SamPhillips

1. They don't talk about it because it is not the primary cause of the warming we see. [0] 2. China and India have agreed to reduce emissions, as part of the Paris agreement. 45% of all solar installed worldwide in 2016 was installed in China. Every country needs to do its part. [1]

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-wo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country

+1 to CCL, they are a well-respected organization.

(disclosure, I work at Google, but not in any way related to this project)

1. 100% of the problem that climatologists discuss is heat from the sun, trapped, by greenhouse gasses that we release. As you rightly point out, we can't control the sun, so we must control how much insulating gas we put in the atmosphere.

2. Even it China cuts is emissions, with the USA outputting more than 4 times per person, would that be enough? How exactly is it that China spends more on reducing emissions while USA spends zero? This is a collective action problem (much like CFC's were in the 1980s, or not peeing in the lake you depend on for drinking water), it requires grown-up behavior from all nations now so as to no despoil the inheritance we might leave to our children.

If you're (rightly) concerned about climate change there is a lot you can do.

Here are three good resources.

Bret Victor's "What can a technologist do about climate change" is wonderful tech overview [0].

"Drawdown", a recent book which enumerates and stack-ranks the wide array of techniques we have which return the atmosphere to a safe composition. [1]

Finally, a self-pitch, we just launched our new site, ClimateAction.tech [2] with a guide for technology employees who are interested in making their companies more sustainable (feedback welcome, @samp or the email on the site)

[0] http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ [1] https://smile.amazon.com/Drawdown-Comprehensive-Proposed-Rev... [2] ClimateAction.tech

Another great resource: Bret Victor's "What Can A Technologist Do About Climate Change"

http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/

Here's an attempt at those things: https://medium.com/@i2amsam/we-can-do-it-ourselves-part-1-48... I'd love feedback. (And if you are interested in climate and tech join us at ClimateAction.tech)

If you're concerned by this, a group of us tech folks will be marching with the Climate March on April 29th. Join us!

https://techsector.peoplesclimate.org/

Elected officials follow public opinion, and large-scale protest is an effective way to demonstrate and shape opinion. Join other technologists at the Climate March in 2 weeks (April 29). https://techsector.peoplesclimate.org/

Something needs to change, we're on the wrong track, and now is the time for you to take action (plus, meet nice people!).

It was alarming before when he said it, and then alarming then he followed up and did it, for exactly the same reasons. The scientific community is clear & unambiguous: this is a huge problem now with civilization-level consequences, and the political answer is "this is all a fairy tale, let's not look into it any more". Alarming is 100% correct. It should alarm everyone.

You mean, other than the insane people at: Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Oracle, HP, Uber... Clearly some successful entrepreneurs find that the 13 cents to still be worth it to have access to the talent and ecosystem. Perhaps there is something about liberal policies that encourages more successful entrepreneurism. Massachusetts, with best-in-the-nation insurance coverage thanks to RomneyCare also as an outsized tech scene.

I mean, you say they are not idiots, but also that they are knowingly destroying the ecosystem on which supports all life on their planet. Which is kinda like knowing the brakes on your car are not working but being smart enough to cheat an inspection. Is that actually smart?

The lack of medallion rent-seeking could be Uber's structural advantage against taxis.

The framing I see sometimes of Big Mean Uber vs 'poor little guy cab driver' seems wholly out of touch with my experience. At least in Boston the taxi system is/was rife with corruption and cronyism. Neither riders or drivers get a good deal, just medallion owners and the regulators they captured[0]. The money isn't staying in the 'local economy', to 'small business owners', it is, by and large, going to rent-seeking medallion owners, many of whom live out of state to monopoly holders who use that power to prevent competition through regulation. I'd happily pay the same to take an Uber driven by someone who wasn't being exploited and who was accountable for the quality of the ride than a crappy medallion cab with a driver who is on the phone, the whole time being forced to watch ads on their "entertainment screen" with no off button.

Uber isn't a monopoly (yet), but they are breaking a monopoly, and that's a good thing.

[0] http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/specials/taxi

Washington State rejected one, unfortunately, one significant downside of the state solution is that some demand can just easily shift to another location. I wonder if there's a scheme where on state will pass it but only have it come into affect if neighboring states do as well.

Greenpeace has some basics but not that level of detail. http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/click-clean/

I think Arcadia Power is available nationally, I believe it was 1.5c/kWhr very cheap. It's the same REC offsetting that Google is doing, just at a much smaller scale.

http://www.arcadiapower.com/

You shouldn't sometimes question it, you should persistently question and change it. It isn't just possible that we destroy civilization, it's actually quite likely. We know that dominate life forms have exhausted the resources which allowed them to thrive before, leading to their extinction. We can see it in the fossil record. The difference is we are smart enough to see it coming, yet we spend our time worrying about stuff that really won't matter when it comes crashing down.

I had the experience of working in healthcare doing data visualization for doctors. The first version of my software I took a very "engineering" approach, a simple, no-frills just-the-facts visualization of the data, defaulting to showing as much data as possible so the well-qualified doctors could decide for themselves what was important. I found very quickly that did not work well at all. Giving a "dumb" scale of graphed data obscured the fact that your blood pressure can vary 20% in a normal conversation, while a change of 10% (F) in your temperature would be generally fatal, that streams of information from redundant sensors make it hard to discern variations in unrelated ones, that a sudden spike in heart rate is likely medically interesting, while a sudden spike in blood pressure is often an artifact of the way that information is collected. In order to effectively present information even to a highly informed audience I needed to contextualize, prune, edit and carefully present that data because by not doing the system was actually creating more confusion and misleading through data overload.

The challenge I'm sure that these climate scientists have is, they see this data not as dry, boring information, but more like health information for the planet. They would like the rate of increase of CO2 to slow and give the planet (which they live on) more time to adapt to the rapid warming which is potentially disastrous. They are trying to properly frame the fact that these are all quite bad signs so we take appropriate actions. A doctor with a patient with a fever of 107º should not present the patient with a report saying "The 2 week moving-average of your temperature is looking normal", or "your temperature is up 9% today", or "while your brain temperature is trending higher, your extremities are cooling so your average temperature is staying even". Those all might be true, but would be medical malpractice.

Here's a dry, boring presentation of the data[0] (with a 'world average' tab as well as Mauna.) My understanding is that CO2 is close enough to well-mixed that levels are consistent at most measuring sites but Mauna one of the longest continuous same-site record and is relatively isolated [1].

The best record keeping we have is that humanity has always lived in with CO2 in the 300's [2], it will now be in the 400's until sometime quite fundamental changes (or, at current rates, it goes into the 500's in 40-50 years) [2, linear extrapolation].

[0] http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/full.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauna_Loa_Observatory [2] http://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/

Some folks are certainly hinting at it. http://rameznaam.com/2015/08/10/how-cheap-can-solar-get-very...

Yes, but is the rate of growth of CO2 concentration sublinear, linear or superlinear?

Some ideas for positive action:

"What can a technologist do about climate change?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622615

(Spoiler: Be engaged, be influential, use your high-leverage superpowers)

This reminds me of the DeepMind bit where the AI beat human players despite not knowing about the edifice of built up knowledge in that domain. I'd expect that an AI could be a great chess player with enough gameplay info and not knowing particular strength scoring, types of famous defenses, etc. In some ways the way that humans have constructed these relationships may actually make learning more difficult. We certainly don't teach 3-year olds about theta criterion, we just speak in 'correct' language and may correct them when they make mistakes.

and to add more context, the bid in this article is $24/MWh, which would imply a $100/MWh Solar + Storage cost given the numbers above from Lazard. For comparison, the new Hinkley nuclear plant in England has a PPA guarantee at ~$120/MWh.

Obviously there are geographic differences, but the trendline for solar is impressive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

They actually already do it, we enrolled in Boston this summer in "RushHour". They pre-cooled our house 6 times over the summer before a expected peak demand and gave us a $40 or $50 credit. It was great, we were not home 3 of those times and the others we didn't notice at the time at all, so it was basically just free money.

Some ideas for positive action:

"What can a technologist do about climate change?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622615

Sure, but there are those 30,000-50,000[0] times a year that humans get it wrong too.

Would you rather have surgery from a human with a 90% success rate but a 0.0001% of a heroic save, or a robot with a 98% success rate, with the bonus that the robot will only be getting better with more adoption.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...

Awesome! Go raise your army!

One interesting development is that I see the small "Nissan Leaf" style electrics competing against electric bikes now for the "second car / commuter car" role. For 1/10th the price ($4000) you can get a very top-of-the-line electric bike which is free to park, doesn't get stuck in traffic, has no regulatory costs, more flexibly to charge (removable battery), etc, etc. Of course it also has downsides (weather, exercise, safety), but I see those bikes more and more around Cambridge and they seem to make a lot of sense.

Why is it then, that there are now cruise ships going through the Northwest passage, roadways built on permafrost melting in Alaska, coral reefs dying worldwide? NASA invented the concept of global warming 40 years ago for political purposes, secretly recruited every other scientific agency-worldwide to collaborate AND coincidentally, unrelated to the billions of tons of greenhouse gasses we release, the world got warmer?

Sure. But if someone is saying "the house is on fire" and you reply, "Ah, Yes, clearly we should expect it to be getting warmer, after all it's springtime now", it's not much of addition to the conversation.