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Comment by pawsforthought | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> 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.

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