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Comment by canal-crab | Hacker News Reader

Whatever current event you're concerned about, have you looked for historical precedent? Suppose you were to discover that the same kind of event had happened in, say, the early 1900s, and/or the late 1800s, before humans had emitted any appreciable amount of CO2. Would that change your opinion about whether we're in a crisis?

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You're looking at this the wrong way: extreme weather is not a predictable, one-off event. With climate change, we would expect to hit the extremes more often, and statistically the data has been showing us moving in this direction for years. Is it a crisis? Well, it only looks like it's going to get worse from here, and it's already not looking good…

you gotta explain the logic to me that should make anyone less concerned about climate crises just because people also used to die of them 200 years ago.

We're not reinventing any phenomena because we're emitting CO2, we're just putting the foot on the gas pedal, both literally and metaphorically. Same argument occasionally crops up during the pandemic. Yes, we've had them before, but that doesn't make this one any less bad, and interacting with animals that spread zoonotic diseases any less dangerous

Well, if the current events tell us we're in a crisis, were we also in a crisis a century ago? Two centuries ago? Three centuries ago? We can look in history books and see the same kinds of events happening back then. If they indicate a crisis now, don't they also indicate the crisis was happening back then?

if a kid threw a small rock at you some years ago and then slowly over the years more kids throw rocks at you, only a couple at a time, and then one day you walk out the door and there are hundreds of kids throwing rocks at you and there is a newspaper on your front porch with headline "Kids throwing rocks projected to increase 50% by tomorrow"; do you think "I guess I've had a kid throw a rock at me before, this is no different"?

You're arguing that it's not a big to deal to kick asteroids onto orbits intersecting with Earth's because in the past Earth also was hit by asteroids.

There is no historical precedent for the CO2 levels since well before mammalian life surged to the fore. Burning hundreds of millions of years of sequestered carbon in the span of 150 years turns out to have consequences. The carbon cycle has been known about for roughly the same time period that we’ve been in accelerated burning mode. Oil companies also extensively researched the likely impact of continued fossil fueled economic activity and the results confirmed what we know today. The oil companies decided to bury these findings and instead paid for the dissemination of rhetoric such as you are emitting here. It’s based on deceptive data and a tactic to always deny the link between human burning of fossil fuels and drastic climate change such as humans have never seen before.

Here, I see your untrue statement and raise you an info graphic https://xkcd.com/1732/

How is it that green user names always are climate-drift negationists? Should they not be red instead?

Tells you a lot of how they stand by their values

No, it doesn't. It happens because HN shadowbans people who have the wrong opinions. dang and whoever else would say that's not true, but it's tough to debate, because the evidence is conveniently hidden by being unjustly flagged. It's tough to point to a comment and argue that every statement in it is indisputably true, relevant, and polite, when it's been hidden from everyone by some anonymous user without explanation or justification.

This kind echo chamber maintenance goes on day after day, while HN delusionally prides itself on curiosity, civility, etc.

I don't see banning on opinions happening on HN, but I understand that seeing the same rehashed fallacious statements over and over gets old quick. Case in point: the "this is not happening because something similar happened before", with no quantification or data or independent research or citation... is just noxious bullshit that deserves, like I wrote, to get you a red username, not green. What's your favorite color?

Well, I'm glad that the site moderation has no patience for QAnon BS and I hope they keep it this way

Reality is not just "your opinion man" as several people dying with a tube down their throat are figuring out now.

No. Frequency of conditions intense enough to constitute ‘a disaster’ has gone up.

The current event I'm concerned about is the increase in average global temperatures caused by the increased concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. To the best of my knowledge Earth has never warmed as quickly as it's currently warming and CO2 levels haven't been as high since before humans were around.

Generally, those who believe in science don't look for anecdotes to form opinions from.

Well, has it?

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