Coal is responsible for more emissions than oil, and natgas isn't far behind. So if we just got rid of oil and kept natgas and coal, we'd be ok according to your logic?
Edit: Maybe my sentiment is unpopular. I read the comment and thought that "oil" clearly was a standing for fossil fuels in general. I don't see how it could be read to be saying "oil is bad but coal and gas are OK" and thought the reply suggesting this was the case wasn't really in good faith. But I may have been mistaken!
Given the topic of conversation, it is a necessary bit of pedantry. If we are going to abandon "climate change" because it does not fully convey the issue, replacing it with "oil catastrophe", which also does not fully convey the issue, is not particularly useful. The latter is going to leave people thinking that all we need to do is stop using oil, which may be a good start, but not a complete solution.
It's really not pedantry, if anything oil is more 'valuable' than (especially) coal and natgas in terms of the energy transition - it is much much harder to replace oil based products (aviation fuels, diesel for heavy industrial use for example) than it is to switch off coal power plants.
Abstaining isn't sabotaging. Vegetarians aren't actively sabotaging meat production. Electricity exports from dirty plants in Germany were vital in propping up France's nuclear power grid when it was in trouble in the past year. There's plenty of sabotage potential there if there were any intention which there is not.
It's harmful nonsense but I don't see how it sabotages nuclear energy. If anything, proponents of nuclear energy should be thrilled. Free energy, now available for legacy heating technology.
The party that keeps insisting on adding these laughable electricity-to-fuel regulations is amenable to nuclear power plants and would undoubtedly have kept them running in a different coalition.
Oil (fossil fuel) is going to fix itself, but not fast enough to keep climate change within reasonable bounds.
But you can go a step further, the problem isn't oil, but growth. Should we have an infinite supply of "clean" energy, we'd use it to destroy the environment faster (destroy forest, marine life, produce more plastic and so on...).
These types of scenarii are well-explained in the "limits to growth" book.
I think it’s possible that the endless renaming treadmill isn’t actually helpful. If you’re already onboard, sure it keeps things spicy, but if you’re not it’s alienating and frankly it’s anti-accessible.
It's 2 fold, it is both a demand issue and a supply issue.
Yes, we need to find a way to move away from oil. But, we also need to move away from decisions that lead to a stark increase in demand. Avoiding things like Car culture, building cities in deserts/tundra, beef consumption are just as important. This is especially true in the developing world. If per-capita energy demands in Africa / India / China gets anywhere close to Canada/USA/ Norway, then no amount of 'clean energy pivot' will be able to save us. But that change has to begin from USA/Canada/Scandinavia as global thought leaders.
This pans out in statistics [1] too. There is clear clustering around car centric, sprawling & snow-clad regions. Japan, France, & Spain stand out as medium-consumption developed nations simply due to better urban planning & moderate climate. Taiwan and SK are the two headscratchers for me. I would have expected both to have similar consumption to Japan, no clue why they use so much energy per capita. Is it all air-conditioning ?
And when we're done transitioning and the problem of end of life batteries becomes more obvious we will live in a world with a battery problem (among many other unforeseen problems I am sure, that's just the blindingly obvious one right now). There's no free lunch, life is trade offs, fossil fuels have been an excellent trade off so far (just look at all the labor they freed up to pursue technological advancement in countries with institutions favorable to rewarding individual achievement).
Because of the trade off nature of this situation your argument is entirely wrong. The main problem is climate changes when we add heat to it faster than we can dissipate it into space. The solution to the main problem is some combination of things that increases our ability to dissipate heat, which will include some amount of fossil fuel consumption decrease. There are secondary problems with the different green house gases that will dictate the optimal decrease mix but that's not that relevant to the main problem with your thought process.
Fossil fuels were a glorious solution to the horror of the average man's existence, they continue to be a large benefit and could be a glorious solution again in the right circumstances so it serves no one to make a "fossil fuel bad!" religion out of it.
Schwarzenegger has a similar comment. And he's worth listening to because (some) Republicans listen to him. He says we should just use the word "pollution".
It's gonna take a lot to convince people that the strategy is anything other than burn oil as fuel to reach the technological advancement to not need oil.
Other than cars (which is not insignificant but we're also headed that way) there's not a whole lot of places to cut unnecessary oil usage. Dropping our oil consumption by a factor of two would be fantastic but also likely not save us in isolation.
The problem is that we dont have a net outflow of heat. Fossil fuels would not be a problem if we could dump that previously scurried away heat of ancient suns into space. The solution is to follow the modern greeks and paint every space facing surface in infrared window white. Barium Sulfate, brothers! And sisters! Even jungles are best grown under barium sulfate roofs. If barium is too rare, iridescent metasurfaces will do
It is astounding how OPs generally decent point was completely derailed because he made the misstep of limiting the scope of his ire to oil. This is so common in online discussions that I wish there was a way to 'rewind' and restart a discussion after making a correction.
In my experience, people only rally around a problem when faced with an immediate problem. It's probably irrelevant how you frame the issue because nothing will be done until it's juuuust about too late. The good news is humans are highly adaptable, the bad news is other species will suffer.
It's hard not to feel a little apathetic about news like this.
I love my children, but I'm not sure how I will be able to explain the world/my involvement in the world to them once they grow old (both are below 2 years as of today).
As an individual, I feel like I have no way of leaving the "rat race" while still being able to sustain our lives financially...
Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century
"We are in the middle of the sixth extinction with as many as 274 species going extinct every day—we have lost an average of 68% of all bird, fish, mammal, amphibian, and reptile species in the past 50 years—and the decline is continuing at more than one percentage point per year. Agriculture is the largest cause of these declines—86% of those species threatened—with animal agriculture (60%) the salient perpetrator."
This number is not based on evidence. I clicked through the links on this number, and it traces back basically to guesses that say if there are 100 million species on earth and if 0.1% of them go extinct every year then, well, that divides into that number. If you try to look up specifics - birds, for instance - you'll find that far fewer bird species have gone extinct in this century so far than the pace of the last century[0]. Which is actually encouraging! We are up against big odds but the immense efforts put into conservation are not hopeless - it's working!
How about not driving a car absolutely everywhere? Even electric cars use many times more energy than an entire household. I already eat less meat than I used to but I cannot look past the obscenely high energy use of a car
Quick google shows that a Hyundai Ioniq gets around 4 miles per kWh. An average US household uses 886 kWh per month. You’d have to drive 3,500 miles a month to have the electric car use more energy than the entire household.
Yes, there is an energy cost in building the car, but there’s also an energy cost in building the refrigerator and dryer and washing machine etc in the house.
I’m sure some electric cars are worse than the Ioniq, but they’d have to be considerably worse to equal the energy used by a household.
I can't find any "average kwh for heating" numbers though. If the US number of roughly 10.000 kwh per year included heating, that could be roughly comparable to what the German average could be. Numbers that I find range from 14.000kwh for old homes with Gas usage to 3000kwh for modern homes with heat pumps.
Would make more sense than the US average being 4x while roughly using the same electronics.
Wow, that's terrible. Do Germans not have as good of climate control or something? I wonder what it would take to get German energy consumption up to a better level. It looks like wholesale electricity costs in Germany are around 4x higher than in the US.
>what it would take to get German energy consumption up to a better level
That's a good question. Prices are a good start. Consumer prices seem to be twice in G as in the US. Don't know where you get the "wholesale price is 4x in G". Most of what I can find is that wholesale is usually pretty close.
My guess of what G could do to increase consumption and thus moneys:
- Lower prices (duh). End user power is taxed heavily to subsidize industry power
- Remove mandatory energy labels on all electronics. Who really needs to know how much a TV or fridge is going to consume in power?
- Mandate "power-included" in rents. If you pay a fixed sum, you might as well leave the fridge open to cool the kitchen
- Mandate central heating and cooling. If you only pay a share of what you consume, might as well go full blast on everything
- stop subsidizing energy efficiency for new single and multi-tenant homes.
- stop building solid houses. Plywood walls are fine
And yet, america uses much more. Shouldn't that give you a pause? :)
Jokes aside, you're describing a correlation. America does not seem "more civilized" to me, you guys are just wasteful. Wasted energy does not lead to more civilization.
No; It's completely consistent with my model. America is more advanced by a huge margin. It's also evidently a more desirable place to live; the Germany-to-USA migration rate is something like 3x the other direction.
> Yes, there is an energy cost in building the car, but there’s also an energy cost in building the refrigerator and dryer and washing machine etc in the house.
I don't think you can really hand wave away that cost. My instinct is that battery, aluminum, and steel production should be very energy intensive.
The 3500+ pounds of "stuff" in your car is over an order of magnitude more "stuff" than a household appliance just by weight alone.
(Maybe we should forego the other luxuries as well, of course).
All that said I imagine the biggest direct end user energy usage would be the cost of HVAC systems running nearly continuously in inhospitable climates.
It’s not that bad. Fossil fuel burn is actually much worse. I used to think this as I thought buying used cars would be a great help but the break even point for the extra cost of building an entire vehicle is something like 2 years of driving. So building all new cars with half the fuel use could reduce overall emissions after about 4 years. Electric vehicles are worth it after 2-3 years. As long as your electric vehicles run for about 5 years, even if you make a whole new car, emissions would reduce considerably
When you look at it further, you find even an electric car uses 20-30kWh/100km at highway speeds. That basically a constant 20kW. Driving a car is just stupidly energy intensive and very little can be done about that. Trains and public transport have a huge benefit in energy use per person
Where I live currently, that’s simply infeasible. It’s a city, just very poor public transit and the city was designed without pedestrians or bikers in mind.
I hope to move soon, and being able to walk/bike/take public transit is a priority for where I choose, but it makes me think there are so many places in the US where going anywhere without a car is not a realistic option. Car dependency is a big issue in the US.
The area was established prior to cars and was livable, but as it grew everything was designed with cars in mind and made it unlivable without them. So it’s not that cars made an unlivable place otherwise livable, it’s that cars made a livable place unlivable without them.
It’s certainly possible for another form of transit to exist in this town, but everything was designed with cars in mind and there is little interest in fixing it, because almost everyone has a car (excluding those that can't afford them, but we don't talk about that or the weak economic mobility that lack of proper public transit absolutely contributes to).
There's your answer, yet you hand wave it away. Mass transit for not just intracity but also putting housing close to where people want to go (parks/stores).
My non-US wife often jokes about "US city planning" being an oxymoron, and I just can't defend it.
I think you got the wrong impression from my comment. I’m not hand waving it at all, I’m highlighting how much of an issue it is in the US and how unlikely it is to change.
This is an issue I’m pretty passionate about and while I’ve put a lot of effort in locally to change this, I’ve come to realize it’s not something that’s gonna be fixed in my life time. This is why I intend to move to a place that already has good public transit and good walkability.
I would hope that the demise of gas powered cars would lead to a surge of focus on non-car transportation and improved city/suburban design, but I fear that car dependency will continue on as it seems most people in the US greatly prefer the idea of electric cars to anything else. It’s a shame, as I believe cars themselves to be problematic for a whole host of reasons and I feel our society is missing out on a good opportunity to transition away from them. I’ll keep fighting the fight, but there is only so much one can do.
> Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth
No it isn’t. The single biggest way to reduce your impact on Earth is so unpalatable as to be literally unthinkable: don’t eat meat and dairy, avoid having children that have children that have children that all want to eat meat and dairy.
Avoid having children that take airplanes and eat almonds.
Avoid having children and your impact on the Earth rapidly zooms out to nothing.
That’s not the only reason or the main reason to avoid having children. But it’s as good a reason as any.
Nobody will mention it at the top of articles though. Children are a joy and a treasure and not having them would be a slight against human nature.
By this same logic it would be even better for you to commit suicide. People don't mention not having children because it is a fundamental biological drive and for most people, the problem isn't how do we eliminate carbon emissions _full stop_, but how do we eliminate carbon emissions while still allowing some form of palatable human existence?
I'm for all sorts of radical action to stop climate degradation. But "just don't have kids" really is tantamount to saying "just don't exist or be human." It isn't just a tough sell, it isn't even what is being discussed.
But "live in a big city and use public transit" is tantamount to saying "just don't exist or be human"
Or put "eat meat" in there.
"Biological imperative" at the peril of the planet. Idk. It's probably ironic for me to have any opinions of the biological imperative of heterosexual sex but it just strikes me as odd.
I'll go do my own research but now I'm quite curious about this. I guess for some reason I expect people to be better than their urges, but maybe that's foolish of me.
The planet has never been, is not and probably won't be in any near future in peril. Humanity is. Humans disappearing is the concern of ecology. The planet will adapt just fine with or without us, and species disappearing will be replaced in time by new ones.
Not having children is not effective at perpetuating the human race, and thus not usually considered as an ecological solution.
That being said, you don't have to have children to be an ecologist either, but you certainly should realise that your efforts are directed towards future humans, not towards the planet which does just fine anyway.
The point here is that it isn't black and white and furthermore, whether you like it or not, taking care of earth is a political problem in the most basic literal sense that you have to get people to do it.
Unless you are cooking up ideas on how to wipe the human race out like some kind of mad scientist, and presumably kill yourself afterward, the fact is, people need to be convinced to modify their lifestyle/culture somehow. Telling them to simply die without children ain't gonna do it.
> "Biological imperative" at the peril of the planet.
I essentially don't care about the state of the planet if there are no humans around to enjoy it.
The larger long-term risk to sentient life is that anti-energy people get their way, humanity never reaches the productive output required to become spacefaring, and we get wiped out by an engineered virus or something.
I find this attitude to be pretty weird. Like merely from an aesthetic point of view, I'd prefer a world with a healthy earth than one without, regardless of the question of human beings. If rational/advanced consciousness is the issue, a healthy earth is more likely to spin up a new intelligent species if we go extinct than a dead one.
I exist and am human and don’t have any need to commit suicide.
It’s incredibly simple for me to use birth control methods, barely an inconvenience.
I have lots of reasons to avoid having kids, but it doesn’t hurt that a side effect is I automatically become a top-1% environmentalist in any crowd I’m standing in, without even really trying.
I don’t have the goal of reducing my carbon output. As I have already explained I don’t need to.
My carbon footprint, or footprint of other kinds, doesn’t constitute a blip on the radar, because mine ends between now and a few decades from now, and doesn’t grow at all into the future, much less geometrically.
Might as well lock and close the thread, with that reductive made-up assertion. It's not like there's a fixed budget of carbon credits distributed amongst the world's population.
And no, "don't have kids" and "kill yourself" are really not actually the same.
I'd like to make it perfectly clear that I'm 100% fine with people not wanting to have kids. I also think people who aren't fine with it suck. Let people do whatever if it doesn't hurt anyone, obviously.
What I object to is the suggestion "just don't have kids" is a viable political path forward on the question of the environment. It isn't a viable path of any kind, political or otherwise.
For what it's worth, I don't feel it's appropriate to dictate or even advise others on child-rearing decisions, but I don't understand how humanity has a chance if we all throw our hands up in the air and say: there's no way we'll get Americans to give up their cars, meat, or 2.5 babies.
I'm not really advocating anything here, just lamenting the seeming (and somewhat assumed) immutability of it all.
(random but I really appreciated these subthreads, definitely some good stuff for me to chew on)
> I don't feel it's appropriate to dictate or even advise others on child-rearing decisions
Why not? It's appropriate to dictate and even advise on lots of things that are personal/private.
We have laws and social norms to keep people from being horrible to their own children, even behind closed doors, but only after those children are born.
My suggestion is for those bits of advice, backed by the government's monopoly on force, to kick in just a year earlier than that.
I'm a big fan of reproductive freedom and I'm not sure how to reconcile that with my thoughts about natalism, so I try to at least stay out of direct advice/condemnation for individuals.
Well, I'm not saying that modification of behavior is impossible, just that "don't have kids" is practically a non-starter. Stiff tax penalties for more than 3 kids is probably something which might become possible if things get pretty bad, for example (I'm sure conservatives would object strongly, however).
Carbon taxes/credits are probably possible. Huge public works (build enough solar panels and energy storage station to meet most of our power needs). Big taxes on carmakers for making high emission vehicles, etc. There are lots of policies which can work, and I think the market will, eventually, also probably get there eventually. But just telling people not to have kids is silly.
>Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth
I grow my own food and meat. I think growing your own food is the single biggest way to reduce your impact on Earth. All that industrial farming and transportation required to feed people. So many people living in single family homes could turn their lawns into gardens and produce _surplus_ vegetables. Several times what their family can eat.
And even people in dense urban areas could have community gardens ie rooftop gardens.
It seems popular to want solutions that doesn't involve any sweat equity. Which I find unfortunate, at best.
Most people don't have time to study stuff like this. Even if they do, it's hard to tell whom to believe. Cost of pollution must be factored into products. That will change behavior.
> Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth
Also the 'single biggest way' to become unhealthy, weak, and scrawny. There is no conceivable way that the (putative, but questionable) negative externalities of healthy food consumption outweigh that.
Also, given that anti-meat activism tends to be either quasi- or literally religious (in the case of groups like Seventh-day adventists), of course my prior is that any anti-meat activist can dump a huge pile of link spam saying "hey, check it out, every problem is actually caused by that thing I don't like". This has little bearing on my posterior distribution, because every time I've looked into specific claims about emission equivalence or deforestation, they are methodologically very dishonest (typically by tricks like falsely equating protein quality or assigning revenue in bizarre ways).
One of my favorite NFL players was Vegan. He would uhh... run people over and generally out class people constantly. A quick google search of "NFL players who are vegan" reveals several well known players. These are among the strongest, most athletic people to have ever existed. So whatever the challenges of being vegan, I suspect "being weak" is certainly not one of them.
Have they always been vegan though? A glance at [0] shows they all decided to go vegan at some point in their adult life. Growing big and strong on a regular diet and then turning vegan does not exactly support the vegan lifestyle. Even this vegan powerlifter [1] turned vegan only at 32 (vegetarian at 26).
That's a fair point. Another athlete I do follow who is ripped[1], has been reportedly Vegan since he was 2. Generally speaking when I think of building muscle in the gym, I think of protein powder and supplements as opposed to eating ever larger quantities of meat; I don't think that's controversial? AFAIK the only thing you need if you are vegan is a Vitamin supplement.
I'm not a Vegan promoter or anything -- I'm not even sure what a Vegan eats for most of their meals (but would love to learn). But having some background in nutrition I'm skeptical there's any shortcoming to being Vegetarian, Vegan, etc, that a very simple supplement (i.e. like one regular vitamin) wouldn't overcome.
Most protein powder is whey-based (not vegan). Whey protein is generally inferior to muscle, connective tissue, etc. but it's typically a lot cheaper. It's better than plant-based alternatives though. Plant protein efficiency is terrible compared to animal protein efficiency, so any moderately muscular vegan is likely eating prodigious quantities of mediocre protein sources like peanut butter.
> AFAIK the only thing you need if you are vegan is a Vitamin supplement.
This is what some vegans will tell you, but you only need to look at the ones saying this to know it's not true. I know some vegans who could be mistaken for non-vegans from a fitness standpoint, and they put quite a lot of work into maintaining their diet. More than just taking a few vitamin pills.
OTOH, you can achieve better results by just eating a lot of steak...
Yes, the top 0.001% of genetic freak athletes with the world's best nutritionists and fitness consultants can get away with a highly constrained diet (for a while, at least).
BTW, famous vegan athletes almost never start vegan, and tend to quickly retire due to increased injury rates and slowed recovery.
It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.
- American Dietetic Association
A vegetarian or vegan diet can be suitable for everyone, regardless of their age.
- NHS UK
A plant-based diet is based on foods derived from plants, […] with few or no animal products. […]
Well-planned plant-based diets can support healthy living at every age and life-stage.
- British Dietetic Association
> they are methodologically very dishonest (tricks like falsely equating protein quality)
For adults, protein from two or more plant groups daily is like to be adequate.
- WHO
> anti-meat activism tends to be either quasi- or literally religious
> every problem is actually caused by that thing I don't like
Plethora of studies has confirmed that (animal) agriculture is one of the biggest destroyers of our environment. It's mostly animal products consumers who reject latest science and choose to be ignorant of those problems.
> Not really interested in arguing with you (you seem to be very set in your ways)
I've had my mind changed (sometimes in significant ways) many times on HN. I would love it if vegans were correct on this topic, but unfortunately their epistemic rigor tends to be extremely bad and as far as I can tell they are pretty uniformly incorrect when they make claims like this.
I think if you understood my objection, you wouldn't have bothered trying to convince me with links from organizations that exist solely to transmit low-quality information to midwits, like the WHO or random advocacy/lobbying group websites.
The types of information that would convince me are e.g. epistemically sound research papers, and I can almost guarantee that I've read more of those than you have if you think random quote clippings from the WHO should have any impact whatsoever on anyone's priors.
Sadly, your response is unfortunately quite typical of veganism enthusiasts on this website. Very condescending, but completely devoid of any kind of useful information.
I must express my utmost admiration for your exceptional intellect, which effortlessly dismisses the perspectives of vegans as lacking epistemic rigor.
Your towering intellect, armed with an exclusive collection of "epistemically sound research papers," surely eclipses the feeble influence of organizations like the WHO.
How foolish of us to think their information could impact anyone's priors.
Your insightful critique of veganism enthusiasts, while devoid of substance, certainly showcases your unmatched condescension. Thank you for gracing us with your profound wisdom and invaluable lack of useful information.
Although that leads to the mother of all natural selection - after a few generations, you'll have selected almost exclusively for families that have lots of kids. My bet is that fertility will flatten out and recover a good bit over the next few decades.
I wonder when many in those 'rich' countries will learn that they need to embrace that instead of 'build the wall'.
Anyway, I don't think replacement fertility is the right measure here. Replacement fertility could be crashing, but if the ratio of 'modern'* humanity is increasing as it is, then the problem remains ... there's probably a term for this if anyone knows.
* (by 'modern' [super air-quoted] I mean, those who have the wants and desires and ability to get the goods and services of the 'rich' countries).
That is an interesting distinction, the order we bring to things--nature refined and directed. Makes me recall this analogy I remember reading years ago about a Japanese Zen garden not being something you'd experience in nature but rather only from a human tended and curated garden. That image changed the way I think about nature and humans in nature.
gotta keep it pristine for those lower organisms who will have a better shot at utopia than we ever could.
But seriously, I always see the planet as on a finite timescale anyways with the lifetime of our sun being the limiting factor (which is interesting because it's the sun that gives us all our energy for the most part ignoring nuclear). Once the sun goes kaput that's it, we better be intergalactic by then. So I wonder can we think of perhaps maximizing the number of civilizational hours spent under the sun on Earth. Is that a good framework to go by. Put another way say the sun goes out in the year 10,000, and we are to judge two scenarios
A) humans go extinct in the year 7,500
B) humans go extinct in the year 9,000
All else being equal what scenario would people prefer and why.
Until they get smoked by an asteroid again. Even if nonhuman life somehow doesn’t get wiped out by other factors it’ll all die with the sun. If we are the only place where life exists then that means humanity is the only chance life has of continuing after this planet is gone.
> Most of the carbon footprint on the planet comes from the relatively low number of people in... Europe
That's not so true now, China emits as much CO2 per capita as Europe does, and quite a bit more than the greener European countries (e.g. France, Sweden, the UK). This remains even after adjusting for consumption rather than production.
They currently use a tiny fraction of the energy the west does (and pollute a tiny fraction), they'll eventually catch up in "quality of life", with all the comes with it (exploding energy consumption)
And they’ll follow the same curve that India did and China before them and so on but I’ll bet the time scale will be greatly compressed because they benefit from all of our experience and technology and having so many more countries ahead of them on the curve who will invest in them.
Worth at least trying to push back on things.
Imagine you were diagnosed with a terminal disease, that also is passed on to your offspring.
Everyone tells you you're screwed, but some controversial group of doctors think there's a tiny chance they can cure you with a painful procedure. What do you do?
If you’re really concerned then change careers to a field that is working on tech to improve the human condition. Short list:
1. Nuclear physics
2. Robotics and automation
3. Space engineering and rocketry
4. Materials science
5. Biotech
Even if you can’t reskill to work directly on the tech you can still contribute using your existing skills. If you want your kids to have a future then you need to build it for them.
It's just peanuts that could be captured this way, isn't it?
It seems to me that better way would be stopping adding to the greenhouse effect and store some of those gases in the ground (by large scale (a|re)forestation).
No, make everything especially energy as cheap and efficient as possible so that everyone gets richer and healthier and can contribute to solving humanity’s problems.
this is an interesting thought to rise the tide to lift more boats, ie for more people to ascend the hierarchy of needs and contemplate what sort of creative output we could secure from that ascent all else being equal. I'll have to think about that, that's an interesting idea.
At the forefront of any niche field in science is a very small group of specialists working the problem (historically too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery) - the way we get ahead as a species is more specialised groups working more problems, which requires a larger educated base to draw from. i.e. we all go to the stars together or not at all, a dystopian future where most humans are impoverished/uneducated can't support the scientific progress needed to advance past our current technology
You think we might be better off burning wood and dung instead of solar and nuclear? Carbon free energy requires high technology global civilization. If you make everyone poorer then say goodbye to science and technology, no one cares about those when they’re worrying about how to heat their home and put food on the table.
Can't win a race with a moving finish line. It's never enough, we always want more
We could live completely on renewable energy if we lived like our grandparents, we don't do it, because we want more, more food, more gadgets, more services more entertainment, more tech, more money, more health, &c. it never ends, because we don't have a goal. "get healthier and richer", the vaguest goal you can come up with
The question is whether it is by society's will or because of the general price of meat. there are communities, tribes and even people in civilization that celebrate when they finally have meat. presidents can win election promising the population will be able to buy meat again [1].
I don't believe in these circumstances that it's a voluntary demand, but an imposition of their surroundings, lack of money, etc.
Well, we don't know the circumstances of your life, where you live, what resources you have. That all determines what possibilities exist for you to engage yourself.
Turn your career towards addressing the problem. climatebase.org is one good place to start. https://workonclimate.org/ is good too. Also consider running for office.
I'm happy to explain why I bike to work. I'm happy to explain why our lawn is not irrigated or manicured like our neighbors, and why we planted those native wildflowers in our flowerbeds. I'm happy to explain why we eat less meat than his grandparents or friends, why we buy organic produce at the farmer's market. I'm happy to explain why we spent that time working on insulating the attic, or why we planted those trees.
I'm less happy to explain why we own two ICE vehicles (even if the one doesn't see many miles), or why we take a plane on 1,000 vacations, or why we run the air conditioner in summer. Why we choose to live on a multi-acre lot on a cul-de-sac far from public transport, why we buy produce in single-use plastics when the farmer's market is closed. Why, in spite of all these choices, our lifestyle costs more than $50,000 per year with commensurate energy usage, when the global average necessary to avoid global warming is far less than that.
I'm happy to explain how the project I recently did at work is saving a local foundry upwards of 50 kWh, every hour, for some 16 hours per day 6 days per week; that industrial-scale energy savings eclipses all the efforts I've put into our home. I'm less happy to explain how I kind of defaulted into this job that only incidentally occasionally helps out with reasonably important problems, rather than explicitly aiming to be involved in solutions to what a reasonable, rational person would conclude are the most important problems facing our world today. (There's an LG Chem EV battery plant going in 45 minutes away, should I spend an additional 1.5 hour commute per day away from my son and sacrifice my comfy family-oriented job, to contribute to an important industry?)
Said 6yo just spent the weekend 'helping' me install some off-grid solar at the homestead my wife's cousin and her husband just bought in northern Michigan. She just retired from the military at just over 30 years old after saving money fanatically, and is farming a few acres. They have a carbon impact that's a fraction of my own, which is a fraction of my parents'. She's a great example. But that may still not be enough, and it's not particularly realistic to take 9 million plus down-state residents and have them all move north to a couple dozen wooded acres; her plan only works because there's a city of 40,000 people with a Menards, Meijer, and Farm and Fleet half an hour away.
I think that all the small choices I make, even if they come from good motives, are disingenuous greenwashing if you reasonably forecast required emissions and hypothetical global development/equality. Our current capitalist, globalist system only works if there are growing populations of billions in poverty, working for the American dream, and industrial externalities being ignored. GDP and carbon emissions are tightly correlated, and achieving carbon neutrality or going carbon negative requires rejecting our financial targets. I fear that rejecting that option will paint us in a similar light as we view non-participants or opponents of the civil rights movement that our parents and grandparents represent - choices that were a product of our times, but which were wrong then and are wrong now.
Dear god I got lost in the sauce of the comments to Dr Thomas Smith's tweets. There's sooooo many people arguing about EVERY SINGLE TWEET and every single graph. How do they live?
Attribution seems to be largely due to changes in surface albedo. One thesis is dust from the Sahara [1], the other (from the QT) appears to be reduced sulfur emissions due to fuel composition changes [2].
Just a shallow reading seems to indicate that this effect might be the opposite -- that the removal of certain particulates has resulted in the ocean absorbing a greater fraction of solar energy rather than reflecting it into the atmosphere. This seems like a net removal of heat from the atmosphere.
Except we lit them ourselves, left the car without pulling the handbrake, then walked in front the car, which is now rolling toward us while we gasp at the strangeness of it all...
Seems obvious to me that we have a dire situation here that is inarguably no less important than COVID was, and yet for COVID we were willing to take drastic steps, curtail civil liberties, etc, but for climate change we do the absolute bare minimum. And this isn’t just the elites nor doing anything - a few weeks ago someone on this forum mentioned that they didn’t go on a European vacation because he didn’t want to contribute to climate change and I posted a comment thanking him for adopting that mindset and this was likely my most downvoted comment on HN with the consensus being that I am off my meds to even suggest that individuals should play a role in the solution, when “we all know it is just the mega corps doing this”.
The fact is, we all need to be more hand-wavy about this in terms of drastically different personal decisions AND mega corps need to change their ways (which happens when people refuse to work for them and refuse to buy their products and services) AND governments need to take COVID-like action to limit civil liberties and force change. We need to throw everything we’ve got at this, but instead we’ll do the bare minimum and pretend like the heat and pollution only affects other people.
I would like to see that substantiated by some historic data. If you look at the other gray lines, they're a couple that would stand out like the 2023 one in their respective year.
What happened in those years? Did we see extreme temperature and storm records?
PS: Unfortunately there is no way to say which gray line is which year.
So far this year we've seen: record breaking fires in Canada, ice disappearing from the north pole area, a huge positive temperature anomaly over the south pole with associated melting, and recording breaking floods across Europe and Asia.
I would suggest that an involuntary geoforming experiment on one's own home planet - which so far is slowly but steadily making it less habitable - may not be the smartest thing a species should be doing.
The melting thing is the thing that flipped me(like 10 years ago). Russia shipping stuff from previously frozen areas during the winter was something I couldn't deny.
Like, you can ignore all sorts of science under the guise that it was bad science. Anything biology and beyond has some sort of issue with methodology.
However, a physical ship, bringing products/oil, in a previously frozen area, was undeniable.
Who would have thought it was a logistics person that flipped me rather than a scientist.
Flipped you how though - I would have thought that was a great example of how warming can be beneficial, hence something we needn't worry about avoiding, and there are still people out there that will argue that with a straight face.
No, and even the first few comments make it clear Antarctica did not gain ice.
A subarea of Antarctica, where they expected ice to decrease, gained ice. Antarctica as a whole lost ice.
One reason could be that this subarea is an area where ice is lost from, but also an area where ice from Antarctica moves to. So as ice in general melts, some of it also gets relocated to this area.
Not to re-start a five-day old flamewar but the discussion you linked to seems pretty divided and my personal opinion is that the answer to your question seems to be "no".
The climate change is not equally distributed. Antractica is getting colder. However, the earth, on average, is getting hotter. This means that places that are getting hotter, are getting hotter more than the average. (since some places are not changing or getting colder).
I'm expecting a few big earthquakes in the next 0-20 years. Melting all that ice on the top of globe will ease up some pressure and the earth will deform and things will shift. There's a few subduction zone's that are overdue for a slip.
Think about it this way: A higher temperature means there is more "energy" in the atmosphere. If this energy can't escape from the atmosphere, it can manifest itself as heat, wind, difference of pressure, rain, etc... Interestingly, it can turn into complexity too (ie: greener environment -> more animals) but certain circumstances and balance are required for this.
This is good for the earth and organic matter but maybe not good for humans.
Raspberries to the Tweeters for not properly citing sources. The two grey lines you're talking about are 2016 and 2020. One of those years had the worst California fire season ever recorded. 2016 was not quite record-smashing but did have the worst blizzard in the northeast US since 1978.
Yes, most probably. What was unprecedented then is not unprecedented now. Unfortunately, we tend to think about such events as a rolling average of only a few years. We did witness what was considered more storms, hurricanes and extreme temperatures during those times, they are now considered as business as usual.
The point of the tweet being: expect unprecedented events in 2023.
>PS: Unfortunately there is no way to say which gray line is which year.
There is. If you want to see reality, click on the "hide all" button, then pick a few years. 1984, 1990, 2022 and 2023 are good. Then try to get the people whose job depends on pretending everything is fine to explain how this is normal.
It doesn’t exist. There are no records of surface sea temperature going back 100 years because there were no satellites to measure it. They could have been substantially higher in the 1930s (A decade when many, still standing temperature records were set), but we wouldn’t know
My kids watch the Bill Nye on Storms, and they talked about El Nino quite a bit. I looked it up and its supposed to have almost no effect on the eastern United States.
However, now we are saying its going to make a big difference in rainfall on the east/northeast. I don't understand why the wikipedia article and this year's articles agree.
Indeed, there were a lot of scaremongering about covid. It then turned into the worst global pandemic in a century which killed millions and millions of people, and hundreds of millions of people (if not billions) was afflicted with it, many of them with symptoms that affect them for years. I'm not entirely sure what point you are trying to make.
There's no shortage of people who are on the "we're doomed, there's no point to even trying" train. If you try to point out any improvements (e.g., US per capita emissions drop), they won't just say it's not enough—they'll deny it's even possible that it's true.
I want people to believe in climate change, and to be concerned about climate change, but also not be petrified into inaction about climate change. Many, many people are on the wrong side of the fear level.
Unecessary anxiety etc if it actually isn't real or isn't man made. (I'm probably on the 'it is man made' side though.) Could ask the question "is there a downside to people not being paralyzingly afraid of a potential meteor strike every waking hour"
I don't see how that would make people's anxiety unnecessary. I'm in the "of course it is man made, what are you talking about" camp, but let's assume it's not man made for now, but climate change is real.
Wouldn't that be even more anxiety inducing? If it is man made presumably with the right incentives and changes we can unmake it. If it is not man made, then what? We just lost out on the cosmic lottery, it was good while it lasted? How is that less anxiety inducing?
Textbook false equivalence. A potential meteor strike is very, very unlikely.
At this point catastrophic climate change is almost certain. The only question is whether it's just a mass extinction or whether it crosses a tipping point and creates a runaway greenhouse effect.
Climate scientists are not relaxed about this. They are running around in terror desperately trying to warn people. And - so far - getting shouted down by the polluter lobbies.
Of course. Even when justified, the longer you are hysterical, the more regular people tune you out. They just get emotionally tired. It's even worse if your predictions are off.
If just showing a graph is 'scaremongering', shouldn't we be scared? What are the options for communicating bad news that would not be accused of being 'scaremongering'?
It's not so much that a different setpoint is worse per se "at steady state", it's that the world has been in a fairly steady state for quite a while now, with little variation, and our structures have grown to depend on that particular state. Think of the locations of cities, the allocation of agricultural crops in given regions, the whole economic system built up around that, etc.
Essentially we've been able to rely on things being a particular way for ~10,000 years or so, and if things keep going the way they are everything will (a) be different from what we've grown to expect and (b) be changing unpredictably for a while to come, meaning we can't just set ourselves up for a new configuration.
Things are changing fast and large population clusters will have to be displaced as a result which is ... less than optimal
Rapid change in any direction is for sure detrimental, you (country level) have to reorganise your supply chain for everything that's weather/climate dependant, and guess what, there is a lot of that (food, energy, &c.)
Random example; train tracks are engineered with the local temperature in mind because they contract/expand with heat, which means we'll have to replace a shit ton of tracks, is this something the average joe could have imagined no ? Well there are hundreds of other scenarios you don't know about that will kick your ass real soon
If you’re going to make changes that affect the lives of billions of people, the burden of proof is on those proposing the change.
So if you have a good argument that extreme summer heat and flooding is actually good, go ahead and make it. But the benefit should be global. The people in Bangladesh shouldn’t lose their homes and livelihoods.
Of course not. But without a cap to emissions, we're looking at continuing increasing temperatures. We have to stop somewhere, and stoping before Miami is underwater seems as good a place as any.
I mean, this sort of absolute statement is bullshit, summer and winter is extremely rapid and far more dramatic than the few degrees "forecasted" over the next century. Plants and animals adapt every year, some die, many thrive, things change. I am not questioning that humans are making things worse, but "has no mechanism"?? Simply false. Migration is one obvious mechanism. Storing more heat in the ocean is another.
But organisms are adapted to summer and winter cycles, they don't suddenly appear, they have been the same for ages.
But change the timing a little, and you have eggs hatching weeks before the caterpillars that the chicks eat appear, and lots of them die. They co-evolved for a fixed time at which spring appeared, now that timing is off and evolution isn't quick enough to move along with climate change.
They have NOT been the same for ages. They have varied wildly with mild and harsh summers and winters. Lots of confidence in thinly observed theories. Caterpillars and chicks having a rough Spring is part of nature.
But there have been mild and harsh summers and winters for ages. They don't have to be the same every year for animals to adapt. But if winters suddenly were twice as long and twice as cold, you can bet that the prior adaptions don't suffice anymore. That is what we're talking about.
The onset of ice ages is relatively slow - the last ice age took about 10,000 years from its onset to reach the peak of of the ice sheets, and another 10,000 years or so for the ice age to end. At the glacial maximum average global temperatures were about 6°C colder than today, and we've managed to raise temperatures by 1°C in only 100 years.
Changes at the speed of man-made global warming (or faster) do happen, but they are uncommon and tend to be associated with catastrophic events and mass extinctions.
Consider how slowly we were coming out of the last ice age before fossil fuels sped things up. The best geological evidence we have of previous rapid changes are extinction events. As others have said it’s not the change itself but the rate of change that is concerning.
Good point. We should stop global warming for Homo sapiens profits, and additionally for some existing animals and plants. For very long term, climate changes without human activity and we'll be end.
It's like, say, someone keeps shooting people in the head, and you keep describing the problem as "sudden death syndrome."
Umm....no. It's not sudden death. It's either guns. Or murderers. Or both.
We don't have a climate change problem.
We have a fossil fuel problem.
We're living in the fossil fuel catastrophe.
And sure, we all benefit from fossil fuels. But it's also a bit having a gun pointed at our heads.
And no matter if you think guns are the problem, or people are the problem....
The symptom (climate change) is not where the solution lies.
Let's put the focus on the actual problem -- fossil fuel.
Fossil fuel is killing us. Not climate change. Fossil fuel.
Edit: replaced the word "oil" with "fossil fuels."