‘Apocalyptic’ scenes hit Greece as Athens besieged by fire
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Like many, Rizos believes the climate emergency will only get worse. “We’re ecologists, we love nature in my family and we want to protect the environment, not install air conditioners that will destroy it. But with temperatures of 45C, that’s going to be hard. We have to adapt. For sure, I’ll be replacing pine trees with other trees that don’t burn so easily.”
We need more people thinking like this. I don't know how we get people to take things seriously and act.
It needs to be local. It needs to be wise more than smart. We need more small solutions to push back against the effects of our top-heavy world where money and power and the like often sweep in with no respect for local traditions just because they can.
I don't know how we get there from here. I know it doesn't help to presume it is a foregone conclusion that we can't make a meaningful difference at this point and we are simply doomed.
Over the course of a millennium, sure, maybe even a couple of centuries. But we're looking at a single generation to get this done. And that's without burning a huge amount of oil to make it happen.
My incomplete BS is in Environmental Studies.
I have trouble believing we are doomed to failure and there is no point in trying. If you don't bother to try, that sounds like self-fulfilling prophecy to me, not proof that we couldn't have accomplished something if we had tried.
Some mitigation is absolutely necessary. But mitigation alone can't prepare us for 3°C. Billions of people will die.
"When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers."
Edit: Please see some old comment by me. I probably need to leave this discussion for various reasons.
We have none of these, I can think of a possible solution but you're not going to like it.
So put the CO2 tax money toward EV credits, solar, wind, batteries, carbon capture and power-to-gas tech, etc...
This isn’t a consequence free world we live in. If we forsake the earth, I’m afraid we will be forsaken.
It's a pretty well known meme that "the government shouldn't pick winners and losers" (specific technologies).
Sure, maybe it's not always true, maybe you disagree, but couldn't you at least address how/why?
Why can't we have a CO2 tax and not choose what to subsidize, because we (some would say) will surely get it wrong and if anything matters, that matters.
I’m not as worried about us getting it wrong because I think we are already well wide of the mark and have plenty of opportunities for improvement. We’ve continued down the cheap and easy route of fossil fuel extraction and haven’t been looking to make the seemingly more painful choices. It’s not too hard to imagine how we could ween off a good quantity of fossil fuels.
One could justify the spent tax money with high expected CO2 reduction choices. This would, in my view, gets us to a better outcome faster.
Here’s my opinion on a some of the consumer side products that can help today. The tax money could go towards credits for purchase of products like 30-50% off EV, solar, battery, insulation purchases. Government side decisions like replacing coal plants are also high expected CO2 removal projects.
We might ramp up more speculative tech based on the needs (e.g. carbon capture and power to gas).
Hope that helps explain where I’m coming from. With any luck we have more margin for error, though I’m not wanting to count on it.
55 million people last year alone, for some perspective.
Edit: In the meantime, please act. I'm calling on everyone in the tech community to exercise your agency. Get politically active. Invent new solutions. Change jobs if you need to. This is the most important problem to be working on right now, and will continue to be until we achieve gigaton scale carbon capture.
The problems of excess heat, from heatstroke to infernos, can be partially addressed by water management. We know we are already approaching shortages of fresh water. So one big mitigation we could do is a new strategy to conserve and distribute water where it's most needed due to climate change.
I imagine massive engineering projects to identify sources of fresh water and start distributing them over populated areas. The Romans built their aqueducts over hundreds of miles to bring water into their cities. Well, imagine a nation-wide distribution of water. Unless we want to completely abandon formerly-habitable swaths of the planet, we may need to start "plumbing the world" to share what little water remains.
Imagine root-like networks of fresh water that can be activated to tamp down on the spread of fires into cities, or accessed for cool drinking water by anyone who needs it on a hot day. More acquifers to collect and process rainwater. Tighter regulations and enforcement around the dumping of harmful material into waterways. Additional regulations or taxes on excess commercial uses of water. Desalination plants to contribute more water (regardless of cost, it will probably be necessary due to increasing lack of fresh water). Development of new technology to reduce the need for water. And finally, regulations to eliminate wasteful use of water in general (we can't keep watering lawns forever).
There's plenty of water in the world, but most of it is salt water from the oceans, so if we can desalinate it that will go a long way towards solving the water crisis -- particularly in areas near the shore.
It would be interesting to hear what a per-capita price of a gallon of desalinated water would cost, especially when the cost is brought down by having lots of desalination plants all around the world.
We invest too much in worshipping the big city, among other things.
No kidding. That's pretty epic footage.
I fear the only possible way through this by deploying solar geoengineering-- soon-- in order to buy us enough time to scale up carbon capture. In addition to transitioning our energy infrastructure and transportation. It can be done.
Letting these conditions continue will almost certainly result in destabilization that make an organized response even less tenable.
But it's not like getting a pay rise, with each day getting just a tad warmer. The average tells you nothing about the extremes.
The laypersons interpretation of 1.5 degrees change is 'so what, it will be a little bit warmer'. The difference between those two views is very hard to reconcile, simply because of the scale.
Lots of things can be done. Most of them won't. People prefer denial - not everyone, but enough to sabotage progress. The pandemic has made this abundantly clear.
> The annual cost of delivering 5 million tons of an albedo enhancing aerosol (sufficient to offset the expected warming over the next century) to an altitude of 20 to 30 km is estimated at US$2 billion to 8 billion. In comparison, the annual cost estimates for climate damage or emission mitigation range from US$200 billion to 2 trillion.
... How much CO2 is that going to emit? Is that achieved by aircraft or rockets?
How many MJ/tonne does that take? How many sites do you need? How many more nuclear plants does it take running continuously to manufacture and launch all this?
Who pays for this?
How do you persuade them?
How do you protect it from getting cut by the denialism faction as soon as they get elected?
The bigger issue is that aerosol delays the "warming" issue, but doesn't stop ocean acidification (in addition to the issue of what happens if we ever stop for whatever reason)
Increase taxes on the wealthy, use the money to improve inequality and pass legislation that heavily taxes or bans pollutants at the corporate level. Guarantee long jail time for leaders caught cheating the system.
None of the climate change problems that exist are technologically hard to solve. We have solved much harder IMO. The problems are all political and denial-based. Removing the denial would go much further than any particular technological solution will.
Too little too late. The system is already moving out of its old equilibrium. Simply stopping emissions won't fix it now.
The last 200 years has seen humanity reverse a climate trend that held for many millions of years and yet there are still people that believe - strongly - that this is all just coincidence.
To make it clear, I'm simply stating that if you only work on something to "reverse" or "clean" you will not be successful UNTIL WE STOP EMITTING. (emphasis, not yelling).
So until we stop emitting, it's spinning wheels with no forward progress.
Solutions will come with a price tag, either in terms of funds, or quite possibly in terms of short term CO2 emissions on a scale even larger than the one that we have currently. But they had better be off-set by much larger savings further down the line. So 'stopping emitting' may not be a valid option, except for some things that are luxuries. Meanwhile, people will have to eat, there will have to be some level of transportation, there will be all manner of consumption all of which will continue emissions. To offset that and fix the damage is going to be the literal challenge of our lives. I hope you like seaweed, and I'm not sure how we'd go about farming that in sufficient quantity and with low enough emissions that we won't end up with massive famine and wars in the next 80 years or so.
Bluntly put: there are too many of us to sustainably live on this planet at our current level of technology, and at the same time there may be too few of us to mitigate the damage already done. Stopping emitting = mass die offs, wars, famine and so on. Unless you're resigned to that I would research for a while to see if there are better options that will avoid those, because even though they are probably quite effective they lack in humanity and empathy.
I'm not overly optimistic that such solutions are still on the table, but it can't hurt to look, though I'm skeptical about us being able to muster the necessary levels of cooperation, to start thinking as a species instead of a bunch of unrelated fiefdoms that can act independently of each other when it comes to major items of policy that affect everybody everywhere.
There's no scenario where we reach net zero emissions in a decade. I'm not saying we should start geoengineering without further study. Only that at the present moment, from my perspective, it seems like the bigger risk is not to geoengineer.
In an ideal world, everyone in every country would have coordinated and stayed inside for a month while the virus died out. Now, just because the ideal measure wasn't taken, folks pretend we're experiencing the worst possible outcome from COVID. This has been far from the worst possible outcome. Let's stop acting like our response to the pandemic was a complete failure when it simply wasn't.
Of course we should do what we can. But if this is far from the worst possible outcome, imagine the relative complexity of scale between a virus jumping species and trying to undo 200 odd years of runaway emissions and the effect on our climate in the next couple of decades and gain some appreciation for the change in scale and intensity of cooperation required to achieve a meaningful difference.
Optimism is a great thing to have, but let's not delude ourselves: humanity is in for a very rough ride, and there is absolutely no indication of how - or even if - we will weather this.
HN is supposedly one of the smarter fora on the net, and yet, every day we are overrun by conspiracy nuts, people have been shouting down the ongoing pandemic since day one - and merrily continue to do so day by day. Forgive me if I'm not all that optimistic about how we are going to deal with something far harder.
So far what we've managed to achieve is to stave of the worst at the expense of ruining our economy and now having to deal with a whole pile of new and nastier variations.
You can't really say anything about the outcome of a fire until the fire is under control, right now we may have the illusion of control but I don't believe that we are there just yet.
If people had just been smart enough to listen to Mike Ryan instead of bashing the WHO we'd be in much better shape today. All this slow-walking cost us dearly. That it could have been worse is true. But it also could have been much better.
Lots of dead people.
> His wife and child safely evacuated
> I hid when the order arrived to evacuate
This isn't heroism. This is complete and utter stupidity. Whoever wrote this article should be fired on the spot.
The advice is there for a reason. People die doing this all the time. I know someone (a child at the time) whose parents went back to try protect their house. That child was raised without parents.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Berating those people is not going to solve it, and I suspect as these stories become more common people will give up their possessions more easily once realization sets in that their attempts are futile and only endanger them. But we are not there yet, and in some ways that is fortunate. The time when that sort of feeling becomes more commonplace will be harsh.
The podcast might have been called “moonshots”?