Ask HN: Is global warming really that bad? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is global warming really that bad?

4 pointschatmasta8 comments

This is a question I don't hear very many scientists asking themselves. A few points to consider:

- imagine a million+ year timelapse of the earth rotating rapidly around its axis, spinning through orbit. Initially it's covered in ice, but soon it starts to thaw. Ice turns to life. Plants blossom. Animals breathe. The planet comes alive. Intuitively, do you expect/want the earth to stop thawing just prior to completion? Why should 90% of the earth thaw, while the rest remains stuck in an ice age?

- new shipping routes through the arctic, and more habitats for an ever growing human population to colonize. Who ever said "more space" was a bad thing? It seems like melting ice caps have a lot of economic benefits.

-BUT rising sea levels could wipe out coastal cities everywhere. Still, this would be a gradual process, and one which we can plan for.

Should we accept global warming as inevitable, regardless of whether or not human intervention accelerates it? Should we manage it and plan for it, rather than try fruitlessly to avoid it? Is it possible that global warming could be a net benefit for humanity?

>> BUT rising sea levels could wipe out coastal cities everywhere. Still, this would be a gradual process, and one which we can plan for.

If we can't muster the political will to take even token action on climate change, what makes you think we could effect the forced resettlement of the majority of the world's population, who live on the coast? Or would even want to? Not to mention the devastating cultural loss of every major coastal city being underwater.

Sorry, but that throwaway statement is so colossally misinformed, it's hard to take you seriously.

We're having a discussion about global warming, which is a geological process affecting an entire planet. Of course no solution or management paradigm will be convenient.

Taking your argument in the opposite direction, is it reasonable to assume consumers will give up their gas guzzling cars? Or install power charging stations in their garage? Those two inconveniences pale in comparison to the devastation of losing all our coastal cities.

Again, though... Cities would "submerge" as part of a gradual process, and not all simultaneously. It doesn't happen overnight. There are technological measures to delay it, and even to manage it. Levies, stilts, barges are all increasingly economical options. Humans have adjusted to major changes throughout millennia, and it seems naive to assume they would be incapable of applying breakthrough civil engineering technologies to the problem of mitigating global warming's effect on coastal cities.

(And you're right, I actually don't have any idea what I'm talking about. But this seems like a nice forum for a discussion including alternative perspectives.)

>> Taking your argument in the opposite direction, is it reasonable to assume consumers will give up their gas guzzling cars? Or install power charging stations in their garage? Those two inconveniences pale in comparison to the devastation of losing all our coastal cities.

I'm not sure what you're getting it. I don't think consumers will adopt those practices, which is why we're in trouble.

>> Again, though... Cities would "submerge" as part of a gradual process, and not all simultaneously. It doesn't happen overnight. There are technological measures to delay it, and even to manage it. Levies, stilts, barges are all increasingly economical options. Humans have adjusted to major changes throughout millennia, and it seems naive to assume they would be incapable of applying breakthrough civil engineering technologies to the problem of mitigating global warming's effect on coastal cities.

I made the wrong argument in my last post: I framed the debate over humanity's response to Global Warming in the language of the phenomenon's impact on humanity. On the damage and possible mitigation of that damage to human life and property.

But far greater a threat is compromising entire biomes themselves (raising the acidity of the sea via carbon dioxide, for example, to the point where it becomes toxic to certain kinds of flora and fauna vital to the larger food chain and ecosystem)

The reason I react so strongly to the argument you're putting forward as part of your discussion, as it's the one often used to justify current apathy towards the subject.

It doesn't matter if the coastal cities are given a respite from rising seawater, or if the Artic straights are opened up for international trade, or if new land is made arable - if the underlying problem is left unsolved, it will eventually compromise the planet's ability to support human civilization as we have come to know it. Anything that doesn't address the root problem of our massive and continued dumping of greenhouse gases is just a temporary patch - and one that won't matter in the end.

Scientists don't ask this question publicly because it's either so stupid or so callous that no intelligent human should ask it aloud. The cost in human life of continued global warming is astronomical. The cost in physical property is too great to even fathom.

Global warming makes the world inhospitable for important parts of the food chain. That means many of the natural resources we require for everyday life would become extinct.

Rising coasts would destroy thousands of years of human habitat and displace hundreds of millions of people (maybe more than a billion). Where would those people go? Who would pay for them to move out of the way of the coasts?

Not to mention the massive amounts of pollution that would fill coastal waters and the destruction (or salination) of vital farmland.

Many already-hot cities would become too hot to support human life. Entire island nations would sink under the sea. Important sources of fresh water would become undrinkable.

Again, in case you didn't get it last time: this is literally the dumbest question I've ever seen on HN (or almost anywhere outside of Yahoo Answers).

Seems like I struck a nerve... Must be a good discussion question...

Even stupid questions need to be asked. Otherwise how do you know they're stupid? :) at least I'm glad you didn't mention quora. Fortunately I asked it in writing, not "aloud", so hopefully that allows me to qualify as an "intelligent human being," at least according to your particular set of standards.

All of this devastation you speak of... What would it look like? How would it play out? Would it be immediate? Who is responsible for fixing it? Could urban centers adjust to rising sea levels and flooding? Are there technological measures that would make such an adjustment feasible?

Can we stop global warming? If we can't, if we can only delay it, then why should we avoid talking about questions like this? Shouldn't we have a plan for dealing with it beyond "delay it as long as possible?" What do we do when we can delay it no longer?

In 2040, there will be at least 9 billion people in the world (barring an extinction event of course). What do we do with all of them? How do we feed them? How much additional infrastructure do we need? How much space do we need for storage and production facilities? Can we build floating cities? Should we? Is it inevitable all coastal cities will sink eventually?

We aren't really sure of all the effects of global warming but you did cover the gist of it. There's going the be significant global change.

No one can really say what all is going to change but don't expect "what always has been" == "what always will be".

Resources will shift, priorities will change, ecology will adapt and so we will need to as well. Like the ancient civilizations some places will be abandoned for better climes. Those who stay steadfast on not changing may have problems, just voting that it doesn’t happen won't stop change.

There is nothing at all wrong with global warming, per se. The problem comes with the RATE at which global warming is taking place.

In previous times, with slow global warming and small populations, it didn't take much for small numbers of people to gradually migrate from places where the environment was becoming unsuitable to places where the environment was getting better. And there were no such things as borders.

Today, with higher populations and faster changes in climate, we need to be able move millions of people quickly from one place to another. This is hugely expensive, and not only that, there is huge ethnic resistance to millions of people suddenly migrating from one place to another. Wars have started over less.

Put it this way. We have only one earth and we are extremely limited to a certain external conditions like temperature, pressure, atmosphere composition, soil, water, ....

The climate is a non-linear chaotic model and no one really knows where we will end. So what we do to our planet is extremely dangerous, because it looks like, that the change will happen within the next thousand or ten thousand years. This is too short to adapt via evolution no matter in which direction the climate change will go, the living space for us might be very limited then.

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