Greta Thunberg

Does this mean you favor the end of air travel and high speed rail everywhere by 2025 plus a general strike? That's what Greta is asking for - a complete cessation of carbon emission by that date. Please indicate how you think this will pan out.

I actually agree about the scaremongering coming out of the Thunberg camp, but come on, it's not like she's doing this personally. She's a figurehead for a relatively niche movement that's trying to make it big, and she can surely handle this role. It's not any harder than the things that she did engage with personally in a decision-making role - namely, the initial school protests (that she was entirely right about, btw - the Thunberg/post-millennial generation is entirely disenfranchised wrt. lots of crucial issues not just climate, and they should be very visibly upset about this!)

Our grandchildren are probably not going to die of climate catastrophe. However, that “probably” is sufficiently weak to justify a huge urgent response.

An asteroid with a 3% chance of wiping out hundreds of millions of people in 60 years would motivate us to deflect it. The long tail of climate outcomes is a worse threat than that hypothetical, and we’re doing precious little to prevent it.

You probably know how feedback (both positive and negative) work in systems. If not, it is the same process that makes a microphone scream if you are too close to the speaker. Often the area between no feedback and full on feedback is really tiny.

Climate is similar – with the tipping point according to current models around +1.5°C average temperature. That means if we manag to limit it to <1.5°C we won't enter a region where climate warming accelerates itself to a degree that makes it unstoppable.

And there is literally no debate about these mechanisms – there is a >97% consensus on this.

Of course we can do the silly thing and try out what happens, ruin our own existential basis, get the predicted migrant waves, conflicts, economic damages etc. Or we could do what a civilized society would do and act accordingly.

Feel like this section of the guidelines have to be added above the commenting box soon.

> What to Submit

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

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

TLDR: it's here because people found it interesting and upvoted it.

Virtue signalling, mostly.