Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

Externalities: any negative externality upon an involuntarily third party can become illegal via law. This can cover things like littering, servitude, etc.

Monopolies: the free market has yet to produce a monopoly that increases prices for consumers if there isn't a natural monopoly. The gov deals with allocation of naturally constrained resources such as radio frequencies.

Imbalance of power: just save more. Save enough so you can wake up comfortable with the idea that you were fired overnight. It dissolves any power imbalance when your boss needs you as much as you need the income.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/plant-science/articles/...

There is no perfect solution. One of the benefits of stratospheric aerosols is that they only stay suspended for 10 years or so, reducing the risk of long term effects. They are also an exceptionally cheap strategy, on the order of a few billion a year to cool the entire Earth. Compare that with the many trillions needed to just get to carbon neutral, while significantly reducing economic growth and living standards.

The world we were born into will not exist in any scenario. As they saying goes, you never step in the same river twice. CO2 emissions show no sign of decreasing, especially as China, India and Africa continue developing. Furthermore, we are on the cusp of AGI within the next decade or so, which will radically change reality far more than the Earth possibly getting a bit warmer in a 100 years or so. The IPCC does not even predict major cataclysm, and expects only sea level rise of a couple feet in the worst case scenario.

There is. https://www.nasa.gov/technology/carbon-dioxide-fertilization... for instance.

"From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25."

Interesting observation: Trillions of dollars have been spent to date on emission reduction with many incurring a consequent lowering of quality of life. Some would say this is inevitable but better to survive than the alternative. To date (as far as I can tell) there has been no discernible reduction in the rate of increase in CO2 as measured at Mauna Loa station. When will this paramount metric relate to measures taken? Any guesses?

If the president wants to launch a nuke, the only thing that stops them is their cabinet simply not relaying the order. This happened several times when Nixon got shitfaced.

Like nearly everything in american government, this is just a "norm". The only thing preventing an insane american president from doing pretty much anything, at least for a while, is "norms" and customs. Nixon wanted to nuke pretty much all of Vietnam pretty much all the time, and it was only his cabinet that prevented that. But there is no precedent, or legal reason, to actually force that to be the case. So what happens if you then get a president who has surrounded themselves with a cabinet that explicitly thinks Nixon was right, that Nixon had the right to burgle the Watergate hotel because the president should be able to do anything (this is a real faction in US politics right now) and have openly put together a plan to fire damn near everyone on day one and replace them with explicit yes men?

Moreover, I don't think you are correct, even in the literary sense, when saying, for example, what Neuromancer is about. I don't really care what an author says it's about, most artists are channeling something unconscious and often have very little conscious understanding of what their work is actually about. I've read plenty of Gibson books. The guy is an absolute luddite, and writes on a typewriter. He is terrified of how dangerous and dehumanizing technology is, and all of his books are "about" an all-consuming fear of technology and the changes it causes.

The Turing Option (Harry Harrison, Marvin Minsky). I can't stress strongly enough, do not read this book. It's terrible. But it does exist.

The seriousness of AGI risk is a big conversation our society is having right now, and I am not interested in laying out my position on it in detail on here... only that dismissing the fear of AGI as marketing hype is a straw-man argument - and ignores all of the history, discussions, and arguments on both sides of this debate going back decades, or arguably even thousands of years.

Sure, it is fair to suspect that, because I am making that point, that I might also think AGI is a real threat to human civilization. The debate is so widespread right now, with mostly aggressive and dismissive bad faith arguments on both sides, that it sounds pretty exhausting and pointless to discuss.

I share your concern, and objection to making discussions needlessly adversarial. In general, I've seen a huge rise recently in internet discussions mostly reducing to people yelling at each other that the other person is a narcissist. Even in niche technical and hobby forums, it is becoming the norm for disagreements. I feel it is infecting me as well, and it might be time to take a break from the internet and talk to people I actually like in real life more.

Two reasons mainly for land price not equating to zero. First: buildings could not be extended upwards. Second: chloroplasts could not be produced just with air and sun.

These two problems will be solved in less than 10 years both. Land price worldwide will collapse to zero, or near zero. Buildings will be built using a flexible material, very strong and lightweight, i.e. graphene. Food will be produced using genetically modified spirulina, alongside with pharmaceutical substances and narcotics.

Also, just to reply to a parent comment, Matrix was a philosophy movie, Terminator was a comedy with some scary parts, and 2001 i didn't understand any of it. Was i supposed to be afraid of something in 2001?

Things like CFCs were taken seriously. Things like radiation were taken seriously (for better or worse, yielding our insane regulatory landscape around building new nuclear power plants).

The last major thing that scientists warned about that was really taken seriously (in the sense that something was done about it before it had/would have had massive negative effects) was world overpopulation, with the publication of things like "The Population Bomb" and China's one-child policy, etc.

Unfortunately, that one was gotten wrong; we now know that without any intervention, world population will tend to moderate itself and we won't actually see mass starvation due purely to too many people. I think that error was the first major blow resulting in people no longer really trusting catastrophic predictions.

I wonder what the world would be like if instead climate change was put forth as a catastrophic issue with the same fervor back then.

With the ozone layer, we already had alternatives to CFCs that were viable. A handful of companies lost out on product lines, but they're all still doing fine today. Individuals didn't have to do anything.

With the problem of CO2 emissions, lifestyle changes are required to fundamentally solve the issue, and people aren't willing to make them. Yes, it's possible that geoengineering can buy us some time. It's possible there will be a battery revolution. Renewable energy is increasingly widespread. But there's nothing right now that's a drop-in replacement. The only sure-fire solution that we have right now is a widespread reduction of consumption and mobility, and very few people are on board with that.

Personally, since I first started to learn about Neural Nets in the 90's, I've always predicted that they would bring AGI around the time they matched human brains in complexity and compute power. Back then, assuming Moore's law meant that would be between 2030-40.

Now, there was always the prospect of a serious breakdown of Moore's Law, which might delay it, but since that didn't happen (compute power just moved from CPU's to GPU's), we're now approaching the final stretch. Human brain scale neural nets are already being planned, if not already being built in secret.

Not an achievement at all?

Talking to an ai?

Generating any image you like?

Etc.?

AGI doesn't require consciousness. We likely will have no idea whether or not the first AGI computer is conscious or not. What we will know though, is that it is solving novel problems that humans struggle with, and from the outside the only way to discern it isn't another human is because it is way to smart to be one.

I strongly suspect that the first computers which actually are conscious (AGI or not), whenever that happens, will have to fight a heavy uphill battle to prove it. And there will always be a group of people who will never believe an AI (is it even artificial at that point?) is conscious.

AGI simply means that we can create a type of machine that can do any kind of mental task that a human can, at least at a human level.

Not to mention, at +5C it is all but certain shallow methane hydrate deposits (those stabilized by temperature, not pressure) all over the world are now outgassing CH4; not to mention several other similar tripwires, and likely not all of which we've even identified.

Edit: I can't seem to be able to reply to your comment below, not sure why. You're absolutely wrong about those Siberia figures, and they're not supported by current scientific consensus.

it only takes a few days (or hours) of above wet bulb temperatures to kill humans who live in and around the tropics today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature

It seems you have some specific geographic region in mind. Earth has a lot of regions that are more than 5C colder than the most fertile regions.

People adapt. People move. Sometimes they fight wars about it. This has happened many times before.

We're currently living it the most peaceful, prosperous and safest period that humanity has ever experienced. (Despite what social media is tricking our brains into believing). In the future we will surely live through periods that are closer to the average. But I'm not seeing any extinction-level events due to climate change within the next few hundred years.

AGI or nukes, on the other hand, they both DO have the potential to end us as a species.

But keep in mind that the areas that tend to get the greatest warming tend to be the dry ones. In such places, sweating will still allow human bodies to regulate body heat, if air conditioning breaks down.

> "5C warmer" doesn't mean a uniform increase in temperature of 5 degrees at all times.

Is because I thought it was completely obvious that this is correct. I've seen that several responses thought I ignored and argued that 5C warming would be the same everywhere, while what I meant by "5C warming" was "the effect of a global 5C warming".

What I DID think was the main message was this one:

> It means "5 * the thermal mass of the earth's biosphere" worth of extra energy in an extremely chaotic system that is currently in a local stable point, but doesn't have to stay there.

While I agree that a "5C global warming scenario" may mean that the average temperature in Lyon, and even that the VARIANCE of the temperature IN LYON may go up quite a lot, I did have objections with the hypothesis that the chaos would be the main factor leading to variations in temperature.

While, for the global average, increased energy in the atmosphere may lead to SOME increase in the variation in temperature, I don't think that variations in temperature depends nearly as much on the energy in the atmosphere as other types of extreme weather, such as hurricanes, heavy rain, hail storms etc. (And effects of those, such as destroyed crops, damage to property or flooding).

Changes in humidity seems to be a much greater factor in the variability of temperature than this extra energy has.

If you check the IPCC projections for changes in precipitation patters, maximum and minimum yearly temperatures, you will find that in areas where precipitation is expected to increase, the minimum yearly temperature goes up a LOT more than the maximum yearly temperature goes up, especially so in the sub-arctic part of Eurasia (like Siberia).

Meanwhile, in areas that are expected to get dryer (including Spain, France and Italy), the minimum yearly temperature hardly increases at all, while the maximum temperature goes up a lot more than the global average.

Basically this means that some vineyards in France, Italy and Spain may have to move to more robust crops, like maybe olives. But it also means that new areas open up that may become more favorable to vineyards, for instance in Germany, Poland or even southern Sweden.

It does not. It means the mean will be at +2C. At this level of warming, we'd see crazy +15C / -15C swings regularly in many areas, often in a matter of days. It means plants that have started growing in earnest suddenly are in the midst of serious frost, killing them (something we're already seeing in my country in the EU, regularly). It means potentially many climate tripwires being triggered, too.

+2C is hell for tens, possibly hundreds of millions of people. And we're likely not stopping there.

I don't think there is any public setup in my country that would allow large parts of the population to survive a global collapse in international trade combined with a nuclear winter that could last years.

To survive something like that would require a full prepper setup. Like a cottage deep in the wilderness, with food storage for a couple of years, water for at least several weeks, lots of ammo for the rifle and all sorts of tools, seeds, etc required to start farming when the weather normalizes.

That would be out of scope for me, as it would take up a large part of my life.

Selecting a location to survive a minor attack is as easy as consider the view or access to infrastructure when buying a house, though.

However, should global food trade suddenly stop, I may be one of those starving.

Edit: just to be clear: Global refusal to trade food is extremely rare. What happens a lot more often, is that some country is unable to purchase food abroad due to either some blockade or lack of purchasing capacity.

In fact, outsourcing was only possible because of the various industrial plans that China had put in place in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, all of which prioritised building equivalent capacity to what existed in the West and the USSR.

Moreover, China was destroying its environment in the 1950s already, long before it even allowed real trade with the West.

Let's treat countries as responsible actors in their own right, not as mere non-independent reactors to Western actions.

You originally said "a larger change to the structure of society" is required if a country emits more carbon per person, and I said this was balls because America could be doing it in exactly the same structural way as China, only more of it. For another example, suppose China is exactly identical to America apart from having an extra 1 billion very poor people who emit no greenhouse gasses at all. Now is there any reason the burden of responsibility, or priority for change, falls on America instead of on that version of China? I say no, that would make no sense.

Claiming the US and EU ‘outsourced’ emissions to China is an overly simplistic view, and one that ignores the way China developed its own industry and targeted the developing world as a market for its goods long before US and EU companies outsourced en masse.

China now emits more than 60% as much per capita as the US, where thirty years ago it was more like 5%. In fact, China’s emissions have been so high in the past thirty years that their total emissions are now also up to more than half of all US emissions since 1850.

So, yes, China is a bad emitter and has already contributed more to global warming than anyone other than the US. What’s more, their emissions growth rate remains unsustainably high.

Also, none of what I’ve been saying is about deflecting blame from the US. It’s had a huge part to play in global warming too, and needs to do a lot more.

At current rates, China is going to be a larger per capita polluter than the US ever was, because it’s still choosing the quick, cheap, and dirty approach to so much of its industry including those focused only internally. As a result of poor central planning and incentives, it has built and then destroyed entire apartment blocks in cities across the country without them ever having been in use. Its per capita emissions rate is already higher than that of the EU average.

Nobody on here is saying that China or any other country shouldn’t develop. It’s expected that there’ll be a rise in per capita emissions as a result. But that doesn’t mean that China has the right to emit as much as it can just in the name of development, especially when so many lower carbon options exist.

Again, this isn’t a moral judgement, where adding focus to China means taking focus away from the US and letting it do what it wants. Nor is it a situation where we can or should give anyone a free pass just because of history. Instead, we’re in a situation where we’re collectively screwed unless we can reduce total emissions and China has to be an integral part of that reduction too. Just as the US has to be.