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The world is losing the war against climate change

economist.com

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Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#111

Post by chosenbreed »

sykhic wrote: post #62
chosenbreed wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The effective action is to greatly reduce the number of births worldwide. It seems to me all other options are not effective. Good luck with that ;-)

Yeah, it’s not a practical solution in terms of implementation. However, if implemented it would work and not require Star Trek levels of innovation. There are simply too many people in the world.

Okay...but how would that work? Where are all these people? China had a one-child policy which they've recently reversed because the ratio of old people/young people has basically reversed. On the plus side it seems that with education and generally societal improvements people tend to have less children anyway. Having said that in some developed countries they're struggling with declining birth rates. Partly because of lifestyle choices and partly due to high costs of raising children...

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#113

Post by nonbel »

jandrese wrote: post #83
nonbel wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The war on cancer is a total fail in my book. They surrendered when they started calling it "many diseases", meaning there will never be a "cure for cancer" by definition.

Huh? You consider it a fail because we learned that there are many different kinds of Cancers? Yes a "one magic pill" option will probably never exist, but we can chip away at all forms of Cancer until they all have a cure. But realistically, this is not a war I think we can win in my lifetime. It's much bigger than people may have originally thought.

Its just an excuse, you are talking about a field with 10% replication rate, and when they tried to start doing more replications it was too expensive to even figure out what generated the data so they had to drop 25% of the studies before even beginning. One guy even calling the literature "augean stables":

https://www.nature.com/news/cancer-reproducibility-project-s...

Every disease can be arbitrarily split or combined into multiple categories. It doesnt mean anything. Here is a cure for cancer:

1) Detect aneuploid cells that fail to show the initial steps of the response to extracellular apoptosis signals, and have been dividing more often than usual for that tissue/environment (eg you have to take into account wound healing, etc).

2) Kill those cells.

This is technological problem, not a "cancer is many diseases" problem. Every problem can manifest in many ways and have multiple solutions.

EDIT:

Ref for "10% replication rate":

>"scientific findings were confirmed in only 6 (11%) cases." https://www.nature.com/articles/483531a

More info in this (short) thread from a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10687879

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#114

Post by nonbel »

heyitsguay wrote: post #95
nonbel wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The war on cancer is a total fail in my book. They surrendered when they started calling it "many diseases", meaning there will never be a "cure for cancer" by definition.

Cancer is many diseases, that all happen to be characterized by uncontrolled cell growth. A "cure for cancer" is like a "cure for fever".

Responded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17698877

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#115

Post by nonbel »

mohaine wrote: post #87
nonbel wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The war on cancer is a total fail in my book. They surrendered when they started calling it "many diseases", meaning there will never be a "cure for cancer" by definition.

Well, I don't think they just started calling it that for no reason. The fact that they they now know more means they are marking progress, even if it makes it harder to declare victory. The way I read it is that they were so far from a cure that they didn't even know what they were trying to achieve.

Responded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17698877

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#116

Post by rabidrat »

jandrese wrote: post #86
317070 wrote: post #2

Legitimate question: will there be a point where we speak about this war in the past tense, as in `The world lost the war against climate change'? How do we determine that turning point?

We've lost the war when everyone is dead.

I say we've lost the war when global civilization is over. People can survive Mad Max style but that's a colossal failure in my book.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#117

Post by fokinsean »

Is there an agreed upon consensus on when SHTF? I've been trying to limit my climate change/collapse reading (keeping away from /r/collapse), but this article triggered my anxiety again. I know things aren't looking good, but is there any hope? Are we completely fucked?

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#118

Post by radicalbyte »

hodgesrm wrote: post #96
radicalbyte wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been looking into carbon capture recently because it's going to be vital to slowing down the warming (and buying us another 50 years for the transition). What surprised me is that I can cover double my two-car-owning European family's carbon footprint via planting trees in the UK at an annual cost of around $400. It'll cost half that to do the same in a developing country. We need a global carbon tax and we need…

Can you post information about this, especially the math? According to US stats I've seen it requires an acre of growing forest to offset 100 US gallons of gas per year.[0] We have a long commute (which I'm working on cutting) so we need about 8 acres to offset fully. [0] https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc... Edit: added missing units.

I used one of the carbon offset sites, this one:

carbonfootprint.com

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#120

Post by hodgesrm »

BurningFrog wrote: post #82
WhompingWindows wrote: post #12

If you look at global power sector emissions from 1998 to 2018, you'll see that while we have dramatically improved upon the energy intensity (energy/capita) and even are making improvements on carbon intensity (carbon/capita), but the sad reality is this: we are still using around 35% coal power in 2018, the same as we did in 1998. And the power sector is the easiest sector to decarbonize, by the way. If you look at…

I don't think any amount of innovation can have close to the impact of de-tabooing nuclear energy for the next few decades.

We need to look at every solution, as the problem is not just energy production. Concrete production produces around 5% of global C02, of which less than half is related to fuel for running furnaces. [0] Deforestation (whether deliberately or by fire) also releases large quantities of previously sequestered C02. Agricultural practices can free sequestered carbon or trap it in topsoil. [1]

Greenhouse gases are a big problem any way you look at it. One somewhat heartening thing is that _any_ technique that reduces atmospheric C02 is helpful since it's really just one big budget that everything is contributing to.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concre... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration

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