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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

This should make #1 on HN. Oh, sure, there are many doubts as to how and when this will actually be implemented, but still, it's a great step forward. We are finally starting to do something about the fact, that our grandchildren will not have a planet to live on, and even our children might be affected.

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Not to dismiss the seriousness of climate change, but "our grandchildren won't have a planet to live on" is a completely unfounded assertion with no roots in reality. Humans are vastly good at adapting.

Also, humans have a good history of taking too much to time to do the right thing (slaves, women rights, gay rights). Added to that, there are gigantic economic forces slowing down the change this time. I'm sure human will thrive at least for the next centuries, but the current mass extinction is a sad thing.

You couldn't stand mentioning the woman's rights and gay rights as rights stuff... How are you sure those are the right thing? I think your ideology should not be mixed into scientific topics, as climate change.

I don't brag about my religion in the topic, nor should you.

Women and homosexuals arent human enough to be accorded rights given to every heterosexual male?

We are currently over using the earth's resources by a factor of 1.5. If everyone on earth lived like people in the US do, we'd already need five planets [1]. I wish I could share your optimism, but it seems like nothing much is done to change this. The Paris agreement is at least a step in the right direction. Let's hope more will follow.

[1] http://m.phys.org/news/2009-11-mankind-earth-resources-alarm...

Well, we may or may not be overusing the planet's resources; people have been saying that since Malthus in 1798, when the world population was less than 1 billion. The fact remains that global food production per capita has been consistently growing since 1960, at a rate of about 0.5% per year.

However, this is entirely unrelated to climate change caused by CO2 emissions, which is what the Paris agreement covers.

Unfortunately, the article you cite attempts to conflate the two, and freely admits that most of their "ecological footprint" is down to CO2 emissions. This is quite literally comparing apples and oranges, and dressing it up in fancy language to make it pass peer review.

I imagine the Easter Islanders were similarly convinced as they felled the last tree.

We're using resources at an unprecedented and thoroughly unsustainable rate, and we're not slowing. So unless we have a few spare planets lined up...

The Easter Islanders were not hit just by consequences of deforestation, but simultaneously by invasive rat species and overpopulation, while being one of the most remote islands in the world.

Plenty of other island nations have seen similar mass deforestation, like Iceland, Sicily and New Zealand, without disastrous consequences.

I'm not saying we should all party on and waste all we can, but this nonsense of "we need five planets" etc. is just that, nonsense. It muddies up the debate, especially when it's based on an arbitrarily weighted sum of different ecological impacts to compute a "total footprint".

I've seen that theory, and it seems to be just that, rather than the consensus. Regardless environmental destruction and overpopulation are now global so either analogy still applies.

As for number of planets anything >1 is a problem, but it seems a reasonable means of helping the public visualise the issue, just as the media use busses or football fields for comparative measure.

As you might have noticed, I didn't write "our grandchildren won't live", just that they "won't have a planet to live on". I'm sure they will adapt. It's just that they won't be able to experience the same green planet that we do.

depends, they get to set the goals and they don't get penalized if they don't. its not a treaty.

if the numbers get set to per capita then they will be bullshit numbers and we effectively have zero progress.

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/avoid.html

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