The trouble, as I see it, is we're all being encouraged to shuffle around some trivia whilst avoiding the real issues, with only a very few truly reflecting the scale of the problem. Instead of making a concerted attempt to get households to reduce energy by insulating, changing fuels, changing tax incentives and subsidies we're given LED light bulbs and faffing around with drinking straws etc. We still often heat by gas, or bring home tonnes of plastic in the weekly shop. We need policy to achieve enough.
I think the only other route to change is via groups like Extinction Rebellion (Who are trying to get "enough" people imprisoned to get public opinion and policy change. Peaceful marches, after all, achieve nothing. Civil disobedience has been the route to the significant changes through history).
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/26/were-doo...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2002/nov/02/weekend7... (Long)
Well, fwiw if we're going to heat with fossil fuels, it is best to "burn on-site". You don't get 98% efficiency in a natural gas power plant.
Until renewables take over the grid, natural gas space heating is probably as good a fuel choice as we've got.
I guess it'll depend on the climate, the COP of even the best heat pumps drops to 2 or worse in colder weather. I think I can agree that if it's a very mild climate and you frequently get a COP of 4 or better, then that could already beat a furnace in per-BTU gas consumption.
But hey, you know, reusable grocery bags and telecommuting 1 day a week should do it. I guess.
It's like we found the asteroid headed for Earth and decided to pretend it doesn't exist.
The nytimes summary (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/23/climate/us-climate-report...) claims the report talks about a 10% hit to US GDP in 2100 (note: I can't actually find such language in the report).
If you are in America, that type of hit is hardly on the level of life destroying, though I'll admit a) there's tail-probabilities of much worse happening, b) people in developing countries will be hurt far more, c) if you care about the outdoors, you'll be a lot less happy.
With rising temperatures, there will be natural selection pressure on all organisms, many on which the economy relies (say plants).
Organisms that repeat their lifecycle faster will have advantage over organisms with longer lifecycles (the shorter-lived adversarial species among 2 adversarial species can iterate variations faster sequentially, regardless if the 2 adversarial species are competing or predator-prey, ...).
Organisms that have higher population counts will have advantage over organisms with lower population counts (since the species with higher population counts is trying out more variations in parallel)
Hence smaller, simpler organisms will cause lots of diseases and afflictions in say agriculture, which probably will adversely affect our economies...
A 10% hit on GDP sounds like a ridiculous underestimate
Also, having hundreds of millions of starving people fleeing central and south america may affect stability. In addition to being a profound and completely catastrophe.
If your political beliefs tell you to not save for your retirement because the apocalypse is coming, that should be a serious red flag.
Unfortunately for humans, all the evidence seems to indicate strongly that climate change is more than a conspiracy to get a few people marginal relative wealth increases. Especially since it seems the ones trying to convince the world to change haven't been very successful.
Also, I'm pretty sure the GP wasn't saying "I shouldn't save because politics," but rather, "A 401k sounds great, but if everyone's starving and the world is in chaos, what's the point?"
Thats missing the point. The fact that these people arent willing to sacrifice the slightest convenience for the planet strongly suggests they dont actually believe what they are saying. Obviously no one person can ruin the planet.
And: >"A 401k sounds great, but if everyone's starving and the world is in chaos, what's the point?" Is just a nicer way to say: >"I shouldn't save because the apocalypse is coming"
>marginal relative wealth increases
Understatement of the century. >Former vice president Al Gore had a net worth of about $1.7 million at the turn of the century and 13 years later, his wealth has grown to more than $200 million. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2320452/Al-Gore-Rom...
You implied Gore made his money from climate activism, but your own source contradicts you. The options are:
1. You have such confirmation bias that you don't even read articles you post as evidence, or 2. You know you're arguing in bad faith, but you hope to persuade people who don't read the link
I'm sure Al Gore has made some money from climate activism, but the vast bulk of his fortune came from elsewhere. So the comment you were replying to was accurate in describing it as a marginal increase due to activism.
https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_1961299
Tldr; The Washington Post attributes most of Al Gore's net worth to investments in taxpayer subsidized climate startups.
There certainly are bad faith people on hackernews, i just hope you yourself arent one of them lol.
There have been times in history where focusing on your retirement has been a stupid idea (fall of Rome, WWII, areas devastated by plague or flood, etc, etc). However, there have also been times where catastrophe has stubbornly refused to occur.
It is actually pretty easy to describe a horrific future that can't be quickly or reasonably debunked - but anyone with sense should also be prepared for the outside scenario that everything carries on as planned. Doomsayers always face the risk that the problem turns out to be solvable or minor, and should be prepared for that.
The jet travel may be justified, but if he believes what he is saying he should be flying commercial and the extravagance in the rest of his lifestyle looks really hypocritical.
>climate change is real
>climate change is man made
>climate hazards will impact people all over the world
>climate change quickly creates additional hazards which need to be dealt with on top of whatever problems already affect us (erosion of infrastructure, salination of farmlands/aquifers due to flooding, traffic trapping people during a forest fire)
Perhaps Al Gore believes that individual actions are completely insignificant compared to the acts of corporations and governments. Maybe he is a closet climate-denier. If either of those things are true, it is inconvenient that many see him as the face of climate activism. I think the case for climate mitigation should hinge upon scientific evidence, rather than the lifestyle and personal opinions of a single man.
It's also fairly straightforward to find people who don't exactly hold scientists in high regard.
I'm a bit puzzled as to why you bring up Solyndra, seeing as they never claimed to be an authority on climate science, just producing PV cells. Are you arguing that climate change was invented in order to motivate grants to research, and ventures like Solyndra, which otherwise may not have received them? If this is the case, then yes, I would say that your skepticism is indeed a political belief.
If you're running around 2018 saying "global warming is not a fact" I would urge some light reading on your part, it's really quite good writing in its own right:
Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/clim...
If the best counterargument you can come up with is proudly ad hominem, that should be a serious red flag.
1) You have to be ready for terrible fires even if the future climate prognosis is great.
2) The residents of Paradise, California with substantial savings are going to be much better off than those without.
If anything, Paradise validates the idea that you should save and invest more in preparation for a hostile future rather than less. They aren't going it alone, they are still part of a large and functioning America.
I was responding to someone who said we would not see a Mad-Max-like world in our lifetimes; my point was merely that some people already are seeing such a thing. (Though I admit I never saw the Mad Max movie, so I may have missed the mark.)
[edit: but on second thought, maybe more of us should consider donating some portion of our retirement savings to those who have had their entire lives wiped out by disaster and are immediate distress. Thanks for the nudge.]
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/un-says-climate-genoc...
+ The 20 warmest years on record have been since 1995
We're already experiencing it.
A small increase in temperature results in a significant increase in lightening which is the big worry.
All major world governments needed to nationalize or brutally regulate polluting industries decades ago. They didn't, and it's tough to see a path forward now even assuming the political will to do so somehow appeared out of the ether.
a) cut back on carbon emissions personally, and climate change will be undone
b) do nothing and let climate change take its course
but the reality is the option for your average consumer is
a) cut back on carbon emissions personally, and whatever happens to the world will happen regardless because you're only a microscopic contribution to the problem/solution
b) do nothing, and whatever happens to the world will happen regardless because you're only a microscopic contribution to the problem/solution
> We have twelve years to show results.
I've been thinking of writing an essay along the lines of the world being "default dead". Basically, unless we come up with something to suck carbon from the air and replace our energy use, I believe we're sunk.
A lot of people seem to believe that if we just stopped or "reduced" we'd solve the problem. But if we continue for just a few years as normal, then even a total cessation of emissions wouldn't solve our predicament.
Reducing, eliminating: these are important things. But, we're basically dead by default, and need to do something more to actually reverse what we emitted.