Will it be too late to save everyone on Earth from climate change?

[zurew]

2 hours ago, Bobby_2021 said:

What's the status of hydrogen powered cars? I thought it was impossible. 

You can build that  by using Electrolysis :

Quote

Electrolysis  is the process of using electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

But at the end of the day, this in my view would still be considered an electric car, because this kind of system still necessitates the use of electricity.

[Daniel Balan]

On 18/08/2023 at 4:47 PM, Leo Gura said:

This climate stuff is way overblown.

Consider than in the 20th century it was typical for a country to lose 10 million people to a war. And the population was less than half of what it is today. So even losing 10 million to climate change will be negligible to the human race. Russia and China both lost 20+ million in WW2 and various kinds of famines.

For climate change to be significant it would have to kill 500+ million people. A couple million people dead is not a crisis, it is a blip on the radar screen. A million people were killed in Ethiopia in the last 4 years. You didn't even notice.

Progressives have lost all sense of proportion.

I've been following your work since 2014. I can say with all honesty, the above is the most stupid thing I've heard you say. I still don't fully compute what I just read. This is redneck level of climate change reasoning. 

What you said here, in my eyes is the same as if you were to have written a conspiracy theory in which you explain how the jews and the Illuminati are enslaving the world through the banking system. 

I hope your views on climate change have evolved since the fall of 2023.

[oldhandle]

2 things Leo is absolutely wrong about, when I generally agree with him about most other things

- Climate change being "overblown" and not a big deal
- Porn addiction being "overblown" and not a big deal 

Unfortunately the first of those issues trends "left wing" and the second trends "right wing" - but I also know he is not a wingnut, in either direction, like myself, so I am puzzled by his opinions on those.

[BlueOak]

Its already too late to save everyone. Water is already drying up in certain countries.

As far as I understand it, there is a ten year lag, even if the problem was being take seriously as the biggest threat we collectively face on planet earth, instead its seen as a challenge but one that can be put off till later. But if it was being tackled globally, there is a ten year lag for any results we do today.

Edited September 7, 2025 by BlueOak

[lukmi]

On 7.9.2025 at 10:06 PM, oldhandle said:

2 things Leo is absolutely wrong about, when I generally agree with him about most other things

- Climate change being "overblown" and not a big deal
- Porn addiction being "overblown" and not a big deal 

I was suprised about point #1 as well, but I thought about it and see it a bit differently now.

Before I was of the opinion that mankind was behaving like a parasite on the world, merely leeching resources and expanding endlessly. I was opposing the notion of expansion at all costs. I was a fan of efficiency versus effectiveness. (Explanation: efficiency is doing the same with less, effectiveness is doing more with the same). I played it though in my mind what would happen if we did not expand further but instead maintained what we have to date.

I was thinking of it from an evolutionary perspective. The universe is supposedly continuously expanding and evolving. Nothing ever stays the same. But if a species, for example, stays the same, it will be rendered obsolete and eventually die like the frequently cited dodo bird. The same would be true for, lets say, a tribe. If it did not develop and just maintained itself, a neighboring tribe, which did evolve further, could have developed better weapons and conquer it. This is exactly what happened to the native Americans. Or a natural disaster could have happened and wiped them out. This is what happened to the dinosaurs. Granted, the dinosaurs couldn't have done very much about it and they were, in fact, evolving. But the point is that they were not evolving fast enough for the challenge at hand. Likewise, the native Americans did use guns they obtained from the cowboys, but yet their development was not enough. Their technological level was still that of bow and arrow. This is not criticism of dinosaurs or native Americans. This could happen to us today as well. There are many theories about natural disasters, such as meteorite strikes or neighboring tribes, such as alien invasions, that could wipe out mankind. But continuous expansion; in terms of land, technology, philosophy, and so on; is what can aid our survival.

To get back to the issue of climate change, this is just another hurdle to be overcome, such as cowboys settling in America was for the native Americans or the meteorites were for the dinosaurs. I don't think that climate change is a capacity issue. It would be a capacity issue if we only had a limited amount of space and our increasing pile of waste products would take up more and more of that space. But since the universe if ever expanding, space is not a problem. We can always develop more technology or ways of living which allows us to use more of that space. Our waste products, such as CO2, could be compressed and blasted into space, we could store it underground, we could reuse it, we could use the additional heat that remains on Earth because of the CO2 as a new energy source, we could develop new energy sources that don't produce CO2, we could trade CO2 to Aliens that are willing to buy it. Since the opportunities are endless, there is never a point when there is nothing else we can try. The issue is simply if we are developing fast enough to surmount the problem before it destroys us. Leo called this requisite variety at some point.

Therefore, I now think that efficiency is a trap in the big picture. Sure, it would be nice to do the same with less resources, such as my laptop having a longer battery life while having the same computing power, but our survival mainly hinges upon if we can become more capable. And part of that is unlocking new resources which fuel our new tools. If what it takes to survive in IT nowadays is the use of AI, then I better have a computer strong enough to run an LLM. And the more capable your AI, the bigger your competitive advantage. This requires the development of better energy sources to run my computer and better AI models. We need to develop the same in regards of climate change. And this is happening not through reducing our footprint, but by expanding the space that is accessible to us.

Hence, we are not parasites as it is the nature of the universe to be ever-expanding.

[Elliott]

12 hours ago, lukmi said:

I was suprised about point #1 as well, but I thought about it and see it a bit differently now.

Before I was of the opinion that mankind was behaving like a parasite on the world, merely leeching resources and expanding endlessly. I was opposing the notion of expansion at all costs. I was a fan of efficiency versus effectiveness. (Explanation: efficiency is doing the same with less, effectiveness is doing more with the same). I played it though in my mind what would happen if we did not expand further but instead maintained what we have to date.

I was thinking of it from an evolutionary perspective. The universe is supposedly continuously expanding and evolving. Nothing ever stays the same. But if a species, for example, stays the same, it will be rendered obsolete and eventually die like the frequently cited dodo bird. The same would be true for, lets say, a tribe. If it did not develop and just maintained itself, a neighboring tribe, which did evolve further, could have developed better weapons and conquer it. This is exactly what happened to the native Americans. Or a natural disaster could have happened and wiped them out. This is what happened to the dinosaurs. Granted, the dinosaurs couldn't have done very much about it and they were, in fact, evolving. But the point is that they were not evolving fast enough for the challenge at hand. Likewise, the native Americans did use guns they obtained from the cowboys, but yet their development was not enough. Their technological level was still that of bow and arrow. This is not criticism of dinosaurs or native Americans. This could happen to us today as well. There are many theories about natural disasters, such as meteorite strikes or neighboring tribes, such as alien invasions, that could wipe out mankind. But continuous expansion; in terms of land, technology, philosophy, and so on; is what can aid our survival.

To get back to the issue of climate change, this is just another hurdle to be overcome, such as cowboys settling in America was for the native Americans or the meteorites were for the dinosaurs. I don't think that climate change is a capacity issue. It would be a capacity issue if we only had a limited amount of space and our increasing pile of waste products would take up more and more of that space. But since the universe if ever expanding, space is not a problem. We can always develop more technology or ways of living which allows us to use more of that space. Our waste products, such as CO2, could be compressed and blasted into space, we could store it underground, we could reuse it, we could use the additional heat that remains on Earth because of the CO2 as a new energy source, we could develop new energy sources that don't produce CO2, we could trade CO2 to Aliens that are willing to buy it. Since the opportunities are endless, there is never a point when there is nothing else we can try. The issue is simply if we are developing fast enough to surmount the problem before it destroys us. Leo called this requisite variety at some point.

Therefore, I now think that efficiency is a trap in the big picture. Sure, it would be nice to do the same with less resources, such as my laptop having a longer battery life while having the same computing power, but our survival mainly hinges upon if we can become more capable. And part of that is unlocking new resources which fuel our new tools. If what it takes to survive in IT nowadays is the use of AI, then I better have a computer strong enough to run an LLM. And the more capable your AI, the bigger your competitive advantage. This requires the development of better energy sources to run my computer and better AI models. We need to develop the same in regards of climate change. And this is happening not through reducing our footprint, but by expanding the space that is accessible to us.

Hence, we are not parasites as it is the nature of the universe to be ever-expanding.

We can improve technologically while also addressing climate pollution, that's a false dichotomy pushed by conservatives. We just have to live smarter, there's no reason that 20% of Americans drive individual cars 2 hours a day with one person when we already have light rail technology for mass transit. We have the dumbest systems imaginable. 40% of all resources are used on stupid shit, these Data centers are for Amazon and Walmart to sell you shit, crap that you don't need but you need it tomorrow, shit that would break next week but you never actually even used it.

Edited yesterday at 12:54 AM by Elliott

[Ajay0]

The meat and livestock industry contributes around 20 % of global human-caused greenhouse gas emissions annually. 

If everyone on earth becomes a vegan/vegetarian, on a temporary time period at least, this can mitigate global warming by a fifth  and give a certain time period to develop new or mature new green technologies that can eliminate the other causes related to greenhouse warming, imho.