Only 100 months left to avoid irreversible climate change? | Hacker News Reader

Only 100 months left to avoid irreversible climate change?

guardian.co.uk

7 pointsksvs9 comments

I'm gonna go with a guess and say "Ummm, no."

I did, however, look up the folks who wrote this. Climatologists? Nope, some guy called Andrew Simms from some place called the New Economics Foundation. These are the same guys who made up that "Happy Planet Index" which got a bunch of press a few years ago by ranking the countries of the world from best to worst according to various bullshit criteria with carefully tuned weightings (Cuba was fifth, the US was 150th slightly behind Ethiopia and Burkina Faso). The guy is currently billing himself as "head of the climate change programme at the NEF", but as far as I can figure out he's also "director of policy" and wrote or co-wrote most of their other publications. I can't find any reference to any actual academic qualifications other than the fact that he "studied at the London School of Economics".

I ditched the article after the writer failed to understand the rationale behind the naming of the common scientific behavior known as "positive feedback." Clearly alarmist BS.

I missed that on my first read-through. Yes, that's truly terrible.

But if you stopped after that you missed the bit about how great life was in Britain in the period 1938-1944, when we apparently were using less resources, but were happier, and how we need to get that feeling back.

update: Also, the article promises that if you want more then there's information available on their website. Unfortunately I can't find anything on their website except two copies of an enormous counter (yup, still 100) and an invitation to spam your friends with their monthly newsletter. Can anyone find it?

I actually found the two-page "Technical note" at:

http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/uploads/sbfxot55p5k3kd454n14...

and it's pretty useless. Lots of talk of parts-per-million, but absolutely no justification of the most important danger-world-in-crisis idea: that there will be a tipping point beyond which change is "irreversible".

In summary, I suggest ignoring this article, and the people who wrote it, entirely.

He's referring to government rationing and fold-up houses while being bombed by the Axis forces? Yea, people were just loving life back then. I wonder what England's energy expenditures were to drive the military.

Hmmmm.... if change is irreversible, then shouldn't we just start partying it up?

It will probably take few centuries before the earth start getting inhabitable, so us, our kids, and our grand-kids will be fine. They will have to put up with droughts, flood,etc, but they will be able to cope.

Ah, and earth will be fine. There have already been 3 cataclysmic events, where 90% of life died (65-70%, on the latest one), and earth just recovered from it, with new dominant species.

So, earth will recover from this too, just not with humans on it.

The problem with the "Tipping Point" is that we humans have gotten to the point where we could cool the earth if we got desperate enough. We know from studying volcanoes that injecting large amounts of sulphur particulates into the stratosphere will cool the earth quite effectively. Any number of industrialized nations could do enough of this to counteract global warming for modest fractions of their GDPs. There are other materials we could use that would persist higher than the stratosphere and reduce certain negative consequences.

Unlike other things we can do about climate change, this is also quick!

Of course, the problem with this, is that there are sure to be unintended consequences. Perhaps this is another sort of "Tipping Point" -- where humanity follows a spiral of ever-increasing interventions with unintended consequences that spiral out of control.

More important: the ability to manipulate the global climate will have profound geopolitical and strategic ramifications. These are perhaps just as dangerous as the CO2 tipping point.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_keith_s_surprising_...

God I hope so. Only 8 years and change until people can start arguing about OTHER scientific/political hot potatoes.

While I am all in to prevent further damage to Earth ecosystems and to fix whatever has been broken, and to switch to renewable energy, lets not forget the Russian scientist predicting an imminent new small ice age akin to that of the middle ages, related to the Sun's emission cycles. We may end up needing to pump CO2 to the atmosphere in purpose.

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