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Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
338 points by andrewstuart on Oct 10, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 499 comments
It seems to me that governments can be counted out of taking the leadership needed to solve this within 12 years. If anything they seem to want to act against solving this issue in some cases.

So what can we do so our children don't live in some ghastly hothouse world?

The scientists have told us its our final chance.... not to start within 12 years, but solve it within 12 years.

I feel like the young people need to take charge of the world because the older generations have had their chance and not fixed it.

Maybe corporations are the ones who can be pressured to take the lead.




Fundamentally it is a political problem, not a technological problem. We need high carbon taxes, we need to end fossil fuel subsidies, and we probably need to change our economic system to something that addresses the tragedy of the commons.

But we’ve seen in recent years how technology can influence politics. I’d quote a tweet from Tristan Harris from the other day [1]:

> In an hypothetical world, if Facebook were re-designed entirely into a global coordination tool for billions of people to take the most meaningful and significant steps to fight climate change -- what would it look like?

1: https://twitter.com/tristanharris/status/1049177712227573760


Yes, it's a political problem. And one solution is to build nuclear power plants. We need a few thousands of these worldwide to get around 70 % of energy production from fission, then solar, wind and hydro can cover the rest. I really don't understand why we're not doing this.

25 % of emissions are from electricity [1], and 21 % from industry. Industy would quickly start using more electricity once it became cheap. Transportation (14 %) will take time to electrify, and the 24 % of emissions from agriculture and forestry is harder to remove (increase meat prices, thus lowering demand and production).

China, India, UAE and South Korea are building lots of reactors now.[2] I really hope Europe, the Americas and Africa follow.

We have a solution! Yes, it costs money, let's do it!

[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss... [2] http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and...


I'm also in favor of nuclear power, but you have to admit that there are valid concerns. Nuclear waste is unsolved as long as we don't build breeder reactors. Uranium supplies aren't limitless either. Without breeders we'd run out quickly. Thorium is unproven tech. Safety is a concern, both engineering (do you really trust for-profit companies not to skimp on safety?) and proliferation of nuclear materials (how many people does it take to break into a nuclear power plant and steal enough material for a dirty bomb? Which nation states do you trust enough to use nuclear power without building bombs?). Nuclear power is also quite expensive because of all the regulations you need to make it safe.


Yep, unfortunately nuclear power is about 2x more expensive than e.g. gas, and more expensive than even renewables. The solution here would be to make CO2 expensive enough.


"Fundamentally it is a political problem" -- Agreed.

What if the whole problem is that of "growth"?

Here's one possible chain of thought. I don't fully subscribe to this, so please feel free to poke holes in it:

1. The biggest polluters tend to be commercial enterprises

2. They are aware of the environmental impact of their actions, but are reluctant to stop

3. They are staffed by (mostly) normal human beings, but they continue because they are heavily incentivized to show continued growth

4. Businesses can no longer reach a "steady state" -- they must continue growth or be considered failures

5. Growth appears to be demanded by stockholders

6. Stockholders need growth for return on their investments

7. Investments are necessary because of... inflation ?

Ergo, stop inflation, slow down growth?


Yes. 100x Yes. See Herman Daly on Steady State Economics. Also see https://newleftreview.org/II/111/troy-vettese-to-freeze-the-... for a critique of Daly's proposals as being not radical enough.


As a stockholders my incentive is to increase my net worth. I do this by investing in companies that produce profits and grow. Now if inflation was to be lowered to 1% or 0% why would I stop being interested in growing companies and getting richer?

And while increasing regulations on climate change would be costly, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of stopping GDP growth and would harms tons of individuals who would find it harder to find a job and provide for their family.


Richer only for the sake of being rich? After certain threshold, more money doesn't change your lifestyle much, does it? Yes, you can get better, faster cars, but that is just greed in particular, ignorance in general. Hint, you don't NEED that.


I think you misread my comment. It was not about need but about incentives. Specifically that changing inflation doesn't change incentives. And removing growth from an economy is far more expensive way to prevent climate change than something like a carbon tax.

If you are arguing the easiest fix to climate change is to convince everyone to stop being interested in increasing their material wealth. That seems like a hell of an uphill battle. Orders of magnitude harder than passing a really high carbon tax.

P.S. getting rich is usually not the terminal goal, but a means to financial security for the middle class, and status for the upper class.


No, it doesn't work out that way.

First, in order to determine what people will do, the relevant word is not "need" but "want".

#6 is that stockholders want growth of return on their investments (because, hey, extra money is good for them). And they'll want that growth to be as big as possible, no matter what the inflation is; so stopping inflation won't remove the pressure for growth.

On the other hand, if you want to force people to be satisfied with what they have and not strive for more, well, that's against a lot of our psychology, it's not going to happen - compared to that, getting all the governments to do what needs to be done (while still striving for as much growth is feasible given the restrictions) is easy.


Nope stockholders need return on investment. Sorry. You can't skip that.

The problem if you kill this is that it breaks the asset allocation "algorithm" that is capitalism. If we don't have return on investment why wouldn't we spend all our money on, say, gold toilet seats ?

Or to put it a bit glib: Why do we need factories to "feed starving children" more than we need gold toilet seats ? Return on investment.


Fundamentally, it's a consumer problem. Consumers don't want to pay more for using green power, or eat less meat, or use public transit instead of a car, buy an electric vehicle, or other things that restrict their comfort or degrade quality of life. Such restriction/degradation would be perceptible and short-term, while the climate threat is not perceptible and is long-term. Nobody really cares if the average temperature of the World ocean increases by 0.5 degree in 10 years. Most people see climate activism as fearmongering.


It's a coordination problem. If the diffuse damage of pollution instead was totally concentrated on an individual, people would be very focused on reducing their carbon foot print.

Right now our best technology for dealing with coordination problems are government and treaties.


I would argue that the only reason those none green things are cheaper is because of unpriced externalities. Externalities that industry isn't going to price in themselves, which means it becomes, again, a political problem


I think the only answer is for green tech to become cheaper, or at least better and more desirable, to an extent that it can overcome all those unpriced externalities.

Consider lighting. When efficient lighting started to take off, it sucked. CFLs were expensive and worked poorly. People avoided them unless they were forced into them or really wanted to be green.

Now, LEDs are awesome. They’re still more expensive up-front, but the breakeven period is really short. They look great. I use them everywhere, not for environmental reasons, but because they’re the best practical choice.

Electric cars are another example. Used to be they were a sacrifice, unless your driving needs fit into a really narrow niche. Now they’re really good. They’re still not cheap, but people who can’t afford them often wish they could, and the prices will come down. Similar to lighting, I don’t drive an electric car to be green (although it’s a nice bonus), I drive it because it’s practical and convenient.

It shouldn’t have to be this way, but I think it does. Maybe it’ll work out anyway. It’s looking possible.


But things can change quickly if aktivists start to be perceived as credible. Germany decided to get out of Nuclear within a year of Fukushima (not the best move in hindsight, given Germanys reliance on coal at the moment...). We need to make climate change more credible in all the ways we have available to us. The easiest step is to start talking about it... get yourself some knowledge about the basics [1] and talk about the topic with confidence. Climate change IS REAL, solutions need to be FORCED ON THE POLITICAL LEVEL and consumers can/should reassure politicans that THIS IS THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE. Steps to take now:

1. Search for a local group enganged in the topic or set up a FB or Meetup event and start doing local talks in Bars. It‘s literally a 30 min effort in preperation plus having a nice time at a bar. Just did that this week and probably doing it again soon.

2. Donate money to effective climate charities, for example, the Coalition for Rainforest Nations [2] or the Clean Air Taskforce [3].

[1]: https://founderspledge.com/research/Cause%20Report%20-%20Cli... [2]:https://www.rainforestcoalition.org (donation page seems to have a problem at the moment...) [3]:http://www.catf.us


Very well put. We have the tools to fix this problem, we just need the will.

I wrote a lot more on this recently, with ideas that people on here can use to help influence better outcomes: https://unop.uk/how-to-help-with-a-big-global-problem-as-a-t...

It's a shame that the big technology companies aren't using their influence and reach to help.


I don't think it's the big technology companies - I doubt there's any large corporation the shuttering of which would not benefit the environment. I'd like to see more measures such as making a factory take its intake water downstream of where it discharges its waste water - you can bet that waste water will be clean. Otherwise we are reliant on the supposed goodwill of CEOs, which has manifestly failed to deliver thus far.


> I doubt there's any large corporation the shuttering of which would not benefit the environment.

Tesla.

Tesla has done more tangible work towards removing carbon from the atmosphere than probably any other entity in history.


> Tesla has done more tangible work towards removing carbon from the atmosphere than probably any other entity in history.

Think you might be over-egging it here - think about the shift from coal to less co2 intensive sources (e.g. gas) for power generation at national scale, which has happened in many countries. I suspect that's responsible for some fairly gargantuan savings in co2 compared to Tesla, which is still a small minority player.


This is true, and many more companies too. What I was getting at though was that tech companies have lots of influence but choose not to address this challenge and instead focus on advertising or other areas.


If we can get renewables cheaper than fossil fuels and get reasonable energy storage politics won’t be a problem.


I thought that all we had to do was develop non-combustion energy sources cheaper than fossil fuels, and everything else would fall into place. I think that's still mostly correct. But I underestimated how long people who are economically dependent on fossil fuel industries, and their political allies, could delay the transition. I think that those sorts of delay-and-obstruct tactics are going to ensure we far overshoot CO2 targets before (hopefully) beginning to correct them. That's even while the technologies of low-carbon energy continue to advance at a rapid clip.


Moving energy production to renewables is the easiest part. Much more difficult is the part where we need to do something about the few billion (and rising!) gas-guzzling personal automobiles. Electric cars are simply not going to be the solution in the timeframe that matters. In the EU traffic is the only major CO2 source that continues increasing. The third big problem is agriculture, specifically meat production. Two to three billion new people who have traditionally been mostly vegetarians are now hungry for meat, and the planet simply cannot afford such a thing.


This absolutely can be a problem, because infrastructure needs political approval. Worst case is a ban on renewable generation to protect fossil fuel profits, for example.


As soon as renewables become more profitable than fossil fuels any (personal) economic incentive politicians have to subsidise the fossil fuel industry will switch to the renewable industry. Even the most corrupt politicians you could imagine are not so hell bent on destroying the planet that they would refuse bribes from their friends in the solar industry.

The real political incentive behind fossil fuel subsidy comes down to technology and economics. The reality is that every nation is dependent on oil and gas and without them their economies would be destroyed. The real reason politicians fear a real push towards cleaner energy is that it will increase energy prices enough to trigger nationwide riots and protests.


You are correct but if we can get to the point that economics drive green energy the political opponents will have trouble stopping it.

There is a tipping point in there that we could be prevented from hitting, but I really don't think that will happen.


Agriculture, deforestation are major emitters not directly linked to fossil fuels.

Cement industry, heating are large consumers of fossil fuel that are seeing very little advances compared to electrification of the transportation sector.

So just because renewable electricity starts to dominate does not mean our carbon footprint goes to zero.


Bhutan is a great example how countries could look like. It is the only carbon-negative country in the world and they measure Gross National Happiness instead of Gross Domestic Product.

https://www.ecowatch.com/this-country-isnt-just-carbon-neutr...


Bhutan achieves this by importing most of what they use from countries that produce the carbon. Obviously this doesn't scale.


I'd really hope that a poor, primarily agricultural country is not actually a great example of what this could look like.


Are you aware of this country's recent past ethnic cleansing...?


How is that related to their carbon policies?


It's probably not relevant to their carbon policy, but it's a valid qualifier to the first sentence which proposes Bhutan an otherwise unqualified "great example".


It is probably relevant to the success in implementing the policy. States that brutalise segments of their populations tend to have an easier time convincing the others to fall in line.


It seems strange to praise them for their Happiness quotient when they may well have arrived at that by shall we say, unsavory methods.


It's only a political problem if you make it one. Better politics requires less technological innovation, and better technology requires less political innovation.

The political barrier suddenly becomes much less intimidating if an extremely efficient way to such CO2 out of the atmosphere manually was found tomorrow.


Thermodynamics kind of forbids efficient ways to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. Unburning coal takes more energy than you got from burning it.


Source? Carbon capture and storage (CCS) seems to be a thing for sure.


If global warming is a political problem not a technological one we’re screwed. China and India aren’t rich yet, never mind Africa and all those people want a nice middle class house or apartment and a two week international holiday per year.

Here’s hoping for a technological solution or failing that gradual and non-catastrophic climate change.

Change in CO2 Emissions per capita 1990-2016 https://twitter.com/naytadata/status/1049675803007602688?s=2...


It is a political problem, but technology can change it dramatically. A cheap and safe energy source like Thorium-based nuclear power and self driving electric cars would tilt the table.


Well, having done some research into this recently, the tech world has something it can do right now. Switch to sustainably powered Cloud and move to renewably powered/offset Data Centres.

e.g. Google (100% carbon neutral), Azure (100% offset), AWS (Oregon, Montreal, Ireland, Frankfurt regions are 100% carbon neutral)

Cloud/Data Centres emit around 2% of Greenhouse Gas Emissions (bet you didn't know that).

There is also research showing that we're going to increase our Data Centre usage by 5x in the next 7 years.

So change that 2% to something much much higher... because that much compute requires that much more energy and we don't have the worldwide renewables infrastructure at scale to cope with the extra capacity.

https://bit.ly/2024wp

https://www.change.org/p/sustainable-servers-by-2024

* Sign the pledge please * (if you agree with it of course)

It's almost the simplest thing we can easily do, and it should put pressure on tech companies to switch to renewables.

If we believe the tech industry is an innovator and a force for good, why not start with the means of production - the energy industry?

Sign up... switch... go!

PS I wrote the whitepaper with Anne Currie - we have not been paid for the work and was entirely voluntary. I used to work for AWS up until June this year.


Agreed, this is one for commercial votes ($). We're a rich industry that uses loads of electricity, most of which is fossil-fueled. We need to choose to run our servers 100% carbon neutral and that would make way more difference than individual action. That will get more spending on renewable generation. Our industry has the money and we can personally just choose to host somewhere carbon neutral (as mentioned, Google, Azure or the 4 sustainable AWS regions: Oregon, Montreal, Ireland, Frankfurt right now)


I wonder what percentage of CO2 comes from programmers commuting to work.


Go remote! the planet, along with your family, sanity, and happiness will thank you!

Every working programmer today can stand up, walk to their boss' desk, and have the conversation about going remote, even if only part time (for now). If they say no, ask how you can work towards that in the future, and if they don't relent, find a different job (don't immediately quit, obviously; now you have leverage in knowing that you want another job, but don't need it quite yet). When doing your job search, the first question you should ask is, "is the position remote friendly?"

Let's change the industry's culture from the ground up.


Stupid question; when saying 'go remote' you mean working from home right?


Essentially, but the joy of working remote is being able to work whenever you happen to be, whether it be on the road (I thought I saw an article about this but I fail to remember the author) or in your home office


This is a great point. This summer, I took my family for a week of beaching, boating, and snorkeling. I also worked the full week ... of course my boss knew what was up, as I'm up front about everything. But it was great being able to just modify my schedule, go snorkeling in the morning, come back, work, dinner, and then work a few more hours at night. All you gotta do is make sure that the place you're staying has wifi.


yes ... mostly :) I'll give my own example ... I work for a team/company in another state. So on most days, yes, I work from home. However, part time, I go into a local co-working space. This gives me a chance to get out of the house, socialize with other technical people IRL, etc etc. If I didn't have a co-working space available, I would probably try to band together a few folks and rent a small office somewhere to similar effect.

So, while for many people yeah it means working from home ... it doesn't necessarily have to mean working at your house :D


A couple of others:

Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/umweltschutz/?country=en

OVH also has an energy efficient data centre in Quebec powered by a hydroelectric dam.


Thanks! Just read the white paper. Super interesting. Just signed the petition


> Cloud/Data Centres emit around 2% of Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Is it just from electricity or the total operation? What about manufacturing and hardware replacements/maintenance? Is significant?


So it is relatively difficult to get exact data and all we can really get from the information supplied is electricity usage. That, plus the mix of electricity in the Data Centre location gives an approximation (again, it's an educated guess) of carbon emissions related to a site. Efficiencies are actually an irrelevance due to the rapid increase in usage swallowing up any gains caused by efficiencies.

Oh and the 2% from Data Centres is a conservative estimate. It's probably higher. We simply don't have the data because it's not required to share it.


So I'm honestly not as concerned about this as I once was.

Don't get me wrong: the climate is going to change, arguably we're in a mass extinction event already and people aren't going to suddenly start acting in the collective long term welfare of humanity.

One of the things I like about futurism is the levelheaded optimism and pragmatism you tend to get. And I'll call out Isaac Arthur as a well-known example of this.

Think there's too many people? You can easily show that the world could easily produce enough to feed a population 10 times what we have now in the very near future, thanks largely to automation.

Think we're dumping too much CO2 into the atmosphere? We no doubt are but that problem basically goes away immediately if we ever get economic fusion power. Even if we don't, the plummetting cost of wind and solar may solve that anyway (by "solve" I mean that as soon as non-fossil fuel power production is cheaper than fossil fuels it becomes economic to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and turn into hydrocarbons).

Too expensive to get to space? Eventually the cost of this will go down to dollars per kilogram.

Worried about how we'll produce all that power? When getting stuff into orbit is sufficiently cheap it'll become economic to put solar collectors in orbit and beam energy back to Earth.

And all you need for this kind of optimism is the kind of technology we're widely expected to have this century.

So it's kind of sad that a lot of the larger fauna is doomed but you're not going to change people's appetites for rhino horns, fish bladders, tiger oil or pangolin dishes. Then again, maybe future genetics can restore some or all of those species.

The Earth has also been a lot warmer than it is now so I have trouble believing the doomsday scenarios of runaway climate change that'll turn the Earth into Venus just because the Earth has been here for 4-5 billion years, has been hotter than now and hasn't become Venus yet. We also seem to have a pretty poor history of predictions when it comes to climate change too.

Fundamentally this also seems like a "betting with the Mayans" type scenario too. Either the doomsayers are right and we're screwed. If so, you'll be right but who cares? We're still screwed. You're probably better off just hoping things will work out because, honestly, I think there's a pretty decent chance they will.


Ah, techno utopianism. It ignores reality in many ways, here are two.

First, if we have clean energy, are we going to shut down fossil fuel plants that have already been built? If not, then fossil fuel will just become cheaper as demand drops, making burning fossil fuels attractive again. Countries currently plan to reduce their emissions, but none are planning to reduce their fossil fuel exports. They just hope it will show up on another country's emissions balance sheet.

Even if we did develop super cheap clean energy, that would only reduce emissions in the future. Past emissions hang around for centuries and contribute to warm the planet (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jan/16/greenhou...). We would need to pay huge amounts to sequester that CO2 and I don't see anybody volunteering to foot that bill.

This paper summarises both issues well: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Both are just aspects of the fundamental issue - although technological solutions perhaps could be developed, there is no political or economic will to do so, and no indication that will change.


> First, if we have clean energy, are we going to shut down fossil fuel plants that have already been built?

That depends entirely on how cheap the alternatives are. Fossil fuel mining is not zero cost in itself, so there is a minimum price it can’t go below.

Indeed, quite a lot of coal plants are being shut down — they can’t compete as the fuel itself is too expensive. This is not universal as not all coal is the same price and transport costs are also relevant, but it is happening.


10$ for Saudis, 25$ for shell, 50$ from the Artic sea.


Per what, barrel of oil?

If that’s what you’re quoting (I’ve not seen any recent attempts to calculate the costs of oil extraction), each barrel has ~1.7 MWh of energy. By way of comparison, PV solar records are around $0.02/kWh = $34/BOE.


>Countries currently plan to reduce their emissions, but none are planning to reduce their fossil fuel exports. They just hope it will show up on another country's emissions balance sheet.

That's not how markets work, at all. Oil has an extraction cost, and once the price falls below the profitable threshold, the production will absolutely shutdown.

This highly visible with the boom/bust cycle of the more expensive extraction areas (dakotas, canada, etc).

So as demand continues to drop due to competition from cheaper energy, oil supply will start to collapse as well because none of it comes for free and taking it out of the ground will become a money losing proposition.


> First, if we have clean energy, are we going to shut down fossil fuel plants that have already been built? If not, then fossil fuel will just become cheaper as demand drops

This is untrue. If cost to extract >> market price, then existing operations may well just be shut down. To quote Hemmingway it would likely happen "gradually then suddenly".


> The Earth has also been a lot warmer than it is now

Key here is rate of change, and what humans can survive. We are changing the climate many many times faster than ever before. Nature does not have the time to adapt. And the wars, famines and mass displacements coming from ecosystem collapse is like nothing we've seen in human history. Think we have a problem with a few million migrants? Try a billion or two!

P-T Extinction event "The Great Dying" took on the order of 100 000 years to elevate CO2 and still killed off 96% of marine species and 70% of land vertebrates. The largest mass extinction ever(?) We're going strong in that direction over a few hundred years.

And a very hot earth will have large areas that are not survivable by humans, by traditional crops and food animals, and so on. Storms and floods massively more powerful than we see today.

Frankly, how can you not be afraid of that future? It's very likely your descendants won't survive it.


Earth will be fine.

Life on Earth will be fine, but that life will be different to the life we have today.

The only thing not fine is whether humans survive what they/we ultimately have brought about.

But in there is a kind of beautiful justice that the universe has in it's self-correcting algorithm... if you create imbalance, the imbalance will correct in time but perhaps to do so it kills you.

If we care about the human race, it means to care about the whole ecosystem and all other life on Earth. But the evidence of behaviour by people and governments is that they only care for themselves as individuals and not the wider human race, and other life on Earth.

I no longer see hope for significant change in the behaviour of humans, and I've shifted my view to believing that what is needed to provide massively long-term stability in the ecosystem for life on Earth is another mass extinction that includes humans.

Which sounds depressing, but doesn't feel it. I'm positive about life on Earth, just not about humans.


> Earth will be fine. Life on Earth will be fine...

TBH statements like these really grate on me. Yes, Earth will be fine in the same sense that you'd be fine if you surgically removed your arms, legs, eyeballs, ears, and tongue and then were fed intravenously and your waste disposed of for you. You might live a long life and have lots of nice dreams.

The reality is that we are in early stages of kicking off a cascade of effects that could wipe out the majority of the food web on Earth--let's say, everything larger than your finger. Yeah sure, insects and microbes will reboot it all--in a hundred millions years, if ever. Wonderful!

To make such flippant remarks about so profoundly annihilating the bioversity of this very special planet is not helpful in the dialogue.

Let's please work on this problem seriously.


I’d love to see a credible source suggesting that climate change has any kind of remote chance of wiping out all life on earth larger than a few cm.


It's not just climate change, it's the combined effects of a lot of different things, not the least of which is overfishing, deforestation, loss of habitat, and selective destruction of ecosystems.

So far we've really only scratched the surface, but there have been hundreds of local mass die-offs (billions of individual animals each). https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/01/150113-mass...

The Great Barrier Reef is about half dead now. In two years. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/since-20...

But look at what happened at the end of the Permian age. 96% of species were lost. It was due to CO2/methane causing climate change. https://cosmosmagazine.com/palaeontology/big-five-extinction...

(btw we still have no idea what caused the extinction at the end of the Triassic).

We're basically on the way to combining all of these causes of mass extinctions in a super-short timeframe that may mushroom into one super-massive extinction.

And as far as what-if's go, if climate change sets off a global conflict, and there's a nuclear war, forget it.


All those things are horrible. None of them have the remotest chance of wiping out all life larger than a few cm.


Phytoplankton seems to decline due to warming[1]. If this trend continues we're going to have a bad time. Phytoplankton produces at least half of the oxygen we breathe and is key to the oceanic food web.

[1] https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100728/full/news.2010.379.h...


I worked a bit around the data, and I am very sceptical about humanity ability to produce enough CO2 for The Climate Change. Volcanic activity was, is, and will be the main contributor to the CO2 pool. Humanity is not the geological force, regretfully.


That's simply incorrect.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/volcano-carbon-emissions/

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/which-emits...

https://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warmin...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/06/06/how-...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcan...


Ah, Forbes always was an authoritative source on climate change. I am not in the mood for battling over the authors who are unable to consider 250 000 underwater volcanoes. You know, 250 000 underwater volcanoes cannot be wrong.


That's a nice cherry-picking over the sources you're doing here. From Scientific American, quoting USGS:

> According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the world’s volcanoes, both on land and undersea, generate about 200 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, while our automotive and industrial activities cause some 24 billion tons of CO2 emissions every year worldwide

But I guess you're more knowledgeable on the subject than the US geological survey?

> On average, human activities put out in just three to five days, the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide that volcanoes produce globally each year

https://www.usgs.gov/news/human-activities-produce-more-carb...


So you‘re biased against one source and ignore all the others given here?


This sources disagree:

https://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warmin...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcan...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=compare+human+emissions+volcanic+e...


> The only thing not fine is whether humans survive what they/we ultimately have brought about.

Humans will be fine, as a species. But the human and economic costs will be large.

Compare it to the Hurricane Katrina: most people in New Orleans weathered it fine (i.e. by evacuating the city). The city itself also survived mostly okay (it's still there). But the economic cost of cleanup was huge; and while most people survived without injury, many did not for various reasons.

The choice of "spend a bit of money now, save a Katrina later" versus "save money now, have a Katrina later" is pretty clear. Unfortunately in the case of Katrina we didn't have much of a choice, but for climate change we do. If we invest resources now we can save a lot of problems later on. Or we can spend our resources on other things now, and pay a huge price later.

Alarming "zomg we might all die" stuff isn't really all that helpful or likely to convince politicians or businesses to actually do something. It also invites the "meh, the earth has been warmer" counter-argument, which is missing the point. I think more level-headed risk analysis which lists potential costs/benefits is more useful.


If the main argument is economic costs, then this turns the discussion from a global to a localized problem, whether the required actions or sacrifices justify the local risks.

For example, is it worth for some country to "invest", say, $100 billion in reducing emissions - which, at least unilaterally, won't be sufficient to prevent the effects of climate change but just mitigate them - or can they achieve better mitigation by a comparable investment in reinforcing their shoreline, updating or relocating buildings, etc?

If USA had to vote on whether to spend (or lose by restricting growth) $1 trillion of USA resources to prevent $10 trillion of future losses in SE Asia, then I'd assume that such proposals would be swiftly declined; spending our resources on other things now and having someone else pay a huge price later would be considered a quite good deal by many governments, as the countries that most need to take action are not the same countries that will bear the harshest consequences.


> If the main argument is economic costs

Economic, human, and ecological costs. I am not hugely in favour of reducing everything to economics (although it's definitely an important part).

I also don't think that it's as simple as "$1 trillion of USA resources to prevent $10 trillion of future losses in SE Asia". Globalisation means that "local" economies aren't really all that local; so problems in e.g. SE Asia will also affect other parts of the world.


Humans are the ultimate adapters. Heck, we can survive in the vacuum of space, the highest peaks and some of the lowest parts of the ocean. We live in deserts and rain forests and tundra and remote islands.

Humans will survive. They will adapt. It may not be in the same numbers and lifestyle as today, but the human race will likely be here for a very long time.


Human societies can have individuals doing all that. Stable, large societies. The astronauts can survive in the vacuum of space because of technology, and they can get to space because of technology - technology that is backed by hundreds of thousands of people all across the greater economic machine that built the rocket and the space suits, and supplied and fed everyone involved.

As individuals, we're not much more interesting than any other animal. It's our technological civilization that makes us interesting in the grand scheme of things, and that civilization is both hard to bootstrap and extremely fragile.


Without our technology, we can still run farther and longer than any other species, use our delicate fingers and opposable thumbs, control fire, and make and use tools and solve relatively complex puzzles. As a species, without our tech, we are head and shoulders above most species.


Sort of. But fire and tools are technology, the very lowest tier. Our ability to stack technology, to use tools to build better tools, is what makes us interesting - as long as we actually make use of this ability.


> Humans are the ultimate adapters.

Well yes, nearly ('extreme' perhaps: 'ultimate' sounds a bit magical), but that's the problem. Darwinian evolution has created a creature than can avoid most sources of population limits that permit ecosystem stability. This same creature has the flexibility to repeat the trick in all regions on the planet, crashing one after another.

And then although our species is (for better or worse) remarkably resilient, agricultural civilisation is far too new to be able to make similar claims about it. The 21st century signs aren't good. It's hard to imagine major climate collapse convulsions not resulting in ongoing wars, probably nuclear.

So yes, literal extinction of humans doesn't seem likely. Some people may enjoy the idea of a dystopic 'The Road' style rag-tag dog-eat-dog existence (though they're probably mostly pale wormy teens who in real life panic when out of reach of a screen). But the breakdown of a planetary society of 7-12 billion (depending on how far into this process we can jury rig nations to hold together) is going to be nothing but a litany of sorrow & pain.


Humans have survived fine these extremes only because there is normal ecosystem outside from it. Now imagine that after climate collapse the vacuum of space, top of the peak or bottom of the ocean is the only environment we have. You don't even have a single remote island with reasonable nature. No, humans will not survive it for long.


Humans cannot survive in the vacuum of space. Check the twin experiment NASA done lately.


“The planet has been through a lot worse than us. And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!”


Nice, dark if not nihilist summary.

Have to agree with you there. Things will probably get much worse before they get better. Now there are 2 possible attitudes, either depression from obvious lack of adequate action, or acceptance of what's about to come will come, whatever it is.

By acceptance I don't mean ignorance, by all means promote moral, 'green' solutions, recycle, vote for sane people who at least pretend to care (I am looking at you, US). Or do gazillion of other things that help, and avoid those which don't. I know I do my part, however insignificant.

But change is inevitable. Even though on paper we can still avoid most dark stuff, we won't. Mankind as a whole will react properly only when it really will start to hurt, globally, and rich won't be able to comfortably escape or hide from it.

Some will die because of this. Some will profit from it. On enough long-term scale, it won't matter unless mankind will go extinct which I don't believe will happen.

Do I like it? Not at all. Can I change it? Same answer. Am I content with it and not waste my time, energy and mood on being depressed about it? Absolutely.


Sounds like a job for Thanos (the last avenger movie) ;)


>We are changing the climate many many times faster than ever before

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080619142112.h...

The ice core showed the Northern Hemisphere briefly emerged from the last ice age some 14,700 years ago with a 22-degree-Fahrenheit spike in just 50 years...


The temp has definitely changed faster than this before and the hundred years people are worried about wouldn’t even show up in geological historic records.

For a recent example look up the younger dryas on Wikipedia. It seems like the average global temp moved about 5 degrees over a few decades.


“””The Younger Dryas … was a return to glacial conditions which temporarily reversed the gradual climatic warming after the Last Glacial Maximum started receding”””

Closest I can get to supporting your client is that the local temperature of Greenland went up a lot at the end of that period. Not global. And given the article talks a lot about global thermohaline circulation, extreme local variation is not surprising.


It is a bit of an educated guess because we can’t know the global average, but most of the local temps that are estimated moved in the same direction. The ones in Greenland were larger than most though.


Wikipedia — which you chose to suggest as a source — Does not at first glance provide citations for other locations. Can you please do so?


Sure, the text of this reference at least agrees with my claim of a general trend: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/abrupt-climate-change/The%20Younge...


Thanks.

I can’t follow the link from there to (Brauer et al. 2008) as that link is paywalled.

The Greenland graph is essentially vertical, but the Cariaco graph looks like it’s relatively spread out as well as being much smaller magnitude — though even then, the delta is double the current estimated maximum sustainable excess over pre-industrial temperatures.


Primates first developed when earth was 14°C warmer:

http://gergs.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/All_palaeotemps_...


How is that relevant?

Areas where more than a billion people live today will become uninhabitable to humans if they warm up by 14 degrees. Actually, much sooner than that.


They will. However, areas, where almost no one lives today, will be inhabitable instead. There's plenty of barely inhabited space on Earth.

That will be a giant migration crisis, on an unprecedented scale, sure. Maybe even a world war. Nothing good, not in slightest. Something best avoided at all costs.

Yet, the point is, if this won't be avoided - humanity as a whole is still not in danger. We're not going extinct if Earth will warm up. The world will change drastically, many millions will die, ecosystems will be shattered - but H.sapiens aren't going to disappear as a species.


I wouldn't be surprised of most of the western world will wait until the "Areas where more than a billion people live today will become uninhabitable to humans if they warm up" start taking drastic anti-climate-change sacrifices first. If they aren't willing to sacrifice economic growth to mitigate those consequences, then no one will.


Yeah I can totally see that kind of logic coming. But if everyone just waits for someone else to do something, nothing will change. That is the most likely outcome, I think.


But why? Why can't we adapt to those environments using technology? This is what the OP comment is saying.


Because our technology doesn't magically appear out of nowhere. Even the simple DIY "lifehack" you can assemble from $5 worth of RadioShack parts has huge supply chains hidden behind it, staffed by hundreds of thousands of people. On top of that, all those supply chains are full of circular dependencies. A chip needs a fab. A fab needs computers. Computers need chips... and screws. Screws need metal and precision manufacturing machines. Precision manufacturing machines need computers and screws. Metal mining needs computer and screws. Etc.

If the climate situation gets to the point of crashing global supply chains, say goodbye to all modern technology. Whatever's left will degrade quickly, and we'll be back to preindustrial levels, but with no easily accessible dense energy sources to bootstrap another industrial revolution.

This is why I keep saying that the most important goal right now is not to protect the planet, not to protect the human species, but to protect our technological civilization. If it collapses, we'll still be there (albeit in reduced numbers). But our civilization won't recover for millennia.


That's a common trope in Science Fiction. But modern technology is different from the Iron Age. It uses vastly less energy for the same result; its honestly simpler in many regards than what came before.

Sure there are dependencies, and some technologies will collapse and become unachievable for generations. But others are essentially free of dependencies - the germ theory of disease, the staff system, democracy, air travel, bicycles. Easy to bring back or keep, and with tremendous benefits.

I've always been sad that post-apocalyptic scenarios have no bicycles, and no biplanes. They just postulate people being the same as people were in the stone age, maybe with some recycled trash thrown in.


That's a fair observation. In fact, applying modern scientific and engineering knowledge to tech built from ground-up is something I'm interested in[0]. The post-collapse life would be better thanks to all this knowledge (as long as people keep copying books instead of burning them), but I still maintain we'd end up in a pretty dire situation.

Consider that food production is very much dependent and looped with all the existing supply chains. As some say, modern agriculture is essentially pouring petroleum into the ground and harvesting crops that grow from it. Could we use our scientific knowledge to get better results than preindustrial people did with the same tech level? Sure. Will it be enough to feed even 20% of current population, especially given the battered climate? I doubt it. And the way I see it, a lot of our "social technologies" - as well as more "physical" ones - seem to depend on population size and density.

Speaking of science fiction tropes, I read an interesting book once - "The Windup Girl". It featured a post-climate-change world with depleted fossil fuels and collapsed technology, that still sort-of worked thanks to machines being powered by mechanical work (with spring systems for storage and special breeds of animals providing muscle power). I wish more books and movies would go into this territory.

--

[0] - not just because it's what we'll need come climatepocalypse, but also because I believe there are many unexplored "low-tech/hi-science" solutions that could let us achieve similar results in many areas of life, while using much less energy, or with much less dependence on existing infrastructure. For instance, I feel that mechanical energy storage (springs) and gliders are underexplored and underapplied, since energy today is too cheap to bother.

--

EDIT and a tangent: I am really interested in the possibility of combining gliders with computers and sensors to enable extremely energy-efficient (if not time-efficient) flight. If anyone knows of work being done in this space, I'd love to get some directions or resources about it.


I'm on the same page. The easiest thing to do once the collapse comes will be to give up and die instead of change - and maybe 80% is too conservative an estimate of the number of folks that will take this route.

Farming is more of a 'trickle petroleum into the ground and harvest crops'. Its one of the most efficient of technologies now. With good timing and no-till and ammonia fertilizer, even eroded clay hillsides produce bumper crops. It is a fragile technology tree but much simpler trees could be forged, having a good whack of the same benefits.


RE the 80%, I expect the food shortage pressures to cause immediate wars that would quickly help shed the excess population. I fully expect to die in such a conflict (or be forced to eat a bullet to avoid the pain of starvation).

RE farming and other technology trees, it might be worth it to hedge our bets by trying to develop such simpler tech trees right now. In the worst case, we'd be making life much easier for the survivors. In the best case, maybe we could reapply some of those ideas to further reduce energy waste.


Just come to my place in the country, here in Iowa. That's what all the family are expecting to do. It's our gathering place. Remote from centers of population, food production facilities and stores everywhere, inhospitable enough to discourage refugees (winter), personal firearm ownership the norm. And our family includes doctors, soldiers, farmers and managers. Kind of the perfect mix!


Thanks :). Would love to come and help you fortify. Alas, it'll involve catching a flight from central Europe before shit hits the fan.


All about the timing. Maybe make a dry run before it gets that far, work the kinks out? Honestly, you'd be welcome.


I'd be happy to. Can you send me an e-mail?


Ideas get lost too. The way out of the dark ages was made by monasteries who saved libraries. It still took forever to recover.

Maybe we’ll have a rennasaince. Maybe we won’t; but Paper Books will be critical


Are we going to adapt all the world's flora and fauna to the changed conditions too?

If so it's simply cheaper to entirely fix global warming. If not, what are we planning on eating?

We're already seeing species can't react quickly enough to changing conditions. Flora especially takes time to move. If it's only humanity that is adapting, isn't the point rather moot?


The principle species that can't react quickly enough is Homo Sapiens, sadly. At least lower mammals don't have to deal with denial and demagogues.


Most of the people who live in places that will become uninhabitable, can either not or can barely afford clear water and food. They will not be able to afford hi tech solutions. Since Humanity does not help them now, it is not reasonable to assume that we will help them in the future.


They're not saying that these people will survive, just that the human kind will survive


One immediate reason is our physiological limit (see wet bulb temperature), which is achieved at air temperatures as low as 45 degrees C depending on humidity.

Another is sea level rise. For +14C that's on the order of +30 meters as currently predicted.

And of course such drastic changes don't come alone. Weather patterns will change, food production will be threatened, governments will be destabilized, wars will happen.

We can tech our way out of some of this but who's to say that we will be given enough time and resources. The universe doesn't owe us anything.


Coral reefs and their ecosystem lie at a precise depth - where water clarity, temperature and sea floor cooperate to provide enough sunlight and energy to allow corals to grow. A change in sea temperature of a degree or two, or a rise or fall of a few inches, and existing coral reefs collapse. And it takes centuries for them to regrow.

Many things are like that. And we don't have decades to wait for the Earth to become congenial again, we need to eat every day.


Sure.

What about industrial civilization?


> Fundamentally this also seems like a "betting with the Mayans" type scenario too. Either the doomsayers are right and we're screwed. If so, you'll be right but who cares? We're still screwed. You're probably better off just hoping things will work out because, honestly, I think there's a pretty decent chance they will.

I think you are fundamentally missing the point of the question. The question is what we can do to prevent climate change, not how we should align our beliefs not to worry about it.

> So it's kind of sad that a lot of the larger fauna is doomed but you're not going to change people's appetites for rhino horns, fish bladders, tiger oil or pangolin dishes. Then again, maybe future genetics can restore some or all of those species.

This perfectly exemplifies my problem with this attitude.

You call this "levelheaded optimism", but you're basically throwing your hands up hoping for someone to apply some sort of sci-fi solution to the problem at some point in the future. Calling for Jurassic Park to restore extinct species is the opposite of levelheaded. To say that there's nothing we can do about it now is really just thinly veiled defeatism and not at all optimistic.

Meanwhile, for example, the demand and supply of rhino horns is decreasing overall, not because people are content with speculating about how someone else in a future generation will solve the problem, but because deliberate action is being taken to change the attitudes towards rhino horns, campaigning to educate people about the medicinal myths surrounding them, to destroy smuggled horns and to protect the animals from poachers.

If the people engaging in these actions had just laid back, convinced that someone will be able to beam rhinos from a parallel universe by 2100AD anyway, they'd probably have been extinct by now.


I think the biggest counter to that optimism is that while those necessary technologies are being developed, civilization will perhaps be going through major disruption that causes lots of suffering and death. Humans will almost certainly not go extinct, and may even get some great technological advancements out of the ordeal, but at the scale of human lives there will be a lot of suffering.


Oh sure. No argument. My point isn't that it should happen (it shouldn't) or that I don't care (I do). Not that there isn't and won't be suffering (there is and there will be).

My point is that this is unfortunately what human nature is and I don't see any great change tool that unless we get to some kind of post-scarcity situation but I'm reasonably optimistic about that.


“Humans will almost certainly not go extinct”

I wish there was a prediction market where I could bet against you on this outcome...


If you are a human, you will not be able to collect your win anyway.


While I appreciate your optimism, it comes at the risk of failing to take personal action. The general sentiment is that people are uninterested in, or incapable of, making meaningful lifestyle changes , and that some future technological developments will transcend the Earth's carrying capacity to sustain us while cleaning up our collective mess. While there may be some shades of truth to that sentiment, it is still within our power and responsibility to live sustainably.


That's better than taking action that is actually meaningless and thinking you've done something (e.g. the CA unsolicited drinking water ban or people unplugging inactive phone chargers). People who do things like this to get their virtue signaling credit do even less to make meaningful changes because they "already helped".

There are things you can do to take personal action. The ones that actually matter are usually disruptive (e.g. eliminating your daily commute is orders of magnitude better than eating local). Most of the mainstream 'sustainable living' tips are just a drop in the bucket designed around minimizing disruption and maximizing showing off.


This is a good point. Optimism is good for motivation but it has to result in action and not be simply ignoring a problem. Pessimism paralyses people into inaction but by understanding the psychology we can change that.

I wrote a series of posts on this recently with more to come. Far more than I can fit in here. It's a classic tragedy of the commons but there is hope.

https://unop.uk/how-to-help-with-a-big-global-problem-as-a-t...


> The Earth has also been a lot warmer than it is now so I have trouble believing the doomsday scenarios of runaway climate change that'll turn the Earth into Venus just because the Earth has been here for 4-5 billion years, has been hotter than now and hasn't become Venus yet. We also seem to have a pretty poor history of predictions when it comes to climate change too.

This is disingenuous because humans have been around say 2M years, and those hot climate years were >5M years ago. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record).

We don't need Earth to have Venus conditions for it to be a big problem for us.


And before someone replies with "How can you possibly say that", you can do both - be optimistic about the future and also change your own personal habits and become educated on the topic in general anyway.


Sounds very optimistic, but also depends on a lot of "if"s and "maybe"s. Fact is that while a lot of hard problems do get solved by new innovations, not all of them are, and systems do fail catastrophically sometimes.

Who knows what the future will bring. I have little doubt that the planet and human species will survive in the longer term, but the ecological, human, and economic costs will be huge. It's a stupid gamble: the benefits to ignoring climate change are small, and the dangers are huge.

It bothers me to no end that even in Europe many parties that acknowledge that climate change is real and a serious problem (basically everyone, only the US/GOP is a mainstream source of climate denial) kind of ignore it because "zomg the economy might shrink 0.001% the next quarter". It's spectacularly short-sighted, and it's one of several examples where our democratic system is failing massively in addressing serious problems.


You don't have to turn the Earth into Venus. You just have to raise the Earth from 283 Kelvin to 285 Kelvin, and you'll get massive flooding and ice melt which technology won't be able to wave away. Look at hurricanes today, they are deadly, where is the tech saving us from them?


The thing is, hurricanes are remarkably not deadly compared to the scale of social change that preventing climate change would require.

For example, in the currently worst recent hurricane years, cars killed something like 10 times more people in USA than these hurricanes. If we got people to drive half as much (which would help but not be sufficient), then the most impact on deaths and injuries would come directly from the change in habits, not from the effect on global warming.

If we're not willing to drastically reduce driving so as we'd save some of the 40000 USA road vehicle deaths/year (and we're obviously not), then why would we be willing to drastically reduce emissions just to save some of the 2000-4000 hurricane deaths/year?

The same goes for massive flooding. OK, Bangladesh will plausibly get many deaths from the sea level rise. USA? Not so much; it can probably afford a massive infrastructure investment to do Netherland-style dams for all densely populated coastal areas.


Cars, weather satellites etc... We can evacuate a hurricane, we can't evacuate the planet.


> Too expensive to get to space? Eventually the cost of this will go down to dollars per kilogram.

You speak of this as if space migration is going to be scalable.


The likely end result of orbital systems looks something like this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E

The thing about the that is that it's not high tech. It's an engineering problem not a science problem. A massive engineering solution I'll grant you. I'll also concede that there are going to be a lot of steps on between.


That is your answer? Some crazy science fiction colossal international space structure that will require all countries of humanity working together to build?

The future is going to be very mundane. Conventional reusable rockets are going to be enough. The fuel cost of a launch is orders of magnitude lower than the cost of whatever satellites you're bringing into orbit.


> Worried about how we'll produce all that power? When getting stuff into orbit is sufficiently cheap it'll become economic to put solar collectors in orbit and beam energy back to Earth.

I used to be a big believer in this. But, from a pure waste heat standpoint, if we ever have to worry about having enough area in Earth's surface for solar panels, we have much bigger problems.

We are nowhere near that point now, but given a small but steady exponential growth in the energy supply, we'll get there in a couple hundred years.

However, space based solar power could help with intermittently of solar/wind if battery tech doesn't outpace enonomic orbital launches.


It all sounds great, except for:

1) We don't have enough time to wait for those solutions to be implemented.

2) Climate lag. We're now only seeing the consequences from the emissions from the 80s. Since then we've emitted a lot more CO2. Not only we need to reach zero emissions asap, as in in the next decade, but we also need to reach strong negative emissions very soon.

Don't get me wrong. I think if all humanity was focused working towards that goal it might be possible to get a shot at this, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.


> When getting stuff into orbit is sufficiently cheap it'll become economic to put solar collectors in orbit and beam energy back to Earth.

Can we have that before 2040 please

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/climate/ipcc-climate-repo...


> Fundamentally this also seems like a "betting with the Mayans" type scenario too. Either the doomsayers are right and we're screwed. If so, you'll be right but who cares? We're still screwed. You're probably better off just hoping things will work out because, honestly, I think there's a pretty decent chance they will.

Exactly. You can spread doom as much as you want and it won't help. You won't get a critical mass to listen to you. They won't change their behavior based on some event that will most likely happen in the far future. Sad, but true.

As a species, we don't have a history of planning and preventing. Instead we have always been adapting to change as things happen. This is essentially the same.

If technology caused a problem, technology can also solve it.


> If technology caused a problem, technology can also solve it.

Sometimes. If it's economically viable. Sometimes many decades later.

Take PCBs as an example. Their absurd longevity means nearly all of it is still around, causing a long list of harms, and will probably continue for decades more. Long after production ceased.


Gentle reminder: op of this thread mentioned Isaac Arthur and futurism in general as a source of inspiration as to how one can positively think about things like climate change.

In that context:

* Economic viability is a matter of time. Have commercially viable fusion reactors? You better recalculate your econ viability all over.

* PCBs: Nanotechnology, robotics, AI


We keep trying to shift accountability from ourselves to technology. It is our responsibility to change our lifestyles now. Not in a generation when some hypothetical technical savior may emerge and deliver us from danger.


It's our technology. We made it. We are responsible. I don't see your point.

What do you want people to do? Stop living their lives and give up tech? To what level? Can we keep the wheel?

That's not how things work in reality.


Previous civilisations have given up the wheel. The Japanese did, then in the Middle East the wheel went by the wayside where animals rather than wheels suited the compact cities.

Just saying that because some people don't understand that there are good reasons to give up those clumsy wheel things, they ain't the bees knees.

In the post nuclear war movie 'Threads' there is a quick loss of education and language in the nuclear winter years. A girl is shown with a record player and records, this scene is about how the girl has no idea what this is for, the very culture of music is not conceivable, it has been lost.

All tech is given up in the apocalypse. As is language and civilisation. It becomes a life of harsh survival. Violence becomes the universal language that everyone understands, that's it.

This is still an outcome our politicians have not gone to rule out for us. With our taxes we pay for tens of thousands of nuclear weapons to be pointed at us.

If we just give up the cult of militarism then we will be fine.


A climate change "Threads" with the same impact and production values might be a really helpful thing. 35 years later there's been nothing else like it, despite its almost unbelievably low budget.


This seems like a psychological defence against anxiety/depression rather than an actual foundation for real action.

You're looking at big, broad patterns and assuming they will work out on the huge scales necessary for civilisation to continue. Other people are looking at the big broad patterns and assuming that cascading failures will make problems accelerate.


No, it's not.

It's a mindset and a positive attitude that is constructive instead of spreading fear and doom, which does not yield any positive outcome at all.


> spreading fear and doom, which does not yield any positive outcome at all.

That's not true. You are keeping saying that in several of your comments. There are many examples where things have changed because of

  Spreading fear and doom -> Politicians pass laws -> Industry is forced to react -> New technologies developed/deployed/...
What you and some others here are proposing is basically to wait that things crash and then directly jump to the "New technologies" part. Like a child waiting for christmas.


No that's not what I propose and I also don't think that's what op proposed.

If you read the comments again you will see that all that was said is "you won't change the outcome this way", which means that political action alone is not enough.

Look at what's happening currently. All that fear and doom may lead to political decisions, but have they changed the carbon level in our atmosphere? You try to regulate something without looking at the overall outcome. If you want to do something, it's much better to do something positive, e.g. passing subsidies for renewable energy tech.

I think it doesn't make sense anymore to discuss this here. HN is not a good place to discuss different opinions which could be interpreted as being political. The people with the downvote power decide what's valid and what's not.

It's sad as otherwise we could have a fruitful discussion here.


> If you want to do something, it's much better to do something positive, e.g. passing subsidies for renewable energy tech.

Okay, that makes sense and, even better, also works sometimes. In fact, renwable energy is a good example where incentives can trigger changes (see the solar market in Europe). However, there are also many examples where incentives have not worked, although running for decades, because people are too lazy or because the financial incentives are not big enough. People and (by design) the industry are waiting that the goverment pays and says "please, please, take that money and prevent that we destroy human life for next 100000 years".

At some point you have to say "fck you, stop that behavior, otherwise you will kill us all". In my opinion, we are very close to that point with the CO2 level. In contrast, OP seems to suggest that we should continue and hope that some miracle in technology will help us, because saying "Stop that, you idiot" doesn't work, right? The market will fix it and regulations and deep states are bad, right? But the fact is that regulations have worked many times. See leaded petrol, asbestos, catalyzators, pesticides, and basically all laws that we have had in Europe for the protection of the environment in the past 50 years. I am not a child waiting for christmas, but an adult who knows that the parents bought the presents.


This is different. It's not asbestos or pesticides. What differentiates it is that it's slow death by heating up. Some time in the future. Not now. You can't even measure the success of your political regulations with regard to global carbon emissions on a conceivable time scale. Success is directly measurable for the things that you named. That's not the case here.

I don't get why it's necessary to start a left vs. right, regulations vs. non-regulations war on this. This is effectively destroying the discussion about real solutions.

I got a completely different impression of op's comment. Namely, that we as humans cannot control everything, but there's ways we can get real progress when we combine our talents to come up with great technical solutions.

I doubt that we will be able to turn the clock back, and I wouldn't want to participate in trying.

That doesn't mean that we cannot do something positive via political means meanwhile. I'm just saying that evidence suggests it doesn't solve the problem on a global scale and hence is obviously not the whole solution.


I think it doesn't make sense anymore to discuss this here.

Personally, I'm impressed with the overall quality of discussion in this thread. It's going a whole lot better than most other discussions I've seen online. There's a certain irony that you are against "doom and gloom" arguments, but fail to see any hope for productive discussion. Stick around, keep discussing, and make it incrementally better.


Indeed I fail to see any hope for a productive discussion involving different opinions on HN if I see people scrolling down to the bottom of a comment page to put another downvote on an already greyed out post.

It's becoming an echo chamber.

I am happy to continue a discussion, but not here.


I don't see how believing it will all work out fine and not worrying is constructive, yet spreading fear (which might actually encourage people to act) is not.


I did not say that you should not worry. Still, spreading fear can yield very dangerous decisions.


How is it constructive to say that there's nothing we can do about people's appetites for rhino horns when there's 70 years of evidence of that not being the case? It's not positive, it's an overall defeatist attitude thinly veiled in sci-fi speculation.


This is such a beautiful and fresh perspective. Too often there is a cheap optimism that doesn't quite feel genuine - laziness and ignorance feels like the easy alternative route.

But sometimes a brand of pragmatic, disciplined optimism serves to inspire without diminishing the urgency or importance of the matter at hand. This hit that mark pretty well.


> Think we're dumping too much CO2 into the atmosphere? We no doubt are but that problem basically goes away immediately if we ever get economic fusion power.

That's an enormous "if". Fusion research has been underfunded for decades, we don't even know if we can sustain it, and for a reason I don't get, many ecologists are anti-nuclear. Plus fusion won't solve everything. You won't put a sun core into your car nor your plane, not in the next centuries.

> Even if we don't, the plummetting cost of wind and solar may solve that anyway (by "solve" I mean that as soon as non-fossil fuel power production is cheaper than fossil fuels it becomes economic to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and turn into hydrocarbons).

Oh, you mean the unreliable power sources that sometimes provide electricity, sometimes don't?

> The Earth has also been a lot warmer than it is now

Well yes but 5°C is also the difference between an ice age and a hot age. We're currently in a hot age and the 4°C increase we're heading to are not very engaging. (Remainder, during ice age North America down to NY and Northern Europe down to Paris were covered by enormous glaciers. So what will the climate be in 4°C?). https://xkcd.com/1379/

Also in human history the Earth has never been this hot.

> Too expensive to get to space? Eventually the cost of this will go down to dollars per kilogram.

Ha. To escape Earth gravity you still need to spend 6.2*10^7 J/kg. That's gonna be a long time before we get to 1$/kg given that rocket propulsion is extremely costly (and as far as we know can't rely on atomic energy either). We're still at ~25 000 $/kg. And anyway recent studies show that the human body is unlikely to bear a trip to Mars, let alone the health issues caused by weightless environment.

Edit, source: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/09/26/1807522115. Basically the study suggests heavy ion irradiation is dangerous for the digestive system. The only thing is I'm not sure about the number of mice they used.

> We also seem to have a pretty poor history of predictions when it comes to climate change too.

I mean it's not as if oil companies conducted their own research and reached the very same conclusion in 1977. Oh wait. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...

I'm sorry but you're just burying your head in the sand, making the problem someone else's.


>> And anyway recent studies show that the human body is unlikely to bear a trip to Mars, let alone the health issues caused by weightless environment.

citations please..


My bad, here it is. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/09/26/1807522115


That shows health effects (which we already know exist) - why does it support the claim that the human body is unlikely to reach mars?

My understanding is that without shielding about 5% of the voyagers will get cancer, and that many people consider this a reasonably acceptable risk. Does this make that number substantially worse?


It's also affecting nutrient absorption. I don't see any quantitative number about this in the paper but it's been mentioned several time as having an impact.


> And anyway recent studies show that the human body is unlikely to bear a trip to Mars, let alone the health issues caused by weightless environment.

Could you link to an article or study about this? I don't believe that humans will ever reach other stars, but if even Mars is too much, oh well.


Sorry, I edited. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/09/26/1807522115


> nor your plane

Agreed with car - not sure I agree with plane.

Currently we have fission powered submarines and boats. Putting a fission reactor in a plane would be somewhat suicidal, but a fusion reactor would be mostly safe. A large plane is similar in scale to a submarine.


There was a US project to produce a fission powered plane, starting in 1946: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Nuclear_Propulsion

There were recently some rumours about the Russians producing a nuclear powered cruise missile.

I'm not sure a fusion powered plane would be any less crazy. At least with D-T fusion you have a MUCH higher neutron radiation requiring more shielding. OTOH if the plane crashes there's less worry about nuclear waste spreading over the landscape.


Safe maybe, but still restraining fusion is not something as easy as restraining fission. I'm still betting it won't happen in the next 150 years, even though I'd love to be proven wrong.


In my opinion, the large corporations behind fossil fuels have too much of an economic clout. The governments around the world are dependent on them for a considerable amount of their respective national economy. So yes you are right about government not doing much about this.

Ultimately, unless there is a relatively quick mass extinction event, no government is going to be bothered into action. Climate change and the devastation it's going to cause, is going to play out slowly over the years. The most affected would be the poorest of the world. They are going to die first. The rich will have enough resources to be able to not only survive, but also thrive on these events as new business opportunities are going to be created.

Ultimately, Earth maybe a very different place 100 years from now, but the rich of today are surely going to have their descendants living quite comfortably.

The only thing an individual can do is to strive to get as rich as possible, because that is the only security that's going to save you and your family in the bleak future that lies ahead of us.


Large corporations have too much economic clout because our economic and political thinking is pre-rational and not fit for purpose.

You can't do rational planning on a planetary scale when your political frameworks are explicitly tailored to maximise short-term resource accumulation without limit for a micro-minority.

We're not going to win this one without a revolution - not just the usual violent class swap that lops off one aristocracy to make room for another, but a moral and cultural revolution in how we plan for the future as a species.

I'm not optimistic, because IMO it's too big a challenge, and we literally don't have the brains or the culture for it.

But I'm open to being surprised.


In democracies we can't all just throw up our hands and blame it on the political class and big business. If the ordinary people of the developed world really wanted something done about it, as a higher priority than anything else, there is no gun held to their heads preventing them from voting for that. We are all benefiting hugely from the cheap energy reaped from fossil fuels, whether we like it or not, and in the main the fact is we like it.

Imagining that 'large corporations' are reaping all the benefits and could bear all the cost of weaning the global economy off fossil fuels is jaw droppingly naive. The massive costs of weaning ourselves off fossil fuels would bear down heavily on all of us, and especially the poor and the third world. Can we imagine China elevating hundreds of millions of people out of poverty over the last 30 years without fossil fuels?

I'm no climate change denier, far from it. You're quite right that the costs will be severe, even catastrophic, but there is no easy answer to this.


Indeed, there's no gun to our heads preventing us voting for taking serious action on climate change. There doesn't need to be.

Imagine I'm a voter in, say, the US or the UK. There is no major party I can vote for that will, if elected, take serious action on climate change. In both nations there is a Green Party which probably would, but it has a firmly established track record of getting approximately zero votes; the only way in which voting Green has ever had any visible impact on US or UK policy is that a bunch of people voting for Ralph Nader in the 2000 US presidential election is part of why we had President Bush instead of President Gore, which is probably not an encouraging precedent to most potential Green voters.

And, of course, voting Green also means voting for all their other policies. Which doesn't matter if you regard climate change as the only important issue, but since you probably don't, you might find them unacceptable on other grounds; and since lots of other voters definitely don't, lots of them are going to be voting not-Green even if they care a lot about climate change ... which means that, once again, the Greens are not actually going to win, and the only real effect of voting for them is to give you less influence on which actually-electable candidate wins instead.

So no, in practice we don't have the option of voting for taking serious action on climate change. We have the option of voting for a big package of things, one of which happens to be serious action on climate change, in the knowledge that (even if a sizeable majority of voters wants serious action on climate change) voting for that package won't actually result in a government that will try to implement it.

It may be that those of us who care about climate change should be voting Green even though it predictably won't help in the near future, in order to "send a message" that might change the political landscape in future elections. Or that we should be putting pressure on the actually-electable parties to change their policies, or starting new parties, or something. But none of that means that we have a realistic way of getting action on climate change just by voting for it.


This isn't how policy making works though.

An excellent example is Brexit. The Brexit referendum existed solely because of UKIP and UKIP have only ever won 2 parliamentary seats. And those were both for sitting MPs that had defected.

However, UKIP did get 4-odd million votes, plenty of local councillors, MEPs etc. In other words, they clearly had a lot of support for their flagship policies and that caused the main parties, that had UKIP voters in their constituencies, to take notice. Unfortunately.

This has also, to a lesser extent, been the case with green issues. The Greens increased their vote from the 80's onwards and the main parties started to adopt green policies accordingly.

So, in the UK at least, there are well worn paths to get policies, like climate change action, to the top of the heap.

I'd argue that there are a few reasons why they're not top of the heap today:

1) Other things are deemed more important. Clearly Brexit is one. Whether you agree that it should be more important, or not, it's fairly undeniable that it's true.

2) The folk that have expressed most interest in green issues have tended to not be very engaged in formal politics. <30s predominantly. That changed somewhat in the 2017 election primarily because of Corbyn (though Greens did particularly badly). So it may be that green issues become more important as a byproduct of other changes.

3) There's a strong argument that UKIP's popularity was, in large part, due to Nigel Farage. He may well be a cock but he's a cock that was on TV a lot reinforcing his message. I mean, I like Sian Berry (no idea who the other bloke is) but she's no Nigel Farage.


This is a good analysis of the situation.

>(no idea who the other bloke is) Jonathan Bartley [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Bartley


Depressingly pragmatic. While building resilience is certainly worthwhile, we can still fix this and should try.

I think individual actions can add up, particularly when we use the magnifying power of tech. I wrote a lot on this recently and I can't fit it all in a comment so I'll just link to it.

https://unop.uk/how-to-help-with-a-big-global-problem-as-a-t...

It boils down to a three step process:

- Understand

- Organise

- Amplify

There's a post for each and more to come.


When you say 'fix' do you mean 'prevent a two-degree shift' or 'transition to an zero-net-emissions economy'? Or do you mean we can avoid some survivable threshold higher than two degrees?

I agree that useful action is possible and important, but I'm starting to feel that our last chance to avoid catastrophic climate change was sometime last decade or the one before.


I mean both, first 'prevent a two-degree shift' then 'transition to an zero-net-emissions economy' and finally even negative emissions. This was almost solved in the 1980s and wasn't but that's a sunk-cost fallacy. The chips are down and we are where we are, so let's roll forward and get this solved.


Well, as comfortable as you will be able get with global wars, refugees, food shortages, etc. going on.

Governments and countries are not very stable under these conditions. Probably shouldn't expect your wealth to crisis proof your life in this scenario. Won't hurt but we'll all be much better off organizing to avoid this future.


>> Well, as comfortable as you will be able get with global wars, refugees, food shortages, etc. going on.

I think the crisis will be contained to the poorest parts of the world. Especially the tropics. This area is going to be the first to bear the brunt of climate change related problems.

I dont foresee Global wars happening. The politicians are too smart for that. They will try to contain the damage to the extant that the richer countries ( US, Europe, Australia ) are not affected much. Ofcourse there will be shortages as global supply routes are going to be disrupted.

The most thought provoking scenario here is going to be what will happen with China. Maybe not being a democracy will prove to be a blessing in disguise for it. Having a pragmatic group of men leading the country is the best option in the face of upcoming doom. China may shed a lot of weight ( population), but it may just survive, because of its largely monoculture and more or less obedient population.

I see much of Africa, SouthEast Asia to completely gone by the next 100 years. They will be left alone by the rest of the world to fight the battle of survival, and the odds wont be great.

MiddleEast is already ravaged, but they may continue to survive because they have oil.

Most rich countries ( the leaders I mean ), may not be very displeased with the fate of the poorer nations. Because as far as they are concerned mass deaths in poorer nations is only going to reduce the carbon emission load on our planet.


Somehow I doubt that people in these countries will sit on their hands while dying off.

Mass migration will definitely happen, and might even be supported by their governments and armies. India, Pakistan and China have nuclear weapons to wave around.

US will likely be better off than Europe thanks to the oceans and a big army / navy. But it will not be a good time for anyone if it comes to this.


> Because as far as they are concerned mass deaths in poorer nations is only going to reduce the carbon emission load on our planet.

But the wealthier nations are the ones producing majority of the carbon emissions.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/worlds-r...

Seems like you're counting on poorer countries to die off so you in the the richer nations can survive when it's the richer folks causing the problem. Like the resource loss from these continents wasting away won't affect them.


A part of the climate change calculation is that the poorer countries are actively improving their standards of living, and that means rapidly increasing their energy demands.


People in regions bearing the brunt of the change aren't just going to stay there. There will be mass migrations of possibly hundreds of millions, and no wall is going to stop them.


It's somewhat plausible that some of the potential targets of migration will choose to prevent this with military force, including nuclear weapons.


"The politicians are too smart for that"

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/oct/09/austr...

Good luck with that.


Mass Migration blows up your entire scenario.


Or migrate northwards, or upwards in elevation (latter might not work as well due to decreased precipitation). UK's latitude and natural moat are looking like pretty useful attributes, at the expense of losing considerable amounts of low lying coastline.


Sorry for painting a negative picture, but when poor countries are destabilised they create conflict for otherwise stable western countries too. Simply because it creates an opportunity for bad actors to gain strategic power.

For example, without becoming too political, it seems a plausible strategy for Russia to try and control migration from the east to gain influence over the EU.

Depending on the hyperbole, similar conflicts could become war scenarios where your wealth would not be enough to protect you.

Considering this, getting rich is certainly a good advice, but might not be enough. We need to work on de escalating the situation even without any altruistic reasons, if you want to maximise your personal survival chances.


> In my opinion, the large corporations behind fossil fuels have too much of an economic clout.

It's easy to blame the big corporations. It's also about the governments facilitating alternatives and about eventually, literally every person buying into that.


Don't wait for others to do things or take decisions. That's going to be an uphill battle if you really want changes quicker. Start with yourself, and then push others (including friends, family, colleagues, corporations, politicians, etc.). A lot can be done if people take up changes on their own instead of waiting for politicians or corporations or "those other polluting countries" to "just do something" about it.

Here are a few things you can do yourself and encourage those you know personally to follow:

1. Eliminate/reduce throwing or wasting food. Don't buy anything you wouldn't finish eating.

2. Eat only plants, or make plants the largest part of your meals while eliminating or reducing the consumption of animal products. Make sure you read up on nutrition and/or join some support groups.

3. Walk as much as possible and avoid fossil fuel based transport for yourself. Or try cycling. If necessary, take public transport.

4. Promote and use renewable sources of energy, like solar and/or wind, wherever possible.

5. Have fewer children or delay have children a little bit. This may have some other side effects depending on where you live and how the population demographic looks like.

If you think of yourself as committed to this cause and yet you see issues or barriers with the above, that's only a sign of how these things seem impossible to others who don't care enough. Work with (and on) yourself first.

Don't be shocked or surprised: you will see a whole lot of apathy all around you. People will even try to discourage you from doing anything and try to convince you that whatever you do just doesn't matter. Stop looking at them or listening to them.


I used to bike everywhere. It cost me personally. I showed up late sometimes. Wet. Disheveled. Sometimes didn’t go because the distance or weather.

While I’m all behind the “be the change you want to see” method, I sincerely believe that it can actually take you out of the fight.

While I’m bicycling on the way to a meeting someone is there a few mins early / or gets two meeting in, and they are able to lobby more. Or do more. And have more of an impact.

Or said allegorically, we need more sheep in wolve’s clothing to take on the wolves in sheep’s clothing.


> Have fewer children...think of yourself as committed to this cause...People will even try to discourage you...Stop looking at them or listening to them.

This sounds a lot like a cult religion to me.


There's no way we're going to make a meaningful positive impact on the climate without doing things that make people uncomfortable. The sooner we start, the less dramatic that discomfort will be


Well, think of any kind of mass change that you believe is beneficial to humanity and I bet you'd have a similar set of points that seem cultish.


Don't worry, it's not going to spread.


I like polar bears so it's sad to see those go. It will be disturbing to see coastal cities founded next to sunken cities. Storms are fun but only when they're occasional. I already miss the insects.

We worry about losing languages, cultures, artwork to the unyielding entropic horror named time. Not because we have a pragmatic need for them. But the future is scary when you can't bring the past with you. My culture is my security blanket.

Maybe my kids are going to grow up in a world not defined by technology but by the change in daily regimen of existence. Humans adapt really well to just about anything, so I bet my kids will feel right at home. They'll roll their eyes on cue when I insist that the future wasn't supposed to be like this.

I've always kind of wondered how someone as liberal as me can possibly turn into an old curmudgeon. Maybe this is how. Maybe I'll be disquieted not by being overrun by the creep of new gadgets, but by looking around and seeing a completely foreign anthroposphere.


Polar bear populations are fine, sea level had been rising at the same rate for much longer than we've been industrialized, storm rate isn't changing, and where do you live that there are no insects?


> where do you live that there are no insects

Relevant paper. 75% recorded decline in insect biomass:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...


Polar bears can swim all summer while they wait for the ice to return.


I'd be surprised if you have any evidence for this. Adult bears can swim surprisingly long (many days, not months), but cubs cannot and die.


Well, we _could_ build a world where the majority of people:

* Live in a very well insulated flat in the city that isn't made of concrete

* Have meat and dairy only as a luxury item

* Use solar and wind power for your heat pump and AC

* Ride a bike or walk to work, or take electrically-powered public transport

* Use non-luxurious sea transport to go on foreign holidays

we'd be about there. But boiling today's young people for the sake of cheap gas has proven more politically feasible.


People on HN seem to believe the default state of humanity is driving everywhere and living in the suburbs, when that's only true in particular parts of the US for the last 80 years or so. A frequent question I see about not owning a car is "well how could I possibly get groceries otherwise??" The only way we can address our individual footprint and our isolation crisis is to build real towns and cities again, but I'm doubtful.

Don't have a lot of hope for this one, people are willing to tell others to change their patterns but will rarely change their own. That way, you get woke points but don't have to do anything. Plus that Tesla looks GREAT in the driveway, especially when you consider that climate change is all everyone else's fault.


"People on HN", to me, seems like it should be "People in the US".

There are plenty of urbanists on HN. Anecdotal, but I swear if I post something like "your free parking is just welfare for car owners" it will be upvoted most of my workday, and then downvoted as Americans come online. But I don't have hard data for this (wonder if HN has a way to pull the comment score history over time...)

For what it's worth, my Brompton looks pretty cool at my desk, too, but that's less visible.

And yeah, all new cities are garbage. Absolute dystopian nightmares of design where letting your three year old play in the street is a death sentence. Never mind that when cars were new a NYC judge decried the possibility of kids being banished from playing in the streets, which of course was perfectly normal.


> Maybe corporations are the ones who can be pressured to take the lead.

Yes. They absolutely will. But only after they have the right incentives. Those incentives can be created over night by having governments put in place a carbon tax.

It gets even worse. If a large group of people reduced their energy consumption to help climate change it has the consequence of reducing demand and therefore energy costs will come down. That will make green energy cost uncompetitive and slow down the transition to green fuels.

This change really does need to come from government. So get politically involved.


> If a large group of people reduced their energy consumption to help climate change it has the consequence of reducing demand and therefore energy costs will come down. That will make green energy cost uncompetitive and slow down the transition to green fuels.

Another way to look at it is, as more people demand green energy, the supply will increase faster to meet demand. As the supply increases, economies of scale reduce the cost, making it more competitive with fossil fuels while at the same time wind and solar efficiency will increase further reducing the cost per unit.

Eventually the supply with the lowest cost will win and the others may become obsolete.

Whether or not that can happen fast enough is another question. Taxation of fossil and subsidizing of renewables seems like a logical conclusion. The likelyhood of a massive win-win solution of that nature with no game theory cheats on a global scale seems much less probable than innovating our way out of it.

I don't think government on a coordinated global level can do it. It would be like diverting the same level of national resources as a war into a peacetime effort. Would need a way to demonize climate change so it becomes a common global enemy. But on the other side of demonizing is half or more of humanity, so it is really a new level of war over new types of resources being shoreline, water supply, and probablilty of destruction or famine by natural disasters.

I hope for no war and don't believe all that will happen. But it could. And I think investing in time, money, and peace seems like a valid approach to get behind vs trying to get government to do it.


Haha, sure! :D Carbon tax. Sounds legit! Here's what's gonna happen: Corporations just jack up prices accross the board according to the tax, and then everybody else gets to pay. And then nothing changes. It'll be like the sugar tax in Norway. Do you really think people are buying less sugar over here because of it? Get real! :D We're well past incentives. The change has to be law, and the law has to be protected with the threat of force. (Force sounds so much better than violence, don't you think, but all this is gonna end in the latter, eventually, if we just let it slide, because when people get hungry, they also get desperate.) And where people don't respect the law, force has to be actually used. However, nobody in their right mind is willing to do that as long as we're boiling frogs... So I guess we'll just die then. We had a pretty good run, though. :)


> It'll be like the sugar tax in Norway. Do you really think people are buying less sugar over here because of it? Get real!

I can't speak for Norway, but in the UK the sugar tax has had a huge impact - a _majority_ of soft drink manufacturers have significantly reduced sugar in their products, to avoid them becoming unaffordable, and it's had a very noticeable effect.

The UK tax is still pretty new so it's difficult to get hard numbers on that, but sugar taxes in general are fairly well studied and have been very effective worldwide. https://www.nature.com/articles/sj.bdj.2018.603 has a good summary, some highlights:

* "Overall 21.6% decrease in the monthly purchased volume of the higher taxed, sugary soft drinks"

* "People living in Philadelphia were 40% less likely to report consuming sugary drinks every day after the tax policy"

* "Mexico's 10% tax on sugar-sweetened beverages implemented in January 2014 is said to have led to a 5.5% drop in sugary drinks purchases by the end of that year and a further 9.7% fall in sales in 2015, yielding an average reduction of 7.6% over the study two-year period"


Consumers are definitely sensitive to prices. In the US in the couple years before the financial crisis gasoline prices spiked to above $4/gallon. This had a dramatic effect on buying habits, with a marked shift to more fuel efficient vehicles. And it hurt SUV happy US automakers to the advantage of more fuel efficient foreign companies.

In Europe, gas prices are 2 to 3 times what they are in the US. As a result, cars are dramatically smaller and more fuel efficient. Transportation patterns are dramatically different, with many fewer miles driven per person.

It's Econ 101 that people adjust their spending in response to price changes. It varies exactly how they do so for different products, this is known as elasticity.


Since consumers have limited amounts of money, increasing the cost of everything will lead to less consumption, which will lead to less carbon being emitted. Furthermore, any company that can produce the same product with less carbon emissions will be at an economic advantage.


We are past the point where we we can fix this with discussions & civil discourse. Not to say that we shouldn't try. But a leaflet campaigns and discussions aren't going to reduce emissions. The best solution would be not to have kids (too late for me) and adopt instead if you must, not to own a car, try to own as little as you can (it will make you happier too). Plant stuff, pick up gardening, go offline and go outside to reconnect with where you come from. Anything that contains batteries is probably toxic. Most shit we don't need we just are brainwashed into thinking we do.

An interesting read is Technological Slavery The Collected Writings Of Theodore J. Kaczynski, A.k.a. ' The Unabomber' which has been mentioned in Bill Joy's famous post "Why the Future doesn't Need Us" and my guess is that despite his infamy he might be heralded as some kind of "hero" in 50-100 years time.

Humans and society is in deeper in trouble than we think and stand "no chance of being saved". If you are of sound mental state, I suggest Thomas Ligotti's "The Conspiracy against the Human Race"

https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/

https://archive.org/details/TechnologicalSlaveryTheCollected...

https://www.amazon.com/Conspiracy-against-Human-Race-Contriv...


Personally, I don't feel like me rescinding my earthly possessions and refusing to procreate will do anything to help anyone, other than maybe quench my own conscience.

That whole approach is referred to as hair-shirt environmentalism, I believe. Bruce Sterling once observed that if you're trying to combat Climate Change solely by minimizing your individual impact, the logical conclusion would be to stop living altogether.


No, of course not, you just need to convince others that it's good for _them_ to do it. It's like elections: your single vote is nearly worthless, convincing others to vote the way you want is not.

Although I believe what GP meant is that nothing _anyone_ can do will improve the situation, so do what you can to prepare, e.g. learning to grow vegetables would be quite useful in case of food shortages.


from the Joy article,

> Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control.

doesn't that describe our financial markets already?


>> The best solution would be not to have kids

Many countries use immigration to stop population falling. The increased co2 from 1 person moving from a developing -> developed country would pretty much cancel this out.


Practically speaking, the single biggest area of low hanging fruit is clean shipping. Right now the largest 15 cargo ships emit more greenhouse gasses than all the cars on the road combined. The US could take the lead on this issue by modifying the Jones Act, a peculiar piece of legislation that forces maritime commerce between US territories to use US ships with an American crew. If the Jones Act were modified to include incentives for zero emission ships it would heavily incentive investment in this critical area. This single change in legislation would reduce the cost of goods and services in Hawaii and Puerto Rico, increase trade, and provide a powerful economic carrot to reduce carbon emissions.


The largest 15 cargo ships emit more sulphuric dioxide than all the cars on the road combined. That is not a greenhouse gas, and actually has a cooling effect, although it’s not healthy locally.


So I looked into this more and you're right that it's sulphuric dioxide that I was thinking of. CO2 emissions from shipping are 800m tons per year and, if taken alone, would constitute the 6th heaviest source of carbon emissions in the world.


How are you dividing up other sources such that shipping would be the 6th heaviest source? At roughly 2% of total global emissions, it seems like you'd have to lump other sources together in a strange way to come up with that ranking.

For example, looking at: https://www.c2es.org/content/international-emissions/

Taking shipping as a separate thing, it would rank 7th in the chart of total emissions and 6th in the chart of energy-related emissions, but only because those charts only contain 6 and 5 entries respectively.


There's a good Planet Money podcast all about the Jones Act: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/05/488869138/epis...


Relevant technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkySails


Give money to Democratic candidates challenging Republican incumbents, right now.

If we believe in evidence-based science, then all evidence points to Republicans being anti-science. You don't have to be a committed lifelong Democrat to see that the current Republican party is fighting climate change efforts at every turn and needs to be displaced in order for political progress on the issue to happen.


Maybe trying to win over republicans would be better? The culture wars don’t help this issue.


Fox News is the a major barrier to that happening. There are those on the right that believe in climate change and think that we need to take action but they are vastly underrepresented on Fox. With that being the case most Republican voters will believe that its a worldwide leftist conspiracy and few Republican politicians will dare defy this orthodoxy.

That's why we have Republican congressional leaders saying things like people can't change the climate only God can (Inhofe), that sea level rise is caused by rocks falling into the ocean, and that increasing atmospheric CO2 levels are the result of more people exhaling.

Short of one of Murdoch's children changing the Fox line, only losing elections will change this behavior.


The issue here is that this more or less blames the messenger and not what I see as the root cause.

For a long time (1980s-2000s for sure), major fossil fuel companies and other extraction industries -- famously ExxonMobil and Koch Industries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont...), but quite a bit of others as well, have spent a lot of time funding and backing climate change denialism. The extraction industries tended to align to the Republican side, so these scientifically unsound opinions have tended to trickle up through conservative think tanks (eg Heartland Institute) and eventually down to the populist outlets (like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and the like).

It does seem like that some of the oil companies are kind of weakly coming around to the fact that climate change is not something you can simply misinformation away. Maybe the lawsuits against extraction companies (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/20/can-clim...) are helping here. Regardless, it is not nearly enough to me at the moment. This is the pipeline that needs to be shut off in order for the message to be clearer on the right wing side in America.

Unfortunately, the concept of climate change denial has taken hold on the "conspiracy theory" side of American politic, so the concept is going to be floating around out there for a while (there are 18th century conspiracy theories still active after all). But what I'd hope to see if the extraction industry misinformation stops is that the more rational side of conservative American politics realize that this is a problem. Unlike most of Europe, it is difficult to think of many conservative politicians and personalities in the United States who are not denialists. (Arnold Schwarzenegger's one of the few I can think of immediately that is strongly convinced that climate change is a huge problem.)


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Nowhere did I suggest banning. I said it was a barrier to change because it ill informs its viewers.


What would win over republicans? I mean, if the survival of human civilisation isn't enough, what can you propose?


Well there is a lot of false information out there about climate change and it's probable influence on the planet. Things have gotten out of hand with how polarised this issue is. Many people on the right don't believe in climate change. A little of this is because the time scales were off in some early predictions such as An Inconvenient Truth. This was a good wake up call to many but it also exaggerates the rate of change to the point that many of the predictions should have already had massive negative impacts. This leads people to think they've been lied to. Screaming at them and telling them they're ignorant climate change deniers does little to encourage this. To think they don't care about the survival of the human race is not accurate. They just don't think it's at risk. IMHO the truth without the us verses them stuff is the key. I think 13 Misconceptions About Global Warming by Veritasium on YouTube is a perfect example of this. Yes it's easy to get mad at people when the fate of the world is on the line but that's not as productive as trying to understand them and reaching out to them.


This seems a bit like the Y2K problem. Even if we collectively get our sh*t together and manage to avert the worst effects of the crisis, there are always going to be people who will wonder what all the fuss was about.

And conspiracy theorists will have fodder for the next 50 years.


jogjayr, you are probably right. But if enough of the voting public can be convinced they might be able to help effect change.


Stop crying wolf (about this issue at least) for a start.

1. Guardian: "President Obama has four years to save the Earth" (2009)

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jan/18/jim-hans...

Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama's first administration, he added.

2. The Independent: "Snowfalls are now a thing of the past" (2000)

According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.

“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/12/one-of-the-longest-ru...

You can read more about the endlessly repeated warnings about "tipping points" that never come in this fairly partisan but well-researched blog article: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/08/the-ever-receding-cli...


Regardless of the end times arriving for President Obama, he surely had as much meaningful data available as we do now regarding climate....and what did he do?

Eventually we will have a Democrat President...get ready for a deafening wave of silence when that President does as little or maybe even less than our current one. Rest assured if that President is elected during a recession, putting people to work will override climate concerns.


Republicans (and the equivalent rich conservatives in other countries) believe that climate change is happening anyway, and that anyone who doesn't try to make money off it is an idiot. They don't buy the survival of the human civilization bit - they think it'll affect only poor people, and that the rich will be safe. And honestly, they're right, at least for what we'll see in their lifetimes. Poor people are going to die in their millions in the coming decades, and rather than seeing themselves as the cause of this they see themselves as protecting themselves and their friends and families against it by insulating themselves with money.

That's my theory anyway.


if the survival of human civilisation isn't enough, what can you propose

Tell them the magic elves demand doing your bidding? Because both things are on the same level of rationality? Civilization, as such, is in no danger.

...

To OP: The problem will solve itself if the population of the world goes down enough, whether naturally or through some actual catastrophe. Indeed most of the world's birth rate is low enough that we are well on the way of a solution. Look up which parts of the world still have massive population growth and then see how many liberals you can get on board with trying to reduce that. Good luck.


i hope population of the world goes down a lot in your region in particular


> If we believe in evidence-based science, then all evidence points to Republicans being anti-science.

I am conservative and tend to lean-republican. I am not anti-science. Please stop generalizing.


I'm not saying you personally are anti-science, but Gallup surveys in 2018 point to 35% of Republicans believing that global warming is caused by human activities vs. 89% of Democrats. [0]

It's difficult to attribute something as vague as pro or anti science to a large group of people. I wouldn't want to get into that flame war on HN. However, OP has a point that Democrats are more likely to be concerned about the real impact of climate change.

[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/231530/global-warming-concern-s...


I should definitely have specified that I mean Republican elected officials. With them, I will stop generalizing when this stops generally being true. Can you point to Congressional Republicans, House or Senate, who've voted for positive legislation related to climate change and environmental protection? Have you written to your representatives encouraging them to vote as such (and in other pro-science ways)?


California is majority-run by Democrats with a Democrat Governor who isn't seeking re-election (so he can do whatever he wants)...

When asked if he would stop offshore drilling, Jerry Brown responded that he refused to put that many people out of work.

This is in a state where Democrats have effectively no opposition

The idea the Democrats are even one iota different on climate is ridiculous and dangerous. If Democrats won't act when they have majorities, a sympathetic electorate and no opposition, when will they act?

Please show me ONE piece of real evidence or instance where a Democrat willingly sacrificed REAL economic gain to achieve a climate goal...and before you mention solar, wind or carbon credits, keep in mind the US only engaged these policies when it was economically feasible to do so. Show me where a Democratic put a voter out of work to save a polar bear.

By the way if you look at where US wind assets are, it's primarily "red" states

Shall we mention All Gore? Asks me to live in a tent while living in a 12k sq ft mansion and traveling on a private jet..

Lastly, all of the evidence on climate we have now was available to Obama...what did he do? People act like it has been decades since a Democrat lived in the White House. Where was the indignation three years ago?

I expect this comment to just be downvoted without reply...


I like how you've qualified your demand, i.e., "show me ONE piece of real evidence or instance where a Democrat willingly sacrificed REAL economic gain to achieve a climate goal". My Magic 8 ball predicts you'll argue any cited examples don't show REAL sacrifice.

http://environment.law.harvard.edu/2018/06/california-cafe-s...

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/09/10/california-renewab...

I'll punt it back to you. Can you please show me ONE piece of real evidence or instance where the Republican Congress did _anything_ positive regarding climate change?

Also, I won't claim (and didn't) that electing a Democratic majority is sufficient to address climate change. It's just necessary, because only when Republicans realize that they'll continue to lose on climate change that we'll make real bipartisan progress.


This is a bullshit comment. For more on what Governor Brown has done, please see: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/09/jerry-b...

For some examples of Trump efforts to roll back GHG limits of the Obama Administration, see: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11092018/methane-flaring-...

I mean, the man does not even seem to believe that climate is changing.

It is not necessary to demonstrate that someone was put out of a job to do any of this.


What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe? Start an economical catastrophe.

We need to immediately, and meaningfully, move away from oil, gas, and other carbon heavy industries in any way that we presently have the means to do so.

If everyone who is presently in the market for a new vehicle could afford to buy an electric one, we'd probably be in better shape. If every household could put solar panels and take a load off of the grid, we would be moving in the right direction.

The problem is these technologies are new, and expensive, and they can't be effective at solving the problem they set out to solve without mass adoption.

Mass adoption won't even _begin_ to happen until the average person can pick up a used Model 3 for around $10k. Where populations heavily use mopeds and motorcycles we need a flood of affordable electric alternatives. Both of those scenarios are at least a decade out.

If we need to solve this in 12 years we're screwed. Best bet is to move somewhere cold and inland. Then at least you can be somewhat comfortable while the whole thing goes down. Although the process of moving the world's economy away from oil (to whatever extent that can be achieved while still producing plastics etc.) is going to make life miserable no matter where you are.


Electric cars tend to put out less CO2 compared to gasoline cars only if you drive them for more than 5 years and don't replace the battery.

https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/11/Cl...

And yes, 12 years is nothing. Countries could start replacing all cars with electric ones for free right now, CO2 would just go higher and higher.

The answer to this environmental catastrophe is not manufacturing new cars. If we would have stopped buying and using cars 40 years ago...

https://mayerhillman.com/transport/key-publications/


> Countries could start replacing all cars with electric ones for free right now, CO2 would just go higher and higher.

How?

I wish people would stop fixating on this magical 12 years figure. It's not a countdown. If we keep our current carbon emissions the same for 12 years we'll see 2 degrees of warming. If we do nothing. If we continue to do nothing after that point it doesn't stay at 2 degrees. It gets hotter and hotter, and the effects get worse and worse. If countries start replacing cars with electric ones for free now, and we still don't reach zero emissions in 12 years, we might see 2 degrees. But we might avoid 3 degrees, or 4 degrees.

We don't have 12 years left and then game over. We have 12 years until things start to get really bad. And then the UN will come out and say we have 12 years left to act to avoid 3 degrees, and we'll all have these same fucking stupid arguments on the internet again in between news bulletins about famine and the various migrant crises.


Electric cars are not massively more expensive than regular cars, for those of us in touch western countries. A tesla is, but a nissan leaf is not. And sure not everyone can afford electric vehicles and solar panels, but if everyone who could afford them made the switch we'd be doing a lot better with our co2 emissions


I wrote a trilogy of long posts on this topic very recently so I'll just link to that.

https://unop.uk/how-to-help-with-a-big-global-problem-as-a-t...

In summary, it's not somebody else's problem. It's our problem and we need to take responsibility and fix it. We already have all the core technology required to solve this and we just need to make it happen. Everyone can help, particularly the talented crowd on here.


> Everyone can help, particularly the talented crowd on here.

I've been thinking about that for a while, is it possible to have a positive impact on the environment writing software?


Bret Victor wrote on the subject: http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/


This was the main inspiration for the posts and I refer back to it. Software is everywhere and can absolutely make a difference. Hopefully this will inspire others too.


I've mentioned it here before, but my favorite is crushing and spreading olivine rocks: http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/oli...

It's a natural process and we just have to mine as many rocks as we dig up oil. We just need to catch up for the last few hundred years where we only dug up oil and no rocks. Just US $200 billion per year to offset all of humanity's carbon emissions. If I was a billionaire I'd already have started developing robots to mine and grind up rocks for accelerated weathering.


Don't forget that the small things add up -- small things on their own won't change the world, but they change the lifestyle of one family at a time, and it helps both a little in the short run, and more as children raised in climate-aware homes grow up. If everyone starts making small changes, it will change demand, which changes markets, which changes politics.

Some small examples:

Walk to the grocery store every other day instead of driving once a week.

Use mass transit. Recycle. Use products made from renewable, recyclable materials.

Go ahead and put up a solar electric system, even if the costs aren't perfect, nor is the tech, or even always the carbon offset.... but it moves demand in the right direction and sends a message.

Turn down your heat in the winter, and your AC in the summer. Turn lights off when you leave a room. Be aware of your energy burn. As another commenter said, don't write or use cryptocurrency.

Produce and buy local goods.

And for cryin' out loud -- VOTE, for people who will be on the right side of this issue.


Walking to the grocery store means you live within walking distance. That means zoning codes that allow a grocery store in your neighborhood. Most do not allow that.


True, but "Walking distance" is a nebulous measurement at best. How far can you walk? I walk 1.5 miles to my grocery store. Most of my neighbors say that is not within walking distance, but clearly that is a personal judgement, because I do it. And if we are talking about what changes we can make to our lives, expanding your perspective on "walking distance" is not a bad place to start.


Electric bicycles and boards have absurdly low energy consumption.


The collapse of the dynamically stable climate on which agricultural civilisation is founded is vanishingly unlikely to be prevented at this stage - no-one has ever even outlined, let alone detailed, even one remotely plausible political route from business-as-usual to where we need to be. As others here note, it's fundamentally a problem of world politics, howevermuch a proportion of HN readership may wish to suck at the corner of their technological comfort blanket. As we have no meaningful world polity, it's unsolvable. Our civilisation will almost certainly descend into chaos & war as the early effects of climate collapse roll in this century. Look at the convulsions flowing from a tiny trickle of refugees into Europe in 2015-16. That was barely a taste of what's to come.

It's hardly surprising - nothing in H. Sapiens' constellation of seemingly unique traits (cognitive flexibility, sociality, cultural transmission through language etc) equips it to make collective decisions on a global scale. It's kind of telling that just as it's becoming most blindingly obvious that all our major challenges are planetary, there is a general retreat from commitment to global decision-making. We're not adequate to to the task. This isn't anyone's fault - it's just biology.


I like this comment a lot. Got goosebumps reading it.


To solve this crisis in 12 years would require overthrowing the government of every country with an industrial base and replacing them with much more progressive people. You can try if you want but I don't see it happening. As far as actually convincing people of global warming, the older generation will absolutely never believe it no matter how much evidence you present. They are truly lost. Change will only be possible after they have died. This is going to be a sad, tragic period in human history, and nobody in the future is going to understand why we made such self destructive decisions. It will pass though. Hundreds of years from now the climate will slowly begin to return to normal. Despite the fact that the fight is hopeless, though, I'll continue to try.


I don’t think the result would be good. All that would do is destabilise the world crash our economies and set back our green tech.


Crashing the economy has historically been the most efficient way of reducing CO2 production.


I'm not sure. It might wind things back a bit for a short time. But during a time of economic down turn the environment becomes a low priority for a lot of people. Then when things recover there is no guarantee that things will be done any better. I'm of the opinion that we need stable governments and economies to tackle this problem.


And ensuring mass depression, deaths and misery.


Right. Toppling elected governments coupled with an age-based genocide would be a wonderful solution.

It's the "young and progressive" who know best! People with life experience are truly lost. /s


I was talking about waiting till they have gone from old age, to be clear. And I'm not advocating otherthrowing governments, I'm just saying, 12 years is such a short timeline, that's what it would take.


The definition of terms becomes critical here. "Catastrophe" is an alarming word. If 25% of the human population died, it would certainly be a catastrophe. But the planet would still be around. Humans would still be around. A thousand years from now, it might be remembered as "that really bad time"

Planet-scale change is truly Brobdingnagian. Anything in your life is insignificant compared to that. You have to frame this discussion before you even begin. Are you talking about stuff you can do that you can see the result of? Or are you talking about stuff you can do that will make things look different a thousand years from now? The first one is doable. The second one? We've had tens of billions of people live on this planet. I don't know of any that managed that. Maybe a dozen or so?

If I wanted to enact change, I would create acceptance criteria before I started. Am I in this to feel good? To change my local government to do X? And so forth. If your goal is something like "I want the world to be a better place!" then that's a great goal, but it's a feeling, not a goal. Goals you can measure. Goals have numbers and measurement criteria.

If you just want to be upset and vent, fine. That's a perfectly fine thing to do. After all, things suck. A lot of things suck. It's actually a more honest and healthy goal than any of the others I've discussed. We are a social species. We adapt through conversation and persuasion.


We should focus our efforts where there is the most bang per buck:

- Cleaner energy for developing countries, esp. China and India. Pay for their solar panels, to prevent new coal plants.

- Research clean energy technology — solar, wind, hydroelectric. Drive maximum efficiency, and minimum cost.

- Raise awareness worldwide. Keep talking.

This documentary was informative: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/an_inconvenient_sequel_trut... (2017, 10 years after the original)

2018: https://www.eco-business.com/news/coal-is-in-decline-globall...


Related question: where could one find jobs related to climate change efforts? beyond walking, eating less meat, etc I might want to put my working hours in as well, but no idea who/what to look for.


That's actually something I want to know as well. I would like to work as a Developer to do good in the sense of avoiding climate change or saving nature. That's hard to find!


Geoengineering: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05357-w

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/a38zve/watch-the-trailer...


The only solution to rapid reduction in co2 emissions that can be deployed right now at sufficient scale is nuclear.

There are passively safe designs built right now.

It can provide electricity, heat and desalination if lack of water is an issue.

There is enough nuclear fuel in sea water to consider it an infinite source as far as humans are concerned [1].

Further, USA alone can be powered by its existing nuclear _waste_ for many years.

Surprisingly, nuclear is almost never mentioned as an option.

[1https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/nuclear-fuel-from-t...


Given that historically it's taken decades to build new plants from scratch this doesn't look like it will be nearly in time to make an impact.


Historically in US and Europe yes, but China Japan and South Korea are way more efficient in deploying nuclear, and for good reason. [1]

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/10/02/4-ways-t...


Nuclear still costs far to much vs Wind and Solar.

If all greenhouse gases came from electricity generation then doing the France model might work, but it's much better to cheaply go 95+% renewable and use the savings to cut down on transportation and home heating etc.

PS: Grid scale solar is rapidly hitting 2 cents per kWh in sunny places. Nothing else is anywhere near competing with that.


If you factor in cost of storage required to provide continuous power, then you get way more expensive and less reliable. Now this problem is solved by, surprise, fossil fuels. [0]

Ofcourse solar is cheaper when it is sunny, provider might even need to pay consumer to get them to consume. [1]

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/15...

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/renewable-power-germany-nega...


Continuous aka base-load power is considered a defect as it's not load following. You can load follow with nuclear but then it becomes ridiculously expensive. France gets around this largely by buying and selling to other countries, but that does not scale.

Really, going 100% nuclear takes either massive over supply or large scale energy storage just like solar. Wind however can supplement solar while still costing less than nuclear and allowing you to more closely match the demand curve.

A little peaking power allows you to avoid significant grid storage at very reasonable costs, and as I said fix transportation etc.

PS: The need for grid electricity storage is overblown. Storing energy for more than 1 day means you very rarely use that stored energy making in non-viable. When you can have 2x as much solar and still only pay 4c/kwh that's pointless. Within the day it needs to compete with an over supply of energy most of the time.


We are comparing two energy sources: one where output depends on the weather, and can go to near 0 another where output is strictly predictable but takes time to change.

Option 2 have the problem of oversupply and undersupply. This forces either storage or fossil fuels in the picture.

Option 1, however, only deals with oversupply, which does not require expensive mitigations.

Not obvious why option 2 is preferable here


First, you can go off grid using 100% solar and a relatively small battery system as long as you get enough solar cells. The reason this works is your daytime input never drops to 0 and it's generally lower when you need less energy for AC systems.

In terms of the grid, Wind and solar really can't go to 0 over large areas. The minimum vs maximum output shows high variance, but maximum output is largely irrelevant. Really what you care about is minimum vs average output and that's more narrow band than you might think. Even better by locating Wind / Solar you can more closely match your daily demand curve.

Option 1, costs far more per kWh even if you can use every kWh, it's just get's worse from there. As it still needs over supply as power plants need occasional maintenance and the grid maximum and minimum demand over a year are wildly separated. You can setup maintenance around peak annual demands, but even then you will have occasional unexpected shutdowns.


Majority of energy consumption and population happens in cities / industry, so if we are talking significant co2 soonest, we should really focus on these.

For large consumers like these to go solar/wind, you will have to really over-provision solar/wind so that minimum possible power output is still enough. (Calm night, anyone?) This looks highly inefficient and tough to predict.

Whereas nuclear can and are already operating in load following mode routinely: [1]

[1] http://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-loa...


First, most city’s have a lot of space for solar and can easily import wind power. ~66w/m2 average over 24 hours is 66 MW per km^2 / the percentage covered in panels and really adds up.

Wind really can't be calm for long periods over large areas because large areas will always have temperatures differences.

It's like saying what if the sun does not rise tomorrow? If that's actually happening you have much bigger problems.

Load following nuclear power plants become even more expensive. Not a huge deal on nuclear subs, but a major issue for civilian infrastructure. Just like energy storage they simply increase the cost of energy above alternatives.

PS: Now if you could get nuclear without any form of subsides down to about 2.5c/kWh then running 24/7 or peaking power with average load's of around 30% down at around 8c/kWh then I would agree it had a major place. But, it's just no where near those numbers.


In northern climates in the winter, people use hundreds of thousands of BTU per day burning fossil fuels to heat their homes. Translated to electricity, that's 30+kwh per day with a huge portion of that during non peak solar and wind.

In order to solve the energy problem, you also have to solve the heating one... and wind / solar currently can't do that.


Solar hot water heaters are cheap and work very well for home heating outside the arctic circle.

In the US we mostly use them for pool heating, as anything else costs to much, but somehow they are ignored for other uses.


Solar water heaters are not cheap. 1 square meter of evacuated solar tubing with a storage tank is > 4k, before installation. That 1 m^2 will give you at most 500w of solar gain for 2-3 hours... in total maybe 5k BTU. That's a factor of 20 off relative to existing systems.


That's not what I am talking about. Bulk collectors for a single home are ~500$. Flat plates run $1,000 - $2,500 per home. Evacuated tubes cost more and collect less energy, but produce hotter water. https://modernize.com/home-ideas/34541/solar-water-heater-co...

1 square meter evacuated solar tubing is used for hot water systems not home heating. It's a question of output temperature, the warmer the water the less cost efficient and more costly the system. High end systems include a backup water heater which means you directly save 1k on a hot water heater.

Anyway, for home heating you don't need 'hot' water, a heat pump operating on even 60f water vs 0f or below air is very efficient. You can also pre heat cold water with a flat plate feed that into your normal water heater and again save a lot of energy.

PS: Also, many people pay 1,000-2000$ / year on home heating even with a well insulated house. These systems generally have payback period under 10 years, assuming you actually need significant amounts of heat.


There is also plenty of hydrogen in sea water. As with the nuclear fuel you claim is infinite, there are costs and complications with extracting it, though. So it’s a silly claim.

Nuclear has its own problems starting with the fact that it’s a highly centralized solution, with attendant problems following from that.


Well, there is plenty of hydrogen in the water indeed. If there was any worry that we are going to run out of hydrogen, and willing to pay hundreds of dollars per kg (uranium fuel cost), we would totally get it from sea water.

In which case hydrogen supply would be technically infinite.

As for your second concern, could you elaborate, why centralisation such a critical barrier to achieving co2-free energy production? Never heard this argument before.


Big government, big industry, crony capitalism, corruption, political control of an essential resource, politics generally, secrecy, coverups, payoffs, concentration of power, etc. etc. which you would not get or to a much lesser extent (verging on negligible relative to nuclear) with some alternative energy sources like solar.


Solar and wind are fine for residential, which is 13% of global consumption.

Transportation and industry, with their 75% , would need some clean source of energy, for which calm nights are not a problem, crony capitalism or not.


Yes, you need some source of clean energy for which calm nights are not a problem.

If only batteries were getting really good... oh, they are. Batteries are not a source, but coupled with a source, your calm night problem is mostly taken care of. And batteries+renewable sources don't need to be 100% of the solution in order for them to effectively wipe out the value proposition of nuclear power in most situations. Yes, you can find exceptions, I'm sure.


> Maybe corporations are the ones who can be pressured to take the lead.

Yep. We need to somehow put pressure on every polluting institution (corporations, militaries, and so on) to either radically change or stop existing. Individual action won't work.

Here are some companies to start with: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...


The first thing we need to do is change the marketing strategy. It should be “Save the people” rather than “Save the planet” or “Stop Climate Change”.

The goal is saving the people, the method to do so is stopping climate change.


When talking about climate change it is important to remember that climate on earth is pretty bad already and we need to learn to control it anyway.

High (~5km) solar updraft towers look like a very promising way to do it.

In addition to generating electricity they can generate rain, prevent storms by reducing the amount of energy in the atmosphere, and reduce the temperature by improving the convection.

Large number of such towers will give us fine grained control over the climate, and reduce the rise of sea level by moving a large part of the water to groundwater in the deserts.


I would love to see Australia take the lead on this.

It's a majestic notion and we should be trying it right now.


Among other things, stop using cryptocurrencies.


Should we also stop using cars given that walking exists, or stop using computers when we could use a pencil and paper? Is there an amount of energy that the traditional banking system could use beyond which you would recommend people stop using banks?

You may not think that cryptocurrencies provide any benefit to the world (and I admit that I don't own any either), but their energy usage should be evaluated like any other technology or asset: Does the energy they require cost more than the amount of value they create in the market? If it did, then no one would mine cryptocurrencies.

The market value for cryptocurrencies may seem irrational to you, but there are probably lots of things that people value that seems irrational or unnecessary to outside observers. I personally think that a global, low-cost, uncensored means of transacting between strangers is revolutionary, and I look forward to future innovations that will make it more energy efficient (for the same level of usefulness and security).


As far as I can see, nuclear is the only existing technology that can now be used to rapidly transition to low carbon energy. We then solve the problem of nuclear waste (if indeed it is a big problem - I suspect not) afterwards.

It's either that or not solving the problem.


Politicians say that business must self-regulate or that consumers must choose different.

Businesses say that they are following the laws made by the politicians and are meeting consumer demands.

Consumers say the government should regulate things better and that businesses should be more environmental friendly.

In others words, everyone is looking to everyone else to do something; thus no one really does something.

Sure, there are some token efforts here and there. But the actual sweeping changes that we need aren't happening.

Not a new phenomenon, and also not isolated to just climate change. It just happens to be the most pressing problem.

The solution? I don't see one, save for a fundamental refactor of our democratic institutions. I don't see that happen in the next 12 years.

So what can be done? Many things can be done technically. What can realistically be done given the current state of affairs? Quite little, I think. Stuff like going to work on the bike is cute – and something I do – but not really making a massive impact.

Vote for your local green party? In some places that's fairly useful; in others it's about as useful as wiping your arse with the ballot (US and UK being prominent examples) :-(

Honestly I think nothing serious will happen until it's too late. Maybe not even then. C'est la vie I suppose?


Stratospheric Aerosol Injection:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...


Thank you for sharing this. It's a dangerous geoengineering project, but it's also a quick solution to a part of the problem.

Dangerous: we don't know how the nonlinear weather systems will behave. This may also compound the problem in the future - lots of unknowns.

But very quick: We can cool the earth down rather quickly using this method.


We do have case studies from specific volcanic events, e.g. Mt. Pinatubo.


Indirect action idea (I wonder about it).

Gather with other persons to invest a few shares in the major groups responsible for CO2 emissions.

Not to have weight per se, but to be invited in shareholders assembly. And to be regularly loud about the topic of the group's responsibility. It's enough for 4, 5 distinct individuals to bring up related questions in the same assembly so that it bothers other investors.

Bothering from within is a start.


At least in Germany, this exists [1]. Sorry, but the page is not in English. They target fossil energy, chemical and arms manufacturing industry mostly. You should check if this exists in your country (I can't believe it doesn't) and get involved. This approach does work.

1: https://www.kritischeaktionaere.de/


If I'm driving the demand they're fulfilling, I'm probably not a good choice to complain. So I guess we have to find the guiltless ones first....


Beware, that's a trap.

Guilt is not a valid reason not to object to, to criticise the compromission.

Would I be drunk, that wouldn't disqualify me from criticising all of: my own responsibility, alcohol, policies regarding liquors.

(in the same way, would I be a believer, that wouldn't make it impossible or irrelevant or even hypocritical to criticise faith, religion, church, customs, etc.).

That's the good thing with reason: you are allowed and you can detach from what you're talking about.


lmao how is paying the companies responsible for this possibly a good idea?


You're not paying the company, you're buying a share of its capital. That's not the same thing at all: in exchange, you get a right to get shareholders information and to participate in general assemblies, a right you may sell back later.

Plus, 1 share is enough to be invited to the shareholders meeting to get to ask questions. That's not out of touch.

(edit for clarification)


We're all tired of hearing "eat less meat" etc. But honestly these things would make a difference. We need to switch everyone who drives a fossil fuel car to electric, or no car at all. So make the switch. Buy an EV. Nissan leaf is affordable. Work remote if you can. Switch your home heating from oil or gas to solar or a heat pump. It's not just about people making little changes anymore. Every household needs to get rid of their oil burning machines, be they the home heating or vehicle kind. We can't do anything directly about trucking companies etc but they will follow. Recharging costs pittance next to refuelling and range goes up every year. The EV you buy now will save you money. The next one you buy will run rings around your old gas guzzler.

The best, least depressing and least defeatist way to think about it is that the world is changing in the next 12 years and we're the early adopters. And if you don't offload that gas car now it'll be unsellable in 6 years


Wouldn't replacing every ICE car with electric one be extremely wasteful? Cars cost resources and energy to produce so it makes sense to keep driving them for as long as possible. Focusing on emissions from driving doesn't account for the whole picture. Also, in many countries majority of energy production comes from burning fossil fuels so switching to electric cars doesn't magically solve CO2 emissions problem.


Cars cost resources and energy to produce, but right now new fossil fuel cars are being produced every minute. We don't stop that process by continuing to drive a car that belches out CO2. Sure, if everyone continues driving their 10 year old Volkswagen and all car companies stop production tomorrow it might have a more immediate short term effect than changing to EV. But even in this impossible scenario, long term all those cars are still emitting CO2.

I do take your point that transportation is not the whole picture, but we can't do anything on a personal level to close a coal plant, other than write to our local representatives in government.

It's also worth pointing out that if all the power for EVs is generated from coal it's still less carbon than petrol and diesel cars on the road, because of how power plants are run at optimal efficiency, where as cars have to speed up and slow down, idle in traffic etc


https://www.drawdown.org


Drawdown is great, but at the end of the day it's just a list of ideas. OP is more concerned about action


Drawdown is a list of ideas for action, if you want to put it that way.


If you look at the recent IPCC reports, people are heavily betting on putting carbon back into the stable form. That can be in the form of carbon capture storage, or creating new building materials or other stuff out of it. I think in the near future, people will pay a hefty premium for carbon storage due to carbon taxes (Check out this great GIF that illustrates carbon tax scheme growth: https://www.sightline.org/2017/06/06/map-the-future-is-carbo... ). Together, these carbon pricing initiatives cover about 7 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e), or about 13 percent of annual global GHG emissions. I think this will create a huge business, so if you are an engineer, I think it makes sense to get involved.

Personally the state of the world has given me a lot of negativity, but I've turned that around after doing a lot of research. There is a lot of awesome work being done.

There are a couple of good resources to see what everybody else is already doing: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xc6lkrIv1XORl7b31ARq... https://www.thirdway.org/graphic/carbon-capture-projects-map http://www.airminers.org/explore

I'm very interested in this space, and think there are a lot of other people interested (just as Ycombinator is in its request for carbon removal technologies: https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#carbon ). I have more resources if people are interested.

(On a personal level, I've also made a lot of changes. I stopped eating meat, and renovated our home to be sustainable, by adding a air to water heat pump, solar panels, a solar boiler, an heat recovery system for our shower, ventilation based on CO2 levels so only the necessary heat escapes and of course better insulation. I'm also thinking about creating an excel of my carbon footprint yearly and trying to reduce it/compensate it)


"If you look at the recent IPCC reports, people are heavily betting on putting carbon back into the stable form"

This is more due to its political palatibility than its scientific value. It allows conclusions like "12 years to save the world" (not actually what the report says, but what the media was able to spin it as, and OP's interpretation) instead of a more honest assessment.

As for the EU's carbon trading scheme, it's a joke and efforts to strengthen it have failed due to lack of political will.


In all scenario's we need negative emissions. If you're interested in the topic, there is a really cool stanford seminar by Brentz Constantz (Cofounder of BluePlanet LTD) about viable ways to do negative emissions that are cost effective without carbon trading schemes. It gives you a very good idea of the amount of carbon that is already in the air and needs to be taken out.

What's your solution for/take on all of this?


Sorry forgot the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvtHPF1ng0s

If you're interested in carbon sequestration this is super interesting


I watched a film recently called Pandora’s Box about Nuclear vs solar.

They make the case nuclear is the best solution for environmentalists (the guys who made it were hard core activists) and that things like solar are toxic and leaching heavy metals.

They say Nuclear is the safest and cleanest solution and is the only viable solution if we want to solve climate change.


it exchanges one set of problems for another, and again its our descendents who'll have to deal with it

traditional solar can be made cleanly and there are advanced biological systems on the way


On a high level, I've found the best way to prevail on big issues is to start by saying Thank You. We are given a chance to better ourselves, let's be excited about it. On the contrary, guilt, fear, finger-pointing and violence have never solved anything.

It seems to me that governments can be counted out of taking the leadership needed to solve this within 12 years.

The way I see it, you have to think of solutions that work within corruption, selfishness, etc, and most importantly, with everybody. People who do that are politicians. It's a voting problem at its heart to me.

I feel like the young people need to take charge of the world because the older generations have had their chance and not fixed it.

Young people aren't less selfish and corrupted than their elders (I mean, maybe, but we don't know that, do we).


> We have 12 years to prevent a climate catastrophe

I don't know how old you are, but those of us over 20 remember that we had '12 years' 20 years ago.

Somehow the prophesied catastrophe never arrives and the date gets perpetually pushed into the future. Looks like a secular Seventh Day Adventists.


The realistic conclusion is that it's already to late to save the world. There is no way we can keep warming below 1.5 degrees now. Twenty years ago we might have had a chance. In another twenty years of business as usual we're probably looking at 3+ degrees of inevitable change.


any citation for that? I'm not saying you're wrong, but IPCC scientists aren't some sort youtube doomsday clan.


The IPCC hasn't said it in an official report. But Jim Hansen has said:

"Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama's first administration, he added."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jan/18/jim-hans...

The IPCC chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, an engineer and economist from India, acknowledged the new trajectory. "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late," Pachauri said. "What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."

from:

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/world/europe/18iht-climat...

There are a few lists around the place of people saying similar things. Those are just I could find easily without too much bother.

Edited to put the Hansen statement in.


the first link doesn't make any statements just that the changes are alarming.

The second quote is more specific, but it doesn't say that inaction before 2012 will cause the world to end by 2018. If you've seen what IPCC suggests is required to stay at 1.5C, then that quote from 2007 reads as an understatement.


> Somehow the prophesied catastrophe never arrives and the date gets perpetually pushed into the future.

If anything, the date gets pushed back. With every subsequent IPCC report it turns out the previous as an underestimation.


> If anything, the date gets pushed back.

That's what "pushed into the future" means. "Back" means "further away," "up" means "closer."

> With every subsequent IPCC report it turns out the previous as an underestimation.

So, every IPCC report has been wrong. How long are you going to keep believing them? Sounds like a religion.


> That's what "pushed into the future" means. "Back" means "further away," "up" means "closer."

Somebody here on HN just very recently claimed the exact opposite. Could it be a regional dialect thing?

> So, every IPCC report has been wrong. How long are you going to keep believing them? Sounds like a religion.

This is how science and engineering works, you keep revising and improving your models taking new evidence into account. This is the exact opposite of religion, which never changes its opinion regardless of any new evidence.


> Somebody here on HN just very recently claimed the exact opposite. Could it be a regional dialect thing?

FWIW, I have never liked the "back=later, up=sooner" thing. Thinking of a calendar, and time going left-to-right, back seems to me to mean "leftward," which would mean "sooner." This tended to confuse me for a long time, but finally I figured out how to think of it in a way that could stick with me, i.e. the "back=further, up=closer" thing.

> This is how science and engineering works, you keep revising and improving your models taking new evidence into account.

That's one way to look at it. But eventually you have to say that enough is enough. We aren't revising and improving models of the Aether. And just like the Aether, the models and predictions of the IPCC have proven to be inaccurate.

So you seem to be applying science backwards here: you're trusting the models first, and trying to make them accurate as you go. That's not science at all. Indeed, it's much like ancient philosophers who imagined a way that the "invisible" (i.e. microscopic) world worked and then devised a model to explain it.

The scientific thing to do is to remain skeptical until a model is proven to be accurate.

> This is the exact opposite of religion, which never changes its opinion regardless of any new evidence.

That's not true at all. Actual religions change over time. Actual religions study ancient texts and invent new theories about how to interpret them, which often spawn new sects. Actual religions even discover new texts (e.g. the Dead Sea Scrolls) and update their interpretations based on them.

Or to put it another way: religion does not have an opinion--people do. Some people are stubborn--and that includes some who claim to be scientific.

And the way science is currently organized is not so different than many religions: schools which educate experts who study and discuss and write peer-reviewed journal articles and offer simplified versions to laypeople through the media. That's literally true for both science and religion today. Perhaps we should be less concerned about "science vs. religion" and more concerned about searching for the truth.


^

Though I imagine you will shortly be deluged with comments advising you that you simply don't understand the seriousness of the situation. Etc


Things have gotten worse over the past 20 years though.

The predictions might've been wrong about the rate of change (and I'm assuming this was a reputable source making the prediction, not cherry-picking the most extreme doomsayers). I hope more than anything they're still wrong today. But they weren't wrong about the actual direction of the change. People 20 years ago ignored the warnings, we must do better.


I never finished my degree, but I'm an environmental studies major. A cartoon in one of my books showed oxygen producing microbes that created earth's oxygen atmosphere organizing to stop the creation of this poisonous oxygen atmosphere as it was killing them.

I was watching a TV show that said "If this spider were alive today, it would be hunting animals the size of house cats." and I blurted "No, it wouldn't. It would be on life support."

Those giant dragonflies with 4 foot wingspans or whatever? They couldn't exist today. The atmosphere isn't dense enough. For that reason, movies like Jurassic Park are probably completely unrealistic. Dinosaur physiology probably is wholly unsuited to the modern atmosphere.

Yes, absolutely, things are changing. But there is an unprecedented 7 billion people on the planet and life expectancy is going up, generally speaking.

Could we see a dramatic population crash? Absolutely. Population crashes of various species in various places are a known phenomenon. That could happen.

But we keep making these dire predictions about the end of the world and they keep failing to come true. We have been making them for at least a thousand years. The turn of the first millennium was predicted to be The End Times. More recently, the end of, I think, the Mayan calendar was supposed to be the end.

Post WW2, everyone expected to die in nuclear war. Today, there is all kinds of post apocalyptic dystopian fiction, often involving antibiotic resistant infections.

There are solutions for such things, though people who know of antibiotic alternatives are often dismissed as crackpots. Yet, we continue to quietly problem solve.

That gets largely ignored in favor of making new predictions of how The End Times are at hand -- this time for realzy realz, I'm serious man, this is not like all those other silly predictions in the last 1000 years.

And if you voice skepticism, you are advised you are a fool who just doesn't get it.


The converse view is that problem solvers emerge because we keep making dire predictions.

The best way to motivate people (especially bright people) is to convince them their work has higher meaning.

If a problem being solved isn't high-stakes, you won't have the best and brightest working on it. They are going to go work on something that is actually high-stakes, high-impact. The post-WW2 nuclear threat was real. It attracted intellectual giants such as John Forbes Nash and John von Neumann whose work probably helped avert a crisis.

> More recently, the end of, I think, the Mayan calendar was supposed to be the end.

That's nowhere near the same thing as a nuclear threat.

The point is that problems don't get solved by magical fairies or elves. They're solved by real people. And smart people are attracted to hard, important problems. All the bellyaching and agonizing serve the purpose of signaling which problems matter.


Geniuses don't need the masses to advise them what matters. They can figure it out for themselves and are frequently ignored for long periods.

Einstein worked in a patent office for years, unable to get the university job he longed for. It took two tries of photographing a solar eclipse to finally get proof of his theory and once proof existed, he was world famous overnight.

He didn't stick with it because the masses were haranguing him about how very, very, very important this was.


Good point about Einstein. It's true that bright minds also go after problems they think are important, regardless of what everyone else thinks.

Haranguing masses can decide what gets funded. Einstein's research didn't need much money, which worked out well for him. What if his genius had been in something that required more capital?


I think the short answer is "If he's a real genius, he either finds the capital or finds a cheaper way to do it."

The long answer is probably a screed that I would probably regret posting.

It's 1am here. Please, excuse me, but I think I'm done here for now.


> But we keep making these dire predictions

I think it's absolutely not reasonable to put climate scientists and their predictions into the same line as the mayans or nostradamus.

> Could we see a dramatic population crash? Absolutely. Population crashes of various species in various places are a known phenomenon. That could happen.

So, a population crash could happen. A lot of the comments here sound as if the people are saying "End of the world? Pffft. Total hysteria. Ultimately a few billion people will die and then human life will adapt. Everything's fine!"

I mean, take a minute and picture the suffering of billions of humans because of famine, resource wars, migration, deaths. Picture yourself and your loved ones into this.

It may not be the literal "end of the world", but don't you (and the others of the "it's-fine"-faction here) think that this is bad enough to take climate change serious and try to lessen all of that?

> And if you voice skepticism, you are advised you are a fool who just doesn't get it.

Are you sure that you do "get it" though?


I've lived without a car for more than a decade. I have a medical condition that is supposed to require at least $100k in medical care annually just to die slower with no hope of getting well. I have gotten off all drugs and I manage it with diet and lifestyle. I got healthier while homeless, sleeping in a tent for 5.7 years and being treated abusively by an awful lot of people who don't find my story credible.

My oldest son has the same condition. I have been supporting myself and my 2 special needs sons on under $20k annually while all of us get healthier.

I also appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard of Hacker News. I hit it a month and 2 days after I got myself and my kids off the street. I then changed handles cuz reasons.

I'm quite confident I really get it. I'm quite confident I actually know useful information that could make a real difference if people would actually listen to me instead of screeching at me about what a nutter I am.

But it is generally pointless to assert that. It just causes people to more vehemently ramp up the dismissive personal attacks and assertions that I'm an idiot whose point is invalid while they run screaming across the stage flailing their arms like Kermit the frog.


Reading these answers make me realize, that we are doomed.


“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Which is exactly what I see here. Many of the brightest people gathered together in one place on the internet. Working in an industry that is scary good at creating products that change behavior and even culture. Together creating all manner of logical loops and justifications, "this is why I don't really need to change anything personally" or "I've made this symbolic change, so I've done my part."

Every one of us could begin donating a significant portion of our revenue to climate change lobbying. We could work for existing climate advocacy organizations. We could found new organisations. We could take every lesson learned in the rush to get users to click on more ads and apply it to climate advocacy. American politics and policy is absolutely for sale. We could buy it.

Shame on us all. Will that money bring you comfort while the world burns?


Does anyone have any views on buying carbon offsets through services like TerraPass and Carbonfund? I drive a pickup truck so I'd like to reduce my impact, but don't know if the efficacy of carbon offsets have really been evaluated.


I don't think that these services take carbon out of the air and turn it back into fossiles.

I guess that they mostly finance re-forestation. Then, you have to ask yourself:

Would the new forest happened anyways and they are just taking your money as a bonus? Is the new forest going to be permanent or will it be removed and re-forested again in 30 years?


>Would the new forest happened anyways and they are just taking your money as a bonus? Is the new forest going to be permanent or will it be removed and re-forested again in 30 years?

Perhaps, in decades/centuries a new forest might happen naturally. I should hope - if you're paying for it - that it not be permanent, carbon capture in trees happens fastest at the beginning of their lifecycle so by harvesting and re-foresting it functions as a renewable resource and has greatest efficacy as a carbon sink.


If you harvest the wood and burn it/let it rot then the carbon will be released back into the atmosphere.

Of course you might make furniture from the wood, but it will replace other furniture that then gets burned in place.

A forest only holds carbon, it doesn't continuously remove it.


> I drive a pickup truck so I'd like to reduce my impact

You could...drive it a lot less :-)


Or I could buy carbon offsets and still maintain my hobbies that are much easier with a pickup.


On the topic of geo engineering, I want to share a quote [0] from the physicist Joshua Bach:

"As long as we are still burning fossil fuels to generate energy, the idea of capturing the CO2 from the atmosphere is a joke. It would require more than all the energy we have generated since the beginning of the industrial age. Or millions of years of growing non-rotting trees."

[0] https://twitter.com/Plinz/status/1041881894995013632


I wonder why he thinks so. What are the calculations? Why can't we use green energy to separate CO2 in atmosphere from clean air and do that faster than we as civilization add CO2 to air, thus buying some time to apply non-technical solutions?


At a personal level, switch energy provider, change your diet, cycle / use public transport and drive electric if you must drive (it's more complex than that depending on if you have a car or not). If you have the chance to own your property and the cash to do so, ensure it's insulated.

On a financial level, divest from fossil fuel, invest in renewable energies and sustainable technologies

On a professional level, if you have the privilege do be able to choose your job, try to find one that do no evil.

Happy to hear about more suggestions


> This is aimed at people in the tech industry, and is more about what you can do with your career than at a hackathon. I’m not going to discuss policy and regulation, although they’re no less important than technological innovation. A good way to think about it, via Saul Griffith, is that it’s the role of technologists to create options for policy-makers.

http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/


Start by voting for candidates who believe in science.

It seems odd to need to say this in 2018, but disbelief in clear scientific evidence should be a disqualification from holding office.


> The best thing a bright young person can do to help rid civilisation of fossil fuels is get an education in engineering.

The Economist, 2009. https://www.economist.com/news/2009/11/13/wanted-green-engin...

I'm guessing the most relevant fields would be chemE and materials science.


I believe that a small minority could turn things around. If about 3 % of the population in the rich world would donate $100 per month, we could use that money to force the other to change. How? One example is to remove all coal power plants (which are responsible for 25 % of the greenhouse gas emissions) by building wind farms. This would drive the price of electricity down and make coal unprofitable.


We do nothing of the sort. We wait for the sea levels to rise and we build dams and walls. And we reinforce our buildings against natural disasters. And slowly the public demands changes on greenhouse gas emissions, recycling, etc, and it slowly will slow down the worsening effects.

That's the most likely scenario, nothing will change because the HackerNews netizens change cloud providers and start recycling more.


Collapse comes that way. Its not about beach houses. Its about food chain collapse, refugee storms that overwhelm public infrastructure, the 'ring of fire' of expanding collapse that can (and has) destroyed civilization before


If it's up to us, it's up to us:

- Invest in (or even set up, if you've got the skills) crowd funded solar projects like http://www.burnhamandwestonenergy.co.uk/ - as a charity or "community interest company"

- Donate/contribute to charities supporting reforestation - for example https://onetreeplanted.org/ or buy land, something like this: http://www.buybrazilland.com/rainforest-property-for-sale/

So there are existing organisations which offer these kinds of services; but there's no reason why a "charity startup" couldn't form to provide these kinds of services in a different way; more focussed on the climate change issue and with more of a social/viral element; to try and build the scale that would be necessary. If every twitter user contributed $10...


We (USA) don't even do the little things that would add up: virtually every super market has wide open refrigerated sections. Every house built has No insulation on hot water piping (less so in commercial buildings but only because the architects get a percentage of the total job cost so they spec insulated Hot and Cold domestic water lines).

Look at cars; anyone here make any solar powered products to keep cars warmer in winter and cooler in summer to reduce idling time to heat and cool the interiors for the occupants... NOPE no one does (a good business idea btw).

Speaking of solar; why is my laptop plugged in right now (beside the fact that its a Dell and meh battery life)?... Oh yeah; IDK of any solar boosters that would either run it or at least help eliminate the drain... build that, market that. All these things would help.

Are cows put into enclosures at night that capture and scrub the CO2 they emanate... NOPE they're not.

These are just a few things based on my experience in the construction industry and casual observation. Let's buy some time until the issue can be solved in a financially viable way.


Urbanization is a big thing too, it makes far more climate sense. Instead of driving to ten places to serve a hundred people on each stop a truck can drive to one and serve a thousand people. Also, heat in high rises is used more efficiently than in single family homes because all that excess heat from bottom homes rise to the ones on the upper floors.

This is thankfully a trend right now, with people moving to bigger cities to find better jobs, but in some Western countries we have a lot of hurdles to make new houses and an overconsumption of existing housing. If you own a home already, that might mean you have to sacrifice something (higher property taxes to incentivize people to choose smaller properties, for example). Also, making the cities more accessible without a car does wonders for this too.

I'm convinced there's some way tech can help with this too. Airbnb makes sure excess or unused living area can be allocated more efficiently, for example.


For the past 40 years we've viewed climate change as a political problem (see "Losing Earth" from the NY Times for a history of this [1].) Like you, I no longer have any faith that politicians will be able to solve the problem. As the NYT research revealed, politicians generally only take on a cause when there is a viable solution... and frankly there isn't a great solution yet. Solar and wind help a good bit. Nuclear would be a fine option but as a society we are apparently uncomfortable with it... Our politicians don't really have a good enough, complete enough option.

At Charm Industrial [2] we started with a different question that at first seems silly: is it possible to sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a profit? We assumed the answer would be no, but to our surprise we couldn't convince ourselves of that. We found a pathway (purpose-grown biomass --> gasification --> hydrocarbons + geological CO2 sequestration) that seems to have high-scale profit potential. And if you can be profitable, then effectively unlimited amounts of private capital are available.

If you're interested in following our progress, you can subscribe to our newsletter here: https://charmindustrial.us18.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=aaf...

And we'd love to see others tackle the problem from the perspective of high-scale, viable economics. Is it possible to sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a profit?

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/clim... [2]: https://www.charmindustrial.com/


As the economics continue along Swanson's law (the photovoltaic solar panel equivalent to Moore's law of ever decreasing costs) I expect the biggest obstacle to large scale transition to a distributed grid of majority local generation resources will be regulatory hurdles by legacy utility industry to protect their business model. Some of these initiatives may even be channeled outside of the legislative process such as some DOE proposals under current administration to protect coal generation. Sorry this might go counter to the intent of this question but I think I'm getting at is that the single biggest factor will be political, and that the voting box is our strongest lever.


As we have become adults, we learn time and time again about personal responsibilities. Some of these lessons take many years, and some are emerging. We are awakening to the fact that the Earth's climate, like bills and taxes, is both our personal and collective responsibility. This means we need to take personal, financial, and political steps to lower our resource usage and carbon footprint. We can look around at our daily lives - the food we eat, our careers, where/how we live - to find areas where we can shed a few kilos from our carbon budget. Likewise we can boycott, divest from, and sanction the major sources of corporate, meaning collective, greenhouse gas emissions.


I honestly believe there are 1000 paths to safety, that there only a few to dangerous climate change, but that we will take a path to dangerous climate change. Because it is easier. It requires not making hard choices. It requires not working together. It requires less sacrifice. It will be the path of human nature and behavioral inertia.

“So what can we do so our children don't live in some ghastly hothouse world?”

We are going to have to explain to later generations why we thought the 6th great extinction was an appropriate price to pay for having elaborate, throw-away Halloween lawn decorations which were made by and the most costly to the most vulnerable citizens of the planet.

I don’t say any of that lightly.


"...governments can be counted out of taking the leadership needed to solve this within 12 years."

This is the issue.[0]

Governments are the middlemen between citizens that we the people decide to put in power through voting to represent us and our issues like climate change.

But democracy has been hijacked by putting additional middlemen between we the people. The second middleman is the capital election, specifically ~132 Americans who donated 60% of the SuperPAC money.

So our representatives spend a significant portion of their time in office calling these people to get funding for the next election cycle and when they vote on issues they think of these donors. Follow the money.

Yes we can fix data centers or cargo ships or deploy nuclear power or utility regulation, but at some point regulation for these as well will be dependent on the people we vote to put into power to represent us.

At the end of the day, corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits and shareholder value. If leaders lead, companies will follow.

I have an idea!

Why don't we, the very large community of Hacker News with 3-3.5M+ monthly uniques[1] petition one of the most innovative and powerful institutions to fund more projects that will fix broken governments around the world? "Government" is only mentioned one time in the YC RFP[2], maybe it should have it's own category.

Send them an email: hn@ycombinator.com or http://www.ycombinator.com/contact/ or contact your friends who are in the YC network.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw2z9lV3W1g [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219581 [2] http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/


Campaign, advocate for and support clean meat as a viable alternative to conventional factory farmed animal products. Factory farming is one of the biggest source of carbon emissions worldwide and a switch to clean meat can – due to higher efficiency of the meat generation process – have a huge impact here. It’s just one aspect of a possible solution but one that is often overlooked. Steps you can do right now:

If your skills are applicable in this area think about changing the industry or maybe consider donating to the Good Food Institute: https://www.gfi.org.


The green parties around the world are to blame for this. The only worthwhile actions to combat this are

1) Using nuclear power (on a massive scale preferrably) 2) Stopping globalisation (because transport is such a large contributor to CO2 emissions.). Local manufacturing would be much better for the environment (reduced transportation needs and also the western countries factories are much more sustainable than in third world countries and china)

Also reducing immigration helps, people in Africa use much less resources than the same people eg. transported to the cold north.


Absolutely nothing. As long as solutions require major changes in lifestyle for most people absolutely nothing will happen. Our only hope is to invent technology to mitigate the problem (sequester carbon from the atmosphere, get cheaper alternative fuels, protect cities from rising ocean levels and reinforce infrastructure to better tolerate extreme weather).

Anything else is just wishful thinking that places much more faith in the ability of people to value their long term interests over their short term comfort than evidence suggests is warranted.


To have any meaningful impact on global warming there would need to be a massive rapid global economic shift, we would also would need to reduce world population otherwise anything we do will just be nullified by increases in population. I think to even suggest that the people in power (politicians and capitalist corporations) will actually be willing and able to solve this problem is incredibly naive and I have no idea where anyone gets this optimism from?

No in reality we will see a slow increase in extreme natural disasters, island states and all coastlines becoming uninhabitable, permanent drought in most parts of the world, drinking water crisis, famine, massive unprepared forced migration, global economic collapse, permanent wars about remaining resources. I actually don't think humanity has any realistic chance to survive beyond 2080 and that number is actually quite conservative given the research.


Don't just vote, run for office.


https://www.runforoffice.org


Vote for sortition.


We'll definitely need geo-engineering to artificially cool our climate while we work out how to effectively remove CO2 from the air and store it for 1000's of years. It may require mass reforestation or putting carbon dioxide into concrete; whatever the answer, if we do not employ it on a massive scale, it won't matter if we transitioned quickly off of fossil fuels, which by the way we haven't. So, we will DEFINITELY need to artificially cool our planet.


There's a lot that technology can do to fight climate change. I came across Treetracker (https://www.greenstand.org/), an app that tracks tree planting and pays planters per tree after verification.

Spinning up multiple crowdfunded instances of apps like this across the world could really bring back a lot of the green cover lost over the years.


Best solution : One child less.


This is especially true if you are in a developed country. I did a college paper for an Environmental Law class. American children consume about 200 times the resources of children in developing countries.

I originally wanted three children. I stopped at two for various reasons. I think I did the right thing.


>> American children consume about 200 times the resources of children in developing countries

So one less immigrant is 99.5% as effective at reducing co2 as one less child?


Since I haven't researched that in specific I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing the answer is "No." Immigrant children from developing countries typically remain relatively poor by American standards and continue to use substantially fewer resources. They don't promptly leap up to middle class American consumption levels.

We would probably be better off, environmentally speaking, to aggressively try to convince American citizens to have fewer children while having more liberal immigration policies than to aggressively try to keep immigrants out while claiming that condemning children who already exist to a life of hardship is the moral equivalent of Americans choosing to have fewer children for environmental reasons. They aren't morally equivalent anymore than "Eat the rich" is some kind of moral high ground.


Great timing! I also believe it takes personal actions, not waiting on someone else.

My personal pledge is to balance the negative impact of my driving and flying. If you are interested, check out the app I'm building for it: https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/pledge-balance


- cycle to work, work from home, car pool in a plugin hybrid/electric car

- improve the energy efficiency of your house (aircon, heating)

- eat less beef

- invest in solar panel/sun thermal collectors

- pick train instead of a car for a trip

- reduce waste and buying unnecessary stuff

- Lobby for certain regulations like more charging stations for electric cars, more bike lanes, electric cars to use a bus lane, property tax that takes home energy efficiency into account


So my thoughts are how this is a problem of a highly dynamic system. There has been this massive injection of CO2 that has pushed the chaotic system to a whole new cycle.

So my question is what exactly is the right amount of change that won’t push the dynamical system to a point of even more instability.

I haven’t seen any discussion about this. That also concerns me.


https://www.drawdown.org/ has a nicely presented list of things that will help with global warming.

Honestly, I think it's too late. There's no way the entire world economy will be restructured in less than 12 years. Future generations will suffer for their ancestors' obstinacy.


Livestock is responsible for a large fraction of grains (and therefore clean water) consumption, while emitting an equally large amount of CO2 and methane into atmosphere. So largely reducing animal intake would be of huge help.

This large scale habit change don't require gov. aid, it can be tackled by for profit businesses and research institutions alike.


As a meta-comment, it's interesting to me that this is so highly upvoted and responded to here on hacker news. As a consultant I often find that clients who are brilliant experts in their own field often assume themselves to be experts in _every_ domain, including my own area of expertise which is software design and development.


There is no single silver bullet. One mechanism which can have lasting impact is applying William McDonough's "Cradle-to-Cradle" philosophy to large sectors. Apple seems to be trying to do that. It needs better support and awareness from consumers, to reward the corporations who deliver on these parameters.


On a personal note, don't have children. I'm not being facetious. It seems like we've had opportunities to do the right thing and consistently haven't so until the outlook looks better and we start taking action it's not a great idea to create offspring that will have to deal with the consequences.


But people without children have even less motivation to care about the future.

Even moreso for people who aren't married....why shouldn't they let their SUV idle in the driveway?


I don't think it's a solution to climate change, it's just a personal choice. The solutions are out of my reach and ideling the SUV is much less of a problem than selling the SUV in the first place.

I don't think we're doing a good job handling the issue on a policy level so creating a child who will potentially have to deal with the worst of these problems directly seems unnecessary, avoidable and selfish.


End exclusionary zoning in the US, so that people can live closer to the things they need, and denser, if they so choose


If we could get fusion rolled out faster, or really try to invest in something like Thorium reactors and then drastically improve battery technology, we could substantially reduce the need for fossil fuels.

It would also help if certain countries would not use CFCs that were banned due to the way they destroy the ozone.


It's a collective action problem and there's almost no way it can be addressed politically in today's world. There's too much win for populists to say to their population, "screw those foreigners / globalists / westerners / elites telling us what to do, we're going to look after ourselves". This is a hard message to compete with in domestic politics. And everybody ends up worse off because everybody else has the same dynamics.

So IMO we'll need to deal with mass migration and political instability in poor countries. That's the next battle; parts of the world with subsistence agriculture will become unsustainable, and there will be large migrations of population to elsewhere. That needs to be dealt with rationally, because if it becomes irrational, we'll get into the realms of fascism and genocide.

I don't think the whole planet is going to die, FWIW. Instead, I think we're going to see a shift in ecosystems, where the relative balance of flora and fauna will alter. Some may be edible, some less so. Prices will change and people will adjust, but adjustment will be much harder where there's subsistence agri. I don't think humans are seriously at risk of being wiped out - we're pretty adaptable and we have a lot of technology we could apply when prices rise enough for it to make sense. But food prices may rise generally, and some specifics may become very expensive. This too will lead to political instability and migration.


Here is my take:

Rich people in rich countries will pay what it takes to adapt to the changing climate.

Poor people in poor countries are basically screwed, just like always.

With some luck, the rich people in the rich countries will donate some of their excess wealth to help the poor people adapt too.


First world citizens need about 600-1000 adult trees to offset their carbon footprint. Go plant a lot of trees. Also, buy fewer things manufactured in countries that use primarily coal power, and travel a lot less (especially by airplane)


In the final analysis, it seems that a smaller population base is the answer.

People are not easily motivated to give up creature comforts. (Though they often tell others they should.) Fewer people == fewer negative influences on the earth.


If altruism is heritible (like almost every other personality trait) won't this just select for a world of selfish people?


As a political solution, I doubt there is much we can do. The young people are not that politicaly active (as in actualy casting votes). I'm very happy that Tesla has made automakers take electric cars seriously, and renewable electricity is doing well. Unfortunately, that's not going to be enough.

Geoengineering research is currently fairly taboo and hard to get money for. It involves developing methods to alter the environment to compensate for what we have done. Many say we should just reduce greenhouse gasses, since if we mess up geoengineering we could really mess up the planet, but I think it should at least be very well funded and studied.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering


If you're concerned about this, help fix it directly:

* Go Climate Neutral: http://goclimateneutral.com. It's much cheaper than you'd expect (~$10/month, depending on your lifestyle) to improve the world's energy efficiency enough to cancel out all your own impact.

* Donate to other efficient climate change charities: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/post/2013/11/less-burn-for-y...


I feel that unless we make some major breakthroughs in atmospheric carbon capture in the next 30 years, we are going to be royally screwed.


I think it is mostly a marketing challenge, once most people realize the risk, it will gain momentum and solutions will follow.


There is a plan already in action...

https://www.drawdown.org


This is not a plan in action, it is a list of ideas


There is a highly distributed plan.

https://www.drawdown.org


Reduce carbon emission by working remotely. Should be the default. Massively reduces carbon emission on large scale.


Not if you walk or bike to work.


vote against ethanol biofuels. From a thermodynamic perspective they will never be sustainable. We're literally dumping energy into growing extra corn that we burn.

It's a farmer subsidy and nothing more.

Just pay the farmers the money. Stop wasting the land, nitrogen, greenhouse emissions and retooling cars for this nonsense.


Plant lots and lots of Azolla. Like a lot of it. In addition to all the other stuff that people talk about.


Please start using Solar and wind as much as possible. We have amazing products available now. I have fiur solar lanterns, one flashlight, a 20k mah powerbank and a 14w suaoki foldable solar panel

In a few years ehen I buy a vehicle, I'll buy an electric moped, a 60w suoaki solar charger and a 150wh suoaki power generator. That way, I will be using my vehicle on renewable energy at all times.

We need to do this and fast.


I have to take issue with your use of the foldable solar panel. Studies have estimated that commercial solar panels take 1-4 years to produce enough electricity to offset that used in their production [0]. This is for fixed panels, pointing south, at optimal tilt, during all available daylight hours. How many hours per day does that portable panel get used? It seems extremely unlikely to me that the average portable solar panel gets used a significant fraction of what a fixed dedicated panel does, thus will not offset its production emissions.

More generally, green gadgets are likely not very green. The true lifecycle advantages over a conventional product if there are any are likely to be very small and you are unlikely to be able to even find out for individual products. People would likely make more of an impact by wasting and consuming less. There are products that can make an impact, they tend to be high energy users like a water heater, HVAC system or insulating a building properly.

In the US, many states have deregulated utility markets. That means users can choose who provides their electricity and many green products are available like 100% renewable. See https://www.electricchoice.com/ for more background and if that's available in your area.

0 - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211...


Earlier, I charged my phone using the grid.

I used grid while reading and writing.

Now, I have five solar products and I don't use the grid.

I also plant 10 trees yearly, I use my bicycle.

Doing something is better than being a cynic. The point isn't recuperating amount of energy spent in manufacturing solar pabel, batteries. It is to stop from further consumption of polluting items.

Sure, it wouldn't amount to much. I don't use more than 2units of electricity. We still run diesel trains in India, most industries dint use renewable energy. We need to make massive changes if we want to be carbon neutral

And I still don't agree with your comment. I have a phone that was manufactured using coal and petrol. I use the phone's half battery during the day by consuming even more petrol.

The least I could do is charge it using Solar. The goal of using solar isn't to be "offset within xyrs" it is to stop reliance on oil. It is to use sun, wind. It is to invest.

If we don't invest then nothing will happen. This might be similar to banks. Solar is like investing money in the market when it is abysmally low, sure, it might not offset immediately, but it eventually will. That's still better than money under the rug


If you are not using the grid and just getting by using a foldable solar panel to charge 5 devices, then I should definitely not be lecturing you about minimizing waste.

You make a good point about the important thing being the comparison of emissions you would have caused had you used the grid versus what was used to create the panel and batteries. Still, it depends how much charging you actually wind up doing with the panel over its lifetime whether less CO2 is emitted or not. Though, I imagine in India pollutants other than CO2 are more pressing.

Thanks for sharing your experience. On the issue of climate change its somewhat depressing being in the US, policy has been stuck for a very long time. Its inspiring to hear from someone so committed from outside my usual sphere.


Thank you for having a civil discussion! Our current world climate is intensly hostile and I was afraid that even our discussion would go south.

Well, today morning, I charged my phone on solar power (and I'll do so daily from now on).

India has bigger issues than CO2, yes, but unfortunately, I can't afford to ignore CO2issues. Our governments are incredibly corrupt and incompetent. Their goal in life is to do enough corruption so that their 7 generations dont5 have to work ever.

That aside, yes, it is depressing that US federal policy is ignoring climate change, but don't be sad, half your states have committed to going green by 2030 or something. Plus, Tesla motors and Tesla energy are doing more things for solar than anyone else in this world. They recently bhilt this backup genset in Australia, they also have built solar energy power stations (quietly) in remote islands, I forgot the names.

That means US is contributing despite its depressing govt policies. My issue is that India isn't contributing despite+ve federal policies. For all his faults, ny PM has obsessively focused on solar, thankfully, shifting away from nuclear energy. But now company hasa good electric car or 2 wheeler and those cars are costly and run for 70km on one charge. Tesla runs 250miles!

Coming to less CO2, I won't be able to offset energy used for solar panel, I don't know how much was used in the first place, But and this is a big but, I'll surely he offsetting all energy I was going to use from the grid anyways.

I wasn't going to stop using mobiles, lights for reading at night. So, I'll be saving those emissions and my electricity bill. I get less than 2 $ bill per month, average bill here, converted in dollars should be somewhat 10$, depending on how rich people are.

And btw I have five different solar powered devices that can be charged by builtin solar panel and by USB port. So my Idea is to use my power bank to store energy and use it to charge phone or lanterns as required. (Powerbank is 20,000 mah, and also has a 2w solar panel included!)


I'd like to agree, but numbers don't add up. All the solar their is, amounts to 1% of energy use. Its not about mopeds, its about steel plants and oil refineries and shipping and heating and cooling. We're talking Terawatts, not Watts.


I totally understand and agree. But we can't afford to not do something. Imagine if everyone planted a tree in a pot in their homes. It isn't about the 1w electricity I used from Solar, it is a momentum. Slowly, 1million people will use solar and it'll be 1 million watt electricity! It is in the scale


Yes, but 1MW is one millionth of the problem. Its very hard to get individual effort to matter. Its the industrial infrastructure that has to change?


That still doesn't mean that we do nothing at all


Which is the origin of the term 'eco-theatre'. Doing something, just to be doing something.

I know, everybody can't be a lobbyist etc.


Do something about YOU; protest insanity by not being insane. It's actually quite simple.


Reforestation. Stop eating meat. Stop burning fossil fuels. Use less energy unless your energy is 100% "green". Overthrow capitalism.


Kind of the 'eco-theatre' top-tunes list. But which are doable? And aren't other non-theatre items more effective?

At least recycling wasn't in the list, which can be an energy sink and actual climate harm.


Is this 12 year timeline correct. What degree of catastrophe are we looking at?


It's generally accepted that if we don't zero our carbon emissions in 12 years we'll see 2 degrees warming minimum.

Best case scenario is drought, heatwaves, forest fires, lose half the wildlife in the world, all the coral reefs, most of the fish, reduced crop yield, flooding, storms, sea level rise, and parts of the world are inhospitable, and the populations of those regions migrate north. BEST case. WORST case is runaway warming when all the methane in the arctic is released and the forests that soak up our carbon burn down and the ocean stops absorbing it, and the earth gets so hot that humans literally just drop dead from hyperthermia.

I refuse to believe in the worst case, because the majority of scientists are not going that far, and because it could make a person crazy just thinking about it. Besides, the best case is bad enough already.


I honestly think there is no way we can zero emissions in that time. But I'm hopeful the rate of technological progress can out pace our predictions. I'm also hopeful that we may one day find a means to reverse the problem through Geo engineering. People are far more motivate when the problem is already at the door. I just hope it's not too late by then.


I agree, on both counts. Rereading my post now it seems hopelessly pessimistic, and negative. I was mostly just trying to explain what we can expect to see as we approach 2 degrees of warming. We won't get to to zero carbon in the next 12 years and we won't avoid at least 1.5 degrees warming.

But I honestly DO believe that we WILL see a downward trend in he next 12 years. We won't hit zero but i would hope we'd hit pre 2000 levels. And I also believe that even though we're going to suffer, technology like carbon capture and geo engineering will play a role in the future. A recent study suggested painting rooves and footpaths white in hotter countries would have the equivalent cooling effect of taking every car off the road for 50 years. Measures like this will help. Fusion power works. ITER in France will generate 500Mw when operational in 2025, and pave the way for more fusion globally.

I think we can fix global warming, but its to our eternal shame that we're going to be fixing it rather than preventing it


there are already a billion people advocating for collective action ie someone else should do something. Donors need to take it upon themselves to fund and assist geoengineering moonshots.


What is the likelyhood of a runaway feedback loop occuring?


Zero. The hotter the planet gets, the more water evaporates from the oceans, which condenses into clouds, which reflect sunlight, which cools the planet.


According to statistical mechanics, even boltzmann brains have a higher probability than zero.

I find your absolute certainty disturbing.


Earth is 4.5 billion years old. A runaway, climate chain-reaction hasn't happened yet.

I find your lack of faith disturbing.


I think you're confusing a complete boil-off of the atmosphere with a slightly less extreme event that simply eliminates 90% of life on the planet, which has in fact happened before


I think you're conflating a "runaway feedback loop" with "a slightly less extreme event that simply eliminates 90% of life on the planet," which says nothing about whether it was caused by a runaway feedback loop.


Therefore, by this logic, zero percent chance... qed


So, how many billion years more would it take to convince you that it's not going to happen? If earth is 4.5 billion years old, that's already more than 25% the age of the universe.

What does the evidence show? Are you willing to believe the evidence?


As I said before, I think you're confusing a complete boil-off of the atmosphere with a slightly less extreme event that simply eliminates 90% of life on the planet, which has in fact happened before


Vote for representatives that take the threat seriously.


There's no climate catastrophe. Nothing have to be done about preventing imaginable things.


Would you mind expanding on this?


I think that the whole human-changing-planet thing is huge fraud. There are legitimate concerns, like bad air in the cities because of cars, but global warming, if it exists at all (which I don't observe because winters are as cold as they always were), is because of planetary cycles, not because human affected anything significantly. Concentrating on green energy is stupid, humans should invest more money into nuclear stations and potentially thermonuclear technology.


EDIT: downvoters, feel free to add your opinion, what seps we can take in 12 years to prevent climate change. I will gladly hear any opinion, especially if it is not as drastic as mine.

1. Drop coal and gas as energy sources immediately. Use renewable and nuclear energy as main power sources. Phase out nuclear after couple decades, when we hopefully can get all our energy needs from renewables. EDIT: forgot to add in fusion.

2. Eat less meat. I am not saying to go full radical vegan, just have less of it. Most people I know have meat for every main meal of the day (breakfast, lunch, dinner). We can definitely eat less of it. Meat production generates extreme amounts of CO2 and consumes too much of valuable land.

3. "Global one child policy". Sounds extreme - but we must lessen global population of humans. I know that western countries have negative growth already, problem is how to solve overpopulation in non-western countries and do it fast (ideally in one generation). Even with technological advances, IMO having 10-12+ billion people on Earth won't do any good for anyone.


Please don't break the site guidelines by going on about downvote(r)s.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Good ideas but impossible in practise. The people and myself included have hard time imagining how global warming will affect us so drastically that such measures would be needed. Maybe they are but as of now we're just sitting happy in our slowly heating up pan like the frogs in one previously done experiment. Only when the effects are clear and causing visible suffering I believe our human civilization will try to find measures to fix it. I wish the scientists knew how to do better marketing to educate the masses of the effects that we are about to face. But I'm not sure how many will listen.


Eating less meat is not only possible, it is a persistent trend in developed countries.


Nuclear isn't feasible within that timeframe - takes years to even build the plants! Not to mention the unpopularity of putting fission plants in the less stable countries of the world.

The other two are even more infeasible.


Any electricity grid change takes years anyway, and I don't see how the other two are not feasible. As an example, we managed to reduce smoking by a good margin nowadays, which was an even more unrealistic battle than meat consumption.


IMO for infeasibly tough problems we must go to infeasibly tough actions (believe me - I do not have any hope for any of these points to come at least 1% true).

It's a theoretical list which would greatly reduce our impact on climate in utopian world.

#3 is extremely infeasible

I would not agree that #1 is impossible (it's just a problem with stigma and politics), though I agree that it is very unlikely and needs great dedication from governments of powerful countries, to make it happen in 10 or even 20 years.

Though what's the problems with #2 to make it "more infeasible"? I am not vegan/vegetarian, but I have no problem eating 10 times less meat than I did 5 years ago.


1. yups. this needs a law.

2. why not radical? we have "good enough" plant-based replacements, and these will improve a lot when meat/dairy/eggs/leather simply becomes out-lawed. (needs a law too) why point one "stop immediatly" and point 2 being just reduce as a personal choice?

3. this i do not get. we have seen (again and again) that educating women greatly changes the reproductive rates. we can just do that! the one-child policy was disasterous for china, and while it may work in the dev'd world, it is the undev'd world where the reduction is badly needed and where the china-disaster is likely to repeat itself.

also, with 1 and 2 in place, we have prolly no need for the one-child policy. we'll have food and land plenty!


1. With no fossil fuel-based energy available, global food production will plummet, and distribution of what food exists will become prohibitively expensive. Millions will starve to death.

2. Go, tell the farmers they are not allowed to eat their chickens' eggs. I will wait for you to report their answer. Or do you intend to enforce your decree by force?

3. If you are allowed to tell other people how many children to have, I am allowed to tell you how many children to have: You may have none.

> also, with 1 and 2 in place, we have prolly no need for the one-child policy. we'll have food and land plenty!

I wonder if you actually believe what you say.


That's about right. I would add a 4th action to this list: Financing of carbon negative research & companies though a carbon tax on the worst offenders. I don't think even reducing drastically is enough personally, we need to go negative.


The only ways that can be effective in 12 years are geoengineering solutions.

The problem with geoengineering is that they make someone clearly responsible for climate change in the good direction. So geoengineering is going to cause trillions in damage, on purpose. So it'll never be done.

These solutions:

1) takes 10 years (minimum) to happen, and ignores that the environmental groups are much more against nuclear than against fossil fuels. So probably never going to happen.

Furthermore, requires rebuilding the electricity grid and changing, I don't know, 100 million households to electrical heating. That too will take time and can't happen before the first part is complete.

So in 12 years ? No appreciable effect

2) won't work at all. That land won't be replaced with co2 sinks. Even if we do put forests, they take half a century before becoming sinks.

Won't work in 12 years. Hell, won't work before we run out of oil. We might as well do nothing.

3) won't take effect until those kids start using significant resources, say 20 years. Won't cause decrease until the current generation starts dying off (worldwide average age is still low 20s, so let's generously say in 50 years). Also: who will take care of those people before they die ?

Won't work in 12 years


Haha, good luck! :)


Zombie apocalypse


I don't think we should, but here's some things that I think we're capable of:

* We could use atomic power, but not to replace oil: we irradiate or directly bomb the main global oil reserves so they are rendered unusable. Both Russia and the US have the power to do this many times over. That would mean World War III, probably. Which would also lower the CO2 levels.

* We can inoculate 10 or 20 people in densely populated areas with highly contagious virus, trigger a pandemic and see the numbers go down.

* We can simultaneously fund anti-vaccination groups, and decrease the funds for the public health organizations like the U.S. Food and Drug administration, worldwide. That could have the same effect, depending on how vicious the viruses we get are in the next 10 years. Super-flu would be fatal enough.


space mirrors


What could possibly go wrong?


Nothing will be done because it’s not profitable.

More people will die from water shortage in the coming years before starvation.


Can’t see it happening when a large portion of the population insists that climate change isn’t real.


Maybe if the media managed to actually present the issue in a balanced way we wouldn't be here. Maybe if every dire prediction wasn't presented as fact and every criticism labeled as conspiracy theory and vica versa for a-lot of other outlets.

Maybe if solutions like geo-engineering were at least discussed instead of the chorus of the media/politicians telling people that taxes and fees are THE ONLY SOLUTION to the crisis.

Just my 2cents, but we would be so much further ahead if the conversation has some actual balance instead of these-days where people are complaining that having a 5/95 skew in favour of the armageddon scenario if we don't have a global tax on carbon, move to 100% renewables and electric cars as being too generous to the critics of this plan.


It seems that people really prefer to vote extreme people who take hard instance against situations instead of level-headed ones.

We now have hundreds of years of experience regarding politicians. Maybe we have to teach politics in schools:

On the methods the politicians have used to manipulate people and how to call them out.

On the way we should measure politicians and what makes a good decision makes vs. a poor one.


Not really, it's just that the nature of democracy leads power to concentrate within two power centres. Just look at Australia over the last decade and you can see how even politicians who are in favour of carbon taxes will campaign against them one year and fight for them another based on the current political solution.

Hell for another issue, gay marriage. It was quite the sight to see the Deputy leader of the labor party who is openly gay vote against gay marriage legislation because the party had decided that wasn't the way they wanted to do it.

In any case, that doesn't account for the media which we don't vote for in any way.

Also just because we have centuries of experience with politics, it's about as developed as many of the other social sciences, which is to say very underdeveloped and at times heading backwards in it's understanding of the subject's truth.


Those responses seem like something from the people who don't believe there's an actual problem. Scientists are pretty much universally convinced, the only ones who aren't are paid by big oil and the Koch brothers - that means they are lying for money. We don't debate whether the earth is the center of the universe or is the earth flat, because debating that would be a false equivalence of equal chance, but one side of those debates is absurd. We are basically at that point on the question of does human activities increase global warming (yes), will this be really really bad (yes), can we do something about it (yes, but its hard to decide). Let's not waste time arguing about whether the earth is flat, let's move on to figuring what to do about it.


> Scientists are pretty much universally convinced, the only ones who aren't are paid by big oil and the Koch brothers - that means they are lying for money.

Thats actually just wrong and shows how closed minded people are to how science works. Even if they were paid by big oil, shouldn't their evidence stand on it's own merits? Just like the claims made by scientists?

And no, I don't buy your false equivalence because the earth being round or gravity existing is empirically proved. Climate science has not and probably will not be ever proved on that level. If we could, then weather forecasts would also be perfect because we would be able to perfectly model exactly how the climate works but we don't, we strive every day to try and model the future better.

Just to give you a recent example: https://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/30277-c...

Can you show me how much hes being paid by big oil to do this? Or how all of the issues he found are just BS? Or maybe it's not exactly true that all researchers are all on the exact same page the media is typically on?


It's actually not wrong.

https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/


It just links to J. Cook, et al which i've read and it doesn't say that 97% agree that the earth is warming and man is responsible for it. Maybe you should read it.


I do think that pretty much all reputable scientists do believe it. But another thing that serious scientists do is publish in accepted journals. I hadn't heard of the new american, but a quick search on the site found an article saying that Martin Luther King wasn't really a pacifist- he actually wanted to encourage violence, and also something lauding the John Birch Society. So reading the article you linked about some who thinks everyone else is wrong about global warming leads me to doubt his veracity, based in part on the other ridiculous views therein.


Considering that we aren't sure that the mathematical equations that govern fluid dynamics can be fully solved in 3 dimensions, I don't buy your statement that weather forecasts would be solved easily if we could just figure out if global warming is happening.


Yes - education, lobbying and advocating would all have to be part of the plan.

Edit: look at https://transitionnetwork.org - grassroots network in the UK that seems to be doing well at getting people to engage.


In terms of education, why not start at the top by educating Richard Lindzen, ex-MIT professor of atmospheric physics, author of 200 papers, who reminds us of the popular narrative that " the climate, a complex multi-factorial system, can be summarized in just one variable - the globally average temperature change and primarily controlled by a 1-2% energy budget due to a single variable - carbon dioxide - among many variable so comparable importance". Lindzen's view is that this claim is based on reasoning that borders on magical thinking.". Should Al Gore and John Kerry put him straight on his basic physics?

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/09/richard-lindzen-lectu...


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> suicide is an an increasingly pragmatic and attractive option.

Don't think that way. Climate despair is real. People get seriously depressed about it and a lot of people probably consider suicide. Messages like this are irresponsible and can push people over the edge. If you feel that urge, talk to someone. Reach out. Get better. If you're this worried about climate change then THE WORLD NEEDS YOU.


while your heart is in the right place, i feel this sort of canned response will only become increasingly inadequate as a means of confronting what the world is going to become and what that means for the people within it. even the most utopian of the potential futures we face present the sort of existential nightmare to which 'opting out' of these terms and conditions will become an entirely rational response.

>Messages like this are irresponsible and can push people over the edge.

this is a very naive view and one that i would argue, with all due respect, is falsely empathetic without truly understanding the mindset and circumstances of someone who chooses to stop living. we need to have a truly honest conversation about self determination as it applies to the right for individuals to end their own lives and safe/ethical means of achieving that end. anything less is an illusion of compassion and a very cruel one.


> So what can we do so our children don't live in some ghastly hothouse world?

How about stopping with the apocalyptic hyperbole?

> The scientists have told us its our final chance....

And "scientists" have been telling us that for decades now.

> I feel like the young people need to take charge of the world because the older generations have had their chance and not fixed it.

Or the old have lived long enough not to buy into hysteria. Maybe the older people are just wiser, better educated and have more experience? Or we could let the young people, who know nothing about anything, take charge.

> What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

Nothing. No more than we can prevent solar flares, tornadoes or volcanic eruptions. We simply have to deal with it.

Climate change occurs naturally. It has existed before the industrial revolution. It has existed before humans. It will exist after humans. Trying to prevent climate is like trying to prevent the sun from rising in the east.

Is there room for us to mitigate human contribution to climate change? Sure. Would that matter. Probably not. Are there other areas we should be concentrating on? Yes.

Environmental preservation ( forests, rivers, oceans ... ). Species protection. Build better and walkable cities.

Global warming ( rebranded by PR firms as the silly "climate change" ) isn't the first apocalyptic hysteria by "scientists" ( and by "scientists" I mostly mean politicians, corporations, lawyers, etc trying to profit ).

Here are some of the "end of the world" events cassandrized by "scientists"

Climate change. Global warming, Global cooling ( from 1940s to 1970s ). That's right folks, before we were going to boil to death, we were going to freeze to death. Of course there are the supervolcanic eruptions. Asteroid strike. Of course dire warnings of nuclear holocaust. Then there was malthusian prediction of death by population growth. Boy was he wrong about that one. "Scientists" even warned of extinction of humans by race mixing - look up social darwinism. Now we laugh at that.

So take a deep breath. The world is not going to end anytime soon. Climate change happens with or without humans. We'll adapt like we always have.


Prevent? Haha, guys! Very funny! :D You had until 2016.


Could we have prevented the extinction of the dinosaur with the knowledge we have now? If not, why worry?


If we had detected the asteroid sufficiently early we probably could have diverted it.


But if it weren't for the extinction of the dinosaurs, we wouldn't be here.


The greed of the 1% most wealthy people in the world has caused this problem so they should pool their resources and fix it.


But they won't, and they will be fine even if comes to living in a bubble. As it has always been, the poor will carry the burden of humanity.


This is a strictly political issue.

Most people think humans can’t destroy the planet’s atmosphere. That’s hubris, and based on your politics.

“Science” always thinks it’s proven right until it’s proven wrong.


Not really. It's about irrational humans and magical thinking.


Just invent a way to get lots of cheap energy without burning stuff and we're fine. Not nuclear plants, nuclear energy is evil, we all know that.


Invest in co2 scrubbers and nuclear power.

But they also said ten years ago that ten years would be the absolutely longest time we had to prevent catastrophic climate change.

They also said the world would be overpopulated and we wouldn't be able to feed everybody by the end of the sixties so who knows.


> They also said the world would be overpopulated and we wouldn't be able to feed everybody by the end of the sixties so who knows.

Thanks to the green revolution, we figured out how to massively increase crop yield, otherwise we would have seen problems supplying enough food. In fact that's kind of the root of many of todays problems. The population of earth has doubled since 1980, when GHG levels were safe. If we couldn't feed another 3.5 billion people they wouldn't have been born and we wouldn't be in this mess. We'd be in a much different mess, where rationing and population control are common, but at least we wouldn't also be cooking ourselves


For a balanced view, this is a must read from Professor of Meteorology Richard S. Lindzen at MIT: https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2018/10/Lindzen-2018...


That's not balanced. The overwhelming majority of experts in the field disagree with Lindzen, who is largely famous among laypeople because he is one of the few academics that deniers can point to.


Experts? That's exactly his point. They're far from being experts. What I meant by balanced was as a balance to all the views being expressed here. I probably misused that word.


I'd describe people with PhDs in atmospheric science who have published papers on climate change or other climate modeling as experts. These people largely disagree with Lindzen.


From the paper:

> Richard S. Lindzen was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until his retirement in 2013. He is the author of over 200 papers on meteorology and climatology and is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and of the Academic Advisory Council of GWPF.

Does meteorology count as "atmospheric science"?

Does climatology count as "climate change" or "climate modeling"?

Does 200 papers count as "published papers"?

Does being a professor at MIT count?

By your own criteria, he is an expert.

Therefore, by what reasoning do you dismiss him?

Religion.


Yes. Lindzen is a working scientist. But he is not among the majority of scientists. The fact that his name shows up so goddamn often is because he is one of the very few people with those creds that speaks what deniers want to hear.


There is a joke "Scientists are telling us that our civilisation stands on the border of the abyss, and propose themselves to take leadership, and make a move forward". Seriously speaking, last year I looked into summary of glacial core data from Greenland. You know, what, climate always changes. This one is no worse then a Pleistocene. May be some cool animals will emerge in a million years from now.


Unfortunately at an individual level effecting change, I feel the boat has long since sailed.

It's pretty obvious that in western democracies, it's not so much the politicians who control the scene, but the corporates that sponsor their election campaigns in return for industry specific kickbacks.

While we have vested interests such as coal, oil and gas producers sponsoring your only valid political choices, you're going to end up voting for parties that are only there due to those companies. I don't see that changing any time soon.

I think it's best to just prepare for the most realistic current scenario, which is an average temperature rise in the area of 1 - 1.5 degrees C. Not so much dooms day preparation, but maybe don't be that little pig who builds his house out of straw.


There is lots of action still required to reach your realistic scenario. Don't give up. You can help.

Hopefully this can motivate people in an optimistic way: https://unop.uk/how-to-help-with-a-big-global-problem-as-a-t...


I read 2001: A Space Odyssey when I was 11. That would have been 1971. The Moon shuttle, the space station, and the elctronic wizardry were okay by me. Even the monolith, though things did turn too weird for my taste towards the end (and I still agree with my younger self here). But one fundamental premise completely toppled my suspension of disbelief: That humanity would still seriously be here by the turn of the century. Clearly, ww would by then be overwhelmed, struggling against or exterminated by ... pollution. Which is what all doomsday was about then. Some years later it was all-out nuclear war. Ask me by the beginning of the eighties, and I shall tell you confidently that I - and you - won't be around by the year 2000. As we now know, I nearly got that one right during the next few years, but today I really no longer believe it would have moved far beyond megadisaster - not into actual extermination. So, these days it's the climate, and I am old and cynical and jaded. Sick to puking level of being called a denier. Noone in his/her/its right mind can deny that climate is changing. Always has, presumably always will. And of course we influence the damned thing. Every living and species does, and we clearly to a very high extent. If we don't - collectively - like the way things are going, by all means, we ought to take steps to shift the course. We may even be in for rough times. Maybe very rough. And then again, maybe we won't. If someone can give me a plausible scenario for the year 2100 - as seen from the perpective of someone actually living there and then - I'm all ears. I have zero idea wheter that scenario in that perspective will be on the black or on the white side. I shall, however, be extremly surprised if climate will have actually killed or ruined us, downvotes be damned.


I understand your sentiment, but it boils down to : past catastrophic predictions were wrong so future catastrophic predictions are also going to be wrong.

That does not reassure me one bit.

Let's that the doomsday future is 100 millions people living in the Arctic circle. Maybe it is not that bad for people living in 2500, with AI, agricultural drones, floating cities. They might even have fusion and a moon base.

But I cannot imagine how we can go peacefully from a few billions people living around the globe to another stable state. This is going to be a very rocky transition, and we, or our children, are going to experience it fully.


Not so much past catastrofic predictions were wrong as my past catastrofic fantasies were wrong. I see frequent commenting here on HN in the tone of the world is ending, we're all gonna die. They are no more and no less credible than my boyhood musings on 2001.

My comment wasn't meant to reassure. I take it for granted (my musings again!) that this century will bring terrible upheavals, unprecedented warfare, and probably a sharp decline in world population. It won't be peaceful, it won't be pretty. It will be history, business as usual, no matter if the planet grows hotter or colder. I'm far too old for optimism.


"It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine."

Y2K was supposed to be a global catastrophe. It got quietly fixed. No one (but me) wakes up today and goes "Oh. Thank. God. We aren't living in the Y2K post apocalypse!"

In fact, I have been told that most people laugh at the idea that we ever worried about it because it turned out fine, so we must not have been in real danger.

The Kuwait oil wells were supposed to burn for years and be a global catastrophe. Crack teams converged on the country and put them out in a mere 6 months. No one is saying "Hallelujah!" about that either. It is also forgotten while we are on to bellyaching about our next catastrophe.

Don't get me wrong. I'm an environmental studies major and I have lived without a car for more than a decade and I would like to do more to mitigate this problem. But I'm pretty damn sure that if I actually fixed it, A. I would likely get zero credit and B. The very next morning the entire world would be focused on some new problem rather than dancing in the streets to celebrate this triumph.

In the mean time,let me recommend that you pee on a tree. (Website possibly coming soon.)


To me the scary part about climate change is the sheer scale of the problem. We burn something like 4.4 billion tons of oil each year. Eventually we have to basically un-burn all of that oil. That's a staggeringly huge amount of work and we have barely begun to stop digging ourselves deeper into the hole.


Walk more.

Eat less meat.

And pee on a tree.

Do that every day. Track it if you need to. Spread the word if you like, though leading by example is more powerful than trying to lecture people.

We are all just dust in the wind anyway. But you can choose what your little speck gets up to, at least to some degree.


That's entirely in the "stop digging the hole so fast" category. Except for the tree peeing I think.

Actually removing thousands of billions of tons of excess carbon from the atmosphere is still an unsolved problem. We can't do it with trees unless we find a black hole to stuff them into.


I don't actually agree with you, but let's assume you are correct. In my experience, if you don't have an effective solution, but you do know that doing X amounts to "putting out the fire with gasoline," then not doing X is vastly better than continuing to do X while claiming there's no point in trying since we don't have a real solution.

If nothing else, slowing things down and hurtling towards our doom less quickly buys us time to come up with Real Solutions (TM).


What is this thing about peeing on trees


I wrote a comment about it on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12656045

And then I spontaneously created a little website, which failed to go viral or save the world with potty humor. And I took it offline. I recently put it back online in hopes of repurposing it and removed all pages.

Just for you, I have restored the main landing page:

https://peeonatree.blogspot.com/2018/09/pee-on-tree.html

Our next wars could be fought over water. You can fight that while helping grow bigger, healthier trees.

It's a silly theory by someone who likely has delusions of grandeur.


we don't have a tree in our apartment, and we don't flush the toilet when we pee. does that count?


It helps. The idea though is to water and fertilize trees, not just reduce use of residential water.


cool I didn't know pee was a fertilizer too


Yes, it gets used in developing countries as a form of fertilizer they can afford. Though they typically collect it and sterilize it first to remove pathogens. However, they are using it at scale on agricultural fields. Peeing on the roots of a tree shouldn't cause any problems.


What's your source for this 12 year figure? What exactly happening in 12 years? What scientists are saying it's our "final chance"?

I don't think being hyperbolic is constructive or helpful in the slightest when you're looking to have a serious discussion. To be clear, I'm not saying there isn't a problem. I agree that there are a multitude of problems and that we must take action to address them. But over the last few decades a few people have made a name for themselves by making crazy allegations, and I believe this has done nothing but make people take the issue less seriously than they should.

I'm happy to be corrected on this, since I'm not an expert and I haven't done that much research. When I last looked into this topic it didn't seem like there was consensus among the scientific community about the predicted timelines for future climate events or even a clear understanding of what those events would be. Again, I'm very happy to be corrected on any of this, as I take the topic of climate change incredibly seriously. It is my belief that allowing climate change issues to run loose is one of the biggest risks to our civilization.


The obvious solution would be to decrease the population globally to more manageable level. That is not possible because humans are hardwired to breed and multiply. The next best thing we can do is try to do some big action on government levels. Again very difficult because it would mean decreasing standard of living (more expensive fuel, for example, to discourage inefficient cars, higher taxes on products dependent on fossil fuels), so you would be asking people to vote for decreasing their living standard and making their life worse off short term. Nobody is going to vote for a politician who promises to make your life worse and products you use daily more expensive thus making you poorer.


> That is not possible because humans are hardwired to breed and multiply.

Wait a second, then why is it that almost every western country is currently seeing negative population forecasts without immigration?

Seems like western countries were already heading towards population decline but have been propped up in recent years with the call for more economic growth and I don't think those calls are hardwired at all.


I think western countries are not representative of the world as they represent a small minority of world's population (10% or so).

I have read some predictions about world population continuing to increase to around 12 billion and stabilising at that number.

Let's say that happens. Then you run into the problem of people in western countries consuming many times more resources and energy per capital as developing world.

Then in order to avoid climate catastrophe it would mean you have to reduce standard of living for the minority that consumes the most fuel and energy, also standard of living of those in developing world could not catch up.

Basically the argument I'm trying to make it that it won't be sustainable to have 1 or 2 cars per family like it is normal in the West, and other similar luxuries.


Your assuming that developing countries don't develop in that time which would be quite the prediction.

Also I don't think 1-2 cars will be the issue, more along the lines of:

- Can you own a car? Or must you bike to work? - Can you access goods outside of your state? Since no trucks/planes for long distance shipping - How much Heating/Cooling in the Winter/Summer will you be allowed? If any?

That or we could look into geo-engineering maybe?




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