Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A graph that should be front-page news

lyrebirddreaming.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 469 posts

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#221

Post by thegrim33 »

deadeye wrote: post #82

The mean is created using 29 years of data. Why those particular 29 years? IDK. But I tend to dismiss findings like this that don't explain why they chose a very specific dates as the baseline.

Yup. 20% of the population will look at the graph and scream about how we're all doomed and need to start executing people / nuking countries to fix it (seriously, comments from this very thread), 20% of the population will look at the graph and see the hilariously short timeframe, the carefully manipulated axes ranging, and instantly dismiss it as extremist climate doomer insanity and close out of it, and the remaining 60% of the population doesn't care one way or the other.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#222

Post by bluebarbet »

Loquebantur wrote: post #137
mbgerring wrote: post #108

Instead of arguing about this on the internet you could do what I’m doing: working to take carbon emissions off the board. It’s not easy right now because of the funding and political climate, but you can find work where success is measured by metrics like “gallons of diesel not burned.” Start here: https://climatebase.org

Only, while such work is necessary it's also insufficient . You point at the actual problem yourself: political obstruction and funding going to the opposite. The relevant issues here are ironically precisely those you can solve by discussing them on the internet. They are caused by people not thinking right and having their emotions cross-wired. They can be solved by correcting those errors in reasoning and setting…

This is a decidedly optimistic take given what we know about social media. HN may be a rare exception.

Rather than using reason to get people to surmount their "emotions" and to "think right", I'd argue we rather need to frame the issue in terms of their self-interest, and to try to persuade and convince not them but rather their tribal leaders.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#224

Post by uv-depression »

azan_ wrote: post #220
Loquebantur wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economic system itself is incompatible with the physical reality of a finite planet. The ones steering society choose to crash and ruin everything rather than to jeopardize their positions in power. That obvious failure in morals and ethics, basic principles of adult responsibility really, is made possible by a lack of rational reflection in the populace. Objective truth has to take precedence over subjective des…

> The economic system itself is incompatible with the physical reality of a finite planet. „Infinite growth is impossible on planet with finite resources” is nice buzzphrase, but upon closer inspection it makes literally zero sense. Fortunately people will never accept degrowthers’ postulates.

You're making a very strong claim ("literally zero sense"), but you've provided no argument as to why. I don't believe that the economy can become arbitrarily decoupled from physical goods, which is a hard requirement for infinite growth with finite resources.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#225

Post by moomin »

layer8 wrote: post #197
crazygringo wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The climate spiral can be misleading though, because it's natural for a viewer to interpret the change in terms of area. Then, the increase from 1.5° to 2° looks much, much larger than the increase from 0° to 0.5°. So it's misleading in terms of making recent warming seem even worse than it is. Now, of course, you might argue that is justified in spirit because the negative consequences from warming grow faster than…

It would be easy to adjust the radius so that the area increase is proportional to the temperature increase.

It would be, but humans are famously bad at judging relative areas at all, which is a problem for data visualisation everywhere.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#226

Post by azan_ »

uv-depression wrote: post #224
azan_ wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The economic system itself is incompatible with the physical reality of a finite planet. „Infinite growth is impossible on planet with finite resources” is nice buzzphrase, but upon closer inspection it makes literally zero sense. Fortunately people will never accept degrowthers’ postulates.

You're making a very strong claim ("literally zero sense"), but you've provided no argument as to why. I don't believe that the economy can become arbitrarily decoupled from physical goods, which is a hard requirement for infinite growth with finite resources.

Because 1) growth is not directly linked to resources and the richer country is the less growth depends on resource-intensive areas such as farming or industry; 2) it’s absurd to think we are at the stage of growth where resource availability becomes constraint - I’d say it’s on the contrary and we are at the stage where we become far less dependent on resources than are on scarcer side (e.g. thanks to solar uptake).

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#227

Post by cuu508 »

QuantumGood wrote: post #204
ablation wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author of that Climate Casino post has some... strong views. So you might want to bear this in mind when reading his analysis: "The human cancer is destructive to every living thing, as humans continue to eat the planet into oblivion. As someone who values “everything else,” I would be one of the first to rally behind the NTHE philosophy if it had any scientific basis at all. I want the human cancer gone from thi…

The most powerful humans, and human systems, often score very low on stewardship and empathy. While "cancer" triggers as opinionated, using a less-charged analogy I think should probably make a similar point.

What analogy might work better, i.e., be less charged but as precise?

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#229

Post by AlexandrB »

uv-depression wrote: post #198
ernst_klim wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The economic system itself is incompatible with the physical reality of a finite planet The economic reality is perfectly compatible with finite reality, because growth is not a function of resources. An email is more economically valuable than a paper mail despite requiring much less resources (and leading to a much less CO2 emission)

To believe this, you must believe that the economy can become arbitrarily decoupled from any physical good. Do you believe that food can become an arbitrarily small proportion of the economy (and so arbitrarily cheap relative to income)? Steel? Purified silicon? Infrastructure like bridges? I don't. Perpetual growth is incompatible with finite resources. Fortunately, human flourishing does not depend on infinite econ…

> Do you believe that food can become an arbitrarily small proportion of the economy

This is not necessary at all for economic growth to be infinite. Food prices can "inflate" and so stay at, let's say 20%, of the economy while the amount of physical food being produced remains flat year after year. That's sort of what's happening with housing, education, and healthcare already.

I think seeing prices go up like this makes people unhappy, but what really matters is what portion of a person's income this stuff occupies.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#230

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

pyaamb wrote: post #74

the ignorance is a consequence of our societies system of incentives. everything keeps pointing back towards that each time theres an event like this. But if we aren't going to attach an economic price for emissions then it remains an externality and not a recognized reality to the economy. The current US administration is playing a leading role in keeping it that way. And voters keep voting for it. Incentives.

We've built an economic system that latches on to scarce things and makes them less scarce. Now we need to make harmful activities scarce, and we can't.

We have to kill this thing before it kills us. There have to be better things to base an economy on (consent? reciprocity? Foresight?).

Post reply on HN