It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record | Hacker News Reader

It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record

noaa.gov

408 pointsmatsemann555 comments

Open articleView on HN

Imagine an asteroid would be on trajectory to collide with earth in (say) 2025.

Possible order of hypothetical events:

1. Scientist discover the asteroid. Calculate risk of collision.

2. Asteroid comes closer, probability of impact is calculated as high.

3. People will start saying that we cannot let our economy be controlled by the specter of an asteroid.

4. The asteroid becomes visible. You can see it with your bare eyes.

5. Still people start claiming it's fake news: The scientists are lying, it's a great conspiracy, it's all just to control us all.

6. Destroying or diverting the asteroid is estimated to be so expensive that it will change our way of life.

7. Anti-Asteroid-Action demonstrations would start all over the planet, to protest any expensive actions against the asteroid.

8. News outlets will be asked to be keep the bias out of their reporting, because they would support "asteroid believers".

9. Countries will create treaties to stop the impact by 2030, or perhaps delay it to 2040.

10. Scientists report new data. Impact is certain. Models about consequences are increasingly accurate and dire.

11. These scientists are labeled as alarmists.

12. The rich countries refuse to take the financial burden, because they feel it's unfair.

13. Impact is now a few weeks away. Nothing happened. Nobody did anything.

Update: Layout and spelling.

Given the experience of the last couple of years, I think this would be a very plausible scenario. And we'd deserve to go extinct like the dinosaurs did.

I believe this is the premise of an upcoming Netflix movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Look_Up_(2021_film)

Cool. I'll watch that one!

(Case in point that everything I have ever thought of has been thought of already by someone else. :) )

you can start writing your book

Honestly, given our track record I don't understand how we've actually managed to ban fluorocarbons globally.

Because unlike the cost of mitigating climate change (or covid for that matter) the global cost of switching to other chemicals was very small, on the order of single digit billions of dollars. It turns out most people don’t want to radically upend their lives for the benefit of others who knew?

Good marketing likely helped.

A hole in the ozone layer? We had better patch it at once!

Global warming? I never liked winter much anyway.

Because it was a very small problem compared to this one. On the order of a broken leg versus having to cure cancer.

The conspiratorial explanation is that freon was cheap to make & not patented, while new more atmosphere friendly replacements were patented. The new refrigerants were also fairly drop-in.

That was a decade ago when there was no real way for the loony opposition to come together.

Is this a pitch for a script for Idiocracy 2: Electric Bugaloo?

Yes, but this time they don't need time travel.

Human beings are so bad at responding to intangible threats. The worried minority have no choice but to take the unpleasant role of waking up the others

Replace an Asteroid with a weakening Geomagnetic field due to a Geomagnetic Excursion. Geomagnetic excursions are correlated with mass extinction in the Paleotological record. This makes sense since the Geomagnetic field shields Earth from space weather & a weakened Geomagnetic field means less protection from space weather.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2018RG00...

Uh oh, we are currently going through a Geomagnetic Excursion. Why are we not doing anything about it? Why is the population at large not alerted?

https://www.sciencealert.com/new-study-shows-that-earth-s-ma...

This makes me of Melancholia[0] although the outcome may or may not be different (#nospoilers)

[0]https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1527186/

I doubt something like that can happen actually.

Global warming is less obvious risk than an asteroid and still today most of the big economies start transitioning to greener energy. Not at a fast pace, but still a lot of work is being done.

It doesn't mean enough effort is being done to not destroy humankind but there are things happening

the asteroid doesn't necessarily destroy the whole population of the earth.. just like climate change probably won't kill everyone.

Disclaimer, I'm all for stopping climate change and think it's the biggest issue facing our generation.

But nothing indicates non runaway climate change is an existential level event for humanity. Nothing.

By comparing it to asteroids, and then 10, 20, 30 years in the future, when what happens is nowhere near to the complete eradication of all humans on earth that you are predicting with this comparison, why are you surprised that people don't take activists and scientists seriously.

Stop with the hyperbole. Stick with the facts and only the facts and you may notice that we will have more support then ever in the fight against climate change.

Why is this comment being downvoted? Valid point.

What about the fact that Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2? And with climbing average temperatures more and more of it will be released all over the Arctic due to thawing permafrost. Where 'Arctic' means Sibira, Alaska, Canada, not only north-pole.

Some say this is a feedback loop.

For some others this is an abstraction which has no concrete meaning.

Why?

Haven't you ever experienced an acoustic feedback loop, where the setup began to screech and howl because the microphone amplification was too strong and/or the speakers too loud?

I think now is the time where we begin to hear the first upswings of that, and it will get louder and louder.

Deafening.

Until we pull the plug.

Considering the inertia of the systems involved it's already too late.

So our plug will be pulled instead, sooner or later.

Except by sucking all that shit out of the air with excess electricty by whichever means, and turning it into something which makes it stay out of the air.

That may make it bearable, maybe.

I laughed out loud when I read that in the end the result was layout and spelling :)

crisis averted!

Nobody wants to solve the technological problem of pulling carbon from the air.

Carbon sequestration consumes more power than bitcoin mining ?

The difference is that an asteroid is an existential threat to humanity while climate change is just short of that. The rich and powerful are always going to be protected from experiencing the worst aspects of climate change.

They won't be the ones working outside when the air quality is dangerous from wildfires. They aren't going to be the ones who can't sleep because it is 90 degrees in their home. They won't be stuck in the path of a hurricane without anywhere to evacuate to. They won't be the ones who are left homeless and penniless due to a flood. They won't be the ones who can no longer afford the high prices of food or water. They won't be the ones fighting in wars over dwindling resources. Short of those future resource wars going nuclear, they don't really have to fear climate change the same way the rest of us do.

And if their primary fear of climate change is decreased wealth, it isn't a surprise why that wouldn't be enough for them to sacrifice their current wealth.

> The difference is that an asteroid is an existential threat to humanity while climate change is just short of that.

This is a valid point.

To clarify, though, I don't think climate change is likely to make humans extinct, but I believe it has a non-trivial chance of destroying our civilization.

If/when the climate gets really bad, human irrationality will go into overdrive, and we'll be a massive danger to ourselves.

Who knows if climate change will be an extinction event for humanity? When things get dire humanity turns to war and there's a lot of nuclear armaments at our disposal. Would it be insane to wage such warfare? Yes. But when crops are failing, cattle are dying and our civilization is undergoing extreme duress don't rule out our resorting to the insane. I think the hope is we're 50-150 years (or more) from things getting that dire and perhaps we'll have a technological solution to the problem. I hope so, but hope is not a strategy.

It will destroy our civilization, i dont know what people expect when we hit 4 plus..

> The difference is that an asteroid is an existential threat to humanity while climate change is just short of that.

And you can see an asteroid heading straight for you, anyone skeptical could just get, or borrow, a scope. I don't think an asteroid collision would induce a politicized disinfo campaign personally, it's too concrete.

I think it's hard to know. I would have thought the earth being round was "too concrete" to dispute, but here we are.

Well, to be fair, you can't see curvature with your own eyes like you can an asteroid, at least not feasibly/easily. Your ancestors lived in a world where thinking it was round was stupid..

Would you be able to see an asteroid heading straight for the south pole if you're living in the northern hemisphere?

Given that the earth is constantly moving around the sun, probably? e.g, when the asteroid is really far away, like years, but still on track to hit the South Pole at some time, it could be viewable. But if the earth was stationary, then no, probably not.

Good ol' bois of 4/8-chan et.al. might do it for the lulz.

People commiting suicide because of their bullying isn't concrete enough, an asteroid might not be either.

We will hit 4 plus in fifty years. They will be affected, no matter where they live or how rich they will be.

We're at 13, on a slightly longer timescale.

Actually there won't be any problem getting support for dealing with the asteroid. Asteroid collision is easy to understand, even for uneducated people.

Political support depends on average people understanding the cause, and not needing to change behavior too much. Asteroid collision satisfies both requirements, but climate change satisfies neither.

Climate change is not an existential threat, although it is a serious problem. I suspect that while millions or even hundreds of millions may be impacted, the majority of humans will survive and adapt to it. A reduction in the population, even if forced upon us without choice, would help correct the problem. There is much debate about which humans exactly are impacted (the poor in third-world low-lying countries?) or if the ones causing the most impact will be the ones killed (from rich Western countries?), but there is some population threshold beyond which our per capita consumption levels and high standard lifestyles will come into balance with the realities of climate and the environments around us. This is different from facing a large asteroid, where one such impact can literally end all terrestrial animal life on the planet on a much shorter time scale.

More on the notion that climate change is not an existential threat here, from a Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Washington: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/08/is-global-warming-exi...

The challenge with this analogy is that the rich countries could unilaterally solve this asteroid problem. If that was true for global warming, I think we might have a chance, but not only isn't it true, the rich countries don't even _matter_ at this point.

(Yes, they matter _per capita_ but that's a fairness discussion not a capability discussion.)

I don't like this analogy.

You can show a picture of an asteroid, but you can't really explain the greenhouse effect to consumers and voters.

It's easy to take action against an asteroid, but fighting CO2 emissions is far trickier.

I believe you could explain greenhouse effect to consumers and voters. The basics are elementary/highschool physics and chemistry. And there are useful analogies too. The issue is that schools in too many countries don't seem to try to explain mechanisms of climate change to pupils.

> It's easy to take action against an asteroid, but fighting CO2 emissions is far trickier.

Really?

Who still believes global warming does not exist?

I am currently listening to audiobook of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six (1998). It has a paragraph on global warming and trying to convince POTUS it is real. And POTUS not wanting to act on it because it would be too large economic drag on US.

This book is almost quarter of century old.

I suspect more deniers just think it will be the next generations problem rather than something that entirely doesn't exist, personally

I think denialism has moved on to 'We're fine as we are, this is a problem that developing countries should be solving.'

I think the more important headline is the numbers of climate change deniers is shrinking and the number of people who want to take action is growing.

Half of all voters say it is a "critical threat," up from 40% in 2017 according to https://morningconsult.com/2021/04/27/paris-agreement-climat...

Unfortunately the difficulty increasing that percentage isn't linear. It'll probably look like the vaccine rollout where there's a pretty hard dropoff in increases past a little over 50%.

10 points in 4 years is pretty good! And this is from April; I wonder if it'd be different now after this brutal summer.

But yeah the real problem is the gains in concern came pretty much entirely from Democrats and Independents.

Well, if science advances one funeral at a time, an increasingly hostile and less inhabitable planet may give us opportunity for advancement ...

Or that if we all just bought electric cars that the problem would be solved. Nobody seems to appreciate the scale at which this is operating.

The mass of the atmosphere is 5 x 10E15 tons. To heat that up by 1.5 degrees is off my scale of intuitive comprehension by a couple of orders of magnitude.

The sun is doing most of the warming work, we have just tightened our greenhouse! There's the order of magnitude you needed. Also the troposphere, other side of the co2 window-pane, is getting correspondingly colder..

> The sun is doing most of the warming work

What other heat source would there be other than geothermal or fission?

> Also the troposphere, other side of the co2 window-pane, is getting correspondingly colder..

As a result of trapping more heat inside I presume?

There is about 10t of atmosphere per square meter. It is the same mass as 10m of water. A lake with 10m of water is very shallow one and can heat up many degrees C even in a single sunny day.

And air is no water, it has much less heat capacity.

The global warming is not stalled at all by waiting to heat up the atmosphere.

The state of atmosphere is a result of balance of huge flows of energy. The atmosphere itself, as immense as it is, holds very little energy and if given chance would heat up to kill us all in couple of days.

The balance is influenced by a lot of factors like how much of energy is being absorbed by ground or reflected back to space.

By consistently adding a small amount of CO2 to atmosphere we keep a tiny part of energy from reflecting back to space. And by allowing the ice to melt the amount of energy reflected back gets even smaller (as ice reflects more than dirt). These very small differences in albedo are enough to cause all that mayhem.

The reason the global warming stalled for a long time is actually our oceans dissolving CO2. Now, the oceans' ability to dissolve more CO2 is reducing and removing CO2 no longer keeps up with us adding more of it.

> A lake with 10m of water is very shallow one and can heat up many degrees C even in a single sunny day.

Sunlight gives about 1 KW of incident energy per square meter (at the surface), about 70% of which gets reflected over water and about 30% of which gets absorbed. If we assume constant light during a whole 12 hour day and perfect perpendicularity of the photons hitting the surface that nets you 300 Watts continuously to heat up that 10 meter deep body of water. Any deviation from that 90 degree angle and it will be less (multiply by the sine of the angle).

The surface layer will warm up quite a bit but the deeper layers of your hypothetical lake will remain mostly unchanged until they are mixed by the wind or some other means with the surface layer.

Of course the atmosphere isn't anything like a lake, there is far less conduction of heat in the atmosphere than there is in a lake, and besides that the temperature is completely inverted from that lake, the higher temps are at the bottom, not at the top due to pressure and the presence of that handy nearby reflector and giant thermal mass: the earth.

That's not my experience, at least for those denying while not in policy positions to do anything about it. They're actually fairly responsive to "let's really make sure we're not making our grand kids lives harder" kind of arguments if phrased in a way that doesn't set off preprogrammed responses.

They've just been so inundated with propaganda that they take the terms "act of god" so literally that they don't believe at a base level that humanity has the power to modify climate in ways that'll hurt us in the long term. Sort of that Teddy Roosevelt line of thinking; when he heard that buffalo were going extinct he organized a hunting party to not miss out before they were all gone. The idea is that any problems we cause, we'll be able to fix after the fact or won't really matter. The idea of being shepherds of the earth rather than simply inhabitants is a very new one, at least among western cultures.

Most of the deniers I know have shifted from it doesn't exist to either its not man made and just a natural cycle or it may actually be a good thing because plants like CO2 and warmth...

Agreed. I see less overall denial and instead more softening of the denial. "The earth's climate has always changed!" and "Sure climate is changing, but can you even say what an ideal climate is?"

I feel that much of the lack of a feeling of urgency comes from people not grasping the inertia and scale of things.

I remember when covid started out and there was all those expectations on emissions going down. I got the feeling that some people thought that if we stopped "doing things" emissions would go down to almost zero and if emissions would go down to zero then the problem would be gone almost instantaneously.

In Canada, the Financial Post just ran an editorial saying it was a net positive because it will result in fewer deaths from "cold waves" e.g. winter storms. Flooding and other severe weather events were, unsurprisingly, handwaved away. Feedback loops and tipping points were completely ignored.

I do not think it was intended as satire, but the idea that we should cook ourselves to death to prevent freezing to death has a very Swiftian vibe to me.

https://financialpost.com/opinion/opinion-ipcc-global-warmin...

The "it's not man made" and "just a natural cycle" is easily disproven by showing historical temperatures change where it does, by pure accident, a hockey stick trick just last century.

Or it would if the audience wasn't resistant to proofs altogether...

To play devils advocate, they could say that they would need to zoom out to a couple thousands years to be sure or (I’ve actually heard this one) that it is a coincidence that temperatures picked up after the industrial revolution since the little ice age ended around the same time.

We've done that though. The climate stayed in a narrow 1 degree Celsius range since the end of the last ice age. It's likely that very stability that allowed agriculture and civilization to flourish. That epoch is called the Holocene. We've left that now and entered a new era. The Anthropocine, where the major driver in the climate is now us.

Sure I was merely suggesting a rebuttal that would be pretty common.

From what I understand, the sun has also been getting hotter, hasn't it? I agree that man contributes to climate change, but quantifying this is where I think the conversation gets interesting. I haven't really gone very far down this hole though as it seems too muddled. And then if you do conclude man is primarily at fault, what do you do? The US is only responsible for so much output, for example, and sources like nuclear aren't viewed positively.

The US is only responsible for for so much of worldwide murders. Why trying to limit the number of murders in the US, then? It won’t change the total number of murders on the planet in a significant way.

That analogy doesn't really apply imo.. Global murder totals don't impact me like murders in America do. Similarly, climate change effects all parties, no matter their contribution. A better analogy, imo, would be something like a leaking ship, where the portion we're responsible for has a pinhole that we're debating on if/how to patch up, while other parties have gaping holes gushing in water constantly with no clear intent to fix the hole, as we all begin our descent.

And in this case, I don't think buying a Tesla or some vegan burgers is going to make a substantial difference. As long as there's economic incentive to negatively contribute climate change, it will happen.

I object to the use of the term pinhole. Per capita the United States is one of the worst offenders. It's also up there in absolute numbers too.

The point of the analogy was to represent that our actions may be essentially inconsequential if all holes are not sealed, and that larger holes or offenders should take priority. The hole size wasn't really all that important, but yes, a more accurate description would've involved a larger hole, probably.

How do we even get emission data anyway? Especially for other countries like China. For example this source is telling me our per capita emissions are higher than China, which I very much doubt: https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...

Why would you doubt that? People are so much richer in the US, they drive more, they have bigger houses to heat and cool, they consume more in general.

Yeah, that's true. And they have a large population to dilute the mean. I'm surprised we're so close to them in terms of total Co2 output too, I thought they dwarfed us given how much production takes place there coupled with a more lax attitude.

That's a tired talking point. The investigation has been done and it's human activity by a country mile. You can Google it if you're curious.

Basically all countries have to cut emissions to zero or nearly zero. I think this is actually looking hopeful. Even China and India are on board. The US must do it's part too and demonstrate leadership in this area.

There's a massive phase change in the global economy away from fossil fuels. The counties that embrace it last will find the market already captured. It pays in this case to lead the way.

>That's a tired talking point.

Well, I don't talk about this much so wouldn't know. From what I understand, atmospheric physics is extremely complicated, and it sounds like a _very_ hard problem to develop accurate models for, and we're limited to a relatively small sample size. I just have a hard time seeing it, as a field, arriving at clean conclusions.. I'll have to read into it more later, though.

> From what I understand, atmospheric physics is extremely complicated, and it sounds like a _very_ hard problem to develop accurate models for.

You are very right about that.

Then how can you say beyond a reasonable doubt that the majority of climate change is caused by man? I think it’s obvious that man is messing up the climate but I don’t know it’s obvious that they are the main cause “by a country mile.”

That's the consensus view. If you want to present evidence to support your contrarian argument, I'll discuss with you.

The key phrase in the question was 'beyond a reasonable doubt'. I'm not versed in atmospheric physics, so of course I can't present an educated counter arguement to the consensus, but it's complexity alone makes me skeptical of any consensus that's reached. It was only so long ago that an ice age was eminent, right?

If you have any quality sources (books, videos, etc) I'd be interested in reading up more, it's an interesting topic that unfortunately developed a polarizing and polemic dialogue.

> It was only so long ago that an ice age was eminent, right?

Yeah, we go through ice age cycles. We've disrupted that now, and that might actually be a good thing on a long enough timescale.

I think your hang up is that you think it's all based on climate simulations. There's lots of evidence apart from simulations, which I'm also skeptical of.

Some reading material to get an overview of what we know and don't know and how we know it:

https://www.nytimes.com/article/climate-change-global-warmin...

https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

This one specifically addresses your question about how much is attributable to humans vs natural factors:

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-scientists-think-10...

>I think your hang up is that you think it's all based on climate simulations

Yeah, models are known to fail and I was under the impression this contributes to consensus heavily. Thanks for the links, I'll read these tonight!

This is one of those rare few times where I feel I did not waste my time disagreeing with someone on HN. I like your attitude towards things you don't understand.

Thanks! Yeah it's all too easy to lump people into stubborn camps, especially on the internet, but I appreciate you not dismissing me. I like nature as much as the next guy, but I'm just naturally a bit skeptical and that can come off as entrenched in some contrary viewpoint I guess.

A long time ago I leaned that no one wins an argument. When it comes to choosing a side in an argument, people end up defending their side to the end. I think it can get worse when the other side is unfriendly.

This is what we have today when it comes to climate stuff. It's not a conversation. It's often not polite. This has the sad effect of pushing many people we disagree with further into their position. Which is exactly what we don't want.

One option is not to contradict but lean into the argument the other is making and let them judge if even the premise that they're positioning themselves opposed to your "wrong" argument puts them in a good position.

Let's accept "it's not man made" and "it' s a natural cycle and here we are still". The Black Plague was natural and surely we wouldn't want it today. We routinely take precautions against so many natural things so why not this?

I think hostage negotiators have a lot to teach here.

Recalling La Rochefoucauld, "The only orator who never fails to persuade is emotion".

I appreciate the distinction between an argument and a conversation. In a conversation, one is hopefully just as open to being persuaded as one is to persuading.

If, by arguing, we engender negative emotions in our interlocutor, we will have employed the most potent orator against ourselves.

The relevant xkcd[1] beautifully rubs that in.

1: https://xkcd.com/1732/

XKCD's "Earth Temperature Timeline" is an excellent visualization of this: https://xkcd.com/1732/

It has a lowpass filter until modern times. It doesn't say much. How would the peak 5000BC look with high resolution?

It's not. Ice core isotope evidence gives you resolution all the way down to a year or two. We're seeing a first derivative of temperature that is simply unattested in any of that data. Or any other data source, honestly.

It's true that over thousand year timescales the earth has seen excursions larger than this. We have no evidence anywhere for anything happening this fast in the climate other than large impact events.

50 million years ago, there were forests in the arctic and the earth was much hotter than it is right now. Climate change comes in both man-made and natural varieties, and it's important to acknowledge the difference.

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

And 4.5 billion years ago the Earth was a ball of lava.

I guess we can only acknowledge the problem after it gets hotter than at some arbitrary point in the past.

it's absolutely a problem for us. But saying climate change is a natural cycle isn't wrong. We have sped up the process of climate change, so much that it is a problem for us.

Aging is a natural process. Now imagine there was a virus that would make everyone age 100 times as fast. It would then be a huge problem for humanity. That's the best way I have of describing climate change.

The rate of change matters, it's a crucial factor. Typically when the climate changes it's over the course of thousands of years. This in contrast is a rapid change.

I'm also not sure what your point even is. "Climate change comes in both man-made and natural varieties?" Ok, and this time happens to be manmade, so maybe we should do something about it.

You're absolutely right. Our current climate change is mandmade, and we need to do something about it. But saying climate change in general is only manmade is wrong, which is what I thought the commenter was saying.

Also we have built a very large amount of infrastructure that assumes the climate is the way it is now.

You think it's expensive and annoying to have software dependencies pushed to you when you aren't ready, try being forced to take SeaLevel 2.0 and HurricaneFrequency 10 before you are ready.

I think this is the main takeaway. If we lived on earth 50 million years ago when there were no ice caps, we would still thrive. But we would be living vey differently, in different areas, and dependent on different ecosystems. Such sudden change is the problem.

Or look at the isotope mix of the C in the CO₂ in the atmosphere. CO₂ from burning fossil fuels does not contain ¹⁴C. CO₂ from volcanoes also does not contain ¹⁴C. CO₂ from other sources does contain ¹⁴C. Subtract out all the CO₂ from volcanoes and whatever you have left that does not contain ¹⁴C came from burning fossil fuels.

Arguing with proofs just ends up leading to Brandolini's law [1]. You can make the most researched argument against any ridiculous point and you just get back a shoot from the hip rebuttal that needs further research that ends need a lengthly explanation why it's also wrong and it just keeps going.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

I had to explain this to a relative who started in with the “the earth has always had climate change” jibberish.

They tried to tell me no-one knows how the last Ice Age happened. So I explained, but because they didn’t understand any of the concepts involved they thought I was just making it up.

It’s a good reminder never to assume malice when plain old stupidity is on the table.

> It’s a good reminder never to assume malice when plain old stupidity is on the table.

We are only in this mess because of this attitude. Don't let evil people get away with evil things just because you think they are stupid. The current groups that believe climate change isn't real all believe that because of decades of misinformation specifically targeted at them, by Exxon and others.

Malice is 100% present and 100% at fault for this. Greedy companies wanted more short term money and knew that it would kill millions of people and cause untold chaos and they didn't care.

Correct. But the reason they believe it is because they’re stupid.

The fossil fuel lobby is malicious. Their audience is gullible.

That’s all I’m saying. I’m not even saying being a gullible fool on this issue is acceptable. It’s clearly not.

I feel the same about this lot as about the anti-vaxxers, which is “read a book before you get anyone else killed”.

I think you're underestimating the role motivated belief (aka 'wishful thinking') plays on the part of the audience.

If your livelihood depends on a certain industry, or you simply don't feel like making sacrifices, it's extremely easy and comforting to believe the side of the 'debate' that says the problem doesn't exist, even if their evidence is patently flimsy.

This is neither outright stupidity or outright malice, but a pernicious mentality that includes a bit of both. That is why the 'ignorance or malice' question is not a productive framing - the two are not mutually exclusive.

you have to plan for the world we live in not the world you want. Gullible people are a fact of life. Blaming them does nothing productive

You're not going to 'win' if you just call people who disagree with you 'evil'. Man... people claim that Christians are bad for judging, but I've found the entire human population to be happy to not just say that an action is wrong but ready to call the sinner literally evil. This is such toxic language, it shouldn't be tolerated.

It’s stupid to not be able to understand something. It’s malice when they don’t want to understand something. Are you sure they want to but can’t?

Fair point

You may win the arguments but you will lose the war. Please, as someone who understands the problem, do the planet a favor and learn about psychology too. Arguing with people is counter productive, as is shading the truth. Lastly, have the wisdom to know that you will not be able to change everyone’s thinking. There are people who think iPhones are secure and no amount of evidence will convince them otherwise. Don’t tilt at windmills. Invest your energy towards finding solutions not arguing with the stupid.

I mean, all of this is fair, but I don’t know how we find a solution without getting a substantial majority of people onboard.

It's not just ordinary stupid people. I've known people with advanced degrees who ostensibly make a living making predictions who don't believe it. Sometimes their arguments get very very intricate. There's just so many layers to the onion it's impossible to do in a conversation, rather than say an essay.

Other friends have CS degrees and don't believe it either.

It's particularly hard because there's a lot of little battles that they might win in an argument.

In the end it all comes down to secondary source critique, since nobody is ever sitting there with actual data. It's often "I don't believe in this guy, he's made a career out of scaremongering".

> Other friends have CS degrees and don't believe it either.

I have three CS degrees. Our field has a real problem with hubris and reinterpreting everything through a CS lens, particularly assuming everything is discrete, falls into neat categories, and is not subject to noise.

I had a decade long debate with a friend from Chemical Engineering about whether the Universe was continuous or discrete, and also about whether it was deterministic. I recall confidently stating tons of crap about quantum mechanics, and it turns out I was completely full of shit because I did not understand probability theory or wave functions.

> the Universe was continuous or discrete

It's both and neither at the same time.

After many years, I realized that's not even the central question of importance. Rather, is the universe representable with finite information? If so, then its description can be written as a series of digits, and all such series are somewhere in the number π, in fact, and infinitessimally small part π, of which is mind-blowing.

Out of curiosity, how can one have three CS degrees? Do you mean you went through the (1) undergrad, (2) masters, (3) PhD cycle?

> Our field has a real problem with hubris and reinterpreting everything through a CS lens

Man, I agree if only because I, too, am guilty of at least having a phase like this. But I think I also observe it in the dev and academic CS community in general. I just don't know if this is a generic intellectual hubris or a type of superiority complex specific to "hackers". Of course my opinion is very biased and maybe even cynical but I'm tending towards the latter. I wonder how that came to be; I can only speak for myself, unfortunately.

> It's not just ordinary stupid people. I've known people with advanced degrees who ostensibly make a living making predictions who don't believe it. Sometimes their arguments get very very intricate. There's just so many layers to the onion it's impossible to do in a conversation, rather than say an essay.

You've just described the "bullshit asymmetry principle," AKA Brandolini's Law: "The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than to produce it."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

It's a nice variation on the theme of destruction being a lot simpler than creation. Any idiot with a rock can break a window but it takes a couple of thousand of years of technological development to make that window.

> “the earth has always had climate change” jibberish.

This is the worst kind of bullshit, because it starts with something that's technically true. Nobody is ever going to say the Earth's climate hasn't changed. Obviously, we've had ice ages and warmer periods. And, we've had CO2 concentrations much, much higher than today.

What we haven't had until is human civilization, and the capability to affect the climate ourselves. But, that's never going to impress someone who starts out their argument with "but the Earth has always had climate change."

i used this recently as an opportunity to focus on one point: five degrees celsius was the difference between us and the ice age. it’s easy to get lost in debates and forget you can’t change minds easily, especially not in the moment. but easy to understand facts are sticky. a person can shut out everything i say but maybe if they realize the difference of temperatures we are racing towards in the next 50-100 years are the same order as between us and the ice age, maybe it will wear them down over time. i hope.

I think part of the problem is that we started talking about global warming (“nice! More sunshine!!”) to climate change (“cool! We get too much snow here anyway!!”).

Maybe instead of talking about climate change, which is a symptom and not the problem, we should talk about “destabilising the atmosphere”.

I feel like people will find it harder to use nonsense arguments if they’re confronted with the problem rather than the explanation.

Semantics aren't going to change anything.

You have to provide very specific and likely negative outcomes to specific regions.

At this point, people are literally dying in heatwaves and houses are burning in forest fires. People are also dying in floods/landslides. But then deniers casually dismiss these as things that have happened in the past.

Sometimes I feel like nothing short of a collapse of the agricultural system and a subsequent famine-triggered civil war killing people's immediate family members is going to wake them up.

I hear key aquifers like the Colorado river are drying up, so it's probably even a fairly likely scenario within the next decade too...

It's all right here: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/billions-could-face-tempe...

Nobody wants to do anything about something that's only going to affect people decades in the future.

> “destabilising the atmosphere”.

Sorry, but that is even more opaque.

"It looks fine to me!"

Try to explain what happens with an unstable atmosphere and why we need it... and you are better off going with global warning.

The problem is that we don't know what is going to happen. We aren't great at figuring the weather in two weeks. Then look an credit cards where we know and understand the consequences and penalties... and people STILL act irresponsibly.

I think "climate change" is the best general term of the bunch. "Global warming" makes people think it's all bunk whenever it gets cold. Hell, a US Senator once brought a snowball onto the senate floor to "prove" it's all fake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E0a_60PMR8

Worth noting that it's always been called climate change, and global warming was a term preferred by deniers to sew confusion and deniability.

> Yet the most interesting findings come from looking at data from the Heartland Institute. In fact, the thinktank used the two terms with roughly the same frequency until 2013, when we finally see a decoupling as the use of global warming dropped while the use of climate change remained constant.

> This shows that “global warming” was widely used by climate change deniers over this 30-year period. Perhaps this is because the phrase is relatively specific, which allowed them to contrast it with simple arguments like saying that the planet cannot be warming as it’s cold outside.

https://theconversation.com/there-is-no-evidence-that-global...

I much prefer "climate crisis." It's just more accurate for where we are.

nobody understands slow motion crises, doesn't compute

The good/bad news is it's starting to not feel so slow.

Climate drift is what's happening.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was formed in 1988. It was always called climate change.

> we should talk about “destabilising the atmosphere”.

Or, more bluntly, "planetary fuckups."

Habitat loss, chemical pollution, overfishing, and microplastics are others, all leading to very bad things on their own.

Climate change is the big one though.

Yeah, I heard about that but was skeptical that people could take that position non-sarcastically until recently when driving on the PA Turnpike, I saw this...

https://twitter.com/co2coalition/status/1397912884756107269

The cynical dishonesty of an organization creating a billboard like that boggles my mind.

It's the same thing Exxon did in the 80s when it's own researchers came to the conclusion that climate change was going to happen and then spent several decades clouding the issue to keep from being regulated so they could keep making money on drilling.

This has strong “Brawndo’s got what plants crave” vibes. Good grief.

"Do you want to live in the Altered Carbon future? If not, realize that death is an important part of life. Paid for by People Against Cancer Research"

Haha I drive the turnpike all the time and these ones make me laugh the most. The ones that say "the green new deal is america's off switch" and the ones that were pro coal at least kind of make sense (their message is that people will lose their jobs), but these new pro-CO2 ones are just so absurd.

Yep, did you see the white Trump truck...

https://twitter.com/StephLSchmid/status/1417153947031199749

It's like they're trying to be a parody of themselves!

When I read Lovecraft's stories, I used to have trouble believing people would willingly worship an uncaring force that was going to kill them just like the others. After the past few years, it's gotten easier to understand.

That's absurd.

I don't think it's worthwhile to spend much time on the reasons people cite to ignore or deny climate change.

Hardly anybody is making a genuine effort to look at what's going on and concluding it's not a problem at all. People are against it, often, because of tribalism. They don't like the people who complain the loudest about climate change and the political party they're aligned with says not to worry about it (for a variety of reasons). The climate crisis is also genuinely scary and it is much more comforting to believe that it can't be as bad as they say it is.

The number of voters who say climate change is important is growing every year (currently about half say it's a "critical threat") but that increase has come almost entirely from Democrats and Independent in the US.

Yes.

So now, if you doubt any of (1) it's man made (2) it's terrible (3) it's fixable, you're a "climate change denier."

Where's the error?

Don't forget the camp of people who say "It exists, and we're past the point at which we can do something about it."

I have to say, that on some days I almost feel like I share that mindset, as the promise of democracy that I was raised up on does not seem to bear fruits. It feels like people have learned to game the system too well.

I'm more or less in this camp. I definitely believe we technically could do something about climate change. But, when I think about the sheer scale of collective action it would take, combined with the fact that we can't even get a sizeable portion of Americans to exercise common sense public health measures to deal with a pandemic, that's when the doom & gloom mentality sets in for me.

This is not typically my public stance; I would very much like for us to do something about it. I'm just afraid that even that amounts to wishful thinking these days.

Also have heard folks make an argument that it's more economical to plan to live in the post-climate changed world than to stop climate change. See https://www.amazon.com/False-Alarm-Climate-Change-Trillions/...

That sounds like an argument made by economists. Economists are notoriously bad at estimating the true, human costs of climate change.

See https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-has-climate-economics-... for instance (skip the political commentary at the top and go straight to the next section).

There is a severely underestimated group of religious people who think that only God controls the weather, His reasons for what he does with it are not for you to evaluate, and that saying that humans can change the weather is blasphemy.

It's easy to make fun of, but the most direct experience that people have of a God who controls the universe would be the weather. These people need to be approached theologically; secular explanations are not going to hack it. The fact that polluters have an easy job getting their support doesn't mean that the ideas that they have about the weather originate from polluters.

To preempt a certain type of response, telling them that "climate" is different than "weather" is not going to work unless you can cite a biblical verse that explains that distinction.

We (middle-class PMCs) vastly underestimate the number of honest fundamentalists the same way we vastly underestimate the number of English-speaking illiterates. I'm always amused on HN when people in a thread realize that the reference to demonic possession or witchcraft by another commenter was completely in earnest.

I have never been able to get my head around the religious paradox of God has a plan and free will.

Can we make choices that effect the outcome of things or is it all part of Gods plan? It can't be both right?

Did God create everything including free will or does it exist outside of his control?

I don't blame my program when it does something wrong, I mean I wrote the code that tells it how to behave.

It is extremely hard for people who are working on facts based stuff to get their heads wrapped around people who are religious, let alone those who are religious and who are working on facts based stuff at the same time (there are plenty of those). Suffice to say that it is very well possible to have different 'modes' of operations, where one moment you are fact based and the next you are belief based. So when you are busy with your fact based work you may see 'the hand of god' in the beauty before you, only to see yourself as part of gods plan in your discoveries and your work.

To a person in that position there is no apparent contradiction, to an atheist there may be but they are not in that position themselves so lack a frame of reference that would allow them to appreciate this and to see that it actually isn't a problem.

So in the end it boils down to something like this:

"God has a plan, that plan is for you to have free will. You may question your ability to choose, you may believe that you have or do not have free will and yet even if you act against Gods plan that too is part of the plan".

This may sound like nonsense but to a religious person it assuredly isn't. Source of this very much abbreviated conversation, my grandmother, long since deceased with whom I had some interesting conversations on the subject (me: atheist, she: devout catholic).

> It is extremely hard for people who are working on facts based stuff to get their heads wrapped around people who are religious, let alone those who are religious and who are working on facts based stuff at the same time (there are plenty of those).

It is also hard for religious people to wrap their heads around facts and certainty. Before I was atheist I would debate Christians on the merits of theistic evolution vs. intelligent design. Intelligent design proponents will literally accuse Christians who believe differently of blasphemy.

My mom even lost a science teaching job over something more minor. She was unwilling to say with 100% certainty if the story of creation happened in 7 contiguous days, or may have happened over 7 non-contiguous days. While she believed it was most likely 7 contiguous days she didn’t have enough evidence to be sure.

> It is also hard for religious people to wrap their heads around facts and certainty.

I know some very good hard science scientists who have absolutely no problem with this and I suspect that goes for the bulk of them. Religious people come from all walks of life and have all kinds of professions, some of them dealing with facts, others less so.

I also know plenty of atheists that have a problem with accepting facts and dealing with probability (which is another way of saying certainty).

So I don't think that by itself says much. It's when the two are in conflict that things get interesting: what if your facts say 'a' and your belief says 'b'. In some cases this leads to people renouncing their belief, in others it causes psychological issues, and in the majority it is just absorbed without any apparent conflict or discomfort.

Atheism is just another 'ersatz-belief'. You can't prove nor disprove the existence of some entity or entities on other levels and timescales. That would be like a virus infecting a cell trying to understand its host body and the world it lives in. Or an ant in front of chip-factory, crawling over the tracks while a train comes rushing by, or something like that.

Fractal.

Try:

[∞] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism

[↕] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_above,_so_below

It’s a really hard thing to reconcile. I struggled with it for a long time. My perspective as a Christian is that God is all knowing and all powerful. He does have a plan (and that plan is often not what I want). I can allow God to act through me via the Holy Spirit. I still have free will, but I choose to use that free will to be God’s instrument.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that all of my actions are “blessed” by God, or that I don’t sin, but it means that I can be a conduit for his plan if he needs me.

It’s not a perfect explanation. Religion is built on faith. If something can be proven then you don’t need faith. That’s kinda a squirmy imperfect answer, but that’s all I got :)

My (albeit atheist looking in, but with a Christian upbringing) understanding of that is it's sort of like how classical physics comes out of the randomness of quantum physics. You have free will, that absolutely can affect the world, but god's plan is emergent in a way that takes into account the randomness of free will, combined with occasionally putting this thumb on the scale with saints, miracles, etc. In that scheme, sinning is in a lot of ways forcing god to put his thumb on the scale.

You'd think that forcing god to take some action would not be a concept, but it goes at least as far back as the ten commandments. The "take the lord's name in vain" thing was this idea that words had magical power in a snow crash kind of way and that you could literally go so far as to command god with the right incantation. Obviously that's a big no no which is why "saying curse words" was considered higher priority than "don't rape". You see pieces of that still in Orthodox Jewish numerology of Hebrew like was a plot point in Pi.

That would seem to require an outside source of entropy to drive the randomness who created that and where does it come from?

Keeping with the metaphor, I'm not sure that quantum entropy requires an additional source of randomness, only the classic concept of entropy. The thermodynamic laws like that are a emergent projection of the quantum realm and don't always have a distinct analog. Additionally, one could argue a breakdown of the metaphor, that randomness isn't a complete analog for free will, and is only useful for talking about free will in aggregate where the different choices tend to cancel and coalesce.

And, again, none of this is a position I actually hold, just where I've ended up trying to understand the cognitive framework of people vastly different from my own who simply have different axioms they start with.

You just don’t have a deeply held belief in God, so when you see a paradox like that, you respond with dismissal.

Now, I don’t know what you hold dear, but I guarantee you, somewhere you hold a fundamental belief that is inconsistent with something else you believe at a fundamental level. That’s what makes belief systems tick - you run into something you can’t reason your way out of and must commit to taking something on faith.

Paradoxes are not flaws in belief systems, they are essential.

Well I'm religious (although I guess I 'believe' in man-made climate change), so here goes. Of course, every religion will have different answers.

The general Christian jist, often twisted by evangelicals and fundamentalists (in my opinion), but still preserved and well-recorded in the annals of Catholic thought is that God is both personal but also perfect.

Let's go back in time. Aristotle, from whom a lot of (Western) Christian ideas come, believed that the universe obeyed certain laws and that behind these laws there was an 'unmoved mover', i.e., an entity whose power permeated the universe and who followed the laws of the universe. To paraphrase, God is that which has no cause. Now to be clear, a lot of human language is predicated on things having causes; we are not used to dealing with that which has no cause, which is why these linguistic paradoxes often pop up and cause confusion.

Broadly speaking, God is Aristotle's unmoved mover. While he could override free will, he won't, because he promised us he wouldn't and as a perfect God, he follows his own law. It actually doesn't make sense to identify 'God's law' as separate from God himself, because God is subject only to himself. God cannot 'cause' himself to do something because God has no cause.

In the same way that God created the universe, but the universe follows certain laws that cannot be broken (save, of course, in Christian thought for exceptional circumstances, although even then it's unclear -- happy to discuss this in more detail). People ask silly questions like 'can God create a square circle', but fail to understand the nonsensicalness of the question. The universe we inhabit was created by God and does not permit square circles. 'Could' God create a universe in which some laws could be broken... sure, but (1) to presume that we have the linguistic ability to speak of such universes is human hubris, and (2) moreover, to 'could' do something requires that one have a cause to do such a thing, but God has no cause and nothing can 'cause' him to do something, since God is his own cause, and the quality of having no cause is one that is necessary for God to be God. If some thing had the quality of needing a cause (like the potential we're talking about to create a new universe with this new set of laws), it could not possible be the same thing as God. If God had willed such a universe to exist, it would already, and maybe it does, but we wouldn't know.

> Can we make choices that effect the outcome of things or is it all part of Gods plan?

Yes, we can make choices that affect the outcome of things. In fact, large portions of the universe is the result of human choices. But we cannot deviate from God's plan, simply because God will manage to fix it, no matter what we do. This is like how humanity can do whatever we want, but the universe will end in heat death basically no matter what choices we make today. The trajectory of the universe towards the apocalypse and the final judgement is inevitable (just like the absolute increase in entropy), even if the choices we make today are not.

> Did God create everything including free will or does it exist outside of his control?

God cannot change his mind (what cause would he have to do so). His will is perfect. Thus, since he's given us free will and guaranteed it, he cannot 'take it back'. In our human conception of 'free will', we grant ourselves -- as imperfect being -- the action of being able to change our mind. God doesn't change his decisions, because his will is perfect. God is not the only creature with this particular nature. The angels also have perfect will, which is why lucifer will not change his mind and reconcile with God.

This conception of God differs drastically from yours which envisions God as simply a very powerful super-hero-like entity. It even differs from the Old Testament view of God, which often has him changing his mind. The Christian conception of God (at least that present in the Western church) is very different from Judaism and extremely different from evangelical, Protestant Christianity.

I'm engaging in good faith (and I am giving my best understanding; many much smarter than myself have thought about this and I am trying to summarize), please no trolling or flaming here.

Sources:

https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1083.htm https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1019.htm http://www.catholictheology.info/summa-theologica/summa-part...

Thank you.

Yeah sorry there is no internal consistency here for me, I do thank you for trying in a honest way.

God created everything including free will and what it means to have it.

God blames and punishes his own creations for excising free will in a way he's deems incorrectly. He's wants us to learn from him and accept him, yet he created us and designed us down to the quark.

Basically for me the buck stops with God, yet he seems to blame us if we stray, why? Is there something outside of God where evil comes from? Who created that?

Again I as programmer cannot blame the program and punish it for its emergent behavior based on the code I wrote that responds to input and makes decisions. The fault is mine especially if I also created the computer and the universe in which it runs, I either change the program or accept its behavior, punishment and blame would just be playing a silly game with myself.

Most responses here seem to revolve around God not following logic, fine there is nothing more to say then, and is truly nonsense, 2 + 2 does not have to equal 4.

> Most responses here seem to revolve around God not following logic, fine there is nothing more to say then, and is truly nonsense, 2 + 2 does not have to equal 4.

That is the exact opposite of what I am saying. God does follow his logic, including his logic that people remain free of his own coercion.

> God blames and punishes his own creations for excising free will in a way he's deems incorrectly. He's wants us to learn from him and accept him, yet he created us and designed us down to the quark.

No one is 'blaming' you. You have internalized your own notion of the Christian God and are arguing against it.

God does not blame you. Never has anyone entitled God a 'blamer'. God does not even punish. Satan is the accuser (In fact that's another name for him), not God.

Rather one is punished by his own sin. Here's an example. I am raising my children in an upper-middle class lifestyle. They will be educated well and raised to understand how to live well. If my child decides to abandon this teaching and instead decides to become a drug addict, they cannot blame me for punishing them. They have punished themselves by turning away from my teachings.

The same is true of God. When we reject God, by rejecting his instructions on how to live life, we punish ourselves. Should you refuse God and rebuke him, he is not going to force you into his plan for eternal life. Isn't that what this whole thing was about? Free will? Well here's the ultimate example. If you don't follow God and corrupt your own soul, you will torment yourself when you see the perfection of God. Have you read the Christmas Carol? Scrooge is not tormented by the spirits. Rather seeing his own behavior in comparison to the good behavior of those around them is enough to indict him in his own mind. So too is it on earth. There is no coercion. No spirit is going to come down and force you to behave.

You can choose joy, or you can choose death. As a Christian, I evangelize because I see what it has done in my own life. When I see others who have gone through similar sufferings as myself (not going to get into this) deal with what life has dealt them and they seem upset, I want to share with them the good news of the gospel and the joy that is to be found in conforming with God's will. No one is going to force you and no one is going to smite you down with lightning. Christianity utterly rejects the notion of karma or that an individual sin leads to individual destitution (book of Job puts this one to rest). The only person who will punish you is yourself when you don't follow the will of God, just as those who refuse to follow the rule of physics and decide they can fly off tall buildings have no one 'punishing' them but themselves. To a Christian, the rule of life prescribed by Christianity is similar to living our life in accord with the rules of physics. There is no difference, since both have the same source, and the laws regarding sin are manifest and obvious to those undertaking the study of the natural world.

>God does follow his logic, including his logic that people remain free of his own coercion.

Again this makes no sense, he created everything, the rules of the universe, how our minds operate, there is nothing free from his coercion unless you are saying there is something he didn't create?

>God does not blame you. Never has anyone entitled God a 'blamer'. God does not even punish. Satan is the accuser (In fact that's another name for him), not God.

Genesis 3:13

>To the woman he said,

>“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children.

>Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”

>To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

>“Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life.

That sure sounds like blame and punishment to me and thats just the very beginning.

>If my child decides to abandon this teaching and instead decides to become a drug addict, they cannot blame me for punishing them. They have punished themselves by turning away from my teachings.

You did not design your children or the universe in which they live, God however supposedly did, there is no other place for blame to go. He's is the alpha and the omega, you as a parent are not, there are many outside influences that can be blamed including your children's choices since you did not design their brain, you are only an influence on them among many.

The Catholic religion has a comprehensive theology of free will. We might not agree with them, but they've thought it through and see no paradox.

https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/free-will

Religions are narrative patchworks which are used to justify things. Not to explain them.

What you've found with your question is one of the many places the narratives don't join up, and the fraying sticky tape shows through.

There's no point trying to make sense of this, because there is no sense to be made. Ultimately it's about people using story telling to make themselves feel better and more reassured that their tribe is safe and stable.

Not coincidentally, this also allows some opportunists to make themselves richer, more powerful, and more important. Surprisingly frequently this also provides opportunities for extra sexual activity.

The stories don't need to make sense beyond that. They just need to look like an acceptable narrative salad made of tasty story bits. In fact it's better that they don't make sense, because then they can reduce believers to a pre-rational state where "You just have to believe!" makes them more credulous.

You can see the effects clearly with climate change and Covid. Some people try to understand the facts to make reliable predictions and offer realistic solutions.

Others can't fit these challenges into a religious world view. So they fall back into outright denial and/or use them as yet another excuse to welcome the apocalypse and their own imaginary personal salvation.

None of this is a function of raw IQ. You can be smart and still be infected by these distorting ideological viruses.

>Can we make choices that effect the outcome of things or is it all part of Gods plan? It can't be both right?

Given the appropriate doctrine, sure it can.

First, in some religions (and some denominations of Christianity) God exists outside of the framework of logical necessity. God being tied to logical necessity himself is a later western theological concern (say, starting with Augustine and co). Not really a tenet of earlier Christian doctrine, or accepted by e.g. the orthodox church.

That is, what looks "impossible" or a "a logical contradiction" to us, isn't necessarily so to God (which is also part of the case with miracles - they're not just cool feats like a Marvel character with superpower would do, they are the bending of physical rules and reality itself).

In that context:

> Did God create everything including free will or does it exist outside of his control?

Both. He created everything AND he gave it free will to chose for itself.

"I don't blame my program when it does something wrong, I mean I wrote the code that tells it how to behave".

That's because you're not God to your program, but merely a human that developed it. So you can't both make it and give it free will (among lots of other limitations, like not being able to make water wine at will).

>First, in some religions (and some denominations of Christianity) God exists outside of the framework of logical necessity.

This is simply an escape hatch, if it can't be explained, it's because it's magic. Gods follow no logic do what you're told even if it makes no logical sense because there is no logic to be found. There is no room for debate here, you can't use reason, there is nothing further to discuss.

>That's because you're not God to your program, but merely a human that developed it. So you can't both make it and give it free will (among lots of other limitations, like not being able to make water wine at will).

Even more so the blame goes to God not his creations since he created everything including free will and the choices. Blaming your creations playing in the sandbox you created with the sand you created is a nonsensical blame game with yourself.

> This is simply an escape hatch

It is an escape hatch, but is it simply an escape hatch? Is a whale simply a mammal?

> if it can't be explained, it's because it's magic.

More or less, as I understand it.

> do what you're told even if it makes no logical sense because there is no logic to be found. There is no room for debate here, you can't use reason, there is nothing further to discuss.

These are your words, not his.

> Even more so the blame goes to God not his creations since he created everything including free will and the choices.

Could be.

> Blaming your creations playing in the sandbox you created with the sand you created is a nonsensical blame game with yourself.

Is God himself doing this, or are you imagining God is doing this? You don't seem to even believe in Him.

> I have never been able to get my head around the religious paradox of God has a plan and free will.

I think this can actually be explained in a fairly straightforward way via science: the laws of physics dictate precisely how reality ought to behave, and yet we have thoughts and we make decisions and we believe to be largely free to do whatever we want even though our conscience and our entire being are essentially just a big clump of chemical reactions governed by the laws of physics.

According to some pantheist flavors, the laws of physics are the omnipotent property of God - aka "His plan" in christian lingo - as well as the omnipresent property.

The interesting thing about this interpretation is that it's immune to the determinism paradox: it doesn't matter if the laws of physics dictate a "plan" or whether "we" can randomly affect it (the definition of "we" is itself a big philosophical rabbit hole btw), because by their very definition, the laws of physics are what they are, and they always hold true no matter what.

Then why would God punish us for following his laws if they are just the laws of physics?

What about randomness and indeterminism? Is there a RNG driving our decisions at some level? If so where does the entropy come from?

Your question seems to be framed from a christian/abrahamic perspective, and is about God's omni-benevolence property. Unfortunately, I've yet to find a sufficiently simple/satisfactory explanation for that question.

In some flavors, the view is that there is no omni-benevolence (think in the tradition of Roman gods, for example), other views include the position that God is not an entity per se and that the notion of conflicts and the pursuit of what is "good" are inherent to our human condition (think Buddhism). If you're inclined to hear abrahamic leaning interpretations, the most closely aligned I've seen is the idea of "God draws straight lines w/ crooked sticks" (i.e. things we perceive as injustices are actually not, but we cannot comprehend the greater good because we are imperfect, biased things). See also karma and beliefs of reincarnation.

As for the origin of entropy, there's a lot of different takes, some rooted in philosophical thought (e.g. Spinoza-like takes that everything is deterministic and RNG is an illusion), some more spiritualistic (e.g. the panentheist idea that the universe is contained in God and that there may or may not be a non-deterministic force underlying it all)

Personally, I don't try to obtain explanations for every claim of every denomination (trying to nitpick apart the exact definition of God as per christianity, for example), since at some level one needs to acknowledge the metaphorical/allegorical aspects of various religious texts. I find it more interesting to take note of what concepts/interpretations appear in multiple denominations, there's a surprising amount of overlap when looking at individual concepts separately from lore.

Aside from all the stuff about deities, there's also quite a bit of literature on the morals side. I find those topics to be have a lot more overlap among religions, with self improvement usually being a central theme.

Anyways, if these kinds of debates interest you, I would recommend looking into pantheism and derivations. A lot of common questions have already been contemplated by various schools of thought. The wikipedia article might be a good place to start.

I have studied much of it and enjoy Joseph Campbell quite a bit, this discussion was focused on abrahamic religions though.

I find it interesting from a study of human behavior but overall all religions seem to lack rigor, they leave me unsatisfied due to their lack of even internal consistency, unlike mathematics and science.

Questions of determinism or free will are at the root of the mechanics of the universe and how a god might construct it or not. If you believe some god to have created all things then how can there be free will, that would denote something from the outside, some source of entropy not under the control of the creator. If it is under control of the creator the it is not true entropy and everything is determined ultimately by the creator.

> If you believe some god to have created all things then how can there be free will, that would denote something from the outside, some source of entropy not under the control of the creator. If it is under control of the creator the it is not true entropy and everything is determined ultimately by the creator.

Yeah, that's one way to look at it. There's also philosophies of what exactly is "self" and where its boundaries lie. One take is that if "God lives within us" then even if the universe is entirely deterministic, our decisions are governed by our own internal mechanisms (hence it's "free will" in the sense that we exclusively "own" those mechanisms, as opposed to them being influenced by outside factors). Another related view is the notion of relativity (i.e. "my reality is not your reality and definitions are inherently tied to each person's relative consciousness because without consciousness there are no definitions". This second notion cuts pretty close to the heart of why arguments between christians and atheists often break down: if they are talking about two completely distinct, mutually-exclusive realities (as it is perceived by each individual), there's really no way to reach a compromise.

There's a variety of interpretations of free will in that context, some simple and fatalist (e.g. immutable, inescapable fate), some quite a bit more creative ("God gave us free will because He loves us and He weeps when we use it to do bad things, yet everything is part of His grand plan"). I don't always see these interpretations as necessarily internally inconsistent. Some definitely are literally nonsensical or highly metaphorical, but some just take a bit more effort to appreciate. At times, it's an exercise in realizing whether I'm being overly pedantic over some philosophical minutia and extrapolating aversion to the entire belief system.

Rather than rejecting entire ideologies at face value, I enjoy looking for common ground between different ideologies or ways to reconcile ideas because religions come packaged w/ moral frameworks and I think the moral aspect is an ignored but key thing if one hopes to talk to religious people about controversial topics in a productive manner.

It might be a bit more complicated once you hear about the story of Adam and Eve, among other sometimes contradictory stories. Was free will given at creation, or maybe after they ate that one apple? Even old Stoics grappled with a variation of the problem[1], but most religious people I think follow an understanding that free will was conferred to humans and that can allow you to disobey god's plan, but that it ultimately will not end well and/or is futile against the predetermined and eventual good outcome.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism

So, the book of Job. Paraphrasing.

God and Satan are sitting together in Heaven. God says "Look at my servant Job, he loves me so much, he does his sacrifices, he worships me constantly." Satan says "Of course he does, you spoiled him rotten with children and riches and stuff. I bet if you kick him in the teeth a few times he'll turn on you, because that's how humans are."

They have a bet. No stakes, mind you, just a gentleman's wager. Satan destroys Job's life. Plagues, famine, all of his children dead. He's a caricature of misery, wallowing in sorrow, rags soaked in pus and bitter tears. He can't figure it out. He's lived his entire life as a righteous man, blessed by God, then one day God just kicked him in the teeth.

Eventually God shows up. Verse 38 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job%2038&versio...) God spends the entire chapter answering, in essence, "I'm God. Who are you to question me?" An interesting part of this chapter is that, if one takes it seriously, it strongly implies that God is in direct control over everything - no free will, no randomness.

Romans 9:19-24 is also interesting, spelling out in no uncertain terms that, yes, God does predetermine everything, including moral choice. And he punishes the sinful, despite making them sinful.

  "One of you will say to me: “Then why does God still blame us? For who is able to resist his will?” 20 But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’”[a] 21 Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use?"

  "22 What if God, although choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction? 23 What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory— 24 even us, whom he also called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles?"

Again, the answer isn't that God is perfectly just, or perfectly loving, but simply that God has the right to do what he will with his possessions. God will kick a righteous man in the teeth on a dare if he wants to. Pray harder n00b.

The problem is the Abrahamic canon is so old that parts of it predate Judaic monotheism (see parts of Genesis referring to God or the council of Gods in the plural, or the commandment "thou shalt not have any gods before me.") The image of God and his nature evolves with religion and society, and eventually God's nature contradicts itself. Modern Christians have to reconcile their morality with the parts of the Bible that openly condone slavery and genocide, and Paul's sexist BS. Why would an all loving, all benevolent Father talk about dashing infants against rocks and sending rape gangs against his enemies?

Because 4000 or so years ago, back when people collected the foreskins of their enemies in jars as wedding gifts, that's exactly what one would expect of a just God.

Don't bother trying to square the circle. The Bible isn't a singular coherent narrative planned out from beginning to end, it's thousands of years of poetry, prose, legal documents, mythology and insane fever dream, and it contradicts itself in many, many places. If you approach it not as a divinely inspired book spelling out the absolute, immutable truth about who GOD is, but as an account of generations of people trying to reconcile their belief in the divine with reality, and coming to radically different conclusions, then the paradox resolves itself.

Well. Maybe we do live in some sort of simulation. That would imply there is some code running on some substrate of whatever nature. Code has errors, and bitrot on storage media is universal. So deviations from that plan resulting from bugs and bitrot could be the free will :-)

I think it's healthy and necessary to make fun of fundamentalists - I think the issue comes when people make efforts at taking them seriously and give their platform a modicum of respect at a national level. The US has a severe issue with fundamentalist entrenchment in media and government at the moment and it's going to take a while to kick them all out. Evangelism is an extremist ideology that is causing ongoing harm to the stability of America in more ways than just the abortion debate.

As I've aged I think I've drifted more and more toward the french view of religious freedom - rather than freedom of religion, freedom from religion.

I find it amusing to compare how we treat fundamentalists vs how we treat children. They both can be extremely stubborn and say the darnest things, but with one group, people think ridicule is going to yield good results, even though with the other, that's a big no-no.

You know you're not going to get a good result from a yelling contest with your kid about who's more right, so I don't understand the reasoning that dismissing religion altogether is somehow going to "make the sheeple see the error of their ways".

Semi-ironically, I'm reminded of an episode of a kids-oriented podcast I listened to recently that talked about a different approach to conflict resolution: negotiations. The gist being to strive to meet the other party at their level and work together rather than against each other. You'd be surprised at how fundamentally you can shake some people by pointing at some relevant Bible passage that supports your position (for example, showering them w/ direct quotes from Matthew 25:35, Leviticus 19:34 and a dozen other similar passages in response to xenophobia)

For climate change specifically, there's a bunch of passages written where the gist is that God made Earth good, but humans defiled it[0]. One could probably start a dialogue by pointing at those.

[0] https://www.openbible.info/topics/climate_change

This analogy is deeply flawed.

Your kids brain is still developing and they are still actively learning. Taking different approaches helps.

That is almost always not the case with a fundamentalist.

The police begs to differ. Negotiation is an effective tactic used by competent police forces against hostage takers.

Also, fundamentalists are people, not pre-programmed robots. Many ISIS fighters, for example, are young adults whose very active learning capabilities are being exploited by a subversive group.

Also, I think the track record of arguing and butting heads kinda speaks for itself. Everyone's doing it and yet the world is literally on fire and on a path towards destruction.

There's no way to kick out religious fundamentalists. They get to vote just like everyone else. And they have created their own echo chamber media. Any real solutions will require working with them and not just dismissing them.

You can't kick religious people off of the world. And anyway, they're better at organization and mutual aid, so they would win any conflict with you.

The question is whether you want to get stuff accomplished or want to be right. A dead pedestrian who had the right-of-way was right, but it doesn't matter to them anymore.

> There is a severely underestimated group of religious people who think that only God controls the weather

There are also millions of ultra-fundamentalists who believe that we are presently living in the "end times" and in some cases doing things to attempt to bring about the end of civilization and final parts of the book of Revelations as quickly as possible. Or they simply don't care about environmental matters because they actually believe civilization and human life on earth will cease to exist in the next 50 years.

Yes, the vast majority of American Evangelicals (the largest sect of Christianity in the US) hold to an apocalyptic view. Their attitude is basically "God's going to burn everything down anyway, so why should we care about the earth?" - of course, other branches of Christianity would very much disagree with this assessment of the Book of Revelation, in fact, the Evangelical view is a fairly recent one emerging with Darby in the 1830s or so, and while he didn't find much of an audience for it in his native England or Ireland, he found a very receptive audience for his ideas when he came to America to preach them.

If you have a time machine and want to have a big impact on history, stop Darby from arriving in America in the 1860s.

Apocalypse WOW!

I have a slightly different view. Not the end of the world, but the end of it as we (have) know(n) it! In the literal meaning of the word, as in lifting the veil which occludes reality.

The reality of our existence as species on a world with limits exploding right back into our faces, shattering our illusions.

No demons, holy spirits, or such.

Those emerge out of our own weaknesses.

Because of bad signal to noise ratio due to SPAM of bullshitters since ancient times.

The good news is (no, not that Good News) that education and information are working to reduce the influence of this group. See [1] and [2] for some survey data and [3] for some more discussion, [1] in particular indicates that church membership has just this year crossed below the 50% mark. Also, it's strongly age-correlated; 58% of Boomers are members but only 36% of millenials are members, so as time moves on this trend will continue. Note that these surveys are often influenced by a strong halo effect where people conditioned as children that they ought to be more religious answer that they attend church more often than they do and that they hold beliefs that they believe to be virtuous but do not actually think are true, so I expect the actual numbers are significantly stronger for this trend.

Also, "PMCs"? A search suggests "Professional-managerial class" for the acronym, but I wasn't familiar with that. Is an engineer or a programmer considered to be in the PMC?

[1]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-...

[2]: https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christ...

[3]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/its-not-just-young-whit...

>>I'm always amused on HN when people in a thread realize that the reference to demonic possession or witchcraft by another commenter was completely in earnest.

I have been in a serious relationship with a wonderful, intelligent, university-educated, well-read, eloquent person who absolutely believed that Magic:The Gathering led to sorcery, which was in turn also an absolutely real thing (to her).

Similarly, the father of another relationship of mine was one of the most well-educated people I met, well-regarded principal of premier private school in Toronto, host of book clubs to which mayor participated in, but definitely prevaricated between "climate change doesn't exist", "it's not man-made", and "it's god's will/plan". His book club included a published physics researcher and university professor who similarly was the head of local skeptics society until his absolute inability & blind spot to apply skepticism/rationality to his strong religious views, including those impacting cosmology let alone earth weather, became too much of a conflict/contradiction.

My best friend is a Microbiology / Pharmacology PhD from prestigious Canadian university, who then went through medical school later in life; roughly half of her student colleagues in either program were similarly highly religious - with religiously-guided views on cosmology, climate, and of course what they can and cannot do as doctors :-/

The bubble is real, and for all its diversity Hacker News is a bubble of its own.

> These people need to be approached theologically; secular explanations are not going to hack it.

I’m one of them. I don’t think that is a silver bullet to getting them to shift. Part of their resistance is because they think it’s not possible for them to live in a ecological conscious economy. Too much disturbance.

I have used a theological approach to getting them to adjust. I call it karma. If you Waste more resource, god will punish you. And the warming of the earth now is a result of that waste. We waste far too much like it means nothing. Their is a whole lot of truth in that even for the agnostic. But the agnostic needs a different argument to change. Something along the lines of saving the fragile planet.

Not only that God controls the weather. I recently saw some propaganda from one of the Young Earth Creationist orgs. It was a book about how climate change can't be real. These groups are pushing hard against the idea of human induced climate change because it threatens their entire world-view. They think the earth is only 6000 year old, so when we say we're burning millions of years of accumulated fossil fuels in a very short amount of time (since the dawn of the industrial age) they go ballistic - it's a threat to their young earth creationist view in which there wasn't enough time to build up that much carbon in the ground. This is why they're fighting the idea of human induced climate change quite vigorously.

Personally I'm more concerned about the absolutely tepid response by folks who allegedly believe in climate change. I don't know how we are going to put a dent in climate change without something like carbon pricing (something that incentivizes us to reduce our carbon emissions). Instead the best case is that we're going to write progressives a check for $3.5T and they'll use a little bit of it to create a "civilian climate corps" and rebates for EVs and EV charging stations. Not the response I would expect to an existential threat.

Yeah, it's fun to blame Republicans for not believing in climate change (and they deserve a lot of blame), but I have a much harder time with people who profess a belief in climate change but behave like climate policy is a nice-to-have.

Downvoters: How are the Democratic reconciliation bill's climate provisions up to the challenge of tackling climate change? Why is climate change a middling priority on the agenda? Or is it all just okay because the Republicans are worse (i.e., we shouldn't let Democratic failure to address climate change distract from the more important work of blaming-Republicans-as-sport)?

That's because quite a few of them have already simply given up. This oil tanker that we've built is not made to turn on a dime and that's what it would take to solve this. So it's a mitigation action at best at this point, reduce the force of the impact and look after your own. It's pretty sad in a way.

You seem to be conflating the broader progressive ideology with the frustrating realities of trying to pass specific policies into law.

The reason what we're getting out of Washington doesn't include enough to fight climate change may not be absolutely 100% the fault of the Republican Party, but it's enough that blaming the Democrats for it to any meaningful extent just smacks of disingenuous both-sides-ism.

I'm not talking about broader progressive ideology at all (apart from a belief that climate change is a real existential threat that requires significant immediate action), I'm talking about the priorities of the current crop of progressive Democratic politicians (and/or Democrats more broadly).

I guarantee you the progressive Democratic politicians have climate change as a high priority—and "Democrats more broadly", depending on how you define it, don't have anything remotely resembling a coherent agenda.

The progressives don't get to make laws all on their own.

Even a single lost Democratic vote on a bill means it doesn't make it past the Senate, and Senators Manchin and Sinema have both made it abundantly clear that they have no interest in fighting back against the Republican obstructionism to advance a positive agenda for the country. I'm frankly surprised that anything got passed at all, given their resistance in the past few months.

I'm not sure I agree entirely with your characterization, but the salient bit that we seem to agree on is that Democrats profess a belief in the existential threat of climate change and still aren't organized to combat it. That seems like a bigger problem than Republican obstructionism (what is there to obstruct if Dems don't even have a coherent, remotely realistic plan)?

While progressives are aligned on the Green New Deal, that's little more than a slogan (no draft legislation or anything). To the extent that it's fleshed out (e.g., AOC's Green New Deal resolution), it seems to mean "decarbonize energy sector by 2030 + fix racial injustice + implement European social democracy + universal healthcare + affordable housing + stronger union protections + etc". Basically the "Green New Deal" isn't a plan to fix the climate, it's a progressive trojan horse. This doesn't seem like real concern about climate change to me.

To be clear, the point isn't "progressives are the worst", it's that no faction or party is doing a great job here, but we're too preoccupied with figuring out who is the worst to actually move forward.

EDIT: Added the last two paragraphs, apologies for any confusion caused.

From my perspective, the bigger problem by far is that everyone to the right of our skewed American political center (this includes some Democrats, particularly those I named) do not believe that it is critical to take any action at all on climate change. The more people agree "yes, we need to solve problem X", the more likely it is that we (collectively) can get something passed to start moving toward change, even if we don't entirely agree on the severity of the problem or the precise methods needed to combat it.

Or, to put it another way: If the Republicans weren't being obstructionist, the Democrats wouldn't need a strategy to overcome them. They'd be able to put their energy toward coming up with actual policy solutions.

Finally, it is my understanding (though I don't have the link handy right now) that the Biden campaign put out a fairly clear set of legislative goals to push for in order to combat climate change. So while it's certainly true that "Democrats", broadly, don't all agree on what to do, a) that's essentially a tautology (not just of Democrats, though they tend to be less likely to fall in line with a centralized message and agenda than Republicans), and b) that's not at all the same thing as saying "Congressional Democrats and the White House have advanced no clear legislative goals toward combating climate change."

> From my perspective, the bigger problem by far is that everyone to the right of our skewed American political center (this includes some Democrats, particularly those I named) do not believe that it is critical to take any action at all on climate change.

I would rather have the 50% who believe climate change is an existential threat behave accordingly rather than have 80% pay empty lip service and rally around token legislation or trojan horses (reconciliation bill, green new deal, etc).

> Or, to put it another way: If the Republicans weren't being obstructionist, the Democrats wouldn't need a strategy to overcome them. They'd be able to put their energy toward coming up with actual policy solutions.

Republican obstructionism is a real thing, but the idea that Republicans are obstructing Democrats from crafting a reasonable agenda is patently absurd, especially when carbon pricing has been the obvious solution for more than a decade, and it even enjoys some Republican support. But Democrats can't be bothered to make it part of their own agenda because of Republican obstructionism? Come on.

> Biden put out a fairly clear set of legislative goals to push for in order to combat climate change

What are these goals? Are they serious? Or are they some variation on the budget reconciliation bill (i.e., largely symbolic gestures that are bundled haphazardly into a bunch of other spending)?

I've been hearing the 'it's a natural cycle' argument for decades. The arguments haven't shifted, it's just that more recently the warmer weather has prompted anecdotal arguments for climate change ("See! It's warmer! Global warming is real!"), and the 'natural cycle' argument is the more relevant rebuttal to that.

If only we were a plant

Another shift if from denial to acknowledging it is real, significantly man-made, and should be addressed--but then rejecting any reduction to emissions on the grounds that it might hurt the economy [1]. All they will support are things like planting trees or offering tax credits for recapture.

Perhaps most ridiculous in rejecting emissions reduction is Senator Rubio who "said it made no sense for the United States to cut its emissions while other countries like China continue to pollute. But at the same time, he also rejected trade policies that would apply pressure on China and others to curb their emissions".

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/climate/republicans-clima...

I was very much a skeptic until I started seeing more and more real world (as opposed to just models) evidence. I am pretty convinced now.

My skepticism was rooted in the fact that politicians, pundits, and the media were trying to scare me about it. Any time politicians or the media try to scare me about anything my default response is to assume it's a get out the vote drive or a power grab and to become extremely skeptical. This isn't partisan. It doesn't matter if the politician is "left" or "right."

I still think that should be a default suspicion, but that means you have to dig and check the details and check multiple sources.

If anything, politicians globally are hugely downplaying the risks of climate change and betting on being out of office before the worst effects manifest.

Did the plethora of scientists claiming that it was an issue not factor in at all?

The scientists seemed to have a single political leaning, which made me more skeptical. I saw it as religious apologetics for green ideology.

The presence of any strong uniform ideology makes me extremely skeptical just like political interest does.

I'd summarize as: I assume that strong ideological beliefs or political motives make people irrational, dishonest, and untrustworthy.

It's a scientific issue though, not a political one. You shouldn't ever have been evaluating it through the lens of politics. You fell into that one side vs the other political trap.

I'm not sure why you are being down-voted for voicing your position. Thanks for sharing it.

I think that if we (as a society) can't find a way to communicate basic truths to all of us, we are probably doomed; There has to be a way for everyone to be able to say "1 + 1 = 2" and not have endless debate about it. Trusting the leaders that we elect is probably part of that equation... but that also means those leaders need to understand these basic truths (as truths) as well.

> I'm not sure why you are being down-voted for voicing your position.

The climate zealots here are extremely aggressive with the downvoting. And yes the description zealot is fair. Denier is their word for heretic.

Another sign of zealotry is the inability to recognize nuance. For example my pointing out that climate zealots act like zealots is observably true, but their brains will shut down and immediately label me as a “denier” even though I’m entirely agnostic on the subject. I really don’t care. I have better things to spend my intellectual energy on than learning enough to evaluate whatever evidence there is for a problem I can’t solve. But there’s no greater offense to a zealot than saying you consider his particular obsession irrelevant.

Yet another sign of zealotry is an extreme desire for others to publicly affirm one’s beliefs. This should help you understand why gp is poorly received.

Edit: As for why I bothered to post about zealots, it’s because I believe zealotry of all sorts, including climate zealotry, is far more likely to cause mass harm than whatever issue the zealots are obsessed with. For example climate zealots are actually seriously planning to blot out the sun. What could possibly go wrong?

> For example my pointing out that climate zealots act like zealots is observably true

That's a tautology. Perhaps you could explain who exactly is a 'climate zealot', and why, without just painting everyone who doesn't agree with you as one.

First, “observably” means I was making an empirical claim. The basis may be tautological which is to say logically sound, but the key point is that I and others have observed zealotry.

Second, persons who are climate zealots are the ones who act like zealots about climate, rather than pornography or any other number of hobbyhorses that zealots obsess over. I think it’s fair to assume most everyone reading this is educated and experienced enough to know what a zealot is. It’s not up to me who is or isn’t a climate zealot, the class is duck typed. So much for that.

Third, I’m not painting people who disagree with me as anything, because there aren’t any people who disagree with me. How exactly does one disagree with someone who has no belief to disagree with?

Edit: Thank you zealots for proving my point.

His point is that saying "zealots are zealots" doesn't say anything. Or the people who are zealots are those acting like zealots.

Once again, that's tautology. He's asking you what actions are those of a zealot. If I recycle, am I zealot? If I say global warming is real, am I zealot? If I sabotage a petroleum refinery, am I zealot? There are degrees to actions.

He knows what he'd define a zealot as, but he wants you to define what it means to you. But you want to dodge the question by saying "it's obvious".

You've also defined anyone downvoting him or you as zealots. But. You could be wrong. I mean, your logic is bad, which is a good reason to downvote you in general. They're not disagreeing with your self-professed non-position on climate change. They're disagreeing with your refusal to engage with others in good faith.

> Once again, that's tautology. He's asking you what actions are those of a zealot. If I recycle, am I zealot? If I say global warming is real, am I zealot? If I sabotage a petroleum refinery, am I zealot? There are degrees to actions

All three of those are entirely orthogonal to whether or not one is a zealot. For example someone could sabotage a petroleum refinery because they’re following military orders without any particular obsession with petroleum. And someone could be a zealot about recycling by being obsessed with it and calling people who think recycling is a waste because China isn’t taking it anymore “wasters” or some other pejorative label and insisting everyone else take recycling as seriously as they do. Perhaps you’ll find looking up “zeal” in your favorite dictionary helpful for understanding what zealotry us.

> I mean, your logic is bad

I’m fairly confident in “A is A” having pragmatic value and uninterested in a model that doesn’t accept that axiom. The correctness of my logic isn’t harmed by assuming my interlocutors can recognize zealotry.

> You've also defined anyone downvoting him or you as zealots.

Now here is an actual logical error: confusing the implication and the consequence or confusing either or both with the equivalence. Observing that zealots will downvote does not mean that all those who downvote are zealots.

Edit: One reliable indicator of a zealot downvote is that other completely unrelated comments from the objectionable author that are still eligible for downvotes will get downvoted at the same time, which I’ve observed in this instance.

See, your talking but saying nothing.

Most of us understand what "zeal" is and being condescending isn't doing you any favors.

"A is A" has no value. It's not an axiom, it's a tautology. It is true by virtue of being itself. You're saying "zealots are zealots". Which, ok. But it doesn't tell us what zealots are. Or what you think they are.

That's what makes your logic bad. You've replaced it with tautologies. Bad is bad. Good is good. Zealots are zealots.

And it's not a logical error. It's what you did with your edit. If not all who downvoted you and him are zealots, then you can't use the fact that you were downvoted as proof of zealotry. Which you did. Downvotes only go to like -4 around here. So it's not like it takes a lot. Unless you honestly believe you and him were being upvoted way more. Which you have no evidence for. Besides your claim that "the zealots are after you". Of which the only proof we have of their supposed zealotry is downvoting you and the other guy. So is that what being a climate zealot means to you? It's someone who downvotes you on message boards?

You do not discuss in good faith. And the evidence is in your posts. You think using words like axiom and pragmatic means you're making good points. You're not. Because you apparently don't know what they mean.

> See, your talking but saying nothing.

You might want to use that edit button yourself. Then again the issue might be a general lack of command of the English language rather than a typographic error, as demonstrated by your demonstrated inability or unwillingness to use a dictionary.

> "A is A" has no value. It's not an axiom, it's a tautology. It is true by virtue of being itself. You're saying "zealots are zealots". Which, ok. But it doesn't tell us what zealots are. Or what you think they are.

Thank you for the succinct demonstration of ignorance of both logic and the purpose of dictionaries. It sounds like you once "lost" a debate and your interlocutor used the word "tautology" and now you think it's some kind of magic I win button.

> And it's not a logical error. It's what you did with your edit. If not all who downvoted you and him are zealots, then you can't use the fact that you were downvoted as proof of zealotry. Which you did. Downvotes only go to like -4 around here.

What? Study some basic first order logic please. Also, consider adding the word "germane" to your lexicon. Oh and work on your reading comprehension.

> Besides your claim that "the zealots are after you".

You do realize that using quotation marks around a fabricated quote is dishonest, don't you? And since I'm feeling charitable, for that matter the word you're looking for is once again "you're." And if you really want to expand your mind look up "gerunds."

> You do not discuss in good faith. And the evidence is in your posts. You think using words like axiom and pragmatic means you're making good points. You're not. Because you apparently don't know what they mean.

Thank you for the case study of a midwit projecting his own intellectual inadequacies on his interlocutor. Sadly, I don't think further discussion with you is going to satisfy my, or anyone's, intellectual curiosity.

"As demonstrated by your demonstrated inability"

I made a simple typo. You can choose to focus on that rather than any substance. It only continues to highlight your unwillingness to engage in good faith. You apparently think saying a lot of words means you're saying a lot.

Just like your obsession with the word "interlocutor". Always use the five dollar word when possible, I guess.

I don't think it's a magic I win button. It is, ironically enough, what it is. Saying something is itself doesn't add to a conversation. If you can't see that, that's your problem.

You think accusing the other side of not using logic is some sort of magic "I win" button however. What I did was basic inference. By noting that being downvoted is proof of zealotry, it stands to reason that zealots must be downvoting you more than the general population. Because if the general population is also downvoting you, then being downvoted can't be evidence of zealotry. You can't have it both ways. If being downvoted is proof of zealotry, then you must be accusing those downvoting you of being zealots. If you're explicitly not doing that and saying downvotes can be coming from anywhere, then being downvoted isn't proof of zealotry. That's basic logic that you're failing.

They were scare quotes. Because your premise is ridiculous. And the word is "your", it's not "you are claim", it is a claim that you are making. I like how you're so eager to jump on any little thing at all, that you over-corrected and made the same mistake yourself.

I mean, no discussion with you is going to satisfy anyone. Unless you're satisfying yourself with your own mental mastubatory fantasy that you're destroying people with "reason and logic".

You still haven't actually responded to anything of substance. You just go on, incorrectly, about what is and is not logic and fail to do the very basic thing asked of you: What, to you, is a climate zealot? Without using the word zealot, without saying it's obvious, or any other dodge. You aren't as opaque as you think you are.

> gamma posturing

I’ll own my erroneous correction. Its only fair to recognize the exceptional, for you, achievement of making a valid constructive criticism, however trivial.

However your reasoning is otherwise so fallacious I don’t think it’s worth trying to go through the errors. Suffice to say that what you are claiming are inferences are actually, charitably construed, at best enthymemes with a dishonest unstated leg. I’m pleased you don’t find me opaque since I didn’t intend to be and thus I’ll leave it as an exercise for you to identify specific examples, since I don’t see any point in spelling it out further.

It's still an inference, even if it were wrong. You go on about dictionaries, but apparently the only book gifted to you was a thesaurus.

Also, I like how an error on your part is "trivial", while an error on mine is reason enough to discard anything I might say.

You "don't think it's worth" the time because you just can't. You've never actually tried to rebut anything anyone says. You just condescendingly call them wrong and the proceed to brag about how logical and smart you are and how you're just cutting down all of your perceived opponents.

But you never actually put in the work.

Here's what I think is just one interesting way to think about it: what if our current forms of government, combined with all other variables in the system that we find ourselves within, are simply insufficient to reach an adequate response to this issue? Or worse: maybe government is just one of many components that are not up to the task.

And if you feel the urge to say something like "No, that's not it", then I would ask: "How do you know?", or "What if we manage to somehow decide and unify on a plan, but the plan is inadequate?"

Whether people like it or not, solving this requires a series of actions that are actually adequate to solve the problem. We all seem to have no problem realizing this at our day jobs, but it seems to me there is something about this problem that downgrades people's ability to execute logic at a high level of comppetency. Perhaps it's that the system is infinitely complex, but it does not appear this way?

I think it's because people are skeptical of the source of his skepticism. They believe he is being disingenuous and trying to couch his position in something that will excuse his behavior.

They're also pointing out the core inconsistency in his logic. He claims his basis for climate skepticism was that politicians said it and politicians lie. But others pointed out that there were always politicians on both sides of the issue. So if politicians lie and politicians are on both sides of the issue then we have a problem. We can't use politicians as a barometer of truth, either way.

So either his reason for climate skepticism isn't "politicians said it" or his reason for climate skepticism is because "politicians who don't share a political party with me said it". And that's obviously bad. But he can't say that, because it's obviously bad.

I can't speak for api's intentions but I think the point is that scientists are people too. The perception of scientists themselves as being politically bent in one direction is definitely not unfathomable. This is especially so in a culture (or sub-culture) of politicians/news that may portray them that way for political gain.

At the end of the day, we all have to decide what information sources we will put money behind. None of them are always correct. Science does have an upper hand when done right... but that's a large caveat that even seasoned scientists may not always discern properly. Also, there is a lot of bad science "out there" sometimes funded by competing interests.

None of this is to say that I doubt climate change but certainly I don't buy wholesale into emerging ideas until they have been sussed out a bit. In 1995, the language was still:

> Any human-induced effect on climate will be superimposed on the background "noise" of natural climate variability, which results both from internal fluctuations and from external causes such as solar variability or volcanic eruptions. Detection and attribution studies attempt to distinguish between anthropogenic and natural influences. [1]

Which could be (and was, when politically beneficial) read to mean "we don't have a clear picture."

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_sar_wg_...

But he originally assigned his viewpoint to politicians and when people pointed out the flaw in his reasoning, he shifted.

But once again, his reasoning is suspect. He claims scientists are of a certain political bent.

His reason for believing they are of a political bent is the alarm they are raising over climate. Which he doesn't trust because of some politicians making an issue of it.

Don't you see how that's circular? He can't use scientists claim of climate change as evidence of their political bent and then use a perceived political bent as to why he shouldn't trust their judgment on climate.

If you wanted to do read in that way, that's a thing, but they also say in their introduction to "Advancing Our Understanding":

> Global climate change moved to the forefront of the international agenda even before the recent growing confidence that a significant part of the observed global climate change can be attributed to human activities. Governments have agreed on the Climate Convention owing to the plausibility of the scientific arguments and measurements showing significant increases in the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. Global climate models have been used to project how the climate might change, based on plausible scenarios of anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases through the next century.

Which is an acknowledgement that it is happening.

And let's not forget Exxon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont...). Who accepted it as fact in the 80s and then actively worked to delay acceptance of it.

So you have to see why it would be difficult to get people fully on board when you have a billion dollar corporation working against you. I mean, api wants to bemoan those darn lying politicians, but Exxon has a very obvious and vested interest in fossil fuel consumption and anything that would cause people to cut back is something they would have motive to fight. But he doesn't mention any oil or gas company at all, does he? For some reason, their objection to climate change doesn't raise one red flag for him at all.

I think all three of us see this in hindsight. Ultimately, Exxon influenced politics to keep its business model. Politicians then amplified pieces of rhetoric (eg: the piece I pointed out) for their own gain. I would bet that very few people (especially the general public) read that original report in its entirety.

What's more important to me personally in this thread is not “a single person was not always thinking the correct things” but rather, “what lead them to think things counter to established/semi-established science?” All of us are prone to misinformation. By understanding biases we can potentially improve ourselves.

I tend to hold the same thumb-in-the-air view that anytime we think we absolutely know something is true, we are probably missing something fundamental. This is just another way of saying that reality (especially political reality) is almost always more nuanced than “x is good” or “y is bad.”

Finally, the human condition is quite messy. We all operate on partial knowledge of the world. There is no way for any of us to spend enough time+energy to really focus on or even fully grasp all the large and simultaneous issues in the world. It’s why we have organizations that go out and try to boil the problems down for us based on interviews and primary sources. Various governments also have these same kinds of organizations that operate independently and are tailored to help make policy decisions.

My point: it’s possible to quickly analyze our limited sources of information and come to wrong conclusions. api openly accepts that his conclusion changed and speaks about where he thinks he went wrong. In this light, down voting based on his internal experience seems… odd.

To keep it short, people think he's lying about where he says he went wrong. Because his reasons aren't internally consistent.

He either used a piece information to justify his already held stance. "I don't believe in climate change. This politician says it. Politicians lie. I can continue not believing in it."

Or he allowed certain affiliations of his to dictate which groups he should dismiss despite any actual evidence. "I work in oil and gas/I am a Republican. This would be bad for my industry/Democrats are mostly in support. I shouldn't support it."

Neither of those are good processes. And no one wants to admit to either of them because they are bad. So if something like the above is the reason, it's best to try and claim another.

But enough people are savvy enough to put two and two together.

> green ideology

Not sure why you’re downvoted so hard. What do you consider the green ideology? I have honestly never heard of such a thing - at least not in something one could describe as a negative thing

How did you even know that the political leaning of scientists in, say, Spain, Germany, or Japan were? How did you know that scientists worldwide had a "single political leaning", when they were in other countries with a different political makeup?

Both scientists and politicians are uniformly in support of round earth theory. Does that make you skeptical that the earth is round?

> The scientists seemed to have a single political leaning, which made me more skeptical. I saw it as religious apologetics for green ideology.

Why didn't you consider that their "green ideology" comes from their scientific findings. Shouldn't all of our ideologies/beliefs be informed by our understanding of the world?!

You assumed that there was a strong uniform ideology because scientists aligned with one political party, when in fact there was a strong uniform body of data which caused the scientists to agree. They aligned with one political party because it supported an objectively correct stance, while the other did not.

Your heuristics utterly failed you, leaving you blind to a devastating truth at a critical moment. While you seem to be on the road to acknowledging the truth about climate change, I can only hope that you are also ready to let go of the flawed reasoning that set you so far back.

To be frank the science is way less apocalyptic in nature than certain politicians and people tend to be rhetorically speaking. Climate change isn’t going to wipe out humanity or all life on Earth and I’ve never seen a legit paper even come close to suggesting this. Yet I hear it from Joe blow all the time.

While science does tend to keep estimates and language neutral to focus on hard facts, I would argue that those facts have pointed to catastrophe for a long time [1]. The language of fact is often dry and what most people (myself included) naturally pay attention to are loud/charismatic/flashy presentations of topics.

Visualization [2] of data helps understand just how much area we can expect to lose around the coasts. These kinds of datasets are available and scientists do their best to publish them but what the public ultimately gets are articles filtered through journalists who often "translate" what they hear.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/26/world/scientists-urge-rap...

[2] https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/#/layer/slr/10/-13585575.60473416...

I’m not saying that climate change isn’t a problem or that it isn’t going to effect a lot of people. But millions of refugees fleeing the coastal areas and crazy weather patterns are not the same as the end of all life on earth or the end of humanity.

Those last two are the common rhetoric from non-scientist who doomsay about climate change and it turns people off or in the worst case makes them think it’s all lies.

Have you read anything by Peter Ward? He's a fairly well respected paleontologist who has argued convincingly in both papers and popular books (most notably "Under a Green Sky"), that sudden rises in CO2 have been linked to the majority of major (and many minor) mass extinctions throughout history.

He's not alone in scientists out there who believe that rapid climate change is a serious existential risk to humans and many species on Earth. We are already likely in the 6th largest extinction event. If you relax from "extinction" to "collapse of industrial civilization" the number of people who have studied and argued this academically grows quite a bit.

I agree that no one seriously believes the extinction of "all life on Earth" is possible, quite a bit survived the End Permian. But existential risk to humans an much life on Earth is not out of the question based on geological evidence.

Additionally scientists are humans too, and it is hard for any of us to seriously consider existential threats as realistic. If there's been a bias in past IPCC reports it's been for optimism, frequently ignoring feedback while assuming large scale carbon capture and storage.

We should listen to the scientists because they're the best we've got. But at the same time, we need to be humble and leave room for them to be wrong. This is where science shines - we should always feel comfortable shedding incorrect models/theories and embrace new ideas that might better explain the data.

So yes, ACC is real, but we should still encourage honest people to investigate and propose a better explanation if there is one. Drowning out honest voices makes the entire scientific community look bad. (Certainly, we should not give a platform to dishonest, known frauds)

So why listen to the politicians in the first place, instead of to the scientists who have been as united about this as they have ever been about any major subject? There is some fringe but the consensus is extremely clear.

And wouldn't it be reasonable to assume, if entire scientific community was involved in some kind conspiracy, that somebody somewhere would find some kind of smoking gun?

And who would exactly benefit from peddling that kind of conspiracy?

I never suspected a conspiracy. I suspected ideological bias and groupthink, neither of which requires any explicit conspiracy.

The problem isn't listening to politicians, the problem is listening to talk show hosts with vested interests in the fossil fuel industry.

The problem is you can tune into those hosts with a simple AM radio. Getting access to the scientific literature is somewhat more difficult, especially if you are a tech illiterate.

If you are tech illiterate then it doesn't matter if you have access or not to the scientific literature, it is hard enough to follow for people that are tech literate and this doesn't always seem to be by accident.

Almost every paper that I've seen could have been more direct, less obtuse and more transparent, especially when it comes to the presentation of evidence that is in doubt or marginal.

If you read papers from the beginnings of science they are such a breath of fresh air compared to the stuff that is produced today. There are some exceptions but they are few and far between.

Obviously science itself has developed, things have gotten far more complex and so on. But that's not really my point, the point is about the language used itself, which seems to be more related to attracting the next round of funding than it is to moving the needle in a scientific way. And those papers that do end up moving the needle tend to be remarkably blunt and precise in their findings.

There is a parallel here between scientific papers and start-up decks. Those start-ups and those scientists that know they have a live one don't need to fluff it up or polish the numbers, they can just present the cold hard truth and you will know it for what it spells out when you read it without any kind of embellishment.

Politicians were also saying "there's nothing to worry about." Shouldn't you be at least equally skeptical whenever someone in power promotes maintaining the status quo?

Seems like a rather useless razor, since politicians often both say pro- and against- arguments for things.

But here especially, "politicians" or "the media" trying to scare you about it is a bit of a red herring. E.g., the media was talking about it because scientists were making claims. Scientists have been wrong before, of course, but discounting the claim because "the media" picked up on it instead of looking into things like "how many scientists" "how long is the trend" "what is the reasoning" is just foolish.

Unfortunately its not that politicians were warning people about it, its that the politicians of the other side were. So many of us automatically discount the opinions of anyone in power if they have the wrong letter next to their name.

No, it wasn’t the letter. I have usually voted D for other reasons, and Republicans say lots of things that trip the same heuristic like trying to scare me about immigrants or “critical race theory.”

It was because someone in power was saying it was a looming catastrophe that could only be solved by doing radical things. That makes me think it’s a cynical power grab.

Sort of like how we had incontrovertible proof there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Green ideology also triggered my skepticism since ideology blinds people to reality. Like the political party, the ideology doesn’t matter. Any time a bunch of believers in an ideology are harping on something that others are not I get real skeptical.

These days it’s hard for me to believe anything unless I see the same information coming from multiple sources with different biases. If it’s all coming from the same sources with one consistent bias it’s probably bullshit.

I've found that a better model is to ignore politicians. They don't care about you, true, but that means that what they're saying is orthogonal to your wellbeing not opposite. Assuming the opposite still lets them define the playfield and works to their advantage.

OP was voted down by others but I respect their honesty about it. And the point about their perception of fear being used as a motivator and resulting skepticism. I think a lot of people feel this way.

I think people are "crisis hardened" at this point. So much news and opinion about most everything is framed as a "crisis" and people are just sort of tuned out to it and they're sick of being made anxious about everything. It feels a whole lot better to have someone else say "don't listen, they're just trying to scare you to get power" and people will tune into that eventually.

I think people see hypocrisy all over the place as well, especially in the climate issue and people hate being preached to. People hate hearing that they shouldn't have meat, they shouldn't have a car, they shouldn't fly, etc. They fear the currently proposed solutions like taxing these heavily or rationing it. Simply put, people at large will not get behind a massive project like this politically until it is sold as something that makes their lives better. That they don't have to give these things up but that we should work towards doing them better.

It's especially difficult with this issue too since it's been sold poorly (global warning, then why is it freezing today?!) and it's a very slow process when considering a human's life. Yes, the data we have and the models we have are compelling. However, denial is a powerful thing especially when people are told to listen to an authority that wants to take their pleasures away.

I just don't think going around calling other people idiots or asking why they didn't just listen to scientists (science and especially scientists are not infallible.) is very useful. To get a super majority behind this we need to sell it as a project to not take away anything but to find new ways of doing it without putting excessive CO2 into the atmosphere. That you can have a steak, and a car, and un your AC, and travel but that we also need to agree to finance projects in making these things sustainable. That engineering ourselves a better future is possible and that stopping doing things doesn't have to be the way.

I don't know, I just think psychology of how it is being sold is ineffective. Unlivable conditions, death, the Earth's destruction should motivate people but the threat just isn't imminent enough for people to sacrifice. I think it does the opposite and sends people looking for a safe place where it's going to be OK and anyone who tells you otherwise is just trying to pick your pocket. Our style of government is not great at unifying around big projects and unless the threat is clearly imminent and/or in progress. We need persuasion to win and positive visions for the future to get there.

I don't agree. I think this is just a faulty way to see the world.

I grew up with ample evidence and cries of scientist of the reality of global warming, and no actual real evidence to the contrary.

And everybody else grew with the same information.

If you think that it is ok to deny everything "because somebody said so" until your house burns down because of it, then you are THE problem.

Please, don't push responsibility somewhere else.

Yes, they are THE problem. So what's your solution to it?

People are different emotionally, intellectually, etc. You may take in the information rationally but not everyone will. They can vote too. So what to do?

I also think acting moralistic (I understand the science, you don't so it's all your fault not mine) won't solve the problem. Aren't we interested in solving the problem? Or are we more interested in coming off as virtuous?

The responsibility lies with all of us.

The idea that everyone who sees the same thing will come to the same conclusion is the height of personal hubris.

> I was very much a skeptic until I started seeing more and more real world (as opposed to just models) evidence. I am pretty convinced now.

There is an enormous momentum, by the time the model predictions are here in the """real world""" you already have both feet in the grave...

> My skepticism was rooted in the fact that politicians, pundits, and the media were trying to scare me about it.

I'm sorry, but this excuse borders on a clear lie. There were "politicians, pundits, and media" lined up on both sides of this issue. And there had been going all the way back to the dawn of the issue in the 70's.

What happened was that you chose to believe one side. And it was wrong. But rather than admit that "your side" was wrong you're blaming the "other side" for, I guess, making you distrust them on a subject where you should have trusted them.

> I still think that should be a default suspicion, but that means you have to dig and check the details and check multiple sources.

Which is exactly what you did not do! You get that, right? Rather than check details and multiple sources, you chose to walk away from the people who were telling you the truth.

> you chose to walk away from the people who were telling you the truth.

To be fair, a combination of heuristics that say "distrust people with proven record of lying" and "ability to detach your opinions from reality is a significant advantage when getting and maintaining power" and "lacking external corrections, any ruling system will accumulate exclusively those who spend most of their effort on power games" strongly promotes automatic distrust for any an all politicians.

And I can't say those heuristics are wrong. Then if is up for individual to become an expert in all areas of life or be left to their natural biases...

> strongly promotes automatic distrust for any an all politicians.

But... it wasn't politicians. It was never politicians, really. It started with scientists! Left leaning politicians got on board only once their electoral base started moving, they are a lagging indicator.

Again, this is excuse-making for having deliberately ignored people who were telling you the truth.

Just based on what I can gleam from things like Facebook newspaper comment sections: there are certainly still some deniers, but I feel like outright denialism has mostly given way to a belief that global warming isn't man-made - that it's a natural part of Earth's climate cycle - and that releasing carbon could only be good for the planet (plants breathe CO2 after all).

The important policy question is what are big and small governments around the world gonna do about it?

No, straws and plastic bags won’t abate it. Electric cars are nice but won’t do much to lessen emissions.

They need to address industry, shipping and population growth. The last one might be a third rail for some countries. But look, China did it. The west did it (via progress on education, etc).

Population control sure doesn’t seem to have had any positive effect on the west’s greenhouse emissions so why would it be a silver bullet?

So this is the old, false argument.

Population control WOULD be effective at solving the problem. That is if it was humane.

Your arguments seems true because at first sight it looks (and it is true) that it is the first world that emits most of the greenhouse gasses.

But everybody forgets that the third world countries do also experience progress and will also want industry and cars and air conditioning and KFC and AliExpress packages shipped to their doors.

That they don't do it now is just because they don't have means to do so, but they work very hard to get there.

Exactly! If we could get reverse migration going where people in OECD countries downsized to developing nations while maintaining efficiencies, that would be ideal but of course it’s not going to happen, indeed the opposite happens where people who consume less move to rich countries and start consuming like the natives in rich countries adding to demand.

Admittedly, existential despair results from this argument.

If population control had been enacted in a humane way centuries ago, maybe I would be one of the millions of people missing from the present. On the other hand, I did not consent to being born, either.

It's harrowing to consider that your existence may be a liability on the rest of the human race in the near future. But I'm only capable of despairing over it because someone gave birth to me.

It's why I think that once the decision to have a child has been made, the consequences of reversing course are severe, especially since society bestows an unalienable right to exist to the people that do leave the womb. A living agent like myself is able to contemplate its own existence and is most likely to fight for its continued survival. Nobody questions the rights or individual liberties or consumption levels of people that were never born. We are likely to be willing into existence a generation that will curse us for not acting sooner.

But because unchecked growth is a default behavior of humanity, it seems that the only way of putting in societal controls on humans is to let humans carry their knowledge of negative externalities through multiple generations.

You are way out there with your thinking. Nobody denies born children the right to live.

The idea was more in line of preventing children from being conceived in the first place.

Not that this isn't fraught with moral, philosophical and other problems (just look at China), but at least it is obvious no children are being harmed by not being conceived.

> and population growth

That will be a very hard sell, as most of the people that count and actually take the decisions that matter still don't believe in Malthus.

> The west did it (via progress on education, etc).

Unfortunately that is still not enough as long as those same Western consumers will keep, well, consuming as much as they do. Problem is that changing today's consumption patterns will most probably have huge (negative) economic consequences for most of the world's population.

Banning plastic straws and plastic bags wasn't to combat climate change, the bans were created because those single-use plastics were overwhelming municipal garbage disposal systems. And then foreign states stop buying it to recycle.

It’s still nonsense because the volume created by these things is minuscule. All it is is Greta feel-good bullshit. Household goods, transport packaging, industrial uses those account for the majority of plastics by mass. Yeah sure, 100 billion plastic straws sounds like a lot, but it’s nothing compared to the main culprits.

It was a large enough problem to cause an international diplomatic dispute between Canada and the Philippines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93Philippines_was...

> And then foreign states stop buying it to recycle.

It was never recycled. Pretty much always was systematically illegally dumped into the ocean.

Well, yah. Recycling has always been something between an unfulfilled hope and an outright sham.

Reduce and Reuse were always the most important components of the trifecta.

I would still like to see a push toward cellulose and wax replacing single use plastic.

> No, straws and plastic bags won’t abate it.

Straws and plastic bags are about pollution more than global warming, I think.

> They need to address industry, shipping and population growth. The last one might be a third rail for some countries. But look, China did it. The west did it (via progress on education, etc).

I'm not a malthusian, but there's still good news for those types. Birth rates have greatly declined globally, and continue to go down. This is largely due to greater access to education and contraception, which I think we can almost all agree are good things.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN

> Electric cars are nice but won’t do much to lessen emissions.

Transportation is 29% of emissions in the US, and over their lifespan, electric cars have much reduced emissions. They will get better as we transition away from fossil fuels, unlike gasoline cars. Fun fact: in the US, 40% of our power already comes from nuclear and renewables.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

Banning straws is virtue signaling. (Plastic straws have little impact on waste.)

Banning plastic bags has immediate results in containing visible litter.

> They need to address industry, shipping

That would be possible with well thought out tariffs. Foreign countries (like China) have no problem bringing online coal power plants at an out of control pace. Then, with all these cheap power plants it's no wonder they can undercut every European and American manufacturer, who has to pay for green energy and environmental norms.

No need to trot out the China bogeyman, when "greenest president" Biden is issuing more drilling and fracking permits than Trump, and is pressuring OPEC to increase production, since golly gee gas is getting really expensive nowadays.

I want to know what percentage of people overlap between anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers and climate deniers. Are they largely the same group or do we actually have disparate groups that think science is somehow just another religion?

Yes, I think you are right that there is significant overlap between 'extreme right' 'anti vaxx' 'climate denial' and quite possibly 'white power' and the modern version of Christianity as well, it would be nice to see some hard proof or a refutation of this.

Not just modern Christianity. It had a “softer” phase for the last hundred or so years but it’s been a authoritarian and power hungry organization for over a thousand years.

all philosophies are authoritarian and power-hungry. It's not like the libertarians and anarchists just sit by passively and wait.

I went to an evangelical high school ca. 2000 and most students thought it was fine to destroy the planet since the rapture was coming anyway.

Practically no one is a flat earther. Anti-vaxxers - maybe 2% of population. Again, not significant. Anti-mRNA - higher, maybe 20% with a portion of those just waiting to see.

Climate deniers - Depends how you define them.

I've been called that but my position is that it is happening, some of it is attributable to human activity, but it is not happening at a rate that we won't be able to adapt to.

Well, speaking as someone who used to live in Marin county, which was the county with some of the highest non-vaccination rates in the country when I was there in 2018, I think they're different. Marin was super anti-vax, but every other thing was about reducing our carbon footprint, and anti-consumption was a common sentiment. Of course it was also one of the bluest counties in the country.

> Who still believes global warming does not exist?

The same people who think there are more risks for old people to take the covid vaccine than to not take it.

Not everyone is rational, and especially on climate change were acting means much more than moving 10km to get the vaccine

Maybe if the cost of it was reasonable more people would bother. With the cost of electricity rising, people naturally buy/replace appliances with more efficient versions. The fact that anything green related costs an arm and a leg makes some people think it's all a money making scheme. The more renewable energy gets installed the more articles like this pop up. We get it, people are worried about the climate, pushing it this hard just feels like feels like fearmongering or propaganda.

You should not be downvoted for stating your opinion, I think it adds to the conversation.

That being said, can you elaborate on how "anything green related" costs an arm and a leg? Do you have a few examples maybe?

If it refers to something like organic food, then, well, yeah... mass producing food without regard for anything but efficiency in creating said food will make it cheaper, not doing that means higher prices for still turning out a profit.

But I don't want to put words in your mouth, please say what you were thinking of.

I would risk suggesting that he is being downvoted because of cynical point of view.

It is us, right now, who are exploiting the world.

It is our kids and their kids that are going to pay for this.

And here somebody complains "the cost is too high".

It is as if the robber, after robbing your house, complained the bus fare was too high to get to work, so it somehow excuses the theft.

I still want to understand that side. And know how it can be counteracted, e.g. by subvention (to encourage the more expensive but better alternatives), and regulation (to outlaw the cheap but terrible ones).

For that, I'd like to know what exactly the "anything green related" is that's (being perceived as) expensive.

Except electricity costs are not rising - renewables are having the opposite effect actually. For example, in Europe, in the last ten years, wholesale electricity prices have on average nearly halved despite the four-fold increase in the contribution from renewables. Renewables are cheaper and better for the environment - just check out the LCOE numbers and capacity factors.

you'd think that asking capitalists to user more energy-efficient processes would be an easy sell because of cost.

apparently thats just completely backwards

I wouldn't call myself a denier. But a hot July doesn't sound that scary. Next thing that will happen is February will be the coldest month ever recorded, and then people will really lose their shit.

Why is it not scary? The hot July killed 1000 people in the Pacific Northwest alone in just 1 week. An entire Canadian town burned the the ground, basically nothing left. Residents had 15 minutes warning and not everyone made it out. Where are you located that this hot July wasn't scary?

This hot July had my fingers on emergency services as temperatures rose, AC couldn't keep up, loved ones with asthma and already trouble breathing sometimes, etc. This hot August has unhealthy fire smoke and it's difficult for me to breath outside if on a long walk.

Physical realities of this hot July for just me, in my one physical location, were INTENSE. And that's not even considering the idea that most future Julys will be hotter than this one.

And that every month being so hot is a leading indicator of more chaotic weather in all the bad ways - storms, heatwaves, etc.

I honestly don't know how you could live through this July and not be scared of it. Maybe you got lucky with your location? This July was 100% miserable to live through and totally scary.

As a kid, I remember blackouts in New York City, and we had to sleep with wash clothes on our head, which was kind of impossible, and we would all make our way downstairs, and our parents would be hanging around outside cause it was cooler than in the house.

Sorry that you had family members that were affected by this.

But, no it doesn't seem scary. The fires are caused by poor forest management (talked about in another thread this week). But, I am in South Carolina, and this week it is in the 90's like just about every week in August ever down here. And actually, this summer, we have gotten a ton of rain, more so than I can remember. But, it's been hot like it always is in the summer in the south, I can't say I ever walked out my door this month and been scared about it.

> The hot July killed 1000 people in the Pacific Northwest alone in just 1 week.

Cold kills more people than heat. Milder winters will save more lives than will be lost in hotter summers.

> Milder winters will save more lives than will be lost in hotter summers.

Ecological collapse brought on by adding stress to a system already stressed the hell out by decades of rapid change, however, would probably kill a lot more lives than any saved.

Humans' ability to adapt to change will save many more lives, if we allow adaptation to happen. The biggest thing preventing that right now is doomsday rhetoric. Humans have adapted to much bigger changes than this in the past. Our ancestors adapted to the change from Ice Age to interglacial with Stone Age technology. The idea that we somehow cannot adapt to this much smaller change with 21st century technology is laughable.

I’m sure we will. I’m sure the toll was heavy then, and will be heavy again.

I was in the PNW for that heat wave, it is not scary to me in an acute sense. I didn't have AC, it was 100 degrees in my house at 10pm for a couple days and it was unpleasant.

It seems like there are now several imminent threats to continued human thriving on earth, global warming among them. But humanity cannot collectively solve its problems (anymore?), and I have not heard anyone smart propose a practical way to think about solving the problem of humanity being unable to collectively solve its own problems.

The more panic that gets spread, whether moral or existential, the more people seem to just throw their hands up. I find this understandable, although depressing, because even small contingencies of voters within a place can't agree on the basic terms of reality anymore. It isn't obvious to me how Russia, China, EU, India and US will come together soon to alter course. But a lot of municipalities will pass legislation that amounts to virtue signaling.

What's scary when everything you've read from the media your whole life promises mass death and suffering to come? Everything and nothing. By some forecasts dating back 50 years, it was supposed to be over by now. The Malthusians thought the planet would run out of food a hundred years ago.

I think this current era has a higher likelihood of being a true threat to humanity, but how much study should I undertake to be sure? How much work should I do to look behind the headlines, that at least 30% of everyone knows are full of lies and sensationalism. What is the impact of my individual contribution or vehement agreement that things are dire?

How can we replace the insistence that everyone be afraid with the insistence that we do something constructive about it?

Where I have lived my entire life, the hottest I'd ever seen in my is 33C. That would be an unusual year. The hottest summer days might hit 30C. This is 100 years, historically: over 30 is possibly, but unusual. Years where 29C is the hottest day is completely typical.

End of June (June! Not even July/August!) we had a heat wave. What would you expect to find in such an event? Maybe 34? That sounds pretty hot. 35? 36?! How hot can it get in a place that has never seen higher than 33C in 100 years?

Well, it hit 42 god damn degrees. If you told me I would ever see that, if I lived to be a thousand, I would not have believed it. Over 40C in a place where 30C is a hot day, where a year going by with zero days above 29C is the norm.

Yesterday hit 38. That would have been shocking last year. Today I was glad it was under 40.

But yeah nothing scary about a hot July. Right. No denial at all.

Looking at small number of samples from one place for a limited amount of history without understanding the pattern of weather you are in.

Argumenting global climate change from your local experience does not work.

It only works when:

* you can measure things globally (you measure the effect)

* you understand relation between the greenhouse gasses and the measured global climate change (causation)

Fortunately, we have both. We both measure temperature pretty much everywhere and we understand the underlying mechanism of the change even if we can't exactly predict how the chaotic system will be have in the future.

Anecdotal... let's do it.

Where I live, we've had the mildest July in many years. It only hit 90+ for a day or two. That's unusual. We've had more rain and cooler temps than I can remember in a decade.

Same here. Most pleasant summer ever with lots of rain and cooler temps.

Cold records being broken are less frequent than in the past. Pretending that 1 cold record being broken disproves global warming is just the kind of disingenuous argument that deniers make.

Figures 1-4: https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...

https://www.climatesignals.org/data/record-high-temps-vs-rec...

https://www.axios.com/climate-change-warm-cold-temperature-r...

https://phys.org/news/2019-03-ap-hot-falling-cold.html

https://skepticalscience.com/global-warming-cold-weather.htm

What am I denying? That it is a hot summer. Or that I don't believe in climate change. For one, the records for temperature only go back a 100 years or so, so I would call it statistically insignificant. But, secondly, I truly would like to know what us as a people are actually going to do about it? Nobody on HN is going to give up their devices, or stop buying crypto that uses massive amounts of energy to produce. I just feel that the genie is out of the bottle in regards to the fact that the world will keep on producing more and more regardless of how people interpret weather patterns.

It only matters what China and India do. We aren't emitting enough where reductions matter in relation to those two.

Please check your facts. Total USA emission is still almost double that of India. (Per capita it's almost 8 times higher.)

Don't generalise too much. I'm planning not to buy any more devices, and have accepted the idea that my career might change tack (again) in the medium term future when computers are no longer available.

Remember that global warming is not real. If it is real, then we don't know what is causing it. If we do know what is causing, it is not humans. If we do know it is humans causing it, then there is nothing we can do about it. If there is something we can do about it, it's not worth it, think of the jobs.

Think of the children.

Rock, paper, scissors, jobs, children. I beat you.

"Humans didn't cause it so it's not our problem" has gotta be the weirdest take. No... it's definitely a problem either way.

Same thing with covid. "The China Virus is sent from China so we shouldn't have to deal with it because it's not our fault". Oh, had the virus arisen naturally in the US, we could fight it, but because it's (supposedly) an act of Chinese biological warfare, we should just take it lying down?

I don't get people.

Scared people flip to angry people. Leaders want to give people something/someone to be angry at that isn't them.

People were actually saying we shouldn't have to deal with covid because it came from China? In what world does that make the tiniest lick of sense?

I've never heard this argument and I'm around a lot of people who believe it came from China. This feels like a strawman.

I believe in climate change, the evidence is there when looking at the earth’s geographical shifts in time.

The question I pose to people which sometimes is misinterpreted is this: What will we do in order to survive climate change? All we hear is how to consume “greener” products.

Where’s the plan for major city relocation, new technologies, etc?

There isn't one. It's far cheaper to depopulate the earth.

You forgot: "It's too late anyway."

You should check the WSJ editorials from a couple of days ago when IPCC report was released.

Ten years prior to that the bad guys in "The naked gun" kidnapped and replaced a scientist to say it wasn't a problem.

I'm surprised this straw-man still exists. If there are any people that "believe global warming does not exist", it's an edge minority. All skeptics are clear that they believe global warming is happening.

The far bigger issue in addressing the global warming matter is actually people who seem incapable of having a rational and logical discussion and debate about things, and instead simply demand imposed obedience and blind trust in people who repeatedly and constantly on many different topics keep proving themselves untrustworthy and even malicious in intent. It is in fact also why we will end up in global conflict over not just this topic, but all other topics that will also be on the line when the dam breaks.

It is unfortunate that people, which you may or may not belong to, are so ideologically and fervently obsessed that they aren't actually talking about "global warming" at all, and what underpins their base assumptions are not only a deep rooted compulsion to hate their own, but also are driven by a need to dominate and subjugate others. It is akin to a psychological state in a turned/toxic relationship, where a deep and irrational resentment based on real or even just perceived slights and insults boils over into ever increasing hostility and often even also blind need to dominate or "win" even if it means self-harm and spiteful self-destruction. It is essentially a manic episode on a societal and civilizational level that we are going through, not just regarding "global warming" but on many different topics like gays, trans, immigration, freedom vs authoritarianism, etc.

They are all issues that are like in a toxic and unhealthy relationship where resentments have built up so badly (regardless of origin or legitimacy) that, no, e.g., she blows up over tiny things as a proxy for whatever the far bigger issue is.

Climate change does not care about ideology, psychology, or any of the issues you listed. It's a problem that affects literally everyone, and it needs solving.

Right. But the solutions can't impact the environment, or the developing world, or the disadvantaged. It's pretty obvious that the US, UK, and Commonwealth countries are going to be expected to disrupt their lives and economies while the rest of the world dithers and screams that not enough is being done.

Who are you arguing with? Because I'm pretty sure climate change cannot hear your complaints or arguments. It's just going to do what it does, destroying your world and that of your children, while you argue about... commonwealth, I don't know.

If climate change is a manmade problem than you cannot ignore politics, psychology, etc. in the solution. Otherwise 'nuke China' is more of a solution than 'tax carbon' is.

Problem is that a lot of activists and politicians don't want to solve it -- they instead spend time replacing nuclear with coal, tacking on unrelated social issues and so on. All of those are about power, and correlate with taking the problem seriously and solving anything only by accident if at all. In other words -- climate change is not the game they are playing to win.

Some of the deniers I know personally told me their views shifted to 'there's nothing we can do now so the point is moot, enjoy it while you can, there's no point in doing anything environmentally friendly now'

About this, what was very puzzling to me was the opinions of the late Michael Chrichton. He was constantly expressing the opinion that the global warming was a frame up, both in his books but also to various talks. He had even written a book on which the bad guys were Greenpeace agents!

Now, considering how highly educated (not only he was a great author but he also had studied MD) and smart (this should be obvious to anybody that has read his books and watched over his career) he was, it means a lot to me that this person had these beliefs. Also the fact that he is not related to the field so he doesn't have anything to gain by believing and advocating these opinions makes the fact even more important.

As I said I am really puzzled about that. Does anybody has more information to shade a light on that?

Maybe I've spent too much time among lawyers, but I have noticed that there are some very smart people that seem to relish having certain unconventional beliefs. A critical, independent mind is a great thing, but the danger is when the view is held because it is unpopular and not because of any critical investigation of the evidence. Call it "anti-confirmation bias" if you want. Or to put it another way, some people just seem to enjoy smugly dismissing the obvious answer because it makes them feel smart!

Yes, that's an explantation that could support his behaviour.

However I don't think that he was doing it just to present himself as smarter than the other people. He firmly believed that opinions, at least that's what I was getting out of his talks and some of his books.

I probably play devils advocate a little bit too much, but most people are too eager to firmly plant their feet in some belief, rather than just roll the ideas around. And if you like to probe around, you'll have some questions or at least value different perspectives, and if you pose these (loaded) questions or insights to others it can be divisive, even if meant in good faith. I probably messed around as a flat earth troll too much, but I think it's a great example.

For almost every issue you can find at least one highly educated person that thinks otherwise.

If you think something is "controversial" because one person thinks otherwise, we would never land at anything.

Look at their arguments and proofs. If you don't have time to examine those, look at their credentials and motivations.

Michael Chrichton was a writer and filmmaker. Not a climate resarcher.

Yes I understand this, the current covid situation has taught us that scientists don't always agree, especially when the answer isn't a universal truth. However, for the covid (or for example that smoke causes cancer debate) each scientific camp has some agenda and things to gain (either economically or scientifically or even as a matter of personal pride). The thing with Chrichton is that (as you say and I agree) was that he was an outsider to this field. And he knew that his opinions would be considered controversial and won't be liked by many people. But still made them public, along with a lot of data to support his claims. This behaviour is puzzling to me.

And yet the best solution science has been able to come up with in all that time is that we should not eat meat or drive a car. Maybe the population in general will take it seriously when they're told to do more than engage in Puritanical self-flagellation about the evils of Western society.

Uh, no. Science has been _screaming_ for a carbon tax. Eat all the meat and drive all you want, but be prepared to pay up for the externalities that have been “free” so far.

So we'll charge the Masai the same for their cows that we'll charge a Texan?

That’s the most ill-constructed straw man I’ve seen in a long time.

lol, I don't disagree...

I chuckled at your picking up that part out of this whole (really great) book.

The general story line about the terrorists trying to "deal" with the global warming is ahead of its time. Don't want to spoil it for anyone, but it's funny how the President wasn't the (most) ridiculous one there.

I chose this because that's exactly where I am in the book.

I am literally listening to it right now!

Cosmos, both the book and the series, debuted in 1980. In it, Sagan warned of greenhouse effects

Al Gore was holding congressional hearings on climate change when he was first elected to Congress. In 1976. Environmental issues were the focus of his efforts during his Vice Presidency. From 1993 to 2001.

So. We're actually closer to 50 years.

It's not like we were not warned.

Try 1896: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

It's real, it's because of humans, it's not a civilization threat, and it probably isn't in the top 5 most important problems facing us this century.

OK, I'll bite. You really don't think it's a civilisation threat? It probably isn't an extinction threat (for humans at least) but certainly seems like it could topple modern civilisation. What do you consider the 5+ other more important problems?

There is a very prevalent group of people on HN who don't deny that global warming is happening, but strongly deny that it is a serious problem.

This group deeply believes that technology will solve their problems, no matter how large. All that is required is believing in this strongly enough. There is a nearly rabid belief that everything will be fine because "technology" will find a way.

What these people fail to recognize is that technology is a function of energy. This comes across pretty clearly in Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization. Technology has felt magical in the last 250 years because we have had a tremendous amount of energy.

There is a very common myth, one I used to believe myself, that magically in the age of reason man woke up and started creating amazing things. I think everyone in tech has been at least someone seduced by this vision. The cover of SICP has a wizard on it!

What more accurately happened is that we started extracting fossil fuels, and that let to us being able to to magical things, including finding more fossil fuels faster. Even the earliest hunter gathers were able to harness fire and benefit from it. The first agrarian societies learned how to use the sun to build truly solar powered economies. We live in the age of fossil fuels, and as much as we wish it to be true, we are not able to build renewables on a scale and timeline to even begin to replace the magic of fossil fuels. In fact we continue to globally use more of every fossil fuel every year. Renewables are only able to supplement our insatiable hunger for energy.

So technology can't magically save us from our energy problems because energy is the magic that makes technology happen. But for many here such statements border on heresy.

It's less that the argument is heretical, and more that it's based on some false premises.

First, it's possible to accept that climate change is a huge (and largely man-made) problem, and also believe technology will fix it.

Second, you're talking about a centuries-scale trend about the relationship between technology and energy, and we're talking about the technological breakthroughs that are possible in the next couple decades if we all work together on this important problem. While it may be true that energy begets technology, technology also begets technology.

Thirdly, you seem to be under-estimating how much energy we can actually get from the Sun with today's technology. We have the tech and economic output right now to completely supply our energy demand with the sun within 10-20 years via worldwide solar farms and a trans-continental grid (so the daytime side can provide for the nighttime side). Again, if the entire planet comes together to make that happen. The only thing we don't have is the will. Telling people "we're doomed, it's too late, we'll never have the technology because of this flimsy historical correlation, just lay down and die" harms the global will to fight the problem, rather than helps.

There is also a major group that would be severely disappointed if technology did magically save us (say if 10 years to fusion was actually this decade), because it would deprave them of the possibility to solve other societal problems or push through reforms using climate change as a lever.

Lots of people — a majority of Americans, even Republicans, believe it's real but that is far from universal and the percentages still mean millions of people:

https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/politics-... https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/06/23/two-thirds-of...

The key thing to remember is there was a deliberate decision made around 40 years ago to try to delay actions, by the time companies like Exxon realized it was a real threat[1] — and that was far from the time the risk was first posited: here's someone in the 1920s saying it was probable:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn87055779/1918-09-1...

Part of that strategy was to turn it into a partisan issue and there are billion-dollar companies (Fox, Facebook, Google, etc.) helpfully providing communications platforms to ensure that message is constantly available in circles they believe might find a receptive audience. Note that I'm not saying their executives all share that view — only that it doesn't bother any of them enough to turn down the ads and engagement metrics.

Because that was successfully turned into a partisan issue, that means there are many millions of people who are faced with the choice of either admitting both that they were wrong and that this is because people whom they trusted were lying to them or continuing to hope that it won't impact them much and they can just continue to make no changes, which is quite correct given their average age and affluence.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2805576-1982-Exxon-M...

Plenty of comments in this thread claiming it's real but not that big a deal

Unreal

I don't personally know any reasonably intelligent people who question the existence of global warming.

I do, however, know several highly intelligent people who have looked at the atmospheric carbon and temperature data and wonder (quietly, for obvious reasons) if we might have got the causal mechanism story wrong.

https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/how-d...

> CO2 produced from burning fossil fuels or burning forests has quite a different isotopic composition from CO2 in the atmosphere. This is because plants have a preference for the lighter isotopes (12C vs. 13C); thus they have lower 13C/12C ratios. Since fossil fuels are ultimately derived from ancient plants, plants and fossil fuels all have roughly the same 13C/12C ratio – about 2% lower than that of the atmosphere. As CO2 from these materials is released into, and mixes with, the atmosphere, the average 13C/12C ratio of the atmosphere decreases.

...

> What is found is at no time in the last 10,000 years are the 13C/12C ratios in the atmosphere as low as they are today. Furthermore, the 13C/12C ratios begin to decline dramatically just as the CO2 starts to increase — around 1850 AD. This is exactly what we expect if the increased CO2 is in fact due to fossil fuel burning.

In other words, all CO2 with biological source (including fossil fuels) comes pre-tagged, and the pattern we see in the atmosphere exactly matches the assumption that they're from fossil fuels.

So, unless your acquaintances theorize that it's the global temperature that drives mankind's demand for fossil fuels, there's really no ground in doubting the causal direction.

It's too bad they're doubting quietly. If they actually voiced their doubts in the form of an honest question, they would have learned about C13 ratio by now.

I think the case has been made quite convincingly that humans have dramatically increased atmospheric CO2. I don't personally know anyone who questions this either (but I don't know any oil lobbyists, to be fair). In fact, as someone who worked in climate advocacy for many years, I think that we proved this link quite well, almost to a fault. I say a fault, because so many resources have gone into proving that humans have caused the increase in atmospheric CO2 that we paid less attention to making a convincing case that the rise in global temperatures can only be explained by the reflected heat caused by that atmospheric CO2. (Just consider your knee-jerk reaction to my comment where you automatically assumed that this was a question about atmospheric CO2 without considering the possibility that it might be something/anything else).

When you look at the graphs for atmospheric CO2 and man-made carbon emissions laid on top of each other, it looks perfect. This is the money shot. But, when you lay the 150 year temperature data on top of it, it suddenly doesn't look so good (ignoring the normal 11 year solar fluctuations, just looking at the general trend line). There's a 70 year stretch when temperatures are flat to declining as atmospheric CO2 climbs by almost 20% (in advocacy training we'd be encouraged to skip past this: zoom out and highlight that they are _directionally_ similar and definitely never chart in percent change, of course).

Personally, I still ride with Team Atmospheric Carbon. But I also don't think there's anything unhealthy with good-faith questioning of the new dogma. The Earth's magnetic field has weakened by about 5% over the past 100 years. Global temperatures have risen by about 5.5% over the past 100 years. The magnetosphere protects the Earth's atmosphere from charged solar particles which would otherwise strip off parts of the upper atmosphere, allowing more UV radiation to hit Earth. Is that a coincidence? Maybe. Is increased UV-B penetration just as likely to cause warming as increased reflected infrared radiation? Yeah? So I keep an open mind.

We are far beyond being able to fix this by just reducing our emissions.

We need to focus on innovations focused on extracting CO2 directly from our atmospheres at scale.

An interesting read on the topic: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-05/bill-gate...

Carbon Engineering [1] seems to be making good progress toward this goal. They even published a paper about their process and its economics in Cell [2].

"We describe a process for capturing CO2 from the atmosphere in an industrial plant. The design captures ∼1 Mt-CO2/year in a continuous process using an aqueous KOH sorbent coupled to a calcium caustic recovery loop. We describe the design rationale, summarize performance of the major unit operations, and provide a capital cost breakdown developed with an independent consulting engineering firm. We report results from a pilot plant that provides data on performance of the major unit operations. We summarize the energy and material balance computed using an Aspen process simulation. When CO2 is delivered at 15 MPa, the design requires either 8.81 GJ of natural gas, or 5.25 GJ of gas and 366 kWhr of electricity, per ton of CO2 captured. Depending on financial assumptions, energy costs, and the specific choice of inputs and outputs, the levelized cost per ton CO2 captured from the atmosphere ranges from 94 to 232 $/t-CO2."

[1] https://carbonengineering.com/ [2] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30225-3

> They even published a paper about their process and its economics in Cell [2].

The journal is Joule.

https://www.cell.com/joule/aims

Whoa, gasoline produces 20 pounds of CO2 per gallon burned. So 100 gallons per ton of CO2. At $2/gallon, that's $200/t to produce. And then we have to spend potentially more than that to clean up the pollution. Planetarily, we iz a stupid.

But for the record, I absolutely don't believe it's that cheap to take CO2 out of the air at scale. So this whole thing is a pipedream.

If I'm doing my (very bad) math right, I think that works out to around a max of 60 cents per liter of gas, if you want to offset it with direct carbon capture using this method. That's not completely insane.

However, How many plants (and at what cost for building these plants), would there need to be, in order to make a meaningful difference? For example, would a $100 billion dollar investment over the next five years make a meaningful impact?

It's not either or, we need both. It will never be more efficient to pull CO2 from the atmosphere then it is to just prevent it from getting there in the first place, so cutting emissions is still the bottleneck

Might be more "politically efficient" to extract it though.

I think this is basically a play by big oil to try to keep their business alive. We actually are pretty much at the point where the only thing standing between us and MASSIVE emissions reductions are special interest groups. Solar/wind are now the cheapest energy in the US, and the move is starting already

I hope they invent time travel in the far future and travel back in time to abduct oil & gas executives to force them to pay penance for their role in ruining the planet. Because they've gotten off scott free for decades.

Shouldn't climate change have both negative and positive effects?

For example, people don't want to live in the Rust Belt because the winters are too cold. Could the region's economic viability increase if winters get milder?

In some places, climate change makes things worse for growing crops, makes people need to move out, or increases the probability of disasters. Everyone is talking about this.

In other places, climate change should be making things better for growing crops, making people want to move in, or decreasing the probability of disasters. Why is no one talking about this?

What's up with the asymmetry?

Edit: Wow this got downvoted fast. I was hoping to get meaningful answers to a genuine question from knowledgeable people with minimum political agenda, but apparently the HN crowd isn't good at dealing with even slightly contrarian takes on this issue.

If the ocean temperature gets warm enough, it's hard to say what the climate will be in the rust belt. Basically, the natural circulation of water that cycles cold and warm water might stop -- leaving some places extremely cold.

The "AMOC" might stop, in other words. Maybe not? Let's hope. But is it worth the risk of pushing things so far that we might just find out?

I'm not even anything close to a climate expert, but I can imagine that this is because most of the world lives in places that are livable in our current climate.

Most of us don't live in Siberia or Greenland. Sure these places might become great because of climate change, but it doesn't matter, since barely anyone lives there.

In the places were we do live, the temperatures are already (semi) ok, meaning that increasing these temperatures will bother more people than it will help.

Furthermore, most people live close to water, which means a rising sea level will be bad for them. Maybe (probably not, but just imagine that) after the sea level has risen we have more viable land that is close to water. However, at that point all the current cities have been ruined by it, because they were built for the old water levels.

> In other places, climate change should be making things better for growing crops, making people want to move in, or decreasing the probability of disasters. Why is no one talking about this?

"Billions of Acres of Cropland Lie Within a New Frontier. So Do 100 Years of Carbon Emissions: Crops grown on this land could feed a growing population. But if these soils are plowed, they could unleash as much carbon as the U.S. emits in more than a century." https://insideclimatenews.org/news/12022020/agricultural-fro...

It takes life a little bit to react to these changes though, e.g plants dying and ocean life being killed off. There's a risk of cascading effects from plant/animal network collapse. I have heard people building off of your idea though and speculating that Northern areas like Russia may be valuable in the next century as new farming land.

And I don't think people should be able to downvote a question without answering, or upvoting a response that addresses some criticism, I agree it sucks.

If the earth warms enough we could enter a period of permanent world wide drought. When temperatures are too hot, clouds can no longer form. No clouds means no rain and even hotter temperatures.

Some areas may become more livable, but we're talking the extreme northern reaches of Canada.

Okay, I will give you a genuine answer: it will have almost unequivocally negative effects.

First, I'll address your asymmetry comment, with a couple of example points.

> crops

This is a common misunderstanding I see. Crops aren't solely viable because of climate -- a large portion of crop-viability is due to soil quality, which is built up over many many years. As areas that have traditionally been extremely cold become potentially more viable, crops are much less effective because the soil has not historically had a lot of fertilizer-producing flora/fauna.

> decreasing the probability of disasters

As far as I understand climate change, this is not expected anywhere. A disaster can be considered an event that goes dramatically against the norm. For example, flooding [extreme rain], drought [extreme lack of rain], fires [extreme heat], crop freezes/cold snaps [extreme cold]. Climate change essentially results in increasingly extreme deviations from the norm, so "disasters" go up. There's nowhere in the world I'm aware of that is going to get more consistent from climate change.

> make people want to move in

Even if climate were a zero sum game, and some places got better while others got worse, forcing everyone to move would be pretty awful. Further -- it's not a zero sum game, as mentioned in my last point.

The final point I'll make around climate change is that it's very likely to lead to geopolitical instability. As some areas become unlivable, famines, wars and refugees become more and more frequent.

> Crops aren't solely viable because of climate -- a large portion of crop-viability is due to soil quality, which is built up over many many years.

I live in a rather less urban area than most HN readers, but I actually don't know all that much about farming.

I'm fascinated about some of the implications of your comments.

Having seen potting soil and fertilizer for sale in greenhouses and garden centers, I've always assumed soil fertility is a portable, manufacturable commodity. That is, if you want to start a farm in a place with the correct climate but unsuitable soil, you can simply buy healthy soil from somewhere else to get started, and then after a while your crops will establish themselves and create a somewhat self-sustaining ecosystem on your fields that only requires input of sunlight, water and nutrients that are commodity chemicals (nitrates and phosphates that can be mined or chemically manufactured).

Where does the bought soil come from? Established farms. Presumably crops have some capability to create soil from barren earth over time, so you can safely harvest and export 5% of your soil a year, or something. Or you can use dedicated compost piles which produce soil from crop / livestock waste. Perhaps occasionally importing rocky / sandy / clay soil to replenish the base mass.

You seem to disagree with this view; your comment instead implies that soil fertility is more fixed, not fungible. I find this interesting, and want to learn more.

> Around the globe: the combined land and ocean-surface temperature was 1.67 degrees F (0.93 of a degree C) above the 20th-century average of 60.4 degrees F (15.8 degrees C), making it the hottest July since records began 142 years ago.

If you are curious about where humans were measuring temperatures between 1880 and now, I put together an animation[1] of temperature station locations in GHCNv3 some time ago. With GHCNv4 out, it is due for an update, but still informative.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h95uvT67bNg

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal

And this is still a thing.

Yeah, these assholes:

(Warning: these videos will make you very mad.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS5psOvHFIE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdDxjge5hmY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHmJSsRLgj4

https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/j1yj0c/trum...

This should be some sort of crime.

edit: Sorry, I edited out my comment about this probably giving bikers cancer after I included more videos. This can't be healthy for the lungs.

edit 2: Downvoted to -3 for calling out this shitty behavior? y'all are insane.

“It probably gave the bicyclists cancer”

I said this to someone who showed me one of these videos once and they basically told me to wise up and stop being paranoid.

How about the whole world stops being a pack of idiots instead?

Oh, we'll stop alright. But not in the way that you probably intended. Earth is a pretty good self-correcting system that acts with total disregard for pesky little organisms that are along for the ride.

I'm not sure getting more views on videos posted by coal-rollers is a particularly effective way to discourage the behavior.

I know someone who does this and also argues at the same time that diesel engines are better for the environment, I'm pretty sure based on the efficiency but ignoring the exhaust

That's true: diesel engines generally have higher mpg and lower CO2 emissions than gasoline. Problem is they emit higher levels of nitrogen oxide (ask Volkswagen) which beside being a greenhouse gas also poisons the environment. Presumably newer cars with Adblue systems which greatly reduce the amount of emitted NOX could be better for the environment than gasoline powered cars.

As much as this is (anti?) virtue-signaling, it's not really a contributor to global warming. Idling the engine for a minute or two probably causes more co2 emissions. The main concern is the particulate emissions.

It’s not the act itself, it’s the fact that there is a segment of the population that will spend thousands of dollars to modify their cars to pollute more, so that they can try and humiliate people driving hybrid and electric cars.

That’s a symptom of a much, much deeper problem.

"Okay apparently in Texas we have moved past climate denial within the oil and gas industry to outright CHEERING ON THE RCP 8.5 APOCALYPSE"

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -Albert Einstein.

Unfortunately, this is nothing new.

> so that they can try and humiliate people driving hybrid and electric cars

I don't think that's really what they're trying to do. It looks more like garden variety virtue signaling. Just like flags in the back of the truck, etc. They're announcing membership in their tribe. I do wish they'd choose something that didn't pollute the air we all breathe.

Ok then, people spending thousands of dollars to make their cars less fuel efficient and pollute more.

It’s the same point. That doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. It’s ridiculous. But the fact it exists in the country with the largest per-person capita of CO2 emissions points to a huge underlying social problem that is unlikely to be fixed in the near future.

>But the fact it exists in the country with the largest per-person capita of CO2 emissions

I have a feeling that you're not talking about all the people rolling coal in Palau. US isn't even in the top 10 when it comes to carbon emissions per capita. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

Or the Falkland Islands, population 3,000. They are the real problem!

The combined populations of the small states above you don’t even reach 1/3rd of the USA’s population.

I'm not saying it's not a problem, just that you have a factual error in your comment.

> US isn't even in the top 10 when it comes to carbon emissions per capita

I think you are correct when we use this very narrow measure. However, please see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_th...

The US is (a) among largest polluters and (b) from that club it is up at or near the top of per-capita pollution. Quoting the article:

The United States produced 6.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2019,[3] the second largest in the world after greenhouse gas emissions by China and among the countries with the highest greenhouse gas emissions per person. In 2019 China is estimated to have emitted 27% of world GhG, followed by the United States with 11%, then India with 6.6%.[4] In total the United States has emitted 400 billion metric tons, more than any other country.[5] This is over 15 tonnes per person and, amongst the top ten emitters, is the second highest country by greenhouse gas emissions per person after Canada.[6] Because coal-fired power stations are gradually shutting down, in the 2010s emissions from electricity generation fell to second place behind transportation which is now the largest single source.[7] In 2019, 29% of the GHG emissions of the United States were from transportation, 25% from electricity, 23% from industry, 13% from commercial and residential buildings and 10% from agriculture.[8]

Dunno, they sure are eager to roll coal when they pass cyclists (myself included). Really cool people.

I mean, sure, it's dumb, but choosing to take a weekend flight to Vail to hit the slopes emits more carbon than a year of rolling coal, and nobody is seriously trying to crack down on recreational travel.

I think the deeper problem is that even "concerned" people have emissions deeply baked into their lifestyles but don't realize it because they check all the right cosmetic boxes.

I think you missed GP's point. Rolling coal itself is not the problem, but it is indicative of a larger systemic and cultural problem. When people are willing to deliberately pollute their local environment to "stick it to the man" or whatever, then there are a lot of other policies and changes that they will never consider or support. And a lot of other, more impactful, actions that they are likely to participate in as well.

Even if we can get the average person to consider emission reducing behaviors and policies, the rolling coal people represent the visible segment of a larger group who would stand to oppose those.

Yes, and I'm not sure it's worse than the people who think they've already done enough (but in practice have comparable emissions to those who don't care).

Because those who erroneously believe they've done enough are more likely to change their behavior when confronted with new information.

Does it matter? Don't you have guns? Shoot them off the road, FFS!

It seems somewhat off-center to think that people who roll-coal are motivated by a desire to humiliate drivers of hyrid or electric cars.

This always gets brought up and it's a distraction from the real coal power plants that contribute to double digit CO2 emissions.

Some guy blowing up smoke in the truck might make you raged but it's misplaced. Can we get raged at the coal powered power plants?

The problem is it is difficult to solve the issue with the coal powered plants when huge segments of the population are fine with "rolling coal" and think it's good to dump on EVs and green policy in general.

So the answer is to get raged at Rolling coal and that’ll change their minds?

I did not intend to suggest that. My point is that without changing folks opinions greater change is not possible - and a large number of people do not think climate change is something important to combat.

Getting mad at coal plants won't help either, it will just give that segment of the population something to rally behind (coal power).

https://www.ecori.org/climate-change/2019/10/4/global-warmin....

There are more than just power plants to worry about... Concrete is 8% of our CO^2 emissions, agriculture is 9%. There are these things that no one thinks about that need to be addressed as well that sneak under the radar. There are teams working on them that don't get the glitz and glamour (or funding) that will make an impact, if adopted.

EDIT:

I'm not downplaying transportation pollution... just a quick edit to make it clear.

I think awareness about the negative environmental effects of agriculture and specifically cattle and other animals used for meat is at least much more prevelant than it used to be.

The concrete thing probably still flies under the radar though.

These people don't matter, a single day of traffic in LA does far more damage than they could ever do.

Their individual contributions don't matter, but they definitely matter. They represent a substantial portion of the population who simply do not care about the environment and believe in its active destruction in their own neighborhoods and cities. This is important to recognize.

They're the tip of the iceberg, as it were, the visible portion of a largely invisible but sizeable community who establish (through direct action, voting, and how they spend their money) a pattern of willful environmental destruction. And this is even without considering climate change. These are the people who think it's fine to toss garbage on the street, which has a much clearer and short-delay impact. If they don't care about that, good luck getting them to think on anything with long-delay impacts.

Thanks, I see this occasionally in South Florida, but never knew there was a term for it. If it were me I'd have pulled over my bike for 10 minutes and waited for the air to clear. I'll never understand the motivations of some people...

Then again https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpunk is thing.

Teslas and solar panels are cool now.

There is some hope.

Reducing carbon emissions is no longer enough. Carbon removal is the only hope.

YC is funding startups in this space: http://carbon.ycombinator.com/

Carbon removal is not possible in sufficient magnitude to make a difference, sorry.

source on this? The most important thing right now is definitely reducing emissions, but carbon capture certainly has a significant role to play

Btw, "carbon capture" seems to mostly mean capturing emissions at their source, which, although it's not a bad idea, is not actually removing carbon from the atmosphere. So when you see news articles fly by that say "progress in carbon capture", look closely to see if they are just talking about scrubbing smokestacks or literally pulling carbon out of the air. The former does not un-screw us.

Are there any publicly-traded companies/etfs/funds/prediction markets/whatever that a retail investor can invest in if they believe that carbon removal technology will play a significant role in the future?

From Wikipedia:

The climate of the Jurassic was generally warmer than that of present, by around 5 °C to 10 °C, with atmospheric carbon dioxide likely four times higher. Forests likely grew near the poles...

...and mammals were all 3" or smaller. Not a world we'd want to live in.

Speak for yourself.

who said that the planet needs the mammals?

To be fair, mammals just appeared around that time, so no wonder.

That's great for whatever ecosystem succeeds us, not so great for us, our children, and their children.

Now go read about the Triassic-jurassic extinction event, because the process of reaching those 5-10 degrees is the scary part.

Yep, yep

Wherever happens the planet will continue, same can't be said for modern human civilization on said new climatic landscape, wheat, corn, and other plants staple foods just didn't exist back then and heck knows if we'd be able to keep cultivating them with such different weather patterns and co2 amounts

I believe tho, that rsther than you quoting the jurassic, you ought quote the Permian triassic event, that's certainly more apt for how abrupt current atmospheric changes are

Assuming the climate continues to change rapidly, which I presume it will, what efforts have been made (in any country) to deal with it? I have seen much about attempting to prevent climate change, but very little planning about how to deal with its consequences.

We can and should continue to discuss and explore our options for sustainable civilization, but at some point we need to start mitigating the risks for calamitous outcomes.

It feels a little like we are living at the base of volcano, debating about the best way to prevent the volcano from erupting.

Any policy should be evaluated on the basis of costs and benefits. Too much of the conversation on global warming is either broadly dismissive or exasperatingly alarmist.

Fundamentally policy changes to curb global warming will have economic consequence, those of which will be borne disproportionately by the poor. E.g. efforts to curb oil and coal extraction will naturally result in the price of energy going up.

I can tell you it makes no difference to me if gas is 3 or 4 dollars a gallon, but it matters a lot to those who live paycheck to paycheck. And especially to those impoverished and living in emerging markets.

Im not suggesting a specific policy course of action (at least in this comment), but we'd be a lot better off if there was more of an effort to quantify impact of action/inaction using real numbers.

Temperature is projected to be X by year Y (we have varying projections of this), and the cost to humanity is Z.

What level of economic sacrifice is justified to address this and how much should we frontload that effort?

Should the poor bear the largest burden, or should we normalize the cost somehow? (Energy subsidy, remittances to emerging economies to use cleaner energy)

I have no doubt people have run these numbers, but I don't see the connection being made to specific policy proposals.

This is a fairly western centric view of “the poor.” The poor in the global south are absolutely going to be disproportionately impacted by climate change. If anything it’s the rich who are least impacted by global warming. The rich can afford to buy AC, move to areas that aren’t at risk of fires and floods and famines won’t cause us to go hungry.

You say disproportionately impacted. Can you quantify that? That's exactly the hand-wavey language we should avoid.

Water level rises by how many feet, displaces how many people? What is the cost of the coastal real estate lost? It can all be quantified (within range).

You'd probably find that for poor areas it's quite cost effective for people to relocate. New York City going underwater is much harder to replace. Obviously due to the level of cost to replicate the construction.

You say famine... Why would climate change bring famine? Farming and arable land would just shift to more cost effective areas. Some arable land is lost, others is gained (cold areas becoming warm). Building logistics to transport food to localities that can't support it locally is a good idea, and easy to achieve. That's the power of trade.

I don't dismiss the reality or impact of climate change at all, but look at the responses I get. Just people taking hyperbolically without really getting into the details that matter. Or lacking convincing and detailed statements. It's all hand-wavey and vague generalities about flooding or fires.

Like many pigouvian taxes, most carbon tax proposals make an attempt to offset its regressiveness by distributing some sort of dividend or rebate.

The idea isn't to punish the poor for driving to work. Rather, it's an attempt to charge the major carbon-emitters for their pollution of the commons (the atmosphere), then compensate the public with that money.

If there's a direct redistribution of sorts, then the poor can be protected from costs.

But any policy without an explicit redistribution scheme will raise the cost of business, and thus, raise the cost to consumers (as businesses pass these on).

e.g. for demonstration, imagine you sell apples for a 10 cent profit. Government enacts a 10 cent tax on apples. Now you must raise your price to consumers by at least 10 cents to stay in business. Consumer feels the effect of the tax

Market based solutions are still best, though.

To (over)extend the analogy: growing apples specifically increases people's chances of dying each year by X%. (Akin to dying from cancer caused from smoke from wildfires caused by global warming, or hurricanes, or droughts in the 3rd world, etc).

By raising the price of apples, some people might just choose to eat pears instead, and still collect their rebate from the apple tax.

(People can buy electric cars, hybrid cars, take public transit, ride their bike, etc)

I’m sorry, but what kind of hole (or bubble, to use a more popular term) have you been living in the last decade? There are a studies like the one you are requesting coming out regularly. Unfortunately, they can’t tell you exactly how many dollars different policies will cost, but that is due to the nature of the subject, not because of any faults of the studies.

But the conclusions are unanimous: it’s going to cost much more to do something today than it would have cost yesterday, and it’s going to be much more expensive tomorrow. The poor are the ones that will be hardest hit, not because they can’t afford AC, but because its their food that won’t grow when there’s no rain or too much rain, and they can’t move.

Science is currently speaking loud and clear: do much more than is currently planned, or we are facing centuries of wildfires, floods, storms, food and water shortages and hundreds of millions of refugees trying to find new futures.

And this is not alarmist. This is what climate scientists, like Cassandras, have been shouting about for decades.

I’ve met a few like you, who think they represent the voice of balance and reason. But you are the ones that still are haggling over the price of buckets while the fire breaks through the roof of the orphanage.

Exactly the hand-wavey and vague language I describe. Nowhere do you quantify the cost of this.

Saying there will be floods or wildfires is not meaningful discussion. We've had those throughout all of recorded history. How much worse will those things get? What is the economic cost?

Just saying climate change is bad because X, Y, Z danger and not quantifying the actual impact with numbers is simply a discussion of hysterics.

There's an endless list of bad things in the world, and logically we should address them from most impactful to least impactful. So where is the math justifying policy X with economic cost Y?

And as I said in my comment, yes studies have been done. Where is that in political discourse? To the average American, addressing climate change will have effectively no impact on their livelihood within their lifetime. Economic consequences will have an immediate impact. That's simply a fact.

Will it get hotter by a few degrees with some knock on effects? Yes. But very little actual impact on day to day life. It becomes obvious to see why many people will vote against these policies.

If you can describe to somebody how it will meaningfully adversely affect their life, you will get more support. Hence why I suggest using numbers rather than "scare language" when discussing.

Here you go: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg2/

It’s the report from 2014, the updated one will come next year. It’s a few thousand pages, but still just a summary of thousands of academic studies. You can go to each individual paper if you want exact confidence interval for each study.

Climate change is already impacting the average American with wildfires, drought, more hurricanes and floods. Costs of insurance in many areas and homes that are no longer possible to insure.

And for the political discourse. Just fucking google it! It’s everywhere. There are countless studies and articles and discussions that are easy to find.

Exactly as I said, studies have been done. So where is that bubbling into discourse?

Saying wildfires and floods, in a hand-wavey sense, makes you sound quite uninformed and doesn't inspire much call to action. You have to connect the direct costs and benefits to the individual if you ever want to persuade somebody. So can you explain to the voter in Michigan why raising gas by 50 cents is worth policy X? Just as an example.

The truth is that if you work out the math, it's unlikely to be very persuasive at all, because most negative ramifications of climate change will only be felt far in the future while costs to mitigate are immediate.

But the whole discussion around policy is meaningless.

The obvious solution to global warming is to make alternative energy more cost effective than fossil fuels. Then people will switch to it without any compulsion simply due to the economics being more favorable. For example, the majority of people will likely switch to electric cars once they're cheaper than gas cars (accounting for both up front and lifetime costs). We don't need legislation forcing people to buy electric, they will do it on their own within the next 10-15 years.

Similar with solar. At least as of a few years ago, solar on houses was a lousy investment from a cost perspective. As solar becomes more efficient, it starts to be more sensible, and in fact, even obvious to do.

By some measures the equilibrium point between fossils and renewable will happen relatively soon... Though there are some domains like aviation where it will take longer.

Policy should be aimed towards pushing renewables to be more cost competitive than fossils. And I don't mean through fiat or subsidy, but through improve d efficiency.

e.g. Better developed grid makes solar on housing more cost effective by allowing consumer to sell excess back to grid

Here you go about specifics about Michigan: https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/how-climate-crisi...

Took me all 20 seconds to find.

I’m sorry that we in advance can’t tell you exactly how many orphans will die in the fire and how many will be saved. Most of us thinks it is a good idea to try to extinguish the fire before the exact outcome is known. We know enough about fires.

And maybe this is what you just don’t get (because you don’t even bother to look at the links that are sent to you): We are facing a catastrophe of gargantuan scale, not more or less inconvenience. And you are counting beans.

Dropping links with 0 analysis or critical thought coming from you.

Very compelling!

I'm sorry, but no point engaging with you. You use 0 logic or quantifiable statements to support your view. Just hand-wavey and vague statements, exemplifying exactly what I stated.

Dropping links with no supporting analysis is not a discussion at all.

But no analysis is needed. You say, A and B don't exist. I say, here it is! That you don't get that just are proved wrong won't any analysis in the world help with.

And no, there's no point in engaging. I've learned that people that still don't get it are using all their mental capacity to wilfully not get it. And at this point I don't care what ideological mental locks that prevent people like you to see what is clear and obvious.

If thousands of scientific studies and decades of dire warnings from scientists won't convince you, there's just nothing that will.

Around 10 years ago when I was telling everyone what will happen soon (floods, wild fires, heat waves etc) people looked at me like I'm some kind of lunatic. These days the same people ask me what I think about the future. Few years ago I believed we can still win with climate change but now I'm certain that we will not. Problem is in the fundamentals of our current economic model that is based on infinite growth, which keeps society stable. General population social hierarchy of values is also a huge obstacle, what's going on Instagram is a huge indicator of that. Most people care but not enough to justify lifestyle change. I was very unhappy and worried a lot about what future will bring and that we are not doing enough to stop it, but now I'm relieved and happy, because I've accepted that this will happen either way and I can't do anything about it more than what I'm doing already. This will be controversial advice on HN but here it goes.. if you are miserable because of climate change and you constantly fear of future just let it go, you can't control the future. Not everyone needs to be a hero, live you life, spend time with your love ones, do what makes you happy, be kind to others, try to not consume too much so you don't contribute to climate change and plan accordingly.

I tried that (accept and move on), but when you have kids...I find it impossible. I can’t accept that fate for them. How do you reason about that?

Agree and don't really see why this is an unpopular view.

I am about to hit 30 and I've never had an opportunity to vote for a winning government. I have been powerless to do anything other than basically pointless personal responsibility actions for my whole goddamn life. Sure I've gone vegetarian and bought green energy, I don't drive and try to avoid flying but it doesn't make any difference.

So given we live in democracies where the majority of voters will block any kind of progressive action (or authoritarian regimes) how do you cope mentally? And effectively stoicism is the only course. Don't take liberties with the environment in your personal life and support and promote solutions at a social and fiscal level. But you can't change any of this shit. The next generation is going to blame my generation and that's completely fair but there's nothing I could have realistically done.

Acceptance is important to stop the despair, feelings of doom and self hate. It isn't the same as denial.

Ok global warming is happening we know it for a long time.

But is there a place somewhere that explain how could the world works without emitting too much co2, or any gaz which are problematic. How do we replace cars ? trucks ? how many people on earth is possible ? Can we have plane ? Boat ? How do we produce clothes, how do we have electricity at night ...

I'm not asking to have a plan for everything, because this is not possible. But a complete description of important areas of life

As I see things the only solution is that humans need to stop reproducing so much. There are far too many people for the resources of the planet given current technology.

How do you back that statement?

Far fewer people means far less environmental destruction.

this is a myth from the 1970s. it has been debunked countless times (even by history itself), but people still fall back to this.

What is a myth? If there were far fewer people less carbon would be used/extracted. Less trees and natural space would be destroyed. Less plastic would be around. Etc.

There are not enough resources for everyone to live like we Americans. As the world gets richer we’ll collectively destroy more of the environment. This is not disputable.

It is a myth that it is "the only solution". If not everyone can live like Americans (agreed), then we'll all have to find a different way to live. Many of us are working on building that new way of living as we speak.

You may also be interested to know that global population growth has been falling for 60 years and will almost certainly continue to do so. There's no need for anyone to take active measures in this area. https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth#how-has-t...

Thank you for the clarification on what you meant by “myth”. The rate of population growth has been declining but not the growth of the population. There are far more people now than 60 years ago. There are around 8 billion people and global poverty is decreasing. This means consumption is correspondingly increasing. The pressure on the environment that this causes is enormous. Man made chemicals, plastics, etc. are all over the place. We are shitting on ourselves with our profligacy. The pollution and environmental destruction are getting worse. There are too many people as I see things.

> If there were far fewer people less carbon would be used/extracted.

1 American releases the same amount of co2 as ten people in Benin, let alone the amount of trash and general consumption

This is not about the "amount of people" , it is about percapita numbers and consumption

If everyone consumed like Americans do, we'd need like 4, 5 earth's just to maintain that

Again, it is a matter of co2/per capita

Poverty is on the decline globally and this means consumption correspondingly increases. People in Benin and elsewhere have the same desires as everyone else and they too want to consume at a greater rate. They want things too. Americans are the worst for sure. I think that there are far too many people given humans’ proclivity toward consumption.

This kind of discourse is simply disregarding facts to promote a not-my-problem ideology.

The countries that contribute most significantly to greenhouse gas emissions almost always have very low demography. Because of that, if we were to change demography to reach strict population equilibrium in every country without changing countries' emissions per capita, we would actually emit more greenhouse gases.

What facts am I disregarding? As global poverty declines consumption correspondingly goes up. Globalization ensures that the message of consumption wins out. Profits need to be had. Humans are local optimization machines. The only real solution given human psychology is for there to be far fewer people. Until that happens the damage will continue to be done and at an increasing rate.

> The only real solution given human psychology is for there to be far fewer people.

The issue is that even with far fewer people, the emissions for developed countries aren't going to work out.

That is why the population control message is simply deflecting from the actual problem towards population which are for the most part way under the recommended emissions per capita considering the current world's population.

How hard is it to fix your own problems before you try to tell other people what they should do?

I thought Bill Gates' recent book covered all the important problems and how they could be addressed. Here is a good summary: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/Lowering-Green-Premiums

high level there's a two pronged path:

* Clean electricity generation (solar, wind, hydro with some sort of grid storage/distribution mechanism to handle when sun isn't shining/wind isn't blowing) and

* Electrification (EVs, non-gas heating)

> Can we have planes

Yes, at some point. Electric planes are being explored but have difficulties with battery weight. Another possibility is green hydrogen or perhaps some other yet-undiscovered energy source. Planes account for a relatively low percentage of global emissions (maybe 2% right now?) so this is not a priority

> Boats?

Yes -- electric pleasure crafts exist already. For long haul/shipping I'm not totally sure what's being worked on, but it certainly will be possible

> Clothing

Another space I'm not super familiar with. Again, it's important to remember that we need to focus on the heavy hitters, which currently are dirty electricity production (ie coal plants) and transportation (gas-powered cars)

So basically you say, let's replace most of the energy sources by solar, wind and hydro. And use battery every time we need to get off the grid.

As for storage for the grid, are we actually confident that we can transfer that quantity of energy between countries ? Because if everything becomes electricity powered. That means a lot of power over long distance.

Do we know if there are enough natural resources to produce that amount of lithium batteries also ?

Grid-level batteries will likely be made of something else -- check out form energy who does iron-based batteries.

> Can we transfer power between countries

Certainly possible, but requires infrastructure build out. Most countires can also provide a lot of their own solar/wind

Right now?

Invest on lowering the price of solar and increasing panel production;

Invest on lowering the price of batteries (I'm not sure ramping-up production is wise right now);

Invest on nuclear power on the (very few) places it can be ramped-up quickly, and stop taking offline the reactors that have no extraneous safety problems;

Invest on electrifying transportation (that's mostly by replacing trucks, buses and cars, but if it's viable to replace things by trains, that's a double gain, I would ignore planes for the time being);

Invest on lowering the costs of carbon capture (I would focus on atmospheric capture for chemical usage, but any kind could be great);

If you live in a place without them, press for carbon taxes, the government can use the money to pay for the things above or distribute it to the poor. It's easier to get if you make it mildly protectionist, but that has the side effect of impoverishing your local economy (politics is weird).

You personally can not do much, unless you have a lot of money. But any reasonably rich government can do a lot of change (it doesn't even to be at the national level).

> But is there a place somewhere that explain how could the world works without emitting too much co2, or any gaz which are problematic.

Per capita per year CO2 emissions, in tonnes:

    US     16.06
    China   7.1
    EU-27   6.56
    France  4.97
    World   4.72
    Sweden  4.26
    India   1.91

Maybe the answer is somewhere between Sweden and India.

For the curious, here's a graph showing average temperatures year-over-year from various datasets[0]. Spoilers: yes, it's been going up.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_recor...

so stop mine your crypto

so stop train your deep models

Both are power supply issues (i.e how the power gets generated) rather than actual bad use cases.

That's one way to look at it. On the other hand, if you know how your power is getting generated, you can try to minimize it until such time as it's not causing negative externalities.

Naaa

I suspect that global warming is growing at an exponential rate. It would surprise me if it weren't so. Every effect of global warming contributes to fueling it. If it is indeed exponential growth, expect the effects to double over the doubling time, probably in the order of years.

Parallel discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28171200

For those who are interested in the historical data, 'Paleoclimatology' has been a fascinating deep dive into what seems like very decent long-term data.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Paleoclimatology/...

the climate change prisoner's dilemma will leave us all screwed.

Why are geoengineering efforts not more popular? I thought that what Bill Gates and co were doing with the chalk dust in the atmosphere was a good idea. I think there are myriad ideas along these lines that would go a long way towards combating climate change while also not killing a large swath of economic activity.

The coolest July for the rest of our lives.

https://i.redd.it/gdra4d4cl5h71.png

2065, 4 plus Celsius projected by the ipcc. And usually they are very very Conservative to not be labelled alarmists. So.. It's likely going to be 5 or 6.

/s dupe, already submitted

If you want to see a very realistic, depressing, and ever-so-slightly hopefully depiction of the possible near-future, read The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.

That started out very powerfully, but the author tried to cram way too many disparate things in there. It lost a lot of steam halfway through; god knows why it turned into a love story. What was the point? All that stuff with crypto? The cryptic poem type things interspersed. It was a good effort and started off amazing; shame about the lack of focus.

Then the next hottest month will be Dec or Jan because summer in Southern Hemisphere is hotter than the one in Northern one of the same year.

On record meaning 142 years of history. Sometimes people conflate "on record" with "ever since humans were around" but on a species scale 142 years is basically no history at all.

Not to say that climate change isn't a very serious issue, but we will likely have to live with the realities of where we are headed, and life has adapted in the past to much larger swings of temperature.

"Life" will adapt. Ecosystems won't. It really sounds like you're expressing your feelings about a likely mass extinction event as "shit happens, what're you gonna do?"

Ecosystems are just a large collection of “Life”.

I don't know where you're going with this. No, that's wrong, they are separate concepts. There was "life" 320M years ago just like there is today. But the carboniferous forest mats that we saw then spanned the globe, with trees growing on tens of millions of years of their undecomposed ancestors. It was an entirely different environment, and we'll never see it again now that bacteria evolved the ability to digest lignin.

Closer to home, there is "life" on the deep ocean floor today. And most of it has evolved to exploit the oxygenated water of the environment, which is fed by an arctic downwelling off of Greenland (yes, all deep ocean water is fed from a "spigot" in just one place).

Well, guess what, with the reduction in ice cover over the last decade or so and the increases in temperature expected to accelerate that process, that downwelling is collapsing. All those ocean floor ecosystems are going extinct within the next thousand years, and it's probably too late to save them.

Yes it has adapted to larger temp swings, but these other swings occurred over 10ks or 100ks of years, not 0.15k years. Life cannot adapt over the span of single or low double digit generations.

What was the previous record?

FTA:

> the combined land and ocean-surface temperature was 1.67 degrees F (0.93 of a degree C) above the 20th-century average of 60.4 degrees F (15.8 degrees C), making it the hottest July since records began 142 years ago. It was 0.02 of a degree F (0.01 of a degree C) higher than the previous record set in July 2016, which was then tied in 2019 and 2020

What's the error on that measurement? I have a hard time believing that the +- on global mean temperature is less than 0.02 degF.

So far.

Can we please stop recording … so it would cool again?!

Don't worry, next July will be hotter.

Yeah, but it's a dry heat /s

Someone make a bot to repost this every year

The current administration has approved more than 2,000 new fracking permits.

I'm so glad the US has rejoined the Paris Agreement.

"Meet the new boss Same as the old boss"

I am very left, and despise Biden's refusal to address climate change where it counts, like fraking. But honestly, the new boss is not the same as the old boss, even with climate change. The new boss does in fact acknowledge it exists, rather than insisting that all climate change is a hoax and it is invented by China to hurt the US. Biden is not making the progress I'd like to see, but he is in no way as bad as the last guy.

I can't say I care very deeply about whether or not he's sympathetic and useless, or antagonistic and useless. The end result is the same.

Maybe the EU will one day get it's agenda together, and apply crippling tariffs to all goods and services imported from countries that don't have carbon taxes.

This is nonsense. Whether someone virtue signals or not, actions are what's important, not words.

The CO2 emissions output has been coming down since the high in 2006. With the old boss and the new boss.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide...

If anything, fracking helped the environment, since it offset resources being mined by the traditional, more wasteful methods.

> This is nonsense. Whether someone virtue signals or not, actions are what's important, not words.

Arguably the most powerful tool the POTUS has is words. So they are not unimportant.

The atmosphere is shared between all countries. Looking at the output of a single country is useless for everything except petty politics discussions. When a country moves its industry abroad without changing its demand, net CO2 output is unchanged, and these figures are worse than useless.

> atmosphere is shared between all countries

True, but since we are talking the old boss vs new boss... Neither can exactly tell China or Europe to stop increasing their CO2 output.

They can. Largest economy on earth. Just put your money where your mouth is.

It seems you are stating that the loudly-spoken and widely-distributed words of the US president are "not important". I completely disagree with that. What the US President says is definitely important. I have already expressed anger in this thread that Biden has not taken the right actions. His words aren't even right. But there IS a difference - it DOES matter what he says.

Denial is not the same as acceptance. Saying that it doesn't matter if the president is a climate denier or not is pretty far out there - I haven't heard this take before.

Is it okay for the president to spread messages of pro-genocide and hatred? That doesn't matter right? The president's words literally don't matter, so whatever, he can go on about yelling that he's gonna nuke someone, doesn't matter. "Words [of leaders] don't matter" is a terrible take.

Wow, "fracking helped the environment" is certainly a take I haven't seen before.

I think it's ridiculous to say Biden and Trump are the same on climate. Biden is pushing through a bunch of climate stuff on the bipartisan infrastructure bill, and hopefully will get even more in the reconciliation bill.

Words _do_ matter, because the threat of serious climate legislation makes companies shift in a direction where said legislation won't completely destroy them. Read this piece to see more: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/06/climate-...

> This is nonsense.

Deleting this sentence from your comment really improves not only your argument, but the tone of discussion. It just makes things needlessly adversarial to lead with fighting words, and for sure it triggers defensive mental antibodies before you've even started.

Normally I'd agree with you, but the rest of the response is such a whiff I imagine it'd be hard to be insulted by it.

Good point!

> This is nonsense. Whether someone virtue signals or not, actions are what's important, not words.

That's not fair. When you're the chief of a fire station, saying "Yep that's a blazing fire right there, let's do something" is not virtual signaling, it's called not being a fucking idiot.

A better metaphor for the behavior of politicians is: saying "Yep that's a blazing fire right there, let's do something...in twenty years".

> If anything, fracking helped the environment

Maybe fracking helped reduce emissions for now, but it remains to be seen whether it helped the environment. It could take decades to learn about all the negative impacts it has.

You are right. That's what I meant to say.

Actions matter. Narratives are often used as palliatives. Demand real change.

And is asking for OPEC to produce more oil[0].

EDIT: updated the linked article. I originally linked to an opinion piece rather than a news piece.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-urges-opec-to-boost...

old link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-wants-opec-to-drill-o...

No administration (L or R) wants to take the political hit. Everyone will burn more carbon.

After land-locking the supply to the most ethical producing nation to the north.

Doing this is not mutually exclusive to taking action on climate. Fracking is what's really killing the coal industry.

The kind of reasoning you're using rings hollow when you actually look closer at what's going on politically:

https://www.slowboring.com/p/climate-left

> $16 billion for capping orphaned wells and cleaning up abandoned mines.

> $47.2 billion for climate resiliency projects.

> $48.5 billion for public transit.

> $66 billion for freight and passenger rail.

> $15 billion for EV charging stations and electric buses.

> $73 billion for upgrading the electricity grid.

> The current administration has approved more than 2,000 new fracking permits.

Most fears about fracking are either myths or overblown.

Fracking has allowed the extraction of more natural gas; and natural has is the main reason that the US was able to reduce its emissions the past decade because it has a higher Joules/CO2 ratio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTA-M12vrT4

> I'm so glad the US has rejoined the Paris Agreement.

Any climate accords not involving the major C02 producers, especially China and India who produces more C02 than all of the rest of the developed world combined, will only outsource the problem to those countries with very poor to non-existent environmental regulations while we sabotage our economies my making them noncompetitive in the mean time.

What year does NOAA choose as the beginning for "record"? It's relevant to the discussion.

Earth is 4.5 billion years old.

Humans have existed for 200,000 years.

This all comes off as political or quasi-religious because I can assure you that the author knows average people will read that headline and assume "begining of time". Hence I call bullshit.

Probably since humans started recording? Doesn’t seem that misleading to me.

What matters is the climate equilibrium that we and the ecosystems we depend on evolved under. Most of Earth's history would be totally uninhabitable for humans ourselves, nevermind those ecosystems. Using the argument of the total time that Earth has existed or previous climate fluctuations totally misses the point.

It doesn't matter what happened millennia ago, what matters is how rapidly things are changing now.

Technically true but not really relevant.

You read the headline yourself and went off asking a dumb question that's answered in the article.

'On record' implies 'since we started keeping records' and that length of time is specifically stated in the article.

The headline isn't "July was Earth’s hottest month ever" - that's the clickbait headline that would justify your reaction.

I call bullshit on your half baked retort. How is the short precarious lives of the very few early humans relevant to greenhouse earth 2021?

Oh crap

Onward and upward... :\

Why is every other post on hacker news about climate change

Because it's of interest to hackers.

Why? Partly because it's a technical problem, and partly because we care about the environment, because that's where we live.

>> Why? Partly because it's a technical problem

Once the deniers soften this is always their answer. The reality is nobody is prepared to sacrifice to the extent demanded, skeptics and alarmists alike.

Can you explain what the demanded sacrifice is?

For people in rich nations, the level of consumerism they have been accustomed to their whole lives, has to go. For most people this means no more driving, no more flying, no more eating fancy foods and buying fancy things. People have to live pretty much like hippies.

For people in the rest of the world, the promise of the modern industrial rich age (which is mostly a mirage anyway) has to go.

Pretty much nobody in the world is willing to accept this sacrifice (remember, covid only lasted like two years and public will was/is really strained by the end -- what's needed here is a permanent change), so since this is a hard requirement for any solution, there's no other except treating it like a technical challenge.

That's my view anyway

Think of it as the next big thing. It is.

If global news were a TV show, covid was the prologue arc before the arc of the arrival of the Actual Big Bad

Well, not yet it isn’t.

That depends on where you live. Global warming, just like the future, isn't distributed evenly. But for more and more places every year the effects are undeniable. 55 million people displaced and 150K dead last year alone, expected to increase for the foreseeable future.

Because it's the most important problem to solve. Everything else won't matter if we don't solve this.

Why won’t anything else matter?

Society will collapse when we become unable to ensure food security, and massive climate refugee migrations overwhelm our infrastructure.

I believe that the globe is heating up. And I’m not being snarky. However, I fail to see how climate change means food insecurity.

https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/chapter/chapter-5/

> projected a 1–29% cereal price increase in 2050

I agree that everything in this article could and probably will happen. However, how could even a 29% increase in cereal prices lead to a societal collapse? I didn’t see anything that would lead to societal collapse.

Humans adapt. They always have. Is it not possible that we could perhaps be made better as a species because of climate change?

30% is not much for us, but for countries where agriculture is 60% of GDP amore capricious weather might devestate the economy. For those people climate change is a threat multiplier. Everything gets worse and more insecure in those regions.

Big climate in short times has historically been very bad for the ecosystem in the short term. Something like the Triassic-jurassic climate shift (due to, presumably, volcanic activity) led to one of the larger extinction events in the history of the planet, killing something like 75% of all species. I am notnsaying that is where we are heading, but even something remotely close to that will most certainly be devestating for society as we know it.

If there is something that will make humanity better it is overcoming this. Not hoping that whoever makes it through will be a part of a better species.

to continue on this: the late triassic had a temperature about 3°c above modern temperatures. The rise into the jurassic period is believed to be somewhere between 3-7°C.

Because its audience seems to be a bit worried that we will cook ourselves taking a look to some statistics, which therefore means (luckily in my opinion) the audience trust statistics

Repeatedly showing stats won’t make things better or make people more aware of the problem, in the end people will still use their cars while they wait for others to make a change. Hypocrisy at its best, that’s what I see

Stats is stats and one of the advantages of it is that they won't change based on the times they are shown or opinions, neither your or mine.

If you don't want to

Don't think science will save us this time lads

Agreed. We are already beyond the tipping point. Positive feedback loops already kicked in (thawing of Tundra, lower albedo due to glaciers melting, ...). We would need to go carbon negative right away and stay at those levels for years. Or go big about engineering the climate until we carbon levels return to normal levels.

Science is what got us here in the first place, is it not?

That will extend the streak to 439 consecutive months with global surface temperature above the 20th century average.

Lower population by encouraging smaller families and no limits on birth control. Lower consumption through minimalism and right to repair and loner lasting products. These policies must be implemented yesterday.

Broke the record by a whopping 0.02 degrees. Time to stop eating hamburgers!

Personally, I have lost hope. The ocean temperatures will continue rising, the ecosystem of micro-organisms that provide the majority of the planet's oxygen will collapse, the seasons will become completely undependable for agriculture, the massive reservoirs of methane under permafrost will explode into the atmosphere, forests around the world will burn, and the reservoirs of potable water will dry up.

My cynical belief is that amongst conservative leadership, there is already consensus that climate change will take place. The anti-immigrant agenda is advanced preparation to repel the imminent hordes of climate refugees out of Fortress America.

> ecosystem of micro-organisms that provide the majority of the planet's oxygen will collapse,

Citation needed. This is the doomsaying that people see, then see legit science doesn’t suggest this, and assume it’s all as real as the book of revelations. We need to spread real information not act like the world will legitimately end because the temperature goes up to what it was 3 million years ago.

I think they might be referring to phytoplankton. Their shells are dependent on the ocean being amenable to their development, and it's becoming less so, already causing growing pockets of oxygen-poor ocean waters.[0][1] They happen to be responsible for about half our oxygen, or more.[2]

0: https://psmag.com/environment/global-warming-is-putting-phyt...

1: https://news.mit.edu/2015/ocean-acidification-phytoplankton-...

2: https://newportbay.org/ask-a-naturalist-do-phytoplankton-pro...

Funny. The MIT article basically proves my point about doomsaying.

>the researchers observed that as ocean acidification prompted some species to grow faster, and others slower

> By 2100, the local composition of the oceans may also look very different due to warming water: The model predicts that many phytoplankton species will move toward the poles. That means that in New England, for instance, marine communities may look very different in the next century

So basically, yes, the ecosystems will change and some species will die while others blossom and thrive. That paper says nothing about oxygen levels or phytoplankton as a group of species going extinct. As is typical, and actual scientist says something and talks about its ramifications and people turn it into an apocalyptic tale. I particularly like the beginning quote from the researcher himself

>”I’ve always been a total believer in climate change, and I try not to be an alarmist, because it’s not good for anyone,” says Dutkiewicz.

Read up on some real science and geography. Earth has been much warmer in the past and there was still plenty of oxygen. warmer also means wetter (in general). Local climates may change quickly but there will still going to be plenty of water, oxygen, and life.

The NOAA currently hosts over over 37 petabytes of 'comprehensive atmospheric, coastal, oceanic, and geophysical data' and was established in October 1970.

It sometimes seems the more data we have the more gloom and doom we get. I'm not one to use emotional quasi religious terms like 'denier' but that does give pause for thought.

The NOAA started out Surveying the US coastline in 1807 as the 'U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey' to provide nautical charts to the maritime community for safe passage into American ports. It's morphed like all giant government bureaucracies into well over 11k people now apparently surveying the entire planet and collecting vast troves of data.

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogdec10/lifecycle-bureaucracy12...

Why does it give you pause for thought? Isn’t the mostly likely conclusion is that the reason more data is leading to more gloom and doom is because we are in a gloom and doom situation?

> It sometimes seems the more data we have the more gloom and doom we get.

Ignorance really is bliss isn't it?

Well to be contrarian: lies, damn lies and statistics...the scholarly arguments about the extent to which man is influencing our climate and the extent to which natural cycles and space weather are far more important is essentially a data war. Both sides have a plethora of data and statistics to make their case.

I do wonder and worry about the damage this 'you did it' alarmism is very negatively affecting the human psyche, causing substance abuse, depression, suicides etc.

https://youtu.be/2ObjtVdsV3I

> lies, damn lies and statistics

The first hard data that existed from global warming came from Exxon and a small team of scientists on the 70's or so, when they attached temperature sensors to a couple oil tankers and measured the temperature of the ocean as it traveled

If you call for "less data" because things scare you, then I am sorry to say that you are a coward and unscientific

I think you entirely missed my points followed by a couple of insults.

I really, honestly wish the people believing it's not a big issue were right. Sadly, that does not appear the case.

Isn't more data good, giving more confidence? If more data paints a bleaker and bleaker picture, aren't things bleak?

Maybe what you fear, in this case, is actually real

Reply on news.ycombinator.com