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Comment by candiodari | Hacker News Reader

It was never true that human industry was the main cause of co2 release into the atmosphere.

Which is one of the reasons to doubt that all those climate accords will have any influence on global warming at all.

> "Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with increasing frequency.

If you increase the input into self-reinforcing feedback loop that is exactly what you'd expect to happen. Not that at that point it makes a large difference, but it certainly makes some difference.

Feedback loops are notoriously hard to mitigate.

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> It was never true that human industry was the main cause of co2 release into the atmosphere.

This is technically true, but I think it misses the point.

It's like complaining about Jeff Bezos being financially irresponsible because he bought a yacht. It might be financially irresponsible for you or me to buy a yacht, but Jeff Bezos's bank account is much bigger, and refills much more rapidly.

It's true that the natural carbon cycle involves a lot of sequestered carbon being released into the air, but nature actually consumes a little bit more carbon than it emits. If we left the natural carbon cycle alone, atmospheric carbon would decline.

Human industry is fundamentally the opposite. We emit CO2, but we don't sequester it in any significant way. Nature may pump more CO2 into the air than we do, but it also absorbs far more than we do. In fact, once nature consumes all of its own CO2, it consumes roughly 40% of what we put out there. The remaining 60% of our output is why atmospheric carbon keeps increasing.

What if it's all a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?

Then trillions of dollars were extremely inefficiently allocated to the task of creating better worlds and a much better world could have been created with that money instead, costing lives in the process.

Having noble goals doesn't immunize you from accounting.

And none of it means anything if we all die because the planet cant sustain us any longer.

quite a nice little set of rhetorical positions you've constructed for yourself

S/He's responding to "What if it's all a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?" therefore in this scope there is no GW

I recommend you read "Money: The Unauthorized Biography [0]" You'll never look at money the same way again. Money is not a commodity even though we treat it as such. It certainly is not a finite resource.

Plenty of money gets created everyday for thing far more stupid than trying to save the world. Look at how much money has been created (and will be spent) for no good reason at all in the current cryptocoin bubble. The massive capital gains are going to be cashed out and spent somewhere, creating market distortions, making people who contribute nothing insanely wealthy. Money is not sacred. Better we use it to try and save the world than to treat it as if it (and the market) are some all-wise, ever-perfect allocator of human and natural resources.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F1W0DAO/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

Actually.. Original money was just a highly marketable commodity. Salt, spices, gold, cigarettes in prison. I highly suggest a better biography of currency. Maybe something authored by one of those pesky Austrians.

The book you want is David Graeber's, but it will not confirm austrian leanings, nor the history of money you present above.

It's not fair to just say go buy someone's book without a single supporting argument. Drop some wisdom on me, man.

The tl;dr is that the commonly told origin of money, right back to Adam Smith, is a-historical assumption that is contradicted by archeological evidence.

The a-historical account is that money was developed to make barter more efficient. This is not what we see in the records from Sumer, and there is similar evidence in the other locations where we know writing arose. Before the neolithic revolution societies economic structure was largely based on social ties and a sense of reciprocal behavior: a sort of informal communism. As sedentary agriculture lead to the development of temple complexes and cities, debt and credit records replaced these. Money was not developed until nearly 2k years later. Barter was actually uncommon in the ancient world and was typically reserved for interactions between strangers such as traders that had traveled long distance and had no social ties to one another. Coinage in particular typically arose as part of a complex that involved raising armies and funding them via taxation.

The commodity theory of money is a-historical, and not what "original money" was.

It's a great book, though Graeber has little restraint in taking pot shots at economists, which might provoke some readers to defensiveness.

So you're saying the first money was essentially "social credit"? I don't disagree with the spirit of the argument, but your good-will credit in your community doesn't have the properties we associate with currency such as fungibility and divisability.

If they used a formalized series of IOUs that allowed for the long term planning of capital then I'd be more inclined to call it currency. But sounds like an interesting book, may have to give it a read.

I'd strongly recommend the book. It's a little verbose in places but that's also because Graeber makes and justifies his arguments in detail.

And yes, it's the latter: formalized debt records that meet the 3 criteria we commonly define money by.

The author addresses this. I suggest you read the book before making assumptions.

I gave a one line rebuttal. Could you not do the same?

I already have an alternate view of money. I look at generalized wealth more directly, with money merely an somewhat interesting special case that is less special than most people think it is. (I tend to think even economists pay too much attention to currency. Not that they pay attention only to currency, but that they pay too much attention to it.) The simple truth is that if you bend the economy towards creating wind and solar and cutting down hydrocarbon usage and all the other things we have to do, all the people doing that stuff as the result of a hoax aren't doing something else that would have been more useful.

Money isn't the issue; finite time and resources are.

My point has nothing to do with how terrible capitalism is or any silly bete noirs like that. It is simply the observation that if we waste our time on A, we can't be using that time to do the better B. It sits at a level of fundamental truth far below debates about economic systems or the nature of money.

I wonder where the theory that government spending is simply free actually comes from, that somehow when the government spends money (or enacts regulation or taxes, same thing) that the cost is somehow magically not that everybody has to work more and/or harder to achieve those things.

But it's sure becoming a popular theory.

Also: I think what you're describing might be the broken window fallacy: http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fal...

>all the people doing that stuff as the result of a hoax

Are you saying that human-caused global warming is a hoax?

I have heard this line several times before, and it is the environmental equivalent of "What if there is no God, and we are being good to each other for nothing."

It completely ignores tradeoffs. General environmentalism has been very aggresively anti-nuclear. In a world of CO2 caused climate change, it has to rethink that opposition. Another example is with diesel engines. There is a tradeoff between NOX emmisions and efficiency (and thus CO2 emissions). What you decide the tradeoff to be, is influenced by how much you thing climate change is a problem.

Another example is endangered species. If we really are going to have catastrophic global warming, then maybe we don't try as aggressively to protect all species from habitat destruction say from building hydroelectric, wind, solar power plants in Africa.

There is no tradeoff.

Reducing waste (CO2, methane, heat, whatever) increases profits.

Not for the entrenched interests, obviously. Happily, everyone else who's been paying their externalized costs (taxpayers, consumers) benefits.

There is only so much you can reduce waste though. The internal combustion engine is limited by thermodynamics to about 50% efficiency, we are already reaching >40% in production engines. There just isn't much more waste we can get rid of. (electric cars bring up a different sets of limits, though probably higher)

Fewer trips, fewer miles/km, lighter vehicals, vehical sharing, etc.

Optimize the whole system. Localized optimization leads to decreased overall efficiency.

"Reducing waste (CO2, methane, heat, whatever) increases profits."

That's a broad generalization and far simpler model than what the poster is referring to.

Yes, riding a motorcycle instead of an SUV decreases all emissions. This is the simple base case.

However driving a diesel SUV decreases CO2 but increases NOx wrt to a gasoline one. This is the higher-order effect.

correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you've been misunderstood. Are you saying:

  1. Most CO2 release is natural
  2. We increased CO2 through our own efforts as well
  3. [implied statement you may agree with: this led to a feedback loop]
  4. We now may be too late to stop it merely by reducing emissions, if planetary emissions of stored carbon take over and become the main source of CO2 emissions

I think's actually fairly profound. We may have pushed the system towards a new equilibrium, and it's now moving itself faster than we are pushing it. The only way to stop it would be to invent something to suck carbon from the atmosphere on a massive scale.

Is that what you were saying? You're getting downvotes because your first statement, while technically true, isn't very profound. Natural carbon emissions were counterbalanced by natural carbon storage.

But that might not be true if our additional emissions have triggered enough feedback loops.

Most CO2 is indeed natural.

We did increase the circulating amount by a very small margin. Large enough so that it accumulated over the years.

This of course led to a feedback loop.

Arctic ice has 1400Gt of carbon locked up as methane. [1] This is equivalent to 1400/10 = 140 years of human 2016 activity. [2] If ice starts to melt, we are doomed.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions

[2]: https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions

I believe (but cannot prove, obviously) that we're way past the tipping point. Meaning simply reducing anthropocentric emissions, even down to zero, will not meaningfully impact atomspheric CO2, methane.

For civilization to survive, we must adapt, mitigate, or both.

The scientific consensus is that sea levels will rise by 1-2 meters over the course of 200 years.

Thats the science. And it doesn't sound like extinction to me.

Sea levels aren't the only source of trouble. Changing rainfall amounts for example would impact our ability to grow crops.

Yes, extinction seems unlikely. But the planet's ability to support the current population could easily be a casualty.

I think the concern is that the models in use don't take these additional feedback loops into consideration because they're difficult to predict.

Yup. That's what's terrifying. Most current talk about CO2 assumes that humans will have control over how much is released.

But since we pushed the system to a new state, its net emissions may dwarf our own emissions. Then things get even harder.

> If ice starts to melt, we are doomed.

It's already happening. Natalia Shakhova has been studying this for years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSsPHytEnJM

Industry? Not initially, no. Activity? Absolutely.

One theory is that agriculture prevented another mini-ice age. I don't know where in the "believe, but cannot prove" spectrum this theory lies (a la http://edge.org).

"Feedback loops are notoriously hard to mitigate."

Complex adaptive systems. Disrupt a system's equilibrium and you get chaos. Hard to predict, mitigate.

> Feedback loops are notoriously hard to mitigate.

"Amplifiers that oscillate and oscillators that won't are the two great fears of analog designers."

So you work hard to keep that feedback gain under '1' in an amplifier and over '1' in an oscillator.

Technically an amplifier with a feedback mechanism can become an oscillator and if you break the feedback loop in an oscillator you end up with 'just' an amplifier.

To make this even more interesting: a negative feedback element in an amplifier will greatly enhance the frequency response at the expense of amplification (and will vastly reduce the chances of that amplifier turning into an oscillator).

No, we started the avalanche with our carbon emissions.

This is idiocy. You basically have to believe tens of thousands of scientist are liars to accept the first statement. Not merely they're mistaken, not merely they have imperfect data, but intentionally deceiving with malice. That's how many scientists and how much data there is contravening your first statement, not least of which is Exxon - that liberal bastion of environmental preservation.

"You basically have to believe tens of thousands of scientist are liars to accept the first statement"

The first statement, that human industry is not "the main cause of co2 release," is undisputed fact. This is what the DOE says [1]:

  "Natural CO2 sources account for the majority of CO2 released into the atmosphere."
    and
  "Carbon dioxide comes from both natural and anthropogenic sources; natural sources are predominant."

Your misunderstanding is apparently common enough that the last assertion is offered in the context of dispelling a myth.

[1] https://www.netl.doe.gov/research/coal/carbon-storage/carbon...

That page says: Myth: Carbon dioxide comes only from anthropogenic sources, especially from the burning of fossil fuels.

Jesus is a myth. The above statement is not something any thinking person has ever considered. You'd have to be a moron to think CO2 only comes from human source. Of course CO2 predates mankind, as well as mandkind's activities. Positioning something that no one is claiming as if it's something someone is claiming and then knocking it down, is known as a strawman, it is not a myth. But this is what you'd expect from a DOE run by an oilman and climate change denier.

The concern is not the source or reason for historic CO2 levels, it's the source and reason for increases above historic CO2 levels.

Treating people as if they're too stupid to see through such transparent attempts at distraction should be a violation of the code of conduct, before name calling those who try to get away with shit like this.

"But this is what you'd expect from a DOE run by an oilman and climate change denier."

I assume you refer to Rick Perry. In point of fact the myth/reality portion of the page has been unchanged since at least September of 2015 [1], at which time Obama appointee Ernest Moniz was Secretary of Energy. Dr. Moniz has never denied the fact that the climate is changing, as far as I'm aware.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150912221729/https://www.netl....

Sure, if you don't include the word "net". Natural processes account for the majority of CO2 introduced into the atmosphere. They also account for the majority of the CO2 removed from the atmosphere, because there's an equilibrium flow.

The important part is that anthropogenic sources are a significant contribution to the net imbalance of those flows, because it's all in one direction.

It's like arguing that your spending, because is a small fraction of the amount of money you move between your checkings and savings accounts, won't make you run out of money...

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