Comment by yongjik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yongjik | Hacker News Reader

> Incredibly, climate denial still festers. “There’s no cliff,” they insist. “This bus is on a smooth road that goes all the way to the promised land. Only a fool would swerve now.”

I think I get the main theme, but I don't think "climate cliff" is a useful analogy. It makes one picture a scene of relative calm until suddenly (and abruptly) the shit hits the fan, when the reality is going to be far more messy. (Just look at all those historians who could never agree on exactly what year the Roman Empire fell.)

If anything, it will make people argue "Well, we haven't hit the cliff yet, which means we still have time," or, worse, "They've preached that we will hit the cliff by 2020, a bunch of liars!"

I think the fictional "denialist" in the sentence is actually half right. Instead of a cliff, we will have a smooth ride... to hell. We will never have one glorious catastrophe where we get to say "I told you so" five seconds before dying. Instead, half of the passengers will still be arguing that we're fine while we're slowly dying.

Maybe a better analogy is a bus moving into a desert rather than out of it, while some people desperately try to tell the driver everyone's gonna die of thirst while others insist there's an oasis nearby and others still believe they're heading towards a city. Some also know they're going into the desert but believe there's enough time to go back when they run out of water.

The cliff is not for Earth. Climate will change gradually, segueing smoothly. Mostly. Mass extinctions, sure, but those are normal.

The cliff is civilizational collapse, which will happen very fast once a threshold is crossed. Which threshold it will be is uncertain. Ocean ecosystem collapse and mass starvation? Refugees from uninhabitable places exceed 200M, bringing fascists to power, hence war?

Civilizational collapse has happened many, many times. Just not worldwide, before. We have seen how it goes: the rich try to cushion it for themselves, hastening the crash.

It's more like we are stuck in a confined space and slowly gassing ourselves with CO2 and we are arguing over turning the engine off.

Oh, wait, no, it is literally that.

Pretty much, yeah, sadly…

I feel like the analogy has to be fleshed out with the caveat that "turning the engine off" kills some > 50% of the people in the confined space right away.

I don’t know why this was downvoted - it has the ring of truth. If you could wave a magic wand and do away with fossil fuels tomorrow it would bring untold suffering on the world.

We have to wind the engine down while shifting the work over to a parallel electric motor that we’re in the process of building.

Except, it doesn't.

A radical program to move all power generation, transport, and home heating to renewables would result in radically cheaper energy and transport for all.

But the people enriched by scarce energy would not be anymore.

It doesn't really matter, does it? As analogies go it's pretty clear what the message is and for that purpose this metaphor is good enough. Any arguing over the shape of the metaphor is essentially pointless, if you didn't get it then it doesn't matter because you are clearly not the target audience, and if you did get it you realize that it is a leaky abstraction, but a useful one nonetheless.

We could also say the analogy is bad because not all of humanity can fit on a bus, but that would be a misunderstanding of what an analogy is for.

If Doctorow wanted a perfect analogy for our attitudes towards climate change, then he wouldn't use any analogy at all, he would talk directly about our attitudes to climate change.

The point of an analogy is to highlight a particular dynamic that both the analogy and the thing being analogised have in common.

All metaphors melt if you push them loudly enough.

The point isn't to find the most apt metaphore.

The point is that there's a looming crisis, humanity is hurtling toward it at breakneck speed, and there's little if any time left to act.

I've had discussions myself with friends and family over this. One response has been that "the people who need to know about this know what the problem is and how to respond". That particular response came before a novel coronavirus emerged in a land far away and spread across the globe in days and weeks.

Pandemics are an emergency we've seen before, that we have contingencies and plans for, whose dynamics we understand, etc., etc., etc. And yet the world, as a whole failed miserably, through the mechanism of individual countries, regions (state, provinces, counties, etc.) and cities failing to act effectively.

With a very few exceptions. Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, Japan, and somewhat improbably the poorer south-east Asian countries of Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos, seem to have responded highly effectively, at least initially. As has mainland China, for the most part.

But as a dress-rehersal for a far more challenging crisis, I'm both underwhelmed and terrified of what else lies in store.

> while we’re slowly dying.

Contracting anyway. The collapse of industrial activity due to covid cooled things off. Enough humans die off, humanity could ultimately survive in a more bucolic but tech stabilized system to help manage logistics, intentionally leave out all the military industrial complex and disposable crap production.

Religion wanted cheap manual labor; breed, breed, breed! We still rely on memes like Protestant work ethic despite the awareness there’s probably no “higher power” in the traditional sense. Less militant political leadership not grown of WWs but of managing a global ecological problem would wisely find value in the idea “doing less is more”.

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