The Uninhabitable Earth

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html

by yuvadam • 9 years ago

238 225 9 years ago

gambiting3• 9 years ago

Why the hell is the author mixing Fahrenheit and Celsius degrees?

Paragraph one: " for instance, where humidity routinely tops 90 percent, simply moving around outside when it’s over 105 degrees Fahrenheit would be lethal"

Paragraph two: "At 11 or 12 degrees of warming, more than half the world’s population, as distributed today, would die of direct heat. "

Same paragraph: "At present, most regions reach a wet-bulb maximum of 26 or 27 degrees Celsius; the true red line for habitability is 35 degrees"

Paragraph three: " As I type that sentence, in the California desert in mid-June, it is 121 degrees outside my door. "

Just....why?

maze-le• 9 years ago

I stumbled upon this one too. I suppose the author consulted various sources and forgot to normalize units afterwards.

dmm2• 9 years ago

I'm an american and if you told me it was 27C outside I wouldn't know whether that was hot or cold until I reflected for a moment and compared that number to cpu core temps.

Ignorance on my part, certainly, and not excusable but perhaps typical.

ancarda2• 9 years ago

Out of interest, why don't you capitalize "American"?

Edit: I'm genuinely curious and not asking to annoy anyone; I might be misunderstanding grammar rules or rules of HN. I ask because I'm not sure this was a mistake; all over the web I see people who write with good grammar, but never capitalize "American". Is it considered rude to capitalize "American"?

gambiting3• 9 years ago

I don't even mind the fact that he used one or the other, it's just that mixing units in a scientific article doesn't seem very....professional for me.

Especially since increase by 12 degrees Celsius != increase by 12 degrees Fahrenheit. So in that paragraph where he talks about 11-12 degrees increase being lethal, you don't have all information necessary.

dexterdog• 9 years ago

I never remember the formula, but I know that 0 is freezing and 20 is room temp so I fudge it from there and know that 27 is warm, but not really hot.

ancarda2• 9 years ago

It sounds very grim, is there any chance/hope of us getting out of this situation or is it just beyond any action at this point? I get the feeling from the article we're doomed.

awjr2• 9 years ago

It's the little things the author mentions, that impressed me. For example the prevalence of Malaria. A higher temperature can increase the lifecycle rate of the parasite by a factor of 10.

I was also unaware that higher temperatures increased sport fouls and criminal behaviour.

phkahler3• 9 years ago

> I was also unaware that higher temperatures increased sport fouls and criminal behaviour.

They also cause an increase in air traffic.

phkahler3• 9 years ago

Don't worry, this is a pure climate alarmist. You can tell by this quote and others:

"But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough."

This person is literally saying we need to be alarmed.

I really didn't understand the part where they said methane has 34 times the greenhouse effect as carbon over a period of time and then changes the timeframe to bring the multiplier put to 84 times. To me it felt a lot like when congress talks about deficits over a decade - well actually they talk about reductions over a decade so it's times 10 and increases are just annual. Anyway, there is a difference between methane and CO2 but to try to make it sound worse by talking about time is just another alarmist tactic.

Regardless of your stance, this article is intended to be alarmist and even says so. IMHO it is not worthy of HN.

jackmott2• 9 years ago

your post reminds me of when actual bad guys call the investigation against them a witch hunt.

cbennett7• 9 years ago

> This person is literally saying we need to be alarmed.

And why shouldn't we (he) be doing that? Actually the author's goal is transparent, to shake up perception, to provide fodder in the imagination of folks to ultimately change how urgently we treat this in public forums. I thought this was a quite trenchant point (from the article):

>Over the past decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopias, perhaps the collective result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet when it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination. The reasons for that are many: the timid language of scientific probabilities, which the climatologist James Hansen once called “scientific reticence” in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was; the fact that the country is dominated by a group of technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an opposing culture that doesn’t even see warming as a problem worth addressing;

Back to you: >>I really didn't understand the part where they said methane has 34 times the greenhouse effect as carbon over a period of time and then changes the timeframe to bring the multiplier put to 84 times.

I also thought this statement was scientifically unclear, but I think the author was trying to say that the rate of methane release increases, thus, the impact on climate systems multiplies relative to an equivalent release of CO2 in that period (100 yrs v 24 yrs). If someone else can mention exactly how he got from 34x to 84x though, id love to hear it; i didn't get it.. I do want to mention, however the 30x GHG effect number is not set in stone. In fact, depending on the rate of release, there may be 'force multipliers' depending on how (quickly) ecosystems can absorb and use these gases. Ominously, this multiplier seems to go up anyways as temps rise. [1]

[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v507/n7493/full/nature1...

nickthemagicman• 9 years ago

I got the same feeling. It's a pretty sensational article that leaves out a lot of details but simultaneously has some really good information.

joloka8• 9 years ago

Why the downvote? The article is clearly concern trolling. Look, if you are worried about overpopulation, the US isn't your primary area of concern. The US is not overpopulated and probably never will be. Maybe some US cities are, but compared to China, India, and Indonesia, we have no overpopulation problem. I'm not sure that "being alarmed" is a good state of mind to be in--Americans suffer from crisis fatigue as it is.

The human race isn't going to solve its problems without either leaving the earth or having a massive die-off. You first.

cbennett7• 9 years ago

First off, the author is prodding people into action by scaring/alarming them. Thus, the entire point of this article is to highlight many of the bad long-tails (note I did not say WORST long tails, eg Clathrate Gun, or phytoplankton crash leading to global anoxia, because they almost instantly wipe out human life), which could give the impression we are more screwed than we are;

In other words, all of these happening is not a probable outcome (the article is not based on a statistical inference or climate model). However, as we climb up the \delta +C ladder, all of these effects/implications become increasingly probable. If you crank up \delta +C to +5C for instance, at least half if not all of these will occur (due to positive feedbacks eg albedo);

I would not say we are beyond the hope of any action at this point. There are two sub-sets of conventional actions being discussed in the context of official orgs, eg UNFCCC at the moment:

-Mitigation- reduce emissions directly,- eg turn off coal plants or plan to do so to dozens within the next few years, massively scale up solar adoption

-Adaptation- take actions now to reduce devastation from past [inertial] and unavoidable future emissions, e.g, invest in heat-proof seeds and crops for certain tropical biomes

Broadly, both are still possible. The former is notably more susceptible to political landmines and fossil fuel monopoly blocking than the latter, so a lot of climate scientists are urging folks to focus on the latter. Is it enough to save us? In terms of physics and climate systems--no, but metaphorically it could reduce pain like palliative care for the swathes of humanity, largely from tropical regions, who probably wont make it. The real heartbreaker here: mitigation is crucial to avoiding all the evil long-tails, but our poltical and economic systems seem allergic to it. How about just a little mitigation- eg lukewarm Paris implementation-- do we still miss some of the worst evils? Very unclear-- now we need to consult the statistical physicists.

There's a third bin too which I would call pure engineering solutions; These could involve for instance, building plants to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere [1], seeding the oceans with certain chemicals to increase Co2 oceanic uptake [2], or straight up engineering the atmosphere [3]. I listed those in increasing order of possible risk/backfiring (complexity of the climate engineering operation).

I invite anyone to clarify or add to which they think are feasible and infeasible amongst these; I listed this all for context, and not to advance a particular legal, moral, or political argument, although clearly there are a litany to be made.

[1] http://www.climeworks.com/ [2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070608142214.h... [3] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection_...

coldpie• 9 years ago

It's especially frustrating, because I genuinely feel we could actually solve this problem with relatively minor economic impact if we wanted to. There are dozens of realistic proposals around for limiting warming to 2-3 degrees. We just need to choose to do them. Instead the world's leading nation continues to elect anti-science morons to positions of power, and so we do nothing but head down this road to destruction. The 2100s are going to be super ugly, and frankly I'm glad I won't be around to see them.

awjr2• 9 years ago

This always reminds me of this cartoon https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/514325219919218393/

"What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"

I think the key point that the article makes is that fossil fuels have enabled much of the industrialisation of the 20th and 21st century but it is also beginning to make certain areas of the world uninhabitable and yet we still seem to want to ignore the warning signs. A shift from fossil fuels and a focus on carbon capture technologies is hopefully not too late.

PS: I do keep reminding my dad that he should sell his house on the Indian River in Florida.

RcouF1uZ4gsC2• 9 years ago

Your quote demonstrates that global warming is either not all that bad or you are not advocating enough stuff to fix it. If it really is an emergency and is that bad, we should be doing stuff that would make our world worse if we are wrong.

Brakenshire3• 9 years ago

Well, a lot of scientists do advocate to keep warming to below 1.5 C, but that is not seriously pursued because it is not considered to be economically realistic or politically viable. The Paris trajectory is aiming for 2C, and hoping that it won't end up being significantly more. That is, not making the okay the enemy of the good, or good the enemy of the perfect.

Shivetya• 9 years ago

like the hoax of recent satellite observations being remapped upward to show increased heat lead by a member who has no expertise in the area? it was predicted many years ago that even those who were in the field would be forced to change their numbers to be in agreement, instead someone else stepped in and did so.

hoax or fraud, some of what both sides qualifies. the trouble is there is so much money at stake that it corrupts research.

Oletros7• 9 years ago

it was predicted many years ago that even those who were in the field would be forced to change their numbers to be in agreement,

Who has changed the numbers?

Do you have sources for those predictions?

hoax or fraud, some of what both sides qualifies.

I suppose that you can give some sources for those fraud accusations, isn't?

panic• 9 years ago

An analysis of possible solutions: http://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank

rdtsc• 9 years ago

Number 1 based on plausibility is refrigerant management.

I have a story about that. Someone I knew in Eastern Europe working with large refrigeration equipment hoarded the bad kind of Freon knowing it would go up in price as the supplies dwindle. Then they charged an increasingly high price for it on the black market. Eventually equipment that uses that king of refrigerant will break down beyond repair but that might take a while. Industrial equipment like that often built reliably and is pretty maintainable.

This is just one individual business owner. I am sure there are more. So officially on paper it might look it's all good and "we've eliminate CFCs" but with corruption mixed in things are not that simple.

yardie• 9 years ago

Guys like the one you describe are a rounding error in modern industrial refrigeration. Like a major company may use him they transition to modern equipment but at the scale they need he would raise all sorts of red flags not just in government regulators but insurance and investors doing their diligence. They are going to want to know why an expensive line item is going out.

TLDR; you're friends business model doesn't scale and relies on very unique edge cases.

latch2• 9 years ago

It's pretty hopeless. I used to think we'd adjust in time, but that was when the decline looked more linear (or at least I thought it looked more linear).

Of the many people who I know who are seriously concerned re climate change, I'd say 2 have taken truly meaningful steps .

It's not the handful of climate change deniers that's the problem. It's the overwhelming number of people who want to say they're green, but still own two cars, never take public transport, eat meat daily, live in big houses, and buy buy buy.

If you think climate change is a serious issue. If you're concerned that scientists are now talking about the low single-digit years we have to change. If you have kids. Why the *@#! aren't you taking drastic change?

dota_fanatic• 9 years ago

What kind of drastic change should one take? Not having kids, OK, drastic but doable. Cutting out meat, driving less, etc, OK.

But what about the rest of the production chain that assumes you're the same as everyone else (whom continues to use and depend on that production chain), which is an ocean of waste compared to what any single person can do? We can individually push the needle very slightly, but it does nothing to push the needle on our behalf within the bigger economic machine. All those wasteful international processes are pushing forward faster than ever. It's like we're bleeding out and you just recommended dabbing the wound with a string of thread.

What are some realistic things that an individual or group of individuals can do to prepare?

throwanem2• 9 years ago

Move north, I suppose, ahead of the great land rush to come.

latch2• 9 years ago

Re kids: I was saying if you have kids, surely that's even more reason to act.

I'm not a survivalist. No idea if you want to prepare? Move north and stock up on guns, ammo, seed, water and soil?

But, I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. Well over 50% of Americans and Europeans view climate change as a threat. That's 500 million of the most affluent humans on the planet. The "economic machine", by which I assume you mean $3 bottled water, SUV, McMansions, beef, exists for them; not the other way around.

cagenut• 9 years ago

The energy consumption (and therefore carbon emissions) per capita in the west/US comes almost entirely from the feedback loop between single-family-detached housing and the car-or-two it takes to live in that kind of sprawled out lifestyle. Put another way, Transportation and Housing (heating & cooling) are the #1 and #2 sources of carbon emissions for suburban, exurban and rural dwellers.

People who simply live in urban cores automatically cut their carbon emissions in half: http://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/maps

If you live in a 5+ unit building, do not own a car, rarely fly, sign up for your utilities low-carbon supply option, and cut out red meat, its possible to be a full order of magnitude below the american average. http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Am...

So the #1 thing an American can do to fight climate change is be "pro-city". Move there. Encourage building/density there. Help fix the schools. Use, vote for, and demand more and better public transit.

People who insist on having a yard and several feet of air-gap between them and their neighbors are the real climate change deniers.

jlebrech• 9 years ago

just nuking each other when resources get sparse should do the trick, the planet will be fine either way.

Unless we survive long enough to cause runaway greenhouse effect.

EGreg2• 9 years ago

Realistically, you should make communities local and more self-sufficient, like they used to be.

This idea that you have to commute 20 miles to work every day, in a personal car, is less than 100 years old. People used to grow up, live, work, and marry and raise families in their villages. Not many would travel all the time. Mozart was probably the most traveled of his time, and he probably didn't go half as many miles as the average worker today.

Make it so people can work from home. Give them an unconditional basic income so they don't have to work.

The problem is capitalism, as much as many people here don't like to hear it. Capitalism is great at what it does -- but it doesn't care about externalities. If a person runs out of food, capitalism doesn't care. If a species goes extinct, the world is turned into farms and monocultures, or the planet is polluted or resources are depleted, capitalism won't care until it's done.

yogthos• 9 years ago

One drastic change would be to abandon capitalism and the idea of growth. Instead, we should be focusing on sustainability which is completely at odds with capitalism.

We need to start making products that are designed to last a long time as opposed to them having been built for planned obsolescence. We need to start abandoning throw away things like plastic containers. For example, Coca-Cola produces a staggering 100 billion disposalbe plastic bottles http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/coca-cola-pl... a year. We have to start moving heavy industry off fossils. We have to move away from combustion engines, and need to abandon cars in general.

The reality of the situation is that most contribution to climate change comes from industrial sources and not individuals.

A 100 companies are responsible for over 70% of all emissions. That's what would need to change, and that's just not going to happen in time. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...

What's going to happen is that majority of humanity will simply die off. If enough humans are left alive to carry on civilization, hopefully they will have learned something from that.

uptown• 9 years ago

The system has evolved to make change very difficult. One part of this post on ZeroHedge shows you the supply chain involved with just a ketchup. 52 transport and process stages. Fifty-two.

"Just how energy inefficient the food system is can be seen in the crazy case of the Swedish tomato ketchup. Researchers at the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology analysed the production of tomato ketchup. The study considered the production of inputs to agriculture, tomato cultivation and conversion to tomato paste (in Italy), the processing and packaging of the paste and other ingredients into tomato ketchup in Sweden and the retail and storage of the final product. All this involved more than 52 transport and process stages.

The aseptic bags used to package the tomato paste were produced in the Netherlands and transported to Italy to be filled, placed in steel barrels, and then moved to Sweden. The five layered, red bottles were either produced in the UK or Sweden with materials form Japan, Italy, Belgium, the USA and Denmark. The polypropylene (PP) screw-cap of the bottle and plug, made from low density polyethylene (LDPE), was produced in Denmark and transported to Sweden. Additionally, LDPE shrink-film and corrugated cardboard were used to distribute the final product. Labels, glue and ink were not included in the analysis."

Source: http://www.321energy.com/editorials/church/church040205.html

How does an individual affect change when something as basic as a bottle of ketchup is clearly part of the world that'd built itself with disregard for its impact on the planet?

ZeroHedge Post: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-06-24/why-next-recession-...

cbennett7• 9 years ago

I managed to find the original PDF : http://infohouse.p2ric.org/ref/37/36505.pdf

Re-optimizing said supply chains in an oil constrained, and eventually oil free world seems extremely non-trivial. I wonder if we will soon have to scale up the methods (both computationally, & in human/practical industrial re-organization terms) to plot new paths and then connect them, before the graph changes so much that the potential for profit disappears.

In the near term,I could see human engineers using deep learning or other computational methods for multi-scale optimization to reduce costs and carbon footprint based on locality of original sources (food/biofuels/..) In the medium term, I would bet that AI agents will exist precisely to optimize these tasks. There's hundreds of billions to be (re)-made in (re)-wiring the economy properly.

norea-armozel• 9 years ago

You should read Homebrew Industrial Revolution by Kevin Carson, particularly his break down of the Industrial Revolution. Mostly the IR was driven by state actors or those who could influence them such as with the UK's Enclosure Act which forced peasants to work in factories and in the US with the transcontinental railroad which was lobbied for by industrial interests on the East coast who wanted a slice of the West coast pie of regional production/consumption. Basically, everything up to this point is the result of capitalism and its owners who are protected from market forces of regional and local production/consumption which would follow more closely than what we have today where companies literally throw away brand new shoes and electronics to keep their prices high.

darkerside• 9 years ago

Seems like that metric is about as useful as LOC

opportune2• 9 years ago

How is this inefficient? I definitely think that markets have the potential to be very inefficient, but do we know that the alternatives to this are any more efficient? Economies of scale often do make it more efficient for all of a particular kind of product to be produced in one location and then shipped to wherever they're needed. The fact that there are 52 steps to the process says nothing about the actual efficiency of it. It's just a play to ignorance to the fact that almost all products we enjoy go through a similarly complicated supply chain.

It's only inefficient in the sense that it expends more gas (thus leading to higher emissions) than is strictly necessary. However, I also assume that it is cheaper for food to be distributed and processed in this manner; this is usually what people mean by "efficient".

hacknat• 9 years ago

It's the overwhelming number of people who want to say they're green, but still own two cars, never take public transport, eat meat daily, live in big houses, and buy buy buy.

The car and the "buy, buy, buy" are the only real problems. Cut those two out and the big houses and meat aren't a big deal (or are at least workeable).

Probably the biggest thing you could do to help the environment is not buy any kind of mobile device and to run your computer into the ground.

extra882• 9 years ago

I don't know about all meat but the deforestation for cattle ranching and feed, methane produced by the beasts themselves, and other factors seem to be fairly significant. The much greater energy requirements to light, heat, and cool big houses should not be discounted so easily either.

Daishiman4• 9 years ago

Home heating and meat consumption are the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases. The creation of the mobile device is peanuts in comparison.

EGreg2• 9 years ago

Just thinking out loud here, but if the arctic somehow contains more carbon and methane than all we've released into the atmosphere (can someone explain why that is???) then can't we:

1) Coat the entire arctic with a more reflective compound, so it will not be as likely to melt under the same summer temperatures... the expense of this would be far less than the fallout later. This may interfere with some life in the arctic that depends on surface ice somehow. But considering the rest of the planet will have to adapt in the alternative scenario, I'd say this life would have to adapt. I doubt it has much effect on the rest of the world.

2) Do one of those sci-fi thingies where a compound is discovered which instantly causes a chain reaction to crystallize e.g. water at much higher temperatures than the current melting point. Salt can lower the melting point of water. Isn't there anything that can raise it? But obviously we wouldn't have enough of that compound to just inject into the ice. I've seen spontaneous crystallization of water into ice at room temperature when you hit a bottle. Maybe something like this can be done on a more permanent basis.

3) Release reflective material into the atmosphere (like in nuclear winter) to counteract the greenhouse gas effect and hope this doesn't somehow cause deadly pollution in some other way. After all, the Earth can only radiate energy into space, convection with the vacuum of space doesn't really transfer heat away much at all. But we can reflect the sun's radiation to the Earth, and limit the heating up that way.

4) Instead of reflective material, you can fly satellites into space where they cast a shadow on the Earth (assuming the sun is far enough, I haven't done the calculations, it might be possible that small satellites or gas clouds can cast a shadow on the Earth just like the moon's umbra will in August 19th this year). And in that case we can try to reflect a lot of the energy that way. Of course, they would have to be SUPER reflective and have a high surface area, or they'd heat up within a decade rendering them useless.

averagewall• 9 years ago

There are lots of good ideas for reducing or eliminating the harm of climate change. But they're sacrilegious because people worry they might lull others into not trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I'm pretty confident we'll do something like this to fix it when it comes.

extra882• 9 years ago

These are not very good gen-engineering ideas but we may be compelled to engage in gen-engineering of some kind. It will be risky, with side effects that we'll know but more worrying will be the unintended effects that we didn't predict. They more we can do to reduce our negative output, the less ham-fisted tinkering with the planet's systems we'll have to do.

NickM• 9 years ago

Well, suppose all the people who want to be green go ahead and cut back to one car, go vegetarian, live in a smaller house, etc. etc. Maybe if everyone is really dedicated, we could all cut our emissions in half. So then what? We're still all emitting way more CO2 than the planet can absorb; climate change would still happen, it'd just be happening a bit more slowly.

We're not going to realistically solve this problem by all making personal sacrifices, because even in the best case, where everyone chips in, it's only enough to slow the bleeding. If we really want to truly solve this mess, we need to promote truly sustainable technologies that scale well and appeal to everyone.

Don't put solar panels on your house out of a personal sense of guilt about your own emissions, put them on your house because it grows the market for solar, stimulates research into better panels, and helps push forward the economies of scale that are needed to make renewables cost competitive with fossil fuels. Don't buy an electric car because you want to pollute less, buy an electric car because you want to fund the continued technological improvements of electric cars in general.

We're all focusing way too much on merely slowing down the death of the planet when we should be focusing on fixing the problem altogether. Don't aim for a slower death, aim for a faster transition to carbon-neutral. If we all feel that the planet is doomed anyway, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because it's a lot harder to motivate ourselves to try and fix a problem that feels unfixable.

enraged_camel2• 9 years ago

>Don't put solar panels on your house out of a personal sense of guilt about your own emissions, put them on your house because it grows the market for solar, stimulates research into better panels, and helps push forward the economies of scale that are needed to make renewables cost competitive with fossil fuels

Or don't live in a house in the suburbs. Opt for medium or high-density residential areas, which are far more efficient in terms of both land and utility use.

tertius• 9 years ago

If you're concerned that scientists are now talking about the low single-digit years we have to change.

This type of alarmism does not help anyone. The "authorities" have been saying "single digit years" for decades, not "just now". The average person has seen very little change causing more denialism to spread.

Please stop.

louprado• 9 years ago

"It's not the handful of climate change deniers that's the problem. It's the overwhelming number of people who want to say they're green."

We see time and time again that laws are required to achieve massive rapid change and reduce the economic impact of that change.

In 1974 one could have spent thousands on a custom installed catalytic converter. That "green" person would have experienced a great financial burden and see no measurable impact on air quality. It would have been a foolish decision. That's why we need laws and that is why the handful of climate change deniers, that have a disproportionate influence on policy, are so dangerous.

How one votes is what matters (mattered) most.

chiefofgxbxl2• 9 years ago

This is why I'm so concerned about the trend that SUV sales are outpacing Sedan sales. Whereas sedans used to be the "default" car a decade ago, SUVs are now taking their place [0].

All things being equal, a smaller car (sedan) should get better MPG than a larger car (SUV) [1].

And yet it seems that people's efforts to reduce their environmental footprint is focused on recycling a plastic cup here and there [2].

A very general trend over the past few decades shows us that the price of gas / gallon has increased. So Americans' response to this is: I need to buy a bigger car? A pollution tax would certainly help but is far too big of a thing to accomplish in the short-term.

I've been contemplating a sort of "big car" tax for a number of reasons, and increased gasoline consumption / environmental impact is a key item on that list. (Non-environmental items include (1) the danger they pose to other drivers in smaller vehicles, and (2) the race-to-the-bottom condition no. 1 imposes, since more and more people will want larger vehicles when they feel threatened by the presence of large vehicles on the road, leading to a positive reinforcement cycle)

[0] http://www.driveprime.com/blog-suv-and-crossover-sales-outpa... [1] http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=37918&i... [2] https://youtu.be/eNx9tvCrvv8?t=1m10s

scottLobster5• 9 years ago

Granted some people buy gratuitously large vehicles, but for many there is a practical purpose: moving large amounts of stuff. Whether it's multiple bags of mulch, dorm room furniture, sports equipment, more than 3 kids, or just lots of luggage for a family road trip, there's definitely an advantage to a big car there. Not to mention better performance in snow depending on model.

In any case, one we get non-luxury electric SUVs the point will largely be moot.

tastyfreeze• 9 years ago

At least around here if you ask people why they, as the only person in the vehicle, drive something so big many will answer, "so, I win". The idea being that in an accident the larger vehicle will provide more protection.

Soon we will all be driving semi-tractors just so we can "win" against the largest vehicles on the road.

gasbag2• 9 years ago

A pollution tax would certainly help but is far too big of a thing to accomplish in the short-term.

There's no need for a big car tax or a pollution tax. We could just end the massive fuel subsidies we have in the US. Of course that is also unlikely to be accomplished in the short term.

anigbrowl7• 9 years ago

Just to add a little context, people were buying huge cars back in the early years of the century (remember Hummers?). Then rising gas prices, the financial crisis, and Obama's election made that unfashionable. Now many people feel better off economically and are buying the large cars they secretly wanted anyway.

tonyedgecombe• 9 years ago

The big energy producers love this message because it results in nothing happening. The only way we will solve this problem is by attacking it at the source, by shifting taxes to carbon.

daxfohl• 9 years ago

The average person has a hard enough time with immediate issues: overeating, exercising, saving for retirement, substance dependencies. So, personal life changes as response to climate change is not something we should rely on.

mikeash2• 9 years ago

I doubt those two people have actually taken truly meaningful steps, unless they're powerful politicians, business leaders, or high up in a relevant regulatory agency.

This is the root of the problem: the actions of most individuals don't matter no matter what they are. Let's say I switch entirely to renewable energy, stop eating meat, buy local food, and do every other thing possible to reduce my footprint. Great, now I've added, what, an extra half a second to the time we have before catastrophe? It just doesn't matter.

Everyone working together is what makes a difference, of course, but that's hard. It's not just a matter of convincing everyone to act individually.

jerrycruncher• 9 years ago

This lazy cynicism is far too commonplace, and easily countered: If a whole lot of people added their half-seconds together, it would matter a whole lot.

You either care enough to change your behavior or you don't. Don't pass your lack of courage of conviction off onto nameless "...politicians, business leaders or [those] high up in a relevant regulatory agency."

timothycrosley• 9 years ago

This is super interesting to me, because in the Seattle bubble I live in, I feel like everyone my age has at most 1 car, often 0. Usually a small car (I have a compact prius) and drives transit the vast majority of the time. We also are very good about recycling and composting within the city.

stcredzero2• 9 years ago

Given the evidence of all of recorded history and archaeological evidence, how is the denial of economics any better than climate change denial? We have many, many examples of environmental changes combined with misaligned incentives bringing about the end of many civilizations.

(Just one example, for which new media exists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkMP328eU5Q )

As another HN commenter on this post noted, you can't overturn people's incentives through moralizing about some abstract fear. Even when pursuing an obvious course of justice, Gandhi knew that you must align with people's day to day incentives. It does no one good to rail against the stupidity of the masses and the greed of corporations. We need to figure out how to align everyone's incentives.

anigbrowl7• 9 years ago

you can't, in the short term. There are no good long-term solutions that are not going to cause some acute pain in the short term. Deep down everyone knows this, and the increasing viciousness of politics is, under the surface debates, a fight over who is going to have to bear that pain and to what degree.

eddieplan9• 9 years ago

If you look at the changes of carbon emission per country, the U.S. emission has decreased in the last 20 years. China's emission has tripled in the same period:

https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/...

The main reason is the growth of Chinese economy. So if you want to make real impact, help the next emerging economies to grow without incurring huge growth in emissions. For example, if you look at the per-capital carbon emission by country:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

China's is half of that of US, while India's is 1/8. Imagine if the India's number grow 4 times to that of China's, any saving in the U.S. will be completely cancelled out and some. In fact, U.S. can cut its emission to 0, and India only needs to grow its number to 75% of that of China's to cancel out the U.S. improvement.

all_usernames• 9 years ago

I'd very much like my next employer to be one that is actively working toward climate solutions, and has a large leverage. Any suggestions?

Obvious choices would be Tesla (any large automaker with a serious electric program), or a political organization with sane and pragmatic environmental goals.

Caveman_Coder2• 9 years ago

If you're in the US, I'd check out some of the national laboratories: https://science.energy.gov/laboratories/

sbierwagen• 9 years ago

  It's the overwhelming number of people who want to say 
  they're green, but still own two cars, never take public 
  transport, eat meat daily, live in big houses, and buy 
  buy buy.

This is the classic neoliberal "individual responsibility" framing, meant to cast global warming purely as a personal moral issue, and deflect attention from regulating corporations, which burn the majority of fossil fuels. Ending corn ethanol and oil industry subsidies will do far more than guilting people to buy electric cars.

ajmurmann2• 9 years ago

It's a tragedy of the Commons problem. I'd vote in a heart beat to make meat consumption illegal, even completely burninh the usage of fossil fuels and even to attack countries that refuse to do the same. However, if only I stop eating meat and driving my car the only thing that will happen is that my quality of life gets lowered.

acjohnson553• 9 years ago

And in the USA, we are led by people who seem almost uniquely incapable of grappling with our societies hard problems. Sad.

crush-n-spread3• 9 years ago

Elon Musk leads America more than Donald Trump does, trust me. Don't get discouraged because Donny has become President. They hardly do anything interesting.

acjohnson553• 9 years ago

I meant "led" on every level. Our president is a symptom of a much larger problem of know-nothingism and myopic greed. We're in a social tailspin, with no clear way out.

And it's absurd to think that Elon Musk has more power or influence as an industrialist than the POTUS, Trump or not.

thesmallestcat3• 9 years ago

Well, one of the clearest consequences of global warming is that an entire continent becomes habitable as well as a large part of the northern Canada and Russia. Everything I've read about global warming indicates an increase in arable land even when accounting for desertification.

cageface3• 9 years ago

The article specifically addresses and disagrees with this claim.

joloka8• 9 years ago

The article also claims that a rise in kidney disease in El Salvador is related to global warming without offering any evidence whatsoever. Correlation is not causation, right? I think that one specious claim undermines the entire article, quite frankly. El Salvador is a nation with all kinds of social problems including a population that is under-educated (to say the least) so I find it hard to believe that heat is the biggest problem there versus dirty water, ignorance of the need to stay hydrated, etc.

gilbetron• 9 years ago

From the article:

"Pollyannaish plant physiologists will point out that the cereal-crop math applies only to those regions already at peak growing temperature, and they are right — theoretically, a warmer climate will make it easier to grow corn in Greenland. But as the pathbreaking work by Rosamond Naylor and David Battisti has shown, the tropics are already too hot to efficiently grow grain, and those places where grain is produced today are already at optimal growing temperature — which means even a small warming will push them down the slope of declining productivity. And you can’t easily move croplands north a few hundred miles, because yields in places like remote Canada and Russia are limited by the quality of soil there; it takes many centuries for the planet to produce optimally fertile dirt."

thesmallestcat3• 9 years ago

In the very long term, how can you dispute the benefit of human expansion in Antarctica? Humans have thrived in times when there was little glaciation and suffered in times of increased glaciation. The only benefit of glaciers is that we're accustomed to the climate they promote. I have no doubt that mankind could adjust to and thrive in a world without glaciers. It's ridiculous how afraid humans are to engineer their planet compared to a century ago.

DanielBMarkham• 9 years ago

This is an article to save and come back 20 years and read.

buckbova• 9 years ago

And in 20 years there'll be a whole new set of doomsday predictions and this'll be forgotten.

https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=earth%20day%20do...

justin66• 9 years ago

Well, that's one way to bring up a bunch of sketchy information sources on a Google search result page.

Oletros7• 9 years ago

Funny thing is that NONE of the links are scientific papers

grondilu• 9 years ago

If you feel like watching more hopeful content on the subject, there is Allan Savory's TED talk about how to stop desertification[1], and Freeman Dyson's speech called "heretic thoughts about science and society"[2].

Basically, those speakers suggest climate change is an issue that can be solved with better land management. Soil is extremely good at absorbing Carbon Dioxide. Isn't it why there is so little CO2 in the atmosphere (0.04%)? We just need to make sure the process does indeed happen.

When one looks at the map of Earth, the vastness of the desert areas is scary. Yet there are reasons to believe this is relatively recent. The Sahara was wet few thousands years ago, the American deserts became so mostly because of the considerable environmental changes brought by Europeans.

Desertification is much scarier than climate change, and it did not wait for the industrial revolution to happen. Reversing desertification is probably not impossible (after all it is being attempted already in many places around the world, like in Africa[3] and China[4]), and it might very well reverse climate change as a bonus.

I personally wish more effort and public attention was diverted to it.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xFLjUt2leM

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-North_Shelter_Forest_Pro...

vram222• 9 years ago

Re. reversing desertification:

Came across this technique - imprinting - recently - seems interesting:

Imprinting soils – Creating Instant Edge for Large Scale Revegetation of Barren Lands:

1) https://permaculturenews.org/2012/09/19/imprinting-soils-cre... Excerpt:

[ Imprinting is a method for instantly adding what permaculturists call the ‘edge effect’ to soils, utilising a heavy and dimpled/wedged roller to ‘imprint’ soils with patterned depressions. The bottom of these depressions then become collection points for all the crucial elements needed for seed germination and soil building: seeds themselves, water, organic matter (including plant debris and animal manure) and wind-blown silt and clay particles. ]

Check the before and after photos in the article.

2) http://imprinting.org/

Bio of Dr. Robert Dixon, who started this:

3) http://imprinting.org/biography.htm

Bartweiss3• 9 years ago

Woah, that's very interesting.

It's pretty well-established that analyzing land based on gross regional characteristics is a disaster for reasons like these - the relevance of a given patch of soil to erosion resistance or vegetation support can change massively over miles or even yards. Sometimes protecting 100 acres of exposed, average land is less useful than protecting a single acre of liminal ground that holds back stream or wind erosion, or helps to germinate the next 'stage' of vegetation.

What's totally new to me is the idea of going out and making seminal land like this. Finding it is hard, protecting it is harder, but making it? There's an idea that could actually be compatible with the sort of bulk-analysis development governments are capable of.

This seems to at least have the potential to really matter, and be far more usable than most grand environmental schemes.

jackmott2• 9 years ago

Soil is extremely good at absorbing Carbon Dioxide. Isn't it why there is so little CO2 in the atmosphere (0.04%)? We just need to make sure the process does indeed happen.

Nonsense hand waving. Nobody has a coherent plan for how to "just" make that happen. The people who think they have a coherent plan haven't opened up excel or a napkin to do some preliminary math about the scale involved.

Brakenshire3• 9 years ago

One of the major problems we have is that this amazing carbon sink is being destroyed, there have been quite a few years where slash and burn in rainforests has competed with the burning of fuels as the major source of carbon emissions. We face a major challenge to halt that, but to actually reverse it entirely and aim for a radical recreation and expansion seems ambitious. My understanding was that rainforests take hundreds, perhaps thousands of years to develop.

erikpukinskis2• 9 years ago

Here's a plan:

Hire 1 billion people to do the remediation work. Hire another 100 million people to do the science to figure out what proper remediation work looks like. Hire another 100 million people to design video games that walk the 1 billion workers through the process, and can accommodate differences in IQ, learning style, and work life needs. Then hire an additional 100 million people who will document the workers lives, and create media experiences to fund the effort. The work can also be funded by creating eco-resort experiences, selling food byproducts, etc.

No need for advanced technology, just very detailed instructional games paired with good quality basic tools and 1 billion people worth of labor.

Seems perfectly actionable to me. You just have to start with four people: the worker, the scientist, the game designer, and the media producer, and iterate until it's working well and then infect the global population virally.

I'd agree with you if it was 1950, we'd have a very difficult time of it going through traditional political/social channels. But it's 2017, and with software the problem seems very tractable.

Daishiman4• 9 years ago

Hope without plans is useless. Hope is not a strategy. This is pretty much just prayer, and a grain of sand in the vastness of problems caused by climate change. Nothing to do with solving permafrost thawing, nothing do with solving the heat shock created by extreme climates, no solutions for ocean acidification.

iak8god• 9 years ago

Hope without plans is useless.

So is despair. Reversing desertification will sink tons of CO2 back into the ground.

anon1253• 9 years ago

It's silly to think we're unable to change. Nearly all of the CO2 emissions were done in just a generation. Post-world war 2 industrialization, automation and globalization caused the vast majority of CO2. There are still people alive today who lived through WO2. Why are we talking like this is an insurmountable problem, that the momentum is just too big? It literally took /one/ average human life span to get where we are. It could take less than one to go back to pre-industrial levels. And it's not just a matter of better technology, it's mostly a matter of social adaptation. If we're dead set on infinite growth (in terms of consumption, GDP, population) we're going to have a problem with or without climate change. The fix is: a smaller population, less consumption, and less production. But that's contrary to /everything/ capitalism stands for. The problem is thus not so much technology, but rather the socio-economic paradigm we're in. How to change this without going all "you dumb communist beta cuck snowflake"? I don't know. But here are some ideas:

- Incentivize less spending by "anti-ads" (could be interesting to add as an ad blocker), basically ads that signal that you /don't/ need what's advertised. Interesting AI problem that can piggyback off of all the stuff that's being done in the ad space itself

- Implement economic incentives for CO2 scrubbing, by carbon-tax, subsidies or secondary effects (e.g. useful non-fuel biproducts, or things like greener living spaces / habitable deserts)

- Stop subsidizing fossil fuels, agriculture, etc. Will it hike up the prices? Sure, but that's kinda the idea.

- Look at the big picture first. Driving your car less, LED bulbs, sure…they kinda work. It's somewhat of a moot point with cargoships that almost burn raw oil, equivalent to the CO2 output of a small city. This is an optimization problem: try to do the big things first.

- Slow down. We define the pace at which society moves. Do you /really really really/ need that stuff in 24hours door-to-door? Do you /really really/ need to commute 8 hours each day? These are human choices. The natural world is kinda reluctant about our endeavors. There's no reason why everything must be done /yesterday/ … helps with mental health issues too.

- Incentivize a culture where "moon-shot" ideas are given a chance. There are many ways we can make a big dent, but often costing billions to build. We have no problem building 250 million dollar warplanes (and buy hundreds of them), no problems building half a billion dollar coal plants. Really, no problem with billion dollar sports matches. In fact, we seem to applaud these things. But when talking about rooftop solar, heliostat installations, CO2 scrubbing, planting trees it's all "cost cost cost". We need to rethink that.

And be kind to all living things. We're in for a tough ride either way. Just try to show some compassion and help those who need it more than you do.

Or that's what I try to tell myself when I'm utterly depressed about it https://joelkuiper.eu/change

crush-n-spread3• 9 years ago

Joel, why do you live your life in a way that does not appease your true desires and concerns? You know that your current job and path is off course. Why are you sticking with it?

gorkonsine13• 9 years ago

It's silly to think we're unable to change. Nearly all of the CO2 emissions were done in just a generation.

We are unable to change. You're talking about change for the worse there (in environmental terms), not change for the better.

Show me one instance in history where a human society avoided disaster. It hasn't happened. Every human society has peaked at some point, and then collapsed. Ancient Rome didn't go from controlling most of Europe and northern Africa to being a stable power among many; it collapsed entirely. Other earlier Middle Eastern societies didn't even fare that well; all that's left of them is a few ruins at best.

Humans are pretty good at going from nothing and building up a society in a short time, but they aren't any good at dealing with problems that arise in that society over time, especially if they're compounded by environmental problems. So human societies are always "upwards or bust". What makes you think it'll be different this time?

As for all your ideas, ask yourself this: will the voting population vote for candidates who tell them they're going to enact these policies?

RcouF1uZ4gsC2• 9 years ago

A few observations:

Trying to scare people into behavior does not work very well. The Catholic Church spent centuries threatening people with eternal hell if they had extra-marital sex, and people still had extra-marital sex. Studies have shown that abstinence only sex education results in more teen pregnancies. Thomas Malthus saw an impending famine and begged people to have fewer children. People did not listen.

What works is "magic science." A solution that allows people to behave the way hey do, and we come up with a solution that just works. Birth control has resulted in a decline in teen pregnancies and population stabilization where it is available. The green revolution is able to feed people, without most people having to do anything different in how they eat.

The other thing is that people don't really think this is a true emergency. An evidence for this is the quote "What if global warming is wrong and we made the planet better?" If it is a true emergency, we should be doing stuff that make the planet worse if it is wrong. We should be pushing nuclear power - even to the the point of reducing existing safety regulations. A Chernobyl every decade is preferable to global warming. Politically, we should be willing to trade existing environmental regulation for those which reduce CO2. For example, what if we traded the Endangered species act for a carbon tax?

Third, we should be pushing for research and funding for climate adaptation at his point. The focus has been on mitigation, but it should switch to adaptation. We should be working on scaling up and testing models of carbon sequestration and Geo engineering.

EDIT: Per cbennett's comment, changed prevention to mitigation and mitigation to adaptation to be more in line with official terminology.

cbennett7• 9 years ago

Preliminary but important point: what you call prevention is typically called 'mitigation' by the UNFCCC, NASA, and other environmental orgs, while what you have called mitigation is typically 'adaptation' [1]. I know this is jargon, but if you have conversations with folks in the environmental/climate field it can in the best case provide instant rapport to at least be speaking the same language, and in the worst case, at least prevent serious mis-understandings.

>The other thing is that people don't really think this is a true emergency. An evidence for this is the quote "What if global warming is wrong and we made the planet better?" If it is a true emergency, we should be doing stuff that make the planet worse if it is wrong. We should be pushing nuclear power - even to the the point of reducing existing safety regulations. A Chernobyl every decade is preferable to global warming. Politically, we should be willing to trade existing environmental regulation for those which reduce CO2.

-Human perception of danger/emergency has, from the evolutionary perspective, been optimized for concrete, near-term events/entities, eg terrorism, explosions, enemies. On the other hand ,it has not prepared us for preparing against abstract, medium to long term adversaries, eg planetary or physics scale changes that threaten civilization, malevolent ETs, malevolent super-intelligences [AIs].. etc etc.

-Even if this weren't true and we didn't have these unfortunate cognitive bias, your argument about broad public wisdom of emergency relies upon a well-informed populace that is familiar with statistics, and the scientific methods. Unfortunately, that is not the case in almost every advanced Representative state on the planet. This broad ignorance renders the ambient public awarness point you have made quite moot.

-Finally, I see the logic behind the 'what if global warming is wrong and the planet gets better' case as analogical to Pascal's wager, or the false postive; what you forgot to mention is the false negative, which is metaphorically relatively similar to the outcome of Pascals (Hell/Earth becomes like Hell).

[1] https://climate.nasa.gov/solutions/adaptation-mitigation/

Danihan• 9 years ago

Birth control has resulted in a decline in teen pregnancies and population stabilization where it is available.

Birth control has also contributed to escalated rates of dysgenic fertility. Smarter people use it and don't pass their genes on, while those with worse future planning abilities disregard it and have more children.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289615...

sanxiyn• 9 years ago

I strongly support nuclear power, and although I kind of understand their points of view, I can't stop thinking those opposing nuclear power is not serious about climate change.

gorkonsine13• 9 years ago

I can't stop thinking those opposing nuclear power is not serious about climate change.

They mostly are I think, they're just completely ignorant and naive and unrealistic about all the solutions. The strongly anti-nuclear people (esp. those a decade ago and longer) seem to really think that everyone's going to suddenly stop driving cars and start walking and biking everywhere.

However, that said, it's getting more and more realistic to forgo nuclear power while still reducing greenhouse gas emissions, thanks to renewables, especially solar power. PV power is getting cheaper all the time, and Germany for instance produces a large fraction of their power with it despite Germany not being an especially sunny country. So it's getting more and more realistic to oppose nuclear power while still supporting policies to reduce climate change, and not be completely naive and ignorant as in the past. The main problem with solar is storage, due to its transient generation nature.

dagss• 9 years ago

I am not against nuclear, just want to point out that while this might have been true in the past, the price decline in solar means nuclear now looses on price. (Perhaps as stable base load where hydro is not already in place...but energy storage might be cheaper than nuclear too)

rwcarlsen• 9 years ago

Not disagreeing with the ineffectiveness of abstinence on unwanted pregnancy, I just would like to point out that I don't think the Catholic church was trying (directly) to address extra-marital pregnancy. Their primary/direct goal was to prevent extra-marital sex - which their teachings do seem to affect. Your comment could be read as a criticism that the "Catholic leaders were dumb - can't they see that birth control education is more effective?" - which is a wrong line of thinking because that is not the issue that the Catholic leaders were trying to address.

jessaustin2• 9 years ago

Yeah the Catholic Church has never been against pregnancy...

crsmithdev• 9 years ago

Trying to scare people into behavior does not work very well. The Catholic Church spent centuries threatening people with eternal hell if they had extra-marital sex, and people still had extra-marital sex. Studies have shown that abstinence only sex education results in more teen pregnancies. Thomas Malthus saw an impending famine and begged people to have fewer children. People did not listen.

How do you know it didn't work, unless you think the only way it could be evaluated as having "worked" is if there were zero extra-marital sex and children born out of wedlock? My sense is that this was at least partially effective in discouraging the behaviors you describe.

What works is "magic science." A solution that allows people to behave the way hey do, and we come up with a solution that just works. Birth control has resulted in a decline in teen pregnancies and population stabilization where it is available. The green revolution is able to feed people, without most people having to do anything different in how they eat.

We don't have the necessary magical science. We cannot continue behaving the way we are and expect to reach a point where we can realistically develop it, we will die or decline significantly as a species well before then. Yes, we can feed more people now, but a big part of what's driving climate change is emissions and other side effects from that. Our current behaviors are killing us.

The other thing is that people don't really think this is a true emergency. An evidence for this is the quote "What if global warming is wrong and we made the planet better?" If it is a true emergency, we should be doing stuff that make the planet worse if it is wrong.

This is a non-sequitur. If you are injured or ill and taken to an emergency room, most effective treatments will not automatically make you worse if the diagnosis is incorrect. In some extreme cases this is true, but taking your line of reasoning would mean that only in such cases would the situation be considered an emergency. We have many, many tools available to us to slow the problem at least and allow ourselves additional time to prepare and react, the problem is that we are not doing them.

My sense is that we will not really be able to address this as a species until we hit some of the disaster points described in the article. When 50k+ people in the US die several summers in a row simply from heat (expect that within a decade), then perhaps we'll take it more seriously. Unfortunately, it might legitimately be too late at that point to even adjust quickly enough.

dietdrb• 9 years ago

The Climate Leadership Council is an organization of Republican Party elders with an extremely solid proposal to immediately reduce carbon emissions through a carbon fee, which is a market-based mechanism to reflect the true cost of carbon at the source.

Link to proposal: https://www.clcouncil.org/our-plan/ Link to TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/ted_halstead_a_climate_solution_wh...

anigbrowl7• 9 years ago

I would have applauded this...a decade ago. The proposal itself is a fine thing, but heralding it as 'the right strategy for our political moment' (1) is asinine.

~1/3 of the population has bought into the idea that climate change is a hoax, and that Tea Party conservative demographic has essentially wrested control of the Republican party from the well-intentioned paternalists that used to run it. Appeals to rationality and institutional consensus are unlikely to be effective when you have a large demographic that has lost trust not just in the media but in the notion of the university (2).

While the authors of the proposal are entirely right about both the current political conditions and necessity of bold action, they are no facing an intractable political problem: generating the political capital required to make this a reality demands large-scale public buy-in, most of which will naturally come from the more liberal side of the political spectrum. But the more they do so, the more intense the opposition will be, and this is a made-to-order target for the right: taxes go up! on gas and oil, the previous bodily fluids of the our psychic economy! at the behest of global elites! You can hear the cries of 'Agenda 21!!!' already.

This is a reconstructive policy, and that's great, but it is going nowhere until our existing political crisis is resolved, which is probably 5 years at a minimum.

1. https://www.clcouncil.org/the-right-strategy-for-our-politic...

2. http://www.people-press.org/2017/07/10/sharp-partisan-divisi...

verylittlemeat• 9 years ago

To me it is the difference between actually finding a solution and deciding that failure to fix X is a moral failing.

kafkaesq2• 9 years ago

Trying to scare people into behavior does not work very well.

What works is "magic science."

Are these the only two options? What about education, radical changes in awareness (and self-awareness), a move toward genuine sense of responsibility toward others as well as to the commons -- is all of that, off the table?

And what if "magic science" fails us this time? Or is that "unthinkable"?

anigbrowl7• 9 years ago

Education takes a generation or two to work even for simple things, and what you're asking for is deep and fundamental. Surely you have noticed by now that a good quarter of the US population views all forms of public education with hostility. Think also how long it has taken for obviously sensible ideas to catch on, and then consider the much greater difficulty of inculcating abstract moral and political concepts.

Radical changes in awareness (and self-awareness) would be a fine thing, but frankly I think most people know about climate change already; some of them refuse to believe it, some of them would just prefer not to believe it, and some of them just don't care. The more public service announcements you make, the more they'll be denounced as satanic/communist/whatever propaganda.

Honestly, if you really want an outbreak of radical self-awareness, cross your fingers, hire every young organic chemist you can find, and start producing industrial quantities of LSD. That is not a facetious suggestion; psychedelics yield unpredictable but powerful changes in consciousness and can have a lasting impact on perception and behavior precisely because they subvert standard epistemological filters.

A move toward genuine sense of responsibility toward others is something that often emerges out of the shared experience of disaster. Just as you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink, you can lead people towards enlightenment but you can't make them think. Experience is the great teacher. Since we'd obviously rather not use disaster as our classroom, it's incumbent on us to create experiences that are sufficiently meaningful to alter behavior.

npsimons2• 9 years ago

The green revolution is able to feed people, without most people having to do anything different in how they eat.

I feel Norman Borlaug (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug) is worth mentioning. As Penn Jillette put it, he's probably saved billions of lives.

We need more Norman Borlaugs, and they need more recognition. This I believe because I agree with you: sure, we could still fix things, but we're not going to. So we better start coming up with ways to handle this. Think of it like creating a mail alias for someone who keeps misspelling an email address. It's a technological solution to a people problem that you can't fix (not easily), only on a much, much bigger scale. We hear people all the time here ask "how can I change the world through X?" or "what should I do with my life?" The answer is simple, but not easy: apply yourself to fixing this mess we've gotten ourself into, because if you don't, your children (or even you) will suffer the consequences.

rhapsodic4• 9 years ago

The other thing is that people don't really think this is a true emergency.

(Raises hand.)

Get back to me when Al Gore, Leo DiCaprio, and a thousand other wealthy frauds who lecture me about my SUV swear off flying on private jets.

When the people who keep telling me AGW is an emergency actually start acting like it's an emergency, I might take them seriously.

aoeusnth12• 9 years ago

This is not an intellectually honest argument. Did it ever occur to you that Al Gore and Leo DiCaprio might be rationally self-interested agents who don't care about the damage they cause to others by flying private jets? They talk about global warming because it gains them social status - that fact alone does not tell you whether global warming is real or not. You are taking their two-faced behavior as evidence against global warming, when it is not evidence.

stevebmark3• 9 years ago

When stating facts is criticized as fear mongering by "intellectuals," you know the world is irreversibly fucked

dustinmoris• 9 years ago

Average person's priorities:

I > My family > My home > My life convenience > My country > Other human beings > Planet Earth.

This is what the average person expects from other people:

Planet Earth > Other human beings > Their country > their family > them

And you wonder why we fail to combat climate change?

Brakenshire3• 9 years ago

Because a lot of people seem to think that doing the best for themselves will end up as the best thing for society, or for the planet. Adam Smith dealt with this from the start, there is an amazing moral alchemy in capitalism which allows for improvements in your own life to drive improvements in society, but there are caveats and limits. And ideologues do not like dealing with that kind of nuance.

ajmurmann2• 9 years ago

Unfortunately the impact you have on any of these is in the same order as you list the priorities. That's making it so that if you prioritize planet earth over your family the only change you'll likely see is your family being less well off. That practically guaranteed inaction. That's why we need to enforce good behavior via laws not only on a national but on a global level. It's mindboggling to me that climate agreements are entirely voluntary.

m777z• 9 years ago

I wish articles like this that are backed up by tons of research, interviews, etc. would cite sources inline (in a manner similar to Wikipedia). I want to at least skim some of the background research, but I'm reducing to copying and pasting sections of this article into Google.

golergka2• 9 years ago

Why is a world war, swiftly reducing populations and industrial output, is never considered among the solutions?

While horrifying, it is still better than total extinction.

mac010217• 9 years ago

It's not better than total extinction for those who die in the war.

Also, how do you know it is never considered among the solutions?

golergka2• 9 years ago

It's not better than total extinction for those who die in the war.

But it's better totally.

Also, how do you know it is never considered among the solutions?

Never seen it discussed.

stevebmark3• 9 years ago

Well, it worked. I'm worried, and I'm turning off some electronics I normally leave on.

Daishiman4• 9 years ago

Are you going to stop eating meat?

sluggg3• 9 years ago

is there a way to significantly cut down on my carbon footprint by only eating certain animals?

stevebmark3• 9 years ago

Cows are the only animals that can turn indigestible (for human) grasslands, and deserts, into rich, plant diverse carbon sinks that produce food for humans.

state_machine• 9 years ago

I did not realize the physiological effects would be as severe:

The fraction of carbon dioxide is growing: It just crossed 400 parts per million, and high-end estimates extrapolating from current trends suggest it will hit 1,000 ppm by 2100. At that concentration, compared to the air we breathe now, human cognitive ability declines by 21 percent.

dmm2• 9 years ago

My father certifies hospital gas systems in the US. He's measured CO2 levels in urban areas around 498ppm. Hospital air, the air piped to patients, has a limit of 500ppm. Soon hospitals will have to put CO2 scrubbers on their air supplies just like astronauts.

Maybe head mounted CO2 scrubbers will become fashion accessories for the 1%.

gorkonsine13• 9 years ago

How is CO2 a problem in breathable air? To humans, it's a harmless and inert gas, just like nitrogen. The real problem is too little O2, which humans require for respiration. Obviously, too much CO2 could displace O2 and reduce O2 levels, but it's not the CO2 that's an actual problem (i.e., if the CO2 displaced only N2, and O2 levels stayed the same, you wouldn't have a problem).

So having a CO2 scrubber doesn't seem to make any sense to me, you need something that keeps the O2 levels up. That may be a CO2 scrubber (pulling the carbon atom off the CO2), or it may be more feasible to just carry an oxygen bottle as many elderly people do today. I suspect the latter is the case; if it were feasible to have a portable CO2 scrubber to improve your O2 levels, they would have done it already for all these people.

_rpd2• 9 years ago

This level of impairment conflicts with data from military studies, for example ...

CO2 at 40,000 ppm for 2 weeks did not affect performance on multiple tests of cognitive function in physically fit young airmen

https://www.nap.edu/read/11170/chapter/5#54

but it is something certainly worth further investigation.

antisthenes• 9 years ago

Twenty-four volunteers, ages 18-23, were selected for their motivation and their excellent health.

If only we were all 18-23 years old in excellent health. The amount of abuse sustained and the speed of recovery my 20 year old self could sustain compared to my 30 year old self is truly astonishing.

When you're young, your body can compensate in a myriad ways you aren't even thinking about, that obviously weren't measured in the study.

It's a good start but not really relevant to the possible scenarios.

1. Dubious sample selection (perfect health, probably above average cognitive ability as well)

2. High levels/short term exposure rather than moderate levels & long term exposure (1+ year)

3. Tests were likely too simple and did not require a high level of abstraction/cognition in the first place.

I know sample n=1, but I've experienced increased anxiety and lower energy levels at ppms as low as 2000-3000, which you can easily encounter in a poorly ventilated room.

e12e• 9 years ago

But seems to be in line with NASA findings:

https://thinkprogress.org/its-taking-less-co2-than-expected-...

Also, the general safety limit for co2 is around 5000 ppm for up to 8 hours - higher than that, and headaches and other effects will manifest.

I'm quite surprised that "no effect" could be seen at 40k ppm - I wonder if there were some limits to the cognitive tests (like the difference between proving a difficult mathematical theorem vs doing some Calculus).

kaybe• 9 years ago

Air indoors (and I'm cars!) routinely reaches these levels, easily.

yourapostasy2• 9 years ago

This is a controversial finding, and not well-accepted nor even abided by where it is a literal life and death matter, like in nuclear submarines [1] or the ISS. Either the LLNL experiment is somehow flawed, or systems designs that crew members depend upon for their lives for months at a time without any pause for the past few decades are poorly designed. By Occam's Razor, I'd rather look at the relatively simpler experiment first before I looked at these complex life support systems, and if anyone is to pursue the LLNL study further, they probably should start there. I'm willing to buy the hypothesis there are cognitive differences, but they would have to adequately explain what has been going on in submarines and the ISS that we missed earlier.

[1] https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/17/claim-co2-makes-you-s...

sosodaft2• 9 years ago

What we really need is WWII-style, society-wide action on this count--remember the days of Meatless Mondays, saving your cans to make bullets, mailing your binoculars to the Navy. Even if it's confined to the parts of society that actually believe global warming is a serious threat, making pro-climate living a social norm could have a tremendous effect.

erikpukinskis2• 9 years ago

How about we just take the step and say that eating beef, in any circumstance, is morally wrong? Even if you can find some beef that you think is ecologically responsible, your are promoting the practice which is perhaps most central to global warming, after driving a large gasoline car.

sluggg3• 9 years ago

The article worked... I am alarmed.

Is there anything I can do with software that would make a difference? Currently, the only things that are coming to mind are simple carbon footprint calculators or infographics/visualization of data, which imo would not be that impactful. I would love to hear ideas

mac010217• 9 years ago

Earn as much money as you possibly can and donate it all to lobbying groups to put a price on GHG emissions or to preserve the amazon rainforest.

gasbag2• 9 years ago

Bret Victor has a page on his site about this.[0] The first hit when I searched for "visualization" was:

"The core technologies in energy storage tend to be physics-based, but software plays essential roles in the form of design tools, simulation tools, and control systems. My favorite example is the inexplicably gorgeous Materials Project, a database and visualization tool for material properties, funded by the Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Program to help invent better batteries."

It's a lengthy page with lots of good ideas, and seeds that might germinate more ideas of your own.

[0]http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/

sluggg3• 9 years ago

I will give it a read, thanks so much!

good_vibes• 9 years ago

Wish for the best, prepare for the worst.

I've grappled with this for the last 7 years. I wanted to build a platform to address this problem but I eventually realized self-interest is the strongest force in the world and that most people are not ready to consider that they may be part of the problem AND own up to it enough to change their day-to-day lifestyle. It's much easier to point a finger at world leaders, corporations, or the developing world's use of coal.

I've finally let go of eating meat. I don't buy things unless I need them and I use them until they are no longer usable. My hobbies are exploring the outdoors, improving my fitness/meditation routine each day, and creating brands, experiences, and campaigns.

I am saving money for a cabin in the Rockies and a camper van to explore all of North America. I am building an agency to work remotely and accept clients that I feel I can help in a substantial way. I've given my ambitions of 'saving the world' or being a part of the world of SV or NYC.

AndrewKemendo6• 9 years ago

the climate window that has allowed for human life is very narrow, even by the standards of planetary history

I remember when I was little, reading the Carl Sagan Cosmos book. It was based on the TV show, and had this really interesting section where it had pictures of what will happen on earth as the sun expands to a Red Giant [1].

That really stuck with me and ever since, it's clear to me that we humans live in a temporary golden period for the possibility of our form of life. Whether we burn ourselves out or wait for the environment to do it, the end result in a billion years is that there aren't humans in our form around anymore.

So whenever climate action comes up I ask: What is the end state that you are seeking? Is the goal to permanently solidify an undefined homeostasis? For what group? Are you trying to make northern Africa green again?

Again though, seems to be in vain cause it's all going to burn up in a few million years anyway. Climate action isn't TRULY long term thinking.

We have a tiny window that we can possibly engineer ourselves into a new form of intelligence. Lets work on that so that these biological issues, and our fate as a (transitional) species aren't issues anymore.

[1]http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/398013/24076923/138732...

mac010217• 9 years ago

Ok. Let's start by ensuring that our children and grandchildren have a livable environment in which to perform that work.

AndrewKemendo6• 9 years ago

Agreed. The one caveat I would make is in a case where something accelerated singularity tech, but was worse for warming/volatility, I would do the former.

mfoy_• 9 years ago

Well, I'd argue it's all about buying time. Obviously nothing lasts forever, but that's no reason to throw the baby out with the bath-water.

If we can buy our species another couple centuries on this planet, we can probably start looking at leaving. But if we continue on this accelerated doomsday course we won't have time to re-imagine the "form" of our species.

AndrewKemendo6• 9 years ago

Also agree. I think we can practically do things that make sense economically, as well as environmentally that are no brainers like transitioning to renewable resources, solar, geo etc...

The challenge is the lifestyle changes that transitioning economies expect in terms of total household energy expenditures. I think the biggest thing is helping developing and transitioning economies continue to raise their standard of living but through renewable resources, and not just piling more coal onto the fire.

jerrylives• 9 years ago

We have a tiny window that we can possibly engineer ourselves into a new form of intelligence. Lets work on that so that these biological issues, and our fate as a (transitional) species aren't issues anymore.

What about the entropic heat death of the universe? Seems to be in vain cause its all gonna settle to an equilibrium of nothingness. Transhuman action isn't TRULY long term thinking

AndrewKemendo6• 9 years ago

You joke but I struggle with that existential question all the time.

I have a few silly theories about it, but it's a real philosophical problem.

Houshalter• 9 years ago

Sometimes a big enough difference in quantity is a difference in quality. The difference between Earth surviving a 100 years or a billion is pretty significant. I can't even imagine how large a billion years is - it's just a mind bogglingly huge number. But my grand children will be around in a century - I might even be if medical technology improves or cryonics works. So it would be nice if the Earth is still in a nice state by then.

AndrewKemendo6• 9 years ago

Yes well, the earth isn't going to be uniformly uninhabitable in anything like the near future.

yongjik• 9 years ago

So whenever climate action comes up I ask: What is the end state that you are seeking? Is the goal to permanently solidify an undefined homeostasis? For what group? Are you trying to make northern Africa green again?

That's all philosophical and nice, but it's just like asking everyone in the lower Mississippi basin "So what is the end game here? The river has changed its courses throughout geological history. Are we trying to lock it up in an artificial stasis?" And we could save billions of dollars spent on trying to artificially keep the river from flooding half of Arkansas.

Somehow I don't think they would appreciate my wisdom.

(In fact, it's actually worse; at least we don't have a "water industry" increasing the flow of the Mississippi every year and saying "But water is essential for life!")

AndrewKemendo6• 9 years ago

I grew up in Houston and for part of my life, we lived in a flood plane. From 2001-2008 our house flooded three times during Alison, Rita, and Ike. I moved out in 2002. I told my mom, maybe at a certain point you take the hint and move. So she did in 2010 right before the county expanded the Bayou system to that area.

So yea, migration should be considered a standard part of life.

Animats• 9 years ago

Right now, some very hot areas are becoming uninhabitable, and low-lying coastal areas are being flooded. In the US, this has already hit a few areas hard, such as Phoenix AZ [1] and Miami FL.[2]

Phoenix is breaking heat records again this week. The number of days of extreme heat each summer keeps increasing. Phoenix also has limited water sources; it's a city in a desert, after all.

Miami now floods regularly. Levees and berms don't help much; the ground is too porous. Pumping helps; at least a dozen huge pumps have been installed, with many more to come. This is a stopgap measure, the mayor of Miami admits.

[1] http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-phoenix-climate-adapt-20... [2] http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170403-miamis-fight-agains...

jessaustin2• 9 years ago

Commentary from a noted scientist:

https://www.facebook.com/MichaelMannScientist/posts/14705390...

kerbalspacepro• 9 years ago

He quibbles a single data point and says, "Don't panic."

The Uninhabitable Earth

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