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Comment by fasterik | Hacker News Reader

I agree with your first point but not the analogy. Climate change is causally related to carbon emissions; if we had 100% carbon-free energy, there would be no concern with waste beyond inefficiency. Data centers can increase electricity/water prices, but it's not a linear relationship like climate change. Prices can stay constant or even go down if we increase supply by building more infrastructure, or decrease demand by limiting how much non-residential buildings can pull from the network. But yes, the conversation about utilities is ultimately more of a proxy for political frustration. If data centers became 10x more efficient, the same people would find something new to complain about because they're fundamentally against the technology itself.

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I'm not actually sure where you land on climate change being causally linked.

Don't get me wrong, I think carbon emissions matter but primarily because we should simply do better if we can. But I've never found a study that proves causation, at best its correlation shown primarily through modeling.

That doesn't mean we should stop trying to reduce carbon emissions, but it does mean that reducing carbon specifically isn't guaranteed to reduce or reverse climate change.

Surely you must agree thst such a complex system as the global climate can't be driven by a single factor, or a single element on the periodic table.

You can always have a conversation with AI about it. Relevant topics: physics of the enhanced greenhouse effect, IPCC methodology on attributing global warming to human activities, transient climate response to cumulative CO2 emissions.

Yes, those are all well researched and well understood concepts based on a large body of modelling studies. Both can be true at the same time, and just because the data can only support correlation doesn't mean its irrelevant or not useful, it simply means we can't extrapolate to an argument of causation.

I'm not sure what you mean by "correlation" in this context. The things I mentioned are strong evidence of causation. CO2 in the atmosphere causes warming by well-understood physical proceses, and human activities account for almost all of the warming above pre-industrial levels. In fact, the net amount of warming undercounts how much we have caused because we have also released aerosols into the atmosphere which cause cooling.

As I said, have a conversation with a top AI model and try to convince it that there is no evidence of causation between CO2 and climate change. AI is better than me or any other human at pushing back and presenting the right arguments and evidence for a specific line of questioning.

If you aren't familiar with the distinction between correlation and causation in scientific research and statistics I really would recommend you look into it.

Modelling studies can never prove likely causation, at best they prove likely correlation. Meaning, two things seem highly likely to happen together but we can't say one caused the other.

Carbon emissions and carbon in the atmosphere has been shown highly correlated with the increase in average global temperatures, weather pattern changes, etc. That doesn't directly say carbon emissions caused those though, they could both be side effects of a more fundamental root cause.

Said differently, we know carbon emissions and average temperatures after the year 1850 both went up at similar rates. We also know, though, that many other things changed over that time. We can't run a controlled study of the entire environment is impossible, we can't isolate variables and compare outcomes when only one facto changes (in this case carbon).

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