Comment by madaxe_again | Hacker News Reader

Comment by madaxe_again | Hacker News Reader

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I'm afraid it will start emerging much sooner than on a decadal timescale - we're already seeing the impact in terms of crop yields and weather damage costs, all over the globe.

Simultaneously, our political systems are gyrating wildly as they struggle to function in an ever faster and more interconnected and complex world.

No, I think we're going to see a lot of bad news over the next few years. The impacts of climate change don't need to be crippling to overtopple a fragile society - just pernicious and frequent.

Demolish metropolises in the gulf states a few times more - when do they stop rebuilding? When it's impractical, or when it's impossible? Flood rural areas of England a few more years in a row - do people remain there? Do insurers continue to offer coverage? Who pays to rehome these migrants? A political crisis grows rapidly. Cynically, I note in the U.K. that the devastating regional floods have only been reported regionally. They don't really want people to get the picture it's happening everywhere.

I do wonder if some of what's happening in the media and state around migrants is to harden us for a future where many or most are dispossessed and homeless.

The anticipation of all hell breaking loose can be as bad as the reality.

You might be painting too rosy a picture of the past. Gyrating wildly? The UK no longer gets bombed by the IRA, there's no cold war, there's no crippling union strikes everywhere. As for more serious but less sexy problems, it'll take a lot of climate change to compete with disasters we've already had/are having:

Global deaths from famine from 1900-2000: 80,000,000 [1]

Global deaths from malaria from 2000-2015: 9,000,000 [3]

Global deaths from WWII: 60,000,000

Global traffic deaths in 2013: 1,000,000 [2]

We've got most of those problems on the run now, and the future looks even more promising with medical and safety tech.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines

[2] http://www.who.int/gho/road_safety/mortality/traffic_deaths_...

[3] http://www.who.int/gho/malaria/epidemic/deaths/en/

I'm not entirely sure the Cold War ever ended, we just don't use that phrase anymore so that people don't think about it or know how to refer to the arms race of continual production of nuclear weaponry around the world.

> I'm not entirely sure the Cold War ever ended

The 70% nuclear arms reduction from the late 1980s [1] and the collapse of the Soviet Union are pretty definitive.

http://www.nukestrat.com/WorldNuclearStockpiles.jpg

For the purposes of mutually assured destruction, you only need to be able to destroy civilization once.

With respect to whether a war has ended or not, I'd rather look at the annual defense budget.

The US defense budget, as a fraction of GDP, has spiked four times, to 12%, 22%, 41%, and 15% for Civil War (does not include CSA spending), WW1, WW2, and Korean War.

Since then, the Vietnam War steadily consumed about 10% of GDP for several years. After it was declared over, spending dropped to 5.5% until the Cold War started. Then it popped back up to almost 7% in 1986 before dropping down to 3.5% in 2001. Then it went up to 5.7% in 2010 before starting to drop again. We're now at about 3.3% again.

Prior to WW2, peacetime defense spending was a consistent low level of 1% to 2% of GDP. The US has never reached such low levels of military spending since.

But the Cold War is a clearly visible bump in the chart around 1986. Similarly, the War on Terror seems to have peaked in 2010. The Cold War, specifically, ended in 2001. But the US has never gone back down to a peacetime economy since the end of WW2.

With my tinfoil hat on, the numbers almost look like the lizard-people are titrating to find the optimal intensity of continual war, to maximize their revenues from military spending.

Odd terminology you use: the Cold War started in the late 1940s, sometime around Churchill's coining of the term Iron Curtain, in about 1947.

Eclipsed by the hot wars in Korea and Vietnam until at least 1969. I may be historically biased by my birthdate.

Crop yields continue to climb.

http://www.wri.org/sites/default/files/uploads/cereal_yields...

That looks like a decline and stagnation to me.

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