(disclaimer: I work in a Climate&Energy research group)
I just want to remind everyone that there are solutions to climate change. We know how to produce clean energy and sequester CO2. The current free market does not make those solutions profitable for investors, though, and we will have to change that.
Solving climate change can be as simple as getting a carbon price adopted. It needs to ramp up over time, allow a secondary market for offsets, and create a cross-border network effect (e.g. carbon free trade zone), but it can actually be that simple.
A "carbon tax" may be infeasible given current political norms, but a revenue neutral "carbon dividend" would have the same effect while being more progressive.
So, if you are curious what you can do to solve climate change, consider contacting your representative.
Right. If solving global warming is a matter of money (which it obviously is) then the cost of global warming would be capped at that amount of money if we just managed to figure out a way to align incentives. Unfortunately right now the groups that create the problem don't bear the cost of the problem.
I’m familiar with the science and I’m afraid to say there are no easy solutions to climate change. Every meaningful systemic solution requires a dramatic curtailment of our current energy use, and would have tremendous negative socioeconomic impact. In short, all meaningful solutions rely on everyone’s life getting a bit worse, and in many cases, esp. in the western world, a lot worse.
Furthermore, any systemic solution that does not enforce global compliance and population control (I went there) is guaranteed to fail.
> Solving climate change can be as simple as getting a carbon price adopted.
Such a solution cannot work, as long as we have a growth-based economy. The fact is that economists have long regarded natural resources as infinite, and their models are conceived accordingly.
Infinite growth is by definition incompatible with a finite planet. Until we have come up with a new, finite economic model (which means also a profound change to our way of living), I'm afraid there's no easy solution to the climate crisis.
One simple thing we can all do is never vote for a candidate if they are not for aggressive and immediate measures to combat global warming.
If the roughly 60-75% of Americans who believe human activity is causing climate change were to stop voting for individuals who don't believe this, we'd have meaningful change coming from the federal government within 2 years.
To really solve climate change we need the American population to take it seriously.
Blasting China won't change it since a lot of China's pollution is due to the developed countries exporting their most polluting industries. Europe is seriously confronting the situation, America's denying it (starting by its president).
I'm asking out of ignorance. You're using the word "solutions". Do we know those are really "solutions", and not guesses for solutions? Like, will those actions reduce temperatures?
It seems that some of what already happened, like melting of icebergs, is not easy to be revert.
To actually prevent further global warming we need active planetary scale solutions.
You paint far too rosy a picture here. A carbon tax is preventative, not active. There is no viable path to scale current sequestration techniques to global scale.
What we're talking about with a carbon tax is not 'solving climate change'. It is limiting the change to approximately what current models predict.
I'm much more in favor of sequestering CO2 naturally (planting trees everywhere possible, it also has huge benefits in well-being, air quality, ..), and forcing people to reduce their excessive consumerism
The carbon tax and tech solutions are a must but won't be enough, due to lack of time.
The science tells us we don't have much to turn things around, not nearly enough.
Based on our history of energy transitions, even rolling out commercially available tech for low/zero carbon generation left to market forces will take many decades, almost a century.
Then there are hard problems we simply have no low/zero carbon solution for at scale.
Manufacturing pig iron for primary steel, ammonia, cement, industrial agriculture, plastics, shipping, aviation, etc.
Also, AFAIK there does not exist a demonstrated technology for CO2 sequestration that scales and has the required CO2 emission balance (needs energy to run).
Storage is also unsolved.
I'm curious if you have a link.
It took a century to build out the global oil infrastructure with its millions of miles of pipelines, pumps, oil tankers, etc.
We'll need to handle multiple times the material flow for CO2 sequestration.
And overhaul/retrofit/upgrade the entire global energy system, industry, transportation, shipping, agriculture...
Even allowing for existing sequestration tech - there's no time.
We need a quick head start that only cutting back consumption can give us.
10% of the population is responsible for 50% of global anthropogenic emissions.
If the top 1% of emitters or the ~75 million people at the top cut back their consumption to the level of the average European's, global emissions would decrease by 30%.
The current economics paradigm (~growth is a must) guarantees we can't solve climate change as growth cannot be decoupled from CO2 increase.
This is a physics problem. Physics doesn't care about ROI or discount rates or tactics.
We were given a diagnosis of terminal cancer quite some time ago and we refused to do chemo or undergo surgery because it would have meant a drastic change in our lifestyle.
Now we are stage three.
We still meet with our oncologist team from time to time, only to actively sabotage all of their attempts to save us.
In 1988 the UN established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In 31 years, after 51 IPCC sessions and 25 major conferences our yearly CO2 emissions increased by 60%.
That's how much we care.
In 2019,
Energy companies are still set on fully realizing their extractions rights and are actively seeking new oil and gas fields to exploit, including in the thawing arctic.
We're still buliding 1500+ new coal power plants and hundreds of airports.
We're busy entrenching our fossil fuel dependence.
Anthropogenic CO2 emissions are still on the rise.
>> Solving climate change can be as simple as getting a carbon price adopted. It needs to ramp up over time, allow a secondary market for offsets
The simple solution to this big global catastrophe is my favorite money making scam. Here, just create this market for carbon credits. It makes my guys money while doing Jack shit.
Seriously, if you think CO2 is the problem, the solution is to simply tax those that either take it out of the ground or import it. Any other solution is political.
Not saying I agree with the premise, but if you do, that's the solution.
Before any tax is issued, I'd like to know the exact percentage breakdown between man-made climate change and natural climate cycles? Can anyone break the percentage down for me, between man-made CO2 and natural CO2 being outgassed by oceans, and then breakdown the difference between CO2 induced warming and variations in the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the cosmic ray flux and it's impact on cloud cover as a result of variations in solar magnetic cycles, volcanic activity, and the El Nino Southern Oscillation? Can anyone break that down by percentages for me?
I'm fascinated by this graph of the growth of solar as compared to International Agency Predictions.
Year after year, the IEA massively underestimated the growth of solar. Last year, at a workshop with the World Bank I heard an expert in energy investments say "even just 5 years ago none of us ever thought the price of solar could go this low this fast".
I'm curious if there's something similar for the changing climate. Just how much are we underestimating the changing climate? Has anyone seen a graph like the one above, but regarding climate predictions?
For example, the rate of Greeland's massive ice melt was as high as the worst climate predictions for 2070, decades into the future. [1][2] It seems even the scientific predictions can be too conservative.
That melt isn't as unprecedented as the Forbes blagger makes it out to be. Follow the chain and you find out that it is reasonably comparable to one that happened in…2012:
Without criticizing the article at all, I want to point out that headlines like this go viral and make money, while the opposite ones would go nowhere.
In other words, the news you see is selected by virality, not by how well they describe the real world.
I have no cure or even complaint for this. I just think it's a very important thing to keep in mind.
This is not just news. It is an academic article published by reputable institutions. If they had published the opposite article it would be even more noteworthy, being that it would be more revolutionary.
Your comment would be true of opinion pieces written by wackos without reputation, that we only read because they validate our intuitions.
Academic articles are a different matter.
Once you have a 3 days heatwave, it's bad. If they occur during summer and the next summer, and if they last for 1 week or more, several times per summer, people will not talk about it, but feel it and understand that global warming is settling in and will not go away.
The problem is that the temperature increase can be sudden and difficult to anticipate. A heatwave can also kill a lot of people (the elderly, the young, people will fragile health, and also people who don't prepare or don't listen to warnings).
You're right that in 10 years there are strong chances for a global panic, but if crops yields are bad it can also have fast consequences. It just hope the wakeup calls will make people react swiftly and as soon as possible. I'd rather have a big heatwave that gives enough political capital to act and do things, than a slow and creeping climate change where nothing is done and it becomes too late.
Mainly because that means there is finite growth in the economy, and we've built a ponzi scheme of sorts at this point. It's a hard pill to swallow, that we can't just grow forever.
I am trying to find the source I read a few years ago where climate scientists are intentionally scaling back their predictions so they aren’t discounted as crazy doomsday predictions. I think that there are many accurate predictions out there but we mostly see the most mild ones because they figure some action is better than being written off completely.
Dropping in here just to say: if this got you worried, come work with us over at http://climateaction.tech/ We are a global community of tech professionals using our skills, expertise and platforms to support solutions to the climate crisis.
Im not sure why anyone expects these estimates to hold any water at all.
From what I gather, pressure from the establishment has systematically caused scientists to lowball impact estimates and ignore second (and higher) order effects. Meanwhile the complexity and far reach of impact is beyond anything we can model.
Consider how all the experts were surprised in the 2008 economic crisis. That was just an economic crisis, primarily involving things we can easily count (dollars) on a very small timescale (years).
Now we are talking about many interlocking systems we cannot model well, on a timescale we cannot fathom. How good could those estimates ever be? Maybe +/- 6 orders of magnitude.
This is a very wide ranging piece by the two academics Naomi Oreskes and Nicholas Stern.
Oreskes: '...contrary to popular belief, there is no single scientific method. Rather, the trustworthiness of scientific claims derives from the social process by which they are rigorously vetted against'. It comes down to trust...
If I understand correctly, currently anthropogenically accumulated extra CO2 takes some hundreds of thousands of years to return to geological circulation, while the faster biological circulation won't withhold it all, and seas are getting saturated (and will acidify beyond supporting current lifeforms in the process). [see eg. Hot Earth Dreams]
Also, if I understood correctly a single article I'll try to dig up a link to later, the kickback effect of stopping a temporary cooling measure and returning to the warming trend caused by the CO2 still in air will have stronger harmful effects. If these hold, it might prove tricky to keep up a moderate, safe cooling effect long enough, even if some technical measure to cause volcanic winter was found. [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0431-0?utm_source... via https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/devi...]
I would hope this or some other measure would prove successful. but I'm not yet able to put all my faith on any of them.
People love to get outraged when economists talk about human tragedy in monetary terms because they assume the sub text of discussing things in terms of money is that that's what they think is really important about the situation. This entirely misses the point.
The economists want something they can measure. They are using dollar losses as a proxy for the gravity of the situation and as a proxy for relative value that people place on things.
If you want someone to analyze people's feelings about the tragedy get a psychologist but there's a reason that economists are more likely to get invited to a climate summit than psychologists.
Remember the trending article yesterday where economists were admitting they totally got the free trade economics wrong? Well, predicting the economic effects of climate change is going to be 10x full of guesswork and mistaken assumptions and bad models. Good luck getting it right.
Do you think people can live without production of food, housing, medicine, clothing and other goods? Do you think those things get delivered without transportation and communication infrastructure? Economic cost is not abstract at all - its a reduction of things people need to live. It measures other things as well but there is virtually no harm from climate change that can’t be measured in economic terms. That’s practically a tautology.
Frankly, if the solution to climate change will slow economic growth, I think that the highest human cost will come from the lack of growth. To put it in clear terms: lack of growth means that a sewage system, or a hospital, don't get built. This _will_ cause victims.
We always had climate change. Not having climate change is the exception. Is it man made? Is it caused by CO2? Ist it getting warmer? Is this a good or a bad thing? Can we and should we do something about it? This are many questions and climate change is one of the most complex phenomenons. I have a STEM PhD and would not be able to make a quick judgement.
"Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think"
Given that all the statements are true, something that is seldom discussed, who is "We"? People with real estate in NYC, Amsterdam and Miami? Maybe. People in super hot climates? Probably.
Climate change will create the first trillionaire.
Find every machine that eats fossil fuels and electrify it. Find every crop that requires stable land and predictable weather and farm it in a shipping container. Find every underlying infrastructure that requires decades to pay off and decentralize it.
Instead of water line pipes, pull water out of the air. Instead of fiber optic cables make LEO satellites. Instead of refrigerated transportation, grow food in your pocket or your stomach. Instead of roads, take to the air. Instead of high power transmission lines that cause fires and burn down trees, build island-mode ready microgrids.
Build a better world, a template for all worlds to come.
[+] [-] chris_va|6 years ago|reply
I just want to remind everyone that there are solutions to climate change. We know how to produce clean energy and sequester CO2. The current free market does not make those solutions profitable for investors, though, and we will have to change that.
Solving climate change can be as simple as getting a carbon price adopted. It needs to ramp up over time, allow a secondary market for offsets, and create a cross-border network effect (e.g. carbon free trade zone), but it can actually be that simple.
A "carbon tax" may be infeasible given current political norms, but a revenue neutral "carbon dividend" would have the same effect while being more progressive.
So, if you are curious what you can do to solve climate change, consider contacting your representative.
[+] [-] mattmaroon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glitchc|6 years ago|reply
Furthermore, any systemic solution that does not enforce global compliance and population control (I went there) is guaranteed to fail.
[+] [-] ciconia|6 years ago|reply
Such a solution cannot work, as long as we have a growth-based economy. The fact is that economists have long regarded natural resources as infinite, and their models are conceived accordingly.
Infinite growth is by definition incompatible with a finite planet. Until we have come up with a new, finite economic model (which means also a profound change to our way of living), I'm afraid there's no easy solution to the climate crisis.
[+] [-] standardUser|6 years ago|reply
If the roughly 60-75% of Americans who believe human activity is causing climate change were to stop voting for individuals who don't believe this, we'd have meaningful change coming from the federal government within 2 years.
[+] [-] neves|6 years ago|reply
Blasting China won't change it since a lot of China's pollution is due to the developed countries exporting their most polluting industries. Europe is seriously confronting the situation, America's denying it (starting by its president).
Here is a good article about it: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/25/lambas...
[+] [-] neiman|6 years ago|reply
It seems that some of what already happened, like melting of icebergs, is not easy to be revert.
[+] [-] Misdicorl|6 years ago|reply
You paint far too rosy a picture here. A carbon tax is preventative, not active. There is no viable path to scale current sequestration techniques to global scale.
What we're talking about with a carbon tax is not 'solving climate change'. It is limiting the change to approximately what current models predict.
[+] [-] 11235813213455|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tito|6 years ago|reply
Here's our meetup on pulling carbon from the air, mainly in the Bay Area but want to spread out: https://meetup.com/airminers
[+] [-] alex_young|6 years ago|reply
The damage already done has a very long tail.
Thermal expansion will continue to increase sea level rise for hundreds of years even if we stop emitting co2 now [0].
We need to think about mitigation of the impact of future climate change in addition to addressing the root cause.
[0] https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/climate-chan...
[+] [-] mtbch|6 years ago|reply
The science tells us we don't have much to turn things around, not nearly enough.
Based on our history of energy transitions, even rolling out commercially available tech for low/zero carbon generation left to market forces will take many decades, almost a century.
Then there are hard problems we simply have no low/zero carbon solution for at scale. Manufacturing pig iron for primary steel, ammonia, cement, industrial agriculture, plastics, shipping, aviation, etc.
Also, AFAIK there does not exist a demonstrated technology for CO2 sequestration that scales and has the required CO2 emission balance (needs energy to run). Storage is also unsolved. I'm curious if you have a link.
It took a century to build out the global oil infrastructure with its millions of miles of pipelines, pumps, oil tankers, etc.
We'll need to handle multiple times the material flow for CO2 sequestration. And overhaul/retrofit/upgrade the entire global energy system, industry, transportation, shipping, agriculture... Even allowing for existing sequestration tech - there's no time.
We need a quick head start that only cutting back consumption can give us. 10% of the population is responsible for 50% of global anthropogenic emissions.
If the top 1% of emitters or the ~75 million people at the top cut back their consumption to the level of the average European's, global emissions would decrease by 30%.
The current economics paradigm (~growth is a must) guarantees we can't solve climate change as growth cannot be decoupled from CO2 increase.
This is a physics problem. Physics doesn't care about ROI or discount rates or tactics.
We were given a diagnosis of terminal cancer quite some time ago and we refused to do chemo or undergo surgery because it would have meant a drastic change in our lifestyle. Now we are stage three. We still meet with our oncologist team from time to time, only to actively sabotage all of their attempts to save us.
In 1988 the UN established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In 31 years, after 51 IPCC sessions and 25 major conferences our yearly CO2 emissions increased by 60%. That's how much we care.
In 2019, Energy companies are still set on fully realizing their extractions rights and are actively seeking new oil and gas fields to exploit, including in the thawing arctic.
We're still buliding 1500+ new coal power plants and hundreds of airports.
We're busy entrenching our fossil fuel dependence. Anthropogenic CO2 emissions are still on the rise.
There's just no political will.
[+] [-] rfish|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wdn|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] phkahler|6 years ago|reply
The simple solution to this big global catastrophe is my favorite money making scam. Here, just create this market for carbon credits. It makes my guys money while doing Jack shit.
Seriously, if you think CO2 is the problem, the solution is to simply tax those that either take it out of the ground or import it. Any other solution is political.
Not saying I agree with the premise, but if you do, that's the solution.
[+] [-] chrisco255|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tito|6 years ago|reply
Year after year, the IEA massively underestimated the growth of solar. Last year, at a workshop with the World Bank I heard an expert in energy investments say "even just 5 years ago none of us ever thought the price of solar could go this low this fast".
GRAPH: https://steinbuch.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/iea-vs-reality...
I'm curious if there's something similar for the changing climate. Just how much are we underestimating the changing climate? Has anyone seen a graph like the one above, but regarding climate predictions?
For example, the rate of Greeland's massive ice melt was as high as the worst climate predictions for 2070, decades into the future. [1][2] It seems even the scientific predictions can be too conservative.
[1] https://twitter.com/xavierfettweis/status/115648786895048294... [2] https://twitter.com/xavierfettweis/status/115648786895048294...
[+] [-] maxerickson|6 years ago|reply
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/08/01/greenland-...
If it ends up part of even a 2 year pattern, that's already concerning, I'm not dismissing the issue, I'm just slagging Forbes links.
[+] [-] BurningFrog|6 years ago|reply
In other words, the news you see is selected by virality, not by how well they describe the real world.
I have no cure or even complaint for this. I just think it's a very important thing to keep in mind.
[+] [-] hychoi99|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lumberjack|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pstuart|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jokoon|6 years ago|reply
Once you have a 3 days heatwave, it's bad. If they occur during summer and the next summer, and if they last for 1 week or more, several times per summer, people will not talk about it, but feel it and understand that global warming is settling in and will not go away.
The problem is that the temperature increase can be sudden and difficult to anticipate. A heatwave can also kill a lot of people (the elderly, the young, people will fragile health, and also people who don't prepare or don't listen to warnings).
You're right that in 10 years there are strong chances for a global panic, but if crops yields are bad it can also have fast consequences. It just hope the wakeup calls will make people react swiftly and as soon as possible. I'd rather have a big heatwave that gives enough political capital to act and do things, than a slow and creeping climate change where nothing is done and it becomes too late.
[+] [-] sambull|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] all2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iikoolpp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sunseb|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stale2002|6 years ago|reply
The effects how over the course of decades. The world is not going to end in 10 years.
[+] [-] chrisBob|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tito|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zzot|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hcarvalhoalves|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mooneater|6 years ago|reply
From what I gather, pressure from the establishment has systematically caused scientists to lowball impact estimates and ignore second (and higher) order effects. Meanwhile the complexity and far reach of impact is beyond anything we can model.
Consider how all the experts were surprised in the 2008 economic crisis. That was just an economic crisis, primarily involving things we can easily count (dollars) on a very small timescale (years).
Now we are talking about many interlocking systems we cannot model well, on a timescale we cannot fathom. How good could those estimates ever be? Maybe +/- 6 orders of magnitude.
[+] [-] mooneater|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tito|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olivermarks|6 years ago|reply
Oreskes: '...contrary to popular belief, there is no single scientific method. Rather, the trustworthiness of scientific claims derives from the social process by which they are rigorously vetted against'. It comes down to trust...
http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/event/why-trust-scien...
[+] [-] crb002|6 years ago|reply
More $$$ money needs to go into Vulcanering. Crazy, but if we can make ash spread 20% more that’s years of cooling.
[+] [-] korpiq|6 years ago|reply
Also, if I understood correctly a single article I'll try to dig up a link to later, the kickback effect of stopping a temporary cooling measure and returning to the warming trend caused by the CO2 still in air will have stronger harmful effects. If these hold, it might prove tricky to keep up a moderate, safe cooling effect long enough, even if some technical measure to cause volcanic winter was found. [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0431-0?utm_source... via https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/devi...]
I would hope this or some other measure would prove successful. but I'm not yet able to put all my faith on any of them.
[+] [-] WillPostForFood|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening
[+] [-] iikoolpp|6 years ago|reply
"Yeah, billions are gonna die, but what really matters is my house prices are gonna go down."
[+] [-] anm89|6 years ago|reply
The economists want something they can measure. They are using dollar losses as a proxy for the gravity of the situation and as a proxy for relative value that people place on things.
If you want someone to analyze people's feelings about the tragedy get a psychologist but there's a reason that economists are more likely to get invited to a climate summit than psychologists.
[+] [-] WillPostForFood|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeremyjh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Udik|6 years ago|reply
Frankly, if the solution to climate change will slow economic growth, I think that the highest human cost will come from the lack of growth. To put it in clear terms: lack of growth means that a sewage system, or a hospital, don't get built. This _will_ cause victims.
[+] [-] fungicide|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gggegegeh|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sunseb|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] joyjoyjoy|6 years ago|reply
"Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think"
Given that all the statements are true, something that is seldom discussed, who is "We"? People with real estate in NYC, Amsterdam and Miami? Maybe. People in super hot climates? Probably.
How about people in Greenland? Russia? Canada?
[+] [-] tito|6 years ago|reply
Find every machine that eats fossil fuels and electrify it. Find every crop that requires stable land and predictable weather and farm it in a shipping container. Find every underlying infrastructure that requires decades to pay off and decentralize it.
Instead of water line pipes, pull water out of the air. Instead of fiber optic cables make LEO satellites. Instead of refrigerated transportation, grow food in your pocket or your stomach. Instead of roads, take to the air. Instead of high power transmission lines that cause fires and burn down trees, build island-mode ready microgrids.
Build a better world, a template for all worlds to come.