Comment by anon1253 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anon1253 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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?

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