Comment by hodgesrm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hodgesrm | Hacker News Reader

I skimmed the background article "Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries." [0] The boundaries don't seem especially helpful.

* They don't seem to account for adaption, in particular by humans. Before December 1903 no powered airplane had ever achieved liftoff in the history of humankind. Within about 70 years jet travel became close to ubiquitous as a means of transportation in the developed world.

* There does not seem to be much acknowledgment of uncertainty in the science behind the boundaries. I'm unqualified to make judgements about things like ocean acidification but seeing estimates presented as bald facts does not give the reader much confidence.

* They don't have much value as a rhetorical device to persuade people to care about the environment. The basic argument seems to be that we're moving out of the conditions that prevailed across the Holocene, so that must be bad. Most people find flooded basements or crop failures more persuasive.

We're torching the environment IMO but there are better ways to get people focused on that and to fix it. Restoring marshlands or changing the albedo of cities seem like a better path.

Edit: typo

[0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458

> don't have much value as a rhetorical device to persuade people to care about the environment

Our success with ozone depletion should ring out as inspiration.

The strategy that worked for the ozone layer crisis might not be as effective for other issues. Obviously for one problems like climate change are way more complex than the ozone issue, which had a pretty straightforward solution.

Also, climate change more broadly is going to affect also big sectors like energy and transportation, so there’s a lot more resistance and economic implications. The ozone issue was more direct – people got it because it had immediate effects like increased skin cancer risk.

So, yeah, while the ozone strategy was a big win, we can't expect the same playbook to work for everything else.

Acid rain is also another example I reach for. I'm not sure why these things are different that society was willing to accept the necessary changes. I'm guessing acid falling from the sky was an easy thing for people to accept is just bad, and were willing to go along with changes. I'm guessing the ozone depletion was acceptable as replacements for the items causing the problem did not cause interruptions to people's day.

The fact that we say significant improvement in such a short time during the pandemic lock down is the most recent example I reach for when providing examples. We as a society can do this if we wanted to. The fact that there are more that do not is beyond pathetic.

Ozone depletion was a relatively easy problem to solve though, since it was replacing some chemicals with different ones, but didn't require much in the way of behavior change.

We are doing very well at replacing CO2 emitting power plants with wind and solar in some places. NIMBY is the major limit right now, so there is plenty you can do about that. Anything you do locally helps scale production of clean energy over dirty.

Electric cars are coming which are a big improvement (fueled by above wind/solar). No changes needed. Though most of us would find our lives improved by the better if we replaced cars with great transit (not to be confused with the terrible transit most of us are familiar with) even though it would be a behavior change.

Concrete and asphalt manufacturing require similar disruption before we can claim EV a like for like win.

Asphalt is only cheap because it is a gas byproduct. switch to ev and it is done. I don't know what to do about concrete though.

But the EV needs asphalt for most of its roads.

Agree. Ameliorating urban heat islands looks like another place to focus effort. [0], [1] Even better, you can attack it at the level of individual cities.

I would add that the uncertainty in the underlying science means that there are as yet undiscovered opportunities to make other improvements.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island [1] https://cshub.mit.edu/sites/default/files/images/Albedo%2011...

> They don't seem to account for adaption, in particular by humans

What kind of adaptation do you have in mind?

How do you adapt to water shortages, crop failures, or the fact that once heat index goes over 120 you die?

Like none of those adaptations sound pretty, our quality of life will roll back to like 1850’s

Humans as a population react very quickly to changes in cost. To take your first problem, water shortages, one answer is to charge something closer what it's actually worth. That actually happened in the Pajaro River basin in California, which grows a lot of the berries for the US. [0] Taxing water faces political resistance and also has downsides like pushing out some crops. The rest of California is not desperate enough to do it yet, but I would guess they'll get there soon enough.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/29/climate/calif...

I think that the climate chaos/catastrophe is a problem several orders of magnitude larger than any solutions we've dreamed of. I don't have much confidence that any effective solution will happen at all:

1. We would need to act as a species, across the entire world, to fix the issues that are already affecting us. But we act as local factions, fighting amongst ourselves.

2. As conditions worsen, our capacity/ability to counter them diminishes.

3. Our economic system stands in opposition to mitigation. There's a stupendous amount of money invested in doing things the current way.

4. Climate refugees will disrupt any places where there's stability enough to try to fix things.

If any humans survive, I don't think that there will be more than a couple of million people left at the end of 2099.

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