The world is losing the war against climate change • Hacker News Board

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#221

Post by pas » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 5:01 PM UTC

Tade0 wrote: post #18

pas wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? What does that mean? Habitability is not a binary thing.

Actually, it is. For most mammals a temperature over around 31C at 100% humidity is lethal after no more than six hours of exposure. Go beyond that and everyone dies.

Sure, but will humans just sit idle by and wait for extinction, or will they do whatever it is necessary to keep the ecosystem from boiling away? Of course it depends on how severe the problem is, but in general we have the means to affect climate. (Solar shade comes to mind and large scale GHG capture.)

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#222

Post by mikestew » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 5:02 PM UTC

fokinsean wrote: post #117

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?

Is there an agreed upon consensus on when SHTF?

The only consensus is that the shit will hit you in dribbles. So much so, you might not even notice until you just kind of become used to smelling a little bit like shit. As the stench becomes overwhelming, perhaps you might look back and think, "you know, I don't remember always smelling like shit."

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#223

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 5:02 PM UTC

roryisok wrote: post #214

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…

Is carbon offset by afforestation effective though? I had read that we can't counter the emissions by planting trees alone. I'm definitely interested in doing this and covering more than double of my footprint

If you chop the trees and use the wood for something durable (not paper), yes it's effective for small scale things.

Most carbon capture forests don't chop their trees. So you are just locking some land into a natural reserve. It's something good by itself, but won't help fighting Global Warming.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#224

Post by PeterisP » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 5:02 PM UTC

losvedir wrote: post #181

21 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were told that Fukushima will NEVER happen. So yeah, some people are very bad at evaluating risks.

Well, what happened? Last I heard the outcome is some land lost, no immediate deaths, and about 100 deaths due to cancer over the next 50 years. A tragedy, but not apocalyptic. (And minuscule compared to the deaths and destruction from the earthquake/tsunami itself.)

And the expected number of Fukushima deaths is tiny compared to the deaths caused by climate change - this summer's heatwave has already killed that many people in Japan alone.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#225

Post by Brakenshire » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 5:04 PM UTC

snissn wrote: post #163

Is there an optimistic argument to be made that we are winning the war on climate change?

One optimistic way of looking at it is that the models for success already exist. The US 2050 target for per-head CO2 emissions is to get to the same as France today. And France has just as industrial an economy, and a similar population density to a lot of US states.

So, the idea cutting emissions is impossible or will inevitably lead to massive damage to the economy or reductions in quality of life is obviously not correct. And that doesn’t even take into account the technological developments which can occur to make the transition easier again. The problems are to do with politics, economic models, and technology development, there are no fundamental barriers.

Also, the economy functions at scale, so if the majority of rich countries follow a transition other countries will likely follow by default. It’s a matter of pushing enough technologies over the tipping point where they take over even if you assume the value of the atmosphere is zero.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#226

Post by spdionis » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 5:04 PM UTC

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #197

alkonaut wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the cheapest and easiest plan by far, It’s the simplest plan, but I’ll argue we are seeing it’s pretty difficult as it requires changing the behavior of a lot of people, if even just a little abd/or changing policies of a lot of countries. I’m not saying plan A should be somehow abandoned or slowed (so perhaps B is a bad name because it’s typically used when A is abandoned) But it should be complemented. We sh…

>a simple and cheap plan that is politically impossible. If it's impossible to execute the cheap and simple plan because of political obstacles, we just have to change politics. It's also simple and cheap once you know that money has nothing to do in politics.

Just offering a thought-provoking POV here:

Do you work in IT?

As far as I could see the hardest problems in technology are not actually technical, but organizational/political/management problems. Politics is just management at a different scale.

We shouldn't underestimate the complexity of societal problems. They may be harder to solve than the hardest technical challenges. I think dismissing these political issues with a "just change the politics, lol" is short-sighted at best.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#227

Post by sykhic » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 5:06 PM UTC

chosenbreed wrote: post #111

sykhic wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I mentioned that it's not practical. Forced sterilization - I'm not advocating this - would do the trick. Again, it's not practical to implement just now but I think it's clear that having fewer people would be ideal and would solve lots of problems.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#228

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 5:07 PM UTC

ashelmire wrote: post #188

gandreani wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious about this and wanted to share some quick calculations on how viable this is: A tree can absorb as much as 48 lbs of CO2 per year [1]. This is pretty vague cause this can vary by tree age and size, but let's use this arbitrary number In 2014 the United States generated 6,870 million metric tonnes of CO2 [2]. 48 lbs is about 0.021 metric tonnes [3]. So... 6,870,000,000 / .021 = 327,142,857,142.85 327 tri…

I thought this was pretty interesting. So I looked up how many trees there are per person: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20... The US has 716 per person. Sadly, it looks like China and India are the worst culprits: "Brazil had 301 billion trees (1,494 per person), Canada 318 billion (8,953 per person), and China 139 billion (102 trees per person). Among highly populous countries, India (po…

So, if you plant 3 times your current forest sizes into wood harvesting forests, you would capture all of your CO2 emissions into a solid.

That's probably not reasonable (but I'm not sure). Even then, if you double your forest area, and cut the wood from there you'll offset some 20% of your emission already.

It's not a silver bullet, but it is something.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#229

Post by JamesBarney » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 5:08 PM UTC

teachrdan wrote: post #187

mavhc wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, it's stupidly cheap, "so you destroyed the world because you couldn't be bothered to pay 5% extra for clean energy? Thanks Grandpa"

It's not someone's future grandpa resisting a carbon tax, but massive lobbying by the coal and oil industry. https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=E1210 https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=E01

And a lot of oil is in favor of a carbon tax because it shifts more electricity away from coal to oil than from oil to wind/solar.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#230

Post by sykhic » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 5:10 PM UTC

vowelless wrote: post #205

sykhic wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The uncomfortable reality is that 7 billion people can’t all live like Americans (or Europeans). Extracting the resources necessary for everyone to live like Americans would be very bad for the environment. The effective action is to greatly reduce the number of births worldwide. It seems to me all other options are not effective.

> effective action is to greatly reduce the number of births worldwide. Unbelievable.

You don't believe that having fewer people in the world would lead to less pollution and less harm to the environment due to human activities? Or you don't believe someone is suggesting that there needs to be fewer people?

It seems clear to me that if there were only 5 million people in the world then human caused climate change wouldn't be an issue. Isn't that obvious? I'm not advocating that we get to that level. I'm just pointing out that there exists a number for the population such that human caused climate change would no longer be an issue. I don't think it's disputable that this is so.

I'm not advocating mass killings or anything like that. Just pointing out an obvious thing. If where were way less people then pollution, etc. would not be an issue.