Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think • Hacker News Board

Re: Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

#111

Post by anm89 » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 6:00 PM UTC

iikoolpp wrote: post #25

Opened the article expecting it to be a more abstract cost. Turns out it's about economics. Christ alive. "Yeah, billions are gonna die, but what really matters is my house prices are gonna go down."

People love to get outraged when economists talk about human tragedy in monetary terms because they assume the sub text of discussing things in terms of money is that that's what they think is really important about the situation. This entirely misses the point.

The economists want something they can measure. They are using dollar losses as a proxy for the gravity of the situation and as a proxy for relative value that people place on things.

If you want someone to analyze people's feelings about the tragedy get a psychologist but there's a reason that economists are more likely to get invited to a climate summit than psychologists.

Re: Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

#112

Post by zzot » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 6:00 PM UTC

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #45

zzot wrote: post #20

Dropping in here just to say: if this got you worried, come work with us over at http://climateaction.tech/ We are a global community of tech professionals using our skills, expertise and platforms to support solutions to the climate crisis.

Looks interesting but what are you actually doing (projects)? I couldn’t find in your site.

The core of the climateAction.tech at the moment is in a Slack, where different projects are moved forward by the community. There are a bunch of different things happening but recently some of our members where behind the https://digital.globalclimatestrike.net. A couple of things I know are being worked on include putting more pressure on AWS to switch to renewables faster and an idea for a green open-source license

Re: Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

#113

Post by jakeinspace » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 6:02 PM UTC

chrisco255 wrote: post #93

chris_va wrote: post #23

(disclaimer: I work in a Climate&Energy research group) I just want to remind everyone that there are solutions to climate change. We know how to produce clean energy and sequester CO2. The current free market does not make those solutions profitable for investors, though, and we will have to change that. Solving climate change can be as simple as getting a carbon price adopted. It needs to ramp up over time, allow a…

Before any tax is issued, I'd like to know the exact percentage breakdown between man-made climate change and natural climate cycles? Can anyone break the percentage down for me, between man-made CO2 and natural CO2 being outgassed by oceans, and then breakdown the difference between CO2 induced warming and variations in the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Meridional…

If the climate were a linear system then that might be answerable with certainty, but it is not.

Re: Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

#114

Post by tito » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 6:03 PM UTC

gus_massa wrote: post #79

tito wrote: post #4

Climate change will create the first trillionaire. Find every machine that eats fossil fuels and electrify it. Find every crop that requires stable land and predictable weather and farm it in a shipping container. Find every underlying infrastructure that requires decades to pay off and decentralize it. Instead of water line pipes, pull water out of the air. Instead of fiber optic cables make LEO satellites. Instead…

Most of your proposal are unrealistic. For example: > Instead of water line pipes, pull water out of the air. You need a lot of energy to transform water into vapor and you need to remove and dispose the same amount of energy to transform vapor into liquid water. Every three months there is a new Kickstarter scam that propose something like this. Sometimes it's an overoptimistic idealist, sometimes it's a plain scam,…

WATER: Traditional municipal water pipes aren't perfect either. They're expensive to install and maintain, and it takes energy to pump all that water around and maintain pressure. Think about Flint [1], think about the upcoming shortage of groundwater in India. The cost of traditional water infrastructure is higher than estimated. There is real need for air capture of water.

Here's an interesting project to follow, perhaps you have seen it already: "The winner of the Water Abundance XPrize creates enough water for 100 people every day by making an artificial cloud inside a shipping container." [2]

FARMS: That's exactly right, agriculture uses much of our land today. Most of that is livestock. "Livestock is the world’s largest user of land resources, with grazing land and cropland dedicated to the production of feed representing almost 80 % of all agricultural land." [2] So much of meat production will be made using cellular agriculture. Livestock is way too resource intensive, cattle will go extinct. And the rest of it, well 2-dimensional farming seems inefficient so let's see what building up looks like. A single shipping container can hold many acres worth of short crops that can be grown on top of eachother.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis

[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/90253718/a-device-that-can-pull-...

[3] http://www.fao.org/animal-production/en/

Re: Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

#115

Post by korpiq » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 6:03 PM UTC

crb002 wrote: post #40

I still think many models are missing volcanic winters. We know they have crazy cooling effects, but they are something we don’t yet control. More $$$ money needs to go into Vulcanering. Crazy, but if we can make ash spread 20% more that’s years of cooling.

If I understand correctly, currently anthropogenically accumulated extra CO2 takes some hundreds of thousands of years to return to geological circulation, while the faster biological circulation won't withhold it all, and seas are getting saturated (and will acidify beyond supporting current lifeforms in the process). [see eg. Hot Earth Dreams]

Also, if I understood correctly a single article I'll try to dig up a link to later, the kickback effect of stopping a temporary cooling measure and returning to the warming trend caused by the CO2 still in air will have stronger harmful effects. If these hold, it might prove tricky to keep up a moderate, safe cooling effect long enough, even if some technical measure to cause volcanic winter was found. [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0431-0?utm_source... via https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/devi...]

I would hope this or some other measure would prove successful. but I'm not yet able to put all my faith on any of them.

Re: Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

#116

Post by badfrog » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 6:03 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #42

sunseb wrote: post #31

A carbon tax is just massive scam built around this fear of global warning.

To claim any tax is a “scam” is to misunderstand tax.

Maybe by a strict/legal definition of scam, but you can easily imagine taxes that fit colloquial usage. Anything where the government is dishonest about the motivations behind the tax or how it will be used.

Re: Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

#117

Post by rfish » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 6:07 PM UTC

chris_va wrote: post #23

(disclaimer: I work in a Climate&Energy research group) I just want to remind everyone that there are solutions to climate change. We know how to produce clean energy and sequester CO2. The current free market does not make those solutions profitable for investors, though, and we will have to change that. Solving climate change can be as simple as getting a carbon price adopted. It needs to ramp up over time, allow a…

[flagged]

Re: Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

#118

Post by UncleEntity » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 6:08 PM UTC

moosey wrote: post #15

tito wrote: post #4

Climate change will create the first trillionaire. Find every machine that eats fossil fuels and electrify it. Find every crop that requires stable land and predictable weather and farm it in a shipping container. Find every underlying infrastructure that requires decades to pay off and decentralize it. Instead of water line pipes, pull water out of the air. Instead of fiber optic cables make LEO satellites. Instead…

I, on the other hand, believe that fighting climate change will be a great wealth equalizer. The development of cheap energy in the form of wind and solar power, and also the need for centralization in the fight against climate change (which will require an increase in taxes against those with money: the rich) will eliminate many current power structures in our current economic system, and will make many aspects of t…

> which will require an increase in taxes against those with money: the rich

Unfortunately they will do what they always do and make the poor and middle class carry the bulk of the tax burden while just throwing a sail or two on their super yachts after the biofuel conversion.

Re: Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

#119

Post by Misdicorl » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 6:10 PM UTC

chris_va wrote: post #23

(disclaimer: I work in a Climate&Energy research group) I just want to remind everyone that there are solutions to climate change. We know how to produce clean energy and sequester CO2. The current free market does not make those solutions profitable for investors, though, and we will have to change that. Solving climate change can be as simple as getting a carbon price adopted. It needs to ramp up over time, allow a…

To actually prevent further global warming we need active planetary scale solutions.

You paint far too rosy a picture here. A carbon tax is preventative, not active. There is no viable path to scale current sequestration techniques to global scale.

What we're talking about with a carbon tax is not 'solving climate change'. It is limiting the change to approximately what current models predict.

Re: Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

#120

Post by aSplash0fDerp » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 6:10 PM UTC

tito wrote: post #4

Climate change will create the first trillionaire. Find every machine that eats fossil fuels and electrify it. Find every crop that requires stable land and predictable weather and farm it in a shipping container. Find every underlying infrastructure that requires decades to pay off and decentralize it. Instead of water line pipes, pull water out of the air. Instead of fiber optic cables make LEO satellites. Instead…

>Climate change will create the first trillionaire.

I was cheering for those canucks a few years back, hoping they'd score an easy trillion with their groundbreaking product.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-pollutio...

Bring on the fad diet pills to fix CC and watch all of the lesser talented fraudsters pile behind. If economies cause CC, economies will uncause CC.

- that gives them enough room for plausible deniability