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We Just Breached the 410 PPM Threshold for CO2

scientificamerican.com

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Re: We Just Breached the 410 PPM Threshold for CO2

#141

Post by jorgen123 »

acabal wrote: post #42

Does anyone have ideas on how a mid-career software developer can switch gears into the clean energy/climate change industry, to do something to help? I've come to think that climate change will be humanity's defining moment, and that we'll all be suffering greatly come mid-to-late-century. I want to do what I can to put my professional skills to use in helping. But I'm not sure where to even begin.

You could pick a solution area you feel attracted to from the Drawdown book (http://www.drawdown.org) and see how you can contribute. The Drawdown team has spent several years computing and ranking the impact of over 100 solution areas that can combine to reduce CO2 while also providing other benefits (so called no-regret solutions)

You may find that high impact solutions are in areas you may not be thinking about but that energize you, like the fact that educating girls beats out rooftop solar power (which is also a very high ranking solution).

Re: We Just Breached the 410 PPM Threshold for CO2

#142

Post by mozumder »

tossaway33 wrote: post #133
epistasis wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a personal responsibility problem, it's a societal priority problem. Living "virtuously" only changes your own impact. We need to change impact globally. We need to make jets that run on biofuels or synthetic fuels. We need to change our energy systems to be carbon neutral. We need to help the developing start using carbon neutral technologies directly, without going through a fossil fuel phase. These are…

be the change you want to see in the world

Yah that doesn't work.

What works is "force others to change".

We're not going to solve global warming without forcing everyone to change. It's not a personal problem, and in fact, you can have small-scale cases of large carbon footprint.

It's not a problem if Leonardo DiCaprio is flying a private jet. It's only a problem if a lot of people are flying private jets.

Re: We Just Breached the 410 PPM Threshold for CO2

#143

Post by alphapapa »

tzs wrote: post #104
acabal wrote: post #42

Does anyone have ideas on how a mid-career software developer can switch gears into the clean energy/climate change industry, to do something to help? I've come to think that climate change will be humanity's defining moment, and that we'll all be suffering greatly come mid-to-late-century. I want to do what I can to put my professional skills to use in helping. But I'm not sure where to even begin.

If in the US I'd suggest getting politically active. It will take long enough even according to the pessimistic models (assuming we don't hit some doomsday scenario like the clathrate gun) for things to actually get noticeably bad [1] that a lot of people will choose short term profit over long term fixing the climate. That means that to seriously get things done soon is going to require government action, and that m…

Just to be clear, you're advocating dishonesty and deception--essentially, infiltration, a tactic used in espionage.

This lies in stark contrast to the idea that progress comes by openly researching, and debating, and convincing one's opponents with reasoned arguments and evidence.

If you have to deceive people to win, are you really "on the right side"? Or is everyone else just so stupid that you have no choice? You know, that the ends justify the means (an argument that has never been abused throughout history).

Re: We Just Breached the 410 PPM Threshold for CO2

#144

Post by dferince »

acabal wrote: post #42

Does anyone have ideas on how a mid-career software developer can switch gears into the clean energy/climate change industry, to do something to help? I've come to think that climate change will be humanity's defining moment, and that we'll all be suffering greatly come mid-to-late-century. I want to do what I can to put my professional skills to use in helping. But I'm not sure where to even begin.

Computers use a lot of energy (that 1000 watt power supply). Consider choosing more environmentally friendly options. Use a lower level language like c instead of python or JavaScript for a program that will be run by many people and machines. An order of magnitude or two of energy savings is possible. Use and build command line interfaces instead of conversational interfaces. Google recently said as to why they built TPUs, "If we considered a scenario where people use Google voice search for just three minutes a day and we ran deep neural nets for our speech recognition system on the processing units we were using, we would have had to double the number of Google data centers!". Avoid that shiny new framework that makes older laptop fans run at full blast. Just because you don't see the smoke doesn't mean that your programs aren't burning a ton of fossil fuels.

Re: We Just Breached the 410 PPM Threshold for CO2

#146

Post by Jach »

acabal wrote: post #42

Does anyone have ideas on how a mid-career software developer can switch gears into the clean energy/climate change industry, to do something to help? I've come to think that climate change will be humanity's defining moment, and that we'll all be suffering greatly come mid-to-late-century. I want to do what I can to put my professional skills to use in helping. But I'm not sure where to even begin.

Use your intelligence to get a degree / study in the relevant earth science fields along with physical engineering study. Work towards geoengineering. Full control of all the earth's natural systems (climate, evolution, aging, lifetime of the sun...) is humanity's destiny, best get working on what we can now.

Of course political activism is available, but the question then is where to push on that front. Enough people are working on awareness, probably not enough are working on amending the UN's Convention on Biological Diversity and London's Convention on Dumping of Wastes at Sea to allow and encourage geoengineering on an international scale in the first place. Something as simple as dumping lots of iron in the ocean ("iron fertilization") could be all we need to do in the short term, but there's a lot of resistance to it. If I were interested in this path I'd focus on removing that resistance politically and/or scientifically.

Re: We Just Breached the 410 PPM Threshold for CO2

#147

Post by bdamm »

mozumder wrote: post #142
tossaway33 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

be the change you want to see in the world

Yah that doesn't work. What works is "force others to change". We're not going to solve global warming without forcing everyone to change. It's not a personal problem, and in fact, you can have small-scale cases of large carbon footprint. It's not a problem if Leonardo DiCaprio is flying a private jet. It's only a problem if a lot of people are flying private jets.

Everyone could fly private jets if we had a carbon neutral cycle to manufacture and fuel them.

Re: We Just Breached the 410 PPM Threshold for CO2

#148

Post by mtempleton »

tossaway322 wrote: post #126
gjm11 wrote: post #12

This is very bad (albeit completely unsurprising) news, but I really don't see that the word "threshold" is appropriate. Is there some special bad thing that happens once 410ppm is reached, that's qualitatively different from 400ppm? Nope. The article itself is quite clear about this: e.g., it quotes one climate scientist as saying "These milestones are just numbers, but they give us an opportunity to pause and take…

gjm11 says: "Is there some special bad thing that happens once 410ppm is reached, that's qualitatively different from 400ppm?" Yes. Climate change proponents post articles such as the OP here and then cry "The sky is falling, the sky is falling and I can prove it! We're at the 410 PPM Threshold, just as we predicted!"

You're being downvoted, but dissenting opinions should be allowed, even when it comes to climate change. There is a reasonable argument to be made that climate change alarmism is not productive. I saw Bill Nye answer the question of 'what happens due to global warming,' to which he replied, 'people's qualities of life will most likely go down because people will fight over resources,' that said, right now we have a surplus of resources in a very real sense. We already basically have productive capacity to feed every person on earth, but it's politics and greed that makes people starve, not resources.

Whether the down-voters like it or not, climate change is a very real and scientifically established fact, but what that will do to people on the world is not a scientific fact. It's just what currently most people predict will happen (and disagreeing with this is feels like some kind of thought crime in the traditional sense--it's not science). The world is not going to end. Biodiversity and Biomass is decreasing. The Northwest Passage is being opened up. Iron fertilization will become a more likely policy to sequester carbon and increase biomass in the oceans. Sea levels will rise. Extreme weather patterns most likely will increase. Productive farm land may or may not increase. Russia actually may have a fair bit to gain from it. But the fact is, there is a lot we really don't know.

In the very long run our civilization will need to harvest as much energy from the sun as possible, but in the meantime we've done a pretty fantastic job of screwing up the planet, so it's a pretty good idea to stop emitting so much pollutants into our atmosphere, since we don't really know for sure, but we have a lot of reasons to think it won't be good. That's really the best argument to end climate change, but it's probably not convincing enough to change behavior in large numbers of people.

That said, the politics and bureaucracies around climate change have started to resemble the War on Poverty and War on Drugs--institutions which now exhibit bureaucratic intertia (have an inherent perverse incentive structure, and they rationally (evilly) place their own survival over that of solving the problems they're tasked with).

Re: We Just Breached the 410 PPM Threshold for CO2

#149

Post by [deleted] »

mcbits wrote: post #113
JshWright wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're stretching the analogy a bit too far there... We know that increasing atmospheric levels of CO2 will result in higher temperatures (the mechanism is well understood, and the IPCC models have done a good job of predicting that over the past couple decades), we also know rising temperatures will result in rising sea levels (again, we have empirically observed this happening at rates consistent with our u…

A more realistic analogy would be if the engineer said it's very likely that the California coast will be hit with an earthquake sometime in the next 100 years, but we have no idea when, which city, or how severe it will be. The safe thing to do would be to stop building things there altogether, but we could also try raising taxes and adding building regulations, making it impossibly expensive to live and work there.…

[deleted]

Re: We Just Breached the 410 PPM Threshold for CO2

#150

Post by humanrebar »

twoodfin wrote: post #87
humanrebar wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It won't cost all that much. Not doing it will cost a whole heck of a lot more. It's possible that it would change 3% year-over-year productivity growth to 0.5%. That "it" might be the difference between a marginally healthy economy and "lost generations" and political upheaval. The "give us the flight controls now or regret it for eternity" position is not necessarily wrong , but there's a real lack of credible ev…

The issue is, as I understand it, how to make a carbon tax "progressive". In particular, how to make it so progressive that the developing world will accept it (i.e., it won't condemn their poor to generations of high energy prices and much slower economic growth) but still strong enough to dramatically reduce future emissions growth. Just imposing it on the developed world would help some, but any benefit would be a…

Those are fair objections. Concerns I have myself, but the counterproposals seem scientifically unfounded to me: picking certain technologies (and inevitably companies and industries) and deigning them "the green future" based on our still early developments in science and engineering.

Worse, people are calling people with concerns about subsidizing, say, certain battery companies (at the expense of alternative approaches and competing battery companies) as "global warming skeptics" and "anti-science". As if subsidizing particular avenues of R&D is a scientifically objective question.

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