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Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

the only difference between before is that we are much much better at handling nature and the climate. We are so good at it that we reduced death from climate related catastrophees by 95% the last 100 years.

Unfortunately the youth is being lied and manipulated thinking the opposite. Its become a religion worshipping nature and politicians and the media is our days priesthood, promising salvation if we repent.

The most dangerous thing humanity can do is to not believe in the future. If you dont believe in tomorrow you wont invest into it. Its the principles of a death-cult.

It is so sad to see the youth wasting their years on pessimism when life is mostly positive even if you are not rich.

And now we see the new contender based on the same defaist attitude in the AI doomers using same speculative frameworks to claim the end of the world without a single thread of evidence

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The AI doomerism is definitely overblown, but I don't think the same is true of climate change. It won't be a fast extinction by any means, but if the heaps of scientific evidence are to be trusted, we are rapidly losing leeway to feasibly reverse/mitigate the consequences.

Only looking at deaths up to this point is like seeing an empty road, walking onto it, and texting people while standing still.

The "95% reduction in the last 100 years" feels like a misguided argument since our improved abilities to handle weather events will not hold if the weather patterns we've gotten so good at handling, change. If you exceed design conditions, your 95% reduction can quickly turn into a Texas blackout.

I agree that optimism is critical to keep moving forward. However I do disagree with your implication that young people believe that we cannot handle nature and the climate. The view I (anecdotally) encounter most is not the belief that we are incapable of handling it, but that we will refuse to handle it till it's too late.

its not misguided, but i am not surprised you are skeptical, its impossible for most people to actually get rational perspectives because of the hysteria.

> we reduced death from climate related catastrophees by 95% the last 100 years.

This seems like a casual claim that requires a strong citation to back it up.

Especially in the matter of seperating "death from a climate related catastrophe" from "death from a weather related catastrophe" .. if in fact such a difference is recognised.

Is this absolute global "death by weather" per annum you're quoting or some locale relative percentage "death by weather" ?

How solid are the numbers?

this is relative to the size of population. The numbers are right, you should also be able to reason how much better weve become at living places that used to be impossible.

> The numbers are right,

.. and your source for this is .. ?

> you should also be able to reason how much better we[']ve become

I can reason quite well thank you, multiple STEM degrees, decades in global exploration geophysics, decades of hearing people pull numbers out of thin air, etc.

With that many degrees it should be trivial for you to realize that it has to be like that.

https://humanprogress.org/the-collapse-of-climate-related-de...

I often see this thrown around, that the youth today are being peddled some nature-worshipping fantasy, when the "hard truth is that nature is a cruel entity, tamed forcefully by the work of our forefathers".

It kind of ignores the fact that young people just want clean water. Clean air. I don't want long-lived hormone-like pollutants in my mattress. I don't want the river that supplies most of the clean water to my city to become polluted, and I also do not want it to dry out due to over-diversion to industry (okay, sue me, I want a good view). I do not want to take massive risks with how I affect the environment, before I have a chance to fully understand future repercussions.

Last, but not least: I do not want to lose knowledge. Currently, a lot of nanotechnology and pharmaceutical technology is being driven not by de-novo design of proteins, but by trawling through information about existing ensembles (which mostly come from come from organisms we had ready access to). Destroying previously inaccessible/invisible (e.g. 99% of the ocean) ecosystems just because "woops, we didn't bother thinking that we live in a chaotic dynamical system" is akin to purposefully deleting hard-drives with millenia's worth of hard-won data.

Climate is an issue too, sure. But its mostly overblown as the reason why people care about environmental issues (especially given how much we do not know about climate, period), rather than: as the scapegoat that the media finds most convenient to trumpet (because it is the easiest for governments and businesses to try and quantify). Most real people (i.e. not the strawmen) aren't nearly so simplistic.

On the other hand, the rather simple concerns along the lines of: "hey, can we just be a bit more careful about just pumping this random shit into the air, until we understand better?", "hey, can you not put selinium rich mining byproducts in my local river?", or "can you not use low-grade silicone with questionable health consequences for my cat's grooming brush" don't get much attention.

I'm all for believing in the future. It becomes harder to do so when one realizes that a) they are disposable, and b) people in power do not care abou the messes they create, because they will never have to personally deal with cleaning up those messes.

Which makes me think: aw shit, I don't want to have clean up those messes either! Why can't they move a little slower, and a lot more thoughtfully?

So...uh, nothing to do with "oh no, death cult!".

your comment is a prime example of the complete ignorance towards the circumstances most people used to live under. Cruel brutish and short for most people dont even begin to explain it. We have access to more clean water than ever, sanitation and i could go on, but unfortunately the youth has been hijacked by antihuman people who under the guise of moral virtue signalling spread unscientific FUD. Imagine how many years they are wasting on worrying rather than learning to solve problems as they appear.

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