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Comment by yongjik | Hacker News Reader

> Please, I remember we would all die a horrible death due to a nuclear armageddon.

And then leaders of superpowers talked to each other, signed treaties, and decided not to start a nuclear war, because nobody likes dying.

> When that didn't happen, we would all suffocate because all the forests would die due to acidrain.

So nations signed treaties and laws to limit sulfur and NOx emission, which worked.

> Then we would all die of skin cancer due to the ozone-hole.

Yep, treaties and laws. No more CFC, no more ozone hole.

> I actually remember the nuclear effects from Tjernobyl, glad I didn't die then.

OK I'll grant you that this was overblown a bit.

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> And then leaders of superpowers talked to each other, signed treaties, and decided not to start a nuclear war, because nobody likes dying.

Well, actually the Russians ran out of money.

> Well, actually the Russians ran out of money.

As a pithy summary of what happened to the USSR, that's not bad. As a summary of nuclear non-proliferation it's ahistorical.

I'm not an expert on this, but 'ran out of money' doesn't sound like a real explanation for the collapse of a government. That state has the authority to make money, it can't simply run out of it's own currency.

A country can print as much currency as it wants. In that sense it cannot run out of money. What it can't do is print as much currency as it wants, and still have people want that currency, or have them accept it at the previous value. In that sense a country certainly can run out of money.

Take a step further back. As Thomas Sowell says, economics is the study of the allocation of scarce goods that have competing uses. In a free economy, money is how we organize that. But even if we had infinite money, that wouldn't give us more of anything else. It would just mean that everything cost infinite dollars to buy.

The problem that the Soviet Union had was that their economy couldn't produce enough to supply their military competition with the US. "Ran out of money" is one way of describing that, but the literal number of rubles in circulation is not at all the issue.

But if you spend that "own" currency on building military equipment that doesn't work instead of farming to feed your citizens, that "own" money doesn't spend very far when buying from outside sources.

What about global cooling scare[1], which obviously turned out to be nothing but I'm sure was used to scaremonger people?

OP wasn't saying that they weren't real issues. In fact they were all serious! I think he was saying there's nothing good about falling into a nihilist hole. Living together on Earth is hard and takes cooperation. There's plenty of room for the innovators but no room for the defeatist.

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

From your link:

> Academic analysis of the peer-reviewed studies published at that time shows that most papers examining aspects of climate during the 1970s were either neutral or showed a warming trend.

I'm too young to have read anything about Global Cooling during the 1970s, but I can confidently say that, by 2021, I've seen way more "Ha ha scientists warned about Global Cooling in 1970s which makes the theory of Global Warming invalid!" than actual "Scientist So-and-so warned that the Earth is Cooling." It's basically historical revisionism for selling an agenda.

I still think cooling is a larger long-term threat than warming. Warming is a temporary disruption for humans, but the biosphere will, overall, flourish. Cooling is more of a general threat to Earth life, and it's pretty sure to happen. We are subject to periodic ice ages. The difference, I guess, is that the warming is upon us NOW, while the ice age is potentially 50,000 years off.

If you believed that humans are causing global warming, then you wouldn't have to worry about the possibility of global cooling: we can obviously put a stop to that if we ever find ourselves facing the onset of a real ice age.

Technically, we're experiencing an ice age, albeit the tail-end of one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation If it ends, things don't look good for us; we'd have to re-do all our infrastructure at the least.

Right in your link:

"Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was generally more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect."

i.e. even in the 70s scientist were worried about warming because they saw concerning data.

people getting concerned out about nonsense in the press has been with us since there was a press (cf 80s satanic panic) ... but that doesn't mean people being concerned about something in the press is nonsense.

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