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The Swerve

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Re: The Swerve

#101

Post by jacquesm »

majormajor wrote: post #98
prometheus76 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole global economy is built around cheap energy sources that also happen to be at least 100 times more efficient than solar, wind, or even nuclear. Petroleum is BY FAR the most efficient way of storing energy. Wind and solar power are both intermittent. That's fine if you live in a coastal city in a temperate zone, but most people in the world do not. So efficient energy storage becomes a huge problem. And we h…

So then how about you get onboard with fighting for what I said , not the other position you're arguing against. The one that's called "technology development." Invest in alternatives, capture solutions, etc so that they get better faster. It's the same thing we've done in wartime, or for a moon mission. The global economy was based on other things than it is today 30, 70, 150, 200, etc years ago. Shit changes. Steer…

Indeed. In the words of Bobby Shaftoe (Cryptonomicon) "Show some fucking adaptability."

Re: The Swerve

#102

Post by mistermann »

hgomersall wrote: post #22
wrnr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The is wrong on so many levels, in most places be it country or company the bus is being steered towards what is thought to result in global carbon reduction. This is a classic example of a moth and bailey argument, if only we had the same confidence about what to do about climate change as the fact of climate change. According to this article it is as if we only need to elect the right people and then those shall do…

We know what to do about climate change - stop emitting greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide and methane. Any strategy that doesn't address that on the scale that is required can be immediately dismissed as noise. That leaves relatively few options, and those are well enumerated. Probably we need to do all of them.

> Any strategy that doesn't address that on the scale that is required can be immediately dismissed as noise.

What about strategies designed to set the stage for that, but do not define it as a direct goal?

Re: The Swerve

#103

Post by atotic »

danhak wrote: post #26
jacquesm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nature really doesn't care about our feelings. All that whining is something that my grandmothers' generation would have scoffed at: you have it relatively easy, stop complaining. 5 years of war, occupation, hunger and brutal death is the kind of thing that generation lived through - or not, in many cases - and they came through to rebuild their world without bitching about it. COVID was - compared to that, sorry - a…

You don't seem to be engaging with the main point here: there were places that DID take COVID seriously--that shut down overnight, paid the price of mass unemployment, homelessness and growing tent cities, increasing substance abuse / overdose, loss of education that will never be recovered and countless other second-order effects. And those places did not emerge with a significantly better COVID outcome. Without an…

> those places did not emerge with a significantly better COVID outcome.

COVID statistics are hard to interpret clearly. But, looking at the list of deaths/100K, it is clear that states that did take COVID seriously mostly had fewer deaths. Depending on how you slice the numbers I'd call 30% fewer deaths a significantly better outcome.

Deaths/100K California: 234 Texas: 307 Florida: 353 New York: 355

My guess is that mass unemployment, homelessness, and increasing substance abuse were not higher where COVID was taken seriously, but proving that would take too much of my time.

Re: The Swerve

#104

Post by dougmwne »

dash2 wrote: post #57

Respectfully suggest this is nonsense. No serious climate scientist thinks we are going to fall off a cliff. There will be huge costs, yes. Civilization won't end, no. What people fail to grasp is that costs can be absolutely enormous but look like a blip compared to the effect of GDP growth in the long run. World War II is an example. The millions of deaths barely show up on a graph of world population. The huge los…

The Clathrate Gun could be the cliff, though I think he was just using a weak metaphor. There could be enough trapped methane in the Arctic to trigger a major warming event if we break a certain warming threshold. This also may have happened before eons ago.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

Re: The Swerve

#105

Post by notriddle »

int_19h wrote: post #36
themadturk wrote: post #5

I like Cory, and I think he's right. But he's preaching to the choir. No one who can get hold of the wheel is listening.

> can get hold of the wheel Only if you insist on legal means of doing so.

Getting thrown in jail doesn't seem like a useful path towards accomplishing anything.

Re: The Swerve

#106

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

SilverBirch wrote: post #86
jacquesm wrote: post #8

Something I read in another comment on HN: "Climate denialists have gone in one smooth move from 'we'll fix it' to 'it's too late to do anything about it anyway'". Which unfortunately rings very true. The really, really big problem is that people seem to think that they personally are going to be exempt from this, that it will happen to others, but not to them. Waking up from that will be pretty harsh. But if COVID d…

I actually think the people who think they'll be exempt are basically right. It's not like a tornado is going to pick your house up (unless, unfortunately that is exactly what happens). Sure, there are going to be hotter hot spells, and more extreme cold spells, but that's not seriously something that a New Yorker can't deal with. What is going to happen is poor people, foreign people, are going to starve to death an…

Poorer people are always worse off, that's true, but we're talking about global climate change and its effects can devastate anyone on the planet.

The climate is a complex system into which more and more energy is being input. That's more likely to produce sudden, drastic and unpredictable changes. It's not just simply going to get hotter.

So it's entirely possible that huge swathes of the US become largely uninhabitable, due to, say, drastic increases in rain or violent weather. It's entirely possible that most current agriculture could become impractical in the US.

The politics of climate change has very likely made scientists too conservative in their predictions as to not seem hysterical, but looking at how quickly the climate is changing right now, extreme outcomes seem very likely.

Re: The Swerve

#107

Post by sbierwagen »

jacquesm wrote: post #99
syrrim wrote: post #96

This analogy is too hopeful for a couple reasons. First, the swerve is made to seem like a decisive action that is taken once and then is never repeated. In practice, if people don't like that we've slowed the bus, they can speed it right back up again. Second, the one's blocking the swerve are supposed to "first class passengers", which seemingly stand in for the rich and powerful. In practice, its many of the least…

Funny, I read 'first class passengers' as 'those in the rich and developed countries who are for the most part responsible for climate change due to their excessive carbon footprint'.

If you define "rich and developed" as NATO+Japan then that's more than a billion people. Forcing that many people to reduce CO2 emissions to third world standards wouldn't require a "yank of the steering wheel", it would need nuclear war.

Re: The Swerve

#108

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 »

jacquesm wrote: post #17
danhak wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in the U.S., at least, what has widely been maligned as "COVID denialism" was actually a deeper and more nuanced conversation about whether sudden, sweeping changes to society would prevent more harm than they cause. And now looking at outcomes across different states (e.g. Florida vs. California)--and considering ALL outcomes (public health, homelessness, unemployment, substance abuse, mental health, truancy, g…

Nature really doesn't care about our feelings. All that whining is something that my grandmothers' generation would have scoffed at: you have it relatively easy, stop complaining. 5 years of war, occupation, hunger and brutal death is the kind of thing that generation lived through - or not, in many cases - and they came through to rebuild their world without bitching about it. COVID was - compared to that, sorry - a…

Your comment comes off as demagogic, and certainly uncharitable and disrespectful. "[reality] doesn't care about your feelings." and "denying reality" are typical expressions that both sides of the divide use to shut-down dialog and to paint their opinion as morally superior and based on truth, as if there is such a thing.

If you want to fight against demagogues, you should engage with people, recognize that issues are nuanced and that most people are not the caricatures that you'd paint them as.

Finally, telling people they're being whiny after a 2 year long pandemic that saw many people lose their loved ones, be unable to even see their bodies, the near collapse of our national health systems (that was not caused solely by the strain of Covid but specifically by the preventative measures put into place) and the great suffering that resulted from it is very insensitive and uncaring. I doubt my great-grandmother would have said anything of the sort were she still alive, and I know for a fact if you asked many elderly people how they've lived these past few years (those who survived) they would not be so dismissive of the complaints of others.

Re: The Swerve

#109

Post by prometheus76 »

jacquesm wrote: post #101
majormajor wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So then how about you get onboard with fighting for what I said , not the other position you're arguing against. The one that's called "technology development." Invest in alternatives, capture solutions, etc so that they get better faster. It's the same thing we've done in wartime, or for a moon mission. The global economy was based on other things than it is today 30, 70, 150, 200, etc years ago. Shit changes. Steer…

Indeed. In the words of Bobby Shaftoe (Cryptonomicon) "Show some fucking adaptability."

No post body was provided.

Re: The Swerve

#110

Post by klipt »

jacquesm wrote: post #31
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. We're past the point where culture can shift in time to turn the wheel. Only technology shifts quickly enough to do so. EVs and wind/solar energies are examples of technologies which are so much better than the alternatives that they're succeeding at reducing emissions faster than consumption can grow to catch up. We don't have the time to get enough people together to mandate that the front row drives a Tesl…

Tough problem. Once you start doing back-of-the-envelope math regarding the masses and volumes you are talking about here as well as the time remaining it quickly tends to require all kinds of unobtanium, besides the obvious climate impact of engineering such a solution in the first place, because it needs to be a net positive otherwise you may as well not start. Funny thing: the only system that I'm aware of that co…

Remember all our heat comes from the sun. The cheapest climate mitigation may be to just block some sunlight:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering

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