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

I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

711–720 of 884 posts

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#711

Post by cloogshicer »

dsign wrote: post #628

We need a phase transition in our thinking about climate change, because our current way of thinking is taking us nowhere. - All human activities, in different degrees, contribute to climate change. Don't believe me? Say that you bike to the office everyday. You enjoy your commute, you never develop a heart condition, and in the course of your long prosperous life you have three kids and nine grandchildren, own sever…

> We have the knowledge, the technology and the means to live in domes in the vast deserts of this planet, to go to the moon or to live in space habitats anywhere in the solar system.

This is incorrect. Please stop saying we have the technology to live anywhere else other than on Earth, it's false: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9YdnzOf4NQ

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#712

Post by tim333 »

kylebenzle wrote: post #647
vegetablepotpie wrote: post #566

You can do something about this. I got involved in climate advocacy in 2021. Since then I’ve successfully lobbied my local government to start an energy resources study, which will look at ways for my community to quickly transition to renewables. A small thing. But if we all do small things, it will add up! Still though. My state, Arizona has really terrible people writing awful laws. This legislative session they’r…

I disagree, strongly. I think the next phase will be people like me, not climate change deniers but climate change doomers. The US could go carbon neutral tomorrow and it wouldnt make a dent because of China, India and Russia. 3 Billion people pumping pollution into the the air like their is no tomorrow vs. a couple hundred million reducing their footprint isn't going to make a lick of difference. I think people have…

China India and Russia are an issue but will probably cut back if there start to be noticeable problems. China is already cracking ahead on the solar and nuclear.

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#713

Post by randomdata »

teamonkey wrote: post #258
randomdata wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emits nothing only if you ignore the engine. Some studies suggest that human CO2 emissions increase eightfold while exercising.

Riding a bike for 2 miles emits roughly half as much CO2 as does walking the same distance, and a car with an ICE produces an order of magnitude more (even ignoring manufacturing). https://www.globe.gov/explore-science/scientists-blog/archiv...

But, as always, the question is not what mode of transport is more efficient, but why are you travelling at all?

Historically, the whole reason for a city's existence was so that everything was right there. But cities, especially North American cities, for someone reason have to decided to become rural areas for people too poor be able to afford to live in actual rural areas.

It's bizarre.

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#714

Post by PeterisP »

naasking wrote: post #489
Geee wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There won't be an extinction event. We already know that warm periods in Earth's history are the most friendly for all kinds of life. And we know that cold periods kill species and reduce biodiversity. In the most catastrophic case Earth will end up as a tropical paradise, resembling the Eocene period [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene#Flora

This is naive. It's not the absolute temperature that's the problem, it's the rate of change. Temperature is going to change faster than most species can adapt, and that's why the food chain could collapse in the worst case.

What "the food chain"? IMHO there are many relatively disconnected food chains.

There are many natural ecosystems which could and would be severely disrupted as the food chains there break up.

However, the food chain for homo sapiens largely relies on artificial monocultures that can be moved around and replaced on a large scale if the local conditions change. Natural environment can't switch to a "warmer climate biome" overnight, but a farmer can and will plant an entirely different crop in the next season if that suits the place better now, with only some expenses in retooling tractor attachments. And while there are many food industries which are relatively brittle, these are relatively niche 'luxury' foods which often are economically very valuable, but not the staple foods which actually feed the population. Like, if California had to abandon growing almonds due to water issues and instead grow something less demanding (and less profitable), that would destroy a huge industry but wouldn't cause food insecurity.

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#715

Post by tim333 »

polar8 wrote: post #629
jokoon wrote: post #264

I live in the south of france, and I really need to move to a cooler region in france. Summer are very long, nights are hot, makes it hard to sleep well. I don't have enough money to install AC. Mobile AC is too noisy. I have been postponing for 4 years now. I am reading The Ministry Of The Future, it's a great book. India will be the first to suffer from this.

Which part? I'm moving to Nice soon and wondering how it will be. Many of my friends still don't have AC.

Nice isn't as bad as some inland places as the hot air rises and pulls in cooler air from the sea.

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#716

Post by hodgesrm »

kylebenzle wrote: post #647
vegetablepotpie wrote: post #566

You can do something about this. I got involved in climate advocacy in 2021. Since then I’ve successfully lobbied my local government to start an energy resources study, which will look at ways for my community to quickly transition to renewables. A small thing. But if we all do small things, it will add up! Still though. My state, Arizona has really terrible people writing awful laws. This legislative session they’r…

I disagree, strongly. I think the next phase will be people like me, not climate change deniers but climate change doomers. The US could go carbon neutral tomorrow and it wouldnt make a dent because of China, India and Russia. 3 Billion people pumping pollution into the the air like their is no tomorrow vs. a couple hundred million reducing their footprint isn't going to make a lick of difference. I think people have…

> The ONLY answer, live your life like there's no tomorrow because chances are is there isn't going to be.

The problem with this attitude is that it prevents you from solving problems that might actually affect the odds of humans making it to tomorrow or any other near-term date. Right now it looks as if we're in the run-up to World War III. [0] Perhaps we should spend a little energy preventing that. Or perhaps aquifer exhaustion, a long-standing issue exacerbated by climate change. [1] Or solving the political polarization that prevents us from addressing other problems. [2] Humans have faced all of these problems in the past and generally solved them.

Climate change is obviously a serious and challenging problem. But it seems doubtful civilization will be directly overturned any time soon by climate change alone. Europeans and others made it through crises like the Black Plague, which killed a third or more of the population without extinguishing the arc of civilization. [3] It's the knock-on effects we need to worry about, as well as the things that prevent us from fixing them.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/27/opinion/china-taiwan-war....

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/climate/global-groundwate...

[2] https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politi...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#717

Post by tim333 »

jokoon wrote: post #264

I live in the south of france, and I really need to move to a cooler region in france. Summer are very long, nights are hot, makes it hard to sleep well. I don't have enough money to install AC. Mobile AC is too noisy. I have been postponing for 4 years now. I am reading The Ministry Of The Future, it's a great book. India will be the first to suffer from this.

Actual aircon units are quite cheap these days eg this 480 euro https://www.amazon.fr/KLARSTEIN-Windwaker-Smart-Split-Climat... Not sure about the installation. Maybe you could DIY? I was thinking of it in London and imagine the installation will be more than the units.

One thing I can't work out is if something like that - a heat/cool aircon unit counts as a heat pump from the point of view of getting a government grant?

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#718

Post by hrududuu »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #672
hrududuu wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet I never saw people tracking the daily electricity spot price until I moved to Finland :). Miten menee sun suomi, on kiva oppia sitä.

Minulla lemppari urheilulaji :D se kehittyy hitaasti mutta varmasti. I actually maintain several online Finnish learning resources now, including a flashcard deck of the most common 10,000 words from the YLE study way back [1], a command line lemmatizer [2], and a website whose permissions I need to refresh ASAP which archives Selkouutiset with YYYY/MM/DD URLs [3]. Indeed building these tools were what got me back in…

Oh cool, I'll check these out! I've been doing some coding myself to learn Finnish. I'll post a video of my tool in a little bit. I generate a daily set of exercises, and then track my progress over time.

The tasks: scrape all the selko articles and then generate fi-> en translation tasks in the form of phrases (using an LLM). Same thing except en->fi. Free form task generation where I tend to use HS for articles (so like, adult Finnish). And then one I'm working on now, Finnish transcription from auto-generated speech, from selko again.

A lot of my evaluation is based on embedding + cosine distance. LLM's are truly bringing a golden age for language learning.

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#719

Post by Jaxan »

zb3 wrote: post #592
perlgeek wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you have partial control. You can vote for candidates that take climate change seriously. You can decide to buy or lease an EV instead of an ICE one. You can raise the bar for when you book a flight. And so on...

[flagged]

You can give money to charity so that poor people also get solar panels. (Or vote for a government which cares.)

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#720

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

hrududuu wrote: post #718
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minulla lemppari urheilulaji :D se kehittyy hitaasti mutta varmasti. I actually maintain several online Finnish learning resources now, including a flashcard deck of the most common 10,000 words from the YLE study way back [1], a command line lemmatizer [2], and a website whose permissions I need to refresh ASAP which archives Selkouutiset with YYYY/MM/DD URLs [3]. Indeed building these tools were what got me back in…

Oh cool, I'll check these out! I've been doing some coding myself to learn Finnish. I'll post a video of my tool in a little bit. I generate a daily set of exercises, and then track my progress over time. The tasks: scrape all the selko articles and then generate fi-> en translation tasks in the form of phrases (using an LLM). Same thing except en->fi. Free form task generation where I tend to use HS for articles (so…

Hell yeah, I'd love to see it in action!

I was planning on doing a similar thing but my wife didn't seem terribly enthused by the current SOTA with Finnish text generation. Sometimes I do ask GPT-4 to "kerro minulle jotain kiinostavaa [aiheesta]" and throw the generated longform text into a single Anki card to read later on. The style definitely feels different, and it hallucinates a lot, but hey, it's still net beneficial on the margin.

Let's keep in touch, it's always good to meet fellow Finnward folk. My email is in my bio if you ever need anything.

Post reply on HN