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Comment by Comevius | Hacker News Reader

It's crimes against humanity, it's what it is. Sabotaging the human race for personal gain is the ultimate crime, it makes Hitler look like a saint. Any sentient species in the Universe wishing to prevail must, absolutely must be able to effectively discourage such behavior.

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> it makes Hitler look like a saint.

You clearly don't understand what you are talking about, based on this.

I clearly do. Hitler killed millions of people, not unlike the Black Death or Genghis Khan, but what can you do, life goes on. Climate change is different. Life will absolutely not go on if we don't start handling it. It's an extinction event, and that's not a hyperbole, we are actually in the middle of the Holocene extinction event, also called the sixth mass extinction.

If it weren't for Hitler, World War II might have been over climate policy instead, and there might be no nukes. You gloss over Nth-order effects and cite a single statistic to compare relative damage done to humanity (spoiler alert: what you actually tried to do here is not possible to scientifically do at all - you are pro-science, right?). This tells me that you haven't done any real research on the topic, but are obtusely confident about it, on HN of all places. Who were your most influential authors on existential risks? Have you contributed to the literature at all?

The what if game works the other way around too. The Third Reich spent a lot of rethorical attention on environmentalism that soon became a less pressing concern. Under different circumstances however one might imagine that they would have tried to make the 1000-year Reich a reality, and nature conservancy and curbing pollution would have been a fit ideologically. But priorities tend to change, and the lack of individualism is not a guarantee against hypercapitalism.

Nuclear weapons were inevitable, they are trivial inventions.

Nobody would have fought over climate policy a 100 years ago. Climate change barely received any publicity before James Hansen's testimony in 1988.

>Life will absolutely not go on if we don't start handling it.

Hyperbole much? The Earth used to be a molten rock and from it life sprung forth. Do you honestly believe that we can put it into a worse position?

Humans might go extinct, but I'm certain that life will go on.

The biosphere is not undestroyable by any measure. Prior extinction events haven't manage to permanently damage it, but we shouldn't set the bar that low and rely on life's magical ability to spring forth and prosper under any circumstances.

It seems that there are only two differences between Hitler and climate change deniers. First, Hitler had actual executive powers to implement the measures suggested by his own slander campaign. Second, unlike Hitler, we still refuse to acknowledge that climate change deniers do have a direct responsibility over the various disasters and subsequent deaths caused by climate change.

You're arguing with a religious person. Logic has no place in these conversations, unfortunately.

...Sentence two, and y'all folks keep wondering who is fueling the lack of trust & emergence of conspiracy theories.

When you're fueling the emotional aspect with your words that unabashedly, you are making people who are on the fence or unsure certain something is really wrong with the mainstream claims. I can tell you this just from the reaction you gave me in the pit of my stomach.

I have strong sense of justice, but this is how countries are built to last. Rest assured that I wouldn't let some libertarian think tank and their corporate sponsors get away with such manipulation of public opinion for personal gain.

On the other hand if you are on the fence about climate change please call me ASAP, I have some property to sell.

No, it's an emergency. We've screwed the planet, big time. When they're cutting open whales to reveal heaps of plastic, find it on Everest's peak and also in our meat at the supermarket, and when 3M is still, to this very day, trying to weasel out of being forbidden from making PFAS (a pointless, stupid chemical group that we basically didn't need as a race), we can't afford to sit idly by and entertain the feelings of people who never really had an interest in anything outside of their yard.

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