
In Antarctica, climate change is having surprising impacts - NeedMoreTea
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/11/antarctica-climate-change-western-peninsula-ice-melt-krill-penguin-leopard-seal/
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burlesona
If North American culture could learn to build new small cities that didn’t
need cars - as the old cities were built - and successfully market and sell
them to today’s suburban crowd, we’d have a much better chance at stopping
this.

It kills me, though, just how impossible that would be.

~~~
aphextron
>It kills me, though, just how impossible that would be.

Is it though? It seems completely like a matter of will. I've thought about
this exact idea before. How much VC would it take to build a small town? A
couple billion? People are throwing gobs of money ten times that at absolute
nonsense right now. Why couldn't we use it for meaningful progress instead?

~~~
api
The allure of gambling is powerful. Everyone can estimate ROI on a planned
community. Nobody can estimate ROI on hot air, so it "could" be "the next"
whatever-the-last-thing-was. Nobody wants to be the one who passed on Facebook
or Bitcoin in 2014 to invest in something boring like housing.

Statistically huge pops like those are extremely rare. Someone wins in the
casino but statistically it won't be you. Statistically you are better off
making rational investments. But... FOMO and daydreams and... there was that
one time! ... rat pushes lever, rat pushes lever...

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jnurmine
A thought. Bear with me, I might be catching a cold.

When a planetary climate is being intentionally altered in a large scale, it
is called terraforming.

But just who benefits from terraforming the Earth to be more hostile to human
civilization?

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titanomachy
Sort of, I think "to terraform" usually means "to make more like Earth"
though.

~~~
jnurmine
Yes, indeed. You are correct. A better term would have been "climate
engineering".

Though I wonder if "venusforming" is also apt, keeping in mind what the
results are said to be down the line.

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walrus01
I am still astonished that there are people out there, particularly
politicians, who can look at the atmospheric co2 charts for the past 50 years
at Mauna Loa, vs ice core sample data going back hundreds of thousands of
years, and go "nope, no greenhouse gases, no global warming".

[https://www.google.ca/search?q=atmospheric+co2+mauna+loa&oq=...](https://www.google.ca/search?q=atmospheric+co2+mauna+loa&oq=atmospheric+co2+mau&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0l2.5168j0j7&sourceid=chrome-
mobile&ie=UTF-8)

~~~
guscost
This is a tricky subject, and we're probably on opposing sides of the
political argument, but if you're interested:

Sure, there are people who say "no greenhouse gases, no global warming" and
stop thinking at that point. Some of them are in positions of power. This kind
of attitude is dangerous and could lead to big mistakes in the long term. On
the other hand, the people who say "greenhouse gases, but maybe not much
global warming" or "land use and healthy ecosystems are most important" or
"gradually moving toward less carbon in fuel is the best approach" never seem
to get a shout-out from the activists.

It's usually more like: "We're trying to save these neanderthals and they're
stupid/tricked by evil so they're going to end up killing us all."

Can you see how this doesn't lead to healthy cooperation? The "no greenhouse
gases, no global warming" people might not know how to study the climate, but
do you really believe that _all_ of them were fed that mantra by bad actors,
and _none_ of them are just lashing out at bullies?

From my perspective, the activists started their political campaign to
regulate CO2 back when the Science (IPCC FAR) said "the observed increase
could be largely due to this natural variability" and I have been suspicious
of their motives ever since. You want me to be mindful of carbon in the
atmosphere, measured temperature trends, changing ecosystems, pollution, and
resource use? Great, those are all smart things to care about.

You want me to support your political campaign to regulate the gas that I
exhale, because otherwise there will be a doomsday, and if I don't agree I'm
either stupid or evil? Ehhhhh, no thanks.

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taneq
It's hard to have a conversation about something important like this when
anything but fervent acceptance of the party line is immediately derided as
ignorant, backwards and/or deliberately obtuse. The left certainly seems to be
a lot more "with us or against us" than they used to.

~~~
xapata
Funny, you could say the same thing about the Right.

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lurquer
Plenty of examples.

Every day we read of Professors not receiving tenure because they believe in
global warming. Articles that support global warming being rejected from
journals. Notable commentators suggesting the belief in global warming should
be criminalized.

Whatever.

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ACC_investor
What is the best way to invest (long-term) in climate change?

~~~
drankula3
Personally, I am thinking very hard about buying rural land in Canada, as
global warming and mass migration may cause the price of land to go up
substantially over time. I haven't run the numbers or pulled the trigger yet
though.

~~~
flycaliguy
What part of Canada, have you researched the best spot? I'd be curious to
know. I own a swampy patch of land with some peat moss potential on PEI. Part
of me wonders if that whole island will be under water just when I need it...

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yters
A number of reasonable sounding posts get a lot of down votes for some reason.
Not sure why that has to happen, nor that is helps the case much.

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akvadrako
It looks like it's mostly just people arguing about global warming, bringing
in their usual prejudices and incomplete knowledge. That's been rehashed here
so many times it can't be done in good faith.

Maybe if the comments were more focused on the specifics of the article.

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dawhizkid
There's something about reading an article like this that makes all the small
things I seem to worry about go away.

