7 ms·

On Behalf of Environmentalists, I Apologize for the Climate Scare

43 points by mudil 6y ago

iamstupidsimple 6y ago
Climate alarm-ism has honestly set back the whole movement in my opinion. For decades, we've only been 10 years away from extinction and it gave conservatives all the ammo needed to write climate change off as fake. Heck, even The Simpsons mocked this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epKaBv6ALcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epKaBv6ALcI
- smohare 6y ago
  Except that’s entirely the denialist straw man. It’s not we’re going to face a cosmic ray style annihilation in 10 years, but rather that we’re cavalierly approaching tipping points that will likely have repercussions for 10,000 years.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    Well, some environmentalists overstating their case ("alarmism") have made that not exactly a strawman.
  - iamstupidsimple 6y ago
    But it's a fact the situation, while serious, was massively overblown and became politicised. We may all be killed by climate change one day, and we need to act now, but we aren't going to die in ten years if nothing changes. Making the situation out to be the end of the world, short term, is how you lose the support of the general public.
- jonasenordin 6y ago
  That's not The Simpsons. That's some sort of surrogate that was snuck into the same time slot many years ago. Some viewers didn't notice. B'oh.
chmaynard 6y ago
Who exactly is Michael Shellenberger and what is his game? It's pretty clear that he is not a trained scientist or a journalist. What qualifies him to speak for those of us who are concerned about climate change and issue an apology on our behalf? Seems rather grandiose to me. I'm thinking pundit with political ambitions.
- kick 6y ago
  He ran for governor of California a bit ago. His career has been built around selling books.
pmiller2 6y ago
Is there even a shred of credible evidence for any of the following: > Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction” > The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world” > Climate change is not making natural disasters worse > Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003 > The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska > The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California > Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s > Netherlands became rich not poor while adapting to life below sea level > We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter > Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change > Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels > Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture Beyond the literal truth or falsity of the claims, how do they fit together into an argument that shows climate change is not an existential threat to human civilization? Last I checked, there was broad scientific consensus that climate change was real, caused (or, at least exacerbated) by humans, and would have massive impacts on human civilization. And then there's this person coming along and saying "Nahhh, none of this is a problem." Who should I believe?
- npongratz 6y ago
  FTA: "In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies." I would like to see those studies as well; wish the claims were better sourced.
- magneticnorth 6y ago
  Agree - some of these really, really need some sources - e.g. humans are not causing a "sixth mass extinction"? Is he arguing that there's not a threat of mass extinction, or that it's not human caused? Either way I'd love to see the reassuring evidence. Some of these seem true(ish) but misleading - isn't habitat loss often driven by climate change? And as far as I know no one is advocating a switch from fossil fuels to wood fuels; the fact that wood is worse is orthogonal to the fact that fossil fuels are problematic and nuclear, wind, and/or solar are often a better solution.
wyldfire 6y ago
It always seemed to me like the greatest hedge we could have is having human colonies on other planets. Because global disasters of so many kinds could sum up to extinction. While I realize that could be many decades away, it does seem like prioritizing it would make it happen much faster. > The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium This seems to match my intuition. > Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did What was the motivation for that switch? Petroleum/palm oil was cheaper? > 100% renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5% to 50% That seems astonishing, not just that it would require so much but that our current use is already so much area.
- joe-collins 6y ago
  > It always seemed to me like the greatest hedge we could have is having human colonies on other planets... While I realize that could be many decades away, it does seem like prioritizing it would make it happen much faster. Greatest in the sense of absolute scale, or with sufficiently long planning horizons, perhaps. But I doubt that any quantity of attainable prioritization will deliver any of that value, on the scale of the time we have before climate change starts inflicting drastic damage on our overall stability and way of life. Put another way, I wish Musk the best. He's absolutely mad, and a terrible person to have as a superior, but for all of that... he's accomplishing far more than I think anyone had right to expect. I think it will still amount to too little as a "climate change lifeboat", but if we adequately mitigate our immediate woes while we wait, and his successors can maintain his vision, drive, and disrespect for petty things like work/life balance, they might actually take us somewhere a few generations down the line.
- pintxo 6y ago
  > Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did According to [1]: The depletion of some whale species to near extinction led to the banning of whaling in many countries by 1969, and to a worldwide cessation of whaling as an industry in the late 1980s. This does sound more like Greenpeace (founded 1971) being the reason than switching to petroleum (no reason to expect much use for whale oil past WW2) to me. But surely Greenpeace is not the only reason. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling
kick 6y ago
This is a really misleading piece, by the way. This person has been speaking against environmentalism for over a decade now; he literally wrote a book about it sixteen years ago that attracted an amount of controversy. He doesn't deserve to speak for environmentalists; his actions for the past decade are pro-capital, any pro-environment effect was secondary. He's an economist, not an environmentalist, and he's trying to sell you a book, not fix anything.
- gHosts 6y ago
  I tried to find the source for the AOC quote.... I want (as always, whether Trump or AOC, to see the exact quote in context) and encountered a interesting new form of obfuscation... Proof by reference to a 4 hours long video!
  - bioinformatics 6y ago
    You really should try that Google thing https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/24/ocasio-cortez-says-world-will-end-years-she-is-absolutely-right/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/24/ocasio-co...
    - dang 6y ago
      Please don't be a jerk on HN, even when someone didn't Google. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - bioinformatics 6y ago
        Ask the person to Google is being a jerk? Wow, what a time to be alive.
        gHosts 6y ago
        I call that one "Proof by Reference to Pay Walled Article". That article could say absolutely anything for all I can see....
anoncareer0212 6y ago
#1) it's good to see alternative viewpoints on global warming, Michael is excellent for sharpening yourself on it #2) reading michael is an exercise in the limits of the slippery slope: he will show the Amazon isn't the "lungs of the earth", in that he will show why eliminating it doesn't mean we'll run out of oxygen, but he won't show that it is meaningless #3) after swimming around his arguments for a few months, your focus may (or may not!) turn to "well, even if we can say each part is overwrought, the whole effect and trend line is a major problem - swallowing a 5 degree celsius increase in temperature is, rather intuitively, a problem, particularly when we still have the _3rd_ derivative increasing"
rich_sasha 6y ago
I’d like to think it is true. But who do I ask? Who do I believe? Combatant environmentalists who look at vegetarians with hate? Climate change deniers? Institutions who have vested interests? Scientists with conflicting views? We’re so deep into a world where “truth” is merely an instrument of debate, bent and shaped into whatever point is trying to make, that I don’t know where to start...
mulmen 6y ago
> Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels. Can someone help me with this? I just moved and have both a fireplace and natural gas furnace. I had intended to supplement the furnace with wood heat in the winter. In what ways is wood worse than natural gas? I can imagine a few but I’m not sure they are right: Wood disadvantages: Local air quality Removal of trees Wood advantages: Renewable Neutral greenhouse gas emissions (?) Abundant (in my area) Natural gas disadvantages: Finite resource Greenhouse gas emissions(?) Natural gas advantages: Better local air quality than wood(?)
- mcphage 6y ago
  My understanding is that the particulates caused by wood fires are terrible for our lungs, especially inside houses: https://samharris.org/the-fireplace-delusion/ https://samharris.org/the-fireplace-delusion/
  - mulmen 6y ago
    Thanks, this is exactly the kind of starting point I was looking for.
    - mcphage 6y ago
      You're welcome :-)
  - Gibbon1 6y ago
    Anecdote from my grandmother. She said the local doctor back in the 20's had a story about med school. Helped out on an autopsy of an old Chinese sailor who spent most of his life on sailing ships. His professor pointed out that the mans lungs were pinkish and asked the students what condition might have caused that unusual condition. Ans: Man hadn't spent his life breathing smoke.
- tsherr 6y ago
  Renewable isn't really accurate for wood, at least not in human time scales. A maple takes about 25 years to mature. It's about three maple trees to a cord. Assuming 5 cords per winter, we're talking 375 trees before the first tree cut can be reharvested (assuming it was replanted immediately). That doesn't into account soil depletion and carbon release.
anarbadalov 6y ago
So many sweeping unsubstantiated claims in this piece — and from a non-scientist. Enough straw men in this article to populate a city.
caconym_ 6y ago
So I guess the fact that he went to live in the jungle as a kid is supposed to prove he isn't a crank now, 20+ years later? That's really, really not how it works. I definitely think a lot of the climate alarm is hyperbolic and misrepresentative, but not so much in the sense that it isn't a problem as that it's a problem that will only become obvious to laypeople long after the chance to prevent it from killing a lot of them is past. If he wants to convince me, he needs to do a lot less talking about how virtuous he is, less talking about his new book, and more showing me real data and scientific results.
wilburTheDog 6y ago
It appears the author wants to convince us of his credentials as a progressive and then use any good will that generates to try and persuade us that environmentally progressive ideas are wrong. He claims we have been 'badly misinformed' by people with 'unsavory or unhealthy motivations'. But this synopsis of his book makes it look like it could have been written by a coalition of lobbyists from the meat and nuclear industries. Who are we to trust? Also I think it's interesting that the only positive review he includes is from Richard Rhodes. I have never read anything from Richard Rhodes, but the second amazon review of his book Energy: A Human History has this to say 'the author is highly skeptical about renewable sources like wind and solar, waxing instead about the lost promise of nuclear'.
jacknews 6y ago
"Netherlands became rich not poor while adapting to life below sea level " LOL, we can all relax and look forward to a prosperous future then.
haltingproblem 6y ago
Michael Crichton's famous speech "Alien's cause global warming" is reprised in [1]. Is there truth in the environmental claims. I am sure there is. The environmental movement and climate scientists have shifted to activism that it is hard to differentiate truth and science from activism and propaganda. They environmentalists and their activism appears like a cross between Big Tobacco marketing, PETA and the Westboro baptist Church with a dash of Scientology thrown in for good measure. Tell me about that other planet colonization thing again ;) In all seriousness, who here really thinks we will have mass deaths, upwards of 10% of the population of the earth in the next 10 year timeframe from global warming? What about 15 years? 20 years? How about 5%? What odds are you proffering and how much would you like to wager on it? [1] https://mindmatters.ai/2020/06/twenty-years-on-aliens-still-cause-global-warming/ https://mindmatters.ai/2020/06/twenty-years-on-aliens-still-...
- Oletros 6y ago
  > and climate scientists have shifted to activism that it is hard to differentiate truth and science from activism and propaganda. Any example of this?

43 points by mudil 6y ago

Climate alarm-ism has honestly set back the whole movement in my opinion. For decades, we've only been 10 years away from extinction and it gave conservatives all the ammo needed to write climate change off as fake. Heck, even The Simpsons mocked this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epKaBv6ALcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epKaBv6ALcI

smohare 6y ago
Except that’s entirely the denialist straw man. It’s not we’re going to face a cosmic ray style annihilation in 10 years, but rather that we’re cavalierly approaching tipping points that will likely have repercussions for 10,000 years.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Well, some environmentalists overstating their case ("alarmism") have made that not exactly a strawman.
- iamstupidsimple 6y ago
  But it's a fact the situation, while serious, was massively overblown and became politicised. We may all be killed by climate change one day, and we need to act now, but we aren't going to die in ten years if nothing changes. Making the situation out to be the end of the world, short term, is how you lose the support of the general public.
jonasenordin 6y ago
That's not The Simpsons. That's some sort of surrogate that was snuck into the same time slot many years ago. Some viewers didn't notice. B'oh.

chmaynard 6y ago

Who exactly is Michael Shellenberger and what is his game? It's pretty clear that he is not a trained scientist or a journalist. What qualifies him to speak for those of us who are concerned about climate change and issue an apology on our behalf? Seems rather grandiose to me. I'm thinking pundit with political ambitions.

kick 6y ago
He ran for governor of California a bit ago. His career has been built around selling books.

pmiller2 6y ago

Is there even a shred of credible evidence for any of the following: > Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction” > The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world” > Climate change is not making natural disasters worse > Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003 > The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska > The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California > Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s > Netherlands became rich not poor while adapting to life below sea level > We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter > Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change > Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels > Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture Beyond the literal truth or falsity of the claims, how do they fit together into an argument that shows climate change is not an existential threat to human civilization? Last I checked, there was broad scientific consensus that climate change was real, caused (or, at least exacerbated) by humans, and would have massive impacts on human civilization. And then there's this person coming along and saying "Nahhh, none of this is a problem." Who should I believe?

npongratz 6y ago
FTA: "In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies." I would like to see those studies as well; wish the claims were better sourced.
magneticnorth 6y ago
Agree - some of these really, really need some sources - e.g. humans are not causing a "sixth mass extinction"? Is he arguing that there's not a threat of mass extinction, or that it's not human caused? Either way I'd love to see the reassuring evidence. Some of these seem true(ish) but misleading - isn't habitat loss often driven by climate change? And as far as I know no one is advocating a switch from fossil fuels to wood fuels; the fact that wood is worse is orthogonal to the fact that fossil fuels are problematic and nuclear, wind, and/or solar are often a better solution.

wyldfire 6y ago

It always seemed to me like the greatest hedge we could have is having human colonies on other planets. Because global disasters of so many kinds could sum up to extinction. While I realize that could be many decades away, it does seem like prioritizing it would make it happen much faster. > The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium This seems to match my intuition. > Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did What was the motivation for that switch? Petroleum/palm oil was cheaper? > 100% renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5% to 50% That seems astonishing, not just that it would require so much but that our current use is already so much area.

joe-collins 6y ago
> It always seemed to me like the greatest hedge we could have is having human colonies on other planets... While I realize that could be many decades away, it does seem like prioritizing it would make it happen much faster. Greatest in the sense of absolute scale, or with sufficiently long planning horizons, perhaps. But I doubt that any quantity of attainable prioritization will deliver any of that value, on the scale of the time we have before climate change starts inflicting drastic damage on our overall stability and way of life. Put another way, I wish Musk the best. He's absolutely mad, and a terrible person to have as a superior, but for all of that... he's accomplishing far more than I think anyone had right to expect. I think it will still amount to too little as a "climate change lifeboat", but if we adequately mitigate our immediate woes while we wait, and his successors can maintain his vision, drive, and disrespect for petty things like work/life balance, they might actually take us somewhere a few generations down the line.
pintxo 6y ago
> Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did According to [1]: The depletion of some whale species to near extinction led to the banning of whaling in many countries by 1969, and to a worldwide cessation of whaling as an industry in the late 1980s. This does sound more like Greenpeace (founded 1971) being the reason than switching to petroleum (no reason to expect much use for whale oil past WW2) to me. But surely Greenpeace is not the only reason. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling

kick 6y ago

This is a really misleading piece, by the way. This person has been speaking against environmentalism for over a decade now; he literally wrote a book about it sixteen years ago that attracted an amount of controversy. He doesn't deserve to speak for environmentalists; his actions for the past decade are pro-capital, any pro-environment effect was secondary. He's an economist, not an environmentalist, and he's trying to sell you a book, not fix anything.

gHosts 6y ago
I tried to find the source for the AOC quote.... I want (as always, whether Trump or AOC, to see the exact quote in context) and encountered a interesting new form of obfuscation... Proof by reference to a 4 hours long video!
- bioinformatics 6y ago
  You really should try that Google thing https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/24/ocasio-cortez-says-world-will-end-years-she-is-absolutely-right/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/24/ocasio-co...
  - dang 6y ago
    Please don't be a jerk on HN, even when someone didn't Google. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - bioinformatics 6y ago
      Ask the person to Google is being a jerk? Wow, what a time to be alive.
      - gHosts 6y ago
        I call that one "Proof by Reference to Pay Walled Article". That article could say absolutely anything for all I can see....

anoncareer0212 6y ago

#1) it's good to see alternative viewpoints on global warming, Michael is excellent for sharpening yourself on it #2) reading michael is an exercise in the limits of the slippery slope: he will show the Amazon isn't the "lungs of the earth", in that he will show why eliminating it doesn't mean we'll run out of oxygen, but he won't show that it is meaningless #3) after swimming around his arguments for a few months, your focus may (or may not!) turn to "well, even if we can say each part is overwrought, the whole effect and trend line is a major problem - swallowing a 5 degree celsius increase in temperature is, rather intuitively, a problem, particularly when we still have the _3rd_ derivative increasing"

rich_sasha 6y ago

I’d like to think it is true. But who do I ask? Who do I believe? Combatant environmentalists who look at vegetarians with hate? Climate change deniers? Institutions who have vested interests? Scientists with conflicting views? We’re so deep into a world where “truth” is merely an instrument of debate, bent and shaped into whatever point is trying to make, that I don’t know where to start...

mulmen 6y ago

> Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels. Can someone help me with this? I just moved and have both a fireplace and natural gas furnace. I had intended to supplement the furnace with wood heat in the winter. In what ways is wood worse than natural gas? I can imagine a few but I’m not sure they are right: Wood disadvantages: Local air quality Removal of trees Wood advantages: Renewable Neutral greenhouse gas emissions (?) Abundant (in my area) Natural gas disadvantages: Finite resource Greenhouse gas emissions(?) Natural gas advantages: Better local air quality than wood(?)

mcphage 6y ago
My understanding is that the particulates caused by wood fires are terrible for our lungs, especially inside houses: https://samharris.org/the-fireplace-delusion/ https://samharris.org/the-fireplace-delusion/
- mulmen 6y ago
  Thanks, this is exactly the kind of starting point I was looking for.
  - mcphage 6y ago
    You're welcome :-)
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  Anecdote from my grandmother. She said the local doctor back in the 20's had a story about med school. Helped out on an autopsy of an old Chinese sailor who spent most of his life on sailing ships. His professor pointed out that the mans lungs were pinkish and asked the students what condition might have caused that unusual condition. Ans: Man hadn't spent his life breathing smoke.
tsherr 6y ago
Renewable isn't really accurate for wood, at least not in human time scales. A maple takes about 25 years to mature. It's about three maple trees to a cord. Assuming 5 cords per winter, we're talking 375 trees before the first tree cut can be reharvested (assuming it was replanted immediately). That doesn't into account soil depletion and carbon release.

anarbadalov 6y ago

So many sweeping unsubstantiated claims in this piece — and from a non-scientist. Enough straw men in this article to populate a city.

caconym_ 6y ago

So I guess the fact that he went to live in the jungle as a kid is supposed to prove he isn't a crank now, 20+ years later? That's really, really not how it works. I definitely think a lot of the climate alarm is hyperbolic and misrepresentative, but not so much in the sense that it isn't a problem as that it's a problem that will only become obvious to laypeople long after the chance to prevent it from killing a lot of them is past. If he wants to convince me, he needs to do a lot less talking about how virtuous he is, less talking about his new book, and more showing me real data and scientific results.

wilburTheDog 6y ago

It appears the author wants to convince us of his credentials as a progressive and then use any good will that generates to try and persuade us that environmentally progressive ideas are wrong. He claims we have been 'badly misinformed' by people with 'unsavory or unhealthy motivations'. But this synopsis of his book makes it look like it could have been written by a coalition of lobbyists from the meat and nuclear industries. Who are we to trust? Also I think it's interesting that the only positive review he includes is from Richard Rhodes. I have never read anything from Richard Rhodes, but the second amazon review of his book Energy: A Human History has this to say 'the author is highly skeptical about renewable sources like wind and solar, waxing instead about the lost promise of nuclear'.

jacknews 6y ago

"Netherlands became rich not poor while adapting to life below sea level " LOL, we can all relax and look forward to a prosperous future then.

haltingproblem 6y ago

Michael Crichton's famous speech "Alien's cause global warming" is reprised in [1]. Is there truth in the environmental claims. I am sure there is. The environmental movement and climate scientists have shifted to activism that it is hard to differentiate truth and science from activism and propaganda. They environmentalists and their activism appears like a cross between Big Tobacco marketing, PETA and the Westboro baptist Church with a dash of Scientology thrown in for good measure. Tell me about that other planet colonization thing again ;) In all seriousness, who here really thinks we will have mass deaths, upwards of 10% of the population of the earth in the next 10 year timeframe from global warming? What about 15 years? 20 years? How about 5%? What odds are you proffering and how much would you like to wager on it? [1] https://mindmatters.ai/2020/06/twenty-years-on-aliens-still-cause-global-warming/ https://mindmatters.ai/2020/06/twenty-years-on-aliens-still-...

Oletros 6y ago
> and climate scientists have shifted to activism that it is hard to differentiate truth and science from activism and propaganda. Any example of this?