I recall reading a CNN scrolling ticker headline about the current European heatwave that said ~5% of European homes/offices have AC.
The DOE says 3/4 of American homes have AC, and furthermore, AC uses 6% of all electricity generated in the United States, quite staggering imo and a lot more than I would have expected. Without AC, a lot of America would just be too unbearable to support some major communities.
The inside of my apartment peaked at 28°C when it was 40+°C outside. No AC. While that is still a little uncomfortable, I can power through that it it's just a week or two a year and blast a fan, and take a cold shower or two. As for some window-mounted (temporary) AC, no chance, I'd have to get permission to "build" it from the city first, which I won't unless it's a really good permanently installed one (so it cannot fall and hit somebody) aka "major" construction, and then from my landlord too.
I have an AC unit on rollers that has a hose out the window[1] to take the bite out of those hot days. Although I've recorded 38C inside my house... Seems like you insulation is a bit better.
Those single hose ones are a bit idiotic. They take air from around them (i.e. the room air they just cooled) to transfer heat into and move out. That will then replaced by air from the outside, transporting new heat inside.
Still better than nothing, and cheaper to buy / easier to use, but I'd hope this is one of those kind of tech we'll see replaced by something better rather soon-ish.
There are two hose units that fixes this problem but they are rare and much more expensive, I 3D printed a set to the back inlet of my single hose one to fix this issue. Works wonders, now hot air are forced out instead of drawn in.
Window mounted AC units are $100 - $200. It sits in a closet except for the 2 months a year that Seattle requires AC. A proper central air system would be overkill, but the small one is worth it.
I wonder if window / removable units factor into the DOE's 75% number. From a real estate recordkeeping perspective, my home does not have AC, despite the previous owner permanently building a window unit into the side of the house. If they're not counted, the real number of American homes with AC could be well north of 75%.
My understanding is that window mounted A/C units do not fit well into typical European windows that swing (instead of slide which I believe is common in US). Or maybe there is some other reason (e.g. permit stuff) for why I don't really see them.
This is what a typical catalog of A/C units looks like in Finland on couple of the largest online retailers:
Most ones are $500+ and out of stock for this summer, though I do see at least one "cheap" €499/$550 unit that is still in stock on the second link (Domair DOM100380). The more expensive ones and split heatpumps seem to be in stock as well.
I had a split A/C / heatpump installed in my apartment ~5 years ago for ~$2000 inc. installation. No permit was needed from the municipal facades committee as it is not visible from the outside (outdoor unit sits on balcony), just a permission from the housing company as a hole had to be drilled for the pipes. Without A/C indoor temperatures of well over 30°C (86°F) were typical for weeks during summers.
With new housing built for optimizing energy intake with three-layer windows and 40cm thick insulation etc, slapping a $200 AC unit in a window seems like a dirty hack to put it mildly.
It is common with centralized heating systems, so perhaps next step is to adapt centralized cooling systems.
Short term I would put my money on moveable outside shades in front of windows, and large green outdoor plants on the balconies.
Would also prefer bright colors on roads and building roofs to reflect light instead of turning it into heat.
Just had a quick look in the UK, and the cheapest decent AC unit I could find was around $450 USD, and that was for a standalone unit (couldn't even find a window mounted one).
> except for the 2 months a year that Seattle requires AC
Huh? 2 months out of the year AC is required? Even if you can not, somehow, stand a week or two of 90-100 degree weather(with NO humidity!) without air conditioning, to months of required AC in Seattle seems like an insane exaggeration.
Lots of modern houses aren't built to function very well in temperature extremes. Windows are too small, don't open wide enough or at all, interior blocks too much airflow, insulation and sealing's too good. Certainly they don't give a damn about which way they're oriented when they plop 'em down, or which rooms are facing which way, or any of that. They're much worse to be in when it's very hot with no AC than an older house. And I write from experience you'll end up on the porch some nights even in those older houses, which ain't exactly fun or restful if you're not used to it and need to get up the next day and at least try to be productive.
Hell, modern interior woodwork and wooden furniture's not meant to take the heat either, for the most part. No tolerances for it, no attention to grain and such.
You're right, I was loose with my language there. It is never "required" in the way that eg Phoenix AZ would demand. It's a convenience. "Desirable" would have been a better word.
I live in Scotland, where the winters are long, and at worst we get a couple of weeks a year of a truely horrible heat/humidity combination.
I'm also well travelled, so well used to experiencing the joys of AC in hot countries.
Yet for some reason the thought of buying an AC unit (or even a fan!) has never once crossed my mind!
If I had thought of it though, I would expect the units to be expensive, and installation to be a pretty specialised (and therefore expensive) thing - the number of homes with AC in Scotland could probably be counted on one hand!
It's absolutely fucking horrible just now though, so I might at least look into it...
Brit here, and in 2017 I bought a window venting small ish unit made by Amcor. £199 or so, and worth every penny these last few years. When I don’t use it, it lives in my spare room tucked away and I wheel it to my office for the hot spells.
One thing about human life that is remarkable is the dramatic range of climates we can survive in, compared to other species. Makes us forget that it is entirely possible to have climates that we CAN'T survive in (and even more that we wouldn't thrive in).
> One thing about human life that is remarkable is the dramatic range of climates we can survive in, compared to other species.
We are pretty impressive compared to most other species. One that holds it own, though, is the Yakutian horse [1], a native horse breed of Siberia.
They are kept outside year-round, dealing with temperatures of up to 38℃ (100℉) in the summer, and as low as -70℃ (-94℉) in the winter. That's a range of 108℃ (194℉).
Of course their human owners also handle those temperatures, but they need buildings and clothes and fuel to do it. They couldn't do it standing around naked in a field like the horses can.
I'm seriously tempted, but at the same time, I remember that it would generate MORE heat outside to cool my bedroom. And the surge in electricity would be probably supplied from burning gas or coal. I feel conflicted.
> I remember that it would generate MORE heat outside to cool my bedroom.
That's not really an issue: "For a 2014 paper, Francisco Salamanca and colleagues at Arizona State University modeled the effects of air conditioning on surface air temps in Phoenix. They found a nighttime increase of about 2°F (and nothing much during the day)" [0].
If it is powered by gas or coal though, that wouldn't be good.
Anecdotally, Hong Kong is extremely air conditioned (to the point where it gets a little chilly) and the outside is unbearable when I've been during the summer months.
IIRC there's around 7m of sea level rise tied up in Greenland ice, and it's already melting remarkably quickly. Now add the wildfires and it seems like it's escalating dangerously out of control.
While a tipping point tips, government action is still conspicuously absent, and countries (well Russia and Canada mainly) are trying to nail their continental shelf claims in the Arctic for oil exploration.
We’re going straight from “we don’t really know if something is happening” to “it’s too late anyway so why bother” without going through the troublesome “we should try to stop this” phase.
There are at least 5 positive feedback loops operating right now, ocean water temps, phytoplankton populations which impacts both oxygen production and cO2 conversion, phytoplankton is also the basis for the marine food chain, and their populations is down 40% since 1950. The other positive feedback loops are permafrost thawing, glacier melts and ocean salinity.
The earth and climate are already driving each other. We disrupted a delicate balance, creating these positive feedback loops.
Usually positive feedback loops run until they exhaust the resources, unfortunately the amount of greenhouse gases sequestered in the oceans, permafrost and glaciers is absolutely massive, when these feedback loops exhaust their resources it’s going to be vastly different planet, and it’s going to happen a lot quicker than anyone expects, we are seeing the acceleration already.
The only thing that disrupt these feedback loops is a global event, like a super volcano erupting, or a huge meteor strike, but both would have devastating impacts to the current life on the planet.
If the world were a fine place worth fighting for, maybe you’d have a point.
But increasingly, I just look around, see the news, see the social media, and think why bother? Humanity will never be anything more than this. Things seem to be wrapping up, don’t have kids, don’t try to save the world, just savor what is left till it’s gone.
In the coming decades we will begin to see a loss in the knowledge of mankind, as people become more dependent on machines and fewer and fewer people know how to work them. Progress will begin to slow down, wealth will continue to consolidate, and people will be left working hard back-breaking jobs to sustain themselves. The world of the future will have more farmers and less engineers, and even fewer people who even understand code and how to write it.
The only known habitable planet in the universe, one filled to the brim with millions of unique forms of life, isn’t worth fighting for because...social media? Do I need to elaborate on the irony of this?
The US has seen a sharp decline in children earning more than their parents. 90% of people born in 1940 earned more than their parents, compared to just 50% in 1985, a trend that we simply aren't doing enough to correct[0]. We're on our way to a new gilded age, but perhaps your kids will among the fortunate and not of the "useless class", as Yuval Harari would say.
As technology and AI continue to progress, it's going to become harder to educate and train the workforce, and perhaps more importantly, re-train them as human skills continue to fall into obsolescence. I look at my baby nephew and hope that he'll be able to find solid-paying work one day, but that just isn't a given anymore.
Or isn’t American, the US standard of living has dropped but for many people around the world, this is as good as it’s been for them in centuries or longer.
I tend to be a pretty pessimistic person and I happen to agree with you.
Regardless of how hopeless our current position might seem to some, there is an absurd amount of sheer panic and terror that you just happen to be exposed to because you are on the internet.
It is a wild gnashing of teeth with little productive thought taking place.
Right now I see some fat kids with necks bent at 90 degrees staring mindlessly into a tablet watching some YouTube video of other people playing video games and shouting nonsense. Or babies and toddlers watching whole playlists of AI generated crap trying to get ad revenue.
These kids are not getting a good start in life. Wouldn’t be surprised if the end of their lives doesn’t look much different from the beginning.
If you had to make an off-hand estimate of the total number of teens and children you've witnessed either in YouTube videos or watching YouTube, how does that number compare to the number of teens and children currently alive in this world at this moment?
People at the beginning of the 20th century were incredibly optimistic, only to be hit with loss of life on an unprecedented level in world wars. Things can improve in some ways and get worse in others. The climate of the planet that our grandchildren inherit will be worse than the one that we enjoy.
I second this. Personally, I'd prefer to see the world working in unity to mitigate or even stop man made global warming, poverty, wars etc. won't happen, though. from a global perspective humanity is basically just a disease. I know it's rather cynical but I actually see a terrifying beauty in the vision of our civilization just fading away. I'm not looking at it from a moral perspective. the world is not a better place without us, but it isn't a better place with us either. I have difficulty understanding why someone would want to subject a child to this drama unfolding. most people seem to be living and thinking in some bubble it appears to me.
Greenland's ice sheet has been melting pretty fast for years [1]. Maybe it's because I'm not a native English speaker, but using "threaten" sounds to me like until now it had been living peacefully unaffected by climate change.
> Greenland's ice sheet has been melting pretty fast for years [1].
Your link talks about how the rate of ice sheet melting is increasing (currently 4x what it was in 2003), so I'm not sure how you arrived at this statement. The whole problem is not that it was never melting in the past, it's that the melting is accelerating, and that even the rate of acceleration may be increasing due to feedback loops; that is what is threatening.
What I would like to see is a country average temperature record, we often see high temps, some may be a small hotspot, others may well encompass the entire country. With that, are heat waves becoming larger in size and by that - area covered? Asking as from my experience in life, they kinda feel like they are.
The range between the min and max temps for the last 100 years is under 1°C globally. For the last 1,000 years it's just over 1°C (from wolfram alpha at least). It's clear that temps are slowly rising, but the constant reports of extreme weather seem at odds with the data to me. Is 1°C over 1,000 years really doing all this? When I read articles about the weather I have to remind myself what the data says. If I didn't check occasionally I'd think we'd increased by 10°C in the last 5 years.
For the record, I drive an electric car and my house is supplied by a purely renewable provider here in the UK. I hate the thought of polluting the planet and I do what I can to live a green life. I really love science and study as much as I can, but reading about global warming is very different to reading about quantum electrodynamics or special relativity. I'll happily watch the oil companies go under and I think dumping tons of crap in to the atmosphere is clearly terrible and shouldn't go unpunished, I just wish I had some better data to back this all up.
Has anyone got good sea level rise data for the last 1,000 years? Again, when I read any article I feel like the sea must have risen by a few meters already as everything is so dramatic, but I can't find a decent dataset that sets out what has actually happened.
I think that the most immediate risks associated with climate change is not sea level rise, but it's extreme weather. We're seeing this in spades already.
It intuitively makes sense at some level: adding more energy to a somewhat chaotic/somewhat stable system (weather over the past 1000 years) will increase the chaos and lessen the stability.
To me, this article about heat moving toward Greenland is less of a cause/risk and more of a symptom. The fucked up jetstreams, caused by a relatively small global increase in temperature, is allowing this heat to move somewhere it would almost never be able to move previously.
Yeah, it looks bad, but the y axis on the chart only represents 1 degree. This is kind of my point, it’s so easy to show a chart with a big uptick and if you don’t dig deeper you come away thinking we’re about to catch fire.
> I just don’t see how we’re getting out of this alive.
Even worst case predictions for climate change don't imply the human race will be threatened. But what we will see is massive geopolitical disruption as previously habitable regions become uninhabitable. What happens when coastal Myanmar is underwater or southern India experiences 130 degree days on a regular basis? Climate change is going to make itself felt over the coming decades as increases in migrant crises, regional conflicts, and famines. (Not to mention economic loss as, e.g., the agricultural viability of large areas changes.)
How can you not think the human race will be threatened by all those factors?
Forget about the geopolitcal issues, which will indeed be massive. What about food production?
In 2010 a single heat wave triggered the Arab spring revolts a couple of months later.
> The wildfires destroyed one-third of Russia's wheat harvest. The Russian government refused to export the rest of its harvest and set a grain export ban to fight inflation. This led to extremely high food prices, which led to panicking on the global markets. Many experts including from the International Food Policy Research Institute say that the Russian wildfires in summer 2010 played a leading role in triggering the Arab Spring starting in 2010, especially in Egypt's case. Higher food prices helped to make oppression, poverty, and corruption under autocratic leaders even more aching for the local population. Also, as Russia was not even a member of the WTO at the time, banning exports was not a problem.
We are approaching a world were these kind of problems with food production will be globalized and will affect everything but specially the global economy.
I don't know, but I really feel like we should be talking about this.
Migrant cries and famines tend to cause war.
It seems like a curl joke to raise a child in this world of plenty only to destroy it before their adulthood.
Arguably, keeping evolution going aka providing our offspring a good future is pretty much the only purpose of life. I don't have a problem with anyone choosing different goals for themselves, but the crowd advising "shouldn't have children because outlook not great" just seem crazy to me. We should do better exactly for those to come after us, so at best this mindset is the same as "giving up, to late" all over again, just in a less obvious form.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "threatened". Sure, humans will continue to exist, we won't go extinct, at least not globally. But we're looking at local and possibly global societal collapse. If we're back 500 years in the past developmentally and technologically, that's a huge deal. Maybe even if you survive, can you go back to a world without vaccines, antibiotics and mass communication?
Do you think we can lose 500 years of tech development globally? I can see some areas becoming challenging and definitely a slowdown in progress but it seems unlikely that all this knowledge will evaporate
I don't have a good answer to that question, I'm not sure anyone does. But if society collapses, much of that knowledge goes with it. Our society is incredibly complex and fragile, with a very high degree of specialization. That makes us vulnerable to these kinds of issues.
While the "dark ages" were hardly dark and ignorant, the collapse of the Roman empire meant advanced road building and concrete were lost for 1500 years. So there is some historical precedent here.
500 years would put us back to 1500ish, I can’t see that, steam technology and electric motors/turbines are simply doable (and where done) with not much technology to boot strap from, hand tools made machines which made specialised machines which repeated for generations but the first step comes back to steam and electrification.
It’s not like every book in every library would or could disappear.
I think there is a problem with knowledge being very dencly concentrated and supply chains being so long.
If you took someone who worked in a steel mill I bet they would have no idea how to produce steel from first principles. They know what their job entails, they know which bits of equipment need serviced an maintained but they don't know how to get from rocks to bar stock.
Similarly if you had a perfectly working steel mill and you cut the supply of coke or iron ore few would know how to get it up and running again. If you cut the supply of the alloying elements you might get a passable mild steel but not one to the exact specifications you require.
I think it's probably surprising how few vital links you have to cut before life as we know it breaks down.
We might lose electronics and such, but we won't forget that a wood stove is more efficient than an open fireplace. We won't forget that it's a good idea to dig your outhouse far away from your source of drinking water.
Well, I'm certainly not getting out alive. And so far, nobody that I know of has. Maybe someday, one day, though.
But yes, you likely meant "we're" in the sense of the human race, or modern technological society. I really doubt that the human race is seriously at risk. Although global population could drop substantially. As part of modern technological society crashing.
So it goes. It was probably inevitable.
Edit: As with population boom-and-bust cycles, generally.
Look, I do think some coastal communities may need to engineer some solutions to prevent damage, or some cities may need to "retract" inland...but it's not like ocean levels have ever been static. http://www.kwaad.net/SeaLevel-MiddleAges-LittleIceAge.html
You need to look beyond just US corn. Crop yields need to continue increasing globally just to keep up with population growth, which going to be a significant challenge. At the same time, farmland is being lost to urbanization and desertification every single day. On top of that, weeds and pests are developing resistance to chemicals, and pollinating insects are dying off rapidly. Plus, GMO notwithstanding, conventional intensification methods are running into diminishing returns. So: farming ain't getting any easier.
Now, enter climate change. Droughts are bad. Downpours (cf. rainiest year) are arguably worse, because they accelerate soil erosion. Many places have lost half or more of their arable soil over the past half century, and rebuilding soil takes many, many years. No soil, no harvest.
So I don't share your optimism. Perhaps there are high tech solutions to all of the above problems, but they're (currently) too expensive for most of the world.
While it's true that there's an abundance of water, the issue is that there's limited drinking water.
You can't survive on drinking ocean water. There's currently no energy-efficient process to remove salt and other impurities from unpotable water. That's a real issue.
Increased rainfall could be good, but could cause flooding and doesn't do much benefit when it's acidic.
Well we really don't have very good predictions for how much rainfall will occur over the next century, but we have no reason to believe that droughts will become standard. Especially since we just experienced record rainfall in the midst of the 4th hottest year in modern records.
There are ways to remove salt from ocean water. It's just almost always more expensive than extracting from the widely available fresh water sources on the planet.
As long as the water cycle is going, we'll still have fresh water.
Rainfall is good, but flooding is a localized issue. It's not a global concern. CO2 doesn't cause acid rain.
> We've got tons of resources for energy (more than ever in history).
Europe is already past its peak, and it already has some effects on its economy. (GPD is roughly proportional to the energy we spend: less energy, less stuff.) Unless we have some technological breakthrough, available energy will go down, and the economy will soon follow.
Malthus was wrong only because we found fossil fuels, allowing our crop yields to follow the exponential growth of the population (the growth used to be linear). If we're not careful, we could very well face a Malthusian collapse.Hmm.
> I'm really not seeing a reason to panic.
Certainly. Panicking only makes things worse. And the "time to panic" is precisely the time when we must not panic.
The productive and habitable locations will move and our governments will probably not keep up with migration crises. The issue is that there well be a dramatic reshuffling, even if total output remains strong.
That does come off as harsh. But in my defense, I did spend a decade in the NGO sector, at nominal wage, trying to build support for reducing CO2 etc emissions. Some decades ago.
Although there's been some progress since -- such as improved energy efficiency, and dramatic increases in solar and wind generation -- it's been overall totally inadequate. We're still heading for civilization-threatening changes in global climate.
Am I not entitled to some "I told you so" lulz?
Also, the "I don't care much, because I'll be dead." attitude has arguably been common among US industrial management. That plus "Hey, we can make good money by gaming the changes."
The seasons won't be disrupted mate. The seasons depend on the tilt of the Earth's axis as it rotates around the sun. The worst case scenario we're looking at is a shift in the fertile zones that crops can thrive in. That shift is far easier to deal with in a global warming scenario than a global cooling scenario. If we were to be entering an ice age, crop yields would go down and food supply would shrink. As it stands, warmth and CO2 are good for plants, so it's not likely to damage food supply at all.
Ah. Yes, I said Mediterranean. But I meant it in the classical sense. Of a sea used for transportation among major centers of civilization. When everything in the current temperate zones has become ultra-tropical hellhole.
yes, I was panicking back when al gore tried to scare the crap out of all of us by saying all ice caps will be melted by 2012 and to start panicking because we were going to lose all the coastal cities.
he then proceeded to buy investment property on the beach.
Has anyone seen predictions that would provide a good estimate of when everyone would die? My sense is if we can surface this data to poor people quickly they might have time to save money and move to Northen Canada where most are saying the weather would be perfect as the climate heat average index increases. The more we share this on FB the faster we can save everyone. I think we can all agree rich people can stay in their original location bc they will have money to pay for AC. Just my 2 cents here.
Two things. First, anybody ever think about why an ice covered body of land was called Greenland? Here's a clue, it used to be a lot warmer and green. This is nothing new. Ice was a disaster for the settlers of Greenland.
And this:
"Scientists already know that the Greenland ice sheet is melting. But the hidden heat source originating from deep inside the Earth partially responsible for that melting has been a mystery. Now, researchers have pinned down evidence of that heat, revealing yet another force pushing glaciers into the ocean."
Individual action cannot convert to zero carbon generation, make treaties, implement carbon taxes, require impact labelling or ban unsustainable methods.
Governments are the only ones with the necessary leverage. Even if we have to wait for some country to elect a Green party government, or there be enough XR style demonstrations disrupting the economy that they have to act.
Clearly government has failed to solve this. And when there's a problem that needs solving, and the current 'solution' ain't working, well you'd be crazy to stick with that being 'the solution' wouldn't you?
> The first step in that is to loosen up your certainty that only via government can anything large scale happen.
If you want to do that, you're gonna need to present some plausible alternatives... otherwise you're not truly "challenging" anything so much as saying "this is a belief you have that I will not provide any evidence to counter but merely point out."
I don't agree that I need to come up with anything beyond raising the idea that we should stop thinking that government can/will solve this.
Once many people come to accept the truth of this, many minds will think in directions other than obsessing about government and what it is not doing.
People tend to disagree very strongly with new ideas. You can see that right here - this thread is voted to the bottom of the HN topic. That's OK. It's an idea that once planted cannot be unthought - the government is not the solution. Let's start thinking of how we can solve this without any dependence on government.
> I don't agree that I need to come up with anything beyond raising the idea that we should stop thinking that government can/will solve this.
Oh yes you do. Certainly you think we can have an alternative to government for a reason? Care to share that with us?
Besides, government or no, the only way to fix the problem is through collective action. Not destroying our environment needs to be a social norm. Whatever is required to stop the current train wreck needs to become mainstream. Otherwise, we'll just continue our merry way until our civilization collapses in a couple decades. Worst case, I'll be alive to see it.
So. Besides begging our governments to do something, what do you propose? Overthrow them? Obsolete them? Ignore them? How? What would we need to succeed?
We can vote with our wallets (or feet) all we want, if we don't get over 80% of the population onboard, it just won't work.
> > I don't agree that I need to come up with anything beyond raising the idea that we should stop thinking that government can/will solve this.
> Oh yes you do. Certainly you think we can have an alternative to government for a reason? Care to share that with us?
He did. You didn't listen. He said that we need something beside the government, because the government isn't actually going to do anything (or at least not anything like enough).
So if you're going to argue with his position, I would ask you what evidence you see that the government will ever do anything close to enough to solve global warming? Because, as I look at the current situation, and the last 10 years, I'm with andrewstuart: government isn't going to get it done. That plan shows almost zero evidence that it will ever work.
Now, look, you should keep trying to get government to do what you think needs done. But don't put all your eggs in that basket, because it looks like it's a pretty lousy basket.
We don't know. The point at the moment is that it needs to be replaced - that government is not going to take adequate action. "What should we do" is the next question, and a very good one.
I guess, if I were to pick one thing, I might say "install solar everywhere you can". Not only do you use less fossil-generated power, but you also help manufacturers ride the cost curve down, which makes more people consider installing it.
And by "everywhere you can", I mean some places were you can't actually install it, but you can nudge people that way. Suggest to your boss that they should install it at work. Mention it to the minister at church, or to the manager at the bar (or even both, if you regularly go both places).
The obvious problem is that without the government authority by threat of violence, selfish entities will certainly choose to go their own way. You and your community may choose to use composting toilets, but Dow Chemical will find it cheaper, sans EPA, to just dump their effluvia in the local river.
To be clear: I believe in and support the notion that the government should set the rules (based on established science) and enforce the law. (No, not particularly with physical violence beyond that needed for incarceration of gross offenders.)
You keep saying that government cannot do this. All the replies say that regulation, labeling, bans, and widespread legal action are the only things that can prompt the world at large to act, and those have to be enacted by government by definition.
I'm not sure what you're implying. You seem to be missing out the bit describing which non-governmental actor can fix this.
The first issue is that everyone else thinks only government can solve this. If you say governments can't, but have no other solution, you're essentially saying "no-one can do this." Which, while depressing, isn't going to achieve much.
The second issue is that, clearly, governments could actually fix this. They most likely aren't going to. But the capital and human investments needed aren't impossible. It's not like a neolithic tribe building a computer for example. Resolving global warming is actually possible with our current resources and technology.
> Resolving global warming is actually possible with our current resources and technology.
Really? We'd all love to see a plan.
Or by "resolving" did you mean "holding it to only a 2 degree rise"?
> They most likely aren't going to.
Yeah... I think that's kind of andrewstuart's point. They aren't going to. So, given that they aren't going to, what's the next move?
> You seem to be missing out the bit describing which non-governmental actor can fix this.
andrewstuart may not know. I certainly don't. But if the government isn't going to fix it, then the correct move is to stop expecting that the government is going to fix it. I don't know what else to do, you don't, and andrewstuart doesn't. But maybe we ought to start thinking like we've got to figure out how to solve it, because the government isn't going to.
Prioritize. Food, shelter, health. Everything else is expendable. Accept an unprecedented, long term recession on the order of 10% per year, possibly a bit less if we're lucky.
That's the easy part. The hard part is doing that without having a civil war (or just plain war) on your hands. We most probably need to come up with a convincing story where the economy slows down drastically, and we're all happier than we are now.
There's one little snag, though: this plan necessarily involves reducing inequalities. We cannot afford the richest of us. The problem is that they are rich and have a lot of influence. They will throw the army at us (possibly by asking the politicians whose election campaing they funded).
Build enough renewables to replace all fossil fuels and then some, use any extra energy to suck carbon out of the atmosphere and bury it. Plant trees and turn them into charcoal. If you're very fancy you can do some more risky geoengineering.
> Build enough renewables to replace all fossil fuels and then some
Might work if you throw lots and lots of nuclear reactors into the mix. It's less dangerous than most people think, and is most likely the most efficient way to amortise the energy shortage induced recession.
(Renewables still need massive investment, I'm just saying they likely won't be enough.)
There are studies for Germany that show that just renewables can do it. I assume in other countries it's similar. I'm not opposed to nuclear, but building nuclear plants takes way too long. We have twenty years give or take to become carbon neutral, there doesn't seem to be enough time to fight the legal battles you have to win before you can even start building nuclear plants.
Wind and Solar have something Nuclear doesn't have, ability of small players to enter the market, relentless decreases in capital costs, and low regulatory requirements. Which why they have traction and nuclear doesn't.
Thus far governments have been unwilling to solve it. They need to be pressured though political activism and mass protests until the problem for them becomes too inconvenient to ignore.
The DOE says 3/4 of American homes have AC, and furthermore, AC uses 6% of all electricity generated in the United States, quite staggering imo and a lot more than I would have expected. Without AC, a lot of America would just be too unbearable to support some major communities.
[0] https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/home-cooling-systems/air-...