I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

In reality, an economy transitioned to tech beyond fossil fuels probably enjoys much greater production dynamics. For instance, the US could build out nuclear power to satisfy base board power and then grow that base by which ever rate it decided per year. At some point, mass desalination of sea water becomes affordable because electricity drives down the price. There, too, sea water is a huge resource for literally every mineral we could need (lithium, gold, uranium, you name it). Further, any co2 removed from the ocean will then be scrubbed from the atmosphere-provided the removed water eventually finds its way back, and it would. With more water and more electricity, more of the land is usable for things like habitation, commercial/industrial, and agriculture purposes. (The US and globe has a ton of unproductive land which can be productive with some combination of water+fertilizer.) There's a relationship between the growth of power produced by an economy and its yearly growth of gdp.

The above will also take place with solar. Eventually we will have the tech to power things off whatever sun they get through the paint/coating on their surface.

At some point, the other national players will see those benefits going to other nations and change accordingly. Or they will be left in the past.

The problem with this attitude is that it prevents you from solving problems that might actually affect the odds of humans making it to tomorrow or any other near-term date. Right now it looks as if we're in the run-up to World War III. [0] Perhaps we should spend a little energy preventing that. Or perhaps aquifer exhaustion, a long-standing issue exacerbated by climate change. [1] Or solving the political polarization that prevents us from addressing other problems. [2] Humans have faced all of these problems in the past and generally solved them.

Climate change is obviously a serious and challenging problem. But it seems doubtful civilization will be directly overturned any time soon by climate change alone. Europeans and others made it through crises like the Black Plague, which killed a third or more of the population without extinguishing the arc of civilization. [3] It's the knock-on effects we need to worry about, as well as the things that prevent us from fixing them.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/27/opinion/china-taiwan-war....

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/climate/global-groundwate...

[2] https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politi...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death

If any major economy achieved zero emissions for productions of electricity, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was either China using Solar and Nuclear, or France betting on Nuclear.

We call China our enemy, but the biggest enemy of US is US. We can either adapt or live in the past.

Electricity prices haven’t changed much in last 50 years in real currency.

Economies that heavily invest in cheap energy, and high autonomy will win out.

Be as good as you can, regardless of others, so that they will have no whataboutism to hide behind.

Don't underestimate the power of peer pressure, even at the nation-level.

Yes, the US Constitution gives regulation of interstate commerce to the federal government, but this has been worked around. Lots of states have "use tax" which is an obvious[1] tax on interstate commerce, but they skirt the Constitution by saying they're taxing "use" of the goods purchased within their own state, not the interstate commerce involved. It's possible the AZ law could be written in a way that claims to tax something that happens within the state, while still being for all intents and purposes a tax on interstate commerce. And probably nobody would do anything about it.

[1] The tax is computed 100% based on the money exchanged in interstate commerce, and 0% based on usage.

They are universally rather timid in their scope, and politically fragile. So maybe they aren’t going to get us there, at least not in their current form.

But it’s going too far to say they just don’t exist or can’t exist.

We have plenty of treaties that inhibit states. Nuclear weapons, slavery, pollutants. Enlightentment and enlightened self-interest isn’t out of the question.

The international political system has a long track record of cajoling nations into joining treaties that theoretically are like this.

It's not prisoner's dilemma, because the main property of the PD problem is that parties are prevented from communicating and cooperating with each other. When there's negotiations, transparencency/monitoring, etc, parties can cooperate. If you think international treaty development is like PD, you are due for a for a big optimism update!

Instead, it should be paired with a dividend which makes it revenue neutral for the median household. Lower income families, who are more impacted by but less responsible for climate change, would be paid a benefit.

We should not be making energy expensive for the lay person.

Provide subsidies to build new solar, wind and nuclear farms - sure.

The world will quickly adapt renewable energy if it is much cheaper and convenient to use it.

In similar vein, for god sake don’t tax solar panels above usual tax rate. I’m looking at Arizona.

The biggest mistake any democratic government can make is life more expensive and miserable for their population.

That seldom goes well.

And yes, imagine what this would look like at $20 a gallon :/

Sources:

https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/sweden

https://government.se/government-policy/swedens-carbon-tax/s...

So everyone is just pushing half solutions and talking a lot. Politicians will never go for hard solutions, especially when everyone is satisfied by talking about magic pills like "green deal", "more renewables" or (from current top comment) "climate advocacy" and "citizen engagement".

People just love talking. And feeling good about it.

This appears to be less true for something like emissions, where the overall total is most relevant -- unless you're arguing that it's masking an "unfair" situation where improvements are coming from one group and should be coming from the other?

Now you might argue that the data either doesn't support the claims made, or you might doubt its legitimacy, but instead of providing a reason you just told me that it should be obvious why the book is nonsense. That doesn't really give me a lot to engage with and I'm not going to try to make your arguments for you.

For me the Book had its intended effect. It argues that the climate movement, as it gained mainstream popularity, also lost its ability to convey nuance in favor of projecting a strong "we are heading towards certain doom" message. This helped grow the movement, but is also responsible for a lot of young people feeling completely hopeless. That's certainly something I could heavily relate with before reading the book. The book then goes on to highlight areas where the world has made much bigger progress than I would have thought. For me this turned a feeling of intense hopelessness into one of motivation.

So was the Book meant to make me feel good? Sure. In that sense I guess you can call it a feel-good book. Were the claims unsubstantiated and "without any evidence to support" them? Certainly not.

It combats the notion that we aren't achieving anything regarding long term sustainability because we're unable to coordinate on a global scale, by showcasing that we are not only moving in the right direction in many areas, we're also accelerating.

If Hansen is right and we live in a world with very high climate sensitivity then it's not looking good, but I'd still prefer to live in a world were we make noticeable progress and fall short, than in one were we watch the world turn into an uninhabitable ball of death while doing nothing.

edit: its funny to see the only people making sense getting downvoted because reasons.

The problem is not use, the problem is extraction. If it comes out of the ground, it gets used, and mostly ends up in the atmosphere. The volume of extracted fossil fuels is carefully managed so that prices remain low enough to prevent green alternatives from winning in the market, and high enough to maximize long term revenue. If extraction would decline, fossil fuel prices would rise, and the market would automatically rebalance into a green transition.

Really the only thing politicians need to do is put in place a global and declining cap on fossil fuel extraction. Wells need to be capped even when they’re not empty. There should be zero new drilling. You can tell the honest intentions of a politician on climate change by their policies on fossil fuel extraction.

And this means ultimately it is a political problem, not an individual problem, and can be fixed through the voting booth. But that requires people to consider this the most important problem, and they don’t. So ultimately, the reason things don’t change is not some cabal, but just plain people not prioritizing it in the voting booth.

I’m sure you’re being facetious, but don’t the suicidal people buy guns? It’s not that gun owners are suicidal

"We" - the Western voting public broadly, but also much of East Asia too - are the owning class. If you actually removed everything in our lives that depend on petroleum products, it would be a riot before the end of the month. I don't think people quite realize how much of our lives are propped up by the downstream products of oil. It's not just moving people in cars and most of electricity generation and wrapping our food in plastics; it's most of our food production (from fertilizer to mechanization), most of our biochem stuff (so much starts as natural gas), most of our infrastructure.

Without oil, the West is shivering in the cold, the shelves are empty, there's nothing to do, nowhere to go (or really, way to get there anyway) and practically no healthcare.

You square that circle, you let the rest of us know. But we won't (and should not) accept any future like that.

Do you include everyone who owns a car in this "ownership class"? I guess I share your disposition to some degree, resignation mixed with a feeling that things are going to be bad but not as bad as some have claimed, and that eventually the situation will improve, but this practice of blanket blaming "the rich" for the problem is a/the major reason we got here in the first place.

I worked in the energy sector for over a decade. It was a very conservative industry, yet everyone who worked there had their home insulation well above code and installed the most efficient appliances they could find, many had solar panels on their roofs (long before these were as available as they are today) and were first in line for plug-in electric hybrids when they first became available. Our parking lot was kind of a dangerous place to walk because there were so many electric cars you couldn't hear them coming, our director had a hydrogen powered car.

We'd get protestors all the time showing up in front of our building. Looking down from the office windows I could see them arrive and depart. They always drove there in ICE vehicles. We sold fossil fuel, but kept our operations as efficient as possible, going to great lengths to squeeze out every joule of energy we could manage and were constantly re-evaluating our processes looking for improvements, meeting with vendors to find new technology, and spent probably more time and money than was prudent experimenting with low-carbon alternatives to majors components of the company's infrastructure.

The average person in the US who is "concerned about climate change" does none of these things, is doing absolutely nothing to change the situation, but sits on their phone complaining on Reddit while consuming as much energy as is convenient for them. The amount of energy Americans use for trivial everyday tasks is staggering. The standard suburban model of living that makes up 99% of US cities and towns is a climate disaster. Although all these things are provided by large companies, this is not the result of a conspiracy, this is what people want, what people demand. When energy prices go up a few precent, people scream bloody murder and call their elected officials demanding something be done about it. When fuel efficiency standards are proposed people complain. Given a choice between a larger home and a smaller but more efficient one, people consistently choose large houses with insulation that meets only the minimum standards. At most any choice towards efficiency is motivated entirely by either financial considerations or social signaling. (note the enormous popularity of the Toyota Prius, which is distinctly a hybrid, over better cars which looked nearly identical to their ICE counterparts)

Voters and consumers over and over again have decided to keep the system they have in place decade after decade, while blaming the people who supply them what they demand for the situation.

But you can for sure mitigate most of the climate change risks by moving to anothe place.

For sure for a lot of reasons like having space for a garden etc. but also i think its a lot more easier to survive there longer.

Alone the space in my flat limits me of having provisions etc.

More co2 means corn and soy will be growing better and better, warming temps increase our growing season. We have more than enough water. What am I missing?

If your energy infrastructure has a significant amount of nuclear, and your solar power is over-producing during the day, it is cheaper to have negative energy prices than to shut down the nuclear plant.

No, it will still suck, but it'll be the kind of suck you can survive without fleeing.

Unless the thermohaline circulation changes significantly, in which case the northern Mediterranean coast starts to look like Toronto, Paris starts to look like Vancouver, and Scandinavia starts to look like Anchorage.

> Won't hundreds of millions of people (or more) from India, China and Africa flee to to wherever is safe?

Yes, although in the case of China they'll probably flee to elsewhere in China, because it's huge.

Finland is terrific! Learning the language is tough, and recommended, but ultimately optional for white collar migrants. The lower salaries here are unfortunate - I make a third of what I could make as a software lead in the US (~50k vs ~150k). Doubly so as there really is a lot of top notch engineering talent here, probably because it's so hard to hire people that FTEs end up having to learn a lot about everything lol. I haven't yet carved a path to make US level money while living in Finland - but you'd better believe it's on my list of things to beeline towards once I hit my thirties.

Also - I can't imagine North Europe will remain prosperous if America somehow fails, the West is very much dependent on the U.S (now also for energy). But I do hope you enjoy your time, I lived in Leiden for almost 4 years and it was like living in a postcard. Shit weather though.

To which I would respond that France could hold two years with its uranium reserves if the world stopped selling it Uranium.

Gasoline reserves in comparison would last three months.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39156692

I'd love to see a much colder Finland, personally, since I want to know what a developed country that has 6 months of winter feels and looks like from the inside. But I do agree that for most people here it would be unfortunate.

Mostly I moved because it amused me. I have a long history of going to places I can't actually locate on a map, eg I thought Northwestern University would be in Portland, not Chicago - imagine my shock when I stepped off the plane. Similarly with Finland. I knew so little about the place that when the opportunity to move arose I couldn't not take it, it would be like turning down getting teleported into the inside of a black hole.

I actually maintain several online Finnish learning resources now, including a flashcard deck of the most common 10,000 words from the YLE study way back [1], a command line lemmatizer [2], and a website whose permissions I need to refresh ASAP which archives Selkouutiset with YYYY/MM/DD URLs [3].

Indeed building these tools were what got me back into software development as a profession, after a long absence.

[1]: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1149950470

[2]: https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/finstem

[3]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/selkouutiset-archive/

As long as you do it.

> What would that do to acidic rain, global dimming, ecology and agriculture.

Well, it's a trade-off. Is sulfur worse than global warming?

> Masking the problem will only make it come back harder

Geo-engineering is not an opportunity to stop phasing out fossils, but a way to get more time for better technology to spread.

If climate change isn't extremely bad, then maybe it's not worth it. But at some point, if it becomes existential, then all options are on the table.

If (e.g.) China stops the US can start, or if a small country can't scale up enough more countries can join in. The whole "termination shock" thing is highly overrated, it's solvable with next to no communication at all. Decision rule: if not enough is being sprayed according to your models, make up the difference yourself.

It has a track record of getting things right that dates back to Aristophanes.

Sadly their publications are frowned upon in academic circles because they use less charts than farts.

The people that believe in climate change don’t understand how to solve the problem. And the people that know how to solve the problem don’t really consider it a problem worth solving at this point.

Cars matter very little in the big picture as well -- it's a distraction to blame the little people.

The vast majority of pollution is caused by industrial processes. The fix here is simple: regulate and enforce the regulation.

The main polluting countries are:

the USA: too afraid to do anything in case it affects their economy, political caste too corrupt to do what's needed.

Russia: doesn't give a shit, mostly see global warming as a way to get more influence, more usable land, and have such a little population density anyway they can afford to fuck some of it.

India: polluting as a result of too many people and trying to catch up economically, but might get their shit together like China did.

Saudi Arabia: has built their whole state on an unsustainable dependency on burning more than half of the oil they extract just for AC and water, and is completely fucked regardless.

In my country people aren't stupid and do embrace reasonable and managed use of natural resources, regardless of party.

What you're describing is people experiencing grief. I'm what you would call an "extreme doomer", and did feel this way about a decade ago when I first realized the dire situation we are in.

But your first reaction is not the end. Waking up and accepting our state, and the despair that came with it, was the first stage in a long process of learning to live, and be comfortable in the world the way it is.

What you are suggesting is that we just ignore grief and pretend nothing is happening. I suppose this is just the denial stage of grieving, but it's worth recognizing that the people you know feeling this way are working through a process.

Pretending that someone isn't dead isn't a long term solution to accepting loss, even if it means in the short term you are in a dark place emotionally. It's unfortunately it upsets you to see people experiencing this, but those people, given enough time, might be in a better place to help you when you finally have to let go of denial.

But that said, religious apocalypse scenarios usually aren't quite as specific as "methane hydrate runaway feedbacks".

In fact religious belief in apocalypse might contribute to the apathy about climate policy from the voters, people can either conflate the two or think the religious apocalypse is nearer so no need to address the climate catastrophe: https://www.newsweek.com/shocking-number-americans-believe-l...

If the sea is fertile the soil can be hacked to be fertile. Any seabird could tell us how

But this is not the problem. The sea level will raise

Edit: good point in the next comment, expect sea levels rising for at least 10m.

Countries such as Pakistan and Pacific island countries that have contributed the least to climate change are among the most impacted, which is why two questions (among many others) have loomed climate politics over the past 30 years: "Where does the liability fall?" (Ex: loss and damage fund) and "How can I, as a country, be in a better position within a global crisis?" (Ex: disagreement over the global warming potential of non-CO2 emissions due to different chosen time horizons between countries; GWP100 vs. GWP*; this greatly affects carbon accounting in agricultural countries that rely on cattle for instance)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7069279/

> There won't be an extinction event.

This also ignores the fact that we are currently in the 6th largest extinction event in the history of life on this planet [1]. Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction is a great book on this (and the history of our understanding of species extinction as well).

So aside for being naive about the science, your comment reads a bit like claiming you don't think it will rain today while in the midst of being soaked in a massive rain storm.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

1. significantly increased amount of 'life' on earth (as in: total kg of biomass, number of living specimens, total area with some amount of green stuff on it) due to warmer climate.

2. significantly reduced number of extant species on earth due to (geologically) fast changes in climate.

Edit: formating.

I’ve seen a lot of things blamed on climate that are debatable. Wild fires, hurricanes, freak high tides, etc.

If it’s a true crisis we shouldn’t be grasping at normal climate events and trying to argue they’re slightly worse.

Can you be more specific?

It couldn't be an attempt to make white people accept poverty by the big corps who sponsor politicians and control research grant monies ?

and it turns out that by building in a strong preference towards the null hypothesis, science has tended to dramatically understate both the amount of emission, the amount they matter, and the feedback loops that can amplify this further.

like yea it has been simulated to death but everyone wanted to whistle past the graveyard and so those simulations had drastically optimistic assumptions built into them such that we are likely to crash through what was only a decade or two ago considered the “worst case scenario” by a decent sized multiple.

And frankly the root cause is really the people who go “I find this very confusing, don’t you have this all figured out by now? wasn’t it supposed to be global cooling in the 70s???”, the process was built around appeasing you so you didn’t dismiss the whole thing as alarmist and it turns out the process was built in a way that produced (unsurprisingly) over-optimistic results. The models missed low largely because royal-you wanted to play skeptic 30 years ago.

(And no, “global cooling” was never a thing and the idea that it was is more fossil-fuel propaganda and marketing. Even noaa is uncharacteristically blunt about this.) https://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf

Not only that the overcrowding and fighting over limited resources causes psychosocial stress, which might explain the mental illness epidemic nowadays?

https://makesunsets.com/

As for the reasons why I have (like anyone else) two or three ideas.

And whatever it is, it ain't making me feel optimist about what's to come.

I think though that is getting harder and harder to ignore actual climate issues (storms, floods, heat), wonder what will be these parties next claim to convince voters "is the left wing/immigrants that generated the floods?"...

Leaning towards left (aka progressive) is good, but if you're not paying a cost for it, someobody else is - and it's likely someone leaning right that's being forced to do so. They're not gonna like it regardless if whether it's generally a good thing.

You support immigration if you have a stable job and own a house but you don’t if you are getting laid off and aren’t sure what you next job will be.

And it seems most of Earth has lately been in a rougher place.

this has not been true since 1951

2) Agents in the current system have incentives to prioritize short term benefits over longer term benefits. And a lot of climate related things are short term cost/investment for "profitable" long term benefits ; the current system sucks big time in this configuration.

3) The people having the least negative impact from climate change are the countries emitting the most greenhouse gas. The countries the more negatively impacted by climate change are countries contributing the least to climate change. There is a big misalignment of interest there making a purely "free market" "economical" solution difficult.

4) There are a lot of case in the real world were there is a strong economical incentive to switch to something different and were the different agents just don't... Because people don't want to change, because there can be some particular interest in the system, because of political motive... Human is not a rational animal, and his rationality is not only dictated by money

5) We need to do more than just switching from fossil to "green electricity"

> The thing that always stood between the world and climate action was the fact that fossil fuels were the best energy source.

> Since a few years, the tables have turned and solar seems to be marching towards absolute dominance.

> So there isn’t much to do in terms of political climate action, since the incentives are now mostly economical.

If we could put climate change on hold for 50 years we would probably be in pretty good shape, because in 50 years we will probably have enough renewable energy that we can just decide to stop burning (most) oil.

But in the real world, in 2024 we haven't actually reduced emissions at all yet, and the possibility of cutting down emissions in 50 years isn't enough.

It's true that in that sense we aren't that far from a scenario that "isn't so terrible" but that seems more like an ironic fact than something that should be comforting.

Because of the way climate change works, the future possibility of reducing emissions simply isn't enough if we aren't actually currently reducing emissions when we would really need to be at approximately zero right now to fix the problem.

Those are emotional definitions having absolutely nothing in common with the situation

I gave up any hope of having meaningful relationships with other people in the name of building a good career in my life because that's what my parents wanted from me. I got into pistol shooting because it was primarily a solo activity.

Then the government passed laws decreeing that handguns have no place in civilized society. So I wanted to get into motorcycles. But that's just wrong because CO2 emissions. Now I'm being told that having space for myself, for a work from home office is wrong too because we need to increase density for the sake of efficiency.

Meanwhile price my groceries has went from $60 what I paid for in 2019 to $110 for that same bag of food. A small bag of flour went from $2.50 to $5 this year. Rice has gone from $14 to $22 for a large bag. And rent has became mad in many ways; last year average rent in this city was $1450 a month. This year, it's $1700 a month.

Then you've got one side that's yelling that we need to transition cars to electric but the nearest one to what you have is $20,000 more. And you're being told that we need to be looking at a way to get rid of the terrible CO2 emitting gas furnace for something more efficient like a heat pump. But the heat pump that can handle our climate is $15,000 to install.

Then they ban single use plastics like bags because of the issue of microplastics. And it annoys you but at this point it doesn't overly matter because you can't afford to eat out as much anymore anyways. But you're lucky enough to be able to afford rent and food, because you know people that are asking food banks for anything and being told the wait times are now at least 1 to 2 weeks because of the number of people in front of them waiting for food too.

All that verbal diarrhea to say... I'm tired. I'm tired of being told that it's my fault the world is screwed up. I'm tired of seeing seeing the roads I took to whatever little stability I have now being closed behind me. Tired of it seeming like that at some point in my future, the only thing I'll have left to enjoy will be the jab of a syringe full of heroin.

Overly dramatic yeah. It doesn't make any sense but it's how I feel. Dunno if it's anyone else that feels like this way, be a little surprised if it's really just me.

I do realize HN trends are unreliable. As a few others who replied, it felt peculiarly acute in this thread, but my impression was not based merely on this thread, but on several such 'huh' moments in the past two years. While HN always felt somewhat heterogeneous and still does, compared to 7-10 years ago, to me it feels that there is relatively more science contrarianism or even denialism with regards to climate, vaccination, etc., more subthreads derailing into religion because someone justified some strongly held position upthread using religion and more socially/culturally conservative attitudes. These are things which for lack of a better term I labeled a rightward trend in the USA sense of the word. In my unreliable memory, I remember HN being mainly economically right leaning and culturally left leaning which mirrors the corporate environment which found it much easier and cheaper to gain good will points that way. In retrospect, the pandemic feels kinda like an inflexion point (both HN wide and society wide).

I also have a limited POV into HN, for example I never really looked at the Launch HN threads (for the simple reason that most focus on the USA, at least in early stages, while I am in eastern EU) so I never really got those data points. With no real data and just remembered personal anecdotes is is hard for me to tell if this was merely an illusion or things haven't changed but I have become more aware of these aspects or whether the trend is real. Others in this subthread have proposed explanations for the trend and I think several theories can be found both society wide and HN wide. But while we do have some evidence the trend is real society wide, I thought it worth checking if the it is true HN wide before hypothesising explanations. Also, (compared to FB for example which we know captured a certain cohort and is aging along with it) with HN allowing easy account creation and throwaway accounts I think it is hard to accurately measure how well the HN sample reflects the population of society at large (we do at least know there is a heavy US-centric bias for obvious reasons).

I wish there was a reliable political alignment text classifier I could use to science this.

I am disappointed to see some have interpreted this inquiry on my part as me trying to police the thread.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/04/more-tha...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01461-y

Beside that, beside the classic Francis Galton experiment, beside Gustave Le Bon observation about the crowds, also the experts crowds, beside the history of Eduard Bernays campaigns, like those for the tobacco industry who makes many doctors believe smoking is good for health, try to LOGICALLY reason with your own knowledge. When the "modern climate change" start to happen for you? Perhaps DECADES ago? That how much "anthropic emissions" was made since them? How much can they change in the near future? Beside that ALL TIMES you here "we need to be quick" what does it means in practice? Maybe doing something before having the time to reason about up front?

If for you the "climate believers" narrative is The Truth and that they are "all the experts" while the others are just foolish unacculturated people from some social network well, you are a believer of some kind of religion, not differently than the believers of the flat earth.

Not counting that, your recipe than is what? Remain sit watching the TV about how important is switching to a heat pump, perhaps without doing it in person, just hearing and reverberating to others? For me there is no enlightenment of wokeism but mere logic: I choose to move from a big city to a mountain area, I built a new home so with the current design and tech, not because "it's my contribution to a cause" but because summing MANY aspects I've decide that's the most opportune/wise choice I have. Meanwhile I've also put a modern wood stove (meaning airtight, sucking air from the outside to ventilate the flame chamber) in the new home, because while I have p.v. and a small LFP storage I prefer having a more reliable backup WHEN, not if, I'll need it. I'm an engineer and I call it logic. Nothing more, nothing less while observing in modern gear how much "not at all experts" are those who have designed most of such gears simply because they do not have them in person at home, so they ignore countless real world cases not easy evidently to grasp at a project level. They dumb thing like a p.v. "integrated" EV charger that actually hyper-flawed because those who have designed it have never try to use it to actually really trying charging from p.v.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

>Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

  - emotional appeal
  - us/them
  - simplifications of complex issues
  - repetition and consistency
  - perceived threads

We had past long time ago the question if is happening or not. What I'm discussing is the "how fast" part.

The sub-question is if the war or wars if you prefer (You all know what I'm talking about) are causing the current wave of claims "I'm worried now but I was not worried yesterday"

I assume that the war is making it faster, but the effect of this particular factor could be temporal. Artifacts happen in science all the time. We don't know if war is a modifier (and in that case if would be a temporary or permanent modifier). I personally suspect that it has an impact. I could be wrong.

The climate change can be expressed a the result of A+(B+C+D...) factors

Lets assume that A is some allegedly --hypothetical-- effect of the wars exploding bombs and releasing heat in the low atmosphere. If we claim that in World War II the value A was higher and nothing happened (So nothing will happen now), we are forgetting that the "everything else" part was much lower in WWII. Just the number of vehicles circulating was abysmally lower. This invalidates our guarantee, because all in ecology is relative to the current updated situation.

Ecosystems create buffers, the expect results are: not changes/very minor changes seen (buffer worked) or catastrophic change happens (buffer fell). Small amounts of energy released in one ecosystem could trigger noticeable effects in how the energy moves around the planet. As "how the energy moves around the planet" is too long, we created a shorter name for this: "Weather"

This is an unfortunate delusion that is widespread, and exploited by governments and industries that seek to ravage what is left of our environment for profit.

If you believe and understand that the earth is a finite place, with finite resources (as all intelligent, rational people do), then you believe and understand that this finite place, with finite resources, can only support a finite population. Of course we can debate about what exactly the "sustainable" population is and we can agree that the "sustainable" population depends on how resources are managed, used and maintained, but there can be no disagreement that this number exists, and that if there are too many people our finite resources cannot sustainably support them no manner how efficiently they are distributed.

Unfortunately far too many people don't believe this, and don't understand that the earth is a finite place with finite resources. They insist that the earth can support an infinite number of people if only we manage our finite resources properly and impose a strict enough dietary and behavioral regiment on the teeming billions stuffed onto the planet.

This is congruent with removing women's bodily autonomy, banning abortion and banning or restricting birth control of all types.

In fact, nowadays I'm beginning to hear the opposite: "please have more kids". I'm in Europe atm (I'm south-american) and I'm shocked to see that natives, by and large, just do NOT have kids, or at most 1. All cultural incentives that promoted having kids seem to have been vilified. I find it kind of sad honestly...

The global population is still increasing. Furthermore, as poor countries develop this is compounded by increased consumption (both resources and energy) per capita. In that respect, "richest 1% account for more emissions than poorest 66%" should be interpreted as very worrying when the poorest are getting richer.

Ultimately we don't anyone to be poor. At current population levels this would probably mean a total collapse of the environment.

Overall, the global population is indeed the root cause of our problems.

I definitely would say that and would argue it needs to be way more than 10.

If you want to solve manmade climate change you need to solve the demand for goods that cause it. You lower demand by increasing the the supply (can't do that because that increases the emissions you try bringing down) or you increase its price making only the very rich able to afford it and delaying the problem for a decade till population catches up. We already see it with migrant crisis all over the west - both Europe and US.

You do this decade after decade, again and again each time creating more and more privileged cast that can afford it (current policy) and in essence pushing the rest of the civilisation further and further into poverty as they will never catch up and if they do - new legislation will bring them down again to mask the issue once more.

An example of that would be farmers in Europe protesting removal of diesel subsidies or just in general people being able to afford smaller and smaller cars due to taxation in Europe every year.

The problem with these "minor changes to their lifestyle" is that they need to accommodate exponentially growing population that already is a magnitude or more higher than persons who need to adjust.

We are talking about 90%+ reduction in what you call "minor changes" to achieve emission equilibrium to begin with and add that with exponentially growing population and its simply not feasible not due to lack of compassion from top percentile but because changes like these would completely anihilate the modern human civilisation and bringing it back hundreds of years.

As an example theres a very informative video on what happens to country and infrastructure when 4 million people join the power grid in a decade [1] Imagine that scaled to 4 billion and the extreme worldwide devastation.

Population control is the only way to solve climate change and it needs to be reduced everywhere but especially in the undeveloped nations as they have the most potential of bringing everything down.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iiny1GrfhYM

But yes they want a better life for themselves.

^ clearly never visited Asia. LOL

The main increase of energy usage has been due to this, not people in urban areas eskewing apartments and public transport to drive cars and live in suburban houses.

https://youtu.be/6sqnptxlCcw?si=FfqAqooG9qg4kejC

Another fun fact: 80% of the world's population has never flown, and only 2-4% fly abroad in a year.

Now that we are seeing a reversal to the status quo, you see the move to more efficient systems moving into full swing. The uptake of renewables is exponential now.

I just renovated and fully insulated my house with cellulose fiber that was actually really cheap, double glazed inner windows and installed floor heating with a hydraulic heat pump. My energy bill is almost nothing of what it used to be and I’ve not installed my solar yet, but I’ll be starting in March.

I did this because the price of gas, kerosene (water boiler) and oil have increased dramatically and the technology to do so exists and is cheap enough to make this investment a no brainer from an economic standpoint. It’s hard to imagine how cheap solar panels are now.

I’m not the only person doing this.

The USA and all other developing countries will adopt all these efficient gains at the same rate. No one is going to pay more for less.

And the leader should be who? Of course you, because only you know the solution! Cheeky ;)

Obviously they are not unsustainable in absolute terms but only when too many people live that way compared to the planetary capacity.

So population is inescapably key because we want everyone to have high standards of living.

The true hard pill to swallow is that YOUR (and a few others') standard of living is unsustainable.

I guess people even have their pension funds tied up into the system, so nearly everyone is forced to participate in it, against their wishes even.

Update: Something to back that up: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/04/05/the-worl...

In a simulator, could you have 12 billion people with their needs met, living fulfilled lives and continuing into the far future? Yes.

Is there a political and practical way to reach that state? No. "One study estimates it would take just over 5 Earths to support the human population if everyone’s consumption patterns were similar to the average American." Any US government that tried to bring America's environmental footprint down to a sustainable or fair level would be voted out. It doesn't matter whether it would be gas taxes, meat taxes, per mile taxes, flight taxes, carbon tax and dividend, building renewable energy in less developed countries, or any other scheme. It doesn't matter if it was targeted at the ultra rich or the middle class. The sheer scale of it would cause Americans to vote out the government. And the same is true for any democracy and plenty of the non-democracies too.

Plainly sustainable without fossil fuels? From what I can gather, the majority of farming, construction and transportation (including of farmed goods) relies heavily on fossil fuels.

Never would I take a stance at such a low percentage - it isn't representative.

Even after millions of years, it isn't a significant portion of what climate is and was.