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Comment by jliptzin | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you but in a situation like this it’s a lot better to overreact than to underreact. If we do more than we need to, we get cheap solar panels, long lasting batteries, and maybe a lot of time and money wasted on ideas that didn’t work out. If we do less than we have to, we get a possibly irreversible feedback loop of global warming that leads to the collapse of most habitats (including ours) on this planet.

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Overreact is practically "Boy who cried wolf"

There is such a thing a social capital that you have to spend wisely on real important things. Else, you'll lose trust and you can't play that card again

The wolf is already at work. Just go hiking in the Alps and look at the extend of the glaciers, take a look at the raining/snowing patterns over the past 50 years, everwhere you look you can see the effects.

You can call it what you want, but anyway if we want to live long term on this planet we need to reach an equilibrium with our environment. We definitely can't achieve this by pumping oil and gas out and burning it.

Glaciers have been melting in the north since the last ice age though. It may go faster now than it did 100 years ago, but with or without more CO2, glaciers were going to disappear many places.

In the very long term, and even then it was uncertain as the planet would be on a cooling trend right now. Even then, we’re talking about “glaciers might disappear in 10 000 years” versus “80% of alpine glaciers will be gone in a century”.

It's speculative so who knows. But northern Europe was covered fully by ice 12000 years ago. There has definitely been more melting since then, than what is left.

Did you pay attention to the boy who cried wolf? There was a wolf. It ate the boy. The villagers didn't do a thing to stop it.

You'd better hope this isn't a "Boy who cried wolf" situation.

Exactly my point.

Environmentalists cried wolf for "Nuclear Powered Solutions". They cried wolf for "Natural Gas Fracking". They cried wolf for "GMO".

Now, they have lost social capital and don't have credibility for "Co2 emissions"

https://www.gocomics.com/joelpett/2009/12/13

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_if_it%27s_a_big_hoax_and_...

But what if it's a smaller deal than some suggests and people in Europe now are going to freeze and potentially even starve because the transition to environmentally-friendly energy was completely botched?

It’s not though.

There are a large volume of people who question the validity of climate change at all, exaggerating only causes more doubt and recruits for the opposition.

The doom scenario of “irreversible collapse” is also quite unlikely but some people really like scary stories. And to be blunt any practical imaginable progress is not going to be a very big change, if it’s going to happen the damage is already likely done.

You said yourself it’s not well understood, don’t you think it’s wise to err on the side of caution? What’s the downside of getting off fossil fuels anyway, besides some people needing to switch careers from coal mining to solar panel installation, for example?

The downside is not having heat in the winter in Sweden. There is a pretty significant downside there.

Electric heating is a thing, and so is nuclear power.

Nuclear power is great. Unfortunately the environmental groups that lobbied for renewable energy, also lobbied against nuclear power. So much less available nuclear power for Sweden in the winter, than there should have been.

The false dichotomy is very damaging. It’s not nuclear or renewables. We need both, and as much of either as we possibly can. Neither nuclear or renewables would be enough to get rid of enough fossil fuels on their own.

But it doesn't make much sense to combine them. Wind and Solar, as well as nuclear have similar cost characteristics. The cost of an additional unit of energy produced is very low, almost all of the cost is in building them & keeping them running. It almost never makes (financial) sense to throttle them. Thus nuclear being a so-called baseload. It doesn't make much sense to use it in any other way (for example, like a peaker-plant).

Both are best served with a complement that has low(er) capital cost but higher cost per unit of energy produced like storage or gas plants (maybe with P2G) for periods of high demand or when generation falls flat (mostly for renewables, but as we're seeing in france some nuclear reactors are having trouble as well in high-temp environments).

It does make sense to combine them. Manufacturing renewable energy sources requires lots of cheap energy, and can be done in remote places, and currently uses fossil fuels. Use nuclear instead as the base of the energy pyramid (like food pyramid).

> But it doesn't make much sense to combine them.

On the contrary, it makes a lot of sense.

They have complementary production profiles, with nuclear providing near/constant levels for time scales from days to years. This mechanically reduces the amount of energy storage needed (storage at the required scale is still very much not solved).

They have complementary risk profiles. Wind and PV rely on weather and are likely to fail us when the weather gets really bad, i.e. when we’re already in crisis mode. Nuclear failure modes are very different and combining them makes the grid much more resilient overall.

There is no realistic scenario in the short to mid term future where we can have 100% wind and solar without either a massive overproduction capacity, or overly-large storage capabilities. The rise in wind+PV is accompanied by a rise in gas and charcoal use.

Nuclear also has the advantage of taking way less land for the same energy output. Yes, this is important if we want at the same time to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels used in agriculture, which will reduce yields and thus require more land for the same amount of food produced, and keep our forests as carbon sinks (expand them, actually).

> Wind and Solar, as well as nuclear have similar cost characteristics.

Cost is only part of the story. If we follow the path of the smallest costs, we’ll just burn oil until we hit a wall.

Nuclear power is not great and environmental groups were and remain correct to lobby against it.

The precautionary principle is attractive, but it ignores the possibility that lost opportunity costs can exceed those of the risk being avoided. Turning on the lhc was considered by some to have a miniscule risk of turning earth into a tiny black hole that would last a moment before evaporating. My particle physics friends laughed and agreed there was a non zero risk. The notion that an action with a tiny yet finite risk of an event with infinite cost should itself have infinite cost would preclude most everyday activities. Not that climate change or emissions fit that category I think the risks aren't that small, just saying be careful with the precautionary principle.

Some amount of climate change would probably be beneficial to some nations. Russia would vome to mind with more arable land potentially becoming available, but some models show it being borderline too dry to grow on. Those same models show a net benefit to agriculture in Midwestern US. I wonder if xkcd or 538 could whip us up a map of climate change winner/losers and areas that support co2 policies?

> What’s the downside of getting off fossil fuels anyway,

Poverty?

The sooner we transition, the sooner we’ll be able to become vastly wealthier: the GDP growth rate is highly correlated with the growth rate of energy consumption. The growth rate of energy consumption has been declining since around 1970, hence the decline in the GDP growth rate. This is because it’s ever more difficult to extract ever more energy from fossil sources. Once we transition to renewables, the GDP growth rate will rise as our ability to increase energy consumption rises, until some point of saturation far in the future.

One way to think about this is to consider that a hypothetical objector might ask the same question of an advocate of a planned, civilization wide transition from wood burning to coal burning. And the coal advocate would be right to make the same argument as above.

Getting off fossil fuels is a necessity. Don't kid yourself what the result of that really means.

"Transitioning to renewables" what does that even mean? Like it's so simple?

Solar panels aren't going to ship you cheap iPhones and mountains of plastic trash from china for pennies, nor will it fertalize your crops or maintain USD as the reserve currency.

Look I don't mean to be rude. I'm not a climate denier. I'm not even arguing against transitioning off fossil fuels. I'm just not naive about it. Poverty, starvation and mass death is the only way we transition off fossil fuels. That's if we're lucky.

Is your argument that renewables aren’t usable for liquid fuels in ocean shipping, therefore we can’t use purely renewable energy sources? Because solar panels (or wind turbines, or geothermal, or hydro, etc.) can generate electricity to use for electrolysis to generate hydrogen (or better, ammonia). The options aren’t only oil or batteries… there are many use cases where fuel energy density doesn’t matter that much, but where it does (transport), hydrogen is a viable option that we can do today.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201127-how-hydrogen-fue...

Yes, it is that simple, and yes, solar panels can be used to ship iPhones from China and fertilize crops and so on. And no, poverty, starvation, and mass death are not required to transition.

It's wise to care about the climate. It's wise to investigate human behavior's effect on climate. It's also wise to question investigations, their results, and especially their conclusions.

I don't know what a downside to getting off fossil fuels would be but its not hard to imagine some. Take this article for example : https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2016-06-15/what-is-an-ic... I seriously doubt the scientific basis for the statement "The Earth is due for another ice age now but climate change makes it very unlikely" but it's one idea.

There are a large volume of people who believe that demons and ghosts are real: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/10/28/do-gho...

I say that just to point out that popularity doesn't provide legitimacy. But with that case I'd assume that there just might be a significant overlap between that example and climate deniers.

The doom scenarios have enough possibility and probability to warrant being taken seriously. Wishing it away on future generations is psychopathic.

Hasn't there been multiple variations/iterations of "validity of climate change"? As in, some form of "climate change isn't real" to "climate change is real but it's normal and not man made" to "climate change is real and man made but it's not that bad" so on so forth.

I wonder if the opposite exists. People in climate change denier groups that exaggerate just how normal it is which as you said only causes more doubts and recruits for the opposition.

I admit I haven't delved into the "opposition" - in this case assuming that "deniers" are a loud minority and the main agreed viewpoint is some form of climate is going to be bad for everyone regardless of the source. But given the rigorous process in science and how much evidence is available (whether deniers are skeptical of ALL of the evidence or not) - is there any research with a similar process against it? Regarding what you said about how the "irreversible collapse is also quite unlikely"?

Haldane's theory on stages of acceptance:

1. This is worthless nonsense.

2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.

3. This is true, but quite unimportant.

4. I always said so.

If we over react we get an unstable grid which is incredibly fragile and doesn't work in the winter. Just look at Germany today. The only country to voluntarily de-electrify itself.

My understanding is that they have actually added brown-coal capacity to their grid. The problem wasn't a fear of climate change, but of another Fukushima type event. They have been ramping up wind, and they have fairly reliable wind, but wind patterns can shift too.

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