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Comment by the-dude | Hacker News Reader

Let me tell you about the 70ies and 80ies.

yes... go on?

First we were all gonna die a horrible death in a nuclear armageddon. When that didn't happen, all forests would die due to acid rain and we would all suffocate. When that didn't happen the hole in the ozon layer was discovered and we would all die of skin cancer.

I must have forgotten some.

Thats such an excellent succinct counterpoint to all the doomer nihilism we tend to slip into on HN. I feel like this should be on some kind of open source tshirt or commemorative plate.

Those... are all problems that would have happened if we didn't change our behavior. And luckily we did. Well, except the forests are still being destroyed.

I don’t believe that claim at all.

I mean, obviously nuclear war was averted because we ended the cold war (we changed our behavior). I suppose I could be misinformed but I believe the hole in the ozone layer was fixed by banning CFCs (we changed our behavior)? I know less about acid rain. We are continuing to destroy forests.

Acid rain was the result of air pollution containing nitrogen and sulfur oxides, primarily from industrial sources, but also from vehicles. Strict emissions controls have largely solved this problem in developed countries.

> I mean, obviously nuclear war was averted because we ended the cold war (we changed our behavior).

I had a very spirited argument the other day about whether a unipolar world is actually more stable than a multipolar world, or not. The threat of nuclear war is ever-present, even if it is less serious now than it was in the 60s. I’m not sure where you get “obviously” in this claim.

> I believe the hole in the ozone layer was fixed by banning CFCs

The alternative explanation (which I’m sure you will be able to find a “debunking” of somewhere) is that ozone is regenerated very quickly, and the “hole” (it really was never more than a “thin spot”) in the Antarctic has improved because the South Pole is exposed to just a little more solar energy now. CFCs probably do make some difference, but they are very heavy molecules and would not accumulate much in the upper atmosphere:

https://news.mit.edu/2021/cfc-atmosphere-ozone-0518

(Note: That article has some data that could support this theory, but it does not reach the same conclusion. You are nevertheless encouraged to think for yourself.)

I believe climate change will see us return to unpolar world.

However it's probably going to be only Russia.

It seems to me that the reason the USA may not be a superpower anymore in the near future can hardly be blamed on anything other than stagnated American politics.

The famous picture of a dying forest to drive that narrative down everybody's throat was a picture of ... a forest dying of something else.

What's happening in the Amazon is an obscene travesty, but overall global forest cover has been increasing for about a century. The 80s and 90s saw the ozone hole and acid rain problems addressed and ultimately put on the way to being righted.

Fire frequency and intensity in the US are a function of warming and really stupid forest management, with density, deadwood, water table policies, and other localized aspects being used wantonly as political tokens.

We need to do so much better. We also need to be much more competent at scale. It's possible. It's necessary. There are too many big real problems for the current state of disarray to last, one way or another.

>overall global forest cover has been increasing for about a century.

Can you cite a source for that claim? WRI's Global Forest Review data across the last 20 years shows annual primary losses between 2 and 6 million hectares with an upwards trend, and overall loss in the last 20 years sitting at 411 million hectares.

https://research.wri.org/gfr/global-forest-review https://research.wri.org/gfr/forest-extent-indicators/forest...

I also found Yale talking about data and sources being less-than-ideal in quality but both the major studies are in broad agreement about the decline in forest cover globally: https://e360.yale.edu/features/conflicting-data-how-fast-is-...

In terms of the longer view: "The turn of the 20th century is when global forest loss reached the halfway point: half of total forest loss occurred from 8,000BC to 1900; the other half occurred in the last century alone."

https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation

I remember being surprised to read about "global greening" - here are some links about it. I don't know if it's such an optimistic trend as presented though, and what it means in the context of large-scale deforestation that you mentioned.

Carbon Dioxide Fertilization Greening Earth, Study Finds - https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...

Global greening is happening faster than climate change, and it’s a good thing - https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/07/05/global-greening-is-ha...

Greening mitigates the impact of climate change to a point, but that we're seeing it so strongly take effect is alarming because it indicates how strong the underlying shifts are, and there comes a point that it ceases to mitigate the negative effects. As the equator becomes increasingly desertified polar regions shift from barren icescapes to being able to support more plant life. Also as photosynthesis increases due to greater CO2 in the atmosphere so too does plant respiration, where carbon dioxide is released back into the atmosphere overnight. One way to look at it - The entire plant biomass of the earth removes about as much carbon from the atmosphere each year as China alone emits in that same year. So the capacity here to mitigate climate change via global greening is quite limited.

Anything that acts as a damping mechanism on the impacts of climate change has to be taken as a good thing though - Our biggest addressable existential threat is the rate of change, and slowing that via any means is a good thing.

IMO this piece (similar to your link, more recent) summarises well: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/greening-of-the-earth-mitigates...

We still have more nukes than ever, plenty to destroy all major metropolitan centers, and exterminate 1-2 billion people. We still have corrupt and war hungry people in power (and a sense that they can meddle everywhere without repurcursions), and so on.

So, we didn't exactly change anything on that front.

We still have worse than ever pollution, increased industrial production, several times increased fossil fuel burning, etc. So much for doing something for acid rain then. What happened was just that industry moved to China and elsewhere, so we exported the problem from where 12% of the global population lives (US and Europe) to where 40% lives.

And so on...

I've also had an older dermatologist tell me that the ozone layer ain't what it used to be.

We never changed our behavior, we simply outsourced it to East Asia, where there are few meaningful environmental regulations, and an even greater cost to human rights.

IMHO we made the situation much worse. You just don’t see it because the average American or European hasn’t been to mainland China where the smog is so thick you can’t see down a city block and the rivers and waterways so polluted they change color. But unfortunately the ignorant will brag about how we have done something to help with environmentally conscious vehicles or activities while doing little to help solve the actual problems.

You understand that a huge amount of work and effort went into handling those problems, right? Like, they weren’t not problems, we just actually did something about them...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferatio...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Helsinki_Protocol_on_the_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol

Not understanding that is at the core of the teachings of the alt-right thought leaders. It's actually formalised under the concept of "The Adams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters"[0] by the Dilbert's creator, who himself is very active in these politics, which is ironic because the law actually recognises the existence of the diverted threats but the application of the law on the current dangers is preached as "relax, nothing will happen no action needed".

You can add the Covid-19 to the list when all this is over. They will say, "We were all gonna die but only 4 million people died. It was yet another fear-mongering by INSERT_YOUR_FAVORITE_BOOGYMAN". The 4 million number to be updated, when it was at 50K the argument was "They say it's extremely dangerous but the flu actually killed more people".

It's bizarre. It's almost like a form of douchebaggery where you put all your chips on the idea that somehow it will be fixed by experts and simultaneously demand that the solution that the experts propose should not involve you in any way and if that solution alters your current or future way of life, the solution proposal will result in harassment to its creator.

[0]: https://www.scottadamssays.com/2015/01/22/adams-law-of-slow-...

I never said or meant such a thing. OP stated that our future was bleak. I offered to tell tales from 70ies and 80ies. Whatever you are projecting is yours.

Can you elaborate on what you say then please? Just to be clear, I wasn't referring to you directly but to the general case of the narrative I described. My apologies if it felt like personal attack.

We were also all going to freeze in the "New Ice Age".

Where normally this gets brought up as some reason we shouldn't trust climate science, this is actually a good example of how media sensationalizes shaky science to get people riled up. (The cooling theory, at its height of popularity, coexisted with a larger body of research predicting warming. I.e. it wasn't well supported.)

The problem is this is based on "it's different this time", which doesn't preclude hearing the same kind of excuses in the future: "how early 21st century climate change stories was mostly sensionalization by the media, and real scientists differed (what with "global weirding")" and so on.

A recent survey in New Zealand found that 7% of people believed the worst case credible predicted sea level rise by 2100 is 15 meters or more, which is wrong. More people underestimated it too. But it shows that media sensationalism is probably leading people to ridiculous beliefs about climate change too.

People saying climate change is a disaster, crisis, catastrophe, etc. use those words because they haven't got a clue what's going to happen and are just hyped up on fear. The media sensationalizes it out of proportion while the solid science is relatively boring. There's also media sensationalizing it as a false bogeyman which encourages denialism. But either way, most people are just tools of the media because it's so much easier and more entertaining than reading dry science papers.

> found that 7% of people believed the worst case credible predicted sea level rise by 2100 is 15 meters or more, which is wrong

7%? Not very many. I would imagine much of it is random / thoughtless guessing, as opposed to someone strongly believing it to be true.

edit: presuming it is the survey from this paper, they didn't offer respondents an "I don't know" option. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Yep, it might be that. But at the same time, who would even consider sea level might rise if not for the media talking about climate change? Surely, for many of them, the general idea came from sensationalization.

That brings back memories!

The Clash (actual British punk rock)- London calling:

"The ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in

Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin

Engines stop running, but I have no fear

'Cause London is drowning I live by the river"

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