Global warming: The state of the climate in 2016 | Hacker News Reader

Global warming: The state of the climate in 2016

economist.com

206 pointsjseliger224 comments

The canary in the coalmine for global warming is Arctic sea ice. It is melting at an alarming rate, and we can expect an ice-free (>1m sq km of sea ice) Arctic in the summer within a decade or two (or 3-4 years if recent trends continue!). There's a small active community who follow this. We tend to hang out here - a HN level of polite discussion goes on: http://neven1.typepad.com/

So what happens to the indigenous population of animals (polar bears are the first that come to my mind) when this happens? Do they just die out or are there groups trying to get them to safety?

Outside of captivity, where would it be safe for arctic animals?

Probably nowhere. But the alternative to captivity is that we will just see entire species of animals go extinct.

We have already seen many, many species go extinct. The exact figures are not well understood, but there's a lot more at stake than just the polar bear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

There's a 2009 paper "Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity" that may be of interest.

> The planetary boundary (PB) concept, introduced in 2009, aimed to define the environmental limits within which humanity can safely operate. This approach has proved influential in global sustainability policy development. Steffen et al. provide an updated and extended analysis of the PB framework. Of the original nine proposed boundaries, they identify three (including climate change) that might push the Earth system into a new state if crossed and that also have a pervasive influence on the remaining boundaries. They also develop the PB framework so that it can be applied usefully in a regional context.

[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6223/1259855 [2] http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

edit: and the indicator that is off the charts relative to its corresponding "safe operating space" boundary is biodiversity loss - measured in species extinction/(millions of species * year). Climate change looks practically controlled compared to that. (ha).

Northern Canadian/European/Russian land masses.

How about the Antarctic? Save the polar bears and fix Gary Larson's biggest "Far Side" error at the same time.

The antarctic maybe. Though interfering with native ecosystems has never ended well.

On the plus side, we get bi-polar bears.

well fortunately the Antarctic is gaining mass, so things happen. We are still only 12k years out an ice age and learning as we go. Natural variability is quite boring so it doesn't make headlines as much as it should.

the real reality is that the Paris agreement is a horrid piece of do nothing legislation that lets the major developing powers do what they want all the while getting the nod of acceptance from the UN because of the hundred billion dollar payout. Basically we have what is a one time voluntary agreement to pay out to certain groups so that developing countries can continue to pollute provided they plan to eventually slow it

On a geological timescale we are in a cooling trend, but what non-biased source grants credence to the idea that CO2 and Methane aren't warming things right now in greater amounts?

It seems entirely reasonable that anthropogenic climate change is a bigger deal than ice ages and we could prevent one.

Having a higher CO2 or methan level for 100 years is on a geological timescale a rounding error. There were times in earth history (vulcano eruptions, meteor impacts) where life had to face a rapid and drastic climate change. And we are still here.

Yeah, and those past times also had mass extinctions.

I think you are unaware of the scope of the problem. (also I did not and cannot downvote you)

The amount of life and species lost to human activities already makes the past few thousand years a major extinction event in line with the 5 other major ones. With this fact in mind taking the stance that this is OK because "life had to face a rapid and drastic climate change" is the moral equivalent of saying killing most of the life is OK because it happened before. That is morally repugnant. I do not think are morally repugnant so I must presume you are unaware of the facts I just presented.

CO2 stays in the atmosphere a long time. If we keep putting there permanently. If we kill ourselves (not with CO2 but with wars caused by the resource availability changes caused by climate change) then what happens during our "rounding error" many will still be dead.

The planet will probably be fine, the Bay of Texas will probably be fine and my newly made beachfront property in Omaha will be damn fine. If you live on a coast, get most of your goods by boat or live in one of the areas that will tear itself apart in useless resource wars then the eventual cooling trend doesn't help you and has no place in this discussion.

Moral is a human construct and as such it is subjective.

Anyhow, I said that the life on earth survived a couple of disastrous events and still flourishes. Life will flourish wether the coast is under water or not. There were times when there wasn't any coast at all, or it was somewhere else. And does it really make a difference?

You won't see anything of the war of resources except you live for 200 years. You may take care too much about things you will never see and can not have an impact on.

What do you mean by "flourish"?

Increasing biodiversity?

>>Life will flourish wether the coast is under water or not.

Life may flourish, but many lives won't.

>>And does it really make a difference?

It does make a huge difference to the 44 percent of humanity that lives on coastal areas.

I think the point is that after the extinction of humans and a large proportion of existing species on earth, life itself will continue and the next few million years will result in speciation to adapt to new niches on a planet with radically different climate.

I don’t understand how anyone finds this comforting, however.

> I don’t understand how anyone finds this comforting, however.

Why can't it be viewed as a source of comfort? At a longer time scale, even life on earth won't exist as the sun dies. At a sufficiently long time scale, none of this stuff on earth matters, the universe continues to move on. As these highlight the transitory nature of life on earth, there is no reason for why one can't "let go" after a point. I find that a tremondous source of comfort, as I often face the problem of when to "let go" in many contexts.

I won't get into a detailed discussion of the purpose of existence (a natural counter-question to the above), or why one should still strive in one's own way to tackle issues like climate change up to "one's capacity" (which depends on accepting the purpose of existence).

These fundamental questions are extremely hard to address. It took me a long time and a lot of thought to have a reasonably satisfactory answer to these questions - though of course what answer one is satisfied by will vary from person to person. For me, the bulk of the answer came from a study of the Indian Vedantic tradition (chiefly Adwaita Vedanta) through the "Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda" among other such books, and the works of Leo Tolstoy. Mileage may vary of course.

I found my way in stoicism. Stopping taking care about inevitable things gives me the power to take care about things I can change. I do not expect the HN folks to understand and accept my point of view. The resulting misunderstanding seems to be also inevitable. And I am OK with that.

I just realised that this is inevitable.

Funny fact: the coast are moving. Slowly, but still moving. 44 percent of humanity sooner or later will have a problem because of it. If this happens 100 or 10M years after our death does really make that much difference to us?

Your statements are equivalent to you not caring about humanity because you implicitly disregard human suffering.

Since the reason people care about climate change, both for and against, is human suffering then we can disregard anything you have to say about it.

That you and you are clearly just choosing the most antagonistic thing to get a reaction from people. This is the last I will be responding. If I could down vote you I would.

I do care about the effects of climate change on humanity as much as I do care about bad weather. When it rains I take my umbrella. Both are things I can not hinder more than as I do now.

I do not own a car, never did, do not plan to own one, I am not caught by the consume madness and I also try to avoid wasting ressources. I wonder how many of the downvoters can say the same.

That's like getting stabbed and saying "Losing a liter of blood in a matter of seconds is a rounding error on the scale of my life."

No, it's not a rounding error. It means things are changing at a speed never seen before, and it's a big fucking deal.

Disclaimer: Of course I'm not suggesting the Earth will bleed to death. I'm just highlighting the logical fallacy.

We could indeed prevent the next ice age.

We would be idiots to do it, but we could. (An ice age would push a temperate climate onto the fucking Sahara. That's a lot of new farmland...)

>> Natural variability is quite boring

After protecting the earth from the giant meteors (at least at the end not a single one hit the earth) we need some new disaster porn.

Even if the Paris Agreement has its problems, do you really think it's worse than no climate agreement?

> well fortunately the Antarctic is gaining mass, so things happen.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-o...

> But it might only take a few decades for Antarctica’s growth to reverse, according to Zwally. “If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years -- I don’t think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.”

> “The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away,” Zwally said. “But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for.”

It was gaining mass for a long, long time and that trend is reversing and it ultimately doesn't change the fact the sea level rise is still occurring despite the mass gain.

That isn't a 'so things happen' situation. It is a "Well, traditionally Antarctica gains X each year. The rate of this gain is offsetting the Y in losses for now but the rate of loss is accelerating and overall we are still losing ground regardless'.

"We are still only 12k years out an ice age and learning as we go"

Some of us are learning more than others. Some of us have noticed that the Milankovich cycles, in particular the precession of the earth's perihelion versus the solstices, is right now COOLING the earth because it is favoring the southern hemisphere which has less mass.

I believe that your premise is a mis-statement. My understanding is that the surface area is increasing due to the protective effect of melt-water, but that increase in melt-water is the result of increasing mass loss.

Furthermore, neither surface area nor mass are a complete enough picture from which to draw conclusions due to the complex physics of calving and cliff collapse.

http://www.nature.com/news/antarctic-model-raises-prospect-o...

No, there is an Antarctic ice sheet that is gaining mass. As a whole, Antarctica is losing ice mass. As is the case for global ice mass balance. Chart of satellite gravity measurements for Antarctica: http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/Antarctica_Ice_Mass.g...

so that chart is from 2003 - 2009 ... and that is evidence of what exactly?

6 samples of a multi century phenomenon and you are ringing an alarm bell !

the chart smacks more of searching around for a chart that shows a decline to prop up the "ice is in trouble narrative".

ice extent ( recovered from 2008/12 ) , ice age ( recovered again from 2012 ), ice thickness ( recovered ), ice refreeze date ( recovered ), polar bear population ( highest its ever been )

now its ice mass that is the panic chart of the day. but 6 samples, its just not enough

https://sites.google.com/site/arcticseaicegraphs/longterm

What is it going to take to convince you?

Let's just wait a few more decades to be sure though. It would be a waste spending resources trying to prevent the demise of life on Earth when we didn't need to.

Is there a name for this sort of chart?:

https://sites.google.com/site/pettitclimategraphs/sea-ice-vo...

Spider chart or spiderweb chart

Thanks.

more than 40 samples. 200 samples at minimum.

"Long term" is misleading and relevant only to a space age start point where we launched satellites.

2000 year ice core samples:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/15/western_antarctic_me...

Longer records exist in ships logs showing that ships sailed through an ice-free arctic.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/03/goddard_polar_ice?pa...

According to official US Weather Bureau records (pdf) from 1922, there was open sailing very close to the North Pole that year. Anthony Watts unearthed this quote from the Weather Bureau:

"In fact, so little ice has never before been noted. The expedition all but established a record, sailing as far north as 81 degrees in ice-free water."

So much lower extent than today.

Can you provide a citations that Antarctica as a whole is gaining ice mass?

Here's one from NASA:

http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of...

More detailed discussion on Antarctic here:

http://joannenova.com.au/2016/07/backflip-antarctic-peninsul...

Nature study finding Antarctic has cooled is in the "References" section of that second link.

Anything more recent? That article showed a dramatic slowdown in the growth and only covered up until 2008.

NASA disagrees: "A new NASA study says that Antarctica is overall accumulating ice."

http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of...

There's a spin-off forum neven moderates (well, sometimes): forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php/board,3.0.html

It's a bit slow in the freezing season, even this completely out of control one, and can often degenerate into ridiculous arguments between a few posters.

But just in case... if there's any Sea Ice geeks in SF, I'd love to talk about it in person!

"Convincing Mr Trump of this fact is now an urgent and daunting challenge."

By appointing Myron Ebell to lead the transition at the EPA, Mr Trump has made it clear he's made up his mind.

Personnel is policy.

For those who want to ask obvious follow up question, based on Wikipedia article on Mr. Ebell:

Through CEI, Ebell has stated his belief that global warming is a hoax, that most of the data predicting climate change is false, and that the scientific consensus was "phony".

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

It's too bad Americans cannot vote for some of the most prominent cabinet members the way they vote for President/Vice-President. Many of these appointees will have a more direct impact on people's lives but yet they have no say in who will represent them. Democracy?

Representative Democracy yeah. The people voted in Trump who now gets to appoint those positions.

Well they need to be let in by congress, who the public also voted for...

>The people voted in Trump

Well no. The people voted in Clinton, and the Electoral College upweighted some votes and downweighted others in a way that favors Trump. The EC once had a distinct purpose, but right now just seems to give Republicans a structural advantage, to the ultimate detriment of Democrats and Democrat-leaners in small or rural states.

That how our Representative Democracy works. Each system has its own way of voting and counting; that's ours.

And if it creates a de facto one-party state?

I didn't hear a lot of Democrats complaining about a "de facto one-party state" when they were chirping excitedly about gaining a permanent demographic majority a few months back, so forgive me if this sudden concern over the topic does not come off as entirely sincere.

No, they really didn't. The Electoral College is not some sort of state secret. Presidential elections have worked that way for over two hundred years. Complaining about the winner in the EC becoming President is like complaining that if we'd counted score by the number of strikeouts instead of runs, the Indians would have won the World Series. True, but so what? We don't count by strikeouts, we never have, and if the rules changed the teams would have played differently so you can't draw a useful parallel anyway.

A whole bunch of states turned on a few hundred thousand votes. It's hard to sell that as a structural advantage. The Republicans have probably paid more attention to the dynamics of it.

I agree that it is not healthy that ~10-12 states have higher importance in the presidential election, but it would be rather similar in a straight popular election.

An intermediate step would be to increase the size of the House of Representatives.

as if they're smart enough? they're the ones who put this guy in charge in the first place and filled the house and senate with deniers as well.

I don't think allowing the public at large to vote on cabinet members would be a good idea. The whole point of representative democracy is you elect a representative who seems reasonable and delegate specialized decisions — like who is the best climate authority — to your rep. (No, this obviously doesn't always work.)

What makes you think that would go over any better though? It's not like any of his cabinet picks have been surprising to anyone paying attention to his rhetoric and stances during the election.

I don't think climate was discussed in any of the presidential debates. It was a topic that was hardly even addressed. Most of discussion focused on ad hominem you did this or that.

Most Americans want action on climate by a pretty wide margin. I double this person would be elected if it was put to a vote.

He has explicitly and repeatedly said it's a Chinese hoax...

And he wants to dismantle the Paris Agreement.

We have representatives that do that. The prominent cabinet members have to make it through the Senate.

Rand Paul has already come out publicly against a couple of names floated for Secretary of State and is making noise that 2 or 3 other Senators (enough) are also concerned.

I don't really like Rand Paul, but at the moment I'm pretty glad that he actually has a coherent and strong ideology.

Rand Paul is safe in his ideology. Just like some of the useless liberals on the Democratic side, he can complain and sound moderate because his voice will sway very little.

127 million voted in 2012, 120 million voted in 2016 despite population growth of ~0.7% per year. So, yay democracy? The plurality winner was the none of the above candidate, but the non-participants by and large think their none choice puts them outside politics, even though there is no such actual thing as no president. There will be one, it's a matter of which one, and not choosing one does have the same effect as choosing one.

And Americans vote in even fewer numbers for the non-presidential candidates. So it'd be almost the fringe that would be voting for cabinet members, were that possible.

It comes down to the DOD having a serious talk with Trump. They have been taking it just as seriously as the EPA.

Exactly. I'm wondering how that circle is going to be squared. It can be done, though.

This is from the man who thinks that US generals are inept and don't understand ISIS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-Mjy9ETtRY

I'm not sure how hes supposed to give a damn what they say.

I know. In the past whether it was a republican or a democrat administration, they have always taken the counsel of the DOD very seriously. But like many things after this consequential election, the country is in uncharted territory. The US has always had a president with past government leadership or military experience.

U.S.C. Article Two, Section 1 needs changes but that won't happen with constitutional purists currently in power.

I've seen lots of comparisons of Trump and Hitler, Mussolini, or Franco. Personally I'm seeing more parallels to Hugo Chavez.

Chavez wrecked Venezuela in part by trying to "purge the insiders." That never works. Problem is that the insiders know everything and have all the skills and expertise.

Chavez was a left-populist and Trump is a right-populist, but history seems to show similar outcomes for populists of any type.

His babble about purging the insiders is all noise. Observe his list of likely cabinet picks.

That's it.

I'm keen to see how Trump evolves as his presidency progresses.

Let's see how he goes after the DoD and other TLAs[1] have told him how it's going to be.

1. Three Letter Agencies

Congress has been trying to put restrictions on the DoD prohibiting them from using any money to address climate change. For instance, the Navy wants to start preparing its bases for rising sea levels, but Congress is trying to stop that (the base preparation, that is, not the rising sea levels).

So even if the DoD makes some headway in getting Trump to change his mind, Congress will be right there to try to change it back. Considering Trump's history of public statements on climate change, I suspect that Congress will have the easier task in the struggle with the DoD:

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/26400729697001881...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/26401012910666547...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/26589529219124838...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/27062860981797683...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/31474447982120550...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/31625201619005440...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/31937728568793907...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/32678179234029977...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/32687452457652633...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/32687562896611737...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/33425433511658700...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/33842934264642355...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/33844829602251161...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/33897838163698483...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/34997329988905779...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/34997384522826956...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/40221753675195187...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/40442009511371571...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/40750593877475737...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/40801845136276684...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/40838030220644352...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/40897761692683059...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/40898378983081574...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/41215967404229427...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/41216206898987417...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/41653970209605222...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/41690900498484428...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/41781603510729932...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/41781839282623283...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/41854213789949132...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/42033388259746611...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/42281959312025600...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/42317918219810406...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/42722642498738585...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/42755669210957414...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/42841640628024115...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/42841832366016512...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/42895438291522355...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/43101867469544243...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/43539308838388940...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/43557404335461171...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/44081115128348672...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/45096479198597120...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/47566899392821248...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/48881360795875737...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/48882520918971187...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/48892600622528512...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/48938185135031910...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/49393581520704307...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/51224620396761907...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/52186235121857331...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/53510273583077376...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/56802153313171865...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/56838779892496384...

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/65338538152680652...

Edit: fixed tweet list order so they should be chronological

Please don't post spammy messages like this on HN.

In a discussion of climate change, on a subdiscussion about whether or not the DoD can convince Trump that it is real, how exactly is posting a list of a large number of Trump's tweets on climate change "spammy"?

You posted a literal wall of text that makes the comment section impossible to read. That's spammy in my book. Five examples would have been more than sufficient; do you really think some masochist was going to click through every single one?

I'll worry when Leo stops using his private jet. Goalposts move all the time and the end is here in every tenth year or so.

Climate change is happening and some of it is due to humans. I doubt Trump disagrees with that. Shipping 'dirty' business to overseas does not help the planet.

No policy is going to fix climate change. Technology maybe.

I think 5 of the most egregious tweets would have been sufficient.

What will convince leaders and the American masses of climate change? I'm afraid that they won't accept it until its effects smacks them in the face, twice.

There isn't a policy that is going to change anything on world scale. Technology is going to be the solution if there is any.

However it is a top priority for the pentagon. Since Trump is the kind of guy that adopts the position of the last person he spoke to, one hopes the pentagon will step up their game and scare him into taking the drastic measures needed.

Trump supporters are usually the most vocal opponents to the climate change campaign, but like all people they will perform mental gymnastics to agree with their champion for a linited amount of time.

Through that (albeit ridiculously optimistic) lens, it's a golden opportunity.

This graph of global sea ice area is kind of alarming:

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JX41K2UK6Io/WCvyXQ6CFvI/AAAAAAAAW...

More info:

http://arctic-news.blogspot.co.uk/

Fortunately, sea ice does not contribute much to the sea level because it displaces about the same volume it will add when melted.

Yep, but it does have other negative effects. https://www.carbonbrief.org/five-reasons-why-the-speed-of-ar...

    Albedo is a measure of how well the earth’s surface reflects sunlight. Snow-covered sea ice has a high albedo and reflects 85 per cent of sunlight. But the open water revealed as ice melts is darker and absorbs more – reflecting just seven per cent.

Yep, that's terrifying.

But sea ice has an albedo affect. Dark seas absorb more heat.

Depends on where it's coming from. Some of those increases are because of on land glaciers thinning and spreading over the ocean.

I don't actually believe this, but it occurred to me the other day as a funny way to look at a very sad situation:

What if Trump does believe global warming is real, but recognizes that we're too late to stop its worst effects? What if he expects the world to go to hell over the next 50 years and is focused on protecting the U.S. specifically? What would he do?

He'd build a wall across the lower border of the U.S. to keep out southern populations fleeing extreme heat. But he'd keep the border with Canada open, so Americans can flee there if they need to. The oceans will protect us from the rest of the world.

He'd disentangle us from overseas treaty obligations that might draw us into wars we wouldn't otherwise want to fight. And he'd focus international relations on the few biggest countries who are most likely to secure and defend their own societies.

He'd incentivize U.S. companies to manufacture domestically: long supply chains are a risk.

He'd ramp up infrastructure spending--particularly on the coasts--to be ready to build sea walls and other mitigating structures.

He'd strengthen law enforcement to deal with internal unrest.

Like I said, I don't actually believe this...

EDIT: Another (and perhaps more likely) way to look at this is that Trump and his posse are just paranoid nuts, but by ignoring global warming, they will inadvertently bring about the global calamity that they fear.

I like that the theory has to assume that Canada is just naturally expected to take in American refugees while Mexico can go screw itself. With such ignorant American exceptionalism it's no wonder why we haven't fixed global warming yet.

You do realize a plurality of American voters voted for Hillary Clinton? She's leading by margins larger than Kennedy and Nixon.

Edited to use correct terminology.

I understand your point, but plurality ≠ majority.

Plurality is more votes than any other candidate.

Majority means more than 50% of the vote.

This doesn't detract from the point you're trying to make, but it is inaccurate. You strengthen your argument by using the appropriate word.

>You do realize a plurality of American voters voted for Hillary Clinton

Nobody cares. Both candidate vote totals combined don't even make up the majority of the US population.

Non-voters are just accepting whatever the majority (er, plurality) of voters decides.

And if the President was selected by popular vote, that would mean something.

It isn't, so it doesn't.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought this.

No one has a solution for climate change that doesn't involve changing personal habits. People don't want to do that. Eating less meat or a carbon tax (i.e taxing the working poor) is not a solution. It's admitting defeat.

People don't need to "believe in climate change". We simply need to build a solution that is much better than what they have available now. What that solution is? Plenty of ideas, no one has a clue how to execute them.

The current strategy for the left is: let's see how guilty we can make people feel about their consumption habits and scare them with far distant consequences. Talk about funding "green"/eco-friendly businesses which barely make a difference and try to sell people on carbon tax.

For the right, the strategy is: deny, deny, deny. Double down on economic growth and hope innovation follows.

Of course, "hope and dreams" sells. Admitting defeat wouldn't get you elected. The rhetoric is adjusted accordingly.

Wind is almost 5% of US electric production.

Solar is finally ready to make a difference (look at the last 5 years of the table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_Stat... ).

Adding 0.3% of generation each year isn't fast enough, but it's ridiculous to say that no one knows how to execute a move towards clean electricity and that it can barely make a difference.

And batteries are almost there as far as being affordable storage.

> Eating less meat or a carbon tax (i.e taxing the working poor) is not a solution.

As for taxing the poor, that's fixable: the legislation should have all revenues from a carbon tax returned as per-capita "rebates" (I'd think of it as a Basic Income paid for by polluters).

>Eating less meat or a carbon tax (i.e taxing the working poor) is not a solution.

The poor emit disproportionately little CO2. A carbon tax mostly taxes industry.

What about China?

They're not poor. Across large parts of their land area, they're an industrialized country now. They have a middle class as large as the entire United States population. That said: most Chinese don't own cars, or eat meat with every meal, or live in 2000 ft^2 fully heated McMansions in cold terrain. In short, most of them live more ecologically efficient lifestyles by default.

Oh, and they instituted population control decades ago.

Nowadays, a poor country is probably somewhere in Africa or Southeast Asia. Not much of the world is "starving children everywhere" poor anymore.

> A carbon tax mostly taxes industry.

And the poor never purchase anything that was made by using industry, so they certainly wouldn't have the costs passed on to them or anything.

Thus the poor will change what they buy. Substitution works.

thank you for writing down what's been going through my head for the past 2 years

I do. At any rate, I do in the case of world leaders and the actions of states over the last decades. Or at any rate I'd like to believe I do.

Virtually everything has been consistent with preparing for the worst case climate disaster. You might think that if we knew it was unavoidable it might comprise protecting populations in cities and so-forth by building huge coastal works, or moving populations, or other such huge projects, but were you to do something so overt you would instill mass panic and bring about a preemptive disaster. No. You would play a very subtle hand.

You would tighten border security, and normalise surveillance and the idea of searches, scans, and armed police.

You would instill a fear of refugees and migrants - this makes it far easier down the line when we hear how many hundreds of millions are in "temporary accommodation". They're far off. They're different to us. Callousness is a survival attribute, if the suddenly popular zombie horror and post apocalyptic genres tell us anything.

You'd saturate popular media with programmes in favour of securitised states, and which deal with unmanageable mindless hordes that need mowing down for the greater good.

You'd engage in wars which build a security apparatus and provide a distraction, while simultaneously feeding your black budgets for the preservation of the, hm, economically and socially valuable sectors of society and technology.

You hold hope around the idea of escape to another world to keep those whom might act problematically mollified until it's too late.

In your end game you start moving your population. Again, you don't want it done in chaotic panic, so you do it piecemeal. A move to the political right, you send your liberal elite scarpering to new climes, and while they're at it they pick places that they think will be mitigated against climate change because they think it might be a problem in their lives. A bit of civil unrest, more leave. Start a war. People flee. People die. Those without the means to flee get left behind - remember that desensitisation bit, and the whole concentrating upwards of wealth - if you wanted to design a system that would leave the majority of humanity unempowered and in the lurch if it all gets climatic, but give the "economically productive elite" a fire escape, you'd build it like what we have today.

I don't actually believe this either (although it would almost be comforting to, as it provides an explanation of sorts for the world), but I do wonder what home truths made Obama want to jump after his security briefings eight years ago - and that DoD report from a while back about the defence (civil and national) implications of climate change revealed a sobering level of thought has already gone into some rather dire possibilities.

It's a fairly crap hypothesis as one can't readily prove or disprove it.

> It's a fairly crap hypothesis

That's the only even remotely true thing in this entire comment. HN would really benefit without all the frantic paranoia and cinematic apocalypse-mongering that has unfortunately become the default position around here. Keep it to Alex Jones, please.

recognizes that we're too late to stop its worst effects

I see this sentiment a lot on HN these days. What's the reasoning behind it? If the temperature in my room increases, I'll go from feeling uncomfortable, to sweating profusely, to fainting, to death. Is there any scientific reason to believe that, say, a 4C increase gives us horrible outcomes, but a 8C increase will be "not much worse"?

4˙C is already reaching an extinction-level event for humanity.

Not really for humanity directly. We'd survive. But the plants and animals we depend on probably wouldn't have a very good time, and our biodiversity as a planet would significantly decrease.

Not quite extinction level, perhaps another Great Dying, though.

> Not really for humanity directly...perhaps another Great Dying, though.

It seems hard to believe that such a drastic shock to our planet won't trigger panic and resource wars which have the potential to finish us off.

A great decrease in population, yes. That is different from extintion.

Finish us off? I doubt it. We're a tenuous species.

> We'd survive. But the plants and animals we depend on probably wouldn't have a very good time...

I'm not sure how you can reconcile these two adjacent statements.

Yes, some humans would undoubtedly exist somewhere. But only a tiny fraction of our current world population.

> Yes, some humans would undoubtedly exist somewhere.

That's called survival.

Oh come on, you're just splitting hairs at this point. Pockets of a few thousand people is, yes, technically survival.

Congratulations, you're "technically correct" — the most useless, pedantically, and antisocial kind of correct.

The original question was "how is 8˚C "not much worse" than 4˚C? Surely you can concede that "tens of thousands of humans" and "zero humans" are not so much different compared to today's "billions of humans".

I think the warming itself is not really the biggest problem, it's the secondary effects like rising sea levels, increased natural disasters, etc. So for example if it's too late to stop coastal cities from being flooded, twice that much sea level rise is not much worse, because all the important cities and infrastructure are already gone.

However, if it's-too-laters really hold that opinion, they will also oppose (among other things) development of affected areas, because those areas are a foregone conclusion. For example, they will oppose any new buildings (at least major urban developments) in low coastal areas such as Manhattan, (part of) San Francisco, or Miami. Such projects are a waste of resource in the same way reducing CO2 emission is, and they will make relocation much more costly when the inevitable happens.

Funnily enough, I don't hear that opinion often, which makes me suspect that most people just want an excuse to keep their lifestyle unchanged.

I have actually heard that opinion, for example: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/09/new-york-future...

However, most people I've talked to who say "there's nothing we can do" are really saying "I think I will be dead before this is a really big problem, so fuck it".

> I see this sentiment a lot on HN these days. What's the reasoning behind it?

By concluding it's too late, one does not have to feel bad for not doing anything about it. Humans are simple that way.

Some prevailing climate models indicated that beyond a certain CO2 concentration, the temperature will continue to spiral upwards continuously, even if there are no further CO2 increases. At that point it would be necessary to reduce the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. It is far more difficult to capture CO2 than it is to abstain from releasing it at this time.

The answer lies in the fact that the amount of heat to get the surface of the Earth from 1 -> 3°C is not so huge, but when the amounts of heat to get the surface temperature to 4-6° exists in the Earth there will be tremendous tectonic activity.

Not sure about tectonic activity, but definitively more extreme weather events. Each 1°C increase does not mean that the whole atmosphere goes a little up uniformly, but that in general there's much more energy available to make stronger storms, more tornadoes, etc, and mess up with established climatic patterns.

Not Global Warming, but Global Weirding.

It's a sentiment that I'm unfortunately starting to accept. I don't think we are in a position as a society to act properly on climate change.

It's an interesting theory but I doubt he has looked that far ahead. What you have laid out would be something more along the lines of US Strategic Thinking for the next 100 years.

The one thing most folks over look is how far are we ready to go to protect America? Global warming will unleash the largest migration the world has ever seen. There will be more than 2.5 billion people trying to escape somewhere more hospitable. You will have millions showing up on your shores from the far reaches of the world. An example is the 400 Sri Lankans that showed up in a boat off the coast of British Columbia 3 years ago. What to do? At some point there could be a million people showing up on the shores of North America (US/Canada) every month, can you imagine the chaos.

No, Trump is not the God-Emperor of Mankind and does not possess century-level prescience. You can totally make a decent science fiction novel out of this, though.

There is already fanfiction depicting Donald Trump as Warhammer 40,000's Emperor of The Imperium of Man.

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=donald+trump+warham...

Yes, including memes depicting him as a "Holy Duo" with Vladimir Putin. Fascist and fascist, together at last.

All of which misses the point that the Emperor is the bad guy, because it's grimdark: there are no good guys.

I like and upvoted your comment for the discussion and thought it encourages. However, realistically speaking it's extremely unlikely that Trump thinks like that. All the evidence points towards him being extremely incompetent, even completely misunderstanding the extent of the office he's been elected for. He's not the guy to pull off smart conspiracies.

The clearest evidence for this is his repeated emphasis on increasing the use of coal and oil. Even if you believe massive global upheaval of societies can no longer be avoided, burning more coal and oil is still going to hurt you.

Here is a disturbing summary of potential effects of sea level rise (but be warned that this subreddit tends to be a bit alarmist):

https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/5abz8e/why_rising...

> But he'd keep the border with Canada open, so Americans can flee there if they need to.

See, this kind of loopy apocalypse-mongering is why you guys are having such a hard time persuading average voters that your cause is legit. Under what possible worst-case scenario are Americans going to need to "flee" to Canada? Is that one-foot ocean rise over the next hundred years going to flood the United States all the way to Grand Forks?

I believe "stop pollution" was always the goal and they had to crank the message to alarmist levels to get any traction.

As technology progresses and we get better at keeping our local environments clean, I predict their predictions will become increasingly dire. These doomsday warnings are just a sign that we're improving.

Or, you know, that things are getting dire. We shall see who was right though.

Dire enough that the population of the United States is going to have to evacuate en masse to Canada?

Really?

Of course not. But the math is pretty simple. More and bigger waves, more and bigger storms on the coasts. The sea level will rise slowly, but surely. It will take 100+ years, but it'll rise by at least 10 meters, of course if we don't do something against it. And it's not impossible to build dikes and levees, but they'd look like huge hills on the shore. Not so bad, we have plenty of time to move a lot of dirt, but maybe a few people would spend that on preventing sea level rise instead.

> Of course not.

Ok. So the original commenter's idea of Trump having some sinister scheme to leave the Canadian border un-walled so Americans can flee en masse as the mainland is destroyed by global warming, is absurd. That's all I was asking.

I merely pointed out to a parent comment, that things still can (and are likely to) get worse, even if he (she?) can't see it presently, and that might be a reason why "global warming aware" hippies are screaming.

The Canadian border wall part is completely irrelevant, and yes, absurd.

I lived on a hill in Los Angeles in the 70's and 80's, putting me inside the regularly Stage One-alert smog layer there. It was horrible, but we cleaned up our act since then. More people live in L.A. now than ever and pollution is down. Not a dire enough situation, try again during summertime when it's hot.

LA? Still terrible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution_in_the_United_St...

The air is still killing people there, even if it doesn't feel hard to breathe.

The same goes for the climate, I guess, if you don't feel it, it must be okay. But it's not.

You have no idea how choking the air was in the 70's and 80's. They still had Stage 3 smog alerts in the early seventies where you were not supposed to go outdoors. Our treatment of the earth has improved and it will continue to improve with technology.

All the (incomplete) computer models since the 90's predicting runaway warming due to human inputs to the system have not been borne out, and every year they aren't, you'll find yourself screaming louder and louder just to be heard. Real science will prevail, not the politicized stuff, and won't it be a bummer when you find you've been duped all these years?

You think the IPCC is not real science?

Why would it be a bummer that something in the "human extinction" category was taken on the "let's make sure it really doesn't happen" side instead of the "oh, those hippies are screaming since the 80s, because they took the scary predictions of some models seriously, and we're still here, so fuck them, and also fuck the 95+% of vastly more advanced and sophisticated models of today, because air quality is improving in urban centers".

It's great to see things improving, but CO2 has not much to do with smog. And that's actually a problem, because people who take the lazy approach to global climate models like you - let's call these people the Peter Wilsons (because an article of his is the [second] thing on Google if you search for co2 and smog) - will insist on having clean air and on doing nothing with regards to CO2.

So, you're admitting some of the computer climate models WERE flawed? Glad to hear some intellectual honesty.

I suspect I don't see the world as statically as you do. If we humans pump more CO2 in the atmosphere, I assume it doesn't necessarily accrete there year-over-year. Also, I don't assume that a rise in CO2 in the atmosphere from year to year means humans are to blame since there are volcanoes and rotting vegetation all over the place. And surface temperatures are bound to fluctuate mainly because the sun is not a constant energy source from year to year.

Do I think the IPCC is real science? I'm sure there is something like science and data gathering going on there. I will note that IPCC has "government" and "climate change" in the name, which is a dead giveaway that politics are a driver in any conclusions made by the panel.

You give them the benefit of the doubt, clearly. I say, "show me reproducible experimental results or there was no science." Reproducibility in this case requires the models to be accurately predicting future trends, which, to-date they have not been. And that brings me to ...

> Why would it be a bummer that something in the "human extinction" category was taken on the "let's make sure it really doesn't happen" side instead of the "oh, those hippies are screaming since the 80s, because they took the scary predictions of some models seriously, and we're still here, so fuck them, and also fuck the 95+% of vastly more advanced and sophisticated models of today, because air quality is improving in urban centers".

Look, cussing isn't necessary. I want clean air and water. I have asthma, I know how bad pollution can be. I'm not a bad guy. I just don't appreciate being lied to and what you said there can be summed up as, "I know a lot of false claims were made on inaccurate models, but good things happened and I'm satisfied."

Here's the thing, I don't like being made to worry over unfounded claims. (And I get super grumpy when my kids are made to worry!) So, scale your message wayyyy back or you lose any credibility.

Heck, the "stop pollution" message is sufficient, and why not? There's a legit/obvious pollution problem worldwide, so you have moral superiority there. Planetary destruction is not imminent though (at least not due to man-made CO2 emissions) and you've got no leg to stand on there.

People usually admit guilt, and I don't think I have anything to do with those models, as some of those are older than me. Of course they were flawed. Models are always imperfect, but the important things is, are they useful?

Well. Ultimately, we shall see the usefulness of these climate models, and those old models were useful to show some the extremes, huge swings, big effects. Solar cycles, big non-sea ice melts (Greenland, Antarctica), no reduction in emissions, a lot of CFC (used for refrigerators, you probably remember them).

Furthermore, it's kind of hard to experimentally test the crude models, as you'd need to copy the universe, and do this or that in a lot of copies. Those models were simple, but still full of statistics, so the chances are still chances, just there are hundreds of millions of people who don't want to put Earth on a roulette table.

Hm, I never considered my worldviews as static. What suggests that?

So, now those are concrete scientifically explorable questions.

First, sure, the CO2 content of the atmosphere is increasing a lot slower than we're adding it, so it goes somewhere. Vegetation, oceans, and some could escape to space, but it's basically zero. So from a CO2 standpoint, Earth is a closed system ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape#Dominant_at... ).

There are thousands of people working on determining the composition of the atmosphere in the past. We have very good data for about the last half million of so year. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmo... ) And getting better and better estimates for the longer timescales (hundreds of millions of years).

The main point of this whole global climate change/warming/alarm/denial is that humans are very busy and we are doing something very fast. Big quick changes. We released so much CO2 and CH4 (methane) and other gases, that it is having an effect, much larger than whatever would happen to any natural cause. (Volcanoes release yearly less than a gigaton of CO2 (about 0.3 Gt per year) and we have good data for the last 50 years, and there was no significant increase in CO2 after big eruptions. So, they released a lot during the millions of years, but that largely went down into the sediments at the bottom of the oceans.)

The Sun has many cycles, the short 11-year sunspot cycle is not that interesting, it happened in the last century ~9 times, and nothing interesting happened (<0.1% total irradiance change from cycle min to cycle max). The big cycles are the Milankovitch cycles (various periodic changes in the orbital position of Earth relative to the Sun), those are important for big Ice Ages, as total irradiance can change ~25%, but these are slow, take 20 000 year or longer. And the models are of course not perfect for what these orbital cycle things mean for the climate on Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles#Problems

So, all in all, we released more CO2 in the last 50 years than "nature played with" in the last 400k yearly, as in we released a half a teraton (500 Gt) in total and the yearly variation was 200 Gt. Each year we release ~35 Gt, that has to go somewhere or accumulate in the atmosphere. (And as you noted, not all of it is accreting, hence all this text and discussion.)

(Furthermore, the average temperature change we're talking about takes into account the seasonality from the Sun, so the trendline is statistically separated from the baseline.)

Well, I treat the IPCC as the aggregation of climate scientists. (Best data, best models, most rational interpretations, and so on.) They are internationally funded (there's a breakdown of contribution by country, it's chartered by the UN, but the world meteorological organisation pays its yearly budget), so far they are pretty cheap, as of 2014 they received about 138 M CHF (136 M USD at current exchange rate). But probably a review of their work could be crowdfunded pretty easily. (Though we'd have to discuss what is a good method of estimation and what isn't, what is a good way to model this or that and what isn't, but of course these points of concern should be listed, and .. there is a list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_IPCC_Fourth_A... ) After the IPCC's 4th report in 2009, there was a lot of scrutiny of their work, conflicts of interest and so on, and their process benefited from this, as the 5th report now uses better data, better sources, a more unified probability framework (so probability estimates are consistent with each other), and so on.

I believe that when thousands of scientists endorse a result, and spend time talking about it, spend energy explaining it, how it came to be, and why specific "counter" papers are flawed, then that result is okay.

The times are changing, I don't know what'll happen in the future after this mini-collapse of intelligent discourse, now that truth and English are basically arbitrary, now that Enlightenment values of clarity and rational attention to detail no longer matter, with the rise of the complex charlatans that are willingly or unwillingly put certain issues before scientific integrity. Now that more and more people are forced to make less and less optimal compromises with supporters of ideologies foreign to theirs.

But that's a bit too doomsaying and offtopic. Back to models.

The IPCC reports are based on technical models integrated into a bigger reporting framework. And those models were covered in a lot of papers, and the best models were chosen, and then computationally run. (See the Climate Model Intercomparison Project, also, "When using blended temperatures the observations lie well within the 90% range of RCP8.5 runs for the whole of the last decade" -- RCP8.5 is what IPCC used, and the blended things is about estimating air temperature (the models predict air temp) from sea temp (what satellites measure when they look at the sea) -- http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/95782/1/blend_paper.pdf )

That said, SCIENCE IS FUCKING SUCKS when it comes to presenting results. (Compare to "tech": https://areweideyet.com/ https://arewefastyet.com/ http://www.arewewebyet.org/ vs http://cmip-pcmdi.llnl.gov/cmip5/publications.html and https://cmip-publications.llnl.gov/search?type=project&optio... there's no one-liner. Yet the question is pretty easy "how accureate are models on some metric, and what does that mean".)

"I know a lot of false claims were made, [...]" .. I haven't said that. I know the models were simple, so crude, bad, inefficient, inaccurate are not surprising to me. Not to mention there was not enough computational capacity in the 90s.

My message is, logic is powerful, but that doesn't mean simple. It means we can say that there are more and more possibilities. Such that if someone is screaming more and more, it doesn't mean that they are just trying to scaremonger more, it might mean things are getting worse and worse. (That's how this subthread started.)

There is so much in your reply, I am gratified!

I can't possibly reply adequately, at least on this touchscreen phone. A few things:

- agree suncycles/sunspots follow a general pattern, but by no means precise nor energy predictable.

- I suspected static because of some of your conclusions, for example that earth as a closed system. It's not! Earth is slowly growing due to dust/meteor accretions, our orbit and spin are slowly changing, single random volcanic eruptions can throw more particulate matter into the upper atmosphere than all human activity in history affecting weather for years, random cosmic ray inputs, earth's fluctuating magnetic field strengths, sun spots, cloud formation, and on and on ... huge inputs that make the system incredibly dynamic.

You are right to say that louder/more urgent pleas for action don't necessarily mean there's an attempt to scaremonger. I just observe that it's tough for fear not to soak the rhetoric especially when the screamer is legitimately afraid.

We just need to be methodical about any substantive change we attempt, no more rush to judgement. Fear can lead to rash decision making that could make things worse. (Like that insane proposal a few years back to seed clouds on a massive scale in order to reflect more sunlight back into space.)

I continue to hold that, based on recent history, we can apply tech that is clean AND continues our economic and social growth. We can have our cake and eat it too!

How do you know that we don't know enough about the Sun to predict the energy output?

Because we actually do know. There's solar magnetohydrodynamics and simple measurements, and measurements of other stars' energy output. And stars are pretty well behaved.

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

The number of sunspots in the past have also been reconstructed, seems crazy, but it's calculable from Carbon-14 dating. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle#/media/File:Sunspo... )

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Solar_cycle&oldid... see the "ACRIM gap" problem, which is about 0.045% difference ( http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/05/acrim-... ) in estimating the long term trend in solar energy output.

Oh, well, of course Earth is not a closed system, since the Sun is constantly feeding us with energy, but from a simple modeling point of view those are constants. From a CO2 aspect it's closed. (As CO2 does not leave to space, it's too heavy for that.) Just as the mass of Earth, length of a day, and year, and so on are pretty well understood, the variations in orbital position (the already mentioned Sun-Earth cycles).

A really bad and big volcano throwing ash in the air is a single event, we can model those too. And those short term (<5 year, after that the particulate matter - aerosol - settles) effects can be simulated.

"The screamer is legitimately afraid" - yes, that complicates human matters a bit. Everyone is a stakeholder, yet with slightly different preferences, fears and views.

Yes, indeed, carbon quota/tax/etc is the right incentive to make the right decisions. If we'd provide cheap loans to help the transformation, we would be borrowing against our own future, and we can decide to pay those back in a 100 years, so it's not like we lack the resources and capacity to deal with major producers (power plants, electricity, 30% https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... ).

Right. Who are you going to believe, Wikipedia or your lying eyes?

I'm guessing you aren't old enough to remember how awful the state of the environment was in the United States back in the '70s. It's like night and day to compare then and now.

As I've replyed to the sibling comment, CO2 has not much to do with air quality, and that's actually a problem, because if it'd be linked to local air pollution, we'd have already insisted on less CO2 output long ago.

EdSharkey replied that the dire days are over. Yeah, in air pollution, great, applause, bravo, but not in climate things, like ocean acidification, storms and hurricanes and so on.

My worry is that Trump doesn't deny it (well he does publicly), but rather privately realizes that it's already far too late. There's nothing we can do, collapse of global civilization before mid-century is probably inevitable. So what can you do, well ramp up every dirty trick you can think off … because it doesn't really matter and it makes you look good with the public (sorry to say, it does, climate change is still not popular in public discourse).

To stay within the 1.5 to 2ºC bounds, the IPCC already includes massive carbon sequestering technologies in even its most simple recommendations. This is technology that does not exist. We're betting life on Earth (and truly, it is that dire) on tech that might be impossible to build and scale. Even if we reduce our carbon emissions to 0 today the delayed effects and non-linear dynamics are so poorly understood, that it could very well be that nothing truly can be done to avoid our mass extinction. And, this too goes for carbon sequestering; even if we magically suck the last 5 decades of carbon out of the air, some stuff that is broken can't be fixed. Thresholds, catastrophes, oscillations, bifurcations, etc are real. We really have to think in non-linear systems when dealing with climate, and that is something we're very bad at. Especially when it comes to the media-voter complex. But picture this, you are driving your car down some road, and everything is fine. You're minding your own business. There's nobody else there, so what the heck, let's ramp up some of the speed. And you go faster and faster. Until bam, unexpected steep corner, your car flies off the road and you die. At that point going back a couple of miles is never going to fix you. It's too late.

Carbon sequestering is not as hard as it would seem. We have several technologies, but we can also just plant trees.

Yes trees are a perfect solution. They've optimized this process through millions of years of evolution. However, we're still removing more trees than adding them per year. Quite impressively so, even. It takes time for forests to grow. A lot of its carbon sink properties are because of soil succession, which takes decades to mature.

Who is "we"?

I think the US is about equalized because industries like the the US paper industry plant about as many trees as we cut.

If "we" is the world the lots of poor countries are unsustainably slash and burning. Starving people want to not die today so they make places to plant crops.

If we is people afraid of the expanding growth of the Sahara southward then things like the great green wall are interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall

But that's the thing right, "we" is the human population. If the US logging industry plants as much trees as it removes, then it doesn't really really matter if the global rain forests are being slashed and burned for agricultural reasons. Not to mention the massive amounts of forest fires we can expect due to increased heat and drought, which we have absolutely no idea how to deal with. It truly is a global problem. Great Green Wall is definitely a good thing! Throw in some heliostat solar (molten salt) powered desalination, and massive amounts of desert could be "greened" (good for people, economy and climate!)

As much as media and schools indoctrinate the idea that papers waste most trees, it's not true.

The biggest percentage of Amazon rainforest deforestation is for the livestock industry. The beef that USA and Europe gladly import, and the soybean that Brazil gladly exports.

Palm oil in Asia also.

Consumers just have to stop voting with their money for oblivious and blind short-sighted products. Politiciancs obviously will never tax beef or Lays chips.

This is why the US should not just be "about equal". We can afford to improve the situation, not just maintain the status quo. Instead, we often find ourselves sitting in judgement of developing countries doing the same things we did to develop.

Do you think American voters are going to be happy about sacrificing their own well-being explicitly so that other people can pollute/deforest more? Do you think that's a platform that will win elections?

I think we should use our wealth and clout to both do better than the bare minimum in our own country and pressure other countries to do at least the bare minimum. I think our leaders should figure out how to do that while still winning elections. That does sound hard, but if the job description were only to pander, anybody could do it.

> I think our leaders should figure out how to do that while still winning elections.

Do you want a pony, too?

Look, we're not talking about straight up charity. You can talk people into charity; despite the standard narrative, the United States is quite generous in that regard. What you're asking for is for us to reduce our standard of living explicitly so other people can pollute. That's going to be a hard sell.

I agree. No progress has ever been made by giving up something lots of people want. Look at smoking, people know it will kill them, banned in most outdoor areas and that it is expensive/super taxed. The taxes doubled the price and that didn't reduce the smoking as much ecigs, a away for people to get what they with all of the benefits and fewer downsides.

Every gain we make needs to unambiguously be a gain otherwise some will choose to ignore the self restriction for their own personal gain and with CO2 we all lose when that happens.

First we'd have to stop the massive deforestation that's happening right now. A lot of that is for agriculture, so we'd have to find another way to feed those people.

We might also want to stop clearcutting vast forests in the Southeastern U.S. to ship wood pellets to Europe, which burns them.

Then we'd have to save the rest of our existing forests, many of which are struggling due to various effects of climate change, including heat stress, drought, topsoil loss, disease, and forest fires. Many large forests are net carbon emitters now.

After we've done all that and finally stopped losing trees, we can think about having more trees. We'll need space for them, so that means reducing agricultural area even more. We've been emitting about ten billion tons of carbon every year for quite a while, so it's going to take a lot of land.

We're also running out of fish in the ocean, so with that food source going away we're going to need more from agriculture than we get now.

"Just plant trees." Like many, perhaps even most purported climate change solutions, it sounds great until you work out the scale.

All true, but "the scale of it all" will be truly mind boggling whatever we do, or don't do. Solving this problem will require engineering on a scale never seen before, failure to act will result in losses on a scale never seen before. So it's not a choice about scale, it's a choice about the survival of civilization.

I completely agree. My only argument was with the word "just." It's a massive problem, and if we were a rational civilization we would be doing everything possible right now, before it's too late. It should be as high a priority as if a civilization-ending asteroid were on a collision course with the Earth.

> First we'd have to stop the massive deforestation that's happening right now. A lot of that is for agriculture, so we'd have to find another way to feed those people.

You speak about deforestation in the US, but there are more forests in the United States now than there were at the time of the Revolutionary War.

Overall, and in the part you quoted, I mean globally.

I did mention the southeastern U.S., because burning wood for fuel doesn't help the global situation, no matter where it's done, even if there's more forest elsewhere in the particular country where it's harvested.

>First we'd have to stop the massive deforestation that's happening right now. A lot of that is for agriculture, so we'd have to find another way to feed those people.

You say that like we couldn't just let them starve. If their descendants are going to be wiped out by global warming anyway what's the difference?

There's that word "just" again. The countries where it's happening don't want to let their people starve; you'd have to make them. You'd have to use military force to guard vast forests all over the world from hundreds of millions of desperate people. Good luck with that.

Does nerve gas harm trees?

Why not nuke metropolitan areas while you're at it? Most of the population is in the coastal cities anyway, who cares about New York, Shanghai or Mumbai. Quick fix. Or force serialization for > 60% of the world population. I mean sure, there are "solutions" but there is ethics to consider too …

For a start, the cities you list contain many valuable people. Places doing lots of slash-and-burn farming, not so much. My original comment was a bit facetious, but if it is a civilization-ending threat (and I'm not saying it is), better to start the killing sooner when we can control who dies than collapse the whole thing and lose thousands of years of scientific and cultural progress.

By the way, we already do this! We let millions starve to death in squalor already. Why? For the sake of civilization. Or do you think it'd be smart to ship them all over here? Amazing how timid we are about weighing life against life in a controlled fashion when this is already happening every day. We can't even have a little hypothetical chat on the Internet about it.

I've already suggested in another thread that any 'solution' to global warming that doesn't involve mass genocide will be too slow to have any effect.

Even sterilization might not be quick enough.

Obviously, neither is acceptable from a humanist perspective.

Actually, now that I've read your comment closer, I noticed you mentioned serialization. Do you mean digitizing people's minds and killing them afterwards?

This comment, along with many others posted from this account, violate the guidelines for being unsubstantive and flamewar (nerve agent, rather) style. We ban accounts that continue to post like this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

By all reports, Trump can't stay focused on any one thing more than a few minutes, whether it was 20 years ago talking to reporters, people working for him, whatever. So he's not likely to be the person who will care about a long term, non-immediate risk.

I still can't believe someone like him can be president. If Jeb Bush had won, I would have been a little disappointed, but I would have gone to sleep and not worried that much about it. But he's terrifying. Maybe he'll just be unable to accomplish anything, so he will self-block, doing as much as obama with republican congress. More likely is he won't be in touch and pence can do whatever he wants.

Honest question: do you think a person like you describe could have his record in business management? Reportedly he was almost bankrupt in the 90's and recovered a quite large fortune afterwards. While I'm not a big believer in the capitalist mythology that people get rich by their effort and skills, and I'm aware that luck plays a huge factor, I do suppose that there is a bare minimum of cleverness and focus needed to pull off that kind of thing. I have a hard time imagining how someone that "can't stay focused on any one thing more than a few minutes" could do it. And hey, he did become president elect with the opposition of most of his own party and the media, which is quite an achievement as well.

Maybe I'm wrong (also not an American, so I haven't been as exposed to Trump as most Americans have) but my impression is that he's not dumb, he plays dumb.

This observation is basically the root of my entire hope that he isn't going to ruin the nation.

Playing dumb is a basic negotiating tactic. As is making outrageous demands and statements.

Or he's the lucky man.

What's more likely? Being lucky enough times to keep his business going, or being veery veery cunningly business-savage deep inside, yet do the stupidest things (start businesses with no expertise, no secret niche, no partner - vodka, flight, university).

He's a salesman, a snake charmer, like Reagan, the guy who keeps on going, persistent, strong, never defeated, because it's not how many times you fall, it's that you get up that many plus one times, and sell, sell, sell, do the talk, push, make deals, don't worry, there's always a next door where you can try a new pitch and dump that vacuum cleaner.

> According to research published last year, spending a day in Beijing is currently akin to smoking almost 40 cigarettes. Decoupling emissions from economic growth thus helps both people and planet. Convincing Mr Trump of this fact is now an urgent and daunting challenge.

How is convincing Trump here the answer? Isn't convincing China more important? How about convincing the American people? Do this and politicians will follow.

Perhaps if Trump can bring back more industry to the US, he is on his way to helping already.

I think all of the above are part of the answer. Convincing Trump not to try to prop up coal as he's promised.

The Republican leadership has already said there's not much that can be done because coal is private and that government money shouldn't be spent on it. They know, and have known for some time, that coal is a dying industry, but you have to appeal to voters.

China is convinced.[1] The American public is convinced, although not as much as they probably should be.[2][3][4]

The problem here is to convince world leaders to actually do something.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-16/china-tell...

[2] http://climatepublicopinion.stanford.edu/sample-page/opinion...

[3] https://environment.yale.edu/poe/v2014/

[4] http://www.gallup.com/poll/190010/concern-global-warming-eig...

China is convinced? Then China should tell China to stop building coal power plants.

They burn slightly more coal than the rest of the world combined.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/26/business/energy-environmen...

> China is convinced? Then China should tell China to stop building coal power plants.

You realise you're source says they're doing exactly that?

"In guidelines released on Monday, China halted plans for new coal-fired power stations in many parts of the country, and construction of some approved plants will be postponed until at least 2018."

They've also gone all in on solar, having more installed capacity than any other nation. They're far from perfect, but they've started to acknowledge the problem at least.

Not only that, but they've taken all these steps while they're bringing hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty doing sustenance farming and into cities. Cities where they want things like electricity and cars. Look at the history of the world, development like that is usually fueled by burning as many hydrocarbons as possible. It's very good to see a country able now to at least start to break away from that. The rapidly dropping price of solar, thanks in large part to China plays a big role in that.

Despite setbacks China is also actively building up more nuclear capacity, something I wish was taken more seriously in the US http://energypost.eu/china-2016-year-nuclear-power/

China also has a sizable population to match.

Biggest problem is that climate change aggressively challenges many foundations of capitalism and consumerism.

That's a religion to some people. And this is akin to changing it.

Well in the end capitalism determines everyone's personal incomes. As long as the rich keep getting relatively richer and the population bigger the economy has to grow in order to leave at least near as much income for people in general as before.

Capitalism has been and will be an essential ingredient to solve the problem and switch to other sources of energy. The issue is that the costs to the global environment are not borne by the polluters. Put a price tag on pollution and the market will do the best it can.

Yes, people are convinced. But ask them to give up a little of their comfort and they start rioting. I see it in my (european) city, even smallish measures to restrict car usage lead to major contestations.

I'm confused with this statement but I'll try to clear up something you seem to be missing.

1) China is already convinced. It's in the article. They are the world-leading user of solar power and are pushing harder than anyone to get away from dirty power.

2) Trump wants to push and invest in dirty power. He wants to significantly increase the production of coal and gas. The very stuff that causes global warming. Convincing Trump is about saving the world from itself. If Trump has his way, the last 20 years of progress towards renewable energy will be wiped out, with a strong possibility of making life very difficult for humanity in the next 50 - 100 years.

> are pushing harder than anyone to get away from dirty power.

Where do you gather that from? They use more coal than the entirety of the rest of the world combined. Their coal usage has more than doubled over the past ~15 years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/26/business/energy-environmen...

This is from your link:

> Now Beijing is trying to slow things down.

> In guidelines released on Monday, China halted plans for new coal-fired power stations in many parts of the country, and construction of some approved plants will be postponed until at least 2018.

Whether this will amount to anything, who can say?

It seems like for it to amount to anything, they would also have to close down currently operational plants.

china's coal use peaked by 2014: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/press/releases/20...

According to that article: "China’s coal consumption growth was responsible for more than half of global CO2 emission growth in the past 10 years."

China gets over 70% of its electricity from coal. Yes, they are building more solar but it'll take over a decade for there to be significant change.

Anyway, the real problem is that even if everyone somehow meets the Paris limits, it's not enough.

https://www.beforetheflood.com/

And they're building nuclear plants too.

They currently get 2-3% of their electricity from nuclear:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/539691/china-will-soon-le...

A 5x increase in 15-20 years gets you to 10-15%. While that's good, I don't think it's enough given the current rate of CO2 production. It's hard to complain because they're doing a lot more than everyone else. Unfortunately, we need to find a way to do more.

I'm glad someone else brought this up on here, and you guys have some sources to back up your viewpoints. My understanding, until now, is that China has been full-blasting the environment as hard as it can even in the face of smog that chokes their entire cities. I'm happy to see they have some resolution to start curbing the problem. But for a long time it seemed like no matter what steps we were making to change, they were taking 10 steps in reverse and killing us economically because of it.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/20/chinas-meat-co...

This too, additional to other links. Meat consumption has a huge carbon footprint.

Their government institutions see the problem and invent guidelines. We'll see the same stuff from the USA, most likely never.

>We'll see the same stuff from the USA, most likely never.

So at what point does the rest of the world intervene?

The problem is that these green energy politics are working within a artesic system of problems, meaning if you start for example the massive creation of bio-ethanol- you destroy by demand and supply jungle in other countrys (freeing carbon dioxide) and unleash social unrest (due to starvation - Egypt, Africa and the south America). The cost of re stabilization, eats via tax into the economy but is unable to reach the cost-creator, creating cascading instability's as the burden is shifted upon those who are unable to evade it.

Solar is fine though, once it paid back its energy production debt. I think bio-fuels should be taxed for the undoing of the distributed damage.

Mixed feelings never make for good punchlines :.)

We (the US) are in a good position to lead the renewables industry, and part of that is dogfooding what we make. But that dogfooding is harder if our domestic nonrenewable prices are low. Yes that means that, for now, those products aren't fully competitive. But they could get there with scale, and we get that scale by rolling them out domestically. It helps us build this industry in the long term.

China is also jumping on this opportunity, by the way. I saw an article recently that competitive solar will be a big focus point for its electronics industry.

The US would be in great position to take the lead here. For example, I don't understand why not every house in Southern California is covered with solar panels. Instead Trump's program seems to be to burn as much coal and oil as possible.

This is exactly what I think we should be doing (as a nation). We should be pushing innovation and becoming a leader in R&D for green energy. It seems like a fantastic way of creating jobs and I have a hard time comprehending why people are so resistant to it.

I hate to beat this drum, but it comes down to money. Oil and coal spend so much money spreading false information about the issues, so it's hard for people to be informed about what our options actually are.

Not to mention that Oil and Coal are sources of energy where western corporations directly profit. Not so much with solar and nuclear.

Fear. Put yourself in the shoes of a 50-year-old coal miner who's had the same job since he was age 18. You lose your job, and the town in which you live is starting to decline because the major source of money is gone. You have no idea how your going to pay for your bills and food.

Do you really think such a person is going to be enthusiastic for retraining for a new, competing with younger people, and moving? Or do you think this person would rather support politicians who promise to restore the coal mining industry?

The thing is, we're not going to get rid of coal and oil for quite a while, even if we do convert mostly to green energy we won't (for better or for worse) abandon the infrastructure we already have. I say this as conjecture, but it seems reasonable unless otherwise shown.

I tend to believe that if we stop subsidies for dirty energy sources, the market will take care of the rest.

So it comes down to policy.

China pretty much destroyed the US solar panel manufacturing market. If the US wants to "lead the renewables industry," ironically for you, the only way to do it is probably Trump-style protectionism. Otherwise China will continue to wipe out the next crop of Solyndras with its subsidies and other dirty tricks.

Of course, we can always put solar panels on top of things. That's a thing. They're doing that in Africa too. But the profits mostly go to solar panel manufacturers in China. And solar panels can't sustain a heavy industrial base... you need coal or nuclear for that, as other industrial nations know very well.

As far as building renewables is concerned both countries are currently doing their share. But that trend needs to accelerate and at the same time fossil sources need to be scaled back. Trump's statements on energy policy are mostly contrary to the latter part.

http://www.ren21.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/REN12-GSR201... (page 20)

The conclusion of this article is not that global warming is dangerous but that local air pollution is bad for public health: "According to research published last year, spending a day in Beijing is currently akin to smoking almost 40 cigarettes. Decoupling emissions from economic growth thus helps both people and planet. Convincing Mr. Trump of this fact is now an urgent and daunting challenge."

Why should Donald Trump worry about local air pollution in Beijing? This has nothing to do with climate change. I highly doubt Donald Trump thinks thick smog is a good thing.

It's mentioned at the end of the article but it's not the main message. The reason it's mentioned is to give the argument why China will have to reduce their own emissions, no matter what other countries do. Then it concludes that Trump should understand the same that China has to understand: "Decoupling emissions from economic growth thus helps both people and planet."

I've read interesting post couple of days ago about Global Warming on reddit:

"Hey guys this research isn't really finding out anything that wasn't already known. RCP 8.5 scenario, which they assumed in their modelling, has long been known to be effectively Armageddon. Any temperature rise past 5.5 degrees is probably irrelevant because there wont be any humans left to deal with that outcome.

However it's looking increasingly likely that we aren't on the RCP 8.5 pathway. RCP 8.5 calls for steady continued growth in emissions of around 3%+ per year, which is what we were on in the early part of this decade. The last three years emissions have been effectively flat in spite of ongoing economic growth, and the Paris pledges that will keep warming to about 2.8 degrees call for the emissions peak to be in 2040~ (RCP 4.5). Based on trends in renewables, the downturn in the coal industry, and emissions growth halting, it's increasingly hard to see how we could possibly get back on track to an RCP 8.5 scenario.

2.8 degrees will still be terrible for environment, the economy, and poorer nations of course, and we should really be aiming for the RCP 2.6 scenario, where emissions peak no later than 2020. It's possible emissions have peaked already, but we will need more than three years of data to determine that. Of course, than comes the hard part of taking offline the carbon intensive elements of the world economy (i.e Coal)"

source: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/5cz4a7/new_climate...

What about the Elon Musk <-> Peter Thiel <-> Trump connection?

Trump respects Peter. He's young & rich.

Peter is an engineer. He must believe in global warming. He wants to live forever, so he'll need a good planet for that.

Musk is a firm believer in green tech.

Peter respects Musk?

The future of the planet depends on how Peter Thiel explains the role of clean tech to Trump! (I'm starting to be very happy about that $1 million Peter handed over to Trump)

"He must believe in global warming."

While I understand what motivates your thinking so, I don't think you can assume this. I haven't looked for anything that addresses Thiel's opinion on this btw, so I'm agnostic on the issue.

Peter has invested in clean tech before. He's a technologist. He wants to live forever (on a stable climate planet). We can assume he believes in global warming.

I could be cynical and view his clean tech investments as a capitalist assessing the market, independent of his beliefs in global warming. If enough people want clean tech for whatever reason (including false beliefs in climate change), investing in clean tech can be a smart move. That said, I did find a quote that indicates he cares about the environment.

Thiel told the TechCrunch Disrupt crowd that "one potential route for cleantech energies is to work with something that’s slightly more environmentally friendly than current sources — natural gas. It's a cheaper form of energy that's much more ubiquitous, and has less of an environmental impact than most energy sources today, but has not been harnessed."

http://www.thegreenskeptic.com/2011/09/peter-thiel-cleantech...

Concerns about the environment don't necessarily mean belief in global warming.

His NYT editorial "The New Atomic Age We Need" talks about other's concerns about climate change, but never his own position on climate change, just on nuclear energy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/28/opinion/the-new-atomic-age...

An interview he did with Glenn Beck for the Blaze quotes him as calling climate science pseudoscience.

Thiel: I do think that having a space where you can think for yourself and where it doesn't always get second-guessed is very important. We have a we have all these monolithic debates about science or pseudoscience. Like there's the climate change debate.

Beck: Is that science or pseudoscience?

Thiel: I think it's more pseudoscience. Whenever you can't have a debate I often think that's evidence that there's a problem. When people use the word science, it's often a tell like in poker that you're bluffing. We have social science, we have political science. We don't call it physical science or chemical science, we just call them physics and chemistry because we just know they're right and you can debate the periodic table of elements. No one will be upset if you ask questions about that. We call it climate scicence. It's a tell like in poker. It's telling you that people are exaggerating, and that they're bluffing a little bit.

But I think this monolithic culture is breaking down. People are asking questions. You know the weather has not been getting warmer for the past 15 years. The hockey stick that Al Gore predicted in the early 2000s on the climate has not happened for the last decade. I think as this monolithic culture breaks down you can have more real debates and I think that would be a good thing on net.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoxxGhLFbw4

I just did the transcript myself, so there are very likely mistakes. I also tried to clean up the language a bit. I won't quibble if people point them out. If someone feels I've misrepresented what he said, please do correct me.

There's a lot of language there that sounds like that of climate change skeptics.

I'm not trying to be obstinate here. I've been surprised by many of the opinions shared by HN commenters that I would think are incongruent (and I'm sure some think the same of mine).

I guess I'm a "Peter Thiel Believes in Climate Change" skeptic. Happy to be shown I'm wrong.

Edit: I realize I'm equating "global warming" and "climate change". I don't think that changes what I've written, but if it does, please let me know.

Thanks for posting this. I guess I was wrong to think he believes in global warming. He has made investments into clean tech along with Vinod Khosla however & did found that personal payments thing along with Elon. So. Maybe there is a chance for discussion?

I'm hoping.

Me, too.

"We call it climate science." Normal people call it climatology. Rhymes with biology.

I believe that it is already too late. Here's my proposed solution. Send a robot into space. Pickup an asteroid and bring it to Lagrangian L1. Have it begin weaving a solar curtain.

doesn't fix the ocean acidification

you got me there

Can someone point me to a URL with an arguably good prediction of how these increasing temperatures would negatively effect the ecosystem specifically? Are we talking mass extinctions? More powerful storms/more extreme weather events? And/or something else?

http://climate.nasa.gov/effects/

"According to research published last year, spending a day in Beijing is currently akin to smoking almost 40 cigarettes."

Wow

There have been a number of studies on how many deaths can be attributed to air pollution. It seems to be ~1 million deaths a year in China. Here's a typical source (a press release with good graphs, the original paper is linked in it):

https://www.healtheffects.org/system/files/HEI-GBD-MAPS-Chin...

If it is truely a big problem, it will be more strengthful to let the denying end to fully deploy their defense. The hope may the system resilient enough not on an irreversable track which has a penalty not bailable.

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