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The Swerve

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Re: The Swerve

#31

Post by jacquesm »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #25
karaterobot wrote: post #20

I guess I'm in the camp that says that unless there are a bunch of people in the back row trying to sew a bus-sized parachute together out of old clothes, we're screwed. In other words, the only hope I have left is that somebody invents a climate-fixing machine. Or a bunch of different climate-fixing machines, I don't care. But, I don't see a lot of other appropriately-scaled options at this point.

Agreed. We're past the point where culture can shift in time to turn the wheel. Only technology shifts quickly enough to do so. EVs and wind/solar energies are examples of technologies which are so much better than the alternatives that they're succeeding at reducing emissions faster than consumption can grow to catch up. We don't have the time to get enough people together to mandate that the front row drives a Tesl…

Tough problem. Once you start doing back-of-the-envelope math regarding the masses and volumes you are talking about here as well as the time remaining it quickly tends to require all kinds of unobtanium, besides the obvious climate impact of engineering such a solution in the first place, because it needs to be a net positive otherwise you may as well not start.

Funny thing: the only system that I'm aware of that could do this on this scale and cheap enough is called biology, and it operates on a timescale that is too slow to make it work in time.

Re: The Swerve

#32

Post by aidenn0 »

danhak wrote: post #16
jacquesm wrote: post #8

Something I read in another comment on HN: "Climate denialists have gone in one smooth move from 'we'll fix it' to 'it's too late to do anything about it anyway'". Which unfortunately rings very true. The really, really big problem is that people seem to think that they personally are going to be exempt from this, that it will happen to others, but not to them. Waking up from that will be pretty harsh. But if COVID d…

Here in the U.S., at least, what has widely been maligned as "COVID denialism" was actually a deeper and more nuanced conversation about whether sudden, sweeping changes to society would prevent more harm than they cause. And now looking at outcomes across different states (e.g. Florida vs. California)--and considering ALL outcomes (public health, homelessness, unemployment, substance abuse, mental health, truancy, g…

Two examples of what I (in the US) decry as "COVID denialism" both are people known personally to me (extended family actually). These are from mid 2020. Both people eventually pivoted to "being opposed to draconian policies"

1: The numbers coming out of NYC are grossly exaggerated; probably only about 1/10th of those reported as "dying of COVID" actually died of COVID. Other people died from different causes but just happened to test positive for COVID.

2: A dialog between person A and person B:

A: If only 1% of people who get COVID die from it why are we still worried?

B: At a 1% fatality rate if half the population of the US gets COVID, that's over a million dead

A: Unlike you I'm not drinking the Kool-Aid

Re: The Swerve

#33

Post by troupe »

danhak wrote: post #26
jacquesm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nature really doesn't care about our feelings. All that whining is something that my grandmothers' generation would have scoffed at: you have it relatively easy, stop complaining. 5 years of war, occupation, hunger and brutal death is the kind of thing that generation lived through - or not, in many cases - and they came through to rebuild their world without bitching about it. COVID was - compared to that, sorry - a…

You don't seem to be engaging with the main point here: there were places that DID take COVID seriously--that shut down overnight, paid the price of mass unemployment, homelessness and growing tent cities, increasing substance abuse / overdose, loss of education that will never be recovered and countless other second-order effects. And those places did not emerge with a significantly better COVID outcome. Without an…

Covid turned out to be much less lethal than originally thought when the only people that were identified as having Covid were the ones sick enough to go to the hospital. The places that "DID take COVID seriously" were places that were initially reacting to statistics that didn't consider how many people had already had Covid and hadn't been to the hospital.

I wonder if we'll someday look back on some of the things we do to prevent climate change and view it through a similar lens.

Re: The Swerve

#34

Post by majormajor »

danhak wrote: post #26
jacquesm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nature really doesn't care about our feelings. All that whining is something that my grandmothers' generation would have scoffed at: you have it relatively easy, stop complaining. 5 years of war, occupation, hunger and brutal death is the kind of thing that generation lived through - or not, in many cases - and they came through to rebuild their world without bitching about it. COVID was - compared to that, sorry - a…

You don't seem to be engaging with the main point here: there were places that DID take COVID seriously--that shut down overnight, paid the price of mass unemployment, homelessness and growing tent cities, increasing substance abuse / overdose, loss of education that will never be recovered and countless other second-order effects. And those places did not emerge with a significantly better COVID outcome. Without an…

This is massively revisionist. "Shutting down overnight" was pretty much the response across the nation in March 2020. This was based on the information available at the time, and as things evolved, things changed.

Everything after was basically differences in how quickly things opened back up (and what things, in what order, with what restrictions).

And mass support for reopening rapidly with no restrictions wasn't there even in Florida or Texas early on - consider the sub-$60M box office that Tenet brought in. Theaters were open where allowed (hell, they were even open in Orange County in SoCal, not just in Florida), but nobody wanted to go because they were looking at the transmission and hospitalization data themselves and waiting for things to settle down and for vaccines to come out. Same with how conferences and events were being canceled before official government action in March 2020.

Economic damage was done at least as much, if not more, by individual behaviors as official policy. And can you blame people for that? Almost as many people died of Covid in the US before the vaccines as after the vaccines in 2021, despite there being way less of a return to normalcy by that point - imagine the number of deaths (and knock-on deaths from the overwhelmed health system) that would've happened if nobody had changed their behavior.

Claiming something like that you could've fixed homelessness in California - which was a rapidly growing problem pre-Covid - by never "officially" shutting down in March 2020 is ludicrous.

Re: The Swerve

#35

Post by SMAAART »

The moment we politicize science, is the moment that society at large loses.

And by "society at large" I mean everyone.

Game theorist should study this

Re: The Swerve

#36

Post by int_19h »

themadturk wrote: post #5

I like Cory, and I think he's right. But he's preaching to the choir. No one who can get hold of the wheel is listening.

> can get hold of the wheel

Only if you insist on legal means of doing so.

Re: The Swerve

#37

Post by GolfPopper »

jacquesm wrote: post #28
danhak wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't seem to be engaging with the main point here: there were places that DID take COVID seriously--that shut down overnight, paid the price of mass unemployment, homelessness and growing tent cities, increasing substance abuse / overdose, loss of education that will never be recovered and countless other second-order effects. And those places did not emerge with a significantly better COVID outcome. Without an…

Those places would have come out better if we all did this. And that's the whole problem: if you don't tackle problems of this magnitude globally then you might as well not bother because a couple of dissidents on a large enough scale will ruin it for everybody else. In this case the dissidents even use this argument to show that the better choices didn't work... which when you think about it is really despicable.

Not to mention, the US by and large collectively avoided worst case outcomes (hospital system too overloaded to provide treatment to majority of cases) because enough people did take COVID seriously.

And that's before getting into how hindsight is 20/20 (in addition to being rosy). the neo-Black Death will be really happy, if, a month into the next pandemic the going line is, "well, the last one probably wasn't as bad as the worst case scenario, so let's assume this one will be fine and do nothing."

Re: The Swerve

#38

Post by prometheus76 »

jacquesm wrote: post #28
danhak wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't seem to be engaging with the main point here: there were places that DID take COVID seriously--that shut down overnight, paid the price of mass unemployment, homelessness and growing tent cities, increasing substance abuse / overdose, loss of education that will never be recovered and countless other second-order effects. And those places did not emerge with a significantly better COVID outcome. Without an…

Those places would have come out better if we all did this. And that's the whole problem: if you don't tackle problems of this magnitude globally then you might as well not bother because a couple of dissidents on a large enough scale will ruin it for everybody else. In this case the dissidents even use this argument to show that the better choices didn't work... which when you think about it is really despicable.

What is the evidence for the claim in your first sentence? And what does "come out better" mean? Less covid, but more unemployment, more drug addiction, more suicides than the ones that happened?

With climate change, what exactly are we optimizing for? That's never been clear to me. We want to destroy the world's economy to keep the climate from changing? How long will the climate "not change"? In other words, the goals have never been clear to me, and the whole point of this line of comments is "are we sure the juice is worth the squeeze?"

We largely don't know what the second-order effects of tampering with the climate could be, because complex systems have very weird, very broad, interconnected relationships. There's genuinely no way of knowing whether we'll just make it worse, accelerate rapid cycling, or destabilize a system that is complex.

Re: The Swerve

#39

Post by majormajor »

prometheus76 wrote: post #38
jacquesm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those places would have come out better if we all did this. And that's the whole problem: if you don't tackle problems of this magnitude globally then you might as well not bother because a couple of dissidents on a large enough scale will ruin it for everybody else. In this case the dissidents even use this argument to show that the better choices didn't work... which when you think about it is really despicable.

What is the evidence for the claim in your first sentence? And what does "come out better" mean? Less covid, but more unemployment, more drug addiction, more suicides than the ones that happened? With climate change, what exactly are we optimizing for? That's never been clear to me. We want to destroy the world's economy to keep the climate from changing? How long will the climate "not change"? In other words, the go…

How is a desire to invest rapidly in new, less environmentally disruptive, technology development wanting to "destroy the world's economy"?

Seems like the opposite to me, unless your personal interests are tied up in legacy monopolistic businesses. It's like being opposed to Apple and Microsoft in the late 70s because you're worried about destroying IBM or mainframes.

Re: The Swerve

#40

Post by simonh »

danhak wrote: post #16
jacquesm wrote: post #8

Something I read in another comment on HN: "Climate denialists have gone in one smooth move from 'we'll fix it' to 'it's too late to do anything about it anyway'". Which unfortunately rings very true. The really, really big problem is that people seem to think that they personally are going to be exempt from this, that it will happen to others, but not to them. Waking up from that will be pretty harsh. But if COVID d…

Here in the U.S., at least, what has widely been maligned as "COVID denialism" was actually a deeper and more nuanced conversation about whether sudden, sweeping changes to society would prevent more harm than they cause. And now looking at outcomes across different states (e.g. Florida vs. California)--and considering ALL outcomes (public health, homelessness, unemployment, substance abuse, mental health, truancy, g…

The differences in policies were heavily hyped, but if you look at overall policy and people's actual individual behaviour both Florida and California went through pretty stringent lockdowns. In practice a lot of work places enforced social distancing, masks, pushed vaccines. The two states certainly had much more similar public behaviour and policies with each other than either had with some other countries like Ecuador or Brazil. Another difference that gets hyped up a lot is Sweden versus many other European countries. Sweden was famous for "not locking down", but in fact it did pretty heavily in the grand scheme of things. It just did it a bit later than many other countries.

Take a look at the stringency index in this article.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-07/califo...

Florida locked down just as fast and just as hard as California for the first 6 months of the pandemic. After that stringency measures diverged, but Florida still maintained a range of significant pandemic control measures. Their measures in early 2021 were about as strict as California's in late 2021. Overall they were more similar than different.

It also seems that the high number of elderly people in Florida, as a group, took the pandemic very seriously. They were in fact more likely to get themselves vaccinated than elderly people in California, despite the lack of mandates.

In the end it's actual behaviour of the population that makes the difference, whether that behaviour was mandated or not. One interesting stat is that in the most pro-Trump counties (60%+ support) death rates were 2.7x higher than in the most Pro-Biden counties. In the top 10% of counties for each camp the death rate differential was 6x. At the peak of the wave in 2021 about a thousand more Republicans were dying per day than Democrats.

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