Climate change Earth has 11 years to avoid the worst scenarios | Hacker News Reader

Climate change Earth has 11 years to avoid the worst scenarios

npr.org

20 pointsdane-pgp48 comments

Maybe the estimate will be right this time, and maybe the previous estimates were right too, in some technical sense, but the people making these predictions need to ask whether their repeated contradictory-sounding warnings are doing more harm than good. For perspective:

* 2021 - John Kerry says Earth has 9 years to avert the worst consequences of climate crisis: "There's no faking it on this one"[0]

* 2019 - Only 11 Years Left to Prevent Irreversible Damage from Climate Change, Speakers Warn during General Assembly High-Level Meeting[1]

* 2018 - We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN[2]

* 2012 - Two years left to curb climate change, Government warned[3]

* 2011 - World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns[4]

* 2009 - 'We have only four years left to act on climate change - America has to lead'[5]

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[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-change-9-years-john-ker...

[1] https://www.un.org/press/en/2019/ga12131.doc.htm

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/08/global-w...

[3] https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/two-years-left...

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/nov/09/fossil-f...

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jan/18/obama-cl...

It amazes me that we can't all just agree that this is real and that we just disagree on how fast we need to act.

Because then we could spend 12 billion to retire the entire coal mining industry in the United States of America and retrofit the entire power grid with whatever mix of solar, wind, and nuclear floats each state's boat. It's about $2.6T to take all 128M homes in the US and convert them to solar with 40 kilowatt-hours of battery backup. These are big numbers but they are not astronomical.

But we can't so here we go. Evidently the extreme weather in Texas last winter and the entire West Coast choking in smog all summer is insufficient evidence that anything is going on whatsoever. Good luck with that mindset.

>It amazes me that we can't all just agree that this is real

The reactions of various pockets of humanity to climate change and COVID gives me the feeling that a study of the psychology of the "acceptance of ideas" is long overdue.

I used to be amazed, but not any more. It's predictable, no matter how illogical. Some kind of variation on "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction", "one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter".

Bad news will not be accepted, by default, without extraordinary evidence, the messenger will be shot, and the source will be character assassinated. Good news will prevail until the (unexpectedly strong) dam of denial is breached by brutal reality. And it will surprise the masses.

Because the anti-CO2 coalition is primarily an environmental coalition whose main skills are condemning, taxing, and lecturing the public about grave injustices.

But when it comes down to actually lobbying for the deployment of mass industrial processes at scale, or recognizing which solutions are viable and which are not, then they feel very uncomfortable advocating for mass buildout of nuclear. They pretend that we can all adopt solar and then handwave away the issues with reliability.

And when confronted with these problems, you hear things like "well, of course we can't have reliable electricity. We need to change our lifestyles, etc". So it's always back to scolding and blaming human behavior to overcome their lack of engineering competency.

But people don't like being taxed and blamed for turning the lights on when they come home, nor should they be. There is no reason why anyone needs to care what powers their home. It should all be reliable, cheap, and clean.

Getting there requires a very different kind of lobby than the current anti-CO2 lobby. It requires a lobby that has a sober-minded - rather than a utopian - understanding of different energy generating solutions, and finally abstains from blaming the public or trying to change end user behavior, but views this purely as a technical challenge to migrate from one reliable infrastructure to another, a migration that should be completely invisible to the end user, providing them with the same or better reliability, and the same or better cost.

If you can do that, then you will see the political opposition vanish. If you still just want to blame people and tell them they need to stop eating meat and suffer high prices to heat their home in the winter, then the political opposition will increase.

You did notice I mentioned nuclear as part of the solution, and it was much more of the solution until the price of solar dropped precipitously over the past decade, but we still need it. I'm fed up with the politics too and I'm ready to move to problem solving phase here. Why are so few like that in my experience? Even without climate change, energy independence is strategic and further pursuit of coal is environmental cancer. This ought to be a lot easier than it is.

Probably should eat less beef and fewer almonds though or at least we should remove the subsidies used to artificially keep their prices down and see how that plays out.

The wast majority of people care about their relative status and power, not solving the problem. The people in the environmental lobby are far more concerned with keeping the problem than solving it.

Normally I would say the solution is to go forth and do it, then apologize later, but that’s not how the law works.

Except yes it does for coal and a myriad of other dirty tricks by corporate America. So I remain amazed that we don't channel that energy into doing good.

> getting there requires ... a migration that should be completely invisible to the end user, providing them with the same or better reliability, and the same or better cost.

So you're saying we just need to remove all the excess CO2 from the air for free? And you think that people who value the environment are the "utopian" ones?

No, I'm talking about migrating to energy sources that don't rely on fossil fuels. I don't see "removing excess CO2" as a reasonable goal.

This again goes to "recognizing which solutions are viable and which are not"

Now perhaps that will change, technologically, in the future, so I'd be willing to fund some R&D for that, but barring some breakthrough we are not going to be removing CO2 from the air.

My view is that people are too interested in making political hay with climate change to actually do something about it. It's better to have a vague threat you can roll out to get votes (I mean this for both sides) than just getting on with some action.

Technological solutions that provide for where we are in human progress are really the only non-partisan way to proceed. This means getting over the evidentiary burden (i don't care of there is some chance climate change is not happening or not caused by humans) and looking at energy solutions as you've mentioned as well as carbon capture solutions.

Fighting in the weeds about which study says what is irrelevant, and trying to walk back from human progress and implement some kind of climate socialism is an obvious non starter, so let's tackle this as a technological solution that is within reach, and get on with it. Unfortunately, this doesn't really increase any one/groups immediate power, so nobody advocates for it

Solar doesn't work everywhere, nor wind. What is the environmental impact to create all those batteries? Does that cost include converting heating systems to electric? Would better windows have a better ROI?

Better windows certainly have a better ROI, but they do not get you to replacing fossil fuels. Nuclear or solar/wind + battery does.

Nuclear fortunately works everywhere and does not require batteries. It does, however, take engineering skill in order to build and operate, whereas a solar panel can be ordered from China rather cheaply.

In the future, I guarantee you that China will mass produce small, safe, relatively idiot-proof nuclear plants and export them all over the world in Belt and Road version 2.0. They will bring in an all Chinese labor force to build it and quite possibly also to operate it or at least provide immediate support. Many of the people angry at China for not making meaningful CO2 commitments will praise them for saving the planet. As the West continues to de-skill and dumb down, we may even need them to come to the U.S. and generate reliable power for us.

Funny you should say that. So it turns out providing 40 kWh of battery backup to 128M homes would create about 500M tons of CO2.

In comparison, the coal industry annually contributes 1.9B tons of CO2 and spews 120M tons of toxic waste which would be gone if we shut this industry down for the low low price of $12B.

Conclusion: there really isn't a good argument against this other than people are being dumb. Or pray tell what that argument is. Also once again I already mentioned nuclear as part of the solution where solar doesn't work. I continue to be confused as to why people keep choosing to ignore that.

One might note that getting solar roof panels can be a pain in certain localities and that insurance companies are dropping people for having large batteries or EVs due to fire risk.

You can cherry pick a few numbers, but it does not come close to the full accounting required for a proper analysis.

Not saying it's a bad goal to switch over, just that the true costs are not being expressed, and that it's not some simple thing you can just do

You can always naysay but sometimes you just need to set a goal and go for it. Coal comes at a tremendously detrimental cost. I don't get how anyone continues to make a case for it. It even generates more radioactive waste than nuclear power does. I just don't get it. Also if you don't like the numbers I just gave you then do the work to come up with a more accurate set of them rather than FUD them

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

I went looking for these insurance companies that are dropping insurance policies over battery backup systems or EVs and I couldn't find any. Do you have a source for this or did you just hear that somewhere?

Industry funded propaganda and bought politicians. Then it (in the US) got polarized along partisan lines. Geopolitically, everyone wants to solve it, but nobody wants to take a big hit to their own prospects.

They are all right. It's just how much human suffering you consider to be worst case.

If those are right, then logically so are these: "it's too late to curb climate change", "it's too late to act on climate change", etc. See the problem?

Don't "forget" about 1970 global freezing too.

https://climatechangedispatch.com/120-years-of-climate-scare...

Or just search "1970 global freezing".

This was a minority view inflated by poor journalism. Climate science as a whole was veering toward the "Earth gets warmer" conclusion.(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/06/...)

I note your article also waves the "follow the money" insinuation that scientists are being bought writ-large by government grants even though these are but a trickle compared to the profits from selling fossil fuels.

Still about that hoax?

It only does harm when people paid to spread global warming denial propaganda use predictions to show that there is nothing to worry about. Turns out, many people make all kinds of predictions all the time. Turns out predictions are random variables. Anyone understanding this would welcome as many predictions as possible because the aggregate paints the most accurate picture.

So conclusions evidenced by climate models, valid or random variables?

Valid and are random variables. Because models change their prediction over time too. Ensemble is better than one model, which is why the IPCC publishes ensemble results from different models.

Those all seem consistent and accurate to varying extents. We are already suffering from permanent or at least metastable effects of climate change.

these scare tactics have only worked in emboldening skeptics. it’s a great example of how to de sensitize the world to a problem

There is a large and growing group of technology companies working to address and mitigate climate change. I work for one, and you can too.

For me, discourse and persuasion around climate change has taken a back seat to making a rapidly decarbonizing electric grid an on-the-ground fact. If you’re tired of the endless arguments, join me in working every day to shift the material conditions of the debate.

https://climatebase.org

I can’t stop thinking about Von Neumann’s elephant[1][2] when I read articles like this. I’m not a “denier” (and what an intellectually ugly term that is), but I do have my doubts about the predictive value of overfitted models.

[1] https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/06/21/how-to-fit-an-elep...

[2] https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/FittingAnElephant/

I think it’s going to be very bad no matter what we do. Having to stay inside last year during the Oregon wildfires was worse than dealing with COVID. It’s definitely going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

It doesn’t necessarily have to get better than today though, only better than the worst at that time.

Been hearing something similar for the last 30. I think we're way too late to the game really, hope I'm wrong.

Even if the research itself is legit, it's a meaningless summary. It just means: we labeled an arbitrary subset of the range of possible outcomes as "worst outcome", and ran simulations on a series of hypothetical future economic policies. The first model that crosses into our arbitrary boundary is labeled "acting 11 years from now."

I have a hard time appreciating such headlines, when the boring truth is no less terrifying: We're in deep shit, we're constantly dumping more shit into the pool we're in, and every shit we're throwing in now, we will have to pay more later to get out of.

it seems like if you tell people we only have X years left, then they will be more than happy to sit on their ass for X-1 years

And then at X+1 years claim "Well, I guess it's too late to do anything now".

This was me doing my homework in the 1990's.

It's human nature to do this, why would you do something earlier than required if it takes effort? We only have a certain amount of energy / attention at our disposal.

We get it. Every day we have one day left to keep climate change from getting worse.

That's how long it will take the Australian Government to arrive at the "Carbon Capture and Storage technology is too expensive and ineffective" party, which many other governments have already attended, had a good time, and left for the next phase.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-09/cefc-fund-investment-...

Resource based economy or this problem will never fade, we are just like chickens running around. If you have legacy code, you dont just patch it up to stop being inneficient, you either update the code to a new robust structure o create a new one. Our socio-economic system is legacy code, very old one, we either update it to a new structure or create a new one, and it seems a resorce based economy structure would be appropiate for the problems us humans have. In my opinion

Go balls deep on nuclear, drop the climate justice stuff, propose a plan that doesn’t involve authoritarian elites preaching austerity, and I’m in.

I feel like it's been 20 years that we only have 5 years to fix it.

It should be stated we need to do x starting today to improve by this rate to avoid X. Then we could update the rate. Less sexy, but more accurate.

We can't even get people to wear a mask to help stop the spread of a respiratory disease let alone take a vaccine that may save their life and will unquestionably save the lives of others.

So there are two possibilities here:

1. This claim, unlike all previous such claims, is true. In that case, we're screwed anyway, so what does it matter?; or

2. This claim is false, in which case we just further teach people to distrust science.

I always wonder when I see these alarmist end-of-the-world predictions: Do those making these claims believe them? As in, are the claims made honestly or dishonestly? It could be either.

A good way of thinking about any claim is to ask yourself who the audience is.

So when a company or university makes a claim about new groundbreaking battery tech that if it ever reaches the market and all the naive assumptions hold true in the most optimistic way then it'll be 1,000x better than current batteries, the audience is investors, donors, those who provide research grants or decide tenure and so on.

So we have climate deniers who won't believe any of this anyway and those who are to varying degrees believe in climate change who don't really need to be convinced. Additionally, extreme or alarmist predictions tend to have the opposite of the desired effect. It tends to entrench opposing views and alienate the more moderates.

But I imagine there are certain political and academic circles where alarmist predictions and the associated publicity are good currency for "street cred" with their contemporaries.

For the record, I believe humans are having an impact on climate change, that change is likely to have some hugely negative consequences but, most importantly, there's really nothing we can do about it altruistically. Any solution will be purely economic. Fossil fuels will be replaced when it becomes cheaper to do so and not a moment before.

> Additionally, extreme or alarmist predictions tend to have the opposite of the desired effect. It tends to entrench opposing views and alienate the more moderates.

Bingo (I'm one of those). And your analogy with COVID is extremely interesting. It somewhat reinforces my belief that the negative impacts of climate change are probably overstated.

1) Most early COVID predictions by experts vastly overstated the deadliness of the virus and its impact[0].

2) There is some evidence that wearing a mask helps prevent COVID transmission, but not by much. Is it worth wearing a mask 24/7 for the rest of our lives? Probably not.

3) Taking a vaccine does not "unquestionably save the lives of others". Recent studies have shown that vaccinated people are just as likely to transmit the virus.[1]

I could go on. I believe in vaccination and am vaccinated. I believe in climate change. But I am very hesitant to accept broad doomsday predictions by climate scientists which involve a mix of economics, society, politics, etc.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7447267/

[1] https://fee.org/articles/stunning-new-study-undercuts-the-ca...

>But I am very hesitant to accept broad doomsday predictions by climate scientists which involve a mix of economics, society, politics, etc.

My assumption is that climate scientists actually see the most extreme examples of changes to environments that are most sensitive to it, and this (to some degree) exaggerates their extrapolation of the effects to the rest of the world. This tends towards alarmism in the same way that computer security experts see the internet as one giant mass of exploitable holes teetering on the edge of catastrophic collapse.

Watch the documentary Chasing Ice. If "climate effects on glaciers" is your niche expertise, the future looks very short.

I mentally dial the doomsday predictions back a bit to factor in "the rest of the world", and it still looks pretty bleak to me.

Additionally, I factor in the qualifications and 'source of income' of those arguing against it. There are a lot of radio and TV personalities who are vehemently opposed to "what science has to say", accusing climate scientists of the self-justification of their chosen career. I find that to be one of the most pristine examples of hypocrisy in existence. It's also inescapable.

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