
UN Says Climate Genocide Is Coming. It’s Actually Worse Than That - chuckdries
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/un-says-climate-genocide-coming-but-its-worse-than-that.html
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curiousity
Defeatism is endemic to comment threads like this. I'm not sure what the
purpose of these comments is, to be honest. If anything, it's a self-
fulfilling prophecy.

Let me offer an alternative point of view. Yes, the climate will be
irreparably damaged. Yes, lots of humnas will suffer. These things seem to be
unavoidable. The harm to both our planet and its citizens is happening as we
speak. However, the scale to which this occurs is in our control.

This is an all-hands-on-deck sort of scenario. Everyone will need to pitch in,
whatever they can, however they can. Travel less internationally. Reduce (or
eliminate if possible) your meat and animal product consumption. Buy less.
Vote for candidates that support renewable energy and environmentally friendly
initiatives. There's a thousand ways an individual can help by voting with
their wallet, their time, and their participation in their political system.

Everything you do, every choice you make today and for the rest of your life,
potentially affects the lives of future generations. In my opinion, the most
harmful thing you can do, is choosing to do nothing.

Edit: Seeing this is Hacker News, I know a lot of people are going to be
commenting with technical suggestions - lab grown meats, renewable energy
sources, carbon capture, geoengineering etc. I am very much in favour of these
solutions. However, (as far as I know) none of these currently exist at such a
scale or level of sophistication so as to make my initial point irrelevant.

~~~
ForHackernews
> In my opinion, the most harmful thing you can do, is choosing to do nothing.

I disagree. Millions of Americans and one of two major political parties are
_actively obstructing_ action to mitigate the impact of climate change.

Doing nothing is better than doing things to actively hamper positive efforts.

~~~
r00fus
You can't control what others do. You can control what you (and perhaps your
immediate family) do.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

~~~
p3nt3ll3r
Seriously? Do I have to list countless individuals who fought multinational
corps and won b/c they were being screwed? Telling your family to put the
hamburgers down aint going to help this situation.

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sys_64738
When the ice shelves in Greenland (40 foot sea level rise) and Antarctica (200
foot seas level rise) occur then I reckon it'll not be gradual but will be a
sudden collapse. All within a very short space of months.

The real issue is that nobody has proven this wasn't going to occur anyway.
This is always the downfall with climate science in that there is no explicit
proof that anything man does to the planet would alter what was going to occur
anyway.

Climate scientists also have an agenda to keep their funding so will never say
"there is no issue" but will always point to the inevitable as it matches what
they want for a conclusion.

Follow the money, as they say.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The real issue is that nobody has proven this wasn't going to occur anyway.

Are you saying that the contribution of CO₂ levels to warming isn't
established, or that the human role in increasing CO₂ levels isn't
established? Because both of those are very well established.

> This is always the downfall with climate science in that there is no
> explicit proof that anything man does to the planet would alter what was
> going to occur anyway.

This is only true in the sense where “explicit proof” is restricted to pure
abstract domains like math and not applicable to any domain of material fact;
to the extent that it is possible to “prove” anything about what would happen
in counterfactual alternative conditions in the material universe, though,
this has been proven.

~~~
stmfreak
CO2 follows warming if you look at the data too closely.

No one has proved that mankind’s contribution is material to the underlying
trend, nor proved that warming will be as bad as claimed. So what if Greenland
becomes green again?

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chriskanan
While things look gloomy, that pretty much ignores geoengineering as a
possibility. Chapter Four of the IPCC report [0] discusses things that could
be done to offset or slow down this process. Besides renewable/nuclear energy
and getting rid of cattle (methane emissions), it discusses geoengineering
methods to actively compensate for what we have done to the environment. One
of the more interesting and cost effective ideas is stratospheric aerosol
injection (SAI):

 _" There is high agreement that cost of stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI)
(not taking into account indirect and social costs, research and development
costs and monitoring expenses) may be in the range of 1–10 billion USD yr–1
for injection of 1–5 MtS to achieve cooling of 1–2 W m–2 (Robock et al., 2009;
McClellan et al., 2012; Ryaboshapko and Revokatova, 2015; Moriyama et al.,
2016), suggesting that cost-effectiveness may be high if side-effects are low
or neglected (McClellan et al., 2012)."_ [0]

Some of the other options are outlined in Table 4.7 of the report. Given that
these are not _that_ expensive and could radically reduce temperature, I think
we should be doing a lot more to research both the intended and unintended
consequences. I strongly think some entity is going to try some of them, and
some have already been done by folks:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/19/science/earth/iron-
dumpin...](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/19/science/earth/iron-dumping-
experiment-in-pacific-alarms-marine-experts.html?_r=0)

If you are interested in mitigating climate change, I encourage you to read
through chapter 4 of the IPCC report which covers many of the possible
methods.

[0] Chapter 4 of the IPCC report;
[http://report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_chapter4.pdf](http://report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_chapter4.pdf)

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nine_k
The more interesting part to me: at the +4 C warming, a lot of currently most
productive and populous areas in subtropics will become too hot for humans to
live. This will lead to deaths, migrations, and, of course, food insecurity.

Also, melting of enough of Antarctic ice may raise the level of oceans so much
that protecting coastal cities with dams will become impractical. That is,
whole countries, like the Netherlands, currently have a lot of their territory
below sea level, and had for centuries. But this only works for a difference
of several meters, but is unlikely to work for e.g. 50m.

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Lidador
Gore said 2015.

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na92
Clean energy is coming, but slowly.

People are not going to get off their cars and hop on a bike.

There is something you can do, today, to mitigate one of the biggest causes of
climate change.

Give up meat and dairy.

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/10/huge-
red...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/10/huge-reduction-in-
meat-eating-essential-to-avoid-climate-breakdown)

Ironically the thing that is easiest to do is also the last one people want to
do.

I always thought that the fight against meat and dairy was a moral one. I
didn't know the toll it takes on the environment, until I specifically went
looking for it. It is one of the best kept capitalist secrets.

~~~
Apocryphon
Why not just have people switch to poultry? White meat is healthier, anyway.
People aren’t going to go vegetarian directly but surely there are half-
measures that are a good first step.

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sosense
"Climate change" hysteria is being pushed hard now, with articles every day
here on HN.

