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Comment by aplanas | Hacker News Reader

> What if you actually can’t predict the future and climate change is actually good?

Is this how rational people react, or is some spiritual response talking from fear?

How can be the depletion of biodiversity, the increase of temperatures and the disappearance of ecosystems that we need to survive "good"?

As a community we do no have a crystal ball to predict the future, but we have science and technology and the predictions from there are clear: it is not good for us, and it is not good for the current species.

The far future, the very far one -- sure -- the are good chances that new ecosystems will appear adapted to the new environments, but those will not be "nice" for our current expectations.

A doing-nothing-and-hoping-for-the-best strategy is a guarantee for massive wars, hunger and suffering, as happen many times in the past (but never in a scale of 7.000.000 population)

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Your entire framing of the world is engineered by pessimistic news articles which only tell a small part of the story.

Is loss of biodiversity bad? Maybe. Will we have resurrected most extinct species using jurassic park DNA within the next 500 years? I dunno but if that happened, it would make the current loss of biodiversity into more of a blip than an apocalyptic thing.

The science and technology enterprise is economically motivated. It is pretty good at creating value out of fewer and fewer resources. It is not good at making godlike insights into the far future about the late stage interactions between itself and the physical world. Any definite predictions provided to you are more likely driven by short-term incentives of some political figures.

There is nothing indicating massive wars are coming due to climate change, most of the world is lifting out of poverty not slipping back into it. If the world does heat by 5-10 degrees, we should be focused on making sure indians and africans have enough economic resources to afford air conditioning like we do in rich countries.

What an absolutely bullshit take, honestly I have a hard time reasonably reacting to it, it is so dumb.

We can’t predict the future down to a point, but we can make good, large-scale predictions with good accuracy — global average temperatures will increase and by every prediction, that will have catastrophic results. Period. That’s not some doomer news, that is reality. We can’t predict how individual countries will react, but that is not the question.

I’m sorry man but based on the stuff I’ve worked on and the situations I’ve seen, it just seems more plausible to me that the scientific enterprise tasked with scaring the shit out of everyone is not sampling and unbiased distribution.

What scientific enterprise? You do realize there are plenty of countries/institutions with widely different monetary/political incentives that finance absolutely separate groups to do research?

So unless you believe in some Secret Government that controls everything, it is just a completely naive take that has no basis in reality. We can’t even coordinate a single country’s various, independent incentives even in very authoritative governments — and you believe that every study made is financed with the same incentives? If not, you can surely list reputable studies that call out the fake research, right?

> you can surely list reputable studies

Dude neither of us have ever read a scientific study about climate change. We are both going on bullshit we read online and related to experiences we had in corporate land. Maybe I read more right-leaning stuff so I have a more counter opinion. Don’t pretend any of us are fact checking the magical climate science, we aren’t.

The one thing I actually have firsthand experience with is computational complexity. And after thinking about it for a while, it seems plausible to me that we cannot know the scientific prescriptions we see in negative climate coverage with nearly the definitiveness that they claim.

And it also seems plausible that a lot of people gradually managed to form a doom and gloom committee to find doom and gloom in a noisy world where there aren’t that many definitive answers.

> The one thing I actually have firsthand experience with is computational complexity.

If that's the case then I expect you're well across the Dzhanibekov effect and the fact that the long term arc trajectory of (say) a spinning wingnut can be extremely predictable as its CoG follows the usual equations of motion while its short term tumblings are utterly unpredictable and chaotic.

The key point being that the corase climate model is pretty damn simple in terms of basic thermodynamics.

Heat from below (core), light from above (sun), energy absorbtion in the sea and land, energy transform to heat, heat radiation outwards, some heat entrapment by insulation.

Increased insulation ==> greater heat entrapment, etc.

To be sure the fine details of interplay within and between climatic cells are challenging .. but the long term arc of more and more energy being trapped leading to more heat, more storm energy etc is straighfrward enough that it was first done as a back of an envelope calculation more than a century ago.

If you're demanding an exact time table on what and where will reach what tempreture when .. then you'll be sorely disapointed.

Otherwise its a simple case of we're in the direct path of a massive fully laden train that is ever so slowly derailing.

This makes sense and gives me some things to learn about, I really appreciate it.

If climate science is correct, the one hole I still see is that it doesn’t take into account future improvement in technology, which I think might have some solutions especially when the problem actually threatens an economic player like a 1trillion dollar company. It is basically a choice to believe something good like this can/will happen, so you could call this out as semi religious.

Thank you for engaging with me in the end.

You're welcome, athough to be honest I hadn't been paying attention to individual names, just watching a newest comment scroll and responding to various comments re: climate science (I've been in exploration geophysics for some time).

Looking at some of your responses to my comments:

> The problem is that you are recommending we turn off capitalism

I made no direct recomendation although I suggested various approaches - I'm not sure where on the globe is practicing fully informed free market capitalism but I'd certainly want to regulate it in the same manner as we regulate engines of power to avoid them becoming unbalanced and walking across the floor just as first generation unregulated steam engines did.

From a complex dynamics PoV Adam Smith was a first order basic bitch (as I believe the young people of the day might say).

> we will doom the world’s poor people to lives of certain poverty with no hope of upward mobility.

Mighty white of you to say so, maybe you might want to ask some of the worlds poor what they want.

The people I know that have nothing (I grew up in very outback Australia) want their land back, they want the "developed advanced nations" to stop dumping waste and shit on the land they've cared for the past 40+ thousand years, and other such novel ideas. eg: [1] [2] [3]

Not one has mentioned wanting yourself or others to speak on their behalf.

Of course there are many people across the planet, I wouldn't assume to speak on their behalf - although I did gain some perspective travelling through roughly 2/3rds of the worlds countries in many of the more undeveloped areas.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UKu3bCbFck

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7h9V4aKlJw

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaoSi6RFqsc

It's a bit of a bone of contention that so many of these massive copper and lithium deposits are on indigenous lands.

Perhaps the question you best dwell on is whether endless growth and increasing consumption is really all that certain groups of people seem to think it is.

> If climate science is correct ...

It's 2023, the time for "if" was 40 years ago - are you questioning "If GPS science is correct", "If Magnetotellurics is correct", "If the James Webb telescope actually works", "If the Finite Element Method is real", etc.

> ... it doesn’t take into account future improvement in technology

Nor should it, but of course climate models can be tweaked with "what if scenarios" - what if the suns input could be reduced (outward reflecting bubbles in space twixt earth and sun), what if X million tonnes per annumn of C02 can be captured and sequested 'somehow', what if we build out thousands of acres of solar PV and mass produce green ammonia to offset the climate effects of the Haber–Bosch process, etc.

'Climate science' contains multitudes after all: https://phys.org/news/2023-07-family-trees-relationships-cli...

Still, it's good that you seem to want to learn more.

Nobody has ever realistically thought that real world problems are easy.

Okay, so I'll try to explain how does global/troposphere warming works:

The earth must radiate all the energy it gets from the sun (else we break physics).

A third of the sun's radiation is reflected directly.

The rest have to be radiated. Calculation show that the temperature needed to radiate the excess energy is 155K. Also, plank's law make that this radiation is mostly infrared.

The atmosphere (GHG concentration especially) makes that the point of emission of the energy is not the earth surface, but high up in the troposphere. The temperature this point need to reach is 155K. To reach that, the point below has to reach 156K, the one below 157... (it's not really discrete values, and it's not really temperature but energy, but I'm both simplifying and explaining in a language I never used for physics or math before).

So, rising the number of Co2 molecules at that altitude (and especially higher) will move the point of emission up. But that new point of emission isn't at 155K yet! So for a while, the earth will absorb more energy than what it's emitting, until the new point of emissions reach 155K.

Its high school physics tbh.

So basically the balancing point at which CO2-based heating stops is bounded by this 155K number, which I’m assuming relates to something really hot and bad on the surface. This means that with just this model we will all die.

Can we not just seed clouds to reflect lots of energy back into space though? Maybe that is a stupid idea, but I could come up with 10 ideas like that and maybe someone could come up with an idea like that, but which actually works.

The temperature on the surface depends on the altitude the surplus heat is emitted. This altitude is variable but is constantly increasing as Co2 concentration at high altitude rises (it rises by osmosis, and basically the current concentration is what was on the surface 20 years ago).

We have to issues:

we don't know how the feedback loops work: we are jumping into the unknown, we have no data to predict the risks: the only thing we know is that between the last ice age (1km ice sheet over Canada, Sweden) and the climate we had for 10000 years, until 1850, the difference in global temperature was 3,5K (2% increase).

The second issue: the transition lasted 10000 to 20000 years. We are on a real, really fast track and making the same transition in 100/200 years.

Now my opinion : we aren't doomed as a specie. In fact, I'm pretty sure mammals can thrive in jurassic era temperatures. But I do expect a lot of death because the transition is way, way to fast. We are unprepared. And a lot of species will disappear. Also Zooplankton is dying because marine CO2 concentration is too high and the ocean is too acid for zooplankton to form shells from CaCO, which is an issue caused by CO2 but unrelated to tropospheric warming.

Climate engineering is way harder than that (we want to avoid acid rain, reducing direct sunlight will reduce photosynthesis, so as long as we have famine, we want to avoid it too. Augmenting the albedo on the surface is an OK option in hot countries).

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