[Pelam]

But economy, china, developing nations, my personal right to consumption, factor x is making this metric seem worse than it should be, another political thing is more important, technological solution Y will save us, technological solution Z won't help or has flaws... endless list of arguments that derail discussion and end up in effective inaction.

Humanity's capacity to handle an slow creeping existential threat appears to be very bad. Especially when preventing it requires simply stopping / doing less some of the things we are doing.

Apparently the production of greenhouse gasses has gone up in past years regardless of the negotiations aimed at reducing them.

I suspect geoengineering is where this will end up when things start to get really bad.

Question, what are the most viable / cost effective / low risk geoengineering tools?

[jsnell]

> Apparently the production of greenhouse gasses has gone up in past years regardless of the negotiations aimed at reducing them.

Second derivatives matter. The growth in CO2 emissions from 2013 to 2023 was like 1/4th of the growth from 2003 to 2013.

And it's now being driven by the profit motive, not by treaties that might be reneged on at any time, so there's no reason to believe the trend will stop. All that's needed is for governments to not actively screw things up. (Which I guess is a possibility in the US due to the hyper-partisan nature of their politics, but China and India are what really matter, and both stand to gain so much from cheap energy that it's hard to imagine them being willing to stop the transition just out of spite.)

Honestly, there has probably not been more cause for optimism on climate change in like three decades.

[kachapopopow]

After we stopped dumping sulfur into the oceans the average temperature went up nearly an entire degree![1]

This will heavily affect the size of cyclones and other weather related disasters (not just heatwaves). 2024 might finally make people realize that the end is near once parts of the world in developed countries start to be slowly wiped off the map due to non stop natural disaster events.

[1]: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%... @credits borg16

[Pelam]

Do you have a reference for that?

One thing that seems obvious, but hasn't been repeated enough IMHO is that injecting more energy (heat) into a chaotic system (climate), won't simply make the average energy (temperature) higher BUT will also proportionally strenghten the chaotic fluctuations (disasters).

[kachapopopow]

I am being blocked from accessing the site, but it all comes from the graph I saw on this site: https://site.uit.no/nclos/2024/01/31/a-peculiar-interaction-....

Correct me if I'm wrong.

[borg16]

I was unable to access the url you shared either. Here's a cached copy of it I was able to find[1]

[1]https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%...

[borg16]

interesting you bring developed countries and not developing countries into the picture here first. Is it because such large scale disasters like the cyclones you mention tend to hit US more than any developing nations?

I ask because I hypothesize that the impact of these raising temperatures will be seen more widely and adversely in parts of developing countries given their population density and inability to address the same.

[kachapopopow]

Well the non developed countries have suffered from these for the better part of few decades and nobody cares. My reasoning is that this happening to a developed nation would be significantly more widespread as this requires global action.

Not to mention that non developed nations tend to have other issues they're trying to solve and climate change is not even on their list (except for very few).

[erkt]

This is hysterical.

[rlili]

I see it more like:

> Major lobbying companies' shareholders' interest in handling an slow creeping existential threat appears to be very bad.

[gmuslera]

The safest path is undo what we did, somewhat stop adding more fossil carbon to the system, and capture the excess that we added since preindustrial times, and then some extra to unwind what some positive feedback loops added by their own. It it looks hard, impractical, expensive and a lot of more ugly words, but it goes right to try to push the system to the previous stable state.

Other “solutions” try to short term deal with one perceived problem without taking into account how the whole system is changing and how our “solution” will change it even more. With very complex systems shortsighted and not holistic approaches could bring to the table far more problems, some of which we may not have a way to deal with.

[silverquiet]

Unburning (my spellcheck marks that as a misspelling which says something even on its own) all the fossil fuels that gave rise to the industrial age we now reside in is I suppose possible in theory, but it would require a nearly limitless source of energy, and even if such a breakthrough occurred, I can't help but feel that all the energy would be directed towards ever more elaborate crypto-mining setups or AI chatbots.

The half-ass solution will be to dim the sky which I suppose will buy some time; enough to see me out I hope.

[analognoise]

I love how humanity is like “should we dim the sky, or give up trucks?” and we’re going to pick dimming the sky.

On the one hand we’re an awesome species; we’re also totally ridiculous. It’s tough to wrap your head around the duality.

[silverquiet]

"If you got it, a truck brought it" is a pretty common sentiment in the transport industry because it's quite true, especially in the US. The thing is, between the economy/built world we've created and the effects on the climate, we've pretty much created a no-win scenario for humanity. Sorry kids.

[hnaccount_rng]

Yeah, I completely agree. But.. keep in mind: the idea that we _shouldn’t_ do geoengineering.. that ship has sailed at least a couple of decades now. Yes, dimming the sky is a more direct measure than the geoengineering we did so far. But I’m not even sure it’s less predictable than our first attempt

[gmuslera]

Letting the patient worsen his health by doing nothing, try to improve things slowly in something rational but that by now it may take longer for him to survive or giving him this potential snake oil that you don't know if it will kill him in the short term?

So far climate and related things in this complex system is full of surprises, even for experts. We are finding out that something seemingly innocent that had a clear positive impact by one metric worsened a lot of other things. I don't know if I could call engineering something with so much uncertainties on the outcome.

[bryanlarsen]

> Apparently the production of greenhouse gasses has gone up in past years regardless of the negotiations aimed at reducing them.

It appears likely that CO2 emissions will fall slightly in 2024, and start dropping dramatically in 2025. https://climateanalytics.org/comment/will-2024-be-the-year-e...

In the past 6 degrees of warming was predicted. We're now down to a prediction of 4 degrees of warming; stopping at 2.5 degrees is both possible and practical.

[Filligree]

> Question, what are the most viable / cost effective / low risk geoengineering tools?

Inject sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere. This can be done by adding it to airplane fuel. We have a good idea of the consequences, as ships did the ~same thing (less effectively) until recently—they're now filtering it into the oceans instead.

[fsflover]

> But economy, china, developing nations, my personal right to consumption

More excuses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39756174

[analognoise]

I don’t care and will pick “let’s all go to war” long before I pick “I got to enjoy it all but my kids should live in communal hovels to save power”.

The USA has what, 12 super carriers? They’re not for show - I guarantee we’ll run out of oil last.

[hyperman1]

I've long been thinking geoengineering is the most likely way for humanity to survive this mostly unscathed.

And this scares me a lot. The technology makes nuclear weapons look like pussies. Letting 1 country control who has which weather where is unacceptable for almost any country.

We need global cooperation to the point of becoming 1 huge global superstate, or we're having all out wars between the most powerfull nations of the world, while dealing with climate change at the same time.

And that's making the assumption that no mistake is made, with a completely new technology field, and mistakes easily killing millions of people.

[dpkirchner]

> Letting 1 country control who has which weather where is unacceptable for almost any country.

As we saw in the Gerard Butler documentary "Geostorm."

[amelius]

> my personal right to consumption

What if we simply stop telling people what they should buy every time they visit a website et cetera?

Would that help to keep Earth's temperature down?

[eastbound]

You’re probably not even kidding, it’s part of a good solution. However, take a 360° look on the other aspects of this solution:

- We seek to raise every person in poverty to the average consumption level. Through charities, political programs, etc. Should we stop?

- If you don’t drive people to earn, you don’t drive people to work. And you get a dysfunctional society which consumes a lot but does not produce a lot.

- It’s the same philosophical problem as if you started to be fair towards men, then they’d stop striving. I assure you that you don’t want that.

- Would you be ok with solving climate change at the expense of other social targets? If not, congrats, you’re a leftist not a scientist.

[nojvek]

Progress requires a generational shift.

At-least in US we are looking at average age of presidential candidates 79y, senate 65y, house 60.

50% of wealth is owned by Boomers. They control majority of wealth and policy.

Even the current generation will be long dead before they have to reckon with climate change.

Until we get a big shock event where millions die, and the death from extreme natural causes is very evident, it won’t be something most governments take seriously.

All major governments dragged their feet through 2020 regarding Covid.

[thegrimmest]

> slow creeping existential threat

I struggle to see how even the worst predicted outcomes of climate change are an existential threat to the human species or our civilization. In the worst case a few billion people die or are displaced. Our species will carry on.

[BLKNSLVR]

Losing a few billion people is an existential threat to civilisation.

Civilisation is quite the fragile structure, built slowly and carefully over centuries of large scale cooperation between much of the populated world.

Scarcity of the basest necessities brings uncivilisation.

[thegrimmest]

I don't think so, civilization has progressed basically unidirectionally for all of history. We've never gone "back to the stone age" or regressed in any meaningful capacity, despite catastrophes of various scales.

[BLKNSLVR]

I'm no historian, but:

https://gizmodo.com/10-civilizations-that-disappeared-under-...

[thegrimmest]

Humanity as a whole has never gone back an age. Once we learned to cultivate plants, domesticate animals, smelt iron, we've never unlearned. We'll similarly never unlearn how to build nuclear reactors or microprocessors. I'm happy to entertain such a suggestion, but I don't see a mechanism by which climate change can destroy enough people and infrastructure to create such an effect. Our knowledge is too distributed and resilient.

[BLKNSLVR]

I understand your point, but the scale of the potential effects of climate change combined with all the societal structures in place, and the number of people required to keep that structure "fed", that allow for the knowledge to be passed down makes me feel that even one generation worth of a significantly depleted humanity (something like 10% of current, spread around the world) who are largely occupied with just ensuring enough food and shelter to survive, will see those societal structures need to be rebuilt from scratch.

[M95D]

> We'll similarly never unlearn how to build nuclear reactors or microprocessors.

Who's "we"? I don't know about you, but:

- I did learn a bit of agriculture and I could probably teach that to the future generation.

- I never learned how to build a nuclear reactor or microprocessor. Did you? Could you teach that?

[silverquiet]

I have never died and so I don't think ever I will.

[kachapopopow]

Losing the means of food production in the most fertile parts of the world would pretty much wipe out more than "a few billion people". It's likely that we'd lose the means to support even a billion human lives and would have to redirect our efforts into survival rather than progression setting us back hundreds of years.

edit: not to mention everyone going into war with each other for securing the small amount of places that are able to produce food.

[thegrimmest]

New fertile areas will become available, Siberia and northern Canada for instance. Do you have a serious scientific source that projects the loss of agricultural capacity to the degree you're suggesting?

[kachapopopow]

The land itself has to be fertile that's why the moon-belt is called like that and is currently where most of the wheat (in europe at least) is being produced. This process happened over thousands of years and is not easy to 'move' or 'prepare' land like that.

New regions would struggle to cultivate new land without fertilizers and the current fertilizer sector would struggle to operate (current sector is built around the availability of ammonia as far as I'm aware).

Your best bets would yes: Siberia, Canada. But it would take maybe few millennia before that land could be used for agriculture and it would effectively become the new oil of the world sparking a new wave of conflicts as I mentioned before.

Our current food supply could be destroyed in decades not millennia given enough heatwaves and other natural events.

[krmboya]

> developing nations

Yet the population in developed economies will fall drastically in the next 50-100 yrs. Let developing nations have their chance at improving quality of life through cheap energy like developed nations did. Mass immigration is but bandaid at maintaining population and the resulting economic demand within the existing order.

Developing economies account for a negligible percentage of global emissions at the moment. By the time they catch up, some iterations of nuclear energy research will have resulted in more efficient energy production.