Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think | Hacker News Reader

Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

nytimes.com

137 pointskawera167 comments

(disclaimer: I work in a Climate&Energy research group)

I just want to remind everyone that there are solutions to climate change. We know how to produce clean energy and sequester CO2. The current free market does not make those solutions profitable for investors, though, and we will have to change that.

Solving climate change can be as simple as getting a carbon price adopted. It needs to ramp up over time, allow a secondary market for offsets, and create a cross-border network effect (e.g. carbon free trade zone), but it can actually be that simple.

A "carbon tax" may be infeasible given current political norms, but a revenue neutral "carbon dividend" would have the same effect while being more progressive.

So, if you are curious what you can do to solve climate change, consider contacting your representative.

I'm asking out of ignorance. You're using the word "solutions". Do we know those are really "solutions", and not guesses for solutions? Like, will those actions reduce temperatures?

It seems that some of what already happened, like melting of icebergs, is not easy to be revert.

It's all trial and error and models that are not proved empirically.

I'm pretty sure we do not know what those interventions will do and what their impact will eventually be.

The line between a "solution" and a "mitigation" is not sharply drawn. As mitigations become more and more effective they eventually become solutions. There's no point quibbling over terminology.

>> Solving climate change can be as simple as getting a carbon price adopted. It needs to ramp up over time, allow a secondary market for offsets

The simple solution to this big global catastrophe is my favorite money making scam. Here, just create this market for carbon credits. It makes my guys money while doing Jack shit.

Seriously, if you think CO2 is the problem, the solution is to simply tax those that either take it out of the ground or import it. Any other solution is political.

Not saying I agree with the premise, but if you do, that's the solution.

That’s essentially what he’s arguing for no?

Not quite. Taking carbon out of the ground isn’t a problem; bringing carbon into the atmosphere is. It also doesn’t matter where the carbon comes from.

So one hand you're saying GP's opinion that pricing (taxing) carbon is a scam (?) that won't work. On the other hand you're saying we need to tax carbon?

What exactly is it that you're saying?

Taxing it at the source until the market figures out an alternative will eliminate it. Other solutions are just politics and money making scams. That what I'm saying.

That's exactly the solution advocated by many climate scientists, economists, and some current candidates for president. An organization lobbying for it is https://citizensclimatelobby.org/

Great to see you here! I wonder how many HN people are actively working on Climate change research. Maybe we could have a meetup or something.

Here's our meetup on pulling carbon from the air, mainly in the Bay Area but want to spread out: https://meetup.com/airminers

One simple thing we can all do is never vote for a candidate if they are not for aggressive and immediate measures to combat global warming.

If the roughly 60-75% of Americans who believe human activity is causing climate change were to stop voting for individuals who don't believe this, we'd have meaningful change coming from the federal government within 2 years.

What people _believe_ is largely irrelevant in almost all situations, whether you mean the voters or the elected officials. Only actions matter.

This is not just semantics, some who believe in global warming fly every month or week, some who don't believe in global warming have not flown their entire life (to pick just one example). The latter do more to mitigate it than the former.

This is the issue. What people believe can be influenced, especially as it becomes increasingly inconvenient. Consider how many people are aware of social network micro manipulation / nudging but couldn't be bothered to just stop using Facebook. It's an easy action, easier than voting even, but it's not worth the inconvenience for the vast majority (yet).

Climate change has some really terrible consequences, but until it gets real for people they'll only suffer so much inconvenience. My own pet peeve is when recycling bins get thrown in with the garbage... Shitty solutions will regress us, but shitty solutions are necessary for iteration, so /shrug.

> The latter do more to mitigate it than the former.

Electing leaders who ignore the problem does way more harm than the lifestyles of average people.

Except individual actions pale in comparison to the impact of industry. The single most impactful action individuals can take to combat climate change is not fly less, or use less water. It's voting for politicians that actually enact meaningful policy. Without that, the number of flights we all take is irrelevant.

"if we all just..." is the ultimate fallacy.

Not everyone's priorities are yours and even if they were its difficult to coordinate action.

It depends entirely on (1) whether you think those "aggressive and immediate measures to combat global warming" will work; and (2) the economic cost of those measures relative to climate change costs.

One estimate of a 3.7C warming scenario is a total cost of $550 trillion: https://www.axios.com/climate-change-costs-wealth-carbon-tax.... That's about in the 2100 timeframe.

That sounds like a lot, except OECD projects that by 2060 world GDP will be $267 trillion annually: https://data.oecd.org/gdp/gdp-long-term-forecast.htm. Estimates of world GDP in 2100 are in the $250-$500 trillion range annually.

That means that adopting policies that cause us to hit the lower end of that range instead of the upper end of that range could cost us more than the total cost of a 3.7C increase in just a few years. And if those government policies don't work then you will have paid that cost, and you'll have to deal with the cost of climate change on top of it.

Now, of course lots of things could happen. Climate change could be an extinction-level problem. (According to the IPCC, there is "virtually no chance" of anthropogenic causes resulting in a Venus-like runaway greenhouse effect.) Or we could figure out workable CCS in 2050 and average climate change entirely. (That's also not super likely.)

Ultimately, the rational course depends on what you think of government action in this area. If you think it'll cost a lot but end up ineffective (like say the "War on Poverty") then it's completely rational to vote against it. If you think it'll work without hurting economic growth significantly, then it's rational to vote for it.

> If you think it’ll cost a lot but end up ineffective [...] then it’s completely rational to vote against it.

That is true, and I easily agree with everything you said, but FWIW there have been studies on whether cost-benefit analysis actually works by examining the outcomes after the fact. For example this set of case studies demonstrating that cost-benefit decision making would have historically made the wrong choice, and that sometimes our estimates for costs in the future are wrong by orders of magnitude.

https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...

Point being that the completely rational vote isn’t always the right vote. Focusing on costs rather than goals sometimes leads us to miss the big picture.

On the flip sides, focusing on goals rather than costs leads to programs that cost stratospheric amounts without producing the desired results. At the end of the day, we must attempt to rationally analyze our world and make decisions accordingly. If we abandon that, we might as well resort to religion. ("Climate change is God punishing us for the sins of capitalism!" "No! God wouldn't let climate change happen to God's people!").

Cost-benefit is not the only way to rationally analyze the world. There are more than two options here, it’s not either cost-benefit or religion. The suggestion is not to ignore all costs, the suggestion is to be more thoughtful about using speculative estimates when deciding whether to do something big that will have a positive outcome, and not to prematurely limit our willingness to do it because the estimated benefits don’t total more that the known financial costs. The evidence here is that cost-benefit analysis has produced incorrect results, especially the larger the stakes, and further in the future the outcomes are. The big mistake in calculations is the estimated benefits, which are intrinsically difficult to put a monetary value number on, and highly prone to wildly incorrect predictions. Over-reliance on cost-benefit analysis in this sense might be just as bad as religion; it is not well suited to all scenarios, prone to failure when costs aren’t actually known, prone to failure when applied incorrectly, and it’s not the only way to rationally analyze decisions.

> focusing on goals rather than costs lead to programs that cost stratospheric amounts without producing the desired results.

Just curious, I don’t doubt there are some, I just don’t know what they are. What would count as some examples of that having happened in the past, akin to the examples I linked of leaded gasoline, damming the Grand Canyon, or removing vinyl chloride from workplaces?

> Cost-benefit is not the only way to rationally analyze the world.

First, the article paints a strawman of cost-benefit analysis. Cost-benefit analysis can consider different scenarios, probabilistic measures, and even qualitative components.

Second, what's the alternative? If you don't at least quantify the things that are quantifiable, all you're doing is going by gut feelings and emotion. And that's the province of savages.

> Just curious, I don’t doubt there are some, I just don’t know what they are. What would count as some examples of that having happened in the past, akin to the examples I linked of leaded gasoline, damming the Grand Canyon, or removing vinyl chloride from workplaces?

There are many areas where over-emphasis on desired outcomes and goals, while ignoring costs, led to poor results.

The war on poverty: https://www.heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/report/the-w...

The war on drugs: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/31/opinion/failed-war-on-dru...

Doubling education spending per student since 1970 (in constant dollars): http://www.foundry.org/wp-content/uploads/ed-spend-fam-facts...

The Iraq War, most of our Middle East policy, and the TSA.

Socialism: https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/socialism-markin.... (Huge disaster from an environmental standpoint.)

Many environmental disasters are the result of focusing on goals or outcomes without thinking about costs. Irrigating the southwest, damming the Colorado, hydroelectric power, opposition to nuclear power in the 1960s and 1970s, etc.

The estimates are totally off: 3.7 degrees hits many tipping points, coastal cities are worth how much?

The underlying study was the basis for conclusions in a recent IPCC report. And the study accounts for tipping points ("discontinuities"). The estimated cost for a 2C warming is just $70 trillion.

It's nearly impossible in the US to vote for a candidate based on policy instead of party, due to the twin dangers of split majorities and Keynesian beauty contests (a.k.a., the need to choose for "electability").

The only remedy to the above problems is abolishing first-past-the-post elections in favor of instant runoff.

Right. If solving global warming is a matter of money (which it obviously is) then the cost of global warming would be capped at that amount of money if we just managed to figure out a way to align incentives. Unfortunately right now the groups that create the problem don't bear the cost of the problem.

Before any tax is issued, I'd like to know the exact percentage breakdown between man-made climate change and natural climate cycles? Can anyone break the percentage down for me, between man-made CO2 and natural CO2 being outgassed by oceans, and then breakdown the difference between CO2 induced warming and variations in the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the cosmic ray flux and it's impact on cloud cover as a result of variations in solar magnetic cycles, volcanic activity, and the El Nino Southern Oscillation? Can anyone break that down by percentages for me?

The oceans are absorbing CO₂.

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

Also, no one knows the exact percentage breakdown. No one. We can't even say with any sort of certainty what the current climate is, because it's something that is only really available retrospectively.

Here is a video that adresses some of your points. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FBF6F4Bi6Sg

Nice, the video addresses myths such as: "Climate Change -- Isn't it natural?"

Made by a former geologist, science journalists for 25 years.

If the climate were a linear system then that might be answerable with certainty, but it is not.

The climate scientists that have spent years studying these issues and are making the dire predictions already know the answers to these issues. If you want to know the answers you could read their blogs and papers and textbooks.

The ocean sucks out carbon. It's a carbon sponge, not an emitter. The ocean is absorbing about 30% of our emissions currently, however that may soon drop [1]

Hope that helps! I'm a bit puzzled you know all those terms but apparently don't have the tools to find answers. Try googling that stuff and see what academic papers you find!

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/03/oceans-do-us-a-huge-s...

Does it really matter whether the CO2 is natural or man made? It seems fairly clear climate change & more frequent extreme weather events are not a good thing for us.

In Colorado, for years the state government spent a lot of time and money trying to show that China was the reason we couldn't meet Federal air quality standards. It was a moronic exercise- no matter who is responsible for the ozone, we are the ones breathing it. Skip the blame game and get to fixing it.

I’m familiar with the science and I’m afraid to say there are no easy solutions to climate change. Every meaningful systemic solution requires a dramatic curtailment of our current energy use, and would have tremendous negative socioeconomic impact. In short, all meaningful solutions rely on everyone’s life getting a bit worse, and in many cases, esp. in the western world, a lot worse.

Furthermore, any systemic solution that does not enforce global compliance and population control (I went there) is guaranteed to fail.

I've read assessments from climate scientists that don't paint nearly as dark a situation in terms of what we CAN do. The hard part is simply making it a political reality.

But even ignoring that, it's important to define "worse". Worse than a year round fire season constantly threatening to burn down your home? Worse than 50 year floods every single year? As the impacts of climate change become more real to individuals, I think you'll find the "worse" situation is not doing anything.

Will just share some brief points. As we pump more energy into the atmosphere, the climate will continue to change until a new equilibrium is reached. There will be winners and losers when that happens, recall that the Sahara was once a tropical jungle, or that CO2 ppm was higher during the jurassic era. Florida may be unhabitable but Wyoming may become a paradise. Any city, county, state, country that looks to be a winner does not benefit from contributing to climate change efforts and therefore will find little incentive in doing so.

Shifting focus to alternatives is noble, but the technology is years from maturation. It took us a long time to master the steam that drives electricity generation whether the plant is coal, oil, natural gas or nuclear (hydroelectric being the lone exception). These sources are mature enough to be reliable. We often take for granted the level of engineering effort involved in building and deploying a stable power grid. Switching to alternatives before they are mature will introduce instabilities across the grid, rolling brownouts/blackouts will be prevalent. Subways will shutdown in major cities at arbitrary times etc. It will dramatically reduce the quality of life. This is what happens in third world countries with inadequate and unstable grids. If you wonder why cellphones outsell desktops and laptops in Africa, this is partly why.

The energy density per unit volume that gasoline offers is unmatched by all other sources except nuclear. It’s stable and portable, and yes it definitely damages the environment when produced or consumed, but then every fuel source does. There’s certainly some great work on better batteries, but it’s years, potentially decades, away from production grade. It’s also unclear whether there won’t be other externalities from mining and transmuting rare earth metals at the scale required to replace gasoline. We may be trading one problem for another. The world is also slowly running out of potable water.

A big problem like climate change requires big solutions. A complete rethink of transportation, energy infrastructure, food production, housing, etc. at a national scale. And any sustainable solution will have to address population limits. But nobody has the courage to talk in those terms. Thing is, even if one country manages to wean itself off of fossil fuels, other, poorer countries will be happy to absorb the excess supply in the form of lower prices. How do we stop that? Put a global price on carbon? Look above for why certain countries won’t agree to that. That requires a one world govt., and we’re probably not getting one of those until we face a mass extinction event (meteor, aliens).

Climate change is the ultimate tragedy of the commons. And humanity has a terrible track record as far as the commons are concerned.

>year round fire season

I'm not sure if this is referencing the current predicament in California (which Gavin Newsom is attempting to blame on climate change [0]), but if so the reality is closer to...

-failure to carry out proper controlled burns [1]

-corrupt California legislature being heavily backed by PG&E lobbying [2]

-those same California politicians not reigning in PG&E [3]

-and a couple other more minor things.. maybe including people living in risky areas [4]

The sea level change of 3 inches over the last 25 years, while ultimately an issue, is a cop-out for political failings in California right now.

[0] https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2019/10/28/...

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2018/11/16/californ...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/us/pge-california-politic...

[3] https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/PG-E-plans-near...

[4] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-28/kincade-...

I think this is wrong but I'm interested in your sources for this opinion.

Many of the things we'd need to do are simply better overall but aren't happening fast enough because of political coordination issues.

I believe most of the people complaining about how it will be really tough are actually just spreading (unwittingly or not) propaganda from the narrow interests who benefit from the status quo.

It's no different from all the people talking about how much a less idiotic healthcare system in the US would cost. While multiple other nations already do more with less.

I'm much more in favor of sequestering CO2 naturally (planting trees everywhere possible, it also has huge benefits in well-being, air quality, ..), and forcing people to reduce their excessive consumerism

A carbon tax or carbon dividend could include payouts for planting & maintaining trees, and it would increase the price tag of excessive consumerism.

To actually prevent further global warming we need active planetary scale solutions.

You paint far too rosy a picture here. A carbon tax is preventative, not active. There is no viable path to scale current sequestration techniques to global scale.

What we're talking about with a carbon tax is not 'solving climate change'. It is limiting the change to approximately what current models predict.

If a carbon fee system grants transferable credits for sequestering ambient carbon, then it would pay for that too.

This ignores the fact that the resources to sequester carbon simply do not exist at the required scale.

The entire point of a carbon credit system would be to produce the funding to develop those resources.

But the funding is backwards. We need genuine engineering genius and/or fundamental scientific breakthroughs to have more than a laughable impact with industrial sequestration techniques. The return on investment will be hugely negative for the vast vast vast majority of efforts.

This is a problem that is very well suited to direct public funding (we all benefit if a solution is found) and poorly suited for private enterprise (privatizing the benefit is unlikely to offset the costs to develop it on an average basis).

No it is not this simple.

The damage already done has a very long tail.

Thermal expansion will continue to increase sea level rise for hundreds of years even if we stop emitting co2 now [0].

We need to think about mitigation of the impact of future climate change in addition to addressing the root cause.

[0] https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/climate-chan...

To really solve climate change we need the American population to take it seriously.

Blasting China won't change it since a lot of China's pollution is due to the developed countries exporting their most polluting industries. Europe is seriously confronting the situation, America's denying it (starting by its president).

Here is a good article about it: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/25/lambas...

> Solving climate change can be as simple as getting a carbon price adopted.

Such a solution cannot work, as long as we have a growth-based economy. The fact is that economists have long regarded natural resources as infinite, and their models are conceived accordingly.

Infinite growth is by definition incompatible with a finite planet. Until we have come up with a new, finite economic model (which means also a profound change to our way of living), I'm afraid there's no easy solution to the climate crisis.

We can adapt to a green and infinite model - solar energy is effectively infinite - assuming we adapt before catastrophe

What do you mean by solar energy being infinite? There's a clear limit to how much energy the sun outputs. If we had high efficiency collection it would last us for awhile. But I think a lesson to learn from all this is that no resource is unlimited and it's better to recognize those limitations and prepare a mitigating well ahead of time rather than when we're in crisis. Though lack of sufficient solar energy (because high energy demands) is not likely to be catastrophic.

The carbon tax and tech solutions are a must but won't be enough, due to lack of time.

The science tells us we don't have much to turn things around, not nearly enough.

Based on our history of energy transitions, even rolling out commercially available tech for low/zero carbon generation left to market forces will take many decades, almost a century.

Then there are hard problems we simply have no low/zero carbon solution for at scale. Manufacturing pig iron for primary steel, ammonia, cement, industrial agriculture, plastics, shipping, aviation, etc.

Also, AFAIK there does not exist a demonstrated technology for CO2 sequestration that scales and has the required CO2 emission balance (needs energy to run). Storage is also unsolved. I'm curious if you have a link.

It took a century to build out the global oil infrastructure with its millions of miles of pipelines, pumps, oil tankers, etc.

We'll need to handle multiple times the material flow for CO2 sequestration. And overhaul/retrofit/upgrade the entire global energy system, industry, transportation, shipping, agriculture... Even allowing for existing sequestration tech - there's no time.

We need a quick head start that only cutting back consumption can give us. 10% of the population is responsible for 50% of global anthropogenic emissions.

If the top 1% of emitters or the ~75 million people at the top cut back their consumption to the level of the average European's, global emissions would decrease by 30%.

The current economics paradigm (~growth is a must) guarantees we can't solve climate change as growth cannot be decoupled from CO2 increase.

This is a physics problem. Physics doesn't care about ROI or discount rates or tactics.

We were given a diagnosis of terminal cancer quite some time ago and we refused to do chemo or undergo surgery because it would have meant a drastic change in our lifestyle. Now we are stage three. We still meet with our oncologist team from time to time, only to actively sabotage all of their attempts to save us.

In 1988 the UN established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In 31 years, after 51 IPCC sessions and 25 major conferences our yearly CO2 emissions increased by 60%. That's how much we care.

In 2019, Energy companies are still set on fully realizing their extractions rights and are actively seeking new oil and gas fields to exploit, including in the thawing arctic.

We're still buliding 1500+ new coal power plants and hundreds of airports.

We're busy entrenching our fossil fuel dependence. Anthropogenic CO2 emissions are still on the rise.

There's just no political will.

I'm fascinated by this graph of the growth of solar as compared to International Agency Predictions.

Year after year, the IEA massively underestimated the growth of solar. Last year, at a workshop with the World Bank I heard an expert in energy investments say "even just 5 years ago none of us ever thought the price of solar could go this low this fast".

GRAPH: https://steinbuch.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/iea-vs-reality...

I'm curious if there's something similar for the changing climate. Just how much are we underestimating the changing climate? Has anyone seen a graph like the one above, but regarding climate predictions?

For example, the rate of Greeland's massive ice melt was as high as the worst climate predictions for 2070, decades into the future. [1][2] It seems even the scientific predictions can be too conservative.

[1] https://twitter.com/xavierfettweis/status/115648786895048294... [2] https://twitter.com/xavierfettweis/status/115648786895048294...

That melt isn't as unprecedented as the Forbes blagger makes it out to be. Follow the chain and you find out that it is reasonably comparable to one that happened in…2012:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/08/01/greenland-...

If it ends up part of even a 2 year pattern, that's already concerning, I'm not dismissing the issue, I'm just slagging Forbes links.

Huge props. I haven't even read the link you posted, but wanted to say I admire your post.

Climate discussions often end up fighting even though they're all sort of on the same page. I'm always up for adding more curiosity, and holding everything to a higher standard. I'll check out the link and perhaps find a better reference for the above post.

EDIT: Cleaned out the Forbes links, thanks!

Following up here:

The reference to 2070 seems to relate to the rate of melting (ablation rate), which was greater than the 2012 melt.

The rate of the recent melt was modeled as the average daily melting rate in 2070 in SSP585: https://twitter.com/xavierfettweis/status/115648786895048294...

Oh so this looks interesting. Here's what SSP585 refers to, it's a hardcore model for 2000 ppm by 2200: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Relation-of-C4MIP-simula...

I haven't found the source for linking that to the ablation rate besides the above xavierfettweis tweet tho. But he has a followup tweet in that thread saying it was related to the melting rate overall.

Without criticizing the article at all, I want to point out that headlines like this go viral and make money, while the opposite ones would go nowhere.

In other words, the news you see is selected by virality, not by how well they describe the real world.

I have no cure or even complaint for this. I just think it's a very important thing to keep in mind.

I may have seen this exact headline maybe once a month for the past 10-15 years.

Maybe soon someone will take notice and do something

This is not just news. It is an academic article published by reputable institutions. If they had published the opposite article it would be even more noteworthy, being that it would be more revolutionary. Your comment would be true of opinion pieces written by wackos without reputation, that we only read because they validate our intuitions. Academic articles are a different matter.

It's going to happen faster than we've been told. I expect in 10 years global panic will set in.

Can you support this opinion?

Nope. I'd love to be proven wrong.

I'm baffled. You "expect" something that you say you have no reason to expect, and you hope this expectation is wrong. Is this some new meaning of "expect" that I'm not familiar with? Or do you follow a psychological strategy of expecting bad things so that you'll always be pleasantly surprised?

It is a human phenomenon, that has religious and secular expressions.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/psychology...

...some apocalyptic believers find the idea that the end is nigh to be validating. Individuals with a history of traumatic experiences, for example, may be fatalistic. For these people, finding a group of like-minded fatalists is reassuring. There may also be comfort in being able to attribute doom to some larger cosmic order—such as an ancient Mayan prophecy. This kind of mythology removes any sense of individual responsibility.

Kinda sounds like you're calling AGW a doomsday cult.

No, but there are doomsday cultish acolytes of AGW.

Thank you for your diagnosis, but I can explain. Reports coming out now are indicating that shit's getting real faster than was modeled.

Models are educated guesses at realty; are the models guaranteed 100% accurate? No, and I'm (just) guessing that the inaccuracies are in the conservative realm.

I do not find it validating, I find it terrifying. I worry for my kids future.

Anybody who isn't worried about what's happening now is a fool.

Greenland's massive ice melt wasn't supposed to happen until 2070.

It seems even the scientific predictions can be too conservative. The changing climate isn't a linear system, it's more like a step function. Once the ice melts it's much harder to get back.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottsnowden/2019/08/16/greenla...

It is interesting to note that just about 1000 years ago the Vikings were growing barley in Greenland [0].

> “Now we can see that the Vikings could grow corn, and this was very important for their nourishment and survival,”

Barley seems to do ok in late Spring conditions in the NE United States [1]. I'm not certain you could grow barley or corn in Tundra conditions.

I bring this up when people mention warming global conditions because the planet has, in the past, been much warmer than it is now.

[0] https://sciencenordic.com/agriculture-archaeology-denmark/vi...

[1] https://plants.usda.gov/plantguide/pdf/ccpg_horde.pdf

It was a well-known and understood roughly 300-year localized warmer period[1] in Western Europe and the North Atlantic. The planet has been globally warmer than what it is now but that was long before H. sapiens and has nothing to do with the Vikings or barley.

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

It's part of a natural cycle. We were never going to stop it anyway. The real means to stop it will not be talked about until the serious changes start happening and the entire world is in panic.

Your first sentence is false (there are natural cycles but the next one is due to cause an ice age in a few thousand years’ time, not warming).

Your second sentence is TBD, except that the actual natural cycle that would have led to an ice age in a few thousand years’ time has been disrupted and that ice age (and perhaps the one after it) will not now occur.

Your third sentence does not follow from either of the first two, and is demonstrably false as a conclusion because we are in fact talking about it.

>> Your first sentence is false (there are natural cycles but the next one is due to cause an ice age in a few thousand years’ time, not warming)

I contend that the warming leads to a tipping point that brings on the glaciation. Its part of the cycle.

That would be neat, like something out of Pacific Rim where these monsters come out of the ground and start making a lot of ice! "It's too hot! ROOOOARRRR!"

Well, extremes are what will cause most pain. Reality is running ahead of and worse than models, and the models seem to underestimate extrema https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08745-6

there are many arguments, some unfortunately rabid ... this one feels well put together.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

Mainly because that means there is finite growth in the economy, and we've built a ponzi scheme of sorts at this point. It's a hard pill to swallow, that we can't just grow forever.

The thing is, we can grow until we can't anymore. Preemptively choosing to struggle with what we had yesterday is not a good response to the idea that there is a limit.

A good short term thing would be to more clearly understand the real costs of the things we do today. What is the long term environmental impact and so on.

If you adhere by the definition of wealth that pg lays out in his famous essay, then it is not true that there is finite growth. The more accurate statement would be that there is a limit to the amount of consumption and consumerism that we are allowed to indulge ourselves in. In our present economy that might more or less be what everyone thinks growth is. But we could have other kinds of economic growth that do not impose a cost on our environment.

We still have a long way to go to become more efficient, which is a way to continue growth without increasing our burden on the planet. Of course the issue there is that efficiency gains can only go so far, and you run into diminishing returns rather quickly.

Also, economic growth does not necessarily rely on increased production of physical goods. If people stopped paying for physical toys in lieu of software, for instance, the economy very well could grow while the physical footprint of the average person decreased (all else remaining the same). If people preferred experiential entertainment such as movies, escape rooms, etc more than e.g. boating, that could also result in economic growth while physical consumption of goods decreases.

But, while we can continue to grow economically without increasing physical consumption (all else being equal), the elephant in the room is that a very large portion of the world does not live a life even remotely similar to that of a wealthy, developed country resident wrt physical resource consumption. So even if we in rich countries maintained our resource usage, global demand for physical resources will continue to grow rapidly as other parts of the world develop. So are we willing to consign huge swathes of the globe to eternal poverty, or will we actively decrease our resource consumption?

This is not what the IPCC believes.

The effects how over the course of decades. The world is not going to end in 10 years.

I think it will happen sooner than that.

Once you have a 3 days heatwave, it's bad. If they occur during summer and the next summer, and if they last for 1 week or more, several times per summer, people will not talk about it, but feel it and understand that global warming is settling in and will not go away.

The problem is that the temperature increase can be sudden and difficult to anticipate. A heatwave can also kill a lot of people (the elderly, the young, people will fragile health, and also people who don't prepare or don't listen to warnings).

You're right that in 10 years there are strong chances for a global panic, but if crops yields are bad it can also have fast consequences. It just hope the wakeup calls will make people react swiftly and as soon as possible. I'd rather have a big heatwave that gives enough political capital to act and do things, than a slow and creeping climate change where nothing is done and it becomes too late.

I hope Californians are at least feeling it. Those wild fires every year are kind of unusual and are getting intense every year.

Everything is only going to get worse

I am trying to find the source I read a few years ago where climate scientists are intentionally scaling back their predictions so they aren’t discounted as crazy doomsday predictions. I think that there are many accurate predictions out there but we mostly see the most mild ones because they figure some action is better than being written off completely.

Would love to see that! See my post above about IEA solar power predictions, interested to learn more about predictions over the years.

Dropping in here just to say: if this got you worried, come work with us over at http://climateaction.tech/ We are a global community of tech professionals using our skills, expertise and platforms to support solutions to the climate crisis.

Looks interesting but what are you actually doing (projects)? I couldn’t find in your site.

The core of the climateAction.tech at the moment is in a Slack, where different projects are moved forward by the community. There are a bunch of different things happening but recently some of our members where behind the https://digital.globalclimatestrike.net. A couple of things I know are being worked on include putting more pressure on AWS to switch to renewables faster and an idea for a green open-source license

Im not sure why anyone expects these estimates to hold any water at all.

From what I gather, pressure from the establishment has systematically caused scientists to lowball impact estimates and ignore second (and higher) order effects. Meanwhile the complexity and far reach of impact is beyond anything we can model.

Consider how all the experts were surprised in the 2008 economic crisis. That was just an economic crisis, primarily involving things we can easily count (dollars) on a very small timescale (years).

Now we are talking about many interlocking systems we cannot model well, on a timescale we cannot fathom. How good could those estimates ever be? Maybe +/- 6 orders of magnitude.

Downvoters please help me understand your angle here

I upvoted, FWIW. Maybe help explain your perspective some more? It sounds like you're just kind of saying "we can't model anything so why bother?".

We can model what we can. Sure, the big recession catches the world by surprise, but people are working constantly to model these systems, and it seems to be better than doing nothing.

Climate models for example tell us that carbon dioxide is indeed a greenhouse gas, and gives us an idea of the amount of warming we'll see at various levels.

+/- 6 orders of magnitude seems like a lot. Like that seems like we don't know whether we'll have 400 ppm or 400,000,000 ppm in the future?

Thanks! My order of magnitude range is extreme, but I was thinking of "total cost to humanity" estimate not ppms.

I do think trying to put a price tag on climate change's "total cost to humanity" is truly a hopeless task, and results are bound to be meaningless, due to sheer complexity combine with subjectivity.

How can we meaningfully price biodiversity, the anguish of future generations, permanently escalating geopolitical stress, and the vast flock of black swan events that will result from these changes, in a single dollar amount? I believe such efforts are pure hogwash.

Glad you responded! Lots of thoughts on this.

The estimates are sure to be not exactly right. But I don't let that hold me up!

I see sooooo many people get stuck because they can't figure out "Well is it 700 billion tons of carbon in the air or 900? Will the the warming 4 degrees C or 5?". "I can't do anything if I don't know exactly what it is".

To me it's all just an excuse to do nothing. And I understand it, it's a relief to feel powerless sometimes, "I can't do anything about this, oh well". But we have to fight that. I know there's more carbon in the air than we know what to do with, and we have to take it out. Current capacities are so much smaller than any estimate of the order of magnitude, that my role is building, not predicting.

We do need more modelers and monitors. However, there is a diminishing return to modeling and modeling and modeling. So we need 10X more modeler and 100,000X people building and taking action.

I think we agree, all Im saying in addition is, "total cost to humanity" is extremely hard to model, far harder than a physical climate model, so hard its near meaningless.

Im not saying climate models are not worth doing, I think we must do them.

But I think the priors on the models are not right, we should be open to publishing radical results not taming them down for palatability.

Your Impossible Labs looks cool btw, glad you are doing this!

Every time a climate change article hits the front page of HN, I cheer a bit. Are there any other awesome tech + climate communities around?

This is a very wide ranging piece by the two academics Naomi Oreskes and Nicholas Stern.

Oreskes: '...contrary to popular belief, there is no single scientific method. Rather, the trustworthiness of scientific claims derives from the social process by which they are rigorously vetted against'. It comes down to trust...

http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/event/why-trust-scien...

I still think many models are missing volcanic winters. We know they have crazy cooling effects, but they are something we don’t yet control.

More $$$ money needs to go into Vulcanering. Crazy, but if we can make ash spread 20% more that’s years of cooling.

There are feasible approaches with similar effects:

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

If I understand correctly, currently anthropogenically accumulated extra CO2 takes some hundreds of thousands of years to return to geological circulation, while the faster biological circulation won't withhold it all, and seas are getting saturated (and will acidify beyond supporting current lifeforms in the process). [see eg. Hot Earth Dreams]

Also, if I understood correctly a single article I'll try to dig up a link to later, the kickback effect of stopping a temporary cooling measure and returning to the warming trend caused by the CO2 still in air will have stronger harmful effects. If these hold, it might prove tricky to keep up a moderate, safe cooling effect long enough, even if some technical measure to cause volcanic winter was found. [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0431-0?utm_source... via https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/devi...]

I would hope this or some other measure would prove successful. but I'm not yet able to put all my faith on any of them.

Opened the article expecting it to be a more abstract cost. Turns out it's about economics. Christ alive.

"Yeah, billions are gonna die, but what really matters is my house prices are gonna go down."

Who said that billions are gonna die?

Frankly, if the solution to climate change will slow economic growth, I think that the highest human cost will come from the lack of growth. To put it in clear terms: lack of growth means that a sewage system, or a hospital, don't get built. This _will_ cause victims.

Eh. While I’m optimistic that solutions will be found, in principle a shifting climate can radically alter food production. Billions could die. I don’t think they will, but in principle they could, and I lack the necessary background in agricultural science to tell what “likely” is.

I doubt that climate can shift so quickly that humans can't adapt at least their most important cultures. We're very good at this, and very quick, and we don't need to produce food anywhere near where it's consumed.

Although of course the ships that bring immense amounts of food across the globe have been built, and are operated, with fossil fuels. As is our agriculture. Again, increase the cost of the fuel that makes both possible, and people will die.

Remember the trending article yesterday where economists were admitting they totally got the free trade economics wrong? Well, predicting the economic effects of climate change is going to be 10x full of guesswork and mistaken assumptions and bad models. Good luck getting it right.

Do you think people can live without production of food, housing, medicine, clothing and other goods? Do you think those things get delivered without transportation and communication infrastructure? Economic cost is not abstract at all - its a reduction of things people need to live. It measures other things as well but there is virtually no harm from climate change that can’t be measured in economic terms. That’s practically a tautology.

People love to get outraged when economists talk about human tragedy in monetary terms because they assume the sub text of discussing things in terms of money is that that's what they think is really important about the situation. This entirely misses the point.

The economists want something they can measure. They are using dollar losses as a proxy for the gravity of the situation and as a proxy for relative value that people place on things.

If you want someone to analyze people's feelings about the tragedy get a psychologist but there's a reason that economists are more likely to get invited to a climate summit than psychologists.

> The economists want something they can measure. They are using dollar losses as a proxy for the gravity of the situation and as a proxy for relative value that people place on things.

This is a poor proxy, as it over-values areas with high, uneven distributions of capital accumulation. If the Netherlands were to succumb to the impending boiling sea-waters, that would necessarily have a higher "economist cost" than a similar tragedy befalling Nigeria, despite Nigeria having over 10x the population of the Netherlands.

Rather than viewing the very real human impact, the "economist cost" rides the coat-tails of chauvinist mythology by saying that, yes, in fact a Dutchman is worth 11x a Nigerian.

> there's a reason that economists are more likely to get invited to a climate summit than psychologists.

I can guarantee you it's not the reason you think it is.

> by saying that, yes, in fact a Dutchman is worth 11x a Nigerian.

I'm pretty sure economists actually genuinely believe this statement.

These figures aren't used to compare tragedies across countries in a professional setting. It is always about how a government should allocate aid resources or distributions within their own economy.

Except for foreign aid in which being devalued works strongly in the favor of poorer nations. Ie if I have 10 million in aid money to spend and I can buy 10 housing units in Germany or 1000 housing units in Uganda because the currency goes further, that money is going to be routed to the poorer place.

So this is a total strawman. No one respectable (and I mean 0) is using these figures to compare human worth between economies.

So you what do you want do? Run around and poll everyone on their feelings and make decisions based on anecdote points?

You fail to present a better alternative.

> Run around and poll everyone on their feelings and make decisions based on anecdote points?

Democracy sounds pretty dope when you put it that way.

> You fail to present a better alternative

I just want people to treat human life with dignity. Chile 1973--we've seen what happens with your line of rationalization and commoditizing human lives.

Yeah, try enacting an infrastructure project at the implementation level via direct vote democracy. No evil quantifiable data needed.

I'm sure it will be "dope".

>I just want people to treat human life with dignity.

I want an airplane made of gold. Who cares what you want? You dislike the only practical method of achieving what you want and present no alternative so you'll get nothing.

> Yeah, try enacting an infrastructure project at the implementation level via direct vote democracy. No evil quantifiable data needed.

It's almost like there are multiple methods of organizing democratic systems of governance and not all of them rely on direct democracy. Maybe, if we had some roughly representative system, wherein people elected people to represent their interests, then those elected officials would hold town-halls to hear their constituents complaints, worries, and get a general feel for their "feelings." That sure seems capable of addressing infrastructural needs.

> Who cares what you want?

I am generally pretty interested in that. Maybe in the above fictional system of governance we recently conjured, my elected official might even have some interest in what I want.

> You dislike the only practical method of achieving what you want

What do I even dislike again? I critiqued you defending monstrous humans for prioritizing dollar values above human lives. Is the Pinochet model really the only viable model in your opinion?

> I want an airplane made of gold

At this point, it seems you'd sooner have a solid gold helicopter.

We always had climate change. Not having climate change is the exception. Is it man made? Is it caused by CO2? Ist it getting warmer? Is this a good or a bad thing? Can we and should we do something about it? This are many questions and climate change is one of the most complex phenomenons. I have a STEM PhD and would not be able to make a quick judgement.

"Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think"

Given that all the statements are true, something that is seldom discussed, who is "We"? People with real estate in NYC, Amsterdam and Miami? Maybe. People in super hot climates? Probably.

How about people in Greenland? Russia? Canada?

If you had a climate science PhD, you'd be better able to judge. Until then, a good overview of the scientific evidence for manmade climate change is in Hansen's Storms of My Grandchildren.

The fact that climate is not especially stable is precisely the problem.

That the climate is changing is not a complex question. The impacts are less known, but an unstable climate seems net negative for the average person on Earth.

Heat wave deaths in Serbia and Canada: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/07/02/climate-chang...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/climate-change-canada-1.4...

This is a net sum loss. We, the species and the Our ecosystems will lose on the whole.

The 'we've always had climate change' argument is bogus. It's the rate of change and the multitude of system's abilities to adapt.

Life will go on, but not as we know it, Jim.

Climate change will create the first trillionaire.

Find every machine that eats fossil fuels and electrify it. Find every crop that requires stable land and predictable weather and farm it in a shipping container. Find every underlying infrastructure that requires decades to pay off and decentralize it.

Instead of water line pipes, pull water out of the air. Instead of fiber optic cables make LEO satellites. Instead of refrigerated transportation, grow food in your pocket or your stomach. Instead of roads, take to the air. Instead of high power transmission lines that cause fires and burn down trees, build island-mode ready microgrids.

Build a better world, a template for all worlds to come.

> Climate change will create the first trillionaire.

Is that a good thing?

It is probably more correct to state that solutions that allow us to adapt-to or reverse the effects of greenhouse gases on our environment will result in trillions of dollars in value to humanity at large.

Whether that that value-creation gets concentrated or not is some combination of randomness, individual choices, and politics.

everything described above is a good thing. Why do you care that someone will become insanely rich by improving lives for millions?

It's funny how my comment questioning the concentration of wealth as being a condemnation of business in principle.

Why are you on Hacker News if you don't think successfully solving enormous problems merits enormous payoff? Like, this is the YCombinator message board. It's about venture capital and discussion for middling-to-wildly-ambitious startups.

I don't think you are wrong for asking the question, but this isn't really the place to question whether investment and entrepreneurism is an efficient system.

There's a lot of internet out there. This one is for startups. Just let this one exist.

It's funny how my comment questioning the concentration of wealth as being a condemnation of business in principle.

Also, go pound sand. My comment has value, even if you don't see it.

Better than the alternatives, which are:

* We end up in serious deprivation due to climate change

* We end up in serious deprivation due to the austerity measured imposed on industrial society to prevent climate change

Why do you keep copy and pasting the same post?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21324768

> Find every machine that eats fossil fuels and electrify it.

As I replied last time... you’re starting a free lunch fallacy, and it isn’t getting much better from there.

Every “replacement” tech you list has massive downsides - replace fiber with inescapable high latency satellites, much higher cost, a crazy carbon footprint to launch them in to space, less bandwidth? Why are you just making up “better” alternatives to things?

I wasn’t sure the last time I replied to you about LED bulbs and their landfill potential vs old glass and wire bulbs that you’ve ever made anything or have any sense of scale. I’m gathering more evidence for that theory though.

Climate change is the biggest opportunity civilization has ever seen, and I'm happy to share that view with others that might contribute.

Appreciate your thoughts on this! You make a great point about LED bulbs and their landfill potential.

You're totally right about the fixed costs of LEDs. Today they're very complex from a manufacturing and materials standpoint, and can create much more trouble at a landfill than old glass and wire bulbs. That's a huge opportunity for improvement.

Ultimately as a civilization we have to find solutions with the lowest fixed and variable costs. The variable cost of glass and wire bulbs is high. You're heating a wire and generating tons of lost heat. LEDs beat the pants of glass and wire bulbs in terms of efficiency. So we have to improve that up front manufacturing and landfill potential of LEDs.

My city runs on 100% hydroelectric. I use incandescent and halogen. They give off much better light anyway, and don't mess up blue light cycles / sleep.

I, on the other hand, believe that fighting climate change will be a great wealth equalizer. The development of cheap energy in the form of wind and solar power, and also the need for centralization in the fight against climate change (which will require an increase in taxes against those with money: the rich) will eliminate many current power structures in our current economic system, and will make many aspects of the 'usefulness' of wealth: the ability to travel quickly and in ... extreme ... comfort, access to exotic foods at any time, and the ability to use huge amounts of energy, will all become extremely limited or will be available to everyone, at least up to the point that it matters anymore.

These things that you describe must happen will never be accomplished by private companies because they are all wealth destructive behaviors, and the organization that does is will not make profit off of these endeavors: nobody can afford to buy the stuff being described anymore, at least in the United States. I know that I certainly can't afford to change out all of my homes infrastructure in preparation for climate change, and almost everyone that lives around me is in a worse financial situation than I'm in.

The process will be completed by governments, not by private corporations. This is probably part of the reason that corporations and the extremely wealthy fight against the knowledge of climate change in the public sphere: it will eliminate their 'monarchic' power structures and replace them with the highly effective centralized power structures that we had pre-Reagan.

Nice, I like the part about equalizing! Fast travel, cheap energy, exotic food for all.

> which will require an increase in taxes against those with money: the rich

Unfortunately they will do what they always do and make the poor and middle class carry the bulk of the tax burden while just throwing a sail or two on their super yachts after the biofuel conversion.

> Climate change will create the first trillionaire.

Or it will break down every aspect of our current society until it is unrecognizable.

Your "technology will save us" attitude isn't a plan, it's more of a prayer.

Yes, that future society will be unrecognizable in many ways. Today, my lifestyle emits over 30 tons of carbon dioxide per year. That's the weight of almost 30 cars every year.

Any society that manages to do away with that will be completely different than today's.

Unrecognizable, here we come!

> Unrecognizable, here we come!

You seem to think things will get better. What evidence do you have of this, besides the fact that global security, political stability and climate change is all getting worse, fast.

> Climate change will create the first trillionaire.

Zimbabwe style.

Spot on!

Most of your proposal are unrealistic. For example:

> Instead of water line pipes, pull water out of the air.

You need a lot of energy to transform water into vapor and you need to remove and dispose the same amount of energy to transform vapor into liquid water. Every three months there is a new Kickstarter scam that propose something like this. Sometimes it's an overoptimistic idealist, sometimes it's a plain scam, sometimes it's difficult to be sure. After a few months and a few millions in development, they just reinvent a dehumidifier with a fancy box.

> Find every crop that requires stable land and predictable weather and farm it in a shipping container.

The current farms cover approximately 40% of the land surface. So you need to build a huge number of shipping containers. Will they have a transparent top to get free light? What about irrigation? Why is it better to use shipping container instead of the current method? Is this just a grrenhouse

WATER: Traditional municipal water pipes aren't perfect either. They're expensive to install and maintain, and it takes energy to pump all that water around and maintain pressure. Think about Flint [1], think about the upcoming shortage of groundwater in India. The cost of traditional water infrastructure is higher than estimated. There is real need for air capture of water.

Here's an interesting project to follow, perhaps you have seen it already: "The winner of the Water Abundance XPrize creates enough water for 100 people every day by making an artificial cloud inside a shipping container." [2]

FARMS: That's exactly right, agriculture uses much of our land today. Most of that is livestock. "Livestock is the world’s largest user of land resources, with grazing land and cropland dedicated to the production of feed representing almost 80 % of all agricultural land." [2] So much of meat production will be made using cellular agriculture. Livestock is way too resource intensive, cattle will go extinct. And the rest of it, well 2-dimensional farming seems inefficient so let's see what building up looks like. A single shipping container can hold many acres worth of short crops that can be grown on top of eachother.

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

[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/90253718/a-device-that-can-pull-...

[3] http://www.fao.org/animal-production/en/

About [2]: It was discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18301190 (122 points | Oct 25, 2018 | 129 comments). Some takeaway of the comments:

They don't extract water from air, they partially burn (gasify) biomass to produce water, carbon dioxide and charcoal. They extract the water from the fumes where it is more concentrated. (It's strange that they can dump all the heat, they need some good coolers.)

The cost is 1/2 of the cost of the desalinization, 2 times the cost of calling a water truck for the town, and 100 times the cost of tap water in a city. But the cost they quote is only the cost of the equipment, they don't include maintenance and they don't include the cost of the biomass.

The places were biomass is cheap and there is plenty of biomass are the places where there is enough water to grow crops or trees. It's not efficient to buy wood just to burn it to extract the water. Moreover, growing the tree will consume much more water than the water that you can extract with this device. Also, it's cheaper to call a water truck than enough truck with all the wood to produce the same amount of water.

> A single shipping container can hold many acres worth of short crops that can be grown on top of each other.

The plants need sunlight. It is possible to replace it with artificial light, but it is more expensive. At industrial scales it is worth only for plants that have a very high ratio of price per weights, not simple crops.

>Climate change will create the first trillionaire.

I was cheering for those canucks a few years back, hoping they'd score an easy trillion with their groundbreaking product.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-pollutio...

Bring on the fad diet pills to fix CC and watch all of the lesser talented fraudsters pile behind. If economies cause CC, economies will uncause CC.

- that gives them enough room for plausible deniability

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