[HN Gopher] How to keep Earth from being cooked by the ever-hott...
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How to keep Earth from being cooked by the ever-hotter Sun
Author : vinnyglennon
Score : 15 points
Date : 2024-05-12 14:43 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| ciconia wrote:
| No, the real question is how to keep the earth from being cooked
| by _greenhouse gases_ , not in 500 million years, but actually in
| a few decades. This article borders on climate change denial.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Multiple problems can exist at the same time.
| fooker wrote:
| Is it a few decades from 1980 or a few decades from 2024?
|
| Alarmist statements hurt more than they help fight human caused
| climate change.
| silverquiet wrote:
| Given that CO2 emissions have only ever increased, it seems
| like everything hurts more than helps the fight against
| climate change. For what it's worth, I'm reasonably convinced
| that the answer is 1980 and that, like a lethal dose of
| radiation, the damage is done and now we merely wait for the
| effects to take hold fully.
| realusername wrote:
| I'm starting to get that there's no good way to talk about
| climate change, especially to people which have a vested
| interest not to hear about it.
| europeanNyan wrote:
| Maybe people are just tired from the same old alarmism
| which is then used to introduce more and more limitations
| and never touches the biggest offenders. Sure, introduce
| the next tax, lovely. Hope Nestle doesn't get touched.
| realusername wrote:
| The measures against climate change have been so weak
| until now that I don't think we can even talk about
| limitations yet. At least there's some equality here I
| guess, nobody doesn't do anything.
| fooker wrote:
| The measures against climate change has been weak
| precisely because of alarmism.
|
| If everything is going to shit anyways, why throw
| resources into a black hole fixing it today? Check how
| many headlines have been saying inevitable, point of no
| return, etc etc for several decades.
|
| Another aspect of this is overfitting on metrics like CO2
| emissions, that's how you get hot garbage like carbon
| offsets that allow the worst offenders to keep operating
| like they have always been.
| realusername wrote:
| You live in a parallel world, the vast majority of the
| mainstream news out there are outright climate change
| deniers funded by billionaires and the few ones who don't
| cannot even relay the whole truth for being accused of
| "alarmism".
|
| The reason nobody does anything about climate change is
| because it threatens their wealth, not because it's a
| catastrophe.
| fooker wrote:
| In my 'parallel world', it does seem like the mainstream
| media publishes articles every week or so (for the last
| decade or so) about how we are at the point of no return
| for climate change. And all of it is preserved in this
| wonderful searchable web of articles that ensures one
| does not have to speculate about what was published.
|
| Maybe search on the web, who knows, it could turn out
| that you too live in the same world!
| deepsun wrote:
| What if in 50 years it turns out alarmists were right,
| and there's nothing could be done? Anti-alarmists will
| say "oopsie, we were wrong, you were right, now we see".
| But it won't help.
|
| Imagine there's a huge asteroid comes at Earth, but it
| will strike only in 100 years. Alarmists start screaming
| that we need to act NOW, but anti-alarmists would be like
| "oh come on, you're screaming it for the last 44 years,
| please stop".
|
| People are pretty bad at solving long problems.
| fooker wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager
|
| You can extend this 'what if I am right' argument to
| literally anything, making it vacuous.
| BearOso wrote:
| Pascal's wager doesn't require much effort on behalf of
| the user, though. The idea is the benefits far outweigh
| the downsides. So should we just try to have a cleaner
| earth with the benefit of subverting this dangerous thing
| if it does exist?
|
| The clincher here is that most of the greenhouse gasses
| come from giant corporations. As non-billionaire
| individuals, we don't have to personally give anything
| up. All we have to do is get those corporations to stop
| polluting simply because it's more profitable in the
| short term.
| holoduke wrote:
| Apologies for being rude, but these kind of answers are exactly
| the type of answers that sre not helping solving things at all
| and are counterreactive. This article is not denying anything.
| Its telling something entirely different. Also it tries to give
| a slightly different look on things than usual.
| Shorel wrote:
| This sentence from the article seems to be completely made up and
| not based in any actual science:
|
| "Without water to lubricate tectonic activity, our plates will
| grind to a halt."
|
| In fact, water has nothing to do with tectonic activity, and the
| "lubricant" seems to be a special kind of molten magma:
|
| https://today.ucsd.edu/story/scripps_scientists_discover_lub...
| addaon wrote:
| This is not my area, but how does your statement reconcile with
| [1] and [2]?
|
| [1] "The fate of water within Earth and super-Earths and
| implications for plate tectonics,"
| doi://10.1098/rsta.2015.0394, from which: "Water is thought to
| be critical for the development of plate tectonics, because it
| lowers viscosities in the asthenosphere, enabling subduction."
|
| [2] "The role of liquid water in maintaining plate tectonics
| and the regulation of surface temperature,"
| 2001AGUFM.U21A..09S, from which: "The difference between the
| strength of a wet lithosphere and that of a dry lithosphere
| seems to be big enough to control the very existence of plate
| tectonics."
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