Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 523 posts

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

#321

Post by aoner »

lozenge wrote: post #148
aoner wrote: post #116

If you look at the recent IPCC reports, people are heavily betting on putting carbon back into the stable form. That can be in the form of carbon capture storage, or creating new building materials or other stuff out of it. I think in the near future, people will pay a hefty premium for carbon storage due to carbon taxes (Check out this great GIF that illustrates carbon tax scheme growth: https://www.sightline.org/20…

"If you look at the recent IPCC reports, people are heavily betting on putting carbon back into the stable form" This is more due to its political palatibility than its scientific value. It allows conclusions like "12 years to save the world" (not actually what the report says, but what the media was able to spin it as, and OP's interpretation) instead of a more honest assessment. As for the EU's carbon trading schem…

In all scenario's we need negative emissions. If you're interested in the topic, there is a really cool stanford seminar by Brentz Constantz (Cofounder of BluePlanet LTD) about viable ways to do negative emissions that are cost effective without carbon trading schemes. It gives you a very good idea of the amount of carbon that is already in the air and needs to be taken out.

What's your solution for/take on all of this?

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

#322

Post by gideonparanoid »

lucozade wrote: post #295
gjm11 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, there's no gun to our heads preventing us voting for taking serious action on climate change. There doesn't need to be. Imagine I'm a voter in, say, the US or the UK. There is no major party I can vote for that will, if elected, take serious action on climate change. In both nations there is a Green Party which probably would, but it has a firmly established track record of getting approximately zero votes; t…

This isn't how policy making works though. An excellent example is Brexit. The Brexit referendum existed solely because of UKIP and UKIP have only ever won 2 parliamentary seats. And those were both for sitting MPs that had defected. However, UKIP did get 4-odd million votes, plenty of local councillors, MEPs etc. In other words, they clearly had a lot of support for their flagship policies and that caused the main p…

This is a good analysis of the situation.

>(no idea who the other bloke is) Jonathan Bartley [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Bartley

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

#323

Post by waylandsmithers »

As a meta-comment, it's interesting to me that this is so highly upvoted and responded to here on hacker news. As a consultant I often find that clients who are brilliant experts in their own field often assume themselves to be experts in _every_ domain, including my own area of expertise which is software design and development.

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

#324

Post by chimprich »

sosense wrote: post #110
Waterluvian wrote: post #22

I like polar bears so it's sad to see those go. It will be disturbing to see coastal cities founded next to sunken cities. Storms are fun but only when they're occasional. I already miss the insects. We worry about losing languages, cultures, artwork to the unyielding entropic horror named time. Not because we have a pragmatic need for them. But the future is scary when you can't bring the past with you. My culture i…

Polar bear populations are fine, sea level had been rising at the same rate for much longer than we've been industrialized, storm rate isn't changing, and where do you live that there are no insects?

> where do you live that there are no insects

Relevant paper. 75% recorded decline in insect biomass:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

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

#326

Post by antoineMoPa »

pauldjohnston wrote: post #221

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…

I wonder what percentage of CO2 comes from programmers commuting to work.

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

#327

Post by nkurz »

adrianN wrote: post #238
patrickg_zill wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware of this country's recent past ethnic cleansing...?

How is that related to their carbon policies?

It's probably not relevant to their carbon policy, but it's a valid qualifier to the first sentence which proposes Bhutan an otherwise unqualified "great example".

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

#328

Post by WhompingWindows »

cletus wrote: post #11

So 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…

You don't have to turn the Earth into Venus. You just have to raise the Earth from 283 Kelvin to 285 Kelvin, and you'll get massive flooding and ice melt which technology won't be able to wave away. Look at hurricanes today, they are deadly, where is the tech saving us from them?

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

#329

Post by revel »

Practically speaking, the single biggest area of low hanging fruit is clean shipping. Right now the largest 15 cargo ships emit more greenhouse gasses than all the cars on the road combined. The US could take the lead on this issue by modifying the Jones Act, a peculiar piece of legislation that forces maritime commerce between US territories to use US ships with an American crew. If the Jones Act were modified to include incentives for zero emission ships it would heavily incentive investment in this critical area. This single change in legislation would reduce the cost of goods and services in Hawaii and Puerto Rico, increase trade, and provide a powerful economic carrot to reduce carbon emissions.
Post reply on HN