Climate tipping points are now imminent, scientists warn

https://www.dw.com/en/climate-tipping-points-are-now-imminent-scientists-warn/a-58665256

by lsllc • 5 years ago

48 94 5 years ago

dw.com

olivermarks5• 5 years ago

Some interesting history of climate anxiety with a zenith in 1975 https://t.co/oXM5Zf8V7d?amp=1

redleggedfrog• 5 years ago

Man, if we had only taken it seriously back then...

Sharlin3• 5 years ago

Petrochem companies did. They spent serious money in order to dissuade the public from taking it seriously. Not that the public needed much dissuading.

UncleOxidant6• 5 years ago

Jimmy Carter was a prophet and they ran him out of town.

polotics• 5 years ago

How is beef from 1975 relevant for my 2021 California fried chickens ?

rad_gruchalski• 5 years ago

Do you mean 2021 California almonds, pistachios, strawberries, grapes and cattle?

alanbernstein• 5 years ago

Very interesting! What conclusion should I draw from this, that unlimited growth and pollution are fine?

olivermarks5• 5 years ago

I can't speak for Simon, but I'd suggest commonsense stewardship of the planet is paramount and that the endless gloomy earth weather hysteria (particularly from academics) is very unhealthy and negative for humanity.

tshaddox• 5 years ago

The problem with the argument is that it assumes the only thing we can do to determine the validity of a claim is to evaluate how convinced certain other people are that the claim is true. He argues that, because scientists in 1975 were (supposedly) as convinced that global cooling was real as scientists today are convinced that global warming is real, we have no other means of determining whether either of these claims are true. Presumably he would also say that, because people before the Copernican Revolution were equally convinced of the heliocentric model as people after the Copernican Revolution were convinced of the geocentric model, we have no means whatsoever of determining whether either claim is true.

t235211• 5 years ago

There was no scientific consensus of global cooling. [1]

Cherry picked bad evidence from 4 decades ago is not a rational basis to ignore the scientific consensus that the entire Earth faces enormous challenges.

That video validates climate anxiety because it shows how scientifically-unsupported ideas can propagate and lead the public to false conclusions with potentially dire consequences.

[1] https://skepticalscience.com/global-cooling.htm

clydethefrog2• 5 years ago

"An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age, an observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate scientists say today about the prospect of global warming. A review of the literature suggests that, __on the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking as being one of the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales__."

https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/89/9/2008bam...

salynchnew3• 5 years ago

The solutions mentioned:

-Phasing out and eliminating fossil fuels

-Implementing "a significant carbon price"

-Restoring ecosystems such as carbon sinks and biodiversity hotspots

All policy issues. Given the amount of regulatory capture, it seems like a fourth obvious solution would require significant changes to the incentives for politicians or how lobbying is conducted by fossil fuel ecosystem companies.

cde-v• 5 years ago

No, I'm sure we are just a few peaceful protests away from changing their minds.

Sharlin3• 5 years ago

Somehow the phrase "being the first against the wall when the revolution comes" has been in my mind lately.

(This is not a threat. It's just that a certain group of old mostly-men have the extremely dubious honor of being the first human beings ever to single-handedly make the entire planet a worse place to live for whole new generations of humans, and the latter may rightfully be slightly resentful about that.)

bognition• 5 years ago

The devil is in the details:

- How quickly do we phase out fossil fuels. Less than 5 years is un realistic but more then 20 years is probably too long to wait

- How much should we charge for carbon emissions?

- How do we restore ecosystems that took millions of years to form?

JohnWhigham2• 5 years ago

Taxing negative externalities won't work here; bean counters just add that to the price of business.

Only thing that will work is government subsidies to invest in cleaner technology and have them rival whatever we give oil companies. We can take the latter away, but we need a lot of baby boomers to die off first; there's too many in power that won't stand for it.

r00fus4• 5 years ago

Why will taxation (or better yet remove subsidies for extraction) not work?

At some price point, the economics of extraction simply don't make sense anymore vs. other means of energy production (see: coal, nuclear).

We have an extraction "economy" mainly because of government subsidies and support. And that continuing because extraction industries have corrupted governments.

cogman105• 5 years ago

It will if there are cheaper alternatives.

Bean counters still use the cheapest means of production to run business. Burning fossils isn't required for most businesses, it's just the cheapest way to do business.

For example, if carbon taxes are high, then all the sudden trains becomes super economical so you can expect a large increase in train shipping vs truck shipping.

ojnabieoot• 5 years ago

I do feel the focus on lobbyists and corruption distracts from the more serious problem: part of the solution will have to involve reducing certain luxuries for many upper-middle-class people: less real meat, less AC in the summer, less driving, much more expensive clothing and furniture, etc. ExxonMobil isn’t the problem here, it’s ordinary citizens who don’t want to make the sacrifice. And the problem isn’t “corrupt politicians” so much as “politicians who want to win elections,” aka all politicians. And “we simply have to elect liars who are guaranteed to lose their election after betraying their voters” isn’t an option.

The process will certainly involve some pain and serious injustices, even if it’s necessary for the long term. Reducing meat consumption in particular is one that won’t be solved by electric generation technology, and lies directly on powerful cultural fault points in the US/Canada (“it’s the hippies and college professors who took your pork chops and bankrupted our hard working farmers!”). And eventually we will simply have to ban beef and pork.

godelski4• 5 years ago

I'm always a little confused by these suggestions because what I've heard from the researchers, directly, seems a bit different (or rather their list is more inclusive). I had the opportunity to work at some DOE labs and while there attended a lot of climate talks. One thing they always mention is carbon sequestration. It seems a lot of groups like Green Peace and Sierra Nevada are against CCS that isn't biological, where the researchers tend to be of the position "we're so fucked that even planting as many trees as we can AND building CCS systems isn't enough". So I find it weird that point #3 here is purely an environmental one. And at these talks there's always some intern that asks about nuclear, and there's almost always the same blunt answer "that'd be great and help, but it is never going to happen" (note DOE labs also research nuclear reactors and weapons, so some of these people work on reactors). There's more that they suggest, but going to these talks can often be depressing because it's not just the political will. We don't even have the technology (which in part is due to political will. Damn coupled equations).

What I learned from them is "don't take anything off the table, we're that fucked." And so whenever I read articles like this I always question why they leave things off the table and do not mention that we currently do not have the technological means to solve the issue. They tend to focus on electricity production and vehicle emissions, but also things like heating/cooling (which creates a feedback loop because adapting to climate change we need more of these technologies).

If you do ever get the chance to attend talks like these I do highly suggest going to them and asking a lot of questions. Climate researchers tend to be extremely passionate and will talk your ears off (in a good way).

Gys• 5 years ago

it seems like a fourth obvious solution would require significant changes to the incentives for politicians

Politicians are choosen. By people like you and me. Obviously (to me) you and me like to look the other way, trying to ignore serious problems as long as possible. YOLO.

anoplus3• 5 years ago

My anxiety about global warming is more intense than ever lately. I feel like most people around me don't realize it. It's a lonely feeling. And I feel uncomfortable bringing it up and ruining others' mood. My fear is that it happens much faster than everyone think it is

pmastela• 5 years ago

My feelings exactly. Just know that you’re not alone.

UncleOxidant6• 5 years ago

You're not alone. As someone who lives in the PNW I dread fire season (summer) now because it means we could have days of smoke and dangerously high particulate levels - having your air full of smoke such that you can barely see across the street for days tends to awaken a primal fear. And there's a huge dead zone now forming off of our coast which is killing untold amounts of marine life (not to mention that marine life that died in last months heat dome event). We've trashed the place and most people don't seem to be even mildly concerned.

vlovich1232• 5 years ago

It will happen much more quickly than people realize since the totality of what I’ve read seems to be “our models about it are too conservative”. The big question will be whether there’s a very significant impact to this in the western world. We’ll feel secondary effects and coastline habitability will shift, but I suspect the point where we see it directly in the west is when the entire world is in turmoil. Even still, there will be people here talking about illegal immigration rather than what causing that.

m4x2• 5 years ago

The flooding, drought, heatwaves and wildfires in the US and Europe are significant impacts on the western world. That's happening right now. There's no question at this point about whether Western and developed countries are going to be hit hard.

salynchnew3• 5 years ago

I literally told family members "I'm going to mention climate change in every conversation from here on out" and then brought it up, even if I just mention in passing or find a way to involve it in the conversation as a joke.

Five years later, and my parents are now single-issue climate voters.

slingnow• 5 years ago

My condolences to your parents and family.

r00fus4• 5 years ago

This is how you do it. It's a fact of life, not some "theory". Not discussing it is the real problem.

anoplus3• 5 years ago

I just started to do the same

kiba• 5 years ago

I don't have anxiety about global warming. My thought is mostly about the heat wave where I live.

Intellectually, I know it's something to be worried about and that we should take care of now rather than later.

systemvoltage• 5 years ago

Are we looking at data or this is a media driven anxiety?

Edit: I usually keep up with NOAA's state of climate updates on monthly basis here: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/

briga• 5 years ago

It’s on the front page of nearly every major news source nearly every week, it’s pretty hard not to notice. It’s not like people don’t realize something is going on, most just don’t want to think about it that hard. And can you blame them? The average person has approximately no impact on global climate change.

anoplus3• 5 years ago

Yes, most people are aware of it. But the common comment I get from people is that it's not going to disrupt our lives very soon. And I bet the disruption will come much faster than they think

howaboutnope• 5 years ago

It’s on the front page of nearly every major news source nearly every week

It also gets flagged off the front page with regularity, as was this thread.

And no, I don't blame the average person. I blame those who disenfranchised and infantilised the average person in the pursuit of profit and power, and the intellectuals who played cheerleaders for it.

FROMM: Like for instance, that we are confronted with the possibility of a war of such destruction that the whole existence of our nation and of the whole world is at stake. And yet, people know it - people read it in the newspapers, people read that at the first attack, a hundred million Americans might be killed.And yet, they talk about it as if they were talking about something being wrong with the carburetor of their car, perhaps. Actually, they have paid more attention to the danger of a flu epidemic than to the danger of the atomic bomb, because...
WALLACE: Don't you think that's a little overstatement, Dr. Fromm?
FROMM: Well, I wish it were, because what I see is relatively few people who experience, who feel, the danger, which we are threatened with, and who feel the responsibility of doing something about it.
WALLACE: Or maybe, when you talk about the responsibility of doing something, maybe it simply is this: that we find it very difficult to make ourselves felt in this amorphous society in which we live. Each individual would want to do something but would find it difficult to make himself felt.
FROMM: Well, I think here you point out to one, really, of the basic defects of our system: that the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act -but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.

-- Erich Fromm, "The Mike Wallace Interview", 25th of May 1958 (!)

And then that "stupidity" is used to justify even more of what created it. It's a constant refrain on HN too, where "the average user" is used to excuse all sorts of shitty software and reduction of options. It's like saying that someone is too weak to go for a walk, so they should remain in bed until their muscles got stronger. We do this all over the place, in all sorts of areas, and have been at it for decades.

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 5 years ago

What's worse is that, well, just no one is willing to do anything at all about it. Nobody in society is willing to sacrifice anything to stop it. We're still going to drive cars to work, everything disposable is still going to be made of plastic, we're still going to burn coal to power our bitcoin miners, and we're still going to eat large quantities of meat at every meal.

Frankly, it's become very difficult to have anything but a fatalist view of the whole thing.

r00fus4• 5 years ago

I bring it up anyway - COVID or climate disaster. I mention it in work meetings or with friends/family.

It's a fact of life.

I don't dwell on it - simply note it, then move on with the rest of the discussion. Ignoring the realities you're facing (bad air, threat of evacuation, etc) simply to avoid discomfort seems worse to me.

deltaonefour3• 5 years ago

The irony is, the avoidance of the problem is a causative factor of the problem. Everyone here, including me, contributes to global warming and we "avoid" the problem by continuing to contribute.

throwaway9843933• 5 years ago

I'm not trying to be rude, but, why are you worrying about it?

From a "the children are our future" perspective, sure, future generations will have a harder time. Poor and coastal communities will be displaced, there'll be economic hardships, and in general life is going to just be harder.

But it's not like we haven't faced hardships before. In fact, it's such a well-known problem that we probably have more solutions (both short-term and long-term) than for any other disaster we might face. Even in the worst case, it's manageable.

cogman105• 5 years ago

Because we don't have solutions. The closer and closer we get to the edge the more and more the realization is that nobody in any government has any sort of contingency plans for the worst happening.

Look at what has happened with recent natural disasters. Puerto Rico is STILL in shambles. And while unrelated to climate change, Flint Michigan's water is STILL undrinkable.

The terrifying part of climate change isn't that things will be harder, it's that our governments are completely unprepared to address it. One of the major political parties is fighting against any modicum of effort that WOULD help to address it.

godelski4• 5 years ago

From a "the children are our future" perspective, sure, future generations will have a harder time.

I very much dislike this perspective. Climate change is happening __now__. It is affecting us __now___. It is costing __us__ billions of dollars a year. Not future generations, __us__.

deltaonefour3• 5 years ago

Relax. We're going to not only hit every tipping point, but we're going to rocket past all of them.

I think the best we can hope for is that this rocket will eventually fall back to earth. When things get too bad humanity will find a way. Of course likely not before a lot of suffering occurs.

The other best thing you can hope for is that the worst of this suffering won't happen in your lifetime.

Let's face it though, resolving the issue BEFORE the tipping point is impossible.

I'm getting voted down, but seriously come back here in 10 years. My prediction is the most likely possible occurrence. Some of the worst case scenarios of global warming WILL play out. It did for COVID, it will for global warming. Even in the thick of the pandemic we still have anti-vaxers and anti-maskers. The same will happen with global warming, even in the thick of it we'll have tons of people who are against mitigating it.

silicon2401• 5 years ago

Life and reality are very grim. IMO there are more reasons to be unhappy than unhappy. The only reason any of us is able to avoid crushing misery is by building up walls to keep physical reminders away and having mental walls to keep thoughts away. The climate's being destroyed, ocean life is being annihilated, slavery exists as much as it ever has, much darker crimes happen constantly and at horrifying scale daily, etc. There is no solution to these problems as an individual, just to find a way to avoid dwelling on the bad and selectively notice the good.

taylodl• 5 years ago

Don't worry about things that aren't under your control. All you're going to do is have a mental breakdown. Focus on what you can control - which is your own carbon footprint. Work on ways to reduce it while living a reasonably "normal" life. Heck, you can even regularly report on it and be a celebrity greenie of sorts. Don't fret though - you simply can't control it.

clydethefrog2• 5 years ago

The subreddit /r/collapesupport has many great threads and articles about this. Sort by top.

ohiovr2• 5 years ago

  22  Unless those days had been shortened, no flesh would have been saved. But for the sake of the chosen ones, those days will be shortened.

ohiovr2• 5 years ago

Koyaanisquatsi

crazy life

life in turmoil

life out of balance

life disintegrating

a state of life that calls for a new way of livng

"if we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster"

"Near the day of purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky"

"a container of ashes might one day be thrown from the sky, which could burn the land and boil the oceans"

13 One of the elders answered, saying to me, “These who are arrayed in white robes, who are they, and from where did they come?”

  14  I told him, “My lord, you know.”

He said to me, “These are those who came out of the great tribulation. They washed their robes, and made them white in the Lamb’s blood. 15 Therefore they are before the throne of God, they serve him day and night in his temple. He who sits on the throne will spread his tabernacle over them. 16 They will never be hungry, neither thirsty any more; neither will the sun beat on them, nor any heat; 17 for the Lamb who is in the midst of the throne shepherds them, and leads them to springs of waters of life. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

UncleOxidant6• 5 years ago

Rev 11:18 "When the nations got angry, you became angry too! Now the time has come for the dead to be judged. It is time for you to reward your servants the prophets and all your people who honor your name, no matter who they are. It is time to destroy everyone who has destroyed the earth."

(Read it in Johnny Cash's voice)

The evangelicals assume God doesn't care about the earth, that he gave it to them to do with whatever they like. They might be overlooking something.

dleslie• 5 years ago

A seriously significant price on carbon should impact the use of jet and bunker fuel; but that would need to be applied at participating ports, and not by the countries whose flags are flown on the ships or painted on the airliner.

Has there been much talk of ports applying carbon taxes in this way?

database_lost• 5 years ago

Honest question: Shouldn't we hedge our bets at this point and also start investing heavily in infrastructure that helps mitigate the worst of the effects? (Flood management, water desalination, cloud seeding, etc.) I feel the race to zero emissions is a trendy topic now in media, but perhaps we are past the "we can still stop bad things from happening" point.

wsc981• 5 years ago

Shouldn't we hedge our bets at this point and also start investing heavily in infrastructure that helps mitigate the worst of the effects?

Should have been from the start. There are so many climate change variables outside of human control (sunspots, volcanic eruptions, etc...) that it's better to just be prepared.

UncleOxidant6• 5 years ago

Even some geoengineering like shooting a lot of reflective particulates high into the upper atmosphere - we need to start thinking pretty seriously about how to do this. It won't be without side effects, but the current side effects of continuing to pump CO2 into the atmosphere without restraint are going to force us to consider things like this.

Sharlin3• 5 years ago

Mitigation and adaptation are big topics within the field, and yes, we're going to need a shitload of both even in the best case scenario. Unfortunately, the hundreds of millions of people who are worst affected by climate change are also in the worst position to do anything to improve their situation.

plutonorm• 5 years ago

Yup, smart money will move in this direction. It’s far too late to try to work against the titanic forces that are in motion. Large scale climate engineering is probably going to be needed.

wonderwonder• 5 years ago

This seems to make sense. I very much doubt the US, Russia, China and a large number of emerging economies are going to make large enough changes to have an impact and they are the main drivers. Seems to make sense to just assume at this point that its coming while working to try and stop it.

coder-32• 5 years ago

I'm no fan of the Chinese government but from what I'm gleaning online, they seem to be leading the charge with adoption of green technologies and are taking climate change relatively seriously.

coder-32• 5 years ago

Yeah, probably. But we need to be careful about higher order effects of those interventions. Climates and ecosystems are complex systems, thus, perturbations/linear solutions usually cause unexpected behaviour.

Things like desalination where we aren't disturbing the system is fine. Cloud seeding on the other hand I wouldn't be so comfortable with widespread adoption.

salynchnew3• 5 years ago

Mitigation is going to happen no matter what. All of the things you mentioned are already happening as temporary stopgap measures.

The issue is that investing in decarbonization, etc., is both a superior long-term strategy AND it makes all of the mitigation strategies you mention more effective bc the primary effects are not as bad.

yongjik• 5 years ago

Rule #1 when you find yourself in a hole: stop digging. Sure, there are other things you could/should do as well, but "to stop digging" should be your #1 priority.

Or, put another way, we're waaaay past "we can stop every bad thing from happening" point, but we're still in the "we can stop even more bad things from happening" range, and we won't be out of that range anytime soon - at least I hope so, I don't want to imagine what it would be like "Everything that can go wrong has already gone wrong so there's no point worrying any more."

m4x2• 5 years ago

It's not quite that simple. It will take decades for us to stop emitting GHGs and destroying the environment. The inertia is too high even in Western nations, and that ignores the problems in China and India.

"stop digging" should be our primary priority, but not at the expense of other solutions which can also be pursued in parallel.

kd9132• 5 years ago

How is Germany assessed as medium? A Country that removed more wind turbines than it put up from 2017-2019 and replaced with gas/coal.

sveme• 5 years ago

Do you have a source for that? All I found indicates that its share of energy production has increased considerably in those years [1].

[1]https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/239528/umfrag...

kd9132• 5 years ago

I think I was remembering this DW video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr5PEAK1t3U

imtringued• 5 years ago

https://interestingengineering.com/german-coal-plant-closes-...

Yeah they replaced wind with coal with wind.

lindseymysse• 5 years ago

"imminent", lol

throwaway9843933• 5 years ago

They should just stop the warnings already. We already fell off the cliff. We are in free-fall. At this point all we can hope for is that MacGyver builds us a parachute out of a roll of toiler paper, some bubble gum, and shoelaces, before we hit the pavement.

narrator2• 5 years ago

Who built more coal plants last year than the rest of the world shut down last year? Who benefits from the low price of coal thanks to the world cutting back their use of coal? Who grew their industrial economy dramatically last year? Who is the biggest carbon polluter out there?

They are laughing all the way to being the next superpower thanks to the west's carbon austerity.

How are our carbon sins magically absolved if we just transfer them to this country and shift all our industrial production there?

The practical effect is the deindustrialization of the west and the building up of their industry with negligible net reduction in carbon emissions.

If this was an intentional policy to impoverish the west and increase some country's economic power with little net environmental impact, it couldn't have been better designed.

jonplackett2• 5 years ago

Governments’ inability to deal with Covid - something that required only a few weeks to months (rather than decades) forethought based on data - is likely a harbinger of how badly we’re going to deal with climate change.

For some reason we seem paralysed and unable to really act until disaster is moments away. Is it politics or just human nature?

UncleOxidant6• 5 years ago

Politics emerge from human behavior. At the base it's human nature. We as a species are not good at taking action to mitigate risks that aren't immediate. We had plenty of warning - the idea was beginning to emerge even back in the 50s and certainly by the 70s our leaders were quite aware.

deltaonefour3• 5 years ago

We are excellent at assessing risk. We developed science and statistics and we have the technology and knowledge to even be aware that this is a problem. We also have the amazing technology to spread this knowledge and make everyone aware of the issue. No other living species has the capability of doing this at all. It is an unprecedented ability.

The other thing humans are really good at are lying to ourselves and procrastinating. The tragedy of the commons is a part of it. These are the main factors that contribute to our downfall. Especially the tragedy of the commons.

jonplackett2• 5 years ago

carbon dioxide concentration in the Earth's atmosphere was higher than at any time since measurements began.

How much co2 is there in the atmosphere now that we don’t want to be there? Wondering how big a pile of dry ice that would make

pengaru• 5 years ago

It's too late.

This is a slow-moving population explosion with its impact only fully realized when global quality of life normalizes, not when population growth slows, stops, or even reverses.

China is now emitting over double the CO2 of USA. It's no coincidence that China has over a billion people who in large part relatively recently came out of the dirt and started living first-world lifestyles.

India is next in line to repeat China's pattern, another billion.

Americans trying to fix the climate disaster at this point is comically futile, unless you're considering the war path to prevent literally a billion+ more people from joining the first-world. You're simply not in the driver's seat.

narrator2• 5 years ago

The net effect is all worldwide industry is moving to China because they can pollute. It's a humungous prisoner's dilemma and they're defecting while we're cooperating and none of the climate alarmists are calling them out on it. I'd be paying the alarmists to do this if I was working for China.

gmuslera• 5 years ago

Even if we full stop emitting now, the CO2 and the methane in the atmosphere will keep doing its warming work. And there are now more sources GHG, some of them are methane from melting permafrost, or CO2 from forest fires, and not sure how much the cloud cover would change with more heat.

You have the exponential trend of growing global average temperature, and the exponential trends of triggered positive feedback mechanisms.

If we want to revert this, we have to offset not just our emissions, but the triggered emissions too, remove the extra carbon from the atmosphere, and lower the temperature, without all four there will be no long term solution, just a continued trend towards conditions not compatible with human life or civilization as we know it now.

betwixthewires• 5 years ago

So we have passed a tipping point after which future tipping points cannot be avoided? Then are they really tipping points, or is the tipping point in the past?

ryandvm• 5 years ago

Not a popular opinion, but I have a lot of faith in humanity's _future_ engineering ability. Yes, we are dealing with climate consequences right now. And yes, we should be trying to improve resource efficiency right now. But that said, the worst is almost certainly yet to come, and it is exceedingly difficult to solve the problems of tomorrow with the technology today.

A little anecdote to illustrate this is that at the turn of the last century the streets of New York City were projected to be buried under 10 feet of horse shit. No joke. Was that a silly scenario to consider? Not really. But it turned out to be completely resolved by unforeseen technological improvements that made the entire conjecture nonsensical.

Just spit-balling, but let's say we crack fusion technology in the next 50 years and unlock effectively limitless energy. With free power maybe we run massive atmospheric scrubbers and bury CO2 and methane in the earth. I'm sure there are other climate control techniques that unlimited power unlocks.

My point is this: think back at any point in the last 500 years and try to imagine them solving the problems of 100 years into the future. It's a laughable thought experiment. Their solutions would have been ludicrous given the technology that future generations develop. What hubris it takes to not realize that we are _at least_ as primitive in relation to future generations.

cogman105• 5 years ago

50 years ago was 1970. We had solar power, nuclear energy, wind energy, and plastics.

The energy landscape today looks exactly the same as it did in 1970. The only difference is renewables are significantly cheaper and batteries significantly better. Fusion looks to be just as close today as it looked to be in the 1970s.

Climate tipping points are now imminent, scientists warn

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