Comment by ftxbro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ftxbro | Hacker News Reader

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I wish climate change news would make some effort to distinguish among the following levels of climate change outcomes: 1) the change would mean we have to change our way of life in some way like wear more sunscreen and not eat cows anymore and food gets more expensive and glaciers melt and polar bears now live only in zoos vs. 2) there will be major upheaval like every coastal city goes underwater and central USA for example will become like the sahara desert and many people die and it causes wars vs. 3) we reach some feedback loop where earth becomes just literally venus and every liquid and metal vaporizes and every human dies even the grandchildren of billionaires and even the ones who tried to burrow under ground.

I feel like so many stories about climate change the headline is like 'humans are doomed if we don't stay below 2 degrees Celsius increase since pre-industrial baseline' and then the body of the article is like 'our way of life will be affected by climate change if we don't do whatever'. I feel like this framing is bad. I'm not a climate change denier. I'm not even one of the guys who is like 'woke democrats are trying to hijack the climate change issue to take away my steaks and make me live in the pod and eat bugs'. I just want some information and not be lied to. Maybe it's normal journalistic sensationalism but I feel like it's extra damaging for this issue in particular.

I totally agree with you. For this reason, I don't follow mainstream outlets about climate change. The most balanced source I have found so far is this substack by Hannah Ritchie. Here is one of those balanced article - https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/15c-warming-tempor...

Great resource! Thanks for bringing it up.

Our world has dramatically increased in living standards during the period of increasing global average temperatures.

All of the IPCC future scenarios - including their worst case outcomes - still project a world where living standards keep increasing.

To restate this: the economic and scientific consensus (as presented by the IPCC) is that our world will be better off in the future even in their worst scenarios. The claims about humans being unable to survive are not supported by science.

The claims that well-off, privileged humans will not survive are not supported by science.

Science communication and trying to appropriately communicate risk has a lot of issues, yeah. I don't really blame them because there's been more than two decades of very obvious failure to get sufficient numbers of people sufficiently politically engaged to change enough to avoid catastrophic outcomes. In general, if you're a relatively high information person, you should probably be looking up the actual reports themselves by organisations like the IPCC.

As to your 1/2/3 scenarios, 1 is basically impossible at this point unless every major country starts extremely rapid decarbonisation, like zero carbon within 15 years sort of thing. We think we are on track for option 2, and with predictable mitigations (countries successfully pull off all pledged reductions) it's still pretty much 2, just potentially less severe. By "less severe", I mean we can try to prevent at least some of that sea level rise which means there will be some cities that become coastal but don't get catastrophically flooded. But like, Miami for example, that city won't exist by the end of the century without a hypothetical and unproven seawall (people always say seawalls, sure it's a decent idea, but we don't know if it's even feasible for us to build them to the necessary standards. It's like asking every coastal city to build something more complex and safety critical than Hoover Dam).

An important thing to think about is that the difference between 1 and 2 is class based. When I said 1 was impossible, I meant that it was impossible for like "most people", because we're on track for billions of people to become refugees because of climate change, likely leading to wars and significant political issues. But obviously if you're wealthy enough, you are basically insulated from those outcomes because you can just keep moving away from the coast (even if millions of other people are trying to move there at the same time) and the only real impact on you is the broader economic impacts on the country you live in, and even those are muted. So for the wealthy, it's always really been a question of "Is it going to be 1 or 3?", which is a big part of the reason why it has been so immensely hard to see significant political change to prevent anthropogenic climate change.

We don't really understand the science of 3 well enough to understand what the tipping points would be to start a runaway greenhouse effect, so no one knows for certain. We need more science on it. I think a very reasonable guess is that it won't happen until our greenhouse gas heat retention is at least as high as it was during the various times in Earth's history when the polar ice caps didn't exist, which gives us significant runway to work with. Beyond that, we just don't know.

Engage in a thought experiment with me, if you would. Imagine yourself 20 years in the future. And, somehow, you find that the world is a bit warmer, but things are still pretty much exactly as they've always been. Yet during this time you heard endless proclamations of the world effectively ending if extremely radical change isn't carried out in some window of 5-10 years. How do you think your future self would then further respond to such ongoing predictions?

The point the earlier poster is making is that he's making is that this behavior is self defeating, and absolutely should be blamed. The tale of 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf' dates back at least 2600 years and has its own version, independently 'discovered', in essentially every culture and language. Resorting to hyperbole for attention is simply self defeating if you care about the long-term, and in this case there is literally nothing except the long-term.

And this has been going on for far longer than 2 decades. This article [1] dates back to 1989. It starts with a lede of, "A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000." with only more excitement from there. Incidentally, that page has also been edited to remove the date of publication. You can see an archive of it here [2]. Very classy AP.

If I could go back in history to try to make people care about climate change, what I would do is lowball every single prediction to emphasize that when I make a prediction not only does it come true, but it invariably ends up even greater in magnitude than I predicted. Instead of creating a rubber banding effect where you get this huge shoart term gain in attention followed by a slap back in the face, you'd instead see an initially small but ever-growing and consistent movement.

[1] - https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0

[2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20201101032435/https://apnews.co...

right, but the purpose of the news is not to tell you the future but to make you feel anxious about it and to push forward political agendas of the people who pay for it. i just pay as little attention as possible to any of this shit beyond entertainment value.

You forgot:

0) Since the troposphere has actually warmed only 0.5C in the last forty years, and the world is rapidly reducing human CO2 emissions (which turn out to be a smaller fraction of the total than previously thought), there is little to worry about, and we should direct our efforts at resolving more important issues.

> the world is rapidly reducing human CO2 emissions

Since when? This is news to me.

news to me, too.

there was a dip in 2020 apparently, but i'd hardly call that a trend -- and the reason is obvious: the world halted for a little bit.

“This is fine” https://climatecasino.net/2023/06/wtf-is-happening-an-overvi...

This sure doesn’t look like a “rapid” reduction either https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...

We’ve added 25% of ALL our Co2 emissions since 2010, and if current emissions remained flat we would add another 25% in ~15 years.

But sure, let’s focus on 1 variable and live in denial.

0.5C in 40 years sounds like a lot.

I'm not an expert but my impression of the issue is like we are headed to (1) no matter what and they are trying to say that if we keep digging up and burning coal and venting or burning natural gas then we are in danger of reaching (2). But the headline says (3) and the deniers say (0).

go ahead and google "co2 half-life in atmosphere" and "cumulative co2 emissions over time"

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