[tyri_kai_psomi]

There's no room for moderates in today's political climate. "You are either completely on board or you are against me" so the current zeitgeist goes. Essentially you have to align your beliefs and talking points with /r/politics and /r/enlightenedcentrism, or you are just closeted alt right.

[Jweb_Guru]

There is absolutely no point to moderation on climate, correct.

[Mirioron]

If you want something to ever actually be done, then there absolutely is a point for moderation. If you just go along with whatever people label as "saving the climate" then you're going to be taken for a ride. People don't like being taken for a ride, thus they resist what makes their life more difficult.

[lotsofpulp]

> People don't like being taken for a ride, thus they resist what makes their life more difficult.

I doubt it. People don’t want to reduce consumption. People want their detached houses and front and back yards, they want their international vacations, domestic vacations, they want to drive around without thinking how much it will cost them. People want to see their children live easier lives than them, not harder. Conveniently ignoring their great great grandchildren’s lives, but there’s comfort in plausible deniability of not knowing the future.

[mistermann]

>> People don't like being taken for a ride, thus they resist what makes their life more difficult.

> I doubt it.

Are you willing to consider it as a possibility though?

No doubt the remainder of what you say is true, to an unknown degree (ignore this at your own peril), but if you had god-like omniscience to simultaneously see into the minds (including the subconscious) of all people on the planet, the true reality of their beliefs and what sort of compromises they would be willing to make under certain conditions - might the material aspects play less of a role in the impasse than you and others think?

Draw upon the knowledge (personal, and observations of third parties) you have about human relationships, particularly conflict. Have you noticed that sometimes people don't behave completely rationally, sometimes going so far as to even lie to themselves about why they do the things they do? Are there sometimes situations where a minor disagreement finds a way to grow into a full on battle where the original objective disagreement has faded into the background, the fight itself takes on a life of its own, and people revert to their irrational, tribal, caveman roots, seeking no particular goal other than revenge?

Might there be some aspect that creeps into the political realm? If it did, what might it look like? Might it look something like irrational, dishonest & disingenuous, hate-filled discussions in social media, as opposed to good faith fact-based discussions where both parties are seeking to achieve a state of mutually beneficial compromise? Do we see any evidence of these two conversation types taking place in social media today?

Jonathan Haidt is the only academic I know of that seems to have noticed this aspect of the situation (as related to political polarization, not climate change) and set his mind to studying it. Does anyone know of others?

[tyri_kai_psomi]

This type of thinking is what gives us more solar and wind farms and less nuclear plants.

[cagenut]

I think you're right in a way you don't mean to be. There was room for moderates in the 90's and 00's. We have unfortunately blown our time window for a moderate response. Think of it like knowing your paper is due at the end of the semester, but not starting till a week before. You don't get to do the paper in a measured and pragmatic way anymore, you already chose not to, your only options now are a sloppy panicked rush, or failure. Yes the sloppy panicked rush may also lead to failure, but the operating margin for moderate solutions is almost entirely exhausted: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM1...

edit: yet again i'm downvoted to -2 because I dare explain the shape of the curves in plain english and then link to my source (the canonical authoritative source no less).

hacker news is swarming with climate change denalists downvoters.

[iudqnolq]

Why I think you reach the wrong conclusion, using your analogy:

Say you're a week from the paper being due, and need to decide between an A thesis and a B thesis.

The A thesis would be great, but you simply can't do the research necessary to prove it in a week. If you went with it your paper would be a complete failure because you'd either spend all your time on research and not have enough time to do the actual writing of the paper, or you decide to spend most of your time writing the paper but it's impossibly to make the arguments because you simply don't have the facts necessary.

Instead you pick the B quality thesis, and write a workable paper arguing for it. Sure your paper would be better with a better thesis, but given your position when you started it was your best option.

With climate change, if we let perfect be the enemy of the good we might end up doing nothing which is clearly worse than doing something insufficient. Badness scales (nonlinearly) with amount we reduce emissions. We want the best solution we have the ability to implement. (Figuring that out is the hard part, and I don't know enough to do that).

Note: Your source is worthless in this forum. No one is going to read through hundreds of pages to figure out if they support your claim. It would be as if I wrote nothing but "You're wrong (cite the Encylcopedia Brittanica)". I'm pretty sure you're right, ironically because of reputable secondary sources I've read that summarized the report.

[cagenut]

> With climate change, if we let perfect be the enemy of the good we might end up doing nothing which is clearly worse than doing something insufficient.

That is exactly what you are doing in arguing for delay and moderation. To the tune of 38 gigatonnes per year.

> Note: Your source is worthless in this forum. No one is going to read through hundreds of pages to figure out if they support your claim.

I linked to a JPG with three 1960 - 2100 graphs that lay out exactly what number of gigatons leads to what warming on what timeframe. It is "Figure 1" from the "Summary for Policy Makers". There is nothing more basic or dumbed down that can still be called science.

[iudqnolq]

> That is exactly what you are doing in arguing for delay and moderation. To the tune of 38 gigatonnes per year.

I'm arguing for implementing an imperfect plan sooner. I don't understand what you mean.

> I linked to a JPG with three 1960 - 2100 graphs that lay out exactly what number of gigatons leads to what warming on what timeframe. It is the absolute barest possible minimum you should understand to have an informed opinion on the topic.

You're completely right. I saw the start of the link and assumed you linked to the full report.

[cagenut]

> I'm arguing for implementing an imperfect plan sooner. I don't understand what you mean.

then why did you start with

> Why I think you reach the wrong conclusion

I confess I got lost in your extended hypotheticals, but your clear intent was to contradict no?

[iudqnolq]

Yes. Specifically, I believe the following to be incorrect

> We have unfortunately blown our time window for a moderate response.

Because I believe our best option is to work for a moderate response sooner, for the reasons I've already said

[imtringued]

What imperfect plan is there? The low hanging fruit are Renewables (and nuclear as last resort) and electrification of transport. Unfortunately they depend on the construction of a grid that is built for decentralized power generation compared to large scale central power plants. This requires government action. The only major roadblock to electric cars is the missing charging infrastructure. You can get a nice used EV for 15k€ or less and it will pay for itself because electricity is cheaper than gas. Again we need the government to act before apartments will be equipped with chargers.

[iudqnolq]

The low hanging fruit is some kind of penalty on CO2 enissions.

[jacinabox]

At any event insisting on a moderate solution now can still be smart because it moves the Overton window making more complete solutions politically feasible in the future.

[Mirioron]

The likely objection to your argument is that people don't really think there's much of a difference whether we start action today or in 5 years. Yes, it will be more difficult, but actually taking the right steps is probably more important.

There's a million ways how some bad steps being taken could end up in a catastrophe. Look at the situation with the Amazon and how aggressive some countries are against the Brazilian government. Some countries (France) are even bypassing the government to deal with local authorities. Situations like that can very quickly spiral out of control. They might make people be even less accepting of doing something about climate change and they can even spark political instability, which very well can lead to hot conflicts.

The climate situation is going to progressively get worse. It will even accelerate the rate at which it gets worse, but it's not going to explode like a bomb. Political situations can explode like that and when that happens, then nobody will care about climate change.

We can't afford not to be moderate on an issue like this. You can't solve climate change at once. It'll take sustained effort and a lot of time. You can't build it on shaky ground.

>hacker news is swarming with climate change denalists downvoters.

This type of attitude is a huge problem for people advocating for changes to be made due to climate change. You're asking for a lot of people's lives to become more difficult, but when they question or disagree on almost any point they are labelled evil and stupid.

[joeblow9999]

>This type of attitude is a huge problem for people advocating for changes to be made due to climate change. You're asking for a lot of people's lives to become more difficult, but when they question or disagree on almost any point they are labelled evil and stupid.

Exactly. This is true of most policy disagreements. Just because you think my plan won't do what I propose it will do doesn't mean you're stupid and evil, even if some other people are opposing it because they are stupid and evil.

[pstuart]

To carry your analogy further, it feels like we're just going to not hand the paper in and try to hide the report card so that the parents don't find out.