We do not have 12 years to stop catastrophic climate change
variable-variability.blogspot.com
variable-variability.blogspot.com
One thing climate scientists have done a poor job around is messaging how, specifically, climate change will cause harm. There was a lot of hyperbole over the past decades which approximated "everyone dies." That's obviously untrue. In an age where we're training to filter out B.S., that might have led to the baby being thrown out with the bathwater.
An economic growth of 2% every year is unsustainable long term.
There is a parable story called "Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist" that tries to go into this further. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
You don't want to halt growth, that would surely be suicide. What you want to do is to be better at using things we have already found ways to turn into resources or turn things that aren't currently resources into resources. That requires growth because it requires the capital to invest.
It's not like earth gives us resources, we have to find ways to turn them into resources such as oil uranium etc.
If you don't grow you will live in a world that might as well be the catastrophe. I am not going to be supporting that.
How literally?
> You don't want to halt growth, that would surely be suicide.
How surely suicide?
> or turn things that aren't currently resources into resources
So the solution to humanity using too much energy is to expand more energy to use up more of the resources?
> It's not like earth gives us resources, we have to find ways to turn them into resources such as oil uranium etc
Seriously, we only have resources from earth, and energy from the sun (some volcanic / thermal). Where else do we get the resources from? Moon? All resources we have are dug from earth, and refined by using energy.
> If you don't grow you will live in a world that might as well be the catastrophe. I am not going to be supporting that.
Again, I am talking here about long term view, like next few centuries. For how long can we sustain same growth rate as we did last 200 years? How long before something gives?
This is irrelevant to global warming, we just can't have indefinite 2% growth. Period.
There are some things that we can do to stave off problems for a few centuries:
1) less wasteful food production, currently humans+cows+pigs represent 96% of all mammalian biomass, 40% of grain produced is fed to livestock -- solution: meat grown in test tubes and vats, this should release some of wasted land on agriculture back to wilderness.
2) proper atom cycle, currently we destroy environment to get atoms (say cut forest / dig metal), and then destroy environment to hide them (landfills) -- solution: Complete recycling of all we use as either composting and fertilizing or back to re-manufacturing
3) finding ways to use energy without generating heat on earth -- solution: space robots with large surface areas that allow them to cool, and do work.
All of these are things we can do, but they are short gap solution. A century or two at best.
Seriously, take a calculator and tell me, how many years is 2% growth sustainable for before we are counting individual atoms on earth?
We arent using too much, this is a nonsensical statement, by that metric all we can do is extend the inevitable resource depletion of earth which means we might as well use it now for the people who are alive today including all the poor countries who need cheap and reliable energy to survive.
No it doesn't. "Energy intensity...is calculated as units of energy per unit of GDP" [1]. It fell nearly 1/3 from 1990 to 2015 [2].
Growth is a measure on value. Value is subjective. It is not intrinsically linked to material or energy use. (For example, modern computers use far less energy and material than older computers while delivering far more value. More extremely, consider many purely-digital goods.)
a) Growth doesn't require work?
b) Work doesn't require energy?
From what you included, since 1980 to 2016, energy usage has doubled, from 281btu to 572btu [1].
Yes, we can become more efficient with the energy we use, but we still use energy, and we still use more of it. If we can use energy without generating heat, then we are good.
Additionally, dangerous part is that, as we are more efficient, we find new use of resource that gobbles up the efficiency gains. [2]
[1] https://www.eia.gov/beta/international/data/browser/#/?c=410... (scroll down to chart to see world consumption)
I would argue that there has been little to no hyperbole from scientists, literal or approximated to'everyone dies'. There has been careful and clearly hedged approximations of likelihood and possibilities. Most of which have turned out to be dramatically understated in the short term.
A fair bit of this has happened in the media though, because it largely supports the status quo (right or left wing).
But this is actually an argument in favour of reducing carbon emissions. If we're dealing with a system we can't understand, where messing with it could cause immense damage to humankind, then maybe that's enough of a reason to stop messing with it.
In general, whenever you're taking a risk with a potentially massive downside, where the outcome is hard to predict (because of chaos, "unknown unknowns"), then you should stop taking that risk.
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Regarding what to do about climate change, Taleb has a theory called "minority rule" that could help here. It says that an intransigent minority, maybe around ~1% of people, can force a passive majority to do the things they want. A good example of this is kosher / halal food in the US / Europe, where an intransigent minority of people have forced a large percentage of food to be certified kosher / halal, perhaps unintentionally. As such, the solution to reducing emissions might be to set up an environmental "beth din" which certifies whether a product is "environmentally kosher" or not. If an intransigent minority only consumes products that are certified environmentally kosher, the passive majority will fall in line.
The thing that irritates a lot of people (me included) is that these articles imply that we do know what is going to happen. We don't. That's all the more reason to reduce emissions and stop destroying habitats.
To the poor people living right now, they are already living with their life at stake to them it's not an actual argument. They need access to cheap reliable energy right now and frankly, don't care about climate change.
Talebs minority rule is not a universal rule it's a contextual rule which is important to understand.
Honestly, excluding them from this analysis makes sense because of this, and additionally because we have no way of affecting change outside of our own nations.
Excluding them is antihuman.
Wealthy consumers are able to fund technologies. Wealthy consumers are also able to be more discerning with purchases.
In the same manner as many nations skipped industrialization and computing stages, we can do the same with eco-friendly products. When Africa was ready, it procured mobile phones, not desktop computers.
Precisely as per the Tesla business model, it is sensible to target 'rich' discerning consumers to drive legislation and production in order to scale & mature it for future consumers.
Agreed. It's still a model that provides an entrance point to wide distribution being possible. (Legislatively, economically, general awareness).
It's not suitable as a single solution to go all-in on - As long as this isn't treated as a false-dilemma and solely relied upon, it has value.
This is very specific to tolerant Western culture. A 1% minority anywhere else in the world would be at best ignored and more likely steamrollered into conformity.
Further:
A. Organizations being held accountable by external audit will be far more likely to engage in ethical behavior than those with internal audits (internal boards are more subject to bias and likely have less access to expertise).
B. This could reduce 'greenwashing' and other exploitative claims over time.
C. The 'intransigent minority' (being willing to invest in such products) fund the initial growth of products, allowing them to gain economies of scale over time. Prices can then lower, and more consumers are then willing to purchase said products.
We have to start viewing climate change mitigation as an engineering problem. We need aggressive investment in carbon and methane capture. If it can't be a profitable endeavor then governments need to make the investment for the public good.
People looking for real discussion about these issues online in places like this are met with a constant barrage of "climate change doesn't real"
France shows a different side to the problem. The French accept that climate change is happening [1]. Yet even simple measures are popularly opposed. That implies climate scepticism is a symptom, not a cause, of inaction.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-08/french-vo...
Take my country, Canada, for example. If you think about all the money and blood we poured into WW2 and you compare it to what it would cost to move to a carbon neutral economy it just pales in comparison. It's like laughable how fixable this is. WW2 was like 30 global warmings. So why didn't people balk in the 30s and 40s?
Because they cared and they believed they could do something about it. I feel like the world has this sludge about it these days. Almost nobody does anything anymore. They kinda float around and raise taxes a point here or there. We more than doubled them to fight the Nazis.
I can kinda see why Elon Musk is freaking out and building five different companies trying to save the world.
There are plenty of proofs out there with hard figures, but just think about it. You need to be more effective and cheaper than plants for this concept to make any sense. That means competing against a baseline of pure solar energy inputs, self-replication, and the ability to trap carbon in the soil.
The biggest carbon capture apparatus we have is our ocean, and we are acidifying and toxifying it INDEPENDENTLY of our carbon misuse. Ecology is our only real hope, and CO2 is only one of many variables we need to control. We're dropping a lot of balls here, and hyperfocus on CO2 will just enable us to continue deluding ourselves into the fatal belief that industrial progress will still save us.
> It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Complaining about climate change is a luxury for the rich, if you didn't have refrigeration at home your priorities would probably look much different.
Heck, just look at the French Yellow Jacket protests, it's clear the policies arguably needed to combat climate change are harmful to the lower and middle class even in western countries. Especially when those policies are often used to subsidize electric cars or energy efficient windows for those who can afford such things - effectively an inverse transfer payment.
I fear the only way we have a shot at solving this is with cheap, clean energy tech that doesn't yet exist.
That has already happened. Circa 2000 we were warned that in (I don't recall the exact number) 15 years time things would go wrong and be beyond the point of reversibility.
So to your point, that is a potential problem. But it seems that people don't remember what anyone said 20 years ago so it's maybe not really a problem after all.
Fortunately (Unfortunately?) we'll probably be seeing more of the effects in twelve years, and that'll hopefully keep people on the bandwagon.
except we don't have to wait 10 years, it is already bad. We are already seeing pretty drastic changes in weather patterns are we not?
That's what happened for cheap oil, where people had predictions with reasonable confidence.
Personally I expect the worst. I don't have faith that the body of humanity will seriously act to save itself. I think we should start planning on how to survive a very hot planet.
Can someone shed some light on that?
We don't though. Not really. Not because we have to act within 12 years, but because we have to act at some point. If we always say that the given deadline is wrong and we have more time then eventually we'll be wrong. It makes a lot of sense to start now if only because that way we can spread the cost out over a longer period of time.
Furthermore the idea of stopping climate change is in itself completely up for grasp. What does that actually mean, what consequences are we prepared to pay?
Is it better to halt growth, are we ready to invade China to stop them are we ready to stop poor countries from getting access to cheap reliable energy sources just because they are dirty?
What are you even doing here if you actually really thought we had 10 years left? Why are you supporting the very system that apparently is going to destroy earth?
So start now with what at what cost?
I am personally not going to support any attempt at halting growth as growth is the only way we can actually pay for investment in cleaner energies and if the result really is catastrophic why are people so against nuclear which is the greenest, safest, most scalable, plentiful energy form we have?
Climate catastrophism helps exactly no one. It paralyzes whole societies and makes them completely irrational making irrational decisions.
So thanks but no thanks.
I take my chances with a world using growth to establish better and better solutions not forcing superficially insufficient and unrealiable energy sources such as wind and solar.
Each to their own of course but it's not getting my support.
Yap, people negating it or the consequences
> We can't predict the future. If someone in 1900 had predicted what the next 100 years would be like, they would have missed all of the major events in the century. We aren't any different than the people 100 years ago.
Taking into account that models have predicted within the error bars the temperatures, I think you can't be more wrong
The data fits the model until it doesn't.
Do you have any evidence that climate models are not good or that they are worthless?
I think we are confussing what scientist say with what media says
Then this is only going to not negatively impact the poor or lower-middle class groups if they can push all the cost onto other groups. However, then you have to ask yourself why haven't the poor or lower middle class groups been able to carve out a larger slice of the pie by increasing transfers from other groups to themselves.
So suddenly these other groups are going to act more generously to the poor and lower middle class over climate change but not generally. That seems a bit of a leap.