The mentioned novelist, Kim Stanley Robinson, is probably best known in HN circles for the Red/Blue/Green Mars trilogy about terraforming the planet. There's a certain irony here about how hard we're finding it to control even the Earth's climate.
Not ironic at all. The Mars trilogy is hardly a utopia. Instead, it's a repudiation of our political economy. Certainly his recent Aurora is an overt criticism of terrestrial hubris which posits that future generations would, if they could, come back and punch us in the face.
Humans can't control the Earth's climate. No amount of taxes, protests, or memes are going to change it, one way or the other. It is sheer arrogance to assume we can. We are simply along for the ride. Sure, we can destroy our environments with nuclear war, China-level pollution, and strip-mining, however only to the point where it destroys us. After we're gone, it keeps going the way it has for a billion years.
Sure we can. For example, by generating enough greenhouse gases to insulate the planet and raise average temperatures. Isn’t this a website for engineers? A strange forum for mystical Gaia reasoning.
Frankly? None at all. We have past the point of no return. We can try to limit the damage now but there will be damages. There is no real political will to change, both in the government and in the people. Just look at the French and their protest when they have to work a few more years because their country would collapse otherwise. Or the anger when prices of goods that were already heavily subsidized rise, such as agriculture and fossil fuels or cheap toys that have to be shipped across the planet.
People want changes, but few of them are willing to accept the personal sacrifices that come with such changes.
Developing countries without robust infrastructure and wealth will have problems. Those living in rich and powerful countries may have less comfortable lives but it is likely they won't have to worry about "living" at all. It is developing countries like those in Africa and Middle East that will bear the brunt.
As concisely as possible, could you please connect French retirement age with global warming? Please do not change the subject or go off on a tangent. Simply draw the straightest line.
Now, do it without passing through a billionaire’s pockets.
Not GP but I'll try: retirement age is a similar issue, with a "tragedy of the commons" feel to it. Retirement age falling behind increases in life expectancy is unsustainable, and will likely end up with the system crashing, or effectively crashing (like people receiving notional but tiny and insufficient pensions).
Rather than take some pain upfront and have a better final outcome, the French apparently (I'm not 100% following the news there) choose to protest, deny the issue and risk taking a big one on the chin later on.
In that respect climate change is similar, as people prefer to stick to their current lifestyles at the cost of a tougher future.
As a Swiss watching the French protests: it seems not so much about retirement age but inequality and injustice. People seem to think, after I have worked off my ass for decades I have a right to retire, the one percent be damned!
I don't know about "None at all". But I sure don't hear much talk about the feasibility or infeasibility of orbital shields/reflectors or other slightly out of the box solutions.
> People want changes, but few of them are willing to accept the personal sacrifices that come with such changes.
If by people you mean the average person, I don't agree with this line of reasoning, at least in the US. There's such a large and effective apparatus to perpetuate hegemony by corporate and media interests (in the Gramscian sense). I don't know if there's an effective mechanism for the collective average person to set the political agenda, and ironically the most prominent examples I've thought are the Trumpers (getting Trump elected) and QAnon (4chan conspiracy becoming so serious that it becomes a media talking point).
Move. They'll become like the Sahara now - desolate wasteland that can't support life. Ironically, the Sahara itself is greening, and large parts of the taiga and permafrost may open up to human habitation.
The biggest problem India and Pakistan will have to deal with from warming is that they depend heavily on water from the Himalayas that will be greatly diminished if we don't get warming under control.
If India and Pakistan end up fighting over declining water supplies and their nukes get involved it could become a serious problem for the rest of the world. Here's an interesting paper about that: "A regional nuclear conflict would compromise global food security" [1]. It looks at a scenario where they each hit the other with 50 nukes about the size of the one used on Hiroshima.
Here's the abstract:
> A limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan could ignite fires large enough to emit more than 5 Tg of soot into the stratosphere. Climate model simulations have shown severe resulting climate perturbations with declines in global mean temperature by 1.8 °C and precipitation by 8%, for at least 5 y. Here we evaluate impacts for the global food system. Six harmonized state-of-the-art crop models show that global caloric production from maize, wheat, rice, and soybean falls by 13 (±1)%, 11 (±8)%, 3 (±5)%, and 17 (±2)% over 5 y. Total single-year losses of 12 (±4)% quadruple the largest observed historical anomaly and exceed impacts caused by historic droughts and volcanic eruptions. Colder temperatures drive losses more than changes in precipitation and solar radiation, leading to strongest impacts in temperate regions poleward of 30°N, including the United States, Europe, and China for 10 to 15 y. Integrated food trade network analyses show that domestic reserves and global trade can largely buffer the production anomaly in the first year. Persistent multiyear losses, however, would constrain domestic food availability and propagate to the Global South, especially to food-insecure countries. By year 5, maize and wheat availability would decrease by 13% globally and by more than 20% in 71 countries with a cumulative population of 1.3 billion people. In view of increasing instability in South Asia, this study shows that a regional conflict using <1% of the worldwide nuclear arsenal could have adverse consequences for global food security unmatched in modern history.
I'm wondering about the prevalence and frequency of water trains, if they've increased or decreased on a long term basis, how they're funded, and if they only operate during dry seasons.
