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Comment by perfunctory | Hacker News Reader

This is yet another reminder that climate change is not a science / technology issue. Science has been settled, technology exists. It's a moral courage issue. Moral courage that our leaders lack. So we have to do it ourselves. There are two broad categories of actions one can take. 1) personal life-style changes 2) system change activism. We are at the point where anyone concerned about the climate change has to do both. Nobody is gonna do it for you.

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"Science has been settled"

The science of what? That we have climate change pretty much "everybody" will agree on.

The science of climate solutions is not even close to being settled. I have a Master in Energy (BSc in Energy) with focus on renewable energy. But try to get a group of professors from different fields to get along to see what is the way forward, or the mix of what. Nuclear energy, geoengineering, hydrogen, fusion, batteries of all kind, destruction of nature to create pumped hydro storage, capturing CO2, wind, concentrated solar, solar PV, biodiesel (and from what), ethanol, gas, Algae, bore holes, solar thermal seasonal storage, biomass, ocean energy and the lists go on.

So when you say that the science is settled I think your looking at the simple part where we see the problem but still has a huge way in what the actual solution.

People who say that we should just do this or that are usually pretty much always out of the loop and rarely know the downside of the technologies. It's not that we have 10 000 thousands of professors in the world that are just stubborn egotist. We don't have obvious good solutions yet. We do for some places, Norway have so much hydro that it's ridiculous, other places have other things and worst part is that many don't have that good options.

Please show some humility to people who have worked on solutions for the last 100 years.

The sensible thing to do when the science that says that we need to stop producing CO2 as quickly as possible is clear but the solution space is not figured out quite so well is to set up a cap-and-trade system for emissions and adjust the cap to whatever the climate scientists think is reasonable for the warming goal we're trying to achieve. This has been known for a long time among economists; there even was a Nobel price for this.

There are also many steps that we can take right now that are completely uncontroversial. For example requiring proper insulation for all new buildings and starting a program to retrofit existing buildings.

Isn't Cap+Trade just worse at everything (except optics) than an appropriate carbon tax?

I don't see a big difference between the two, but I'm not an economist. Why do you think that a tax is strictly better?

Tax is not good enough either, because of immediate gaming of "tax breaks".

Directly mandate use of clean solutions. No trade, just cap and regulate. Hard deadlines and checks. Including on outsourced deployments to close that loophole.

IMO, regulations are easier to gamify and capture than simple taxes are.

What happens with trade systems is that they get gamed to the point of uselessness. They're implemented already and patently worthless, because the price would have to be truly high to matter.

This is not the way and a delay in implementing proper controls nobody can afford.

Science has been settled

Science can never be so arrogant. Most people probably know this but it's worth restating in a heated debate about the 'evidence': The null hypothesis exists for a reason; that is because we can not prove anything. We can only eliminate those theories which are demonstrably false.

Are you being pedantic, or, if someone is not worked up about "science has been settled", are they playing loose with truth?

As far as I know, there is no heated debate about the evidence among climate scientists, at least not on the points that matter for policy decisions. The debate only exists outside of expert circles.

There is no real debate about whether climate change is real nor whether or not it is a major threat, but there is still debate on policy-relevant points. I'm not a climate scientist myself, but I do work with a bunch of them and from what I gather from talking to them there is still a lot of work and debate over consequences, remediation, and urgency. The latter mostly ranging from "extremely urgent but we still have time to avoid the most severe consequences" to "it's too late to prevent widespread disasters and we need to try to minimize the worst."

Right, there is plenty of confidence that climate change is real and caused by humans, but pretty much zero confidence in the long term effects of climate change on human population.

Yeah; nobody knows for certain how long we've got left. Could be a century or more, could be a few decades. Personally, I'd rather not risk it.

The author of the article in question was asked by the IPCC to be an 'Expert Reviewer' for the next Assessment Report.

Yes, you're right. When "science is settled" we scientists stop debating, exchanging data, collaborating and discussing about it. We move to new fields, where the science is not settled.

In the past 10-20 years we settled so many things, and predicted so many others, that we are running out of ideas on what to settle soon.

You're describing the exact opposite of a scientific process.

And even if science reached nirvana just now (spoiler: it did not) the exact action to take is nowhere close to being an easy choice. We're in a prisoner's dilemma in which if you stop polluting I can take advantage of that, kill you economically and the climate goes to hell faster because you where out tree hugging and left me to do whatever I want with the planet.

Assuming an ideal free market in a real-world environment. Fortunately, though, we have regulation, which can solve this issue! (In theory. Of course, for this to work, we have to have countries sticking to the agreements they've made with other countries, e.g. the Paris Agreement.)

You mean like the Brussels Effect? Make it more expensive to not keep the rules.

Enough political will and all the polluters will bend to it.

It feels like a chicken or egg problem. Individuals in general cannot easily make the life style changes without a broader infrastructure and system in place. Riding the bus or driving an electric vehicle cannot happen easily without an effective bus system or electric filling stations. Leaders cite low bus ridership or low electric vehicle purchases as reasons not to build or improve those systems.

Thr problem lies not with the leaders, at least not in the western world, people just need to stop voting for conspiracy theorists, it really is that simple.

That is simply not true. No one is on track to meet the Paris agreement goals. This is not because every government is lead by conspiracy theorists.

I think we're suffering from what France suffered from at the beginning of WWI - peacetime generals (or in this case politicians). For the last 30+ years, the consequences for incompetence and fuck ups in politics have been generally low. The current do-nothing political class is a result of these very weak selective pressures. I don't think we'll see a change until more voters begin to feel the effects of climate change and related issues. Hopefully it will be a positive change to more competent leaders, but it's not looking great based on the last few years.

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