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Comment by jghn | Hacker News Reader

"but recent climate news has just gone from bad, to worse, to grim, to 'ah well, glad I didn't have kids and I'm dead in the 2060's'."

I'm in my mid-40s and don't have kids. In the last 5-6 years I've gone from figuring it'll be ok-ish in my lifetime but will suck for the next generation, to legit wondering if life will be a complete hellscape by the time I'm a senior citizen. And more important, what if anything that means in terms of how I live the rest of my life. For instance do I live life to the fullest now? Or do I skimp and scrounge now to have some hope of surviving when things really go sideways.

I hope that it's just doomerism on my part, but the fact that someone like myself is already putting mental energy towards this does say something in my opinion

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You are right to worry; these things are insanely nonlinear, and we're already well into the meat of several feed-forward loops / tipping points (e.g., melting permafrost releasing gigatons of methane which is 22x as effective at blocking IR radiation vs CO2, melting of arctic icecap leaving open ocean absorbing far more heat vs white snow/ice, etc.).

Worse yet is the threat that few are mentioning: the breaking of the food web. This incredibly delicate web literally keeps us alive and is under threat not only from anthropogenic climate change but also from everything from pesticides, plastic & microplastic pollution, habitat destruction, slowing and impending collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, and 100 other scaled-up threats. We're already in the anthropocene era marked by the sixth mass extinction in the planet's history, and everything from fish to insects are nearing single-digit percentages of their pre-industrial populations.

Disaster can be averted, but only if we take serious action. Good luck with that.

> For instance do I live life to the fullest now? Or do I skimp and scrounge now to have some hope of surviving when things really go sideways.

As someone in the mid 30's who survived a bad accident with a TBI: it's never early enough to start living life to the fullest.

A lot of things you might want to do now and are able to do, you might not in your 60s for health reasons.

Do them now.

It's a hard call to make. On the one hand, you can live in the moment and hope the government or your family will give you enough for a modestly comfortable if frugal lifestyle in your old age.

Or you can save for a nice retirement lifestyle but end up with a terminal illness or sudden heart attack or stroke and not live to enjoy much of it. On top of that, the older you get the more and more people are scheming to drain you of your wealth. The Big Medical/Big Pharma complex, Long Term Care insurance scams, greedy relatives, everyone will be eyeing your retirement accounts.

> On the one hand, you can live in the moment and hope the government or your family will give you enough for a modestly comfortable if frugal lifestyle in your old age.

Living in the moment does not equate to "have 0 savings" or "spend everything you make on experiences". There's a whole spectrum of middle ground between the extremes.

I understand the argument you're trying to make, but viewing it through the lens of extremes is a baby mistake (maybe a consequence of polarized american politics?). As an adult, you should be able to find a middle ground that works for you.

>And more important, what if anything that means in terms of how I live the rest of my life. For instance do I live life to the fullest now? Or do I skimp and scrounge now to have some hope of surviving when things really go sideways.

I'm facing the exact same question. I think I've mostly resigned myself to appreciating the world as it is today, while it's still recognizable. I want to see glacier national park while there are still glaciers. I want to see others before forests give way to savanna. I want to see the old world before things really destabilize.

Don't get me wrong, I've made choices to reduce my impact on the world, and I'll continue to vote for anyone who I think will seriously help on the issue, but I'm not going to live some 'hairshirt' existence of climate piety when my sacrifices amount to a fart in a hurricane compared to the actions of corporations and the ultrarich.

> I want to see the old world before things really destabilize.

To future generations, the new world will be their "old world". And so it goes.

> to legit wondering if life will be a complete hellscape by the time I'm a senior citizen.

Climate change is one thing, but another is resource scarcity which will also hit (some of) us within our life time. We owe our lifestyle to fossil fuel, and we'll have to reduce it at the time we need it most.

This is a big part of my quandary.

If resources, including livable land, become scarcer then it stands to reason having accumulated more wealth would be the only possible path to help ensure you survive. And even this isn't a guarantee, as the wealth might become worthless and or taken away from you.

On the other hand if you assume we're all fucked and proceed as if that's the case, if the shit hits the fan before you expire then you're even more likely to be on the outside looking in.

Move to New Zealand. It'll be kinda OK, the government's stable and democratic, and they aren't gonna be machine-gunning waves of climate refugees (or else getting overrun and seeing QOL plummet) like most other democratic countries will in the next few decades.

I reckon that's why there's been a trend of billionaires buying citizenship there. Guaranteed entry if they get citizenship, even if things get bad, and they're not autocratic so they probably won't seize all their stuff.

> the fact that someone like myself is already putting mental energy towards this does say something in my opinion

Wouldn't it be expected that you'd have the mental energy to put towards such things, lacking the tried and true distraction of having puppies?

Look at how climate related deaths have dropped dramatically over the past century.

https://www.humanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/cha...

https://images.wsj.net/im-428434/?width=700&height=434

What are you worried about, exactly?

Wait, are you suggesting current climate related deaths are a good indicator of what the climate will be doing in 30 years from now?

Are you suggesting you can predict the future 30 years from now?

This doesn't mean much if you consider we may have just gotten better about predicting and avoiding human loss during extreme weather events.

A better indicator IMO is the amount of property damage from extreme weather events, which has been trending up sharply since the 80s: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/summary-stats#temp...

That's because there are more buildings.

It's just a media doomerism. Life in western/eastern societies improved every generation. I speak as someone who talked to a lot of old people in my family and is interested in genealogy. When you don't have kids, someone else will have 5 and that someone else will most likely be a religious fanatic. In couple of generations they will overwhelm our socities and then it will be the end/modern Dark Ages. What is happening in Israel right now is prime example of this demographic disbalance.

I love how some people find a way to inject "Israel Bad" into any discussion on any topic.

Don't know why you get this impression from my comment. I lived in Israel and still love Israel but what is going on there is a concern to me. I want it thrive and be a jewish home for many generation to come and not to have a repeat of 2000 years ago scenario.

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