Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

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You're trying to rationalize it (understandably). There is a word for what we've done, and it's the Holocene mass extinction.

Locust are part of nature, as are elephants. Locusts eat everything and then all die. Elephants slowly reach the carrying capacity of their environment. There is also a word for that each type of reproduction strategy: locusts with exponential growth are r-strategists, elephants with logistic curve growth are K-strategists.

r/K is slightly dated and it's not completely binary, but there is truth to it. And humans, because of technology, have all the population dynamics of a r-strategist. We have the collective intelligence to observe this, but not to act on it. Even though they are part of nature, the life of r-strategists individuals is brutal and short. And a locust swarm can be highly detrimental to life in their area. Since we are ubiquitous and the world dominant species by far, we are very, very badly harming biodiversity and it only has the chance to get worse.

I'm glad you are finding peace, but you definitely have the possibility of dying from global warming direct (famine) or secondary effects (war) in what would otherwise be your lifetime, as does everyone under the age of 50. That is perfectly natural and in tune with nature. Nature is brutal and amoral.

I don't understand how you can begin with a somewhat rational argument about overpopulation and then jump to the completely irrational conclusion that for some reason global warming (as a root cause) will kill us, rather than overpopulation. Do you really think like that, or are you just trolling?

I'm not trolling, it's not like overpopulation directly will kill us. Overpopulation is relative to the carrying capacity of an ecosystem. Global warming will reduce the carrying capacity of the world vis a vis human population faster than we can adapt to it (migration, crop changes, etc). The end result is jump discontinuities in populations, which is really just a polite/scientific way of talking of really significant numbers of people starving to death or killing each other over limited food and water resources.

edit: and to be clear, I view this as a problem for us, the current generation, not a future problem. I am personally taking small but real steps to prepare for this, right now.

And yet, all the predictions of climate catastrophe of the last 50 years never came true. According to some, by now Great Britain should be underwater.

Will they never be true? No one knows, because predicting the future is not our best skill. They might well be someday. But the track record, for now, is dismal, which makes me thing they are more driven by ideology than by science.

I think you have made a couple of errors.

First, how many satellites did we have 50 years ago? How many advancements have there been in sensors over that time? How much has compute capacity increased? Our level of data and observation has increased - trying not to exaggerate - a million-fold. With that, the algorithms and models have improved, too. It's like comparing a Pinto to a Tesla.

Second, 50 year old forecasts have held up remarkably well. I will just point to Exxon's forecasts, under "Select ExxonMobil documents": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont... They actually did a fair job in the 1970s and 80s of modeling the warming we've seen just based on first principals of measured CO2 greenhouse effects and atmospheric concentrations.

Third, we are actually quite good at predicting the future! We can predict where a planet will be in a million years. It's basic Dunning-Kruger bias to think these professional trained scientist building these models don't understand nonlinear systems maths and the ways these systems diverge, couple, and otherwise interact.

Fourth, "According to some" is the source of so many flawed conclusions. According to some, the world is flat. According to some, reality is based on the theory of the Time Cube. You can't go around quoting cranks to attack non-cranks. I don't know who or what you are talking about, but I have a very hard time believing a qualified individual thought GB would be under water in 2020 in 1970. And even if they did, times change and we know much more now.

I hate to be out ahead of the mass psychology of awareness of the magnitude and criticality of climate change. It is very hard to digest how bad things are. This is data driven, though.

Growing up in California in the '80s and '90s, I recall seeing maps showing how rising ocean levels would flood the Sacramento valley with ocean water and turn the California coastline into a chain of islands by 2010 or so.

One has to wonder for how long these alarmists will be able to get away with these doomsday predictions which continually fail to materialize before they go back to the basics; let's keep the water and air clean because we gotta drink and breathe that stuff. Maybe you can't get the big research bucks with arguments like that, but I think you'll get far better results in terms of actually changing human activity.

Some of the extremely dangerous sources of pollution actually get away with it due to the focus on CO2 and global warming, e.g. shipping - its CO2 emissions contribution is insignificant, but:

> Of total global air emissions, shipping accounts for 18 to 30 percent of the nitrogen oxide and 9% of the sulphur oxides.[2][28] Sulfur in the air creates acid rain which damages crops and buildings

Nobody thinks about this anymore when they buy their fancy new PV panels from China, or their organically grown tropical fruit.

I don't think you appreciate the relative risk from CO2 pollution (or really, warming in general which then brings CH4 and water vapor into the mix).

Marine shipping uses the dregs of refining: bunker fuel. The have absolutely enormous two-cycle engines that run on something in the neighborhood of tar and motor oil. It is an inefficient combustion with trash fuel. NO2 and SO2 is bad, but it's nowhere near the danger of global warming, and shipping is otherwise extremely efficient in terms of carbon intensity/kg/km cargo shipped.

Would you do a rough energy life cycle (back of envelope) on the energy expenditures of a shipping tanker full of solar PV cells (ie, building local factories, the cost of time until they are operating, cost of building up upstream supply chains, and then more prosaic PV vs baseline grid carbon intensity per kwh consumed?). I think you'd find there is some nuance in what is optimal.

Shipping produce vs local and seasonal is a big waste, agreed. All of that is refrigerated multi-modal, too, and ships are hardly the worst offenders in that logistic chain.

I think non-CO2 shipping pollution tends to get pulled out as a distraction device in these discussions, though I don't think that's why you're bringing it up.

I mean, you just kind of proved our point, here. You immediately started talking about how CO2 will cause warming, and so many people like me are just gonna tune out from there because we're so desensitized from all this warming false alarmism. I'm sorry, maybe there really is some merit to your words, but the boy has cried wolf too many times.

Do you have any arguments about how and why we should save the earth that don't involve warming? Let's try one of those.

I'm going to focus on the phrase "false alarmism".

It is super foreign to me, since I look at IPCC reports, live temp/precip reports, I look at meta discussions around why reports aren't lining up to observations... everything there is mind-numbingly terrible. You literally have mental health problems emerging in related fields, like PTSD. The more you know about this problem, the more and more terrifying and depressing it gets.

I don't know that you have an accurate and fair history of the science of global warming, or appreciate the degree of knowledge we have built up - particularly in the last 20 years, as the urgency of the situation has become clearer.

I used the analogy of a Ford Pinto (1970s tech) to a Tesla Model 3 (current tech) to drive home the gulf between the knowledge we had 50 years ago and what we have now.

I will remind you that Steve Jobs, when faced with a pancreatic cancer diagnosis, chose alternative medicine and diet vs conventional medical treatment. I just think that anecdote is instructive.

Okay, perhaps you are seeing predictions that number X will increase by Y by year Z actually come true. I'm talking about the predictions that the Sacramento valley will flood, as I mentioned upthread, and various other doom-and-gloom predictions that clearly haven't come to be.

> You literally have mental health problems emerging in related fields, like PTSD.

The anti-vax movement shows us the danger of correlating things like global warming and PTSD. Do you have more evidence of causation than those people do?

Anyway, I'll ask again. Can you give an environmentalist argument that doesn't involve warming scares? I challenge you. One wouldn't think this would be that difficult.

you're getting confused by sensationalist reporting overblowing the short-term impact of our climate catastrophe.

the scientific predictions were always pretty conservative and the only thing they were off about was the time... as they alway thought we'd take longer to get to where we are now.

But yeah, you won't see the effect in your day-to-day life as an american nor european until its way too late to do anything anymore. but hey, most of us will experience it in a few years, so stay tuned until after 2050 i guess. though i'd wager we'll still discuss if we have impacted earth at that point. there is just too much money to make in denying it.

"I'm talking about the predictions that the Sacramento valley will flood, as I mentioned upthread, and various other doom-and-gloom predictions that clearly haven't come to be."

What prediction? Who said this? When? You're entire reference upthread for this is "I saw a map back in the 80s". Without knowing who drew that map and why, we can't really know what to make of it, can we? For all we know it was made as a satire of global warming predictions, or was designed by a fringe group with limited understanding of the subject matter, or you're making it up to make a point. Unless you can find an example of actual scientists (and not just one, but a group of them) predicting inundation of the Sacramento valley then you have no case for claiming 'alarmism' in that regard.

And besides that, even if alarmism were an issue, that doesn't mean that there isn't a serious issue underlying it. You need to look at what the actual science predicts, not just the people who glom on to climate change as a cause célèbre, and you need to match those predictions to the outcome. The outcome of that comparison might surprise you.

For an analogy, if Bob told you that eating a single milligram of arsenic were to instantly kill you, he would be wrong and would be exaggerating its real effects, but that would not mean that arsenic is somehow not poisonous or that you can ignore its poisonous effects. People can and do die of arsenic poisoning.

> Would you do a rough energy life cycle (back of envelope) on the energy expenditures of a shipping tanker full of solar PV cells

This has been done already here in Central Europe and for the CO2 emissions alone, PV panels from China are worse than local hydro plants (~50g vs. ~20g CO2/KWh over their lifespan including production). Naturally, adding the other pollution caused by shipping makes it even less attractive.

> I think non-CO2 shipping pollution tends to pulled out a distraction device in these discussions, though I don't think that's why you're bringing it up.

On the contrary, it's grossly neglected and many of the direct negative effects of human actions on the environment we've seen in the past decades are from other causes than warming/CO2. CO2 gets so much attention because it's also a convenient way for many industries to distract from their impact on the environment. You can poison the water and soil or bury even nuclear waste underground, but as long as you buy some CO2 certificates, you're good.

Few things compare well to hydro, but we ran out of ideal river locations making it a meaningless comparison.

PS: Central Europe is also rather far north making local Solar less efficient, but that’s rather off topic.

Can you link them? I suspect they where showing 2100’s, but you are recalling them as 2010’s.

We are a little above the 1990 IPCC predictions for sea level rise, but 1-2mm per year was never going to produce drastic changes in 30 years.

PS: It’s actually CO2 releases that are significantly below projections. Considering this was in many ways an intentional change, it’s hard to call old CO2 predictions wrong, just pessimistic.

> Can you link them?

I'm afraid I cannot provide links to original material from my childhood 25-30 years ago, no.

I do explicitly remember seeing predictions of this sort of doom which were well within my lifetime, though.

Predicting some eventual outcome isn't quite as difficult as predicting its precise timing. This is common knowledge regarding market bubbles, but really applies to more than just economic questions.

We can't just shrug off past predictions because they failed to get the timing right when the trends they foresaw are clearly observed, just not quite as strong as predicted. The UK is still more united than underwater, but the poles are melting nonetheless.

> all the predictions .. According to some ..

I'm sure that all types of predictions have been made, including very bad ones. I'm not aware of something of the scale of the GIEC studying climate change 50 years ago. You are comparing hypothetical past predictions (when? from whom?) with a scientific effort of unprecedented scale.

> predicting the future is not our best skill

It depends. We can predict many future events very accurately.

> they are more driven by ideology than by science

I think that not listening the scientific consensus is ideological. I have no reason to believe that the GIEC predictions are less valid than those of some random dude on the internet.

Are you able to cite these predictions?

> all the predictions of climate catastrophe of the last 50 years never came true

What predictions? The predictions about ozone layer depletion and how to address it successfully? Those were accurate.

Predictions about warming and sea level rise? Those are accurate.

> According to some

Who?

Don't use weasel words[1] like "all the predictions" and "according to some"

You clearly have specific issues in mind, so why don't you let us know what they are so we can address them, and not have to rely on your interpretation of "all the predictions" and whoever "some" of these people are.

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

Also acid rains and their mitigation.

Thou foul hypocrite and deceiver. I won't throw Wikipedia links at you for those terms, because you obviously know how to (ab)use it.

We've banned this account for obvious reasons. Could you please not create accounts to break HN's guidelines with? It's not hard to use the site as intended, if you want to, and it's in your interest to do that, since breaking down the threads with comments like this will just lead it to informational heat death.

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

> Predictions about warming and sea level rise? Those are accurate.

Which ones? Satellite data projections, NOAA, IPCC estimates and wacko reporter/activists all say very different things. Looneys regularly say crazy things, like the Marshall Islands[1] won't be there any more. Al Gore used the words "20 feet" in his wacky documentary; that's certainly not right.

Intelligent people, with Ph.D.s in numerate sciences even, have exhibited horror when I bought a condo a kilometer from a shore (63 meters above sea level mind you; I like hills and ocean views); they really think I'll drown in my old age! The disinfo out there being put out by activists is at least as bad as that put out by oil companies or whatever. This isn't helpful. And the error bars on the scientific consensus don't inspire a lot of confidence (or sufficient horror, apparently) either.

People on here regularly confound weather (aka hurricanes and such, and what they experienced when they went to the beach), which always happens, and which doesn't even jibe with climatological predictions, with climate. Also political/military problems such as the ongoing nonsense in the middle east are confounded with "climate refugees" which is also not helpful.

The reason stuff like the ozone worked out reasonably well from a political point of view, and was eventually more or less mitigated is there weren't crazy people exaggerating things.

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/11/risin...

"Satellite data projections" that isn't a thing.

"People on here regularly confound weather" no they don't.

"The reason stuff like the ozone worked out reasonably well from a political point of view, and was eventually more or less mitigated is there weren't crazy people exaggerating things" There were, but they were the industry lobbyists against CFC regulation (https://www.wunderground.com/resources/climate/ozone_skeptic...)

> "People on here regularly confound weather" no they don't.

Here is an example of you confounding weather with climate:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21215190

Not an isolated incident.

Malthusian insanity. Population will decline globally w/in 75 years. Advances in natural power generation will make it economical for humans to align electric consumption with natural resources. As usual, even HN'ers are temporally ego-centric. Hakuna Matata.

> I don't understand how you can begin with a somewhat rational argument about overpopulation and then jump to the completely irrational conclusion that for some reason global warming (as a root cause) will kill us, rather than overpopulation.

Global warming is almost certainly already killing us. If a hurricane, flooding, heat waves, or drought is more severe than normal due to climate change, that means people are dying due to climate change.

In the decades to come, droughts, crop failures, and fishery collapses means people will starve. Extreme weather and sea level rise will create climate refugees. In unstable parts of the world, climate change-induced stressors will cause armed conflict and probable massacres. It also means previously stable parts of the world will become unstable.

All of those things means lots of dead people within the lifetimes of people alive today. Maybe we'll be able to change course and lessen the impact of climate change, but if we don't succeed the outlook is grim.

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