To heat all the water in all the Earth's oceans by 1 degree Celsius it would require the energy equivalent of the detonation of roughly 87 billion Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs.
On the front page the counter is up to nearly 4 billion since 1998. The real problem is that we continue to do things to accelerate this, and as we all know, humans are terrible with exponentials.
This is a dishonest comparison. The atmosphere warming has a much more immediate impact and the ocean isn't a perfect heat sink.
Air has a specific heat (~1) less than a quarter per unit mass than water (~4.1). The atmosphere has a mass of ~5 billion kgs and the ocean has a mass of ~1.4*10^21 kgs.
It requires a lot less trapped energy to warm the atmosphere by 1 C than the ocean. We're well on track for 2.5 C increase since preindustrial levels.
To be completely blunt, the humanitarian crisis being caused by runaway fossil fuel use is tantamount to massacre of civilians.
The death toll from Hiroshima was between 90-160 thousand people. The amount of excess deaths due to heat waves in 2023 was around 178,000. There are projections that the El Nino related heat waves could cause up to half a million, and longer term projections grow to 300,000 a year just from heat in the next few years. Just from heat.
Add in crop failure, ecosystem collapses, and other unexpected disasters, and it's easy to see why.
It might be crass, but it's mostly poor people and poor countries that are going to be affected.
> The amount of excess deaths due to heat waves in 2023 was around 178,000. There are projections that the El Nino related heat waves could cause up to half a million, and longer term projections grow to 300,000 a year just from heat in the next few years. Just from heat.
Scary.
On a related note, annual deaths from extreme cold are estimated at over 4 million per year.
(Note: I picked this article specifically because it’s written by people who are desperately trying to find a way to make the heat story sound worse, but still have to admit that the facts are the facts.)
and due to climate change the phenomenon called "meandering jetstreams" will only amplify.
this will destabilize the jetstreams and allow for sudden breakouts of extremely cold polar air even in times when this should not happen. like snow in May...
Making long-term predictions of deaths due to inherently contradictory outcomes
of long-term fluctuations in those “more chaotic” systems. That’s obviously objective.
Well, there’s currently about an 9:1 ratio of cold deaths to heat deaths, using the article’s numbers. It’s actually a bigger ratio using the numbers presented in this thread (without citation).
You're referencing this study[1] ,which is a modeling study, not observational data and it attributes only half of that number to climate change. It also includes this strong caveat:
"Due to data limitations, adaptation indicators such as access to air conditioning and healthcare resources were not included, and GDP per capita was used as a proxy."
I'm sure this analysis is directionally right, but it's not defensible to use the 178,000 number. Moreover extrapolating out into the future based on such an analysis seem fraught at best.
Sure. There are weaknesses in the study, it doesn't change the fact that there was a significant increase in the number of deaths.
Hiding behind the claims that studies of complex systems are not completely valid because of a lack of rigor in the process or a weakness in the data are easy to overlook when governments around the world (including mine in Canada) are routinely fudging the numbers to achieve political goals.
People are dying from climate change in record numbers, and it's going to get a lot worse, and criticizing the quality of the studies does absolutely nothing helpful.
Im not hiding behind anything, I was pretty clear that I think it’s directionally correct. However 90k deaths out of 8 billion people is not particularly significant. It’s an order of magnitude lower than a typical flu season. It’s roughly 2x the number of US auto crash related deaths, but global. I think you’re making it sound far more dire than it is.
While it’s important it seems like a tractable problem in a lot of ways, and the study’s lack of data on AC use is a serious flaw.
Yeah but opponents of green measures want us to treat climate change related deaths like car deaths, just background noise which can somehow be boiled down to some tragic responsibility failure which is worth the price.
The comment I responded to was tone policing for crassness instead of actually contributing to the discussion.
Would it have been better to point out there has been a Russo-Ukraine wars worth of deaths from heat waves each year since 2022?
Or a Rwandan Civil Wars worth of deaths projected in the next year?
Or a Holocaust worth of deaths over the next decade?
What does it take to get people to listen and take it seriously?
Not for nothing but I am growing lemons and coffee beans in Vancouver, BC, and I only need to bring them in for about 2 months a year. What that actually means is that people are already evaluating how we will relocate crops (luxury and essential) to other climates.
What about when major crops like wheat, corn, rice, and beans fail around the world?
No, it isn't. It's a number, and implying that Japanese people would be more offended by this comparison that to they would be about the long term impacts of climate change on an island nation where up to 65% of the population lives in at risk coastal regions is basically a form of cultural white knighting.
If I am wrong, I apologize, but politeness and tone policing to shut down discussion of crises is a recurring problem in society.
In your experience, how do people typically respond to crassness? That's how they'll respond to your argument.
To be completely blunt, fuck your bluntness. You clearly don't care about climate change all that much if you aren't willing to even attempt effective messaging. Go do your revolutionary cosplay with some lesser topic
Politeness hasn't worked, and we are accelerating climate change, not slowing it.
You can act as upset as you want, I am more concerned about the impact to the world around us than I am about hurt feelings on a tech discussion forum.
I'm not entirely sure why you are so upset with me, but I assure you, it's not cosplay. My family lives on the west coast, and are going to be significantly impacted by climate change. My family back east lives in rural Manitoba (southern and northern), and their farms have been impacted by poor harvests due to weather and climate issues. My friends and family in northern Manitoba were evacuated due to forest fires last summer, and other friends in the BC interior were as well.
It's not performative concern and it's not revolutionary, it's just exhaustion from watching people deny and tone police discussions about something having real, human impacts. People will starve to death because of crop failures happening today, and its going to get worse :(
I understand that the party line in the US is that the quality of life engendered by the ecocide of the earth makes up for the mass death that anthropogeenic climate change entails.
At the same time, I have a hard time thinking that the destruction of the environment is either necessary or natural. So the death caused by climate change also seems like a particular kind of massacre.
Where I was raised, it was a commonplace to think of the firebombings and nuclear incineration of vast amounts of civilian populations as regrettable but necessary and perhaps even a natural outcome of technological growth.
I hadn't really considered that position until your comment, but my rejoinder would be "perhaps the comparison is unfortunately apt and it is crass to ignore the death caused by climate change."
Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet, the planet is fine… the people are fucked! Compared to the people, the planet is doing great: been here four and a half billion years, we’ve been here what? 100,000? Maybe 200,000? And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over 200 years, and we have the conceit to think that somehow, we’re a threat? That we’re going to put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a-floatin’ around the sun? The planet has been through a lot worse than us: been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drifts, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and aluminum cans are going to make a difference?
The planet isn’t going anywhere… we are! We’re going away!
The planet has not been through anything, it doesn't experience things or has memories. It literally cannot care if we survive or go extinct. This is why environmentalism focusig on "mother earth" or "the earth is suffering" is so annoying. Focus on humans and what we will face in the future, what our kids will face. Environmentalism should be a humanism and focus on them instead of having broad goals like fixing the whole planet.
The planet / Mother Earth is just a way to talk about connected ecosystems of this big rock we live on. Yes the rock is not alive, but life is important, even if your only concern is as a proxy for our own support systems. How much value you place on different lives - your own, other people, whales, monkeys, deer, bugs… you are free to value them differently, but I’d hope you would not gleefully accept that we should just tolerate the wholesale destruction of habits on earth simply because it does not appear to affect human survival on the surface.
In case you have not noticed, we are currently in the sixth great extinction of this planet, which is driven by human activity. I consider it beyond tragic and existential to know that many of the wonders of this planet are going away and never coming back. Humans can live with air conditioning or under ground, but that doesn’t help other animals. You can still view this under a human lens if you wish, but for many of us, those other kinds of life are worth something, and bundling up that value by saying “we must protect the Earth” seems quite natural and defendable to me.
That argument can lead to the assumption that it's ok if we completely wiped out life on earth as long as humanity survives by leaving for the stars.
The earth is the only place in the universe right now where humans can survive at our current technology level, and we are destroying that ecosystem at an alarming rate. We depend on the entire planets ecosystem for our survival, and even if technology somehow could let us survive ecological collapse, a humanist approach to the environment is tantamount to burning the boat we are sailing on to keep warm.
The aspect that's depressing to me is that we've shown many times that we can throw huge amounts of resources at various projects, numbers quantifying them so large most people don't have the context for the scale, but not for projects that preserve our environment. If anything it seems like doing so would give us a greater time span to do things like colonize the nearest chunk of rock in space (which is a figurative paddle off the coast compared to reaching other habitats) and terraforming our own world first might teach us things we need to know for greater projects.
Environmentalism is this way on purpose. It's a lot easier to get people riled up about the plight of majestic creatures than about some abstract metric. Also, the movement has strong anti-capitalism / "degrowth" roots, and you need this kind of stuff to stay in the headlines. Movements that don't take controversial positions and don't attract radical activists tend to fade from view.
If you want an example from our field: AI doomers and AI maximalists get a lot more air time on the mainstream media and on HN than those who think it's a normal technology with some benefits and some downsides.
It feels like the Earth’s oceans are at a tipping point and can no longer continue to absorb this amount of heat and acidification from the carbonic acid levels increasing when CO2 breaks down.
Politically, fossil fuels are in vogue. New pipelines, new capacity, lower prices -- all of these are being accelerated right now. There's no #$#$% hope that we'll stop extracting carbon from the ground. It's just not going to happen.
Honestly burning natural gas is much better than producing electricity with coal, and we can retrofit existing coal generation plants with natural gas and be like 85% cleaner. I'm kind of fed up with the absolutist takes of "don't use any fossil fuels," since that's just completely unreasonable in the next 10-20 years. Setting up power plants takes massive investment, and excluding AI-driven demand, there's not much money in power generation.
Solar has been making incredible progress, and works in sunny locations, but it's not a general purpose solution. Nuclear is getting there, but it's still too expensive and over regulated. I can't say much about wind as I haven't looked into it enough to say. Both thermal and hydro are location dependent, so good when it works but not a general purpose solution.
So that leaves coal and natural gas. We have a lot of both, but switching over to natural gas to coal by retrofitting existing power generation would make a massive difference imo.
At the end of the day, we want diversity in the power grid, not just one thing for every place, since every place is different/has its own history.
Gas produces about 40-50% less CO2 per unit of electricity produced, than coal. Not 85%.
As far as I'm concerned, a planet that is able to support human civilization ranks just a bit higher on the priority list than a diverse power grid and economic viability.
Economic viability is how we support human civilization, no? Economics is literally observing how humans interact and prioritize scarce resources like time and materials. So being not economically viable means it not happening.
Is your goal to reduce global temperatures? If so, it needs to be a sustainable effort. You don't get sustainable effort without economic viability.
If your goal is to dramatically reduce temperatures in the next 5 years, why not dump SiO2 in the atmosphere? That would bring the temperature down pretty fast by reflecting out sunlight in the upper atmosphere.
But if your goal is long-term change, we need an approach that works long-term.
Edit: sorry I forgot to mention your point on coal vs natural gas efficiency, I didn't realize it was not that much gain. I still think it's worth it though, since it's still making progress.
The problem is if you spend the next 5 years building new fossil fuel capabilities, the economic payoff won't be for at least 10 to 15 years more years. We absolutely should not be burning natural gas at that point. Not only would it cause continued havoc on our environment, zero emissions alternatives are already extremely cost competitive in most parts of the world. We should spend the next 5 years, instead, building for the future, not sinking our money into assets that will only cause further harm without providing any real cost savings.
Large scale battery storage, by the way, is already a mostly solved problem, and possible to do at a cost competitive price.
The only reason fossil fuels are "economically viable" is because we're ignoring the cost of the destruction they will bring in the future, and are already causing today. Nuclear is economically viable. We already have lots of nuclear power. Maybe it's a bit less profitable than fossil, maybe if we invested more into it it would be more profitable. Either way it seems entirely viable to me, except of course for all the trillions of dollars being made by extracting and selling fossil fuels to the detriment of all our futures. The only reason alternatives aren't "viable" is because they're priced out by fossil fuels. Take fossil fuels out of the equation and lots of new things become viable.
How is dumping SiO2 into the atmosphere economically viable? How do you make money doing that? If you're thinking that governments should pay private companies to do it, why can't governments simply pay private companies to produce clean power instead? Without having done any actual research on this topic, I suspect you might find that this would be far more "economically viable" than paying for the experimental climate engineering that might not even work, and might have devastating unintended consequences. For example I imagine shitloads of fine sand in the atmosphere would be a problem for aviation, and that's probably far from the only issue with it.
Yes, your proposal would have been an acceptable approach in 1990. Instead, we have been happily increasing our CO₂ emissions every year since then*. No, we no longer want diversity in the power grid; "reasonable" solutions don't move the needle. Even if the entire world would go carbon zero overnight, the global temperature would continue to rise for decades before settling around a new steady state. It's not a matter of holding out a bit longer for tomorrow's magical solution: every piece of fossil fuel burned today makes the planet more unlivable tomorrow.
We are currently on track to reach the "climate-compatible" scenario of the Paris accords (+1.5°C climate increase by 2100) in 2030. We will exceed the "minor change" scenario (+2°C) in 2050. Those targets are already locked in, they are unavoidable because of the delay between CO₂ emissions and their full effect. Maintaining our current levels of emissions gets us to 3.5°C above historic averages in 2100, which is the lower end of the disaster scenario in the Paris accords.
* except for a short drop in 2020 due to Covid. You may not like it, but that is what full climate change mitigation looks like today because we didn't act sooner.
Why not two volcano eruptions? Or half a solar flare? Oh I see, fear is the point. What do we need to vote for now? Who should we hate? What tax are you going to ram down our throats? Sheez
I mean, if two volcanoes erupted every second, or we were getting hit by a solar flare every two seconds, those would be pretty significant events also.
With that said, this measurement system is very stupid. But do you know what is even stupider? Climate denialism.
To heat all the water in all the Earth's oceans by 1 degree Celsius it would require the energy equivalent of the detonation of roughly 87 billion Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs.
On the front page the counter is up to nearly 4 billion since 1998. The real problem is that we continue to do things to accelerate this, and as we all know, humans are terrible with exponentials.
This is a dishonest comparison. The atmosphere warming has a much more immediate impact and the ocean isn't a perfect heat sink.
Air has a specific heat (~1) less than a quarter per unit mass than water (~4.1). The atmosphere has a mass of ~5 billion kgs and the ocean has a mass of ~1.4*10^21 kgs.
It requires a lot less trapped energy to warm the atmosphere by 1 C than the ocean. We're well on track for 2.5 C increase since preindustrial levels.
Just ~250000 years ( in atmospheric absorption rate )
If we're trying to give perspective, may as well leave it to the master: https://xkcd.com/1732/
Then one of these is wrong. If this counter is at 4B, wouldn't we have evaporated 5% of the worlds oceans already?
“Evaporated“? I think you need to reread parent comment.
he said - raise it by one degree, not evaporate
I guess that demonstrates the concept of “a drop in the ocean”, but turning a massacre of civilians into a unit of energy feels crass at best.
To be completely blunt, the humanitarian crisis being caused by runaway fossil fuel use is tantamount to massacre of civilians.
The death toll from Hiroshima was between 90-160 thousand people. The amount of excess deaths due to heat waves in 2023 was around 178,000. There are projections that the El Nino related heat waves could cause up to half a million, and longer term projections grow to 300,000 a year just from heat in the next few years. Just from heat.
Add in crop failure, ecosystem collapses, and other unexpected disasters, and it's easy to see why.
It might be crass, but it's mostly poor people and poor countries that are going to be affected.
> The amount of excess deaths due to heat waves in 2023 was around 178,000. There are projections that the El Nino related heat waves could cause up to half a million, and longer term projections grow to 300,000 a year just from heat in the next few years. Just from heat.
Scary.
On a related note, annual deaths from extreme cold are estimated at over 4 million per year.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254251962...
(Note: I picked this article specifically because it’s written by people who are desperately trying to find a way to make the heat story sound worse, but still have to admit that the facts are the facts.)
and due to climate change the phenomenon called "meandering jetstreams" will only amplify. this will destabilize the jetstreams and allow for sudden breakouts of extremely cold polar air even in times when this should not happen. like snow in May...
Sure, sure. More people will be dying of extreme heat, and extreme cold [1]. Got it.
When the facts don’t support your story, make up a wild new prediction of the future that can’t be falsified.
[1] ...even though 99% of the world's population lives between -50 and +60 degrees latitude.
https://engaging-data.com/population-latitude-longitude/
More energetic systems are more chaotic. They're not making up facts.
More chaotic, maybe.
Making long-term predictions of deaths due to inherently contradictory outcomes of long-term fluctuations in those “more chaotic” systems. That’s obviously objective.
Predictions are probabilities. Uncertainty in the predictions increases the error bars; it doesn't make them invalid.
Sorry, where were the error bars in the prediction?
Climate change is real and you need to admit that.
I never said it wasn't. Climate change is real. This particular story of doom is not.
We have no way to predict what will happen, even in the broadest sense. Global climate is the literal grandaddy of chaotic systems.
Sorry, I'm unsure what your thesis is in presenting deaths due to extreme cold this way.
Well, there’s currently about an 9:1 ratio of cold deaths to heat deaths, using the article’s numbers. It’s actually a bigger ratio using the numbers presented in this thread (without citation).
Not a “thesis”, just a fact.
You're referencing this study[1] ,which is a modeling study, not observational data and it attributes only half of that number to climate change. It also includes this strong caveat:
"Due to data limitations, adaptation indicators such as access to air conditioning and healthcare resources were not included, and GDP per capita was used as a proxy."
I'm sure this analysis is directionally right, but it's not defensible to use the 178,000 number. Moreover extrapolating out into the future based on such an analysis seem fraught at best.
[1]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7618246/
shrug.
Sure. There are weaknesses in the study, it doesn't change the fact that there was a significant increase in the number of deaths.
Hiding behind the claims that studies of complex systems are not completely valid because of a lack of rigor in the process or a weakness in the data are easy to overlook when governments around the world (including mine in Canada) are routinely fudging the numbers to achieve political goals.
People are dying from climate change in record numbers, and it's going to get a lot worse, and criticizing the quality of the studies does absolutely nothing helpful.
Im not hiding behind anything, I was pretty clear that I think it’s directionally correct. However 90k deaths out of 8 billion people is not particularly significant. It’s an order of magnitude lower than a typical flu season. It’s roughly 2x the number of US auto crash related deaths, but global. I think you’re making it sound far more dire than it is.
While it’s important it seems like a tractable problem in a lot of ways, and the study’s lack of data on AC use is a serious flaw.
Yeah but opponents of green measures want us to treat climate change related deaths like car deaths, just background noise which can somehow be boiled down to some tragic responsibility failure which is worth the price.
That's the point of crass comparisons.
The comment I responded to was tone policing for crassness instead of actually contributing to the discussion.
Would it have been better to point out there has been a Russo-Ukraine wars worth of deaths from heat waves each year since 2022?
Or a Rwandan Civil Wars worth of deaths projected in the next year?
Or a Holocaust worth of deaths over the next decade?
What does it take to get people to listen and take it seriously?
Not for nothing but I am growing lemons and coffee beans in Vancouver, BC, and I only need to bring them in for about 2 months a year. What that actually means is that people are already evaluating how we will relocate crops (luxury and essential) to other climates.
What about when major crops like wheat, corn, rice, and beans fail around the world?
This is disrespectful to the people of hiroshima who had to walk ankle deep through blood and bone just to find their family
No, it isn't. It's a number, and implying that Japanese people would be more offended by this comparison that to they would be about the long term impacts of climate change on an island nation where up to 65% of the population lives in at risk coastal regions is basically a form of cultural white knighting.
If I am wrong, I apologize, but politeness and tone policing to shut down discussion of crises is a recurring problem in society.
Yes, because the endless shallow catastrophizing of climate change has been famously effective messaging!
You cracked the code, let's just try to equate climate change to Hiroshima! That'll convince people!
You can't catastrophize catastrophe.
In your experience, how do people typically respond to crassness? That's how they'll respond to your argument.
To be completely blunt, fuck your bluntness. You clearly don't care about climate change all that much if you aren't willing to even attempt effective messaging. Go do your revolutionary cosplay with some lesser topic
Politeness hasn't worked, and we are accelerating climate change, not slowing it.
You can act as upset as you want, I am more concerned about the impact to the world around us than I am about hurt feelings on a tech discussion forum.
I'm not entirely sure why you are so upset with me, but I assure you, it's not cosplay. My family lives on the west coast, and are going to be significantly impacted by climate change. My family back east lives in rural Manitoba (southern and northern), and their farms have been impacted by poor harvests due to weather and climate issues. My friends and family in northern Manitoba were evacuated due to forest fires last summer, and other friends in the BC interior were as well.
It's not performative concern and it's not revolutionary, it's just exhaustion from watching people deny and tone police discussions about something having real, human impacts. People will starve to death because of crop failures happening today, and its going to get worse :(
I understand that the party line in the US is that the quality of life engendered by the ecocide of the earth makes up for the mass death that anthropogeenic climate change entails.
At the same time, I have a hard time thinking that the destruction of the environment is either necessary or natural. So the death caused by climate change also seems like a particular kind of massacre.
Where I was raised, it was a commonplace to think of the firebombings and nuclear incineration of vast amounts of civilian populations as regrettable but necessary and perhaps even a natural outcome of technological growth.
I hadn't really considered that position until your comment, but my rejoinder would be "perhaps the comparison is unfortunately apt and it is crass to ignore the death caused by climate change."
The short term solution to this problem may be to burn gigatons of liquid sodium in the exhaust of jet engines in the stratosphere.[1]
If you burn liquid sodium in steam, you end up with sodium bicarbonate particulate of just about the right size to offset global warming.[2]
[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20250000498/downloads/Re...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST49jDo4d-Q
I don't know about you guys but I'm feeling it
The earth would take on heat from the sun in any case. Is this additional heat?
Your question is answered in the second paragraph on that page.
What is the conversion to Nagasakis
About 3/s
Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet, the planet is fine… the people are fucked! Compared to the people, the planet is doing great: been here four and a half billion years, we’ve been here what? 100,000? Maybe 200,000? And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over 200 years, and we have the conceit to think that somehow, we’re a threat? That we’re going to put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a-floatin’ around the sun? The planet has been through a lot worse than us: been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drifts, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and aluminum cans are going to make a difference?
The planet isn’t going anywhere… we are! We’re going away!
The planet has not been through anything, it doesn't experience things or has memories. It literally cannot care if we survive or go extinct. This is why environmentalism focusig on "mother earth" or "the earth is suffering" is so annoying. Focus on humans and what we will face in the future, what our kids will face. Environmentalism should be a humanism and focus on them instead of having broad goals like fixing the whole planet.
The planet / Mother Earth is just a way to talk about connected ecosystems of this big rock we live on. Yes the rock is not alive, but life is important, even if your only concern is as a proxy for our own support systems. How much value you place on different lives - your own, other people, whales, monkeys, deer, bugs… you are free to value them differently, but I’d hope you would not gleefully accept that we should just tolerate the wholesale destruction of habits on earth simply because it does not appear to affect human survival on the surface.
In case you have not noticed, we are currently in the sixth great extinction of this planet, which is driven by human activity. I consider it beyond tragic and existential to know that many of the wonders of this planet are going away and never coming back. Humans can live with air conditioning or under ground, but that doesn’t help other animals. You can still view this under a human lens if you wish, but for many of us, those other kinds of life are worth something, and bundling up that value by saying “we must protect the Earth” seems quite natural and defendable to me.
What an insanely selfish take.
This attitude of humanity first is exactly what got us here and what will wipe us off the planet.
That argument can lead to the assumption that it's ok if we completely wiped out life on earth as long as humanity survives by leaving for the stars.
The earth is the only place in the universe right now where humans can survive at our current technology level, and we are destroying that ecosystem at an alarming rate. We depend on the entire planets ecosystem for our survival, and even if technology somehow could let us survive ecological collapse, a humanist approach to the environment is tantamount to burning the boat we are sailing on to keep warm.
The aspect that's depressing to me is that we've shown many times that we can throw huge amounts of resources at various projects, numbers quantifying them so large most people don't have the context for the scale, but not for projects that preserve our environment. If anything it seems like doing so would give us a greater time span to do things like colonize the nearest chunk of rock in space (which is a figurative paddle off the coast compared to reaching other habitats) and terraforming our own world first might teach us things we need to know for greater projects.
Environmentalism is this way on purpose. It's a lot easier to get people riled up about the plight of majestic creatures than about some abstract metric. Also, the movement has strong anti-capitalism / "degrowth" roots, and you need this kind of stuff to stay in the headlines. Movements that don't take controversial positions and don't attract radical activists tend to fade from view.
If you want an example from our field: AI doomers and AI maximalists get a lot more air time on the mainstream media and on HN than those who think it's a normal technology with some benefits and some downsides.
No I don't get it, can you please provide the measurement in either beaver pelts or football fields.
A LOT, like, a lot lot, of beaver pelts.
Pretty schmick to look at, to be honest, but ultimately bad news and best avoided.
It feels like the Earth’s oceans are at a tipping point and can no longer continue to absorb this amount of heat and acidification from the carbonic acid levels increasing when CO2 breaks down.
https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/ocean-co...
This year it feels like the ocean is losing its ability to breathe in a sense https://scienceblog.com/the-ocean-stopped-breathing-off-pana...
When do we get to full stop on the combustion of fossil fuels to protect humanity’s future?
Politically, fossil fuels are in vogue. New pipelines, new capacity, lower prices -- all of these are being accelerated right now. There's no #$#$% hope that we'll stop extracting carbon from the ground. It's just not going to happen.
Honestly burning natural gas is much better than producing electricity with coal, and we can retrofit existing coal generation plants with natural gas and be like 85% cleaner. I'm kind of fed up with the absolutist takes of "don't use any fossil fuels," since that's just completely unreasonable in the next 10-20 years. Setting up power plants takes massive investment, and excluding AI-driven demand, there's not much money in power generation.
Solar has been making incredible progress, and works in sunny locations, but it's not a general purpose solution. Nuclear is getting there, but it's still too expensive and over regulated. I can't say much about wind as I haven't looked into it enough to say. Both thermal and hydro are location dependent, so good when it works but not a general purpose solution.
So that leaves coal and natural gas. We have a lot of both, but switching over to natural gas to coal by retrofitting existing power generation would make a massive difference imo.
At the end of the day, we want diversity in the power grid, not just one thing for every place, since every place is different/has its own history.
Gas produces about 40-50% less CO2 per unit of electricity produced, than coal. Not 85%.
As far as I'm concerned, a planet that is able to support human civilization ranks just a bit higher on the priority list than a diverse power grid and economic viability.
Economic viability is how we support human civilization, no? Economics is literally observing how humans interact and prioritize scarce resources like time and materials. So being not economically viable means it not happening.
Is your goal to reduce global temperatures? If so, it needs to be a sustainable effort. You don't get sustainable effort without economic viability.
If your goal is to dramatically reduce temperatures in the next 5 years, why not dump SiO2 in the atmosphere? That would bring the temperature down pretty fast by reflecting out sunlight in the upper atmosphere.
But if your goal is long-term change, we need an approach that works long-term.
Edit: sorry I forgot to mention your point on coal vs natural gas efficiency, I didn't realize it was not that much gain. I still think it's worth it though, since it's still making progress.
The problem is if you spend the next 5 years building new fossil fuel capabilities, the economic payoff won't be for at least 10 to 15 years more years. We absolutely should not be burning natural gas at that point. Not only would it cause continued havoc on our environment, zero emissions alternatives are already extremely cost competitive in most parts of the world. We should spend the next 5 years, instead, building for the future, not sinking our money into assets that will only cause further harm without providing any real cost savings.
Large scale battery storage, by the way, is already a mostly solved problem, and possible to do at a cost competitive price.
The only reason fossil fuels are "economically viable" is because we're ignoring the cost of the destruction they will bring in the future, and are already causing today. Nuclear is economically viable. We already have lots of nuclear power. Maybe it's a bit less profitable than fossil, maybe if we invested more into it it would be more profitable. Either way it seems entirely viable to me, except of course for all the trillions of dollars being made by extracting and selling fossil fuels to the detriment of all our futures. The only reason alternatives aren't "viable" is because they're priced out by fossil fuels. Take fossil fuels out of the equation and lots of new things become viable.
How is dumping SiO2 into the atmosphere economically viable? How do you make money doing that? If you're thinking that governments should pay private companies to do it, why can't governments simply pay private companies to produce clean power instead? Without having done any actual research on this topic, I suspect you might find that this would be far more "economically viable" than paying for the experimental climate engineering that might not even work, and might have devastating unintended consequences. For example I imagine shitloads of fine sand in the atmosphere would be a problem for aviation, and that's probably far from the only issue with it.
Yes, your proposal would have been an acceptable approach in 1990. Instead, we have been happily increasing our CO₂ emissions every year since then*. No, we no longer want diversity in the power grid; "reasonable" solutions don't move the needle. Even if the entire world would go carbon zero overnight, the global temperature would continue to rise for decades before settling around a new steady state. It's not a matter of holding out a bit longer for tomorrow's magical solution: every piece of fossil fuel burned today makes the planet more unlivable tomorrow.
We are currently on track to reach the "climate-compatible" scenario of the Paris accords (+1.5°C climate increase by 2100) in 2030. We will exceed the "minor change" scenario (+2°C) in 2050. Those targets are already locked in, they are unavoidable because of the delay between CO₂ emissions and their full effect. Maintaining our current levels of emissions gets us to 3.5°C above historic averages in 2100, which is the lower end of the disaster scenario in the Paris accords.
https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/climate-cha...
* except for a short drop in 2020 due to Covid. You may not like it, but that is what full climate change mitigation looks like today because we didn't act sooner.
It's become clear that when society suffers, they demand cheap fuel. There's no way around it. I don't see a path out of this: do you?
How, precisely, does one feel this?
> When do we get to full stop on the combustion of fossil fuels
The most likely answer seems to be "when the last human dies".
Oh no, atomic bombs, we all gonna diiiie!
Why not two volcano eruptions? Or half a solar flare? Oh I see, fear is the point. What do we need to vote for now? Who should we hate? What tax are you going to ram down our throats? Sheez
That is the "joke" here - you can switch to Hurricane Sandys, Earthquakes, Dynamite or Lightning Bolts at the bottom of the widget.
i think hiroshima eqivalents is a somewhat informal energy unit -.-
I mean, if two volcanoes erupted every second, or we were getting hit by a solar flare every two seconds, those would be pretty significant events also.
With that said, this measurement system is very stupid. But do you know what is even stupider? Climate denialism.
I don't deny climate change. I mock media attempts to manipulate sheeple for what they are, cheap shots to scare the shit out of idiots