More Fucked Today Than Yesterday
climatecasino.substack.com
climatecasino.substack.com
and make the problem even worse. lol. There's only one actual solution to this problem but no one wants to talk about it :)
"Forgive me nature, for I have sinned..."
Obviously, until now the victims have been among the most vulnerable, i.e. old people with cardiovascular diseases.
Nonetheless, there is a non-negligible risk that in the future the heatwaves will become so intense that they could affect even the healthy people.
In most countries the majority of the people cannot afford air conditioning.
Logistically (from wikipedia): Elderly people living by themselves had never faced such extreme heat before and did not know how to react or were too mentally or physically impaired by the heat to make the necessary adaptations themselves. Elderly people with family support or those residing in nursing homes were more likely to have others who could make the adjustments for them. This led to unexpected survival rates with the weakest group having fewer deaths than the more physically fit; most of the heat victims came from the group of elderly not requiring constant medical care; often childless women who lived alone.
Academic source: https://comptes-rendus.academie-sciences.fr/biologies/articl...
Multiple studies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48524696
It tears me up inside to think that we might not even have food and water by the time they get there, let alone the level of pretend we have to maintain so that their childhood is preserved now.
My parents grew up thinking they might die at any moment in a nuclear war.
I’m not saying nothing will happen. Obviously we are already dialed into this and it’s physics and it will have effects. I’m also not saying past successes guarantee future ones.
I’m just saying that every generation since WWII has grown up with at least one impending doom scenario and yet here we are.
“May you live in interesting times.”
Personally I think we will be forced to adapt to climate change, and that it will be expensive and in parts of the world ugly. It will drive migration and conflict. It will rob us of dividends we could have spent on better things but instead must be spent on infrastructure mega projects. It will kill and impoverish and start wars.
But we will make it.
People will say never again, let’s never ignore warnings like that again. But we will probably forget that lesson, unfortunately, and future generations will grow up under some other avoidable doom cloud.
Makes me wonder how many times my parents wondered whether we were going to make it/had to pretend everything was going to be okay.
Many of the big estimates of death rates in say 2100 combine the air pollution of continuing to use coal and combustion engines with heat and climate effects.
The good news is that we have cheaper, better, cleaner options for the vast majority of that fuel burn today and they continue to get better, cheaper and cleaner. There's a clear shift in the market, it just takes time to work it's way through.
But if your kid has asthma today then that is probably doing more damage to them than climate change.
Of course, to state the obvious, both problems have the same solution. Stop burning fossil fuels.
They are non-renewable, meaning the more we use them the more we have sunk cost in an energy infrastructure that in the long term can only get more expensive and more scarce. That's the opposite of what you want. It also means there's hard limits to how big they can scale, and the more you scale them the worse their scaling gets. Also the opposite of what you want.
They are geopolitically problematic and bind us to foreign conflicts.
Many of the most virulently anti-American and anti-Western ideologies (like fundamentalist radical Islam) are propped up and funded by petrostates. Domestically a lot of authoritarian far-right ideology (which IMO is also anti-American if you think America should be a free country) is funded by the fossil fuel industry. The term fundamentalism comes from a tract called The Fundamentals published by an oil baron.
Many, many reasons to phase out fossil fuels.
As for the merits of the article and author I'm not so sure, but I like to disagree widely.
I voted to flag this article. Peace out!
I have said this thousands of times. Now in a different way. Collectively, people born in rich countries between 1930 and 1980 could have done something.
When the oil crisis hit in the early 70s, governments could have decided it was time to get out of fossil fuels. I was there on the cusp of adulthood. There was lots of talk, but the extreme rich and the oil barons started a huge propaganda campaign. People in gov. at the time were not stupid, they saw through it. But instead wanted to keep their jobs and the status quo. So here we are.
What could we have done ? Instead of crying about gas prices in the 70s, waiting hours in gas lines*, people could have started using other forms of transportation and kept at it. Back then public transportation worked fine in many places and bicycling was booming. Also many people lived relatively close to their work place. Instead we cried and cried about gas prices and continued to drive 2 or 3 or 5 miles to our work place daily. Same goes for shopping. Most shops were also rather close to were people lived.
So here we are, handing our grandchildren a life probably worse than what people experienced in the late 1800s to early 1900s. This way we avoided a bit of inconvenience in our life style.
Hope we are all happy as we age out.
* in many cases people waited hours with their cars running, some even ran out of gas waiting in lines. Others drove around for hours looking for a gas station with the lowest price. How stupid was that!
We're particularly indebted to Germany and Denmark and a few others. In the 90's and 00's they installed a lot of wind and solar power at particularly ridiculous prices. They were the ones that really bootstrapped the production curve that has lowered the prices so much that today solar and wind power are cheaper than any fossil fuel source.
Today the world is spending over $2T a year on clean energy and electric vehicles.
It's far from enough, but it's likely the difference between 4-5 degrees of climate change instead of the 6-8 we could have ended up with. That's a massive difference.
From what I remember, they let their gas prices raise, keep public transportation viable and some countries even supported bicycling as an alternative.
But it was not enough, especially with a giant at the time spewing CO2 into the air at ever increasing rates. I remember the manufacturing smoke stacks pumping it into the air. Only in the 80s did I start seeing the smoke lessen. By the late 80s, most manufacturing left my area.
In the US, I would narrow that a bit and place the blame squarely on the boomer (or "me") generation. Slightly less than a majority of congresspersons (both house and senate) are boomers, with many of them having served for decades. Similarly, Clinton, Bush, and Trump were all born in 1946, with Biden barely predating them in 1942. Obama technically fits the bill as well, having been born in 1961, which is the tail end of the generation.
The generation is marked by enacting policies that rob from future generations to enrich themselves and continue pushing fossil fuels to this day despite overwhelming, irrefutable evidence that they not only contribute to climate change but also no longer make economic sense, again screwing later generations for their own gains.
Lol. We are going to get richer. Climate change means becoming richer at a somewhat slower pace.
Burke/Hsiang/Miguel [1] find poorest 40% of countries down ~75% and richest 20% up slightly.
So "we get richer" and "grandkids are worse off" are both true. Depends whose grandkids!
But what actionable steps can an individual take that will actually affect the “it’ll be worse tomorrow” outcome?
I feel like there’s more resources put towards marketing that there’s a problem rather than coming up with practical steps people can do. And not picking on vegans but “turning vegan” isn’t really an acceptable answer for a industrial society.
Installing solar panels is something that I view as actionable by almost anyone. Battery is a bit out of reach. There’s questions to be asked about how sustainable that all is but in terms of getting people onboard, lower outgoings is a mighty big pull compared to endless impending doom articles.
I'm putting together an event next Wednesday, We should have climate scientist Zeke Hausfather there to weigh in: https://luma.com/tu0uvbx1
Write and call your local leadership. You cannot do much as an individual. But if you convince your local leadership (city, county, state, etc.) to consider nuclear, geothermal, solar, and wind where possible, you can be part of an enormous tidal wave of good.
edit: If you're hoping for a "what can I do TODAY" type of thing, write or call. They hardly ever get anything but emails and internet comments. Hell, go downtown for a visit. This is one of the best ways for a politician to know what their constituents care about. If people start showing up to your door with the same complaint, you'll fix it knowing it'll make happy all of those highly enthusiastic people (probably enthusiastic enough to vote in my reelection campaign!), things move much faster.
There's a global war on, we're not going to be burning less Jet A or Diesel any time soon... The left will not be able to disengage from Iran no matter how much they want to now because of the ramifications of the IRGC controlling the global oil supply. Along with that, because prices are high companies and nation states are hyper incentivized to drill more to try to get as much oil as they can since it is scarce, so it's not like we're going to stop exploration now.
The high prices might deter some use, but probably not as much as we'd need. But yeah, the day Russia invaded Ukraine most of my dreams of decarbonization evaporated. You can't fight a war with one hand tied behind your back - and it's only gotten worse since then.
Now, electing the Dems might staunch the bleeding some, but this is going to get much much worse before it gets better. Bear in mind that a ton of people are likely going to starve as a result of the increased gas prices? So there's that too... The whole thing is a mess.
Now, what to do about it? I don't know, I live in Alaska, my state will probably come out better from this whole mess on a 30 year time horizon? But I expect the salmon runs to be much smaller and the forest fire season to be much worse year after year. On the bright side, we might end up solving a lot of chemistry and health issues with the open fold stuff, and we might get cheap access to space, which could change things a lot? But things are going to be quite weird.
People in America aren't nearly as likely to starve because of gas prices. If you live in the middle of nowhere, you've got land for growing and/or hunting if legal. If you live in a city, there's food everywhere (even if much of it is unhealthy).
We're going through a rough period whether we like it or not. The milk is on the floor. What we can do is work to limit how bad it will get. There's nothing you personally can do beyond getting the right people in the right seats. We need regulations and investments.
Edit: It's also super weird how many people are like, actively downplaying the most powerful right almost any standard citizen anywhere holds. Is this what the kids are thinking these days? I certainly hope not.
Oh I agree with that, but the NIMBYs aren't going to get out of the way of any of those technologies likely in the next decade or 2... while I'm genuinely optimistic for the world, I expect things to get a lot worse before they get better at least environmentally.
> People in America aren't nearly as likely to starve because of gas prices. If you live in the middle of nowhere, you've got land for growing and/or hunting if legal. If you live in a city, there's food everywhere (even if much of it is unhealthy).
America will be fine, but there's going to be people in the global south die from this war that couldn't find Hormuz on a map if their life depended on it. It's an unmitigated tragedy, but I suppose war always is.
> We're going through a rough period whether we like it or not. The milk is on the floor. What we can do is work to limit how bad it will get. There's nothing you personally can do beyond getting the right people in the right seats. We need regulations and investments.
And I'm saying, "sure" you can vote blue or whatever, and I plan on it. The both sides thing is a farce, clearly one side is objectively worse... however I think nothing will likely change materially regardless of who wins this fall.
> Edit: It's also super weird how many people are like, actively downplaying the most powerful right almost any standard citizen anywhere holds. Is this what the kids are thinking these days? I certainly hope not.
This certainly isn't your most powerful "right" (if there are such things). But I probably can't really delineate what the "most powerful rights" are without getting into trouble on this forum.
Just actual practical advice is all I'm after, as mentioned it's never quite laid out in simple steps. More just doom at 6 o'clock. Never having kids. We're all fucked(which I don't believe is the outcome we'll end up at).
It's absolutely not your responsibility, but it is to your benefit.
And well said. For some context, "carbon footprint" and this idea of individual emissions actions to solve climate change started as a marketing campaign by British Petroleum. Even the term "climate change" instead of "global warming" came from a U.S. Bush-era policy memo, because the term global warming "frightened" people.
The book I linked above proposes a different frame, managing your impact at a regional, state, national level etc.
Not what I’m asking.
Looking at the past, societies did changed a lot. Indeed, "Force" is often used : I'm forced by the law to not use slavery workforce, or to not eat an endangered species.
I'm peer-forced to consider people with disability in the code I produce, but not yet law-forced, although that is probably going to change soon.
The are diminishing returns to going full vegan from a greenhouse gas standpoint, beef and cheese are the big ones.
In general individual choices don't matter but helping kick of a cultural trend does. It's the same wierd logic as voting, no individual vote counts but voting matters.
Techies should really be leading the way on installing solar, heat pumps, induction hobs and EVs and in fact often are.
Haven't we been doing that since the original UN IPCC report in 1990?
It ditches the concept of "Carbon footprint" (originally created by oil companies) and gives direction on how to join together and make local, state, and national policy change.
I pre-ordered the book today!
You can also come to our El Niño action session next week: https://luma.com/tu0uvbx1
Volcanic winters only last a few years. The largest ones are estimated to only have a few degrees effect on global temperatures, so we could temporarily be in 1980s climate before returning after 3-5 years to an even hotter one than ever.
The climb would probably accelerated by the inevitable policy reversals by climate change deniers who would take hold of the temporary rapid reversal of global warming to burn as much fossil fuels while they have the chance
In terms of having a longer cooling period with volcanoes, what happened historically was you had several volcanic eruptions in a row that caused something else to happen entirely -- sea ice restoration which caused a feedback loop. Generally, more sea ice begets more sea ice (Effectively, you're trading black ocean surface that absorbs light/heat for white ice that reflects light/heat. And so you get this feedback loop, more ice, cooler temps, even more ice) Anyway, The More You Know Star about some climate history stuff. (One issue with global warming is we're nearing the opposite end of that feedback loop, where less sea ice begets less sea ice and everything melts super fast. For shorthand, you can say that the temperature of Earth is likely rising as slowly as it will during the rest of our lifetimes. The ice is melting as slowly as it will for the rest of our lifetime. The sea level is rising as slowly as it will for the rest of our lifetime. etc)
The other thing to point out here is that volcanic emissions just mask warming caused by greenhouse gasses (ignoring the ability to start feedback loops). At the extreme end, for example, human IQ starts to suffer around 1,000 parts per million of carbon dioxide, so no matter what the temperature is in that scenario it's likely a decent idea to deal with carbon dioxide.
Pointing out that were in an iceage and the planet used to be warmer or the role of volcanos isn't playing ball with the narrative.
volcanos ain't the answer, mate
The timing is still being finalized but we should have climate scientist Zeke Hausfather there to give his take, and then we can talk about actions to avoid the worst impacts of El Niño this cycle, what innovators can build etc. I heard one idea of building modular battery powered Starlink systems that activate when the cell system gets knocked out.
But yeah, if nothing changes El Niño this year will likely be fucked.
Life as we know it, on the other hand, is a little more delicate.
everything is gonna have a bad time. other critters first, then people.
I'm disappointed in the climate change deniers on HN.
Unflag this.
I don't deny climate change. I do doubt that people can stop what amounts to civilization with possibly may be massive geo engineering on an unprecedented scale.