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Comment by zaro | Hacker News Reader

"The fleet of new coal plants would make it virtually impossible to meet the goals set in the Paris climate accord, which aims to keep the increase in global temperatures from preindustrial levels below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit."

I've been watching some lectures on climate change recently, all of the climatologist I've seen in the lectures were claiming that staying below 2℃ is impossible to achieve anyway. Staying at 2℃ or less, requires around 2050 the world going into negative carbon emissions, which nobody know yet how to do exactly.

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Don't believe everything you hear from talking heads on TV.

We could put the earth into an ice age for under 1% of global GDP. Discussing geo-engineering is generally seen as a moral hazard, though, so western commentators act like no such possibility exists.

The real threat is ecosystem collapse.

Talking heads giving lectures on current state of climate in universities , taking really critical look at it.

Maybe not the most optimistic crowd, though :)

> We could put the earth into an ice age for under 1% of global GDP. Discussing geo-engineering is generally seen as a moral hazard, though, so western commentators act like no such possibility exists.

Yes it exists, but taking this road is the same road that took is to the point where we are right now. I am not very certain it will help at all.

The only way to do it that cheap is with sulfate aerosols. We don't have the data to use the right amount yet but that's fixable. A larger problem is it would make ocean acidification even worse. That might end up being better than the alternative but its not a step to take casually.

Thus the moral hazard. If geo-engineering were a major point in climate change discussions, some would feel a false sense of security. Ultimately, this could increase the odds of such drastic measures would be needed. The other thing is that we just can't know how much acidity it would take to cause an ecosystem collapse until it's too late.

That said, sulfate aerosols are one of the oldest proposed plans and our technology has advanced considerably since then. Perhaps some people working on or funding work on a better solution are on reading this thread.

I sure hope someone is quietly tackling it because the political efforts around CO2 emmissions agreements of the past 50 years are not working very well despite a great deal of activism.

What about marine cloud brightening? Wikipedia claims that could be done for a couple of billion $/year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening#Costs

What are the news on ocean iron releases?

It's something that does not cause acidification, and seems to be very easy to start or interrupt if a problem arises. It's also toward economical gains, as it can be done around ocean farming to increase yelds.

"We could put ...". And your basis for that confident assertion?

Honestly? It's from voracious reading over many years, and including both pop and more academic sources. Books almost always go deeper than what you'll find in video format.

That said, if you try googling geo-engineering and climate change for a few minutes, you'll almost certainly find some of the techniques people have evaluated, their trade-offs and how the issue of moral hazard adds a cost to discussing them.

It's not a case of "anyway" though - 2.1 degrees is worse than 2, 3.1 is worse than 3. If 2 is impossible that means the safe scenario is now impossible and a certain amount of flooding of cities etc. is inevitable, but we can still affect how bad it's going to be.

True, but if we are facing massive climate change with unpredictable catastrophic effects then isn't that a good reason to build up as much industrial and military capacity as possible to withstand those unpredictable effects?

That certainly seems to be what most people are doing even if they are saying something different.

> True, but if we are facing massive climate change with unpredictable catastrophic effects then isn't that a good reason to build up as much industrial and military capacity as possible to withstand those unpredictable effects?

No, I don't think so. We have a pretty good idea of what kind of things are going to happen - if we were serious about trying to withstand them we'd be putting more efforts into flood defences, desalination plants, disaster-relief type stuff - and on a longer-term level maybe food-supply work. Even if you believe what's needed is industry, in the long-term the scientific uses of oil and plastics are far more vital than burning it moving people between the office and the suburbs. But no-one really believes at a visceral level that the oil supply is limited, because we've spent our whole lives living with abundant oil. Add in a dose of classic tragedy of the commons - reducing carbon emissions makes things better for everyone, while building up your own economy/industry and ignoring emissions hurts the common cause but is profitable for individual nations.

The parent comment said "build up as much industrial and military capacity as possible to withstand those unpredictable effects".

And then you said: "if we were serious about trying to withstand them we'd be putting more efforts into flood defences, desalination plants, disaster-relief"

These are the same.

My point is there are specific, narrow things we could be doing; it's not grounds for a general-purpose industrial/military buildup (which frankly sounds suspiciously like an excuse to carry on with business-as-usual rather than doing anything hard).

>(which frankly sounds suspiciously like an excuse to carry on with business-as-usual rather than doing anything hard).

That's what I took from it too. Grab everything we can and dig in.

> going into negative carbon emissions, which nobody know yet how to do exactly

Pretty sure planting a lot of trees is a good start

I definitely is a good start, with precondition on stopping deforestation.

But trees won't give negative carbon emissions unless industry cuts emissions dramatically. And also, the other problem with trees is you might have to convert farmlands back to forest, what happens to the food production then?

I guess my point was that we do know how to do it, just not how to muster the will. In a war economy climate change would be disaster averted in a decade.

You have to keep planting them. And you have to watch that they are developing ecosystems to encourage more carbon sequestration into the ecosystem. And you have to keep it up, and water them, and fight attempts to strip the plot and turn it back into monoculture farmland, and you probably need to make sure no fires happen in the first couple hundred years until you're ok with natural fires dumping carbon back into the atmosphere which also entails some kind of light controlled burn or very targeted application of intense heat for any species that rely on fires to reproduce.

I'm totally for it, I love having trees everywhere, especially as I walk to most of my destinations.

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