Comment by throwaway936482 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway936482 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

throwaway936482

The problem with this argument is that climate change presents an existential risk for our current global civilisation and ability to support the numbers of people currently living on earth. If climate change (along with the other types of environmental destruction we are currently reaping) is as bad as predicted (and scientists are actually fairly certain of the likely impacts. Read the IPCC reports and then remember that these are the outcome of a process designed to produce the most conservative estimates) then we face an enormous die off of the world's population as large swathes of the planet become essentially uninhabitable at current densities. The costs of mitigating climate change are, in comparison, tiny. A few percent of GDP if we don't replace current polluting industries with cleaner ones. Given this it makes sense to mitigate against climate change, even if it turns out that the predictions are overly pessimistic, because the risks are so high. It's similar to taking out fire insurance. Sure the chances of your house or business burning down are pretty low, but the impact on you if they do is so high that it makes sense to pay the relatively low cost.

Where in the IPCC reports do you find an existential risk to humanity? I’ve read most of AR5 and I haven’t come across it.

I’m worried about climate change, but activists like extinction rebellion are far from telling the truth, and the doomsaying is preventing action.

I don't claim an existential risk to humanity, I claim there's an existential risk to our current global civilization which manages to feed, cloth and shelter almost 8 billion people in largely tolerable conditions and which will need to find room for another 1.5 billion before global population peaks. If parts of the world where large numbers of people live become heat stressed to the extent that living in them is impossible without air conditioning and agriculture starts to become a lot less productive in currently fertile areas then the secondary effects of billions of people trying to find somewhere else to live in a short space of time are likely to be not good. I don't think we face extinction. I do think we face having to transition to a low carbon lifestyle. We can either do that in a peaceful way and maintain and even increase the standard of living for the majority of the human race or we can do nothing and face decades of major disruption that kills huge numbers of people.

Just thinking something doesn't make it true. Why can't they just use air conditioners like everyone else in hot climates does? They'll all be rich soon afterall, with poverty due to be effectively extinct by the end of the century.

Who are these billions of people? I haven't seen predictions of anywhere near a billion people needing to migrate.

You need to stick to the science here because there's so much misinformation spread by activists.

You're surely right that it's a risk to civilization but lots of things are and we still have to try. Falling birth rates are a risk, spread of Islam is a risk, meteor strike is a risk, nuclear war is a risk, pandemic is a risk, and importantly, suddenly stopping using fossil fuels is a risk! But these are just unquantified imaginary risks so we don't need to drop everything and solve them or we'd never get anywhere.

> enormous die off of the world's population as large swathes of the planet become essentially uninhabitable at current densities

Can you provide any more details to go on for that? I can't find such predictions in an IPCC report but they're huge so any extra specifics would help.

I can't imagine a place being essentially uninhabitable. Las Vegas and Israel are both full of people, for instance. Almost everywhere is uninhabitable without shelter.

I'm pretty sure nobody is predicting existential risk to civilization. You really need a reference for that.

Here we go

"2°C warming would imply [...] average GDP per capita would be reduced by 13% by 2100. By comparison, economic impacts at 1.5°C on GDP growth would be almost indistinguishable from current conditions (1°C)." https://350.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/The_Peoples_Dossi...

13% is like setting the global economy back 10 years by 2100. If we stop using oil, how much will it reduce GDP?

Other predictions are pretty tame, like a 60% increase in fires by 2100. So what? That's not as bad as HIV or cigarettes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com