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Comment by bregma | Hacker News Reader

I was alive in the 1970s when folks like the Club of Rome declared we'll all be dead form overpopulation and Malthusian collapse by the year 2000. Those self-same folks told us this century the arctic will be completely ice free by 2013. In the 1980s, others predicted our total demise due to acid rain and ozone depletion.

Mean time, people are making good progress on both feeding the masses and curbing the exponential growth of humanity across the globe. At the same time, clear progress is happening on the reduction-of-greenhouse-gas-emissions front. Acid rain and ozone depletion have been curtailed.

We'll always have doomsayers, extremists, and prophets. They're so busy with themselves they rarely get in the way of people who actually get work done.

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On the other hand, these doomsayers also caused public outcry that changed a few things. We can never know if these changes are the reason doom didn't happen, or because the prospects were imaginary.

Anyway, I believe that it'll be very hard to annihilate humanity let alone the planet, but it'll be very easy to lower the living standards slowly enough that we won't notice the reasons for it.

If you plan to have children, I think it's something you should thinks of.

Ofcourse, I'd prefer a rational discussion regarding the issues. But the powers at be, which usually have what to lose, usually steer the debate to be anti rational. And then you find yourself in a position where you must exaggerate in order to gain attention to your cause. It's a tragedy...

> folks like the Club of Rome declared we'll all be dead from overpopulation and Malthusian collapse by the year 2000

Some of the actual predictions from the CoR's "Limits to Growth", according to the Wikipedia page about that document:

> Given business as usual, i.e., no changes to historical growth trends, the limits to growth on earth would become evident by 2072, leading to "sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity".

(2072 is quite a long time after 2000. I wonder whether it's a typo for 2027, given what follows, but that too is a long time after 2000.)

> Global Industrial output per capita reaches a peak around 2008, followed by a rapid decline ... Global Food per capita reaches a peak around 2020, followed by a rapid decline ... Global Services per capita reaches a peak around 2020, followed by a rapid decline ... Global population reaches a peak in 2030, followed by a rapid decline

Those are all well after 2020. (The first of them doesn't seem like it's correct, thankfully. I suspect the others are some way off, too. But I'm not arguing that the CoR were right, only that they didn't say what you say they said.)

Club of Rome predictions are pretty much spot on. It's been re-evaluated two or three times recently and each time has held up an amazingly accurate picture of what has happened since. See here for the graphs filled in the intervening years[1]. I don't recall any ice predictions from Club of Rome - do you have a link?

In the 1980s the world actually came together to phase out CFCs, and fit sulphur scrubbers on coal power stations. Interestingly the builders of Battersea were the first to fit these - in 1925. They took a while to catch on.

The ozone hole has finally stopped increasing only this decade. It's trending to resolve in 50 more years, if and only if, the recent discovery of CFC use in China doesn't grow. So a century to probably solve the man-made problem.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits...

Really like that last paragraph, toally agree. I'm not sure I agree about the clear progress on reduction of greenhouse gases thou. Expanding consumerism and population in a carbon economy would seem to preclude this. Can you explain your thinking?

Except the people predicting climate change isn’t the club of Rome, it’s an entire scientific community, who have been double, triple, and quadruple checking every measurement and assumption for 50 years. This is not some hysterical group of panicked hippies. We’re talking about broad consensus among all the most educated and intelligent members of our civilization. Please show a little respect and listen to them.

You are missing the fact that the salesmen of climate change have been politicians, and politicians lie, and politicians propose political solutions, they want more and more of my limited money, and browbeat people who already don’t like or trust them, and frankly that is a bad combination of tactics if the solution is needed that badly across the broad spectrum of the population.

If climate change stops being sold as a one sided political problem with one sided political solutions, you may see momentum on it, but speaking as a conservative, when your pitch men and women are Bernie Sanders, Warren, and Cortez, amongst others, people I don’t trust and disagree with already, people who have tried framing me as a stupid person who doesn’t get it, you have already lost me entirely on the pitch before it left their mouths.

Change the salesman and the tactic, because the current one doesn’t work, and it is doomed to failure because of that.

The conservatives will never support addressing climate change honestly, because they are getting too much money from the fossil fuel industries. I mean honestly, that’s like saying, I won’t believe that we are spending too much money on the military until I hear it from Northrop Grumman. So you’re going to be waiting a long time if that’s what you’re waiting for. None of those people care at all about you or your kids or the worlds future. Not one single bit.

You are literally listening to the people who have the greatest conflict of interest on the subject and the least competence in it. It’s no wonder you’re confused.

Perhaps instead of assuming a position that he didn't actually state and calling him "confused" you could have addressed his larger point that the vocal proponents of climate action alienate large portions of the population by painting them as ignorant or stupid instead of attempting to engage with them.

No, his central point was that he would never listen to anyone on the issue that didn’t have specific ideological positions, which turn out to be the least likely people in the world to accurately represent the science due to blatant conflicts of interest. It’s in impossible request.

To my knowledge the only major political party anywhere in the world to deny the science of anthropogenic climate change is the Republican Party in the United States, and those are the only people he will listen to. It’s an absurd situation.

Absolutely this, the fight for climate change was lost 20 years ago when Al Gore made it one of his campaign goals. Things like CO2 climate change or net neutrality that 90% of the population had absolutely no opinion previously on are best resolved in the background because as soon as a politician tells people what opinion they should have, 50% of them are going to take the opposite side simply because of the letter next to their name. Politicizing anything is a guaranteed way to ensure it will be in a substandard limbo forever.

I understand your point, though I can't help but think that if the US had more than only two viable parties, maybe things wouldn't be so polarized?

Yes, and they are repeatedly wrong in their predictions. We can't accurately forecast the weather a few days out. All our great hurricane model forecasts are off and that's typically a day or two out in the future. There are just far too many variables at play that we don't even know about for us to accurately forecast anything climate related that far into the future.

You don’t have to be able to predict weather to predict climate.

Think of it this way: it’s impossible due to quantum uncertainty to predict the path of a single particle in a gas. Yet out of the chaos, you can still draw out nice mathematical rules like the ideal gas law PV=nRT

I agree. My issue is the climate predictions that we do have over the last 50 years have been grossly inaccurate. We don't have any mathematical proofs for climate at this point like ideal gas law. But yet that is not how it is presented to the public.

I think you have it wrong. Gravity and momentum are very well understood, but a double pendulum or three body problem is chaotic such that prediction past a certain point is useless.

So is the climate well behaved like the ideal gas law, or are there complicated sources of feedback like clouds, plant growth, and albedo which make it chaotic? There are quasi-periodic alternations between the fairly cold periods of the current ice age and the interstitial we're now in, so you should recognize it's substantially more complicated than just averaging the speeds of all the molecules.

I'm all for a cleaner better world, but I'll never believe someone who says they can usefully predict a chaotic system.

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