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Comment by clpm4j | Hacker News Reader

"Given the circumstances, Scientific American has agreed with major news outlets worldwide to start using the term “climate emergency” in its coverage of climate change."

This seems reasonable and appropriate. As much as I want to believe in humanity, I'm not optimistic that we're going to be able to actually solve this before things get really bad.

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I feel the same. The coronavirus pandemic pandemic felt like the final nail in the coffin of my optimism. Humanity’s collective response or lack thereof was on full display and if that was the best we could do when faced with an immediate and dire threat to our way of life then I’m in need of serious convincing that something like the climate crisis which is already here and quantifiably guaranteed [1] to occur in the future as we can’t simply reverse the process on a dime like we did with a vaccine when it came to the virus.

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/22/climate/climate-change-fu...

> That price — more vicious heat waves, longer wildfire seasons, rising sea levels — is now irretrievably baked in. Nations, including the United States, have dithered so long in cutting emissions that progressively more global warming is assured for decades to come, even if efforts to shift away from fossil fuels were accelerated tomorrow.

The threat to our way of life was the government response, by a long shot, not the virus.

And it’s not over, our way of life is still very much in jeopardy from government throwing away civil liberties to “flatten the curve” which somehow turned into “flatten the economy”, this is probably the most terrifying thing I’ve seen in the past 30 years.

To be fair, the response in South East Asia was considerably better and more collective-minded than what any European or North American state achieved.

Which still doesn't bode super well for a coordinated global response to the climate emergency. But it does point to which areas of the world are likely to manage the best while the rest of us descend into chaos and anarchy.

Agreed, there were bright spots, one of them was South East Asia.

Perhaps the people there will manage better but that's all they'll be able to do is manage and not prosper. Rising sea levels won't spare those that manage to muster up a better response.

Sure it will. I mean, coastal cities will flood regardless, but the nations which understand what's going on and get a head start on a compassionate, equitable approach to relocation will fare much better than those which prize rugged individualism and react to a climate refugee crisis with victim-blaming.

South East Asia had something of an advantage: it was already culturally acceptable to wear a mask; acceptable to consider someone else's health over your own appearance.

Of course, I'm not sure how we can build such a culture of acceptance around masks in the West, where masks are seen by some as an attack on personal liberties.

>Of course, I'm not sure how we can build such a culture of acceptance around masks in the West, where masks are seen by some as an attack on personal liberties.

Don't worry, natural selection will take care of them in due course.

Probably the worst possible damage a person can do to the enviroment is to have children. Everything else is basically just a drop (of pollution) in the ocean. I have my own opinions here, which i won't say, but i'm just addressing the elephant in the news.

Yes but, to be clear, we are only fixing the climate emergency _for_ our children, and their children.

Climate change will not really impact most of us alive today.

This is why it has been so hard to get people to make real changes, spend real money reducing our footprint. A lot of people just don't care because they will be dead and gone when the real trouble starts.

> Climate change will not really impact most of us alive today.

Climate change is already effecting millions of people worldwide in drastic, life-changing ways, and those effects will only increase over current lifetimes even under the most aggressive plausible decarbonization scenarios.

> Probably the worst possible damage a person can do to the enviroment is to have children

Sure, let's nuke the whole world and get rid of the human species to save the environment! What a wonderful take.

A "take" is knee jerk replying to a valid statement, albeit not sourced in this case, with what is an outrageous exaggeration.

Reducing the number of humans is not the same thing as extinction. Your argumentation is lacking.

Omnicidal and suicidal thoughts are multiplying as people lose hope in the future and their future specifically.

Furthermore, is there any sensible, hopeful, safe, stable, productive, and generally happy society that has mass shootings and addictions/crimes of despair nearly everyday?

Mass shooting are isolated events - Statistics clearly show that most gun deaths are either self-inflicted or the result of gang wars - and "mass shooting" reporting is incredibly biased since they decided to artificially cut the definition at "more than 3" iirc and the data will look quite different depending on the thresholds you choose. But that's a very different topic.

Isolated events are like the weather, a general trend is the climate. There are 12000 gun-related homicides in the US every year. Per capita, the US is the 7th worst in the entire world.

There isn't any first-world country with the number and frequencies of mass shootings or gun-related homicides the US does. 2/3 of gun deaths are suicides, which are a bigger problem of preventable acts of despair. Murder is entirely different. 54% of mass shooting are family-related. Roughly 40000 gun deaths in the US per year.

> There are 12000 gun-related homicides in the US every year. Per capita, the US is the 7th worst in the entire world

Comparing with other countries is ridiculous at best when not nonsensical. No country enables citizens to purchase weapons like in the US and no other country has hundreds of millions of weapons in circulation. Trying to make it look like a single variable problem is a joke.

The current apocalyptic scenarios are the same as in the past. If anything, we do have more science and technology to deal with them and to predict them.

And the grim prediction is rather than climate change, the real problem is population growth.

> the real problem is population growth

Population growth is not a massive problem: we already know that human population will hit a max of 10 billion people and from there start aging progressively and reduce over time.

I agree. The problems are resource consumption and pollution per capita. There are many soft and hard effects trends that are reducing population. Oceanic food production that would also sequester carbon would allow for a greater population carrying capacity. The main issue is getting people to reproduce. xD

We don't know, we suspect that in the most optimistic scenarios. Without knowing the underlying mechanism. Without knowing the consequences of cultural change and industrialisation of the third world countries.

This is the finest kind of denialism, and it is really going to bite us hard in about a hundred years at most.

I wouldn't be such a prophet of doom; there is still plenty of happiness in humanity, and i'm not certain its declining as badly as you are making out.

If we end up with an upside down population pyramid, we'll have bigger problems than a slowly changing climate.

There are some countries with an upside down population pyramid and it isn't the end of the world. Certainly less apocalyptic than most climate change scenarios.

Well, it doesn't scale for the future tax vs. elder social benefits. You can't just sweep the consequences of extreme population demographic shifts under a rug. Look at China with its disastrous One-child policy where there are millions of unhappy, dissatisfied men who can't marry. That's a recipe for social unrest and suicide attacks.

> Look at China with its disastrous One-child policy where there are millions of unhappy, dissatisfied men who can't marry

I'm pretty sure that's because of Missing women of China[1], not necessarily the one child policy.

[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-selective_abortion#China and the other linked articles.

Look at Japan, there things got more stable with the aging of the population. China isn't really an example for most of the world because CCP experiments screwed up more than just their age pyramid.

Also, taxes and pensions are very small problems compared to uninhabitable coastal regions, mass migrations and food shortages that climate change predictions show us.

Taxes and pensions are pressing, immediate problems within the next 50 years. What you're talking about is a much bigger problem trend, but it will take longer to occur, say 80-120 years.

Age pyramid? That's not the biggest issue in China's demographics: it's the sex ratio. Talking vague FUD about China isn't helpful and doesn't contribute to this discussion.

Mass migrations and food shortages are happening now, but not as bad as they will be. This is due to both climate and US Monroe doctrine meddling (crime caused by the War on Drugs and installation of right-wing leaders with death squads).

agreed, but that's the inevitable conclusion of any inquiry into solving climate change. Should we therefore do nothing? Probably not. But again, i won't elaborate.

Increasing population levels in highly emitting countries whose populations have naturally leveled off or are decreasing is very bad too (not to mention all the other horrific problems with this neocolonial type of immigration).

I happen to like kids and want someone to bury me in the right plot that was already set-aside (in basically the middle of nowhere). We also need some people sensible enough to fix the damage done to the Earth by the reckless and selfish generations of FF burners, meat eaters, jet-setting frequent-fliers, long-distance/single-occupant car commuters, and concrete pourers who came before.

We do not need humans to "fix" anything on earth, the ecosystem will find a new balance on its own. Absent a few chaotic effects that might happen, without human disturbance, this balance will be reached faster than with humans meddling.

:-/ You're basically recommending giving-up. There is waay too much energy in the water cycle that is locked in for hundreds of years, and may lead to global ecological collapse: desert earth. Humans already "meddled" negatively, humans can also "meddle" positively to make the Earth habitable and stem the Holocene extinction. Just throwing your hands up in the air in the names of external locus-of-control is insane when humans can clean-up and restore the ecology of what we damaged. Coral reef preservation, for example. Cleaning up microplastics from oceans is another.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-disease-ravages-coral-reef...

Using a depiction of Cali wildfires which are mostly caused by the state's own forest management policies puts your quote into perspective: Framing.

Uh no, not backdoor climate emergency denial. I survived in the 2018 Paradise fire. The main problem there was no rain for 200+ days, coupled with strong, dry winds in a particular direction, and PG&E's 100+-year-old under-maintained, bare powerlines that broke off their ancient fasteners. The reason for the 200+ days of no rain is likely related to both rising average temperatures, breaking record-after-record each year, and the lack of enough Arctic sea ice pack to stabilize the Arctic's jet-stream. Without a stable jet-stream, it breaks off into disjointed loops and also dips down into lower latitudes. This causes havoc and seemingly more random/variable/intense weather in N America. Blizzard in Austin, for example, which never anticipated such an occurrence that far south.

> Blizzard in Austin, for example, which never anticipated such an occurrence that far south

The ERCOT report [0] on the 2011 Texas outage states, verbatim,

> "The winter weather event of February 1-5, 2011 was determined to be a one in ten year event for some regions of Texas in terms of low temperature extremes and duration."

Or, if you'd rather be kinder to Texas power generators while using the same report,

> "Taking these temperature extremes into account, and coupling them with the sustained winds of this event, it is estimated that the resultant [...] event suffered by many Texas generation facilities approached a one in 25 year severity."

With this decade-old report suggesting extreme cold may well occur roughly once per decade, I will respectfully follow up with: Never anticipated my ass.

[0] http://www.ercot.com/content/meetings/other/keydocs/2011/201...

> The main problem there

No, the main problem there was a neighborhood situated in a highly flammable area in the middle of a forest.

The catastrophe would be dramatically different if it weren't because of that.

Climate change makes things more catastrophic. It's not dishonest.

> state's own forest management policies

Weren't most burned acres on federal land (managed by executive branch under Trump)?

Yes and no. I wouldn't blame just Trump per se, because forest management policy implementation across jurisdictions moves glacially-slow. There is likely enough blame to go around, such as not clearing fuel around the electrical grid and not setting intentional, controlled clearance fires.

https://www.redding.com/story/news/2018/11/11/trump-blames-s...

The most economically-destructive fires are at the Wildland-urban interface (WUI), especially new residential developments that build right up to and in large, dense forested areas. Without proper fire mitigation for houses, infrastructure, and communities, devastating Camp Fire scenarios are entirely possible again.

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