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Comment by DuskStar | Hacker News Reader

From the GGP:

> NYC was crippled by Sandy, and that didn’t lead to any changes.

This is what I was referring to. Would the Democrats have implemented more hurricane protections?

I don't think either party has any sort of sane carbon-reducing policy. The Republicans are obviously insane, but the Democrats seem to be focused more on attacking politically charged targets than on actually getting things done. You say they've "attempted" action - I'd say they've implemented things that are more virtue signaling than effective. (plastic bag bans, straw bans... These are not the actions of someone who cares about the environment more than political point-scoring)

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Discussing improved hurricane protections is shifting the conversation to addressing symptoms rather than root causes. The conversation thread starts with the assertion that the US will be unable to take climate change seriously until a major city is lost.

While you make fair points, you're not disagreeing with general trends. Democrats have made moves to address emissions, while Republicans are struggling to admit there is even a problem. We do live in a Democracy, and politicians do have to work within the reality of what can be passed. The general public is the problem. Until the public has a strong appetite for addressing climate change, no meaningful change will happen. Any leader making bold moves prior to that is just going to be voted out. The scary conclusion at the root of this thread is that the public will lack that will until a major city is lost.

Hurricanes are not symptoms of climate change. At least, not empirically validated symptoms.

“We find that, after adjusting for such an estimated number of missing storms, there remains just a small nominally positive upward trend in tropical storm occurrence from 1878-2006. Statistical tests indicate that this trend is not significantly distinguishable from zero (Figure 2). In addition, Landsea et al. (2010) note that the rising trend in Atlantic tropical storm counts is almost entirely due to increases in short-duration (<2 day) storms alone. Such short-lived storms were particularly likely to have been overlooked in the earlier parts of the record, as they would have had less opportunity for chance encounters with ship traffic.”

https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/

Critiques like this are utterly unhelpful. If you truly believe the Republicans are insane then try turning your efforts to neutralizing them instead of wagging your finger at the people making an effort to improve things, however inadequate. They're working on small things both to raise public awareness and because that's all that's possible while the other major party is detached from reality but still wields most of the power at the national level. You don't have much political capital to make a difference as an individual (like most of us) so complaining about limited progress is a net negative.

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