The Brutal Truth About Climate Change
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
There is a fixed sum of yearly Global GDP we'd need to spend to fix this. It may be unknown, but that doesn't make it less existent. Estimating it has been a whole area of work, but we haven't found a system to actually pay down that planetary tech-debt. Carbon Engineering can get a ton of carbon out of the atmosphere for roughly 100$. Driving down that price further while aggressively scaling the deployments of that technology would be one engineering solution.
But the political, economical and possibly even legal parts of this stay unsolved. Who's working on this, how are they even paid?
If there was an asteroid heading for earth and we could stop it but the rocket was going to cost 100 trillion dollars, would it be built?
But you are completely underlining my argument. I don't know if the rocket would get built.
Such an important project should transcend money. Governments should provide the manpower to build the rocket, companies provide the parts for free, scientists work Pro bono to get it done and save the planet. Otherwise we all die.
I would volunteer to work for free to build that rocket, if my skills would help.
But even given such a tangible, measurable, timetablable thing as a rock coming to crush us, i have my doubts.
I guess you're not optimistic of any solution then.
GP agrees that there is a cost, however known or unknown. But also argues that even if it were trivial, countries and other actors wouldbe fighting over it.
Your point is far less clear.
As of right now we seem set to power right past Paris agreements, so 1.5 or 2 degrees is just wishful thinking.
Remembering the ozone crisis, and subsequent international agreements, that appeared to be the last occasion public policy and international politics actually worked anything like "as intended". That action came rather slowly, and there were attempts to evade the bans of CFCs doesn't change this.
Which leaves us with almost nothing with which to solve this more pressing issue.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97... and others.
Global carbon emissions are, say, 10B tonnes per year.
At $100 to extract a tonne of carbon, that's $1T per year to get to zero emissions.
i.e. at a tax of just 1.3% of global GDP, we could extract ourselves from the shit.
This seems cheap at the price. It would cost a lot more to fight any decent war.
Yet like the proverbial frog in the boiling water, we'll most likely sit here as things heat up, not taking action because it all seems too hard or not yet an urgent problem.
We're fucked.
I can kind of see the "methane fireballs" (I'm guessing, the methane trapped under the tundra escaping when the permafrost melts and then igniting because, er, the ambient temperature reaches the methane auto-ignition point at 600 ⁰C?) but how does the soil get to be radioactive, because of climate change?
I think this is a weee bit exaggerated.
Several of those represent scenarios on which radioactive soil might be present in areas, limited or otherwise.
Equally, why stop at thermonuclear war brought on by economic instability, brought on by climate change? We can go all the way and imagine hostlie aliens taking over the Earth now that humanity is nearly wiped out by the rising temperatures.
There's a point at which predicting the future stops and imagining it begins, and that stuff about methane fireballs and radioactive soil seems to be over it.
That was not the question, or assertion.
...hostile aliens taking over the Earth...
That is an uncorrelated exogenous risk.
As I said above, and for wwhich there is ample historical evidence and contemporary risk analysis by governments, militaries, and others, the second- and higher-order consequences of climate change include a wide range of effects commensurate with the scenario as spelled out in TFA's review.
More generally, one can divide risks into endogenous, or correlated, scenarios, and exogenous, or uncorrolated ones. I and Vollmann's view is that the first set seems larger than is generally realised.
I've gone from hoping science will save them, to hoping we have a decade to make a few happy memories before things get truly awful.
The only way I've been able to find peace lately is to think about how the universe will eventually collapse on itself in a few billion years, and to try to put human history and my family's lives in context with that. Both are tiny points of data on a chart.
Hope might land you in a worse situation than otherwise.
And if your prospects are grim, it is better to understand that, than deny it.
He's not so hopeful about the environment, either.
High emissions come from a monetary economy with a requirement of profit. Soon each remaining part of the world outside that economy will be a part of it, because this is how the monetary economy expands: putting regions "outside" under it's control. I just don't understand how people are sanguine that "now" it's "fine" because the rapidly expanding populations are outside of regions with intensive economic development, because very soon they will be inside such regions, either because a capital-intensive region enveloped them (no more free sheep grazing on the meadow, etc) or because the need for money in some area of their lives drove them into a capital-intensive region (favelas, etc.).
The harsher reality of the billions of people coming out of poverty is that many more people will be increasing their climate impact.
Optimism tends to be synonymous with ignorance.
A century ago everything was organic. There were no plastics to buy on a daily basis, there was no glyphosate in food. There might have been tincture of arsenic and other nasties, food might have not been affordable and so on, but progress for the better does not mean that everything is better. What point is there if things are better but everything is polluted?
I do not believe that community has got better over the last century, before the television made its appearance in every front room people did go out for their entertainment a lot more. Village halls, church buildings and public houses used to be where people would go to participate in things. The world was not a spectacle to be watched. Today it mostly is.
We also live in an age where the motorcar and planes are omnipresent. Kids used to play in the street, now they have Snapchat. One day of playing in the street - even if bullied - is worth an eternity of Snapchat, even if not 'cyber-bullied'. Cars also have a way of killing all forms of life, not just people's pets but every life form that is not well versed in the Green Cross Code. The billion or so car drivers think it is their divine right to right of way, that climate change does not concern them and that bicycles are for kids.
As for the wonders of scientific advances and breakthroughs, the ancients in Greece, Persia and elsewhere worked out all the difficult maths. But 99% of people get lost at the mention of cosine and would not be able to solve a simultaneous equation even if their life depended on it.
Even this longer, healthier lifespan you speak of is questionable. Who doesn't have elderly relatives that have been on some kind of life support for decades? Fed through a straw, needing a bed hoist, this might be better than dead, but if the Alzheimer's has set in does it even matter? This extended life also ties up the potential of younger generations, care workers who pop by three times a day do not come for free, they too have potential and, whilst they are doing the bed hoist thing, they are not writing the next War And Peace or spending time with their own family.
I am playing devil's advocate here, however, we live in an era of Trump and maximal human stupidity. The baby boomer generation had a better gig in the last century.
It is either save for retirement or save for a house.
Our "amazing creativity" might help us in the future, but there are much simpler and more effective things to do, right now, such as STOP BURNING COAL. What we really need now is more like political willpower.