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Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

nytimes.com

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Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#131

Post by jamesblonde »

wdr1 wrote: post #126
jamesblonde wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's Foxnews-like nonsense. Here's some facts. A nice visualization of per-capita EU-US Co2 emissions over the last 20 years: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location... The US has over double the per-capita emissions of the EU. The EU has a larger economy, by GDP. The US can do a lot more - particularly leadership.

OP doesn't present the full story. Specifically the EU started far lower than the US, but it does show the US falling at faster rate.

It's lower in the EU because we tax gas/fuel at a higher rate for environmental reasons. It's like losing weight. Going from 5000 calories/day to 4000 calories/day is a lot easier than going from 3000 to 2500 per day.

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#132

Post by sctb »

netgusto wrote: post #67

Why is this entry already on page 2 of HN? Seems a bit fast given the popularity and the fact that it was posted 2 hours ago (also, compared to those that are present on p1) -- edit: we're now on page 3 just 30 minutes after my comment.

Y'all are way out in the weeds here.

This story tripped the overheated discussion detector, which we've just turned off. There actually aren't many flags, and one of the main reasons why it isn't ranked higher is that most of the upvotes were dropped by the anti-abuse software.

When users start speculative meta subthreads like this, it foments a kind of disconnected conspiracy thinking that we can't seem to help ourselves from. You can email us and get the answer to exactly what's going on in a few minutes! But that's not what most choose—we'd rather wring our hands and imagine demons. If we could do this a bit less, Hacker News would be more intellectually interesting.

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#133

Post by arglinugs »

jorisw wrote: post #125
arglinugs wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to have this all figured out then, so let me ask, approximately what point beyond your retirement will all of this happen? And I say "beyond your retirement" because that is the time you will probably give me, a time you won't have to worry about anyone taking you to task on your faulty science.

What's faulty about his science?

There is no proof humans are causing doomsday levels of climate change through CO2 emissions (literal plant fertilizer, the shit I brew and inject into my fish tank to grow plants). What is demonstrable in a lab is going to be much harder to prove for a whole planet. People should not just accept what these people say as gospel, we have had 30-40 years of doomsday warnings from these people and nothing, absolutely nothing has happened. In addition, we as humans will not be stuck burning CO2 forever, eventually Nuclear and/or Fusion will be perfected to a point that there will be no going back to burning dinosaur oil for fuel.

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#134

Post by sctb »

lazysheepherd wrote: post #117
netgusto wrote: post #67

Why is this entry already on page 2 of HN? Seems a bit fast given the popularity and the fact that it was posted 2 hours ago (also, compared to those that are present on p1) -- edit: we're now on page 3 just 30 minutes after my comment.

Slot 143 Points 112 Comments 111 My first chunk of free time goes into making an automated bigotry-watcher for HN. This is the purest bullshit I have seen in a while. Had I checked HN half an hour late, I would have never caught this.

Please just email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can actually look at what's going on instead of spewing into the threads like this.

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#135

Post by frockington »

kerbalspacepro wrote: post #128
arglinugs wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to have this all figured out then, so let me ask, approximately what point beyond your retirement will all of this happen? And I say "beyond your retirement" because that is the time you will probably give me, a time you won't have to worry about anyone taking you to task on your faulty science.

We have reason to believe it's happening now! Besides the AGW signal in the temperature spread, there's now a AGW signal in hurricane behavior and precipitation patterns. It's happening now! That's the point of the article! Did you even read it?

We have reason to believe that ice caps will melt and NYC will be underwater by 2012. - An Inconvenient Truth

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#136

Post by [deleted] »

grzm wrote: post #120
netgusto wrote: post #67

Why is this entry already on page 2 of HN? Seems a bit fast given the popularity and the fact that it was posted 2 hours ago (also, compared to those that are present on p1) -- edit: we're now on page 3 just 30 minutes after my comment.

This subthread may very well be contributing to the submission sinking: one of the factors involved is the "overheated discussion detector", which, as I understand it, takes into account rate of comments. From the FAQ: > How are stories ranked? > The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in comment threads are ranked the same way. > Other factors affecting rank in…

[deleted]

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#137

Post by btilly »

yesyesno wrote: post #33

Ouch. I read this and I am completely confused about what to do with the rest of the time I have left. Should I even bother with my current career in tech, or would it be better to quit it and do something that could have even a slight impact now? These articles are great, but preaching to the choir. What should any of us do? I'm seriously and sincerely asking. Are there any suggestions, from a personal stand point i…

There still are solutions. They, however, require that the environmental movement accept large scale engineering efforts aimed at adjusting our environment. Which runs counter to their instincts.

See https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312505967_Olivine_W... for one approach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization for another. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering lists several more.

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#138

Post by jerf »

kerbalspacepro wrote: post #102
jerf wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I read this and I am completely confused about what to do with the rest of the time I have left." It is a grave life error to assign excessive likelihood to the doomsayers. I've been reading about inevitable doom for 25 years now. Some of what I read as a kid dated to the 60s and the guaranteed dates of inevitable doom had already passed by the time I read them in the early 90s. Even assuming they are completely 100…

It's funny because your concerns are exactly like that of Bush Sr's advisors in the article. He's also one of the villains.

If you want to believe in Inevitable Doom, go nuts.

Possibly literally.

But if that's how you want to play things, I probably can't stop you. But at least I tried.

It's not a healthy way to live, and I don't think it's one particularly backed by the evidence. In terms of threats I think are likely to impact me over the next twenty years, I still rate "governments instituting stupid economic policies" well over "environmental catastrophe". You look around the world and that's something that happens a lot more often than, say, a port closing or a city being abandoned because of rising seas. There's a nontrivial chance they'll both combine and we'll get stupid economic decisions made because of unjustified panic about environmental issues.

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#139

Post by mullen »

arglinugs wrote: post #133
jorisw wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's faulty about his science?

There is no proof humans are causing doomsday levels of climate change through CO2 emissions (literal plant fertilizer, the shit I brew and inject into my fish tank to grow plants). What is demonstrable in a lab is going to be much harder to prove for a whole planet. People should not just accept what these people say as gospel, we have had 30-40 years of doomsday warnings from these people and nothing, absolutely no…

> There is no proof humans are causing doomsday levels of climate change through CO2 emissions

Not true at all. We have plenty of evidence that humans are causing the rise of C02 emissions. Just simply look at the C14 (Carbon 14) and C12/13 (Carbon 12 and Carbon 13) ratios in the atmosphere. These give a clear signal what is causing the rise of carbon and where the carbon is coming from.

> People should not just accept what these people say as gospel, we have had 30-40 years of doomsday warnings from these people

Yes, and right now, the predictions from the credible scientists are showing to be true. Their predictions were not end of the world in 30-40 years, but we would start to see the effects of climate change, and we are starting to see the effects of climate change.

Re: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

#140

Post by mullen »

frockington wrote: post #135
kerbalspacepro wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have reason to believe it's happening now! Besides the AGW signal in the temperature spread, there's now a AGW signal in hurricane behavior and precipitation patterns. It's happening now! That's the point of the article! Did you even read it?

We have reason to believe that ice caps will melt and NYC will be underwater by 2012. - An Inconvenient Truth

And last time I checked, Al Gore was not a scientists.
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