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Even if it turns out the 2% of scientist who doubt man made global warming are right, you would think that it would at least be worth trying to save the world.
by alistproducer2 10y ago
Even if it turns out the 2% of scientist who doubt man made global warming are right, you would think that it would at least be worth trying to save the world. This failure is not on regular people, it's on the people who know better and are in positions of power yet failed to fight hard enough, make winning arguments and treat the fight with the urgency it deserved.
If people can be convinced to vote for taxes on themselves to build stadiums in cities that already have one, I don't believe for a second that it is a lost cause to convince people of a tax to literally help save the fucking world.
- triplesec 10y agoCan you provide a link / info for the stadium tax decision? Interesting behavioural news
- r0m4n0 10y agoI'm aware of my own city that has done this... hundreds of millions in tax payer money to move the nba team downtown instead of across the river http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2014/05/20/downtown-arena-plan-gets-final-approval.html http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2014/05/20/downto...
- ProAm 10y ago> trying to save the world The world wont end, it will just change... happens all the time. Seriously 99.9% of all species that have walked the Earth are extinct. Humans are not exempt from that process, there is nothing to save here, the Earth will continue on just as it always has.
- Robotbeat 10y agoNihilism is never a good look.
- ProAm 10y agoI dont think it's really nihilism I just dont believe humans will fix this issue (if they even can). But life will certainly go on, it just might not be us here on Earth.
- intended 10y agoyou are, actually, too optimistic. Even In the 1990s, people knew that environmental efforts were going to fail and people have already started trying techniques to terraform the planet. https://books.google.co.in/books?id=nArq-K7ZiacC&pg=PA420&dq=climate+change+%22thicker+sea+ice%22&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.co.in/books?id=nArq-K7ZiacC&pg=PA420&dq... Take a look at he geoengineering options. This is how it's going to go down. 1) environmental attempts will fail. 2) various records will be breached, eventually a perceptual point will be crossed, but it will be far, far too late to save the planet. 3) poltical imperatives will change, soon after public imperatives change. 4) since the risk/reward from stoping environmental damage is now a divide by 0 operation, "can-do" individuals/groups (the same firms who created this mess), will pitch geo-engineering/terraforming 5) Governments will propose multi billion dollar programs to do this, farming out contracts for "jobs!" Bonus) hacker news 2.0 will debate on various economic models to support such work, and people will say they hate big government, so let's give limited resource rights to these firms as compensation instead of government largesse. They'll brand it as jobs creation, man against nature, and use it to capture more power and funding. I've been right betting on my reasoning for non standard events before, and I can't see any reason this won't happen. Within a few deviations of the original plan.
- ProAm 10y agoThis is actually my pitch for YC S23, Earth 2.3 it's a SAAS based volunteer program to head up extra-terra farming with a weekly delivery option. Looking for a CTO/co-founder.
- Gravityloss 10y agoIf you're lying - and if the audience knows you're lying, but supports you anyway, you can certainly say anything and just turn on a dime. From CO2 is life to CO2 is death. For this plan yo work, the owners would have to sell the oil refineries and rigs now when you can get a better price, and only then change the rhetoric. The buyer would have to bet on milking the CO2 is life for a decade yet.
- badosu 10y ago"The planet is fine. The people are f*ed!" https://youtu.be/7W33HRc1A6c?t=142 https://youtu.be/7W33HRc1A6c?t=142
- marcgcombi 10y ago#FakeNews alert. 98% of "scientists" don't actually agree on human driven climate change. Google it. It's a myth that started when some wing-nut published the unfounded assertion and everyone glomed onto it...
- sctb 9y agoPlease stop posting unsubstantively like this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- pdonis 10y ago> you would think that it would at least be worth trying to save the world Not if "saving the world" means spending trillions of dollars on things that (a) might well not fix the problem, and (b) could be better spent on other things with a much more certain payoff. For example, bringing people out of poverty and building up our infrastructure so it is more robust against any kind of disruption. Especially if doing those things makes it a lot easier to adapt to whatever happens to the climate anyway.
- epistasis 10y agoYeah, that "trillions of dollars" is a baseless assumption that's just pulled out of somebody's behind. There's this assumption that it's going to cost so much, when in reality, renewable energy and storage are shaping up to be cheaper than fossil fuels in the coming decades. Pretty much the worst case spending on mitigation plans is 3% of GDP. Less than we spend on the military. And that's worst case. Over the long run, most mitigation analyses have us saving money. I think that these baseless assumptions about the cost of mitigation are just as much a problem as the denial. A good amount of the denial comes from people that assume that they'll have to give up driving and eating meat. Another good amount of the denalism comes from dark money that influences political thought. That dark money is hard to eliminate, but we need to stop the speculation that fighting climate change means a significantly lower quality of life.
- Turing_Machine 10y ago"renewable energy and storage are shaping up to be cheaper than fossil fuels in the coming decades." If they actually become cheaper, there won't be any government action necessary to make people adopt them.
- epistasis 10y agoThere's been a ton of government action to build the early industry, though, in the form of subsidies. It's something that we've seen in aerospace, the history of the semiconductor industry, and even in a ton of biotech. Government subsidies fund the early risky research, and often the military provides the early price-insensitive customers of new expensive technologies. With renewables, tax credits have been very influential in widening the market of early entrants.
- musgrove 10y agoIn a vacuum, with no costs associated maybe. But we're talking about vast amounts of money being taken from people and redistributed, huge egos vying for political power, and a host of other reasons that make it more complicated than if 2% are wrong or not. Even those 2% may not be doubting "man made global warming" but other aspects about it that make them want to act like...scientists, and question theories and findings and not jump into the global warming pool head-first like so many. Incidentally, and this is food for thought not an opinion of any sort, I'm almost 50 years old, and I've now been a part of 3 global climate scares. One cooling; one warming; now both after previously warming, but none of the predictions have come to pass, except the world has become infinitely friendlier to it than we were when I was a kid, which were the days of the crying indian commercial, 10 MPG behemoth cars, and a shiny new EPA.
- jamesblonde 10y ago3 global climate scares - none of which have come to pass. Please, fact-less nonsense. Global warming is coming to pass. That is a fact. The arctic is warming significantly. A fact. Not a scare story. The consequences are scary and uncertain. Have you ever heard of positive feedback effects? They can happen, we don't know. The release of methane in the arctic leading to runaway global warming - can we be sure it won't happen? References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/climate-trends-continue-to-break-records https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/climate-trends-con...
- alphapapa 10y agoOn the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both. --Stephen Schneider in APS News, Aug/Sep 1996, p. 5, http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/199608/upload/aug96.pdf http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/199608/upload/aug96....
- s73ver 10y ago"This failure is not on regular people" Regular people are the ones who voted for those in power who declared that Global Warming was a hoax. Regular people are the ones who voted for leaders who prized returning to coal instead of advancing renewable energies.
- reddytowns 10y agoThe 97% claim is bullshit: https://www.google.com.tw/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/alexepstein/2015/01/06/97-of-climate-scientists-agree-is-100-wrong/amp/ https://www.google.com.tw/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/alexeps... I do believe that there is man made climate change, however, but this meme has to end.
- mikeash 10y ago"The warming is a whopping 0.8 degrees over the past 150 years, a warming that has tapered off to essentially nothing in the last decade and a half." This article is bullshit.
- reddytowns 10y agoAs thee declared so, it must be...
- mikeash 10y agoWould you like to address the quote? Warming has not stopped in the last decade and a half. Quite the opposite.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rhino369 10y agoYou need viable solutions and cost/benefit analysis for how much warming is too much warming. There is little to no consensus on all of that. There isn't a consensus on how sensitive the climate is to carbon and to what feedback loops exist. Even the IPCC ranges are fairly broad. Then we don't know how much the warming will affect the actual climate and what the effects will be. What does earth at +5 degrees C even look like? What if in 20 years solar, wind and battery tech is so cheap that natural gas and coal plants shut down. Everyone goes to electric cars, and carbon output plummets?
- intended 10y agoWell, we know that even if humanity vanished overnight, carbon dioxide driven warming will continue, just because of the time taken to remove co2 from the atmosphere. We have increasingly better ideas of how the world will look like...and if we have ranges then we have an idea of how sensitive climate is to carbon. All of which directly point to the fact that the world will warm, and it's a question of how fast. The question of how long this will go on, is beyond science because it's a political question - warming will stop years after we stop adding to the heat cycle. I'm also a bit confused as to how you say "we don't know what the earth at +5 looks like", because countries (other than America) are already deploying resources to manage migration and movement, we know other countries and islands will disappear with sea level rises. I know my country has been grappling with water scarcity issues, and people don't argue about global warming, the same way they don't argue about evolution. Matter of fact the only major country I know which actively engages and exports denialism is America. India and China are fighting for economic stability, but no one doubts that this is a crisis that has to be solved. I'm confuxsed by your question, as most of these are answered to some degree or the other on the net or on Reddit. You could just head to a r/science climate AMA and get your answers.
- mythrwy 10y agoIf a tax would save the world I'd be all for it. But it won't.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]