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Comment by efitz | Hacker News Reader

I am tired of the “end of the word is nigh” headlines about climate change. I stopped going to church regularly in my late teens because I got tired of the “Armageddon could happen anytime” messaging in protestant Christianity. Feels the same to me with climate change alarmists.

Is the earth warming? Yes. Is it net bad for people? I’m not convinced.

I’m not convinced that oceans rising an inch in the next century is going to doom humanity. More people die of cold every year than of heat. We have dikes. When something becomes a visible problem we usually either address it or find a workaround.

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It sounds like you only care about problems that affect you very directly, which is pretty short-sighted. There are many climate-related problems that are affecting people already in Central America (no rain, can't farm, so they're walking north), the northern US and California (wildfires and wildfire smoke), the Midwest (aquifers depleted, rendering farmland less valuable), Florida (sinkholes from aquifer depletion, flooding in streets, no they can't just build a dike). It's a pretty multi-factorial problem and it's unfortunate that the interpretation here seems to be pretty simplistic.

Your does point out something, though, that really really bugs me from climate activists/politicians. The idea that you have to "believe" in climate change, like you'd believe in religious proclamations. I don't give a sh*t if you believe -- and making this ideological creates tribes where one group is like "I believe climate change isn't happening/is God's will/is natural, so I will run my F150's AC with the windows open and breathe in exhaust proudly because internal combustion and burning oil is what God has ordained as the pinnacle of human achievement". Belief whatever. I'm much more interested in action. Why does it seem good to some people to... just waste resources without much return? Irresponsibly manage our farmlands for short-term profit vs long-term yield? pin success to ownership of fossil fuels in specific places rather than a more flexible and less geopolitically fraught paradigm? There are a lot of visible problems to address, to your point, efitz.

Along these lines, if there's one place where the left and the right in the US have an easy opportunity to cooperate and yet for some reason don't, it's on Chinese emissions.

China's responsible for almost a third of all the CO2 emissions in the world, and they have some of the dirtiest industry on the planet [1]. They got their own relaxed version of the Paris Accords and haven't even been meeting those standards. You don't really see anyone dinging them for any of this though.

Now the left really dislikes emissions and the right simply dislikes China. So you'd think there would be an incentive for them to cooperate on this issue but they don't.

I think it underscores how so much of politics is basically secular religion now and really about identifying with your tribe, like the issue on the left is probably that they don't want to admit a lot of this climate problem is someone else's fault, and the issue on the right is they don't want to admit there's a problem in the first place.

[1] https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/

There isn't because geopolitics of US pushing blame based on total instead of per capita emissions (nevermind historical) would make US look retarded - the left doesn't want that taint. Since it's not going to fly internationally, which limits it to domestic politics, and basing domestic politics of changing a geopolitical rivals largely functions as political theatre.

Just to clarify, China is at ~8T per capita [1]. USA is at 14T [2]. Rhodium group [3] says it was 10.1T and 17.6 in 2019 so it seems like the numbers have quite a bit of variability.

I do think that OP has a good point that we do probably need to consider totals since the environment doesn't care about per capita. It's also important to consider that China's energy use is probably dominated by industry supporting manufacturing for the entire world, so that "per capita" number is fairly inflated vs the true number.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states

[3] https://rhg.com/research/chinas-emissions-surpass-developed-....

>environment doesn't care about per capita

The enviroment doesn't care about climate change, earth will go on in some form regardless. Climate change is an anthropocene / (geo)political problem. The only way to coordinate politcal/human problem is via metrics stakeholders think is "fair" to regulate behaviors around. Currently that's per capita, which is already concession of not factoring in historic emissions. OPs point is extra useless because it tries to coordinate geopolitics of climate change via metrics most of the world will never agree to, made even more unfeasible by trying to do so via US domestic politics. It's like suggesting PRC domestic politics should be leveraged to reduce US defense spending, it's fundmentally unworkable.

I think you're splitting hairs. Clearly "environment" in this context isn't the existence of Earth as a planet but life on Earth, the current ecology, and our place within it. That cares very much about how much total carbon output there is, regardless of what we perceive as fair. And again, as I mentioned, China's total energy use is likely artificially inflated than it might otherwise be because the world's manufacturing capacity is centered there - a fairer comparison would likely take carbon emissions used in exports and attribute that back to the home country that is importing the product. I suspect in that context USA & Europe will look remarkably worse per capita.

It may matter on academic considerations, people can discuss it, but it doesn't matter on global regulation layer whereby fairness is determined via collective consensus and for forseeable future, per capita is what everyone can live with. Your last point is signficiant because the rhetoric of total emissions isn't going to fly especially if the numbers make west look worse. In context of OPs post, trying to unilaterally frame climate debate around total emission in US and somehow turn that into geopolitcal leverage is not realistic especially if closer interogation of metric is against most major players interests. I don't think it's splitting hairs rather than acknowleding geopolitical constraints over what's workable and what's not, even if what's workable is suboptimal.

Nobody is going to give up their F150 and Corvette if they don't believe there is anything wrong with burning fossil fuels.

Unless they get better acceleration and lower cost of ownership + a cool factor.

I have a finite amount of attention, resources and energy. I'm fortunate to have more than most. But climate change is not even in my top 10 problems. Preparing for retirement, getting my kid educated, caring for ill family members, supporting my local food bank, keeping my government from going authoritarian - these are where I spend my resources. If I had more I'd probably spend them on things that literally kill millions of people per year like malaria, typhoid, infant mortality, etc.

There’s a bit of a difference between religious Armageddon and a scientifically driven concern that the changes wrought by climate change will be catastrophic on various fronts. Not to mention all climate change predictions I’ve seen are consistently under representative of how bad it’s actually getting. For example, the Great Barrier Reef has lost half its corral in the past 30 years. The impacts to humans directly will be less visible than the damage done to the broader life ecosystem (not to mention that climate change is only a part of the story - our addiction to plastics and other toxic chemicals destroys the ecosystem in other ways).

Armageddon is presented as an inevitable sudden destruction. It’s closer to an asteroid strike. Climate change is also Armageddon except it’s caused by us, it’s something under our control, and we continue to dither about how bad it will really be instead of taking explicit action. I’m an alarmist because I consistently see a lack of any real progress being made on tackling this problem in a timely manner. Remember, it took ~300 years of burning fossil fuels to get us here. In fact, most of the damage was done even more recently since it took a while for us to really scale this up. And this system has lag. That means that even if we cut emissions to 0 today (COVID is the closest we’ve come), the Earth would continue warming for a long time (decades?). Waiting for the damage wrought to be “visible” to us is waaay too late. Not to mention that it will easily become economically infeasible to address and eat up our economy in the process.

People should stop swimming the coral reefs. Human oils destroy it.

And yet, the primary cause of destruction is climate change, not human oils. On top of it, the bleaching events are happening faster & faster without giving the coral time to recover. Again, because of climate change.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/29/great-ba...

https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/28/world/un-great-barrier-reef-c...

I don’t think most experts are saying literally everyone will die. I think they’re saying many will and that there’s no reason to think conditions will be as favorable for humanity after we change the planet.

For example, consider that humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years but only in the past 10k did civilization develop.

Was it because we sat on our hands? Did it take us that long to domesticate plants? Domestication of wheat does not take anywhere near that long even if you’re not really trying. One theory it’s that until 10k years ago there was a big ass ice age that made living pretty rough.

Once conditions became favorable human behavior changed pretty rapidly. To make all this.

So why should we be afraid of climate change? Because climate wise these 10k years have been pretty favorable for humans and there’s absolutely no reason to believe the next 10k will be if we fuck it up.

The fact that you are not convinced is why you need to keep hearing about it. Once people are convinced and taking reasonable steps to mitigate, we can quit harping on it.

For instance the sea level is expected to rise much more than an inch in the next century. It is projected to rise 10 inches in the next 30 years.

The concern is not that people will start dropping like flies, it's that the changing climate will have destabilizing effects on the economy, geopolitics, and the ecosystem. For example, drought contributed to the Syrian conflict, the rise of ISIS, etc: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1421533112

If individual citizens can affect their local politics to mitigate climate change, it is important to do so.

That's the rational concern. The actual concern amongst large numbers of people is that we are literally "going extinct", and those people are leading the narrative. I look forward to telling my grandchildren how millions of idiots doubted they'd ever exist.

Population in Syria has more than quadrupled between 1960 and 2010, so they had to feed four times the people from the same area of not very fertile land. Are you sure climate change had a greater destabilizing effect? If so, please explain.

> Are you sure climate change had a greater destabilizing effect?

Read my comment more carefully. You don't get to dismiss contributing factors simply for not having the greatest effect. The world is complex, nuance exists.

>> Is the earth warming? Yes. Is it net bad for people? I’m not convinced

Even if it is, why do we need to keep hearing about it? Oh yeah, this kind of news drives clicks. It creates fear and “climate anxiety” which drives more clicks. As citizens there is little we can or will do to fix this. It’s down to politicians agreeing on a strategy globally. With high inflation, and the rising cost of living, citizens have plenty of more pressing things to worry about without the media piling on more misery.

We need to keep hearing about it because more than half the global population is in denial about it and we are not doing much to prevent it while preventable catastrophe looms.

"In denial" and "catastrophe looms" are exactly what I was talking about in my original post. Evangelical protestants will be happy to tell you why you need to change your ways today or else you'll go to hell along with every other non-believer, and that Christ is going to return anytime now and then it will be too late. It sounds very similar to me. Doomsaying just tunes me out, and I suspect that's a widespread pov that's not widely spoken because who wants to engage with doomsayers.

Yes, I'm sure all the Climate Change deniers both read and respect the Washington Post.

Because it is a disaster of our own creation which we can mitigate if we take it seriously. If people start taking it seriously maybe we can quite talking about it.

Because it’s the citizens who can put pressure on the politicians.

Well if you are under 60, you will find out seen enough when people from southern regions start migrating north in mass and you have constant power outages due to high demand for AC.

Where I am, when young, we never had heat like this in June/July. And in the winters the lakes would freeze enough for you to drive on. I have been unable to walk on frozen lakes for at least 10 years, never mind drive. So everyone, keep driving your SUVs :)

Also, I am tired of blaming all problems on climate change. There is a famine in region X? Let's just ignore that they have a civil war and population has tripled in the last fifty years (while arable land area has stayed the same), it must be because of climate change because only that fits our political agenda.

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