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Comment by tiahura | Hacker News Reader

Is there a proof demonstrating that the climate in 1800 was optimal and any change is detrimental?

It's not so much that a different setpoint is worse per se "at steady state", it's that the world has been in a fairly steady state for quite a while now, with little variation, and our structures have grown to depend on that particular state. Think of the locations of cities, the allocation of agricultural crops in given regions, the whole economic system built up around that, etc.

Essentially we've been able to rely on things being a particular way for ~10,000 years or so, and if things keep going the way they are everything will (a) be different from what we've grown to expect and (b) be changing unpredictably for a while to come, meaning we can't just set ourselves up for a new configuration.

This is the way I understand it, anyway.

Optimal for who/what/where ? That's the question

Things are changing fast and large population clusters will have to be displaced as a result which is ... less than optimal

Rapid change in any direction is for sure detrimental, you (country level) have to reorganise your supply chain for everything that's weather/climate dependant, and guess what, there is a lot of that (food, energy, &c.)

Random example; train tracks are engineered with the local temperature in mind because they contract/expand with heat, which means we'll have to replace a shit ton of tracks, is this something the average joe could have imagined no ? Well there are hundreds of other scenarios you don't know about that will kick your ass real soon

https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7bwb3/why-the-uks-trains-ca...

Was 1800 the optimal best weather for everything, everywhere ? No, but we definitely built our entire infrastructures and supply chains based on that.

If you’re going to make changes that affect the lives of billions of people, the burden of proof is on those proposing the change.

So if you have a good argument that extreme summer heat and flooding is actually good, go ahead and make it. But the benefit should be global. The people in Bangladesh shouldn’t lose their homes and livelihoods.

What a wonderfully contrarian statement. Surely a climate that destroys our way of living is less than optimal, no?

"Just asking questions"

I thought fundamentally changing our way of living was the way to halt climate change?

Of course not. But without a cap to emissions, we're looking at continuing increasing temperatures. We have to stop somewhere, and stoping before Miami is underwater seems as good a place as any.

No, of course not. But nature has no mechanism to handle extremely rapid change in climate.

Now I don't agree with attitude of person above but we had ice ages

Consider how slowly we were coming out of the last ice age before fossil fuels sped things up. The best geological evidence we have of previous rapid changes are extinction events. As others have said it’s not the change itself but the rate of change that is concerning.

The ice age transitions were over a much longer period of time. And of course had very transformative effects on the landscape.

The onset of ice ages is relatively slow - the last ice age took about 10,000 years from its onset to reach the peak of of the ice sheets, and another 10,000 years or so for the ice age to end. At the glacial maximum average global temperatures were about 6°C colder than today, and we've managed to raise temperatures by 1°C in only 100 years.

Changes at the speed of man-made global warming (or faster) do happen, but they are uncommon and tend to be associated with catastrophic events and mass extinctions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...

Syre but it also caused many extinction events, yet biosphere survived just fine.

And that somehow means it's good to start the next extinction?

I mean, this sort of absolute statement is bullshit, summer and winter is extremely rapid and far more dramatic than the few degrees "forecasted" over the next century. Plants and animals adapt every year, some die, many thrive, things change. I am not questioning that humans are making things worse, but "has no mechanism"?? Simply false. Migration is one obvious mechanism. Storing more heat in the ocean is another.

> Migration is one obvious mechanism.

Something humans are famously tolerant of each other doing? No, the other thing.

> Storing more heat in the ocean is another.

This is also part of the problem; storing CO2 in the ocean has adverse side effects too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification

But organisms are adapted to summer and winter cycles, they don't suddenly appear, they have been the same for ages.

But change the timing a little, and you have eggs hatching weeks before the caterpillars that the chicks eat appear, and lots of them die. They co-evolved for a fixed time at which spring appeared, now that timing is off and evolution isn't quick enough to move along with climate change.

They have NOT been the same for ages. They have varied wildly with mild and harsh summers and winters. Lots of confidence in thinly observed theories. Caterpillars and chicks having a rough Spring is part of nature.

But there have been mild and harsh summers and winters for ages. They don't have to be the same every year for animals to adapt. But if winters suddenly were twice as long and twice as cold, you can bet that the prior adaptions don't suffice anymore. That is what we're talking about.

Good point. We should stop global warming for Homo sapiens profits, and additionally for some existing animals and plants. For very long term, climate changes without human activity and we'll be end.

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