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Comment by at_a_remove | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a game theorist or an economist, but I believe that dealing with climate change will involve, uh, "non-cooperative solutions." People saying, "If we can all just get together and ..." keep forgetting we can't even get humanity to stop stabbing each other in the face. If the "solution" depends on mass cooperation, and worse yet, cooperative mass sacrifice, I just don't think it will happen.

Therefore, we need to look at solutions that don't require eighty percent of humanity agreeing on something.

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Giant "sunshades" at L1, funded/designed/launched/operated by the Pentagon, using SpaceX Starships. Each "shade" consists of thousands of long variable-pitch "slats" (like a mini blind) in a very thin, light framework. The paper-thin slats are slightly curved ("for rigidity"), and the control system is always fiddling with their pitches - to keep the shade's location fixed, without expending rocket fuel, in spite of L1 being unstable, light pressure, the solar wind, etc.

And if any other nation down on Earth causes too much trouble? One quick flick of all the slats, and the sun briefly gets 10,000X brighter & hotter for them.

(Yes, I know enough optics to know that really wouldn't work. It's still a cool story.)

Yeah. Which is why things like this (limiting sunlight so greenhouse effects are mitigated) mixed with a push to 100% clean energy and carbon capture (both via trees and technology) are probably the way forward. You might get away with pushing to limit non reusable resources if companies were the targeted party though (so instead of asking people to recycle or reuse, governments outright demaded corporations stop providing as much disposable packaging).

And what happens when one realizes that limiting sunlight, of course, is an incredible weapon against your adversaries. Or, god forbid, ampliflying sunlight?

And then, when the inevitable happens and it moves from theory to "you know ... actually ... our atellite could actually do that" and then to actually doing it against that really-evil-dude-that-totally-deserves-it du jour?

Or we do it first to lessen the economic impact of a cold not-very-well-oiled winter in Europe?

Plus, I'd like to point out that even when it goes perfectly smoothly, ironically, fixing climate change will make many climate change effects worse. For instance, currently meltwater is helping offset the draught in California (and in the nearly-1-billion-people Indus valley, and a hundred less important valleys). If we slow down climate change that meltwater contribution stops, today, almost entirely.

The same with many other effects. For instance the greening of the Sahara will stop, we will not only see less extreme weather, but less rainfall ... everywhere. And that will do a lot to prevent the countries from growing.

Any technology can be weaponized. Nukes seem to be a very strong deterrent against excessive overt aggression.

Wouldn't these sunshade concepts all reduce solar energy available to plants as well as total thermal radiation?

This is studied as global dimming. And the effects are bad. Global dimming is happening even now but contradicts the global warming narrative for some reason.

In reality, global dimming is worse than global warming. Much of the co2 is absorbed by the ocean planktons powered by sunlight. There are other ramifications too.

Exactly, that seems underappreciated.

It seems you'd want to block infrared where most of the thermal energy is transferred, while letting the shorter wavelengths through for plants/plankton.

Check out Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock. In fiction you can consider things that are too taboo to discuss seriously.

The only scientific connection between climate change and CO2 are global circulation models. I've read the code of several of these. The quality of code is terrible, with so many obvious mistakes, unreadable functions, code copy between different models and what not.

The entire narrative controlling trillions of dollars rests on code whose quality wouldn't pass 10$ bug bounty.

Quite like how the Fed economic policy which predicted transitory inflation was probably done with similarly bad models. Or how coronavirus spread models overshot and led to terrible decisions.

I don't trust centralized decisions done like that. They amplify expected errors into devastating proportions.

There are tons of independent lines of evidence. Climate models are but one, and the code quality isn't really relevant. If they can successully simulate past climate, then bad coding practices is irrelevant to their proposed predictive ability.

Plus, all the reports have been WAY too optimistic. Year after year there actual measurments come out and it's worse than the climate models.

There is other evidence of changes. But the evidence connecting climate change to CO2 is purely these models. If there's so much evidence, surely you can find evidence for this connection that isn't circulation model?

Code quality is extremely relevant. These models are nearly untestable. Climate is too chaotic and these models don't predict anything successfully on short timescales, and some of them don't predict anything on large timescale either - look up the term "flux adjustment".

So at this point the entire trust in these and the entire narrative comes from a code that any experienced programmer with physics knowledge would never put the faith of the world economy on.

Do you know what's even worse than not stopping a human made climate change? Destroying the world economy just to find out that it did not solve anything and still end up with worse climate but without economic power to deal with it. Somewhat similar to coronavirus lockdowns.

What if we save the environment, save a lot of money on healthcare, and make the world a better place for nothing?

All is needed (at least for start?) I think are stronger accords and mechanisms to make demands (or even just give help) for those who don't meet the targets. Don't lose hope :)

https://climateactiontracker.org/

https://ccpi.org/ranking/

So when different groups assume they have the "correct" answer... And we all take matters into our own hands?

Much like most decisions have been made by humanity since the dawn of time, yes.

Well good luck on that, how will you get to a solution withouth getting money/people on board.

You need money/people on board, but not on the order of 80% of the people of the world; you need the leadership of singular countries to decide to do something. Consider how easy it was for individual countries to pour a ton of resources into developing atomic bombs, compared to how difficult it has been for countries to come together and agree to get rid of nuclear weapons.

It's easy for a country to do what's in its own self-interest. It's difficult for multiple countries to come together and do things which are in everyone's common interest but which is against each individual country's interest.

I sorta disagree. During Covid, the entire world came together. I think the world can work together as long as they're forced to.

Did it though? I remember the whole "muh body! No masks" entitled attitude. I also remember people literally dismissing the vaccine - a tech wonder - because Bill Gates.

The world did not come together. It was a shirt show. If the world came together we would have burried Covid sooner and with less people dying.

Those people were certainly loud, but also certainly in the minority when you look at the % of people who actually got vaccinated.

Rage gets engagement, algorithms boost the wild opinions and soon it feels like everyone is taking crazy pillS, but that is just your feed trying to keep you doom scrolling.

I member a time when most adults would have somewhat reasonable opinions and we could have a discussion about a specific issue without jumping to "you're a <insert political party>" therefore you suck, therefore your opinion is bad.

Nowadays I hear straight up batshit crazy things all the time. All the time.

It used to be that if you had crazy ideas you would receive feedback that you're crazy and people would not want to associate with you. Nowadays instead of thinking about it you just double down. Other nuts are coming out of the woodwork and all of a sudden "we have to consider all points of view". We cater to the lowest common denominator and entertain things that should be summarily dismissied.

I don't know where esotericsean and x86x87 are from.... Being from different parts of the world could explain different perspectives. But here in the U.S.....is was a real shit show as x86 said. It was definitely not "coming together" by any stretch. COVID made us feel more divided than we were before the pandemic.

87 comes after 86. There is nothing special about it. Something i made up when registering the account

Yup. I'm in the US. Yup it's a mess :(

On a much more systemic level, the whole global patent and intellectual property system worked to ensure that countries who would have been able to create vaccines themselves instead had to rely on ordering vaccines from the few companies with the IP rights, drastically limiting vaccine rollout. Literally putting corporate profit above the lives of millions and the well-being of billions.

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