And when exactly will it become an actual problem in the sense that it actually affects anyone's life? 1000 years? 10000 years? Like global warming is going to suddenly show its teeth on some random day and we'll all be sorry. You sound like someone preaching the coming rapture, thinking people are crazy for rolling their eyes and continuing on with their lives.
Literally right now there's a bunch of island nations that will probably not exist in 30 years. Many coastal cities are getting worse floods every year, having to invest billions in measures to protect themselves.
Every drought means conflict, they mean war, refugees and instability. Sure, the first world will be shielded from the worst for some time, but this isn't a Hollywood movie, the pressure will keep increasing every year exposing every flaw in the system.
Corona has shown that our world does not deal well with pressure and you can't make a vaccine for food insecurity.
So if it's not your problem it's not a problem at all?
Nth order effects will make it your problem pretty quickly.
Many are blind to exponentially growing phenomena.
One good example is that a several degree increase can melt the Siberian ice and release methane stores equivalent to 100 years of maximal human CO2 footprint. That's already a massive nth order effect.
Like I said, I just don't really care and it's not going to affect my life. I'm all for improving technology and efficiency and believe that it will never truly be a life threatening issue and it's foolish to sit around and be afraid of it. You say it's going to be my problem but how? What would that look like exactly? Maybe in 1000 years it would literally be a problem but by then through the natural course of technological evolution it will just not be a problem. If freeman dyson, a man who solved some of the hardest problems of the 20th century, can say that there is little scientific rogor in our models, estimation and understanding of our affect on climate change, why should I pretend like you know what you're talking about?
But do you understand his argument? I’m pretty sure he would not disagree with projected temperature increase or wet bulb temperature estimates. They are already being measured and confirmed.
I’m pretty sure he would also agree with the estimate for Siberian methane stores. He would just be careful with predicting what happens when they get released.
The average temperature increase can have different effects and that is one of the lines of his argument.
If you do not care about the issue and don’t want to hear opposing opinion then do not leave a comment.
Given the projected temperature increase the wet bulb temperature will make vast areas around the equator deadly for humans. Millions will be affected in our lifetime or will be confined to spaces isolating from the harsh conditions.
Although the temp increase might happen during the colder times of the day so the wet bulb might never reach the deadly quantities.
We had devastating fires over Christmas in Australia, directly linked to global warming. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51742646 . (In fact we just went from one disaster to another here, the second being C19).
This is just the beginning. It will get far worse and then worse again, thanks to people denying it and saying we might think about maybe reducing our emissions gradually next decade sometime..
In South Australia they're talking about taxing EVs because they don't get to tax their owners by way of the fuel excise. There's zero regard for pollution, it doesn't even have a monetary value - high polluters aren't taxed at all, so they're taxing the solution not the pollution instead. (Contrast Norway).
This is why I said it's going to get far far worse. There's so many thick skins to get through, blocking and impeding what needed to be immediate action decades ago and still isn't.
I've been on here for 10 years. When did hacker news loose all resemblance to hacker culture? And i'm not a truther (thanks for making me use a word like that btw), maybe a rationalist is a better word. Let's all wake up an be afraid of asteroids too.
The actual words you used in your reply to my post (akin to "we may see someone affected by global warming in 10,000 years maybe and besides that I don't care") was just pure denialism.
Observing science has been part of the HN culture as long as I've been here.
Several Pacific Islands, and some in the Indian ocean have already lost significant parts of their land. Just because something doesn't personally affect you does not make it a hoax.
I'm a huge believer in alternative energy, but it's just nonsense to blame natural disasters across-the-board on climate change. It almost implies that the climate would be docile without human-introduced CO2. Plenty of bad weather events happened before climate change. The most deadly Atlantic Ocean hurricane on record was in 1780. The Dust Bowl droughts were the worst in American History.
I'm not sure the dust bowl draughts are a great example - they weren't product of global climate change - but I think they were very much the result of large scale "terra forming" - changing prairie to farm land?
At any rate, the question isn't so much - were extreme bad weather events bad before as well, more - are they getting worse and/or more frequent?
While you're being downvoted, I agree with you. The artificially low interest rates are a huge burden to society, so while I'm optimistic about the vaccine, I believe that getting back to a society based on savings instead of debt will be extremely painful.
I'm talking about the next 10 years, people are so focused on 2020 that they don't see the big picture, that the economy is getting worse every year, and it effects everybody, even people who have wealth...we're all connected.
And even on the healthcare side, we will have to deal with the consequences of the lockdown. Massive backlog in hospitals, cancer screening and vaccination campaigns not happening, obesity up, psychological consequences, and also the knockdown effect of disruptions and economic crisis on treatment and vaccination campaigns in developing countries.
The government orders are a huge part of it! Case in point, look at the employment numbers and other economic indicators from early April vs today. It was so, so much worse in April, yet the pandemic is mostly the same. But today we don’t have nearly as strict lockdowns.
These are only results of the US-specific lack of welfare protection mechanisms, not a lockdown per se - especially unememployment and to a lesser degree also the negative growth are significantly less accentuated in the other OECD countries.
The high unemployment was because of how the US structured the spring legislative response. Businesses were ordered to close, and that made employees eligible to collect unemployment insurance. A federal program paid those unemployed people $2400 a month (in addition to their unemployment insurance).
The US poverty rate went down during the period. So it wasn't a lack of welfare protection, it was just a (likely bad) implementation choice, paying individuals instead of paying businesses to keep them on payroll.
The lack of response since that expired in July fits your description though.
I know, I'm not from the US but I tried to follow the US development closely. Many other countries have furlough-like systems where workers get money in cases of force majeure like floods or a factory burning down, without losing employment. One usually gets payout as a percentage of regular wage (depends on the countries, I'd say it usually lies between 60 and 90% of net income). These institutions were already in place, and when lockdowns were ordered the government just had to inject more money into them. All the red tape and all logistics were already in place. Most countries also allow soft fade-outs (I'm lacking the proper word here, sorry), i.e. 80% furlough and 20% regular work in month 1, 50/50 in month 2 etc.
The big advantage of this approach (in addition to the obvious advantages for the workers) is that companies don't lose the organizational knowledge held by the workers: With whom to speak in case machine X fails, whom to approach in customer company Y for a new deal etc.).
The government orders have been overwhelmingly the largest piece of it! I wrote this a few months back; the secondary effects from government intervention, and they fear they've brought with them, have been far reaching and disastrous:
The citation for gunshot wound victims being counted as Covid deaths says it was 5 deaths, and it was only on the publicly-available dashboard to track deaths. Not being used for official reporting purposes. In my opinion it's kind of dishonest how you present that.
I'll admit it made me lose interest in reading much further because I don't trust you to have used the other 42 citations in good faith.
Anyway, that was just meant as constructive criticism. Just something to keep in mind in your writing in the future.
It was one account, but during that time period, there were tons of reports, every single week, from miscounted deaths. The No Agenda Podcast guys covered it pretty well.
If it's just a couple here or there, there are miscounts for sure. But with news report after news report from local stations, I think the issue might be enough to be statically significant, or at least warrant investigation and not outright dismissal.
Furthermore, Sweeden seems to be doing alright as far as fatality numbers across their population for the year, even though their covid orders were much more limited:
> because I don't trust you to have used the other 42 citations in good faith.
We're getting into this really interesting era where we're attacking people's views for their sources .. even though there has been obvious bias in all mainstream reporting for over a decade. If you're not willing to entertain viewpoints you don't agree with, that's on you, not on me.
Entirely reasonable of OP to posit bad faith on your part, especially given how you've reacted and the way you constructed a strawman to get upset about.
The secondary effects from a pandemic rampaging through society unchecked by government orders would be very bad as well. At some point people just stop showing up for their jobs and then you might even end up with a barter based anarchy were big cities would simply starve in absence of the required logistics.
Seriously? In my big city, people are generally behaving as if the disease doesn't exist, at least on weekends. Restaurants are pretty full, stores are busy. The only time it feels different is during weekdays, when the city is empty from forced WFH. When people are given the choice, they are choosing to go out in the world, risks and all.
I think a majority of people stopped giving a shit in June[1]. The government's continued lockdown policies are 100% at fault for continued economic distress.
Hmm, "counting the number of requests made to Apple Maps for directions" is different than people actually going places, though. If you look at the Google location data reports, the retail and recreation category was down 16% when the Apple graph was at its peak: https://www.gstatic.com/covid19/mobility/2020-08-14_US_Mobil...
> When people are given the choice, they are choosing to go out in the world, risks and all.
That could change pretty fast when hospitals have to start sending seriously ill home to die. That would still only directly affect a small minority, but the same people who feel safer than they should now would then start feeling more in danger than they should. There's a certain irony in how a lot of people think that the rules are unnecessary exactly because they do work.
