

IPCC Concludes Climate Change is Irreversible, Effective Responses Needed - couchnaut
http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2014/03/31/324799.htm
Third (and last) try to see if the HN crowd gives a shit
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webmaven
I just know a segment of the media will take this to mean we now don't have to
do anything to try and stop _further_ climate change, because change is now
inevitable.

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ptr
Be happy you've got a segment like that. Here, media is quite one-sided.

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webmaven
That doesn't make sense... I should be _happy_ that the media will switch from
'climate change isn't happening, so we don't have to do anything' to 'climate
change is hapenning, but isn't bad, so we don't have to do anything', and now
to 'climate change is bad, but inevitable, so we don't have to do anything'?

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cultureulterior
Irreversible? So even if we built a machine to liquify and store the entire
atmosphere in a giant gas bottle, we'd still get greenhouse effects?

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couchnaut
I'm not a climate scientist myself but the consensus seems to be that we're
past a lot of tipping points already. Some even go as far as write us off
altogether.

In any case the story is huge but the real weird part turned out to be the
indifference of people in here. Weird -at least to me- because I thought that
HN readers are mainly people that have a wider and deeper understanding of how
the world works and thus (I assumed) a greater sensitivity on setting the
priorities right. Meaning that probable extinction should rank higher than
this or that new framework.

All in all I submitted the story three times (that's the third). This time I
got most attention - 7 votes.

I rest my case.

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thedrbrian
What if people stopped having so many kids?

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dancunningham
They are already doing that, the fertility rate is approaching 1 in many
countries, especially developed ones.

Problem isn't kids, it is all the people already born becoming richer and
starting to live a western middle class lifestyle.

We just need to make the desirable western middle class lifestyle a low carbon
one.

For this it means changing how we produce energy, our agricultural and food
system (huge carbon impact) and reducing our overconsuming behaviour. We need
to make it desirable to have things that last.

Read "How bad are bananas" for perspective on the relative impacts and most
important problems to solve.

We can also incentivise energy and business moving in the right direction by
setting a price on carbon (emissions), ideally globally agreed though we can
start setting examples nationslly.

Huge reforestation will also go a long way.

We have the solutions we just need to implement them.

If you want to join the Geeklist Corps of Developers in making this low carbon
future a reality join #hack4good in September, we'll be hacking against
climate change in 30+ cities around the world in the run up to the UN Climate
Summit in September.

Let's hack a better world!

Join at [http://hack4good.io](http://hack4good.io) and share your ideas and
thoughts below.

