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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Now imagine a climate change future where this happens all more often -- also the resulting wars between neighborhood states with more/less recourses.

This is a more likely future than "colonies on Mars", fully autonomous self driving cars, and personal robot assistants...

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No need to imagine the future, the present is bad enough to justify climate mitigations.

There's a lot of talk about drought and climate change. But what does the consensus climate science says about droughts? The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that "There is low confidence in attributing changes in drought over global land areas since the mid-20th century to human influence owing to observational uncertainties and difficulties in distinguishing decadal-scale variability in drought from long-term trends." https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2017/09/WG1AR5_Chapt...

Well, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy had both. The premise of William Gibson's The Peripheral also seems to be that the development of futuristic technology is not going to stop, it's just going to exacerbate the unequal distribution of resources.

Who says we can‘t have both? Of course the latter will only be accessible to a wealthy elite still glad they managed to escape the woes of socialism.

>Who says we can‘t have both?

Reality. Once constant recession, social unrest, famines, resource struggles, and so on become a permanent fixture, consensus to spend money on such things becomes even lower (and there's no market to sustain a "wealthy elite" either, the elite declines too, like it did in Rome's fall).

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