> Clearly, it is in humanity's best interest to...
Herein lies the problem. What happens to the environment is not governed by "humanity's best interest", it's governed by whomever has the most power and the biggest stick. These entities act in their own best interest.
To the Chinese government, more factories = more money = more power = good. To the US government, more military equipment = more power = good. At the executive level of either organization one would be laughed out of the room for suggesting environmental issues should take priority over national security.
But it's not just two countries, it's every single country making these types of decisions for 100+ years... And if $country doesn't build that weapons facility or export that labor, $otherCountry will, therefore $country will be at a disadvantage. Repeat ad infitium.
Those in power are far more concerned with maintaining and leveraging that power than they are with "humanity's best interest".
The vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions isn't military, it's for ordinary consumer uses like heating, cooling, driving, and farming meat. No matter what the form of government, lots of people will object very strongly if the solution to climate change is not having central heating, cars, hot water, or beef for dinner.
I think I would like to have safe housing, healthcare, nutritious food, and clean water more than "driving and farming meat" but I guess we all have our priorities.
I think that can definitely be sustainable indefinitely, but not so long as companies and cultures are unable to make any kind of real concessions to reality. We should not be using plastic. For basically anything. We should never have started. We should barely be using cars. We should never have started. We should not be eating nearly as much meat as people do in rich countries. We'd use a fraction of the agricultural area and be healthier to boot. Yet somehow meat being cheap is a god-given right?
I object to lots of things that reality forces me to deal with.
I was in full agreement with your comment until...
> We should not be eating nearly as much meat as people do in rich countries.
My peasant ancestors were eating meat every day 500 years ago. You can find different groups of people all over the world that are documented eating absurdly meat-heavy diets historically.
Yes, at least some of us believe meat is very important for human flourishing. In strictly measurable health terms, I am extremely healthy, at least according to current medical science, so I'd rather not change my diet.
> My peasant ancestors were eating meat every day 500 years ago. You can find different groups of people all over the world that are documented eating absurdly meat-heavy diets historically.
That can't be true, unless your ancestors have always been exceedingly wealthy. Most people's food subsisted on things you would go outside of your house and forage/barter for. Vegetables, grains, mushrooms, pulses and maybe some small game here and there.
Pound for pound, the amount of meat eaten was substantially low, since what farmer could afford to sacrifice their larger livestock on a daily basis, as well as keep the carcass for potential customers in a time without refridgegeration.
In the country where my parents grew up, this was their way of life. Small game you would eat maybe once a month, and a livestock would be sacrificed at the end of the year as a treat.
> That can't be true, unless your ancestors have always been exceedingly wealthy.
I am honestly not sure where this meme came from. That was sometimes true, for very poor people in places where the population was too high for the amount of land that was seeing agricultural output. For example, this would have been true in parts of the American South amongst the kind of people that were coming down with pellagra, or during the Great Depression. It was manifestly not true during most times and for most people. You can study local diets and records and see it was quite usual to eat meat every single day as the core of at least one meal.
> Pound for pound, the amount of meat eaten was substantially low, since what farmer could afford to sacrifice their larger livestock on a daily basis, as well as keep the carcass for potential customers in a time without refridgegeration.
Of course people didn't have refrigeration, but that didn't mean that people threw all that meat they couldn't finish away! They used smokehouses (and other methods, of course.) Even in my parents generation, before electricity was common in some areas, everyone had a smokehouse, where meat could be preserved basically indefinitely.
One animal provides quite a lot of meat - for example, a single healthy bull can feed a family for about a year. Of course, it is true that people were not historically eating sirloin steaks every day - the most typical meat-centric dish was a long slow-cooking stew, and very little went to waste. Everyone was eating cuts most people have never touched today.
> Small game you would eat maybe once a month
This seems really uncommon. My friend for example used to eat squirrel every day for lunch. Without knowing anything, I would speculate they were from a country that went through some very hard times in their or their parents generation?
This conversation seems like it could be clarified with references to subject matter expert’s publishings on the topics related to historical food sources.
If the price is saving the planet is turning it into the dystopia we seem to be zooming towards full speed, I will be happy to not pay it and suffer the consequences of our civilization collapsing. I’m not changing my behavior and I will fight vigorously for it.
If you stopped all meat production today it would not save you. (Post)industrial society itself is what is unsustainable. There is no way around that. There is no technological solution - we can barely maintain the pretense of keeping up with all the problems our tech causes. You can buy time (maybe), that’s all. Technological man cannot seem to grasp humility. There is no controlling the world. This article and some other comments go into some great detail.
>might cause minor inconvenience for you.
My current great health is not a “convenience.” It is an incredible blessing and I will fight to maintain the things that seemingly contribute to it.
It's not a binary choice, it's a gradient and you decide to pick one of the extremes. Meat is a luxury, always has been for 'ordinary' people. One day per week if you were lucky until sixty to seventy years ago or so. The exception: farm owners and the wealthy.
> Meat is a luxury, always has been for 'ordinary' people. One day per week if you were lucky until sixty to seventy years ago or so. The exception: farm owners and the wealthy.
I guess we have different perspectives. For me, for most of human history, "ordinary people" were farmers (or hunters.)
However, even among urbanites, "once a week" is probably too rare. For example, see this paper on the mid-Victorian diet:
> Red herrings were a staple of the working class diet throughout the year because they were easily cooked (e.g. Idylls of the Poor). Other favourites were cheap and easily obtainable varieties with better keeping qualities than the more vulnerable white fish, including sprats, eels, and shellfish (oysters, mussels, cockles, whelks).
> Consumption of meat was considered a mark of a good diet and its complete absence was rare: consuming only limited amounts was a poverty diet [23]. Joints of meat were, for the poor, likely to be an occasional treat. Yet only those with the least secure incomes and most limited housing, and so without either the cooking facilities or the funds, would be unlikely to have a weekly Sunday joint; even they might achieve that three or four times a year, cooked in a local cookhouse or bakery oven. Otherwise, meat on the bone (shin or cheek), stewed or fried, was the most economical form of meat, generally eked out with offal meats including brains, heart, sweetbreads, liver, kidneys and ‘pluck’, (the lungs and intestines of sheep).
There is a reason there is a Van Gogh painting called 'the potato eaters' and it isn't called 'the sides of beef' eaters. Eating meat was a luxury simply because the vast majority of the people was poor. Poor beyond our present day imagination. In between the hunter gatherers (who had a diet that went from 'gluttony' to 'starvation' twice annually) and the industrialized production of meat (and chicken, and fish) there is a long period where poverty was the norm, and meat indeed an occasional treat.
'Urbanites' were the exception, living on or near the land was the rule. If you were lucky enough to live inside the walls of a city you were already rich.
The idea that you could eat meat 7 days per week, whenever and whereever you wanted is a historical anomaly, so don't present it as normal, or even a right. It isn't.
It was absolutely normal for most times for most people. I cited a source for you. I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time in my life studying social conditions and the daily experience historically. I get the feeling we’re not going to be able to meet on this. If expertise isn’t enough for you, well, it is what it is.
Your source do talk about the introduction of tinned and canned meat.
I haven’t find ratio or quantity. But furthermore I find this bit problematic in the context of this conversation.
“ This period was, nutritionally speaking, an island in time; one that was created and subsequently squandered by economic and political forces”
In the light of this last paragraph, it seems incorrect to use this source to qualify the diet or the ( nebulous ) “past”. It seems to apply only for the Victorian era.
Honestly, absolutely wild that you view “reduce meat intake to environmentally sustainable levels” as dystopian. Nobody’s saying you have to eat bugs for every meal.
It's easy for me to see how my comment could be read that way, but I would consider that only a very small contributing factor to to what's going wrong with society. Instead, read my reference to "we can barely maintain the pretense of keeping up with all the problems our tech causes" as having a lot to do with it, which even carbon-neutral will cause the destruction of ecosystems and continue the increase in cancer rates. We could also talk about the total loss of privacy, atomization, the obliteration of communities, anomie, the accelerating decline of democracy and increase in bureaucratic authoritarianism, the grim future we can expect from things like genetic engineering, etc.
Industrialized agriculture doesn't scale either. We are rapidly destroying the fertility of the American midwest via intensive farming of corn/canola/soybean. Even ending a animal agriculture will only slow this down. What's your solution?
What would be sustainable is returning grazing animals to the Great Plains en masse to regenerate the rapidly-depleting topsoil originally built up by the American bison, but virtually nobody is talking about that because the entire focus is on one thing, CO2.
To be extra precise, human initiated greenhouse gas emissions. My understanding is about half of the emissions are natural and there's little we can do about their emission (but can do about their sequestration). Of course that doesn't/shouldn't stop us from addressing the half we can :)
Well no, but it's either pedantic or meant to mislead. If we're in agreement we need to do something about CO2, then we both know we're talking about human sources of CO2, so why be pedantic?
Also part of my point is that we do not have to focus on human emission as the only lever. We can also focus on sequestration of natural emission (or sequestration of atmospheric carbon as a whole).
Telling people to not emit carbon dioxide from, say, a health related usage (sanitation) IMO is foolish when we can choose to sequester from other areas. Frankly I think we need to focus on the decarbonization of energy, rather than regulating human behavior.
For one thing, because it's important to know the lower bound of success in order to identify the reasonableness of the proposed solution, competing its perceived costs with its perceived benefits.
Nope. The way we build things from the ground up has to change. Literally build things. Flat topped buildings made out of steel and concrete surrounded by pavement generate tons of heat that doesn't get dissipated, which cascades into creating high pressure air bubbles around towns and cities that prevent rain from approaching. That cascades even further into affecting weather and creating droughts, because all the pavement prevents water from being absorbed by the ground and entering the water table. That water creates flash floods since the ground underneath the pavement is too dry to absorb it, creating a vicious cycle where the water table drops even further and the soil compacts and becomes even more hydrophobic.
We have to stop building parking lots everywhere, stop building flat top highrises, stop using concrete and steel, build everything with roofs designed to absorb heat and transfer it into the ground instead of radiate it, tear up a good chunk of the highways, parking lots, and surface streets, plant tons of trees and broad leaf greenery to shield from heat with shade and absorb it, and refill the water tables by pumping water back into the ground. All of which costs a ton of money. And what we should do, damn the financial cost and those who decry it.
Slapping a Mickey Mouse Band-Aid onto a gaping wound that needs seventy two stitches is the equivalent of what people suggest when they say "Well I'll just use renewable energy."
>No matter what the form of government, lots of *Americans* will object very strongly if the solution to climate change is not having central heating, cars, hot water, or beef for dinner.
FTFY. Countless people outside the US get along just fine without cars, central heating, and the entire 1B+ nation of India is fine without beef for dinner.
> At the executive level of either organization one would be laughed out of the room for suggesting environmental issues should take priority over national security
Supposedly some folks are starting to frame climate issues as threats to national security. It may just be lip service so far, but we're now seeing "Meet the Climate Crisis" listed as one of the top 5 priorities for the US Department of Defense: https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/331664...
They pushed for the shuttering of something they considered (and consider) an existential risk to life on the planet, and believed that movement towards renewable electricity generation would occur relatively quickly (which is now starting to happen, but did not happen as fast as they believed it would).
You can call it a failure of judgement, but it's not what was claimed in the GP.
Yeah I was more referring to groups that want to do X, and then when a new "hot button" item appears (climate change, anti-racism, poverty, whatever) they quickly release how doing X is the solution to whatever is currently in the news.
It's most obvious with companies, drinking Coke™ is always the solution, no matter what the problem, even if the problem is drinking too much Coke.
“Hell hath no wrath like a national security apparatus threatened,” I think that’s how it goes. Once USG, or Wall Street even, is threatened nothing is really off the table.
It's governed by the eyeballs of whoever has the most power and the biggest stick. We don't, for instance, know what the actual rates of theft is in a civilization because we cannot accurately discern lost belongings from stolen belongings. Anyone who tells you they think they know the number is absolutely full of shit. A truly crafty thief makes you think you lost something, used it up, or threw it away. In which case there is no report, because as far as you know nothing happened. The better the criminals, the bigger the disparity between the reality of theft and the perception of theft.
I can't beat you with a stick if you're dumping toxins somewhere I can't see. And it's no good beating your successors once you're dead, or you once you're very old, because there is no lesson to learn there except that you can get away with bad things for 30 years, so time your crimes accordingly.
I recently came across a game theory term called "Moloch" in which individual incentives lead to negative outcomes for all parties involved. Nobody individually wants the negative outcome, but it's extremely difficult to break out of the cycle.
I've also just learned this recently. See "Meditations on Moloch" for the original essay. It explains so much but it's also very depressing -- it's hard to imagine how any ordinary person has a prayer of changing the system when so many elements of it are primed to both produce terrible outcomes and to resist change.
It's possible that you could design a new system of government deliberately designed to counter some of these natural tendencies, to change the rules of the game to reward beneficial outcomes better than selfish ones. But I don't know you'd ever get such a thing in place when the people who can make that kind of change are the ones with the most to lose.
It is interesting that the Great Filter Theory usually concerns itself with issues such as nuclear weapons, or disease, but not the failure to overcome greed and self-interest, which, let's face it, is how the modern world is structured.
I'm pretty sure SlateStarCodex coined the term, in reference to game theory. It's originally from an Alan Ginsberg poem, and I've never seen it anywhere else in game theory literature.
The game-theoretical term is a "Nash equilibrium", which is the state that reality ends up in if every participant follows their own incentives (i.e. no participant can improve their individual outcome by altering their decisions). It is possible - even very common in many real-life games - to end up with a negative Nash equilibrium. The classic example is the Prisoner's Dilemma, where the globally-optimal solution is for neither player to defect, but each individual improves their own outcome by defecting, and so what actually happens is that both suspects confess.
It's also possible to achieve a positive Nash equilibrium out of morally-abhorrent individual choices. Mutually-assured destruction is a good example. The game is setup so that if either superpower launches their missiles, humanity ends. Therefore, both superpowers have an incentive to avoid nuclear war, and we're still here.
Interesting read so far. Some examples rely on overly idealized or simplified assumptions but they still illustrate how isolated individuals and groups are powerless to resist the race to the bottom.
> t's governed by whomever has the most power and the biggest stick. These entities act in their own best interest
Everyone acts in their own interests. The gilets jaunes were a grassroots protest against a gas tax increase. You see similar gas-station sticker-shock pressure exerted by voters in the United States.
There are coordination problems to climate change. But it's less a prisoner's dilemma than a time-horizon problem: the fruits of a green transition won't yield for decades. (Economies of scale help with this. Geopolitical decoupling gets in the way of that--this is the only domain where I see the prisoner's dilemma that you allude to.)
The Gillet jaune started this way. Very true. But also self organise to be something vastly different pretty quickly. Maybe 20 days into that months long movement ( it’s not officially over; like Korea war … )
And another opportunity for me to point out that there is no such thing as the Tragedy of the Commons. Garrett Hardin, who popularized the term, has walked it back, and others, as long ago as the 1990s, have pointed out with a wealth of evidence that the popular conception of "the Commons" never actually existed. More or less all "pooled" resources in human cultures have historically been carefully managed by a variety of cultural, social, political and economic systems. The so-called "Tragedy of the Commons" happens not because typical individuals over-use the resource, but because specific individuals violate norms, actively work to dismantle management processes and willfully work to utilize the resource for their own benefit to the detriment of others.
Hmmm, I think if we had similar (but roving, pastoral, etc) neolithic with population we do today (ok, doubtfully possible, but whatever carrying capacity), we'd never the less have resource fouling, resource depletion and we'd be sending soot into the atmosphere.
Note that the areas of the three largest deviations are, in order: Biosphere Integrity, Novel Entities (synthetic chemical & processes), and Biogeochemical Flows.
The entire ecosystem on which we depend for sustenance is an extremely complex web of interlocking dependencies, from plankton to pollinators, to soil microbiota, to temperature & hydration, and so on, endlessly.
This is the food web. If it collapses, we as a species are beyond fooked. Because it is so complex (and even something relatively simple such as CO2-driven greenhouse effect climate change is too complex for the lower half of the population to understand), it is barely even discussed.
But make no mistake, the food web is under massive assault from all kinds of human activities (and even the artificial agriculture web is coming up against the hard limit of a phosphorus crisis). This is likely to be a sooner and more catastrophic failure than the climate crisis. The Fine Article nicely clarifies some of the threat.
One major contributor to the overshoot is our current agricultural practices, with animal agriculture being a primary offender.
It's responsible for a significant amount of greenhouse gases, it's a leading driver of biodiversity loss and deforestation, and it contributes to soil degradation and water pollution.
We can significantly reduce our footprint by adopting plant-based diets, reforesting the pastures (more than 50% of which were originally forests), and allowing biodiversity to recover.
The carbon opportunity cost of animal-sourced food production on land - shifts in global food production to plant-based diets by 2050 could lead to sequestration of 332–547 GtCO2, equivalent to 99–163% of the CO2 emissions budget consistent with a 66% chance of limiting warming to 1.5 °C
Humanity would rather go to war to thin our numbers than give up eating meat.
The only viable method is lab grown meat that tastes exactly the same, same texture, and is cheaper. That's it. People have real stuff in their lives - they're not worried about planetary survival in 100 years, they're worried about next months rent, etc.
I suspect it's true that the only way to substantially cut animal-based protein consumption at scale is some technological alternative that offers a comparable culinary experience but with a lower cost (and lower impact). Although as another poster notes, it's also true that — like many resource consumption issues — the distribution isn't flat, but shows the majority of consumption coming from a relatively small fraction of the population.
However, what I wanted to point out is that "lab grown meat" is not the only possibility in this general area. Precision fermentation of proteins (e.g. https://gfi.org/science/the-science-of-fermentation/) is another approach that seems to have potential. Although I note that I don't have a specific horse in this race, and would be delighted to see anything that can reduce the overall environmental impact of food production at a global scale take off.
If you are actually worried about next month's rent, then going mostly vegetarian is FAR cheaper than eating beef
Plus, only 12% of the people eat 50% of the beef in the US. That is a group of 50-65 year-old men. Change their habits to match the normal population (or let them age out) and 50% of the problem disappears.
> Humanity would rather go to war to thin our numbers than give up eating meat
We're using up resources at a pace that outstrips Earth's ability to replenish them. For instance, we're already consuming 1.7 times the Earth's available resources.
Veggie sausages and burgers up to ten times better for environment than meat, study finds
> they're worried about next months rent
Vegan diets are typically the most economical choice, even in first-world countries. The affordability of animal products is primarily a result of significant subsidies, without factoring in the negative externalities.
I don’t think our grandchildren are going to care what we say. They’ll be too busy scavenging the scorched ruins of our cities for the last cans of refrigerant so they can survive another month on our doomed planet.
>They’ll be too busy scavenging the scorched ruins of our cities for the last cans of refrigerant so they can survive another month on our doomed planet.
Don't be silly. Our grandchildren won't need refrigerant to survive a hot Earth; they can just live underground. Caves stay cool year-round. Or they could dig a bunch of silos, 144 levels deep, and live in those, sending outcasts to the "outside" to die in the poisoned air.
I definitely would not eat lab grown meat. My own meat consumption is less than 200g per day. I eat one hamburger a month at most, as a treat. I want it to be the best hamburger from the happiest free range cow ever. I'm not going to eat some synthetic imitation, I'll just have bean stew with the occasional piece of chicken.
The way the vegan movement has weaseled its way into the discussion on climate change has been frankly horrifying to watch. As you said, people will not stop eating meat. Tell them that going vegan is the only way and they'll just say "fuck the planet" and not bother with it. Like, the worst that could happen is humanity going extinct. The Earth itself will be fine. Put that way, well, if we can't figure out how to run our farms more optimally, we should go extinct. Chickens don't contribute to atmospheric changes by themselves.
> My own meat consumption is less than 200g per day
You think that is little? 200 g per day would be 80000 tons of meat for a 400m population (EU) - let's generously account for the less hungry babies and we'd maybe have 60000 tons.
How many cows and pigs are we talking about here daily?
> The Earth itself will be fine.
Sure. Earth will be fine even if we are hit by a megathingy that rips apart the entire lithosphere. Nature will be fine even if our sun blows up tomorrow. But what has that to do with anything?
PS My own meat consumption is down to 2-3 meat dishes per month. Don't know if that helps...
Who is people? I've been a vegetarian for half a decade now on account of a family history of cardiovascular disease. People lack discipline and imagination, but it's not exactly rocket science to have a plant based diet. The largest obstacle is the large swathes of food deserts and the subsidizing of junk food.
If people had to pay the real price of meat with environmental externalities factored in most people would consume at a level you've described or even less. My issue with that is it doesn't address how most lifestyle emissions are attributable to the wealthiest economic class. It's still a better alternative to the system we have now, which is clearly unsustainable.
A 1/3rd pound burger takes 660 gallons of water to produce, or about 2500 liters. That's not even getting into any of the typical inputs like antibiotics which have their own collection of problems. Say what you will about vegans, it's impossible to talk about the environment without bringing up the impacts of industrial agribusiness and factory farming.
While we're talking about efficiency, you gain an order of magnitude improvement by farming crops for humans to eat rather than farming crops for animals to eat for humans to eat. Only about 55% of the crops we go are directly consumed by humans, the rest is used for feed and biofuels. It would take a tenth of the land area to feed the same amount of people plant-based vs an omnivorous diet. We should absolutely be pushing for less centralized food production, and chickens are a useful part of that. They turn food waste into new food and deal with several pests. That's very different from slaughtering them wholesale for cheap dinosaur nuggets.
Doesn't work. A long time ago I thought when all the old farts are gone, everything is going to be better. Had to have faith in my own generation right?
You know what happened... Humanity just grew a new set of old farts.
This, and so much this. "The hope of the world is in our generation". No, it really isn't. Any given generation is, statistically, a lot like every other generation (certainly over spans of 4-6 generations).
hope based on (a) there are always some number of people at a given point in time working toward the goals you want to be hopeful about (b) there's always some non-zero chance that they may be successful.
but hope somehow contigent or predicated on the age of those people? nah.
In NL the agro lobby has just successfully launched the largest political party here, on the back of a very well financed and organized series of protests. These people will stop at absolutely nothing to be allowed to fuck us all over for a few more years just so they can rake in some more dough. It is very disturbing to see how gullible the voters are.
>>Our agriculture and food production are major contributors to the damage
Yes - deadly serious.
I had to travel to the US midwest recently, after not having been there for a long time. As I drove out of the city the first impression of the farmlands was pleasant. But after an hour of highway-speed driving past nothing but bare fields (out of growing season) with scant rows of trees, we became a bit horrified — there was absolutely zero habitat for anything but the artificial plantings, when they were in season. And they would be coated with pesticides to ensure that there were no insects, or anything that ate them, or that ate the things that ate the insects, etc.. And indeed, returning to the airport in daytime, there was remarkably little wildlife.
It was a seriously disturbing experience, which I did not expect.
>>Feeding 10 billion people by 2050 within planetary limits may be achievable
Yikes. The damage being done by 7 billion right now, adding 20-30% more is kind of unthinkable, even setting aside the agricultural damage. And you're absolutely right that we need to adopt a plant-based diet.
The conversion away from meat does seem much more doable, since only 12% of Americans eat 50% of the beef. Moreover, that's men between 50-66 years old, so if younger generations don't acquire that habit, we'll get a 50% reduction just by that sub-population aging out.
>And they would be coated with pesticides to ensure that there were no insects, or anything that ate them, or that ate the things that ate the insects, etc.. And indeed, returning to the airport in daytime, there was remarkably little wildlife.
Did you also notice a lack of dead insects on your windshield?
Maybe you're not old enough to remember, but several decades ago, any significant drive in most of the US would result in your windshield being coated in dead bugs. Not enough to cover it of course, but enough you'd have to run your washers and wipers sometimes, and use the scrubber at the gas station to clean your windshield (back in the full-service days, the attendant did this automatically for everyone, because they needed it).
These days, you can take a long drive and get virtually no dead bugs at all.
I don’t know why this triggers such skepticism in me. Particularly the section on novel entities. But it feels funny, somehow, and I can’t put my finger on it.
I think the thought, like death, is simply so horrible it defies full consideration. This is why climate activists can seem fanatical, because it has a religious quality. Either you believe “it” will happen in our lifetime, very soon, or it will not happen at all, and it’s this horrifying, apocalyptic nature of the problem that causes this schism. If some of these climate scientists are right in their claims it is the most important thing for these activists to do. I’m sure we can all draw parallels here.
There’s a lot of religion going on right now. Whatever that is in humans that encourages that, going back to tribal behavior, or survival or whatever, it hasn’t gone away just because formalized religions are weak right now.
>just because formalized religions are weak right now.
Do you mean in average number of active participants? Because everywhere I look, there are headlines full of religious based government decisions being made. So while the number of sheep in the flock might be lower, the power being wielded by the religious leadership is not weak at all
I know it does for me - because the people who claim to believe in it the most don't actually live their lives as if they actually believed it. Don't get me wrong, I'd be happy to do whatever I could reasonably do to create cooler summers and less smog, but I've never heard any actual concrete proposal beyond "vote democrat".
Ok, I will bite. Concrete proposals for anybody regardless of political view:
* Eat half the meat you do or less
* Don‘t fly unless absolutely necessary
* Get on a plan for renewable electrical energy if possible
I know, far from everything in this topic is about consumer choices but a lot really is. If you don‘t want the nanny state to fix your problems you can start at your own doorstep.
Considering that will just result in a lower quality of life for me, and everyone else not even noticing (and not moving the needle even a little globally) - why?
It’s like self flagellation in private. Maybe soul cleansing religiously or something, but utterly pointless in the real world.
It’s expensive to eat less meat. And I done mean in an abstract way about the time it takes to prepare meals, etc.
On a per weight basis, chicken is half the price of peanut butter or cheese at the local grocery store. A whole cooked chicken is even cheaper at Costco. Not everyone can afford to eat less meat and replace it with plant protein.
Fair, but you can probably help save both money and the environment by cutting back on beef, and replacing it with chicken. Chicken is FAR more resource-efficient than beef. It's too bad they haven't figured out how to make it taste similar (of course, chicken doesn't taste bad, it's just really different, just like vanilla and chocolate ice cream taste different but one is not better than the other except in terms of personal preference).
2. The meat and dairy industries are heavily subsidized especially in developed countries. These prices are artificially low.[1]
The subsidies could of course be shifted to human edible plants (instead of feeding corn/maize) making plant-based diets more affordable.
At the moment however few politician want to be connected to rising meat prices. If they were to get clear signals from their voters for shifting preferences of course that could also change.
The flying thing is weird. It’s really that you emit a lot because you traveled so far. It’s more efficient that driving per mile and slightly less efficient than rail (not sure the type)
So it should be don’t travel so far and if you have to, take a train and if there’s no train, carpool, but fly rather than drive if you are traveling alone.
Most people aren't driving across the country every time they need to go from the east coast to the west coast. If planes didn't exist these trips would also not exist.
Right, our quest for ever faster travel has led to consuming huge amounts of energy. Even something like the interstates has contributed to this by shrinking travel times to downtown and encouraging people to travel greater distances at higher speed.
You are right, that would certainly be a very big contribution and could have been listed as well. Relocating however is a very big step. While I actually don’t own a car myself and seldom needed one, I am hesitant to prescribe that to others as I know the situation outside the bigger cities gets unpleasant very fast when you are not mobile and relocating is a drastic step not available to everyone.
In the area of personal mobility, change away from cars could only result from collective action, e.g. drastic improvements to public transport and less from personal choice. (EVs however or hybrids are also a real option for many.)
In general because the tragedy of the commons is solved by one group pointing a gun at everyone else. Nobody wants that, but at the end of the day that's what we're going to get if we like it or not.
The longer we wait, the more people are going to get shot by that gun.
One of the reasons for this is because you're not actually responsible for all that much as a middle class and below person. Yeah, get better fuel efficient cars. Yeah, eat less meat. Yeah, get the most out of what you can when you buy things. But that's not going to do much while corporations are still chugging along. It won't do much while coal and gas are the primary energy production. Sure, use less electricity and get onto renewables as much as you can but the offenders will buy these nonsensical carbon credits and such that cause issue.
The real answer is definitely vote Democratic, one cannot vote democrat as that's not a party in the US. But more than that it gets involved in the political process such that change to our policies are done with climate change in kind. You won't get that from Republicans.
> I've never heard any actual concrete proposal beyond "vote democrat".
Trump called the global warming a "Chinese hoax." If you're looking for leverages to influence the global climate as a US citizen, "vote democrat" is not a bad strategy. (Have to add: it's not because democrats are awesome, but because the alternative is horrible.)
The one thing I don’t see people take into account is a globally declining birth rate, very rapid declining birth rate. Fewer humans will mean less consumption, and therefore lower demand and less production. This could reverse many effects within the lifetimes of millennials and GenZ.
Yes, fertility is below replacement in 183 out of 191 countries. True. But it depends.
IPAT: impact = population times affluence times technology.
Take away the 700 million people with the highest incomes (10%), then about 90% of the impact is gone. I doubt that population decline will be that swift or deep, though.
Technology won't save us either. If it isn't deployed commercially at billion-dollar scale now, it won't scale up enough in four decades to make much of a difference.
We are done falling off the cliff and are toes are starting to impact the ground.
The best case scenario is for the powers that be to understand that there isn't enough private island to stop what's coming. They're in the same boat with us no matter what. Nature always has the last say.
We need to stop draw down of fossil resources, reduce our impact on the land, and seek the best possible outcome of a really bad situation.
I feel like climate issues are best solved by anthropologists and diplomats.
That aside, considering how much things improved during covid lockdowns, I've wondered if one of these climate failures killing a fee billion people will fix the whole problem on its own and have earth recover from the human parasite for a few more decades.
If anything, the covid lockdowns just proved that human activity has that much of an affect on the climate. Some people already accepted that prior to lockdowns, some people became aware of it, others continue to deny it. Those that deny that human activity has an effect will never be convinced otherwise.
What a fantastic graphic and title! I do not believe I need to read the article to understand the point of it. Rarely have I seen such good visualization.
How is something critical if it has been transgressed and we are still alive? Or on the very first moment every single one is past we all suddenly die?
If the engines on your plane fall off mid flight, everyone doesn't die instantly. They die instantly after 30 thousand feet of screaming terror.
This comment screams lack of education about complicated systems. For example take overpopulation in things like grazing mammals. The funny thing about being overpopulated is that it is not instantly deadly. Once the mammals eat enough of their food source that their food source cannot reproduce reliably the game is over. But they tend to have reserves of fat and muscle that last for some period of time. The weakest die first. Then the population reduces. But the population doesn't go back to what was previously considered at the over population limit. No, populations massively collapse because there is nothing to eat at all. 9 out of 10 members of the population can die. And if it's something like an island, extinction is on the menu.
Even if not on an island extinction is on the menu depending on how large the population was to begin with and the velocity of the crash. This is because the males in the population can't reproduce by themselves and the weakest are often the young. So when food runs out, even if it is temporarily, you may see one last generation of very fit males and possibly some cannibalism and after that it is game over. Calhoun did some pretty gruesome (and borderline unethical) experiments that are the closest thing we have to lab controlled overpopulation experiments. The results presented are pretty sobering.
The Titanic didn't sink the moment it hit the iceberg, it took a little over two and a half hours. During a significant portion of that time it wasn't all that obvious that anything was seriously wrong. The ship was listing slightly to one side and the engines were off.
The passengers weren't all affected equally either. A lot of first-class passengers made it onto lifeboats, whereas third class passengers mostly didn't.
(The analogy breaks down a little in that we don't have lifeboats and the collapse of our ecosystems probably won't be as absolute and catestrophic as a ship sinking. The Earth's ability to sustain large numbers of humans may decline significantly though, and a lot of things we take for granted now may be gone.)
We don't have life boats (yet) but I do wonder if some part of the massive increase in wealth disparity we've seen is due to uncertainty about the future, or if the reluctance to take meaningful action to slow/reverse the impacts we've had on the earth is because it's already clear that our time is running out and there's nothing that can be done to stop it.
Give it some time. Good news is that "faster than expected" seems to be a very common saying among people studying these areas, so you might not have to wait as long as the geological time might suggest!
Honestly, as someone who has been very concerned about climate for a while now, I'm surprised how much visible disruption of the climate system we've directly been able to observe. Earlier in my life I thought that, though dire, this was certainly a problem that would impact future generations but not so much ours. It turns out I might have been quite wrong on that front.
The Club of Rome's "Limits To Growth" study in the 1970s, in its central scenario, had the 2040s as the time when we'd start to really feel the consequences of "pollution" (broadly conceived, including things like fossil water drawdown and soil exhaustion as well as the results of using fossil fuels).
A little faster than expected maybe. Not all that much though.
There was a somewhat funny joke about the hunger winter here in NL: "Kids I've got good news and bad news, the bad news is that we will eat flower bulbs, the good news is you can eat as much as you want".
> Boundary positions do not demarcate or predict singular threshold shifts in Earth system state. They are placed at a level where the available evidence suggests that further perturbation of the individual process could potentially lead to systemic planetary change by altering and fundamentally reshaping the dynamics and spatiotemporal patterns of geosphere-biosphere interactions and their feedbacks
Probably would need to read more to get a clear understanding of exactly what they mean and how they're defined, but it sounds like we're to an unstable place. Perhaps somewhat analogous to skating on thin ice: you may not have haven't broken through yet, but you're in a spot where a break could happen at any moment and from any movement.
California's climate patterns are already changing but the state has managed to deal with the problems and will probably continue to do so. Texas on the other hand is starting to see problems with their electricity grid during summers and it's going to keep getting worse as temperatures continue to rise.
California's "dealing with the problems" seems like a lot of shortsighted non-sustainable policy. Parts of CA are burning right now. At this point they've been bragging about maybe not having to go back to rolling blackouts. Reliably providing even the most basic services like water and power is such an astonishingly low bar that only in the poorest developing nations should that even be in question yet here we are. Long term, I don't see Texas or California holding up very well to climate change.
I know there have been models to predict which areas of the country are expected to be most/least impacted by climate change but I'm not qualified to judge them. I suspect that increasing heat and desertification will leave much of the southern and western US in very bad shape. Anywhere prone to flooding now will only have it worse. The coastal areas will also deal with flooding and storms in increasing frequency/severity.
Maybe some of the northern flyover states would be best? Higher land around the great lakes for example? If I were looking to buy up some land today I'd even consider Canada, but only after the fires have died down. The only nice thing about wildfires burning 40 million acres of forest to the ground is that it'll be a while before there's enough fuel for it to happen again.
I'd have more faith if I saw a lot more effort being expended. It seems like most places are still pretending nothing will change. People are still buying property that regularly floods even while insurance companies are refusing to cover them. States are selling off their clean drinking water to industries that will waste and pollute it. Important infrastructure is left outdated and crumbling. Environmental protections are being rolled back, fracking and drilling continue.
My man, this comment is so wildly antiscience. I don’t know where to begin.
I’m not sure if it would be with forest management, or the complexity and reasons that cut Texas has its own grid, separated from everyone else. I’m not sure I would say either directly applicable to this topic.
Texas throwing a tantrum and refusing to have their power grid under federal regulation will become increasingly applicable to the topic since the changes we're causing to our planet and its climate will put even more strain on their weak and inflexible power grid. People in texas are already dying from the heat in the summer and freezing to death in the winter and it's only going to get worse.
This is looking at changes over a scale of centuries, and the potentially irreversible effects of what we are doing right now.
> Had Earth system remained forced by 1988 conditions (350 ppm and 85%/50%/85% of tropical/temperate/boreal forest cover remaining), the simulations show that temperature over the global land surface would not have increased by more than an additional 0.6°C in the subsequent 800 years
> If climate and land system change can be halted at 450 ppm and forest cover retained at 60%/30%/60% of boreal/temperate/tropical natural cover, then the simulation indicates a mean temperature rise over land of 1.4°C by 2100 (in addition to 0.7°C between preindustrial time and 1988) and 1.9°C after 800 years as vegetation evolves in a warmer climate
The latter is an optimistic projection assuming we will do more to stop climate change, the paper goes further into the odds of a >3C increase.
To put that in context, a 1.5°C increase in average temperature is considered a doomsday scenario where wildfires and storms ravage the earth, killing over half of the global population.
Breathing is critical to keep me alive, but I can hold my breath for a minute, and if forced by external means to stop breathing, will still be ok for a few minutes.
Ha, good point, let's not focus on the main issue and instead argue semantics shall we... /s
To ELI5 like you seem to prefer, the iceberg breaching the hull of the Titanic seems like a critical transgression, but the ship stayed afloat another hour or so...
> How is something critical if it has been transgressed
I don't think the paper claims we've passed criticality. Instead, it talks of boundaries and risk, the latter reflecting that we don't know where the critical points are.
> on the very first moment every single one is past we all suddenly die?
Biosphere collapse could happen suddenly and without warning. That would throw the global south into political turmoil while prompting a global and destabilizing refugee crisis.
It reminds me a bit of radiation poisoning - you can receive a lethal dose in moments. After that, you can carry on for a time; hours, maybe days feeling normal, but your death has already been ordained and your biochemical systems will collapse from the insult.
If you have a pond with 1000 fishes, and each year the population of fish doubles, you can remove 501 fishes/year for quite a while. You are clearly in an unsustainable situation, yet it will take time for the population to completely collapse. These limits are in the sense that we cannot stay above forever, not in the we cannot go above ever sense.
Echoing the kind of climate change scenario 5 year old kids have seems kind of cruel the week thousands of people in Libya died of events that are exasperated by the climate crisis. People are already dying of climate related causes, like crop failures and natural distasters.
What you are saying is technically not wrong, but misleading, as it omits the fact the dams broke due to a natural disaster, Storm Daniel, which previously also "affected Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey with extensive flooding.".
No kidding, but to say that climate change did this when hurricanes have been on the decline the last thirty years is misleading. This is weather and engineering failures.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24268-5
> No kidding, but to say that climate change did this when hurricanes have been on the decline the last thirty years is misleading. This is weather and engineering failures.
This HN user categorically and obsessively has their own opinion on climate change, and how it is influenced by humans.
Their "evidence research" is taking the first Google search result that they believe to support their position in the discussion at hand - even if it doesn't make sense (hurricanes in North America versus Mediterranean).
If they don't invest in such sloppy research, their arguments hit rock-bottom Tiktok factoid niveau. one can better just assume nonsense/randomizing/lying and ignore this user for anything climate-related.
Use the drop down and look at accumulated cyclone energy. There's no trend in 42 years and last year was the third lowest total tropical cyclone energy for earth in the last 42 years. This year seems on track to be very low for cyclone energy too.
Do you understand how creepy it is of you to go digging into other users comment history and posting about it when there's a disagreement on a topic? Maybe let the arguments speak for themselves? We're not supposed to be some kind of commissars looking for dissidents or witch hunters looking for heretics.
Well I guess I'm guilty of posting my own opinion on various aspects of climate change along with links from time to time. Is that evil in your books, should I be banned? I think you can go back to every post I've ever made and not find any cases of ad hominem attacks. I'm satisfied with that.
> And why should commenting and posting history count any less than a specific comment?
Because the user/writer is completely unimportant in an endless flowing sea of anonymous text. Whatever one of us writes in a comment, somebody else could as easily have written, that's why only the argument itself is interesting. It is misguided effort to care about any "reputation" of an anonymous user on an anonymous discussion platform, unless you're moderating said platform.
Because the user/writer is completely unimportant in an endless flowing sea of anonymous text.
I reject both of those assertions.
Authorship matters. Comments are not anonymous, but optionally pseudonymous, where reputation (karma) is explicitly tracked.
The significant point of karma tracking isn't the accuracy of that karma, but the tracking of it. Other measures, such as flags and moderator admonishments, are also presumably tracked, at least by mods.
All imply that reputation is an integral element of Hacker News participation.
The very concept of science is a revolution against the idea that author matters more than content. What you propose is how the world used to work, and still does in many aspects and places, ie that something is to be judged not by what is said, but by who said it. If a nobody or disreputable person says something it is to be considered false, and if a reputable and honored person says something it is to be considered true. But that's backwards and hurts both science and justice. Instead we must dare to take arguments at face value in order to move forward.
Studying court cases, I've seen too many instances of people who initially weren't believed or just dismissed, because they weren't considered the right "who", but in the end were proven to be completely right. Studying the history of science, there are many such famous cases.
As for the science of meteorology, it shouldn't be treated as an ideological war, where people go after each other's characters – even pseudonymously. It's the study of elements that don't care what humans think of them.
Apart fromt this, you seem to confuse moderating with discussing. Wether somebody or somebody's comments are subject to moderator actions have nothing to do with the truthfulness of what they wrote.
Nullis in verba means that the authority of no person should be the basis of belief. It was born out of a tradition in which authority, particularly religious authority, was paramount, and notions such as papal infallibility reigned.
The reputation and credibility of speakers may, however, count against a consideration of what it is that they have to say. If someone is known to have been an unreliable guide in the past, or violated other precepts of dialectical discussion, they deserve little consideration, or at best might be offered reserved judgement until a more reliable narrator appears or independent verification can be provided.
You are confusing a positive claim of authority against a negative claim of credibility.
The notion of empirical evidence does not mean that every last fact or claim must be verified. It relies profoundly on the credibility of the messenger, witness, and/or experimenter. Expertise in field lies both in specific knowledge of a domain as well as credibility in relating that knowledge. Experience without credibility is charlatanism. Lacking both credibility and experience is the foolish fraud.
In the specific domain of weather, it's those with an axe to grind against credible impartial experts from an overwhelming number of independent disciplines and organisations who'd launched character assassinations, as is exceedingly well documented. Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway's Merchants of Doubts is only one of many accounts of this. Oreskes is interesting herself as a historian of science, who's specifically studied another instance in which heterodoxy became not only orthodoxy but the central organising principle of an entire scientific study: the development of plate tectonics theory as the foundation of geology. That revolution occurred over the course of about 50 years, in which, again, evidence from many independent individuals, disciplines, and institutions provided overwhelming justification for a new model of understanding. Those include the discovery of radioactivity, the use of radiometric dating, the fossil record, gathering and dating of extraterrestrial rock samples from asteroids and the Moon, ocean core data, magnetic field history revealed in those cores, bathymetry, volcanology, seismology, and others.
Science does occasionally make hasty judgements; the ideal of empirical validation runs up against fallible humans and human institutions. Ultimately, however, it corrects itself, which is the one thing ideologically-motivated reasoning cannot do. Alfred Wegener's initial hypothesis proved to be in the right direction, but of itself lacked sufficient evidence for the theory to be accepted on its own. Over the course of a half century, and despite quite strong resistance within and outside the scientific community, that evidence was gathered, however, and a theory based on the broad outlines proposed by Wegener was all but certain by the mid-1950s and was eventually accepted in 1965.
The ideology in climate science comes largely from commercial interests who would be gravely harmed should the full implications and conclusions of what is now the overwhelmingly supported scientific consensus be adopted and realised. Upton Sinclair is validated yet again.
This late summer was pretty great around here. We were able to go swimming on 10th of September, whereas the folk wisdom here tells is's a no-no after 2nd of August.
That airport station wasn't around for the entire record though. 20's was similar to present. I really don't think you can make any claims either way with just that data.
pretty sure we have enough solar and batteries to power the world. Sure ok we could use nuclear in some places too.
aerosols... that's from burning fossil fuels, no?
fake meat will go a long way to reclaiming farmland.
micro / nano plastics everywhere sucks. going to have to think hard about how to fix that one.
can we take cell samples of all the species just in case we need to conjure them up again? (or is at least one required to "boot")
Every paragraph has a flair of scientism and “technology will solve everything, don’t you worry.”
While ignoring basic physical fact. ( like the intermittence of renewable. And the scarcity of material used in battery manufacturing )
Herein lies the problem. What happens to the environment is not governed by "humanity's best interest", it's governed by whomever has the most power and the biggest stick. These entities act in their own best interest.
To the Chinese government, more factories = more money = more power = good. To the US government, more military equipment = more power = good. At the executive level of either organization one would be laughed out of the room for suggesting environmental issues should take priority over national security.
But it's not just two countries, it's every single country making these types of decisions for 100+ years... And if $country doesn't build that weapons facility or export that labor, $otherCountry will, therefore $country will be at a disadvantage. Repeat ad infitium.
Those in power are far more concerned with maintaining and leveraging that power than they are with "humanity's best interest".