Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040 | Hacker News Reader

Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040

nytimes.com

226 pointsstablemap167 comments

We are not going to get anywhere until those that benefit from any action pay. Those that will benefit from any action are mostly not even born yet.

Imagine if the people of the future living in a trashed world could travel back in time and pay us to do something now. How much would they be willing to pay? Probably far more than it would cost to fix. All they would need to do is invent a time machine and they could come back to now, pay us to fix the problems, and they get to live in an intact world.

Given we haven’t had too many visitors from the future flashing the Benjamins around, time machines are likely impossible. We do however have a magic way of allowing the future to pay for actions now as long as we act on their behalf. This magic is called long-term zero-coupon bonds [0]. The idea is we issue a whole lot of zero coupon bonds due in 50 years (or more), use the money to decarbonise the economy and pay off the owners of all the carbon, and the leave it to the future to pay the debt with an intact world.

I gave a talk on this idea a bit over 10 years ago which I have up on my blog if anyone is interested [1].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-coupon_bond

1. https://www.tillett.info/2015/12/13/preventing-global-climat...

Interesting, but how is this different from just issuing treasury bonds? I guess my question is, how does it relate to climate specifically? Is the difference just that we issue a crap ton of them now and only use the money to pay for climate related things?

I guess the bigger question too is what do we spend them on? Is anyone aware of a feasible, “go to market” plan that could actually “fix” climate change if we had, say, 1 trillion dollars to spend on it? (Or whatever the number is)

Doomsaying is frequently accompanied by monetary schemes.

I go into more detail on my blog about why zero-coupon bonds.

What do we spend it on? The first place is buying up all the fossil fuel and preventing it from being burnt. Paying off the owners of the fossil fuel is the essential step to removing the political opposition to doing something about climate change. Once that is tackled then we just have to scale out the technology we already have to generate energy that doesn't emit greenhouse gases.

> We are not going to get anywhere until ...

In most advanced countries, climate change is accepted and the problem and risks are being mitigated. AFAIK, the countries that refuse to act, such as the U.S., are the exceptions.

I wish this was true, but even the USA alone is enough to destroy the world. We need a new approach.

Even in the countries that have accepted it, the response is less than adequate. But yes, it's shameful where the US sits on this, and shameful that interests in the US seek to make climate change a partisan issue and spread misinformation.

Where the US sits on this politically, or sits in practice?

In practice, the US has cut emissions more than any signer of the Paris Accords. That's very much not shameful in my book.

> the US has cut emissions more than any signer of the Paris Accords

Can you provide some basis for this claim? It's the first time I've heard it.

Um... not immediately. I have heard it several times, but I can't cite a source.

We'd need a graph of carbon emissions by nation, over time. I'm sure the data is out there, but I'm not sure where...

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/

As you can see, the US response is critically deficient.

Either time machines are impossible, or there are no people left in the future to invent one.

I hope the former and not later is true.

I prefer a third possibility -- that time machines are possible, but can only travel back in a non-recursive manner for a limited sliding window. And we haven't arrived at the boundary of that window yet.

Or that it sends you to another dimension, or that the people who do time travel know that if they do anything, they'll change everything so that they won't exist ?

Defining every single social transaction in terms of "Who pays?" is the problem.

Setting fire to the planet is just one of many symptoms which suggests this moral basis has one or two rather large bugs.

Well this may be so, but I would rather solve one large problem at a time than two.

A century worth of wars, proxy wars have been fought to put capitalism the supreme form global economics.

And now people are supposed to magically think differently?

We need honest cooperation and rational leadership, but we don't have those things. Good leaders wouldn't be doing all this business as usual, they'd be working hard to make everyone realize that change is coming, our previous way of life can't survive, and preparing us to change before we don't have a chance. Anyone sane can understand this if coached, but to many it's just a blip in the stream of usual garbage. There needs to be confrontation. Capitalism, consumerism, whatever else --our way of life is not more important than life itself.

So you want to completely change human society and then solve climate change? History would suggest this might be more than a little difficult.

So, to sum up:

- Pollute the environment

- Let yourself get paid in long-term bonds to stop polluting the environment

- Wait 50 years

- Profit!

Not quite. Think of it as more those who get the benefit pay. Much better than ending up in a world you can't live in because your ancestors could not decide who should pay.

This reminds me of Travelers, a sci-fi series (available on Netflix in US). An intelligent take on the time travel trope.

If you are concerned about climate change, stop eating animals. Governments are slow to act, but switching to a plant based diet is something you can do right now.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...

Rice paddy fields also produce a significant amount of methane as well.

Step one: get people to eat less meat. Step two: move farming away from monoculture crops.

Your comment helped me put some thoughts in line.

Soy is a big reason the loss of biodiversity in my country. People are cutting down trees left and right because soy grows everywhere and pays well.

"That's easy", I could say, "just stop planting a single thing". But this doesn't make sense for the farmers, who are asked to give away money to allow (from their POV) rich people to ride more Hummers.

So we come with a better answer, "enact and enforce laws protecting native forests", and now we are back where we started, because a problem that we wanted to solve with individual action suddenly requires government intervention.

I believe in individual action, as I said in another comment. But I don't think it's an "either/or": we created governments specifically to solve problems like this.

We cant stop a grand solar minimum as we go into a new one called the Eddy Minimum. This book details some of the effects we can likely expect to see. https://wordery.com/the-little-ice-age-brian-fagan-978046502...

I don't think a systematic problem like this one can be fixed by individual action.

it absolutely cannot be fixed by individual action alone

it also absolutely cannot be fixed without mass waves of individuals acting.

its an AND not an OR

You need pioneers to show it's possible to have a good life on a small carbon budget. Without that you will never convince the mainstream.

Sorry, but this type of thinking bothers me. The scale of the problem at hand is so enormous that individual action is essentially meaningless.

While I disagree with the OP's point of view, I don't think the type of thinking is wrong. And here's an example why:

In Cowboy Bebop, the Japanese animated show, there is a scene with two characters smoking outside. It is clear during the show that they are morally grey at best, and yet they both have a cup with them to catch their cigarette's ashes, even though they are outside on top of an old boat (a sci-fi one). Such a detail is meaningless in the overall scheme of things, but the mentality is what matters: by living in a society where every individual does their best, no matter how meaningless, is how you end up with streets as clean as those of Japan, where everyone carries their garbage with them.

Individual action is important to create a societal mindset - if you inspire two people to change their behavior, it scales up.

individual action is essentially meaningless.

Now there's a motto to live by. Isn't that all we have? Individuals acting?

it is true that 'red' meat alone is the 80/20 tradeoff you can make to reducing the carbon footprint of your diet, just like solving a bottleneck in any other system its important to focus your efforts on the top 1 or 2 things, not the 4th or 5th thing.

exactly what things are #1 - 5 for you will vary by country and lifestyle, but assuming a coastal-american/northwestern-european "tech worker" bias, its: #1 children, #2 cars, #3 heating, #4 electric, #5 flying, #6 red meat.

Children should not be on this list.

The first reason is baby/bathwater: The reason we care about climate change is for the sake of children; simply denying them existence isn't much of a solution. E.g. You could equally solve homelessness by (humanely and painlessly) killing all the homeless people in their sleep.

But more importantly:

If the present is any indication, in the future, children of "coastal-American/Northwestern-European tech workers" are going to be the only people with the motivation and ability to address climate change.

Subtract them from the equation and think about who is left: Religious nativists (Muslim, Christian, and otherwise), supremacist ideologues and ethnonationalists, and a great mass of impoverished third-worlders too disconnected and ignorant to even use birth control correctly. There is no chance a climate change solution gets sustained without the high-IQ pro-globalist Western elite.

Basically if you're reading this you should have as many kids as possible to benefit the planet in the future.

You might want to rephrase your post; implying that everyone who isn't a "coastal-American/NW-European tech worker" must therefore be either:

a) Religious nativists,

b) Supremacist ideolouges,

c) Ethnonationalists, or

d)"a great mass of impoverished third-worlders too [...] ignorant to even use birth control correctly"

...is simultaneously pretty offensive, and bafflingly hyperbolic. Alternatively, given that I live in Texas, and am therefore neither a coastal-American nor NW-European tech worker, would you mind telling me which of those four alternative categories I'm in?

It needs to be rephrased, but the point is otherwise good. I'd put it like this: only those who are both well enough to have time to care about climate and smart enough to understand the magnitude of the problem are the ones who'll be considering having no children as a mitigation strategy. If they all follow through, that leaves you with only people who can't care (due to economic situation) or don't care (religion/ideology/stupidity) reproducing and passing their values on to the next generation.

It's essentially the Idiocracy plot, with climate change twist.

Quoting from myself upthread:

> Given the timespan involved, everyone who can intellectually contribute to fixing the problem in the article must already have been born.

This is a pedantic overly literal reading of what I wrote. Please use your brain while reading to interpret what's being said in the form that makes sense. Otherwise we'll just spend all our time dragging you away from hostile, idiotic misinterpretations (which you'd never make it you agreed with the underlying point) to talk about the issue.

E.g I obviously don't mean that literally no person who doesn't live in the coastal USA can help. I'm indicating an archetype of a person.

> The reason we care about climate change is for the sake of children

Is it? And if so, whose? If we should plan for disaster by 2040, I'm going to see it. I stand a good chance of living 30-40 years past it (unless modern medicine collapses, which isn't unlikely).

Given the timespan involved, everyone who can intellectually contribute to fixing the problem in the article must already have been born. Voluntarily going childless absolutely deserves to be on that list. The children I choose to benefit may not be my own, and that's fine. I'd hope that the false equivalence with killing homeless people would be obvious, but just in case: there is a real difference between stopping a life that is already in progress, and deciding not to start one in the first place.

> If the present is any indication

That's a hell of an assumption. The safer stance is to assume that the West will shrink in significance, and for Asia and Africa to grow.

Your comment about the "great mass of impoverished third-worlders" is not consistent with reality: the number of people in this state is less than a billion; you're leaving out the vast numbers of educated and capable folk in China, India, and Africa, who not only outnumber Western tech folk, but also many of whom have a far higher incentive to solve the problem because they directly risk their home locations becoming uninhabitable.

> simply denying them existence isn't much of a solution. E.g. You could equally solve homelessness by (humanely and painlessly) killing all the homeless people in their sleep.

This is a ridiculous analogy. Hypothetical children who don't exist have no rights (because, again, they don't exist) -- homeless people do have human rights.

The rest of your post is just eugenics.

"That's just eugenics" isn't even true in this case (my point is mostly about culture). And even if it was true, is not an argument, it's a label.

You forgot dogs.

dogs count as one vegetarian child

if no one have children, then who will live in the future?

I agree with number 2 and number 3 though, using bikes as daily transportation and fixing your home's heat-leeching-off issues (for example, windows drafts in old homes) makes really big difference!

what made you think that says "have zero children"?

its always fascinating to me when people read the most extreme possible interpretation into a single word like that.

did you interpret that list to mean you can't use electricity or heat your home anymore either?

As an individual, you can’t do that much. But if McDonald’s for example were to put veggie patties in their burgers by default and beef only on request, that would actually change something.

In addition: if you have ever tried the veggie burger, it’s surprisingly good (the beef is a bit tasteless anyways) and I bet most people wouldn’t notice the difference, especially if McDonald’s pimp their veggie patty a bit more.

McDonalds would be out of business and a laughingstock.

Win-win!

Not a vegetarian and not a McDonald's client, but I'd actually support them if they went all in on something like that.

I'd argue this is a matter of marketing.

Also, you don't have to go all-in at once. Introduce a special veggie burger, maybe even in a few stores or selected countries only. Gradually, switch more and more burgers to the veggie version.

Defaults matter, as they say.

I wonder if they would be better off pricing it at parity, at a premium to beef, or lower? I initially thought “heavily subsidize it, maybe put a huge one on the $1 menu...), but making it a premium option along with their “specialty” burgers might be better. At some point in the future they drop it to parity.

There's a vegan fast food chain in Australia called Lord of the Fries. It's basically a vegan McDonalds.

It's actually quite popular, even amongst the non-veg population.

McDonalds beef patties are like eating cardboard, they're entirely flavourless. There are a few things I miss eating since I became vegetarian, McDonalds beef is not one of them.

Personally, I've always liked vegetarian burgers better than meat burgers anyway. There's so much variation and flavour in vegetarian patties, whereas meat patties tend to just be a lump of meat, sometimes with some interesting seasoning.

There are some extremely convincing new veggie burgers that mimic the texture, taste and even bleeding of meat so well that meat eaters love it too [1].

I'm thinking of the Beyond and Impossible burger brands especially.

[1] https://youtu.be/bVNoDP66UEE?t=199

This has been done by Burger King but didn't get any traction AFAIK.

https://burgerking.ca/content/bk-veggie-burger

And stop buying dogs.

What's with dogs ? I mean fine but then there are also cats or other pets ? And not buying them doesn't mean they are not there, that's not a sufficient solution. Stray and such, still there and consuming resources.

I think meat grown in a lab is a more viable alternative and much more promising than having everyone change to a vegan diet.

Veggieburgers are one thing but I think I would wait for 10-20 years of other people eating frankenburgers before I’d be willing to switch.

Virtue doesn't scale. But corporate catering does, and one of the big caterers (Sodexo?) is rolling out a whole new set of base menus that are meat-free.

I've always maintained that prisons should only serve vegetarian food. Apart from the health and environmental benefits, it would save a lot of money for them as well.

A lot of prisons in the world are already smoke free, I see no reason why the privilege of eating meat shouldn't be withheld from them as well. Want to eat meat? Then don't break the law.

Cows grow on sunshine and inedible to human grasses. Feed them some seaweed and they don’t even spew methane so badly. Per calorie, plant foods are more draining on the planets resources.

You can't expect anyone to believe that without a solid source.

I wouldn't expect this crowd to believe it even with a solid source.

That Guardian article switched between the various environmental harms of meat production in a confusing way. Here is what Wikipedia has to say with respect to greenhouse gasses:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...

From the article:

>At a global scale, the FAO has recently estimated that livestock (including poultry) accounts for about 14.5 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions estimated as 100-year CO2 equivalents.

>A PNAS model showed that even if animals were completely removed from US agriculture and diets, US GHG emissions would be decreased by 2.6%(or 28% of agricultural GHG emissions). This is because of the need to replace animal manures by fertilizers and to replace also other animal coproducts, and because livestock now use human-inedible food and fiber processing byproducts.

So if you live in the US, decreasing meat consumption will help significantly, but people in the US use a heck of a lot of GHG producing energy in other forms:

* https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

It's not enough to approach this problem as a consumer. It's valiant but it's not going to bring about real change. We need heavy handed regulation of the environment by governments if we wish to actually prevent environmental devastation. Anything less is just rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.

“Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

>Governments are slow to act

If we keep thinking that individual actions is the best thing to do because governments are slow to act, then, government will certainly be slow to act. That's a pretty sad self-fulfilling prophecy.

I've stopped using fossil fuel transportation (living in a big, European city I can rely on my feet, my bike and the pretty good subway systems + and trains and EV when traveling). I'm going vegan and get most of my food from community-supported, organic agriculture. My electricity is 100% from renewable (solar, wind and hydro). I don't buy shit anymore and I'm doing my best to reach zero waste (not easy). I'm trying to be positive and inspire people around me (no more criticizing, just showing that many of those small actions are not that hard to do).

Yet, things deteriorate pretty fast. We lost 30% of the birds in just a few decades in my country, and worst, 80% of insects. CO2 emissions are rising fast (3+% this year, while the government promised to reduce them). I can think I'm doing my part, and go on with my life. But I can't sleep. The average citizen just don't have the time, peace of mind, or resources, or the required information to act.

Telling others to change their habits won't do much. We've got to organize and make big decisions. The small steps won't be enough, that's for sure (cf. https://www.france24.com/en/20180828-france-nicolas-hulot-re...)

Does anyone else feel like we'll fail to make reasonable progress on climate change? I'm naturally inclined towards pessimism, but I feel that the political solutions aren't going to work out and that the market isn't moving fast enough for humanity to get ahead of it.

Edit: to clarify, I think that political solutions won't work not because there aren't good ideas or that we couldn't collectively do a lot, but because there's too much money and power held by special interest groups that pollute.

After the right wing wave took over the world I think many are concluding no corrective actions to be taken.

True. The worst part is that they won't be around to see the consequences of their actions.

I almost wish for the process to move faster. Maybe then people would take action.

Think again. Medical progress means that many 70 year olds will be alive when the SHTF really gets undeniably started 15-20 years from now.

In the game of Prisoner's Dilemma, if the game is played for only one round, the optimal move is for both players to betray each other. If you modify the game by playing many rounds of the same two players choosing whether to cooperate or betray, cooperation continues as long as neither player knows how long the game will last. The moment either player learns when the last round will be, it once again becomes advantageous to betray, and to do so immediately, before your opponent gains the same information. You want to betray before you are betrayed, but to do so at the last possible moment.

I think there's something to be learned there about the connection between climate change, and the charge towards mass surveillance and authoritarian government.

I’m not following.

I’ve heard that the change would benefit certain areas of the world. Ie Russia may warm up and gain more hospitable land. For this reason I’ve also heard some nations may be emissing greenhouse gasses.

I think philipov is saying that the reason politicians are not acting is because they do not believe any action is possible.

So, if they believe no action is possible this also means they view this as the last round in a game of prisoners dilemma they've been forced to play for most of the modern era.

So, in their view, there is no more downside to defecting.

Yes, precisely. Or, to put it another way, politicians are acting to prepare for climate change. The action they are taking is to tighten control in anticipation of global disaster.

Also, I think this game is playing out not just between politicians and populace, but at all scales of society and business, as no individual actor has the power to take corrective action alone, or is otherwise pinned in a Mexican Standoff.

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

Not without wholesale political change in the US. It will happen but probably not in time to matter if this report is correct :|

I feel like the changes are too slow for the majority of people to take any remotely pressing action or vote accordingly. Losing coral reefs sadly won't matter to the majority of people. You can watch Finding Nemo on TV in air-con comfort and ignore the dust bowl outside. I don't think people get a clear picture of how broad the mass migration issues is likely to become.

China and India have to be on board for reasonable progress to occur.

What would progress look like, in this case? China and India catching up in emissions/capita to the developed world? Or are you expecting them to keep their emissions at a fraction of ours?

China is doing pretty well. Long way to go tho.

As far as climate goes, what matters is the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, not where they came from. Greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere for varying amount of time, depending on the particular gas.

Whatever we finally decide we need to hold warming too, there is some maximum level of greenhouse gases that we can allow without warming going above our limit.

If we take that level, and figure out each country's fair share of that, what we'll find is that the West is responsible for way more of the greenhouse gases present than is their fair share (with the US the farthest over its share), and India is way under their fair share.

It would not be unreasonable for India to feel that it is unfair that the West used cheap fossil fuels to boost itself to first world status and in the processes went way over their fair quota for greenhouse gases and now wants India to stay way below its fair quota and give up cheap development to balance that.

To make it fair, the West would need to subsidize India so that it can afford to become a developed country without having to use the cheap fossil fuels. Another way to think of it would be the West paying India for having used up India's quota for allowed greenhouse gases--essentially a kind of retroactive cap and trade system.

India and China both have leadership that acknowledge the existence of anthropogenic climate change and is taking active measures. That would seem like table stakes but unfortunately we live in a world where that's not a given.

India produces 20% of electricity from renewable sources, not including large hydro[1]. Including large hydro, it's 29%. In comparison, the US produces only 15% from renewable sources including hydro[2] which, of course, has lots of environmental costs before any energy generation begins. This is admittedly a meaningless factoid but still kind of cool - India has 5 of the 10 largest solar power stations in the world, more than any other nation.[5] The Delhi city government has made it mandatory for government and public institutions to install rooftop solar[6]. This is on top of a government program that provides subsidized loans for rooftop solar on factories.[7] There's plenty of other renewable energy, rainwater harvesting, and recycling programs at various levels of the Indian government - federal, state, and city. I'm not saying all of them will work (it's the government, after all) but it's solid effort, and hard cash being put in.

Gasoline costs USD 4.55/gal in Mumbai today[8] - compared to around USD 3.50 in California, which already has the highest gas prices in the continental US. Due to the lower average disposable income in India, this means motorists prioritize fuel economy over comfort, and even safety.

India's annual population growth rate is 1.10% - a shade above the global average of 1.09%[3]. It's also been steadily dropping for decades and that trend is expected to continue.[4] China's population growth rate is 0.41% - lower even than the US.[3]

The only way India and China can keep from increasing their emissions is by stopping their economic progress. This would effectively keep their respective populations poor, undernourished, and lacking modern amenities such as healthcare, transportation, or entertainment. So what do you mean by "on board" exactly? What other shining exemplars of environmental rectitude can one point at to persuade India and China? What other nations have made, or committed to make, similar lifestyle sacrifices?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_India

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio...

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India#Fertilit...

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_photovoltaic_power_sta...

6. https://www.ndtv.com/delhi-news/government-announces-policy-...

7. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2017/12/07/india-t...

8. https://www.mypetrolprice.com/3/Petrol-price-in-Mumbai

How low have we sunk that we expect developing nations to act concurrently with supposed world "leaders"?

We should expect their emissions to increase and we'll meet them in CO2e per capita or the way down.

I'm much more worried about the US right now.

I have zero confidence that enough action will be taken before it is too late.

Even if almost every country in the world takes immediate drastic action, all it takes is inaction by a single major polluter to ensure that the negative consequences of climate change will occur anyway.

Voters will think, why should we make sacrifices when we will get screwed anyway, because other countries won't take action?

To be honest my rational view is that the situation is hopeless. We haven't even managed to stop global emissions increasing annually yet. That's the second derivative of temperature (even ignoring any feedback loops); the rate at which we're causing temperatures to increase is itself still increasing.

I disagree about special interest groups being the main problem; political will of the population is just as much of an issue. Even in the UK where the majority of people do believe in climate change, successive governments have failed to increase duty on fuel because of a popular outcry every time they attempt to.

I have friends who alternate posts on social media between complaining about a lack of action on climate change and posting photos of their latest intercontinental travel. People are prepared to do quite a lot to look after the planet. What they seem less accepting of is not doing things.

Special interest groups are arguably in control of the political will of people in many ways. In politics, people are told what to think. ISPs have managed to convince some people that net neutrality is a partisan issue when it never was. They have lying politicians and lying tv pundits on their side because they have piles of money, and that's enough to change opinions.

I’ve started buying carbon offsets when our family flies (through carbonfund) and it’s a lot cheaper than what I’d imagined. I think requiring airlines to offer carbon offsets directly in the ticket checkout flow would be impactful. I’d go a step further and have people opted-in by default so they have to un-check a box if they really don’t want to spend the extra ten bucks.

Also, as others have said: eating less meat is an effective way to lower your carbon footprint.

I don't know how effective these carbon offsets are.

Many of them may just be re-planting some forests that would have been planted anyways or may be even playing some more obvious scam.

You can buy credits here https://www.goldstandard.org/get-involved/make-an-impact for projects that have been audited and certified.

Carbonfund was recommended by my airline, and they provide full transparency into which programs your money is going towards, so you can research and decide for yourself.

If you are looking for something that is probably not a scam, there is a UN citizen platform for carbon offsets. [0] FWIW the platform is supported by a number of major corporations including Microsoft. [1]

[0] https://unfccc.int/climate-action/climate-neutral-now/i-am-a... [1] https://unfccc.int/climate-action/climate-neutral-now/i-am-a...

I've always wondered how that works. Is there a standard that is enforced or is like a charity that you have to trust?

Currently it’s more the latter. If we had a full-fledged cap-and-trade law, there’d be more accountability in place. Right now you see where the money is going and decide whether you a) trust the organization b) feel confident that the project is going to be an effective offset.

Air New Zealand offers this as part of their checkout flow: https://www.airnewzealand.com.au/sustainability-customer-car...

I've never used it myself, because I don't feel like it should be up to the passenger/user to volunteer to pay for their carbon. I also donate to charities outside of carbon credits, and those donations are tax deductible, unlike carbon credits. I'd be more inclined to buy carbon credits for my travel if they were tax deductible like charitable donations are.

Cool Earth is a charity that can estimate how much carbon each donation saves.

I still find the idea of carbon offsets hard to justify morally : you could probably avoid flying in the first place. You could even buy the carbon offsets without flying.

Offsets aren’t mutually exclusive to taking other steps to conserve and reduce our carbon footprint.

> it’s a lot cheaper than what I’d imagined

That's mostly because so few people buy them. You are getting low hanging fruit prices; if we were offsetting a significant amount of world emissions, offset prices would be much higher.

Link to report:

http://report.ipcc.ch/sr15/

Looks like this is the paper that presents the model for the calculations:

https://www.geosci-model-dev.net/11/2273/2018/gmd-11-2273-20...

Source code available too https://github.com/OMS-NetZero/FAIR

The article seems to paint a rather non-crisis economically, perhaps unintentionally:

> The United States, it said, could lose roughly 1.2 percent of gross domestic product for every 1.8 degrees of warming.

I guess that's in Fahrenheit, but again.. not really scary numbers. We're talking about two years of ordinary productivity growth being lost over a decade+. Bad, but nowhere close to resulting in the future being worse than the present, much less society ending.

For how much we all worry about global warning, why are the estimated GDP numbers not coming in much worse?

I haven’t read the sourced paper yet but the quote is vague; are you sure that’s not annual?

"why are the estimated GDP numbers not coming in much worse?"

A guess: Because the hardest hit areas do not contribute as much to GDP. Most of world GDP is created outside of the tropics.

The gruesome prediction from this report is that the poor areas next to tropics will come refugess camps unlike anything seen before (think Blade Runner or Judge Dread with the skycrapers replaced by an ocean of tents and shacks). And the rich world will invest in border controls and barbed wire.

Why would you expect this instead of people simply gradually moving inland and continuing to do more or less exactly what they were already doing? The developing world and developed are identical in that population densities are extremely disproportionate. We tend to have very high densities near water and much lower densities inland. This creates a dual effect of magnifying the numeric impact of climate change, but also giving us immense 'safe' buffers. If we view climate change as a sort of terraforming then the primary effect would be to push coastal regions further inland - not to permanently remove them.

And even in in the low probability worst case scenarios water levels will begin to plateau off simply because there's a fixed amount of possible water on Earth. This [1] National Geographic article from a while back showed exactly what the world would look like if all the ice melted, resulting the maximal possible increase in sea levels - about 216 feet. The peculiar thing is the world would be reshaped, but it'd mostly be the exact same place. And keep in mind that this would happen over many many decades as the sea levels inched forward, thus giving people time to calmly and orderly adjust. It's not like one day you go to bed and when you wake up New York is New Atlantis.

[1] - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2013/09/rising-s...

"Why would you expect this instead of people simply gradually moving inland"

Please read the article. The gradient of liveability is not away from the shores. It's away from the equator.

No, it's not. The real risk is in coastal areas, as the article emphasizes. The headline is based on the quote "[The] United States along with Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam are home to 50 million people who will be exposed to the effects of increased coastal flooding by 2040, if 2.7 degrees of warming occur."

I'm unsure if I'm reading too much into your comment as it was not particularly informative, but you seem to be implying that the problem with climate change is the warming itself, which will be most pronounced around the areas most exposed to the sun's energy -- the equatorial regions. But this isn't the issue. Humans, plants, and animals of all sorts could be fine with temperatures much higher than they are now if that's all that changed. The real risk of climate change is the ancillary effects like the rising of tides. This effect will be most pronounced in coastal areas with dense population hubs - which are the exact areas they mention. And this is already happening.

For instance the most recent storms we've had including in Florida, North Carolina, Louisiana and so on were likely at least somewhat exasperated by climate change. And indeed there are people that are going to decide enough is enough and decide to move inland. These are now part of the people counted in these numbers. Something people often forget is that climate change is not something that will happen, but something that is happening.

Sure, coasts will have issues, but like you said yourself, there is quite a lot of land mass to to absorb the population likely within the same polity.

I've understood the predicted changes to weather patterns are such that the area between the tropics will be most impacted. This includes more droughts etc. So it's not directly related to sun's radiation, just about how the heat will be distributed in the global weather and what effects it will have. I don't know why tropics are more affected than other areas.

https://theconversation.com/why-blowing-the-1-5c-global-warm...

I only slightly exaggerated my comments about telt camp conurbations. People are already drowning by the thousands trying to reach Europe via Mediterranean crossing because the landmass of Africa offers so little hope for the future even risking drowning is better than staying. Imagine how much worse it will get when the climate gets more inhospitable (the problems are not caused by climate but by corruption but worse climate is not going to help the issue).

Ah! I think what that article is trying to say is that when you have a greater variance in temperatures, any change is going to be something that is more regularly tolerated. E.g. - imagine you add 5 degrees of temperature to an area that varies between 20 and 100 degrees throughout the year, spending only 10% of the year at temperatures above 95 degrees. That means during 90% of the year there would be no change in temperature that has not already been seasonally experienced for centuries. By contrast if you do the same to a country that spends 100% of the year at 98 degrees, then adding 5 degrees would have a consistent 0-variance impact all year long above anything ever experienced. Since there's the least variance in the seasons at the equator (due to Earth's axial tilt) they then suggest that climate change will thus affect the equatorial regions the most.

But I think this is a gross simplification that again gets into the thinking that the temperature is, in and of itself, the problem. It's not. The global climatic system is in an equilibrium. At any given point in the sea for instance the difference between ice and water is the slightest change in temperature. Bump up the temperature a few degrees and that equilibrium radically shifts. This, in turn, can have cascading effects. It doesn't matter that in one location it's now only e.g. 65 when they have heat that goes up to 100 degrees during their summer. It's not about the heat - it's about the ancillary global effects of that change in heat levels, that will affect everywhere. This is one of the many reasons that I think the change in terminology from "global warming" to "climate change" was extremely appropriate. Global warming is not a problem, but the climatic effects it causes may be.

Our micro-level predictions for climate change have so far been pretty awful, but our macro-level predictions have been decent. So I think it's more reasonable to look at the 'big picture' effects, like rising seas. When you get into micro predictions you get silly things. This [1] is an article from AP:

"A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2028. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco-refugees" threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP. He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control. As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday. Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta would be flooded, cutting off its food supply, according to a joint UNEP and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study."

I changed the date there. That article is from 1989. The real catastrophe deadline given was 2000, 18 years ago.

[1] - https://apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0

> why are the estimated GDP numbers not coming in much worse?

Farming is 1% of the United States' GDP.

Yet, if the United States lost that 1% of its GDP, we'd have food riots, breakdown of law and order, political slogans like 'Bread, Land, Peace', and the bourgeois strung up on lamp posts.

The answer to your question is: "Because agriculture is undervalued in dollar-denominated economic metrics."

Also, because a hurricane destroying a city, and then construction workers rebuilding it will increase GDP. GDP is a terrible measure of value, and of the utility of any one particular industry.

I find when you actually work out the costs of these things in terms of real, in context, impact - the story often does not justify the headline. For instance an article The Guardian ran was, "We're moving to higher ground': America's era of climate mass migration is here." [1]

That article took a negative end outcome of climate change and calculated that by the end of this century 13 million people might have to migrate. That sounds pretty scary until, again, you actually break it down into something in context. 13 million people over 82 years works out to 434 people per day. I contrasted this against current day migration rates found here [2]. Today Florida has a very large migration rate of 16/1k. For a population of 21.3 million that means they're seeing 340,800 new residents per year or 933 per day. So to put another way this migration rate, which was framed as a catastrophic and revolutionary event, would have a net effect of the entire US having to take on about half as many migrants per unit time as Florida alone already does.

Of course it wouldn't be evenly spread out, but it also wouldn't just instantly jump from e.g. 20 to 20,000 per day. It's a gradual effect that is and will continue to pass mostly unnoticed. Present tense because we're already seeing this. Climate change has likely at least contributed to the severity of conditions in Louisiana, North Carolina, and Florida. Those residents that decided, 'ya know.. this isn't for me' already make up part of that 13 million. Another mitigating factor is that I'm certain their study accounted for population growth. I'm not. 82 years from now there will probably be a whole lot more people in the US meaning this "mass climate migration" will be even more minuscule just relative to normal day to day migration levels.

Climate change is not something that should be ignored, but the media is exploiting it for clicks. That not only damages society but also undermines the issue by poisoning the well. If somebody reads one article on the topic and realizes how far it was taken out of context, and reality, it makes them more skeptical of everything else they read on the topic. And while healthy skepticism is good, some end up taking that skepticism a step beyond healthy.

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/sep/24/americas...

[2] - http://www.governing.com/gov-data/census/state-migration-rat...

There are other effects, too. You'll see the population of Central America shift northwards, for instance. Given today's political climate, and the available directions of travel, how do you see that playing out? In my mind it's got a good chance of getting very nasty, very quickly.

Why would you expect people to leave their country instead of simply moving inland and continuing, more or less as they already are?

Climate change's primary destructive effect will be to shift the coasts. There are good and bad things about this. To bad thing is quite self evident. We, and I mean as a species, tend to be extremely densely populated on coasts. This maximizes the numeric affect of increasing sea levels. But there are also some good things about this. The corollary of densely populated coastal regions is that there is an immense amount of sparsely populated inner land to migrate towards. It's not like the increasing seas will push people up against a wall. There is plenty of underutilized land to expand into, right behind us!

And another thing here is to keep in mind is what I already hit on above. Climate change is slow. Even the catastrophic near 0 probability ignore-everything climate change will happen very slowly and over many decades. This again has pros and cons. The obvious con is the parable of a frog boiling in water (which as an aside is not true...). People are less likely to act in any substantive way when the negative change is so gradual, which will increase the chances of us ending up in one of the worse scenarios. But there's also a very positive aspect. The change will not be catastrophic. The coast line won't suddenly be inundated with tens of feet of permanent water. Instead you're going to see the seas inch forward ever so slowly. This gives people time to adjust and migrate while minimizing chaos. So for instance take Miami, which is already suffering from increasing sea levels. You're not going to see property values go from sky high to $0. Instead they will slowly trend downwards and we'll likely see more inner land values slowly trend upwards. And they are also trying to combat the rising tides technologically, with some success. This same pattern will be expected in most places, so it helps preclude scenarios getting "very nasty, very quickly."

Because I think you're wrong about where the primary effects will be.

On edit, this isn't quite right: I think it's wrong to ignore either effect. People will be forced away from the coast because of rising sea levels and changes in weather patterns, and be forced further from the equator when climate shifts break existing local agriculture.

I completely agree with you that agriculture will be changed in some areas, but I'd like to know why you think it might become literally impossible in some areas. The big change will not be in the temperature, but in water supply. But irrigation is a quite well explored technology and how we can have thriving countries setup in the middle of literal deserts, though often in today's global world nations optimize for what's easiest and import as necessary instead of going through the effort to ensure self sufficiency.

I find it difficult to reconcile the 1.2% GDP figure with this part:

"The estimated $54 trillion in damage from 2.7 degrees of warming would grow to $69 trillion if the world continues to warm by 3.6 degrees and beyond, the report found, although it does not specify the length of time represented by those costs."

World GDP is currently $78 trillion, so the total cost of climate change is about 1 year's worth of ecenomic output. Perhaps the report is spreading this cost over 80 years to arrive at the 1.2% figure?

I think we need to start wrestling with the idea that the anticipated climate crisis is impossible to stop and that it's worthwhile to begin preparing to live in a world with a warmer climate.

The reality is that most people don't care about climate change and the world's leadership is increasingly hostile to the idea of dealing with it. Even if our leaders were willing, the absolute dominance of private industry in this regard precludes any possibility of progress on the issue of reducing emissions.

On the other hand, we might be able to develop technologies that mitigate the impact of a warmer climate or begin developing and researching strategies to take advantage of agricultural possibilities that might be opened up by a warmer climate. The worst thing we can do right now for the populations that will be impacted by this is to assume there is a possibility that we can curb this disaster rather than taking these 40 to 60 years to brace for impact.

Can't disagree with this. Short of a one world government with dictatorship esque powers (which would be a very bad idea for other reasons), the chances of people magically changing their lifestyle/society completely changing overnight to fix climate change are pretty slim to none.

It's science and technology that'll solve these issues, make it possible to live even in 'extreme' conditions and at some eventual point in the future, either reverse or avoid the issue altogether.

My wife and I are turning 30 and our parents are starting to pressure us to have kids. However, we had both decided against having kids because the thought of someone we love worrying about global climate change crisis is too much for us to handle emotionally. We tried explaining our concerns to our parents but they don't seem to give a shit.

Other than sending our parents reports like these, any suggestions on how we can convince our parents that having kids and subjecting them to a lifetime of dealing with global warming might not be such a great idea?

Don’t bother. It’s your lives, her body and ultimately nothing to do with them. Head over to /r/childfree on reddit to perhaps get some better advice but fundamentally it really has nothing to do with your parents, or anyone else, if you have children and your reasons behind that choice.

That subreddit seems to be about looking down on people who have kids more than anything.

/r/childfree is a an extremely toxic place, I would avoid it.

I like the idea of a child free community being CF myself, but that's not a pleasant or positive place.

I wouldn't visit that subreddit. My experience has been that it's an incredibly toxic, polarised echo chamber, like so many subreddits.

There are better, more balanced sources for insight and argument on this subject out there, in my experience.

Went there, couldn't find any valuable insights / discussions. Feels more like a cult than a group of healthy independent thinkers.

Tell them to mind their own business. You aren't going to convince them of anything, so just tell them you've made up your mind and you aren't their personal baby making machine, end of subject.

What in particular makes you believe that a world that suffers the ills from climate change is a world not worth living in? I do imagine it making life more difficult, sure, but—life is already very difficult for very many people, and judging by suicide rates, most people decide they'd rather stay in the game rather than jump ship.

I can't speak for the GP, but I have two friends who are avoiding having children for similar/the same concerns. They believe climate change will cause mass famine which will kill off about half the population and essentially lead to the full breakdown of society, with the associated breakdown in law and order, the end of property rights, and money becoming worthless. I can't personally speak to the accuracy or these predictions, or how realistic these predictions are.

Well, to put it in context, Soylent Green was written in 1973 and felt like a very real concern given the political and social unrest of the time. I tend to think that this is just a sign that humans like to think in terms of superlatives. I hope I'm right, and that society is able to get it's sh*t together given the likely upcoming tumult. I don't know, I feel that especially in more civilized western countries (Canada?—not the US :).), people tend to stay more united in the face of affliction and are therefore more likely to be able to ride out the storm. I guess it will depend on how badly things really end up breaking down.

Apart from anything else, if enough people believe it will happen, it will happen, that's for sure. Predictions easily become self-fulfilling prophecies. Which is why hope isn't a luxury that can be casually tossed overboard like that. It is essential.

I'm still in the game, I'm not talking about giving up. I can put up a better fight and do more if I don't have to deal with children. Its better if I don't have children until I feel more optimistic that climate change can be a solved problem.

I can understand your position but I think that you're being pessimistic.

Despite the headlines the report is exceptionally positive. Our fate is in our own hands; the political will seems to be there with the majority of the world economy (EU/China) and the things we need to do to hit 1.5c offer some massive benefits. Simply the air quality benefits are worth the investment costs.

I was expecting the costs to be in the order of the western world reverting to the quality of life from the 1800s but that isn't the case. Climate change is looking like a problem in the order of a space-race or nuclear-arms-race only this time with enormous benefits for humankind and nature.

Sadly, the political will is not there: https://www.vox.com/2016/10/4/13118594/2-degrees-no-more-fos...

If governments were serious about fighting climate change, the entire world economy would need to be on a war footing bent toward this goal, similar to WWII. You're correct it doesn't mean 1800s-level subsistence, but it would mean sacrifice from everyone: hefty carbon taxes, rationing, bans on holiday flights, etc.

There's no realistic possibility any of that will happen, so we are dooming the next generation to a world of famine, drought and war.

Thanks for sharing that article, I'll share that with my parents.

I agree I'm being pessimistic, but unfortunately I can't find any grounds optimism. You solve one problem, there will be another to take its place. Solar panels sounds nice, but making them comes at an environmental cost that people generally don't talk about: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2014/11/1411...

In addition to global warming, there is also the problem of over fishing / farming, loss of biodiversity, waste disposal, all of which are getting worse every year. https://www.conserve-energy-future.com/15-current-environmen...

With that said, I'm still trying to do my part to live responsibly: I monitor my electrical and water usage and keep them low, stopped eating meat, and donate most of my earnings to charitable causes to help as much as I can.

Sure climate change is likely to make the climate worse than it is now, but climate on earth is already terrible in most places, and humanity needs to learn how to control it anyway.

If you are rich enough to give a good education to your children, the only thing you achieve by not having children is reducing the number of people who care about climate change and can do something about it.

Maybe your child will be the one who finds a way to terraform sahara, or build sea-steading cities, or create some other amazing thing.

As someone who have watched too much Cousteau documentaries as a child, was convinced that humanity is a pure evil as an adult, and is too old to marry and have children anymore, i would argue that not having children is a mistake.

There's no reason to assume that just because a parent is worried about climate change, that their kids will automatically be conscientious. Also, in the future the children of many people who ignored climate change will be forced to care about it.

This comment is full of rationalization. I hear this all the time: Maybe my little darling will be the genius who cures cancer and solves climate change.

Yeah, and maybe you'll win the lottery. But no, your kid will not fix climate change.

Keep in mind that they were replying to "my little darling is going to have a life so fucked by climate change that it couldn't be worth living."

The post you replied to took the other extreme.

Thank you for sharing. Rather than having our own children, I think I would prefer to invest my emotional and financial bandwidth to open up an education system that provides good education for general public. I have been actively experimenting with education and observing how people communicate and learn during my free time and plan to dedicate myself fully to providing good education full time in a few years.

If my wife and I decide too late that we want to have children, I think we will be happy with adopting and providing someone with shelter and love they otherwise wouldn't have had.

Raising children simply takes time and energy, and turns you away from other activities. If I had to take them to and back from daycare, to spend 3x the time needed for every activity because they're a very inefficient part of it, would I still have the willpower to cook everyday, to make my commute on bike, to live simply without much stuff or furniture, to do 2 hours of exercise daily (not much for the environment, but still keeps you in shape)...

Considering the situation of people that went that way, one can doubt it.

Humanity has endured all manners of hardships. Is your life optimal? Think of what your ancestors went through to bring us to this point. Should you throw all of that away because of your fears?

Your parents knew people who faced World War II. They themselves worried about global nuclear war. They're not going to be that freaked out about a little temperature rise - unless they really buy the number of deaths that it will cause.

We need to put a solar shade at L1.[0] That will give us time to switch to a renewable electric economy, before hitting the catastrophic methane release from permafrost thaw.[1]

At 7C, mathematical modeling [2] shows that we may lose two thirds of our oxygen generation (plankton) which could lead to complete human extinction within ~3600 years.[3]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions

[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11538-015-0126-...

[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12576-016-0501-0

But the sunshade is megascale engineering that you'd have to get everyone in on - and quickly, so that's a real project risk, even assuming it's worthwhile.

And the clathrate gun was overhyped.

Out of all geoengineering solutions that I am aware of, the sunshade is the most likely to work, and with the least drawbacks as it is the only truly global solution. It is also pretty simple physics as compared to other solutions which involve complex system modeling and unknown side effects.

All of the solutions require everyone on board, and quickly. The biggest issue is cost. At Falcon heavy prices, getting the requisite 20 million tons to L1 approaches 100 trillion dollars, according to my back of the napkin calculations. BFR may get that down an order of magnitude. The only way to pay for something like that is the really hard part, a global financial transaction tax, or some similar scheme.

Could you point me to anything showing that the methane release threat is overblown? I would love that reassurance. But even the Trump administration acknowledges 4C by 2100, there is no reason to think that it would stop there.

Climate engineering seems like a better bet than massive political/economic change across the entire world in advance of clear harm.

It is relatively easy (but still difficult in an absolute sense) to get support in sufficiently rich countries to handle clearly demonstrated, immediate threats — clean air, clean water, removal of litter, etc. These also tend to have relatively low costs, and the costs they do impose tend to be on large industries which also have pricing power to pass it along.

There have definitely been successful global environmental actions. The CFC/Ozone thing was probably the most clear; it was a pretty substantial and demonstrable harm, and the costs of switching were relatively low. (It was painful for fire suppression, since halon is still superior to alternatives, and did require a lot of special stuff around auto air conditioners, but it was basically industries which could pass along costs.)

Acid rain/sulfur dioxide/etc was a lot harder because it crossed jurisdictional boundaries, but within the US it was at least pretty easy to use the federal level. Hasn’t worked as well with China...

CO2 has the problems of an indirect link between the pollution and harms (merely raising CO2 in the air is fine; the issue is science showing a few levels downstream this is a problem, and it isn’t as clear as most other forms of pollution.). It is also much more fundamentally tied to economic activity, and alternatives have much higher costs (including higher forms of other pollution due to decreased efficiency...), and is pretty widely distributed across consumers and smaller businesses. As well, a lot of the problem is the 3-4B people living at a lower standard of living who if they industrialize the same way will make 50% reductions in the other 3-4B pretty meaningless.

I’d rather bet on climate engineering.

California recently completed its 4th Climate Assessment task

http://www.climateassessment.ca.gov/

People are too slow with change. Our worldly scenario is unique because we can basically predict our end now. Like weather forecast becomes more precise the closer it gets to the forecasted day, we know more precisely how and when we will end every day. And like weather, practically there is little we can (will) do to change it.

Oh but this gets better!

This is a great dissertation on how the GeoPolitics will play this little game out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_4Z1oiXhY

- by Gwynne Dyer

That's… well.. bleak. At BEST 1.5 C uptick by 2040? Am I reading that right? That is really not good. Like, as in, really bad, and that is the most optimistic report they can generate? It’s hard to not feel, well, despair here. First, good on the scientists for keeping up with the reporting and modeling. That’s not an easy job. Second, we all know it matters for fuck all. Donny can hardly twit a full sentence, let alone understand anything in that report. If democracy is running out the clock, then autocracy is gumming the pacifier.

But, I dunno man. It just feels like we’re closing up the house. Maybe it’s because I just moved out of a bad apartment, but I get that feeling here too. Like, the walls were shoddy, the electrical system was haywire, the neighbors were loud and overcrowding the place, the constant noise was too much, and the fights, oh the fights just outside my bedroom window. It was just nutz. But it feels like moving out of that place, like closing down the house of a recently deceased loved one. There is all the history in a place, all these things and pictures that people made and cherished. But there is no-one left to love them anymore. You’re cleaning out your now dead grandma’s stuff, going through photos that you’ve no idea about, if she really thought well of the people or the place in it, those clothes of your long dead grandfather” These were his dress blues from when he just got out” Maybe he’s buried in another set, but only grandma would know and she is gone. And you know it’s important that someone know if Joe is resting in his blues or not, but no-one will know ever again.

That feeling of a deep clouded sea; you know it goes down down down, but you’ve no idea how deep or what leviathans of a life are flitting about in there, and the light is going out and the air is cooling and the fog is rolling in and you have to go back to the docks and you know you’ll never be back out there to that spot of ocean.

It’s that final echoing feeling of that dark, dingy apartment. You had so much emotion there, so much life, not all of it bad. You know the floorboards that creak just so, the time that the garbage company comes in the mornings, how your cat really loves that one warm sport near the equinoxes. But now the musty smell of the shower mixed with the bleach and it’s…. over. The carpets are cleaned and all the fibers lay one way and the other, making dark and light colors from the reflected glow of the blinded window. Somehow the background noise of the crying babies next door is gone, the street murmurs are like ghosts and drum along. You can hear your shoes slap along for the first time ever. All is as you found it, and there is no life you recognize there now. It’s colder on your cheeks.

That’s the feeling that I get with these climate reports. Like I am just supposed to be a person that is destined to clean up the house, move out the stuff, as best I can, quietly, mournfully. Like, I am, just here to witness it all, like the bottom of the 9th when the home team is down by 7 and everyone has already gone home in late September, the pennant race long lost, the hopes of summer gone. The lights are still bright as the dark moves in, illuminating a field that everyone is just out on, doing the motions. Like, just sitting there in the stands, hoping, but knowing the game is over. That my job is just to record the score, for the books, that maybe 10 people will ever look at. Trying to secret away scrolls from the Ostrogoths, for a brighter time. I’m hoping that being a witness means something for the future. That acting like Samuel Pepys will make me the next one, because I know it’s so fantastically unlikely that I will be, but I’ve nothing else to do really. Like walking around empty streets after the bars close and the rain lets up, neon reflecting off the asphalt.

I know the game’s not over, but I can’t help but sigh with each out. I can’t help but linger in the last darkness of the cleaned house, that single light left to turn off. I can help but just wipe my face as the boat hums back into the docks, not knowing if the salt is from the water or a tear.

FTA : >>>Ms. Warrick said her organization intends to campaign for governments to invest in carbon capture technology. Such technology, which is currently too expensive for commercial use, could allow coal to continue to be widely used.

I hope we'll talk about the pulmonary diseases her family will get in some years

second point : this post lasted less than 24 hours on HN's home page. It's a telling sign.

The skeptical part of me seems bound to point out that we've been told that it would happen by 2020, or even earlier.

What were we told? That the artic ice would be in retreat and that the permafrost would begin to melt? Sounds as if the predictions were pretty accurate.

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