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Comment by wolco | Hacker News Reader

The missing piece of any climate model is how the earth will respond.

Do I think we are pumping co2 into the sky causing a raise in tempature? Yes. What happens after is still unclear.

The planet itself will be absolutely fine. It's been through a heck of a lot worse. Humans (and other animals) are the ones who are going to have to adapt, hard.

As a small example, a rise in sea levels would make unlivable countless coastal cities and destroy an immense amount of infrastructure. Humans will -survive- it, but say good bye to our cushy 21st century lifestyle.

So maybe we'll learn the lesson that shorelines aren't constant, and stop building right on the water? The ocean levels have been up and down hundreds or thousands of feet in the past.

Or we won't learn, and the rise will be slow enough that no one's going to drown. (Other than very low-lying islands, which were precarious to begin with, and which don't usually house complex civilizations.)

> maybe we'll learn the lesson that shorelines aren't constant, and stop building right on the water?

Coastal cities will never /not/ be a thing. The ocean and river mouths contain very many important resources for societies to ignore.

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> rise will be slow enough that no one's going to drown.

It depends on the solution: the cheapest usually is to build seawalls, and this obviously puts the city at greater risk of flooding.

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The comment you're replying to states rising sea levels as an example. There are, of course, known consequences that you don't address. To name two, it is a very direct consequence that 1) the weather will get more violent, with the additional amount of energy it contains, leading to a more frequent occurrence of natural disasters. Next, a change in climate will cause a massive redistribution and likely destruction of land suitable for agriculture, as well as lower overall quality for agricultural land, thereby 2) threatening worldwide food security.

The difference here is the accleration of climate change, estimated to be 10-50x faster than previous transitions from cooler periods[1]. One study finds that this accelerated warming could lead the extiction of 1 in 6 species[2].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97... [2] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6234/571

Yeah, but I think the parent posters' concern is that the outcome is "unclear", and I was just pointing out that no matter what happens, the planet will be fine, humans will survive, and our infrastructure is what'll be impacted (and consequently, our lifestyle).

None of that is "unclear", I think. It all follows from "temperatures rise" (which the parent concedes as a given). Ice melts. Waters rise. Life changes.

This isn't true. We have a pretty clear picture of what will happen as earth's temperatures rise. We know that sea levels will rise, ocean salinity will fall, sea currents will slow or stop, and much more.

It isn't hard to find research on this. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=effects+of+climat...

But we don't know about secondary effects those changes will bring and how they interact with the initial effects. The earth is an ecosystem and the models as good as they are are not complete.

The big thing we don't know is if there is some kind of "tipping point" where it will be very hard to correct the extra CO2 problem because it starts to get very bad, very fast. One such "tipping point" would be that the methane clathrates(methane trapped with frozen water) all over the earth start to release lots of methane causing more methane clathrates to melt and quickly we get a 3C or something increase in a decade.

The people who study this stuff for a living are pretty clear on this. The only unclear question is how to find the political will to fix it, or to deal with the effects.

As long as we continue to put our blind faith in job titles we are lost. Science is repeatable experimentation with similiar results that can be repeated by all. Religion, or politics puts faith in job title above facts.

We need to be clear on this.

You're right, and fortunately that's exactly what we're doing. Lots of good science has been (and is being) done, with "disagreements" along the lines of "I can only reproduce 97% of your findings to p 0.05, with the rest at p 0.08". There's no substantive question remaining of the gist of it, though.

The fact that it is unclear is kind of obvious. And a few decades ago, we really didn't know much.

But models have improved a lot lately and we are getting a better idea. Enough to consider it worthwhile to do something about it.

It is still very complex science, with lots of statistics involved. And with deniers on one side and doomsayers on the other, as non-specialists, it is hard to get a good picture.

The article links a website with rebuttals for most climate science myths [1]. One of them lists what we do know what will happen, and how bad that will be at least [2].

[1] https://skepticalscience.com/argument.php

[2] https://skepticalscience.com/global-warming-positives-negati...

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