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

The Great Siberian Thaw

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 104 posts

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#61

Post by tazjin »

bpodgursky wrote: post #14
lovecg wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read somewhere that the soil is the problem, not just the local climate. And soil takes a long time to accumulate the good stuff. So in short, places with good soil will become less farmable and places with now better climate won’t have good soil. We’re all kinda screwed then.

Mmm. Modern fertilizer has done a lot to neutralize the importance of good soil. You can't farm rocks, but the US west has done a lot with sand + fertilizer. As long as you have money, water, sun, heat, and something better than bedrock, I wouldn't call it unrealistic.

Plus Belarus is a massive producer of said fertilizer, and Russia and Belarus have good trade relations. We'll see what happens ...

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#62

Post by baybal2 »

vermilingua wrote: post #17

The Newsroom said it best, "your house is burning to the ground, the situation is dire; your house has already burned to the ground, situation's over." [1] I don't see a way that we plausibly reverse course, when nearly every government, the people running them, and the private sector leaders are all just doing an end-run to accumulate as much as they can, planet be damned. Every "climate target" gets re-evaluated an…

> Barring moonshot tech breakthrough or militant scaling-down of consumption worldwide, how can we survive?

Just bare with it? The frequent storms, and severe weather frequenting USA in recent years are nothing special in East Asia.

1m Downpour rainfall is an annual event in much of India.

Snowstorms where you see no more than a few meters are also very survivable, and people can adapt to live with them.

Kilometers long storm surges, and multi-decade coastal errosion are also something people learned to live with.

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#63

Post by screenbreakout »

kragen wrote: post #46
screenbreakout wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't just a change in the way we view our economy work? If a lot of the emissions come from creating GDP, why not take a break, live off our assets,like when Covid initially happened... i'd continue but would probably get buried as a utopian (tbh it seems like businesses a machines getting people create more machines while getting very little actual return...)

Coordination problem: whoever takes a break gets invaded, overthrown, and annexed by whoever doesn't.

Really? Let's take the case of Switzerland, everyone wants to go there, they are literally spending money to supress the increasing exchange rate to avoid a collaps of exports... what would happen if they took a years break.. I mean maybe it would be better, letting the CHF, go higher , allowing the swiss to leave to greener pastures, allowing others to visit such a beautiful country (and use the empty living space from departed swiss , foreigners)...

Maybe what we need is radical capitalism, but all we have the balls for is corporate nepotism?

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#64

Post by mellavora »

lmilcin wrote: post #29
xrd wrote: post #23

Is it possible to live in isolated sealed compounds that protect us from all that carbon? Can we build filtration systems?

Filtering carbon dioxide to have breathing air at home isn't difficult. But housing 8 billion people in sealed environment is. The trouble with CO2 is that already the amount of it in atmosphere starts making us measurably dumber and it is only going to get worse. 1000ppm is a badly ventilated room that causes headache and poor performance on tasks. Imagine experiencing this for your entire life. Imagine ALL kids hav…

What if we consider the sealed environment "the earth"?

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#65

Post by lb0 »

bpodgursky wrote: post #14
lovecg wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read somewhere that the soil is the problem, not just the local climate. And soil takes a long time to accumulate the good stuff. So in short, places with good soil will become less farmable and places with now better climate won’t have good soil. We’re all kinda screwed then.

Mmm. Modern fertilizer has done a lot to neutralize the importance of good soil. You can't farm rocks, but the US west has done a lot with sand + fertilizer. As long as you have money, water, sun, heat, and something better than bedrock, I wouldn't call it unrealistic.

Short term - long term we realize now it is eroding and "destryoing" it - like tech debt it is creating soil debt :)

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#66

Post by screenbreakout »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #49
deanCommie wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the situation isn't over when your house has burned to the ground. Taking the metaphor literally... You have a family and you need shelter. You need to figure out how to survive without shelter. You need to see what you can salvage. Which means still trying to put the fire out so that some of your things or some of the materials can be salvaged so you can consider rebuilding. You need to start clearing out the…

I think its both valuable and important to recognize that the climate change is inevitable so that we can stop talking about how we might prevent it, and start talking about how we can sustain our civilization regardless of the weather. (How would we sustain ourselves if we lived in a satellite orbiting the sun?) I also think neither democracy or capitalism is well equipped to ask people to make large sacrifices for…

I'm certain, that more refined forms of democracy and capitalism would be well adapted to help find solutions to CC, structurally though things are very (too) slow to change and few people have a more holistic view

Ultimately it took a external event like Covid to shake things up and show the way...ie less work, less consumerism, less flying and polluting Cruise ships... but the machine/auto industry continues to dominate, as do inefficient work practices which just serve to feed the bank accounts of the middle class....

I'm currently in Egypt living on 300$ a month, learning arabic and enjoying life... why freeze yourself/heat the planet, instead of WFH or not at all a few hundred miles south... people are dumb and the internet is generally making them dumber The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Oliver Carr

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition#:~:text=In%20gover....

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#67

Post by screenbreakout »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #50
chillwaves wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After the coming resource\migration wars, some of this will sort itself out. Don't worry.

I just realized that perhaps the problem is not global warming. Perhaps the problem is that we are having children. If we all just decided to stop having kids, nobody would care what the weather was like at the end of the century.

With the right partner, kids (depending on how you see it) make you work less,(if you decide to take time to help them grow) enjoy life more (hilarious situations) and grow as a person (suppress your ego) The good thing is they grow up fast and are the closest thing to positive change we can potentially actively have a hand in... also according to book quoted on HN the upper limit of human population is 1 trillion... so all we really need to do is work less, stop useless packaging and wasteful bureaucracy, enjoy life more and eat better by transforming the junk food (glucose syrup, wheat, rye (beer u and meat agriculture into a refugee(from work) based garden of nuts fruits and veg

Try watching a french film called Demain (Tomorrow) ...plenty of immediate great solutions out there

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#68

Post by gitanovic »

vbezhenar wrote: post #58
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sarcasm is fine, but I have no sense of whether or not the point is even valid. Do you have any back of the napkin maths to illustrate how effective covering the Earth’s land masses in trees would be, even if we could terraform all the big deserts? Planting a load of trees is at least actionable, but I wonder if it’s also futile.

Phytoplankton is what makes oxygen from CO2. Trees actually do not add much. IMO we should bioengineer phytoplankton to allow it to grow faster, so our oceans will just turn more CO2 into O2 and solve that issue.

Well, the carboniferous era would disagree with you :)

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#69

Post by throwaway10122 »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #47
Retric wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s probably a significantly more difficult problem than stopping pollution as you actually need someone to pay for it directly. And of course we don’t know a good way to only try and cool the Arctic. You can ballpark this yourself a 288 K black body in equilibrium is radiating as much energy as it receives, at T^4. To drop that by 1C to 287K means blocking 1- ( 287^4 /288^4) or roughly 1.4% of all sunlight. As th…

Why does every solar geoengineering project seem to pretend that decreasing solar radiation wouldn't impact photosynthesis which also binds CO2, and, uh, supports the entire food web / our civilization? We already are massively stressing the biosphere: mass extinctions, mass destruction of habitat, mass disruption of migration patterns, warming, plastic pollution, invasive species. And the suggestion is to reduce inc…

At least they try to solve issues with science/engineering instead of just giving up and throwing hands in air about climate change issues.

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#70

Post by masklinn »

lkxijlewlf wrote: post #8
missedthecue wrote: post #7

I wonder how much of the land is going to become farmable now

Too much?

More like not much: the soil is non-existent, and because the latitude and weather remains dreadful the growing seasons are short.

Furthermore Siberia will not be exempt from climactic instability, meaning unpredictable weather events (limited seasonal regularity) making YoY farming planning extremely difficult.

Not only that, but the thawing creates extremely unstable ground, leading to very irregular subsidence.

Post reply on HN