301–310 of 523 posts
Stratospheric Aerosol Injection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...
Dangerous: we don't know how the nonlinear weather systems will behave. This may also compound the problem in the future - lots of unknowns.
But very quick: We can cool the earth down rather quickly using this method.
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I'm on the same page. The easiest thing to do once the collapse comes will be to give up and die instead of change - and maybe 80% is too conservative an estimate of the number of folks that will take this route. Farming is more of a 'trickle petroleum into the ground and harvest crops'. Its one of the most efficient of technologies now. With good timing and no-till and ammonia fertilizer, even eroded clay hillsides…
RE the 80%, I expect the food shortage pressures to cause immediate wars that would quickly help shed the excess population. I fully expect to die in such a conflict (or be forced to eat a bullet to avoid the pain of starvation). RE farming and other technology trees, it might be worth it to hedge our bets by trying to develop such simpler tech trees right now. In the worst case, we'd be making life much easier for t…
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Maybe trying to win over republicans would be better? The culture wars don’t help this issue.
Fox News is the a major barrier to that happening. There are those on the right that believe in climate change and think that we need to take action but they are vastly underrepresented on Fox. With that being the case most Republican voters will believe that its a worldwide leftist conspiracy and few Republican politicians will dare defy this orthodoxy. That's why we have Republican congressional leaders saying thin…
I watched a film recently called Pandora’s Box about Nuclear vs solar. They make the case nuclear is the best solution for environmentalists (the guys who made it were hard core activists) and that things like solar are toxic and leaching heavy metals. They say Nuclear is the safest and cleanest solution and is the only viable solution if we want to solve climate change.
traditional solar can be made cleanly and there are advanced biological systems on the way
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What would win over republicans? I mean, if the survival of human civilisation isn't enough, what can you propose?
Stop crying wolf (about this issue at least) for a start. 1. Guardian: "President Obama has four years to save the Earth" (2009) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jan/18/jim-hans... Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating cl…
Eventually we will have a Democrat President...get ready for a deafening wave of silence when that President does as little or maybe even less than our current one. Rest assured if that President is elected during a recession, putting people to work will override climate concerns.
Well, having done some research into this recently, the tech world has something it can do right now. Switch to sustainably powered Cloud and move to renewably powered/offset Data Centres. e.g. Google (100% carbon neutral), Azure (100% offset), AWS (Oregon, Montreal, Ireland, Frankfurt regions are 100% carbon neutral) Cloud/Data Centres emit around 2% of Greenhouse Gas Emissions (bet you didn't know that). There is a…
Fundamentally it is a political problem, not a technological problem. We need high carbon taxes, we need to end fossil fuel subsidies, and we probably need to change our economic system to something that addresses the tragedy of the commons. But we’ve seen in recent years how technology can influence politics. I’d quote a tweet from Tristan Harris from the other day [1]: > In an hypothetical world, if Facebook were r…
"Fundamentally it is a political problem" -- Agreed. What if the whole problem is that of "growth"? Here's one possible chain of thought. I don't fully subscribe to this, so please feel free to poke holes in it: 1. The biggest polluters tend to be commercial enterprises 2. They are aware of the environmental impact of their actions, but are reluctant to stop 3. They are staffed by (mostly) normal human beings, but th…
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Fox News is the a major barrier to that happening. There are those on the right that believe in climate change and think that we need to take action but they are vastly underrepresented on Fox. With that being the case most Republican voters will believe that its a worldwide leftist conspiracy and few Republican politicians will dare defy this orthodoxy. That's why we have Republican congressional leaders saying thin…
Welcome to HN, where we switch from damning Google for supporting censorship at home or in the PRC...to suggesting that banning a TV network is a precondition for saving the world.