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Comment by DoctorNick | Hacker News Reader

The record breaking temperatures that I'm suffering in the PNW right now serves as a grim reminder that we won't have much of a future, even with all this cool tech.

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There are populated areas whose livability is threatened by climate change. These are in very poor, low-latitude regions like Northern India. Sorry to burst your bubble, but PNWers will have the privilege of surviving and thriving with relatively minimal issue.

As always, the consequences of the environmental sins of the global wealthy, like you and me and most HNers, will be borne by the global poor in other places. We are all responsible for what they will endure in the coming decades.

Eco-despair is, as always, a facile psychological defense mechanism and a luxury of the most privileged. We are responsible for the problem, and we also have the most power to solve it. We need to act accordingly. Starting with a calm, rational, comprehensive reckoning of our options, including nuclear (which has made France the low-carbon leader of the developed world).

Instead of letting guilt paralyze us with delusional fantasies of a well-deserved universal doom, we should use our privilege to advance no-carbon energy and carbon capture to hopefully protect the less fortunate people whose futures truly are threatened.

Northern India has always been this hot. I remember in 90s and early 2000s and god it was so freaking hot in May and June. There is this thing called loo in India (not the toilet) but this is warm westerly winds which start in the afternoons. It sucks your soul (and hydration and sodium out) and leaves you fully dehydrated. Many people die of that heat stroke caused by this loo.

But then monsoon comes in July and it is hot and sweaty! People don't die anymore of heat stroke but it is uncomfortable like anything. Once we reach september, we are back to normal and it is festival time! This continues till Novemeber when more festivals come like diwali, christmas etc along with wedding season (yes we have those).

Then with a zip in the air, Cold season starts and soon it is freaking cold in Dec and Jan. Like really chilly winds but no snow. We have our rajai (quilts) which save us. Poor people on streets die again but rich ones have their rajai, sweaters, tea and warm bonfires and heaters. Then comes feb and it is really beautiful again. Flower bloom. And it is festival time again. April comes which tells us that we are in for a May & June again. :)

From the maps I’ve seen, Northern India itself is only a bit warmer than it used to be; However, if I understand correctly, the problem is the effect on the Himalayas and the subsequent consequences to the Northern India water supply: https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/water/crisis-in-the-hima...

I'm not sure your calm and comprehensive reckoning of your options will be comprehensive enough to have any effect on where we as a species are heading.

Because I don't shy away from facts, I am paralyzed? I disagree. If anything, I am less paralyzed than people who refuse to see where this path leads. I vote for green policies and try to inform others, even when I know there is no hope.

Nah, you don't know the technology well enough to say if there is no hope. This is just the fashionable moralistic eco-despair of the privileged: "we are doomed because we deserve it." No, we're not doomed, maybe some poor people of the global South are because of what we do, but we're not.

The science agrees with me. What is this "the technology" that you refer to? Carbon capture?

"The" science, whatever that is supposed to be, doesn't say we are all doomed.

I don't know if you've noticed, but the political process is completely fucking broken. Good fucking luck getting any of that passed in any meaningful form.

You're not going to have to worry about that.

Once rich people are inconvenienced, the problem will be taken seriously.

Case in point, there was no "opioid crisis" in America until some rich Senator's daughter overdosed on heroin. Then all of a sudden it's a crisis.

Yes, life is hard.

Yes, we have to live through it anyway.

Just like everyone else who lived before us.

Stop with the doom trolling and get busy inventing solutions.

We have solutions, there's an entire field with solutions, it's called climate engineering[0]. The problem is that currently it's not politically supported because the thought of humans actively editing the climate to suit our needs makes the wildly vast majority of environmentalists start foaming at the mouth and, ironically, doom trolling any solutions because the current thought paradigm is "we have to interfere less", ignoring that it's way too late for that. Also because with climate engineering there's very little need to reduce emissions, which again makes current environmentalists get aneurysms.

In other words, nowadays climate change is no longer an engineering problem, only a political one.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering

That's a simplistic take and unfair to those who are cautious about it.

Most opposition to climate engineering is based on the risks of introducing more instability to a complex system we already don't completely understand. For instance experiments to fertilize oceans with iron to supposedly stimulate phytoplankton production had all kinds of unexpected side effects and failed to produce the hoped-for outcome.

We will certainly be forced into climate engineering solutions of some sort, as emission reductions alone are no longer sufficient to solve the problem even if we drop to net zero immediately, but they should be treated with caution and skepticism because of the inherent risk involved.

It also varies by the type of engineering. CO2 sequestration is widely accepted and desired because of its low risk, but it's difficult and expensive.

Heck yeah, this why I keep coming back the HN community. But if you gotta get that doom trolling out too its all good as long as it reminds us all how hard we gotta keep workin :^)

In hackerrank I was expecting post like

"Show:HN I injected chameleon DNA to my dog"

Technical solutions are often ineffective when faced with obstacles of politics or cutting corners to make money.

Unfortunately I think technical solutions are the only thing that will save us. Most countries would rather invade others then give up their standard of living.

Here's my controversial opinion - the best individual solution is to do less stuff. To me, it doesn't make sense that a problem caused by over-zealous production will be solved by over-zealous production. We can't really expect making more stuff to solve our problems caused by making too much stuff. The new stuff we make should be targeted at increasing the efficiency of production, but, while helpful, I can't help but view that innovation as only part of a solution. Another part of the solution is individuals trying to change the functions of corporations, and the only way I can think to do that is by doing and demanding less overall. Still, though, individual change feels like it's meaningless at this point. The building I live in is run on solar, and climate awareness has been baked into my school curriculums since elementary school, but if Exxon Mobil doesn't sort its shit out, I don't think my house is going to do much.

The rest of the solution, and this is controversial opinion number two, is that we need to reorient the purpose of corporations, and the economy as whole, from profit to humanity. Only 20 companies produced 35% of GHG emissions, and 100 produced 70%[0]. This isn't an individual issue, and it won't be fixed by individual solutions. Corporations, driven by innovation as an extension of profit, caused this problem. If we just request more innovation, I feel like we're going to be fucked.

I agree that climate despair is unhelpful, but so is the "let's let innovation sort it out" attitude - we need real structural change that innovation within capitalism can't provide. I'd suggest Marxism, but I doubt that's something most people want to hear.

0: https://climateaccountability.org/pdf/CAI%20PressRelease%20D...

And this is a reason we're really up against it in facing this challenge. Every ounce of advertising being thrown at people is trying to convince them to do the opposite - buy more, eat more, travel more, etc. And no government can work against that or they'll be reverted by lobbyists or destroyed by industry campaigns.

Same reason people struggle to manage their weight. There's no money in convincing people of the cheap/easy solution to buy and eat less. The pitches are always gyms and diets of specific foods and quick fixes. You don't see an article about a very reasonable size of hamburger or normal steak pancakes - it's always the 1kg steak or world-record pizza or a burger that you go on the honour wall if you complete. We're unsatisfied by small meals, they don't seem like value for money; tiny meals at high-end restaurants get ridiculed by the masses.

By doing less stuff you're ultimately decreasing your evolutionary fitness, benefiting those who don't have such qualms.

I'm also asexual. I'm well past worrying about that, even if I did follow your logic there.

Without doom trolling nobody will vote for the people who want to implement the costly solutions.

There's a curve to most people's response to levels of advocacy. The response rises with advocacy to a point, but then past a certain point, the response drops precipitously. When the advocacy turns into over-the-top vehemence, people tend to stop responding and may even respond negatively (i.e. rebel and go full anti-whatever).

As an example of a similar drastic falloff at the top of a response curve, I recall reading that people who live right next to a dam report near zero concern about the dam collapsing, but as you go further away people are very concerned, then somewhat concerned, than only little concerned.

So anyway, we need more carrots, fewer sticks.

Hmm, that's interesting about the dam, though I wonder whether only the people who wouldn't fear a dam collapse would live next to one.

Or if living closer to a dam means you are more likely to be better informed as to the construction and safety margins and thus less likely to think catastrophic failure is likely.

This++

Everyone will move to Canada and similar places. Only the poor will be left behind to die in the heat and most of the world won't care and will feel like "good riddance."

Edit:

In case anyone thinks this is just snark, no. I'm in the PNW and I grew up in Georgia and lived in California for a lot of years, including the High Desert where I was south of Death Valley and 115 in July was not unusual. I'm dirt poor and have been for years. I spent years homeless.

The heat wave per se is not a big deal to me. But it's late in the month and I'm nearly broke.

If the heat kills me, it will be because I'm out of funds, not because 107 is a big damn deal per se. The world has spent a lot of years making it clear to me that it doesn't care about my welfare at all and no amount of virtue, hard work, yadda is ever enough to adequately remedy my problems.

I think you are correct. Unchecked climate change will send the wealthy and middle classes North. If History is any indicator, they will close the borders of their regions as tightly as possible and commit a pitance to "humanitarian aid" leaving the poor piling up in refugee camps on their borders.

We have the examples of the U.S. border, Australia's camps on Naru, the various permeant refugee camps spread across the Eastern Mediterranean and many more as examples.

As the situation becomes more intense, migrants will become more desperate and bold. The reaction from the wealthy enclaves will become more and more repressive. (Who themselves will be seeing a diminished standard of living).

In my opinion, the only thing that could spare us this future is a global commitment to universal rights and more equal resource distribution. But this would require countries like the United States to write rights of non-citizens deeply into their constitutions. And that is likely unattainable at this time.

Animals are already migrating to more northerly climes as recent articles on Svalbard attest.* What prevents people from doing the same is mostly international borders, politics and money.

Before we had international borders, plenty of humans lived migratory lives as well.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27479739

Absolutely. Even recorded history is full of migrations of large groups of people (anglo-saxons, repeated migrations out of the Asian steppe, mass migrations of the Native Americans after European arrival, etc). If we could reach high enough state of moral development we might even come to see migration as a human right. Though I believe impending material poverty will make that unlikely.

In spite of my own personal challenges, I'm actually more hopeful than many people seem to be. (Edit: at least for humanity. Not necessarily for myself.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028732

So what then? We should throw our hands in the air and give up? Take the good news as it comes.

It’s not impossible to speculate the possibility that in 50-100 years, climate change could be reversed through a CRISPR-like technology (e.g. something that can be released and replicate in the environment, thereby changing it).

Or at the very least, I can see a future where gene editing could relieve your suffering from heat by raising the threshold your body can tolerate :)

You want something that replicates in the environment and removes carbon? We have those. They're called "plants."

> They’re called “plants.”

Incidentally, CRISPR + plants is one of the most promising solutions to climate change: https://www.ted.com/talks/joanne_chory_how_supercharged_plan...

Anytime I see a TED talk, I just automatically assume the technology is at best overhyped and at worst completely fraudulent.

If food crops are engineered to grow big, carbon sequestering roots, how will we determine whether the quality and safety of the food is unaffected?

Mass spectrometry and similar analysis methods to look for unexpected proteins in the food parts, followed by feeding the food parts to animals and seeing what happens.

Thank you for your patronizing response to the above poster.

The problem is to do with things called "numbers".

1. There is no spare land to devote to CC. You could do this only at the cost of poor people's food supply.

2. The rate at which plants remove CO2 from the air is very low. Far too low to solve the problem.

1. Can be solved with phytoplankton, and separately also by more land-area-efficient farming e.g. greenhouses, 2. Can be improved with genetic engineering.

Do the right generic engineering and you even get the oil feedstocks you need for plastics. You could even put the algae in a tube on a rooftop as an alternative to PV, if you could resolve the issue of unwanted other phytoplankton getting in and gumming it up.

A lot of agricultural land is wasted growing crops to feed to animals. If we were to lower meat consumption, agriculture land could be freed for other uses without taking away poor people’s food supply.

Even if we reforested every possible area, the current rate of carbon outlay exceeds capacity to absorb.

Well explained in the Economist video: https://youtu.be/EXkbdELr4EQ

If we could convert Sahara back into a savannah or farms, the amount of carbon required for the new soil and plants would exceed the amount of extra carbon we have added to the atmosphere so far. And there are many viable routes to do that. E.g. building large number of ocean thermal energy conversion plants [1] to reduce temperature of the north hemisphere, recreating conditions that have caused green Sahara in the past. There are numerous possibilities to use engineering to revert adverse effects of climate change, and to actually improve the climate. The only scenario when we are doomed, is if population declines significantly so that we get runaway effect from carbon we have already produced melting permafrost, and not have large enough economy to use geoengineering on a large enough scale.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversio...

So there’s one minor problem with the Sahara…

There was a minor problem with stating in air, having plants with large edible parts, talking with people far away. Science and engineering have helped with all these minor problems, and they can help with the new one if we spend money on geoengineering research instead of wasting it on inefficient "clean energy".

Does this include ocean farming based carbon capture? That sounded like a pretty positive route in terms of land use limitations when I heard about it.

Too bad for the millions of people who will die because of the changes during these 50 years...

Looking at the world right now, I hope for the best with that gene therapy against sociopathic billionaires.

At current rates of carbon outlay, there won’t be much of a world left to save in 100 years.

That statement isn’t backed by science

“We are currently on track for a rise of between 6.3° and 13.3°F, with a high probability of an increase of 9.4°F by 2100”

https://www.climatecentral.org/news/ipcc-predictions-then-ve...

Not unless we all work our asses off! Engineers can do anything :^)

... except politics, engineers are usually not very good at politics, and climate change is, in large part, a political problem.

again, I love me some doom trolling but only if it helps motivate work, and if software engineers can build platforms that undermine democracy I gotta believe its at least possible they can undermine bad politics too

Yes, but what we can do is try to invent things which are better then the status quo in terms of both money and the environment — if people use those inventions for purely selfish reasons, they’re still helping the world.

It's a technology problem unless you want condemn most of the world to an incredibly low standard of living.

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