Tried to stir HN crowd but failed miserably (IPCC announcement)

http://anta2.wordpress.com/2014/05/21/hacker-blues/

by couchnaut • 12 years ago

30 23 12 years ago

anta2.wordpress.com

Robadob• 12 years ago

Such an issue is hard to affect on a personal scale, perhaps this is part of the reason for the indifference?

If there isn't anything I can personally do to resolve it and it's a slow barely visible change, I'll sit quietly and hope for some of the worlds governments to fund a viable solution.

couchnaut7• 12 years ago

That's a good explanation indeed. But then again that applies to almost anything of a political nature.

slvv• 12 years ago

I totally agree. Of course climate change and its newly announced irreversability is alarming. It's really hard, though, to figure out what immediate, effective action one can take.

ChrisNorstrom• 12 years ago

You have to include a provocative title that excites the newer HN members. Rename the article "How race/gender/class sees irreversible climate change" and re-submit it.

thenmar• 12 years ago

I think this is a joke but I don't get it... could you explain please?

forgottenpass• 12 years ago

Hacker News is not news nor for hackers, it's a place that (among other things) likes to bikeshed social issues popular in bay area tech circles.

rossng• 12 years ago

Part of your problem is probably that it's not really news.

Pretty much everyone knows that climate change is happening and that we should be doing something about it (not that that translates to much action).

The IPCC keep publishing reports like this mainly in an effort win over 'skeptics'.

couchnaut7• 12 years ago

That's exactly the point (which I obviously failed to get through). The news (at least to me) is that we're past the tipping points - it is irreversible now. Plus it is not (probably) just about droughts, weird weather and rising sea levels but rather about Earth becoming like Venus.

glenra6• 12 years ago

The news (at least to me) is that we're past the tipping points - it is irreversible now.

To say "it's irreversible now" is to imply there was ever a point that it wasn't, a point at which there was something we could have done to change trends at this scale. The links you gave don't really suggest this to be the case.

BTW, David Suzuki is a fearmonger with a long history of making ridiculous unscientific doomsday claims. For instance, he claimed that a second Fukushima disaster would force evacuation of the west coast of America:

http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/01/20/david-suzuki-regrets...

So if you really want to claim the earth is likely to be "uninhabitable in only some decades" you probably want to use somebody else as a source.

swalsh• 12 years ago

Its so predictable, futuretimeline.net published the story a few years ago:

http://www.futuretimeline.net/21stcentury/2014.htm#ipcc

aaronem2• 12 years ago

I hadn't seen that site before. I think it's really cute how they update their past predictions [1] after the fact [2] to improve their apparent accuracy, but you'd think they would have the sense to stop short of having "predicted" the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion last year.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20121227101314/http://www.futuret...

[2] http://www.futuretimeline.net/21stcentury/2013.htm

aaronem2• 12 years ago

Those who are willing to take IPCC at its word need no convincing. Those who are not so willing also need no convincing. By now there's no third category of meaningful size, and everyone on both sides is sick and tired of arguing over it.

hitchhiker999• 12 years ago

Depending on who you ask:

- Most major governments are ineffective, if not corrupt. - We put almost no resources into educating our children. - It's pretty clear we've broken the planet (or are breaking it fast) - The masses are confused, and feel helpless. - The world economy appears to have been subjugated by central banks. - Our food is progressively getting more toxic. - Corporations (in general) have scraped together too much power. - It's 2014 - this is not the world we had dreamed of, it's lame, inefficient and generally run by emotionally immature, tiresome, short sighted people. - Many people have given up at some level.

OP your point is valid, but I think (in some way) some of us are just thinking 'f-- it, let it roll, we deserve it'

Disclaimer: I have not given up, I think things will get better - perhaps naive

couchnaut7• 12 years ago

Cannot disagree with any of the answers. Yet, it seems like this is one of the problems that has to be dealt with, no matter how hard or meaningless that may seem. Then again if I accept the inevitability of it all then not much of everyday normalcy is making any sense.

glenra6• 12 years ago

The IPCC's job is basically to find or invent ways to claim the sky is falling and continually declare "it's worse than we thought" regardless of what the data says. They've been doing this for long enough that by now most sensible people have tuned out.

In context, the most recent IPCC reports confirm earlier impressions that the likely costs of climate change are relatively small compared to the benefits of economic growth over the same period whereas the cost of doing much about climate change now is much larger than the cost of doing nothing. So even if we chose to get "stirred", what would you have us do about it?

Lomborg gives a few relevant numbers here:

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/bj-rn-lomborg-sa...

couchnaut7• 12 years ago

Most researchers say that actually IPCC is rather conservative in its views not the other way around.

First time I hear about Lomborg. Will read later.

glenra6• 12 years ago

Most researchers say that actually IPCC is rather conservative in its views not the other way around.

Sure, if you're listening to people like David Suzuki you'd have that impression. But on the other side there are people like Chris Landsea - here was his resignation letter from the IPCC:

http://cstpr.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/science_policy...

The IPCC's charter is to tell us about risks related to climate change. Not the benefits. If there weren't any risks or we were fully informed about them, the IPCC would have no institutional reason to continue to exist. So naturally it focuses on the latest big scary "we just noticed THIS risk!" stories and puts much less emphasis on "it turns out we were wrong about THAT risk!" stories. For all we know, each new report could be exactly the same as the last one in terms of the net overall danger documented and it would still look like things were "getting worse", because areas where things are "getting better" generally aren't mentioned or are soft-pedaled.

For instance, the IPCC once tried to claim a high certainty that there'd be more hurricanes in the future due to climate change (see Landsea's letter linked above), but now they either don't make such claims or assign them a much lower certainty level. The IPCC once claimed Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035 ( http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jan/20/ipcc-hima... ); that turned out to be a mistaken claim based on grey literature. If there were some sort of a rundown in each report listing all the ways things "are worse" AND all the ways things "are better" since the last one it'd be easy to keep score. But there isn't, and the summaries and press releases emphasize any mentioned "this is worse" stories because bad news travels fast.

Suzuki complains that the IPCC report doesn't focus on the loss of arctic sea ice, but if they DID mention sea ice, they might have to mention that overall sea ice levels worldwide are currently above the long-term (30 year) average because we've gained more sea ice cover in the antarctic than we've lost in the arctic. And so on. (Given a big, complicated planet you can always find SOME areas or trends that seem to be "getting worse" but that doesn't mean throwing them - and only them - into the mix would make the report more accurate.)

Tried to stir HN crowd but failed miserably (IPCC announcement)

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