Great read. It's always interesting to see how individuals (John Sununu, Rush Limbaugh) have the capacity to change the arc of history - against prevailing wisdom and agreed facts. Sure, they had massive support from the oil industry, but Europe also has an oil industry and it didn't change Europe's stance on climate change.<p>For a real-time update on climate change, just look at the canary in the cold-mine - Arctic Sea Ice. I have a look daily in summer to see if we will again break the record minimum and when the summer will be ice-free there - it will happen within a decade or two at the most. For Arctic sea ice voyeurs, check this out:
<a href="https://sites.google.com/site/arcticseaicegraphs/" rel="nofollow">https://sites.google.com/site/arcticseaicegraphs/</a>
Ouch. I read this and I am completely confused about what to do with the rest of the time I have left. Should I even bother with my current career in tech, or would it be better to quit it and do something that could have even a slight impact now?<p>These articles are great, but preaching to the choir. What should any of us do? I'm seriously and sincerely asking. Are there any suggestions, from a personal stand point i.e. excluding a completely new economic model and government structure? Is it to drive less and cut out meat? (done) Buy less stuff? Support the right organizations and political candidates?<p>What if one is doing all of those things already, now what? Just sit here and watch our homes go up in flames as the entire place becomes a desert? Some actionable things would be great to have.
I feel like this article underestimates the difficulty of stopping climate change. Would China have remained poor, if in the 1980's a better anti-climate-change treaty had been signed? Would the world have discovered better clean technology? There is a tendency to assume that treaties just solve the problem. I suspect that a different treaty would have failed, just like current negotiations are failing, because of the immense cost of slowing climate change.
How can a dev get into clean-tech today? What are the current problems a software engineer could solve? Please, someone with the knowledge give us a path. I wish there was an HN on clean-tech with emphasis on IT
Why isn't there a billion dollar reward to any person or company that comes up with a cost-effective way to capture carbon from the air and convert back to solid carbon? I'd love to understand the physics (or chemistry? maybe economy?) that prevents this from materialising.
<i>Six weeks after Hansen’s testimony, Exxon’s manager of science and strategy development, Duane LeVine, prepared an internal strategy paper urging the company to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions.” This shortly became the default position of the entire sector. LeVine, it so happened, served as chairman of the global petroleum industry’s Working Group on Global Climate Change, created the same year, which adopted Exxon’s position as its own.</i><p>This is lying, spreading lies, with malicious intent. There was no scientific uncertainty.<p>A proper public policy would be to wipe out the Exxon, and all petrol companies, shareholders. Claw back all profits from all shareholders proportionally going back 40 years, all profits on those profits, and unwind the companies over the next 20 years strictly to public benefit. And if that is still not enough to pay for fixing what has been damaged, the corporate veil should be pierced and make every shareholder of these companies personally liable. And I'm one of those shareholders - I've owned BP directly and indirectly through funds.<p>And it is also quite damning for an unlimited 1st amendment concept that proposes telling lies is a right. Unlimited opinions however unpopular should be protected, but spreading proven falsehoods should not be protected. It should be used as evidence the speaker is culpable, in part, of the ensuing damage. Criminal? Perhaps. Civil? Absolutely.
Okay, the article claims there was a lost opportunity to do something about the problem in the eighties, but reading the actual text, the presented historical facts (which are very interesting and very well presented!), I'm not seeing it. What I'm seeing is that the world was not ready to face the problem back then.<p>And it seems to me the reason why not is economic. At the end of the day, people care more about the roof over their heads than they do about global problems. In the eighties, we didn't have much by way of good substitutes for fossil fuel. So the message people heard was that they would have to accept economic hardship for the sake of the environment. That was not what people wanted to hear.<p>The lesson to learn from this is that we need to address the economic issues alongside the environmental ones. The message needs to not be that you must accept unemployment and poverty. The message needs to be that the task of transitioning the world to renewable energy is doable but enormous - and has the potential to create millions upon millions of jobs, as well as breaking the resource curse that decoupled the interests of the rulers from those of the people. That successfully turning our hands to the new energy industries will bring more prosperity than holding onto the old ones.
It's weird, reading that article reminds me about all of that talk in the 80s. It was a real, undebated (for the most part as far as <i>my</i> bubble went) thing, the question was, "what are we going to do about it?" Ideas were put forth, etc.<p>And then it's like we talked ourselves out of it. Then someone found an old copy of <i>Time</i> magazine at a yard sale, and said, "aha! See, they can't make up their minds!" No, "their minds" were kind of made up, don't let a crap article from a weekly news magazine sway you.<p>I haven't finished the article; I'll do that tonight, because I'm kind of curious in NYT's take on why we changed our minds.
I find it really interesting that this has been published along with all the news/media about how hot it is in Europe/Asia and in the end of the hottest month of the year for the United States.
This is just a silly idea and doesn't fix all the problems, except heat.<p>Could we position a sheet, or a carpet of asteroids in a Lagrange point around the Earth, or as a sort of reverse Dyson sphere?<p>I heard that such a thing could be used to cool down Venus.<p>That doesn't address the ocean acidification, or mass extinctions, etc. Certain high-light plants would also likely perish without intervention. Also, solar energy on Earth would be stifled.
Who is into low tech and (near) zero waste ?<p>How much would you be happy to lose in today's practices ? (I'm curious about what people need/want)
When will we release our trillionth tonne of CO2 in the athmosphere? <a href="http://trillionthtonne.org/" rel="nofollow">http://trillionthtonne.org/</a>
Why is this entry already on page 2 of HN?<p>Seems a bit fast given the popularity and the fact that it was posted 2 hours ago (also, compared to those that are present on p1)<p>--
edit: we're now on page 3 just 30 minutes after my comment.