Climate change causes Australia to downgrade Great Barrier Reef′s outlook

Everything that exists is there because it survived. Complex systems that do not prioritize survival tend to get eclipsed by those that do.

One very effective way to achieve survival is to build your "self" out of many independent competing subsystems, and select only those that themselves survive. An individual human does not particularly care if some of its cells die; the point is for them to die, such that the overall human remains healthy (when they don't, you get cancer). An individual cell does not care if some of its mitochondria die; this happens naturally at times of low energy use. An individual mitochondrion does not care if glucose molecules are broken down and reconstituted into ATP; that is its function.

On the other end of the spectrum, an individual corporation does not care if it ruins the lives of some of its employees by laying them off; such callousness helps improve the efficiency of the organization itself. A healthy economy does not care if the individual firms that comprise it go bankrupt, because this is the only way to free up inefficiently-used resources before they drain the whole economy of its vitality.

A lot of things that suck come from competing interests across the different levels. To the corporation, layoffs are a good thing, and the share price goes up when they happen; to the individuals laid off, they're a tragedy. At the species level, evolution is what gave us the richness of biodiversity we see; at the individual level, it gives us death and fruitless competition to pass on our genes.

If the machines manage to take over, it'll be because they manage to evolve this fractal competition within them, in which case they'll just replicate human foibles at the lower levels. (Won't somebody think of the poor software libraries, replaced by a shifting package.json?) If they don't evolve this, they will themselves remain tools, subject to replacement at the whim of their human masters.

Mars only doesn't have anyone there the first time.

What makes you think the interaction between the first and second wave of colonists wouldn't run into all the same problems that we had on Earth?

(Not that I believe there will be any waves of colonists. It'd be easier, and have a better social ROI to make the ocean floor, Antarctica, Mount Everest, or San Francisco hospitable to human life, than it would be to settle Mars.)

You seriously think that Mars will escape that? That the overpopulated proles on increasingly uninhabitable Earth will silently watch as constant resupply launches head for Mars? I think there have been a selection of movies along those lines. :)

If it's going to be child's play, how come none of the attempts to achieve an ongoing sealed biome have been successful? Nearest so far was the Soviets in the seventies during their lunar programme.

Honestly, that seems like a fool's errand. We would have to find a planet capable of supporting us stably (the "class M planet" archetype), which is likely to be nearly impossible given the size of the visible universe, how little of it we will ever be able to reach with subluminal technology and limited time and resources, and how hostile the universe seems in general. Our relationship with our environment is delicate and finely-tuned over millions of years of evolution, and we can't just hope to blindly stumble across a planet with a breathable atmosphere, hospitable climate and either no ecosystem, or an ecosystem which won't collapse with our introduction, and hope for the best.

We're certainly not going to thrive for a million years under a glass dome in an artificial ecosystem that requires constant technological maintenance and power, on a planet that might be amenable to terraforming over millennia .... and if we could, there's no reason to go out into space when we could just colonize and re-terraform Earth that way faster and more cheaply.

The whole idea of spreading ourselves across the universe to preserve ourselves is a fantasy that assumes there is anywhere else for us to go, and any ability to reach that place, as if space is just a bigger ocean. It isn't though, and chances are very high that this one planet is all we're ever going to get.

34% of our exports come from fuels & oils [0] and 50% of our energy [1]. We contribute essentially nothing to the problem of carbon emissions [2]. We would, at best, be showing leadership by torching our own economy which is unlikely to sway the Indians, Chinese, Americans , etc into following our lead.

We would be doing much better applying our leadership to making billions in exports and showing leadership in renewables & nuclear research. The only contribution Australia can make is finding a way to show that coal isn't the most profitable option. Mandating uneconomic experiments is not the path to doing that.

If the reef goes because of climate change, Australia was never in a position to stop that by reducing our emissions.

[0] http://www.worldstopexports.com/australias-top-10-exports/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Australi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

> Who are the alarmist movements?

I assume you mean who represents them, as it isn’t an organization I’m naming. A generation ago Al Gore would have been the figurehead of the alarmist movement. Now it is Greta Thunberg and green policy makers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

> Are climate scientists alarmists?

Some are, usually when they back predictions outside their specialty or make the mistake of applying scientific nodes of thought to (geo)engineering problems and unsurprisingly come up short.

Most are more reserved in how they present themselves and/or understand that our prediction capability is still quite limited and the non-specialist public doesn’t understand the nuances of qualified statements about future outcomes.

Unfortunately evo-activists have cherry picked data, neglecting to mention that global climate has been historically much warmer than now, that rising levels of fixed nitrogen thanks to artificial fertilizer is causing increase of the biome which sequesters carbon in biomass. Some facts presented are outright wrong: rising temperatures means higher atmospheric water capacity and therefore more precipitation, not drought, and fewer numbers of storms (albeit greater in magnitude). Deaths due to changing climate have consistently fallen year over year for as long as such things were measured.

The alarmist narrative is that basically that civilization will fall apart in the next 10-15 years, there will be mass die offs, and the world will be reduced to some sort of Mad Max / Waterworld post-apocalyptic anarchy. It’s bunk, just as the same imminent doom predictions were over the last 40 years. Climate change is real, but nothing even close to that order of magnitude will happen in the next 100 years. And a 100 years is more than enough time to have a sensibly paced transition to nuclear base power supplementing fluctuating renewables, and to develop geoengineering technologies to effectively manage both regional and global climate change. It’s somewhere on the scale closer to Y2K bug, not nuclear holocaust.

But this climate change alarmism is causing our kids to develop acute anxiety and depression disorders, as Greta Thunberg has, which are totally misplaced, and I pity those kids and feel anger towards the adults in their lives that are doing psychological damage. The alarmism is also driving policy recommendations that would bring about global recession on a scale not seen since the Great Depression. If millennials think boomers gave them the short stick, wait until their children see what lack of opportunities they have from our misguided climate change policies.

Edit: Lol, posted and within seconds a negative score. This is always what happens when you attempt to have a reasonable discussion about scientific facts and engineering trade-offs in climate change rather than an alarmist circle-jerk. I don’t know why I bother. Why do we let such important scientific topics become politicized?

It's not how you create an atmosphere conductive to discussion. The downvote-related addendum (which I would edit out if I could, but the edit window has passed) was thrown in due to frustration. Writing a post skeptical of climate alarmism on any social media feels like pissing in the wind. On HN or Reddit it gets instantly down-voted into oblivion without any meaningful responses. On Facebook or Twitter it just gets you categorized weird and future posts shown to only fringe denier cranks. I knew you would see it, but probably few others, so why bother? And sure enough, the thread got collapsed by a moderator. We should reward posts that think critically and bring up facts you might not be aware of, even if they're arguing against something you thought was settled. Doing otherwise is not healthy for the utility of the platform :\

Maybe I'm just lazy but I'm pretty sure I'll never be an expert in climate science. So when a near consensus of actual experts in climate science say that something is happening I'm happy to believe them and move on to pondering other mysteries that aren't so clear-cut.

That this guy opposes that consensus and takes funding from interest groups like the IPA, mining companies and cane growers leads me to another, quite possibly equally lazy conclusion.

That he was not treated fairly, I'll take the judge's word on that, too. The university's position was, ironically, partially about the quality of the debate:

“The University has not objected to Professor Ridd's right to comment on quality assurance.

However, the University has objected to the manner in which he has done this. He has sensationalised his comments to attract attention, has criticised and denigrated published work, and has demonstrated a lack of respect for his colleagues and institutions in doing so. Academic rebuttal of his scientific views on the reef has been separately published.”