Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

There's some interesting data in there. If you look at the supplemental info, note that this year is well on track to be bracketed within the top ten hottest years on record:

> "This graphic compares the year-to-date temperature anomalies for 2021 (black line) to what were ultimately the ten warmest years on record: 2016 (1st), 2020 (2nd), 2019 (3rd), 2015 (4th), 2017 (5th), 2018 (6th), 2014 (7th), 2010 (8th), 2013 (9th), and 2005 (10th)."

Now, consider the lag effect on climate response and atmospheric forcing (i.e. the ocean absorbs a fair amount of the extra heat, but as the ocean warms, that heat gets injected back into the atmosphere, especially polewards, so there's a lag time before current atmospheric forcings are full realized, and that's a multidecade effect, so we won't feel today's forcing completely for decades, even a century).

Conclusion as I see it: every year for the next 50 years is going to be bracketed in the top ten hottest years, meaning the years 2030-2040 will all be hotter than 2010-2020 and so on. Decade by decade for the rest of the lives of people alive today, this will continue - and while getting off fossil fuels is needed, is indeed the only way to slow this trend, it's only going to slow down the year-to-year increase.

Additionally, as polar melt proceeds, permafrost melt and outgassing becomes self-sustaining even if humans completely stop fossil fuel use and deforestation.

Practically, this means adaptation is simply a must. People have to move out of flood plains, waste treatment plants in low-lying coastal zones needed to be moved uphill, people need to realize the global refugee crisis is going to be 10X as bad as anything seen yet at least, perhaps a steady rate of 1,000,000 per year fleeing climate disaster zones.

In reality we are heading back to climate conditions last seen ~3-5 million years ago, before the ice ages set in, with sea levels dozens of meters higher than they are now. Nobody likes to hear this it seems, but the science does seem to be saying that this has already happened, sort of.

We are not going to a new normal, because even if we stop everything feedback loops will keep worsening things till we can't adapt anymore, will be no mark in the sand saying that we will stay there.

It is not just about temperature, or sea level, is a system where we thrived while it was stable enough, going to a long period of chaos. Agriculture and food production in general, infrastructure, travel and more will be increasingly disrupted.

Passive adaptation may not be the way out, just letting the water to boil up till the frog is cooked, or risk ending things faster with the some of the surprises that climatologist are getting year to year. Stopping or compensating emissions, and aggressive/extensive carbon capture may be a way out. Going into silos much like what happened in Wool may be another (where a lot of things can go wrong, anyway).

There's a fascinating talk from about eleven years ago: Dr. Gwynne Dyer – Geopolitics in a Hotter World – UBC Talk Transcribed (Sept. 2010) https://spaswell.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/dr-gwynne-dyer-geo... video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_4Z1oiXhY

Among other things he talks about is the possibility of unilateral geoengineering by some of the nations that will be feeling the effects sooner and more, uh, compellingly than others:

> I talked–actually, the head of the Bangladesh Institute of Strategic Studies about this (you didn’t even know that existed, did you?). Well, there is one, it’s quite serious–run by a General, bright guy. I said, “have you heard about geoengineering?” and he smiled–seraphically–and he said, “Mmm. Yes. Your question?”

> And I asked the question, “Do you think that this is something the Bangladesh government might want to do a little bit, before, let’s say, the US government or the Chinese government?”

> He said, “yes it has crossed our minds.”–and then he stopped talking.

I’d say that unilateral geo-engineering by private entities becomes an option. Far easier for a private billionaire to fund this than for any government considering the geo-political implications . Who’s up for playing billionaire punk?

All of that is assuming we don't make major advances in carbon/methane capture and maybe some sort of "ice capture" plan, of course.

I don't know how much hope we have to actually see major advances in these areas, but given what we all expect of how much pressure we will be in collectively I can imagine a lot more money being thrown at is as people get desperate.

Carbon capture and sequestration, as it's called, suffers from a major co-ordination problem, the free-rider effect. Why pay yourself if others are paying? You get the same benefit. Every country can see that, so no-one pays.

Look how well the world did with covid-19. Low income countries are still desperately short of vaccines, which means that covid is going to be endemic from now on.

Or look how well the world coped when there were commodity food price spikes in 2005-2008, and 2010-2011. Countries banned exports, rather than co-operating.

We're going to have more of those (food price spikes), btw.

Something that has been vanishingly low probability (once per 5_000 years, say), until now, is simultaneous harvest failure by say 10% or more in two or more of the four "bread-basket" (grain) regions of the world.

Simulations suggest that probability will rise over the course of the century to about 50% per decade starting in the '40s.[1] I hope we're planning for it.

1. Daniel Quiggin, Kris De Meyer, Lucy Hubble-Rose and Anthony Froggatt, Climate change risk assessment 2021, Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House Environment and Society Programme Research Paper 2021. ISBN 978-1-78413-491-4.

There are solutions for the free-rider effect, such as Pegovian customs duties.

But isn't the point moot, since all climate change solutions suffer from the same effect?

No. The Musk solution, make clean technology cheaper and better than fossil-fuel technology. doesn't.

The Musk solution takes time and is already late to the party, tariffs could be imposed 30 years ago.

Sucking carbon out of the atmosphere yourself will never be cheaper than letting other people do it, no matter what Elon's R&D departments do. We can't reach our climate coals without it.

I wasn't clear.

If people are already buying something, like electricity or cars, then buying clean substitutes that are cheaper and better than older dirty products doesn't suffer from free rider effect.

Each person makes their own decision and gets more value with the clean option if it is better than the old product at what it does. The clean option takes over automatically thanks to individuals each looking out for themselves.

I used Musk's name as a short-hand for this approach targeting individual self interest because he has a very high profile in cleaner transport in the US. I did not mean to imply that Musk will somehow make CCS a desirable thing for individuals to buy. That's not possible.

Sucking carbon out of the atmosphere is not something that people get individual value from, or have been willing to pay for to date. So left to themselves, no-one would pay for it. That's why it needs co-ordinated action. Which we're not good at.

Yes, we can't reach climate goals without CCS. But it's going to be hard to scale up to approximately the same size as the global oil and gas industry.

The Musk solution is limited to transport, where emissions can be reduced economically. Other emissions sources, such as steel production, will not be solved with the same mechanism, because no single company is going to suffer the competitive disadvantage of using clean tech.

Direct Air Capture (DAC) will never be impactful for the simple reason that you need to process way too much air to remove an appreciable amount of Carbon. Capture at the source of plants producing CO2 will be helpful, but DAC is a pipe dream.

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