Comment by prometheus76 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by prometheus76 | Hacker News Reader

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This will open up a huge can of worms, but I am asking in good faith, because I have never really heard it articulated clearly. What is bad about the climate changing?

Here's what I understand so far: The climate is a complex system, which means it's the interplay of many complex and/or chaotic systems, which means it's inherently unpredictable. The climate changes. It has changed dramatically over the course of the earth's existence, as far as we can surmise from available geologic records, etc. The main argument I have heard is "yes, the climate changes, but not at this rate! Ever!" Which seems like a very dubious claim, in my mind, because we don't have very good weather data going back very far, so we don't actually know if that's the case.

I really want to understand the fear and anxiety people are experiencing with regard to climate change, because from my current understanding of the data and of the inherent unpredictability of complex systems, I don't.

Tangentially related: if we are anxious about the climate changing, why do we think it should stay the same, and also, what would "ideal steady state" look like?

I am prepared for "You're obviously an idiot..." kinds of comments. I'm genuinely asking these questions in good faith, hoping someone can help me understand the panic.

What is bad is the variance. We know that the variance in weather is increasing, and the average temperature is also moving up.

Yes earth has been hot and cold, but the point is to avoid enormous fluctuations due to variance as they lead to extreme events. We saw huge droughts and floods in Europe, China, and the US, events that we hadn’t seen in a long time.

We also know that the variance causes a split of the polar vortex in Europe which creates heat domes and traps air from Northern Africa. The world we have built was not designed to withstand such heat, see infrastructure melting in England last summer, and much of the world is not prepared to deal with extreme heat, ask the Scandinavians how they handled last couple of summers, I know I suffered in CPH.

We also know that it is caused by our emissions, while we use “CO2” it’s a few different gases and we scale their potency to equivalent CO2.

I can recommend “firmament” as an introduction to weather science. Dr Simon Clark is an excellent science communicator with a PhD in meteorology, and has a great YT channel.

Thank you for the details and for a useful reference. I'll definitely spend some time taking this all in.

To ELI5 your question: the infrastructure that makes the world go round is located in the zones that will be flooded as sea level rises. It will be a huge cost to migrate this, and it isn't being done, which means a potential for massive disruptions in everything that makes society possible. It is SO expensive to address, 95% of the world's politicians are just pretending it isn't happening.

The magnitude of the change is far beyond anything that has been experienced over "recent history" where "recent" is on a geological time scale. It's not on the order of the "little ice ages" and such of the past. It is extreme.

Change, apropos of nothing, is not positive or negative; but when the climate changes so much that the ocean turns into acid and the animals start to die off, people will have concerns.

> What is bad about the climate changing?

More severe storms, droughts/desertification, ocean levels rising, oceans acidifying, ocean currents potentially hauting, lower crop yields, loss of arable land, fights over remaining land that is livable, mass migrations, mass extinctions.

Basically, the world we evolved to live in is changing such that most of life isn't going to be capable of living in the new world. So mass extinctions will occur (and have already started) and the next wave of life suited for this new climate will emerge and take over (hint: this won't be humans).

The civilization we've built, globally, is dependent on a certain climate. Certain places are livable and some aren't. Climate change threatens that. Even a few inches of global sea rise threatens millions of people who live in places like Miami or on islands. Many animals as well can only survive under certain climate conditions. So, the Earth will not crack in half, but those of us who live here will have a lot to deal with in the next few decades. Wouldn't it be better to just (or "just") reduce our greenhouse gas emissions?

Just a layman, but as far as I understand it:

Our current societal organization requires the climate to be within certain bounds, our current way of living, and the things we rely on to survive (plants, livestock) only work within certain temperature ranges with a certain stability/predicability.

adding Greenhouse gasses to atmophere -> traps more heat -> increases volatility of the system

Which causes more intense heatwaves, more intense colds, quicker changes in weather patterns, rare weather events becoming more common.

Which in turn ruins harvests, increase scarcity, creates migration waves, creates conflicts and societal instability which affects everything because of how interconnected our way of living is.

The poorest people are the first ones affected because it requires money to mitigate the effects, so you might say, so what because you yourself are in a rich place, but your rich economy requires on products produced in cheaper places.

There probably is a point where it becomes prohibitively expensive to continue our way of living, because the cheaper places stop working, so it's a good idea for rich countries to take expensive measures now to prevent everything falling apart in the future.

And personally I feel like it's also our moral obligation because the richest countries are responsible for a large amount of excess greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.

I think this is a very good question! IIRC when the effects of greenhouse gasses were discussed in the late 1800s, some people thought that it might be a positive thing, and might make the planet more comfortable to live on.

I think "Climate Change" as a term doesn't really strike at the heart of the issue. The issue is not that 'any change is bad,' but rather that the climate is changing (1) in a way that will negatively impact people, and (2) because of _our_ greenhouse gas emissions.

There are many negative impacts, but here's one major one: farmers grow certain foods because their farms experience certain climates. If your farm gets too hot, or too little rain, or too much rain, then your crops won't grow. The world bank has a report analyzing this particular issue in depth: https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/6766014682496426...

If you're interested, there are many more reports, from different sources, analyzing the varied effects that climate change will have on humanity.

Thank you for pointing me to resources. That's what I was hoping for. I work in data science, so I am not a scientist per se, but I know how to read statistics. I appreciate you taking the time to give me a detailed answer and links to other references.

In many places, humans have adapted to live on the verge of the survivable wet bulb temperature. These places have been relatively static in temperature and humidity for hundreds of years and while they may have occasional spikes, it's something mitigatable. Climate change means longer and higher extremes, and if an area exceeds the wet bulb temperature then that means any sort of outside work or function is actively deadly.

Evidence points to the specific change we are charging forward into resulting in huge amounts of drought, famine and flooding around the world. This will lead to resource wars and refugee crises at a scale we have not yet dealt with.

Or, if we somehow set the greenhouse gas levels back to where it was not long ago and kept it there, we would Not have tremendous excess amounts of drought, famine, flooding, wars and refugees.

I guess the problem is actually fast climate change. Faster than evolution can adapt maybe, at least for many species.

And it’s just potentially gonna change life as we know it. For example, the currents in the oceans are changing. This could potentially eradicate a large number of maritime species pretty fast. Which in turn are food not available anymore to other species. And so on.

My eyes were opened when I saw the calculations for how many watts of energy a 1 C change in the atmosphere equals. It is something like the world's total energy output over a ten-year period.

Think of the weather system as a huge engine. We are effectively stepping on the accelerator with an enormous number of terawatts. That's a lot of wind and rain.

    Rapidly increasing likelihood of exceeding 50 °C in parts of the Mediterranean and the Middle East due to human influence

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-023-00377-4

Temperatures over 40°C allready killed older people in Greece and elsewhere. Retirees in Switzerland filed a lawsuit at the highest european court.

An increase in atmospheric concentration of CO2 leads to cascading systemic failures and an endogenous positive feedback loop that is moving us very quickly out of the - frightfully and incomprehensibly narrow - window of human habitability. Some of us know it now, some of us will become intimately acquainted with it soon enough.

[0] (data warning, large image file) has a pretty good demonstration of the scale we are looking at here. We may not have accurate weather data into the past, but we do have good climate data into the past. A figure part way through goes lightly into the kinda of deviations to the data would be realistic. If you need harder evidence than a comic you will need to dig up some papers.

[0] https://xkcd.com/1732/

XKCD has a graph that tries to make this feel real:

https://xkcd.com/1732/

But since you've premeptively dismissed the science behind it, maybe a web comic won't convince you either.

I'm not sure what gave you the impression you articulate in your last sentence there. I haven't dismissed any science. I simply haven't seen enough of it to come to a conclusion. I was asking for more information and a lot of people, including you, have helped me learn more about the topic.

You're getting a lot of the usual talking points back. People assume you're stupid if ask questions like this, and you get the equivalent of someone speaking louder and slower when they realize someone doesn't speak english.

Anyway, I can see the point that something equally or more disruptive will happen, so, whatever. As others have pointed out, we're all indirectly very bought in to the current equilibrium, even more so those in power. There's always resistance to change, and so I'd say it's that that people are against, rather than the end state. (And of course it's been turned into a big political power grab, so it's in everyone's interests for you to belive either it's the worst threat we face or it's not happening at all and we can ignore it).

> People assume you're stupid if ask questions like this, and you get the equivalent of someone speaking louder and slower when they realize someone doesn't speak english.

I'd genuinely tried to answer the question. If this came across this way, I'd love some feedback so I can not come across this way in the future.

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