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Comment by surfsvammel | Hacker News Reader

Climate change is the only thing in my lifetime to fully horrify me. I imagine those before us feeling similar horror in the face of world war. Still. They acted. I find myself going on like normal. Why am I not fighting with everything I got, if, for nothing else, for the future of my children? There seem to be some psychological dissonance. Is the challenge just too big, the enemy just to diffuse, for us to bother?

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I'll take present day living over any single point in the past. Antibiotics weren't even produced until the 1940s, and before that time a scraped knee could literally kill you.

In the cold war people built concrete bunkers in their basement for fear of a nuclear Armageddon.

In Rome, if you couldn't pay your taxes you were forced to sell your children into slavery.

And here we are, where past presidents are buying ocean-front property so clearly the elites aren't truly as concerned about it as they publicly state.

Buying beach property isn't such a big deal when you're rich - at worst, you lose it, but you're still rich.

As for living in the present... I'm in my 50s, and have a chronic respiratory illness that developed a few years ago, but it has probably been latent since childhood. Today, it's an annoyance to treat and a mild disability. As a child, it would have flat out killed me. That's the change of half a lifetime.

In the Cold War a very few rich people built concrete bunkers in their basement, and the Swiss mandated it for all properties.

It just was. It was what we were born into, and grew up with. Peace movements and CND were big in the sixties and seventies. So was John le Carre, and all those Cold War movies - good, bad, and awful. Aside from that, most of us couldn't care less. We made jokes about it. We watched Threads in 1984 without a care, after watching it however...

“In the cold war people built concrete bunkers in their basement for fear of a nuclear Armageddon.”

It’s not like this threat went away. People just stopped paying attention to it.

Agreed, it just doesn't seem imminent anymore. Mutually assured destruction seems to keep the whole thing in check.

It will until it doesn’t. What troubles me is that it’s hard to tell whether the risk is 1% per year or 0.000001% per year.

Buy “high”, sell “low”, my advise is...

I'm trying to get my anxiety attacks under control over this. It's going to happen so much faster than we were thinking.

What adds insult to injury is that if the global community treated this as a life and death situation, we could probably find a way to mitigate it so that it's not too horrible. It won't happen, and that lack of activity is being led by the current "Leader of the Free World".

It might impinge on GDP by 10% come a century from now. A life or death analysis of the issue would say that development of poor developing countries is much more important, as are other pollutants that really kill.

It might impinge on GDP by 100% by ending human civilization. That 10% figure was the "median" outcome at the time, and increasingly it's looking like a hopelessly optimistic best case scenario.

I remember when no one wanted to bury trash so they would burn it.

Now we use methane from burying it to produce green power.

Carbon can be recaptured and reused. Wait until we see a planet about to smash into us before we start worrying about the end of civilation.

Virtually every mass extinction in the history of the planet we now think was caused by climate change caused by CO2. The K-T asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs is the outlier. The worst in history, the P-T extinction that nearly wiped out all complex life, happened after a volcano in siberia flowed into a coal bed. We're currently releasing CO2 10x faster than that.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/science/climate-change-ma...

Don't worry every few years there is a crisis. The worst thing you can do is internalize it.

In the 60s big fears around climate getting colder and fears around a new ice age.

I remember. It would seem that those models were wrong.

Looks like the only thing wrong with the current climate models is the conservative timeline.

The climate models (which were to record temp) were wrong? At the time weather was getting cold yearly. It made sense with the data available.

Which climate change model do you find correct? Why are there model(s), shouldn't only one correct one exist? Are people still making new models?

Relax. I've seen a dozen such imminent crises announced over the last half century, and nothing has changed. There is nothing different about this one.

Famous last words. I don't think humanity ever faced a similar crisis. The effects of climate change won't become too dramatic before it's already too late to change anything about it. It's a tragedy of the commons problem where you only face catastrophe decades after you had any control over the matter.

Once the permafrost starts melting in earnest, or the Greenland ice shield is gone, there is literally nothing we can do to stop the climate spiralling out of control. Right now it looks like these tipping points will be reached much sooner than we anticipated.

There is nothing differentiating this one from all the others I’ve lived thru.

We’re at a natural cyclical high, and the century-hence dire predictions are objectively well within noise levels (1° and 1 foot).

Capitalism is moving us to lowered emissions because we prefer them when possible (my office is 100% solar). Emerging nations will get there too. Strange how the imperative of radical change is directed at US, not others producing far more emissions.

I don't know, I'm much more terrified by the collapse of bird/insect/fish/etc. populations, which happens in front of our eyes, largely _not_ because of climate change, but most likely because of industrial agriculture, pesticides, habitat destruction, etc. A fully and relatively easily fixable problem, that is not even on the radar in public debate, policy discussions, and public imagination.

Climate change is a bit too abstract for me.

I'm also horrified by the amount of comments delegitimizing this important issue. Even worse, we see governments doing it.

Yes, I agree with you, it's terrible. The challenge is indeed enormous. The future looks bleak, specially to young people who will actually have to deal with it. Even worse, people in poor countries will probably be the most affected by this crisis. Is it already to late? I wonder.

Nevertheless, it's good to see people fighting for awareness. The recent protests are very important. Also, we are always seeing new technologies, and even old technologies that can help being developed and improved.

Climate change is one of two things that horrify me. The second is the nuclear sword of Damocles that has been hanging over our heads for 50 years. I don't understand why everyone thinks that now that the Cold war is over, everything's fine.

I'm incredibly concerned by the inaction, and the direction of the action being taken (Especially by climate activists), but I'll give people credit - at least there is a demand for the first problem to be taken seriously.

I don't see how the two aren't linked to be completely honest. Yeah the cold war "softened" a bit, but with conflicts arising due to climate change, the future wars could turn incredibly nasty, _especially_ with nuclear weapons and unstable people with access to them now asking why we can't use them....

It seems like the solution to both problems is the same. We need far far more nuclear power plants to get off of oil and coal. Can we convert the plutonium or whatnot in nuclear bombs into fuel for the new nuclear reactors?

Nuclear is no longer a climate solution since it unfortunately takes too long to build and scale. Modern economies do not have the skills for this.

We do have the skills for massive amounts of thin film production that's necessary for solar and lithium ion batteries. And somehow, we are massively reducing the cost of wind as we scale to ever larger turbines!

We need to lean into our current tech skills, particularly those that get cheaper as we deploy more of it. That description does not fit nuclear, as it has a negative learning curve for costs.

> We do have the skills for massive amounts of thin film production that's necessary for solar and lithium ion batteries. And somehow, we are massively reducing the cost of wind as we scale to ever larger turbines!

Don't wind farms actually warm the earth by robbing kinetic energy from the wind (which cools the earth)? I read that local climates actually get warmer where there are huge wind farms

Wind doesn't cool the Earth globally. It's just movement of air masses because of uneven heating by the sun. There are localized effects of wind farms, but they don't add any energy to the climate system.

Because today's nuclear powers are greed driven rather than ideologically driven. Yes, that's safer.

The biggest risk is religious zealots commanding a nuclear arsenal. No, that isn't Iran.

Exactly, couldn't agree more and why I'm fully supporting Gabbard in her US presidential run

I mean, why not solve one with the other?

If we can terraform Mars by nuking the poles, maybe we can use nukes to trigger huge volcanic eruptions that will cause global cooling by putting tons of dust into the atmosphere

Are you being facetious? How many people do you think would be killed by a nuclear blast of that size? How many more would die in agonizing pain as the fall-out spread over the globe? How many more from horrible cancers forty years from now? A volcanic eruption of that size would destroy agriculture and cause most of Africa, much of Asia, much of South America, and probably good chunks of North America and Europe to starve. It would also send ash contaminated with nuclear fall-out into the atmosphere.

No, the nuclear blast would be underground in the remote Pacific away from civilization, just enough to trigger a massive ash cloud to cool the earth.

I though ocean warming was enough of a problem as-is? Many thermo-nuclear weapons can reach temperatures exceeding one hundred-fifty million degrees. Also, that would probably wipe out the entire Pacific rim with colossal tsunamis. The radioactive fallout would then be carried throughout the world by currents, percolate throughout the ecosystems, and poison every one.

Nukes are not that powerful. See: https://what-if.xkcd.com/15/

The delusional paranoia among the catastrophists never ceases to amaze me. Fwiw, you people do more to hurt the cause than anything else.

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