Ask HN: Why don't geeks care about climate change? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why don't geeks care about climate change?

12 pointsmijustin35 comments

Maybe it's just me, but I'm surprised by how little the tech community talks about climate change.

Searching HN, the top climate change story has about 100 points. Anecdotally, I don't see geeks discussing it elsewhere either (Twitter, blog posts). In terms of leaders and startups tackling the problem, I can only think of Elon and Tim Cook.

Air travel, electricity consumption (think server farms), manufacturing, and shipping are big pieces of the startup culture and rarely seem challenged.

This surprises me. We geeks have rational, logical minds. Is it just me, or do geeks not care about the issue?

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> We geeks have rational, logical minds.

No. Geeks just like tinkering with computers and/or electronics, and are better at that than others.

Some geeks think that because they're good at computers they must be equally good at everything else. (To be fair, I guess that also happens to other hobbies/professions.) That might explain why some geeks have so little respect for the opinion of actual experts.

One of the (many) reasons I went vegan was to cut my impact on the environment. I don't own or use cars. Where I can I walk, where I can't I take public transit. I've made considerable changes to what and how I buy, to source food with less of a total impact. I've started to look at alternative clothing and technology strategies to reduce my environmental impact there too.

I know there are plenty of geeks who have done similar things. The truth is that a new tech or more companies aren't going to solve this problem - the problem is we (who live in large economies) now live in a world which is completely separated from the daily realities of where our stuff comes from. We have spent the last 50 years enabling large mono-cultures and promoting specialization - which has done amazing things for food availability - at the expense that now a single plate of food easily contains ingredients from every continent - at a huge environmental impact. Similar trends have happened in manufacturing, textiles and practically every other industry.

Trends in tech that might help us:

* Hyper-local agriculture

* Locally-efficient down-cycling / recycling programs - for clothes, tech...pretty much everything.

* Teaching people how to buy and cook produce.

But the truth is that every individual needs to make a transition in how they live - that means eating less (hopefully no) meat and animal products, repairing instead of buying new, developing ethical supply chains (starting by knowing the supply chain is a good start!)

And yes, companies need to change and adapt too...that means more environmental regulation, more incentives to develop and adopt renewable sources of energy - how we structure those is completely beyond my expertise though...and I don't have much hope there.

> I went vegan was to cut my impact on the environment

Maybe you can explain to me then how it is that this makes a significant difference in global warming. The carbon that is released by cows and humans after consumption of plant matter was derived from said plant matter. The carbon in those plants came from the air. Hence, this is a closed system where carbon is taken from the air by the plants, consumed by the animals, and then put back into the air by the animals. There cannot be a net gain of carbon from this. The only reasonable argument I have thought of so far is that of methane, although in theory that can be pulled from the air and used as fuel (whereafter it becomes available to plants again).

The burning of fossil fuels, on the other hand, puts more net carbon into the air since those fossil fuels are being pulled from deep reservoirs that otherwise would be keeping their carbon to themselves. The fossil fuels are being burned far faster than they are being deposited back into the earth, which lacks the balance that the grass-cow-human-air-grass loop has.

I completely agree that transportation should use electricity and related energy sources wherever possible. However, I don't believe this will come any sooner than economics demands it. All the countries in the world cannot be controlled. Just look at all the unsuccessful wars where one country tries to control another's internal affairs. Without the majority agreeing to bite the bullet and use green energy, the first-world nations would become even less competitive than they currently are, making first-world jobs harder to find. Even many of the jobs related to building green technologies would most definitely be outsourced to lower-cost nations who don't follow the guidelines. Outside of fully socialised (zero-profit, public-benefit) production of green technologies, the cost is too prohibitive.

One of the reasons why this topic is rarely discussed here is because people often get very emotional. I hope people can understand that I'm simply trying to point out the problems with non-socialised green. Please don't shoot the messenger, as I care about the environment more than the average person; but that doesn't give me or you magical powers to make people stop using fossil fuel.

> Maybe you can explain to me then how it is that this makes a significant difference in global warming. The carbon that is released by cows and humans after consumption of plant matter was derived from said plant matter. The carbon in those plants came from the air. Hence, this is a closed system where carbon is taken from the air by the plants, consumed by the animals, and then put back into the air by the animals. There cannot be a net gain of carbon from this.

Instead of the energy taken to grow those plants going to feed people - they are used to grow animals. This takes an enormous amount of input energy from farming the plants, to transporting them to the animals. Not forgetting water transport also. Then there is the energy that is taken to manage the huge sums of waste that these animals produce (most of which is stored in huge silos or pits, which ends up leaching into ground water - but that's another thing). Then there is the energy to transport, kill, transport, package, transport and eventually sell - so the energy / calorie of animal food is no where near efficient as it is for plants and beans. Basically, it is not a closed system - we input so much energy into sustaining our meat habit (as well as the ethical implications of killing 100,000,000-500,000,000 sentient animals a day - including fish and the resulting bycatch)

I think we agree when it comes to the impact of a solution - there needs to be a HUGE concerted effort to even make a dent - people can't immediately change the nature of the worlds largest companies - but I believe that our only hope is to promote local change (to get people to commit to a lifestyle change that has to happen one way or another) - and push for governmental reform - will it be perfect? no. Will it be easy? nope. But we have to start somewhere - and I think diet and local economies might be a good first step.

> we input so much energy into sustaining our meat habit

Well, the energy alone wouldn't really be a problem if we were using green energy. The Sun provides more than enough energy for all sorts of human endeavours. At the same time, I absolutely agree that much of the current production and delivery system, food and otherwise, is inefficient. Efficiency is an important matter, but alone it's probably not enough to curb global warming in the long run, especially not if the population keeps growing.

As you might have guessed, I eat meat. The funny thing is, I don't do it for taste reasons. I do it because it's cheap protein that works well with my digestive system. For some reason, I can't consume more than 15g fibre per day without problems, and I've tried for months at a time before to see if I would simply adjust, but that didn't happen. If there were affordable, safe (no mercury or other contaminants), and quick-to-prepare plant-based food that went well with my body, I would certainly be on it. So far I haven't found such a thing. One of the most peculiar aspects of all this is that I constantly hear about how efficient plant-based foods are supposed to be in terms of production, yet plant based protein (without high fibre) is never cheap. It's always more expensive than meat/egg/milk based protein. How is it that plants are so expensive when they're supposed to be so efficient? Without that efficiency being seen by the consumer, it's unreasonable to expect everyone to switch.

On the topic of changes in the system, I personally would prefer the government-based approach where essential technologies for green energy were at least subsidised enough that they were on-par with fossil fuels. The problem is that companies might take advantage of the subsidies to increase their own profit margin, which is why I suggested that the production be fully socialised, so that profit doesn't get placed at higher priority than the environment. Moreover, there would be no unreasonable burden on individuals, as would be the case to expect everyone to simply buy a Tesla.

One of the reasons for the relative expense is the heavily-subsidised corn (and a few other) industries which pretty much all goes to animal feed.

That being said, my food costs were easily cut in half when I went vegan (and now, they are about 1/4 after some fine tuning of some other recipes) - I mostly get protein from chickpeas, kidney beans and lentils - which are all super-cheap compared to meat. I also eat a fair bit of tofu (which is very low in fibre and which is also very cheap compared to meat). Tempeh is another option, but I don't tend to make it often. We generally cook a big batch of food at the beginning of the week - which means time to prepare is amortized nicely (and frying tofu is very quick also)

I will admit that processed vegan meat-alternatives do tend to be more expensive than their animal derived counterparts, and not the healthiest - so I tend to avoid them - most of the expense is due to small production runs and limited quantity - and the extra processing.

I just looked up the price of bulk tofu, and it looks like the protein/price ratio is less than that of ground beef but ~2x that of milk or eggs. I can't say I've actually tried tofu. Maybe some day I'll give it a whirl.

For years now, I've wanted to see a wider availability of affordable plant-based proteins, particularly at normal grocery outlets. At the same time I understand that for many folks, beans are ideal since they're quite affordable. Soy milk is a prime example of the difference in cost between plant and animal protein. Not only does soy milk cost about 2x what cow milk costs, but it has only about 65% the protein per serving, making it more like 3x the price. Perhaps there will come a day when these things are more affordable, but I fear it may never happen since food seems only to get more expensive with time.

The main thread was talking about technology, so maybe someone can come up with a way to process and distribute plant products more efficiently. There is a certain dilemma here in that many plant-goers like small-scale operations, when large-scale operations and bulk processing are necessary for the lowest prices. In this sense, there seem to be two separate goals being combined together -- the desire to return to the olden days of family farming, and the desire not to eat meat. I have also felt that there is something of an elitist culture surrounding some of the vegan circles, where much of the food is very high quality yet rather pricey. Perhaps it dates back to Hitler's plant-based diet, which was also seen as high-class and elite. I can't help but wonder if the prices are kept where they are as a result of this elitist culture.

There's a great documentary on Netflix called Cowspiracy. It's very well sourced[1] and quite entertaining too.

1: http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts/

There are plenty of geeks who care deeply about the planet. No offense, but it doesn't sound like you're looking very hard. In terms of superstar techies, how about adding Bill Gates to your list? How about Google's investments in solar? We're in the midst of a vast societal transformation to sustainability -- certainly all the sectors you mention -- and it's being invented by techies.

I agree: I see movement at the top (Gates, Elon, Google, Cook). But it doesn't feel like there's much of a grassroots movement.

Maybe I'm just missing them, but are there examples of this? I've been looking for prominent new startups attacking this problem, and haven't come up with much.

(For example, search Product Hunt for: climate change, sustainable, ecology, solar... It doesn't feel like there's much there)

I don't think that the lack of a "grass roots movement" implies a lack of caring (on any groups part, but specifically "geeks").

Also, I don't think the lack of startups in the (pardon the buzzwords) "sustainability space" implies that tech people don't care.

Maybe the tech people that do care work for established companies in that industry?

Maybe there are constraints that make it extremely hard for a startup to (again, pardon the buzzwords) "gain traction" in the industry, i.e. companies that already have huge market share, overbearing regulations, etc.

idk, I just think it's a little premature to think that "geeks" don't care about renewability/climate change just because there aren't a ton of tech specific startups trying to solve it.

There are tons of companies that don't list themselves on Product Hunt, etc.

There are tons of engineers that don't use twitter (and that's not specific to engineers).

You couldn't be more wrong (about the grassroots). Use the google. Just to take one (random) example: the past decade has seen a swell of innovation in business models that make home solar affordable through pooling of capital, volume buying, long-term lease deals, etc. These are startups.

There is a comment in this thread that discusses slaughtering people in order to reduce their carbon footprint.

Also see this ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDXQsnkuBCM

This kind of attitude is one of the reason why I do not want anything to do with the climate alarmists. Quite possibly the cure is worse than the disease.

As regards the climate change itself, even the pessimistic projections of its effects are not too bad as I see it.

I am skeptical of many absolutes. Specifically when they become politically charged. I used to stand behind climate change much more before it became such a hot political topic.

My trust in scientific findings and reports is not blind trust. Studies are often funded by people or governments with special interests. The ethics of university researchers is not as great as I would hope. The first time I can remember a big scandal such as that is the aftermath of the financial crisis in the US back in 09. I've worked under professors in academia and experienced first hand how data is presented and funding is acquired, and it was not always done with absolute truth and honesty.

Take a look at the front page here. It's a story about CMU academics taking funding to do something very unethical.

I'm not denying that we are the direct cause of Earth warming up or anything, but I am willing to listen to both sides make their case, and I will remain silent while I listen and develop my own opinion.

Also,

>We geeks have rational, logical minds.

I see lots of irrational, illogical comments and threads on here and other places. It's interesting to bunch everyone together and say we're perfect.

Well seeing as how this comment got down voted for simply explaining my opinion, I guess that's another reason why you don't see climate change being discussed on here.

People can't even stand the fact that I don't Share the same opinions and want my opinion silenced by down voting it. So I guess see the last sentence of my previous post.

I care about the Earth and climate change.

However I think those of us with rational, logical minds might have reservations about a group of scientists who can be so sure that the earth is warming and that human activities are the definite cause of it.

So most of us might be a little quiet on the issue of climate change since we're not positive that human activity is definitely the cause of it and temperatures are definitely going to rise 2 degrees (C) causing all kinds of calamaties.

I think this explains why you don't wee more votes, comments and tweets about it from engineers/developers.

I think we should definitely reduce emissions, I think the policies being pursued are justified and smart to do just in case this theory is accurate.

My problem is scientists saying that without doubt human activities are definitely causing the global temperatures to rise. At this point in time with the data we have how can we be sure. It needs more study/data.

I'm definitely not saying that's an excuse for inaction. Reduce emissions now just be careful about over stating what we really know for sure.

I think a more scientific approach would be to say that our data is pointing in that direction we need to reduce emissions now just in case, here are our finding and our data. We welcome other theories and review of our data and we are going to collect more and more data to track this trend and determine if our theory is accurate.

The Earth goes through climate cycles/changes over time. Ice Ages, warm periods, little ice age, etc. And all of these changes/cycles previously were independent of humans or human activity.

I'm not saying humans are not the cause of it, I'm just saying lets hold off on saying they definitely are, collect more data/and more accurate data, be open with the data and work together, be open to new theories, then determine what is really happening while reducing emissions at the same time.

Also there is a possible solar minimum coming that might cause a 30 to 40 year little ice age. Maybe that will give us some time to develop some break through technologies that nearly eliminates the need for using fossil fuels while avoiding the predictions of increased hurricanes, sea levels rising, etc if temperatures would rise.

Most of all improve, perfect and invent green energy sources so we can eliminate most emissions.

The Earth is amazing, lets take care of it.

Really appreciate this thoughtful response (and the respectful tone). Thank you!

The tone is nice but I don't think he is right about the science of it. For example he talks about how more data should be gathered about this but climate change has been in the public eye for more than a decade now so there's tons of data on it so this sort of hedging of the bets isn't necessary anymore.

This paragraph is a good example of the problem here: > However I think those of us with rational, logical minds might have reservations about a group of scientists who can be so sure that the earth is warming and that human activities are the definite cause of it.

This person is probably a computer scientist and yet they don't trust a "group of scientists" which I am assuming by context to be climate scientists, who are literally the experts in the field he is talking about

We're not in the luxurious position of having an arbitrary amount of time and resources to spend on identifying with absolute certainty what is happening. This is reality, not the platonic realm of mathematics, and there's severe opportunity costs to sitting around and twiddling our thumbs [1]. We'll highly likely doom billions of people to starve or drown or die in resource wars, and force another 30% or so of species into extinction, and by the time this is all very obvious there will be no options left to change course, and we'll be committed for the next few centuries.

I agree with you to some degree, but I am not sure it is helpful to even talk like this at this point in time. It's basically a war of ideology -- we can change if enough of us want to change, we're not reliant on technical progress to react in time, there just has to be enough willpower from the population to force change.

We are highly confident that we're causing it. Let's not even talk about things like blame or ethics or morality, if that's not a helpful way of thinking. Let's be coldly pragmatic. The predicted consequences of not taking appropriate preventative actions are catastrophic. The predicted consequences of taking appropriate preventative measures are merely quite unpleasant. So we should do something about it, immediately. We've had the last 45 years for analysis.

Sure, more research is a great idea, but the action / analysis ratio should be tipped to about 99% action and 1% analysis at this point.

To end on a positive note, German citizens have made good progress on taking control of their local government, de-privatised their local energy production, and pushing a shift toward renewable energy. It provides an example that genuine change can be made at the local level, even when higher levels of government aren't taking sufficient action. In turn, then that puts pressure on higher levels of government, and the rest of society, and slowly we make progress

[1] - http://polyp.org.uk/cartoons/environment/polyp_cartoon_globa...

Unless you are a genius inventor that's going to reduce everyone's carbon footprint the best thing you can do to help prevent global warming is to kill yourself.

Also, what if I just don't care?

Well, you went there, regarding killing yourself, so let's think this through, using your own assumptions.

Devil's advocate:

I think your suggestion of suicide is perhaps one of the best ones possible if you want to prioritise reducing your personal carbon footprint over all other concerns, and are unwilling to (coercively or non-coercively) influence the behaviour of other people. There's not a lot of difference one of us can make, in terms of individual lifestyle choices. There's billions of us (and some of us, like myself, have carbon footprints of 10x or 40x those in other nations with less affluent lifestyles).

If you are willing to non-coercively influence the behaviour of other people, then if you can convince 200 people to each reduce their carbon footprint by 1%, and that wouldn't have happened otherwise, you've just paid for your own carbon footprint twice over (assuming your footprints are all of the same size, etc). Note that this doesn't need technological wizardry - one might be able to do this merely by talking to people, or perhaps being involved in the odd act of political resistance.

If you are willing to coercively influence the behaviour of other people, well, then you could e.g. kill 200 people (ideally those with large carbon footprints, who were not going to kill themselves or be killed otherwise) and yourself, and by your own logic that would seem strictly better (we're glossing over secondary consequences here, this might cause a huge backlash and security crackdown on environmental groups, which might make the overall situation worse, but you get the idea).

Hm, I think your data is rather skewed. Sure, most people on HN would probably self-describe as geeks, but that doesn't mean that all geeks are here! As for the Twitter and blog posts you mention, I'd put that down to a sampling bias.

I think the geeks who do care are elsewhere - the natural sciences, for example. HN is a place mainly to talk about technology, and so obviously that is what gets most attention. Go to science fora, and you might find more about climate change.

Maybe they know sources like these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...

and are still trying to fit a regression line showing any kind of global warming...

Sure, I guess it depends on your perspective. It's good to look at things over a geological time scale, and to have a broader perspective than the human species, or human civilisation.

Regarding very recent climate change, maybe it is easier to focus on the subset of the timescale that has supported human civilisation -- say, the last 10 thousand years. You'll note the temperature was relatively stable during most of this time. Interesting!

If you look really closely at the right side of the second graph you posted - over the last hundred years or so - you'll notice the temperature is shooting up. It's a bit hard to see on that graph as the change is happening so quickly relative to geological time scales.

If you look at a graph that focuses on the last 100 years, a trend is easier to spot:

http://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/

I've had a go at drawing a regression line by hand myself:

http://imgur.com/ixnuDX4

Hypothetically, supposing this strange recent warming trend were to continue, it is plausible that by the end of the century our planet might be experiencing environmental conditions never previously encountered by our species, and indeed not experienced by the planet for the last 5 million years or so.

Perhaps not much interest in a geological sense, nothing to see here, but perhaps from a shamelessly anthropocentric perspective we might have some cause for concern.

In time series analysis picking the right time scale is everything.

Let´s do a small experiment:

One hot summer day I measure the temperatures in my home town between 6:00 and 12:00 and I get some data like this:

6:00 - 10 C

...

12:00 - 32 C

Now I make a small regression analysis and say that at 24:00 we are going to die a painfull death because the temperature will raise with a probability of 95% to 70-80 C.

In this case I obviously forgot about the periodicity of daily temperatures.

The global temperatures have a periodicity of ca. 400.000 years. Therefore any analysis based on a time period shorten than 400k years has the same problems as my summer experiment.

>> the end of the century our planet might be experiencing environmental conditions never previously encountered by our species

- 2*2 might be 5...

- at the end of the century I will be dead and "our species" will be only one of million other species. For example the dinosaurs loved the 12 C more and had a happy life on the ice-free antarktis a couple of million years ago...

So what are you arguing? That it is not possible to come to any conclusion regarding the earth climate without first waiting some multiple of 400k years? That it's not possible to separate a long-term 400k-year temperature variation trend from short term temperature variations due to unusual/novel forcing conditions?

The thing your hot summer day analysis is missing is a clear physical explanation that explains why the trend you are observing is occurring, and why it is going to keep occurring until 24:00. We probably don't even need the explanation to be 100% accurate for this to be useful, merely accurate to a first or second order approximation.

I believe "we" [1] have got enough understanding of the earth system to make some pretty reasonable inferences on limited data. Certainly not complete understanding, but it's not like a bunch of people are merely using e.g. some deep learning voodoo to perform regression on climate data and have literally no idea what the underlying physical processes involved might be.

Here's an example of my own: consider the geoengineering "launch a bunch of disk-shaped satellites to block x% of the sun's light from hitting the earth" thing. Let's ignore the fact that this isn't necessarily a great idea, and assume someone has gone ahead and done it. We can predict with reasonable confidence what the primary consequences of this intervention will be: less light from the sun hits the planet, planet's mean temperature lowers a bit. This behaviour won't be at all explainable as part of a 400k year planetary periodicity.

[1] not in the sense of you or i, necessarily, but the relevant scientists in the field.

but don't bring up anything like that in casual conversation lest you get shouted down by the ignorant majority.

Most geeks care, but I think most geeks recognize that the currently proposed solutions like carbon caps and rationing are regressive and insufficient anyway.

We can:

1) Ration our current carbon-producing technology (carbon caps)

2) Figure out more efficient technology

1 sounds good in theory but doesn't seem practical in reality. I don't drive, yet most of my friends who are ardent "greens" wouldn't dare contemplate giving up their car and red meat.

I guess we are too busy delivering the next billion dollars to the likes of Steve Jobs to think about the future of the planet.

Some of us work in the renewable sector by choice :-)

What the hell is a geek?

I reject the premise.

The premise of my question, or the premise of climate change?

Oh, sorry; I wasn't clear :( The question :)

Climate change (and that it's almost certainly human-induced) seems pretty clear-cut. Like a forest.

Most of us went to college and saw that Climate courses were where athletes were routed for an easy A.

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