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Comment by Mendenhall | Hacker News Reader

Headline could have been written 10,000 years ago. Things like the great lakes wouldnt even be here without the "arctic unraveling".

edit-interesting how the truth looks to becoming unpopular.Included link to pdf so those downvoting can see its true.

http://sashabalcazar.weebly.com/uploads/2/4/6/2/24627865/gla...

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The down votes come not from the "truth", but that this is a smoke screen. Yes, we had much higher temperatures in the past. What is the problem right now is the quick change in temperatures. At minimum this means, that our day-to-day lives are getting screwed up, as the current civilization is adjusted to the temperatures of the last 200 years. Large cities are going to be flooded, whole farming regions are going to shift. We are talking about relocating billions.

And if we are really unlucky, the eco systems get screwed up by this fast shift, which could have extinction level consequences.

Relocating billions of people is going to cause massive political disruption and the rise of all kinds of hostility between groups, including violence.

Relocating billions of dollars of economic production is going to cause significant loss of production, especially when a certain percentage of people prefer to waste away uselessly in place, like Trump's coal miners and the rust belt layoffs of a previous generation, instead of finding a role in the new economic order. We'll need people to move and change, and instead a certain percentage of them will stay home and drink and pray for everything to go back the way it was.

Relocating billions of dollars of agriculture is also not going to happen without a hitch. Is our agriculture flexible enough to avoid a significant loss of production? In the US I guess we'll call the bluff (or maybe not?) of all these subsidized farmers we've been paying to maintain extra growing capacity. There will be famine in many places.

Given the "stick your head in a bottle and pray for everything to go back to the way it was" mentality, I think the disruption of global warming will be a huge push to automate entire industries. Either you force people to move and work, which sounds horrific, or you find a way not to rely on them. The best way to derisk your reliance on low- and middle-wage workers is to rely on fewer of them. The technical/professional class, which already practices and values mobility, will consolidate control, while workforces who do not get on that bandwagon will be further reduced in relevance. Maybe the entire economy will come to resemble the petroleum extraction industry, where a small number of nomadic, relatively high skill, relatively highly paid blue collar workers are the only blue collar workers needed to sustain an entire industry. Huge numbers of people will live on public assistance in formerly productive areas, dwarfing the numbers left behind in the wake of previous economic disruptions.

Still, even in the best case scenario, we will be finding "democratic" ways to force large populations to move and other populations to make room for them.

>Relocating billions of dollars of economic production is going to cause significant loss of production, especially when a certain percentage of people prefer to waste away uselessly in place, like Trump's coal miners and the rust belt layoffs of a previous generation, instead of finding a role in the new economic order.

You mean the "new economic order" in which wages for blue-collar workers have been falling for decades, while we also cut the welfare state, leaving most of these people too indebted and impoverished to move for work, which wouldn't help anyway because there just aren't that many well-paying jobs?

The fact that the headline could have been written before means what, exactly?

65 million years ago you could write the headline "Giant Asteroid Set to Wipe Out Most Life" but that doesn't imply we should be ok with a giant asteroid hitting now.

Dinosaurs now, as then (except that I probably do a disservice to our saurian brothers and sisters).

Why are all these hippie liberals so ANTI-LAKE?

I think we're just worried there might be cities we like where the next great lakes will form.

We're wondering how fast this will happen and if there's anything we can do about it.

What is the point you are trying to make with? If the headline included that this time it's largely due to human activity would that placate you? It's an implicit assumption with such artcles that the alarm comes from this time being the fault of human activity and that the change is rapid.

Large numbers of people are passive or apathetic to what is going on in terms of pollution and the detrimental effects that this is causing. What is the point of mentioning that climate changes naturally when the focus is on human caused change?

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