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Comment by zkmon | Hacker News Reader

Two issues with the title. Global warming is not specific to Europe (it is "global"). And the "why" can't be meaningfully answered unless you specify how far you want to go along the cause-and-effect chain (Feynman on magnetism - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8).

Let me look at cause-and-effect chain for the past 100 years. It is the unbridled industrialisation, captial markets, business push, desire to dominate other countries, vote-bank democracies, exploitation of natural resources and so on. It is not something caused by single person or policy over past few years or decades.

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GW make it much more likely but they go into the why and it is localized / specific - land abandonment (rural > urban migration, i.e. lack of pruning / plant diversity), wet / dry whiplash (leading to plant growth that is fuel for fires in droughts), reforestation (mostly monocrop). GW isn't specific to Europe but EU is warming 2x as fast. I get what you're saying but your critique - I don't think the piece was written to warrant it.

That sounds like a lot of generic, hand-wavey hot takes about why the world is a mess that are taught in higher ed. Here's a take: The world was a mess when drought led to the collapse of the Mayan empire. It was a mess when foreign invasion (now known as mass migration) caused the end of the Roman empire.

You want to funnel the causes and effects into a political or economic framework that suits your ideology, but humans were great at ruining their polities and destroying their ecosystems long before industrialization or capitalism existed.

What industrialization and capitalism have done is to triple the life expectancy and quarter the infant mortality rate in most countries, as well as provide things like, idk, refrigeration and rapid transportation.

Doomers are getting closer and closer to outright Luddite ideas. But the practical consequences of doing away with modern capitalism or industry, the things which have led us to environmental danger, would be the mass extermination by starvation or violence of most of humanity. If that's cool with you, if that's what it takes to save us from capitalist driven climate change, then you're not really much of a humanist.

We are consigned to this road. We are the residue of many empires. We produce a lot of waste and heat and carbon. We also produce life-saving medications and air conditioning and the highest standard of living of any society in history, even in the poorest places in the world. The alternative to this system would incur mass death for most of the population on the planet. And yet so many privileged people think that would be alright if it fixes their pet political issues. Think about how anti-human that actually is.

> The alternative to this system would incur mass death for most of the population on the planet

Maybe we could produce less plastic waste, like action figures and other toy junk?

Children need/benefit from having toys, sure, but do we need mountains of options, many of which are destined for the landfill without ever leaving their packaging?

There's a lot of areas we could cut back on excess without necessarily giving up the life saving medications, air conditioning and high standard of living. Maybe just maybe?

We don’t need any of those things, but they’re in no way the source of our problems anyway, and eliminating them will do nothing of significance to solve the problems. So it’s pointless to discuss.

We have so many plastic toys because plastic is cheap. Plastic is cheap because the feedstocks fall out, practically for free, from the refining of fuel that we absolutely need for society to function at the scale that provides us a healthy and comfortable standard of living.

So the main problem we need to solve is to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. The rest will follow. When the economies of scale for oil and gas extraction go away, the balance will massively tip in the favour of renewable solutions.

We will still make lots of useless plastic toys though. But perhaps it’ll be bio plastics and perhaps the scale will diminish a bit as the price increases.

And I think they’ll end up in trash burning facilities with district heating rather than landfills. That’s already the trend in Northern Europe, and they’ve started importing trash to burn. Yeah, recycle first. But eventually everything degrades and should be burned.

Obviously we can improve the world by having laws and customs that reduce wasteful consumption.

I was talking about the alternative to a free market system dictated by people's wants, and the alternative to a natural progression of growth. The alternative is North Korea. It's a system that murders as many people as necessary to maintain what a few people in privileged positions would consider an equilibrium.

Whether that's done in the name of self-sustaining, or in the name of ecology, or in the name of keeping bloodlines pure or in the name of preventing overpopulation, it's irrelevant. The alternative reality in which one person's idea of what's good for the world overrides millions of people's means of providing for their families is, by definition, a state of murder and ultimately a state of cannibalism. It is not the salvation state of balance that some fools think it would be.

> I was talking about the alternative to a free market system dictated by people's wants, and the alternative to a natural progression of growth. The alternative is North Korea

None of that is true. Capitalism is not dictated by people's wants, and it's not a natural progression. It's just another new method being tried out for the last few decades or a couple of centuries, which is a tiny time period. Business goals are driven by greed, with utter disregard to good of humanity. Fossil fuels and AI are good examples of this.

> But the practical consequences of doing away with modern capitalism or industry, the things which have led us to environmental danger, would be the mass extermination by starvation or violence of most of humanity

These are just your imaginations and exaggerations, while the effects of climate changes are real and here to be seen. Even then, the effects of climate change are not going to be any lesser evil than the scenario you projected.

For example, globally food is already losing nutritional value upto 50% compared to the 60's and becoming toxic due to use of chemicals and modified rapid yield, thanks to your "progress" ideology. Chicken is grown in 40 days, rice crop yield time is reduced to half. Add climate change to this, you as a humanist are proposing people to eat plastic.

The world is able to sustain billions more people than was thought to be the upward limit in the 1960s. The Malthusian idea that we would all starve when population reached 5 billion was proven wrong by that fast-growing rice and a lot of other improvements.

The global population is now close to going down again, but the hatred of too many people lives on in polite western society. It's just changed form. Instead of wanting to sterilize third world peoples, you find it more convenient to claim that modern tech should be stopped or rolled back because one or another doomsday scenario will take place. Tell me, what is the doomsday scenario causes by higher availability of faster growing rice? Will we all get cancer? In 1960, people in China and Africa died before there they were old enough to worry about cancer or chemicals or any of what you're so concerned about.

Your form of panic is just a new iteration of European panic about non-Europeans having independence. Cloaked in the language of social justice. When Euro-Americans freak put about climate change, all I hear is pearl clutching fear about what if those other people pollute the world as much as we did? And live longer lives while we've stopped having children? Whatever shall you do?

> Tell me, what is the doomsday scenario causes by higher availability of faster growing rice?

In concrete pragmatic terms, "If you build it they will come" - eg: building out six lane highways results in more traffic (and more FF demand (until more green vehicles are available for masses)).

The direct result of improved food production has been significant post WW population expansion globally, and with that, hand in hand, greater human consumption leading to larger resource drains and greater impact on the insulation factor of the atmosphere.

Population is still increasing, it's on track to peak ~ 2050, then fall and likely stabilise at some as yet unknown lower level.

The still pressing issue is that the number of people with large western level consumption patterns is expected to increase, even as total population falls.

> Your form of panic

I'm Australian, I don't panic and beside I'll personally be dead before this is an issue for the people that come after me.

These are, however, real issues. Even if you personally don't see any problem.

The fact that you're acknowledging that this form of anticapitalism, environmentalism, fear of chemicals and global warming is about a fear of population growth, is extremely telling. You're explicitly saying that the problem with higher food productivity is more people. Even though you also acknowledge that population growth is peaking. 2050 is less than 25 years away. And populations in many first world countries may actually be crashing by then, but not because of starvation and not because of chemicals or cancer.

This fear of the hordes being fed on cheaper rice, it's and an explicitly European one, but it turns out not to be well founded.. The reason population growth peaks in each country is because along with better nutrition comes longer lifespan, higher education, women's rights, and more options besides marrying and having children.

Australia has perhaps the most dire fear of population growth, particularly nonwhite population growth, of anywhere in the world besides maybe South Africa. It's ironic. Deep fear of turning into a native tribe, like the Boers I suppose. That's what Mad Max was all about. Yet you burn an awful lot of coal for a very small rich country. Rail all you like about capitalism, I don't see you giving up your car to go roast kangaroos and eat ants off a stick.

Also, it is "Luddite" on your part, to misinterpret a cause-finding as saying what should have been done in the past. Saying why something happened is not same as saying that should not have happened.

Slinging blame is usually not the same as cause-finding. But saying that someone is slinging blame in a blatantly meaningless and uneducated way is not, uh, related to Luddism at all. Do a quick Wikipedia search of what Luddism was, and you'll see that it roughly conforms to blaming all modern systems for the supposed oncoming collapse of society. (Which incidentally never happened).

Perhaps you should do a a quick Wikipedia search of what Luddism was.

Less about hating automation for some imagined coming collapse of society and far more about the immediate pressing issues of job losses, pay levels and working conditions.

Here's what I originally said, so you can tell me whether the parent poster's interpretation of my usage was accurate or not, and to what degree my usage of the term is a hill worth fighting on:

The problem with your argument is, the "mass" effect won't be there because the excess mass won't be there. Rise of population is caused by the plentiful food that was possible due to industrialization and GM modifications. The "progress" has caused the problem (population) which you claim as being solved by the progress.

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