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Comment by istorical | Hacker News Reader

Carbon emissions are correlated to human activity. We can dial them up or down theoretically through human action.

Methane emission through permafrost (both land and submarine) could end up as a cascading natural emission that forms a feedback loop.

I think that's a big part of why people are panicking.

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The cheap option of going out of our way to do less (so we emit less) is very probably off the table at this point.

As a species we need another plan. I like a mixed approach of sequestering atmospheric gasses via processes that synthesize useful compounds from the components we don't want in the air as well as hard scifi concepts like giant reflective surfaces in space. Throttling the quantity of sunlight by reflecting a portion away from the earth sounds super expensive... but that might be the only viable option left.

Or we could go with the cheap option. If there’s anything that the global pandemic taught us, it is that nothing about human behavior is ever set in stone and there will always be a way to make even draconian policies like lockdowns and mandatory face masks politically viable. The billions we’d spend building the crazy ideas you suggested which also have no guarantee of success, could be channeled into whatever it takes to get people to care more about the planet.

Lockdowns were heavily resisted even with millions dying right now. It will be hard to lock people down in what they can do, politically, because of something that will kill people in the future. People that might not be “me” from the point of view of each individual.

The pandemic also told us that people won't even do something as mildly inconvenient as wearing a mask. Forget about major life changes.

I believe it also showed us the limit of individual action on climate change. It's doubtful I could have gotten 100% work from home out of my employers sans pandemic. My partner stopped going to work because her industry was on government provided life support.

Despite that CO2 emissions in 2020 dropped by 6%. A change which would be wiped out in a few years by the natural growth.

Getting individuals to do anything meaningful about climate change is like those people telling millennials to stop buying Starbucks and cancel Netflix in order to buy a home.

> A change which would be wiped out in a few years by the natural growth.

That’s the elephant in the room.

There is that terrible idea that you know what should be best for others. Just forget it, it is not how society works. Totalitarian states trying that idea use over and over and fail with terrible costs.

I’ve burnt 12 cars after lockdowns to ensure that you don’t get the idea that climate lockdowns would be a nice solution after Covid lockdowns. My CO2 emissions now far outweigh (perhaps 10x) the base level, not to talk about the poor grandmas who can’t afford a new car.

Lockdowns are absolutely horrible. I don’t get why you don’t kill us directly, and pretend to do it for our health. Suicide, harm, family violence, just having a life with no leisure, no secret why solitary confinement is used as a means of torture in US prisons.

You just don’t have the stats yet, but the harm you have caused by choosing lockdowns is incommensurable. PLEASE build stats on well-being and how many hours-in-good-health were actually saved by lockdowns, and wait a few years for those studies to surface before concluding that lockdowns are a fine way to deal with a problem. Taking harm upon others may satisfy your feeling of dealing a problem, but the base problem, Covid, has not even been squashed, it spread in waves and became widespread and endemic anyway like doctors always said it would. Not - solved, but saddistic measures were taken against the weaker of us.

With global warming, I have no doubt you’ll crush our lives again without solving anything about global warming itself.

I sincerely hope that burning part was just a poor joke...

Creating “useful” compounds from atmospheric green house gasses isn’t some “have your cake and eat it, too” type thing. It is going to be extremely inefficient and expensive. Emitting less is still cheaper.

There’s research into self-replicating micro machines that could create useful compounds from atmospheric CO2 cheaply and efficiently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_plants

Honestly, at this point, we need to be doing BOTH and to such a degree that it feels painful. We need to cut our global energy use massively to slow the runaway acceleration, and we need carbon capture solutions, ridiculous sci-fi mirror solutions, pretty much all of it, to get it back under control. And even then, we're going to have quite a few years of fucked-up weather worse than this.

The problem is, I despair of us doing EITHER, and "quite a few years of fucked-up weather" is going to sound like a fantasy story.

If you block sunlight, you will negatively effect food production, tree growth etc. I don't think it will have the positive effect you think it will.

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