Climate--A New Story

What Hacker News says

1. jazzyjacksonSep 2023
   trees basically perform cloud-seeding by releasing micro-droplets of oils into the air

   "climate: a new story" by charles eisenstein is a great resource on an alternative understanding to climate change then simply "CO2 bad", which he presents as a red herring to ecosystem destruction

   conventional wisdom is apparently "fair weather leads to more biomass" when the reality might be "more biomass leads to fair weather" as every ecosystem acts as a chemical and energetic buffer

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2. jazzyjacksonMar 2022
   > root fusion and fungal symbiosis, rather than trunk volume and canopy size

   one could consider the soil itself as a living organism by the ton, and I would hope conversations around sequestering carbon will transition into conversations around increasing total biomass on earth.

   Carbon gets top billing because its easily measurable and has a direct influence on the greenhouse effect, but the costs of climate change really come from the climate becoming more chaotic - every living organism acts as a buffer for storing energy, carbon, and water - the more life on earth, the more stable the atmosphere becomes.

   (I'm no climate scientist, this is my impression from reading Charles Eisenstein's Climate: a New Story, totally turned me around on being fatalistic about climate change)

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3. jazzyjacksonOct 2021
   I like converting it to soil and wood. Forests and grasslands store hundreds of gigatons of carbon. It can't just be planting trees, it has to be cultivating rich ecosystems: the more living things the better.

   I've been converted by Charles Eisenstein's book "Climate: a new story" - he makes a strong case that we're only obsessed with carbon because we don't have good ways of measuring anything else, and that while of course the greenhouse effect is real, the negative effects of climate change including unpredictable weather and stronger storms can be mitigated by restoring forests, coral reefs, marshes, barrier islands, anything that lives will act as a buffer to fast changes in weather.

   There's some good stuff in there too explaining the feedback loops between life and the weather, such as forests releasing aerosols that act as cloud seeds that bring moisture toward the forest.

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4. jazzyjacksonSep 2021
   I enjoyed this episode of "Ologies" talking to an artist, Andy Hall [0] working on what he calls the "The Drawdown Design Project" - creating inspirational posters and raising money to go towards the rainforest coalition.

   Basically he had the same question, talks about the themes in the posters, empower - engage - cultivate - electrify. When asked what the average person can do, his answer was basically 'donate money to elect democrats' and honestly I agree. You can spend thousands of dollars or thousands of hours of volunteering, but its the politicians that are deciding how to spend trillions. Outside of that, I can recommend the book "Climate - a new story" by Charles Eisenstein, it argues against focusing on a single metric of CO2 ppm (and includes an aside on the war-analogy we default to when we decide to fight something ;). Basically it suggests we focus more on creating a healthy biosphere, explains the connections between weather, chemistry, and life. It's got me convinced that planting trees is the right approach, but not just to sequester carbon, but to increase the amount and variety of life on earth.

   [0] https://www.alieward.com/ologies/drawdowndesignproject

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5. jazzyjacksonJul 2021
   IMO the focus on CO2 emissions is a distraction from the greater sin of ecosystem destruction. Science has a bias for finding single, measurable factors, and its easy to measure CO2 and the greenhouse effect is real.

   But on the other hand, the atmosphere and oceans storing more energy is not strictly what's causing our problems, but rather the severity and unpredictability of the weather.

   Charles Eisenstein's book "Climate - a new story" convinced me that biomass and large healthy ecosystems act as a buffer on weather, that forests change the atmosphere around them and attract rain fall, all kinds of complex interactions that we've taken for granted.

   The way I see it, the more life we wipe off the planet, the closer Earth gets to a primordial version of itself, firestorms and all. It's not the case that Earth's weather just calmed down enough for life to survive, but that the increased complexity of a planet covered in plants has a homeostatic effect.

   I think we have to be much more creative than 'reduce consumption', find a way to get the labor and energy of billions of people to go toward increasing biomass and biodiversity instead of merely harvesting it and taking the good weather for granted.

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6. jasalooMay 2019
   Anyone who found this story intriguing should immediately go buy "Climate: A New Story" by Charles Eisenstein. He explores how we use "war language" when talking about environmental issues and how that undercuts our efforts... then he proposes how we get out of that conversational rut, with allies, people on the fence, and even climate change deniers.
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