"The Threat of a Solar Superstorm Is Growing—And We’re Not Ready"
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-threat-of-a-s...
Discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40196820
Discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40196820
Much of the climate change discourse on this site strays into the absurdly hysterical, but some of it veers even further into deep childish fantasy.
Edit: context
Is PFAS rain that much better than acid rain? Rainwater is no longer safe to drink anywhere on Earth.
As for the whales, that's nice they got a reprive... But we're still extinctifying species at 100-1,000x the background rate.
And the people responsible for all of this are not strung up, nor even imprisoned. They're fucking around on mega-yachts and private planes (environmental atrocities in themselves).
All while subsidizing oil companies to an absurd degree, even as they make record profits and avoid liability for environmental disasters.
So glad we 'solved' that. How great for us, and what an interesting example of how we come together to solve global scale crises that was.
Maybe we can solve PFAS rain by coating everything in Teflon so the PFAS don't stick.
Doesn't this sort of assertion leave no room for the possibility of learning to do so?
I think those kinds of comments can be discouraging for the layman who wants to help the planet but maybe isn’t well versed enough in the topic to argue with the doomer. More sinisterly, I’ve often wondered how much doomerism is pushed by oil companies and other businesses that stand to benefit from the status quo.
> A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
Gall uses the web as an example.
”We can’t do this” is both inaccurate and harmfull. I believe ”We are not currently fixing this” and ”there is a need for stronger political alignment” are the more accurate descriptions of the current malaise.
But this _is_ the psychological deficiency of our species.
For example things such as:
-should universities be state subsidised or should there be tuition.
-If state needs to raise more taxes what type of tax should they increase; sales tax or income tax.
- should there be a tobacco tax or should tobacco be made illegal
- should cocaine be legalized
Etc etc mundane things.
This is not unrelated to all other things - these all are political issues. There is no ”lane b” for matters of urgency unless there is an imminent disaster looming. All matters need to churn through the same machine - sales tax incease of 0.1 % as well as specific environmental matters.
The biggest villain here is not humnanity. It’s the hydrocarbon companies and families (Koch!) that have fucked up the political dialogue by first seeding ”skepticism” and then making a matter scientific urgency a political negotiable thing.
The machine is what it is, and it’s capable of doing great things. Some fucktards have just intentionally loosened a few gears and somebody would need to fix the mess.
Now, one must point out that the fossil fuels burned have not just disappeared as smoke in the air. We’ve used them to keep the wheels of civilization spinning and in a way it’s not just folks like Koch that have profited but we all have profited from fossil fuel based world order (see for example ’How the world really works’ by Smil). So, in a way all consumers in the industrial world have been benefitted materially - which also explains why there are so many vested interests not too keen to energetically debunk the ”climate skeptics”. Yeah. Everything I own I own mostly because of cheap industrial goods and food in whose production fossil fuels have played an important part.
So it’s not a simple thing to fix. But it’s all down to the same machine.
As long as these beliefs are allowed to be mainstream we are 100% fucked.
Ozone is still hole'ing[1]. The hole is no longer growing, sure, but that's a far fetch from "fixed".
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220321-what-happened-to...
So no, neither of those problems are even remotely fixed. We’ve just done the bare minimum to check the “we’ve reacted to a crisis” box.
The problem is that we won't learn about it early enough for our current level of technology to do anything about it.
We'd need 2 fully-operational Starship launches or 4 SLS launches or 10 Delta IV Heavy launches with 25 years notice to redirect an asteroid like Bennu.
Now obviously 2 is better than 4 is better than 10. But the 25 years notice is a big problem. The momentum change you need to deliver the later it gets is so much larger.
Imagine humanity being forced to react to an impending impact, say within a few years, from a newly detected 1km+ asteroid, never mind something like the colossal Chicxulub impactor.
And this is exactly my point. We aren’t investing into inventing the technology to do this. Instead we just say “if we can detect a small asteroid early enough then we might be able to divert it” and then count that problem as solved. Even though Bennu is small, we still can’t see the vast majority of objects in the solar system and the advance notice we are talking about is impracticality long.
If this was a software engineering Jira ticket, it wouldn’t pass PR. And software developers aren’t even the most diligent of professionals compared engineers, doctors and scientists. But there’s no incentive for governments to sink money into a theoretical risk that impacts their “enemies” equally. And man do I hate how nations refer to other nations as “enemies” — but that’s a whole other argument.
I mean if it's strong enough to fry off-grid electronics then it's a different matter entirely, but consumer electronics has some protections against that, right?
Last big storm in 2003 did damage grid level transformers. They also don’t just have those lying around and they’re quite expensive so it’s particularly devastating.
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/images/u33/fin...
> but consumer electronics has some protections against that, right?
Much more complicated to answer, but no consumer electronics aren’t safe. Also not much use if the communication systems and electrical grid are down