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Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

Nature has never been stable especially not for humans so that's hardly a useful premise. If anything we have made it more stable because we are better at handling all the things it throws at us.

I would still ask those most worried to point to a scientifically demonstrated consequence of climate change we don't know how to deal with or that they believe we won't be able to find solutions for over the next 50-100 years or so.

Edit: It's funny how downvotes are being used instead of argument by people I assume consider themselves on the side of science.

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You dismissed mass migration and civil war with a single sentence. You're either being intentionally inflammatory or in denial about how close to home these effects are going to be.

Humanity may survive, yes, but civilisation as we know it will regress to a large degree if the world leaders are as flippant about the issue as you are.

Software will not solve climate change, no matter how many startups you create and sell. Climate Change is a human lifestyle addiction problem that affects the suppliers of the lifestyle more than the consumers - until the number of suppliers start dwindling and then the consumers wonder why their coffee habit starts costing so much. Addictions and habits aren't easy to break even individually, much less for a whole society.

Rising oceans, changing climate zones, less arable land, fewer food resources, civil unrest, mass migration, resource wars, economic collapse.

(edit: the first three are things in the above list are already occurring, the rest are logical extensions).

I didn't dismiss them I just don't believe they are impossible to deal with.

Again you are just listing a bunch of things that might or might not happen without any evidence: 1) that they will happen, 2) that we can't deal with them if they happen. 3) when they will happen.

Yet you consider yourself the rational one.

Legitimately curious: how do you "deal with" mass migration? Societies don't deal particularly well with large influxes of migrants.

You deal with it as it happens. It's not like it will happen one day. It will also happen over time and yes create tensions. But the solution is not as some ex want to stop the moderns world and growth. On the contrary it's to make those countries richer so they can deal with the other consequences of a changing climate like the resto of us.

Again we are discussing the difference between accepting there are some consequences of the climate changing and then these catastrophist claims that the world is going to end and we can't deal with it.

Kif: It's an emergency, sir.

Zapp: Come back when it's a catastrophe

> Nature has never been stable especially not for humans so that's hardly a useful premise.

Sure, but making it more unstable is clearly worse for us. Sure, we have ways of making even the most unstable environments survivable (like the Moon!) but saying that we should just make things worse and hope that we can undo it in 50 years isn't a really good strategy.

Again how is the world more unstable?

Global warming increases the extremes of natural disasters, doing things like making deserts drier and creating larger storms.

But we are better at dealing with extreme weather. More people survive extreme weather than before.

http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/hazstats/resources/weather_fatali...

I would really encourage you to stop for a minute and start digging into the data. You will be shocked when you realize how little is based on actual facts.

You're being downvoted for trotting out well-worn and eye-roll inducing ignorance. It'd be one thing to approach this conversation with an open mind, but just stating blanket nonsense raises hackles.

> Nature has never been stable especially not for humans

Yeah, it changes on geologic timescales, i.e. thousands and millions of years. We've subjected nature to catastrophic shocks 1000x faster. It does not respond well. It collapses. We're in the middle of shit storm because of our own actions. It is absolutely not business as usual for Earth.

> I would still ask those most worried to point to a scientifically demonstrated consequence of climate change

We're not really sure how Earth is gonna function if the oceans are dead and there are no insects, and parts of it are literally uninhabitable for humans because it will be too hot to go outside (~130F).

> If anything we have made it more stable

Nonsense. We chopped down most of the forests in the US [1] to make farmland. Literally. My home state of Indiana was _literally_ solid hardwood forest 250 years ago. Take a look at it on Google maps sometime.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_in_the_United_St...

Edit: added handy reference

And yet all you are doing here is proving my point.

You take the most catastrophic interpretations as gospel while at the same time admitting we have no idea what the consequences will actually be.

That's exactly the point here.

So instead of jumping to conclusions like you are doing perhaps it would help if you started being concrete.

The quesiton still stands. What scientifically demonstrated problem which will arise over the next 100 years can't we deal with?

I at least am not trying to argue that we're utterly doomed. But wouldn't it be a hell of a lot easier to not have to damn every ex-glacier? To not have to build sea walls on every coast, and deal with year round hurricane & fire seasons, and desalinate massive quantities of water, and everything else? Yeah, we can survive on the moon and grow crops in Antarctica. But notice, most people prefer living in Palm Beach and cultivating the Midwest.

It's like with bees. Some people go, who cares if neonicotinoids wipe them out, we'll simply make a billion incredibly advanced miniature robot bees to replace them. Ok, sure, we can probably figure that out in the next fifty years. But that seems like way more of a pain in the ass than just cutting it out with the neonicotinoids.

P.S. the insect populations are already massively cratered. That part isn't wild speculation about 2100, that's today. I'm sure you remember the headlines about the study in Europe finding 75% reduction in insect biomass over the last twenty five years. Oh, and the year round fire season is here in California.

There are a lot of things in life that would be a lot easier if only they were different. The problem is that we are dealing with a wicked problem.

We need energy to survive especially being as many as we are, poor countries are depending on cheap reliable energy and don't care about the climate. They are trying to survive today.

So it all comes back to what the consequences will be of what you are going to propose as a solution.

If for ex. the choice was between making fossil fuel illegal or allow it to be used as it is being used today then I would definitely be choosing the latter so that we can continue to have growth and create the surplus to come up with better solutions.

You're the only one here proposing making fossil fuel illegal, and IMO anybody proposing poor countries bear the brunt of fixing this, doesn't take it seriously- one, yes, it's obviously an impossible ask for people living in huts, and two, they are only a tiny, tiny part of the problem.

Personally I figure we need a lot of things- heavy investment in sequestration technology, clean energy, and carbon free transport in the first world, but also clever spot fixes like the $1 grate for cookfires (https://www.engineeringforchange.org/news/a-1-insert-for-coo...) that could cook the same meal with less fuel in millions of households. Maybe someone will come up with a cheap clever way to slow down the melting of drinking water glaciers to buy a few decades. The floating shade-ball experiments in reservoirs to reduce evaporation also come to mind.

P.S. The barely-surviving communities you mention concern for are the least able to cope with the consequences of climate change. Desalination plants and robot bees are simply not on their list of options.

Let's not pretend there isn't a big group of people who want to make fossil fuel illegal.

And lets not pretend that whatever solution most people think of it isn't somehow going to be based on slowing down growth.

P.S. They certainly will be having big problems dealing with the consequences if they aren't allowed to grow and become richer and won't have access to cheap reliable energy.

What can I say, you aren't talking to those people.

The build-out of renewable power and electrifying everything in a matter of two or three decades would be superhero-level industrialism worthy of the legacy of WWII America. Solar panels & windmills need people to install them, and that new battery-electric F-150 is going to need a lot of people to develop & build it. Sequestration, too, will be a massive industrial works if we get it going, and synthetic fuel could balance the flow of carbon in the transit sector overnight.

That future would be built on a lot of American sweat & hard work. Plenty of growth, too. Frankly, I'd have thought that was something the country that rebuilt her fleets in like a year after Pearl Harbor & landed on the moon could get excited about.

Wind and solar are not going to come even close to solving our energy needs and they aren't as environmentally friendly as claimed.

They can certainly fill a lot moreof our need than they do today, and there is still nuclear as well.

More or less environmentally friendly than climate change?

I'm surprised for someone pro growth and all, you aren't interested in the opportunity to build all this out. Why not?

I am interested in solving the basic problems with energy which means finding a base source that fulfills the following 5 parameters: Cheap, plentiful, reliable, scalable and clean.

Only Nuclear solves that today but there is a huge anti-nuclear sentiment by the environmental organizations and thus politically against nuclear which of course is absurd as that's probably the only energy form that actually can deliver on the no-emission promise which is the one everyone claims to be so worried about.

I have nothing against wind and solar but they are just inferior to nuclear and hopefully in some distant future fusion and in a less distant future thorium but the current sentiment makes that even more filled with friction.

To give you an example of the absurdity.

This summer the weather was amazing in Denmark, the result no wind which in a country largely based on wind energy means they are relying on other countries to provide energy in this case Germany. Germany who also had a great summer and has been focusing on solar.

What happened? Germany used coal. And now that they are closing their nuclear powerplants that will only increase and is a good example of the consequences of a ideologically driven rather than a rationally driven energy policy.

Thanks but no thanks.

> You're being downvoted for trotting out well-worn and eye-roll inducing ignorance

Please do not break the site guidelines like this, regardless of how wrong or annoying other comments may be.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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