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Comment by PKop | Hacker News Reader

Awesome, good for them. More should oppose the insane climate propaganda and not cave to ideological mob pressure.

The ideology of wanting humans to not send themselves to extinction like we're doing to so many other species. How horrible!

Humans will not send themselves to extinction if the earth gets a few degrees warmer. That is the propaganda. We survived ice ages, and with our modern technology we will survive warming.

I'm not saying there won't be negatives, but to say we are all going to die, is absurd to the extreme. Unfortunately that is common today, however it is merely one in a long line of apocalyptic movements which have been common in every century in recorded history.

I didn't say we are all going to die. I still have hope that despite all the recalcitrant folks constantly bemoaning every attempt at collective action to curb the coming problems that we will survive. But it won't be thanks to said people crying "climate propaganda!" The attitude espoused by OP here is worse than useless. It's thanks to propaganda from ideologues who OPPOSE collective action on climate change that there are huge swaths of people who think it's not an issue at all, or some kind of commie plot. Stop the buffoonery, and stop demonizing people who want to prevent future suffering and ecological degradation.

We can't all make it either, that is utopian thinking. There will be winners and losers.

This is a non sequitur given what I wrote.

But we can try to minimize the number of losers.

> I didn't say we are all going to die.

But you said:

> The ideology of wanting humans to not send themselves to extinction

It seems pretty clear you are implying we will literally go extinct because of global warming. This is crazy.

The nuance you and others are missing is that I didn't say it was a definite thing. I didn't even say it was likely. I implied that the ideology he was complaining about is made up of people who don't think we should accelerate towards extinction: not an extreme stance at all.

Given even a slight, non-zero risk of us doing that, if you have the stance that we shouldn't, it's reasonable to take steps to reduce the risk.

I could have been way more succinct and less sarcastic with my original comment, but it hardly seems worth the effort when replying to a post like theirs.

The stance is extreme because it's doomsday speak, of the kind only people on top of a box in the park used to say when I was a kid. Humans will be here, maybe less of us, on boats, in constant air-con personal pods, whatever, we'll figure something out.

We're not going extinct any time soon unless someone decides to launch nuclear weapons.

>It seems pretty clear you are implying we will literally go extinct because of global warming. This is crazy.

It's implying that we are sending ourselves towards extinction, just as if you were sending yourself towards obesity by continually consuming 10,000 Calories per day. What is really crazy is that there are still climate change deniers that exist in this comments section.

Hyperbole tends to push people away. I was quite active in climate causes about 20 years ago, in large part because I was young and felt that without imminent action the world would face catastrophic damage. This [1] article is just one countless of the time. It was reporting on a Pentagon climate report that the White House was trying to 'keep the public from seeing.' At the top, in bright yellow, the Guardian is reminding viewers that "This article is more than 19 years old." And the lede is "Britain will be 'Siberian' in less than 20 years."

Other claims include that "by 2020 'catastrophic' shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war.' It's further suggested that this will also come with "widespread crop failure, famine, disease, and mass migration of populations..." And that's just from "my" era. As you go further back, you will find similar reports. Here's [2] one I dug up from 1982: "Monstafa K. Tolba, executive director of the United States environmental program, told delegates that if the nations of the world continued their present policies, they would face by the turn of the century "an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible, as any nuclear holocaust."

If I could go back 80 years into the past and try to optimize the world for climate action I would make sure that any and all predictions made appealed not to the drama of the high end outliers in order to try to spur on immediate action, but instead did the exact opposite and assumed the low end outliers - so that people would have decades of evidence of my predictions not only coming true, but being far greater in impact. At least in my case, you can thank hyperbolic messaging for the reason I've gone from 'active advocate' to 'meh, I'm somewhat more concerned about nuclear war tbh.'

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.t...

[2] - https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/1982.j...

IMHO, that sounds just like a burnout from activism, caused by cynical people who are "meh" about the issue.

Logically, your claim (that catastrophizing drives people away from activism) doesn't make much sense. If you still think that environment has same value as you did in the past, then you should still support the ecological policies, regardless what people are saying. If you only supported them because of catastrophism and not because you don't inherently value it, then you were misled and shouldn't have advocated it in the first place.

What I am saying is you have moral agency, and if you feel misled by other people's factual claims (e.g. exaggerating the impact, regardless of reason), it shouldn't change the validity of your moral stance or your values. But if your values didn't change, you're still an advocate, although perhaps with a different outlook.

The problem is the doomsday prophesies are unfalsifiable. We are at the point now where questioning anything related to global warming is professional suicide. Experts have been telling us perpetually that “soon” we will be past the point of no return and we are doomed. The climate is so large, and so much data is collected, and experiments are impossible to conduct, that you can make a case for almost anything at no one can say you are wrong.

I find the whole thing very exhausting. Fine let’s reduce carbon but I’m not going to live my life in panic and depression because of this.

Of course the globe warming 3 degrees isn’t going to cause human extinction. But it will kill hundreds of millions due to inevitable war and genocide over the changing landscape.

Thinking that mass famine/flooding/heat events in Africa, India, or South America isn’t going to affect you is incredibly naive. Instability ain’t good, and we can’t just welcome it with open arms. Shit that happens in Wuhan, Donetsk and elsewhere do affect you

Global warming is going to increase food supply because carbon is an input to photosynthesis. Several studies have shown that increased carbon in the atmosphere increases crop yields and increases water usage efficiency by reducing plant transpiration.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-study-rising-...

On social media I've noticed a trend where people attribute every bad thing that immediately comes to mind to climate change. War, extinction, famine, disease and pestilence, I've even seen people confidently throw increases of rape in there when describing the impending hellscape sure to befall humanity in the next x years due to climate change, citing some very dubious chain of correlative logic.

The truth is that a warming planet will change things but not all changes are bad for humans, and those that are bad are not all catastrophic or unmanageable. I think it will do everyone some good to take a step back and look at things with an analytical and curious eye, and reject the urge to panic or spread addictive but harmful fear porn.

> For wheat and soybean crops, in terms of yield the median negative impacts are fully compensated, and rice crops recoup up to 90 percent and maize up to 60 percent of their losses.

That’s quite a buried lede. At best it evens out all the bad effects

I honestly don’t know how to reconcile our worldviews here, and I envy your optimism. But “just wingin it” isn’t what brings about good change. Those with curious and analytical eyes should see that our actions vis a vis climate change and other things have consequences. Good or bad, who really knows. But why are we committing ourselves before knowing?

Seems pretty dumb

You're missing the point. Many places won't be able to grow food anymore, not in sufficient quantities.

It's irrelevant if Ukraine produces 20% extra if other countries can't make enough food. You can't always assume international trade is there or that poor countries, especially, can afford it.

Plants like more carbon and more heat. Areas that are currently too cold to grow will become capable with longer grow cycles. We can enrich soil with fertilizer to make it better.

In the past, current deserts (Iraq / Mesopotamia) were much more hospitable to plants and life. Now they are not. Climate change has been a fact of life for all of human history. Now it may be man made, but that doesn’t change the fact that we have lived through this before. The Bible is full of stories regarding drought, famine, floods. That is part of nature.

Those past changes were quite disruptive, causing malnutrition and death, wars, etc. The current rate of change is much faster so we should expect all of those to be worse because there are far more people alive now and neither humanity nor the ecosystem have much time to adapt.

I disagree - I think modern society, international trade, and communication systems make such disasters far, far less likely.

I'm against the hype that every storm is "omg gobal warming", getting a stream of existential dread in news headlines and personal discussions or posts is tiring.

That said, the globe will be easier to live on if the +x degrees C is minimized from pre-industrial temperatures. Like I'm sure humans will make it but it's up to us the quality of that existence and if we'll share it with current species.

I also get that the globe goes through cycles and the suns heating up in solar cycles, etc. Still pushing more ocean water into the atmosphere, sinking thermal energy into the oceans where we are using up the latent energy of ice melt, (after which there is less cooling capacity available in liquid water than surface ice at constant temperature), acid-ification of oceans that provide food for much of the globe, accelerating arid-ification of already progressing geological areas like US southwest or sub-Saharan Africa, all of these could in part be natural progressions. But if its in our control to reduce the greenhouse gas concentration (that has mechanistic explanation for heat capture, it is not blind correlation) in air or do something crazy like atmospheric geoengineering more people and plants and animals would face a better shot.

Global average temperatures are one part of the story. There is high-frequency temporal variance and spatial variance. Its possible to make a rough order-of-magnitude approximation for energy released in a hurricane. Higher incidence of high wind and heavy rain hurricanes is a measured (~100 years) value. We won't get rid of storms or famine & flood magically. But maybe transitioning from burning stuff for all energy and adopting more scalable living models wrt density and transportation could slow down the bad effects. Its not a conspiracy. Plenty of companies want to capitalize on teh movement but that doesn't invalidate the underlying motivation to change from the current state.

Humans didn't exist during the last Ice Age. We've never survived an Ice Age and you certainly can't say anything for certain about our future. Technology has gotten into this mess. We can hope it also brings our salvation but I wouldn't bet the species on it.

Yes we did?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period

That's what they want you to believe.

Harnessing fear itself has proven to be a powerful tool of controlling the masses.

Realise the truth and it will set you free.

This has strong Poe's law vibes. If you're serious: pretend I sent you an eye-roll emoji.

Whichever group/nation abstains from consuming better energy sources will just get run over by the the nations that don't make that mistake. ESG et all are national suicide pacts, look at Europe. They are declining, and will be a weaker power as they use less energy than their competitors. Human history and the human condition is conflict and competition, you have to win the game against others, not voluntarily lose it.

This is kind of a shallow take. Building for sustainability makes a nation STRONGER in the face of declining resources. It's investing in the future.

In a global system like the one we have, is there really only one game to play in order to succeed?

Transitioning from natural gas to renewables will make Germany weaker?

No but moving away from nuclear power will.

Just checked and yes indeed, the German govt has and will continue to shut them down. Darn.

I really thought they were going to pause and keep them running, for a while longer at least.

I don't pay much attention to stuff outside of the USA. We've got so many problems of our own.

But, in case you're interested, I did find this episode interesting.

"Germany's current energy situation & its past energy choices. A conversation with German energy economist Claudia Kemfert." 2022/11/09

https://www.volts.wtf/p/germanys-current-energy-situation

There is no threat of extinction, this is silly.

YES, let the fascism wash over us. More profit. Forget the people and the polar bears. As long as the imaginary bank account number grows and grows and we're beating the other rich people, none of that stuff matters. We're building a rocketship anyways and we won't be here much longer. We'll leave them all gasping for air in the wake of our plumage. Yesssss Bezos Yes.

Yeah look there's nothing in the above I'm actively disagreeing with here. What I am disagreeing with is the way you've said that. It isn't productive. It doesn't shed any light on things. It doesn't assume the best of the person you're replying to. It goes nowhere.

There's plenty of other places where this kind of response is welcome. Also @dang will get cross and we can't have that.

There is this liberal idea (nicely explained in https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/) that all disagreements are about facts, i.e. if we all understood reality well enough, we would surely agree (mistake outlook). But some disagreements are about values. That's the conflict outlook. In this case, some people simply value ecological future more than short-term profit.

There are as many different ways of disagreeing as there are pairs of people.

I don't know what this kind of naked abuse with no substance achieves but whatever it is, there are /plenty/ of places to do it. It's been a thing discouraged here in house rules. Making no progress without it seems no worse than making no progress with it to me. I find especially when I just /know/ I'm completely correct about something important and feel emotionally engaged in that, someone is right there to use that to exploit it. So even though I'm right, and obviously so about something deeply, deeply important to the world, remaining calm and rational has value for me and for the proper prosecution of the thing I believe in so strongly. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and all that.

Ymmv. Anger and rage have their place.

> insane climate propaganda

In a nutshell, what is the climate propaganda?

"Climate propaganda" is any statement that places environment, life, or literally anything else above the idea that our filthy rich overlords desperately need more money even if it kills us all. More money for the filthy rich is the only thing that matters in the entire Universe. If you believe otherwise, you're a filthy heathen heretic hippie tree hugger.

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