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Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

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Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#341

Post by titzer »

fasterik wrote: post #340
jacquesm wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluntly: far fewer people, sustainability built into every process, no more oil, very high cost for transportation unless it is by ship, personal transport will be very costly and you won't do it unless you really have to. Think '1850' but with transistors.

>far fewer people Also bluntly: how would we do that ethically without severely restricting reproductive rights or "cleansing" populations?

What part of birthing billions of children into poverty was ethical again?

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#342

Post by almostnormal »

dougmwne wrote: post #187
sz3 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no alternative. We have "aggravated the situation" (as you put it) beyond recovery. Doing nothing will now surely lead to an unacceptable outcome. We are going to have to fix it, or resign ourselves to a huge shrinking of the habitable region of the planet, with the hunger/famine/war that will accompany that. Obviously we can always make things worse. But when doing nothing is unacceptable, we have to start…

[flagged]

> You sound like someone about to perform a triple bypass with a butter knife.

If climate change was a disease it wouldn't have an ICD number, no method of diagnostic in standard literature, let alone a treatment approved by the competent authority.

The recommended solutions would be to eat more healthy, more physical activity, and something to treat the symptoms.

There won't be a double-blind study for specific treatments of earth, so any kind of idea is equally valid.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#343

Post by fasterik »

titzer wrote: post #339
fasterik wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That is why discussions around such technological silver bullets are always toxic: people want to believe. On the flip side, some people reject technological solutions on principle because for them, it's not about solving problems, it's about atoning for the sins of humanity. What does the alternative future look like where we solve the climate crisis by changing the way we live and organize society? Personally, I w…

It's not about religion, but about empathy and justice. Some people actually think that other forms of life on this planet have a right to exist, and there's no question at all that human life has been catastrophically bad for virtually every other form of life on this Earth. You can't just apply an energy patch and presto-reverso the carbon content in the atmosphere; we've managed to seriously disrupt global ecosyst…

I'm not saying it's a magic fix, I'm saying it's a really hard problem that we can solve if we put the resources and brain power into it. But some people apparently think that even trying to solve the problem is pointless. Needless to say, I disagree.

>Incredibly tone deaf, frankly, when most past humans had none of those things and yet dealt with it, living actual full lives. We've basically forgotten what we are, what we came from, and believe we deserve Saturday morning cartoons.

We came from a history of mostly starving, struggling for survival, dying of infections, dying during childbirth, being illiterate, and having little shelter or comfort. I think this nostalgia for the past is a golden age fallacy that needs to die. Technology has vastly improved human life and taking it away is essentially a call for reducing the standard of living for everybody.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#344

Post by jacquesm »

fasterik wrote: post #340
jacquesm wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluntly: far fewer people, sustainability built into every process, no more oil, very high cost for transportation unless it is by ship, personal transport will be very costly and you won't do it unless you really have to. Think '1850' but with transistors.

>far fewer people Also bluntly: how would we do that ethically without severely restricting reproductive rights or "cleansing" populations?

That is a very good question, but it is also the wrong question. The better one would be how are we collectively going to avoid nature doing it for us?

Because I don't know what the solution is but I do know that the alternative is going to be no fun at all. One possibility is that we all end up agreeing that we should at least try to reduce our numbers. My parents brought me up with 'replacement' numbers so that we'd end up with a steady population. I'm not so sure if that was wise. And I'm aware that there are many predictions out there that our numbers will eventually top out (they will, either because we do it ourselves, voluntarily or because our resources will run out, an exponentially expanding population in a fixed environment always ends in collapse).

But unless we manage to massively reduce our impact on the environment I don't see a way for the increased consumption and eventual survival of our societies as we know them today. In another comment someone offhandedly asked whether we should all want leisure yachts or not. The obvious answer to that is 'no'. But we probably also shouldn't all want vehicles and the ability to transport ourselves to the end of the world on a whim. Hard choices are ahead of us, the time for easy answers is long behind us.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#345

Post by geysersam »

fasterik wrote: post #305
atoav wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very uncomplicated in fact: Most people here on HN are rationally capable of understanding the challenges humanity faces right now. What many aren't capable of is accepting the conclusion that we all have to change the way we live and quite possibly even the way we organize society in order to mitigate the irreperable problems our way of living has already caused. Deep down they might suspect this is necessary,…

>That is why discussions around such technological silver bullets are always toxic: people want to believe. On the flip side, some people reject technological solutions on principle because for them, it's not about solving problems, it's about atoning for the sins of humanity. What does the alternative future look like where we solve the climate crisis by changing the way we live and organize society? Personally, I w…

> for them, it's not about solving problems, it's about atoning for the sins of humanity.

Never encountered that. Maybe it exists but it's extremely rare and irrelevant.

> putting a substantial portion of GDP into building nuclear reactors and removing carbon from the atmosphere

Spending lots of money, to produce lots of energy, to solve a problem we created by using too much energy...

What people don't get is that environmentalists just want to solve the problem in the most cost effective way, and that is to stop destroying the environment we live in.

> having electricity, heat, running water, sewage treatment, shipping, transportation, and the internet.

Where in the Paris Agreement did you read we shouldn't continue having those things?

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#346

Post by jacquesm »

titzer wrote: post #341
fasterik wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>far fewer people Also bluntly: how would we do that ethically without severely restricting reproductive rights or "cleansing" populations?

What part of birthing billions of children into poverty was ethical again?

That's the problem right there: by asking the question like that you are essentially saying 'children are for the wealthy'. And that's also not how it should be. This is a super hard problem to resolve in a fair way that works in an international setting because you need everybody on board otherwise it will not work. It's the tragedy of the commons endgame.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#347

Post by almostnormal »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #212
szundi wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No problem with this, apart from convincing like 5-6 billion people to cut their standards of living to half. Also less people is needed, few children. Sounds like impossible now without concentrated media effort and all ruling parties probably would lose for decades.

5-6 billion people are going to have their living standards and reproductive opportunities destroyed anyway. If not worse. But you're really just remaking the point that as a species we're incapable of intelligent collective management of our resources.

>> No problem with this, apart from convincing like 5-6 billion people to cut their standards of living to half.

> 5-6 billion people are going to have their living standards and reproductive opportunities destroyed anyway.

The problem might be that those sets of people are not the same.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#348

Post by fasterik »

geysersam wrote: post #345
fasterik wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That is why discussions around such technological silver bullets are always toxic: people want to believe. On the flip side, some people reject technological solutions on principle because for them, it's not about solving problems, it's about atoning for the sins of humanity. What does the alternative future look like where we solve the climate crisis by changing the way we live and organize society? Personally, I w…

> for them, it's not about solving problems, it's about atoning for the sins of humanity. Never encountered that. Maybe it exists but it's extremely rare and irrelevant. > putting a substantial portion of GDP into building nuclear reactors and removing carbon from the atmosphere Spending lots of money, to produce lots of energy, to solve a problem we created by using too much energy... What people don't get is that e…

>Spending lots of money, to produce lots of energy, to solve a problem we created by using too much energy...

How does this argument make sense? Why is producing energy inherently bad if it doesn't put carbon into the atmosphere?

>What people don't get is that environmentalists just want to solve the problem in the most cost effective way, and that is to stop destroying the environment we live in.

The most realistic way to stop destroying the environment is to switch to clean energy. That means spending money, and building a lot more nuclear reactors than we currently have. If the climate is truly an emergency, which I believe it is, then it's worth spending the money.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#349

Post by haswell »

concordDance wrote: post #302
Loic wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replying here to your below comment because of the "stack" limit. You wrote "I want to go to visit my friend Bob who lives 10 miles away but the rain is pouring down." as a justification for ownership of a car. We just went through 2 weeks of heavy rain here in Germany. I am only biking (not even an E-Bike) and what I did is just looked at the rain radar with a simple app, add a bit of buffer time, packed rain clothe…

I'm a biker, I commute to work via bike and mostly shop via bike. The car is still incredibly useful for rainy days, visiting friends or when I really don't feel like tackling that hill to shop. Maybe you enjoy half an hour cycling in rain that's going to last 6 hours, but I don't.

> Maybe you enjoy half an hour cycling in rain that's going to last 6 hours, but I don't.

At some point, people are going to have to start preferring long term survival over short term enjoyment.

I don’t love getting rained on, and there are days that the last thing I feel like doing is getting on the bike or walking somewhere, but feeling like doing something is often not the primary reason to do it. And I realize that if I can’t/won’t make the harder decisions, I have no business encouraging others to do the same.

Societies collectively need to change habits and shift mindsets about the ways we live life. It certainly won’t be because it all feels good.

I’m not saying there is no place for cars, and clearly there are situations where a bike won’t work. But that does not mean our current car culture is acceptable either.

Re: Reduction of sulfur emissions from ships may be causing rising sea temperatures

#350

Post by at_a_remove »

atoav wrote: post #226
nologic01 wrote: post #156

The enthusiasm with geoengineering among the HN community is worrisome. Not sure which computing analogy would drive home the complete recklessness of this mentality but the Earth is not something you can reboot to the last working state once you harebrained patch implodes. It is true that we have been slowly geoengineering for ages (initially unwittingly, recently with eyes wide open) and it is also true that our mo…

It is very uncomplicated in fact: Most people here on HN are rationally capable of understanding the challenges humanity faces right now. What many aren't capable of is accepting the conclusion that we all have to change the way we live and quite possibly even the way we organize society in order to mitigate the irreperable problems our way of living has already caused. Deep down they might suspect this is necessary,…

Ha! You sort of slid a miracle in there like it was a checkbox. "We all have to change the way we live and quite possibly even the way we organize society ..."

Your solution to this problem involves Universal Agreement and Cooperation Among Humanity. People can't even agree not to murder each other.

Any solution which requires UAaCOAH might as well have unobtanium as its focal point. It's just not going to happen. We can't agree on metric versus imperial, on language, on such weirdly silly things like an afterlife, on oppressive things like what women should be allowed to wear (in the face of the collapse of the biosphere, right now, you can find interviews with men who have chucked acid onto the faces of their wives because their peers taunt them about said wives wearing modern and "immodest" clothing: a real top priority for civilization). We can't agree on who owns what rock and we can't agree on how to govern, and our governance can't agree with its populace on little things like not lying to them about practically everything.

We are a divisive, fiercely independent species with our own thoughts about everything, however trivial, whether or not it is good for us.

Forget three nines, ignore a couple of standard deviations, getting even four-fifths of humanity to suddenly snap on to an agenda which will be personally uncomfortable to them is too much to ask. Any plan which requires that level of agreement is absolutely doomed unless you've got some kind of high-level AGI in your pocket with just one priority: stop the oncoming several catastrophes valued over the preferences, choices, comfort, even reproductive lives of each person on the planet ... and some way of enforcing it. Lacking Forbin and his Colossus, we will not unite on much of anything besides "we all want to do what we individually want."

Once you realize this, it's going to be the small (in terms of populace) projects which do not require universal consent which might have any shot whatsoever, rather than getting the bulk of humanity together, for the first time in history, to cooperate.

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