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Comment by hashxyz | Hacker News Reader

I am getting sick of seeing the same edgy fatalistic comments every time a climate article is posted. If you are really such a master of the universe that you can predict the future and know it’s gonna be so horrible, then you must also know that the only morally justifiable action for you to take is to end your life right away to become a net-zero hero.

Otherwise why don’t you calm down and entertain the thought that maybe the future won’t suck, and might even be normal or good, just like the present is right now.

Why are you working on technology if you don’t think the future will be great?

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Every people is in my opinion eligible for some sane amount of resource usage on Earth - that is not a problem, the Earth is rich and would have enough to provide for the current population.

But we should not have people that travel with private jets at all, neither should we transport locally easily produced goods across the world due to salary arbitrage, should build small, walkable cities, communities. There are plenty appliances/tools we could easily share and thus not opt for cheaper, low lifetime ones — e.g. how often do you use you drill? Or power washer? Wouldn’t renting/lending it between a few houses be more environmentally responsible? Also, multi-generational houses are not a bad thing if the relation between people is not bad — the elderly get to experience the joy of their grandchildren, parents get “free babysitters”, later on the parents can care for the elderly. It’s how humanity has been since forever, and I believe it would have positive effects on everyone, not just ecology. Also, there should be barely any need for single use plastic packaging besides medicinal use — create standard container dimensions for various kinds of products and create dispensers in supermarkets that take in your previous container, and give you your product in a new one. If you break it/don’t bring it back, you have to buy that again. Yoghurts, drinks, huge swathes of supermarkets could be replaced that way.

The problem is the huge inequality — my Western ass is in huge luxury, when my African counterpart is hungry with barely any potable water. Wouldn’t they also deserve equal treatment? But if everyone were to live in Western lifestyle we would be even worse off. We should strive to cut back a bit on the Western side, and bring up the rest of the world in a sustainable way. We have the tech for that, mostly.

I agree with some of your points about excesses of American lifestyle (where I live), but there is another side to this. A pretty good proxy for wealth is basically how much stuff you can waste and not care about. I can leave all the lights on in my house because electricity is cheap, or I can afford to eat so much delicious food I become overweight and get heart disease.

You could argue that I should turn off the lights, and on that point you might have some ground. But more generally there are many things in my life that I save time on by basically throwing a little money in the trash, and I am very fortunate to have this opportunity. This is on a spectrum and we should obviously not cause obscene long term damage so I can save 2 seconds per day, but we are not at that point yet.

And regarding inequality, it is also on a spectrum, and at some point it is definitely too much, but I don’t think we have necessarily crossed that line. 99% of the people in my city have enough food to eat. And the right amount of inequality is certainly not 0, the only way to achieve that is by killing all life on earth. Some inequality is a natural consequence of the different branches of possibility that people explore with their lives. To the extent that we have anything in our society it’s because we are able to share ideas and cooperate. A society will necessarily always have the have’s and the have-not’s.

Also why are they having kids, why are they buying things, etc. If someone is truly concerned: vote that way, go work on making floating houses and thermal isolation and carbon recapture and leave the rest of us that live normal lives with average carbon usage alone.

Anytime someone that had kids mentions anything about reducing other people's carbon output they should just be ignored. You just created a potentially forever chain of carbon usage that will be exponential. Meanwhile here I am with my "constant" carbon usage to your O(2^n) in perpetuity.

What if you actually can’t predict the future and climate change is actually good? What if having kids is actually a great thing for them and for the world? These are reasonable ideas if you don’t just spend your time doomscrolling on twitter all day.

People talk about the AI singularity but the whole world is a singularity all the time. To model the entire world and predict how everything is going to play out on a social and economic level is obviously impossible. To make impoverishing top-down prescriptions based on that seems criminal. To utilize this storyline as a political mechanism is cruel.

> To model the entire world and predict how everything is going to play out on a social and economic level is obviously impossible.

Sure.

But that's a trite non sequitur entirely orthoganal to the simplicity of the thermodynamics underpinning the cause of climate change.

Ever increasing levels of trapped energy that will increase at an even faster rate once methane and water vapor get seriously involved in the mix unless action is taken to either block the sun or reduce the insulating effects of atmospheric gases.

I agree with your last statement, although it is describing a very simple interaction and I don’t feel certain that we are observing that in action yet. I also don’t know if there are counter-balancing interactions that we aren’t aware of yet.

If humanity does end up accidentally terraforming the planet to get to hot in a positive feedback loop, I believe we will be within a line-of-sight to terraforming it back in the other direction.

Technology has solved all our physical problems so far. Maybe we will seed clouds in the upper atmosphere to reflect a lot of energy back into space. Maybe we will find something useful to do with captured carbon (which doesn’t just release it). It is insane to suggest capitalism won’t solve this problem by the time it actually needs solving, and therefore needs to be shut down (it’s the thing that actually works).

If it takes > 100 years and all the energy of tens of billions of tonnes of fossil fuel to put us in a state of extreme peril then yes, it will at least * take another 100+ years and all the energy of tens of billions of tonnes of fossil fuel to reverse out of that position.

If that's your suggested strategy then I would suggest that we can do better by not going there in the first instance.

* Thanks to the arrow of time, the issue of unbreaking a glass, methane release and other factors it very realistically could take more time and energy to get out of the hole we seem intent upon driving into.

> Technology is for solving problems.

It's not 'magic' though and I have little time for green washing or praying to the technology fairy.

> I would suggest that we can do better by not going there

The problem is that you are recommending we turn off capitalism, which will have serious consequences that are easier to predict than climate change: we will doom the world’s poor people to lives of certain poverty with no hope of upward mobility.

Who recommends turning off capitalism?

But un-restricted capitalism is literally the stereotypical paper clip AI. It will seek out maximal profit at every cost. As per the very Adam Smith, it only works well in small, welll-regulated markets. Let the government do its job, and capitalism its own.

> Who recommends turning off capitalism

The article is about degrowth.

The paperclip thought experiment is a stupid thought experiment. An AI that had the executive functioning to improve its entire substrate (e.g. rewrite the entire TSMC Nvidia chip and software supply chain) would require the same higher order agency that would stop it from destroying the world to turn it into paperclips. It only seems plausible if you spend all your time disembodied from reality browsing lesswrong.

> It is insane to suggest capitalism won’t solve this problem by the time it actually needs solving

That time is now, and it has failed.

But it is crystal clear that we should decrease our current CO2 usage as much as we can, even at the (imo small) price of personal luxury — even if some new technical advantage can solve the problem, we should stop at least speeding towards the cliff, and try to break as much as possible.

You are forgetting just how much bigger the planet is then us.

> That time is now

We diverge on this point and I talked about it in other comments.

> we should decrease our current CO2 usage as much as we can, even at a small price of personal luxury

It’s luxury because we live in the first world. In the 3rd world where most people live (and most people are poor), these policies have catastrophic consequences, such as the Sri Lankan organic farming affair.

> What if you actually can’t predict the future and climate change is actually good?

Is this how rational people react, or is some spiritual response talking from fear?

How can be the depletion of biodiversity, the increase of temperatures and the disappearance of ecosystems that we need to survive "good"?

As a community we do no have a crystal ball to predict the future, but we have science and technology and the predictions from there are clear: it is not good for us, and it is not good for the current species.

The far future, the very far one -- sure -- the are good chances that new ecosystems will appear adapted to the new environments, but those will not be "nice" for our current expectations.

A doing-nothing-and-hoping-for-the-best strategy is a guarantee for massive wars, hunger and suffering, as happen many times in the past (but never in a scale of 7.000.000 population)

Your entire framing of the world is engineered by pessimistic news articles which only tell a small part of the story.

Is loss of biodiversity bad? Maybe. Will we have resurrected most extinct species using jurassic park DNA within the next 500 years? I dunno but if that happened, it would make the current loss of biodiversity into more of a blip than an apocalyptic thing.

The science and technology enterprise is economically motivated. It is pretty good at creating value out of fewer and fewer resources. It is not good at making godlike insights into the far future about the late stage interactions between itself and the physical world. Any definite predictions provided to you are more likely driven by short-term incentives of some political figures.

There is nothing indicating massive wars are coming due to climate change, most of the world is lifting out of poverty not slipping back into it. If the world does heat by 5-10 degrees, we should be focused on making sure indians and africans have enough economic resources to afford air conditioning like we do in rich countries.

What an absolutely bullshit take, honestly I have a hard time reasonably reacting to it, it is so dumb.

We can’t predict the future down to a point, but we can make good, large-scale predictions with good accuracy — global average temperatures will increase and by every prediction, that will have catastrophic results. Period. That’s not some doomer news, that is reality. We can’t predict how individual countries will react, but that is not the question.

I’m sorry man but based on the stuff I’ve worked on and the situations I’ve seen, it just seems more plausible to me that the scientific enterprise tasked with scaring the shit out of everyone is not sampling and unbiased distribution.

What scientific enterprise? You do realize there are plenty of countries/institutions with widely different monetary/political incentives that finance absolutely separate groups to do research?

So unless you believe in some Secret Government that controls everything, it is just a completely naive take that has no basis in reality. We can’t even coordinate a single country’s various, independent incentives even in very authoritative governments — and you believe that every study made is financed with the same incentives? If not, you can surely list reputable studies that call out the fake research, right?

> you can surely list reputable studies

Dude neither of us have ever read a scientific study about climate change. We are both going on bullshit we read online and related to experiences we had in corporate land. Maybe I read more right-leaning stuff so I have a more counter opinion. Don’t pretend any of us are fact checking the magical climate science, we aren’t.

The one thing I actually have firsthand experience with is computational complexity. And after thinking about it for a while, it seems plausible to me that we cannot know the scientific prescriptions we see in negative climate coverage with nearly the definitiveness that they claim.

And it also seems plausible that a lot of people gradually managed to form a doom and gloom committee to find doom and gloom in a noisy world where there aren’t that many definitive answers.

> The one thing I actually have firsthand experience with is computational complexity.

If that's the case then I expect you're well across the Dzhanibekov effect and the fact that the long term arc trajectory of (say) a spinning wingnut can be extremely predictable as its CoG follows the usual equations of motion while its short term tumblings are utterly unpredictable and chaotic.

The key point being that the corase climate model is pretty damn simple in terms of basic thermodynamics.

Heat from below (core), light from above (sun), energy absorbtion in the sea and land, energy transform to heat, heat radiation outwards, some heat entrapment by insulation.

Increased insulation ==> greater heat entrapment, etc.

To be sure the fine details of interplay within and between climatic cells are challenging .. but the long term arc of more and more energy being trapped leading to more heat, more storm energy etc is straighfrward enough that it was first done as a back of an envelope calculation more than a century ago.

If you're demanding an exact time table on what and where will reach what tempreture when .. then you'll be sorely disapointed.

Otherwise its a simple case of we're in the direct path of a massive fully laden train that is ever so slowly derailing.

This makes sense and gives me some things to learn about, I really appreciate it.

If climate science is correct, the one hole I still see is that it doesn’t take into account future improvement in technology, which I think might have some solutions especially when the problem actually threatens an economic player like a 1trillion dollar company. It is basically a choice to believe something good like this can/will happen, so you could call this out as semi religious.

Thank you for engaging with me in the end.

You're welcome, athough to be honest I hadn't been paying attention to individual names, just watching a newest comment scroll and responding to various comments re: climate science (I've been in exploration geophysics for some time).

Looking at some of your responses to my comments:

> The problem is that you are recommending we turn off capitalism

I made no direct recomendation although I suggested various approaches - I'm not sure where on the globe is practicing fully informed free market capitalism but I'd certainly want to regulate it in the same manner as we regulate engines of power to avoid them becoming unbalanced and walking across the floor just as first generation unregulated steam engines did.

From a complex dynamics PoV Adam Smith was a first order basic bitch (as I believe the young people of the day might say).

> we will doom the world’s poor people to lives of certain poverty with no hope of upward mobility.

Mighty white of you to say so, maybe you might want to ask some of the worlds poor what they want.

The people I know that have nothing (I grew up in very outback Australia) want their land back, they want the "developed advanced nations" to stop dumping waste and shit on the land they've cared for the past 40+ thousand years, and other such novel ideas. eg: [1] [2] [3]

Not one has mentioned wanting yourself or others to speak on their behalf.

Of course there are many people across the planet, I wouldn't assume to speak on their behalf - although I did gain some perspective travelling through roughly 2/3rds of the worlds countries in many of the more undeveloped areas.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UKu3bCbFck

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7h9V4aKlJw

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaoSi6RFqsc

It's a bit of a bone of contention that so many of these massive copper and lithium deposits are on indigenous lands.

Perhaps the question you best dwell on is whether endless growth and increasing consumption is really all that certain groups of people seem to think it is.

> If climate science is correct ...

It's 2023, the time for "if" was 40 years ago - are you questioning "If GPS science is correct", "If Magnetotellurics is correct", "If the James Webb telescope actually works", "If the Finite Element Method is real", etc.

> ... it doesn’t take into account future improvement in technology

Nor should it, but of course climate models can be tweaked with "what if scenarios" - what if the suns input could be reduced (outward reflecting bubbles in space twixt earth and sun), what if X million tonnes per annumn of C02 can be captured and sequested 'somehow', what if we build out thousands of acres of solar PV and mass produce green ammonia to offset the climate effects of the Haber–Bosch process, etc.

'Climate science' contains multitudes after all: https://phys.org/news/2023-07-family-trees-relationships-cli...

Still, it's good that you seem to want to learn more.

Nobody has ever realistically thought that real world problems are easy.

Okay, so I'll try to explain how does global/troposphere warming works:

The earth must radiate all the energy it gets from the sun (else we break physics).

A third of the sun's radiation is reflected directly.

The rest have to be radiated. Calculation show that the temperature needed to radiate the excess energy is 155K. Also, plank's law make that this radiation is mostly infrared.

The atmosphere (GHG concentration especially) makes that the point of emission of the energy is not the earth surface, but high up in the troposphere. The temperature this point need to reach is 155K. To reach that, the point below has to reach 156K, the one below 157... (it's not really discrete values, and it's not really temperature but energy, but I'm both simplifying and explaining in a language I never used for physics or math before).

So, rising the number of Co2 molecules at that altitude (and especially higher) will move the point of emission up. But that new point of emission isn't at 155K yet! So for a while, the earth will absorb more energy than what it's emitting, until the new point of emissions reach 155K.

Its high school physics tbh.

So basically the balancing point at which CO2-based heating stops is bounded by this 155K number, which I’m assuming relates to something really hot and bad on the surface. This means that with just this model we will all die.

Can we not just seed clouds to reflect lots of energy back into space though? Maybe that is a stupid idea, but I could come up with 10 ideas like that and maybe someone could come up with an idea like that, but which actually works.

The temperature on the surface depends on the altitude the surplus heat is emitted. This altitude is variable but is constantly increasing as Co2 concentration at high altitude rises (it rises by osmosis, and basically the current concentration is what was on the surface 20 years ago).

We have to issues:

we don't know how the feedback loops work: we are jumping into the unknown, we have no data to predict the risks: the only thing we know is that between the last ice age (1km ice sheet over Canada, Sweden) and the climate we had for 10000 years, until 1850, the difference in global temperature was 3,5K (2% increase).

The second issue: the transition lasted 10000 to 20000 years. We are on a real, really fast track and making the same transition in 100/200 years.

Now my opinion : we aren't doomed as a specie. In fact, I'm pretty sure mammals can thrive in jurassic era temperatures. But I do expect a lot of death because the transition is way, way to fast. We are unprepared. And a lot of species will disappear. Also Zooplankton is dying because marine CO2 concentration is too high and the ocean is too acid for zooplankton to form shells from CaCO, which is an issue caused by CO2 but unrelated to tropospheric warming.

Climate engineering is way harder than that (we want to avoid acid rain, reducing direct sunlight will reduce photosynthesis, so as long as we have famine, we want to avoid it too. Augmenting the albedo on the surface is an OK option in hot countries).

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