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Comment by mangecoeur | Hacker News Reader

Climate change in action, only going to get worse.

Yes, and i dont see anyway to change it. It will just get worse and we will do nothing.

I can see several million or even billion people die in the next 20 to 30 years.

You're being downvoted but this is pretty much what we should expect to happen (unless we take real action). A zero sum mess for livable spaces for some decades. I'm sure humanity will be awesome again in like 2300 once we get out of it and the wisdom of the mistakes are engrained in the new culture (it'd be wonderful to see).

Is nature going to put a stop to our rape of this planet by directly killing millions (maybe billions) through heat, fire, flooding, famine, drought, etc.? Is that what it will take? Am I wrong to be despondent about our capability as a species to prevent this coming catastrophe any other way?

> Is that what it will take?

Probably. That said, the brunt will be born by the poor. America may face a deep recession. India, starvation and a political reboot.

Even if all humans on the planet went to zero emissions tomorrow it is too late. We are now inside a feedback loop that will push temperature rise to +20c and sea levels up 200m or more within 200 years. Photosynthesis drops off to zero long before then. Geoengineering is the only way we don’t go extinct along with most animals.

Dear doomsayer: Citation needed.

Well you're in luck because it's likely we'll have a nuclear war soon, and that will put plenty of aerosols in the atomosphere, and cool things down.

Bad news: nuclear winter isn't actually a thing, so after the bombs drop we'll still be stuck with runaway climate change.

That is just a temporary band-aid, lasting like 8 years tops. Are we going to nuke each other regularly? Do we have enough nukes for a permanent climate change? How can we make sure we have a sufficient supply of nukes for that?

Population reduction is the most effective tool we actually have. So nature doing it for us is a good thing. Sadly it targets more likely those who emit less and not more.

> Population reduction is the most effective tool we actually have

Are you a visitor from 1900? That's exactly what people were saying 122 years ago. Prophecies of Doom are easy to make but appear to be hardly take in account a key factor: technological progress.

It doesn’t matter. We are now in a feedback loop that will take us to +20c regardless of human emissions. Geoengineering is our only hope.

Cite your sources? This is 10x any estimate I've seen.

Look into the papers collected by the ipcc. The ipcc is the most conservative possible estimates that every member nation can unanimously agree on, and many are big carbon export nations.

Even the ipcc report this year says we are fubared.

Not disagreeing on fubared but the reports I've read say 4C by 2100. Not 20.

> Population reduction is the most effective tool we actually have

This is the ultimate "do as I say, not as I do", never seen a single person who has argued that there are too many people on this planet follow it up by removing themselves from the tally. It's always other people who are the "too many".

And natural selection is a harsh mistress. If a certain cohort decides not to reproduce, then the next generation will be populated by those who did decide to reproduce, and humanity on average will have more reproductive fervor than ever. By all means, have fewer children if you want, but that does not solve the long-term problem. If you want people in general to have fewer children, then focus on educating and enriching the world's poorest, for whom having many children is a matter of survival.

Article says this isn’t a record high so what do you mean?

This may surprise people, but places near the equator are really god damn hot most of the time and when they have a heat wave it’s even hotter.

Climate change isn't only new record high temperatures. It's also, as described in the article, temperatures consistently being higher than is regular for this time of the year.

It's the new normal now.

People already think that the avarage temperature in the last 3 years was always like that

How do you tell "climate change" heat waves from "non-climate change" heat waves? I mean "heat waves" are not some recent phenomenon.

I mean, any farmer can tell you some growing seasons are really warm, others cold, some very dry and others very wet. No two seasons are the same.

This is more or less covered in the article as well:

> Meteorologists from the India Meteorological Department (IMD) found that March 2022 was the hottest March for India as a whole since 1901, with average highs jumping to a staggering 3.35 degrees Fahrenheit (1.86 degrees Celsius) above the climatological average.

Heat waves happen, and have happened before, but if they become more common, longer, hotter on average etc you can see this in the statistics.

If the last time this happened was 1901 (but 1901 was hotter), it doesn't sound "more common"?

It's literally more than 100 years since the last time this level of heat occurred. Sounds similar to 100-year floods?

My understanding is that 1901 wasn't particularly hot. They mention 1901 because that's when systematic collection of weather data began.

"Meteorologists from the India Meteorological Department (IMD) found that March 2022 was the hottest March for India as a whole since 1901".

As the other comment already pointed out, the study linked in the article [0] makes it clear that it's not the case that 1901 was the hottest March, but instead 1901 is the year that data gathering began. The warmest March on record was 2010.

> Characteristics of Average maximum, minimum and mean temperature for the country as a whole and over four homogenous region during March 2022 and its comparison since 1901

> [...]

> The country averaged monthly mean temperatures of 26.67ºC is the second warmest since 1901 (The warmest year on record was 2010 (26.671 ºC)).

[0] https://internal.imd.gov.in/press_release/20220402_pr_1551.p...

By 1 thousandth of a degree C?

Your observation is correct that for all practical intents and purposes, this March was as hot as the hottest March ever recorded since bookkeeping began in 1901.

You cannot tell the difference between types of events. However the science says that the frequency increases.

That is what is actually the thing that climate change models say: more exteme weather events.

Climate != Weather

But climate shapes weather.

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