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Comment by ecmascript | Hacker News Reader

I always have wondered how people calculate pollution from countries. I mean, that must be from data gathered from the government?

For countries/governments that doesn't even have or have a very limited garbage disposal, that must mean they pollute very little on paper when in reality people just throw stuff into the ground / ocean etc.

I don't really believe this article. It seems like a typical clickbait shit article actually. Pollution is not only how much CO2 you release into the air, just look at some rivers in India which are incredibly polluted or countries in Africa where people simply burn metal in hunt for rare metals which they can sell. That pollution is probably not included in this statistic which makes me call bullshit on this claim.

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> I mean, that must be from data gathered from the government?

I'm going to take the wild stretch of imagination that the people who are professionally interested in pollution and study it full-time have also considered this and are doing something a little more sophisticated to measure it.

Therefor you are making an assumption that compounds/reinforces your confirmation bias as opposed to actually seeking further further information to determine whether the article is correct? Is that a close-minded approach or a knowledge seeking approach? To what other "professionally interested" group do you also automatically give the benefit of doubt?

The article is talking about carbon footprint, it's in the very first sentence, had you taken time to barely open the article.

Lol, I did open the article but it doesn't say how it calculates the carbon footprint or whats included.

And my point was literally that there is several countries that simply cannot measure their carbon footprint since they barely have a functional government.

And even if the article only talks about CO2, it is still very, very misleading and the title is even worse. Like I said, a clickbait article.

Dirty rivers suck, but humanity's big problem right now is global warming.

Well, we face multitude of issues. For example loss of biodiversity is likely as important as global warming.

Loss of biodiversity is in big part caused by global warming (temperature rising, ocean acidification etc.) Global warming is not caused by loss of biodiversity.

On top of that, many of things that need to be done to reduce global warming will directly positively affect biodiversity, such as reducing deforestation and thus habitat loss.

So no, fixing global warming is more important since its a prerequisite to stopping loss of biodiversity.

The problem is we're making the single world we can live in poisonous unstable and dead through short term unsustainable growth, violence and greed.

Maybe we can spare a few murder machines for the Imperial army until we figure out how to stop choking the planet to our collective toxic, entirely preventable deaths?

Let’s not make this a one or the other thing. Dirty rivers are at least as bad as global warming. We can’t focus on one environmental threat while forgetting all the others.

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