Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kaiyou | Hacker News Reader

All these doomsday messages! And they have zero impact on the quality of my life. I wonder why nobody cares. \s

Kaiyou falls off a 10-story building. As he passes the sixth story, someone yells from the window, “How’s it going?” He yells back, “So far, so good!”

This conversation is now 30 years old. Still, so far, so good.

Well, that is the thing about hitting the ground— you can be milliseconds away and everything still looks fine. In a few decades, historians will be able to look back and identify the key events and turning points in all this. I suspect that the stuff we're seeing now will be eventually seen as part of the transition from "getting bad slowly" to "getting bad very quickly". But obviously it's hard to know without the full benefit of hindsight.

I suspect it won't be earlier than in a few centuries.

All signs point to you being wrong.

What data does your suspicion derive from?

Because historians work on different time scales. Stuff from only a few decades ago is still politics, not history.

That's quite the non-sequitur. What relationship are you implying between this supposition and the scientific facts of climate change? Would your argument change if it were astronomers telling you an asteroid would hit in 5 years?

I was replying to > In a few decades, historians will be able to look back

Historians don't look back only a few decades. That's still politics. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

My mistake, I thought we were still discussing climate change, not dropping into definitional pedantry.

Since we're into definitional pedantry, you're incorrect anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_history

Good riddance

from what is reported already happening, expect massive (hundreds of millions) climate refugees to really get going within the next five to ten years.

The problem is that the climate will be fucked beyond repair when ordinary people in rich countries feel the impact on their quality of life. We need to act way before that point.

I'm not planning to stop you from acting. Do as you wish.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com