Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

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> I guess that opinion comes down to whether you think Climate Change is an existential threat to our civilisation or not.

Not necessarily. I don't think climate change is an existential threat to our civilization; human civilization has already dealt with problems much bigger than the average temperature going up by a couple of degrees and sea level rising a couple of feet. (Personally, I think the biggest existential threat to human civilization comes from humans with false beliefs and too much political power.)

And yet, I think nuclear energy should be a no-brainer. (I have no problem with renewables or storage either; I just don't think they can provide enough reliable base load power by themselves.) Why? Because we need to stop buying foreign oil for national security reasons. Which is not an economic reason--economically speaking, oil is still pretty cheap--but I still think it's a good one.

> already dealt with problems much bigger than the average temperature going up by a couple of degrees and sea level rising a couple of feet

With respect, I think you may be underselling the effects! The chaotic knock-on of species loss; water pressures causing human migration; a loss of half of the ice on the third pole (the Himalayas) that provides water to over a billion people; acidification of the oceans. We could go on but the point I'd like to hammer home is this isn't anything at all like the previous crises in our brief 60k year sojourn: the anthropocene is an apocalyptic event that will wipe out half of the species on earth (probably).

> this isn't anything at all like the previous crises in our brief 60k year sojourn

We do not know that this is true. Alarmists claim it, but they have no evidence to back it up. For example, we don't know what the ice in the Himalayas was like, say, 6000 years ago. We do know that as glaciers are retreating now, they are uncovering evidence of human habitation in many mountain areas, which is evidence that there have been previous warm periods where there was no ice there as well. That is evidence against the claim you are making. But you don't hear about that from alarmists.

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