[HN Gopher] Climate endgame: exploring catastrophic climate chan...
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Climate endgame: exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios
Author : anigbrowl
Score : 51 points
Date : 2022-08-02 20:18 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pnas.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pnas.org)
| felixmeziere wrote:
| Amazing. I wish there were more discussions about this most
| important topic on HN, and more generally on describing how we
| are depleting earth's resources and dispersing them everywhere,
| transforming it into a giant pile of garbage (gaseous garbage in
| the case of GHG). Sadly, climate change is not even the only
| imminent threat, when 60% of vertebrae have disappeared in 50
| years for example, among many others...
|
| We need to invent a new storytelling for society to have an
| organized energetic and material de-growth, so that we don't have
| to undergo a disorganized one, forced upon us by nature, that
| would be orders of magnitude worse.
|
| Technology can be a huge help in organizing this de-growth, so I
| guess HN could be a great forum for collectively imagining how to
| do it!
| logifail wrote:
| > Technology can be a huge help in organizing this de-
| growth[..]
|
| Errm, what?
|
| Apologies for appearing to be negative, but isn't technology
| one of the main contributors to the mess we're in?
| solardev wrote:
| Maybe we can get everyone to start playing AR Lemmings into
| the Grand Canyon
| felixmeziere wrote:
| Absolutely agree, I didn't want people to fixate on this fact
| so I preferred focusing on the positive and not mention it,
| but technology alone without deciding collectively how to
| repurpose it (this is a huge philosophical/cultural change
| where we need to decide together that black Friday and going
| to space for fun are lame, for example) is not going to be
| the solution.
|
| As you said so far we have observed it has only made the
| problem worse, year after year after year! And with the
| little margin we have left, it's irrational to take the bet
| it'll change by itself and just "improving".
| eej71 wrote:
| I think one of the challenges that the movement faces is that
| since the 1960's, there have been many disaster claims -
| sometimes bordering on the fantastical - and they simply don't
| come to pass.
|
| Not sure why this go-around should be given more credibility.
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| Maybe we because we can observe these disasters happening in
| real time?
|
| I find it absolutely wild that you can claim not to see
| climate disasters that are actively unfolding around us.
|
| The first thing that really woke me up was the sudden loss of
| _global_ sea ice in 2016. Take a look at the arctic death
| spiral if you aren 't familiar already [0]. In 2012 if you
| mentioned that the response was "well yea but the antarctic
| is growing!!". There were good explanations for why that what
| happening during global warming, but that's no longer
| necessary since the antarctic is _also_ declining rapidly
| [1].
|
| Then there's lake Mead. I can't imagine you haven't been
| paying attention to what's happening there but we're on the
| path to reaching dead pool in a few years [2]. And yes, this
| is _also_ due to poor resource management, but it is
| exacerbated by climate change and desertification of the
| region.
|
| Then there's the amazon rain forest, which was once a carbon
| sink, becoming a net carbon _emitter_ [3]
|
| But the most important part of all of this, is that these
| events (which represent just a few examples of the impacts of
| climate changes) are _not the new normal_. Because the rate
| co2[4] and ch4[5] are being emitted is accelerating we 're no
| where near a new stability point. All of the things we see
| now are just the beginning of a process that will only
| continue to accelerate each year for the rest of your life.
|
| And that's just what we can observe and predict. Thwaites
| glacier, for example, will very likely collapse at some point
| in the next 100 years. We have no idea when, but when it does
| it will cause massive and near instant sea level rise. Far
| more concerning is that this tons of geological evidence that
| there are feed back triggers that cause rapid rise in GHGs
| and temperature and _we don 't know exactly when we might
| cross these_. The book _Under a Green Sky_ , by
| paleontologist Peter Ward lays out rather convincing evidence
| that the majority of extinction events have been caused by
| rapid climate change triggered by changes in CO2.
|
| I'm not sure why you _don 't_ give these things more
| credibility.
|
| 0. https://www.arcticdeathspiral.org/
|
| 1.
| https://twitter.com/ZLabe/status/1540742236807213058/photo/1
|
| 2. https://mead.uslakes.info/level.asp
|
| 3. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/14/amazon
| -r...
|
| 4. https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
|
| 5. https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends_ch4/
| yongjik wrote:
| Let me give you an example. Back in the 1990s the ozone hole
| was considered a serious problem. Scientists argued that with
| unchecked emission of CFCs the hole will grow larger and
| cause serious harm.
|
| Limits on CFCs were implemented, the hole stopped growing.
|
| Pfft, scientists, warning against a disaster, which never
| comes because we worked to prevent it. What do they know?
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| you know how in the boy who cried wolf, there is a wolf.
| pc86 wrote:
| If that's your takeaway I don't think you're getting from
| the story what you're supposed to.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I mean if we're going for snarky takedowns how about "if
| you identify most strongly with the attention-seeking
| liar in the story I don't think I need your advice."
|
| But more seriously you can take more than one lesson from
| a tale. "A threat may be real even if the one relaying it
| lacks credibility" is not a neat or satisfying morality
| lesson to feed to children, but it remains true in my
| experience.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Because climate models have largely delivered accurate
| predictions since the 1970s.
|
| > In general, past climate model projections evaluated in
| this analysis were skillful in predicting subsequent GMST
| warming in the years after publication. While some models
| showed too much warming and a few showed too little, most
| models examined showed warming consistent with observations,
| particularly when mismatches between projected and
| observationally informed estimates of forcing were taken into
| account. We find no evidence that the climate models
| evaluated in this paper have systematically overestimated or
| underestimated warming over their projection period. The
| projection skill of the 1970s models is particularly
| impressive given the limited observational evidence of
| warming at the time, as the world was thought to have been
| cooling for the past few decades (e.g., Broecker, 1975;
| Broecker, 2017).
|
| https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019GL08.
| ..
| Sharlin wrote:
| For the past 20 to 30 years, the climate science community
| has been consistently nothing but EXTREMELY conservative in
| all their predictions in order to not being labeled as
| alarmist. Newsflash: they were STILL labeled alarmist AND
| also ignored because whatever happens in 50 years is Someone
| Else's Problem, can't be bothered to think beyond the next
| quartal or election cycle. Look! A shiny new thing! Consume!
| Consume! Now it's becoming clear that almost everything is
| happening way faster than the conservative models estimated.
| Humanity just. can't. win. against itself.
| felixmeziere wrote:
| https://www.amazon.fr/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-
| Improbable/dp...
|
| Using the past to try and predict the future, in particular
| unusual and impactful events is a reliable way to constantly
| miss the main events of history.
|
| Also there is no equivalent to the current disaster claim...
| and contrary to previous ones you can already observe the
| beginning of the effects of the current one... even though we
| are just at the beginning of its exponential-driven effects.
|
| Long story short: that's fine if you are still skeptical
| we'll start working on it and in 5-10 years the people who
| are still skeptical will join us once they are more convinced
| by what's happening in the world, down to their neighborhood.
| deepdriver wrote:
| De-growth means lowering humanity's total energy output.
| Lowering our total energy output means lowering humanity's
| average life expectancy, quality of life, and the size of our
| overall economic pie. These are all negative side-effects with
| comparable potential for societal destabilization as the
| effects of rising sea levels or increasing global temperatures.
|
| There are solutions to climate change that avoid de-growth and
| its many negative consequences, such as increasing our
| investment in nuclear energy. Some states already see things
| this way, such as China, where the government has announced
| plans to build 150 new reactors by 2050:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...
| badtension wrote:
| Your reasoning is flawed, technically if we make things last
| longer, be repairable, skip vacations on the other side of
| the planet and stop buying so much cheap plastic crap we
| would most definitely "degrow" but the quality of life would
| at least remain unchanged.
|
| Capitalism is a beast that needs constant feeding, it doesn't
| do much good in many cases, it's just growth for the sake of
| it.
| bwestergard wrote:
| Kate Soper makes the case that quality of life would
| improve significantly if we took these steps. The carbon-
| intensive "good life" leaves us time poor and stressed.
| felixmeziere wrote:
| Preach
| deepdriver wrote:
| The vast bulk of global energy production does not go
| towards "cheap plastic crap" or vacationing. It goes
| towards transportation (which affects the base cost of
| practically all economic activity), industrial uses that
| are essential to healthcare, construction, and agriculture,
| and the heating and cooling of our living spaces and places
| of work. These expenditures will only increase as the
| world's human population increases to a projected ceiling
| of around 10 billion. In addition, replacements for "cheap
| plastic crap" may consume more energy to produce, even if
| their production emits less carbon.
|
| There are certainly efficiency gains to be had. They will
| not be made overnight. America's housing stock alone can't
| be replaced in a week, or a year, or a decade with hyper-
| insulating, low-emission construction materials. Changing
| from one mode of construction, consumption, or production
| to another has an energy cost, too.
|
| https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25133463-500-how-
| to-u...
|
| https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth104/node/1346
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth
| cortesoft wrote:
| You can argue how much a change in quality of life it is,
| but not being able to travel or buy cheap plastic things is
| certainly a reduction in quality of life.
| xnx wrote:
| Does degrowth mean have to mean lower quality of life, or
| could it mean continued improvements in quality of life for a
| smaller population?
| felixmeziere wrote:
| Our ability to transform matter at always bigger scales and
| rates, which is proportional to the energy we master, is what
| has driven the current environmental crisis (were not all the
| imminent existential threats are climate change, although
| climate change is the most obvious one).
|
| If we keep the same consumerist and expansionist culture and
| add more energy to the mix (even if it's climate-friendly
| energy), i.e. more capacity to extract resources deeper and
| deeper, become more dependent on them and disperse them in
| our constructions, devices, ground, water and atmosphere,
| what do you think will happen?
|
| Energy will be key in amortizing the pains of de-growth, but
| de-growth will happen on a planet with finite resources,
| whether we want it or not.
| deepdriver wrote:
| This is an unscientific viewpoint. The current climate
| crisis has been driven by man-made carbon emissions. Our
| ability to transform matter at always-bigger scales, or
| merely at the scale of our current rate of consumption (see
| declining global fertility), does not rely solely on
| carbon-emitting forms of energy production.
| cortesoft wrote:
| We have no issue with finite resources. We have plenty of
| energy and raw materials for everything we want for a long
| time.
|
| The challenge is working out how to access those resources
| in ways that don't harm our lives. That is a technically
| possible challenge, but the problem is that it is much more
| efficient in the short term to harvest resources in a
| destructive manner. Without some sort of collective action,
| the destructive manner simply outcompetes the sustainable
| methods.
| wizofaus wrote:
| De-growth shouldn't significantly lower average life
| expectancy - after all in developed nations a high percentage
| of deaths are due to lifestyle decisions that are only
| possible because of our high use of technology and exogenous
| energy sources. As long as we still retain the knowledge on
| how to treat most diseases, and the physical infrastructure
| of our health-care systems, there's good reason to suppose
| average human health/life expectancy might well improve with
| the right sort and amount of de-growth. "Quality of life" is
| much harder to judge. It would definitely feel like a step
| down for many people used to just having everything and
| anything they want delivered to their door at the click of a
| mouse button. And it's true there's no good example that I
| know of a large population smoothly transitioning into a
| lifestyle with a significantly lower material standard of
| living. But I'm not convinced it couldn't be achieved in such
| a way that most people would come to accept that we've gained
| more than we've lost.
| tremon wrote:
| Rather, what we need is lowering humanity's total energy
| input. That same approach has been preached by MBA business
| types for decades, under the moniker "efficiency". I don't
| see why we can't do for energy efficiency what we've been
| doing for labour efficiency for decades, but it does require
| a more comprehensive management focus.
|
| I don't see a-priori how "de-growth" should lead to lowering
| living standards, other than by implication of the (IMHO ill-
| chosen) word.
| nradov wrote:
| You aren't going to get anyone to embrace de-growth by telling
| stories. Instead, find ways that technology can enable
| continued growth while simultaneously decreasing environmental
| impact. If you force people to pick between global warming
| versus a major step down in living standards, a lot of them are
| just going to say screw it and pick global warming.
| felixmeziere wrote:
| Everyone tells themselves stories. Like << what's cool in
| life is to try and be a billionaire so I can get a private
| jet and everybody treat me like a king >>, or, at the level
| of a country << we should build entire new cities and
| airports and stimulate growth to increase GDP which is the
| main metric measuring our success >> or, if you are an
| economist: "what nature has concentrated for us for free for
| millions of years, like oil, clean air, water, sand for
| construction etc, is free".
|
| I'm not talking about telling stories to people but about
| changing theses stories they already tell themselves that
| have been implanted into them by a system
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| No matter how bad it gets, Earth will always be more habitable
| than anywhere else. But even if humans survive for millions of
| years, we'll never get back what we have now.
| wizofaus wrote:
| If humans survive for millions of years we'll almost certainly
| transform the planet vastly further than anything even
| conceived of so far (except perhaps in SciFi). And I wouldn't
| assume that even within a few 1000 years Earth will be more
| habitable than elsewhere (but yes, it's almost guaranteed for
| the next century or so at least). OTOH, if we really did
| somehow totally self-destruct as a species, there's good reason
| to suppose the climate would settle back to something similar
| to what it has been the last 10k years, though it certainly
| won't last forever, or even much more than a dozen or so more
| thousand years.
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| > there's good reason to suppose the climate would settle
| back to something similar to what it has been the last 10k
| years
|
| What's that good reason?
| ben_w wrote:
| Other than the easily available fossil fuels, this planet will
| be essentially back to the wild state a few tens of millennia
| after a hypothetical catastrophic collapse in technology.
| deepdriver wrote:
| I'm surprised that this paper doesn't mention hydrogen sulfide, a
| poisonous gas emitted into the atmosphere during anoxic ocean
| events, which is thought to be responsible for several known
| periods of mass extinction:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extin...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event#Atmospheric_effec...
|
| >The trigger for these mass extinctions appears to be a warming
| of the ocean caused by a rise of carbon dioxide levels to about
| 1000 parts per million
|
| To me, this is the most concerning potential result of climate
| change. Short of hermetically-sealed self-sustaining biodomes,
| which must run smoothly for up a million years before the
| atmosphere naturally clears of H2S, an event like this could wipe
| out all human life on Earth. Our political or ideological
| alignment would be of no consequence. Even communist utopian
| societies can't survive a poisoned atmosphere.
|
| We'll hit 1000ppm in a few centuries if current trends hold, or
| much sooner than that if certain positive feedback loops kick in.
| Last I checked, the methane clathrate gun hypothesis wasn't as
| bad as previously thought, but we simply don't know what we don't
| know in this area:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis#Curre...
| AftHurrahWinch wrote:
| > Last-resort emergency measures like solar radiation management
| (SRM), the injection of aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect
| sunlight (35). Whether to resort to such measures depends on the
| risk profiles of both climate change and SRM scenarios. One
| recent analysis of the potential catastrophic risk of
| stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) found that the direct and
| systemic impacts are under-studied (36). The largest danger
| appears to come from "termination shock": abrupt and rapid
| warming if the SAI system is disrupted. Hence, SAI shifts the
| risk distribution: The median outcome may be better than the
| climate change it is offsetting, but the tail risk could be worse
| than warming (36).
|
| > There are other interventions that a better understanding of
| catastrophic climate change could facilitate. For example, at the
| international level, there is the potential for a "tail risk
| treaty": an agreement or protocol that activates stronger
| commitments and mechanisms when early-warning indicators of
| potential abrupt change are triggered.
|
| I like the idea of a "tail risk treaty" as a way for skeptical
| nations to hedge their bets and prepare for unilateral
| geoengineering.
|
| > An existential risk is usually defined as a risk that cause an
| enduring and significant loss of long-term human potential (51,
| 52). This existing definition is deeply ambiguous and requires
| societal discussion and specification of long-term human values
| (52). While a democratic exploration of values is welcome, it is
| not required to understand pathways to human catastrophe or
| extinction (52). For now, the existing definition is not a solid
| foundation for a scientific inquiry.
|
| Dark comedy.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| How can one not be skeptical when every existing model fails to
| even come close to predicting future temperature patterns, and
| every publicized prediction about climate catastrophe over the
| past 50 years has been wrong?
|
| Where is the science?
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Don't feed the troll
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| "every"
| YellowStuDregg wrote:
| A quick google search gives us plenty of past published
| projections and how they fared:
|
| https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m...
|
| You can also watch Carl Sagan break it down in front of
| congress back in 1985 for just 15 minutes of your time
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| Do you mean because the impacts of climate change continue to
| happening faster and more severe than expected?
| wlindley wrote:
| In all Earth's history, has there ever been Climate Stasis?
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