Ask HN: Is there any hopeful news about climate change?
I would love to follow something online that can supplement what is a 100% bad news stream of climate change information. Can it really be that absolutely nothing is going well?
A few years later I noticed nobody was talking about this Kyoto Protocol anymore. It turned out innovation (in this case fracking) had caused gas to become more widely available, and since it causes lower emissions than coal, the US's emissions had fallen below the targets stipulated in the Kyoto Protocol even though it never signed, and this was achieved purely through innovation.
This gives me hope that problems we currently see as catastrophic could be similarly solved by innovation (e.g. by clean power generation becoming more economically viable than dirty methods).
The U.S's production-based emissions starts dropping at the start of the millennium, and China's starts increasing at the inverse rate. And this is the same time that China is entering the global market and their trade with us starts increasing.
It seems like our appetite for "more" and "new" does not cease.
Any efficiency gains we make, and technological advances we discover increases the space in our belly - but we are still hungry, and that void is filled soon enough.
Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 continue to rise. And it has been doing so for the past few centuries.
Source :
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/dont-believe-the-hype
One of the high scenarios for emissions, RCP 8.5, which was used for modelling what might happen with climate change, is unlikely to happen:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-good-news-about-cli...
See France, Ontario, Quebec, Sweden and other places on the map below and look at their C02 emissions per year per kilowatt.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27658488
Animals are adapting.
Namibian Desert Lions Spotted Hunting and Eating Marine Creatures
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19029210
Animals are also evolving. New large species are emerging before our eyes, like a crossbreed of coyotes and wolves and a crossbreed between polar bears and brown bears (sorry, failed to readily find supporting articles).
In my opinion short term things are getting worse indeed but in the medium future (10+y) it's going to start improving. What is really weird is that the "experts" completely lack the ability to recognize exponential growth (S curves) and model everything linearly. Especially episode 5 (~3:15) shows how coal usage has been massively over-estimated and not just a couple of years but 15 years and it's still going. And similarly how renewable energy sources are underestimated massively. The estimated time for going to 10TWh of renewables is ~2100, but it will most likely happen in 2030 (same episode ~10:00).
Of course, nobody says to stop worrying because things are actually bad. But just from the perspective of cost all energy will migrate to renewables and after doing that and price starting to decline to 0, we will be able to look into other ways to fix climate (e.g. recapture CO2 which currently is cost-prohibitive).
This all based on their Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics that solves the electron orbit in hydrogen as a spherical shell of charge spinning in all directions (orbitsphere) instead of the probabilistic solution of quantum mechanics.
Note that the Wikipedia article about them is policed by skeptics and has not been updated much in at least a decade despite their major progress.
If they are right, $300B worth of their Suncell tm devices can essentially power the world pollution free and solve global warming.
The science establishment continues to dismiss their claims as rubbish and has done no significant investigation or testing.
An example of nature adapting:
I read somewhere that when the first trees appeared about 380 million years ago. Their lignin could not be broken down. There were no organism who could digest that complex polymer. It took tens of millions of years. This was the carboniferous period. Wood accumulated without being broken down and got converted to coal. Then nature adapted and lignin get broken down. Coal is still formed but at a lower pace than in the Carboniferous period.
For me this means, the anthropocene is just one of the many periods of the Earth, and hopefully we will be fine. Let's cross fingers.
What is uniquely promising is that the world as a whole is getting richer, and once you escape poverty, people care more about their surrounding environment. If we focus on growth we're likely to see the environment improve naturally.
While backers of the RNC are the worst offenders in the US, please don't let the DNC off the hook:
if you’re not you should probably get on it and come here
we have food, water, and energy.
Also what drought? We had so much rain it’s basically not an issue atm.
Besides it’s the US. We will probably outlast everyone else lol.
Let's catch you up[0] on some of the impacts:
> between 1971 and 2020, around 380 zettajoules of energy has been trapped by global warming. The oceans have absorbed around 89% of the energy (338.2 zettajoules), land has absorbed 6% (22.8 zettajoules), 4% (15.2 zettajoules) has melted parts of the cryosphere — the part of Earth's climate system that includes snow, sea ice, freshwater ice, icebergs, glaciers and ice caps, ice sheets, ice shelves and permafrost — and just 1% (3.8 zettajoules) has remained in the atmosphere.
> The majority of the heat absorbed by the seas is trapped in the upper 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) of the oceans. This has spared humanity from the brunt of climate change so far, but it has also caused massive increases in sea surface temperatures, which has accelerated polar melting, damaged marine ecosystems, increased the severity of tropical storms and begun to disrupt ocean currents.
All of this is to say nothing of the added effects of CO2 itself, such as ocean acidification disrupting marine ontogeny[1] or even CO2 concentrations causing cognitive impairment[2] in humans!
0. https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/ener...
1. https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/Ocean+Acidification's+im...
2. https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200421/Atmospheric-CO2-l...
Edit: just found this on Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2023/07/19/excessiv...