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Comment by turns0ut | Hacker News Reader

Quality of life has been impacted by changes in climate and we can measurably link human activity to it.

I don’t need doomsayers or keep calm carry onners while we collect data to generate directionless statistics chiming in anymore.

Experts have to accept their professional title does not make them smarter than others with the same quantitative ability.

Specific forecasts are wrong. That nothing is wrong is wrong too.

Chanting the ways in which someone else is a hypocrite is exhausting at this point.

“Do nothing until it’s an actual problem.” - people old enough to die before it’s a problem.

Ok we get it; you aren’t part of the solution.

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> “Do nothing until it’s an actual problem.” - people old enough to die before it’s a problem.

Imagine being a developing country and people saying "yeah well, you can't become developed because... you know ... climate change. Think of humanity and stay undeveloped while we keep exploiting you"

I'm in no way saying we should not care, but if the data is not collected the right way we could end up focusing on the wrong solution.

In one of these examples looks like tearing down airports and grow grass fields back could lower the temperatures collected by those climate stations. But would it be the right thing to do?

Just asking.

I thought the point was that an airport is a poor choice for an unbiased climate station because the airport generates/retains heat.

yes, exactly, as I wrote if the data is not collected the right way we could end up focusing on the wrong solution

in this light the article is not completely useless or "not part of the solution", after all.

I think most reasonable people are sensitive to this, that’s why I strongly advocate for a tech utopian vision of the future rather than some sort of back to nature idea

I’m more of a bucolic life routines uplifted and assisted by automation type, than a Star Trek TNG live a life of technobabble.

Designer drugs that leave behind the same memory markers as the real thing seem possible given bio-electric therapies and growing understanding of psychedelics in emotional therapy.

VR goggles for everyone seem prosaic, corny af to me relative to such ideas. Traveling to every continent a huge waste.

Either way I suspect no one is asking the developing world not to have an improved quality of life. I am suspicious, however, that bucolicism is incompatible with the number of people alive today, though I certainly like the esthetic

> I suspect no one is asking the developing world not to have an improved quality of life

If you're referring to me, I ask myself if the largest country of the western world (and the worst offender in terms of dangerous emissions for 40 years straight) built cities where people cannot walk and need cars to move, can be still considered developed or it should be considered irresponsible.

Humanoids went millions of years without airplanes.

There are plenty of industrialized endeavors that are enabling a financed minority to endanger the entire species. Trying to carve out exceptions that many will still be too poor to participate in is some self serving gibberish.

Accept figurative death as a necessity and disabuse ourselves of delusions of grandeur. As minds adjust we’ll find new things to be titillated by.

Don’t get me wrong; given politics and public agency, YOLO it is. Zero fucks. If the present is not going to concern itself with others future, why concern myself with the present? Why mold myself to expectations of indifferent moral relativists, implicit ageists, a perspective built on observation of their indifference to adjustments agency, virtue signaling rhetoric be damned.

Dedication to inaction or action that comes way too late in deference to equivocating, is nihilism about the state of the future. Let’s dispense with calling ourselves anything else.

> Humanoids went millions of years without airplanes.

for clarity: I'm not opposing to the idea that we could survive without planes or any other post industrial comfort.

But perhaps embedding thermometers in the asphalt of an airport track it's not the smartest of the moves if you want to reliably measure changes in temperature over time.

I believe people give themselves too much credit: politics, planes, cars, it doesn't matter, it's not the people that will solve the climate crisis, but how well the system as a whole is going to adapt.

I can do whatever I want, but it's factually (not cynically, it is what it is) completely useless when all the population of my country put together represent 2% of India+China population.

It's like trying to fix high blood pressure when only the thumb is following doctor's orders.

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