[gwerbin]

What in the world are you talking about? This gets discussed all the time. The impact is not making it even worse at this point. And you talk as if posting on HN was equivalent to starting a coal-fired power plant in your backyard.

[remarkEon]

Yeah great example of what I’m talking about. Technology people on the technology website don’t seem interested in figuring out how to use technology to mitigate any effects of a changing climate. All they care about is “carbon number go down”, as if turning off power plants magically reduces the amount of fires.

[gwerbin]

Well it sure sounded like you were arguing that climate change was not a causal factor, which is ridiculous.

Of course we are going to need to use technology to mitigate the effects, even if we stop all carbon emissions tomorrow we are already dealing with an altered climate. You can't just vacuum up all the carbon and put it in the ground, and you can't get all the warm freshwater out of the oceans. I don't think I've ever seen a claim that we only need to stop carbon emissions and everything will be fine, here or otherwise.

You're arguing against something that people don't really say, and in the process you're making arguments in support of climate change denial. Are you really surprised people are pushing back on you?

[remarkEon]

The initial claim here was that these fires are the result of political leadership in my country deciding to not nuke the economy to make a number on a chart go down, or at least stabilize. I'm not going to argue the finer points of how much carbon release actually matters, because I think the right way to think about it is "increasing carbon release in atmosphere is not a good idea". I am in fact not arguing against something that people don't really say, because, again, this whole argument was started by people claiming that my country is responsible for Canada's inability to do basic forest fire prevention.

>and in the process you're making arguments in support of climate change denial

I am in fact not. Climate change "denial", such as this is even a real conviction that exists, is simply a phrase used as a hammer to get people to agree with a particular political program. Do you support declaring war on China and India and grinding their economies to a screeching halt? Because that would actually be the most effective way to drop carbon emissions back down to pre-1990s levels. The only countries that care about this stuff are the ones where their carbon emissions are a rounding error. The ones that don't care about this are the actual problems.

[defrost]

> Canada's inability to do basic forest fire prevention.

Australian here. What makes you think the "forest fire prevention" methods you outlined upthread are "basic"?

Have they ever been performed at the scale required in the history of European occupation of North America?

Normally dry lightening doesn't cause so many strikes to spark, nor do sparked fires normally spread so far and fast. Regardless of cause there are vast areas of remote forest covered land with extremely low moisture indexes - ie. dry as a tinderbox.

Clearing that land area of dry under brush and criss crossing it with wide firebreaks is no casual undertaking.

[remarkEon]

>Australian here. What makes you think the "forest fire prevention" methods you outlined upthread are "basic"?

American here. They are basic where I come from (the midwest). We learned about them as children. Australians used to have a similar sense of adventure and appetite for what would otherwise be considered difficult projects.