Climate change: 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months | Hacker News Reader

Climate change: 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months

bbc.co.uk

It's always ~12 months away.

It was 5 years ago and will be in 5 more years.

I've got a strong suspicion that it's game over already. Perhaps various grades of game over still exist.

Well, we’ve know of the increasing need of stopping emissions for something like 30 years and basically ignored trying to solve the problem for all of that time. So yeah, there have been plenty of deadlines for easier solutions we’ve blown past.

But it is true, there are still some time left before we’re reduced to the Elysium solution.

It's 18 months because of upcoming UN meetings. Which means nothing, so it's making an alarmist headline to tie to a story, which has no bearing on the reality. The UN can't keep humans from slaughtering each other, so what chance at "Saving the planet", for whatever that means?

The UN was created to do one job: prevent World War III. Everything else it has done is a bonus.

But the climate/energy crisis might very well lead us to World War III, still.

These sensationalist “Climate Emergency” articles and protests actually undermine the core arguments for climate change action. It’s obvious no matter how much political will we will be unable to make a 45% cut in 18 months.

In the end these deadlines will come to nothing as technology advances and we develop novel solutions like a space based sun shield (launched by SpaceX starhopper?), seeding oceans to grow carbon absorbing algae, nuclear fusion, and new energy storage solutions. Just like “peak oil” and “global food shortages” predicted decades ago.

Also never mind we have an excellent solution to carbon emissions in nuclear power but the same green left protesters oppose it too.

Solar power will come online faster than nuclear anyway, just need to make 100x more solar panels per year to have solar for all energy usage in a few years. Seems to take 10 years to build nuclear power plants. Store excess power in batteries or convert to chemicals. There's enough gas in the gas pipes of the world for days of energy.

To make solar panels certain materials are needed, which we do not have an abundance of. There's also limited space as to where to put them. On the other hand, if there weren't as many people consuming energy, we wouldn't need as much. But killing off 95% of humanity is unethical, after all.

Only needs a small area compared to the size of the planet.

As for mining certain minerals, seems like it's mostly economics, we've only mined 1% of places after all.

Humans don't only live on a small area, so how do you get the generated electricity to where the humans live? And what if someone attacked this small area? Seems like a bad idea.

> It’s obvious no matter how much political will we will be unable to make a 45% cut in 18 months.

Please read the article.

Nuclear power's going the wrong direction because they get decommissioned and then replaced with coal/gas plants. I think around 10% of nuclear's current gigawatt capacity will be decommissioned over the next five years.

Pretending that the US could solve it single-handedly, and it were dispersed among every US citizen, what would that look like? Is that just about buying carbon offsets from non-profits that plant trees?

I'm tired of "we gotta do something", I want to know what to do and what the math implies in terms of personal responsibility. Carbon neutral or carbon positive behavior.

Switch to electric everything (heating/cooling/transport) and buy renewable electricity. Stop eating meat. Stop buying stuff you don't really need.

I don't doubt that that is necessary, but I'm not sure that would be sufficient. Like, if everyone in the US switched to electric heat/cooling and went vegetarian, does that make up for China, India, and Africa?

I feel like I want a Drake equation for climate. Number of petawatt hours / year, number generated by fossil fuels, how much it needs to decrease (or have its growth slowed) to reach 1.5 degrees by whenever... but something simple that larger amounts of people can understand.

Some numbers from Saul Griffith at Otherlab:

Decarbonizing with massive electrification will bring about a new American abundance. https://medium.com/otherlab-news/decarbonization-and-gnd-b8d...

How do we decarbonize? We don’t need a miracle. Everything we need to solve climate change is already here. https://medium.com/otherlab-news/how-do-we-decarbonize-7fc2f...

Green New Deal: How much does fixing climate change cost the US? A real-world argument with numbers you can check for yourself. https://medium.com/otherlab-news/green-new-deal-how-much-doe...

Why do you think only people in USA would switch?

Although they create 10x more CO2 than average iirc.

Donate to cool earth. When I looked last, it cost about $300/year to offset my carbon footprint. Go offset yours 20x or 30x over, or whatever "x" you can afford without feeling resentful about it.

Right, I feel that more people want me emotionally entangled in the issue to advance other policy/cultural goals rather than involve me at a practical level. For me, the "what to do" in my sphere of influence is:

* Repair rather than replace

* Avoid buying/using plastic trash if possible

* Recycle where it makes sense

* Follow basic guidance on proper disposal

* Try to pick up a little bit of plastic trash that's not my own.

If you can, make sure a carbon tax is imposed across all industries, and make sure it is enforced.

Hottest days ever recorded in half of Europe, but no reason to panic, right?

I assume everyone realises that we're going to die, and we're too stupid to spend 5% of GDP on fixing it, which is why the world's gone a bit crazy.

The problem is the world won’t end, it simply changes, for every piece of land in a Bangladeshi river delta that gets flooded there’s a piece of Siberia where the permafrost will melt and become fertile farming ground.

Assuming we don’t have runaway warming. There’s a lot of co2 locked up in that permafrost. When siberia gets too hot, where do we go after that?

Seems like everything about the Earth is a positive feedback loop for global warming.

  More ice melting, less reflection
  More ice melting, more methane released
  Co2 released from soil
  Less rain, less amazon rainforest
  More forest fires
  More deserts
  Clouds changing
  More water vapour

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

Right, and you will move the 120 million people and requsite infrastructure to this promised land in the north yourself?

And what will you do about the parts of the middle east that will have unsurvivabled heat waves, move abu dabi and dubai to Alaska?

Probably why Russia is funding internet conspiracies about global heating being fake.

In case you want a pointer to thorough, well-written material on real things, you can look for the State of California 2017 Climate Plans.. e.g.

http://resources.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DRAFT-Saf...

Hyperbole like this is not helpful. The planet will be fine in 19 months and everyone will just crank the "boy who cried wolf" factor up a couple of notches. Also, this is a statement by Prince Charles of all people, might as well have Taylor Swift chime in while we're at it.

This who discussion needs to be reframed. "The planet" is not ending. Humanity is not ending. We will survive. The ability to do so will rely on innovation as it always has. The media stoking the fires of fear with pure clickbait isn't helping the situation at all.

It's ok, only millions will die, not billions?

Then mass migration as crops and water supplies fail, leading to xenophobia, racism, riots. Already started.

> Also, this is a statement by Prince Charles of all people, might as well have Taylor Swift chime in while we're at it.

That's not fair. As the Prince of Whales it's his duty to protect the environment of marine mammals.

Way to totally misframe the piece. Hardly an off the cuff cry of wolf. He was commenting on the events and summits coming over the next 18 months. To quote the article:

"But today, observers recognise that the decisive, political steps to enable the cuts in carbon to take place will have to happen before the end of next year."

There are two significant summits - New York in September, and London toward the end of 2020.

If substantive and binding global agreement isn't achieved, then we're on for another half decade of pissing about. It's not like 1.5, 2 or 3 degrees is an end point, just which line of the graph we follow through the rest of the century and beyond.

Do you mean you honestly don’t understand the message about decrease in survavability that the headline is trying to convey?

What can the average person do to help? The scale of the problem sometimes seems so large that it's impossible to imagine how one person riding a bike or purchasing "green" energy from PG&E can really have an impact.

How can one person have a bigger impact on such a global-scale issue?

Well, you know 150 people, convince them to do the same. Get local politicians to be more proactive.

In your personal life, switch everything you can to electric: electric cars and electric home heating/cool (with a heat pump or radiant hyrdonic). If you can, get solar panels to power these things. This will decarbonize you and your family's footprint and move the cultural norm ever so slightly. Financial packages that make these decisions the rational decision and building codes that allow this to happen are also essential.

Drive less, and use public transit more, a relatively modest proposal. Vote out the blatantly vote pandering politicians pushing fossil fuels. Endorse those pushing solar and wind, plant billions of trees. These are a few of my favorite things. We are already F’d from pre-existing emissions - don’t go YOLO!

Have a -30x climate contribution. Give $10,000/year to cool earth.

Looking around me it seems to be stand in the street, hold a sign, block traffic and mess up everyone’s day...

Or we could continue to be agile and innovate like humanity and technology has always done.

This is not an “innovation” problem. We know how to solve climate change. It is a policy and funding problem. It is a political problem. We need more protests!

Try to block free trade agreements that aren’t in line with the paris goals.

The radical answer is to go out and kill as many other people as possible. Can't kill the planet if they ain't alive. The good news is that it's all media scare anyway. If you live long enough you too, will learn to not trust the media. Just think about the stuff you know a lot about and how the media depicts it. Media is clueless about everything.

It’s 12 years to zero carbon if we want to keep below 1.5C, without assuming massive removal of carbon from the atmosphere from the mid century. Obviously this doesn’t stand much chance of happening, but it gives you an idea of the scale of the challenge.

The Paris cuts are very much within our ability to do, and likely without damaging the economy, although of course some special interests with holdings in fossil fuels will lose their money. That’s a good start, even if it ends up being 2-3C that’s infinitely better than the alternative.

It's just the Earth's immune system finally kicking in. We need to stop fighting against nature and start working along with it. We cannot sustain ourselves without this planet and we're not going to find a replacement anytime soon.

The intelligence that makes a seed grow into a flower is the same intelligence that will protect the Earth from these insane beings who live on its surface.

Anthropomorphizing Earth does not do anyone any good. It's not a living creature, nor does it contain a single "immune system."

If an organism were 'alive', self-sustaining and fully conscious in space what would that look like?

This planet won't explode because of climate change. Don't be a drama queen. We may not be able to sustain 7 billion people, but why do there need to be billions of humans anyway? There's no good argument other then they are alive and killing humans is bad.

The planet is only responding to a stimulus and experiencing a sort of fever which will cause major shifts in human consciousness by inducing increased suffering and eventually mass-ego destruction.

It is at this stage that we will be able to work with the underlying intelligence of the Universe and reach our next stage of evolution.

The 'end of the world' only means the end of the mind-identified state of consciousness and a return to pure consciousness and the end of all suffering.

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