A 3°C world has no safe place • Hacker News Board

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#121

Post by bigyikes » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 11:11 PM UTC

donatj wrote: post #28

azalemeth wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I equally wish that more Americans used SI -- Farenheit is about as familiar to me as Rankine; I have been bitten by the US use of 'mil' to mean thousandths of an inch whilst remaining how some en-gb engineers use it as inaccurate slang for mm. But this is a big distraction. Alas, I know that the whole reason we're in this pickle is that scientific literacy is low, and most people prefer short term gains over longer…

> I have been bitten by the US use of 'mil' to mean thousandths of an inch Huh, I live in the US and I've only ever heard that called a thou but wikipedia backs you up. I'd think a mil would be a millionth of an inch.

Mil is used in circuit board design, not sure about other fields. I find it very confusing

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#122

Post by scoofy » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 11:12 PM UTC

daxfohl wrote: post #99

scoofy wrote: post #49

American here. I took a bunch of earth science classes in college in 1999. I realized then, I would just plan ahead and aim for an urbanist lifestyle, because our country would have to change. I focused on transit alternatives as my primary advocacy, because it was the most obvious low-hanging fruit and paired with the public health. I never imagined this would happen, but as the years went on, I grew less astonished…

There's a lot of concrete and steel in the urban lifestyle, which according to Gates are the biggest contributors to global warming. Not saying urban lifestyle is the worst, but there's a good chance it's just not enough. My guess is no matter what we do we're over the limit, a reduction in one thing leads to an increase in another, and probably population reduction is the only solution.

You don't need skyscapers. You need the density levels of Paris. Six-story walkups. The concrete can be put into 5/2 urban buildings, or it can be put in to driveways, pools, and sidewalks no one will ever use.

Pretending that urbanism is somehow remotely equivalent is naive at best.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#123

Post by fallingknife » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 11:12 PM UTC

scoofy wrote: post #49

American here. I took a bunch of earth science classes in college in 1999. I realized then, I would just plan ahead and aim for an urbanist lifestyle, because our country would have to change. I focused on transit alternatives as my primary advocacy, because it was the most obvious low-hanging fruit and paired with the public health. I never imagined this would happen, but as the years went on, I grew less astonished…

> We don't even have serious bicycle or transit prioritization in our major urban areas. We don't have any concern for reducing our meat consumption. We don't have any concern for alternatives to airlines.

Sorry, but this stuff is a joke. Population control and non carbon based energy sources are the only things that can really make an impact.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#124

Post by simonh » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 11:12 PM UTC

ip26 wrote: post #104

lotsofpulp wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I look at what I can do about this. I can turn up the temp in my room, and the house. > So what do I do? know what we're doing is what we can Everything you do is inconsequential in the face of living in a detached single family home on a quarter acre lot. That very simple fact has exponential knock on effects requiring so much more mass to move so much further and hence consuming so much more energy, that everythi…

If we could wave a magic wand & cut global energy consumption in half via more public transit & denser living, but still burning fossil fuels... we would have the exact same crisis, perhaps delayed a few years. I'm naturally inclined towards austerity, but this problem cannot be fixed with cutbacks & efficiency alone.

Not at all, reducing global energy consumption by half would massively reduce, as well as delay the total long term impact. It’s true a lot of impact is baked in due to past emissions, but that’s no reason for complacency or fatalism. There still a lot we can do to reduce total impact and mitigate the impact we will suffer.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#125

Post by mrcwinn » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 11:12 PM UTC

scoofy wrote: post #49

American here. I took a bunch of earth science classes in college in 1999. I realized then, I would just plan ahead and aim for an urbanist lifestyle, because our country would have to change. I focused on transit alternatives as my primary advocacy, because it was the most obvious low-hanging fruit and paired with the public health. I never imagined this would happen, but as the years went on, I grew less astonished…

I hear you and I understand where you're coming from. And it's serious. Very serious.

And while I do think habits both have to change and will be forced to change — I do think it's useful to accept that we have to build our world and our environment to our behavioral tendencies. It's easy to look back cynically and say, I wish we'd never done X, or Y, or Z. The reality now though is this massive economic engine, which has lifted people out of poverty and created opportunity -- polluting in its current form though it may be -- might be the thing that saves us and helps us escape velocity. Technology can help us adapt and solve this. I know it's easy to live the cynicism but I promise you, challenging though it may be, we need each other and to believe in possibility more than ever if we're going to pull this off.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#126

Post by lacker » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 11:12 PM UTC

scoofy wrote: post #49

American here. I took a bunch of earth science classes in college in 1999. I realized then, I would just plan ahead and aim for an urbanist lifestyle, because our country would have to change. I focused on transit alternatives as my primary advocacy, because it was the most obvious low-hanging fruit and paired with the public health. I never imagined this would happen, but as the years went on, I grew less astonished…

To me, it is just the nature of large groups of human beings that sometimes there is an impending disaster, but people do not agree on what to do about it, and humanity stumbles into disaster. Look at Europe before WW1 or WW2, how many people predicted an imminent disastrous war, and how little agreement there was on how to fix it. Climate change is probably not as bad as impending WW3, but it shouldn't be surprising that we haven't had a mass changing of opinion to avoid disaster. That never really happens.

The simplest answer is that we just need to prepare for a hotter world. This article points out that there will be "no safe place". Okay, we won't have a safe place. We will need to do the best we can to minimize natural disasters and at the same time try to figure out political and technological solutions to limiting climate change.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#127

Post by hak8or » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 11:12 PM UTC

scoofy wrote: post #116

RedditKon wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions. This isn't a right/left problem - both parties have let corporations get away with runaway pollution for entirely too long.

Bullshit. 100 companies are responsible for extraction . They are selling us the carbon we are actively buying .

Thank you, I could not agree more. These companies exist because their services and products are being bought by someone else, and in the end the consumers are either actual consumers or governments (who consumers vote for). I place minimal blame on companies, because clearly consumers don't care, and instead want to buy the cheapest products possible.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#128

Post by bko » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 11:12 PM UTC

scoofy wrote: post #49

American here. I took a bunch of earth science classes in college in 1999. I realized then, I would just plan ahead and aim for an urbanist lifestyle, because our country would have to change. I focused on transit alternatives as my primary advocacy, because it was the most obvious low-hanging fruit and paired with the public health. I never imagined this would happen, but as the years went on, I grew less astonished…

I don't know who you're referring to as 'we' but in the US, carbon emissions have actually peaked in the early 2000s and decreased in an absolute sense since then, despite growing population and industrialization. We're currently at 1986 emission levels. US has 15% of global emissions, while China has 28% and is growing in both per person and absolute.

I don't think you're wrong to be cynical about tackling this problem but you should be honest about what reducing emissions means to billions of people that are just now coming into the industrial age.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide...

[1] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emi...

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#129

Post by mannerheim » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 11:12 PM UTC

scoofy wrote: post #116

RedditKon wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions. This isn't a right/left problem - both parties have let corporations get away with runaway pollution for entirely too long.

Bullshit. 100 companies are responsible for extraction . They are selling us the carbon we are actively buying .

Not to mention quite a few of those 'companies' are state-owned entities...

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#130

Post by wizzwizz4 » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 11:12 PM UTC

daxfohl wrote: post #99

scoofy wrote: post #49

American here. I took a bunch of earth science classes in college in 1999. I realized then, I would just plan ahead and aim for an urbanist lifestyle, because our country would have to change. I focused on transit alternatives as my primary advocacy, because it was the most obvious low-hanging fruit and paired with the public health. I never imagined this would happen, but as the years went on, I grew less astonished…

There's a lot of concrete and steel in the urban lifestyle, which according to Gates are the biggest contributors to global warming. Not saying urban lifestyle is the worst, but there's a good chance it's just not enough. My guess is no matter what we do we're over the limit, a reduction in one thing leads to an increase in another, and probably population reduction is the only solution.

“Population reduction” again? It might be the most politically expedient option, but the planet isn't overpopulated. We're just polluting way too much. If you model a back-of-the-envelope sustainable civilisation, you'll find we're nowhere near any sort of fundamental population limit.

As a species, our median per-capita pollution is okay. It's the mean per-capita pollution that's the issue.