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Comment by brutusborn | Hacker News Reader

Alarmist nonsense. I would be interested to see how he justifies the belief that “It is still possible to limit global temperature rise to 1.5C.”

Even if all the rich countries stop all emissions, poor countries will continue emitting for a long time. I haven’t seen any climate plans which explicitly consider this.

In the same way the west falsely hoped that Chinese growth would lead to Democracy, we are assuming that western efforts to reduce emissions will be copied by others.

This is all moot anyway, since the West isn’t going to stop emissions anytime soon.

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How alarming does something have to get before talking about how alarming it is is no longer "alarmist nonsense"? At this point seeing the word "alarmist" in reference to climate change is indistinguishable from parody, because it's become painfully obvious that the claims made were real, the effects we're seeing are real, and we have done very little to put the brakes on what we've been told is probably a runaway process.

That's why it's nonsense: there is no limit to when a "worrying" problem becomes "alarming" or global "warming" becomes "boiling", it's just language designed to induce fear with no link to anything tangible. Calling climate change an "emergency" does nothing to help, it merely stokes pointless political discussions over what adjectives are best.

I think the opposite about climate claims being 'real.' The majority of climate claims I see are merely conjecture that often turns out to be exaggerations. We definitely see real effects, but nothing near the catastrophes most activists predict or attribute.

Listening to this debate [0] really opened my eyes. Take for example the claim that "Climate change will cause worse storms and infrastructure damage." Most of the increasing damage from storms is from humans building in environments like flood plains, a minor part of that effect is from climate.

Or take the claim that "Climate change will cause food shortages." Some models predict warming poles will increase available farmland! [1]

I'm not saying that the current situation is good, but I think the downsides are overblown and the accuracy of the models used for these predictions are overstated. The amount of resources redirected to climate change are huge, so I reject the idea that we are doing very little.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Gk9gIpGvSE [1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

So your solution is to sit on your hands and do nothing. You may be an anti environmental shill or a simple defeatist, either ways you’re wrong. China and India are both furiously building nuclear reactors that will over time reduce their emissions. Both those countries are also massively building up their solar power generation.

I don't mean to suggest apathy. I mean that whatever solutions we come up with need to be realistic and take into account geopolitical. The east may be building lots of nuclear and renewable but their emissions are still rising much faster than the west. I hope that changes but I don't see any reason to believe that.

Emissions in developing are rising being they are starting from a much lower baseline. We can't expect them to just stay poor forever for the our benefit.

If rich countries set an example of how to have a high standard of living without massive per capita pollution, the rest of the world will follow that.

I’m not expecting anyone to stay poor, I just want politicians and scientists to call a spade a spade.

I don’t think the rest of the world will necessarily follow. If there is a competitive advantage to pollute, poor countries will do so. It’s similar to how we expected China to follow the democratic model.

I think the ideal solution is some kind of tariff regime that makes emitters pay equivalent externalities. This could be done for all pollution, not just ghg.

No, tariffs should not be equitable. If anything there should be a certain threshold of the development status of a country above which the tariffs should apply. It’s fair as well, the vast majority of greenhouse emissions up to this point have been from countries that are currently developed.

The rest of the world will follow because renewable energy is beyond/at the cusp of being cheaper than fossil fuels and no one is interested in maintaining a reliance on oil from the Middle East, Russia and Northern Europe.

Developed countries aren’t going to fund the transition in poor countries. And if we don’t include them a tariff like system, they will have no incentive to decarbonise.

I’d love renewables to be cheapest, but if you include storage and demolition of old panels/wind turbines then this isn’t the case. There’s a reason coal/gas plants are still being built. If it was actually cheaper to go renewable, it would be the only power source we see.

Their argument is just the next gen of climate change deniers.

We've gone from "there's no problem" to "ok maybe there's a problem but we can't do anything." Next step is "maybe we could have done something but the worst effects are already locked in so it's not worth the pain now."

The goal is always the same: do absolutely nothing

I don't deny climate change or want to do nothing. In fact I currently spend most of my timing working on solutions. I do resent hollow words like "climate boiling" instead of actions or cogent plans for action.

Instead of making guesses at my views, you're welcome to engage with my argument. I'm open to being convinced either way. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36902582

Why does somebody automatically have to be a "shill" for anything just because they make a coherent argument contrary to yours? Aside from being a transparently stupid and dishonest way to shut down debate through ad hominem, it's absurdly binary on how it categorizes agreement with you as correct and anything else as automatically mendacious.

Could your arguments not by the same silly logic not then make you a shill for the extremely media-savvy, multibillion dollar system that's currently pushing specific and often politicized arguments about how climate change is a looming catastrophe? Whether they're wrong or not, I don't yet know and would prefer to debate on evidence more than politics, but if organized, well-financed effort to move a certain agenda is a hallmark of shills existing, then there must be shills for Big Climate too.

Both those countries are simultaneously building out their coal power

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