Comments

• By hyperman1 2023-11-1922:314 reply

  The last few days, my region (De westhoek in Flanders, Belgium) had serious troubles with flooding. A politician on the news complained how she took measures, but climate change came faster than expected.

  This level of idiocy creeped me out. Climate change has been known since the 1970's. Everybody with half a braincell knows the IPCC reports are underestimating things badly, even if they were correct we were going in for a rough ride, political investments are below what these reports require from us, and the small amount of money spent is badly mismanaged.

  I can't blame her alone personally. She's a child of her political generation. But that generation has only seen good times and is completely incapable of doing anything in a crisis. They'll keep going trough the same old motions, and feel very sorry for us when disaster inevitably strikes.

  Unfortunately, the average voter agrees with her. 'Eco realism' is the preferred course, and even the Belgian green parties care more about integration than climate.

  By hyperman1 2023-11-2010:25

  Peyton being flagged, I can't directly respond. But the expressed sentiment (There is nothing the politician can do) happens regular enough that I want to respond.

  Flanders is a small region, and climate change is so huge and multi facetted that no nation on its own can do it. Its the ultimate case of death by a thousand papercuts.

  But we are a rich region with a lot of industry and research. We should be able to develop and deploy partial solutions locally. In fact, we should be able to get richer by exporting these solutions.

  We're also owning Antwerp, one of the biggest ports in Europe, so we partially decide what Europe does or doesn't buy. Brussels is next to our border and a lot of us work there. Flanders has an outsized impact on the EU. We could put our thumbs on that scale if we wanted.

  By euroderf 2023-11-2010:29

  > Climate change has been known since the 1970's.

  And in particular, Soylent Green.

  By peyton 2023-11-204:33

  Unless they’re voting to block industrialization agendas of African nations by force or diplomacy, there’s nothing your Flanders-based politician can do.

  By t0bia_s 2023-11-2012:44

  So you think that politics solve weather changes?

• By 8fingerlouie 2023-11-208:131 reply

  What scares me the most about that graph is the outlier/singularity of it compared to almost 100 years of data. Every other year on the graph, the temperature has begun declining roughly halfway through the year, but this year it just keeps climbing.

  I'm not ready to call "we're doomed" (yet), and it is probably just natural variation, but it's scary none the less.

  By ath3nd 2023-11-2220:00

  I am convinced we are doomed, but still would like humanity to try something to mitigate the amount of hellfire that is going to rain on us in the not so distant future.

• By pjmlp 2023-11-1921:512 reply

  The way wars are going, we might as well destroy ourselves before it becomes critical.

  By sillywalk 2023-11-1922:03

  That would be devastating to my retirement stock portfolio, if I could afford to have one.

  By netsharc 2023-11-1923:323 reply

  Well, lack of resources leads to conflict - although I'm not sure if it's a real lack or a perceived lack. A drought in Syria lead to rural farmers moving into the cities to try to earn money differently, and the tensions there sparked the civil war (and as NY Times called it, proto world war[1]). Refugees entering Europe and Merkel's "We can do it!" after her years of saying "Austerity uber Alles!" to Europeans under her de-facto rule (remember the whole Euro crisis, the PIIGS, featuring special case Greece?) probably caused natives' resentment against the refugees, and now right-wing politics are winning across Europe (e.g. Brexit), because hey, we humans are selfish, we want to save ourselves first, and then our family, and then our tribe, and we identify with people who are like us, visually, culturally (heh, I've got Polish people I know who hated middle eastern war refugees and were then proud for Poland to be taking Ukranian war refugees, spot the difference, "But it's different!" they say, after using their confirmation bias), and we're still under the effects of goverments being idiots about saving vs spending...

  [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/16/world/middlee...

  By kaba0 2023-11-209:15

  > proud for Poland to be taking Ukranian war refugees, spot the difference

  I have no dog in this fight, but integrating someone from a very similar culture is just so much more easier. Also, let’s not pretend that a huge percent of random people just joined the war refugees. I still think that taking in refugees was/is a good idea — but they should have done what Canada did, send a military plane directly to Syria, pack it full a few times, and that’t it. Every country should have done the same depending on their capabilities, put those people into some rural areas so they have to integrate with the locals (which also would have helped greatly as rural areas are dying out due to not enough children being born/younger people moving to bigger cities), and call it a day.

  By gentleman11 2023-11-200:24

  Unlimited growth eventually leads to resource shortages. And we’re about to see a massive amount of growth from a lot of countries in the next century (not to mention how the west is about to spend electricity on ai and/or crypto in the near future)

  By hulitu 2023-11-2012:261 reply

  > A drought in Syria lead to rural farmers moving into the cities to try to earn money differently, and the tensions there sparked the civil war

  I'm sure the US had nothing to do with it. They just came later to exploit some abandoned oil fields. /s

  By OfSanguineFire 2023-11-2017:23

  Do you have any firsthand knowledge of Syria, or merely passively consume "geopolitical" content on the internet far away? Anyone who actually spent time in Aleppo in the early millennium saw that it was a powder keg, because the one thing people loved to complain about endlessly -- whether they were religious or secular, Arab or Armenian or Kurd -- was how much they despised the regime. Blaming the actual unrest against Assad on the US, as opposed to US attempts to subsequently exploit it, infantilizes the Syrian population.

  And don't do "/s", which I see you post often. This is HN, not Reddit, and sarcasm is considered poor form here.