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Comment by zemvpferreira | Hacker News Reader

We do need to urgently discuss the role of the first world towards massive third world calamities.

I'm a global warming believer, but I'm starting to question whether the planet warming won't actually be posivite for a lot of first world economies. More solar power, less money spent on heating, less dependent on foreign resources etc etc etc. Meanwhile, poor countries will take the brunt of the disasters due to geography and lack of own resources.

If the rich turn out richer and the poor poorer due to man-made global warming, I do believe we owe them help as a restitutive obligation.

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> I'm starting to question whether the planet warming won't actually be posivite for a lot of first world economies

Well this is a fun new twist on climate denial.

I have a hard time understanding how you can believe this when we've already seen incredible and costly damage in the US caused by climate change in just the last few years. Insurers are pulling out of Florida because they can't afford the increased risk and the entire insurance industry is at risk of catastrophic failure if extreme events keep getting more extreme [0].

> More solar power, less money spent on heating, less dependent on foreign resources etc etc etc.

What? Climate change means less predictable weather, not more sunny days; I think people in Texas would have a hard time buying your argument for "less spent on heating"; less dependent on foreign resources is another way of say "reduced global trade" which has been and continues to be a major part of our economy.

0. https://www.wsj.com/finance/insurance-catastrophe-reinsuranc...

The term "global warming" being seen as interchangeable with "climate change" has really been troublesome, and I think has led a lot of people to think surface warming is the entirety of what "climate change" is.

The term "climate change" was literally created by conservative activist and Bush pollster Frank Luntz to confuse people about global warming and muddy the waters.

From his Wikipedia article:

> Although Luntz later tried to distance himself from the Bush administration policy, it was his idea that administration communications reframe global warming as climate change since "climate change" was thought to sound less severe.

The scientific use of both terms has been around since the 80s, and is pretty well-settled, with climate change evolving from "inadvertent climate modification" which was the go-to term in the 70s.

The memo you are referring to happened well over 20 years later. The term was not created by Frank Luntz.

>In the 1980s, the terms global warming and climate change became more common. Though the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably,[24] scientifically, global warming refers only to increased surface warming, while climate change describes the totality of changes to Earth's climate system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#Terminology

https://web.archive.org/web/20100809221926/http://www.nasa.g...

Louisiana, too, has been suffering the same.

> less dependent on foreign resources is another way of say "reduced global trade" which has been and continues to be a major part of our economy.

TBF I'm growing more and more apathetic to this whole "economy" thing. Unbounded growth is what led us to the present problem in the first place. What about we try to optimize for quality of life instead of quantity of made-up number?

>What about we try to optimize for quality of life instead of quantity of made-up number?

That's still economic growth. I don't know about you, but I would like there to be treatments for medical issues that aren't curable yet. I would also like to get improvements in life in general like better insulation, better water etc. The sum of all of that improvements is economic growth though.

You're right, but the current system is full of perverse incentives. Sure someone is looking for a cure to the cancer, but for every scientist/researcher there is a thousand cars each carrying a single person to work an office job they could've done from home, a hundred bitcoin mining rigs running off coal, a dozen private jets, etc.

Just look at the mean salary in US vs western EU, but compare healthcare, access to education, public transport. EU still has a very long way to go, but I think it's proof enough that "line go up" is very different from (even if correlated to) actual quality of life.

Even George Rombio agreed climate change is positive for northern climates. The desserts are retreating and the earth re-greening. The climate winners enjoy longer growing seasons and more arable land. If see levels rise, we can build sea walls and levies. But if you choose to rebuild after disasters, instead of relocating, which used to be the norm, then each time you rebuild you increase your risk from severe weather events. Naturally insurers take a dimm view of that. It is U.S. policy causing your biggest problems.

The entire biosphere (forests, forest-dwelling animals, ocean life, the crops we grow, us) as well as most human infrastructure rests on an equilibrium so precarious that a couple degrees in mean temperature change is going to have first, second and third order effects we can barely predict. No one and nowhere will be “sheltered” in any broad sense.

Like, increased heat is already causing rails to heat up, forcing railroad delays[1], which will eventually translate into more expensive shipping for everything. And if we start getting Wet Bulb 95 conditions[2] then an afternoon power outage in any American city will lead to a million dead (the homeless will die either way in these conditions).

[1] https://ggwash.org/view/90938/summer-heat-means-longer-amtra...

[2] https://climate.nasa.gov/explore/ask-nasa-climate/3151/too-h....

> The entire biosphere (forests, forest-dwelling animals, ocean life, the crops > we grow, us) as well as most human infrastructure rests on an equilibrium so > precarious that a couple degrees in mean temperature change is going to have > first, second and third order effects we can barely predict. No one and nowhere > will be “sheltered” in any broad sense.

This is complete speculation. And the annual variation in temperature of ~50 degrees C many places on earth, does not really support it.

> And the annual variation in temperature of ~50 degrees C many places on earth does not really support it.

Ummm, hello? so "most anomalously hot month ever" does not suggest a change in the underlying system??

Would you predict that handrails in Arizona now can give 3rd degree burns? https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/24/health/arizona-heat-burns-er/...

Because I remember conversations like this when I was growing up:

"Mommy, can I go to the playground?" "No, Johnny, the slide will fry your ass"

Please read what you're replying to, before pressing reply.

"equilibrium so precarious that a couple degrees in mean temperature change" does not really mesh very well with having annual (and even daily) variation much larger.

If you never experienced a hot slide as a kid, maybe you were just coddled? Lots of the modern so-called environmentalism is driven by people having ridiculously little first hand experience with nature or even being outdoors.

>I'm a global warming believer, but I'm starting to question whether the planet warming won't actually be posivite for a lot of first world economies.

It's not about whether it will be good or bad to live in a warmer climate. Maybe it would be better. But the rate of change is the danger. If we were slowly warming over the course of millenia, it'd be a different story. But 2C of warming over less than 100 years is something the planet has never seen before, and that we are ill equipped to deal with.

The geological record can't state that the pace of warming we're seeing hasn't happened before. And our real-time measured data prior to digital electronics is laughably imprecise.

Yes, and absence of edvidence is not edvidence of absence.

Which is why you need to posit a causal mechanism.

To say current climate models are overly narrowing the problem domain as to exclude purely natural factors (assuming humanity is not part of nature, but that’s an ontological discussion) you would need to provide an alternative one which can predict past and future pathways.

It would also need to be at least as good and not rely on improbable assumptions… which is one reason climate scientists favor the anthropogenic models.

This is hogwash, as the resolution of time in archaeological records are generally not this granular, and a lot of short-term trends are being smoothed.

Anyway, it's very likely that the younger dryas had a much sharper shift in temperature.

>the resolution of time in archaeological records are generally not this granular, and a lot of short-term trends are being smoothed.

We have precise records from antarctic core samples that can say with near absolute certainty what our climate looked like for hundreds of thousands of years. I won't argue any further about basic chemistry.

>very likely that the younger dryas had a much sharper shift in temperature.

...which was a catastrophic event for humanity that nearly wiped us out as a species. So yeah, point taken.

But furthermore, what exactly do you have to gain here by claiming that the sky isn't blue? That is the number one thing that confuses me about this idiocy. The earth is warming, and that will cause massive problems for society. It's a cut and dry fact of reality, regardless of your opinions.

> Wrong. We have precise records from antarctic core samples that can say with near absolute certainty what our climate looked like for hundreds of thousands of years.

Cool story, bro.

The antarctic ice cores contain valuable information, but they do definitely not tell a complete story of neither temperatures, nor anything else across the whole globe on a granular time scale.

> ...which was a catastrophic event for humanity, and led to the winnowing of our population to less than 100,000 individuals. So yeah, point taken.

Yes, it wasn't fun. But then again people seemed to die when temperatures went very quickly down, and thrive very well when they shortly after increased again.

Anyway, you just wrote that such temperature shifts had never happened before. And now you say that it did naturally, not so long ago.

What I've got to gain on calling out bad apocalyptic propaganda? I might just be able to avoid the cure for 2C temperature increase, which looks like it may very well make life completely miserable for almost everyone.

As they say, the cure for climate change is the disease it claims it's fighting.

A fascinating look into the mind of a Joe Rogan listener ITT.

Have no idea what you mean. But if you refer to me being logically consistent and not contradicting myself every few sentences, I recommend that you not just continue looking, but also learn it.

Never really understood the whole Rogan hate thing.

Explicitly what's wrong with listening to Joe Rogan ?

Plenty of really cool guests on there

>Explicitly what's wrong with listening to Joe Rogan?

Ehh, he's not particularly awful himself. I used to be a fan long ago, before the slide. It's just that his show now serves as the entry way to the crazy funnel of Jones, Peterson, Tate, et. al. for impressionable young men, which then leads to things like climate change denial and other (worse) conspiracy theories taking root.

Mostly it's just an indicator of poor critical thinking skills than anything else. Kind of like how it's been shown that the single most reliable indicator someone will believe in a given conspiracy theory is whether or not they believe in any others, even completely unrelated ones.

>More solar power

Aren't solar cells led efficient at higher temperatures?

But the rest of your point does stand. Europe is pretty far north, as is Russia and Canada and even the northern parts of the US.

Almost all electronics are less efficient when 'hot'.

Solar systems are not an exception.

That's batteries that behave that way, not solar cells.

The good news is that we can start helping right away, there is no need to wait for these long debates about the role of the first world towards the second and the third. That will take way too long. We can each pick 2 or three persons from the third world and send them money to aquire the means of surviving the coming crisis. How much have you thought donating monthly/yearly? I can put you in touch with people ready to act.

More solar power?

Global warming does not mean we get more solar power. It means we trap more of the Sun's energy in our atmosphere. Solar panels are not going to be getting more light.

>More solar power, less money spent on heating, less dependent on foreign resources etc etc etc.

If you care more about the price of energy than the price of bread, sure.

I think you're right but I don't think the majority of the population in first world countries will be getting richer... so are the people who did get richer going to pay?

I also worry that hardening the infrastructure in first world countries is going to be very expensive. Especially if the developing countries are so badly affected that they can't provide the normal supplies of food, minerals, ores, etc.

I'm sure the wealthy coastal elite, rolling in the cash mountains of globalization arbitrage and extolling the virtues of humanitarianism, will be bending over backwards to build refugee camps and in turn permanent housing in their towns to accommodate mass migrations of third world climate refugees.

The same people that as of today [1] waived 26 Federal laws so they can begin building a border wall after dismantling and selling for pennies on the dollar the previous one that was being built.

It’s funny how something considered racist is now considered necessary now that the migrants are being dumped in their front yards.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/05/politics/biden-administration...

If you're trying to make an argument that mass climate refugees will be resettled humanely and won't be turned away to die, then saying "look, cruelty to migrants is a bipartisan problem" is not really doing you any favors.

What do you think should be the role of the first world ?

Average warmer, with much higher SD.

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