la64710 3y ago
Yet all the CEOs are screaming in unison - get back to office get on with your commute and pollute the earth more. Neither the government or the politicians or the CEOS or even the common people are willing to reimagine a more sustainable way of life. They are more willing to find reasons to maintain the status quo.
- netsharc 3y ago
  No one (or very few people) wants to give up luxuries like beach holidays in Thailand, electronic gadgets, steak. And if they do and someone else still get to enjoy them (e.g. billionaires, or just the wealthier Westerners), they get resentful - I think India got quite mad about "The West" dictating that people should travel less, "How fair", they say, "Westeners have been having good food and seeing the world for decades, and now when it's affordable to the poorer nations, Western leaders say 'how about we make it more expensive (e.g. by Carbon tax) so less people do it'."
  - valval 3y ago
    I imagine people will resent you when you go about claiming that meat is a “luxury” indeed. It might just be you, not everybody else.
  - t0bia_s 3y ago
    Recent prices of meat are lower than prices of cheese for example.
bobthepanda 3y ago

nancyhn 3y ago

[flagged]

ajsnigrutin 3y ago
Yep, all the oil/gas not used by USA/EU will be used by other, poorer countries, probably at lower prices than we are paying now for that gas while switching to even more expensive alternatives. We still have nuclear as an option, but the 'greens' are somehow too stupid to even think of nuclear as a solution to many of our problems.
V__ 3y ago
Why do people always try to equate climate-neutrality with poverty? Or that escaping poverty has to be co2 intensive? Those aren't related at all.
- nancyhn 3y ago
  Because they are focused on fossil fuels, which are responsible for both CO2 emissions and increasing standard of living, including reduction of climate related deaths. The real solution is to use a better base load fuel source, which would be nuclear, but they're not pushing for that. That necessarily means they are advocating poverty.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - V__ 3y ago
    It is a solution. Just like wind/solar/hydro/geothermal/batteries are ones. None of which require poverty. I agree, that fossil fuels increased the standard of living, but that doesn't mean that it's/was the only way or that other countries have to follow suit to increase their standards of living right now.
    - willcipriano 3y ago
      > None of which require poverty Quite the opposite they require a great deal of money

willcipriano 3y ago

[flagged]

veave 3y ago

[flagged]