Comment by drawkbox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drawkbox | Hacker News Reader

> "So in the middle of the Cold War, the Soviet Union found itself trying to pit its land and resource advantage against the continental United States' more temperate climate. With space and the atom having been harnessed, why not the world's oceans? Why not the weather itself?"

Soviets always wanted a warm water port and to warm the Arctic for trade routes and making Russia more able to have an advantage on their land which is 63% frozen.

> It's important to note that Borisov wasn't a mad scientist or anything of that sort, and his work was of interest to the Soviet government, which was already funding a wide range of research looking to warm the Arctic. It was all aimed at solving a simple problem: Russia is too damn cold.

> You might laugh, but while Soviet Russia was blessed with the largest land mass of any nation on Earth, much of it resource rich, putting that land to use was stunningly difficult. Currently about 63 percent of Russia is buried under permafrost, and as the CIA World Factbook notes, even today it is a significant barrier to development of Siberia.

It wouldn't have been good for climate for everyone else, even Russia long term.

It also seems climate change and global warming Russia thinks benefits them at least then, maybe now as well. [1]

That is an interesting idea considering the oil/gas export leads to that and all that permafrost which would cause massive carbon releases.

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/3/28/what-is-behind-...

Their population never boomed like it did in the US post WW2, possibly because of the massive loss of lives in the war. I feel like all that development would be pretty useless if there were no people to actually do anything.

That + killing/imprisoning a lot of your own population + creating an economic climate where it was hard to sustain your family + creating a political climate favoring emigration?

Huh? The population was booming in the post-war USSR as well:

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

Compare with the US:

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

And population growth in the pre-WW1 Russian Empire was even higher, despite having regular food shortage and hunger period. In general, pre-industrial agrarian societies tend to have much higher birth rates than industrial and post-industrial ones.

For some strange reason the US nowadays is comparable in the percentage of prisoners in USSR in worst Gulag years:

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

I don't have an explanation here, TBH. The US is a rich and socially advanced country. In comparison to Europe this feels very wrong.

>For some strange reason the US nowadays is comparable in the percentage of prisoners in USSR in worst Gulag years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_in... I don't have an explanation here, TBH. The US is a rich and socially advanced country. In comparison to Europe this feels very wrong.

The US justice system is very broken. No matter where one stands politically (e.g. be more lenient or be tougher on crime), the current system is suffering from bureaucracy, ineffectiveness, ineptitude and slowness. It's caught in an endless feedback loop.

To add to what other person responded, birth rates fell down after communism fell. They were higher during USSR times then now. Not just in Russia, but everywhere in post communist world.

not totally clear if this is the point you’re trying to make, but the US today fits that description exactly

> killing/imprisoning a lot of your own population

the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world

> creating an economic climate where it was hard to sustain your family

the cost of housing has far outgrown the median household income and in many places you need 2+ income earners to sustain a household meaning nobody has time to raise children

>Their population never boomed like it did in the US post WW2, possibly because of the massive loss of lives in the war

Checked the censuses:

USSR:

  170,467,186 (1939)
  208,826,650 (1959)

USA:

  132,164,569 (1940)
  179,323,175 (1960)

USSR: +38 mln

USA: +47 mln

I'd say it's pretty comparable, if you also consider that 26 mln Soviets were killed in WW2

26 million, mostly in prime working and childbearing age - so a larger effect on future population size than the number itself implies.

> mostly in prime working and childbearing age

You have seen that in stats or just assume? Because civilian causalities in WWII outnumber military ones. Old people, kids and sick people are extremely vulnerable during wars and die a lot.

Especially in WWII. First, obviously holocaust - most victims were from Eastern Europe and old, sick, kids had even lower chance to survive then physically strong people (not that it was high there, but). Second, German army was cleansing Eastern Europe for German settlement. That meant whole villages routinely burned out to ground. Third, famines and such, cause military extracts resources from people.

26 millions Soviets were not killed in WW2, as Soviet Union (and Russia today) adding to the WW2 kills victims of Soviet Gulag system (about 2 millions) and 6-10 millions Ukrainians starved to death during Holodomor genocide.

BTW: WW2 losses are still exorbitant, even if we subtract those 10 millions, but no longer that "impressive" (Poland lost 6 millions people, which was almost 20% of the population, killed by Germans and Russians - till 1941 Hitler and Stalin were best pals).

>6-10 millions Ukrainians starved to death during Holodomor genocide

Ukraine's Holodomor happened in 1932-1933, and the census I mentioned is from 1939-1959. If you are implying that they were hiding Ukrainian losses in the 1930's and secretly added it to WW2 kill count then it's not quite true, censuses in 1926 and 1937 registered a drop in Ukrainian population from 31 mln to 26 mln. The results of the 1937 census were declassified only in 1990 and the revised number (26 mln) was estimated in the 1990's after the collapse of USSR and on the basis of declassified documents in Soviet archives.

>adding to the WW2 kills victims of Soviet Gulag system (about 2 millions)

Documents from the Soviet archives number the total deaths of prisoners in the Gulag from 1941 to 1945 at 621,637 (Evdokimov, 1995)

USSR occupied areas during that time frame with their pooulation. Still a population growth on paper but I believe parent poster meant something else by boom.

According to Wikipedia, the population increase of the USSR in that time period is mostly due to territorial expansion during WW2 rather than indigenous population growth.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Census_(1959)

As others have said, the USSR expanded significantly over that period, so you're counting people in '60 that weren't a part of the USSR in '39.

A better comparison is Russia by itself:

1939: 108,377,000

1959: 117,534,000 (+10% over 20 years)

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

> It also seems climate change and global warming Russia thinks benefits them at least then, maybe now as well.

That is curious idea. I wonder how the risks of thawing permafrost play into the equation. The thaw leads to newly available biomass, digested by microbes to release carbon dioxide and methane, and leaving a considerably altered environment including depressions filled with water [2]. Would those risks be outweighed by overall gains of a warmer Siberia?

[2]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/17/the-great-sibe...

Slightly worrying notion but, if Russia believes that global warming benefits them, they might keep on extracting and burning fossil fuels long after everyone else has transitioned to renewables.

Indeed it might but its need for it is finite and renewables as more resources are sunk into improving them may eventually make doing so increasingly economically disadvantageous. As more of the world moves on it becomes easier to encourage different behavior as well as Russia ceases to have anything else anyone needs.

For most of this time we didn't know it was bad though.

Unlikely. Fossil fuel extraction is expensive. It makes sense economically only because theres a lot of demand for it globally and companies can net huge profits. Without that kind of global demand, fossil fuel extraction will be limited to keeping the existing facilities open until they dry up.

For a preview of the future of oil, we just need to look at what happened to coal.

> For a preview of the future of oil, we just need to look at what happened to coal.

So people turning nuclear power off and burning lots of coal and gas to compensate?

Is there a cheap way to create fertilizers without hydrocarbons? Otherwise there will be demand for them as long as they are available. In other words, it's very likely that we will use all available fossil fuels.

> Is there a cheap way to create fertilizers without hydrocarbons?

There is cow poo if you don't count circulating carbon.

I think there is recent experiment about that... My understanding is that it didn't go too well in Sri Lanka...

There are only so many cows.

The Haber-Bosch process needs Hydrogen. Currently we get that from Methane, but you can also use electrolysis to produce it.

Hopefully not. Global coal consumption has steadily increased over time. If oil follows the same pattern, we're all dead.

https://yearbook.enerdata.net/coal-lignite/coal-world-consum...

Coal is a lot more plentiful than oil, and much less concentrated.

So, it's like we, the good guys, can decide to extract and burn fossil fuels as long as we want, but once we say enough is enough, everybody else must also stop doing what we have been doing for ages.

Well the USA knows global warming does not benefit them, yet they continue extracting and consuming fossil fuels like there's no tomorrow. I'd first focus on that transition to renewables at home before worrying about what Russian energy consumption looks like in this post-renewable-transition utopia :)

My understanding is that global warming is only mildly negative to US as a whole long term. Coastal cities/region are obviously toast but they are only small % of landmass. Country will adjust just fine.

I'm not sure that's the case. Don't most of the population live on those coastal regions? And isn't there an ongoing drought problem that'll only get worse over time? These don't sound mild at all.

They are a large country but a smallish population that is actually shrinking. Their domestic needs for fuel are pretty modest. It's their exports drying up that will drag them into the future. Considering recent events, that might be sooner rather than later.

Then why not doing more things where coldness becomes an asset instead going against nature?

Geo-engineering should be made illegal. Their "bugs" would scorch the Earth. No geo-engineer knows what's he/she is doing. Any implementation there is a guarantee of having massive unintended consequences that are irreversible.

We'll need to do some serious geo engineering on purpose to reverse all the geo engineering we've been doing by accident. Current efforts are all about stopping the problem from getting worse. We reducing the pace at which co2 emissions grow. But they are still growing, not shrinking. But the point is that, unless we do some geo engineering, those levels are not coming down by themselves any time soon.

Malthusian fabulations of the over-inflated egos of technologists wildly overestimating their understanding of Nature itself.

For the purposes of human life, extreme cold is never an asset. It is an absence of energy and will always require energy input to accomplish anything in such a climate.

Some technologies benefit from cold. The challenge is in making them ROI positive.

That's cool but you don't need to use half the landmass of a country for those technologies. You'd be further ahead paying the cost for cooling in exchange for having that land used for agriculture, cities, and more easily accessed resources.

Yes but what you say has a premise the current statu quo of tech. What I'm saying is that some new tech requiring lots of coldness made ROI positive. You don't need thaaaaat much. Think of having something strong enough to make cities around that industry prosperous. They will urbanize places that previously wasn't feasible to urbanize.

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