For 110 years, climate change has been in the news • Hacker News Board

Re: For 110 years, climate change has been in the news

#81

Post by frypto » Fri, Aug 19, 2022, 2:36 PM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #45

origin_path wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first link claims Koch Industries is "a little-known, privately owned US oil company". That's the sort of lie you've got to expect from the Guardian. Quoting Wikipedia: "Koch Industries, Inc. (/ˈkoʊk/) is an American privately held multinational conglomerate corporation based in Wichita, Kansas and is the second-largest privately held company in the United States, after Cargill.[2] Its subsidiaries are involved…

I think you're missing the forest for the trees. When you look at the people who actually study this stuff for a living there is very little disagreement about the nature of the problem and the direction things are headed. Most of the controversy and the oft-regurgitated talking points about "solar cycles", "ice age", "but everyone thought it was global cooling in the 70s", etc seem to originate from the same few sou…

What are you talking about the most controversy is that scientist are refusing to answer questions sceptics have. Your talking points are just well poison used to make critiques look stupid. Like what is the margin of error of the climate data. They don't give any and just say they don't need too, they are perfect. Which can easily be disproven. Even Bill Gates criticized that scientist don't have an answer to "cloud formations" in his TED Talk about climate change. Clouds just don't exist in climate models, because apparently it's just to complicated.

Re: For 110 years, climate change has been in the news

#82

Post by wizofaus » Fri, Aug 19, 2022, 2:47 PM UTC

pif wrote: post #78

wizofaus wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, the only answer is not "let's reduce fossil fuel consumption". There's really no other option though, there are pretty solid reasons rooted in basic physics why CO2 capture/scrubbing are not feasible at a large enough scale to really matter, geoengineering proposals are unproven, expensive and high risk, and the cost of attempting to adapt to the sorts of temperature and sea level changes expected to take place…

Your answer reflects the dogmatic view that too often is attached to otherwise serious reports and articles. You are technically correct that reducing emissions is the only way to impact the temperature raising, but why do people think that stopping global warming is the only option? Why do you think that embracing it is not possible? Whatever we do, we know that global warming is not going to disappear in a matter o…

How much of the IPCC report have you read? If temperatures are allowed to increase 5 or 6 degrees the changes would be catastrophic, even without considering the very real possibility of tipping points triggering run away climate change that would make the planet entirely uninhabitable. There's nothing dogmatic about it, this is our absolute best scientific understanding at this point in time. There are various hypotheses around that allow for the possibility of negative feedbacks that will reduce the likelihood of catastrophe, but so far none have stood up to testing well enough to gain any more than fringe acceptance. I desperately hope somehow one of them turns out to be right, but that's no basis for sensible policy.

Re: For 110 years, climate change has been in the news

#83

Post by carapace » Fri, Aug 19, 2022, 2:49 PM UTC

origin_path wrote: post #16

edgefield wrote: post #7

It’s striking to me that Hacker News has a significant audience of flat earthers. Don’t look up, right? Let’s be clear, human caused climate change is very real. Rigorous science confirms this and CO2 + methane levels are now driving very visible and catastrophic weather all over the world.

Don't Look Up is a film with a story that makes absolutely no sense and constantly contradicts itself, so it might not be the best slogan to use: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look...

That's a bad review. The movie was a satire, it's not supposed to make sense like a normal movie would, rather it's holding up a funhouse mirror to current events.

For example, SA presents as a contradiction:

> It depicts elites as simultaneously incompetent and omnicompetent.

But this is exactly what we see in the real world. Take the iPhone for example: a marvel of technology with a cretinous supply chain and amoral-at-best business model. Or VW, great cars but we could do without the emissions scandal. Or the tech industry, great tech (mostly) but they turn around and have a that "no poaching" scandal. Bankers have their LIBOR scandal, etc. Really, "simultaneously incompetent and omnicompetent" is the order of the day, yeah?

Re: For 110 years, climate change has been in the news

#84

Post by ben_w » Fri, Aug 19, 2022, 2:49 PM UTC

origin_path wrote: post #42

ben_w wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The newspapers printed those stories in the 1970s, but they didn't reflect general scientific consensus at that time. Or were you thinking of a different decade?

The 50s and 60s were also full of reports on global cooling. Temperatures started dropping from the 1940s by the data they used back then (these days that fall has been edited out). But there's a deeper problem with the point you're trying to make here. You claim the reports didn't reflect the scientific consensus. Really? Go read those reports. They do claim they were reporting the consensus. To the extent they admi…

> So how do you know that reports back then were lying about the existence of a consensus, but today's reports aren't?

Doch[0]. Todays newspaper reports are also generally disconnected from reality. To illustrate with a tech news story as this is a tech news site, I saw one news story about the Raspberry Pi which had more errors than sentences, including the price, the OS, the RAM, the processor, the country of manufacture, and claimed it came with a hard drive. In general this problem is called the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...

> Who gets to declare a "general scientific consensus" anyway?

You can try doing a poll of the scientists or their publications and seeing what those say.

In fact, it's the scientists' own work doing this, and absolutely not the newspapers, which make me aware of the actual scientific consensus.

Though I should point out that this whole concept only matters if you're specifically trying to study the social dynamics of the scientist themselves (and those consuming their work) rather than the actual science itself — while this seems to be the case for you, I'd like you to ask yourself if that's the right question to be asking.

> Can we meet these people and ask how they determined that?

Yes. Also, as scientists exist in the physical world, you can try email and such.

Also, they published their work, including how they reached their conclusions. Here is one of many such studies: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966

> What about virology, where they claim there's an absolute consensus that SARS-CoV-2 couldn't have escaped from a lab even though it's obvious it could?

Which "they" is this? The newspapers again? Because scientist absolutely don't say it's impossible for a virus to escape from a lab in general, including any who are also saying there's no evidence in favour of any specific outbreak *actually* being caused by that.

[0] German word that needs to be adopted into English: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/doch

Re: For 110 years, climate change has been in the news

#85

Post by ashildr » Fri, Aug 19, 2022, 2:50 PM UTC

pif wrote: post #78

wizofaus wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, the only answer is not "let's reduce fossil fuel consumption". There's really no other option though, there are pretty solid reasons rooted in basic physics why CO2 capture/scrubbing are not feasible at a large enough scale to really matter, geoengineering proposals are unproven, expensive and high risk, and the cost of attempting to adapt to the sorts of temperature and sea level changes expected to take place…

Your answer reflects the dogmatic view that too often is attached to otherwise serious reports and articles. You are technically correct that reducing emissions is the only way to impact the temperature raising, but why do people think that stopping global warming is the only option? Why do you think that embracing it is not possible? Whatever we do, we know that global warming is not going to disappear in a matter o…

> Why do you think that embracing it is not possible?

We need to learn to stop worrying and to love climate change?

Because it will destruct significant portions of inhabited land? Because we now can have a marina where once were densely inhabited cities? Because those surviving the famines and wars will have a low BMI?

Your comment is the most stupid shilling I read in a while. How about embracing a truck on the highway?

Re: For 110 years, climate change has been in the news

#86

Post by hotpotamus » Fri, Aug 19, 2022, 2:52 PM UTC

frypto wrote: post #81

AlexandrB wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the forest for the trees. When you look at the people who actually study this stuff for a living there is very little disagreement about the nature of the problem and the direction things are headed. Most of the controversy and the oft-regurgitated talking points about "solar cycles", "ice age", "but everyone thought it was global cooling in the 70s", etc seem to originate from the same few sou…

What are you talking about the most controversy is that scientist are refusing to answer questions sceptics have. Your talking points are just well poison used to make critiques look stupid. Like what is the margin of error of the climate data. They don't give any and just say they don't need too, they are perfect. Which can easily be disproven. Even Bill Gates criticized that scientist don't have an answer to "cloud…

If you want metaphysical certitude, ask your preferred religious leader and then ignore all the other religious leaders who provide metaphysical certitude that contradicts your preferred religious leader.

A good scientist will not provide you with guarantees, because they know that they are limited, imperfect humans who are doing the best with the information and models they have. Many people will interpret this as refusing to answer questions.

The fact that we don't have a perfect understanding of climate does not suggest to me that we're free to alter the gas composition of our atmosphere any way we choose - I'd think the opposite - we should be careful when making changes to the Earth when we do not fully understand the consequences.

Re: For 110 years, climate change has been in the news

#87

Post by carapace » Fri, Aug 19, 2022, 3:08 PM UTC

eej71 wrote: post #39

igorkraw wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact is that oil companies have been knowingly sabotaging the discourse and scientific process about this in a similar way that the tobacco companies kept 'having the debate' for as long as possible to not change their business model, externalities be damned. To downplay this is the real historical revisionism and lie

Quoted post unavailable.

There's no "other foot" here: we all want clean air and water, healthy farms and forests, etc.

I've never heard "intellectuals" complain about the good things oil has provided: energy, nitrogen fertilizer, plastics, pharmaceuticals, and other useful chemical byproducts, and so on.

Those things are not the problem. It's the undesirable consequences that are the problem. We are victims of our own success, so to speak.

(Just to give one example of how oil itself is not the problem: biodegradable plastic has been commercially available for decades. We could make e.g. plastic shopping bags that lasted only as long as they were needed, but it's cheaper to use nigh indestructible ones. We could use biodegradable plastic straws.)

- - - -

In re: "a ready and steady supply of energy", I like to remind people that the Sun is a maintenance-free fusion reactor so powerful that it can burn out your retinas from 150,000,000 km away.

Re: For 110 years, climate change has been in the news

#88

Post by kornhole » Fri, Aug 19, 2022, 3:13 PM UTC

eej71 wrote: post #33

AlexandrB wrote: post #9

It was very eye opening to see how many groups and individuals who "just want to have a debate" on the reality of climate change are funded by fossil fuel companies[1][2][3][4]. We are being lied to, and it's working. Just see the first few comments in reply to this article. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/mar/30/us-oil-d... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climate-skeptic-idUST... [3] http…

If that's important to you, then you should also be aware that many of the greens and various anti-nuke groups from the 1980s and onwards were funded by the Soviets. Some of these details can be found in books like "The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War".

And the US funded countless parties and organisations that could effect a more favorable situation to the US in other countries. None of this is surprising. The important issue is holding parties accountable for the damage done. Fossil fuel companies should owe massive reparations.

Re: For 110 years, climate change has been in the news

#89

Post by pl-94 » Fri, Aug 19, 2022, 3:38 PM UTC

wizofaus wrote: post #82

pif wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your answer reflects the dogmatic view that too often is attached to otherwise serious reports and articles. You are technically correct that reducing emissions is the only way to impact the temperature raising, but why do people think that stopping global warming is the only option? Why do you think that embracing it is not possible? Whatever we do, we know that global warming is not going to disappear in a matter o…

How much of the IPCC report have you read? If temperatures are allowed to increase 5 or 6 degrees the changes would be catastrophic, even without considering the very real possibility of tipping points triggering run away climate change that would make the planet entirely uninhabitable. There's nothing dogmatic about it, this is our absolute best scientific understanding at this point in time. There are various hypot…

Even the special report on 1.5 degrees is super scary. I stopped taking the plane and became vegetarian just after reading it in 2019.

Re: For 110 years, climate change has been in the news

#90

Post by pif » Fri, Aug 19, 2022, 3:41 PM UTC

ashildr wrote: post #85

pif wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your answer reflects the dogmatic view that too often is attached to otherwise serious reports and articles. You are technically correct that reducing emissions is the only way to impact the temperature raising, but why do people think that stopping global warming is the only option? Why do you think that embracing it is not possible? Whatever we do, we know that global warming is not going to disappear in a matter o…

> Why do you think that embracing it is not possible? We need to learn to stop worrying and to love climate change? Because it will destruct significant portions of inhabited land? Because we now can have a marina where once were densely inhabited cities? Because those surviving the famines and wars will have a low BMI? Your comment is the most stupid shilling I read in a while. How about embracing a truck on the hig…

I'm not saying it will be nice. I'm just reminding that current science states that global warming is here to stay.

> Because we now can have a marina where once were densely inhabited cities?

I don't agree with your "can". We will have a marina where today are densely inhabited cities. No shouting "stop fossil fuels", no actual stopping fossil fuels will prevent huge cities to disappear.

We can (and must) avoid the uber-super catastrophe, but part of the problem is that the situation is much worse than most people appreciate.

There is no alternative to learning to cope with global warming.