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Comment by agentultra | Hacker News Reader

I agree with Neil Gaiman and the many, many climate scientists watching this unfold that the Australian, Canadian and Californian fires are only the tip of a very large iceberg. Policy wise I think politics needs to plan to cope with living in a 4-5C world and action wise we need to do everything we can to try and plateau in a 2-3C world.

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I think 4-5C is a pretty reasonable assumption, over the next century.

The thing is that most of our current action plan for climate change consists of reducing CO2 emissions, and this is woefully inadequate for a world that the most recent science indicates has already passed the tipping point. Among the second-order changes that we should be preparing for:

1. Migration as the new norm. A 4-5C temperature rise will shift equivalent biomes over 1000 miles northward/southward, and inundate large coastal areas where major populations are currently located. Major densely-populated areas will become uninhabitable, and currently uninhabitable areas will become fertile.

2. The collapse of governments, and of the nation-state system. When migration becomes the new norm, borders become irrelevant, as do settled homogenous populations. What's the new political organization look like?

3. Large temporary food shortages. Higher temperatures, higher rainfall, and higher CO2 levels actually mean that in the long-term, plant growth and agricultural productivity will increase, and the earth's carrying capacity should go up. But in the short term - a lot of our current crops are hyper-specialized to their existing climate, and land rights, water rights, & physical crop location become problematic. Food distribution becomes critical - we'll likely make enough food to feed everyone on the planet, but the people who grow it may not want to share (or may have the inability to trade) with the people who need it.

4. Expect to see more diseases emerge. Large migrations, changes in biomes, and increased human habitation of formerly virgin ecosystems all spell chances for pathogens to jump from animal hosts to people and spread widely.

Overall, I'm a lot more scared of the likelihood that humans will kill each other than that the environment will kill us. We have a unique tendency to blame each other for unwelcome changes rather than to adapt to them.

"borders become irrelevant"

On the contrary, citizens become more nationalistic. The pendulum will swing right again. EU falling apart already due to it.

I think we'll see some citizens become more nationalist, while the number of people who are either stateless or consider themselves only loosely attached to a state grows dramatically. At the same time non-state organizations (multinational corporations, drug cartels, city-states, religious fundamentalists) will grow in power to fill the void left by the shrunken state, taking over many of the functions of the state like physical security, dispute resolution, taxation, infrastructure, etc.

This is already happening as well: while the hinterlands of Britain voted for Brexit, it was widely unpopular in London, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and other regions, and may lead to the breakup of the UK. I could easily see a future where cities declare their independence and then organize a loose global confederation of free-trade agreements and mutual assistance pacts, leaving behind rump states ruling over the rural areas of what used to be their country. Then add in private corporations (incubated within the cities) to provide physical security for travelers and migrants who pay for the service.

"City-states" - I doubt that, unless they have their own army, currency etc.

However, the model of the Hanseatic cities:

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

may be something that certain cities or city-regions could theoretically try to set up.

The concept is not that far away. You already have city tolls coming back into fashion with the implementation of fees to enter “Low Emissions Zones”

Adding local regulation that doesn't contradict state law isn't that difficult. The difficult part is getting nation-states to exempt such states from much of the national law.

We should also consider that as the ambient CO2 density rises we're also going to lose a lot of our cognitive function. If we're going to rely on nuclear energy to see us through we might need to rely on AI to carry on operations for us.

I'm skeptical of that claim without some good supporting evidence. Submarines tend to maintain CO2 concentrations 10x higher than atmospheric, and they have a better reactor safety record than civilian power plants.

No. The CO2 increases won't be at this level.

Or alternatively, personal CO2 scrubbers (already used as a part of diving rebreathers) become standard equipment for knowledge workers.

Humanity produces sooo much food already, and that's with a huge fraction of people in under-developed countries doing low-yield production. Food shortages these days are artificial, in the sense that the deciding factors are socio-political, not physical/climatic.

Other than that, agreed. I'm very worried popular movements will not be strong enough to prevent the emergence of authoritarian regimes who try to keep the migrating masses out with extreme violence (a more extreme version of how Europe has been trying to stop the flow of immigrants from Syria and Libya).

How about we get into cloud seeding. I’ve seen plans costing it at under $10 billion a year per 1°C decrease.

Seems like the most sensible option for me.

There’s already ample literature proving the tremendous impact of cloud cover on global temperatures.

Accelerated Olivine weathering is my geoengineering method of choice. It's exactly how the earth brought itself back into equilibrium over millions of years after the mass extinction events. As an added bonus it fixes the acidity of the oceans.

For more info check out this project:

https://projectvesta.org

This is really cool but seems almost too good to be true. Why isn't this being talked about more?

My understanding is that once you start cloud seeding, you can't really stop...if you stop, you'll have runaway warming at a significantly accelerated rate[0].

I'm pretty wary of geoengineering, just because we don't really know the second/third/nth-order effects geoengineering solutions might have. I'm not saying it should never be done, but I think much more research is in order before doing something that literally affects the entire planet.

[0] I believe I learned that from this book (which I thought was excellent), although I'm not 100% sure: https://www.amazon.com/This-Changes-Everything-Capitalism-Cl...

surgery with a chainsaw works ok, too, in certain cases

> living in a 4-5C world

It would be close to impossible to feed 8B people in a +4C world. Probably even in a +2C world.

Enjoy the party while it lasts.

What information is that based off of? How do we know we won't be able to use technology (whatever that means in this case) to solve it?

Gotta love this "some yet-existing technology will solve all our problems!" mindset.. /s

Might as well have faith in Jesus at this point, if you're just going to pray to non-existant future tech.

E.g. I think a lot people have prayed for a solution to solve problems like aging, but several millennia of civilization, and we're still aging and dying.

Difficult to say since we don't even know what technology we'll discover in 10 years from now.

If you look at the wildfires in Russia from 2010 which helped trigger the Arab revolutions in 2011 it should give you an idea. That occurred 10 years ago when we weren't even at +1C.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Russian_wildfires#Role_in...

Also:

> Rockström [director of the Potsdam institute] doesn’t like our chances. “It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate eight billion people or maybe even half of that,” he says. “There will be a rich minority of people who survive with modern lifestyles, no doubt, but it will be a turbulent, conflict-ridden world.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/18/climate-...

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Russian_wildfires#Role_in....

Just FYI that all the links in this are dead apart from one that links to a youtube channel called "Russia Good"

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzFHWLAMQ2hWPc7fbssfSUg/abo...

Any better sources on this?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-an...

I dunno if "technology [will] solve it"... We'll have droughts, famine, and 16k 8g streaming VR porn.

We already have the capability to solve it (we created it), it's just not profitable enough to start trying yet. Or at least it will be unfathomably more profitable when people are faced with life or death situations.

I totally agree wildfires are getting worse because of climate change.

But... I was asked about the far larger and far worse fires Australia had in 1974-1975, and why those were related just to mismanagement and these are related to climate change. I didn't have an answer, does anyone?

I would wonder why. Why would wildfires get worse because of climate change?

Wildfires need an accumulation of fuel. Climate change could produce the fuel, but that would be a process of decades. Indeed, bad fires in 1975 -- 45 years later there is enough fuel.

Which would mean that the mechanism would be: climate change -> growth of fuel -> burn.

It’s not a direct answer to your question and I don’t have a reference to hand but I found it interesting. I read that the 74-75 fires were a fairly different situation - the year before there was anomalously high rainfall which lead to a large amount of unsupportable grass growth. The grass grew over a huge but primarily uninhabited area, died, and dried out. When it caught fire the next year it was allowed to burn uncontrolled. So it was primarily grass being allowed to burn in remote areas versus the current situation which involves more forest and is being actively fought.

1. It is not as if global warming wasn't happening in 1974-75. It is just that the signal was MUCH weaker, the amount of historical and contemporary data was MUCH less, our confidence in climate modeling was much lower, and processing power was much less for actually running our models. To say that 1974-75 was not related to climate change at all is likely wrong. But certainly, the amount of human-induced global warming was significantly less too, so it is likely that 74-75 had other larger underlying reasons.

Right! So things in the 1970s were climate crisis too, we just didn't know about it. Good point.

Anywhere I could look up and see what the global degree increase was in the 1970s? I imagine this might be hard to find because they thought largely that the climate was cooling then, no?

edit: why downvotes? I'm agreeing!

Just look at any IPCC report, it probably is a good starting point. That is all very well known to the extent allowed by science at the time. The greenhouse effect was well known. Exxon essentially predicted the level of warming we've seen in the late 70s/early 80s in internal reports. Nobody really think the climate was cooling. There was one magazine cover, once, that has been grossly blown out of proportion.

Scientists and science-fiction has been dealing with/talking about climate crisis since the 50s/60s. A lot of the early stuff is tied in with some wrong (since disproven) Malthusian beliefs, but a since of post-fossil fuel-related climate change is an undercurrent through a lot of sci-fi. Even just looking at well known pop culture artifacts, climate crisis is a component of the films Logan's Run and Soylent Green in the 70s.

One of my favorite graphs on the subject remains xkcd's: https://xkcd.com/1732/

You can't read an exact "degree increase" around the 70s on that chart, but you can clearly see the seventies is in a notable slope/gradient as is everything post-world wars.

Agreed. I like that chart too. But doesn't it pretty much show that from 1800 to 1920 that the damage was already done? It was steady for 3000+ years then jumped drastically over a 120 year span.

edit: Obviously not "damage is done" let's not care, but rather, how little emissions started the slope change.

Already done? That chart shows the damage is clearly continuing and projected to only get worse.

Totally! But look at the 1800-1900 mark, what were the emissions then? It's crazy just how little CO2 was released that made that sharp flow immediately start, I would have thought the would be some ramp up phase, but I guess not!

Isn't it amazing how little CO2 from 1800-1900 was released compared to today? But it still kicked off this drastic change in slope?

I'm very skeptical would could in our best efforts globally get down to 1900 levels just given how many more people there are, and they need to eat.

I don't think it was that "little"; 1800-1900 encompassed a lot of early fossil fuel usage, including a lot of coal and nearly extinguishing whales for burnable oils. There was also a great deal of deforestation. Don't forget to take into account efficiency improvements in your mental estimates of how much CO2 was released, we don't produce that much more CO2 than the 1800s because we do a lot more with less. (An LED lamp compared to a whale oil lamp is an amazing difference in carbon output thanks to all sorts of efficiency gains.)

Certainly, we are in trouble if our goal is to somehow get back to pre-1800 temperature levels. Which is why the goal setting has always "merely" been to try stop the current slope from so dangerously remaining exponential, and has never been about entirely undoing the effects of man-made climate change. As a species, we can try solve that after we've done what we can about the present problems of that sharp forecasted curve.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong:

Because of the trend towards increased frequency. "100 year events" (fire, flood, heatwave, storms) are now happening every year.

It is likely that 100 year events, calculated on the basis of historical data are overly optimistic. That is, these events will occur with higher frequency. However, "every year"? The only way to make that a correct statement is to say that there is at least one 100 year event (fire flood earthquake viral outbreak, etc.) happening in each year globally. But that has essentially always been true. "100 year event" really only has any meaning when talking about a specific event: e.g., category V hurricane landing within 50 miles of Houston.

> Someone please correct me if I'm wrong >"100 year events" (fire, flood, heatwave, storms) are now happening every year.

Alright, that is incorrect. Perhaps you're living in age of better reporting and global information exchange?

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