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Comment by malux85 | Hacker News Reader

Nearly a year and a bunch of webinars and presentations to allocate only 1M?

No wonder climate change is upon us. When the crops are failing, areas becoming uninhabitable and sea level has risen the paper pushers will still be filling their forms out

(No no! This doesn’t qualify on section 32.3A, Trash it!)

Absolutely no sense of urgency, and such a small amount isn’t going to move the needle for the city, or the climate

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It's a 1M prize, not the money allocated to implementing whatever change is proposed.

If Helsinki comes up with a plan, within a year, at the cost of 1M, to decarbonize their city's heating and then takes 5-10 years to implement the plan, they will be carbon neutral within 6-11 years. Pretty good, right?

What's your plan?

> Nearly a year and a bunch of webinars and presentations to allocate only 1M?

The same applies for several X prizes or DARPA grand challenges. And yet, the DARPA grand challenged sparked the huge surge in autonomous driving we see today. The original grand challenge was in 2004 with a $1M prize.

I don't think the city expects anyone to invent a new reactor type or such for that funding. If you have developed something, Helsinki just hopes to see it here sooner than later: "We invite innovators from all around the world to use Helsinki as a testbed for truly sustainable solutions for urban heating."

The crops aren't failing. Far from it, they are thriving under the elevated levels of CO2. Indeed, this gas forms an essential ingredient in the photosynthesis process and plants all grow more efficiently with elevated levels of CO2. There is absolutely no risk of crop failure on account of CO2 levels. Just the opposite, yields are at near all time highs and have more than doubled in the past few decades for most crops!

Unfortunately the crops that are produced have less nutrients.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/08/08/climate-c...

No they haven't. The macronutrient profile shifts by single digit percentages. The plants produce slightly more carbs and slightly less protein per ounce. But for instance, soy, only experiences a 2% drop. So if you double yields but protein per ounce drops 2%, that is a net win.

There is a risk of crop failures not because they can't handle the CO2, but because the areas where we plant them have a changed climate that is no longer suitable, for example because it becomes too dry, too wet, or too hot. Right now we're only at 0.8° of warming give or take, so these effects are not particularly pronounced. But the CO2 we emit today cumulatively effects the climate for millennia to come.

Humans will adapt. Some might have to switch crops or change locations. Its nature that will suffer.

All it would do is cause the growing area to expand towards the poles. It would lengthen the growing season in many parts of the world. As for dry / wet conditions, which are variable and shift with oceanic oscillations like the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, PDO, etc. We have technology to deal with those. Irrigation, desalination, drainage, etc.

The CO2 we emit today used to very much exist in the biosphere. It got trapped underground as an accident of evolution. And then it turned into coal. Plants evolved under conditions with CO2 as much as 10x higher than current levels.

Solar insolation increases over time as the sun gets older. Levels of CO2 that were safe in the past will result in higher temperatures today. We aren't talking about a few ten thousand years here and there. Millions of years have passed since these historical levels of CO2,

Then the obvious plan is to move the farms or switch crops. Farm machinery is somewhat mobile and obviously crops can be grown in a year or so. We grow crops in a wide range of climates.

It'd be a massive hassle but it isn't obvious that it should conjure a sense of terrific urgency.

Odd. I got different information, that it was too wet, which lowered corn yields. https://www.agriculture.com/news/crops/us-corn-yields-are-ro...

If CO2 is good for plants maybe we should start a few forest fires ourselves. Just think of all the thriving plants from the higher CO2 levels.

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