Comment by zeveb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeveb | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

You know, my takeaway from that graphic is that higher temperatures appear to be pretty well-correlated with improved human quality of life.

And of course the graphic doesn't show a cost-benefit analysis for any of its three future scenarios. Would it be worth a nickel to preserve the current environment exactly as it is? Maybe (although maybe some change would be good; I don't know). Would it be worth $1 quadrillion a day to prevent a single town of 1,000 people from being submerged by rising oceans? Almost certainly not.

What are the costs of each scenario, and what are the benefits? Is it worth losing a few houses in Miami if it means that Oslo produces more food?

That the world has always been changing has always been true, whether respecting climate or any number of other factors. That we're affected by change has also always been true. That we can have an effect on it is relatively new, and that we ought to is unproven. Frankly, the 20th century makes me very suspicious of any technocratic solution which claims to be able to predict every possibility and make the best choice (remember the Aswan Dam!). That doesn't mean we should do nothing, either (doing nothing is itself a choice which needs to be justified too!), but it means we should be very suspicious of easy answers which claim to be all benefit and no cost.

You really don't understand anything about dynamical systems do you? It's incredibly naive to assume we will land in some nice stable equilibrium where it's a couple of degrees warmer globally. The truth is we don't know where the climate will end up, but we know that we are in the process of exiting our current 'stable equilibrium'. The worst case scenario (and that is the only one we should be concerned with!) is a global mass extinction event. We've already had 5 of them - one of which was due to runaway greenhouse warming - https://cosmosmagazine.com/palaeontology/big-five-extinction...

> It's incredibly naive to assume we will land in some nice stable equilibrium where it's a couple of degrees warmer globally.

I don't assume that, nor did I write it. A mass extinction event would have high costs; it's entirely possible, though, that preventing one would have higher costs still (after all, it's not beyond belief that even if the Earth returned to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, mankind could survive).

All I wrote is that we need to consider costs as well as benefits of any scenario, to include doing nothing, and that I currently have relatively little faith in those who are confident in their estimates of costs and benefits. It's a bit surprising that either of these is so controversial.

If 5 global mass extinction events have already happened without any human intervention (positive or negative), why do we think we can stop the 6?

I'd assume from that data, that its going to happen regardless of what we do.

Are you aware that the current situation is due to humans using fossil fuels and the problems can be addressed if governments weren't blocking progress? Or are you in denial that this situation is man-made?

I'd say I'm more of a realist, whatever is happening is happening, and whatever the results are going to be are going to be.

Likely some of what is happening is caused by humans and some is outside our control. Likely our actions will make little difference. Realistically the whole world runs on fossil fuels and that is not going to change anytime soon or quickly. Sure they can raise taxes significantly, but that is going to make the food at the grocery store much much more expensive before it makes any serious change on the environment.

You seem to be in denial about how prohibitively difficult it would be to 'fix' this problem.

"why do we think we can stop the 6?"

We don't know, but it doesn't mean we should be actively trying to make it happen sooner. Heck, there's a pretty big difference if next mass extinction happens few years/decades from now or few thousand years in a future, when we might be better prepared for it. We all gonna die one day, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to improve our lives now or make it better for our children.

Haven't we been trying to improve our lives and the lives of our children for 30,000 odd years... Take a look at the situation we created, this world is the direct result of our desire to make things better... We've literally destroyed the earth.

We are not destroying the earth. The earth will go on with or without us. We are destroying the future of millions of humans. It will cause a great deal of pain and suffering. It may even cause the extension of our civilization or even our species.

True, when I say destroying the earth, I mean destroying it for us.

As you said, the earth will be fine.

Your response to possible global mass extinction is to shrug and say whattyagonnado?

Why not? From a purely nihilistic/hedonistic point of view, I can honestly say the strategy with the most personal utility to me is to shrug and say "whattyagonnado" .

Yeah, sort of, like we can try to escape earth, or build something underground, or whatever sci-fi fantasy you like.

But if its our species time to go, than that is what will be.

I'm more of a determinist than a defeatist, I don't really think things could be any different than they already are.

"Nothing occurs at random, but everything for a reason and by necessity." Leucippus

So basically we have no free will so why should we change things? what.

"if it's our species time to go"

but it's NOT. we can make a change. this is like seeing a bulldozer slowly approaching your house - and instead of picking up and moving, despite the difficult, resigning yourself to death. It's illogical, it makes no sense.

This isn't a philosophical debate, but consider something like physicalism rather than free will.... No point in getting into a debate about that, but if you believe in science then you kind of have to believe in determinism.

We aren't really special, we ONLY think we are, we are restricted to the same laws as all other animals over all of time. We THINK we are different and ACT differently, but the 'effects' will still come to our 'causes.'

Take a stoic perspective rather than a defeatist one on the deterministic nature of things and it stops being something to get angry about.

You're telling me that this isn't a philosophical debate and then telling me a philosophical opinion.

Pragmatically, we make decisions. If a car is flying at you at high speed, stopping to think about determinism means you die instead of just jumping to the side and living.

your contribution here is literally null, que sera sera. Yes, the future is not ours to see, but guess what: that means it isn't set in stone.

case in point: heizenberg. measuring something by bouncing photons off it changes it's path. you can't know the future without changing it. thus we can change the future.

Not sure you understand determinism.

Both your examples are examples of deterministic responses.

Also, not knowing what the future will bring, doesn't mean that its not determined to a certain way.

to apply my point - yes, it is determined that the climate will change, temperature will drop and rise. claiming that current changes are a part of this natural change is to say that it was pre-determined, and we didn't do anything to change this.

your mistake is elucidated when you consider this analogy:

'the earth is going to be consumed by the sun eventually. so we shouldn't do anything to save our environment.'

The kind of future you're talking about is going to happen whether we like it or not. but it's SO FAR away. the changes in climate that you say are pre-determined are on a geological time-scale.

thing is travelling along a pre-determined path.

we can determine it is following this path. but we want to measure it. so we do, and we change it's pre-determined path.

it still is and was always pre-determined. but it is not the same original determination.

I definitely understand determinism. Did you know there is soft and hard determinism?

I'm proving to you here that the future can be determined, but unknown. We can then seek to know it, and in doing so change it's path to another one that is just as determined.

Why not ask a bean counter?

http://evanmills.lbl.gov/pubs/pdf/climate-action-insurance.p...

Also, look up US drought and climate refugees if you want to see where the real problems are going to come from.

Turning huge swathes of the equator uninhabitable just seems like a bad idea to me.

how's that for mixing correlation & causation.

Sorta like, I've noticed that I have a good time when my bank account is low.

Low bank accounts must mean good life havin'!

> how's that for mixing correlation & causation.

I'm just noting the correlation. In some cases it's likely that causation goes one way (e.g. post-industrial changes), but in other cases it's not (e.g. well before there were enough men to make a mark on the Earth).

Of course, even back then there's still a post hoc, propter hoc fallacy to watch out for: the mere fact that civilisation has done better as the world has warmed — if it is even a fact — doesn't mean that warming is the cause.

It could be as simple as increased sunlight leading to both more plant growth and more heat, and more plant growth leading to more food & other resources for man's use. Which — if the case — would raise the question of how much is too much: a greenhouse in winter can be great, but an unvented greenhouse in summer can be unlivable for plants or anything else.

Global warming doesn't mean "it'll get a few degrees warmer and sea levels will rise a bit and things will settle into a new normal and we'll all have to cope by just moving inland a bit and no longer having to shovel snow in the winter".

The ecosystem is a huge, dynamic, non-linear system. A key characteristic of a non-linear system is that relatively small changes can have huge cascading effects.

When you disrupt the system by introducing an imbalance — by pumping out CO2 — the result is usually a period of chaos until the system settles on a new equilibrium. We don't know what equilibrium is exactly, because we don't know what the first step is — there'll be a cascade of effects.

For example, we know that melting ice will decrease ocean salinity, and we know that the balance of salinity is crucial in driving the global ocean conveyor belt, which in turn has an impact on local climates, storms, wind patterns, rainfall. That's ignoring the cascading effects of melting tundras unlocking enormous methane deposits that could turn Earth into another Venus.

In the short term, the effect on agriculture is probably the scariest problem, even scarier than rising sealevels forcing coastal settlements inland (mass displacement has never been a happy occurrence for the people being displaced or those who have to receive them). Society is completely dependent on food production to stay civilized. If crops fail, livestock die, too, and eventually people.

A huge number of the world's greatest cities are on the coast since cities have a tendency to develop around ports.

> A huge number of the world's greatest cities are on the coast since cities have a tendency to develop around ports.

Sure. That effects the cost of rising sea levels and the benefit of lowered sea levels. I'm not saying, 'let's do nothing!': I'm saying, 'let's perform a cost-benefit analysis' and 'I'm suspicious of anyone who has high confidence in his cost-benefit analysis'[1]. It's remarkable that so many folks find those to be distressing views.

[1] Particularly if his analysis supports giving him and people like him the sort of social power that great apes tend to crave like a drug. The Aztec priests had every incentive to believe that the human sacrifices they performed kept the Sun in his track — I won't say that the acted in bad faith (although their actual faith was appallingly bad: if one's religion requires ripping the hearts out of people and then engaging in cannibalism, maybe one should re-evaluate one's religious options), but they were still factually wrong.

> I'm suspicious of anyone who has high confidence in his cost-benefit analysis

Maybe you could tell that to those who are convinced that reducing CO2 emission will destroy economy.

I mean, how much do you figure flooding New York permanently would cost? Hurricane Sandy cost billions of dollars.

> I mean, how much do you figure flooding New York permanently would cost?

I honestly don't know the answer; I never said or implied that I did: I just noted the questions we have to answer to make a rational — rather than an emotional — decision.

> Hurricane Sandy cost billions of dollars.

True, but an awful lot of that was repair, wasn't it? If you abandon something, you don't need to spend money fixing it first. There would certainly be huge costs in losing New York City, but there would be some benefits too. And, again, taking the measures needed to not-lose-New-York isn't free: there are costs associated with that course of action.

It truly boggles my mind that so many folks here think that, 'something must be done; this is something; this must be done!' is valid when applied to climate change, when we would all recognise it as invalid in a software-development context.

You'd have to build some replacement if you decided to abandon most of our major cities, unless your plan is just to forget about all the economic activity that happens in them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com