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Disclaimer: I'm not a climate change denier, I think we should stop burning fossil fuels ASAP. Though I'm one to question a lot of things and this is my 2 cent

Disclaimer: I'm not a climate change denier, I think we should stop burning fossil fuels ASAP. Though I'm one to question a lot of things and this is my 2 cents. How the hell we know this current changes are completely abnormal? I read about some weird climate anomalies centuries ago and of course there's a lot of evidence that current events are completely abnormal but one question always come to my mind. What if we're wrong? What if we're being too cooky thinking that by having looked into some evidence that made sense, we're not completely wrong here and current events are just part of a cycle in the planet weather? Again, I'm questioning but I don't need you guys to present me the proof, I'm aware of it. Just questioning if we're not wrong all along and are here destroying our mental health for nothing. Seems like even by the 1940s standards our generation is being constantly swarmed with problems which we can't fix, which are causing all sort of mental issues due to the complete stress we live in. This being said, the switch from fossil fuels should be done ASAP, even if we're wrong and it's not causing issues in the environment, they are for sure causing health issues.

ipnon 3y ago
There is a very simple experiment to show that human industry is affecting the climate. Take two glass boxes. Fill one with air. Fill the next with air and add carbon dioxide in any amount. Put them outside next to each other in the sun. The one with additional carbon dioxide will get hotter in proportion to the amount of carbon dioxide added.
- marklubi 3y ago
  > Take two glass boxes. Fill one with air. Fill the next with air and add carbon dioxide in any amount. Put them outside next to each other in the sun. The one with additional carbon dioxide will get hotter in proportion to the amount of carbon dioxide added. Any amount? How does this play out with a CO2 concentration of 0.04%?
  - ipnon 3y ago
    Yes any amount. It is a simple chemical property of carbon dioxide that it absorbs more sunlight than air does on average. That heat becomes a part of our climate.
  - johnchristopher 3y ago
    > Any amount? How does this play out with a CO2 concentration of 0.04%? It spreads out, like colorants in water. Think about mercury: > For example, if Isabella weighs 132 pounds (60 kg), she should consume a maximum of 95.8 µg of mercury per week. 95.8ug is just .0000001596..% of Isabella and yet it's deadly.
- traveler01 3y ago
  Again this what I meant by we being too cooky. You're speaking about taking a water bottle, fill it with CO2 and use it to represent the entire planet.
  - johnchristopher 3y ago
    Then go read the fucking reports https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/ https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/ https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6syr/pdf/IPCC_AR6_SYR_LongerReport.pdf https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6syr/pdf/IPCC_AR6_SYR_LongerReport.... you can get all the numbers and studies for free on the internet. If you can't be convinced by simple explanations and if you can't be convinced by harder explanations then you are just spreading doubts and part of the problem. edit: "what if we are wrong" fuck that shit, it's the same shit from the crowd of "but what if we develop interstellar travels and escape climate change consequences, haha gotcha" or "we'll just invent a carbon extractor in the next 10 years for the whole planet et voilà, ah!".
    - traveler01 3y ago
      If you can't have an argument without becoming toxic, please abstain from commenting. We're discussing here and I literally put a disclaimer in the beginning of the comment saying I'm not pro fossil fuels usage.
      - silverquiet 3y ago
        What if he put a disclaimer in that he's not being toxic? Could he then continue commenting?
        traveler01 3y ago
        So you want me to shut up just because I'm questioning common knowledge without being toxic to anyone?
        ryneandal 3y ago
pphysch 3y ago
It's healthy to be skeptical about the fearmongering and narrative control, while also promoting ecological policies. A recent example: Nordstream bombing was the "worst case of environmental terrorism in modern history". US govt blames Ukrainian actors[1]. Yet Greta Thunberg hasn't made a peep about it, and recently did a photo op with the Ukrainian govt, which also hasn't spoke out about it. It's unbelievably cynical. For some people, environmentalism is just a means to power. [1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-intelligence-suggests-pro-ukrainian-group-sabotaged-nord-stream-pipelines-nyt-2023-03-07/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-intelligence-suggest...
- martinko 3y ago
  > US govt blames Ukrainian actors pretty sure it doesnt, but the russian one does - maybe youve confused them?
  - pphysch 3y ago
    Is Reuters Russian propaganda now? Good Lord. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-intelligence-suggests-pro-ukrainian-group-sabotaged-nord-stream-pipelines-nyt-2023-03-07/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-intelligence-suggest... https://www.reuters.com/world/us-had-intelligence-ukrainian-plan-attack-nord-stream-pipeline-washington-post-2023-06-06/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us-had-intelligence-ukrainian-...
    - Volundr 3y ago
      From your first link: > There was no evidence that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy or other Ukrainian government officials were behind the attacks which spewed natural gas into the Baltic Sea, the newspaper reported, citing U.S. officials. I'm not really following why Greta should be condemning the Ukrainian government if there's no evidence they had anything to do with it.
      - pphysch 3y ago
        Where did I suggest that Greta should condemn him? She should simply not run PR for the government most proximal to the worst act of environmental terrorism in history, until more is figured out. Imagine if Barack Obama did a photo op with the Saudi King in 2002, with the purpose of promoting the Saudi regime, just a year after a dozen Saudi nationals perpetrated 9/11. "Tone-deaf" would be putting it mildly. I'm saying that Greta Thunberg, figurehead of environmentalism, is being unbelievably tone-deaf and it reflects very poorly on the integrity of her movement.
repeekad 3y ago
https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
- traveler01 3y ago
  Yes, like I said I'm aware of the facts.
  - c048 3y ago
    Then you should know that we're already close to the optimistic path.
    - traveler01 3y ago
      I'm not aware of that, everything I read about climate change is pretty conclusive on the fact we're doomed. Some scientists say we might have created feedback loops so even if we "solve" the problem, our end might be inevitable. Would be cool to see more positive takes on it but can't find many. Also makes me laugh seeing environmentalists being against nuclear power when by now seems to be our only solution stop CO2 emissions (together with renewables of course). The people who should be trying to get the solution are also making the problem so much worse.
      - c048 3y ago
        Know that there are sources that survive on misinformation on both sides. While the situation isn't good and still needs our attention and focus, it's not hopeless. Recent reports show significant improvement, although I cannot provide you with a link at this time (since I'm not in the habit of bookmarking things). Sadly I've also seen plenty of social media responses to this that we should keep regarding the situation as doomed, lest we start to slow our efforts due to good news.
        SirMaster 3y ago
        This is part of the problem IMO. All the big headlines always show the worst news events and such. It's all doom and gloom. I never see these reports showing significant improvement make the headlines and news about optimism about the recent changes and such.
dadoomer 3y ago
The thing with dynamical systems, and specially complex systems, is that things very complicated, very fast. Evidently things are complicated to reason about, so the severity of climate change is not obvious. So your questioning is completely natural. There are intuitive one-minute explanations for why climate change is real and important. However, I think that due to the complex nature of the topic a full answer requires deep study. Thus, I think it is reasonable to rely on the decades of evidence and science that have led to a concensus among the people that spend their entire lifes studying the topic.
- traveler01 3y ago
  > Thus, I think it is reasonable to rely on the decades of evidence and science that have led to a concensus among the people that spend their entire lifes studying the topic. That's the thing, I could use the same argument to believe in "god" by saying that priest spend their entire lives studying the matter so I should believe them when they say it exists. Yet I'm an atheist. You see where I'm getting at right? My entire take on this is that we should really do something about it. Specially since, in the chance they're actually right we'd be both saving the world and improving people's health. Going around in a city with smog is very bad for your lungs. Edit: Though screwing over the mental health of an entire generation over it might defeat the purpose of "saving the world" or "saving humanity".
  - Timon3 3y ago
    > That's the thing, I could use the same argument to believe in "god" by saying that priest spend their entire lives studying the matter so I should believe them when they say it exists. Yet I'm an atheist. You see where I'm getting at right? The difference is called "empiricism". God is defined as something supernatural and unexplainable. Science is the opposite. Why do you think this is a good comparison?
    - traveler01 3y ago
      You're falling in the assumption that the studies being done are actually right, and I questioned that as well.
Yizahi 3y ago
It works like a brick wall. The thing is that people often think that "theory" is something unproven, just a sudden idea out of left field. Well, that is probably better described as "hypothesis". Theory on the other hand is a proven thing, just maybe not finalized (sorry if I made any mistakes here in the simplifying terms). So returning to the brick wall - scientists are doing research everywhere contributing to the climate change theory, adding new facts brick by brick. They look the directly measured CO2 levels in the atmosphere and see an alarming trend. The trend has never reproduced previously according to research (both magnitude AND acceleration rate simultaneously, so "cycles" don't explain). They measure ocean temperature. They dig into Antarctic ice and check elements in older layer. And so on, all around the planet. When they encounter something that is hard to quantify, like say global atmosphere temperature over time they estimate. They also check if the existing data fits into an existing theory, and unsurprisingly it does. Unfortunately so far everything fits in the global climate change theory.
WA 3y ago
> What if we're wrong? That is an excellent question to ask. If climate change is not a thing or not man-made, the worst outcome would be missing a few percentage points of economic growth by unnecessarily restricting energy sources. If climate change is a thing and it is man-made, the worst outcome would be everything that is described by the IPCC, which is bad for society as a whole. So, just pondering the worst-case scenario is enough to give you an idea of a sensible course of action.
- fsflover 3y ago
  See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle.
- traveler01 3y ago
  > If climate change is not a thing or not man-made, the worst outcome would be missing a few percentage points of economic growth by unnecessarily restricting energy sources. This is a bit reductive of what is happening. How about the psychological damage done by the fear mongering caused by these type of news regarding climate change?
  - reaperducer 3y ago
    How about the psychological damage done by the fear mongering caused by these type of news regarding climate change? What about it?
    - traveler01 3y ago
      You're not concerned about how having such a large percentage of population becoming basically useless due to psychological problems can trouble the future of mankind?
      - reaperducer 3y ago
        You're not concerned about how having such a large percentage of population becoming basically useless due to psychological problems can trouble the future of mankind? I have not seen any evidence of a "large percentage of the population becoming useless" due to fear of climate change. Can you provide a citation? I have seen people with a basic background concern about climate change, and some people have more of it than others, but I don't see a "large percentage" of people becoming useless. People have lots of fears. Some even more more pressing than climate change. Human beings are able to handle and process many different fears of varying intensities simultaneously, and have for thousands of years. I have also not seen any information that the psychological fear of climate change is worse than actual climate change. One provokes level of fear in a subset of the population. The other will kill us all. Perhaps the best way to fix those psychological fears in people is to fix the climate so they don't have to worry about it?
Volundr 3y ago
> What if we're wrong? What if we are? Worst case we've significantly reduced the amount of pollution we are putting into our air, land and sea, and reap those health benefits, but not actually affected the climate one way or another. I think the evidence for climate change is pretty strong, but it's not like it's the only reason to quit burning coal and pumping the smoke into our atmosphere or producing huge amounts of plastics. If we act and we're right we've prevented catastrophe, if we act and we're wrong we're just healthier, and kill less of the ecosystem around us.
- traveler01 3y ago
  Yes like I said in the comment. I'm for all that because even if we're wrong about climate change we got healthier bodies thanks to it.
zenkat 3y ago
There's plenty of easy-to-find evidence out there that shows that the speed and magnitude of these changes are not only unprecedented in human history, but geologic time scales as well. It's also crystal clear that these changes are caused by the massive increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations caused by humans burning fossil fuels. This is sorted by both theory and massive amounts of evidence. Good primers exist all across the web, http://climate.gov/ http://climate.gov/ is a good starting point. "But wait, maybe this is all just natural cycles" is borderline willful denial at this point, especially on a well-informed site like HN. Might as well ask if maybe the earth is flat after all.
- traveler01 3y ago
  > "But wait, maybe this is all just natural cycles" is borderline willful denial at this point, especially on a well-informed site like HN. Might as well ask if maybe the earth is flat after all. On such website dismissing someone for questioning common knowledge wouldn't be worse? :) May I remind you people used to think the earth was the center of the solar system and they burned the person who questioned it. Quite an extreme example, but you get it right?
  - mstipetic 3y ago
    Just… don’t
  - zenkat 3y ago
    LOL. Copernicus & Galileo didn't "doubt" the geocentric model, they provided scientific evidence that it was incorrect. You see how that's different, right? "I'm not trying to question climate change, I'm just wondering if this overwhelming scientific evidence might somehow be wrong, despite any evidence to the contrary ... and I'm just as brave as Galileo for questioning established orthodoxy, too!". Sure, buddy. Tell me all about it.
addisonl 3y ago
http://theclimatebonus.org/blog http://theclimatebonus.org/blog Your comment reminded me of this comic, “what if we create a better world for nothing” is basically what you’re saying.
- traveler01 3y ago
  I quite literally said that even if we did the switch to nothing we'd be improving global health, so in any case the outcome would be positive.
- bryanmgreen 3y ago
  Definitely saving this comic for future reference! Was chatting about "marketing gimmicks" earlier with a colleague but saying so what if the gimmicks are actually objectively good? Things like product made by humans, sustainable packaging, etc.
NikolaNovak 3y ago
My personal perspective, FWIW:), is not "is this natural/normal" but a far more selfish "is this good for us?" There were many extremely destructive events in the past that were perfect "normal", in the sense they're not man made, but we might not enjoy happening now. So if there's a climate change happening ; and if it is negative / bad for us ; and if some actions we take can make it better and some can make it worse... It feeels like a no-brainer, that religion and capitalism and myriad other talking points of dissenting only distract from. I.e. Even if without human kind, some curve would have a spike ; and that spike is bad for us ; and we can flatten that spike ; them umm lets do it. It feels fairly intuitive that "pollution is bad" (we can argue how bad), and "adding c02 and making everything crazier is bad" (we can argue how much of the bad is our contribution).
- traveler01 3y ago
  In my view the entire point should be maintaining the earth atmosphere in a balance that suits us. Too much CO2 is bad but if we remove too much will be bad for us as well. Right now the common agreement is that we have too much of it though.
  - NikolaNovak 3y ago
    That's kind of where I'm at. I find that a lot of folks start with very strong disagreement; and eventually it turns out (my interpretation, possibly horribly wrong!) subconsciously they resent feeling blamed or judged or moralized for just living. And fair enough. But for me, the key part is a very selfish perspective - something is happening that's bad for us, we are making it to some degree or another worse, and there's a clear optimal place on a curve of economic activity vs life stye vs future of species, and I don't think we are on the selfish optimal spot, let alone some "global earth/gaia-perspective multi-species well-being of all life" optimal spot.
nrjames 3y ago
Part of what I fail to understand about our current situation is that it seems like there's enormous economic gains to be had in leading the world in the development, production, and distribution of alternative energy (solar, wind, etc) technology. Would not a USG led moonshot type clean energy project both lead to economic growth while also helping address the issues from fossil fuel emissions? Are we just lacking the political will to make that happen?
- traveler01 3y ago
  Germany stopped all their nuclear plants to go back to burning natural gas and worse, coal. So you tell me.
btilly 3y ago
https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/ does a good job of showing why it does not look like "just part of a cycle in the planet weather". For a long time scale, a rapid warming is associated with a rapid increase in greenhouse gases. This causes ocean acidification. Ocean acidification leaves a clear record in the paleontological record. The last one which was comparable to what we're doing through now was https://www.britannica.com/science/Paleocene-Eocene-Thermal-Maximum https://www.britannica.com/science/Paleocene-Eocene-Thermal-... about 55 million years ago. And current projections for the speed and severity of acidification are worse. Which indicates that the warming that we are going through is also faster than that experienced at any point in the last 55 million years.
cc344 3y ago
[dead]
- traveler01 3y ago
  Nowadays you can't really question anything that's taken as common knowledge. During Covid times it happened that stuff that were questioned in a year were disproved in the next year. Yet people who questioned it were treated like assholes (like it's already happening here). And then there's this hungry for clickbaits media that will publish anything that can scare people into reading their articles... Coming back to the matter at hand, there's a lot of new battery technologies and I strongly believe that current evs will be able to switch from Lithium if a better technology comes. Also Lithium batteries are recyclable so they might become useful to store energy in the grid, though I barely see investment for it worldwide. Nuclear for me seems more and more as a silver bullet, together with the various renewables and grid storage. But this is just energy production, we still have a lot of things to stop burning fuels that right now seem damn impossible.
  - Timon3 3y ago
    > Nowadays you can't really question anything that's taken as common knowledge. During Covid times it happened that stuff that were questioned in a year were disproved in the next year. Yet people who questioned it were treated like assholes (like it's already happening here). Care to give examples? Because I don't remember anything those "questioning" were right about. I'll give you a short list of things they were wrong about that I can remember: - "masks don't work" - "it's just a flu" - "vaccines are either perfect or fully ineffective" - "they are using the crisis to control us and will never open back up" - "as soon as the next US president is elected it will suddenly be over"
celeritascelery 3y ago
This reminds me of the "population bomb" of the 1970's. There was a scientific view at the time that the world would become overpopulated due to the rapid growth in places like India and China. That in turn would cause mass death and starvation world wide. This view became mainstream enough that the US and the World Bank pressured India into a mass sterilization program[1]. By the end over 8 million Indians were surgically sterilized, many against their will. Of course the population bomb turned out not to be real. Third-world birth rates drop as they grow economically. But on the path to preventing the perceived apocalypse we imposed massive harm on millions of people. The real problem was that part of the scientific community were so confident in their ability to correctly model extremely complex systems that they were willing to do incredible harm "for the greater good". But it turns out that modeling complex systems, especially ones that have never been observed (such as a population "bomb") is really hard. They were not wrong about the data (population was growing at an unprecedented rate). But they were wrong about how that would impact the future. This has a lot of parallels to climate change. Climate is an incredibly complex system that we have just recently started to study. We have never before observed runaway anthropomorphic climate change (obviously) so all these predictions are based on our ability to model this system. There really isn't any dispute that the global climate is warmer then it was a few decades ago, but what that actually means for the future has big error bars. This could be another "population bomb" type scenario. But again, it might not be. The science strongly suggest that climate change is a very real and preventable phenomenon. Scientists have been right about the global harm of many other industrial activities (such as leaded gasoline or CFC's). But I am wary of people who say we need to ignore the harm of climate related policy actions because the IPCC future is "inevitable" if we don't. I am also skeptical of our ability to get the international community united enough to actually have a meaningful impact. [1]https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/india-the-emergency-and-the-politics-of-mass-sterilization/ https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/india...
- traveler01 3y ago
  This is actually a great view on the matter and the same concern I was trying to express, maybe poorly.
- seanp2k2 3y ago
rich_sasha 3y ago
I think model predictions match observations, in more ways than "it's getting warmer by about the right amount". Not a climate scientist, but roughly, from memory: - Past predictions didn't know exactly what future emissions will be like. Applying real emissions to the models gives "correct" warming quantities - Climate is changing in a similar manner to predicted, e.g. the poles are warming more quickly than the other areas
yk 3y ago
> How the hell we know this current changes are completely abnormal? Doing science. Thing is, unlike what everybody likes to pretend, doing science means to do a lot of tedious hard work and not a whole lot of quick explanations. So the thing is, that we understand the physics of dilute gasses at roughly room temperature phenomenally well, we did all the experiments of putting this gas into a piston, and then heating the piston slightly, and then do it with a slightly different gas mixture, and then we double checked all these experiments and finally we got a pretty good theory sometime around the turn of the 19th century. Then you start to integrate all that knowledge with a knowledge of radiation basis, and you start doing cross checks and try to understand weather, and at some point try to start forecasting wether, with all the associated trouble and that was then sometime in the let's say 1960ies or thereabouts. (During WWII the flying wing of the US Army had meteorologists at all airfields, I believe German news started to broadcast weather forecast in the late 60ies.) Then you do all that with bigger computers and quite a bit of theory of partial differential equations, and then you realize that understanding the 11 year average is a much much better defined problem than next weeks weather. And all of these steps do suggest different cross checks. (Actually in the Physical Science Basis part of the 5th IPCC report there is a chapter called Evaluation of Climate Models ([0], p. 741), which goes into quite a bit of detail on the most recent efforts along those lines.) [0] AR5: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/
theironhammer 3y ago
Exactly, burning fossil fuels causes air pollution hence health problems. This is a problem to be addressed/solved regardless of the causes of climate change.

ipnon 3y ago

There is a very simple experiment to show that human industry is affecting the climate. Take two glass boxes. Fill one with air. Fill the next with air and add carbon dioxide in any amount. Put them outside next to each other in the sun. The one with additional carbon dioxide will get hotter in proportion to the amount of carbon dioxide added.

marklubi 3y ago
> Take two glass boxes. Fill one with air. Fill the next with air and add carbon dioxide in any amount. Put them outside next to each other in the sun. The one with additional carbon dioxide will get hotter in proportion to the amount of carbon dioxide added. Any amount? How does this play out with a CO2 concentration of 0.04%?
- ipnon 3y ago
  Yes any amount. It is a simple chemical property of carbon dioxide that it absorbs more sunlight than air does on average. That heat becomes a part of our climate.
- johnchristopher 3y ago
  > Any amount? How does this play out with a CO2 concentration of 0.04%? It spreads out, like colorants in water. Think about mercury: > For example, if Isabella weighs 132 pounds (60 kg), she should consume a maximum of 95.8 µg of mercury per week. 95.8ug is just .0000001596..% of Isabella and yet it's deadly.
traveler01 3y ago
Again this what I meant by we being too cooky. You're speaking about taking a water bottle, fill it with CO2 and use it to represent the entire planet.
- johnchristopher 3y ago
  Then go read the fucking reports https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/ https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/ https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6syr/pdf/IPCC_AR6_SYR_LongerReport.pdf https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6syr/pdf/IPCC_AR6_SYR_LongerReport.... you can get all the numbers and studies for free on the internet. If you can't be convinced by simple explanations and if you can't be convinced by harder explanations then you are just spreading doubts and part of the problem. edit: "what if we are wrong" fuck that shit, it's the same shit from the crowd of "but what if we develop interstellar travels and escape climate change consequences, haha gotcha" or "we'll just invent a carbon extractor in the next 10 years for the whole planet et voilà, ah!".
  - traveler01 3y ago
    If you can't have an argument without becoming toxic, please abstain from commenting. We're discussing here and I literally put a disclaimer in the beginning of the comment saying I'm not pro fossil fuels usage.
    - silverquiet 3y ago
      What if he put a disclaimer in that he's not being toxic? Could he then continue commenting?
      - traveler01 3y ago
        So you want me to shut up just because I'm questioning common knowledge without being toxic to anyone?
        ryneandal 3y ago

pphysch 3y ago

It's healthy to be skeptical about the fearmongering and narrative control, while also promoting ecological policies. A recent example: Nordstream bombing was the "worst case of environmental terrorism in modern history". US govt blames Ukrainian actors[1]. Yet Greta Thunberg hasn't made a peep about it, and recently did a photo op with the Ukrainian govt, which also hasn't spoke out about it. It's unbelievably cynical. For some people, environmentalism is just a means to power. [1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-intelligence-suggests-pro-ukrainian-group-sabotaged-nord-stream-pipelines-nyt-2023-03-07/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-intelligence-suggest...

martinko 3y ago
> US govt blames Ukrainian actors pretty sure it doesnt, but the russian one does - maybe youve confused them?
- pphysch 3y ago
  Is Reuters Russian propaganda now? Good Lord. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-intelligence-suggests-pro-ukrainian-group-sabotaged-nord-stream-pipelines-nyt-2023-03-07/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-intelligence-suggest... https://www.reuters.com/world/us-had-intelligence-ukrainian-plan-attack-nord-stream-pipeline-washington-post-2023-06-06/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us-had-intelligence-ukrainian-...
  - Volundr 3y ago
    From your first link: > There was no evidence that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy or other Ukrainian government officials were behind the attacks which spewed natural gas into the Baltic Sea, the newspaper reported, citing U.S. officials. I'm not really following why Greta should be condemning the Ukrainian government if there's no evidence they had anything to do with it.
    - pphysch 3y ago
      Where did I suggest that Greta should condemn him? She should simply not run PR for the government most proximal to the worst act of environmental terrorism in history, until more is figured out. Imagine if Barack Obama did a photo op with the Saudi King in 2002, with the purpose of promoting the Saudi regime, just a year after a dozen Saudi nationals perpetrated 9/11. "Tone-deaf" would be putting it mildly. I'm saying that Greta Thunberg, figurehead of environmentalism, is being unbelievably tone-deaf and it reflects very poorly on the integrity of her movement.

repeekad 3y ago

https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/

traveler01 3y ago
Yes, like I said I'm aware of the facts.
- c048 3y ago
  Then you should know that we're already close to the optimistic path.
  - traveler01 3y ago
    I'm not aware of that, everything I read about climate change is pretty conclusive on the fact we're doomed. Some scientists say we might have created feedback loops so even if we "solve" the problem, our end might be inevitable. Would be cool to see more positive takes on it but can't find many. Also makes me laugh seeing environmentalists being against nuclear power when by now seems to be our only solution stop CO2 emissions (together with renewables of course). The people who should be trying to get the solution are also making the problem so much worse.
    - c048 3y ago
      Know that there are sources that survive on misinformation on both sides. While the situation isn't good and still needs our attention and focus, it's not hopeless. Recent reports show significant improvement, although I cannot provide you with a link at this time (since I'm not in the habit of bookmarking things). Sadly I've also seen plenty of social media responses to this that we should keep regarding the situation as doomed, lest we start to slow our efforts due to good news.
      - SirMaster 3y ago
        This is part of the problem IMO. All the big headlines always show the worst news events and such. It's all doom and gloom. I never see these reports showing significant improvement make the headlines and news about optimism about the recent changes and such.

dadoomer 3y ago

The thing with dynamical systems, and specially complex systems, is that things very complicated, very fast. Evidently things are complicated to reason about, so the severity of climate change is not obvious. So your questioning is completely natural. There are intuitive one-minute explanations for why climate change is real and important. However, I think that due to the complex nature of the topic a full answer requires deep study. Thus, I think it is reasonable to rely on the decades of evidence and science that have led to a concensus among the people that spend their entire lifes studying the topic.

traveler01 3y ago
> Thus, I think it is reasonable to rely on the decades of evidence and science that have led to a concensus among the people that spend their entire lifes studying the topic. That's the thing, I could use the same argument to believe in "god" by saying that priest spend their entire lives studying the matter so I should believe them when they say it exists. Yet I'm an atheist. You see where I'm getting at right? My entire take on this is that we should really do something about it. Specially since, in the chance they're actually right we'd be both saving the world and improving people's health. Going around in a city with smog is very bad for your lungs. Edit: Though screwing over the mental health of an entire generation over it might defeat the purpose of "saving the world" or "saving humanity".
- Timon3 3y ago
  > That's the thing, I could use the same argument to believe in "god" by saying that priest spend their entire lives studying the matter so I should believe them when they say it exists. Yet I'm an atheist. You see where I'm getting at right? The difference is called "empiricism". God is defined as something supernatural and unexplainable. Science is the opposite. Why do you think this is a good comparison?
  - traveler01 3y ago
    You're falling in the assumption that the studies being done are actually right, and I questioned that as well.

Yizahi 3y ago

It works like a brick wall. The thing is that people often think that "theory" is something unproven, just a sudden idea out of left field. Well, that is probably better described as "hypothesis". Theory on the other hand is a proven thing, just maybe not finalized (sorry if I made any mistakes here in the simplifying terms). So returning to the brick wall - scientists are doing research everywhere contributing to the climate change theory, adding new facts brick by brick. They look the directly measured CO2 levels in the atmosphere and see an alarming trend. The trend has never reproduced previously according to research (both magnitude AND acceleration rate simultaneously, so "cycles" don't explain). They measure ocean temperature. They dig into Antarctic ice and check elements in older layer. And so on, all around the planet. When they encounter something that is hard to quantify, like say global atmosphere temperature over time they estimate. They also check if the existing data fits into an existing theory, and unsurprisingly it does. Unfortunately so far everything fits in the global climate change theory.

WA 3y ago

> What if we're wrong? That is an excellent question to ask. If climate change is not a thing or not man-made, the worst outcome would be missing a few percentage points of economic growth by unnecessarily restricting energy sources. If climate change is a thing and it is man-made, the worst outcome would be everything that is described by the IPCC, which is bad for society as a whole. So, just pondering the worst-case scenario is enough to give you an idea of a sensible course of action.

fsflover 3y ago
See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle.
traveler01 3y ago
> If climate change is not a thing or not man-made, the worst outcome would be missing a few percentage points of economic growth by unnecessarily restricting energy sources. This is a bit reductive of what is happening. How about the psychological damage done by the fear mongering caused by these type of news regarding climate change?
- reaperducer 3y ago
  How about the psychological damage done by the fear mongering caused by these type of news regarding climate change? What about it?
  - traveler01 3y ago
    You're not concerned about how having such a large percentage of population becoming basically useless due to psychological problems can trouble the future of mankind?
    - reaperducer 3y ago
      You're not concerned about how having such a large percentage of population becoming basically useless due to psychological problems can trouble the future of mankind? I have not seen any evidence of a "large percentage of the population becoming useless" due to fear of climate change. Can you provide a citation? I have seen people with a basic background concern about climate change, and some people have more of it than others, but I don't see a "large percentage" of people becoming useless. People have lots of fears. Some even more more pressing than climate change. Human beings are able to handle and process many different fears of varying intensities simultaneously, and have for thousands of years. I have also not seen any information that the psychological fear of climate change is worse than actual climate change. One provokes level of fear in a subset of the population. The other will kill us all. Perhaps the best way to fix those psychological fears in people is to fix the climate so they don't have to worry about it?

Volundr 3y ago

> What if we're wrong? What if we are? Worst case we've significantly reduced the amount of pollution we are putting into our air, land and sea, and reap those health benefits, but not actually affected the climate one way or another. I think the evidence for climate change is pretty strong, but it's not like it's the only reason to quit burning coal and pumping the smoke into our atmosphere or producing huge amounts of plastics. If we act and we're right we've prevented catastrophe, if we act and we're wrong we're just healthier, and kill less of the ecosystem around us.

traveler01 3y ago
Yes like I said in the comment. I'm for all that because even if we're wrong about climate change we got healthier bodies thanks to it.

zenkat 3y ago

There's plenty of easy-to-find evidence out there that shows that the speed and magnitude of these changes are not only unprecedented in human history, but geologic time scales as well. It's also crystal clear that these changes are caused by the massive increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations caused by humans burning fossil fuels. This is sorted by both theory and massive amounts of evidence. Good primers exist all across the web, http://climate.gov/ http://climate.gov/ is a good starting point. "But wait, maybe this is all just natural cycles" is borderline willful denial at this point, especially on a well-informed site like HN. Might as well ask if maybe the earth is flat after all.

traveler01 3y ago
> "But wait, maybe this is all just natural cycles" is borderline willful denial at this point, especially on a well-informed site like HN. Might as well ask if maybe the earth is flat after all. On such website dismissing someone for questioning common knowledge wouldn't be worse? :) May I remind you people used to think the earth was the center of the solar system and they burned the person who questioned it. Quite an extreme example, but you get it right?
- mstipetic 3y ago
  Just… don’t
- zenkat 3y ago
  LOL. Copernicus & Galileo didn't "doubt" the geocentric model, they provided scientific evidence that it was incorrect. You see how that's different, right? "I'm not trying to question climate change, I'm just wondering if this overwhelming scientific evidence might somehow be wrong, despite any evidence to the contrary ... and I'm just as brave as Galileo for questioning established orthodoxy, too!". Sure, buddy. Tell me all about it.

addisonl 3y ago

http://theclimatebonus.org/blog http://theclimatebonus.org/blog Your comment reminded me of this comic, “what if we create a better world for nothing” is basically what you’re saying.

traveler01 3y ago
I quite literally said that even if we did the switch to nothing we'd be improving global health, so in any case the outcome would be positive.
bryanmgreen 3y ago
Definitely saving this comic for future reference! Was chatting about "marketing gimmicks" earlier with a colleague but saying so what if the gimmicks are actually objectively good? Things like product made by humans, sustainable packaging, etc.

NikolaNovak 3y ago

My personal perspective, FWIW:), is not "is this natural/normal" but a far more selfish "is this good for us?" There were many extremely destructive events in the past that were perfect "normal", in the sense they're not man made, but we might not enjoy happening now. So if there's a climate change happening ; and if it is negative / bad for us ; and if some actions we take can make it better and some can make it worse... It feeels like a no-brainer, that religion and capitalism and myriad other talking points of dissenting only distract from. I.e. Even if without human kind, some curve would have a spike ; and that spike is bad for us ; and we can flatten that spike ; them umm lets do it. It feels fairly intuitive that "pollution is bad" (we can argue how bad), and "adding c02 and making everything crazier is bad" (we can argue how much of the bad is our contribution).

traveler01 3y ago
In my view the entire point should be maintaining the earth atmosphere in a balance that suits us. Too much CO2 is bad but if we remove too much will be bad for us as well. Right now the common agreement is that we have too much of it though.
- NikolaNovak 3y ago
  That's kind of where I'm at. I find that a lot of folks start with very strong disagreement; and eventually it turns out (my interpretation, possibly horribly wrong!) subconsciously they resent feeling blamed or judged or moralized for just living. And fair enough. But for me, the key part is a very selfish perspective - something is happening that's bad for us, we are making it to some degree or another worse, and there's a clear optimal place on a curve of economic activity vs life stye vs future of species, and I don't think we are on the selfish optimal spot, let alone some "global earth/gaia-perspective multi-species well-being of all life" optimal spot.

nrjames 3y ago

Part of what I fail to understand about our current situation is that it seems like there's enormous economic gains to be had in leading the world in the development, production, and distribution of alternative energy (solar, wind, etc) technology. Would not a USG led moonshot type clean energy project both lead to economic growth while also helping address the issues from fossil fuel emissions? Are we just lacking the political will to make that happen?

traveler01 3y ago
Germany stopped all their nuclear plants to go back to burning natural gas and worse, coal. So you tell me.

btilly 3y ago

https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/ does a good job of showing why it does not look like "just part of a cycle in the planet weather". For a long time scale, a rapid warming is associated with a rapid increase in greenhouse gases. This causes ocean acidification. Ocean acidification leaves a clear record in the paleontological record. The last one which was comparable to what we're doing through now was https://www.britannica.com/science/Paleocene-Eocene-Thermal-Maximum https://www.britannica.com/science/Paleocene-Eocene-Thermal-... about 55 million years ago. And current projections for the speed and severity of acidification are worse. Which indicates that the warming that we are going through is also faster than that experienced at any point in the last 55 million years.

cc344 3y ago

[dead]

traveler01 3y ago
Nowadays you can't really question anything that's taken as common knowledge. During Covid times it happened that stuff that were questioned in a year were disproved in the next year. Yet people who questioned it were treated like assholes (like it's already happening here). And then there's this hungry for clickbaits media that will publish anything that can scare people into reading their articles... Coming back to the matter at hand, there's a lot of new battery technologies and I strongly believe that current evs will be able to switch from Lithium if a better technology comes. Also Lithium batteries are recyclable so they might become useful to store energy in the grid, though I barely see investment for it worldwide. Nuclear for me seems more and more as a silver bullet, together with the various renewables and grid storage. But this is just energy production, we still have a lot of things to stop burning fuels that right now seem damn impossible.
- Timon3 3y ago
  > Nowadays you can't really question anything that's taken as common knowledge. During Covid times it happened that stuff that were questioned in a year were disproved in the next year. Yet people who questioned it were treated like assholes (like it's already happening here). Care to give examples? Because I don't remember anything those "questioning" were right about. I'll give you a short list of things they were wrong about that I can remember: - "masks don't work" - "it's just a flu" - "vaccines are either perfect or fully ineffective" - "they are using the crisis to control us and will never open back up" - "as soon as the next US president is elected it will suddenly be over"

celeritascelery 3y ago

This reminds me of the "population bomb" of the 1970's. There was a scientific view at the time that the world would become overpopulated due to the rapid growth in places like India and China. That in turn would cause mass death and starvation world wide. This view became mainstream enough that the US and the World Bank pressured India into a mass sterilization program[1]. By the end over 8 million Indians were surgically sterilized, many against their will. Of course the population bomb turned out not to be real. Third-world birth rates drop as they grow economically. But on the path to preventing the perceived apocalypse we imposed massive harm on millions of people. The real problem was that part of the scientific community were so confident in their ability to correctly model extremely complex systems that they were willing to do incredible harm "for the greater good". But it turns out that modeling complex systems, especially ones that have never been observed (such as a population "bomb") is really hard. They were not wrong about the data (population was growing at an unprecedented rate). But they were wrong about how that would impact the future. This has a lot of parallels to climate change. Climate is an incredibly complex system that we have just recently started to study. We have never before observed runaway anthropomorphic climate change (obviously) so all these predictions are based on our ability to model this system. There really isn't any dispute that the global climate is warmer then it was a few decades ago, but what that actually means for the future has big error bars. This could be another "population bomb" type scenario. But again, it might not be. The science strongly suggest that climate change is a very real and preventable phenomenon. Scientists have been right about the global harm of many other industrial activities (such as leaded gasoline or CFC's). But I am wary of people who say we need to ignore the harm of climate related policy actions because the IPCC future is "inevitable" if we don't. I am also skeptical of our ability to get the international community united enough to actually have a meaningful impact. [1]https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/india-the-emergency-and-the-politics-of-mass-sterilization/ https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/india...

traveler01 3y ago
This is actually a great view on the matter and the same concern I was trying to express, maybe poorly.
seanp2k2 3y ago

rich_sasha 3y ago

I think model predictions match observations, in more ways than "it's getting warmer by about the right amount". Not a climate scientist, but roughly, from memory: - Past predictions didn't know exactly what future emissions will be like. Applying real emissions to the models gives "correct" warming quantities - Climate is changing in a similar manner to predicted, e.g. the poles are warming more quickly than the other areas

yk 3y ago

> How the hell we know this current changes are completely abnormal? Doing science. Thing is, unlike what everybody likes to pretend, doing science means to do a lot of tedious hard work and not a whole lot of quick explanations. So the thing is, that we understand the physics of dilute gasses at roughly room temperature phenomenally well, we did all the experiments of putting this gas into a piston, and then heating the piston slightly, and then do it with a slightly different gas mixture, and then we double checked all these experiments and finally we got a pretty good theory sometime around the turn of the 19th century. Then you start to integrate all that knowledge with a knowledge of radiation basis, and you start doing cross checks and try to understand weather, and at some point try to start forecasting wether, with all the associated trouble and that was then sometime in the let's say 1960ies or thereabouts. (During WWII the flying wing of the US Army had meteorologists at all airfields, I believe German news started to broadcast weather forecast in the late 60ies.) Then you do all that with bigger computers and quite a bit of theory of partial differential equations, and then you realize that understanding the 11 year average is a much much better defined problem than next weeks weather. And all of these steps do suggest different cross checks. (Actually in the Physical Science Basis part of the 5th IPCC report there is a chapter called Evaluation of Climate Models ([0], p. 741), which goes into quite a bit of detail on the most recent efforts along those lines.) [0] AR5: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/

theironhammer 3y ago

Exactly, burning fossil fuels causes air pollution hence health problems. This is a problem to be addressed/solved regardless of the causes of climate change.