World to hit temperature tipping point 10 years faster than forecast

https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/world-to-hit-temperature-tipping-point-10-years-faster-than-forecast-20210805-p58g7u

by jay_kyburz • 5 years ago

130 123 5 years ago

afr.com

qeternity2• 5 years ago

Supposedly the world’s first trillionaire will be minted in the ESG revolution. Part of me struggles to see how we link the economic incentives with urgently needed action, without government support.

WA• 5 years ago

There’s a nice SciFi book about this: one person got incredibly rich, because he invented artificial trees that capture a lot of CO2. Good book, unfortunately only available in German: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/38356981-hologrammati...

noio• 5 years ago

I often have this thought. If only one could bioengineer some kind of device that replicates itself and captures CO2 using sunlight.

Oh right. We already have those. That’s a tree. We just need to stop cutting them down maybe.

WJW• 5 years ago

Why needlessly hamstring yourself by specifying that any solution needs to be done without any government involvement? Governments are difficult to work with and slow to get moving, but they wield a level of resources unmatched by any company. It'd be like insisting on transporting oil across the ocean but disqualifying the use of oil tankers beforehand because they are expensive and can't dock in every port.

qeternity2• 5 years ago

I think you misunderstood my comment.

m4r35n357• 5 years ago

Paywall

vpj• 5 years ago

Atlantic Ocean currents weaken, signalling big weather changes - study

HN Discussions:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28082887

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28078575

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28085342

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28091087

truculent• 5 years ago

If you took each IPCC report and made every number 20% worse (larger or smaller depending on the context), would you end up with a better set of predictions?

oefrha• 5 years ago

https://archive.is/X3zJY

bamboozled• 5 years ago

Geez, you'd think there were no alternatives to continuing to burn fossil fuels or something ?

taneq2• 5 years ago

There are plenty of alternatives but they're not cost effective...

ajnin2• 5 years ago

It's not true, solar is very cost effective, cheaper than coal. But there are industries build around extracting coal from the ground and they have an interest to continue to push coal.

zz8652• 5 years ago

Is anywhere getting better? It seems the whole world is either flooding or burning right now, it seems pretty bleak. Surely some places will become nicer places to live. My friend in Chicago said winters are getting milder but summers staying the same. Eastern Canada & Greenland maybe too?

mFixman• 5 years ago

Weather isn't felt in a vacuum: you have to account for centuries of architecture and customs.

Weather in London has become nicer in the last decade, with winters that are milder on average and summers that are warmer and sunnier (except this one). However, inside of London's thick stone houses you don't notice any difference in winter while you also are cooked alive in the summer heat.

samatman5• 5 years ago

Retrofitting heat pumps is completely tractable.

This has two advantages: it's more energy efficient than any other way of heating buildings, and they can be run in reverse for air conditioning.

A lot of those buildings didn't come with indoor plumbing or electricity, after all.

hcurtiss3• 5 years ago

I think we become victim to selection bias in reporting. There’s not much reporting when it’s just a beautiful day. Or even better than average over a longer than average time. That leads one to conclude it’s all going to hell, when in fact the real problem is we have increasingly real time knowledge of all the disasters everywhere across the globe.

jmfldn• 5 years ago

Good point. I don't doubt climate change or anything like that but the world seeming bleaker now than in previous times is, at least partly, a function of selection bias. In the past, even a news-hungry person would consume a daily news show and a daily newspaper at most. News consumption was very constrained even for the news fiends. Now we have realtime global news 24/7 coming at us from everywhere. Furthermore some of this tech is bi-directional so it amplifies the negative catastrophic stuff as it increases engagement / eyeballs and therefore money. It's a classic vicious circle (or a virtuous one if you're on the side making money from it!). It's an insane information environment out there if you choose to over indulge. If you're not careful you're constantly assaulted by an avalanche of negativity, and the world can start to feel very dark indeed. It's really not though.

People from my generation (old millenial / young gen X) often hark back to the 1990s as some sort of halcyon age, but imagine if we had today's tech then. Imagine the 90s refracted through today's tech / media landscape. I bet we'd have felt differently about it.

fouc• 5 years ago

It's not just "increasingly real time knowledge" though.. The number of disasters are actually up.

horrified3• 5 years ago

Just turn off the news. They feed on fear.

bloniac• 5 years ago

I’ve heard no predictions though about what will happen to society.

oumua_don17• 5 years ago

Probably because what's the point of predicting about something that may not exist as we know of it and experience it today.

zthrowaway• 5 years ago

So we can fear monger all we want into forcing change in the west with alternative energy. But you can’t change how fossil fuels make things much easier and affordable in the rest of the world which is where a lot of the pollution exists at this point (India and China). To go through the amount of energy it takes to become a 1st world nation you need massive amounts of energy that is cheap to acquire and cheap to use. And right now that is fossil fuels. Alternative energy is a luxury.

Hopefully someday the tech becomes more affordable for poor countries and can supply enough energy for them to get through an Industrial Age.

SideburnsOfDoom4• 5 years ago

Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’

https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-is-now-cheapest-electricit...

New solar is now often cheaper than keeping a coal plant running

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/23/most-new...

And we should expect solar to get even cheaper.

hcurtiss3• 5 years ago

When the sun is out. And when you’re blanketing literally 6 SQUARE MILES of beautiful Oregon ground[1] at a time with PV panels, it starts to look a lot less cheap.

[1] https://www.oregon.gov/energy/facilities-safety/facilities/P...

horrified3• 5 years ago

Can you explain to me then why China is still building new coal based power plants? If solar is cheaper, why would anybody build something else?

nabla92• 5 years ago

Not for a baseload needs.

belorn• 5 years ago

Solar is cheapest in a similar way that fish is the cheapest food on an island.

If you only look at the days when catches are high then it is the cheapest method to produce food. If fish are your primary source of food, and every day you don't get enough you will have to eat expensive imported food, you food cost over the year can be quite high for a primary fishing nation. The fish will still be cheapest, but as a strategy it is somewhat expensive or carry a high risk of starvation.

Nations will build as much solar/wind as there is peak demand, because it is the cheapest energy when it produce. Nation will also build coal, oil and gas power plants in order to be there when those solar and wind aren't producing. Economically that is the cheapest way to produce a stable energy grid. Environmentally it is far from the best. Falling solar and wind prices reinforces this model.

chewz• 5 years ago

And yet coal and natural gas prices reach multiyear highs due to unsatiated demand...

ReptileMan3• 5 years ago

Both yes and no. If renewables and buffer storage become raw cheaper than fossils, then they will just be adopted.

But as of now coal is cheaper. And nuclear which is the natural bridge gap tech is politically unfeasible.

SideburnsOfDoom4• 5 years ago

But as of now coal is cheaper.

do you have a reference for that? Citation needed as to where and by how much coal is cheaper.

jl6• 5 years ago

Also note that much of the pollution in India and China is created in the process of manufacturing goods which are then exported to the west, so it’s not like you and I have no influence at all.

patricius• 5 years ago

Right. We could choose not to buy from them, helping them stay in poverty. That's always an option.

belly_joe• 5 years ago

Most of the growth in Chinese carbon emissions (>90%) is due to growth Chinese consumption, not exports.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china

PicassoCTs• 5 years ago

This. And to be honest, luxury solution discussions and their waste of public discussion bandwidth are part of the problem. Financially support the building of thorium reactors in china and india- is part of the solution. Solar at home- is nice, but not part of the solution - as most of the carbon cost in the west has been carted off into the east.

horrified3• 5 years ago

Also switching to alternative energy has a huge upfront cost in CO2 - producing all those windmills and solar panels costs a lot of energy.

If the time to turn things around is really so short, maybe that upfront CO2 explosion is not the right way to go.

Similar things hold for other things like energy neutral buildings - actually building them has a huge upfront cost in CO2.

dead-snake2• 5 years ago

These doomsday prophecies are always conveniently distant. You can tell people any scary nonsense as long as it's far enough away that everyone will have forgotten the details of your prediction by the time it fails to come to pass.

It's just the same as how we can show people today any number of doomsday prophecies from the past about how the world was definitely going to be wrecked by 2020, or 2010, or 2000, or 1990, but somehow nobody thinks they were serious back then... but then they take the doomsday prophecy about 2030 seriously.

throwawaycuriou• 5 years ago

The Branch Davidians said the world is ending in 1993. That doesn't render our understanding of climate change 'scary nonsense'.

WesleyHale• 5 years ago

The issue OP is making is that climate scientists have forecasted "tipping points"[0] for years on end now, and none of them have come true. It ruins the credibility of these "point of no return" articles.

[0] https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-poca...

headmelted4• 5 years ago

Exactly.

That you would just batch up any amount of cultish astrological nonsense and equate it with science because they both make predictions is ridiculous.

By this logic you might as well insist the Earth is flat because Columbus didn’t end up in India.

secondcoming• 5 years ago

And these prophecies are always of the 'worse than previously thought' kind. It really just makes me question how sophisticated climate modelling actually is/was.

MattGaiser• 5 years ago

They are probably slightly different prophecies and the nuances get lost by the media and/or by readers.

1990: We are 10 years from being unable to stop climate change. -- Happened.

2000: We are 10 years from coral reefs being killed. -- Happened.

2010: We are 10 years from farms being permanently scorched. -- Happening.

smaryjerry• 5 years ago

I think this is why young people think boomers are dumb when in reality boomers have just been burned over and over with doom predictions and by political lies obviously said to earn votes. These doom predictions are always conveniently 10 years away, long enough that it feels close and urgent but so it also feels that we still have time to fix. My high schooler came home one day just last year and said they learned that we are going to run out of fossil fuels in 10 years so we have to convert everything to renewable right away. I told him 25 years ago I ‘learned’ in high school that we would run out of fossil fuels in 10 years also. They even explained the models in my day not just showed the results to you. They had the total available stores, usage rate over time, predicted finding of new resources, and it was all neatly organized into charts perfectly that made it look impossible to be wrong to a high schooler whose only knowledge on the topic came from school.

Comevius5• 5 years ago

Strange to live in a world that failed to incentivise it's own survival.

You would think that trillion dollar companies like Amazon would care about not being able to operate at all in a few decades.

I get it from behavioral science why it all works like this, but one still wonders if it's the same for every other civilizations out there, if there are any.

thrdbndndn2• 5 years ago

Why would Amazon care more than others (which, in average, is not caring enough)? If anything, with the wealth/asset they have, they would likely do better than most of other company/people/entity when things went south.

Don't get me wrong, I wish they would, I just don't find it's hard to understand why they don't.

Comevius5• 5 years ago

I don't find it hard to understand either, as I said behavioral science 101. I just find it disappointing.

PragmaticPulp3• 5 years ago

For what it’s worth, Amazon does care about doing more than required about climate change. They’re moving to 100% renewable energy within the next few years and funding alternative energy and sustainability research on the order of billions of dollars: https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/about/the-climate-ple...

You can find similar commitments from other big tech companies like Apple: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/07/apple-commits-to-be-1...

Let’s focus on the lawmakers who are failing us, not the big tech companies who are already doing more than required by law to reduce their footprint.

dade_2• 5 years ago

That is the problem with publicly traded companies. They exist a fiscal year at a time. No past on January 1, no future December 31st.

The underlying cause of this in western society is well explained in ‘Voltaire’s Bastards’ by John Ralston Saul. Good reading to understand our collective problem with some ideas on what to do about it. The answer isn’t clear.

I am not remotely religious, but it is a powerful force. Islam is the fastest growing religion, and while that alarms some people, it has a wonderful innovation that I think is key to our survival. Maybe it is from playing too many hours of Civ, but if I was playing with a pending climate catastrophe, I would double down on this:

‘Caring for the environment is an important teaching of Islam. The Qurʾān describes mankind as being stewards of the earth and therefore Muslims must care for the earth. It is our responsibility to care for the earth and environment. The reality of climate change requires us to rethink our lifestyles and actions and we must reflect on how our actions impact our environment. The Qurʾān highlights this point: Corruption has appeared on land and sea because of that which men’s hands have done (Q. 30: 41).‘

sascha_sl2• 5 years ago

And that's why the Saudis built a shiny golden city on top of the decaying corpses of dinosaurs? I'm sorry, but this can motivate individual action at best, and we really need the opposite.

DennisP2• 5 years ago

It's less obvious now maybe but for a while Amazon was pretty infamous for focusing on long-term investment and ignoring people's expectations for nice-looking numbers in annual reports.

sascha_sl2• 5 years ago

Elon Musk comes to mind, not so much in doing anything about climate change but offering mitigations for those that can afford it. You can find doomsday preparations all across Tesla and SpaceX. From Bioharzard Mode to escaping to Mars.

And I guess the fund for the magic technology bullet that fixes everything exists too. Not that we have existing technology that would be carbon neutral.

Hey, we need to handle our existing nuclear waste anyway, might as well keep using it.

dkersten2• 5 years ago

Mars isn’t a short term solution. The best we’ve had so far is a human in space for a year and he said it was hell. I can’t imagine mars would be any different, it will take a gigantic effort to construct a colony that is better than a climate-change-destroyed earth.

Not saying we won’t manage it eventually, I just don’t think it’s very likely in Elon Musks lifetime. Perhaps he should start with building a mars colony... here on Earth first. Some kind of habitat dome thing perhaps.

koonsolo3• 5 years ago

This is a failure of politics, not of companies.

pydry2• 5 years ago

Except politics failed mostly because of the sway those companies had over the government.

batavian• 5 years ago

The former is a superset of the latter. Companies are political entities. At the most obvious level they are legal entities, and law is politics.

But the mistake here (and some other comments) of drawing "lawmakers", "politics", etc as being conceptually distinct from private corporations is particularly absurd from a historical view. The Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment forged political battles with substantial effort, debate, human cost that over centuries invented the concept you take granted as "companies", but which no other human civilization previous would have been familiar with. That there are "companies" at all is political, and so the OP is already pointing to a failure of politics.

meowster3• 5 years ago

What makes you think that the world won't survive? Or are you talking about how the world is now? Sure, the world will be different, but is that a bad thing? Do you want the entities/policies/etc that caused the problem to continue in perpetuity, or would you rather the world change to address the circumstances it will find itself in?

Clarification Edit: I'm not being facetious/snarky. Otherwise I don't understand the downvotes as they don't provide any meaningful feedback in this case. I would appreciate feedback, thanks.

(I do believe in taking care of the environment etc, my line of questioning is mere curiousity, not trying to imply a worsing environment is a good thing.)

Kye• 5 years ago

The people who caused it will continue to thrive in and profit from the chaos. Why would climate change make them less powerful? They're best positioned to prepare for it.

gmuslera• 5 years ago

If you say that the current photo is not so bad, you are forgetting that you are seeing a movie, the very start of it. The next frame may not be so bad? That doesn't matter if the movie keeps running, you will get increasingly worse frames next, it won't magically stop because you want.

Think that the warming you are seeing is a second+ level consequence of our action. We emit GHG, the planet keeps more energy than the one it emits because the excess of GHG, the global average yearly temperature increases. Emitting less GHG will keep increasing that excess of GHG. Emitting zero will keep that excess in its place (because the carbon cycle last around 100 years or more). Doing a massive capture managing to do more carbon capture than what we emit will keep having an excess of GHG until we reach the preindustrial levels. All the way till that fantasy point the global average temperature will keep increasing.

And your emissions are not the main drive of that anymore. We reached already a lot of tipping points that triggered a lot of positive feedback mechanisms. Less ice means less albedo and so getting more heat from the sun. Hotter northern regions are releasing methane that were frozen there for millenia. Forest fires emits even carbon and cause even more heat. And there are several more.

And the problem is not just heat. It is energy to fuel extreme weather events, that happens from the equator to the poles. Is disrupting previously stable climate features that made the world livable as it were for thousands of years, the polar vortex seem to be disrupted, the atlantic ocean current seem to be going in the same direction too.

And we depend on more life, in direct and indirect ways. Agriculture doesn't mix well with extreme weather. We are in one of the biggest extinction events on Earth history. Its just not sustainable in the long term.

PragmaticPulp3• 5 years ago

You would think that trillion dollar companies like Amazon would care about not being able to operate at all in a few decades.

Lawmakers are the issue, not big tech companies.

I know it’s popular to hate on big tech companies, but many of them are actually doing a lot more to improve the climate impact of their own operations than average or required by law.

Amazon has committed to switching to 100% renewable energy in the next few years and also going completely carbon neutral before the date proposed in the Paris Agreement: https://www.aboutamazon.com/planet/climate-pledge

They’ve also created a program to coordinate with other companies to join the same climate pledge and funded research in the area to the tune of $2 billion (so far): https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/about/the-climate-ple...

I don’t understand why Amazon is the first target that comes to mind when they’re doing more than required to reduce their own and others climate impacts.

It’s not the big tech companies we need to be angry at. It’s the lawmakers who are failing to put appropriate regulations in place and the voters who continue to enable them.

headmelted4• 5 years ago

This is it.

Anytime a politician complains about companies not doing their part or not paying their taxes all I can hear is you can’t do your own job.

The first rule of leadership is that everything is your fault. If there’s loopholes, close them. If companies are polluting or emitting change the law.

The function of a company is to make money for it’s shareholders. The function of government is to keep them in check.

throwthere2• 5 years ago

Amazon is investing quite a bit in this space.[1] It may not be enough by the UN committee estimates (edit: I think it actually is sufficient according to IPCC's scenarios [2]), but I don't think it's fair to say Amazon doesn't care.

[1] completely carbon neutral by 2040, carbon-neutral shipments by 2030, 100% renewable power for their operations by 2025, $2 billion pledged for decarbonizing tech, $100 million invested in reforestation https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/.

[2] carbon-neutral by 2050 meets the Paris agreement goal-- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7007533/

Comevius5• 5 years ago

Amazon is making a switch to low-carbon products and services because it makes sense economically. However the problem is that these solutions are often only low-carbon on paper. Reforestation and carbon capture are not feasible solutions either.

This is disappointing because in a few years companies will be sustainable on paper. This will make a coordinated effort to fight climate change even harder to achieve.

You can see Amazon not walking the talk on their political lobbying.

esarbe3• 5 years ago

I get it from behavioral science why it all works like this, but one still wonders if it's the same for every other civilizations out there, if there are any.

I'm pretty sure that this is the great filter: a species evolving under the constraints of competition for resources inevitably fails as soon as it steps on the land mine of global dominance.

Joking aside; it's kinda tragic to see this happening. The worst thing about it is the willful blindness of many people that should know it better; we're at the brink of extinction and still people find ways to close their eye and go "lalala".

It's fantastic. As in; beyond believable...

_y5hn• 5 years ago

My take on it, this has been the status quo for 200 years. Native American Indians warned about this hundreds years ago. From the natural world it has been obvious for a looong time!

Aeolun• 5 years ago

Which tipping point? We’ve passed so many tipping points by now that it’s just so much noise when someone announces we’re going to pass one 10 years earlier.

NiceWayToDoIT3• 5 years ago

Tipping point is considered 450ppmv CO2, a point at which no technology can reverse worst-case climate change scenario.

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

samatman5• 5 years ago

The second paragraph of that page says "Climate scientists have identified over a dozen possible tipping points".

dead-snake2• 5 years ago

So, if 450 ppm is bad, wouldn't 900 ppm be worse? It wasn't so long ago in the climate's history that it was that way. Not so long before that, it was 1800. Wouldn't that make the world ultra-XXXL screwed beyond belief? What happened there?

imgabe• 5 years ago

An article so vitally important to the survival of humanity that it had to be hidden behind a paywall.

xwdv2• 5 years ago

Starting to look like the end. If you were to have a child now they would likely be dead from climate change before their 30th birthday.

samatman5• 5 years ago

This is totally absurd and unjustifiable fearmongering.

xwdv2• 5 years ago

Wishful thinking. You either don’t think climate change will have life and death consequences or you have a lot of hope that humanity will get its shit together and solve it in the next decade.

Life expectancy isn’t going to go up, and quality of life won’t improve after the tipping point. It’s all downhill beyond that.

Fricken• 5 years ago

It don't consider the parent's scenario to be likely, but it's on the table. We are in deep shit.

Throwaway1974015• 5 years ago

In other words. Speculative forecasting replaces other speculative forecasting.

I would urge anyone who gets worried every time they see these kind of headlines based on modelling, to spend some time reading about how modelling and prediction actually work to understand what is really going on.

Any critically thinking person should take notice when you only hear about how the models have been underestimating the severity even though they are constantly wrong both ways.

Yes the temperature is changing, no it's not something we can't handle.

knuthsat3• 5 years ago

The thing about these models is that they are not necessary if you want to understand the magnitude of change.

For example, we can estimate correctly (within the same order of magnitude) the emissions of CO2 equivalent gases a year that we do as humanity.

Then we can estimate correctly (within the same order of magnitude) the CO2 equivalent gases stored in permafrost or ice. [0]

Now we can ask a question. What if the ice melts? How many years of 2020 human activity is stored there. It ends up being more than 100 years of 2020 emissions.

It does not really take that much modelling to realize that a temperature increase that melts the permafrost can result in completely unpredictable outcomes, that are very probably not positive.

That is of course, if one believes in human caused climate change. The amount of CO2 equivalent gases that is emitted by everything else (not humans) is magnitudes more, but obviously it was not a problem for the Earth to handle before. Now, the n-th order effects will increase the rate of warming and will cause new invisible effects.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions

Throwaway1974015• 5 years ago

I am unconvinced by your argument.

The models are trying to predict based on various factors, CO2 being one of them. If you were correct all you are really saying is that the models could be much simpler than still be precise. So on that alone it seems like you are missing the point.

Second of all, while most agree human activity have some correlation with temperature rise we have no actual idea how much. There is no scientifically demonstrated percentage of the temperature that can be attributed to humans.

With regards to the permafrost. This is pure speculation and in many ways relies on the accuracy of the models and doesn't take human ability to deal with it into account. It might be bad it might not, regardless we can't stop living the way we do just because there is some percentage risk of bad outcomes.

We should always take the climate seriously but so should we any other event like astroids hitting earth, super vulcanos, nearby super novas, pandemics etc. The world is always and have always been filled with dangers which is why 99.99999% of all species ever existed are extinct way before humans were around.

Comevius5• 5 years ago

"it's not something we can't handle"

The climate models are improving, but they all paint the same picture.

Between your non-speculative forecasting of "it's all going to be better" and our imprecise, albeit improving scientific models I choose science.

No critically thinking person would do otherwise in this case.

Throwaway1974015• 5 years ago

The climate models aren't really improving and to the extent they have the IPCC is getting less and less concerned. There is still quite a big spread between the predictions from no problem at all to world is ending.

You don't have to choose between my forecasting or the climate models you just have to understand how models work to realize that you aren't being as critically thinking as you might think you are.

RickJWagner• 5 years ago

If the Covid lockdowns and remote-work bonanza didn't change the trajectory, there doesn't seem to be much that will.

World to hit temperature tipping point 10 years faster than forecast

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