We have "aggravated the situation" (as you put it) beyond recovery. Doing nothing will now surely lead to an unacceptable outcome. We are going to have to fix it, or resign ourselves to a huge shrinking of the habitable region of the planet, with the hunger/famine/war that will accompany that.
Obviously we can always make things worse. But when doing nothing is unacceptable, we have to start taking risks.
You're the proverbial boiling frog
If not worse.
But you're really just remaking the point that as a species we're incapable of intelligent collective management of our resources.
In this sense, continued emissions only accelerate and compound the current process unfolding. Global warming as it exists today cannot be stopped passively.
That was the previous poster's point. We can infer that their unstated objective is the end of global warming in the near future (i.e. in the next few centuries), the achievement of which necessarily requires active intervention.
I might infer that your unstated objective is not the end of global warming, but the end of ongoing human interference per se. That's an entirely different objective, albeit no less legitimate.
If I'm correct (and I'm confident in my assessment wrt to the previous poster), then you two are talking past each other.
Indeed we have practiced quite a bit. Read on the catastrophe that was geoengineering attempts resulting in what is now happening with the Sea of Azov.
Is that enough? AFAIK all paths forward to avoid the worst outcomes includes becoming net negative ASAP.
That's stopping the addition of 37,000,000,000 tonnes of CO2 anually.
For context, a modern CCS captures some thousands of tonne, which is a comparatively tiny, tiny number.
Unless magic happens in the next decade, it appears that geoengineering is something we can't avoid, sans the suffering and death of billions.
I'd love to be wrong here.
With all its inherent uncertainties geoengineering has many chances to make living conditions even worse.
It appears that the best think we can do is to stop doing thinks. I concede magic will be needed to make boomers accept that.
Convincing every country in the world that they don't need fossil fuels isn't possible.
Blocking some sunlight from reaching the Earth is.
People do change their habits, donate, volunteer, make concessions and work hard for the good of society in its whole.
Throw all of those in a blender and it's easy to see why democracy and global problems are not going lead to an actual solution. Individuals are going to make some minor difference but not enough to offset the larger trends as long as it isn't a solid majority doing this.
We're way past that point, the choice is quickly became to try geoengineering or die and I'm not going to take the dying option, no thanks, no matter how immoral you think the other one is.
Don't forget that, it's important!
The carbon emissions of the richest 1% of humanity are more than double than that of the poorest half of humanity. Oil and coal companies profit, while putting out disinformation, as they have been for decades. But why step on the toes of the powerful when you can just use inject sulfur into the atmosphere?
This style of comment is lazy and simply trying to shut down conversation without actually making an argument. If you have an objection to the comment you're responding to, then say why you think they're wrong, what your alternative point of view is, and why your point of view is the correct one.
If climate change was a disease it wouldn't have an ICD number, no method of diagnostic in standard literature, let alone a treatment approved by the competent authority.
The recommended solutions would be to eat more healthy, more physical activity, and something to treat the symptoms.
There won't be a double-blind study for specific treatments of earth, so any kind of idea is equally valid.
At the risk of stating the obvious: we need to measure every weird idea we try, and do our best to isolate the variables. Easier said than done. But we broke it, it's our problem now.
Talking about humility: an excess of humility leads to fatalism. Some is good, but not too much if you want anything to happen. We're talking about fixing the ecosystem of a planet, of course it's ambitious.
Up until the point climate change is becoming an existential threat, which it isn't yet, we shouldn't go doing anything too drastic. There is plenty of evidence that we can still avert the worst of it without resorting to geoengineering.
And zero evidence we will...
I want to know what the costs[1] of ignoring are likely to be so I can be sure it's worth the pain to ban non-electric cars in 10 years, ram through nuclear power plants while gutting safety regs so we can get them built in less than a decade and try and threaten India and China into reducing CO2 emissions. What do you tell me?
[1] In $, convert other units like lives into dollars as need be and be sure to value lives from different culture lives at 0.1x as thats the expressed preferences of the population based on chatitable giving figures.
These are all regrettable facts. But that are facts.
40 years of raising awareness and individual action has failed.
We already have once in a lifetime climate event every month and the carbon locked-in of the past decade still hasn't kicked-in. I'd argue the complete opposite, there's a lack of evidence of other options.
This is absolutely untrue.
The mechanisms of how SO2 in the stratosphere cools the planet are well understood and empirically observed.
This includes the fact that it breaks down in ~2 years, making it self repairing, should something unforeseen happen.
It is untrue that they have no idea if the "solutions" we try won't lead to worse outcomes
It is true that they have some idea that the "solutions" we try won't lead to worse outcomes
It is true that they have some idea that the "solutions" we try will lead to better outcomes.
I think the nuance needed here is: what do we mean by "better outcomes?" It's reasonable to believe that it will help lower temperatures. But is that an "outcome" in and of itself?
If we consider the "outcome" to also include the second and third order effects, I'd like to understand how anyone could be certain that it will be better.
> Such an increase in sulfate aerosol emissions had a variety of effects. At the time, the most visible one was acid rain, caused by precipitation from clouds carrying high concentrations of sulfate aerosols in the troposphere. At its peak, acid rain has eliminated brook trout and some other fish species and insect life from lakes and streams in geographically sensitive areas, such as Adirondack Mountains in the United States. Acid rain worsens soil function as some of its microbiota is lost and heavy metals like aluminium are mobilized (spread more easily) while essential nutrients and minerals such as magnesium can leach away because of the same. Ultimately, plants unable to tolerate lowered pH are killed, with montane forests being some of the worst-affected ecosystems due to their regular exposure to sulfate-carrying fog at high altitudes.[1]
Sure, let's have ~2 years of that.
Betting on never having a disruption to that supply seems high risk to me.
How big? 1%? 10%? 50%?
This matters.
It’s cool to analyze but it can paralyze us into observation and this situation benefits from the former because the consequences of being wrong is so profoundly dire.
Generally agree with you, but why not be conservative when it comes to issues like global warming and species extinction and avoid catastrophe if it turns out to be as bad as it could be?
That takes linear thinking and action now. We should also analyze, but it’s logical to take action too.
Geoengineering is an act of desperation. Its like your laptop is on fire, so you throw some water on it.
Is it a lithium fire? I think this might be a very good analogy.
But it might just be a simpler fire.
But if smothering isn't an option... You take the lowest risk choice, which is the water.
The appeal of geoengineering is you can nudge specific systems slowly into another direction. You can start small and observe expected effects and unwanted side-effects.
Reduction of sulfer emissions by ships is an interesting starting point to learn something.
So in the worst case: small input, giant irreversible effect.
Of course that’s impossible to do since the world itself is doing things like erupting volcanos, shifting plates, melting glaciers, and redirecting ocean currents.
Ooops... bricked it :(
I used to think this way, but after years of trying I don't think getting people to change their life habits is going to happen.
At this point I think geoengineering is necessary. At the very, very least, carbon sequestration at scale is a fairly safe form of geoengineering if we can pull it off.
The lesson being. We as humans aren't simply animals occupying a rock floating in space. Us being powerful means we have to take responsibility no matter how much it makes our internal naturalistic fallacy emotions winge.
The idea to inflate space foam reflective bubbles to reduce incoming sunlight is one of the saner geoengineering proposals:
* It can start small and grow to measure incremental effect,
* It's orthogonal to any unintended effects as it happens in isolation and isn't deeply coupled to things unknown in the same sense as aerosols and atmospheric chemistry is.
* It's reversable as bubbles can be popped and no longer exist to reflect and have an effect.
> This should not be some VC funded endeavor.
Yeah, on this we can agree- a high degree of global nation state consensus is what's called for with most climate action .. like the 1970s UN agreements that got effectively sunk by unending Koch et al oil bro's negative media campaigning and lobbying.
'Lone' capitalists do seem to have undue sway in matters that impact billions.
How would it be VC funded? Where would the return on investment hypothetically come from? If you could produce localised effects while being able to turn them on or off then maybe you could charge for it as a service, but is that at all realistic?
Probably akin to "testing in production". But, as is in computing, it's still done all the time despite the dangers.
Also I object to the use of the term geo-engineering. Engineering supposes we know exactly what the outcomes will be following centuries/decades of experience with similar systems. Including many failed experiments. Thinking we can geo-engineer a predictable change when there is no way to experiment, fail and learn safely because we only have one shot at this is massively stupid. Anyone that claims "but we've been geoengineering for decades with our greenhouse gas emissions etc" is simply wrong. No, we haven't been "geoengineering". Engineering implies conscious intent. Humanity didn't start burning coal to increase co2 content in the atmosphere. Confusing these two things are akin to finding a victim of a vehicle accident and doing a roadside open heart surgery by a random bystander. "Hey, the guy is already sliced open, we've already started the surgery so we may as well continue right?" No, wrong. That is insane.
The biggest lie today is that we comprehensively know how climate works. We don't. We don't even measure the earth's temperature properly. We extrapolate huge amounts of data. If we _really_ wanted to learn how climate works it would require not just arrays of sensors covering the entire planet's surface, but also ocean depths and the the entire thickness of the atmosphere. No, satellites are not a replacement. Anyone that knows the limitations of satellite sensing knows we can measure a lot, but reliably measuring temperature, humidity, and wind direction across the entire thickness of the atmosphere is not something we can do. We can roughly approximate some measurements across the entire thickness, in theory in good conditions we can narrow it down to certain attitudes and on this basis we make conclusions on the entire state of the system pulling the missing data from our "models". If we discovere the models are wrong? We just tweak them to match the historic data. We might know the measures in this particular place and time, but we use our "models" to "approximate" everything we are unable to measure.
This is one of the major reasons why we cannot reliably predict weather for next 3 days, and why our attempts at making climate predictions are laughable. We know a certain number of principles so we can make some conclusions like more co2/h2o/ch4 = more temperature, but even in this we have to accept there are processes (positive and negative feedback) we have zero idea of.
Furthermore, our planet has shown us huge climatic variability in the geological record. Within that variability the most dangerous to human life are periods of excessive glaciation (ice ages). We're "just" in the warming period after the last one. Is humanity taking part in accelerating the warming? Yes, is it a licence for stupidity like attempting to "stabilise" something that is inherently unstable and periodic(climate) risking we overdo it and find ourselves in a "mini ice age"? No.
Has it ever stopped us before? No. Anyone interested in results of previous "geoengineering" efforts should read up on the soviet attempts at it and what catastrophe it wrought on the region including the Sea of Azov. People in the entire Black Sea region can consider themselves extremely lucky they haven't implemented more than few percent of their plans. It is generally accepted today had more of Soviet attempts at geoengineering been implemented it would've had same horrible consequences we see near the Sea of Azov far and wide.
The point about climate variability is a stock denialist talking point.
In reality climate predictions have been extremely accurate. There is absolute no mystery or ambiguity here. We've been improving our CO2 models for over a century now, and in recent decades the modelling has been extremely good - although if anything it's been too optimistic.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-a...
The problem isn't the science, it's the politics. We have a planetary culture that puts profit and political ambition - naive uninformed personal indulgence and status seeking, mixed with sanctioned reality denial - over collective intelligence and awareness.
While we have individual intelligence - in varying degrees - we still have herd-animal politics and economics. Our management systems have barely changed for millennia, the same issues and tendencies to self-harm keep recurring, and they're completely unsuitable for dealing with the kinds of problems we're facing.
Darwin is remorseless. If a species is maladapted to its environment, extinction - cultural and eventually physical - beckons.
That's where we are now.
If the models are too optimistic, that still means they are wrong, right? Genuinely confused about this.
“The situation today is more dire than our previous models predict and the same models predict an even worse future so we need to take them extra seriously” doesn’t strike me as very reasonable. Not in a super non-linear system with tons of complicated feedback loops.
Any pointers to in-depth explanations of how these models work and how they are benchmarked? Definitely want to learn more.
And yes, if the alternative is an extinction-level event, for example a runaway greenhouse effect turning the earth into Venus, then stomping on the brakes with anything whatsoever is a perfectly valid proposal. And doing something comparable to a volcano doesn't come close to "anything whatsoever", because, as I said, we have records of how this plays out, and it happens all the time anyway.
And if you are saying that this isn't an acceptable way to proceed, which is a perfectly valid position, then very obviously the alternative cannot be an extinction-level event such as a runaway greenhouse effect that will turn Earth into Venus.
What you cannot have is have it both ways. Which is where a lot of people currently seem to be positioned. As in "we are literally destroying the planet AND geo-engineering is unacceptable". Nope. Pick one.
Furthermore, injecting SO2 into the atmosphere is easy enough that it is well in reach of pretty much every state actor whose population is going to be most severely affected by climate change, in particular "wet-bulb events". So the question of whether we want this to happen or not really isn't relevant. It almost certainly will happen.
Black sea indeed had a catastrophe but that one predated humans.
But emitting some sulfer oxides is not.
Geoengineering is a very broad term, yes there are things that are in the category of "geoengineering" that could make humans extinct, but none are proposed as a solution to global warming.
here's one: stop writing random bits to the BIOS hoping it will fix things
Eg. The odds of blocking out the sun not cooling the earth are much lower than the earth's temperature magically stabilising at current levels despite more co2 emissions.
Most people here on HN are rationally capable of understanding the challenges humanity faces right now.
What many aren't capable of is accepting the conclusion that we all have to change the way we live and quite possibly even the way we organize society in order to mitigate the irreperable problems our way of living has already caused.
Deep down they might suspect this is necessary, but it is much more comfortable to believe in a solution that is only technological and go on as we did. That is why discussions around such technological silver bullets are always toxic: people want to believe.
That's because this has never actually been shown. So many people think it has, but almost none have ever seen an actual attempt at a QALY calculation for no climate change mitigation. If you've actually seen one I'd love you to link it!
Mostly it's lots of handwaving, but attempting to quantify things is actually important so we can know what measures are worthwhile (e.g. if climate change was an existential risk this century then threatening with nukes any country emitting CO2 would be reasonable).
Cars != all weather mobility
And if you really want a car get ready to pay 4x current prices because that's what they actually cost without subsidies and free externalities
Btw: CO2 emission taxes, road taxes and congestion charges are a great idea.
Sorry but getting rained on a bit is least of our troubles. Imagine there are places like Netherlands where it rains all the time and people (including very old ones) bike around the city…
if you want to shape the behaviors of the world's people as you suggest, you'll need fascism. hard sell when there are already two paths to clean energy abundance, two paths to sustainable driving, and many paths to damage control competing in the public discourse.
People biking are just happily chugging along. They are not the fascists.
I'm also unsure what the proposed solution to Bob being 10 miles away is. Should I only make friends with people who work at the same place?
Use public transport, take a cab if you need to or use a car club (shared vehicles use less resources than owning a car), ride a bike, walk the 10 miles. Infrastructure helps to reduce personal car use.
“But my quality of life!”
An umbrella solves that at minimal cost.
For the record, I don't think all car use is wrong, but the example of visiting a friend 10 miles away isn't a very good one. Someone shouldn't be expected to buy a car and its associated maintenance, tax, and externalities, just to visit someone that nearby.
I want to say here that this comment sounds extremely alien to me, to the point that out of context I would have taken it as satirical.
I know you're serious, but there's probably a big portion of people to whom discussing the problem of walking in the rain to the bus stop sounds completely ridiculous, in any context, and as as something we must consider when talking about climate change policy, well, even more ridiculous.
I've lived in rainy places, and you just wear a raincoat, boots, maybe an umbrella (not always), and carry on.
This kind of disproportionate weight assigned to even the smallest levels of personal discomfort, when discussing these problems, is what most people are denouncing here. And this bias might be what pushes people towards techno-solutionism that doesn't have a chance of actually solving our problems in the time frame that we need.
- you wait until it stops raining
- you bring an umbrella
- you bring a change of clothing
- you bike or walk
- you ask Bob to meet you halfway
Kids here in NL do this every day, sometimes across even longer distances (when they're high school age and live in rural parts of the country).
(That comment must be satire)
I do agree there should be more options in the housing market, but in the end there is some percentage of the market which will prefer to not live in flats and rowhouses.
Ah, now you're understanding why US cities are so sprawled. Those SFH's are remote, and a good chunk of the people living there want it that way. Those people want a large yard away from a large city while still having things like some stores and a large airport within an hour or so. These people reject the thought of living in a place like New York or Amsterdam or London or other dense cities. They actively vote against expansion or creation of public transit options.
I know there's a lot of media online about people being anti-suburbia, and yeah that's a growing percentage of America. But there's still a massive chunk of the population that will continue to just move out further from the city as you densify or actively fight densification.
As I suggested, those zoning laws aren't writing themselves. They're not being handed down by some far away dictator. They're being written and continued by popularity elected local politicians. Democracy at work.
I've absolutely seen densification efforts massively fought by the people who currently live there. I know people who purposefully moved further out from the city. I've seen neighborhood after neighborhood that seem like nightmares to me get built way out in the middle of nowhere with people clamoring to buy into them even if there are similar purchase-price denser options further in the city. Because, they want a large yard, they want a three car garage, they want five bedrooms and a study and a theater room and a wine humidor closet.
Which buying way out there, it's cheap to have some massive house because the $/sqft for just the lot alone is massively higher in the city. A massive chunk of the value of the home in a city is the land it's on not the structure itself, unless it's a really fancy structure.
Vancouver is 80% SFHs because of zoning. Recently the government allowed multiplexes in SFH zones, and suddenly every new construction is a multiplex, and families are looking at rebuilding their houses to maximize value.
If there was no artificial zoning, then Vancouver would be a lot denser and current SFHs would be a lot more expensive (and they're already expensive, 2M on average). This is true across most NA cities.
My argument is not that nobody wants SFHs. I'm sure they do, but desires are not fixed. If you had to choose between an SFH 1 hour away from the city, and a row house 15 minutes away, you might go with the row house.
And yes, sometimes people want to live far. There's lots of reasons for that, and that's ok, as long as they're paying the real value of it. By the way, this would mean massive property taxes because sparse infrastructure is very expensive.
Can you expand on why these SFH's would be more expensive if the zoning policies were different?
If people prefer the flats and rowhouse, and we expand the availability of the things they prefer, wouldn't the thing they don't prefer (SFH) fall?
If instead of one SFH with a large yard you build 5 row houses in the same plot, and sell each one for 1M, the SFH is only 50% efficient compared to the row houses, so its price needs to increase for it to be worth building.
It's obviously more complicated than that, but that's the underlying idea. It's the same reason you don't see SFHs in Manhattan, because the opportunity cost is too high.
I live in Tokyo. As I'm replying to you, I'm coming back from meeting my friends that live 13 miles away. This isn't uncommon. One of my best friends, I see her almost every week, lives 15 miles away from me.
Here's what I did: I cycled 5 minutes to the train station; I got on the train; I ran into a friend in the train, and we chatted the whole way; I got to the station, went to our meeting spot, and we hung out for hours, drank a bunch, had fun, until last train; then we all went back to the station, rode the train for 45 minutes, and now I'm home.
It wasn't raining today, but I hang out with my friends when it's raining too. We don't let that stop us. Take an umbrella or a raincoat or just walk for 5 minutes in the rain. It's not a big deal.
At the same time, I understand that this can feel very foreign to you. Our thoughts are molded by our environment. But I'm sure that if you lived in Tokyo you would also change your mind.
I don't know how to change your mind, but I can tell you that if you gave it a try you would change your mind. l
I'm not saying cars have no place, but they don't need to be the be all end all of transportation. There's very real negatives to cars, we're just blinded to them as long as we live in a car centric society.
I've been cycling and using public transport in the south east UK as my primary means of travel for 12 years, the car is a supplement. Update your mental models accordingly.
We just went through 2 weeks of heavy rain here in Germany. I am only biking (not even an E-Bike) and what I did is just looked at the rain radar with a simple app, add a bit of buffer time, packed rain clothes in my bike bag and just go. I was only once a bit wet because I was too lazy to pull out my jacket as I came back home one evening.
You will always find a good excuse to keep the apparent comfort of a car, but once you start to really bike on a regular basis, in my case, I found the bike way nicer, you bring movement in your life. It helps my health and my mood, which is a nice side effect.
The car is still incredibly useful for rainy days, visiting friends or when I really don't feel like tackling that hill to shop.
Maybe you enjoy half an hour cycling in rain that's going to last 6 hours, but I don't.
At some point, people are going to have to start preferring long term survival over short term enjoyment.
I don’t love getting rained on, and there are days that the last thing I feel like doing is getting on the bike or walking somewhere, but feeling like doing something is often not the primary reason to do it. And I realize that if I can’t/won’t make the harder decisions, I have no business encouraging others to do the same.
Societies collectively need to change habits and shift mindsets about the ways we live life. It certainly won’t be because it all feels good.
I’m not saying there is no place for cars, and clearly there are situations where a bike won’t work. But that does not mean our current car culture is acceptable either.
Two things on this: A. Electric cars are now viable. B. Even if they weren't, current climate change projections are not a threat to human survival, merely going to make life harder by a hard to quantify amount.
I sometimes worry that the pyramid of infrastructure and labour required to create that flat is not scalable
Opportunities are everywhere if one is looking and prepared.
I don't understand why so many people choose to believe things are impossible.
Public transit exists but luckily there arn’t many places to go.
If it’s not within 3 miles mostly likely you have to travel 20 miles. This helps keep the carbon footprint low because it is easy to go without.
Meets your criteria and has fiber installed. We have at least 2 neighbors that will sell you eggs and I would let you garden.
*have chosen EV charger the ev share will have to wait for full occupency.
The only thing unsustainable about the first world lifestyle is the fact that we don't have the political will to invest in real solutions like nuclear power, carbon capture and storage, etc.
My point is that an average HNer lives in a country where per capita co2 per person is >10x as much as the poorer countries. And since the average HNer is a well off person with a lavish lifestyle, international travels etc., it's probably closer to 100x the amount of a person in a developing country.
Either this lifestyle should only belong to us few and developing countries should remain developing. Or we need to cut back to a sustainable level everyone can share. Which is a reality people don't want to face.
> The only thing unsustainable about the first world lifestyle is the fact that we don't have the political will to invest in real solutions like nuclear power, carbon capture and storage, etc.
It's not about "political will". Would you pay more for a product if it's external effects were priced in? Probably not. Hence unsustainable. Our level of consumption is only possible because we don't pay the true price, someone else is.
We don't need to "cut back" to a sustainable level. A sustainable level is whatever amount of energy we can produce without increasing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. If we built more nuclear, solar, and wind, we could sustain a much higher level of consumption than we currently are, while emitting less carbon.
I'm not saying keep going as if nothing is happening. I'm saying the climate crisis is a real emergency, and the solution is to build more renewable energy and remove carbon from the atmosphere.
I thought we were talking about energy "consumption", not consumption of material goods. However, I'm still not sure how much reducing that kind of consumption is going to help in the overall picture of the climate crisis. It's also not realistic to expect that everybody is just going to stop buying things in the next 10 years.
But it's not going to go down far enough in developed countries and it is going up very rapidly in developing countries, the result of that is predictable, and in the meantime we are emitting a large multiple of the per-capita greenhouse gases compared to everybody else, who simply want to have theirs too.
We do need to 'cut back' to a sustainable level or we will be cut back. The amount of carbon in the atmosphere is already too high, it won't come down unless we cut back, as a species.
> If we built more nuclear, solar, and wind power, and invested more in carbon capture and storage, we could sustain a much higher level of consumption than we currently are, while emitting less carbon.
That can not be stated with such a degree of confidence, and smacks a bit of people saying that driving electric cars is good for the environment. It isn't, it's just slightly better than driving an ICE.
Isn't this because we're paying them to make stuff for us? Or is there some accounting of this where its their own consumption that causes it?
The powerhouse that is the United States was built on the externality of carbon emissions. Now that the West has built their economies of this externality, they're trying to prevent developing nations from catching up by utilizing the same externality.
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/The-2...
Canada 18.72
United States 15.32
China 7.44
Brazil 2.24
Indonesia 2.02
India 1.89
You make a good point though: what is and what isn't habitable will change and as a result there will be substantial movement of people, displaced either by choice or by need.
Looks like Niagara falls only produces about 16 billion BTUs or 4.9 Million kWs.
There is also the delta to take into account. Industrialized countries are decarbonizing and switching to renewables, while industrializing countries are building new coal plants.
The ethical solution would be for industrialized nations to subsidize the development and decarbonization of developing nations.
That sounds an awful lot like a long con.
Most rational people have arrived at the very reasonable conclusion that the more extreme the danger is, the more justified we are in attempting cutting edge countermeasures. So when the response we get back is "oh no, you can't do that, anything but that!"... the more it sounds like it was a grift all along.
This requires no conspiracy, by the way. Large groups of people can subconsciously coordinate in these ways without even realizing their doing it. Just takes a bit of groupthink and a small dab of neuroticism.
On the flip side, some people reject technological solutions on principle because for them, it's not about solving problems, it's about atoning for the sins of humanity.
What does the alternative future look like where we solve the climate crisis by changing the way we live and organize society? Personally, I would prefer to continue having electricity, heat, running water, sewage treatment, shipping, transportation, and the internet. It seems to me that if we really wanted to, we could keep these things around while putting a substantial portion of GDP into building nuclear reactors and removing carbon from the atmosphere. But that's not a satisfying answer for people who have made the climate crisis into a religious issue.
Also bluntly: how would we do that ethically without severely restricting reproductive rights or "cleansing" populations?
Because I don't know what the solution is but I do know that the alternative is going to be no fun at all. One possibility is that we all end up agreeing that we should at least try to reduce our numbers. My parents brought me up with 'replacement' numbers so that we'd end up with a steady population. I'm not so sure if that was wise. And I'm aware that there are many predictions out there that our numbers will eventually top out (they will, either because we do it ourselves, voluntarily or because our resources will run out, an exponentially expanding population in a fixed environment always ends in collapse).
But unless we manage to reduce our impact on the environment in very drastic measures I don't see a way for the increased consumption and eventual survival of our societies as we know them today. In another comment someone offhandedly asked whether we should all want leisure yachts or not. The obvious answer to that is 'no'. But we probably also shouldn't all want vehicles and the ability to transport ourselves to the end of the world on a whim. Hard choices are ahead of us, the time for easy answers is long behind us.
Nature will be wanton, cruel, perhaps overshoot. It will be ugly and horrific. We will not be left in great shape. The only fairness it will possess is unpredictable randomness.
Or, we can do it. Harsh. Belt-tightening. Unpleasant conversations. Lengthy debates about worth. Whole societies wanting their turn at the trough. Deprivation. Lifeboat politics. The Cold Equations in a hot, hot world.
Everybody who decides that what they need to do is kill extremely large numbers of other people can just off themselves instead.
And so the scavengers will feast and the plagues will bloom again. And because no-one will agree, we will have little local wars over resources. Maybe someone will grab a warhead or two. Technology still keeps happening, so expect at least one plague to be targeted. And some group will have a "if we can't have it, nobody can," so a self-irradiated country will get to keep a resource out of some other group's hands. You'll get real genocides, then.
Nobody wants to participate in the one way of getting their hands bloody, pretending that they won't get bloody later on, up to the elbows.
Uh, no. I'm watching this garbage truck smash into the wall, same as you. We're all in the same boat.
We could easily be in 'adapt or die' territory somewhere in the next century.
I hope it's clear from context that I wasn't directing anything at you; we're basically in complete agreement.
The majority of people around me would rather invest in holidays and luxury goods than sustainability and aim to increase their footprint rather than that they reduce it. I'm just as guilty because I too live in a wealthy country. And even though I bike when I can and have spent a small fortune on making this house less dependent on outside energy I make myself no illusions: I'm still a net negative on the environment, far in excess of any developing world denizen. All I have to do to have that reinforced is to look at our trash can, food bill and fuel bill for the times when we do drive. Each of those alone is probably well in excess of our 'proper' budget that would be sustainable.
And for the life of me without stopping all activity I have no idea how I can further reduce it, this is just the world I happen to live in. I guess I could not have had kids, I guess I could live in a tiny shack. But overall everybody in the developed world will increase the problem by virtue of being alive. That's not good news, but I don't have anything better.
Rich people consume orders of magnitude more resources than poor people so if anything it's unethical for rich people to have children.
Exactly. The dismantling of Roe v Wade in the US comes to mind as a form of severely restricting reproductive rights.
The first thing takes years and we still don’t have feasible technology for the second. Not to mention that we would still have a lot of emissions from transport, manufacture, and meat consumption.
A technological silver bullet would be cool but the reality is that we don’t have one and there’s nothing in the near future. But reducing our consumption is something we can start doing now.
I'm not saying there's a silver bullet, I just think it's our decision as a society whether or not we invest in these technologies and do the work of developing them to the point that they actually have a chance of solving the problem. We were able to make rapid progress on nuclear in the 1940s and space flight in the 1960s. We have the resources, but it doesn't seem like we have the political will this time.
Now imagine it's not just some meaningless project at your job but a matter of life and death for the majority of life on Earth, which do you pursue?
The solution is crystal clear, we have real life working examples right now all over the world, for example the people living in Bangladesh are at a level of consumption that would actually be sustainable for all 8 billion of us to embrace.
The solution is clear, it’s just that we don’t like it, so we readily embrace the magical thinking that we can have our cake and eat it too.
> Personally, I would prefer to continue having electricity, heat, running water, sewage treatment, shipping, transportation, and the internet.
Incredibly tone deaf, frankly, when most past humans had none of those things and yet dealt with it, living actual full lives. We've basically forgotten what we are, what we came from, and believe we deserve Saturday morning cartoons.
>Incredibly tone deaf, frankly, when most past humans had none of those things and yet dealt with it, living actual full lives. We've basically forgotten what we are, what we came from, and believe we deserve Saturday morning cartoons.
We came from a history of mostly starving, struggling for survival, dying of infections, dying during childbirth, being illiterate, and having little shelter or comfort. I think this nostalgia for the past is a golden age fallacy that needs to die. Technology has vastly improved human life and taking it away is essentially a call for reducing the standard of living for everybody.
The past wasn't sunbeams and frolicking in meadows, but your take on it is totally off base. The fact is that in every period of (Western) history, the wealthy have always lived incredibly comfortable and enjoyable lives. Modern technology isn't the determinant variable. They did it by harnessing their respective civilizations--it was absolutely not equitable. They rested atop a pyramid of other people. And so do you and I! We do not live in equitable times globally. To the extent that we've made any strides morally, it's only that we've substituted technology and industrialization for slavery and oppression. But under no configuration is modern life sustainable for 8 billion people, energy, living space, and raw materials wise, so this situation is going to keep drawing down the reservoir until there is a brutal correction.
I also think your characterization of all of history being "mostly starving, struggling for survival, dying of infections, dying during childbirth, being illiterate, and having little shelter or comfort" is frankly tripe. As if native peoples lives (over hundreds of thousands of years, indeed) are such utter trash that they need to be rescued from it by technology. "Oh, the poor brown people living such primitive lives, how sad. Let's do a mission to convert them to consumerism and fill their lives with junk, get them some jobs and atomize their tribes." I invite you to visit basically any place on Earth that is not Europe or North America. It's frankly a white/western superiority complex and technology is just a fig leaf over it, a fundamental belief that today's way of life is the only one worth living and is so obviously superior that it cannot be questioned. I mean, those stupid native Americans and their huts. Good thing we fixed that, right?
This is reproducible across time, geography and culture. It is the basic condition of humanity.
> I invite you to visit basically any place on Earth that is not Europe or North America. It's frankly a white/western superiority complex and technology is just a fig leaf over it, a fundamental belief that today's way of life is the only one worth living
I invite you to do the same, and ask the people you'd meet if they'd prefer if half their children died in their arms or if they'd prefer to live without electricity, or antibiotics, or fertilizer, or telecommunications, or vaccines, or, or, or....
> But under no configuration is modern life sustainable for 8 billion people, energy, living space, and raw materials wise, so this situation is going to keep drawing down the reservoir until there is a brutal correction.
If billions are going to die either way then instead of just giving up we should be trying everything in our power to improve our technology to increase the carrying capacity of the earth and escape another malthusian trap as we've done so many times in the past.
Unless of course you want billions to die.
As an aside, I'm very disturbed to realize this screed is coming from someone of your stature in the tech community.
Oh geesh. As if the lines of code I have written are what I put forth to vouch for this. We should divorce the tech fantasies from the meatspace realities. My opinions are based on the many, many, non-tech days that I've spent roaming the Earth[1] and have seen what humans as a whole are really up to. I've spent a whole lot of time picking up garbage off beaches and roadsides and over the course of my short life have already seen the forests and fields of my youth get gobbled up by Lowes's and Burger Kings and endless, endless sprawl and greed. When I see a hundred acres of corn get sold off for 6 million bucks and the only thing that is built on it is a gas station, it dawns me that it's just another transaction in a long, long line of trading what was here before for the now--forests, trees, raccoons, foxes, wolves, beatles, ants, birds, bees, all...woosh. I guess tomorrow it'll be a solar/wind-powered datacenter and we'll all pat ourselves on the back. But we're fruits or flowers on the tree of life, and we're sawing its branches off.
What I find disturbing, but not really surprising, given how virtualized and fake our worlds and imaginations have become, just how blinkered the tech sector is, as if exponential growth is going to continue forever and matter and energy are just going to suddenly take up our growthism mindset and help us boost our fever dreams of...what...a hundred billion people on Earth? Or of 8 billion Elon Musks whisking around the planet on private jets? I honestly don't know what people expect. The exponential curve would naturally become an S curve at some point, but unfortunately we aren't aiming for that. We've already overshot, and the reservoir we are drawing down will eventually run dry, and that's a brutal, brutal crash.
And if you take my opinion for advocating any fascist-sounding, eugenics-sounding, kill-the-baddies-sounding recommendation, then you're reading something in I didn't write. Like if pointing out we're headed for a cliff turns into an argument about the two options: magically sprout wings or all of us cut our legs off the knees. It's a total non-sequitur and binary thinking.
[1] And yeah, it's true that I've been able to roam said Earth because of tech that's been invented in the last 50-100 years. And yes, I am lucky. And yes we are having this conversation because of tech, and yes, I don't feel great about the unsustainability of the lifestyle that all of us, including me, live.
1. The human growth explosion already happened. We're dealing with the end stage of it over the next 50-100 years. There will never be a world of "a hundred billion people on Earth" since it turns out people don't want to reproduce that much. We'll hit peak human this century which means that we actually do have a shot at giving all people a decent lifestyle if we develop our technology and have abundant energy. Exponential growth is just not required. The Ehrlichian doomsday was never going to happen.
2. The past was actually really bad, even for the wealthiest. Disease, starvation, and violence were actually rampant. Rewinding the development clock in rich areas, or pausing it in developing areas, would be equivalent to the largest crimes against humanity ever perpetrated.
I find your rejection of this basic fact of history by writing things like: "if native peoples lives (over hundreds of thousands of years, indeed) are such utter trash that they need to be rescued from it by technology" or "Incredibly tone deaf, frankly, when most past humans had none of those things and yet dealt with it, living actual full lives. We've basically forgotten what we are, what we came from, and believe we deserve Saturday morning cartoons." to be wildly ignorant. These people suffered, for millions of years, and still they suffer today. Alleviating this suffering is not optional. Frankly only someone who grew up in the utterly privilege western culture could ever think or write something like this.
3. Humans are not separate from nature. This one is counter-intuitive and hard to swallow but the truth is all human activity is natural, Lowes and Burger Kings are just a natural as forests. Nature is utterly impersonal. It has no morality or opinion. Sometimes one species gets a lot of adaptions that let it dominate and reshape the rest of nature into the way it sees fit. Then other species evolve to fill the new niches that are created. We make a lot of plastic now, but bacteria are starting to evolve to eat it, is plastic bad for nature? It's a nonsensical question. Plastic is nature.
It's fine to not like this and prefer some parts of nature over others, I certainly do, but no part of it is "better" or "worse" it just IS. Any morality you assign to it is purely your own opinion.
> And if you take my opinion for advocating any fascist-sounding, eugenics-sounding, kill-the-baddies-sounding recommendation, then you're reading something in I didn't write
But surely you must realize that the malthusian collapse that you anticipate will be characterized by authoritarian violence. Times of resource scarcity always are. So by embracing a defeatist philosophy you implicitly endorse it.
Reminds me of this George Carlin bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rld0KDcan_w
We can fit far more than 8 billion people on the planet. Look how much of it is uninhabited by humans right now. The limit isn't living space, it's our ability to generate and distribute clean energy. Raw materials are a concern, but I don't think we're anywhere close to running out at the moment, and if we get our shit together technologically there are plenty of raw materials in the solar system.
>As if native peoples lives (over hundreds of thousands of years, indeed) are such utter trash that they need to be rescued from it by technology. "Oh, the poor brown people living such primitive lives, how sad. Let's do a mission to convert them to consumerism and fill their lives with junk, get them some jobs and atomize their tribes."
> I mean, those stupid native Americans and their huts. Good thing we fixed that, right?
I'm not sure why you needed to bring race/skin color into the discussion, or to attribute this view to me in that tone. How about we ask people what they want, rather than prescribing how they should live from our idealized/nostalgic view of native people? Let's see whether they want to live with an electric grid, medical care, and access to modern goods and services. If we judge by the number of industrializing societies across the world, it seems like people do want these things.
>I invite you to visit basically any place on Earth that is not Europe or North America.
I invite you to look at statistics like life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, healthcare outcomes, and access to food and housing. I think you'll find that most places in the world don't do as well on these metrics as Europe and North America. You're basically arguing that these people should stay in poverty. Again, I think you should ask the people you're talking about whether they want that.
Never encountered that. Maybe it exists but it's extremely rare and irrelevant.
> putting a substantial portion of GDP into building nuclear reactors and removing carbon from the atmosphere
Spending lots of money, to produce lots of energy, to solve a problem we created by using too much energy...
What people don't get is that environmentalists just want to solve the problem in the most cost effective way, and that is to stop destroying the environment we live in.
> having electricity, heat, running water, sewage treatment, shipping, transportation, and the internet.
Where in the Paris Agreement did you read we shouldn't continue having those things?
How does this argument make sense? Why is producing energy inherently bad if it doesn't put carbon into the atmosphere?
Because it costs money.
Just not polluting in the first place is cheaper.
Nuclear is probably an important part of the future energy mix but now we discussed using nuclear energy to remove carbon from the atmosphere and I believe that would be a huge waste of resources compared to just not putting the carbon in the atmosphere in the first place.
Carbon capture is a scam.
We should be pouring a huge amount of money into nuclear fission right now, it's the most straightforward way toward a zero target, and repetition/scale with large series of identical reactors and streamlined regulatory oversight will hopefully make it cost competitive with fossil fuels.
I've got nothing against carbon capture technology in principle, but it's not a solution that will let us continue releasing carbon into the atmosphere at anywhere near the current rate.
But yeah, not emitting is cheaper in most cases, and you’re right, we can’t just slather carbon capture on our current situation and not change anything else.
But do we really need to be able to order some bullshit plastic shit from China for 2 dollars? I think it is only fair to give up that for local production, even if that costs 10 dollars for the same thing. Similarly, do I have to eat argentine beef in Europe? Sure, make it available for a hefty price for the rare occasion, but it really should not be generally available. Fruit that is local and is out of season? Don’t import it from Peru, simply wait for it to be in season, or buy some product that was made locally when it was in season, like jam. Strengthening local production would already massively decrease the number of ships we need for minimal inconvenience (hell, it might just be beneficial for the local economy). Do I even have to eat meat each day?
Similary, why don’t we ban most kinds of single-use plastics? How often do you buy milk that you plan on drinking while you walk somewhere? Couldn’t it be stored inside a container you have to bring back to the shop the next time, or buy again if not? Hell, most liquids meant for drinking could easily come in a few sizes of these reusable bottles. We have goddamn shops that can auto-subtract your bought items simply by camera imaging, don’t tell me we don’t have the tech to safely and hygienically refill containers, something we had 100 years ago.
As for societal change: do my parents have to live in a separate house with way too much space for them, having them see their grandchildren only occasionally (making parents having to pay for babysitters)? Only so that they can later be cared for by some random person? Sure, not everyone has parents worth living together with, but this tendency that it is somehow a failure to not move out of your parents home is imo very harmful to everyone involved - parent not having enough self-time, grandparents being alone, slowly deteriorating mentally, children not seeing grandparents enough (also, parents having to figure out parenting from zero).
These are not big sacrifices, but we will do them, one way or another. The question is, do we want to do it with self-agency, or let nature run its course?
You're just following what feels like it would be good for the environment (and maybe it is good for your local environment) but isn't actually impactful at a large scale.
You write eloquently, but futilely.
Instead, what if it's a mindset: Doing such things, and 1000 others, some of them vastly more important than others.
And you can add to the list (instead of just saying "it won't work").
E.g. high car gas taxes, so there'll be trains, buses and bike lanes instead for everyone.
That doesn't make any sense why would we make sacrifices that are not important.
The whole point of a capitalist economy is to “route around inefficiency”, in the same way the internet is designed to “route around damage”. Any single player or even a large contingent of players, who act inefficiently, are only increasing the alpha available for another player to exploit.
“Inefficiency” in this sense is anything that doesn’t maximize personal benefit - profit or other quality of life. Anything that is legal according to the rules of the game (or tolerated by society) is going to happen whether it’s you that does it or someone else.
The only long term solution is that if this is what needs to happen, we have to encode that into “the rules” so everyone plays by that rule. Personal recycling or personal consumption reduction does nothing at a social level, and in fact is pushed as a deliberate stalling tactic to avoid and stall those political actions which could have a real impact.
This is also the problem with bitcoin - any one player choosing not to participate in mining only increases the reward for the remaining players who will continue to participate. If there is only one person on the planet willing to mine, she gets all the rewards. So simply choosing not to mine does nothing, you’re just transferring profit to someone else.
Humanity has already built the first AIs, they are emergent paperclip-maximizers encoded into the bylaws of corporations and market structures. And they will route around any attempt to un-maximize paperclip production according to whatever levers we continue to give them. If you don’t want people to eat as much beef, you have to build that rule into the system, it’ll never happen due to personal-level changes in behavior.
Governments can alter the rules of the game we play and they are (indirectly) controlled by us, as least in democractic countries.
similarly, even a country-level tax, you're only making it cheaper for other countries who don't care. We saw this play out with Russian oil last year - banning it from the West didn't make it go away, it just made it cheaper for certain other states to import it. The commodity market is global.
The fundamental point I'm trying to make here is the "capitalism routes around inefficiency/morality". That's what it's designed to do, in the same way the internet routes around infrastructure damage (or censorship etc, which is fundamentally infrastructure damage). By taking a moral stand, you only increase the alpha available for other players to exploit.
These "individual moralistic stand" approaches like personal-scale recycling are inherently less effective than taxing producers, or outright bans. The reason they are pushed is because they are ineffective, and because they stall out the political will to adopt real solutions that would be effective.
(E.g. india did buy up russia’s oil cheaper, but if there would have been a carbon tax in the eu with serious tariffs on products made in a not eco-friendly way, their usage might not have increased as much)
that is the observable impact though. perhaps the bitcoin example is more straightforward - if only one person on the entire planet is willing to mine, they get the entire block rewards of the entire network.
this is an extreme example, but if you have a small number of corporations who don't give a shit about environmentalism and pursue maximum profit within whatever the law allows, you get to pretty much the same result. People doing good in one area only increases the alpha available for another player to exploit.
capitalism literally is the removal of morality from economic planning - by making it about personal interests and profit, you ensure that if one player has those uncomfortable morals, that other players will take care of the problem and ensure maximum profit is pursued regardless. It's an Autonomous System designed to eliminate morality from the field of economic activity.
When enough people change their behavior, that can have an effect. And I suppose you're right that that effect is smaller than what one would hope (for the reasons you mentioned), and laws or taxes would have more effect
Further, even if what you advocate isn't exactly harmful, just neutral (ie eating local vegetables instead of imported, nevermind that the carbon footprint difference is negligible) wasting valuable political capital on useless gestures is objectively wrong.
So do you want governments to legislate that you must live with your parents? Or that you must not eat meat? Otherwise it's fine and good that a small share of the populace will make these choices on their own, but we need an order of magnitude more.
Oh how I wish I could just bring a reusable bottle to some dispenser at the store and refill directly. Milk, common juices, soaps, etc. So many bottles going into trash/recycling all the time.
It’s not going to be politically feasible since 99% of people don’t want to live that way. Thus we have to pursue alternatives.
Maybe technology will help us achieve that last minute stop we so need, but we have to start somewhere.
Complete with language about believers and non-believers
So, the first one taking decades and the second one being a meme """solution""" for the science illiterate?
If CDR is a meme solution for the science illiterate, then why does the IPCC include it as a key mitigation strategy?
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/resources/spm-headline-st...
>C.11 The deployment of CDR to counterbalance hard-to-abate residual emissions is unavoidable if net zero CO2 or GHG emissions are to be achieved. The scale and timing of deployment will depend on the trajectories of gross emission reductions in different sectors. Upscaling the deployment of CDR depends on developing effective approaches to address feasibility and sustainability constraints especially at large scales. (high confidence)
This is either dishonest or ignorant. We can make a huge difference by moving faster to solar, eating a lot less meat, living in denser settings rather than suburbs, living in smaller houses, switching to heat pumps, not driving huge trucks and SUVs, avoid so much waste particularly in food, driving less, etc.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/10/02/treating...
I agree that we can all do better on our individual choices. But we're not going to convince billions of people to that in the next 10 years. We need to fix the problem now, and the solution is to power our current level of growth with clean energy.
Your solution to this problem involves Universal Agreement and Cooperation Among Humanity. People can't even agree not to murder each other.
Any solution which requires UAaCOAH might as well have unobtanium as its focal point. It's just not going to happen. We can't agree on metric versus imperial, on language, on such weirdly silly things like an afterlife, on oppressive things like what women should be allowed to wear (in the face of the collapse of the biosphere, right now, you can find interviews with men who have chucked acid onto the faces of their wives because their peers taunt them about said wives wearing modern and "immodest" clothing: a real top priority for civilization). We can't agree on who owns what rock and we can't agree on how to govern, and our governance can't agree with its populace on little things like not lying to them about practically everything.
We are a divisive, fiercely independent species with our own thoughts about everything, however trivial, whether or not it is good for us.
Forget three nines, ignore a couple of standard deviations, getting even four-fifths of humanity to suddenly snap on to an agenda which will be personally uncomfortable to them is too much to ask. Any plan which requires that level of agreement is absolutely doomed unless you've got some kind of high-level AGI in your pocket with just one priority: stop the oncoming several catastrophes valued over the preferences, choices, comfort, even reproductive lives of each person on the planet ... and some way of enforcing it. Lacking Forbin and his Colossus, we will not unite on much of anything besides "we all want to do what we individually want."
Once you realize this, it's going to be the small (in terms of populace) projects which do not require universal consent which might have any shot whatsoever, rather than getting the bulk of humanity together, for the first time in history, to cooperate.
It is negligently irrational to believe the entirety of the human race can be convinced to do, in perpetuity, what you suggest.
The conclusion to accept is the cat's out of the bag. Two weeks won't stop the spread. Nuclear weapons will never be uninvented. Etc etc etc.
And, like, yawn. This has long been obvious. We'll adapt in some manner whatever the horrors. I would bet against a human but not against humanity.
While there might be a way to produce 84% of the energy currently used without involving fossil fuel, it would not reasonably be implemented in the next decades.
So, we might have to change the way we live. The sooner we adapt, the less painful it would be. If this is not for the climate, it would be as we reach peak oil/gas/coal.
This seems like a euphemism for "a lot of people 'have' to die" - when phrased that way it becomes obvious the reason that many will search for active measures to take to try to prevent that.
The amount of cognitive dissonance with regard to environmental concern continues to amaze me.
Many people seem to have strong concerns about their environmental impact but few acknowledge just how damaging (relative to others) certain activities are.
The obvious example is driving. People know it is bad but few seem to be aware of just how much co2 is produced per litre of petrol used (about 234g - so about 1kg every 5km traveled). Let that sink in. At an average of 20,000km per year that is about 4,000kg. Per capita co2 emissions in the US is 14,000kg.
Sorting your recycling is so much easier than acknowledging that.
Sometimes perfect is the enemy of good. If climate change really was going to kill a billion people then taking the risk with some geoengineering would be better than just letting it happen.
One thing that we should not refrain from is applying 10x, 100x, 1000x the brainpower to understand objectively (as in: not captured by short-term interests) what sustainable biospheres look like and how things can go wrong.
The capacity and orientation of the scientific apparatus (universities, research centers etc) is a WIP that has been shaped by momentous historical events (WWII in particular) and societal choices. I think the sustainability transition is of far greater importance but it has not yet had a visible impact. There are a few new fields (e.g. industrial ecology) but its a slow process.
Geoengineering is the only solution.
Its an insane strategy. Predicated, among others, on the impossibility of getting back into the control room and charting a non-collision course (which among others will ensure we can better handle any future sustainability challenges). I would challenge that assumption (but with a caveat).
The obstacles you mention are real and in a sense currently as complex to model and work through. Its the difference of socially engineering the complex system that is human society versus biophysically engineering the complex system that is the Earth's biosphere.
Social change is intrinsically easier and far more comprehensive insurance: There is a lot of precedent of purposeful social change and the enormous historical diversity of socioeconomic structures points out to very flexible systems. The obstacles you mention did not even exist a few decades ago. There is nothing deterministic about the current state of the world. Its all in our freaking brains, a lot of it just inane over-consumption because for a while the answer was... why not.
The caveat is that a minimum amount of social change needs to be truly global. This is something unprecedented. We are living through a historically unique moment where the random walk of political and socioeconomic evolution folds onto itself: its canvas is now a finite manifold. Cherished behaviors, power games etc may no longer be part of the solution space.
Remains to be seen how our complex system will adapt.
Politicians can't tell their constituents the truth -- that their lifestyles are destroying the planet and are unsustainable. They'll be replaced be politicians that tell voters what they want to hear or scapegoat others.
I personally think in the future this idea will be severely dated but it’s in vogue right now.
> to refrain from aggravating the situation
Easier said than done. What makes you think this is going to be achievable?
Why are you assuming the HN community isn't acknowledging the complexity and not taking a holistic approach?
There are methods of geoengineering that you can stop doing at any point, at which point they stop having an effect.
The one proposed in this twitter thread, marine cloud brightening by spraying seawater in the air, is one of those.
- if all emissions stopped tonight, we’d still be on track for temperature rises over the next several decades
- some places would get hotter, others wouldn’t. Similarly changes in rainfall would not be evenly distributed. It may be that Europe’s climate doesn’t change all that much, for example (due to changing ocean currents cooling the North Atlantic)
- some of the facts that drove rhetoric 20 years ago have since changed, for example the cost of renewable energy has dramatically decreased such that certain kinds of subsidies or sacrifices are less necessary (on the other hand, the power/km^2 density of solar / wind in some places may still imply land uses that people would find unacceptable were they to become dominant)
- in the grand scheme of things, geoengineering (like pumping SO2 into the troposphere or dispersing silver particles in the atmosphere) is cheap and could be performed unilaterally by many countries were they to feel sufficiently threatened by climate change.
I think one reason to care about this kind of geoengineering is that it might just happen. I think it’s also useful to consider that we’re currently doing the ‘geoengineering’ of pumping more and more CO2 into the atmosphere and I think we should be careful to avoid treating ‘planned’ geoengineering asymmetrically from the side-effect kind.
Good News Everybody! (hey, every little bit counts) That was the thinking in 2007.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-st...
https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/16/is-it-too-late-to-prevent-cl...
However, if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the rise in global temperatures would begin to flatten within a few years.
Temperatures would then plateau but remain well-elevated for many, many centuries.
There is a time lag between what we do and when we feel it, but that lag is less than a decade.Anything we choose to do will require geoengineering. We can continue dumping CO2 into the air, which is geoengineering. We can try to make our atmosphere more reflective, which is geoengineering. We can try to pull carbon out of the atmosphere, which is geoengineering. We can try to completely stop putting CO2 in the air, which is geoengineering. We need to change the state of Earth, which, pretty much by definition, is geoengineering.
If we don’t understand all the variables we’re probably going through make things worse. Given how complicated weather and climate are and how are models are not perfect, that seems inevitable if we embrace geoengineering.
It reflects the gravity of the situation. What I find incomprehensible is a reluctance to consider investigating such steps when the extremes of climate model forecasts are so horrific.
It is true that we have been slowly geoengineering for ages (initially unwittingly, recently with eyes wide open) and it is also true that our modeling abilities increase but this is quite far from making us experts in geoengineering.
For the short term future (decades) the only strategy that seems to make sense on the face of epistemic uncertainty is to refrain from aggravating the situation while studying ever more deeply the system we are now perturbing so much.
Our biggest mental deficiency when handling complexity is that we cant think holistically in practical ways. Isolating individual factors and applying linear thinking has worked wonders in isolated problems but it is not cutting it here.