Ask HN: What can a technologist do about climate change?
It’s been 5 years since http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ was published. Is it still up to date? Are there other similar resources?
Also, the book "Ministry For The Future" is an SF take pulling together ideas people have on climate change. The actual prose may make you throw the book at the wall.
You can, if you wish, push information forward. For example, having free interfaces to solar panels, cheap sun following controls, software to control car charging for cheap times, software to use a car as a 'peak load' battery, data modelling to show Hawaii why tourism is better with only electrics, software to create micro cargo ships with solar power, cleaning up the automated kite power generators that were open sourced, and the like.
You have more power than you expect.
I think it's only partially true. It really comes down to your definition of tech. But i guess your right that green tech is our only hope to keep the planet inhabitable for 8 billion people.
A counter example is cars, cars have come with new technology and as such they have increased our emissions. But they have lowered their emissions overtime. Cars will continue to get more efficient and cleaner.
This is the trend the more we advance the cleaner our technology gets. However we also seem to use more and energy as we expand our numbers. There are two options, reduce our numbers or increase our efficiencies. I rather like humanity and the freedom to procreate so I put all my eggs in the efficiency basket. The only way I know that increases efficiency is to develop new technology.
Climate crisis should be lumped in as fake news, disinformation until such time as it can either be shown to be real or not. How many more failed predictions such as the end of snow by 2010 do we have to put up with.
Even those politicians who spouted on about this such as Al Gore and Barack Obama have bought expensive sea front houses. Clearly they are no longer worried about rising sea levels...
Asking people to consume less meat, won't do anything - creating lab-grown meat and making it cheaper than the alternatives will phase out most factory farming by itself. Regulations on fossil fuels won't reach every country and won't persist with every change of government - making cleaner fuels more economically viable than fossil fuels will scale over the entire planet. This isn't an argument against regulations - until the tech catches up, regulations might be the best we can do but better and cheaper technology is always a more persistent option.
It's very similar to what is happening with coronavirus - you can have the government impose some measures, you can ask people to make responsible decisions but that is just buying time until technology actually solves the problem - invent a vaccine and you have the problem as close to solved as possible. I think the same goes with climate change, the difference is that for climate change we need a large number of really good technology solutions instead of just one.
Demand your government do more. If you are in the US and a Republican, at least politely request that your party acknowledge climate change as a reality.
I'd say from technology alone. It is clearly also a collective and societal problem. But a big part of the problem is that much of the things we do are mal-adapted to that reality, and need to be changed - and this will, of course, include a lot of new technology.
And also, hard questions do have interesting answers - they are intellectual challenges as well, as they need true out-of-the-box thinking.
develop tech for ag to automate ag and to make it more efficient...both indoors and outdoors. what we lack most is ag robotics and automation as labour saving tech in food farms and fields.
solar energy tech to power our automation instead of batteries and fossil fuels.
rewild and reforest most of the earth's surface.
give people viable methods of contraception and spread the message for it's adoption so they have more control over their lives to aim for quality of life for progeny rather than quantity of progeny. population pressures and consumption levels indicate that we have crossed carrying capacity. more lives will be lost tragically and painfully when the statistical guarantee of depopulation begins with scarcity of resources that will first start to dwindle and then disappear due to increased human activity and then amplified consumption patterns.
Start a vegan fast food company. Don't advertise it as vegan, just make the food tasty and cheap.
Vote for parties that take climate change seriously.
I think that's the most a normal individual can do.
It is like we live in a space station which is on fire, only at a larger time scale. We all need to fight, one way or another, for our collective survival.
- For technological development
* anything that explores additional renewable Energy sources (like the Pelamis Wave Energy converter). AS it is a tricky and multi-fac3eted problem, there is infinite room for improvement and better technologies. They will probably not be economical quickly but they do have the potential to average-out wind and solar fluctuations cheaper than with battery technology, because ocean waves for example can be harvested later and far away from their origin. here an example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelamis_Wave_Energy_Converter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3-SXFtPYe0
* a lot of things which are related to energy management. For example, there exist already commercial energy weather forecasts which predict the generation by wind and solar energy for about the next 48 hours, and help to make balancing energy cheaper because the quickest sources are the most expensive
* anything which makes energy consumption, especially heat and cooling, more adaptable to renewable production. For example, cold houses can be cooled at times of the day where is a lot of wind energy, and can use up that reservoir when there is less cheap electricity available. This principle can also be used in the household, e.g. in washing machines which wait for an excess of solar energy.
- the second domain I think is the political realm - climate change is a political problem and it will take a lot of political pressure to do something about it. There can be interesting sub-task for technical people. For example, online carbon footprint calculators can help people to make better decisions and estimate quantitatively what impact their life-style has (and this can, in turn, also inform political processes. A good one, but specific for Germany, is this one: https://uba.co2-rechner.de/en_GB/
- The third realm I think of is to fight misinformation on climate change and climate-saving policies. There are organized campaigns which work nearly like information warfare, against the interests of all of humanity. There are some organizations which work to uncover anti-climate lobbying, like desmog.org:
https://www.desmog.co.uk/55-tufton-street
Similar and often interreolated to pro-brexit think tanks and lobbying groups, it is not a far stretch to guess that they will use similar tactics. Now, for Brexit, a few citizen-invastigators have done a lot of work do uncover misinformation campaigns. A few examples:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great...
https://bylinetimes.com/author/jamespatrick/
https://bylinetimes.com/sections/fact/page/20/
https://bylinetimes.com/2019/11/05/the-box-set-byline-times-...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/dec/05/police-whistleblo...
https://twitter.com/search?q=%40agoodfireburns%20misinformat...
I think what is needed is more citizen journalists / investigators which expose how misinformation about climate change is formed and spread. This can be helped by forensical techniques that, for example, detect bots in social networks and how they are coordinated. It is probably a kind of sharks basin which won't be comfortable for most people, but it is very needed that this gets exposed more.
Regardless of what we do (or don't), climate can and will change drastically at some point, most likely due to variables we have no control over. It's just a matter of time. It can happen now, it can happen next week, next month, next year, in the next 10 years, next 100 years, next 1000 years, next million years. They say that they know it will be in 5 years or 10 years or some made up number. But no, it's not possible to say for sure. It could very well be tomorrow.
There is absolutely no way to control climate in any meaningful way by doing or not doing something as humans. Even if we did manage to identify the right variables and control it a few times does not mean we'll be able to do it every time.
Environmental change will most likely wipe off our species too, just like it has done to countless other species in the past couple of billion years.
Having said that, we as humans have managed to survive some big environmental changes, like the last ice age when several other species perished. Not all of us will survive but enough of us will.
So, what are some of the climate catastrophes we need to protect ourselves against and are we doing enough to prepare for that?
One big problem today is that most humans don't have access to energy to heat or cool their habitats artificially if the planet warms up or cools down significantly. In developed nations, this is taken for granted but poorer countries lack the infrastructure for it.
Solar, wind and hydro are unreliable if say some climate catastrophe causes sun to be blocked (say because of volcanic clouds or asteroid impact or something similar) and there is no heat or light from the sun. The only good sources are fossil fuels and nuclear. Do we have infrastructure for it spread out around the world so that no matter what part of the earth the asteroid impacts, as long as it doesn't wipe off everything all at once, we can rise again?
What other problems might we face climate-wise? And assuming it happens, are we prepared such that enough of us will survive?
No, we're not thinking about any of that shit because the entire fucking world is hung up on "Global Warming" and "Climate Change", the PR material that CleanTech Industry in the U.S. fabricated to get tax breaks on their investments when they thought that the world was running out of oil... and moved the production to China... except China stole the technology and built upon it... while the U.S. found and perfected fracking... and now China is using the same PR infrastructure to promote selling solar fucking panels and wind turbines... while using their pawns in politics to try to stop fracking and natural gas projects in the U.S. because it hurts Chinese energy business.
Get a grip.
Get a job in the industry. They need technologists in energy industry too.
Read a book or two and widen your view of the subject.
How about "The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World Without America" by Peter Zeihan?
Or just to see another side of it, how about "The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels" by Alex Epstein?
Anything but repeating this PR nonsense over and over again.
That almost sounds like the fossil fuel industry has already difficulties to find engineering people. Is it?
what is this based on? if it's the most recent study from 11/12, there is a lot of debate about the validity of the model they used to arrive at that conclusion.
It’s pathetic.
So we are just relocating 100s of million people and abandon all cities in the coastlines? How does the cost of this compare to the cost of trying to solve climate change?
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One thing I want to point out: Climate change has negative consequences, but this is not a thing that is either going to happen or not in a black-or-white manner. In contrary, there are many degrees of possible severity as the Earth's climate system is going to progressively break down with every increase of the amount of CO2 which is released into the atmosphere. These negative effects are not linear, but they are of a complex, interconnected, highly dynamical system of processes which are linked to each other. As a consequence, additional amounts of CO2 do NOT have a diminuishing effect, but an ever increasing effect. This is a very clear effect of climate science.
What we see is already a disintegration of the large ice shields in Antarctica, an acceleration of extreme weather events, droughts and so on. Each additional amount of CO2 is going to make these consequences ever more severe. There will no be saturation of effects. That means that even if the general course of events is not what we want, the influence we can take is ever increasing. So, we are probably still in the situation that we can, for example, avoid a break-down of the North Atlantic circulation which would have a devastating impact on Northern Europe and the East coast of the USA.
Let's put that into a picture. A catastrophic, highly undesirable situation which will cause harm to a lot of people. Let's imagine you are sitting in a heavy truck where the steering control has broken down and which is movin with a high speed and with little control towards a group of 50 school children. All you can do is to brake, or not do it.
So what is ethical to do? If you brake, you cannot prevent that some of the children are harmed - you are already too close, the truck is going too fast. Collision of a child with a hard, fast-moving object causes injuries and will be often deadly. But, the effect of speed is that the higher the speed, the higher is the harmful effect, in a non-linear way. That means, that it is not the right thing to do to do nothing and let the disaster happen. It is not even relevant who is to blame here, the only question is what you can do?
The right course of action is to brake as much as possible. Every reduction of speed means to disproportionately reduce the harm which the situation is causing. Maybe you cannot prevent it entirely, but the truth is that you have room to act, and every action does have disproportionate effects.
There is one more, not-that-obvious parallel to climate change: A lot of the destruction will be caused by the speed of the changes. It is a big differences whether the Earths climate changes slowly over one million years, or within just a century. The latter will cause far more extinctions of species, and also will be much more of a problem to human societies.
And, by the way, if I were some industrial lobby group which wants to inhibit that people act on climate change, the message "it is to late to do something about" is exactly what I would spread. It is the new climate denial - denial that our actions do have a lot of effect. In my opinion, also a pathetic way of living. Remember we are leaves of the great tree of life. As Helen Fox-Keller says, real life was always a risk. Don't be a shame for our ancestors. The first sulphur bacterium on Earth which crawled out of its comfy underwater hot pool and participated in the evolution of Life was way more courageous than that.