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Comment by belval | Hacker News Reader

> How do you all cope with this?

I ignore it.

> Do you ignore it because it is painful?

Yep

Honestly, I am young enough that in elementary school they were already talking about global warming, we were told that it would be too late soon and that we had to do something about it.

15 years later nothing has been done about it, but then again nothing really went wrong yet, being told everyday that the world will end has the pervasive effect that it feels pointless to really try and change things. You just feel numb and wait for something to happen.

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It sounds like you are quite young compared to me. They were talking about it in the late 80s while I was in high school. I remember Al Gore in the 90s was saying that Florida will be under water in 10 years or something like that. So this conversation has been going on for a long time.

> 15 years later nothing has been done about it.

That is absolutely is not true. When I moved to SoCal in the 80s, for the first six months I didn't realize there was a mountain nearby because of all the pollution and resulting haziness. You can clearly see it today because the cars have gotten a lot cleaner. This is just one anecdote.

I meant nothing was done w.r.t CO2/CH4-based global warming. I think some form of pollution (smog/acid rain/CFC) were tackled surprisingly efficiently because they didn't require a complete rethinking of our lifestyle.

It took us a long time, but overall emissions in the US are down about 10% from their peak in 2005, even when you adjust for us exporting manufacturing to elsewhere. This only brings us down to ~1996 levels, but it's a good sign. Per capita, we're back down below 1990 levels[0]. (I think this is mostly from some energy-efficiency improvements and less coal, though a lot of that has just shifted to natural gas[1].)

It's not nearly enough, and may be overwhelmed by China and India's development, but significant positive change is happening. It just took us until ~2007 to really get things moving.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2

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

> nothing really went wrong yet

Seriously, what do you consider to be 'something' or 'going wrong'?

There are so many things, and they are going so badly wrong. Case in point current Kentucky tornadoes and the article you're replying to.

Can scientists definitively pin the Kentucky tornado on global warming? That is, is it conclusively known that "If emissions were curtailed by X% 20 years ago, the count of tornadoes with a strength of at least Y that passed through Kentucky would've been reduced by at least 1"?

My impression is, that assignment of blame seems much more precise than other predictions from weather forecasts that I've seen.

Why would any hypothetical scientist have to entertain your fancy? Actual scientists are telling us what's going on as precisely as can be computed. There is no doubt anymore. You will however be able to ask for more precision for as long as no other more pressing thing becomes what you're asking for, most likely because of what climate change will inflict.

I was thinking the EPA or NWS might have a document describing exactly how the tornado originated, so no effort would be needed beyond linking to it.

It sounds like you've talked to scientists somewhere and there is no such document, though.

This is the problem: if you blame every extreme weather event on global warming, global warming could be totally made up!

Indeed. Presumably extreme weather events were in existence before humans were here to experience them, and they will continue to exist so long as the Earth's surface is heated unevenly by the Sun. But which events would have happened anyway, and which are the result of some new element(s) accounted for by the theory in question? In fact - if we are unable to distinguish the former from the latter - is the theory in question refutable by any conceivable event?

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7434469-a-theory-which-is-n...

There was such a bad hurricane season during the Revolutionary War that the French navy sailed back home in tatters, refusing to port there again in that time of year.

If you argue a modern tornado proves global warming, then extreme hurricanes in the 1700s (by extension) disproves it.

I am not denying that there are more extreme weather event, I hope my comment didn't come off as denying climate change, because that's not what I was trying to convey.

> nothing really went wrong yet

Nothing went wrong in the sense that nothing went wrong for me, for my loved ones, for people I actually know.

I didn't think that, I was just curious about your perspective. I think I'm observing the same stuff everyone else is observing and, even the other side of the world, it feels far too close for home, geographically. And, having a child, it seems far too close to home temporally too.

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