I guess governments will just skip the prevention step when they realize their own inaction made that impossible and just try to find ways to adapt to the inevitable changes instead. There's pretty much no way, purely for political/human reasons, that keeping the temperatures below 2 or even 3 degrees seems feasible at that point, so humanity will just have to deal with it and adapt over the next century. Shame about the planet and the natural ecosystem, though.
Right. We'll claim it's too late to "prevent global warming", keep our lifestyle exactly the same because it's "radical" to suggest otherwise, and shoot for +5 degrees in 50 years instead of stabilizing at +2/+3.
>so humanity will just have to deal with it and adapt over the next century
So far, how much did you lose by fighting for the climate, to get the system to change? Your time? Your wealth? Your reputation? Your comfort? How much?
I can't believe we're becoming fatalist without a fight. I'd rather join the rebellion than watch the world burn and adapt to hell.
> so humanity will just have to deal with it and adapt over the next century. Shame about the planet and the natural ecosystem, though.
I don't think you understand that efforts to prevent climate change are efforts to preserve humanity - the planet will survive in any case, and just form new ecosystems. It's us who'll be the first victims.
There was never anything the government could have done. To simply maintain carbon output at current levels, folks in the west would have to reduce their usage to a small fraction of the current amount to account for the increased usage in India and China.
It always seems odd to me that people still plan their lives as though the world fifty years from now will be basically the same as now. I hope they're right, to be honest. But we're talking 3+c warming (5.4F) and that could be horrific. I guess it's nice if you want a winery in Norway but that's small comfort.
> It always seems odd to me that people still plan their lives as though the world fifty years from now will be basically the same as now
Even planning for anything 10 years in the future is a daunting task. For any prognosis there are a dozen more claiming different results or different trends with different outcomes. It's an information flood that does not let you make a definite judgement since it's overwhelming, and even when you try to base a decision on scientific evidence, because there's usually a "model", the certainty of the outcome "depends" (on any number of "variables").
What do? Make a conversative projection on what things are like today, and a plan based on that.
You also have to adjust for the fact that most of what climate scientists publish is already conservative. Get them talking one-to-one and their predictions for the next decades are dire.
Me, I take a pessimistic view - I don’t think you have to have a large percentage change in, say, crop production, or storm damage rebuilding costs, for economies to feel the effect - prices rise, labour is diverted from growth to maintenance, and adaptations are ultimately made, but in the intervening period expense has been incurrred, and by now the climate has warmed further. The costs end up growing astronomically, and at what point do governments fail due to popular discontent, at what point do further governments collapse and even wars start due to resource cost rises and the need for popular distraction, and mass migration caused by revolution and war nearby?
I’ve put my money where my mouth is - I’ve become itinerant, while I scope out where on earth to live this out - somewhere quiet, and remote, and self-sufficient, that hasn’t yet seen ecological disaster and might escape the worst of climate change due to geography. Sadly, everywhere I’ve been in the past few years, across all continents and hemispheres, even when these places as yet appear verdant and untouched, are feeling the wrath of a changing climate, and human-wrought ecological destruction, from drought to flood, from aquifer pollution to overfarming and desertification, and vast agricultural monoculture, highly vulnerable to moving growing zones and viable climates for pests.
I’d love to be able to do something to prevent this - I recycle, I don’t buy much, I travel overland wherever possible - but I fear we’re too far gone.
What humanity and our civilisation will be in 20 or 30 years I don’t know, but I fear it’ll be unrecognisable and almost unimaginable to us, even now.
I'm curious: if you think so much about climate change and its effects, and even plan your actions and location around it, have you considered directing your energy to combatting climate change with your skills on a systemic level? (For example, building sustainability companies, being part of climate activism, earning-to-donate?)
I'm in a similar spot but optimistic about systemic action.
I’m doing consultancy at a CTO level for a number of medium/large environmental technology companies while I travel, comprising everything from supply chain management around hazardous materials to sustainable living systems to pipeline management - and I’ve been contributing photography and footage to documentarians as I go.
I’m not optimistic about systemic action - the people taking it seriously don’t have the power to overcome a far more dominant system: our consumption-driven way of living, and the economies built around it. Mindshare may grow sufficiently in coming decades, but by then it’ll largely be too late, and that growth will likely come from more people witnessing and enduring the effects of climate change - and if we’re at that point, it’s already too late, as systemic collapse beckons as I laid out in my previous.
The climate is a chaotic system - it finds a metastable mode for a given set of inputs, and once moved by changing those inputs (e.g. CO2 ppm) from that point of stability can wander drastically before finding that point again. As forests die, as methane is belched from the thawing permafrost, as marine ecosystems collapse (everywhere is overrun by jellies - even Antarctica), as ice caps and glaciers melt, as coastal plains flood, as grassland turns to desert, core components of the current system of stability are yet further altered, thus pushing the current mode yet further from its stable point and making that stable point harder to reattain.
Like I said, get a climatologist talking in private, and it’s grim listening. They see the bigger picture in their work, but only publish studies on specific observations. Longitudinal studies end up being conservative otherwise they sound radically alarmist and don’t get published.
Anyhow. We should keep on playing while the ship sinks.
There were large scale demonstrations held on September 8. Hundreds of thousands of people marched and demanded change around the world. You didn't hear about it? Not strange. Zero media coverage.
tl;dr I got tired of people saying I was "lucky" that I could ride a bike to work and made a tool to help them do the same thing. It shows flats for rent on a map with transport and bike routes instead of roads.
Sorry if it sounds like a plug but it's the best answer I have to your question. I studied physics in college and hoped it would help me work on energy efficiency or renewable energy generation technology, but it turns out that when I graduated (in to the worst recession in a century) nobody had any interest at all in what I was able to offer. I'd still love to work on saving the planet if I could do so while paying rent or a mortgage.
> What humanity and our civilisation will be in 20 or 30 years I don’t know, but I fear it’ll be unrecognisable and almost unimaginable to us, even now.
This is certainly true when looking at 2018 from the perspective of 1988 (or even 1998).
I don‘t like alarmism. Most of it is simply proven wrong in the long term. People are good at adapting most of the time. For example, I got myself air conditioning in a country famous for skiing. People in poor countries will probably suffer much more, but they need to tackle their population growth issues anyway. In essence, there are life-changing problems affecting us every day (who would have thought 50 years ago that we‘d need barriers againt car attacks at all major public events?), don‘t obsess over one thing like some sort of religious freak („the end is nigh...“).
I think alarmism is a retrospective assessment. We can probably say a lot of our reporting on current Western terrorism is alarmist - numbers wise, it didn't compare to road deaths or regular shootings.
But global warming will be/is unprecedented and will affect the whole world. Immediate action is unlikely to reverse this process either.
Your comment about population growth issues is disgusting.
> We can probably say a lot of our reporting on current Western terrorism is alarmist - numbers wise, it didn't compare to road deaths or regular shootings
Because we have adapted. But how many are affected by the terror it involves? Terrorism = terrorizing people, not just murdering them.
"who would have thought 50 years ago that we‘d need barriers againt car attacks at all major public events"
To be honest, we still don't need them. Obviously it's horrible but considering that we accept ~1.25 million people a year killed on the roads (~25k in the EU, 30-40k in the US, or about one 9-eleven a month) it's probably not the best ROI. Though to be honest I think we should put massive barriers between cars and people anywhere we can, or just remove the cars wherever possible, but I'm odd that way.
Like I said I hope I'm wrong, but right now it looks like all the earlier estimates were too conservative and to think that we can cause major disruptions to the world's food supply, as well as making some places simply uninhabitable without air conditioning, strikes me as naive. To think that you can do it while still planning a 401(k) and buying holiday houses on the beach a cheap flight away for when you retire seems especially naive (though I worry we'll still have the cheap flights, which would be a bummer unless they're electric).
As far as population - it's true that we could stand to have far fewer people around, but even if your motivations are purely selfish, making hundreds of millions of people hungry, thirsty, and desperate doesn't sound like a good idea. And of course, most poor people emit basically nothing, so reducing the population of people living on under 5 dollars a day won't do much for the planet as a whole.
I don‘t really want to play this game of stupid comparisons. Because then we don‘t need treatments for many uncommon diseases either. It‘s a fact that people demand these barriers for their peace of mind and cities build them.
The perceived need to add car barriers to public events ks nothing in comparison with having to air-condition homes and public spaces around the globe. Also, remember nature?
I don‘t care about your assessment. You are free to live in humility, poverty, extreme heat, whatever - if you think it will make you a superior human being. I prefer having bearable temperatures where I live, sleep and have visitors, without having to beg and wait for the whole world to stop burning fossil fuels, eating meat etc.
I would feel stupid if I did. I believe in technology as a provider for solutions to such problems, not regression to a primitive lifestyle like the eco-hippies demand. They aren’t particularly thorough anyway, because there’s about 10-20 tons of CO2 emissions to save by relieving the world of one‘s unhappy existence after being deprived of all the fun life has to offer (we exhale about 1Kg per day). ;-)
The right of the stronger, fitter. I’m sorry if it hurts your feelings, but that‘s how nature and evolution works. Perhaps your religion preaches something else, but why should I care?
Please keep generic ideological tangents off HN, especially when the thread topic is already divisive. They just lead to predictable flamewars, equal parts destructive and tedious.
If you accept climate change is real, and accept we need to tackle the problem, the simplest and most powerful solution would be coordinated action. However, we are stuck in a prisoners dilemma, because people with your attitude will not stop, will not change, and if that is say 1/100 people then it becomes unbearable for the other 99, socially and economically, to commit to the plan.
> Right, so why don't I just come along and murder you? I have the right, by your logic.
Or, maybe, this Social Darwinism is fascist nonsense and you fully admit to being disgustingly amoral.
You are free to try if you want to bear the consequences and the risk of a different outcome. What you people tend to forget: different morals and amoral is not the same thing, don‘t force your morals on me. You have no right to.
> The only reason to care about social wellbeing and people other than yourself is religion?
I care very much about our survival as a species, but I believe that by allowing each and every one to survive at a high cost to society, we put the wellbeing of mankind at risk. I‘m all for getting dumb people to stop eating meat for perceived ecological reasons though!
Nothing is more important than getting our reaction to climate change right. It’s so frustrating that so few genuinely helpful companies are emerging out of our ecosystem.
Even in the worst case scenario, global warming will not annihilate the human species. AI, nanotechnology, weaponized bioweapons, nuclear war, asteroid impacts, or alien contact could all potentially wipe out humanity.
Probably unlikely that those will wipe out humanity, at least we don't have any concrete evidence or examples of them (e.g. we have't built an AI that can do much yet, we don't have nanotech that will self replicate and kill us all, aliens have yet to show up etc.). Bioweapons seems unlikely to end humanity as someone will win the war, and personally I think MAD prevents widespread use.
The only thing in your list that does make sense is an asteroid impact, which we don't have much say over.
With climate change we know a) it's happening, b) it's going to affect us in some pretty major ways and c) we can do something about it.
I was more thinking an infectious agent that's modified to be particularly deadly.
I believe that the second law of thermodynamics implies with high probability that humanity will not last forever, so I don't think it's that unlikely that something will wipe us out.
What are you doing? If I must change, why not you? The people telling me to change must also change. People think this is an adolescent response but really, it boils down to us merely sneering at each other and not doing anything.
edit: totally predicted...people are reacting with a simple question about actual change by downvoting my comment into Oblivion. You need no better explanation for our fate.
Well maybe because of your general tone and because you didn't seem to react to the OP directly. You see, with a question like "If I must change, why not you?" you imply the OP said you must change while he/she doesn't. But the OP came nowhere near mentioning such thing. On the contrary, OP used we.
Because it isn't adding to the conversation? I could ask what you're doing, but instead i'm reading and wondering what more i can do personally.
Edit: Hell, ill even provide what i am doing. Not only am i trying to reduce my electricity usage in my house (which was really bugger all to begin with), I have convinced the owner of my restaurant, and have been implementing for months, a system where we source our produce locally as much as possible. (it is costing is approx 5-8% at the moment - as of last months check - but advertising this fact has been a ton more profitable than not putting the effort in).
So that's just a part of what I'm doing. I'm willing to do more.
another slightly more palatable way of framing this is:
i don't want to change my lifestyle to lower carbon emissions, because that ends up being a net loss for me.
i want you to change your lifestyle to lower carbon emissions, because that ends up being a net win for me. that's right, i'm talking to all n billion of you!
what can i do to get you to agree to doing that? can i coerce you, or do we end up negotiating or trading?
The entire article reads like a blog post. It obviously wasn't written by a news writer or edited by a news editor - there are grammar issues and tonal issues and sourcing issues.
Does the BBC now have something like the Fortune "Contributor's Network" - a group of random bloggers who get to write under their domain as if they were BBC writers, weakening the brand but bringing in more click revenue? That'd be my guess as to what's happening here.
Regarding just the first sentence example:
> In this case, there are 86 lead authors from 39 countries, of which 39% are female.
The sentence structure suggests it's the countries rather than the authors who are female. The clause is misplaced and "of which" applies to things not people ("of whom" would have been better). Basically the writer wanted to cram in a bit of extra information, couldn't figure out where or how to do so gracefully and grammatically, yet stuck it in anyway.
Blame falling standards in UK education, and the fact that bright kids don't go into the media any more. A 2:2 in media studies from an ex-poly and this is what you get.
I still frequently encounter people who consider the whole thing either a conspiracy or an outright lie, a way to bring America down, or some sort of left-wing class war in the UK, or all sorts of other bizarre things.
I even encountered one commenter recently who claimed that we fundamentally misunderstand the action of gasses in a a gravity field, and he was going to single-handedly prove it all wrong (and invent a source of free energy at the same time).
With this, and the long-term nature of the problem meaning that the can can always be kicked just a little further down the road, I'm not surprised that little gets achieved.
According to Wikipedia, Earth atmosphere weights about 5e18 kg. A m^3 of air is alightly above 1,2 kg under normal conditions.
Suppose that on average each person from the most resourceful 1 billion people on Earth installs a device for air cleaning. The machine sucks air in, removes CO2 and releases the clean air. The device works using renewable energy, so by itself it doesn't contribute additional CO2 to the atmosphere. Suppose we want to remove 10% of CO2 from air, or in other words we want to pass 10% of Earth atmosphere through such cleaning devices. The year has about 365 * 24 * 3600 seconds, so to have those 10% in 10 years each device has to process 5e18 / 1e9 / 365 / 24 / 3600 / 10 / 10 = 1.6 m^3 of air per second.
This is not a small number, yet it's not immediately obvious why this isn't possible. For example, energy requirements can be small, because the device effectively doesn't change the bulk of the air. 10 years isn't that much comparing with the speed of raising air temperature. Cost of such a device could be perhaps smaller than a modest car. We still have option to deploy more devices, to separately clean ocean water etc. This is largely technical and not political solution.
1. Cost to produce devices
2. Assumes perfect processing rate
3. That seems like quite a lot of air. For reference, a 52 in ceiling fan does 2.8 , and you're talking about pushing air through some type of filter probably
A key factor contributing to climate change is the number of people weighted by energy consumption.
Should governments in rich countries encourage people to have fewer kids or otherwise constrain their life choices in various other ways? This goes against liberal values. What do most progressives think?
It's probably important not to take that equation too seriously, as it's roughly an accounting identity based on structural assumptions. If you don't like it, pick any other factors to factorise one side of I=I. But it does provide a helpful perspective: in terms of what you stated, we'd also need to multiply by a coefficient that describes carbon emissions in terms of per-capita energy consumption.
> Should governments in rich countries encourage people to have fewer kids or otherwise constrain their life choices in various other ways? This goes against liberal values. What do most progressives think?
I'm not sure if I am a progressive. My short answer is "yes, governments should constrain life choices to help force a controlled crash ahead of continued overshoot then a forced hard collapse". In the future I suspect we'll end up in scenarios where either we have the luxury of choosing one or more ecologically incompatible liberal values to break, or reality will go on ahead and break one or more of our incompatible values for us.
A liberal perspective of free individual choice in the short term that causes uncontrolled growth and consumption at the population level is not logically compatible with a desire to avoid wide-scale suffering due to famine, resource war, etc in the future (assuming that the latter concern is a value we wish to maintain).
Specifically regarding population, the carbon emissions of a US family* + descendants versus a Bangladeshi family + descendants, projected forward 100 years, estimates that the US family & descendants generates about 40x as much carbon emissions. (picking those two countries as extremes of (high per-capita pollution, low population growth) versus (low per-capita pollution, high population growth)). The US family & their descendants still incurs a higher carbon emission footprint even up to time horizons of 900 years. This is even with a US birth rate of 1.9, which isn't sufficient to maintain population over the longer run.
From an overall population level, arguably "we" the human endeavour should seek to minimise the number of people with affluent high-pollution lifestyles.
On the other hand, of course there is no "we" that includes all of us. Perhaps myself and my neighbours can figure out how to push more of the costs of global warming onto you and your neighbours while keeping a disproportionate share of the benefits, or vice versa. Or maybe together we can collaborate to share the benefits of the current cheap energy jackpot and push more of the costs on to our actual/hypothetical grandchildren.
* i dont mean to pick on the US, I'm australian, we're about the same or worse in terms of per-capita impact of ruining your children's atmosphere and climate. you should impose trade sanctions on my country to encourage my government to stop pushing for new coal mines. my federal government can't seem to think of anything cleverer to do than digging up all of australia's coal and selling it before it loses all market value.
Yet I doubt even these scientists have engaged in radically rewriting their lifestyles to reduce climate impact. If they had, they would have video conferenced instead of flying to Korea.
Basically no one in the West other than the very poor live a low impact life.
In the US in particular, we are really only very good at telling others how they should change. Case in point was the "March For Science" that took place a while back...in San Jose the parking for the event was full of giant SUVs...yet they all seemed so angry.
Doubt it, most in the West can afford moderate price spikes, and anything more profound will be viewed as job-killing. Indeed this was the exact response from Jerry Brown when asked about more impactful carbon taxation...he specifically stated that he refused to put "10 million people out of work".
Too shortsighted. You also need to invest in housing in the Arctic region, as well as in shuttling between the Arctic region and Antarctica. The inhabitants will likely want to move to their summer home every half year.
