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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

"It's us" could use much more work. Suppose you could make the case

    1. It's warming.
    2. It's not us.
    3. We're sure.
    4. It's bad.
    5. We can fix it.

What would be different? That point speaks exclusively to the morality of the issue (It's us: environmentalists are noble! - It's not us: environmentalists are evil!), not to what's happening or what should be done.

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What would be different?

It would be incorrect, the evidence is clear that it is a man made problem. This has nothing to do with the morality or lack of, that's your projection.

> It would be incorrect, the evidence is clear that it is a man made problem.

This isn't how you do hypotheticals. If, in the hypothetical world, it isn't us, the claim that it isn't us is correct, not incorrect by virtue of disagreeing with the non-hypothetical world.

And you didn't even address my point that this bullet point is completely irrelevant to what's happening and to what should be done. All the recommendations are identical in either case. Why is the bullet point present in the list? Wouldn't it make more sense to have a four-item list?

You are right, you could say: "It's a problem, it doesn't matter if it's us or not, but we have to fix it".

Question is whether this helps the debate or not. It could help.

If you don't say "it's us", you generally mean that it's a natural occurring phenomenon / cycle. And with that generally comes the assumption "...therefore we don't need to fix it, because it will fix itself.".

That really isn't an assumption that people make about natural phenomena. Let's compare a swamp, anywhere:

    1. It's causing disease.
    2. It's not us.
    3. We're sure.
    4. It's bad.
    5. We can fix it.

And we do! Draining swamps is an important way to make uninhabitable land habitable. But there's no one out there saying "why bother, just wait for the swamp to go away on its own".

It's relevant to item 5.

How? We can only fix it if we caused it?

Imagine a building is on fire and one side firemen are spraying water on it and on the other side someone is spraying gasoline on it.

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