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Comment by ForHackernews | Hacker News Reader

I guess this is one silver lining from the pandemic, but it's worth highlighting that this 8% drop in emissions rate only means that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is rising more slowly. It's still rising.

So we've got the second derivative going in the correct direction, at least.

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Well, technically this is right about the time of year when CO2 concentration stops increasing and drops sharply for the next couple of months, corresponding to the Northern hemisphere growing season.

CO2 doesn't increase monotonically, it's actually more like a sine wave with an upward trend. It's that upward trend that has everyone rightfully worried, but the seasonal oscillation is part of the pattern too.

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

Also worth noting that the ways to realistically address climate change require a massive, historic investment. I don’t know what the limit is on world governments’ ability to write a giant blank check, but I can’t imagine the trillions we need to spend on the current crisis makes turning around and dropping trillions on the next one any easier.

It might actually. Once you have had one impossible thought before breakfast, subsequent impossible thoughts surely become easier to have.

Truly? How many Trillions of dollars have we spent to slow the descent of the stock market in the last few months? How many more are we planning on spending?

We aren't on the gold standard, we're on the idea standard. As such, our money is worth what we say it is worth and we can have as much of it as we want. If we said tomorrow "Here's 100 Trillion USD to fix climate change" we could do so.

Yes I'm ignoring the inflationary effects for this example, but ultimately it doesn't matter. If we don't have a world to live in we'll have much larger concerns than inflation.

Exactly. We don’t have a choice. And as powerful as that toolkit is, nothing is infinite.

We've got tons of lagging indicators incoming:

The Untold Toll — The Pandemic’s Effects on Patients without Covid-19: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMms2009984

COVID-19 Is Likely to Lead to an Increase in Suicides: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/covid-19-i...

Coronavirus could deplete Social Security as early as 'this decade': analysis: https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/coronavirus-could-deplete...

"Deaths of despair”: The deadly epidemic that predated coronavirus: https://www.vox.com/2020/4/15/21214734/deaths-of-despair-cor...

'Biblical' famines could double global hunger as a result of the coronavirus crisis, UN warns: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/04/22/coronavirus-biblical-fam...

How COVID-19 may increase domestic violence and child abuse: https://www.apa.org/topics/covid-19/domestic-violence-child-...

Millions of Credit-Card Customers Can’t Pay Their Bills. Lenders Are Bracing for Impact: https://www.wsj.com/articles/millions-of-credit-card-custome...

Flattening the curve :)

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