10 ms·

Like the boiled frog, perhaps we have not even realized that we are already cooked/doomed.

by srgpqt 3y ago

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
I don't know, I feel like it's already pretty obvious that we're "cooked/doomed", with some caveats: 1. Even in the worst case I haven't seen any level-headed scientists argue that the Earth will be uninhabitable a la Venus. We'll get a hotter planner, sea levels will rise considerably inundating coastal areas, the current anthropocene extinction event will accelerate, storms will be a lot more intense, etc. Obviously a major set of problems, but I think it's important to be specific about what those problems will be as opposed to "we'll all be dead". 2. Whenever someone even remotely argues that we'll be able to stick to some reasonable emissions targets I like to show this graph, https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions#global-co2-emissions-from-fossil-fuels-global-co2-emissions-from-fossil-fuels https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions#global-co2-emission.... That is, it's good news that global emissions have largely stabilized over the past decade, but we're still pumping out over 35 billion tons of carbon every year. We need to find a way, somehow, to bring that to near 0, and while tech may get us there eventually I don't see that happening in my lifetime (I'm middle aged).
- snarf21 3y ago
  Agreed .. A lot of people will die as places become uninhabitable for a very very long time .. Access to clean water will become a major issue and the poor will lose (even more than they already are) .. Humans are a greedy species and this planet just can't support 8B+ (and counting of us) .. I don't know what it can support but we'll soon find out .. We are still decades away from near zero fossil fuels globally and yet we are still growing crops in the desert and watering it so people can have fun hitting a white ball .. Even if we can get to near 100% wind/solar/battery, we'll be busy polluting anything and everything with rare earth minerals as we churn through batteries like candy .. I don't see life being very fun in 50 years, even for the richest people
  - t0bia_s 3y ago
    - "Humans are a greedy species and this planet..." Propaganda of collective guilt is indeed strong last decade. Just not let them divide society. We have enough experience with that from history.
  - ericd 3y ago
    On your last point, lithium ion battery packs are supposedly extremely recyclable, and it’s cheaper to recycle them than to make a new one, so it seems likely that they will be recycled.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      They'll have to be, because there isn't enough lithium on the planet (that we know of) to meet the expected demand.
  - oceanplexian 3y ago
    > Humans are a greedy species and this planet just can't support 8B+ This seems like a pretty bold statement. Let’s assume the only constraints on population are energy, water, and space. If you do a back of the napkin calculation on much Uranium exists on Earth, how much power we could produce by fissioning it, then how much water is in the oceans, and then assume everything else is an engineering problem? I think the number wouldn’t be 8 Billion, but much more. That’s not even getting into mining asteroids, space-based energy, vertical hydroponics, living underground or in the oceans. I think the limits could be extraordinarily high
    - lovich 3y ago
      It’s a political problem first. You can’t engineer your way out of a problem when most of the people holding power or the resources needed decide to not spend the time or money because they think it’ll affect others and not them
      - valval 3y ago
        We’re spending an enormous amount of money on climate alarmism and various apocalyptic cults right now. Are we living a different reality?
- jlarocco 3y ago
  It seems pretty optimistic to say it's "stabilized over the past decade". If I'm reading correctly, between 2011 and 2021 (the last year in the graph) there was an increase of 5 billion tons, and that was certainly helped by the big drop during the pandemic...
- mullingitover 3y ago
  The vast majority of human history has been the Stone Age. It’s the stable state. What’s doomed is this temporary blip that has resulted from the explosion of free energy. The human species will survive and will simply go back to the Stone Age and stay there another million years, this time without the risk of stumbling onto vast amounts of easy, free, dangerous carbon-based energy.
  - valval 3y ago
    HN, where you’ll find the greatest fortune tellers.
  - jmclnx 3y ago
    In a way, I can agree with this. But I doubt it will be a "stone age". I tend to think it will be very similar to a cancelled SYFY Show called "Incorporated". It is too bad it was not allowed to continue, but how the main star was written I think it doomed it. To me, if born outside the privileged caste, you would have no hope.
    - mullingitover 3y ago
      The post apocalyptic-type civilization can only last so long, though. I base my hypothesis on the Bronze Age collapse, where a bunch of fairly complex civilizations all went back to approximately the Stone Age in the span of 50 years or so. Advanced civilizations live on supply chains and are (as was demonstrated by the pandemic) actually pretty brittle. So I think the path back home to the Stone Age will go, as Hemingway said, “gradually, then suddenly.”
      - selimthegrim 3y ago
        The Mayan collapse might also be instructive.
- hedgehog 3y ago
  Depending what all the other effects you describe do to food production and communicable disease spread "we'll all be dead" may be only a moderate exaggeration of the effect over say a century or two.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    That's my point, without more information that doesn't make sense: 1. I don't doubt disruption in global food production will likely cause some famines, but again, plenty of places will still be able to grow food, and in fact many places will open up to food production. 2. I don't see how any increase in communicable disease spread leads to anything close to "we'll all be dead". Yes, lots of people will die due to the impacts of global warming, but nothing I've seen says there is any reason to think it will be a species ending effect.
    - hedgehog 3y ago
      As we are under more pressure due to all the factors you pointed out the odds that we are able to avoid spread of a highly contagious virus with a higher fatality rate than COVID (closer to say MERS) or a series of big famines (say 1% of global population) start to look uncomfortably lower than 100%.
WeylandYutani 3y ago
Nah we realise. But there's nothing that you can do about it. Reminds me of Dutch Jews in WW2 who tried to live a normal life until the police came to collect them.
pastor_bob 3y ago
[flagged]
- netsharc 3y ago
  And if your area's electricity grid goes down? Even France had a problem with keeping their nuclear power plant running last year, the rivers didn't have enough water for cooling, and they weren't allowed to dump overly heated water because it would hurt the environment, so the only solution was to reduce production...
paganel 3y ago
We weren't cooked/doomed for about two years recently. Sometimes I miss the pandemic and those two years only because that apocalypse at least had an end in sight when it came to the "educated" public's reaction to it, this climate thing is the new year 1000 hysteria [1], it's just unfortunate that it will spread over the next decades. [1] https://www.bu.edu/history/files/2011/10/11.Fear-of-an-Apocalyptic-Year-1000-Speculum.pdf https://www.bu.edu/history/files/2011/10/11.Fear-of-an-Apoca...
- anon25783 3y ago
  The ten hottest summers on record happened in the last fifteen years. The number one hottest is this summer we're experiencing right now. And you call this "hysteria"?
  - paganel 3y ago
    Like I said, those stats had been forgotten about between 2020-2022, when the discourse was about another type of “new normal”, but one related to public health. Yes, it’s the very definition of apocalyptic hysteria.
    - anon25783 3y ago
      Presently in Nebraska we are bracing for a heat index of 117°F, a situation with no precedent here in 2020, '21, or '22. I contend that what you describe as "apocalyptic hysteria" is the only reasonable and appropriate response to such a morbidly inhospitable climactic state of affairs. It's no more "hysterical" than screaming and banging on the windows when trapped in a hot car with no way out.

Like the boiled frog, perhaps we have not even realized that we are already cooked/doomed.

by srgpqt 3y ago

Like the boiled frog, perhaps we have not even realized that we are already cooked/doomed.

I don't know, I feel like it's already pretty obvious that we're "cooked/doomed", with some caveats: 1. Even in the worst case I haven't seen any level-headed scientists argue that the Earth will be uninhabitable a la Venus. We'll get a hotter planner, sea levels will rise considerably inundating coastal areas, the current anthropocene extinction event will accelerate, storms will be a lot more intense, etc. Obviously a major set of problems, but I think it's important to be specific about what those problems will be as opposed to "we'll all be dead". 2. Whenever someone even remotely argues that we'll be able to stick to some reasonable emissions targets I like to show this graph, https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions#global-co2-emissions-from-fossil-fuels-global-co2-emissions-from-fossil-fuels https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions#global-co2-emission.... That is, it's good news that global emissions have largely stabilized over the past decade, but we're still pumping out over 35 billion tons of carbon every year. We need to find a way, somehow, to bring that to near 0, and while tech may get us there eventually I don't see that happening in my lifetime (I'm middle aged).

snarf21 3y ago
Agreed .. A lot of people will die as places become uninhabitable for a very very long time .. Access to clean water will become a major issue and the poor will lose (even more than they already are) .. Humans are a greedy species and this planet just can't support 8B+ (and counting of us) .. I don't know what it can support but we'll soon find out .. We are still decades away from near zero fossil fuels globally and yet we are still growing crops in the desert and watering it so people can have fun hitting a white ball .. Even if we can get to near 100% wind/solar/battery, we'll be busy polluting anything and everything with rare earth minerals as we churn through batteries like candy .. I don't see life being very fun in 50 years, even for the richest people
- t0bia_s 3y ago
  - "Humans are a greedy species and this planet..." Propaganda of collective guilt is indeed strong last decade. Just not let them divide society. We have enough experience with that from history.
- ericd 3y ago
  On your last point, lithium ion battery packs are supposedly extremely recyclable, and it’s cheaper to recycle them than to make a new one, so it seems likely that they will be recycled.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    They'll have to be, because there isn't enough lithium on the planet (that we know of) to meet the expected demand.
- oceanplexian 3y ago
  > Humans are a greedy species and this planet just can't support 8B+ This seems like a pretty bold statement. Let’s assume the only constraints on population are energy, water, and space. If you do a back of the napkin calculation on much Uranium exists on Earth, how much power we could produce by fissioning it, then how much water is in the oceans, and then assume everything else is an engineering problem? I think the number wouldn’t be 8 Billion, but much more. That’s not even getting into mining asteroids, space-based energy, vertical hydroponics, living underground or in the oceans. I think the limits could be extraordinarily high
  - lovich 3y ago
    It’s a political problem first. You can’t engineer your way out of a problem when most of the people holding power or the resources needed decide to not spend the time or money because they think it’ll affect others and not them
    - valval 3y ago
      We’re spending an enormous amount of money on climate alarmism and various apocalyptic cults right now. Are we living a different reality?
jlarocco 3y ago
It seems pretty optimistic to say it's "stabilized over the past decade". If I'm reading correctly, between 2011 and 2021 (the last year in the graph) there was an increase of 5 billion tons, and that was certainly helped by the big drop during the pandemic...
mullingitover 3y ago
The vast majority of human history has been the Stone Age. It’s the stable state. What’s doomed is this temporary blip that has resulted from the explosion of free energy. The human species will survive and will simply go back to the Stone Age and stay there another million years, this time without the risk of stumbling onto vast amounts of easy, free, dangerous carbon-based energy.
- valval 3y ago
  HN, where you’ll find the greatest fortune tellers.
- jmclnx 3y ago
  In a way, I can agree with this. But I doubt it will be a "stone age". I tend to think it will be very similar to a cancelled SYFY Show called "Incorporated". It is too bad it was not allowed to continue, but how the main star was written I think it doomed it. To me, if born outside the privileged caste, you would have no hope.
  - mullingitover 3y ago
    The post apocalyptic-type civilization can only last so long, though. I base my hypothesis on the Bronze Age collapse, where a bunch of fairly complex civilizations all went back to approximately the Stone Age in the span of 50 years or so. Advanced civilizations live on supply chains and are (as was demonstrated by the pandemic) actually pretty brittle. So I think the path back home to the Stone Age will go, as Hemingway said, “gradually, then suddenly.”
    - selimthegrim 3y ago
      The Mayan collapse might also be instructive.
hedgehog 3y ago
Depending what all the other effects you describe do to food production and communicable disease spread "we'll all be dead" may be only a moderate exaggeration of the effect over say a century or two.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  That's my point, without more information that doesn't make sense: 1. I don't doubt disruption in global food production will likely cause some famines, but again, plenty of places will still be able to grow food, and in fact many places will open up to food production. 2. I don't see how any increase in communicable disease spread leads to anything close to "we'll all be dead". Yes, lots of people will die due to the impacts of global warming, but nothing I've seen says there is any reason to think it will be a species ending effect.
  - hedgehog 3y ago
    As we are under more pressure due to all the factors you pointed out the odds that we are able to avoid spread of a highly contagious virus with a higher fatality rate than COVID (closer to say MERS) or a series of big famines (say 1% of global population) start to look uncomfortably lower than 100%.

WeylandYutani 3y ago

Nah we realise. But there's nothing that you can do about it. Reminds me of Dutch Jews in WW2 who tried to live a normal life until the police came to collect them.

pastor_bob 3y ago

[flagged]

netsharc 3y ago
And if your area's electricity grid goes down? Even France had a problem with keeping their nuclear power plant running last year, the rivers didn't have enough water for cooling, and they weren't allowed to dump overly heated water because it would hurt the environment, so the only solution was to reduce production...

paganel 3y ago

We weren't cooked/doomed for about two years recently. Sometimes I miss the pandemic and those two years only because that apocalypse at least had an end in sight when it came to the "educated" public's reaction to it, this climate thing is the new year 1000 hysteria [1], it's just unfortunate that it will spread over the next decades. [1] https://www.bu.edu/history/files/2011/10/11.Fear-of-an-Apocalyptic-Year-1000-Speculum.pdf https://www.bu.edu/history/files/2011/10/11.Fear-of-an-Apoca...

anon25783 3y ago
The ten hottest summers on record happened in the last fifteen years. The number one hottest is this summer we're experiencing right now. And you call this "hysteria"?
- paganel 3y ago
  Like I said, those stats had been forgotten about between 2020-2022, when the discourse was about another type of “new normal”, but one related to public health. Yes, it’s the very definition of apocalyptic hysteria.
  - anon25783 3y ago
    Presently in Nebraska we are bracing for a heat index of 117°F, a situation with no precedent here in 2020, '21, or '22. I contend that what you describe as "apocalyptic hysteria" is the only reasonable and appropriate response to such a morbidly inhospitable climactic state of affairs. It's no more "hysterical" than screaming and banging on the windows when trapped in a hot car with no way out.