Comment by lgkk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lgkk | Hacker News Reader

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Honestly and I’m sure I’ll get some flack for this.

I’m not so sure we need to be that alarmed. First of all, I’m all about renewable energy I don’t like burning fossil fuels. I think planes and gas cars and cargo ships are awful emitters of nasty gases.

However, we can’t even accurately model the global weather system. We keep changing the scientific definitions every decade. Off topic but first the universe was 13b years now it’s way more. Or this kind of fat is bad but flip flop some time later that it is good. The ozone hole was huge, then it turns out it’s patched. Sometimes arctic ice is melting so fast we will all be underwater in 2040. Other times it is somehow way more than expected.

I’m in California and the wildfires probably release a shit ton of bad juju into the air. Some volcano erupts and just spews black smoke into the air.

Our planet has literally been killed by asteroids. And life bounced back. There were no humans then sure, but what I’m trying to say is that nothing is really that certain. I’m a software engineer I literally hack systems to make them work together. We have insane test coverage and shit still goes wack sometimes. It gets patched and we move on, and our tech is definitely far better and powerful than a month, a year, or a decade ago.

Humans will figure it out. We aren’t going to die out. We shouldn’t kill progress because of doomerism fueled by paranoia.

> The ozone hole was huge, then it turns out it’s patched.

You make it sound like the ozon layer problem was not a big deal, and went away on its own.

It was actually fixed with the Montreal protocol[1]. So this is an example of a problem that urgently needed international cooperation to solve, and was indeed solved that way.

(The ozon layer is still slowly recovering btw. The hole is still there. But the problem peaked in the year 2000.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol

You are correct that doomerism is bad and wrong but your examples of scientific uncertainty are iffy.

The 13b year estimate for the age of the universe is about right. A better estimate is 13.8b, which is not way more.

The ozone hole didn’t “turn out” to be patched. We identified a problem, took specific actions to address it (migrate off CFCs), and that repair project is still ongoing.

The occasional cold winter doesn’t negate the overall trend of polar ice melting. Only Hollywood is predicting that we’ll all be underwater by 2040.

Volcanic CO2 emissions are 1/60 that of human activities: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/which-emits...

For how long have volcanoes been erupting and for how long have humans been burning fossil fuels?

Volcanoes do change the climate - especially large eruptions. But they are part of the natural carbon cycle which operates over million-year timescales. Their CO2 doesn’t build up monotonically - it is also absorbed. So it would be fallacious to draw an equivalency between volcanic emissions (small emission times large duration) and anthropogenic emissions (large emission times small duration). The rate matters.

Anthropogenic CO2 will also be reabsorbed over millions of years. But the rate of emission is so high that our challenge is to survive the next few hundred years.

Again, the argument is never that we won’t be able to survive as a species. The argument is that the climate change will greatly disrupt the current status quo, changing large parts of coastal parts into sea, displacing many people. Then current food production will get disrupted causing further displacement.

The species will most likely survive. Whether is on the same advanced level and whether we will be able to make progress still, that is another matter altogether.

One thing for a human to figure out is whether they are confusing short term weather with long term climate.

A good place to start is how it is we cannot predict the tumbling of a tennis racket or wingnut from moment to moment despite being able to very accurately model and predict the arc of motion of their respective centres of gravity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis_racket_theorem

https://www.wolfram.com/system-modeler/examples/more/mechani...

What do Lorenz (Butterfly effect) and Smale (Horsehoe maps) tell us about weather uncertainty Vs climate trajectory prediction?

Life will most likely thrive again should the earth system wipe it out again almost completely, there is a scientific consensus based on solid evidences and sound theories. But at geological scale.

However the same scientific approach don't support that much that humans are immune to extinction and even less that a similar species would ever appear again through evolution. Mass extinction is here, there is no scientifically compliant way to deny it. Human species are not independent of the rest of biological ecosystems. If they collapse, we fall with them. We don't have technologies to resurrect these complexe systems, even through magic hacks we could use without a sound theory to reason about how it works. We only have the poor technology that allow to destroy it.

To make a IT technology analogy, it's like we master the stone technology and a fleet of advanced computer are all around, artifacts of disappeared civilisation. That is, we can easily employ our technological stack to destroy any computer we encounter, and we will have little to no resistance from them. We can interact with computers, though we have no idea of how they really work internally or together as a networked system.

The point for lots of us is not to avoid the extinction of the human race but to reduce our suffering.

Lots of people are gonna suffer worse climate each year, lose their home and eventually their life all because we didn't put our shit together. Try telling them it's fine because the human race will prevail at the end.

Science keep changing predictions and recomendations. That's part of the scientific method and the expected result. It can be disencouraging some times but the solution is not to give up on science and just wing it. Having said that, the climate change models have been pretty accurate, more so taking into account the difficulty of modelling such a complex system.

The ozone hole was huge and we changed the products we used and it got fixed, it wasnt a miracle or a bad prediction just cause and effect. This worked well because the economies were favorable but if the replacement were a lot more expensive the issue would have lasted a lot longer.

There are some more points I would like to tackle but I'm writing on my phone and this is already getting too long.

As a software engineer, you must face global warming as a risk mitigation problem. You know, you could just ignore the risk of a catastrophe. But, usually, mitigations plans make the system more secure and robust, and people being calmer, even if the risk never happens.

>However, we can’t even accurately model the global weather system.

Why should this make us less alarmed? Uncertainty of prediction doesn't mean that the outcome is going to be better than predicted, it might just as well be worse.

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