Comment by time_to_smile | Hacker News Reader

Comment by time_to_smile | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think it's worth pointing out that the impacts of climate change are often presented as singular effects: rising sea level, warmer summers, increased drought, etc. But as we can see here there is also a very strong interaction effect between all of these (and it tends to magnify the issues rather than having them cancel out).

This is also why many major climate reports tend to inherently be on the conservative side: it's really, really hard to correctly model these interactions so you can only earnestly report the predicted change in individual variables rather than the impact on the system.

And keep in mind this is not the "new normal", we're entering a period of transition that will not end within our life times. The rate of CO2 accumulating the atmosphere is accelerating and the rate of methane in the atmosphere is rapidly accelerating. We will likely see a blue ocean event in the next 20 years and it's really hard to imagine how that will even play out with the global climate, Thwaites glacier could collapse without much warning (very rapidly causing sea level rise beyond our current projections), the AMOC slow down could reach a tipping point, etc.

Everything we're witnessing now will in the future seem relatively mild.

> The rate of CO2 accumulating the atmosphere is accelerating

It's a small point, but the ratio of CO2 on the atmosphere is definitively not accelerating. On the last couple of decades it has been growing steadily, and the noisy few months look like they have negative acceleration.

https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/

I had to look up what a "blue ocean event" was. So, for others, here it is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline#Impacts...

I chuckled when I saw your username together with your probably not far fetched but damning prediction of what's to come.

also missing is yet another aspect of a very complex system - parched soil has lower ability to retain water. These floods follow an intense heatwave during which large swathes of pakistani soil dried up. Come the rains and you have a massive problem.

Like you say, this is just the beginning. If floods like this happen in the Indian plains - and they will - the human and social costs will be immense.

we just saw this in the DFW area last week. 3 months of triple digit temps and zero precip followed by a single 24 hour period receiving 5-7" of rain. the ground was so hard, that it might as well have been concrete. that just allowed all of the water to run off into the streams that fed the lakes. fortunately, those lakes were well below normal levels, so this just helped them come back to where they were. if there were multiple days of that level of rain, a la Harvey, we'd have been really screwed.

It's not a foregone conclusion that we're doomed to a life of accelerating climate change. We could deploy solar geoengineering to see us through the transition to renewables. Then, as fossil sources are retired and direct air capture comes online, gradually draw down our geoengineering efforts.

It may seem like a non-starter right now, but what about five years from now? What if our best climate models agree that it will do less damage to the planet than allowing the permafrost to thaw?

I think it's a political problem, not a technical problem. If we can imagine that our best climate models could drive decision making to enable geoengineering... why don't our best climate models drive earlier interventions?

Geoengineering is a unique prospect in that it's inexpensive-- Cheap enough that a couple of billionaires could pay for it if they wanted. In terms of interventions, it's a much easier pill to swallow than something in the trillions of dollars.

The pushback comes from the risk. While we know that it'll cool the planet, we don't necessarily know how it'll affect weather patterns. If we can figure that out with some level of certainty, I believe there will be a point where the rewards outweigh the risks.

I think there are probably several billionaires who independently have the resources the pursue significant stratospheric aerosol injection. I wonder how such an individual would imagine their liability for stochastic effects on agriculture. Those risks make me think it's most likely a government with a nuclear arsenal would pursue this... perhaps India? Mumbai could become a very difficult place to live in a few decades.

That's the whole premise of Robinson's novel Ministry of the future.

Pretty disheartening to see the downvotes in a forum like hn which are supposed to be informed about these things. If people that are supposed to be able to critically assess data and have access to as much information they need to verify any claims come to the conclusion that you are full of shit, what hope is there to educate grandpa screaming at the wokes on the street.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his startup idea depends upon his not understanding it.

–Upton Sinclair, paraphrased

I love technology and have to keep telling my friends that it's possible there won't be a computer industry in 30 years. I'm not joking. Our technology requires a highly complex and organized society to continue to function and develop. Complex and highly organized societies developed under a stable climate. We created societies built on cities that don't move.

If you love technology. If you love computers. Then global warming is your biggest threat and something you should care about deeply.

HN has become very hostile to reality when reality makes people scared.

I no longer expect any thing I say to convince people, but still keep saying what I do so that other people that see it, can feel a little less crazy/alone.

Consider it my, probably futile, struggle against the upcoming wave of cognitive dissonance. As soon as I realized the way things were headed, I also realized that, paradoxically, the more obvious our situation becomes the more aggressively people will refused to see it.

There was a time on HN where downvotes where pretty exclusively reserved for trollish comments and other inappropriate content. I agree with your feeling that this is disheartening, but strangely serves as evidence that these things are happening.

I myself have days where I can't believe my own eyes as I watch events unfolding I thought I would only see at the end of my life if I lived to a ripe old age.

It's not surprising, actually. The problem with very smart people is that they're often very smart in their particular domains of expertise, but socially they will be treated as just very smart in general. This often leads to an emotional overconfidence in assessing fields outside their domains of expertise, and that extreme cleverness becomes more of a tool to create complex rationalizations of uninformed biases rather than being used humbly, empirically, and diligently as should be the case for a beginner in any topic.

And yes, I'm aware that's essentially a paraphrase of the Dunning-Kruger concept. We're all probably making similar assumptions about domains of knowledge we don't know much about, because that's what the brain does. Just like human vision appears solid and complete but is actually a stitched together amalgamation of the small, receptor-dense fovea in the center darting around constantly, and the rest being filled in by the brain instead of direct perception, so is our impression of the world, and we won't know things for sure unless we take time to study them up close.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com