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

Why North America's killer heat scares me

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 193 posts

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#111

Post by jeffbee »

taylorlapeyre wrote: post #98
jeffbee wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Koonin's book is highly misleading. You'd be better off spending your time reading IPCC reports, or, frankly, staring at a wall and picking your nose, than reading that contrarian drivel. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/that-obama-scient...

Most of Koonin’s sources are directly from the IPCC reports, in fact they are what the book is based around.

Yes, but they are often taken out of context in a misleading way. His statements about melting in Greenland being slower than 80 years ago, for example, are highly misleading, presented in a way to lead the reader to believe that melting in Greenland is decelerating when in fact it is accelerating, it just happened to be exceptionally high for a single year, 80 years ago. Other misleading techniques are the straw-man, there he says something like tornados are not increasing in frequency, leaving the reader to assume that climate models predict increasing tornado frequency when in fact they do not predict that.

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#113

Post by anonAndOn »

dragontamer wrote: post #18
liotier wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You feel powerless to do anything about climate change ? You feel your individual actions such as recycling are meaningless in the face of the incoming tsunami ? That is because they are. If you want meaningful, get into political action ! "For consumers in the industrialized world to signal virtue with their individual actions is irrelevant at best. Countries like Sweden that have had success in decarbonizing, didn’…

It was extremely difficult getting my knowledgeable and smart sister to vaccinate for COVID19, an eminent disease that we both agreed was killing hundreds-of-thousands of Americans. Fortunately, I pushed her hard enough with a little bit of help from the Demon Slayer: Mugen Train movie (we will go to theaters if you vaccinate). Honestly: I don't know how I would have done it without that movie, lol. Now my sister's s…

COVID is an evolutionary filter for the anti-vax movement. If freedom loving Americans want to roll the dice on survival, let 'em.

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#114

Post by hooplah »

adamcstephens wrote: post #95
hooplah wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fracking did manage to drop our emissions phasing out coal. But politics gets in the way of natural gas all the time. Politics got in the way of nuclear as well. Also, if you truly want to cut emissions, stop caring about "per capita" and force your politicians to start holding the biggest polluters accountable and the countries not decreasing their emissions.

Who is to blame for outsourced manufacturing then? If one country consumes a vast amount of goods from another, are they not also accountable for that other country’s emissions?

If you truly believe it's this dire, does it matter?

It's up to that country to cut emissions even if they accept that job on behalf of other countries.

But first, lets start on just not dumping plastic into oceans, building more coal plants, and generally not cutting emissions at all (China)

Then we can worry on the manufacturing like cement and steel (I believe we should make our own steel anyway)

The more stuff we make, the more control we have over the emissions during the process. Because apparently, other countries don't give a shit.

Go look at the countries that have cut emissions. https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/climate-change-co2-emissions...

That's the only metric that matters, anything else is propaganda for those who aren't.

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#115

Post by dragontamer »

anonAndOn wrote: post #113
dragontamer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was extremely difficult getting my knowledgeable and smart sister to vaccinate for COVID19, an eminent disease that we both agreed was killing hundreds-of-thousands of Americans. Fortunately, I pushed her hard enough with a little bit of help from the Demon Slayer: Mugen Train movie (we will go to theaters if you vaccinate). Honestly: I don't know how I would have done it without that movie, lol. Now my sister's s…

COVID is an evolutionary filter for the anti-vax movement. If freedom loving Americans want to roll the dice on survival, let 'em.

I happen to care about my sister-in-law's life. So that's not an option.

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#116

Post by jrmg »

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #85
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sympathize with and share your exhaustion, but I force myself to pay attention to these stories. They remind me why Climate Change is always my #1 priority when voting in elections, and when thinking about the world writ large. There was an editorial in The Atlantic a couple of years ago—which I now can’t seem to find—titled something like “We should be covering climate change like it’s the only story that matters”…

| Climate Change is always my #1 priority when voting in elections If every climate change candidate you favored for won in the US and Canada the impact on climate would be near zero. Why? Because China, Vietnam, India and Indonesia are now the majority contributors to emissions and they don't care about your agenda. Such are the unintended consequences of progressive agendas. We regulated 'dirty' businesses out of e…

We regulated 'dirty' businesses out of existence (mostly) in North America and in so doing gave up our influence over how those industries operate.

Thats a bit hyperbolic, but presuming it’s true, What influence do you believe we would’ve had if we hadn’t done that?

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#117

Post by generj »

partiallypro wrote: post #88
throwaway284534 wrote: post #6

Respectfully, I’m getting fatigued from hearing about climate changes. Not because I don’t care, but because I feel powerless to do anything major about it. For all the recycling I’ve done, a single factory can undo in just a day. Being defeatist isn’t exactly productive, but hearing that calamities are happening on a daily basis doesn’t help much either. I really do think the only way this’ll get better is after som…

Also the US, Germany etc could all cut their carbon emissions drastically and it wouldn't even matter because China and India dwarf any small change by the West. Not only are you powerless, so are most countries, even the most powerful ones. What is tiresome is that the US, etc is supposed to do something drastic which would barely have any effect while China builds new coal plants constantly. They run over 50% of al…

Doesn’t the poor farmer in China deserve electricity though? US + EU got to use coal (and still do) for 150 years before we even started discussing eliminating its use.

If the West isn’t going to let the world use coal or other carbon heavy solutions, they need to pay the cost differences. It isn’t fair to impose poverty on everyone else after reaping the benefits of carbon emissions. We will never get global buy-in for the needed emission cuts if there is no recognition of this.

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#118

Post by pastage »

Retric wrote: post #92
mtrn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not own a car, I do not fly, I buy clothes used or new just once a year. My newest smartphone I bought five years ago (and I just bought a new battery for $10, so I can use it for five more years). My utility company stats says my energy consumption is overall very low. I eat meat once a month. I try to own as few things as possible. I try to write and deploy code in energy efficient languages (Go, Rust, C, ...)…

I am not saying anything negative about your lifestyle and I make similar choices. But, the perception is you need to be that extreme when the reality is different. People really don’t need to suffer to make a difference, which is critical as most people aren’t willing to suffer if they can avoid it. For example rather than turning the heat down, buying a solar hot water heater let’s you save money, take long hot sho…

FWIW That is not extreme, it is also not suffering. What would an effective leverage be?

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#119

Post by nradov »

jefftk wrote: post #106
dragontamer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7316113/ > COVID-19 is a highly contagious infection with no proven treatment. Approximately 2.5% of patients need mechanical ventilation while their body fights the infection So I'm a bit off with my estimate. But I still stand by my logic.

That is 2.5% of patients, not 2.5% of the population if it spreads everywhere. Not everyone who is exposed to coronavirus gets sick enough to be counted as a patient in those statistics

Correct. The CDC estimated that only about a quarter of US infections were officially counted as cases.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#120

Post by cranekam »

JohnWhigham wrote: post #27
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For all the recycling I’ve done, a single factory can undo in just a day. Tangential, but recycling is much less effective the reduced consumption. I think the problem with policy makers not moving on this front is a reflection of people not doing so. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to make people even believe in something that would require them to sacrifice their lifestyle, let alone actually commit to doing…

I think most consumer-facing plastics need to go. They're one of the major catalysts, if not the catalyst for our hyperconsumerist habits. Go back to glass bottles for things. Give subsidies to companies that use glass for inventory loss and such. Bring back the milkman who refills your empty jugs.

IMO the focus on plastics is a distraction. We'd be much better served by building buildings that last longer (I live in Switzerland and I'm surrounded by 50 year old concrete buildings being knocked down and replaced with concrete apartments at the cost of god knows how much co2) and need less energy (noticed how old cities with narrow streets stay cool in the sun? Much better than glass-fronted apartments), reducing land use change, taxing transport appropriately, taxing meat, and so on. But those are hard and complaining that too much clingfilm is used is easy, so here we are.

I'm sure someone will say "but we need to start somewhere!". That's true, but we don't really have time for starting small. And often the alternatives are no better anyway — lots of people bought cotton bags to replace single-use plastic ones at the supermarket but that's probably worse for the environment than just continuing to use plastic (a cotton bag needs to be used hundreds of times to have a lower impact). I know that people mean well but we're all just getting stuck on trivial but attainable micro-goals while the world slowly burns around us.

Unfortunately I believe that unless our economic and political systems ("grow the economy by digging stuff from the ground and making things to sell" and "don't do anything to annoy the people you need to vote for you in N years") change neither will the climate crisis, meaningfully. And this makes me sad and terrified.

Post reply on HN