
World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency - andyjohnson0
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biz088/5610806
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quest1
Articles about Climate Change seem to get very few comments on Hacker News. I
think nearly every other article on the home page right now has more comments
including an articles about building a flying taxi (47 comments).

Honest Question: Why is there seemingly such little interest in what very well
could be a huge threat to the survival of humanity?

I asked a similar question here - and it got 0 comments!
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21027145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21027145)

~~~
the-dude
Let's please remember you have asked for it.

I have lived through :

\- The end of the cold war, we were all going to die a horrible death, all at
once.

\- Acid rain, all forests would die and consequently we would die too or have
a terrible planet

\- The hole in the ozone layer, we would all get skin cancer ( I can't
remember if we would die )

\- Tchernobyl with elevated radiation stretching into Europe. Could not eat
apricot-jam and damn I love apricot-jam

Furthermore, I have studied Computer Science, which was basically 50% math. I
have worked with people developing physical models, advanced computing and
simulations are freaking hard.

In my time, the hockey-stick would be an indication there is something wrong
with the model ( instability ). "Nature does not behave this way"

The earth is getting greener and yields are up, partly because of increased
CO2 in the atmosphere.

It is completely unclear if "climate change" is either good or bad.

The sea level has been rising for thousands and thousand of years : about 6-8k
years ago, I would be able to walk to the UK ( from NL ).

~~~
heisenzombie
Just pick one of your points that seems misunderstood:

> In my time, the hockey-stick would be an indication there is something wrong
> with the model ( instability ). "Nature does not behave this way"

But the popularly known "hockey stick" graph isn't a model prediction, it's a
reconstruction of _past_ and _current_ temperatures. "Nature is currently
behaving this way"... And as you point out, that's an indication that there's
something wrong -- instability.

~~~
akvadrako
It's not actually a reconstruction of temperatures – it's cherry-picked data
to support a per-determined conclusion.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
> The climate crisis is closely linked to excessive consumption of the wealthy
> lifestyle.

> Excessive extraction of materials and overexploitation of ecosystems, driven
> by economic growth, must be quickly curtailed to maintain long-term
> sustainability of the biosphere.

> Profoundly troubling signs from human activities include sustained increases
> in both human and ruminant livestock populations, per capita meat
> production, world gross domestic product, global tree cover loss, fossil
> fuel consumption, the number of air passengers carried, carbon dioxide (CO2)
> emissions, and per capita CO2 emissions since 2000

There's the rub. The vast majority of people in the developing world want the
wealthy, Western lifestyle. People like eating meat. People like having
technology and air conditioning and transportation and using airplanes to
visit far off places.

No leader of a developing country is going to go to their people and say,
"Sorry, for the sake of the planet we are going to remain poor." And no leader
of developed country is going to go to their people and say, "Sorry, for the
sake of the planet, we are going to have to give up our lifestyle, and curtail
our economic growth."

> Exactly 40 years ago, scientists from 50 nations met at the First World
> Climate Conference (in Geneva 1979) and agreed that alarming trends for
> climate change made it urgently necessary to act.

My guess is that 40 years from now, this group of scientists will put out a
paper talking about how they have been warning us for the last 80 years, and
we still haven't done anything.

~~~
jawilson2
> No leader of a developing country is going to go to their people and say,
> "Sorry, for the sake of the planet we are going to remain poor." And no
> leader of developed country is going to go to their people and say, "Sorry,
> for the sake of the planet, we are going to have to give up our lifestyle,
> and curtail our economic growth."

Then we will all die, and will deserve it.

~~~
anonuser123456
"We will all die" is such hyperbole. Billions of poor people? Sure. But in
developed nation's, technology will keep us going for a long time.

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
If you want to save the lives of poor people from climate change, the number
one thing you could do is help them develop as fast as possible. When the
temperatures get high, having access to dependable electricity and air
conditioning can mean the difference between life and depth. Having reliable
road and rail networks means that if the crops fail, food from outside can
easily be brought in to stave off starvation.

------
adamch
Perhaps 30 years ago climate change could have been stopped or kept under
control by a series of taxes and trading schemes. However, world governments
have squandered that opportunity.

If climate change continues unfettered, millions of people living on
coastlines will be displaced and agriculture will become difficult in many
regions. This is likely to lead to political chaos and instability.

I think climate change should be the most important issue on in any election.
We still have time to keep warming manageable, but it will mean halving the
amount of greenhouse gas we produce. This is going to require fighting climate
change on multiple fronts, including changes to almost every industry -
energy, housing, transportation, commerce - and possibly even geoengineering
as a last resort. But it can be done. The Green New Deal is the only family of
solutions that can plausibly halt climate change. Anything less is
incompatible with the science.

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john_moscow
I absolutely hate how such articles are designed to make most readers feel
guilty, while not offering any realistic and quantifiable action plan. Nope,
the average reader of this will not give up their plans on having a family, to
delay the global warming for the less environmentally conscious part of
humanity by a couple of milliseconds. They won't change their lifestyle from
living in a house, traveling to events and eating tasty food to suddenly
sitting in a 100 sqft box and eating sustainable pea soup every day. What
those articles do is give more votes to the green politicians, whose platform
often consists of taxing things people enjoy and spending that money to
produce more fearmongering articles. So instead of a small shop owner flying
with their family to a vacation in Hawaii, the same plane seat will be taken
by a politician flying to a climate change conference where they will commit
to spending more taxpayer money on creating committees, publishing papers and
making sure as many people as possible vote green.

On the other hand, there are not many articles on addressing climate change
from an engineering standpoint. How much of the CO2 emissions come from
burning gasoline? How much of that CO2 could be trapped back by switching to
biodiesel? What would be the CO2 output of producing the necessary fertilizers
and compensating for the increased corrosiveness? Are there better ways of
trapping atmospheric CO2 in something that can be easily loaded into a gas
tank in 5 minutes? Can we compensate the greenhouse effect by emitting some
reflective particles into the atmosphere?

There are plenty of quantifiable and constructive ways to to reduce the global
warming that would actually require research and collaboration across the
board, but somehow instead we are stuck in a loop of guilt and are fighting on
who should get blamed and taxed for something we are not yet solving.

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alexeiz
> The climate crisis is closely linked to excessive consumption of the wealthy
> lifestyle.

My bullshit detector went off here. I don't known how any reputable scientist
can claim that.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Well... in almost all cases, the wealthy lifestyle produces more carbon than a
less-wealthy lifestyle in the same country.

The thing is, though, that the wealthy lifestyle isn't that common. Are we
talking about the 1%? Well, only 1% of the people can live that lifestyle. Are
they responsible for 2% of carbon emissions? 5%? 10%? That still leaves 90% of
carbon emissions.

So, yeah. The quoted statement seems to be far more political than it is based
on objective evidence.

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digitalboss
Relevant Posted today: The Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT),
Portugal Space Agency (PT Space), European Space Agency (ESA) and Unbabel Labs
open competition for a €500,000 award that will combine Artificial
Intelligence and space technologies to solve major environmental issues. The
winning team will present its solution at Web Summit 2020.

[https://unbabel.com/news/500k-ai-moonshot-challenge-will-
com...](https://unbabel.com/news/500k-ai-moonshot-challenge-will-combine-ai-
with-emerging-space-technologies-to-combat-climate-change/)

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the-dude
Full of Y-axis manipulation. Alarmist language.

And what does this mean ? ( from the conclusions ) :

"Mitigating and adapting to climate change while honoring the diversity of
humans"

Did they get bonus points for the diversity angle?

~~~
Miner49er
Population control is often a dog whistle for ethnic cleansing. I think they
are simply trying to be very clear that they aren't advocating for that.

~~~
the-dude
The merely want to control the population?

~~~
adamch
No. As the report itself says, stabilizing the population (or slightly
shrinking it) will help fight climate change, but that can be done very easily
without "population control".

"make family-planning services available to all people, remove barriers to
their access and achieve full gender equity, including primary and secondary
education as a global norm for all, especially girls and young women [1]

Which makes sense! Rather than some sort of authoritarian China-esque policy
of limiting children, just spread access to goods (like education,
contraception and abortion) which allow people to control how many children
they have.

[1]
[https://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6403/650](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6403/650)

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bprater
11,000 scientists, in fact.

~~~
Bantros
Are these the hallowed 99%?

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fumar
Is there a solution for rapid change from the private sector? I don't believe
the current US policy makers will act on climate change.

~~~
tasteslikepaper
The one solution I see is replacing traditional meat (especially beef) by
alternatives like Beyond Meat or processed insects.

I believe that we can see a huge shift once meat alternatives become a viable
alternative, not only for the sake of direct methane/CO2 consumption but also
in terms of rain forest preservation (iirc, around 77% of the total soy
production go into mass breeding).

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brillas
it says worldwide, but we all know who this is aimed at. Global North
countries with excess consumption are distinctly to blame. Why then, the
emphasis on coordinated global action? Broad demands, like moving away from
GDP and doing nice sustainable things instead are not productive. But when
these kinds of alliances insist on ignoring the overwhelming burden of the US
and friends on the climate crisis, instead asking for aid in moving developing
countries and their minuscule footprint away from fossil fuels, its the only
way to go about it. We need to understand that, as the developing world, this
is not “our” fault. It is -their- fault. That’s why this will fizzle out like
all the agreements before it. If these thousands of scientists want to make a
change, they need to throw their weight behind specific policy proposals in
specific guilty countries and get political, using their numbers as focused
power and not as vague alarmism calling for impossible policy.

------
Bantros
When I say climate, you say emergency!

Climate

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deepnet
Well worth reading.

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SubiculumCode
Climate Change is an existential threat. Period.

~~~
joeblow9999
not even the most pessimistic IPCC projections describe it as an existential
threat. youre buying into hype instead of science.

~~~
SubiculumCode
That is debatable, and is being debated. There remains a lot of unknowns, a
lot of them having to do with the northern permafrosts that have been
increasingly releasing methane.

------
wchandler
Yawn ...

~~~
imesh
So says the collective consciousness...

