Apocalyptic Claims About Climate Change Are Wrong
forbes.com
forbes.com
As the article says, climate change won't destroy human civilization.
Halting climate change won't destroy the economy, nor would it significantly affect it. It'd cost on the order of a trillion dollars. That's a crazy amount of money, but the US can and will spend that kind of money regularly. For instance, it's comparable to the Iraq War or the Apollo project. It's less than WWII.
And it's not like the trillion would disappear; it's being spent in the economy. And via the broken windows measurement fallacy of economics, it would likely increase our GDP rather than decrease it.
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2019/05/02/Glo...
You could implement a carbon tax, and I'd be all for that, but it wouldn't be in the same policy class as diverting an existing stream of budgetary money.
It's what upsets me about these sorts of papers- "civilian" climate change skeptics/deniers point to them as evidence of the dishonesty of consensus community. They are able to take away the wrong message- that consensus community is stretching and manipulating the data, rather than there are $300-600B of subsidies for fossil fuels out there.
Negative externalities are a type of subsidy.
The UK kept that reduced rate on domestic fuel when they brought in a low carbon price floor (another bonus of EU membership). That managed to take almost all coal out of UK power generation - there's only three plants left, all marked to close in the next couple of years. It's already starting to have impact on gas's viability.
As different rules apply to vehicle fuel, and domestic fuel, individual behaviour hasn't been much affected, and cities are still full of dirty air from internal combustion. UK has been particularly weak at improving air quality in the last decade or so.
> We are spending more than $5T annually on fossil subsidies. All you have to do is divert that elsewhere.
"Spending" and "divert" imply a cash flow, not a flow of value in the form of a collection of externalities. That's relevant. Redirecting funds is a different political beast from increasing taxes. To be clear, I want a carbon tax. Let's promote it with logic, not with clumsy attempts at deception.
It reminds me of nothing so much as the tenor of criticism of Trump, especially early in his term. The man is already a monster! You don't need to keep lying to make him look like one, and all it does is turn of people who mightve agreed with your legitimate criticism!
[1] To be clear, I have no reason to think that our counterparts on the right don't do this too. It just makes more of an impact to realize that everyone around you is dishonest and stupid than it does to realize that everyone in a relatively alien subculture is.
Why the heck would climate get a uniquely honest political conversation? Politicians of all colours lie, obfuscate and distort the facts on all issues all the time, whilst continuing to hurtle in a direction most of the country's voters would prefer not. Unless the US experience has been very different, most votes will be for least worst, not in favour of either as tribal loyalties mostly died last century, only really remaining tribal with the elderly. It's one of the reasons for such a deep mistrust and disillusionment of politics and may have contributed to some of the world's "surprise" results lately, along with so many polls being proved wrong.
Honesty and politics are oil and water. The honest discussion is usually elsewhere.
So I'm a little more flexible in a web discussion than I would hope for from a finance minister. Except actual politicians, of all colours, are even more creative in the hoops jumped to imply wholly incorrectly their own tax raising policies are not a tax hike such that it becomes a logic and fact free zone.
Personally, I want the same as you, perhaps a little further as I'd like those externalities baked into the price of everything, and required to be picked out before sale. Maybe required on every label like how calories or salt content is picked out on food. Then I can choose logically or at least knowingly. I don't think politicians are ever willing, after a little industry lobbying, to give us that... Which applies to far too many issues, not just climate.
No, that's absurd way to put it. It's like saying that shipping industry receives trillions of dollars of invisible subsidy due to not having to rent the ocean water the container ships float on. Yes, if oceans didn't exist, shipping would be quite a bit more expensive, and you can even do the math and put a number on that, but the fact is that if you tried to "divert" these "invisible" subsidies from shipping companies, and taxed them for the trillions of imputed income, you'll soon find that those trillions do not line up shipping companies pockets.
The only reason to call it "subsidy" is to imply that the companies are "unfairly" benefiting, but unless these externalities have actual cost to the economy instead of just imputed carbon/water tax, you'll find no resources to divert.
The ocean analogy isn't such a far stretch either - the increasing levels of pollution and emissions from container traffic, using a particularly dirty fuel and an industry that flushes tanks and oil rich pollutants in international waters has an impact on water quality, fish stocks and other ocean life. Roads are a subsidy on cars as they are paid for by general taxation rather than specifically on vehicle use.
Those externalities should all be priced in to discourage impactful behaviour, and encourage truly sustainable behaviour, on the sole viable planet we currently have. At the very least we can make a poor choice knowingly.
It very much does have actual cost, just not today or tomorrow, so it's a bit harder to calculate.
If I break your bike in the middle of winter, the cost won't actualize until spring when you would have used it, and instead have to pay for the bus. So sure, it's not a Q4 cost, but it is real nonetheless.
with under-charging for domestic air pollution accounting for about half of the total subsidy and global warming about a quarter.
I’m not completely against calling the huge unpriced externality of carbon emissions a “subsidy”; but markets are reactive and once we start charging a carbon tax, we’ll start emitting less carbon dioxide (good!) But we’ll lose out on much of this “subsidy”, too.
You mean we will have to pay less to deal with the health effects of air pollution and and the economic effects of global warming? I'm not clear what subsidy we "miss out on" here.
> Then the report adds that there is actually another kind of subsidy, which it calls a post-tax subsidy. This subsidy reflects the difference between “actual consumer fuel prices” and the full societal and environmental costs of a fuel.
Ok, but China is adding millions of brand new drivers to the roads every year, they've had to institute a lottery system just to determine who can apply for a license. They're building roads, bridges, gas stations etc as fast as they can to accommodate all of the new drivers and you can see this documented in the China episode of Grand Tour last season. This is going to happen with or without subsidies (Besides, I highly doubt China is subsidizing their citizens petrochemical purchases in any meaningful amount).
China is going to have more drivers than the United States has people in the country in the near future and that will only continue to grow. Are you going to tell more than a billion people to never get a car and to only walk places?
What about the fact that China is actively constructing hundreds of coal power plants? Or the fact their middle-class is rapidly growing which will mean more energy demands (which will mean more fossil fuel consumption) and more consumer goods (more plastics, from fossil fuels)?
>Since the early 2000s, China's middle class has been among the fastest growing in the world, swelling from 29 million in 1999 (2 percent of population) to roughly 531 million in 2013 (39 percent of population).
China has over 400,000 electric buses (99% of the world) and the longest high speed rail in the planet. High-speed rails carry twice as many passengers each month as the country’s airlines.
4.2% of new car purchases in China were electric vehicles in 2018. China has 250 million electric motorcycles/scooters (99% of the world's). These numbers are growing rapidly every year.
China is also the world's largest producer of photovoltaic power not to mention the world's leading installer of solar panels. Their literal stated goal for 2050 is to reach 1,300 GW of solar capacity, which is enormous. That would make it the source with the largest installed capacity in China.
China has a lot of problems, but fossil fuel addiction is not one of them.
2050 is too late as well. To make a big difference the timetable for that capacity would have to be 2030 and all the baseline would have to be hydro or nuclear. This is unlikely to happen even if they really want to do it.
Now consider that we also have USA to handle who are notorious about ignoring climate change targets...
Now, even 5 C is not a cataclysmic event but it will be very bad on a global scale - mostly water availability and farming, related price shocks and social upheaval.
Effectively what would happen is high CO2 parts (such as concrete) would be manufactured in a country that doesn't tax it. If you say "Oh, well we'll just tariff it!" then the next step would be to ship it to a country without said tariff. That country could then move the goods directly to the taxed nation or it could ping pong a bit till it reaches it's end goal.
Would that raise prices? Absolutely, but probably less than the $100 tax would. All the while increasing the amount of CO2 emitted due to all the shipping that would occur.
And, if you don't think that would happen, just look at how it's worked out with child labor laws.
The balancing act would be to tax hard enough to make industries want to decrease their emissions, yet low enough that importing isn't more economically viable. As a bonus, you could spend that revenue in building out clean energy sources to effect change faster.
Duties are based on the country of origin, a middleman country would have to do something substantial to the goods to change the country of origin (for example taking wafers and manufacturing them into bare printed circuit boards).
Even with a country doing something significant they could still be subject to counterveiling and/or anti-dumping duties for another country. For example the tariff 8517700000 which is frequently used for parts of mobile phones like the screen/keypad/bezel/antenna from say Vietnam are still potentially subject to ADD/CVD for China. Or photo-voltaic cells/panels universally flag as potentially subject to ADD/CVD regardless of the declared country of origin.
In examples like the above two part of the scope of the investigation involves companies in those countries known to use things from CN, such as aluminum extrusions for the 8517700000, that are subject to ADD/CVD so they have to disclaim it on a case by case basis or pay the ADD/CVD charges.
Source: this is what I do for a living and the 8517700000 VN example is actually from this morning with some mobile phone displays.
Take food as an example. With the recent china soybean tariffs the way that some manufactures got around it was first shipping the goods to Thailand.
From there it is either processed or re-exported.
https://www.scbeic.com/th/detail/product/4730
So long as the middleman country/countries have lax regulations and the actors aren't pushing heavily on them, then goods can flow (all be it at increased cost due to additional shipping/repackaging).
Yeah, except people have tried to do this with aluminum by bringing it through Mexico and it doesnt' really work. This is partly why say 8517700000 from Vietnam like in my example is potentially subject to anti-dumping as if it were from China.
https://fortune.com/2016/09/09/chinese-aluminum-giant-is-tie...
Sure, it works for some handbags or sunglasses, even a few cargo containers of product, but any meaningful amount and forget about it.
Trees and other plants take carbon from air, energy from the sub, and use it to build themselves. We take carbon from them and put it back into the air, using the excess energy to move and think.
Which was in the air in the past few months to handful of years depending on how fresh the food is and what it is (plant, animal). Unlike the CO2 from fossil fuels which was sequestered for millions of years. And had that not been harvested for food, it would have sat their being decomposed in a field somewhere returning that carbon right back into the atmosphere via animals and bacteria snacking on it as they broke it down.
The oil and coal only happen when organic matter is subjected to pressure and non-porous geological layers. Otherwise you get peat fields and those emit methane.
This isn’t my opinion, we have known this —by this I mean, science, not voodoo— for many years, probably a decade or more.
One thing I know for sure: if the population is growing, the Earth is becoming better for human-life, not worse. I'll be concerned about climate change when the population starts to shrink but we are way far from that.
This logic seems completely contradictory. At first you argue that we can’t really influence climate, then you concede that we have no idea of our impact on it. Can you further explain?
That isnt logical, casting doubt on your absolute claims. Population growth in animals is relative to available resources not some mythical quality that can be interpreted as "better environment".
You said the same as me, with different words. That's it. When did humans have so much spare time to be discussing imaginary problems online? And getting so offended when someone disagree that these imaginary problems will cause our doom.
> Population growth in animals is not just available resources, climate, location, and many other factors play their parts.
Habitable area is a resource, which species compete for. There is a generous interpretation of my statement, but there isn't one of a "Earth is better", that makes sense. The commensurate appeal to logical thought was rightly pointed out as hypocritical. I stand by it.
But then you're also revealing yourself as a dishonest participant who is probably not worth discussing this issue witb
Nonetheless, you are arguing past each other. The answer, is no matter how much is, or is not man-made, we stand to profit as a species if we combat what we can without causing greater harm by proxy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21649195
BTW, this IS NOT my opinion. We have known this for probably a decade, if not more. The problem is that the masses are being brainwashed with lies on both ends of the spectrum. One end claims there is no such thing as human-caused climate change (which is false) and the other that we can actually fix it (which is also false).
I haven't examined your math in detail, but I'm willing to stipulate that you're right that passive measures are wholly inadequate to address climate change. But then you may still be wildly wrong by not addressing active measures.
This is common sense, requiring only basic physics principles.
Simple analogy: Burn a cubic meter of wood inside a warehouse large enough that the flames will not burn it down. How much energy is required to clean the warehouse from all the particulate matter on every surface, shelf, box, counter, light, crevice, etc?
The answer is: Far more than the energy that went into creating the mess in the first place.
This is not meant to be a perfect analogy, of course. All it is meant to illustrate is that we cannot “clean” the atmosphere with less energy than what created the problem. In fact, we need more energy, lots more. Given that we are talking about an unimaginably large amount if energy and resources it is easy to conclude this is nowhere near possible.
My concern is that we are going to cause more damage than good.
BTW, this does not mean we should not clean-up our act across the board. It simply means we need to stop using climate change as a political battering ram to push these things through.
There's also a simple solution to getting trade partners on board. It's called a carbon tariff.
We can talk about total global emissions, but then bring it down to the total per capita contribution per country. e.g. China has 20% of the worlds population so are “allowed” 20% of the worlds total emissions.
being tiny now implies incredible room for growth given growth rates of those countries, which is actually an arugment for more action not less.
> Per capita is the only way we can talk about CO2
Wouldn't it also mean India and china won't have to do anything for decades till they get to same per capita as USA ?
No it doesn't following GP's chain of logic. It doesn't need to do anything till the point it hits US per capita.
Why would any burden fall on china/india given they are already on the low end of per capita.
Can you define what burden falls on them under your per capita model?
If the US does not reduce it's emissions, yes. (In China's case, it's emissions are currently per-capita similar to most of the EU).
This is a great argument for the US, and the EU to reduce their emissions, instead of sitting around, pointing fingers are China.
Again, if you aren't using per capita metrics, you will get absurd conclusions. If a country splits in half, does that mean it should be allowed to emit twice as much?
Why would EU need to reduce if they are currently 'middle of the road' like you said.
The US is in a terrible position, however, because everything is car-based. It would help if they'd push for more dense development and extending public transit, but there's really no sign of that at all.
No, it really can't. The voters would immediately vote for the candidate that promises to reverse this. Gas prices are a huge political issue in the US, to an irrational extent. Americans cling irrationally to their gigantic SUVs and will do anything to keep them.
>Most European cars are way more efficient than American cars.
Not really, no. Cars these days are all pretty efficient; it's the trucks and SUVs that guzzle gas. Tiny cars really don't get much better fuel economy than mid-size cars any more, and no one buys full-size cars these days (I don't think there's even any made any more). A Prius is way more efficient than some tiny European car like a Smart.
Now if you're talking average fleet economy (which takes into account that so many Americans buy trucks and SUVs instead of cars), then you're correct, but that's because of buying choices. If we all switched to Priuses, we'd easy double (or more) our average fuel economy.
>Admittedly, this is a cultural, not a technological, problem in the US.
Exactly, which is why I was complaining about the sprawl and car culture of the US. Just telling people to buy more efficient cars isn't going to change anything; it's a product of a culture where there's sprawl and too much low-density development and a mindset that everything should be optimized for car-based travel. It's naturally going to lead to many people being selfish and buying larger vehicles than they need. This is the case everywhere where there's private vehicles, including Europe and Japan. I've seen huge SUVs, vans, etc. in Japan and Europe. Of course, they're not that common in those places because fuel prices are high and public transit is good, but if those two factors weren't true there, they'd be full of giant SUVs just like the US.
Is there a country where this isn't an issue? I know its a super big deal here India. There are protests, strikes and political agigatioins on regular basis on this issue. It might actually be the number one issue here.
If gas were $200/gallon, then the amount of attention Americans pay to it would be rational.
China's per-capita output is a problem. But it's not the kind of problem where we can just point fingers at it, and using that as a justification to ignore the mess we're making. (As we range from 'just as bad' to 'much worse'.)
https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/overview.php?v=booklet2018&ds...
Up to and including Kyoto they differentiated between developed and developing world. That differentiation was lost at Paris so the developed world could evade their "historical responsibility" (a key phrase of the differentiation). The intent was, I think, that the developed world would assist via subsidy the developing world to shortcut past the mucky phase of fuel use. An intent that goes all the way back to the eighties, and has come and gone in terms of visibility. That would have cost actual money. Needless to say that didn't happen. Or come remotely close to happening.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
Per capita carbon emissions of US are 8 times as of India and 2 times as of China. And which country is withdrawing from the Paris agreement?
> Measuring per capita carbon
being better...
It is not clear to me why this makes sense.
If person A drive 2 miles per day in an SUV, and another person B drives 100 miles per day in a sedan -- person B pollutes more.
Why would driver A considered to pollute more ?
Also, deciding to not do something positive because other people are still doing something negative somewhere else is a shitty argument.
This is also against HN guidelines
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>" When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
"
Meanwhile, “all miles driven are created equal” said no one ever.
In my view, measuring delta in total greenhouse gasses produced, would a better measure for international accords, and their subsequent corruption-free enforcement.
This is why I brought the pollution-per-mile vs pollution-produced analogy.
With regards to > "The amount of emissions correlate strongly to that pursuit of happiness at least for now..."
I think, you are also averaging out to-per-capita that, might not be appropriate...
Say there is energy-demanding and mineral demanding manufacture process, that causes deforestation, pollutes rivers, mows down beautiful mountains to get coal, produces lots of green house gasses.
You are claiming that this benefits, at least, economically, 'every' per-capita person on that country.
But if same manufacture used more renewable energy, and produced more expensive goods. Would the 'per-capita' be worst off?
Perhaps it would not be. Right?
In other words, we really need to measure what that manufacture is doing.
And that's why I think measuring changes in pollution (due to changes in policy of a given country), and changes in preservation of natural habitats -- is a much more effective way to measure policies of governments.
Another way to look at it is this way:
Performance indicators should be relevant to the individuals or institutions that are actually accountable for the execution of what's being measured.
In this case, we are measuring government policies, not individuals. Therefore dividing per capita, should not be used as 'first-order' measure.
China is ahead of schedule in reducing its emissions. Consider also that being the first to switch to renewables or other energy sources means we develop technology to replace existing infrastructure that we can then export. The first-mover advantage on this is obvious.
India and China both have leadership that acknowledge the existence of anthropogenic climate change and is taking active measures. That would seem like table stakes but unfortunately we live in a world where that's not a given.
India produces 20% of electricity from renewable sources, not including large hydro[1]. Including large hydro, it's 29%. In comparison, the US produces only 15% from renewable sources including hydro[2] which, of course, has lots of environmental costs before any energy generation begins. This is admittedly a meaningless factoid but still kind of cool - India has 5 of the 10 largest solar power stations in the world, more than any other nation.[5] The Delhi city government has made it mandatory for government and public institutions to install rooftop solar[6]. This is on top of a government program that provides subsidized loans for rooftop solar on factories.[7] There's plenty of other renewable energy, rainwater harvesting, and recycling programs at various levels of the Indian government - federal, state, and city. I'm not saying all of them will work (it's the government, after all) but it's solid effort, and hard cash being put in.
Gasoline costs USD 4.55/gal in Mumbai today[8] - compared to around USD 3.50 in California, which already has the highest gas prices in the continental US. Due to the lower average disposable income in India, this means motorists prioritize fuel economy over comfort, and even safety.
India's annual population growth rate is 1.10% - a shade above the global average of 1.09%[3]. It's also been steadily dropping for decades and that trend is expected to continue.[4] China's population growth rate is 0.41% - lower even than the US.[3]
The only way India and China can keep from increasing their emissions is by stopping their economic progress. This would effectively keep their respective populations poor, undernourished, and lacking modern amenities such as healthcare, transportation, or entertainment. So what do you mean by "on board" exactly? What other shining exemplars of environmental rectitude can one point at to persuade India and China? What other nations have made, or committed to make, similar lifestyle sacrifices?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_India
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United....
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio....
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India#Fertilit....
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_photovoltaic_power_sta....
6. https://www.ndtv.com/delhi-news/government-announces-policy-....
7. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2017/12/07/india-t....
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
If you want to bring an earlier comment into the conversation, the way to do that is to explain what it is and link to it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21608174
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21601167
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21600892
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21505062
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21428001
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21220189
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21206132
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21172089
It's frustrating to me to read comments like this. I will try my best to elaborate.
> Halting climate change isn't even that hard and would clearly benefit billions of people.
This is a simplification of course - I'm in no way implying you're not aware of that, or that this is a flaw in your argument. I think we can agree on this well enough.
> It just affects the pocketbooks of a couple of rich people, so we can't do it
"It affects the pocketbooks of a couple of rich people...."
This seems factual.
"It just affects the pocketbooks of a couple of rich people...."
This seems non-factual, due to that seemingly innocuous additional word: just. A multi-trillion dollar initiative and the corresponding policy changes would ripple through the incredibly complex system we call the economy, affecting everyone, and not in a completely proportional and "fair" manner. From my years of close observation of the behavior of the various actors in democratic political systems, I predict this could affect sentiment and therefore voting patterns, to a consequential degree. Keep in mind though, this is only a prediction, I am unable to see into the future.
"...so we can't do it..."
This on its own seems factual, but not for the reason you stated. At the very least, it is speculative.
"...and instead spin our tires with dumb nit-picking articles like this one."
I strongly disagree that this article is "stupid", but rather, I think it is right on the money, and is drawing attention to an incredibly important and incredibly overlooked underlying (potential) cause of our inability to move the ball forward on the climate change initiative.
FTA:
> Journalists and activists alike have an obligation to describe environmental problems honestly and accurately, even if they fear doing so will reduce their news value or salience with the public. There is good evidence that the catastrophist framing of climate change is self-defeating because it alienates and polarizes many people.
....who then often proceed to vote, illogically, in a "fuck you" manner. [0]
I often read sentiments about climate "deniers"[1] being "the children in the room", and people like[2] yourself being "the adults". I can agree that there is some truth to this, but I would argue less than meets the eye.
My intuition tells me a more accurate description would be something like: the "deniers" are the children, "people like you" are the teenagers, "people like the author" are "the young adults", and the people that recognize that what we're doing just isn't working, decide to calm down and start looking deeply at details, taking into consideration the infinite complexity of the numerous inter-related systems involved (one of which is the human mind), paying close attention to the nature of conversations and making note of where things may be going off track, come up with some new ideas, and try to get those ideas out into the meme war.....these are the actual adults in the room.
To me, tackling climate change with science and facts is similar to bringing a knife to a gunfight. People don't think in facts, because that isn't how we evolved. Purely factual thinking mutations are culled from the herd by evolution, because it doesn't produce results. Historically for sure, but the same argument could be made today, at least within most domains.
We can deal with reality as it "should" be, or we can deal with it how it is. That choice is up to each and every one of us, each and every time we interact with these and similar issues.
(I speculate that) We all think we're worried "just" about the climate change, because our senses tell us that. But is that all that's going on here? The intense emotions we each feel when reading such discussions, are those emotions purely derived from pure logical thinking about the future state of the climate, or might they be in part a result of reactions to subconscious heuristic interpretations of the words others are writing, resulting in a subconscious classification of the person into an in-group or out-group categorization, which in turn results in signals being sent up to the conscious mind to react in a certain manner, which sets off a chain of events which are hilariously counter-productive to our conscious, logical, intended goals. (An example of this curiously complex behavior would be the brain sending signals to the hand to move one's mousepointer over top of one of two available diamonds beside this comment, and then a signal to depress the left mouse button, as an expression of...something, but exactly what is not discernible to an outside observer. It may not even be accurately discernible to the person operating the mouse, such is the beautiful complexity of the human mind).
My proposal is that we cool our jets and realize what is actually going on here, and use the substantial intellectual power that exists within the HN hivemind to start to come up with some better ideas. Battling climate change is a multi-dimensional problem, but we seem to be aware of only a subset of these dimensions. Scientists, politicians, "journalists", and media celebrities are helpful (at times at least), but I believe there are many crucially important disciplines that have been excluded from the conversation - in part because we're thinking about the problem wrong, in part because we often think of those disciplines as "stupid" or trivial.
This thinking may be right, or it may be wrong. But at the end of the day, we are going to find out one way or the other. Let's hope we've guessed right, because that's what we're doing here so far: guessing. Educated guesses perhaps, but still guesses.
As the saying goes: as we sow, so shall we reap. This statement is true regardless of humanity's current collective agreement on the matter - the universe will unfold as it will. We can let this process occur randomly, or we can intervene and attempt to shape it more to our liking, but being successful in that endeavor requires a proper analysis, and proper action.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMm5HfxNXY4
[1] "deniers" are often not actually that, but let's not get hung up on trivialities like facts.
[2] I say "like" here as a generalization, but am reserving judgement on whether you are actually such a person - this footnote is to make it explicitly clear that my statement is speculative.
I guess what I'm saying is that I agree with you that the discourse of many activists isn't great, but I think that's because they have lost confidence that the other side will argue in good faith or even can be reached.
Perhaps one could find some "evidence" that hints at it, but the unfortunate reality is that some things are beyond our ability to know. However, it does not logically follow that we should then assume one way or the other and categorize that conclusion as true or false. An objective approach would be to classify the idea something along the lines of: "Status": "Uncertain - needs further investigation", "Importance":"Potentially High". Of course, this isn't how we evolved to be, but it's worth pointing out.
> It seems to me that Republicans have always voted against addressing climate change.
This may be true (or "true enough", to be pedantic), but is it useful? It's likely useful sometimes, but at other times might thinking and speaking in such terms be harmful (counter-productive to our goals)?
These seem like worthwhile questions to me, and the point the author is trying to make if I'm not mistaken.
> I guess what I'm saying is that I agree with you that the discourse of many activists isn't great, but I think that's because they have lost confidence that the other side will argue in good faith or even can be reached.
If you speak to the other side and you are not reaching them, it may be worthwhile to examine the manner in which you are speaking to them and consider new strategies. The fields of psychology, psychiatry, communication (conflict resolution), etc have a fair amount of expertise in this area, yet I don't recall any of them being consulted on this matter.[0]
[0] EDIT: Based on voting, I infer that my theory above is not considered popular by readers. Perhaps this style of thinking is common across those who have influence over what disciplines shall be included in the public persuasion initiative that has been underway for several years now, which would explain why the initiative is limited to only a subset of the plausibly relevant intellectual disciplines, which may in turn be a root cause of why the initiative seems to be falling well short of the desired success rate, that logic indicates should be an expected outcome.
Oh well, what can ya do! I'm probably taking this whole climate change thing way more seriously than the circumstances call for.
I note, with interest, that France enacted the most modest of modest steps toward this goal and the result was nationwide riots in the streets that continue to this day.
I, also, would like to live in the Star Trek future I always dreamed of where we drive electric cars and generate power in new and elegant ways ... I'm not sure how easy it will be.
That isn't an argument against rsync's point, which is that raising fuel taxes in France triggered months of nationwide rioting by people wearing yellow vests, symbolic because French people have to have them in their cars by law. That is they literally made the symbol of their protests a symbol of car driving.
The UK is less prone to riots. However the government abandoned its fuel tax escalator policy ("automatic" fuel tax increases) after a series of protests by truckers who blockaded ports and threatened to bring about a collapse of supply chains.
The conclusion I draw from all this is simple but brutal:governments have nothing they can do about climate change. Nor do protestors, nor do most people. The only people who can make any difference at all are a small group of scientists (not climate scientists), and (primarily) engineers. It's only engineers who develop better cars and power generation techniques who shift the needle. The rest of us might as well forget about it.
Macron decided to go faster than initially decided by Hollande. I would not call that a "fast one", especially given that IIRC it was announced during his electoral campaign. Macron electors are mostly urban middle class, so are not affected by taxes on gas that much...
[1] Here is a graph (the article is in French): https://www.ledauphine.com/economie-et-finance/2018/10/24/pr...
That is terrific news; any sources?
It's incredible you could change enough with "only" that many resources, even limiting the scope of discussion to the U.S.'s 15% contribution [1] to the global total.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...
Wow, I'm surprised the claim isn't more widely circulated.
Halting or mitigating? I don't see climate change halting when 3/4 of the world are still clawing out of developing status. Whatever projections we have now we should triple it. Though I agree it's worth investing in engineering solutions now if only because we need proven solutions later as conditions gets worse.
The article suggests that is a good thing and we should help this 3/4 of the world to acheive afluence
>> “If you want to minimize carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2070 you might want to accelerate the burning of coal in India today,” MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel said.
>> “It doesn’t sound like it makes sense. Coal is terrible for carbon. But it’s by burning a lot of coal that they make themselves wealthier, and by making themselves wealthier they have fewer children, and you don’t have as many people burning carbon, you might be better off in 2070.”
>>“You’ve got to come up with some kind of middle ground where you do reasonable things to mitigate the risk and try at the same time to lift people out of poverty and make them more resilient,” said Emanuel. “We shouldn’t be forced to choose between lifting people out of poverty and doing something for the climate.”
The US has always presented itself - through media, propaganda, etc - as exemplary, greatest country in the world, home of the free / brave, leaders of innovation, technology, economics and warfare. So why not be better than the others at reducing emissions? It's a huge financial opportunity too, as exemplified by e.g. Tesla that sells cars, batteries, battery technology and solar all over the world, bringing a lot of money back to the US (in theory, assuming it's not whisked off to a tax haven like e.g. Apple and Google do).
What I'm saying here is that someone has to take the moral high ground. The US already pretends to do this, but they have the means to put it into practice.
Well it’s a _global_ problem. The US isn’t the only party here. Emissions in the US have been going down and in India and China they’ve been going up[1] like crazy. And yet the US is constantly harangued about reducing emissions and concerns about India and China are hand waved away.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_fossil_carbon_dio...
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...
1. There’s 3x as many people in China as the US but the US emits about 2x as much per capita as China (and decreasing!). So it isn’t that far off in per capita terms. What will the talking point be once that changes?
2. When it comes to pollution it absolutely does matter who the largest overall polluter is. If the world were two countries and one was responsible for 90% of carbon emissions and the other was responsible for 10% at a higher per capita rate, who would it make more sense to go after first?
This is really where climate alarmists lose me. Too many contradictory policies. Harass the US, who has both a declining birth rate and declining CO2 emissions while giving a pass to other countries who are exploding in population and total emissions. And don’t even get me started on how we in the west are told to have fewer children but are simultaneously told that we must import enormous numbers of third world immigrants, who by the way will have their carbon footprint boosted dramatically.
Both as the effect is global, and if the differential is 2:1 both have much room for improvement. Though you must not conveniently forget that much of China's emissions stem from being the world's manufacturer. A hell of a lot of European and US emissions have been globalised to China, rather simply a billion Chinese adopting a Texan lifestyle. I'd be interested to see per capita global emissions after someone accounted for globalisation of manufacturing and services, and brought all those imports back home, emissions wise.
Yet even after outsourcing all that heavy industry and manufacturing, the US has, by far, the worst per capita emissions on the planet. It is completely beyond my understanding when numbers sometimes come up on HN, how they are able to use so much for a family. The lifestyle isn't 2x UK, France or Germany. Not just CO2, but water use too. It beggars belief to be so wasteful for so little gain.
Everyone should be doing more, whether tiny or the largest. It really should be a race to the bottom - for national, and global pride.
I'd encourage you to harass my country all you like - decidedly mid tier on climate action and emissions, precisely because they are mid tier on a globe that is not doing nearly enough. Complaining it's worse elsewhere just reeks of trying to evade or ignore the issue.
Whoa there, settle down. That’s not the sentiment behind the argument.
That is not my argument at all.
To spell it out, I'm saying that the US alone lowering emissions will not solve the problem, as the name implies, Global Warming can not be solved locally.
From the rest of your comment, it sounds like solving the problem isn't really your main concern. You're more focused on your country being seen as a moral leader. That might explain our differences.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945541/#B1-ije...
When electric cars are competitive, and solar and storage cheaper than coal, no one's going to keep throwing away money on the dirtier alternatives..
China isn't building coal because it's hip. They do it because it's cheap, so long as you don't account for its externalities. If solar + storage were significantly cheaper and met demand just as well, why would they keep throwing away money on coal?
I hate to use increasing GDP arguments either - GDP is a measure of activity and _what_ it's used for is completely out of the picture. If every American was on payday loans and would be dying immediately after having spent their last dollar on basic needs and capital efficient goods & services our GDP would soar - this is clearly not something that should be optimized for except it's the path we're heading toward right now.
While the GDP per capita might soar, the GDP itself would plummet. When you kill off productive workers (all else being equal) you lower your GDP.
Indeed! Don't listen to pundits and politicians. They are generally blowhards, not experts. Even some experts make outlier predictions, and those who want to make a case that there is too much exaggeration glom onto such. If you go looking for exaggeration or nuts, they are easy to find.
In any subject, listen to multiple opinions and find the original source of claims or studies, not paraphrased or re-construed summaries.
The most accurate voices are rarely the loudest.
I think many more people would be amenable to addressing the problem if it can be demonstrated that it could be solved for a fixed, one-time cost.
Relevant snippet:
> Her green manufacturing plan would invest $2 trillion over the next ten years in green research, manufacturing, and exporting
It then breaks that down with slightly more detail ($400 billion for clean energy research, $1.5 trillion to "purchase American-made clean, renewable, and emission-free energy products", $100 billion to increase clear energy tech exports.)
It also links to https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/green-manufacturing for (a little) more details on that section.
She's not necessarily my first choice, but the claim that she's not talking about "paying a similar sum to fix climate change" is wrong.
There is one crux where forgiveness makes sense. You cant pay back a loan with a job you cant get because the school was sued into oblivion for fraud.
> bright college students
College for all ensures that the majority of students trying to pay for college are below average, while graduates may align more with your assessment. Im not sure how you can characterize a bright student as someone who took out loans in lieu of scholarships.
>student loans taken out by bright college students who surely knew what a loan is
That's not quite fair. First, universities are free in modern, first-world industrialized nations. Second, the university fees are so prohibitively expensive that a loan is necessary for anyone bright but not born wealthy. In other words, it's a predatory mechanism geared to any bright student who wants to get an education to have a better life. It needs to go.
You might want to read this:
However if he meant planting trees and switching the world to nuclear, that might be doable for a few trillion.
Every government project goes over budget, so it's probably much higher than that.
Overprovisioning is a much cheaper solution.
Hilariously disconnected from reality. That would be tens of petawatt-hours. The world uses tens of petawatt-hours of electricity annually.
World electricity production is ~5 TW, assume that you need to store half of it to cover nighttime (seasonal adjustments exist, but I think that’s more a problem for production than storage when the storage itself is effectively a stockpileable consumable), 2.5 TW-years of battery production per year @ $0.03625/kWh = $729.4 billion/year worldwide.
And that’s even ignoring things like a worldwide power grid as an alternative to batteries, as I agree that government projects are often over budget: batteries can be done at a household scale and every kWh helps.
I really should write up a long form blog post about this, these conversations keep circling around the same points.
It also has the imperfect assumption that storage becomes totally worthless after 4000 cycles instead of gradually degrading, but that degradation starts at the first use and I don’t know the curve so I can’t integrate it to find the total lifetime stored energy, which might be higher or lower than the simplified model I’m giving here.
Current capital costs are about $200/kWh. Daily global energy use is about 400 TWh. That would be an 80000 trillion dollar battery.
The number is so large we just can't build it, so it's actually infinite. It also doesn't take into account land costs, because these batteries will take huge amounts of space. It's also only for 1 day, and there will surely be multiple days where wind and sun are below 20% output, so you'll need to accept periodic blackouts.
2. You’re counting all energy use, I’m just counting electricity
3. $200/kWh * 400 TWh is $80 Tr not $80,000 Tr
4. That’s not “just one day”, it is >4,000 days because the battery can be recharged that many times
5. Even if you forced everyone to accept blackouts until this would be completed (won’t happen), they would occur at night.
Except that’s $29 Tr when using the cheapest currently available batteries that I’ve seen.
7. The lifetime cost of the battery and a PV cell is cheaper than the fuel in a coal plant even when the cost of the coal plant itself has been written off, so each incremental step of that combination is still profitable compared to that particularly fossil fuel.
I’m not sure about the cost of wind or other fossil fuels, but the combined cost of PV+battery that anything else has to beat is 5¢/kWh.
EDIT:
8. Land costs. The energy density of LiIon batteries is “250-693 Wh/L”. A high efficiency 1 m^2 sun-tracking PV panel with the lowest energy density battery would produce up to 400 W * 12 hours = 4800 Wh = 19.2 litres = a layer behind the PV panel of 1.92 cm thickness. Why is this supposed to be a criticism?
It will devastate part of the population. Climate change is just an inevitable change. To cope with the change, certain portion of people will be sacrificed and certain people's position will be leveraged. So the view depends on the perspective. If you looking at humanity as every one together and equally, then it is apocalyptic. There is little hope that we can sustain. If you are looking at human civilization as something carried on by elites (as we always have), then such changes may even be welcomed -- all the reason that one need be prepared.
Perhaps the framing needs tweaking. It is inaccurate to say "if we don't fix climate change, it will end humanity". But "unmitigated climate change could spell the end of the world as we know it. Do you like the world as it currently is, or do you wanna roll the dice and risk apocalypse/Mad Max/ etc?" is completely plausible.
Is there a semantic and ontological difference between "er'rybody gonna die!" and "[almost] er'rybody might die!"? Of course. Is there a difference in terms of expectation value of human quality of life in the future? Not a very big one if you ask me.
So are sleeping volcanoes and space asteroids
The point is that the "end of the world as we know it" has already happened in history, more than a few times already.
I'm sure either we stop it or not that things are going to be vastly different after .
But it doesn't mean is gonna be worse
They're not even remotely comparable.
Not only will coastal areas be inundated but previously relatively temperate areas will suffer from regular inundation, storm damage, and/or droughts, or possibly all of the above in alternation.
This is already happening in Europe, California, Australia, and elsewhere. And we haven't even had significant sea level rise yet.
Anyone who doesn't understand what this means for developed countries - never mind rest-of-world - isn't thinking straight.
Miami and Venice, as two easy examples, are already suffering annually recurring issues from higher sea levels than they were previously accustomed to.
We’ve already seen that with LEDs and lighting. Likewise opportunistic electricity use (which doesn’t depend on time and location) derived from wind or solar is already perhaps half to a third of the cost of the cheapest fossil fuel source.
Electric vehicles will also end up significantly cheaper per mile, and in fact are already cheaper at the right levels of utilization.
Fossil fueled electricity and road transport are going to be progressively undercut by the zero carbon alternatives, and that’s going to make the global economy vastly more productive.
That’s to say nothing of the economic benefits of reducing air pollution and the massive costs associated with its impacts on human health.
It's likely climate change itself won't destroy human civilization. Food shortages, massive wildfires (which climate change contribute to), rising sea levels, and changing weather patterns will have huge and unpredictable effects on global politics. What the downstream effects of those changes will be is extremely hard to predict, but the chances of a nightmare outcome are far greater than the chances civilization will remain largely unchanged over the next 20-30 years.
The good news is the most likely scenario is things will just keep getting shittier slowly and we'll avoid any sort of apocalypse. We'll just leave our grandkids a super-shitty world. Yay Us!
But just think of GDP as people continually try to patch the super-shitty world!
Just like if you feel you need bodyguards, are you as well off as someone who spends the same on something he doesn't feel compelled to buy?
Not to say our food production couldn't collapse from a superbug decimating a monculture of wheat or something, but that happening would be completely independent of how healthy Earth's climate is
So you are saying, for just the cost of 200 of those airports, climate change could be halted?
I find that extremely unlikely. I mean for the price, you could basically only build 200 things that are the size of that airport (granted, you can build them cheaper, but apparently it is not a given that it works out).
I think you need to change far more things than just 200 airports to halt climate change.
New power plants or solar energy thingies or whatever. New cities so that people don't have to commute with energy sucking cars. New cars, so that people don't need to burn fossil fuels for driving (and we are talking millions of cars). New factories, new farming methods, and so on and so on. And not just in one country, but world wide.
The scary part is that I think many things climate activists propose actually produce a lot more CO2 in the short term. Factories to build those new cars. Building housing to shorten the commutes. Many other things. Wouldn't it be better to use the existing infrastructure for as long as possible, rather than build new things to replace it?
I wonder how much of a proxy for CO2 output the cost of things is, anyway (since oil price affects so many things). If "cleaner" new products cost more, it makes me suspect they actually consume more CO2 in production. Of course you have to factor in CO2 production in use (fossil fuels vs battery powered cars for example). But often the advantage is not so clear cut. If the new things were better, there would be no need for political intervention to make people use them.
Simple science CO2 is the root cause of such things..
Its very freakling real folks despite money people not willing to protect our futures!
Does anyone every pay attention to the chemistry and biology we had in hs anyo0mre?
> one estimate published in 2004 expected that some 90% of the currently spoken languages will have become extinct by 2050.
What is that, but the destruction of human civilization?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct_language
There is no stopping it. We must accept that fact and choose to adapt if humans are to survive as a species on this planet.
Otherwise, I don't think there will be humans 100,000 years from now.
I don't know what timeline you're thinking, but we are doomed on some scale assuredly if we don't get over our hubris.
This planet is not under our control.
The new money goes into the economy yes, but wherever you replace things instead of adding things, any 'value' of the defunct equipment is pretty negligible, isn't it?
Let's say we decommission a coal plant. On the one side you have the human support materials (furniture, office supplies, etc). On the other side you have the equipment for power grid tie-in. All of these could be redistributed into non-coal related businesses.
Isn't there a lot of stuff in the middle that's scrap? It had more value than that. Both objectively and subjectively (sunk cost fallacy), there's going to be some loss associated with the process.
I think most reasonable people agree with this statement. I've personally never heard about the collapse of human civilization in the near future due to climate change. Having said that, this article sounds a bit too optimistic.
Some people attribute the Syrian civil war to long droughts and climate change [1]. The science is disputed but regardless of the cause, we can all see the backlash against the flood of refuges in Europe. Now imagine the scale of mass migration is one or two orders of magnitude larger; do you really believe you can persuade voters by saying that the solution is less expensive than WWII?
I think the real danger of climate change will be political. Who is going to pay for it? The countries which are most affected don't necessarily have the resources to manage it and the countries which have the resources might have a hard time convincing their citizens to bear the cost of it. This requires a coordinated international effort.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/03/global-warming-helped-cause-sy...
And why are we so sure about that?
As far as I can tell by what's happening in the oceans, climate change may very well destroy all surface-dwelling multicellular life.
https://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
They show a slight warming trend, but still quite under the projections and nowhere near enough to cause more than economic disruption, let alone destroy humans, let alone all multi-cellular life. The climate has had far greater extremes in the past and multi-cellular life was just fine.
But this people still have a problem
https://www.kgou.org/post/five-years-after-tornado-moore-ret...
Looks a pretty finished work to me... If is recoverable or not would depend on the interval of time between each reconstruction.
tl;dr; Futurama was right: nuclear winter cancels global warming
1. At high humidity max temperatures humans can survive for more than 30 minutes are not that high.
2. During a heatwave (peak 46C at ~50% humidity) in India 30% of Ahmedabad all cause mortality was connected to temperatures https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4024996/
3. Temperature increase is not going to be the same across the globe. Many models predict with a 2C global avg temp increase a 4C increase of average temperatures in India and Pakistan with peak temperatures during heat waves going up by as much as 10C.
4. That temperature increase pushes conditions beyond what most people can acclimatize to. In large areas of India, Pakistan and China (among other places) physical labor and maybe even survival without access to cooling will not be possible for as much as 20-60 days per year.
5. A significant chunk of 3.9B people living in India, Pakistan and China will be displaced with nowhere to go. All 3 countries have nuclear weapons to make sure they have somewhere to go :P
I'm not sure it does (I'd love to read an accurate model of it) but I get your point. It's a very compelling point.
I wish humans didn't need the threat of nuclear weapons to keep the basic needs of other humans in mind, but since they do... there you go.
Wait, what? You're correctly calling out the broken windows fallacy as a fallacy, but saying that it's _true_? Wealth is tied to value/utility in a way that isn't fully captured by spending, and the broken-windows phenomenon shows up in GDP figures too (it just trades short run for long run, at unfavorable exchange rates).
The danger of climate change is that incremental sea level rise would put tens of millions of people underwater.
Could they move? Absolutely. And we clearly have enough land to move people around, both globally and in many countries.
The danger is whether we can make those migrations without civil unrest. What land is taken for them to move to? What about Vietnam, where most of the country is projected to be underwater by 2050? We’re going to just move millions of Vietnamese and no one is going to be upset?
If we look today at the relatively tiny migration of people into the United States and Europe, we can see how quickly voters swing far right as The Other settles in.
The trickle down of these effects is tremendous.
Climate change means the chance of a hot / dry summer (or long / cold winter) will increase. Sure, at the time it seems like a fluke, and sure especially the more wealthy countries will be able to survive well enough, but at the same time it will cost lives. The poorest and disadvantaged will likely be the first to go, those that can't afford the gradually increasing prices of food.
And the problem will become bigger as the climate change becomes more widespread. We can (as a collective) survive a year of famine well enough, but what if crops fail two or three years in a row?
Those events also generated few millions refugees and, here in Europe, we are already unable to act. I can see that when this phenomenon will get 100s or 1000s time more severe wars will be fought for securing food/land (IMHO likely it will happen in south-east Asia at some point [2]).
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937801...
A small majority of grains grown world-wide are fed to animals. During crop failure the price of grain rises making it unprofitable to feed animals. These animals are sold, depressing the price of meat. People adjust to rising grain prices and falling meat prices by eating more meat in the short term. In the medium term the fewer number of animals available mean the animals eat less grain, depressing the price of grain again. In the long term a new equilibrium is met (if crop failure is the new normal) or the cycle reverses (if crop failure was only temporary).
It's not quite as rosy as I depicted above. Those price adjustments are massive changes, and change disproportionately affects the vulnerable. So lots of people will die. But it won't be because of lack of food, it'll be the lack of food in the right places, caused by the failure of capitalism to sell things to people who don't have any money.
+ wild fires
+ tropical storms
+ pollinator die-off and pest booms
+ crop failures
...all adding up to migration pressure, food supply shocks, and infrastructure losses.
+ ocean acidification
+ fisheries collapse
For that matter, what about the Netherlands, where 21% of its population is underwater today? Or rather, 21% of its population is below sea level. They manage to keep the land above water. The article addresses this. ctrl+f "400 years ago"
Vietnam probably already has thousands of climate refugees, and as 2050 gets closer, more and more people will leave, and by 2050, probably a lot of people will still be there, having figured it out somehow.
So, yes, I believe this is a huge problem. But I think most people have this idea that there's going to be some set time where it suddenly becomes HUGE. Maybe there will be some Black Swan moment. But it's just going to progressively get worse, slowly not suddenly.
The problem with things like that is, progressive problems have a track record of going unsolved.
But articles involving mis-targeted casual skepticism make us feel nice and ok with the status quo so we share them, because articles about the need to act are uncomfortable to digest.
To me it presents an alternative view and interpretation on the article. Even if I don't necessarily agree with some of the sentiments and/or how opinions are phrased, they do remind me that I should read things with caution, which is probably something that even the most cautious of us need to be reminded of every now and then.
I'm not entirely sure at what point one can start downvoting but I vaguely recall that it's a privilege that's given for having been recognised for a certain amount of contribution (presumably due to points). For this reason it seems irresponsible to downvote something, without commenting, just because it doesn't match your worldview and that you are too lazy to think of it as an opportunity to at least think about why there are people thinking differently.
What I find really irritating, though, is the idea that the media should make people scared and angry and push them toward action. That seems cynical, manipulative, and will probably backfire.
The article says " Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ... said, “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change.” " That's unscientific claim by Cortez. I think the point that exaggeration undermines your credibility is an important fact.
I believe that those of us who push a cause so hard that we lose sight of facts actually hurt the cause, because we alienate all the objective-truth-seekers.
Every now and then somebody says something so hyperbolic I have to ask "Am I really a democrat?"
If somebody asks do I believe in global warming I want to be able to answer "Yes" not "Yes but"
The author explicitly quotes scientists and says that climate change is a problem.
A great book on the effects of climate change is Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, who read 3000 peer-reviewed papers on climate change and summarized them, with extensive references. It was published in 2007 but from what I've seen it's holding up well. Four degrees is grim; it won't make us go extinct but it's a horrible mess nonetheless.
One claim in the article was that food production will be fine. In fact, there are agricultural areas feeding hundreds of millions of people which are dependent on glacier melt during dry seasons. Those glaciers are going away. Another issue is that prime areas for growing grain are moving towards the poles; the new "best" areas are smaller and have poorer soil. We're also losing topsoil, from a combination of droughts with occasional torrential rainfalls.
I can't think of any other problem that people think is fine because it's not bad enough to make us go extinct. "Bad healthcare system? Well, it won't wipe us all out, we're fine." And we're experiencing effects of climate change already, e.g. with the forest fires in California.
Complete BS.
E.g. the rationale of burning coal is that if India burns more coal they'll become wealthier faster and that will push the birthrate down, which will result in fewer people using less energy. That obviously makes no sense since wealthier nations have much higher per-capita carbon emissions which far more than offsets lower population growth. E.g. the US has ~8x the per-capita carbon emissions of India. (Now a constant change in the rate of population growth will overcome that difference in enough time -- but there's no reason to expect the difference to be constant. In fact, no exponential phenomenon holds a constant rate of growth for long since it must soon outstrip the environment that allows it.)
The only reason an intelligent person would make such a easily refutable untrue claim is because it's in their personal self interests to do so... It's a con and they are making money. (It's not too hard to guess where the money might be coming from, BTW)
Of course these guys love the environmentalist lunatic fringe. They are easy to dislike and easy to argue against. And as long as you can keep the focus on them you don't have to address real objects.
The idea that climate change will have a minor impact on GDP is also terribly wrong. The essential dynamic of the climate change crisis is that we are "borrowing from the future" -- we're emitting a lot of carbon now for short term gain vs costs that won't come due for the long term. But the GDP projections are based on the effect of climate change on our GDP in the recent past. It's like taking cash advances on a 40% no-minimum payment credit card and saying: "this won't screw up my financial future, look at how much money I've had in my pocket over the last week... At this rate, I'll always have money in my pocket." But the reality is the bill is going to come due.
Thank you for pointing out the very obvious elephant in the room: both China and India, nearly 3 billion people, cannot live like the United States, but they are on a trajectory to do so, and we in the west have no moral high ground to tell them no. This is the #1 reason we are totally hosed in the long run.
Plus, it's not like those countries would even want to live like the US. No, they want better. Public transportation, affordable healthcare and education, and so on.
At a personal level I used to be rather pro-nuclear, but certainly not anti-renewable. In any case, I think it can be helpful for the readers to have a little bit of background when reading such articles.
And we are at a point where it could get quite out of control, with positive feedback loops kicking in (permafrost, clathrates, etc), unless we take serious action now. Simply counting the (human) economic impact of climate change seriously ducks our moral responsibility to take care of the planet.
Shellenberger was raised in Greeley, Colorado and attended college at Earlham College, a Quaker school in Richmond, Indiana.[79][80] He went on to receive a master's degree in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
It's not possible for someone to hold all the myriad problems of the world in their head at once and keep them all in perfect balance, advocating for each issue according to its scientific importance. It's just not possible. For starters, the brain processes language in serial, not parallel. For that reason alone, focus on one thing at a time is necessary.
So the author is wrong. Who is this guy to say that people shouldn't bring attention to any one issue simply because there are other issues which are also important? That seems to be the gist of this article.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/06/26...
Nuclear, solar, hydro, even natural gas are all better solutions in the ways that matter. Wind is the least reliable resource of out of them all and we seriously shouldn't be generating our energy from intermolecular kinetic interactions, that is the lowest level of density. There's a reason the whole world adopted fossil fuels - the breaking of chemical bonds allowed us to harness unprecedented amounts of power.
Not to mention wind turbines, as the industry stands right now, rely on an increasingly ridiculous amount of sulfur hexafluoride being placed in effective GHG landmines, posing an unknown threat to global temperatures.
They also aren't exactly safe to humans. People die trying to fix burning wind turbines.
The physics are bad, the economics are bad, and the tech is bad. We really don't need wind.
Question: Aside from what I assume are massive error bars on projecting economic growth due to scientific models 80 years in the future, I read that most of the models do not assume climate change impacts actual growth and therefore is exempt from compounding. On the other hand they use compounding to extrapolate growth. It seems odd that escalating climate damages as outlined in the reports would not impose a sizable tax. Anyone with more detailed knowledge of long-term economic projections care to comment on this?
All of these things make the sedate trend predictions nonsense, so all are routinely discounted as part of the projection. But in sum the risks of these events make the probability of the projection's accuracy nil.
For example many humans rely on fishing for a large part of their protein, but marine ecosystems are already collapsing from overfishing. What will happen if climate change also negatively affect them? Insects are also rapidly declining everywhere, how sure are we about their importance for our food supply?
It's not really the thought that sea levels might rise that makes it feel apocalyptic; it's the fear that the change becomes irreversible. We've always been told that if temperatures rise too much (possibly from 2 degrees onwards), the effect will become self-enforcing: as the ice caps melt, less heat is reflected back into space, which will cause temperatures to rise, which causes more ice caps to melt, etc.
I have no idea about the validity of those fears, but it would be nice if the article addressed it.
(And w.r.t. the Netherlands adapting to sea levels 400 years ago... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_flood_of_1953)
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/extinction.html
That's why we need geoengineering solutions right now. But there's no funding to test geoengineering solutions because the IPCC is so conservative and has a long track record of always underestimating the rate of climate change. Like the article says IPCC claims that major changes are years away. They've been consistently wrong every 5 years, and the speed at which their predictions diverge from reality is accelerating.
If we put real effort in limiting carbon emissions and investigating geoengineering there are almost no downsides... on the other hand if the IPCC is wrong we're all dead. Which option would you rather have?
Meanwhile we still need to reduce emissions as much as we can.
On the other hand, there will always be incentives for politicians and journalists to sensationalize issues. It's just that HN isn't their target audience.
This is craziest thing in this article. You obviously burn less carbon by switching fully to alternatives and burning no carbon at all than any reduction you could get by reducing the birth rate. Even cutting carbon emissions per person in half would do more than you could get from any plausible decline in birth rates, and an implausibly large decline in birth rates would bring its own set of very serious problems.
And the fertility rate in India is now at the population replacement rate and falling. It's now below the population replacement rate in First World countries. Which is already problematic for efforts to switch to non-carbon fuels, because of the economic consequences -- a larger number of retirees per working person leaves fewer resources to spend switching to alternative fuels.
As far as I can tell there is accredited and reliable science both for and against the idea that global warming will bring about seriously consequences if left unchecked.
That being said, I agree with the authors sentiment that polarizing people on the issue isn't helping. Fear mongering and alarmism is not the answer as far as I can see. If we want to get the world motivated a different approach is needed; you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar, as they say.
A better approach would be to start with the truth.
Wet bulb temperatures in South Asia and the Persian Gulf reach dangerous or outright fatal levels. Depending on the location, two degrees of warming is enough.
This alone results in the displacement of hundreds of millions of people. That it would happen in India is very worrying because of the tensions with Pakistan, and the danger of nuclear war between the two states. As for the Gulf, well, that area is not exactly stable even today.
So what happens if several hundred million people relocate, while at the same time different lower-key consequences of climate change such as rising sea levels, increasing storm damage and the economic upheaval of having to give up fossil fuels contribute to instability and international tensions? Europe went nuts with the Syrian refugees we got recently, a real crisis will topple governments.
Will we somehow rally and discover a co-operative spirit in ourselves, that will let us manage the various crises peacefully through treaties and diplomacy? It sure doesn't seem like that is the kind of political paradigm that's being built now.
Not to put too fine a point on it, how do we avoid WW3 in the above scenario?
WWII didn't lead to the collapse of civilisation either. I wouldn't envy anyone who lived through it though.
We won't have a problem with growing crops because we don't have now? That's a nice idea you got there, but we fail at distributing food as needed right now. Why would we get any better at it when growing it as before is getting harder?
I'm also not sure where these estimates of growing food supply are coming from. I mean, maybe? But certainly not by growing the same kind of crops in the same regions as now, cause at least in central Europe we are feeling the issues with that already. The last summers and falls just grew continuously worse with last year being an utter disaster. If we don't want to continue artificially watering everything, I guess we have to set for crops that need less water and more sun.
https://www.sightline.org/2019/11/27/end-apartment-bans-to-s...
"Thousands of climate scientists come together and agree that the minimum amount of climate change we can expect is XXXXXX"
That's what consensus means, of course. The minimum that everyone agrees on is what is published. If you look at, say, median predictions of the group, it will probably be much worse than these IPCC reports describe (and indeed, the IPCC reports get much worse with each new edition as even the climate sluggards can no longer deny the weight of incoming evidence).
That should put the overall problem into very stark relief.
The difference between the two sides here is that of one the answer to the second question is yes and for the other one it's no. If you are a climate change skeptic you might lean to being probably or very probably right about that but not 100%. The consequence of not acting because of that if you are wrong is that we mess up the planet. Vice versa, the risk is much lower and we are looking at maybe doing things at a bit extra cost that don't do long term harm.
-We do nothing about climate change -> Climate change is actually not a problem. No money wasted
-We do nothing about climate change -> Climate change is real and devastates civilization
-We address climate change and switch to renewables -> Climate change is actually not a problem and we wasted money/resources
-We address climate change and switch to renewables -> Climate change is real and we avert disaster through our action
In my mind, even if expend the effort to switch to a more sustainable economy and somehow climate change was overblown, that's not a terrible outcome. We'll have cleaner air, less waste, and won't have to worry about oil so much. But if we don't make the switch and we're wrong, it is absolutely ruinous for the future of humanity.
It's like when someone gets bitten by a possibly rabid animal. Yeah, the vaccine shots are painful and it would suck if you took them when they weren't necessary. But if you were actually bitten by a rabid animal and don't get the shots you will die.
Even though there is no anchor tag with that value...
The title that I imagined seemed more intriguing, as it seemed to suggest (a belief that) that some of the apocalyptic claims were true, but that some were false (and a desire to clarify which ones those are, perhaps in order to make the true ones more believed?).
However I have a major issue about how he goes about presenting this message. He is unnecessarily provocative and dismissive in a way where he ends up being a useful tool for climate deniers.
While his nuclear power advocacy is absolutely a relevant alternative to discuss, he spends so much energy attacking renewable energy solutions such as wind and solar that all he really ends up doing is providing ammunition for climate deniers.
Far too many of the nuclear fans don't actually believe in climate change. They push nuclear as a way to dismiss efforts to introduce wind and solar power.
Michael Shellenberger simply cannot read his audience.
And civilization collapse is absolutely possible. The way he reasons about numbers is wrong. It is the equivalent of arguing that the 1929 crash was irrelevant because hey were were richer afterwards than in 1900 and we managed just find back then.
He thinks just in terms of absolute numbers, when relative change is usually MORE important. If you suddenly get a 50% cut in your income from one year to another that will have huge impact on your family. It makes no sense to argue that 10 years ago you made 50% less and managed just fine.
Back then you had adapted your lifestyle to those costs. Now you are paying for a bigger house, car, college for your kids etc. A sudden 50% drop in income is a big hit to adjust to.
Germans in the 1930s were much better off than poor people in Africa. Yet the decline in income they experience radicalized the population and led to the rise of Hitler. France on the eve of the French revolution was richer than in classical times. But crop harvest failures due to climate change radicalized the country and led to the French revolution.
This is the danger of climate change. Sudden changes in living conditions in various countries can tip the scales and spark revolutions.
I think he is wrong on this in that if we don't address climate change, we are on the road to extinction. It won't happen in our lifetimes but on a timescale of hundreds of years or a few thousand it may indeed happen.
The CO2 released in the atmosphere can stay there for thousands of years, and once we cross certain temperature thresholds there are feedback loops that will make things hotter still. We're talking about 2 degrees C by the year 2100, but what about 2200, 2300, 2500?
If we don't get things under control, at some point modern civilization is going to start breaking down, and at that point carbon sequestration or geoengineering measures that could fix things, simply won't be possible. After that point, humanity would just be a passenger on a ride to a planet inhospitable for human life.
> And civilization collapse is absolutely possible. The way he reasons about numbers is wrong. It is the equivalent of arguing that the 1929 crash was irrelevant because hey were were richer afterwards than in 1900 and we managed just find back then.
> He thinks just in terms of absolute numbers, when relative change is usually MORE important. If you suddenly get a 50% cut in your income from one year to another that will have huge impact on your family. It makes no sense to argue that 10 years ago you made 50% less and managed just fine.
Absolutely. I think he fails to account for the fact that climate change makes it much more likely that parts of the world will experience devastating collapses that will be difficult, if not impossible to recover from. There are parts of the world now that are unstable and poor, what's going to happen to them when wide scale weather disasters and resource shortages hit entire regions?
One way or another, our civilization is going to change radically in the next couple of decades.
We will have to make radical changes to how we grow food: https://www.wri.org/blog/2019/11/water-could-limit-our-abili...
> There’s an anthropologist friend of mine, a guy called Steve LeBlanc–he runs the Peabody Museum in Harvard–who wrote a book once called “Constant Battles” about pre-civilized human beings and how they actually lived. Not the fantasy version, where they lived in, you know, the Garden of Eden and wore flowers in their hair, but the real ancient world where food shortages, including ones that you could die from, were a regular occasion. And his rule of thumb is “people always raid before they starve.”
https://spaswell.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/dr-gwynne-dyer-geo...
> “We shouldn’t be forced to choose between lifting people out of poverty and doing something for the climate.”
That's not the issue.
The question before us is whether or not to rejoin Nature after our divorce or continue on the exploitative blind path and crash, hard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_and_Thou Nature is I-Thou not I-it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698
We have the technology (applied ecology) to "save" ourselves in a fun and graceful way: http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/redesigning-civilization-with... Including carbon-neutral fuel production: http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/
Food prices, drought and heatwaves are big threats.
But I wonder how many suicides it provokes :(
IMO that’s the only way the gloom and doomers are effective; to radicalize their base.
And they ARE proposing solutions by the barrelfull, the problem is politicians and many corporations simply don't listen and don't act.
Reference the IPCC as if it were fact, when the general consensus seems to be much of it is too conservative.
>Apocalyptic statements like these have real-world impacts. In September, a group of British psychologists said children are increasingly suffering from anxiety from the frightening discourse around climate change.
One day they're also going to find out they're going to die (unless their rich enough for cryonics, storage tanks that will be incinerated when this planet is engulfed by its sun, (or if they Jameson Satellite themselves, they can look forward to waiting to be evaporated by cosmic dust (or in the really long term, the decay of all the matter in the universe, or the big crunch (but of course the majority of scientists don't absolutely agree on any of that, so there's still hope))))
>And last week, an XR co-founder said a genocide like the Holocaust was “happening again, on a far greater scale, and in plain sight”
We don't need climate change for this, they're already going on in Africa and South America and China, so we're good in that department no matter what.
>There is good evidence that the catastrophist framing of climate change is self-defeating because it alienates and polarizes many people.
The opposite of polarization is uniformity. We could be uniform changing or staying the same, but since we're already here, might a well save the energy. Stay calm and carry on.
>First, no credible scientific body has ever said climate change threatens the collapse of civilization much less the extinction of the human species.
Oh.
>It’s not like climate doesn’t matter. It’s that climate change is outweighed by other factors. Earlier this year, researchers found that climate “has affected organized armed conflict within countries. However, other drivers, such as low socioeconomic development and low capabilities of the state, are judged to be substantially more influential.”
This really seems like an isolated version of climate change, it somehow only effects the climate and nothing else. (Cue reminder of Australian politician talking about leaking oil tanker having been 'towed out the the environment'.) Also, give me an economy long enough and things'll move.
>That last part may be true, but it’s also true that economic development has made us less vulnerable, which is why there was a 99.7% decline in the death toll from natural disasters since its peak in 1931.
More capitalism completely solves the problems that capitalism created, you just aren't using enough (also it's not pure enough). (Also it's the most powerful force humans have ever created (except we didn't create it because it's 'natural') and it can and can't change the world. Invincible when you need it to be, a drop in the bucket when you need it to be (and, again, with more of it we can fix everything [citation needed].))
>Wheat yields increased 100 to 300% around the world since the 1960s, while a study of 30 models found that yields would decline by 6% for every one degree Celsius increase in temperature.
What about soil microbes, worms, sourcing the components of the fertilizers that explicitly made that growth possible? So, yes, temperature alone won't do much. And to pull a Fox news talking point: green houses are hot, plants love green houses, so growing things will be better than ever.
>Rates of future yield growth depend far more on whether poor nations get access to tractors, irrigation, and fertilizer than on climate change, says FAO.
The more countries and people who do things exactly as we do (aka 'raised out of poverty[1]') the better. Our way of life if the not only the rightest but the right and this must be reproduced across all the corners of the universe (Bezos and Musk will take it to mars and beyond).
[1] in the vein of this article: just to be clear: I'm not pro poverty.
>One of the reasons I work on climate change is because I worry about the impact it could have on endangered species.
>As tragic as animal extinctions are, they do not threaten human civilization.
The world is like a zoo, all of these things are only there for our amusement, to look cute.
>Should we worry about koalas? Absolutely!
Eh, stinky, perpetually high, walking chlamydia infestations, not cute. Recommend reject from planet Earth. (See also mosquitoes.)
>“It doesn’t sound like it makes sense. Coal is terrible for carbon. But it’s by burning a lot of coal that they make themselves wealthier, and by making themselves wealthier they have fewer children, and you don’t have as many people burning carbon, you might be better off in 2070.”
Didn't I already mention something about further the spread of a particular set of ideological dispositions? I think so. One might get the idea that, at their core(s), the Republican and Democratic both fundamentally predicated on defending an ideology that shall remain nameless, and that their main disagreement seems to be in regards to how to do that.
>Emanuel and Wigley say the extreme rhetoric is making political agreement on climate change harder.
All we have to do realize we need a away to talk about climate change while the people making money of the situations that have led to it continue to do so and everyone gets what they want. (In fact, even better, they should make more money off climate change. They can exercise Scrooge McDuck style by swimming through the tunnels of their New Zealand bunkers. (After all, prepper fantasy shouldn't be something only the lower classes get to access.))
>Happily, there is a plenty of middle ground between climate apocalypse and climate denial.
The world isn't ending, you aren't dying. Won't someone please think of the children?
---
In the future (since we now know there's going to be one, thank the god of the market) maybe I should avoid reading Forbes before morning coffee-substitute (which the god of the market also grants me, so thank you).
[Addendum]
Looking back on growing up in a semi-apocalyptic religious environment, I can't ever remember anyone being worried about convincing us that the world wasn't going to end. Maybe that says something. Maybe Not.
This has been bothering me a lot lately, journalists/reporters are running wild, blaming all kinds of droughts, wildfires, and migrations on climate change, particularly on NPR, but the truth is that these claims are no more valid than deniers claiming unusual snowfall to be evidence against climate change. Only long term, aggregate statistical data is a valid proxy for the effects of climate change - one cannot cherry pick events for a phenomenon which really has relatively tiny observable features on local time and space scales.
It's not like it's hard to find. You can quibble about how certain media outlets or stories make the point, but the overall point is both true and important: climate change is real.
That doesn't excuse bad reporting, which is my point.
And YES, it’s crazy frustrating when “weather is not climate - unless I’m trying to prove climate change”. Many religious believers who argue they’re interested in “the science” are just as stubborn and bull headed as the deniers. But, anyone who questions whether a global tax designed to keep a specific group in power and really just call for global socialism is the only solution is automatically “a denier”, so there is that too.
I’m with you, I find the die hards on the topic to be highly ineffective in convincing me of their point let alone actual skeptics.
https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/12/democratic-sen-mazie-hi...
For example see Green New Deal details, which pushes for "justice" and equity (equality of outcome) and other policies unrelated to climate change, at https://www.factcheck.org/2019/02/the-facts-on-the-green-new...:
> Promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities...
For another example see https://extinctionrebellion.us/demands-principles, which asks for reparations:
> We demand a just transition that prioritizes the most vulnerable people and indigenous sovereignty; establishes reparations and remediation led by and for Black people, Indigenous people, ...
As such, to me it does seem like these issues are being taken over and misappropriated as carriers for unrelated policies, in order to build a deceptive coalition or false consensus on the more controversial points.
What frustrates me the most about the climate change mess is that it is now a religion, on both sides of the argument. The truth isn’t being covered by anyone because they are all making money or gaining votes with the nonsense.
First truth: We can’t do a thing about climate change. Nothing will “fix” it.
This is very easy to understand.
Go dig-up the last 800,000 years in atmospheric CO2 data from ice core samples.
Curve fit lines to the large up and down cycles of approximately 100 ppm.
Measure the down slopes in years per 100 ppm.
The numbers you’ll get are in the range of 25,000 to 75,000 years for a 100 ppm drop. Let’s call it 50,000 average.
Now add a graph of total human population to this 800,000 year chart.
Identify the period when humanity represented less than 1% of current world population, say, 70 million or less.
Calculate the down slope during that period. Still about 50,000 years for a 100 ppm drop.
Conclusion: If 99% of humanity and all of our technology evaporated from this planet next Monday, it would take in the range of 50,000 years for a 100 ppm drop in atmospheric CO2 concentration. In other words, the rate of change is in the tens of thousands of years per 100 ppm.
We cannot “fix” this even if we all left earth.
Anyone proposing a solution has to explain how this would be better than leaving the planet.
Example claim: No more planes, trains, autos or motorcycles to fix climate change in 50 years.
Ridiculous.
This claims a ONE THOUSAND FOLD improvement on the rate of change corresponding to all of humanity leaving the planet. That’s preposterous. In fact, this will do nothing and might even make things worse.
If you claim a “fix” you have to explain how it will perform a thousand times better than if seven billion people committed mass suicide next Monday.
We desperately need to start talking about reality and leave fantasy behind.
Climate change is real, and we are not going to fix it.
EDIT: Here's a link to the ice core sample atmospheric CO2 data. I urge you to go through the steps I listed above and engage in some critical thinking before commenting or down-voting this comment. If you disagree, explain why and how we can do a thousand times better than if humanity left the planet.
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical...
Humans are actors. Collectively, we have huge powers to shape the planet. We have used those powers to change the planet's atmosphere and we could use those powers to change it differently.
This is, at it's core, a physics problem.
This is like saying we are going to decelerate a cruise ship from 20 knots to 0 in one microsecond without killing everyone on board and destroying the ship in the process due to the forces you have to apply. In other words, it doesn't take much more than elementary science to understand that the claim is just plain nuts.
> Humans are actors. Collectively, we have huge powers to shape the planet. We have used those powers to change the planet's atmosphere and we could use those powers to change it differently.
This is the other false claim. First of all, we are not Superman. The universe follows the laws of physics. You can't violate them any more than you can turn off the sun.
The common fallacy is to claim something like "we've done this in 200 years and we can undo it in 50 if we set our minds to it".
No, we can't.
And, no, we did not do this in 200 years (or 300, or whatever). We did this in MILLIONS of years.
What?
Conservation of Energy.
Pesky physics again.
Let's go back to the ice core sample data and ask a question: How did CO2 levels go UP when humanity was not around or we were insignificant?
Simple answer: Shit burned. Massive fires over thousands of years caused CO2 accumulation.
How did CO2 go down?
Trees grew back, capturing CO2 and storms did the same, over tens of thousands of years. After all, the basic process of photosynthesis tells us how this works in the plant domain:
CO2 + 2H2O + photons → CH2O + O2
CO2 and water and photons are converted to carbohydrates (plant) and oxygen.
OK, so, why am I claiming that we did this in millions of years rather than a few hundred when humanity hasn't really been around that long?
Simple, we did this by burning plants.
What?
Where does OIL come from and how was it made?
It is made through a highly inefficient process that uses solar energy to convert plant and animal matter into oil.
Some studies have estimated that one gallon of oil required about 98 MILLION TONS of plants and millions of years of solar energy.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-10/uou-bm910260...
Yes, we did this in a few hundred years in human terms. However, in terms of the physics of the matter, we did this in MILLIONS of years. Before our use of fossil fuels the planet could only really burn the plants on the surface to pump CO2 into the atmosphere. We came along and unlocked millions of years of stored energy through burning oil that was the result of an unimaginably large number of plants and animal matter crunched together and cooked over geological time scales. It was like burning the entire plant population of the planet every day rather than a small percentage of it every year for ten thousand years. The scale and rate of CO2 production we achieved in a few hundred years was the result of converting an unimaginably large amount of energy and having no natural process to deal with the CO2 we produced at the same scale.
And so, we go back to physics:
The problem was created by an unimaginably large amount of energy and matter. This is the kind of scale you can only measure using moles (Avogadro's number). If we only use the principle of Conservation of Energy to evaluate any proposed solution to this problem we are going to run right into a solid wall:
How do we use LESS energy to fix a problem that was cause by an unimaginably large amount of energy and matter.
The answer it:
We can't.
And if we deploy some of these crazy ideas floating around we are far more likely to kill us all than to fix anything.
I mean, how are we going to fix the result of unleashing multiples of Avogadro's number of plan matter and the unimaginable amount of solar energy that went into storing that energy by simply not flying, or installing solar panels or switching to electric cars? When looked at in the proper scale and context these ideas are laughable at best. We are wasting time talking about religion --on both sides of this matter.
Simple physics. This isn't hard at all. It does require thinking beyond the surface of the matter though.
Again, go back to the data: How is a country or a person better than all of humanity evaporating?
Let's say the US evaporates from the planet on Monday. No change. Atmospheric CO2 will continue to rise. China? Same problem. India? Same problem.
Once you look at the data dispassionately it is hard to conclude we have the ability to do a thing about it.
What we can and should be doing is to understand and model changes and plan for society to adapt.
I also believe the planet's own regulatory system is reacting to counter our influence, the question is one of scale and time. I haven't found any evidence that says the planet can fix this in 50 years when it has historically taken 50,000 without humanity around to muck it up.
If we left, it would take 50,000 years for a 100 ppm drop in CO2 (which is roughly what we need).
How is farmers doing as you suggest going to accelerate this to a meaningful human scale rather than 50,000 years.
It can't. It won't. Because the things you propose will not do a thing about reducing atmospheric CO2 concentration. They won't even stop it.
We already understand that if we convert the entire planet to the most optimal (efficient, clean, cheap, etc.) forms of renewable energy sources not only will atmospheric CO2 accumulation not stop, it will continue to rise exponentially.
Again, not my opinions. This is super simple science. Not hard to understand at all.
Any claim made must explain how it will improve the rate of change a thousand fold. In other words, just making a claim that sounds good does not make it true.
I'm fairly ignorant on the matter and by default am very skeptical of this, but damn would it be nice to have a real answer instead of some interesting very light text at the bottom of the screen.
The responses usually range from flat-out attacks to repeating what I will call memes without one ounce of critical thinking applied. Things like "all we need is more renewable energy" sources --something that has been completely and utterly debunked for at least five years, if not ten.
This is so simple:
Show how we are going to do better (in terms of atmospheric CO2 concentration reduction) than the historical rate of change corresponding to humanity not being on this planet.
That is a tall order. Extraordinary claims that propose being able to fix the problem in 50 or 100 years need to explain how we are going to deploy such monumental amounts of energy, natural and man-made resources at such a scale without killing us all.
We are talking about a claim to be able to affect change at a rate a THOUSAND times faster than if humanity did not exist. It baffles me that nobody is asking how this is possible.
Also --and this is really important-- I am NOT saying climate change is not real. Quite to the contrary. All I am suggesting is that it is quite likely we can't do a thing about it. These two things are separable and should be treated separately. On the one hand we have the undisputed reality of climate change and our contribution to the problem and, on the other, the potential reality that there isn't a thing we can do about it.
And then the question becomes? If this is true, that we can't do a thing about affecting climate change, what should we do? That's the conversation we need to be having, not a bunch of hair-brained ideas promoted by ignorant politicians for easy votes.
* We cannot let despair prevent us from acting. The big changes needed are possible, and we need to accelerate them.
* We actually don't know with certainty how bad it is going to get.
* People, in general, are not scared enough right now.
When people feel a problem is hopeless, they cease to act. Climate alarmists trying to scare people into action with improbable outcomes, I feel, are being counter productive in this regard.
But the damage is already done. More alarmism (which is almost guaranteed) will be even more counter productive where people will just tune out.
I hate to say it, but I feel that climate change has become a distraction from doing real and necessary environmental work.
How do you figure that?
Not that there wasn't plenty of ignorant hysteria. But there was also a lot of real mitigation work. A lot of stuff didn't break on 1/1/2000 because we fixed the bugs before then.
> Global warming is a real issue and we are going to slowly warm our planet, resulting in substantial impacts (like less snowpack in the Cascades, increased river flooding in November, drier conditions in the subtropics, loss of Arctic sea ice). But the world will be a much richer place in 2100 and mankind will find ways to adapt to many of the changes. And there is a good chance we will develop the technologies to reverse the increasing trend in greenhouse gases and eventually bring CO2 concentrations down to previous levels.
> Global warming does not offer an existential threat to mankind, and politicians and decision makers only undermine their credibility and make effective action less likely by their hype and exaggeration. And their unfounded claims of future catastrophe prevents broad national consensus and hurts vulnerable people who are made anxious and fearful. And just as bad, all this end of the world talk results in folks turning away from the issue, both out of fear and from intuition that a lot of hype is going on.
He also wrote a VERY disturbing post about how the university has tried to censor him and retaliate against him because he would not kowtow to the pressures of student and faculty activists, who are polluting universities with their ideological fervor. I highly recommend that anyone interested in protecting scholarly attitudes, academic rigor, and neutrality give this a read: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-university-of-was...
Unfortunately, I could believe a university atmosphere promotes ideological fervor and suppresses neutrality in this cancel-culture, overly PC society. But we really do need to stop using the term "global warming" in a serious way, this is bad science.
In any case, climate change is the better term, it's more generalizable to flooding, hurricanes, polar vortex, ecosystem collapse, coral bleaching, etc. If you use the term global warming, it conveys much less of how broadly the upcoming changes will be seen.
Seems like if we are making claims and enacting tax policy right now, we should at least be able to predict it’ll warm or cool. No?
If the concern is sea levels rising, is that not warming?
So, global warming is technically true, the average heat content of the globe is rising over time...but it's an outdated, over simplistic term because "warming" does not tell us that each locality is going to face a different reality. It's also used by skeptics to say "well, there's snow, so clearly warming is a hoax" or "well, MN has record low temps, global warming is a hoax." Actually it isn't, but ignorant politicians and voters may think it's a hoax if they only look in their own zip code for warming, and not for climactic changes everywhere.