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Comment by socialist_coder | Hacker News Reader

Of course, there will always be people who are less than noble in their pursuits. In academia, in NGOs, in environmental groups, in government, in private industry, everywhere.

Ask yourself though, even if all this climate change and global warming is FUD, what happens if we respond to it like it is real? Result: we have a cleaner planet (cleaner air, cleaner water, oceans that still support life) and we have a sustainable path when fossil fuels do eventually run out.

What happens if we ignore it? Result: the potential demise of the world as we know it...

Think about it from a risk vs reward perspective. It's clearly much riskier to ignore than it would be to take a hit on our economic growth and pivot hard to 100% renewable energy.

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Good point. I've often wondered: apart from wanting to be right, what do climate skeptics have against e.g. transitioning to renewable energy?

It's very fucking expensive. And those articles frequently on the front page of HN are biased and are not telling the whole story. That's the problem. NGOs are framing the public discourse in a very one-sided way. If you raise concerns, you are a "denier" and downvoted into oblivion because people just want to believe the beautiful story of clean energy vs. greedy capitalist pigs.

That's definitely true, it's rare to see a fully civilised discussion where those concerns are addressed without the accompanying rhetoric.

Having said that, surely it's a fact that we'll run out of fossil fuels at some point and will need an alternate source of energy, and that will be expensive no matter when we do it, so why not start early?

You don't seem to grasp what I am saying at all. I am not against upgrading our energy capabilities. This whole comment chain started because of the claim that only lizard people have incentive to lie. This couldn't be further from the truth. There are snake people who lie, scream and spread FUD who just want to take the lizards' place.

Their screaming leads to a lot of tension and escalation. THIS IS A PROBLEM. SOLVE IT RIGHT NOW. This is what FUD is after all. This leads to rash decisions. We don't know where and when to invest. Should we invest in more nuclear and supplement with distributed photovoltaics? Should we build giant panels? Should we focus on batteries and what kinds of batteries?

Or should we focus on hydro power instead? Or maybe beam energy from space (it's a thing)? What about clean chemical reactions?

And most importantly - when should we start and when should we double down on it? What are the checkpoints of R&D and production grade equipment? What should we wait on?

Opportunists did what they do best - they found an opportunity to get attention and are exploiting it for their gain. This goes against the general public's gain. That's what I am against. Repeating completely unproductive rhetoric to get the tension high.

I agree about unproductive rhetoric, and my question wasn't aimed at you specifically, I was just wondering out loud about the opposite viewpoint. The focus of the climate discussion in general should definitely be more towards the points you raised, I'm just curious about people who don't think it's even a discussion worth having.

Opportunity cost. Those resources could conceivably be better spent building roads, railways, factories, protecting wetlands, rewilding forests, educating children...

There are plenty of current, pressing problems to solve; why solve a problem that won't exist for decades if not centuries?

OK, I can understand that. Does that however not come with the assumption that we can solve that problem quickly when it does come about (assuming we can calculate roughly when we run out of fossil fuels)? I don't know how much evidence there is out there that that's the case.

In a market economy, we never actually run out of a resource; rather, the price rises gradually in accordance with increasing scarcity and cost of extraction, making alternatives more cost-effective, increasing the reward to researching alternatives, and pushing the use of that resource into niches where the cost doesn't matter as much.

Examples of this would be guano (replaced by saltpeter and then by the Haber process) and whale oil (replaced by petroleum).

Yes, your upfront cost are expensive, because of course the plants have to be build. But that was the case with fossil plants as well, the only difference is, they are already built. But in the long run, it's cheaper due to the lack of needed fuel.

So there's three things here: upfront cost, running costs, and decommissioning costs. The running costs of renewable generation are nonzero even if the fuel is free, as there's considerable maintenance cost. The long run cost - and so the decision whether to build fossil or renewable - has to take all three into account.

I don't dispute there is climate change. It is pretty self-evident at this point that the climate is changing.

What is not clear at all is whether humans are responsible for it.

Sorry, but at this point this gets absurd. I can understand that for some people it is beneficial to deny the idea of climate change. But since you are already acknowledging the self-evidence of it, how is it "not clear at all", that the change is not human made?

The climate has changed many, many times throughout history.

But wasn't that on totally different timescales?

Not as dramatically as in the last 50 years.

http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

The scientific consensus is that it is probably man made.

The scientific community could not possibly hope to have a definite answer to that.

Hard liners on "man-made" climate change are sponsored through various channels just like hard-liners on no climate change at all.

I am no ecologist, but I know my statistics, math and logic. From what I've read on the subject, claims that it is man-made are based on assumptions which don't hold and huge jumps in logic and conclusions.

What we can safely deduce is that there is some shift in the climate with temperatures increasing. Humans probably are a contributing factor without any way of knowing how much we contributed overall.

Every paper which claimed something differing from the above made HUGE jumps in their logic.

The claims that climate change is likely mostly man made are based on a combination of well-established physics and chemistry as well as observations of how climate change correlates with the various conditions which are theorized to drive it, which gives a pretty clear idea of the direct contributions, and we have very good ideas of the root causes of those direct contributions, at least to the extent of which ones are largely the result of human activity (e.g., atmospheric CO2) and which are not (e.g., variations in solar conditions.)

Yeah, those physics and chemistry models are made by scientists who are really, really smart and are 100% correct, 100% of the time. They have lab coats and all.

It's definitely possible to model the whole climate system. Amazon is making recommendations with machine learning AI and shit.

And your qualification is that you read HN? I'll stick with the scientists thanks.

No, my qualification is that I create statistical models for living and I know how flawed they are. What are yours?

I wasn't giving mine, I am leaving that up to the experts in the field and trusting that they will do a better job than me.

"The scientific community could not possibly hope to have a definite answer to that."

Do I take that by your logic we should not even try to understand the environment? Since definitive answers are not possible, and if the current expert's opinion is not sufficient, then I fail to see what argument could possibly be of any higher quality.

"Hard liners on "man-made" climate change are sponsored through various channels just like hard-liners on no climate change at all."

Evoking "hardliners" sounds like all debates would be about selecting the most charismatic authority and sticking with their opinion.

I prefer to peruse the reports of established scientific bodies http://www.ipcc.ch/

No, it sounds like balanced opinions are always better than radical opinions. Radicals are almost always wrong and always unproductive.

And to answer your other question, environmental NGOs have plenty to do with atmospheric research. They publicize it some of it. They fund some of it. They use some of it as a political lever.

Are there any links between NGO "environmental fud" and IPCC federated results that would point out stronger political rather than scientific drivers for the results?

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