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Comment by jon_richards | Hacker News Reader

If you spend too long trying to convince someone there's a problem, then you are the problem.

If I'm not mistaken than the vast majority globally is convinced of man made climate change being an issue. The holdouts primarily seem to be a subset of US Americans. There is disagreement on what a fair solution would look like but the vast majority agrees on the problem.

Let us be honest: no they are not convinced. If they were legitimately terrified of existential disaster >400ppm, they would be IMMEDIATELY limiting industrial production and investing MASSIVELY into carbon sequestration and renewables. The fact that ALL NATIONS take half-hearted and half-assed measures to confront what the pro-AGW crowd paints as an extinction risk demonstrably contradicts your claim that "the vast majority globally is convinced".

Collective action problems are not that easy to solve, no matter how dire the consequences of failure.

Did collective action not work for solving the hitler problem?

Taking down Hitler just needed one force to take down Hitler. We didn't need to convince the majority that Hitler needs to be taken down and agree on how to do it. There also was no competitive advantage to be won by preventing this from happening. If I keep my pollution deregulated on there other hand I have a big competitive advantage over everyone who does. Very different problem.

Not until it was almost too late.

No that's not true, and it's another tiresome argument based on first order armchair logic sans application of actual subject related experience/knowledge.

Environmental diplomacy is hard, and made much harder by the fact that most tools to stop pollution require such massive cuts to industrialization (and western pollution first) that most countries can't afford to enact what is needed.

So we have had the weak predecessor of Kyoto, and then the even weaker Kyoto protocol. Which has been followed by nothing.

This just means that people are willing to play the game of lying to their populations and voters, who can't care or understand the issues because they have other existential problems to deal with.

Distributed responsibility is another name for "not my problem".

The fact that ALL NATIONS take half-hearted and half-assed measures to confront what the pro-AGW crowd paints as an extinction risk

That's part of the problem. There is no "extinction risk," at least with regard to human life, and anyone who says differently is either misinformed or lying. In the latter case, it's easy to argue that they have an economic agenda that has nothing to do with climate.

Either way, such absurd exaggerations make it hard to sell the real truth, which is that AGW appears to be a legitimate problem that demands action.

>The fact that ALL NATIONS take half-hearted and half-assed measures to confront what the pro-AGW crowd paints as an extinction risk demonstrably contradicts your claim that "the vast majority globally is convinced".

Its actually not; even if it is an extinction risk, if a meaningful difference in risk can't be made absent collective action, you have a massive tragedy of the common problem in which individual states are incentivized to do as little as possible, except what is necessary to signal that they would be open to serious action if there was an agreement on collective action.

But close the loop - the reason US Americans don't believe in climate change is because energy companies have paid politicians and fringe scientists to deny climate change. Why do energy companies care? Because climate change mitigation would cost them a lot of money.

It's not just that. There's a religious component to it (only God can alter the Earth so dramatically, or Jesus is returning soon so it doesn't matter, or similar) as well as an ideological component (mitigating climate change can't be done with laissez-faire approaches).

At this point, it's self-reinforcing. One of our two major political parties has climate change denial as a fundamental part of its identity. Lots of people vote for that party because they share that belief. Those who benefit from that party's success are then motivated to spread that belief even further just to recruit more voters to the cause. And as that belief solidifies among their voters, the party becomes unable to change its position no matter how convincing the facts become.

That does seem to be the case. So I wonder what will happen when facts render their position entirely untenable. It reminds me of the fight to regulate tobacco companies. That took decades of solid evidence.

This here is indeed the real problem - corporations who are so unethical that they would damage the entire world in order to make some cash.

These are the people who Trump wants to set free of all regulation.

This is one of those comments that sounds profound if you give it a cursory glance, but actually makes no sense whatsoever.

Oh come on, sure it makes sense.

It means that you failed to communicate effectively. Or that communicating to them was not an effective strategy.

Or the person you are communicating to has a conflict of interest and has a strong incentive to feign ignorance. Usually referred to as being "corrupt" for short.

In that case, "communicating to them was not an effective strategy".

"Their strategy is not effective" is quite different from "they are the problem."

Anyway, what would you propose that they do?

If B is ignoring A, for whatever reason, then A can talk to others. Or more generally, do whatever it takes to workaround B.

A does talk to others. It still hasn't worked, and now B is trying really hard to make A stop telling everybody about this stuff.

So A has to get rid of B, or make them irrelevant.

How? B has all the power. It's easy to say "get rid of them" but how do you actually do it?

Maybe B has overwhelming power now. But if B's position is untenable, that will eventually become apparent. And yes, that may take far too long to be of any good.

But if B's position is untenable, that will eventually become apparent.

Sure. That's why B is investing heavily in its military.

I thought that this subthread was about US politics. That's so knife-edge that it could flip in four years. But yes, if the US goes full-moron, and takes a military approach to climate mitigation, all bets are off :(

I may have butchered the quote a little bit (not a famous quote, just something told to me once).

"If you spend too long convincing someone of a problem they can't see, they start to see you as the problem" gets the meaning better. It doesn't mean to give up, it just means that you are making yourself their enemy and thus probably making it harder to get your message across (look at the studies on showing scientific evidence to anti-vaxxers).

I see this was taken quite negatively. The point isn't that you _actually are_ the problem, the point is that you need to realize that they start to _see_ you as a problem.

It means you have to consider what the other person is thinking and not just think "If I just keep telling them and showing them the facts, they'll see the light and come around to my side." Studies have shown that when you show scientific evidence to anti-vaxxers, they reject it and become more entrenched in their beliefs.

I understood the comment as saying that if you can't get your point across after a certain amount of time, it's your own fault. Thanks for clarifying, it makes much more sense now.

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