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There is no alternative. We have "aggravated the situation" (as you put it) beyond recovery. Doing nothing will now surely lead to an unacceptable outcome. We
by sz3 3y ago
There is no alternative.
We have "aggravated the situation" (as you put it) beyond recovery. Doing nothing will now surely lead to an unacceptable outcome. We are going to have to fix it, or resign ourselves to a huge shrinking of the habitable region of the planet, with the hunger/famine/war that will accompany that.
Obviously we can always make things worse. But when doing nothing is unacceptable, we have to start taking risks.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y agoThis is a good example of the lack of epistemic humility OP was taking about.
- sz3 3y agoWe don't have the time to sit back and let epistemic knowledge wash over us. We know more or less what needs to happen (less sunlight in, more heat out). All attempts to resolve the situation require taking some risk, and it'll be impossible to quantify all those risks until we try them. At the risk of stating the obvious: we need to measure every weird idea we try, and do our best to isolate the variables. Easier said than done. But we broke it, it's our problem now. Talking about humility: an excess of humility leads to fatalism. Some is good, but not too much if you want anything to happen. We're talking about fixing the ecosystem of a planet, of course it's ambitious.
- dougmwne 3y ago[flagged]
- sz3 3y agoWell, hopefully we have some time to practice first. Because we're the only person in the room and the patient is bleeding out.
- aziaziazi 3y agoYou are the doctor and the patient at the same time. On what body do you want to practice ?
- Roark66 3y agoSo don't do a bloody tripple bypass with a butter knife. Just stop the bleeding. Jeez, this conversation is the best illustration of everything that's wrong with geoengineering ideas. Indeed we have practiced quite a bit. Read on the catastrophe that was geoengineering attempts resulting in what is now happening with the Sea of Azov.
- fredrikholm 3y ago> Just stop the bleeding. Is that enough? AFAIK all paths forward to avoid the worst outcomes includes becoming net negative ASAP. That's stopping the addition of 37,000,000,000 tonnes of CO2 anually. For context, a modern CCS captures some thousands of tonne, which is a comparatively tiny, tiny number. Unless magic happens in the next decade, it appears that geoengineering is something we can't avoid, sans the suffering and death of billions. I'd love to be wrong here.
- psychphysic 3y agoOr an emergency trach while us sensible folk watch the patient die and hand wring?
- raverbashing 3y agoYou can watch the patient choke from the obstruction as well, but it won't be pretty neither
- johnnyworker 3y agoThat metaphor implies an understanding and overview that we simply do not have. Think of it as changing bytes in an executable file which will be run in 50 years, based on what "seems reasonable" to you staring at a wall of hex without even a de-compiler existing, much less you being able to use one. The only reason to even dream of it is not having to suffer the consequences, period. And that's not just because you might not be here in 50 years, it's because you're just one person in one very, very narrow walk of life, as opposed to being billions of people. The carbon emissions of the richest 1% of humanity are more than double than that of the poorest half of humanity. Oil and coal companies profit, while putting out disinformation, as they have been for decades. But why step on the toes of the powerful when you can just use inject sulfur into the atmosphere?
- sangnoir 3y agoA modest proposal: load up all the geoengineering-of-bust onto Falcon Heavies and ship them to Mars as a pilot project
- _factor 3y agoMore akin to duck taping the HVAC to avoid an emergency amputation.
- jb1991 3y agoAs someone who uses a butter knife literally every day, I am offended by this comment.
- fasterik 3y ago>You sound like someone about to perform a triple bypass with a butter knife. This style of comment is lazy and simply trying to shut down conversation without actually making an argument. If you have an objection to the comment you're responding to, then say why you think they're wrong, what your alternative point of view is, and why your point of view is the correct one.
- almostnormal 3y ago> You sound like someone about to perform a triple bypass with a butter knife. If climate change was a disease it wouldn't have an ICD number, no method of diagnostic in standard literature, let alone a treatment approved by the competent authority. The recommended solutions would be to eat more healthy, more physical activity, and something to treat the symptoms. There won't be a double-blind study for specific treatments of earth, so any kind of idea is equally valid.
- lm28469 3y agoThe only viable alternative to doing nothing is stopping our quest for infinite growth in all sectors. You're the proverbial boiling frog
- szundi 3y agoNo problem with this, apart from convincing like 5-6 billion people to cut their standards of living to half. Also less people is needed, few children. Sounds like impossible now without concentrated media effort and all ruling parties probably would lose for decades.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago5-6 billion people are going to have their living standards and reproductive opportunities destroyed anyway. If not worse. But you're really just remaking the point that as a species we're incapable of intelligent collective management of our resources.
- sacrosancty 3y ago[dead]
- concordDance 3y agoCoordination problems are really really really hard. You shouldn't be dismissive about them.
- selestify 3y agoYou are right. But good luck convincing those billions to voluntarily reduce their living standards. I fear change will have to come involuntarily.
- almostnormal 3y ago>> No problem with this, apart from convincing like 5-6 billion people to cut their standards of living to half. > 5-6 billion people are going to have their living standards and reproductive opportunities destroyed anyway. The problem might be that those sets of people are not the same.
- Turskarama 3y agoYou have absolutely no idea if the "solutions" we try won't lead to even worse outcomes. Up until the point climate change is becoming an existential threat, which it isn't yet, we shouldn't go doing anything too drastic. There is plenty of evidence that we can still avert the worst of it without resorting to geoengineering.
- LatteLazy 3y ago>There is plenty of evidence that we can still avert the worst of it without resorting to geoengineering. And zero evidence we will...
- PradeetPatel 3y agoThis kind of defeatist attitude doesn't help with the situation at all. We can all do our part in reducing our daily carbon emissions, raise awareness, and educate policymakers and business stakeholders on the importance of mitigating climate change!
- LatteLazy 3y agoYou can call it defeatist, but at this point it's factually true. We've made a negative amount of progress on this matter. And that's taken 40 years. We have very little time left. We have already locked in almost 2 degrees of warming. These are all regrettable facts. But that are facts. 40 years of raising awareness and individual action has failed.
- concordDance 3y agoConsider me a policy maker. I want to know what the costs[1] of ignoring are likely to be so I can be sure it's worth the pain to ban non-electric cars in 10 years, ram through nuclear power plants while gutting safety regs so we can get them built in less than a decade and try and threaten India and China into reducing CO2 emissions. What do you tell me? [1] In $, convert other units like lives into dollars as need be and be sure to value lives from different cultures at 0.1x as thats the expressed preferences of the population based on chatitable giving figures.
- concordDance 3y ago> huge shrinking of the habitable region of the planet. How big? 1%? 10%? 50%? This matters.
- ironmagma 3y agoDoing nothing is itself a risk. Better to think of it as risk in every direction, all we can do is use what we know from science to choose our exit from the roundabout.