Comment by sqeaky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sqeaky | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think you are unaware of the scope of the problem. (also I did not and cannot downvote you)

The amount of life and species lost to human activities already makes the past few thousand years a major extinction event in line with the 5 other major ones. With this fact in mind taking the stance that this is OK because "life had to face a rapid and drastic climate change" is the moral equivalent of saying killing most of the life is OK because it happened before. That is morally repugnant. I do not think are morally repugnant so I must presume you are unaware of the facts I just presented.

CO2 stays in the atmosphere a long time. If we keep putting there permanently. If we kill ourselves (not with CO2 but with wars caused by the resource availability changes caused by climate change) then what happens during our "rounding error" many will still be dead.

The planet will probably be fine, the Bay of Texas will probably be fine and my newly made beachfront property in Omaha will be damn fine. If you live on a coast, get most of your goods by boat or live in one of the areas that will tear itself apart in useless resource wars then the eventual cooling trend doesn't help you and has no place in this discussion.

Moral is a human construct and as such it is subjective.

Anyhow, I said that the life on earth survived a couple of disastrous events and still flourishes. Life will flourish wether the coast is under water or not. There were times when there wasn't any coast at all, or it was somewhere else. And does it really make a difference?

You won't see anything of the war of resources except you live for 200 years. You may take care too much about things you will never see and can not have an impact on.

What do you mean by "flourish"?

Increasing biodiversity?

>>Life will flourish wether the coast is under water or not.

Life may flourish, but many lives won't.

>>And does it really make a difference?

It does make a huge difference to the 44 percent of humanity that lives on coastal areas.

I think the point is that after the extinction of humans and a large proportion of existing species on earth, life itself will continue and the next few million years will result in speciation to adapt to new niches on a planet with radically different climate.

I don’t understand how anyone finds this comforting, however.

> I don’t understand how anyone finds this comforting, however.

Why can't it be viewed as a source of comfort? At a longer time scale, even life on earth won't exist as the sun dies. At a sufficiently long time scale, none of this stuff on earth matters, the universe continues to move on. As these highlight the transitory nature of life on earth, there is no reason for why one can't "let go" after a point. I find that a tremondous source of comfort, as I often face the problem of when to "let go" in many contexts.

I won't get into a detailed discussion of the purpose of existence (a natural counter-question to the above), or why one should still strive in one's own way to tackle issues like climate change up to "one's capacity" (which depends on accepting the purpose of existence).

These fundamental questions are extremely hard to address. It took me a long time and a lot of thought to have a reasonably satisfactory answer to these questions - though of course what answer one is satisfied by will vary from person to person. For me, the bulk of the answer came from a study of the Indian Vedantic tradition (chiefly Adwaita Vedanta) through the "Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda" among other such books, and the works of Leo Tolstoy. Mileage may vary of course.

I found my way in stoicism. Stopping taking care about inevitable things gives me the power to take care about things I can change. I do not expect the HN folks to understand and accept my point of view. The resulting misunderstanding seems to be also inevitable. And I am OK with that.

I just realised that this is inevitable.

Funny fact: the coast are moving. Slowly, but still moving. 44 percent of humanity sooner or later will have a problem because of it. If this happens 100 or 10M years after our death does really make that much difference to us?

Your statements are equivalent to you not caring about humanity because you implicitly disregard human suffering.

Since the reason people care about climate change, both for and against, is human suffering then we can disregard anything you have to say about it.

That you and you are clearly just choosing the most antagonistic thing to get a reaction from people. This is the last I will be responding. If I could down vote you I would.

I do care about the effects of climate change on humanity as much as I do care about bad weather. When it rains I take my umbrella. Both are things I can not hinder more than as I do now.

I do not own a car, never did, do not plan to own one, I am not caught by the consume madness and I also try to avoid wasting ressources. I wonder how many of the downvoters can say the same.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com