2023 was the hottest summer in two thousand years
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Humanity's capacity to handle an slow creeping existential threat appears to be very bad. Especially when preventing it requires simply stopping / doing less some of the things we are doing.
Apparently the production of greenhouse gasses has gone up in past years regardless of the negotiations aimed at reducing them.
I suspect geoengineering is where this will end up when things start to get really bad.
Question, what are the most viable / cost effective / low risk geoengineering tools?
> Major lobbying companies' shareholders' interest in handling an slow creeping existential threat appears to be very bad.
Inject sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere. This can be done by adding it to airplane fuel. We have a good idea of the consequences, as ships did the ~same thing (less effectively) until recently—they're now filtering it into the oceans instead.
This will heavily affect the size of cyclones and other weather related disasters (not just heatwaves). 2024 might finally make people realize that the end is near once parts of the world in developed countries start to be slowly wiped off the map due to non stop natural disaster events.
[1]: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%... @credits borg16
One thing that seems obvious, but hasn't been repeated enough IMHO is that injecting more energy (heat) into a chaotic system (climate), won't simply make the average energy (temperature) higher BUT will also proportionally strenghten the chaotic fluctuations (disasters).
Correct me if I'm wrong.
[1]https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%...
I ask because I hypothesize that the impact of these raising temperatures will be seen more widely and adversely in parts of developing countries given their population density and inability to address the same.
Not to mention that non developed nations tend to have other issues they're trying to solve and climate change is not even on their list (except for very few).
I struggle to see how even the worst predicted outcomes of climate change are an existential threat to the human species or our civilization. In the worst case a few billion people die or are displaced. Our species will carry on.
edit: not to mention everyone going into war with each other for securing the small amount of places that are able to produce food.
New regions would struggle to cultivate new land without fertilizers and the current fertilizer sector would struggle to operate (current sector is built around the availability of ammonia as far as I'm aware).
Your best bets would yes: Siberia, Canada. But it would take maybe few millennia before that land could be used for agriculture and it would effectively become the new oil of the world sparking a new wave of conflicts as I mentioned before.
Our current food supply could be destroyed in decades not millennia given enough heatwaves and other natural events.
Civilisation is quite the fragile structure, built slowly and carefully over centuries of large scale cooperation between much of the populated world.
Scarcity of the basest necessities brings uncivilisation.
https://gizmodo.com/10-civilizations-that-disappeared-under-...
Who's "we"? I don't know about you, but:
- I did learn a bit of agriculture and I could probably teach that to the future generation.
- I never learned how to build a nuclear reactor or microprocessor. Did you? Could you teach that?
I don't personally know how to do these things either. I know how to program computers, and could teach that. My point is that I am a small component of a vast, distributed system of knowledge that is very hard to destroy. It doesn't seem practical to kill every nuclear physicist and destroy every copy of every document that describes nuclear physics. I don't see how climate change could do this.
It's actually very simple: climate change destroys crops and then people kill each other for food. I don't expect physicists to survive. Thugs will. And thugs can't read physics books.
PS: Microprocessors and nuclear physiscs knowlegdge is not that well distributed. I expect there are only a few hundred people in the world who know how it's done and each knows a tiny piece of it. For example one knows MCU design, but knows absolutely nothing about silicon waffers manufacturing. If they don't meet - no complete complete knowledge to build a microprocessor.
I've never disagreed that these events will be disruptive to supply chains, create shortages, stall innovation, or force us to reconstruct lost cutting-edge expertise or infrastructure. All of these seem like relatively small hiccoughs, not civilization-ending catastrophes. Recall that the Black Death, which killed nearly half of Europe, was shortly followed by the Renaissance.
More excuses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39756174
The USA has what, 12 super carriers? They’re not for show - I guarantee we’ll run out of oil last.
It appears likely that CO2 emissions will fall slightly in 2024, and start dropping dramatically in 2025. https://climateanalytics.org/comment/will-2024-be-the-year-e...
In the past 6 degrees of warming was predicted. We're now down to a prediction of 4 degrees of warming; stopping at 2.5 degrees is both possible and practical.
Other “solutions” try to short term deal with one perceived problem without taking into account how the whole system is changing and how our “solution” will change it even more. With very complex systems shortsighted and not holistic approaches could bring to the table far more problems, some of which we may not have a way to deal with.
The half-ass solution will be to dim the sky which I suppose will buy some time; enough to see me out I hope.
On the one hand we’re an awesome species; we’re also totally ridiculous. It’s tough to wrap your head around the duality.
So far climate and related things in this complex system is full of surprises, even for experts. We are finding out that something seemingly innocent that had a clear positive impact by one metric worsened a lot of other things. I don't know if I could call engineering something with so much uncertainties on the outcome.
And this scares me a lot. The technology makes nuclear weapons look like pussies. Letting 1 country control who has which weather where is unacceptable for almost any country.
We need global cooperation to the point of becoming 1 huge global superstate, or we're having all out wars between the most powerfull nations of the world, while dealing with climate change at the same time.
And that's making the assumption that no mistake is made, with a completely new technology field, and mistakes easily killing millions of people.
As we saw in the Gerard Butler documentary "Geostorm."
Second derivatives matter. The growth in CO2 emissions from 2013 to 2023 was like 1/4th of the growth from 2003 to 2013.
And it's now being driven by the profit motive, not by treaties that might be reneged on at any time, so there's no reason to believe the trend will stop. All that's needed is for governments to not actively screw things up. (Which I guess is a possibility in the US due to the hyper-partisan nature of their politics, but China and India are what really matter, and both stand to gain so much from cheap energy that it's hard to imagine them being willing to stop the transition just out of spite.)
Honestly, there has probably not been more cause for optimism on climate change in like three decades.
Yet the population in developed economies will fall drastically in the next 50-100 yrs. Let developing nations have their chance at improving quality of life through cheap energy like developed nations did. Mass immigration is but bandaid at maintaining population and the resulting economic demand within the existing order.
Developing economies account for a negligible percentage of global emissions at the moment. By the time they catch up, some iterations of nuclear energy research will have resulted in more efficient energy production.
What if we simply stop telling people what they should buy every time they visit a website et cetera?
Would that help to keep Earth's temperature down?
- We seek to raise every person in poverty to the average consumption level. Through charities, political programs, etc. Should we stop?
- If you don’t drive people to earn, you don’t drive people to work. And you get a dysfunctional society which consumes a lot but does not produce a lot.
- It’s the same philosophical problem as if you started to be fair towards men, then they’d stop striving. I assure you that you don’t want that.
- Would you be ok with solving climate change at the expense of other social targets? If not, congrats, you’re a leftist not a scientist.
At-least in US we are looking at average age of presidential candidates 79y, senate 65y, house 60.
50% of wealth is owned by Boomers. They control majority of wealth and policy.
Even the current generation will be long dead before they have to reckon with climate change.
Until we get a big shock event where millions die, and the death from extreme natural causes is very evident, it won’t be something most governments take seriously.
All major governments dragged their feet through 2020 regarding Covid.
Y Combinator is actively looking for founders starting climate tech companies: https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs#climate-tech
Tl;dr = Climate change is best addressed by producing technology that makes things more efficient and/or that helps the developing world decarbonise.
If anyone is working on something gamechanging please hit me up -- I'm happy to help out on the dev / infra side pro bono.
Yeah, I don't think these will be part of the solution. We're not going to get out of this by making more money. Trying to make more money is how we got here.
I recently read some opinions about carbon credits for example, and boy does it look like it's just a scam to take money from governments into private pockets, while at best doing greenwashing.
I absolutely think we are going to get out of this by making money.
The incentives preventing action on climate change are not moral/ethical, but economic.
Countries and individuals use fossil fuels because they are cheaper, and are unwilling to make decisions that put them in a worse position relative to others.
While de-growth naively sounds appealing, the results are horrendous – countries with approx. the same GDP that they had 20 years ago are not places you would want to move to.
You might also point to the ozone layer issue in the late 80s and argue an accord will fix our current problem, but fossil fuels are far more fundamental to our way of life than CFCs were.
... since 30 years (of not longer) it was the "hottest year of all times" some where on Germany.
One or two years in a row? Random chance ... Every, single, year for 30 years? Yeah something is definitely wrong here.
It's a tragedy but at some point it stops being news.
> 77% of respondents believe global temperatures will reach at least 2.5C above preindustrial levels, a devastating degree of heating;
> almost half – 42% – think it will be more than 3C;
> only 6% think the 1.5C limit will be achieved.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2024/...
Don't compare AI with commute. Compare AI with (human) remote work. AI will never be cheaper than remote work and AI can't replace any work that can't be remote work.
2000 yrs ago, the world population was a fraction of what it is now. Tbere was no mass burning of fossil fuels. And yet the temps were at record highs. Do we have enough reliable data to judge the climate properly?
1) You could have provided a link to two, yes?
2) The Media - and its scientist (?) pundits - would ease up on the "this is absolutely 100% human-made" narrative.
3) People who have suggested that maybe it's not "absolutely 100% human-made" would not be ridiculed, marginalized, canceled, etc.
So if you can help out with any of these, it would be appreciated, sincerely.
p.s. And per the article, the climate data that was being used prior, was incomplete, unreliable, and too small a sample size. And yet how many leaders and scientists have been basing big stroke ideas on that? We can't demand The Science, and then cherry pick bullshit because it perpetuates a narrative. Or can we??