Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

So while I 100% agree we have man-made climate change, there are two principles to live by:

1. Not everything is climate change. This has come up a lot with Hurricanes Helene and Milton recently, saying they're "unprecedented" or similar superlatives. Consider the 1916 flood of Asheville [1], also caused by a hurricane. Also, hurricanes aren't more frequent [2] but there's an argument to be made for intensity. A moving statistical distribution takes a lot of data points to quantify, however; and

2. We really have no idea of how the EArth will respond to climate change. This comes up when people talk about "runaway climate change" a la Venus. My argument is that if that was going to happen, it would've happened at some point in the last 4 billion years. That's a really long time.

So in relation to coral and the seas, the argument is made that warming is a lot more rapid than what naturally occurs. It turns out that's not true either. Consider abrupt climate change in the last Ice AGe (~100K years) [3]:

> One of the most surprising findings was that the shifts from cold stadials to the warm interstadial intervals occurred in a matter of decades, with air temperatures over Greenland rapidly warming 8 to 15°C (Huber et al. 2006)

That's a massive change and it's happened many times in the last 100,000 years. So what's happened over 4 billion years?

This is likely associated with sea changes too so what happened to all the coral? Did it die and regrow? Did it adapt?

I understand the motivation here but fearmongering (even if justified) just doesn't work to educate people and ultimately change policy [4]. Psychologically, catastrophic predictions will tend to get ignored because hey, there's nothing you can do.

[1]: https://www.frenchbroadrafting.com/blog/remembering-the-floo...

[2]: https://www.npr.org/2024/10/09/nx-s1-5146477/how-climate-cha...

[3]: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-cli...

[4]: https://heartland.org/opinion/climate-change-fearmongering-i...

>> One of the most surprising findings was that the shifts from cold stadials to the warm interstadial intervals occurred in a matter of decades, with air temperatures over Greenland rapidly warming 8 to 15°C (Huber et al. 2006)

My understanding is that this was local to a region and not global, and constituted extinction or near extinction-level events for plant and animal populations that suffered through them. And even though those changes were fast, my understanding is that our present change is (1) even faster, (2) is not a back-and-forth oscillation controlled at the bounds by natural dynamics but a one-directional trend upward (3) from human activity stacked on top of the dynamics of natural systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event We live on a planet saturated in one of the most corrosive pollutants (to life that evolved before it). If an anaerobic intelligent life had evolved before the world was conquered by cyanobacteria, in a society with a profit motive for manufacturing sugar, would they have farmed the very thing that would wipe them out?

Right, and said slightly differently: this is the context against which we have to judge whether there was any natural experiment we can refer to. There's no reason to think that the history of life on earth thus far has presented a sufficiently comparable case, to reassure us that what's happening is a re-run of a familiar event we've already seen, where everything works out well.

Yes that is nicely concise, but in addition I was trying to say that the line of reasoning that life has persisted through cataclysmic environmental changes and therefore worrying about them is fearmongering is a facile argument as the persistence of lichens and prototaxites etc has no bearing on the survival of humans. The nature of a cataclysm is very relative, as the oxygenation of the atmosphere and oceans would be meaningless to geochemical anaerobic bacteria that live miles below us.

We only have coal because trees grew and fell on each other for like 60 million years before anything figured out how to decompose lignin.

Kind of. Climate change has occurred in the past, and climate and weather are chaotic systems. But we can still determine where the attractor lies, and that it’s moving.

I still think we shouldn’t focus on climate change, since the majority of the population won’t understand, nor care.

Instead focus on environment, which is what you’re living in right now. The benefit is that doing what’s good for the environment year on year would also accomplish what’s good for climate

I agree. Should be campaigning against fossil fuels like against tobacco and lead in the water.

> This is likely associated with sea changes too so what happened to all the coral? Did it die and regrow? Did it adapt?

Well, before you pat yourself and feel safe, you'd better answer those questions instead of just asking them and deciding the answer will go on a direction you like.

Coral is a weird kind of organism, we can't expect it to adapt like insects. It changing can be quite bad.

But yeah, we won't have runaway warming. I don't know what the people that invented that risk were thinking.

>Also, hurricanes aren't more frequent [2] but there's an argument to be made for intensity.

I checked your source here, and the emphasis of the article is almost completely the inverse of how you presented it. The article is emphatic at the urgency of understanding how much more forceful the storms are, while noting there is not a larger total number of storms. In the article, that latter point is an aside to the urgency of understanding storms are becoming more intense.

It actually explicitly says that storms of greater intensity are indeed becoming more frequent. Your portrayal, however, is to reference the central point in passing while emphasizing a side point and implying something completely at odds with the article. And this isn't just tomayto-tomahto, one point is critical to understanding the intensity of storms and the other isn't.

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