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Comment by cowboysauce | Hacker News Reader

It's akin to saying "Why is everyone concerned about this Volcano erupting? Plants will flourish in the resulting rich, volcanic soil"

The statement is completely true, but it misses the point as to why people are concerned and glosses over a lot of negatives.

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The Goklany report that Dyson was discussing deascribes the evidence for many of the potential negatives. I don't vouch for the quality of the report one way or the other but I just skim-read it and it addresses the potential costs of increased CO2 directly.

edit: the report has 18 pages on the benefits and 12 pages on the costs of elevated CO2.

I interpret his point being less about denying that some people will be harmed by global warming but that most (or 'all') people will be.

I agree with what I think Dyson believed: that it's NOT obvious that global warming is net-negative (long term).

Another ice age would be pretty terrible too.

Global warming is a net negative for all people if the rate of change exceeds the rate at which we can adapt our society. That shows up in our economy as a cost, and when costs exceed revenue, society runs into trouble regardless of whether the atmosphere is 15% more conducive to plant growth.

The most obvious cost is the threat to densely populated real estate along coasts as sea level rises. You have to build sea walls or move. Building walls is a huge direct cost. But forced moving creates huge indirect costs as the price of real estate above the new waterline soars--at the same the people with land under the waterline all file flood insurance claims (or go bankrupt).

Freeman Dyson was a brilliant physical scientist, but the problems of global warming will be primarily social, not physical.

How much would you spend (or spend to convince the government to spend) to keep your billions-of-dollars-worth-of-real-estate viable?

Building sea walls is a trivial cost compared to moving (and giving up the real estate to the sea). Ask the Netherlands - 26% of the country is below sea level - up to (or down to) 6.7m below.

The Deltaworks project did not have a trivial cost, and the Ministry of Water in the Netherlands is deeply concerned about how we will mitigate further sea level and river level rises.

"Altogether the Delta Works cost nearly 5 billion Euros." http://www.deltawerken.com/The-Delta-Works/1524.html

"The South Holland coast region is home to approximately 4 million people who live below normal sea level" https://www.ice.org.uk/what-is-civil-engineering/what-do-civ...

Roughly 1300 Euros per person protected. How much would it cost to move those people? And what is the total value of the real estate where they live/work/farm?

So yes, "Building sea walls is a trivial cost compared to moving (and giving up the real estate to the sea)."

Moving a city over a number of decades is more of an inconvenience than a disaster. You would tear down most buildings every 50 years anyway.

Some of the disaster scenarios seem to assume people would just stay as the water rose, until they all drowned, shortest people first.

> Another ice age would be pretty terrible too.

OK, but the next rational step would be to ask which scenario is presenting the greater risk. Just raising an issue without following through is not helpful, and, I am sorry to say, that is what Dyson tended to do on this issue.

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