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Comment by subroutine | Hacker News Reader

Not to dismiss the effects of climate change, but when we start blaming every environmental change we observe on climate change, I feel like we're bound to misdiagnose a bunch problems. That is a serious issue because reversing climate change is likely much more difficult and long-term (and perhaps conducive to forming defeatist attitudes) than identifying solutions to some number of unrelated environmental problems.

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I find it curious that after all the pages they dedicate to saying that water is getting browner, they say that the primary cause of brownness is a reduction in the amount of acid rain over the last 40 years but some people suspect that warmer weather may be contributing to it as well. If the primary cause is reduction in acid rain, it seems weird to talk about how people aren't going to be able to wash white shirts in lake water as if it is a bad thing and how expensive water filtration systems are.

> This change has been taking place since the 1980s, and until the present day the main cause has been a decrease in acid rain. But now researchers think that climate change is also having an effect.

I guess the problem with that line of thought is that we don't have a control planet to compare results with. We know climate change is real, and we know that these changes are real, but we don't know if they're related because we can't get away from climate change. Maybe the answer isn't to dismiss these findings, but to stop climate change so we can know for sure.

You don't need a control planet. And you don't need to dismiss climate change. And we shouldn't stop aggressively trying to combat climate change. All I'm saying is there's bound to be environmental issues not due to climate change that we can fix rather rapidly, but since they've been chalked up to climate change we have stopped looking into the actual underlying reason. For example California has seen a steady increase in the number of wild fires each year. Someone says it's due to climate change. We accept the reasoning - makes sense. But maybe it's due to aging electrical grid infrastructure? After all most fires are started by downed power lines. And if it is due to old telephone polls, that's something we could fix now. But if we've already accepted that the increase in wildfires is due to climate change, why look into alternative explanations?

The solutions are already very clear, there is no difficulty or complexity here. It's just another example of the change that we observe all over the world, only this time documented in a beautiful web page.

Oh and the solution is quite simple: we need to stop burning things. It really is that simple.

This isn't about focussing on misdiagnosing problems, it's acknowledging that there is a problem in the first place and that we must make very significant sacrifices in our way of living.

The real discussion is mostly about: do we want a controlled change in our way of living or do we want nature crash down upon us?

It seems now that people don't want to change for the most part, just continue with business as usual and thus automatically choose the latter part.

People also don't want to starve or freeze to death. Or be reduced to the level of 19th century poverty.

It is a mark of just plain bad thinking to reduce any dissident opinion to that of a "denier".

This 'dissident opinion' was clearly a 'just asking questions' bad-faith attempt create confusion where there isn't one.

Starving or freezing to death or being reduced to poverty is not a defacto outcome of climate change measures, but purely politics.

The article doesn't even discuss specific policies or measures, so it's 100% bad faith.

A local professor takes the local newspaper to task over this alarmism.

https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2022/12/more-climate-misinfor...

That's because this piece is more propaganda than science. I'm not denying anything, but anyone serious about science should not be persuaded by pieces like this.

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