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

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#231

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

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…

> we'd still have massive fossil fuel use for non vehicle uses of petroleum for chemical industries, airplanes, plastic production

And maritime shipping, upon which pretty much the entirety of our economic system relies.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#232

Post by cryoshon » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 5:12 PM UTC

vowelless wrote: post #164

rb808 wrote: post #151

The war is unwinnable. Global warming can only be reversed if we stop all Co2 and methane emissions, and then start net carbon capture to reduce current co2 levels. Its just not going to happen. No one ever says that out loud. There is noise about reducing carbon emissions - in reality this is a lot of argument about reducing carbon emissions in wealthy countries. We can't even do that. Meanwhile even my greeny-lefty…

That is indeed what it seems like. We need a 10x improvement in this space. That can only happen with carbon capture and ability to regulate CO2 in the atmosphere. Not "planting trees", for God's sake. The whole conversation around emissions and the massive politicization of this is disappointing. Emissions reduction doesn't seem to do much. We need a Manhattan project to produce carbon and weather manipulation techn…

we have the technology already: the cyanobacteria which produced the oxygen that ultimately became the earth's atmosphere. they're even better than trees because they're easier to multiplex and they don't catch on fire.

all you need is clean-ish seawater. i even drew up a few designs myself a few months ago.

what we lack is the will to put the plans we know will work into action.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#233

Post by api » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 5:13 PM UTC

I'm not optimistic about this for game theoretic reasons. It would require a global scale all-cooperate scenario, since any single defector gets massive economic benefit from defecting and using cheaper energy to undercut everyone else.

The only hope we have is the development of post-carbon energy sources that are cheaper than fossil fuels. If we can't do that I do not see a plausible scenario where we don't burn every bit of profitably accessible carbon.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#234

Post by gandreani » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 5:15 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…

Yeah I don't think China or India are catching up any time soon. They're extremely arid regions.

China even has a program in place to plant trees along the Gobi dessert to stop it's expansion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-North_Shelter_Forest_Pro.... That will help with the number (closer to 200 tree/person) since they plan to plant 100 billion trees by 2050 http://www.theplaidzebra.com/china-is-building-a-great-green...

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#235

Post by masklinn » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 5:16 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #150

BurningFrog wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Too late. If you start planning nuclear plants now, they'll take 10 years to build. Also, I'm not sure that the an to build nuclear reactors across Africa, South America, and the middle east will be popular; the proliferation risk hasn't gone away.

> Too late. If you start planning nuclear plants now, they'll take 10 years to build.

Probably more unless you build Gen IIs: because of the ongoing popularity of Gen IIs manufacturers have very little experience building their Gen IIIs (and the building processes have not been de-kinked yet) and Gen IVs are still years away from design completion to say nothing of actually building them.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#236

Post by jmcgough » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 5:17 PM UTC

nonbel wrote: post #113

jandrese wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comb…

I know a lot of smart people who've devoted their lives to solving this problem. It's very easy for you to dismiss it as easy or say that researchers are incompetent when you haven't spent years working on cancer research in a wet lab.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#237

Post by carry_bit » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 5:18 PM UTC

21 wrote: post #68

angersock wrote: post #4

We have nuclear power, but people are bad at evaluating risks, so here we are.

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

We've had a working reactor design that doesn't suffer from Fukushima's failure mode for over 20 years. Ironically, public opposition has made nuclear less safe than it would've been.

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#238

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 5:18 PM UTC

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.

You can make a photovoltaic panels fab with the money that goes into a nuclear power plant, and complete it faster.

The one thing that would probably have the largest impact would be guaranteeing some demand for PV fabs. (As much as I hate governments guaranteeing demand in general.)

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#239

Post by carry_bit » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 5:20 PM UTC

21 wrote: post #219

losvedir wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

> A private think tank says the total cost of the Fukushima disaster could reach ¥70 trillion ($626 billion), or more than three times the government’s latest estimate. But I guess you'll say that $626 bil is just 15% of Japan's GDP, totally manageable over the long term. I'm sure the communities where future nuclear plants are to be build will love this argument: "if disaster strikes, remember, it's for the greater…

What's the cost of rising sea levels over the long term?

Re: The world is losing the war against climate change

#240

Post by Bouncingsoul1 » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 5:20 PM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #131

vowelless wrote: post #91

I am a little out of the loop and so I have a few questions: 1. At what point in time can we arrest ocean temperature rise purely by reducing emissions? 2. Even if we stopped further rise in temperature, is the current temperature (land and ocean) sustainable, or is a chain reaction already underway that will increasingly lead to more and more turbulent weather? 3. Are there viable ways to extract greenhouses gasses…

How are we going to make the ice cube? Where's all the heat from cooling the water going to go? Back in the atmosphere? Maybe we should just make a massive solar array, power a large laser with it, and shoot the beam into space.

We could get it from Europe (moon),anyway this would result in further rise of the sealevel.