Smoking is probably a good analogy. In all ways. Because it took decades before we reduced the impact once we knew the dangers. And centuries before we even realized the dangers.
And smoking a cigarette won't kill you. Smoking one cigarette a day won't kill you. And most people who smoke don't actually get lung cancer.
But it all catches up with you. Smoking a cigarette a day for a decade is going to cause you to die earlier than if you hadn't. Smoking more, even earlier. Most is not all. Because most people who have lung cancer are smokers. And lung cancer isn't even the only thing. There's emphysema, heart disease, etc that's all related to smoking. And way more likely. But that's all aggregate.
Climate is a lot like that. It's nothing in isolation, it's everything in aggregate.
So it's like if you're not disputing smoking is bad for health, but you're saying it's not "catastrophically" bad?
It's like the sooner one stops smoking, the less chance he has for a "catastrophic" lung cancer; it's not like when you smoke 10K cigarettes you sure won't get cancer but if you smoke 20K you sure do.
Of course, different people call "catastrophe" different things, but the analogy is quite apt here. There is no "catastrophe" coming, in the sense of a sudden disaster. We can stop any time, and the sooner we stop, the better overall result (and less costly) will be.
That's a completely flawed analogy. This is like seeing a smoker who smokes a pack a day and saying "could you try half a pack and be that much safer?"
In this analogy, you come along and say "don't bother, you're gonna get lung cancer and die anyway."
Smoking is a great analogy, it's distributed exactly like secondhand smoke, causes chronic inflammation in the lungs, systemic health issues, and for now most people don't believe in it! Problem is covid may be dangerous in even smaller doses than smoke.
Exposure is cumulative though. If someone keeps getting exposed to "innocuous" things like cigarette smoke, they may very well find 20 years later they've got lung cancer and end up dying young.
Right. And tobacco smoking has been heavily demonized while the decreasing number of smokers are consigned to shiver in the cold at least 100' feet away from civilization when doing their dirty deed, yet somehow lung cancer keeps on increasing. Funny that.
There's a theory that it actually is one cigarette that gives you cancer -- the tobacco in that one cig absorbed radioactive material and triggers the cancer. That theory supposedly explains why a great number of smokers don't get lung cancer. I'd find a link, but I'm at work.
A more apt comparison for the article might be cigarettes & emphysema/heart disease. Not saying I agree with it, but it'd be a better analogy.
i would argue that on a long enough timescale, anything will 100% kill you. not trying to be cheeky, more just trying to say that that sort of argument only really works for people who are active antismokers; most smokers (i think, from personal experience) are very aware of the danger of smoking, but feel that it offsets some condition of reality that makes it more tolerable even compared to the reduced lifetime. that's just my perspective though
That's a very bad argument. Sure, people may not care enough now, but that's just because the threat is new and poorly understood. There was a time where people didn't care about getting lung cancer from smoking, but then it changed.
If someone tells you that cigarettes are going to give you cancer the fact that you aren't dead yet isn't a good indication that they are wrong. Furthermore the climate is incredibly complex. Waiting until we are absolutely certain of the exact trajectory of our fuckery will surely result in us being too fucked to take much corrective action. Basically you are asking to much and you're wrong.
Comparing to smoking seems to be a huge stretch to me. One thing virtually guarantees cancer and an eventual unpleasant death while providing no measurable benefits at all, and the other allows you to easily travel all over the place cheaply with a relatively small chance of a major accident.
If you live in western or northern Europe it is already obvious that the climate is getting warmer. Summers we previously thought were heat waves are now normal and winters with -5C to -10C days which were previously normal are now extremely cold. The change in the last 15 years has been very notable.
But evidence? How can you prove that a smoker's lung cancer was caused by them smoking their entire life?
Here's the point I'm trying to articulate: we used to blame nearly all the non-smoker lung cancer incidents on 2nd hand smoke. Smoking was everywhere. It was terrible. I hated it so much.
Now smoking has dropped significantly and smoking indoors and in many public spaces is banned. But the non-smoker lung cancer rates don't appear to be dropping accordingly.
Did we replace the 2nd hand smoke with some other cancer causing particulates? Or were we wrong about 2nd hand smoke and there was something else in our environment the whole time?
You probably have to differentiate risk. I assume for some risks associated with smoking there is a linear correlation with exposure, where it's on/off for others, or e.g. following a logarithmic function.
Nicotine, CO and radioactive toxicity have a long half-life, where primary radical damage or reactive carcinogen burden is dose dependent stochastics.
Also people forget, you are much, much more likely to die from cardio-vascular damage or COPD as a consequence of smoking, than lung cancer.
Smoking increases your risks for a lot of things besides just lung cancer. I never thought of lung cancer as the only bad outcome of smoking in my impressionable years.
And smoking a cigarette won't kill you. Smoking one cigarette a day won't kill you. And most people who smoke don't actually get lung cancer.
But it all catches up with you. Smoking a cigarette a day for a decade is going to cause you to die earlier than if you hadn't. Smoking more, even earlier. Most is not all. Because most people who have lung cancer are smokers. And lung cancer isn't even the only thing. There's emphysema, heart disease, etc that's all related to smoking. And way more likely. But that's all aggregate.
Climate is a lot like that. It's nothing in isolation, it's everything in aggregate.
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