World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2021 | Hacker News Reader

World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2021

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38 pointsjonbaer36 comments

I wonder why nothing is said about the nuclear energy. You cannot just immediately abandon coal and switch to renewables.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunctio...

I was looking at page 36 in JPM's Guide to the Markets [1] the other day. Looks like nuclear is getting more expensive, coal/gas laying flat, and solar/wind dropping in price. Oil and hydro are missing, but make a cameo on page 60. I can understand solar/wind being favored right now. Also curious about wave energy, which is often announced, but AFAIK has limited use.

I'm guessing this is something about regulations increasing costs for nuclear, but does anyone know what happened?

[1] https://am.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm-am-aem/global/en/ins...

it is pretty much a common knowledge that we will never reach consensus with this issue. Question: assuming that prognosis is actually true (this time), what could we do to prepare for the worst?

With renewable energy advancements we shouldn't have problems with powering city-wide air-conditioning systems.

Architectural engineering would be one of the booming domains, I imagine (re-engineering shorelines, artificial islands - similar to what UAE is doing, or how Miami beach was engineered)

What else? Countries that can afford it - i imagine it's the perfect time to invest in/strengthen military and, most importantly, border security.

Indoor farming with irrigation complimented by a condescension from cooling systems?

The backstop is ultimately geoengineering. We know in principle that we can forcibly bring down global temperatures if needed, although we don't and probably can't know all the secondary outcomes that would result.

How can we bring down temperatures?

Pumping sulfur up, a dangerous game if you can't keep doing it all the way to the time when CO2 scrubbing fusion plants save your crispy bacon. There is a recent book named: under a white sky.

Interesting thanks!

Why do you think consensus will never be reached? In the face of mounting evidence it seems to me the move of short-term focussed actors from a denial to a delay strategy is well underway. This demonstrates strong consensus on the fact our climate is dangerously drifting I think. Investing in military is only as good as your ability to keep a civilian society able to feed that military. At one point all you got yourself is one more mercenary tribe...

By consensus I mean an actionable agreement that propagates beyond your household's kitchen.

Globally, climate might be drifting but consensus on what needs to be done will never be reached. Small gang of seemingly nervous Europeans (even if US is forced to join) will never be able to tell China what to do (or how) with their resources.

While were are tearing ourselves up with fearmongering, China can build an underwater supersonic bullet train in like 2 months if they have to for what they care.

I think this is a pretty clear example of what you might call "science laundering", where people put their political views into the form of a journal article to try and prevent debate. There's some reasonable stuff in here, but broad social agendas like "switching to mostly plant-based diets" or "stabilizing and gradually reducing the population" can't be decided based solely on their climate impacts.

these issues should be addressed in reasoned debate if we're talking about a existential crisis.

Well, what counts as existential? The paper isn't suggesting that climate change will cause humans to go extinct. There's no doubt that it will have very bad consequences if not mitigated, but to a lot of people, being unable to eat meat would itself be a climate disaster. This is kinda what I was getting at - their analysis of what we "have" to do has smuggled in a lot of assumptions about human desires which aren't universally shared.

Which is why it's not a realistic solution.

I suppose I don't disagree, but I don't think realistic vs. unrealistic is the right way to frame this. Questions like "should we eat meat" or "should we promote having kids" are huge, cross-cutting issues which strike to the heart of what we value as a society. The idea that you could analyze them solely in terms of the climate, that climate concerns would compel us to ban meat if it were politically feasible, is already fundamentally confused.

Everybody needs an electric car.

The need to more or less halve in price and we need A LOT more chargers.

You mean an electric cargo bike.

My wife and I just had a day in Chicago, our original plans fell through so we ended up going on a little bike ride on the new(?) e-bikes by Divvy/Lyft, the actual renting of it was complete garbage (I've never used ApplePay before, so I had to set that up, cards didn't work, etc), but the actual e-bikes were bloody fantastic, a really fantastic way to experience the city, I think we did 10-20 miles and barely broke a sweat. I think we're going to buy one/two so I can nip out to groceries and not drive

The one I ride has a box in the front that can hold 3 grownups (or a monster trip to the garden store). The motor means I can go 28 mph. On the occasional day where we have a rental car (grandma in town) sometimes I drive the kids to school and I am always surprised how long it takes. On the bike I never wait in a queue, and I always get the best parking.

Maybe they cost a lot for a bike but they are faster, cheaper, and more fun than a minivan: https://www.splendidcycles.com/products/riese-and-muller/rie... (see "Triple Badger Box for Packster 80" it comes with 6 seat belts.)

Those prices are going to seriously discourage adoption. I can buy a Honda off road capable motorcycle that can go anywhere for half the money - and it would still be a better environmental investment than driving my Honda Civic!

It would be better if we could move away from a car per person transportation system to something more energy efficient.

That idea is appealing to people living in larger, more concentrated, urban environments, and a huge boogeyman for everyone else, thus becoming a big point of friction.

There is currently no real alternative to cars for people in rural environments, so we need good electric cars there. At the same time, cars in cities are completely barbaric and should not have been a part of city planning in the first place. There are good solutions that still enable people to enter cities with little problem, like largescale suburban parking with express busses/metros.

But while cars should be slowly outphased, for the foreseeable future, we will have to rely on personal transport in more rural areas, so we should do our very best to integrate it with more advanced systems in urban areas.

As a person reading HN, here's what you can do:

Don't have kids. Don't eat meat. Don't fly in planes. Don't drive a car. Don't buy stuff you don't need. Live in small dense housing. Take political action.

Whether you choose to do them or rationalize a way to not do them doesn't matter that much. But at least you can say you tried. For whatever that's worth.

Reference: http://www.kimnicholas.com/uploads/2/5/7/6/25766487/fig1full...

Shouldn't political action be first on the list? I wish I had the image handy, but it was something like this: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5eda91260bbb7e...

No, having one less child makes sens as the first element on the list, as it's estimated to be up to 60 times more efficient than any other action when it comes to fighting global warming.

In fact, having too many children appears to be the single most destructive thing a person can to do to the environment.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541

Not having kids is both incredibly impactful and incredibly easy. It's also clear whether you've done "enough" or not. Either you had a kid or you didn't.

Political action is much more wishy-washy and hand wavey. Did you do enough of it? What impact did it have? Sure if you could take political action that fixes the whole mess do that first. But understand that's not likely at all.

Maybe this one? https://i.imgur.com/avjsowj.png

recommendations for others to not procreate will never sit well with me. I understand that not everyone wants to have kids, but for people like me, whose life goals amount to little more than "attain financial stability to the point where I can start a family and continue to provide for it," the idea that I should be discouraged from doing so comes across as basically offensive, in a way that I believe most people suggesting as much do not fully understand.

Most of the parent's list comes across as "don't live your life, basically", which is not going to convince a majority of people. It could have read as a recommendation to reduce your environmental footprint. "Eat less meat, fly less often, drive an electric car if you can afford to, or bike when you can", etc. But everyone isn't going to just give up all that and go live in a small apartment in the big city.

> But everyone isn't going to just give up all that and go live in a small apartment in the big city.

Some people are going to have to make decisions like the ones I've laid out (it's how I chose to live my life, but not for environmental reasons).

If not, that's fine too, but then enjoy the next 50ish years before things get real bad.

The reality is that people are still going to do those things on a global scale regardless of what some people do. Solutions have to take human behavior on a that scale into account. 50 years of thinking about the problem while technology improves and society adapts is reason for hope. Maybe in that time a lot more people will adopt a standard of living you suggest as part of that adaptation (with cities adapted to suit that lifestyle), while renewable energy completely replaces fossil fuels, and things like carbon capture become a reality, along with tree planting initiatives and other ideas being tossed around know to mitigate climate change.

As I said in my original post:

> Whether you choose to do them or rationalize a way to not do them doesn't matter that much

My point is that there is no meaningful solution. I present the best individual actions the average HN reader can take. Either do them or don’t.

The world 50-75 years from now is going to be unimaginably ugly for a huge number of people who just don’t think it can happen to them (or their kids/grandkids). This is regardless of whether I get on a plane again (I won’t) or whether we start planting trees.

Besides which we end up in The Marching Morons situation. All the smart, caring people stop having kids while the conspiracy theorists proliferate. What kind of future does that create for us? None that we'd want to live in.

Like I said, there's always plenty of great ways to rationalize not taking action. But that doesn't change the outcome which is a world that's going to be a lot less fun for nearly all the kids.

Having children is then worst you can do for the environment.

Side note: being able to control basic, primitive instincts like reproduction is what distinguishes us from animals. Career and goal oriented individuals who opted out from having children are the ones driving progress, are the ones who you need to thank for your pleasures and leisures in modernity.

Investing decades of your live into driving society upwards (as opposite to catering to your offspring, which, statistically speaking, has a very high chance of becoming a consuming one, one that habitually takes advantage of the generosity of others without making any useful return) is not for everyone, of course, but those who decided to reproduce should have an awareness of what they are doing a who for.

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