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Comment by beebmam | Hacker News Reader

You're wrong about what the Clinton staffer said. He said, in article 1 that you've linked: “You and your friends will die of old age and I’m going to die from climate change. You and your friends let this happen, which is going to cut 40 years off my life expectancy.”

It is plainly false to claim that he is going to die during the 4 years of Trump being in office. Please don't lie.

It's quite likely that with the RCP 8.5 climate change model, which could be feasible under a Trump administration since he has stated many times that he wants to increase the use of climate change inducing energy sources, someone who is 25 years old right now could die from climate change's apocalyptic effects when they are a senior. As for 40 years off his life expectancy, that's possible, depending on what life expectancy could be by the time he reaches that age.

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> It's quite likely that with the RCP 8.5 climate change model, which could be feasible under a Trump administration since he has stated many times that he wants to increase the use of climate change inducing energy sources, someone who is 25 years old right now could die from climate change's apocalyptic effects when they are a senior.

Please tell me how. Excluding wars, I don't see how climate change will kill many healthy people in the US or Europe in the next century. It will affect our lives, surely. But kill?

Re: "depending on what life expectancy could be by the time he reaches that age"

This is quite easy to estimate, since increases in life expectancy have been constant for the past 80 years. The Dept. of Social Security even has an online calculator for it, which says a 25 year old male today has a life expectancy of 82.3 years.

Do you really think he'll be dead in 15 years from now due to climate change?

A 1% loss of Greenland's ice mass raises seas by 6cm. A 1% loss of ice from the Antarctic, polar, and Greenland sheets will yield 76cm rise in sea level. This puts entire European and American cities under water.

If all three melt entirely, we are looking at about 70m of sea level rise bringing the oceans to the heartland of America.

Those numbers don't take into account other glaciers or thermal expansion of water as the base line temperature rises.

As sea levels rise, hundreds of millions of people will be displaced and die trying to relocate. See: any time in history people have tried to move en masse.

Surely, human kind will survive. Life will surely survive. I think you're nuts if you think anything remotely related to the status quo will survive the next century.

We are looking at about a meter of sea level rise in the next 80 years based on current data sets: http://kaares.ulapland.fi/home/hkunta/jmoore/pdfs/jev_moore_...

Your 70m of sea level rise is entirely unsupported by the paper you link to, where the worst-case scenario in 2500 is 10m rise.

The latest IPCC report in the RCP8.5 scenario (very pessimistic, emissions keep increasing) predicts 62 +/- 20 cm of sea level rise from 1990 to 2100.

How on earth will that drive mass displacement of people in the US and Europe?

You're saying 75 cm of sea level rise will put entire cities underwater. Which ones, and why are they not already under water? Autumn storms bring waves much taller than 75 cm. Most coastal cities are built to withstand 2 meter waves, probably even more. Besides, they lifted all of Chicago by that much already a hundred years ago. We'll have exactly zero problems fixing this.

Look, I'm no climate change skeptic. But the fact that no real life-changing effects are expected for young people today nor our children (in the US/Europe) is the biggest problem in fighting climate change. That, and the fact that literally everything we do today causes emissions.

>Please don't lie.

I in no way "lied," I merely did the math based upon his statement and likely age given his station in life.

He said Trump was going to cut 40 years off of his life expectancy, and specifically said that his cause of death would be climate change that will occur as a direct result of Trump winning the election. Assuming he is in his 30's (it would be rare for someone to be senior enough to have been in that meeting if he weren't), he will be at least 34 when Trump leaves office. The life expectancy of an American male (pre-Trump death rays) is 76.3 years [1]. 76.3-40=36.3. Assuming he was at least 32, he is claiming that he will indeed die during Trump's initial term. If he is slightly younger, you are correct that he might survive a couple of years into the next Presidential term according to his version of science.

[1] http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa/life-expectancy-male

You are calculating from life expectancy at birth, not life expectancy at his current age. That's a fairly serious methodology flaw that makes your calculation meaningless.

For a 30 year old male, life expectancy is +52.2 years, so Trump taking 40 years off of that would leave about 8 years after the end of the first Trump term.

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