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Comment by semi-extrinsic | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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.

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