Deadly global heatwaves undeniably result of climate crisis, scientists show
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Understandably, people don't want to give up their existing comforts and habits.
Understandably, people that don't have these comforts feel its only fair that they too get access to them.
Understandably, people don't want to see wind or solar parks or other intrusive installations in their backyard.
Understandably, complex and less that 100% certain science tackling long-term effects and phenomena will be questioned by people with limited trust to institutions of tarnished authority.
People just want the magic tree of energy driven consumption to go on as this is the dominant model of a "fulfilling" life.
What is brewing is a toxic cocktail of denial, blame shifting, panic, snake oil salesmen, speculators etc.
We certainly haven't seen the end of history.
> People just want the magic tree
Most probably do. I don't. You do.
If you frame it like that, climate change could be even seen as some sort of salvation : Soon, it’ll be the uniting “enemy” that humanity has to face and beat if it wants to continue to exist. We have to cooperate, and we have to become better beings to overcome this tremendous challenge.
And if you overcome it, and leave a better world to your children, is that not purposeful?
https://solar-power-now.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/bette...
Soon, someone will beat you over the head wih arguments like "you're a hypocrite for using computer to make a post on HN" and that you should be grateful for your air conditioner (which I don't use) and that if you lived 70 years ago your head would've fallen off by now, etc etc...
It's the credible part that I have never heard any good results for. Clearly almost anything I can do as an individual (other than science or politics) is not going to have any kind of influence and large scale inter-national agreements haven't exactly led to much.
So if you want to join this up as a fight, at first we must know how to fight and we must know that it has a reasonable chance of success.
Educate yourself, and educate others. Fight ignorance and consumerism. Fight those who're making it worse.
> Clearly almost anything I can do as an individual is not going to have any kind of influence
Those in a position of power would like you to believe that. Because this viewpoint preserves the status quo.
All social justice movements in history started with a few individuals loudly demanding changes while being ridiculed by the masses, whose own lives they were trying to improve.
A tsunami is made up of many drops together. Be the change you want to see in the world, and all of that.
> we must know that it has a reasonable chance of success
We now know that nobody will solve it for us, certainly not the politicians or the corporations, until we loudly start demanding change. Meanwhile, we should prepare for the worst while simultaneously trying to prevent the worst from happening.
It may not work out in the end, as shown in the movie 'Don't Look Up.' The protagonists are sitting after the lost fight, having dinner while the extinction event is happening. Their last words (if I remember correctly) are: "I'm glad we tried.".
Rationally, that is the thing to do.
All predictive models agree that temperatures are not going to decrease during the following decades. We should be organizing the largest human migration in history, and instead we are wasting time on comfort solutions that give people the illusion to do something while accomplishing exactly nothing.
Seems over the course of human history humans have firmly marched in the direction of making life more comfortable. You are going to have a hard time convincing humanity to go against their nature.
In fact the modern materialistic lifestyle is probably an exception rather than historical rule. For most of history religious beliefs were uniting people and creating solace despite the more arduous existence.
The uniqueness of our condition is the scale of required change (global, spanning both avid consumer populations and deprived ones), the speed of required change (a few decades), the complex interplay with technological solutions and the rigidity/monoculture of economic systems.
Not clear how all this will play out.
But I've also lost hope on that. After all I would have thought the rise of Nazism in Germany would have provided us a historical lesson. Less than 100 years later and that lesson appears to be lost on many people.
I am also very tired of big corps polluting like crazy and then shifting blame towards the customers, especially wherever there is no "greener" choice. New pipelines get built to send oil to plastic factories, yet you hear only "advice" to consume less plastic directed to the customer. The real polluters never ever get mentioned, yet we are asked to switch to plastic straws, as if they make any difference against thousands of cubic meters of plastic produced every day.
The rules of our society are dictated by corporations and money. We're enabling those corporation with our purchasing habits.
Btw, paper straws are not that much better, neither for us or the environment (they're coated with PFAS).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00456...
[1] I really don’t get the paper straw thing. They’re fine today and they’re going to improve over time.
That may be good to your conscience, but you realise that you have not tackled the problem at all, do you?
If you really want to have an impact, try and achieve a concrete result: for example, help someone relocate from India to Canada!
The question I think we should consider is, if giving up these habits is so critical to saving humanity, why are they so cheap? The problem is fundamental to the system, there is no way to dig ourselves out of this hole.
Because the real costs were/are pushed off to the future, instead of being paid up-front. The real cost should have included the price of fixing the damage caused in the extraction/production/shipping/use/disposal of the product.
The cost will be paid. It only gets more expensive with time.
As a people I have to watch the Amazon being chopped down and burned and coal usage being at an all time high, while methane is spewed out by leaking coal seam plants and some how it's something I'm doing wrong?
Imagine how people in Africa feel about all this...we worry about AI wiping out humanity but we're doing a pretty good job ourselves....
Say what you will about saving developer time, but should we maybe think about these resources too?
We cannot unsee that a lot of work can be accomplished without pushing around the planet our clumsy bodies in massive exoskeletons.
> I have to watch the Amazon being chopped down
https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation
The research suggests that by far the largest driver of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has been driven by the expansion of pasture land for beef production, soy is likely to have played at least some role in the loss of forest.
More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/weve-lost-35-pe...
The Southern Brazilian Amazon has lost 30 percent of its forests, and if the destruction doesn’t stop, the area will lose 56 percent of its forests by 2050. Environmental scientists argue the loss of the Amazon will have a global impact ...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/19/colombia...
Cattle, not coca, drive deforestation of the Amazon in Colombia – report
https://phys.org/news/2022-08-global-forest-area-capita-decr...
New study finds global forest area per capita has decreased by over 60%
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/jun/02/t...
The multinational companies that industrialised the Amazon rainforest
Ranching is the biggest driver of deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions after land grabbing, with which it is often closely associated. By 2018, the Brazilian Amazon had lost 741,759 sq km (about 286,000 sq miles) of its original forest cover, mainly due to agricultural expansion. This accelerated during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, when forest clearance increased by 59.5%, the fastest rate since at least 1988. More than 2bn trees were cut or burned.
The soya sector is another powerhouse in the region. Between 2014 and 2020, five multinational food companies – Bunge, Cargill, ADM, Amaggi and Louis Dreyfus – extracted soya worth $18bn on global markets ...
https://earth.org/major-companies-responsible-for-deforestat...
13 Major Companies Responsible for Deforestation
1. Cargill (soy & beef)
3. Wilmar International Ltd. (soy)
4. Walmart (palm oil, pulp and paper, soy, and beef)
5. JBS (beef)
6. IKEA
9. Starbucks
10. McDonald’s
11. Yum! Brands (KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell)
13. Ahold (meat)
https://news.mongabay.com/2023/05/3-million-hectares-of-colo...
3 million hectares of Colombian Amazon deforested for illegal pasture: Study
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/02/more-tha...
More than 800m Amazon trees felled in six years to meet beef demand
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/
Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/15/4110/htm
Which Diet Has the Least Environmental Impact on Our Planet? A Systematic Review of Vegan, Vegetarian and Omnivorous Diets
https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-opportunity-costs-food
What are the carbon opportunity costs of our food?
https://www.wri.org/insights/without-changing-diets-agricult...
Without Changing Diets, Agriculture Alone Could Produce Enough Emissions to Surpass 1.5°C of Global Warming
... and many more ...
> some how it's something I'm doing wrong?
You have to answer that.
I'm building furniture myself and not using Ikea.
I never go to Starbucks and I've had McDonalds probably 5 times in ten years.
This reinforces my point, millions of other people go to McDonalds each day because it's cheap food, I can't judge them for it.
So me never eating McDonalds and building my own furniture from recycled timber means hardly anything and the rain forest is still fucked.
The US Government should do more about it. Not me.
Soy it is then ;)
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2019.0003...
Soybean is one of the primary ingredients in poultry diets ...
77% of soy is for animal feed (source higher in the thread)
> So me never eating it means hardly anything and the rain forest is still fucked. ... Not me.
> The US Government should do more about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
Be well.
I'll assume you're a vegetarian, and you're probably eating legumes and the legumes you're eating are exported from a country where people cannot afford them. This was an issue I had with being vegetarian, one, I was hungry and tired a lot of the time and I needed a lot more time to prepare meals to feel better. Second, most legumes I had access too where taken from India, Mexico and South Amerca, thus people in those countries were going without.
I'll continue to eat food...and if I can't get access to it readily, I'll take it by other means.
So I get it, you're being smug, but you're dismissing the fact that people need to eat food. This should have priority over burning fossil fuels for energy.
You've not refuted shit with your graphs.
McDonalds isn't going to shut down for you. They' just drop their prices to lure people back.
Be well.
One takes 77% of the land, the other one 7%. We have so many animals to feed, that we need to deforest the Amazon (that was the discussion about, wasn't it) to be able to feed them all.
Just by those numbers alone it's clear that without the need to feed those armies of domestic animals we'd been able to slash international trade of those foods significantly. Were we not growing corn and seeds for animals, we'd have a lot of space to feed our populations with veggies.
> which have chopped down many of their forests, such as the USA
Again, if our needs were not that high, we wouldn't need to cut anything, but we'd be able to regrow them.
> I'll assume you're a vegetarian
No, vegan. And by choosing to eat legumes and peas I'm using 10-100x less land compared to the regular carnist.
> an issue I had with being vegetarian, one, I was hungry and tired
Sometimes people try to remove meat and eating just the rest. Or when being vegan, to be a fruitarian or eat raw veggies. Or they eat just the processed stuff. Beer, cocacola and oreos are vegan, but not healthy and cannot sustain you for long.
You have to make sure you're eating properly. In this day and age there are caloric tables online, meal plans, sites full of recipes, studies etc. etc. But let's not pretend it's overly complicated.
25% of your plate should be proteins (lentils, beans, tofu, tempeh, seitan, peas ...), 25% whole grains (brown rice, quinoa, whole wheat bread, whole grain pasta), 30% vegetables (variety of colors to get different nutriets), 10-15% fruit (apple, banana, berries), 5-10% fats (avocados, nuts, seeds, or a drizzle of olive oil).
That's it. No vegans think twice about it when cooking. Variety is a key for filling and healthy diet. With such diet you won't feel hungry.
I did it wrong too, few decades ago, turned vegetarian and ate as badly as my girlfriend did. I couldn't do it longer than few months, then ate meat for many years again, in big quantities, until I've realized how big problem the animal ag is for the planet and for survival of our children. Then I've learned cooking vegan and have not been hungry or feeling deprived of anything since :)
> I'll continue to eat food...and if I can't get access to it readily, I'll take it by other means
See ... animal ag will leave us scorched earth and gives us very real chance of an environmental collapse. Then people with such attitudes will fight for the scraps. I'd prefer if we'd tried to prevent such future.
> you're dismissing the fact that people need to eat food
You're dismissing plants as not being food. We eat meat for 4 reasons, and for 4 reasons only: tradition, convenience, culture, and taste. We already get something like 63% proteins and 82% of calories from plants.
> You've not refuted shit with your graphs.
Those graphs (and studies) are better than you think.
Atomising society from the late 70s to today might end up being not only a major historical mistake but a catastrophic one.
Social bonds and ubuntu (finding meaning in others) is something we naturally do. It doesnt take particular superhuman virtue. The question is whether there is an escape path away from the black hole trajectory we are currently falling-in and towards a more meaningful, sustainable and balanced future.
Sure.
> Understandably, people that don't have these comforts feel its only fair that they too get access to them.
Yep.
> Understandably, people don't want to see wind or solar parks or other intrusive installations in their backyard.
...Sorry, you lost me.
Particularly with repeating the basically-propaganda that industrial-scale wind or solar installations would be literally in people's backyards.
Now, I can't speak for you, but every wind or solar farm I've seen people opposing—and I live in the middle of farm country, which means both lots of wide-open spaces for such things, and lots of conservative people who think they're (sometimes literally) the Devil's work—were well away from their actual houses. They were solar farms on the neighboring farmer's land (so, nearly a mile from their house), or windmills Anywhere Within Their Sight Lines.
I'm sure there are some places where someone wants to install an industrial wind turbine that would be close enough to someone's house that they would, say, be concerned it might fall on it—those things are tall. But that's an incredibly rare case.
And frankly, I can't see any legitimate reason to object to someone else building a wind farm on their property. I have zero sympathy for people who are more concerned with their own "pristine views" or property values than they are with sustainable energy generation.
So it seems to me that your apparent insoluble dilemma falls apart as soon as you take away the entitlement and short-sightedness of some of the richest and most arrogant among us.
But we already have growing evidence that many new frictions show up and they are not obviously short-sighted.
E.g., land based wind-turbines might be on pristine hilltop locations, need access roads that might require deforestation. Geothermal units might create their own local pollution etc.
The gigantic scale of required alternatives if we are to maintain current energy use patterns will only increase tensions.
These are further compounded by the economic and control aspects of that transition (who benefits directly): eg building an installation that aims to serve datacenters and a global social media noise instead of powering the local community.
> Gareth Redmond-King, at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit in the UK, said: “As we keep burning fossil fuels, we fuel ever worse climate impacts. It won’t stop until we cut emissions to net zero. Politicians who attempt to delay [climate] measures are locking in more of these extremes.”
To be honest, this kind of extremism is turning me off from the whole climate movement. Emissions are never going to be cut to net zero. We have billions of people that still need to industrialize. People are not just gonna roll over and turn into cavemen. We have a global trading network that needs to be kept up. Politicians and corporations are not gonna do anything about it, maybe a meaningless tax.
I think the only way out of this mess is innovation, not net zero emissions.
Turns out we already have nuclear power, so there is little need for innovation to get to zero emissions. Just need to get over our collective irrational fears and get building.
Even the baby steps we're making towards this are leaps compared to the degrowth crowd solutions.
I guess we’ll end up A/C’ing the fields of dying crops too?
This is your interpretation of my perspective. I can do that also; the people dying of heat exhaustion in India should just decouple from the global trade network and go live in caves like in the olden days.
> I guess we’ll end up A/C’ing the fields of dying crops too?
Maybe? Or engineer heat resistant crops. Or figure out a different way to feed billions of people. If you think the only solution to climate change is net zero emissions on a global level, I'm not jealous of your imagination.
This will happen, as it is well within the reach of even smaller state actors (and even sub-state) and once you get a wet-bulb event killing thousands in, say India, that country will not have a choice.
And then we'll have to get crackin' building those nuclear power plants (as well as building out solar and wind and geothermal and tidal and storage). Because as another poster pointed out quite correctly: global warming is bad (but manageable), but pre-industrial society is far, far worse.
Nobody's talking about that. Your position will get us there.
> Or seed the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide
That's not solving the situation, that's temporarily mitigating some effects with poisons for a short term and at the same time emitting a ton of emissions from a lot of flights.
> global warming is bad (but manageable)
Warming, or better climate change, is only one of the symptoms of the overshoot. We've managed almost zero, nil, zilch in past 50 years (coal is still at 82%).
> but pre-industrial society is far, far worse
Calling mitigation strategies return to pre-industrial society ... i don't have words for that. But if we don't start solving it, and fast (yesterday was late), the nature will solve the problem for us. One way is better than the other.
If you're interested where else you're wrong, you should really spend some 30 mins here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPb_0JZ6-Rc
> That's not solving the situation, that's temporarily mitigating some effects
Yep, I clearly identified this is a temporary mitigating measure to buy us time for the real solution, which is the following:
>> And then we'll have to get crackin' building those nuclear power plants (as well as building out solar and wind and geothermal and tidal and storage).
But it is a mitigating measure that will work and will allow us to get to the actual solution, which is rapidly building out nuclear power (and others).
And of course, if you know that this scenario is possible, then you probably also start to understand why governments aren't as panicky about the whole situation as you seem to be.
And yes, the mitigation is for the most immediate short-term effect, the rise in temperature. We will still have to get the Carbon out of the atmosphere, for example to avoid Ocean acidification. But we have more time for that. And it will likely need quite a bit of energy (see the nukes).
And no, not going to listen to 30 minutes of someone ranting about the collapse of civilisation. We had the club of Rome with the same message in the 70s, and they were comically wrong. If there is something of actual substance, please make the point yourself here. So far you haven't.
In particular, I am still waiting for even a hint of shadow of an argument how building out nuclear power and other non-fossil energy sources, while at the same time mitigating the worst effects of global warming, will get us to a pre-industrial society.
So not ecosystems restoration (habitats restoration, reforestation and afforestation, wetlands restoration, streams and rivers restoration, sustainable land management, conservation and protected areas, plant-based diets, ...), but attempts at geoengineering with aerosols like sulfur dioxide, or mirrors in space, or whitening the clouds. The potential problems are enormous.
Solar radiation management is also an ungovernable technology. Even if we knew how to reflect the sun's rays, that means deciding on what is an international "best temperature". So what if cooling down the US means massive drought in China? What if China deploying this causes rainfall in India to drop? The Earth's climate is interconnected and block the sun's rays in one area affects another.
It seems obvious to me that this technology could cause massive conflict (violent maybe) over what is the best way to use it.
Anything to avoid doing the right thing.
> We had the club of Rome with the same message in the 70s, and they were comically wrong
There you're wrong again.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332655753_Limits_Re...
"We unravel the arguments that have raged for forty years in its aftermath and explore more recent findings which relate to the original hypothesis. There is unsettling evidence that society is still following the ‘standard run’ of the original study – in which overshoot leads to an eventual collapse of production and living standards. Detailed recent studies suggests that production of some key resources may only be decades away. Certain other limits to growth – less visible in the 1972 report – present equally pressing challenges to modern society. We highlight, in particular, recent work on our proximity to ‘planetary boundaries’ and illustrate this through the challenge of meeting the Paris Agreement on climate change. We also explore the economic challenge of a ‘secular stagnation’. If the Club of Rome is right, the next few decades are decisive."
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-08-16/revisiting-the...
https://advisory.kpmg.us/content/dam/advisory/en/pdfs/2021/y...
"I conducted a data update to Limits to Growth (LtG), best known from the 1972 bestseller that forecasted a scenario of global societal collapse occurring around the present time if humanity did not alter its priorities. Empirical data comparisons since then indicated that the world was still heading for collapse. My objectives were to examine whether this was still the case based on the most recent data, and whether there was opportunity left to change that trajectory. My research benefited from improved data availability, and included a scenario and two variables that had not been part of previous comparisons. I collected data from academia, (non- )government agencies, United Nations entities, and the World Bank. This was plotted along four LtG scenarios spanning a range of technological, resource, and societal assumptions. From these graphs and two quantitative accuracy measures, I found that the scenarios aligned closely with observed global data, which is a testament to the LtG work done decades ago. The two scenarios aligning most closely indicate a halt in growth over the next decade or so, which puts into question the usability of continuous growth as humanity’s goal in the 21st century. Both scenarios also indicate subsequent declines, but only one—the scenario in which declines are caused by pollution, including greenhouse gas pollution—depicts a collapse pattern. The scenario with the smallest declines aligned least with empirical data, however, absolute differences were rarely big and sometimes insignificant. This suggests that it’s almost, but not yet, too late for society to change course."
> If there is something of actual substance, please make the point yourself here
You're the one who should decide whether to stay ignorant or learn more on your own. You can't reasonably expect that someone will compress such complex and diverse topics into few social media comments. Few hours of attention and learning could possibly completely change your viewpoint ;)
> how building out nuclear power and other non-fossil energy sources
I'm not against that, and I'd tend to agree with you on that. But there are people who are more knowledgeable about energy (i'm more interested in biodiversity and agriculture) and more sceptical of the idea / possibility. One of them is Sid Smith ... you'd find those arguments in a well known talk of his https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WPB2u8EzL8
>I'm not against that, and I'd tend to agree with you on that.[..]
Glad you agree with my central point. Not exactly sure what all the ranting is about, then. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I haven't heard of Sid Smith and am not sure why I should have. Apparently some obscure random retired math professor who rants about collapse. I checked the video where he talks about nuclear, and there he just repeats talking points that are either wrong, irrelevant, or both. So same old same old. (I used to vote green, but them being instrumental in the worst environmental/economic and foreign policy decision of the last 50 years in Germany is putting a damper on that). Not sure why I should listen to the rest, but I might just for curiosity, though given what I've seen it is unlikely to be substantive or enlightening.
> So not ecosystems restoration. ... anything to avoid doing the right thing
Where did I say that? Nowhere, that's where. Please keep your straw men to yourself.
> Solar radiation management [problems]
And where did I write this was "good"? That's right: nowhere again. I said "bad, but manageable". And we know that it is manageable because we actually have data. Lots of it. From quite a number of volcanic eruptions.
Again, is this good? No. But it does mean that the doomsday scenarios people keep painting are wrong. The earth will not become uninhabitable due to runaway global warming, because we know how to stop that. And again, the ways of stopping it are certainly less than ideal, but they exist and are even fairly predictable.
Regarding the Club of Rome and LoG: sorry, but no. Their original claim was resource exhaustion on a fairly tight timeline, and resources are not becoming exhausted, and certainly not on anything like their timeline. See the Simon / Ehrlich wager, which put that theory to the test, and was lost in all resource categories.
And no, a political position statement by the UK green + labour parties is not evidence. The KPMG piece that claims to validate the original actually does nothing of the sort. In fact, it has to completely discard the original model's predictions:
"Around 1990, it became clear that non-renewable resources, particularly fossil fuels, had turned out to be more plentiful than assumed in the 1972 BAU scenario. Randers therefore postulated that not resource scarcity, but pollution, especially from greenhouse gases, would cause the halt in growth. "
This is in the "Updates to the LtG" section. Some "update". LOL.
"Remember the stuff we said about resources becoming depleted? Yeah, that was complete bunk. We now know that it is pollution. How do we know this? Well, because of the perfect forecasting record of our models that we just had to discard"
You can't make this stuff up.
See:
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/economic-growth...
And you still haven't told me how "my approach", the one you agree with, leads to going to pre-industrial civilisation.
I never said that you did. I did, and you're taking it out of context.
>> Solar radiation management [problems]
> And where did I write this was "good"? That's right: nowhere again. I said "bad, but manageable"
You're misquoting youself.
You said that climate warming is bad, but manageable. And I don't agree with you there.
> See the Simon / Ehrlich wager
This bet was over a relatively short timescale and on a very narrow selection of resources, and so doesn't definitively prove or disprove the larger issues raised by the Club of Rome.
> You can't make this stuff up. See:
Lomborg views are very controversial, and even this article has some serious problems.
- resource abundance - while it's true that predictions about running out of certain resources haven't come to pass thanks to technological innovation and more efficient usage, this doesn't mean that all resources are infinite or that extraction doesn't have environmental costs. Extraction and use of fossil fuels, for instance, is one of the leading causes of climate change
- innovation - innovation isn't guaranteed to solve all problems, dependence on it to resolve issues of resource scarcity or environmental degradation might be risky
- economic growth - exponential economic growth is unsustainable in the long term given the finite planet
- pesticides and organic farming - he oversimplifies the issues, organic farming isn't solely about avoiding pesticides - it's also about soil health, biodiversity, and long-term sustainability
- pollution: is still a major problem worldwide, particularly in developing nations, he doesn't address climate change (a form of pollution) with poses massive risks at all
> "my approach", the one you agree with
You're misquoting me again. I tend to agree that nuclear should be a part of the solution. However, based on the opinions of more knowledgeable experts in the field, I'm not entirely convinced that it's possible or feasible on the scale and timeline required.
I'm not with you on your stance on solar radiation management. In my opinion, it's not a solution at all, and it would be extremely irresponsible and almost stupid to even attempt it.
Sure, I don't have any sources to back up my claims - just as you don't, and that's fine. That's why the White House is calling for further studies, not the implementation of the idea, while a number of experts express serious concerns and strong reservations about this "solution".
Dismissing SRM technology, Prof Joeri Rogelj of Imperial College, London, called it “irresponsible, dangerous and a threat to the manageability” of our survival, saying: “It is not a solution but an extremely dangerous band-aid that covers up the global warming problem without healing it, creating a false and unwarranted sense of climate safety while the core of the problem continues to fester.”
Imagination is after all, all in your head.
All things intelligent exist in one's brain and imagination is how each piece of everyone's understanding of the world began.
The social solution requires a removal of freedom. The removal of freedom will involve a war. I would say the risk tolerance isn't black and white.
No? Then clearly there’s a path to getting people onboard with fighting climate change, it just requires the right messaging and education
In other words, a group of truckers is enough threat to social order(in Canada) to call in a law that replaced the War Measures Act before it.
This was over a little needle in the arm. The events are not reasonably comparable in the slightest. It is an incredibly difficult thing to become carbon neutral in today's society.
What are you doing right now to fight climate change? I live my words and would consider myself carbon 'negative'. My actions reach outside of myself to positively influence the carbon impact of others.
Also, everyone does precisely nothing. There is no single thing in the universe which enjoys unanimous agreement.
The idea that the right messaging and communication is going to fix climate change is childish. It ignores reality. It is fantasy. I don't intend this in an aggressive or mean manner, it is my assessment of your proposal.
I love how you just throw stuff in my bag. I'm not willing to bet our world, nor can I do that. What I am not willing to do is make my family suffer today so that the people of the world can, tomorrow, get together and sing kumbaya, magically deindustrializing while preserving standards of living.
To me, the risky move seems to be to push away from the magic technical solution and towards the magic humans deciding to do worse for themselves solution.
Did you know half of all human emissions since 1750% were released in the last 30 years?
Even going back to 60s levels would do us well.
Moving back to simple foods instead of ultra processing. Embracing nuclear power. Driving less and flying less. All better options than sticking our heads in the sand and hoping some country geo engineers the earth in the future.
Because climate change is an existential human challenge, we all need to pitch in.
There were 3 billion people in the world in 1960, now we are 8 billion.
What about standards of living on the planet in the 60s? Not just the US and some parts of Europe. How will this be spread evenly on the planet? Do we ask China and India to get back to 60s levels? Do we ask Africa to not make any steps towards industrialization? Does US get back to lower levels than 60s so that emerging nations are on an equal step?
> Moving back to simple foods instead of ultra processing.
Why do I pay almost double for 'bio' foodstuff? Why do people today choose to buy ultra processed instead of simple foods? How do we feed 10 billion mouths in the future without processing? There's a reason we have an abundance of cheap nutrients.
> Embracing nuclear power.
This is innovation, which was my initial point.
> Driving less and flying less.
Who decides how much we can drive, and fly? Can I go visit my grand-dad in the countryside? Can Bill Gates go to the climate conference on the other side of the world to scold us?
> Because climate change is an existential human challenge, we all need to pitch in.
We all need to pitch in with innovative solutions or with votes for politicians that push for innovative solutions, not by closing our AC and voting for degrowth.
> All better options than sticking our heads in the sand and hoping some country geo engineers the earth in the future.
I'm pushing for actively trying to develop new technologies to mitigate the strategy and you are fighting against the viewpoint that we should put our heads in the sand and wait for a solution... I think this thread has run its course.
And some of them consume very little, and a western minority consumes much more than in 1960.
https://futureearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/great_acc...
> Why do I pay almost double for 'bio' foodstuff? Why do people today choose to buy ultra processed instead of simple foods
Why is healthy food so expensive in America? Blame the Farm Bill that Congress always renews to make burgers cheaper than salad
https://fortune.com/2023/07/21/why-healthy-food-so-expensive...
The 2023 Farm Bill is projected to spend $700 billion over the next five years, with powerful industry lobbyists directing funds to enrich themselves at the expense of agricultural communities, human health, animal welfare, and environmental sustainability.
Most Americans have never heard of this massive omnibus bill, which Congress reauthorizes every five or so years, yet it impacts us every day. It shapes our food system–from subsidizing factory farms to funding food and nutrition programs, and it is why burgers are artificially cheap and salads cost more than they should.
> with votes for politicians that push for innovative solutions
Where did that got us in the last 50 years? Still business as usual.
> actively trying to develop new technologies to mitigate the strategy
You have one of the 4 classic viewpoints, pretty understandable, but not really realistic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPb_0JZ6-Rc
Our technology is a hell of a lot more efficient nowadays so hopefully these the answers to these questions will be uncomfortable rather than unbearable.
> Why do people today choose to buy ultra processed instead of simple foods?
Advertising. UPF allows companies to add value to food by making it more addictive/less filling/etc. See the obesity epidemic.
Whole foods take less fossil fuel to create -- less fossil fuel to process, less to transport, etc. They're not even that much more expensive.
> Who decides how much we can drive, and fly? Can I go visit my grand-dad in the countryside? Can Bill Gates go to the climate conference on the other side of the world to scold us?
The expense of how much fuel costs. The social stigma of driving a gas guzzling truck.
> I'm pushing for actively trying to develop new technologies to mitigate the strategy and you are fighting against the viewpoint that we should put our heads in the sand and wait for a solution... I think this thread has run its course.
It's sad that you don't see what you're doing for what it is. You started this thread by effectively saying you have A/C so technology will save us. What happens when heatwaves disable the electric system? When we have power outages due to climate changed caused storms? Will technology save us then?
My whole point is you are being too blase about the existential threat we face. You're not even a minority viewpoint. I hope we don't all come to regret this attitude.
We don't have to wait for it appearing.
We just have to build it out.
But we don't, because of irrational fears.
Well, actually countries are starting to turn around and re-investing in nuclear, because governments know that this is the only viable solution.
If people do survive in the Sahara, we can do that, too.
This country has half a million people alone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Sahara
Here's the executive summary:
> It is as vast as the United States and so arid that most bacteria cannot survive there. Its loneliness is so extreme it is said that migratory birds will land beside travelers, just for the company. William Langewiesche came to the Sahara to see it as its inhabitants do, riding its public transport, braving its natural and human dangers, depending on its sparse sustenance and suspect hospitality. From his journey, which took him across the desert’s hyperarid core from Algiers to Dakar, he has crafted a contemporary classic of travel writing.
What was your point, again?
There is nothing we can do to help them now, apart from shipping them A/C units, diesel generators and diesel fuel to burn.
Although we are making progress, that progress does not appear to be fast enough to avoid the "wet bulb events" that others have described (and linked to sources).
So that is going to happen. And once it happens, the governments where this happened will have a choice: protect their citizens or let them die.
What do you think will happen?
And I am sure I am not alone.
There are tribal societies that have been stable for tens of thousands of years. Modernity is an inherently unstable system.
With which average lifespan and enduring what pain? What was the solution for, say, a tooth going south?
Medicine was ugly back then. Between 1% to 1.5% of all the woman giving birth would die while doing so in 1600. Something insane like that. We've literally gone down at least 30x.
Also back then women couldn't really decide whether they'd become pregnant or not.
At 17 years old or so I got a medical emergency: doctor diagnosed an appendicitis that was missed a few days earlier for I was under strong painkillers. When it was diagnosed a few hours later I was undergoing surgery.
In 1600 I could very well have died of peritonitis / infection without the surgery. I see all those years I lived since then as pure win, thanks to modernity.
It comes at a cost but I live better than any king has ever lived (except for those who live/lived in modern times).
I had a terrible fever when I was 3, I probably wouldn't have made it if it wasn't for modern health care. Beyond that, though, I've only needed modern healthcare for ailments caused by modernity: Tooth problems from sugar and not chewing enough, and also I was hit by a car.
Talking about cruel healthcare practices, though, can you imagine being on your back with a tube shoved down your throat for weeks while you slowly suffocate to death like some of those peeps in the COVID wards?
3 of my 4 grandparents are dead, and all but one died in slow, drawn out and excruciatingly painful ways.
We kinda do. We just have an irrational fear of it.
The fact that we let irrational fears override real and pressing problems is an indicator that the problems aren't perceived as real and pressing enough.
Yet.
You are talking about nuclear, aren't you? I agree with you that nuclear is part of the solution. The pragmatic in me just insists that we cut drastically fossil fuel consumption after enough nuclear reactors are in operation.
And that seems like a good idea.
Well, in parallel. There’s quite a bit we can do while we build, but we need to build.
For example, biking more for short journeys not just cuts emissions, it is also healthy, makes you happier, and reduces congestion.
Having company doesn't mean that preference isn't selfish and short-sighted though.
Here are some of the planetary costs of the industrial revolution:
> The contemporary rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than the background extinction rate
> 7% of all species on Earth may have been lost already
> only around 3% of the planet's terrestrial surface is ecologically and faunally intact
> roughly one million species face extinction within decades as the result of human actions
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
If you believe Sky Daddy only cares about humans, or that we out-value all other life on the planet because we invented rocketry and antibiotics, then I guess this is all fine. But I don't, and I'm not alone either.
Just as we can have capitalism without poverty, we can have industry without apocalypse. It'll upset some extraordinarily wealthy fossil fuel people, but they're the ones who put us in this mess.
Just how? I've not yet heard a proposal for a plan that is expected to work.
Yes I am aware. Tragedy of the commons. Game theory. The solution to our global problem is not me stopping the AC, neither is it all of us stopping our ACs.
So yeah, I'm pessimistic about how climate change will unfold.
It's probably not even a black and white thing honestly. For the person dealing with unlivable temperatures in India it might feel one way. For the person living in Siberia that just got a couple of hectares of farmland it might feel differently.
I'd wager a bet that in the future, more people will be impacted by war caused by climate change than the actual climate change effects, if we cannot solve the issue technologically.
Yes, it's adding to the problem, very little. Yes, it's helping you, very much. No, you don't have an alternative.
I sincerely wish you it doesn't break. Keep cool!
But nature doesn't wait for petty plans to complete.
In the US there are still people who don't believe COVID 19 existed or that it took out over a million people. Or that the US population is <400 million people and that semi trucks filled with dead Americans across the country was ever a problem.
Propaganda makes it much much easier for bad faith industrial actors to sabotage an entire country, or I suppose even the world. Pump and dumping civilization has got to be an extraterrestrial meme or something...
Even in my Western rich country a lot of people have never been in a airplane.
Article says 61,000 people in Europe died in the 2022 heatwaves. Something like 60,000,000 people die annually (I'd guess about 6 million in Europe) [0]. How much comfort and profit were we meant to sacrifice to prevent that rounding error? Air pollution from coal plants that could directly kill people is a better argument for phasing them out than these heat waves.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-per-year
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
With this is the same, but with years and decades, by the time you notice visible enough symptoms it may be too late to stop all that is coming in the delivery train, but you can still have some margin to mitigate some of the damage.
It’s not a system with so direct action and immediate reaction, things build up, accumulate, trigger feedback loops, and that in a scale that we won’t be able to stop by delaying action.
I really wonder what kind of people HN'er are sometimes.
It's wild that you'd get this:
> You're setting up a strawman argument between continuing to burn fossil fuels and 'degrowth' and keeping the industrializing world in poverty.
from what I wrote, when I'm arguing for exactly the opposite.
You're arguing that "cutting emissions to net zero" means "billions of people not industrializing" and "rolling over and turning into cavemen".
You're getting downvoted by all the people who don't view "net zero" and "growth" as contradictory (like you're asserting they are). And the fact that you just assert like it was as obvious as breathing, that there's a dichotomy there between economic growth and zero emissions means people don't want to bother engaging with you.
One guy did a "fuck you I got mine" saying that owning an air conditioner makes all of this okay. There are people still in such denial, and they are working together to brigade any mention of a list of hot topics they've been taught on.
We are in the misinformation age.
Additionally, it feels like threads about this subject are not open to discussion unless that discussion matches the HN crowd.
Further, look at the headline and content of the article. It's a non-stop fear campaign that has two main reactions: 1. Fear that, could be argued, crosses into terrorism. 2. Ignorance because the government has gone above and beyond to signal that they only care about their own power and the power of their families.
Now at the bottom I will mention that I have not created garbage in almost 5 years. I don't use gas and I have adapted my diet to use far less meat. I pickup recycling materials that have become litter so they don't reach landfills. I use less water for anything I can. I avoid harmful chemicals. I don't buy junk that breaks if I can help it. I fix things. My code is unreasonably efficient. I have used my talents to force positive environmental changes from billion dollar corporations using the letter of law.
I get called a right wing bigot all the time in threads like this because I disagree with the methods that are being used. They are clearly ineffective.
Of course the only solution that will be proposed is that of the removal of freedom. My freedom to do the right thing isn't going to save me from this fact.
Maybe all the devs at HN can stop writing slow, gross, and overengineered slop. No more 100mb websites that spin up fans to handle a paragraph or less worth of text.
What is the deal with 2030 anyway? We won't make it, what's plan B and when is 2030 too close for plan A to work?
If you don’t like the loss of freedom now, you definitely will not like what the solutions to climate change are going to be if we don’t take the actions now.
We have Party C in Canada right now. Capable of gaining approval for anything using a coalition of Party C and Party A. Yet, we do nothing to combat carbon. Instead, we offset our footprint by having it outside of the border.
The people in power, from all parties, are incapable of making the important decisions. This is by design. These politicians are there mostly for power. Going to your voters with a statement like "you have to modify your diet" is opposite of what these elected/placed individuals will do.
I propose an immediate and strong response from a party with the power to do so. If you happen to have power in Canada, perhaps you read this and actually do something? Kill the meat subsidy, Let's start there. Move it to a vegan alternative or move it to better sources of the removed nutrients.
Create a program for mini homes (that are carbon neutral by design)
Tax excessively sized vehicles instead of gas (which harms the poor and increases waste [unproven theory])
Fix recycling.
Charge for garbage collection.
Build road-free cities.
There's a whole lot of low hanging fruit that could be tackled in a matter of weeks in Canada. Same with California.
Humanity's not going to meet any goals, unless by accident a war happens that wipes out large swathes of population, thus removing demand for carbon-based goods and fuels. I used to be more optimistic 10-15 years ago, but now my optimism has been worn down to naked comedic cynicism.
I think the personal plan is to just mitigate climate change for your family and friends the best you can.
> I get called a right wing bigot all the time in threads like this because I disagree with the methods that are being used. They are clearly ineffective.
What do you think are the methods being used?
The carbon tax has had an incredibly negative impact on the members of my extended family whom are disabled or retired. It's decreased their nutritional intake, decreased their physical activity, and has exacerbated problems as a result. The "refund" of $150 for a year where the cost of groceries has gone up by that much per month for many small families, is not enough. These costs are not entirely from covid related inflation either. The worst offenders (greens) have seen the largest increases. Something like a head of romaine going from a commonly found $0.99 purchase to a purchase of $6.99. 90% of lettuce consumed in Canada is made using carbon in greenhouses.
The tax of that carbon is removed by Ontario(which has its own carbpn tax) but the new Federal tax is not, nor are the former Federal taxes.
Then there is the article here that offers a bunch of problems with no fix in sight. Do the same thing, they say.
That refund does look laughably small compared to the price increases.
Reading through their other material, it's not clear to me how they are able to make such a definitive statement. Statistics and modelling are not my strong suits though, so hopefully someone can chime in.
https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/extreme-heat-in-nort... e-much-more-likely-by-climate-change/
A country that had literally dozens of nuclear plants is now one of the biggest producer of CO2 emissions.
Real geniuses.
It's terrible but I kind of don't want to think about it anymore, and this Guardian article is only preaching to the converted.
It may be already too late, but trying it won't make it worse (maybe not for you, for that I'm sorry :)