Hacker News Reader

Comment by RandomThoughts3 | Hacker News Reader

The Planetary Boundaries framework is so bad, I don’t understand why it’s so popular. Most of the "boundaries" are directly correlated. Most of them are fairly arbitrary.

It’s such an awful tool to discuss the actual very serious issue it underlines. I wish it would just disappear.

Just to be clear, there is nothing magical about most of these boundaries. The situation is not in any way suddenly worse today than yesterday. Some of the axis actually showcases issue which would be a problem at any level. Others are debatable. Thresholds are overall a bad way to think about dynamic systems.

View on HN

You announce a set of boundaries, imply that crossing them shifts the system to some new, disastrous attractor state, and get a lot of media and donor attention. For a couple years you get lots of mileage out of it, until you need to come up with a new set, except this time it's For Real. Repeat.

It's counterproductive: once people see small violations of the boundaries result in only small changes, they start to tune them out. And, with global warming, the accumulated small changes will ultimately result in significant harm, so there's no need to invent fake boundaries.

It's useful for political and media purposes. Some might call it climate propaganda, such as when Al Gore claiming (based on what we was told by top climate scientists) that the arctic would be ice free in 5 years. It's used to make a point and to shock people. It does not appear that any of those same type of doomsday predictions (Gretta, etc.) ever came true. They really do a disservice to the underlining, and very important, issue.

Instead of trying to scare people with future predictions of doom, talk about what is happening right now, today, and what will continue to happen. Educate, stop trying to shock and manipulate.

>the arctic would be ice free in 5 years

The claim at the time was that if nothing was done in the 5 following years, the Arctic would start an unstoppable heating process that wouldn't stop even if we stopped all emissions.

Nowadays, almost all ice and thermoaline specialists work on Antarctica because we already know what will happen with the Arctic, that's why almost nothing new is published. At least new routes will open :)

We could define similar boundaries for humans: Wealth, education, health etc.

They are also directly correlated but still a indicator of a humans condition.

If the floor have 0º of inclination you can walk up and down without risk of falling down, 10º is still good, 20º? probably on. But there is some point after which most people could slip down.

There, that is boundary. It is not a meaningless line, just that the odds of everything falling down gets high enough.

That’s a meaningless line.

People fall gradually more as inclinaison rises. There is no arbitrary cliff as 20° is crossed. Plus, minor issues but not insignificant issues like slippage probably started at very low level.

You have artificially transformed a continuous issue into a threshold which is intellectually shoddy.

> That’s a meaningless line.

That absolute is actually intellectually shoddy to me when parent is clearly using "could" and the slope to indicate it's around 20°, not at 20°. It doesn't really matter what the error margin is if it's low enough.

Let's try another analogy: of course the patient looks fine, but he's cancer terminal and in his last weeks. Tests are showing his internals are fucked up beyond certain thresholds. Yeah, they are smiling and talking but it's over, they are dead in two weeks top.

Omae wa mou.

They love fancy titles - reading it I thought we got accepted into the intergalactic federation.

Never heard of planetary boundaries framework before but the way it’s discussed in this piece kind of immediately tripped my hippy pseudoscience alerts. TFA is actually a maddening read from beginning to end anyway.. lots of awkward phrasing, bad diction, weird punctuation.

The cynic in me sees people building careers off promotion of pseudo-science, and other on the creation of content around said pseudo-science. Reminds me of string theory for some reason.

"correlated" isn't an evil term, it doesn't mean there can't be useful observations in different domains.

To nit pick, since "correlation isn't causation" is often an internet meme to discredit any science.

if 7 of the 9 are highly correlated, then breaching all 7 isn't as bad as it sounds, it's just one boundary.

Are they thought?

Guess that is part of the meme, anybody can say "well correlation isn't causation" and sound kind of smart. Then the onus is on the other to go prove they aren't correlated, when they are not obviously correlated to begin with, so then need to devolve into a deep dive showing percentages of correlation. It's part of the 'easy to produce BS' type argument.

I'd push back and say. Ok, then show how 7 of 9 are highly correlated. Just saying 7 of 9 are obviously correlated so boom, who cares. Is just as invalid as someone saying there is no correlation.

You have to prove it either way. And there is no clear proof. And these aren't obvious.

Just everything going bad at once doesn't mean they are highly correlated thus we really don't have to care about any single item.

I'll direct your attention to the first word in my post - "if". I'm just as lazy as you are!

"The fire has spread to 50% of the house."

"Now the fire has spread to 90% of the house."

"Meh, the metrics are meaningless because they are correlated. The house is fine."

The issue is not the metrics. The boundaries are meaningless because the issue was that there was a fire from the start.

The correct analogy would be "Fire in the house boundary on the brink of being breached. We can confirm that 49% has already burned and the threshold of 50% will have burned in the next minute. This is the second catastrophic boundary to be crossed: the fume in the house boundary was breached five minutes ago." which is indeed a completely pointless way of looking at the issue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com