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bithive123

Here is a good video about the arctic methane emergency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F9ed5E54s4

Some summary points:

- Total amount of methane in the current atmosphere: ~5 gigatons

- Amount of carbon preserved as methane in the arctic shelf: estimated at 100s-1000s of gigatons

- Only 1% release would double the atmospheric burden of methane

- Not much effort is needed to destabilize this 1%

- The volume currently being released is estimated at 50 gigatons (it could be far more)

- 50 gigatons is 10x the methane content of the current atmosphere

- We are already at 2.5x pre-industrial level, there is a methane veil spreading southward from the arctic.

- Methane is 150x as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2 when it is first released.

Here is a longer video for those who have the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPdc75epOEw

View on HN

Methane has a short ~5-10 year half life in the atmosphere. So, releasing 50x current methane levels over 100 years does not triple current methane levels.

Yep. Everything depends on how fast that methane will get released. It can vary from "we are completely fucked up, good bye" to "that's a rounding error, no big deal".

Methane should be easier to take out of the atmosphere than CO2. Spraying something at the Stratosphere could be incredibly helpful even if the substance is short lived. (But I have no idea what to spray there, would water make any difference?)

When you look at the many different potential sources of, "Fucked... goodbye..." the trend is very clear. We're juggling apocalypses and just waiting to find one that will stick. Will it be ocean acidification first? Ocean levels rising? Catastrophic weather patterns? Famine? Drought? War touched off by rapid changed? Mass extinctions?

They're all in play, each with the potential to end us.

Is this why we have not yet found signs of intelligent life in the universe? Every time a civilization is advanced enough to really screw up (their) planet, inevitably, they do? Fermi Paradox redux.

I think it's a good possible resolution, yeah, generally referred to as 'The Great Filter Hypothesis'.

It is necessary to note, however, that the great filter does not necessarily occur when a civilization achieves some arbitrary technological level.

In fact, it could be at the point of single cell --> multi-cellular organisms or at the point of sexual dimorphism or developing general intelligence and ability to use tools, etc.

I guess it's also possible there are multiple Great Filters...

That's a good point, and you're right of course. In fact I take some hopeful comfort in the notion that while the leap from organic molecules to single-cells might not have been too big, there are some indication that going to multicellular life was a leap that took quite some time. We still have reasons to hope, but we're doing almost all that we can to extinguish that hope.

It's not a particularly good candidate I would think. For example we know what's happening and could theoretically have stopped it but didn't/don't have the will.

The Fermi paradox requires it to be extremely unlikely to survive, but you could imagine scenarios on other worlds where the right kind of political situation was around to stop it.

> but you could imagine scenarios on other worlds where the right kind of political situation was around to stop it.

I can't imagine that. The only evidence I have to date (from a sample size of 1 planet) is that there is next to zero real political will, even if the politicians of the world create additional heat saying they have in fact found the political will.

Because we are not unified and working towards the same goal. Tribalism is our roots and they will be our ends. That is the problem with too many sentient beings-everyone believes they deserve something. Thus no intilligent life unless they are a single entity.

Competition is not the only response to being one entity among many, and it is not even necessarily the most reasonable response. Cooperation is also possible, and it is one of the necessary elements in every human organization, from the family to global cultures. We have civilization because we are to some degree able to cooperate, and if you simply turn up the dial on that trait, it is easy to imagine that other creatures could exist who were even better cooperators - and who would be collectively even more successful because of it.

Sure. The point here, we're not coordinated enough. Not by a long shot.

I'm not arguing here that we are. I'm arguing that it is conceivable that intelligent creatures could exist that were.

Why would such a cooperative require intelligence, never mind high intelligence? We already see such vast cooperatives in fungi, but they have no selection pressures for intelligence. Far from it, competition is the driver that made us "smart".

I'm not saying that cooperative behavior requires intelligence. I'm saying that cooperative behavior is a reasonable and effective choice for creatures intellectually capable of choosing between behavioral strategies, no matter what the evolutionary forces were that developed them to the point of being intelligent.

I feel like your imaginative capacity could stand to be exercised more. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of ways in which intelligent entities could meaningfully differ from us, and which would lead to different political circumstances.

And we ourselves are not that far from being able to deal reasonably with problems like this. If nothing else were different about us, except that average IQ were, say, 120 on the current scale, I think we'd be able to respond sensibly to non-immediate threats.

There is no reason to believe that intelligence, in whatever form it takes, ever stops being energetically expensive. Is it possible to imagine selection pressures that would select for high intelligence over other factors? How harsh can an environment get, or how easy, before something like brute strength or rapidly breeding is always a cheaper strategy?

Some rules are universal, because they're thermodynamic. That's not to say that your species of intelligent individuals is impossible, but it is unlikely. When you really take the time to think through these scenarios, you often find that there is no justification to assume that exceptional intelligence would evolve.

We already know that thermodynamics and evolutionary pressures can allow for intelligent beings with a population average IQ of 100 (on the arbitrary scale we've devised for ourselves) to exist, since we humans do exist. I'm suggesting that a slight increase in that population average might be enough to make a large difference in how we collectively respond to mid- to long-term problems.

If you're arguing against that suggestion, it seems you would have to be arguing that human intelligence exists at a level that is nestled directly up against some kind of hard thermodynamic limit, even though a non-trivial portion of our species already exists on the other side of that line. I don't see how that argument could plausibly be made.

You could liken our situation to yeast in a bottle of wine. Given that comparison, what good would an average 20 iq points do? I don't see how any species could not evolve for conditions of scarcity, and I don't see how sudden abundance wouldn't lead down the same path we're on. If anything smarter would be worse.

But, like you say, we don't know we're screwed, so it's a lot of supposition.

Yeast can't make metaphors, can't understand that they're in a fermenting bottle with limited food and increasing amounts of excreted toxins, and couldn't imagine or implement plans to do anything about that situation even if they could comprehend it. Humans can do all of those things - except, so far, muster the collective political will to take meaningful steps. So I don't know in what sense it would be useful to make that analogy.

If you don't think 20 IQ points make a significant difference, consider some questions: do you believe that the average IQ 100 person is more or less likely than the average IQ 120 person to be concerned about global climate change? What about IQ 100 vs. IQ 80? If IQ numbers have no tangible meaning to you, do you expect the average Walmart shopper to be more or less concerned about climate change than the average graduate student (in any field at all, your choice: agricultural engineering just as much as climatology or gender studies).

"Yeast can't make metaphors, can't understand that they're in a fermenting bottle with limited food and increasing amounts of excreted toxins, and couldn't imagine or implement plans to do anything about that situation even if they could comprehend it. Humans can do all of those things - except, so far, muster the collective political will to take meaningful steps."

you mean the thing that allows any of those other things you listed matter at all?

and with all those abilities, it may make no difference, so there's no evidence that the difference in intelligence between yeast and humans is sufficient to save us. then why would 20 more points do it? and if yeast survive but people don't, what then? the point is in both the case of the yeast in the bottle and the human case our drive for survival kills us when we move into sudden abundance. greater average intelligence would just bring that abundance on faster.

since we can't seem to steer this ship, we're at the mercy of the currents. despite all our metaphors and plans and concern about global climate change we don't seem able to do anything. is there much of a difference in carbon footprint between your average walmart shopper and your average graduate student, concern notwithstanding?

Bridges require foundations, pier columns, truss cables, and roadways in order to function. Each is necessary to the function of the whole; none has priority, and it doesn't make sense to single out any one of them as the thing that allows any of the other things to matter at all. In particular, it doesn't make sense to point at a bridge under construction that doesn't have the final piece in place yet, sneer at it because it doesn't have that piece, and suggest that it's pretty much exactly the same as no bridge at all.

20 points on average might push enough people from "unable to genuinely perceive long-term threats as threats" to "able to genuinely perceive long-term threats as threats", that it would move us past the political tipping point of collectively caring enough about doing something meaningful to both figure out what to do (devote money and resources to research) and to do it.

Individual carbon footprints are not meaningful - it doesn't matter how well an individual paddles their canoe when that canoe is in a swimming pool on a cruise liner. What matters is how the liner is piloted. If all people suddenly disappeared off the earth, except for those people who happened to be standing in Walmarts at the time, do you think that society would be better or worse at recognizing and handling abstract, long-term threats like global warming than the society composed only of graduate students would be?

Sorry, but you conflate IQ with individual values that are acquired mainly through culture and education. A higher IQ does not automatically mean that a person will care about global problems that have no immediate negative effect on their own life, affect everyones wellbeing in the long run and are hard to solve. Or that a society with a higher average IQ will magically create political and economical structures that reward working towards common good instead of rent seeking.

Case in point - Silicon Valley has probably an average IQ around 120-130. How many truly planet-saving innovations have been created there? I mean, you fail to eradicate powerty in SF, your backyard. Because why bother if creating ever new and exciting ways to share cat pictures is infinitely more personally rewarding in the short run and who gives a f about anything else?

So, my point is, higher IQ is not a solution in and of itself, since human nature - instinct to care about oneself first and foremost, will still be present. This instinct can be only tamed by education, culture and political and social structures that promote common good. The chances that a society will evolve these kinds of structures is a toss-up. It is a lot more likely that the outcome will be exactly the same as what we see now - much like adding a 1.2 multiplier to all stats for both mobs and pcs in a computer game - numbers are different, but it is still the same game.

The key is culture, and education, and conscious work towards better social, economic and political structures. But I am quite sure that we will all kill ourselves a long time before any of that will happen.

I'm not conflating IQ with values, I'm arguing that as average IQ goes up, the percentage of the population who will recognize that certain problems of non-immediate import will inevitably become immediate, personal problems, will also go up.

I agree with you that the mechanisms through which greater awareness and active concern for seemingly abstract problems will trickle into the global zeitgeist are things like education, culture, and social/political structures. But where do those come from, and what allows people to perceive their value and meaning? You can't teach people things that you don't understand, and they can't learn things that they can't understand. Better cultural and social structures are a result of better understanding; better understanding is more common with brains that are better able to perceive patterns and project consequences.

I see your point. I would argue, howevever, that very few of the issues we are facing at the moment stem from lack of understanding. We have most of the knowledge we require to instantiate a radically better-off civilisation, and, most importantly, we have the tools to continue gathering and applying said knowledge and iterate on said civilisation.

But we choose not to. There are loads of VERY smart people in the top positions of gigantic multinationals. They do not lack for IQ, or for information that without a shadow of doubt informs them about the long-term consequences of their actions. They choose, daily, to apply their IQ and information not to create solutions that would benefit humanity as a whole, but to maximize the short-term gains for themselves and (hopefully) their shareholders. The reasons for this behaviour are multitudinous and complex, but I would argue that lack of IQ is not a major contributing factor, quite the opposite.

And all that could still fall in the category of "fine, whatever", if in their greed they would not actively destroy the education system already in place, because people who lack basic knowledge and tools for critical thinking are that much easier to manipulate. Again, it is not the lack of IQ that is the issue, it is the knowledge and exercise it has been exposed to. I myself have an IQ well above average (Mensa member), but before I found out about heuristics, biases and critical thinking, and learned to apply them, I was an easy prey for "mediums", "spiritual guides" and other "new age" crap.

TL;DR people are easy to manipulate regardless of their IQ, if they haven't had an opportunity to learn to use it.

> I would argue, however, that very few of the issues we are facing at the moment stem from lack of understanding.

My 11 year old nephew sprained his ankle a few weeks ago playing basketball, badly enough that he started walking in an odd way to compensate for the discomfort. He kept playing sports, including soccer on a rough grass field, every day at school recess, despite us having talks several times about how he needs to stay off it and let it recover or else he risks causing lasting damage. He nods and says, "I know" when I tell him that, but he keeps doing it. I think we are collectively much the same: we 'know', but we don't really believe that the abstract, distant bad thing will ever really happen to us.That is not understanding. That is lip service.

My argument isn't that IQ makes every individual behave better - it is the statistical argument that if the population average went up 20 points (and that number is one I just threw out, but I do think it's close), then we might cross a tipping point where there would then be enough people who take abstract, distant bad things seriously enough to take meaningful action, to form a significantly politically effective bloc.

Massive changes do happen. But - the changes are through economics and culture, not through politics. Culture guides the long term behaviours in a civilization, economics play key part in what resources they have to use, politics only guide the short term effects generally.

I agree, it's unlikely a massive change can happen through a political shift (which happen only generally in revolutions and civil wars). A cultural change, however, is completely feasible.

If Facebook for instance turned into a zero-carbon marketing machine I'm pretty sure they could convince the planet to shift gears in consumption. Is the any plausible scenario where they would do this? I suppose if the global catastrophe could be computed as certainly as a trajectory of a asteroid that was about to hit earth - maybe.

Can we make them do that somehow?

The problem is that any race gets increasingly powerful as technology and science improve, so it takes a smaller and smaller mistake to end us all. Also, the population of those who are able to end us increases. Right now very few people have the ability to save or destroy us. One day every human might be able to, unless we hand the keys to the robots and we aren't certain how that'll play out.

Edit: and we affect our environment more, which is always a battle with our level of understanding to manage that. Right now it's the climate. One day it could be the sun.

>Right now very few people have the ability to save or destroy us. One day every human might be able to, unless we hand the keys to the robots and we aren't certain how that'll play out.

Ironically one of the more likely ways an individual could end humanity (in the future) is via the haphazard or malicious creation of said robots.

If all it takes is someone to execute a bootstrapping process on a large amount of computers, we're in trouble. There's no 100% reliable way to prevent that short of what you said: handing over the keys. It would require the creation of an entity so omnipotent and powerful that it may as well be considered a god.

Another way to look at it is the creation of an operating system kernel for humanity itself, with each individual human being akin to a user-land process.

What if it's not lack of will but game theory? Maybe it's actually impossible for a large complex system to act against these trends because there exists no stable game strategy for the kind of large-scale cooperation that is necessary?

I can think of two counter-examples:

* Polio eradication

* The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer/Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer

Both are examples of multi-state cooperation that dealt with serious world-spanning issues, the Polio eradication has had the most immediate impact, but Ozone Layer depletion has been checked and the numbers will trend down to 1980s levels over the next 20 years.

I don't think polio eradication is a good counter-example. There were no strong economic forces advocating for the status quo; the iron lung industry was quite small.

There are still polio cases today but pretty much only in areas ruled by death cults who don't care whether their people live or die. So game theory isn't a factor there.

Yes I think this is the reason.

At least for our class of life: organic. Organic life naturally evolved & so all intelligent organic life lives on top of a pile of stored chemical energy (oil / coal / methane gas)

Organic life evolves through competition and so when chemical energy is discovered it is rapidly used, most often faster than such intelligent life can figure out what a truly bad idea that is.

Once they realize, it's too late. Runaway climate change is occurring. And this ends the intelligent life.

No. We did not find any signs, because Universe is very very very very very big, live is very very rare and signal speed is finite. Just look up some visualisation how far our own radio signals have spread since the first were transmitted — they cover just a tiny volume of space.

Also, another problem that you easily put yourself into and that we did as well, besides the climate change, is that our world is built on non-renewable resources. Easy, abundant access to oil was essential to kickstart the current society as this only demands low tech solutions for success. Could humanity do the same with the current resources if we were forced to start over?

Yes, that's the [Toolmaker Koan][0].

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Toolmaker-Koan-John-McLoughlin/dp/067...

I agree. This is where the bottleneck is. What really hurts for me is knowing just how close we are but how many are willfully choosing to stay in the dark. We really could make the planet habitable for humans for at least a few more centuries while we become multiplanetary but inertia is our biggest obstacle right now, not lack of technology or information.

How would any of these things end us? We've have world war II. That didn't make a dent in the population.

Famine and drought would be localized so we can use international trade to smooth them over, just like we currently do. For long term failures, there will always be other arable places to grow crops, they just might be fewer or more inconvenient than they currently are, and they'll change at an easy human scale speed. China has a 300,000,000 migrant worker population. That's all of the US population migrating every year!

We currently produce far more food than we need, so even losing a big part of production capacity will still leave us with enough to eat, but perhaps with less meat or seafood for poor people.

I think what the point of the parent is saying is that we have never witnessed the likes of something like this and that our system is more fragile than we think. Previous wars and other events have all been leading up to "the big one". We can see it beginning to happen in what you mentioned above or in smaller instances.

Also saying that poor people can just not eat meat or seafood seems a bit distasteful; not that you might be wrong.

>>Previous wars and other events have all been leading up to "the big one".

WW2 was quite dangerous in the sense, it put a very serious problem in front. Say you nuke a nation, the nation refuses to surrender. The issue is you need to keep nuking till you finish them off. That will not just finish off your enemies but a lot of planet along the way.

Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan#Broadcast_o...

The key in the above statement is : "Should we continue to fight".

Notice how 'continuing to fight' is an option there. This sort of stuff is scary as it is.

You can't exactly defeat enemies by weapons if they refuse to give up. The only option then is continue, you then cause larger damage to the planet and biological species.

3-4% of world population is a dent. But non-nuclear/non-biological wars are hardly civilization ending events.

Things like deaths of mesoamerican civs due to destroying their environment http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/03/0313_030313_.... Or all of america after 2nd european invasion. Ever hear of the mississippi mound builders? I'd expect not since there civ was totally wiped out.

And civ bending doesn't mean everyone's dead. Just large enough population drop to break the institutions and social order supported by that population.

The freakiest one in Peter Watts' Echopraxia is the firestorms.

I have to get around to reading those books... I have Blindsight sitting on a shelf.

I love his ideas, but sometimes they swamp the action. There's less of that in Echopraxia than in Blindsight, as a response to feedback. But Blindsight gives you back story for Echopraxia.

After you've read them, do check out https://www.reddit.com/r/SF_Book_Club/comments/2hzpmt/echopr... .

Which one should you read first?

Even if every bit of the icecaps melt, ocean levels won't even come close to ending civilization.

The process is potentially self-reinforcing as the methane is frozen or trapped in ice so after reaching some tipping point the volume/time released could increase massively.

Where did you get that? Every link I've ever seen indicates that the half-life is 7-9 years.

Regardless of what the half-life is, what you say is true about the concentration of methane. It is so much better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, though, that even over a 100 year time frame, it will warm the earth 34 times more than carbon dioxide would. (https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...)

CO2 concentrations went from 280,000 to ~404,000ppb CH4 concentrations went from 700 to 1,850.

So if you use 34x that 1,000ppb is only 39,000 vs 124,000 meaning it's significantly less important overall contribution. It would need to reach ~4,347ppb to cause as much impact as CO2 has which is in nobody's projections that I have seen.

PS: "Methane has a large effect (24 times as strong as carbon dioxide per unit mole) for a brief period (having an estimated lifetime of 8.9±0.6 years in the atmosphere)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane So, if it's lifetime is ~8.3-9.5 years it's half life is around 1/2 that. However, I have also seen a lot of other numbers tossed around and most people want to make it seem much more important even if it's been rising very slowly.

Okay, the half-life of methane is 7-9 years. Not the lifetime.

The 34x potential I gave is for methane over a hundred years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential

It's incredibly potent stuff, so much that despite the relatively quick breakdown, an initial mass of methane will have a warming effect that is 20-35x that of an equivalent mass of carbon dioxide over a century. GWP numbers take the brief half-life of methane into account when calculated. You're making the mistake of looking at the absolute quantity of methane and short half-life, and thinking that it couldn't possibly have much of an effect. Well, people have already run the numbers, and it can have a huge effect.

Current rates of methane leaks from mining natural gas could very well offset the benefits of moving away from coal: http://blog.nature.org/science/2016/06/24/natural-gas-coal-l...

Methane's very bad news, even in small quantities.

The risk is from 100s's of Gigatons which is a extremely massive quantity. How much of that is going to be liberated and how soon has a massive impact on estimates.

Anyway, your first link says " In the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, methane has a lifetime of 12.4 years" (If that's X ln(2) for half life it's 8.6 years)

"This means that a methane emission will have 28 times the impact on temperature of a carbon dioxide emission of the same mass over the following 100 years." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane

PS: As to small quantities, we are talking about billions of tons of a gas.

The point of everything I have said is that it would take only a small quantity of methane, relatively speaking, to make a significant contribution to global warming. You don't need to emit as much methane as would match all the warming caused by current levels of CO2. Even an extra tenth of a degree is bad news. Every tenth of a degree shaves off a decade from the time we have to fix our planet. Any significant source of greenhouse gases.

Seven years. And after that you get carbon dioxide (& water)

Source? Wikipedia says: "an estimated lifetime of 8.9±0.6 years in the atmosphere." Which suggests a half life of 1/2 that.

A half-life describes an asymptotic curve. You don't just divide a "lifetime" by 2.

1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16... = 2 so it's not that far off as an approximation but yea 1/LN(2) = 1.44 so the low number is 5 point something years and the high is 6 point something years.

Maybe my math is simplistic, but a half life of 5 years gives a life expectancy of ~7 years (5 years / ln 2).

If 50x current methane levels are released over 100 years, then at steady state you have added 0.5x/year * 7 years, or 3.5x current methane levels, bringing the total to 4.5x.

That's a bit too simplistic for my taste, but I think you're on the right track.

Exponential decay implies that the rate at which methane disappears is equal to the total amount divided by the average lifetime, so with an additional 0.5 / year, you reach a steady state when (total amount / average lifetime) = (0.5 / year), hence when the total amount is 3.5. Assuming we already were in a steady state initially there should be an additional 1/7 / year from natural sources bringing the total to 4.5.

Untrue and misleading. The more important GWP half-life (neither concentration lifetime nor concentration half-life) is on the order of 50 years.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zuRBO1uTI70/T8A40kdMWBI/AAAAAAAAC9...

That's a graph of total heat gain / time which does not have a half-life. If you take A/10 years the A/20years them A/30 years... the graph looks like that, but you not getting warming in years 10-20 just averaging over longer time periods. Basically, it's graphing a short spike in temperatures and a rapid return to normalcy as a much slower decay.

In layman's terms, how much are we screwed without hope of a solution, and what is the rough timeframe before the evening news starts looking like "The Day After Tomorrow?"

I'm wondering the same thing. Should I start blowing through my 401k money now or what?

Save it for your ticket to mars.

Better save it for anti aging supplements first. Easier to build climate resistant infrastructure here than on Mars.

But as a member of the .01% I'd rather only build new infrastructure where I can guarantee only myself and select others will be able to utilize it. I wouldn't want to waste my money on something that might be ended up being used by the public.

Can't tell if this was sarcasm or a serious statement.

That depends on whether you have a bunker in New Zealand or not.

New Zealand could be in trouble if ocean acidification happens or weather patterns cause more drought (~80% hydro for energy generation and the arable land relies upon high rainfall).

Can there even be non-localised drought on a small island the size of New Zealand? The only significant geographical feature in the North Island (where most people live) is 3 mountains right in the middle.

New Zealand is small enough that a localized drought can have significant impact. Most of the people do indeed live in the North Island but most of the power is generated in the South Island, particularly around the Mackenzie Basin/Otago area (dry highlands).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_New_... - sort the hydroelectric by capacity - most of the major dams are in this area.

New Zealand? Real players build their own islands.

The only people going to Mars for the foreseeable future will be those with explicitly useful skills that can only be done in person. The 0.01% are going to be dead weight up there unless they have such a skill. And given it's a one-way ticket... how much social pull will the 0.01% have over the people with actual skills.

You may be a multibillionaire on earth, but being able to sell widgets to the masses isn't a skill that's going to be needed (or appreciated) on Mars for quite a while. Cut off from your wealth, you're just another mouth to feed.

More importantly if the population of earth is facing critical systems collapse, what are the odds of the next critical resupply mission the Mars colony actually launching. It's not like a martian colony would be self sufficient anytime soon.

We added too much CO2 to atmosphere so we'll move to a planet with an atmosphere of 100% CO2... sounds like a plan!

The problem isn't CO₂. The problem is the roaming hordes of zomb^H^H^H^Hpeople displaced by rising ocean levels and subsequent collapse of civilized society. Mars doesn't have that :).

If you can' beat them, join them?

You'll be fine.

If you care about your offspring, try not to reproduce. With the various positive feedback loops (permafrost methane, arctic albedo, antarctic ice shelves), things are going to get ugly.

It doesn't make sense to blow the money by yourself. Send me some.

And while you're at it, you might want to cancel any insurance that you have. Afterall, what's the point? That will make more money available to blow.

Our grandchildren are in for tough times. Unless a political miracle occurs. Even then, it might be too late.

More likely our models will turn out to be slightly wrong and it won't be as apocalyptic as we thought and we'll adjust according to our observed reality.

What's the relative expected utility of assuming your best model is actually not as good as speculation?

Are we talking long term expectations or in the next quarterly budget? Because if the budget looks good I'm up for a raise.

Every single time the models have turned out to be wrong it's always been that they've been overly optimistic.

Not once has there been an "oh, it wasn't as bad as we thought" moment. It's always worse.

It's going to be bad. A little panic is not a bad thing. If we panic for nothing that's better than brushing it off and having the worst possible outcome unfold because of inaction.

> It's going to be bad. A little panic is not a bad thing.

It's always lose/lose for the skeptics:

Scenario A: skeptics were wrong - "burn them at the stake, they screwed us all over!"

Scenario B: skeptics were right - "well, they got lucky. It wasn't as apocalyptic as experts were claiming. They were still wrong to have rejected the evidence at hand and I was still right to have believed the evidence at hand"

If reducing emissions means harming economies and impoverishing and killing people, then if skeptics are right, "you" will have caused needless destruction.

If preventing climate change didn't cost anything, then nobody would be against it. But it will be pretty expensive and somebody will have to suffer to pay for that. That somebody probably doesn't want us to prevent it because they may well lose out, even in the long term.

Do you use any power generated by coal? Do you use a car or bus? Do you eat meat? If you do any of those things, it means preventing climate change is too expensive for you.

Here's the logic:

Scenario A: We spend a ton of money and resources on combating climate change. Energy and fuel become more expensive. There is economic crisis in some areas of the word. There is large scale refugee migration. Some small proxy wars break out. We manage to stem climate change and even slightly reverse it back to a natural level. We keep our modern technology. We keep most of the cultural status quo. Maybe a couple hundred million people lose their lives due to indirect consequences. The Earth still spins. Coastal cities aren't underwater. There is no global famine. Climate change skeptics will complain that combating climate change was a bad idea because they didn't see the worst of it.

Scenario B: We decide to not try and combat climate change. We don't spend any money on it. We think "everything will work out". Everything goes on just like normal for a few decades. Climate change skeptics are saying "I told you so." The economy prospers. Technology improves. We continue our dependence on fossil fuels, continuously pumping carbon into the atmosphere. We continue dumping waste into the ocean. The permafrost continues to melt more and more every year. It's all so gradual that barely anyone notices. Coastal cliff faces in California start eroding and taking beach front property with them as the sea level rises. Farms at lower latitudes start having more and more of a difficult time producing good yields. There is less snow falling in the mountains meaning that come spring time there is less melt. This causes droughts in many parts of the world. This drought starts to impact farmers. The global food supply dwindles. We are noticing massive numbers of oceanic lifeforms start to die off. Fisheries are not able to keep up with the demand. There isn't enough feed for livestock. The global food supply falls even lower. The drought is getting worse over the years due to less snow melt. Smaller countries with sub-par infrastructure start seeing a massive exodus of their population. These refugees migrate to large developed nations causing cultural strife and putting a strain on their economy and food supply. This cultural and economic strain leads to warfare. This warfare leads to even larger migrations. Soon we have world war 3 in the midst of the greatest global famine and drought the world has ever seen. Billions of people die. Human civilization as we know it is destroyed. We regress culturally and technologically.

This is just one set of possible scenarios. So, I ask you; Why not spend a little bit of money now and avoid what is essentially the apocalypse later? Let's say I'm wrong. Let's say scenario B could never happen and climate change isn't as bad as we think it is. Well, you have insurance on your house, don't you? Your car? Think of combating climate change like car insurance. Even if an accident is unlikely, it's still nice to know that you have it covered if it does happen.

> If reducing emissions means harming economies and impoverishing and killing people...

It doesn't. It just means shifting employment from one class of jobs to another class of jobs. Either you have people mining coal, or you have people making renewable power. Either you have people digging for oil, or you have people building batteries for elecric cars. You can steer the private sector with subsidies and incentives just as the have for the last hundred years.

Reducing emissions does not mean reducing employment. It means shifting. If you have two possible jobs that pay equally, one with high emissions and one with lower, incentivize the lower one. A carbon tax mechanism is one way to price the cost of emissions into the job and that naturally makes the lower emission one more rewarding.

> Do you use any power generated by coal?

No. We got off of coal about a decade ago. Now it's mostly nuclear, hydro-electric, and for boost, natural gas. The power company was able to phase out coal power plants ahead of schedule becaue power consumption has been declining, everything is getting more efficient.

> Do you use a car or bus?

I walk.

> Do you eat meat?

Mostly chicken, occasionally fish. Some people eat astounding amounts of red meat and they're the ones that can move the needle the most. If they cut back by 20% that's a huge shift. If I cut back by 20% it's irrelvant.

> ...a political miracle occurs.

You mean the Republicans get voted out of office completely and the other party isn't completely incompetent? On that day.

I'm not sure we can blame it on the politicians, since they're just a reflection of ourselves.

US politicians are not, by comparison with other modern democracies, a particularly good reflection of the population, even in terms of publicly stated views on political issues of high salience (you know, the things on which politicians in an ideal representative democracy would be a reflection of the citizenry.)

And the politicians actively choose to maintain, and reinforce, the policies and actions which contribute to that difference.

It's all part of some greater force. Elements like the Koch Brothers, the Republican party, and the extreme right-wing media powered by Fox News that whips up the hard-line Christian crowd drive this ridiculous narrative that resources are infinite and "god will provide".

They couldn't be more wrong.

I think we might be about to see the political miracle you're hoping for.

The Dems are already cleaning up their act, and if the system works, and Trump is impeached for treason, the GOP will need to clean house too.

We might just end up with an actual, honest to goodness, functioning democracy in the U.S. as politicians seek to regain trust.

I honestly thought Bush had doomed the Republicans for a generation, but all that got wiped away somehow. Two wars and a fucked world economy? Can Trump top that?

Please stop with this tangent. grandparent is asking a question almost every average person is asking: what is the impact on me? and you basically started an entirely new unrelated subthread.

It's not a terrible diversion, but it is very US-centric.

Currently the fossil fuels industries and other "old school" extraction industries tend to align with the Republican party in the United States.

The issue is less "Republican party" and more those certain industries that stubbornly resist the notion a concept that could damage their businesses. I get the impression, for instance, that the much-maligned Koch family privately is aware of climate change. However, being in an industry that would be impacted by any regulatory push, they put up all psychological blinders to not only deny it -- but actively pursue an agenda against it. And they are not the only extraction industry leaders that do this.

That Upton Sinclair quote comes to mind: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it".

I do not know if there is a similar situation in other countries; it's going to take more than just United States industry direction to slow down climate change, after all.

I'm sorry, did another political party just designate the former head of an oil company as Secretary of State, or did they take someone actively suing the EPA the head of the EPA? Is there any other party on the planet receiving massive amounts of money from coal companies?

This is not unrelated. This is directly related.

If the US was some little country in the Pacific where they could do whatever they wanted with little consequence it wouldn't matter, but they're not. They're one of the largest polluters in the world and the largest economy, so it's absolutely important that they steer in the right direction to avoid disaster.

the grandfather is drowning and is asking "will i survive?" and you are basically in high ground yelling "blame the politicians!".

I answered the second question here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13769896

Methane release will be followed by an increase in methanotrophs and probably some weird algae blooms.

Nature is fairly dynamic, especially at the prokaryotic level.

"the Earth's most severe known extinction event, with up to 96% of all marine species[6][7] and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species becoming extinct.[8] It is the only known mass extinction of insects.[9][10] Some 57% of all families and 83% of all genera became extinct. Because so much biodiversity was lost, the recovery of life on Earth took significantly longer than after any other extinction event,[6] possibly up to 10 million years"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extin...

Maybe it's methane, maybe not.

I wonder how many of these bubbles are harvestable into useful fuel? Prevent a crisis and stockpile fuel at the same time? Obviously it's nicer if we could get everyone to sign the Kyoto treaty but ...

[Unrelated: Good to see you're still around; feel free to drop by EFnet again sometime.]

I've thought about this, but I think there's a serious question as to whether humans can even muster an effort on the scale that would be required to harvest and prevent release into the atmosphere.

Take ocean clathrates, for example. At a certain point, the ocean may become warm enough to destabilize them. What do we do in that case? Put up collection tents over the ocean that are millions of square kilometers large? The problem just doesn't seem tractable.

But who knows? I'm certainly not the sort of engineer that is qualified to answer these questions.

Where're you going to store that much gas?

mentioned in a sibling comment to yours, but maybe we can just burn it? AFAIK 1 CH4 turns into 1 CO2 when burned, and that might be better

from what i understand, just burning it would improve the situation too. bearing in mind that i don't know much about chemistry and this is entirely from google: when burned, 1 CH4 turns into 1 CO2 and 2 H2O, so you essentially trade CH4 for CO2.

that ignores the whole CH4 being a short term problem thing though...

I apologize for not watching the video, but what sort of effects will these increased levels have on humans, plants, and other life on the planet? It doesn't sound like it would be beneficial.

Extinction for the most part

For what it's worth, your "longer video" is just two copies of the shorter video spliced together. Did you mean to provide another link there?

I'm sorry, that was not my intent. I was trying to find another video from the same conference but I may have to upload it myself. To make up for it, here is a link to the interesting/informative YouTube channel of Paul Beckwith, a climate scientist at the University of Ottawa: https://www.youtube.com/user/PaulHBeckwith/videos

Would you happen to know, what percentage of temperature increase due to greenhouse effect is caused by methane right now?

Isn't Wikipedia great? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas)

|Water vapor and clouds |36–72% |

|Carbon dioxide | 9–26% |

|Methane | 4–9% |

|Ozone | 3–7% |

Ok, so release of 50 gigatons of CH4 means 10x increase in atmospheric CH4, then we are looking at around 50% contribution to greenhouse effect from CH4 after that I guess.

That's basically double of what CO2 contributes today, what will also increase the amount of water in the atmosphere.

But CH4 is short lived, so the most important question is how fast it will be emitted. (And the second may be: could we make it even shorter lived?)

That's totally wild. I hadn't heard about this before.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com