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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting you chose the boiling frog parable because it's a fallacy. Skeptics contend that climate change will not precipitate an abrupt catastrophe; rather, humanity will simply adapt to it.

To illustrate, the Earth's temperature has already risen by approximately 1 degree since the inception of industrialization, yet our lives have arguably improved significantly during this period. Would we willingly forsake the past century of human progress to revert the global temperature back by that single degree? This seems improbable, and yet it is a viewpoint advocated by certain climate change alarmists who propose concepts like degrowth.

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Which notable people think we should go back to a pre-industrial age?

I’ve never heard anyone seriously suggest that. I don’t believe you’ve heard serious people suggest it either.

If denialists had anything other than irrational arguments & mischaracterizations they wouldn’t be denialists.

Well, the capabilities (or lack thereof) of the person(s) doing the categorizing is rather important as well.

For example, I am a conspiracy theorist, and the number of nasty things that have been said about "me" by literally delusional Normies over the years gets a little annoying after a while. It would be a real shame if these chickens were to come home to roost at a particularly inconvenient time.

Anyways, I wish you and your Rational crew best of luck with your climate problems!

Mostly it’s obvious you’re just tired of being consistently called out on your nonsense. It hurts your unearned feelings on superiority. A trait conspiracy theorists have been repeatedly shown to have I might add.

Like I said: you’ve made it an emotional core of your identity.

Protip: you can't actually read my mind, neurotypical. It is your mind you are reading, not mine.

Please read up on some science.

> Which notable people think we should go back to a pre-industrial age?

It's being suggested quite clearly in some of the most unexpected places. One of the most curious things about the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, is that a great deal of the funding for some of its largest exhibits comes from one of the Koch brothers. Specifically there is the floor sized exhibit on human evolution which repeatedly emphasizes a subtext of adaptation, adaptation, adaptation as the driving force behind development of modern humans. The proponents don't care if this adaptation can also take the form of a misery-soaked return to pre-industrial society in 500 years, they won't be around to deal with it.

But they know that it's an asymmetrically structured argument that is difficult to counter using the language of progressive politics, in which adaptation is also emphasized but of course in different contexts.

No, you misunderstood what I meant.

I've seen people claim that slowing down or stopping economic (or even reversing, but I admit this position is rarer) progress was an acceptable tradeoff to counter global warming. Almost all solutions proposed by climate alarmists follow this pattern, albeit to varying degrees.

The analogy was that 100 years from now, people would see our current era as we see the industrial age. That is, unless we stop progressing.

Formulated differently, if degrowth had been followed in the industrial age, we would still be living in the industrial age (but the Earth would be a degree cooler).

Why do we need to sacrifice living standards to control emissions?

How could we not? In the western world we might be able to, but that means poor people will start dying elsewhere.

> Would we willingly forsake the past century of human progress to revert the global temperature back by that single degree?

Eh. I see what you are saying but have we felt the full effect? Do any of us have a perception of what was lost that would let us even make such a determination?

It's not alarmism to say we should take action to prevent out extinction. By your logic, people who call emergency services when a building is on fire are "alarmists".

There has literally NEVER been a problem anywhere near as large as climate change, including World War 2. If being concerned about literally the largest problem to have ever existed is 'alarmism', then your position is simply that it's impossible for anything bad to ever happen.

> By your logic, people who call emergency services when a building is on fire are "alarmists".

By my logic, people who call emergency services when the room temperature rises 1 degree are "alarmists". The building is not on fire. We are not headed towards extinction, not even close. How do you explain that the world has gotten significantly better over the last century despite warming over one degree?

My position is that this "extinction" fear you speak of makes absolutely no sense. And any attempt to prevent warming through economically harmful policies will likely have a greater negative impact on humanity.

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