I met a coral researcher last year who said we just have to get over the fact that it’s all over for coral as it exists now, and try to learn as much as possible from it so we can re-design it later ourselves. They were very calm about this suggesting they were way past the grieving period. It was quite shocking to me.
There’s a gq/esquire or rolling stone article on depression in the climate sciences.
I remember a researcher who described leaving America and heading to a Nordic country to raise his children- because he said its hopeless and this is the only shot his child would have. He gave up on the subject.
There’s other parts which describe the number of students who leave the field because of how bleak the data is.
If there’s a canary in the coal mine, it’s long since dead and The canary handlers are resigned to inevitable collapse. (And mine owners seem to be fleeing to New Zealand)
These folks won't be missed for the most part. "Climate science" (note the quotes) will probably benefit greatly once most of the borderline psych cases have left the field.
> As a leading climatologist who spent many years studying the Arctic at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at Ohio State, Box knew that ...
>Jeffrey Kiehl was a senior scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research when he became so concerned about the way the brain resists climate science, he took a break and got a psychology degree. Ten years of research later, he's concluded that consumption and growth have become so central to our sense of personal identity and the fear of economic loss creates such numbing anxiety, we literally cannot imagine making the necessary changes. Worse, accepting the facts threatens us with a loss of faith in the fundamental order of the universe. Climate scientists are different only because they have a professional excuse for detachment, and usually it's not until they get older that they admit how much it's affecting them—which is also when they tend to get more outspoken, Kiehl says. "You reach a point where you feel—and that's the word, not think, feel—'I have to do something.' "
Thanks for the link (I will read it shortly), but I was specifically referring to folks who go around spreading the "OMG, climate change - we're all doomed!" mantra, which is borderline psychotic thinking. But it's basically one ("Repent ye, for the end is nigh!") which has historically been quite effective, as thousands of years of fear-based religious-type dogma will attest.
Frankly, at this point I'm not sure what I'm more puzzled by: that so many people seem to be falling for this stuff, or that more people aren't calling it out for what it is.
PS: Oops! Turns out that I already read this long ago (I thought it sounded kind of familiar), but I may read it again just for laughs. Even though the story has a "JUL 20, 2018" date on it, it's actually several years old now. Places like Esquire must be getting kind of desperate if they're recycling old stories like this one.
"This story was published in the August 2015 issue of Esquire."
Ok I think I got what you meant - yes, there are some people who see the headlines and ONLY the headlines. That’s something that applies to laymen- despair in the experts and scientists themselves ? That’s unheard of. And this isn’t the only article or source.
I’m not sure what you mean by “calling this stuff out.”
We are going to see the barrier reef die in our life time. Even the weakest carbon targets have been ignored and world consensus has failed.
And this is before Most of the developing world has come online, so human consumption is not even close to its peak.
We are already seeing displacement, and fish stocks world wide are plummeting.
Look no one believed 2008 was coming, because the economy is a complex system which looked to be fine.
The environment is the same. Eventually there’s going to be a failure cascade. The depth and natural complexity of it is being hollowed out, or overwhelmed.
Oh wow, looky here! Yet another reef system out there which scientists didn't even know existed. Now I half-way expect them to say (as they have about some other recently discovered reefs) that this reef shouldn't even be able to exist at that location. Imagine that: scientists' current understanding of reef ecology may be woefully lacking!
Well, one good thing about this article being three years old now is that we've had three years for some things to have become much more clear since then. I could give you the details but I won't unless you ask because I don't want to waste your time or mine.
"despair in the experts and scientists themselves"? Yeah, it's called "believing your own press", and it's almost always a bad thing. Of course, usually said press is too much on the positive side instead of the negative side, so perhaps in this case the sentiment is better expressed as "believing your own garbage data and models built on that data".
“calling this stuff out" means calling a lot of this climate stuff out as being the doomsday-cult type thinking that it is. Said thinking clearly should be treated with disdain instead of being encouraged.
The barrier reef will generally be fine. It may change a bit ("adapt", as it's called), and its size and location may shift a bit, but it's been doing that kind of thing for eons now anyway.
Since supposedly the poorest and most populous among us will be hurt the most here anyway (that probably isn't really true, but whatever), then the "human consumption" problem will probably be self-correcting, just as long as we don't do anything to interfere with that process.
The last I read of it, the plummeting fish stock issue was being blamed on the fact that the Chinese were taking something like 7x the number of fish out of the oceans than they're supposed to. So maybe we should be doing everyone a favor here and shipping a lot of those invasive Asian carp back to them, huh?
If by 2008 you're referring to the economic collapse, quite a few of us did see that coming! In fact, the economic modelers at the big company where I worked at the time not only saw it coming, but they thought they'd positioned the company well enough to sail through it relatively unscathed. It turns out that they weren't quite right about that last part, though.
The environment is going to be fine. It's been through a lot worse than anything we could ever put it through. Our ancestors lived through it, too; remember that.
I generally noticed a recent change in tone of reports and documentaries regarding environmental issues towards admitting defeat. In terms of software engineering - we aren't going to refactor our society and economy - instead we'll deploy monkey patches, work-arounds and flashy new features until somehow the plug gets pulled.
This is a good thing, IMO. Because if a lot of the folks who are currently running their mouths and hogging the limelight by trying to blame anything and everything on climate change (and anything related to climate change on CO2) would just STFU already, then maybe we can figure how much of the danger is actually real vs. what is just hyperbole and maybe even outright lies.
The environment is like a jumbled stack of stilts holding up a house.
There’s enough stilts that if a few of them get eaten by termites, there’s enough redundancy to keep the house upright. The system is interconnected and deep enough to end up fine.
What’re happening is that many supports are dead, others are rotten and still more are weakening.
This means that eventually, one support will collapse and set off a contagion. A collapse chain, similar to what happened during the 2008 crisis.
Reef collapse means a whole chunk of ecosystem dies - and it’s never coming back in multiple human life times. This impacts every creature that depends on that ecosystem.
We're going on holiday to the Great Barrier Reef in a few months. I think it's quite likely to be the first and last time I see it in any state worth visiting for many years.
Irrespective of how successful or unsuccessful the far-rights are in maintaining Australia's CO2 emission levels, I believe it's already too late - we've crossed from 'recovery is possible' to 'rebuilding is the only way' and that will take decades if not centuries.
The far right have been advocating or at least partial to Nuclear power since as far back as the late Howard government in '07. Cory Bernardi has a bill before the Senate right now titled "Nuclear Fuel Cycle (Facilitation) Bill 2017". France with nuclear remains the first world country with the cheapest, cleanest, and probably safest power.
There is no branch of politics committed to "maintaining Australia's CO2 emission levels". There is a branch that wants cheap, and a branch that wants specific technologies. And the status quo seems to be holding until Australia decides which option is better.
> France with nuclear remains the first world country with the cheapest, …
France had a nationalized electricity grid when it build its nuclear fleet. So, the demand side was nationalized (EDF), and they made sure to nationalize the supply side of nuclear as well (Areva).
This was probably the main reason why Nuclear is cheap in France: They standardized the design on the supply side (only two designs in 30 years) and they could deploy top-down without having to pay anyone to shut down the pre-existing plants (since they already owned them).
In a free market setting, nuclear is not going to be cheap.
> In a free market setting, nuclear is not going to be cheap.
Costs haven't stopped Germany trying to jump ship to solar, and that hasn't turned out half as well as France from an economic or environmental perspective. Australia is one close election away from the Greens pushing something similar on to us.
Australia is composed of unusually large, flat, desolate geotechnically stable areas. We produce large amounts of raw materials, including steel, and have some of the most extensive uranium deposits currently known about. We have a highly educated population.
The next time we have one of those big once-in-a-generation crashes and the government is looking for a great big expensive infrastructure project to soak up some excess capacity, it would be absolutely fantastic if a nuclear plant was at least on the cards.
Currently, it is banned. It is banned for no good reason. And banning something because the peanut gallery thinks it might be expensive is not a good move. And, and this is my central point in this thread, none of this is because the far right has an irrational love of coal.
Not a huge amount; but I got riled up reading "the far-rights are ... maintaining Australia's CO2 emission levels". I sometimes get called far right in political discussion, and as far as I'm concerned Australia has a perfectly good option to lower CO2 emissions that is being blocked by the far left. I want to see more nuclear power stations, they look like a good idea to me.
There is a big coal mine in the works (Adani) and any outflows from that mine have some potential to add further stress to the reef ecosystem, so coal v. nuclear might be tangentially related there.
That branch isn't the far right though. That branch is the people who represent electorates with lots of coal mines (ironically likely to be voting Labor, who are perceived as left aligned).
The perception that anyone likes coal because there is a massive pro-coal conspiracy is missing out on the Occam's Razor idea that there is broad electoral support for cheap power that the right wing, far right or otherwise, are happy to support.
> The far right have been advocating or at least partial to Nuclear power since as far back as the late Howard government in '07.
The Howard government commissioned the Switkowski report and one of the core findings was that nuclear power wouldn't be viable unless we had a carbon price of at least (from memory) 50c/tonne if CO2e.
When the far right are in favor of a carbon price which is a necessary pre-requite I'll believe they're in favor of maintaining our CO2 emission levels.
Florida used to have substantial reefs. Now there are none and rebuilding efforts have just resulted in piles of tires thrown into the gulf that no fish or polyps give a crap about.
Corals are done. Visit so you can tell your kids you saw them, when you are chaperoning their field trip to the museum of natural history.
Hazelwood Power Station was decommissioned under the watch of a Liberal government.
The station was listed as the least carbon efficient power station in the OECD in a 2005 report by WWF Australia, making it one of the most polluting power stations in the world.[3] At 1.56 tonnes of CO2 for each megawatt hour of electricity, it was 50% more polluting than the average black coal power station in New South Wales or Queensland. Hazelwood emitted 14% of Victoria's annual greenhouse gas emissions and 3% of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions.
That's a good thing, but it doesn't really counter the parent's point. It's going to take a lot more than closing one power plant to turn around global warming.
As far as I understand it recovery was never possible by the time we realized what was happening. We have no good way to capture CO2 and no actionable way worldwide to reduce CO2 production fast enough. Even if we stopped producing CO2 right now the levels in the atmosphere would still continue to have detrimental effects for dozens of years.
Dozens of years are manageable, if the cost is avoiding an ELE. Short term thinking is what got us in this mess, maybe it's time to think on larger timescales.
I know that some people claim we could but it is often because they do not look at every angle, especially economics, and scalability. Global scale endeavors tend to be complex and require long timelines.
There is a known straight-forward way to solve the economic problem. You impose a large carbon tax per ton of CO2 and use 100% of the money to subsidize power generation from non-fossil energy sources per KWh. Schedule regular increases in the rate over time, announced years in advance.
There are only two real impediments to this happening.
The first is lobbying from oil and coal companies (especially in the United States). The only solution for it is to have the will to tell them off and do it anyway.
The second is that nobody wants to do it alone. Having a carbon tax is a relative disadvantage -- if everybody does it then everybody is in the same boat, but if only you do it then everyone else is going to out-compete you, so you need some coordination method.
In particular, what keeps happening is that Europe and China are willing to reduce emissions but not if the United States won't and the United States has a large oil industry that it doesn't want to see destroyed even though that's what needs to happen. The answer is for the other countries to be serious about it and not take no for an answer -- literally stop trading with countries that won't do it. Give the US the choice between the oil industry and literally every other industry and the choice is easy.
That doesn't work for everyone. It isn't going to get a random African dictatorship to reduce its emissions. But none of the countries it wouldn't work on are major carbon emitters to begin with.
The problem is that nobody is willing to put their foot down.
This is incorrect - the fact is that we cannot afford it at all
A carbon tax of that nature will kill global growth, and our ability to service debt.
A carbon tax will mean many businesses will shut down or have their margins pruned significantly - costs which will be pushed to consumers.
This means lower global growth rates, which is not something politicians can sell, especially since the source of funds (corporations) will fund politicians who oppose it.
So it’s not just that nobody is willing to put their foot down, it’s that no one can afford to, without suffering huge repercussions.
> A carbon tax of that nature will kill global growth, and our ability to service debt.
Any discussion of growth and cost has to be industry-specific. Obviously a carbon tax is bad for the oil industry and good for the solar industry -- that's the whole point. But you're assuming it would be bad for everyone else, which isn't actually true.
Consider what happens when you have a cross-subsidy like that. The oil and coal companies have a bunch of known reserves and existing infrastructure -- already explored, already built. When the new policy arrives, suddenly the cost of solar or wind goes from e.g. $.06/KWh to $.04/KWh, meanwhile the total cost of oil or coal-fired power generation goes from $.04/KWh to $.06/KWh -- at the previous market commodity prices. But nobody is going to pay $.06/KWh for oil or coal when they can get solar or wind for $.04/KWh, so if the fossil fuel industry wants to make any use of their existing reserves and existing infrastructure, they have to eat the entire difference out of their profits -- they have to charge $.04/KWh after-tax in order to continue to compete in the market.
So the first question is, should we feel sorry for them? No. If you built a coal-fired power plant in 1945 then you've more than recovered your investment already. If you built or acquired one in 2010, decades after we've known this was a problem, you get what you deserve.
So the initial effect is a transfer of profits from the fossil fuel industry to the non-fossil fuel energy industry, but no actual change in the price of electricity -- after all, it's revenue neutral. The government isn't keeping any of the money.
What happens next is that oil exploration ceases to exist. There is no point in searching for more oil if the pre-tax market price is $10/barrel; it's not profitable. They'll sell the reserves they have for whatever they can get because what else are they going to do with them, but then they're done -- that's the whole idea. Meanwhile there is a huge boom in renewables because all the profits are there now -- all the profits the oil producers would have had are going to install solar panels instead.
So what does that make energy costs look like in ten or twenty years? Well, the two effects mostly cancel out. The existing oil and coal reserves get used up and not replaced, but in the meantime we're building non-fossil alternatives to replace them, using the money we're not paying to the oil producers. It's likely that the price would be slightly higher, because otherwise it's what the market would have done without the tax (though that is actually already happening somewhat because the prices are already pretty close), but the net result isn't a huge price differential because they're countervailing forces.
The major effect is what happens to the people who own the existing oil reserves. But notice that these are predominantly countries we don't really love, like Russia and Saudi Arabia. So the main effect is to transfer wealth from those countries to the local economy where you create jobs installing renewable energy infrastructure, which is an effect that significantly outweighs -- is net economically positive -- against a slight increase in generating costs, for any country that is not a large net oil exporter.
And that's assuming an increase in demand for renewables doesn't bring any economies of scale that could bring the price down below the existing energy market price.
Renewables will help significantly in reducing the power plant power issue. Sure. But we haven’t solved the storage problem, which means that at night we need gas/coal. When there’s no wind we need gas/coal.
Any tax will be passed on to consumers, if not in full then in part. This will of course drive people to use it less, which is good. Except that if people stop consuming, we have a problem....
Human demand for consumables is just starting to ramp up. Total power produced, total plastics produced, total chemicals used, total waste generated are just small portions of what they will end up - based on growth projections for countries like India and China.
7% growth means a doubling of materials use in a decade, over a population much larger than the first world.
That means the number of plane tickets, international trips, shipping containers, iPhones, batteries and inflatable mattresses - will go up. The carbon cost for most of these items is never calculated, and it’s convenient to push production to places where the laws can be ignored.
Further - Most of that growth investment has been done on the backs of debt.
when we tell people that they will become more expensive, people will be unhappy, and they will buy less.
Therefore Business owners are unhappy, lenders are unhappy which means politicians are unhappy.
Our current consumption patterns are not sustainable, but stopping them is political and economic suicide.
The circular loop at play here ensures that nothing will happen, because the costs are too high.
But that doesn't (inherently) emit CO2 so it isn't subject to a carbon tax. It should actually make plastics cheaper because they won't have to compete with power plants for oil.
> Renewables will help significantly in reducing the power plant power issue. Sure. But we haven’t solved the storage problem, which means that at night we need gas/coal. When there’s no wind we need gas/coal.
Markets are good at fixing things like this. Nuclear works great at night. Solar works during most of the peak load times (solar generation correlates with air conditioning usage). There is a problematic demand period between when the sun goes down and when people go to sleep, so use pricing to encourage people to do their laundry on Saturday morning instead of Friday night -- this may even save money on net.
And there is nothing saying you can't burn any carbon. If it's 9PM on a windless night then you pay the carbon tax for an hour. You're still down 95% from when that plant was operating 24/7.
> Any tax will be passed on to consumers, if not in full then in part.
It's revenue neutral. You're basically taking money from oil companies and giving it to renewables companies. That doesn't inherently change the market price at all. It's like taking money from Nike and giving it to Reebok. You get a change in the type of shoes but not necessarily the price of shoes. The only price difference is if it costs more to generate with renewables than fossil fuels -- but if that's even true at all anymore, the difference is very small.
And again, there is a plausible argument that scaling use of renewables will bring prices down. Once you have a given installed base of solar, it keeps generating power without having to spend additional resources on oil exploration/extraction/refining/distribution/etc.
I'm too old to believe "Markets will fix it" anymore, now I need to see the fine print, and then figure out how the economic game will look after the third play through.
Secondly, this doesn't obviate the need for additional power - you will still be burning coal/etc. You will use it less as a % of total power output. But if your power output increases (which it will, since most of humanity doesn't have power today), you are still looking at a potential increase.
I assume we are not including cars/busses because we expect electric cars to fix that.
However, flight and shipping will remain oil based.
------
I love your points and the enthusiasm with which you make them, I think you need to consider your model with bad actors playing it, and you need to consider the self referential aspects of this model.
For example
1) More cheap power means more use of that power. Imagine millions more tamagotchis, or fans which can be kept running nonstop, or other items which are now affordable because power is cheaper.
Case in point - bitcoin miners are today limited by the cost of power. Every efficiency gain in power production, results in more bitcoin miners being added to the system. Every increase in power, results in people dropping out of the system.
2) The economic game is played over several rounds. In the best case scenario, the 3 players (consumers, regulators, producers) are in even tension.
But if producers get rich enough (or even earlier), they can regularly suppress regulators and get away with not paying taxes, polluting without worry and so on.
They can also just straight up reject options like carbon taxes, saying that it will not work for them.
----------
To make my point clear to you -
The set up of the game is such that no player is in a position to put their foot down! Any player that makes that call is removed from the game
Observe the set up of the game
1) Financers
2) consumers
3) Producers
4) Regulators
5) Politicians
Contracts and obligations guarantee that the interests of financers will be met by producers - in short, the necessity of global growth is backed up by contracts and loans.
The producers of industries, regulators, and politicians regularly ignore many of the primary concequences of polluting industries (the tradgedy of the commons, and this is worse in developing nations which dont have the resources to afford or keep regulators safe)
Any politician which ends up proposing a tax increase, will need massive consumer support - but this is eventually self harming.
Those consumers need jobs, an effective carbon tax would severely harm growth prospects, and thus job creation in an economy.
This means that people will eventually vote this govt out, because they want growth.
FInancers and producers will collude to fund people who support their goals.
Your "foot down" cant happen, because the game is not set up to allow that behavior.
> I'm too old to believe "Markets will fix it" anymore, now I need to see the fine print, and then figure out how the economic game will look after the third play through.
You're using "I don't believe in markets" as a justification for not regulating something.
> Secondly, this doesn't obviate the need for additional power - you will still be burning coal/etc. You will use it less as a % of total power output. But if your power output increases (which it will, since most of humanity doesn't have power today), you are still looking at a potential increase.
The potential increase is independent of the percentage decrease. If total consumption doubles while the share of fossil fuels drops from 50% to 5%, total fossil fuel use has gone down. Even if total consumption increases by more, you still have proportionally less fossil fuel usage than you would have with the same increase in consumption and no decrease in the ratio of fossil fuels.
> More cheap power means more use of that power. Imagine millions more tamagotchis, or fans which can be kept running nonstop, or other items which are now affordable because power is cheaper.
You only burn oil when there is more demand than supply, which are exactly the times that price-sensitive users will discontinue their usage.
> However, flight and shipping will remain oil based.
It's possible to use biofuels for this. Also, you can make ships run on anything. Wood, garbage, batteries, wind, plutonium. If it can generate torque, thrust or steam it can power a ship.
> Those consumers need jobs, an effective carbon tax would severely harm growth prospects, and thus job creation in an economy.
You keep saying that it would reduce growth. How is taking billions of dollars that would have gone to unfriendly countries and instead using it to hire a million domestic workers to build renewable energy infrastructure, all while energy prices remain the same or go down, supposed to reduce growth?
>You're using "I don't believe in markets" as a justification for not regulating something
If that’s the case I’m doing it wrong, since I believe the opposite. Good regulations with the ability to verify easily make markets work.
>The potential increase is independent of the percentage decrease.
Agree, it’s matter of what the mix is. Higher power gen, with a smaller coal/oil mix in big relative and absolute terms is also. Possibility. I don’t believe it is, but it remains a possible outcome.
>You only burn oil when there is more demand than supply, which are exactly the times that price-sensitive users will discontinue their usage.
I am wary that this will cleave so cleanly.
>It's possible to use biofuels for this. Also, you can make ships run on anything. Wood, garbage, batteries, wind, plutonium. If it can generate torque, thrust or steam it can power a ship.
But those aren’t there yet and oil is still the best and economic option
So change will not come here, without a break through technology.
>You keep saying that it would reduce growth.
Well yes - you are focused only on power. But I’m looking around me and an actual, effective working carbon tax aimed at saving the environment would hit every industry, not just power.
For example most of the products made in my country don’t necessarily come from places that follow regulations.
Working regulations would necessarily make those products more expensive and that would mean many jobs lost, marginal business shut, and and overall increase in costs of goods.
The cost of compliance with just air regulations norms for engines increased the price significantly. This resulted in many hacks or workarounds which harm the engine but superficially match the new norms.
Another example - we recently saw a major city try and ban plastic (yet again), but it would result in many street vendors and stores being unable to package liquid goods.
India is famously cost sensitive, and price advantages often completely override quality advantages. People developed single use washing powder sachets, and created an entirely new market.
But if the cost of carbon cleanup was added to those sachets, they would not be viable products at all.
All of those represent the razor thin margins needed to ensure the economy in india Grows.
There’s no way in our economy, to keep growth and the environment safe.
So while we are moving to alternate sources of power, it’s not stopping the other sources of pollution.
China’s well more than 4x the population of the US.
Those stats, from 2012, are quite outdated, too; while still the largest users of coal (but again, largest country) they’re rapidly and aggressively investing in green energy and cutting back on coal use. The Chinese produce much less carbon per capita than Americans do [1] and recently hit their carbon reduction targets well ahead of schedule [2].
Great for China! The point is that the OP used the all-too-common, purposefully-vague "lobbyist" argument into his rant, as if a profession (rather than the oil and gas companies for whom they work) is responsible for all the global warming problems in the world.
Further, the OP obscures the simple fact that even with large shifts in power production over the next few decades, China is, and will remain, the largest coal consumer in the world by far. And yet his suggestion is to cut off the USA, not China, from all global trading.
The oil and gas companies employ lobbyists as a means to effect policy changes (or inaction), so...well, despite your snippy attempt to clarify I'm still not sure exactly what your point here is? Yes, the oil and gas companies are the bad guys, I doubt anyone (myself or OP included) would disagree; the problem is that the tens of millions of dollars each year they spend lobbying is apparently a very effective weapon (that they probably shouldn't have) to prevent collective climate action.
And yes, the proper global action is to punish climate hogs like the US. And to be clear, once again, relatively speaking China's not a climate hog: it's inane to demand a country of 1.5 billion reduce its total coal usage to less than that of a country less than a quarter of the size before demanding the smaller country to do anything at all, and even more inane to try to punish countries who are aggressively working towards a solution (Europe, China), instead of those actively fighting against one (the US).
From some kind of top-down perspective, where you have total control over all aspects of policy in all countries, then yes, I suppose the focus should be on China. But that's not the way the global economy works; it's a game where no one country will be gladly willing to sacrifice its competitive advantage, and that's why per capita figures matter more than raw numbers.
In the first, the U.S. and China are the only countries reducing coal use in the final years of the chart. In the second, from 2015, it clearly states the U.S. reduced coal consumption by 11%. Double the reduction from Japan or Canada, 3x that of Germany.
And finally, I'm sorry it needs to be specifically pointed out -- but politicians vote on policies. Not lobbyists, not energy companies.
What does India have to do with anything? Yes, India uses even less carbon per capita than the US or China! Good for India! It'd be awesome if both China and the US could bring their carbon production per capita down to India's level, or even lower.
As for the situation in the US: the latter of your sources is conveniently from 2015, before the US elected a president who campaigned on reviving the coal industry, appointed the CEO of Exxon-Mobil to Secretary of State, pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord, and has made it his daily mission to roll back EPA protections. Does this [1] sound like a government that's "aggressively reducing coal usage"? If coal usage is going down in the US, it's despite, not because of, any efforts by the current federal government. And indeed, coal specifically aside, carbon emissions in 2018 are projected to rise in the US after a steady decline since 2005 [2].
> And finally, I'm sorry it needs to be specifically pointed out -- but politicians vote on policies. Not lobbyists, not energy companies.
I mean, it doesn't need to be pointed out; we're all, despite differences of opinions, reasonably intelligent people here, and we all know about and have made up our minds on lobbying. Of course politicians write laws and vote on policies; I happen to think that if oil and gas companies are spending things like $65 million a year [3] to try to influence those politicians and the policies they make, they must have determined that has some effect. I suppose you don't, or think it doesn't matter because the buck stops with the politicians or something. I think that's naïve. But I promise we're all familiar with the ground facts, and your condescending attitude isn't really encouraging any useful discussion.
Come on dude, fine that we disagree but don't keep deflecting. You've twice given China a pass due solely to its population. India is proof that you can have well over a billion people without 4x the coal consumption of the USA. The exact thing you called "inane."
I’ve given China a pass relative to America. Bringing in some other country doing better than China to argue that America should then be given a pass relative to China is the exact thing you called “deflecting”.
One thing that I do know is that wind and solar have more installations and lower cost than every projection. So they're projected to not be enough... eh?
Indeed. It's awesome that they are beating projections, but even so, the rate is far below what is needed to decarbonize the energy sector by mid-century which is what we need to keep warming below 2C.
It is? That's because we aren't spending very much on wind+solar, because the projections said that the wind+solar industry couldn't grow fast enough. It's all circular reasoning.
I’ve read it had died off in the past and recovered afterwards. This had happened 5 times in the past 30000 years, From that it would logically follow that recovery is possible, just not for these particular specimens. Additionally, it’s hard to tell if the current bleaching is as fatal as everyone here seems to assume. FWIW scientists seem to think the situation is grave, but not as grave and hopeless as the mass media portrays it: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/scientists-pronounce-great.... Of course the more balanced view doesn’t drive the clicks quite as well.
I've been wondering about this. If they're this sensitive to change, then this can't be the first time massive bleaching has happened.
> Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, said that he was “not impressed by the [article’s] message that we should give up on the [Great Barrier Reef], or that it is already dead.”
Yes. Downvoting your valid perspective is stupid. More resilient species would quickly fill the gaps and they have. Problem is temperatures are not stable, so every rebuilt reef will need to be rebuilt again in some years. Maybe full recovery when man is gone.
As a Brisbane resident I've been lucky enough to visit the north central reef twice in the last 30 years. If you are a casual visitor (as I was) the damage is for many people, theoretical because you have no basis to compare, and the reef charter boats go to the best places you can find to see the best diversity. I know it's real. It harder too see and understand it's extent.
Also, much tourism runs in the northern-central reef, but the southern reef is actually visitable, if slightly less spectacular and less developed onshore for tourism and hospitality. You can still see a rich diverse reef from heron island or lady Musgrave. It's not as "wow" as up north.
TL;DR yes, the reef is highly damaged and in extreme danger. Come visit anyway: you'll have fun, you will still see a rich diverse ecosystem (albiet in stress and failing globally) and the reef community needs your dollars.
It doesn't matter, Australian politicians can't save the reef no matter what they do. The reef isn't dying because of pollution or whatever, it's dying because the ocean temperature is increasing and nothing we do will stop that in time.
actually, long distance flights are huge generators of carbon. for many, getting to Australia involves multiple long distance flights.
it'd probably be best to reduce demand of these long distance flights across the globe, and as a result, encourage people to not engage in tragedy of the commons style behaviors justified thusly: I have to see it before it goes away, which are likely to increase demand.
so, really, you should absolutely not visit if you're considerate of your personal carbon emissions.
Why are those guys in the videos touching and tugging on the coral?
Quite certain that's a no-no, and setting a terrible example for others.
For reference, see "Coral Etiquette" [0]:
Simply touching corals to see
what they feel like can cause
the death of an entire colony.
Oils from your skin can
disturb the delicate mucous
membranes which protect the
animals from disease.
The etiquette is different for you and me than on of the world's foremost, eminent researchers. He has a different level of understanding of what is harmful and not harmful.
I don't know anything about coral, but I do know something about plants. Many botanical gardens have similar disclaimers about touching plants, but invariably what they actually mean is "Touching is fine, but some dumbass is going to take it too far and kill something, so we'll say no touching just to ensure it doesn't get to that point". Of course the vast majority of plants are safe to touch for you and the plant, and even those that are delicate or dangerous in some way can be safely touched by experts or researchers.
Maybe coral is similar to this, maybe not, but by analogy I don't see a problem in offering the public a more conservative version of safe guidance.
> Simply touching corals to see what they feel like can cause death of an entire colony. Oils from your skin can disturb the delicate mucous membranes which protect the animals from disease.
Just watched a PBS Nova special on rising CO2 levels and the impact on corral (requires lower acidity). Scientists in that episode removed coral for experiments. They removed a bit in the really high acidity areas. Interesting special, although I think it was from 2013 "lethal seas".
Just in case you're serious, I think you would need to dump an entire small dwarf planet worth of baking soda which would probably have other negative consequences.
Well, we’ve just had another “coup” here in Australia... our 6th Prime Minister in 10 years, so yeah there’s definitely a steady hand on the tiller of Australian climate policy...
Oh, come on now. The previous prime minister Mal (and current deputy leader Josh) gave the great barrier reef $444m. They are doing their very best to save it.
I mean sure, the charity they gave it to never asked for it, and have only 6 people working for them. And of course they were good friends of the party, ex-exxon, ex-origin (gas fracking), ex-jbp (most corrupt gov in aus history). No oversight, no investigation, no input from the environment minister, just a big lump of cash... "for the reef". But they probably will do something with it.[0]
It doesn't matter. There's no way that Australia could "save" the reef. At best, maybe they could bioengineer something that looked enough like a reef to keep tourists happy. Or maybe just replace it with plastic and stuff ;)
Well, I mean, it matters.. both the corruption and the destruction of the reef (which by the way also faces more imminent threats from mining and agriculture).
I don't mean that destruction of the reef doesn't matter. But I do doubt that Australia can do much to help or hurt, at this point. Perhaps reducing runoff from mining and agriculture would help. But oceanic acidification is a global issue, and it's inevitable at this point.
Hey, its not that bad, as you know only carefully vetted and patted down people are allowed into the exclusive lounge where the charity was born:
> the foundation “started with a small group of businessmen chatting at the airport while waiting for their flight, wanting to do something to help the Great Barrier Reef
Australia's climate policy is simply its population policy. The country has hit 25 million people 33 years earlier than planned, due to very high levels of immigration from India and China.
Not that the headline exactly matches the article, but at this point is there any well educated forward-thinking person who doesn't think the planet is headed for a catastrophe?
The population of humans is booming.. and surely any intelligent person can see that eventually, at some point something will have to give. Maybe it will be when there are 10 billion of us, or 20, or 100, but surely, at some point something's going to break in a very big way.
That means that they constantly have to revise upwards their scenario because it does not happen as expected and the population grows each time faster. In 20 years, they had to add 1 extra billion people to their forecast...
Well given that even at our current population levels we're headed for a massive catastrophe unless we implement quite radical measures to reduce our carbon footprint I don't find it very comforting that we'll top out at 50% more people.
Developed countries have a fertility rate below the replacement rate.
The population growth we are seeing now is caused by mortality decreasing in developing countries. If history is an accurate guide, the birthrate will naturally follow and global population will plateau without the need for any catastrophe.
Of course, we are experiencing this period of population growth, at the same time as an environmental catastrophe, that we know will cause large scale displacement, so it is not obvious if we will make it to the "natural" population plateuo, or hit some less pleasent wall.
What a shame you had to spoil your otherwise reasonable argument with this canard. In most areas of the global (the Americas, Europe, Asia above India), population is not booming but shrinking.
Moreover, the destruction of various sorts we see hardly the result of booming population by itself but massive resource wastage of variety of sorts combined overall short-sightedness. Climate change is 97 billion pound set to destroy our world and it's relation to population growth is quite tenuous.
Sure, the human population is no longer growing exponentially. But mean resource use and pollution per capita is still growing. During the last century or two, when humanity released all that CO2, less than one billion people were responsible for most of it. And now we have maybe 2-3 billion more who demand such a lifestyle.
So anyway, it's not population per se that matters. It's the sum over population times per capita impact. And that is still growing exponentially.
NB, fossil fuel use was doubling every decade or two (3.5 - 7% annual growth) through much of the 20th century. This means that roughly half of all carbon emissions were from the most recent 10-20 years.
As of 2007, half of all emissions dated from about 1987.
Sure, the human population is no longer growing exponentially.
Which is to say it isn't "booming".
But mean resource use and pollution per capita is still growing.
Indeed total resource is huge and massively destructive but that use isn't even happening in any uniform per capita basis but rather some individuals, processes and organizations consume far more than others. Bitcoin for example, air conditioning Dubai for example, etc, etc.
I didn't argue that resource use and pollution per capita is uniform. It's obviously not.
But damn, just look at the aggregate indicators. CO2 emissions are still growing exponentially. Ecological degradation is increasing exponentially. We're starting to see widespread firestorms across the northern hemisphere.
I agree we in a horrible, crisis situation. I simply believe pointing to overpopulation as a primary cause is wrong headed. The world's nations could stop a country's worth of energy use tomorrow by banning bitcoin as just a single example. There are other, harder examples but the (awful) problem of stopping runaway really doesn't seem related to a "booming" human population - the quote I originally took issue with.
The causes are co-option and destruction of ecosystems, and various sorts of pollution. I do agree that it's inaccurate to focus on overpopulation. Still, some impacts, such as ecosystem co-option for agriculture, and harvesting wood for fuel, are substantial even without industrial development.
Also, expecting industrial development to moderate growth rates in rapidly growing populations is iffy. Time lags could push systems into regimes with positive feedback. Ultimately, though, human populations will crash, and stuff will head back toward equilibrium.
The only possible solution is policy changes that force a significant decrease in resource usage among a wide swath of the developed and less-developed population. That solution would be necessary regardless of the level of population increase we're going to see. The population increase is going to correct itself. The resource usage so far does not seem like it's going.
And certainly, populations in less developed areas have done and can quite a bit of damage - but that damage can only be corrected by state policies to prevent poor resource usage.
Also, expecting industrial development to moderate growth rates in rapidly growing populations is iffy.
This has occurred in a fairly predictable rate over the majority of the world's area. India, the Mid-East and Africa are basically the primary areas of growing population in the world.
Most projections are for about 10 billion people by 2050.
Even if the population stopped growing today developing countries are rapidly modernising. A few billion people soon to be middle class consumers.
The world can't cope with every Chinese person consuming as much as the average American, and they are quickly moving down that path, meat and dairy consumption is a good example of this.
Yes, that was exactly my point. India too, and Southeast Asia generally. Maybe even substantial parts of Africa. As far as global climate change goes, we ain't seen nothing yet :(
Hopefully starting afresh they can avoid some of the developed worlds mistakes like power generation lock-in and poorly planned car based cities.
But when it comes to meat consumption, making concrete and airline travel there's currently no way around the huge emissions. Air travel has been growing at 6% for decades now with no sign of stopping and makes up a significant chunk of global emissions.
I have no solutions but feel people are underestimating how hard this problem is to fix.
The exponential growth, this planet is not growing...
I always am worried that no leading intellectual is considering the humans future. Cross the globe, I cannot see any happy ending for humans road forward.
The decidability factor is exploited by the side with skin in the game. Those that would be bankrupted by expensive restrictions on behavior, or restrictions designed to prevent such business entirely, know that they can point to unpreventable externalities like caldera volcanos and extinction event asteroids as a means to arm consumers with a toolkit to rationalize hedonism.
As if to say, live well now, because what if any of these other catastrophies strike, and obviate your life savings and insurance policies. You could have spent that money on good times today, but living with your means, and planning for a future that possibly doesn’t exist will leave you kicking yourself during the rapture.
The other side also has existential skin in the game, in the sense that a destroyed inhospitable biosphere is the figurative eating of our only free lunch, and understands the optics of the decision, but hasn’t come up with selfish motives to prey upon the undisciplined weakness of the unwashed masses. Mostly because such principles of psychological exploitation for personal gain (the joy of living in a world where the ice caps don’t melt and unleash category six hurricanes on a monthly basis in every quadrant of the world) are unrelatable to their own motivations to good conduct.
This asymmetry of operations means an unfair fight, and thus a waiting game, each biding everyone’s time until it’s too late, but undeniable.
Until then, the level of money poured into this system is only equalized by the perception of threat on the part of the hedonists. The more they feel threatened, the more they spend to fight the shadow of the obvious truth that will ultimate rob them of all inaction anyway. They aren’t even fighting their do-gooder counterpart. They’re fighting their own capacity to continue typical behavior, with diminishing returns. Shooting themselves in the foot, to maintain a gun collection of foot guns.
The sci-fi writer in me envisions a story about a future where humans exist, and there is only one species of fish in the ocean, and everyone is sick of eating it.
Ocean acidification frightens me more than climate change. Moving Miami is doable. Look at how fast Dubai was built. Sea walls and flood control are also things we know how to do. Ocean ecosystem collapse could be absolutely catastrophic and there is no mitigation.
In theory if you could mix the oceans faster (I know lol), you could begin dissolving the deposited calcium carbonate at the bottom and buffering the oceans with even more bicarbonate ions. Unfortunately this happens naturally on the time scale of centuries, which is super fast for geology but not great news for corals.
The actual title of the article is: Great Barrier Reef headed for ‘massive death’, and that's what the article is about. There are only cursory mentions of climate change in general.
The title on CNN‘s main page, from where I copied it, is precisely the submitted title.
Yes, I hate how media outfits use several titles for the same piece. Readable heading vs. HTML title tag (which the bookmarklet uses) is another discrepancy.
But I mostly hate it because you just know that someone on HN will not understand this reality and try to give you a hard time.
It's cognitive dissidents. We all know this is happening to every aspect of our enviornment and that we as humans are behind it. But of course we're not going to give up our material world, and we'll continue to disbelieve only because it threatens our very nature of the animal that minipulates materials. The planet isn't doomed, we are. We're creating conditions that are feeding back on us in a negitive way. We will be our own distruction; probably be creating a nice warm enviornment for some disease to mutate and run rampant, where the only humans left will be some isolated populations of humans. To Moburg in Hunter S. Thompson's "Rum Diaries, "The only animals to claim a god, yet behave the least lile they have one."
Fairly morose even for internet standards. The Earth is plenty capable of plunging into an ice age without human intervention. Also no matter what an asteroid is eventually going to destroy the earth or it will get swallowed up by some exploding star.
Those facts still should paralyze you. We are all plenty capable of improving the lives of ourselves and others today. What’s stopping you?
None of those things are relevant for you and your children and grandchildren. But global climate change and ecological collapse almost certainly will be.
