Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

It’s kinda funny that project veritas released a clip showing CNN and media were going to start selling this issue (for profit) and now it’s happening...

https://www.projectveritas.com/news/part-1-cnn-director-admi...

> It [COVID] will taper off to a point that it's not a problem anymore. Climate change can take years, so they'll [CNN will] probably be able to milk that quite a bit…Climate change is going to be the next COVID thing for CNN…Fear sells

Some other factoids:

- 20,000 years ago an ice sheet covered a large portion of North America

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurentide_Ice_Sheet

- 10,000 years ago the Sierra was green

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-really-tu...

- generally, I agree with world is warming. Is that bad? I’m actually unsure. There’s a lot more data on this; it’ll definitely Impact our lives — but is there anything we can do about it? Seems like a trend going back tens of thousands of years.

What we saw 20k years ago was the end of the most recent Milankovich cycle. The warm period in that cycle is fairly brief compared to the whole, and quickly goes back to the cold period again.

What we’ve already done is likely to prevent the next cold period, even if we stop emitting completely tonight.

What we’re doing now under the “business as usual” scenario is about the same scale of impact as that cycle, but in addition.

Also the main gas, CO2, demonstrably makes us significantly dumber in the concentrations we expect from a business-as-usual scenario.

And yes, there are things we can do about it, and are doing some of those things. The better question is: can we make it profitable to do enough about it, because the greenhouse gases hang around so long it is not sensible to hope for altruistic solutions.

We already know that a warmer planet means rising sea levels, and as a species that tends to congregate near the sea... this is definitely a problem. If mitigating CO2 emissions buys us any amount of time, it's worth it.

The Project Veritas that is famous for making up stories out of whole cloth or grossly distorting statements until they no longer resemble the actual situation? Is your supposition that they have suddenly done a 180 and started telling the truth for no apparent reason?

Why should I take anything that comes out of Project Veritas seriously when they have a long track record of lying or putting so much spin on a story that it flies apart?

Your statements are inaccurate and there’s nothing to back it up as far as I can tell.

Project Veritas is currently suing everyone who makes those claims and has yet to lose. NYT in particular has done some insanely shady stuff

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BvRaQk5yeao

Just listen to the CNN employees own words, you don’t even have to assume project veritas is doing anything. It’s pretty clear.

I'm guessing you fully trust Project Vertias's statements about their own truthfulness?

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Project_Veritas

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/nov/09/project-ve...

https://www.newschannel5.com/news/fact-check-political-video...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/10/16/fac...

https://firstdraftnews.org/articles/project-veritas-amplifie...

https://www.logically.ai/factchecks/library/22a2b3a9

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/05/04/james-oke...

https://www.businessinsider.com/james-okeefe-project-veritas...

https://www.snopes.com/news/2016/10/18/project-veritas-elect...

https://ballotpedia.org/Project_Veritas

It is harder to find cases where they aren't spinning bullshit. I put a huge variety of sources in here just to hammer home the fact that pretty much every time someone tries to fact check a Project Veritas story it falls apart. He is a master of the out-of-context clip and the disingenuous talking point. He doesn't care about objective reality in the least, only pushing his political position. It is hard to overstate just how shameless O'Keefe is. Only a fool would take his statements at face value.

Everything you shared is partisan opinion pieces and some are currently named in lawsuits.

Every single news outlet by necessity clips news stories. Thus far, project veritas appears better than most, but I agree not perfect. I don’t think anything linked here provides more support to your claims. Particularly as several are currently involved in defamation lawsuits and are almost entirely opinion.

Literally, the argument here is the opinion of those being investigated by project veritas is that project veritas fake lol

Just because James O'Keefe is lawsuit happy doesn't mean he is right.

Agreed, it means the claims are disputed

You're not allowed to question climate change like this on HN.

>generally, I agree with world is warming. Is that bad? I’m actually unsure.

The eemian period was around 115,000 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian

It was about 2 celcius warmer compared to today. Sea levels were ~6-9 metres higher. Which puts significant amount of current day valuable land under water. Flipside, this increase in warming also unlocks significant parts of the Canadian arctic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian#/media/File:All_palaeot...

You can also see that it's always sudden spikes up to peaks. I suspect it's related to solar cycles.

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

When the solar cycle ended in ~1820 and we went into the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Maximum

This is also why so many graphs showing climate change tend to start around 1820. Including data before 1820 would just muddy their conclusions.

>You're not allowed to question climate change like this on HN.

What's there to question? The carbon credits markets that are being implemented definitely won't be manipulated by Wall Street like the commodities markets are.

Nothing at all could go wrong with financializing periodic elements and allowing entities like Goldman Sachs to create carbon credits out of thin air.

Today's carbon credits are yesterday's church indulgences

Or speeding tickets and parking fines.

Carbon credits are nonsense because there is no large scale atmospheric carbon removal industry, so you are trying to run a market using only a supply curve with no demand curve. There is no way to set the price so the market doesn't work, it ends up being a tax that doesn't even directly contribute to the goal of removing the carbon emitted by industry.

For carbon markets to work properly there would need to be industrial processes that pull CO2 out of the atmosphere at a price per ton. Companies would then pay those companies to remove the CO2 they release at that price point. Multiple companies could compete to be the most efficient at removing CO2 and taking the largest share of the market. But it has been 30 years now and we still don't have a supply side to the market beyond some penny ante tree planting and research projects.

Um, no? The government can put a cap on the amount of carbon credits available on the market. There is demand to emit carbon, so a price for these credits exists independent of the existence of carbon removal industries. The problem currently is that the governments don't put (realistic) caps on the number of credits, so they are much too cheap.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com