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Comment by voidfunc | Hacker News Reader

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If you walk in the middle of a highway then you "could" be hit by a truck. "Might" be left at the side of the road as a hit-and-run. Don't take it seriously though; go walk on that highway like it's yours.

You act as if reacting to global warming is cost-free. It would have a drastic impact on the economy and people's standard of living, especially in the 3rd world.

You act as if NOT reacting to global warming is cost-free. It WILL have a drastic impact on the economy and people's standard of living, especially in the 3rd world.

Yes I literally copied your comment, added a single word and modified another; it's that easy to rebut.

It's a bad rebuttal. What can an individual do besides vote? I already drive an electric car, I vote for candidates who promise to fight climate change, and I've been a vegetarian for over 7 years. I'm about maxed out on my negative carbon foot printing, so getting anxious over stories like this seems unproductive at best. I can't be worried about that shit.

What makes it bad? Kudos for at least trying, though I'm not sure driving an electric car helps, unless your power station uses hydro power or another renewable source to provide that electricity. A bigger gain/sacrifice in that regard would be to use public transport, or at least carpool, as often as possible so there's less energy overall being used.

And one person didn't cause the situation we have now; many did. And it'll take huge collective action to move the needle in the positive direction.

> Kudos for at least trying, though I'm not sure driving an electric car helps, unless your power station uses hydro power or another renewable source to provide that electricity. A bigger gain/sacrifice in that regard would be to use public transport, or at least carpool, as often as possible so there's less energy overall being used.

I live in rural Iowa where public transport doesn't exist. But the good news is 65% of the state's electricity comes from wind energy, and my own municipal utility has a tiny solar farm too.

> And one person didn't cause the situation we have now; many did. And it'll take huge collective action to move the needle in the positive direction.

Others are chastising OP for not being concerned about every piece of breathless, anxiety-inducing climate change news, but an individual can't do anything to change it except make a couple of tiny changes and then stop worrying.

Edit: I don't mean to be combative, I largely agree with your overall point. I shouldn't have said your rebuttal was bad, I was up too late last night when I left that comment.

Well, it's not really a rebuttal, is it? When choosing a path to take we need to be clear on both the climate benefits and the economic disbenefits (or vica versa).

Exactly the kind of thinking that's gotten us to this point. What happens when that which benefits the climate continually "disbenefits" the economy, or vv?

Then we should let the electorate make a fully informed decision about whether they want to definitely reduce their standard of living for some estimated/modelled future climate issue (none of which have come true to date), bearing in mind that it makes no sense for EG the UK to do it if China or Russia don't as we are just rounding errors on their polution.

> estimated/modelled future

Would you also like to take a highway stroll[0]?

> China or Russia

Why look toward them to make a first move? What do you think happens when everyone keeps looking at everyone else to make the first move? Pretty sure there was/is a rush to be first to accessible fossil fuel deposits, and first to build infrastructure exploiting those deposits. How about making that move first to fix things because it's the right thing to do, and set an example that others can then actually follow? Or is it better to just keep watching and exploiting and let it all burn and flood, because that's a "future concern"?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48528356

Would it be more scientific to say it is sure it will happen?

I suspect the opposite is happening, too many times an environmental catastrophe has been predicted in too certain terms and has not happened, which is why many people lost trust.

And if you think that we shouldn't try to predict but only inform about what has already happened that seems even stranger to me.

It's a refusal to engage with the reported information, not an argument.

Note that the general sentiment on HN when it comes to other topics is that every slight simplification in reporting on science is unforgivable, Gell-Mann-amnesia-effect, bla bla...

For example, it is clickbait to say "cancer" instead of "some types of cancer which we further need to specify" in headline.

But it is of course impossible to take scientists seriously when their results are reported as "they observed X, and are there are indications that it could mean Y".

Who says "could"? It's way too risky to engage with people who don't tell me exactly what to think!

This ^

All is good. until it’s not.

And once it has indisputably happened, and the destructive consequences are impossible to ignore, the same people and institutions who spent decades complaining about "could" and "might" will immediately pivot to "there was nothing we could have done".

Yeah better to let an irreversible catastrophe happen than do anything about it before hand because we might be working to prevent something that wasn't going to happen.

All science-based conclusions come with uncertainty. Only ideologues (and siths) write in absolute terms.

And yet millions of people still play the lottery.

I don’t think it’s as simple as uncertainty. Nobody wants to change their lifestyle to avert climate change. People prefer carrots to sticks.

People prefer carrots to sticks.

I sometimes think those in the environmental movement have made a mistake with their messaging. It is too often "we need to suffer to save the planet". It could also be things like:

  "Why do you want to pay more to drive a giant expensive gas guzzling vehicle to work so that you can pay for a giant expensive gas guzzling vehicle to go to work in".

  "Why do you want to pay for extra electricity when conservation and efficiency will help save money for other things"

  "Single use items are thing you pay for time and  time again. Durable maintainable items you pay for once."

  "Throwing things in the garbage is like paying to store things forever (landfills are not free)"

It is true that there are, at times, good reason to do things that are not at the extreme of conservationism and environmentalism. If the messaging was a little more carrot than stick we might see more progress.

That ignores the fact that there is a incredibly well founded coalition of organisations with idiological (climate change by its nature requires collective action, but collective action is bad...) and economic (big oil, big tobacco...) motivations that has been running a massive desinformation campaign for decades. We know desinformation is much easier than factual information, climate change is almost a poster boy for this. It would have not mattered an iorta if "environmentalists" would have used different messages, in fact they primarily used exactly the messages you proposed, the fact that you remember it as being ”you all have to suffer to save the planet" just shows how powerful the desinformation campaign was. Because that was their prime message, not the one of climate activists.

It’s also been tried (endlessly), but society is too enamoured with consumption and GDP as the principle guiding metric for it to have had much effect. Some large number of people, wilfully or otherwise, reject intellectualism as a whole.

It's that the marginal benefit of individual action accrues mostly to other people, or (on a national scale) to other nations. The fraction of benefit that accrues locally isn't enough to justify the cost (unlike, say, the ban on CFCs, or control of local pollution.)

So absent something enforcing prohibition of defection from a collective action, the collective action doesn't happen.

You want to actually solve the problem? Find such an enforcement mechanism (CO2 tariffs, perhaps), reduce the cost of solution (sufficiently cheap non-fossil energy), or find another solution that doesn't require global cooperation (albedo modification, say).

A solution that just requires everyone to get along and cooperate to their marginal net detriment doesn't seem like it will work.

I take it seriously, as do many others. Careful of the bandwagon fallacy or, even worse, the mind projection fallacy.

No it's the frog boil effect. It's a staggering amount of change, it's just over a whole human lifetime so most people don't really clock it. Elites are supposed to do something about it, but mostly because of corruption and ideology they aren't.

Classic normalcy bias. AMOC collapse catastrophe is literally unimaginable for at least 80% of the population.

Every look into the future is could and might.

So you prefer just to ignore it and deal with the disaster afterwards?

A read a good quote this week but I can’t remember the exact saying. Something like: the check gets cashed eventually.

Thank you. HN should not allow any headlines containing "could", "might", or a question mark at the end. Conjecture is not news.

Many many HN posts are not news

This has none of it

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