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Comment by dbspin | Hacker News Reader

Great, please state your expertise in these matters.

The issue here is you have a large number of people in the hacker news 'community' who are domain experts with insufficient humility. While it's great to be informed, essential in fact to engage with a useful conversation about public policy - it's ludicrous to get ideological about areas of scientific knowledge in which one is a layman. If the consensus is, based on UNEP, IPCC etc, that we're going to see the deaths of at least hundreds of millions, the loss of major sea fronting cities and a likely systems collapse of our civilisation... Then mannered critiques of policy outcomes read like defences of appeasement in 1939. Buffoonery masquerading as serious engagement with reality.

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The climate is going to change. The climate is always changing. ~12,000 years ago oceans were 200 feet!! lower and a large portion of the world was under a mile of ice. This drastic change in climate didn't come as a result of human activities. It is perfectly reasonable to accept that human industrial activity is changing the climate, but question the degree to which it matters in the big scheme of our constantly changing climate. Further, it is ridiculous to pretend that the constant stream of unhinged hyperbole coming from both the media and "scientists" for decades hasn't worked against mitigating this issue. This is the 20th anniversary of "An Inconvenient Truth" which was widely touted by scientists, luminaries and every other pointy head as being an accurate, sober and science-based view of climate change. Go watch it today and look at the predictions, stated as fact, and backed by "the science". Finally, even if you believe that climate change is the greatest threat to humanity (rather than nuclear war, pandemics, AI, ect) that doesn't mean that we have the sort of governance capacity to deal with this problem effectively. I certainly don't believe that giving our dear leaders infinite power to micromanage every ounce of energy people are allowed to use will result in anything but a more dystopian society with even fewer freedoms. The people running our society are incompetent and corrupt, and even if they were capable of dealing with such a massive, global problem (they aren't), they'd be more likely to use the power they are given to enrich themselves and tighten their grip on power.

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