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Comment by thecrumbles | Hacker News Reader

Apologies in advance for a low-effort hot take:

Its growing abundantly clear that the tipping point is well in the past.

Decarbonization must proceed, of course, but if we can't feasibly remove carbon from the system at scale, we're well and truly fucked.

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Whenever I think of Geo-Engineering I imagine someone getting into keeping reef aquariums, noticing some fish are looking less than healthy, testing and seeing chemical/physical properties of the tank are off, adjusting by adding/removing some chemical only to see everything die anyway, and then coming to the realization that maybe this hobby is a lot more nuanced then they imagined and isn’t for them.

Perhaps next time we’ll just get a freshwater planet, I hear those are much more forgiving ;)

I don't understand this US mentality that some more tech will save us. It's some some of blind headlong rush to our demise, just to ignore the fundamental problems:

- too many humans

- too much pollution

- too much energy consumption

I agree. And the solutions to all of those are very simple but entrenched interests in economic growth seem to be in the way. We should be championing the natural decline in birthrates and start planning for a new economy based on the changes that will bring.

Honestly I partially blame advertising in general. We are all constantly reminded that we should want more, that we never have enough, and are offered solutions to problems that we didn't view as problems to begin with putting us in constant competition with one another. I think we will end up happier overall when we stop pursuing consumer growth and start pursuing human connections realizing that the things most of us want are not produced in a factory or presentaed on a screen.

Fucked is not a binary. The choice now is between majorly fucked and severely fucked.

Severely fucked is human extinction?

Mass migration, I think. We'll lose and gain livable land mass, and I don't recall if the net is positive or negative.

I find the fear of mass migration a funny one to be championed by the left(who do the heavy lifting for climate change response, at least in the US), considering their, at best, "meh" reaction to the mass migration that is already happening across the US southern border.

I don't believe the fear/apprehension is specifically about immigration of peoples, but the likelihood that we'll see intergroup conflicts (fuelled by fear mongering rhetoric that usually follows), as well as the fact that these peoples –who are least poised to handle the challenges of global warming– are being displaced in the first place.

The left prefer people don’t have to migrate, but that they can seek asylum when they need to

There is no contradiction between wanting migrants treated humanely and wanting fewer people forced to become migrants. The more migrants there are, the worse they are treated.

We survived the ice age with a lot less than we have now. I can’t foresee the population staying as high as it is but human extinction won’t happen imo.

Ummm... During the ice age, did humanity have any literal lunatics in charge of any weapons of mass destruction, capable of wiping out entire cities at the push of a button? Weapons that could alter the state of natural weather systems? Weapons that could unleash diseases or poisons on global scales? Sure, humans have survived nature in the past, but this is humans with really deadly technology this time around. Even if we survive this, what's the stupidity of warmongers with those sorts of weapons gonna do to the world during the ensuing chaos? Will it be a world worth living in anymore, or will we wish we'd died with the rest?

That's terminally fucked. Severely fucked would (imho) be a complete breakdown of order and anything larger than local infrastructure.

Tipping points and feedback loops are meaningless to techno-utopians, in their eyes nothing is fundamentally different between climate change and other technical challenges in the past

Additionally, even if we could remove carbon from the system scale, it's not like everything would magically reset to where it was. We are seeing changes (e.g. extinctions) that aren't really undoable.

With that said, I'm sure that some of the damage can potentially be reversed, and the planet has some capacity to self-heal over long periods of time.

Hopefully reducing emissions and even partial decarbonization will lead to a less bad outcome in the medium to long-term.

I got accused of being a Luddite because of my (negative) response to a post about SpaceX launching rockets every 2.5 days. There are reasons, beyond being a Luddite, for being against such enterprises.

People telling me I’m a Luddite is just making me more and more of a Luddite.

Elon promised to switch to a carbon-neutral fuel (methane synthesized from atmospheric carbon). It'd be nice if some agency actually held him to that promise.

Where do they get the energy for the synthesis from?

Nothing but solar makes any sense, environmentally or economically.

Example: https://terraformindustries.com/

It would be interesting to "store" solar energy as synthesized fuel. The efficency would probably be abysmal, but definitely interesting.

> It'd be nice if some agency actually held him to that promise.

And then what do they do if he does not? SpaceX is a sacred cow.

It's a terrible, interesting time we are leaving our collective children and grandchildren. There will have to be a mass migration, where possible, since so many people live or work within that zone of sea water rise.

They also need to adjust this map viewer thing to go to 20 feet.

https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/

my hometown is so low the contour maps have no contour lines on them. I've recently heard neighbours chatting about not being able to afford flood insurance. I have friends who still believe climate change is an academic ploy for funding liberal universities - given our barely higher than high tide elevation, I understand the longing in their denial. Jacked premiums are the first event I've encountered that moves acknowledgement/denial of global warming from a lifestyle/personal identity choice into unignorable.

The focus on sea level rise is a huge mistake. We need to be focusing on what this is going to do in terms of food production. People will be more alarmed from starvation than having to move away from the coast.

It should be talked about but I do not think it matters since the fact of human influenced climate change happening has been politicized so a large percentage of people have as a matter of their political identity need to deny it and stop any effort to mitigate it, so they won't change their behavior or voting habits even on the point of it directly make them un-housed (this is from listening to interviews with people who got flooded out of their homes from last hurricane to hit Florida) or hungry. It's a long term problem in our short term focused society. So far the only free market reaction is home insurance being set much higher or cut off in Florida for extreme weather risk and California for fire risk. We in the USA probably won't do anything drastic until things get very dire directly for tens of millions of people in the USA or maybe tens of millions of people to die, since we have already shown to be okay with approximately a million excess deaths from COVID-19 so far.

Humanity got our act together on CFC's and the ozone layer hole but fossil fuels has so many vested interests it's a hard nut to crack.

Might need to do a bit of geoengineering on the side. I hear upper atmosphere SO2 does wonders for atmospheric cooling (and yes, Neal Stephenson has written a book about it).

Apologies for the slightly dark take. But either it’s humor or despair and I refuse to choose the latter out of principle.

How do you know what signs represent post-tipping point and what don't? It would take some heavy duty physics and meteorology to know one way or the other, no?

Living in South Texas it sure feels like something changed this year; I've never seen so many trees die.

If we are unable to determine the point of no return, then perhaps that would be good reason to stop changing the carbon content of the only planet we can occupy, but I have also come to believe that the changes to come are inevitable and likely terrible.

> Living in South Texas it sure feels like something changed this year; I've never seen so many trees die.

> If we are unable to determine the point of no return, then perhaps that would be good reason to stop changing the carbon content of the only planet we can occupy, but I have also come to believe that the changes to come are inevitable and likely terrible.

Problem is what if are already past point of no return and extinction of human race is inevitable? And all we can do is postpone it? Would releasing such info help anyone or would only hasten fall of our civilization?

We just don't know what big corporations hide in their research, like they hidden similar stuff in the past?

Personally I think people should stop having children and prepare humanity for an orderly winding down, but that seems pretty unlikely on a number of levels. I suppose we all have to live in denial of our inevitable demise because how else would we get out of bed in the morning? It seems collectively we'll just continue to ignore the problems until they consume us.

Doom-mongering--correct or not--doesn't add to the debate.

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