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Comment by poelzi | Hacker News Reader

I"m into that topic before it became mainstream, long term /r/collapse reader. To be honest, I don't think there will be a rebuild after this one. No water, no food and wet bulb temperatures over 35 °C for many hours a day, good look under this conditions. Maybe some smaller groups will find some sweat spot to survive in, but large scale civilizations I doubt that.

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> To be honest, I don't think there will be a rebuild after this one.

Wait, I'm confused. Are you claiming that current climate change will lead to the collapse of civilization?

That is the default path we're on. All the models for things not going that way involve the emissions rate plummeting over the next decade and then going negative for several decades.

Essentially the IPCC and scientists in general have baked in the assumption to the models that we are smart enough to avoid collapse by changing our behavior. TBD.

Or to put it in P.G./HN jargon, (our current) civilization is "default dead" if we stay above 10Gt/year for the latter half of the century.

He's far from being the first one to claim that. That's where doing nothing leads us, and so far, we (as in, the society) seem incapable of tackling this problem. It's already too late to stop it, and we seem incapable to contain it as well.

For the overview of the argument, I'd recommend a paper called "Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy". Direct link: http://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf

Yes, if no action is taken against climate change and our annual CO2 emissions rise because the living standard in India and China rises then collapse of civilization is very likely. Depending on our determination it is also possible for no human to survive climate change. 9°C warming might be far off but it certainly isn't impossible, thanks to feedback loops and ignorance.

The reality will probably look a bit more rosy if we get our act together and do manage to reduce CO2 emissions, at least I hope this will happen.

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