Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

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You're being downvoted for trotting out well-worn and eye-roll inducing ignorance. It'd be one thing to approach this conversation with an open mind, but just stating blanket nonsense raises hackles.

> Nature has never been stable especially not for humans

Yeah, it changes on geologic timescales, i.e. thousands and millions of years. We've subjected nature to catastrophic shocks 1000x faster. It does not respond well. It collapses. We're in the middle of shit storm because of our own actions. It is absolutely not business as usual for Earth.

> I would still ask those most worried to point to a scientifically demonstrated consequence of climate change

We're not really sure how Earth is gonna function if the oceans are dead and there are no insects, and parts of it are literally uninhabitable for humans because it will be too hot to go outside (~130F).

> If anything we have made it more stable

Nonsense. We chopped down most of the forests in the US [1] to make farmland. Literally. My home state of Indiana was _literally_ solid hardwood forest 250 years ago. Take a look at it on Google maps sometime.

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

Edit: added handy reference

> You're being downvoted for trotting out well-worn and eye-roll inducing ignorance

Please do not break the site guidelines like this, regardless of how wrong or annoying other comments may be.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And yet all you are doing here is proving my point.

You take the most catastrophic interpretations as gospel while at the same time admitting we have no idea what the consequences will actually be.

That's exactly the point here.

So instead of jumping to conclusions like you are doing perhaps it would help if you started being concrete.

The quesiton still stands. What scientifically demonstrated problem which will arise over the next 100 years can't we deal with?

I at least am not trying to argue that we're utterly doomed. But wouldn't it be a hell of a lot easier to not have to damn every ex-glacier? To not have to build sea walls on every coast, and deal with year round hurricane & fire seasons, and desalinate massive quantities of water, and everything else? Yeah, we can survive on the moon and grow crops in Antarctica. But notice, most people prefer living in Palm Beach and cultivating the Midwest.

It's like with bees. Some people go, who cares if neonicotinoids wipe them out, we'll simply make a billion incredibly advanced miniature robot bees to replace them. Ok, sure, we can probably figure that out in the next fifty years. But that seems like way more of a pain in the ass than just cutting it out with the neonicotinoids.

P.S. the insect populations are already massively cratered. That part isn't wild speculation about 2100, that's today. I'm sure you remember the headlines about the study in Europe finding 75% reduction in insect biomass over the last twenty five years. Oh, and the year round fire season is here in California.

There are a lot of things in life that would be a lot easier if only they were different. The problem is that we are dealing with a wicked problem.

We need energy to survive especially being as many as we are, poor countries are depending on cheap reliable energy and don't care about the climate. They are trying to survive today.

So it all comes back to what the consequences will be of what you are going to propose as a solution.

If for ex. the choice was between making fossil fuel illegal or allow it to be used as it is being used today then I would definitely be choosing the latter so that we can continue to have growth and create the surplus to come up with better solutions.

You're the only one here proposing making fossil fuel illegal, and IMO anybody proposing poor countries bear the brunt of fixing this, doesn't take it seriously- one, yes, it's obviously an impossible ask for people living in huts, and two, they are only a tiny, tiny part of the problem.

Personally I figure we need a lot of things- heavy investment in sequestration technology, clean energy, and carbon free transport in the first world, but also clever spot fixes like the $1 grate for cookfires (https://www.engineeringforchange.org/news/a-1-insert-for-coo...) that could cook the same meal with less fuel in millions of households. Maybe someone will come up with a cheap clever way to slow down the melting of drinking water glaciers to buy a few decades. The floating shade-ball experiments in reservoirs to reduce evaporation also come to mind.

P.S. The barely-surviving communities you mention concern for are the least able to cope with the consequences of climate change. Desalination plants and robot bees are simply not on their list of options.

Let's not pretend there isn't a big group of people who want to make fossil fuel illegal.

And lets not pretend that whatever solution most people think of it isn't somehow going to be based on slowing down growth.

P.S. They certainly will be having big problems dealing with the consequences if they aren't allowed to grow and become richer and won't have access to cheap reliable energy.

What can I say, you aren't talking to those people.

The build-out of renewable power and electrifying everything in a matter of two or three decades would be superhero-level industrialism worthy of the legacy of WWII America. Solar panels & windmills need people to install them, and that new battery-electric F-150 is going to need a lot of people to develop & build it. Sequestration, too, will be a massive industrial works if we get it going, and synthetic fuel could balance the flow of carbon in the transit sector overnight.

That future would be built on a lot of American sweat & hard work. Plenty of growth, too. Frankly, I'd have thought that was something the country that rebuilt her fleets in like a year after Pearl Harbor & landed on the moon could get excited about.

Wind and solar are not going to come even close to solving our energy needs and they aren't as environmentally friendly as claimed.

They can certainly fill a lot moreof our need than they do today, and there is still nuclear as well.

More or less environmentally friendly than climate change?

I'm surprised for someone pro growth and all, you aren't interested in the opportunity to build all this out. Why not?

I am interested in solving the basic problems with energy which means finding a base source that fulfills the following 5 parameters: Cheap, plentiful, reliable, scalable and clean.

Only Nuclear solves that today but there is a huge anti-nuclear sentiment by the environmental organizations and thus politically against nuclear which of course is absurd as that's probably the only energy form that actually can deliver on the no-emission promise which is the one everyone claims to be so worried about.

I have nothing against wind and solar but they are just inferior to nuclear and hopefully in some distant future fusion and in a less distant future thorium but the current sentiment makes that even more filled with friction.

To give you an example of the absurdity.

This summer the weather was amazing in Denmark, the result no wind which in a country largely based on wind energy means they are relying on other countries to provide energy in this case Germany. Germany who also had a great summer and has been focusing on solar.

What happened? Germany used coal. And now that they are closing their nuclear powerplants that will only increase and is a good example of the consequences of a ideologically driven rather than a rationally driven energy policy.

Thanks but no thanks.

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