Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Sad that the guy has to start off his presentation by showing how many Democrats he's voted for in his lifetime (and that still wasn't enough to tame the mob). That's the fever pitch, antagonistic world we find ourselves in. What if global warming isn't the dire catastrophe that so many people seem to desperately cling to? I have conversations with people who think we are going to face extinction from global warming. It's pseudo-religious and it strikes me as very primitive.

Humans live in Antarctica. We grow tropical plants in greenhouses in Canada. We've invented thousands of ways of harvesting electricity. We have climate control systems for indoor environments. Some humans even live in outer space. Some humans spend months at a time in submarines under the ocean.

We're one of the most adaptable species on the planet and that's the very reason for our success ...but global warming is going to kill us all? Give me a break. None of this is constructive.

Humans are the most adaptable species, but we still depend on the global ecosystem. Sure, our species could probably survive a few tens of thousands of years underground after a meteor strikes, huddled around breeder reactors, but this mode of live doesn't scale to nine billion people. If critical systems like phytoplankton in the oceans get out of whack literally billions will die.

Listen, life has thrived on this planet for well over a billion years. It's seen carbon levels much, much higher and primates literally evolved during such periods. It's ludicrous to suggest that billions will die.

As far as I know it's been a really long time since the climate changed as rapidly as it's changing now. I'm not sure whether it ever warmed up as quickly before. Evolution needs time. We're already in the midst of a major extinction event. Life will most likely go on, but I see no reason to believe that we'll survive the transition at our current numbers.

I see no reason to believe that we won't, unless you think we'll suddenly lose all technology that we've developed over the past 5000 years.

Also, here's a list at some of the dramatic swings in temperature and sea levels over just the past 2 million years, including many events impacting modern human history, such as the Little ice age: http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/7x.html

> unless you think we'll suddenly lose all technology that we've developed

Which is normally what happens after a civilisation crash.

Getting back to the level of the Middle Ages is fairly easy to do - many, many people can figure out some of the basics even from first principles. Figure out a windmill, weaving, fulling, irrigation etc just from the basics people got going through school probably in just a few years.

Yet the more advanced tech? That's a system fragility. Easy to lose, hard to get back if lost. If there's mass destruction of cities, relocations, perhaps wars and huge numbers of deaths and displaced people why expect a globalised, technological and mainly online world to survive?

Could just as easily find ourselves in the same boat as those in the worlds after the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians etc. Lots of things we can see but have no idea how to recreate. It could take hundreds of years to claw our way back to creating chips. Once the first generation that remembers high school or uni is passed, it gets even harder...

Note the scale of the x-axis here and the predicted jump for the next 100 years: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/All_pala...

It doesn't look like we had such rapid warming before, at least not in the last million years where we have decent data. We don't know how the ecosystem will handle it.

Which major extinction event? Do you really think this is an appropriate comparison to proven major extinction events of the past (e.g Chicxulub, 66 m. years ago)?

The human impact on biodiversity forms one of the primary attributes of the Anthropocene. Humankind has entered what is sometimes called the Earth's sixth major extinction. Most experts agree that human activities have accelerated the rate of species extinction. The exact rate remains controversial – perhaps 100 to 1000 times the normal background rate of extinction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene#Biodiversity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

It's not just a modern trend, either. Most of the North American megafauna went extinct ~10,000 years ago, around the time when humans first arrived on the continent. We lost the mammoth, mastodon, saber-tooth tiger, dire wolf, giant beaver, ground sloth and more.

New Zealand was the same. Humans arrived around 1300 and we lost the moa and Haarst's eagle (the world's largest flying bird) by around 1400.

Incidentally, the largest species of bird that ever lived was the elephant bird of Madagascar. It weighed up to 730kg (1600lbs) and stood 3m (10ft) tall. It went extinct around the year 1200.

There used to be a lot more interesting animals around, but our ancestors hunted them to extinction. Nobody misses them because nobody alive today ever had them in the first place.

It's sad, but even the extinctions of the coolest, most amazing creatures are quickly forgotten. When the giraffe or blue whale is gone, it will just be another story like the elephant bird.

Yet, billions will die. Regardless.

Setting aside snide remarks, the concern most people have for the environment is not about "life", it is about our civilization. We have seen huge advances in quality of life in the past 100 years, because of increases in medicine, trade, and mobility. These characteristics rely on a relatively peaceful coexistence across the globe.

The fear is that increased survival pressure will void most of those advances. If global trade breaks down, we might lose the technology and infrastructure that enables us to feed 7+ billion people. So regardless of whether the Earth's climate will kick us out, we still might end up returning to population levels of the 1900s.

> Sad that the guy has to start off his presentation by showing how many Democrats he's voted for in his lifetime (and that still wasn't enough to tame the mob).

Of course he doesn't have to do that. What he votes for is completely irrelevant. It is a cheap rhetorical trick to imply that the opposition is driven by ideology rather than search for truth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com