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I am surprised you were downvoted. The 4 points you make seem straightforward, and are accurate.

The timeline for economic damage (from global warming) is fairly long. Even in the worst-case scenario, the Earth as we know it is still recognizable for the next 50 years, and all of the seasons and climate patterns remain roughly the same. The major changes will tend to show 50 to a 100 years from now.

Also, I'd like to point out that the increasing acidity of the oceans is a much worse problem, in the long-term, than the warming of the atmosphere. Carbon washes out of the atmosphere, and ends up as acid in the oceans. At current trends, in less than 100 years the oceans will be more acidic than at any point since the Cambrian Revolution. It is not clear that life in the oceans can survive with those levels of acidity (other than organisms that live in volcanic vents and love acid).

> I am surprised you were downvoted.

I'm not. Many people seem to have lost sight of what downvotes are supposed to mean on HN. They are supposed to mean, "This comment is not constructive." Instead, people use it to mean, "I don't agree with this." So controversial opinions often get downvoted into oblivion rather quickly. It's damned annoying, especially when people don't follow up with any explanation of why they disagree.

> It is not clear that life in the oceans can survive with those levels of acidity

Actually, that's pretty clear. Some kind of life will survive, even if it's just bacteria and jellyfish. Life is incredibly robust. This is exactly the kind of hyperbole that undermines the arguments for policy changes.

This is not to say that acidification is not a serious problem. It is. But not because it will sterilize the ocean. It won't.

I downvoted because the comment wasn't a response to the article, nor did it really seem to be responding to other comments. I agree that many people make the same complaint you do, claiming that many downvoters are simply disagreeing with content. You might want to consider topicality, too.

I was responding to things like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13045831

I would have posted as a child comment, but I saw a lot of those kinds of things in the discussion even at that early stage. That's why I decided to post top-level.

But your point is well taken.

Thank you for considering my comment to be constructive! It was intended that way, and I really appreciate your response.

> So controversial opinions often get downvoted into oblivion rather quickly. It's damned annoying, especially when people don't follow up with any explanation of why they disagree.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who's noticing that. There are certain topics - e.g. progressive taxation, Steve Jobs, Apple and socialism - that are impossible to criticise on HN without triggering a flurry of downvotes.

Meta: it seems the discussion of the downvote topics generates its own downvotes.

It's futile to argue against usage - either of language, or forum software. But I don't think I'll be back to HN, at least not as a poster.

I suspect that some of the life in the ocean _could_ adapt, if they were not also being over-fished (or having their prey over-fished). You need a large population for variations to crop up, and then some period of time for the beneficial variations to spread out. 50-100 years is _breakneck_ speed as far as evolution goes, but if you have an annual-breeding fish then they could get 50-100 generations to adapt. Whales & dolphins may have a bad time though.

This is exactly the kind of hyperbole I'm talking about. Whales and dolphins and fish are not the totality of life in the oceans. There's krill and algae and bacteria and a bazillion other things.

Now, losing whales and dolphins and fish would be catastrophic (IMO). But that is not the same as losing all life. It is not that "some of the life in the ocean could adapt." Life in the ocean (and on land) will adapt, no question about it. It just might not be the kind of life we humans want to see. That is the problem.

Point 3 is the one that matters. We still have the ability to keep our current civilization alive. We don't even have to change our life style at a large scale. Switching from coal and oil to solar and wind should be a no brainer. It is even widely cost-efficient. People, who think that a few windmills are an offensive sight, are not considering how different life for all of us would be, if we do not act in time.

> a Mad-Max type scenario is a real possibility.

Can you please substantiate this conclusion?

Sure. There are any number of ways that climate change could destroy civilization. It could do it directly. For example, weather could get so extreme that it could directly destroy our infrastructure faster than we can rebuild it. Weather anomalies could destroy our ability to produce enough food to feed everyone. A catastrophic melting of the Greenland ice cap could raise sea levels to the point where all of the world's coastal cities would be inundated, and it could happen much faster than we could rebuild elsewhere (to say nothing of the fact that global commerce currently depends crucially on stable coast lines so we can have ports).

But much more likely is not the direct destruction of civilization, but rather increased political and economic tensions leading to nuclear war. Climate change is going to lead to a global game of musical chairs as the world's powers vie for ownership of what used to be arctic tundra but is soon to be prime farmland, or what used to be polar ice cap and is soon to be rich oil fields. People are already starting to quibble over who owns the northwest passage (is it an international waterway, or does it belong to Canada?) That didn't matter when you couldn't get through because it was filled with ice. When the ice clears and it becomes a prime shipping route, it matters a lot.

>But much more likely is not the direct destruction of civilization, but rather increased political and economic tensions leading to nuclear war.

Ah, I see that you and I actually do agree that the much more likely case is not a Mad Max scenario, and I agree political tension is the greatest danger. The worst case scenario is we see innocent people needlessly die due to the actions of other people--whether it be squabbling over who caused climate change, or over newly found resources it created, or migrations of peoples whose homelands have been destroyed. I really don't want that to happen.

>Weather anomalies could destroy our ability to produce enough food to feed everyone.

That is a good point, and a great reason why we should stop altering the global environment. It may not be that the ability to produce food is destroyed in the long run, but in the short run we struggle to adapt quickly enough to a changing environment--a topic for debate but certainly one for worry. While I concede there's no evidence this will necessarily happen, the fact is we simply don't know what we're doing when it comes to global climate science, and we're historically great at screwing up the planet with unintended consequences. So we should stop.

>weather could get so extreme that it could directly destroy our infrastructure faster than we can rebuild it.

While of course anything is possible, can you link me to scientific evidence that this will happen. Of course, there is in fact evidence that weather extremes will increase, the likelihood of this scenario where we literally cannot sustain infrastructure on the planet anymore, that would require very extreme weather and a loss of current technology (there already exists technology to build infrastructure which can withstand harsh weather and earthquakes).

I don't have a problem with the science, but the doomsday or "Mad Max" alarmist scenarios are not based in science, and that kind of irrational thinking may do more harm than good--leading to even more irrational thinking.

> the much more likely case is not a Mad Max scenario

I'd say Mad Max is the worst case. Possible, but certainly not inevitable. How likely it is depends on what we choose to do (or not do). But we have to stop talking about turning Earth into Venus or destroying all life or even humans going extinct. None of those are going to happen.

> The worst case scenario is we see innocent people needlessly die due to the actions of other people

The worst case scenario is the collapse of modern technological civilization with the resulting deaths of billions of innocent people. The worst case is really, really bad. So arguments like this:

> we simply don't know what we're doing when it comes to global climate science

don't carry a lot of weight with me. It's true that there is a lot of uncertainty. But that uncertainty cuts both ways. We might be erring in either direction, and the consequences of getting this wrong are very, very serious. So we ought to err on the conservative side. Because the only way to know for sure whether the worst case is possible is to actually make it happen.

> While of course anything is possible, can you link me to scientific evidence that this will happen.

No, of course not. But I can probably find some papers that show that it's possible.

The worst case scenario is we see innocent people needlessly die due to the actions of other people

There's a good case to be made that we're in that situation right now. Look at all the migrants fleeing the Syrian civil war (a conflict arguably driven by climate change as crops failed repeatedly in that area). The flow of said migrants has already resulted in a good deal of avoidable death and political conflict, and that's set to rise with the President of Turkey threatening to use flows of desperate people as a political weapon.

I don't have a problem with the science, but the doomsday or "Mad Max" alarmist scenarios are not based in science

A nuclear exchange would put us in Mad Max territory pretty quickly if you ask me. It's one of a number of unlikely but far from impossible scenarios that we should consider.

Oh yes. The Syrian conflict is due to climate change.

NOT to the political instability in the area caused by USA military interventions, that caused the societal destruction of Iraq and Libya and the rise of ISIS;

NOT to the fact that the CIA armed and trained rebels to topple the local government;

NOT to the American obsession that "Assad must go";

NOT to the fact that Israel favours weak neighbours, in order to have an upper hand in regional economics and conflicts (see for example Golan Heights);

NOT to the fact that Saudi Arabia and Turkey would like to replace the Shiite government with a Sunni one and win a proxy war against Iran.

No, it's becauz climate change. A strange one that follows borders very closely, since Israel seems to be doing absolutely fine.

The closest anyone above came to saying the Syrian conflict was due to climate change was "a conflict arguably driven by climate change as crops failed repeatedly in that area". Note the word "arguably" and the words "driven by" rather than "caused by"; the poster acknowledges that it is at most a contributing factor.

So I'll say that that comment was arguably driven by dangerous ignorance, are you fine with that? In fact, it has to be true, since I just argued it.

Most people agree that climate change has made the situation in Syria worse, but don't claim that climate change is the cause.

http://www.irinnews.org/news/2010/03/25/why-water-shortages

> Poor planning and management, wasteful irrigation systems, intensive wheat and cotton farming and a rapidly growing population are straining water resources in Syria in a year which has seen unprecedented internal displacement as a result of drought in eastern and northeastern parts of the country.

> “Population [estimated at 24 million in 2009] growth, urbanization and increased economic activity have contributed to the water crisis, as have climate change and mismanagement of the water sector,” said a local expert, who preferred anonymity.

http://www.irinnews.org/feature/2009/09/02/drought-driving-f...

> Blamed on a combination of climate change, man-made desertification and lack of irrigation, up to 60 percent of Syria's land and 1.3 million people (of a population of 22 million) are affected, according to the UN. Just over 800,000 people have lost their entire livelihood, according to the UN and IFRC.

[...]

> Aid agencies say a sustainable long-term plan for the affected areas is needed. "We need to do studies to identify a disaster risk reduction strategy on how to overcome climate change and have better farming practices," said Awad.

http://www.irinnews.org/analysis/2015/10/20

> Most studies currently describe climate change as a “threat multiplier” rather than a direct cause, just one of a host of interconnected factors – like poverty, exclusion of ethnic groups, government mismanagement, political instability and societal breakdown – that drive conflict.

It is incredibly easy to throw in "climate change" at the end of any list of factors to explain this or that event. Indeed, who is ever going to dispute it? Climate change is, by its very nature, everywhere- so everywhere it can be used as an explanation of something.

The links you provide follow this rule, listing many good reasons for the Syrian water scarcity (and not for the Syrian conflict)- such as dramatic population increase (83% increase in 23 years), land and water resources mismanagement, bad economic measures, wasteful agricultural practices- and throwing in climate change in the end, just to be safe.

Anyway, this is a 2015 article by Mike Hulme debunking the link between climate change and Syrian war: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/29/climat...

In general, one could question how much sense does it make to even cite a far and dubious cause like climate change when more obvious causes are perfectly evident. My favourite example was a WHO report which calculated the future global health impact of climate change as an additional 250000 deaths per year. A huge number. And the method to get it was the following: given the current total number of deaths due to diarrohea, malaria and undernutrition (about 7 million deaths yearly- all of which in developing countries, therefore due to poverty and perfectly preventable), multiplying them by 3.5% (the projected impact of climate change on these issues) and voila... an excellent case for spending some 44 trillion dollars to switch from fossil fuels to clean energy. Or not?

You're arguing with people who have a religious view towards climate change. That poster, Smaug123, just came close to justifying the use of nuclear weapons in the other thread to the grandparent comment, don't take them seriously.

No he didn't. If you think that then you have serious reading comprehension problems.

Nice ad hominen attack, good on ya' for that

I'm not discussing this with you further.

You've shown yourself to be insulting. You've shown yourself to argue for a case that the Syrian war is caused by climate change. You read a post where someone took an inflammatory meme out of context, and tries to make sense out of a situation where climate change could lead to nuclear war:

> "Guns don't kill people! People kill people!"

> Having climate change around sure makes it easier for people to work themselves into positions where they have to use the nukes.

And you defended it by insulting my intelligence. I am really not impressed.

I don't think my comment was ignorant at all. It might be that I just have a longer memory than you. In reality the US government gave a guarded but cautious welcome to Bashar Assad when he succeeded his father and carried himself like a reformist for a few years. But when poor harvests - among other factors - led to protests against the Syrian government, said government responded in a very repressive fashion, which in turn stirred up more opposition.

Clearly you think many other factors are more important, but if you think I'm 'dangerously ignorant' for considering food security as a factor then I'm not going to take your input very seriously.

Well, the US government was in excellent terms with Saddam Hussein, when he waged against Iran a war that killed between half a million and a million people.

Then invaded the country and had Saddam captured and killed on a false pretense, causing other 40 thousand deaths and plunging the country into civil war.

In Chile backed the coup of a bloodthirsty dictator that had thousands of opponents killed and tens of thousands tortured.

Is backing right now Saudi Arabia, one of the states with the worst human rights record on Earth, in the military repression of the Houtis rebellion in Yemen.

As for Syria, according to Wikipedia:

"The Assad government opposed the United States' invasion and occupation of Iraq. The Bush administration then began to destabilize the regime by increasing sectarian tensions, showcasing and publicising Syrian repression of Kurdish and Sunni groups, and financing political dissidents." And "the main Syrian opposition body – the Syrian coalition – receives political, logistic and military support from the United States, Britain and France. Some Syrian rebels get training from the CIA at bases in Qatar, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Under the aegis of operation Timber Sycamore and other clandestine activities, CIA operatives and U.S. special operations troops have trained and armed nearly 10,000 rebel fighters at a cost of $1 billion a year since 2012."

Thus promoting and fuelling a civil war that has costed so far between 300 and 400 thousand deaths.

So climate change, yeah.

>A nuclear exchange would put us in Mad Max territory pretty quickly if you ask me. It's one of a number of unlikely but far from impossible scenarios that we should consider.

Climate change does not and can not create nuclear war. People create nuclear war.

"Guns don't kill people! People kill people!"

Having climate change around sure makes it easier for people to work themselves into positions where they have to use the nukes.

Dear god please tell me this is a joke.

I don't see why. You are ignoring the fact that many people simply don't share your value calculus, and that that group might include people who have control over nuclear weapons.

It's a mistake to assume everyone else has the same priorities and basic values that you do; their actions might seem illogical to you but actually be logical courses of actions if you knew what their starting premises were.

Oh give me a break. You are the very person going around insulting other's intelligence in this topic, telling people that disagree with you that you 'have a better memory than them,' or they 'have bad reading comprehension.'

Go ahead, keep justifying nuclear weapons on the basis of your presuppositions, whatever they are. The truth is given your reputation here, I'm not keen to give you the time of day to let my imagination run wild about what you are supposing if nuclear war is your answer.

I really don't appreciate these posts of yours.

Well, I would guess Mad Max without the combustion engines

> 1. Earth is not going to become Venus

Not sure about that on a couple-of-hundred-years-from-now time-scale.

> 2. Homo sapiens is almost certainly not going to go extinct.

I agree. But it's possible that 90% of humanity dies, mainly because of starvation after the oceans become lifeless.

I also think there are going to be massive refugee streams in the order of more than 100 million people.

> Not sure about that on a couple-of-hundred-years-from-now time-scale.

It's really not possible. Even if you took all of the oxygen and carbon on earth and converted it to CO2 (which is not even remotely possible) you still wouldn't get Venus. Venus's atmosphere is almost 100 times denser than earth, and it's nearly 100% CO2. Venus is also closer to the sun, which isn't the deciding factor, but it certainly helps keep Venus nice and toasty warm.

Look, earth is 4 billion years old, and life has existed for about 3.9 billion of those, give or take a few hundred million years. Environmental catastrophes have come and gone and life has persisted through all of them. But civilization has only existed for 10,000 years or so, and those 10,000 years have been climactically stable. Unusually stable. It is far from clear that civilization can survive climate change. That experiment has never been done.

> it's possible that 90% of humanity dies

Yes, that is definitely possible. Maybe even likely if we stay on the current trajectory.

> you still wouldn't get Venus. Venus's atmosphere is almost 100 times denser than earth, and it's nearly 100% CO2

That extremely high amount of CO2 in the atmosphere of Venus is not the original cause but a consequence of runaway warming. At a few hundred degrees C, the carbon dioxide bound in rocks starts to sublimate into the atmosphere. For example, limestone would go CaCO3 -> CaO + CO2. 10% of all sedimentary rock is limestone so one can see how that leads to a Venus-like atmosphere.

That said, I agree that a Venus scenario doesn't seem to be possible for Earth right now. In this paper published in Nature, even 3000 ppm of CO2 (i.e. all fossil fuels burned) was calculated not to trigger such a thing. It would require more like 30,000 ppm, which is not really breathable atmosphere anymore:

http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n8/full/ngeo1892.html

Coverage in scientific american: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-r...

What are you talking about? Even the most worried climate scientists talk about a few degrees celsius in the absolute worst case scenario.

Not just starvation, but war as well.

>Homo sapiens is almost certainly not going to go extinct even in a worst-case scenario.

This is an incredibly arrogant assumption.

I don't think this is true. Even with an unbreathable atmosphere, some tiny fraction of humans would survive with recycled air, solar power, and greenhouse vegetables.

It's conceivable that climate change could kill 99%+. I would be very surprised if it exterminated us completely.

Not long ago I thought the same thing. We can live on the ISS, so even if there's no oxygen and temperatures will be perpetually 200ºC above current, I'm sure we can construct habitats (even small cities) that could be self-sustaining and live. But here's the catch: these things don't happen instantly. It's not a turn-based RPG where somebody decides one turn to "build self-sustaining, hermetically sealed arks", before these things become an absolute necessity we may have already lost the infrastructural or technological abilities to do so (even the raw materials come from /everywhere/ on Earth these days). Worse yet, when the social-economic inequality is the difference between life and death, I'm sure a lot of people will be very angry. And very angry people do stupid things. So you build an ark to live, but not everyone outside is truly dead yet, I'm very sure these people would like to get in. Destructively.