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Comment by withinboredom | Hacker News Reader

I’ve kind of accepted we are screwed. Whether I am alive when shit hits the fan or not is another question. But seeing that people are trying to build satellite mirrors to put MORE solar energy into the planet without even thinking about it for more than a few minutes, I would say we are more screwed than we realize. The first law of stupidity applies.

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Nah, this is just doom and gloom based on persistent and pervasive messaging. On large geological timescales, our temperatures are pretty close to the mean. Even given the last 500 million years, we're nowhere near the peak [1].

Will habitable zones change? Yes. Will migrations occur? Yes. Will there be unrest leading to disease, famine and death? Yes, for sure. And we could get all those things from war, a major natural disaster or an extraterrestrial event. Just take war for example. War promises to bring all of those changes too, that hasn't stopped human beings from fighting. If anything, destroying our economies to deal with the climate threat will inevitably lead to war, and then the resulting outcome will be the same: Death, famine, unrest, change/loss of habitable zones. What would we have gained?

[1] https://www.climate.gov/media/11332

Humans haven't lived on the planet on geological timescales. All of human civilization only became possible because 10k years ago the climate cooled and stabilized enough for there to be agriculture.

Without agriculture there is no human civilization, no nation states, no institutions. We go back to being hunter gathers.

With an unstable climate agriculture disappears. Billions will dies, life expediencies will crater, the modern world you know will no longer exist.

Yes, the planet will be fine, at one point it was a giant snowball, humans are fucked.

> Humans haven't lived on the planet on geological timescales. All of human civilization only became possible because 10k years ago the climate cooled and stabilized enough for there to be agriculture.

The average global temperature in the Jurassic era was 16.5C, which is 2.5C higher than the current average global temperature. Average CO2 levels in the atmosphere were as high as 2000 ppm. The planet was teeming with life, an abundance of flora and fauna. While dinosaurs were the apex predators, mammals flourished as well.

> Without agriculture there is no human civilization, no nation states, no institutions. We go back to being hunter gathers.

Since the first part is false, the second part is moot. It also supposes we would have trouble adapting whereas humans are ingenious at finding ways to survive.

> With an unstable climate agriculture disappears. Billions will dies, life expediencies will crater, the modern world you know will no longer exist.

See previous argument.

> Yes, the planet will be fine, at one point it was a giant snowball, humans are fucked.

Yet here we are. Our ancestors survived the Ice Age. Their distant ancestors survived the Jurassic era. My bet is on humans.

CO2 was at that level with an entire planet covered in a healthy ecosystem. If that happened now, we would probably witness the entire global collapse of the ecology. It took hundreds of millions of years to cool down that much, and we’ve turned it back up in a century. Animals (humans included) do not have the time to adapt.

Have you ever been in a stuffy meeting where brain fog sets in or you start to feel tired? That’s around 2k ppm where that sets in. Humans don’t like that much co2. No offense, but your argument doesn’t seem thought through.

The modern era of humans roughly coincides with Earth's coldest period over the last 485M years: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk3705

Even some of the worst predictions for where temperatures are headed before we get close to Net Zero emissions don't put us above historical averages.

To be clear, if the worst predictions come to light, that will be bad for people. But the planet will be fine.

I doubt some extra solar radiation will turn the Earth into Venus or Mars.

Afaik Earth turning into Mars would require shedding the magnetic field such that our atmosphere can be stripped by solar radiation

Venus seems more in reach but I don't know the specifics. Will continue researching in my evil scientist retreat

Venus atmosphere has a very different composition.

Am aware, but it seems to have come from a place that was more similar to earth than Mars'

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/venus-could-have-b... and other articles make that case. I don't know if that's still current information (heard it a while ago and just looked up a random article as reference now, so this might be akin to cherry picking or confirmation bias), I'm not an expert on this particular topic, but that claim is what I had in mind when saying Venus' conditions are more attainable for earth

Blurb from that article

> Venus was downright Earth-like for 2 to 3 billion years and didn't turn into the violent no-man's land we know today until 700 million years ago.

I used to joke that life actually started on Venus and we were the backup planet.

But seeing that people are trying to build satellite mirrors to put MORE solar energy into the planet without even thinking [...]

Like Reflect Orbital [1]? In which case do not worry, they did not think that through, the amount of energy they can deliver is noise compared to the noise in solar radiation.

[1] https://www.reflectorbital.com

Where is the assumption coming from that a “shit hits the fan” event will happen?

What if it is just a slow degradation in myriad aspects of quality of life only felt over the course of decades?

Yep, multiple shits hitting multiple fans.

Ah yes, the myriad aspects of quality of life that has degraded over decades.

https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-activists-disasters-fir...

I thought it was clear that the person you responded to (as well as the grandparent comment) was talking about the future. No one is denying that we are much better off right now as a species than we ever have been. The point is that we can't safely assume that that trend will continue in the next 25, 50, or 100 years.

Not sure how this is relevant given it's the effects of a future climate catastrophe being discussed, not something that has already happened.

Regarding the second link, it seems to put off climate issues as something we're mastering based on extreme weather events and other disasters like earthquakes resulting in fewer and fewer casualties despite having more and more humans on the planet to be potentially struck. They start the article with climate protests, but those protests are looking decades to centuries into the future; it's not about the type of events we've historically encountered. This amazingly positive trend is much less likely to continue if we go far beyond the Paris agreement's temperature, which we've just about started crossing afaik. That's what those protests are about, it's not about our own lives or lifetimes necessarily...

Did upvote your comments btw because your general point about the world not having been going to shit is underrepresented and was, to me, very important to learn about (about five years ago now)

Because complex systems in general are known to enter critical transitions when pushed hard enough, and we do keep pushing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_transition

I'm tired of hearing this idea that this is some binary phenomenon of either saving the world or dooming it.

Technological civilization is undergoing a chaotic growth and reshaping process that will end up thrashing the container it lives in to an unknown and catastrophic degree. There's no known ultimate boundary to this process. Or the only really known ultimate boundary, a completely dead planet, is very far away. We cannot know exactly what will happen but we have a lot of power to shape this process and limit the damages.

The process will continue. There's no going back. There's no stopping. Only a multitude of ways to affect the outcome. Some of those ways can limit the destruction. Some of those ways can shape the process to something that can live and let live.

Note that I mentioned nothing of saving it. We are well and fucked. How fucked? Couldn’t tell ya, what I can tell you, is that the river outside my house hasn’t frozen in nearly 20 years, and it had frozen every year before that in all of recorded history, some 900 or so years. There used to be annual ice skating races that now happen indoors.

I’m not worried about science boundaries and all that. I’m worried about civilization going tits-up once some places get too affected. For example, we are probably less than a decade or so away from certain places with lots and lots of people living there becoming inhospitable. Either they will die, or run into some other country/region that can’t support them, or disperse around the world (most unlikely).

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