Comment by loceng | Hacker News Reader

Comment by loceng | Hacker News Reader

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"CO2 is also a greenhouse gas and makes our atmosphere store much more energy than it used to which destabilizes ecosystems in which those plants you want to grow bigger actually live. So yeah, they’ll grow faster, and then they’ll all die."

There may be a delay but then the CO2 gets absorbed and stored in the plants, and then in more animals that will be added mass to the cycles - the plants dying then goes into the soil, to support more growth, and eventually over millions of years that Earth gets compacted - turned into rock, then arguably more oil will be formed.

Your point doesn't argue anything because you stopped-didn't think exponentially through the cycle after they "die" part in the cycle - what happens next?

"The rest of your argument is orthogonal to the issue. Taking CO2 out of the atmosphere works globally, it doesn’t matter who does or doesn’t reduce emissions."

So you don't think the West "being responsible by reducing CO2" - getting hurt by costs going up - while the East massively increases CO2 production and gets rewarded by doing so, doesn't have an impact?

Please actually address my specific points, rather than just making a general claim if you want to continue discussing this.

> here may be a delay but then the CO2 gets absorbed and stored in the plants, [...] turned into rock, then arguably more oil will be formed.

Yes, the planet and life on earth will do just fine. The problem is can our civilization survive? Like, can our current civilisation survive the next 100 years of worsening conditions? Humans will survive, we are the most widespread species already (from hottest to coldest places on earth). Some areas will be a little too unhabitable of course, billions will die, but who cares, right?

The political difficulty with handling CO2 appropriately is orthogonal to whether it's bad. A likely outcome without some form of geoengineering is vast swathes of currently inhabited land becoming uninhabitable due to flooding, extreme storms, and lengthy wet-bulb events. In some sense that's also just a political problem, but if we can't agree that CO2 production has significant negative effects then I think we'll struggle to deal with 3B homeless people [0] [1].

[0] Of course, many of them won't be able to migrate at all and will just die (I'll posit that's also bad).

[1] Do think through this for just a second. Our current economic systems include property ownership, and basically all land on earth is owned by somebody. If the land owned by 3B people becomes worthless (both in an economic sense and also in that they can't live there anymore), they'll have to either die, or they'll have to start using land owned by other people. Suppose no significant numbers of people move till they have to (since if we can't coordinate on CO2 sequestration/production, we probably can't coordinate on mitigating the harm from that initial lack of coordination). There are solutions, but they all represent at best a global transfer of resources. Is solving that problem easier than handling CO2 correctly to start with?

"The political difficulty with handling CO2 appropriately is orthogonal to whether it's bad."

I think rational-reasonable people, who are usually the most competent and resourceful - aside from industrial complexes with wealth and willingness to do bad in order to achieve regulatory capture to selfishly benefit themselves - will and are landing on that CO2 is an issue to address but how urgent and how close to castrophou we are is the question, but that also then has to be balanced by how harmful could or will the response be to it, e.g. increasing energy costs by adding a CO2 tax will then kill off how many millions around the world, slow how many more millions from getting out of poverty sooner, and how much natural forest environment gets destroyed from people now needing to cut down forests unsustainably because they need a cheap fuel for heating and cooking?

The issue is "armchair" conversations like this, where most people aren't accounting for or factoring everything necessary for a balanced approach - and there seems to be a big ideological divide and vast amount of teaching to happen, whether people are even calm enough to be willing to listen - or if they're fixed and avoidant, succumbing to whatever hysteria and fear mongering propaganda that they may have been misled by (not to claim everything they believe is false).

A bigger threat in my eyes are authoritarians who want to use climate alarmism to manufacture consent to implement further authoritarian-lockdown type policy.

You at least acknowledge there's a CO2 problem though, which was my only communication goal. Even if the end result is mostly ignoring it for the time being, I think our efforts will be much better spent if we agree that problem exists and decide to side-step it for rational reasons than if we bury our heads in the sand.

Perfect! Now we just need "everyone" to align on a common understanding of the COVID "pandemic" and the Israel-Palestine "conflict" - so people can be calm enough to find common ground for resolution, rather than blindly believing, being indoctrinated into propaganda - from either side, to see the truth; why free speech is so important, and why it's always the bad actors who want to suppress truth under the guise of so-called "misinformation" being more harmful than a lack of free speech.

> then arguably more oil will be formed

No, modern decomposes are more effective than ancient ones. Rare events like landslides might bury carbon effectively, but for the most part it will be returned to the biosphere long before it ends up resembling oil.

Fair enough, so instead more CO2 will be captured in more plants and more animals - and more infrastructure if we use wood or capture it in concrete, etc.

How much more, and on what schedule? The destabilizing effects of "more CO2" antecedent may interfere when the "therefore more wood" consequence.

For instance, here in Colorado we're seeing a lot of our wood turn into CO2 due to an invasive beetle. I can't say for sure if the warming climate is what catalyzed the invasion, but it's plausible.

My point is just that it's uncharted territory, which is inherently more dangerous than charted territory. The system will surely find a new equilibrium eventually but there's no guarantee that we're going to like the path it takes.

Great questions - I wish the side who's wanting to do drastic-widespread and costly changes would also ground their reasons in facts; in contrast, authoritarians-tyrants manufacturing consent to implement policies to control and limit others isn't uncharted territory - and it is what must first be kept at front of mind in all of these conversations.

Perhaps we need our leadership to be a bit more afraid of us so that they we can encourage them to authentically attempt to address these concerns rather than use them as cover for some kind of alternative agenda--which seems to be what you're implying they'll do--but that strikes me as orthogonal to the issue of deciding what steps would be effective in the first place.

Well, in the great scheme of things after millions of years nothing matters really, but this is not a reasonable argument for talking about harm done to humans and ecosystems _now_.

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