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Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

that's motivated reasoning leading to hand-waved figures, driven by the desire to capitalize on the climate change frenzy.

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I haven't seen any sources from you yet.

and in general, you won't, since we're each quite able to do our own research ourselves, and also because sources aren't ace-in-the-hole smackdowns but rather extended information that typically doesn't fit into a discussion post. no source, especially not recent research out of an academic journal, is by itself invulnerable enough to criticism that it can wholesale end a discussion, and therefore has limited utility in these circumstances.

but it's easy enough to verify that there have been at least dozens of papers (and at least hundreds of news stories) on coal by itself having killed millions of people over the past century and a half, and having nothing to do with CO₂ or climate change.

In this day and age of misinformation, I think reputable sources go a long way to making an online discussion productive rather than just spewing nonsense back and forth.

Also, they can short circuit a discussion. In fact, here are two articles that cover the exact topic we are discussing, and largely summarize the issue as climate change is a bigger threat and they are two sides of the same coin anyway:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/why-clima...

https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/air-pollution-an...

Can you point me to some sources that helped you reach your conclusion, or is this just an idea you came up with by looking at deaths due to pollution compared to deaths due to climate change historically?

national geographic is entertainment (read: misinformation, owned by disney). this article uses dramatic photography and liberally employs weasel words like "could" and "might". even "linked" isn't as strong as you might think, as that only implies correlation, not causation. it mentions no counter-factuals or alternate hypotheses, just drives boldly forward with the messaging.

as for the second, i agree that pollution and climate change are linked, but why address the boogeyman when we have the villian right in front of us? [insert tribal, mediopolitical reasons unrelated to making lives better.] pollution is clearly a problem now. climate change might be a problem in decades/centuries. and the causation is pollution -> climate change, not the other way around, so fixing pollution (not simply CO₂) is win-win, but not the other way around.

a long arc of digesting and triangulating information has led to my understanding of the problem, which doesn't easily link to a study or two. i'm a proponent of sensible environmentalism, not tribal bandwagoning. i was a member of https://netimpact.org/ in business school and took courses on sustainability (i.e., i've studied the problem using primary sources rather than relying on mass media to tell me what to think).

Respectfully, I don't feel like there is much value to be found in this discussion (arguing what's a more pressing issue between pollution and climate change), so I'm happy to land on agreeing on this statement and moving on:

> pollution -> climate change, so fixing pollution (not simply CO₂) is a win-win

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