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Comment by lanstin | Hacker News Reader

You think if a billion people lose monsoon water, some of them won't put together a hand-made virus to wreak revenge on the wealthy nations responsible for the carbon burn and for climate denial? I mean, maybe, people have a capacity for good, but also for anger and revenge.

Carbon caused climate change isn't a carry-ing capacity / overpopulation / over utilization issue (and is now somewhat dwarfing those issues). It is a big change that has some chance of devastating a lot of biological based support systems all at the same time.

The risk to technological civilization is not in the direct effects, but in the human mediated effects. Not that leaving on yeast and water would be that good.

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What's your estimate of the probability of collapse, and why?

I'd put it in the low single digits or maybe lower, on the basis that a cascade of things need to go wrong: first you need a climate scenario that exceeds the IPCC estimates, then you need significant damage or conflict, then you need a potential collapse event to emerge from the conflict, then the event has to trigger collapse on its own or other events have to occur and combine with it.

Curious to hear your thoughts though, because I haven't put firm numbers on anything or looked deeply into any of the research on collapse specifically.

https://youtu.be/fliCxyAwBWU

Can you explain what I'm meant to be getting out of this 47 minute long review of current climate indicators?

I understand that climate change is progressing rapidly, is going to cause very bad things to happen (my earlier comment mentioned hundreds of millions of human deaths as an example), and should be mitigated. What I question is whether the total collapse of industrial civilisation as a result of climate change is likely to occur. This is as opposed to economic stagnation, famine, war, widespread desertification, unliveable wet-bulb temperatures, or anything else short of a total collapse.

Depends on your meaning of collapse. If you mean extinction of only humans, that's not gonna happen. Even in total nuclear fallout, few people will survive underground.

> economic stagnation, famine, war, widespread desertification, unliveable wet-bulb temperatures

For most people those are collapse and it's definitely going to happen and will come much sooner. The video shows it's going on the worst case scenario way.

You are asking to predict what people will do in the future. Not a historically profitable venture. Having the Monsoon rains stop dropping snows into the Himalayas would be super bad. Just flooding Bangladesh with a meter or few meters would displace a lot of people less popular than Floridians. Is Montana going to take a few million Muslim refugees?

But maybe like Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent book, it will all work together and we will make a new carbon based cryptocurrency backed by the bankers, switch to blimps and all ends well. I have kids and am teaching them to corporate with people rather than become preppers, so I guess I am optimistic de facto.

I'm asking to put some numbers on our predictions in a conversation that's already had us predict what people will do, as a tool to dig deeper into the factors that could lead civilisation to collapse.

Being totally accurate when predicting the future is impossible, but discussion of the factors is useful in its own right.

I have to disagree. You are asking for a path integral when the local derivatives of various paths are clear, and In a problem space where things can always get worse. Each moment in each place lets climb the curve towards better reality.

100%. Thanks to globalization and just-in-time economy, supply chains are already overextended and on the brink of failure. Once the first cracks set in, the consequences will cascade until most of agro-industrial production will grind to a halt.

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