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Comment by stareatgoats | Hacker News Reader

There is no "natural balance" in the climate. It has always changed and always will and there is no foreseeable scenario where we would be able to predict all the consequences of say attempting to bring the climate to stabilize so that Manhattan would always be above water. Or prevent Europe from being covered in ice again (which it likely will be at one point).

We need to start thinking about how we can adapt to various scenarios, rather than imagine that we are omnipotent here (we are not and will most likely never be unless some miraculous breakthrough in predictive powers occurs).

Adapting and making sure that our footprint going forward is as minimal as possible is the only reasonable strategy, ASAP.

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The goal is not to maintain an ideal temperature and stop the world from changing, but having the climate changing too rapidly, because many animals and plants do not have the time to adapt. This is why a 2~3 degrees changes over a century is way more dangerous than an ice age that took various thousands of years to happen.

> there is no foreseeable scenario where we would be able to [...] prevent Europe from being covered in ice again

Considering we've accidentally caused startling global warming in just 200 years, I'm confident we can solve the next ice age in the 50,000 years before it comes.

it's actually 500,000 years now with climate change, or so I read

An inevitable step in human progress is to seize control of the planet's climate for ourselves.

We should not accept that the world will change around us, we should make the world fit our interests. On a time scale at which the world changes, time scales which humans are not involved with (eg: global warming), we should be able to fix the problem before it happens.

> An inevitable step in human progress is to seize control of the planet's climate for ourselves.

An inevitable step is human progress it to realize that there is no controlling the planet's climate.

We might be at the top of the food chain, but we are still at the bottom of the interplanetary dust chain, and always will be.

>An inevitable step is human progress it to realize that there is no controlling the planet's climate.

That’s an odd thing to say, we’re controlling it right now. We’re about half way through pushing up global temperatures by several degrees over a hundred years or so. We didn’t set out to do that, but we’re doing it nonetheless.

It’s not a question of whether we can significantly change the climate, we know we can, the question is how we should choose to do that going forwards.

We're affecting it, yes. But we aren't controlling it. There are no intended effects and outcomes that satisfy those intentions. Quite the opposite, actually: We're trying to affect it less and finding it very difficult to do so.

> It’s not a question of whether we can significantly change the climate, we know we can, the question is how we should choose to do that going forwards

This I agree with. What the GP and I are trying to say is that, in our opinions at least, we should choose to do it by adopting practices that minimize how much we affect the climate.

Ok, so it's a position opposed to active measures? I can certainly see the argument, there could very well be negative unintended consequences. Ultimately I suppose it's a matter of balancing the risks. If controlling emissions proves unrealistic, or if a feedback effect kicks in like melting oceanic methane or tundra melting, then active measures may be the only option left.

> we’re controlling it right now

Does it look like we have the climate under control? No, quite the opposite. We're not controlling the climate, we're the climate equivalent of toddlers who just set the house on fire.

We know what effect emitting CO2 has, we have a choice how much we emit, and we're choosing to emit a lot of it. OK, we've decided we have other objectives that take priority, and to an extent that makes some sense, but we have choices in this. We can't just throw our hands up and say we have no control over this, and therefore no responsibility. Yes we do have choices we can make, and yes we do have responsibility for the consequences.

No control doesn't mean no responsibility. Though we're definitely behaving irresponsibly, which seems to be a universal trait of large groups of people. You could argue that theoretically we can control it, but in reality that would require humans to not behave like humans for once.

The "she made me do it" argument ;)

You really just have to follow the trend of human energy use, eventually we're going to get to a point that planetary scale changes are within our reach, and eventually they'll be easy.

Technically we're already changing the planet today, it shows that it is very much inside of our grasp, it just requires the cooperation of every human on the planet and right now we just have that cooperation both incidentally and in a bad way.

We just need to get to a point where it does not require such mass cooperation, and as our energy scale increases that will become more and more possible with time.

That is assuming we don't collapse or regress or stagnate, which is possible, but I would hope that doesn't happen.

I figure a Starlink-style satellite fleet of large, flat mirror sheet, satellites orbiting earth in the ecliptic plane might do it.

They in total would need to be able to dim up to 2% of incoming solar radiation.

"Always will be"? That seems excessively pessimistic. Why do you think that?

Because we let ourselves down.

We knew about fossil ressource depletion in the 70s and about the effect on Co2 on temperature in the 19th century (the earliest article i've found is from 1912, but the science was available earlier).

We could have invested in better infrastructure and better housing since at least the 90s, and pushed the research towards material science and fission/fusion after the 80s. Pushed to create more public researcher jobs would've been nice too (most innovation is built on top of public research, and forming researchers is nice for the industry too)

Instead we built more stuff for cheaper (by outsourcing the production and crippling the productive apparel of small third-world countries).

There are two levels to this:

1. Whether it's physically possible to accomplish this. The natural course of the Earth is to enter into another ice age at some time in the future. Is there a way for us to prevent this from happening, without compromise or sacrifice? Without side effects? I don't have the needed knowledge to disqualify that possibility, but I lack the confidence that it is an achievable outcome. I imagine the closest comparison points we have for such efforts is our attempts to introduce non-native species to impact local flora and fauna. And that hasn't typically gone well in the past.

2. Whether having such control is at all possible. If we develop the means to control the climate to such an extent, I can only imagine what that would lead to in terms of global politics. It has to be something that the entire planet is cooperative about, and hope that no personal agendas try to push for misuse of the technology.

Seriously? We're many decades out on fusion, many less decades early on climate disruption, as well as fossil energy depletion. We're looking at one big gap that we knew precisely about since the 1970's, and still you have some faith left in what I'd call the cult of Progress? May I propose you notice the imagined world of spaceman futures matches fairly when with previous religious iterations of heavenly ideals?

> we should make the world fit our interests

It is not a binary, of course we make the world fit our interest to some degree. That idea that we can make the world fit our interest in every aspect, even on planetary scale is hubris and as such will likely always bite us in the ass if pursued.

and what if this optimism doesn't lead to a scaled solution by the time we're dead / dying

sounds pretty cool though. a techno solution just in time for every threat

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