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aurareturn

#1 is very real

#2 is warmongering

#3 will be solved by human ingenuity

I have a more positive outlook. :)

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#1 is a pipe dream. Oauth2 token TTL expiration alone will limit infiltration :-)

Underrated comment :-)

Recent "Star Trek Picard" episode...

Data: We are going to die.

Geordi La Forge: Data...You are being negative again. Say something positive!

Data: I hope we die quickly!

That should be the slogan for the in-coming climate and viral disasters.

One person can make one command decision and make #2 a reality. That's all it takes. No matter how many people drool over AGI the bandwidth and processing just isn't there. We barely have control systems as intelligent as a bacterium.

As far as I know no single person on earth can do it all by themselves - all the mechanisms I'm aware of at least.

To my knowledge, this is correct. In theory a command from e.g. the President is authoritative and should legally be carried out. In practice, you'd require every person along the chain to implicitly agree to effectively ending the world. Even at the bottom of the chain, there are likely multi-key requirements so even there you don't have just one person with his hand on the trigger.

This makes one of the biggest threats to humanity's survival being buggy software. If a software glitch from one side or the other suggests nuclear weapons are incoming, they will almost certainly retaliate in kind. And once the bombs are away, the other side will definitely respond, and that's pretty much gg humanity. In fact this exact thing very nearly happened in 1983. Soviet instrumentation indicated that the US had attack the USSR with multiple nuclear weapons. The technician on duty, Stanislav Petrov, [correctly] judged that what was happening was an instrumentation error, and disobeyed protocol - refusing to escalate it to his superiors who very well could have ordered retaliatory strikes.

For some context this had happened at once of the highest levels of tensions between the US and the USSR. This was in the era of the 'Star Wars program', which was to be a US missile defense shield, leading the Soviet Union to become paranoid about intentions of a preemptive nuclear strike attack. Those tensions had already led to the downing of one 747 that had inadvertently veered into Soviet territory, while carrying a US Congressman at that. Given this context it's highly probable that his superiors would have ordered the retaliation. So he's one of very few people who can be reasonably said to have saved the world.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

In America this is not actually a useful thing. America's ICBM silos have technicians sitting in front of consoles, and basically every day, they get a command of keywords/numbers to punch into the computers. The technicians do not know whether the numbers are a test, or a real launch, at any time. This is purposely designed to prevent a low level button pusher from preventing the US from launching nukes.

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?

This seems to run contrary to basically everything I've read on this topic. For instance during Trump's presidency there was a tremendous amount of fearmongering about him possibly wanting to nuke North Korea. This led to commentary from numerous generals and others opining on the topic about whether they would or would not obey the order. Here's some rando link. [1] The sort of system you're describing would enable the President to unilaterally carry out illegal orders independent of the military. I just find it difficult to imagine that they would concede that, not only because of the power concession, but because of the ethical or even constitutional implications. Notably officers don't swear an oath to their commanding officer or anything of the sort - they swear it to the Constitution.

As for Nixon, he was literally playing the madman as part of a strategic goal [2] (arguably the exact same thing North Korea is doing in modern times), but privately was the one who ultimately scrapped a plan that involved nuking Vietnam. [3] A nice quote from the Madman article (from Nixon), "I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that, "for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can't restrain him when he's angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button" and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace."

[1] - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5082689/Retired-gen...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_Hook

> Notably officers don't swear an oath to their commanding officer or anything of the sort - they swear it to the Constitution.

The Project 2025 agenda targets the Pentagon as being "woke" and full of "Marxists" and will likely result in a purge of generals and officers. Anyone who has ever signed off on anything they can call a diversity program will get ousted on day 1. The vacancies will then be filled with Trump supporters.

Tactical nukes are sometimes under the command and potential authorization of battlefield commanders who in theory could operate without the authorization of a president. Consider a risk of this happening in the context of a border war between two nuclear armed states with low spillover risk to the rest of the world - i.e. pakistan and india.

The commander cannot initiate it himself. No single person in the United States, that I know of (no access to classified info) can physically do it by themselves. The commander would have to order someone else to do it at least. This is a huge component of the whole doctrine as far as I'm aware.

Putin seems quite adept at launching dumb wars that no one seems very keen on.

> #3 will be solved by human ingenuity

It already started, billions of dollars in losses, with no real solution in sight.

There will always billions in losses from something, especially when global wealth is estimated to be around 450 trillion. The Dust Bowl was a disastrous incident of climate change, yet it didn't occur because of CO2. The damage caused by the California Wildfires are just as much a function of expanding developments into forests, immediately putting out small fires leading to the accumulation of fuel over time, and opposition to controlled burns. Property damage and deaths from flooding are mostly a function of population growth in the developing world, without sufficient corresponding investment in water management infrastructure.

Regarding the solution, stratospheric aerosol injection would be the most immediate and effective solution to rising temperatures. It's been estimated that current increases in CO2 have a radiative forcing effect of about 2 watts per square meter, compared to the total solar irradiance of 1361 W/m2. If CO2 levels doubled to 800 ppm then it's estimated this would have a radiative forcing effect of 6 W/m2. This scenario would require mitigation strategies like stratospheric aerosol injection to reduce solar irradiance by about 0.4%. In the context of plant growth this reduction in sunlight would be negligible given that photosynthesis is only 1 to 2% efficient. If anything we should see significantly accelerated plant growth by about 10 to 50% due to the CO2 fertilization effect at 800ppm.

I'd be curious to see the science on enhanced plant growth; my understanding is that the benefits of increased CO2 fade very quickly. I believe we can already see plant pores evolving to be smaller as they were in previous times when the Earth had greater CO2 levels.

About the only thing that gives me hope is SRM, but it's a half-assed solution at best. A world with 800ppm CO2 and a dimmed sun via aerosols is not the Earth that I was born to; it is probably not possible to fully understand the affects.

The optimal CO2 level for plant growth is between 800 and 1000 ppm, as observed within greenhouses.

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.

> they only stay suspended for 10 years or so

And then what happens? Earnest question.

Back to the ground in rainfall I guess.

Yeah that's kind of what I was getting at: the implications of all these aerosols falling to earth later, and getting into everything.

Calcium carbonate aerosols are proposed as a good alternative to sulfur dioxide since they are basic and do not react with ozone. Calcium carbonate is used an additive to soils to reduce acidity and is used by organisms to construct bone tissues. Furthermore, these aerosols would be extremely diffuse. It's estimated that we'd need 5 million tons of sulfur dioxide per year to reduce temperatures by 1 degree centrigrade. Assuming we need 10 million tons of calcium carbonate that eventually descends to the Earth, that would come out to be 0.0196g per square meter. Effectively negligible, and may even be beneficial for areas that have slightly acidic rains.

And then we have to do it again, and again, and again; once you grab that tiger's tail, there is no letting go. In the meantime, sense of urgency abated, we would most likely keep on burning fossil fuels and putting more CO2 into the atmosphere, locking ourselves further into the loop.

It is a terrible idea which will almost certainly happen.

Entropy is inexorable and must always be resisted. Humans need to drink water and eat food, again, and again, and again. Unimaginable amounts of time, effort, and resources are spent every day maintaining civilization. If we build out solar panels, we will have to replace them in 20 years. There is no free lunch.

We don't know how bad the climate will be at 800 ppm. 300 millions years ago, during the Carboniferous era, there were vast forests and very high CO2 levels, around 1000 to 5000 ppm. If the Earth gets too hot we will simply do stratospheric aerosol injection. If climate change turns out to be overhyped, then we get the CO2 fertilization boost for free, win-win.

Regardless, the real solution is next level energy production from advanced fission, deep geothermal, and ultimately fusion power. With a vast surplus of energy we could do wildly impractical things like filter sea water for gold, and of course extract extremely diffuse gases from the atmosphere. Renewable energies are very low energy density, and more akin to farming from a physics perspective. They make sense in certain situations, but are not reliable for powering an advanced industrial civilization.

I also suspect people's intuitions are out of perspective in terms of time scales. It seems likely AGI will arise within the next 20 years. Climate change is nothing compared to the singularity and rise of superintelligence.

Seems plausible at least, and you are of course correct about the world; the CO2 level of the atmosphere when I was born was well below 400 and we'll not see that again as long as I live. That's what I tell those who respond viscerally to the idea of messing about with the atmosphere purposefully - we are already altering it regardless.

I mean, we can try to un-alter it rather than altering it further and hoping it will cancel out.

> If anything we should see significantly accelerated plant growth by about 10 to 50%

If that’s true, there should be global evidence of this happening already- are you aware of any publications confirming this effect?

You say accelerated growth like it’d be a good thing, but I don’t think we should wish for it or expect that to mitigate any damage… getting to the point of doubled CO2 would probably be extremely bad. If CO2 levels doubled, we’d for sure lose significant amount of our ice sheets, and some coastal cities along with it. Some of that is already happening anyway, but tripling the radiative effect will make it go much faster and much farther. As it stands, any increase in plant growth isn’t in any way making up for the rate we’re cutting down and paving over all the plants, and it’s not clear that 10 to 50% accelerated plant growth would make up for it either… even assuming that accelerated plant growth actually leads to more plants and a greater volume of oxygen cycle, and not just earlier blooms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation#Rates_of_defores...

https://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/what-...

> there should be global evidence of this happening already

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?

From your article:

"The beneficial impacts of carbon dioxide on plants may also be limited, said co-author Dr. Philippe Ciais, associate director of the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, Gif-suv-Yvette, France. “Studies have shown that plants acclimatize, or adjust, to rising carbon dioxide concentration and the fertilization effect diminishes over time."

The beneficial effects of increased CO2 will also be more than counteracted by other problems as the world temperature rises, such as greater heat stress and lower soil moisture.

> Trillions of dollars have been spent to date on emission reduction with many incurring a consequent lowering of quality of life

It's cheaper to avoid the warming in the first place rather than deal with the consequences, so complaining about the cost is a false economy.

> 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

It's possible that we've reached peak CO2 emissions:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...

...however we need to cut them significantly.

Are you suggesting that trying to reduce CO2 isn’t worth it? What alternative are you proposing? What lowering of quality of life are you referring to? How do you know what Mauna Loa would have measured without the efforts to date? And what is the expected delay between CO2 reduction and effect?

Does money matter when we are all dead from a lack of oxygen?

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices

https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy

Seems like we're moving directly and rapidly towards a real solution. Perhaps not rapidly enough, but the only way to change that is billions more in "losses"

The idea that we are going to technology our way out of climate change is hilariously naive. That would require us to remove more co2 from the atmopshere each year than we add, which is just a laughable idea to achieve within the required time frame of the next 15 years or so.

What happens in 15 years? It’s not a comet impact. It’s an ongoing problem where technology will help us adapt.

The problem is that we are adding too much CO2 to the air. In fact, we have already added too much CO2 to the air, to the point that we will have noticable bad effects within the next few decades. More importantly, all this stuff has huge inertia, so if we stopped producing CO2 right this second, we would STILL blow past CO2 goals.

If we EVER want to get back to today's climate, you know, "normal", it requires removing gigatons of CO2 from the air. From a pure chemistry energy of reaction standpoint, that will be enormously expensive. There is zero technology that can change the physics fact that combining CO2 with something that will sequester it will take more energy than we ever got out of it.

Petroenergy is explicitly a loan. We have to pay that back

I understand that, but we may have to adapt to new normal with noticeable bad effects. That's where technology can help. Not sure we can remove that much CO2. Maybe if fusion becomes a thing, it would give use enough cheap energy.

There's all kinds of tipping points that are plausible in the next decade that would lead to accelerating warming. Permafrost melting releasing large amounts of methane; gulf stream redirecting; extended drought in climate critical regions; large ice shelves collapsing, etc. It's gradual until it's not.

there are likely technologies that could mitigate the effects while we work on a solution. geoengineering could help reduce the temperature of the planet although that has its own problems.

We have the solution for decades. The rolling class just doesn’t want to use them because it would cost them money

It would have to be both cultural/political, and technological on that time frame. With current technologies that remove CO2, we could completely remove all of the CO2 we currently add to the atmosphere, without even any reduction in our use or release of CO2. The cost of such an effort with current technology would be slightly less than, for example, the cost of World War II (adjusted for inflation, etc.).

If people cared enough to make huge sacrifices, we could absolutely do it right now. Now the technology to make it effortless, so it happens automatically without people doing anything expensive or difficult? E.g. pulling carbon from the air to make things becomes cheaper and superior to pulling oil from the ground? Indeed, we are a ways from that.

the solution is that most of humanity has to go. it sounds like the world is moving that direction, anyway

Ok Thanos

#1 is marketing hype

#2 is warmongering

#3 will be solved while trying to reach #1

Or optimistically AGI will solve #2 and #3

#1 will lead to #2

#2 will solve #3

Number 3 is literally an article of faith. And like all matters of faith, not only is there no evidence for it, the evidence that we do have runs counter to the belief.

Let’s be honest here. Climate change was a completely predicable problem with known causes causes and solutions. It was detected early and alarms were raised in a timely manner. Literally nothing happened. In fact, even today, nothing happens. Why? Money. Because the billionaires would rather have us all die than not buy a tenth superyacht. (NB: Go Team Orca!)

The problem was not, and is not, science. It’s money and who has it. Now those same folks and their apologists promote quite laughable ideas like carbon capture and geoengineering. Could we have gotten cheaper lithium batteries earlier with more investment? Probably, but what did we get instead? Fracking. Literally the opposite of what was needed.

Science is not magic. Even if it was, the nature of the problem means it gets exponentially more difficult every day that passes. You mange to repeal the second law of thermodynamics and somehow got the carbon pollution industry to spend enough money to make it viable? Great! Oh, oops! The permafrost melted and now 10x more powerful methane has been released, so… yeah. Too late!

It’s just Pollyanna talk that actively harmful as it not only directs resources from mitigation and migration to wasteful handouts while simultaneously giving cover for just staying the course.

But hey. Maybe I’m just a doomer, and those Titanic passengers should have just sciences up more lifeboats instead of drown. Maybe all of this just… “needs more study”.

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