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Comment by throwaway-1209 | Hacker News Reader

Pros: the US was signing up for a _minimum_ of $100B/yr in foreign aid to help others implement the accords. When you're up to your ears in debt that's kind of stupid.

Cons: estimates say that the climate will be warmer by 0.3 degrees Celsius by 2100. Assuming estimates are in fact right (which they historically haven't been) this could have devastating effects elsewhere in the world.

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For anyone taking this comment seriously: verify the numbers for yourself. The poster has given the lower bound of the confidence interval in positing that we will see 0.3C warming by 2100. The latest assessment puts warming at 3.7C (6.67F!) under the "Business as Usual" RCP8.5 scenario.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_P...

Edit -- not to mention that climate models are quite good at reproducing the observed changes:

https://www.skepticalscience.com/Climate-Models-Show-Remarka...

That's if _everyone_ withdraws. That's not what's happening. 0.3 degrees is if the US withdraws but everyone else proceeds as planned. But we aren't even withdrawing per se. Immediately after announcing his decision, Trump also announced his willingness to re-negotiate the accords on better terms (by which I think he means not spending $100/B a year on something that other countries aren't even legally bound by).

And climate models predict things just fine as long as you pick the ones that are somewhat accurate in retrospect. That's not what prediction is. Prediction is when, like Al Gore, you say that in 15 years we'll all be underwater, and it doesn't happen. If you bet your money on the accuracy of the current models you will lose.

Complete nonsense on both counts. First of all, consider that the most visible public debate about this has centered on whether it is even possible to limit warming to 2C. Start by reading the two links I posted. If you would like to learn more, the IPCC reports are genuinely well written and accessible: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/

I would hope that at least on HN we could all agree on a shared objective reality and the validity of the scientific method. Your claims sound like something straight out of a Heartland brochure.

Further clarification, my bad: 0.3 degrees _greater_ warming if the US withdraws. Not 0.3 degrees total. The climate is warming, no one is disputing that. It's not warming anywhere near as quickly as models from 10 years ago predicted, though.

No, but that means we underestimated an energy sink, probably the ocean. That additional energy isn't going anywhere.

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