Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

Man-made climate change makes for easy storytelling and easier self-flagellation, but the more earth history I read, the less massive climatic events surprise me. Australia was the smoke-filled continent long before Europeans arrived. California fires are nothing new: Pre-1800, about 1.8 million ha burned each year.

https://www.sierraforestlegacy.org/Resources/Conservation/Fi...

> Approximately 1.8 million ha burned annually in California prehistorically (pre 1800). Our estimate of prehistoric annual area burned in California is 88% of the total annual wildfire area in the entire US during a decade (1994–2004) characterized as ‘‘extreme’’ regarding wildfires. The idea that US wildfire area of approximately two million ha annually is extreme is certainly a 20th or 21st century perspective. Skies were likely smoky much of the summer and fall in California during the prehistoric period.

And: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.201...

> Many consider wildfire as an accelerating problem [...] however, important exceptions aside, the quantitative evidence available does not support these perceived overall trends.

For that matter California can go into drought for hundreds of years at a time which lead to the downfall and forced migration, understandably, of peoples in the area.

That's not to minimize man-made impacts, which certainly change the game! But I worry the focus on man-made change leads people to fail to appreciate just how much living on earth, on the geological scale, is riding a wild horse. If we can barely stomach a single weather anomaly without thinking it must be the result of man-made climate change (and would not be there otherwise), rather than a part of a planet with a big history of anomalies, it will lead us to thinking less clearly. (Of course all kinds of denialists aren't helping there, either.)

Our job is to steward the earth so we can stave off things like mass death, famines, etc. California should be thinking about the engineering needed to live in a biome that genuinely wants to be on fire, sometimes, and we should be routing around this possibility. It's somewhat frustrating to see the governor jump to climate change if only for its convenient exculpatory power, as if when we are not sequestering carbon, we humans are otherwise helpless.

This sounds like a cogent, well-reasoned argument, but it is not.

The summer 2020 fires in the western US are largely a man-made disaster [1]:

1. Suppression of fire over the last century has led to an excessive build-up of biomass fuel.

2. The woodland urban interface has become more crowded in recent decades leading to difficulties in forest management (e.g., controlled burns) and safety.

3. Anthropogenic climate change leading to warmer and drier conditions in forests around the world.

Yes, large fires burned in the past and are a natural part of the forest ecosystem, but their severity has vastly increased (e.g., sterilization of soils, re-burning of forest that had burned just a few years ago). Yes, the climate changes but at no time in recent or medium-term geologic history has it changed so quickly.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/inside-the-megafire/

We're on a thread about an article where New England was blacked out for 24 hours because of wildfire. How can you claim that severity has increased vastly since then?

Edit: I'm sorry this goes against the zeitgeist, but we still need evidence for backing up our claims

Here's a source[1]. It also shows that in the US, yearly acreage burned is rising in addition to the intensity of fires.

[1] - https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/climate-change-and-wildfire....

Every single argument you just made failed to refute anything the parent comment said. Furthermore, despite linking to sources specifically stating how fires in the past could regularly be vastly bigger, you simply state that the opposite is the case now..... just because...

And this last bit is a bit of nitpikcing but depending on how you'd like to define "medium-term" geologic history yes, the climate has changed very quickly and drastically in even moderately recent history. It's a conciet to think we really affect the earth so much that it has rarely dealt with equal problems. Quite the contrary, it has many times dealt with far worse catastrophes than man-made climate change.

The earth is a big ball of metal. Of course it will be fine. The creatures that live on it won’t. And many haven’t in the many times in the past that the earth dealt with like climate changes. Sure something will survive, but that’s not really useful as a declaration for humanity’s survival.

That tangentially reminded me of this classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c

> It's somewhat frustrating to see the governor jump to climate change if only for its convenient exculpatory power

Eeeeeh.

Sure, fair I suppose. Except that the US political arena is currently composed of people that want to address climate change and environmental stewardship responsibly and those that deny it's existence while toting snow balls onto the senate floor.

It's fine to reasonably say that California & the feds are underfunding efforts to maintain fire breaks and forest management in the state. It's not fine to say that carbon sequestration will solve everything magically one day - we need to be doing both, addressing excessive carbon generation and looking into carbon sequestration.

Also, as far as I've seen, carbon sequestration isn't really a renewable process - the idea is to lock that carbon outside of the natural cycles, that's a great way to reset things, but it doesn't effect the velocity with which we continue to make the problem worse.

Lastly, we're a pretty rich society - if we can do something about this why don't we. I think most people would be happy to go without the next generation of iPhone if it means solving climate change - maybe we can just slightly slow down the economic engine and produce a more sustainable existence.

> I think most people would be happy to go without the next generation of iPhone But it's been a while that people are not at the centre of our economy anymore (have they ever been?). The issue is political. Politicians, backed up by economists, sell the dream of ever-increasing growth as a way to maintain peace. It's not reasonable in a finite, and like OP mentioned, chaotic world.

>I think most people would be happy to go without the next generation of iPhone if it means solving climate change

Don't you also have to go vegan, stop flying, switch to an EV car, stop using disposable plastic, switch to green electricity, avoid businesses that aren't carbon neutral, consider the environment before you print that email, and so on ... ?

The scale of change required is seriously overwhelming and I fear without a solution to that, we aren't going to fix this problem anytime soon :(

Start small, change one thing.

Actually you mainly have to just go at the rich and regulatory capture. Carbon and plastic taxes/cap/trade to capture those externalities and most of the problems go away on their own. But then someone might not get another yacht.

I see those same people opposing nuclear, so not sure about their motives.

A carbon tax that covers 100% of the external environmental cost on all goods would mean a substantial change in the way people live. Tautologically, such a change is needed to stop climate change. A change like this would mean gas, international travel, heating oil, meat and some other foods, plastics would be much more expensive. A change like this would be nearly impossible to pass.

The good news is a much smaller carbon tax is enough to change some behavior and get much of the benefit. You can start small and go from there.

Ultimately it doesn't matter if climate change is manmade or natural. It doesn't change the facts on the ground governors have to deal with: continued water scarcity and increasing wildfires.

But thinking about if California can continue to be habitable for 40 million people is scary.

Man-made vs natural isn't a matter of morality or anything, it's just about whether we can do something to avoid our destruction. If an asteroid hits earth then it's not man-made but also inevitable. Climate change isn't a threat to the world -- it's a threat to humans, and if we don't do what's in our power to avert it, we'll wipe a large fraction of us off the planet and precipitate world war. That doesn't mean we still won't have a climate event that wipes out advanced civilization -- but we should do what we can.

If there was a natural climate event that would decrease temperatures by 20 degrees and we could only prevent it by clear-cutting forests and polluting our environment then that's of course what we would do.

> and if we don't do what's in our power to avert it, we'll wipe a large fraction of us off the planet and precipitate world war.

This is definitely the approach ("avert") that is assumed in almost all discussion of this topic but there is also the choice to mitigate the effects (infrastructure, relocation, technology).

I don't think it is at all clear that we can "avert it" without a tremendous cost and I think it is entirely reasonable to discuss ways of mitigating effects and that approach may be much less costly.

The costs associated with averting global warming ultimately focus on reducing greenhouse gases, which means reducing fossil fuel use. But accomplishing that means expensive energy (i.e. carbon tax approaches, expensive power grids based on intermittent renewables) or extraordinary economic slowdowns (think COVID-19 global reduction in economic activity permanently, for example). More importantly instituting those changes to an extent that would actually reduce greenhouse gases would require extraordinary global enforcement mechanisms. How are the more industrialized economies going to force less industrialized economies to use less energy? to build fewer fossil fuel plants, etc? The reductions that are required can't be accomplished by a subset of world's economies.

All of this assumes that our knowledge of how the global climate systems work is substantially accurate. What if it isn't?

You mean if CO2 is not causing a global warming?

And you don’t think global warming will eventually cause an economic slowdown at Covid19 or worse levels, permanently? I’m not so optimistic.

> You mean if CO2 is not causing a global warming?

I'm not exactly sure what part of my comment you are referring to. If it is the last part regarding our understanding of global climate, then perhaps I can expand my comment a bit.

Catastrophic global warming predictions are predicated on two linked concepts: 1) Greenhouse gases block infrared radiation 2) the global climate system has a particular sensitivity to 1) that results in the predicted net change in average global temperature.

1) is basic physics and can be measured directly in the lab. 2) is the "climate sensitivity" to atmospheric CO2 concentrations and its particular value is not directly measurable. It is a component of the complex climate simulation models and is just an estimate of the real climate's sensitivity.

My comment was about our confidence in the climate models and the sensitivity that they model.

> And you don’t think global warming will eventually cause an economic slowdown at Covid19 or worse levels, permanently? I’m not so optimistic.

I don't think there is any particular reason to think that humans won't adapt.

Non-renewable energy is limited... if we don't gradually make it expensive now it's going to get REALLY expensive very suddenly in a couple of decades. That process is where global wars will be fought over what little energy is remaining. Look how many wars even today are fought over oil.

We keep coming up with ways to overcome this scarcity, however. Fracking has led to tons of cheap fossil fuels, for instance. I'm much more concerned with the disastrous effects if carbon-based fuels remain so cheap; we need to tax the hell out of it now rather than waiting for scarcity that might always be on the horizon.

LOL fracking. Destroy all your fresh water to get more fossil fuels. It’s almost QED by itself.

Are you trying to say that companies will automatically stop fracking due to the environmental effects? Because it turns out that they do not do that.

No, I’m saying that “we’ll find new solutions to our energy problems like creating potable water problems!” is dumb.

Agreed on that, then.

Is nuclear non-renewable? Because nuclear is effectively unlimited by today’s standards.

Mitigation and adaptation are both absolutely part of fighting climate change. Proposed strategies are actually pretty sophisticated.

Discussion on boards like this is pointless. No one here knows what they're talking about because they are arriving at these conclusions from first principles and so they are far too slow to reach the better parts¹. But if you go up to the proposed plans for the future talked about by the policy eggheads you know that spending money to move people, to build and renovate sea walls, and build flood control is all absolutely on the cards².

If you are curious, then these are usually referred to as climate change adaptation strategies (Google for that exact phrase to get lots of results) in contrast to climate change mitigation strategies (reducing carbon emissions etc.).

¹ The SOTA policy thoughts around this are at Shakespeare and the discussion here is like a child reciting the alphabet. Do yourself a favour and skip this part.

² The geopolitical details about who gets more arable land, etc. are all other factors.

> we'll wipe a large fraction of us off the planet and precipitate world war

Most climate economists estimate that, without substantial behavioral changes, the effect of global warming will reduce our GDP by a single-digit percentage from what it otherwise would have been on the order of 100 years.

You’ve been swept up in a very hyperbolic and apocalyptic narrative which lacks any factual basis.

It’s not clear that, from a humanitarian standpoint, we should actually change anything about our behavior right now. The humanitarian cost of losing various sources of cheap energy very likely exceeds the humanitarian benefit of slightly reducing expected global temperature.

That may be on a global scale - but does it not ignore localised issues in certain parts of the world?

> The humanitarian cost of losing various sources of cheap energy very likely exceeds the humanitarian benefit of slightly reducing expected global temperature.

I'm totally cool giving a pass to areas with severe humanitarian problems that don't have the means to fight them. I care about America and other big consumers getting their act together.

And GDP is an interesting measure of stuff, but it is a really poor reflection of standard of living which I value a lot more than GDP measures or the stock market. In fact, losing or gaining a few points of global GDP isn't going to have any meaningful impact on folks living through humanitarian crises.

> Man-made vs natural isn't a matter of morality or anything, it's just about whether we can do something to avoid our destruction

Your last paragraph points out that this isn't the case.

I fail to see how?

Apparently no documented megafires occurred in California before 1970, according to NASA:

https://climate.nasa.gov/blog/2830/six-trends-to-know-about-...

While yes, the earth is unpredictable and humans should aim to be adaptable, if we have identified trends that look dangerous then ideally we want a political and value system that rewards steering away from them.

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