Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Uninhabitable Earth

nymag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 252 posts

Re: The Uninhabitable Earth

#31

Post by YCode »

ancarda wrote: post #8
dmm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an american and if you told me it was 27C outside I wouldn't know whether that was hot or cold until I reflected for a moment and compared that number to cpu core temps. Ignorance on my part, certainly, and not excusable but perhaps typical.

Out of interest, why don't you capitalize "American"? Edit: I'm genuinely curious and not asking to annoy anyone; I might be misunderstanding grammar rules or rules of HN. I ask because I'm not sure this was a mistake; all over the web I see people who write with good grammar, but never capitalize "American". Is it considered rude to capitalize "American"?

HN frowns on meta discussion.

For what it's worth, it should be capitalized but I suspect Americans don't formally discuss themselves in the third person enough to have that grammar rule down.

Re: The Uninhabitable Earth

#32

Post by philbo »

paulpauper wrote: post #29
ancarda wrote: post #3

It sounds very grim, is there any chance/hope of us getting out of this situation or is it just beyond any action at this point? I get the feeling from the article we're doomed.

If it is any solace, people have been predicting he end of the world for a very long time; all predictions thus far have failed.

In geological terms, people have been predicting the end of the world for a very short time.

Re: The Uninhabitable Earth

#33

Post by uptown »

latch wrote: post #15

It's pretty hopeless. I used to think we'd adjust in time, but that was when the decline looked more linear (or at least I thought it looked more linear). Of the many people who I know who are seriously concerned re climate change, I'd say 2 have taken truly meaningful steps . It's not the handful of climate change deniers that's the problem. It's the overwhelming number of people who want to say they're green, but s…

The system has evolved to make change very difficult. One part of this post on ZeroHedge shows you the supply chain involved with just a ketchup. 52 transport and process stages. Fifty-two.

"Just how energy inefficient the food system is can be seen in the crazy case of the Swedish tomato ketchup. Researchers at the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology analysed the production of tomato ketchup. The study considered the production of inputs to agriculture, tomato cultivation and conversion to tomato paste (in Italy), the processing and packaging of the paste and other ingredients into tomato ketchup in Sweden and the retail and storage of the final product. All this involved more than 52 transport and process stages.

The aseptic bags used to package the tomato paste were produced in the Netherlands and transported to Italy to be filled, placed in steel barrels, and then moved to Sweden. The five layered, red bottles were either produced in the UK or Sweden with materials form Japan, Italy, Belgium, the USA and Denmark. The polypropylene (PP) screw-cap of the bottle and plug, made from low density polyethylene (LDPE), was produced in Denmark and transported to Sweden. Additionally, LDPE shrink-film and corrugated cardboard were used to distribute the final product. Labels, glue and ink were not included in the analysis."

Source: http://www.321energy.com/editorials/church/church040205.html

How does an individual affect change when something as basic as a bottle of ketchup is clearly part of the world that'd built itself with disregard for its impact on the planet?

ZeroHedge Post: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-06-24/why-next-recession-...

Re: The Uninhabitable Earth

#34

Post by germinalphrase »

EGreg wrote: post #20

We need to accelerate our search for carbon capture technologies. AND prevent the effect of induced demand with carbon taxes! https://www.iea.org/newsroom/news/2017/january/the-potential... Or perhaps it came time to really have a conversation about which families are having 7-10 kids? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_population_growth

That article cites Muslim families as having 3.1 children compared to Christian families at 2.1 - which is obviously more but I didn't see a reference to 7-10 children as you suggest.

Re: The Uninhabitable Earth

#35

Post by ChrisLomont »

paulpauper wrote: post #29
ancarda wrote: post #3

It sounds very grim, is there any chance/hope of us getting out of this situation or is it just beyond any action at this point? I get the feeling from the article we're doomed.

If it is any solace, people have been predicting he end of the world for a very long time; all predictions thus far have failed.

They've never had the amount of data, the power of modern science, and computer modeling to show how it plays out, to back up the claims before.

Re: The Uninhabitable Earth

#36

Post by jlebrech »

dota_fanatic wrote: post #21
latch wrote: post #15

It's pretty hopeless. I used to think we'd adjust in time, but that was when the decline looked more linear (or at least I thought it looked more linear). Of the many people who I know who are seriously concerned re climate change, I'd say 2 have taken truly meaningful steps . It's not the handful of climate change deniers that's the problem. It's the overwhelming number of people who want to say they're green, but s…

What kind of drastic change should one take? Not having kids, OK, drastic but doable. Cutting out meat, driving less, etc, OK. But what about the rest of the production chain that assumes you're the same as everyone else (whom continues to use and depend on that production chain), which is an ocean of waste compared to what any single person can do? We can individually push the needle very slightly, but it does nothi…

just nuking each other when resources get sparse should do the trick, the planet will be fine either way.

Unless we survive long enough to cause runaway greenhouse effect.

Re: The Uninhabitable Earth

#37

Post by cbennett »

uptown wrote: post #33
latch wrote: post #15

It's pretty hopeless. I used to think we'd adjust in time, but that was when the decline looked more linear (or at least I thought it looked more linear). Of the many people who I know who are seriously concerned re climate change, I'd say 2 have taken truly meaningful steps . It's not the handful of climate change deniers that's the problem. It's the overwhelming number of people who want to say they're green, but s…

The system has evolved to make change very difficult. One part of this post on ZeroHedge shows you the supply chain involved with just a ketchup. 52 transport and process stages. Fifty-two. "Just how energy inefficient the food system is can be seen in the crazy case of the Swedish tomato ketchup. Researchers at the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology analysed the production of tomato ketchup. The study cons…

I managed to find the original PDF : http://infohouse.p2ric.org/ref/37/36505.pdf

Re-optimizing said supply chains in an oil constrained, and eventually oil free world seems extremely non-trivial. I wonder if we will soon have to scale up the methods (both computationally, & in human/practical industrial re-organization terms) to plot new paths and then connect them, before the graph changes so much that the potential for profit disappears.

In the near term,I could see human engineers using deep learning or other computational methods for multi-scale optimization to reduce costs and carbon footprint based on locality of original sources (food/biofuels/..) In the medium term, I would bet that AI agents will exist precisely to optimize these tasks. There's hundreds of billions to be (re)-made in (re)-wiring the economy properly.

Re: The Uninhabitable Earth

#39

Post by astrodust »

throwanem wrote: post #23
dota_fanatic wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of drastic change should one take? Not having kids, OK, drastic but doable. Cutting out meat, driving less, etc, OK. But what about the rest of the production chain that assumes you're the same as everyone else (whom continues to use and depend on that production chain), which is an ocean of waste compared to what any single person can do? We can individually push the needle very slightly, but it does nothi…

Move north, I suppose, ahead of the great land rush to come.

Although there might be opportunities for beach-front surf shops on tropical Baffin Island, good luck getting customers when the rest of the world has gone to hell.
Post reply on HN