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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

> The findings do not represent a break of the landmark Paris Agreement, which aims to “limit global warming to well below 2, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels” over the long term.

It seems safe to say we are now locked in to a path that will break the Paris Agreement, unless "long term" includes space sunshades, scattering reflective particles in the upper atmosphere, or other similarly drastic geoengineering solutions.

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> It seems safe to say we are now locked in to a path that will break the Paris Agreement

I've been of the opinion that this was obvious from the day the Paris agreement was signed, and should be absolutely no surprise to anyone.

Not saying we shouldn't try, more energy makes for more extreme weather which is not great.

I don't like the word "drastic" here. It's very much less drastic than what we are already doing. In fact, it's much less drastic.

I like to say: There is no longer a choice of playing God or not, only a choice of playing a competent or incompetent God.

You know what would be less drastic? Fucking stop emitting as much carbon. Solutions are there: Less livestock farming, less cars, less flights, less production of unnecessary products. Now, can we convince enough people to change their behavior just by telling them to do it? No, of course not. But what works really well is controlling people's behavior via consumer prices. This means, make animal products more expensive, make gas more expensive, make cities pedestrian and bike-friendly so people can get around without cars, make fast fashion more expensive.

But of course nobody wants this, because the politicans and people voting for them are also fucking babies that start whining if they can't fucking fly across the world just for fun twice a year. God forbid they need to eat one meal without a fucking dead animal in it.

Excuse my language, but FUCK trying to find "maybe" futuristical technological solution to problems we know we can solve right now, right today.

But of course, VCs and other motherfuckers can't make money this way.They can make money if they invest in a direct air capture startups that will never work, but then get the fuck out of there and cash out. They are out there building underground bunkers while they have you believe that technology will solve our problems. IT WILL NOT.

Also, stop fossil fuel subsidies. Fossil fuels have many externalities in addition to climate change. Air pollution kills 10 million/year.

Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Reached $7 Trillion in 2022, an All-Time High: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuel-subsidies-2022

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-10-16/climat...

Air Pollution Kills 10 Million People a Year. Why Do We Accept That as Normal? https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/environment/air-p...

The car one is the most frustrating for me just because global warming is but one of the many problems associated with car-only infrastructure in countries such as the United States.

Your point about bunkers is kind of interesting. If society collapses the bunkers are really pointless. I think deep down the “rich people” building them know that. It’s just the same kind of silly doomsday prepping that regular folks do. 50 guns? Patagonia provisions? Plastic tubs of rice? All the same phenomenon.

What I find so bewildering is that since the early 1900s the “rich people” seem to have lost their minds a bit more or perhaps just hate themselves and society.

We went from a notable history of great public works to satisfy the ego, libraries to the glory of mankind, beautiful commissioned artwork and sculptures, and more to… well… “my name on a hospital/university”, effective altruism, bigger yachts and doomsday bunkers, and sprawling McMansions filled with boring bowling lanes for boring people.

Of course this is a generalization and, I think a lot of good work is going in to funding research projects and things like space exploration (making fun of wealthy people trying to launch rockets is way too nihilistic for my taste). But on the whole it really seems like our civilization hates itself and the actions of the wealthy seem to reflect that quite clearly.

The bunkers are in New Zealand in the hopes that a rich island stable democracy will not undergo complete societal collapse even if much of the world does.

Although, if society doesn't collapse I'm not sure if the bunkers are all that useful, maybe for the stockpile of tradable goods? Or as a castle?

> We went from a notable history of great public works to satisfy the ego, libraries to the glory of mankind, beautiful commissioned artwork and sculptures, and more to… well… “my name on a hospital/university”, effective altruism, bigger yachts and doomsday bunkers, and sprawling McMansions filled with boring bowling lanes for boring people.

I'm not all that convinced we aren't just remembering the nicer parts of turn of the century wealthy philanthropy instead of their gold toilets. And effective altruism is at least supposed to be helpful in a different way.

> Of course this is a generalization and, I think a lot of good work is going in to funding research projects and things like space exploration (making fun of wealthy people trying to launch rockets is way too nihilistic for my taste). But on the whole it really seems like our civilization hates itself and the actions of the wealthy seem to reflect that quite clearly.

Oh yes. But the "I want to run away from this doomed planet" is way too obvious. But aren't a bunch of the tech billionaires at least somewhat techno-optimists?

To be fair to space exploration, Elon has by far the best bunker plan. He knows there are a couple decades left until shit really hits the fan. As you say bunkers on earth aren't all that promising, but what if you could make a self-sustaining colony on another planet, far away from societal collapse.

You know what's even less promising than a bunker on Earth? A bunker literally anywhere else in the observable universe. In fact, we could nuke the entire surface of the earth and it would probably still be easier to establish a self-sustaining colony on the resulting radioactive wasteland then on the Moon/Mars/Venus.

There is a very good reason why Earth is, and will continue to, sustain a great diversity of life and the rest of space is sterile.

Building a nice place on Earth to ride out climate change would be a lot simpler. But it also puts a massive target on your back. If society collapses, everyone will want in on your little Garden Eden, and no amount of fortification will be able to keep millions of people out. Nuking the entire surface of the Earth would solve that issue, but is generally frowned upon. Better to just build your bunker far, far away where most people can't get to it.

You see self-sustaining colonies outside of Earth in our lifetime? Wouldn't they need a massive industrial base, a variety of resources, large populations, etc to not need Earth?

Aren't you exactly describing Elon's proclaimed plans for a mars colony? Not a tiny lab like NASA would build, but an industrial base with thousands of inhabitants.

Is his plan realistic? Hard to tell. It's far beyond anything we have ever done, and financing such a plan is going to be challenging to say the least. And technologically we are also decades out. So I guess he better hurry up. But that's a different goal post that the one I set, a plan doesn't have to be easy or have probable success in order to be better than the other bunker plans.

Don't we need millions of people for a viable industrial Martian civilization? Honest question don't know.

Also, we haven't even been to Mars, unless SpaceX has some single-state to orbit spaceplane plus some fancy interplanetary engines in the works I'm not that optimistic. And who is going to finance this?

Honestly building a Fallout vault to wait the worst out seems easier.

The current idea of how to get there depends on launching Starships to earth orbit, refueling them completely using a bunch more Starships, and then going to Mars. In terms of energy required it should work out, but I have no clue how he is planning to pay for it beyond a small NASA colony.

On the other hand Mars hasn't been stripped of easily accessible resources in the same way Earth has been over the last couple thousand years. As an obvious example, Mars's surface is covered in so much iron ore that it dominates the color of the landscape. Iron isn't worth enough per pound to bring it back to earth, but if they find deposits of more valuable materials there might well be a mining opportunity that pays for the whole endeavour. Nothing brings in money, people and resources like a gold rush.

I don't know anything about Martian geology but wouldn't you need a large amount of travel around the planet to acquire everything an industrial civilization needs like resources for solar or nuclear power because it's lacking the easily accessible fossil fuels Earth had. And is it cost effective to mine on Mars and export? I thought using asteroids for that was easier.

And honestly, I don't think Musk is planning to do it, my opinion it's 60% marketing strategy 20% wishing for government funding for a small science mission 20% wishing the Mars colony happens somehow.

Calling Mars our back-up planet is beyond foolish. If humans cannot manage Earth, they certainly cannot manage the airless, frozen radioactive desert that is Mars. Do you think that these Martian colonist will be substantially wiser than Earthicans? Consider Mr. Musk's recent behavior before you answer that question!

I didn't call it our back-up planet, I called it Elon's back up planet.

Humanity will survive climate change. Our society may not, and that's what people try to insure against with bunkers or space colonies. To achieve that goal, the bunker or colony only has to be stable for a couple decades, maybe a century if you include the wish for a better life for their children.

Sure, let’s lower everyone’s standards of living - except for the richest people who won’t change their behavior at all. That’s so politically toxic that its effectively a fantasy.

That’s the problem with these tax and prices based economic nudges. They’re effectively punishments, and everyone fucking hates unjust punishments. Think about the person who has to fly to visit a sick family member. Now they’re still flying the same amount, but they’re just a lot poorer. Well that’s an edge case! Of course, it’s also going to be the lead story on conservative media for a news cycle, followed by another and another and another story just like it.

What's funny is that any time I've suggested increasing taxes on the rich, I hear how I'm jealous and really I should be thankful for the incredible standard of living that I have as a modern human (as I struggle to maintain employment, housing, and health insurance while nursing some health issues). And yet any time I see suggestions of collective sacrifice to literally save the world, I'm told it's impossible because people are too jealous of how rich people will bend the rules for themselves (as though they don't already live beyond any kind of rules in our current arrangement anyway).

It really seems like heads the planet is fucked, tails the planet is fucked. And for some reason it's a mystery why people have stopped having children.

Eating meat, flying a lot and driving a car does not equal a high standard of living. I'm not doing any of these things, but I would say that I have a very high standard of living - probably even higher than people who are stuck in a car in traffic for 2 hours a day and eat cheap meat until they get a heart attack.

People won't. They just won't.

Now what are you going to do? If your plan won't work with the humans we have, do you have a realistic plan to change the humans? No, you don't. So your plan won't work. It will not work.

So, are you going to stand on your soapbox blazing out your righteous indignation at the folly of humanity, or are you going to try to figure out something that will work with the humans that we have?

Revolutions have traditionally been how we achieve major societal change, and standing on soapboxes yelling is one way to help that along. How else do you engage the humans that we have? Hope that they silently come up with the same plan you have? No, like any politician you yell at them from a soapbox to get enough support for you to act.

Stopping all CO2 emissions tomorrow magically won't bring back the 1+ degrees of warming we already caused though.

But yea, I agree, we really really need to cut CO2 emissions. BADLY. Even if we can compensate for the warming we still need to fix the ocean acidification.

You want to solve the problem of "slowing warming", period. Most people want to solve the problem of "slowing warming without harm to standards of living, as defined by them".

So you think people who babies and stupid, etc. They're not - they just care about something you don't.

They might be wrong to care about it, but they do.

I do so love my dead animals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

I guess at some point we will start geoengineering which will either work or kill a lot of people.

We already do massive geoengineering. That's what all that CO2 is doing! We're just doing it incompetently.

For reference: all that CO2 is equal to about 0.04% of human atmosphere. Of which 3% is from human activity.

So 0.0012% of CO2 in atmosphere caused by humans. Nature is responsible for the remaining 0.0388% in atmosphere.

>So 0.0012% of CO2 in atmosphere caused by humans. Nature is responsible for the remaining 0.0388% in atmosphere.

Unless you're discussing literal "human expelled co2", as in "the measure of peoples exhalations during breathing", then you're out by several orders of magnitude. The pre-industrial co2 concentration in the atmosphere trends between 180ppm - 300ppm. In the last hundred years, the concentration has increased to 420ppm.

https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/

For reference, each 1ppm in the atmosphere is around 7.8 gigatonnes of CO2. Humans currently create around 40gigatonnes of CO2 per year, roughly equating to 5ppm added per year. We add equivalent to 0.8% of the atmospheric CO2 per year.

Kind of silly to compare the amount that actually insulates and traps heat to nitrogen and oxygen that don't.

It's a 50% increase in insulating gases due to human activity that's the problem here .. not the thermally inert gases.

"I don't know what you're complaining about, I only increased the amount of cyanide in your body by 0.002% of your body weight."

That's a bit dishonest as the CO2 level has risen by almost 50% from pre industrial times so you would need a very narrow definition of human activity.

It's been much lower and higher in the past. In reality, CO2 has little, if any, effect on climate change.

Much more impactful are the sun and clouds.

It doesn't matter if the sun and the clouds have more effect. It only matters that one variable is changing, slowly but surely pushing the equilibrium.

Sure, all the climate scientist are wrong and some random guy in the internet knows more.

Actually there are various climate and other scientists who have this position. These scientists usually don't depend on grants and such for research.

The thing is, whomever I will link, you will have some accusation that the scientist’s opinion cannot be trusted for whatever reason. So discussion regarding this issue is kinda pointless anyway.

Time will proof these scientists opposing the human induced climate change narrative to be correct however.

- https://twitter.com/CO2Coalition/status/1755024453174542740

- https://twitter.com/robinmonotti/status/1753863552790618203

- https://twitter.com/robinmonotti/status/1753863954638459008

- https://twitter.com/robinmonotti/status/1753861517043208485

- https://twitter.com/TheChiefNerd/status/1752397688526569944

- https://twitter.com/Denachtzuster1/status/174509982623087414...

- https://twitter.com/WimKoning/status/1747299988231577860

Is there a point to starting geoengineering after the situation is already disastrous? Because that's the only case I see it happening.

The big advantage is that it could be done unilaterally.

I think it being done unilateral is an even bigger risk.

If China thinks x hast the best outcome for them but it is a desaster for Chile?

Tough luck for them.

Yes it's risky but I feel it might work better with the world of states we have today.

Why wouldn’t there be a point?

Maybe it would take too long for it to be worth starting when the situation is already very bad, but at least wikipedia implies the most well know aerosol injection is fast. I'm no climate scientist.

Looks like this is already documented: Termination Shock, by Neal Stephenson.

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