Obama on Climate Change: The Trends Are ‘Terrifying’ | Hacker News Reader

Obama on Climate Change: The Trends Are ‘Terrifying’

nytimes.com

63 pointssmacktoward112 comments

What's really terrifying to me is all the positive feedback loops inherent to warming.

Melting permafrost in tundra regions like Alaska releases methane: more warming. Less snow/ice coverage reflects less sunlight: more warming. Desertification and dying rainforests mean less CO2 absorbption: more warming. Warmer air temperatures mean the atmosphere can hold more water vapor, which traps longwave radiation: more warming. Some of these haven't even hit the hockey stick portion yet.

Between that, the "time delay" between atmospheric CO2 and climate (i.e., that we're probably seeing the climate effects corresponding to the CO2 levels of many years ago), and 2016 breaking temperature records every month so far, it's hard not to conclude that we're fucked and it's way too late. Sigh.

Yep, that's why it's so scary. By the time the effects have become so obvious that even the strongest deniers realise something must be done... that's too late.

And it's not just about temperature. It's about the socio-political effects of climate change. How many people realise that a large part of the Syrian conflict is actually down to crop failures? Migration from country -> town led to big social conflicts, which massively contributed to the eventual military conflict.

A lot of the conflict you see in the middle east has more to do with crop failure and water shortages than oil. Yemen fell into chaos over acute water shortages.

What's terrifying is that people don't connect their behavior to global warming and spew the most ignorant garbage justifying their airplane flights and so on, including the most knowledgeable people.

We can't stop what's happening now, but as sure as we wish past generations had reduced polluting, future generations will wish we had. But almost no one does. How many people do you know haven't flown in the past twelve months versus how many have?

Everybody cares about the environment until they want to see the Eiffel Tower.

Individual actions don't make any noticeable difference. Climate change won't be affected if I fly to Europe next month versus staying home. It's a massive collective action problem, and collective action is hard. Individuals changing their habits won't do anything to help.

That's the biggest cop-out ever. Of course 'individual actions don't make any noticeable difference'. But every collective action is ultimately enacted by lots of individual actors the sum of whose actions is making a noticeable difference.

The bigger problem is that there are so many people in the pay of those who'd rather watch the world burn that the short term interests are going to win out or have at least significant enough effects that in the longer term we're going to be paying a very hefty price indeed.

Individuals changing their habits will do plenty, if enough individuals are involved. It's a sales and marketing job. If you can get 100's of millions of people to download a stupid game then you probably could get 100's of millions of people to think about whether or not they really need to make that trip, about whether or not they need a new car or not and whether or not they really need to have the AC running 24/7, and to vote for parties that have an eye out for the environment (never mind that in a two party system that's a pipe dream but in countries with coalition governments those parties do tend to get into positions of relative power and the changes they cause are large enough to matter).

It's not a cop-out, it's simply acknowledging reality. My individual choices don't matter. What matters is convincing billions of people to all make those individual choices. Changing my own behavior does nothing to convince those others. It seems paradoxical on the surface, but that's how it is.

Someone who spends his time flying around the world while successfully convincing the masses to be environmentally conscious will have a much greater positive impact than someone who reduces his own carbon emissions to zero but does nothing else.

Flying to see the Eiffel Tower, or not, doesn't do squat.

It's just a way to do whatever you want to do 'because it doesn't make a difference anyway'.

But it does make a difference: because you chose not to fly and by telling others that you chose not to fly and why you are setting an example. That act, multiplied by thousands does have an effect.

So your individual choices do matter, because you are not only affecting yourself but also those around you, who in turn may affect those around them and so on. Virality is at every scale made up of small connections.

I could easily afford a new car. Instead, I've bought an old one which will last me at least another 5 years at a very small fraction of the price and the environmental impact of buying a new one. Anybody that challenges me on why I drive an old boat like that is a primary candidate for a lesson on what the environmental impact of a new vehicle - even one that is more energy efficient than this old one - is.

And so on, hopefully with a replication factor > 1.

Talking down to people about their choices because you see it as a cop-out is a great way to reduce your replication factor.

If you think that it's useful to set an example, then fine. But if I honestly think that my example isn't going to change anybody else's mind, then it's not a "cop-out" to take a flight anyway because the marginal contribution to climate change is down in the noise.

> Talking down to people about their choices because you see it as a cop-out is a great way to reduce your replication factor.

You have a point, but if your mind has already been made up then what difference does it make how I see it?

> But if I honestly think that my example isn't going to change anybody else's mind, then it's not a "cop-out" to take a flight anyway because the marginal contribution to climate change is down in the noise.

You too are somebody, and if you can't convince yourself that your actions ultimately (especially when taken over a lifetime) add up to something tangible then I'm not sure what I could say to you that would change your mind.

But let's just for a moment assume that everybody thinks like you: that would be one world. And then let's imagine a world where people are more likely to think like me, that would be another world. My argument is that those worlds will materially differ and it is all those small decisions that made the difference.

It's a bit like war: if all the soldiers would refuse to fight the war would end, immediately. But as long as they all collectively believe that their action or inaction will not make a difference the war will go on.

Yes, we're part of a collective. But responsibility is carried by all of us, individually, and that responsibility can't be waved away by saying 'my actions make no difference'.

If you can't convince me, a relatively rational person who firmly believes in anthropogenic climate change and the need to take action against it, to curtail my personal carbon emissions, then what hope do you have of making any difference through your example?

Imagine two more worlds: one where everybody but me thinks the way you do, and one where I think the way you do but everybody else thinks the way I do. My argument is that those worlds will also materially differ, but in this case the "good" one is the one where I don't do anything.

You need to show me that changing my own personal habits will somehow noticeably push the world toward one of the "good" ones. All you've offered so far is a bunch of wishful thinking about how if everybody thought this way, it would be better. It's true, but changing my habits doesn't do anything to change other people's minds.

It is a bit like war, except that we don't have an army. There's an implacable enemy out there, and there's no organized resistance. You're telling me that I ought to pick up a gun and go fight. I'm saying that this would be silly, I'll just be instantly killed by the enemy without making a dent in threat they pose. Instead of convincing individuals to individually grab guns and charge the enemy, we need to raise an army. We need to get everyone together and act collectively.

You don't raise an army by going around criticizing people for not fighting the enemy. You need to create an organization, you need hierarchy and structure and doctrine and funding and a mandate from people with power, and only then can you productively go around telling people they ought to join up to fight the enemy.

Awesome! Go raise your army!

So by the same rationalization you don't vote either?

I do, but pretty much just so people can't tell me I don't have a right to complain. I vote, but I don't see how it can possibly matter.

Voting actually matters more, because it is more direct, short term find results are easily seen.

It is reasonably easy to convince people to vote for a relatively popular candidate.

The best way to get people to make the kinds of decisions you are talking about, is through their pocket book. You can't guilt most people into not doing something important to their lives, like visiting a famous city or staying cool enough to be able to go to work the next day, even if it is something you personally consider frivolous. This is the entire reason why markets exist.

More to the point, if there was a carbon free air travel then you would have no moral case against visiting Paris (or wherever). The marginal cost in terms of the environment of one person, more or less, staying home is pretty darn close to zero. The only real way to convince a few million people to stay home or travel closer to home, is through a carbon tax or something similar. But you seem to have conveniently left that out of your argument here.

It is the everyday travel that matters, as well as shipping. Air travel is comparatively clean.

The easiest way to clean up air is to convince people to switch to mass transport, especially rail; failing that, to electric vehicles.

No raindrop believes it is responsible for the flood.

Yes, because no raindrop is responsible for the flood. If you want to stop floods, you need to invest in dams and levees which can influence the behavior of all of the raindrops. Going to the individual raindrops and suggesting that they should change course doesn't work.

I won't be able to afford kids in my lifetime, so the people who can have to pay me in order to not pollute if they care about the quality of life of their kids.

Want your little offspring to have fun in Florida before it goes underwater?

Pay for my solar panels or screw off. It is far too costly for me to employ a strategy that takes into account future generations and someone's going to have to pay that cost, because I can't afford it.

There's also positive feedback loops when it comes to opposition of the very idea that the warming exists.

When one politician pushes the idea hard, when people show interest in it, there's an incentive for other politicians to double down on their positions or push even farther to more extreme levels of denial.

Plus, voters who strongly identify with a party that promotes that platform may find themselves pulled along, wanting to be in line with the party's politics, and in so doing skew things even further.

Here is a really great, in-depth article of analysing the effects of methane, and tracking it from space. It's not looking good. Humans are not great with stuff they can't see or that spans over decades.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/MethaneMatters/

If it makes you feel better, melting permafrost is currently a small portion of overall global methane emissions. There's a potential for a massive release of gas, but it isn't happening yet.

>Melting permafrost in tundra regions like Alaska releases methane: more warming

If it makes you feel any better, the methane disperses in about 12 years. So a bunch of animals will become extinct and then 12 years later everything will go back to normal!

Yeah it doesn't make me feel good either.

That could be twelve years of utterly apocalyptic weather we might not survive. Just saying. Nobody knows how bad that could get, but do you think we could survive over a decade where the outdoor temperature is, on average, 200°F?

One of those animals could be the human species, or at least our idea of what that represents.

What is this nonsense? The worst case models predict a 10-20 degree increase by 2100.

A) That's 10-20°C, not °F. We're already seeing temperatures of 120°F (49°C) in parts of the world, so another +20°C puts that at 156°F (69°C). I'm not exaggerating all that much.

B) The projections keep getting more pessimistic as more data is accumulated.

C) We're talking about the theoretical worst-case scenario where everything spirals completely out of control and Venus starts to look like a temperate climate.

The models don't rely on the silly assumption that all the permafrost would melt and release it's methane instantly.

> So a bunch of animals will become extinct and then 12 years later everything will go back to normal!

It's not going to suddenly release all in one day. And it can/will trigger further feedback loops.

I don't think that's a great model, in 12 years, lot's of the biosphere could die off, generating more methane in decay.

Do you have any sources for that 12 years datum? It's a new one to me.

Climate change is one of the most interesting issues in politics because of how pure and overt the motivations of the opposition are.

It's so hilarious to me that you can have a politician with major donations from Coal/Fossil Fuels try to legitimately discredit a trend that 98% of the scientists in this field have agreed is proven by data. I also can't think of another issue where 98% of experts in a field have empirically demonstrated with data that trends are occurring, yet we're still allowed to just "believe" or "not believe" in its occurrence.

It's also interesting because of how important it is. If people didn't believe the Earth was round or that smoking causes cancer, it would be sad and ridiculous but it wouldn't have a huge impact. Lots more lung cancer and heart disease deaths for the second one, but life goes on.

But this is one of the few issues where convincing people it's real makes a huge difference for our civilization. It's crazy (but perhaps also expected) that it's also one of the few issues where the scientific conclusion is simply not accepted by so many.

> this is one of the few issues where convincing people it's real makes a huge difference for our civilization

Without arguing over the validity of AGW here, is there really any evidence that we could make a "huge difference" as you claim? Apart from using technology to deal with extreme climate conditions, is there anything demonstrably within the realm of human possibility that could significantly delay or reverse such climate change?

It's too late to stop it, but greatly cutting CO2 emissions will make the damage much less severe. Climate change isn't a binary proposition, where we either get it or we don't. We're pretty much locked in to some degree of change at this point, but how much change we get still depends on how much more CO2 we dump into the atmosphere.

> cutting CO2 emissions will make the damage much less severe

What does that actually mean? The best models of a few years ago predicted huge increases in the loss of life due to climate change by today, yet we continue to see a decrease in climate-related deaths (thanks to technology that helps people adapt to climate rather than the other way around). We've been wrong, not just in scale, but in the direction of the trend that (at least in my opinion) matters most.

So if there is a warming trend, how much do you really think we can postpone or alleviate its effects by driving a Prius and using recycled shopping bags - in terms of human lives saved? Even under the completely unrealistic, hypothetical assumption that we could get every country on earth to make it priority #1, how does that affect the overall picture? Do you think, possibly, that kind of focus/priority might actually be a net loss if we sacrifice innovation that saves lives in the face of any climate change (as we do now) for a drop-in-the-bucket-scale difference in an otherwise unavoidable trend?

Which models predicted a huge loss of life due to climate change by today? The technology for adapting to climate has been around for decades, so I'm skeptical that some change there has made a difference. Your mention of "recycled shopping bags" as if it had anything to do with climate change makes me suspect that you're not being entirely sincere here.

It just occurred to me that pro-fossil fuel trolls might realize they are losing the argument that there is no anthropocentric global climate change, and instead decide fight government regulations by arguing it is out of control and so there is no point in trying to stop it.

I'm hardly a "pro-fossil fuel troll" as you seem to imply, though I do think it's odd that you'd resort to framing someone with opposing views as "losing [an] argument" when scientifically speaking, facts should speak for themselves - no arguments needed. The facts relating to AGW are far from clear. Anyone telling you otherwise is either funded by powerful political agendas, or too ignorant to recognize the manipulation happening in the media.

There are very legitimate reasons to support the use of fossil fuels and to consider the cost - in human lives - of trying to reduce the use of fossil fuels. To ignore that side of the debate is simply irresponsible. They certainly aren't free from negative consequences, but the negative consequences of eliminating fossil fuel use are far greater.

Lastly, pointing out additional flaws in the AGW narrative is not an indication of "losing an argument" or subsequently deciding to fight another. I raised this particular point to help illustrate the fact that even if you do happen to subscribe to the idea of AGW, if you follow that idea to its logical conclusion, you're still no better off in terms of actually fixing anything. It's just one more clue that the whole AGW ideology serves a hidden political purpose. In my experience, ideological flaws tend to travel in pairs - or in this case, herds.

I bet it feels like you're doing the world a favor by perpetuating the flawed idea that climate change and fossil fuels are the most important problems of our time, but unless you're actually willing to give up everything that fossil fuels do for us (FYI, that includes pretty much all the conveniences of modern civilized living), then that's a pretty hypocritical position to take. Worst of all, the anti-fossil-fuel agenda ends up hurting the people who stand to gain the most from industrial progress - especially those in developing countries.

I think this argument is very shallow at best. You seem to be claiming that the choice is either "use all fossil fuels forever" or "give up all fossil fuels immediately". You also seem to be ignoring the fact that replacing any fossil fuel tech you name with an equivalent one that doesn't produce CO2 is the very definition of "advancing the tech".

The argument for clean energy is basically that we need to be doing as much as we can to advance energy technology as quickly as possible no matter how it affects legacy industry, like fossil fuels. The human costs from ditching these legacy fuels are real, but rate very low compared to the cost to future humanity. There really is no argument about what we should be doing, but rather how quickly we can and how much effort is needed.

In my experience, the "skeptic" side transitions fairly freely between "the world isn't warming," "the warming is natural," and "the warming is anthropogenic but beneficial" based on whatever best fits the argument at any given moment. Adding in "the warming is anthropogenic and harmful but unstoppable" wouldn't be much of a change.

You are not wrong, simply driving a Prius won't save the world. If however we start including the actual costs to society in the cost of petro then you won't need to encourage people to drive hybrids or recycle. I am not so sure that the price of petro is negatively tied to innovation, or at least the innovations needed to mitigate global warming.

Contrary to the climate change deniers, I think the models aren't aggressive enough.

I have tried to read climate change predictions, and all models I saw predict CO2 concentration with reference with increases seen in history. The assumption is that history will model future correctly. However, I think that's really wrong. Right now 1.5 billion chinese are at middle income stage. What happens when they start polluting/consuming at first world levels? History hasn't seen such a migration and can't model that. What happens when 1.5 billion in South Asia and 1.5 billion in africa raise their per capita pollution? No historical data has seen effects this extreme.

Changes as driving green cars/turning vegan/recycling are really good but might be far from sufficient. What's needed is complete shift to green energy right now. And even that may not be enough.

"We're pretty much locked in to some degree"

I'd say so! [1]

[1] http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/temperature-cha...

> Climate change isn't a binary proposition

In some ways it kind of is. If we hit the threshold of a particularly nasty feedback mechanism then we go from little impact to severe impact quite quickly.

Mitigation is the key word here.

The best-case scenario is that over the next 30 years we ramp down our greenhouse emissions to zero, and the planet warms up by ~2 degrees Celsius and stays there. We're not currently on track for this, but it's still achievable (or close to it).

The worst-case scenario is that we do nothing at all to solve the problem, and the planet warms up by 10+ degrees over the next century. And the temperature would continue to increase until we literally run out of fossil fuels to burn.

There's a big difference between 2 and 10 degrees warming. I think modern civilization could survive the former, not so sure about the latter.

> and the planet warms up by ~2 degrees Celsius and stays there

Everything I've read from the "experts" seems to suggest that we're experiencing a runaway trend that realistically cannot be stopped, regardless of what we do. Why should we believe 10 degrees, 2 degrees, or any of the figures mentioned are possible, probable, or frankly anything more than numbers pulled from a hat when they've been absolutely wrong, pretty much every time an "expert" has made predictions for more than about 5 years (and not just wrong by a hair, but by orders of magnitude)?

Do you have any references to a scientific expert making a prediction that was off by orders of magnitude?

AFAIK, we're already committed to a 2C rise by 2100 even if we stop any and all CO2 emissions today.

And those models don't take into account potential feedback loops.

By "we" do you mean the few people reading this on the forum, or all of humanity? There are a number of actions that can be taken to keep things from getting too hot to handle.

People seem to be under the mistaken assumption that AGW is a problem to be solved and then we can just go have a party of something and move on with our lives. It's more like a relay race for a world record or something. Each new technology or change gives us more time to get ahead of the problem. We may not see the end of the race no matter what, we can't even know if we're ahead really until 80-100 years from now, but we just gotta do the best we can on our leg and make things easier for the next runner when we pass off the baton.

Getting as much coal (especially) and oil left in the ground as possible buys us more time before something bad happens. Advancing the tech for solar and wind or putting another non-fossil fuel power plant in place buys us more time. If we had to, we could go towards more extreme strategies like solar deflection or CO2 sequestering, but those are dicey at best.

The end goal isn't a world without any problems, but some place where clean energy is everywhere and the potential for war, famine, and extreme weather is better than it otherwise would be. This isn't going to happen overnight, but then the problems that caused it started 100 years ago.

Stop using fossil fuels?

Or at the very least stop distorting the market to favor fossil fuels over alternative energy sources.

I hate to inject politics into this forum, but my reading of the US political landscape for President is pretty grim and I think the topic is very serious. One major Presidential candidate denies climate change outright, the other one has at best a lukewarm plan (pardon the pun) and has gotten more dollars from fossil fuel donors than the climate denier (that in addition to pulling lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry into her staff). There is only one third party candidate who proposes any sort of serious push that is actually needed to combat climate change in a feasible timeframe. And even if they pull off a win, they're unlikely to get broad support from congress.

>you can have a politician with major donations from Coal/Fossil Fuels try to legitimately discredit a trend that 98% of the scientists in this field have agreed is proven by data

Which politician? What data?

>98% of experts in a field have empirically demonstrated with data that trends are occurring

I would think those experts would have better things to do, but any source?

What is hilarious to me is to see ignorant pseudo intellectuals who believe in political propaganda without even considering what the implications are. So, yeah, climate is changing, it always has and yes human activities affects it too. So what do your politicians do about it? Collect money from people who have no other alternative but to use the same fuel and give it to their friends, move manufacturing to different parts of the world causing more resource usage in transportation instead and pushing inferior, impractical and just as environmentally taxing technologies by subsidising them. How is any of it helping the cause again?

Subsidies have encouraged the renewable energy industry to explode and drop prices radically, and soon unsubsidized renewable energy will be cheaper than fossil fuel energy.

Yes, experts in the field have better things to do then demonstrating the harmful effects of certain human activities /s

I sometimes wish descriptions of climate change would include one or two potential positive benefits, no matter how small.

This would give me more faith that the discourse coming from climate scientists is entirely objective and descriptive. Even if we accept that climate change is overwhelmingly negative for human life on the whole (which I do), I still find it hard to believe that there aren't one or two minor effects that could actually be beneficial.

Much of the left seems to view climate change as a crime that humans commit against nature. This view seems as morally blind to me as the right's view that God gave humankind the Earth to have dominion over. The objective view is that the activities of humans are changing the climate, and the effects are X, Y, and Z. Changing the climate is not wrong because it makes an anthropomorphized Mother Nature shed a tear, but because X, Y, and Z are harmful to animal and plant life, including us humans.

Unfortunately if I get what I want (an objective account that includes possible upsides of climate change), climate change deniers might seize on that as an excuse to do nothing.

I don't know what purpose it will serve. In addition to distracting the main point with minutiae, it will merely serve as a basis for "See? Even scientists say climate change may be good!"

But since you asked, here's one actual benefit of climate change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_shipping_routes

I'm sure there are others, but I'm too lazy to look up.

A scientist's job is to study the world as it is. If a scientist decides that the information must be filtered to represent only one side so that I will reach the "right" conclusions, I will distrust what the scientist tells me, and look further to get the full picture.

That's an awful way of describing the current state. A scientist discussing the public health effect of Zika virus has no obligation to discuss potential benefit to competing tourist locations: it's simply not pertinent to the research they are doing. If any hotel manager in Rome thinks they may get more reservations, they're free to research and make predictions using their resources.

If you want to learn about potential benefits of global warming, you're free to search for it, and it's not like scientists are suppressing the information: here we have a nice chart with a dozen potential benefits [1].

It's just that most scientists think "Greenland may make more money catching cods" is just not worth mentioning, in a press release where you get a few sentences to discuss ecological collapse in the oceans, never mind an individual paragraph for Arctic North Atlantic.

Also keep in mind that there's a multi-billion-dollar industry very interested in everyone knowing how global warming may benefit themselves... and so far all they've dug up were lame platitudes like "Don't you like warm weather?"

[1] https://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-positives-ne...

> A scientist discussing the public health effect of Zika virus has no obligation to discuss potential benefit to competing tourist locations: it's simply not pertinent to the research they are doing.

A better analogy would be if some small percentage of people infected with Zika gained some benefit, like resistance to HIV. That would absolutely be pertinent information that the scientist should report.

>Much of the left seems to view climate change as a crime that humans commit against nature. This view seems as morally blind to me as the right's view that God gave humankind the Earth to have dominion over. The objective view is that the activities of humans are changing the climate, and the effects are X, Y, and Z. Changing the climate is not wrong because it makes an anthropomorphized Mother Nature shed a tear, but because X, Y, and Z are harmful to animal and plant life, including us humans.

As a leftist, I want climate change addressed because fully automated luxury communism is going to require a technological base, of the kind we can't create or maintain if the ecosystem collapses out from under us, the fossil fuels run out, we can no longer run what we need without downgrading to human and animal labor, and a mass extinction occurs while everyone's working a lot harder.

Out of curiosity, I have some questions about the "luxury communism" idea (I've heard of it a few times, sometimes maybe worded differently - I picture something like the ship on Wall-E):

What leverage will people (leftists?) use to ensure access to "fully automated luxury communism"?

For instance, what if those who claim ownership of the means say "no"? Will those people use force? If so, what weapons will they use? I'm having trouble understanding how this scenario will play out exactly.

If the answer is that they will simply create the luxury communism on their own, then why haven't they done that already (it would be so cool to see something like the ship from Wall-E)? I mean, what will have changed, and through what means would such a change be forced?

>Out of curiosity, I have some questions about the "luxury communism" idea (I've heard of it a few times, sometimes maybe worded differently - I picture something like the ship on Wall-E):

No you don't. You have an opposition to any kind of socialism, and a support for capitalism. You have asked a leading question by which you hope to accuse leftists of (shock and horror!) using force, as if capitalists and capitalism do not use force to institute their system each and every day, right here in the real world.

I'm truly not accusing leftists of anything. I'm using this Socratic method to try to get you to recognize that all of the plebeians don't have the kind of leverage to create such a future, and that the wealthy elite (read 1%) have been using the promise of "luxury communism" as a means of pitting the bottom 70% of income earners against the next 29% of income earners, in an effort to hold tightly onto their hegemonies.

Think about it; why else would people like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates call for higher taxes on millionaires' income, while not giving up their own money to the treasury, and also not calling for taxes on people that already have billions of dollars? Because they want to keep anybody else from getting close to where they are[1]

In other words, I am on neither side, nor in the middle.

1. The 48 Laws of Power. It explains this concept of using the bottom to hold down the middle, among many others.

Since when were Buffet and Gates communists, of either the anarchist or Marxist varieties? They're liberals. They're capitalists. They're second on the list of the working class's enemies, right after the oil barons and landlords.

Curiously the 100,000 people working jobs created by Gates might call it a different relationship than 'enemy'

Or they might say straightforwardly that Gates exploits their labor-power and also exploits the general public as an abusive monopolist. You'd have to ask the workers instead of worshipping Gates.

Thanks, I worship as I please. But all the talk about exploitation is pretty thin, when Microsoft pays top rates for good talent.

If you really want to know, Marx had a thing to say about that. He viewed capitalism as the 'necessary evil' to get economic production to the point where socialism was possible.

I've read the Communist Manifesto. I'm just curious about how this transition will take place.

It's easy to suppose that those with means (which also tend to be those with weapons) will resist this, even to the point of taking their money elsewhere (divesting from e.g. US markets, etc.), and this pattern could keep repeating until there aren't enough moves left for all of those with means. At that point, is there a war between those with means / food / weapons and those who have nothing, because the money left them behind?

Here's what I think will happen. The same people (Buffet, etc.) that tricked everyone into thinking something like "luxury communism" would ever happen will have everyone virtual reality and Soylent, and call that "luxury communism". If you think otherwise, than ask yourself why they don't give their own money to you now.

But, I don't think these people will literally hand everyone this VR and Soylent. I think they'll trick everyone into believing they've achieved "luxury communism" with a "basic income" (read: "printed money", lest we forget where the means will come from), and then inflation will reduce the value of this income and the need for better efficiency will force the population into VR and Soylent.

What you say isn't the same as my admittedly extreme "Mother Nature sheds a tear." But a phrase like "the ecosystem collapses out from under us" implies that climate change is a total and unambiguous attack on "the ecosystem." This is the assumption that I often feel is inadequately justified.

For example, CO2 is used for photosynthesis in plants. This Nature article concludes:

> Under elevated CO2 most plant species show higher rates of photosynthesis, increased growth, decreased water use and lowered tissue concentrations of nitrogen and protein. Rising CO2 over the next century is likely to affect both agricultural production and food quality. The effects of elevated CO2 are not uniform; some species, particularly those that utilize the C4 variant of photosynthesis, show less of a response to elevated CO2 than do other types of plants. Rising CO2 is therefore likely to have complex effects on the growth and composition of natural plant communities.

http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/effects-of-...

When articles and arguments acknowledge both positive and negative effects of something, I trust them more.

> What you say isn't the same as my admittedly extreme "Mother Nature sheds a tear." But a phrase like "the ecosystem collapses out from under us" implies that climate change is a total and unambiguous attack on "the ecosystem." This is the assumption that I often feel is inadequately justified.

It doesn't matter if there's any concept of an attack, as such. If, for instance, the pollinators of our food crops go extinct, then our food crops will suffer a die-off and we will go hungry.

Plants are adapted to the climate they are in and aren't known for their mobility. Temperatures increasing and rainfall patterns changing have huge effects. Sure those plant in the amazon might theoretically grow faster with more CO2, but no rain means the amazon disappears.

How would you positively describe an impending comet strike on the planet? Sometimes there are situations in which there is absolutely no positive benefit.

I don't think climate change is comparable to an impending comet strike on the planet. If you argue that it is, I'm going to distrust you unless you can make a pretty compelling case about it.

I wasn't trying to say that climate change would be as catastrophic as a meteorite strike - just that maybe the reason no one is talking about the benefits of dramatic climate change because there aren't any?

Winter generally supports less life than the warmer seasons. In colder parts of the world, it is a season to be survived. Surely, if winters were shorter and milder, there would be some benefits, no?

What makes you think winters will be milder? Researchers believe that climate change will lead to more massive winter storms in areas that before had mild winters.

https://thinkprogress.org/why-big-blizzards-in-winter-dont-d...

Perhaps I'm using the wrong word, but by milder winters, I meant warmer winters.

The article you link to points out how increased moisture in the atmosphere will lead to more extreme snow storms in below-freezing areas, but acknowledges that winters will be warmer in general (just not enough warmer to get those below-freezing areas above freezing, which would result in rainstorms instead or snow storms).

> How would you positively describe an impending comet strike on the planet?

It ended up quite good for us mammals...

Based on the title I was hoping for more actual data about the trends, but this is mostly a political puff piece about Obama's efforts toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

And yet US produces 66% electricity from fossil fuels. And yet US would sue India in WTO over local sourcing of solar panels. It's all business to the american politicians and companies. All the green talk is to keep the voters happy.

Reading things like this [1] every couple of days it seems we are standing on the train tracks hearing the train is coming but we choose to cover our ears instead of stopping the train. There will come a time and we will need to pay the price for covering the ears, we just postpone it but train is coming closer and closer every day. Soon we will feel vibrations on the tracks but then I am afraid it will be already too late to stop the train.

[1] http://phys.org/news/2016-09-unprecedented-atmospheric-behav...

Aside from companies working on electric cars and solar projects, who else is working on large-scale projects to ameliorate climate change? Any truly massive projects akin to putting a man on the moon?

I can't speak to what is actually being done but here's an interesting and quasi-comprehensive write-up of what engineers, developers and designers have to offer in the climate change fight: http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange

Bill Gates is trying to fund some of the research that might lead to break through technologies

The link to http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ below was good and lead me to think what are the basic philosophical underpinnings of, well, an HN point of view?

  Equality

  Externalities

  Empiricism

A good start?

This is gonna get me totally downvoted, but...

What if I said I was pro-global warming....

I am buying property that will be at or around beach level when all the ice melts. In the mean time just a couple of houses and I rent them out reasonably. But in time when all the snow stops and the climate here is subtropical the warm waters of the bay of Texas will lap onto the shores of what are hills today. And the property will have increase many-fold. These properties will have been netting me and my family money the entire time.

/what if

I have not actually done that, but not shoveling would be nice.

The problem with that is the high value of beachfront property is based on having a civilization with a great deal of consumer surplus, where a large number of people can afford to take time off to go to the beach for vacation. The worry for climate change isn't just that it'll displace people, but that it'll severely disrupt civilization due to massive refugee problems and agricultural failures. By the time the seashore reaches your inland property, people may be too busy trying to survive to care about beach vacations, or you may have lost your property and/or life in the turmoil.

It's kind of like stocking up on sunscreen and iodine pills in the hope of selling them for a tidy profit after a nuclear holocaust.

what if...

I think total societal collapse is unlikely, these events will not happen in a vacuum and will take a hundred years or more to fully play out. Governments and peoples coalitions will resist, make attempts to fix and generally resist total anarchy.

If owning land becomes unstable then the general notion of owning wealth is impractical. Leaving property, and well stocked proptery, so that my descendants can convert it to whatever is required still leaves me better off than not saving.

/what if

It will be extremely hard to get this right. You may up end in a desert or underwater. Or you may get blown away by a big hurricane.

Considering that we might actually go extinct being pro that is a like the ultimate crime against humanity. Not to mention the countries already being heavily impacted by it, its almost an act of war by the developed nations against those countries considering we have known the impact since the 1970's and almost all countries (except the USA and China) agreed how to deal with it in the Kyoto agreement, which USA opted out of and all but collapsed efforts to deal with man made climate change.

Lets not be coy, we face our extinction and to say you are pro makes you genuinely a mad man maniac.

Global warming will cause a lot of problems and people may die but no way will we go extinct. There is zero risk for that unless global temperature goes up an enormous amount and the oceans boil off or something like that.

Zero risk? The human race has come close to extinction already by our own hands directly. To say that there's zero risk, adding in all the chaos that will spawn from the climate change projected, is simply laughable. More and more people will have nothing to lose, and they'll go down fighting.

And besides, there are more catastrophic risks on our plate than just climate change.

Even then, if some small number were to survive, the modern ways of living would be over and it'd be a much harder go the second time around, with so many things we take for granted now already spent, or tainted.

When has the human race come close to extinction by our own hands? The only near-extinction I'm aware of is the theorized population bottleneck caused by the Toba eruption, whose existence seems to be disputed and which in any case wasn't caused by our own hands.

If you're referring to global thermonuclear war, there was (and still is) the constant threat of destroying civilization, but never any chance of causing the extinction of the species.

I agree with that guy, our economies will collapse, our civilization will stagnate. But no way will this lead to our extinction (unless it breeds a superbug).

The biggest issue I see is that the already tropical areas of the world will become unsustainable for farming. How are we going to move these billions of people out of there newly created deserts. Of course, such changes are going to be slow and visible beforehand. It will happen over the course of decades if not a century. I wonder if we will make a world government and allow people from those regions to immigrate to places that are currently frozen tundra.

So, allow mexicans to go to Canada?

Unless the economy collapse will trigger a truly destructive world war. That is not out of question.

I doubt humanity will go extinct even in that case. Going extinct means that nobody is left. That just seems unlikely.

I am not saying that things can't get very bad but I don't believe we can go extinct. Even if 99.9% of humans die the rest could go underground and have nuclear reactors to provide energy and whatever is needed. It won't be pretty but I believe humans are just too inventive to go completely extinct.

Humans won't go extinct but modern civilization might

Open positive feedback loops are very difficult to estimate where they will end up. We could easily end up in a range of climate where it's difficult to impossible for human kind to raise food or conduct civilization in the nearly the same manner as we do now. In the really far out outcomes, who knows if the atmosphere would stay in any sort of human habitable range.

It's a long-running process. Ice does not catastrophically melt in a year. It melts over centuries. Which also means shore lines and climate zones will keep moving. Betting on a fixed location does not look like a winning strategy to me.

The safer bet would be on farmland in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Nowadays it has all but reverted to secondary forest, but back in the day it was the breadbasket of the nation. Unlike Kansas or the Central Valley it is rain-safe.

This is specifically a bit silly, but as a general trend might be a sensible hedge. For example Toronto is likely to benefit from a 2-3 degree warming, land currently not arable quality is likely to become amenable.

Something similar should be expected for Greenland, Russia, etc. However that's in say 200 years. The meantime is going to be a struggle.

I think it is well worth building models to try and predict these outcomes (not so much the weather models but river and water course changes, etc. I don't think this exists but would be interested)

But trying to predict where the next beachfront will be - nah not great.

Youre missing the point of grossly increased and unstable weather patterns due to higher energy in he atmosphere, social and political instability due to the lack of food elsewhere, with possible wars wiping out a lot more food production, and death of so much plankton and wilds that the biosphere becomes practically inhospitable and unable to support food production for even millions, never mind billions.

> But in time when all the snow stops and the climate here is subtropical the warm waters of the bay of Texas will lap onto the shores of what are hills today.

And a decade or two later the same houses will be under water.

I think it is interesting how many people down-voted for a thought experiment. The what if hypothetical wasn't clearly stated or something?

How can we discuss these ideas without a bunch of downvotes?

For anyone interested in this topic I would recommend reading "The moral case for fossil fuels". It gives a big picture look of this problem in the context of human flourishing. As someone who had only ever been exposed to the gloom and doom predictions like this article it was a refreashingly clearly thought and precisely structured counter argument.

I looked up that book's author, it's a guy named Alex Epstein. Who is he?

> Alex Epstein is an American author, energy theorist and industrial policy pundit. He is the founder and President of the Center for Industrial Progress, a for-profit think tank located in Laguna Hills, California, and a former fellow of the Ayn Rand Institute.

Sounds like a reliable source to me!

All those so-called researchers in academia just have an axe to grind. Think tanks are definitely what you should bank on, intellectually. Especially the for-profit ones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com