Mere ~30 years after discovering the Greenhouse Effect we managed to split the atom, harnessing heretofore unimaginable amounts of energy.
Yet almost 100 years later, here we are - Oil and gas dependent, boasting an energy and climate crisis, all the while fooling regulators with worthless climate certificates, unaccountable off-shore factories and just plain rampant fraud when it comes to CO2 emissions.
Unfortunately, nuclear seems to get a bad rep from a lot of people. I suspect this is because of a mixture of things:
1. The rare instances of it going wrong look catastrophic, while the many times it does better than coal/oil/gas go ignored. Kinda like how people fear plane travel more than driving, despite the former being far safer than the latter.
2. It's more expensive to setup, so there's an economic incentive to either stick with what's there already (fossil fuels) or try and go with renewable solutions.
3. A certain percentage of the left/environmental movement seem to hate the concept, either because of subtle influencing from the fossil fuels lobby or because the idea of compromising and going with a system that isn't 'perfect' doesn't appeal to them.
Fossil fuel is a cheat code because you neither have to pay to create it nor pay for the consequences of using it, nature is dealing with both of these. Everything you use from roads to shampoo, toilet paper, clothes, computers, buildings, bicycles, it's all either enabled by fossil or a fossil fuel derivate
At planet scale nothing will ever get better than: dig hole, pump oil, burn oil
Environmental activists are almost entirely responsible for the killing of nuclear energy in the 1970s. Much of the blame for climate change lays at their feet.
Every theory fails to account for human factor. Oil and gas are convenient and make so much money, it is so easy to "lobby" any government for it to stay that way.
We can all be happy clappy about doing something, but it will always fail if we don't have anything to combat corruption and manage greed.
I think that carbon offsetting is a good idea in the spirit of a glass half-full. It's unrealistic to expect the world economy to quit fossil fuels cold turkey, and a system that allows those who cannot transition to externalize their ability to reduce or eliminate emissions is a way to get close to the desired result with the constraints we have right now.
Isaac Asimov in all his optimism predicted we'd drive cars and fly airplanes powered by tiny nuclear engines in the 50s. Foundation even solves military tensions through proliferation and shared knowledge, access to nuclear physics.
...It all seemed so obvious - we partied when we blew up the Bikini islands. Alas
I worked in climate policy for awhile. I got out of it because I lost hope. I believe our governments have lost hope also. Covid taught us that if they inflict the necessary pain to control carbon, our governments will be consumed by populist anger. Only the Chinese system appears to have any hope of controlling people’s behavior that much without riots. And what a terrifying system! Even their control began to slip after a few years of zero Covid.
We will just have to deal with the consequences while we try to innovative our way out of this mess. It’s made me a AI accelerationist. Of the two civilizational dooms, I’ll take my chances with the computers.
I think your take is giving much too much credit for "governments wanting to do the right thing" if it weren't only for those pesky populists.
Take your China example. The issue wasn't just that the government wanted to control Covid and the people pushed back. The issue was that their zero-Covid policy was extremely stupid. I kept thinking "Umm, what do they think is going to happen when they eventually open back up - of course Covid is going to ravage through the populace." And that's exactly what happened. The policy did extremely little to actually save lives in the end compared to much less restrictive policies elsewhere.
So I'm actually less pessimistic about the case for the energy transition. I do think it's particularly unfortunate that our tribal politics has led to people lining up behind "drill baby drill" even if there is no economic basis to do so. But I do think since we know the transition is possible without draconian cutbacks in standard of living that governments can help craft effective incentives to make the change more quickly.
You are right that degrowth is not a politically viable path to saving the climate.
Additionally, it is not effective unless you want to return to pre-industrial society.
What works is: Changing the source of the energy we consume. Solar is the cheapest source of energy now. Wind is good in some areas. Nuclear can be useful too.
The amazing thing is that solar is so cheap now, there is basically no way stopping it. We may still want to burn gas and oil in the off-hours, but it will be expensive and consumption will be much lower than today.
I feel the same. The entire planet enacted a total reorganization of society in a matter of weeks! Oil is worthless if we aren't all consuming, governments can give generous payments to those who need it without nonsense about how we will pay for it, it was a frightening but honestly optimistic time, we had problems but they can be solved, its only a question of willpower.
Now we can see that vast quantities of people in the first world think not being able to go to Arbys is a human rights violation, and worse still the friendless losers who were pining to back into the office.
If sitting indoors is too much of a sacrifice for people, what happens when they need to make real changes to their lifestyles?
> We will just have to deal with the consequences while we try to innovative our way out of this mess.
We've already innovated our way out of this mess. We have all the technology available now to decarbonise the economy (well, mostly; we're still a bit limited in a few areas; but we can get a lot of the way there).
Covid is a good example. In most of the liberal democracies people accepted the restrictions their governments argued were necessary to combat Covid. I think these restrictions were significantly greater than what is needed from individuals to combat climate change.
You can’t just shut down the fossil fuel industry before you have alternative green energy infrastructure in place, this is a multi decade project. Otherwise the price of oil shoots up and you get inflation which affects most people’s ability to get by. “Populist anger” might be justified if people have a hard time paying their bills.
There are ways to reduce carbon emissions drastically without incurring populist anger. It's not so much the population that would be angry from these measures as the corporate interests that supply carbon fuels and products that use them.
I've tended not to worry about the warming much partly on the basis that AI/acc and similar tech will fix it all.
Reasoning: Intelligent robots and AI will be able to build all sort of stuff and even without that solar + wind nuclear will probably overtake fossil fuel shortly. We can have the bots cover the Sahara with solar and run carbon capture. Also fusion may work although I'm not so sure about that one.
Our governments are so dysfunctional and corrupt our only hope is that AI will actually be benevolent and can help guide us and solve problems. Because, as the comic, and thousands of other examples show, our governments aren't actually capable of leading and solving problems, even when the problems are blatant. Same when the solution is easy, but it will cause the wealthy to lose money, see US health care and taxation systems.
I know which one you mean, as I'm sure we all do, but it always amuses me that we refer to her as just 'Cleopatra' because... basically every queen of Egypt in that dynasty was named Cleopatra. They named the vast majority of the boys Ptolemy and the girls Cleopatra. Her mother's name is Cleopatra V Tryphaena. Her daughters name is Cleopatra Selene II. Her Fathers name is Ptolemy XII, she has brothers named Ptolemy XIII and Ptolemy XIV, one of her sons is named Ptolemy.
It should be the least useful mononym possible, but its totally not. Its perfectly understood.
Yeah, but those are so well known that they show up in every reddit thread. Therefore, not that interesting. Whereas the one linked is new (and isn't merely trivia).
I find it surprising that the 1896 answer of warming estimates closely match modern estimates.
Back then:
- They didn't have electronics, radio was barely being discovered
- They didn't have airplanes, they just discovered the upper atmosphere, with the very first weather balloons
- They knew about atoms, the periodic table was 30 years old, but nucleus wasn't discovered yet
Climate science is a notoriously difficult topic, with countless feedbacks, positive and negative. Nowadays, we run simulations on supercomputers based on satellite data, decades of precise historical data, geological data, etc... They didn't have that at the time.
Maybe he got the precise value by chance. Sometimes it happens. For example it is said that Eratosthenes (240 BC) calculated the Earth circumference with great accuracy (<1%) and no one managed to get a better estimate until modern times. In fact, many later estimates were off by more than 10%. The technology available at the time wasn't capable of such accuracy, but by chance, it turned out to be spot on (but they didn't know it was).
The 1896 warming estimates that were accurate were not estimating future CO2 emissions. They were of the form: if we emit X tons of CO2 a year, the greenhouse effect will be Y. The greenhouse effect of CO2 can be studied in a literal greenhouse, and the effect can be extrapolated to the earth with methods we teach in high school today. They didn't predict at what year we would be at a tipping point, but at what the effects would be with a given level of CO2.
I read somewhere that if you take a simple model based simply on the extra heat trapped by CO2 in the atmosphere and the black body emission from earth to space as a function of temperature it comes as close to reality as all the elaborate models. Or probably closer as the elaborate models can easily produce extreme results if you assume a lot of positive feedback and so far the real world results have been closer to feedback free results.
Meanwhile, half of CO2 emissions from human causes since the industrial revolution have happened in about the last 40 years or so. Every time we mash the snooze bar for another decade the problem just gets that much harder to solve.
As this brilliant cartoon points out, we've had 128 years of warnings about human-induced climate change, and over all those years, humanity did not change course.
That's because warnings and exhortations rarely accomplish anything.
Things tend to change only after there's no other choice, i.e., when there's a crisis.
There's an insightful quote from Milton Friedman on this:
"Only a crisis -- actual or perceived -- produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable."[a]
I disagree with Friedman on many things, but on this, I think he was right.
It is only now, when we find outselves in the early stages of crisis (unprecedented heat waves, perpetual giant fires, etc.), that the work of all those scientists and engineers who have been documenting, predicting, and warning about climate change for the past 128 years is finally being put to good practical use.
> Warnings and exhortations never accomplish anything.
Except that warnings and exhortations did accomplish the result of causing nations to begin banning CFCs back in 1987, well before the hole in the ozone layer became a global crisis.
I agree, and if you could magically go back during the industrial revolution and show everyone what would happen to the world, I doubt there would be a difference.
The increase in the then-current living conditions increased so much that not doing it wouldn't make sense to them.
Same as if our future selves came from 128 years from the future and told us to all stop doing something, it would be near impossible.
In response to all the nuclear power discussion in this thread, see thorium molten salt. We have had the technology since Oak Ridge in the 70s. We ignored it because the existing refinement infrastructure is conveniently "dual use" for nuclear weapons.
It must be emphasized that solar panels, wind turbines and batteries are products of carbon-burning industry. They have their place but we don't have the metals to repair and replace them in the long term, and we don't yet know if a fully electric industrial society is even possible. E.g. how do you reach the necessary temps in a blast furnace without melting your heating element?
Electrifying civilization as we know it is politically palatable, but the feasibility studies are few, and those that have been done are sobering. Any analysis which ends without a serious look in the mirror is likely serving some special interest. To expect that modernity can continue in the same mold, with hydrocarbons swapped out for something else, smacks of nostalgia or naivete. Alternative energy sources are needed, absolutely; but even more important is to transform the way we relate to each other, to other life forms, to natural resources, and to this generation ship we call a planet.
We could switch to regenerative agriculture and yeet most of the carbon back out of the air[1] and back into the soil where it belongs, but that might hurt Monsanto's profit margin, so it's unlikely to happen.
PSA:
Your personal experience of climate change resulting in
"We are all going to live horribly in the future"
is quite dependent on the definition of "we"
The sad reality is that the humanity probably needs some type of big climate-related event that would act as a wake up call when it comes to the urgency of climate change.
We need something that people can relate to with their senses or emotions. Data by itself can only get us so far.
Apocalyptic fires in California, NE Canada, Australia; harder and stronger storms; record heat waves and cold waves every year.. What more visual, personally affecting climate events do we need? Like for Africa or India to quite literally become unlivable?
In my opinion the only solution is a drastic drop in number of human beings. Thankfully we wont have to do much since nature will do it for us when the droughts begin and the crops start failing. Its fun to think of how we will science ourselves out of this as we go over 8 billion people who all desire an ever increasing standard of living. However the only science we will science ourselves with are going to be fully autonomous suicide drones patrolling our borders for any straggling climate refugees and also drones inside our ruined cities patrolling for dissent.
That's my take on the thing at least
Individual demand for consumption is unbounded. You can depopulate out of this problem, unless your depopulation is extremely targeted at the wealthiest, and the definition of "wealthiest" broadens as overall consumption grows.
I guess it's the logic behind the vaccine mandate fearmongering. If one would want to reduce the population maybe the easiest method would be a stochastic approach by injecting at random a malicious agent affecting health or reproduction globally. Of course it would mean we do have such an agent and we know how to control it, which I doubt, but it's sound (and kinda painless).
Oil is a hell of a drug for civilization, and I'm not sure how we will willingly tune off of it, unless we chose a radically different economical organization.
But as many I am kind of hopeless as it seems competition, which fuel this need, is at the core of mankind (or at least the leading West)'s mentality.
While we have a socio-economic that values market and profit over social benefits we will keep this going just because it's cheaper. (and also because there is some big people gaining lots of money with it)
As with most large scale changes...there are winners and losers. New species and extinctions. High CO2 is great for plants in my greenhouse...I suppose that's why it is called a greenhouse gas. Anyone longing for lower CO2 levels in our entire atmosphere is basically an anti-Canadian Agriculture bigot. Seriously though sometimes the cure is much worse than just handling the issues one at a time as we transition to a beautiful warm catastrophe/boon. Historically the planet has gone through all sorts of things before. Perhaps we should be looking more at how to successfully terraform our planet. Why are we still predicting weather when we should just be making it?
The problem is timing: the past shifts were spread out over many thousands of years, which gave ecosystems time to adjust, and humanity has made many ecosystems less resilient with our expansion and pollution. We also have the practical problem that we have billions of people now living – it does not help someone in Africa getting unprecedented droughts to know that a farmer in Canada is seeing 20% better yields, especially since lost income means they can’t afford to import that extra food.
Similarly, the trending on peak heats means that there are places where many people live which are becoming less survivable. Theoretically India could migrate people to Siberia but the political implications of something like that are orders of magnitude worse than reducing emissions.
CO2 is actually not so nice for breathing, if you ever monitored a CO2 ppm meter indoors, where the air gets stuffy when too much CO2 from breathing accumulates. With the current trajectory, by the end of the century, opening the window won’t get you what we now consider fresh air anymore, the air will feel stuffy all the time. We already get less fresh air now than 50 years ago, where CO2 base levels were around 300 ppm, vs. 400 ppm now.
Even if we solve the political and technical aspects of the problem, most of the Earth's habitable history has been at mich higher mean temperatures. Either finding ways to adapt to that, or modify it should definitely be on our todo list. Just because we don't slam ourselves directly into planet-sterilizing feedback loop, doesn't mean we aren't going to hit elevated temperatures in the future. We maybe only have half a billion years until increased irradiance kills everything, so having a parasol before then would be nice. Could get the planet another couple billion years of habitability.
> Seriously though sometimes the cure is much worse than just handling the issues one at a time as we transition to a beautiful warm catastrophe/boon.
This is a disgusting attitude. I'm sure you'll be safe in Alberta while Bangladesh drowns. Your ancestors benefitted from the industrial revolution, and now you want to reap all the benefits of climate change?
For anyone who's curious, here's an explanation of how the greenhouse effect works -- it's not just that some infrared radiation escapes from earth to space, while some other infrared radiation gets trapped. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqu5DjzOBF8
And people keep wondering why climate protesters are not asking things "nicely" anymore, and resort to blocking traffic and defacing paintings. They tried the nice way... they tried for many decades.
That doesn't sound fair to me either. The subset of people who have benefitted from polluting won't have to foot the clean-up bill. So those who want lush, temperate, and healthy surroundings may have to take charge, even though it isn't fair. I certainly feel grumpy about those who benefit from polluting, when others have to deal with the effect. It would be nice if they were more responsible, so we didn't have to figure this all out. I gave up on that happening, and instead have started to change my own part in this. It's a shift from the justice model to the effectiveness model.
In 1991 Germany closed a finished but not operational power plant in Kalkar[0]. Nowadays it's a theme park built by Dutch entrepreneur Hennie van der Most, who is famous for these kinds of projects. I've visited the plant as a kid with my dad and uncles when it was open for public but barely any work had been done on the demolition or transforming into a theme park. For me it was the most awesome theme park I ever visited. You could go into the control room and press all the (buttons), look inside the reactor, see all the technology that went inside this plant, peruse the entire complex and visit almost every building as almost nothing was off limits except for what was used by the park staff for office/storage. I still regret not having a camera at that time to capture everything I saw. Nowadays it's 'just' a theme park with an all-in formula.
When we have people who cannot house and feed themselves, why do we expect them to care abotu what will happen to the planet in another century? We have a hopelessnes crisis.
The propaganda of capitalism has also been widly successful. Many people believe in the myth of meritocracy or that somehow markets will solve all problems or that Jeff Bezos having $200 billion instead of $100 billion while Amazon warehouse employees work in dire conditions are all good things. At the same time, very few of those people can define capitalism but will defend it anyway.
There is no fixing the climate crisis without fixing wealth inequality and giving people dignity and hope for the future. And no, I don't mean some communist utopia where everyone has the same (b3cause that's the usual straw man argument people jump to). I simply mean it has to be way less extreme than it is today.
Capitalism created this problem. Capitalism perpetuates this problem. And it won't be solved until you deal with capitalism.
I don't personally care about wealth inequality (or more specifically, I don't care that Jeff Bezos has more money than me - if he suddenly became poor, my standard of living wouldn't change).
For me the bigger issue is not that the elite have so much money, its that they have egregious carbon footprints, while telling the little people they need to sacrifice their standard of living to save the planet.
Read the other day, Jeff Bezos yacht, even if it is sitting idle for the entire year, has a bigger carbon footprint than 80,000 people using a gas mower to mow their lawn for a season. And of course, it doesn't sit idle all year, so the carbon generated could be multiple times more than that.
Until the elites and politicians actually start sacrificing, they have no right to lecture me on what I need to give up. I already have a carbon footprint 100's of times smaller than Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Bill Gates Jeff Bezos - they can all go pound sand if they want to tell me I need to dump my propane stove or gas lawnmower to save the planet.
But I don't see the advantages over the desktop version, as the images are not made to fit the width, so I need to zoom out of this mobile page to see the image.
"""In a speech in 2002, Crichton coined the term "Gell-Mann amnesia effect" to describe the phenomenon of experts reading articles within their fields of expertise and finding them to be error-ridden and full of misunderstanding, but seemingly forgetting those experiences when reading articles in the same publications written on topics outside of their fields of expertise, which they believe to be credible."""
Newspapers may have said that, scientists did not, and would not have done. I mean the maximum is about 70m rise if everything melted, and while that would mess all the coastal cities, the adjective "costal" is important. Also the worst case heating isn't expected for a while yet, and the "ice age" discussion that sometimes gets mentioned was on the scale of millennia, not decades.
The planet is warming more than 20X the rate of warming seen through natural processes. There is a unplanned, uncontrolled, planetary scale experiment underway with the chemical and thermal properties of the atmosphere and oceans of the only planet available to us for our survival. The burden of proof is on anyone who wants to continue that experiment to demonstrate that it's safe.
rcbdev|2 years ago
Yet almost 100 years later, here we are - Oil and gas dependent, boasting an energy and climate crisis, all the while fooling regulators with worthless climate certificates, unaccountable off-shore factories and just plain rampant fraud when it comes to CO2 emissions.
CM30|2 years ago
1. The rare instances of it going wrong look catastrophic, while the many times it does better than coal/oil/gas go ignored. Kinda like how people fear plane travel more than driving, despite the former being far safer than the latter.
2. It's more expensive to setup, so there's an economic incentive to either stick with what's there already (fossil fuels) or try and go with renewable solutions.
3. A certain percentage of the left/environmental movement seem to hate the concept, either because of subtle influencing from the fossil fuels lobby or because the idea of compromising and going with a system that isn't 'perfect' doesn't appeal to them.
lm28469|2 years ago
At planet scale nothing will ever get better than: dig hole, pump oil, burn oil
tompccs|2 years ago
varispeed|2 years ago
We can all be happy clappy about doing something, but it will always fail if we don't have anything to combat corruption and manage greed.
foofie|2 years ago
I think that carbon offsetting is a good idea in the spirit of a glass half-full. It's unrealistic to expect the world economy to quit fossil fuels cold turkey, and a system that allows those who cannot transition to externalize their ability to reduce or eliminate emissions is a way to get close to the desired result with the constraints we have right now.
archerx|2 years ago
grey_earthling|2 years ago
CRConrad|2 years ago
repelsteeltje|2 years ago
...It all seemed so obvious - we partied when we blew up the Bikini islands. Alas
richrichie|2 years ago
[deleted]
Paul-Craft|2 years ago
That's not correct, unless you mean to say we discovered nuclear energy in the 1880s: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2382758-eunice-newton-f...
dougmwne|2 years ago
We will just have to deal with the consequences while we try to innovative our way out of this mess. It’s made me a AI accelerationist. Of the two civilizational dooms, I’ll take my chances with the computers.
hn_throwaway_99|2 years ago
Take your China example. The issue wasn't just that the government wanted to control Covid and the people pushed back. The issue was that their zero-Covid policy was extremely stupid. I kept thinking "Umm, what do they think is going to happen when they eventually open back up - of course Covid is going to ravage through the populace." And that's exactly what happened. The policy did extremely little to actually save lives in the end compared to much less restrictive policies elsewhere.
So I'm actually less pessimistic about the case for the energy transition. I do think it's particularly unfortunate that our tribal politics has led to people lining up behind "drill baby drill" even if there is no economic basis to do so. But I do think since we know the transition is possible without draconian cutbacks in standard of living that governments can help craft effective incentives to make the change more quickly.
konschubert|2 years ago
Additionally, it is not effective unless you want to return to pre-industrial society.
What works is: Changing the source of the energy we consume. Solar is the cheapest source of energy now. Wind is good in some areas. Nuclear can be useful too.
The amazing thing is that solar is so cheap now, there is basically no way stopping it. We may still want to burn gas and oil in the off-hours, but it will be expensive and consumption will be much lower than today.
Devasta|2 years ago
Now we can see that vast quantities of people in the first world think not being able to go to Arbys is a human rights violation, and worse still the friendless losers who were pining to back into the office.
If sitting indoors is too much of a sacrifice for people, what happens when they need to make real changes to their lifestyles?
chimprich|2 years ago
We've already innovated our way out of this mess. We have all the technology available now to decarbonise the economy (well, mostly; we're still a bit limited in a few areas; but we can get a lot of the way there).
Covid is a good example. In most of the liberal democracies people accepted the restrictions their governments argued were necessary to combat Covid. I think these restrictions were significantly greater than what is needed from individuals to combat climate change.
drexlspivey|2 years ago
snowpid|2 years ago
foxyv|2 years ago
tim333|2 years ago
Reasoning: Intelligent robots and AI will be able to build all sort of stuff and even without that solar + wind nuclear will probably overtake fossil fuel shortly. We can have the bots cover the Sahara with solar and run carbon capture. Also fusion may work although I'm not so sure about that one.
manx|2 years ago
maxrecursion|2 years ago
nojs|2 years ago
* We are closer in time to the T rex than the T rex was to the Stegosaurus
* We are closer to the time of Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza
RuggedPineapple|2 years ago
It should be the least useful mononym possible, but its totally not. Its perfectly understood.
a_c|2 years ago
tjhill|2 years ago
offices|2 years ago
Let's see... the release of the film The Day After Tomorrow is closer to 'We begin bombing in five minutes' than it is to today.
lkdfjlkdfjlg|2 years ago
GuB-42|2 years ago
Back then:
- They didn't have electronics, radio was barely being discovered
- They didn't have airplanes, they just discovered the upper atmosphere, with the very first weather balloons
- They knew about atoms, the periodic table was 30 years old, but nucleus wasn't discovered yet
Climate science is a notoriously difficult topic, with countless feedbacks, positive and negative. Nowadays, we run simulations on supercomputers based on satellite data, decades of precise historical data, geological data, etc... They didn't have that at the time.
Maybe he got the precise value by chance. Sometimes it happens. For example it is said that Eratosthenes (240 BC) calculated the Earth circumference with great accuracy (<1%) and no one managed to get a better estimate until modern times. In fact, many later estimates were off by more than 10%. The technology available at the time wasn't capable of such accuracy, but by chance, it turned out to be spot on (but they didn't know it was).
Cheer2171|2 years ago
tim333|2 years ago
elihu|2 years ago
cs702|2 years ago
That's because warnings and exhortations rarely accomplish anything.
Things tend to change only after there's no other choice, i.e., when there's a crisis.
There's an insightful quote from Milton Friedman on this:
"Only a crisis -- actual or perceived -- produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable."[a]
I disagree with Friedman on many things, but on this, I think he was right.
It is only now, when we find outselves in the early stages of crisis (unprecedented heat waves, perpetual giant fires, etc.), that the work of all those scientists and engineers who have been documenting, predicting, and warning about climate change for the past 128 years is finally being put to good practical use.
Hopefully it's not too late.
---
[a] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/110844-only-a-crisis---actu...
kibwen|2 years ago
Except that warnings and exhortations did accomplish the result of causing nations to begin banning CFCs back in 1987, well before the hole in the ozone layer became a global crisis.
mlrtime|2 years ago
The increase in the then-current living conditions increased so much that not doing it wouldn't make sense to them.
Same as if our future selves came from 128 years from the future and told us to all stop doing something, it would be near impossible.
walleeee|2 years ago
It must be emphasized that solar panels, wind turbines and batteries are products of carbon-burning industry. They have their place but we don't have the metals to repair and replace them in the long term, and we don't yet know if a fully electric industrial society is even possible. E.g. how do you reach the necessary temps in a blast furnace without melting your heating element?
Electrifying civilization as we know it is politically palatable, but the feasibility studies are few, and those that have been done are sobering. Any analysis which ends without a serious look in the mirror is likely serving some special interest. To expect that modernity can continue in the same mold, with hydrocarbons swapped out for something else, smacks of nostalgia or naivete. Alternative energy sources are needed, absolutely; but even more important is to transform the way we relate to each other, to other life forms, to natural resources, and to this generation ship we call a planet.
tommiegannert|2 years ago
Induction heating? As long as some ferromagnetic material has a higher melting temperature than what you want to melt, this seems solvable.
walleeee|2 years ago
rickdeckard|2 years ago
"Yeah, but that can't be us. I need a scientist to prove it's not because of us!"
turning to workforce
"It's not us, keep going!"
mikewarot|2 years ago
[1] https://forceofnature.com/blogs/regenerate/carbon-sequestrat....
pcblues|2 years ago
rpozarickij|2 years ago
lunarboy|2 years ago
questinthrow|2 years ago
lupire|2 years ago
wakawaka28|2 years ago
tsylba|2 years ago
Oil is a hell of a drug for civilization, and I'm not sure how we will willingly tune off of it, unless we chose a radically different economical organization.
But as many I am kind of hopeless as it seems competition, which fuel this need, is at the core of mankind (or at least the leading West)'s mentality.
CapitalTntcls|2 years ago
Winse|2 years ago
acdha|2 years ago
Similarly, the trending on peak heats means that there are places where many people live which are becoming less survivable. Theoretically India could migrate people to Siberia but the political implications of something like that are orders of magnitude worse than reducing emissions.
layer8|2 years ago
galangalalgol|2 years ago
timeon|2 years ago
Since this is thread under XKCD post: https://xkcd.com/1732/
Isn't it bit naive to exclude rate of change in this argument?
Cheer2171|2 years ago
This is a disgusting attitude. I'm sure you'll be safe in Alberta while Bangladesh drowns. Your ancestors benefitted from the industrial revolution, and now you want to reap all the benefits of climate change?
gcanyon|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
unglaublich|2 years ago
mlrtime|2 years ago
They should be spending their time getting PHDs in Engineering or Physics to try and help solve these issues.
ejb999|2 years ago
layer8|2 years ago
chrsw|2 years ago
bigfont|2 years ago
lollol_dimi|2 years ago
weberer|2 years ago
tmalsburg2|2 years ago
aequitas|2 years ago
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNR-300
brettermeier|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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jmyeet|2 years ago
The propaganda of capitalism has also been widly successful. Many people believe in the myth of meritocracy or that somehow markets will solve all problems or that Jeff Bezos having $200 billion instead of $100 billion while Amazon warehouse employees work in dire conditions are all good things. At the same time, very few of those people can define capitalism but will defend it anyway.
There is no fixing the climate crisis without fixing wealth inequality and giving people dignity and hope for the future. And no, I don't mean some communist utopia where everyone has the same (b3cause that's the usual straw man argument people jump to). I simply mean it has to be way less extreme than it is today.
Capitalism created this problem. Capitalism perpetuates this problem. And it won't be solved until you deal with capitalism.
ejb999|2 years ago
For me the bigger issue is not that the elite have so much money, its that they have egregious carbon footprints, while telling the little people they need to sacrifice their standard of living to save the planet.
Read the other day, Jeff Bezos yacht, even if it is sitting idle for the entire year, has a bigger carbon footprint than 80,000 people using a gas mower to mow their lawn for a season. And of course, it doesn't sit idle all year, so the carbon generated could be multiple times more than that.
Until the elites and politicians actually start sacrificing, they have no right to lecture me on what I need to give up. I already have a carbon footprint 100's of times smaller than Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Bill Gates Jeff Bezos - they can all go pound sand if they want to tell me I need to dump my propane stove or gas lawnmower to save the planet.
foxyv|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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unknown|2 years ago
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a1o|2 years ago
SushiHippie|2 years ago
But I don't see the advantages over the desktop version, as the images are not made to fit the width, so I need to zoom out of this mobile page to see the image.
joshka|2 years ago
ivanb|2 years ago
On the other hand, we've been "staving off the next ice age" too zealously: https://xkcd.com/1732/
midzer|2 years ago
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wschfdkbrmcdf|2 years ago
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Throw494955|2 years ago
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ben_w|2 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
Newspapers may have said that, scientists did not, and would not have done. I mean the maximum is about 70m rise if everything melted, and while that would mess all the coastal cities, the adjective "costal" is important. Also the worst case heating isn't expected for a while yet, and the "ice age" discussion that sometimes gets mentioned was on the scale of millennia, not decades.
richrichie|2 years ago
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breakyerself|2 years ago
Hucklederry|2 years ago
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