If you have a smoke problem you can put the fire out without working out how it started.

It is not possible to put out sufficiently large fires.

We need to act earlier in the causal chain. But where? And who pays?

Yes?

Do we know how to mitigate the risks?

>Yes? Do the things.

>No? Pay the experts to figure this out. Draft them if need be.

No? Pay the experts to figure this out. Draft them if need be.

Everyone pays proportionally. Nationalize assets if need be.

We have the knowledge, resources, and capacity to solve these problems. (Change my mind). We lack leaders with the spine to take necessary action.

The problem here is that we have a bunch of smoke, and a good chunk of the population is either saying that there's no smoke or that the smoke is unrelated to the fire.

How do you fix the smoke problem if you can't get enough people to agree to put out the fire?

This is vastly overestimated and straight up poorly informed statistics. There are dozens of solutions for pollution that involve energy efficiency, which doesn't require a single shut down and merely uses what we're already consuming more efficiently (think gasoline standards, heating, A/C, LEDs, insulation, weatherization, etc).

Alongside these simple and job-intensive efficiency gains, we can encourage the already massive growth in wind, solar, batteries, EVs, and other clean industries, which will vastly reduce the number of pollutants without shutdowns needed.

If we apply smart stimulus for Corona to encourage the many green tech jobs, we will see huge benefits on air pollution alone, never mind long-term climate impacts. Even if you think climate is a hoax, pollution certainly isn't and it's killing poor people by the hundreds of thousands every year. We have the solutions above, let's implement them, not throw up our hands in despair.

However even doing these things won’t return the biosphere to it’s previous condition, we’ve extracted extreme quantities of energy from underground and dumped them into the atmosphere, and our ‘locked in’ climate change will not decrease with those measures alone. We need to restore balance and I can’t see a way of doing it short of significant carbon sequestration - vastly beyond what can be achieved by reforestation.

I don’t want to be uncharitable, but I can’t help reading your comment as, “we shouldn’t be inconvenienced to prevent ours and our children’s suffering.” That can’t be a correct reading, can it?

[1] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/20...

You seem to discount the anthropocentric argument (as it should be) and then promptly jump right in to it. Why does it matter what the cause is?

Are you being serious? The cause is a key part of choosing the most efficient response. Responses can potentially involve both reactionary measures to climate forcing and reductionary measures trying to reduce forcing. If the cause was, say, the sun getting brighter by 15% for some reason, well we can't just turn down the sun, so while yes we'd having just a much motivation to respond our range of actions would be purely on the reaction side, reducing incoming solar insolation maybe. And that'd further just be bringing things back into the comfortable range we and everything else have been living in.

But since instead the cause is human driven fossil carbon emissions, both different reaction measures and reducing the cause in the first place are possible and important. To take the above example, solar shading would be a bad idea because while yes it'd lower thermal input, it'd also reduce critical wavelengths used by primary producers below normal levels as well. That's a major side effect that's different from if the cause was different. And while we can mess with the sun, we certainly can treat net atmospheric carbon increases as the externality it is.

But if you don't accept greenhouse gas emissions are an externality, why would you support internalizing those costs? If they weren't the cause after all it'd be uneconomic and pointless to go after them.

I mean, I'm genuinely astonished to even be writing this on HN. Like if my "computer broke", well if the cause is a dead SSD that's quite different then a dead mobo or fried PSU or "5 year old knocked a potted plant onto it then 7 year old poured seltzer water on it to clean it off". Would you be saying "what does it matter what the cause was" there?

If the cause of the problem was a brighter sun but we could save the planet by internalizing the cost of our emissions, it seems like it would be wise to do that regardless of whether an earth umbrella might address the root cause more directly.

So of course nothing should be done about it because either it isn't real or it isn't human caused.

This is also the group that often votes single issue or directly against their best interest much like What's the matter with Kansas. Surprisingly, Kansas itself hasn't read that book and seems to repeat history every time the GOP wants less taxes.

Oh please. Inner city minorities have been voting for gun control (good luck getting the cops to show up let alone promptly in some places) since long before climate change was a thing. The bases of both parties are rife with cognitive dissonance. You could probably count on one hand the number of people in the other country who agree with everything in an official party platform if you present each policy goal in isolation instead of as a platform.

Proclaiming that people are voting against their interest is just calling them stupid or saying you know what's good for them better than they do with some obfuscation thrown in to make it fit in better in "polite" conversation.

Kind of like you do in this sentence: "Inner city minorities have been voting for gun control (good luck getting the cops to show up let alone promptly in some places) since long before climate change was a thing."

Are you calling them stupid or just saying you know what's good for them better than they do?

I did find several where minorities refused to vote GOP due to racism and related issues but I'd consider that decency not single issue.

Meanwhile I can list my Grandma's entire church as mostly single issue related to abortion rights, or at least that's what the current leadership preaches.

By voting against their interest, I'm considering that the GOP has had platform planks, policy options, or new laws/rules related to reducing farm subsides, setting up tariffs that bring counter actions that destroy entire US farming groups, refuse to acknowledge climate change is real let alone human driven, curtailing regulations around safe pesticides or environmental efforts in general, and reducing rural outreach like cuts to USPS, voting access, and more.

It seems odd that a group of often rural and farm related folks would vote for a party that has succeeded in reducing their subsidies, axing their crop values internationally via revenge tariffs, refusing to acknowledge why droughts are sweeping the nation and doing nothing to counter them, and reducing their access to mail and levers of democracy would be against their core interests.

But hey, the rich have lower taxes and the poor can't get healthcare, jobs, retirement, home ownership, and the chances of preventing massive droughts and climate change related issues are nil so all is right for the GOP.

What's the Matter with Kansas is a deeper look into the Kansas aspects of this. It's an interesting read and very relevant as just back in 2016 they tried to ax taxes across the state and schools closed, hospitals started to shut down, roads fell apart, and more until the state supreme court ordered the legislature to fund basic services and the GOP dominated state legislature had to override the governors veto to pass higher taxes. At this point, cutting taxes seems to be the biggest right wing driver apart from protecting Trump.

Of course, if the GOP gets into office then floods you with more subsidies because their actions would otherwise destroy your entire national industry, perhaps its more about selfish people being selfish than voting against their interests. If US farmers didn't have tariffs shredding their markets and driving demand to Brazil and other nations, maybe they wouldn't need more bailout money than the US auto sector in 2009. So far I think they are up to about 2x the auto bailout but that was a year ago.

So much for person responsibility and fiscally conscious conservatives. The deficit hasn't mattered since Obama left office apparently.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/21/trump-teases-more-t...

https://www.freep.com/story/money/business/john-gallagher/20...

They know whats best for you.

So they can give you Iraq, Credit Crisis, Vietnam, Covid19 in nursing homes, etc

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), cites shrubs and live and dead vegetation as <the most important factor> in forest fires, 'being an easily ignitable fuel source that helps spread the flames quickly over vast distances.'

It's worth noting that NASA reports that global fires are down by 25% between 2003 and 2019. In other words, there has been a global decrease in the total number of square kilometers burned each year. Africa 'dominates in terms of the sheer number of fires'.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145421/building-a-l...

It's like getting pamphlets at the airport. You do not read them but you know what they're about.

It's normal for the west cost to burn. But we don't want that, so we stop it for as long as we can. But at some point the condition are just perfect: hot, dry, windy and then it burn like never before.

This is common knowledge among firefighter.

Winke, Winke :-)

edit: Written as experienced multiple times in the last few weeks. Fine was initially 40EUR.

yes, we have a lot of confirmed infections but that doesnt mean shit. its a vanity metric that you a) can easily game and b) shouldnt matter as long as icus and death dont go up

And that's how conversations go to hell. You just postulate your own correctness and the opposing side recoils from that. Do you really think it's productive?

We’ve spent decades just trying to get people to agree on facts, basic facts supported by the majority of scientific consensus.

So, forgive me my frustration, but at a certain point we have to agree the sky is blue [1] and move on to the “what are we going to do about it” part.

1: Well, normally it’s blue at least.