Technology

“Fuck it, might as well keep doing what I’m doing.”

And that last group is going to be angry when they can't keep doing their stuff when insurance rates go insane so they can't buy houses or cars, or when food prices keep going up even faster than they are now.

It's the parable of office pizza: some people take 1 slice because there are many people to feed.

some people take 3 slices, because there are many people to feed.

And industrialists!

Only a Sith Lord deals in absolutes.

It doesn’t make any difference what got us here in the first place. What matters now is what options are the best from now moving forward.

These scientists seem to say that trying to reverse climate change isn’t the right path forward. I wonder why.

edit: I wonder what makes them think that reversing climate change won’t work.

Someone was so offended by their misreading of my comment that they went through and downvote-bombed every comment in my history.

Two types of people reading this, the cannibals, and the cannibees

Yeah and it was pretty much going once we hit the twenty teens but took awhile to notice. At this point its about slowing things down as much as possible.

I mean, the whole “startups are doing x” is really code for “venture dollars have been made available for entrepreneurs to explore x”. Startups these days are chasing fields which have investment dollars, so this means the rich are starting to invest in the tech a little more earnestly

People won't even rise up for their own sake. gestures in every general direction

Governments will fail. Wherever unpopular "Green" Measures are implemented, the right-wing cockroaches appear, destroying any discourse.

The consequence will be a global war by stupid populists who think that is one solution (which it kind of is,... Dead people won't emit CO2)

We’ll have a big environmental 9/11 moment where a major American city becomes permanently uninhabitable and then there will alot of handwringing about “What could we have done!?” Then we’ll start getting lukewarm serious about it for maybe a few years, but by that point it’s way too late.

There's a point made at the end of the article that most people seems to have missed entirely:

Existing facilities that can filter carbon dioxide out of the air only have the capacity to capture 0.01 million metric tons of CO2 globally today, costing companies like Microsoft as much as $600 per ton of CO2. That’s very little capacity with a very high price tag.

“We cannot squander carbon dioxide removal on offsetting emissions we have the ability to avoid,” study coauthor Gaurav Ganti, a research analyst at Climate Analytics, said in a press release. The priority needs to be preventing pollution now instead of cleaning it up later.

It's obviously a matter of "why not both?", and both the article and the scientists behind the report agree on it. However, a lot of people are betting their eggs on the idea that climate reversal technology will suddenly become a lot more effective and cheaper than it is right now. And sure, that may be the case, or not. For how many years have we heard of flying cars or self-driving autonomous vehicles and predicted that they were just around the corner, at most a few years away, but nada so far? Betting on the invention of a new technology that'll make a very expensive process today way cheaper is a VERY naive and bad approach.

Remember it used to be called global warming, because that's what's actually happening. But morons thought a cold winter day disproved global warming, so it was renamed climate change.
And yes we can reverse global warming, but obviously that won't recreate polar or mountain ice, or lower sea levels quickly, but we can get the temperature down to stop it first, which will also curb the increase in natural disasters, then the restoring of sea levels and ice will take at least decades and probably centuries.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted. Glaciers formed over millennia. If they melt, they’re gone, even if we drop CO2 to pre-industrial levels. The Antarctic ice sheet is millions of years of snow that fell at the rate of a few inches a year and just didn’t melt. If significant portions of that fall off and melt, it’ll be millions of years more for the water it adds to the oceans to cycle back to the ice sheet again. The changes we have made will not be reversed automatically or in many cases at all.

And also irreversible is The decline of biodiversity. Once a species is extinct it won't come back.

if we drastically reduce the human population. Which would not only avoid the issues caused by climate change but also would prevent further increases in pollution and CO2 emissions.

Ignoring the genocide-apologist trend, the pandemic did wonders to reduce global warming.., perhaps start taxing more the companies that force back-to-office when they could clearly keep most of their work force at home?

One difficulty with that is that the way we organize economies currently depends on having a working-age population that is large enough to support the non-working population. When you have far fewer workers than retired people you start having problems. I don't know what the answer to that is, but it's another instance of how any plan to seriously address climate change tends to require deep changes to how we run society. The current systems can't simply be tweaked to make the problem go away.

Yeah. Thanos should simply have made half of all living beings gay. Much less violent and this would probably also make future generations more likely to be gay too. So it‘ll probably have a much more longlasting effect than killing 50% once.