I personally believe we're doomed. Even if there is a technological solution, as things get worse it gets harder to deploy it. If people are struggling with persistent climate driven change then they'll be using whatever is cheap and available.
I've accepted it though. I don't doomer at people unless they ask. I can't do anything about the situation. I've voted for green parties and politics my whole life. If I have blame it's not for denialists, it's for all those politicians who know and accept the science but did nothing, they didn't have the guts, being voted in again was more important.
It does make me sad to see so many HN comments rolling out the same stupid "I don't trust the data" arguments that were pretty thoroughly debunked within the scientific community 10 years ago, yet still feel the need to jump on every thread about it because the whole thing makes them so angry.
If there is a theory for how climate change will doom us, you should spend time talking about it. The threats people usually bring up are relatively mild. Eg, wet bulb events are pretty scary but are also sound relatively straightforward to mitigate if they start happening. Human societies deal with nasty weather events already.
I've heard scenarios put as mild as a reduction in real GDP growth, which is just a non-issue compared to the risks people want to shoulder to mitigate climate change.
> I've voted for green parties and politics my whole life
These people tend to be anti-nuclear in my experience; so I'm not sure from your comment if that strategy is a good idea. Environmentalists have been some of the more effective lobby groups for locking in fossil fuel use through 1980-2020 when we really should have been transitioning to nuclear power.
> wet bulb events are pretty scary but are also sound relatively straightforward to mitigate if they start happening
First time I've heard that, everyone else says "this will kill anyone experiencing it for more than a brief period, meaning hours or minutes depending on the details".
Solution is only easy on a scale of one person, "move elsewhere", or rich societies, "stop working outside and install aircon inside", which isn't so easy for anyone working in agriculture or much of Africa and India.
> Solution is only easy on a scale of one person, "move elsewhere", or rich societies, "stop working outside and install aircon inside", which isn't so easy for anyone working in agriculture or much of Africa and India.
India's real growth rate is >5% p.a. They're going to be a rich society pretty soon, because they are behaving like a clever country and building lots of power plants.
And while horrific things are likely to happen in Africa, horrific things have been happening in Africa every year for my entire lifetime. So yeah, it is terrible but not going to make me depressed by the future so much as the present. They need to figure out economic growth like Asia did. It is their only hope.
> stop working outside and install aircon inside
I dunno, sounds scalable to me. Repurpose office buildings with air conditioning for crisis use sometimes. People with air conditioners help those without.
Order of magnitude it sounds pretty doable. I don't see where the scale issue comes from to the point where I'd consider anyone I know "doomed".
EDIT If you described snowstorms, earthquakes, bushfires or tropical cyclones in the abstract they sound civilisation ending too. They are bad but people cope.
If India is building more power plants, which I'm assuming are coal? Isn't that going to mess them up worse than before? I mean, having air-con is nice, it's not possible for the whole of India to be inside with air-conditioning on for 3+ months of the year.
Even in places like Tokyo, they have to limit their use of A/C because it' so energy intensive due to the crazy amount of heat from the urban heat island effect.
> Even in places like Tokyo, they have to limit their use of A/C because it' so energy intensive due to the crazy amount of heat from the urban heat island effect.
I was in Singapore on Friday, for one day.
There's air-conditioning in the MRT (metro) stations, but (at least from what I experienced during my brief stay) the stations are not typically closed off from the outside.
You approach a station at street level and it's perhaps 33°C (91F) w/ humidity outside. Around midday my phone reported the weather as '33°C feels like 38°C (104F)'.
You go down an open set of stairs/escalators, and it gets progressively cooler and then you're in the metro and it's pleasantly cool. I was very quickly wondering whether this wasn't a mind-blowingly wasteful use of energy.
heat rises and cold falls, so the cold air will stay in the subway system. there is no real need for doors/etc at the entrances as long as you're going down.
the subways themselves put off a substantial amount of heat (from friction, motor loss, etc - all inefficiency eventually becomes heat) and for example in london they have problems with heat buildup in the tube system. so air-conditioning the platforms is generally desirable and probably necessary (especially in a more equatorial climate than england).
> I dunno, sounds scalable to me. Repurpose office buildings with air conditioning for crisis use sometimes. People with air conditioners help those without.
Your "solution" is an example of what I meant by "easy on a scale of one person […] or rich societies", and no, they won't work for India. Not yet, anyway, as their power grid can't supply enough to run AC for everyone at the same time[0] in the event of a sufficiently wide and hot heatwave — and possibly never, as even the UK has measurable excess deaths during heatwaves (although caveat the UK has approximately no AC installed). On the plus side, India has completed the electrification of all the villages.
Remember, it's not just the national average that matters, if the bottom 15% can't afford it, they can't survive those events — 15% of India is earning no more than 125k INR/year[1], which at current rates is $1,508/year[2]. A few low income people might choose to get AC and have their friends over, but I think[3] it is sadly unreasonable to suggest that even a significant fraction of low income people could find a high income person with AC who will let them stay over for a bit.
Also, 45.6% are currently working in agriculture[4], and when these events happen, approximately all of that sector (in any specific location) has to stop working even if they have access to a building with AC and aren't just killed by such an event in their area. So do all the builders, though that's a much smaller sector. And when that happens, they earn less, so they have less money to spend on AC.
This is kinda what I mean about the doomer cases I hear being weak. This is all bad, but bad in line with what humanity has pretty much always been dealing with. History is a really nasty place. The present too. There are risks here, but they are not significant enough to justify abandoning fossil fuels or economic growth. Or being gloomy, for that matter.
Using those figures, you seem to be making an argument that 15% of Indians are at risk. That is pretty bad. But the upside of business as usual is much bigger than the downside. At a 5% real growth rate, income doubles in about 15 years. That is a lot of wealth that they can use to solve this problem. And approximately 80-90% of living Indians seem to be due to the fossil fuel economy that people are blaming for global warming; so by raw numbers most people are still coming out ahead. The obvious path is to keep going with coal until it runs out.
And the doom case hinges on 85% of the population sitting there and doing literally nothing while 15% fall over and die on the street. You m might believe that is likely, but I think it is implausible. And if it does happen that way, that doesn't seem like it'd sit on my conscience.
> Also, 45.6% are currently working in agriculture
Now that is a horrific stat. I would encourage Indian's to do whatever is necessary to get those poor people out of farm jobs and into something more comfortable. That sort of agricultural sector is a path of poverty, the people can't be productive enough to sustain a comfortably materialist society.
The path to doing that probably involves a lot of power stations. Likely coal fired. This point dovetails nicely with:
> Not yet, anyway, as their power grid can't supply enough to run AC for everyone at the same time
They'll need to beef up their grid, or they will be poor and probably die horribly. More electricity fixes a lot of problems simultaneously.
IMO you're continuing to demonstrate the wrong type of world model, seeing numbers as absolute cut-offs rather than distributions.
The 15% number was being used to demonstrate that wages are not equal — that number is not my free choice, it is not due to me thinking an income of US$1508/year is a magic number below which one cannot have AC, but rather it comes from how that specific income distribution graph was broken down. The underlying reality is (unless all the UBI proponents have missed a huge example), not constant income in each of those boxes; and a separate point that not everyone in any given income category will be able to choose to buy AC simultaneously even if it is available for purchase.
I am going to say that when such events happen today[0], people already die. The question is how often, and how many are impacted at any given time. And given that temperature is a continuum, what implications this has for close-to-threshold conditions where people can live through it just so long as they don't move or stand up, or the even earlier broad transition zone where they can do decreasing levels of labour before being forced to rest (answer: sub-threshold events are more frequent).
> At a 5% real growth rate, income doubles in about 15 years. That is a lot of wealth that they can use to solve this problem.
The average income doubles in 15 years, but no, it's not a lot of wealth — it's starting at a moderately low level, and there's a lot of things that are also important to spend money on, and even if everyone picks AC first and then the rest, a fixed percentage growth for all groups puts most of the numerical growth in the already rich; if you want to argue around this issue, you would need a model that shows different growth rates for different income levels[1] or that the culture is significantly different from how the west demonstrably does things[4][5].
> And approximately 80-90% of living Indians seem to be due to the fossil fuel economy that people are blaming for global warming; so by raw numbers most people are still coming out ahead. The obvious path is to keep going with coal until it runs out.
Er, what? No. Even from the pure energy argument, the obvious answer is "use the cheapest power". That's not coal, and hasn't been for a while now. At least, it is everywhere else, when I tried searching for the Indian prices the pages I was given were clearly written by ChatGPT…
Also for the specific example you picked, "until the coal runs out" would put out enough CO2 to cause measurable cognitive impacts worldwide as humans, unlike plants, do not thrive with more CO2. Nuclear power would also be "green" in this sense, though given the geopolitics of India and Pakistan specifically, I'd hope both would move away from nuclear for reasons entirely out of scope of this discussion and regardless of any optimism about the price of future reactors.
> And the doom case hinges on 85% of the population sitting there and doing literally nothing while 15% fall over and die on the street. You m might believe that is likely, but I think it is implausible. And if it does happen that way, that doesn't seem like it'd sit on my conscience.
It won't sit on my conscience either, just as the grounds for my belief already don't sit on my conscience, though my beliefs are anchored on European culture rather than Indian culture which may well be different.
Specifically with regard to heat issues: "Despite the fact that many European countries activated heat prevention plans during the summer of 2022, the estimation of over 60,000 heat-related deaths suggests that prevention plans were only partially effective."[2] (Also note that Europe has a GDP/capita about fifteen times higher than India[3], which would take 55.5 years of 5% growth to match).
And with regard to "do rich people really help poor people?", using homelessness as a proxy: "The data shows that more than one million properties across England in 2022 were unoccupied (4.01 per cent of all dwellings), an increase of nearly 60,000 homes since 2018."[4] vs "New research from Shelter shows at least 309,000 people in England will spend Christmas without a home, including almost 140,000 children. This is a stark increase of 14%, 38,100 people, in one year."[5]
Now, if you're like me, at this point you're thinking "why isn't Ben giving evidence about specifically Indian heat deaths?": I wanted to, but it seems they don't actually exist in a good quality form, and it's politically divisive within the country: "The Indian Express newspaper reported that one hospital superintendent who’d publicly linked deaths to heatstroke was later removed from his position for giving “a careless statement.” It then quoted a doctor who’d visited the same clinic as saying the causes were unclear. […] Beyond that, though, it’s symptomatic of the parlous state of health services and public data in a country that lacks the means to even know for certain how many people its broiling climate is killing, let alone take measures to help them. […] A common solution to that problem is looking at excess deaths — comparing recorded fatalities with the number you’d expect in a typical year to iron out the effects of reporting bias. […] Even that approach may be inadequate in India, however, because the most basic data on mortality is too patchy. Nationwide, roughly 8% of estimated deaths in 2019 went unrecorded, according to an annual government survey, and only 19% of the total were certified by a medical professional, a step considered routine in most countries."[6]
(Also, "fall over and die on the street" is more likely to be "go home and lie down out of the sun, and still die", as the 'wet bulb' condition is that you can't even survive in a breeze in the shade, and I'd expect people to seek shade and a breeze before the temperature reached true deadly 'wet bulb' levels over the course of any given day. This also means the AC has to be actual AC and not just a fan).
> More electricity fixes a lot of problems simultaneously.
On this we agree.
[0] and they do happen, with increasing frequency, which is why they are in the meme-sphere at all, though caveat the language in the meme sphere often conflates "hot bulb" with all heat-related deaths and that's not actually what the term means.
> Environmentalists have been some of the more effective lobby groups for locking in fossil fuel use through 1980-2020 when we really should have been transitioning to nuclear power.
If environmentalists are so effective, climate change would have been a higher priority over those decades. It seems likelier to me that there's other, more convincing reasons we haven't rolled out nuclear at a huge scale. For example the following are typically more convincing and applicable to nuclear as well: high costs, high political risk, fossil fuel lobbying.
I've always been pro nuclear. We talk about it a lot now (on hn anyway), but when I was growing up in the UK the greens had such a minor voice I didn't even know their stance on the issue.
The hypothesis of doom that I subscribe to is that it'll cause cascading effects that destroy parts of the existing ecology (this is already happening) and then the same to our food supply faster than we can react to. I don't worry it's going to mass cause temperatures that kill me directly if that's your implication. It'll be social collapse far away from where I live that will spread.
I live in a safe country that gets about 80% of its power from renewables. But we don't build those wind turbines here and we certainly don't mine for their materials, if the supply of stuff goes awry we'll be just as buggered as everywhere else.
Well, if you don't see the problem, then please hand over your home to someone else, and move soon. Not a problem right, if your area becomes uninhabitable? Also change your diet, because of other plants growing in your (new) area, or the old ones no longer growing in your previous area. Also calculate in to pay way more rent, because world population will have less space to live in and more people compete for your new home. I am sure you also won't mind devastating floods and other weather evens happening, forcing you to leave your previous home.
In case of part of climate researcher being right and there being a point of no return, please also calculate in the cost for building a climate bunker under ground.
>The threats people usually bring up are relatively mild
Failed crops on a global scale may result in widespread famine and war. Crops can fail as a result of not enough rain, too much rain, not enough insects, too many inspects, all kinds of climate related things.
I remember reading during covid that there is not some massive food cache somewhere with the government ready to bail us out if they need to. That we are basically living season to season.
Putting the blame for the climate crisis on environmentalists for opposing nuclear is very disingenuous. Nuclear would not have saved us from SUV's, consumption society or all the other forces wrecking the earth we live on. If nuclear would have made electricity cheap and abundant without addressing other factors, we just would have wasted more of it.
If we have enough cheap energy, the other stuff doesn't matter. It is like someone from 200AD being worried that we're not all working the fields and we're going to starve in winter - that isn't a constraint on modern society, we broke it with cheap energy. Fuel goes in the machine, the machine does lots of work, and then we get food.
In fact, it might literally be like someone in the UK in 17xx worrying about the early industrial revolution because of climate change. The cost benefit calculation favours the industrial revolution by a heavy margin. If energy gets cheap enough, climate change happens and nobody needs to care.
> If we have enough cheap energy, the other stuff doesn't matter.
Not so — the person you're responding to was demonstrating that important things had not in fact been invented, while your example only worked out because we did actually invent stuff.
Indeed, even today electricity is only about 10% of humanity's total power usage, and that's with batteries cheap enough to make electric cars viable. (Bit of a shame that the alternative to batteries, hydrogen, still isn't cheap enough to be a great contender today, even despite the strong incentive to replace gasoline during the height of pro-nuclear attitudes and the OPEC-induced fuel crisis).
How exactly does an opposition party force the country to do something like this? Why is it the fault of the Green party, and not of the parties that were in government at the time and made the decision?
That is incredibly biased framing. The main opinion in the broad population at the time was that nuclear power was too dangerous. You're right that the governing parties followed this to stay in power, but how is that then the fault of the opposition party, not of the governing parties?
The green party wasn't able to make this happen or not happen, as they had no governing power. The governing parties were able to make this happen or not happen. They chose to adopt part of the opposition policy to gain political power, but doing this also means they have to accept the responsibility for those decisions.
They might not having governing power, but these opposition parties, as well as NGOs like Greenpeace had a lot of propaganda power that they used for evil.
Even if this were true (and I strongly disagree with both the idea and the framing), it would make the governing parties complicit in the "evil". They could have used their power to fight against the "evil", but instead chose to participate in it to score political points.
Closing down all nuclear plants was first decided on in the year 2000, 24 years ago. It were the Liberals (FDP) and Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) who rescinded that decision in 2010, only to later reinstitute it in panic after the Fukushima meltdown happened.
Those reactors that got shuttered hadn't had any safety inspections in years, they had no viable fuel left and not even the owning energy companies wanted to operate them any longer than absolutely necessary, so they would have been shut down even without the Green party in the current government.
That the now missing nuclear baseload had to have been replaced with coal, well.. Thank the Christian Democrats for that. They're the ones that favoured building out coal, slowing down the build-out of renewables as much as possible, at every chance they got.
True. However, as I experienced it, there was negligence regarding a base load problem among those favoring renewable energies.
I got into emotionally charged arguments for even asking, "Will Germany produce enough electrical power after shutting down nuclear power stations?" People told me base load was an outdated way of looking at the energy market and a conservative talking point to justify cutbacks in subsidies for renewables. An often repeated argument was that Germany has been a net exporter of electrical power for many years, so reducing capacity should not be a problem.
Personally, I feel that neither side engaged in an honest public debate. I remember very well a leading Green politician, Jürgen Trittin, declaring that the transition towards renewables would cost each German citizen as much as an ice cream cone. Yes, politics must create positive momentum, but being off by orders of magnitude signals fundamental incompetence. The usual counter is, "Had everything gone according to plan, it totally would have worked out." That is childish and not a way to do serious politics.
> they didn't have the guts, being voted in again was more important
Isn't this how democracy is supposed to work? Isn't it, as a general rule, preferable that politicians fear being voted out, and so do the things that the voters want, so they get reelected? The alternative seems to me for a politician to say one thing in the campaign - what the people want to hear, and then do something else when elected - what he thinks is best. Some do that, but they're not loved for it.
I am pretty sure that even when or if politicians do not care about the voters, they still do not do the right thing, but some other wrong thing, like enriching themselves.
What you are in fact complaining about is that politicians elected by other people did what those people wanted, instead of what you wanted. While not laying the same complaint on those you voted for - greens. They obviously did right to listen to their voters - you and people you agree with.
It's not about the guts of a chosen few. It's about humanity overall. If we do not care about the environment, billions of us, a handful who care will not, can not change much.
Problem is that democracy doesn’t seem to work in bad times, voters only want to hear that they have more, more, more. More jobs, more income, more houses and cars. No politician will win the election by stating voters will have to work longer hours, for less payment, have to pay more taxes, and send their kids to the army to protect our freedom. As soon as that is necessary, populist politicians will gain votes by stating all of that is not needed.
If you think democracy is a system for obtaining good outcomes, then yes, it doesn't work too well. Actually I think we don't have any system for obtaining good outcomes consistently.
If you think democracy is a system for getting the government to do what the people want, then it's working as designed in many places.
The problem is not politicians, the problem is not democracy. We are the problem, we the people who want more more, and do not accept the consequences of our actions. We vote for cheap gas, then shift the blame wherever we can: to politicians, to democracy, to other countries etc.
>We are the problem, we the people who want more more, and do not accept the consequences of our actions
Ask why. Consider why it is that people do that. Is it really human nature? Can't we imagine a world, or even a country, where the cultural zeitgeist is different?
We certainly can have smaller communities where people accept the consequences of their actions, where people will hear about what else happens besides "more" when you ask for more. It's not that the human brain floating in a vacuum is incapable of understanding that actions have consequences. We develop that skill pretty early!
I think it's interesting to look at what separates these smaller groups from the bigger groups. I don't think it's people themselves being built of a different stuff. It's the inputs and the norms that differ.
I can certainly think of norms for a group that result in worse outcomes. I also don't think we're necessarily at an optimum in epistemics, looking around me. So optimistically, candidly, there's room to do somewhat better.
Yes, it would help if we would be more careful with our choices. But it would also be nice if politicians could be held accountable: if they say global warming is fake, and it turns out to be true, they should get some sort of penalty. Same with allowing pollution, you’re responsible for the health impact.
If a politician doesn’t think global warming is true, at least be open to the fact they might be wrong and be careful with their choices. The environment is a fragile balance, better to be careful and limit things that might impact this fragile balance.
Under the assumption of perfect information, yes. Politicians should be afraid of doing unpopular things that will not get them re-elected.
A problem that exists down there, outside the internet bubble of information overload, is that people _aren't_ reliably informed. A human in a vacuum without access to accurate information will never spontaneously guess that they should care about the environment.
A politician's decisions are informed by voter preferences. That's good.
But the voters, themselves, how should they know whether to care or not care about any particular subject they're not experts in? Who do you trust? Where does information come from?
Well, there isn't a widespread decentralized information effort. It's not billions of us independently doing investigatory work. It is a handful of us, a small relative percentage. Voters can't all be experts. They have to trust some smaller group.
The majority of people aren't deniers, so the minority that wants super aggressive change in policies just has to realize that not everyone is a revolutionary, and people shift their voting very little so this needs to be done over generations.
The problem here is the benefits are localised but the harm is globalised. Nobody in Micronesia can vote to raise fuel taxes in the US, despite being very much affected by US energy policy.
If we all voted together it might be different. Though I doubt it, to be honest.
This is exactly the problem. Above assumptions about democracy simply are not true at world level. I would imagine that if every person in the world would be able to vote equally on these topics - and everyone would have the same impact, things would look different.
The rich countries are a minority population wise (or better: the people benefitting from non-ecological behavior are a minority). But when climate based refugees come, people might change their mind - or when we see in the news people dying in those affected regions… (oh wait - we already don’t care about seeing people starving… :( )
Greta Thinberg’s speech at the UN a few years ago is crystal clear. Climate is collapsing, it is an actionable situation, and we choose to do pretty much nothing about it.
Her message and the way she conveyed it is, for the millions that it resonated with, more important than who her mother is or her credentials (what credentials are you expecting of a teenager?)
I don't even know her mother or the status of her mother, and read that from your comment for the first time today. I tend to focus on the message, not the ancestors.
Because of shaking some people awake. And because of the content of the message. To me personally it could have been anyone delivering the message, but I am glad, that she reached lots of people. Starting this at the age of 12 (iirc) is remarkable, even if it does not change the message. Although one could argue, that it does add a kind of meta message: "Look here, I am a child! I will have to bear the consequences of your (in)actions!"
What is your goal with this question? What are you trying to accomplish? Are you confused about the existence or nature of climate collapse or its action-ability? Are you unhappy about Greta’s contribution to the conversation and hoping to discredit her? Could you clarify your intentions?
What I feel from your contribution is simply interference and pulling the conversation in an unproductive direction. There’s enough of that I think.
What I’m more curious about is - what are some leverage points to shift toward solutions. Denialism is not an acceptable solution from where I stand.
Her credentials are her ability to rally support/interest in climate issues. What credentials would satisfy you? Folks with PhDs and political accolades have been speaking the same points for years, and clearly they haven't bread success.
Frankly a question to ask is why you feel a person like her isn't encouraged to speak out on these issues, and isn't worth listening to? Is she saying things that aren't true? If so it seems like the thing to do would be to speak to those misstatements.
Much more likely though, systemic sexism and ageism make it difficult for folks to accept young women in leadership roles, particularly when their message asks for change from the status quo.
So the reasons you should care about what this person is saying are 1) she is speaking truths about climate change 2) the truths are about existential threats to humanity and she is able to communicate the seriousness of those threats 3) she is able to rally groups of like minded people with a common vision of those threats and their seriousness 4) paying attention to her and uplifting her leadership role helps erode systemic sexism and ageism.
> Fly less or not at all, Cut down on meat consumption or go vegan, Join an activist movement, Vote
Two of those are immediately actionable and have significant impact, and the latter two are really important for building political will to overcome the efforts by a rich but minority group who profit from the status quo and whose money will insulate them from many downsides.
> The 20-year-old Swedish activist stuck to her stance against all new oil, gas and coal developments during the fringe event, that was not part of the official conference agenda.
This letter is stronger but calls for things which could be done immediately with no technological breakthroughs needed like removing subsidies for fossil fuels and not expanding usage:
I think it very much depends on your situation. I personally look to her as a role model who's demonstrated the value of strikes and collective action in influencing climate legislation.
Others might take inspiration in her criticisms of air transportation (something that seems to be growing in popularity these days) but I'm not able to give up seeing my aging parents across the country a few more times so that point hasn't reached me quite yet.
Her wikipedia page is worth 5 minutes if you can spare them and maybe go from there.
Come on! Reorganization to cut fossil fuel by 5% year on is doable and hits the 2 degrees target, and no one dies. The deaths are on the side of doing nothing to the status quo and letting the world burn.
“Listen bub, said the slaveowner - if you’ve got a better system I’d be delighted to hear it!”
idk maybe it’s not the job of literal teenagers to come up with solutioning that meets the arbitrary whims and constrains you’ll doubtlessly impose on them? They live within the system that you have built for them.
There have always been very obvious solutions: heavy taxation on carbon emissions, with economic sanctions and perhaps eventually military action for willful and deliberate violations. The problem is that you as adults don’t consider that feasible for your own arbitrary political reasons, and so you’ll push us down the path of collapsing the climate rather than rock the boat.
Just like those Chinese fishing boats cleaning out fisheries etc: really you are only a 50 pound dumb-bomb from a solution if it came down to it. China can’t project force, they certainly can’t defend every fishing boat spread across every coastline on the globe, and if they rattle back then you retaliate in some other way. They need us too, for now. They would quickly see the light on keeping their boats in check.
But you can’t solve the problem within the arbitrary political constraints set up by the current regimes.
We know the status quo doesn’t work and will collapse the climate within decades, and all anyone can do is ask why solutioning can’t be oriented around maintaining and upholding that same status quo. If you don’t change the game we all lose in the long run. But muh stock market will go down if we tax carbon!!!
The laws of the sea say one thing and china obviously won’t sign a new one that removes their right to strip-mine Greenland fisheries or whatever. And no nation will sign a treaty which truly penalizes them for collapsing the climate. And so the question is what next? You assume the answer is “nothing”, but it doesn’t have to be. And it in fact climate change itself is going to have a say too - political and military instability is already identified as a prime outcome from climate change for precisely this reason. You’re whistling past the graveyard.
What happens when some smaller nation (or group) decides drones look like a pretty good way to enforce some of this? We already see them effective with small state sponsors. Can you keep shipping safe around the entire coast of Africa, and every part of the southeast Asian region? Especially when we have absolutely democratized the means of warfare and driven the cost down to zero.
That’s the world she’s growing up and reacting to. You have truly given her and her generation nothing except a world on fire and you laugh at her for even recognizing or acknowledging this let alone attempting to reverse it, and I think that’s not going to work out as “politely” as you think.
But if you’re too shortsighted and intransigent to solve your own maze that you’ve built for yourself… why would you ever expect a literal child to be able to do it? Of course there are solutions, it just can’t be solved within your self-contradictory system. And as with anything - it’s difficult to get someone to acknowledge something when their paycheck (or quality of life, retirement fund, etc) depends on them not acknowledging it.
But ultimately, I think the people who die of climate change aren't just going to go quietly into the good night like you hope. and they get a vote too - they get all of the "boxes of democracy" in fact.
So is every other kid born the same year, she's famous because she's famous because she's famous. But anyway, there's worse people in the limelight, to worry about her.
Wikipedia has all primary sources at the bottom linked.
You don't need to trust wikipedia. You should trust the sources linked.
Wikipedia is basically a group collaboration on fact aggregation.
Why should you believe a random blog or a blog from an oil company more than a open collaborative group project which works transparent (site history+talk feature)?
For example, omitting relevant things, focusing on only some considered more important by some people, using impressive data to impress people with no deep idea sbout a topic without knowing how to interpret data relative to the full phenomena... the list is endless.
What is a fact is that politicians and secret services, according to Pedro Baños, often enter and manipulate in subversive ways information, specifically he mentioned controversial Wikipefia articles. He is a retired military.
So my advice is that we should all doubt by default about every topic that is politicized and gather information from as many sources as we can that we have a reason to trust. An open place where absolutely everyone can add and remove things is not a source I would take as primary. Yes , there are links. But the time it takes to go through all that is unfeasible for most people.
My advice: choose many sources, compare. Specifically, there is nothing as enriching as putting people with different opinions face to face for a live discussion. I fo not like arguments like 80% of "experts" say... that is not an argument... and science has plenty of examples where almost everyone was wrong, from whcih this man is an example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
He was beaten to death and enjailed in a madhouse, even their mates ignored him at the time. He was right.
What usually happens in these forums is that they do a lot of cherry-picking, or, at least, that is what I believe. I could be wrong, though.
> Even if there is a technological solution, as things get worse it gets harder to deploy it.
As the world gets hotter, some people will benefit. Those people will try to stop any serious attempts to reverse course, especially when the next generation comes (to them, the current climate is normal - why would we want to spend lots of money to revert it to the way it was hundreds of years ago).
A 2/3/4 C rise in global temperature is going to happen, and humans might put the brakes on, but they will never put it back the way it was.
> A 2/3/4 C rise in global temperature is going to happen, and humans might put the brakes on, but they will never put it back the way it was.
I think CO2 emissions are going to decline – not fast enough to prevent a 2/3/4 C rise in global temperatures – but I think that rise could well be just a temporary thing for a few centuries, after which the climate goes back to what it used to be.
People are trying to limit CO2 emissions – not hard enough, but they are trying – and renewable electricity, electric vehicles, etc, are in the long-run going to win out because even if you don't care about CO2 emissions at all, they have other advantages.
> a temporary thing for a few centuries, after which the climate goes back to what it used to be
Reduced or even zero emissions are not negative emissions. By what processes and at what time scales will 100% of the surplus accumulated CO2 go away? I am not so sure this can happen in just a few centuries.
"According to the IPCC's 2021 projections of global temperature under different emissions scenarios, peak temperature could be anything from 1.6 ºC in around 2050 (if the globe hits net zero emissions by then), dropping to 1.4 ºC by 2100; to, with emissions still climbing, 4.4 ºC at 2100, with the peak still to come."
The IPCC's own predictions are that temperatures will peak and thereafter fall due to reductions in anthropogenic CO2 emissions. The question is when it will peak and how big the peak will be, which all depends on how quickly emissions are cut.
> The IPCC's own predictions are that temperatures will peak and thereafter fall due to reductions in anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
Yes, but it's important to understand why. I believe it's because the oceans and atmosphere would not be in equilibrium when we reach zero emissions, and so the oceans would continue to absorb CO2 for a while. This reduces atmospheric CO2 concentration and temperature in the short term (at the cost of further ocean acidification).
But what happens after the oceans and atmosphere reach equilibrium? Where does the excess CO2 go?
I think it can only go away through the very slow process of bicarbonate formation. And I'm not convinced this can completely remove the excess CO2 in just a few centuries.
I believe James Hansen’s latest paper about long-term feedback effects actually predicts 10 degrees Celsius as the new equilibrium after a few centuries which seems… apocalyptic?
The IPCC views many of Hansen’s predictions as unlikely.
I don’t know who is right, but I think for someone who isn’t an expert at this, there is an argument for preferring the mainstream consensus to the views of a single controversial researcher-especially if one hasn’t spent the time to understand the details of that researchers’ work (I haven’t)
I fairly recently re-read some of Hansen’s work from the 80’s and it was quite prescient of the current state of the world (done in a time when a super computer would be firmly outmatched by a cheap cell phone of today), so I’m inclined to give him some consideration. Certainly his past performance makes no guarantees about his present work; I think he’s in much more of a mentor/managerial role these days anyway, but then again, I don’t think anyone can really tell you with certainty and precision what the future holds. That’s just the way it is.
When that happens, people will set fire to a coal seam or open a gas well because it's a cheap and easy way to maintain the climate at 'current' levels.
When people grew up in a 4C warmed world, that is the way they'll want to keep it.
Nope! A 4 degrees average rise means massive chaos of climate ups and downs, no one is going to be happy with that. Also note that extreme North/South location do not get good sunshine for plant growth, it's too low on the horizon, even if the temperatures are balmy...
You can do a lot of things about it. You can talk about it, you can gather data, you can vote politically and with your wallet, you can reduce your consumption, you can set the example for others, you can research, you can help in current organizations which are doing things about it... there is actually so much you can do if you really care. But people ale don't really care bc. putting in the work is harder than blindly consume and doom
This is a fiction. Just like the fact that you cannot end war by voting for antiwar candidates or end mass surveillance by voting for anti-surveillance candidates (viable ones do not exist, by design), you cannot meaningfully affect this trajectory by any individual choice.
That is absolutely not a fiction. You can make a big impact with all the things i mentioned and many more. Now it will obviously not change the thing overnight and the result will depend on how hard you work, what area you choose and a bit of luck i guess. But if you persist there will be results.
By changing a few things in your own behaviour and taking pride in it you can improve your own life. Not consuming so much actually improves a lot of other areas in your own life like physical and mental health, finances etc.
By working on things in your local area, raising awareness, getting involved with local government(at your town) you can make a difference with a few hours per week. Or be imaginative, do some research, get interested in some specific area and then try to apply it around you.
These are the easiest things you can do. And then you can do more, if you are ambitious. What you are describing is a viewpoint of somebody either lazy, resigned, or not really interested in these things.
I’m not sure if you are actually serious. They did not have billions of people relying on a very brittle global economy back in the day. They did not have cities with millions of people and an enormous infrastructure to keep these people alive.
I've accepted it though. I don't doomer at people unless they ask. I can't do anything about the situation. I've voted for green parties and politics my whole life. If I have blame it's not for denialists, it's for all those politicians who know and accept the science but did nothing, they didn't have the guts, being voted in again was more important.
It does make me sad to see so many HN comments rolling out the same stupid "I don't trust the data" arguments that were pretty thoroughly debunked within the scientific community 10 years ago, yet still feel the need to jump on every thread about it because the whole thing makes them so angry.