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Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

nytimes.com

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Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#81

Post by adrianN »

yesyesno wrote: post #33

Ouch. I read this and I am completely confused about what to do with the rest of the time I have left. Should I even bother with my current career in tech, or would it be better to quit it and do something that could have even a slight impact now? These articles are great, but preaching to the choir. What should any of us do? I'm seriously and sincerely asking. Are there any suggestions, from a personal stand point i…

You can read through https://www.drawdown.org/solutions check what you can do yourself and talk to your peers and your political representatives to bring about collective action.

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#82

Post by Sharlin »

adrianN wrote: post #50
Sharlin wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why burn them to charcoal? Living trees continue to be efficient carbon sinks for potentially hundreds of years. If you have to cut them down you should use the material for construction, to reduce dependency on energy-intensive steel and concrete industry. But it’s a moot point anyway, because trees simply grow too slowly to be an effective carbon buffer at the timescales that are relevant right now.

You burn them because that prevents decay from releasing CO2, stabilizing the carbon for at least a millennium. Young trees also add biomass much faster than old growth. Using them for building material is okay as well, but the amount of wood needed to get rid of the excess CO2 is far above any reasonable demand for building material. (We're talking about a trillion tons of carbon here)

”Young” here still means ”decades old” (and large, mature trees keep growing thicker fairly consistently which leads to carbon fixation to be a superlinear function of tree age). Plus recent research indicates that old-growth forests actually continue adding biomass quite efficiently. So any planted trees should at least be allowed to grow a lot longer than your standard tree plantations.

Whatever you do with the biomass a hundred years from now doesn’t really matter; either climate change is in control by then or the humanity is screwed.

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#83

Post by cgdcraig »

erikrothoff wrote: post #3

Why isn't there a billion dollar reward to any person or company that comes up with a cost-effective way to capture carbon from the air and convert back to solid carbon? I'd love to understand the physics (or chemistry? maybe economy?) that prevents this from materialising.

Atmospheric concentrations are low so you need to harvest a lot of air. To put in context the earth has ~2E9 km^3 air, if you wanted to process every cubic meter of air in the world once in 10 years you'd have a system that could process ~6km^3/s , using air flowing at 30kph(18mph) would require ~800km^2 of collecting area.

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#84

Post by jamesblonde »

netgusto wrote: post #67

Why is this entry already on page 2 of HN? Seems a bit fast given the popularity and the fact that it was posted 2 hours ago (also, compared to those that are present on p1) -- edit: we're now on page 3 just 30 minutes after my comment.

Wow. People in power really dont want us to discuss this topic.

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#85

Post by lazysheepherd »

netgusto wrote: post #67

Why is this entry already on page 2 of HN? Seems a bit fast given the popularity and the fact that it was posted 2 hours ago (also, compared to those that are present on p1) -- edit: we're now on page 3 just 30 minutes after my comment.

I am on the watch and in last 5 minutes this submission got 6 new votes but have fallen 8 places!

Before we attempt to solve climate crisis, first we should solve BIGOTRY CRISIS.

I have seen this happening before too. Why does HN allows anonymous flagging? I bet anything if it were unanimous we would able to frame bigots who only flag because of their stupid personal world view.

Has there been any efforts to make flagging more transparent-perhaps where I can contribute or should we raise a new issue on that?

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#86

Post by androidgirl »

This is just a silly idea and doesn't fix all the problems, except heat.

Could we position a sheet, or a carpet of asteroids in a Lagrange point around the Earth, or as a sort of reverse Dyson sphere?

I heard that such a thing could be used to cool down Venus.

That doesn't address the ocean acidification, or mass extinctions, etc. Certain high-light plants would also likely perish without intervention. Also, solar energy on Earth would be stifled.

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#87

Post by jamesblonde »

majewsky wrote: post #61
zaarn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would, however, propose that once we have CO2-neutral energy production, we use some of it to recapture CO2 if the effect would be even minimal.

The problem is that "once we have CO2-neutral energy production" is way too late. There are several tipping points where the rising temperature sets off other processes that speed up warming even further. For example, when the Russian permafrost melts, it will release gigantic amounts of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. Once that happens, not only do you have to capture all the CO2 you emit…

Yes, the clathrate gun hypothesis.

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#88

Post by netgusto »

netgusto wrote: post #78
netgusto wrote: post #67

Why is this entry already on page 2 of HN? Seems a bit fast given the popularity and the fact that it was posted 2 hours ago (also, compared to those that are present on p1) -- edit: we're now on page 3 just 30 minutes after my comment.

Wow sinking so fast. Slot 47 RN, on its way to page 3.

Slot 52 now, and 87 points / 83 comments.

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#89

Post by toasterlovin »

pier25 wrote: post #59
ForHackernews wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want the honest but depressing answer: it's probably too late. Don't have kids unless you want them to have a worse life than you've had. On the plus side, the worst consequences from climate change will occur after we're dead. Just enjoy the rest of your life and try not to think about it too much. After all, that's what everyone else has been doing.

Sadly I agree. Climate change is one of the reasons we're not having kids. In part because they would have had a very bad life, but also because it's the best for the planet. Reducing consumption of resources is not working, so we should start thinking about controlling population growth.

As an individual, you are powerless to control population growth. If you decide not to have kids, the world will get filled with the descendants of other people. The descendants of those other people will probably care less about what happens to the environment than your descendants would.

Dealing with the issues of the future will require collective action. In order for that collective action to take place, people will need to vote for it. Having kids means more people to vote for the things you think need to be voted for (since they will share your genetics and you will heavily influence their environment).

So you should have kids.

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#90

Post by veebat »

yesyesno wrote: post #33

Ouch. I read this and I am completely confused about what to do with the rest of the time I have left. Should I even bother with my current career in tech, or would it be better to quit it and do something that could have even a slight impact now? These articles are great, but preaching to the choir. What should any of us do? I'm seriously and sincerely asking. Are there any suggestions, from a personal stand point i…

Leverage.

You don't throw your foe to the ground with brute force alone. You take him off-balance, and move in with good timing and technique.

If your goal is solving climate change, well, the leverage isn't really in the technical solution, but in the political economy. We need a redesign. That's problem one.

But if it's the power structure that needs changing, what affects it? Knowledge. Signalling. Valuation. And then you get into things that you can potentially change as a tech worker, by pushing for information systems that change our valuation metrics to match a philosophy of sustainability. And that positions actors who wish to take sustainable actions to have the leverage to realize it.

That, I think, is the trick to feeling OK about it. At the end of the day, it's a war fought in an abstract, everyday sense: Build up your sense of morality and build your career around those principles. You might not be the hero, but you won't be the villain.

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