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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

Not so active nowadays I'm afraid. I'm going through a bit of an existential crisis (thinking about climate change).

Would be great to get your thoughts on climate change when you get the chance.

I'm debating with myself over whether to write it up. The TL;DR is that I have come to believe that the situation is much more dire than anyone seems to realize. The big short-term problem is going to be changes in rain patterns, which will cause crop failures, which will result in world-wide famines, which will lead to political unrest, which will lead to WW3, and that all this could happen in my lifetime. The really scary part is how fast things are changing. I live in northern California, and the changes we've seen here just in the last ten years are dramatic. People think about climate change as playing out over centuries or maybe decades, but it's not. Things are changing year-over-year. The scariest thing is that even if we cut emissions to zero tomorrow (and obviously that is not going to happen) that would not solve the problem. We have to actually go to net negative emissions to avoid catastrophe. So an actual solution seems out of reach in any realistic scenario. We've taken carbon that nature has sequestered over a period of hundreds of millions of years and released it in a period of a few hundred. That genie will not go quietly back in her bottle.

There is literally nothing that would make me happier than to have someone convince me that I'm wrong about this.

You're not alone lisper. I thought of another way to grow your wealth to add to your list, risk reduction. If you can reduce the risk of losing wealth, you stand to gain more wealth.

For example, it's great to have crop lands, healthy national parks and coastal cities, but if you don't address risks to this wealth, you stand to lose it. When you lose wealth, you also forfeit gains you might have otherwise had from them. So taking care of your downside also adds to your upside.

On the issue of rain fall in California, I'm reminded of "However, imagine that California had to get its entire water supply of 35 million acre-feet per year by desalinating sea water at the Santa Barbara price. This would come to $70 billion per year, which is on the order of ten percent of the state's GDP. We'd survive, but it would be a blow to our standard of living, and the arguments about whose fault it was and how the cost should be allocated would be exciting."

from http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/water.html

which agrees with you about political unrest, but not about famine. Before I read that, I assumed that desalination was only for drinking water, and far to expensive for agricultural use. That is probably about right for poor countries, but rich countries might get through the total failure of the rains without famine (and without WW3).

What would that number be if only essential water use was considered? i.e. no lawns, no cash crops, etc.

Significantly lower. Agriculture accounts for about 5/6th of CA's water usage for a sector that generates 2% of its GDP.

To be clear, I love getting my food from the Central Valley, but I also think there are overdue discussions to be had about where the water's going and how much utility we're getting from it.

Desal gets tricky quickly. Already at current scales, the brine discharged back into the ocean causes dead zones.

OK, but... so what if the world ends? The universe won't care.

Do you have a detailed write-up of this somewhere? I would be interested in reading it.

No. Like I said, I've been debating with myself over whether or not to write it up. But if I do write it up I'll post it on my blog.

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