I've been there a few times in the summer. Some people were complaining about 75F weather, saying it was hot. 75F is the temp that I still wear a light summer jacket, and 70F is pretty chilly to me.
Either way 90F without AC is too hot, even for me.
It's not _just_ humidity. Rain just simply can't exist at -15C, so you can't get your clothes moist because it can only snow, and that snow is cold enough not to stick to you at all.
I am not even going to start on the fact that you can walk miles of snow and not get wet, while walking through miles of slush... Well, I hope you understand the distinction.
You joke, but that's close to an argument that's actually been promoted by The Heritage Foundation: "How Fossil Fuels Will Help Us Confront Climate Change" [1].
Briefly, the argument goes that the average world temperature is about 58 F, and that climate change could raise that by 7 F. Dubai averages about 35 F above the world average of 58 F and they get by just fine by heavy use of air conditioning. They are able to do this, according to the article, because of their heavy use of fossil fuels and government policies that promote "economic freedom and growth".
The article notes that not every county as oil, but they can still share in this fossil fuel driven response to climate change:
> Not every country has oil, but in a globalized market, cheap fossil fuels are available everywhere to spur rapid growth and technological change.
Alaska has its own sovriegn wealth fund, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund, which is largely funded by oil drilling. It pays out a dividend to residents every year. Threatening that, even slightly or indirectly, is probably political suicide.
Want to make a difference on climate change as a technologist? Feel free to join these communities actively looking for support and with ongoing projects (that are alive):
Hey NeedMoreTea, you're right - so far I haven't posted so much else. Do you have any idea on how to raise awareness of community projects that you would feel are more respectful? 50+ people have joined the projects over the last week, attributing it to threads on HN, so it seems that for some users it is providing some value.
If you're only here because this place has high visibility, not because you're interested in the conversation, you're a spammer no matter how noble your goals are.
I'm (obviously) very involved in climate change and how tech (very represented in the HN community) can play a role in fixing it: many are asking themselves the question on how they can do something about it.
I want to help these people find a spot where they can find like-minded people interested on working on it - and I believe climate change posts on HN are a good match between people concerned about the climate, and who would be interested in joining tech communities working to fix it. I'm all ears to find other ways to give people avenues to work on their "climate" anxiety - let me know if you have better ideas.
I'm concerned about the starving people in sub Saharan Africa. It would still be inappropriate for me to constantly spam you about it, regardless of how hungry they are.
Yes. Absolutely. I am concerned about the security/surveillance state. I understand this and try to apologize when I start going on about it.
I love HN, but it's gotten so that if it's a weekend or U.S. holiday, it's climate stories. I'm happy to ignore them, but the site itself is beginning to look a bit preachy on this particular topic.
So, the person copy pasting shouldn’t do that, but....I would expect the volume of climate stories to get larger, not smaller.
The issue is growing in urgency and severity. By social convention people treat it like any other issue, but it drawfs anything else in terms of the scale of the problem.
So it’ll remain relevant to the forum, which tends to do a better joh weighting things based on importance. That said the discussions likely verge on repetitive.
If you're very much involved in climate change issues and want to make an effect on the tech crowd then you might as well partake yourself with meaningful comments in the relevant discussions here on Hacker News, offering your wealth of information and expertise to the community. That would further your cause while also giving back to people. Merely spamming is... just spamming.
Actively join in the community here? Maybe a little judgement?
It's a topic I find important, so I do try and read those that come by. First time or two it's interesting, when I see 4 or 5 relevant stories break same day, like a couple of days ago, and it looks like I saw half those you found that day... For me at least, that seems like pushing it.
I think generally joining the discussion is a good thing to do. Especially if you're passionate about these issues that probably means you have more to add than just copy-pasting the same links.
Also, every time I feel compelled to point out that these hobby projects are nice, but what we really need is large scale government action, and that will only come through serious political pressure from voters.
Complaining about posts that are trying to raise awareness of and find solutions to climate meltdown feels a bit like criticising a fire alarm for disturbing your sleep.
Calling this "spam" implies the poster hopes to profit from his actions. In this case, the poster literally wants to save the entire planet.
Well I'm no groth hax0r like OP, but it shouldn't be too difficult for them to sit down and write an actual comment. Like you just did, and like I'm doing right now. Who cares if a lazy spammer has a heart of gold?
There is also https://citizensclimatelobby.org/ which doesn't require any particular skills. Maybe you want to include that in your copypasta for the next thread.
I'm a moderator here. The users replying to you are correct: the comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=martincollignon are way over the line and we would have asked you to stop if we had seen them. When someone does this for their startup that's an immediate ban.
The principle of HN is intellectual curiosity: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Repetition is the enemy of curiosity—readers come here for things they haven't seen before. So is promotion—readers come here for relief from growth marketing, not to be subjected to it. We want users to post to HN when their personal intellectual curiosity is engaged, and not otherwise.
Rallying support for a cause is no different, even if the cause is important—more important than the rest of what's on this site. In fact, that importance means that HN needs even more protection, because otherwise it would be taken over completely by those more important things.
Sure, whatever. Honestly, I'm tired of arguing with denialists. Really, I do hope that it turns out you're correct and know better than almost every climate scientist on earth.
At this point irrational hope is about the only hope left, so sure. Let's say you're right. Everything is fine. Natural cycles. Whatever.
Nobody sensible says Earth will be incapable of sustaining life. Jellyfish, for example, are predicted to flourish in a warming ocean depleted of fish stocks.
If society does collapse from drought, famine, resource wars, etc., then will we be able to rebuild it without all the free energy from fossil fuels, or was that a one-time cheat code? Maybe we're looking at the Great Filter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
Right now society is monolithic. As individuals we are part of a highly coupled system and we would die without it. What we need are small communities that are independently self sustaining. That will be much more robust and eco friendly I believe
Please break down what you mean by self-sustaining for me then - tech is super specialized, requiring special resources to construct. There is very little of modern standards that you can self sustain - really, food is about it, and for everything else you need trade, and can't self sustain.
>I don't think that guy is denying anything. He's merely stating that the earth has gone through drastic changes _many_ times in the past.
Bringing with them tons of changes to the climate, the kind which would kill billions from famines, floods, tornadoes, heat, lack of potable water, etc, in our hugely populated modern world.
>What makes this change the final one before earth is incapable of sustaining life?
We don't merely want an Earth "capable of sustaining life". We want an Earth capable of sustaining us, the whole 8 billions, and not a hellhole of environmental disaster, famine, decertification, and so on.
I could not give less fucks if cockroaches and wolves, e.g. survive, but billions of people are wiped out...
Some people will survive, and hopefully they figure out what it is that this civilization did wrong and do a better job. This isnt the first time a human civilization has wiped itself out due to spiritual negligence, that is the myth of Atlantis.
So I guess there is no scientific reason, just living memory. For me such articles just lack the scientific merit and the only purpose is trying to cause mass hysteria. Earlier it was about how we all going the freeze to death, nowadays it is how we are all going to die because of global warming. In fact Earth went through several warm and cool periods, even if you look back just few hundred years. I am all for reducing CO2 and I am pretty successfully reduced unnecessary CO2 production in my work by using more efficient solutions and not wasting energy because this is what is under my control to help mother Earth. Writing click baity articles without context and scientific merit is not going to help anybody.
"Moore co-chaired the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, which was supported by the Nuclear Energy Institute, a national organization of pro-nuclear industries.[59] In 2009, as co-chair of the Coalition, he suggested that the mainstream media and the environmentalist movement is not as opposed to nuclear energy as in decades past.[59]
He argues that any realistic plan to reduce reliance on fossil fuels or greenhouse gas emissions would require increased use of nuclear energy to supply baseload power."
During Cambrian explosion there were ~7000ppm. Why on earth would someone want to reduce CO2 ? Flora desperately needs more. More CO2 -> Greener earth.
Or maybe it’s only you who considers it clickbait and everybody else immediately understood the article was about recorded history of temperatures, because, you know, it’s kinda common sense?
To cause "hysteria" in the way you're implying the general public would have to read the headline any other way than it is meant in the first place. But joe shmoe wasn't ever going to consider that 1000 years ago earth may have been in a different place climate wise so they're going to read the headline exactly the same whether it has the qualifier "in recorded history" or not.
I was looking at this yesterday and learned the following. A 100 year flood is a flood that has a 1% chance of happening in a given year. A 500 year flood has a 0.2% chance of happening in a given year. I’m not sure if temperature has the same model as rainfall. Anchorage was settled in 1914 according to Wikipedia, so I’m assuming that there are no temperature records beyond that and that 100 years in this case refers to it only having been settled for about 100 years.
My former co-founder of my SaaS was based in remote Alaska (I am in tropical Australia), and I remember one day a while back late in the year, it was +35degC here and she said it was -35degC over there. I couldn't believe we were equidistant on either end of the 0 datum, with a massive 70 degree C difference in temperature variation.
Weirdly, it is now our dry season, with temperatures around 21degC and I just Googled the weather in her area and they are expecting around 30degC - Alaska is actually hotter than Northern Australia is right now!
But isn't that partly due to it being summer in Alaska right now, and it is winter in Australia? You said "late last year" was your previous comparison, which implies it was approaching summer in Australia?
We are so close to the equator here that we don't really have the equivalent of 4 seasons. Rather just a 'wet' and 'dry' season. Probably about a 15 degree C variation in temperature throughout the year.
My point was that I don't believe Alaska ever got warmer than we ever do here, but it has happened. My first story about the 70 degree variation in temperature is more the norm.
for reference (for everyone else). Darwin is 12 deg south of the equator, which makes it closer than Hawaii/Honolulu (which is 21 deg north), or Nicaragua which is roughly the same at 12 deg north.
Darwin is typically hot and humid.
A quick google for "Anchorage climate chart" shows that that expected maximum temperature even during summer months is about 20°C. That's quite far away from 30°C. According to the weather forecast about 25°C are to be expected. Doesn't seem healthy.
> I couldn't believe we were equidistant on either end of the 0 datum
Longitude only affects the time of day, and thus daily temperature variations.
Latitude is much more important, and determines climate and seasons. You are at vastly different latitude than Alaska.
Sadly this is one of those arguments that are basically impossible to refute with large enough timescales.
I don't like the argument because it's unprovable with any degree of reliability (i.e. we can know the ice age was cold, but how cold? generally... this cold), but to outright ignore it is not fair either.
Good remarks, good sources. Still would like to see if there is no naturally sinusoidal tendency in the slightly longer term, i.e., are we just going into another Medieval Warm Period? [0]
It has, Earth was much warmer in the past. I completely believe climate change is happening, but I don't understand why a new temperate record is scary.
Higher sea levels, higher temperates, higher CO2. The earth has had all that for millions of years in the past without triggering mass extinctions. Humans have been around for all of it except higher CO2.
And it's all happening on a slow enough time scale (generations) that I expect minimal disruption. Global warming is real but not the apocalyptic catastrophe that media makes it out to be. We as a species have better things to worry about like millions of us dying from preventable diseases every year.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] thread32C is not that bad, a simple fan is more than enough to keep you cool.
I imagine 32C might feel damned pretty hot to an Alaskan.
Either way 90F without AC is too hot, even for me.
E.g. I find 0C in London way colder than -15C in Northern Europe.
I also think that you wear different clothes and are more prepeared when it is -15.
It's not _just_ humidity. Rain just simply can't exist at -15C, so you can't get your clothes moist because it can only snow, and that snow is cold enough not to stick to you at all.
I am not even going to start on the fact that you can walk miles of snow and not get wet, while walking through miles of slush... Well, I hope you understand the distinction.
Briefly, the argument goes that the average world temperature is about 58 F, and that climate change could raise that by 7 F. Dubai averages about 35 F above the world average of 58 F and they get by just fine by heavy use of air conditioning. They are able to do this, according to the article, because of their heavy use of fossil fuels and government policies that promote "economic freedom and growth".
The article notes that not every county as oil, but they can still share in this fossil fuel driven response to climate change:
> Not every country has oil, but in a globalized market, cheap fossil fuels are available everywhere to spur rapid growth and technological change.
[1] https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/how-fossil-f...
- https://climateaction.tech/
- https://techimpactmakers.com/
- https://www.tmrow.com
I see from your history it's the only thing you have ever posted on HN.
I want to help these people find a spot where they can find like-minded people interested on working on it - and I believe climate change posts on HN are a good match between people concerned about the climate, and who would be interested in joining tech communities working to fix it. I'm all ears to find other ways to give people avenues to work on their "climate" anxiety - let me know if you have better ideas.
I love HN, but it's gotten so that if it's a weekend or U.S. holiday, it's climate stories. I'm happy to ignore them, but the site itself is beginning to look a bit preachy on this particular topic.
The issue is growing in urgency and severity. By social convention people treat it like any other issue, but it drawfs anything else in terms of the scale of the problem.
So it’ll remain relevant to the forum, which tends to do a better joh weighting things based on importance. That said the discussions likely verge on repetitive.
There are "Show HN:" posts...perhaps that's a better option for you.
It's a topic I find important, so I do try and read those that come by. First time or two it's interesting, when I see 4 or 5 relevant stories break same day, like a couple of days ago, and it looks like I saw half those you found that day... For me at least, that seems like pushing it.
Calling this "spam" implies the poster hopes to profit from his actions. In this case, the poster literally wants to save the entire planet.
https://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/that-which-we-dont.html#n...
The principle of HN is intellectual curiosity: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Repetition is the enemy of curiosity—readers come here for things they haven't seen before. So is promotion—readers come here for relief from growth marketing, not to be subjected to it. We want users to post to HN when their personal intellectual curiosity is engaged, and not otherwise.
Rallying support for a cause is no different, even if the cause is important—more important than the rest of what's on this site. In fact, that importance means that HN needs even more protection, because otherwise it would be taken over completely by those more important things.
Lets pick the peak of last ice age and be amazed because since then we are only getting warmer.
Lets also add some exponent predictions in the end, because it worked out so well for Lisa Simpson teeth.
I like xkcd, but this is not their best work.
At this point irrational hope is about the only hope left, so sure. Let's say you're right. Everything is fine. Natural cycles. Whatever.
I don't think that guy is denying anything. He's merely stating that the earth has gone through drastic changes _many_ times in the past.
What makes this change the final one before earth is incapable of sustaining life?
I think it still it's an open question whether modern human civilization will survive these changes. Today, people are already dying of heat and rioting for lack of water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_heat_wave_in_India_and_Pa...
If society does collapse from drought, famine, resource wars, etc., then will we be able to rebuild it without all the free energy from fossil fuels, or was that a one-time cheat code? Maybe we're looking at the Great Filter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
Bringing with them tons of changes to the climate, the kind which would kill billions from famines, floods, tornadoes, heat, lack of potable water, etc, in our hugely populated modern world.
>What makes this change the final one before earth is incapable of sustaining life?
We don't merely want an Earth "capable of sustaining life". We want an Earth capable of sustaining us, the whole 8 billions, and not a hellhole of environmental disaster, famine, decertification, and so on.
I could not give less fucks if cockroaches and wolves, e.g. survive, but billions of people are wiped out...
"Moore co-chaired the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, which was supported by the Nuclear Energy Institute, a national organization of pro-nuclear industries.[59] In 2009, as co-chair of the Coalition, he suggested that the mainstream media and the environmentalist movement is not as opposed to nuclear energy as in decades past.[59]
He argues that any realistic plan to reduce reliance on fossil fuels or greenhouse gas emissions would require increased use of nuclear energy to supply baseload power."
If you look at the bigger picture it means nothing:
Last 65M years:
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/65_Myr_Climate_C...
Lat 10K years:
https://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/gisp-last-10000...
Now please explain to me that how looking at only the last 100 years is relevant or it prooves anything.
Don't worry about climate change, we're all going to have bled to death first.
Great ! now rest of the world can't understand.
I won't enter into the unit war, and FWIW I'm used to centigrades.
I'll change it to say 90°F now.
Weirdly, it is now our dry season, with temperatures around 21degC and I just Googled the weather in her area and they are expecting around 30degC - Alaska is actually hotter than Northern Australia is right now!
My point was that I don't believe Alaska ever got warmer than we ever do here, but it has happened. My first story about the 70 degree variation in temperature is more the norm.
Longitude only affects the time of day, and thus daily temperature variations. Latitude is much more important, and determines climate and seasons. You are at vastly different latitude than Alaska.
If we could show that prior to the Last Glacial Period the temperature never breached 90°F, maybe this would be compelling.
It seems that you are setting an impossible bar rather than seeking an honest inquiry, happy to be corrected though
I don't like the argument because it's unprovable with any degree of reliability (i.e. we can know the ice age was cold, but how cold? generally... this cold), but to outright ignore it is not fair either.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period
Higher sea levels, higher temperates, higher CO2. The earth has had all that for millions of years in the past without triggering mass extinctions. Humans have been around for all of it except higher CO2.
And it's all happening on a slow enough time scale (generations) that I expect minimal disruption. Global warming is real but not the apocalyptic catastrophe that media makes it out to be. We as a species have better things to worry about like millions of us dying from preventable diseases every year.