Comment by icegreentea2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by icegreentea2 | Hacker News Reader

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I think its worth considering how long that long tail is:

https://www.cement.org/for-concrete-books-learning/concrete-...

Taking at a look at the link above (which is published by pretty much the more pro-cement group you can imagine), we get that carbon resorption is a thing, that certainly there is a potential for many structures to achieve carbon neutrality over their design lifespans, and that in the "best case", we're talking about 100% carbon neutrality over decades. We also get that 100% carbon resorption is not a design goal of many forms of current reinforced concrete applications since the presence CaC03 increases rebar corrosion.

Taken at face value then, what you have is that cement currently emits 8% of all human carbon activity, that over the timespan of decades, it may self sequester itself to 4%, but probably somewhere in between. So even if we trivially converted kiln sources to renewables, there's still probably a decent chunk of carbon emitted in cement creation process that may never be self-sequestered.

I think understanding what that final number comes out to would be pretty useful thing to understand, and is hardly scare-mongering.

I think once we drill into our heads that we need to decarbonize, after "the easy step" of cutting fossil fuel use, litterally every other form of decarbonization consists of chasing down some carbon source that accounts for the 2-5% range. There will be no low hanging fruit left.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41024-016-0010-9 is a pretty nice discussion of concrete carbonation as well.

It is also worth pointing out that the GP's comment was showing the chemistry for a lime-based concrete. OPC (Ordinary Portland Cement) based concrete is substantially different in terms of the chemistry and the amount of energy involved in the manufacturing process (due to the increased amount of energy involved in producing the clinker).

I'm not very worried about the remaining carbon producers once fossil fuels become minority energy sources.

I think the ability of the biosphere to sink carbon is underestimated as are the benefits of a higher carbon atmosphere. Most talk about anthropogenic climate change are either denying it exists or exaggerating (usually without much knowledge) its negative side effects. Nobody talks about the benefits of expanding the arable land at higher latitudes or increased plant growths in forest (and forests denser and further north). At one point during a carbon spike the planet was more or less covered by jungle pole to pole, how's that for biodiversity? Change is hard and people are always upset about it, but this is a change we have already made for better or worse. There is much doom and gloom about any change and this one will have big consequences but we need to move past arguing about whether or not it will happen and towards how best to respond to it (and in ways other than only desperate attempts to reverse it completely). That doesn't mean there isn't a great benefit to capping the size of the change or to stop the forcing, but at some point you have to accept it and stop treating it as your doom.

Ok, thats a fair position to have.

For what its worth, I also wonder about that. I live in Canada, and I'm not aware of what steps are being taken to understand how we would have to respond to growing areas moving north. I've read that the areas where favourable climatic conditions are projected to settle in that we only have sufficient top soil for a few decades of intensive agriculture. I wonder what steps are being taken to deal with that.

I also would point out that people are upset that change is happening because they look at the form the change is projected to take, and most of the forms of change involve a lot of people either dying, or just having shitty shitty lives.

Agriculture has learned a lot about topsoil. Farmers are actually growing topsoil now. Most history books stop covering farming with the 1930s dust bowl. Thus few people are aware of what universities have discovered since.

On the question of whether a warmer planet is inherently bad for humans, ignoring adaptation costs (which are large), I’d note that the richest countries tend also to be the coldest ones. Coincidence? Hard to say. But I’d rather not bet the future of civilization on getting the answer wrong.

That is interesting, I wonder if it is possible to pull apart the factors. I always thought it was a combination of the long shadow of colonialism and things like malaria.

I‘m worried that as the earth is warming up the benefactors of it become so powerful that they start to defend the new status quo. Say the main benefactor would be Russia, and Canada‘s population would grow to 300 million and take on the US‘s role as a global superpower. It would be very hard to convince them to go back to where we are now in supernational bodies, and consensus would be impossible to achieve.

Meanwhile we have to say good-bye to New York, Shanghai, the Netherlands, and many other places that are close to the seas.

Large parts of The Netherlands are already below sea level. We will be fine.

I'd be more worried about invasion from armies than the sea. There's a strange assumption that the losers in climate change will just sit calmly and accept their fate.

Armies? From where?

From countries suffering social unrest caused by climate change, electing populist leaders proposing to solve the crisis in their borders by expanding their "living space" and so on.

History is a circle...

No, History is not a circle, it never repeats itself because the variables always change. Context matters.

> proposing to solve the crisis in their borders by expanding their "living space"

When you are in a crisis mode you don't have to time to wait for elections, the most likely result of social unrest is civil war. There are ample examples in very recent History.

From places with hungry people and newly-arid landscapes. What do you think will happen when they can't get visas? Just happily sit there and starve?

I have a hard time picturing how tired and hungry people would suddenly become a threat against countries producing all the weapons in the world and armed to the teeth. But surely you can explain?

China, as noted by others, stands to lose a lot of arable land and makes plenty of weaponry. India and Pakistan are both likely to become more or less uninhabitable, and have nukes and (for the former) no shortage of people to draft. The United States of America, under a 4C rise, would also see large regions become uninhabitable, and has a northerly neighbour that could not repel an invasion. Russia has already shown a fondness for acquiring territory (see Crimea) when the opportunity presents itself, and Europe is weakly defended.

Not to mention that "set up turrets on the southern border and mow them down" is not the most humane way to handle this, especially since the nations likely to fare OK(ish) are generally the ones that caused this trouble in the first place.

OK, maybe central Africa is not going to be a major military threat.

How about China and India, whose southern parts are densely populated, and who are capable of launching rockets to space, have nuclear weapons for a long time, etc?

You don't want them to feel desperate.

China and India are not desperate enough to choose to reduce their projected increase in coal-fired power stations. Nuke themselves?

No, the idea is:

1) Keep building coal stations

2) Invade northerly regions that are now better for growing crops

Not just China and India. Russia could just about do this for the lolz when you consider they're already expansionist.

Mind you I'm not _endorsing_ this, I'm just worried about it.

> Russia could just about do this for the lolz when you consider they're already expansionist.

In all seriousness if you really want to picture Russia as expansionist, the only time when this was really true was post-WW2 and Cold-war Era. Now Russia is far from being a fool enough to "invade" countries around much beyond their border. Let's not forget NATO as well. I'm not sure in what world this scenario would ever happen.

We already have 'open borders'.

Dude, you're being very un-dude.

Also, it might be a good idea to bring evidence of this forward since immigrating seems to be getting harder as time goes on.

Schengen is literally an open border treaty. Zhe Germans could invade The Netherlands by driving about a thousand cars and trucks in smeared over a couple of days.

Then change to combat dress and take over.

How is that not an 'open border'? No need to bomb Rotterdam.

True, but so is the border between Flanders and Wallonia. The Schengen border itself is the relevant one there.

My original comment was about NL. What is your point?

Trying to control nature will never work out in humanity's favor. That is precisely the same hubris that has landed us in this mess. Once we surrender to the notion that we will capitalize on nature's response to our unwieldly use of technology, then we are only going to make matters worse. We simply do not understand the complexity of nature and should be skeptical of perceived benefits -- such as increased amounts of arable land -- as if that won't have consequences.

Never? An enormous part of civilization is exactly wrestling for control of nature and succeeding. From prairie nomads to mega-cities our direction is clearly one of increasing control. The whole issue is about humans changing the climate. We already have incredible control of many complex systems, the planet's climate is just another system.

It will take an incredible amount of resources to control but there should be no doubt as to if, only when. The earth is our garden, we have only to put ourselves to the task to make it bloom. The blocking point is our intentions and efforts not the possibility. You can't be burning down the Amazon for a quick dollar and trying to maintain the climate at the same time. We're so focused on arguing about whether or not we're having an effect and panicking about what that will be that we're not really trying at all to gain any control.

True the climate is not a trained dog, it will not act on command, it is not a linear system that we can put one PID controller on and be done with it. It is complex, it has feedback system on top of feedback system, some negative, some positive, it's chaotic. None of that means we can't make it do what we want.

We just have to focus and not spend our time on the stupidity that drives our everyday political process.

The problem of taking control over complex systems the size of climate isn't about knowledge or technology; it's a coordination problem. We could be having climate jumping through hoops on command today, if we could coordinate at global scale instead of competing and sacrificing long-term benefits for next quarter rewards.

Humanity has controlled nature for thousands of years. We have achieved unthinkable progress in almost any thinkable area.

I mean, I get your point: It's hard to control complex systems, and unintended consequences can and do happen.

But we have a rather spectacular track record of powering through and figuring things out.

The way I understand it is that we just don't want an erratic climate with lots of mood swings.

By the way, on the topic of a changing climate and especially when climate at x changes to y, y changes to z, changes to etc; that is what some of my research is about in the context of agriculture.

Edit: Somewhat obviously, we also don't want to lose current biodiversity.

Very interesting this reminds me of motorcycle riding in the cold and I think you are right. It is very hard to keep warm so you wear warm pants and a jacket and that helps but it can still be cold. It is all about percentages. Add nice boots and you may be 1% warmer. So add a scarf tbat gets you anothe %. Gloves another 2%. All the little things alone don't do much. But once you start adding them up the little pieces add up fast and make the final and most important contribution to the problem. Like you mentioned it will be all the little areas of carbon emissions we will be tackling which will ultimately need to be the hardest and most important step.

Very reminiscent of many conversations at work.

“And then the hard work begins...”

Optimizing the long tail is a slog. But when it’s most of the remainder it has to be done.

That's also why it's so important to get the easy 80% of the work done as quickly as possible.

The longer we get to sort out the long tail the better. The more time we have the higher the chance of creating efficient CO2 scrubbers, then we can cut a lot of the tail off..

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