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Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

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Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#331

Post by Mawr »

xienze wrote: post #214
b40d-48b2-979e wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah? We need millions of personal, individual trucks? For work, of course, ignore all those white collar job parking lots full of extended cab pickups that get 10mpg.

Have you considered that sometimes people buy automobiles that can accommodate multiple use cases? Just because you don't need to haul hundreds of pounds of supplies every single day doesn't mean that you don't need to do it a couple times a month, or sometimes every day for short bursts of time. With vehicles being as expensive as they are, some people prioritize the one vehicle that can suit their regular _as well…

Hauling "hundreds of pounds of supplies every single day" is a fringe use case, essentialy nobody does this, it's not relevant.

"Maybe you don't understand people's needs and motivations as much as you think you do."

It's the opposite. You're confusing "needs" with "wants" and extrapolating the needs of the very, very few people who genuinely need a truck onto the entire population.

The vast majority of people use their cars to transport only themselves to work each day, then maybe pick/drop off one more person, then maybe go buy groceries.

I don't think you quite understand just how ridiculously niche valid use cases for trucks are. It's literally just towing, or some very specific off-road hauling. Everything else is going to be handled way better by something else, starting with a regular car, ending with a van.

Hell, for most people even a car is way overkill, a bike works perfectly fine to go to work each day, I assure you. So does public transport. You don't need 2 tons of steel just to to move your 100 kg body around.

To your analogy, I can use my dinky little chromebook 99% of the time and only boot up my PC when I actually need the power.

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#332

Post by dfdydx »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #99
dfdydx wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't those "other problems" somewhat affected by climate change though?

All those problems were already there even before climate change was a topic, so nothing new regarding that front

I'd wager they're not binary (absent/present) issues but have many dimensions and a continuum of possible values and thus "climate change makes this problem worse or different" is something new. Random example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-024-00583-8

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#333

Post by senordevnyc »

allannienhuis wrote: post #293
tyre wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but there is zero shot at doing this versus energy and transportation. The major limiter of veganism is cultural. People love eating meat. It’s a major source of protein and calories, especially in developing countries. Americans are not going vegan, so it’s kind of silly, in my opinion, to focus on it as a solution. Compare to building nuclear energy or solar / wind + batteries. China, the US, Europe, and India…

Culture can be changed - we changed the attitude toward and prevalence of cigarette smoking in 2-3 generations, we could change other practices as well. Success doesn't need to mean 100% adoption - material changes in attitude toward meat consumption (luxury/celebration vs everyday) would make a material difference in the overall impact. And yes, some/many ranchers, butchers, etc would need to turn to some other indu…

I think the difference is that smoking is also horrible for the smoker, and many want to quit, but can’t very easily. People don’t want to stop eating meat, driving their SUVs, buying cheap shit on Amazon, and flying to cool vacations. Stopping doing those things doesn’t benefit them unless everyone else stops too, and unlike smoking, we’ve made little progress in the last few decades (other than the progress unlocked by technology that means it’s immediately beneficial to the one making the change, like solar), so I can’t blame anyone for thinking that giving up meat to save the planet is stupid since their entire lifetime of lived experience tells them that the vast majority of their fellow humans are not going to do the same.

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#334

Post by tzs »

unchocked wrote: post #115

Geophysically, there are 3 pillars to climate stabilization: 1. Emitting fewer greenhouse gasses. Need to do that more than ever, but we are now in overshoot so… 2. Actively remove greenhouse gasses from atmosphere. Will need to do that, but land use and dirty energy trends away from net negative. Also, it’s a 100 year project once started. 3. Shade Earth. Not regions, The whole globe. There are two ways to do that:…

> Actively remove greenhouse gasses from atmosphere. Will need to do that, but land use and dirty energy trends away from net negative. Also, it’s a 100 year project once started.

I once did the math, assuming we have enough resources to build a lot of solar panels. Assuming current efficiency levels of solar panels and current commercial feasible levels of direct air carbon capture (DAC), if we annually allocated an amount equal to our current annual solar panel production to building large solar farms dedicated to powering DAC plants, in about 150ish years those plants would be capturing each year an amount about equal to our current total annual emissions.

If we keep expanding solar panel production we could shorten that timeline and build more than just enough to breakeven. The area for those solar farms would be about 1/15th the area of the 5 largest subtropical deserts.

What would we do with all the carbon extracted? That's not really a problem. If we can't think of a good use for it, just mount the solar panels powering the DAC plants a few meters off the ground, convert the carbon to graphite, and dump it under the solar panels. Spread evenly it would only be a few mm thick.

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#335

Post by Tade0 »

radu_floricica wrote: post #308
m00dy wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain what 'Luddite' means in a broader context? Not all of us grew up learning British history :)

In the context of climate change, it is the opinion that more industrialization and technologization cannot help solving the problem, except in a few narrow acceptable directions (solar, wind, hydrogen etc). An example would be the european reaction to AC. It's a way of using technology to solve warming, its costs are perfectly acceptable, but it is still frown upon because... well, it's beyond the scope of a HN comm…

> An example would be the european reaction to AC.

That was over hyped in the media, particularly American.

It's largely senior citizens who oppose AC - they've spent most of their lives in a different climate and would rather not have to handle such an expense.

Meanwhile in some European countries like France demand for AC units doubled this year.

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#336

Post by caminante »

tzs wrote: post #325
internet2000 wrote: post #171

It's hard to have people use data in these types of conversations, so I'll just link two charts. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re... Notice which countries are going down. Notice which countries are going up.

One of the countries that is going up (China) is also doing more than any other country to rapidly roll out renewables both domestically and in other countries, and their emissions have peaked or are near peaking, and is capable of sticking with long term plans. Also a lot of their emissions are from making things for the rest of the world. The other country that has grown significantly in the last 20 years (India) i…

Also a lot of their emissions are from making things for the rest of the world.

That doesn't make it righteous and is a common critique of their coal powered PV manufacturing base.

They're playing games with carbon commitments with arbitrary reduction goals from undefined peaks. We can't trust them.

Meanwhile, they're currently building >200GW of new coal plants.

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#337

Post by tcfhgj »

epistasis wrote: post #243
tcfhgj wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Technology has now aligned society's incentive systems to promote climate action. no, it has not

https://www.irena.org/News/pressreleases/2025/Jul/91-Percent... https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/why-clean-energy-... https://www.lazard.com/news-announcements/lazard-releases-20...

1) renewable energy is only a part of climate action, it's not sufficient - renewable energy being cheap alone doesn't help a bit if you don't keep fossil fuel in the ground

2) not technology aligned societies incentive systems, but politics which a) incentivized producing electricity by renewable methods and punishing electricity produced by fossil fuels, which again encouraged research which in return made renewables mostly cheaper than fossil fuels - and we are lucky that the physics aligned with that.

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#338

Post by tzs »

tito wrote: post #202

HN's community moderation tools seem to fail at times, so I'm responding to ssearyus's comment that is marked [dead]: ssearyus: At the risk of being immediately downvoted, let me point out that a 250ppm CO2 level is borderline disastrous for plant life -- at 180ppm, plants would starve globally. The increased CO2 levels in recent years (slightly added to by human activities) is immensely helpful for drought-resistanc…

I'd guess part of the reason he got downvoted is this: "The increased CO2 levels in recent years (slightly added to by human activities) [...]".

Pretty much all of the CO2 increase above pre-industrial levels (280 ppm) is due to human activity.

99% of the time when someone says otherwise they are going to continue with a bunch of other equally inaccurate things which they got from scientifically worthless sites and so people just flag and move on.

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#339

Post by senordevnyc »

kennywinker wrote: post #263
monneyboi wrote: post #257

Why are we framing this as "the fight against climate change"? This framing puts the culprit outside of ourselves, as if it's some external force. I feel that way of looking at it makes changing impossible. It's our own behaviours and systems that will have to change. There's nothing to fight here, the answer instead lies in collaboration.

Great point. For example, we should encourage collaboration between people building hyperscale data centers, and people not building hyperscale data centers to find some middle ground that is good for the planet. Collaboration implies we are all on the same side. Reality suggests some people have made it their business to be on the wrong side.

Who is using the hyperscale data centers?

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#340

Post by senordevnyc »

dariosalvi78 wrote: post #276

we have had the perfect storm to do a U-turn on most fossile fuels: - COVID pandemics: everybody at home, less traveling, massive economic reset and massive capitals injected (EU recovery funding, quantitative easing) - Russian attack on Ucraine, stopping a big chunk of gas and petrol to Europe - Strait of Hormuz, also chocking oil coming to the rest of the world We could have said: "oh, let's swap those energy sourc…

From my perspective, we simply didn’t evolve to have the kind of collective intelligence required. There’s no point in being angry about it, any more than it makes sense to be angry at any other animal for the abilities it hasn’t evolved to have.
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