Ask YC: How will you solve the problem of climate change? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: How will you solve the problem of climate change?

9 pointsmoog26 comments

Don't ask me

There is something like a 90% chance of getting a cap-and-trade system passed within the next two months. McCain-Warner is going up for vote in a couple of months, and if it passes then Bush is going to be under a lot of pressure to sign it since A) McCain is the Republican nominee and B) both Obama and Cinton have their own versions of a cap-and-trade system. This bill isn't perfect, but it's a pretty good start toward fixing the problem. If it doesn't get passed in two months then almost certainly it will in another year, or failing that, Obama's bill will.

It's gotten to the point where even many of the major industrial companies in the US support a cap-and-trade system. Risk costs serious money for entrepreneurs. When taking out a loan on these billion-dollar power plants their weighted average cost of capital goes up a lot since they know there are going to be new rules in place but they don't know what the rules will be. It's actually better for these companies to get the rules in place ASAP because their cost of capital goes down so they get a much better return on their investments. That's partially why Duke and Alcoa and Caterpillar and Dupont and all these companies are lobbying for cap-and-trade.

I think we are going to see more progress on this issue than anyone can possibly imagine within the next couple of years. Once a cap-and-trade system is put in place, expect solar photovoltaic to achieve price parity with coal within 24 months.

With a solution that passes a cost-benefit analysis. None of the most popular proposals do. Seriously.

Efficient markets will weed out ideas that fail this analysis in time.

Incentives like the Automotive X-Prize will accelerate this process, leading to solutions that are smart for the planet and smart investments, too.

Help make the most enjoyable kind of life less dependent on stuff, space and transport by returning centeredness to urban existence.

I believe the single biggest problem is that planes fligh so high they are burning Ozone which has 2 parts oxygen rather then flying lower. Since the engines run better burning ozone rather then just plain oxygen that we breath they save money flying higher and will keep doing so.

http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg14219232.100-saving-...

The one that is caused by aliens? (http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-alienscauseglobalwar...)

Learn, ignore politics, care about real issues that affect you and people that you know.

Paint all roads white.

Major urban areas, such as London, can be three degrees centigrade warmer than the surrounding region partly due to dark synthetic surfaces which absorb extra energy. Dark tarmac roads cover a significant proportion of urban areas and therefore contribute significantly to this effect.

Wait around for the end of the current interglacial period?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interglacial

Global warming will be defeated by incremental increases in efficiency across the board.... think of it as the death of a thousand cuts.

Everything from better internal combustion engines, electric motors, improved solar energy technology, carbon capture to my affliction, aerodynamic drag, will make “small” but significant progress.

Combined, those incremental advances will add up to a serious threat to the threat of climate change.

Massive decrease of earth's human population. Biological, Nuclear or Nano, pick your delivery method ... Stop worrying and learn to love the extinction event.

Just thinking, we are told oil, gas etc. are running out and also that these items are causing global warming. Now I reckon that all the economical carbon in fossil fuels is going to be used up and is going into the atmosphere anyway so is it not just a question of timing?

If you mean "global warming", don't worry, it will be discredited soon enough, (for those who don't already know it is a pile of crap, and I mean that in the most rigorous mathematical sense).

I don't fear "climate change" as in most temperate zones climate changes every 6 months, just as it has for thousands of years.

How do you discredit global warming mathematically?

You examine the current mathematical climate models and determine their limitations in terms of available CPU power, RAM, disk on even the largest supercomputers.

Then you take into account the lack of any accurate model at all being available for the operation of the seas and oceans - we don't have an accurate mathematical model for even the Gulf Stream, for instance; much less the rest of the world.

Then you realize that all prediction models are so error-prone due to the above that they cannot be relied upon with a reasonable degree of certainty.

Since your second sentence displays rather poor logic (poor analogy), I am biased against believing your first sentence.

Seasonal change != Climate change. The former is something ecosystems have had years to adapt to. The latter is a problem because it disrupts an established pattern & organisms (including ourselves) have not learned to adapt to the new environment. The loss of biological diversity as a result of human disruptions of ecosystems is the real killer here.

As a resident of one of our lovely northern states recently digging out of a cold winter into a colder spring, my only concern is that by the time it gets notably warmer , I'll be long dead.

How will I solve it? Persuade the government to force every citizen to live in grass huts and ride horses to work. Or electric scooters.

Fly ice in from asteroids and dump them in the ocean. And they say you don't learn anything from television.

Number crunching with Google Earth to find the best places to be in in the future.

why is this getting voted down? I think speculating on which real estate is going to be the future tropical beaches is valid.

what climate problem?

Ice cubes. Lots of them.

The singularity and nanobots will take care of that for us.

Solve it? Why do that when we could ignore it and go away?

http://www.google.com/virgle/index.html

Note: This is an April Fool's Joke.

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