Ask HN: What do you do for global warming?

One aspect of climate change that I found/find difficult is being forced to think about mortality of myself & mortality of "civilisation". But on another hand: this isn't specific to climate change: personally, I was always going to die at some point, of something. At a larger scale, historically, all civilisations eventually collapse. When civilisations collapse, this does not mean that all individuals involved perish, although some may. Other individuals involved switch to new patterns of living, when the costs of being involved in the civilisation exceed the benefits offered.

So from one perspective, as individuals & as societies we are all living on borrowed time anyway.

> Life is probably over in 50 years

I suggest that this is an exaggeration.

Personally, I find it very frustrating to deal with things that I have little control over -- when I focus more of my time & energy on things I can largely control, I can see results from my efforts relatively quickly & directly. I don't personally feel responsible for "saving civilisation". This isn't a particularly moral or ethical position to take.

But, enough philosophising, what actions to take?

The problem is caused by environmental impact of a very large number of people multiplied by the environmental impact per person. Someone with a high energy high pollution lifestyle in a developed country may have the same environmental impact as 20-30 people with much lower energy or lower impact lifestyles. Anything you personally do to change your behaviour or reduce your impact is essentially negligible. Taking actions that influence and reduce the impact of large numbers of other people seems more helpful. E.g. activism, or any helping roll out policies that reduce population growth, particularly in countries with higher per-capita environmental impact.

You may also wish to consider hedging: suppose the global economy & global human population keeps roughly doing its thing, business as usual, and not changing sufficiently quickly to limit climate change, how do you want to live your life? "Adaption" rather than "mitigation".

I do convince people to use public transportation and being vegan to reduce their emissions.

So I don't need to.

I eat meat and use my SUVs but since I already convinced several people to do otherwise I do think I am entitled to some privilege. --> BUT I use the "ECO" function on my SUV.

Same as my colleagues ecologists that always travel by plane, buy a lot of disposable stuff but claim it is ok because they ar are spreading the message.

Samewise I do as voting I just need to convince 2 people of opposite party to not vote (mostly I do a big BBQ at home) and then I don't need to vote AND we reduce carbon emissions but kind we offset it on BBQ (using charcoal..)

I think the secrete is to balance and being a net positive.

I am doing my part we need more people doing it.

I make allot of noise and flap my arms but ultimately, unless I'm feeling generous, all I do is make it worse, or marginally less worse. The truth imo is that we are bit players and the real players are destroying the planet as fast as possible for reasons unknown.

It's not true everyone had to react to it, many of the ppl. who have the power have a fatalististic attitude or just don't care

I read this: https://www.minitab.com/en-us/Published-Articles/Weather-For...

And I extrapolated the results into forecasting the climate for 100 or 1,000 years from now and drew the conclusion that we are trying to model a complex system that can be affected drastically by small changes to the inputs of that system, and that we don't even come close to 1) understanding all the inputs into our climate, 2) do not understand the proper weighting of those inputs in a prediction model, and 3) even if we knew parts 1) and 2), our computational ability to account for both properly and produce a reliable prediction model doesn't exist.

Because of the nature of complex systems, making predictions on them is mathematically impossible. They're a non-reducible emergent behavior.

Looking at the problem broadly, the issue is that we, as an entire species, are unable to commit to a single goal and execute. One of the externalities of this fact is we behave in such a way that makes our environment less inhabitable. This is one of the ways we need to reinterpret the problem. Global warming is a HUGE THREAT, but we can't solve it directly. Us being able to solve it directly means we can get the whole planet to agree.

We can't agree because of psychology (sorry for the rhyme). This immediately leads us to shadow work (Jungian depth psychology). As a human race, I think we all can agree, we have a VERY DARK shadow.

So I think our only hope to save the planet is to "save ourselves". Just think about it logically. Within 2 years, just in the USA, we have rolled back 8 years or more worth of efforts to stop global warming. The reasons are ultimately because of business, which is linked to consumers; who are consuming (mostly) because of.... psychology (be it from the consumer end/ or the producer end that jacks up prices). Unless the entire planet can agree on the course of action, we are going to have a bunch of great things get cancelled out by not so great things.

My hope in this comment is to get the conversation moved in that direction. How can we get the entire human race to commit to a goal that will take 10, 100, 1000 years to execute? And as daunting as that seems, it has to be WAY EASIER than figuring out the weather... and it should speak VOLUMES to all of us that we are more willing to figure out quantum physics, machine learning, AI, complex weather dynamics; but very few of us are willing to tackle this human condition that keeps the world going the way that it does. It's not enough to solve for scientific solutions; we have to develop solutions that appease our mental lives in ways that don't cause harm to ourselves or our planet.

I believe much of this come down to us developing a common mythos that makes us all feel (sorry for a lack of better words/terminology) like Marvel Superheroes; like Avengers. My case in point, look at how many people came out to see this comic book movie. If we felt the same way about our individual lives, we wouldn't feel the need to escape into movies or the numerous other outlets of consumerism that ultimately lead to global warming. This comes right up against our concepts and uses of religion, politics and anything else that we still consider sacred.