8 ms·
Eeh. I'm currently experiencing 47 degrees but due to human innovation I'm inside with my air conditioners turned on, and even though it's adding to the problem
by ThalesX 3y ago
Eeh. I'm currently experiencing 47 degrees but due to human innovation I'm inside with my air conditioners turned on, and even though it's adding to the problem, it's rather comfortable.
> Gareth Redmond-King, at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit in the UK, said: “As we keep burning fossil fuels, we fuel ever worse climate impacts. It won’t stop until we cut emissions to net zero. Politicians who attempt to delay [climate] measures are locking in more of these extremes.”
To be honest, this kind of extremism is turning me off from the whole climate movement. Emissions are never going to be cut to net zero. We have billions of people that still need to industrialize. People are not just gonna roll over and turn into cavemen. We have a global trading network that needs to be kept up. Politicians and corporations are not gonna do anything about it, maybe a meaningless tax.
I think the only way out of this mess is innovation, not net zero emissions.
- mpweiher 3y ago> I think the only way out of this mess is innovation, not net zero emissions Turns out we already have nuclear power, so there is little need for innovation to get to zero emissions. Just need to get over our collective irrational fears and get building.
- ThalesX 3y ago> Just need to get over our collective irrational fears and get building. Even the baby steps we're making towards this are leaps compared to the degrowth crowd solutions.
- simmerup 3y agoThe hacker news perspective; the people dying of heat exhaustion in India just need to invest in better A/C. I guess we’ll end up A/C’ing the fields of dying crops too?
- ThalesX 3y ago> The hacker news perspective; the people dying of heat exhaustion in India just need to invest in better A/C. This is your interpretation of my perspective. I can do that also; the people dying of heat exhaustion in India should just decouple from the global trade network and go live in caves like in the olden days. > I guess we’ll end up A/C’ing the fields of dying crops too? Maybe? Or engineer heat resistant crops. Or figure out a different way to feed billions of people. If you think the only solution to climate change is net zero emissions on a global level, I'm not jealous of your imagination.
- mpweiher 3y agoOr seed the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide, causing global cooling like that after a volcanic eruption. We've had enough of those with records to know pretty precisely what the effects are and how long they last. This will happen, as it is well within the reach of even smaller state actors (and even sub-state) and once you get a wet-bulb event killing thousands in, say India, that country will not have a choice. And then we'll have to get crackin' building those nuclear power plants (as well as building out solar and wind and geothermal and tidal and storage). Because as another poster pointed out quite correctly: global warming is bad (but manageable), but pre-industrial society is far, far worse.
- myshpa 3y ago> pre-industrial society Nobody's talking about that. Your position will get us there.
- mpweiher 3y agoBuilding out nuclear and (all) other non-fossil energy options in order to keep or possibly even increase available energy for industry and private use will get us to a pre-industrial society exactly how?
- myshpa 3y agoQuickly: > Or seed the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide That's not solving the situation, that's temporarily mitigating some effects with poisons for a short term and at the same time emitting a ton of emissions from a lot of flights. > global warming is bad (but manageable) Warming, or better climate change, is only one of the symptoms of the overshoot. We've managed almost zero, nil, zilch in past 50 years (coal is still at 82%). > but pre-industrial society is far, far worse Calling mitigation strategies return to pre-industrial society ... i don't have words for that. But if we don't start solving it, and fast (yesterday was late), the nature will solve the problem for us. One way is better than the other. If you're interested where else you're wrong, you should really spend some 30 mins here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPb_0JZ6-Rc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPb_0JZ6-Rc
- blueflow 3y ago> I guess we’ll end up A/C’ing the fields of dying crops too? If people do survive in the Sahara, we can do that, too.
- hotpotamus 3y agoUh... You may not be aware, but the Sahara is somewhat famously devoid of life.
- blueflow 3y agoOr do a quick search before telling me i'm wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara#People,_culture,_and_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara#People,_culture,_and_la... This country has half a million people alone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Sahara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Sahara
- hotpotamus 3y agoI'm recalling my read through of "Sahara Unveiled: A Journey Across the Desert" by William Langewiesche. (Great writer, but it wasn't my favorite of his works). Here's the executive summary: > It is as vast as the United States and so arid that most bacteria cannot survive there. Its loneliness is so extreme it is said that migratory birds will land beside travelers, just for the company. William Langewiesche came to the Sahara to see it as its inhabitants do, riding its public transport, braving its natural and human dangers, depending on its sparse sustenance and suspect hospitality. From his journey, which took him across the desert’s hyperarid core from Algiers to Dakar, he has crafted a contemporary classic of travel writing.
- blueflow 3y ago> ... to see it as its inhabitants do, ... What was your point, again?
- mkesper 3y agoThere will be totally inhabitable places due to being too wet to allow humans (and many animals) to survive. It's called the "wet bulb" effect. https://www.sciencealert.com/human-survival-in-hot-and-humid-conditions-is https://www.sciencealert.com/human-survival-in-hot-and-humid...
- pif 3y agoThe scientific perspective: no matter what we do, global temperatures will not go back for several decades. There is nothing we can do to help them now, apart from shipping them A/C units, diesel generators and diesel fuel to burn.
- ThalesX 3y agoHeresy! They're good enough burning cow dung while we judge them from our AC cooled homes for not living frugally enough.
- mpweiher 3y agoThey will drop once someone starts seeding SO2. And someone will.
- pif 3y agoEdit: sorry HN'ers, I Hadn't noticed it was a troll comment!
- mpweiher 3y agoNot sure I'd call it "wishful", but it seems inevitable. Although we are making progress, that progress does not appear to be fast enough to avoid the "wet bulb events" that others have described (and linked to sources). So that is going to happen. And once it happens, the governments where this happened will have a choice: protect their citizens or let them die. What do you think will happen?
- hef19898 3y agoVertical farming might just have found its new sales pitch, farming independent of climate change (so we can ignore a problem that doesn't exist by using our solution circumventing the issues caused by said problem). Oh, and AI of course.
- pif 3y agoMaybe there is no way out, but I prefer modern life with global warming to pre-industrial-times life. And I am sure I am not alone.
- Fricken 3y agoI've noticed in people a strong bias toward what they're familiar with. How much time have you spent living in a pre industrial society? There are tribal societies that have been stable for tens of thousands of years. Modernity is an inherently unstable system.
- pif 3y agoStability is not the goal. Comfort is the goal. And pre-industrial societies switched to industrial societies as fast as they could!
- TacticalCoder 3y ago> There are tribal societies that have been stable for tens of thousands of years. With which average lifespan and enduring what pain? What was the solution for, say, a tooth going south? Medicine was ugly back then. Between 1% to 1.5% of all the woman giving birth would die while doing so in 1600. Something insane like that. We've literally gone down at least 30x. Also back then women couldn't really decide whether they'd become pregnant or not. At 17 years old or so I got a medical emergency: doctor diagnosed an appendicitis that was missed a few days earlier for I was under strong painkillers. When it was diagnosed a few hours later I was undergoing surgery. In 1600 I could very well have died of peritonitis / infection without the surgery. I see all those years I lived since then as pure win, thanks to modernity. It comes at a cost but I live better than any king has ever lived (except for those who live/lived in modern times).
- thefz 3y agoAre you aware that air conditioning is a heat pump, making it a bit more livable for yourself while a bit less for everybody else?
- ThalesX 3y ago> Eeh. I'm currently experiencing 47 degrees but due to human innovation I'm inside with my air conditioners turned on, and even though * it's adding to the problem * , it's rather comfortable. Yes I am aware. Tragedy of the commons. Game theory. The solution to our global problem is not me stopping the AC, neither is it all of us stopping our ACs.
- tcgv 3y agoIf there are two things that I've learned from the pandemic is that i) societies fail to prevent totally predictable catastrophic events if doing so is detrimental to their economies and ii) societies only commit to solving these problems when there's really no other option (and even so it won't be smooth nor will everyone agree on how to handle it). So yeah, I'm pessimistic about how climate change will unfold.
- ThalesX 3y ago> So yeah, I'm pessimistic about how climate change will unfold. It's probably not even a black and white thing honestly. For the person dealing with unlivable temperatures in India it might feel one way. For the person living in Siberia that just got a couple of hectares of farmland it might feel differently. I'd wager a bet that in the future, more people will be impacted by war caused by climate change than the actual climate change effects, if we cannot solve the issue technologically.
- pif 3y ago> even though it's adding to the problem Yes, it's adding to the problem, very little. Yes, it's helping you, very much. No, you don't have an alternative. I sincerely wish you it doesn't break. Keep cool!