Hacker News Reader

Comment by perfunctory | Hacker News Reader

Climate related reports are getting scarier by the day. I am scared. Really scared. Everyone should be.

If I may, let me make a little plea.

May I remind everyone that we are not a mere spectators of the show. We are active participants. We can influence things. We as in you and I, HN crowd. It may not seem like it, but an average HN reader has a non-trivial amount of influence. And not only in financial sense. Please, use it. I used to urge people to please go and do something about climate. I think the phrasing has to change now. Please! Go out and do everything you possibly can to fight climate change. The future of humanity is in your hands.

View on HN

>>I am scared. Really scared. Everyone should be.

The thing is, I'm completely oversatured with being scared. This has lead to massive mental issues in the last few years, because everything around us is apocalyptic, even though we live in unimaginable luxury compared to 99.9999% of the rest of the time when humanity existed. I just....can't anymore.

>> The future of humanity is in your hands.

No, it isn't. At least it doesn't feel like it. Impact of my actions is zero. The only way that a "future of humanity is in my hands" is by either deciding to not have kids, or even better, just killing myself and immediately reducing all my output to zero. Still, on a global scale that amounts to nothing.

Watched a good video about this recently - even if all of United Kingdom was wiped off the map and just disappeared overnight, China and US would make up for the reduced polution in about 8 weeks, as both countries emit more and more by the day. And you're telling me the future is in my hands? Right.

And yet we shut down airlines and personal car travel for a month or two and we can measurably see pollution in the air drastically fall.

Incredible how we react when we might die in 2 weeks instead of 50 years...

But the lockdown also shows the problems of shutting down the economy; in developing nations day wagers are starving and dying. In developed nations frothing-in-the-mouth idiots are protesting with their semi-auto weapons.

The problem however is it shows us that unprecedented shutting down of the economy has an effect below that needed to tackle climate change. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-co2-isnt-fall...

The figure I saw quoted is an estimated yearly reduction due to global lockdown of around 5% for CO2 emissions where about 7.5% yearly reduction is needed.

This isn't necessarily a cause for doom and gloom but it does show we need to move the focus back to transport, energy generation, etc and away from personal responsibility which on its own has minor benefits.

>I am scared. Really scared.

May be from reading too many scare-mongering alarmist articles like the one in OP where the usual quantitative terms that are supposed to be present in the abstract are replaced with "much lower", "serious health and productivity impacts", "dangerously high", "serious challenge", etc.

I understand what you're saying about the hyperbole, but we're also at the point where there are multiple, overlapping problems of a very serious nature to a species with 7.8 billion beings sharing a planet. The hyperbole isn't useful, but the larger idea that the time to act IS NOW shouldn't be diminished.

> It may not seem like it, but an average HN reader has a non-trivial amount of influence. And not only in financial sense. Please, use it.

What do you mean by a 'non-trivial amount of influence'? Sure, we can ask our employers to enforce climate-friendly practices and talk to friends and family, but even protesting companies that contribute the most to pollution doesn't provide much relief as they either ignore the protests or make small changes that give them positive PR and make the less active people happy to stop trying.

What steps can a random person take to actually help the planet? I'm asking this without a shred of irony or doom and gloom, I legitimately would be happy to help stop the crisis but the only thing I can think of is planting dozens of trees every year.

If you own a house in the US, you can very likely cut your energy use at least in half even without lifestyle changes. Cut back air travel and switch from a gas powered vehicle to an alternative that works for you.

A lot of what needs to happen, IMO, is culture change. Doing all of the things you mentioned is only a drop in the bucket, but one person putting in that effort normalizes it. That makes other people feel more comfortable and motivated to do the same. It might not feel like much, but it's definitely better than nothing.

Also, if you're in tech and you have the luxury of changing jobs, there are companies doing good work on climate change. Electric vehicles, solar power, making production and supply chains more efficient, etc. We can make it easy/cheaper/more pleasant for people/corporations/governments to make the right choices.

Well, you know, so long as we're fighting about all these other things it's hard to organize the kind of cooperation needed to focus on climate change effectively. We really need to resolve these other differences somehow.

You can do something to fight climate change, at the professional down to the personal level. This was my plea to software and tech people: https://dev.to/pablooliva/has-covid-19-made-you-reconsider-y...

> I am scared. Really scared. Everyone should be.

This is a statement about your mental health, not one about reality. Barring a badly-timed war, the global standard of living in 2100 will be much better than today’s. Even if global warming causes 10% less increase in GDP, as some modeling conservatively predicts.

If you want something to freak out about, I’d recommend nuclear war, the next AIDS-like virus, drone terrorism, and the casual destruction of human prosperity caused by housing policies.

May I suggest you read the IPCC report? 2100 with business as usual scenarios looks like at least one billion humans with an urgent need to relocate. If you have a better model please show your work.

I was referring to either this one: https://www.nber.org/papers/w26167 or some other with similar scale of estimates, using what I presume to be mainstream predictions of temperature growth.

Edit: Also, you can easily tell without looking that the idea billions would have to relocate is a complete joke. The reason is, let’s suppose global warming makes a region unfarmable. Well, even if it were farmable, automation in the 3rd world will move people out of farming anyway. So they’d have to be doing other work, trading for food, no matter what happens.

We are not on the business as usual path any more, so that isn't the most relevant scenario.

2100 is way too far out to predict anything.

The cost of gene synthesis is roughly 20 years behind gene sequencing [0]. Extrapolated, by 2040, arbitrarily modifying your offspring will represent a trivial fraction (~0.5%) of the total cost of starting a family.

Follow Moore’s law (considering lower costs rather than boosted performance) and assuming the Kurzweil estimate for full brain emulation, then by 2047, uploaded minds would be cheaper than the food eaten by subsistence farmers. [1]

The first thing most people suggest when they hear about 3D printers is printing another 3D printer. It is definitely possible because that’s what every living cell does; while nobody knows how to do this now, if we can make it happen with the rocks of Mercury, it only takes four decades to build a Dyson swarm. [2]

The questions are, what happens first, and how does humanity collectively react to that?

[0] https://image.slidesharecdn.com/gblocks-webinar2014-14012312...

[1] https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/67531

[2] https://youtu.be/zQTfuI-9jIo

Reply on news.ycombinator.com