Comment by helloworld11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by helloworld11 | Hacker News Reader

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>At a certain point humanity's chances with the warming are zero. Just depends on how many dominoes start to fall and how fast. We could conceivably wipe out just about all life on the planet.

The hyperbole in your claim is laughable and completely unhelpful for anyone who's on the fence about climate change and climate change measures. Even the worst evidence-based predictions of the UN and the IPCC come nowhere near the extinction of all life or anything remotely in the same ballpark.

What you're saying seems to be part of a doom and gloom fetishism that has always been innate to humanity (see centuries of apocalyptic predictions under any number of pretexts you can conceive) and has nothing to do with real science, real risks and real, possible solutions. Today, for many, this fetishism happens to have latched onto climate change, and steals some of its apparent legitimacy from the fact that the underlying problem is a real one, though not a genuine doom scenario.

The Earth has warmed drastically at many times in its past, and it will survive along with life, without problems despite even our worst human-caused warming. Even with our predicted warming trends, humanity will be a long ways from being in danger of extinction as the climate changes to a warmer one because of our economic activities. As we've already done many times in our past, we will simply adapt.

  "we will simply adapt."

You will adapt, as a person who likely lives in a colder country in the global north. A country that has tight immigration laws and that has been the prime beneficiary of emissions to date.

Tough luck to the other folks, right? They should have been born in a different country. They deal with the consequences of your pollution, as their political system crumbles and nobody lets them migrate.

First, don't make assumptions. I live in a tropical country, in the tropics.

Secondly, your emotional comment completely disregards the basic point of what I was saying, that humans in general will adapt and are actually very good at it in general.

Furthermore, even more fundamentally, my points about doom fetishism and apocalyptic exaggeration: Climate change is a problem for the vastly complex human society spread all across the globe and sustaining 8 billion people, but it is not on par with a true cataclysm for life on earth in the way something like a large asteroid impact or a "snowball earth" ice age would be. It is something that the earth, life on earth and much of human society in general will find ways to deal with. This isn't to sweep suffering under the rug, but it's worth mentioning for a dose of realistic optimism.

We simply can't predict at this point what human innovations in the next 150 years of the UN/IPCC predictions of worst case climate warming will possibly improve things or let humanity adapt in ways that mitigate the worst effects of those evidence-based predictions (as opposed to sheer hyperbole pushed forward by people obsessed with emotional arguments over death and destruction.)

Also, the whole world has benefited enormously from emissions and the economies of scale that they have allowed, not just the global north. The immense economic uplifts that have happened in the developing world during the 20th and 21st centuries were also bought with huge levels of resource use and industrialization.

> unhelpful for anyone who's on the fence about climate change

I have no interest in trying to convince anyone who is "on the fence" about climate change. It's real. Anyone who doesn't see that by now can't be convinced by facts, or overwhelming scientific consensus, they sure as hell aren't going to be convinced by me.

> Even the worst evidence-based predictions of the UN and the IPCC come nowhere near the extinction of all life or anything remotely in the same ballpark. What you're saying seems to be part of a doom and gloom fetishism

Some scientists like Frank Fenner, Henry Gee, and Stephen Hawking have already predicted that humans will go extinct in large part due to climate change, but climate research hasn't given much consideration to the worst effects of climate change and it's hard to blame them.

The IPCC has looked at tens of thousands of species of land animals and determined that as many as 14% "will likely face very high risk of extinction" and things are looking much worse for things living in our oceans (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/without-action...) but predicting the effects of climate change on animal populations is hard enough, predicting the effects of the collapse of human society is much much more difficult and also really depressing to think about. Still, scientists are saying that it's time to explore how bad climate change will be on humanity, what the collapse of civilization might look like (https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/15/8161/htm), and that human extinction is one of those outcomes we need to be thinking about. (https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2108146119)

You call it doom and gloom fetishism, but it's smart to take a hard look at the potential outcomes of climate change so we know what's at stake and can prepare as best as we can for what's coming. Even the DoD acknowledges that climate change is an "existential threat" (https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/25...).

> The Earth has warmed drastically at many times in its past,

And in the past those periods of warming, which are nothing like what we face now, still resulted in mass extinction events that killed off 80%-90% of all life on the planet. Adaptation takes time, and that's something we might not have enough of.

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