6 ms·

>Be constructive, be creative. Ok, solution time. Let's immediately ban everyone who denies that climate change is human made from all positions of power. That

by vesak 10y ago

>Be constructive, be creative. Ok, solution time. Let's immediately ban everyone who denies that climate change is human made from all positions of power. That implies stripping them of both titles and wealth.

retrogradeorbit 10y ago
I vote we kill you first. You breathe out CO2, right? EDIT: Nice silent edit there. Let me just quote what you just deleted from your comment "Since they won't probably give in voluntarily and since many of them are already in power, this further implies a violent uprising."
- tehwalrus 10y ago
  Breathing is turning carbon that was already in the cycle into CO2. You don't eat coal, or drink crude oil, do you?
- scarmig 10y ago
  "I vote we kill you first" If you're going to troll, at least get your science right. Breathing out CO2 adds zero net CO2 to the atmosphere, because it comes from food you ate, which itself came from CO2 in the atmosphere. The oil and gas that an individual uses to survive, on the other hand, is literally deadly. So you are at the verge of having a point: we could lower CO2 usage by killing people. However, a much more direct and reasonable fix to the problem is to disincentive the use and production of that particular poison. There are a couple ways to do this, but I'd argue a steep carbon tax, with proceeds used for funding sequestration research and programs, is the most humane solution to the monstrous evil of carbon pollution.
  - retrogradeorbit 10y ago
    I'm not trolling. I am feeding back to this person calling for outright violence their own attitude. It's attitudes like vesak's that will lead us to blood filled streets. Hate breeds hate. And eye for an eye leaving the whole world blind.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - flukus 10y ago
    > Breathing out CO2 adds zero net CO2 to the atmosphere, because it comes from food you ate, which itself came from CO2 in the atmosphere. For most of us that food probably took a considerable amount of fossils food to grow, package and transport.
- sctb 10y ago
  Please don't post uncivilly like this, like the guidelines ask. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
tehwalrus 10y ago
Doing this within democratic structures may be a hard problem, but that doesn't make it unsolvable. (I'm not sure where you get the authority to ban people from authority from. That was a fun sentence!)
stale2002 10y ago
Why bother? The IPCC, which is the official authority on climate change, says that over the next 200 years sea levels will rise by a meter or 2. Damaging, for sure. Trillions of dollars in costs. But not exactly world ending. Thats the scientific consensus. I look at the official statistics that the scientists provide, and I go "meh". If I had the choice between magically stopping climate change forever, and stopping, I don't know, a single Iraq War (trillions in damages!), I'd have an awful hard time choosing between the 2.
- scarmig 10y ago
  Luckily, those aren't mutually exclusive choices. And climate change potentially causes wars as countries are strapped for resources, so acting to fix climate change is a twofer. Also: you are understating the cost of climate change. These estimates are tricky to get right, but the IPCC estimates a ballpark figure of 1-4% of GDP for a 4 degrees C increase in global mean temperature. That puts the cost on the order of trillions per year, not in total.
  - stale2002 10y ago
    4 degrees C is an absolute upper bound in the temperature predictions. The kind of thing you'd get if the world attempted to explicitly maximize CO2 output, instead of only pretending to minimize. And then imagine if they did that for the next 80 years. We are not going to climate change tomorrow, but I'd be awfully surprised if we haven't made some very good progress in the next 2 decades. Solar prices have something like 10 to 100X decreased over the last 20 years, and there really isn't that much further (comparatively!) to go before they reach grid parity. What I am saying is, that there are a whole lot of reasons to be optimistic about the future, and that panic seems a litter premature. We are currently easily on track to solving it, solely through normal capitalistic efforts that have created the amazing technology breakthroughs that we've seen over the last 2 decades.
    - scarmig 10y ago
      Why wait for the free market fairies to magically fix climate change decades from now, when we can tax and mitigate the pollution that's destroying other people's lives and property right now? That's a well understood solution within the scope of already known science, and economics can easily predict what happens when you tax something: use of it goes down.
ryanwaggoner 10y ago
You either do this via dictatorship, which is problematic (highly unlikely to remain committed to environmental agenda in long run), or via democracy, but if via democracy, then it's pointless. If people are willing to do this, they're willing to cut carbon. The problem with those denialists is that we keep electing them!

by vesak 10y ago

retrogradeorbit 10y ago

I vote we kill you first. You breathe out CO2, right? EDIT: Nice silent edit there. Let me just quote what you just deleted from your comment "Since they won't probably give in voluntarily and since many of them are already in power, this further implies a violent uprising."

tehwalrus 10y ago
Breathing is turning carbon that was already in the cycle into CO2. You don't eat coal, or drink crude oil, do you?
scarmig 10y ago
"I vote we kill you first" If you're going to troll, at least get your science right. Breathing out CO2 adds zero net CO2 to the atmosphere, because it comes from food you ate, which itself came from CO2 in the atmosphere. The oil and gas that an individual uses to survive, on the other hand, is literally deadly. So you are at the verge of having a point: we could lower CO2 usage by killing people. However, a much more direct and reasonable fix to the problem is to disincentive the use and production of that particular poison. There are a couple ways to do this, but I'd argue a steep carbon tax, with proceeds used for funding sequestration research and programs, is the most humane solution to the monstrous evil of carbon pollution.
- retrogradeorbit 10y ago
  I'm not trolling. I am feeding back to this person calling for outright violence their own attitude. It's attitudes like vesak's that will lead us to blood filled streets. Hate breeds hate. And eye for an eye leaving the whole world blind.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- flukus 10y ago
  > Breathing out CO2 adds zero net CO2 to the atmosphere, because it comes from food you ate, which itself came from CO2 in the atmosphere. For most of us that food probably took a considerable amount of fossils food to grow, package and transport.
sctb 10y ago
Please don't post uncivilly like this, like the guidelines ask. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

tehwalrus 10y ago

Doing this within democratic structures may be a hard problem, but that doesn't make it unsolvable. (I'm not sure where you get the authority to ban people from authority from. That was a fun sentence!)

stale2002 10y ago

Why bother? The IPCC, which is the official authority on climate change, says that over the next 200 years sea levels will rise by a meter or 2. Damaging, for sure. Trillions of dollars in costs. But not exactly world ending. Thats the scientific consensus. I look at the official statistics that the scientists provide, and I go "meh". If I had the choice between magically stopping climate change forever, and stopping, I don't know, a single Iraq War (trillions in damages!), I'd have an awful hard time choosing between the 2.

scarmig 10y ago
Luckily, those aren't mutually exclusive choices. And climate change potentially causes wars as countries are strapped for resources, so acting to fix climate change is a twofer. Also: you are understating the cost of climate change. These estimates are tricky to get right, but the IPCC estimates a ballpark figure of 1-4% of GDP for a 4 degrees C increase in global mean temperature. That puts the cost on the order of trillions per year, not in total.
- stale2002 10y ago
  4 degrees C is an absolute upper bound in the temperature predictions. The kind of thing you'd get if the world attempted to explicitly maximize CO2 output, instead of only pretending to minimize. And then imagine if they did that for the next 80 years. We are not going to climate change tomorrow, but I'd be awfully surprised if we haven't made some very good progress in the next 2 decades. Solar prices have something like 10 to 100X decreased over the last 20 years, and there really isn't that much further (comparatively!) to go before they reach grid parity. What I am saying is, that there are a whole lot of reasons to be optimistic about the future, and that panic seems a litter premature. We are currently easily on track to solving it, solely through normal capitalistic efforts that have created the amazing technology breakthroughs that we've seen over the last 2 decades.
  - scarmig 10y ago
    Why wait for the free market fairies to magically fix climate change decades from now, when we can tax and mitigate the pollution that's destroying other people's lives and property right now? That's a well understood solution within the scope of already known science, and economics can easily predict what happens when you tax something: use of it goes down.

ryanwaggoner 10y ago

You either do this via dictatorship, which is problematic (highly unlikely to remain committed to environmental agenda in long run), or via democracy, but if via democracy, then it's pointless. If people are willing to do this, they're willing to cut carbon. The problem with those denialists is that we keep electing them!