Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#151

Post by AznHisoka » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 8:49 AM UTC

buro9 wrote: post #45

netjiro wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Earth has also been a lot warmer than it is now Key here is rate of change, and what humans can survive. We are changing the climate many many times faster than ever before. Nature does not have the time to adapt. And the wars, famines and mass displacements coming from ecosystem collapse is like nothing we've seen in human history. Think we have a problem with a few million migrants? Try a billion or two! P-T…

Earth will be fine. Life on Earth will be fine, but that life will be different to the life we have today. The only thing not fine is whether humans survive what they/we ultimately have brought about. But in there is a kind of beautiful justice that the universe has in it's self-correcting algorithm... if you create imbalance, the imbalance will correct in time but perhaps to do so it kills you. If we care about the…

“The planet has been through a lot worse than us. And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!”

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#152

Post by kharak » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 8:50 AM UTC

plopilop wrote: post #138

cletus wrote: post #11

So I'm honestly not as concerned about this as I once was. Don't get me wrong: the climate is going to change, arguably we're in a mass extinction event already and people aren't going to suddenly start acting in the collective long term welfare of humanity. One of the things I like about futurism is the levelheaded optimism and pragmatism you tend to get. And I'll call out Isaac Arthur as a well-known example of thi…

> Think we're dumping too much CO2 into the atmosphere? We no doubt are but that problem basically goes away immediately if we ever get economic fusion power. That's an enormous "if". Fusion research has been underfunded for decades, we don't even know if we can sustain it, and for a reason I don't get, many ecologists are anti-nuclear. Plus fusion won't solve everything. You won't put a sun core into your car nor yo…

> And anyway recent studies show that the human body is unlikely to bear a trip to Mars, let alone the health issues caused by weightless environment.

Could you link to an article or study about this? I don't believe that humans will ever reach other stars, but if even Mars is too much, oh well.

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#153

Post by marmaduke » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 8:50 AM UTC

Related question: where could one find jobs related to climate change efforts? beyond walking, eating less meat, etc I might want to put my working hours in as well, but no idea who/what to look for.

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#154

Post by mynameishere » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 8:50 AM UTC

cthulha wrote: post #35

xupybd wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe trying to win over republicans would be better? The culture wars don’t help this issue.

What would win over republicans? I mean, if the survival of human civilisation isn't enough, what can you propose?

if the survival of human civilisation isn't enough, what can you propose

Tell them the magic elves demand doing your bidding? Because both things are on the same level of rationality? Civilization, as such, is in no danger.

...

To OP: The problem will solve itself if the population of the world goes down enough, whether naturally or through some actual catastrophe. Indeed most of the world's birth rate is low enough that we are well on the way of a solution. Look up which parts of the world still have massive population growth and then see how many liberals you can get on board with trying to reduce that. Good luck.

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#155

Post by AznHisoka » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 8:52 AM UTC

baddox wrote: post #46

cletus wrote: post #11

So I'm honestly not as concerned about this as I once was. Don't get me wrong: the climate is going to change, arguably we're in a mass extinction event already and people aren't going to suddenly start acting in the collective long term welfare of humanity. One of the things I like about futurism is the levelheaded optimism and pragmatism you tend to get. And I'll call out Isaac Arthur as a well-known example of thi…

I think the biggest counter to that optimism is that while those necessary technologies are being developed, civilization will perhaps be going through major disruption that causes lots of suffering and death. Humans will almost certainly not go extinct, and may even get some great technological advancements out of the ordeal, but at the scale of human lives there will be a lot of suffering.

“Humans will almost certainly not go extinct”

I wish there was a prediction market where I could bet against you on this outcome...

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#156

Post by kebman » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 8:52 AM UTC

josho wrote: post #3

> Maybe corporations are the ones who can be pressured to take the lead. Yes. They absolutely will. But only after they have the right incentives. Those incentives can be created over night by having governments put in place a carbon tax. It gets even worse. If a large group of people reduced their energy consumption to help climate change it has the consequence of reducing demand and therefore energy costs will come…

Haha, sure! :D Carbon tax. Sounds legit! Here's what's gonna happen: Corporations just jack up prices accross the board according to the tax, and then everybody else gets to pay. And then nothing changes. It'll be like the sugar tax in Norway. Do you really think people are buying less sugar over here because of it? Get real! :D We're well past incentives. The change has to be law, and the law has to be protected with the threat of force. (Force sounds so much better than violence, don't you think, but all this is gonna end in the latter, eventually, if we just let it slide, because when people get hungry, they also get desperate.) And where people don't respect the law, force has to be actually used. However, nobody in their right mind is willing to do that as long as we're boiling frogs... So I guess we'll just die then. We had a pretty good run, though. :)

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#157

Post by NeedMoreTea » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 8:52 AM UTC

Theodores wrote: post #114

starbugs wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's our technology. We made it. We are responsible. I don't see your point. What do you want people to do? Stop living their lives and give up tech? To what level? Can we keep the wheel? That's not how things work in reality.

Previous civilisations have given up the wheel. The Japanese did, then in the Middle East the wheel went by the wayside where animals rather than wheels suited the compact cities. Just saying that because some people don't understand that there are good reasons to give up those clumsy wheel things, they ain't the bees knees. In the post nuclear war movie 'Threads' there is a quick loss of education and language in th…

A climate change "Threads" with the same impact and production values might be a really helpful thing. 35 years later there's been nothing else like it, despite its almost unbelievably low budget.

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#158

Post by chienandalou » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 8:56 AM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #82

jogjayr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things have gotten worse over the past 20 years though. The predictions might've been wrong about the rate of change (and I'm assuming this was a reputable source making the prediction, not cherry-picking the most extreme doomsayers). I hope more than anything they're still wrong today. But they weren't wrong about the actual direction of the change. People 20 years ago ignored the warnings, we must do better.

I never finished my degree, but I'm an environmental studies major. A cartoon in one of my books showed oxygen producing microbes that created earth's oxygen atmosphere organizing to stop the creation of this poisonous oxygen atmosphere as it was killing them. I was watching a TV show that said "If this spider were alive today, it would be hunting animals the size of house cats." and I blurted "No, it wouldn't. It wo…

> But we keep making these dire predictions

I think it's absolutely not reasonable to put climate scientists and their predictions into the same line as the mayans or nostradamus.

> Could we see a dramatic population crash? Absolutely. Population crashes of various species in various places are a known phenomenon. That could happen.

So, a population crash could happen. A lot of the comments here sound as if the people are saying "End of the world? Pffft. Total hysteria. Ultimately a few billion people will die and then human life will adapt. Everything's fine!"

I mean, take a minute and picture the suffering of billions of humans because of famine, resource wars, migration, deaths. Picture yourself and your loved ones into this.

It may not be the literal "end of the world", but don't you (and the others of the "it's-fine"-faction here) think that this is bad enough to take climate change serious and try to lessen all of that?

> And if you voice skepticism, you are advised you are a fool who just doesn't get it.

Are you sure that you do "get it" though?

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#159

Post by akvadrako » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 8:57 AM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #147

akvadrako wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The temp has definitely changed faster than this before and the hundred years people are worried about wouldn’t even show up in geological historic records. For a recent example look up the younger dryas on Wikipedia. It seems like the average global temp moved about 5 degrees over a few decades.

“””The Younger Dryas … was a return to glacial conditions which temporarily reversed the gradual climatic warming after the Last Glacial Maximum started receding””” Closest I can get to supporting your client is that the local temperature of Greenland went up a lot at the end of that period. Not global. And given the article talks a lot about global thermohaline circulation, extreme local variation is not surprising.

It is a bit of an educated guess because we can’t know the global average, but most of the local temps that are estimated moved in the same direction. The ones in Greenland were larger than most though.

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#160

Post by shard972 » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 8:58 AM UTC

c0nducktr wrote: post #59

shard972 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Scientists are pretty much universally convinced, the only ones who aren't are paid by big oil and the Koch brothers - that means they are lying for money. Thats actually just wrong and shows how closed minded people are to how science works. Even if they were paid by big oil, shouldn't their evidence stand on it's own merits? Just like the claims made by scientists? And no, I don't buy your false equivalence becau…

It's actually not wrong. https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

It just links to J. Cook, et al which i've read and it doesn't say that 97% agree that the earth is warming and man is responsible for it. Maybe you should read it.