The world is losing the war against climate change

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/08/02/the-world-is-losing-the-war-against-climate-change

by sethbannon • 8 years ago

241 308 8 years ago

317070• 8 years ago

Legitimate question: will there be a point where we speak about this war in the past tense, as in `The world lost the war against climate change'? How do we determine that turning point?

WhompingWindows6• 8 years ago

There was an article in the NYTimes stating that we have already lost the war, but since climate changes in a continuous and highly complex fashion, I personally doubt there'll be an agreed-upon point where things changed from not lost -> lost.

imgabe• 8 years ago

Based on the wars on drugs and terror: no.

ebbv• 8 years ago

Not exactly the same because at some point climate change will make the planet uninhabitable.

pas3• 8 years ago

History is written by the victors.

However, we already lost it - in a very real sense - because we failed to convince enough humans that it's important, that they ought to demand tougher legislation, policies, treaties, mandates, cleaner air, better waste management, more energy efficiency, instant order of nuclear and renewable plants to phase out CO2 producing energy sources as soon as possible, etc.

We should be building 20km long hydro T-s, electrifying more and more railways, capturing as much emission as we can (chemical plants, big freighter ships, etc.)

Instead we are building walls on borders, blabbering about secession, killing/jailing/maiming/kidnapping/torturing each other in an organized fashion all around the planet.

We're simply late to efficiently manage a lot of things.

But humanity is very likely to survive, so in that sense as long as someone can ask that question we don't have to use past tense.

btrettel6• 8 years ago

I wonder if future generations will think people were even serious about solving the problem. In this respect the war was lost long ago.

The vast majority of people who believe climate change will have large negative consequences make no major changes to their lifestyles. As someone who rides bike for transportation largely to save money and stay in shape (I think climate change is a lost cause), the environmental crowd seems to think I am doing something saint-like. But it really isn't anywhere near as difficult as they believe. They rarely adopt cycling to work, and at least part of the reason why seems to me that their environmentalism is not entirely sincere. This is speculation, but I think most people stop at signalling that climate change is bad. They rarely take effective action.

eropple• 8 years ago

A large part of it is that it is a collective action problem. If you want to talk about "effective action"? You're talking about shutting down coal plants, not going after the man or woman on the street. A person needing a car to get to work is, both in real and proportional terms, causing overwhelmingly less damage to the environment than industrial-scale polluters. If everybody who could switch to a bike instead of a car (which is fewer people, at least in America, than you might realize), you would see a blip on the graph.

Calling into question the sincerity of people concerned about climate change but also concerned about actually getting to work on time and not stinking and getting fired because their bosses don't care is just some nasty, uncharitable stuff. And it's also counterproductive. It's the "but Al Gore flies in jets!" thing all over again, discrediting what state actors need to be doing because of the actions of private citizens. Don't do that. It's bad for you and bad for us.

curuinor• 8 years ago

I drive about 50x less than most people, but this is entirely 100% a collective action problem. There are many problems government can't solve, but this is a problem only government can solve.

sykhic6• 8 years ago

The uncomfortable reality is that 7 billion people can’t all live like Americans (or Europeans). Extracting the resources necessary for everyone to live like Americans would be very bad for the environment. The effective action is to greatly reduce the number of births worldwide. It seems to me all other options are not effective.

briandear• 8 years ago

...seems to me that their environmentalism is not entirely sincere.

That's my problem with the entire political side of climate and environmentalism. The simple fact that Al Gore flies in a Learjet while simultaneously claiming the "Earth has a fever." Makes it impossible for me to take that movement seriously. Even if he buys "carbon credits" -- that carbon he's generating is still being generated. You can't dump mercury in a river and then pay a bunch of money and pretend mercury wasn't dumped in a river.

The Paris Climate talks -- Anyone have a look at the tarmac at Le Bourget? Delegations of essentially anonymous officials arriving via private jets and being shuttled around by private cars while suggesting that I should make my house hotter by turning up the air conditioner temperature or I should pay more to take my kids to school each morning. And they're flying private? They're actually having an in-person meeting at all? If the threat were so dire, then why not video conference? Or at the very least fly commercial and take public transit.

Even Bill and Hilary have flown commercial -- so arguments about the feasibility of that aren't very valid. Certainly random environmental officials where nobody even knows their names, let alone faces aren't subject to any special security requirements that would necessitate private jets. They do it because they see themselves as more important than those that they would regulate. It's Animal Farm where some animals are more equal than others.

To be clear, I'm not debating any particular scientific position -- I'm just suggesting that many people (like me) have a hard time reconciling how "dire" our situation is when the supposed "experts" aren't making any changes to their own lifestyle unless it's politically expedient. Personally, I try to live a low-impact lifestyle when possible. I don't waste water, I use programmable thermostats, I reuse when possible and I don't drive if it's easy to take public transit or company shuttles. However, my adherence to a reasonably green lifestyle is offset 1000 fold when some factory in China dumps benzene in the water or some Delhi trucker fills the air with dense smoke while idling in traffic for hours.

It might seem to an skeptical observer that the anti-carbon political movement might be more about controlling/profiting from/reallocating the means of production more than helping the actual environment. The implication that people on the far left care more about the environment seems to be good marketing -- people on the far left seem to care more about far left economics than the environment -- the environment is just good populist toast upon which to serve a marmalade of collectivist economic policy.

It seems that most normal people, right and left, care about the environment. For me though (on the libertarian side of the aisle,) when I hear stuff like this, from former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer:

"One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole," said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.

When I hear stuff like that, then that discredits a lot of the climate alarmism in my mind -- despite the fact that I actually do care deeply about the environment.

gascan4• 8 years ago

IMO phasing out automobiles as the primary form of transit is a herculean battle the environmental groups probably don't feel like they have a prayer of winning. I bike & bus to work, but speaking on a grand scale cars prey on our weakness for comfort & convenience, and the cities we live in are designed to accommodate cars, not bicycles.

I do get frustrated with some enviro groups though, currently the ones who want to replace nuclear plants with natural gas plants.

Tade03• 8 years ago

Look up "wet bulb temperature".

ELI5: if the temperature of a wet thermometer(which would normally be colder due to evaporation) in a given place goes over around 31C this area becomes uninhabitable for almost all mammals.

Burning all the known fossil fuels would be enough to make it so for some places on earth, but the big unknown is what about the other sources of GHG's like thawing permafrost or clathrates lying under the sea?

SamUK963• 8 years ago

Hard to say. I don't think there will be a well-defined turning point. The thing is, the climate changes on long scales, and humans only pay attention to the immediate details, like children analyzing the stock market. The climate will get _gradually_ worse, and people will be forced to migrate north where the environment is more livable. This is obviously what is happening now, and isn't fully sustainable. A little patch of green (Europe) can't feed the world, in slightly over-the-top terms.

However, I will say this. If anyone has ever been in a large storm, or a drought, you'll be shockingly aware at how quickly a small announcement about "sold-out water" or "store stock issues" turns into absolute, utter, pure, _pandemonium_. Once _that_ happens often enough, I think people will begin to admit that we lost _something_, for sure.

To answer your question though, it's generally believed that it will be a gradually-growing sense of despair and dread, and a growing struggle. Migration into the northern hemisphere as it slowly becomes the last livable place on Earth. Ever played musical chairs in the later stages of the game? Yeah.

Honestly, it's remarkably similar to the mechanics behind the French Revolution, but instead of just rich vs poor, it's some kind of crazy triadic chaos-war between rich, poor, and nature, all made more ironic that nukes have a triadic motif.

mmphosis• 8 years ago

War is in the past. The war on drugs. The war on whatever. We are not waging war. War doesn't work. War is what has exacerbated the problem. We needn't dwell on the past but maybe learn from it.

I agree that wording is important. Talking about climate changes is important. We need an effort, perhaps greater than the war effort in world war 2 to make the changes necessary because whether we do nothing or make needed changes for the better, change is coming. There is no turning point. The Great Turning is a shift from the Industrial Growth Society to a life-sustaining civilization.

mattygh3• 8 years ago

It's all about changing the goalposts. We have probably lost the war against 1.5 deg C climate change, as even if we were to freeze emissions now, I believe we would hit that (need fact check on that). We are currently losing the war against 2 deg C climate change. The next war is against 3 or 4 deg C climate change. All of these milestones have severe consequences more significant than the last, so all are worth fighting.

aurailious2• 8 years ago

We have almost certainly already lost. The challenge now is to adapt to the change. Paris was not about bringing global temp change to 0C, just limiting it to 2C.

Fortunately planet Earth won't be bothered by us too much. The cycles of ice ages we are in will "correct" most anything we do. The loss of biodiversity will probably be our only legacy.

bmarkovic4• 8 years ago

Biodiversity will recover on a planetary timescale. Our civilization will probably be lost tho.

jandrese2• 8 years ago

We've lost the war when everyone is dead.

rabidrat• 8 years ago

I say we've lost the war when global civilization is over. People can survive Mad Max style but that's a colossal failure in my book.

carry_bit5• 8 years ago

When we accept the change instead of fight to prevent/reverse it.

angersock• 8 years ago

We have nuclear power, but people are bad at evaluating risks, so here we are.

ythn• 8 years ago

people are bad at evaluating risks

People are easily emotionally manipulated. Show some pictures of cancer or disfigured babies and you can get everyone to rail against nuclear. Media does it all the time to skew our priorities. Think medical malpractice and healthcare is a big source of death in the US? Think again, bump stocks and crappy 3d printed plastic guns are the types of killers you should be worried about according to the media. Rinse and repeat.

213• 8 years ago

We were told that Fukushima will NEVER happen. So yeah, some people are very bad at evaluating risks.

losvedir• 8 years ago

Well, what happened? Last I heard the outcome is some land lost, no immediate deaths, and about 100 deaths due to cancer over the next 50 years. A tragedy, but not apocalyptic. (And minuscule compared to the deaths and destruction from the earthquake/tsunami itself.)

carry_bit5• 8 years ago

We've had a working reactor design that doesn't suffer from Fukushima's failure mode for over 20 years. Ironically, public opposition has made nuclear less safe than it would've been.

okket• 8 years ago

I don't know if the "war against" theme fits here. There is no enemy but ourselves.

bhhaskin• 8 years ago

I agree with you, as it also implies that we can shift the blame one else.

the_cat_kittles2• 8 years ago

well, the enemy is clearly those of us who decided its a hoax, or that it doesn't matter.

strainer• 8 years ago

Agreed, describing essential struggles and challenges as wars, promotes the ruthless traumatic destructiveness which actual war necessitates. The idea of making war should be repulsive, sadly it is freely glorified and normalised - and made.

aurailious2• 8 years ago

How many times have we fought wars not against ourselves?

codeafin• 8 years ago

The war is between those who wish to act on it, and those who wish to ignore it.

rcMgD2BwE72F4• 8 years ago

What other title would you give it instead, then?

moduspol• 8 years ago

Framing it as binary serves only political ends.

At best, you could frame it as "people willing to act sufficiently to meaningfully combat global warming" and "everyone else," but the former group is far smaller than "those who wish to act on it."

Put plainly: It will take far more dramatic action than most climate alarmists advocate to even have a measurable impact on (let alone solve) global warming. The opposing side isn't just "those who ignore it," it's most people who rationally evaluate policy claiming to be capable of a significant effect.

Sir_Cmpwn• 8 years ago

I dunno, painting oil execs as subversive national security threats and investing military-level economic resources into fighting a "war" on climate change just might work...

charlchi• 8 years ago

Where do I sign up?

PunchTornado• 8 years ago

is there a proof somewhere that these wild fires are linked to climate change?

For example the really bad one in Greece happened because someone decided to burn some wood.

(I'm convinced that climate change is real and we're responsible)

artimaeis• 8 years ago

I'll see if I can get some citations later -- but the general idea of wildfires and climate change is that climate change has caused more intense periods of drought in ares that haven't experienced those sorts of conditions before.

As such - when wildfires start (regardless of origin of the fire), they tend to spread more rapidly and more intensely.

btrettel6• 8 years ago

There is no conclusive proof. Likely climate change is a factor, but forest management practices are as well. I can recall reading that not allowing forest fires to occur in the past can lead to an increase in dead plant matter on the ground, which makes future forest fires worse.

Arcten• 8 years ago

I haven't found an academic source for this, but the suggestion is that even though triggers for fires may be unrelated, the scope and intensity of the fires are intensified due to the effects of climate change. This article discusses some of this background https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/11/science/climate-change-fo...

fabricexpert• 8 years ago

Trying to link individual, recent news events to climate change is generally a bad idea. You're taking a long term term trend (climate change) and comparing it with short term extreme events - there may or may not be a direct link, it's hard to say.

This makes it easy for climate change deniers to give cherrypicked examples of outliers that tune to emotional responses, rather than factual evidence.

It's better to look at overall trends over time to see the impact of climate change, e.g. are we getting more of the extreme weather scenarios? Yes. Are temperatures globally going up? Yes. Are sea levels rising? Yes. Are the polar ice caps melting? Yes. etc.

rc_bhg• 8 years ago

It will be 20 years before we have hard scientific proof. You know full well that this kind of data is slow to gather and study and draw conclusions from it.

mattygh3• 8 years ago

Good analogy - which one of Barry Bonds' 73 home runs in 2001 were because he was on steroids? Hard to pinpoint any single one, but he wouldn't have hit 73 if not for being steroid-enhanced.

jillesvangurp• 8 years ago

I think we're past focusing on proof. We need to focus on probabilities and insuring ourselves against possible or likely outcomes.

Reality check, we have a sample size of 1. So, if we get it wrong, it's game over and we mess up our planet for centuries or millennia. The question is how comfortable we are with being utterly wrong on that gamble. For me the answer is, pretty damn uncomfortable.

Even a 1 % gamble on getting this stuff wrong has a pretty significant chance of backfiring on us. Russian roulette has only a slightly worse probability. And to be fair, our odds might actually be considerably better putting the proverbial gun to your head considering what some scientists are saying. Are they 20% right 50% right or 80% right? I don't know. Is the water going to rise 1 m by 2060, by 2100, or later? I don't know. I do know that would be highly annoying for a lot of people and it would be awfully nice to live in a place that has dikes or is well above sea level by then.

I happen to believe it is probably ballpark closer to 95-99% but I'd argue even a 1% chance that they are not completely wrong about this should be more than enough motivation to do something about it on the off chance it is needed.

The number doesn't actually matter that much. What matters is acknowledging it is not 0%. We have a non zero, potentially very large chance that we are actively killing this planet and everything on it in either the next decades or centuries. That's too big of chance to just go "Meh, lets wait and see". As soon as you acknowledge that, opposing any action that mitigates that risk becomes madness.

konschubert• 8 years ago

Do we know what will happen if we keep burning all fossil we can find, at today's rate?

andy_ppp• 8 years ago

Sort of...

https://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/21/opinions/sutter-6-degrees...

I worry that all the sink holes appearing in Russia are massive methane deposits which are probably are not factored into estimates. It being this hot in Europe and specifically the UK for this long is insane.

chosenbreed7• 8 years ago

Yep. That could be a bit of a problem. The land mass affected appears to be huge...

WhompingWindows6• 8 years ago

If you look at global power sector emissions from 1998 to 2018, you'll see that while we have dramatically improved upon the energy intensity (energy/capita) and even are making improvements on carbon intensity (carbon/capita), but the sad reality is this: we are still using around 35% coal power in 2018, the same as we did in 1998.

And the power sector is the easiest sector to decarbonize, by the way. If you look at electric vehicles, even if we had the most rapid, insane ramp-up that's beyond even Elon's crazy predictions, we'd still have massive fossil fuel use for non vehicle uses of petroleum for chemical industries, airplanes, plastic production, and for the numerous numbers of legacy cars that will be leftover that are not EV.

We need massive innovation across all our uses of fossil fuel. We can not rest on our laurels, saying PV and wind are so cheap now. They are still around 4% of total energy consumption, and when you factor in the decline of nuclear and relative decline of hydropower in the ever-increasing industrial energy base, we see that fossil fuels are basically the same % of our energy mix as they were before 2000.

For an energy realist, I recommend checking out Vaclav Smil, who has long been predicting 21st century as the century of natural gas, and who has been skeptical of renewables taking over instantly. It will take us until the 22nd century to truly decarbonize, and by then the seas will have risen over Miami and Shanghai on a regular basis.

It's a truly scary future. Get innovating, in your personal lives and in your professional careers, everyone!

the_cat_kittles2• 8 years ago

i dont understand. you completely omit laws in your suggested solution. we need to pass laws that prevent businesses from fucking everything up worse than they already have. you can innovate all you want, but i think you should also not elect people who are fucking STUPID about climate change.

chosenbreed7• 8 years ago

but i think you should also not elect people who are fucking STUPID about climate change.

Sure...but that would require getting enough people who are not "fucking STUPID about climate" to vote appropriately :-)

toomuchtodo• 8 years ago

This is hard. Like, really hard. It definitely needs to be done, but it takes tens, hundreds really, of millions of dollars and a vast network of candidates who can run for office and win (US-specific outlook).

Whereas driving coal and natural gas out of the generation mix is "as easy" as getting PPAs signed with electrical consumers and getting solar and wind installed as fast as possible. You don't need to convince people in this case, as the actors (large corporations and utilities) are economically rational (cheap renewables->huge cost savings->yes please kthx).

More of this is needed, for example: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-06/negative-...

Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid
Wind and solar farms are glutting networks more frequently, prompting a market signal for coal plants to shut off

nutjob2• 8 years ago

Great theory, but have you tried to get a climate change law through Congress lately?

People vote for people who reflect their views, or at least freely, for whoever they want, so ultimately responsibility rests with the voters for the quality of government.

CamTin• 8 years ago

Laws are a reasonable (thought still incredibly difficult) solution in the parts of the planet that have the rule of law. Large parts don't, and we need different solutions in those places because this is a global problem.

As an example, see this report about cheating on an international agreement about CFCs (https://www.nrdc.org/experts/david-doniger/chilling-news-spo... which) were supposed to have been phased out worldwide by 2007.

Unfortunately, we don't have the international governance in place to attack this problem, and we might not until its too late. Still, you go to war with the army you have, and this is the one we've got.

Woberto2• 8 years ago

Based on the current political climate, this kind of action also seems to be a ways off. While a clean revolution in laws like that of the 1970s would do much to bring about change, it will be a while before things are bad enough for enough people to care and push for these laws. In a capitalist society, I think money talks more and it talks faster. I think op is right that innovative solutions that are cheap will do more to bring about change.

steego5• 8 years ago

I don't understand. You completely omit laws and specific policy suggestions in your criticism. I'd love to see you advance this discussion by adding something to it.

What laws and policies would you suggest? If you don't feel like you can articulate your position well, do you have any books/articles you recommend we read?

ebikelaw2• 8 years ago

Is petroleum for chemistry and plastics a GHG source? It seems like the carbon involved stays out of the atmosphere.

Woberto2• 8 years ago

"Plastics emit GHG as they degrade": https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/plastics-emit-gre...

carry_bit5• 8 years ago

Is chemical/plastic production really a source of emissions? After all, oil is used in the production of plastic because plastic has a bunch of carbon in it.

newswriter99• 8 years ago

In the US plastic is produced via cracking natural gas into ethane. In Europe and China they still use crude oil and crack it into naptha, but that's starting to decrease as they turn to cheaper natgas.

Reason0773• 8 years ago

Yes, it is. The chain of industrial processes that converts oil to plastics are energy intensive, and the chemical processes involved often have direct emissions as well. Not to mention the emissions from extracting, refining, and transporting the oil in the first place.

blattimwind• 8 years ago

Plastics reactors themselves don't really do much (if tuned properly, most aren't because it's cheaper), the emissions are mostly from the refinery processes before it. You can't make plastics from raw oil.

Obviously running these still requires a lot of power for heating, cooling and so on. Large-scale extruders for producing the plastic pellets everyone uses for e.g. injection moulding require a fair bit of electricity as well (think dozens of MW per screw pair / channel).

radicalbyte4• 8 years ago

I've been looking into carbon capture recently because it's going to be vital to slowing down the warming (and buying us another 50 years for the transition).

What surprised me is that I can cover double my two-car-owning European family's carbon footprint via planting trees in the UK at an annual cost of around $400. It'll cost half that to do the same in a developing country.

We need a global carbon tax and we need it now. Heck, even a carbon tax in the EU / US applied to local emissions and, importantly, to imported goods would go a long way to solving the problem.

We can't just sleepwalk into oblivion, can we?

logikblok• 8 years ago

Hi are you using any specific UK service to plant trees please?

SamUK963• 8 years ago

sleepwalk into oblivion

Tell that to the Egyptians, Romans, Easter-Islanders (debated now, actually), and the countless other human civilisations who didn't really appreciate their impending demise before it was too late. Hell, the Romans hired essentially barbarians (so mercenaries, basically) to defend the northern territories against...you guessed it, barbarians.

Just because the bulk of the harmful effects that humans contribute to begin at 50+ years, conveniently after humans have to live through it. Humans still create children to suffer through the hell they created though, how peculiar.

philbarr2• 8 years ago

Could you point us to any good resources you've come across?

hodgesrm5• 8 years ago

Can you post information about this, especially the math? According to US stats I've seen it requires an acre of growing forest to offset 100 US gallons of gas per year.[0] We have a long commute (which I'm working on cutting) so we need about 8 acres to offset fully.

[0] https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc...

Edit: added missing units.

mavhc• 8 years ago

Exactly, it's stupidly cheap, "so you destroyed the world because you couldn't be bothered to pay 5% extra for clean energy? Thanks Grandpa"

gascan4• 8 years ago

Hell, considering the UK is heavily deforested, probably a lot of people who would appreciate those new trees too.

swebs2• 8 years ago

What surprised me is that I can cover double my two-car-owning European family's carbon footprint via planting trees in the UK at an annual cost of around $400. It'll cost half that to do the same in a developing country.

Then what happens when the trees are fully grown? Processing them for industry would just reintroduce the carbon back into the environment. Letting them stay in the forest is nice, but you would quickly run out of room. There needs to be some sort of way to bury the biomass in order to put that carbon out of the atmosphere for good.

vowelless5• 8 years ago

It's disappointing to me that planting trees is the best we can come up with. One would hope that we could work on a 10x, technological solution.

sjwright3• 8 years ago

But it's not just planting the tree, right? It's taking land that currently has no tree, reserving it for the tree, and guaranteeing that the land & tree will remain intact for a nominal period of time, possibly indefinitely?

Trees are cheap. Fertile tree-growing land not currently used for trees: not so much.

gandreani2• 8 years ago

I was curious about this and wanted to share some quick calculations on how viable this is:

A tree can absorb as much as 48 lbs of CO2 per year [1]. This is pretty vague cause this can vary by tree age and size, but let's use this arbitrary number

In 2014 the United States generated 6,870 million metric tonnes of CO2 [2]. 48 lbs is about 0.021 metric tonnes [3]. So...

    6,870,000,000 / .021 = 327,142,857,142.85

327 trillion trees!! The population in the US on 2014 was roughly 317 million people [4]. This means for each person we would have to plant

  6870 / 317 / .021 = 1,031.99 trees

Just north of 1000 trees. That's 1k additional trees that need to be planted just to offset our CO2. Crazy

    [1] https://projects.ncsu.edu/project/treesofstrength/treefact.htm
    [2] https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions
    [3] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=48+lbs+to+metric+ton
    [4] https://www.census.gov/popclock/embed.php?component=pop_on_date&date=20140101

roryisok• 8 years ago

Is carbon offset by afforestation effective though? I had read that we can't counter the emissions by planting trees alone. I'm definitely interested in doing this and covering more than double of my footprint

btilly• 8 years ago

The thing that I don't like about carbon offsets is the incentive to cheat. Green consumer buys carbon offset, company selling carbon offset pinky swears to offset carbon, but failing to do what was promised is unlikely to be caught, and is pure profit if they don't do it.

And they don't necessarily have to lie to do it. Take your growing trees example. They arrive at the carbon offset by saying that a tree takes X carbon, so Y trees will offset your carbon. They plant Y trees, and they are done.

However over half of trees planted in communities, will die within 1-2 years. (See https://www.state.sc.us/forest/urbsurv.htm for a source.) Based on conversations with people who planted trees for a living after clearcuts, in a wild forest setting the percentage loss is even higher for a combination of reasons from unreliable water to browsing by forest animals to a monoculture being vulnerable to disease. What incentive is there for the company planting the trees to come back in 5 years and see how many trees are still there? The higher the number, the better for them, checking just costs them money.

Moving on, are trees permanent CO2 storage? No. As forest fires around the world demonstrate, trees are only temporary storage. You don't control what will happen to those trees by mid-century and farther.

And all this assumes that there is no lying. See https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2010/0420/Buying-carbo... for one of many examples where it turned out that there was lying.

So pay for your carbon offsets. It will soothe your conscience. It might even do some (probably temporary) good. But be aware that you're likely telling yourself a white lie if you think that they are real.

aperrien• 8 years ago

Is there some sort of service that I can pay to have this done? That's not an unreasonable amount of money to spend for that.

Demotech• 8 years ago

Good to hear about tree plantng in the UK at $400 and at $200 to compensate for European-level personal energy use. Please give me the source! Our project TreeDripper.net that promotes tree planting by schoolk in poor countries needs this type of quantative information. Or mail to info@demotech.org , thanks!

BurningFrog• 8 years ago

I don't think any amount of innovation can have close to the impact of de-tabooing nuclear energy for the next few decades.

hodgesrm5• 8 years ago

We need to look at every solution, as the problem is not just energy production. Concrete production produces around 5% of global C02, of which less than half is related to fuel for running furnaces. [0] Deforestation (whether deliberately or by fire) also releases large quantities of previously sequestered C02. Agricultural practices can free sequestered carbon or trap it in topsoil. [1]

Greenhouse gases are a big problem any way you look at it. One somewhat heartening thing is that _any_ technique that reduces atmospheric C02 is helpful since it's really just one big budget that everything is contributing to.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concre... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration

pjc502• 8 years ago

Too late. If you start planning nuclear plants now, they'll take 10 years to build.

Also, I'm not sure that the an to build nuclear reactors across Africa, South America, and the middle east will be popular; the proliferation risk hasn't gone away.

marcosdumay5• 8 years ago

You can make a photovoltaic panels fab with the money that goes into a nuclear power plant, and complete it faster.

The one thing that would probably have the largest impact would be guaranteeing some demand for PV fabs. (As much as I hate governments guaranteeing demand in general.)

Scarblac4• 8 years ago

This entire thread is talking about different ways of producing energy. I think using less energy could have an even higher impact. We'd be poorer as a result, but it's technically easiest to implement.

justsomedude43• 8 years ago

Also, between 1998 and 2018 we gained almost 2 billion people.

WhompingWindows6• 8 years ago

True, this is a huge aspect that is not discussed enough. Even if we reduce carbon intensity of our energy per capita, we may keep emissions too high simply by providing energy to many more people. I believe a huge aspect of reducing future emission would be educating women and families in developing nations, helping them through the epidemiologic transition to lower birth rates/family size much quicker.

rsync2• 8 years ago

"For an energy realist, I recommend checking out Vaclav Smil, who has long been predicting 21st century as the century of natural gas"

My very recent reading on this topic has lead me to believe that while burning natural gas is quite an improvement in carbon emissions vs. burning coal or oil, unburned natural gas traps quite a bit more heat than carbon dioxide does.

It was even suggested that pipeline leaks, manufacturing leaks and (other misc. steps in the lifecycle) leaks make natural gas a wash in terms of climate change.

I hope this is not the case and I wonder if anyone here can comment further ?

rosser• 8 years ago

"Natural Gas" is primarily methane. In terms of Greenhouse effects, we would do vastly better to "burn off" any leaks than let them leak.

WhompingWindows6• 8 years ago

I believe methane is around 25 times more potent at trapping heat than CO2 (have seen different figures around 25ish). There is a much shorter half-life on that methane, it degrades in the atmosphere much more quickly (<100 vs ~1000 years) than the very stable CO2 molecule. However we have to think of positive feedback loops. The methane will heat us much sooner, which will allow more ice melt, more methane emissions from the permafrost in northern climates, and accelerating the heating we've already seen in polar regions.

tmaly• 8 years ago

Education is what needs to be innovated. We need more kids becoming scientists. Battery and storage technology need to be improved. We should be taking a multi-prong approach to coming up with working nuclear fusion.

teachrdan3• 8 years ago

What if better educated kids grow up to be lobbyists for Exxon? Or work at the Heritage Foundation? Or finance new coal infrastructure at Goldman Sachs?

The problem has nothing to do with an insufficient number of smart people being involved. The problem is that coal and oil companies are paying a lot of those smart people a lot of money to make things worse.

sadris• 8 years ago

Education is what needs to be innovated. We need more kids becoming scientists.

Some people cannot just "become scientists". Without the intelligence, even an infinite amount of education would be pointless: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62jZENi1ed8

johnchristopher• 8 years ago

We need massive innovation across all our uses of fossil fuel.

I am tempted to say, for the sake of the conversation, that what we need is people in the street.

Your post is about getting better tech. Fine. Following posts are about how taxes will solve the problem because incentives.

It's a lost cause.

masklinn2• 8 years ago

we'd still have massive fossil fuel use for non vehicle uses of petroleum for chemical industries, airplanes, plastic production

And maritime shipping, upon which pretty much the entirety of our economic system relies.

ZeroGravitas2• 8 years ago

Why does the use of fossil fuels in chemical or plastic production factor into climate change?

I've seen this mentioned before and didn't really understand it, and interestingly that person also mentioned Vaclav Smil (in fact, it may have been an article written by him).

Is there something I'm missing or is that conflating two realted but different things for no obvious reason? Or does carbon end up in the air due to plastic production and chemical feedstock usage?

WhompingWindows6• 8 years ago

You'll emit carbon dioxide when you make plastic:

https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?artic...

safgasCVS2• 8 years ago

I think you need to be clearer what you mean by innovation.

If by innovation you mean new technology coming to save the day then I'm very skeptical it will work out. Teslas are nice but not a match for 1 billion Chinese entering the middle class.

If by innovation you mean a drastic change in how carbon is taxed leading to a sensible focus on how energy is consumed then we may have a chance however it means paying $50 for a bigmac and no more flights to Ibiza for 20 Euros.

WhompingWindows6• 8 years ago

I say innovation in careers and personal lives. We need all sectors to decarbonize, it's not just new tech gadgets and gizmos, but new ways of thinking, servicing, and behaving. Innovative thought is necessary from every corner, both politics for carbon tax, personal diets for less food waste, more muscle-powered transportation (helps with diabetes/obesity too), etc. If we have "business as usual" in too many places, it won't matter if we decarbonize our power sector or our transport. We have to change in thousands of ways.

acd• 8 years ago

We should switch to a carbon/anti pollution based crypto currency that is mined in a earth friendly way. All goods and transports and all other pollution is such a system should be accounted for.

As it now with the current economic system it is too easy to offset the cost on somebody else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

kang• 8 years ago

solar mining in space and beaming the results to earth https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/897631806899597312

samfriedman• 8 years ago

I think orbital solar collection is interesting, but I'm not sure why it needs to be used to mine BitCoin: can't we just use the energy to power a microwave beam to collectors on the surface? Not sure what the economics of that is vs. the cost of launching a geostationary satellite though.

DoctorOetker3• 8 years ago

there is no fundamental reason cryptocurrency "mining" should be energy-intensive, it was & is merely an unnecessary side-effect of the first cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) and its spin-off's / copycats. Sadly a large fraction of the crypto proponent "community" misinterprets the unnecessary energy expenditure as the source of "value", while the majority of the crypto opponents similarily consider it an unavoidable side-effect of cryptocurrencies and hence an argument against cryptocurrencies in general...

check out the Algorand papers to learn more

Reason0773• 8 years ago

Is there even a "war" against climate change? If there is, it's barely gotten started.

For the most part, politicians are at best apathetic and at worst, actively hostile to the idea of "fighting" such a war.

anoplus• 8 years ago

From the activism I follow in my country in last decade, I learned that politicians are apathetic, and a good activism is needed to make them move. That's how lazy governments work. So I think until we fix governments performance we need to engage in efficient activism. What is efficient activism? This question interests me.

TOGoS2• 8 years ago

Workplace organizing. It's a lot easier to get people to fight for something when they know they'll benefit from it directly (via higher wages, better working conditions, etc). A unified working class is the most effective tool we have for fighting countering the power of bug business, who would rather let the world burn than stop building pipelines.

Most people don't like what's happening to the world -- they just feel powerless to stop it. So let's change that.

chosenbreed7• 8 years ago

The politicians largely reflect the people they govern. I don't think we can expect much better from them as compared to the general population...not to mention of course the vested interests and lobbying capability of corporations. And again corporations have shareholders, employees, etc...

rcMgD2BwE72F4• 8 years ago

The politicians largely reflect the people they govern.

Yet, people expect the politicians not to simply reflect them. Who or what is at fault then?

colordrops• 8 years ago

The politicians largely reflect the people they govern

Is that really true though? The statement is so vague.

munificent• 8 years ago

I think a more precise statement is that politicians reflect the people who got them in office.

In theory that means the voters. In practice in the US, because election spending is so huge and effective, it means the wealthy.

TOGoS2• 8 years ago

The politicians largely reflect the people they govern.

Someday I'd like to visit the universe you live in. It sounds nice.

Merad• 8 years ago

Not in the US. The majority of the country isn't to the point of believing that climate change poses a serious threat, and among non-Democrats attitudes towards climate change are actually regressing: https://news.gallup.com/poll/231530/global-warming-concern-s...

sparkling2• 8 years ago

Weather or not the majority believes in climate change is irrelevant. The simple fact is: while the US reduced its total carbon footprint by ~0,4% in 2017, it increased in the EU and China. No reason to point fingers at the US.

sehugg• 8 years ago

Those who haven't experienced it directly might underestimate how effective the right has been at tying anti-environment beliefs to political identity, even among people who are highly educated in the sciences and should know better.

nonbel9• 8 years ago

"War against" ("War on") seems to mean it is a never-ending boondoggle that, at best, wastes a bunch of resources. Is there any example of these "wars" being a success? The three that come to mind are:

  War on drugs:   fail
  War on cancer:  fail
  War on poverty: fail

Why is the economist trying to link climate change to this?

SamUK963• 8 years ago

War on cancer has been...not completely a fail? Certainly made harder by profiteering, but, y'know.

Also, I find "War on poverty" hilarious. Like a country saying it's "making crime illegal".

nonbel9• 8 years ago

The war on cancer is a total fail in my book. They surrendered when they started calling it "many diseases", meaning there will never be a "cure for cancer" by definition.

steego5• 8 years ago

I can't help but think that picking apart a magazine's headline is a huge distraction from an important issue, but I also can't help myself in pointing out how off the mark you with such a superficial observation.

As far as global poverty is concerned, between 1990-2013 more than a billion people were lifted out of poverty according to the World Bank. I'm sure you can point to local and anecdotal evidence that does not correlate, but to say efforts to reduce poverty have failed are just flat wrong.

Cancer is an intractably complex disease, but to dismiss all efforts and advancements is also off the mark. Life expectancy for many types of cancers has improved significantly. Oncolytic viruses have been shown to treat some very advanced forms of cancer with profound results.

I wish I could be more optimistic about the war on drugs, so I'll concede that one to you.

If you think the branding of the effort is that terrible and counter productive, I'd love to hear your ideas on how we should brand the effort.

nonbel9• 8 years ago

"As far as global poverty is concerned, between 1990-2013 more than a billion people were lifted out of poverty according to the World Bank. I'm sure you can point to local and anecdotal evidence that does not correlate, but to say efforts to reduce poverty have failed are just flat wrong."

Those "war on" phrases refer to specific projects in the US. For that one I wasn't too familiar but quickly looked it up and didn't see anyone claiming success: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty

Regarding cancer, I responded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17698877

tripplethrendo• 8 years ago

A billion people consuming more is surely bad for climate change though, no?

Millions of people pouring into 1st world countries and consuming more is surely bad for climate change.

JamesBarney3• 8 years ago

The war on poverty is arguably effective. The poverty rate is lower than it would be if we stopped all transfers.

Sol-• 8 years ago

Was there a serious attempt to begin with? Yes, there are some efficiency gains and in some developed nations CO2 emissions seemed to stagnate, but much of that seems incidental (for instance partly caused by the Great Recession 10 years ago) and rarely part of a coordinated effort. Though I guess you can at least partly credit the rise of renewable energy like Solar to some government programs.

Wonder how much faster the effort would have been if we had an actual cap-and-trade system that encompasses the global economy instead of the lackluster attempts which aren't legally binding, only cover limited industries or have an oversupply of emission certificates to render the system useless (like the European one).

But it's pointless to ponder about that. It's not there's a lack of ideas regarding possible solutions, it's a just lack of foresight by humanity. We probably can't even blame previous generations, because we would have acted the same in their situation.

maze-le• 8 years ago

Its not that much, but it's a start:

https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/international/negotiatio...

biznickman• 8 years ago

Yet another article that emphasizes how absolutely garbage our politicians are. They are also actively complicit in Trump's war against environmental protection and the continued apathy that began before Trump.

The problem is that environmental driven campaigns have been incredibly ineffective. Perhaps it's our responsibility to generate noise the same level of that with Net Neutrality?

cletus• 8 years ago

So in the last month or so I stumbled across SFIA [1]. This guy has produced 150+ videos about futuristic topics but grounded in science. Everything from how to get into space cheaper to the Fermi Paradox to Black Hole civilizations.

Anyway, one thing I like about it is the optimism. This guy is genuinely optimistic about the future. And he has pretty good reason. Like this planet can realistically be home to trillions of people with not much more tech than we have right now.

But a recurring topic is the subject of fusion and how much of a game-changer it will be if we can do it in any kind of economic fashion. Now I'd previously somewhat dismissed this because of the naive view that it is free energy. Well the fuel might essentially be free (even that depends on what the fuel is; deuterium is common enough to essentially be free, Helium-3 not so much) but the plant itself costs money, has a power output, requires maintenance and we still need power lines and the like.

But he points out some of the reasons why this is a complete game changer and why certain problems simply cease to be. One of these is the greenhouse gas problem. Why? Because as soon as you have energy cheaper than hydrocarbons you simply use your power to make hydrocarbons from the CO2 in the atmosphere. This is pretty simple chemistry and we can do that now. There's just no point because we'd be powering the process largely with hydrocarbons (solar and wind notwithstanding).

I should also point out that I remain somewhat skeptical about nuclear fusion being economic because of the neutron problem (in that neutrons quickly destroy the container). This works fine for stars, not so well for superconducting magnets.

But (as Isaac Arthur points out) you don't even need fusion for some of these rosier outcomes. You just need cheaper than what we have now and there's good reason to think that solar may get us there, particularly if we can mass produce solar collectors in low Earth orbit (these produce about seven times the power of Earth bound collectors). And there's actually pretty good reasons to be optimistic about that.

The human condition is one of exaggeration, unfortunately. Namely that both fear and optimism tend to be overstated. You see this in markets all the time.

The counterargument against radical changes to combat climate change tends to revolve around the idea that markets will eventually solve that problem (for those that admit there's even a problem at any rate). And it makes me somewhat uncomfortable to admit that this idea probably isn't 100% wrong.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g

mattygh3• 8 years ago

I'm similarly optimistic that outcome is possible, maybe even probable, but I'm not excited for it. When it comes to population and the future, the question is less whether we can survive, the question is what kind of world is consistent with 20Bn people? Or 1 Trillion people?

If you value open space, wild places, other species' existence, bucolic lifestyles, or other non-techno sci fi outcomes, that's a scary thought. Maybe we will all move to space and keep earth as a re-wilded paradise for vacationing and research. Or maybe future generations won't care about any of that and will densely cover the whole planet, snuffing out anything that came before.

alkonaut3• 8 years ago

So we need a quick plan B. The required goals from nations won’t be met and people won’t change lifestyle to do something about it. We need to also do something that ensures warming stops without any sacrifice made by people (other than taxe to fund the massive programs)

Maybe we could turn things around in 10 or 30 years but the damage done may either be irreversible or runaway.

So a short term solution that ensures no temperature increase for the next 30 years would be great. But what is it? Carbon capture? Artificial Whitening of oceans? Is there any solution that is even remotely viable?

rcMgD2BwE72F4• 8 years ago

We haven't done $%# to try and execute Plan A i.e. reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It's the cheapest and easiest plan by far, so why do you think we can afford to switch to some fanciful plan B?

Most alternative are either distractions by/for those who can't accept the harsh reality, Get-rich-quick schemes by some industrialists or science-fiction by/for those who prefer to dream of a nice future rather than doing something now.

"The American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period." -- The People In Charge.

alkonaut3• 8 years ago

It's the cheapest and easiest plan by far,

It’s the simplest plan, but I’ll argue we are seeing it’s pretty difficult as it requires changing the behavior of a lot of people, if even just a little abd/or changing policies of a lot of countries.

I’m not saying plan A should be somehow abandoned or slowed (so perhaps B is a bad name because it’s typically used when A is abandoned) But it should be complemented. We should also investigate the stupidly sci-fi get-rich-quick (or perhaps lose weight fast?) schemes. Technological solutions might at least buy some time for the slow change we are seeing in behavior and policy.

And yes, I realize there is a hazard that some of these schemes risk giving an impression that the problem is being solved, and plan A isn’t necessary. That can’t happen.

I also realize that anything other than simply limiting emissions is a complex and expensive plan, but even a complex and expensive plan is better than a simple and cheap plan that is politically impossible.

desireco42• 8 years ago

Maybe instead of going to war, we should come to peace with our environment. I think mindset is important in looking into this issue.

safgasCVS2• 8 years ago

The article fees cheaply alarmist to me. Its incredibly difficult to make good predictions even 2-3 years into the future let alone whats going to happen globally decades from now. We have only started to see the effects of global warming but the really bad stuff has yet to happen - and when it does the reaction wont be linear as whats being projected here.

vowelless5• 8 years ago

I am a little out of the loop and so I have a few questions:

1. At what point in time can we arrest ocean temperature rise purely by reducing emissions?

2. Even if we stopped further rise in temperature, is the current temperature (land and ocean) sustainable, or is a chain reaction already underway that will increasingly lead to more and more turbulent weather?

3. Are there viable ways to extract greenhouses gasses from the atmosphere? Will extraction necessarily lead to lowering of temperature?

4. Are there risk factors in extracting greenhouse gasses? Could we trigger excessive cooling?

5. Alternatively, is the Futurama approach of dropping a massive icecube in the ocean a viable approach?

6. Are there long term benefits of warming?

StavrosK4• 8 years ago

How are we going to make the ice cube? Where's all the heat from cooling the water going to go? Back in the atmosphere?

Maybe we should just make a massive solar array, power a large laser with it, and shoot the beam into space.

pjc502• 8 years ago

There was actually a very clever paper on nano materials which, instead of emitting IR on the blackbody spectrum, emit it in a band the atmosphere is transparent to. Reversing the greenhouse at ground level.

Bouncingsoul1• 8 years ago

We could get it from Europe (moon),anyway this would result in further rise of the sealevel.

WorldMaker• 8 years ago

A good book on the subject is Hot Earth Dreams: https://smile.amazon.com/Hot-Earth-Dreams-climate-happens/dp...

Frank Landis did a ton of research to try to find the best comparable models of what's happening, what's about to happen, and the book is still extremely easy to read (well analogized) despite trying to get to hard science answers for most of it.

PeterisP5• 8 years ago

1. I'm not sure - 20 years ago maybe?

2. No, not anymore, in the current situation emission reduction is about reducing the future consequences, not about preventing them. The current accumulated greenhouse gases are sufficient to continue warming for some time even if we didn't emit anything starting today, and also there are two positive feedback loops started already - methane emissions from melting permafrost and increased Arctic sunlight absorption because there's more dark water and less reflective ice.

3. Maybe - it likely could help, but it'd need a lot of investment and we're not ready to even start

4. Yes, probably.

5. Only if we had a magical source of massive icecubes, but we don't.

6. Depends on your viewpoint - if humans get eliminated, then after a few million years there might be more biodiversity, that may count as a benefit to some.

lsiq• 8 years ago

I can only speak to some of your questions.

2. Well the current temperature is somewhat sustainable because we haven't yet destroyed the Earth.. but that's not really what it's about. The condition of the Earth is not the present temperature, but the present condition of the atmosphere which is becoming increasingly filled with these gases; higher temperatures are merely the consequence. The higher temperatures themselves don't contribute much to a snowballing effect, except in the case of wildfires. If tomorrow, we magically stopped emitting a net positive amount of greenhouse gases, the Earth would stabilize and return to a previous cooler state because of carbon absorption from forests and so on, but this is impossible because it would require a commitment from 7 billion people.

3. The are plenty of ways to extract gases directly but many are fairly costly and only a few hold promise of being economically profitable. Extraction of the CO2 (and other gases like methane) would certainly lower temperatures, as they trap the heat in the atmosphere that would otherwise radiate back into space. The most clear empirical evidence we have of this on a planetary scale is Venus, which has a truly hellish climate because of it's C02 atmosphere.

5. This can't be a serious question. But, actually, there is the idea of iron fertilization of the ocean where dumping granulated iron into presently lifeless tracts of would cause massive blooms in ocean life and would have a substantial carbon capturing effect. It's likely to be a very cheap solution, relative to the outsize effect it would have.

6. Biggest benefit to warming is an increase in arable land as the climate is warmer towards the poles, which should more than make up for some losses to desertification. The other benefit is increased crop yields due to more CO2 in the air. Not much of a consolation tbh.

fokinsean• 8 years ago

Is there an agreed upon consensus on when SHTF? I've been trying to limit my climate change/collapse reading (keeping away from /r/collapse), but this article triggered my anxiety again. I know things aren't looking good, but is there any hope? Are we completely fucked?

mikestew• 8 years ago

Is there an agreed upon consensus on when SHTF?

The only consensus is that the shit will hit you in dribbles. So much so, you might not even notice until you just kind of become used to smelling a little bit like shit. As the stench becomes overwhelming, perhaps you might look back and think, "you know, I don't remember always smelling like shit."

randomThoughts9• 8 years ago

Not even the people that pretend to care are putting in the minimum necessary effort to fight this. So where does the war in the title come from?

"War on/against x" is becoming a meaningless expression.

As far as I can see, our only real plan is: we'll invent something. The rest is just rhetoric.

Brakenshire3• 8 years ago

We will invent things, the question is the market conditions which will allow inventions to arise and then quickly gain market share. Even with the amazing progress in solar, wind and electric batteries, it’s still not enough. We need some meaningful pricing of carbon to allow the market to solve the problem.

sparkling2• 8 years ago

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

Thank me later.

nitrix• 8 years ago

The war? It's not about war, but symbiosis.

FrozenVoid• 8 years ago

The loss is because we invent half-solutions that only delay the inevitable(reducing/storing/filtering emissions instead of removing sources), but are more profitable for the industry/economy in the short term vs renewables.

rb8082• 8 years ago

The war is unwinnable. Global warming can only be reversed if we stop all Co2 and methane emissions, and then start net carbon capture to reduce current co2 levels.

Its just not going to happen. No one ever says that out loud. There is noise about reducing carbon emissions - in reality this is a lot of argument about reducing carbon emissions in wealthy countries. We can't even do that. Meanwhile even my greeny-lefty friends enjoy their central heating, imported food, masses of electronics and vacations in foreign countries. There is little hope in getting the world's peoples to reduce their quality of life. Generally everyone is happy to just blame Americans/China/Big Business/Coal/etc and keep on living as they please.

Realistically not much is going to change. It might be possible to slow down the warming a little. But its going to get much more uncomfortable, its probably worth moving to somewhere cooler.

vowelless5• 8 years ago

That is indeed what it seems like. We need a 10x improvement in this space. That can only happen with carbon capture and ability to regulate CO2 in the atmosphere. Not "planting trees", for God's sake.

The whole conversation around emissions and the massive politicization of this is disappointing. Emissions reduction doesn't seem to do much. We need a Manhattan project to produce carbon and weather manipulation technology.

cryoshon2• 8 years ago

we have the technology already: the cyanobacteria which produced the oxygen that ultimately became the earth's atmosphere. they're even better than trees because they're easier to multiplex and they don't catch on fire.

all you need is clean-ish seawater. i even drew up a few designs myself a few months ago.

what we lack is the will to put the plans we know will work into action.

hacknat3• 8 years ago

I think it's worth fighting hard still, because while we've definitely f&%$ed over the next few generations there is a strong possibility that we could keep the world habitable at least, but if we give up now then there is the distinct possibility we could hit 4C increase and dwindle the human population down to extremely dangerous levels (or even cause or own extinction).

alephnil• 8 years ago

There is no way to avoid all effects of climate change, but there is a significant difference between a two degree increase in global temperature and a six degree increase, which will be truly catastrophic. Thus everything that is done to reduce emission will make the effects less severe.

Brakenshire3• 8 years ago

Global warming can only be reversed if we stop all Co2 and methane emissions, and then start net carbon capture to reduce current co2 levels.

We do not want to reverse climate change, we want to slow it as much as possible. And there is never a point at which you can meaningfully give up, 5C is better than 6C, 3C is better than 4C. What you’ve posted is just another rationalization for inaction.

vowelless5• 8 years ago

What you’ve posted is just another rationalization for inaction.

How so? Seems like they are advocating for even more action than usually discussed because the problem is even more severe than we think.

lumberjack• 8 years ago

Climate change is one of those crux problems that necessitate the formation of a new political ideologies. Liberalism is inept to deal with it. Individual action is not enough. The current politicians will not do anything. But liberalism is not going to last forever nor is the current political climate, eternal.

beamatronic• 8 years ago

Would it help make this more concrete for people if we were to install markers along the coastlines of various cities that say “The ocean will be touching this sign on $date”

carry_bit5• 8 years ago

What do you do for the people whose location wouldn't be underwater even if all of the ice melted?

yawz• 8 years ago

I agree with these points.

On the other hand, defeatist attitude is not going to help anyone. Reversing the climate change may be the moonshot, but unless we have an objective we cannot convince anyone outside the "greeny-lefty" minority. At a minimum, we should be good examples to our children who are in greater danger of suffering from this than we currently are. I, for one, am teaching my child respect for nature and its resources. If we all did this, world would be a better place nonetheless.

FigmentEngine• 8 years ago

someone is https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-We-Can-Save-Planet-ebook/dp/B00...

ithkuil2• 8 years ago

honest but silly question: since the only way to deal with the problem is to also implement carbon capture to deal with the existing excess, would the same carbon capture mechanism be also able to cope with the rest of the world continuing to emit carbon at present rates?

xyzzyz• 8 years ago

Possibly, but more likely it would be more cost effective to actually subsidize the energy of the rest of the world so that they don’t emit carbon in the first place.

rb8082• 8 years ago

Yeah I've thought about this - the best carbon capture system would take CO2 and turn it into pure carbon - or something like coal. So it does seem simpler not to burn coal in the first place. Alternatively if we can grow forests then bury them that could work too.

I don't think we can ever have such an efficient carbon capture system in the forseeable future, but we should really be researching this much more than we are.

atlantic• 8 years ago

The war is perfectly winnable, but not within the context of a democracy. Here you would need the equivalent of a state of emergency, lasting for perhaps a century, to force the necessary changes upon an unwilling public, who are quite happy to sort trash into three piles, stop using straws, or engage in other such cargo-cult behaviours, but not to give up their iPhones, 2nd cars or annual vacations.

Ironically, a country such as China is much better equipped than the US or Europe to handle this kind of emergency. Once the leading figures become convinced of what needs to be done, they can implement the necessary measures in full and overnight, and ensure the necessary public support via the state-controlled educational system and media.

In the West, we are reduced to endless haggling, as lobbies strive to convert the emergency into additional demand for new "green" product lines or for bogus geoengineering solutions, and political representatives end up implementing toothless half-measures that achieve nothing.

TheCoelacanth2• 8 years ago

A large majority of Americans support adding a revenue-neutral carbon tax, which demonstrates a willingness to reduce consumption as long as it is part of a concerted action and not just an insignificant choice by a single person that will make no noticeable difference to climate change. We need "leaders" to catch up with the general public's views on this matter, not the other way around.

Tade03• 8 years ago

I can't agree and I think the problems you're describing concern mostly the US.

European emmisions are not only lower than the ones generated in the US despite the larger population of the former but also until last year have been consistently falling since at least 1990 contrary to what was happening in the latter.

My take is that there has to be less involvement of private entities in shaping regulations in the US. Once that's out it will be possible to e.g. make people drive smaller, more fuel efficient cars by raising taxes on fuel.

Currently driving a Ford F150 is as cheap in the US as driving a compact hybrid in most European countries- this is ridiculous and needs to stop.

torpfactory• 8 years ago

I think we need a few things to win the war: 1) A few more technological solutions to make the switch to carbon free energy painless (think grid scale batteries, hopefully fusion power someday). In reality people won't want to give up some of the great benefits of a carbon-intensive lifestyle such as travel and convenience. 2) A political movement to make the case that the switch will be not-so-bad. 3) A social movement to focus on what people actually need in life (health, friends, family), not material wealth. And to consider their place in the world on century time scales.

Thanks all ;).

mnm12• 8 years ago

Why would you expect the common person to change their habits when government abs industry aren't changing theirs? It won't make a difference what I do personally. I could fly on a jet nonstop for the rest of my life and it will make little difference. Government could pass a law to reduce carbon output tomorrow and it would make a difference. Why should us regular people be uncomfortable when we're fucked anyway because of idiot climate change deniers in power, especially in the US? If we're all going to be fucked anyway, I'm going to enjoy my AC and vacations while it lasts. Maybe leaders should start fucking leading first and people should stop pretending like individuals can even make a worthwhile dent in carbon output without government and industry changing their ways.

reitanqild2• 8 years ago

Well, it certainly would signal something the day these government leaders stop flying private jet planes to climate conferences or even start having video conferences.

That should help. History has a number of examples of how far people will go if their leaders go first.

But as long as leaders say one thing and do something completely different? I say no wonder uneducated people don't buy it.

Note: this is not to be taken as defense for the current behaviour but as a suggestion for how to improve the situation.

tonyedgecombe• 8 years ago

We can't even do that.

We have done it in the UK: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/06/uk-carbo...

hacknat3• 8 years ago

Losing? We already lost.

It's probably too late to save modern civilization, the new war on climate change is about making sure we don't make the planet uninhabitable for almost ever land animal. But, our chances of accomplishing that are pretty good (of keeping the planet habitable, not failing to do so), especially as we lose billions of people that will die because of catastrophic climate change.

snissn• 8 years ago

Is there an optimistic argument to be made that we are winning the war on climate change?

hacknat3• 8 years ago

It depends on what your goals are. If it is human survival, then yes. If it is about maintaining the current global economy and modern civilization then absolutely not.

Brakenshire3• 8 years ago

One optimistic way of looking at it is that the models for success already exist. The US 2050 target for per-head CO2 emissions is to get to the same as France today. And France has just as industrial an economy, and a similar population density to a lot of US states.

So, the idea cutting emissions is impossible or will inevitably lead to massive damage to the economy or reductions in quality of life is obviously not correct. And that doesn’t even take into account the technological developments which can occur to make the transition easier again. The problems are to do with politics, economic models, and technology development, there are no fundamental barriers.

Also, the economy functions at scale, so if the majority of rich countries follow a transition other countries will likely follow by default. It’s a matter of pushing enough technologies over the tipping point where they take over even if you assume the value of the atmosphere is zero.

gorpomon• 8 years ago

Serious question: whatever happened to mechanical solutions like seeding the atmosphere with a chemical that will reflect light? Are those things considered too risky to try? I remember hearing about those solutions some years ago, but they seem to have fallen out of vogue now.

fancyfish• 8 years ago

In the US we've been having this "debate" and talking about the "war" since at least the late 1970s. Even that long ago it was nearly impossible in our country to garner the political will to fight climate change.

Our question now is, how do we best stall the inevitable? But the political will is still sorely lacking. The idea of a globally effective Paris Accord with teeth is laughable.

From the NYT Magazine: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/clim...?

The scientists knew the consequences of warming: "When, at Charney’s request, Hansen programmed his model to consider a future of doubled carbon dioxide, it predicted a temperature increase of four degrees Celsius. That was twice as much warming as the prediction made by the most prominent climate modeler, Syukuro Manabe, whose government lab at Princeton was the first to model the greenhouse effect. The difference between the two predictions — between warming of two degrees Celsius and four degrees Celsius — was the difference between damaged coral reefs and no reefs whatsoever, between thinning forests and forests enveloped by desert, between catastrophe and chaos."

When the dire climate forecasts were established science, the foremost American scientists, senators, industry representatives, etc met to discuss what to do about it. They started their conference - in 1980 - with this:

“We might start out with an emotional question,” proposed Thomas Waltz, an economist at the National Climate Program. “The question is fundamental to being a human being: Do we care?”

This provoked huffy consternation. “In caring or not caring,” said John Laurmann, a Stanford engineer, “I would think the main thing is the timing.” It was not an emotional question, in other words, but an economic one: How much did we value the future?

We have less time than we realize, said an M.I.T. nuclear engineer named David Rose, who studied how civilizations responded to large technological crises. “People leave their problems until the 11th hour, the 59th minute,” he said. “And then: ‘Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?’ ” — “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It was a promising beginning, Pomerance thought. Urgent, detailed, cleareyed. The attendees seemed to share a sincere interest in finding solutions. They agreed that some kind of international treaty would ultimately be needed to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide at a safe level. But nobody could agree on what that level was."

luord• 8 years ago

Improved education and quality of living tends to have an inverse proportion with birth rates.

With that in mind, maybe the way to win the "war" could be killing poverty: No more poor people, and the population is going to decrease. Looking at Japan, according to the estimates and trends, they would no longer be around anymore in roughly 100 years.

So, we still would go extinct (eventually, in a long time from now), but the planet will keep on living, so there's that.

marcosdumay5• 8 years ago

Hum...

Solar prices are comparable to coal nowadays, and getting lower by the month. Besides, where is that investment in solar or wind stalled? I haven't seen any place like that. Instead, I only see people talking more and more about solar, even to the point that some want to get off-grid for economical reasons (I don't agree with their calculations).

I would really like to see some study about how long will solar power need to ramp-up until coal becomes uneconomical. I would also like to see some study about how much oil, gas and coal we can actually use, with what levels of energy returns.

Instead, here it is that sensationalist piece based on basically no data at all, claiming the end of the world... At the economist.com. Journalism used to be better.

api• 8 years ago

I'm not optimistic about this for game theoretic reasons. It would require a global scale all-cooperate scenario, since any single defector gets massive economic benefit from defecting and using cheaper energy to undercut everyone else.

The only hope we have is the development of post-carbon energy sources that are cheaper than fossil fuels. If we can't do that I do not see a plausible scenario where we don't burn every bit of profitably accessible carbon.

artemisyna• 8 years ago

It sucks that we're in such a bad place right now, but I'd probably bet money that there are going to be some big geoengineering startups in the next couple of years.

forapurpose• 8 years ago

I think Americans have a special responsibility: Not only have they probably contributed more GHG than anyone else,[0] they have the power (and thus responsibility) to do the most about climate change, and they are the chief obstacle (see below). People are dying, and will die in greater numbers. Most people who will die didn't benefit from those GHG (the people in wealthy nations, such as the U.S., benefited), in countries where they can't afford to mitigate the problem. Is it ok to do that, to watch people die, and to be a bystander?

As much as people on HN don't like to politicize issues, sometimes the problem is political and to talk about other causes and solutions is misleading. There is one powerful political entity standing in the world's way, the U.S. Republican Party; the rest of the world is generally united. The solution isn't technical or scientific, but political: Organize against them and vote them out of office if you are American.

[0] I think China may produce more GHG now, but that's just recent history; I would guess that the U.S. is the all-time leader by a good margin.

Bachoglider• 8 years ago

Hey guys,

Let me present the project our team have created for tree planting https://treespond.com/

- treespond is a web platform where one can offset Trump's ignorant Twitter quotes by planting trees.

- the twist is simple: the more ignorant the phrase, the more trees are treesponded.

Your feedback is huuugly helpful

Thanks!

sir_brickalot• 8 years ago

Humanity is the problem. Address it!

One focus should be on the root cause: The human population is the reason for our environmental problems, all-of-them. And the population growth rate is frightening [0]. It renders any other approach almost impossible to succeed. So even if it is an ethically difficult topic it should be addressed!

The conclusion of this line of thinking could be less human population means less environmental problems and more prospects of success for every other approach to stopping climate change. So why not try to think of ways to incentivise birth control?

Is it really to much to ask to stop producing more than 2 offsprings per family? This would bring population growth down. I'm sure otherwise human future is doomed.

To support this you could install tax reduction for no/one/two child/ren. As any solution has to be globally installed, maybe something similar to emission trading with birth rights. Shrinking countries may need more growth, developing countries might need financial help and so on.

I know this is drastic, but you know the saying... [1]

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth

[1] https://www.theidioms.com/drastic-times-call-for-drastic-mea...

The world is losing the war against climate change

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