Would global warming be so bad? | Hacker News Reader

Would global warming be so bad?

csmonitor.com

6 pointscwan25 comments

This kind of thoughtlessness is what terrifies me, more than anything else in the world.

What is the thoughtless part of asking a question? If there is global warming some places will be better off and some worse. Is it so thoughtless to do a cost / benefit analysis?

It’s not thoughtless to ask that question. It’s thoughtless to not search out the current scientific literature or interview an expert and to just wildly guess.

What is the thoughtless part of asking a question?

Actually, there are many thoughtless questions. For example, "would raping a small child to death every once in a while really be so bad?" is a thoughtless question.

If there is global warming some places will be better off and some worse.

That might be true if we were talking about climate change taking place on much larger time scales. But the whole problem with anthropogenic climate change is that we've introduced changes at much faster rates than natural climate evolution. So even places that become "better" in theory can't necessarily benefit in practice.

For example, climate change may shift rainfall patterns away from arable land towards deserts. The arable land is now useless, but the deserts need not become fertile: without a deep enough layer of soil to hold water, the rain may just wash away. Now, if this change happened over the course of millenia, the desert would eventually develop a thick enough soil layer so that it might become a fertile region. But for people who were depending on the arable land's food production, the fact that the desert may be fertile in a few thousand years is small comfort.

I see the beginning of an article. Where's the middle and the end?

You can't make such a controversial statement in 240 words!

Continues past the first set of ads.

I don't see it, in either Chrome (with AdBlock) or Safari (with no ad blocking). Last words of the article are "And this cold weather will largelly undo the initial warming effect, leaving us with little to worry about, assuming "global warming" is bad."

Is there more?

"Global warming" is something of a misnomer. I prefer "climate change" as it more accurately depicts the fact that everything could become more extreme, not just heat. I don't think it would be as enjoyable as the author seems to think.

Global warming scares people, "Climate change" is more vague. Hence the oil-company backed think tanks and political parties want to use the later.

"Change" might be more accurate description. It's just not useful if you want people to change behaviours.

Definitely true, but unfortunately it also promotes thoughtless arguments such as "this was such a cold winter, so global warming must be a hoax."

How about "catastrophic climate change?"

climate != weather

global != local

average != seasonal

As part of average warming, we also expect more variability and extreme weather events.

The effects of climate change certainly have to be carefully considered. It is true that not every change is automatically bad. I’m, however, pretty certain that the scientific literature is full of papers dealing with just that topic [0]. You obviously won’t find an answer by asking “Gore supporters”, you will have to ask scientists.

This guy is an economist for goodness sake. I’m pretty certain that if he looked hard enough he could find a colleague who is working on just that topic with a climate scientist. He could ask her or him and then write an informed article.

[0] http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=economic+costs+climate+c...

Climate change will inevitably result in a reduction in biodiversity on Earth. I would argue that that is automatically bad. Biodiversity is the single greatest untapped resource that we have - it's the reason this is Earth, and not a rock. It would be beyond irresponsible to allow biodiversity to be lost before we have even scraped the surface of understanding it.

I can't believe that the argument has shifted from "climate change is not happening" to "even if it is happening, climate change doesn't matter". At least some scientists would agree with the first statement. I doubt that any would agree with the second.

Well, a reduction of biodiversity would be a possible effect of climate change that has to be considered. I’m not disagreeing with you.

>> Climate change will inevitably result in a reduction in biodiversity on Earth.

Do you have a source for that claim? Things like the ice age and deep sea lifeforms spring to my mind whenever someone says that.

On an evolutionary scale, it is very difficult to know what our intervention will do to the level of diversity on the planet - but there is a vast amount of evidence to suggest that climate change causes mass extinctions. Certainly the ice age did. Mass extinctions reduce biodiversity.

We're already part way through the latest mass extinction event, which began soon after humans arrived on the scene: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

Since we have reached a level of self awareness which allows us to consciously limit the damage we do, why not try to preserve diversity where we can? Each organism that becomes extinct represents a loss of information about one particular form of life. They're like books in a big, awesome library, and we're burning them to keep warm.

... says an economist. So, what we have is someone who doesn't know much about climate change (and puts it in quotes whenever it appears, which is always a bad sign) claiming that it might not be so bad, because it would get warmer, and the Antarctica might become habitable. Ignoring the fact that the ocean levels will rise. Ignoring the fact that there's a trend of tropical storms getting worse and worse. Ignoring that heat exhaustion really sucks and actually does kill lots of people, especially the elderly. In fact, there's absolutely no scientific evidence in the article, just his own uninformed opinions.

This tool uses elevation maps to estimate what areas would be underwater in the event of sea level rise: http://flood.firetree.net/

Motherf*cker can't tell the difference between climate and current weather. Shameful.

I've wondered the same thing: let the oceans rise twenty feet; I own property in Indiana.

Too bad about the whole probable breakdown of civil order and thus property rights.

one should not respond to trolls, but I should at least say, coastal populations and food production.

What is this tripe? Yes, of course it would be bad. The devastating effects on agriculture are reason enough to be concerned.

It's easy to say that the global warming isn't too bad when you have an air conditioner.

Or there's -25 Celsius and 60 centimeters of snow outside.

I believe that's normal winter weather for Northern Europe. As a politician once said, winter is not like summer. I prefer having both winter and summer, instead of a cruel summer.

P.S. Having a summer like the one from 2003[1] is way worse than some snow and cold weather.

[1] This is what http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave

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