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Comment by zamalek | Hacker News Reader

> 2030

I think that the climate crisis will be the thing affecting more people by 2030. I'm very interested to hear how proof of work would help alleviate that.

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The climate crisis will be used as justification for more of this centralized control for sure.

You didn't answer the question. How would a technology that consumes more power/carbon than some countries help prevent that?

What percentage of the world's energy consumption do you think crypto uses?

What crisis? Who is dying from mild warming? The crisis that has been predicted every year since 1990 has not materialized. We have rather ordinary, rather boring climate conditions right now. No, really. Crop yields are near all time highs (although with man-made fertilizer shortages due to war, may take a hit this year) [1]. The earth is greening as a result of CO2 fertilization [2]. Deaths from natural disasters are near all time lows [3]. Sea level rise is marginal (1.5-3 mm per year) and not by any means catastrophic [4]. The planet will be fine in 2030 just like it is fine today. Please, go visit our national parks if you're in the U.S. Go hike Yellowstone. Go to Glacier National Park, which they predicted would melt by 2020 (didn't happen). Go look at the wildlife yourself. They are thriving. The polar bear population has more than six-tupled since the 1950s [5]. There is no, suddenly in 2030 everything is going to collapse. Earth has been much, much warmer, much more CO2 dense, and life was thriving. Warmth is almost universally good for life. It is icy and cold and dry conditions that life struggles to survive in. Yes, I know some ecosystems are under intense pressure as a result of manmade activity. But warmth isn't it. The majority of the biodiversity falls within the tropics and drops off as you enter temperate zones and then again as you enter the arctic zones. But meanwhile, it's not as if those tropic zones are expanding rapidly. They're not going to be any different in 2030 than in 2022.

The 2030 narrative is designed to terrify you. It is a narrative. It is not science. It's a deranged hypothesis focused on manipulating human psychology. And clearly, it's highly effective as an exercise in thought control.

1: https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields 2: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer... 3: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-from-nat... 4: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012374...: https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index 5: https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-the-polar-bear-popula...

It’s telling how your libertarian astroturfing site accepts conservation groups’ numbers re: increasing/stable polar bear populations, but not the same groups’ estimates those populations will drop by 30% within two decades due to ice loss. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect them to try to disprove… if they weren’t just a libertarian astroturfing site.

The bad faith is also comically obvious when deaths from national disasters is your chosen metric, as if more better mitigation and response efforts disprove either the increasing occurrence of severe weather events or that they’re caused by changing climate.

100% There is climate change yes. There is probably even man-made climate change although I don't know how much. There is pollution yes. But no, there is no climate crisis or catastrophe. Thats horse shit.

The catastrophe will be the combo of overpopulation + mass exodus from the hottest areas like the Near East. 2035 is slated as the point of no return re: carbon emissions, but it'll take 50-100 years before the actual catastrophe. So, not us, and not our children until they're middle aged. And if they choose to have children, you better have given them generational wealth.

Hottest years on record: 2010, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 (hottest), 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021. https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/

Largest carbon emitter in the world is the USA military, and that is also the largest defense of the USD. Bitcoin has quite the adversary if it's to alleviate climate change.

"The climate crisis", yep very crisis-y out here.

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