What if it’s too late to save our planet without geoengineering? | Hacker News Reader

What if it’s too late to save our planet without geoengineering?

theguardian.com

25 pointspseudolus26 comments

Even the necessary level of reforestation at this stage would probably amount to geoengineering - CO2 is only one of the many ways we are wrecking the planet, countless small, unique ecosystems at a time

What if it's too late to save our planet _with_ geoengineering?

How is that relevant to anything?

Once people realize that humans are going to go extinct within hundreds of years, they can focus on the right things. Humans aren't going to migrate to space or other planets, and the planet's systems are too complex and interconnected for humans to manage like a farm. It probably isn't possible to put band-aids on these kinds of problems.

Why do you think humans will go extinct in a 'few hundred years'? How confident are you humans will never build settlements outside of earth?

> How confident are you humans will never build settlements outside of earth?

I'm just a random person who could be wrong, but to literally answer your question: I'm convinced that it will never happen on a long-term basis. It might be possible to put a base on the Moon or Mars and even have thousands of people live there temporarily, but it won't be a viable long-term solution. It will probably only push us to disaster more quickly, because our resources could have been put to better use.

I think the planet would probably have a better chance of extending the time frame if the resources were spent on things like behavioral change.

What if it's too late to be late?

Well, I think that's human's favorite way of getting out of trouble: Let things go to crap, then engineer or brute force an emergency patch.

I'm already on board with geoengineering, especially a program weatherizing rocks in some of unpopulated areas like Nevada. I am a little weary of sea seeding with iron, just because so much of the climate and gas mix is regulated by the ocean...I'd hate to somehow, idk, spur an algae bloom of death world-wide...not that I know anything on the matter.

There was this company that wants to upwell nutrients from the seafloor to the top, to skip explicit iron seeding

The usual solution was to move on? Wanderlust should rise to run away from our problems?

It's a problem that headlines commonly use "our planet" or "life on earth", with what is actually destabilized is merely "human civilization, in its current form, size, and characteristics; along side an ecosystem well into an anthropocene extinction"

The planet will be just fine.

Life on earth will be just fine. The worst we could possibly manage is beating it down by eliminating a few kingdoms; and that's vanishingly unlikely.

What is at risk is every level of the stack of "civilization" and its processes; and perhaps perpetuation of our species, though again, it would be very, very, hard to wipe us out, even intentionally. A particularly bad pandemic or set of pandemics, riding on top of prior systemic collapse and massive climate change, might do it. But almost certainly not. There are a lot of people, in a lot of places, and modulo catastrophic climate destabilization married to pragmatic total blockers on migration, life uh finds a way.

Human life would be brutish and short to be sure. For a while.

None of this is reason to not fight to the last to prevent collapse scenarios. I'm just tired of breezy self-important shorthands when lack of precision and hand-waving contributed to our current crises.

> The planet will be just fine. Life on earth will be just fine.

I have a problem with this statement. It rides a thin line between technically true and just false. Life will continue to exist is multiple forms after this, and the planet as a mass will still be present, so as far as that is true. But many if not all of it's biomes will be heavily altered, many beyond recognition. Multiple notable species will vanish. Things that have grown for litterally millions of years will die. This is like saying that the earth was "just fine" after the Devonian extinction, or the Chicxulub impact, or someone after a lobotomy.

At some magnitude of change, it is disingenuous to apply the term "just fine".

Were this just humans winking off of the earth that'd be just fine, but we are taking _many_ others with us.

The planet is going to be fine. The question is whether we can save ourselves.

That’s pretty much what everyone means when they say “save the planet”. Short of completely quaking the entire planet into dust, everyone knows that the hunk of rock will still be here, and probably some level of biological life with it. The entire conversation around climate change is whether humanity can change enough to survive in a meaningful way that doesn’t involve massive wars as resources shift to different locations and others get submerged.

What always strikes me is how often social problems are separated from all of this, like social and climate problems are distinct in some way. We spend our times talking about the chemistry of the atmosphere, and mechanical efficiencies and electricity and lurking in the background is the displaced persons crisis, a crumbling safety net, and a society built on people as unchangeable resources to be exploited. How can people change the atmosphere when they are being pulverized into ash?

A worse, and more likely, possibility: What if the money spent reversing climate change could save more lives if spent adapting to climate change?

> It would also mean that the United States and other capitalist countries would have to reorient themselves to a more centrally planned economy, devoted less to maximizing growth than to minimizing carbon.

At least the US Government has been researching this area for a long time, so we won't be starting from zero. Check out "Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025" (PDF, 1996): https://web.archive.org/web/19970429012543/http://www.au.af....

Central planning is orthogonal to minimizing carbon. There are plenty of market-based solutions to pollution (carbon included). It's just that a about half of the party that at least ostensibly favors free markets denies the existence of human-caused global warming.

The grandparent was quoting the article, but it wasn't obvious.

I disagree with the author there concerning a planned economy being necessary. Its amazing what a few incentives can do to unleash capital innovation. And in terms of geo-engineeing, all that would take is a dedicated spending program and the right innovations. I'm still optimistic, but know the next decades will be rough, weather-wise.

> Its amazing what a few incentives can do to unleash capital innovation.

Capitalist solutions seem to always fall to Goodhart's Law in my experience.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Touche, but as a counter example, rebate[s] for electric cars, solar panels, etc, have made real inroads to changing the mix of energy in the U.S.

That's a feature of commubism too. Soviet almost wiped out the whales because of such a thing. They didn't even eat the meat. Just killed the whales because there was a meat production goal.

That holds true when you need proxies for the thing you really care about. You can't just tell VPs, departments, etc to just make more money, which of course is what most KPIs are going to seek to do in one way or another. So we construct measurements that should reasonably result in increased profits for the company. And these then become gamed whereby the measurement goes up, but the profits do not.

Carbon is actually interesting because we don't actually need proxies. Put a global cap on emissions and enforce it like the existential threat it is, and then let the market trade around it. Auction off the allowances to fund/subsidize other things.

What you just described is exactly how communist China killed millions of people in famines. Among other things, they made industrial production of steel a national goal (trying to beat the UK), and because it didn't work out as expected (lack of industry and mining at the time), small owners of tools like farmers were forced to melt their iron, effectively destroying their necessary tools and wasting their labour time.

Eh, capitalism is to blame for this problem in the first place? Plutocratic democracy unleashed ideologies/movements that attacked technical solutions to the problem (solar/nuclear) and defended the status quo.

Why do people turn to the cat to guard the cream?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com