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Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

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Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#211

Post by adrianN »

otabdeveloper2 wrote: post #60

> We have 12 years to prevent a climate catastrophe I don't know how old you are, but those of us over 20 remember that we had '12 years' 20 years ago. Somehow the prophesied catastrophe never arrives and the date gets perpetually pushed into the future. Looks like a secular Seventh Day Adventists.

The realistic conclusion is that it's already to late to save the world. There is no way we can keep warming below 1.5 degrees now. Twenty years ago we might have had a chance. In another twenty years of business as usual we're probably looking at 3+ degrees of inevitable change.

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#212

Post by boomlinde »

starbugs wrote: post #79
cthulha wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a psychological defence against anxiety/depression rather than an actual foundation for real action. You're looking at big, broad patterns and assuming they will work out on the huge scales necessary for civilisation to continue. Other people are looking at the big broad patterns and assuming that cascading failures will make problems accelerate.

No, it's not. It's a mindset and a positive attitude that is constructive instead of spreading fear and doom, which does not yield any positive outcome at all.

How is it constructive to say that there's nothing we can do about people's appetites for rhino horns when there's 70 years of evidence of that not being the case? It's not positive, it's an overall defeatist attitude thinly veiled in sci-fi speculation.

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#213

Post by blablabla123 »

vjsc wrote: post #78

In 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…

> In my opinion, the large corporations behind fossil fuels have too much of an economic clout.

It's easy to blame the big corporations. It's also about the governments facilitating alternatives and about eventually, literally every person buying into that.

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#215

Post by simonh »

vjsc wrote: post #78

In 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…

In democracies we can't all just throw up our hands and blame it on the political class and big business. If the ordinary people of the developed world really wanted something done about it, as a higher priority than anything else, there is no gun held to their heads preventing them from voting for that. We are all benefiting hugely from the cheap energy reaped from fossil fuels, whether we like it or not, and in the main the fact is we like it.

Imagining that 'large corporations' are reaping all the benefits and could bear all the cost of weaning the global economy off fossil fuels is jaw droppingly naive. The massive costs of weaning ourselves off fossil fuels would bear down heavily on all of us, and especially the poor and the third world. Can we imagine China elevating hundreds of millions of people out of poverty over the last 30 years without fossil fuels?

I'm no climate change denier, far from it. You're quite right that the costs will be severe, even catastrophic, but there is no easy answer to this.

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#217

Post by ryanwaggoner »

titzer wrote: post #199
buro9 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earth will be fine. Life on Earth will be fine, but that life will be different to the life we have today. The only thing not fine is whether humans survive what they/we ultimately have brought about. But in there is a kind of beautiful justice that the universe has in it's self-correcting algorithm... if you create imbalance, the imbalance will correct in time but perhaps to do so it kills you. If we care about the…

> Earth will be fine. Life on Earth will be fine... TBH statements like these really grate on me. Yes, Earth will be fine in the same sense that you'd be fine if you surgically removed your arms, legs, eyeballs, ears, and tongue and then were fed intravenously and your waste disposed of for you. You might live a long life and have lots of nice dreams. The reality is that we are in early stages of kicking off a cascad…

I’d love to see a credible source suggesting that climate change has any kind of remote chance of wiping out all life on earth larger than a few cm.

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#218

Post by dang »

trymas wrote: post #27

EDIT: downvoters, feel free to add your opinion, what seps we can take in 12 years to prevent climate change. I will gladly hear any opinion, especially if it is not as drastic as mine. 1. Drop coal and gas as energy sources immediately. Use renewable and nuclear energy as main power sources. Phase out nuclear after couple decades, when we hopefully can get all our energy needs from renewables. EDIT: forgot to add in…

Please don't break the site guidelines by going on about downvote(r)s.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#219

Post by bansheehash »

There's a lot that technology can do to fight climate change. I came across Treetracker (https://www.greenstand.org/), an app that tracks tree planting and pays planters per tree after verification.

Spinning up multiple crowdfunded instances of apps like this across the world could really bring back a lot of the green cover lost over the years.

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#220

Post by titzer »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #217
titzer wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Earth will be fine. Life on Earth will be fine... TBH statements like these really grate on me. Yes, Earth will be fine in the same sense that you'd be fine if you surgically removed your arms, legs, eyeballs, ears, and tongue and then were fed intravenously and your waste disposed of for you. You might live a long life and have lots of nice dreams. The reality is that we are in early stages of kicking off a cascad…

I’d love to see a credible source suggesting that climate change has any kind of remote chance of wiping out all life on earth larger than a few cm.

It's not just climate change, it's the combined effects of a lot of different things, not the least of which is overfishing, deforestation, loss of habitat, and selective destruction of ecosystems.

So far we've really only scratched the surface, but there have been hundreds of local mass die-offs (billions of individual animals each). https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/01/150113-mass...

The Great Barrier Reef is about half dead now. In two years. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/since-20...

But look at what happened at the end of the Permian age. 96% of species were lost. It was due to CO2/methane causing climate change. https://cosmosmagazine.com/palaeontology/big-five-extinction...

(btw we still have no idea what caused the extinction at the end of the Triassic).

We're basically on the way to combining all of these causes of mass extinctions in a super-short timeframe that may mushroom into one super-massive extinction.

And as far as what-if's go, if climate change sets off a global conflict, and there's a nuclear war, forget it.

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