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Comment by Benjamin_Dobell | Hacker News Reader

> the idea that you can sue someone because of possible future damage is legislating predicting the future.

Aren't the vast majority of laws about preventing potential future harm?

Building codes, speed limits, gun control etc. You don't need to wait for a building to collapse and kill someone, or someone to have a head-on before you stop them and penalise the reckless behaviour.

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>Building codes, speed limits, gun control etc

But those are all explicitly legislated, as opposed to this lawsuit which is based on a vague idea of harm. Suppose we don't have statues against speeding. Would it be fair for you to get sued for speeding but haven't harmed anyone?

The judgement references 12 Acts and over one hundred cases were cited. The judgement would seem to indicate that this is legislated. Perhaps not explicitly, but Australia practices common law, so this is the normal process. That said, I'd expect something like this to be appealed to the High Court.

Building codes, at least in my state, aren't explicitly legislated. There is a carveout for a governmental department that determines them.

For better or worse most of the rules of a government aren't explicitly legislated - usually they create the ability for some governmental department to exist and make them instead.

Weird. In my state, there are laws, not just departmental rules.

What about people who live in freezing climates, like Sweden or Alaska? Aren't we reducing harm to those people?

I live in one of those areas and climate change is _harming_ us today, here a couple of examples:

- Milder winters mean more ticks and pests survive to eat lumber and spread disease, causing personal harm as well as economic.

- Warmer and drier summers decrease agricultural output

- A grater variety of rainfall cause mudslides and property damage increases

- Snakes can survive further north, to the mountains eating birds eggs which have never needed to understand the danger of them

- Boars survive winters better, causing destructions to agriculture.

- Higher frequently of forest fires.

- Algae at the coast bloom more intensely, preventing tourism and suffocates other species.

The only thing proven is slightly milder winters. Agriculture output has done nothing but increase every year. Forest fires on the decline. We've been getting warmer since the last ice age for sure, more so the last forty years but not at a dire rate. Sea level rise has varied between 1.5 and 3mm per year since useful records started, again, that rate of change is easy to handle. Humans have and will adapt with very little hardship. The panicked masses fed by headline grabbing media and climate 'modeling' that fails basic back testing are just as bad as the outright deniers.

Take a look at the map in this article: https://nerdist.com/article/global-warming-video-earth-4-deg...

Everywhere that isn't green will be uninhabitable under a worst case 4C warming scenario. How do you think that balances out?

For the sake of accuracy, I should note that the map leaves off Antarctica, a substantial portion of which will become habitable under this scenario.

So that article admits right at the outset that it is extremely speculative. You could just as easily post an extremely speculative article that shows the entire world will be jungle with the rise in temperatures.

The only speculation is whether or not the 4C scenario is the one we're in. The map itself is derived from climate models, which have been shown to be accurate in reproducing current conditions, when fed correct levels of atmospheric greenhouse gasses. I can dig up the paper that says this if anyone would care to read it.

> The map itself is derived from climate models, which have been shown to be accurate in reproducing current conditions

how do you know that the models show accurate results that match and predict real measurements? Where is the code to verify that there's no post-factum editing and fitting the results into the desired interpretations? Who is performing verification? Is it made open-source for independent reviews?

Would you like to read the paper? If you say you will actually read it, I will find the reference. The answers to your questions are mostly there. For the ones that are not, I'm sure you can contact the researchers, ask them, and report back.

I would like to see sources of the models first, similarly to how implementations of RSA could be found on Github prior finding papers describing principles of RSA and verified by everyone interested in the topic of cryptography. If there's a paper claiming that the models consistently predict observable climate numbers in the future, the models have to be published openly in full, as it would be a pre-requisite for verifying reproducibility of the results.

Alright, well, I guess you don't want what I have to offer, so, have fun on your own.

I doubt you had anything to offer in the first place. If you had it, you would have shared a link, as I can do for cryptography projects with strong claims.

You're free to be wrong.

I'm simply not willing to spend effort digging up a reference for someone who won't read it. Literally all you had to say was "I'd like the reference please, so I can read it," but you did not. So, it seems I was right. Given your attitude, I don't even believe you intended to do what you said you were going to do in good faith.

Have a nice day.

Turning the permafrost to mud is definitely not helpful.

If you truly want to look at it that way then it has to be a utilitarian net harm calculation.

They are instituted as is and must be regarded from that point forward. Not enacted with intent that any judiciary can interpret simply because they overlooked something that wasn't required or a law at the point. Otherwise, how do you know if you're being moral or ethical if the government can incriminate you for not following an never-made-yet law? This goes down to personal ethics and everyone's is different. Legislating morality as we see with any religious country shows it's just a means of governmental control.

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