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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Failure to act on climate change has a game-theoretic cost. Taking unilateral action massively improves your negotiating position and reduces the cost for other countries to reduce their emissions via economies of scale. One country taking decisive action could trigger a chain reaction of political pressure.

Australia has a horrendous wildfire problem. The frequency and severity of wildfires has drastically increased over recent years. A small increase in global temperatures could render vast areas of the country effectively uninhabitable due to the risk of fire.

I think that most Australians are willing to act; that will is being subverted by a powerful coal lobby. They see the hellish scenes every summer. They see the immense financial, environmental and human cost. They see the weight of scientific evidence.

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> Failure to act on climate change has a game-theoretic cost. Taking unilateral action massively improves your negotiating position and reduces the cost for other countries to reduce their emissions via economies of scale

Thanks - I wasn't aware of that. Are there any books / articles that go into this in more detail and might be accessible to someone with a decent math + comp sci education but no knowledge of game theory?

I'm also appreciating the same as you quoted above.

But I keep defaulting to a painfully pessimistic imagination that is the costs are collectively going to be so moot so much sooner than any expectation, due to unforseen extreme results.

Am I going through a depression or something manic, maybe, because I don't believe we're not all suppressing contemplation of the outlier worse consequences of climate instability and as a result are walking blindfold in a kind of negotiated but half acceptable death march into a slower extinction and because of this unseen compromise on the range of forecasts that are shorn of the scariest conclusions we're investing in hope and eliminating healthy appreciation of the dangers, and ultimately accommodating skepticism too much for that accommodation to be without inevitable negative effects ?

edit: final words arranged for grammatical clarity, no overt meaning altered by edit.

Personally I have found reading both history and philosophy is helpful - not in "solving the problem" but being able to manage emotion and anxiety about climate change. I think learning about previous periods of large-scale ecological change or collapse of civilisations helps to normalise the possible/likely/inevitable upcoming events intellectually. Philosophy helps to figure out a workable emotional response. I think there is some value in stoic philosophy that can be applied in daily living, particularly in terms of managing responses to loss (e.g. loss of one's health, or one's material possessions, or loved one's, or perhaps one's society)

There's also this - Roy Scranton's "Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene":

https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/learning-ho...

> The biggest problem climate change poses isn’t how the Department of Defense should plan for resource wars, or how we should put up sea walls to protect Alphabet City, or when we should evacuate Hoboken. It won’t be addressed by buying a Prius, signing a treaty, or turning off the air-conditioning. The biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront this problem, and the sooner we realize there’s nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.

i am not sure if you will find any of this helpful but i hope that you can find some peace with time

Wow thank you so much for your very thoughtful reply. I'm glad you mentioned philosophy albeit I named my company after the most introspective and protective muse of Kirkegaard, so I have to find a way to not loop into a existentialism of my career. But as a reply I think you are correct in saying that I would benefit from a new sight of the philosophers to be at least a clearer mirror of the world than I am possessing now.

I'm possibly finally reaching the simple steps of normal reaction to events that so shocked me I blanked a considerable amount of my life memory and only recently was reunited with by a further trauma. But I have reacted to your comment by latching on to the health side of the equation as patently a relatively simple thing to incrementally improve that is likely to be a positive feedback catalyst. My mind is silently expressing a elongated and expressive Yep to that. But what you say about philosophy and understanding emotions is particularly apt, as it is a pain point that my memory loss is associated with the devaluation of emotions in my life at important times.

I'm unable to add to the thoughts of resources wars, except for mention of the emergency powers in place in the UK for 13 years now which are so draconian the only parallel is Soviet control over the population. Statewatch is a good place to source for the much ignored data and law. In my mind the powers have been long anticipating social breakdown and were ready over a decade ago. I can only wonder at the imagination of the technology advances in recent years without a accompanying chillier political climate and stagnating peacetime. I actually take solace from thinking that it is not a given, the seemingly inseparable advance of tech and the diminished capacity for liberties. I'm inclined to bet long and hard on the positive side of technology.

Thanks again for your thoughts. I've actually taken them to heart.

You might want The Prisoner's Dilemma, by William Poundstone, and if that intrigues you, Games of Strategy by Dixit and Skeath is a well-known textbook.

Game theory has important effects on economics and marketing, as well as the obvious politics.

Works the other way too.

First country footing the massive startup bill will have an economy slowdown compared to other that can be dirty a decade or more while the tech and the solution become commodity.

Besides countries won't really change until it's in their economic interest. Taking from your example until the cost of fighting bush fires (and other climate change related stuff) is greater than the cost of implementing a national plan on the whole economy, things won't change. That's why the hop production crisis is a better predictor on government action than bushfires or heat strokes deaths.

>First country footing the massive startup bill will have an economy slowdown compared to other

not in the modern R&D driven economy. As an example, Silicon Valley is regularly footing the massive startup bill :)

>that can be dirty a decade or more while the tech and the solution become commodity.

and so lacking their own technology they would be naturally buying it from the "first countries" while the first countries will be reinvesting those money into development of even better tech thus ever increasing their lead.

if you think China is going to "buy" the technology, you're not paying attention

Yup, just look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Railways_CRH380A

Although I see it as a positive. The money spent to "buy" technology is essentially wasted money.

> Although I see it as a positive. The money spent to "buy" technology is essentially wasted money.

Is money spent to buy software also "wasted money"? How are you going to pay the engineers developing this technology?

Just because I make a living writing software does not mean I have to support all of this wealth transfer.

I can live on a decent wage. I don't need to make millions of dollars a year.

Screw "creatives" and screw this madness of royalties and license fees. Of what you're doing is of value to someone, they will pay you upfront.

The bigger economic problem is a tragedy of the commons. Everyone benefits from the energy that they individually get from fossil fuels. Everyone pays for a share of everyone's contribution to global warming. When you get all of the reward and only a fraction of the cost from your personal use, it is in your personal interest to have burned fossil fuels even when the total cost far exceeds your individual reward.

Paradoxically, more frequent fires can often mean less severe fires. That's the rationale behind controlled burns and traditional aboriginal land management practices.

And because this is Hacker News, have a play with the simulation hosted at Fourmilab: http://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/rules.html#Forest

Having written (as in, programmed, based on process knowledge from fire departments) a model for forest fires in Australia myself over the last few months, I feel that I can say that while a fine demo application of CA based modeling, this model is not an accurate description of forest fir behaviour (well unless it's just to illustrate how planned burns interact with their crude approximation of fuel load). E.g. it doesn't even consider slope and wind direction, or vegetation type.

Some places getting dramatically hotter drier weather all the time does not lead to less severe fires.

I know that some trees have adapted to fires. Some pine cones are held closed by a resin that is sensitive to high temperatures. These cones will not open to release their seeds until the critical temperature is reached, out with the old and in with the new and such.

However, if there's nothing left ot burn and the whole ecosystem is destroyed, that's a problem

Not paradoxically. No tree burns two times, so in the next fire you'll have less burning material. This is obvious, and bad.

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