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Comment by revscat | Hacker News Reader

This seems like the perfect time to panic.

I just don’t see how we’re getting out of this alive.

> I just don’t see how we’re getting out of this alive.

Even worst case predictions for climate change don't imply the human race will be threatened. But what we will see is massive geopolitical disruption as previously habitable regions become uninhabitable. What happens when coastal Myanmar is underwater or southern India experiences 130 degree days on a regular basis? Climate change is going to make itself felt over the coming decades as increases in migrant crises, regional conflicts, and famines. (Not to mention economic loss as, e.g., the agricultural viability of large areas changes.)

How can you not think the human race will be threatened by all those factors?

Forget about the geopolitcal issues, which will indeed be massive. What about food production?

In 2010 a single heat wave triggered the Arab spring revolts a couple of months later.

> The wildfires destroyed one-third of Russia's wheat harvest. The Russian government refused to export the rest of its harvest and set a grain export ban to fight inflation. This led to extremely high food prices, which led to panicking on the global markets. Many experts including from the International Food Policy Research Institute say that the Russian wildfires in summer 2010 played a leading role in triggering the Arab Spring starting in 2010, especially in Egypt's case. Higher food prices helped to make oppression, poverty, and corruption under autocratic leaders even more aching for the local population. Also, as Russia was not even a member of the WTO at the time, banning exports was not a problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Russian_wildfires

We are approaching a world were these kind of problems with food production will be globalized and will affect everything but specially the global economy.

Slightly off-topic: Is there data on how many people don’t put children into our world because of this?

I don't know, but I really feel like we should be talking about this. Migrant cries and famines tend to cause war. It seems like a curl joke to raise a child in this world of plenty only to destroy it before their adulthood.

Arguably, keeping evolution going aka providing our offspring a good future is pretty much the only purpose of life. I don't have a problem with anyone choosing different goals for themselves, but the crowd advising "shouldn't have children because outlook not great" just seem crazy to me. We should do better exactly for those to come after us, so at best this mindset is the same as "giving up, to late" all over again, just in a less obvious form.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "threatened". Sure, humans will continue to exist, we won't go extinct, at least not globally. But we're looking at local and possibly global societal collapse. If we're back 500 years in the past developmentally and technologically, that's a huge deal. Maybe even if you survive, can you go back to a world without vaccines, antibiotics and mass communication?

Do you think we can lose 500 years of tech development globally? I can see some areas becoming challenging and definitely a slowdown in progress but it seems unlikely that all this knowledge will evaporate

I don't have a good answer to that question, I'm not sure anyone does. But if society collapses, much of that knowledge goes with it. Our society is incredibly complex and fragile, with a very high degree of specialization. That makes us vulnerable to these kinds of issues.

While the "dark ages" were hardly dark and ignorant, the collapse of the Roman empire meant advanced road building and concrete were lost for 1500 years. So there is some historical precedent here.

500 years would put us back to 1500ish, I can’t see that, steam technology and electric motors/turbines are simply doable (and where done) with not much technology to boot strap from, hand tools made machines which made specialised machines which repeated for generations but the first step comes back to steam and electrification.

It’s not like every book in every library would or could disappear.

I think there is a problem with knowledge being very dencly concentrated and supply chains being so long.

If you took someone who worked in a steel mill I bet they would have no idea how to produce steel from first principles. They know what their job entails, they know which bits of equipment need serviced an maintained but they don't know how to get from rocks to bar stock.

Similarly if you had a perfectly working steel mill and you cut the supply of coke or iron ore few would know how to get it up and running again. If you cut the supply of the alloying elements you might get a passable mild steel but not one to the exact specifications you require.

I think it's probably surprising how few vital links you have to cut before life as we know it breaks down.

We might lose electronics and such, but we won't forget that a wood stove is more efficient than an open fireplace. We won't forget that it's a good idea to dig your outhouse far away from your source of drinking water.

as a reminder, the original comment was "I don't see how we are getting out of this alive"

A lot of people will die due to climate change and the ensuing political instability.

If extreme political instability from climate change leads to nuclear war, that could threaten human extinction.

With melting Himalayan glaciers, I am a bit worried on how Pakistan, India and China will deal with water rarefaction.

>Even worst case predictions for climate change don't imply the human race will be threatened.

I mean some obviously do https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/world-climate-ch...

here is someone who denies that it is an existential threat but provides a lot of nice links to people saying it is https://www.climatechangenews.com/2019/06/04/i-denier-human-...

Well, I'm certainly not getting out alive. And so far, nobody that I know of has. Maybe someday, one day, though.

But yes, you likely meant "we're" in the sense of the human race, or modern technological society. I really doubt that the human race is seriously at risk. Although global population could drop substantially. As part of modern technological society crashing.

So it goes. It was probably inevitable.

Edit: As with population boom-and-bust cycles, generally.

Not getting how that's possible at all. An ice age would be far more devastating to the human race than a warming period. Crop yields are up:

1) https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornyl... 2) https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/riceyl...

Ok, so food looks safe and secure. Um, lets see, what are the other basic needs? Shelter? Water? We've had the rainiest year in 125 years: https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/05/08/united-sta...

So uhh...water looks good. We also happen to find ourselves on a planet that's covered in 70% water...so there's always that as a back up supply...

Hmm...maybe our 21st century sensibilities require energy as a basic necessity. We've got tons of resources for energy (more than ever in history).

Hmm. I'm really not seeing a reason to panic.

EDIT: Sea level is rising at 3.3 mm a year: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/

Look, I do think some coastal communities may need to engineer some solutions to prevent damage, or some cities may need to "retract" inland...but it's not like ocean levels have ever been static. http://www.kwaad.net/SeaLevel-MiddleAges-LittleIceAge.html

You need to look beyond just US corn. Crop yields need to continue increasing globally just to keep up with population growth, which going to be a significant challenge. At the same time, farmland is being lost to urbanization and desertification every single day. On top of that, weeds and pests are developing resistance to chemicals, and pollinating insects are dying off rapidly. Plus, GMO notwithstanding, conventional intensification methods are running into diminishing returns. So: farming ain't getting any easier.

Now, enter climate change. Droughts are bad. Downpours (cf. rainiest year) are arguably worse, because they accelerate soil erosion. Many places have lost half or more of their arable soil over the past half century, and rebuilding soil takes many, many years. No soil, no harvest.

So I don't share your optimism. Perhaps there are high tech solutions to all of the above problems, but they're (currently) too expensive for most of the world.

While it's true that there's an abundance of water, the issue is that there's limited drinking water.

You can't survive on drinking ocean water. There's currently no energy-efficient process to remove salt and other impurities from unpotable water. That's a real issue.

Increased rainfall could be good, but could cause flooding and doesn't do much benefit when it's acidic.

Well we really don't have very good predictions for how much rainfall will occur over the next century, but we have no reason to believe that droughts will become standard. Especially since we just experienced record rainfall in the midst of the 4th hottest year in modern records.

There are ways to remove salt from ocean water. It's just almost always more expensive than extracting from the widely available fresh water sources on the planet.

As long as the water cycle is going, we'll still have fresh water.

Rainfall is good, but flooding is a localized issue. It's not a global concern. CO2 doesn't cause acid rain.

> We've got tons of resources for energy (more than ever in history).

Europe is already past its peak, and it already has some effects on its economy. (GPD is roughly proportional to the energy we spend: less energy, less stuff.) Unless we have some technological breakthrough, available energy will go down, and the economy will soon follow.

Malthus was wrong only because we found fossil fuels, allowing our crop yields to follow the exponential growth of the population (the growth used to be linear). If we're not careful, we could very well face a Malthusian collapse.Hmm.

> I'm really not seeing a reason to panic.

Certainly. Panicking only makes things worse. And the "time to panic" is precisely the time when we must not panic.

But it is when we should do something, and stop debating whether anything is happening.

The productive and habitable locations will move and our governments will probably not keep up with migration crises. The issue is that there well be a dramatic reshuffling, even if total output remains strong.

Time will tell.

Honestly, I don't care much, because I'll be dead.

But I do expect considerable lulz, before I die.

That does come off as harsh. But in my defense, I did spend a decade in the NGO sector, at nominal wage, trying to build support for reducing CO2 etc emissions. Some decades ago.

Although there's been some progress since -- such as improved energy efficiency, and dramatic increases in solar and wind generation -- it's been overall totally inadequate. We're still heading for civilization-threatening changes in global climate.

Am I not entitled to some "I told you so" lulz?

Also, the "I don't care much, because I'll be dead." attitude has arguably been common among US industrial management. That plus "Hey, we can make good money by gaming the changes."

I'm on your wavelength.

The biggest, most gigantic problem, amongst many, is that the food supply seems in serious danger.

No, it's not at all. Look, crop yields are way up in the past few years:

Rice yields are up 40% since 1988: https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/riceyl...

Corn's up 60%: https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornyl...

Wheat is up 48% since '88: https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/wwyld....

Cattle inventory looks steady: https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Cattle/inv.php

Yeah...hmm, not seeing a reason to panic about food supply.

You're giving historical stats.

These are effectively irrelevant because they are from the time when the climate was still largely the same as it has been for hundreds of years.

The question is - what will be the yields in a world in which the seasons are disrupted?

The seasons won't be disrupted mate. The seasons depend on the tilt of the Earth's axis as it rotates around the sun. The worst case scenario we're looking at is a shift in the fertile zones that crops can thrive in. That shift is far easier to deal with in a global warming scenario than a global cooling scenario. If we were to be entering an ice age, crop yields would go down and food supply would shrink. As it stands, warmth and CO2 are good for plants, so it's not likely to damage food supply at all.

> Yeah...hmm, not seeing a reason to panic about food supply.

Food supply go up for now. Will they still go up after Peak Oil? Peak Energy?

food, water, shelter, space..

right now the most important is leader, but that's a concept not a thing

Does anyone really make it out of this world alive?

I wonder if Canada and Russia will be the nicest places to live in the next century.

The northern parts, sure. Also northern China. The Arctic could become the new Mediterranean.

Under what scenario would the temperature of the artic shift by more than 30C over the whole year...

That’s silly.

Why would that be necessary?

They grow lots of wheat in the US upper midwest, and it gets damn cold there in the winter.

He said Mediterranean, upper Midwest in the US is not a Mediterranean climate either.

Ah. Yes, I said Mediterranean. But I meant it in the classical sense. Of a sea used for transportation among major centers of civilization. When everything in the current temperate zones has become ultra-tropical hellhole.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nR0lOtdvqyg

While you panic other people make big money.

yes, I was panicking back when al gore tried to scare the crap out of all of us by saying all ice caps will be melted by 2012 and to start panicking because we were going to lose all the coastal cities.

he then proceeded to buy investment property on the beach.

forgive me if i dont give a shit anymore.

Have you completed shock and denial already?

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