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Comment by orthecreedence | Hacker News Reader

If the scientists don't convince people, I hope the massive droughts in some places, flooding in others, superstorms, and other massive weather pattern shifts will.

In the US, there's still a large group of people (or maybe just a vocal group) that cover their ears and won't listen to anything climate-change related, even in the highest places of our government.

I hope a healthy dose of "this is what climate change looks like" will scare people into believing. Even if you don't want to believe that humans are the cause, we still need to do something about it, and fast (something besides blaming everything on homosexuals).

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Yet if your house gets flooded or blown away by a hurricane, the insurance company won't blame global warming- instead they literally claim that it is an "act of god"

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

It's interesting how a lack of accountability over the weather is so deeply ingrained into our culture like this.

I don't think that is necessarily true. I think the 'large group of people' do not deny that climate change exists. I find they come to a conclusion somewhere in the ballpark of: Sure, natural climate change exists, but manmade climate change is an insignificant factor in this, and/or humans have little ability to overpower natural climate change and turn it around (cooling it, even if we're in a naturally warming stint). Misinformed, perhaps, but rational.

Not unlike the apathetic feeling that causes people not not show up at the polls.

Convincing people this is real is only the tiniest first step. Even amongst über-liberals who fully acknowledge climate change is real—and that we're causing it—they're still eating their steak dinners, driving their cars, drinking bottled water, and flying to vacation in far-away lands. Until we each do our tiny parts of reducing our consumption, Earth's temperature will continue its steady march upward.

Getting political consensus here would be nice. But individuals can lead by example by living more sustainable lives.

> Until we each do our tiny parts of reducing our consumption, Earth's temperature will continue its steady march upward.

Now we're getting into the meat of the problem. If everyone worked less, got less money to spend on stupid plastic shit, drove less in our cars, threw away less perfectly edible food, and spent more time with the people we care about, both we the people and the planet would be better off.

But for our debt-fueled micro- and macro-economies, it would spell utter disaster. Financial crisis writ large. Housing market would go to shit. Banks would default. The state would get less taxes, so deficit would skyrocket. Meanwhile national debt, which is measured relative to GDP, would blow up much quicker than the deficit since GDP would drop sharply.

So nobody will ever actually make it happen.

The causes of the problem are not evenly distributed. I could eat steak dinners for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and not contribute 1% of some awful industrial-scale disasters.

If I have the personal will to devote an hour a week or $20 of my budget to sustainability, that energy is inordinately more effective when spent pressuring my boss to upgrade our fleet of derelict 4 mpg coal-rollers that do hundreds of miles a week, or writing a letter to my congressman to tryto convince him that global warming isn't a scam, rather than enduring the inconvenience of carpooling so that between my wife's 25mpg and my 30 mpg cars we can save 30 miles a week.

I can contribute a tiny part through personal life changes, or a big part through advocacy, with the same effort.

Warming seems to be the most pressing issue that is causing the climate changes you mentioned. And, I think we can all agree it's probably too late combined with we don't really know what to do. Unfortunately, reducing our energy consumption is not a realistic option (because universally, humanity will never act accordingly). Which leaves me asking...

When does Mr. Burns' Sun Blocker [1] become the most realistic opportunity for us to actually control warming?

[1] http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Sun_Blocker

My brother works in the North West of Western Australia, as a geological surveyor. He said to me that they're having an 'apparent temperature' today of 48.9 degrees C - it's over 40 degrees in the shade where he is right now (Koolin Island, roughly 9,000kms north of Perth). It's so hot today that their rubbish dump just spontaneously combusted and bins on their site are doing the same thing.

When that starts happening in major cities, hopefully people notice before large numbers of the population have severe health problems from it.

http://leftycartoons.com/2017/11/14/if-global-warming-were-r...

Remember folks, weather isn't climate unless it fits our narrative.

There are people who continue to deny the reality of climate change even while they're literally up to their neck in flood waters.

We need a Pearl Harbor or 9/11 level event to drive people to action. However, the back-to-back world-wide coral bleaching events didn't do it, and the back-to-back record breaking storms in both the Atlantic and Pacific this year didn't do it.

By the time it gets destructive enough that effective mass action becomes possible, I fear it will be too late for us.

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