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Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

Recently I've been talking frequently with folks about my concerns re: climate change. The general feedback is along the lines of: "don't worry, the earth knows how to regulate itself, it will figure itself out, we'll be fine". :(

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>"don't worry, the earth knows how to regulate itself, it will figure itself out

Yep that part is true

>we'll be fine

That part is not

Exactly! I'm afraid that whatever equilibrium (or quasi-equilibrium) or death spiral that nature comes up with, humanity won't be part of it.

First part isn't true, either. There's no reason why the Earth couldn't end up like Venus or Mars, and it could well do so in a few hundred million years. Habitability is a confluence of luck, there's no constraint that it has to last. It's just unlikely that we could cause harm on that scale, yet. Climate change won't wipe out humanity either, it will just inflict a tremendous amount of pain.

Earth is a massive (a bit under 6x10^24 kg) ball of iron and some other elements in comparatively minute quantities. The thin layer of the "biosphere" is utterly insignificant to Earth. It's massively significant to humans.

obligatory George Carlin bit. . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmtSkl53h4

I think this is the best short summary of the situation. Short of a nuclear war we won't kill all life on earth. But what we do next will determine how difficult the next decades will get. Cutting back on CO2 emissions is not about saving "the planet" it is about saving our immediate future.

Don't forget the "You're just being an alarmist, the earth has been heating and cooling for centuries!"

Did you see the XKCD infographic on that from just the other day? http://xkcd.com/1732/

A friend of mine told me that we shouldn't worry. A few years ago, he denied global warming but now his view has changed. His reasoning is the following. More pollution => more growth => more knowledge => humanity will find a way to solve this like it always had.

Apparently, many people think along those lines :(

The problem is that "it will figure itself out" does not imply "we'll be fine".

Yeah, homo-sapiens will undoubtedly survive but the economy sure as hell won't. And given the inevitable loss of every major city coastal city, the unutterable disruption of agriculture and water supplies with the attendant massive die off, I agree the word 'fine' may be a tad inaccurate.

Sea level is rising so slowly (currently 3.4 += 0.4 mm/yr) that we can absorb the increase for quite a while simply by abandoning coastal property and rezoning as each parcel of land becomes endangered by sea level rise. We're talking less than 7 1/2 inches over 50 years.

I suspect something similar will hold true for agriculture. Farmers will plant different crops 50 years from now than they do today.

You are assuming the rise will remain constant. It has only been rising slowly because the temperature change hasn't reached a tipping point that would trigger massive melting of polar ice.

The rate of increase has been going up, too. When I first started watching all this, which was 10 years ago or so, the rate was at 3.2 +- 0.4 mm/yr rather than 3.4. I haven't seen an estimate of that acceleration anywhere that gets it just from the data and not from assumptions about models or tipping points. I haven't really looked that hard, though.

I'm skeptical of tipping points. Right now, I'm taking a "just what I see in the data" approach because of how politicized everything is.

I don't know what the future holds, but I'm not convinced, yet, that it's going to be a complete catastrophe.

Note that we only need to worry about the south pole and Greenland. Floating ice, like all floating objects, already displaces water equal to its mass, so if it melts it will not affect sea levels.

You're also assuming that plants and animals can migrate/adapt at a fast enough rate. Trees seem especially at risk.

We'll move the corn potatoes and Roundup, but nature will have to manage the rest. If a few keystone species go who knows what havoc will be wrought.

"Simply abandoning costal property" and "rezoning" on a global scale is already going to be a far worse impact on what we consider today as modern life, than any realistic actions against CO2 would have been. We are talking about moving hundreds of millions of people. Sure that is entirely possible, but tell that to people who seem to be scared of helping a million Syrian war refugees.

Fortunately, with recent progress in renewal energies, achieving a massive reduction in CO2 emissions does not require hardship, just a larger investment program (which will pay even off long time for most countries, due to no more money drained from the economy for oil). This investment would be comparable to the building of the US highway network in the 50ies and 60ies. Long term it was a huge boost to the American economy.

> achieving a massive reduction in CO2 emissions does not require hardship

Houston is America's 4th largest city. Turning it into Detroit would absolutely be a hardship. We should still do it, but we shouldn't pretend that it won't cause suicide and violent crime.

are you arguing against the gospel of the up every year forever s&p500?

Well, if "by fine", they mean mass migrations away from the equatorial band, fragile areas near deserts, and increased conflict as immigration controls block that migration.

We are looking at pretty much everything from Florida to Brazil being rendered unfit for humans.

I think this is the most effective way to get people's attention at this point in history. The current waves of migration from Syria, North Africa, and from Central/South America are just a tiny foretaste of what's to come if climate change goes the way we fear.

I think you are right.

However many people will mindlessly argue that "secure borders" will magically prevent the mass migration of 100+ million people.

Well, if states were to embrace a lot more violence than they do now "security" probably could do that (not an endorsement).

> We are looking at pretty much everything from Florida to Brazil being rendered unfit for humans.

That is not even remotely politically tenable though, and lots of stupid things will be attempted long before it gets to that point. Mt. Tambora deposited 50 megatons of SO2 into the upper atmosphere in 1815, and in so doing dropped the global climate by .5℃ for over a year. Such an action is well within our technological and industrial capacity. It's a terrible idea but it will definitely be attempted long before global warming depopulates 2/3rds of our inhabited range.

So you're saying Yellowstone is an option... ;)

I don't know about that specifically, but is there a reason why geoengineering in general is a bad idea?

We lack even a basic understanding of many aspects of the global climate. Imagine trying to engineer a computer with a nineteenth-century knowledge of electromagnetism. The only thing we know for certain is what worked in the past.

I think the bigger risk will be associated with extreme weather, all over the globe, not just in the middle. We're already seeing that ramp up big time.

I fear that long before the oceans rise substantively, crop killing heat, crop killing cold, crop killing floods, crop killing drought and crop killing storms will strike so widely, frequently and randomly that it will be difficult to reliably produce food anywhere.

I haven't seen much science on this specific topic yet. I'm just intuitively extrapolating how quickly these food-destroying '500 year' storms are ramping up. We've had something like 6 '500 year' storms in the US so far in 2016.

We are humans. We adapt the world. If the waters rise we will build dikes. If flooding will become frequent we will build dams and use that to generate electricity and regulate the water cycle. The only people who won't do well are those who insist on being victims and refuse to see the opertunity in the challenge (and there is always an oppertunity).

Yeah, damn those Bangladeshis always insisting on being victims just because they don't have initiative. Wait, did I say initiative? I meant money. The people who don't have money will die by the millions.

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