151–160 of 210 posts
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We have reason to believe it's happening now! Besides the AGW signal in the temperature spread, there's now a AGW signal in hurricane behavior and precipitation patterns. It's happening now! That's the point of the article! Did you even read it?
We have reason to believe that ice caps will melt and NYC will be underwater by 2012. - An Inconvenient Truth
How can a dev get into clean-tech today? What are the current problems a software engineer could solve? Please, someone with the knowledge give us a path. I wish there was an HN on clean-tech with emphasis on IT
Animal welfare/rights is most important to me, but I realize that its all connected and can be brought about mostly by investing in clean tech, clean meat, and fighting climate change.
Great read. It's always interesting to see how individuals (John Sununu, Rush Limbaugh) have the capacity to change the arc of history - against prevailing wisdom and agreed facts. Sure, they had massive support from the oil industry, but Europe also has an oil industry and it didn't change Europe's stance on climate change. For a real-time update on climate change, just look at the canary in the cold-mine - Arctic S…
US emissions of CO2 have fallen much faster than Europe's. Europe likes to talk a lot but not to compromise. So while they could be fracking and displacing dirty energy sources, they instead use oil and coal where the US uses natural gas.
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If you want to believe in Inevitable Doom, go nuts. Possibly literally. But if that's how you want to play things, I probably can't stop you. But at least I tried. It's not a healthy way to live, and I don't think it's one particularly backed by the evidence. In terms of threats I think are likely to impact me over the next twenty years, I still rate "governments instituting stupid economic policies" well over "envir…
In your original post you listed out a bunch of issues that never amounted to anything. Did it occur to you that they never amounted to anything because people did shit about them? It wasn't the economy that stopped the Ozone hole from expanding. It wasn't technological innovation that brought down the Soviet Union and ended Red Scare. Did it occur to you that just because you live an insulated life, that these disas…
Then you've admitted the only point I care about here, which is that getting personally panicky about those things would have been a waste of time. Doom is not certain. People do in fact do things in reaction to problems.
"Did it occur to you that just because you live an insulated life, that these disasters are actually happening right now?"
Read what I wrote again with an eye towards answering those questions, because the answer is there. The Earth is positively saturated with problems... but that's not actually a new state of affairs, despite what youth may think and/or certain people may have told you.
You are establishing that problems exist. That is not the question I am answering. I am answering is doom inevitable? And the answer is simple: No. Do not live hopelessly. Do not plan for your future life as if we're all going to be dead in 10 years inevitably because of environmental disaster. There are many disasters in your future with non-zero probability, but living as if they have already occurred just moves them into the present with 100% probability. That's not a win.
In terms of reading my mind, you'd be doing better off if you first read my text, instead of what you assume my text is going to say. Or trying to figure out which bogeyman to associate me with so you can stop thinking and start emoting. That's not a healthy psychological pattern. Who taught you to do that? What benefit do they get from it? Are you benefiting from it? (Hint: No.)
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There still are solutions. They, however, require that the environmental movement accept large scale engineering efforts aimed at adjusting our environment. Which runs counter to their instincts. See https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312505967_Olivine_W... for one approach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization for another. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering lists several more.
"accept large scale engineering efforts aimed at adjusting our environment." While these are interesting technologies, it's very difficult to see how they make sense economically. The cost/benefit ratio is invariably much worse than simply investing in emissions reductions. If we have $X to invest in climate mitigation, it's always going to be better to spend it on technologies that reduce carbon emissions: replacing…
Secondly the two techniques that I pointed to are, today, cheaper than emissions reductions.
Third, the cost of other mitigations is improving over time as the price of renewable power (particularly solar) drops. So even approaches that are not currently cost-effective may be in the near future.
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What's faulty about his science?
There is no proof humans are causing doomsday levels of climate change through CO2 emissions (literal plant fertilizer, the shit I brew and inject into my fish tank to grow plants). What is demonstrable in a lab is going to be much harder to prove for a whole planet. People should not just accept what these people say as gospel, we have had 30-40 years of doomsday warnings from these people and nothing, absolutely no…
So what you're saying is that the proof that we have in labs isn't good enough for you?
> we have had 30-40 years of doomsday warnings from these people and nothing, absolutely nothing has happened.
What do you classify as nothing? We've shown that the ice caps are melting [0], that temperatures are increasing rapidly across the globe [1], sea walls are being built to stop cities from flooding [2] [3].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8auMIfF50Ng&feature=youtu.be [1] https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/photography... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vj8m0Nqr7s
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You're still pretending like your kids or those other peoples' kids might get together and fix climate change. I'm saying it's too late for that. Having kids is just condemning them to live in a world ravaged by famine, war and drought. Maybe you're fine with that because you believe on some philosophical level that any life is preferable to never having lived at all, but that's not self-evident.
Black Americans are living proof that a lot of people thought a life of slavery was worth living, despite it's utter terribleness. I think it’s a good bet that living in a world with global warming is better than slavery.
Ouch. I read this and I am completely confused about what to do with the rest of the time I have left. Should I even bother with my current career in tech, or would it be better to quit it and do something that could have even a slight impact now? These articles are great, but preaching to the choir. What should any of us do? I'm seriously and sincerely asking. Are there any suggestions, from a personal stand point i…
Perhaps the memoirs of terminal cancer patients would be instructive. However, they benefit from frequentist statistics. We've only got Bayes for our experiment.
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In your original post you listed out a bunch of issues that never amounted to anything. Did it occur to you that they never amounted to anything because people did shit about them? It wasn't the economy that stopped the Ozone hole from expanding. It wasn't technological innovation that brought down the Soviet Union and ended Red Scare. Did it occur to you that just because you live an insulated life, that these disas…
"Did it occur to you that they never amounted to anything because people did shit about them?" Then you've admitted the only point I care about here, which is that getting personally panicky about those things would have been a waste of time. Doom is not certain. People do in fact do things in reaction to problems. "Did it occur to you that just because you live an insulated life, that these disasters are actually ha…
Your sentiment really embodies the worst kind of free-rider: "you shouldn't worry, because other people have solved problems for me in the past".