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Comment by lexapro | Hacker News Reader

It's called paraphrasing (and yes, dramatization to make a point).

From the comment I replied to:

>reality of unavoidable climate catastrophe

>how dire the situation is

I read this as "doomed". And if we are already doomed and nothing can be done about it, shouldn't we eat as much meat and take as many flights as we want? This is how a lot of people think when they read stuff like this, and honestly, they have a point. Either it's unavoidable and dire OR we can do something about it (by limiting emissions). So why ask people to make sacrifices and then also tell them we are doomed anyway?

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There are degrees of how doomed we will be, depending on what we do. That's why "paraphrasing" using words like "doomed" that imply something binary are really unhelpful. There's still a vast difference between a +2.5° and a +4° world.

Exactly my point, why not say it like that?

OP literally didn't say anything except

> There's no chance of limiting warming to 2 degrees anymore. It's just not a realistic goal.

They said nothing about 2° being the tipping point between hope and hopelessness. Only that we're more screwed than some people still hope we are.

I think that's more of a reflection of you than the OP. You read it as "doomed", I read it was "dire, but still fixable if we do more"

How do you see: “I know the reality of unavoidable climate catastrophe is uncomfortable to talk about.”

As a suggestion of “fixable” they literally said it was unavoidable.

I think the problem we're having talking to each other is you think an unavoidable climate catastrophe is "doomed", and I think "doomed" is more like the complete extinction of the human race, which is definitely still fixable, from what I know.

Doomed mean to unavoidably suffer some negative outcome in the future, but not necessarily death/extinction.

Someone that forgot about an upcoming test is doomed.

Please have a more charitable interpretation of comments here. Even if some event (like climate change, a hurricane, etc.) is bound to occur that doesn't mean there is nothing that can be done to mitigate damage or impact

If it is unavoidable than the question becomes how do we build to handle it instead of how do we prevent it - the first question may involve much more carbon output during the building phase, for example.

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