World to hit temperature tipping point 10 years faster than forecast
afr.com
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You would think that trillion dollar companies like Amazon would care about not being able to operate at all in a few decades.
I get it from behavioral science why it all works like this, but one still wonders if it's the same for every other civilizations out there, if there are any.
Don't get me wrong, I wish they would, I just don't find it's hard to understand why they don't.
You can find similar commitments from other big tech companies like Apple: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/07/apple-commits-to-be-1...
Let’s focus on the lawmakers who are failing us, not the big tech companies who are already doing more than required by law to reduce their footprint.
The underlying cause of this in western society is well explained in ‘Voltaire’s Bastards’ by John Ralston Saul. Good reading to understand our collective problem with some ideas on what to do about it. The answer isn’t clear.
I am not remotely religious, but it is a powerful force. Islam is the fastest growing religion, and while that alarms some people, it has a wonderful innovation that I think is key to our survival. Maybe it is from playing too many hours of Civ, but if I was playing with a pending climate catastrophe, I would double down on this:
‘Caring for the environment is an important teaching of Islam. The Qurʾān describes mankind as being stewards of the earth and therefore Muslims must care for the earth. It is our responsibility to care for the earth and environment. The reality of climate change requires us to rethink our lifestyles and actions and we must reflect on how our actions impact our environment. The Qurʾān highlights this point: Corruption has appeared on land and sea because of that which men’s hands have done (Q. 30: 41).‘
And I guess the fund for the magic technology bullet that fixes everything exists too. Not that we have existing technology that would be carbon neutral.
Hey, we need to handle our existing nuclear waste anyway, might as well keep using it.
Not saying we won’t manage it eventually, I just don’t think it’s very likely in Elon Musks lifetime. Perhaps he should start with building a mars colony... here on Earth first. Some kind of habitat dome thing perhaps.
But the mistake here (and some other comments) of drawing "lawmakers", "politics", etc as being conceptually distinct from private corporations is particularly absurd from a historical view. The Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment forged political battles with substantial effort, debate, human cost that over centuries invented the concept you take granted as "companies", but which no other human civilization previous would have been familiar with. That there are "companies" at all is political, and so the OP is already pointing to a failure of politics.
Government is just a function of agreed upon values, rules and principles.
It's really a failure of our society. We're all failing.
When you put the blame on big companies, like the person I replied to, that is distancing! Because we cannot influence those decisions.
Clarification Edit: I'm not being facetious/snarky. Otherwise I don't understand the downvotes as they don't provide any meaningful feedback in this case. I would appreciate feedback, thanks.
(I do believe in taking care of the environment etc, my line of questioning is mere curiousity, not trying to imply a worsing environment is a good thing.)
Either OP meant the whole world, or the circumstances which are leading to what is happening, which would include "the people who caused it". It would be difficult for the to "thrive in and profit" from it if they "failed to incentivise it's own survival."
Think that the warming you are seeing is a second+ level consequence of our action. We emit GHG, the planet keeps more energy than the one it emits because the excess of GHG, the global average yearly temperature increases. Emitting less GHG will keep increasing that excess of GHG. Emitting zero will keep that excess in its place (because the carbon cycle last around 100 years or more). Doing a massive capture managing to do more carbon capture than what we emit will keep having an excess of GHG until we reach the preindustrial levels. All the way till that fantasy point the global average temperature will keep increasing.
And your emissions are not the main drive of that anymore. We reached already a lot of tipping points that triggered a lot of positive feedback mechanisms. Less ice means less albedo and so getting more heat from the sun. Hotter northern regions are releasing methane that were frozen there for millenia. Forest fires emits even carbon and cause even more heat. And there are several more.
And the problem is not just heat. It is energy to fuel extreme weather events, that happens from the equator to the poles. Is disrupting previously stable climate features that made the world livable as it were for thousands of years, the polar vortex seem to be disrupted, the atlantic ocean current seem to be going in the same direction too.
And we depend on more life, in direct and indirect ways. Agriculture doesn't mix well with extreme weather. We are in one of the biggest extinction events on Earth history. Its just not sustainable in the long term.
Lawmakers are the issue, not big tech companies.
I know it’s popular to hate on big tech companies, but many of them are actually doing a lot more to improve the climate impact of their own operations than average or required by law.
Amazon has committed to switching to 100% renewable energy in the next few years and also going completely carbon neutral before the date proposed in the Paris Agreement: https://www.aboutamazon.com/planet/climate-pledge
They’ve also created a program to coordinate with other companies to join the same climate pledge and funded research in the area to the tune of $2 billion (so far): https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/about/the-climate-ple...
I don’t understand why Amazon is the first target that comes to mind when they’re doing more than required to reduce their own and others climate impacts.
It’s not the big tech companies we need to be angry at. It’s the lawmakers who are failing to put appropriate regulations in place and the voters who continue to enable them.
Anytime a politician complains about companies not doing their part or not paying their taxes all I can hear is you can’t do your own job.
The first rule of leadership is that everything is your fault. If there’s loopholes, close them. If companies are polluting or emitting change the law.
The function of a company is to make money for it’s shareholders. The function of government is to keep them in check.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
The focus on short-term shareholder value is contraproductive. It's bad for the company, it's bad for society.
If there are two rival companies, and one of the two focuses on social initiatives to the detriment of it’s financial competitiveness, then logically the result is that it falls behind it’s less moral competitor until being crushed completely or subsumed.
In this scenario, you’re defacto punishing social initiatives rather than supporting them.
It’s illogical to expect companies to behave in a way that they’ll be punished for.
You clearly blame Milton Friedman.
I blame a political class with no morals or consequences for betraying their electorate. They’re at best too lazy to do what they’re paid to do and at worst utterly corrupt. Either way, they’re responsible.
[1] completely carbon neutral by 2040, carbon-neutral shipments by 2030, 100% renewable power for their operations by 2025, $2 billion pledged for decarbonizing tech, $100 million invested in reforestation https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/.
[2] carbon-neutral by 2050 meets the Paris agreement goal-- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7007533/
This is disappointing because in a few years companies will be sustainable on paper. This will make a coordinated effort to fight climate change even harder to achieve.
You can see Amazon not walking the talk on their political lobbying.
I don't know if your conclusions apply to a set of businesses s/Amazon/businesses in a broader sense, but it's hard to see how they apply to Amazon.
I'm pretty sure that this is the great filter: a species evolving under the constraints of competition for resources inevitably fails as soon as it steps on the land mine of global dominance.
Joking aside; it's kinda tragic to see this happening. The worst thing about it is the willful blindness of many people that should know it better; we're at the brink of extinction and still people find ways to close their eye and go "lalala".
It's fantastic. As in; beyond believable...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_points_in_the_climate_...
The Last Time CO2 Was This High, Humans Didn’t Exist https://www.climatecentral.org/news/the-last-time-co2-was-th...
CO2 – Why 450 ppm is Dangerous and 350 ppm is Safe https://sustainabilityadvantage.com/2014/01/07/co2-why-450-p...
And of course this one: https://skepticalscience.com/co2-higher-in-past.htm
Oh right. We already have those. That’s a tree. We just need to stop cutting them down maybe.
Edit: I did some calculations and to sequester 1 Gt of carbon we would need to bury approximately 1.7 km^3 of (fresh) oak wood. That‘s a lot, especially since emissions were over 30Gt/a in 2020.
Forests, as we're seeing right now, burn. Global trade has made this worse by spreading various pathogens and invasive creatures around the planet.
Even the ones which don't burn reach a steady state (takes centuries, but gets close in decades), where rot releasing carbon and uptake into new growth balance out.
To really fix carbon with plants, we want to grow something fast and woody, char it, and bury the char. Doesn't have to be deep, in fact working it into topsoil is a pretty good solution.
This isn't anywhere close to sufficient, but it's necessary and we should be doing a lot of it.
I would urge anyone who gets worried every time they see these kind of headlines based on modelling, to spend some time reading about how modelling and prediction actually work to understand what is really going on.
Any critically thinking person should take notice when you only hear about how the models have been underestimating the severity even though they are constantly wrong both ways.
Yes the temperature is changing, no it's not something we can't handle.
For example, we can estimate correctly (within the same order of magnitude) the emissions of CO2 equivalent gases a year that we do as humanity.
Then we can estimate correctly (within the same order of magnitude) the CO2 equivalent gases stored in permafrost or ice. [0]
Now we can ask a question. What if the ice melts? How many years of 2020 human activity is stored there. It ends up being more than 100 years of 2020 emissions.
It does not really take that much modelling to realize that a temperature increase that melts the permafrost can result in completely unpredictable outcomes, that are very probably not positive.
That is of course, if one believes in human caused climate change. The amount of CO2 equivalent gases that is emitted by everything else (not humans) is magnitudes more, but obviously it was not a problem for the Earth to handle before. Now, the n-th order effects will increase the rate of warming and will cause new invisible effects.
The models are trying to predict based on various factors, CO2 being one of them. If you were correct all you are really saying is that the models could be much simpler than still be precise. So on that alone it seems like you are missing the point.
Second of all, while most agree human activity have some correlation with temperature rise we have no actual idea how much. There is no scientifically demonstrated percentage of the temperature that can be attributed to humans.
With regards to the permafrost. This is pure speculation and in many ways relies on the accuracy of the models and doesn't take human ability to deal with it into account. It might be bad it might not, regardless we can't stop living the way we do just because there is some percentage risk of bad outcomes.
We should always take the climate seriously but so should we any other event like astroids hitting earth, super vulcanos, nearby super novas, pandemics etc. The world is always and have always been filled with dangers which is why 99.99999% of all species ever existed are extinct way before humans were around.
Permafrost is speculation when it comes to time, not the size of the effect. There's no natural process that will reverse the release of 100 years of 2020 greenhouse emissions in a short amount of time.
There's no scientific way to demonstrate that human activity increases the planet's temperature -> therefore no reason to worry, but there's also no scientific way to demonstrate that there are interventions that work to stop the increase -> so no reason to worry?
Of course, the question of risk is asked before additive intervention, so in a way, combustion of oil should have never been done in the way it was, similarly raising of livestock (global pandemics), but the way unscientific think -> no data that demonstrates risk -> no risk at all. Then after the risk surfaces, we ask the question "Why should we change the way we live just because we became aware of the risk?". Sounds worrying to me too.
We also know that to be true historically.
Climate itself varies over time. So to the extent that permafrost is time specific speculation it's not really useful for anything.
The only thing I worry about is to which extent the current hysteria ends up pushing catastrophic political decisions which will kill millions of people not in 80 years but today. Trying to push for alternatives to oil, gas and coal when there is no real contender besides nuclear is going to make everything much more expensive.
When everything becomes more expensive it means people can afford less. This will especially hit the poorest. So when faced with that kind of choice I choose.
Combustion was done in the way it was because it solved a problem which was much bigger than the ones it created. The problem of how to make combustion engines cleaner is a much better problem to have than coming up with a reliable, clean and plentiful energy resource.
You most certainly wouldn't be around and the internet certainly wouldn't if it wasn't for combustion engine freeing up time for humans to focus on other things than just surviving.
So again. I am unconvinced by the revisionist historical logic at display here. The world is like it is for a reason the combusting engine have saved many many many many more lives than it's taken.
1. anything humans decide to do should be accepted because of invisible positive outcomes (who could have predicted Internet from oil combustion),
2. the moment negative outcomes become visible, let's wait until it becomes a problem, any attempts at prediction when it will become a problem are futile and fearmongering,
3. humans can solve any problem they encounter.
All three can be used to create an argument for solar/wind. Who knows what kind of positive stuff will solar/wind create (let's see), whatever happens (due to inherent volatility and energy storage problem of solar/wind) let's wait until it happens and then see, we are entirely capable of solving the issue.
1. All choices have consequences. The choice to not use combustion engines would have meant that most of us would not be alive, we wouldn't have the internet or 99% of all the things we take for granted today. The use of combustion engines have positive and negative externalities. The positive far outweighs the negatives. The problems we have to deal with because of our use of combustion engine are better problems to have than those we had before the combustion engine was invented.
2. Said no one ever. Coming up with better alternatives that pollute less is an ongoing project humans have been involved with since the combustion engine was invented.
The issue is when there is no better alternatives and inferior solutions like wind and solar (which btw cannot be created without fossile fuels) is pushed as a better solution even though it means less reliable energy supply. It's one thing to solve with something like fusion or nuclear but what we are seeing currently is creating worse not better problems because it's trying to solve something it can't solve.
3. Humans have the potential of solving any problem they encounter with enough knowledge. There is no guarantee though and the history of the world is that 99.9999% of all species went extinct, but the fact that we can come up with something like a combustion engine makes us able to potentially solve the problems the climate have always presented us with.
With regards to wind and solar. No, just know, even in principle it can't be a better solution. It's simply a question of physics and energy density.
For some things it's great but it's unreliable and completely depending on the weather which means that we have to create backup systems of coal, gas, oil and nuclear to deal with it just as we are doing today which only makes the entire sytem more complex, less reliable and more expensive.
So lets get alternatives to fossil fuels as fast as possible, but they have to be better not worse in terms of reliability, price and scale.
The climate models are improving, but they all paint the same picture.
Between your non-speculative forecasting of "it's all going to be better" and our imprecise, albeit improving scientific models I choose science.
No critically thinking person would do otherwise in this case.
You don't have to choose between my forecasting or the climate models you just have to understand how models work to realize that you aren't being as critically thinking as you might think you are.
Weather in London has become nicer in the last decade, with winters that are milder on average and summers that are warmer and sunnier (except this one). However, inside of London's thick stone houses you don't notice any difference in winter while you also are cooked alive in the summer heat.
This has two advantages: it's more energy efficient than any other way of heating buildings, and they can be run in reverse for air conditioning.
A lot of those buildings didn't come with indoor plumbing or electricity, after all.
People from my generation (old millenial / young gen X) often hark back to the 1990s as some sort of halcyon age, but imagine if we had today's tech then. Imagine the 90s refracted through today's tech / media landscape. I bet we'd have felt differently about it.
Hopefully someday the tech becomes more affordable for poor countries and can supply enough energy for them to get through an Industrial Age.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-is-now-cheapest-electricit...
New solar is now often cheaper than keeping a coal plant running
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/23/most-new...
And we should expect solar to get even cheaper.
[1] https://www.oregon.gov/energy/facilities-safety/facilities/P...
Square miles of land are pretty common. Blanketing them with something useful is a good thing.
Baseload is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over some timespan. Providing that baseload with solar or wind is not as cheap as hydro, coal, natural gas or nuclear.
The quoted prices for cheap solar energy don’t include storage. Solar plus storage is still expensive.
If you only look at the days when catches are high then it is the cheapest method to produce food. If fish are your primary source of food, and every day you don't get enough you will have to eat expensive imported food, you food cost over the year can be quite high for a primary fishing nation. The fish will still be cheapest, but as a strategy it is somewhat expensive or carry a high risk of starvation.
Nations will build as much solar/wind as there is peak demand, because it is the cheapest energy when it produce. Nation will also build coal, oil and gas power plants in order to be there when those solar and wind aren't producing. Economically that is the cheapest way to produce a stable energy grid. Environmentally it is far from the best. Falling solar and wind prices reinforces this model.
But as of now coal is cheaper. And nuclear which is the natural bridge gap tech is politically unfeasible.
do you have a reference for that? Citation needed as to where and by how much coal is cheaper.
And this is fairly trivial to start with coal.
It's becoming clear that (see links that I posted upthread, and the replies) that _any_ blanket statement of "_x_ energy is cheaper" is going to be wrong in some cases, at present. And things are changing year by year.
As we can see by Itaipu and Three Gorges Dam - people prefer renewables to coal when it makes economic sense and is cheaper.
China isn't self-sufficient in calories, be they fuel or food. If they don't get dollars for foreign trade, they starve in the dark.
If the time to turn things around is really so short, maybe that upfront CO2 explosion is not the right way to go.
Similar things hold for other things like energy neutral buildings - actually building them has a huge upfront cost in CO2.
HN Discussions:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28082887
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28078575
It's just the same as how we can show people today any number of doomsday prophecies from the past about how the world was definitely going to be wrecked by 2020, or 2010, or 2000, or 1990, but somehow nobody thinks they were serious back then... but then they take the doomsday prophecy about 2030 seriously.
[0] https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-poca...
The direction of travel has been clear, understood and consistent for decades, as has the messaging from the scientific community around it.
Back in 2007 the book Six Degrees was published, with one chapter per degree of warming, summing up the science of what results we would see. We're at one degree and everything in that chapter is happening now.
That you would just batch up any amount of cultish astrological nonsense and equate it with science because they both make predictions is ridiculous.
By this logic you might as well insist the Earth is flat because Columbus didn’t end up in India.
1990: We are 10 years from being unable to stop climate change. -- Happened.
2000: We are 10 years from coral reefs being killed. -- Happened.
2010: We are 10 years from farms being permanently scorched. -- Happening.
Life expectancy isn’t going to go up, and quality of life won’t improve after the tipping point. It’s all downhill beyond that.