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Comment by sqeaky | Hacker News Reader

This is gonna get me totally downvoted, but...

What if I said I was pro-global warming....

I am buying property that will be at or around beach level when all the ice melts. In the mean time just a couple of houses and I rent them out reasonably. But in time when all the snow stops and the climate here is subtropical the warm waters of the bay of Texas will lap onto the shores of what are hills today. And the property will have increase many-fold. These properties will have been netting me and my family money the entire time.

/what if

I have not actually done that, but not shoveling would be nice.

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The problem with that is the high value of beachfront property is based on having a civilization with a great deal of consumer surplus, where a large number of people can afford to take time off to go to the beach for vacation. The worry for climate change isn't just that it'll displace people, but that it'll severely disrupt civilization due to massive refugee problems and agricultural failures. By the time the seashore reaches your inland property, people may be too busy trying to survive to care about beach vacations, or you may have lost your property and/or life in the turmoil.

It's kind of like stocking up on sunscreen and iodine pills in the hope of selling them for a tidy profit after a nuclear holocaust.

what if...

I think total societal collapse is unlikely, these events will not happen in a vacuum and will take a hundred years or more to fully play out. Governments and peoples coalitions will resist, make attempts to fix and generally resist total anarchy.

If owning land becomes unstable then the general notion of owning wealth is impractical. Leaving property, and well stocked proptery, so that my descendants can convert it to whatever is required still leaves me better off than not saving.

/what if

It will be extremely hard to get this right. You may up end in a desert or underwater. Or you may get blown away by a big hurricane.

Considering that we might actually go extinct being pro that is a like the ultimate crime against humanity. Not to mention the countries already being heavily impacted by it, its almost an act of war by the developed nations against those countries considering we have known the impact since the 1970's and almost all countries (except the USA and China) agreed how to deal with it in the Kyoto agreement, which USA opted out of and all but collapsed efforts to deal with man made climate change.

Lets not be coy, we face our extinction and to say you are pro makes you genuinely a mad man maniac.

Global warming will cause a lot of problems and people may die but no way will we go extinct. There is zero risk for that unless global temperature goes up an enormous amount and the oceans boil off or something like that.

Zero risk? The human race has come close to extinction already by our own hands directly. To say that there's zero risk, adding in all the chaos that will spawn from the climate change projected, is simply laughable. More and more people will have nothing to lose, and they'll go down fighting.

And besides, there are more catastrophic risks on our plate than just climate change.

Even then, if some small number were to survive, the modern ways of living would be over and it'd be a much harder go the second time around, with so many things we take for granted now already spent, or tainted.

I am not saying that things can't get very bad but I don't believe we can go extinct. Even if 99.9% of humans die the rest could go underground and have nuclear reactors to provide energy and whatever is needed. It won't be pretty but I believe humans are just too inventive to go completely extinct.

Humans won't go extinct but modern civilization might

When has the human race come close to extinction by our own hands? The only near-extinction I'm aware of is the theorized population bottleneck caused by the Toba eruption, whose existence seems to be disputed and which in any case wasn't caused by our own hands.

If you're referring to global thermonuclear war, there was (and still is) the constant threat of destroying civilization, but never any chance of causing the extinction of the species.

I agree with that guy, our economies will collapse, our civilization will stagnate. But no way will this lead to our extinction (unless it breeds a superbug).

The biggest issue I see is that the already tropical areas of the world will become unsustainable for farming. How are we going to move these billions of people out of there newly created deserts. Of course, such changes are going to be slow and visible beforehand. It will happen over the course of decades if not a century. I wonder if we will make a world government and allow people from those regions to immigrate to places that are currently frozen tundra.

So, allow mexicans to go to Canada?

Unless the economy collapse will trigger a truly destructive world war. That is not out of question.

I doubt humanity will go extinct even in that case. Going extinct means that nobody is left. That just seems unlikely.

Open positive feedback loops are very difficult to estimate where they will end up. We could easily end up in a range of climate where it's difficult to impossible for human kind to raise food or conduct civilization in the nearly the same manner as we do now. In the really far out outcomes, who knows if the atmosphere would stay in any sort of human habitable range.

It's a long-running process. Ice does not catastrophically melt in a year. It melts over centuries. Which also means shore lines and climate zones will keep moving. Betting on a fixed location does not look like a winning strategy to me.

The safer bet would be on farmland in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Nowadays it has all but reverted to secondary forest, but back in the day it was the breadbasket of the nation. Unlike Kansas or the Central Valley it is rain-safe.

This is specifically a bit silly, but as a general trend might be a sensible hedge. For example Toronto is likely to benefit from a 2-3 degree warming, land currently not arable quality is likely to become amenable.

Something similar should be expected for Greenland, Russia, etc. However that's in say 200 years. The meantime is going to be a struggle.

I think it is well worth building models to try and predict these outcomes (not so much the weather models but river and water course changes, etc. I don't think this exists but would be interested)

But trying to predict where the next beachfront will be - nah not great.

Youre missing the point of grossly increased and unstable weather patterns due to higher energy in he atmosphere, social and political instability due to the lack of food elsewhere, with possible wars wiping out a lot more food production, and death of so much plankton and wilds that the biosphere becomes practically inhospitable and unable to support food production for even millions, never mind billions.

> But in time when all the snow stops and the climate here is subtropical the warm waters of the bay of Texas will lap onto the shores of what are hills today.

And a decade or two later the same houses will be under water.

I think it is interesting how many people down-voted for a thought experiment. The what if hypothetical wasn't clearly stated or something?

How can we discuss these ideas without a bunch of downvotes?

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