Hacker News Reader

It's especially tragic because any attempt to fix the situation implicitly crushes nations that are presently bootstrapping themselves into industrialization. E.g. major "developed" countries got a free ride on cheap, dirty fossil fuels. But now the climate is going to shit, and if by some miracle they managed to get themselves to carbon-negative (lol sure), you'd also have to prevent other developing nations from going down the cheap/dirty fossil fuel route themselves.

Which is crazy when you think about it. How's that going to work? Is the US and the EU going to give up half their GDP subsidizing clean energy in foreign nations to prevent further carbon release? Subjugate those countries to forcibly prevent them from industrializing?

It's truly a tragedy of the commons writ large. Short of some breakthrough in carbon sequestration or cold fusion or whatever, we're pretty screwed no matter how you look at it :(

> there's nothing you can say to any leader, politician, or pleb that can shock them into action

The notion that a bright ape, with social cognition designed for small group interaction, could scale its decision-making abilities to manage a global civilisation, was always a mere superstition.

> There's nothing you can say to any leader, politician, or pleb that can shock them into action.

Humans weren't designed to feel terror at numbers.

Most leaders, politicians and plebs have thus far experienced the disaster as nice winters and slightly more news about tornados in tornado-prone places.

You'll find people taking action only when the sky is falling (i.e. when it's too late to take action).

>There is literally no way to stop it

All people have to do is put their arms behind their backs, stop working, and demand it happen from the most powerful people in the world. I assure you that this isn't as bad as having humanity go extinct from climate change. Admittedly, getting enough people to do that is the real challenge, especially in the face of capital trying to tell them the exact opposite.

If an asteroid was about to direct hit in say 2029. Would society just argue on the internet and die? For how advanced we are, I really think we're an extremely weak society. Existential threats are taken very lightly.

There is a real difference between a singular event like an asteroid, and a slowly boiling frog like climate change.

You can point at an asteroid and say "That thing. It's going to melt half the planet." I'd like to think we could collectively get our shit together and find a way to fix that.

But climate change is more insidious because it's so slow. It's in every nations best (short term) interest to ignore climate change. And there are zero short-term consequences to politicians because the average person probably won't measurably see an effect in their lifetime. Sure, summers might get a bit hotter and have worse floods, winters get a bit colder. New pests will pop up, species might start to die. But there's not a galvanizing event to really scare the shit out of people. Even if people believe climate change, they'll shrug, tsk tsk a little (like I'm doing!), maybe stop using plastic bags or install solar on their house or something. But it's negligible, and they know it's a meaningless gesture because everyone else has to make the same gesture for it to work.

Eventually it'll get bad enough -- widespread fires, droughts, rampant pest or diseases, all the pollinators die out, whatever -- that people really start to take things seriously. But by that time we might have 20 billion humans on the brink of starvation and it'll be a bit late to do much more than try to survive.

I doubt humans will ever go extinct completely. We're pretty hardy primates. But it's very possible we get knocked back to hunter/gather tribes (probably with some neat technology!) scraping a living in some kind of post-apocalyptic industrial nightmare.

>You can point at an asteroid and say "That thing. It's going to melt half the planet."

How do you get people to believe it up until the day it gets close enough to make out with the human eye that it's approaching the planet? It's too late at that point. How many people have a telescope with that type of resolution, cameras that can pull out something likely low magnitude? We present scientific evidence to the public on Climate Change and many just don't care enough to actually do anything, why wouldn't the same happen with an Asteroid?

Because enough people will believe it when they see an asteroid looming towards them on CNN, Fox, whatever. There are plenty of people that deny climate change because it's convenient, either politically or economically. There are considerably fewer people that think the moon landing was faked, or the earth is flat, or pluto and mars and jupiter are actually jewels hanging from threads in a crystal sphere.

An asteroid is a sufficiently "concrete" science that the average person would believe if they see it. You can't "see" climate change, which is part of the issue.

> If an asteroid was about to direct hit in say 2029. Would society just argue on the internet and die?

I think many people would deny the asteroid exists and populists would claim it's a lie to put more money in the pockets of Big NASA government bureaucrats.

We might well die.

I think too many people are assuming that climate change will get worked out because previous threats to humanity have. As they say in investing, past performance does not predict future results.

Too bad most of the messaging now is about personal carbon footprints instead of political action on a mass scale.

> You’re all dead.

Oh darn, I was counting on my immortality.

You're dead too, buddy.

> You're all dead. And you have no idea.

Such panic. Seriously. We'll be fine. We'll grow to 20 billion before the population declines. Humanity will adapt. The planet has been through far worse extinction events. This one isn't even remotely impressive compared to the others.

Humanity will be fine. And every single generation will keep whining about "WOE IS US, THE END IS NEAR!" for all eternity.

I believe in climate change, I also think it's pointless to worry about. We can't stop it. We can deal with it. And we'll get damn good at it in the process.

"This one isn't even remotely impressive compared to the others."

This one is provoked by your mindset and it is going to make life unsustainable for everyone you know. It is called science bitch.

"I believe in climate change"

Do you also believe in gravity ?

> It is called science bitch.

I think I'll just avoid climate change threads here from now on, they're the /r/politics of HN.

Commenting like this will get you banned here. Please review the site guidelines.

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

> This one is provoked by your mindset and it is going to make life unsustainable for everyone you know.

And you fell for that nonsense? They said the same in 1985, we'd all be dead before the millennium. Unsustainable... hardly. People will thrive and will be absolutely fine.

>It is called science bitch.

Name calling is so charming.

I know people with PhDs who believe in homeopathy. That doesn't make it any less of a scam. I know medical doctors who refused to vaccinate their children in the rich west. She's a GP, not an expert in immune systems.

You know where the world will be in 20 years? Right here, just fine. We'll have about 3 billion more people on it.

And in 100 years from now it'll also be here. Probably around 20 billion people in total by then.

I'm a big fan of science and I think climate change is going to cost lives and make it hard to live in some areas, impossible in others, but people will be fine.

People are overreacting immensely and spending resources on all the wrong things. It's pathetic how herd-like we behave in panicky situations...