I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

Ok, but are they wrong?

It’s funny how tech bros pretend to be ultra-rational about anything they like to think about and “oh just look on the bright side” on the things that makes them a little sad.

"nothing matters the world is doomed soon"

What you're describing is people experiencing grief. I'm what you would call an "extreme doomer", and did feel this way about a decade ago when I first realized the dire situation we are in.

But your first reaction is not the end. Waking up and accepting our state, and the despair that came with it, was the first stage in a long process of learning to live, and be comfortable in the world the way it is.

What you are suggesting is that we just ignore grief and pretend nothing is happening. I suppose this is just the denial stage of grieving, but it's worth recognizing that the people you know feeling this way are working through a process.

Pretending that someone isn't dead isn't a long term solution to accepting loss, even if it means in the short term you are in a dark place emotionally. It's unfortunately it upsets you to see people experiencing this, but those people, given enough time, might be in a better place to help you when you finally have to let go of denial.

Recently I survived covid exponential deaths apocalypse and Al Gore's sea levels rising in 2016.

There was massive concerted effort to stop acid rain and ozone depletion. Maybe we should try that for the climate crisis if we want similar success at preventing catastrophe.

„Overpopulation“ is a fascist propaganda term.

A bear is chasing you. “Glad I survived crossing a dangerous road, smoking a cigarette and unprotected sex”

Also you’re in what, likely the top 10-20% of the wealthiest people on Earth?

Your list is a 1.75. What's occurring and coming fast is a 9.9. Thanks for sharing the kind of naivete that helped get us here.

Yeah, but are you building a bunker in Hawaii? Because Mark Zuckerberg is building a bunker in Hawaii.

This is naive. It's not the absolute temperature that's the problem, it's the rate of change. Temperature is going to change faster than most species can adapt, and that's why the food chain could collapse in the worst case.

The paleontologist Peter Ward has made a fairly compelling argument (in both academic research and the popular science book Under a Green Sky), that virtually all major extinction events are related to sudden rises in atmospheric CO2. A lot more happens when CO2 rises quickly other than it getting warmer. A major issue is it's impact on the oceans, which can become anoxic [0], causing them to emit hydrogen sulfide instead of oxygen. Such an event would be devastating to our current ecosystem.

There won't be an extinction event.

This also ignores the fact that we are currently in the 6th largest extinction event in the history of life on this planet [1]. Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction is a great book on this (and the history of our understanding of species extinction as well).

So aside for being naive about the science, your comment reads a bit like claiming you don't think it will rain today while in the midst of being soaked in a massive rain storm.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

Two things can be true at the same time:

1. significantly increased amount of 'life' on earth (as in: total kg of biomass, number of living specimens, total area with some amount of green stuff on it) due to warmer climate.

2. significantly reduced number of extant species on earth due to (geologically) fast changes in climate.

Edit: formating.

We are already in the midst of a massive extinction event. It’s called the holocene extinction, you can research it. There is an ongoing collapse of biodiversity at a rapid rate.

There’s more than just humans and their tech here to worry about though. I get so depressed when I hear people describe the gravity of climate change only in terms of the chance of survival of us humans.

That's the only silver lining. Finally people stop staring at their phones, and restaurants get rid of this QR-code nonsense.

I get what you're saying. Although I find that referring to humanity as a collective, or using "we" as in "we are in this together" in discussions like these runs the risk of homogenising human societies into one, even though a large part of humanity's historical impacts on the environment has been heterogeneous (i.e., industrial revolution beginning in Western societies). You can find the same criticism surrounding the term "Anthropocene" in academic and general settings.

Countries such as Pakistan and Pacific island countries that have contributed the least to climate change are among the most impacted, which is why two questions (among many others) have loomed climate politics over the past 30 years: "Where does the liability fall?" (Ex: loss and damage fund) and "How can I, as a country, be in a better position within a global crisis?" (Ex: disagreement over the global warming potential of non-CO2 emissions due to different chosen time horizons between countries; GWP100 vs. GWP*; this greatly affects carbon accounting in agricultural countries that rely on cattle for instance)

Don't misunderstand me here. I'd rather be wrong regarding my "doomism," and I no longer worry about climate change; it doesn't make sense to worry about something that can't be changed. However, I observe that people aren't scared enough to take action. They continue to dance around the issue in political euphoria. The changes to our lifestyle are happening too slowly to be effective. The gas and oil industry is doing a lot of carbon emission washing, like CSS. Many optimists argue, "We can't predict it, therefore we shouldn't be worried."

It’s interesting how the right has their “the economy is going to explode because we left the gold standard” preppers and the left has their “we’re all going to die because of global warming” preppers.

Now refute ocean acidification and burning forests.

Religious predictions never come with data to support them. That’s an important difference.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a-religi...

But that said, religious apocalypse scenarios usually aren't quite as specific as "methane hydrate runaway feedbacks".

Depends a lot on your relationship with religion. For some religious people, yes.

In fact religious belief in apocalypse might contribute to the apathy about climate policy from the voters, people can either conflate the two or think the religious apocalypse is nearer so no need to address the climate catastrophe: https://www.newsweek.com/shocking-number-americans-believe-l...

Exactly people are even using phrases like “when shit hits the fan”.

I've thought about this as well. It's feasible to move soil only to certain regions. Greenland and Antarctica aren't among them (remember the ice shields; they will continue to scrape all the soil as they melt). Some islands in Antarctic Ocean could potentially sustain a population of 20-40k. However, you need to start moving the soil now, but you will also need to develop methods of preserving this soil until it is needed, because right now it will be useless and it will be eroded by wind and hydro factors. What might happen is a gradual migration towards the poles on the Americas and Eurasia, moving the soil as migration progresses. This will be bloody and ruthless. But none of these solutions take into account the "exponent", and there is no way to forecast if a Venus atmosphere scenario will occur or not due to the water vapor.

Edit: good point in the next comment, expect sea levels rising for at least 10m.

Or just keep your intestine working actively

If the sea is fertile the soil can be hacked to be fertile. Any seabird could tell us how

But this is not the problem. The sea level will raise

What was that story about a frog which was slowly boiled in a pot and didn't know it about it until it was too late?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7069279/

Not a biologist, but won't the tropical amphibians migrate away from the equator? It seems to me that polar bears and penguins have bigger problems

Oh... How many mass extinction events have humanity survived as a species so far? I would also like to see this data... pretty please?

It's all about timing. You need the ice shields to be gone before you deploy the new soil; otherwise, it will be scraped or eroded. You also need to consider rising sea levels. You may need to think about bringing the soil first and storing it there until it's usable. Otherwise, you could lose it.

The issue is the global population. Obviously, that's the metric that matters for global issues like the climate and environment.

The global population is still increasing. Furthermore, as poor countries develop this is compounded by increased consumption (both resources and energy) per capita. In that respect, "richest 1% account for more emissions than poorest 66%" should be interpreted as very worrying when the poorest are getting richer.

Ultimately we don't anyone to be poor. At current population levels this would probably mean a total collapse of the environment.

Overall, the global population is indeed the root cause of our problems.

are you not saying that it may be better that 10 poor people are not born, than for rich people to do minor changes to their lifestyle?

I definitely would say that and would argue it needs to be way more than 10.

If you want to solve manmade climate change you need to solve the demand for goods that cause it. You lower demand by increasing the the supply (can't do that because that increases the emissions you try bringing down) or you increase its price making only the very rich able to afford it and delaying the problem for a decade till population catches up. We already see it with migrant crisis all over the west - both Europe and US.

You do this decade after decade, again and again each time creating more and more privileged cast that can afford it (current policy) and in essence pushing the rest of the civilisation further and further into poverty as they will never catch up and if they do - new legislation will bring them down again to mask the issue once more.

An example of that would be farmers in Europe protesting removal of diesel subsidies or just in general people being able to afford smaller and smaller cars due to taxation in Europe every year.

The problem with these "minor changes to their lifestyle" is that they need to accommodate exponentially growing population that already is a magnitude or more higher than persons who need to adjust.

We are talking about 90%+ reduction in what you call "minor changes" to achieve emission equilibrium to begin with and add that with exponentially growing population and its simply not feasible not due to lack of compassion from top percentile but because changes like these would completely anihilate the modern human civilisation and bringing it back hundreds of years.

As an example theres a very informative video on what happens to country and infrastructure when 4 million people join the power grid in a decade [1] Imagine that scaled to 4 billion and the extreme worldwide devastation.

Population control is the only way to solve climate change and it needs to be reduced everywhere but especially in the undeveloped nations as they have the most potential of bringing everything down.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iiny1GrfhYM

Yea, yea, people making their life better is now the reason. We must all live in poverty, because that is the natural state, where we obey the needs of nature. Nature is healing!! And for that we need to abandon demoncracy.

And the leader should be who? Of course you, because only you know the solution! Cheeky ;)

"Standards of living" are not some kind of homogeneous global state.

The true hard pill to swallow is that YOUR (and a few others') standard of living is unsustainable.

Even if it all grinds to a halt tomorrow, at this point it won’t make a difference anymore. It’s the end of an era, possibly of civilization too, at least this particular flavor of it.

Whether standards of living are sustainable depend on how many people live that way.

Obviously they are not unsustainable in absolute terms but only when too many people live that way compared to the planetary capacity.

So population is inescapably key because we want everyone to have high standards of living.

From my observations the current rightwing meme is that women in rich countries haven't had sufficient numbers of children and measures to drive increased population should be put in place.

This is congruent with removing women's bodily autonomy, banning abortion and banning or restricting birth control of all types.

I am confused as to how discouraging procreation is racist?

Sustainable means different things to different people.

In a simulator, could you have 12 billion people with their needs met, living fulfilled lives and continuing into the far future? Yes.

Is there a political and practical way to reach that state? No. "One study estimates it would take just over 5 Earths to support the human population if everyone’s consumption patterns were similar to the average American." Any US government that tried to bring America's environmental footprint down to a sustainable or fair level would be voted out. It doesn't matter whether it would be gas taxes, meat taxes, per mile taxes, flight taxes, carbon tax and dividend, building renewable energy in less developed countries, or any other scheme. It doesn't matter if it was targeted at the ultra rich or the middle class. The sheer scale of it would cause Americans to vote out the government. And the same is true for any democracy and plenty of the non-democracies too.

which is plainly sustainable

Plainly sustainable without fossil fuels? From what I can gather, the majority of farming, construction and transportation (including of farmed goods) relies heavily on fossil fuels.

It's not sustainable because the more people they are, the worse their living conditions will be. Look at how densely populated Asia is. Does everyone want to live like this? Overcrowding is also not good for our mental health.

Is that actually true? Nature has a very low capacity per area for "wild humans". I don't think the planet would support anywhere near 8 billion "wild" (hunter-gatherer) humans.

There's no such thing as "overpopulation" on its own. There's only population relative to resource abuse.

This is an unfortunate delusion that is widespread, and exploited by governments and industries that seek to ravage what is left of our environment for profit.

If you believe and understand that the earth is a finite place, with finite resources (as all intelligent, rational people do), then you believe and understand that this finite place, with finite resources, can only support a finite population. Of course we can debate about what exactly the "sustainable" population is and we can agree that the "sustainable" population depends on how resources are managed, used and maintained, but there can be no disagreement that this number exists, and that if there are too many people our finite resources cannot sustainably support them no manner how efficiently they are distributed.

Unfortunately far too many people don't believe this, and don't understand that the earth is a finite place with finite resources. They insist that the earth can support an infinite number of people if only we manage our finite resources properly and impose a strict enough dietary and behavioral regiment on the teeming billions stuffed onto the planet.

I'm super super low carbon footprint, personally. All ARM-based computers here, just Raspberry PIs and tablets, that can run from a portable solar panel if I want. Very few possessions too. I love coding and freedom so much more that having stuff. And even more so when doing so in the forest, amongst nature.

As a westerner, the most impactful thing you can do is to not create more westerners.

Asian style living in apartments with public transport.

^ clearly never visited Asia. LOL

Well, the bulk of them want more meat, washing machines and air conditioning.

The main increase of energy usage has been due to this, not people in urban areas eskewing apartments and public transport to drive cars and live in suburban houses.

https://youtu.be/6sqnptxlCcw?si=FfqAqooG9qg4kejC

Another fun fact: 80% of the world's population has never flown, and only 2-4% fly abroad in a year.

nobody specifically wants shitty us style suburban planning with shitty us style houses. Plus it would hard to replicate that because its an artifact of historical cultural and political developments. In short it would be harder to replicate that instead of doing better.

But yes they want a better life for themselves.

Th USA and other industrialised countries operated with huge emissions because oil and gas were cheap and because no one factored in the externalities. Which includes energy security.

Now that we are seeing a reversal to the status quo, you see the move to more efficient systems moving into full swing. The uptake of renewables is exponential now.

I just renovated and fully insulated my house with cellulose fiber that was actually really cheap, double glazed inner windows and installed floor heating with a hydraulic heat pump. My energy bill is almost nothing of what it used to be and I’ve not installed my solar yet, but I’ll be starting in March.

I did this because the price of gas, kerosene (water boiler) and oil have increased dramatically and the technology to do so exists and is cheap enough to make this investment a no brainer from an economic standpoint. It’s hard to imagine how cheap solar panels are now.

I’m not the only person doing this.

The USA and all other developing countries will adopt all these efficient gains at the same rate. No one is going to pay more for less.

Everybody is gaining access to lower carbon tech, renewables, heat pumps, electric cars etc at the same rate. It doesn’t matter about rich people.

Exactly. I'm not sure if they just stepped out from under a rock... I've been hearing the overpopulation rhetoric for decades already.

In fact, nowadays I'm beginning to hear the opposite: "please have more kids". I'm in Europe atm (I'm south-american) and I'm shocked to see that natives, by and large, just do NOT have kids, or at most 1. All cultural incentives that promoted having kids seem to have been vilified. I find it kind of sad honestly...

And in the really long term that's completely unsustainable. So it's like a pyramid scheme scam, it requires a constant influx of new entrants. Whilst destroying the planet.

I guess people even have their pension funds tied up into the system, so nearly everyone is forced to participate in it, against their wishes even.

Update: Something to back that up: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/04/05/the-worl...

While you may be technically true, it is obviously clear that some places are far safer than others, and moving to another place will have a very high impact on how global warming affects you, as some regions will be affected much more harshly than others. At the extreme, some places may be underwater or otherwise uninhabitable, but if you can afford to, moving away from them in a timely manner, you can escape being forced to do so at a time when doing so may be much harder.

The earth has had some of the fastest warming ever in the last 15 thousand. During this time crop yields have increased dramatically. The trend is unmistakable, the warmer the planet, the more food we produce.

I want to move back to a farm/out of the city.

For sure for a lot of reasons like having space for a garden etc. but also i think its a lot more easier to survive there longer.

Alone the space in my flat limits me of having provisions etc.

There is no safe place in general, with or without climate change.

But you can for sure mitigate most of the climate change risks by moving to anothe place.

Why do you say that? Most of the Midwest USA seems like it will do fine for the inevitable future.

More co2 means corn and soy will be growing better and better, warming temps increase our growing season. We have more than enough water. What am I missing?

If shit hits the fan everywhere else but North Europe remains safe - will it be business as usual there?

No, it will still suck, but it'll be the kind of suck you can survive without fleeing.

Unless the thermohaline circulation changes significantly, in which case the northern Mediterranean coast starts to look like Toronto, Paris starts to look like Vancouver, and Scandinavia starts to look like Anchorage.

Won't hundreds of millions of people (or more) from India, China and Africa flee to to wherever is safe?

Yes, although in the case of China they'll probably flee to elsewhere in China, because it's huge.

The plan appears to be massive gun turrets at every southern border at this rate.

We will close the border, and kill them. :)

Slowly. I don’t think it happens all at once but over generations.

I lived in Oulu for a time, and yes it does indeed live up to its winter cycling reputation. Actually most of my wife's family lives around that region, so we'll probably return up there in a few years.

Finland is terrific! Learning the language is tough, and recommended, but ultimately optional for white collar migrants. The lower salaries here are unfortunate - I make a third of what I could make as a software lead in the US (~50k vs ~150k). Doubly so as there really is a lot of top notch engineering talent here, probably because it's so hard to hire people that FTEs end up having to learn a lot about everything lol. I haven't yet carved a path to make US level money while living in Finland - but you'd better believe it's on my list of things to beeline towards once I hit my thirties.

Whatever bothered you about US politics is also happening in Europe. There's no Trump, he's one of a kind, but there's polarization, distrust in institutions and populism just fine. It's the same disease really.

Also - I can't imagine North Europe will remain prosperous if America somehow fails, the West is very much dependent on the U.S (now also for energy). But I do hope you enjoy your time, I lived in Leiden for almost 4 years and it was like living in a postcard. Shit weather though.

Please don't talk like that about Sweden. They are bad, but don't quite deserve this.

Let’s also not forget another human activity, also a kind of energy consumption, but in a more direct way, aka eating. Livestock produces around 15% of global greenhouse emissions according to my quick Google search. And I am sure some Finns like to eat meat.

That's because it's more just a nice secondary factor. ;)

Mostly I moved because it amused me. I have a long history of going to places I can't actually locate on a map, eg I thought Northwestern University would be in Portland, not Chicago - imagine my shock when I stepped off the plane. Similarly with Finland. I knew so little about the place that when the opportunity to move arose I couldn't not take it, it would be like turning down getting teleported into the inside of a black hole.

Just here[0] they say that that’s a myth. I don‘t know what to believe anymore.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39156692

Yeah, the AMOC collapse predictions are interesting.

I'd love to see a much colder Finland, personally, since I want to know what a developed country that has 6 months of winter feels and looks like from the inside. But I do agree that for most people here it would be unfortunate.

Minulla lemppari urheilulaji :D se kehittyy hitaasti mutta varmasti.

I actually maintain several online Finnish learning resources now, including a flashcard deck of the most common 10,000 words from the YLE study way back [1], a command line lemmatizer [2], and a website whose permissions I need to refresh ASAP which archives Selkouutiset with YYYY/MM/DD URLs [3].

Indeed building these tools were what got me back into software development as a profession, after a long absence.

[1]: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1149950470

[2]: https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/finstem

[3]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/selkouutiset-archive/

Aren't all immigrants like this?

Glad to be here! I'll likely be visiting Sweden for work next month, you guys are doing great over there.

Great! Much nicer than Boston.

In a way, yes they did.

If your energy infrastructure has a significant amount of nuclear, and your solar power is over-producing during the day, it is cheaper to have negative energy prices than to shut down the nuclear plant.

I think you are implying that this self sufficiency is illusory

To which I would respond that France could hold two years with its uranium reserves if the world stopped selling it Uranium.

Gasoline reserves in comparison would last three months.

The world will go down when the sun expands to gobble up the earth, with much more global warming due to that. This should take a few million years but the Earth has an expiration date already after we die. I think it's hard to have people care about that the same way it's hard to have people care about issues that will come up 25 years after they die. When you're dead 25 feels the same as a few million years from what I was told.

The thing that always stood between the world and climate action was the fact that fossil fuels were the best energy source.

this has not been true since 1951

1) there are still trillions of "subsidies" (that includes some negative externalities)to fossil fuel each year according to IMF (IMF, not Greenpeace!).

2) Agents in the current system have incentives to prioritize short term benefits over longer term benefits. And a lot of climate related things are short term cost/investment for "profitable" long term benefits ; the current system sucks big time in this configuration.

3) The people having the least negative impact from climate change are the countries emitting the most greenhouse gas. The countries the more negatively impacted by climate change are countries contributing the least to climate change. There is a big misalignment of interest there making a purely "free market" "economical" solution difficult.

4) There are a lot of case in the real world were there is a strong economical incentive to switch to something different and were the different agents just don't... Because people don't want to change, because there can be some particular interest in the system, because of political motive... Human is not a rational animal, and his rationality is not only dictated by money

5) We need to do more than just switching from fossil to "green electricity"

Im not dang but I would like to share a hypothesis why this maybe isn’t so terrible.

The thing that always stood between the world and climate action was the fact that fossil fuels were the best energy source.

Since a few years, the tables have turned and solar seems to be marching towards absolute dominance.

So there isn’t much to do in terms of political climate action, since the incentives are now mostly economical.

If we could put climate change on hold for 50 years we would probably be in pretty good shape, because in 50 years we will probably have enough renewable energy that we can just decide to stop burning (most) oil.

But in the real world, in 2024 we haven't actually reduced emissions at all yet, and the possibility of cutting down emissions in 50 years isn't enough.

It's true that in that sense we aren't that far from a scenario that "isn't so terrible" but that seems more like an ironic fact than something that should be comforting.

Because of the way climate change works, the future possibility of reducing emissions simply isn't enough if we aren't actually currently reducing emissions when we would really need to be at approximately zero right now to fix the problem.

The whole Western world? It seems mostly men, not women: https://www.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/1ac0...

it's because the left has been attempting to make progress too fast, without regard to the people who lean towards the right as tho their point of view is universally regarded as being wrong. Reactionary politics is real, and the left ought to be more aware.

Leaning towards left (aka progressive) is good, but if you're not paying a cost for it, someobody else is - and it's likely someone leaning right that's being forced to do so. They're not gonna like it regardless if whether it's generally a good thing.

This is an unsupported shower thought but I suspect societies become more right when times are not as good.

You support immigration if you have a stable job and own a house but you don’t if you are getting laid off and aren’t sure what you next job will be.

And it seems most of Earth has lately been in a rougher place.

Politics works in cycles and maybe we are seeing the backlash of a lot of people starting believing in climate issues. Now that actions start being taken, people not caring about climate start pushing back because they need to change their lifestyle, and some parties (right wing/populists) promise them nothing has to change.

I think though that is getting harder and harder to ignore actual climate issues (storms, floods, heat), wonder what will be these parties next claim to convince voters "is the left wing/immigrants that generated the floods?"...

Not support, but prevent. All the conservatives have is hate and anger because they don't want to talk about their fears because they are men. They believe all shit no matter what, because in the end they are a fearful child on the inside.

Because he moderates this place and therefore is orders of magnitudes more knowledgeable about trends on HN. Next in line are people scraping and researching HN.

How did the lyrics to that song go? And when you ask them, "How much should we give?" Hoo, they only answer, "More, more more more!"

I gave up any hope of having meaningful relationships with other people in the name of building a good career in my life because that's what my parents wanted from me. I got into pistol shooting because it was primarily a solo activity.

Then the government passed laws decreeing that handguns have no place in civilized society. So I wanted to get into motorcycles. But that's just wrong because CO2 emissions. Now I'm being told that having space for myself, for a work from home office is wrong too because we need to increase density for the sake of efficiency.

Meanwhile price my groceries has went from $60 what I paid for in 2019 to $110 for that same bag of food. A small bag of flour went from $2.50 to $5 this year. Rice has gone from $14 to $22 for a large bag. And rent has became mad in many ways; last year average rent in this city was $1450 a month. This year, it's $1700 a month.

Then you've got one side that's yelling that we need to transition cars to electric but the nearest one to what you have is $20,000 more. And you're being told that we need to be looking at a way to get rid of the terrible CO2 emitting gas furnace for something more efficient like a heat pump. But the heat pump that can handle our climate is $15,000 to install.

Then they ban single use plastics like bags because of the issue of microplastics. And it annoys you but at this point it doesn't overly matter because you can't afford to eat out as much anymore anyways. But you're lucky enough to be able to afford rent and food, because you know people that are asking food banks for anything and being told the wait times are now at least 1 to 2 weeks because of the number of people in front of them waiting for food too.

All that verbal diarrhea to say... I'm tired. I'm tired of being told that it's my fault the world is screwed up. I'm tired of seeing seeing the roads I took to whatever little stability I have now being closed behind me. Tired of it seeming like that at some point in my future, the only thing I'll have left to enjoy will be the jab of a syringe full of heroin.

Overly dramatic yeah. It doesn't make any sense but it's how I feel. Dunno if it's anyone else that feels like this way, be a little surprised if it's really just me.

May be, in fact terrible, ot may be, in fact, absolutely normal.

Those are emotional definitions having absolutely nothing in common with the situation

Hmm. I think a lot of people who were silent about their positions on this topic are much more inclined to say them out loud now, even on websites like HN. Not that they are right though.

As for the reasons why I have (like anyone else) two or three ideas.

And whatever it is, it ain't making me feel optimist about what's to come.

It feels far more rapid, e.g. try to find all highly upvoted posts about EVs over the last couple of months. It feels (anecdotally) that they have been increasingly more negative recently.

You being downvoted only furthur proves your point.

Left wing politics wants freedom and equality for all while right wing only want it for some. Makes no sense to discuss, lefties are correct and right wing people are either benefiting directly from the abuse ($$$) or are just stupid and believe all bullshit without using their brain.

Encourage other people (especially if you're in a developing country) not to have too many children. The absolutely unsustainable population levels worldwide are behind the climate and pollution crises. We are an incredibly destructive species to the planet. All countries, developing and developed are part of the problem.

Not only that the overcrowding and fighting over limited resources causes psychosocial stress, which might explain the mental illness epidemic nowadays?

That's not going to be sufficient to prevent climate change (well, nothing we'll realistically do now will be sufficient to do that - it's too late, just as scientists were warning us decades ago), so probably the question is less about reducing climate change but rather how to mitigate the consequences of climate change to you personally and your community - "avoid waterfront property" is one step there, but probably we can do much more.

What's wrong with waterfront properties?

Or Silicon Valley start ups that have already declared intent to do so and begun small scale injections already:

https://makesunsets.com/

The only people that will use violence to reduce emissions will be western trust fund activist kids desperately searching for meaning.

the impending collapse of cattle farming will cause the majority of agricultural land to return to the wild. This is a larger amount of land than all other human activities combined

It's clear at this point that the world's ownership class is NOT going to allow any significant mitigation of petroleum use.

The problem is not use, the problem is extraction. If it comes out of the ground, it gets used, and mostly ends up in the atmosphere. The volume of extracted fossil fuels is carefully managed so that prices remain low enough to prevent green alternatives from winning in the market, and high enough to maximize long term revenue. If extraction would decline, fossil fuel prices would rise, and the market would automatically rebalance into a green transition.

Really the only thing politicians need to do is put in place a global and declining cap on fossil fuel extraction. Wells need to be capped even when they’re not empty. There should be zero new drilling. You can tell the honest intentions of a politician on climate change by their policies on fossil fuel extraction.

And this means ultimately it is a political problem, not an individual problem, and can be fixed through the voting booth. But that requires people to consider this the most important problem, and they don’t. So ultimately, the reason things don’t change is not some cabal, but just plain people not prioritizing it in the voting booth.

I agree with a fair bit of this, except that I'm not convinced the consequences to humans will be as dire as the loss of a good part of the global population. If we're counting animal species though, then maybe.

I agree with this sentiment. Theres no stopping it now, its just going to have to run its course and we'll see if theres much of a world worth living in at the end. I do laugh at billionaire bunkers tho, like how long are they going to survive when money means nothing and the plebs that are still alive are outside blocking the exits and airways with dirt and rocks.

edit: its funny to see the only people making sense getting downvoted because reasons.

the world's ownership class is NOT going to allow any significant mitigation of petroleum use.

"We" - the Western voting public broadly, but also much of East Asia too - are the owning class. If you actually removed everything in our lives that depend on petroleum products, it would be a riot before the end of the month. I don't think people quite realize how much of our lives are propped up by the downstream products of oil. It's not just moving people in cars and most of electricity generation and wrapping our food in plastics; it's most of our food production (from fertilizer to mechanization), most of our biochem stuff (so much starts as natural gas), most of our infrastructure.

Without oil, the West is shivering in the cold, the shelves are empty, there's nothing to do, nowhere to go (or really, way to get there anyway) and practically no healthcare.

You square that circle, you let the rest of us know. But we won't (and should not) accept any future like that.

the world's ownership class is NOT going to allow any significant mitigation of petroleum use

Do you include everyone who owns a car in this "ownership class"? I guess I share your disposition to some degree, resignation mixed with a feeling that things are going to be bad but not as bad as some have claimed, and that eventually the situation will improve, but this practice of blanket blaming "the rich" for the problem is a/the major reason we got here in the first place.

I worked in the energy sector for over a decade. It was a very conservative industry, yet everyone who worked there had their home insulation well above code and installed the most efficient appliances they could find, many had solar panels on their roofs (long before these were as available as they are today) and were first in line for plug-in electric hybrids when they first became available. Our parking lot was kind of a dangerous place to walk because there were so many electric cars you couldn't hear them coming, our director had a hydrogen powered car.

We'd get protestors all the time showing up in front of our building. Looking down from the office windows I could see them arrive and depart. They always drove there in ICE vehicles. We sold fossil fuel, but kept our operations as efficient as possible, going to great lengths to squeeze out every joule of energy we could manage and were constantly re-evaluating our processes looking for improvements, meeting with vendors to find new technology, and spent probably more time and money than was prudent experimenting with low-carbon alternatives to majors components of the company's infrastructure.

The average person in the US who is "concerned about climate change" does none of these things, is doing absolutely nothing to change the situation, but sits on their phone complaining on Reddit while consuming as much energy as is convenient for them. The amount of energy Americans use for trivial everyday tasks is staggering. The standard suburban model of living that makes up 99% of US cities and towns is a climate disaster. Although all these things are provided by large companies, this is not the result of a conspiracy, this is what people want, what people demand. When energy prices go up a few precent, people scream bloody murder and call their elected officials demanding something be done about it. When fuel efficiency standards are proposed people complain. Given a choice between a larger home and a smaller but more efficient one, people consistently choose large houses with insulation that meets only the minimum standards. At most any choice towards efficiency is motivated entirely by either financial considerations or social signaling. (note the enormous popularity of the Toyota Prius, which is distinctly a hybrid, over better cars which looked nearly identical to their ICE counterparts)

Voters and consumers over and over again have decided to keep the system they have in place decade after decade, while blaming the people who supply them what they demand for the situation.

Some capitalists want you to believe that there is no solution. There will be lots of money to be made from this change by new entrepreneurs. We can also all do our part by reducing our own fossil fuel use, investing wisely, declining working for companies who consume or produce lots of fossil fuels, and make renewable energies get forward. Unfortunately the fossil fuel lobby (which comprises big & rich states) has put lots of energy convincing a lot of citizens otherwise. But this is not lost. Solar is progressing very fast and we have lots of potential in simple solutions like better house insulation and middle size batteries (especially the ones we'll soon be able to get cheap from used TVs).

The "world's ownership class" has on average already set its sights on the wealth to be had in the energy transition. If you believe they are in charge, things will work out fine.

So, I've learned to take this in stride, like with gun ownership: most gun deaths in the US are suicide. As more and more gun owners shoot themselves, this is the only mitigation to this crisis.

I’m sure you’re being facetious, but don’t the suicidal people buy guns? It’s not that gun owners are suicidal

This is why it is important to know your local super-emitter: https://climatetrace.org/explore

Except that CO2 emissions also causes acidification of bodies of water. Which cover two thirds of the planet.

What warming scenario on Earth would lead to the end of complex life forms? You realize that humans colonized most of the planet thousands of years ago with stone-aged technology, survived ice ages, lived in all sorts of climates? That the dinosaurs evolved on a world far warmer than we're likely to see? Complex life forms didn't all go extinct back then.

We can live without oranges or lemons for sure. Is just a worse life. No acting has consequences.

The government of Florida cut down my family's orange tree, will never forgive them.

But use transport daily. Ironically, at least in the typical North American city, you can’t do anything without a machine to take you over long distances.

In the rural area, you maybe travel once a week to stock up but otherwise don’t need transportation at all.

Yeah but per-capita emissions were revealed to me to be a trick that corporations have played on us to make us take responsibility for their sins.

It was easier to ebike in the city, for sure. But a GMC Sierra makes the hills all right too. And it’s much better here for the environment because I’m not endorsing the capitalist view that everything should be grey concrete.

It’s terrible that they would rather create smog in cities than live among nature in a 5 br / 5 ba. But human greed and capitalism are just too powerful.

...pretty sure that was the joke.

Oh I want to write: so we can all cycle downhill towards the centee to our work without any effort!!!

(sshhhh... don't mention the ride back home)

The new video is however a spot on commentary on people who didn't worry about climate change but now do. Very sharp swap, IMO.

Is Dang trolling us?

The new video is pretty funny!

It's because it's just a link to an embedded youtube video. The HN mods unwrapped it (accidentally to the wrong link) and added a "[video]" tag to the title. They'll reword titles that people editorialize or shorten titles for length

Was it an admin or the OP? Can OPs even change post links?

actually KSR writes hard scifi, so he does do his research before writing

The Ministry of the Future. Chapter 1. is super accurate. That will happen in our lifetime. Learn about wetbulb temperatures.

Hammocks - the poor man's AC?

Nice isn't as bad as some inland places as the hot air rises and pulls in cooler air from the sea.

Offsetting income tax would be a massive handout to the rich, who have been and continue to be the greatest contributors to carbon emissions.

Instead, it should be paired with a dividend which makes it revenue neutral for the median household. Lower income families, who are more impacted by but less responsible for climate change, would be paid a benefit.

This is already the case in Canada's carbon tax. The amount of tax you pay is proportional to the amount of fossil fuels you consume. But the amount of refund you receive is equal to the total tax collected divided by the population; you receive the same refund regardless of how much you consume. It is a revenue-neutral scheme.

Gas was just under $4 a liter every time I've been to Europe. That's about $16/gallon. People were driving to work, and sitting in traffic, just like they do in the US.

That’s too pessimistic. Dozens of countries have some kind of carbon tax right now. Important and influential jurisdictions like California, also have them. Even oil-producing regions have them.

They are universally rather timid in their scope, and politically fragile. So maybe they aren’t going to get us there, at least not in their current form.

But it’s going too far to say they just don’t exist or can’t exist.

We have plenty of treaties that inhibit states. Nuclear weapons, slavery, pollutants. Enlightentment and enlightened self-interest isn’t out of the question.

Yeah, poor people should be even poorer. Fuck the poor.

The crux of the problem is this;

The people that believe in climate change don’t understand how to solve the problem. And the people that know how to solve the problem don’t really consider it a problem worth solving at this point.

Well, the only meaning full to do is kill yourself, so you are right : everybody is in control, somehow

What is stoicism

It's not a secret that propagandists hijack survival instincts for psychological manipulation:

  - emotional appeal
  - us/them
  - simplifications of complex issues
  - repetition and consistency
  - perceived threads

That's assuming the situation follows your specified path.

In reality, an economy transitioned to tech beyond fossil fuels probably enjoys much greater production dynamics. For instance, the US could build out nuclear power to satisfy base board power and then grow that base by which ever rate it decided per year. At some point, mass desalination of sea water becomes affordable because electricity drives down the price. There, too, sea water is a huge resource for literally every mineral we could need (lithium, gold, uranium, you name it). Further, any co2 removed from the ocean will then be scrubbed from the atmosphere-provided the removed water eventually finds its way back, and it would. With more water and more electricity, more of the land is usable for things like habitation, commercial/industrial, and agriculture purposes. (The US and globe has a ton of unproductive land which can be productive with some combination of water+fertilizer.) There's a relationship between the growth of power produced by an economy and its yearly growth of gdp.

The above will also take place with solar. Eventually we will have the tech to power things off whatever sun they get through the paint/coating on their surface.

At some point, the other national players will see those benefits going to other nations and change accordingly. Or they will be left in the past.

China India and Russia are an issue but will probably cut back if there start to be noticeable problems. China is already cracking ahead on the solar and nuclear.

The ONLY answer, live your life like there's no tomorrow because chances are is there isn't going to be.

The problem with this attitude is that it prevents you from solving problems that might actually affect the odds of humans making it to tomorrow or any other near-term date. Right now it looks as if we're in the run-up to World War III. [0] Perhaps we should spend a little energy preventing that. Or perhaps aquifer exhaustion, a long-standing issue exacerbated by climate change. [1] Or solving the political polarization that prevents us from addressing other problems. [2] Humans have faced all of these problems in the past and generally solved them.

Climate change is obviously a serious and challenging problem. But it seems doubtful civilization will be directly overturned any time soon by climate change alone. Europeans and others made it through crises like the Black Plague, which killed a third or more of the population without extinguishing the arc of civilization. [3] It's the knock-on effects we need to worry about, as well as the things that prevent us from fixing them.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/27/opinion/china-taiwan-war....

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/climate/global-groundwate...

[2] https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politi...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death

This does not change what I said.

We had past long time ago the question if is happening or not. What I'm discussing is the "how fast" part.

The sub-question is if the war or wars if you prefer (You all know what I'm talking about) are causing the current wave of claims "I'm worried now but I was not worried yesterday"

I assume that the war is making it faster, but the effect of this particular factor could be temporal. Artifacts happen in science all the time. We don't know if war is a modifier (and in that case if would be a temporary or permanent modifier). I personally suspect that it has an impact. I could be wrong.

Or we can be smarter and understand that ecology does not work in absolute terms, most of the time all is relative and buffers are very important

The climate change can be expressed a the result of A+(B+C+D...) factors

Lets assume that A is some allegedly --hypothetical-- effect of the wars exploding bombs and releasing heat in the low atmosphere. If we claim that in World War II the value A was higher and nothing happened (So nothing will happen now), we are forgetting that the "everything else" part was much lower in WWII. Just the number of vehicles circulating was abysmally lower. This invalidates our guarantee, because all in ecology is relative to the current updated situation.

Ecosystems create buffers, the expect results are: not changes/very minor changes seen (buffer worked) or catastrophic change happens (buffer fell). Small amounts of energy released in one ecosystem could trigger noticeable effects in how the energy moves around the planet. As "how the energy moves around the planet" is too long, we created a shorter name for this: "Weather"

TFA explains this. As models got better and CO2 rose more and more it was realized that the old models lacked important aspects of cloud reflectivity.

did you watch the video?

it’s a complex system and you can’t experimentally test the effect of changing specific values, so everything is tremendously confounded.

and it turns out that by building in a strong preference towards the null hypothesis, science has tended to dramatically understate both the amount of emission, the amount they matter, and the feedback loops that can amplify this further.

like yea it has been simulated to death but everyone wanted to whistle past the graveyard and so those simulations had drastically optimistic assumptions built into them such that we are likely to crash through what was only a decade or two ago considered the “worst case scenario” by a decent sized multiple.

And frankly the root cause is really the people who go “I find this very confusing, don’t you have this all figured out by now? wasn’t it supposed to be global cooling in the 70s???”, the process was built around appeasing you so you didn’t dismiss the whole thing as alarmist and it turns out the process was built in a way that produced (unsurprisingly) over-optimistic results. The models missed low largely because royal-you wanted to play skeptic 30 years ago.

(And no, “global cooling” was never a thing and the idea that it was is more fossil-fuel propaganda and marketing. Even noaa is uncharacteristically blunt about this.) https://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf

Government money printing has created a huge number of bullshit jobs.

I dont know if there is a causal relation, but both are rampant.

For me the worst is how hollow the word "science" has become. I refer to the old law-based science as "natural or hard science" nowadays. And all climate models (on a highly complex open system that is the earth) are not hard science. Also virology side-stepped Koch's postulate on isolation and transmittability.

So according to "science" a treatment is "safe and effective" and in a few months turns out to be neither safe nor effective: but barely anyone can reflect on that because all are too invested in their own story. That's not science (nor hard nor soft), that's a cargo cult.

capitalism is not the same as having markets.

https://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/1...

good book on the topic ^^^

Thinking the market will save us is just a convienient pipe dream.

I think you should dig a little deeper into my comment before calling me out on my supposed pipe dreams.

I say taxation (which is NOT a market force, but a govt intervention in a market) can be used to then let the market fix the problem. Especially given that I also say that tax on "wholesome" things such as labour and housing should be abolished. To break it down for you: a massage these days costs, say, 50 USD for 30mins, because labour and the parlours location are expensive. For 50 USD I can order bin bags full of plastic rubbish (toys) from China (plastic, transport, im/ex, are all suuuuuuper cheap). I suggest to use taxation to the other way: make labour/housing cheap and transport/plastic expensive.

ChatGPT burns quite a lot of energy. We need less of LLMs, not more

As you've observed, averages can be misleading because they're not robust to outliers. However, this seems most relevant to something like income, where we're interested in "most people" and don't care so much about the one ultra-rich person in the sample.

This appears to be less true for something like emissions, where the overall total is most relevant -- unless you're arguing that it's masking an "unfair" situation where improvements are coming from one group and should be coming from the other?

You're free to dislike the book, but I can't really follow your criticism. The book is clearly not "based on vibes". It's chock full of data to support the authors claims.

Now you might argue that the data either doesn't support the claims made, or you might doubt its legitimacy, but instead of providing a reason you just told me that it should be obvious why the book is nonsense. That doesn't really give me a lot to engage with and I'm not going to try to make your arguments for you.

For me the Book had its intended effect. It argues that the climate movement, as it gained mainstream popularity, also lost its ability to convey nuance in favor of projecting a strong "we are heading towards certain doom" message. This helped grow the movement, but is also responsible for a lot of young people feeling completely hopeless. That's certainly something I could heavily relate with before reading the book. The book then goes on to highlight areas where the world has made much bigger progress than I would have thought. For me this turned a feeling of intense hopelessness into one of motivation.

So was the Book meant to make me feel good? Sure. In that sense I guess you can call it a feel-good book. Were the claims unsubstantiated and "without any evidence to support" them? Certainly not.

Unfortunately you’ve done very little to refute the claims yourself.

The video link was correct at the start. I believe that OP has decided to change it due to rate of doomism and rising depression levels.

To me he is more like: Climate change exists but we will adapt.

you were born into Original Sin™ for being the wrong sex/gender/race/country

Which world do you live in? It can’t be Earth. Go outside and talk to people and please realize spending all your time online is bad for your health. What you’ve described here doesn’t exist.

In what field? Because what is on the headlines is in the field of PRs, witch are the same kind of those who nourish certain cohort of "believers" like those of the flat earth. If you analyze their readers you'll find they are the very same ascientific kind.

Beside that, beside the classic Francis Galton experiment, beside Gustave Le Bon observation about the crowds, also the experts crowds, beside the history of Eduard Bernays campaigns, like those for the tobacco industry who makes many doctors believe smoking is good for health, try to LOGICALLY reason with your own knowledge. When the "modern climate change" start to happen for you? Perhaps DECADES ago? That how much "anthropic emissions" was made since them? How much can they change in the near future? Beside that ALL TIMES you here "we need to be quick" what does it means in practice? Maybe doing something before having the time to reason about up front?

If for you the "climate believers" narrative is The Truth and that they are "all the experts" while the others are just foolish unacculturated people from some social network well, you are a believer of some kind of religion, not differently than the believers of the flat earth.

Not counting that, your recipe than is what? Remain sit watching the TV about how important is switching to a heat pump, perhaps without doing it in person, just hearing and reverberating to others? For me there is no enlightenment of wokeism but mere logic: I choose to move from a big city to a mountain area, I built a new home so with the current design and tech, not because "it's my contribution to a cause" but because summing MANY aspects I've decide that's the most opportune/wise choice I have. Meanwhile I've also put a modern wood stove (meaning airtight, sucking air from the outside to ventilate the flame chamber) in the new home, because while I have p.v. and a small LFP storage I prefer having a more reliable backup WHEN, not if, I'll need it. I'm an engineer and I call it logic. Nothing more, nothing less while observing in modern gear how much "not at all experts" are those who have designed most of such gears simply because they do not have them in person at home, so they ignore countless real world cases not easy evidently to grasp at a project level. They dumb thing like a p.v. "integrated" EV charger that actually hyper-flawed because those who have designed it have never try to use it to actually really trying charging from p.v.

So realistically is most of the climate talk you hear directly from scientists, or from reporters looking for clicks giving you their interpretation of the data?

Please consider whether this type of post raises or detracts from the quality of the culture here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Average American, perhaps, with our "rugged individualism" and apparent lack of empathy.

There are catastrophic predictions actually happening, sure some of them were wrong but the planet is in a pretty fucked up state right now.

Can you be more specific?

Press X to Doubt

It couldn't be an attempt to make white people accept poverty by the big corps who sponsor politicians and control research grant monies ?

Do you have an example or two that’s not open to interpretation?

I’ve seen a lot of things blamed on climate that are debatable. Wild fires, hurricanes, freak high tides, etc.

If it’s a true crisis we shouldn’t be grasping at normal climate events and trying to argue they’re slightly worse.

I think you need to look more closely at the wildfires in the western USA, and wet bulb temps high enough to kill people just sitting in the shade drinking water.[1] A power outage there will cause a very large number of deaths.

[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/nexstar_media_wire/4074341-extr...

As long as is needed to transition away from burning fossil fuels. You can always put more in high altitude. If half the comments here are right and climate change is truly an apocalyptic threat, then acid rain and global dimming would be worthwhile tradeoffs.

If climate change isn't extremely bad, then maybe it's not worth it. But at some point, if it becomes existential, then all options are on the table.

How long would that temporary measure help?

As long as you do it.

What would that do to acidic rain, global dimming, ecology and agriculture.

Well, it's a trade-off. Is sulfur worse than global warming?

Masking the problem will only make it come back harder

Geo-engineering is not an opportunity to stop phasing out fossils, but a way to get more time for better technology to spread.

It's called "comedy".

It has a track record of getting things right that dates back to Aristophanes.

Sadly their publications are frowned upon in academic circles because they use less charts than farts.

Thank you. Good link. I posted something similar below and, here's more food for thought:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/04/more-tha...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01461-y

You can typically see their handiwork in every single internet discussion of related topics, including HN threads that get enough traction.

By this logic, assuming you're American, one is free to do anything to your property, justifying it with calling out some bad thing the US government is doing, e.g. supplying bombs that are being dropped indiscriminately on Gaza.

By removing agency from humans.