Stratospheric Aerosol Injection:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...
Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
91–100 of 523 posts
Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
#92Unfortunately at an individual level effecting change, I feel the boat has long since sailed.
It's pretty obvious that in western democracies, it's not so much the politicians who control the scene, but the corporates that sponsor their election campaigns in return for industry specific kickbacks.
While we have vested interests such as coal, oil and gas producers sponsoring your only valid political choices, you're going to end up voting for parties that are only there due to those companies. I don't see that changing any time soon.
I think it's best to just prepare for the most realistic current scenario, which is an average temperature rise in the area of 1 - 1.5 degrees C. Not so much dooms day preparation, but maybe don't be that little pig who builds his house out of straw.
Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
#93In my opinion, the large corporations behind fossil fuels have too much of an economic clout. The governments around the world are dependent on them for a considerable amount of their respective national economy. So yes you are right about government not doing much about this. Ultimately, unless there is a relatively quick mass extinction event, no government is going to be bothered into action. Climate change and th…
Large corporations have too much economic clout because our economic and political thinking is pre-rational and not fit for purpose.
You can't do rational planning on a planetary scale when your political frameworks are explicitly tailored to maximise short-term resource accumulation without limit for a micro-minority.
We're not going to win this one without a revolution - not just the usual violent class swap that lops off one aristocracy to make room for another, but a moral and cultural revolution in how we plan for the future as a species.
I'm not optimistic, because IMO it's too big a challenge, and we literally don't have the brains or the culture for it.
But I'm open to being surprised.
Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
#94space mirrors
Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
#95https://www.drawdown.org/ has a nicely presented list of things that will help with global warming.
Honestly, I think it's too late. There's no way the entire world economy will be restructured in less than 12 years. Future generations will suffer for their ancestors' obstinacy.
Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
#96As we have become adults, we learn time and time again about personal responsibilities. Some of these lessons take many years, and some are emerging. We are awakening to the fact that the Earth's climate, like bills and taxes, is both our personal and collective responsibility. This means we need to take personal, financial, and political steps to lower our resource usage and carbon footprint. We can look around at our daily lives - the food we eat, our careers, where/how we live - to find areas where we can shed a few kilos from our carbon budget. Likewise we can boycott, divest from, and sanction the major sources of corporate, meaning collective, greenhouse gas emissions.
Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The Earth has also been a lot warmer than it is now Key here is rate of change, and what humans can survive. We are changing the climate many many times faster than ever before. Nature does not have the time to adapt. And the wars, famines and mass displacements coming from ecosystem collapse is like nothing we've seen in human history. Think we have a problem with a few million migrants? Try a billion or two! P-T…
Primates first developed when earth was 14°C warmer: http://gergs.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/All_palaeotemps_...
How is that relevant?
Areas where more than a billion people live today will become uninhabitable to humans if they warm up by 14 degrees. Actually, much sooner than that.
Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
#98So I'm honestly not as concerned about this as I once was. Don't get me wrong: the climate is going to change, arguably we're in a mass extinction event already and people aren't going to suddenly start acting in the collective long term welfare of humanity. One of the things I like about futurism is the levelheaded optimism and pragmatism you tend to get. And I'll call out Isaac Arthur as a well-known example of thi…
While I appreciate your optimism, it comes at the risk of failing to take personal action. The general sentiment is that people are uninterested in, or incapable of, making meaningful lifestyle changes , and that some future technological developments will transcend the Earth's carrying capacity to sustain us while cleaning up our collective mess. While there may be some shades of truth to that sentiment, it is still…
This is a good point. Optimism is good for motivation but it has to result in action and not be simply ignoring a problem. Pessimism paralyses people into inaction but by understanding the psychology we can change that.
I wrote a series of posts on this recently with more to come. Far more than I can fit in here. It's a classic tragedy of the commons but there is hope.
https://unop.uk/how-to-help-with-a-big-global-problem-as-a-t...
Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Things have gotten worse over the past 20 years though. The predictions might've been wrong about the rate of change (and I'm assuming this was a reputable source making the prediction, not cherry-picking the most extreme doomsayers). I hope more than anything they're still wrong today. But they weren't wrong about the actual direction of the change. People 20 years ago ignored the warnings, we must do better.
I never finished my degree, but I'm an environmental studies major. A cartoon in one of my books showed oxygen producing microbes that created earth's oxygen atmosphere organizing to stop the creation of this poisonous oxygen atmosphere as it was killing them. I was watching a TV show that said "If this spider were alive today, it would be hunting animals the size of house cats." and I blurted "No, it wouldn't. It wo…
The converse view is that problem solvers emerge because we keep making dire predictions.
The best way to motivate people (especially bright people) is to convince them their work has higher meaning.
If a problem being solved isn't high-stakes, you won't have the best and brightest working on it. They are going to go work on something that is actually high-stakes, high-impact. The post-WW2 nuclear threat was real. It attracted intellectual giants such as John Forbes Nash and John von Neumann whose work probably helped avert a crisis.
> More recently, the end of, I think, the Mayan calendar was supposed to be the end.
That's nowhere near the same thing as a nuclear threat.
The point is that problems don't get solved by magical fairies or elves. They're solved by real people. And smart people are attracted to hard, important problems. All the bellyaching and agonizing serve the purpose of signaling which problems matter.
Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
#100I wrote a trilogy of long posts on this topic very recently so I'll just link to that.
https://unop.uk/how-to-help-with-a-big-global-problem-as-a-t...
In summary, it's not somebody else's problem. It's our problem and we need to take responsibility and fix it. We already have all the core technology required to solve this and we just need to make it happen. Everyone can help, particularly the talented crowd on here.