Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

It might be that big-picture thinking and the future, generally, is terrifying rather than climate change in particular.

It is challenging to construct a realistic long-run scenario of a happy future that is sophisticated and meaningful. And at the global scale even the recent past sounds pretty horrific if you spell it out. The fact that the global situation is improving rapidly doesn't balance out the fact that being subjected to a 1950s standard of living would be potentially abusive today (no mobile, no connection to the internet, questionable access to goods, etc, better or worse depending on where you live).

Part of the trouble I have with climate change as an imminent emergency is there are actually quite a few civilisation-level threats at the 200-500 year timeframe. Resource depletion, progress in weapons research, fragility of logistic chains to disruption, disease. The actual impacts of climate tend to be contributing aggravations to what are honestly concerns more driven by overpopulation.

  It is challenging to construct a realistic long-run
  scenario of a happy future that is sophisticated and
  meaningful.

It's simple enough: Pick a reference point in the past that makes most things look pretty good, and extrapolate from there.

Compared to the 1800s, everything seems to be going in the right direction. Medical technology? Much better! Childhood mortality? Lower than ever! Science? Much more advanced - and much better funded! Democracy? Many fewer limits on who can vote or serve in government! Women's rights? LGBT rights? Much improved! War? Fewer and smaller wars than ever! Long distance communication? Faster and cheaper than ever! Average education levels? Higher than ever! Prices of books? Lower than they've ever been. Availability of food? We literally have an obesity epidemic! Quality of food? More people have access to salt and spices than ever! The average westerner today eats better than a king would have in 1800! Access to education? More university lectures than you could ever watch, on a screen in your pocket.

Then just gloss over any negative changes as temporary blips, and you've got a pretty positive outlook!

That type of extrapolation form the past is extremely simplistic though. And a bit like saying that you feel pretty good at 50 years old so it'll be easy to make it to 100. Everything winds down and dies eventually; we should resist entropy as best we can but realistically one day humanity is going to fall over and not get back up. The question is how long until then, and the order of magnitude number of years probably doesn't have 5 zeros on the end.

And anyone who extrapolated 2019 from 1800 was correct but also undeniably delusional; there was no evidence it would turn out as it has, and the journey was largely uncontrolled. Anything could have happened.

I think the core issue is that people think humanity is static in the face of an imminent danger, while in effect it’s certainly not. Everyone wants to live and prosper and I’m sure that as the problem becomes more tangible, we will find the ways to mitigate this issue - just like, as a species, we did many times before.

I am also optimistic for this reason, too. In the 1980's, I had nightmares about a nuclear armageddon. We were told that by the time we were teenagers we would no longer be able to play outside: because of ozone depletion, air pollution, and acid rain. In the 1990's, we were told modern society would collapse because we would literally run out of oil. We were told that 20% of us would die from AIDS.

Don't mistake me - these threats were real, not imagined, but based completely on static trajectories. We countered these problems by changing behaviors, changing laws, and innovating.

The threat of runaway climate change may be greater than these threats, but we have shown a remarkable ability to effect change on those things that the experts told us were unchangeable.

> The actual impacts of climate tend to be contributing aggravations to what are honestly concerns more driven by overpopulation.

Yeah, but we don't need one more way to screw ourselves over.

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