I read 2001: A Space Odyssey when I was 11. That would have been 1971.
The Moon shuttle, the space station, and the elctronic wizardry were okay by me. Even the monolith, though things did turn too weird for my taste towards the end (and I still agree with my younger self here).
But one fundamental premise completely toppled my suspension of disbelief: That humanity would still seriously be here by the turn of the century. Clearly, ww would by then be overwhelmed, struggling against or exterminated by ... pollution. Which is what all doomsday was about then.
Some years later it was all-out nuclear war. Ask me by the beginning of the eighties, and I shall tell you confidently that I - and you - won't be around by the year 2000. As we now know, I nearly got that one right during the next few years, but today I really no longer believe it would have moved far beyond megadisaster - not into actual extermination.
So, these days it's the climate, and I am old and cynical and jaded. Sick to puking level of being called a denier. Noone in his/her/its right mind can deny that climate is changing. Always has, presumably always will. And of course we influence the damned thing. Every living and species does, and we clearly to a very high extent. If we don't - collectively - like the way things are going, by all means, we ought to take steps to shift the course.
We may even be in for rough times. Maybe very rough. And then again, maybe we won't. If someone can give me a plausible scenario for the year 2100 - as seen from the perpective of someone actually living there and then - I'm all ears. I have zero idea wheter that scenario in that perspective will be on the black or on the white side. I shall, however, be extremly surprised if climate will have actually killed or ruined us, downvotes be damned.
Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
181–190 of 523 posts
Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Wikipedia — which you chose to suggest as a source — Does not at first glance provide citations for other locations. Can you please do so?
Sure, the text of this reference at least agrees with my claim of a general trend: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/abrupt-climate-change/The%20Younge...
Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Primates first developed when earth was 14°C warmer: http://gergs.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/All_palaeotemps_...
How is that relevant? Areas where more than a billion people live today will become uninhabitable to humans if they warm up by 14 degrees. Actually, much sooner than that.
They will. However, areas, where almost no one lives today, will be inhabitable instead. There's plenty of barely inhabited space on Earth.
That will be a giant migration crisis, on an unprecedented scale, sure. Maybe even a world war. Nothing good, not in slightest. Something best avoided at all costs.
Yet, the point is, if this won't be avoided - humanity as a whole is still not in danger. We're not going extinct if Earth will warm up. The world will change drastically, many millions will die, ecosystems will be shattered - but H.sapiens aren't going to disappear as a species.
Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
#184I believe that a small minority could turn things around. If about 3 % of the population in the rich world would donate $100 per month, we could use that money to force the other to change. How? One example is to remove all coal power plants (which are responsible for 25 % of the greenhouse gas emissions) by building wind farms. This would drive the price of electricity down and make coal unprofitable.
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Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
#185EDIT: downvoters, feel free to add your opinion, what seps we can take in 12 years to prevent climate change. I will gladly hear any opinion, especially if it is not as drastic as mine. 1. Drop coal and gas as energy sources immediately. Use renewable and nuclear energy as main power sources. Phase out nuclear after couple decades, when we hopefully can get all our energy needs from renewables. EDIT: forgot to add in…
Good ideas but impossible in practise. The people and myself included have hard time imagining how global warming will affect us so drastically that such measures would be needed. Maybe they are but as of now we're just sitting happy in our slowly heating up pan like the frogs in one previously done experiment. Only when the effects are clear and causing visible suffering I believe our human civilization will try to find measures to fix it. I wish the scientists knew how to do better marketing to educate the masses of the effects that we are about to face. But I'm not sure how many will listen.
Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Humans are the ultimate adapters. Heck, we can survive in the vacuum of space, the highest peaks and some of the lowest parts of the ocean. We live in deserts and rain forests and tundra and remote islands. Humans will survive. They will adapt. It may not be in the same numbers and lifestyle as today, but the human race will likely be here for a very long time.
Humans cannot survive in the vacuum of space. Check the twin experiment NASA done lately.
Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
#187I read 2001: A Space Odyssey when I was 11. That would have been 1971. The Moon shuttle, the space station, and the elctronic wizardry were okay by me. Even the monolith, though things did turn too weird for my taste towards the end (and I still agree with my younger self here). But one fundamental premise completely toppled my suspension of disbelief: That humanity would still seriously be here by the turn of the ce…
I understand your sentiment, but it boils down to : past catastrophic predictions were wrong so future catastrophic predictions are also going to be wrong.
That does not reassure me one bit.
Let's that the doomsday future is 100 millions people living in the Arctic circle. Maybe it is not that bad for people living in 2500, with AI, agricultural drones, floating cities. They might even have fusion and a moon base.
But I cannot imagine how we can go peacefully from a few billions people living around the globe to another stable state. This is going to be a very rocky transition, and we, or our children, are going to experience it fully.
Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 peopl…
I've lived without a car for more than a decade. I have a medical condition that is supposed to require at least $100k in medical care annually just to die slower with no hope of getting well. I have gotten off all drugs and I manage it with diet and lifestyle. I got healthier while homeless, sleeping in a tent for 5.7 years and being treated abusively by an awful lot of people who don't find my story credible. My ol…
Maybe I am a black transwoman with a disability and a history of clinical depression. I think that has nothing to do with the topic at hand. I'd prefer if we talked as two human beings to each other.
> But it is generally pointless to assert that. It just causes people to more vehemently ramp up the dismissive personal attacks and assertions that I'm an idiot whose point is invalid while they run screaming across the stage flailing their arms like Kermit the frog.
In my post I never intended to question your intelligence. I also did not call you a nutter and I don't know why you think I did.
I questioned your line of reasoning, and wanted to know whether you really thought about the consequences of a "population crash". I believe that these two words very cleanly describe a hell on earth, and your post seemed to handwave all this suffering away. That is a line of thinking I don't agree with, and I wanted to make you think about and reply to that.
I'm deeply sorry for the hardships of your life. All the best to you.
Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
#189Reading these answers make me realize, that we are doomed.
Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
#190So 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…
Sounds very optimistic, but also depends on a lot of "if"s and "maybe"s. Fact is that while a lot of hard problems do get solved by new innovations, not all of them are, and systems do fail catastrophically sometimes.
Who knows what the future will bring. I have little doubt that the planet and human species will survive in the longer term, but the ecological, human, and economic costs will be huge. It's a stupid gamble: the benefits to ignoring climate change are small, and the dangers are huge.
It bothers me to no end that even in Europe many parties that acknowledge that climate change is real and a serious problem (basically everyone, only the US/GOP is a mainstream source of climate denial) kind of ignore it because "zomg the economy might shrink 0.001% the next quarter". It's spectacularly short-sighted, and it's one of several examples where our democratic system is failing massively in addressing serious problems.