Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene (2013)

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I find all the recent discussions about how we are past the tipping point pretty scary. However, let's hope it will help to raise the awareness globally and help us take more decisive actions (whatever it can be, including geoengineering)

And which particular empirical dataset is giving you cause for concern?

Planet earth is not a lab with perfectly controlled conditions. It is a highly complex system with problems that are difficult to measure directly. Ignoring things that are dfficult to measure is a recipe for bias.

For me the current industrialization launched extinction event [1] is giving me the creeps.

The last time it happened anything larger than a cat did not do so well. Yeah, we humans are an exception and soon we will grow meat in labs and vegetables in city gardens, so we might fare better than that.

The difference with this and historical predicted catastrophes that did not happen, is that it's actually happening right now. As an example the malthusian catastrophe that never happened was that Malthus was predicting future values of population versus food production (thus giving yet another failed apocalyptic prediction) whereas the extinction is actually happening, right now.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/22...

jeeez, you enjoy living scared to death about impending doom here or there? I don't get people like you, apparently spending too much time on internet. go out and have some fun :)

doomsayers running around are nothing new for last couple of thousands of years. you know what I think? it's a character weakness, and a big one in this case. grow some balls, look at positive things happening, have some faith (not religious one, in mankind), and for the-guy-on-the-cloud sake, don't poison others with your inner frustrations/scares/half-empty glass.

No, the difference is that, unlike the "last couple thousands of years", we actually understand out environment very, very well, to the point where out predictions of climate have not been failing, and when they do, it's because we have underestimated everything.

I would call finding the positive side of seeing the end of the planet as you know it a serious case of delusion, at the very least, and at worst the sort of attitude that's gotten us here.

Like I said, the difference between the forecasts of past crackpots, and the current extinction event, is that the crackpots made crazy predictions with poor understanding of the world, whereas the extinction event is an observable fact

As in 'lets see how many species whe have left - oo, there goes one... and there another'.

Human beings have made a great impact to our environment and it saddens me an intelligent person such as you can bypass it with a shrug.

Do you remember the slight problem we had with CFC compounds destroying the ozone layer in the 80's? Well, it was an observable fact - and it was fixed by placing controls. So, less people die of skin cancer which I think is nice.

With your attitude we should have just let the CFC flow and tell australians not to worry so much about increasing cancer rates but rather just be cool and wear longer sleeves.

I have great faith in humanitys spirit and skill, but we are now a species which operates on a planetary scale and we should acknowledge it.

I would like to avoid ecological disasters before they become undoable ala easter islands.

I guess radiative properties of CO2 in the lab, that was already thought of centuries ago.

Also the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere plotted against time. It was news back then and some people started getting worried because of that. Since Keeling started measuring it in 1958, it took some years for the trend to show.

I think our safest bet is pretty much - get fusion ASAP, outsource it, replace all forms of energy with it.

And start planting trees/plnats wherever you can.

Also it might be better for people to congregate in few large metropolis, to minimize the impact. Chernobyl is doing great pretty much because no humans are there to bother the wildlife.

> I think our safest bet is pretty much - get fusion ASAP, outsource it, replace all forms of energy with it.

We've been trying to get controlled civilian fusion ASAP for 60-odd years now and it seems as far away (or as close a reach) as it ever was.

> get fusion ASAP

If we rely on fusion to save us then we're thoroughly fucked – please excuse my language, but it's the most accurate portrayal of the situation.

- The best-known research project, ITER, is incredibly expensive and it will be 2050 until we can even start building commercial reactors using this concept (note that this is the current official schedule, so expect to add several decades to this). It is not even certain whether we can overcome the immense engineering challenges within the next 100 years.

- Other approaches only receive a fraction of the funding of ITER. Some of them might be more promising, but are still far away from breakeven, and it is still unknown, if and when they reach commercial viability.

We already know how to generate CO2-neutral energy: solar, wind, and fission nuclear. Let's do those instead, and keep researching fusion energy, but don't bet the future of our planet on it.

I really like solar and wind (personally invested in some) but can you (or someone) clarify the CO2-neutral aspect of solar? Until some time ago, we still kept hearing about the impacts of building the panels, etc...

I link this in every discussion about how we will never get fusion power:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fusi...

See the nice funding graph in question three.

If we were to decide that fusion is the way to go and would fund it appropriately, we could get commercial reactors much faster.

However, note that building power plants takes a lot of time. Building a new nuclear power plant for example takes 6-8 years just for the actual construction. Planning and bureaucracy have to be added to this. So even if we speed up fusion power development so that we can start building commercial fusion power plants in say twenty years, that's still mostly too late if we want to limit warming to two degrees.

At current CO2 production rates we have time until 2039 for that.

http://trillionthtonne.org/

> See the nice funding graph in question three.

Oh please, that graph is dug out whenever the feasibility of fusion is discussed. It's a prediction from 1976 – you should know how credible decade-long predictions on the progress of unproven technologies are.

It's also pure fantasy that if we just throw enough money at the problem, we'll get the work done quickly. That's not even the case for large software projects, so how do you expect that to work for a task with so many hard scientific and engineering challenges?

Imagine that instead of writing "javac file.java" every time you wanted to recompile you had to hire workers and buy materials to build the program using cogs and levers. Development would obviously slow down a lot if you had to ration your recompiles because of funding. Also, a project has an optimal amount of employees. I'm pretty sure ITER and the like has less than that number right now. Throwing money at the problem seems like an excellent way to speed things up.

Besides the obvious problems of building very expensive machines like ITER with a limited budget, there are multiple routes that might lead to commercial fusion. Magnetic confinement is just one of them. Currently it's the only one that gets any significant funding. If we had unlimited money we could pursue all options simultaneously.

That's how it worked in the Manhattan Project. They tried all ways to a working nuke in parallel. So they came up with Little Boy (gun type assembly) and Fat Man (implosion type assembly).

> If we rely on fusion to save us then we're thoroughly fucked

As far as I understand, it's a problem of funding and bureaucracy problems rather than technology.

We're thoroughly fucked already, the only thing that changes now, is how deeply fucked are we, to pardon by French.

People are unjustifiedly afraid of fission, wind and solar are unreliable and come with a carbon cost. Fusion ticks all the right fields - self-containing, stable (barring catastrophes), cheap and highly energetic.

Question is - is it easier to sway people on nuclear power or to get fusion ready?

The problem is that regular fuels are still absurdly cheap. Considering their environmental impact - too cheap. Running coal power plants still produces cheaper electricity than a nuclear power plant or solar or wind, because coal is so absurdly cheap. As soon as that changes, and coal becomes scarce enough to make the price go up, other technologies will take off very rapidly. Fusion is really difficult because it's costing a tonne of money and no one has actually proven that it would actually pay for itself or in fact produce a surplus of power.

> As far as I understand, it's a problem of funding and bureaucracy problems rather than technology.

No, it's very much a problem of technology. One of the challenges of most fusion approaches is that we don't have materials that survive the heavy neutron bombardment from the fusion process for very long. You don't simply solve this through more funding (although it helps).

Another problem is that we still haven't managed to build a fusion device that delivers even close to break-even energy return, not even under laboratory conditions for very short timespans.

> cheap

That is doubtful. Fusion reactors with the ITER concept are extremely large and complex devices.

Note that I'm not against fusion in general. In fact, I think we should fund research in alternative fusion technologies a lot more than we do now.

> No, it's very much a problem of technology.

Well, you can't make technology without funding and time. But given enough of both, its definitely achievable. There is nothing scientific preventing us from creating fusion reactor.

Perhaps I misspoke, but the thing is, the main issue is funding, you can't expect research without funding. If the project was well funded, we'd probably have it by now.

> cheap

Cheap as in resources required to produce energy. Not cheap to make. By same measure how much infrastructure you need to mine, transport and make a power plant.

Fuel costs for fission nuclear plants are only about 28% of operating costs - so why should fusion plants be hugely cheaper than fission plants? The capital costs for something based on ITER look they might be comparable to fission plants - I guess decommissioning and waste handling might be cheaper though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...

Well, large parts of operating costs of a fission nuclear power plant is getting rid of the radioactive waste and shutting it down safely.

With fusion, due to nature of the process, and the fact that the reaction isn't self sustaining the prices could be lower.

The big reason is that fusion produces less radioactive waste and doesn't cause a meltdown when a breach happens. Yes, neutron bombardment happens, and it makes stuff more radioactive but IIRC the half time is lower and the shielding could be optimized to have low half-life time.

I think that is akin to an engineer suggesting that to solve a problem you need to buy 10k servers and put oracle on them. It might be just what you need, but it seems a little naive. Like technology we treat the environment as a seperate cost centre that is outside the normal buisness. But interacting with the environment is so critical that this approach is just horrbily flawed.

People need to understand the envirionment and how it interacts with people. This understanding needs to be a part of political and buisness decisions. We need to stop being passive consumers of the environment and learn the subtleties of engineering it. Fusion may help but it is wildly more complicated than that.

> People need to understand the envirionment and how it interacts with people. This understanding needs to be a part of political and buisness decisions. We need to stop being passive consumers of the environment and learn the subteleies of engineering it.

I fear that change will take way longer, than any fusion reactor ever will.

Is the way of life negotiable?

I think a large portion of the problem is that energy is cheap and it results to not very good decisions regarding the environment.

Strategic decisions: For example cities in very hot and dry places, with urban sprawl, large apartments, air conditioning, lawns. Or conversely very cold places with a lot of heating.

Daily decisions: Environmental burden not reflected almost at all in the price of foodstuffs.

There's a rhetoric problem with being past the tipping point - it means that all the advice we've been submerged in for the past 10 years suddenly has to change from "release less greenhouse gas" to "forget the gas, that ship has sailed, just protect ourselves!". We might very well find that coal saves us by providing the power needed to do large scale engineering work, generate the food we'll need, and basically all the good things that it already does plus whatever added demands come from more severe weather and sea level rise.

And then it runs out quicker than ever and we all die. Soooo.... I think we better just take some of the scariest fear messages with a grain of salt, especially when it leads back to the status quo. I think that we need to be the best stewards of our planet that we can be and that means there is a sort of moral imperative to move to the cleanest methods of energy production as soon as possible. We are making strides, the whole world is. Maybe not as fast as some would like, but the progress is there and will continue because the economics are finally starting to come around.

Yes let's totally ignore the real problem(s) and let's apply the same tools that got us here to get us into a more precarious position, i.e. geoengineering.

Agreed, but voices of reason like yours will be "lost in the flood" once the East River starts lapping at sidewalks of Wall St. Geoengineering to avert climate disaster will be attempted by governments and even private individuals everywhere once the shit really begins to hit the fan. So, we might as well get good at it.

I wonder if global scale industrialization could be the Great Filter?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

Too soon. We probably have another 1000 years give or take left. There are 7-8 billion of us on the planet. A few million can easily holdout for a thousand years if something happens.

When empires or civilizations collapse and you read about them in history you can see the decline, and you wonder why no one did anything. There is so much common sense stuff any reasonable person would do. Then you find that the people playing the games were generally obsessed.

And then you look at our civilization and you realize that's what's going on here. We're obsessed and at the same time you can totally see this is not going to end well for us. But we're so focused on our own rhetorical frames of economic development and progress that we can't do a damn thing to slow any of this down. And we're basically headed for the cliff.

Want to reduce CO2? Stop eating meat. Want to seem edgy and cool without doing anything requiring effort? Claim we are doomed.

Civilization does not function on the personal responsibility level. But keep claiming that, that's a very big part of the rhetorical frame of laissez faire capitalism. The responsible thing to do would be reduce population, reduce consumption, and stop pursing endless creative destruction. But that's too far out there man!

I get your point, and think it is valid.

My opinion is consistent with your opinion, at least in terms of what a reasonable next action might be: stopping eating meat would be a good place to start.

Here is another perspective:

  > Have no illusions. To achieve our goal of getting
  > off fossil fuels, these reductions in demand and
  > increases in supply must be big. Don’t be distracted
  > by the myth that “every little helps.” If everyone
  > does a little, we’ll achieve only a little. We must
  > do a lot. What’s required are big changes in demand
  > and in supply.

  > “But surely, if 60 million people all do a little,
  > it’ll add up to a lot?” No. This “if-everyone”
  > multiplying machine is just a way of making something
  > small sound big. The “if-everyone” multiplying machine
  > churns out inspirational statements of the form
  > “if everyone did X, then it would provide enough
  > energy/water/gas to do Y,” where Y sounds impressive.
  > Is it surprising that Y sounds big? Of course not. We
  > got Y by multiplying X by the number of people involved

  > -- David MacKay [1]

My opinion: Want to seriously reduce CO2? Stop eating meat and have fewer children and limit spend on products to $1k / year and limit spend on services to $2k / year and don't fly on planes and encourage everyone around you to take similarly progressive measures and apply pressure to your local political representatives and rejig our ideas regarding how to run society...

That said, "the best is the enemy of the good". What more can we do than take progressive steps in the right direction, even if we are unable or unwilling to personally change far enough? At least we can influence those around us.

I claim no moral high ground: I am still eating meat as it is easy to do so, and I like doing it, and thinking about the longer term picture causes me distress, even after reading a dozen books about this stuff this year.

[1] http://www.withouthotair.com/c19/page_114.shtml

With regard to McKay, every journey starts with a tiny step forward. I believe we have for the first time seen economic growth increase faster than emissions and worst case scenarios have been dialed back, but that won't sell newspapers.

"rejig our ideas regarding how to run society..." To what exactly? Has it worked in real life somewhere? How much suffering should the weakest members of society be subject to in this experiment? If it is likely more than the suffering they would suffer from climate change is it still justified?

Totally agree on don't fly on planes, especially so if claim you want to stop climate change.

"The city’s secular middle class was disappearing, squeezed out between gangsters, profiteers, fundamentalists and soldiers."

...sounds like the USA we hear about on the news :)

Yeah most Europeans think if they come to the US they will be carjacked.

Or killed / tazered / robbed by the police (the us specific travel agency warned us about some parts of missisipi specifically). For real: dont screw around with cops in the us. They're not pussies like our cops (Holland).

It is probably good advice not to screw around with the cops in any foreign country.

nah, they are gun wielding nutjobs who feel righteous in any situation... yes, you don't want to screw with them, but people don't have respect for them, just fear

When I was living in Johannesburg where carjacking was rife, one of our senior managers went on a business trip to the USA. At some point he was carjacked, by a white woman. He is black, and his friends and colleagues never let him live down the fact that he was hijacked by a white woman.

i don't think so, US ain't paradise, but carjacking is a bit off from major concerns groups. rather general antipathy to police state which US became, making "land of free" expression a rather ridiculous one. Life is just generally better and nicer in many parts of Europe, and that can be shocking when one comes for first time and expects... more from say Hollywood propaganda

I don't even lock my doors... more rural area, but not out in the forest rural. Now, when I go to a more urban area, or a city, or a place less familiar then I lock my car doors. Lots of it depends on where you are.

I see the challenge for the 2000's is for the human species is to take on planetary stewardship in a real way.

Or "Planetary Management" from Wikipedia "The term has been around in science fiction novels since the 1970s." The future has arrived whether we like it or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_management

Another less fatalistic way to look at it is to see how far humans will go to protect/manage/revive nature itself. http://www.radiolab.org/story/resurrections/

Let's learn how to Live in the Anthropocene...

That was a good read. Some related reading material:

Jared Diamond -- Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed [1]. A historical analysis and discussion of past and present societies, and the multiple factors involved in collapse.

Tim Flannery -- The Weather Makers: The History & Future Impact of Climate Change [2]. Includes a readable overview of the history of the earth's climate, and evidence of recent climate change (~2005).

Kerryn Higgs -- Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet [3]. Higgs' book focuses on the history of how the philosophy of economic growth has come to be a dominant ideology in our civilization. This book roughly addresses the question of "why aren't we doing anything!?".

McKenzie Funk -- Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming [4]. Funk writes about the many exciting business opportunities created by the changing climate, including: the melting arctic provides access to new oil and mineral reserves, new markets for artificial snow makers now some ski fields lack natural snow, private firefighters employed by insurance companies to defend certain high-value homes, climate-based speculation of farmland, mosquito genetic engineering to suppress mosquito-transmitted diseases, ferrying boatloads of economic/climate migrants from africa to the EU, floating buildings, how to define a country's borders (and resulting claim to coastal natural resources) when that country is completely underwater.

Joseph A Tainter -- The Collapse of Complex Societies [5]. I have not read Tainter's book. I believe it roughly focuses around an argument that more complex societies require more upkeep to maintain them, and adding incremental complexity offers diminishing returns.

Graham Turner -- Is Global Collapse Imminent? [6]. A short research paper comparing the various simulated trajectories of the "Limits to Growth" modelling from the 1970s against data measured from the last 40 years of reality.

David JC MacKay -- Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air [7]. Almost entirely ignores economics and climate change to focus on physics-based back-of-the-envelope estimates to gauge how realistic it is to provide the UK's energy needs solely using the various forms of renewable energy.

Seneca -- Dialogues and Letters

  6.1.4-7 [the terrors of earthquakes]
  ...
  > There is no disaster without some means of escape. Thunderbolts
  > have never burned up whole peoples. A season of plague has
  > emptied cities, not carried them off. But the disaster of an
  > earthquake stretches far and wide; it is unavoidable, voracious,
  > and deadly to everyone. For it not only devours homes, families
  > and individual cities: it submerges nations and regions. Sometimes
  > it covers them in ruins, sometimes buries them in a deep chasm,
  > not even leaving any evidence that what is no longer there at least
  > once was. Only the ground covers the noblest cities, without any
  > trace of their former appearance.

[1] http://www.jareddiamond.org/Jared_Diamond/Collapse.html

[2] http://www.theweathermakers.org/

[3] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/collision-course

[4] http://www.mckenziefunk.com/book

[5] http://monoskop.org/images/a/ab/Tainter_Joseph_The_Collapse_...

[6] http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/M...

[7] http://www.withouthotair.com/

A good list. I'd add Stewart Brand's book Whole Earth Discipline [1], although some (not me) take issue with him on his support for nuclear power.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Discipline

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