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Comment by timst4 | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating that his Gaia hypothesis came after his research with Royal Dutch Shell. It’s amazing how early we knew fossil fuels were destabilizing our biosphere.

This man knew we were heading towards an uninhabitable world and screamed at the top of his lungs, but corporate growth was more important. Persephone, indeed.

He may have walked back his prediction of earth being largely uninhabitable by 2050, but I have a feeling he was only slightly off. The sad truth is that 50C is coming faster than you realize, and this man was crystal clear on the subject in the 1990s.

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> It’s amazing how early we knew fossil fuels were destabilizing our biosphere.

For those who don't know, the US government had a pretty complete understanding of the issue in the 60s.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3227654-PSAC-1965-Re...

https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/virtuallibr...

We knew about tobacco, we knew about opiates, we knew about climate, we knew about lead, the list is long.

I've wonder if that's as damning as it sounds, though. Knowing something is a problem, and even knowing how to theoretically solve it, still doesn't mean you have the power to change it. Fighting systems is hard, even for a government that might happen to be a supermajority sometimes.

Also "knowing" and actually knowing are different things.

There had been research done as far back as that which came to the conclusion that it causes climate change. But that doesn't mean that the governing body at that time was aware of the research and if so, really believed it or just thought that the researchers are massively exaggerating.

I know that the research was done on the behalf of the government, but that doesn't mean that everyone governing/deciding on these issues had access to/were aware of the results.

> really believed it or just thought that the researchers are massively exaggerating.

Particularly in a period of time, the '60s/'70s, where a lot of things were happening and lots of stuff was shouted in the street as "inevitable" (the proletariat rising, the age of Aquarius, the arrival of aliens, or even good ol' biblical apocalypse...).

I was reminded this week of the "Peak Oil" craze around ten years ago. No one really talks about that anymore.

We knew about sugar but knowingly blamed it on fat.

I'm not sure I'd say those documents suggest "a pretty complete understanding" by any means, and on their own would hardly constitute convincing proof of the need to start reducing emissions. But we definitely did have that by the 80s, and 40 years later we're still not taking it seriously.

I find it tragic how common this rhetoric exists, where one says we should take something seriously immediately after downplaying the issue with a crippling "[no] convincing evidence" clause. Managing world-ending risk, the bar for conviction simply oughn't be so high. How convinced of the inevitability of a home invasion must one be to lock their doors & get an alarm or a gun?

What's wild to me is how consistently science has chosen to be politically palatable rather than come off as "alarmist".

Like in the original 1.5C report. We didn't have good data on permafrost melting and how much methane that would release. Permafrost melting has been hypothesized as possibly one of the biggest contributors to a runaway effect. But they just straight up decided to ignore the entire effect

That's just one of the many decisions made that makes the 1.5C report wildly more optimistic than reality.

It's no wonder scientists like Lovelock who were very familiar with this research were some of the most likely to point out that science is a political institution with its own biases and incentives

If the choice was to be invited to participate in the conversation or not, wouldn’t you tone down your public statements in order to have a hope of influencing policy?

I’m not saying it’s the right strategy now, but premature hyperbole just slows down adoption, if it does anything at all.

> If the choice was to be invited to participate in the conversation or not, wouldn’t you tone down your public statements in order to have a hope of influencing policy?

An interesting bind is called "The Critics' Dilemma", best understood through a (Chinese) story.

One day some farmers see an invading army coming over the hill. They rush into the city to tell the emperor. "Emperor, a huge army is approaching, we're surely doomed!" Not wanting to have the whole city panic the emperor has the men executed to silence them. Invaders enter the city and slaughter all the imperial soldiers.

Many years later two farmers are watching the horizon when they see an army gathering. "Quickly, let's warn the citizens" says one. "No. Remember the story of what happened to our grandfathers." says the other. So they return to the city and tell the emperor, "We saw a few bandits gathered by the woods". The emperors soldiers go to confront them and are all killed, The city is raided again.

The dilemma is "Tell them too much and they will deny you out of fear. Tell them too little and they will be unprepared."

This applies, along with the Cassandra effect, right to the heart of all intelligent critique. People are happy to die from ignorance so long as you don't upset them with cognitive dissonance. Later, when they are in imminent peril, they'll blame you for not speaking up sooner.

The story doesn't really make sense, wouldn't the more distant outposts easily confirm if a huge army is amassing nearby?

It's a short parable, of course it doesn't stand up to pedantic nitpicking.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf isn't a tightly tuned narrative either - why wouldn't they just put a more reliable shepherd boy out with the sheep after the first couple of lies? But that's hardly the point of a parable/fable.

I'd hardly call the fundamentals of organization pedantic nitpicking. It's not much of a country if they can't figure out whether or not a huge enemy army is on their territory. I'd say the only way this situation could ever be remotely possible was is if the country was in the final stages of collapse.

It’s a fable or parable.

Frogs and scorpions can’t have chats either but the point remains sound.

Not if the distant outposts have already succumbed to the advancing army…and all of those who came in from the field to warn the Emperor have previously been silenced.

The answer is "no".

If the system refuses to face truth, you will need to circumvent the system. The opposite of that gives us institutions that are continually disseminating lies, in the process undermining trust in institutions.

Truth doesn't get "invited to conversations". It is always part of it, and the choice is just spoken or unspoken.

> If the system refuses to face truth, you will need to circumvent the system.

That is a terrifying sentence. It can be used to justify anything while denying accountability. There's always the possibility (probability) that you are wrong about what is "the truth."

I completely agree with you but I don't really think it's relevant to this situation. The situation is not a decision between 2 different possible truths. It's a decision to sweep something under the rug. Something that we know will have an effect, we just don't know the magnitude of it. When faced with ambiguity we should take a best guess (even if it's a "conservative" guess) not ignore everything because its more politically convenient

The "best guess" was clearly not taken here

"face truth" is not exactly "anything". The desired outcome is - which is pretty damn obvious from the context here - that the system will need to face up to truth.

And I'm certainly not sure how any of this denies accountability.

Maybe you're just projecting a little bit much into a single sentence?

Right, that's why empiricism and the scientific method are so important. This is in the context of scientists being "invited to participate in the conversation or not", eh?

> That is a terrifying sentence

It is.

But so is the situation under discussion. When you have the choice between getting silenced for the truth, or keeping quiet about a disaster, the people putting you in this dilemma aren't doing so by using tools of reason or debate - but with tools of power and terror.

> premature hyperbole just slows down adoption

Wasn't it intentional euphemism in this case, however?

"Premature hyperbole"? Interesting choice of framing.

Assuming that permafrost is going not only be a major contributor to greenhouse gases, but also trigger a runaway reaction is the alarmism. They're not being politically palatable, they're making predictions based on the data that we have and being honest.

#1 The likely scenario we don't yet have evidence to make a strong claim about: it's a huge effect

#2 The conservative position: it's going to have an effect

#3 The radical position that goes completely against any existing science: it won't have any effect

Why choose #3?

There's an asteroid headed for earth. It's going to kill us all. We need to drop everything, including our effort on climate change, to redirect it. I can't actually find the asteroid, but should we still follow through with my demands?

Do you understand how the example you just gave is exactly the opposite of the actual scenario I tried to paint.

My ENTIRE point is that it's a continuum. It's not a binary thing. The point is that there's gonna be an impact and it's gonna be somewhere between 2.35 and 6.25 of impact on some arbitrary scale I just made up. Why would we act as if it's 0 when we could at LEAST act as if it's 2.35??

Your scenario is exactly the opposite of this and a really unhelpful metaphor

Where does the lower bound of 2.35 come from? When you state this lower bound you are saying that we know with certainty that at least this much impact will happen. We lack that data so there's no lower bound, or rather the lower bound is zero. You could falsely claim a lower bound, but that erodes the credibility of the environmental movement.

Persephone? I think you might mean Cassandra, if you’re talking about the woman who was cursed by Apollo to speak the truth but have nobody listen.

I'm sure you're right that the commenter meant Cassandra but one might also argue that Persephone's curse, that newly increased periodic temperature swings will sometimes turn the earth barren and useless to us, is relevant to the conversation.

> This man knew we were heading towards an uninhabitable world [...]

Huh? Since when are we heading towards an uninhabitable world?

Yes, climate change is real. But it's not going to make the world uninhabitable.

The best estimates are that climate change would cut between 5-20% of global GDP. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_ch... or https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/climate/climate-change-ec... (Keep in mind that the latter is an article from the NYT reporting on an analysis by an insurer. The NYT isn't exactly a climate change denier.)

That's a gigantic number in absolute terms. But it's also less than the difference between US and UK GDP per capita. And the UK is far from uninhabitable.

(My assumption here is that an uninhabitable place would have essentially zero GDP. Therefore to retain 80%+ of GDP, the planet must still be heavily inhabited.)

"Uninhabitable" could take many forms. Imagine that by 2050, summer temps in Europe and N America sometimes hit 50C, and in the likes of Middle East, N Africa, Pakistan/India etc they hit 60C. This doesn't seem far-fetched given that Seattle had 42C last year, UK 40C this year, Pakistan has had 50C, and the trend appears to be accelerating. So in the 60C places there'd be complete wipe-outs of population if people tried to stay living there, in the 50C places there'd still be mass deaths. But also, there'd be extremely severe crops failures leading to mass starvation even in places not as hot. Unless humankind develops very fast, some carbon capture tech that immediately rids us off this excess CO2, and/or some major advances are made in agriculture to respond to the change in temperature, it seems to me that much of the earth could become effectively uninhabitable.

You know that airconditioning is already a thing in hot places, do you?

There's also other lower-tech means for dealing with temporary extreme temperatures.

> But also, there'd be extremely severe crops failures leading to mass starvation even in places not as hot. [...]

We'd expect all of these to show up as a drop in GDP, wouldn't we? Eg you can clearly see the wars in Syria or Ukraine show up in their GDP figures.

Please correct the Wikipedia article I linked to, if you have better impact-of-climate-change on GDP forecasts than what's currently on there.

Air-conditioning is a thing in well-off hot places and for well-off people in poorer countries. But not for poorer people in poorer countries. Given how many in the world don't even have enough to eat, right now, I struggle to see how they'd acquire air-conditioning in the foreseeable future. And if they did, that'd need a massive increase in electricity generation and supply infrastructure. I don't see how that would easily happen. There are indeed some low tech means to deal with high temps, but its not enough, is it? We're literally playing with fire here. Just my 2p ...... (as for GDP I don't know much about the effect of climate change on that, but would imagine GDP is gonna be the least of people's worries if the temp is 50-60C )

What so you mean 50C is coming?

50 degrees C of warming?

No, obviously it means high temperatures of 50C will become reality even in urban areas, not just in deserts.

I think they mean the temperature spiking to 50C, instead of ~40C, in the summer.

~10C of warming in the short to medium term is beyond even the wildest IPCC models is it not?

Averaged out globally that might be the case, but any one location might experience temperature spikes like that. Consider the Pacific Northwest “heat dome” that we got last summer, featuring temperatures 10-20C above normal. They indeed maxed out out at 50C in the village of Lytton, BC, which burned to the ground as a result.

I suggest moving.

Global warming. Moving to a different globe?

No, why? Just because something has 'global' in the name, doesn't mean everywhere will have the same temperature.

not at all, large swaths of the northern hemisphere are expected to see 6 - 8C warmer hottest days of the year, even in just a 2C scenario:

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/11/figu...

also that report is four years old now. the AR6 data revised the ranges up but didn't re-do all the visuals so I don't have a new jpg to link to. also observed reality has trended warmer/sooner than predicted.

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