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If there is a theory for how climate change will doom us, you should spend time talking about it. The threats people usually bring up are relatively mild. Eg, w

by roenxi 3y ago

If there is a theory for how climate change will doom us, you should spend time talking about it. The threats people usually bring up are relatively mild. Eg, wet bulb events are pretty scary but are also sound relatively straightforward to mitigate if they start happening. Human societies deal with nasty weather events already. I've heard scenarios put as mild as a reduction in real GDP growth, which is just a non-issue compared to the risks people want to shoulder to mitigate climate change. > I've voted for green parties and politics my whole life These people tend to be anti-nuclear in my experience; so I'm not sure from your comment if that strategy is a good idea. Environmentalists have been some of the more effective lobby groups for locking in fossil fuel use through 1980-2020 when we really should have been transitioning to nuclear power.

ben_w 3y ago
> wet bulb events are pretty scary but are also sound relatively straightforward to mitigate if they start happening First time I've heard that, everyone else says "this will kill anyone experiencing it for more than a brief period, meaning hours or minutes depending on the details". Solution is only easy on a scale of one person, "move elsewhere", or rich societies, "stop working outside and install aircon inside", which isn't so easy for anyone working in agriculture or much of Africa and India.
- roenxi 3y ago
  > Solution is only easy on a scale of one person, "move elsewhere", or rich societies, "stop working outside and install aircon inside", which isn't so easy for anyone working in agriculture or much of Africa and India. India's real growth rate is >5% p.a. They're going to be a rich society pretty soon, because they are behaving like a clever country and building lots of power plants. And while horrific things are likely to happen in Africa, horrific things have been happening in Africa every year for my entire lifetime. So yeah, it is terrible but not going to make me depressed by the future so much as the present. They need to figure out economic growth like Asia did. It is their only hope. > stop working outside and install aircon inside I dunno, sounds scalable to me. Repurpose office buildings with air conditioning for crisis use sometimes. People with air conditioners help those without. Order of magnitude it sounds pretty doable. I don't see where the scale issue comes from to the point where I'd consider anyone I know "doomed". EDIT If you described snowstorms, earthquakes, bushfires or tropical cyclones in the abstract they sound civilisation ending too. They are bad but people cope.
  - inference-lord 3y ago
    If India is building more power plants, which I'm assuming are coal? Isn't that going to mess them up worse than before? I mean, having air-con is nice, it's not possible for the whole of India to be inside with air-conditioning on for 3+ months of the year. Even in places like Tokyo, they have to limit their use of A/C because it' so energy intensive due to the crazy amount of heat from the urban heat island effect.
    - logifail 3y ago
      > Even in places like Tokyo, they have to limit their use of A/C because it' so energy intensive due to the crazy amount of heat from the urban heat island effect. I was in Singapore on Friday, for one day. There's air-conditioning in the MRT (metro) stations, but (at least from what I experienced during my brief stay) the stations are not typically closed off from the outside. You approach a station at street level and it's perhaps 33°C (91F) w/ humidity outside. Around midday my phone reported the weather as '33°C feels like 38°C (104F)'. You go down an open set of stairs/escalators, and it gets progressively cooler and then you're in the metro and it's pleasantly cool. I was very quickly wondering whether this wasn't a mind-blowingly wasteful use of energy. Anyone care to comment?
      - paulmd 3y ago
        heat rises and cold falls, so the cold air will stay in the subway system. there is no real need for doors/etc at the entrances as long as you're going down. the subways themselves put off a substantial amount of heat (from friction, motor loss, etc - all inefficiency eventually becomes heat) and for example in london they have problems with heat buildup in the tube system. so air-conditioning the platforms is generally desirable and probably necessary (especially in a more equatorial climate than england).
        inference-lord 3y ago
        What about the waste heat from the a/c units heating the surrounding areas?
tda 3y ago
Putting the blame for the climate crisis on environmentalists for opposing nuclear is very disingenuous. Nuclear would not have saved us from SUV's, consumption society or all the other forces wrecking the earth we live on. If nuclear would have made electricity cheap and abundant without addressing other factors, we just would have wasted more of it.
- roenxi 3y ago
  If we have enough cheap energy, the other stuff doesn't matter. It is like someone from 200AD being worried that we're not all working the fields and we're going to starve in winter - that isn't a constraint on modern society, we broke it with cheap energy. Fuel goes in the machine, the machine does lots of work, and then we get food. In fact, it might literally be like someone in the UK in 17xx worrying about the early industrial revolution because of climate change. The cost benefit calculation favours the industrial revolution by a heavy margin. If energy gets cheap enough, climate change happens and nobody needs to care.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > If we have enough cheap energy, the other stuff doesn't matter. Not so — the person you're responding to was demonstrating that important things had not in fact been invented, while your example only worked out because we did actually invent stuff. Indeed, even today electricity is only about 10% of humanity's total power usage, and that's with batteries cheap enough to make electric cars viable. (Bit of a shame that the alternative to batteries, hydrogen, still isn't cheap enough to be a great contender today, even despite the strong incentive to replace gasoline during the height of pro-nuclear attitudes and the OPEC-induced fuel crisis).
zelphirkalt 3y ago
Well, if you don't see the problem, then please hand over your home to someone else, and move soon. Not a problem right, if your area becomes uninhabitable? Also change your diet, because of other plants growing in your (new) area, or the old ones no longer growing in your previous area. Also calculate in to pay way more rent, because world population will have less space to live in and more people compete for your new home. I am sure you also won't mind devastating floods and other weather evens happening, forcing you to leave your previous home. In case of part of climate researcher being right and there being a point of no return, please also calculate in the cost for building a climate bunker under ground.
corney91 3y ago
> Environmentalists have been some of the more effective lobby groups for locking in fossil fuel use through 1980-2020 when we really should have been transitioning to nuclear power. If environmentalists are so effective, climate change would have been a higher priority over those decades. It seems likelier to me that there's other, more convincing reasons we haven't rolled out nuclear at a huge scale. For example the following are typically more convincing and applicable to nuclear as well: high costs, high political risk, fossil fuel lobbying.
jemmyw 3y ago
I've always been pro nuclear. We talk about it a lot now (on hn anyway), but when I was growing up in the UK the greens had such a minor voice I didn't even know their stance on the issue. The hypothesis of doom that I subscribe to is that it'll cause cascading effects that destroy parts of the existing ecology (this is already happening) and then the same to our food supply faster than we can react to. I don't worry it's going to mass cause temperatures that kill me directly if that's your implication. It'll be social collapse far away from where I live that will spread. I live in a safe country that gets about 80% of its power from renewables. But we don't build those wind turbines here and we certainly don't mine for their materials, if the supply of stuff goes awry we'll be just as buggered as everywhere else.
jay_kyburz 3y ago
>The threats people usually bring up are relatively mild Failed crops on a global scale may result in widespread famine and war. Crops can fail as a result of not enough rain, too much rain, not enough insects, too many inspects, all kinds of climate related things. I remember reading during covid that there is not some massive food cache somewhere with the government ready to bail us out if they need to. That we are basically living season to season.

by roenxi 3y ago

ben_w 3y ago

> wet bulb events are pretty scary but are also sound relatively straightforward to mitigate if they start happening First time I've heard that, everyone else says "this will kill anyone experiencing it for more than a brief period, meaning hours or minutes depending on the details". Solution is only easy on a scale of one person, "move elsewhere", or rich societies, "stop working outside and install aircon inside", which isn't so easy for anyone working in agriculture or much of Africa and India.

roenxi 3y ago
> Solution is only easy on a scale of one person, "move elsewhere", or rich societies, "stop working outside and install aircon inside", which isn't so easy for anyone working in agriculture or much of Africa and India. India's real growth rate is >5% p.a. They're going to be a rich society pretty soon, because they are behaving like a clever country and building lots of power plants. And while horrific things are likely to happen in Africa, horrific things have been happening in Africa every year for my entire lifetime. So yeah, it is terrible but not going to make me depressed by the future so much as the present. They need to figure out economic growth like Asia did. It is their only hope. > stop working outside and install aircon inside I dunno, sounds scalable to me. Repurpose office buildings with air conditioning for crisis use sometimes. People with air conditioners help those without. Order of magnitude it sounds pretty doable. I don't see where the scale issue comes from to the point where I'd consider anyone I know "doomed". EDIT If you described snowstorms, earthquakes, bushfires or tropical cyclones in the abstract they sound civilisation ending too. They are bad but people cope.
- inference-lord 3y ago
  If India is building more power plants, which I'm assuming are coal? Isn't that going to mess them up worse than before? I mean, having air-con is nice, it's not possible for the whole of India to be inside with air-conditioning on for 3+ months of the year. Even in places like Tokyo, they have to limit their use of A/C because it' so energy intensive due to the crazy amount of heat from the urban heat island effect.
  - logifail 3y ago
    > Even in places like Tokyo, they have to limit their use of A/C because it' so energy intensive due to the crazy amount of heat from the urban heat island effect. I was in Singapore on Friday, for one day. There's air-conditioning in the MRT (metro) stations, but (at least from what I experienced during my brief stay) the stations are not typically closed off from the outside. You approach a station at street level and it's perhaps 33°C (91F) w/ humidity outside. Around midday my phone reported the weather as '33°C feels like 38°C (104F)'. You go down an open set of stairs/escalators, and it gets progressively cooler and then you're in the metro and it's pleasantly cool. I was very quickly wondering whether this wasn't a mind-blowingly wasteful use of energy. Anyone care to comment?
    - paulmd 3y ago
      heat rises and cold falls, so the cold air will stay in the subway system. there is no real need for doors/etc at the entrances as long as you're going down. the subways themselves put off a substantial amount of heat (from friction, motor loss, etc - all inefficiency eventually becomes heat) and for example in london they have problems with heat buildup in the tube system. so air-conditioning the platforms is generally desirable and probably necessary (especially in a more equatorial climate than england).
      - inference-lord 3y ago
        What about the waste heat from the a/c units heating the surrounding areas?

tda 3y ago

Putting the blame for the climate crisis on environmentalists for opposing nuclear is very disingenuous. Nuclear would not have saved us from SUV's, consumption society or all the other forces wrecking the earth we live on. If nuclear would have made electricity cheap and abundant without addressing other factors, we just would have wasted more of it.

roenxi 3y ago
If we have enough cheap energy, the other stuff doesn't matter. It is like someone from 200AD being worried that we're not all working the fields and we're going to starve in winter - that isn't a constraint on modern society, we broke it with cheap energy. Fuel goes in the machine, the machine does lots of work, and then we get food. In fact, it might literally be like someone in the UK in 17xx worrying about the early industrial revolution because of climate change. The cost benefit calculation favours the industrial revolution by a heavy margin. If energy gets cheap enough, climate change happens and nobody needs to care.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > If we have enough cheap energy, the other stuff doesn't matter. Not so — the person you're responding to was demonstrating that important things had not in fact been invented, while your example only worked out because we did actually invent stuff. Indeed, even today electricity is only about 10% of humanity's total power usage, and that's with batteries cheap enough to make electric cars viable. (Bit of a shame that the alternative to batteries, hydrogen, still isn't cheap enough to be a great contender today, even despite the strong incentive to replace gasoline during the height of pro-nuclear attitudes and the OPEC-induced fuel crisis).

zelphirkalt 3y ago

Well, if you don't see the problem, then please hand over your home to someone else, and move soon. Not a problem right, if your area becomes uninhabitable? Also change your diet, because of other plants growing in your (new) area, or the old ones no longer growing in your previous area. Also calculate in to pay way more rent, because world population will have less space to live in and more people compete for your new home. I am sure you also won't mind devastating floods and other weather evens happening, forcing you to leave your previous home. In case of part of climate researcher being right and there being a point of no return, please also calculate in the cost for building a climate bunker under ground.

corney91 3y ago

> Environmentalists have been some of the more effective lobby groups for locking in fossil fuel use through 1980-2020 when we really should have been transitioning to nuclear power. If environmentalists are so effective, climate change would have been a higher priority over those decades. It seems likelier to me that there's other, more convincing reasons we haven't rolled out nuclear at a huge scale. For example the following are typically more convincing and applicable to nuclear as well: high costs, high political risk, fossil fuel lobbying.

jemmyw 3y ago

I've always been pro nuclear. We talk about it a lot now (on hn anyway), but when I was growing up in the UK the greens had such a minor voice I didn't even know their stance on the issue. The hypothesis of doom that I subscribe to is that it'll cause cascading effects that destroy parts of the existing ecology (this is already happening) and then the same to our food supply faster than we can react to. I don't worry it's going to mass cause temperatures that kill me directly if that's your implication. It'll be social collapse far away from where I live that will spread. I live in a safe country that gets about 80% of its power from renewables. But we don't build those wind turbines here and we certainly don't mine for their materials, if the supply of stuff goes awry we'll be just as buggered as everywhere else.

jay_kyburz 3y ago

>The threats people usually bring up are relatively mild Failed crops on a global scale may result in widespread famine and war. Crops can fail as a result of not enough rain, too much rain, not enough insects, too many inspects, all kinds of climate related things. I remember reading during covid that there is not some massive food cache somewhere with the government ready to bail us out if they need to. That we are basically living season to season.