No one gives a fuck about Climate Change | Hacker News Reader

No one gives a fuck about Climate Change

titojankowski.com

17 pointstitojankowski10 comments

Fousing on CO2 may give that kind of result, but if you focus on another indicator, like say, sea ice, there's also charts for days, e.g.:

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

Truth is that CO2, unlike financial indicators, increase monotonously, and even big changes at the national scale only introduce very subtle and gradual changes to it. However, other indicators change much faster (and not as monotonically).

I wonder how we could build more of a story around "monotonous" datasets. What events could be called out on a monthly chart like https://99bitcoins.com A volcano? An explosion? A factory fire? A change in fuel policies?

The problem with CO2 is that it's a delayed process. We may not see the results globally of changes in CO2 until years later; unless it's a very localized event that affects the monitoring station https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/2016/08/31/br.... And even then, those small blips will be hard to call out/notice on a global scale (i.e. if we factored in multiple monitoring stations). Since most shorter term changes in CO2 will be localized and temporary, you're going to run into https://xkcd.com/1138/.

That's not to say that it wouldn't be a good idea to do, if we could attribute local events to local anomalies in CO2 we might be able to get people "incentivized" to get something that monitors it in their area and get some sort of gamification of groups trying to get their numbers lower.

Reminds me of those visualizations designed for magnifying tiny changes, Eulerian Video Magnification: https://youtu.be/ONZcjs1Pjmk

Perhaps a potential application?

Focusing time on climate change has the benefit of being right. This is good for the collective.

Focusing on blockchains has the benefit of being potentially profitable. This is good for the individual trying to get ahead of their competition in the rat race of life.

Guess which incentivizes human behavior more?

Proof of work mining always struck me as very close to being ideal energy credits.

If cheap energy is available then mining will be cheap, and thus you get cheaper coins and cheaper fees, leading to inflation (and more spending). On the other hand if energy becomes scarce, the currency will become more scarce and expensive so you get deflation (and more saving). It looks like (in theory) a nice feedback that encourages development of cheap/decentralized energy sources.

Yea totally, cheap energy = cheap compute = cheap mining

I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not. If so, what is wrong with the reasoning?

Not sarcastic at all! That's how it could work. If you had free electricity, mining would be awesome sauce: http://www.coindesk.com/microscope-economic-environmental-co...

Haha yea totally. How might we make tracking CO2 profitable? One of those betting sites like the presidential election?

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/writeup/us_president...!

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