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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> what would falsify the theory that humans are causing global warming and this is a bad thing

(emphasis original)

Who cares? Once you've asked whether something is bad, why on earth would it matter whether humans are causing it? It matters to the environmentalist movement, because it is a tenet of that movement that the same change is good if not metaphysically related to humans but bad if it is. That's not a viewpoint I'd endorse, though.

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Because if we aren't causing it, then there's very little reason to make vast changes to our way of life in hopes of preventing it.

Sort of like how there's very little reason for Holland to try to prevent the ocean from coming in?

Using solar panels to take hot shower instead of burning gas does not constitute "making vast changes to our way of life".

The argument you propose could be described as a fairness fallacy - I didn't do something bad, so bad things won't happen to me. Sometimes its worth preventing things we didn't cause, if they will nonetheless impact us in significant ways. An asteroid barreling toward earth would hardly be caused by us, but if we didn't try to prevent it, we'd share fate with dinosaurs.

To be fair, we have ways that the dinosaurs didn't have of mitigating the results.

Bad logic. Whether we caused it or not is irrelevant, if it's going to harm us, and we can do something about it, we should regardless of the cause.

The idea that we can do something about it, i.e. by decreasing the use of fossil fuels, is based entirely on the idea that we caused it, i.e. by burning lots of fossil fuels. If we didn't cause it, the whole edifice crumbles.

> The idea that we can do something about it, i.e. by decreasing the use of fossil fuels, is based entirely on the idea that we caused it

That's a misconception you're holding onto. Those working on mitigating carbon in the atmosphere don't' care what the source of the carbon is. Whether we caused it or not simply doesn't matter.

> If we didn't cause it, the whole edifice crumbles.

The attempts to stop a calamity are worthwhile regardless of the original source of the calamity. Engineering the environment does not depend on whether we think we accidentally engineered it before.

Well, personally I like having clean air and water, and the idea of not giving a completely barren Earth to my offspring. Even if climate change is not caused by humans, the things we would do to try and stop it are good things we should be doing anyways.

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