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Comment by jules | Hacker News Reader

It is exceedingly unlikely that raised temperatures or sea levels would end humanity. Even if all ice melts there would still be a lot of land, and humans can and do currently survive in hot climates. The habitable zone will just shrink a bit, but it will also expand in other places. Siberia + 5 degrees is still cold.

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No, this is very wrong. It’s not about having land to live on and being able to continue to breathe on it. Of course we would be able to do that.

The issue is all the parts of the ecosystem we have come to rely on. Animals, plants, insects... the entire global economy and our ways of live are tightly intertwined with everything else and even small disruptions can have enormous repercussions, especially on more vulnerable populations in the world.

This description is full of hyperbolic generalities. The available land example may or may not be comprehensive, but at least it's specific.

I think the biggest problem that I have about everything climate change / global warming is that we are making laws to force (don't forget that force means pointing guns at people regardless of the warm and fuzzy intentions used to sell it) entire populations and their economies in the absence of so much specific knowledge. That doesn't make me a denier because accept / deny is not really the issue. Just because I accept the general premise doesn't mean that I trust the depth of the understanding to the point that I am willing to turn a gun on my neighbor to either reduce their liberty and / or confiscate their personal property in the name of said premise.

> (don't forget that force means pointing guns at people

I'd love to know where this comes from, because it's clearly fucking bollocks but is trotted out in many threads.

It comes from a very explicit reading of Ayn Rand, who frequently likens law and regulation to the explicit use of force. To be fair, it's true but the literal statement of the fact misses a lot of the nuance of living in a civil society.

Of course it's true, no need for your generosity of fairness. Just don't obey the law and see what happens. Continue to do so and eventually you'll be looking down the barrel of a gun. Pointing this out is not Randian. It's just reality.

There are no nuances of living in a civil society when solutions are implemented by law. If it's by law, then it's by gun. I don't know of any law that works otherwise.

I think the nuance you're referring to is when people's minds are (actually) changed such that they work together on a common goal. There becomes a natural supply and demand of a certain behavior. But most of the effort that I see is not convincing people to support a certain shared goal per se, but rather to join a tribe to crowd source the passage of laws.

The more important thing to me - and the point I meant to make, though I didn't fully articulate it - is that pointing a gun at someone (or indeed entire sectors of an economy) should be reserved for situations in which there is a very high bar of confidence in the detailed facts and predictions of the outcomes. While we may all agree that global warming causes climate change and even that it is anthropomorphic, it doesn't appear to me that we have a level of specific knowledge to say that "a reduction of carbon emission by x will result in a climate of y in the year z". If we don't have that, then I question both the morality and practicality of what appears to be a witch hunt in the form of policy making.

Even in a fully laizes fair community you would sooner or later be “looking down the barrel of a gun” for some reason or other. Laws at least makes it a bit easier to predict what reasons that would be.

But regarding the need for knowing exactly how things works and who should have rights to do what. I could equally argue that your contribution to raising the CO2 concentration of our shared resource, the atmosphere, is not sanctioned by me. So why is it not you that should prove it is safe before asking me to just accept your doing so?

> I could equally argue that your contribution to raising the CO2 concentration of our shared resource, the atmosphere, is not sanctioned by me.

Then I suppose you should do us all a favor and stop breathing because your breathing is not sanctioned by me. (Just kidding, it is :))

Seriously though, that's just the way it's always been. We're born into the world and we act w/out permission to survive. I don't have to prove to anyone that the next step I take is safe. But if it harms you in some way, then yes, I'm liable.

I guess there is a fundamental difference in how we see the commons. I take the view that it is not simply “there” as a first come first serve basis, but rather something we have an equal right to, the basis from which private property must be derived. Locke started here.

But I think the breathing thing is actually a good retort. Where do the principles meet...

I guess in the case the differenence is between drinking from the well and pissing in it. It might very well be safe, but certainly not nice

> I take the view that it is not simply “there” as a first come first serve basis, but rather something we have an equal right to, the basis from which private property must be derived. Locke started here.

I think I'm with you there. I don't have a problem paying property tax because as a person born on this earth, you're also entitled to my land. I'm paying a tax for the privilege of it being mine.

Ultimately though, the state derives its power from a legitimate monopoly on violence.

If an entity continues to defy the laws and softer enforcement doesn't work (fines levied, assets frozen, etc.), eventually the state must use physical force to maintain the rule of law.

What if your neighbor was dumping liquid radioactive waste on your land, right outside your house? Greenhouse gases should be considered harmful pollution, and because they eliminate vast swathes of habitable land they should be treated similarly to other forms of toxic waste.

I agree 100%. For some reason environmental discussions always have to include the "cost" to business in the decision whether we do anything about it.

I imagine if I told my neighbor that I felt it was cost prohibitive to pay for trash pickup service, so I was just going to dump my trash in their yard, they'd have a problem with that. Why do we allow companies to pollute water, land and air that doesn't belong to them?

I understand your general comparison to toxic waste. The problem is not the comparison, it's the level of specificity. If someone is dumping an amount of say Parathion on my lawn, it is well within our ability to accurately determine the nature and amount of damage to me and my property given the amount and frequency of the dumping. And given that, it's a short step to monetizing the damage. In terms of accuracy, can we say the same for carbon? I don't believe we can. So while there may be a valid comparison at a high level, when it gets to actually determining damages to individuals or society, we just aren't there imo.

I realize the simulations we're using to extrapolate the potential damage are just that -- extrapolations. However, we've been using the actual effects of the existing warming to improve those simulations. These simulations are increasingly indicating that we will raise sea levels by several meters, and that vast swathes of temperate land will become uninhabitable. While we don't know for certain this will happen, the hazards posed in the event that it does happen mean we need to take steps now.

If it could be reasonably expected the dumper knew Parathion were toxic at certain levels in the groundwater and they continued to increase those amounts, it would be reasonable to sanction them before the levels become unsafe. If you only apply sanctions after the damage is done, the sanctions don't really do anything. The best thing to do is to try to mitigate the risk rather than waiting for more information.

Maybe, but none of those things necessarily end humanity.

That it would hurt vulnerable populations who live in a region that becomes uninhabitable is undoubtedly true and I didn't argue against that, but that is not the end of humanity, which is what you claimed.

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