Comment by Consultant32452 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Consultant32452 | Hacker News Reader

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Consultant32452

Climate change is a similar kind of moral crusade. I don't know if you are old enough to remember, but when AIDS came out we were all told it would be jumping to the general straight population at any moment. The scientists knew at the time this was largely a lie but they told us the story because they didn't believe we would invest in treatment for mostly gays and junkies. They might have been right. Climate change is similar. It will be really bad for the poorest humans. Relatively rich westerners will have some adaptive behaviors and technology, but it will come in slowly and the population mostly won't notice it happening. But the rich people, the people who surely have better information than you, are still doing things like buying beach front property. Barack Obama did this recently, he clearly doesn't expect it to be under water in the next few years. Climate change is a moral crusade to help poor people in other countries. We're given a polite fiction because they don't believe we would help in the same way they didn't believe we'd help the gays and the junkies. Maybe they're right.

>... he clearly doesn't expect it to be under water in the next few years.

Most people who actually understand climate change also don't expect beachfront homes to be under water in the next few years. It's a slow death/dramatic change of our planet, something that will take place over the next few generations, not the next decade. And if you - or anyone else - thinks it will only impact the poor, you're grossly mistaken.

There's less death today than there was 100 years ago due to improved healthcare, food availability, clean water, etc. As things change in the world there will surely be some adaptation, some migration, some new technology solutions, etc. But I predict two things. First, the developing world will continue to pollute more and release more greenhouse gases as they industrialize. And second, that there will be less death in 100 years than there is today.

Most folks pushing climate activism fully understand that for the most part, only the poor will be effected. That doesn't lessen the argument at all, and to imply "Well, since it won't affect rich people, it doesn't matter" is borderline maniacal.

More than one major national politician has talked about the potential end of the human race within the last year. I don't think it's helpful to get into an argument about what exactly constitutes "most folks" but let's not pretend that the doomsayers aren't treated credibly.

I'm torn on this. I think it's good to police flagrant fear-mongering and all other forms of predation on our worst qualities. But we also got here by people and systems preying on other bad qualities like complacency, laziness, helplessness, and blindness to shifting baselines.

Perhaps more to the point: our world is stuffed to the rafters with complex adaptive systems--both man-made and natural--themselves threaded together by positive and negative feedback loops, punctuated equilibria, and participants trained on making decisions under these conditions.

We don't know which threads will snap, nor when, nor where. We don't know how the other systems and participants will react to the ripples. We don't know if, how long it will take, or where disrupted systems will settle into new equilibria.

In the face of uncertainty on this scale, I think there is some value to catastrophizing. We do this with uncertainty all the time. We imagine threats (both banal and catastrophic) to our systems and game them out. We make plans and run exercises. I'm not sure it's a bad idea, per se, to be gaming out dead-end scenarios.

> But we also got here by people and systems preying on other bad qualities like complacency, laziness, helplessness, and blindness to shifting baselines.

This is not how I would characterize the last 300 years of our efforts as a species.

I'm not exactly sure how you would characterize it, so I'll just project into the space you didn't see fit to fill. We are an endlessly-(infini|adjec)tive species. I have a Whitmanesque love of our species' best and worst qualities.

Characterizations are not mutually exclusive.

There's no catch clause in the universe's code to stop our most-impressive inventions from ultimately killing us, our most-creative disruptions from sundering our societies, or our most endearing traits from tucking us neatly into the geologic record.

Rich people can afford to insure and rebuild on disaster-prone, but otherwise highly desirable, property.

I lived near a barrier island that would get hit with hurricanes each season, and every 5-10 years a storm would devastate it. Despite that, property owners would rebuild their several million dollar vacation homes exactly where they last stood, but raised just a little higher than the last time.

I don't blame them, it's an amazing spot in the summer.

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