You're seriously overestimating Americans, circa 1982. We were still fighting about whether cigarette smoke causes cancer (correlation is not causation!) and we had a president who claimed that trees pollute the environment more than cars do (who went on to be reelected). Politically influential Christian public figures rationalized how the deadly sin of greed should be considered a virtue while also blathering about how HIV was a manifestation of God's wrath toward homosexuals. And everyone kind of assumed our odds of surviving the cold war weren't great anyway, so you want to worry about something about temperature increasing, and also didn't you say there was going to be an ice age or something, blah blah blah?
It's a minor miracle that we managed to cease the destruction of the ozone layer given the level of stupidity we were operating at. A person aware of current events and capable of making analogies might question how much progress we've truly made, but that's a separate topic.
Circa 1982? Some months ago, the NYTimes did a story on Coke/Pepse/Nestle sugar drink/food causing simultaneous systemic obesity and malnutrition in Central/South America. Company leadership was quoted as expressing surprise at this "unexpected" impact. TPP had ISDS provisions to permit companies to sue governments to recover profits lost to health policies. And so it goes. Today.
I'm not sure you can say that we ceased destruction of the Ozone layer. Certainly slowed, and in some cases ozone is increasing but not universally. Ozone levels in the upper levels have been slowly increasing, but the lower levels are still being depleted and there is evidence of an increase of short-lived ozone depleting substances.
If you want change you have to convince the customers or force change through government.
> Clifton C. Garvin Jr. - CEO
> Served on the boards of directors of Georgia Pacific, Chevron, Citicorp, Citibank, Johnson and Johnson, J.C. Penney, PepsiCo, Inc, Sperry Corporation, and TRW Inc.
> 1982 Exxon celebrates 100 years since the formation of the Standard Oil Trust in 1882. In its first 100 years, the company evolved from a domestic refiner and distributor of kerosene to a large multinational corporation, involved at every level of oil and gas exploration, production, refining and marketing, and petrochemicals manufacturing.
> 'There is no wad of cash like this anywhere on earth,' said Jack Blum, a Washington energy lawyer and former Senate investigator. 'This is a wad of cash to break banks, even governments.'
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/09/business/the-singular-pow...
This isn't about the environment.
There is a part of the brain that is responsible for integrating events into a continuous narrative. That part of the brain is why we perceive ourselves as an integral being and not a set of parts, but that part is also severely biased in healthy humans, biased to paint ourselves as kinder, more altruistic, more intelligent, while also rewriting the motivation we cite for our past actions, so as to put ourselves in the best possible light.
But no, there's nothing special about those Exxon researches, that's just normal human behavior.
And to go further, acting against ones own interest requires going over a strong emotion. The body let's you know that you shouldn't be doing something through a gut feeling. Repeatedly ignoring or repressing those emotions is not healthy for the nervous system, and much has been written on this subject.
LE: And regarding claims that stopping global warming was in their own interest back in the 1980s, there's the hyperbolic discounting effect (among other things).
This and other statements in your comment are assumptions rather than facts.Have you considered the possibility that your view of human nature is overly reductive?
I'll keep posting about it untill this hysteria dies, though I fear that given social pressures regarding anything representing "denial" will keep it alive indefinitely. No one knew about an incoming crisis in the 80s. People were aware about the possibility of climate change in the 80s. It took 30 years of data collection, research, and computational modeling on increasingly modern hardware, which allows for exponentially larger and more precise models, before we had amassed enough evidence in a totally model driven field to conclude that we may be terraforming on the scale of 100 years.
Let's correct two of these. Of course there are empirical observations related to climate. There is a definition of 54 "essential climate variables" (ECVs), see [1]. One of these is greenhouse gases [2]. At the bottom of the link, you can see observing programs for CO2 and CH4, both in situ and satellite.
These are well-measured variables, with well-characterized error bars, and models are tested against these observations. For instance, the ~400 ppm CO2 ECV is measured to within 1ppm quite regularly and has been for many years. This is how we improve the models. The same kind of monitoring/model-improvement feedback loop is in place for almost all of the ECVs, including clouds and sea surface properties like temperature and salinity.
Another correction, relating to "no one knew" about a future crisis in the 1980s. Here is a paper [3] from James Hansen in Science magazine, in 1981, that clearly warns of crisis-level consequences. From the abstract -- In the 21st century, we will see "creation of drought-prone regions in North America and central Asia, erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage." For whatever it's worth, this appeared on the NYTimes front page in 1981.
That's just one publication. Throughout the 1980s there were broad-based studies, mandated by Congress, that indicated the scope of the problem. See [4], from 1983.
[1] https://gcos.wmo.int/en/essential-climate-variables
[2] https://ane4bf-datap1.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/wmod8_gcos/...
[3] https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04600x.html
[4] https://www.nap.edu/catalog/18714/changing-climate-report-of...
You can use "geoengineering" if you want a sarcastic term similar to how rocket people use "rapid unplanned disassembly" instead of "crash".
--
My 4th grade teacher (1978) was brain washing us into being tree huggers. Conserve water while brushing our teeth was "magic". Turn down the heat. Recycle. Etc.
I recall hippie flavored propaganda in the school library asking if we wanted Earth to become a Red Planet (industrial) a Green Planet (farming) or Blue Planet (natural ecosystems), or some combination.
My (much older) cousin was a physicist studying submarine acoustics. He's always known, patiently explained the whatnots to us younger skeptics.
I worked at a civil engineering firm while still in high school (1980s). All the adults seemed to know what was happening, even if we didn't yet know all the causes. I vividly remember my boss (from Canada) telling me his childhood neighborhood lake was no longer safe to play hockey on.
I volunteered thru the 1990s at an org trying to save the PNW salmon. The staff scientists knew our local snow packs were shrinking. (Need the melt for salmon runs.) Now our mountains are bare most of the year, of course. Terrifying.
Maybe because I read a lot of sci-fi, I've always "known". Most memorable to me have been John Brunner's Shockwave Rider, The Sheep Look Up, and Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia. But of course, post-apocalyptic is a popular storyline, so there have been zillions others.
--
PS, for the down voter(s), one of the minor plot lines from the TV show Dallas was Bobby Ewing's renewable energy efforts, in opposition to older brother JR Ewing's doubling down on carbon. In debating with Bobby in front of Daddy Ewing, JR's money quote was "We've been running out of oil since the first oil well." So, ya, climate change was part of the (most) popular culture too.
No.
Science will not save us. God will not save us. It will not be okay. And unless you're currently on your deathbed, you will feel the effects of climate change. You will be fucked.
I suspect only drastic, world wide, almost revolutionary political change could effectively halt the massive carbon generating machine that is human industry. Except the problem with massive revolutions is that they tend to cause conflict, which tends to increase emissions (tanks don't exactly run on solar).
Man, I'm pretty damn close to joining a doomsday cult.
I think the far bigger problem will be that it won't really be that bad for the next 50 years, leading to complacency, and we will hit the point of no return before we really feel much impact in the richer western countries.
The 18 month stat is a mashup of two totally different deadlines. First, that we need strong emissions commitments by 2020, which is not a meteorological deadline but a political one: UN meeting schedules and the Paris Agreement call for strengthened emissions plans by 2020, so failing to act by then implies an overall lack of political will. Second, the IPCC report that CO2 emissions need to peak by 2020 to keep warming below 1.5 C by 2100. That's important and hard to reach, but "peak" is not "become net negative" and >1.5C is not "doomed".
The 12 year stat is basically backwards - confusing an emissions deadline with a temperature peak. The IPCC finding is that we'll reach 1.5 C of total post-1975 warming between 2030 and 2050, and that major emissions cuts by 2030 (and net-zero by 2050) could limit warming to 1.5C. The worst case described was 3C by 2100, not 2030, and harms arriving some time after their "locked in" warming thresholds.
None of that means it's not a serious problem, or that rapid action isn't needed, but I'm really disturbed to see people predicting death and doom for what are actually emissions deadlines. It seems like an attempt to trick people into acting fast, but action that fast isn't actually possible. I think that instead we're going to get to the 2020s and be hearing "you said the world would end but things are still basically ok, you're full of shit, clearly we don't need to keep taking action".
This isn't necessarily validated by hard scientific evidence, but I have a suspicion that climate change is exacerbating conflict in the middle east. For one, heat is a known catalyst for violence. But also, as desertification takes effect, resources become constrained, creating conflict.
The US has a refugee crisis stemming directly from the loss of arable land in Central America, and Europe is suffering from one as a result of the a massive drought and the Arab Spring hitting Syria.
Effects of emissions take about 20-30 years to be seen, so today’s emissions are already locked in to be felt mid-century. That should help put the 1 degree C rise you mentioned in proper context.
So, yes, things are that gloomy. We need immediate, global efforts in a war-like sense to change our entire energy sector if we are to avert the worst of it, and of course we’re only headed faster and more headstrong in the opposite direction. It’s not incorrect to say that we’re most likely completely fucked, and that Gen Z will be the last generation to experience a peaceful planet.
We have hit the point of no return. The only options available to us right now are how to minimize the inevitable effects.
I don't think we can fix this problem.
The best possible solution, at this point, is to try to build "habitats" for humans to survive in for as long as it takes for the ecosystem to reboot.
That obviously won't work for long term since historically, after a mass extinction, it takes about 50 million years for a new diverse ecosystem to get established.
We'll have to evolve as a species, both biologically and socially, in order to survive the extremes and lack of resources.
The question is if we can accomplish that evolution, even with the benefits of science, within time. Do we have 100 years? 200 years? 500 years? Even if we can survive in a mad-max style dystopia for 200 years, would we even have the ability to manufacture multi-generation shelters at that point? If we manufacture them now, would people stay in them even when the ecosystem hasn't yet collapsed?
How long can we live in an underground bubble before it falls apart and we're thrown into a world that's not hospitable for regular human life anymore? Can we survive as a species with a population collapse from almost 8 billion to a few dozen million?
The only "magic bullet" I can see saving us is if someone figures out cheap and accessible fusion energy. Nearly unlimited cheap energy could power a lot of otherwise impossible "moon shot" projects to try to save our species.
Anyone who generally participates in the modern lifestyle that most of us share is one way or another contributing to the problem. Your passion is misplaced - wasted, even - unless you yourself are making drastic changes to how you live.
On a serious note, I hear you and agree with you to a certain extent.
Indulge me for a moment, in long run most likely universe will end up in heat death. So yes, we are screwed. But right now, it's time for action. We need to think of engineering solutions.
There are 2 key problems here:
1. amount of CO2 in atmosphere
2. heat added by sun every day.
Fix any one of them and we stand a chance. There are ways of fixing it from accelerating photosynthesis (chemically or by optimizing plant growth by controlling env. it's growing in etc.) or having a sun shade at L1 or just literally planting more trees.
I am assuming you are a techie, so you are well equipped with tools and you are certainly not happy, so you have a motivation.
We may not be able to solve it perfectly we can certainly make a huge dent.
Here's an alternative approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-market_environmentalism
> Free-market environmentalists therefore argue that the best way to protect the environment is to clarify and protect property rights. This allows parties to negotiate improvements in environmental quality.
I would not hold my breath waiting for ExxonMobil, the Saudi Royal family, or any other powerful entity to give up property rights. This outcome is worse for them than turning the planet into slag.
> Owners face a strong incentive to take care of and protect their property. They must decide how much to use today and how much to use tomorrow. Everybody is trying to grow value. Corporate value and share price is based on their anticipated future profits. Owners with the possibility of transferring their property, either to an heir or through sale want their property to grow in value. Property rights encourage conservation and defend resources against depletion, since there is a strong incentive to maximize the value of the resource for the future.
Just like a CEO would never risk the long term sustainability of the company for fat short term bonus. /s
If humans were rational and were maximizing for future value we wouldn't be in this position.
It's easy to be skeptical but there are plenty of rational Christians who believe humans are made in the image of God, and while humans are inherently sinful (think the greed that plays a role in accelerating climate change), this brings them further from God. They believe that the closest to God you can be is to be essentially humanitarian. Humanitarians by definition would put aside personal gain to help their fellow humans (help reduce/eliminate climate change). Also that since the earth was given to us a gift, it is our responsibility to be good stewards.
Not all religious people think this way, but there does seem to be a sizable contingent who do.
It's a near impossible battle to fight, but that doesn't make it ok to give up. You eat an elephant by taking one bite at a time (and trying to convince other people how good elephant meat tastes)
^[1] Arguably Snowpiercer but people still interpret the ending in an optimistic fashion
At what point do we learn the lesson that’s deeply embedded in our collective consciousness (Noah’s Ark, the ant and the grasshopper) and decide that modern states are not capable of dealing with the problem, assuming that climate change is going to result in serious disruption, and look to make contingency plans for ourselves and our families?
William Nordhaus' Nobel prize winning proposal would make that easier: https://issues.org/climate-clubs-to-overcome-free-riding/
You assume that it will require power (read: coercion & violence) in order to deal with climate change.
For a few hundred years we've had an ever-growing state in most places in the world, reaching levels of power undreamed of by rulers of the past. Yet climate problems persist with no sign of stopping. Relying on the current political order will not result in anything different. All nations exist in a state of anarchy with respect to one another.
So we're at a crossroads: do we empower global government to control the entire population, in order to address climate problems? Or do we admit that government cannot solve the problem and look to more imaginative -- and less violent -- solutions?
I for one don't expect that global government will work out quite like its proponents envision. Is anyone fit to be King of the Earth?
Yes, even when it's a celebrity or elected official, we should just utterly ignore them.
Whenever I hear about a celebrity breakup like it's actual news I shudder.
Anecdotally, the hn community does have an obvious majority on most issues, including this one, but is still good about allowing dissenting opinions to be heard, because it is necessary for the mission of satisfying intellectual curiosity.
>Because you people
One of the worst ways you can start a discussion if you actually want people to listen to you but ok. You people being those that trust and listen to scientists and data over politicians and pop culture figures with no scientific training or background? If anything, it is climate change deniers that treat it like a religion, blindly believing in something.
> Some things are true, some things aren't. Your 'climate change nightmare' of what might happen in 40 years is the daily reality for billions of people
Correct, and climate change is true and a daily reality for everyone living on earth.
>And just because someone doesn't buy into the same bs you do, does not make them a troll
He never said it did, he simply stated that there are a large number of trolls online that deny climate change exists which is also true
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2017/10/24/yes-the-u-s-...
Everyone knows China and India lead GHG growth by country, and they have no real interest in increasing the costs for their poorest and most vulnerable, and neither does the West (see "yellow jacket protests"). Increasing energy costs under the justification of protecting the poorest in the world from environmental catastrophe, which only leads to highers costs to those very same people is very sordid "logic." It's almost a thought-crime situation.
I heard a pundit on NPR this morning point to flooding in the midwest this spring as evidence of GCC, despite the problem going back 200 years[0]. Of course, addressed by our benevolent government with 12 separate Flood Control Acts[1], costing billions of dollars. It started, coincidentally, in 1917 (i.e. Lenin's Russian Revolution).
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1844 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1881 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mississippi_Flood_of_192...
> Exxon internal researchers knew about the incoming crisis since 1982.
> ...they started sponsoring anti climate change material producing organizations and supporting its dissemination. A wildly succesful project that has probably paid itself back with a large factor.
So yeah, find a way for lowering emissions to create money and power and then .aybe there would be the motivation to do so.
"You dont want to give No-Strings-Attached money to China to help the environment? You must be a Anti-Science Denier!"
I have read 2007 IPPC report and evidence of the above two claims is burried under mountains of fear mongering and dire predictions about the consequences of the claims being correct. The actual evidence is barely addressed and comes down to trusting a handful of computer models that only a few dozen people understand.
Recent warming amount and rate is not unusual for the earth's recent pre-human past.
When you add to this the myriad of political causes that have latched on to anthropogenic hypothesis being true, its pretty reasonable that informed individual is sketical. Especially with authoritarians calling for violence and censorship against"climate deniers".
I worry that poor countries like my home country, which has not much resource to migrate people in mass, will face serious issues in the near future. Having said that, I also believe in the resilience of the people there. They have been through military dictatorship and whatnot, so I have faith that they will survive albeit with huge cost of lives and property...
Climate change will disturb world's political and economic systems, and I hope (and kind of believe) that the humanity can survive through this ordeal. In my honest opinion, it's too late to stop climate change, and the best we can do is to do our individual parts to mitigate the effects and come up with ways to cope with it the best we can.
Climate change is not a binary thing, it's a process. We absolutely still have the opportunity to stop it from getting much much worse. So let's not give up and fight on that front as well!
I think that is a very hard marketing battle to win since the idea of climate change to many people just means warmer temperatures.
I think a lot of people in colder climates feel they have little to lose. The actual massive scale effect is extremely difficult to comprehend, even after watching excellent documentaries. I think it is only something most voting citizens will care about when it effects them personally & by then it would be far to late.
* Based on living in the Midwest
- Edit - Giving this more thought I wonder if these articles need to be less about temperature changes & reflect more about increases of extreme weather & effects on farms.
But yes, people have been indoctrinated in associating warmth and heat with "good". I trace it back to the post-WW2 era, with the development of paid holidays and tourism in the sun. Before that, the part of population who could afford holidays would either go to spa resorts in the mountains or to the North Atlantic shores; i.e. they would go to places which were cooler than the places they usually lived, not to places that are hotter than those places where they lived which are already hot in in summertime.
From the 60's to the 80's, sun was promoted as an extremely positive value. The more sun you could get, the healthier you would be. You'd have to get more and more tanned.
Previously, people protected themselves from the sun. Hat, scarfs, long sleeves were worn. Shades were looked after, and large trees were planted along the roads and most squares. Houses (also for practical reasons) had smaller windows, unlike the fad of large window bays which make the room behind unbearable as soon as the sun shows up.
There has been lately a little bit of back-pedalling on a few of those aspects, but the main principle ("sun, heat, and light are good for you") has not changed much and remain quite deeply ingrained in most people.
I find it infuriating that in 2019, TV and weather forecast anchors still always present long streaks of hot, dry and cloudless days as a "beautiful weather" for which we should rejoice. It doesn't matter if the main news theme of the previous days has been climate change/warming, or the drought hitting farmers, nope, 24 h later they use the same wording again. I mean, they could finish their sentence with "a beautiful weather for those who fancy this or that activity", that would be fine, but they never do: in their mind it is must be good and welcome for everyone. At the same time, as a fair scale gardener I see half of my crops die from the drought or the heatwave, because it has rained only once in 8 weeks, despite the fact that I am supposed to live in one of the chamber pots[1] of my country... :-(
I think it indicates a huge cultural inertia, even though this culture was only (IMO) recently born, in the second half of the XXth century. Despite the awareness which has been rising in the last 15 years, it hasn't yet translated into the common mental model.
--------
[1]: not sure how well it translates in English: a place where it rains very often.
Yes
>Summers in the Midwest tend to be humid and hot. Temperatures in the 80s and 90s are common, and in many areas of the region, the temperature rises to triple digits at least a few times each summer.
>https://traveltips.usatoday.com/typical-climate-midwestern-u...
The thought is it will translate to less cold winters. I'm not arguing that this is great logic, just pointing out the common thoughts I overhear.
Unchecked climate change could mean that the weather conditions hurting farmers this year will become increasingly common and result in higher costs for the federal government, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report.
The report, issued by the USDA’s Economic Research Service, found that if greenhouse gases are allowed to continue to increase, U.S. production of corn and soybeans—which are more susceptible to extreme heat during growing season—could decline as much as 80% in the next 60 years.
This is a problem. The US has some of the most fertile growing regions in the world and if we stop exporting cheap grain there will be global hunger and strife.
Shits about to get real yo.
He who controls the Spice controls the Universe.
In the Twin Cities, for instance, the altered jet stream has greatly increased both colder-than-usual and hotter-than-usual patterns that stick around for longer. So although our average increase looks low, for instance this summer espeially we are having unusually hot streaks followed by unusually cold streaks (and the winters have been very bad over the past several years, with two 'polar vortex' years due to arctic air masses displacing on us, which is greatly impacted by climate change and arctic warming).
TL;DR I'd be very interested to look at the data shifts in temperature more deeply and see which areas are impacted by both hotter AND colder weather, which wouldn't show up in an examination of averages.
The system has become completely unstable to the point where weather models no longer seem to be able to output accurate results.
Filed under believe but cannot prove: Agriculture interrupted the background warming & cooling cycle.
If humanity is to survive climate crisis, we'll need to actively manage the entire carbon cycle. aka Garden Earth.
This I agree with.
In all this turmoil and disappointment that we screwed up our ecosystem, regardless of whoever is at fault, it's about time we step up to evolve into a specie which can control their home planet's climate to a large extent.
I may be day dreaming but I see controlling climate as next progression in our evolution. And when I say "controlling climate", I don't mean it at expense of arresting development or hoping that people will just stop indulging themselves etc.
1. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/08/02/english-sparklin...
2. https://www.france24.com/en/20180914-down-earth-climate-chan...
Wineries are moving up into Oregon and Washington now, following the climate [1]. It takes ~7 years for the grapes to get to a point where you can make wine out of them, hence moving up there now and planting.
This climate crisis is going to ruin Napa and already kinda is. ~81% of the grapes can't manage in the heat by 2080 [2], that's 4 of every 5 vines just dying in the sun. Meanwhile, the Napa Valley Vinters Association's head is firmly in the sand [3] and remains steadfastly confused that climate is weather.
[0] https://vhs-nvusd-ca.schoolloop.com/
[1] https://apnews.com/2a2da3558a1c47f6a2aeec8d409e47c2
[2] https://www.climatehotmap.org/global-warming-locations/napa-...
Going by evolutionary theory, that means the more our total population increases the smaller average human body size must shrink, so we would consume less input resources and produce less waste individually. Same reason why giant dinosaurs went extinct yet little cockroaches survived. Those T-Rex'es required massive calories consumption to sustain themselves, yet there was no longer enough resources in the environment to fuel them.
The problem is for any of those biological changes to take place and for human to evolve (assuming the evolutionary theory is true), that process will be a slow and gradual one, likely to take hundred thousands or even millions of years. Climate change certainly doesn't operate within even a remotely similar time frame. Once it hits, resources will become scarce so in the worst case if we cannot stop climate change, the only possible solution is to practice reducing average consumption level to minimum, or to forecast optimal numbers of the world's total population that can still be accommodated by the Earth at each level of damage produced by climate change, then find a way to relentlessly control that number to keep it within limit.
I sincerely hope we will never have to come to that scenario as countries which own nuclear power will possess massive advantages over others.
But the areas of the world now with less population growth (such as the US) also consume much more resources than the areas with higher population growth. So resource consumption is a big problem. But I think it's not helpful to frame it as a "population" problem, as we expect the population to level off.
The show made a big deal about how communist secrecy and denial obstructed the solution, made the problem worse, and even allowed it to happen in the first place. "A nuclear disaster cannot occur in the Soviet Union".
But when I think about how we're reacting to climate change, it really seems like we're pretending the problem doesn't exist the same way they did, but without the corresponding succeed-at-all-costs extreme problem solving.
