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I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

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Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#761
post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The video in the post addresses points 1, 3, and 4 quite well, in my opinion. Did you watch it? Also, if we granted your fourth point, it would be impossible to establish the first point; you can't say both things at the same time. Regarding point 2, if the "hot" models are accurate, then climate change is something that will effect us maybe one or two generations from now, if it isn't already (it's a little hard to…

Yes, but I'm not going to do your homework for you. I won't address an argument you don't make. >Also, if we granted your fourth point, it would be impossible to establish the first point; you can't say both things at the same time. Please elaborate. There isn't a formal fallacy here so I'm assuming you have some esoteric implicit "own". >Regarding point 2, if the "hot" models are accurate, then climate change is som…

I asked if you had watched the video because you didn't raise any specific objections to the evidence provided. I'm not going to restate everything said in the video, but if there's something specific you disagreed with, we could talk about it in more detail.

I assume that by "slow burn," you mean to say that climate change takes place on a time scale that goes beyond just one or two decades. If that's true, then how can we possibly judge the accuracy of the newer "hot" models except by looking at how well they predict past climate data? And by that metric, some of them do just as well as the older, less "hot" models that we've been basing climate policy on for decades. Is there some other metric you're using to dismiss the new models? I hope it's clear why I think you're contradicting yourself, but maybe you have some other way of telling whether a climate model is accurate.

I think there is some validity to what you say about risk assessment, and I have the general feeling that there is some real hysteria among younger generations w.r.t. climate change. There may be more pressing issues, but again, if it is the case that we can expect to see much hotter temperatures than previously predicted, then everyone, regardless of wealth or location, should be concerned for their own wellbeing in the near future.

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#762
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would make me jump from pure joy, but what gives you the idea there was a pending collapse of cattle farming?

precision fermentation and lab-grown meat both exhibit cost curves analogous to Moore’s Law. within the next ten years, they’ll outcompete animal products in many situations. the first domino to fall will be milk-extracts used in processed food products, see startups like “Remilk”

Last time I read up on this topic, there were numerous issues that made mass production of vat meat just plain unable to compete with animal meat. Has that really changed?

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#763

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an unsupported shower thought but I suspect societies become more right when times are not as good. You support immigration if you have a stable job and own a house but you don’t if you are getting laid off and aren’t sure what you next job will be. And it seems most of Earth has lately been in a rougher place.

Societies become more right when they see how left destructive policies and actions. People are not stupid, they can be fooled temporarily by high moral stances, but once they see all bs, they move away. “Times are not good” not because of some unknown force but because of policies/actions creating those “not good times”

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Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that actually true? Nature has a very low capacity per area for "wild humans". I don't think the planet would support anywhere near 8 billion "wild" (hunter-gatherer) humans.

It's estimated that we couldn't support much more than half the world population without the Haber-Bosch process. Industrial fertilizers are just that important. With hunter gatherers you'd be talking about orders of magnitude fewer people.

We should have never let the population levels grow havoc as the H&B process was introduced.

We reduced famines for a few centuries or less while the population in the most polluting countries exploded. Now, we risk famines and a possible slow death due to extreme drought due to the climate change created by the fossil Fuel Industry, in the billions

The implementation of the H&BP was irresponsible and reckless.

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#765
I think the reason everyone just has a "worry" or an opinion and there's so much disagreement is because nobody knows, even in the slightest what effect climate change will have on people's quality of life. We have predictions of some effects like temperature extremes, sea level rise, storm severity (or so I've heard, I can only find hand-waving in IPCC reports), mass migration, etc. but no credible and terrible predictions of numbers of deaths, financial cost or other more direct impacts on people. Maybe the climate will be radically different but we'll adapt just fine? Who knows? Nobody! So people invent their own beliefs and we end up with doomsdayers imagining the worse possible outcome and neverminders imagining the best possible outcome and they all want to control each other's behavior according to their own imagination. Now it becomes political and people hate each other because they see them working against each other's believed fantasy.

Even in this video, I couldn't find any quantified predictions of actual effects on people, so it just continues to support everyone's own fantasy, whichever way that goes.

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#766

Just a contextual note -- one thing Sabine says is: AI won't help because we know the exact solution, we just aren't willing to do it. Presumably she's referring to her first proposal -- a carbon tax. It's my understanding that there's nearly consensus among economists that a carbon tax is the most efficient solution to global warming, but political consensus that it would never happen when framed as a tax. If you do…

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Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overpopulation isn’t the source of the problem, IMHO. A wild human being in their natural environment pollutes thousands of times less than an industrialised consumer. Each American or European, whose food is grown thousands of km away, is plenty more only to make their salad. Can they be blamed for their Carbon Footprint^TM? I think we should blame the fossil fuel corporations which have turned us into fuel junkies

Is that actually true? Nature has a very low capacity per area for "wild humans". I don't think the planet would support anywhere near 8 billion "wild" (hunter-gatherer) humans.

Why should there be eight billion people?

Wild humans would pollute less exactly because they are limited by their environment instead of torturing from cradle to the shop billions of chicks and piglets every year

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that actually true? Nature has a very low capacity per area for "wild humans". I don't think the planet would support anywhere near 8 billion "wild" (hunter-gatherer) humans.

It's actually true that some blame can be apportioned to fossil fuel companies that have actively pushed "more fuel consumption" since the 1970s, the Koch Group in particular funde a slew of think tanks to poo-poo and crash and burn any grass roots public transport movements in the USofA during the past 50 odd years. It's less true that a valid comparison should be "if not modern 21st Century life then hunter gather"…

> It's less true that a valid comparison should be "if not modern 21st Century life then hunter gather".

There are billions of shades of grey, like, for example, living like before the 2000’s, when the massive production of plastic crap in China produced pollution levels to skyrocket.

The alternative meant paying wages in the west

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#769

Why was the link changed? 3 hours ago it linked to this: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2024/01/i-used-to-not-worr... Now it links to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCo3XwTRg9o

Yikes, not sure what happened there!

It would be standard mod practice to replace https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2024/01/i-used-to-not-worr... with a link to the video, since the blog post is just a thin wrapper around it. As the HN guidelines say, "If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Why the wrong video made it in, I don't know, but most likely it was a simple copy-paste error. Sorry, all!

Edit: oh it might have been that one of us saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39157418 and mistook that for a comment of this sort: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39163616.

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#770
post #252
post #162

What country is going to take the hit and start the high altitude sulfur spraying? If we even could get the forcing back to what it already was in the recent past that would be a great help.

How long would that temporary measure help? What would that do to acidic rain, global dimming, ecology and agriculture. Masking the problem will only make it come back harder when measures don't scale up anymore. Then there'll be no time to do much more.

> Masking the problem will only make it come back harder when measures don't scale up anymore.

If (e.g.) China stops the US can start, or if a small country can't scale up enough more countries can join in. The whole "termination shock" thing is highly overrated, it's solvable with next to no communication at all. Decision rule: if not enough is being sprayed according to your models, make up the difference yourself.

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