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

Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

thetyee.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 241 posts

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#41

Post by toxik »

cyrksoft wrote: post #35

"11. A global population strategy to enable a smooth descent to the two to three billion that could live comfortably indefinitely within the biophysical means of nature." Part 2: https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/11/12/Climate-Crisis-Realis... This is highly disturbing. With the 11,000 scientist warning the other day they proposed something similar. I find it very worrying. Who will decide who lives? Or who has kids a…

Probably just family planning. Nobody needs to die to save the earth, well, not execution at least

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#42

Post by julienb_sea »

The effects of climate change will play play out across many localized areas. Some will be dramatically more impacted than others. The impacts will require remediation solutions, some difficult and expensive. Millions will be displaced and affected, and complex engineering challenges will arise.

This will not end humanity. The apocalypse is not coming. Humans will adapt because we have no choice. Engineering a solution to a global climate problem is borderline impossible. Engineering a solution to imminent local direct impacts of climate change is a more coherent, approachable problem.

I agree with the author's assessment - humans require fossil fuels for society's function. Thus, instead of moping around about how we are all fucked, it seems a more productive exercise to sort out how to cohabitate a world where we are going to continue consuming, for the medium term, our near infinite supply of natural gas for energy.

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#43

Post by xyzzyz »

yodsanklai wrote: post #25
mdorazio wrote: post #2

Lots of assumptions baked in here. Chief among them is that renewables deployment will continue to be slower than new energy demand. If you look at the charts, this is pretty unlikely since the renewables trend is a consistent exponential increase year over year while the demand curve is very lumpy and mostly linear when averaged. Next is the assumption that renewables have to be deployed at grid scale, with the mate…

> renewables deployment will continue to be slower than new energy demand. Does renewable deployment cover new energy demand as well as the fossil fuels we are supposed not to use anymore? > renewables deployments are offsetting dirtier production methods Renewables take their toll on the environment too. Batteries and solar panels need fossil fuels for their production, and the mining of rare metals is an extremely…

And, of course, to build significant acreages of solar farms, you need to destroy ecosystems already existing there. Consider, for example, the case of the desert tortoises that were blocking the construction of the Ivanpah Solar Plant. The company building it had to spend over $20 million to have people literally walk over the area to find and relocate every desert tortoise living there. This was in the middle of the desert a few dozen miles south of Las Vegas.

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#44

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

greglindahl wrote: post #32
jandrewrogers wrote: post #22

The crux of the matter is that we need to drive thermodynamics backward at planetary scale. This is a fancy way of saying that we need to increase electricity generation by an integer factor beyond current global demand without producing net CO2. The list of existing energy sources capable of scaling like this that don't rely on burning carbon is extremely short: nuclear fission. I don't see any possibility of the re…

> The list of existing energy sources capable of scaling like this ... solar and wind are scaling much better than every prediction, for many years now, yet somehow that's not good enough for the people who claim to be realists. Odd.

> solar and wind are scaling much better than every prediction, for many years now,

The issue is that scaling is about relative growth, and to solve climate change we need absolute growth. Despite all the optimistic growth, the truth is that our world runs on fossil fuels and is likely to do so in the future as more and more parts become developed and use more energy.

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#45

Post by cyrksoft »

toxik wrote: post #41
cyrksoft wrote: post #35

"11. A global population strategy to enable a smooth descent to the two to three billion that could live comfortably indefinitely within the biophysical means of nature." Part 2: https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/11/12/Climate-Crisis-Realis... This is highly disturbing. With the 11,000 scientist warning the other day they proposed something similar. I find it very worrying. Who will decide who lives? Or who has kids a…

Probably just family planning. Nobody needs to die to save the earth, well, not execution at least

Family planning how? Who will decide who can have children and who can't? Governments? A global one child policy? That's insane

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#46

Post by greffetti »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #19

We are going to need technology that will pull CO2 from the atmosphere. Yes, doing that is very energy intensive, but we have tech like nuclear power that could power such a process. People want to have their lifestyle and telling people in developing countries that they can never have the Western lifestyle and telling people in developed countries that they have to reduce their lifestyle are simply untenable politic…

Our society is able to take flights all the time, has year-round availability of seasonal fruit, has gargantuan industrial processes treating millions of sentient beings like inanimate product to supply meat, etc. Obviously these things aren't sustainable, given that their structures are so closely intertwined with fossil fuel usage, yet it would be basically impossible to convince everyone on Earth to stop using making use of them, which is why I suppose I agree with the "pessimistic" view that the author has.

Regardless, mitigating a disaster while still causing that disaster doesn't result in the disaster ending. If we allocate all our efforts into mitigation we won't be in a position to actually restructure our society to be sustainable when the problem of climate change remains.

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#47

Post by ronilan »

In part two is an 11 steps plan:

11. A global population strategy to enable a smooth descent to the two to three billion that could live comfortably indefinitely within the biophysical means of nature.

Another anti-humanist Malthusian loony. It’s probably the effect of Vancouver’s dump weather. Ignore.

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#48

Post by usrusr »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #19

We are going to need technology that will pull CO2 from the atmosphere. Yes, doing that is very energy intensive, but we have tech like nuclear power that could power such a process. People want to have their lifestyle and telling people in developing countries that they can never have the Western lifestyle and telling people in developed countries that they have to reduce their lifestyle are simply untenable politic…

Pulling is easy, the "technology" is called trees and actual technology will never be able to compete with them as long as the CO2 content in the atmosphere is measured in hundreds of ppm (and if it ever reaches into the thousands we might just as well give up and focus on building mementos for passing alien civilizations to find)

The challenge is to keep the extracted carbon from returning to the atmosphere. Those underground reservoirs of coal and hydrocarbons we have been digging up all the time are hard to beat.

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#49

Post by jhayward »

xyzzyz wrote: post #37
mdorazio wrote: post #2

Lots of assumptions baked in here. Chief among them is that renewables deployment will continue to be slower than new energy demand. If you look at the charts, this is pretty unlikely since the renewables trend is a consistent exponential increase year over year while the demand curve is very lumpy and mostly linear when averaged. Next is the assumption that renewables have to be deployed at grid scale, with the mate…

This is also not true - solar + battery is a perfect use case for distributed deployment This is simply not feasible. Do the math. To store 3 days worth of current US energy use, you need to build $50 trillion worth of batteries. If you assume that the battery installation lifetime is 20 years, and amortize it over that period, you’re looking at over 10% of US GDP spent just on building and installing the batteries.…

> To store 3 days worth of current US energy use,

There is absolutely no need, of any kind, to store 3 days of US energy use. It's a complete strawman.

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#50

Post by XorNot »

cyrksoft wrote: post #35

"11. A global population strategy to enable a smooth descent to the two to three billion that could live comfortably indefinitely within the biophysical means of nature." Part 2: https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/11/12/Climate-Crisis-Realis... This is highly disturbing. With the 11,000 scientist warning the other day they proposed something similar. I find it very worrying. Who will decide who lives? Or who has kids a…

If the human population were limited to one-child per couple for a few decades, then everyone can have a family, and the population still declines.

This is happening naturally in a lot of countries already:

> According to projections of the population with the current fertility rate, over 65s will account for 40% of the population by 2060,[10][11] and the total population will fall by a third from 128 million in 2010 to 87 million in 2060 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_Japan#Effects

Post reply on HN