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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

I wish most crises weren't so defeatist. It's a fine line because, you need people to know it's a real problem. But framing it this way makes people say 'whats the point.' 700 years is an eternity, given our lifespans. Put another way, I think it's immensely more useful to frame it in a way humans better relate with. In 20 years, we can do what?

It also completely removes the innovation that humans can achieve. Reminds me of the NY Times saying in 1903 that humans wouldn't fly for at least 1 million years. Glad the Wright brothers and others weren't listening.

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False Polyanna-ism is far, far worse than sober rational, scientific assessment!!

Life isn't fair. Life isn't nice.

Mother Nature doesn't give a Frig about humans or you individually. We are expendable and NOT the center of the universe. See George Carlins "The Planet is Fine" because that's reality.

Innovation takes time. 20 years minimum but 90% of all "ideas" NEVER make to reality because they are poorly thought-out "hopium" rather than science or engineering.

Flying is NOTHING like this because this is primary nature rather than technology or engineering. Seriously how is that not clear?!

In terms of technology: look up "entropy" and the energy required to overcome it. CO2 in the air already is at maximal entropy so it takes ENORMOUS amounts of energy to grab at scarce CO2 molecules diluted among a see of N2/O2.

http://www.chem1.com/acad/webtext/thermeq/TE4B.html

The Gibbs energy of dilution has to be provided to reverse and extract the CO2. The C2/C1 ratio is literally 420 ppm or 420/1,000,000.

This is why the ONLY practical means is to get the CO2 BEFORE it's in the atmosphere. Whatever is already there will take a very long time (700 years apparently - but where are you REALISTICALLY going to the energy for the duration - if you say Green, you are full of shit because you are ignoring the actual supply chains for making that Green technology and whether any of that breaks even, energy-wise).

The most effective solution is plants; it will still take dozens if not hundreds of millennia.

What about these startups getting real investment from people like Bill Gates and (soon) Elon Musk? Companies like Carbon Engineering seem to have some method of extracting co2 from the atmosphere using some sort of catalyst I think. They are working on a 1 megaton per year pilot plant. Yes it is peanuts but it is a start.

[1]: https://carbonengineering.com/

Do you have numbers for that?

If I found the right equations to use, the entropy from CO2 being diluted into the atmosphere is a bit over 400 joules per gram.

Burning enough carbon to produce a gram of CO2 releases 9000 joules.

So if we assume we have to undo combustion to store CO2, the entropy factor only makes it 5% harder.

If we assume we don't have to undo combustion to store CO2, then we could use oil to fuel the process and get up to 20 grams captured for each gram produced.

Did I do the math wrong?

Isolating CO2 is really bothersome but as far as I know it's not the raw thermodynamic factors that have the most impact.

Maybe the article should have been written as "using technologies we have today scaled to the max, it'll take more than 700 years to get carbon under control" ? I mean, that's how I read it, but not everyone does.

On the flip side, this just goes to show you how much of a scam forest planting based carbon credits are. I've said it before, industrial scale carbon emission takes industrial scale solutions. (planting forests is generally good, but I don't think it balances out a coal plant or any other industry buying credits).

I actually really like this... because it immediately makes me think 'we should work on better technologies.' Versus the original, which makes me think 'why are we even doing this, then.'

> "using technologies we have today[..]"

I feel this limitation is where we lose most of the public. For example I am convinced that if we bid the bullet and banned burning fossil fuels starting next January, things would suck in the short term. However, I am also convinced that the progress we'd make in alternative technologies in the next 1-2 years would be unfathomable. I think we underestimate the miracles mankind can do given strong incentives like this. Yet we are afraid to create these incentives because of our low faith in our own ability.

I agree with you on the premise but not on the motives.

People who hold the money/power don't want to lose it. Quick (big) changes are a huge risk to their positions. Hence, we get slow gradual changes instead. It really is that simple to me.

100%! Both are true

I 100% agree with this view. Its not practical to go cold turkey as people would freeze and starve.

It’s one of the reasons I’m anti-pipeline. I’m generally against anything that makes it easier to get and distribute fossil fuels. Adding friction is an alternative way to internalize the cost of fossil fuels.

What happens instead is just that people use trucks to move the oil, instead of the more efficient pipelines. That makes it somewhat more expensive, which makes the oil somewhat less useful economically, and therefore somewhat less used. On the other hand, the trucks pollute more than the pipeline would have.

Are you sure your approach is helping?

"I 100% agree with this view. Its not practical to go cold turkey as people would freeze and starve."

Not sure if I was clear that my view is the opposite of what you are saying. I believe much fewer people would "freezer and starve" than expected because we suddenly would get very, very industries about finding alternative solutions. We would get through a short period that's super super tough but quickly would end up end par or better than our current circumstances. What's more, I believe that it's much easier to go through tough times collectively than individually. This is often true in war and natural disasters and night be true if we go cold turkey, as long as we do it together.

We have technologies today to transform CO2 in the ocean directly into calcium carbonate. It's just that this article isn't talking about those, it's talking about removal from the atmosphere

How, exactly, is this defeatist? It's defining the size of the problem. If we don't know what's actually needed to solve the problem, how are we supposed to ever solve it?

I'm also rather unsure what innovation you're imagining here. It's literally a model of ocean acidity based on some tons/year of carbon sequestration. Innovation can make this cheaper, but the model isn't about cost.

The size of the problem is known, sure. But the framing is bad. Tell us what we can do to help, in realistic timespans, and where that gets us.

If the answer today is 'nothing', then what would ever get people to care?

As for carbon sequestration, I'm not learned enough on the subject to even guess what's possible, or if the idea of doing it faster is feasible from a scientific standpoint.

Is the moral of the story that we must do carbon capture better, or that we're all screwed?

The article is reporting upon a scientific study. It is up to you to decide what that means, not them. If you choose to act on it by complaining about tone then that is your problem, not theirs. Perhaps instead you yourself should do something, something more productive than complaining about word choices and/or tone, neither of which are helpful in the slightest.

Because these choices matter. Again, you're not going to ever get people on board with such data.

That's what I care about. This isn't being pedantic, it's trying to help get people's attention. This does not.

You don’t know that, have no way of knowing that, and have no proof of it. This is simply your opinion, and, like assholes, everyone has one. (And I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt here, because honestly I have zero expectation that you are arguing in good faith.) All you seem to be interested in, like others before you, is detracting the conversation away from the underlying story. “If only they had approached it differently!” Yet no matter how it is approached the response from those like you is exactly the same.

Not to mention that it doesn’t matter. This article isn’t even a call to action. It is simply dryly stating facts. There is no “come in guys, we can do this!” It instead says “ocean acidification will take hundreds of years to recover.” That’s it.

There is no way to frame this other than clinically. How exactly could it be framed differently? Do tell!

Just replying to say I did read your reply, and I apologize that I've upset you in my replies. My intent is/was never to distract from the data at hand. I care about the issue greatly, but am not super educated on the topic. I am, admittedly, mostly speaking from how I view this data and presentation, as a layperson. I'm not interested in arguing, so I'll stop on the topic.

This is the go-to response on HN now when it comes to articles related to the environment. It’s general form is: “it’s not what they say, it’s how they say it.”

IOW: nonsensical replies that steer the conversation away from the point being made, intentionally or not.

> Reminds me of the NY Times saying in 1903 that humans wouldn't fly for at least 1 million years. Glad the Wright brothers and others weren't listening.

The difference is in 1903 the breakthrough technology of human flight was not being depended on as a matter of skirting existential crises.

Both apocalyptic defeatism and procrastinatory techno-optimism are failure modes.

Indeed, praying for technological moonshots to save us is the most vicious tactic of delay for climate change action [1].

The root problem is that we people of the Global North are incapable of looking ourselves in the mirror. The obvious solution is to stop all of the frankly idiotic overconsumption that hasn't increased our well-being in decades and – when no overconsumption means no economic growth – rebuild our economy on equity, instead of feverishly insisting that accumulation of almost all of the wealth to a few people is a the only alternative.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/global-sustainabilit...

Edit. replaced "westerner" with "Global North" for clarity.

Doesn’t work that way. The way “the West” lives isn’t good for global warming but the way “the East” lives isn’t sustainable either. Just different classes of passenger on the Titanic.

> and rebuild our economy on equity, instead of feverishly insisting that accumulation of almost all of the wealth to a few people is a the only alternative.

Senseless non sequitur. Social ownership doesn’t solve climate change, that’s just a trope from some leftists as a means to couple one issue (climate change) with something completely unrelated (disrupting capitalism). Just look to Norway for an an example of a huge socialist project terrible for climate change (Statoil).

Granted "westerner" was the wrong word: I meant rich nations, which are responsible for almost all of the historical emissions.

"Social ownership doesn’t solve climate change,"

I skipped a few steps there: the reason we can't just stop overconsumption is because that would effectively stop and reverse economic growth. No growth just doesn't work without restructuring the economy.

> was not being depended on as a matter of skirting existential crises.

Life was much bleaker in the early 1900s. Then the Cold War was decades of immediate existential crisis (grade school children practiced getting under their desks for nuclear bombs).

> Both apocalyptic defeatism and procrastinatory techno-optimism are failure modes.

And this article is squarely defeatism.

> existential crises

I agree that climate change is horrible for biodiversity [1]. Solutions to life that took millions of years to evolve will die and be forever gone. Tragic, irreplaceable losses. Undoubtably the worst part of climate change.

But I don't think this will be an existential crisis for humans unless we trigger a "clathrate gun" [2] or some other runaway system that kills off the entire food web. Or substantially changes the chemical composition of the atmosphere well beyond periods such as the Mesozoic Era. (There have been vastly different climates and atmospheres throughout Earth's history, but we're adapted to a similar enough environment to survive many of them.)

We have to fight climate change, but I think that the doomsday "existential crisis" attitude is a turnoff to many that you'd attempt to sway. There's a pragmatic sweet spot.

Besides, there are a number of more likely culprits that would kill us before climate change (nuclear war, bioweapons, reverse chiral autotrophs [3], ecoterrorists seeding the world with prions, ...). Or at least things that would stick us in this gravity well until civilization ends.

[1] my thoughts on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27279511

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28038505

> It also completely removes the innovation that humans can achieve. Reminds me of the NY Times saying in 1903 that humans wouldn't fly for at least 1 million years. Glad the Wright brothers and others weren't listening.

It's not how I read this. I read it as: this is a massive problems that needs massive attention and innovation.

perhaps we are defeated?

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