IPCC Concludes Climate Change is Irreversible, Effective Responses Needed

IPCC Concludes Climate Change is Irreversible, Effective Responses Needed(insurancejournal.com)

7 points by couchnaut 12 years ago | 8 comments

Third (and last) try to see if the HN crowd gives a shit

webmaven 12 years ago |

I just know a segment of the media will take this to mean we now don't have to do anything to try and stop further climate change, because change is now inevitable.

ptr 12 years ago | |

Be happy you've got a segment like that. Here, media is quite one-sided.

webmaven 12 years ago | | |

That doesn't make sense... I should be happy that the media will switch from 'climate change isn't happening, so we don't have to do anything' to 'climate change is hapenning, but isn't bad, so we don't have to do anything', and now to 'climate change is bad, but inevitable, so we don't have to do anything'?

cultureulterior 12 years ago |

Irreversible? So even if we built a machine to liquify and store the entire atmosphere in a giant gas bottle, we'd still get greenhouse effects?

couchnaut 12 years ago |

I'm not a climate scientist myself but the consensus seems to be that we're past a lot of tipping points already. Some even go as far as write us off altogether.

In any case the story is huge but the real weird part turned out to be the indifference of people in here. Weird -at least to me- because I thought that HN readers are mainly people that have a wider and deeper understanding of how the world works and thus (I assumed) a greater sensitivity on setting the priorities right. Meaning that probable extinction should rank higher than this or that new framework.

All in all I submitted the story three times (that's the third). This time I got most attention - 7 votes.

I rest my case.

thedrbrian 12 years ago |

What if people stopped having so many kids?

dancunningham 12 years ago | |

They are already doing that, the fertility rate is approaching 1 in many countries, especially developed ones.

Problem isn't kids, it is all the people already born becoming richer and starting to live a western middle class lifestyle.

We just need to make the desirable western middle class lifestyle a low carbon one.

For this it means changing how we produce energy, our agricultural and food system (huge carbon impact) and reducing our overconsuming behaviour. We need to make it desirable to have things that last.

Read "How bad are bananas" for perspective on the relative impacts and most important problems to solve.

We can also incentivise energy and business moving in the right direction by setting a price on carbon (emissions), ideally globally agreed though we can start setting examples nationslly.

Huge reforestation will also go a long way.

We have the solutions we just need to implement them.

If you want to join the Geeklist Corps of Developers in making this low carbon future a reality join #hack4good in September, we'll be hacking against climate change in 30+ cities around the world in the run up to the UN Climate Summit in September.

Let's hack a better world!

Join at http://hack4good.io and share your ideas and thoughts below.

krisdol 12 years ago | |

It'd be better if they stopped having so many cars.