"Many of the threats we know are associated with climate change are slow moving. Gradually rising seas, a steady uptick in extreme weather events, and more all mean that change will come gradually to much of the globe."
Wicked Problems [1] are going to kick our arses over the next century, and I don't see how we're going to get through it without large-scale death and horror. There just isn't the political or social will to address the problems - and if we ever do get our act together then I can't see how it'll be anything other than too late. Mose things on HN seem utterly trivial when I'm reminded of this.
Slow buildup. Rate of change increasing. Underlying mechanisms likely to be be non-linear. Requires large-scale human cooperation to fix. Powerless people substantially more affected than the powerful.
I think the wicked problem is the impacts of climate change, the unpredictable weather patterns. It's really hard to solve the problem of hurricane season expanding, or multiple strong hurricanes per season. It's hard to solve the problem of rising sea levels that cause sea walls to be breached any time there's a moderate storm. It's hard to solve increasing desertification causing water shortages which increases world migration and destabilizes economies leading to the rise in disaffected youth in poverty stricken countries that then leads to a rise in gang violence which then unifies under a banner and attempts to establish a new nation causing a civil war which only further increases world migration further destabilizing economies and politics around the world. It's hard to solve... you get the picture.
Rising CO2 levels are the cause of the wicked problems, not the wicked problem itself. We know people are dying from climate change, but determining what will directly cause those deaths and how to prevent them is the problem.
Personally, I would worry more about a meteor wiping out humanity than climate change.
There isn't political or social will because those on the extreme ends of both sides are controlling it making it impossible to meet somewhere in the middle. Which is what politics have to do to move anywhere.
Many of us understand very well that the climate is changing and that humans might have something to do with it, we just don't know to what extent.
But even posing such an idea will get you put into the "climate denier" category in a heartbeat and stop all rational discussion.
There are other ways to think about this. Here is one.
Humans have historically been living at the mercy of nature, nature is rather unforgiving and quite harsh.
Over the time we have adjusted to climate change and we always will have to as the climate will always be changing.
I would personally rather be in our current situation and have a fighting chance to improve than being left with the chances I had as a person 200 years ago for even basic natural causes.
The wicked problem isn't that there isn't political will but that we can't both secure the continued prosperity of humanity and at the same time not have an impact on the environment we live.
The way out of our problems is not to stop up but to continue improving technology and energy utilization. A great start would be to get back to nuclear but I am under no illusion that there are many rationally minded people left in the environmental organizations anymore.
The problem is human infrastructure is built around existing climates. Something small like 2% more rain seems meaningless, but add that on top of extreme events and overtopping levees instead of being a 100 year event it's a 10 year event. Tropical diseases / insects stop being so tropical etc etc. It's a death of 1000 cuts.
On top of that clean energy is cheap, the difference between coal electricity and renewable sources is vastly less than the costs from climate change. So doing nothing has significant costs from climate changes but cutting emissions 50% is fairly cheap.
PS: Electric cars might win on their own even without considering climate change. So, we can make huge difference in adoption without significant costs.
It's just not that easy. We also have 14% more green vegetation today than 30 years ago. The climate system is one endless positive negative feedback system and we don't have enough data to say anything truly conclusive other than the climate is changing and things are getting hotter.
Anyone claiming they know how this is going to turn out on either side are simply lying or are trapped in some ideological self-delusion. We have no way of knowing.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything but just that what we should do might not be ignoring the reality of a majority of this world who are not rich enough to install solar panels on their roofs.
With regards to the Pascals wager argument again I am more worried about a meteor hitting us and that brings us back to the discussion again about how to ensure growth which pays for technological advancements and helps more people get out of poverty.
Clean energy isn't cheap, it's subsidized heavily (yes other energy forms are too) and it's just not realistic for most of the world to use solar cells or wind as they don't have the infrastructure at all to support unreliable energy sources.
My personal belief is that we should assume the climate is changing and then use that to build solutions rather than endless and meaningless debates about whether climate change is true or not which brings us nowhere and doesn't change the climate.
If you believe things are going to be bad then make a company that deals with the things you believe are most problematic. If you believe the sea levels are rising the build solutions to deal with that if you believe methane is going to suffocate us then figure out how we can encapsulate it.
> The climate system is one endless positive negative feedback system and we don't have enough data to say anything truly conclusive other than the climate is changing and things are getting hotter.
The no-feedback warming per doubling of CO2 is 3.7 W/m^2, which is held to be roughly equivalent to 1 degree of global temperature. There are some fairly readily ascertainable facts about climate change, sufficient to demonstrate that it is happening, and that it is caused by human CO2 emissions. The Earth is a complex system, but the critical effects are at the top of the atmosphere, which is much less complex. The lower bound for the warming effects is consequently very well known. And it's not so much the case that there are large quantities of this other well-known greenhouse gas lying around, and more like we misnamed this planet. There is uncertainty when trying to model anything, but I'm afraid at this point the "not a serious problem" warming scenarios have been ruled out.
These problems are definitely going to be serious. But how serious they will be and whether or not all the doom and gloom is justified depends on how our societies react to the challenges.
It depends on how quickly we can develop technology and make it available to everyone. It depends on how quickly people can adapt to migration situations. It depends on countless non linear interactions that are unpredictable.
I think what we can say is that the pace of change is absolutely crucial. If land is lost to deserts or to the sea at a pace noticable only by asking your great grand parents, then I think we're good.
But if a billion people have to move within 20 or 30 years because large poor cities can no longer be defended against the sea or because technology to deal with desertification is only available to rich countries then I fear the gloom and doom is more than justified.
Well, considering that nearly 2 billion will die in the normal course over the next 30 years, I would suspect it's not as big a deal as you make out.
None of the infrastructure in s low-lying city like Miami is designed to last more than a few decades anyway. Gradually move a bit inland, or elevate foundations, or throw up a levee. Big woop. Not that big of a deal. Pretty much every structure standing -- every road, bridge, airport -- is going to be demolished and replaced within the next century anyway.
Infrastructure is generally built to last for a very long time. The average US bridge is 42 years old with many over 100 years old. Further, the tendency is to not move when the ocean rises just look at Venice. People are going to move as otherwise useful infrastructure is destroyed at vast expense.
> But if a billion people have to move within 20 or 30 years because large poor cities can no longer be defended against the sea or because technology to deal with desertification
That seems perfectly reasonable. Nowhere near doom and gloom. There's no doom there, that I can see. Moving a billion people is not that big of a deal, as long as there is incentive. The idea that "the sea" will push people around has been going on forever and doesn't cause mass migrations in terms of the earth. It's the food and distribution a population has to worry about that will cause trouble. Everything else is well within human abilities to mitigate (even when average lifespans decrease by a few decades).
We have no other choice probably. But I have no idea what the point of saying it's going to be easy when nothing even remotely close has happened in the history of humanity, and we can't even deal with infrastructure problems for a few thousand people at a time due to the incredible greed inherent to human society. It is rather a humanity breaking event that approaches, and its weight is heartbreaking.
Moving a 1,000,000,000 people is not that difficult? Do you have any idea what you're talking about? That would be the largest migration in human history, by a wide margin.
Recently, we've had something on the order of 2,500,000 people moving to Europe and it's widely seen as somewhere between a crisis and a catastrophe.
I think I have a better conceptualization than many people "discussing" this issue.
> That would be the largest migration in human history, by a wide margin
Nope. How many people have migrated from mexico to the US over the last 50 years? Are you assuming that one day 1 million people wake up and everyone has to move because the ocean is rising? How many feet to permanently displace 1 million over what time and how far do you really think anyone will go? You get people living next to live volcanos in Hawaii where the largest island is kinda the size of Orange County, CA. smh
I agree but again then we are back to Pascals Wager. I consider meteor hit more dangerous and human flourishing more important than climate change for the reasons I oulined.
Risk is dependent on probability not just outcome. The odds of a major asteroid hitting in the next 50 years is under 1 in 1,000,000 so it's not worth spending much effort preventing. Climate change is close to 100% certain so it's worth spending vastly more effort preventing relative to the downsides.
Really though, I am talking about spending well under 1/1,000th US GDP. So, that's worth it even if climate change is bad, but not devastating.
The risk of a large amount of humans dying from not being prosperous enough to care for themselves every year the next 100 years is 100% if there is not enough growth.
You are welcome to isolate this discussion if thats what you need, but to convince me at least you will need show a much broader perspective here and care not just for nature and the people that might be here in the future but also those who are here right now.
I am less worried about climate change than of many other things including a major or even fairly large meteor.
Do you think Climate Change is somehow going to help these people? Because it's also going to directly kill a lot of people in absolute terms.
The technology is here, using current levels of fossil fuels is not going to aid global GDP. It's really more a question of which groups end up with the proceeds and many very wealthy people would be worse off if oil fields become worthless. That's the push-back on this issue.
PS: It's not even a jobs issue, there are only 50,000 coal mining jobs in the US. It's all about infrastructure and owning existing resources.
I think that denying them access to cheap and reliable fuel such as fossil fuels isn't going to allow them to deal with the climate change thats happening no matter what we do.
It's not a question of limiting coal/oil. The global poor can't afford these resources today and that's not going to change.
The third world mostly avoided using landlines because cellphones ended up cheaper. Coal and Oil are also likely to be skipped over for cheaper alternatives.
Consider, in the US people save money by installing Solar at home vs using the high quality electric grid. When the grid is on average down for several hours a week the incentives are even stronger.
The progress of technology is not the same as progress of energy infrastructure. They didn't avoid using landlines they got a better and cheaper alternative.
Poorer countries are using fossil fuels today, more so than they are driving around Teslas, let alone having solar on their roofs which is an investment mostly for those of us who can afford it (a small fraction of the western world)
Niger/ Gambia / Niger / Myanmar all have ~7 vehicles per 1000 people, and Togo is down at 2 where the US is at 910. So sure some cars, but not a significant investment even
China which is a good model of where these countries are going manufactures both electric and IC's. So while they are at 154/1,000 it's a lower percentage of IC's than the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car_use_by_country
You have that backwards China has 2.1% electric cars USA is 1.13% electric.
China also has vastly more Solar panel adoption than the US because they are building a lot of infrastructure and are using the cheapest options. China even uses solar hot water heaters. https://www.asiabiomass.jp/english/topics/1209_06.html
The poorest countries are a rounding error right now, but don't expect them to use more expensive fossil fuel options.
Adequating human flourishing with our current CO2 output, discounted at zero while the measurable ongoing and certain future costs mount up, is not fit for a hacker. Systems are real things, no matter what defending your entitlements demands. Good luck with the climate.
Close enough I think: setting up a false analogy between climates and meteors is an argument against action. Packaging this in seductive can-do arguments for the HN crowd does not change the reality of the global predicament (not problem) we are in.
The maximum commitment to R&D and the belt tightening that are both not happening now would probably not be enough to avoid major global disruption.
First of all. Its not a false analogy at all. Meteors have struck before and eradicated almost all life. Climate have been hotter than it is right now and didn't have the same effect.
Second of all I didn't mention anything about not doing anything I specifically have stated the opposite. The fact that you will straight out lie about what I said shows your true colors.
> we can't both secure the continued prosperity of humanity and at the same time not have an impact on the environment we live.
I'm not sure I believe that. There are many aspects of modern life that are way more energy wasteful than they need to be.
Ever walk down a street in Vegas? The amount of excess demonstrated there is staggering. Giant fountains in a desert.
I'm not convinced we need to live to that level of excess in order to be prosperous.
> The way out of our problems is not to stop up but to continue improving technology and energy utilization.
I'm not sure any environmentalist would argue that we should stop improving technology. I certainly wouldn't.
I think we need to invest heavily in research and technology to find better cleaner sources of energy. But I also think we need some level of regulation like a Carbon Tax/Rebate, pollution taxes, etc, in order to actually incentivize the market to be take those externalities into account.
They wouldn't argue we should stop improving technology. It's my claim that the consequence of their politics would be to stop growth. Environmentalist are against humans making an impact on nature and consider nature sacred.
That excess you see in Vegas is also paying the bills it's part of the growth. That's the point. You can't isolate them and have non-impact on nature and then at the same time growing the economy.
Should we also regulate the internet? How much of our use is excess? Is this discussion excess? Are 99% of discussion on the internet excess is posting images excess?
Once you start digging into it you realize that these things can't be isolated.
This is why it's better to let the market play it out as it will optimize local needs. It's far from perfect to the extent that it's useless but it beats all the other ways we have at least to my understanding and I haven't heard of any other and better solution than let growth play out and produce surplus and then use some of that to be better and better.
Yup one of the areas where it's most underrepresented is when it comes to exponential growth of technology. In other words, climate discussion also has externalities that it doesn't consider.
Great, please send me the link to those studies.
Right now as far as I know it is very clear cut where the ignored externalities lie: island nations going under (Kiribati, check out Anote's Ark), civil strife with a climate component spilling over (check out Syria last ten years), hurricanes and floods frequencies way above historical records (soon in an abandonned mall nearby)
I don't think much is clear to you right now. You seem rather hellbent on disproving something no one ever claimed. I have no interest in those kinds of debates.
>Many of us understand very well that the climate is changing and that humans might have something to do with it, we just don't know to what extent.
But even posing such an idea will get you put into the "climate denier" category in a heartbeat and stop all rational discussion.
Because when climate change deniers could no longer deny that the climate is changing, they started saying that humans were not to blame. It's mostly the same people moving the goal posts. It is then quite natural that you get lumped into that camp when expressing that "opinion".
Perhaps, but I see this from the pro-climate-change side, too. First it was a "coming ice age" (1970s) then it was Al Gore banging the "global warming" drums (1990s), now it's simply "climate change" (either/or) -- "heads I win, tails you lose." It's intellectually dishonest.
There is a very important reason to inquire as to whether mankind is the cause of global-warming, or merely an observer. If man is the cause, then perhaps there is a chance to prevent it; we might ask what action might one take. If man is merely the observer (e.g. the sun is to blame) then our odds are infinitesimally small for having any positive effect whatsoever, and quite large for having unintended consequences.
It is not "denial" to ask for evidence, untainted by politics or opinion or data clouded by curve fitting and backwards adjustments to "compensate" for who-knows-what but always in a way that predicts gloom and doom and fosters continued grant money. That raises suspicion of any open-minded person and especially the cynical.
Personally, the groupthink hysteria surrounding this "settled science" alarms me much more than the .5 degree C/century temperature increase observed. I have lived long enough to remember the panic about the world starving to death in the 60s, the coming ice age predicted in the 70s, and recall scientists literally laughing about the idea of bacteria being responsible for ulcers, high-fat diets being "deadly", cholesterol and salt is bad for you, etc. Trends change and science moves ahead, often not hand-in-hand.
finally, you should drop the ugly "denier" label. lumping in those who ask for evidence for global temperature change with those who deny the occurrence of the holocaust is sickening and has no place in reasonable discourse.
The "coming ice age" was a creation of Newsweek. There was some scientific speculation about whether cooling from particulates would offset CO2-induced warming. Theories of climate change were first proposed in the early 19th Century, in order to explain the evidence for Ice Ages. The first theory of CO2-induced climate change (Arrhenius 1896) was actually discussing that. Global warming describes a subset of recent climate change.
Note the date above. AGW is older and better-established than Relativity. It's a relatively straightforward consequence of the heat physics of gases, which was first worked out in the 1860s, and can be trivially replicated in your basement. It was also, as it happens, completely disproved for about fifty years, and the overturning of its disproofs was notable for none of the political infighting surrounding the issue today. The skeptic might wonder what the difference is, and why the people complaining of bad science don't have better science to present. We've only been studying the issue for a dozen decades or so, and surely the previous disproofs would be a start?
P.S. That you can create a semantic link between the concepts of "holocaust denier" and "AGW denier" does not mean that those two things are commonly treated as being morally equivalent: non sequitur.
Do you know, I'm not quite sure what you might mean specifically. Why don't you describe what exactly the problems are with describing the behavior of CO2 at the top-of-atmosphere. What energy transfer mechanism do you think is being missed?
Your strawmen are getting pretty dry in the heat. Some guys' misconceptions from the seventies have nothing to do with today's real science. I recommend you check out the realclimate website.
The sun is not to blame for almost all of it (just a tiny little bit). This is quite easy to figure out since we have data on the sun and Earth's orbit and the relationship is simple.
So then what caused the prior ice ages and following warming spells, spanning hundreds of millions of years? Or were things different that time around?
We don't really know yet. It seems to be connected with the sun and CO2 variation, but it is not clear what drives that variation. Today we drive the variation, and into regions that haven't been seen for a looong time, so things are indeed different.
It's interesting that the collapse of an ice age seems to happen very fast, within a few hundreds of years, so fast changes are definitely possible.
(It's good to research this since an ice age would suck majorly for us too - and we have suppressed the next one by now.)
We will adjust to climate change the way we adjusted to smallpox and the plague. As a species we will probably ride it out, but things are going to look pretty grim for those of us in the thick of it.
Complex systems have less linearity than expected, but more hysteresis. The flat(ter) early naughties have already been well explained, mostly taking 98 as reference is where the effect comes from, we caught up since then, and ain't slowing down.
Yet everything is getting better, not worse because we've become better at dealing with issues. The number of people who died from drought has gone down not up according to some studies. Number of people out of extreme poverty is going up is going up not down.
And so we are back to the beginning. We don't really know as much as some like to claim. So what is the goal of humanity? How do we measure human flourishing? How do we ensure we still get people to become more resourceful?
The climate models predict larger increases in temperature than have actually occurred, and the increases in temperature appear to be slowing down. I think most (reasonable) people agree that climate change is caused by humans, but there still isn't much to do about it. Pretty much anything you do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is going to massively increase the cost of everything. Plus it puts your country at a disadvantage relative to countries that don't put in place the same policies.
Hydrocarbons have made the modern world possible by providing a relatively cheap and portable energy source. None of the renewables come close. They're also the main source of greenhouse gases and thus climate change. There is no practical policy proposal to decrease fossil fuel usage in the near-to-moderate future that would maintain living standards at their current levels.
you come across immediately as a climate change denier. The science of what humans are doing to the climate is well established. We _have_ something to do with it, no "might" about it. Of course other things are contributing -- in fact we may well have passed a tipping point where non-anthropogenic carbon emissions are being generated via feedback loops, similar to warming cycles in the past that aren't associated with human activity. But there is a very very broad consensus that as a species have something to do with climate change.
As you have pointed out, good "faith" is in short supply in this conversation because there are extreme elements that will go to great lengths to maintain the status quo, despite all the evidence that it is long-term unmaintainable.
If you want to talk in good faith with me personally, there are a few things you have to accept as ground truth:
1) Human behavior has caused a change to the climate that is measurable and has real impacts to the environment.
2) Those changes are complex and driving systems in ways we do not fully understand, any more than we fully understood the systems before we started adding climate change into the equation. Despite this lack of understanding of all of its effects, this does not mean #1 is somehow disproven.
You tripped over #1 -- if we don't agree about that we will have a problem having a productive discussion.
Another commenter in this thread tripped over #2 -- if someone wants to litigate the minutiae of every historical prediction from climate scientists we will have a problem having a productive discussion.
You took only the middle part of that sentence and ignored the whole sentence which is quite a different meaning than the one you tried to attach to me.
Here it is in it's whole:
"Many of us understand very well that the climate is changing and that humans might have something to do with it, we just don't know to what extent."
So yes I agree we have an impact just not sure how much and what it will mean and if you want to debate that with me personally you either prove me wrong or agree with that.
Furthermore, I wrote plenty of other things that should make it obvious I am not in any specific camp but interested in a larger context than just debating climate change true/false silliness.
Human flourishing, how to also get people out of poverty, the ability to control nature more than it has historically controlled us etc they are all important issues and climate change doesn't mean we should just ignore those. Yet that's exactly what people do when discussing climate. They ignore all the other things that are also important and also affecting real people right now as we speak.
So I frankly don't see you doing anything but not reading me in good faith. But bygones.
"Well, the defendant was clearly present at the time of the crime. It is clear he might have something to do with it, we just don't know to what extent."
That statement (unmoored from the climate change context) in its most literal interpretation says something along the lines of "the range of possibilities is from 0 to 100". I don't accept that 0 is in the distribution, and will not agree with any statement that can be most literally interpreted in that way. Maybe that's not what you meant, it sounds like it's not -- so great, problem solved. But as written, that is the most literal reading.
Reading anything online, without knowing the person, literally, sounds like exactly the problem with most online debates.
Instead of inquiring about what was meant you just assumed. Perhaps we should start with giving other the benefit of the doubt rather than just having "your criteria" without any context especially when you actually got quite a lot of context that would indicate it wasn't at all the case.
The whole world is probably past the tipping point. People who talk about halting or reversing climate change at this point are pollyannas or liars. The only thing we can realistically do is try to mitigate the most severe consequences.
I think ambient carbon capture has a genuine chance to improve the situation. This isn't to say that we should stop doing other things to reduce emissions. We are very much in the thick of the struggle -- anyone trying to tell you otherwise is simply trying to maintain the status quo.
Ironically, it’s the daily activities such as flying glorious ocean fish on aircraft which dump huge amounts of CO2 and water vapor into the stratosphere, or trucking them in refrigerated trucks all across the country, that led to this problem.
I know you were /s here, but I point this out because there is a huge amount of personal responsibility implied by climate change. Even if one doesn’t believe humans are driving it, climate change is happening and humans have to deal with it. From a mitigation perspective, individual consumer choices have a large bearing in his successful we will ultimately be.
People don’t like the implications, though, and either most people don’t connect the dots or are in denial that their choices count. Sadly, this trend is worse among climate change believers.[1]
Kidding aside, ordering less fresh ocean fish during winter is a meaningful personal start.
jokes aside, this is mindset of most people - things are good, look my backyard is not burning yet, I can buy so much stuff.
I wonder what is the most appropriate course of action - people need to suffer a bit to realize how bad things are and going to be. Comfortable 1st world lives need a bit of a shake up to really change things.
Or an old man with motivated reasoning to believe he and his cohort have not made the lives of his grandchildren and their children poorer and more perilous.
Wicked Problems [1] are going to kick our arses over the next century, and I don't see how we're going to get through it without large-scale death and horror. There just isn't the political or social will to address the problems - and if we ever do get our act together then I can't see how it'll be anything other than too late. Mose things on HN seem utterly trivial when I'm reminded of this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem