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Comment by heymijo | Hacker News Reader

If the commonality is that living in these higher latitude zones causes increases in suicide, what happens when/if the Earth hits +4C and the habitable zones become these very same areas? [see map linked below]

There would be obvious confounders, like the despair of knowing that humans decimated the planet's habitability.

https://mymodernmet.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/climat...

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>If the commonality is that living in these higher latitude zones causes increases in suicide, what happens when/if the Earth hits +4C and the habitable zones become these very same areas?

When that happens, the deaths from first-order climate related causes (floods and droughts, extreme weather phenomena, raised temperatures, etc) would be so many, that the increase in suicides due to migration to higher latitude zones would be a drop in the bucket...

If people really believe +4C is likely in 80 years, why aren’t they out marching and demanding a move to nuclear power? It’s the only option that doesn’t decimate the poor and drastically increase the price of food, and this magnitudes more likely to be acted upon. Yet the overlap between people against nuclear power and terrified of climate change is a massive majority.

People are out demanding changes.

I'm terrified of climate change. I'm also terrified of nuclear power. I'm not really against nuclear power in theory, but I'm afraid about how we're unable to think about, plan, or prepare for longer than an election cycle. If we're heading for a collapse then a lot of abandoned nuclear power plants are going to cause a lot of damage.

Not everybody is looking at the same statistics you are, and not everyone is as hopeful about our ability to store nuclear waste safely indefinitely.

I'm pro-nuclear power, but it's foolish to act like their motivations or beliefs are less real than yours because they have a different risk assessment.

Wind and solar just can't scale to what is needed to stop climate change, and if they did scale that high, would become active in increasing climate change themselves. Never mind the complexity of keeping power on 24/7 when your predictions of wind and solar availability are off.

It isn't statistics, but cold hard math.

> it's the only option that doesn’t decimate the poor and drastically increase the price of food

This is an unsupportable assertion. Nuclear power costs far more than the alternatives (mainly Wind/Solar), none of which impoverish people nor drastically increase the price of food.

The difference is that one (nuclear) can deliver energy consistently, while the other (wind/solar) simply cannot. Wind/solar just aren’t comparable at this point. If an energy source isn’t producing energy when you need it, it isn’t an energy source.

As GP said, nuclear is the only option.

You'll have to help me out. The assertion is that all things that aren't nuclear "decimate the poor and drastically increase the price of food".

Can you suggest some reading material that would tell me how wind and solar do those things?

Wind and solar just aren't viable at the scales needed.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/10/large-scale-w...

It's going to suck when the only habitable areas on the planet are dark for a quarter of the year.

It is not the latitude that is causing the suicide rates. The at-risk populations just happen to be there. Causality does not equal causation.

Pretty sure you're the one who has it backwards, and extended periods of darkness and/or vitamin D deficiency have causal factors in suicide.

Yes, this is one of the factors at play but there are no proof that seasonal depression is the main one. All of northern countries have this issue without having such high suicide rates.

This issue is a sociocultural one. There has never been any proof that Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) can increase suicide rates that much. Living up north, I can assure you that everyone is aware of SAD and is taking steps to minimize it. Omega-3, vitamin supplements, light therapy, etc.

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