10 ms·

World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency

119 points by andyjohnson0 7y ago

bprater 7y ago
11,000 scientists, in fact.
- Bantros 7y ago
  Are these the hallowed 99%?
the-dude 7y ago
Full of Y-axis manipulation. Alarmist language. And what does this mean ? ( from the conclusions ) : "Mitigating and adapting to climate change while honoring the diversity of humans" Did they get bonus points for the diversity angle?
- Miner49er 7y ago
  Population control is often a dog whistle for ethnic cleansing. I think they are simply trying to be very clear that they aren't advocating for that.
  - the-dude 7y ago
    The merely want to control the population?
    - adamch 7y ago
      No. As the report itself says, stabilizing the population (or slightly shrinking it) will help fight climate change, but that can be done very easily without "population control". "make family-planning services available to all people, remove barriers to their access and achieve full gender equity, including primary and secondary education as a global norm for all, especially girls and young women [1] Which makes sense! Rather than some sort of authoritarian China-esque policy of limiting children, just spread access to goods (like education, contraception and abortion) which allow people to control how many children they have. [1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6403/650 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6403/650
- rebuilder 7y ago
  I believe it means "while avoiding a totalitarian hell"
- excalibur 7y ago
  Looks to me like the Y-axes were consistently manipulated, with the sinister aim of fitting all of the data points in some very limited real estate for each graph.
  - the-dude 7y ago
    And because there are so many graphs, one would like to correlate. Which is totally senseless now.
    - excalibur 7y ago
      ...Most of them aren't even measuring the same variable. What were you hoping to correlate? For the handful of pairs that are apples to apples, couldn't you just imagine one being situated above the other?
- erentz 7y ago
  It's perfectly fine to truncate the y-axis on line charts when zero is not in the normal range of values. The charts all look very clear and it's easy to interpret the data and trends to me.
wchandler 7y ago
Yawn ...
- imesh 7y ago
  So says the collective consciousness...
booboolayla 7y ago
This looks like a Hail Mary move from the climate apocalypse cult.
deepnet 7y ago
Well worth reading.
quest1 7y ago
Articles about Climate Change seem to get very few comments on Hacker News. I think nearly every other article on the home page right now has more comments including an articles about building a flying taxi (47 comments). Honest Question: Why is there seemingly such little interest in what very well could be a huge threat to the survival of humanity? I asked a similar question here - and it got 0 comments! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21027145 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21027145
- wtvanhest 7y ago
  Its a highly politicized topic. The two major political parties in the United States are arguing over the validity of the claims. Even if you wanted to have a technical discussion, the average HN reader will not be able to put aside their political party's beliefs in order to actually evaluate claims made by individual scientists.
- on_and_off 7y ago
  Another question : what can I do to make things change ?
  - maelito 7y ago
    One way is to reduce your climate impact to 2 tons / year and spread the word.
    - on_and_off 7y ago
      well I already don't own a car (last mile vehicle is enough for my use), and follow a mediterranean diet, avoid waste, etc But e.g. as much as I try to avoid single use plastic, my limited useage is not going to do much vs just banning / heavily taxing them. So my question was more : what can I do to actually make the lines move.
      - tempguy9999 7y ago
        I answered this before but can't find my post (is there an easy way to search your own comments?) Basically I said put pressure on your politician. As an individual you can't do much, a politician is the person to make things happen - it's their job! - so pressure them. I'm currently doing this to my own (in the UK). They seem to be struggling rather pitifully to understand the difference in priorities between Brexit, and a Catastrophe of Human Making aka climate change. Well, FWIW I'll keep pressuring them.
SubiculumCode 7y ago
Climate Change is an existential threat. Period.
- SubiculumCode 7y ago
  Voting this down is not going to cool down our planet. Thanks.
- joeblow9999 7y ago
  not even the most pessimistic IPCC projections describe it as an existential threat. youre buying into hype instead of science.
  - SubiculumCode 7y ago
    That is debatable, and is being debated. There remains a lot of unknowns, a lot of them having to do with the northern permafrosts that have been increasingly releasing methane.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
> The climate crisis is closely linked to excessive consumption of the wealthy lifestyle. > Excessive extraction of materials and overexploitation of ecosystems, driven by economic growth, must be quickly curtailed to maintain long-term sustainability of the biosphere. > Profoundly troubling signs from human activities include sustained increases in both human and ruminant livestock populations, per capita meat production, world gross domestic product, global tree cover loss, fossil fuel consumption, the number of air passengers carried, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and per capita CO2 emissions since 2000 There's the rub. The vast majority of people in the developing world want the wealthy, Western lifestyle. People like eating meat. People like having technology and air conditioning and transportation and using airplanes to visit far off places. No leader of a developing country is going to go to their people and say, "Sorry, for the sake of the planet we are going to remain poor." And no leader of developed country is going to go to their people and say, "Sorry, for the sake of the planet, we are going to have to give up our lifestyle, and curtail our economic growth." > Exactly 40 years ago, scientists from 50 nations met at the First World Climate Conference (in Geneva 1979) and agreed that alarming trends for climate change made it urgently necessary to act. My guess is that 40 years from now, this group of scientists will put out a paper talking about how they have been warning us for the last 80 years, and we still haven't done anything.
- jawilson2 7y ago
  > No leader of a developing country is going to go to their people and say, "Sorry, for the sake of the planet we are going to remain poor." And no leader of developed country is going to go to their people and say, "Sorry, for the sake of the planet, we are going to have to give up our lifestyle, and curtail our economic growth." Then we will all die, and will deserve it.
  - adamch 7y ago
    "We" won't deserve it. There is a small minority of people who have worked for 30 years to suppress research about climate change. For example, Exxon has known about climate change for decades, but funded denialists [1] Unfortunately, these people are unlikely to suffer very much from climate change, because they will be able to afford higher food prices, private security, etc. So a more accurate statement would be "Then millions of undeserving people will die, and the people who deserve to won't." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont...
brillas 7y ago
it says worldwide, but we all know who this is aimed at. Global North countries with excess consumption are distinctly to blame. Why then, the emphasis on coordinated global action? Broad demands, like moving away from GDP and doing nice sustainable things instead are not productive. But when these kinds of alliances insist on ignoring the overwhelming burden of the US and friends on the climate crisis, instead asking for aid in moving developing countries and their minuscule footprint away from fossil fuels, its the only way to go about it. We need to understand that, as the developing world, this is not “our” fault. It is -their- fault. That’s why this will fizzle out like all the agreements before it. If these thousands of scientists want to make a change, they need to throw their weight behind specific policy proposals in specific guilty countries and get political, using their numbers as focused power and not as vague alarmism calling for impossible policy.
fumar 7y ago
Is there a solution for rapid change from the private sector? I don't believe the current US policy makers will act on climate change.
- tasteslikepaper 7y ago
  The one solution I see is replacing traditional meat (especially beef) by alternatives like Beyond Meat or processed insects. I believe that we can see a huge shift once meat alternatives become a viable alternative, not only for the sake of direct methane/CO2 consumption but also in terms of rain forest preservation (iirc, around 77% of the total soy production go into mass breeding).
Bantros 7y ago
When I say climate, you say emergency! Climate
adamch 7y ago
Perhaps 30 years ago climate change could have been stopped or kept under control by a series of taxes and trading schemes. However, world governments have squandered that opportunity. If climate change continues unfettered, millions of people living on coastlines will be displaced and agriculture will become difficult in many regions. This is likely to lead to political chaos and instability. I think climate change should be the most important issue on in any election. We still have time to keep warming manageable, but it will mean halving the amount of greenhouse gas we produce. This is going to require fighting climate change on multiple fronts, including changes to almost every industry - energy, housing, transportation, commerce - and possibly even geoengineering as a last resort. But it can be done. The Green New Deal is the only family of solutions that can plausibly halt climate change. Anything less is incompatible with the science.
alexeiz 7y ago
> The climate crisis is closely linked to excessive consumption of the wealthy lifestyle. My bullshit detector went off here. I don't known how any reputable scientist can claim that.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Well... in almost all cases, the wealthy lifestyle produces more carbon than a less-wealthy lifestyle in the same country. The thing is, though, that the wealthy lifestyle isn't that common. Are we talking about the 1%? Well, only 1% of the people can live that lifestyle. Are they responsible for 2% of carbon emissions? 5%? 10%? That still leaves 90% of carbon emissions. So, yeah. The quoted statement seems to be far more political than it is based on objective evidence.
digitalboss 7y ago
Relevant Posted today: The Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), Portugal Space Agency (PT Space), European Space Agency (ESA) and Unbabel Labs open competition for a €500,000 award that will combine Artificial Intelligence and space technologies to solve major environmental issues. The winning team will present its solution at Web Summit 2020. https://unbabel.com/news/500k-ai-moonshot-challenge-will-combine-ai-with-emerging-space-technologies-to-combat-climate-change/ https://unbabel.com/news/500k-ai-moonshot-challenge-will-com...
john_moscow 7y ago
I absolutely hate how such articles are designed to make most readers feel guilty, while not offering any realistic and quantifiable action plan. Nope, the average reader of this will not give up their plans on having a family, to delay the global warming for the less environmentally conscious part of humanity by a couple of milliseconds. They won't change their lifestyle from living in a house, traveling to events and eating tasty food to suddenly sitting in a 100 sqft box and eating sustainable pea soup every day. What those articles do is give more votes to the green politicians, whose platform often consists of taxing things people enjoy and spending that money to produce more fearmongering articles. So instead of a small shop owner flying with their family to a vacation in Hawaii, the same plane seat will be taken by a politician flying to a climate change conference where they will commit to spending more taxpayer money on creating committees, publishing papers and making sure as many people as possible vote green. On the other hand, there are not many articles on addressing climate change from an engineering standpoint. How much of the CO2 emissions come from burning gasoline? How much of that CO2 could be trapped back by switching to biodiesel? What would be the CO2 output of producing the necessary fertilizers and compensating for the increased corrosiveness? Are there better ways of trapping atmospheric CO2 in something that can be easily loaded into a gas tank in 5 minutes? Can we compensate the greenhouse effect by emitting some reflective particles into the atmosphere? There are plenty of quantifiable and constructive ways to to reduce the global warming that would actually require research and collaboration across the board, but somehow instead we are stuck in a loop of guilt and are fighting on who should get blamed and taxed for something we are not yet solving.
realldeal 7y ago
have you guys checked this hacker Andrej Boldiss at boldisshack@gmail.com ...dude's totally the word hack.Does from yahoo,facebook, gmail,hotmail, aol, twitter, instagram,snapchat hacks.Does bank jobs and credit card tops as well.paypal acct payments as well as your blank atm cards.He's currently upgrading a nephew's schoolgrade.lol.Top class hack tool he is..Top secretive and discreet jobs.dude's kinda picky so make mention of the reference.katty referred you. you're welcome
pressurefree 7y ago
let's go. we got this!

119 points by andyjohnson0 7y ago

bprater 7y ago

11,000 scientists, in fact.

Bantros 7y ago
Are these the hallowed 99%?

the-dude 7y ago

Full of Y-axis manipulation. Alarmist language. And what does this mean ? ( from the conclusions ) : "Mitigating and adapting to climate change while honoring the diversity of humans" Did they get bonus points for the diversity angle?

Miner49er 7y ago
Population control is often a dog whistle for ethnic cleansing. I think they are simply trying to be very clear that they aren't advocating for that.
- the-dude 7y ago
  The merely want to control the population?
  - adamch 7y ago
    No. As the report itself says, stabilizing the population (or slightly shrinking it) will help fight climate change, but that can be done very easily without "population control". "make family-planning services available to all people, remove barriers to their access and achieve full gender equity, including primary and secondary education as a global norm for all, especially girls and young women [1] Which makes sense! Rather than some sort of authoritarian China-esque policy of limiting children, just spread access to goods (like education, contraception and abortion) which allow people to control how many children they have. [1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6403/650 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6403/650
rebuilder 7y ago
I believe it means "while avoiding a totalitarian hell"
excalibur 7y ago
Looks to me like the Y-axes were consistently manipulated, with the sinister aim of fitting all of the data points in some very limited real estate for each graph.
- the-dude 7y ago
  And because there are so many graphs, one would like to correlate. Which is totally senseless now.
  - excalibur 7y ago
    ...Most of them aren't even measuring the same variable. What were you hoping to correlate? For the handful of pairs that are apples to apples, couldn't you just imagine one being situated above the other?
erentz 7y ago
It's perfectly fine to truncate the y-axis on line charts when zero is not in the normal range of values. The charts all look very clear and it's easy to interpret the data and trends to me.

wchandler 7y ago

Yawn ...

imesh 7y ago
So says the collective consciousness...

booboolayla 7y ago

This looks like a Hail Mary move from the climate apocalypse cult.

deepnet 7y ago

Well worth reading.

quest1 7y ago

Articles about Climate Change seem to get very few comments on Hacker News. I think nearly every other article on the home page right now has more comments including an articles about building a flying taxi (47 comments). Honest Question: Why is there seemingly such little interest in what very well could be a huge threat to the survival of humanity? I asked a similar question here - and it got 0 comments! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21027145 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21027145

wtvanhest 7y ago
Its a highly politicized topic. The two major political parties in the United States are arguing over the validity of the claims. Even if you wanted to have a technical discussion, the average HN reader will not be able to put aside their political party's beliefs in order to actually evaluate claims made by individual scientists.
on_and_off 7y ago
Another question : what can I do to make things change ?
- maelito 7y ago
  One way is to reduce your climate impact to 2 tons / year and spread the word.
  - on_and_off 7y ago
    well I already don't own a car (last mile vehicle is enough for my use), and follow a mediterranean diet, avoid waste, etc But e.g. as much as I try to avoid single use plastic, my limited useage is not going to do much vs just banning / heavily taxing them. So my question was more : what can I do to actually make the lines move.
    - tempguy9999 7y ago
      I answered this before but can't find my post (is there an easy way to search your own comments?) Basically I said put pressure on your politician. As an individual you can't do much, a politician is the person to make things happen - it's their job! - so pressure them. I'm currently doing this to my own (in the UK). They seem to be struggling rather pitifully to understand the difference in priorities between Brexit, and a Catastrophe of Human Making aka climate change. Well, FWIW I'll keep pressuring them.

SubiculumCode 7y ago

Climate Change is an existential threat. Period.

SubiculumCode 7y ago
Voting this down is not going to cool down our planet. Thanks.
joeblow9999 7y ago
not even the most pessimistic IPCC projections describe it as an existential threat. youre buying into hype instead of science.
- SubiculumCode 7y ago
  That is debatable, and is being debated. There remains a lot of unknowns, a lot of them having to do with the northern permafrosts that have been increasingly releasing methane.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

> The climate crisis is closely linked to excessive consumption of the wealthy lifestyle. > Excessive extraction of materials and overexploitation of ecosystems, driven by economic growth, must be quickly curtailed to maintain long-term sustainability of the biosphere. > Profoundly troubling signs from human activities include sustained increases in both human and ruminant livestock populations, per capita meat production, world gross domestic product, global tree cover loss, fossil fuel consumption, the number of air passengers carried, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and per capita CO2 emissions since 2000 There's the rub. The vast majority of people in the developing world want the wealthy, Western lifestyle. People like eating meat. People like having technology and air conditioning and transportation and using airplanes to visit far off places. No leader of a developing country is going to go to their people and say, "Sorry, for the sake of the planet we are going to remain poor." And no leader of developed country is going to go to their people and say, "Sorry, for the sake of the planet, we are going to have to give up our lifestyle, and curtail our economic growth." > Exactly 40 years ago, scientists from 50 nations met at the First World Climate Conference (in Geneva 1979) and agreed that alarming trends for climate change made it urgently necessary to act. My guess is that 40 years from now, this group of scientists will put out a paper talking about how they have been warning us for the last 80 years, and we still haven't done anything.

jawilson2 7y ago
> No leader of a developing country is going to go to their people and say, "Sorry, for the sake of the planet we are going to remain poor." And no leader of developed country is going to go to their people and say, "Sorry, for the sake of the planet, we are going to have to give up our lifestyle, and curtail our economic growth." Then we will all die, and will deserve it.
- adamch 7y ago
  "We" won't deserve it. There is a small minority of people who have worked for 30 years to suppress research about climate change. For example, Exxon has known about climate change for decades, but funded denialists [1] Unfortunately, these people are unlikely to suffer very much from climate change, because they will be able to afford higher food prices, private security, etc. So a more accurate statement would be "Then millions of undeserving people will die, and the people who deserve to won't." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont...

brillas 7y ago

it says worldwide, but we all know who this is aimed at. Global North countries with excess consumption are distinctly to blame. Why then, the emphasis on coordinated global action? Broad demands, like moving away from GDP and doing nice sustainable things instead are not productive. But when these kinds of alliances insist on ignoring the overwhelming burden of the US and friends on the climate crisis, instead asking for aid in moving developing countries and their minuscule footprint away from fossil fuels, its the only way to go about it. We need to understand that, as the developing world, this is not “our” fault. It is -their- fault. That’s why this will fizzle out like all the agreements before it. If these thousands of scientists want to make a change, they need to throw their weight behind specific policy proposals in specific guilty countries and get political, using their numbers as focused power and not as vague alarmism calling for impossible policy.

fumar 7y ago

Is there a solution for rapid change from the private sector? I don't believe the current US policy makers will act on climate change.

tasteslikepaper 7y ago
The one solution I see is replacing traditional meat (especially beef) by alternatives like Beyond Meat or processed insects. I believe that we can see a huge shift once meat alternatives become a viable alternative, not only for the sake of direct methane/CO2 consumption but also in terms of rain forest preservation (iirc, around 77% of the total soy production go into mass breeding).

Bantros 7y ago

When I say climate, you say emergency! Climate

adamch 7y ago

Perhaps 30 years ago climate change could have been stopped or kept under control by a series of taxes and trading schemes. However, world governments have squandered that opportunity. If climate change continues unfettered, millions of people living on coastlines will be displaced and agriculture will become difficult in many regions. This is likely to lead to political chaos and instability. I think climate change should be the most important issue on in any election. We still have time to keep warming manageable, but it will mean halving the amount of greenhouse gas we produce. This is going to require fighting climate change on multiple fronts, including changes to almost every industry - energy, housing, transportation, commerce - and possibly even geoengineering as a last resort. But it can be done. The Green New Deal is the only family of solutions that can plausibly halt climate change. Anything less is incompatible with the science.

alexeiz 7y ago

> The climate crisis is closely linked to excessive consumption of the wealthy lifestyle. My bullshit detector went off here. I don't known how any reputable scientist can claim that.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
Well... in almost all cases, the wealthy lifestyle produces more carbon than a less-wealthy lifestyle in the same country. The thing is, though, that the wealthy lifestyle isn't that common. Are we talking about the 1%? Well, only 1% of the people can live that lifestyle. Are they responsible for 2% of carbon emissions? 5%? 10%? That still leaves 90% of carbon emissions. So, yeah. The quoted statement seems to be far more political than it is based on objective evidence.

digitalboss 7y ago

Relevant Posted today: The Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), Portugal Space Agency (PT Space), European Space Agency (ESA) and Unbabel Labs open competition for a €500,000 award that will combine Artificial Intelligence and space technologies to solve major environmental issues. The winning team will present its solution at Web Summit 2020. https://unbabel.com/news/500k-ai-moonshot-challenge-will-combine-ai-with-emerging-space-technologies-to-combat-climate-change/ https://unbabel.com/news/500k-ai-moonshot-challenge-will-com...

john_moscow 7y ago

I absolutely hate how such articles are designed to make most readers feel guilty, while not offering any realistic and quantifiable action plan. Nope, the average reader of this will not give up their plans on having a family, to delay the global warming for the less environmentally conscious part of humanity by a couple of milliseconds. They won't change their lifestyle from living in a house, traveling to events and eating tasty food to suddenly sitting in a 100 sqft box and eating sustainable pea soup every day. What those articles do is give more votes to the green politicians, whose platform often consists of taxing things people enjoy and spending that money to produce more fearmongering articles. So instead of a small shop owner flying with their family to a vacation in Hawaii, the same plane seat will be taken by a politician flying to a climate change conference where they will commit to spending more taxpayer money on creating committees, publishing papers and making sure as many people as possible vote green. On the other hand, there are not many articles on addressing climate change from an engineering standpoint. How much of the CO2 emissions come from burning gasoline? How much of that CO2 could be trapped back by switching to biodiesel? What would be the CO2 output of producing the necessary fertilizers and compensating for the increased corrosiveness? Are there better ways of trapping atmospheric CO2 in something that can be easily loaded into a gas tank in 5 minutes? Can we compensate the greenhouse effect by emitting some reflective particles into the atmosphere? There are plenty of quantifiable and constructive ways to to reduce the global warming that would actually require research and collaboration across the board, but somehow instead we are stuck in a loop of guilt and are fighting on who should get blamed and taxed for something we are not yet solving.

realldeal 7y ago

have you guys checked this hacker Andrej Boldiss at boldisshack@gmail.com ...dude's totally the word hack.Does from yahoo,facebook, gmail,hotmail, aol, twitter, instagram,snapchat hacks.Does bank jobs and credit card tops as well.paypal acct payments as well as your blank atm cards.He's currently upgrading a nephew's schoolgrade.lol.Top class hack tool he is..Top secretive and discreet jobs.dude's kinda picky so make mention of the reference.katty referred you. you're welcome

pressurefree 7y ago

let's go. we got this!