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Comment by Abishek_Muthian | Hacker News Reader

While we are at it, can we change some vocabulary used for sensitising climate change from 'For the planet' to 'Your children will die soon, your grandchildren sooner'?

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People will be able to smell the bullshit. The idea that climate change will be apocalyptic (for first world nations) in your grandchildren's time frame is just as loony-toons as denying it exists at all. The scientific consensus is nowhere near that bad.

What are you basing this on?

If the heat doesn’t kill people, famine, floods, fires and wars likely will.

It might not be the apocalypse, but further rises in temperature could easily topple civilisation as we know it?

Paired with social uprising, drought, and mass immigration.

1176 BC, the year the bronze age around the Mediterranean collapsed for all the above reasons (plus earthquakes).

We should learn the lessons of what history says about this period. It took 300 years for them to recover...

Unfortunately, so far I have seen the opposite - people lapping it up and the "consensus" on the Internet (Reddit in particular) being that we're all doomed, with the more extreme outliers thinking about suicide because they genuinely expect the world to _inevitably_ become a literal Mad Max desert dystopia within the next few decades.

We've swung way too far from "completely ignoring the problem" to "absolute frenzy". Reminds me of Y2K.

Also, of course, if you don't agree with the hivemind (that everything is going to be much worse than actual science predicts), then you're a terrible person and need to be at least downvoted to hell, but ideally shunned and have your life ruined.

>Reminds me of Y2K.

Well, people say Y2K wasn't a problem because we buckled down and solved it.

I just saw an article that claimed the UK was back to like 1890 levels of CO2 emissions. Maybe it's still salvageable if the US gets shaken out of its stupor. Maybe decarbonization will just happen anyway through market forces as renewable energy improves.

> Well, people say Y2K wasn't a problem because we buckled down and solved it.

That's why I think it's a good parallel:

1. Something that would be an issue if nothing was done.

2. By the time the public got into a frenzy over it, things were already being done.

3. (Hopefully) will turn out to be a non-issue because things were done.

I'm taking no particular position, because I don't go out of my way to read on the subject, but I did notice an article recently which said that we seem to be firmly on the worst of the likely IPCC scenarios from a few years ago, not in the middle.

The media have been pushing hard on the idea that we're living in the worst-case RCP8.5 IPCC scenario. The article that particularly annoyed me was the Atlantic one which based this claim on a Twitter thread that, if you actually clicked through to it, showed us right in the middle of the middle two IPCC scenarios plain as day on the graph. (The tweet actually claimed that we were closer to RCP8.5 than he'd like, which is of course true since all the emissions scenarios are relatively close together early on and he wants us on the best one.) It's not true, of course. Similarly, RCP8.5 is not the "business as usual" scenario that happens if we don't take action, as the media also likes to suggests - it actually requires a rather improbable combination of events. The media are actively making people less informed on this stuff in order to sell fear and a narrative.

>People will be able to smell the bullshit. The idea that climate change will be apocalyptic (for first world nations) in your grandchildren's time frame is just as loony-toons as denying it exists at all.

Who said apocalyptic? I said, sooner; even a millisecond reduction in lifespan is sooner.

> The scientific consensus is nowhere near that bad.

Behavioural changes due to climate change leading to increase in skin cancer already has scientific consensus even in our lifetime.

>(for first world nations)

Oh, right /s.

I'm stunned how even when I agree with other people about climate breakdown happening, they think "Miami flooding" and I think "my kids dying horribly in a resource war or food riot".

Though people seem to be finally understanding that sea level rise is a minor concern all things considered.

> and I think "my kids dying horribly in a resource war or food riot".

I still think "I'll believe it when I see it". Scientists are very good at making apocalyptic predictions based on theoretical worst case scenarios, but reality just never seems to match said predictions. In reality, stuff happens more slowly on much longer timescales.

Just look at covid - back in March, the predictions were pretty dire - it was predicted millions were going to die in the US alone... 6 months later it turned out it wasn't nearly as deadly as we thought and a lot of measures we took (like SIP, shutting down economy, etc.) probably caused more harm than good.

I'm highly skeptical of your claims, nearly 200,000 people have died of covid, despite having shutdown the country. You've presented no information to suggest that the scientific consensus that millions would likely have died without the measures we went through is false.

I wonder what would have happened if we gave a 2 week advanced notice for people to stock up, and then shut everything down 100% for 4 weeks straight. Would we have been out of this whole mess by now as opposed to this lingering?

I think for starters this would never happen in the current US both due to a lack of political will and highly varying circumstances (things were fine in Texas at the start, why would they lock down?). Not to even mention legal challenges. I believe people would need to be dropping dead nationwide to the tune of one in a hundred or thousand per week for this to happen here.

But even if we could I don't think it would save us for some of the following reasons, though it might have bought us a couple week or month reset. However, if this were followed up by strict adherence to social distancing, mask usage, and restrictions on social and work gatherings, we'd likely be in a much better place than we are now.

Completely eradicating the virus when there are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of cases seems unlikely to me. Enough cases are likely to persist through propagating within large households, cases with extended infectious time period (I'm not sure how likely this is? It seems to me like it should be possible for some cases to remain infections for longer than normal periodas of time, but I haven't read anything about this), and people not following the guidelines to give a sizable enough base for the virus to recuperate. And even if some areas do eliminate it, it can come back through domestic or international travel.

Right around the time shelter in place orders took effect, supermarkets were sold out of various items. Toilet paper was the most infamous one, but depending where you were, you might also have had a hard time finding chicken and canned soup, for example. It goes to show that the supply chain is decidedly not prepared to handle the event of the entire population suddenly decicing to stock up on provisions for extended periods of time.

We wouldn't be. The countries that control the coronavirus with shutdowns have had to continually impose new shutdowns as cases arise. I'm not saying policy doesn't matter, but I don't think any country is or could have been out of the mess right now.

Agreed with your first paragraph. I don't think your comment about covid makes much sense (200K+ dead in 6 months is pretty damn dire).

> 200K+ dead in 6 months is pretty damn dire

Disagree. At least 450k die per year of preventable health conditions (lung cancer + obesity) and nobody bats an eye (that's 4.5M deaths per decade). The flu alone kills orders of magnitude more than covid over longer timelines. A once-in-a-lifetime virus kills medically compromised people at elevated rates for 6 months and people lose their minds? It's not rational.

The spanish Flu killed about 600k Americans. We're on target to hit 400k+ by January. So, it's a safe bet we'll beat the Spanish Flu by next spring.

These are people who didn't need to die, who wouldn't have died for another reason. Do you really place such a low price tag on people's lives? What if it were your life, would you gladly sacrifice it?

> The spanish Flu killed about 600k Americans.

USA population was also only 100M in 1918. So 600k back then was .6% of the total population. So far covid has killed .06% of the total population, or one order of magnitude less.

Spanish flu pandemic lasted a little over 2 years, we are just now coming up on 8 months.

Out of morbid curiosity, how would you describe 200K+ dead from a contagious disease in 6 months? I'm sticking with "pretty damn dire".

It's not like covid can continue at this rate... there are only so many people with comorbidity or otherwise compromised health. In the year 2030 we will look back and say:

"Over the past 10 years, covid killed (on average) X people per year, and the flu killed (on average) Y people per year"

Do you predict X or Y will be the higher number? Because I predict Y will be the higher number. And if not in the decade timeframe, certainly Y would be higher in the century timeframe.

So, "it's just fat and sick people that are dead, and they'll all be gone soon enough, who cares"?

At the end of March, Dr. Anthony Fauci predicted between 100,000 and 200,000 US residents would die of COVID-19 over the course of the pandemic[0]. Now, only at mid-September, we're closer to his upper limit. Not to mention flu season's coming, and we're seeing outbreaks as schools and universities reopen. So that prediction was probably too conservative.

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...

Dr. Fauci was just one voice in many at the time. It's easy to pick out the most accurate voice in retrospect.

Take a look at this HN thread from 6 months ago. People in the comments were extrapolating CDC/WHO statements and predicting millions of Americans were going to die.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22552137

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22548715

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22548952

Random HN commenters vs a leading expert on infectious diseases?

Assuming everyone has the same expertise is also one way climate change deniers sow doubt about the science behind carbon emissions.

Let's start by clarifying something. There are two uses for predictions: making decisions based on the knowledge that something will be X units by a specific date (e.g. buying stocks), or making decisions to avoid something becoming X by that date (e.g. planning interventions). Nearly all predictions of COVID-19 death tolls are the latter. They're meant to predict the outcome if all things remain the same so we can decide if something more needs done. If we respond to predictions by changing behavior, and the eventual number is lower, that's a good thing. The prediction worked. The model assumed no change, so you can't use reality after a change to dismiss the model.

Your link is a discussion about a news report from March 11th, before the US and state governments started taking drastic actions. I'm not surprised the model predicted dire results and was followed by drastic action.

He's not just the most accurate, he's also the designated official responsible for coordinating the nationwide covid response. You're comparing him to randos on HN making armchair extrapolations.

Yes, for covid.

For climate, we seem to be moving along faster than expected for many measures. Ice loss is trending with worst-case predictions to give the most recent example I can think of. https://www.sciencealert.com/ice-sheet-melting-is-perfectly-....

IPCC reports explicitly _do not_ consider self-sustaining positive feedback mechanisms, which seems concerning.

A lot of it isn't even scientists, it's media picking up the most extreme opinions, distorting them to make a vague possibility sound like certainty or to make them sound worse than the actual prediction, then amplifying them for the clicks.

The thing is, when it comes to climate change, those predictions are often a best case scenario given the evidence. They assume that we will take the necessary measures, which we have been falling way short of doing for decades. We now only have a narrow window within which to take extreme measures to keep to those best case scenarios, if we are lucky.

With covid, many followed the suggested measures, so we avoided extreme results where the appropriate precautions were taken. The fact that scientists predicted doom and gloom and many people actually did what scientists recommended to avoid it shows that we should be following their recommendations for the climate too. In the case of covid, it was in the interest of short term political/corporate outcomes that we did something. Climate acts on longer timescales so we continue to see inaction...

Resource wars and food riots are already happening in many parts of the world and no one wants to do anything about it :(

Why will your grandchildren die sooner than your children will?

It it strange phrasing to be sure. I interpreted it as sooner from birth (at younger ages).

While I agree "for the planet" is terrible messaging (namely, the planet's been through worse and will be just fine), I also think your proposed change is bullshit.

Your children will and their children will be fine, but there's big and real chance that they will not have the standard of life you have and certainly far below what they could have. I think that's plenty scary in its own.

>Your children will and their children will be fine

What about the children who died in the fires now in USA, in Australia, Floods in India and elsewhere all of which have been worse than ever in this century and the reason being attributed to climate change?

Humans of all ages have been killed by natural disasters as long as there has been humans. Nothing new. It is not like huge numbers of people are being killed by them all of a sudden. Increase in population and structure construction in these forests is why the toll seems higher now.

It’s that, and woodland management, and climate change.

The question is "what's at stake with climate change", not about what happens to invididuals (because everything happens to individuals).

What's at stake isn't the death of the planet, or the death of life, or the death of civilization. All these things are resilient enough to adapt to the effects of climate change.

What isn't resilient enough is our quality of life, which is based on my assumptions that climate change will invalidate. The next generation will thus have to spend their surplus resources dealing with these adaptations, instead of leveraging themselves up into higher and better lives.

>All these things are resilient enough to adapt to the effects of climate change.

Everything lasts forever, until it's over. Extinctions are the norm in Earth's history. There's no reason to think humans are the exception. The fact that humanity has yet to die off isn't much comfort. It's a sample size of 1 species, and by definition we wouldn't even be discussing this if the alternative happened.

I wonder how much perception aligns with reality here. For people who don't know the numbers, please post your estimates of how many people died in the 2019-2020 fires in Australia and the 2020 California fires so far, then look up the answer on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Australian_bus... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_wildfires.

The plant will be fine and so will your children and their children. If you live in a low lying area like Maldives then they might not be living where you live now but they will certainly be able to live. Alarmist claims like "everyone will die" only serve to discredit scientists even though they aren't the ones making them.

How certain is that, given that according to previous predictions the Earth should currently be uninhabitable?

Which predictions are you referring to?

By all means, provide us with reputable sources that claim "the Earth should currently be uninhabitable". We'll wait.

Not OP but a quick google search. https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/18-spectacularly-wrong-predic...

So of the 18 predictions none are from climatologists, none are in published research but rather in comments to magazines and speeches, and half are from 2 people, Paul Erlich (a biologist) and Kenneth Watt (an ecologist). And some of them are not even wrong, for instance concerns about population growth or rainforest loss at the rate it was occurring at the time. The headline here is “some random scientists were wrong about something 50 years ago”. The fact the comparison is even made between these comments and the published evidence base for climate change, indicates more about the person making the criticism than the target of the criticism. These are the same kind of people who think that political commentators on rolling news are making a meaningful contribution to scientific debate.

I'm not sure this is a particularly constructive line of debate, but predictions in the 1970s from [sources well known and accepted by mainstream press, if not reputable in hindsight or by other definitions] are pretty numerous. Here is one from Paul Ehrlich in April 1970:

"Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make...The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years."

There are many more. I think this type of stuff was that decade's click bait.

In the 1970s, people were dealing with things like Acid Rain and large hole in the ozone layer. Things probably were much more dire looking at that point.

And people were worried about catastrophic global cooling

Just like now we are worried about catastrophic global warming. Only that, of course, now we are right. ;-)

If you look at a temperature graph all would become clear. It's not like the data they had was fake or misrepresented, it's just that the trend is noisy and became clearer later. Now that it is clear, it makes no sense to say "we could still be wrong". It's like a stock market graph; you don't know if a few days ago was the peak, but in a year you do. Or in case of climate, 30-40 years.

Some were, yes, but they were in the minority. Curiously, folks are still predicting global cooling, but the proportion of such papers continues to dwindle.

https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s-in...

More to the point, we acted decisively as a society to remediate these conditions and those efforts succeeded. To look back now and ridicule those predictions without considering the actions taken to prevent them is folly.

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