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Comment by throwaway42668 | Hacker News Reader

Have there been any of our climate change projections that have proven too aggressive? Because most of them, this one, seem to always end up being too conservative.

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Various fossil fuel interests made a very powerful bid to cast doubt on climate science. The result was that scientists were forced to restrict their public communications to “consensus” findings that everyone could agree on, and people who considered more aggressive timelines were heavily criticized. If you consider the distribution of possible outcomes, the effect of this very deliberate effort has been to push everything to the left, in the sense of more conservative predictions. This bought the fossil fuel industries more time to pollute, at the cost of, well, everything.

Sure, the fossil fuel industry does pollute, but we are the culprits in this mess: the largest fraction of pollution actually comes from everyone that drives a gas car, flies in commercial jets, eats a meat-rich diet, and uses electricity from fossil-fueled generation. Until people--all of us--radically change these behaviors, nothing will change.

You missed a few: We also can't have anything new made out of steel, iron, or cement. And we can't have heating or cooling in our houses or businesses:

https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector

Low carbon cement and steel are absolutely possible, as is low-carbon heating and cooling. But it requires major (governmental) technological investment and a commitment to deploying the technologies.

Lots of things are possible, but the person I replied to seems to think that driving, flying, meat, and electricity are the problem. If you could magically convince every person in every country to eliminate those, you'd get:

    Road Transport:       11.9%
    Aviation:              1.9%
    Livestock:             5.8%
    Building Electrical:  17.5%

These numbers are taken from the chart I linked above, and that's aggressively rounding up in favor of their argument. I'm including things like trucks delivering food, all flights for any purpose, chicken and pork in addition to beef, and commercial buildings in addition to residential. Add it all up and it only comes to 37.1% of the total. In other words, the most charitable interpretation of their statements and it hits 1/3 of the problem.

And again, that's assuming you got every person in every country to conform. It's absurd to believe this will happen, and I don't hear anyone knowledgeable saying that eliminating 1/3 of the problem is sufficient.

Emissions in Europe and China are declining due to massive government-subsidized rollouts of renewables and massive investments (and subsidies) for EVs and charging. They are not declining because people “made and individual choice to generate lower-carbon electricity or drive EVs” which would have been pointless without the technological investments that made mass-scale EVs and renewable energy possible.

This has always been a coordination problem and “people need to make individual choices that are better” has always been the worst possible solution to it.

I vaguely remember Ozone layer predictions being pretty dire decades ago…

I am conflicted. On one hand, there is a definite “slant” to news reporting. There seems to be a short list of topics that publishers frequently and regularly publish content about, seemingly to “check a box” without really providing anything new. Whether it be “climate crisis”, “democracy”, etc…

I also dislike the coverage of CO2 emissions.. Threshold X is the goal, threshold X+0.1 is doom… There seems to be a reluctance to admit that all we’re really doing is trying to decide which generation meets the fate we fear. Buying time is certainly valuable though.

On the other hand, the scale at which humans make a mess is hard to ignore. One trash bag/ week times 100M households… where does it all go? How many tons of lead are we putting into the air from coal use? There used to be a lot more bugs when driving in rural areas at night… Could go on and on…

I feel like we should just live slightly a more simply instead of trying to “fix” climate change. The problem is not climate, it’s us.

We could decrease consumption slightly and have a better quality of life.

The plastic coffee lid or food container today will still be intact in 75 years… yet we’ll be gone. Why is that OK?

Ozone was much easier / cheaper to fix, we could keep doing what we are doing and just change it around a bit. Which is mostly what we did - there was a resurgence in freons emissions, vaguely traced to China.

The ugly truth of CO2 emissions is we would have basically needed to massively cut our energy consumption - either by going to renewables more aggressively, at a higher cost, or by outright cutting fossil fuels. We couldn't make small adjustments and keep going as we were.

So we didn't.

I have similar thoughts in my mind while reading this. In that vein, I'd be interested to know what the 'worst case' prediction for sea level rise is, including the effects listed in the article on the Thwaites glacier; a 1 foot sea level rise in X years?

What's conservative about this? "Catastrophic" "doomsday glacier" doesn't sound very conservative to me.

The entire film "An Inconvenient Truth" was too aggressive, and did more damage to trust in climate science than any other publication on the topic.

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