[HN Gopher] Emissions are no longer following the worst case sce...
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Emissions are no longer following the worst case scenario
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 212 points
Date : 2023-05-26 03:08 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theclimatebrink.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theclimatebrink.substack.com)
| otikik wrote:
| This is good news, but I hope this was a real change and not
| "solved" by "creative accounting" (e.g. stopping counting some
| emissions as emissions). I will have to look at the reference
| data for this.
| ImaCake wrote:
| Hard to argue with robust monitoring of CO2 concentrations
| which are now increasing linearly rather than exponentially
| (i.e emissions are constant instead of increasing).
| revelio wrote:
| They have never been increasing exponentially:
|
| https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| From skimming the article, it seems to be due to decreased coal
| burning and increased renewables. So good news indeed! However,
| the trajectory of progress at the moment is just stagnating
| emissions, not decreasing so a lot of work remains to be done.
| fguerraz wrote:
| > This is due to the rapidly accelerating energy transition..
|
| Err, just NO. This is largely due to global trade being flat for
| the past 10 years [1], this is a good proxy to measure _real_
| economic growth. Don 't believe GDP as an indicator of real
| growth, they keep on adding fictitious sources to these numbers.
| Did you know that rent is part of GDP? And even rent that
| homeowners would have paid to a landlord had they owned their
| home? [2]
|
| So basically this is just about the world becoming poorer since
| the 2008 financial crisis (and covid of course).
|
| Also, "not following the worst case scenario" is not really a
| reason to rejoice, 4.5 degrees is still absolutely terrible.
|
| Also, funny enough the page they link to as a source for "Global
| CO2 emissions (both fossil and land use) have been relatively
| flat" has for title "Analysis: Global CO2 emissions from fossil
| fuels hit record high in 2022" [3]. So, lols.
|
| I could also add that less emissions _growth_ doesn 't mean less
| carbon accumulates in the atmosphere [4]
|
| [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/merchandise-exports-
| gdp-c...
|
| [2] https://unherd.com/2018/11/truth-gdp-figures/
|
| [3] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-global-co2-emissions-
| fr...
|
| [4] https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
| kieranmaine wrote:
| The data on the global Electricity Mix provides evidence there
| is an energy transition -
| https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
| iso1631 wrote:
| Your link says that in 2005 international trade as a percent of
| GDP was 23% and in 2014 it's 24%, so about the same.
|
| Gross World Product was about $43t in 2005 and $78t in 2014, so
| that would suggest international trade has increased from $10t
| to $18t in 10 years, nearly doubling, inflation adjusted.
|
| You can say that the non-international part of GDP is
| overestimated, lets say by 40% more in 2014 than in 2005. That
| would mean that real GWP in 2014 was just 56t, and therefore
| the 18t international trade would actually be 32% -- a 33%
| increase in 10 years.
| tuatoru wrote:
| Looks right. The trend break in the OP's chart of emissions
| happens around 2009, right when the GFC started to have major
| effects.
| Aunche wrote:
| > This is largely due to global trade being flat for the past
| 10 years
|
| People are consuming more international goods _and_ more
| domestic goods, so trade as a percentage of trade relative to
| GDP has stagnated, but not volume of trade. Since 2008,
| maritime trade has increased by 3 billion tons or 37% [1].
|
| > Did you know that rent is part of GDP?
|
| It's also a component of the inflation, so it cancels out.
| Housing is getting more expensive, but part of it is that we
| are consuming more of it than we used to. Home sizes have been
| growing, but household sizes have been falling [2].
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264117/tonnage-of-
| worldw...
|
| [2] https://www.thezebra.com/resources/home/median-home-size-
| in-...
| emilyst wrote:
| The first source isn't really accessible unless you have an
| account. Total exports in terms of adjusted cost _has_
| stagnated: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-trade-
| exports-const....
|
| I suspect sheer maritime freight tonnage may be a less
| reliable proxy due to factors like cost of shipping changes,
| role of air freight, tariff changes, etc. Maybe share all the
| trade and globalization graphs instead?
| https://ourworldindata.org/trade-and-globalization
|
| Your second source, hilariously, predates the entire pandemic
| (which is when home prices really took off). It also says
| very little to support your point that we're "consuming more"
| housing because home sizes are growing. The Case-Shiller U.S.
| National Home Price NSA Index seems to suggest that home
| prices were rising only modestly until the pandemic.
| https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/indices/indicators/sp-
| core...
| Aunche wrote:
| > Total exports in terms of adjusted cost _has_ stagnated
|
| This doesn't seem to match what you'd get by multiplying
| their figures of inflation-adjusted GDP [1] with their
| figures of exports as a percentage of GDP [2].
|
| > Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price NSA
|
| Home prices aren't factored into in either GDP or inflation
| because they're considered an asset. You're right that the
| economy has stagnated since the pandemic, especially in
| America. My point is that it's absurd to suggest that the
| global economy hasn't grown in the past decade.
|
| [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-gdp-over-the-
| last-t... [2]
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/merchandise-exports-
| gdp-c...
| vpribish wrote:
| your global trade link stops in 2014, but the world bank shows
| the trade decline trend continuing to the present [1]
|
| you raise concerns about the interpretation of GDP and use
| trade as a more believable replacement - but how about using
| manufacturing as a more direct replacement? it seems to have
| continued it's rising trend through the present. [2] rising by
| 50% in the last 10 years.
|
| this seems to show that growth has not been flat, but has been
| rising in line with long-term trends.
|
| [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS
|
| [2]
| https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/manufacturin...
| Guthur wrote:
| Really, ok what is the good part of plus 4.5 degrees? Is it all
| bad or has no one actually considered both sides.
| empyrrhicist wrote:
| Looking for good parts of 4.5 degrees of warming is like
| looking for a bright side in a horrible apartment fire. Sure,
| it might open up some more green space for a future park, but
| given all the terrible death and suffering that kind of
| misses the point.
| Guthur wrote:
| Would it open a north sea passage, would it make most of
| Russia inhabitable...
| Sakos wrote:
| I fail to see any upside that would justify the displacement
| and suffering of hundreds of millions of people across the
| planet. Are you serious?
| Guthur wrote:
| Still not telling the good side then?
|
| We're talking global control here so displacement is not
| that far fetched.
| epups wrote:
| > Don't believe GDP as an indicator of real growth, they keep
| on adding fictitious sources to these numbers. Did you know
| that rent is part of GDP? And even rent that homeowners would
| have paid to a landlord had they owned their home?
|
| Of course renting is an economic activity that should be
| reflected in the GDP, and it is as "real" as anything else. To
| focus solely on international trade feels shortsighted as well.
| When a doctor sees you and charges you $200, that's going into
| the GDP but not into any trade balance.
|
| The world is richer since 2008 by almost any metric you can
| think of, including inflation-adjusted per capita income which
| is independent of GDP.
| tuatoru wrote:
| So the country is better off if prices of non-tradable
| services are increased by their suppliers? That sounds like
| the broken window fallacy.
| epups wrote:
| The sentence "the country is better off" is subjective. The
| country's GDP will go up if all prices go up, yes. But this
| will also mean that inflation will go up, and in adjusted
| terms no one will be richer. The price deflator mentioned
| by the sibling is one of the ways to make that adjustment.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Equating a high GDP with "better off" is problematic.
|
| It could be backed by products that nobody wants (wars and
| such) or it could be at the expense of other quality of
| life metrics such that the juice is not worth the squeeze.
|
| It's like lifting weights to get huge instead of to get
| strong or healthy, you can end up some undesirable results.
| iso1631 wrote:
| If I own a house (outright) and live in it, I pay nothing,
| and no impact on GDP
|
| If my neighbour owns a house (outright) and lives in it, I
| pay nothing, and no impact on GDP
|
| If I rent from my neighbour for $10k a year, and he rents
| from me for $10k a year, GDP increases by $20k a year, but
| nothing has really changed, expect the amount of money paid
| in taxes.
|
| So that's why you have imputed rent as part of GDP. Fine, I
| get that.
|
| How about this scenario
|
| I have a kid and look after it, I pay nothing, and no
| impact on GDP
|
| My neighbour has a kid and looks after it, he pays nothing,
| and no impact on GDP
|
| I look after my neighbours kid 3 days a week and he looks
| after mine, in an exchange, no impact on GDP
|
| I look after my neighbours kid 3 days a week and he pays me
| $300, and he looks after mine 3 days a week and I pay him
| $300. GDP increases $600 a week, and more money is taken in
| taxes.
|
| Do we include all unpaid work?
|
| If I (a painter) pay my neighbor (a gardener) to garden my
| front yard and he pays me to paint his garage, then GDP
| increases.
|
| If I do the gardening myself, and he does the painting
| himself, GDP doesn't increase.
|
| How about me looking after my old parent vs me working
| overtime and paying a care home to do it?
| epups wrote:
| The GDP is a measure of economic activity, meaning the
| exchange of money for products or services. Of course
| there are activities, such as the ones you describe, that
| will not be accounted because they are done for free or
| in exchange for something else.
|
| > How about me looking after my old parent vs me working
| overtime and paying a care home to do it?
|
| Yes of course the latter will have an impact on the GDP,
| and the former not. You are producing more work for money
| and you are buying more work for money.
| brvsft wrote:
| The point is that the country is no wealthier in either
| scenario, yet people use GDP as a proxy for the
| productive output and wealth of a country.
| epups wrote:
| But the country is wealthier in the scenario where you
| produced and sourced more labor for money. Arguably more
| productive too, because you expanded the pool of labor
| when you worked more hours, which your employer
| (presumably) transformed into more money.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Can you explain how?
|
| If someone is paid to dig holes and fill them up right
| after, the country is not any wealthier even though GDP
| is increased, in fact slightly less wealthy because of
| wear and tear on the shovel/excavator.
| epups wrote:
| The example that started this is someone taking care of
| an elderly person themselves vs working overtime and
| paying someone to do so. Simply by working overtime for a
| company, this person created economic value, likely
| higher than of their own wage. Second, other economic
| agents received payment in exchange for services, so this
| also increased our productive output. In both sides of
| this operation, taxes were paid, and the country is
| therefore wealthier in both a fiscal and economic sense.
|
| I think the confusion here is because it seems odd that
| taking care of your parents by yourself is not considered
| productive unless you exchange money for it. GDP is an
| imperfect measure, and by definition does not take into
| account such voluntary/unpaid activities.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I don't see how formalizing and adding money to an
| informal relationship increases wealth.
|
| The caregiver is doing the same work either way. Where is
| the wealth increase coming from?
| epups wrote:
| Before we continue our discussion, can you tell me what
| is your definition of wealth?
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I go by the OED standard definition.
| antisthenes wrote:
| GPD is an estimate that relies on most people being
| rational.
|
| A company that pays contractors to do nothing but dig up
| holes and fill them back up again will quickly go
| bankrupt, so most people aren't going to engage in such
| enterprise.
|
| Just because you found a way to hack the GDP in an online
| argument doesn't immediately throw its usefulness in the
| real-world.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Repeatedly digging up the same place is a relatively
| common real world scenario, such as when multiple
| utilities need to be installed or repaired on the same
| stretch of ground.
|
| e.g. repairing a water main, then laying some underground
| electrical cables, then laying some fiber optic wire.
|
| Due to inefficient coordination, country A may have the
| same patch of ground dug up and filled three times.
|
| Whereas country B, more efficient, only has to dig once,
| do all the work, then fill it up once.
|
| So country B records lower GDP but in fact ends up
| slightly wealthier.
| iso1631 wrote:
| > Yes of course the latter will have an impact on the
| GDP, and the former not. You are producing more work for
| money and you are buying more work for money.
|
| I neglected to mention I work in an old peoples home. The
| overtime is the exact amount of care my parent needs.
| febusravenga wrote:
| > If I do the gardening myself, and he does the painting
| himself, GDP doesn't increase.
|
| But capital increase. Next time this capital will hit
| market - when you decide to sell fruits or home with
| beautiful garden it will be taxed and will increase GDP.
|
| GDP is statistics anyway, so any work that doesn't rot
| and hit the market will eventually show up in GDP.
| csomar wrote:
| > If I rent from my neighbour for $10k a year, and he
| rents from me for $10k a year, GDP increases by $20k a
| year, but nothing has really changed, expect the amount
| of money paid in taxes.
|
| Not really because even if you are living in your own
| paid-off house, the rent will be added to the GDP.
|
| > If I do the gardening myself, and he does the painting
| himself, GDP doesn't increase.
|
| There is a law being worked out somewhere (probably
| Europe) that will tax any activity you are doing. If you
| paint your garage, this activity will be evaluated
| financially and you'll have to pay taxes on it. Not doing
| so is tax evasion.
|
| * last one was /s but maybe not really?
| engcoach wrote:
| > There is a law being worked out somewhere (probably
| Europe) that will tax any activity you are doing. If you
| paint your garage, this activity will be evaluated
| financially and you'll have to pay taxes on it. Not doing
| so is tax evasion.
|
| New feudalism
| swader999 wrote:
| Along with the surveillance to make it practicable.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| Two economists were walking down the street. One saw a
| dog s*t on the ground, and told the other: "If you eat
| that, I'll give you thousand dollars." Other guy looked
| at it, thought "It's bad, but I'll get $1000", and ate
| it. His friend paid him, although he still regretted it
| because it was really bad. After some time, they
| encountered another dog s*t. This time the guy who ate it
| before offered $1000 for eating it to his friend. He
| accepted, thinking "I'll gain the $1000 I lost". He ate
| it and got paid. After some time, they stopped for a
| while, and one said to other, "I feel like we just ate
| dog s*t for nothing", the other replied "Oh, come on! We
| just contributed to the GDP by $2000, it was not for
| nothing!"
| [deleted]
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Makes sense. GDP captures money spent on services, not
| philosophical judgment on if that money was wisely spent
| or produced net happiness.
|
| In a more realistic examples, alcoholics purchasing
| booze, obese people overeating, and people wasting their
| lives watching TV all contribute to GDP.
| Aunche wrote:
| > If I own a house (outright) and live in it, I pay
| nothing, and no impact on GDP
|
| This is not true, at least in the US. If you're a
| homeowner, they estimate how much it would cost to rent
| your own home and include that in the GDP.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imputed_rent
| timuzhti wrote:
| The GDP, by virtue of having the basket of things under
| comparison already picked out, has this very convenient
| thing called the implicit price deflator.
| laratied wrote:
| So often I read so many utterly ridiculous economic opinions
| expressed here by people who should know better and be better
| educated.
|
| How can a smart, presumably educated person not know that
| rent counts as economic activity?
|
| To say the world is poorer than in 2008 is just utterly
| preposterous.
|
| Per capita GPD in China went from 3500 to 12500. India 1000
| to 2200.
|
| There is half the world. US, Canada and Europe is only 15% of
| the population but I don't know how the case can be made we
| are poorer than in 2008 either.
| [deleted]
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > How can a smart, presumably educated person not know that
| rent counts as economic activity?
|
| Of course it's "economic activity". But if I sublet to
| someone that sublets to someone that sublets to someone
| that lives in an apartment, that's a 4x increase in money
| flow but there's no production of goods or services at all.
|
| It makes sense to have the cost of building and maintaining
| homes represented somewhere, but rent is a poor proxy for
| that.
| Aunche wrote:
| GDP doesn't count all "economic activity." Otherwise,
| HFTs would cause GDP to explode. It doesn't account for
| the cost of construction either because that's an
| intermediate cost. Even home sales aren't counted because
| they're considered an investment. GDP only considers the
| value of the final consumed goods and services, and rent
| is a consumed service. If you're a homeowner, they
| estimate your rent and use that instead.
| empyrrhicist wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
| antisthenes wrote:
| For the 1000th time, regular rent (e.g. you pay $1000/mo
| for an apartment) is not the same as rent-seeking.
| empyrrhicist wrote:
| It's just correlated with ALL sorts of rent seeking:
|
| https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-
| increase-r...
| [deleted]
| mordae wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XndsyYUjMv8
|
| Watch this. Counting rent is about as sensible as counting
| financial services.
| epups wrote:
| No thanks - if you are interested in an argument, please
| present yours in written format.
| tomcar288 wrote:
| Also, GDP is inaccurate because the CPI is innacurate. compare
| the CPI with any realistic way of measuring inflation such as
| case shiller, the big mac index or the price of oil in barrels
| and you'll quickly see that the CPI is undercounting by a
| several percentage points per year. she shadowstat:
| http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts
|
| Also, related, check out Nate Hagens work on the Great
| simplification (he's got a podcast and on youtube). I won't
| spoil it here but he and his team of scientists have made some
| very interesting discoveries on future GDP growth.
| foobar36079311 wrote:
| Another fun effect of less overall emissions growth from
| burning fossil fuel, whether due to decline in global economic
| activity or emissions target regulations, is a specific
| reduction in sulfur dioxide emissions. (Atmospheric SO2 has a
| cooling effect and, sort of, mitigates CO2 driven warming. One
| terraforming idea is to just increase atmospheric SO2, which
| obviously has problems of its own; see Venus...)
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| Yeah, see aerosol cooling effect.
| jokoon wrote:
| I wonder if COVID and/or inflation somehow started a trend of
| economic slowdown that allowed emissions to slow down.
|
| It means that somehow, if we care about the environment, we may
| have to be against economic growth and/or good economic health.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| Indeed, it did [0] but only temporary. It seems to confirm the
| correlation of economic growth with GHG emissions.
|
| 0 https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-
| release/covid-19...
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| I think we should live humble, but I can see that companies
| producing things just put on green robes and say "throw out
| your old car and buy this one because it's much more eco". All
| that forcing by law to throw out old things to get something
| more eco-friendly is so immoral (and insincere/hypocritical - I
| was missing a word)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > All that forcing by law to throw out old things to get
| something more eco-friendly is so immoral
|
| It's not. Local emissions are a thing, too - a new car will
| have way cleaner exhaust than a 20 year old beater, and an
| electric vehicle even less. Nitrous oxide is the big issue in
| urban areas, the less of it is in the air the better for
| those having to live near high traffic streets.
| acdha wrote:
| Somewhere half of the total emissions produced by a car are
| produced manufacturing it. This is how you can buy a gas
| powered car and have lower emissions than an electric
| F-150, Rivian, Hummer, etc. because those require so much
| more steel and thus manufacturing emissions.
|
| Improving local emissions is good but it doesn't help with
| global emissions if you're still buying a couple tons of
| metal which will sit idle 95% of the time and will on
| average haul 1.1 people when in use. There's also a concern
| that EVs not only don't help but actually worsen the health
| impacts of tire particulates.
|
| They might take away my US passport for saying it but if we
| want to reduce emissions the solution isn't spending more.
| The best options are things like walking, biking, taking
| transit, and eating less beef.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > This is how you can buy a gas powered car and have
| lower emissions than an electric F-150, Rivian, Hummer,
| etc. because those require so much more steel and thus
| manufacturing emissions.
|
| That's _a different_ problem - US consumers are (lured
| to) buying SUVs because of an old loophole [1] and
| because SUVs make really good margins so manufacturers
| prioritize these in advertising. Nothing, absolutely
| nothing makes an electric vehicle be heavier than an ICE
| vehicle.
|
| Comparing apples to apples, a Tesla Model S clocks in at
| 2255kg max dry weight, a 7-series BMW at 2525kg.
|
| [1] https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-wants-to-close-
| the-suv-lo...
| freedude wrote:
| The dry weight is a misnomer which avoids the
| inconvenient facts. The Tesla requires large amounts of
| hard to obtain Lithium, Nickel and Cobalt. The BMW uses
| Aluminum and Iron which are easy to obtain by comparison.
| This means the Tesla requires much more emissions to
| produce a car of the same mass.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > This means the Tesla requires much more emissions to
| produce a car of the same mass.
|
| Indeed, but during the course of its operation, the BMW
| will consume a ton of fossil fuels (which may be produced
| at harm to the environment such as with fracking) while
| the Tesla can be driven completely emissions-free using
| renewable electricity. It's a trade between upfront and
| recurring emissions, and given just how long cars can
| last (many a first-generation Tesla from over a decade
| ago is still on its first battery pack), I seriously
| prefer the former as the _total_ lifetime emissions are
| what matters.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| have you calculated amount of CO2 required to produce a new
| car? Why no one is fighting to convert those existing
| vehicles to electric? Why nobody produces filters for used
| cars?
|
| Maybe because companies do not have interest in it? And
| this way there is nothing change: just produce the same,
| but with new type of engine. Even better, because more
| money is earned. Meanwhile ecology is about putting down
| the production, but the production blossoms for some
| reason...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Why no one is fighting to convert those existing
| vehicles to electric?
|
| Electric conversion kits exist, but these are relatively
| niche as you have to replace the entire guts of the car
| and have to find room for the batteries. It's _way_ more
| cost-effective to buy a new, from-scratch electric
| vehicle.
|
| > Why nobody produces filters for used cars?
|
| Essentially every modern ICE car carries a whole portable
| miniaturized chemical factory with it - catalytic
| converters, particulate filters, systems to inject more
| fuel to burn off the particulate filter, adblue
| injection, constant real-time analysis of a whole host of
| different parameters... a retrofit to bring an older
| engine to modern emission standards is incredibly
| complex. You'd need to replace the entire ECU, place
| sensors _everywhere_ , redesign the entire aerodynamics
| of the exhaust stacks so that the system doesn't collapse
| from accidental standing waves or pressure shockwaves,
| and have all of that certified to be road legal.
|
| Oh, and on top of that you need to fight for every cubic
| inch of space as most vehicles of the last 20 years have
| been designed to be as compact as possible for
| aerodynamic reasons.
|
| Again, not worth the effort.
| rspoerri wrote:
| RCP8.5, the scenario defined in the article as "worst case", is
| that the global air would have >1000ppm, looking at the
| referenced graph i'd guess it could go up to 3000ppm or more. A
| co2 detector warns if you have 1500+ ppm, where some people start
| to get headache and you should start ventilating your room.
| Imagine that 24h a day, on every place on the earth. Not to
| mention the effects of heating of 3.0degC to 5+degC .
|
| https://climatenexus.org/climate-change-news/rcp-8-5-busines...
|
| RCP 4.5 is really bad as well. In our last project it was kind of
| the worst case scenario we considered. It means that rich
| countries will have problems adapting to the changing
| environment. The changes will happen so fast (20 Years), no new
| infrastructure can be built to prevent natural disasters (for
| example dam's). Poor countries have even less possibilities to
| adapt. For example countries like Kazachstan completely rely for
| it's water resources in summer on glaciers. In Switzerland we
| already know that all glaciers will disappear or melt by 80% to
| 90% in all likely scenarios.
|
| https://ethz.ch/de/news-und-veranstaltungen/eth-news/news/20...
|
| edit: please correct me if i'm wrong, i am a designer that worked
| in climate visualsation research projects. However my short
| searches for the outcomes of rcp 8.5 are disastrous and no relief
| at all that it's now unlikely to come.
| toxicFork wrote:
| Let's assume that the world is incapable of solving this
| problem.
|
| What can an individual do to not suffer?
|
| Invest in oxygen masks and a mountain cabin?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Individuals should join or form diverse groups to build a
| resilient empathetic community.
|
| There's nothing you can do strictly by yourself in my
| estimation that will help over the long term.
|
| The only way out is through as a team
| freedude wrote:
| This is why you fail. If you are relying on the team for
| success then you will not be motivated to personal success.
| You must decide what you do counts and you must do it. If
| you don't your team will fail. Because in the end success
| requires each team member to own the problem or failure is
| always the result.
|
| Why? 1+1=2 2+2=4 3+3=6 And 0.5+0.25=0.75
|
| When two people don't give it 100% you can't get the
| results you are looking for. Just ask anyone who has been
| divorced...
| snowwrestler wrote:
| You're talking about effort, the parent comment is
| talking about alignment.
| mpreda wrote:
| > What can an individual do to not suffer?
|
| Does "suffer" take into account "transitive suffering" from
| children? (from future generations, our offspring)
|
| i.e. if I'm physically fine but my child is suffering, I
| suffer too.
|
| Now, for what one can do, there are always two ways: one is,
| as suggested, to find a better spot for oneself and let the
| others go to hell for all I care. But what about the
| children?
|
| other is to become millitant, and force action. Worse outcome
| for oneself, but potentially a better outcome for the
| children.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| As they say "Collapse now, avoid the rush."
|
| Be independent in all your supplies as much as possible
| (food, water, basic necessities). Cyclical gardens,
| Biosphere-2 like systems, etc. Then scale up and do the same
| with a small community. The bigger the community, more
| chances to repel an attack of cannibals.
| [deleted]
| simmerup wrote:
| > What can an individual do to not suffer?
|
| You should be asking what an individual can do to not starve
| to death or die of over heating.
|
| Most answers are: move to a rich, powerful country not in the
| danger zone
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Most answers are: move to a rich, powerful country not
| in the danger zone_
|
| There might not be any. Migration pressure from
| uninhabitable areas will keep mounting, and some of the
| countries in the "danger zone" have nukes.
| iso1631 wrote:
| New Zealand is always the obvious "lifeboat". It's a long
| way from populated area so difficult to get there, and
| it's fairly easy to sink any ships that try. It's in the
| southern hemisphere so will be protected from the
| majority of nuclear war which would be in the northern
| hemisphere.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Unless someone with nukes decides to threaten NZ to open
| up the borders for their people, or else.
|
| With global changes this big, we can't expect the usual
| MAD Mexican Standoff a couple big powers to keep everyone
| safe. It may be that all nuclear powers (or all that
| remained after a brief nuclear war) will decide together
| to politely ask NZ to open up or else.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| somewhat ironically, widespread nuclear war might actual
| pare back human population to a point where emissions
| dramatically declined.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Or else what ? They half nuke the place they intend to
| escape to ?
| scott_w wrote:
| Have you ever seen a child smash a toy they tried to
| steal rather than give it back?
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Can't say that I have.
|
| I say the people threatening with nukes here would turn
| to more subtle methods of invasion, that's their
| objectives. They won't destroy it because they can't have
| it. That'd be a waste of nukes.
|
| Now is there someone threatening another country with
| nukes at the moment but not using them because he knows
| that'd be useless anyway and would it prove my point ?
| scott_w wrote:
| > Can't say that I have.
|
| Then I recommend you spend more time around people. Grown
| men have been convicted of throwing acid in an ex-
| girlfriend's face because "if I can't have you, no-one
| can."
|
| > Now is there someone threatening another country with
| nukes at the moment but not using them because he knows
| that'd be useless anyway and would it prove my point ?
|
| It doesn't prove your point because no country today is
| facing imminent extinction. Rationality changes when
| desperation comes into play.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > > Can't say that I have.
|
| > Then I recommend you spend more time around people.
| Grown men have been convicted of throwing acid in an ex-
| girlfriend's face because "if I can't have you, no-one
| can."
|
| You come up with a stupid analogy based on children
| behavior and now you invoke people throwing acid ?
|
| This is nickelodeon level debate here.
|
| > It doesn't prove your point because no country today is
| facing imminent extinction. Rationality changes when
| desperation comes into play.
|
| You are making the extraordinary (and quite childish
| considering you started with an analogy based on children
| behavior) claim that a country would nuke another one to
| go and settle there, it's up to you to prove it. So far,
| in the real world, no one has used nukes like that.
|
| I'd follow the argument but if a guy would throw acid and
| was in position to throw a nuke over a country they were
| denied access to it's most likely plausible they have the
| means and resources to get into this country in a more
| discrete and safe way (safe as in: he's in a country that
| wasn't nuked).
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _claim that a country would nuke another one to go and
| settle there_
|
| You have misunderstood the entire argument. Perhaps
| instead of calling other people stupid you should review
| your own reading comprehension.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| I never called anybody stupid, I called the analogies and
| the arguments stupid.
| scott_w wrote:
| > You come up with a stupid analogy based on children
| behavior and now you invoke people throwing acid ?
|
| It's called an analogy. Given we're talking about nuclear
| war, it's not an insane analogy.
|
| > claim that a country would nuke another one to go and
| settle there, it's up to you to prove it.
|
| I never said they'd try to settle the wasteland. I think
| you're struggling to understand the analogy.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > > You come up with a stupid analogy based on children
| behavior and now you invoke people throwing acid ?
|
| > It's called an analogy. Given we're talking about
| nuclear war, it's not an insane analogy.
|
| It looks more like a slippery slope bias to me. You can
| "prove" any dangers with that analogy but it's running
| against what history and reality have shown us so far.
|
| > > claim that a country would nuke another one to go and
| settle there, it's up to you to prove it.
|
| > I never said they'd try to settle the wasteland. I
| think you're struggling to understand the analogy.
|
| True, true, somehow the "threaten to" stayed in the
| keyboard. I still stand by the fact that this analogy
| doesn't scale to the real world.
| scott_w wrote:
| > It looks more like a slippery slope bias to me.
|
| I have no idea what you're talking about.
|
| I'm simply making a point that humans don't always behave
| reasonably in a way that would achieve their stated
| goals. I tried to use an analogy to make this easier but
| you seem confused. I could have replaced "acid" with
| "murder." Would that have helped?
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > > It looks more like a slippery slope bias to me.
|
| > I have no idea what you're talking about.
|
| Sorry, I reread the definition from the bias list and
| it's not the good one. Read the whole line, it's too
| small an illustration to fit a bigger picture:
|
| > It looks more like a slippery slope bias to me. You can
| "prove" any dangers with that analogy but it's running
| against what history and reality have shown us so far.
|
| > I'm simply making a point that humans don't always
| behave reasonably in a way that would achieve their
| stated goals.
|
| This, I agree with. But:
|
| > I tried to use an analogy to make this easier but you
| seem confused. I could have replaced "acid" with
| "murder." Would that have helped?
|
| No. I understand your analogy but it happens that I
| disagree with how it is an argument in favor of your
| opinion (which I also disagree with but that's for
| another paragraph).
|
| If anything, I think it undermines your position because
| it reduces the many more complex steps leading to nuking
| another country to a petty and cruel behavior from one
| individual. The analogy doesn't explain the reality
| behind a potential revengeful nuclear strike
| (geopolitical moves leading to that decision, climate
| disasters, consequences stemming from the reaction of
| other nations, etc.). All it is saying is "there are
| humans who would do crazy things so it follows that we
| are always at risks from one human doing the most crazy
| thing like nuking another country" but nuking another
| country, for the sake of the argument, requires more than
| one human (no matter how petty he is) and so far it
| hasn't been done yet (unlike people throwing acid at
| exes, which breaks the analogy). This is skewing
| proportions ("this analogy doesn't scale").
|
| I'd rather we discuss the likelihood of such an event
| happening based on real world data and information, not
| using illustrations.
|
| To follow on the analogy: unlike the guy with the acid
| bottle, the guy with the nuke has certainly the means to
| hop on a plane and buy his way into NZ rather than nuking
| it.
|
| Of course we can always make the argument "but what if
| someone crazy comes and do the crazy thing" but how
| likely is it ? Adding "but what if he's under a lot of
| pressure ?!", that's still a what if scenario that would
| be better validated through real world examples/data than
| an analogy boiling down to "there are crazy people" or
| the single argument "people don't always act rationally
| so _anything is possible_. Well, duh.
|
| On analogies, I like this blog post:
| http://itdept4life.blogspot.com/2012/04/why-analogies-
| suck.h...
| scott_w wrote:
| > To follow on the analogy: unlike the guy with the acid
| bottle, the guy with the nuke has certainly the means to
| hop on a plane and buy his way into NZ rather than nuking
| it.
|
| That assumes money matters any more. It's not
| unreasonable that we go past that point, leading to the
| irrational scenarios.
|
| It's hard to apply regular probabilities to this, since
| we're discussing a situation _where the best option for
| all humans is to get to New Zealand!_ We have no frame of
| reference for this scenario.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _They won 't destroy it because they can't have it.
| That'd be a waste of nukes._
|
| If your civilization is on the verge of extinction then
| you are not concerned about wasting nukes. You are way
| overestimating human rationality under extreme pressure.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| I think I'll be keeping my nukes to defend myself from
| the next bigger bully (which would allow me to keep my
| country) rather than waste it on the smaller one (which
| would give me no advantage and less nukes).
|
| > You are way overestimating human rationality under
| extreme pressure.
|
| Ironically, pretty sure the people with the power to
| launch nukes won't feel the same pressure as people
| suffering from climate change consequences. So.. keep the
| restless and angry gods content and they won't wage war
| and spread destruction.
| swader999 wrote:
| Or spit in its food so no one else grabs it.
| sharemywin wrote:
| child? that tactic still works as an adult. even with
| strangers in a restaurant, besides who wants to eat
| "inside" that stupid restaurant anyway.
| swader999 wrote:
| Its the first place I'm sending my shelter vent seeking
| drones so don't bother.
| freedude wrote:
| much or all of it is under water...
| RandomLensman wrote:
| If you are invoking rather insane scenarios - why rule
| out the use of bioweapons? Why rule out geoengineering?
| p_j_w wrote:
| >Why rule out geoengineering?
|
| If there was a viable geoengineering technology
| available, we'd be using it right now. Assuming that
| something will pop up is wishful thinking.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| There are a bunch of carbon sequestration technologies
| that work right now. The question is who is going to pay
| for them to be deployed at scale?
| CalRobert wrote:
| What's insane about those scenarios?
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Because if large-scale nuclear or biological war is
| reasonable likely then climate change really doesn't
| matter anyway. End of the world scenarios are always an
| easy "sell" but they are usually not helpful for
| constructive progress.
|
| Before nuclear war, lots of constructive things like
| geoengineering could happen.
| 12907835202 wrote:
| What counts as a rich powerful country in this instance?
|
| China? Norway? UAE? I feel like they will all fare very
| differently
| [deleted]
| freedude wrote:
| There is only one way to be free. Believe in the truth. Acts
| 16:16-40
|
| Beyond that you are supposing based upon bad data and
| conjecture which results in a scenario where worry will kill
| you.
|
| But let's say the worst happens and you can't live in a city
| anymore. Can you grow your own food? Can you grow all of it?
| How many resources does that take near where you live? How
| about in the mountains near where you live? Now go learn how
| to do it.
| omginternets wrote:
| That's somewhat like asking how to win a fight if you get
| knocked out.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Let's assume that the world is incapable of solving this
| problem.
|
| Incapable not, but _unwilling_ most certainly - just look at
| the state of politics across all Western countries and that
| doesn 't even include China and India who're hell-bent on
| growth.
|
| > What can an individual do to not suffer?
|
| Move to somewhere high up north, these places are going to be
| those where climate change will at least not cause them to
| get uninhabitable.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| Do we have the technical capabilities? Probably yes Do we
| have the organizational/coordinating capabilities? Maybe
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > Incapable not, but unwilling most certainly - just look
| at the state of politics across all Western countries and
| that doesn't even include China and India who're hell-bent
| on growth.
|
| Unwilling and incapable are sort of two sides of the same
| coin. Our political and economical systems are set up as a
| greedy (in the CS sense) optimization process.
|
| This makes solving long term global scale problems all but
| impossible in any case that would entail any sort of short-
| term inconvenience, and anyone seeking to solve such
| problems by such means are (by definition) politically and
| economically irrelevant.
|
| I think in general there's a somewhat unfounded notion that
| someone is actually in control that's getting harder to
| defend in the light of what's been several decades of
| fairly public failures to address obvious problems in
| society. You to look very hard to find examples of public
| policy successfully addressing any sort of problem, and
| even in that case it's questionable whether the problem was
| actually solved or whether it's just a case of regression
| to the mean.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I think in general there's a somewhat unfounded notion
| that someone is actually in control that's getting harder
| to defend in the light of what's been several decades of
| fairly public failures to address obvious problems in
| society. You to look very hard to find examples of public
| policy successfully addressing any sort of problem, and
| even in that case it's questionable whether the problem
| was actually solved or whether it's just a case of
| regression to the mean.
|
| I think it's obvious by now when all that began: with the
| collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia in the early 90s.
| With the corrective against capitalism lost, _everything_
| defaulted to greed in the following decades.
|
| Before that, humanity showed many times over that it
| could cooperate on critical crises and to ban dangerous
| stuff: sulphur in fuel was banned after "acid rain", lead
| and asbestos were banned, CFCs were banned after the
| ozone hole, nuclear weapon tests were all but abolished,
| biological and chemical weapon developments as well. Even
| the right to wage wars of aggression was under pretty
| solid control.
| Lutger wrote:
| Please consider this is not a problem that we either solve or
| not solve. We are at 423.70 ppm CO2 today*, which is 2.43 ppm
| more than last year. It is not that every increment above 0
| ppm means we failed to solve the problem.
|
| Let's say we reduce that 2.43 ppm increment to 1 ppm at some
| point. Or even to 2.41 ppm. Does that mean we failed? In a
| way, yes. But was the effort meaningless? No, the 1.43 ppm we
| didn't put out in the atmosphere really had an impact, and in
| a similar way, the 0.02 ppm we reduced also had a real impact
| on actual people. Both would translate to less sealevel rise,
| less floods, droughts, storms, heatwaves, biodiversity loss,
| etc. Which means a reduction of death, migration, hunger,
| suffering, extinction, chaos, economic loss, etc.
|
| I know your question is about adaptation and not mitigation,
| but we need to get out of the either/or mindset. Every single
| action we take to reduce our emissions matters. I mean that
| in a very matter of fact way, not as a call to action. It is
| just technically incorrect to think it does not matter
| (though by no means I am implying you specifically think so).
|
| * https://www.co2.earth/daily-co2
| ericmcer wrote:
| You will be ok based on the fact that you are asking about it
| on HN. Tech workers in the US move their entire lives just to
| do something like snowboard more.
|
| I watched a documentary about bread bakers in Afghanistan and
| there was a whole ecosystem of wheat growers, millers and
| bakers who were all centered around a river and had been
| doing the same work for many generations. They are screwed.
| runarberg wrote:
| I call these sort of arguments _Climate Optimism_ and I
| consider it a form of climate denial.
|
| The central thesis is that the climate crisis has already been
| solved with technology and capitalism. The worst offenders
| (like Max Roser of _Our World in Data_
| https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser) overemphasize success in western
| countries and hint the problem lies in China and India not
| doing enough.
|
| A more run of the mill climate optimist claims that the efforts
| we've done so far are enough to avert disaster, and we just
| need to do more of the same. The YouTube channel Kurzgesagt
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxgMdjyw8uw) is guilty if this
| form of denialism.
| Lutger wrote:
| You are correct. RCP8.5 is such a nightmare scenario, it was
| always quite unlikely to happen even if we were tracking it for
| a while. So its not a real surprise nor consolation we are not
| tracking that path anymore. The best possible take on this
| article is that change is in fact possible, that it always
| matters, and we need more of it.
|
| Because, like you said, we do need to step up our game. The
| middle of the road is not good enough. We must resist both the
| naivety of the techno-optimists as well as the doomist
| fatalism. Any perspective that leads to inaction is wrong.
| colordrops wrote:
| One of the top things that could be done to help the climate
| is to remove the stigma around veganism and its promotion. It
| would have a tremendous impact if a significant proportion of
| the population stopped using animal products.
| belorn wrote:
| Veganism is not the same as low emission. There are plenty
| of vegan food that has unsustainable levels of emissions if
| all of earth was to eat it.
|
| The top thing is for people to consider emissions and allow
| emissions to become part of the decision process. In terms
| of diet that could be to introduce and consider food
| outside of the cultural limits, like shell fish and sea
| weed. A related issue are that a large number (majority?)
| of Europe and northern American lakes has major issues with
| eutrophication with mostly fish that people refuse to eat
| because of culture. Eating those kind of fish would solve
| two problems at the same time, feeding people and removing
| uncontrolled overgrowth caused by artificial fertilizers.
|
| Right now it is also cheaper to operate heavy machinery
| that run on fossil fuels to control plant growth in nature
| reservation and around power lines, rather than raising
| animals that would do the same job and create food. Same
| thing with Lawn mowers. One of the most ecological method
| to keep grass cut is (real) free range hobby scale
| chickens. Produce food, cuts grass and keeps pests away.
|
| As with everything else, everything change if people allow
| emissions to be part of the decision process.
| colinsane wrote:
| what do vegans feel stigmatized in doing these days?
|
| gotta say i see the challenges between animal-free and car-
| free life as much the same: most people around me generally
| agree we'd be better off with both these lifestyles, but
| the issue is practicality. best way to promote veganism
| around me in the past couple years has literally been to
| cook vegan meals with friends. if the stigma you're talking
| about is "vegan food stinks" or "vegan food's hard to
| prepare", then that's an easy way to address those two.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Vegetarianism, yes. Veganism, no.
|
| The CO2 emissions from a world full of vegetarians vs a
| world full of vegans are pretty close to indistinguishable.
| ethor wrote:
| Wouldn't an increase in co2 in the atmosphere spur a massive
| plant growth, both on land and in the oceans? I have no
| qualifications nor merit in this field as well, so anyone
| please feel free to correct me if I am wrong.
| Mizza wrote:
| Some, but most plant growth is nitrogen limited, not CO2
| limited.
| danielheath wrote:
| Depends whether that's a bottleneck; hard to imagine much
| improvement in a plant that's short of nitrogen.
| ajnin wrote:
| It probably would, but if you're implying this would absorb a
| lot of CO2, I don't think so, plants die and when they do
| they decompose and release the CO2 back into the atmosphere.
| The conditions are not really met for a new carboniferous era
| right now and it took millions of years.
| revelio wrote:
| No because plant levels settle at a higher equilibrium.
| Plants may decompose but there are more plants growing at
| the same time, so it still ends up being more.
|
| Higher CO2 levels are said to have led to a "global
| greening", in which crop yields have gone up a lot. This is
| especially true in Africa, so that reduces global hunger
| and increases wealth. The idea that more CO2 = less life is
| not as simple as it's made out to be. Climate doomers
| ignores this type of thing because they are convinced
| society can't handle complexity, so have to insist that CO2
| is always bad even when it's not.
|
| https://fee.org/articles/rejoice-the-earth-is-becoming-
| green...
| snowwrestler wrote:
| No one actually argues that CO2 is "always bad."
|
| The argument is that the total effect of increasing CO2
| in the atmosphere is net negative for most people.
| NumberWangMan wrote:
| Some people can handle complexity, but I think they're in
| the minority. I'm not sure that tacking on "oh, but also
| climate change will be good in a few ways" is helpful in
| getting people to take action. So there are sure to be
| some misinformed climate activists out there who don't
| know about greening, but that may be a preferable
| situation to everyone being very informed about the
| nuance and therefore feeling like this is a smaller
| problem than it really is.
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| Oh my.. few serious educated persons would refute the
| increased greening, yes, but there it stops already.
|
| Crop yields have gone up a lot? Unfortunatly our farming
| has even more problems, but let's leave it at the
| increased greening: How much have crop yields increased
| by that please, any numbers? Or at least how much the
| increase of greening is?
|
| Do you know our crops vs the plants that mostly benefit
| from this and will also thrive in the future weather
| conditions, that is more than the CO2 level?
|
| Hunger in Africa has already reduced? Please wtf, any
| numbers?
|
| And that this will outweigh the other bad consequences..
| no comment.
|
| Even your reference doesn't get to anything more concrete
| than wishful but hilarious extrapolation based on ...
| just opinion (vs facts of.. but I think it is not worth
| continiueing, right? :/ )
| dalbasal wrote:
| ... ideally, during a carboniferous epoch, you have lots of
| bogs and places where plants can decompose into oil for
| future civilizations to enjoy... And re-release I to the
| atmosphere.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| From what I've read that can't really happen again. In
| the prehistoric past, plants could die and would build up
| into massive layers. Over time those wound up in various
| geologic processes that caused them to become oil.
| Nowadays the Earth has plenty of microbes that will
| quickly decompose the plants into something that is not
| oil and that's the end of the process.
| sharemywin wrote:
| wouldn't the models already take that into account? I thought
| we were having problems with deforestation also.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| Yes, we expect increased some degree of photosynthesis.
| However, we hardly expect to see an proportionate increase of
| photosynthesis (or plant mass?) - if nothing else, we'd
| expect there to still be a bottleneck from nitrogen.
| m0llusk wrote:
| Yes, but in the worst way. Giving large amounts of CO2 to
| plants is kind of like giving huge doses of steroids to
| athletes. They grow abnormally and become unhealthy and short
| lived.
| JudasGoat wrote:
| My cannabis plants flower with 15 to 20% yield improvement
| and no abnormalities at 1500ppm CO2. Edit One of the side
| effects of CO2 infusion ironically, is tolerance of higher
| temperatures.
| m0llusk wrote:
| This is not about your cannabis yields. In high
| concentrations CO2 is a pollutant:
| https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/12/more-co2-in-
| the-a...
| swader999 wrote:
| Yes it already has. Earth has greened considerably,
| agriculture, forests have all been boosted the last forty
| years.
|
| Here chat 4:
|
| Piao, S., Liu, Z., Wang, Y. et al. (2020). Plant phenology
| and global climate change: Current progresses and challenges.
| Global Change Biology, 26, 1928-1940.
| https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15004 This review paper discusses
| the impact of global climate change on plant phenology, which
| includes effects of elevated CO2 levels.
|
| Zhu, Z., Piao, S., Myneni, R. B., Huang, M., Zeng, Z.,
| Canadell, J. G., ... & Zeng, N. (2016). Greening of the Earth
| and its drivers. Nature Climate Change, 6(8), 791-795.
| https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3004 This article provides
| evidence for the 'greening' of the Earth over a period of 33
| years, attributing roughly 70% of this greening to increased
| atmospheric CO2.
|
| Smith, P., House, J. I., Bustamante, M., Sobocka, J., Harper,
| R., Pan, G., ... & Popp, A. (2016). Global change pressures
| on soils from land use and management. Global Change Biology,
| 22(3), 1008-1028. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.13068 This
| article discusses the effects of global change pressures on
| soils, including the impacts of increasing CO2.
| q87b wrote:
| Just to makes sure no one things that this means that extra
| CO2 is good because of this: Elevated CO2 levels
| drastically change the climate and will make Earth
| inhabitable for humans at some point if not reduced. It's
| good for some plants in some places but their growth does
| not fix the underlying and future issues with CO2 in our
| atmosphere.
| askin4it wrote:
| Please stop "making sure" when it comes to MY thinking.
| Also on behalf of everyone who doesn't like being told
| what or how to think, please stop "making sure".
|
| If you really need to "make" something "sure" please pick
| something real and not a political football.
|
| In the early 70's alarmists were "making sure" everyone
| was panicking about an ice age.
|
| See..no ice...
|
| Wait a while....I predict the alarmists will change to
| something else when people no longer buy the current
| looming disaster.
|
| Please stop participating in the most recent fashionable
| doomsday fantasy.
| mikestew wrote:
| I imagine one must spend most time running in particular
| self-confirming circles to expect to be taken seriously
| when retorting with "in the 70's 'they' said there would
| be a new ice age, yuk, yuk, yuk", especially around HN.
| It's been refuted repeatedly, and I see someone already
| got to it while I was typing this.
| revelio wrote:
| [flagged]
| phtrivier wrote:
| > There were international conferences on the
| possibility, presented to the US President
|
| Out of curiosity, do you remember the date and place of
| such a conference ? And the name of the US President ?
|
| > Note that these days climatologists have erased the
| cooling trend from the old temperature records that these
| scientists were talking about.
|
| Not sure what you mean there. Has the data been dubbed
| irrelevant and replaced with, supposedly, more accurate
| data, or was it maliciously "erased" from records ?
| revelio wrote:
| [flagged]
| BizarroLand wrote:
| I mean, in the 70's people had leaded gasoline in cars,
| lead paint in the walls, washed their hands with DDT,
| blew a hole in the ozone layer and doused countries in
| unknown chemical blends, so relying on the things that
| were common ideas at that time as signs of good ideas may
| not be the right call.
| njarboe wrote:
| I wonder what the future will say about the 2020's.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Future Person 1: "They did the best they could with PCBs
| in their bloodstreams, a credit card sized hunk of
| plastic in their brains, breathing 60% more carbon
| dioxide with every breath than their great grandparents,
| having their food so processed and imbalanced that it
| lead to a multitude of diseases while wildy disrupting
| their gut biomes, and random chemicals in every drop of
| water on the planet disrupting their hormones and causing
| all manner of endocrine disorders."
|
| Future Person 2: "Wow! I'm glad they got all of that
| fixed! That must have sucked living through!"
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| In the 70s the gradually forming consensus was still that
| global warming was real. The popular press just ran with
| cooling more, so the lay person believed it. The modern
| "the 70s predicted cooling so can we believe anything
| these 'scientists' say?" talking point is based upon a
| false premise.
|
| https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-
| in-1970s.ht...
| revelio wrote:
| NY Times, 1976:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/1976/07/18/archives/the-genesis-
| stra...
|
| _But there is considerable evidence that this warm
| period is passing and that temperatures on the whole will
| get colder. For example, in the last 100 years mid-
| latitude air temperatures peaked at an all-time warm
| point in the 1940 's and-have been cooling ever since.
|
| [Climatologists] are predicting greater fluctuations, and
| a cooling trend for the northern hemisphere.
|
| The most imminent and far reaching [danger] is the
| possibility of a food-climate crisis that would burden
| the well to do countries with unprecedented hikes in food
| prices, but could mean famine and political instability
| for many parts of the non-industrialized world."
|
| So writes Stephen Schneider, a young climatologist at the
| National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder,
| Colo., reflecting the consensus of the climatological
| community in his new book, "The Genesis Strategy."_
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| If you're using that as evidence that media over-
| represented bad science, then I think that's a great
| example. Even before 1976 Schneider had already
| apologized and said that his assumptions regarding global
| cooling were overestimated and heating underestimate.
| Wikipedia also mentions that the book considers both
| global warming and cooling, it seems like the review was
| aiming at a particular popular angle. I don't know if I'd
| use a book review as an indicator of the actual
| scientific consensus of the time, but rather the media's
| understanding of the scientific consensus.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Schneider_(scientis
| t)
| revelio wrote:
| Every time I post that story here someone quickly reads
| Wikipedia, doesn't think about what they just read and
| then immediately attempts an AI-quality refutation.
|
| Yes Wikipedia claims that _" Having found that
| recalculation showed that global warming was the more
| likely outcome, he published a retraction of his earlier
| findings in 1974"_. Yet there he is in 1976 - two years
| after this supposed retraction - telling the NY Times
| that there's an absolute scientific consensus on global
| cooling.
|
| Wikipedia isn't reliable for anything climate related or
| on many other topics. Their citation for this claim of a
| retraction doesn't go to any retraction, but rather a
| book written by a Guardian journalist.
|
| It's really depressing how systematic this problem is.
| I'd try to fix Wikipedia with a link to the 1976
| interview but there's no point, it'd get reverted quickly
| for sure.
|
| For the wider point here see my other comment. According
| to present day understanding not only the media but also
| scientists were massively misleading the public about the
| climate and what other scientists believed. So how do you
| know it's not still happening?
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| > AI-quality refutation
|
| Cool, we're going to be like that. What's depressing is
| that I made the effort when you tried to pull things off
| into a rabbit trail of to a single book review.
|
| To be clear you didn't refute my initial argument here
| which looked at the state of the scientific community,
| you threw out a (from the sounds of things favorite
| cherry picked) book review from the New York Times.
|
| > So how do you know it's not still happening?
|
| Because it's much easier for scientists to have their own
| independent voices and easier to hear from the scientific
| community directly. Our ability to communicate these
| points, much like the science itself, is greatly improved
| from the 70s.
| revelio wrote:
| There are _two_ book reviews on the page I linked, both
| about global cooling. This is what I mean. You 're trying
| to argue using sources but not reading those sources.
|
| This point is relevant because you can't directly measure
| what the scientific community believes. It's not even a
| well defined group to begin with. So in practice everyone
| relies on summaries, articles, assertions by scientists
| about what other scientists believe and so on. If you
| read HN discussions on climate you'll see all kinds of
| things stated with 100% certainty that everyone believes
| those things, but it's easy to find research papers
| refuting them or providing contradictory evidence. Whilst
| communication abilities are indeed better than the 1970s
| this does not lead to more rational discussion because
| attempts to bring up the complexities and contradictions
| of the actual evidence base are invariably suppressed,
| along with people pointing out the unreliability of the
| climatological community. Many scientists today in
| climate will tell you point blank that their views are
| never brought to public attention and even actively
| suppressed.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I see you still didn't read MY SOURCE, which highlights
| it wasn't 100% consensus by looking at papers throughout
| the decade. As you're not trying to engage with my
| information in good faith, I'm going to have to say good
| day to you.
| revelio wrote:
| I did read it, but I mentioned it in a reply in a
| different sub-thread:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36079311#36087598
|
| See the sentence starting "Even the attempted refutation"
| [deleted]
| csomar wrote:
| Logically, yes. The energy will be transformed by nature if
| humans don't do it. However, this might not happen in a
| timely fashion for us to survive as a specie. Remember, earth
| timelines are wildly different than human ones.
| nomel wrote:
| > for us to survive as a species
|
| An incredibly strong feedback mechanism exists (see article
| above).
|
| Societal problems, yes. Extinction to the human species? I
| think that's extreme hyperbole. What would the mechanism
| even be, to eradicate all humans, across the globe?
|
| Climate change is real, things will be bad, etc, but the
| possible end of the species is an incredible claim, that
| doesn't follow logic.
| earthling8118 wrote:
| Okay so it won't make us go extinct. What if it makes
| life full of significant suffering. I find this kind of
| argument quite annoying. It's the same thing was happened
| with COVID19. Sure, I'm not going to die from it. That
| doesn't mean I want to live a life without my taste or
| smell. I enjoy those things. Likewise I want to live on a
| good Earth and leave that to the people after me.
| nomel wrote:
| > I find this kind of argument quite annoying.
|
| What is "this kind of argument"? Something ridiculous was
| stated, and I pointed out an apparently annoying reality.
| The argument that you seem to want to have is unrelated
| to what was said and my response to it. I don't think
| hyperbole has a place on meaningful discussions. Relevant
| points should be made without theatrics.
| eimrine wrote:
| Am I right that the source does not count pollutions created from
| warheads explosions? Those are also exploating fossil fuels and
| exposing the greenhouse gases and amount of warheads spent is not
| being declared anywhere.
| timthelion wrote:
| I believe total emissions are being measured by satellite
| spectrometry and not by reported figures. So if these are the
| numbers from the satelites they include all emissions including
| warheads, oceanic die-offs, permafrost melting ect. Or are
| those numbers different?
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Which specific source you checked?
| zdragnar wrote:
| IIRC, carbon isn't a significant component of high explosives.
| Carbon burns when supplied with oxygen, but you really don't
| want an explosive to burn. You want it to detonate, which tends
| to favor the form of nitrogen in various arrangements.
| usernew wrote:
| I'll put it to you this way: all the militaries of all the
| countries in everything they do, are responsible for 6% of the
| CO2 emissions. I'll let you figure out why explosions alone
| were not mentioned at all.
| eimrine wrote:
| > all the militaries of all the countries in everything they
| do, are responsible for 6% of the CO2 emissions
|
| I have quickly googled that statement and all I see is
| pre-02/24/22 data. I am sure the percent has changed
| significantly from the good old times.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Ah, how times have changed since _checks notes_ last year.
| sofixa wrote:
| It's a fair argument, an active war is more intensive on
| emissions (tanks, trucks, planes, trains if not
| electrified need fuel, and especially older Soviet-era
| models aren't known for the fuel or emission efficiency).
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| I think pollution from warhead explosions is still
| negligible compared with pollution from fires or created
| from the emissions in reconstruction destroyed buildings or
| perhaps even the supply chain of delivering the warhead.
| The US and China military transport emissions probably
| dwarf everything.
|
| https://www.economist.com/international/2021/04/27/the-
| wests... archived: https://archive.ph/nFd2h
| usernew wrote:
| Expand your search, and be amazed by how many wars are and
| have been fought, always, continuously, and forever.
|
| When you're done with that search, look up volcano
| explosions on land and under the sea, and compare them to
| the explosive power of a missle.
|
| When you have a bleeding cow, you can solve the bleeding
| issue and keep the cow alive, while completely ignoring the
| mosquitoes "relentlessly draining" its blood.
| hnarn wrote:
| The assumption that military activity, which is a subset of
| any nations economy and mostly stationary in any case but a
| world war, would not be dwarfed by the majority of civilian
| activity like industrial activity and trade routes, is
| simply absurd.
|
| There is nothing about "military engines" or "military
| supply routes" or "military explosions" that leads anyone
| to believe their impact would be any worse than their
| civilian equivalents, and even if they were, you still have
| to prove that they are so _much_ worse that even their
| limited activity compared to the normal economy must be
| given priority attention.
|
| The burden of proof is on the one making the claim, not
| everyone else.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| What's wrong with pre-22? Did you expect something
| important to have changed after the US withdrawal from
| Afghanistan?
| ttiurani wrote:
| What's very important to note is that a big bulk of the recent
| reductions have come from picking low-hanging fruits, i.e. by
| replacing coal with natural gas.
|
| This does not mean that going to zero will be possible with just
| more of the same.
| logifail wrote:
| > a big bulk of the recent reductions have come from picking
| low-hanging fruits, i.e. by replacing coal with natural gas
|
| US and Europe, maybe. What about China and India?
|
| "China permitted more coal power plants last year [2022] than
| any time in the last seven years, according to a new report
| released this week. It's the equivalent of about two new coal
| power plants per week. The report by energy data organizations
| Global Energy Monitor and the Centre for Research on Energy and
| Clean Air finds the country quadrupled the amount of new coal
| power approvals in 2022 compared to 2021"[0]
|
| [0] https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-
| building-...
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The thing is, India is emitting less than either the USA or
| the EU even in absolute terms. In per capita terms, it's
| negligible. And in total emissions to date, it's not even a
| blip. Even China is far better in these metrics than the US
| and EU.
|
| So, at least morally, they seem to have every right to
| increase their emissions, and it is up to us, the largest
| historical polluters, to contract our economies if we are
| serious about both climate change and moral rights. Why
| should we expect to live in luxury in the EU while peasants
| in India live without electricity just because they can't
| afford a non-coal power plant?
|
| Of course, an even better approach would be for the large
| historical polluters to contribute funds, manpower and know-
| how, freely, to build clean power and clean industry in China
| and other places.
|
| And finally, I am also well aware that this is higy
| idealistic and none of this has any chance in hell of
| happening. We'll just keep pointing fingers at China and
| India (and the USA, speaking as an EU citizen) and avoid too
| much actual change.
| ralfd wrote:
| > India is emitting less than either the USA or the EU even
| in absolute terms
|
| This will change with more wealth though. We must ensure
| that future energy hunger in India (and Africa) ist not
| satiated by fossil fuels.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| The CO2 levels are all about absolute emissions. Per capita
| is irrelevant when we're talking about total damage being
| done. 2 new coal plants a week is terrible.
| rypskar wrote:
| >>Per capita is irrelevant when we're talking about total
| damage being done
|
| Per capita is relevant when we are talking about
| countries or regions, if not the easy way is to cut the
| region in 2 and say you have cut emissions by 50%.
|
| The per capita is irrelevant is often used by small
| countries as an excuse for not doing anything because
| "they" are so many more than "we", so what "we" do don't
| change anything
| tsimionescu wrote:
| They are relevant to equity. We can't just stay in our
| air-conditioned running water homes playing on the
| internet and going to work in our cars while complaining
| that poor people in India and China and elsewhere should
| just spend more on solar since cheap coal is too dirty.
| They clearly have a much dire need for energy than we do,
| so it is up to us to either help them reach that energy
| need without coal and gas, or to reduce our energy
| consumption (and lifestyle) commensurately with how much
| they are producing.
|
| If they build 2 coal plants, we can tear down 4 natural
| gas plants and still reduce overall emissions. Sure, we
| may need some rolling blackouts, but such is the price -
| we'll still live much better than the vast majority of
| the world.
| adrianN wrote:
| China's CO2/kWh is falling. Of course they could do much
| better, but they're not only building coal plants, they're
| also building massive amounts of renewables.
| elihu wrote:
| In the U.S. a pretty simple next step would be to stop
| exporting coal. I mean, why are we doing that in the first
| place? We get all the same negative consequences of CO2
| emissions as if we burned it ourselves, but someone else gets
| to use the energy.
|
| But yeah, we need a lot more investment in non-fossil-fuel
| energy production, and we need to be able to move and store
| electric energy on a much bigger scale than we can now. Fossil
| fuels for ground transportation needs to stop being a thing. We
| can do it with existing technology, we've just chosen not to.
|
| https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55980
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| How the fact that we're seeing a 80% reduction in insect
| population fits in all of this? Honestly asking, I think it's
| really worrysome and not getting the attention it deserves.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Of Interest: https://biodiversityireland.ie/the-silent-
| extinction-of-inse...
|
| The tone of which suggests the studies are not wide-ranging
| enough: each study has its flaws and
| limitations, as do all scientific studies, and in
| combination with the North American/European bias where most of
| studies were conducted, this means that it would be a
| stretch too far to say the science currently supports
| global insect declines: the jury is still out on
| insectageddon.
| tuatoru wrote:
| Also arable land loss through erosion, desertification,
| poisoning and salinization, loss of coral reefs, overfishing
| ocean fish populations to extinction, and creation of anoxic
| dead zones in the ocean.
|
| And more! Destruction of coastal mangroves. Groundwater over-
| extraction. Pollution of freshwater reservoirs and rivers.
| Destruction of tropical rainforests and their collections of
| many possibly useful organisms.
|
| A while ago (2010?) the US Defence National Intelligence
| Council's report on threats labeled climate change a "force
| multiplier".
|
| That's all it is, really: the least of the things we're doing
| wrong, that we will have to fix this century. It makes the real
| problems a bit worse.
|
| People are going to be really disappointed when we change the
| car fleet to 100% EV, but somehow things still keep getting
| worse.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| I agree: fixing the global biocide of Bayer & monsanto is
| probably even more disastrous and should have even higher
| priority than climate change.
|
| There MUST be more sustainable ways of farming than killing the
| biosphere.
| Proven wrote:
| [dead]
| Julesman wrote:
| Well, that's nice. Not gunna stop sea level rise from flooding
| every coastal city within 30 years. But hey, a slightly better
| apocalypse just gives me a warm glow all over. Totes.
| Yizahi wrote:
| I may be out of depth here, but does anyone else also thinks that
| measuring "emissions" is a kind of bullshit? First it is not very
| precise in the first place, but let's assume it is. Second - the
| effects of the GH gasses in atmosphere is not linear, scientists
| hypothesize about different thresholds which can be reached at
| certain global temperature points. Like for example west
| Antarctic shield detaching, Gulfstream interruption, sedimentary
| ocean methane release, permafrost methane release etc. All these
| can rapidly change our climate while "emissions" would be steady
| or even receding. Third - even "level" emissions would still
| continue heating up the planet, and heating rate would increase
| even with the "level" state of emissions, simply because "old"
| already emitted gasses are still in the atmosphere.
|
| I think it is more fair to measure temperatures directly, as we
| already do, and make estimates from there. It's not the CO2 which
| would harm us (at least not that much), it's the temperature, so
| we need to base our analysis on the thing that interests us
| directly. And not on the derivative of the derivative of it
| (emission rates).
|
| I suspect it doesn't matter how good are our models or how good
| are humanity's efforts in green tech. Until we are actually
| removing gasses from the atmosphere permanently, the planet is
| fucked. Just faster or slower, doesn't really matter.
| argiopetech wrote:
| > the planet is fucked
|
| The planet will be fine. It will be different, but that's a
| normal thing in its 4 billion year history.
|
| Whether it will be habitable for humans is a different
| question. I suspect we'll adapt (like we did for the last ice
| age), but I'm no expert.
|
| On the bright side, more heat and CO2 means more arable land
| and better growing environment. Veggies and grazing animals are
| all I need to get by, food wise.
| AlphaCerium wrote:
| More heat and CO2 means a higher sea level, which will lead
| to the loss of arable land, not gain
| argiopetech wrote:
| I've been unable to find a source either way. Can you help?
|
| Just looking casually at topo maps and assuming the worst
| case I've seen (all land and sea ice melts, resulting in
| sea water rising 250'), the land we'll lose in coastal
| regions and major river basins is smaller than what we'll
| gain near the poles. Farming just Antarctica would probably
| produce enough food to feed the world several times over.
|
| Edit: This isn't to say that worst case scenario wouldn't
| displace high percentages of the population or that that
| isn't a major issue; however, it's not an insurmountable
| obstacle given the gradual nature of the change.
| HNDen21 wrote:
| Antarica is problematic since it is completely dark 4
| months out of the year... and completely sunny the
| opposite 4 months.. and even then isn't it just rocks
| underneath that ice.. you would need to bring in soil
| etc.. but if all the ice melts will that even be above
| water at that point?
| mikestew wrote:
| _Farming just Antarctica would probably produce enough
| food to feed the world several times over._
|
| I'd bet a paycheck that there's no top soil worthy of the
| name under all that ice. Same with when people yuk it up
| with, "we'll just farm Canada!" Have you _seen_ the dirt
| in British Columbia? I don 't think that soil could grow
| anything other than more dirt. (Though Manitoba and
| Saskatchewan would probably do better, dunno.)
| freedude wrote:
| You don't know what you are talking about. Some of the
| richest soil exists in the Canadian North. I have lived
| on a farm and planted and raised vegetables on a Canadian
| farm for multiple years.
| Yizahi wrote:
| People are misunderstanding George Carlin standup sooo much.
| Yes, "The Planet" will be fine. The ball of molten iron will
| be fine. It's just that current ecosystem will die out, but
| apparently it's "fine". We will adapt probably, but billions
| will die. A simple hypothesis - let's say due to the global
| warming rice crops will fail globally. Just imagine how many
| people would be affected and how many nuclear wars started
| for the remaining resources :) .
| [deleted]
| argiopetech wrote:
| What climate change-induced mechanism could cause a global
| rice crop failure? Would it also cause global failure of
| grain, corn, beans, potatoes, etc? The hypothesis seems so
| far fetched to me as to be dismissible out of hand.
|
| I can understand how, over a period of years, farms near
| the equator may become less tenable and land farther from
| the equator more arable, but, at the scales I've seen
| (single digit average degrees up over the next 100 years),
| we should be able to account for that.
|
| Edit: I don't know the Carlin bit you refer to. Link?
| Yizahi wrote:
| As for the rice crop - afaik it requires a lot of water
| and right temperatures. If the temperatures will rise a
| lot, then crops will weaken and increased droughts will
| cut water supply for the fields. Famines are very
| possible I suspect in far future. Importing food from the
| north is possible but not very probable. First because
| north would also suffer, just differently, second because
| the population in question is insanely huge (whole
| Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, East Asia etc.) I don't
| think enough grain for example can be imported to
| supplant a loss of a staple crop like rice. And just
| where this additional grain can be raised in the north?
| Suitable farmlands are already in use for agriculture.
| And new lands are either in bad terrain or in bad climate
| zones.
|
| The standup I've referenced:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHgJKrmbYfg I've seen way
| way too many folks on the right who take it at face
| value, literally. Even his not so subtle references that
| humanity will die out don't phase people with an agenda.
| freedude wrote:
| "As for the rice crop - afaik it requires a lot of water
| and right temperatures."
|
| You don't know enough. Stop watching Carlin and go learn
| something about growing things in your environment.
|
| If you live in the Northern Hemisphere step away from the
| keyboard, get outside, breath some fresh air and soak in
| the sunlight while you dig in the dirt and plant some
| food for yourself. Then perhaps you can think clearly
| enough to make steps that make sense.
| swader999 wrote:
| Worst case scenario they'll be farming on Greenland.
| Again.
| revelio wrote:
| I wonder how many people will understand what you're
| referring to.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| The norm for planet Earth is for the environment to change
| drastically over millions of billions of years, though
| sometimes in mere moments (eg: asteroid smack). Life as we
| know it since its inception has also survived all of those
| changes.
|
| So Earth will be fine and life will go on, the only thing
| that will destroy everything is when the Sun goes om nom
| nom many billions of years from now as it feasts upon its
| inner children to become a red giant.
| Timon3 wrote:
| > The norm for planet Earth is for the environment to
| change drastically over millions of billions of years,
| though sometimes in mere moments (eg: asteroid smack).
| Life as we know it since its inception has also survived
| all of those changes.
|
| Life itself survives, but most living things die. It
| would be pretty disingenuous to say "hey, an amoeba
| survived, who cares all other life is dead" - because
| somehow every second commenter seems to have the
| incredible insight "but the planet earth will not
| literally be destroyed, so why should we care".
| wrycoder wrote:
| About one billion years, actually.
| pavlov wrote:
| _> "Until we are actually removing gasses from the atmosphere
| permanently, the planet is fucked. Just faster or slower, doesn
| 't really matter."_
|
| If I have a cancer, and a lifestyle change would make the
| difference between whether the cancer kills me in four years or
| forty... I definitely wouldn't say "I'm fucked anyway, no point
| in doing anything unless the cancer can be permanently
| removed."
| bartislartfast wrote:
| Plenty people take exactly that view, when it comes to
| cancer.
|
| The problem is, this is not cancer, and all the people who
| take the "fucked anyway" view are damning the rest of us
| vages wrote:
| Living for forty additional years from 1983 (40 years ago)
| would have made a world of difference to your chances of
| survival for any type of cancer.
| Yizahi wrote:
| This is a very good metaphor. That's exactly what we are
| doing - we have a cancer and we are making a lifestyle
| changes, hoping that cancer will reconsider :) . The gas
| already in the atmosphere, just like cancer cells, doesn't
| care about good intentions, positive thinking and a number of
| "net zero" logos slapped on the heavily polluting hardware.
| It's doing it's work all the time, regardless of the emission
| rates were have on the ground, be they real or faked.
|
| Sure, it's great that we are changing our society globally,
| it is beneficial for us. If we will ever decide to cool the
| planet then green energy is must have tech for that, because
| we can't sequester gas while emitting more of it, it's dumb.
| But we are talking about a long term estimate now, and that
| one unfortunately in my uneducated opinion didn't change
| much. The heating rate didn't change much because of a few
| Leafs and Teslas on the road, and some northern EU countries
| actually reducing emissions.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Unless we:
|
| 1: Discover some previously unknown method to directly
| recreate cheap and easy unlimited photosynthesis either
| electrically or mechanically or
|
| 2: Somehow create a fan system that can atomically slice
| the carbon atoms off of gaseous co2 particles
|
| And the one that we create is ALSO cheap enough to deploy
| world wide en masse capable of equal or greater CO2
| concentration reduction than the number of CO2 producing
| ICE engines in use and industries put out, it's not going
| to ever be a miracle fix.
|
| or
|
| 3: Hijack a currently existing biological system to do the
| heavy lifting for us:
|
| I imagine that with government incentive something like a
| self-regulating robotic rooftop duckweed farms being
| required for every vehicle owning household, but something
| like that would first need to be perfected and made
| available at an affordable price, like $400 or less with
| minimal maintenance expense which is a HUGE ask considering
| that duckweed propagation is not a solved part of
| agricultural science.
|
| I chose Duckweed because it is the fastest growing plant in
| the world, which can double in mass almost daily under
| ideal conditions, uses photosynthesis to convert water and
| carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbohydrates, fats, and
| proteins, and its dietary requirements are met easily, only
| needing a small amount of additives to common water and a
| ready source of carbon dioxide as could be handled by
| bubbling atmospheric air into the water.
|
| Additionally, duckweed is edible by humans and animals, and
| if there were unconsumable excess as would be likely given
| 3 billion home duckweed farms, we could theoretically dry
| and burn it for carbon negative fuel (as the leftover
| carbon ash from the burn would count as sequestered
| carbon).
|
| Alternatively, some genetically modified cyanobacteria
| could probably do the trick, but with risk of harm should
| it escape from its confines into the ecosphere.
| wizofaus wrote:
| Except we can't directly/ immediately alter the global
| temperature, whereas we can alter emissions rates. If we bring
| them down to net zero quickly the planet will be warmer than it
| was 100 years ago but still at a temperature that's safe enough
| for humans to thrive in (though maybe not many other species,
| particularly corals etc.). And yes, we'll probably need to
| resort to some form of geo-engineering to further reduce CO2
| levels and/or temperatures, but for now measuring emissions is
| the best way we have of monitoring to what degree we're doing
| enough to stave off a catastrophic future.
| Lutger wrote:
| From just tracking temperature it may not be clear we are
| seeing climate change or weather variations. There are also
| cycles in the climate, like El Nino, which cause temporary
| increases in temperature. So I do think tracking emissions, or
| rather actual level of CO2-equivalents, is a much more reliable
| indicator of 'how we are doing' on the longer term. The CO2e
| levels are (a) cause of temperature, so it is the latter which
| is derivative of the former. But mostly, emissions are what we
| are directly responsible for and can influence, temperature
| increase is just the result of that and we have no direct
| control over.
|
| Obviously we measure and study both and they both matter so the
| point is somewhat moot.
| feoren wrote:
| Emissions are something we have (relatively) direct control
| over. Realize that these models _do_ take into account
| cascading effects like triggering ocean methane releases. They
| do take into account nonlinear effects of different GHGs. They
| pick possible emissions scenarios, simulate as many of these
| effects as they can, and look at the spectrum of possible
| future results. Then we look at our emissions to try to guess
| which simulation results our future is most likely to resemble.
| It 's not quite as tunnel-visioned as you make it out to be.
|
| > Until we are actually removing gasses from the atmosphere
| permanently, the planet is fucked.
|
| I happen to agree with this, but realize that's exactly the
| same metric: it's just negative GHG emissions. We would do the
| same thing: simulate potential future outcomes given an
| emission / capture balance that is overall negative, estimate
| what might happen, and then measure what we're actually doing
| to see whether we might actually be on that path or not. Once
| we start removing gasses, it's _still_ useful to track overall
| emission balance.
| scythe wrote:
| >sedimentary ocean methane release
|
| http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
|
| >While it may be important on the millennial timescales, it is
| no longer considered relevant for the near future climate
| change: the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report states "It is very
| unlikely that gas clathrates (mostly methane) in deeper
| terrestrial permafrost and subsea clathrates will lead to a
| detectable departure from the emissions trajectory during this
| century".
| Yizahi wrote:
| Oh, and while we are it, I have problem with correlating
| author's graphs of emissions with this graph of actual gas in
| the atmosphere:
|
| https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/
|
| You don't even need to be a big wig scientist to test this
| assumption. Open the graph on the big monitor and put a ruler
| or anything straight like a piece of paper to the median points
| corresponding to years 2000-2010. If emissions were "level" in
| the last decade then we should have 2010-2022 datapoints at
| most at the same line or even below the line. But in reality we
| see that the curve is raising up faster, meaning that the rate
| of emissions increased between years 10-22 compared to years
| 00-10, which contradicts author's graphs.
| vages wrote:
| It's very hard to argue without numerical data, but the graph
| on the Wikipedia version of the graph seems to increase
| linearly to my eyes:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeling_Curve (Edit: No, I can
| see what you mean; the graph is steeper from 2010-2020 than
| from 2000-2010.)
|
| (To anyone a bit confused, the Keeling graph is the
| cumulative amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, so emissions are
| the first derivative of this graph.)
| roter wrote:
| > ... so emissions are the first derivative of this graph
|
| Not exactly. There is a net sink of emissions every year
| into the land & ocean, so d(CO2)/dt = emissions minus the
| net sinks, roughly. See the graph on CO2 partitioning [0].
| A lot of research goes into whether these sinks continue at
| their current rate of removal.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_carbon_cycle#
| Anthr...
| penteract wrote:
| It looks to me like the graphs agree - emissions were growing
| 2000-2010, so the average emissions during that period (which
| roughly correspond to the gradient you're measuring with a
| straight edge) are lower than those from 2010 onwards, even
| if yearly emissions stayed constant after 2010.
| ImaCake wrote:
| Yes, to put it simply, the rate of emissions stopped
| increasing but we are still emitting what we were in 2010
| (plus a bit) so the keeling curve goes straight instead of
| continuing to subtly bend upwards.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| If you take the emissions from 2000 to 2010, the total is
| less than from 2010 to 2020. [1] Hence the keeling curve of
| concentration should be steeper in 2010 to 2020. [2] That
| indeed is the case.
|
| 1: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_
| pr...
|
| 2: https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/
| Yizahi wrote:
| Maybe I'm making some math mistake here, please correct me
| then. But I though that if a rate of addition is constant
| (horizontal graph), then the graph representing the sum
| total should be rising but linear. If the rate is negative,
| then the total graph would curve down. If the rate of
| addition is positive, then the total graph would curve up.
| And it's the last scenario which we see on the Keeling
| curve. Graph is curving up in the past decade, therefore
| rate of addition is increasing. No?
| penteract wrote:
| You're right except for the timescale of the claim that
| the graph is curving up in the past decade. Your
| observations show the graph curving upwards over the past
| 2 decades, during which we all agree that CO2 emissions
| were rising.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| You're correct in general but you need to be more
| specific with the years if you think there's a
| discrepancy. One would assume that there's some time
| delay from mixing and some other sources of change. But I
| think there shouldn't be any if smoothed?
|
| Easiest visually would be to integrate the emissions and
| compare it to the keeling curve, or differentiate the
| keeling curve and compare it to the emissions.
| jasmer wrote:
| This is some really bizarre logic: "It's not the guy with then
| gun, it's the bullets, let's avoid them!"
|
| I think the secondary things you describe are almost large
| scale weather events, not quite climate.
|
| But most fundamentally, the 'primary driver' of temperature
| change is CO2 and that's that so of course we have to measure
| it.
|
| And yes, it's far more fuzzy than they let on, which is not
| good they should be more open about that, or find a way to
| communicate it more effectively.
|
| No, the planet is not all 'fucked' and CO2 levels will go down
| as we put less in the air, and of course, if we want to start
| to decarbonize the atmosphere we can do that as well.
|
| I wish they would use the term 'climate risk' - because risk
| all about less likely probabilities, than 'specific paths to
| the future'.
| Yizahi wrote:
| > CO2 levels will go down as we put less in the air
|
| What? You are saying that if your are cooking meat on a
| skillet and turn the fire down from 3 to 1, or even to 0,
| then your meat temperature would start actively decreasing
| below the ambient temperature and freeze on it's own? Because
| that's what you are saying, literally.
|
| I'm not against measuring emission rates, that's an important
| metric. I'm against making any far reaching assumptions based
| ONLY on the emission rates estimates. Because that's like
| cooking meat inside an opaque black box by measuring torque
| forces applied to the regulator over time. It loosely
| corresponds to the result, but the meat would be charred most
| likely, due to big amount of conversions and estimations. On
| the other hand measuring meat temperature with a thermometer
| inserted directly into it would give us a precision result.
| darkwater wrote:
| > What? You are saying that if your are cooking meat on a
| skillet and turn the fire down from 3 to 1, or even to 0,
| then your meat temperature would start actively decreasing
| below the ambient temperature and freeze on it's own?
| Because that's what you are saying, literally.
|
| Considering that nature provides carbon traps and that the
| Earth is ultimately in the void of the space, you cooking
| meat is a kitchen with opened windows and freezing weather
| outside, and you turn down the climate that was set to full
| throttle.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I believe they are claiming that various processes break
| down or passively absorb CO2 in the air, so if emissions
| stopped by some magic, CO2 levels would not be steady but
| decreasing, even without other interventions.
| Yizahi wrote:
| I have no proper knowledge about natural carbon sinks,
| their capacity and remaining capabilities. But from the
| amateur point of view I think there are 3 main
| possibilities - vegetation, ocean and permafrost.
|
| Permafrost won't help because first the planet need to
| cool down a lot and start general cooling trend. And we
| will be heating up the atmosphere due to existing gasses.
| So it's a dead end.
|
| Vegetation is a linear carbon sink. Because microbes
| decompose dead vegetation and release gasses back in the
| atmosphere, the most of the captured carbon in vegetation
| must be in the actual alive plants. And number of alive
| plants scales linearly with the area we humans leave for
| them. Since humanity is increasing in numbers and each
| human demands more and more land to be used, I highly
| doubt that we can spare a lot of arable land for a NEW
| vegetation. So that's also dead end.
|
| And at last oceans. I have no idea what is the capture
| mechanism of an ocean and how much carbon on it's own it
| can capture permanently. Maybe yes, maybe no. But
| considering that a) we are acidifying oceans, b)
| overfishing them, c) raise sea levels, d) heat up oceans
| - all this together would probably hamper natural carbon
| capture capabilities of an ocean.
|
| So maybe this is possible. But I haven't heard a lot
| about such possibility from scientists, and I doubt it's
| a solution for our problem. Until some research will be
| done at least.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Here are some numbers from the Guardian, mostly citing
| IPCC reports as far as I can tell:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jan/16/green
| hou...
|
| Overall the OP's assertion seems to be only technically
| ture - it seems that CO2 is indeed absorbed, but only on
| a scale of decades to centuries essentially.
| jasmer wrote:
| "Because that's what you are saying, literally."
|
| You're having trouble with the meaning of word 'literally',
| but also analogies, and climate.
|
| The earth has various mechanisms for absorbing CO2 over
| time.
| rsync wrote:
| "I'm literally never going to stop misusing this word"
| Guthur wrote:
| Tertullian circa 100-200AD
|
| "The strongest witness is the vast population of the earth to
| which we are a burden and she scarcely can provide for our needs;
| as our demands grow greater, our complaints against Nature's
| inadequacy are heard by all. The scourges of pestilence, famine,
| wars and earthquakes have come to be regarded as a blessing to
| overcrowded nations since they serve to prune away the luxuriant
| growth of the human race."
|
| We have been beating this same drum for nearly 2000 years, at
| least. Nothing is new, we're tripping ourselves ad infinitum.
| simmerup wrote:
| Yeah, on a species level fine. On an individual level, I'm sure
| they had famines back then you wouldn't want to have been apart
| of.
| captainbland wrote:
| Short version seems to be "it's not the worst case any more, but
| it's still fairly bad" in that we need to reduce emissions, not
| just have them plateau otherwise we will still have a fairly bad
| outcome.
|
| I'm also a little wary that the apparent plateau in the data
| might not pan out in the longer term. Particularly because of
| carbon cycle feedback loops that we may not be seeing the worst
| of yet.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| That's a relief.
|
| We can all get back to normal life then.
| ido wrote:
| did we ever leave normal life?
| Gravityloss wrote:
| I think some new scenarios between RCP 8.5 and RCP 6 would be
| useful. There's the old IS92B which would be closest. I found an
| old presentation from 1992 [1] where it was 2.7 C by 2100. A
| large effect.
|
| If we don't have more specific information people can get the
| incorrect idea that "crisis is averted".
|
| 1:
| https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/05/ipcc_wg_I_19...
| nologic01 wrote:
| There are multiple effects going on and some are hopeful, but it
| is worrisome that key factors seem to be the cooling impact of
| _negative_ events: mismanaged financial systems, pandemics and
| geopolitical strife.
|
| The bigger and counterintuitive picture is that vast numbers of
| people do not enjoy the quality of life that is nominally
| achievable with todays technologies and a more peaceful and
| better managed world would actually enormously increase emissions
| unless we find sustainable substitutes for whatever really
| contributes to quality of life.
|
| We need to snap out of such absurd incentives and false dilemmas.
| The task is global sustainable prosperity and we are lucky to
| have a worthy purpose.
| andersrs wrote:
| [flagged]
| kibwen wrote:
| Lest the lede be buried:
|
| _> What does this flattening of emissions and divergence from
| the high-end scenario mean for the climate going forward? First,
| its important to emphasize that a flatting of emissions does not
| mean that global warming will stop or the problem will be solved.
| The amount of warming the world experiences is a function of our
| cumulative emissions, and the world will not stop warming until
| we get emissions all the way to net-zero. Even after we reach
| net-zero emissions, the world will not cool back down for many
| millennia to come in the absence of removing more CO2 from the
| atmosphere than we emit._
|
| _> This is the brutal math of climate change, and the reason why
| its so important to start reducing our emissions quickly. We are
| already well off track for what would be needed to limit warming
| to 1.5C without large overshoot (and the need for lots of
| negative emissions to bring temperatures back down). If we do not
| start reducing global emissions over the coming decade, plausible
| scenarios to limit warming to below 2C will move out of reach as
| well._
|
| In other words, this is heartening progress, but not an excuse
| for apathy.
| revelio wrote:
| _> the world will not stop warming until we get emissions all
| the way to net-zero_
|
| It already did, hence the frequency of awkward "pauses" in
| warming, punctuated by natural events like El Nino.
| bricemo wrote:
| We need to be both celebrating wins and working harder to
| improve further. There's lots to do but this is encouraging to
| me that it's possible to reach better outcomes.
|
| Let's keep bending the curve!
| orwin wrote:
| This is good news, somehow.
|
| Here is how the earth 'greenhouse effect' really works:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oqu5DjzOBF8&pp=ygUlZ3JlZW5ob3V...
|
| This is why Co2 do not have any effect until it reaches the high
| troposphere. That takes 20 years. The average climate we have
| right now is caused by emissions from 2003.
|
| I'll repeat that in the comments of every climate article I read
| by the way, sorry for the repetition. M
| seren wrote:
| RCP 4.5 is still quite horrible in terms of consequences anyway
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > I'll repeat that in the comments of every climate article I
| read by the way
|
| Please don't do that. Thank you.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| If it's true then why not?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Because I will have already read it and we don't want to
| have the same discussions in every thread. To quote dang,
| it makes comments uninteresting and raises the signal to
| noise ratio.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Can you link something that is not a youtube video but a text?
| orwin wrote:
| I have slides? It's quite interesting because the first
| hypothesis "isothermal atmosphere at the same temperature as
| the ground" show exactly hw climate change doesn't work.
|
| From pages 32 onwards:
| https://www.lmd.ens.fr/legras/Cours/L3-meteo/radiatifNN.pdf
| kitd wrote:
| Which suggests to me that CO2 extraction from the air should be
| the next big target for innovation?
| lozenge wrote:
| Who's going to pay for it? At 400ppm, you need a million
| cubic feet of air to go through your system to get 400 cubic
| feet of CO2 out. That has an inherent cost.
|
| Whether the CO2 is pulled from the air or from more
| concentrated industrial sources, the carbon sequestration
| industry would need to grow to the size of the fossil fuel
| industry (in terms of mass moved). But instead of extracting
| resources and selling them for financial gain, it will be a
| pure financial loss for an ecological gain. Under capitalism
| it's as impossible as water flowing uphill.
| badpun wrote:
| We actually already have water flowing uphill, in the
| pumped-storage hydroelectricity facilities. So who knows.
| lozenge wrote:
| Next you'll be telling me that clouds are made of
| seawater!
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| It's not impossible if you can earn credits that can be
| sold. This is why the majority of the world needs to agree
| on a carbon tax system, yesterday.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| > not impossible
|
| > the majority of the world needs to agree
|
| Mmmhhh, not sure if betting on a world economic agreement
| to protect our climate and biodiversity is a good idea.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| Are you expecting the world to overthrow capitalism
| instead?
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| No need to overthrow it if capitalism collapses on
| itself. Green growth is a mirage if not a lie (see
| https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-what-is-esg-
| investin... for a primer)
| aziaziazi wrote:
| I dream about that but don't expect it in any foreseeable
| future. Neither do I believe in a worldwide coordinated
| economic action when the goal is not money itself but
| common good.
| master-lincoln wrote:
| That would be more reasonable. Carbon offsets turned out
| to be not reliable because companies are gaming the
| system and an international way of making sure this does
| not happen seems unrealistic.
|
| But I personally expect things to just get worse and
| worse in the next few decades. Capitalism will not slow
| down and climate change effects will increase, driving
| migration into rich countries, causing societal uproar
| and reduced quality of life for everybody.
| lozenge wrote:
| What happens when people feel it's too expensive or
| disruptive and vote in somebody who undoes it?
| owisd wrote:
| Other countries are implementing carbon taxes on their
| imports from countries that don't tax carbon so companies
| will end up paying it indirectly on import taxes if their
| own government doesn't levy it.
| lozenge wrote:
| Oh the anti tax country won't pull out of the treaty,
| they'll just undermine it with dubious accounting,
| waivers, etc.
| bootsmann wrote:
| > it will be a pure financial loss for an ecological gain
|
| Not true, under the current EU emissions trading scheme you
| can actually earn money by selling the certificates for the
| CO2 you remove. If you check the price of it you can see
| that well defined markets can actually get the power of
| capitalism to work in your favour, with the price jumping
| from $30 to $90 within last year.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| I'd like to see some proof that these trading scheme
| work. I know how it is gamed, and how much speculators
| like them though.
| roelschroeven wrote:
| CO2-extraction takes energy though, quite a lot of it. Using
| energy from fossil fuel for CO2-extraction is worse than
| doing nothing, since you're never going to extract as much
| CO2 as is emitted by the power plant. That leaves using clean
| energy, but clean energy is a limited resource. Using clean
| energy to replace current uses of CO2-emitting energy is
| likely going to be more effective than using it to extract
| the emitted CO2 back out of the atmosphere.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| I read somewhere that sulfur emissions from global shipping
| have been making the part of the world where such shipping is
| most active (i.e. around Europe, North America and China)
| cooler than it otherwise would be. But now we're using low-
| sulfur fuels, so things might rapidly get worse in these
| latitudes.
| freedude wrote:
| Those of you that claim plant growth is nitrogen limited have not
| spent enough years working in an orchard. An observant orchardist
| will tell you the trees on the outside of the orchard always grow
| the most given like conditions (soil, water, etc...). How would a
| lowly orchardist know this when an environmentalist doesn't? The
| orchardist prunes the trees and knows there is significantly more
| pruning required on the outside edge of an orchard. Could that
| related to substances other than CO2? Yes. But the fact remains
| there is a higher concentration of CO2 on the outside edge of an
| orchard than the inside.
| vages wrote:
| The last paragraph is probably one of the best ways you can
| phrase a "Keep up the good work" message about emissions.
|
| > Ultimately, the progress we have made should encourage us that
| progress is possible, but the large and growing gap between where
| we are headed today and what is needed to limit warming to well-
| below 2C means that we need to double down and light a (carbon-
| free) fire under policymakers to ratchet up emissions reductions
| over the next decade. Flattening the curve of global emissions is
| only the first step in a long road to get it all the way down to
| zero.
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