Live data from Hacker News

UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

bbc.co.uk

171–180 of 349 posts

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#171
post #134
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your solution involves Russia getting on board then you've already failed. Russia is actually encouraging climate change because it opens up more shipping in the arctic circle. This is to illustrate that in the short term climate change leads to winners and losers. In the long term we probably all lose, but we're not known for our long term thinking.

Not sure why it is downvoted, but Russia is massively on the benefiting side of global warming. It reduces the amount of useless land, and massively increases crops yields throughout its territory. Geopolitically, it benefits from additional pressure on Europe to accommodate the migrations caused by climate change, and all the instability it causes.

I'm sorry, but Russia, just like Canada, will not have increased crop yields from warming. It will (and does) have massive forest fires, drought, and erratic winters which swing from warm/hot to extreme cold within days.

You know what is even worse for farmers than a cold climate? An unpredictable one. It's damn hard to pull a profit farming if you can't rely on any kind of 'normal' growing conditions from year to year.

An increase in mean temperature isn't a neat and tidy "oh, we'll just move north"; it's on the whole an increase in variance.

I'm seeing it happen here in Canada, and I'm certain we'll see it in Siberia as well.

In the end, petro-regimes like Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Alberta, whatever... they'll become more and more paranoid and erratic and dysfunctional as the broader crisis around 'energy' deepens. We're right now seeing our first war triggered by a cornered petro-regime on the cusp of climate catastrophe. I suspect we'll see more.

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#172

I used to be really depressed about this sort of thing. It caused me to severely limit my lifestyle out of a desire to "do the right thing". I didn't own a car. Very low consumption and minimal waste (no takeaway food, coffee etc., very frugal, didn't use things like paper towels and napkins). I cycled and walked everywhere. Didn't go on holidays abroad or even very far away. Then I looked around and noticed that eve…

The fact that others are kicking an old lady to death doesn't mean you should join them. Do what you think is right even if it doesn't change anything. Avoiding flights isn't a big price to pay.

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#173
That this is news reflects only the reluctance of much of world leadership to acknowledge it. Anybody paying attention has known for over a decade that a +1.5C limit is out of reach.

The question the world faces now is whether the 3C rise we're actually going to get is enough to trigger non-human forcing through various feedback loops dumping carbon into the atmosphere in the form of CO2 and CH4, to require runaway warming as the future.

I'm not optimistic.

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear is extremely dangerous with toxic waste needing special storage facilities. I don't think this is true. Nuclear power plants generate relatively little waste and we know how to store it safely.

We may how to store it safely, but still doesn't stop it from being a risk. Only takes the contracted company get lax on the upkeep of the facility.

So stop contracting the work out. Have a government department handle it instead of just chucking it off to the lowest bidder

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#175
post #5

No surprises here. We've known for years we're going to shoot beyond 2C with very high certainty. Even if a miracle happened and we reached zero emissions today, the climate will keep warming at least for some more decades due to climate lag and feedbacks.

Of the amount of CO2 released each year by humans (~30gt), only about half persists in the atmosphere. The other half is re-absorbed by the biosphere.

This is based on estimated total biosphere emissions, estimated human emissions, and annual CO2 PPM increases. I did some math on that and wrote it up here if anyone wants to dig deeper: https://biotinker.dev/posts/climate1.html

In the case of the zero-emission miracle, atmospheric CO2 levels would start dropping at about the same rate they are currently climbing. As you mention, there is climate lag and feedbacks, but the "return to normal" would start fairly quickly.

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#176
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

other than the giant one staring at us 93 million miles away beaming massive amounts of energy directly at us all day, fusion reactors otherwise don't exist. Maybe not throw away all the other approaches until they do?

Solar and wind have many issues. Intermittency, the need for rare earths, and low energy density leading to ecological impact are some. It’s also under-recognized that as those technologies are built out beyond a few percent of global power, supply issues will likely lead to large cost increases and potential scarcity. Then there’s the waste/recycling problem, which is worse than nuclear. I also was clear that fusion…

To add to this, for people suggesting that renewables are sufficient and that we should abandon nuclear for some reason or another, this report does a good job of motivating nuclear as a critical part of the solution: https://energy.mit.edu/research/future-nuclear-energy-carbon...

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#177
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about if storage improves? Can't that smooth out the intermittent nature and provide for the base load?

To be very honest, I feel like the car culture in the US gives every household a potential large battery to sustain their house with. In a future where every car is an EV, every American house has two giant batteries, if not more, hooked up to it all night.

But what happens in the morning when people wake up to an empty car battery and they need to drive to work?

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#178

We are too politically polarized to solve problems in this class, which requires political unity because of the scale, cost, and speed requirements. All of our major political forces play games, constantly make moves in bad faith, talk out of both sides of their mouths publicly vs privately, so we are screwed. The reality is that IF climate change science were a big hoax (sadly, it's not) there WOULD be a team using…

> Maybe if we didn't spend decades politicizing every microscopic issue including in science, technology, and medicine, we could have policy makers advocate for positions based on science and everyone would trust it.

`we` isn't the common people. It's a very concerted effort to keep the status quo [1].

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/02/us/a-call-for-softer-gree...

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#179
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what the article says. We aren't doing enough to limit global warming to just 1.5c. we could do more a possibly limit warming to 1.5c but it becomes an ever greater challenge the longer we leave it.

At some point we have to stop talking about the 1.5° number as if it were anything but a ludicrous pipedream by now. Even ten years ago it was an entirely hypothetical "if the entire global economic system magically turned around overnight then it might be possible". Now it's "if we had a literal time machine and could go back and magically turn around the global economy overnight".

Indeed, it promotes inaction because the goal is so impossible you might as well not even try.

Better to set a goal we can still actually achieve and take the consequences of that level for granted.

Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

#180

Let me just leave a Unicode ‘degree’ symbol here for anyone who needs one: ° (on iOS and possibly MacOS you can get one of these by pressing and holding ‘zero’ until the alternate characters appear)

If you're curious on how to do this on linux:

--u then enter unicode char: 00B0 and then press

list of unicode codes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters#Lat...

Post reply on HN