[hashxyz]

I am getting sick of seeing the same edgy fatalistic comments every time a climate article is posted. If you are really such a master of the universe that you can predict the future and know it’s gonna be so horrible, then you must also know that the only morally justifiable action for you to take is to end your life right away to become a net-zero hero.

Otherwise why don’t you calm down and entertain the thought that maybe the future won’t suck, and might even be normal or good, just like the present is right now.

Why are you working on technology if you don’t think the future will be great?

[kaba0]

Every people is in my opinion eligible for some sane amount of resource usage on Earth - that is not a problem, the Earth is rich and would have enough to provide for the current population.

But we should not have people that travel with private jets at all, neither should we transport locally easily produced goods across the world due to salary arbitrage, should build small, walkable cities, communities. There are plenty appliances/tools we could easily share and thus not opt for cheaper, low lifetime ones — e.g. how often do you use you drill? Or power washer? Wouldn’t renting/lending it between a few houses be more environmentally responsible? Also, multi-generational houses are not a bad thing if the relation between people is not bad — the elderly get to experience the joy of their grandchildren, parents get “free babysitters”, later on the parents can care for the elderly. It’s how humanity has been since forever, and I believe it would have positive effects on everyone, not just ecology. Also, there should be barely any need for single use plastic packaging besides medicinal use — create standard container dimensions for various kinds of products and create dispensers in supermarkets that take in your previous container, and give you your product in a new one. If you break it/don’t bring it back, you have to buy that again. Yoghurts, drinks, huge swathes of supermarkets could be replaced that way.

The problem is the huge inequality — my Western ass is in huge luxury, when my African counterpart is hungry with barely any potable water. Wouldn’t they also deserve equal treatment? But if everyone were to live in Western lifestyle we would be even worse off. We should strive to cut back a bit on the Western side, and bring up the rest of the world in a sustainable way. We have the tech for that, mostly.

[hashxyz]

I agree with some of your points about excesses of American lifestyle (where I live), but there is another side to this. A pretty good proxy for wealth is basically how much stuff you can waste and not care about. I can leave all the lights on in my house because electricity is cheap, or I can afford to eat so much delicious food I become overweight and get heart disease.

You could argue that I should turn off the lights, and on that point you might have some ground. But more generally there are many things in my life that I save time on by basically throwing a little money in the trash, and I am very fortunate to have this opportunity. This is on a spectrum and we should obviously not cause obscene long term damage so I can save 2 seconds per day, but we are not at that point yet.

And regarding inequality, it is also on a spectrum, and at some point it is definitely too much, but I don’t think we have necessarily crossed that line. 99% of the people in my city have enough food to eat. And the right amount of inequality is certainly not 0, the only way to achieve that is by killing all life on earth. Some inequality is a natural consequence of the different branches of possibility that people explore with their lives. To the extent that we have anything in our society it’s because we are able to share ideas and cooperate. A society will necessarily always have the have’s and the have-not’s.

[vasco]

Also why are they having kids, why are they buying things, etc. If someone is truly concerned: vote that way, go work on making floating houses and thermal isolation and carbon recapture and leave the rest of us that live normal lives with average carbon usage alone.

Anytime someone that had kids mentions anything about reducing other people's carbon output they should just be ignored. You just created a potentially forever chain of carbon usage that will be exponential. Meanwhile here I am with my "constant" carbon usage to your O(2^n) in perpetuity.

[hashxyz]

What if you actually can’t predict the future and climate change is actually good? What if having kids is actually a great thing for them and for the world? These are reasonable ideas if you don’t just spend your time doomscrolling on twitter all day.

People talk about the AI singularity but the whole world is a singularity all the time. To model the entire world and predict how everything is going to play out on a social and economic level is obviously impossible. To make impoverishing top-down prescriptions based on that seems criminal. To utilize this storyline as a political mechanism is cruel.

[aplanas]

> What if you actually can’t predict the future and climate change is actually good?

Is this how rational people react, or is some spiritual response talking from fear?

How can be the depletion of biodiversity, the increase of temperatures and the disappearance of ecosystems that we need to survive "good"?

As a community we do no have a crystal ball to predict the future, but we have science and technology and the predictions from there are clear: it is not good for us, and it is not good for the current species.

The far future, the very far one -- sure -- the are good chances that new ecosystems will appear adapted to the new environments, but those will not be "nice" for our current expectations.

A doing-nothing-and-hoping-for-the-best strategy is a guarantee for massive wars, hunger and suffering, as happen many times in the past (but never in a scale of 7.000.000 population)

[hashxyz]

Your entire framing of the world is engineered by pessimistic news articles which only tell a small part of the story.

Is loss of biodiversity bad? Maybe. Will we have resurrected most extinct species using jurassic park DNA within the next 500 years? I dunno but if that happened, it would make the current loss of biodiversity into more of a blip than an apocalyptic thing.

The science and technology enterprise is economically motivated. It is pretty good at creating value out of fewer and fewer resources. It is not good at making godlike insights into the far future about the late stage interactions between itself and the physical world. Any definite predictions provided to you are more likely driven by short-term incentives of some political figures.

There is nothing indicating massive wars are coming due to climate change, most of the world is lifting out of poverty not slipping back into it. If the world does heat by 5-10 degrees, we should be focused on making sure indians and africans have enough economic resources to afford air conditioning like we do in rich countries.

[kaba0]

What an absolutely bullshit take, honestly I have a hard time reasonably reacting to it, it is so dumb.

We can’t predict the future down to a point, but we can make good, large-scale predictions with good accuracy — global average temperatures will increase and by every prediction, that will have catastrophic results. Period. That’s not some doomer news, that is reality. We can’t predict how individual countries will react, but that is not the question.

[hashxyz]

I’m sorry man but based on the stuff I’ve worked on and the situations I’ve seen, it just seems more plausible to me that the scientific enterprise tasked with scaring the shit out of everyone is not sampling and unbiased distribution.

[defrost]

> To model the entire world and predict how everything is going to play out on a social and economic level is obviously impossible.

Sure.

But that's a trite non sequitur entirely orthoganal to the simplicity of the thermodynamics underpinning the cause of climate change.

Ever increasing levels of trapped energy that will increase at an even faster rate once methane and water vapor get seriously involved in the mix unless action is taken to either block the sun or reduce the insulating effects of atmospheric gases.

[hashxyz]

I agree with your last statement, although it is describing a very simple interaction and I don’t feel certain that we are observing that in action yet. I also don’t know if there are counter-balancing interactions that we aren’t aware of yet.

If humanity does end up accidentally terraforming the planet to get to hot in a positive feedback loop, I believe we will be within a line-of-sight to terraforming it back in the other direction.

Technology has solved all our physical problems so far. Maybe we will seed clouds in the upper atmosphere to reflect a lot of energy back into space. Maybe we will find something useful to do with captured carbon (which doesn’t just release it). It is insane to suggest capitalism won’t solve this problem by the time it actually needs solving, and therefore needs to be shut down (it’s the thing that actually works).

[defrost]

If it takes > 100 years and all the energy of tens of billions of tonnes of fossil fuel to put us in a state of extreme peril then yes, it will at least * take another 100+ years and all the energy of tens of billions of tonnes of fossil fuel to reverse out of that position.

If that's your suggested strategy then I would suggest that we can do better by not going there in the first instance.

* Thanks to the arrow of time, the issue of unbreaking a glass, methane release and other factors it very realistically could take more time and energy to get out of the hole we seem intent upon driving into.

> Technology is for solving problems.

It's not 'magic' though and I have little time for green washing or praying to the technology fairy.

[hashxyz]

> I would suggest that we can do better by not going there

The problem is that you are recommending we turn off capitalism, which will have serious consequences that are easier to predict than climate change: we will doom the world’s poor people to lives of certain poverty with no hope of upward mobility.

[kaba0]

> It is insane to suggest capitalism won’t solve this problem by the time it actually needs solving

That time is now, and it has failed.

But it is crystal clear that we should decrease our current CO2 usage as much as we can, even at the (imo small) price of personal luxury — even if some new technical advantage can solve the problem, we should stop at least speeding towards the cliff, and try to break as much as possible.

You are forgetting just how much bigger the planet is then us.

[hashxyz]

> That time is now

We diverge on this point and I talked about it in other comments.

> we should decrease our current CO2 usage as much as we can, even at a small price of personal luxury

It’s luxury because we live in the first world. In the 3rd world where most people live (and most people are poor), these policies have catastrophic consequences, such as the Sri Lankan organic farming affair.