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Comment by Fej | Hacker News Reader

We are in deep shit.

We can change, or we can die. Continued emissions at our current rate will kill us. We're already teetering at the precipice of feedback loops and may be committed to some.

At this point, we need a Manhattan-Project-level effort to end carbon emissions as we know them. Else we just have to hope that colonies on Mars and the Moon will be able to sustain the species while we nuke ourselves over resource wars here on Earth.

The problem is worse than most people know. It doesn't help that we have a segment of the population here in the US that is willing to ignore all evidence on the issue.

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I think Manhattan project efforts are useful when there's a goal where there's a clear engineering hypothesis, i.e. how do we achieve a nuclear chain reaction, or send a rocket to the moon.

But when there's a much much much broader research space to explore, such as methods to capture carbon, I don't think that such focused projects are as useful.

We already have the technology to get completely off of carbon, it's the industrial scale-up that's the issue. At current prices, energy costs would increase no more than 3-4x, at the very very worst, and double in a more likely scenario.

So what we really need is political will to cause the market to make these existing technologies efficient on the industrial scale. We need a stiff carbon price. And we also need a way to incentive pulling carbon out of the air, perhaps direct transfer of the carbon tax to those that are able to securely sequester carbon without the possibility of it escaping into the atmosphere. That way, if somebody wants to burn natural gas, that's fine as long as they also pay the cost of taking the carbon out of the atmosphere at the same time

With those two things, we could be off carbon in a few decades, worldwide, economically efficiently. All it takes is the political will, and the investment of a tiny fraction of our global GDP.

Most of all, we need to never, ever, vote for politicians who deny reality and live in a fantasy land on important issues like this. It's affected an entire political party in the US, and the disease is practically contained within them. They have politicized the science, have led large chunks of the US to believe these lies. And they have a huge persecution/inferiority complex so if you even mention that the Republicans are bad on this issue, they get defensive and dig deeper into their lies. There are a few respectable Republicans on this issue, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, but they are the exception, and the rest of the Republicans ostracize them them for it.

The technology and science is practically there for a solution, it's the politics that needs fixing right now.

Sadly, look what happens when someone tries to actually implement a carbon tax. The Sierra Club of all people try and sink it: http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2016/09/will-naive-left-and-se...

Another strong point that the obstacles to addressing climate change are political, and not technological.

Alternatively, this is what happens when it does get implemented:

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

If it were as simple as you claim, and as critical, why wasn't a carbon tax passed in 2009 when Republicans could not have stopped it? Was it even attempted?

I think he is referring to political will beyond the scope of the US, which collectively, is a much bigger issue.

Probably a similar reason why that carbon tax you mention wasn't passed. (Why do it if others aren't, and lose competitiveness economically?)

There is hope for international collaboration on this, however. The Paris climate agreement is an excellent step. We can't let it be sabotaged in the US by short-sighted, pandering, lying politicians. Such as those that believe that the Chinese invented the concept of climate change to sabotage us.

Why do you think I'm claiming its simple?

The Democrats could barely get a health care bill through in 2009, a health care bill that was based on a Republican plan. Ballooning health care costs were an issue throughout all the 2000s, which nearly everybody agreed needed to be addressed in some manner. The concept of Democrats also being able to also push through a carbon tax at that time is absolutely ludicrous. Try convincing the average Republican that climate change is 1) happening, 2) caused by humans, 3) addressable without destroying the economy. We can't even get broad consensus that there is a problem, much less on a solution.

Democrats could have enacted whatever carbon tax they wanted without a single Republican vote. Why didn't they?

Despite you ignoring everything I wrote, and repeating a bald and false assertion ("Democrats" are not a monolithic thing, they are a party with a wide diversity of views, and saying they could have enacted whatever they wanted presumes that "they" could have a singular view of what they want), I'll try to answer yet another way.

In this world many people assume that the truth lies somewhere in the middle between two sides, and one side is a mixture of those who accept climate science, and those who continually demonize the science and lie about economic consequences. Suppose the Democrats were 100% in agreement on the climate science and how the problem should be addressed, which obviously they're not. Then in that political world, moderates would assume that the truth lies somewhere between the climate science (in this hypothetical world the Democratic stance) and the official Republican party stance. Meaning that the moderates in the country would think that the Democrats would probably be extreme in their views, just because the Republicans have gone so far in the extreme the other way.

And in reality, Democrats are not a monolithic body, they have a variety of views in how to address the problem, and there are even a handful of Democrats from areas with heavy fossil-fuel industry that pay attention to their campaign contributors rather than the science, which makes this supposed Democratic control.

I'll ask you this: why would not even a handful of Republicans support addressing climate change, enough to make this even a slightly bipartisan issue? Why does it fall entirely on a single political party to come to a solution? Shouldn't this be a non-partisan issue where we come up with a solution that people of multiple political views can support?

Because the Democrats are a bourgeois party.

Given recent events[1], one cannot stress the word deep enough. To be honest though, it's not just the republican candidate who thinks that global warming is a non-issue. It's the entire Republican party.

Of course, I can't help but referring my all time favorite Daily Show clip, Burn Notice [2].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGEzFbRl-g8

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPgZfhnCAdI

Democrats had the presidency, senate, and house all under their control and didn't act like they believed it was a serious issue. It was a time where they could have done something big (e.g., carbon tax). But it was politically more useful to take token measures, stay friends with the carbon industry, and keep climate change as a political issue. If you want something done, you should pick us! If we do it, then maybe you don't need to pick us anymore. Keep chasing the carrot.

Agreed :-)

Doesn't this cheer you up a bit?

2016/09/27

"Since hitting its earliest minimum extent since 1997, Arctic sea ice has been expanding at a phenomenal rate. Already it is greater than at the same date in 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2015. Put another way, it is the fourth highest extent in the last ten years. Even more remarkably, ice growth since the start of the month is actually the greatest on record, since daily figures started to be kept in 1987"

Hardly the kind of observation to get wide coverage.

ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/north/daily/data/ https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2016/09/25/rec...

You're not the first and you won't be the last but it's useful to know the difference between sea ice and land based ice shelves and why they shouldn't be conflated.

An earth even 10 degrees warmer than now will be much more habitable than the Moon or Mars ever will be.

Why is that? I imagine a lot of species would have to move too, but basically, if we all move north (or south, depending on where you are relative to the equator)... why doesn't that work?

Well, for one thing, we're on a sphere. As you go toward the poles, there's less square miles of land per degree of latitude.

The temperature range. The atmosphere held in by the natural magnetic field. The liquid water.

The atmosphere held in by the natural magnetic field.

Please explain. I always thought it was gravity.

Mars has nearly no atmosphere because the solar wind blew it away. The magnetic field acts as a shield that prevents the atmosphere from leaking out into space, basically [1].

[1] http://m.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Cluster/Earth_...

That's assuming the ecosystem holds together and the warmer temperatures don't begin to cause massive die offs of sensitive plant and animal species. That's also assuming we don't kick off some kind of dangerous feedback loop such as destabilizing methane clathrate deposits or something similar. Are we willing to take the risks? I'm not.

Though I'm not a climate scientest, I'm sure if we had one here they'd agree that ten degrees farenheit is an absolutely MASSIVE change in global temperatures. To say that it would be livable is incredibly naive.

Even if all the plants and animals die, there is still an atmosphere, magnetic field, liquid water.

Sigh...this conversation is pointless.

I think he may be taking the human-survival-apathetic stance similar to this George Carlin bit, "The planet is fine; the people are fucked."

Not that I defend that viewpoint, but I can see its merits.

What will you and your 7 billion fellow humans eat if all of the plants and animals die? Why do you think that conditions which would be deadly to nearly all other life on this planet won't be deadly to you?

If you're making the point that life will find a way given Earth's strong life-supporting traits, I completely agree. But it won't be human life.

What are you planning to eat on Mars?

I've struggled with this for a while. As context to what I'm going to say, know that I've been gravely concerned about climate change for a good while. The rate, quantity and quality of 'bad news' climate-change related data has been increasing exponentially, and I might even be using that word in a literally correct way.

I've posted this elsewhere, but I'll just summarize.

> An earth even 10 degrees warmer than now will be much more habitable than the Moon or Mars ever will be.

To first and second approximations, your statement is spot on accurate.

Mars has 1 or 2% of our atmosphere. Mars has radiation. Even under some of the best SpaceX scenarios, it will be something like $100/pound to the surface of Mars. ...many others...

I've come up with two basic advantages Mars has, or could have. 1. Its extremely thin atmosphere makes it virtually harmless to structures, to things we might build there.

I think that it's possible that the climate here on earth will get so wild and so intense that the air itself will become our primary physical enemy, in the form of storms. That is, property-damaging winds and floods might become frequent and wide-spread enough that any kind of large-scale surface building becomes impractical.

I haven't seen any science on this specific to this scenario, and, objectively, it's unlikely, but it's something to consider.

So, assuming it's not possible to build above ground, surely it's still cheaper to build underground on earth than above ground on Mars? This is the second advantage I can imagine for Mars.

2. There will always be (relatively) few people on Mars, and all of those people will be living with pretty intense self-sustaining frameworks/environments.

If things get really bad on earth, it's possible, perhaps likely, that people overall will make the future of other groups of well-prepared people precarious. I don't really need to go into what all that means.

So, those are the two Mars-provided 'survival-level' advantages I have managed to come up with. And both of them are contingent on some pretty extreme stuff happening here on earth.

In closing, I'll say that I agree with Elon Musk's statement about how we may as well get started now, rather than later. Over a long enough timeline, human survival on earth approaches zero.

I'm worried more about nuclear war, which would very quickly end the human species.

Life on Earth would continue but it would not be sapient.

Other celestial bodies do not have this problem we've self-inflicted.

Why nuclear war? Global warming/heating will cause drastic resource shortages... people go to war when they can't feed themselves. An unstable world increases the probability of nuclear war, especially accidental nuclear war.

I argued with a friend of mine about climate change. His first instinct was to dismiss it with a shrug: "So what if sea levels rise a little, we'll just have to move inland".

We really don't know how much instability human civilization will tolerate before devolving into slinging nukes around. Why even fuck with that possibility?

I know war and tension have always been part of the modern era, but it does seem like we're going back to cold war levels of tension again. U.S. vs Saudi Arabia. U.S. and Europe vs Russia. India vs Pakistan. North and South Korea (although it's been like that for a long time). One "Archduke Ferdinand" event and things might get ugly. With as much internal tension that we see inside the US right now, politicians might not be so reluctant to go to war. Giving citizens a common enemy might calm things domestically.

Yep...it's a pretty unbelievable situation. It's led me to face the fact that humans are really not special in any way and this Hollywood sense of "eveything's going to work out somehow in the end" is completely false. Indeed, we can easily kill ourselves off. The universe is perfectly happy to let us do that.

I'd say it's more like we can change now or adapt later. And I mean adapt in the most Darwinian fashion. It looks like we've already picked the latter. Shame as the former would hurt a lot less.

The earth has been through huge changes before. I've still got my money on humanity to figure it out. We just passed up the early booking discount and are gonna hafta pay full price for the ride.

I think there's a good case to be made that "adapt in a Darwinian fashion" will mean "humanity doesn't continue to exist on the planet in any meaningful numbers".

I prefer to address the problem in a more timely manner.

The problem with Darwinian evolution is that it takes a long long long time. Humanity has never faced climate change so quickly before.

So what will actually happen is that large chunks of the world will become unlivable. As in, if your plane crashes in that section of the planet, you will die. Mammals all have a very similar limit here, the idea that we will quickly evolve around that is ridiculous.

http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/research/2010/100504HuberLimi...

We will adapt, and not in the Darwinian fashion, by becoming a much smaller population, living in very different parts of the world, farming in very different ways.

The economic destruction in such an adaptation will be immeasurable, even if we somehow do it without causing all sorts of wars and revolutions from resource shortages where people are dying of thirst and starvation.

Maybe the doomsday argument wasn't crazy after all!

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

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