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Comment by nynx | Hacker News Reader

It’s nice to submit to call of civilizational collapse every once in a while, but it’s not a realistic view. Yes, climate change is going to affect billions of people, but from what I can tell, things are moving in the right direction and we’re on track to avoid the worst even with barely any political action.

If it was suddenly 2050 and none of our technology had improved, we’d be fucked. But it’s not a useful perspective to assume that technological progression will stop. Solar panels have dropped in price by literal orders of magnitude. It seems like nuclear is coming back into vogue. Space-based power seems like it might be economically viable in a few decades, even.

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> "Based on this I felt like some of the big winners in 2050 will be Rust, Clojure and Go."

I mean the guy may be delusional, but he's right on the climate part.

Even if our tech improves and we cut carbon to zero in a fairytaleish fashion we're still up for a 3 deg temp increase till 2100 which will be rather catastrophic. Of course the developed world will be hit the least due to its location, so we'll likely be fine for the most part but it will be troubling time regardless. It all depends on cascading issues that we can't really predict, like warming causing some fish to go extinct that ate eggs of some insect that will now breed uncontrollably and push out useful pollinators from the ecosystem, leading to crop failure and such.

From the literature I’ve read, that doesn’t seem right. If we cut all emissions to zero by 2050, total temperature rise would be more like 2C afaik.

I mean that's in the ballpark, few people agree on the exact numbers given that it depends on so many unknown factors. There's the oceans outgassing the CO2 they've absorbed so far, ice melting resulting in permanent greater sunlight absorption, clathrate gun, etc.

The rule of thumb (iirc) is that 1C would be business as usual, 4C a Mad Max hell scape, and we'll likely end up somewhere in between. The closer to which side we'll be depends on how well we implement countermeasures... and how much luck we have.

Yep. For anyone curious to learn more, here’s a good summary of this energy technology transition: https://www.tsungxu.com/clean-energy-transition-guide/

Yep, this is the comment. We've been on and are continuing along a path to disruptive new tech in a whole cluster of key societal sectors, and this will change the whole game to the point where by 2030, we'll wonder why we were worried in 2022(see: any Tony Seba lecture). It's not just energy production but the paradigms of land use, transport, communications, materials engineering, all shifting at once, with orders-of-magnitude consequences in each. It'll make solving the climate issue be a slam dunk - we still have to make it a reality but there will be plenty of capacity to do so.

The ONLY techs we should be caring about over the 50-year horizon are the disruptive ones.

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