Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wrfitch 2075 days ago
As much as we should be cautious about complicating the problem further, we have roughly 20 years before the cumulative greenhouse effects really take effect. At what point do we stop worrying about what might happen in the far future and focus on what we know will happen within our lifetimes? I get that knock-on effects might cause more problems further down the line, but the impending end of the world seems like a more pressing concern.
2 comments
stupendousyappi 2075 days ago
This, except for geoengineering. Developing the infrastructure to apply it at planetary scale will take years, and then actually applying it will take trillions of dollars. If by some miracle it turns out to not be necessary, we have plenty of time to cancel it, but now (really, 10 years ago) is the time to start spending 100s of billions of dollars preparing (and 100s of billions reducing emissions, of course).

FWIW, my preferred approach is ocean-powered olivine weathering, as in Project Vesta. But we'll need multiple approaches.

link
jascii 2075 days ago
"but the impending end of the world seems like a more pressing concern". While climate change may lead to a mass extinction event that will likely wipe out a lot of species, including our own, it will not likely lead to the end of the world. Isn't it the short term thinking you are advocating here that lead us into this situation to begin with?
link
wrfitch 2075 days ago
Planet Earth will continue to exist and the natural world may eventually recover, but a manmade extinction event and the possible extinction of human life is a good enough definition of "the end of the world" for me, though perhaps I should have said "the end of the human world". I agree that it's not worth fixing climate change at the expense of the future, but the situation is bad enough that fixing it is worth some level of risk - we had the time for a methodical, considered approach to climate change when we found out about it decades ago, and we didn't do anything.

I also think the decision to accept some long-term risks to alleviate the (frankly terrifying) short/medium-term dangers we face is very different to the decision to exploit natural resources in service of the industrial revolution.

link