And what most people, especially younger folks, don’t realize is that it’s AlWAYS been this way. And most of the time, when something does blow up, there wasn’t a clear or unambiguous difference between the thing that blew up, and all the things everyone was screaming about that did not.
It’s natural that people are going to tune out and not take it super seriously, especially people who have given up on doing the deep research to have an informed opinion on the constant stream of new topics everyone is worried about. Which is a problem when it legitimately is a serious problem.
My point is that you're not wrong, but it's not just that people are choosing to hunt an extra buck. It's that they've turned their back on the very idea of self-restraint, or the possibility of idealistic, positive leadership from government. It's not a choice because they don't know about any option other than consumerism.
And those of us that whinge about it tend to be engineering types, disgusted by politics; and yet the solution really is political: you've got to learn that system, get control of the narrative, allocate the vast resources of government to the right things, and somehow inspire people to be more thoughtful, conscientious, and less cynical and selfish when it comes to getting things done for society and government in general. And it's a change that, if enough people believe in it, it will happen.
> change that, if enough people believe in it, it will happen
I've heard that speech before somewhere...
One thing to point out however - EVERY time is a (genuinely!) unique time, and for those in it, there is always the press of things to be concerned about, or tackle things or avoid things or whatever. Our current challenges are definitely unique, but the existential threat of Mutually Assured Destruction of the Cold War was no less a unique, serious, and pressing matter for those living it than anything going on today. And it could have been an apocalypse. It just happened not to be.
Same with being in Europe pretty much anytime over the last couple hundred years (longer?) with constant wars, disease, plagues, etc.
It’s important to recognize, because it can help give perspective and balance to what can otherwise be a profoundly easy to manipulate state of mind.
Would it make sense to sell all your assets, move the middle of nowhere, and live in a bomb shelter in the 70’s? Well the Soviets didn’t nuke the US, so no, clearly you would have been an idiot. If they had, then you would clearly have been a genius with incredible foresight.
In the end, we do what we can based on the best of our ability to understand the world and our options. Because fundamentally a lot of these things integrate with other people and societies, this also means they influence decisions others make, and can result in huge shifts - or resistance to shifts - and sometimes really unexpected or bizarre behavior.
One thing that may be happening for instance with a lot of the discussions today is people getting overwhelmed and defaulting to their ‘overwhelmed’ state - and not being aware of it.
For instance, common overwhelmed behavior includes running away/avoidance (this isn’t happening), fighting (fuck you, you can’t tell me what to do), or freezing (just ignoring things or locking up).
These can easily escalate over time to full on and very persistent delusion, and the threat to someone if someone starts to challenge their delusion is very real - and they need to defend it.
Trying to deal with someone in this state by treating the way they are acting at face value (oh, this guy is anti mask so I’ll give him facts!) often not only doesn’t work, but causes more resistance because it isn’t really about the mask or the facts.
They are in a messed up emotional place, and doing the best they can to try to keep themselves feeling safe. It just so happens that they picked something that is dangerous to others and there is some facts that could ACTUALLY keep them safer. But they can’t handle that, right now. And trying to tell them that is likely to just make them feel unsafe talking to you, because you’re essentially trying to rip away their safety blanket AND make them feel dumb.
When people feel unsafe around someone, they either avoid them, fight them, don’t do anything and try to pretend they don’t exist.
It’s a hard problem.
I find myself comforted by the fact that, in some ways, the spasm toward fascism and ignorant belief is a cry for help, a demand to be held accountable, a plaintive request to be corrected. They don't actually hate elitism, they just hate the elites we have. (Well, except for one, paradoxically).
If I had to choose between technological progress and stewardship, I'd pick technological progress because that's our only real chance at long-term survival. We should really attempt to do both and better align the hunt for that extra buck with both tech progress and stewardship (ahem carbon tax) rather than demonizing it.
Technology can help to sustain life in space, I'm sure it will enable us to sustain life here on earth. But for how many, and with what quality of life?
Nature didn't give us a safe and friendly environment we made unsafe, it gave us a hostile and dangerous environment we have made safe by using technology to impact the planet to better suit us.
All impacts have externalities but I take those any day over just waiting for some catastrophe to happen whether meteors, super vulcanos or any other real threat that is out there lurking.
Technology is the sole reason we are 8 billion people on this planet and still are most better fed than 2 billion people were 150 years ago.
Living on this planet IS life in space and we are luckily constantly improving our ability to cope.
All solutions create new problems but these problems are better problems to have.
Wiping out the rest of the planet to give us a safe habitat may have been a giant mistake, monocultures tend to end bad.
Right. Let's say we're not going to agree on this and leave it at that.
It's not that clear-cut: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/planet-earth-has-more...
And that's before we get into the hardwood vs softwood differences in growth speed.
Poplar/Maple/Oak/Pine are all good options, with the slow growers storing the carbon for the longest time, and even when not harvested they won't rot nearly as fast (rot is best looked at as slow burning in this context).
And then not to harvest them until they die of 'natural causes', hopefully not a forest fire.
If it is in a forest long term (same trees), sequestration flat lines after awhile no? I'm not saying I don't like trees - far from it, I own 90 acres of timberland! I'm pointing out that pulling carbon from the atmosphere as fast as possible vs a pretty piece of old growth timber are two different goals with different tradeoffs.
I thought forests tended to be pretty much neutral once they get old enough for trees to start dying and decomposing.
If you take some fast growing trees, harvest them just as the curve starts to slow, put that wood to use somewhere it won't rot, and plant new trees that also fast grow - seems like you'd pull out more in aggregate?
Personally I'm more of a fan of the geo-weathering type sequestration plans, but if if we have a target, might as well optimize for it?
Thomas Ligotti has this great quote about why people, most people, are Optimistic (specifically with existence), that this is all okay, and nothing will go wrong, and that when things do go wrong, it'll be okay in the end
“The point that in the absence of birth nobody exists who
can be deprived of happiness is terribly conspicuous. For
optimists, this fact plays no part in their existential
computations. For pessimists, however, it is axiomatic.
Whether a pessimist urges us to live “heroically” with a
knife in our gut or denounces life as not worth living is
immaterial. What matters is that he makes no bones about
hurt being the Great Problem it is incumbent on philosophy
to observe. But this problem can be solved only by
establishing an imbalance between hurt and happiness that
would enable us in principle to say which is more
desirable—existence or nonexistence. While no airtight
case has ever been made regarding the undesirability of
human life, pessimists still run themselves ragged trying
to make one. Optimists have no comparable mission. When
they do argue for the desirability of human life it is
only in reaction to pessimists arguing the opposite, even
though no airtight case has ever been made regarding that
desirability. Optimism has always been an undeclared
policy of human culture—one that grew out of our animal
instincts to survive and reproduce—rather than an
articulated body of thought. It is the default condition
of our blood and cannot be effectively questioned by our
minds or put in grave doubt by our pains. This would
explain why at any given time there are more cannibals
than philosophical pessimists.”For example, when radio was being first pioneered, there were people like John Brinkley who would use it to sell quack goat testicle treatments for erectile dysfunction. He became so popular that he ran for office and eventually moved to the Mexican border to avoid the government shutting down his radio towers.
The internet is kind of like early radio, or other means of communication today. Yes, it's more scalable, but we're still socially figuring out how to trust it, one harmful misinformation campaign at a time.
Mrs. E.C. Harrington was the leading name to be looked at. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5q91q53r
Up until about 1900 nature was in control. Now, humans and domestic livestock are nearly all the land animals that exist. [1] [2]
Climate change is bad--very bad--but its main effect is going to be on other risks. Global thermonuclear war (which is also new in civilization terms) remains the biggest risk (probability x cost). Climate change ratchets up the probability of GTW.
1. https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930.h...
2. Graphical representation: https://xkcd.com/1338/
If our math models can predict the Higgs decades before it’s experimentally discovered, why is a math model from the 70s confirming society will implode in the 2040s any less reliable? Same correct order of operations. Reconfirmed recently by better trained experts.
Unfortunately your “always been this” way is problematic nowadays since humans weren’t always capable of annihilating themselves. A whole lot of their imagined scenarios rightly were bullshit. Previous generations left behind rock and stone buildings, some sludge at worst.
We’re leaving behind an industrial mess and a melted planet.
Now is a very different point in time.
Earth will go on with or without us. If the answer is shrug it off, well that won’t work as a majority get anxious. Nihilism risks social stability and solution seeking. If a bunch of people aren’t going to care, why support society? Let’s all just go tribal now.
I don't see why we should ignore the deforestation or hunting to extinction that previous generations imposed on the planet.
Just two pictures to give you an idea of what has been lost:
https://i.pinimg.com/550x/73/62/26/736226b8437e6ce9eb1bab42e...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B7a4mTiIIAEsESF?format=jpg
Multiply by a few million or so...
We have evidence of wide scale changes made by humans long before written records existed. We also now have better records, so it’s easier to point to this one here done by this person, instead of only picking up what is visible in the fossil record (which is by it’s nature spotty and incomplete). But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
History is not a linear function of progress. Conditions can and do get worse for people, sometimes for generations into the future. The stunning progress of the industrial revolution is the anomaly, not the norm.
We're in a car that's breaking down and we're hoping it will be cheaper to fix later if we ignore it now. We're seeing once-in-a-century weather events every few years. Sea level rise is currently impacting coastal communities. It's not going to go away if we ignore it and hope things get better in the future, we have to work on these things now. We've been refusing to make incremental changes for decades, so the only option left is drastic changes, and they're not going to get easier the longer we wait.
A very partial list of headline impacts in the first world off the top of my head:
- US West Coast droughts and fires
- Pacific Northwest heat dome
- Texas cold snap
- Epic floods in Germany
- Australian wild fires
- European heat waves
- <fill in your favorite recent hurricane here>
Even when rich SF techies were under a terrifying orange sky, our behavior mostly did not change.
I think we need to start mobilizing the other dysfunctional aspects of our society to apply more pressure.
- Some were upset when propublica released info about the tax-avoidance strategies of the very wealthy, claiming it to be a violation of their privacy. Should we not also find and leak information on extravagant emitters, to be named and shamed in the press?
- Companies that spent years pushing opiods in the US were sued and came to a settlement agreement. NYC has tried to sue oil companies for their emissions. They're now trying to sue them over their false statements and misinformation campaigns. Perhaps _every_ state, county and city should be filing lawsuits against large emitters.
- I think _someone_ needs to press absence of carbon taxes at the WTO as a form of dumping, wherein goods are being exported for less than their true cost, once we acknowledge the externalities.
- Everyone hates this take, but I think local jurisdictions in which people die from climate-related disasters should press involuntary manslaughter charges against companies with terrible emissions records. If the headlines were, "Exxon on trial for deaths of dozens", I think companies would begin to change their behavior.
Until wealth can't buy its way out of the consequences of climate change, this hasn't really happened.
Who cares about what's going on in SF when you can hop on your plane and fly to one of your properties elsewhere?
I lived somewhere where people would build multimillion dollar homes on the beach, and every few years hurricanes would wash them away. It's happening at an increasing frequency now. It's no big deal, though, because wealthy people can afford to insure and rebuild every time it happens. It's just one of the costs of having a beach house in a desirable area.
Similarly, wildfires are just one of the costs of having houses in the Bay Area.
Yes, but not the majority all at once.
As long as 51% of the electorate or more hasn't been personally inconvenienced you might as well be Al Gore shouting into the night.
- 1/3 of emissions come China which has an autocratic leadership accountable neither to its people or the global community.
- 70% of emissions come from energy consumption. 35% of all emissions is electricity and heat, and another 15% is construction + manufacturing.
- Even if every mode of transportation was fully electric supplied by 100% nuclear supplied electricity, global emissions would only drop by 15%. (i.e. transportation only accounts for 15% of global emissions).
Have you stopped heating/cooling your house? Moved to a small apartment? Stopped driving a car?
Carbon taxes will also meet friction because:
1. They are actually regressive income taxes. The bottom 90% of the income distribution spend most of their wealth on necessary consumption (food, rent, getting to work).
2. Most of the goods taxes (electricity, heat, transportation) are inelastic. People may chose to purchase less consumer items, eat less meat, but they are still going to heat their homes and drive to work.
I'm not suggesting to do nothing, but a smug mentality of "people are just not willing to do the obviously right solution because they are stupid" doesn't solve anything either.
China has a higher percentage of its energy coming from low emission sources than the US and single handedly accounts for 45% of worldwide annual investment in renewables, 3 times that of the US.
Carbon taxes are not sin taxes meant to disincentivize carbon production, they are a means to pay for carbon capture. If you can't afford to store the carbon released from burning a ton of coal, you can't afford to burn that ton of coal. Of course any new tax is going to meet friction, but what is will if not the ability to overcome friction when necessary?
They’re in fact very progressive - the poor consume less than the rich, and rich “hobbies” have greater proportional CO2 emissions - think supercars, yachting, flying business or private. So the poor will receive more in CO2 “income” than they’ll pay in CO2 tax.
The only difficulty is border control - how to prevent manufacturers simply escaping to CO2-tax-free jurisdictions and importing the finished goods - but with free trade getting a bad rep, maybe viable solutions will emerge.
In the higher up the income distribution the percentage of a person's income spent on consumption decreases, as highest earners typically put their money into wealth generating assets. So a smaller percentage of their income is actually taxed.
If you make 30k a year, you are spending everything you make on essentials. They're for the full amount of your earnings will be taxed by any consumption tax. If you make 300K a year, even if you spend 2/3 of it on consumption you are still being taxed at a lower rate.
The US generates 2x more emissions per capita (15.5 vs 7 tons). Australia generates more than the US (17), and Canada even more than Australia (18.5).
We got plenty of work to do ourselves before we look to China.
The best fair first approximation to this is for each country's share to be proportional to its population. That can then be refined with some sort of emissions trading system so that countries that want to outsource high emission industries to others can provide the emissions budget to allow that work.
Anything other than a per capita first approximation requires deciding that some countries simply are not going to be allowed to develop beyond third world status.
At projected 2050 population levels of 10b, and 25GT/year emissions, per capita emissions allowance is 2.5t/year. There is no industrialized country with this level of emissions, the lowest being Sweden, Switzerland and France at 4.5, 4.7 and 5.13. These countries have moved >90% of their electrical production to nuclear and renewables and cut their emissions in half compared to the 1990s. Possibly they are also externalizing their food and industrials production.
B. What is 'fair' share? Population as of 2020? 2050? 1950? Land area? Forest mass?
The most obvious issue is population. Hard to believe, but in 1950, at the beginning of the current Golden Era, world population was a mere 2.5 billion people. At those population levels everybody on Earth could have had afforded the industrialized lifestyle of Japan, Germany or Netherlands, with about 10 CO2t/capita emissions.
The US, Canada and Australia together make up roughly 20% of global emissions with approximately 5% of the global population. Regardless of how you slice it these countries need to take serious action.
You’ll notice that per-capita emissions are highly correlated with the list of countries that export fossil fuels.
I agree with your point but per capita emissions alone is a gross oversimplification.
Let's just focus on plugging the latter shall we, while we all go down together.
China is doing proportionally more to combat climate change than we are.
>70% of emissions come from energy consumption. 35% of all emissions is electricity and heat
There are so many "easy wins" here. Better insulation and other end user improvements (e.g. heat pumps), stricter efficiency standards and mandates, carbon taxes on the most polluting industries and generation methods (i.e. make it unprofitable to restart an old coal power plant to mine bitcoin), etc.
>I'm not suggesting to do nothing, but a smug mentality of "people are just not willing to do the obviously right solution because they are stupid" doesn't solve anything either.
There's not an obviously right solution to everything, but there are obviously right solutions to many things, and we are still choosing not to do any of them.
My house is ~100 years old structural brick. The insulation on most of the vertical walls is just the plaster, air gap, and 9” of brick. As we remodel (very slowly), we insulate with spray foam, but that remodeling is never driven by energy concerns. It’s vastly cheaper for me to keep heating the bulk of the house with natural gas than it ever would be to take money from investments and turn them into insulation and new plaster walls.
I’ve had insulation and HVAC contractors out. To totally redo just the vertical walls and change the HVAC to locally electric is a six-figure proposition and by the time it’s done, the first digit won’t be a “1”. The payback period on that is infinite if you charge yourself 2% interest (with energy priced as it is today).
This is why we need to change the economics of the situation. If we raise taxes on the very wealthy, Jeff Bezos might not get to go to space, but we could insulate a few hundred thousand houses.
If you create a large pile of government giveaway money but keep energy cheap, people will take the money and continue to use a lot of energy. (I’ll save money on heating and use it to keep the house 74°F instead of 69°F in the winter or to take a vacation to a tropical location.)
Bezos, Musk, and Gates aren’t the problem here. 100s of millions of Americans and a couple billion people worldwide who could all save 2-5% of their footprint are the problem. Incentives need to nudge them each a little rather than confiscation and redistribution of the wealth of a few dozen people. It can be comfortable to think “I don’t need to change; we just need to tax the ultra rich”, but the reality is closer to the opposite.
Why would we keep energy cheap? The economics of that also needs to change. I agree that we should also raise carbon-intensive energy prices, and do our best to structure it to penalize disproportionate users (e.g. construction costs for massive houses and buildings). I also don't understand how you could "take the money" for improvements like insulation and then still use more energy, unless you just mean fraud in general.
Change also needs to happen at a societal level. We need to tax extreme amounts of wealth, because that wealth came from society, so the burden is on them to help. On a global level, we could also do more to help developing and industrializing nations. Imagine a green version of the Marshall Plan.
“We should tax billionaires and raise taxes on carbon energy” is effective overwhelmingly because of the second part. You could nearly equally well say “we should chew more bubble gum and raise taxes on carbon energy”.
(It’s fine to have a separate debate on billionaire tax policy, but it seems tenuous at best to link it to energy policy.)
If I were a wealthy silicon valley type guy I would be looking closely at the Biosphere 2 project from the 80s and other closed ecosystem projects. There is untold wealth to be made knowing how to build and manage closed ecosystems, both here on earth and in space. There is a lot of science to do, and a lot of tech to build.
I would not be surprised if there were a number of secret ecosystem projects already underway around the world.
I actually don't agree that a system of any size will just balance itself. I think maintaining a closed system that can maintain human life, as we know it now, indefinitely, would take a lot of careful balancing. It would need constant monitoring and intervention. Something as simple as an algal bloom could wipe out everything else living in your water. If your bees die of some disease, you lose pollination, and all your fruit.
Can you imagine how much tech and effort it would be to manage every bee in your colony to make sure they all don't just die one season. And what do you do if your bee population crashes, you have to have some kind of bee breeding program to get the numbers back up.
The earth doesn't somehow just balance itself, the earth could become one vast desert in just a few generations. Pockets of live here and there for thousands of years no doubt, but enough to sustain human life?
That aside, some of the early research in climate change actually pointed out that the result of this climate instability may in fact be another glacial period rather than a period of extremely high temperatures. Just as damaging to people and ecosystems but not what a lot of people think about when they think "climate change."
And finally, there are a models and there are a bunch of unknowns. As the unknowns reveal themselves the models get better, but some things like the "great oxygenation events" that are documented in the fossil record are really really unknown.
The current wildfires are a good example of an unknown. The drought combined with lightning is burning millions of acres of forest. It can do that year after year for perhaps a decade, maybe two, and then the properties that make the forest subject to massive fires are mooted. So what then? Does the American northwest turn into a giant savannah with sparse trees and lots of grassland? When the ice has melted and the moisture carrying capacity of the air has quintupled, The annual rainstorms/hurricanes/monsoons will be biblically huge every year. How will people respond, how will we change the way we build, the way we live, the way we survive? It involves change but the challenges of living on the earth in those conditions is a couple of orders of magnitude less than the challenge of living on a planet that has never supported life in the first place.
Every generation is dumb in their own way, and we may get knocked back into a feudal existence, but what we can do as individuals remains the same, set good examples, practice less impactful living, and try to leave our patch of world better than it would have been had we not been there.
I'm afraid you are the victim of another popular climate denial myth that continues to spread like a virus.
* The 1970s Global Cooling Zombie Myth and the Tricks Some People Use to Keep it Alive, Part I https://skepticalscience.com/70s-cooling-myth-tricks-part-I....
But the key here is that in this discussion 'heat' here is a measure of energy not specifically temperature.
Climate change is the response of the current system when it has more latent energy versus without that latent energy. Those changes are varied, from changing thermoclines in the ocean to the changing ice levels at the poles.
A graduate student at Berkeley observed that the reason we talk about "glacial" cycles is because they leave durable marks in the landscape. But what sort of markers would a "hot cycle" leave? That was the fundamental question he was trying to answer. I believe his advisor had done his PhD on glacial cycles and there was a question of why weren't we in one given the periodicity of the geologic record.
So he was exploring the question of whether or not a "hot cycle" would somehow lead to a "cold cycle". The working hypothesis was was investigating cloud formation. I'm presuming that you've read the IPCC report and a number of papers on the models that are used so that you are familiar with the way in which they handle clouds. There are two kinds, clouds in the ionosphere and clouds in the troposphere. Their effect on surface temperature are exactly opposite.
From Chen Zhou in correspondence about his model work on climate, "It is worth noting that different cloud types have different climate radiative effects to the earth: high thin cirrus clouds warm the earth, while the marine boundary low clouds cool the earth significantly. To set a 90% cloud cover, you have to determine whether cirrus clouds or low clouds should be added: if you add cirrus clouds, the earth will warm significantly; if you add low clouds, the earth will cool."
And of course there were a number of papers that discussed "nuclear winter" which was a disruption of weather patterns by the particulates in the air from a general nuclear exchange. And papers that studied the weather effects of volcanic eruptions like Pinatubo in 1991.
So what this grad student was looking at was this; When you increase the mean temperature of the atmosphere, the ability for the air to hold moisture increases. When you increase the mean temperature of the oceans, evaporation rates increase. So more energy in the air means more moisture. There was another paper that discussed 'wet bulb' temperatures and how those would become more common as more moisture was being held in the air as well.
So what does that moisture do? Well it eventually condenses out of the air, first into clouds and then into precipitation. Because the difference in temperature between the surface and the ionosphere is greater, when rapid temperature changes occur (as they do when water condenses out of the air) you get huge upwellings. Basically much stronger storms, stronger tornadoes, and stronger hurricanes Etc. So what if there is enough heat in the air so that it keeps the moisture from condensing into drops and stays as clouds? Well if they appear at low altitude the surface gets really cold, if they appear at high altitude the surface gets hotter. Which we get isn't in the models because nobody knows yet how that will play out.
What that meant is that it is worth considering the effect of tropospheric clouds. If things got really cold, it could blanket the northern latitudes with 100% of snow cover that did not melt all year round. The 'year without a summer' which occurred when Krakatoa erupted is believed (but not proven) to have been this sort of effect. Snow cover increases the planets albedo and that increases the radiation of heat into space. If the northern lattitudes were covered in cloud and snow 365 days of the year you create a new model where water is evaporating in an over heated equatorial region flowing north and south and then contributing to the continuing cloud cover and precipitation. And THAT could lead to glaciation.
Is that going to happen? I don't think anyone knows. Can you tweak the current climate models and make it happen? Sure, just add a lot of low continuous cloud cover being resupplied with moisture from the equator.
But it is equally important to understand that this is climate change which is just as much human induced as baking in a dry desert. It isn't denying the science, it is looking at the science and the models and asking "Okay, given what we know what changes in the model cause what changes in the habitability of the planet?" And perhaps more importantly, how can we identify, as early as possible, how the model needs to incorporate what we're seeing in order to continue to help us understand what the future may hold.
All that’s missing is a weakening of the state and a few private drone armies.
The tricky thing about "Climate moment" is that it's impossible to prove that any single disaster was caused by climate change, because it's statistical in nature. A super-hurricane could ravage Florida or Texas, and you will always find someone saying "You can't prove it's global warming - freak weathers do happen all the time! Now is not the time to be carried away by knee-jerk emotions!"
And chances are the blow will be more like the proverbial frog slowly boiling in water than a sudden punch in the gut, so they'll probably only get off their asses and do something to adapt to the changes rather than prevent or reverse them.
Sorry, the Flynn effect is dead.
This is hindsight bias in spades. The global response to Covid-19 is much better than could reasonably have been expected before the event.
We don't have 10% of the world's population dead (partly through war), collapsed major cities due to core services failing, or any disasters at similar scale, and a raging pandemic with 20 or more virulent variants sweeping through repeatedly.
We're going to have to disagree on that. I read a couple of books on the subject pre-pandemic and I thought we were in good shape because the science was well understood. I had not calculated in politics, my bad.
> We don't have 10% of the world's population dead, collapsed major cities due to core services failing, or any disasters at similar scale, and a raging pandemic with 20 or more virulent variants sweeping through repeatedly.
Well, this is where some hindsight would come in handy, but for that we'll have to wait until this is all over, which so far it isn't. And this is exactly the kind of thinking which makes me believe strongly that we will not be able to effectively address climate change. It takes place on a time scale too slow for people to give a care. The things we're good at are earthquakes, storms, volcanic eruptions and floodings: they are there, immediately and you can do something about it using emergency response. The kind of problem that would effectively require 8 billion people to cooperate for a change is something that we simply have not mastered and my never master.
But thank you for illustrating my point in a very effective way.
When a virus jumps species there is a chance that it will evolve into more benign species over time, unfortunately COVID seems to be going in the other direction, it is getting better at infecting us and doing more damage to allow itself to spread better. And our slow-walking of counter measures has created an ideal environment with just enough selection pressure to evolve some even nastier strains.
On a global scale this is far from over, and there is a very good chance that the places that are now breathing a sigh of relief are going to be hit hard by later waves of more dangerous versions of this virus.
So 'mitigate' is a word that is best used retrospectively.
Bangladesh could lose a third of its per capita GDP by 2060 due to climate change: https://www.tbsnews.net/economy/bangladesh-lose-3649-gdp-cap.... But that’s compared to a no climate change baseline. It will still be far richer than it is today. And it’s in no danger of ceasing to exist. That’s not a scientifically supportable claim.
My hope is not on the next generation to be less willing to sacrifice the environment for short term economical gain. If I got any hope left it will be that politicians figure out how to farm tax money by targeting those that pollute, knowing that they can do so safely because they got popular support.
Certainly we can do things after that point, but we’ll see much more diminishing returns.
Perhaps we may get lucky and some event could throw things the other direction, like a large meteor impact or wide scale nuclear weapons discharge (leading to a lengthy nuclear winter.)
In al seriousness, the next generation isn’t going to be all that different than the last 10000 generations of mankind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Past_populati...
Famines, pandemics and wars are mere speed bumps compared to the kind of impact this can have. And if not the next generation then maybe the one after it but this will not go on for much longer before some kind of limit is reached.
It's all the same until suddenly it's not.
Thinking that just because something has been true for a million years it is also going to be true tomorrow.
This is how our brain is wired and it helps us function, most of the time, but sometimes it is wrong and leads to overlooking things until it becomes too late to react.
Coastal flooding...move to your vacation home in Vail, CO.
120F heat? Fit your house with 100000W AC units...the electric bill is pocket money.
Civil unrest from effects of climate change? Hire a private army to protect you.
But yeah, the poor will suffer much more.
> Hire a private army to protect you.
You seem to be talking about the ultra rich, like the top 1%.
I am, because they own the legislators.
I signed up for 350.org and I got put on a mailing list. I signed up with Sunrise and there are events to support DC statehood and hand out blankets for the homeless. How do I find people working on GHGs? What now?
What goes up can definitely - and must eventually - go down. This one is on us.
Or are we just talking about the ones that work?
The effects of climate change have occurred much more slowly and silently. At some point it will no longer be silent, but it will already be too late to meaningfully change its trajectory.
But in truth, and on a global scale, when it comes to new cases and deaths we are at roughly 60% of that peak right now, and still going up quite rapidly.
edit: And of course, the fact that the bulk of the problem is now facing the developed world certainly isn't a factor. /s
Let's see how long that attitude lasts, once we realize that covid anywhere is the equivalent of covid everywhere there may be a change of heart there.
It only becomes difficult when you have to mobilize politicians and regular folks.
species
The “climate industry” is full of people loudly proclaiming they’re holier than thou, but realistically there are few serious global solution except basically going back to pre-industrial world. Thanks but no thanks, I’d rather bet on technological breakthroughs in the next few decades.
- designed and built a house on renewable energy
- designed and built a windmill
Unfortunately both of these I have had to abandon, the former because it is on the wrong continent compared to where I am today, the latter because of permitting hassles.
- I do have the maximum surface of the roof covered in solar panels, a good 2500W peak.
- transport myself everywhere I can using bicycle / e-bike (< 30 km, sometimes much more than that if I'm not in a hurry)
- eat very little - hardly any, actually - meat / poultry / fish
That still leaves a ton of room for improvement but as long as I'm living in my current situation I personally can't do a whole lot more for a variety of reasons, and I would if I could.
I have fortunately been able to stop flying completely, all of our work is now remote and we are pushing hard to keep it that way (when before our customers demanded on site visits all over europe).
Compared to 1 year ago my energy usage is probably about half, compared to 10 years ago it is probably less than 25% because this is a much more temperate climate.
So, what have you done?
But the greens put a stop to that, so I find it hard to take them - and anyone else who, like you, writes paragraphs about things that in reality do not matter - seriously.
Going 'full nuclear' without capping the per-capita energy budget is still going to release a very large amount of energy. Besides that heating in many places is based on natural gas. Then there is the per kilo-watt hour cost of nuclear energy which is way higher than solar or wind when taken over the full lifetime of the installation including the eventual cleanup / disposal.
Nuclear energy is an option but it isn't the only option and it has serious drawbacks, just like every other option on the table today.
The best thing we can do is to limit our consumption. But that's easy to say from the point of view of the developed world, where consumption is excessive. It will be more than offset by the developing countries gains leaving us with a situation that is net worse than things are today even if we do our best. This is not a simple problem and naive one sentence solutions are not going to get us to a sustainable situation.
> Then there is the per kilo-watt hour cost of nuclear energy which is way higher than solar or wind when taken over the full lifetime of the installation including the eventual cleanup / disposal.
If we went full nuclear the cost per kWh would go down a lot. Costs are high because of minimal investment in the last several decades, western countries have not been building NPP and therefore aren't good (i.e. efficient) at it.
> The best thing we can do is to limit our consumption. But that's easy to say from the point of view of the developed world, where consumption is excessive. It will be more than offset by the developing countries gains leaving us with a situation that is net worse than things are today even if we do our best.
The cognitive dissonance is jarring. For the reasons you yourself state, clearly limiting consumption is NOT the solution.
I'm just about ready to pack it in and hope the next generation is smarter than this one because we sure messed it up. We'll go into the history books as the people that could have fixed it but didn't because we were too busy with our lifestyle.