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Comment by javert | Hacker News Reader

> Climate change over +2C will hit the U.S. hard, and the fact that other places are worse off won't be consolation.

Care to elaborate? I don't see how that would be a problem. Agricultural areas would shift, and maybe we'd have to move some stuff further inland/build dikes/turn cities into Venice. Anything I'm missing?

I don't see how that stuff is worse than energy controls (people have no idea how important energy is for the economy), plus even if we change, other countries won't.

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>Care to elaborate? I don't see how that would be a problem. Agricultural areas would shift, and maybe we'd have to move some stuff further inland/build dikes/turn cities into Venice. Anything I'm missing?

All of those things sound like huge problems.

Humans have been adapting to nature and vice versa for all of history. Those things I mentioned are not enough to stangle the economy.

I mean, if you are going to impoverish people, what's the point? Isn't preventing global warming supposed to be for the sake of helping people?

Again, people don't understand how essential cheap energy is.

Plenty of economists have compared the economic impact of taking action now vs. dealing with the damage later. Action now is much, much cheaper.

Yea, but action now has a "tragedy of the commons" aspect to it in that not acting lets you freeload off of your neighbors who do. Taking action later to deal with the damage is local expenditure of resources for local benefit.

A fair amount of the required effort is a good idea in itself, e.g. efficiency improvements in business, converting coal plants to natural gas to reduce air pollution health effects, wind is the cheapest and easist to build power source for new electricity capacity, solar correlates brilliantly with usage, electric cars/busses/taxis are great for big cities and so on.

It gets trickier later, but a lot if it just needs a tiny push in the right direction, as can be seen by the many countries around the world, already doing the "impossible" with relatively little fuss.

The bigger economic issue is that a very small number of people benefit directly from coal usage, and they can buy off politicians easily without challenge from the millions of people who suffer the ill effects indirectly through healthcare costs etc.

Action now is much, much cheaper.

Only if you pick the right action. Doing something big and expensive now that turns out to have negligible effects or unintended consequences will lead to us not only exhausting resources now, but also having to spend exactly the same in the future.

So while I agree that action now is important, let's not fall into the trap of "We most do something. This is something. Let's do this".

Not according to a bunch of Nobel Prize winning analysts at the Copenhagen Consensus. They said the effort/resources would be much better spent solving problems for the poor today. Curbing CO2 by some small amount in 85 years will yield, by a large margin, the least benefit of money spent today.

This isn't a topic they dared to cover, but imagine the benefit to the hundreds of millions in Africa living without access to reliable cheap power if their countries could secure international loans for coal plants. Jobs, prosperity, food, industrialized living.

Here's a debunking from one of the economists involved. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/aug/22/climate...

I got as far as "and they have the infrastructure to mitigate severe depletion of resources like fresh water and arable land."

The IPCC has never stated there is a high probability of a loss of arable land and fresh water. They've stated it is a possibility with a high amount of unknowns. And given that CO2 barely warms the Earth, it is the water vapor feedback loop that is the mechanism for large amounts of global warming, it seems odd to believe the world's atmosphere would get wetter, but there would be less rainfall.

Cheap energy is a cornerstone of our (modern, American) way of life, to be sure, and losing it would be awful. For us. But there's the OP's point- climate change will screw over vast numbers of people who didn't even benefit from cheap energy to begin with.

It would be interesting to see an in-depth quantitative analysis of the effects of dramatically reduced fossil fuel use versus dramatic climate change, in terms of a general global sum of badness (and if anyone knows of such a resource, please link it!) But there's more to the whole matter than global utilitarianism- there's also the sheer unfairness of the situation.

32 of the 48 countries in Africa are in an energy crisis according to the World Bank. Think how many millions of lives could be improved/saved by cheap coal plants, with immediate benefits. Or, the horror, nuclear power plants in 15 years.

We're leaving hundreds of millions in abject poverty today, for some mild to negligible benefit in the future (We aren't cutting CO2 emissions from industrialized nations much anytime soon).

Or wind and solar (including PV, CSP and domestic water heating) seeing how they are cheap and easy to roll out? Why wait 15 years for nuclear that is seen as too expensive as well as socially unacceptable in many nations, when you can get immediate returns with wind? Why poison the air with coal when you can use distributed solar and save on grid expansion costs?

Because a modern coal plant can provide rock steady power at $.05/kwh, day in and day out. Yes, thorium, uranium, VOC's, and mercury suck. And the CO2 isn't exactly a benefit. But compared to the abject poverty, or even eternal "developing" status some countries acquire, it is probably a worthwhile investment, or at least should be given as an option. At least until solar becomes cheaper and we find a way to store energy for when it is needed. [EDIT] Because this isn't just about providing retail power to consumers, but commercial power to factors and industry, to generational wealth to pull whole societies out of poverty.

But asking the Congo to invest in massive solar farms when it can't afford cheap coal, is just cruel.

And Vietnam, China and many other countries see nuclear as the only sensible option. We only have about 3 billion years of fuel left (including thorium, but excluding the immeasurable amount of uranium that could be mined from Ocean water).

Solar's fine, but very inconsistent. I work in natural gas myself, but I know quite a few people in Solar. It's great in some areas, not so great in others. They get a lot of calls during the winter wondering why they're getting no production out of their panels when it's snowing or has recently snowed.

Wind more and more is looking like it might be a nightmare. Natural gas is way cheaper in terms of energy provided when you factor in maintenance costs of wind turbines. In addition, there's significant concerns about the environmental impact of wind farms.

http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2013/02/rethinking-wind-pow...

Natural Gas is actually insanely good right now in terms of carbon footprint versus cost. Most countries don't have the infrastructure for NatGas E&P though like we do in the US, and it's mostly a local resource.

I'd be more supportive of gas if the industry weren't so resistant to measuring and controlling their methane leaks.

Modern nuclear power plants have negligible environmental impact.

Yes, they should be built everywhere.

A growing number of environmentalists support nuclear. James Hansen, for example, advocates advanced nuclear in his book Storms of My Grandchildren. Several other very prominent environmentalists talk about their conversion to nuclear advocacy in the documentary Pandora's Promise.

And we could cut CO2 emissions from industrialized countries quite soon, with the right kind of nuclear power. ThorCon, for example, has a design for a molten salt reactor using existing technology, which could be built in modular form at a rate of 100GWe capacity per year by a single shipyard. It'd be safe, very proliferation resistant, six times more fuel-efficient than conventional reactors, and as cheap as natural gas. Their only problem is that the NRC won't let them do anything.

75% of U.S. coal plants are scheduled for retirement within the next decade. Air pollution from coal kills thousands of Americans per year, according to the American Lung Association. We have lots of shipyards. We have a historic opportunity here, if the government will get out of the way.

Humans have been adapting to nature BY SUFFERING MAJOR HARDSHIP for all of history.

No, cheap energy is not "essential." It's essential to living like a suburban American, but when you see Europeans living more comfortably than Americans, while consuming far less energy, that ought to give you pause.

It also should give you pause to notice how "essential" it is for the sea not to force you to relocate, something global warming is slowly doing to hundreds of millions of people.

Look at Louisiana for example of harm.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/losing-ground-sout...

> In just 80 years, some 2,000 square miles of its coastal landscape have turned to open water, wiping places off maps, bringing the Gulf of Mexico to the back door of New Orleans and posing a lethal threat to an energy and shipping corridor vital to the nation’s economy.

A football field size area of land is lost every hour. That's going to have massive economic and cultural impact on the rest of the US.

and how is that different than what man has gone through all his existence? We still find ruins today underwater that obviously at one time were quite a bit above the surface. I am quite sure that Venice wasn't built with the idea it would have the water problems today. There are even areas of the world previous underwater that are not.

In summary, people like to exaggerate the issue by ignoring the past. Climate change became the focus after their previous terms all bit the dust. It became the cause celebrity when big business found a way to exploit it for money and politicians found it gave them more control over people; in turn how to coerce donations from groups not previously bending the knee.

It is all so very easy to make it sound dire but the exaggerations border on religious fanaticism and the name calling/branding of anyone who doesn't agree one hundred percent is similar in nature

You say it's an exaggeration -- a believable claim -- but that's something you've got to actually demonstrate, not just speculate assertively.

Nuance, nor perspective, among many other things, do not lend themselves well to any discussion about climate change, which is awfully sad. You are exactly correct that this is a 21st century religion, regardless of the accuracy of the discussion around it.

Ah yes, the predictable downvotes which only validate my comment.

No, you're being downvoted because the only reason you think there isn't nuance or perspective is because you seem to be ignoring it.

You want perspective? The mass die-offs in fish stocks, vertebrate life, and ecosystem damage is essentially unrecoverable.

We are changing the atmospheric composition at a rate greater than that of many of the natural catastrophes that have wiped out a significan amount of the biosphere. The models that work in accordance to our understanding of climate science have very well-delineated scenarios, all of which are considerably worse than the status quo. Some of those have consequences which will end in the Earth having a significantly lower carrying capacity for life, human included. And not in a thousand years; we're talking a span of 30 to 50.

Have you even seen the effects that we're having on the ocean through acidification? What do you think will happen when the ocean can no longer support the amounts of phitoplankton responsible for generating most of the oxygen we use, and which are the base of the planet's food chain?

Have you every studied agronomical sciences? Do you know what the impact on crops is when you have extended flooding and drought, or when the average temperature of a site is raised by a few degrees?

Again, your hyper-alarmist reply only bolsters my point. No perspective, no rationality, just pure paranoia. Anyone with even a slightly divergent view continues to be dissuaded from saying anything. These sorts of responses only validate my views. I'll say a prayer for the phitoplankton, though [eye roll].

There's literally thousands of scientific papers in disciplines of environmental science, agronomical sciences, glaciology, geology, oceanography, climate science, and the dozens of biological subdisciplines which are documenting this.

Do you want to bring on the evidence or do I need to quote a few hundred papers authored by experts in their respective fields?

Having not read the source material referenced by OP, the biggest concerns I have (that are not commonly addressed) are as follows:

1: increased ocean acidity due to CO2 dissolving into water. A lot of the smaller lifeforms (coral, others) rely on calcium carbonate for exoskeletons, even small changes in PH can greatly reduce their capability to extract such from the water. There will also be many more unexpected implications, so the total impact on ocean biomes is unknown.

2: global warming means more energy in the weather systems, which means greater fluctuations and more chaotic weather, not necessarily just a small increase in average temperature. Think bigger hurricanes, more severe floods and droughts, higher winds, etc.

From IPCC report "Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis" chapter 2:

"In summary, there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale." (2.6.2.2)

"In summary, the current assessment concludes that there is not enough evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought since the middle of the 20th century, owing to geographical inconsistencies in the trends." (2.6.2.3)

It's not as simple as more energy -> more chaotic weather -> more severe floods and droughts. Unlike other parts of global warming, many changes in extereme events are hypothetical and unsettled. (For floods, we are not sure of sign!)

Another big concern is shifting precipitation patterns. Our civilisations and current ecosystems are build for current patterns, and floods in deserts during droughts in normally wet areas don't help anyone.

3: increase in days over 100F. Being hotter isn't just an inconvenience: photosynthesis stops working efficiently when temperatures are over 100F (fun chemistry fact: chemical reactions are temperature sensitive; this is why your body tries to maintain a very narrow temperature range. Otherwise, the chemical reactions all run at the wrong speed (or not at all), and the delicate balance of chemical pathways is disrupted). So when temperatures get too hot, plants switch from photosynthesizing and storing energy to burning their stored sugars and respiring. Forests begin emitting CO2 instead of consuming it; crops do not have the extra sugars to store as fruits and grains for us to harvest and eat.

That's less than 38°C. At Brazil, we have huge areas of florest that rarely see a temperature smaller than that during the day.

Are plant leaves cooler than the environment?

The rain forests themselves will be quite a bit cooler -- they tend to average 80F/27C, with temperatures rarely much higher than 92F/33C. I think it's a side effect of the constant rain.

I'm not sure about your non-rain forests. It's possible they are seasonally operating at a loss -- storing sugars during the cool seasons and burning them during the hot seasons.

Averaging the florests do not mean much.

As I've said, there are big areas of rain-florest in Brazil that rarely see less than 38°C during the day. There are also big areas of savanna that stay around that temperature for half a year (the half that rains). The fact that there are also cooler areas does nothing to explain how plants survive on those both.

I do think it's quite likely that plants keep leaves bellow the environment temperature, I'd just like somebody that knows it to confirm it or not.

Water sources for Kansas aren't surface waters but ground waters. Problem is that the recharge rate is far outstripped by current crops we're growing. Western Kansas will slowly turn into a desert due to this reality. The same goes for most of Oklahoma and Nebraska. These are the states which grow the wheat and corn that goes into your food stuffs. You think bread is expensive now wait until a gallon of fresh water costs more than a gallon of gas. Then you'll feel the pinch of Malthus' Curse.

Major ag and commodities companies are already buying land in Canada and Australia with this expectation.

Yeah, but it's likely to be not sufficient to handle a growing population either. I expect that the long term solution is to take to space and create artificial habitats or cut down on our population (most likely option imo).

It's ludicrous to suggest that fresh water will ever be more expensive than gas. The price of gas would have to drop by a factor of about a thousand to get to the realistic maximum price for fresh water (the cost of producing water via desalination).

Of course, farmers are so used to cheap water that it would be a huge shock to the agricultural economy for the price of water to rise to even 1/1000th the price of gas.

I may be hyperbolic in my statement regarding the price of water, but the fact remains the more scarce the water the more expensive the crops that need it. Food crops will become prohibitively expensive as fresh water sources become harder to find or transport to areas were water is scarce. This is a reality that we can't avoid anymore. We either bite the bullet and get ready for what will be a multi-generational Grapes of Wrath or just lay down and die. There's no half-measures when Nature dictates the situation.

I feel bad for the state of discussion on HN that you were downvoted for asking an honest, polite request for more information.

Since you mention it...

I recently lost 11 points in the span of a few minutes (while writing a comment), apparently because someone went and downvoted all my recent comments.

I've seen other suspicious behavior for months, but it's more anecdotal, so I won't go into it here.

tl;dr I am probably getting vote brigaded.

edit: And now I am "submitting too fast" and can't continue the conversations I am in (though I can still make edits). I don't know how the algorithm for that works, but I suspect (from experience) it's partially based partially on how many downvotes you're getting, because I often hit this without submitting quickly or all that much. Also from experience, it takes a really long time before you can start submitting again. So I'm effectively silenced (until next time...).

edit2: "If you talk about downvotes, chances are you'll get downvoted" (below---I'm still "rate" limited). Well, someone else raised the issue of culture on HN (not me), and I'm providing data. This is constructive, as opposed to simply bitching about getting downvotes, which I am being accused of. That is wrong and I never do that, as my comment history will prove. This accusation is conflating two entirely different things and is really unjust and unhelpful. Again, having someone systematically downvote your comment history is not the same as complaining about people downvoting a particular comment because they don't like it. Calling me a "bore" because I am reporting abusive behavior is beyond the pale.

"A bore is someone who persists in holding his own views after we have enlightened him with ours."

If you talk about downvotes, chances are you'll get downvoted...

>> "A bore is someone who persists in holding his own views after we have enlightened him with ours."

Where is that quote from? It's been a while since I've seen such an elitist snarky statement and I'd like to know who to attribute it to.

Frankly, I couldn't tell you. I get my quotes from `nc alpha.mike-r.com 17`; some come with attribution, some don't. A great quote though, no?

(Aside: Why doesn't everyone run a QoTD server? The world would be a better place for it.)

politics, environmentalism, and sexual orientation, are highly clique oriented here to the point you might as well be on reddit.

Asking why it is a problem to move cites honestly sounds more like trolling than a honest question.

Moving or converting cities does seem like an incredible undertaking. However, it also looks like making the world reign in its carbon emissions sufficiently has been tried and is not yet successful; maybe it's actually impossible as opposed to just difficult. At least changing the world to adapt to climate change doesn't have the tragedy of the commons working against it, because when a local government works to prepare for whatever is going to happen, the benefit accrues locally to the people making the sacrifice.

I read several of javert's posts, and I don't get the impression of a troll.

The issue at hand, isn't the people in the first world.

how would you move a city like Mumbai? Or how about any of the villages in the hinterlands, like Waynard Kerala, Nagpur Maharashtra, random village in Bihar.

There is very strong regional centrism when CC gets discussed on the web (for obvious reasons). Local government has a hard time getting by now, in the places that have it at all.

Moving a city? Building infrastructure to manage water shortages?

I do not see how those human beings, with those resources, are going to achieve that.

Only a few groups can talk about adapting to climate change.

There are a couple cities moving now, more or less; mostly cities in Syria trying to move to Germany as far as I can tell. Don't see how that movement is worse than energy controls?

Imagine Bangladesh trying to move its cities. There are about 157 million people there. Let's say only the quarter of the population that's on the low-lying coastal areas currently experiencing a lot of flooding need to move. Is the Bangladeshi government going to organize a nice resettlement program? Are they going to rent land in India to move everyone to? Or are we gradually going to see more and more folks individually and collectively saying, F..., I need to get to Europe for the safety and opportunity of my children. Imagine just a quarter of those Bangladeshis in low-lying areas making their way to Europe: 10 million people trying to move to avoid the floods and the threat of death, with few to no cash reserves, moving across the continents paying smugglers and trying to ride trains on top of trains.

This year (Jan-Aug 2015) only 350,000 people tried to make it into the EU in this way and it's already affecting political stability in the region.

http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2013/06/19/wa...

Two wrongs do not make a right, and thinking that climate warming only poses a minor inconvenience is ignorant. Please do some further research or you could misconstrued as a rude troll.

> plus even if we change, other countries won't.

Because the US has no political power, amirite?

On completely separate note, as an Australian, I'd like to thank the US for pushing it's list of verboten drugs onto us, for pressuring us to take part in it's wars of convenience, for pushing it's IP laws down our throat via treaty obligations, and for bending us over the desk with our "free trade" agreements.

Obviously the other main culprit (for putting carbon into the air) is China, and it's not worth it for the US to try to exercise power over them.

As to the list of stuff you're complaining about, you can only blame Australia (i.e., your fellow citizens and your politicians). Australia absolutely could just not do that stuff. The US is not going to invade Australia.

The reason Australia goes along with it is because it wants to.

And it wants to because it's a whole lot like the US. All the former British colonies have a lot in common.

We probably should have all just stayed in one big empire. After all, the US Founders bungled up our system permanently by claiming that rights come from God, which is only a way to supposedly invalidate rights.

What are you on about, China is way behind the US in emissions per per capita:

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

And yet that same chart shows China has twice as much in total emissions as compared to the US. Pick your preference I guess.

Plus I don't remember hearing quite as many reports of extremely polluted cities outside of China as I hear about in China.

And three million kilotons ahead on emissions total, which are what matter. Also, how and where was this data collected? We know that we can't trust companies to report this accurately. Was it collected by the state? Since it's not privacy-related, I sort of trust the US to report accurately, whereas I don't trust the PRC to do so.

Also those emissions are relatively easy to fix since it's mostly cheap and nasty coal plants. They're already sick of coal plants due to local pollution, and switching electricity generation tech is much easier than say changing 100 year old car based city structures. And they are well positioned to do renewables & nuclear.

I don't think it's especially useful to think about emissions by country for the purpouses of thinking who can effect change. Any more than a small town resident should feel discouraged about voting in national elections.

People need to be doing their part in all the reference groups they belong to, be it their field of expertise, their local government, international communities they belong to etc. "Act locally, think globally".

As long as citizens of Australia blame America and not their own politicians the status quo is safe, and pols can sell out without fear of repercussions.

Seems to me that Australian politicians took all those "suggestions" and made them even worse for your own population.

Don't blame other countries, your own government are the ones fucking you - I can tell that from experience and recent history in my own country...

You're describing a false dichotomy. where only one party can be responsible for screwing people over. Who said I gave no blame to our own politicians?

In any case, people seem to have missed my point, which is that the US has plenty of political power to get other countries to play ball. Do people really believe that something called a 'superpower' has negligible influence?

I'd also expect mosquito and pest populations to spiral out of control in areas where they are already bad, and spread to areas that didn't have them previously. Changes like this could cause collapse/redistribution of ecosystems pretty reliably.

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