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But economy, china, developing nations, my personal right to consumption, factor x is making this metric seem worse than it should be, another political thing i

• rlili 2y ago
  I see it more like: > Major lobbying companies' shareholders' interest in handling an slow creeping existential threat appears to be very bad.
• Filligree 2y ago
  > Question, what are the most viable / cost effective / low risk geoengineering tools? Inject sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere. This can be done by adding it to airplane fuel. We have a good idea of the consequences, as ships did the ~same thing (less effectively) until recently—they're now filtering it into the oceans instead.
• kachapopopow 2y ago
  After we stopped dumping sulfur into the oceans the average temperature went up nearly an entire degree![1] This will heavily affect the size of cyclones and other weather related disasters (not just heatwaves). 2024 might finally make people realize that the end is near once parts of the world in developed countries start to be slowly wiped off the map due to non stop natural disaster events. [1]: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%3A%2F%2Fsite.uit.no%2Fnclos%2F2024%2F01%2F31%2Fa-peculiar-interaction-extreme-temperature-rise-in-the-north-atlantic-and-the-international-maritime-organizations-sulphur-regulation%2F https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%... @credits borg16
  • Pelam 2y ago
    Do you have a reference for that? One thing that seems obvious, but hasn't been repeated enough IMHO is that injecting more energy (heat) into a chaotic system (climate), won't simply make the average energy (temperature) higher BUT will also proportionally strenghten the chaotic fluctuations (disasters).
    • kachapopopow 2y ago
      I am being blocked from accessing the site, but it all comes from the graph I saw on this site: https://site.uit.no/nclos/2024/01/31/a-peculiar-interaction-extreme-temperature-rise-in-the-north-atlantic-and-the-international-maritime-organizations-sulphur-regulation/ https://site.uit.no/nclos/2024/01/31/a-peculiar-interaction-.... Correct me if I'm wrong.
      • borg16 2y ago
        I was unable to access the url you shared either. Here's a cached copy of it I was able to find[1] [1]https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%3A%2F%2Fsite.uit.no%2Fnclos%2F2024%2F01%2F31%2Fa-peculiar-interaction-extreme-temperature-rise-in-the-north-atlantic-and-the-international-maritime-organizations-sulphur-regulation%2F https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%...
  • borg16 2y ago
    interesting you bring developed countries and not developing countries into the picture here first. Is it because such large scale disasters like the cyclones you mention tend to hit US more than any developing nations? I ask because I hypothesize that the impact of these raising temperatures will be seen more widely and adversely in parts of developing countries given their population density and inability to address the same.
    • kachapopopow 2y ago
      Well the non developed countries have suffered from these for the better part of few decades and nobody cares. My reasoning is that this happening to a developed nation would be significantly more widespread as this requires global action. Not to mention that non developed nations tend to have other issues they're trying to solve and climate change is not even on their list (except for very few).
• thegrimmest 2y ago
  > slow creeping existential threat I struggle to see how even the worst predicted outcomes of climate change are an existential threat to the human species or our civilization. In the worst case a few billion people die or are displaced. Our species will carry on.
  • kachapopopow 2y ago
    Losing the means of food production in the most fertile parts of the world would pretty much wipe out more than "a few billion people". It's likely that we'd lose the means to support even a billion human lives and would have to redirect our efforts into survival rather than progression setting us back hundreds of years. edit: not to mention everyone going into war with each other for securing the small amount of places that are able to produce food.
    • thegrimmest 2y ago
      New fertile areas will become available, Siberia and northern Canada for instance. Do you have a serious scientific source that projects the loss of agricultural capacity to the degree you're suggesting?
      • kachapopopow 2y ago
        The land itself has to be fertile that's why the moon-belt is called like that and is currently where most of the wheat (in europe at least) is being produced. This process happened over thousands of years and is not easy to 'move' or 'prepare' land like that. New regions would struggle to cultivate new land without fertilizers and the current fertilizer sector would struggle to operate (current sector is built around the availability of ammonia as far as I'm aware). Your best bets would yes: Siberia, Canada. But it would take maybe few millennia before that land could be used for agriculture and it would effectively become the new oil of the world sparking a new wave of conflicts as I mentioned before. Our current food supply could be destroyed in decades not millennia given enough heatwaves and other natural events.
  • BLKNSLVR 2y ago
• fsflover 2y ago
  > But economy, china, developing nations, my personal right to consumption More excuses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39756174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39756174
  • analognoise 2y ago
    I don’t care and will pick “let’s all go to war” long before I pick “I got to enjoy it all but my kids should live in communal hovels to save power”. The USA has what, 12 super carriers? They’re not for show - I guarantee we’ll run out of oil last.
• bryanlarsen 2y ago
  > Apparently the production of greenhouse gasses has gone up in past years regardless of the negotiations aimed at reducing them. It appears likely that CO2 emissions will fall slightly in 2024, and start dropping dramatically in 2025. https://climateanalytics.org/comment/will-2024-be-the-year-emissions-start-falling https://climateanalytics.org/comment/will-2024-be-the-year-e... In the past 6 degrees of warming was predicted. We're now down to a prediction of 4 degrees of warming; stopping at 2.5 degrees is both possible and practical.
• gmuslera 2y ago
  The safest path is undo what we did, somewhat stop adding more fossil carbon to the system, and capture the excess that we added since preindustrial times, and then some extra to unwind what some positive feedback loops added by their own. It it looks hard, impractical, expensive and a lot of more ugly words, but it goes right to try to push the system to the previous stable state. Other “solutions” try to short term deal with one perceived problem without taking into account how the whole system is changing and how our “solution” will change it even more. With very complex systems shortsighted and not holistic approaches could bring to the table far more problems, some of which we may not have a way to deal with.
  • silverquiet 2y ago
    Unburning (my spellcheck marks that as a misspelling which says something even on its own) all the fossil fuels that gave rise to the industrial age we now reside in is I suppose possible in theory, but it would require a nearly limitless source of energy, and even if such a breakthrough occurred, I can't help but feel that all the energy would be directed towards ever more elaborate crypto-mining setups or AI chatbots. The half-ass solution will be to dim the sky which I suppose will buy some time; enough to see me out I hope.
    • analognoise 2y ago
      I love how humanity is like “should we dim the sky, or give up trucks?” and we’re going to pick dimming the sky. On the one hand we’re an awesome species; we’re also totally ridiculous. It’s tough to wrap your head around the duality.
      • hnaccount_rng 2y ago
        Yeah, I completely agree. But.. keep in mind: the idea that we _shouldn’t_ do geoengineering.. that ship has sailed at least a couple of decades now. Yes, dimming the sky is a more direct measure than the geoengineering we did so far. But I’m not even sure it’s less predictable than our first attempt
• hyperman1 2y ago
  I've long been thinking geoengineering is the most likely way for humanity to survive this mostly unscathed. And this scares me a lot. The technology makes nuclear weapons look like pussies. Letting 1 country control who has which weather where is unacceptable for almost any country. We need global cooperation to the point of becoming 1 huge global superstate, or we're having all out wars between the most powerfull nations of the world, while dealing with climate change at the same time. And that's making the assumption that no mistake is made, with a completely new technology field, and mistakes easily killing millions of people.
  • dpkirchner 2y ago
    > Letting 1 country control who has which weather where is unacceptable for almost any country. As we saw in the Gerard Butler documentary "Geostorm."
• jsnell 2y ago
  > Apparently the production of greenhouse gasses has gone up in past years regardless of the negotiations aimed at reducing them. Second derivatives matter. The growth in CO2 emissions from 2013 to 2023 was like 1/4th of the growth from 2003 to 2013. And it's now being driven by the profit motive, not by treaties that might be reneged on at any time, so there's no reason to believe the trend will stop. All that's needed is for governments to not actively screw things up. (Which I guess is a possibility in the US due to the hyper-partisan nature of their politics, but China and India are what really matter, and both stand to gain so much from cheap energy that it's hard to imagine them being willing to stop the transition just out of spite.) Honestly, there has probably not been more cause for optimism on climate change in like three decades.
• krmboya 2y ago
  > developing nations Yet the population in developed economies will fall drastically in the next 50-100 yrs. Let developing nations have their chance at improving quality of life through cheap energy like developed nations did. Mass immigration is but bandaid at maintaining population and the resulting economic demand within the existing order. Developing economies account for a negligible percentage of global emissions at the moment. By the time they catch up, some iterations of nuclear energy research will have resulted in more efficient energy production.
• amelius 2y ago
  > my personal right to consumption What if we simply stop telling people what they should buy every time they visit a website et cetera? Would that help to keep Earth's temperature down?
  • eastbound 2y ago
    You’re probably not even kidding, it’s part of a good solution. However, take a 360° look on the other aspects of this solution: - We seek to raise every person in poverty to the average consumption level. Through charities, political programs, etc. Should we stop? - If you don’t drive people to earn, you don’t drive people to work. And you get a dysfunctional society which consumes a lot but does not produce a lot. - It’s the same philosophical problem as if you started to be fair towards men, then they’d stop striving. I assure you that you don’t want that. - Would you be ok with solving climate change at the expense of other social targets? If not, congrats, you’re a leftist not a scientist.
• nojvek 2y ago
  Progress requires a generational shift. At-least in US we are looking at average age of presidential candidates 79y, senate 65y, house 60. 50% of wealth is owned by Boomers. They control majority of wealth and policy. Even the current generation will be long dead before they have to reckon with climate change. Until we get a big shock event where millions die, and the death from extreme natural causes is very evident, it won’t be something most governments take seriously. All major governments dragged their feet through 2020 regarding Covid.