Ask HN: Programmer abroad, how can I help fight climate change?
Do you know of any projects/communities that I can contribute to?
Thanks in advance for any angle or opinion on the matter :)
Thanks in advance for any angle or opinion on the matter :)
Write better code, use less computing power, lower energy usage!
There's this article from Bret Victor: "What can a Technologist Do About Climate Change?" http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/
I'm always looking for more things. https://Climate.Careers is interesting!
They also do a great job of educating users about what they can do to reduce their carbon footprint!
Also this video: "What can a javascript developer do to combat climate change? - Olivier Corradi" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keOPXD-ojWY
Sure the whooping 4 dudes living in Siberia will be able to cultivate more things, but for the rest of the world (aka were people actually live) it's a net negative in every aspects.
Besides that, even if climate change doesn't exist or if it is positive for some people, fighting pollution will always be a good thing if you care about your lungs or your health in general.
> even if climate change doesn't exist
From what I've read climate change very much exists and it's due to the increase in co2.
But I haven't seen people put out forecasts they are confident in on what the impacts will be. I'm not kidding, a few times per year here in Hawaii the forecast for rain is 0% while it is raining. And this is a place with very advanced military and atmospheric stations. I think scientists have made an overwhelming convincing case climate change is real and it's from an increase in co2, but I have seen no models that I can play with specifically predicting how it will affect certain regions. Instead people say "it will be bad". If you think because scientists say something is good or bad without showing you all the underlying data and allowing you to reproduce things yourself at home, I've got some government approved pain pills to sell you.
> fighting pollution will always be a good thing if you care about your lungs or your health in general.
I agree with this.
I guess my point is the first step is better forecasting and modeling tools. Otherwise we really don't know what we are fighting, other than higher temperatures.
Crop yields per region: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aab63b
Also, this might help direct you in the right contacts for that first step: https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/impacts-climate-change-o...
> Otherwise we really don't know what we are fighting, other than higher temperatures.
Pretty important to fight higher temperatures too though, wet-bulb heatwaves can kill even under shade. "Some people" won't "suffer"; they'll actually die. https://www.pnas.org/content/114/33/8746
You can't reproduce everything at home, especially things happening on very long timescales. If you deny things you can't reproduce at home you can basically forget any scientific progress of the last 30 years.
The underlying data is available and pretty clear.
Yes, you can, if it's reproducible science. If you can't figure out an experiment at home that could prove the validity of a recommendation made by a "government" or "institution" it is not science they are selling you. It's marketing.
Wrong example, I guess.
It's a good analogy. Though it goes both ways: some people make money (or preserve more of it) by preventing plague and war.
> Climate change makes atypical seasons and extreme weather much more likely.
Are people betting real money on this? I haven't seen any specific predictions predicting how many hurricanes there will be in 5, 10 years, etc. People are quick to blame every cat 5 hurricane on climate change, but if it were truly science than they would be predicting, not blaming.
My general point is our "scientific" tools are laughably bad for big complex systems. I work in medical research. It's a bad joke, and I'm dead serious. I don't think people understand how primitive our tools are (as far as they've come, still primitive compared to the challenges). So the OP might want to look at companies tackling that problem, the Observables or Wikipedias or Palantirs or NYTimes data team, etc.
Then there is a good analogy: tobacco. You believe smoking drastically increases the risk of cancer, right? Yet for years, tobacco companies argued that the evidence was inconclusive. After all, if a doctor can't predict which of their patients will respond well to a certain medication, how can they say that exposure to this or that substance was responsible for the cancer?
What I am arguing is that climate change is not good or bad. It just is.
I think we need better tools to understand climate change, and hopefully control it. However, I think "fighting climate change" is a partisan approach, and not scientific at all. For example, assume we are able to figure out how to reverse global warming, and in effect cool the planet. How cool should we go? By your statement "when you put more energy into a system, it becomes more volatile", we should keep going lower, and perhaps make it cooler than it was 100 years ago, which might be deadly for people living in colder northern climates or mountain towns. So any action on climate will have winners and losers. And "fighting climate change" means fighting the people who just happen to live in a different geographic region.
What I'm saying is the issue is complex, the numbers are massively bigger than even the type of data Google handles, and we need much better tools to tackle this set of very complicated problems.
(1) I also believe in the future we may learn that smoking is very healthy for a small fraction of people.
Yes! Great point.
But the problem is, some people are currently benefiting from climate change, so by fighting it, you are indeed doing harm to them.
Not only is this wrong, but the exact opposite is true.