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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

It's not going to decimate us or kill half of us or most of us, it's going to kill us all? What scenarios get us from here to there, such that nobody can adapt to the changes? Is this hyperbole or do you really think that human extinction is the probable result of AGW?

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It's an interesting thought. Mass displacement will be a huge issue though. While we do have plenty of landmass in theory, migration of major cities is just.. I cannot possibly fathom how that could ever be organized. We'd panic, loot grocery stores, rob pharmacies, etc. I mean look at what this pandemic has done. You can't even buy cans of beans or toilet paper! My local store is out of bags of dry rice. Of _rice_.

I don't recall where I heard it but before I knew it was a quote, I used to say this all the time: humanity is three square meals away from total annihilation. One day without food and humans will revert right back to our caveman "attack other human, take food" lizard brains.

I definitely went a little off topic from your original post but, "adapt to the changes" isn't honestly something I can fathom happening. I don't know where you live - be it a city or suburbs or otherwise - but think about 30 million people showing up and tell me that doesn't end in a massive disaster.

Massive disaster can be a huge distance from human extinction. A 1% die off is a massive disaster but even a 99% megadeath is 75 million people short of killing us all. I haven't seen any likely AGW scenarios that get us close to that. Maybe someone could point me that way.

I was using the Planet Venus as a historical precedent of what happens to a planet in our solar system in the conditions of a runaway greenhouse gas effect when I wrote that.

I'm a cryptography-focused security engineer, not a climate scientist.

Here's a credible paper asserting that the net feedback is negative:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/16000870.2019.1...

I'd have to know a lot more before deciding that either a runaway greenhouse or net cooling is plausible, let alone likely.

The end of human industrialized civilization is only a reasonable outcome as a secondary effect (e.g nuclear war destroying most of society). And even then I'm dubious if we'd reach human extinction rather than just the end of industrial society.

Even with 5 or 7 degrees celsius warming there's still a lot of habitable land. The main concern is that agricultural capacity will be lower overall. This will disproportionately impact poorer countries that have less resources to do things like improve irrigation infrastructure, or set up large thermonuclear desalination plants to cope with lower water supply.

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