Ask HN: Is there any hopeful news about climate change?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36980429

24 31 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I would love to follow something online that can supplement what is a 100% bad news stream of climate change information. Can it really be that absolutely nothing is going well?

xqcgrek2• 3 years ago

More people die of cold related causes than heat related ones, by orders of magnitude.

tyleo• 3 years ago

Do you have a source? I thought the opposite was true but I’m no authority.

Edit: just found this on Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2023/07/19/excessiv...

mupuff1234• 3 years ago

And that is good news because?

rexpop• 3 years ago

So what? The risk of climate change isn't that individuals will die from acute heat events, but that a few degrees' change of average, global temperatures will destabilize climate systems and ecological niches.

Let's catch you up[0] on some of the impacts:

between 1971 and 2020, around 380 zettajoules of energy has been trapped by global warming. The oceans have absorbed around 89% of the energy (338.2 zettajoules), land has absorbed 6% (22.8 zettajoules), 4% (15.2 zettajoules) has melted parts of the cryosphere — the part of Earth's climate system that includes snow, sea ice, freshwater ice, icebergs, glaciers and ice caps, ice sheets, ice shelves and permafrost — and just 1% (3.8 zettajoules) has remained in the atmosphere.
The majority of the heat absorbed by the seas is trapped in the upper 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) of the oceans. This has spared humanity from the brunt of climate change so far, but it has also caused massive increases in sea surface temperatures, which has accelerated polar melting, damaged marine ecosystems, increased the severity of tropical storms and begun to disrupt ocean currents.

All of this is to say nothing of the added effects of CO2 itself, such as ocean acidification disrupting marine ontogeny[1] or even CO2 concentrations causing cognitive impairment[2] in humans!

0. https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/ener...

1. https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/Ocean+Acidification's+im...

2. https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200421/Atmospheric-CO2-l...

karmakurtisaani• 3 years ago

Why is it that I've seen this argument online a few times just recently? It's wholeheartedly idiotic, please stop.

throwaway019254• 3 years ago

Canada will gain a lot of farmland in the upcoming years. So good news for Canada?

pschuegr• 3 years ago

of course, much of it may be on fire during the growing season...

invalidname• 3 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is that farmland is bad for the environment since it produces more carbon than it traps.

moomoo112• 3 years ago

if you’re in the US you should be fine. Especially Midwest and west should be good.

if you’re not you should probably get on it and come here

we have food, water, and energy.

Tagbert• 3 years ago

Aside from the drought and fires?

moomoo112• 3 years ago

The west and Midwest is supposed to be prime in the next 50 years.

Also what drought? We had so much rain it’s basically not an issue atm.

Besides it’s the US. We will probably outlast everyone else lol.

hotpotamus• 3 years ago

Lots of people are coming to the US already and it seems like a contentious issue.

nomilk• 3 years ago

I studied econ in the 2000's and a theme that constantly came up was the Kyoto Protocol (basically a joint agreement between many countries to lower emissions). The US refused to sign for many years, which was seen by the rest of the world as tragic and unconscionable.

A few years later I noticed nobody was talking about this Kyoto Protocol anymore. It turned out innovation (in this case fracking) had caused gas to become more widely available, and since it causes lower emissions than coal, the US's emissions had fallen below the targets stipulated in the Kyoto Protocol even though it never signed, and this was achieved purely through innovation.

This gives me hope that problems we currently see as catastrophic could be similarly solved by innovation (e.g. by clean power generation becoming more economically viable than dirty methods).

drooby• 3 years ago

It seems like we just externalized our emissions though.

The U.S's production-based emissions starts dropping at the start of the millennium, and China's starts increasing at the inverse rate. And this is the same time that China is entering the global market and their trade with us starts increasing.

It seems like our appetite for "more" and "new" does not cease.

Any efficiency gains we make, and technological advances we discover increases the space in our belly - but we are still hungry, and that void is filled soon enough.

Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 continue to rise. And it has been doing so for the past few centuries.

sien2• 3 years ago

The impact of extreme weather events has been declining as a share of global GDP since 1990, people are good at adapting.

Source :

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/dont-believe-the-hype

One of the high scenarios for emissions, RCP 8.5, which was used for modelling what might happen with climate change, is unlikely to happen:

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-good-news-about-cli...

sien2• 3 years ago

There are also plenty of sizable places around the world that generate very little C02 when generating electricity.

See France, Ontario, Quebec, Sweden and other places on the map below and look at their C02 emissions per year per kilowatt.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

sp332• 3 years ago

It will, in aggregate, be much cheaper to avoid climate change than to pursue the status quo. For example, a recent paper showed a cost of $62 trillion to convert the entire global economy off fossil fuels, and a payoff timescale of only 6 years. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33135183 There is still a lot of momentum, but as the effects get more noticeable and more expensive, there will be lots of cash and political will to get moving.

kdamica• 3 years ago

Around a quarter of US electricity is now generated via renewables, and it’s growing fast. It seems clear to me that we will decarbonize the world’s energy within my lifetime. This still leaves us with a lot of carbon in the atmosphere that we’ll need to deal with.

guywithahat• 3 years ago

Most of the climate news we see on reddit/etc is just alarmism. Realistically according to the USGS we have 100-200+ years until warming becomes a serious problem, and I would be shocked if we don't have high quality solutions long before then. Further a lot of those "we're going to be underwater" figures are complete junk. Huge portions of the world have always (relatively speaking) been below sea level, and rising sea levels have nothing to do with it.

What is uniquely promising is that the world as a whole is getting richer, and once you escape poverty, people care more about their surrounding environment. If we focus on growth we're likely to see the environment improve naturally.

labster• 3 years ago

Birth rates are falling in most if not all of the countries that consume the most energy, which will reduce energy use in the long term. Yes, it poses another set of economic challenges in places where population is shrinking, but that’s a problem we’d have to solve eventually.

timbit42• 3 years ago

India and Nigeria and growing really fast though. China's population is going to collapse over the next 50 to 70 years.

fragmede• 3 years ago

Solar is competitive with coal for pricing, which means solar power is finally viable. Combined with energy storage devices, our reliance on fossile fuels has an end in sight!

carrolldunham• 3 years ago

They said that 0.3 degrees of warming is currently hidden from the data by the way cities air haze clouds reflect sunlight to space. When the city haze is cleared up we'll get that 0.3. But this obviously implies that if things get really bad, we can simply invest a relatively small expense popping smoke at spaced intervals over a lot of ocean and cancel a degree or two's worth of warming that way while while decarbonizing. I was hyped for the apocalypse but it's yet another nothing burger.

DoreenMichele• 3 years ago

We speak with more certainty than we really have. There is a lot we don't actually know.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27658488

Animals are adapting.

Namibian Desert Lions Spotted Hunting and Eating Marine Creatures

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19029210

Animals are also evolving. New large species are emerging before our eyes, like a crossbreed of coyotes and wolves and a crossbreed between polar bears and brown bears (sorry, failed to readily find supporting articles).

rado• 3 years ago

Maybe the development of next generation nuclear reactors (small, midular) and their contribution to carbon zero 2050, as told here: https://www.nuclearnowfilm.com/

radoomi• 3 years ago

Watch this list of short videos and hopefully it will change your mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hk9VQt5Nt64&list=PLxB143vg5_...

In my opinion short term things are getting worse indeed but in the medium future (10+y) it's going to start improving. What is really weird is that the "experts" completely lack the ability to recognize exponential growth (S curves) and model everything linearly. Especially episode 5 (~3:15) shows how coal usage has been massively over-estimated and not just a couple of years but 15 years and it's still going. And similarly how renewable energy sources are underestimated massively. The estimated time for going to 10TWh of renewables is ~2100, but it will most likely happen in 2030 (same episode ~10:00).

Of course, nobody says to stop worrying because things are actually bad. But just from the perspective of cost all energy will migrate to renewables and after doing that and price starting to decline to 0, we will be able to look into other ways to fix climate (e.g. recapture CO2 which currently is cost-prohibitive).

dave333• 3 years ago

Brilliant Light Power claim to have a prototype device that produces 250 kW of light energy (mostly UV light) that can be converted to electrical power at high efficiency using concentrator photovoltaics with light recycling. See https://brilliantlightpower.com/plasma-video/

This all based on their Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics that solves the electron orbit in hydrogen as a spherical shell of charge spinning in all directions (orbitsphere) instead of the probabilistic solution of quantum mechanics.

Note that the Wikipedia article about them is policed by skeptics and has not been updated much in at least a decade despite their major progress.

If they are right, $300B worth of their Suncell tm devices can essentially power the world pollution free and solve global warming.

The science establishment continues to dismiss their claims as rubbish and has done no significant investigation or testing.

_nalply2• 3 years ago

Plastic-eating bacteria suddenly appeared (or were human generated, I don't know). This means, nature is adapting (if you view humans belonging to nature).

An example of nature adapting:

I read somewhere that when the first trees appeared about 380 million years ago. Their lignin could not be broken down. There were no organism who could digest that complex polymer. It took tens of millions of years. This was the carboniferous period. Wood accumulated without being broken down and got converted to coal. Then nature adapted and lignin get broken down. Coal is still formed but at a lower pace than in the Carboniferous period.

For me this means, the anthropocene is just one of the many periods of the Earth, and hopefully we will be fine. Let's cross fingers.

AnimalMuppet• 3 years ago

Wait a minute... it took 10 million years to get organisms that could break down lignin, but less than 200 to get organisms that can break down plastic?

_nalply2• 3 years ago

I found that crazy, too. Perhaps digesting lignin is the hard part and the jump to plastic is not as hard?

johnea• 3 years ago

Yes! You'll be dead before the worst of it!

While backers of the RNC are the worst offenders in the US, please don't let the DNC off the hook:

https://www.levernews.com/obamas-greenwash/

Ask HN: Is there any hopeful news about climate change?

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