Our climate may already have reached an irreversible tipping point | Hacker News Reader

Our climate may already have reached an irreversible tipping point

thebulletin.org

30 pointsbitfield7 comments

We need SOLUTIONS. This is the equivalent of throwing up a BLM or Ukraine flag on twitter. Awareness, at least in the camp of people who can likely be persuaded, is at pretty deep penetration.

Obviously exist like nuclear being one component probably, but there is an lot of heavy lifting needed all across the world to even get STARTED. Thats why these articles fall on deaf ears.

Like what can I, a middle class single American in my 30s do? The answer is retweet this article and say I did my part.

You could vote for the candidates (senators, state and national, governors and presidents) that push for nuclear, building-heating-tech regulations, carbon taxes on food production and tell your friends and family about it.

If you have the means to, you can even donate.

Even better than voting is writing and calling. Those are a much stronger signal than voting, which is a binary sort of blunt instrument.

Imagine you just got voted in to office. How do you have any idea which of the ideas on your campaign platform were the ones that got you elected? How do you know what people want you to do -- be it because you actually care, or are purely self-interested and want to get re-elected? Was it abortion rights, or school vouchers, or tax policy, or what? Remember that people run on a big basket of policy positions, of which environment is only part, and within environmental policy there are lots of different specific options.

If you get a hundred letters and calls about people all asking specifically for carbon taxes and/or a transition to nuclear power, THAT is a much clearer signal. Maybe you are a diehard anti-nuclear kind of person, but if you see that your constituents are mostly for it, you realize you may need to re-evaluate your beliefs, or perhaps just grit your teeth and compromise a bit if you want to stay in power. Maybe you are really anti-tax, but when a debate comes up for carbon taxes, you don't speak up against them. Maybe you mention to one of your colleagues "Gee, I've been getting a lot of push for carbon taxes in my district. What about you?" and they say they have too, and the Overton window for carbon taxes shifts just a bit more.

Maybe you're already for nuclear power, but you just want to make sure that if you support the next bill to make it more feasible by reducing over-regulation on it or by providing subsidies, you won't get voted out! You need people to show their support for the policies you already want!

So you don't really know what each vote actually means, unless people tell you.

*edit -- oh, and consider joining Citizens' Climate Lobby. They have all sorts of stuff like this and more that you can do.

More trees would be a good start

A drop in the bucket, no, a drop in the ocean. It's no good to plant trees, for a good start you need to plan forests. And you can't plant a forest by sticking a bunch of saplings in the ground and then walking away... you have to construct a whole ecosystem, with enough diversity to create stability, otherwise you're at best slightly increasing the buffer size of the anual carbon cycle, not reducing long term carbon. That's why "global greening" didn't have any measurable impact on global warming.

Best estimates for how many trees it would take to start making a significant dent in atmospheric carbon is on the order of a trillion, btw. There are currently about 2-3 trillion on the planet. A few thousand years ago there were probably about 6 trillion.

Then we just need to allocate some land to plant one trillion of trees and let them in peace and the problem will be solved in 80 years. Or maybe two trillions and will be solved in 40 years... The sooner we start to do it and respect the plants as more than just goat food, the best chance to survive as society in the near future.

Why is this so difficult to understand? Maybe because many "lets plant trees" projects are just logging companies in disguise. Maybe because many people still expect low-effort magical solutions, and charity and free children work for environmental projects. Allocating just the minimum resources possible into building a future to reach the "feel good" point, is stupid. This is not entertainment, is the future of humans.

We need to plant more trees, period. Now. And we need to protect the precious trees that we have. We will need to think about replacing all the trees killed in the Ukraine genocide, for example, not only the buildings. And we will need to start punishing arsonists and "captain chainsaw" wannabee tools. Allowing arsonists or overgrazing just because their grandpas did it, will lead us to a mad max scenery with much better killing machines.

As nikhilsimha says, you can vote.

Nothing you do yourself matters. It's not about what you do as an individual, because your choices are constrained by the large scale infrastructure.

Giving up your car means little, but voting for a vast upgrade to public transportation means a lot. So does voting to redesign the way we build cities and suburbs, because our current streets and zoning are laid out for the assumption of cars.

Reducing your meat consumption means little, but changing the agriculture subsidies makes a difference. Your own habits are a microscopic signal; to shift the economics of it requires a collective reconsideration of who we are -- away from "we are the nation of people who don't eat meatless meals".

Right now those things aren't even on the ballot, because they're hard, and even people who accept climate change are afraid of getting massacred for even suggesting that something hard might be in order. Which is why the #1 thing you can do is send the message: "I will not vote for you if you deny climate change. Belief in science is my top priority and I'm not going to accept your conspiracy theories."

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