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Comment by iforgotpassword | Hacker News Reader

I think it's with everything that doesn't have an immediate, graspable impact. Nobody would smoke if cigarettes killed you after a few months with a 50% chance. If they increase the likelihood of a stroke or other complications decades down the line, it's much easier to brush it off, tell yourself you're more of a Helmut Schmidt kind of person. Or just think it's a worthy tradeoff for the benefits you get from smoking today.

Same thing with child labor regarding smartphones, clothes, you name it. It's far away. If you had to buy it right at the factory at a counter where you could see the working conditions, it would have a vastly different impact on you.

And I'm not claiming to be smarter or superior to the average Joe here. This pattern strikes all the time, for everyone.

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Smoking is probably a good analogy. In all ways. Because it took decades before we reduced the impact once we knew the dangers. And centuries before we even realized the dangers.

And smoking a cigarette won't kill you. Smoking one cigarette a day won't kill you. And most people who smoke don't actually get lung cancer.

But it all catches up with you. Smoking a cigarette a day for a decade is going to cause you to die earlier than if you hadn't. Smoking more, even earlier. Most is not all. Because most people who have lung cancer are smokers. And lung cancer isn't even the only thing. There's emphysema, heart disease, etc that's all related to smoking. And way more likely. But that's all aggregate.

Climate is a lot like that. It's nothing in isolation, it's everything in aggregate.

And even now that the dangers are widely and indisputably known we still have a hard time passing regulations to curtail the behavior because of addiction and entrenched profit motives.

So totally not a climate skeptic, but part of the reason for this is because models are often wrong, and the more complex the system, the more likely it is to be off I think.

So to be fair to humans, skepticism is often rational, in the sense that science of complex systems can be off.

The part I have not totally understood is that there are good reasons to be more energy efficient and ecologically sensitive even in the absence of climate change per se.

I think the thousands of scientists who have been studying this phenomenon for the last 40 years have a much better picture than just about every skeptic that has muddied the waters with their hasty rhetoric.

If anything scientists have been abundantly cautious with their messaging. Many predictions made in early IPCCC reports were in many cases too lenient. Feedback systems, impacts, and rate of warming have been happening on track or faster than reported. I suspect many knew but they didn’t want to be labelled as alarmists.

> If anything scientists have been abundantly cautious with their messaging

And then new's outlets take that cautious wording and turn it into extremely alarming headlines. It's exhausting.

And yet the top of this thread begins with the claim that it's hard to alarm people (my words) appropriately enough to act. Ironic.

Yes humans individually are absolutely horrible at long term thinking, it’s just part of our nature.

I wonder if we’re evolving to get better at that, if ever so slightly

Assume the models are wrong: Why is that reason to believe that things will be better than the model predicts instead of worse?

It is all about tangibility. That is why we install car reverse parking sensors. If people had glasses that see air pollution, they would revolt. If people had access to a very accurate live and high-res computer simulation of climate-change, or anything, they would take it more seriously. People are spoiled with regard to the level of accuracy and tangibility they require to be convinced.

> If people had glasses that see air pollution, they would revolt.

I've ruined a couple of people's perspectives by sharing the the reason LA sunsets are so beautiful is because of the pollution particulate.

Heh, a small oil film on the water is beautiful as well. Or if chemicals give water a nice green or red shade. There are bright sides to everything.

> It is all about tangibility.

What if every weather app showed, next to actual temperature, what the temperature is modelled to be if climate change had been avoided (kept CO2 ppm to 1950s levels, say)?

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