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Comment by DantesKite | Hacker News Reader

I think when trying to predict the future of climate change, you’ll find every model imperfect (even if it can tell you important truths about what may happen).

If you try to make specific predictions, you’re going to turn people off.

It’s far better to frame it as a matter of, “Look we don’t know what’ll happen and since we only have 1 planet and pollution is bad, we’re going to try and minimize the impact we have, because we don’t get a second chance.”

And then just take it from there.

We don’t need to understand what’s inside the box when it arrives on our doorstep. We just have to avoid opening it.

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> ... and since we only have 1 planet and pollution is bad ...

There is a high correlation and probably causal relationship between increasing global pollution and improved living standards. It is extremely unclear that "pollution is bad". Someone taking a strictly data driven approach could reasonably conclude that pollution is good.

There is a reason that the pro-environment types are struggling to have an impact on actual policy. Their ideas have, up until very recently with the relative cheapness of solar and wind, been likely to doom us all.

This is why compartmentalizing things as "good" or "bad" is unhelpful. It's rarely so simple. Sure, there are aspects of polluting behaviours that ostensibly raise the quality of life for many people, but that doesn't mean you should ignore the long term impact of that behavior, especially if it has a provably negative impact on the planet. You have to look at the whole issue, not just the short term positives.

> provably negative impact on the planet.

There is nothing negative happening to the planet. We couldn't hurt it if we tried. "Human life supporting environment" is what's at stake.

> We couldn’t hurt it if we tried

Even if we dug up every gram of fissile material on earth, made it into a bomb, and detonated it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyECrGp-Sw8&t=249

While I agree there seems to be a positive correlation, the argument reminds me of this classic video from the Onion:

[0] https://youtu.be/nJ4K0hHin9s "China Celebrates Status as Number One Polluter"

"The labor of the people has made the sky black with the smoke of progress... We are overjoyed."

"Cancer is a very modern disease"

"If pollution ruins a river, we will build a new river"

> There is a high correlation and probably causal relationship between increasing global pollution and improved living standards.

That would be if pollution was a global phenomenon. Climate is global and chaotic, and we only have one planet so we can't compare, but pollution levels are local are different between heavily industrialised places and times and less so places and times. I'm sure there is extensive and conclusive research that pollution is bad for your health, which is an important part of living standards.

There are two kind of things that are often lumped together:

Visible local pollution: This includes things like particulate matter in air, river pollution, dirty streets, toxic water etc. This is clearly inversely correlated with development and health and developed countries generally sorted it out better.

Global level: This mostly includes greenhouse gases etc. This is very correlated with development and health among countries. The countries with highest emission has best quality of life and they are sharing the burden with undeveloped countries.

Environmentalist solutions that would lower carbon would have no negative impact on our standards of living, and would in fact raise it.

For example we know from studies that long car commutes are terrible for your health and even dramatically rise divorce rates. With that in mind, jurisdictions with good public rapid transportation networks have higher quality of life than SF, and at the same time have less CO2 emissions due to the more efficient transportation system.

The reason for friction against environmentalism is because the low carbon solutions have been politicized into being part of the left/right culture war.

The result is inexplicable push back against dull public works that benefit everyone on top of also lowering CO2.

From my point of view, two of the main factors against environmentalist ideas were:

1. Scientific dishonesty among some environmentalist researchers

2. Vocal advocates caught doing exact opposite in their personal lives - hypocrisy

Culture war is just a small part of the problem. In order to avoid disasters, we will have to limit our consumption to the levels of 1960ies. For many businesses, big and small this means complete bankruptcy. If you want reliable numbers, Google for 'future economic challenges' and get the report from French Nobel prise winning economists.

> There is a high correlation and probably causal relationship between increasing global pollution and improved living standards.

There is a high correlation and probably causal relationship between consuming heroin and pleasure yet you don't want to do that every day because short term positive effects don't cancel long term negative ones.

Everyone knows pollution is a long term catastrophe, us being addicted to it doesn't make it a good thing....

I don't think car smog is good for you and I don't think you need a study to prove that.

> If you try to make specific predictions, you’re going to turn people off.

I think it's fuzzier than that. Like, I think it's extremely useful to say out loud that climate change will cause large tidal events in the relative short term (sea level rise in the long term). And that an immediate action is for cities like Venice, New Orleans, and Miami to ready themselves for that. It's specific and should be motivating for a large group of people to do something (or risk losing their homes and possibly lives). You have to hope they connect it to the larger picture of things happening too.

> We don’t need to understand what’s inside the box when it arrives on our doorstep. We just have to avoid opening it.

The problem with this is that a lot of folks will do nothing if you don't unpack the box for them and explain how it will affect them.

> And that an immediate action is for cities like Venice, New Orleans, and Miami to ready themselves for that.

If you really believe in what you say, now is the time to go short on housing in these (mega-expensive) cities and re-invest your incredible profits into clean energy.

Alas, nobody is actually serious about what they say, on both sides of the so-called "debate".

But, if that were the right approach, you’d never change anything. We’d have never left the caves. The question is not whether we alter the natural environment. It’s whether we have reason to believe the benefits of those changes may outweigh the costs.

leaving the caves was an individual- or tribal-level decision. in fact, many groups did not leave the caves, only some did. it’s a poor metaphor for climate change because we don’t have the option of exploring both paths simultaneously as a species in the same way our ancestors did with those caves.

cost/benefit analysis, i do agree with though. or maybe a “risk-adjusted” cost/benefit. the biggest disagreement i have is with people who think climate change is inherently bad, rather than believing specific outcomes/effects of climate change are bad. when you unpack climate change often the bad things are common across catastrophes caused by other disruptions, e.g. food/water insecurity is something we could see both from climate change or large-scale war. certain ways of thinking about the situation might lead a person to believe that addressing these effects is the way to make humanity more bulletproof, rather than trying to prevent the several distinct causes (CO2 emissions being one of them) that lead to the real problems. though it’s never an all-or-nothing, more like “reduce the causes to the point that you’re not reducing our ability to respond to the effects”. cost/benefit analysis, like you say.

Isn't this line of thought very similar to how the Roman Church guided people in the past? Results were not astonishingly good...

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