Comment by chmod600 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chmod600 | Hacker News Reader

This is a reminder to me how deceptive projections are. We were so sure before that we'd run out of economically-available oil on the planet soon. The numbers felt irrefutable. Now that point seems far away.

This is not a comment on whether that's good or bad in the case of oil, but it seems to happen a lot.

I think what we miss is that there are simply so many variables changing at any time that something that seems impossible all of a sudden becomes possible. And then we just take it for granted so quickly.

It makes me wonder if we will be saved from global warming by some series of changes that seem utterly ridiculous. Maybe AI, cheap space flight, and some other crazy thing we aren't paying attention to combine into a solution. That's not to say we shouldn't care about global warming: quite the opposite, we should keep trying to make improvements on every front, both reasonable (consume less wastefully) and crazy (ask ChatGPT to come up with a plan).

I think people tend to underweight tech improvements which is largely what happened with oil - we got better drilling and fracking tech. Which I guess you can understand in projections as it can be hard to read the future.

I've always thought the global warming doom was a bit overdone as there are a bunch of potential changes that could happen including better solar and batteries, effective carbon pricing, fusion energy, AGI helping out, geo engineering and so on that could be done. Also living with it - things getting hotter or colder is not an ususual occurance really.

It will seem overdone when it's solved, like Y2K. But only because people actually did the work and had the ideas.

Or maybe someone will just crash an ice asteroid into the planet...

We will obviously save ourselves from climate change, even if we met every single climate target climate change is going to happen without humans anyways.

Way too many environment activists think that humans are the sole reason for climate change, not realizing that the climate is going to change regardless if we want it to or not, humans just speed it up. Continents move, jet streams migrate, space weather is a thing, and the sun is getting hotter as well (longer time scale obvs but you get my point). We have to deal with it, if that means putting up a huge mirror between the earth and the sun then so be it.

It's curious that HNers purport to be...smart, yet this comment is heavily downvoted.

Climate has changed before man. Climate will continue to change.

Beyond that, our understanding of our impact is nonexistent and naive. I have to laugh at the hyperfocus on CO2 as if the planet doesn't have a use for it already.

Never has global climate changed this quickly, as far as we can tell. Usually changes this big take tens of thousands of years, and they're handled fine-ish. A couple of times it has happened over centuries and that resulted in mass extinction. Over decades? Unprecedented.

> as far as we can tell.

We can't tell very far.

Uncertainty makes it even more important that we don't change the climate.

Climate changes, and you can't change that. Whose to know if its because of you or because of nature?

If the rate of change is unprecedented, one answer is highly likely.

> Whose to know if its because of you or because of nature?

There is a lot of research over decades into that very question, and it overwhelmingly points to humans as the main cause.

The only person literally making things up here is you

> A couple of times it has happened over centuries and that resulted in mass extinction.

You just said, without proof, that all (apparently 2 according to you) rapid climate changes have resulted in mass extinction events.

You cannot fight for change if you look like an idiot.

Are you claiming that the Permian-Triassic and Triassic-Jurassic extinction events didn't happen, or that they weren't coincidental with rapid climate changes?

Certain portion of HNers certainly is not that smart, judging from the ever present climate change denialism.

Way too many gun control activists think that guns are the sole reason for deaths, not realizing that people are going to die regardless if we want them to or not, guns just speed it up.

The speed of change is the entire problem. And if you have information sources that support your statement that humans aren't the major driver of climate change over the past roughly 50-100 years, please share it.

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