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Since you’re unsurprisingly taking a beating here in HN, let me reframe your general mood.

The planet is and will be fine, it’s our way of living and society that will go, and that will not happen in your lifetime. So there’s no need for you to suffer with that gloom.

Another even more practical reason: it’s unproductive.

Most of that anxiety is offloaded from those in true power and resold by “the media”. It’s obviously a serious problem but they are feeding you mostly bullshit in order to meet their revenue targets or agendas.

Don’t be a victim of them before being a victim of climate change.

> The planet is and will be fine,

You can't know that. Rising temperatures, acidity and water levels in oceans, deforestation, overfishing, drastic temperature amplitudes and higher frequency of natural disasters can all be devastating for whole ecosystems, which could have cascading effects. Nobody can reliably predict how all of that will turn out, but it could turn out really bad. Will the planet "be fine" if a big portion of ocean life is extinct and huge swaths of land are uninhabitable? Depends on your definition of fine i guess.

Huge amounts of life and species have died out in the past and will continue to happen. This time we have an hand in it, but you don't see any other species aware or preoccupied by it, so it's also morality issue.

My response was in order to address this generalized anxiety and guilt that's mostly unproductive and in some cases quite maquiavelic.

So yes, "the planet" will be fine. Our coddled asses attached to our infantilized minds probably not, so instead of this schizophrenic attitude ranging from "We're doomed!" to "I want to talk to the manager", maybe we should be more productive and do our best while understanding we might not get what we want and that's "fine".

The ecosphere has been around for billions of years. It's been through much much, MUCH worse. It'll be fine. Maybe some hairless apes might suffer a bit, and a few thousand species might be replaced by something else, but in the long run the planet is going to thrive.

This is normalcy bias. Since it’s worked out well so far, it’ll work out well in future. But there is a point of no return - if the concentration of atmospheric carbon exceeds a certain level, it will melt the ice caps, which will increase the temperature further, which will cause dissolved CO2 in the oceans to enter the atmosphere, which will … you get the idea. There’s a potential feedback loop at the end of which the planet becomes like Venus.

Not saying there won’t be life left on the planet even if it looks like Venus. Life is adaptable. But it wouldn’t flourish like it does today.

Is there any credible science indicating that "Earth turns into Venus" is even remotely possible if we were to deliberately put all our efforts into triggering it?

I've never heard this scenario from anyone who has spent any time reading the science. Unless you can give some details of why this is something that's worth having on the radar, I'm going to dismiss that scenario as a fear-mongering doomsday prediction.

> It's been through much much, MUCH worse

The ecosphere, yes, but I'm concerned about humanity specifically.

Also, it might be possible the same argument could hold for Venus. It probably thrived (at reasonable temperatures) for billions of years before it didn't.

I mean, I’m pretty concerned about the magnitude of suffering of those hairless apes. That seems like a sufficiently bad outcome to warrant a change in behavior and even doomsday rhetoric.

As Carlin so eloquently put it, "The planet is fine. The people are fucked".

Any way, it won't happen in a day, and as with any pandemic humans are great at finding solutions, (see covid). Sure some people will die along the way as they don't get with the program, but that's expected.

Unless our energy sources become useless (ie. sun blackout AND depleted oil AND no wind) we will have a way to keep warm, produce oxygen and grow food.

The worst case would be we'd have to move into underground bunkers.

> and as with any pandemic humans are great at finding solutions, (see covid)

My takeaway is the opposite: COVID is a lot simpler on a problem solving scale than climate change and we're not exactly doing well with COVID.

Organizing billions of people is not a simple problem in either case.

Do you have any criterion by which you would accept the planet as "not fine"? If the entire biosphere were eliminated by supernova, would that be "fine"?

Conversations about what we should and should not do cannot be held on a basis of nihilism. I respectfully suggest that people with the view of "fuck the planet, I'll be dead anyway" should not be permitted a voice at the public policy table.

> If the entire biosphere were eliminated by supernova, would that be "fine"?

Yes, because it's out of our control.

> Conversations about what we should and should not do cannot be held on a basis of nihilism.

100% agree, just as they shouldn't be held on the basis of fear, panic and self-righteous superficial knowledge based on the arrogance that "we" are so precious and "can do anything", a kind of celestial exceptionalism "we" use to point out the flaws in others but not in ourselves.

> I respectfully suggest that people with the view of "fuck the planet, I'll be dead anyway" should not be permitted a voice at the public policy table.

I 100% respectfully disagree, mostly because it's not practical and will backfire. Also the assumption that others are dumb and shouldn't be listened can only come from people who are very narrow minded to the point they themselves are "dumb".

You know whats worse than people who say climate change doesnt exist? People like you who spout off unsubstantiated defeatist nonsense about "why it's too late" and "it doesn't matter". Because people like you trick others into thinking the same, and not giving a damn.

Agreed. We live in a world with many grave challenges—and yet the correct response is still hope.

No, the correct response is action.

not mutually exclusive

True, yet Action is impossible to coordinate without hope.

There's a lot of pessimism and cynicism in the world these days. I think movies make that clear. There are so many movies about dystopian futures where everything is hopeless and everything is inevitably going to shit. The general mood is very different from what you saw in movies from the 1980s.

Personally, I think that any action we can take towards making things better will pay off. Action is better than inaction. There will be negative consequences to climate change, but acting sooner could save millions, even hundreds of millions of lives, so don't give up now. We're just finally starting to see real adoption of electric cars and grid-scale batteries, those industries are set to boom. The solution is at our doorstep, now is not the time to just go "ah, fuck it, why bother?".

I don't feel tricked into not caring when threatened with living on a barely livable planet. I don't know if he or she is right but if anything, when I read it, it rather made me think about what would ecological armed struggle against the biggest polluters would look like.

If the biggest polluters petrol/oil, then you'll be fighting people with working vehicles.

To put things in perspective

We've already warmed up the planet by about 1C from pre-industrial times, and...well, pretty much nothing consequential happened

Based on the most likely temperature impacts of the most realistic emission scenarios, we're looking at an additional 0.8C (optimistic) to 1.5C (pessimistic) on top of that by the end of the century, with the temperatures plateauing shortly afterwards. No, Earth will not become the next Venus, nor will Greenland and Antarctic melt (it's -30C there right now)

You assume linear relationships between temperature and "bad things happening", but the climate system is not linear at all.

Greenland is literally melting. Google it.

looks around Yep, yeah, nothing consequential happening around the world. No widespread unprecedented flash floods in multiple areas of the globe simultaneously. No megafires burning on multiple continents. No temperature records being broken and re-broken by wide margins multiple times a year every single year. Nothing really at all. I don't know what they're talking about.

...is "Greenland and the Antarctic are still cold" really your hot take on climate change?

What a boring anti-science trope. At least the anti-science denialists aren’t so negative.