Governments 'not on track' to cap temperatures at below 2 degrees: U.N

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-thailand-climatechange/governments-not-on-track-to-cap-temperatures-at-below-2-degrees-u-n-idUSKCN1LI03S

by clumsysmurf • 8 years ago

206 248 8 years ago

reuters.com

wrong_variable• 8 years ago

Its most likely we are heading for 4 degree warming, I have very little faith that this type of collective action problem will be solved in time.

Best way to protect yourself is to invest in real estate up north and in inland parts of the world.

[

The time horizon is too long though, I wish 4 degree warming happened much quicker so that I can reap the rewards of my investment earlier. /s.

]

heurist3• 8 years ago

Climate is not consistent across the north. Real estate is particularly tricky because it is so reliant on local conditions, which are completely unpredictable at this point. Maybe refugees drive up demand for real estate in the south, maybe invasive beetles destroy all the maple trees, maybe the government drains the great lakes to irrigate Iowa. It's better to make solid (eco-conscious) 10-20 year investments than to try to guess what will be valuable in 50-100 imo

myrryr• 8 years ago

You joke, but I would guess Russia will ultimately be the winner here.

cperciva2• 8 years ago

In the 1960s, the idea of deliberately warming Canada's arctic -- in order to make more farmland available for cultivation(!) -- was a serious policy proposal.

mirimir39• 8 years ago

Russia and China. And Canada, but the US will presumably annex it.

chupasaurus• 8 years ago

Regions which are habitated less aside Far East are either swamps where you can't build a house or with permafrost. You are very welcome here.

konschubert8• 8 years ago

How likely do you consider a 6 degree world or higher?

konschubert8• 8 years ago

Which regions do you think would still be liveable in a 4 degree world?

trashtester9• 8 years ago

Everywhere in the world, at least 5 meters above see level that have maximum temperatures below 40 degrees celsius will be livable, as long as economic output is sufficient to purchase food (if it cannot be grown locally any more).

Just like Dubai is livable today.

zaroth• 8 years ago

Imagine the force required to make governments do their share to prevent >2 degree shift.

There is a cost to compliance. There is a point where the damage is so incalcuable that you are compelled to force compliance on all other governments.

labster• 8 years ago

Nuclear winter is a very effective way to reduce global temperature, despite the initial CO2 spike. Also, the damage is quite calculable.

bigbugbag18• 8 years ago

I'm pretty sure a nuclear winter does not reduce global temperature other than the short term (~10 years). IIRC the hopi prophecies have one such outcome where all humans die crawling in the dark with no food due to no agriculture possible without photosynthesis.

Razengan2• 8 years ago

Could it be that the human brain just cannot relate to or care about large-scale and long-term problems without continually making a conscious effort to?

It seems that as long as our immediate lives are good enough, we're fine with everything.

Does that make our species incapable of expanding beyond our home planet let alone the solar system? Because those undertakings require a fundamental reconfiguration of how we operate and interact.

So far the best "hack" we've found for keeping things going is money: Someone finds a way to make money from projects that may or may not happen to advance the species as a whole, convinces people to work on those projects with the offer of money, and those people use money to improve their immediate lives.

So until someone needs to find a way to make money from keeping climate change in check, there's probably nothing to be done about it until it directly impacts people's ability to make money and affects their immediate lives.

joe_the_user2• 8 years ago

Could it be that the human brain just cannot relate to or care about large-scale and long-term problems without continually making a conscious effort to?

What we are experiencing is a failure of particular institutions - government, industry, NGOs, Intergovernmental organizations etc. What an average brain might or might not care or related-to is a significant distance from this.

One might argue we have a failure of brains together to create responsible organizations and frameworks. But here, we have had quite a few struggles between types of organizations, with some winning and some losing. Perhaps the losers might have done better, perhaps not.

atomi2• 8 years ago

It's hard to blame our government when millions of people voted for a guy that proclaimed climate change was a Chinese hoax.

yashap2• 8 years ago

Governments, companies, NGOs, etc. are all just collections of people. At the end of the day, I do think the issue is that we’re fundamentally selfish creatures, only able to really make decisions for the good of ourselves, or maybe also a few close friends/family members.

We understand that we’re destroying the planet, but we figure, why should I consume less, if others might not limit their consumption the same way? It seems that we’re incapable of making decisions that prioritize the welfare of the human race. I do think that apocalyptic sci-fi is probably right - on the scale of 100s to 1000s of years, we’ll likely drive ourselves to extinction, or something near extinction. The tragedy of the commons seems like an unavoidable consequence of the way we think, and I don’t see us getting past it.

xupybd2• 8 years ago

I think you've hit the nail on the head. Motivation on this scale is very hard to manage. The free markets are the best way I know of to motivate people into action. But the best thing motivated people do is they come up with new technologies. This is where I'm pinning my hopes. I don't think this is going to be solved by governments regulating (that is needed however). It's going to be when we hit the tipping point of low carbon energy production being cheaper than coal and when batteries get cheap enough to both buffer the electrical grid and take over the role of energy storage in vehicles. Once that happens I think we'll see an asymptotic reduction in emissions. I just hope things are in a reasonable state when that happens.

konschubert8• 8 years ago

I am hoping for the same. But yhe thing is that gas and oil are stored in big underground "warehouses" and the owners just have to open the valve to be profitable. They may just undercut any competition and drive it out of business.

bigbugbag18• 8 years ago

Sorry to burst your bubble but free markets are not the best way to motivate people, people do not want to work but simply want to be happy and live a fulfilling life.

Then again it is not a matter of putting cheap batteries in vehicles, it is a matter of not having road vehicles because the issue at hand right now is that we're currently aiming over the threshold where conditions making life possible on earth are going to go away.

Only option is massive reduction of human population and energy use.

semi-extrinsic3• 8 years ago

I think constructs of our society, and short-term political leadership in particular, is a bigger problem than the human brain. Politicians can and do make pledges on being committed to "the green shift" while actually choosing easy "greenwashing" solutions that they publicise heavily.

Meanwhile most of the can gets kicked down the road. And the term for a politician, even if it's 8 years, is so short that no single politician gets the blame in 50 years' time.

tux19682• 8 years ago

That's all true, but doesn't really come to terms with why we as individuals don't spontaneously leap into unified mass action. We keep our cars, our flights, our meat and our general over consumption. Even the tendency to defer to authority and expect our government to deal with the problem undermines potential solutions. It seems to be truly an innate human failing... at least so far. This kind of problem just doesn't trigger an existential threat response where we throw everything we have at it.

heurist3• 8 years ago

I agree. Also, humans are terrible procrastinators. In my experience as a terrible procrastinator, motivation will come only when nothing else could possibly seem more important. By then, the most valuable time and opportunity to solve the problem will be long gone. Humanity will survive after pulling some half-baked solution out of its ass, but it will remember with great pain global civilization's first abject failure. After the second or third abject failure, we might start to wise up and take equilibrium seriously...

(That's one potential outcome. I think it is most likely but I also have high hopes for the tens of thousands of brilliant problem solvers focused on averting catastrophe).

munificent3• 8 years ago

I don't think we've hit a limitation of our brains. We used to be able to build cathedrals that took dozens of years to complete. Voyager 2 was launched in 1977 and didn't complete its initial mission until 1989. We planted trees that we knew would take a hundred years to reach full maturity.

We don't have a cognitive failure. We have an institutional failure. The corporate system that drives most of human society today is often unable to deliver long-term projects that benefit society. The tragedy of the commons is a viable business model — the way to compete is to exploit as much of the environment as you can before the other guy does.

TeMPOraL7• 8 years ago

I fear things you mention are exceptions that don't scale - that can be mostly traced down to a bunch of individuals believing in a mission and having a means to accomplish it, supported by lots of people doing it for money or being coerced. That, and religion, which is a way of rewriting people's cost/benefit calculations at scale. So with cathedrals, I'd expect most people involved were either paid, coerced by violence, or coerced by their religious beliefs; with Voyager, I expect there was a bunch of scientists and managers who cared and got public money to command, and thousands of people who were simply paid to do their jobs.

I'd love to see money go away as a factor, but I can't see how - especially for projects that require large existing industries (leveraging economies of scale).

Razengan2• 8 years ago

Replying to other sibling comments similar to the one above:

We have an institutional failure.
What we are experiencing is a failure of particular institutions - government, industry, NGOs, Intergovernmental organizations etc. What an average brain might or might not care or related-to is a significant distance from this.

Those institutions are other humans. Why do we pretend they're not?

Is this more of a social hierarchy thing than biological; i.e. trusting our "superiors" to take take care of it, or basically "not my job."

rapnie3• 8 years ago

Implied in your answer is that the root cause of climate change is failed economic systems. Isn't that what we should address?

AndrewKemendo• 8 years ago

The human animal is not cognitively adapted to cope with the world we have built.

It's quite astonishing actually when you realize how all of our tiny individual inputs made this massive machinery that individuals physically cannot truly understand the impacts of.

dafrie• 8 years ago

From economic theory, the concept of time inconsistency [1] in my opinion explains pretty well whats currently going on:

For current governments, it is allegedly optimal to not take immediate action but to announce/commit to actions in the future. Problem is, that for the next government, the same result from the optimization problem arises.

A similar pattern can be found with nuclear waste, a problem that is known since many decades, yet there are very few permanent solutions.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_inconsistency

TeMPOraL7• 8 years ago

Dynamic inconsistency assumes a person actually wants to do something in the future, but in the future, their calculations change. I fear it's much simpler than that.

Political system is a strong selection process in itself. It selects for people who can pander to public the best, and make best deals with their colleagues. Any effort spent on making something good happen, or even making good on the promises used to get in, is an effort wasted; it's something the system slowly but surely selects against.

newnewpdro3• 8 years ago

The main problem with this situation is fossil fuel interests are in control.

They use tactics similar to those responsible for electing the current president of the United States. The people are not well-informed, they are drowning in misinformation and propaganda.

fineline• 8 years ago

"someone needs to find a way to make money from keeping climate change in check"

What about a price on carbon? We should put the most powerful tool created by our civilisation - our free market industrial economy - to work on our biggest challenge / opportunity. Governments need to represent their citizens to the market on this, not the other way around.

alvah• 8 years ago

By "a price on carbon" you presumably mean "a tax on CO2", aka simultaneously making everything a little more expensive for current voters, and making government dependent on yet another sin tax? Not particularly good politics.

mirimir39• 8 years ago

That idea's been around for decades. And it's never been seriously implemented. Maybe it will be, once things are horrible enough, but then it will be too late.

marssaxman• 8 years ago

Yes, that should have happened 20 years ago. Now it would require even more drastic measures. I think at this point it is safe to conclude that humanity will not solve this problem, and will simply have to cope with its consequences.

mirimir39• 8 years ago

Right, money. And the problem, as you say, is ...

So until someone needs to find a way to make money from keeping climate change in check, there's probably nothing to be done about it until it directly impacts people's ability to make money and affects their immediate lives.

By the time that happens, it will be decades too late, and we will be committed to several decades of altered climate. Because the atmospheric halflife of CO2 is ~30 years. And there are likely positive feedbacks.

polotics2• 8 years ago

Several decades? You mean centuries. But you're right we are a few decades too late, and haven't started reacting yet.

AmericanChopper6• 8 years ago

A part of the problem, and perhaps a significant part, is that climate science has done a terrible job of selling itself to the public. The history of climate science is 30 years of marketing catastrophe and doomsday predictions, backed by near unanimous support from the scientific community. Sadly, it’s also 30 years of bunk predictions, and scientists appealing to a sense of impending doom, justified by the idea that overselling the evidence is worthwhile due to the importance of the cause. The consequence is that it doesn’t matter to many people whether they’re right or not, because the communication around this science has done such a remarkable job of undermining its own credibility.

vixen99• 8 years ago

Don't even bother with stuff like this on HN. A majority of folk are utterly impervious to or unaware of the actuality of those '30 years of bunk predictions'. And those that are not, don't bother commenting because they know what happens.

mirimir39• 8 years ago

If you actually look at the history of predictions about climate change, you'll find that they've been remarkably conservative. But whatever, let's just see what happens.

bigbugbag18• 8 years ago

This is not a large scale problem, it is an individual problem, when one turns the light on, eats meat everyday, drives a car, watches tv, uses a cellphone, etc. one is part of the problem.

It is not a long term problem either, we're not talking millenia or centuries but decades. And it all started a couple lifetime ago.

InclinedPlane• 8 years ago

No, people care. But our governments are hugely messed up. Part of this is that they are still fighting the old fights of the 20th century about racism and classism and so on. In the US we're still struggling to get cities to build mass transit and teach evolution in schools. Generally everywhere in every country is still struggling to get the public to concentrate on problems that matter rather than falling for the classic scam of rallying to the cause of hating people who are different.

Climate change is only one problem, there are so many others that fall under the general outline of "act like an adult and take care of your own problems" that aren't being addressed. Flint, Michigan's water, for example, is the poster child for the fact that across the developed world there has been substantial and persistent under investment in municipal water and sanitation infrastructure. So much of the developed world is coasting along on temporary hacks put in place decades ago that are running on borrowed time. Roads and bridges are also under maintained. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

All of these things, and climate change, are solvable problems, we have the wealth and the technology to tackle these things effectively, we just don't seem to be able to organize the work effectively.

TaylorAlexander• 8 years ago

And even the agreed upon measures were criticized as hardly enough to affect the change we really need.

Scientists criticized the governments for making a show out of the agreements despite them being insufficient, and here they’re not even meeting those goals.

zaro3• 8 years ago

A promise by rich nations to provide developing nations with $100 billion a year to tackle climate change is only one part of the huge transformation needed, she added.

This sounds like a joke when the military budgets are in the trillions. But on the other hand when poor countries become inhabitable and people start moving military will be needed to push them back .

onion2k2• 8 years ago

Unless you're happy to have your sons and daughters kill people fleeing their uninhabitable countries, military solutions won't help.

batiudrami3• 8 years ago

Unfortunately it seems increasingly inevitable. You only have to look at what my country is happy to put faceless brown asylum seekers through rather than take a (comparatively minuscule) compromise in their living conditions to recognise that, when it comes to it, probably this results in war or genocide. When it comes down to it, faced with hundreds of thousands or millions of people coming to Australia in boats, threatening an already shaky lifestyle, the most likely outcome I can see is that we kill them, as sick as that makes me feel.

adimitrov• 8 years ago

Actively kill? Probably not, or at least not widespread. Passively watch them die (while denying life-saving care)? That is already reality, and in no way hypothetical.

It's already happening in Europe [1] and the Sahara Desert [2]. This situation is already in large parts due to climate change, as the entire Syrian war, for example, can be seen as being caused by climate change [3], and the patterns of migration in Africa are driven by desertification, among other things.

In all of these cases, a large military can secure a border, creating a fortress few, if any refugees can enter. And climate change is going to be the main driver of refugee migration.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/03/mediterranean-...

[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/06/walk-die-algeria-aban...

[3] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/03/150302-syri...

doombolt4• 8 years ago

There is a case of Israeli-Egyptian border.

Israeli don't have to actively kill Egyptians because they, for almost all purposes, can't enter.

Nothing much wrong in having my daughter participate in some wall building.

TeMPOraL7• 8 years ago

You mean uninhabitable?

Yeah, my biggest worry about climate change isn't that we're going to cook the planet. It's that we're going to burn it way before that, as migration pressures start causing wars.

riffraff• 8 years ago

Zaro might be a native romance-language speaker.

abitare/habitar/habiter is "inhabit" in english, while inabitabile/inhabitable/inhabitable is "uninhabitable", the "in-" being privative (compare: in-sufficient, in-secure etc).

English played us bad :)

zaro3• 8 years ago

Yes. I meant uninhabitable of course.

lozenge• 8 years ago

Fun fact: GHG emissions by the military were explicitly excluded under the Kyoto agreement. It's like they don't exist, since their cause is so noble.

newnewpdro3• 8 years ago

The National Geographic film Before the Flood [0] did a reasonably good job of covering this topic. If you haven't seen it, it's worth a watch.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_the_Flood_(film)

rb666• 8 years ago

I just can't watch it, too depressing. Especially with the USA actively steering the opposite direction, I have little hope.

bigbugbag18• 8 years ago

If the only way out is to kill everyone in the USA, this is something that may be attempted at some point. Putin and his new set of weapons could probably razes every major US cities and put an end to the US nonsense.

One way or the other, most humans are gonna die before the end of the century and a dramatic reduction of population will happen. The US way of living will also come to an end, it is simply a matter of doing it voluntarily and aim to avoid the worst or having it forced on them by powers over which they have no say and feel the burn.

xae342• 8 years ago

DW also has a good documentary exploring how past societies collapsed due to climate changes, and how only Japan was able to change course when they realized they had broken their environment.

https://youtu.be/z2r9PxN3Hwg

rdm_blackhole• 8 years ago

It is not just governments, its people too.

How many couples will have more than one child? How many people eat meat or fish every day? How many people drive their car to the corner store less than a mile away? How many people buy huge SUVs and trucks as a status symbol when a smaller car is all they need?

Governments won't solve this issue. We the consumers have to solve it, the problem is that nobody gives a fuck.

I have tried to reduce my carbon footprint to the minimum and guess what? It won't matter because by the time I have saved a few kilos of Co2 there's a douchebag with a hummer driving down the street sucking gasoline like there is no tomorrow!

And to top it off everybody thinks that the world's economy can continue to grow without any limits. I believe that as a species we are simply delusional.

abyssin• 8 years ago

Driving to the corner store isn't the issue. Having a lifestyle that makes you need a car is the issue. Also travelling in general is a big taboo, because environnementalists usually love to travel.

Relying on individual's changes will lead to what we've been doing for 30 years. It leads to the current situation of “penny wise and pound foolish”, saving water when brushing teeth but taking planes.

pimmen2• 8 years ago

Driving to the corner store isn't the issue. Having a lifestyle that makes you need a car is the issue.

This. I pissed off my ex's sister once when she said that since she was moving 40 kilometers outside of the city, she and her husband needs two cars. I asked her why she was moving then, you already have a house with a room for all your kids close enough to work that you can bike. She answered that she loves nature, and just going for a run there whenever she wants. So I said "wouldn't you then say that to go for a run in the woods whenever you want, you'll get two cars"?

It sort of killed the mood. I'm a monster.

rabidrat2• 8 years ago

But the planes run whether or not we take them. There are bigger forces at play than any individual's choices.

jesperlang• 8 years ago

I think people just deal with the culture/infrastructure they are born into. If you live in Los Angeles you buy a car, if you live in Amsterdam you buy a bicycle, if you live in Venice you walk. It's the institutions that set this up that are to blame (and the corporations/politicians/voters that affected them). Problem is that most infrastructure was "set up" during high growth years decades ago and now it's just there and very very hard/slow to change...

probably_wrong• 8 years ago

I think blaming the douchebag with a hummer is focusing on the wrong part of the problem.

There are factories right now polluting the environment with CFC, which you might remember as being a. the cause of the hole in the Ozone layer, and b. forbidden. Whomever approved this awful idea will likely get no sanction, amd yet they'll cause way more damage than a guy with a hummer will do in their lifetime.

Just like the ban on plastic straws, focusing on those things that are moderately bad while ignoring those that are ridiculously, catastrophically bad is a wasted effort. Unfortunately we created institutions to deal with those issues, and they have no interest in doing their jobs. That, I believe, is where the anger should be focused on.

6nf• 8 years ago

I understand the source of that CFC pollution is unknown at this stage, we're not even sure which country it's coming from. CFC production is banned worldwide already so it's a matter of finding the culprit and shutting it down.

mjfl• 8 years ago

My parents had 9 children. What do you think of that?

another-cuppa2• 8 years ago

Governments won't solve this issue. We the consumers have to solve it, the problem is that nobody gives a fuck.

Consumers will never "solve the problem". Why would they? Why would someone downgrade their lifestyle when everyone around them continues to live unsustainably and are more happy as a result? It's all or nothing, and only governments can enforce that.

bigbugbag18• 8 years ago

So according to you there is no possible solution for people living in the zomia[1] despite people in the zomia actually living in a sustainable way.

Governements is something we could do without and probably fare much better, the logic is simple when you do not relinquish your sovereignity to a hierachy of power then you are in power and feel responsible of your own life so you are an actor of your own life and consequences instead of being a passive consumer, consuming things to try to alleviate fearful living of an unfilfilling life. Happy and fulfilled people do not consume.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zomia_%28geography%29

Vinnl3• 8 years ago

How many people drive their car to the corner store less than a mile away?

I'm sure that in the Netherlands, far fewer people do so than in the US. A reason is that the government has invested a lot in bicycle infrastructure, to the point where for many people, going to the store by bicycle is far more comfortable than doing so by car.

In other words, governments can very much influence this issue.

Though of course, they usually need popular support for that to some extent, which in the end still comes down to consumers, or at least people.

doombolt4• 8 years ago

How many couples will have more than one child?

I think this speech should be aimed at nations of Africa, Middle East and India. After all, they have way greater fertility rate than Europe, US and Far East, and they are also in greatest immediate danger from Climate Change.

Why this moot point is being made to HN audience, I fail to understand. We're on track to dwindle our numbers anyway.

bnhjg• 8 years ago

The average carbon footprint of an individual is however much larger for rich countries. It is true that n_children is higher for say, Nigeria rather than Germany. However n_children times footprint_of_a_child is much higher in Germany.

Using the very limited numbers from this wikipedia page [0], the carbon footprint of a German individual is about 15 times more than a Nigerian individual. Yet Nigerians "only" have 3.7 more births per woman than the Germans, and that's without taking into account the enormous difference in life expectancy. Taking the two numbers, the carbon footprint of the average German couple fertility behavior is about 4 times bigger than for a Nigerian couple.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

sdinsn• 8 years ago

It's ridiculous to blame climate change on couples who have more than one child.

qqqwwweeerrr• 8 years ago

I feel somewhat embarassed to talk about this, but does anyone else feel a sense of dread and depression when reading news like this? I can't seem to shake it and it's quite strongly affecting my worldview.

polotics2• 8 years ago

Nope. Just a strong motivation to get ready. From where I stand in terms of worldview for my children, the 21st century looks like a race between geo-engineering and forced adaptations, inclusive of genetics, with the lowlands' populations having one chance at armed migration. So maybe not as bad as the 20th...

atomi2• 8 years ago

These news stories are ominous.

mirimir39• 8 years ago

Based on my experience over the past few decades, it's going to just keep getting worse. And there's not much that we can do about that. Except to maybe mitigate the extremes. And even that's iffy, because we don't know what'll happen with the permafrost.

batiudrami3• 8 years ago

I do too. Considering the scenarios in which this plays out makes me feel sick, and overwhelmingly helpless.

awestroke4• 8 years ago

Climate Anxiety is starting to get more and more common. APA's guidelines are interesting: https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/03/mental-healt...

It's very jarring to read information from experts and scentific reports on where we're heading and at the same time everyone in the media and all people around me just ignore the problem completely except some comments now and then that reveal how greatly they underestimate the problem. If you start trying to talk about how severe our problems are becoming, you may be labeled a conspiracy theorist / "prepper" and your opinion thrown out the window.

fouc• 8 years ago

I get the feeling that the winds are shifting, less and less it's being considered extremist thinking.

Freak_NL• 8 years ago

Then there are those who will not just ignore the problem, but gladly regurgitate the latest denialist tropes:

→ CO₂ makes plants grow! It compensates for the rise of CO₂ levels!

→ We used to worry about the environment too, now suddenly it's the climate. The environment turned out fine! Acid rain wasn't a problem either!

It all boils down to not being able to accept that our society will (have to) change.

mirimir39• 8 years ago

I used to feel that way. But now I'm old enough that I'm pretty confident that I'll die before shit gets too bad. I'd feel differently if I had kids, but I don't. So mostly I'm left with ironic amusement.

If I were younger, and/or had young family, maybe I'd be doing more. As it is, I spent maybe a decade working on climate change issues at an NGO. And my carbon footprint is relatively low. I don't commute, or travel long distances, I don't eat much meat, and my home is very well insulated. My main sin is running too many computers. But at least I've switched to SSDs.

konschubert8• 8 years ago

I know that this is my personal view on life, but: If you don't care at all about what happens after you're dead, what's the purpose of your life? You'll be dead and it won't have mattered a bit that you're been here.

bigbugbag18• 8 years ago

You can be pretty confident most people will die before shit gets too bad, also confident that most people will die (latest estimation I heard was over 75% before 2060).

But unless you're over 70-80 you will have to face the shit, it has already been happening for some time now and is accelerating.

ummonk3• 8 years ago

Personally, I worry about a lot. Global warming, not so much. It will have an impact on coasta cities but that aside, it really isn't that big a deal. We have much bigger risks to worry about (both environmental and otherwise).

awestroke4• 8 years ago

Once the permafrost starts to melt, it will cause a positive feedback loop causing all trapped methane to rapidly be released, doubling the amount of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. It's literally a ticking bomb. I worry about it.

scotty793• 8 years ago

The problem is how quickly and where to people from costal areas will relocate. And how new climate will affect food production.

vidarh2• 8 years ago

Most of the worlds largest cities are near the coasts. And weather systems hundreds of km from coastal areas are still affected by things like ocean currents that affect the temperature. E.g. weather in large parts of North Western Europe is substantially warmer than you'd expect because of this.

So on one hand expect large scale migrations and/or massively expensive programs to mitigate the problems. On the other hand expect far more extreme weather far inland.

The idea it will only affect coastal cities is a dangerous one.

bigbugbag18• 8 years ago

Try not living in the past and regurgitating media nonsense. Global warming is what global media uses to brainwash people away from the problem. Climate change is the real thing and real deal.

Inform yourself and learn that one of the current issue we face is a continental increase of temperature and shift inseason that would make agriculture impossible in about 50 years.

There are reinforcing feedback loops that will push the change past a threshold where cascading effects would make life on earth surface near impossible.

Life on earth is a complex interdependent system and the larger animals are the first to go, guess what's next now that elephants, whales, tigers, and pretty much every animal larger than humans is on the brink of extinction.

hackerbabz• 8 years ago

I'm 24, and two years ago I think I had a full nervous breakdown over climate change. I couldn't stop thinking about it to the point that I stopped sleeping, lost 10 lbs, and almost dropped out of college.

If any train of thought leads you to this point, you have a medical problem, regardless of what you are thinking about. Fortunately, I was able to get help and had fantastic support from my family and friends.

Today I'm off medicine and therapy. I still have bad times lasting 1 - 2 weeks, but never to the point that I can't live.

The important thing that I'm able to see now (even when my anxiety is back) is that everything that is important without climate change, is important with climate change. Even though the world is ending (I am not hopeful), I can still find love, learn new things, see the world, enjoy good food, risk my life, make money, enjoy art, and play sports. You can substitute into that list anything that brings you joy. You can also include fighting climate change in that list.

mirimir39• 8 years ago

Well put :)

unpopular42• 8 years ago

Me too! Reading about how dysfunctional and corrupt the UN has become is indeed very depressing. Great to hear I'm not alone.

TangoTrotFox2• 8 years ago

If you zoomed us forward a century from today, with present day technology, and assume the worst case scenario for climate models we'd still be perfectly fine. The most impactful practical effects would be the changing of coastlines and more severe weather conditions. It's not the end of the world.

Now enter technology. Think about where we were a century ago technologically. Consider that in many ways technology today is accelerating even faster than it was then. Imagine now where we'll be in a century from now. Nobody would from 1918 would be able to guess what 2018 would look like, from a technological point of view, and I'm certain nobody in 2018 can even imagine what 2118 will look like from the same metric. I mean we are already today approaching the level of technology required to live on other planets which are completely and absolutely inhospitable. In the worst case scenarios of climate change, Earth would still be a utopia by comparison. And then enter in near future ideas like geo-engineering, atmospheric manipulation, and so on.

So I don't think it's smart to run a species level experiment on seeing what happens if we just keeping pumping out CO2, but the worst case scenario is both survivable and improbable. It could even end up changing us vastly for the better. The Black Death is something no one would have ever wanted, yet it paradoxically accelerated, if not sparked, the change that nearly everybody would have wanted of a transition away from feudal society to a more free society.

mirimir39• 8 years ago

What about impacts on food production? And chaos from mass migrations?

moultano• 8 years ago

If you zoomed us forward a century from today, with present day technology, and assume the worst case scenario for climate models we'd still be perfectly fine.

The average case looks like that. The worst case looks like the Permian-Triassic extinction.

CalRobert• 8 years ago

Yes. It's awful. But you're not the only one.

I feel like someone found an asteroid headed for Earth and everyone just shrugged and decided to pretend it wasn't there. People still make plans for retirement, etc. assuming the world will be the same as it is now, and it dumbfounds me. It's not just climate change deniers - it's people who agree with the science and even see that we're not doing enough, and that it may be accelerating. But apparently it's too abstract to consider it in your own life. I kind of wish it were that way for me; it would beat living in dread and fear.

garretraziel• 8 years ago

I've read about this psychological theory somewhere - that there is so much danger around human that human brain has to ignore everything that doesn't impact him directly, othervise everyone would be paralized by fear all the time. Without this mechanism, one would be unable to leave his apartment - there are hundreds of potentialy dangerous individuals you'll meet every day, moving in things that would kill you instantly if someone just made a small mistake. And if you decide to use this thing, you depend on tens of people you've never met that they did their job correctly, othervise you may be killed even though you haven't made any mistake. Public transportation is even worse in this regard.

It would also explain how anyone is able to do things that are unhealthy - smoke, drink alcohol, eat sugar. Even though we all know that it's really unhealthy, it doesn't affect us directly, so it's hard to take it as serious threat.

I'm not sure if this theory is true, but it keeps explaining a lot of human behaviour to me.

erikpukinskis3• 8 years ago

It’s funny to think how people would probably also ignore an asteroid that was 50 years away. It would be “fake news”.

GreeniFi• 8 years ago

The things that concern me about this are: 1. The amplifying impact that the global financial system will have on climate change. When banks feel agricultural loans are too risky, they will pull farmer credit lines, resulting in a halving of yields. This might already be happening in some places. 2. The organizations which have a mandate for resolving this problem are not fit-for-purpose. Big bloated and corrupt beaurocracies - breaking up in disarray: see the Green Climate Fund. 3. Active attempts to frustrate solutions. And I simply don’t understand why people would want to do so. Even if your livelihood is dependent on a petrol company, or similar, your families’ ultimate livelihood will be dependent on a stable climate.

For reference, I don’t think life on earth is threatened (that’s just hyperbole) but there is a high probability that the population will readjust down to 3-4 billion and this readjustment will be a rather painful down-sizing.

hfdgiutdryg• 8 years ago

Here's my view on this: I've stopped caring. I don't have kids and I don't particularly care about the future of humanity. Humans will most likely ruin the planet and, at some point, due to a lack of foresight, kill themselves to extinction. After a few hundred million years, the Earth will be back in operation.

In my opinion, humans just don't do well with restriction. If politicians focus on restricting consumption of goods and energy, we'll just end up in another "general malaise"[1] like in the 1970s.

The only way this will ever get solved is through enormous amounts of clean energy (nuclear, which nobody wants) and recapturing carbon.

[1] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106508...

wcoenen• 8 years ago

After a few hundred million years, the Earth will be back in operation

Well... The sun is gradually getting hotter over geological timescales. Eventually it will experience Venus-style runaway warming, and this could happen as soon as 500 million years from now.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130729-runa...

Discombulator• 8 years ago

This is a classical example of a market failure. The issue is that today, when you you are buying any good, you are not paying for the full end-to-end cost of the item, which includes the cost of disposal (collection, sorting, recycling) and the cost of fixing the issues caused by for example, CO2 emitted during the production process. In other words, everyone of us is enjoying now a large subsidy/handout paid by future generations. This is called a negative externality.

The straightforward - but not easy - solution is to ask governments to assess a charge on each sold item that brings the price in line with the full cost to society.

Note that market failure does not mean that the “market” mechanism is the cause of the failure - rather the issue is the incompleteness of information. Markets would solve this allocation problem very efficiently once the subsidy is removed. I imagine for example that most packaging using non recyclable plastics would become entirely uneconomical, and the full price of gas would be so high that industry will be incentivized to look for alternative technologies and sources of energy.

mturmon2• 8 years ago

And what really burns is that certain segments of our society are aggressively exploiting this externality.

roel_v• 8 years ago

I can't tell if you mean 'rich people' or 'poor people' by that, because depending on how you look at it, I could argue both. But doesn't that mean that everyone is at fault?

_5ysi3• 8 years ago

Has any politician ever campaigned on this though? I don't think I've ever had the opportunity to vote for a cap and trade

mirimir39• 8 years ago

Thanks. Great summary. Wish I'd said it so clearly.

The hard part has obviously been justifying government intervention when there's still uncertainty. Or at least, when those with vested short-term interests can make a strong case about uncertainty. I thought at one point that the insurance industry was going to make a difference, but haven't seen much about that lately.

VBprogrammer• 8 years ago

I think my biggest problem with the idea of pricing in end to end cost of products is that unless it starts meaningfully impacting the quality of peoples lives then it is not nearly doing enough. I don't think there is a way forward against climate change which allows us to continue to consider the current western quality of life as non-negotiable.

Even when people talk about electric cars (deliberately ignoring the potential end-to-end cost here) they will talk about how they sometimes drive cross country to their parents house, or that they tow their travel trailer huge distances that they couldn't possibly do with an electric vehicle.

Then you consider that to make a meaningful change in carbon emissions they probably would need to move to an aerodynamic recumbent electric bicycle for most of their day to day trips you can see how far away we are from making progress.

marmshallow• 8 years ago

I agree this happens for the vast majority of goods today. But does anyone have an example of where end-to-end societal cost is included in an item's purchase price?

cosmojg• 8 years ago

Cigarettes.

cdancette• 8 years ago

Gasoline

gaius2• 8 years ago

you are not paying for the full end-to-end cost of the item

Dirty little secret: this is deliberate. Why do you think the West closed all its heavily regulated factories and shifted manufacturing to China where environmental protection and workers rights don’t exist?

We should impose tariffs to punish imports from anywhere that isn’t up to Western standards of regulation. That’s the only way for the market to fix this.

twoodfin• 8 years ago

“Imports” are just things, they can’t be punished. The punishment would be for poor workers in China who would see their living standards rise more slowly, and poor citizens in the West, for whom the tariffs would be a highly regressive tax on many of their purchases.

bigbugbag18• 8 years ago

Nuclear plants are a good example of this mentality, cheap power until you have to decommission the plant and suddenly costs goes through the roof.

But I would not say this is market failure, to me this is market working exactly as intended and expected: maximizing profit without caring for the rest.

On the other hand, it is not a question of subsidy/handout paid by future generation anymore, we're now at the point where it is a matter of going over the threshold effect where the consequence will be no human life possible on earth in a matter of decades.

mirimir39• 8 years ago

... the consequence will be no human life possible on earth in a matter of decades.

That is very unlikely. People could have survived just fine during the Eocene Optimum, ~50 Myr ago. When the entire planet was tropical. Assuming that they knew what to eat, anyway.

hhjinks• 8 years ago

this is market working exactly as intended

This is why we regulate the market. The market will seek to maximize its profit within the bounds of the law. Make the above suggestion compulsory, and the market will adjust to it.

david_ar• 8 years ago

I believe GP was using "market failure" in the sense that the market is not allocating resources in a (Pareto) efficient manner, because of said externalities.

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

pygy_• 8 years ago

Something I wonder is if changing the rules around money could help align the short term incentives with long term outcomes.

So we'd keep the "decentralized resource allocation" part of capitalism, but with hopefully better sustainability...

_5ysi3• 8 years ago

I think this is a major arguement for folks who criticize currencies. For example an energy based currency could be intrinsically ecologically conservative.

Another example is continuous inflation of fiat currency (exponential growth), whereas all things that experience exponential growth in nature eventually run into a limit or another correcting factor.

dorgo• 8 years ago

In other words, everyone of us is enjoying now a large subsidy/handout paid by future generations.

Are future generations going to pay same price we would today? Or are they going to get a discount due to more advanced technology?

bryanrasmussen• 8 years ago

or are they going to be scrounging up remnants of technology as the last million humans clustered around the arctic circle.

titzer• 8 years ago

I agree 100% with your comment.

The straightforward - but not easy - solution is to ask governments to assess a charge on each sold item that brings the price in line with the full cost to society.

Sadly, the first blip in GDP growth and this is out the window.

_5ysi3• 8 years ago

I think the problem is not really a blip on GDP, because it could be done in a revenue neutral way. The problem is that it will change the winners and losers

easytiger2• 8 years ago

Pretty much everything bought in the UK, for example, has a 20% tax. How is that a subsidy and how isn't it an example of what you are talking about?

TeMPOraL7• 8 years ago

Does it accurately capture the environmental costs? I'd expect counting in emissions would make the tax more like 200% on everything.

yoz-y• 8 years ago

Externalities must be accounted for individually. If the tax is flat then products that pollute more get effectively subsidized by those who pollute less.

dorfsmay• 8 years ago

This would work, but could only be implemented for longer than a political mandate if all politicians agreed it were a good thing. Today we have politicians that run their campaign promising to cut taxes on gas, and it works, because the average person doesn't care about long term effect on the environment. There are good reasons for this:

- super rich people have super large footprint (extremely large houses, gas guzler vehicles, private jets, etc.... Since humans are humans, they try to imitate people from the top.

- the whole SUV thing (restriction on gas consumption -> people buying trucks with sit in them -> manufacturers started to charge premium for those -> manufacturers made insane profit from those (under 1% profit on a car, up to 50% profit on large SUV) -> manufacturer using ridiculously inefficient vehicles in all their product placement and increase product placements -> people started to buy those exclusively to the point that one manufacturer completely stopped selling car)

- Industries typically pollute a lot than individual, and get away with ridiculously low fines when they do get caught.

Eridrus• 8 years ago

Depending on your country, there are usually ways of implementing laws that cannot be overturned with a simple majority. Things like ballot initiatives and constitutional amendments come to mind. Obviously carbon tax bills would be tricky to enact this way since they are fairly technical, but you could set up an agency with it's own authority, ability to appoint it's own executive, etc, if there was a real mandate to have an agency that was beyond political control.

fogetti• 8 years ago

I don't agree with you. Let's take Apple products. You are saying that the apple products' price wouldn't cover'the full end-to-end cost of the item, which includes the cost of disposal (collection, sorting, recycling) and the cost of fixing the issues caused by for example, CO2 emitted during the production process'? I doubt it.

CptFribble• 8 years ago

Apple's profit margins may be high enough to cover external costs, but is Apple fully compensating rare-earth mining communities in developing countries for the environmental effects of sourcing iPhone materials? Is Apple helping communities deal with mountains of disposed Apple-brand electronics? I imagine not, or at least not fully.

The government would have to assess a tax or fee that covers those externalities, and then Apple would be forced to deal with it. Either pass the tax to consumers to save the profit margin, or control externalities to remove the tax at the cost of profit margin.

Presently, Apple products, like all electronic products (and indeed, most products of any kind), are priced without regard to external costs. That the profit margins may high enough to pay for these external costs is only a coincidence due to Apple's silly-high prices.

RickJWagner• 8 years ago

I took part is such a scheme as a youngster.

Pop bottles carried a .05 charge on each bottle, refunded when the empty bottle was returned to the store. Careless consumers (litterers) might just throw the bottles out. Likewise lazy consumers might decide it's 'beneath them' to bring back the empties. But for hungry young scavengers like myself (had to pay for 'Space Invaders' somehow) it was a great source of income.

I'd be glad to see the same idea scaled up.

trashtester9• 8 years ago

That global warming is man made and likely to produce catastrophic results, seems well documented now. (possibly 10s or 100s of millions of deaths over the next 200 years, along with a number of species going extinct).

But any claims of cataclysmic outcomes (collapse of most civilizations or even extinction) seems unlikely, as far as I can tell. There are other possible events that are much more likely to produce that kind of results.

Here is my list of fears: 1. Runaway AI (>40% over the next 200 years) 2. Nuclear War (>20% over the next 200 years) 3. Runaway nanotech 4. Runaway biotech 5. Runaway, cataclysmic global warming effects (full ecosystem collapse, ice age triggered, >5 degree warming, etc)

randyrand• 8 years ago

this is my feeling to.

the 10s or 100s of millions of people that die will mostly be from A) children not being born that otherwise would have been B) indirect deaths - a few years off life expectancy

trashtester9• 8 years ago

I'm less optimistic than this. The 10s or 100s I was referring to would be due to events like famines, wars directly caused by climate change, hurricanes, etc.

Still, even 200million over 200 years is not a cataclysm. In fact, the reduction we've seen in global hunger over the past generation is a greater effect than that (in the opposite direction).

Which is NOT to say that 200 million deaths is not a problem! It just needs to be seen in perspective.

awestroke4• 8 years ago

You should read the article The Uninhabitable Earth[1] by David Wallace-Wells on NyMag. It's a good primer on the current information and predictions.

[1] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-...

trashtester9• 8 years ago

Thanks for the link. I've seen most of these points before, I think. My impression is that this view is a fringe view within the academic community. Do you have any references to indicate that this is actually becoming an academic consensus?

To be clear: I'm all for taking the possible actions in order to slow down the global warming. Unfortunately, the best replacement we've had to coal up until now (nuclear) has been unjustly demonized by many of the same people that claim to be most concerned about global warming.

Even the worst case outcome for nuclear is better than the best case outcome for coal...

thenewewb• 8 years ago

The comments here are so far extremely biased towards panic. It’s worth considering that perhaps the world’s governments aren’t panicking because it’s not warranted.

Climate change, while generally “accepted,” has a pretty amorphous definition and most current research agrees that there has been a pause since 1995 or so. Given that we are in a 20 year “pause,” it’s not entirely unreasonable - though clearly heretical - to posit that the alarm is largely unwarranted.

Year after year we see climate predictions fail to come to pass. Good science is based on hypotheses leading to testable predictions, and global warming predictions have a really poor track record of accuracy.

It might be time for the more scientifically minded among us to start increasing our criticism of climate alarmism.

bigbugbag18• 8 years ago

Funny that this would be news in 2018 when a year after the paris COP21, at the 2016 COP22 in Morocco the matter was that we were already past the 1.5° goal and we were on course for going over 2° faster than expected which meant a possible increase of 2.5-3°

These estimation were not even taking into account the full picture and things like positive feedback loops.

Governments 'not on track' to cap temperatures at below 2 degrees: U.N

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