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toddmorey 3 hours ago

Have we ever as a species successfully changed our behavior on a scale needed to address something like climate change and underwater oxygen loss?

What would be the closest “we’ve got to change or perish” moment we’ve successfully navigated?

hinoki 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We did a reasonable job with ozone depletion, but that has much lower costs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion

piskov 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yesterday there was an article here about ozone vs aluminum from the spacex sattelites reentry (which soon there will be plenty of)

WalterGR 3 hours ago | parent [-]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49062120

“Plasma Tunnels Reveal How Dying Satellites Fall to Earth” (ieee.org)

littlexsparkee 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The cost of not addressing it is more distributed: at some point you can't go outside anymore since the UV index is so high, sunscreen can't block high-intensity UV-B and UV-C, plants get damaged to the point of catastrophic crop failures... you can live in denial about climate change in developed countries (for a limited time anyway) but ozone affects everyone.

runtime_terror 2 hours ago | parent [-]

True but at the time the ozone hole was mostly over the Antarctic so the average person didn't feel its effects which wouldn't then contribute to the change in policy.

conception 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Acid rain as well.

m4rtink 5 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

DNS, IP adresses and Emoji of course, all global efforts, with extinction level risks.

t0mpr1c3 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The only truly global intervention I can think of whose impact might be discernible over geological timescales is the ban on testing nuclear weapons.

gneuron 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Lead in gasoline? https://ourworldindata.org/leaded-gasoline-phase-out

r3trohack3r 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Food?

I.E. avoiding population collapse due to lack of ecosystem carrying capacity? Eliminating famine? etc.

3 hours ago | parent | next [-]
[deleted]
yablak 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

the kind of changes that were required to avoid massive famines also rely on chemical fertilizer. aaand.... "the production of chemical fertilizers, particularly synthetic nitrogen-based ones, is a highly energy-intensive process that creates significant amounts of carbon dioxide"

3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]
[deleted]
rablackburn 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nuclear weapons (so far)?

Banning CFCs perhaps?

If you want to go older and more localised you could look at forestry and fisheries laws. Sometimes we self-regulate and form a stable state, other times we over-extract until collapse

chasing 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ozone hole over Antarctica.

It is possible for us to work together and fix these things.

Edit:

Moving away from leaded gas might be another example.

(CFCs and leaded gas invented by the same dude, fun fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr. Quite a legacy...)

appreciatorBus 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

When the costs are low and require no change in personal behaviour, nor even belief in the problem. Billions of people had no idea about changes to aerosol propellants or refrigerants and they were not required to know or agree in order to solve the problem.

nemomarx 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Do people have to know about what generates their electricity? They get input now, but we could probably just stop taking public input on new infrastructure and that would avoid poorly motivated protests of wind farms or nuclear.

appreciatorBus an hour ago | parent | next [-]

They do not need to know what generates there electricity but...

- when what generates the power changes the landscape they can see, many people get upset, however irrationally

- many people are emotionally attached to lifestyle objects that use fossil fuels, i.e. cars, boats, planes, etc

- even where there are good options, most people are not willing to spend one extra penny

- even when there are options that cost less (i.e. bicycles, walking) humans spend a lot of their energy thinking about status and struggle to voluntarily choose things that they fear might result in a loss of status

- even if you solve all that, collective action problems are a named thing for a reason - they are hard and don't necessarily have obvious answers.

My point is not that everything is hopeless, but that OP who said "Have we ever as a species successfully changed our behavior on a scale..." has a point that we will have to grapple with if we want to actually change stuff. Wishing human nature away doesn't actually solve anything.

Loughla an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Stop taking public input on public infrastructure. That would go over life a lead balloon.

nemomarx an hour ago | parent [-]

Good point - maybe also stop taking public input on decisions. :V

I kid, but I get more sympathetic to totalitarian countries seeing how people react to some things too. it simplifies "banding together" if there's fewer decision makers I guess and I can't think of a good way to have that squared with democracy.

m4rtink a few seconds ago | parent [-]

You also get no feedback from people, massive corruption and many useless megaprojects end up being built at the cost of everything else (because everyoneis too afraid to point out its nonsense & regime adjacent thugs will then make it 5x as expensive and pocket the extra money).

rgbrenner 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We haven't fixed the ozone hole yet. It'll take another 40 years for it to return to the levels prior to 1980:

https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/ozone-hole-...

chaostheory an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well, we inadvertently stopped having as much children. That should help, but our current system economic systems can’t handle falling birthrates

tsunamifury 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Historically speaking over over a billion years almost every species has consumed one thing and output another to the point of extinction while another species that consumes that grows and repeats the cycle.

Climate change has been the story of evolution since life appeared on earth and aglae filled the atmosphere with gasses.

underlipton 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We almost eradicated several diseases, usually screwed over by designating an Omelasan child (though, that's a bad characterization, because letting parts of the world continue to suffer and serve as a reservoir for those diseases was actually completely unnecessary).

epistasis 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think that the banng of HFCs is a pretty good example of collective action.

Also, it's important to realize that climate change, as we best understand it right now, is not a "or perish" type of situation. RCP8.5 has now been soundly eliminated from the set of potential climate trajectories, so what we're left with is a question of 1) how much mass migration will be forced upon the world, with concomitant wars and social strife, and 2) how much economic loss results from that, as well as from lost opportunity by not adopting cheaper renewable energy routes.

Technological innovation has done something absolutely remarkable: the future with the cheapest and most abundant energy is the one that switches to renewable energy and storage the fastest. Every day we delay, not only do we end up with a worse climate outcome, but we also just light money on fire, with worse economic efficiency. And in economies built on the continual compounding interest of technological advancement, we subject humanity to far greater poverty for every day we delay the transition.

Most of the world will benefit from this technological change happening quickly. There will be some outliers, like the US, that choose to be poorer and less influential by actively subverting renewable energy in the marketplace (the Trump administration has done a huge amount of economic damage in only a small amount of time), but the US will come around. Texas is leading the way, because they are actually market driven more than they are politically driven, but the rest of the US is kind of screwed on that front for a while.

glitchc 2 hours ago | parent [-]

No matter how poor you think the US is, the average person in the rest of the world is indeed poorer.

epistasis 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm not understanding how this observation relates to my comment, in any way.

Renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels. The areas that are just developing widespread electricity now will do it far cleaner than the US did, skipping the lower development stages of electricity and jumping directly into the future, if that's what you're saying. But I'm having trouble understanding what you mean.

harimau777 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The average person in the rest of the world lives in a dramatically different social structure than Western late stage capitalism. In effect the social contract of capitalism was "give up the culture, social institutions, etc. that make for a stable collectivist society and in exchange enjoy the benefits of consumerism." I don't think it is surprising that people are angry when the Capital class decides that they don't get the consumerism either.

anonymousiam 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

True, but most people don't think about why that is the case. They'll blame slavery (abolished over 160 years ago), or the "exploitation" by capitalists (that produce wealth for all). Some may claim that the US has more natural resources, but The US is rich because of the freedoms and rights that our citizens have. Look at the poverty of the Soviet Union or Mao's China, or in Cuba today.

I cannot for the life of me understand the increasing popularity of socialism and communism in the US today. Those forms of government have a proven track record of failure.

harimau777 32 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Socialism is increasingly popular because people are seeing that capitalism makes them LESS free. People don't have the freedom to own a home, the freedom to get medical care, the freedom to travel, etc. When they see that many of those things (particularly medical care) are available in socialist (relative to the US) countries, it's no surprise that they abandon capitalism.

t0mpr1c3 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Let's consider the economies of Communist nations. I suggest we take into account a bit of regional history.

By any measure, China has come a long way since the Communist regime took over in 1949.

You could say something similar about Soviet Russia. By the 1980s it had stagnated, but the average Russian was incomparably better off than in 1917.

How far have Russians come since then? Has capitalism ushered in a golden age of prosperity and well-being? (Here's a clue: life expectancy peaked in 1986. Russians lived longer 40 years ago, under Communism, than they do today.)

Vietnam has done reasonably well since other countries stopped invading it.

American foreign policy hasn't done much for Cubans, either. Especially in the last few months.

Castro and Ho Chi Minh will go down in (our) history as Communist revolutionaries, but they weren't fighting against capitalism. They succeeded by uniting their people against colonial rule.

(Slavery ended a while back, as you are keen to acknowledge, but Cuba was a US colony until 1959. Puerto Rico still is.)

I'll grant you North Korea is a basket case. But it is arguably a monarchy.

metalman 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"We"? if by "we" you mean Chinese, then yes, as THEY have maintained a cultural structure and language far longer than we have, and adapting themselves and there environment to do that was something they have been doing successfully for millenia,China still venerates the first engineer "Gun"assigned to control the flooding on the yallu river 3300 years ago, and it is then no surprise that they are building solar, wind and other renewable fossil/carbon free energy sources at an unprecidented rate, and ultra high voltage grid systems to distribute that energy, while we wring our hands committing genocide on the Palistinians.

harimau777 25 minutes ago | parent [-]

They've also gone through 13 major dynasties and about 2 societal collapses. That of course doesn't undo China's amazing cultural, technological, and social advances and achievements over the millenia, but it does suggest that their history is more nuanced.

andy99 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

rpearl 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

CFCs are responsible for the ozone hole. There are no known significant natural sources of CFCs. The ozone hole was caused by humans and its course correction was due to the political will to phase out CFCs.

> Climate scientists can raise the alarm or whatever but have no credibility

Climate scientists have credibility.

lstodd 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Climate scientists have credibility.

Seriosly? Imo they never recovered it since the "hide the decline".

mitthrowaway2 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is a class of problems where "when things get really bad" is also the point when it's too late to implement a solution. Driving off a cliff, for example.

What would you do if you studied this matter for several years, and found overwhelming evidence that this is such a category of problem?

caconym_ 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Ozone hole? Not sure how much of that was cyclical vs in human control.

If you don't know, maybe you should look it up instead of touting your ignorance in a public discussion forum? Your ignorance is not noteworthy. And while you're at it, you can educate yourself on climate change and proposed solutions to it, too. You seem to be suffering from several significant misconceptions, likely because you're bought into a narrative spun out by political hacks with zero understanding of the relevant scientific principles/knowledge and a vested interest in never changing that.

solid_fuel 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> not when the proposed solution is some kind of global authoritarian communism

Please make an effort to engage more substantially with reality, especially on this forum.

jibal 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Things like this, it’s still hypothetical. Climate scientists can raise the alarm or whatever but have no credibility, certainly not when the proposed solution is some kind of global authoritarian communism, and it always is.

Absolutely ridiculous. Climate scientists have credibility; climate science denying cranks who blather about communism have none.

> When things get really bad

Things are really bad.

Muted via my HN front end ... I won't be responding further.