Comment by jrapdx3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrapdx3 | Hacker News Reader

The laws of unintended consequences were never more evident than implicit in global climate change, a result of human activity. We always intended to make the world better, at least that's what we constantly said we were trying to do.

We should be warned based on history. All actions and decisions have numerous and unpredictable outcomes, more than we ever realize at the time. It's a curious thing that we seem not to remember this lesson, endlessly repeating the process on each iteration. Rush headlong into an idea, and then spend decades or centuries repairing the damage.

Despite having evolution's best brain, and the ability to do otherwise, we humans have been on the whole poor long-term planners, we have failed to see the big picture. Or more to the point we don't heed those among us who urge us to consider the implications of our behavior, preferring the expedient until we hit a wall.

The article's conclusion is not a surprise, all the clues are converging toward the revelation that human cleverness will be our undoing, unless we learn to push our problem-solving abilities to their full capability, setting aside our usual short view for the possibility of continued existence.

So what do we surmise are the odds world-wide leadership of that caliber will arise? One guess is as good as any other.

The activities that resulted in climate change also resulted in a vast improvement in the lives of a huge number of people. If I were somehow thrown back in time and given control over the process, I'd do it all over again, albeit with a greater emphasis on efficiency, and on alternatives once they became practical.

Of course, I too enjoy the benefits of the technologies fueled by everything that causes global climate change, and wouldn't want to do without. But the evidence for deleterious side-effects of progress have been around for a very long time, and time and again overlooked until it had reached an interim crisis point.

I don't have a solution for balancing technological improvement with due caution for untoward outcomes. That lies in the social/political domain, but it provokes the question of whether we humans have the courage or will to face up to the task or what it takes to get us there.

Or even the capacity.

a vast improvement in the lives of a huge number of people.

It sounds like you view utility of happiness as additive, in which case the only justifiable decision in your unlikely circumstance would be to do everything in your power to prevent the 19th/20th century population explosion that resulted in the need for the aforementioned activities that resulted in climate change. Additively, there's far more misery and suffering in the world now than there has ever been at any point in history.

> greater emphasis on efficiency, and on alternatives once they became practical.

Sorry, that's weasel language and I hear it everyday. Electric cars existed before gas tech, the first Porsche was electric, Einstein described the photoelectric effect in 1905, got Nobel Prize in 1921. The greenhouse gas effect by carbon dioxide has been realized the century before and wind energy is in use for millennia. If we had not chosen that route, we'd be _all_ better off for sure, had probably a few wars less and wouldn't look at sea level rising for thousands of years to come.

Of course you'd do it again, the party was fun and the cleanup team pays someone else.

> Of course you'd do it again, the party was fun and the cleanup team pays someone else.

Wow. I don't know how you expect that to contribute to the conversation. Maybe your goal is just to shut it down? Don't be a dick.

instead of assaulting the poster directly we should pick up where he left and think of ways to improve the situation. Bickering just breeds more negative thinking

I had half of such a reply written, but when I got to than massive insult I couldn't proceed.

I think it's worthwhile to inform people when they've gone way too far.

Electric cars need batteries, which in turn need to be manufactured and charged with electrical energy by nuclear, gas, coal, solar or wind farms, which all have their effects on the environment too (but centralized plants would be easier to keep clean). Batteries are nasty chemical contraptions that are hard to produce and dispose of cleanly. Yes sometimes in Corporatism (State and Capitalism), there are underhanded deals, but in Capitalism, things cost money, because they take time and labor. Instead of disparaging somebody with a pejorative term, why not use your smarts and labor to come up with a way of accomplishing your wishes to see something realized? Money is, in the general sense, man's way of placing some value on goods or services, his time and labor. It is not evil in and of itself, it is a thing that allows trade to take place; men act, and do either good or evil. The world is a whole lot better due to technology, markets, and Capitalism. Sure, it's not perfect, but more people have been lifted out of poverty through it, or by it. It does have its warts. You should aim for utopia (aim high, miss low), but not fail any policy that isn't 100% utopia. As an aside, sea-levels are not going to just rise like water in a glass analogy because of polar ice melting. They are going to fall in certain places and really increase in others due to many physical reasons - see [1].

[1] - http://nautil.us/issue/33/attraction/why-our-intuition-about...

I'm not anti-capitalism. I just say we've it thrown it at the wrong energy source and went us into dark ages. Just imagine for a second all that money, labor and ingenuity had been used to develop solar. Or the other way round, where will solar be in 100 years?

And please learn the difference between melting sea ice and land ice. It's measured in kilometers.

I am assuming you are not directing the last line at my comment, since I know the difference between melting sea ice and land ice; you should read the article I referenced as it addresses sea vs. land ice, salinity near an iceberg, and many other topics. The main point was to say it is not a universal rise in levels. A lot of people, even technically-minded people, do not grok these points. Like me: I didn't know the land rebounded back up, but that make sense once you hear it. The weight compresses the land, and when it diminishes, any recoil in it acts.

We wouldn't be better off if we had not used coal, oil, and natural gas for the last 200 years, we would be much, much poorer. There would not be as much pollution in the world, but we would have missed out on a massive amount of economic growth that was only possible through abundant, realiable energy.

There is nothing more reliable than solar. And do you really feel rich after taking money from your children?

Solar became practical and economical for mainstream usage about a decade ago. It wasn't an alternative.

I often think about what the world would do if we all did have a chance to do it over again. I would hope that all the fossil fuels would stay in the ground and easy routes to electrical, wind, water and other energies would be discovered instead. As a race we took the easy way out when we discovered the huge stores of energy in the Earth, but now we are paying the price, and I'd rather we had worked harder in the beginning to find methods that would have prevented what's happened (my particular pet peeve is the awful air quality that is now accepted around the world). But also as a race, I know we would have been capable of pulling it off, but we didn't because humans more often than not take the easiest path.

So I must respectfully disagree with you. The alternatives should have been rigorously pursued from the beginning.

Amazing article, and science. We are poor long-term planners true, but I tend to be a rational optimist here. I believe in man's effect on the climate, no denier here, although I do not like the way terms in language become simplistic polarizers in politics on both sides to the point with those trying to work on issues have to deal with the politics. The fact is with ice ages and mountain forming, the change to the rotational center of gravity was always there, and careful measurement was not taken up until 1989 per the cited article. It's amazing to see we can shift dirt, water and melt ice and affect it this way, although, I am not entirely convinced it is just those factors. I am eager to see their follow up on land water in this exciting area of research. If you want long term thinking, you should be thinking 'off earth'. Many are aware the sun swallows the earth when it goes through the natural stages of a star's life in about 4 billion years. Regardless of whether we go 100% clean energy tomorrow (yet even electric cars need power generation plants to charge their batteries: gas, nuclear, coal or otherwise), what a lot of people are unaware of is that the sun is expected to keep growing in brightness and have catastrophic effects on the earth's atmosphere in 1 billion years (we lost 3 billion years there ;) ), boiling off the oceans and climate change will be measured in the hundreds of degrees until the oceans boil off and life on earth ceases to exist. I had a button in the early 80s from OMNI magazine that read: "The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth, the Rest of Us Will Go To The Stars!". Presaging and teasing the I.D. vs. Evolutionary theory. I am not saying give up on earth, simply adjust your 'long-term' thinking to real long-term. We need space exploration and colonization to survive ultimately as a species. Frankenstein was one of my favorite reads as a child, and the novel gets cited as a moral of 'man should not play with Mother Nature, or God' parable, but the same people who tow that line, are leading up programs to save one of each species, circumventing evolution, in hopes of preventing 'man-made' extinctions. I wonder if they might save a species that ironically turns out to be a carrier of disease that wipes man off the planet: good intentions, poor foresight. In the same way, if we can shift the earth's rotational axis, or North pole, we can study how to VERY slowly and over much time compensate with moving water and mass, a gargantuan task I am sure. And in the meantime, and in light of SpaceX's success yesterday, I am hoping to go to the stars, but they better hurry, since I probably only have 20 to 25 years left, and I might be meek by then ;)

Yes, in billions of years we'll have a problem with our expanding star, and in quintillions of years the whole universe may completely run out of fuel, or suffer a Big Crunch... Clearly we're talking about different timescales and priorities. Space exploration is reasonably a low-priority quest for now. If we manage to control our most pressing (short-term) problems for, say, a mere thousand years, technology will presumably take care of a lot of that. And a thousand years is a blip in that kind of timescale.

All actions and decisions have numerous and unpredictable outcomes

Every time you blink, you blow up a planet with life on it

What's wrong with a small tilt of the axis? It has to point somewhere. Certainly a fast and large change might take time for ecology to catch up, but this is spectacular in how tiny it is! What observable effect could it possibly have on our lives or lifestyles ever?

> So what do we surmise are the odds world-wide leadership of that caliber will arise?

I believe the only real barrier left is the Republican Party in the United States. If they will stop their obstruction on this issue, then there is plenty of political power in the world to do something.

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