I got involved in climate advocacy in 2021. Since then I’ve successfully lobbied my local government to start an energy resources study, which will look at ways for my community to quickly transition to renewables. A small thing. But if we all do small things, it will add up!
Still though. My state, Arizona has really terrible people writing awful laws. This legislative session they’re proposing a 12.5% tax on purchasing solar if you’re not a utility, and a bunch of other regressive, anti-free market, pro-fossil fuel legislation [1]. We’re going to vote these people out of office this November and remove barriers to using our states abundant solar resources.
And since HN is a startup and technology forum, we need cheap utility scale energy storage as soon as we can get it. It exists, but solar+storage is just a bit too expensive for most regions of the country. If it does become cheaper than methane, that makes the move away from fossil fuels much easier. If you want to work on this, do it.
But also, citizens engagement is crucial. If you live in a regressive state like mine. It’s super important to get involved. If you live in a place that is going in the right direction, engage on the implementation details, there are so many ways good climate policy can get derailed in bureaucracies. There are a ton of groups that you can work with on this [2] [3] [4].
Quick google search of the AZ law says it will tax solar energy exported to other states and divide the proceeds among the local residents, which sounds a bit more nuanced than your summary. Not saying it's positive, but it's not clear to me that it's negative without more details; some form of this could incentivize more of the land to be used for solar, for example. I actually thought that this sort of law would be disallowed by the fed, since they reserve the right to govern interstate commerce.
>I actually thought that this sort of law would be disallowed by the fed, since they reserve the right to govern interstate commerce
Yes, the US Constitution gives regulation of interstate commerce to the federal government, but this has been worked around. Lots of states have "use tax" which is an obvious[1] tax on interstate commerce, but they skirt the Constitution by saying they're taxing "use" of the goods purchased within their own state, not the interstate commerce involved. It's possible the AZ law could be written in a way that claims to tax something that happens within the state, while still being for all intents and purposes a tax on interstate commerce. And probably nobody would do anything about it.
[1] The tax is computed 100% based on the money exchanged in interstate commerce, and 0% based on usage.
... hm, and what would current SCOTUS say about this? the DoJ or other states don't want to push it because probably they would lose? (or states would just again and again come up with silly new taxes, so enforcement would be hard in general?)
A significant fraction of commuting by information workers stopped during COVID. Nothing like the whole world stopping, but yes, it would make a difference if the reduction in commuting could continue.
From what I've read (can't find the source, sorry), it did have an effect, but it needs to repeat every year on top of the previous one to have the effect to stay below the 2.0 celsius avg.
I think the next phase will be people like me, not climate change deniers but climate change doomers.
The US could go carbon neutral tomorrow and it wouldnt make a dent because of China, India and Russia. 3 Billion people pumping pollution into the the air like their is no tomorrow vs. a couple hundred million reducing their footprint isn't going to make a lick of difference. I think people have always had a hard time understanding things at scale, especially a global scale.
The ONLY answer, live your life like there's no tomorrow because chances are is there isn't going to be.
That's assuming the situation follows your specified path.
In reality, an economy transitioned to tech beyond fossil fuels probably enjoys much greater production dynamics. For instance, the US could build out nuclear power to satisfy base board power and then grow that base by which ever rate it decided per year. At some point, mass desalination of sea water becomes affordable because electricity drives down the price. There, too, sea water is a huge resource for literally every mineral we could need (lithium, gold, uranium, you name it). Further, any co2 removed from the ocean will then be scrubbed from the atmosphere-provided the removed water eventually finds its way back, and it would. With more water and more electricity, more of the land is usable for things like habitation, commercial/industrial, and agriculture purposes. (The US and globe has a ton of unproductive land which can be productive with some combination of water+fertilizer.) There's a relationship between the growth of power produced by an economy and its yearly growth of gdp.
The above will also take place with solar. Eventually we will have the tech to power things off whatever sun they get through the paint/coating on their surface.
At some point, the other national players will see those benefits going to other nations and change accordingly. Or they will be left in the past.
You'll still mine oil for tires and roads, and you'll have gasoline as a byproduct. You'll use the gasoline to mine lithium and to transport used batteries. And you'll bury the batteries somewhere out of sight. Just like we're doing with nuclear. None of these solutions actually help preserve live. Life can thrive in a carbon rich atmosphere. It has before. But many years from now when the lithium batteries decay and the nuclear stores erode, life on Earth will actually cease.
There is no problem mining oil for tires and roads. The carbon is sequestered. The problem is burning fossil fuels and producing CO2. Also, tires and roads are a byproduct of refining, and much less is produced than gasoline.
Mining lithium doesn't require gasoline. Mining can be electrified like many other things. Probably easier to electrify than long distance transport since it is short distances.
Nuclear waste is not a danger in the far future. The radioactive products decay on short time scale. Most of them are gone in century, but they want to store them for.
Lithium batteries aren't a problem if they did decay. Lithium is a common, non-toxic metal. Some batteries, like lead acid in every car, have toxic metals but is small scale overall and not that dangerous.
> The problem is burning fossil fuels and producing CO2.
That's one problem. But I'm aware that CO2 is not the ONLY danger to the environment. Hopefully you are also aware of that and can discuss the topic beyond only CO2. We obviously wouldn't replace CO2 with methane, right? So let's talk about the environment, not just CO2.
>Mining lithium doesn't require gasoline.
Name one mine that doesn't use gasoline to mine, haul, store, or transport. Good luck.
>The radioactive products decay on short time scale.
At least 3% of the waste from any reactor is extremely harmful for many thousands of years. The other 97% is irrelevant. Why did you bring it up? Seems dishonest.
>Lithium batteries aren't a problem if they did decay.
Sure if you manage to keep them all really far away from each other. High concentrations of anything is a problem. Even a basic Wikipedia search can help you here. Leaked evaporation pools, water contamination, huge amounts of water usage in production, etc.
Not nuclear in a century? Who sold you that? It doesn't matter. We can't discuss the pros and cons because downvotes prevent me from commenting. The choice is made for you. Enjoy. Knowingly or unknowingly, I'm sure you're destroying the environment. And since we can't discuss it, you can't convince me otherwise. I'll vote against you until I die because we can't discuss the topic. How can I learn if you're right?
In your version of the future, we create the battery and the nuclear problems and we still have to deal with the hydrocarbon problem. In my version we discuss what to do about the hydrocarbon problem.
> The ONLY answer, live your life like there's no tomorrow because chances are is there isn't going to be.
The problem with this attitude is that it prevents you from solving problems that might actually affect the odds of humans making it to tomorrow or any other near-term date. Right now it looks as if we're in the run-up to World War III. [0] Perhaps we should spend a little energy preventing that. Or perhaps aquifer exhaustion, a long-standing issue exacerbated by climate change. [1] Or solving the political polarization that prevents us from addressing other problems. [2] Humans have faced all of these problems in the past and generally solved them.
Climate change is obviously a serious and challenging problem. But it seems doubtful civilization will be directly overturned any time soon by climate change alone. Europeans and others made it through crises like the Black Plague, which killed a third or more of the population without extinguishing the arc of civilization. [3] It's the knock-on effects we need to worry about, as well as the things that prevent us from fixing them.
The scale at which China is deploying Solar is more than rest of world combined. It’s frankly quite amazing.
If any major economy achieved zero emissions for productions of electricity, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was either China using Solar and Nuclear, or France betting on Nuclear.
We call China our enemy, but the biggest enemy of US is US. We can either adapt or live in the past.
Electricity prices haven’t changed much in last 50 years in real currency.
Economies that heavily invest in cheap energy, and high autonomy will win out.
China India and Russia are an issue but will probably cut back if there start to be noticeable problems. China is already cracking ahead on the solar and nuclear.
Per person, China India and Russia are still lower in emissions than the US. The people who individually have the most impact and likely ability to reduce their carbon footprint is therefore those in the US.
Just a contextual note -- one thing Sabine says is: AI won't help because we know the exact solution, we just aren't willing to do it.
Presumably she's referring to her first proposal -- a carbon tax. It's my understanding that there's nearly consensus among economists that a carbon tax is the most efficient solution to global warming, but political consensus that it would never happen when framed as a tax.
If you don't know what a carbon tax is, or why it's orders of magnitude more efficient a solution than "eat less meat" I'd encourage you to look into it a bit. Essentially if you create a system where what is best for the planet is also the cheapest course of action (for individuals and businesses), you no longer have to rely on convincing every single individual to change their morality/beliefs.
It's finding a way to input the external costs of consumption of emissive products into their final price(s). In reality, a gallon of gas causes significantly more damage than the price paid at the pump - it was like $16/gallon when I saw a figure for it around 2010. Imagine how much differently a world with $20/gallon gas would look. There'd probably be massive pressures from all corners to move away from oil.
>The biggest mistake any democratic government can make is life more expensive and miserable for their population.
>That seldom goes well.
We are the richest nation in the world, so calling life "miserable" is hyperbole beyond belief. You talk about this like it's a new problem.
We have been trying to get a carbon tax since literally 1992, but the response is always the type of nonsense your suggesting, which is designed to be feel-good bs.
If we want to stop climate change, we have to change our behavior, period. We could have done that slowly, but we chose to not do it at all.
If you're worried about life being miserable... buckle up.
If a comment goes below 0 (total votes), it gets greyed out.
I've found HN pretty divided when it comes topics like energy/climate/electric vehicles, immigration and foreign policy.
Before I used to feel bad, now I somewhat expect to be downvoted bringing up anything that doesn't fit someone's worldview.
I lived a decade in Seattle, WA which is a strong blue/liberal state as it goes. Sometimes pretty extreme. Now I am in Florida which is now a solid red state since Trump. It's interesting to see how the thought bubbles and world views have formed.
I kind of agree. Right now, too, what is happening is what you describe. The other options are getting cheaper and will eventually be the cost effective solution. On the other, taxing societal negatives is exactly how to disincentivize them. But at least have an industry for remediating the effects of emissions.
Also see above where I said to build out nuclear asap and at economically significant rates.
Gas was just under $4 a liter every time I've been to Europe. That's about $16/gallon. People were driving to work, and sitting in traffic, just like they do in the US.
Gas was never above $2 per liter in Europe, you are mistaken. The highest gas price I've ever seen was close to $2 per liter, a bit below (~1.90, maybe).
Depends where and when. Regardless you're around $7.50 per gallon today. That's more than double the price in the US. Globally, fuel is relatively cheap right now.
Do you have any example of a country driving less when fuel costs were ALWAYS higher? I would guess short term, yes, but eventually people will drive just as much, and they will spend less on housing, which will decrease costs of housing to allow for a larger portion of income to pay for gas. That seems like basic economics to me. Unless, you have a real world example that contrasts that. People still have to get to work. They still have to pick up their kids from school. It doesn't matter what gas costs. They still have to. Just like they are paying double for it in Europe today, they will pay whatever it costs.
Absolutely, when gas doubled during the Great Recession I personally saw much less traffic on the roads in the major US city I lived in at the time. People were also much less aggressive on the roads. Unlike those days, people can now offset their use of oil for transportation with BEVs and PHEVs. See recent reports of oil/gas demand seemingly plateaued to decreasing.
When the price of something increases, energy included, alternatives become more attractive. Oil enjoyed strong price insensitivities for a long time, but those days are sunsetting.
Even China is seeing this with their “lying flat” movement. Dowries for a marriage are averaging USD 60,000(per The Economist). So instead men aren’t dating and aren’t doing the 996.
Russia is seeing it in European nations building LNG infrastructure at their major ports and taking deliveries from overseas. That’s a long term loss of business. And those same European nations are incentivizing their citizens to replace heaters with heatpumps and other means of reducing fossil fuel use.
When prices and costs increase people are incentivized to decide to go with alternatives.
Okay, I'm going to give you the Great Recession, despite the fact that it was temporary which is counter to your argument. And despite the fact that you can't tell if it's causal or not. For all we know, people drove less because they had no job to drive to. And in response, gasoline prices went up to compensate for lesser sales, while operating costs remained unchanged. Or, in short, gas prices went up because we drove less. A similar argument could be made for Europe today. High gas prices, because they drive less. Not less than they used to, but less. Meanwhile operating costs are the same.
But let's take it. So the assumption is that there is an alternative that is better than gasoline. Nuclear is largely dominant on the coasts and gasoline usage is roughly half for goods delivery across the middle of the country where everything is coal powered. So at least for the moment, do you prefer reliance on gasoline or coal for goods delivery?
I maybe don't understand the point of downvoting. Am I unwelcome on HN because of a differing opinion that strikes actual thought about a topic that is overwhelmingly run by a one sided story of solar good?
It would be fine if it didn't prevent me from replying. But since it does, it feels exactly like you covering my mouth while you yell in my face.
It surely doesn't make me think that I should vote for solar. If anything it makes me sure that people aren't doing any critical thinking. Aren't interested in scientific debate. And are simply pushing a marketing agenda without discussion. The Nazis did the same thing. I'll take CO2 over a world where we can't speak any day. It inspires me to rally against solar. Surely if it was scientifically sound it would be easy to defend without covering my mouth?
Go ahead and downvote again. It says everything I need to know about YC and HN and the kind of regard that you people have for human life, which is apparently none.
An echo chamber of lies and self serving agenda. Certainly not a place for science. And definitely not for the betterment of the environment. It's disgusting in short.
If gas was magically $16 a gallon tomorrow, it would amplify inflation. Markets and their workers would demand wage increases, which would of course trickle to everything else.
And yes, imagine what this would look like at $20 a gallon :/
Thanks for that link. I'd love to see how the author factors in inflation with the thought experiment. Reviews on Amazon don't mention this at all unfortunately.
A carbon tax will not be politically viable for two simple reasons: 1) Some people who would need to pay can't really afford it: It's people living in old houses or who have to drive very far to work or rely on cheap energy for heating and electricity - It's not gonna affect the software engineer who drives his Tesla to work.
2) Another big chunk of the working population would lose their jobs because their industry gets shaken up: Those working in polluting industries (coal and gas) or the huge part of the economy that's surrounding petro-chemicals (gas stations clerks, heating engineers, fuel truck drivers), etc.
You would need to redistribute the CO2 tax income as welfare checks but again: That's not a politically viable solution because the fear of job losses pretty much outweighs anything else.
How about redistributing the CO2 tax as cuts in payroll and income taxes? That would benefit the working population and create a lot of replacement jobs.
I've been hearing for over a decade that carbon taxes are the solution. I've also been hearing that Republicans are standing in the way of this solution.
What I've never heard is an explanation of why some sensible, well-run scandinavian country hasn't already implemented this and brought their emissions down to zero.
If there are simple solutions to this problem then why hasn't some country already implemented them?
The US has dropped them 25% over the same time period, so Sweden has done 25 percentage points better. That's less than a 1% compounded drop for those 35 years, and that's assuming that all of the delta was attributable to carbon taxes. That's not a very convincing case.
It is not simple. Carbon tax is useless without carbon tariffs, which have high political costs. Not to mention without any kind of carbon dividends the whole scheme would be extremely unpopular.
So everyone is just pushing half solutions and talking a lot. Politicians will never go for hard solutions, especially when everyone is satisfied by talking about magic pills like "green deal", "more renewables" or (from current top comment) "climate advocacy" and "citizen engagement".
People just love talking. And feeling good about it.
In germany we can't agree on building new north-south power lines to transport the energy we generate through wind power.
..and in the USA (and many other 1st world countries) you still have one of the two political parties who doesn't even agree that climate change is either real or poses a serious problem.
That’s too pessimistic. Dozens of countries have some kind of carbon tax right now. Important and influential jurisdictions like California, also have them. Even oil-producing regions have them.
They are universally rather timid in their scope, and politically fragile. So maybe they aren’t going to get us there, at least not in their current form.
But it’s going too far to say they just don’t exist or can’t exist.
We have plenty of treaties that inhibit states. Nuclear weapons, slavery, pollutants. Enlightentment and enlightened self-interest isn’t out of the question.
I don't understand your point: There are bad things in the world, so everything is bad? We could point to lots of good things too.
In fact, you live better - far better - than anyone in history. It's not even close. It was built by the post-war 'neoliberal' order, on a foundation of human rights and free markets.
For us to quit and complain after all the work our predecessors did, remaining optimistic and working in a much starker situation - after depressions and world wars - would be pathetic abdication of our duties.
> life is hard for a lot of people and getting harder.
Life is hard and always has been, but it's far easier than the lives of our ancestors (on average, of course).
Just look at the people who lived through - or the (200?) million who died in and more who lost everything in - WWII, less than 100 years ago, right after the Great Depression, right after WWI. And they were optimistic and energetic enough to build historically free, peaceful, and prosperous postwar order.
There is far more to do, absolutely. Let's get to work.
The international political system has a long track record of cajoling nations into joining treaties that theoretically are like this.
It's not prisoner's dilemma, because the main property of the PD problem is that parties are prevented from communicating and cooperating with each other. When there's negotiations, transparencency/monitoring, etc, parties can cooperate. If you think international treaty development is like PD, you are due for a for a big optimism update!
In order to be politically acceptable, a carbon tax should be phased in gradually and coupled with a reduction in income tax so as to make it revenue neutral. That way it can't be framed as just another government tax grab.
Offsetting income tax would be a massive handout to the rich, who have been and continue to be the greatest contributors to carbon emissions.
Instead, it should be paired with a dividend which makes it revenue neutral for the median household. Lower income families, who are more impacted by but less responsible for climate change, would be paid a benefit.
> Offsetting income tax would be a massive handout to the rich, who have been and continue to be the greatest contributors to carbon emissions.
I'm not sure how these two ideas make sense in your head. If you implement a carbon tax and the rich are the greatest contributors as you stated, one would expect them to be hit by the carbon tax as well.
In any case, I personally see an income tax as a strange thing to have in the context of a discussion wherein taxing undesirable behavior is seen as a way of disincentivizing it.
At the very minimum free the working class and lower-middle class from income tax.
In the U.S. capital gains and dividends are taxed at a low rate to benefit the rich, and "Income tax" is a working-class thing. Maybe the OP was referring to the U.S. concept of income tax.
This is already the case in Canada's carbon tax. The amount of tax you pay is proportional to the amount of fossil fuels you consume. But the amount of refund you receive is equal to the total tax collected divided by the population; you receive the same refund regardless of how much you consume. It is a revenue-neutral scheme.
The plan for Germany was to give out climate money to everyone. E.g. all additional funds acquired through increased carbon taxes where supposed to be equally returned to the population on a per head basis. Turns out even Germany does not have a Government process for that. And parts of the current coalition, which happen to be tasked with creating that process, are more interested in stalling implementation as long as possible.
A carbon tax will make the problem worse. To make up for the profit losses from the tax, business will produce and sell more goods - actually increasi g the pollution put in the air.
There’s a new book from Hannah Ritchie called „Not the end of the world“, that argues for optimism, without denying the reality of the situation. It’s a fantastic book and I highly recommend it.
You're right, it doesn't. But most of the books claims don't depend on a specific climate sensitivity. Climate Change is just one of the chapters. It also covers air pollution, deforestation, agriculture, biodiversity loss, ocean plastics and overfishing.
It combats the notion that we aren't achieving anything regarding long term sustainability because we're unable to coordinate on a global scale, by showcasing that we are not only moving in the right direction in many areas, we're also accelerating.
If Hansen is right and we live in a world with very high climate sensitivity then it's not looking good, but I'd still prefer to live in a world were we make noticeable progress and fall short, than in one were we watch the world turn into an uninhabitable ball of death while doing nothing.
"Doing nothing" sounds like a straw man position. The question is rather whether optimism is warranted. I think there are some very worrying trends where we are not moving in the right direction at all, where it is even taboo to address the problem. I doubt she mentions those.
The whole premise of the book is a multi-layered hail mary, or a hail mary that continually plays out like a jackpot based on vibes and misconstruing the forces that are causing climate change.
Not sure why you'd call this "fantastic" other than it's a feel-good book without any evidence to support it.
>Carbon emissions per capita are actually down [1]
It takes maybe 2 minutes, maybe upwards of 10, to realize why this is completely silly. I would expect most highschoolers in stats to rip this apart. Does anyone need to devote time to debunk this? Why? You can ask ChatGPT.
>Average figures can mask significant inequalities within countries. In many countries, a small percentage of the population may be responsible for a large portion of emissions, while the majority have very low carbon footprints.
If you don't understand why this negates your comment out right should I start quoting 2Pac?
You're free to dislike the book, but I can't really follow your criticism. The book is clearly not "based on vibes". It's chock full of data to support the authors claims.
Now you might argue that the data either doesn't support the claims made, or you might doubt its legitimacy, but instead of providing a reason you just told me that it should be obvious why the book is nonsense. That doesn't really give me a lot to engage with and I'm not going to try to make your arguments for you.
For me the Book had its intended effect. It argues that the climate movement, as it gained mainstream popularity, also lost its ability to convey nuance in favor of projecting a strong "we are heading towards certain doom" message. This helped grow the movement, but is also responsible for a lot of young people feeling completely hopeless. That's certainly something I could heavily relate with before reading the book. The book then goes on to highlight areas where the world has made much bigger progress than I would have thought. For me this turned a feeling of intense hopelessness into one of motivation.
So was the Book meant to make me feel good? Sure. In that sense I guess you can call it a feel-good book. Were the claims unsubstantiated and "without any evidence to support" them? Certainly not.
Indeed, hopefulness is much better and productive than hopelessness. As long as it's done in a realistic way, not denying the facts, not cherry picking data, etc. Hopeful people can accomplish a lot more than hopeless people.
In what way is the book not admit the problems? Like the previous commenter said, it's full of data supporting it's claims. I'm truly interested in your arguments, because I just got this book.
As you've observed, averages can be misleading because they're not robust to outliers. However, this seems most relevant to something like income, where we're interested in "most people" and don't care so much about the one ultra-rich person in the sample.
This appears to be less true for something like emissions, where the overall total is most relevant -- unless you're arguing that it's masking an "unfair" situation where improvements are coming from one group and should be coming from the other?
I live in the south of france, and I really need to move to a cooler region in france. Summer are very long, nights are hot, makes it hard to sleep well.
I don't have enough money to install AC. Mobile AC is too noisy.
I have been postponing for 4 years now.
I am reading The Ministry Of The Future, it's a great book. India will be the first to suffer from this.
If you live in a rural area without too much noise, soak a sheet, hang it in front of the open window before to go to bed. Put a bucket or something below to save the water drops from ending in the soil. Enjoy the cooling effect of the evaporation
KSR is a good prose writer but I found The Ministry of the Future to be full of extremely unconvincing scenarios and I don't think you should let it inform your worldview. It's just a story written by someone who does not really know what they're talking about.
Just finished that book myself and couldn’t disagree more. Ministry for the Future is an authoritarian’s wet dream mixed with a bunch of extremely implausible stuff, told in a style that’s as unengaging as possible.
Actual aircon units are quite cheap these days eg this 480 euro https://www.amazon.fr/KLARSTEIN-Windwaker-Smart-Split-Climat... Not sure about the installation. Maybe you could DIY? I was thinking of it in London and imagine the installation will be more than the units.
One thing I can't work out is if something like that - a heat/cool aircon unit counts as a heat pump from the point of view of getting a government grant?
Yes. Works very well in hot climate. Doesn't heat up like a mattress, and is thin enough that the airflow from a fan in the room can help cool both topside and underside at the same time. But beware it may take some time to get used sleeping in it. When installing the hooks to set it up in the walls, the separation between them must be large enough such as the person is not too bended while sleeping, otherwise you may get back pain in the morning. The best position to sleep is semi-crossed in relation to the axis between hooks (~45 degrees), that allows you to lie almost straight.
I live in the south of spain, and AC is already a necessity in the summer. Days with 40° and nights with 30° are becoming increasingly common.
Also the water comes out of the tap at like 35-38°, unheated. I've had plants die when watering them with this. At this rate I'm going to have to install some sort of water cooler too.
It's extremely frustrating to watch our world deteriorating because politicians aren't willing to actually do their jobs and govern.
I'd go even stronger and, for the US, pass regulations that all emissions of all kinds must be captured or the company will be fined double the cost of environmental remediation as executed by contractors employed by the government (scaling from 1% of the fine to 100% of the fine over X years).
Arguably the job of democratically elected politicians is to represent the interests of their constituents - so when there's internationally a "prisoner's dillema"/"tragedy of commons" scenario where there is a lack of global coordination and taking on unilateral commitments would hurt their people but not really solve the issue, it can make all sense for an effective, honest politician doing their job to "defect" and put the interests of their people above the interests of the rest of the world.
They are governing according to the will of the people (to some degree). Fact is that outside the western intelligentsia nobody really gives a shit about climate change and why would they? For people without children, certainly it is not their problem. The world's resources are plenty enough for this generation and even the next. Everyone else would be stupid to sacrifice their own wealth for an absolutely minuscule chance of improvement without an enforcible promise that their neighbours will do the same. They will just end up doing it all for nothing. It's a typical tragedy-of-the-commons dilemma.
You say that as though politicians appear out of thin air. The root problem is that the average person isn't motivated to do anything, including voting in politicians who will do something.
> Weird. I used to worry about climate change and now I don’t.
That's funny! I was going to start my post with the exact same sentence!
But for a totally different reason: I'm now convinced that there is no stopping the massive destruction of the natural environemnt. A much MUCH bigger problem than that of the climate alone.
I'm not a "doomer", I'm a "realist". It's clear at this point that the world's ownership class is NOT going to allow any significant mitigation of petroleum use.
The situation will continue unabated until all of the worst predictions, and many more not foreseen, come to bear.
So, I've learned to take this in stride, like with gun ownership: most gun deaths in the US are suicide. As more and more gun owners shoot themselves, this is the only mitigation to this crisis.
This will be the same for industrial distruction of our environment, including the climate. The only way it's going to mitigate is when the natural consequences come to bear and destroy a good part of the world population.
Of course, there's always "citrus greening disease" to worry about 8-)
The excuses people are willing to tell themselves will prevent any meaningful responce to the crisis... Thus, the natural consequences will occur...
It's clear at this point that the world's ownership class is NOT going to allow any significant mitigation of petroleum use.
The problem is not use, the problem is extraction. If it comes out of the ground, it gets used, and mostly ends up in the atmosphere. The volume of extracted fossil fuels is carefully managed so that prices remain low enough to prevent green alternatives from winning in the market, and high enough to maximize long term revenue. If extraction would decline, fossil fuel prices would rise, and the market would automatically rebalance into a green transition.
Really the only thing politicians need to do is put in place a global and declining cap on fossil fuel extraction. Wells need to be capped even when they’re not empty. There should be zero new drilling. You can tell the honest intentions of a politician on climate change by their policies on fossil fuel extraction.
And this means ultimately it is a political problem, not an individual problem, and can be fixed through the voting booth. But that requires people to consider this the most important problem, and they don’t. So ultimately, the reason things don’t change is not some cabal, but just plain people not prioritizing it in the voting booth.
There's a theory that our economies are so fundamentally dependant on fossil fuels that, if you limit their extraction, you don't get fossil fuels price increases, but rather proportional GDP contraction (as less f.f. means less economic activity overall), and f.f. prices stay roughly the same. The evidence to back this up is the fact that, historically, the correlation between global f.f. extraction and global GDP is pretty much perfect. In other words, economic activity is pretty much about energy expenditure, and energy means pretty much fossil fuels.
I have wondered for some time if short term in-balance in fossil fuel supply capacity (oil tankers and pipelines) could help renewables along significantly. Let's say an environmental organization would buy 10 oil tankers and would interrupt the ability of fossil fuel producers to sell as much as they extract, wouldn't this increase fossil fuel prices temporarily and boost renewables and their technological trajectories? At some point renewables will be cheaper than developing new oil sources.
> So, I've learned to take this in stride, like with gun ownership: most gun deaths in the US are suicide. As more and more gun owners shoot themselves, this is the only mitigation to this crisis.
I’m sure you’re being facetious, but don’t the suicidal people buy guns? It’s not that gun owners are suicidal
>the world's ownership class is NOT going to allow any significant mitigation of petroleum use.
"We" - the Western voting public broadly, but also much of East Asia too - are the owning class. If you actually removed everything in our lives that depend on petroleum products, it would be a riot before the end of the month. I don't think people quite realize how much of our lives are propped up by the downstream products of oil. It's not just moving people in cars and most of electricity generation and wrapping our food in plastics; it's most of our food production (from fertilizer to mechanization), most of our biochem stuff (so much starts as natural gas), most of our infrastructure.
Without oil, the West is shivering in the cold, the shelves are empty, there's nothing to do, nowhere to go (or really, way to get there anyway) and practically no healthcare.
You square that circle, you let the rest of us know. But we won't (and should not) accept any future like that.
Some of the doomers are accelerationists and just want to get the worst over with now. I think that's foolish and untenable, but it makes more sense of their arguments.
The "world's ownership class" has on average already set its sights on the wealth to be had in the energy transition. If you believe they are in charge, things will work out fine.
I agree with a fair bit of this, except that I'm not convinced the consequences to humans will be as dire as the loss of a good part of the global population. If we're counting animal species though, then maybe.
Just you wait, the effects are subtle and interlinked. If the bees eventually go extinct (which is happening right now), most plant species on earth will cease to exist. This includes fruit trees, but also a boundless number of plants animals need as food sources; animals that have other responsibilities in their ecosystems, like fertilizing the soil, transporting nutrients, and devouring vermin.
Earth is inhabitable without a functioning ecosystem, and humans are about to learn that. We’re taking it apart piece by piece, until the cascade cannot be stopped anymore. It cannot be overstated how dangerous the current situation is.
I would be in favor of replacing the US flag with this, since flags are everywhere in the states and you'd have to see this every day, likely multiple times.
Some capitalists want you to believe that there is no solution. There will be lots of money to be made from this change by new entrepreneurs. We can also all do our part by reducing our own fossil fuel use, investing wisely, declining working for companies who consume or produce lots of fossil fuels, and make renewable energies get forward. Unfortunately the fossil fuel lobby (which comprises big & rich states) has put lots of energy convincing a lot of citizens otherwise. But this is not lost. Solar is progressing very fast and we have lots of potential in simple solutions like better house insulation and middle size batteries (especially the ones we'll soon be able to get cheap from used TVs).
the impending collapse of cattle farming will cause the majority of agricultural land to return to the wild. This is a larger amount of land than all other human activities combined
Data shows a very tiny downard trend in the last decade [1] - I'm not exactly sure how you can project that into a "collapse", but, hey, "predictions are hard, especially about the future", I guess ?
precision fermentation and lab-grown meat both exhibit cost curves analogous to Moore’s Law. within the next ten years, they’ll outcompete animal products in many situations. the first domino to fall will be milk-extracts used in processed food products, see startups like “Remilk”
Last time I read up on this topic, there were numerous issues that made mass production of vat meat just plain unable to compete with animal meat. Has that really changed?
I agree with this sentiment. Theres no stopping it now, its just going to have to run its course and we'll see if theres much of a world worth living in at the end. I do laugh at billionaire bunkers tho, like how long are they going to survive when money means nothing and the plebs that are still alive are outside blocking the exits and airways with dirt and rocks.
edit: its funny to see the only people making sense getting downvoted because reasons.
> the world's ownership class is NOT going to allow any significant mitigation of petroleum use
Do you include everyone who owns a car in this "ownership class"? I guess I share your disposition to some degree, resignation mixed with a feeling that things are going to be bad but not as bad as some have claimed, and that eventually the situation will improve, but this practice of blanket blaming "the rich" for the problem is a/the major reason we got here in the first place.
I worked in the energy sector for over a decade. It was a very conservative industry, yet everyone who worked there had their home insulation well above code and installed the most efficient appliances they could find, many had solar panels on their roofs (long before these were as available as they are today) and were first in line for plug-in electric hybrids when they first became available. Our parking lot was kind of a dangerous place to walk because there were so many electric cars you couldn't hear them coming, our director had a hydrogen powered car.
We'd get protestors all the time showing up in front of our building. Looking down from the office windows I could see them arrive and depart. They always drove there in ICE vehicles. We sold fossil fuel, but kept our operations as efficient as possible, going to great lengths to squeeze out every joule of energy we could manage and were constantly re-evaluating our processes looking for improvements, meeting with vendors to find new technology, and spent probably more time and money than was prudent experimenting with low-carbon alternatives to majors components of the company's infrastructure.
The average person in the US who is "concerned about climate change" does none of these things, is doing absolutely nothing to change the situation, but sits on their phone complaining on Reddit while consuming as much energy as is convenient for them. The amount of energy Americans use for trivial everyday tasks is staggering. The standard suburban model of living that makes up 99% of US cities and towns is a climate disaster. Although all these things are provided by large companies, this is not the result of a conspiracy, this is what people want, what people demand. When energy prices go up a few precent, people scream bloody murder and call their elected officials demanding something be done about it. When fuel efficiency standards are proposed people complain. Given a choice between a larger home and a smaller but more efficient one, people consistently choose large houses with insulation that meets only the minimum standards. At most any choice towards efficiency is motivated entirely by either financial considerations or social signaling. (note the enormous popularity of the Toyota Prius, which is distinctly a hybrid, over better cars which looked nearly identical to their ICE counterparts)
Voters and consumers over and over again have decided to keep the system they have in place decade after decade, while blaming the people who supply them what they demand for the situation.
It's a lot easier to worry about sulfur dioxide and NOx producing rain compared to worrying about global carbon emissions. Climate Change seems best dealt with at a local level, with the cause of the problem being pollution.
This site looks very interesting but I'm not quite sure what I'm looking at. What is that map for and how does it filter sources, since it seems like it doesn't include all airports.
There’s a lot of information there. They literally answer the question “What am I looking at?” in the first popup you get (How to use, top left corner).
What warming scenario on Earth would lead to the end of complex life forms? You realize that humans colonized most of the planet thousands of years ago with stone-aged technology, survived ice ages, lived in all sorts of climates? That the dinosaurs evolved on a world far warmer than we're likely to see? Complex life forms didn't all go extinct back then.
A snowball earth with a thin band of warm enough weather in the tropics is easier to survive on than an earth with 6 months of warm spring to tropical weather and 6 months of pitch black winter darkness.
We need a phase transition in our thinking about climate change, because our current way of thinking is taking us nowhere.
- All human activities, in different degrees, contribute to climate change. Don't believe me? Say that you bike to the office everyday. You enjoy your commute, you never develop a heart condition, and in the course of your long prosperous life you have three kids and nine grandchildren, own several dogs and get a bigger house. In other words, your climate footprint all of the sudden is greater than if you had used a polluting car and died of a heart attack when you turned forty.
By definition, humanity thriving means humanity growing, and with that its footprint on the entire planet.
- But in the aggregate, humanity is what we are. There is a price to pay for climbing that hill, but there is an even greater price for not climbing it. Critters in the Serengeti don't compose poetry, nor make Youtube videos; they are too busy surviving. So are people in places where material scarcity reigns supreme. My father, who never wanted to leave his homeland, is dying at home, and my mother won't hire a nurse not for lack of money, but because she doesn't trust that young people will work for just the money and won't rob them blind.
We have the knowledge, the technology and the means to live in domes in the vast deserts of this planet, to go to the moon or to live in space habitats anywhere in the solar system.
> We have the knowledge, the technology and the means to live in domes in the vast deserts of this planet, to go to the moon or to live in space habitats anywhere in the solar system.
> our current way of thinking is taking us nowhere.
What some people are doing is obstructing us from going anywhere. We need to stop acting helpless, stand up for what we believe, fight (peacefully), stop the post-truth nonsense that supports these people, and vote them out of office.
> All human activities, in different degrees, contribute to climate change.
It's kinda true, because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (and ignoring activities that actively reduce climate change, like installing insulation or voting certain people out of office), but meaningless. Riding a bike and riding a private jet both contribute to climate change, but that's a pointless statement.
> Say that you bike to the office everyday. You enjoy your commute, you never develop a heart condition, and in the course of your long prosperous life you have three kids and nine grandchildren, own several dogs and get a bigger house. In other words, your climate footprint all of the sudden is greater than if you had used a polluting car and died of a heart attack when you turned forty.
That's restating the Second Law, in a sense. But we can do all those things, and still prevent climate change by using different technologies.
> We have the knowledge, the technology and the means to live in domes in the vast deserts of this planet, to go to the moon or to live in space habitats anywhere in the solar system.
I never worried particularly much about climate change, but just to hedge my bets for my kids I moved to northern Europe. For the most part it's just equated to milder (= bearable) Winters and nicer summers up here.
I guess we also spend a fair bit on moving to renewables up here - Finland achieved energy self sufficiency last year thanks to a good combination of nuclear + solar + hydro. If I were an ideologue in either direction I'd probably say "that's the real reason I moved" or "can't believe they're waiting my tax money on this", but I'm not, I'm just a guy who likes hedging his bets. The nuclear is especially nice because cheap electricity is the true backbone of society, and we've seen the market prices go straight up _negative_ a few times due to overproduction.
Self recommending! Come to Finland and help us build a stronger democracy, whatever that means to you.
> Finland achieved energy self sufficiency last year thanks to a good combination of nuclear + solar + hydro.
Energy means, well, energy. Finland still drives combustion vehicles (a lot of them, last I was there they drove some of the oldest cars in the EU on average due to high taxes for buying new ones) and probably mostly heat with energy not originating from the trio you mentioned.
I think you meant electricity, which is a great milestone on the way but not yet the destination.
Electricity used to be about 10% of a rich country's energy consumption, of late I think it's closer to 20% as some early adopters and new buildings have made the switch, but that still leaves 80% of your energy generated from oil and natural gas
Let’s also not forget another human activity, also a kind of energy consumption, but in a more direct way, aka eating. Livestock produces around 15% of global greenhouse emissions according to my quick Google search. And I am sure some Finns like to eat meat.
Agriculture in general is less than 15% of the US and the US likes to eat meat. Agriculture including farming plants in total is 10-11%. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
If the plant farming was higher than animal farming, would you suggest they not farm?
And add to that the fact that cow flatulence is very rich in methane (much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2) because of poor diet in industrial agriculture.
Yeah, the AMOC collapse predictions are interesting.
I'd love to see a much colder Finland, personally, since I want to know what a developed country that has 6 months of winter feels and looks like from the inside. But I do agree that for most people here it would be unfortunate.
Nothing out of the ordinary here in Norrbotten, Sweden. Seems like things stop working properly under -35 degrees or so (trains, heat pumps), so some adjustments would be needed if such temperatures became more frequent.
While you may be technically true, it is obviously clear that some places are far safer than others, and moving to another place will have a very high impact on how global warming affects you, as some regions will be affected much more harshly than others. At the extreme, some places may be underwater or otherwise uninhabitable, but if you can afford to, moving away from them in a timely manner, you can escape being forced to do so at a time when doing so may be much harder.
Second order effects will be the killer. It won’t be the coastal flooding, it will be the dispossessed hordes. It won’t be the uninhabitable areas, it will be the rapid rise in price of food staples. No matter where you are, the chaos will come to your door, when it comes.
Takes surprisingly little to collapse a civilisation when you kick its knees out from under it.
I agree, but there is a meaningful difference between having dispossessed hordes on your doorstep and being among those dispossessed hordes having to find a place for yourself; and if the price of grain doubles, for a poor community that means starvation while a wealthy community would barely notice.
...until the dispossessed hordes burn it to the ground.
The belief that rich people will be able to ride this one out is a huge part of the problem. No matter how deep your bunker, no matter how many acres of land you own, extreme weather will make all of it worthless.
This scenario is not a zombie apocalypse where the hordes are literally at your doorsteps and it's individuals protecting themselves from other nearby individuals.
The climate change may easily cause large scale international conflict or fights over resources at national level, but the distance between places without capacity to handle the weather and the better-off areas generally are thousands of miles and an ocean, and the parties to any conflict would be neighboring communities of many millions of people each - I mean, this discussion is about "what will happen to the population of current Bangladesh, and what effect that will have on neighboring countries" not about what will happen for few rich people in USA against their literal neighbors from the same state and county.
I fully expect that the wealthy countries can handle some internal displacement due to e.g. sea level rise without mass violence and a general breakdown of internal order - people having to abandon coastal properties in Florida would cause economic woes and internal political pressure to Do Something (not necessarily constructive), not cause the displaced Florida men to form large uncontested gangs roaming the Midwest looking for bunkers to loot.
You seem to believe that the disposed hordes will inevitable be able to burn it to the ground despite primarily being dispossessed from places with near primitive military practices, alone supplies. While we’re writing fictional tales, there’s an alternative ending to this fiction that ends with the dispossessed hordes simply losing.
By losing you mean starving, I assume. If the rich northern countries can even come to some sort of agreement that the poor from the south should be kept out by killing them when they try to migrate north. This is all going to be horrifying no matter what.
There are also potential feedback effects from rising temperature. Northern Europe should survive the 2C warming we are headed towards, but higher temps could cause big problems.
Northern Europe should worry about the Gulf Stream or Atlantic Conveyor currents failing and changing the climate.
Another big one is melting permafrost. Warmer temps cause permafrost to melt and release CO2, which leads to more warming, and repeat.
Finally, there is danger of ice sheets melting which could rise sea levels by hundreds of feet.
I always tell my gun-hoarding, go-box toting, bug-out planning prepper friends the same thing. You don't have enough guns and ammo to stop the masses coming for your canned pork'n'beans.
Is that true? I mean, I figure worst case, small rural midwest communities that band together and shoot trespassers on site will be the best off.
I guess an army of thousands could take it over but my hope is that me and my gun toting farming community won't put up with invaders and invaders won't want to take their chances
On the other hand, on a country level, countries generally do have enough guns and ammo to greatly limit any chaos coming over their border; uncontrolled immigration happens not because countries can't control it but because they effectively choose not to.
I wonder how long that strategy will work. Eventually society will reach a new "equilibrium" but how many less defended societies will succumb to the starving hordes before that happens.
I quote "equilibrium" because social structures never stop changing. What I mean is a relatively stable situation where most of the world is not invading the rest of the world. Our present situation is that the larger portion of the population is not invading the rest, though the present trend seems to be in the wrong direction.
Why do you say that? Most of the Midwest USA seems like it will do fine for the inevitable future.
More co2 means corn and soy will be growing better and better, warming temps increase our growing season. We have more than enough water. What am I missing?
Or live to learn like a drifting dog on the street, that’s probably the most realistic training. Become homeless with no money and only the provisions you can carry. Oh and no electricity either. Learn to thrive like that and you may be prepared.
The earth has had some of the fastest warming ever in the last 15 thousand. During this time crop yields have increased dramatically. The trend is unmistakable, the warmer the planet, the more food we produce.
Hot Weather.—Many a man has mopped his brow during the summer months of 1884, declaring it was the hottest weather the world ever knew, which, of course, would not be true, for the extreme heat in the record of the past has not been approached during the late summer.
In 627, the heat was so great in France and Germany, says the London Standard, that all springs dried up; water became so scarce that many people died of thirst.
In 879, work in the field had to be given up; agricultural laborers persisting in their work were struck down in a few minutes, so powerful was the sun. In 993, the sun’s rays were so fierce that vegetation burned up as under the action of fire. In 1000, rivers ran dry under the protracted heat, the fish were left dry in heaps and putrefied in a few hours. Men and animals venturing in the sun in the summer of 1022 fell down dying.
In 1132, not only did the rivers dry up, but the ground cracked and became baked to the hardness of stone. The Rhine in Alsace nearly dried up. Italy was visited with terrific heat in 1189; vegetation and plants were burned up. During the battle of Bela, in 1200, there were more victims made by the sun than by weapons; men fell down sunstruck in regular rows. The sun of 1277 was also severe; there was an absolute dearth of forage.
In 1303 and 1304, the Rhine, Loire, and Seine ran dry. In 1615, the heat throughout Europe became excessive. Scotland suffered particularly in 1625; men and beasts died in scores. Meat could be cooked by merely exposing it to the sun. Not a soul dared to venture out between noon and 4 p.m. In 1718, many shops had to be closed; the theatres were never opened for several months. Not a drop of water fell during six months.
In 1753 the thermometer rose to one hundred and eighteen degrees. In 1779, the heat at Bologna was so great that a large number of people died. In July 1793, the heat became intolerable. Vegetables were burned up and fruit dried upon the trees. The furniture and woodwork in dwelling-houses cracked and split up; meat became bad in an hour.
In Paris in 1846, the thermometer marked one hundred and twenty-five degrees in the sun. The summers of 1859, 1860, 1869, 1870, 1874, etc., although excessively hot, were not attended by any disaster.”
Only in regards to the rivers drying out.
At that time those rivers weren’t canals like since the 19th century. They where much larger and had more „siderivers“ so water could get into the ground etc much more easily.
Mate, it's not, it's based on extraordinarily well understood theories around the how chemical bonds and the electromagnetic spectrum work. That is the theory behind the mechanism for anthropogenic climate change is based on exactly the same science that allows big chunks of the infrastructure of civilisation to work - that is, chemistry, quantum physics and arithmetic/accountancy.
You. Literally YOU. Can trivially measure the impact of different gases on temperature.
Telling the difference between natural and human produced is probably not doable by you personally, however, human burned pollution tends to have different atomic markers from naturally occurring. We have mandatory pollution reporting. We can do basic maths to find reasonably close numbers to how much of the pollution is natural and how much is from us.
With regard to “the prediction models are always wrong” fake news propaganda bullshit:
They are always wrong in a way that’s worse for us by underestimating the bad impacts. Every time we improve the models, the outcomes are worse even faster than the models predict, and we have to find why.
Yet you don't know nothing, you believe in catastrophic scenarios.
We can measure anecdotaly that temperature is slightly rising. The reason why is it happening and happend in history multiple times is topic for debate that we can explore.
However your tone is not open for debate and use exactly same words as those you fight against.
It is not “up for debate” that various gasses cause a rise in temperature.
You are pretending that our scientific knowledge is at 1600 levels to come to your insane conclusions.
You claim that I’m not open for debate, but it’s actually just that there is no debate here. You’re a just printing demonstrable lies on to the internet, for what?
posed in ignorance (perhaps genuine ignorance, perhaps feigned) above, we (humans) have been measuring gas properties in isolation for 200 years (and more) and have been specifically measuring (and storing as bottled samples) atmospheric gas composition since the start of the Cold War.. seventy odd years or so now.
Much of our high quality environmental data comes from cold war research - ocean tempretures were first mapped at large scale by Scripps in order to use thermoclines to pinpoint submarines and other sounds in water.
This and other global references informs us about the changing atmospheric makeup and other experiments inform us about the increase in trapped heat from incoming solar radiation.
Those data from measured ocean temperature needs to be readjusted:
Before about 1940, the most common method for measuring sea surface temperature was to throw a bucket attached to a rope overboard from a ship, haul it back up, and read the water temperature. The method was far from perfect. Depending on the air temperature, the water temperature could change as the bucket was pulled from the water. (1)
In the late 1970s ... tracking what was happening to Earth temperatures was at a relatively primitive state. Much of the relevant weather station data had not been digitized and what had been, was not widely available. Previous estimates of temperature changes ... had focused on the northern hemisphere, but that obviously missed half the planet. (2) interactive map: (3)
There is analysis showing differences in model temperature variation models and actual data from balloons and satellites since 1979. (4)
Those are few examples how our ability to measure things changes with our developing knowledge.
Rising temperatures is not new phenomena. Greenland ice core project (5) showing that there was about 25 dramatic climate changes in history. Its called Dansgaard–Oeschger event. (6), (7) and shows that for example during Younger Dryas (8) there was dramatic temperature decline and increase in few decades.
Making predictions on data since 70's are fragile and should be constantly reanalyzed.
You've provided links to things the vast bulk of people in earth sciences, particularly climatic related earth and atmospherics are already well aware of.
Yet they, in near majority, still stand behind the broad predictions of future climate change - even being aware of the work of Smale and Lorenz .. perhaps it's that 40+ year old understanding of stability, robustness, and the Dzhanibekov effect in which the broad arc of motion is entirely predictable despite wobbles on a minor axis or two.
Normalisation and may other adjustments to data sets are stock in trade operations across all the observational sciences- geophysical mineral exploration, radiometric surveying, radio astronomy, distributed signal aquisition, etc. etc. etc. You'll note for example that NASA et al are out in front about doing such things.
Predictions of trains headed for derailment based on speed, mass, and topography are not refuted by an inability to predict where the centrepiece vase in the dining car comes to rest.
That's because it's more just a nice secondary factor. ;)
Mostly I moved because it amused me. I have a long history of going to places I can't actually locate on a map, eg I thought Northwestern University would be in Portland, not Chicago - imagine my shock when I stepped off the plane. Similarly with Finland. I knew so little about the place that when the opportunity to move arose I couldn't not take it, it would be like turning down getting teleported into the inside of a black hole.
how were you able to permanently move from the states to Finland - were you already a citizen there? (I assume you mean Boston Mass, unless you are talking about another Boston already in the EU)
Real nasty bunch. Used to burn whole parts of england only a few centuries ago. They'd probably still do it if it weren't for the might of the British Navy.
Thank you. I must stop scoffing at others on HN when they don't get what I consider to be obvious jokes, as it seems I too am capable of missing obvious humor.
Certainly 'self-sufficient' is inaccurate, given the reliance on external inputs.
If other nation states are also not self-sufficient for fissionable materials, and/or other fuel types, then I would also not call them self-sufficient on power generation.
Sure, there are degrees of reliance on providers of fuel types, but no need to muddy the waters about self-sufficiency. (f.e. Australia could be self-sufficient on solar, wind, coal, fission, I suspect - at least in terms of raw materials.)
If shit hits the fan everywhere else but North Europe remains safe - will it be business as usual there? Won't hundreds of millions of people (or more) from India, China and Africa flee to to wherever is safe?
That’s very interesting, can you point me to any sources showing that 99.5% of all asylum seekers and refugees are deported every single year? Or do they instead just transition into the illegal immigrant category and we just kinda collectively shrug our shoulders and go “well what can ya do.”
Because I see that we have a lot of people coming in from Mexico claiming asylum for uh, whatever war is going on there, getting released into the country, and just never showing up for their court hearings: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/nearly-600000-m...
> If shit hits the fan everywhere else but North Europe remains safe - will it be business as usual there?
No, it will still suck, but it'll be the kind of suck you can survive without fleeing.
Unless the thermohaline circulation changes significantly, in which case the northern Mediterranean coast starts to look like Toronto, Paris starts to look like Vancouver, and Scandinavia starts to look like Anchorage.
> Won't hundreds of millions of people (or more) from India, China and Africa flee to to wherever is safe?
Yes, although in the case of China they'll probably flee to elsewhere in China, because it's huge.
> No, it will still suck, but it'll be the kind of suck you can survive without fleeing
Still. Moving now to North Europe because maybe 30 years from now you'll have to move? Why not wait it out and see if you have to move? The whole thing is one huge speculation. There's no telling if Finland will be secure since its quite weak militarily. And we we don't really know what's gonna happen - we have models with very differing scenarios.
> Still. Moving now to North Europe because maybe 30 years from now you'll have to move? Why not wait it out and see if you have to move?
The older you are when you move, the harder it is. New language, new culture, new laws, disconnection from your old friends who took a different path. And less time to contribute to a state pension — a skilled 30-year-old can be a welcome addition to a workforce, a 60-year-old might get their state pension before citizenship — which may make them less inclined to accept you. Especially if you're moving because there's a huge global disaster and they need more workers rather than pensioners.
That said, the economics may radically change over the next 30 years; while I think the current humanoid robot workers are a bit gimmicky at best, and that they'll only be ready for autonomous use about 5-10 years after no-steering-wheel-included self-driving cars[0], the general trend of automation they represent is significant and began long before they were able to walk on legs.
> The whole thing is one huge speculation. There's no telling if Finland will be secure since its quite weak militarily. And we we don't really know what's gonna happen - we have models with very differing scenarios.
Indeed; very little is predictable even 10 years out in geopolitics. The UK was never going to leave the EU in 2012, but gone it was a decade later. The USSR was indomitable in 1984 and gone in 1994. 30 years? That's the gap between the height of the British Empire and the WW2 home guard starting with arm bands instead of uniforms, and being armed with a mix of privately owned guns and various improvised weapons.
For the environment, what happens depends on how people react to the models that exist. We may well completely eliminate CO2 emissions on that time scale — the technology is already known and in deployment for how to do this for electricity and land transport, it's being demonstrated for iron and other metal oxide refinement, but there are plenty of things to work on before we say we can manage this without also removing CO2 from the air.
But on the other hand, we may squander the remaining time, just like we squandered the last 30 years.
[0] More specifically, when the energy cost of the computing power needed for sufficient quality real-time vision reduces to ~10W; the computers Tesla currently use are supposedly 100W, but as Tesla's autopilot is not yet rated as a full-replacement for human drivers I must assume that a sufficient AI would also be more power-hungry. As 100W is very little power, Tesla (and others) might brute force this problem by having a bigger computer that uses e.g. 1kW rather than keeping the power use to 100W and waiting for a better computer. 1kW is my guess for the maximum that anyone would be willing to use in a car-based AI.
How dead Moore's Law is or isn't depends on what you're asking, I think it's still working for Joules-per-operation which is what matters here, and every factor of 10 improvement needed is about 5 years at Moore's Law rates.
> That said, the economics may radically change over the next 30 years;
I think you're optimistic, I think we'll see mass layoffs 5-10 years from now for white collar work, and 5-10 years after that for expensive manual labor (like doctors etc). I think the gap between "solving" white collar work (e.g something similar to AGI) and solving humanoid autonomous work will be narrow, but that's just my hunch.
Also, even without AI, sufficiently cheap telepresence robots can do to for manual labour what Mechanical Turk and remote work (and possibly GenAI) is doing for desk jobs — "good enough" can be surprisingly poor quality if it comes with a small enough invoice.
However, my main point is that things are hard to predict.
Thermohaline circulation might not be the cause of warmer Europe although many people believe it is.
Its probably mostly because of the planetary effect which lets the wind flow in a typical pattern. Europe is a sea climate. Eastern US is continental. Western US and Canada has the same warming as Europe. Because the wind does something similar.
If your energy infrastructure has a significant amount of nuclear, and your solar power is over-producing during the day, it is cheaper to have negative energy prices than to shut down the nuclear plant.
Minulla lemppari urheilulaji :D se kehittyy hitaasti mutta varmasti.
I actually maintain several online Finnish learning resources now, including a flashcard deck of the most common 10,000 words from the YLE study way back [1], a command line lemmatizer [2], and a website whose permissions I need to refresh ASAP which archives Selkouutiset with YYYY/MM/DD URLs [3].
Indeed building these tools were what got me back into software development as a profession, after a long absence.
Oh cool, I'll check these out! I've been doing some coding myself to learn Finnish. I'll post a video of my tool in a little bit. I generate a daily set of exercises, and then track my progress over time.
The tasks: scrape all the selko articles and then generate fi-> en translation tasks in the form of phrases (using an LLM). Same thing except en->fi. Free form task generation where I tend to use HS for articles (so like, adult Finnish). And then one I'm working on now, Finnish transcription from auto-generated speech, from selko again.
A lot of my evaluation is based on embedding + cosine distance. LLM's are truly bringing a golden age for language learning.
I was planning on doing a similar thing but my wife didn't seem terribly enthused by the current SOTA with Finnish text generation. Sometimes I do ask GPT-4 to "kerro minulle jotain kiinostavaa [aiheesta]" and throw the generated longform text into a single Anki card to read later on. The style definitely feels different, and it hallucinates a lot, but hey, it's still net beneficial on the margin.
Let's keep in touch, it's always good to meet fellow Finnward folk. My email is in my bio if you ever need anything.
I love languages, but I've been scared off of Finnish because I have heard that it has impossibly complicated grammar. Is this true? Or is there a logic to it that can be easily understood?
There is indeed a logic to it, and I'm currently working on an edutainment game meant to focus on drilling this part in particular.
Finnish has 15 noun cases, but it's probably better thought of as 4+6+5 cases. The first 4 are pretty straightforward, except for the partitive, which is kind of a catch-all case. The middle 6 correspond to certain spatial relationships. Very roughly you can imagine these as {inside, outside} × {unmoving, moving closer, moving further}. Huone = room, huoneessa = in room, huoneen = into (=moving closer to the inside of) room. That kind of stuff. The last 5 have niche, special uses. That's how I mentally imagine them at least, there are a lot of details you only pick up by reading a lot.
The trade-off is that Finnish has virtually no prepositions, which English has a lot of, and which are similarly very confusing for beginners and even intermediate English speakers. There are a few post-positions, but even these are mostly things you can pick up by ear.
Verbs have a similar story. If you've ever learned Latin, Russian or Spanish you'll feel right at home with Finnish verbs, which pack a lot of info into the conjugation, but with the benefit of requiring fewer actual words per sentence.
Similar, though leaving the US had a lot to do with hedging our bets against a crumbling democracy as well.
How is Finland? It was on our list but we wanted to have good train connections to the continent so ended up in the Netherlands (but above sea level). Oulu has impressive winter cycling though.
I lived in Oulu for a time, and yes it does indeed live up to its winter cycling reputation. Actually most of my wife's family lives around that region, so we'll probably return up there in a few years.
Finland is terrific! Learning the language is tough, and recommended, but ultimately optional for white collar migrants. The lower salaries here are unfortunate - I make a third of what I could make as a software lead in the US (~50k vs ~150k). Doubly so as there really is a lot of top notch engineering talent here, probably because it's so hard to hire people that FTEs end up having to learn a lot about everything lol. I haven't yet carved a path to make US level money while living in Finland - but you'd better believe it's on my list of things to beeline towards once I hit my thirties.
Meh, you can come up with twenty different methodologies and they all point to coming out way way behind in Finland. SF -> Finland immigrant, took approximately 70% pay cut, and enjoying the 80% marginal tax rate.
The health of democracy is way better than the US at least.
Consumer prices are not lower in Finland, although VAT is responsible for a lot of the difference, to be fair. Yeah, sales tax in Finland is 24%. I've been in both places in the last year, cried when I bought my used Toyota here.
Rent indeed is 70% lower, but you lose by having 70% lower rent and 70% lower salary. Besides, median salaries in Finland are 15% of what they are in SF (staff swe at 500k vs 90k). And the tax burden is way lower, even in CA. Finland has a lot going for it, but there's just no point in debating the money part.
Whatever bothered you about US politics is also happening in Europe. There's no Trump, he's one of a kind, but there's polarization, distrust in institutions and populism just fine.
It's the same disease really.
Also - I can't imagine North Europe will remain prosperous if America somehow fails, the West is very much dependent on the U.S (now also for energy).
But I do hope you enjoy your time, I lived in Leiden for almost 4 years and it was like living in a postcard. Shit weather though.
On Thursday, the Expert Group for Studies in Public Economics (ESO) will present a report on the employment level of refugees between 1983 and 2015. Among other things, the study shows that the integration of refugees gradually deteriorated during the period, and that an average refugee represents a cost of SEK 74 000 per year for public finances.
I think the reason everyone just has a "worry" or an opinion and there's so much disagreement is because nobody knows, even in the slightest what effect climate change will have on people's quality of life. We have predictions of some effects like temperature extremes, sea level rise, storm severity (or so I've heard, I can only find hand-waving in IPCC reports), mass migration, etc. but no credible and terrible predictions of numbers of deaths, financial cost or other more direct impacts on people. Maybe the climate will be radically different but we'll adapt just fine? Who knows? Nobody! So people invent their own beliefs and we end up with doomsdayers imagining the worse possible outcome and neverminders imagining the best possible outcome and they all want to control each other's behavior according to their own imagination. Now it becomes political and people hate each other because they see them working against each other's believed fantasy.
Even in this video, I couldn't find any quantified predictions of actual effects on people, so it just continues to support everyone's own fantasy, whichever way that goes.
What country is going to take the hit and start the high altitude sulfur spraying? If we even could get the forcing back to what it already was in the recent past that would be a great help.
As long as is needed to transition away from burning fossil fuels. You can always put more in high altitude. If half the comments here are right and climate change is truly an apocalyptic threat, then acid rain and global dimming would be worthwhile tradeoffs.
If climate change isn't extremely bad, then maybe it's not worth it. But at some point, if it becomes existential, then all options are on the table.
> Masking the problem will only make it come back harder when measures don't scale up anymore.
If (e.g.) China stops the US can start, or if a small country can't scale up enough more countries can join in. The whole "termination shock" thing is highly overrated, it's solvable with next to no communication at all. Decision rule: if not enough is being sprayed according to your models, make up the difference yourself.
It's not up to individuals to fix it. Your impact is nothing.
Cars matter very little in the big picture as well -- it's a distraction to blame the little people.
The vast majority of pollution is caused by industrial processes. The fix here is simple: regulate and enforce the regulation.
The main polluting countries are:
the USA: too afraid to do anything in case it affects their economy, political caste too corrupt to do what's needed.
Russia: doesn't give a shit, mostly see global warming as a way to get more influence, more usable land, and have such a little population density anyway they can afford to fuck some of it.
India: polluting as a result of too many people and trying to catch up economically, but might get their shit together like China did.
Saudi Arabia: has built their whole state on an unsustainable dependency on burning more than half of the oil they extract just for AC and water, and is completely fucked regardless.
We don't care about pollution, for climate change only the pollution of carbon dioxide matters. The majority of carbon dioxide is produced by transportation and heating, much of that from individuals.
There are a lot of people that want to deflect from action on climate change by focusing on the oil refinery and not the tailpipe.
Your list is suspiciously missing China, the biggest producer of CO2. Saudi Arabia is down the list, after South Korea and Germany; their CO2 per capita is but not abormally. It is the per capita emissions and population that matter. Then USA (300 million), Russia (147 million), Saudi Arabia (40 million), India (1.4 billion). The first three have large per capita emissions, double the others. The list of CO2 producers are basically a list of large and/or rich countries.
World society is just a bunch of individuals so some have to do something.
Re global regulation you need to get the main players like the US, China and Russia to agree some sort of policy which is tricky but might be possible if people lobby their politicians.
There is already a global agreement that the US keeps getting out of.
China has already solved their problem and significantly improved air quality in its cities, and is the world biggest builder of nuclear power plants. They ceased being a problem already.
The people that believe in climate change don’t understand how to solve the problem. And the people that know how to solve the problem don’t really consider it a problem worth solving at this point.
There's a narcissism that lends to every generation thinking theirs is the end of history, but I don't think it entirely explains anxiety over climate change.
I no longer worry. I'm extremely pessimistic about the impending climate change. I believe Sabine isn't pessimistic enough about what to anticipate. Consider the tundra methane emissions and the explosive release of methane-hydrates from the oceans, along with water vapor, a potent greenhouse gas. The disaster looming over all ecosystems (a mass extinction event) that will happen in decades and the doom-phase could last for 200,000 years. The chances of humanity surviving are incredibly slim, IMO. We can't colonize Greenland or Antarctica due to the lack of fertile soil, and it would take thousands of years to develop it. Without saying so, we don't have this amount of time.
The IPCC 6 says "It is very unlikely that gas clathrates (mostly methane) in deeper terrestrial permafrost and subsea clathrates will lead to a detectable departure from the emissions trajectory during this century".
Your pessimism may be trendy but it isn't supported by the bear available evidence.
Don't misunderstand me here. I'd rather be wrong regarding my "doomism," and I no longer worry about climate change; it doesn't make sense to worry about something that can't be changed. However, I observe that people aren't scared enough to take action. They continue to dance around the issue in political euphoria. The changes to our lifestyle are happening too slowly to be effective. The gas and oil industry is doing a lot of carbon emission washing, like CSS. Many optimists argue, "We can't predict it, therefore we shouldn't be worried."
> I observe that people aren't scared enough to take action. They continue to dance around the issue in political euphoria. The changes to our lifestyle are happening too slowly to be effective.
These are all reasonable observations, but they don't remotely substantiate "The chances of humanity surviving are incredibly slim, IMO."
Just tone down the hyperbole. No serious informed science exists to predict human extinction, though lots of ecosystems and most large wild animals are at high risk.
Citation:
The associated period of massive carbon release into the atmosphere has been estimated to have lasted from 20,000 to 50,000 years. The entire warm period lasted for about 200,000 years. Global temperatures increased by 5–8 °C.[21]
The hot-models Sabine referred to are in range of 4.8 - 5.6 if I'm not mistaken...
So, to avoid engaging in a Gish Gallop on this issue, I'm going to ignore the specifics except to point out that neither of those links says anything about human extinction at all.
It is reasonable to be concerned. But deploying easily-refuted hyperbole makes your (our!) cause MORE likely to be ignored as crackpot nonsense, not less.
Do you really mean that humans can survive without ecosystem? Mass extinction events are causing chain reactions ... I do not care about the causes. I'm not a climate activist. I'm just an average guy that can't do a squat and tired to be afraid for my children's future. I just accepted the fact that humanity will destroy itself sooner or later. I do not see any point in expecting wonders.
Maybe people aren't scared because they disagree with your wild, unscientific assertion that "the chances of humanity surviving are incredibly slim, IMO"
Climate change is a catastrophe, but it's not going to be the apocalypse and if we keep working on mititgation, there is a good chance it will merely be a "normal" scale disaster.
For example - it's possible that tundra methane emissions in many areas could be mitigated relatively quickly by the regrowth of birch and pine scrubland whose increased evapotranspiration will reduce water tables and eliminate methane emissions. And aboveground carbon sequestration in woody tree mass could outweigh losses from belowground oxidation. This already occurs in fenlands in Southern Finland (paper I read)
We don't know enough about methane hydrates to assess their stability.
Many ecosystems will be reasonably resilient to climate change - maybe up to 2/3 of them, although some specific species groups like tropical amphibians are going to have a really bad time.
Maybe we can stretch the metaphor to a number of frogs in the pot, and the frogs need to work collectively to escape the pot. It is hotter in the middle of the pot, the frogs there are already in the panic, while the frogs at the sides are like "I sincerely hope you get the help you need. You dont have to feel like that."
Oh the frog knows in our case, it knows perfectly well. But it's so nice and warm in the pot and freezing outside, plus it's sure that if it concentrates real hard it'll come up with a solution to being cooked alive while still being able to stay in the pot.
There’s more than just humans and their tech here to worry about though. I get so depressed when I hear people describe the gravity of climate change only in terms of the chance of survival of us humans.
Mass extinction events have happened many times before. The tragedy here is that it is the first preventable mass extinction event. If speaking about it in self-centered terms gets people to act then we should do it. Pragmatism is essential.
If climate change didn't affect humans we wouldn't care. Did we care when the skies started to glow at night due to air pollution and destroyed the ecology, or the importation of European honeybees, or effects of toxins on fauna. No it was "marvelous" a "triumph against nature".
The ONLY question to most people is: what will happen to me from it, if it will, why me changing anything will help?
You can make it a bit less depressing by thinking on the scale of the universe. Life on this planet has at most a billion years left, after that it's gone even if humans never existed. Humans are likely the only species that can save anything from this planet for the trillion years of life that is possible in the universe after this planet is gone.
The current extinction event is the most depressing part. A lot of environmental changes can be undone, but bringing back thousands of species is impossible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
I get what you're saying. Although I find that referring to humanity as a collective, or using "we" as in "we are in this together" in discussions like these runs the risk of homogenising human societies into one, even though a large part of humanity's historical impacts on the environment has been heterogeneous (i.e., industrial revolution beginning in Western societies). You can find the same criticism surrounding the term "Anthropocene" in academic and general settings.
Countries such as Pakistan and Pacific island countries that have contributed the least to climate change are among the most impacted, which is why two questions (among many others) have loomed climate politics over the past 30 years: "Where does the liability fall?" (Ex: loss and damage fund) and "How can I, as a country, be in a better position within a global crisis?" (Ex: disagreement over the global warming potential of non-CO2 emissions due to different chosen time horizons between countries; GWP100 vs. GWP*; this greatly affects carbon accounting in agricultural countries that rely on cattle for instance)
What is your point? My point is, there will be no escape for humanity with no regard to their contribution to the climate change... We are in this together, though 99% of the human population can't do a thing about it.
There was massive concerted effort to stop acid rain and ozone depletion. Maybe we should try that for the climate crisis if we want similar success at preventing catastrophe.
“After the ban came into force, global concentrations of CFC-11 declined steadily until about 2012. However, last year scientists discovered the pace of that slowdown slowed by half between 2013 and 2017. Because the chemical is not naturally occurring, the change could only have been produced by new emissions.”
“If emissions do not decline, it will delay the recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole, possibly for decades”
Covid was no joke, 3 million people died despite the entire world grinding to a halt and hiding in their houses for months. Sea levels are up 10 cm since Gore was VP and it's accelerating.
Where did you get that number? I initially just looked up WHO's estimate which turns out quite the lowball compared to what everyone else is listing, but most sources I can find seem to say something around 5-9M. I suppose it most depends on just how much China is fudging their numbers since they had the most people exposed at the worst time.
"Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize."
Which was extra ironic, given Kissinger reportedly said to Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin "I figure it like Groucho Marx said 'any club that took him in he would not want to join'. I would say that anything Lê Đức Thọ is eligible for, there must be something wrong with it." while Lê Đức Thọ declined the prize, on grounds that such "bourgeois sentimentalities" were not for him and that the Paris Peace Accords (for which he and Kissinger had been awarded the prize) were not being adhered to in full.
No matter how you spin this covid brought up 25 mln of excess death. That massive event, which is so foreign to "normies" minds that the majority just ignore the number.
There won't be an extinction event. We already know that warm periods in Earth's history are the most friendly for all kinds of life. And we know that cold periods kill species and reduce biodiversity. In the most catastrophic case Earth will end up as a tropical paradise, resembling the Eocene period [0].
The paleontologist Peter Ward has made a fairly compelling argument (in both academic research and the popular science book Under a Green Sky), that virtually all major extinction events are related to sudden rises in atmospheric CO2. A lot more happens when CO2 rises quickly other than it getting warmer. A major issue is it's impact on the oceans, which can become anoxic [0], causing them to emit hydrogen sulfide instead of oxygen. Such an event would be devastating to our current ecosystem.
> There won't be an extinction event.
This also ignores the fact that we are currently in the 6th largest extinction event in the history of life on this planet [1]. Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction is a great book on this (and the history of our understanding of species extinction as well).
So aside for being naive about the science, your comment reads a bit like claiming you don't think it will rain today while in the midst of being soaked in a massive rain storm.
That isn't true. 5 major exctinction events are related to giant volcanic eruptions. 7 are due to sea-level falls, and one is due to an asteroid impact. In all cases there might be a correlation to ocean anoxidation, but I doubt it as a cause.
Eocenic period had high CO2 levels, but it didn't lead to ocean anoxidation. In fact, at the end of the period, the eocene-oligocene exctinction event happened in connection with reduced CO2 and global cooling of the climate. [0]
This is naive. It's not the absolute temperature that's the problem, it's the rate of change. Temperature is going to change faster than most species can adapt, and that's why the food chain could collapse in the worst case.
What "the food chain"? IMHO there are many relatively disconnected food chains.
There are many natural ecosystems which could and would be severely disrupted as the food chains there break up.
However, the food chain for homo sapiens largely relies on artificial monocultures that can be moved around and replaced on a large scale if the local conditions change. Natural environment can't switch to a "warmer climate biome" overnight, but a farmer can and will plant an entirely different crop in the next season if that suits the place better now, with only some expenses in retooling tractor attachments. And while there are many food industries which are relatively brittle, these are relatively niche 'luxury' foods which often are economically very valuable, but not the staple foods which actually feed the population. Like, if California had to abandon growing almonds due to water issues and instead grow something less demanding (and less profitable), that would destroy a huge industry but wouldn't cause food insecurity.
> However, the food chain for homo sapiens largely relies on artificial monocultures that can be moved around and replaced
As just one example, ocean acidification could kill a lot of the algae. Pretty much everything is upstream of algae. It would be catastrophic, even for us.
Are cereals, tubers and legumes upstream of algae? They are "pretty much everything* as far as food security is concerned, they constitute 90% of calories consumed by humanity; the three main species - rice, maize, and wheat - currently form 2/3 and in case of a catastrophe probably could cover nearly 100%.
That's true, but I think it's quite debatable what would actually happen. Most species wouldn't need to adapt, but just migrate. There are a lot of species which already thrive in warm / tropical climates, and those species would increase in numbers.
This all will absolutely disrupt agriculture and food chains. Also humans are political creatures which cannot easily migrate. These migrations usually end up with things, called wars.
And what about the species that do not warm nor thrive in tropical climates? Or those that cannot migrate? Even if some species increase in numbers, it still means that all other species would get lost, reducing biodiversity and effectively meaning an extinction-level event.
> ...all other species would get lost, reducing biodiversity and effectively meaning an extinction-level event.
Reducing biodiversity doesn't equate to an extension-level event though. It also doesn't mean all species who didn't thrive would be lost - many would be affected but not existentially so.
I'm reminded of George Carlin's joke about the planet being fine long-term, we're the ones who will be screwed.
> Reducing biodiversity doesn't equate to an extension-level event though
From the Encyclopaedia Britannica [0]: __These conspicuous declines in diversity are referred to as mass extinctions__
> It also doesn't mean all species who didn't thrive would be lost - many would be affected but not existentially so.
But this is not a fact, it is a conjecture. On the other hand, we do have declining numbers of a big number of species. Unless the tendency reverts, constant long-term declining numbers will be an existential threat.
> I'm reminded of George Carlin's joke about the planet being fine long-term, we're the ones who will be screwed.
That's true, for sure. But asides from "the planet" and "we", there are also all the others.
1. significantly increased amount of 'life' on earth (as in: total kg of biomass, number of living specimens, total area with some amount of green stuff on it) due to warmer climate.
2. significantly reduced number of extant species on earth due to (geologically) fast changes in climate.
We are already in the midst of a massive extinction event. It’s called the holocene extinction, you can research it. There is an ongoing collapse of biodiversity at a rapid rate.
Yes, and the inhabitants of this new tropical Earth will do recreational dives to see the ruins of the places where the vast majority of people live now.
Depends a lot on your relationship with religion. For some religious people, yes.
In fact religious belief in apocalypse might contribute to the apathy about climate policy from the voters, people can either conflate the two or think the religious apocalypse is nearer so no need to address the climate catastrophe: https://www.newsweek.com/shocking-number-americans-believe-l...
- banning plastic bags and straws
- buying expensive electrical vehicles
- ignoring other risks in our circle of influence
- listening to public figures and scientists who gave us “point of no return” dates several times in the last 30 years
You don’t need soil, you need fertilizer and water. We farm outside now because it’s cheap. If you move to a temporarily inhospitable place then farming outside is no longer cheap so it is better to do it inside or in outdoor hydroponic or aeroponic systems if the weather is nice enough.
There historically hasn't been much mass extinction in hot phases. It usually seems to happen when cold, especially if an asteroid has hit the place. I guess hot, life can move towards the poles, cold if everywhere freezes and plants die life is a bit screwed.
We should ask this to an archeologist, but If I remember correctly we dodge the bullet a few times. Almost gone 900.000 years ago. Human DNA points to several genetical bottlenecks.
It's all about timing. You need the ice shields to be gone before you deploy the new soil; otherwise, it will be scraped or eroded. You also need to consider rising sea levels. You may need to think about bringing the soil first and storing it there until it's usable. Otherwise, you could lose it.
I've thought about this as well. It's feasible to move soil only to certain regions. Greenland and Antarctica aren't among them (remember the ice shields; they will continue to scrape all the soil as they melt). Some islands in Antarctic Ocean could potentially sustain a population of 20-40k. However, you need to start moving the soil now, but you will also need to develop methods of preserving this soil until it is needed, because right now it will be useless and it will be eroded by wind and hydro factors. What might happen is a gradual migration towards the poles on the Americas and Eurasia, moving the soil as migration progresses. This will be bloody and ruthless. But none of these solutions take into account the "exponent", and there is no way to forecast if a Venus atmosphere scenario will occur or not due to the water vapor.
Edit: good point in the next comment, expect sea levels rising for at least 10m.
Aren't we hypothesizing a situation where there is no (or a much reduced) Greenland ice sheet? I'm imagining "hey, look at all this bare rock that's suddenly available, and it's gonna take a couple of thousand years for erosion and lichen to develop soil here, so lets take a short cut".
I'm not saying it's a good idea, I'm saying it's a theoretically possible idea in the face of an extinction-level event.
Here is where you are incorrect in your anticipation. The amount of land usable for agriculture will be decreasing faster than the ice shields melt. The territory where the fertile soil is available will not be human-friendly for the entire season, if at all. You can't make people work at 50°C or even 45°C with 90° humidity. You can't breathe water...
But "usable for agriculture" implies "has soil" to me. We're talking about moving the soil to a more temperate zone, and we're not talking about the current population of the planet, we're talking about the human species surviving.
(I'm trying to find a sea rise map that looks right by eye and not having much luck. Here's the North Atlantic at 10m[1]. Surely that's not enough flooding?)
There's lots of room in Northern US, Canada and Russia. Not sure why Greenland and Antartica would be the only living places on Earth. There's also the Rockies, Andes, Himalayas and other mountain ranges. That's some extreme doomerism. I doubt most of Earth will become uninhabitable. Some places will be harder to maintain larger populations and grow crops.
Places without decent soil (i.e. Northern Russia, or high mountains) can only grow food in meaningful qualities if you bomb the soil with copious amounts of fertilizer. Fertilizer production requires fossil fuels and advanced civilization, both of which are not a given in the future.
I think extreme doomers like this create a shitty world to live in where you're surrounded by people that adopted an extreme "nothing matters the world is doomed soon" perspective that is depressing.
The most shocking is the sea surface temperature, but we see rising temperature in all layers of the troposphere. A factor that has dampened global warming for very long, since the last ice age, is the ocean's capacity for absorbing heat. If this gets saturated, and since surface waters don't mix much with deep waters.. If the same surplus heat equivalent to 15 hiroshima bombs per second today hits the surface, and rising. All that goes into heating air and surface, it's going to accellerate warming going forward. Early projections are in fact showing accelleration already.
That most people are incapable of emotionally processing this, is part of the problem.
There's a good chance that the sudden bump in sea surface temperature is a consequence of us cleaning up marine diesel. Which is at least interesting, because it suggests we were doing geoengineering without even knowing it.
(Random thought: what's the sulphur content of automotive diesel? I know it's cleaner, but there are so many more cars than boats. Could we see another sea surface temperature bump as we phase out diesel cars?)
All these are temporary masking conditions. They also add to feedback effects, for increased warming. So could be partly accellerating heating as well.
I think some researchers are seeing accelleration in the overall trend. You can eyeball this with a ruler as well. Even though it might be too early to tell, it's hard to find any negative feedback loops to counter all these positive ones.
For cars, I think we'd probably see increase in surface temperature on land. People might care a bit more then. It could be removed from both gas and diesel. That would bring pollution down, but also remove aerosols currently masking effects from GHG.
UPDATE: As noted in another comment here. Car fuel is quite a bit different category than bunker fuel (heavy fuel oil). We might still observe "unmasking"-impacts if implemented generally though. We'd notice it more too, as the impact would be right where we use our cars.
No useful comment, except to say I thought that was a great response. Thoughtful and detailed despite being an extended "it's complicated". My ignorance feels much better informed ;)
Is 1+ enough of a trend to disregard most of the models? Is there no other explanation for the "new paradigm" of accelerating warming? You're saying that extreme warming scenario is now the correct science. I don't think there is a consensus about this.
It's not enough to call it a change of trend. I have another comment here where there are other, more temporary factors that also came into play. There's not consensus until after we see the new trend. Likely there are some temporary factors that will make the lines go down again when they wear out. But the overall trend might still be accellerating, just that it's going slower than normal human reference of time.
The increasing sea surface temperature is concerning because it directly is starting to harm millions of sea creatures that cannot adapt fast enough. There are multiple die-offs happening already that might be due to this.
I just provided links with the latest diagrams, facts. You provided what, ad hominem attacks and projection?
I suggest to read up on the matter, in order to contribute something of value. There are lots of content derived from scientific studies and facts that present unbiased, objective material.
Not wrong the science, but on the doomerism, that was my comment. I have a few friends on this extreme-depression-due-to-climate-change and it's not helpful to their health.
Think of it like this, death is unpreventable and we still live our lives. So even if the world collapse was totally unpreventable (I think we can still turn it around), it's still better to go down fighting and living life.
When I was a kid, I heard that the sun is going to eventually explode, destroying planet Earth and us all. This was deeply saddening for me on a deep level, I remember crying and all.
My parents tried explaining this will take 5 billion years, and we will all be long dead anyway but this wasn't really helping. Prior to that I had a major shock when I learned about death, and this was kind of a relapse.
Looking at it now, I think doomerism, preppers, apocalyptic religions and the guy that stands on the street shouting "it's the end of the world" are all a basic part of the human experience. It's not a coincidence every cult eventually reaches the narrative of the impending end of the world.
Death is suppressed and finds other avenues to pop out in
I'm nearly a doomer and the bullshit "it'll all be fine" or "human ingenuity will fix it!" Crowd have caused us to waste precious decades. I'm doing carbonthirteen now to try to find a way to help fix it and I encourage everyone who can to do similar. Action is the antidote to despair, but unfounded optimism and stupidity are the fuel for laziness
How many of your extremely depressed friends are willing to abandon civilization as we know it and relinquish capitalism, transforming political systems into dictatorships focused solely on achieving net zero emissions by 2035 through drastic measures that could potentially result in millions of deaths (indirectly)? None. Consequently, worrying about this issue is as futile as fretting about snow being white. The crypto miners will continue mining, the gas and oil industries will prosper, and the wealthy will ponder the feasibility of establishing bunkers and retreats in New Zealand (which would not offer protection). Our selfishness extends to the point of sheer stupidity; each of us thinks, "What can I do? Nothing," and only a handful among us will take action that doesn't contribute to solving the problem at all. I suppose this is what the great filter looks like.
Comments like we need to “relinquish capitalism” cement the fact for me that climate change doomerism is a thinly veiled attempt to push a collectivist economic system, not an honest attempt to actually help the environment.
I’ll stick with the economic system that has reduced global poverty by 80% in the last century, and brought us everything from clean water to smartphones. Not the economic system that resulted in the genocide of millions, the systematic theft from the working class and which continues to oppress people under crushing dictatorships in places like Cuba and Venezuela.
Yes, because it isn't so expensive to turn things around. An estimated 100-200% in global GDP is needed to reach carbon net zero by 2050. Annually we need to spend 2-6% of GDP to solve this.
We’re screwed then. The 99% can’t afford to go one to two years without an income, and the 1% simply never will because they don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves.
They might be wrong. And since they might be, and we have a chance to mitigate things somewhat, doom is not a useful response. It is paralysing.
Imagine fighting a war. If you and your fellow troops believe you will definitely lose, what happens to morale and the outcome? Morale collapses and you create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The situation is serious but extreme doom predictions are the outlier in all credible models.
Yes, they always were. Predicting the end of the wrld is a very old game. Long before the industrial revolution, when people didnt even know about poluton, they already predicted the downfall of everything. It is a mental illness that creeps up on some of us. These people need help.
What you're describing is people experiencing grief. I'm what you would call an "extreme doomer", and did feel this way about a decade ago when I first realized the dire situation we are in.
But your first reaction is not the end. Waking up and accepting our state, and the despair that came with it, was the first stage in a long process of learning to live, and be comfortable in the world the way it is.
What you are suggesting is that we just ignore grief and pretend nothing is happening. I suppose this is just the denial stage of grieving, but it's worth recognizing that the people you know feeling this way are working through a process.
Pretending that someone isn't dead isn't a long term solution to accepting loss, even if it means in the short term you are in a dark place emotionally. It's unfortunately it upsets you to see people experiencing this, but those people, given enough time, might be in a better place to help you when you finally have to let go of denial.
It’s funny how tech bros pretend to be ultra-rational about anything they like to think about and “oh just look on the bright side” on the things that makes them a little sad.
If I call it Dunning-Kruger to point out that they think their expertise in tech translates to expertise everywhere else, they'll come back with some weaksauce akshually about what DK actually is.
I don't think it's "funny" that they waste time, energy, and resources on building bigger machines to make them more money and shit out hopium when it won't mean anything on a planet unfit for human habitation come century's end. I think it's a crime against humanity that deserves to be treated as such.
Don’t get me wrong. I still think it’s an area of concern. I’m actually a raging environmentalist but I just think we should spend our limited political capital on air pollution, heavy metals, microplastics, and expanding national park access.
You mean 30 years of listening to non-experts instead of experts. 30 years of listening to scientifically illiterate journalists who exaggerate and make stuff up to sell more papers or get more clicks, while refusing to listen to what scientists actually say.
Pretty much everything in that link is just random headlines, with zero connection to what the scientific consensus was in the listed years.
>but living through 30 years of catastrophic predictions not happening has made me question the messenger instead.
Have you seen what's been happening the last couple of years?
There are catastrophic predictions actually happening, sure some of them were wrong but the planet is in a pretty fucked up state right now.
Climate models are showing that a parameter (ECS aka “climate sensitivity”) has been increasing since 2019. This parameter determines how much temperature increase can be expected if atmospheric CO2 doubles.
Not quite. We don't know the correct value for the ECS, and estimates for that value have been increasing in the last 5 years. Higher sensitivity means a higher temperature per extra carbon in the air.
I find it very confusing that this is supposed to be new knowledge. Shouldn't the correlation bewtween CO2 concentration and greenhouse effect been researched and simulated to death by now?
it’s a complex system and you can’t experimentally test the effect of changing specific values, so everything is tremendously confounded.
and it turns out that by building in a strong preference towards the null hypothesis, science has tended to dramatically understate both the amount of emission, the amount they matter, and the feedback loops that can amplify this further.
like yea it has been simulated to death but everyone wanted to whistle past the graveyard and so those simulations had drastically optimistic assumptions built into them such that we are likely to crash through what was only a decade or two ago considered the “worst case scenario” by a decent sized multiple.
And frankly the root cause is really the people who go “I find this very confusing, don’t you have this all figured out by now? wasn’t it supposed to be global cooling in the 70s???”, the process was built around appeasing you so you didn’t dismiss the whole thing as alarmist and it turns out the process was built in a way that produced (unsurprisingly) over-optimistic results. The models missed low largely because royal-you wanted to play skeptic 30 years ago.
(And no, “global cooling” was never a thing and the idea that it was is more fossil-fuel propaganda and marketing. Even noaa is uncharacteristically blunt about this.) https://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf
Not to add more pessimism icing to the anxiety cake, but ... I have not seen any discussion on a particular Venn diagram of worries.
1. Climate change as a biological and human ecosystem catastrophe.
2. A potential ecosystem threat to humans from GAI. We might anticipate AI (and initially its wealthiest owners) would be less biosystem dependent, and more of a "Let's extract ALL the rare elements from the bottom of the ocean and not clean up the mess later", "Non-degradable plastic? Its still the future!", and "Fossil fuel reserves are a horrible thing to waste" kind of constituency.
It might be prudent to think about how different impending risks might have unfortunate "alignment".
Stop burning stuff. Tell other people to stop burning stuff. Tell your representatives to work on alternatives to burning stuff. Don't invest in companies that burn a lot of stuff. Avoid waterfront property.
That's not going to be sufficient to prevent climate change (well, nothing we'll realistically do now will be sufficient to do that - it's too late, just as scientists were warning us decades ago), so probably the question is less about reducing climate change but rather how to mitigate the consequences of climate change to you personally and your community - "avoid waterfront property" is one step there, but probably we can do much more.
Why are you saying this. We just need to get to netzero. This is going to cost some money but it won't break the bank. Estimates go up to 2x global GDP.
If we magically went netzero tomorrow, the greenhouse effect from the already accumulated emissions would still cause a significant climate change in the upcoming decades.
And, of course, we won't go netzero tomorrow, there's no "just" in it due to the time and effort it would take to scale up the solutions even if the money was there, but of course the money isn't there; while technically the world could afford it if it wanted, there are absolutely no indications that those who can afford it would be willing to do fund the bill, quite the opposite.
You are making it out to be an insurmountable challenge and reject what we are have already achieved. Cost-parity renewables being the most impressive feat. Global treaties such as Paris are a second.
I'm saying that if you look at, for example, the IPCC reports, then out of the various scenarios considered, the very most optimistic ones, the most ambitious goal they consider worth discussing, amounts to stabilizing global warming at 1.5 degrees and that requires achieving net zero by 2050.
I'm not rejecting what we have achieved, I'm just discouraging wishful thinking that we can somehow avoid having to adapt to the effects of the climate change - our actions can change whether we'll have a small global warming or a large global warming, but there is no scenario where we will have zero global warming, as it's already happening. And it's not just my opinion, this is a high-confidence consensus of IPCC.
China already abandoned the Paris Agreement and it's foolish to think that developing nations will prioritize long-range climate change over their own economic growth & security. This is a major issue with climate change - the entire Western world could go net-zero tomorrow and we would still end up at > +2C change from everyone else.
Even if we had net zero emissions of GHG today, which we can't, we would also need to remove much of what we already emitted. Otherwise effects of GHG concentrations will still warm the planet for centuries, maybe even thousands- to millions of years with feedback loop effects.
Going zero emission today would mean most people would starve and not have proper transportation. But without a job, they maybe wouldn't have need for that..
Encourage other people (especially if you're in a developing country) not to have too many children. The absolutely unsustainable population levels worldwide are behind the climate and pollution crises. We are an incredibly destructive species to the planet. All countries, developing and developed are part of the problem.
Not only that the overcrowding and fighting over limited resources causes psychosocial stress, which might explain the mental illness epidemic nowadays?
I genuinely do not see the point you’re trying to make. Is it that pollution == lower birth rate? I’d imagine there are many factors besides pollution that may influence why certain regions have more birth rates than others.
The places with high birth rates are economically undeveloped, so the people there consume very few resources, produce very little pollution and have negligible impact on the environment. One person in the US produces the same amount of CO2 as 150 people in DR Congo. That disparity is broadly similar for metrics like land use, water use, soil depletion, waste production etc.
The number of people being born in very poor countries is essentially irrelevant compared to the consumption choices of people in rich countries. Based on current trends, the global population is expected to peak at around 10 billion, but the planet is comfortably capable of sustaining billions more if we can find a middle ground in resource use between the dire poverty of DR Congo and the wanton profligacy of the US. Talking about birth rates in relation to climate change is at best a misguided distraction and at worst wilful misdirection.
We don't expect or desire (or IMHO even consider it acceptable) for these places to stay poor - the less developed countries on average have had steady improvements, a major reduction in poverty and the associated increase in consumption. The growth in emissions of China are not caused by some population growth but by the increase in prosperity of Chinese people, and we'd also expect places like DR Congo to steadily grow their consumption-per-capita.
The US currently has what was once the Earth's entire population. Much of the population can be explained by a steady flow of relatively poor immigrants.
The people in the high population growth rate regions aren't going to stay there, and their emissions will look similar to the nations they move to.
Medical condition gave me a built-in vasectomy, and my wife and I tried IVF (getting the sperm out without a vas deferens wasn't a fun surgery, FWIW) but it wasn't successful.
Yes, for me it's because of childrens' rights, I don't want my kids to potentially go through what I went through, including the soul crushing compulsory education system.
I feel that natural learning is so much superior, if you can encourage and cultivate it. Coercion destroys the fun in learning and it teaches us how to procrastinate very well indeed. Treat people like slaves, and what do you expect? You get poor productivity as a result, too.
Overall I think the treatment of children and young people in society is terrible and unjustified. It is inhumane.
I think they are being (sort of) micromanaged and exhibit the same behaviors as adults do when micromanaged, this is especially applicable for older teens.
This sounds to me like you're extrapolating your own experience and generalizing it to the whole population, when in truth you are likely to be an outlier: most kids do fine in school (and always have), and most home schooled people find it harder to contribute meaningfully to society (due to less exposure to socialization opportunities and poorer education).
Yes, and my kids are likely to be like me, outliers, that will end up suffering the same way.
And I heard the reason why teens act out so much can be due to the incredibly stifling environment they are in for their age. I think the rise of over-controlling helicopter parenting is making that even worse?
Throughout history the treatment of children in society has been absolutely appalling. And even in today's times emotional abuse of children is very common. During the COVID lockdown nearly half of children were victims of it.
Birth rates decline pretty proportionally to economic development, arriving at well below replacement levels in highly developed countries. In light of this, it seems misguided to expend energy personally convincing people to have less children, when we could just focus on bringing more people up to the western standard of living that, apparently, organically makes having many kids mostly unappealing.
Less charitably, this is the kind of advice that mostly seems like an excuse to preach at people.
> Less charitably, this is the kind of advice that mostly seems like an excuse to preach at people.
No, I just picked it as a random example of something that you can do to reduce population growth. Widespread access to birth control in developing countries would be a better solution. Supposedly educating girls in developing countries also helps reduce population growth as well. And there are probably countless other things you can do.
They also have traditions in many developing countries to have very large families.
There are 100 things I could put on a list of potential causes for the mental illness epidemic. “Overcrowding and fighting over limited resources” would not be on that list.
> Tell other people (especially if you're in a developing country) not to have too many children
That’s my bullshit detector. All of the friends heavily engaged in global fight, to the point of leading a 500-people EU startup on ecology… have finally changed their minds and have children.
My bullshit detector is, so is ecology more important for you than immigration? Because for me, if you use immigration in parallel to ecology, then you’re just nullifying the results, while asking me to take less space, which is just the usual leftist ideology.
Turns out, after interviewing dozens, that none of the ecologists, really care about ecology. None of them are sincere. None of them are honest when presented figures. None of them are upfront about their desires and projects.
It’s just that they want less of people like me. Has always been.
None of the scientific evidence I have studied has withheld the “what if we didn’t do it the leftist way” test.
This won't work. You have no instrument on actually limiting child birth and no one ever will have it. While some nations might listen to that advice, others simply won't. Then what?
We already have a method for reducing birth rates that has worked 100% of the time - end extreme poverty, send girls to school and provide basic healthcare.
My all-time favorite response to this problem was I think from Ben Shapiro who said that people who experience flooding should just sell their houses and buy somewhere else and it won't be any big deal. Lol.
We've started realizing that just now in the Netherlands.
My parents live in a neighborhood with waterfront properties. Almost everybody except my parents have water standing in their crawl space. One house has a flooded cellar.
* using a bicycle/train. not possible everywhere for americans, anyway, but possible for most europeans. minimum is car sharing and using a light car.
* less house heating, more insulation
If they disagree, don't worry, but make sure they know. It's expected some people are going to use violence to reduce CO2 emissions, especially for the ones that can be avoided easily.
Anyways, western rich countries will not be the ones who are hit the hardest.
Push as hard as you can for regenerative agriculture, which sequesters Carbon as it improves the fertility and moisture retention of the soil, reduces the need for industrial farming inputs, and produces livestock along the way. If adopted world-wide it could pull about 20% of the CO2 back out of the atmosphere.
Push for right to repair. We've strip mined the resources for your phone and computers, appliances, etc. from the planet, they should be able to stay in service for at least a decade, if not more. Designed obsolescence needs to go.
Sea level went up 200 feet before, there's 100 feet to go. Hopefully it won't happen in the space of a few years, like last time. (The source of the flood myths in every culture)
Prepare for mid-size nations near the equator to launch stratosphere aerosol injection programs against the will of the rest of the world and be party to the largest experiment humans will ever conduct.
I used to now I don't. After over 3 decades of hearing about it, none of the catastrophic predictions have come true. The sea level hasn't risen by any perceptible amount (I live on the coast). And I see no reason why it's considered a bad thing if it gets slightly warmer.
She is typically a very "anti-establishment" accessible science educator. When she talks about climate change she puts the onus on herself to actually make the arguments rather than just "pushing the consensus." This is very important. As somebody who is anti-academia myself, I am so annoyed at being told I am anti-science as well for being as such. Hearing the evidence laid out by somebody also willing to call out academia, but who does believe in climate change is WAY more effective than one more bludgeoning tool from a boot licking sycophant.
Want to have your discussion regarding "What to do?" regarding climate change? You need to stop treating people who want to know your arguments and see your data with respect first. Sabine is a great ACTUAL science educator and not merely a grifter, and (I suspect) just a modest honest person. She legit deserves clicking that subscribe button.
It's because it's just a link to an embedded youtube video. The HN mods unwrapped it (accidentally to the wrong link) and added a "[video]" tag to the title. They'll reword titles that people editorialize or shorten titles for length
That blog post is a thin wrapper around another video btw. Direct link to the content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S9sDyooxf4 (For those who prefer to read: it has subtitles/transcript available for various languages — proper ones, not auto-generated!)
Most likely an accident, I'm guessing dang or another moderator was changing the link directly to Sabine's video and copied the wrong link from youtube
It's a sketch comedy YouTube group. In this sketch a group of scientists are accosted by two people representing the rich and politically powerful who are yelling that people are dying outside because of poison falling from the sky. The scientists take this in stride saying it was a bit earlier than they predicted. The politicians try to get the scientists to do something, but they refuse angrily throwing their papers in the politicians faces that predicted this outcome. The scientists then don additional PPE as the politicians die (there wasn't enough funding to make PPE for them) and the scientists walk out the door to go see a movie, noting that they won't have any competition for the theatre since everyone else is probably dead.
I genuinely gave it a try but either my smartphone speakers or my ears weren't up to the task of having this at a non-obnoxious volume during the screaming while being able to understand the lines being spoken. Subtitles are not available and the auto-generated ones are (predictably, for this format) quite unusable.
If there's a point they're making, I wasn't able to hear it unfortunately :/ Can't imagine what a hard-of-hearing or deaf person would have to make of the auto subtitles...
Maybe I speak for myself, but the reason I visit this site is for longer in-depth topics on everything, not just tech. I'm not a programmer, more IT, so some posts are way over my head.
But this site is a good filter to get good, long articles and videos and in-depth discussion in the comments.
Short meme comedy skits can be left to plenty of sites like 9gag/some subreddits etc. There is a time and a place for that too. But in my opinion, not on HN.
@dang Is it just my impression that HN is drifting rigtwards on this topic? I remember HN being more in favour of proactive action against anthropic climate change. This thread feels dominated by attitudes reflecting inaction.
I notice a surprising unwillingness to consider that the situation may be, in fact, terrible, and the arguments are usually "well changing lifestyles is impractical" at though the current status quo is sustainable.
How did the lyrics to that song go? And when you ask them, "How much should we give?" Hoo, they only answer, "More, more more more!"
I gave up any hope of having meaningful relationships with other people in the name of building a good career in my life because that's what my parents wanted from me. I got into pistol shooting because it was primarily a solo activity.
Then the government passed laws decreeing that handguns have no place in civilized society. So I wanted to get into motorcycles. But that's just wrong because CO2 emissions. Now I'm being told that having space for myself, for a work from home office is wrong too because we need to increase density for the sake of efficiency.
Meanwhile price my groceries has went from $60 what I paid for in 2019 to $110 for that same bag of food. A small bag of flour went from $2.50 to $5 this year. Rice has gone from $14 to $22 for a large bag. And rent has became mad in many ways; last year average rent in this city was $1450 a month. This year, it's $1700 a month.
Then you've got one side that's yelling that we need to transition cars to electric but the nearest one to what you have is $20,000 more. And you're being told that we need to be looking at a way to get rid of the terrible CO2 emitting gas furnace for something more efficient like a heat pump. But the heat pump that can handle our climate is $15,000 to install.
Then they ban single use plastics like bags because of the issue of microplastics. And it annoys you but at this point it doesn't overly matter because you can't afford to eat out as much anymore anyways. But you're lucky enough to be able to afford rent and food, because you know people that are asking food banks for anything and being told the wait times are now at least 1 to 2 weeks because of the number of people in front of them waiting for food too.
All that verbal diarrhea to say... I'm tired. I'm tired of being told that it's my fault the world is screwed up. I'm tired of seeing seeing the roads I took to whatever little stability I have now being closed behind me. Tired of it seeming like that at some point in my future, the only thing I'll have left to enjoy will be the jab of a syringe full of heroin.
Overly dramatic yeah. It doesn't make any sense but it's how I feel. Dunno if it's anyone else that feels like this way, be a little surprised if it's really just me.
> I'm tired of being told that it's my fault the world is screwed up.
It's not your fault specifically though, it's our fault.
I'm fortunate that I'm in Australia, so my parents now have a hybrid car, a heat pump hot water and solar panels.
I have an EV, electric hot water, solar and home battery but... it was only 2 years ago I was renting, I had no solar panels, gas hot water, petrol car, and no home battery.
I did my best to reduce my electricity usage + paying extra to use the 'green power' option, my car was the smallest/most efficient I could get, I got a motorcycle to reduce the amount of oil use for daily trips to work.
My point of view is that you can only do what is in your capacity to do, and so long as you can say that to yourself you're good, we need more people like you.
I had a multi split system air source heat pump installed for 7k. And indeed, government has a lot of blame for the high cost of living. I'd love to live in a nice, cheap bungalow court in San Diego close enough to things to not need a car, but it's de facto illegal to build them most places since too much parking is required.
The food prices suck though. If only corn subsidies could be applied more sensibly.
It's not surprising. The average demographic of this site is a laptop-class worker whose work and passion is only made possible by a nearly incomprehensible foundation of thousands of years of infrastructure to build off of, who lives very comfortably, fancying themselves humanity's pioneers and dreaming of a singularity within their lifetimes. They've been told it's inexorable, so they think they're entitled to it. Snatching not only that dream away but their entire set of assumptions about how this civilization can't possibly collapse (even though many have in the past) because we're more enlightened or something? Literally can't compute, won't compute.
1) there are still trillions of "subsidies" (that includes some negative externalities)to fossil fuel each year according to IMF (IMF, not Greenpeace!).
2) Agents in the current system have incentives to prioritize short term benefits over longer term benefits. And a lot of climate related things are short term cost/investment for "profitable" long term benefits ; the current system sucks big time in this configuration.
3) The people having the least negative impact from climate change are the countries emitting the most greenhouse gas. The countries the more negatively impacted by climate change are countries contributing the least to climate change. There is a big misalignment of interest there making a purely "free market" "economical" solution difficult.
4) There are a lot of case in the real world were there is a strong economical incentive to switch to something different and were the different agents just don't... Because people don't want to change, because there can be some particular interest in the system, because of political motive... Human is not a rational animal, and his rationality is not only dictated by money
5) We need to do more than just switching from fossil to "green electricity"
> Im not dang but I would like to share a hypothesis why this maybe isn’t so terrible.
> The thing that always stood between the world and climate action was the fact that fossil fuels were the best energy source.
> Since a few years, the tables have turned and solar seems to be marching towards absolute dominance.
> So there isn’t much to do in terms of political climate action, since the incentives are now mostly economical.
If we could put climate change on hold for 50 years we would probably be in pretty good shape, because in 50 years we will probably have enough renewable energy that we can just decide to stop burning (most) oil.
But in the real world, in 2024 we haven't actually reduced emissions at all yet, and the possibility of cutting down emissions in 50 years isn't enough.
It's true that in that sense we aren't that far from a scenario that "isn't so terrible" but that seems more like an ironic fact than something that should be comforting.
Because of the way climate change works, the future possibility of reducing emissions simply isn't enough if we aren't actually currently reducing emissions when we would really need to be at approximately zero right now to fix the problem.
I'm starting the question chaotic climate happening in my lifetime - 37. "Not being around" is something geriatrics get to enjoy, so basically all of our politicians.
This is closer to paranoia than really concerns about the guy you answer. Million of years or billions don't matter much in the context of what he is saying, nor does it really serve his point. I see the mistake but not the malice. And I don't understand why you want to flag/ban.
Millions or billions of years after you're dead makes as much difference as 25, that is my point.
As for the rest of your calling for banning, people can look at my history of more than 10 years of comments on HN and decide if it's fair to call for banning someone like this, lol.
Because these are the same talking points billionaires use to scare people with maybe twenty five dollars in cash accounts and no savings and people who have a couple million dollars into believing misinformation about taxes.
Our taxes (in the US) are pretty low by any standard.
Saying a billion dollars is "a few million" is disingenous.
Nobody is arguing for higher taxes on everyone.
Normally, I would believe someone is just a useful idiot (like I am most of the time) but you seemed too knowledgeable to be ignorant.
Societies become more right when they see how left destructive policies and actions. People are not stupid, they can be fooled temporarily by high moral stances, but once they see all bs, they move away.
“Times are not good” not because of some unknown force but because of policies/actions creating those “not good times”
Politics works in cycles and maybe we are seeing the backlash of a lot of people starting believing in climate issues. Now that actions start being taken, people not caring about climate start pushing back because they need to change their lifestyle, and some parties (right wing/populists) promise them nothing has to change.
I think though that is getting harder and harder to ignore actual climate issues (storms, floods, heat), wonder what will be these parties next claim to convince voters "is the left wing/immigrants that generated the floods?"...
"US data is respondent's state ideology. Other countries show support for liberal and conservative parties"
It shows increasing disagreement between women and men on the matter. Me2 and BLM showed how much is going wrong in society and it reached many people around the world.
edit: additional link on the matter:
https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-gender-gap-young-men-w...
it's because the left has been attempting to make progress too fast, without regard to the people who lean towards the right as tho their point of view is universally regarded as being wrong. Reactionary politics is real, and the left ought to be more aware.
Leaning towards left (aka progressive) is good, but if you're not paying a cost for it, someobody else is - and it's likely someone leaning right that's being forced to do so. They're not gonna like it regardless if whether it's generally a good thing.
I think single factor explanations are likely to be overly simplistic. Usually, there is not one single reason that motivates people to vote one way or the other.
> it's because the left has been attempting to make progress too fast
I think social progress is linked to technological progress (increased communication, education, etc.) and it is absolutely true that technological progress is on a rocket headed to the moon.
I really don't know. It's possible. If there is such a trend, I wouldn't necessarily call it 'rightwards' because there is always a range of different factors and left vs. right is only one.
All I can tell you for sure is that perceptions of trends on HN are usually unreliable. You definitely can't judge it by one thread. The Launch HN posts of startups working in climate tech generally get favorable receptions, for example.
I do realize HN trends are unreliable. As a few others who replied, it felt peculiarly acute in this thread, but my impression was not based merely on this thread, but on several such 'huh' moments in the past two years. While HN always felt somewhat heterogeneous and still does, compared to 7-10 years ago, to me it feels that there is relatively more science contrarianism or even denialism with regards to climate, vaccination, etc., more subthreads derailing into religion because someone justified some strongly held position upthread using religion and more socially/culturally conservative attitudes. These are things which for lack of a better term I labeled a rightward trend in the USA sense of the word. In my unreliable memory, I remember HN being mainly economically right leaning and culturally left leaning which mirrors the corporate environment which found it much easier and cheaper to gain good will points that way. In retrospect, the pandemic feels kinda like an inflexion point (both HN wide and society wide).
I also have a limited POV into HN, for example I never really looked at the Launch HN threads (for the simple reason that most focus on the USA, at least in early stages, while I am in eastern EU) so I never really got those data points. With no real data and just remembered personal anecdotes is is hard for me to tell if this was merely an illusion or things haven't changed but I have become more aware of these aspects or whether the trend is real. Others in this subthread have proposed explanations for the trend and I think several theories can be found both society wide and HN wide. But while we do have some evidence the trend is real society wide, I thought it worth checking if the it is true HN wide before hypothesising explanations. Also, (compared to FB for example which we know captured a certain cohort and is aging along with it) with HN allowing easy account creation and throwaway accounts I think it is hard to accurately measure how well the HN sample reflects the population of society at large (we do at least know there is a heavy US-centric bias for obvious reasons).
I wish there was a reliable political alignment text classifier I could use to science this.
I am disappointed to see some have interpreted this inquiry on my part as me trying to police the thread.
Hmm. I think a lot of people who were silent about their positions on this topic are much more inclined to say them out loud now, even on websites like HN. Not that they are right though.
As for the reasons why I have (like anyone else) two or three ideas.
And whatever it is, it ain't making me feel optimist about what's to come.
>Hmm. I think a lot of people who were silent about their positions on this topic are much more inclined to say them out loud now, even on websites like HN.
I'm not sure, HN has always been welcoming to contrarian views unless it is something particularly nasty like racism.
If I could point to anything it would be the fact that we are getting close to an election in the US.
Aging userbase? People get to a certain age, realise they'll probably outlive problems then just start campaigning for whatever will give them the best rest of their life. Seems to kick in quite early now too, like 35.
It feels far more rapid, e.g. try to find all highly upvoted posts about EVs over the last couple of months. It feels (anecdotally) that they have been increasingly more negative recently.
EVs are interesting because it's a classic example of people simplifying a multidimensional problem into one. It's not just pro-EV and anti-EV. There's also the orthogonal pro- or anti- car dimension.
For example, I'm anti-car. In principle I'm pro-EV, but I also see EVs making things even worse with respect to all the other damage cars do besides exhaust emissions. They are heavier, more powerful and at best neutral with respect to safety and social issues.
But if you look through the one dimensional lens I'm just "anti-EV" because I don't want them.
Left wing politics wants freedom and equality for all while right wing only want it for some.
Makes no sense to discuss, lefties are correct and right wing people are either benefiting directly from the abuse ($$$) or are just stupid and believe all bullshit without using their brain.
> @dang Is it just my impression that HN is drifting rigtwards on this topic?
Of course it does, telling people that they have to reduce fossil fuel use directly means that they are part of the problem, people really don't like that.
Perhaps it's time for a tweak on an old classic: "It is difficult to get a person to understand the severity of climate change, when their comfort depends upon them not believing it."
I similarly am quite surprised to scroll past ten top voted comments all just saying slight variations of "I used to care, but now I don't" followed by some "whataboutism".
Almost like this whole post has been astroturfed. I'm not even sure though it is.
I think the US in particular is experiencing mental whiplash to how bad it really is and how much comfort the whole planet has to give up to prevent it.
Can we bring the planet back into equilibrium, absolutely. But I think many people over 20 have absolutely no interest in it. They want a solution that won't change their standard of living, which won't happen.
I expect the governments of the world to be toppled or redirected by the next two generations as they can clearly see how drastically everything is changing.
Why are you @-ing dang as if his job is to maintain some kind of particular consensus in order to ... idk, support some kind of political narrative? Hah!
Because he moderates this place and therefore is orders of magnitudes more knowledgeable about trends on HN. Next in line are people scraping and researching HN.
In my day job, I trace ecological changes over time in landscapes by reading a very localised sediment core. Over time, this knowledge builds, piece by piece, to build a complex tapestry of what was. It's like building a functional database that then fuels positive action.
You can only do what you can and when you can, so do it well and realise that the little things do add up. People are busy, and realistically, no one really has the power to stop the giants involved in this rolling disaster as an individual.
Society (with a capital S, aka encompassing the social, political, and economic spheres) is a machine we must slow down, do maintenance on and redeploy. Because we are fighting the velocity of the thing, having many people act as another set of "breaks" on the direction trends are headed does matter.
This is the first thing that anyone who has actually studied historical societal change would have to disagree with.
In fact, history almost completely shows that organizing one another and acting strategically in unison is the only hope, because there is effectively zero evidence of the "little things" just happening to add up.
In conclusion, you are absolutely full of it. You either don't know you're wrong because you're lying about having done the research, or you did the research and you are intentionally lying about the results.
This guide I linked is literally how to do that if and how you are able to, especially when you do not know where to start. Those movements start small, with a few people organising and snowballing. This is a guide on starting that process, not finishing. We need to show people how to begin if we want mass action, and the groundwork for strong movements is extremely important as it is inherently a bottom-up approach to societal change.
Historically mere "movements" don't accomplish anything. You need actual strategy. Not just attention wrangling. The fact that you haven't shared a strategy shows me you're ineffective at anything except wasting peoples' time.
Oh... I didn't realize you could change the link like that?
Uhh isn't that a big flaw with HN if you can?
(for example, link to a blog post that would be popular with the community to get upvotes, then switch it up for your own company blog or something to get the traffic)
Some stupid hacker just deleted over 2 Peta Bytes of Russian climate research data dating back decades. Data that was collected from satellites around the world for decades for processing. This affects us all if we don't have data.
By this logic, assuming you're American, one is free to do anything to your property, justifying it with calling out some bad thing the US government is doing, e.g. supplying bombs that are being dropped indiscriminately on Gaza.
They do it because it works. Many YouTubers experiment extensively with their thumbnails to see what gets most clicks. You can alter a thumbnail after uploading and compare the clickrate.
You are right. Americans will be fine. We’ve got enough money to fortify cities from rising waters. Well maybe not some poor areas. But we’ve never cared about the poors, so they can suffer.
The border will be where the American crisis exists. Droughts will cause the poor and hungry to flee their homes. We’ll see a refugee crisis at the border that makes today look tiny.
Oh and refugee crisis’ that are left unsolved lead to criminal activities. So we are likely to see a resurgence of ISIS. If we are really unlucky we’ll see a few strong men take over power in these countries. Combine both and we’ll have regional conflicts. Maybe some of those will bleed over to terrorism in the US.
But yeh, you are right for Americans it isn’t an existential crisis. For millions of others however it will be.
I think you need to look more closely at the wildfires in the western USA, and wet bulb temps high enough to kill people just sitting in the shade drinking water.[1] A power outage there will cause a very large number of deaths.
Same here, except the shorts bit. Not sure we are winners so: never before seen droughts in summer, extreme weather events and flooding at least every other year at scales we used to call once in a hundred years events. And then we are a lot less effected by all of this than other regions.
Also, I love snow and winter, so I really do miss this!
I went to a private talk a long time ago. The main point was "climate change isn't real, but if it is, it's not our fault. And if it is our fault, then it's not that bad."
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
Many studies over years that some countries are net winners (i.e. more arable land in higher latitude etc). And sometimes winning is simply your competitors doing worse (i.e. some countries need to divert more resources than others). Competition increasingly > cooperation in geopolitics.
Do these studies consider collapsing supply chains and unequal global fossil resource distribution necessary for food security beyond arable land? Because modern agriculture sure won't do without phosphorus supply from Morocco. Is the local fauna and flora diverse and robust enough to adapt to rapidly changing ecosystems? Can those "net winners" build their MRI machines, when lethal wet bulb temperatures close rare earth mines in China? Will they have the means to defend their prosperous islands against billions of refugees and enemy soldiers at their borders? Do reactionary authoritarian governments qualify for "net winning" societies?
I presume "net winning" suggests something very misleading here. It certainly won't mean a net gain over the status quo in wealth and welfare.
Not "woke" climate change only studies designed to propagandize / mitigate climate change. But read enough disparate industry analysis and you can connect the dots. i.e. up here in Canada, we'll gain arable land with receding tundra, we have large reserve of every mineral you can imagine. Shit hits the fan, supply chains get disrupted, we will tear up indigenous ecosystems to process rare earth and play to our geoeconomic strengths while poor global south chokes from web bulb. We'll burn extremely poluting tar sands oil / discover more coal veins to gasify into fertilzer. We'll gain transit dues when North West Passage becomes reliably passable. Geographically isolated, we'll have large oceans and militant US to drown/shoot climate refugees. On balance, we have potential do significantly better when everyone else does worse. That's not pleasant, that's not what anyone respectable would write about, but when things get bad, that will be reality. Some winners can win big, or at least much more than they (and others) lose. And I'll be walking around winter in shorts, angry that I spent 100s on a nice winter jacket and feel bad for rest of world. Like that's not going to be the narrative being sold. But as soon as the economic benefits come, people who benefit will shrug, and maybe do performative protest. But in the back of their minds, they'll appreciate their good fortunes.
This sort of anecdote is exhausting. Growing up, I was skeptical of "global warming" and heard endless admonishments about how "weather is not climate" any time anyone around me made a comment about a particularly cold day proving anything about climate.
But now, it's acceptable to make this kind of anecdote on an unseasonably warm day.. and on unseasonably cold days! Now you're an idiot if you don't see that weather is climate, and no matter what the weather does, it's further proof of anthropogenic warming.
Now, I think it's quite possible that the climate crisis is real, but if every observation leads to the same conclusion it's not science, is it? Anecdotes about a warm day in January push me away from the alarmist side, because it tells me that the people promoting the crisis see evidence in everything, both real and imagined.
> because it tells me that the people promoting the crisis see evidence in everything,
Are you saying you really believe that academic papers studying the GLOBAL temperature are using individual local weather events as evidence? That if you go to the IPCC reports they'll say "it sure was hot in California this week, so our gut feeling is..."?
Are there any other fields of science where you would dismiss the science based on other non-scientists associating themselves with it making anecdotes?
I think this is how to look at it:
Step 1) The science about GLOBAL TEMPERATURE doesn't have anything to do with local weather. It's statements about what you will see as the global average. That's testable, verifiable, etc (do you want to bet that the global average is COLDER in 10 years than today? I'll take your bet...)
Step 2) Given the predictions about the global temperature -- one may point to individual weather events as illustrations -- "hey, in the future we'll see more weather like this as the increased energy in the systems changes the patterns from what we are used to in the past". That's a valid statement; but it's not meant as anecdotal proof, it's just making a statement on what you're likely to see more of now and in the future, based on science that is NOT based on local weather events, but on looking at averages for the entire planet.
I dont get it. Every scientist & 5yo kid will prove you that things accelerate with 9.81 m/s^2 when falling, and guess this is still science? Which is a proof of cobtradiction that your point doesnt hold.
It doesn't really make sense when talking about physical constants. But if someone told you that things always fall at that speed everywhere, including on space stations and on the moon, you might suspect something had gone wrong.
The point dingnut makes is that science has to be falsifiable. That means you have to be able to articulate what set of observations would lead you to abandoning your theory. If someone showed there was a place on Earth where things did not fall at that speed you would consider the claim falsified.
So what dingnuts is saying is that he feels that claims about climate are becoming unfalsifiable. If it's hot, that's evidence for climate change. If it's cold, that's also evidence for climate change. If there's no snow, climate change. If there's snow, also climate change. If it's just a sort of average week, then that's ignored and considered to not mean anything.
It's maybe more of an issue of journalists, but the trend towards presenting every possible weather event as leading to the same conclusion leads to the question of what kind of short term weather would be accepted as evidence against the theory. Is there any?
1) No, no local or short-term weather is ever going to falsify or prove anything about the global average.
2) Assuming you are already convinced by the science that the global average temperature is quickly rising; one might ask: What are the consequences? And one of the consequences is more extreme weather, as there is more energy in the weather systems..
3) So one may point to extreme weather events and say "in the future, we'll have more of those, and that's why we need to stop emitting CO2". That doesn't mean the weather event is proof of global warming in any way -- it is just pointing to an illustration of what will happen if global warming continues; as measured by the GLOBAL temperature.
Dingnuts' complaint is about (1). Your statement is true, but it's not treated as true by the media nor increasingly by governments, who are comfortable making claims of the form "this weather today is proving that the climate is changing (for the worse)".
It's a valid complaint. It's one about the practice of the philosophy of science though, not something that can be refuted with claims about temperature or CO2.
Nonlinear dynamics means that adding heat to a partially-closed system doesn't result in an even distribution of increased temperatures. Instead, we observe a net increase in temperature averaged over the planet's surface, and wild swings in local weather due to the basically infinite-dimensional state space of the planet's atmosphere being nudged. No single observation of local weather should ever be attributed to climate change, I'll give you that.
Basically, climate change is occurring, and is known to cause extreme weather events. So when there's an extreme weather event, it could be evidence of climate change. Each individual one is not proof of climate change, but in aggregate they are strong evidence. And of course they're not the only evidence.
I mean, you can read all the data instead of relying on newscasters for scientific information. The first IPCC report came out in 1990 and, to my understanding, accurately predicted both a rise in average temperature and the resulting increase in extreme weather events. Both of which have occurred at unprecedented rates. All of the Reports are available online. Just because you do not want to read the data doesn’t mean it is not there for you to debunk. The IPCC has made all sorts of predictions, along with confidence metrics, for almost every component of the climate and local weather. I mean this tongue in cheek, but if you know more than the hundreds of scientific authors and thousands of reviewers that have contributed to the Panel Reports you should help them out:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-11/
When the normal winter climate in my area has in average 5 months of freezing temperature with an average at -4C and now it's only freezing for two weeks and I'm getting 8C to 12C instead, climate change is the reason of this insane weather change.
The changes are so big that now the weather is also the climate, they are so large that they became visible with the naked eye without any measurement.
The CO2-induced temperature rise might not be as severe as predicted. I suspect a "moral panic" over climate change. There's huge amounts of money, influence and power to be made exaggerating the problem into a catastrophe, there's a bandwagon effect.
I personally think desertification will increase, there will be problems with weather cycles in certain regions. But no end of the world, at least in my opinion.
How was my comment related to suicide? I was talking about the process that will take place - and since it will - then at THAT time it still shouldn't be painful.
Life might or might not go on, but I don't see any reason to make our lives more miserable just to make sure even more people can experience those miserable lives. That's why I don't care about preserving resources or living conditions for "future generations".
Thinking that reducing living standards to more ecosphere-compatible levels (at current technological sophistication no less) would result in "miserable lives" is an unfortunate consequence of the consumerist programming of the late 20th century.
We're consuming a lot of pointless shit that could be cut without much consequence. Stop ads and you will find out what some of that is.
Another big problem being throwaway culture. Even in 2024 people still change smartphones like their underwear (I mostly see this with Android users though, not that I'm surprised).
The thing is that this reduction negatively impacts especially the poor. The rich will consume less pointless shit, but for the poor it means things like not being able to heat their house, not being able to have a car (since they can't afford the new, "eco friendly" one). That's why they rightfully revolt against.. or maybe that's WHAT they revolt against.
I use LineageOS on my phone, thanks to this I have an up-to-date system with security patches. Oh, and of course a shiny warning about the unlocked bootloader...
Many people would prefer having a non-bloated phone that they don't have to replace very often. But those who make it as-hard-as-possible are the very same people who shout very loudly about the need to sacrifice in order to deal with climate change.
: The first result we found is that all of the 17 models correctly projected global warming (as opposed to either no warming or even cooling). While this is so unsurprising to climate scientists that it is not even mentioned in the paper, it may be surprising to non-experts. The second result is that most of the model projections (10 out of 17) published between 1970 and 2000 produced global average surface warming projections that were quantitatively consistent with the observed warming rate.
: While comparing global warming rates may seem like a straight-forward “apples to apples” comparison, it sweeps one very important difference between the simulated climate projections and reality under the rug: human behavior. Climate modelers have to guess at plausible future scenarios of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions to feed into the model. Some modelers developed projections meant to be realistic predictions of what society would actually do (e.g. Nordhaus’ 1977 coupled climate-economic model), while others chose to estimate “worst-case” (high emissions) and “best-case” (low emissions) scenarios to bracket all plausible realities.
: When conducting our comparison, given this information, it became clear to us that simply comparing the warming rates between simulations and reality could be misleading, if the simulated emissions scenario and historical emissions were dramatically different. To account for differences in emissions between the simulations and reality, we calculated the warming rates with respect to anthropogenic radiative forcing, the rate at which human emissions trap energy at Earth’s surface, instead of calculating them with respect to time. Using this novel metric of the warming rate, we found that the model projections were even more consistent with reality (14 out of 17 models captured this).
> 2. Proposed economic responses to climate change do less harm than good.
As for 2, how much harm is being caused by more efficient autos, wind turbines and solar power, and battery storage? By feeding cattle a bit of seaweed?
Please just stop buying the latest and greatest and get some long term use out of the costly products you've already bought (or at least sell them on in the second-hand market).
The video in the post addresses points 1, 3, and 4 quite well, in my opinion. Did you watch it?
Also, if we granted your fourth point, it would be impossible to establish the first point; you can't say both things at the same time.
Regarding point 2, if the "hot" models are accurate, then climate change is something that will effect us maybe one or two generations from now, if it isn't already (it's a little hard to tell whether we are in a particularly hot period right now and will regress to the mean). Even if you are completely selfish, anti-natalist, and atheist, you should probably still be concerned.
Yes, but I'm not going to do your homework for you. I won't address an argument you don't make.
>Also, if we granted your fourth point, it would be impossible to establish the first point; you can't say both things at the same time.
Please elaborate. There isn't a formal fallacy here so I'm assuming you have some esoteric implicit "own".
>Regarding point 2, if the "hot" models are accurate, then climate change is something that will effect us maybe one or two generations from now, if it isn't already (it's a little hard to tell whether we are in a particularly hot period right now and will regress to the mean). Even if you are completely selfish, anti-natalist, and atheist, you should probably still be concerned.
They aren't.
Anyways, again, if you're talking about immediate threats to your physical self, it's obvious that only a very deluded individual would rank "climate change" anywhere reasonable.
The threat model is just laughable. It fails too many conspiracy sniff tests and reeks of the same psychology that enables doomsday cults (vague predictions that constantly fail and are re-made).
I asked if you had watched the video because you didn't raise any specific objections to the evidence provided. I'm not going to restate everything said in the video, but if there's something specific you disagreed with, we could talk about it in more detail.
I assume that by "slow burn," you mean to say that climate change takes place on a time scale that goes beyond just one or two decades. If that's true, then how can we possibly judge the accuracy of the newer "hot" models except by looking at how well they predict past climate data? And by that metric, some of them do just as well as the older, less "hot" models that we've been basing climate policy on for decades. Is there some other metric you're using to dismiss the new models? I hope it's clear why I think you're contradicting yourself, but maybe you have some other way of telling whether a climate model is accurate.
I think there is some validity to what you say about risk assessment, and I have the general feeling that there is some real hysteria among younger generations w.r.t. climate change. There may be more pressing issues, but again, if it is the case that we can expect to see much hotter temperatures than previously predicted, then everyone, regardless of wealth or location, should be concerned for their own wellbeing in the near future.
Sabine Hossenfelder is a German Physicist. This is not about your election. Look at her twitter feed - no mention of american politics https://twitter.com/skdh
- I choose for MANY reasons, climate is one of them, not the topmost but still one of them, to leave a big city toward the mountains, choosing a place locally hydrogeologically stable (meaning no landslide can reach my home, no flood as well, nothing tall enough to fall onto it and so on);
- I still IGNORE both the climate change and the climate "deniers" narrative because I consider both PROPAGANDA. I mean I do not care if actual climate change, I see well (meaning it exists no extra proof needed for me), is due to anthropic activities or natural cycles or both in various percentage simply because even if the cause is 100% anthropic and we can cease now all relevant activities this would not produce significant results in less than SOME centuries, simply no matter the causes we need to ADAPT;
Now the biggest issue: both parties the "climate scared" and the "climate deniers" spit emotions but reject rationality. Most climate scared gossip about adding rooftop solar (typically while they live, in apartments), need to ditch cars for walking or cycling nearby in 15' cities (typically refusing the argument that anyone eat, in cities and in countryside, but in cities live many so there is a big need of food and no production, meaning that for allowing people to live in 15' cities a big and typically not green logistic much bigger than the countryside is needed) while most climate deniers state we can go on classic diesel for 500+ years rejecting tha claim that banally we experience raw materials issues since some years with less and less new big discovery an year after another an even if we have still much oil changing away from it take decades.
Long story short people do not want any real change, so one act as classic reactionaries, other as classic futurists who dream a future, but refuse to really think and design it to make it real.
My take is simple: we need to relocate an enormous mass of humans from some now inhabited areas to some others, not tomorrow morning but also not for the next century, and such big change means typically wars, disasters, famine and so on, planning and moving calmly a cohort at a time means SOME chances to get it done without enormous amount of spilled blood. Very little is done in that sense. The probable result is that nothing change until the immediate emergency level where things get done in a rush, some profit very much, many starve and die. The best I can is try to be as much as I can aside. I do not have a personal space station, fully autonomous and capable of rebuild itself when needed to watch from the orbit so...
There is no point wasting nerve energy for a fact I can't deal with more than that. There is no point in trying convincing a mass of Lebonian crowd (cfr. Gustave Le Bon writing on the crowds) who is actually already polarized in two opposite groups, already fighting each others.
So realistically is most of the climate talk you hear directly from scientists, or from reporters looking for clicks giving you their interpretation of the data?
In what field? Because what is on the headlines is in the field of PRs, witch are the same kind of those who nourish certain cohort of "believers" like those of the flat earth. If you analyze their readers you'll find they are the very same ascientific kind.
Beside that, beside the classic Francis Galton experiment, beside Gustave Le Bon observation about the crowds, also the experts crowds, beside the history of Eduard Bernays campaigns, like those for the tobacco industry who makes many doctors believe smoking is good for health, try to LOGICALLY reason with your own knowledge. When the "modern climate change" start to happen for you? Perhaps DECADES ago? That how much "anthropic emissions" was made since them? How much can they change in the near future? Beside that ALL TIMES you here "we need to be quick" what does it means in practice? Maybe doing something before having the time to reason about up front?
If for you the "climate believers" narrative is The Truth and that they are "all the experts" while the others are just foolish unacculturated people from some social network well, you are a believer of some kind of religion, not differently than the believers of the flat earth.
Not counting that, your recipe than is what? Remain sit watching the TV about how important is switching to a heat pump, perhaps without doing it in person, just hearing and reverberating to others? For me there is no enlightenment of wokeism but mere logic: I choose to move from a big city to a mountain area, I built a new home so with the current design and tech, not because "it's my contribution to a cause" but because summing MANY aspects I've decide that's the most opportune/wise choice I have. Meanwhile I've also put a modern wood stove (meaning airtight, sucking air from the outside to ventilate the flame chamber) in the new home, because while I have p.v. and a small LFP storage I prefer having a more reliable backup WHEN, not if, I'll need it. I'm an engineer and I call it logic. Nothing more, nothing less while observing in modern gear how much "not at all experts" are those who have designed most of such gears simply because they do not have them in person at home, so they ignore countless real world cases not easy evidently to grasp at a project level. They dumb thing like a p.v. "integrated" EV charger that actually hyper-flawed because those who have designed it have never try to use it to actually really trying charging from p.v.
We have a lot of existing stuff ("political stuff" like cabron pricing, or "technological" stuff like double glazing or heat pump) that already make sense economically that we don't use fully. How AI deeply impact it ?
I never worry because fear and anxiety shrinks the brain and makes you stupid. If you rely on intelligence for your work why would you ever allow something to make you anxious.
Be mindful of where you focus your attention.
Focus on what’s actionnable right now, be prepared but never anticipate nor procrastinate. Don’t worry about that which you can’t control. Be humble about what you think you control.
This is just a tribute to the stoic philosophy. I recommend reading the classics. You can start with this article.
The amount of energy accumulating in the oceans is equivalent to detonating five Hiroshima atomic bombs per second, every second over the past 25 years.
We had past long time ago the question if is happening or not. What I'm discussing is the "how fast" part.
The sub-question is if the war or wars if you prefer (You all know what I'm talking about) are causing the current wave of claims "I'm worried now but I was not worried yesterday"
I assume that the war is making it faster, but the effect of this particular factor could be temporal. Artifacts happen in science all the time. We don't know if war is a modifier (and in that case if would be a temporary or permanent modifier). I personally suspect that it has an impact. I could be wrong.
Certainly explosions and fighter jets result in a lot of GHG emissions. You seem to be suggesting that it might be significant enough to explain recent accelerated warming. That's how your comment reads.
My comment was mean to point out that the scale of warming is far more intense than two conflicts would produce.
I really hope the recent acceleration in warming can be traced to industrial methane emissions that could be stopped.
We could measure the effect of historical wars which exploded a much, much larger quantity of explosives than any current conflict, and assume that the current impact isn't any larger than that.
Like, the intensity of current wars isn't even comparable to that of WW1 or WW2 battles.
Or we can be smarter and understand that ecology does not work in absolute terms, most of the time all is relative and buffers are very important
The climate change can be expressed a the result of A+(B+C+D...) factors
Lets assume that A is some allegedly --hypothetical-- effect of the wars exploding bombs and releasing heat in the low atmosphere. If we claim that in World War II the value A was higher and nothing happened (So nothing will happen now), we are forgetting that the "everything else" part was much lower in WWII. Just the number of vehicles circulating was abysmally lower. This invalidates our guarantee, because all in ecology is relative to the current updated situation.
Ecosystems create buffers, the expect results are: not changes/very minor changes seen (buffer worked) or catastrophic change happens (buffer fell). Small amounts of energy released in one ecosystem could trigger noticeable effects in how the energy moves around the planet. As "how the energy moves around the planet" is too long, we created a shorter name for this: "Weather"
It's taboo to say this, but people worldwide have had far too many children, and I believe that overpopulation is the root of the sustainability crisis, including climate change and pollution.
And that taboo is probably rooted in evolutionary psychology, people have a genetically driven tendency to criticize those who advocate having less children? So could there be an instinctual drive behind it?
> I believe that overpopulation is the root of the sustainability crisis
This has been studied long time ago by scientists such as Alfred Sauvy [1], who concluded that overpopulation is not the cause of sustainability crisis, and that greenhouse gas is the major cause. In particular, limiting the growth of population has few impact on the production of greenhouse gas, whereas changing the means of energy production and consumption is much more impactful.
Moreover the world population is expected to be less than 12 billions in 2100 [2], which is plainly sustainable. This is mostly due to the demographic transition, a pattern observed in most countries, where the fertility rates decrease over time. More specifically I recommend the excellent book of Emmanuel Todd and Youssef Courbage on this subject [3]. The authors argue that in most countries throughout history, when both the majority of men and the majority of women know how to read and write, then the fertility rate decreases, and a revolution becomes imminent.
Sustainable means different things to different people.
In a simulator, could you have 12 billion people with their needs met, living fulfilled lives and continuing into the far future? Yes.
Is there a political and practical way to reach that state? No. "One study estimates it would take just over 5 Earths to support the human population if everyone’s consumption patterns were similar to the average American." Any US government that tried to bring America's environmental footprint down to a sustainable or fair level would be voted out. It doesn't matter whether it would be gas taxes, meat taxes, per mile taxes, flight taxes, carbon tax and dividend, building renewable energy in less developed countries, or any other scheme. It doesn't matter if it was targeted at the ultra rich or the middle class. The sheer scale of it would cause Americans to vote out the government. And the same is true for any democracy and plenty of the non-democracies too.
People have children for lots of reasons. I'm probably not qualified to list them all, but I expect that people will not stop any time soon. Seems that they enjoy the process.
Perhaps consider that those 80 billion souls will contain Einsteins and Mozarts.
I doubt there's any single ideal population size, because the impact of each individual varies so widely. In the future, when we're all living 100% solar powered regenerative net-carbon-negative lives, the problem will be that there aren't enough people to offset warming caused by volcanic eruptions, meteor impacts, and overpopulated wildlife.
Always handy, the point (lean back, look up) is we don't need 80 billion as a prerequisite to have more - that's a weak (to be generous) argument.
> I doubt there's any single ideal population size, ..
It's bounded by an upper limit of humans living like turkeys in a turkey farm and tossing the weak in the chipper to blend back in with the feed . . . is that your ideal mode of life?
The Earth is nice example of a complex system with many interconnect parts maintaining a relatively stable for millenia feedback regulated environment.
What is the argument for pushing human population to 80 billion, and at what cost does that come in terms of human living standards and the other non human life we share the planet with?
> we don't need 80 billion as a prerequisite to have more
Your claim, unproven. My point is that 80 billions souls will produce 80 billions souls worth of art, science, literature, and culture. Which sounds divine. Why would you be opposed to such a thing if it can be accomplished sustainably?
> It's bounded by an upper limit of humans living like turkeys in a turkey farm and tossing the weak in the chipper to blend back in with the feed
Seems that you have a dark turn of mind, which explains the pessimism.
> What is the argument for pushing human population to 80 billion, and at what cost does that come in terms of human living standards and the other non human life we share the planet with?
Humans have lived regeneratively and sustainably in the past. We seem to be in the process of figuring out how to do it in a less labor intensive manner presently. I do my part to live sustainably, and I believe in humanity's ability to innovate and adapt and to address complex problems. Seems like you feel differently.
> My point is that 80 billions souls will produce 80 billions souls worth of art, science, literature, and culture. Which sounds divine.
This sounds like magical thinking. Even making the huge leap to say that cultural output would somehow scale commensurate with population infinitely, what does that actually look like in a reality with finite time and attention? I think we've already passed the point where anyone can keep up with all the cultural output (music, literature, graphical media) that is released each day. This idea of a cultural smorgasbord where we all get to sit back and enjoy a buffet of art is a dream that can only exist in the most idealistic of vaccuums.
Nothing magical about observation. Seems to have scaled so far. Not sure what magic you think might interrupt individuals' desire to produce more art and science.
> I think we've already passed the point where anyone can keep up with all the cultural output (music, literature, graphical media) that is released each day.
Good thing that's not necessary for one to benefit from it. I, for one, am happy to benefit from all the medical innovation I can't keep up with.
I'm not sure why they think Americans are a good standard of living. If we want people to be 30+ percent obese, unhappy with dating and the stuff we ordered to have shipped yesterday.
There's programs to give efficient LEDs from comed to people for changing it slowly.
People can get a good standard
of
living
by
exercising more but habit forming is hard and people
can be very short
termist and sheep like. Sheep like can be a positive thing too though (in a more health obsessed city you might encourage others).
Plainly sustainable without fossil fuels? From what I can gather, the majority of farming, construction and transportation (including of farmed goods) relies heavily on fossil fuels.
It's not sustainable because the more people they are, the worse their living conditions will be. Look at how densely populated Asia is. Does everyone want to live like this? Overcrowding is also not good for our mental health.
I think there's 2 topics that need to be held apart here:
1) Limiting number of children in rich countries. This is what your links talk about I think. Yes, perhaps there is a taboo in place here.
Is that relevant to sustainability crisis though? Population is already declining in rich countries, quite naturally.
2) Limiting number of children in poorer countries. Well, as in the article pointed to in a sibling comment, "Richest 1% account for more carbon emissions than poorest 66%"...
So by saying that overpopulation is the root of the crisis -- are you not saying that it may be better that 10 poor people are not born, than for rich people to do minor changes to their lifestyle?
The issue is the global population. Obviously, that's the metric that matters for global issues like the climate and environment.
The global population is still increasing. Furthermore, as poor countries develop this is compounded by increased consumption (both resources and energy) per capita. In that respect, "richest 1% account for more emissions than poorest 66%" should be interpreted as very worrying when the poorest are getting richer.
Ultimately we don't anyone to be poor. At current population levels this would probably mean a total collapse of the environment.
Overall, the global population is indeed the root cause of our problems.
I never understand this argument of overpopulation. How can you be OK with reducing population but at the same time worry about global warming?
To have that position you basically need to reconcile two positions that to me aren't really compatible, unless someone explains it to me.
Either it's fine for Earth to not have humans and just exist peacefully with the rest of the ecosystem until another lifeform takes over.
Or it's not fine for the Earth to have no more humans and so we need to stop climate change from making the Earth uninhabitable for us, but if to do that we want to reduce the humans, I don't get it.
To "kill" humans to save humans seems weird. I guess you can slide on the scale of "more people living worse", or "less people living better", but to choose who is not possible in my opinion, so this is not implementable.
Because if you care about the Earth primarily, then warming or not doesn't really matter, it's just a geological event like many more gnarly ones over the history of meteorite impacts and so on.
But if you care primarily about the humans, then how can the answer be to have less of them? And pick and choose who gets to reproduce?
Your belief seems to be that the value of humanity scales relative to the number of living humans. I disagree - I don't think one billion humans would be 1/10th as valuable as ten billion humans, provided we got to one billion just by deciding to have fewer kids. Killing humans is morally wrong in everything except weird edge cases, but having two children instead of three is not killing anyone.
The bulk of what I value about the future of humanity is our continued existence and collective ability to do beautiful and impressive things together, not the individual existence of some as-yet-unborn hypothetical humans in that future. I don't think humanity's output scales linearly with population and I don't think there's much moral worth to future individuals outside their general contribution to wider human civilisation.
What you are missing is that to you, "valuable" continued existence means continuing to produce pointless tech gadgets and indefinitely increasing global GDP or something.
To somebody else it means just living life.
There is no way to objectively argue superiority of one over the other except from a religious worldview.
I don't care about useless gadgets and GDP. I care about people poking around in the Mariana Trench, surveying carnivorous snails, writing and reading novels, and keeping their societies functioning and happy. Please don't damn me for opinions I don't actually hold.
Regarding the superiority of worldviews, sure, subjectivity applies and we could go down the rabbit hole of discussing that - but the comment I was replying to was not about which worldview was better! Vasco said that "Either it's fine for Earth to not have humans ... Or it's not fine ... but if to do that we want to reduce the humans, I don't get it." I'm not going to argue that my values are the best because it's already self-evident to me and I doubt I can improve on the existing work[0], but I am very willing to explain how they're logically consistent.
[0] Via utilitarianism and the repugnant conclusion and onward. I don't think I can do any better than all the philosophers who've debated this.
I mean, you might as well quote me a list of your very personal niche hobbies and the importance of keeping them up as some kind of tradition humanity needs to uphold.
I don't think such a line of argument holds very tight in the grand scheme of things.
To others, enjoying the company of their own children and grandchildren (some of the most commonly shared joys across people, in contrast to niche interests) are far higher up there on their list of priorities of things that make our existence worthwile.
Likewise, utilitarianism won't get you far since the other person must first subscribe to it as a good idea. I don't care about "the greatest good for the majority" in some kind of vague sense whatever it means, if subjectively it means no good to me.
There will be less people in the future if people reproduce at less than replacement rate. You don't have to have them killed, they will die eventually.
> The issue is the global population. Obviously, that's the metric that matters for global issues like the climate and environment.
No. "Obviously", the metric that matters is emissions. Or, the integral sum(person * emission of that person). When the emission per capita varies by a factors of 1000x, the distinction matters.
Look, what if you could choose between:
Option A: The 50% lowest polluting part of the world's population never existed. Would this make a dent towards global warming? No. Perhaps slow the onset by a few years. The overall magnitude of the problem would be the same.
Option B: Through reduced consumption and technology, reduce emissions of the 50% highest polluters by 80%. This would have a quite massive impact towards global warming AND also help when the 50% poorest increase their living standards.
Given these -- how can you say that "population" overall, without further qualification, is the problem?
Another factor here is that population growth isn't something that will continue as/if people are lifted out of poverty -- when people become richer and more educated, the birth rates invariably drops.
There are many other good comments on this page now about why you are wrong citing statistics and research reports, I encourage you to read them.
Emissions are only one of the problems, the other being use of resources.
And both are a function of the population and are people get out of poverty use of energy and resources per capita only increases, compounding the overall impact, as already said.
If we were 500 million globally, for instance, we would not be having this discussion because there would be no problems.
I am not wrong, this is just a statement of fact. I am always surprised by this ostrich syndrome many have in absolutely refusing to consider that population is an issue, the key issue, even.
> If we were 500 million globally, for instance, we would not be having this discussion because there would be no problems.
I think even 500 million is too much with current lifestyles. Given that a very large proportion of current emissions are caused by 500 million.
But this aside, let's assume you are right.
Which 500 million would you preserve? How would you get there before climate change is irreversible anyway due to melting tundra etc?
Especially given that a lot of human history can be summed up as "wars to determine WHICH one will be the surviving set of humans to survive on limited resources". So which billions do you think will go willingly?
--
Yes, of course, assuming that this magically just happened it would solve the problem. So would a number of other unrealistic solutions that has nothing to do with population control. Are we going to discuss which one out of a number of completely unrealistic uptopias are best?
I see your 500 million inhabitant world, and raise with imagining a world with a population of 20 billion, with a million nuclear plants, no use of fossil fuels, LED-powered vertical farming, centralization of populations in big cities to let wildlife grow back and focus all efforts in responsible, non-disruptive mining of the resources needed.
Which one of those is more or less preferable or realistic is pointless, and distracting from possibilities that may be within reach.
> are you not saying that it may be better that 10 poor people are not born, than for rich people to do minor changes to their lifestyle?
I definitely would say that and would argue it needs to be way more than 10.
If you want to solve manmade climate change you need to solve the demand for goods that cause it. You lower demand by increasing the the supply (can't do that because that increases the emissions you try bringing down) or you increase its price making only the very rich able to afford it and delaying the problem for a decade till population catches up. We already see it with migrant crisis all over the west - both Europe and US.
You do this decade after decade, again and again each time creating more and more privileged cast that can afford it (current policy) and in essence pushing the rest of the civilisation further and further into poverty as they will never catch up and if they do - new legislation will bring them down again to mask the issue once more.
An example of that would be farmers in Europe protesting removal of diesel subsidies or just in general people being able to afford smaller and smaller cars due to taxation in Europe every year.
The problem with these "minor changes to their lifestyle" is that they need to accommodate exponentially growing population that already is a magnitude or more higher than persons who need to adjust.
We are talking about 90%+ reduction in what you call "minor changes" to achieve emission equilibrium to begin with and add that with exponentially growing population and its simply not feasible not due to lack of compassion from top percentile but because changes like these would completely anihilate the modern human civilisation and bringing it back hundreds of years.
As an example theres a very informative video on what happens to country and infrastructure when 4 million people join the power grid in a decade [1] Imagine that scaled to 4 billion and the extreme worldwide devastation.
Population control is the only way to solve climate change and it needs to be reduced everywhere but especially in the undeveloped nations as they have the most potential of bringing everything down.
> The problem with these "minor changes to their lifestyle" is that they need to accommodate exponentially growing population that already is a magnitude or more higher than persons who need to adjust.
It was approximately exponential up until around 200ish AD, fell below exponential for a few hundred years, then was above exponential for around 600 years (the growth rate was going up approximately linearly), had a period where it varied and even was slightly negative, and then around 1500ish entered a period where the growth rate was increasing almost exponentially. That lasted to around 1960, and since then the growth rate rapidly.
Here's a graph of the growth rate from 4000 BC to 2023 [1] from the data here [2].
I was curious what it is called when the growth rate itself is going up exponentially, but utterly failed to craft a search in Google that worked for me. I then tried ChatGPT (the free version) and at first it was just wrong. I reiterated that I want to know what it is called when the growth rate is going up exponentially, not when the growth is exponential. It apologized and told me it is called "exponential growth of the growth rate" or "exponential acceleration".
I tried to verify that it is called "exponential acceleration" with Google, but failed.
There's two different ways to indicate how fast a function, F(x), is growing.
One is to look at host much its value changes as x goes to x+d, and divide that to d to get an average rate of change from x to x+d. Take the limit as d -> 0 to get the instantaneous rate of change at x.
That gives a rate of change of Limit as d->0 of (F(x+d) - F(x)) / d, which is pretty much the textbook definition of d/dx F(x).
The other way is to look not at the actual value of the change but rather how much of a fraction of F(x) it was. That gives this measure: ((F(x+d)/F(x) - 1) / d. The instantaneous value would be the limit as d -> 0. That limit is of the form 0/0, but using L'Hôpital's rule we can turn it into (using the notation F'(...) for d/dx (F...)) the limit as d -> 0 of F'(x+d) / F(x) which is F'(x) / F(x).
When people talk of growth rate they usually mean this second measure. The first is usually called the rate of change. BTW, note that rate of change and growth rate are related. The growth rate is the rate of change of log(F(x)).
Exponential functions have an exponential rate of change but a constant growth rate. It is that constant growth that makes the concept of a half-life work for things that exponentially decay.
Jevon's Paradox[1] states that as efficiency increases (which itself is a form of supply increase), demand increases.
My own view is that the paradox makes the idea of population reduction moot, those remaining humans would simply use more energy because supply has gone up and demand (through lack of competition) going down to levels below supply would, again, drive prices down.
This looks to support my argument as its indeed what is happening and what is causing emissions to go up (less developed nations industrialising) due to technology trickling down. Please correct me if i'm wrong.
> My own view is that the paradox makes the idea of population reduction moot
Lets use math and assume all pollution comes from end users who can afford/drive cars (~20%) and ignore the rest of modern civilisation and set current efficiency of 1x.
8 000 000 000 * 0.2 * 1 = 1 600 000 000
Lets call the 1.6Bil a hard line that we want to sustain aka the perpetual enviormental doomsday in the current year+x.
Over the next 80 years with strict population control and current technology we can make that:
4 000 000 000 * 0.4 * 1 = 1 600 000 000 and bring 20% more people into the top percentile bringing the misery, disease, war and resource shortage down or keep it to its current form.
Or if we wanted to bring same 20% of population to the same mark with efficiency (11.2 bil is expected population by 2100) we would need to achieve efficiency of:
11 200 000 000 * 0.4 * x = 1 600 000 000
x = 1600000000/(11200000000*0.4) = 0.357
Thats an efficiency increase of ~2.8x
So it boils down to you claiming that in the next 80 years we can increase efficiency 2.8 times across the board. This does not only include energy but materials too 2.8x less materials used to build cars, houses, roads etc. And on top of that we will do it with a completely new source of energy since fossil fuels are going dry in the coming decades.
Furthermore you calling population growth moot suggest thinking that this can be repeated again ad infinitum in 2180 and 2260 and so on.
I'll put it mildly - don't think its feasible.
Edit: fixed the last calculation for clarity/typos
Sure, if we ignore the paradox altogether then you have a point, but there's a reason why this paradox has held as a useful observation for hundreds of years.
Redo those calculations as if the paradox has weight and see where you end up.
The big problem is the way that people want US-style lifestyles with big houses and cars. This consumes way more energy than European or Asian style living in apartments with public transport.
Overpopulation will solve itself as countries develop. We’ve seen that over and over.
Well, the bulk of them want more meat, washing machines and air conditioning.
The main increase of energy usage has been due to this, not people in urban areas eskewing apartments and public transport to drive cars and live in suburban houses.
The amount of concrete needed to build such big homes contributes to carbon emissions, not to mention destruction of nature, and it also costs more to heat and cool.
Th USA and other industrialised countries operated with huge emissions because oil and gas were cheap and because no one factored in the externalities. Which includes energy security.
Now that we are seeing a reversal to the status quo, you see the move to more efficient systems moving into full swing. The uptake of renewables is exponential now.
I just renovated and fully insulated my house with cellulose fiber that was actually really cheap, double glazed inner windows and installed floor heating with a hydraulic heat pump. My energy bill is almost nothing of what it used to be and I’ve not installed my solar yet, but I’ll be starting in March.
I did this because the price of gas, kerosene (water boiler) and oil have increased dramatically and the technology to do so exists and is cheap enough to make this investment a no brainer from an economic standpoint. It’s hard to imagine how cheap solar panels are now.
I’m not the only person doing this.
The USA and all other developing countries will adopt all these efficient gains at the same rate. No one is going to pay more for less.
nobody specifically wants shitty us style suburban planning with shitty us style houses. Plus it would hard to replicate that because its an artifact of historical cultural and political developments. In short it would be harder to replicate that instead of doing better.
i don't think overpopulation is the problem, but maybe it's a symptom. the problem is we've forced our way up to an unrealistically high standard of living which is completely unsustainable, and now we're trapped in an inescapable death spiral because nobody wants to go back.
people aren't willing to stop paying for conveniences because they're cheaply available, corporations aren't willing to stop selling them because there's a demand for it and money to be made, and governments aren't willing to force anybody's hand because the people and corporations will both force them out of power if they try.
there is absolutely no chance of breaking out of it other than giving up on democracy, but that will only happen when modern society collapses entirely, which will be far too late to prevent unimaginable suffering on a massive scale.
There is a difference between striving for basic amenities like clean water, healthy food etc, and the luxury of ordering vanities off Amazon every other day..
Not everyone desires the latter, yet it appears to be the much more environmentally impactful one at least at scale..
my standard of living is very sustainable. i don't drive, i don't eat meat, i rarely eat dairy, my electricity is 100% renewably sourced, i recycle diligently, i heat my home to the absolute bare mininum temperature required to be liveable and rely on wearing extra layers for warmth, i don't spend hours using power-hungry entertainment devices, i've been wearing the same shoes and clothes for ~4-5 years and i only replace things when they completely break, or if replacing it allows me to use less energy or be less wasteful in the future. it's not hard.
some of the "innocent poor countries" you're talking about are the worst offenders for deforestation, pollution, and other habitat destruction. get off of your high horse, we are all responsible for the state of the planet we live on.
The point wasn't about you specifically, just about the average Western/1st World citizen.
> some of the "innocent poor countries" you're talking about are the worst offenders for deforestation, pollution, and other habitat destruction. get off of your high horse, we are all responsible for the state of the planet we live on.
For their own sake? Or is it, among others, Western offshore companies who partake in what you blame those darn third worlders for? It's a global economy.
Think of coffee for example. Pretty sure we consume orders of magnitude more of it in the West than the rest of the World. Yet, the coffee bean plantations aren't exactly at our doors- Instead they replace forests in Guatemala, Columbia, Indonesia, etc.
Yea, yea, people making their life better is now the reason. We must all live in poverty, because that is the natural state, where we obey the needs of nature. Nature is healing!! And for that we need to abandon demoncracy.
And the leader should be who? Of course you, because only you know the solution! Cheeky ;)
you can put your fingers in your ears and say "la la la" all you want, it doesn't change the undeniable and objective truth.
everybody knows the solution, *you* know the solution, it's just a hard pill to swallow so mental gymnastics are preferable.
as a species we know that the overconsumption of resources is the problem. there are exactly zero valid arguments against that. anybody who claims that consuming less resources *isn't* the solution is either ignorant or lying.
It's not overconsumption, it's waste and pollution that are the problems. Cleaner technologies and policies are the solution. We could have decarbonized part of the economy already with nuclear power.
Degrowth is not a viable alternative on a world that's still has a large number of people that need better standards of living, and will still be adding a couple billion to the population. There's no viable economic or political model that would make degrowth work.
it is overconsumption. for one, it would be much easier to need our needs with renewable energy sources if we just consumed less energy and weren't so wasteful with it. more to the point, energy is only one part of the problem. all the clean, free energy in the universe doesn't stop deforestation, overfishing, and other habitat loss and environmental damage from unsustainable agriculture as a result of overconsumption. solving the emissions issue doesn't count for much if all the ecosystems we rely on collapse and we starve to death anyway.
degrowth is the only thing that could work at all, the lack of compatible economic and political models that would be compatible with is exactly my point, which is why we will ultimately not solve the problem.
meh, semantics. the only correct answers to the question of "how do we prevent the suffering caused by the overconsumption of resources?" are "consume less resources." or "pull more resources out of thin air using magic". whether people are unable/unwilling to do it or not is neither here or there.
Even if it all grinds to a halt tomorrow, at this point it won’t make a difference anymore. It’s the end of an era, possibly of civilization too, at least this particular flavor of it.
it would make a huge difference. sure, we can't undo the damage that has been done, but things can and will get way, way worse as we carry on without changing anything.
The human species might have a built in self-destruct / self-limiting mechanism, which is world war, possibly nuclear war, which might end up saving the planet in the really long term?
Exactly. I'm not sure if they just stepped out from under a rock... I've been hearing the overpopulation rhetoric for decades already.
In fact, nowadays I'm beginning to hear the opposite: "please have more kids". I'm in Europe atm (I'm south-american) and I'm shocked to see that natives, by and large, just do NOT have kids, or at most 1. All cultural incentives that promoted having kids seem to have been vilified. I find it kind of sad honestly...
There's no such thing as "overpopulation" on its own. There's only population relative to resource abuse. A small fraction of the population using resources at the rate that your common local billionaire or environmentally abusive megacorp uses resources will be just as "over". A much larger population appropriately pricing externalities instead of ignoring them will not be "over".
The number of people in India is not why companies like Vedanta Limited, an alumnium, iron, and gold ore mining company pollute so much.
>There's no such thing as "overpopulation" on its own. There's only population relative to resource abuse.
This is an unfortunate delusion that is widespread, and exploited by governments and industries that seek to ravage what is left of our environment for profit.
If you believe and understand that the earth is a finite place, with finite resources (as all intelligent, rational people do), then you believe and understand that this finite place, with finite resources, can only support a finite population. Of course we can debate about what exactly the "sustainable" population is and we can agree that the "sustainable" population depends on how resources are managed, used and maintained, but there can be no disagreement that this number exists, and that if there are too many people our finite resources cannot sustainably support them no manner how efficiently they are distributed.
Unfortunately far too many people don't believe this, and don't understand that the earth is a finite place with finite resources. They insist that the earth can support an infinite number of people if only we manage our finite resources properly and impose a strict enough dietary and behavioral regiment on the teeming billions stuffed onto the planet.
Most essential resources aren't consumed but part of cycles — food, water, shelter. These cycles are sustained by energy and, if we were to use it well, the sun alone provides more than enough.
A simple example of this is that water isn't used up, it gets dirty. It can be made clean again but that requires energy. This can be done by humans (water filtration) or by nature (evaporation and rain). We don't manage these cycles very well and they sometimes stretch out over too many of our lifetimes to manage (plastics, some nuclear waste) so it becomes easier to talk about resource 'use'.
The equation is pretty simple `humans × resources/human`. We can talk about reducing number of humans or reducing the resources needed per human. If we manage the cycles well, humans could inject more resources into the system instead of taking away from it. Of course this would still be limited by available energy. In that case, increasing the number of humans within energy capacity could benefit ecosystems.
We already have a lot of available energy but there is orders of magnitude more available as our technology improves — fusion, thorium fission, solar, wind, tides.
The amount of vitamins in food is trending down. We say we're farming, but the plants are living on materials delivered from petroleum or natural gas in a media where we attempt to kill all life. There's not a cycle. We shouldn't complete that cycle because our waste streams are doomed with toxic chemicals (f.ex. PFAS).
In the US we build shelters either out of carbon-intensive materials or use significant carbon fuels for upkeep... or both, usually.
It's not that the technology isn't there, we just choose not to. Hell, some 30% of people love that reality star turned president. Sadly we're getting what we deserve.
There are great opportunities here — improving farming being a great one as you mention.
Changing our farming methods to increase humus and topsoil quality should bring back vitamins to our food. Not only this but it should also capture a great amount of CO₂. I'm not sure how reliable my memory or the original calculation are but I remember reading in "The Scientist as Rebel" that if we increase our topsoil by 2 inches on currently farmed land, that should capture most of the carbon we've emitted during industrialisation.
Of course, as you mention, if we keep mindlessly following the status quo, we'll keep getting what we deserve.
Yes, but the vast majority of the resource consumption happens for people in rich countries in the West, and those are not the countries with the large population growth.
> we can agree that the "sustainable" population depends on how resources are managed, used and maintained
Good. Now read what I wrote again.
Side note on tone: The posturing ("delusion", "intelligent", "rational") makes you look bad. And it's like a thousand times worse when you're trying to pick a fight with someone by argumentatively agreeing with what they said to attack a straw man. If nobody ever told you that before, I'm sorry that you never got the benefit of that advice, and I hope it helps now that you know.
It’s not really taboo, it is being mentioned in, like, the comments on every 2nd post on climate change.
The problem with this line of thinking (and similar ones like „what about China?“) is that it basically absolves you from any responsibility in the matter. After all, there are simply too many people on the planet, what could you possibly do about it?
As other commenters pointed out - the west uses way too many resources compared to their population, and that is a problem.
And it is absolutely possible to have a society that doesn’t drain the planet dry, but not with capitalism :-)
I'm super super low carbon footprint, personally. All ARM-based computers here, just Raspberry PIs and tablets, that can run from a portable solar panel if I want. Very few possessions too. I love coding and freedom so much more that having stuff. And even more so when doing so in the forest, amongst nature.
The carbon impact of PCs is negligible for almost all people, and possessions are only a smaller portion of emissions (with the exception of high embodied carbon things like electric cars).
Important things you can influence for a low carbon footprint are:
- How do you heat and how much? Gas heating is surprisingly bad in the US due to the high amount of methane leakage
- Do you drive a lot in a combustion car, or even worse, fly?
- What kind of food do you eat? As a rough guideline, dairy and meat is pretty bad and beef much worse. Also the stuff that has to be brought in by plane.
Living in nature often makes it harder to have a low carbon lifestyle and the things often associated with "good for nature" like reducing plastic waste and organic products are often worse carbon wise.
That's an interesting question re: genetically-driven tendency to criticize those who advocate having less children. I've had the same experience when voicing my opinion as it seems you have, and I'm still not quite sure where its rooted. From the outside, it just seems like a kind of species-selfishness, like "we can be invasive but no one else can or we'll exterminate them!" like we do with deer.
> And that taboo is probably rooted in evolutionary psychology
No. It's because it inevitably puts you in the position of deciding who gets to have children while the rest are denied such privileges for the good of the species.
When I think of reducing the population I think simply of making birth control universally free and public information campaigns about the environmental cost of more humans. Nothing more than that, and that'd honestly be a huge step in a country where large swaths support abstinence-only sex education.
And in the really long term that's completely unsustainable. So it's like a pyramid scheme scam, it requires a constant influx of new entrants. Whilst destroying the planet.
I guess people even have their pension funds tied up into the system, so nearly everyone is forced to participate in it, against their wishes even.
I think not having egalitarian destribution of resources is real problem rather then overpopulation. Becoz as we see very few have most carbon footprint.
It's just that it wouldn't work because any group defecting and having more children would inherit the earth and you'd be back to square one, only now not even in control.
It's the same mistake as every other decel "solution".
It's so obvious, and so unbelievable that proponents don't think of it that one has to wonder, who pushes this? Qui bono?
Overpopulation isn’t the source of the problem, IMHO. A wild human being in their natural environment pollutes thousands of times less than an industrialised consumer.
Each American or European, whose food is grown thousands of km away, is plenty more only to make their salad. Can they be blamed for their Carbon Footprint^TM? I think we should blame the fossil fuel corporations which have turned us into fuel junkies
Is that actually true? Nature has a very low capacity per area for "wild humans". I don't think the planet would support anywhere near 8 billion "wild" (hunter-gatherer) humans.
It's estimated that we couldn't support much more than half the world population without the Haber-Bosch process. Industrial fertilizers are just that important. With hunter gatherers you'd be talking about orders of magnitude fewer people.
Probably best to focus on decoupling from fossil fuels.
The Haber-Bosch process is the primary method in producing ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen. Ammonia produced, utilized mainly as fertilizers, currently responsible for approximately 1.8% of carbon dioxide global emissions
Yes, green ammonia is a thing - not yet at scale but there are plans afoot, funded by resource billionaires, to make industrial ammonia w/out the greenhouse gas ommissions.
We should have never let the population levels grow havoc as the H&B process was introduced.
We reduced famines for a few centuries or less while the population in the most polluting countries exploded. Now, we risk famines and a possible slow death due to extreme drought due to the climate change created by the fossil
Fuel Industry, in the billions
The implementation of the H&BP was irresponsible and reckless.
I would argue the opposite. It has led to the greatest improvement of human life in history and prehistory. It's one of the cornerstones of our technological progress. It has staved off immense amounts of suffering. Even if it doesn't last it was worthwhile, because we at least have a chance to deal with future problems like climate change. Staying as a pre-industrial society would never have given us this chance.
It's actually true that some blame can be apportioned to fossil fuel companies that have actively pushed "more fuel consumption" since the 1970s, the Koch Group in particular funde a slew of think tanks to poo-poo and crash and burn any grass roots public transport movements in the USofA during the past 50 odd years.
It's less true that a valid comparison should be "if not modern 21st Century life then hunter gather".
There's a middle ground more agrarian, less hunter, lifestyle that supported a large population in the past and can likely support a larger population than Victorian times if farming | mining switched across to renewables (electric | hydrogen) instead of fossil fuels - we've learnt a lot about efficiencies in the past century, it's a matter of application and less consumption now, certainly time for less greenhouse gas being released.
> It's less true that a valid comparison should be "if not modern 21st Century life then hunter gather".
There are billions of shades of grey, like, for example, living like before the 2000’s, when the massive production of plastic crap in China produced pollution levels to skyrocket.
Wild humans would pollute less exactly because they are limited by their environment instead of torturing from cradle to the shop billions of chicks and piglets every year
Nah, its not true. Look at the overpopulated areas, look at how dirty the rivers are and how much trash is at the shore. Why should they care? Most of the people do not own anything. And owning something is considered evil as of late on HN. There is some socialist government in place and most likely it takes years to open a business when it is not a soup kitchen. Ah, business, thats evil now too.
It's not really taboo, it's just straight-up a racist right-wing talking point.
Treat it as a software optimisation problem - should you go after a large number of very minro problems, or take an axe to the single large problem that dominates your metrics?
I didn't single out a specific race, I think, I just mentioned that it was that specific region of the world where the problem was located. As far as I'm aware it was nothing to do with discrimination because of a specific characteristic (which is the definition of racism). It was just that population growth in that region was very large combined with a high per-capita CO2 footprint.
Many NGOs are actively trying to increase the availability of birth control in such regions, they are aware of the problem with unplanned pregnancy in those parts of the world. I strongly doubt there's any racism behind it.
While in the west population growth is relatively slow and we still have a high per-capita CO2 footprint.
I guess I unintentionally touched a taboo subject (racism) that's not permitted by the current moral orthodoxy, which is no different to religion in the end? I hope I'm correct about this.
I don't really care if my posts are flagged or even if I get banned from this site completely, I am exercising my 1st Amendment protected freedom of speech rights. It's just that on the Internet every forum is privately owned, there is no "public square" here, and thus all are subject to moderation and censorship.
> It was just that population growth in that region was very large combined with a high per-capita CO2 footprint.
I can't find the comment in question, but if the person above is right when they said it was about India then you are wrong that they have a high per-capita CO2 footprint.
They are under 2 tons CO2 per person per year.
That's about 40% of the world average, 25% of the EU, 22% of China, and 13% of the US.
From my observations the current rightwing meme is that women in rich countries haven't had sufficient numbers of children and measures to drive increased population should be put in place.
This is congruent with removing women's bodily autonomy, banning abortion and banning or restricting birth control of all types.
I have never in my life seen or heard anyone advocating for less use of birth control. This might be an N=1 scenario, but my bullshit'o-meter is tingling a bit.
The people I know on the right have nothing against birth control. They are just against abortion exept for exceptional circuimstances, because by that point the relevant parties had their chance with birth control. To them, abortion shouldn't be an escape hatch from bad life choices.
You make be hanging out with some fairly centrist right-leaning folks. Clarence Thomas explicitly painted a target on Griswold vs Connecticut when overturning Roe vs Wade, and quite a number of anti-abortion groups have been trying to parlay their victories versus abortion into restrictions on Plan B and IUDs.
Err - have you heard of a fella called "His Holiness The Pope"? Here is a recent summary of remarks made recently [1].
'On the subject of birth control, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “legitimate intentions on the part of the spouses do not justify recourse to morally unacceptable means (for example, direct sterilization or contraception).”
St. Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae, the landmark encyclical reaffirming Church teaching against contraception, on July 25, 1968.
In the encyclical, Paul VI warned of serious social consequences if the widespread use of contraceptives became accepted. He predicted that it would lead to infidelity, the lowering of morality, a loss of respect for women, and the belief that humans have “unlimited dominion” over the body.'
Now, mainstream Catholics are relatively moderate in terms of many modern political positions, but I hope that the fact of approximately 1bn people adopting and affirming this position establishes that my assertion isn't bullshit. Beyond Catholics I think that the "true right" (someone help me please) have many folks (often with undercuts, wild eyes and tattoo's that they regret only because if they are discovered they will disqualify them from public life) who have far stronger views. To find out about these people (I will restrain myself from more powerful descriptions of them) please investigate the "tradwife" [3] and "incel" [2] movements.
> This is congruent with removing women's bodily autonomy, banning abortion and banning or restricting birth control of all types.
There is absolutely no need to do any of that. Just tax them. Tax the childless and unmarried more. Tax the married couples with children less. Make not having children a form of wealth and tax it accordingly. The results will be achieved without a single sacrifice in personal autonomy.
> From my observations the current rightwing meme is that women in rich countries haven't had sufficient numbers of children and measures to drive increased population should be put in place.
When you get to the far right wing, it's not just about "are there sufficient numbers of children?" but "Is my favoured population subgroup having sufficient numbers of children?"
Now we're getting somewhere. The taboo is when you start accounting for christofascist families churning out children like it's a Factorio assembly line so that there are always more of "us" then there are of "them".
: The oldest continuous ice core records to date extend 123,000 years in Greenland and 800,000 years in Antarctica. Ice cores contain information about past temperature, and about many other aspects of the environment. Crucially, the ice encloses small bubbles of air that contain a sample of the atmosphere – from these it is possible to measure directly the past concentration of atmospheric gases, including the major greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.
And fossil records go back further with respect to more general climate conditions capable of sustaining various species.
But regardless, changing the climate status quo in a short time will have various impacts, only some of which we can accurately predict and model.
Millions of years of past tracking of a baseball (assuming one could last that long) has little bearing on the trajectory when thrown yesterday.
We're informed by past conditions and responses - but the most recent conditions (climatic parameters steady state wrt decadal means for past several thousand years + most recent hundred years of atmospheric change) are what matters now wrt AGW.
Hmmm....this post has stayed on top on hackernews (while I didn't visit the link shared in this post) AND the video shared in this post also shows up on top on youtube.
Same has also happened with this hackernews post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39162856 (I didn't visit the link shared in this post either) and looks like this post didn't get 'as much' traction on HN as compared to the above one. However, the video shared in this post also came up on top on youtube.
Looks like HN is a good place to boost your content on YT, if it gets pushed to the top!
I was always pro-environment and pro-more-industry-regulations, since I can think. Then came Greta and the doomsayers. Realising there is really nothing more I can do--I am already walking to work and don't even own a car--I stopped supporting apocalypse-loving-movements and went back to living my life as I used to do.
I was developed an aversion for the climate apocalypse movement since. I wonder, if they managed to alienate people without a car and very low CO2 footprint, what demographic is actually left to cater to?
BTW, this phenomenon is very old. Thausands of years ago, religious nuts already announced the end of the world.
Soem religious movements like the 7th day adventists even were born out of a failed waiting for the end. That was, IIRC, in the 19th century, at a time when people didn't even know what polution will be.
We have a built-in tendency to predict our own downfall. A sort of built-in mental illness that needs to be worked against.
> I wonder, if they managed to alienate people without a car and very low CO2 footprint, what demographic is actually left to cater to?
With climate deniers and conspiracists I always suppose they hide their real stance and it is revealed through small hints they let out. I strongly believe these small hints are baits to see if the other party has the same beliefs. They will be lying until they think there are in like-minded company (or are too drunk and let it out).
Yeah, I have been burned hard before by climate and covid deniers who lied right out to my face. They are dishonest and advance in disguise (with loaded questions and fake scepticism and the whole arsenal of arguments coming from fabricated doubt factories).
I'm the same. I'm a quiet greenish person. I don't own a car I walk and I hate these death cults whose sole nihilism is that you shouldn't exist, you were born into Original Sin™ for being the wrong sex/gender/race/country, and when you aren't busy killing off things you enjoy, you yourself can only be green when you die. The logistical thing to these cults is suicide to prevent global warming, so they mentally circle the drain constantly.
> you were born into Original Sin™ for being the wrong sex/gender/race/country
Which world do you live in? It can’t be Earth. Go outside and talk to people and please realize spending all your time online is bad for your health. What you’ve described here doesn’t exist.
I'm not part of them. But they do exist. Original Sin ™ is a powerful concept, for example see the eagle and the condor prophecy, a radical lefist group that seeks to use south Americans as leverage, taking selfies with them at the border and luring them north. https://blog.pachamama.org/the-eagle-and-the-condor-prophecy
The rise of asylum seekers is due to this cult which believes in many of these sins. I am just as alarmed that it exists. They are the same political activists who failed to stop the pipeline have put their efforts here. Those caravans are NOT organic.
I used to worry about climate (80s), now I dont (20s).
Why?
1. Too many lies. In the 80s the water level was rising, but it didn't. Then acid rains would kill all, but did not. Then ...
2. I cannot change it. Using fossils (or other tech with big "environmental" impact) is a great way to scale business. The "economy God" is to important to actually go an fix the problem. That why we see no real solutions being implemented and climate agreements being ignored/ not signed.
3. The focus on CO2 is stupid. There are worse problems: fine dust, pollution, disruption of ecosystems. But we now totally focus on CO2 (or CO2-equevalents).
I do have a solution. Remove (gradually) all taxation, in favor tax on pollution and usage of particular scarce resources (e.g. land, water, fossils, radio frequencies, etc.) This way the market will solve the problem. Housing and labour (two examples of wholesome things that are currently heavily taxed) will become a lot cheaper, and polluting will become expensive.
Capitalism has shown itself to have a complete inability to correctly price in the value of ecosystem services and the costs of environmental externalities. The profit cycle also operates on too small a timeframe for these climate issues.
Thinking the market will save us is just a convienient pipe dream.
> Thinking the market will save us is just a convienient pipe dream.
I think you should dig a little deeper into my comment before calling me out on my supposed pipe dreams.
I say taxation (which is NOT a market force, but a govt intervention in a market) can be used to then let the market fix the problem. Especially given that I also say that tax on "wholesome" things such as labour and housing should be abolished. To break it down for you: a massage these days costs, say, 50 USD for 30mins, because labour and the parlours location are expensive. For 50 USD I can order bin bags full of plastic rubbish (toys) from China (plastic, transport, im/ex, are all suuuuuuper cheap). I suggest to use taxation to the other way: make labour/housing cheap and transport/plastic expensive.
> Government money printing has created a huge number of bullshit jobs.
I dont know if there is a causal relation, but both are rampant.
For me the worst is how hollow the word "science" has become. I refer to the old law-based science as "natural or hard science" nowadays. And all climate models (on a highly complex open system that is the earth) are not hard science. Also virology side-stepped Koch's postulate on isolation and transmittability.
So according to "science" a treatment is "safe and effective" and in a few months turns out to be neither safe nor effective: but barely anyone can reflect on that because all are too invested in their own story. That's not science (nor hard nor soft), that's a cargo cult.
Koch's postulate's can't work on viruses, that's not how viruses work. How do you propagate an obligate parasite in a pure culture? Mycobacterium leprae (the cause of leprosy) fails Koch's postulates as well, because of the same "pure culture" issue. Plaque assays clearly show viruses exist and they are self controlling due to the dilution of the original sample and their ability to still work when the virus is cloned.
There’s nothing much to do. An environmentalist told me that it’s a few big companies that are causing it all but that I was greenwashing it by buying Terrapass so now I’ve stopped. I grew up in the city, too, but apparently that was the problem because you’re surrounded by a concrete jungle so now I’m buying a home in the hills. It’s pretty cool, honestly. I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t just live in the hills since it’s better for the environment.
Wouldn't per capita emissions in a city be lower? Simply because of transport - we're far more likely to use public transport than folks living in rural areas.
But use transport daily. Ironically, at least in the typical North American city, you can’t do anything without a machine to take you over long distances.
In the rural area, you maybe travel once a week to stock up but otherwise don’t need transportation at all.
How much? If that's 1% of car (making this up), would this be a real practical issue?
By the way this argumentation is great to sabotage any argument to keep the statusquo. When someone argues for a way better solution, tell why it's still not 100% perfect to make people to believe it has the same flaws than the previous state. Repeat until someone finds a 100% perfect solution (hint: there is never such a thing).
> By the way this argumentation is great to sabotage any argument to keep the statusquo.
Exactly. The direction we need to head is obvious: Stop treating cities like wanna rural areas for poor people and turn them into actual cities, where everything is right there and travel isn't necessary – not by car, not by train, not by bike, not by anything.
But, indeed, a move from the status quo is uncomfortable, so we get silly things like "But, but, my bike is better than a car!", completely missing the forest for the trees.
I am not arguing against biking, just pointing out that with current materials, there is still pollution emitted. As you said, cars are likely exponentially worse.
Shoes have the same problem, except for some very expensive artisan brands. They may actually be worse per mile than biking.
Riding a bike for 2 miles emits roughly half as much CO2 as does walking the same distance, and a car with an ICE produces an order of magnitude more (even ignoring manufacturing).
But, as always, the question is not what mode of transport is more efficient, but why are you travelling at all?
Historically, the whole reason for a city's existence was so that everything was right there. But cities, especially North American cities, for someone reason have to decided to become rural areas for people too poor be able to afford to live in actual rural areas.
A car is more or less efficient than cycling, depending on the food, car and source of electrical power, and manufacturing CO2 production. The bicycle production emits a less CO2 than the car production, tilting the comparison at the beginning of the lifecycle of both.
The GHG emissions associated with food intake required to fuel a kilometre of walking range between 0.05 kgCO2e/km in the least economically developed countries to 0.26 kgCO2e/km in the most economically developed countries.
A Tesla model 3 according to WLTP test cycle uses
0.191 kWh / km * 0.434 kgCO2e/kWh = 0.083 kgCO2e / km
The alternative is to stay close to home, not drive a vehicle of any kind. But the North American city, strangely, scatters everything over large distances, making life impractical without a machine to carry you.
Hi, CO2 and work-out Captain here. I don't know how much CO2 you typically exhale when you do push ups but it is nothing near the exhaust fumes by your 5lt gasoline SUV built in 1990.
It’s funny how travel has become so ingrained into the urban psyche that it doesn’t occur that not travelling is an option.
It’s especially funny as you would think the whole reason people want to live so close to other people is because they don’t want to travel far to engage with other people… Yet it is always about how to get as far away from them as possible, whether by bike or train or whatever it takes.
Yeah but per-capita emissions were revealed to me to be a trick that corporations have played on us to make us take responsibility for their sins.
It was easier to ebike in the city, for sure. But a GMC Sierra makes the hills all right too. And it’s much better here for the environment because I’m not endorsing the capitalist view that everything should be grey concrete.
It’s terrible that they would rather create smog in cities than live among nature in a 5 br / 5 ba. But human greed and capitalism are just too powerful.
Not an unreasonable argument, though I can't help but remember the empirical evidence we saw when everyone stopped driving for a period in 2020.
That said, I've tried to open my eyes to greenwashing. For example, most plastic recycling is a lie sold by oil companies (#1 and #2 are really the only ones that have a hope of being recycled), so I've worked hard to avoid plastic packaging.
I got involved in climate advocacy in 2021. Since then I’ve successfully lobbied my local government to start an energy resources study, which will look at ways for my community to quickly transition to renewables. A small thing. But if we all do small things, it will add up!
Still though. My state, Arizona has really terrible people writing awful laws. This legislative session they’re proposing a 12.5% tax on purchasing solar if you’re not a utility, and a bunch of other regressive, anti-free market, pro-fossil fuel legislation [1]. We’re going to vote these people out of office this November and remove barriers to using our states abundant solar resources.
And since HN is a startup and technology forum, we need cheap utility scale energy storage as soon as we can get it. It exists, but solar+storage is just a bit too expensive for most regions of the country. If it does become cheaper than methane, that makes the move away from fossil fuels much easier. If you want to work on this, do it.
But also, citizens engagement is crucial. If you live in a regressive state like mine. It’s super important to get involved. If you live in a place that is going in the right direction, engage on the implementation details, there are so many ways good climate policy can get derailed in bureaucracies. There are a ton of groups that you can work with on this [2] [3] [4].
[1] https://legiscan.com/AZ/bill/HB2281/2024
[2] https://citizensclimatelobby.org/
[3] https://www.sierraclub.org/
[4] https://www.environmentalvoter.org/