
Ask HN: Can you help me learn about climate change? - dsacco
Hey HN friends,<p>I&#x27;m pretty concerned about the ramifications of climate change but I find myself woefully under-informed.<p>The difficulty I have is finding unbiased sources. To be clear - I believe in the phenomenon, and I believe in the consensus about our species causing it. But I find any searches I do through Google (for example) to be so muddled by catastrophizing and political strife that I find it hard to learn anything of value. So, I turn to this community.<p>Specifically, I&#x27;m looking for resources, or ways to find resources, that help me with the following:<p>1. I want to learn the technical causes of climate change (for example, I get that CO2 is bad, but I don&#x27;t know much about the phrase &quot;400 PPM.&quot;) and the &quot;current state of global warming.&quot;<p>2. I want to understand grounded, realistic consequences due to happen in the next 10, 20 and 30 years.<p>3. I want to know what can and cannot be changed at this point, and I want to know what I can do to help as a non-scientist.<p>I am not averse to reading technical papers on this if it means I can learn about this in as &quot;pure&quot; a way possible. I also don&#x27;t mean this to come across as lazy, I just really don&#x27;t know what I don&#x27;t know and I&#x27;ve seen enough convincingly educated comments here to ask.
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dalke
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming)
covers much of that.

1\. Humans pollute. One form of pollution is exhaust gases. We burn a lot of
fossil fuels. One of the resulting gasses is CO2 - carbon dioxide. This ends
up in the atmosphere.

CO2 is naturally present in the atmosphere. However, we are putting CO2 into
the atmosphere faster than it can be taken out. One reason is that fossil
fuels are a form of long-term storage, which took CO2 out of the ecosystem
across a long period of time. We are returning that CO2 at a much faster rate
than it was created.

CO2 is a "greenhouse gas." It acts as an insulator for infrared energy, a.k.a,
"heat". Light comes to the earth from the Sun, warms up the planet, and is re-
radiated back into space. This includes a shift from visible to infrared
energy. CO2 blocks infrared more than it does visible, so adding CO2 to the
atmosphere can result in more heat.

(The mechanics are very complicated. Clouds reflect light, so lower energy.
The oceans absorb CO2 but become more acidic.)

The amount of CO2 in the air is small. It's measured in parts per million, or
"ppm". The "400 ppm" is a semi-symbolic threshold which indicates the severity
of the problem. It's been over a million years since the CO2 levels were his
high, meaning (roughly) that insulation level is this high, meaning (roughly)
that it's going to get hotter.

2\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming)
gives a good summary of the effects of global warming.

3\. I cannot answer this one. There are a myriad of possibilities.

> I also don't mean this to come across as lazy, I just really don't know what
> I don't know and I've seen enough convincingly educated comments here to
> ask.

To help pursuade people that you aren't lazy, you could include information
about what you've looked at, or why you feel like the Wikipedia pages are
insufficiently unbiased.

There are many documents referenced from those pages.

A search for the IPCC reports includes pointers to things like [http://ipcc-
wg2.gov/AR5/images/uploads/WG2AR5_SPM_FINAL.pdf](http://ipcc-
wg2.gov/AR5/images/uploads/WG2AR5_SPM_FINAL.pdf) "Climate Change 2014 /
Impacts, Adaption, and Vulnerability / Summary for Policymakers".

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evolve2k
> what I can do to help.

This excellent piece was on the front page of HN in last 12 months.

'What can a technologist do about climate change'

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622615](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622615)

