The Climate Crisis Is Worse Than You Can Imagine. Here’s What Happens If You Try

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-climate-crisis-is-worse-than-you-can-imagine-heres-what-happens-if-you-try

by maybelsyrup • 5 years ago

69 79 5 years ago

rayiner3• 5 years ago

I can imagine a lot of things, but what the science is saying and what this article is saying don't seem to line up. It reminds me of this tweet from Senator Ed Markey: https://twitter.com/SenMarkey/status/1101234939058683904?s=2...

Climate change is literally destroying the planet. According to the Trump admin's National Climate Assessment, with no action, climate change will result in 10% GDP loss by 2090.

That 10% figure is on the high end (see: https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/how-much-will-the-green-ne..., under the heading "10% of GDP?). But even taking it at face value, it's irreconcilable with Markey's assertion about "literally destroying the planet" or the article's claim of "apocalypse." It's like two completely opposite thoughts in the same tweet, and I can't decide whether Markey is crazy or I am.

What is an apocalypse? The year my dad was born in Bangladesh, the under 5 mortality rate was about 1 in 3 children. That wasn't great, but it still wasn't "apocalypse." Will climate change be that bad? I don't think that's what the science says, but am I missing something?

varvar• 5 years ago

What you're missing in my opinion is how profitable drumming up existential fears about climate change in the population has been over the decades.

throwaway5752• 5 years ago

How profitable? This guy in the article? Al Gore getting a speaking gig?

Aramco does $300B revenue annually, and they are less than 10% of the market. Only an idiot would go into climate change advocacy for the money.

IfOnlyYouKnew2• 5 years ago

Yes, there’s, like, at least a dozen post-docs financing a burgeoning ramen habit off of it.

Fricken• 5 years ago

You're literate, you can form complete sentences, most of you have a post secondary education. It's not news, you've had your whole life to figure this out. The debate was over a long time ago. The party is over, the balloons are all either popped or up in the ceiling. Time to put away your gazoo, and wash the make-up off. This is no time to be a clown.

ncmncm5• 5 years ago

You are missing that economics is not science, and economists are, collectively, very carefully avoiding even considering the bulk of wholly predictable effects just because they have no way to incorporate them into their models.

covidthrow2• 5 years ago

You're witness to mass hysteria driven by a whole lot of profit motive, career posturing, and social signaling, with a touch of "some kinda/pretty bad stuff is gonna happen."

When I was younger—before the internet was in every home—I read articles about how the "information superhighway" was going to bring the whole world closer together. To my mind, that was analogous to a major city gone amok: unprecedented competition with everyone vying for attention.

One guy paints his sign on his window. The next guy lights up his sign. The next backlights a plexiglass sign. The next uses neon. The next blinks his neon. And so on.

It took some time, but we're about at the point of maximum stimulus on the internet. And so to compete, the messaging follows a similar pattern. And eventually some people believe what they read. And others believe what they write.

Those that believe what they write become desensitized. Those that believe what they read become indoctrinated. And you're left with this emergent characteristic of a chaotic system stuck in feedback loops.

What you read as overstated, others will read as gospel and damn you for underplaying the emergency. And they will try to shout louder than the next, because everyone is a storefront for something; profit, or power, or ego, or social status.

So what's an apocalypse?

Not global climate change.

The apocalypse is what you witness as you try to decipher and pick apart the insanity that has become not only the internet, but soon the whole of humanity.

The climate change cathedral had it right all along: we are the apocalypse. But they got wrong the cause.

The cause is not climate change. Or fascism. Or racism. Or even hatred.

The cause of our apocalypse is us, by virtue of our connected hyper-competition. The apocalypse is the "human superhighway."

mandis• 5 years ago

This is a brilliant text. It joined pieces of knowledge I had into one unibody that sort of illuminated a whole new pathway! Thanks for this!

Perhaps you may have seen this? Will Schoder on the Attention Economy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50R21mblLb0

teddyh• 5 years ago

“What causes it? The world causes it. This causes it, this causes it, this causes it – information overload! All the electronics around you poisoning the airwaves! Technological fucking civilization! But we still we have all this shit, ’cause we can’t live without it.”

— Spider, Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

gnicholas2• 5 years ago

I was hoping the article would discuss the first sentence of the headline, but it skips right to the second. I expect better from ProPublica.

IfOnlyYouKnew2• 5 years ago

That’s the point of the article. It’s about relationships, not global warming.

ncmncm5• 5 years ago

A big part of the problem is these anodyne expressions "climate change" and "global warming". They say, "so what?"

We should only ever be saying "Global Climate Disruption".

I am estimating a 50% chance of global civilization collapse by 2030.

It starts with crop failure in tropical and subtropical countries. Fishery collapse, as coral reefs are wiped out by bleaching and acidification, slashes access to protein. Famine drives mass refugee migration across borders.

Rich, temperate countries panic at the influx and allow fascists into power (as has already happened in Brazil, Hungary, the Philippines, Turkey, India and Russia, and is only forestalled in the US, Italy, France, and Germany; pace China and the former SSRs).

Fascists in power will (as they do) start wars, disrupting trade, generating economic crises, and more wars spiraling out of control, and ultimately nuclear exchange.

A big part of the problem is actually refrigerants; HFCs currently in use, if vented, force as much heating as all the CO2 already in the atmosphere. We could remove CO2, in principle, but not the HFCs.

You might suggest 2030 is too soon, and 2040 more likely. I hope so, but it doesn't make that much difference, really. If we don't act like 2030 is the deadline, we will hit one soon enough.

betwixthewires5• 5 years ago

Surely you mean "guessing"? What are you basing your estimate on? An estimate is based on metrics. You can't use that word "estimate" without at least citing what you base it on.

If you were to reach 2030 and things are alright climate wise, would you decide you are wrong, or pick another deadline? What is your criteria for deciding whether or not you should change your mind?

ncmncm5• 5 years ago

Those are entirely the wrong questions to be asking.

wernercd• 5 years ago

Global collapse by 2030

Al Gore... is that you? https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-poca...

BelenusMordred• 5 years ago

I am estimating a 50% chance of global civilization collapse by 2030.

You are saying that the human population will be ~3,500,000,000 less in the next ten years? That's...an extraordinary claim to make.

roenxi• 5 years ago

I struggle to see the story in the article except for this man being potential mentally ill. That level of obsession isn't healthy.

It isn't possible to look into the future and see a good material result. Literally everyone dies.

brutusborn• 5 years ago

I completely agree. I was hoping he had written a guide to low carbon living, or started a research group to investigate incentives to decarbonize in terms of game theory but... nothing. The article is longwinded and doesn't do much for his cause besides provoke anxiety.

jraby3• 5 years ago

The argument that people who care about the environment shouldn’t have children just makes absolutely no sense to me.

For me, one of the main reasons I care about the environment is for my children (and hopefully one day, grandchildren).

hkougju• 5 years ago

Of course he lives in California, grows his own organic kale, his wife likes the anti-capitalist aspect of it and quotes Marx, and they both worry about fascism.

You need to commit, perhaps even create drama, and make real changes in your life.

Right, create drama like saying billions of deaths, civilization collapse and nuclear war is imminent?

Zane, the younger one, started doing his own regular, Greta Thunberg-style climate strikes in front of city hall. Braird, the older, meanwhile, was entering his teens, differentiating and waxing nihilistic. When asked what he wanted to do with his future, Braird said, “What future?” When asked what he thought about climate change, he sunk a dagger into his father’s heart like only a child can. Braird said, “I don’t really think about it.”

This part is just sad, terrifying his own kids to death.

Animats• 5 years ago

It's going to take out the fringes of many coastal cities. The US probably loses much of New Orleans and Miami. Some of the hotter spots on the planet will become unlivable. Those things have already happened. India and parts of Africa have the worst problems. As do some Asian cities with heavily populated river delta areas.

On the other hand, the northern tier of US states become more habitable. We get an ice-free Northwest Passage.

Udik5• 5 years ago

India and parts of Africa have the worst problems.

So much so that Africa's population is projected to increase by 1 billion, doubling in the next 30 years. Any environmentalist would like to elucidate us on the consequences of this? Those who are worried about the impact of climate change on water availability or conflicts might want to have a word about the consequences of adding 1 billion people in 30 years in the poorest and most conflictual continent of the world. Yet I hear no one speaking, I see no headlines, why is so?

gnicholas2• 5 years ago

I went to a TED talk at UNGA week a few years ago, and the presenter talked about various things that can be done to limit climate change. At the top of the list was women's education/empowerment. This got a lot of applause from the audience, who were excited to clap for preventing climate change and empowering women at the same time.

The presenter did briefly mention the reason that these two laudable goals coincide, which is that women who are empowered and educated have fewer children. I don't think the presenter would have gotten quite so much applause if he had said "the number one thing we can do to prevent climate change is to make sure women in developing countries don't reproduce quite so much". And to be sure, he wasn't saying we should just fund birth control and abortions — he was framing that as a result of educating and empowering women.

But it's no coincidence that the Gates Foundation has dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars to their Family Planning initiative in Africa. [1]

So it may not be in the headlines, but the UN and others are surely aware of the impact of population growth.

1: https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/gates-foundation-com...

kumarvvr• 5 years ago

Per-capita pollution in America is the highest in the world.

1 American produces 16.5 tons of CO2 on average, 40 times of that of Uganda, Rwanda, Chad & Somalia combined

America has about 330 million people. Convert that into a population normalized for polluting capacity, it's population will be Billions.

It's time developed countries take responsibility and lead in tackling climate change. Because they are responsible for the bulk of it in the past 10 decades.

Edit : Per-Capita pollution from India is 1.7.

Normalizing Indian population for polluting capacity, it is just about 120 Million.

https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/10296/economics/top-co2-p...

edit 2: To clarify a bit, the per-capita pollution for whole of sub-saharan Africa is about 0.834. Thus on average, normalizing Americas population to match Africas per-capita pollution levels, population of America will be 6 BILLION.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...

known• 5 years ago

https://archive.is/mPsqz

WillPostForFood• 5 years ago

Those things have already happened.

Where?

Udik5• 5 years ago

I keep reading of a "climate crisis", and yet cannot see first hand any actual manifestation of it outside of the newspaper headlines. There is a covid crisis going on, and I can see that well, affects me personally, affects the economy, affects the country. A climate crisis? Absolutely not. There are climate-connected adverse events here and there in the world, some with higher frequency than in the past, but do these collect together into a global "climate crisis"? I certainly don't see it.

fogihujy2• 5 years ago

The climate is changing, and it seems to be primarily caused by human activity. With change comes unpredictability and unpredictability results in perceived (and potentially actual ) instability of systems that have been in place for millennia.

If you're lucky you won't experience any crisis first-hand but for the ones experiencing things like random famines, water-shortages, poverty and conflict, all due to "climate-connected adverse effects here and there in the world", it will be life-altering.

It's not going to be the end of the World, and while the climate changes may be very long-term, life will adapt and overcome. That doesn't mean that humanity won't have a very rough ride going forward.

Udik5• 5 years ago

perceived (and potentially actual )
If you're lucky you won't experience any crisis first-hand

Ok, so is it here or not?

for the ones experiencing things like random famines, water-shortages, poverty and conflict

All of which existed before climate change (since ever, actually), and are due to a multiplicity of factors of which climate is just one, and probably one of the least relevant.

going to be >may be >going forward

So is there a crisis right now or not?

mnd999• 5 years ago

You missed all those wildfires then?

rdevsrex• 5 years ago

As with every major man made catastrophe, it could have been avoided, if we cared enough about it. Also, there is never a single solution that will fix everything, but if we got behind half a dozen of the best options, we could probably avoid the worst effects, but that would require actually making a global plan and sticking with it through various administrations.

The one good thing if civilization does collapse, is that doesn't necessarily mean the end of humanity. It just means thousands to hundreds of thousands of years to get back to normal temperature wise. In that time frame I'm sure we will evolve to handle those tempatures, but of course not without all the tradedgy and loss of life.

Huwyt_Nashi018• 5 years ago

This man is nuts. It's a dire sign of the times that any publication would assert him as an intellectual or a martyr rather than a deranged outcast. Replace his delusions with almost any other and he would certainly attract those labels, or worse.

This is not science. It's religion. Enough doomsday predictions have come and gone for me to be a heretic. People like this make me proud to wear the label.

rayiner3• 5 years ago

You’re not a heretic. This guy’s attitude literally contradicts established climate science.

lgats• 5 years ago

Nothing like reducing your carbon footprint by using a composting toilet and having 3 offspring

Traubenfuchs2• 5 years ago

I wonder what climate clowns would respond when asked about this? Would they admit that having 3 offspring was a bad decision, climate wise, or would they remain committed to their cognitive dissonance?

mbgerring4• 5 years ago

Every month I go into The Who Is Hiring thread and Ctrl-F for “climate,” “energy,” and “carbon” and almost never turn anything up.

I’ve been part of this community for something like ten years and I know many people on here to be extremely shrewd and intelligent, and yet, over and over again, I see people who don’t understand the scale of climate change at all, nor the scale of the opportunity involved in transitioning the world’s energy and infrastructure away from burning carbon.

Is Peter Kalmus a little eccentric? Sure. But who’s crazier — him, or the vast majority of the Hacker News community who just completely shrug off climate change and the opportunity represented by the transition, even now that there are several clean energy billionaires?

arkitaip• 5 years ago

Why do you give so much valuable headspace to HN? In the scheme of things, it's mostly irrelevant and impotent. There are more fruitful grounds if you seek allies in your climate change work.

mbgerring4• 5 years ago

Don’t worry about me, I’m already doing that work (and making good money doing it!) I’m just trying to understand why so few people here see what to me is very obvious.

twoslide• 5 years ago

I don't know if it is a question of intelligence or understanding, but rather evidence that there is currently very little demand for climate solutions (because everyone can externalize these costs for free). The lack of jobs on HN in this area is really a symptom of the problem. But also true that their are jobs in this area (solar) they just don't overlap with the typical HN skillset.

mbgerring4• 5 years ago

There is a large and growing demand for both clean energy and climate solutions. Because climate change is an unavoidable physical fact, that demand is likely to grow. It is already not free to externalize the cost of carbon, and a great deal of money and engineering talent will be needed for adaptation in the coming decades. It’s also not likely to remain cost-free to externalize the cost of carbon either. And even in the event of a breakthrough technology like nuclear fusion, there’s still the task of decarbonizing infrastructure and electrifying everything. All of this will need software. All of this will require a staggeringly large deployment of capital. And you would think that with so many smart people here, more of them would want a piece of that!

timlod• 5 years ago

As for your search: there's climate.careers - a site with jobs based around climate change.

mbgerring4• 5 years ago

Yes! They’re called climatebase now, and I landed at my current job through them. Very smart folks running that organization, highly recommended!

TheCapeGreek• 5 years ago

I know HN skews mostly from the USA, but after being subscribed to that site for a while I found very few remote jobs (and usually requiring the ability to work in the US).

clydethefrog• 5 years ago

Monitor the comments in this thread and you have your answer.

hyko4• 5 years ago

Climate change is too big an issue to be solved by entrepreneurs. We have to create a business environment where climate solutions can be unambiguous economic winners, which is the job of government.

blub• 5 years ago

It seems that this attitude bordering on delusion of being able to change the world for the better is a defining feature of entrepreneurs.

I'd say it's the entrepreneurs which are crazier, even if some of them at least succeed at changing the world and only a tiny subset for the better.

Traubenfuchs2• 5 years ago

And yet he had children. Having just one child increases your climate footprint beyond your control -even if it's zero otherwise.

Besides that, beyond his (outdoor toilet & food) masochism he is a massive hypocrite like EVERY SINGLE person that publicly whines about climate change: Unibody macbook, car, christmas lights, another macbook, iPhone, wait a second... is this a god damn amazon box in the background? Yes it is! So anyways, unless you don't have children, stop pretending you really care about bobcats and your climate footprint.

addicted3• 5 years ago

The reality is that they can achieve a better footprint by simply packing their bags and moving back to Manhattan.

Livein in an apartment instead of a house with a backyard, and largely using public transport on a daily basis will do far more to reduce their carbon output than the steps they’ve taken.

hyko4• 5 years ago

Having just one child increases your climate footprint beyond your control

Unless they invent a cheap fusion reactor. People don’t just produce pollution; they produce ideas as well.

fsflover2• 5 years ago

It will take at least 30 years for a child to invent a fusion reactor. It will be too late.

endymi0n• 5 years ago

This guy remembers me about the golden rule in product management: If a lot of customers complain about something, they are almost always right. If they tell you how to fix it, they are almost always wrong. Outdoor toilet? OMG, please!

It annoys me to no end that with the current environmental catastrophes, almost nobody approaches this with a quantitative engineering mindset, especially the ones who care most: Progressives (of which I consider myself one).

It‘s mindblowing how I can‘t buy a plastic wrapped cucumber in the organic shop even though it reduces waste from damage by 30%.

In a country where we recycle or cleanly incinerate 99% of plastic.

When 70% of the oceans‘ plastic comes from 4 rivers, none of them in Europe.

And they feel great about it, as if they‘re actually doing something.

Repeat after me: Large scale change will not come from individualized action. It just doesn‘t scale. The only working solution is to make the ecological choice economical.

The first way is the Elon Musk way. Just make the alternative better than the original. Best, but needs an extremely long breath with flawless vision and execution.

The second is large scale regulation. As much as I hate a lot about the EU bureaucracy, they did exactly the right things with incandescent lamps. Flat out banned them over a period of 10 years.

The same people who whined in the beginning about how mean the state is towards their free choice are now sitting in LED illuminated rooms with lower watts, better long life and almost equal CRI. All catalyzed by a removal of alternatives on the horizon.

I believe the just started CO2 tax can do the same.

m_mueller• 5 years ago

CO2 tax is indeed the only way I think. Even if all ground transport and the grid is carbon free, we still have massive CO2 output in industry, agriculture, housing and airline industry - there's no way to fix that if the massive external effect CO2 has, is not paid by the consumer. It should create a CO2 market that puts a price on capturing it, with whatever is the best (cheapest) method at the time. We already have that with the certificates, but should be careful with those as they seem to be not the most cost efficient way of getting to negative carbon - a lot of money is afaik. flowing to developing nations that have below-average carbon emissions (at least as officially captured), without actually having to plant any trees.

addicted3• 5 years ago

You’re confusing a few things though. A plastic ban has nothing to do with climate change. The drivers for a plastic ban lie elsewhere.

And the fact that Europe’s rivers aren’t among the top 4 likely has everything to do with that plastic ban and the fact that Europe isn’t as populous as the places whose rivers do contribute the most plastic to the ocean. Also, the fact that until recently much of Europe almost certainly shipped their waste plastic off to China anyways.

cipher_system2• 5 years ago

I would say plastic bans only reduces ocean plastics on the tiny margin if the country has a well developed waste management system, which most European countries has.

Coming from a country importing garbage to use as fuel in combined power and heating plants I see no major problem with some countries exporting garbage.

China imported plastics to recycle, not throw into their rivers. They stopped because the learned that the health cost exceeded the tiny profits that industry made.

With that said, banning some kinds of plastic use under certain circumstances is a good thing. For a sustainable solution we still need to figure out recycling, correctly used, plastic is an awesome material.

Balgair• 5 years ago

Look at CFCs and the hole in the ozone. We came together as a world to ban them, and the hole in the ozone is largely healing. It's a great story.

But with one wrinkle: We had a good alternative to CFCs that cost about the same.

With oil and gas, we kinda don't have a good alternative yet. Sure, sure, solar is very cheap nowadays. But from a carbon footprint viewpoint? Solar is still pretty high when you remember you have to melt down all that silicon before you go soak up the sun.

Nuclear? Pebble Bed? Thorium? Public's got a very bad smell about that stuff. Besides, you just can't let all the autocrats out there get their hands on it otherwise they start making up things about having a-bombs and then things get invasion-y. Not cheap, those invasions.

Hydro? Wind? Great if you live in Vancouver or Nepal, but in Arkansas or Uttar Pradesh?

Unlike with CFCs, we just don't have a single power source that meet the requirements wherever you go. It's got to be a mosaic of power, and that's hard (read expensive) to manage and make.

hyko4• 5 years ago

Peter appears to be suffering from mental illness. It’s quite possible to imagine the impact of climate change and not have it consume your every waking (and sleeping) moment.

morgengold• 5 years ago

Although I have no doubt climate change is happening and bad, I have big problems generating an emotional response that leads to action.

Is there any website, that explicitly lists the consequences that will punch me in the face?

fsflover2• 5 years ago

I recommend Our Planet series from Netflix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aETNYyrqNYE&list=PL7rb3uMaYm....

Also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#Impacts

gmuslera• 5 years ago

Looking at how you will feel with the tenths of degree of temperature rise each year/decade is the wrong mindset. Because what goes up "slow" and steady is what we add of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

We don't feel temperature as global averages over a year, we feel heatwaves of maybe days over 45ºC, hailstorms, hurricanes, droughts and massive loss of crops. Our cities won't go because a slow and steady, centimeter by centimeter rise of the sea level, will get ocassionally flooded by each time more frequent storms, till we decide that we should abandon them. An that won't happen evenly on all the world.

Regarding the "slow" rise of greenhouse gases, it happens orders above of what a person, or an organized and large enough group of persons can revert, the industries add really big amount of CO2 and methane to the atmosphere each year. But that slow rise gets jumps, not because what we do, but because triggering possitive feedback loop processes, like each time more frequent forest fires, loss of ice reflecting sunlight, and warming polar regions (that have a lot of frozen greenhouse gases, that are getting released in massive scale by now). And some of those positive feedback mechanisms will work by us, when most of us must take measures against the effects of extreme weather, like everyone having air conditioners and turned on most of the time.

Personal action won't make a difference, at least directly on global climate, the only thing at a large enough scale that could do something to slow down the trend are the big industries, and they won't do anything to affect their profits till is too late already. And regarding governments, the last 5 years already showed us that matter for most of them are profits and short term results too.

Maybe the Great Filter is already with us since we invented money, all that came after till this point just took the path of least resistance.

The Climate Crisis Is Worse Than You Can Imagine. Here’s What Happens If You Try

Related Stories