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Comment by Magodo | Hacker News Reader

Can someone help me out with my cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, I keep reading about how climate change will destroy everything very soon and the first person to die of serious climate change has already been born and on the other hand, there's always hopeful news like this... If the first is true why bother with renewable energy at all and why celebrate it as a milestone. If the latter is true, then what's the point of worrying about the climate at all?

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Human driven climate change is going to do significant damage. It's not going to be halted in a mere decade or two. But it's always possible to make the consequences a little more severe by burning more fossils, or to make them a little less severe by burning less.

The people who claim "only X years left to save the world from severe climate change" are stretching the truth for effect or don't understand the primary research well enough. There are certain milestones that we'll pass if we don't make deep emissions cuts in those X years, but there's not a bright dividing line between "ok" and "doomed." Telling people that there is a bright line coming up in just a few years is likely to induce cynicism/apathy when we start living on the far side of that line.

On the other hand, there certainly are significant irreversible events coming up if temperature rise is not capped, deforestation not stopped, industrial agriculture doesn't change, etc.

Because articles like this are deceptive. In terms of climate change: 1. You need to look at all sources of carbon emissions (not just electricity). 2. You need to look at the whole world--not just the United States.

Overall it turns out there is a modest improvement in the U.S. and the other Western industrialized countries.[And even with the modest improvement in the Western industrialized countries, they are still putting massive amount of carbon into the atmosphere every year.]

However there is a worsening in the third world--and they are responsible for more emissions that the Western industrialized countries. Thus for example you see articles like:

Mexico was once a climate leader – now it's betting big on coal

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/15/mexico-coal-fo...

> However there is a worsening in the third world--and they are responsible for more emissions that the Western industrialized countries.

That's true for new emissions, but remember that various greenhouse gases once emitted stay around in the atmosphere for a while.

For CO2, a while is 300-1000 years. The US plus Europe emitted about 58% of the CO2 that is currently in the atmosphere.

Like coronavirus, it's not a binary but a question of how well or badly we cope with it.

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