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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

Studying this topic is very interesting in a world where climate change threatens to make whole regions essentially uninhabitable. I think the conflicts caused by climate change will be a much bigger threat to humanity than climate change itself.

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Environmental stressors also make it far easier for an unscrupulous party to create a casus belli, and you should absolutely expect to see that happen in the next few years.

I don't see these sorts of claims as falsifiable.

History is not a field where it's easy to make falsifiable claims (until we invent time machines). But I don't think that completely prevents us from learning something from the past.

"History is written by historians." Frank Herbert

> History is not a field where it's easy to make falsifiable claims (until we invent time machines). But I don't think that completely prevents us from learning something from the past.

"History is written by historians." Frank Herbert

Question: Is evolution falsifiable?

Of course it is. What has that got to do with anything?

It was a rhetoric to “I don't see these sorts of claims as falsifiable.”

Creationists regularly posit that Evolution is not falsifiable. Popperian falsifiability is being abandoned these days and instead Neumann’s definition of Science and scientific theory is increasingly embraced.

Isn’t that true of almost every field that deals with humans?

Health - coffee/alcohol is good for you this week and bad for you next week

Sociology and Psychology - is anything in these fields truly falsifiable?

History - same

That coffee and alcohol thing only happens in certain tabloids and other trash media. Both have positive and negative effects on your health depending on how much you drink of it. Having a little is fine, drinking it 24/7 is not.

The civil war in Syria started with a famine, which is certainly evidence for the claim. Culture preserves adaptation strategies long after those ideas become maladaptive.

But nature is bad enough. As a climatologist, what keeps me up at night is Bangladesh. A couple meters of sea level rise, and a direct hit from a super typhoon, and we could easily see millions of refugees. And as India continues its tilt towards a Hindu state, conflict could also happen there.

We apply a different standard here, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

The concept is equivalent to "Bring a coat, it might rain" not "It's going to rain"

It'll be as falsifiable as many other questions that historians grapple with (e.g. did famine X lead to conflict/instability Y?), but only once the warming has happened and we're looking retrospectively. The best we can do now is an educated guess that large amounts warming will lead to migration away from hotter countries which will lead to some instability.

The US DoD has already said similar.

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