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Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

What should we do?

Throw as much engineering and innovation at the problems as possible. Conservation alone is no longer sufficient.

And I meant problems. As in, protecting the food supply chain, protecting the electronics supply chain, adopting a defense posture to prepare for a far more desperate global population, finding ways to save coastal cities or quickly relocate people, throwing everything at the wall for innovative new exotic energy generation and storage systems (far past nuclear) and, most importantly, preserving the knowledge and means of humanity.

We're past the point where pretending this will get fixed politically is reasonable. We need to assume it won't and work to protect the future in spite of the horrors to come.

I wonder why ocean fertilization isn't talked about much anymore? All the articles I found about it were from ~10 years ago, with some vague conclusion that we shouldn't do it because it might be bad for the life on the ocean floor or something. There are no good solutions though, nothing will be perfect.

Haven't read anything about it in a while but I believe the conclusion was it wouldn't work, basically because it would take way too much iron to even start to make a dent.

There wasn't a real conclusion because the tests were always small. Governments became afraid of triggering toxic blooms and otherwise messing up coastal ecosystems and then being liable for damages, so they put a moratorium on testing [1]. Then in 2012 someone illegally tried it again anyway, with mixed results [2].

Basically it's like most geoengineering projects - everyone is too afraid of negative consequences to really try anything at scale, so instead we get endless inconclusive studies. Personally, I think we're going to pretty quickly get to the point where we need to make decisions about what negative consequences are acceptable to prevent complete environmental catastrophe.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/453704b

[2] http://www.planetexperts.com/two-years-russ-george-illegally...

That wasn't the conclusion. It'd make a dent, but not sufficient by itself. The real reason is people are skeptical of the wisdom of geoengineering in general. But I think we will almost certainly have to look at it.

This is what I read as well. Couple this with planting 1e12's trees, maybe aerosol injection and possibly buy some time.

I don’t mean to pick on you, but this question comes up in every single climate change post. Answering it is exhausting. We need a climate change FAQ.

The simple answer is end fossil fuels. How do we do that? Vote, eat less meat, bike ride, strike, protest, invest in solar, boycott, reuse, buy less, telecommute, etc. Use your imagination. Do something, do everything, the end goal is we all stop releasing sequestered green house gasses into the atmosphere.

> The simple answer is end fossil fuels. How do we do that?

Build nuclear power plants.

All the other things are fine, but if you really want to end fossil fuels, you need a non-fossil-fuel source of reliable base load power. Nuclear is the only one we have. Other sources are fine, but they can't produce reliable base load power.

And, btw, I think we should end fossil fuels even if it turns out not to make much of a difference to climate change (which might well be the case since all of the models that have a high sensitivity to CO2 built in have been over-predicting warming for several decades now).

>Build nuclear power plants.

And to all the people who say "they take too long there isn't enough time": the best time to start nuclear power plant construction was 10 years ago, the second best time is now.

Except by the time the plant is done being built (10 years late and 10x over budget) renewables will have surpassed it in terms of cost for deployed GW, and grid-scale and consumer batteries will be at the point where we can store and demand shift enough power to use all the renewables we can bring online.

Renewables has already surpassed nuclear in the US. I think the new reality is the best time to build a nuke plant is never.

Go into this with an open mind, but it shows a number of ways that nuclear is superior to renewables, coming from someone who was staunchly against nuclear:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciStnd9Y2ak

It’s a great video - thanks! I’m less worried about the safety, than the actual ability to just manage to build the damn things to spec and any kind of budget in the US regulatory environment.

Here's a way for nuclear to make a dent: if the defense officials [1] who claim the climate change is a security threat are indeed serious about it, they could demand that Congress legislate the US military to be net zero carbon emitter. The US Navy can then build and operate enough reactors to achieve that. They already are operating dozens of naval nuclear reactors, and acquiring new ones at a steady pace (2-3 per year). Their regulatory hurdles are basically zero.

Currently the US defense emits a non-negligible amount of CO2 [2]: "If it were a country, it would have been the world's 55th largest greenhouse gas emitter, with emissions larger than Portugal, Sweden or Denmark." [2]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/03/05/700462955/former-defense-lead...

[2] https://www.livescience.com/65698-defense-department-climate...

> renewables will have surpassed it in terms of cost

Are you thinking in terms of dollars or including the price of future use/materials? In other words, can’t a nuclear plant effectively be swapped in for a (e.g.) coal-fired generator and Just Work, versus all the materials (grid-scale collectors, batteries, etc), which is just the next generation of junk in a treadmill that’s still a carbon problem?

I ask because I don’t know.

Look at the other article on the front page about air pollution. We’ve actually made tremendous progress reducing sulfur dioxide emissions from coal in the last decade. To damages from air quality problems in the US are down 20% overall, which is a economic savings of $1.6 trillion per decade.

The waste stream from solar is a real question. The video posted in the other reply brings it up as well. We definitely need panels that are designed for extremely long service and recyclable end of life. I do think the battery tech is evolving extremely rapidly and dovetails with EVs so that will help keep renewables competitive even as total overall renewable supply share increases.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21200082

Bill Gates wants to: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/amp25728221/...

So... backed by about 24 to 48 hours of storage, and overbuilt by a factor of 2 to 3 (so you curtail most of your energy), wind and solar can produce reliable, baseload power. Particularly if you connect geographically separated regions and use wind/solar (and possibly geo/hydro) together. The cost is about the same as nuclear.

We should do everything, though, including nuclear. i'm a big nuclear fan. All at once, right now.

If the cost is the same as nuclear, it should be preferred, as there is no nuclear waste.

And that's probably even also considering that both the actual cost of nuclear[0][1][2][3], as well as the risk of failure[4][5] and the therein resulting costs[6] are often wildly underestimated.

[0]: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4631737.stm

[1]: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/01/31/debunking-the-low-cos...

[2]: https://financialtribune.com/articles/energy/9386/nuclear-de...

[3]: https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/true-cost-of-nucl...

[4]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4543400/Scie...

[5]: https://phys.org/news/2017-05-nuclear-greatly-underestimate-...

[6]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...

I'm including the wildly inflated costs, here. And it only works at lower latitudes. At high latitudes, it's not viable.

And engineer some safe small-scale reactors for container/cruise ships. It's a crime we aren't hedging our bets on renewables with some next-gen prototype reactors.

Generally, I do find that a good idea, but I seriously doubt the people operating those ships are to be trusted in the proper handling of nuclear equipment.

Make operation of diesel cleaner and thus more expensive so that sails and PV would be considered and used as well.

Hydropower can work for base load, but it has its own issues.

I call these kinds of suggestions abstinence based environmental policy and it will work about as well as shaming teens into not having sex. Abstinence based sex ed results in more STDs, teen pregnancy, and abortion. We've been preaching abstinence based environmentalism since the 70s. Load up the atmospheric CO2 graph and look at the plastic in the ocean and see that the result is basically the same. People pretend to go along, do showy things like wear promise rings or ban plastic straws, and keep fucking and driving and running their air conditioners.

People won't go for being shamed into reduced wealth, especially when the shaming is coming from comparatively rich people. Try to force it on them and you will get a populist revolt.

So by all means keep preaching 70s style lifestyle shaming environmentalism if you want another 50 years that looks identical to the last 50 years. People will listen, nod, and ignore, just like they do with sexual moralism.

The answer is to replace fossil fuels with solar, wind, nuclear, etc. and to electrify transport and industry. Replace as in generate the same or even more energy. As I say this I live in a place where as much as 50% of my power is solar on some days and I drive an EV. We are close to cracking the storage problem with better batteries and scaling production of them. This is very possible.

Sort of like how you cut STDs and unwanted pregnancies by making contraception available and guys putting rubber things on their willies. It's what works. Only ideologues oppose it.

The replacement is well on its way. EVs in particular will usher in more renewables because the next generation of EV batteries will have cycles to spare, so they can be grid-tied and earn their owners money.

It will all naturally happens over the next several decades as the cleaner tech becomes technologically superior as well as cheaper.

The investment needs to be made as a way to improve infrastructure that provides better service at less cost, not as a “shut it all down” panic - or else the damage of forced switching itself will be measured in the trillions.

Any climate change that’s happening in the next 10 years is happening regardless of net CO2 emissions over those next 10 years. In reality, the solar minimum we’re in will significantly mitigate climate impact in the short term while the technology for cleaning up is rapidly advancing.

> The answer is to replace fossil fuels with [renewables]

I agree.

> So poverty.

Don’t be so dramatic. Would it kill you to turn the thermostat up while we convert our global power infrastructure to renewables?

My list of example actions one could do to to fight climate change was not exhaustive or exclusive.

I understand, but when you lead with reduce people hear "rich elitists want me to be poor." They hear that because they have in fact been told that by clueless ideologues for decades.

That's true along the white/blue collar divide in the West and even more so between the developed and developing world. Think Africa is going to listen to the people who used to gather slaves from them and colonize them tell them they can't do what everyone else is doing because we need to save the Earth? The response will be "fuck you, we're poor."

Hell France's vast yellow vest protests were in part triggered by a gasoline tax. Egypt's revolution was in part triggered by rising food prices. Reduce = revolt. This is because anything that increases prices of consumables amounts to a strongly regressive tax. It hits the poor much harder than the rich.

So I get what you mean but I think that whole rhetorical line is actually counterproductive. Focus on replacing fossil fuels. That matters far more than little token reductions anyway. Replace coal with solar and gas cars with EVs and the carbon reduction is large and more importantly persistent.

Personally I like to frame it as progress. Solar could in fact scale much larger than fossil fuels. In the future it could actually provide cheaper more abundant energy.

Passive solar design can improve comfort levels wile dramatically lowering energy use.

No real sacrifice involved -- other than giving up our entrenched mental models that dictate we can either be good or we can have satisfaction, but not both.

> eat less meat

While eating less or no meat is a big part of it, it's more nuanced than it's often presented. For instance, this talk provides a very, very good argument for keeping livestock. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI

Not disagreeing with you, only replying to you for visibility/to add on to what you said.

While you are correct there is just no way that this is going to happen. Even if you could convince all the West to give up FF then I don't think you could convince China and India. Also there is no way you could convince the majority of people in the West to give up FF because a large percentage still don't believe climate change is man made. I was having a discussion a couple of nights ago with someone who thought it was all a conspiracy and when I said well NASA says the number of climate scientists behind it is 94% they still prefer to believe the right wing radio.

I really can't see this being turned around unless a major technical breakthrough is discovered which I consider fairly unlikely.

At this stage no one knows exactly how bad it will get. I've got between 30 & 40 years left (and no kids) so I don't think it will be catastrophic in my lifetime but I still have basic plans in my head about becoming more self-sufficient in the future as one way to deal with a potential fallout should there be some kind of calamity in the future.

Consider these -

http://www.walkthroughindia.com/walkthroughs/top-15-biggest-...

https://www.news18.com/news/auto/bjp-led-nda-government-mull...

On the wikipedia "list of photovoltaic power stations", China and India turn up on top when sorted by plant capacity.

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

yes I have heard of some of those but I've also heard of Adani wanting to build coal plants too - a quick search showed this https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/climate/coal-adani-india-...

So yes it would be great if they can make progress but I will hold judgement for some time.

All of that is pointless, it will not work, and anything that requires human behavior to change en mass without direct incentives is wildly unrealistic. Imagine doing all that, only to die, all the same. We cannot accept simple answers, we need complicated engineered answers.

Increasingly, I find the best thing to do is get your affairs in order, do not birth a child, and try to enjoy what is left of this life before it’s all over and the world cooks to death.

If life must have no purpose, then you might as well choose to be happy. And I mean it. BE happy, before it’s too late.

Or live a carbon-negative life and teach your kids to be carbon-negative as well.

Geoengineering is really the only realistic option if this is the case.

Sulfate aerosol injection is by far the most promising. And cheap - maybe 5-8b per year [1]. I'm not claiming this is a good idea in any way. As they say: desperate times call for desperate measures. We could buy ourselves several decades to sort our (as humans) shit out. We don't understand the unintended consequences very well, but at least this technique mimics natural processes (volcanic eruptions).

[1]https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/3/034...

I've a hunch that a Lagrange point sun shield is becoming quite affordable with recent reductions in cost of launching to space. A sunshield consisting of many self orientating mirror bearing craft would have the advantage of being able to be quickly attenuated if required, even filtering more or less light on particular continents or weather systems.

It could win you some time to resolve real issues, wont work as permanent solution as stopping would have quick devasting results.

Well, cutting CO2 and CH4 emissions won't have much impact on decade scales. But we should still do that, to mitigate longer term damage.

What could help shorter term is adaptation. Moving cities to higher ground, away from oceans. And building dikes, where it's workable. But not in Florida or New Orleans. Maybe not even for New York City.

Also moving populations to areas that require less air conditioning. And moving farmland from areas that are becoming more arid. So generally, poleward.

And then there's immigration. As others move generally poleward. Targets could block immigration, and build walls where feasible. As the US and UK are doing. Or they could focus on integrating immigrants, as some EU nations are doing. That seems like the best long term strategy. Otherwise, you're going to have huge refugee camps, near borders, and probably end up killing lots of people.

And then we have social and political implications. I have no clue about that. Except to extrapolate current trends. So socially, that would be increased concentration of wealth, with the wealthy increasingly isolating themselves from the poor. And politically, increased authoritarian control, with associated surveillance.

Interesting times, for sure.

Nothing. Too late.

Our current global political structure can't coordinate such action. So what will left to be done is dealing with the mess.

Big countries will have a lot more room to weather this, but small countries are on their own.

Document our failures as a species for the next one that attempts to ‘civilize’?

Or for our next time around the cycle. At which point I think of Mote Prime[1]. Their "museums" were to document tech for rediscovery each time around the cycle, after their civilisation crashed.

[1] Mote in God's Eye, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

Methane is a valuable resource, so it should be cost effective for somebody to capture it.

Certainly not. Methane may have some value, but it is quite plentiful and fracking has made it cheap. Oil drillers already flare it off when it's inconvenient and uneconomical to capture. You're talking a methane release spread across continents, then dispersed into the atmosphere in parts per billion.

Green new deal applying financing to scaling known replacement tech like wind solar batteries and electric vehicles.

Also separate programs to identifying war scale R&D to identify topics and research them widely. Adjust contracting criteria for ability to pass scaling gates instead of financial or other criteria (this is the war terms for us).

Labor programs for rapid training and factory capital deployment.

Use technology to survive in an inhospitable atmosphere. Probably without any dependency on the atmosphere outside our cities in the long run. Cleaning the atmosphere is harder when you’re just trying to survive.

EDIT: Inhospitable atmosphere, to my mind, includes weather, drought, flash floods, etc. Not just the chemical makeup of the air.

> Use technology to survive in an inhospitable atmosphere.

Oh, please. The atmosphere will be perfectly hospitable. This is just FUD.

Really? Everything I’ve heard indicates a fairly dramatic change in the weather patterns as our global temperatures rise by even 1-2 degrees. The atmosphere is not just the chemical makeup, it’s the weather it creates. The droughts. The flash floods. The unnaturally cold winters, and unnaturally hot summers. Or vice versa - neither is very good for us.

> Everything I’ve heard indicates a fairly dramatic change in the weather patterns as our global temperatures rise by even 1-2 degrees.

These are not predictions based on data. They are predictions based on models--the same models that have been overpredicting warming for several decades now.

The actual data says that extreme events have not been getting more frequent. Their consequences have been getting more severe because so many more people live in areas that are primarily affected by them. That's not a climate change problem: that's a problem of mismanagement and politics. The southwest US has been a desert for centuries if not millennia--now all of a sudden lack of water is a problem? Anyone with half a brain could have seen that coming. Coastal cities are finding problems with drainage? Sea levels have been rising since the last Ice Age ended, and if your coastal city in a hurricane zone suddenly has a problem with a storm surge, that just means you've been ignoring the problem for too long.

Yes, the climate is changing; it's always been changing, and it will keep changing. People need to be given accurate information about risks and the tools to adapt to change.

Do you have a citation on the claim that mainstream models have been overpredicting warning? I'm not aware of it.

I'd like to seem them too.

From what I've heard so far, scientists have been underestimating the nature of climate change, almost perpetually, like any good scientist should do in order to keep their reputation.

2009: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7890988.stm

2019: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/scientists...

https://judithcurry.com/2015/12/17/climate-models-versus-cli...

https://judithcurry.com/2017/09/26/are-climate-models-overst...

Cherry-picked input and model data to exaggerate their claims, Pat Michaels and Chip Knappenberger both work for the CATO institute, and Ross McKitrick is an economics professor and known climate change denier[0].

I do not have enough in-depth understanding of climate sciences in order to fully comprehend the articles you've attached, nor can I be bothered to (there's no attempt to make it accessible for the layman), but the comment section appears to be quite telling.

Does that sound rich to you? Well, I'm a simple programmer, not a climate change specialist, but Judith Curry OTOH is, and she has chosen to "not “bother with” peer-reviewed journals, in favor of publishing her own papers so that she could editorialize and write what she wanted “without worrying about the norms and agendas of the ‘establishment.’”"[1]. In other words, she's a lone scientist defying the consensus. Maybe she's our modern day plate-tectonist, but in all probability, not.

EDIT: To summarize, why even write (apparent) highly scientific articles if you're ignoring all the other scientists? To me, it just seems like someone wants to appear that way.

[0]: https://twitter.com/carbonbrief/status/913361157846597634

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

> I do not have enough in-depth understanding of climate sciences in order to fully comprehend the articles you've attached, nor can I be bothered to

And yet you have no problem accusing the authors of "cherry-picking" and exaggeration. Amazing how people refuse to accept that ignorance and refusal to look at the facts disqualifies them from having an opinion.

Btw, Judith Curry has plenty of published peer-reviewed papers; even the Wikipedia article you reference notes that (apparently you can't be bothered to read that either). She took the position you describe in 2019 (according to that same article); her doing so was based on bitter experience with how much the peer review process has been hijacked by ideological partisans.

> she's a lone scientist defying the consensus

If you think Judith Curry is the only scientist who questions the "consensus" in climate science, you are extremely misinformed.

well consensus is at 97% https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

Yeah, let me get back to you on the overestimation of the severity and frequency of weather events after I make it through our second record breaking snow storm this fall.

Sure, this could just be an isolated event, but there sure have been a lot of record breaking isolated events these last couple of years.

Maybe some years ago it was just models. By now we have also a lot of direct data. Make yourself up to date with recent developments.

Nothing. We're fucked. The world will die in the pursuit of expanding growth and profit.

Get a time machine

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