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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

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are long histories of cultures managing collective resources democratically over extremely long periods. Both the water temples of Southeast Asia and the rituals around salmon runs and controlled burns in the Pacific Northwest maintained careful husbandry of scarce resources across time periods that extend well beyond the time period since the tragedy of the commons was discovered by the same people who are ass…

With respect, those examples are about tiny heterogeneous populations and do not involve tremendous sacrifice. The actions required to make meaningful difference for climate change are orders of magnitude larger. And your solutions are basically “we could all change our view and start taking coordinated collective action together”, which is not actionable. I mean, it clearly hasn’t happened, and you can villainize wh…

You’re underestimating both the size and the heterogeneity of those cultures. Politics attains anywhere with a population that exceeds Dunbar’s number, and both of those cultures were easily in the tens to hundreds of thousands. They’re also just two examples out of many - most of human civilization has managed to handle this over time.

And, yes, the solution here is in fact that we change our behavior and build political alliances, starting at the local level and building up. The datacenter fights are a good place to look if you’d like a blueprint, as are the anti-Flock movements, and Minneapolis if you want to see what sharper action looks like. I don’t know what else you’re expecting with regards to “what to do” - I’ve never heard of any effective magic wand, any solution here involves getting off your ass and advocating for what you want.

And, we hack this the way we hack everything else: by actually understanding the system and how it works, not just listening to what we’re being told by the people who built the system, by identifying places of high leverage within the system, and by using those to enact change in the system. To just sit around and say “well, my Econ professor said we’re fucked, so I guess that’s that” is just fucking lazy.

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

#342

Not much of a surprise. Government action has been anemic at best. Industry action (overall) has been net negative. The only hope now is exponential growth of (solar and wind)+batteries making other sources uneconomic. This seems to be slowly happening, so I hope we hit the exponential curve soon and we're there quicker than we expect. This only stops it. Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture indus…

The technology-will-save-us mentality is part of the reason we are here. We live in a society that doesn't do anything unless it makes money for some set of decrepit old men. We had the means to avoid this (strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition) but people made money doing the opposite. And more people made money sabotaging solar+battery pricing in the US. So…

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

#343
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Many are being built as backups and peakers rather than baseload, designed (or retrofitted in the case of existing plants being upgraded) to be able to cycle up and down to balance wind and solar. They are running at low capacity factors, not actually burning much coal.

Many of these are idle so much that their owners have financial difficulty keeping them open, and the government has had to start paying them for their idle time so they won't go under.

Most of the rest are to replace existing plants that cannot not yet be replaced with renewables, so are at worst neutral on coal usage and are usually actually more efficient than the old plants so there is a reduction.

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

#344
post #54

>Climate scientist Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, said that "although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we've dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there's a way out." I need to say WTF, the way out is to stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. That means stop using fossil fuels. How many times does this need to be said ? Already it probably has been said millions of times.

In practical terms, that’s closer to stating the problem than it is to stating the solution .

Well said. At this point I’ve literally read many thousands of HN comments about climate change over the past two decades that boil down to “we just need magically overcome the unprecedented global scale of the collective action problem we face!”

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

#345

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.

Hey, quick question, who does virtually all manufacturing for US and Canadian and EU citizens? And why is the rise of Chinas emissions so coincidentally timed to the fall of those countries'? I didn't go into the study, but looking at all the little text blurbs about the numbers, I don't see anything about if a US citizen purchasing a product that's made in China counts as US emission, as it obviously should.

Are we forcing China to make stuff for us?

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

#346
I got invited to a UN conference on climate change. It was a huge deal of course that I could get in; however, the whole time I "felt" important. Everyone did. I question how many of the tens of thousands of people involved actually did important work.

Everyone knew we will miss the 1.5 degree target, btw. This was a few years ago.

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

#347
post #47

We already know we need to pump the breaks on AI for a host of safety issues. However, perhaps the biggest concern is the sheer scale of electricity generation they require. One hyperscale data centre can require electricity equivalent to a fair sized city. Many data centre builders are keen to claim they'll use renewable energy sources... eventually. They'll just suck power off the grid "temporarily" or rely on "cle…

Data centers seem tangential to any real problem. The grid should be converting to green energy and regulation that says datacenters must also be power stations is backwards.

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

#348
post #338
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 s…

Makes sense. The challenge I have is that a lot of people on the planet think the same things. So it's more than just some person spouting weird things off a weird website. The entire output of our civilization right now is higher and higher CO2 levels. I appreciate the chance to talk it out. I supposed multiple downvotes is what leads to something being marked "dead".

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

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Right now? Nobody is using the hypothetical un-built datacenters that threaten to tax our planet. All the current individual LLM demand is being met by what exists already, yet we're seeing unprecedented amounts of money being spent at the cost of the environment to build out at scale. This is so that jobs that currently earn people money can be replaced with LLMs that earn investors money. Something only the investors want.

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

#350

I'm mostly stopped feeling autistic since adolescence, but climate change is one of those times. It's obviously real, and it's also obvious that shuffling chairs in developing countries is rounding to zero effect. We're converting to cleaner energy anyways because of pollution and better economics, so the push for decarbonization in itself is... what do you call a rounding error when it's already rounding to zero? An…

When you find yourself stuck in a hole the first step to solving the problem is to stop digging. We're still digging at a superhuman speed. Meanwhile here you are talking about how you aren't worried because ladder building technology is really coming along, but nobody wants to talk about ladders.
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