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Comment by BaseballPhysics | Hacker News Reader

This kind of rhetoric is alarmist and counterproductive. It effectively gives one a free pass to do nothing. After all, if you already believe the earth is doomed, what's the point in trying?

Bluntly, your little prognostication, here, is based on nothing. Is 2023 a wicked outlier in the global climate? Absolutely. Is global warming continuing to progress as humanity fails to move quickly enough to change our ways? Absolutely.

But this is one year. A single data point. It's absurd to come to such an extreme conclusion based on a single year of (admittedly very scary) data.

If anything, I'm hoping this year will serve as a wake-up call for more people who might've previously been on the fence about the nature and severity of climate change, and will thus accelerate moves by people and their governments to do more about it.

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> But this is one year. A single data point.

Let's not understate this. The OP article is regarding a record low in 2022, but this year (2023) we've now also seen a sustained 5-sigma deviation in sea ice extent.

https://twitter.com/EliotJacobson/status/1674736887322533888

> alarmist and counterproductive

I think we ought have been alarmed long ago. Rhetoric of restrained caution hasn't really served us well.

And that doesn't change my point, does it?

This one year, or the year previous, is not evidence that the ecosystem of the planet is going to collapse in 10 years.

It's one year in a long and alarming trendline, but to extrapolate that to such an extreme conclusion is completely unwarranted.

> Rhetoric of restrained caution hasn't really served us well.

First, I didn't suggest "restrained caution". I can only speculate as to how you came to that conclusion.

Second, rhetoric that we're all gonna die by 2030 and nothing can be done is far more harmful.

> This one year, or the year previous, is not evidence that the ecosystem of the planet is going to collapse in 10 years.

Global warming writ large has been going on for a lot longer than a couple of years, and ocean temperature tipping points have been an anticipated consequence. An anomaly of this size warrants alarm. If not proof of imminent ecosystem collapse, it seems foolish to 'wait and see'. Though I take your point that defeatism is worse, but I doubt OP is defeatist.

> rhetoric that we're all gonna die by 2030

That's an even more sensationalist spin than what the OP wrote

> An anomaly of this size warrants alarm.

Yes, it does.

> If not proof of imminent ecosystem collapse, it seems foolish to 'wait and see'.

Jesus Christ. I never said that.

Read what I wrote, not what you think I wrote.

> Though I take your point that defeatism is worse, but I doubt OP is defeatist.

You should also try re-reading what they wrote.

> That's an even more sensationalist spin than what the OP wrote

Fair point. The OP didn't say we'd all die by 2030. Just that the climate would collapse. My bad.

> I never said that.

Never claimed you did.

> You should also try re-reading what they wrote.

It was hyperbole, and given the moment we find ourselves in, I'll take it over the popular complacency that has characterised the last many decades

They're not trying. They're just expressing with what little they have with what little we all have left.

Don't shoot the messenger.

That phrase is used when someone is delivering someone else's message.

That comment, both it's content and it's implications, are yours. If you're gonna run away from it now, you shouldn't have written it in the first place.

I stand by what I said, but I am just the messenger.

Everywhere its easy to see evidence of the tipping point accelerating.

There's extremely good reason to panic at this stage.

>> But this is one year. A single data point. It's absurd to come to such an extreme conclusion based on a single year of (admittedly very scary) data.

Nope - this year is part of a statistical heat trend. It's not up and down, some years cooler, some warmer. It's getting hotter every year.

Plants and animals and the ocean ecosystem will be devastated by this.

The human food supply depends on seasons, and seasons are being massively disrupted. If plants don't product food then that's a big problem.

I would wonder what do you gain from denying this is where the problem has got to? Why do you need it to not be at catastrophe level right now?

> Everywhere its easy to see evidence of the tipping point accelerating.

Cool, let's start here, then: what tipping points are you referring to, specifically, and what is the evidence that they're accelerating?

To be clear: ocean temperatures are unusually high this year relative to historic trends, but with just this one year as a major outlier, there's no basis to conclude a tipping point has been reached, especially given El Nino muddies the data.

As for atmospheric temperature, 2023 is likely to be a warmest year on record, but January to July 2016 was hotter, so there no reason to believe 2023 will be wildly outside the current trendline (which, to be clear, is up and to the right):

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/monthly-report/g...

> Why do you need it to not be at catastrophe level right now?

Why do I dispute unsupported claims that the earth is now on an irreversible course to climate disaster that will destroy the human race?

The answer is literally in the first paragraph of my first reply. Go read it again. It seems silly to repeat myself.

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