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

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#191

Post by mrDmrTmrJ » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 11:34 PM UTC

wait_a_minute wrote: post #64

lmilcin wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait for all migrants from places that will be becoming uninhabitable.

When is this projected to happen, realistically? 100 years from now?

Realistically? 2011. As get global instability every time food prices spike from drought and commodities price spikes. That time it kicked off the Arab spring & Syrian civil war. Look at immigration into Europe across the Med. from North Africa.

Global food prices are spiking now and we're also seeing protests around the globe. The quote is "Society sits 2 meals and 24 hours from anarchy." So any place there's drought or crop failure we'll see a lot of choas.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#192

Post by eplanit » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 11:35 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 are the lifelong chain-smoker who, when diagnosed with lung cancer, chooses to keep smoking because of a misguided belief that "at least I'll die happy".

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#193

Post by r00fus » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 11:35 PM UTC

WorkLobster wrote: post #172

noasaservice wrote: post #27

I'm sitting in my air conditioned room, in the USA. Doing computer stuff, naturally. I look at what I can do about this. I can turn up the temp in my room, and the house. Meager difference. I can use less water - I already am, with getting showers every other day on average. I can eat less meat - which I do with purchase of the beef CSA. I'm big into the repair movement, and repair household equipment and electronics…

> I can eat less meat It's something I keep quiet about in day-to-day life since it seems to invite reprisal, but if we're soul-searching for what we as individuals can do, I beg you to try eating no meat at all. There seems to be an increasing awareness that animal farming as currently practised is an environmental catastrophe on many levels, including emissions[1]—I dimly recall the IPCC report being quite clear th…

Absolutism ("eat no meat") really does turn people off (because they can't envision a lifestyle without meat). I have cut down my meat intake by about 90% and it's great. I still eat a burger every quarter or so.

I think 90% is better than 0%.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#194

Post by perl4ever » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 11:36 PM UTC

lacker wrote: post #126

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…

>Okay, we won't have a safe place

There never was a safe place.

Nothing much may be happening around Yellowstone, but people speculate it might some day pretty much trash the whole continent if not the world.

People in the midwest don't worry about earthquakes much but New Madrid showed it is possible and could be really bad.

In the northeast, we're a long way from where most tornadoes are, but it can happen here, I've seen evidence.

Nobody's particularly worried about something like Fukushima in the US, but there are quite a few nuclear reactors all over the place. We tend to assume the Atlantic isn't going to have a tsunami, I guess. Is that certain?

In Europe, they assume there's not going to be a devastating volcano eruption, but you know, there's the historical records of Pompeii and so on.

Nobody saw Tunguska and Chelyabinsk coming, something like that could happen at any moment over a major city.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#195

Post by spats1990 » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 11:36 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #170

lsllc wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.ecowatch.com/military-largest-polluter-240876060... https://weaversway.coop/shuttle-online/2020/04/us-military-w... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190620100005.h... https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/06/13/report...

> https://www.ecowatch.com/military-largest-polluter-240876060 ... The headline does not seem to be supported by the article, which mainly consists of various pollution figures for the US military but lacks comparison to other entities. The closest it gets to that is saying the US military produces "more hazardous waste than the five largest U.S. chemical companies combined". Overall it makes a convincing case that t…

try this (PDF d/l): https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/Pe...

"...the DOD is the world’s largest institutional user of petroleum and correspondingly, the single largest institutional producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world. From FY1975 to FY2018, total DOD greenhouse gas emissions were more than 3,685 Million Metric Tons of CO2 equivalent."

"World's largest institutional user of petroleum" is both more precise and pretty damning.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#196

Post by nwiswell » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 11:38 PM UTC

scoofy wrote: post #187

nwiswell wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just, i cannot believe this is happening. This isn't hard to understand. The Sierra Club is made up of legitimate environmentalists, but they also care about their organization and their livelihoods, and many of the major donors to the Sierra Club are property owners in San Francisco (or Marin, or LA). Property values are obviously negatively impacted by development / densification, and so to avoid alienating don…

> and complete symbolism without substance on the left.

There's plenty of substance. It's just hypocritical for the Sierra Club to pretend that the motive is environmental.

There isn't any cause for shock. Given the incentives at play this is expected. How much financial suffering would you accept to put a dent in global warming? For most people it's not much.

The good news is, it's easy to predict that the Sierra Club is going to eventually lose on this issue. Property values are so high that many people are totally shut out of the property market and a political storm is gathering. Hopefully, by the time the dam breaks and real urbanization finally arrives on the West Coast, it's not too late to matter.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#197

Post by gpt5 » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 11:38 PM UTC

From a game theoretic perspective - fossil fuels will be depleted. Even if the US reduced its consumption to zero, other countries, as independent players that want to maximize their benefit will be glad to take over and enjoy the effects of reduced demand and price.

This means that there are two ways to deal with it:

1. Force all countries to reduce use. To make this really worldwide, this can only worked by force, economical or military (i.e. a world cop). Unfortunately, even if we had that, it is not a stable solution since the short term benefits of using these fuels create constant political pressure.

2. Mitigate the emissions, for example by carbon sequestration. I'm a strong believer in technological progress and our ability to reduce the cost exponentially, the tricky part is to make profitable at any cost.

3. Direct the limited fossil fuel supplies towards economical uses that do not have the same negative impact. For example, by encouraging consumption of more plastics. Plastics essentially trap the carbon in the oil into a very stable form, essentially sequestering the carbon in the oil without first going into the atmosphere.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#198

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 11:38 PM UTC

RedditKon wrote: post #110

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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#199

Post by visiblink » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 11:39 PM UTC

goatlover wrote: post #181

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently, a reasonably sustainable level of CO2 production is about 3T per person per year. The average in the US is about 17.5T pp/yr. But ... 5.3T pp/yr of that amount is caused by the existing coal fired power plants in the USA. So one thing you could do is to write to your elected representatives to specifically petition for the abandonment of this form of power generation and its replacement with renewable sys…

Nuclear could have already replaced coal by now. Renewables need a lot of battery storage and transmission to scale up to not relying on coal any longer, since a majority of it is relying on the sun and wind.

Nuclear is such a horrible replacement. Let's let future generations deal with the waste from the power that sustained our lifestyle. I hate it. I'd rather live with less.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#200

Post by bko » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 11:41 PM UTC

magicalist wrote: post #180

bko wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prob…

> but you should be honest about what reducing emissions means to billions of people that are just now coming into the industrial age. Isn't that part of the point? If the US has maintained per capita emission levels that would be ruinous if the rest of the world joined us at, can you really say "we" are done with anything? OP listed a bunch of specific things, moderate efficiencies and switching to natural gas are g…

I don't get what you're asking. US emissions per capita have been going down considerably since ~2000 without too much prodding or political will. As have Europes. If you look at the chart, there are only three countries with growing per capita emissions and that's China Russia and India, but most dramatically China.

I don't see your point refereeing the past emissions of the US as some kind of moral victory against the west, but regardless of what the west does, the math does not work without those countries taking action. We can cut emissions to 0 and that'll likely buy a decade or so with the current growth rate of China. So you're focusing your energy in the wrong place

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/us-leads-greenhouse-gas-emis...