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Comment by sarbaz | Hacker News Reader

> I suspect reducing emissions is cheaper in the long run than dealing with the effects.

I'm not entirely sure. People seem to be convinced that climate change will destroy all civilization, but in the distant past the earth has flourished with significantly higher temperatures than what we have today. Once our climate reaches a new equilibrium, humanity will adjust and everything will probably be OK.

And we can be certain that there will be a new equilibrium, otherwise life wouldn't have lasted for hundreds of millions of years.

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It's not just higher temperatures. Ocean acidification is a major issue as well, and that threatens to completely upend the entire ocean ecosystem. Drinkable water will be reduced. Less farmland will be viable. Glaciers melting threaten to disrupt ocean currents which would completely change our weather patterns, and not likely to be for the better.

>And we can be certain that there will be a new equilibrium, otherwise life wouldn't have lasted for hundreds of millions of years.

Basically every time something this major changes, the dominant species does too. We're smarter than previous dominant species, but since 'not having to deal with all of this bullshit' is far smarter than 'scrambling to come up with solutions that may or may not work and are unlikely to be cost effective even if they do', maybe not as smart as we think.

The climate has never before changed as quickly as it is changing today. It seems likely to me that major ecosystems will collapse completely because they can't adapt quickly enough. It is doubtful whether our technological civilization will survive the intense struggle for food and water that is too come. Look what a measly million Syrian refugees did to the European political landscape. Climate change will likely lead to a hundred times more refugees.

> Once our climate reaches a new equilibrium, humanity will adjust and everything will probably be OK.

Whatever remains of humanity will adjust and live the medieval or pre-medieval lives for the next many thousands of years.

The most fragile component of the climate change issue is human technological civilization. Once it breaks, it's game over. Most of us and most of our families won't make it. Current level of technology is maintained through a complex global supply chain involving millions of people. When that breaks, humanity will regress. Devices will die, there won't be a way to repair them. Survivors will regress maybe to early industrial era for a while, but since all easily accessible dense energy sources have already been used up, this won't last and the remnants of humanity will regress further, and stay there for God knows how long.

It's not a fate I'd wish on worst enemies.

As for how this collapse would happen? All the climate change-related "small" issues increasingly clogging our economy. More expensive food, more expensive water, less arable land, less habitable land, unprecedented migration. Eventually, there will be war. Or the global economy halts, and then there will be war.

All but one major extinction event in the past was because of global warming. What you are missing is that during those times , the temperature change was over a much longer period of time than now. What we are doing is unprecedented and there is little reason to believe anything will flourish.

But not all instances of global warming caused mass extinction events. I think that there is a correlation here rather than a causation. In fact, looking at historical charts the earth's temperature undergoes a relatively significant change every few 100k years at least. So extinction events are only a tiny minority of those events, around 5/5000

> Once our climate reaches a new equilibrium, humanity will adjust and everything will probably be OK.

That really depends on what your definition of "OK" is, I suppose.

i think the idea of reducing emissions is to reach a new equilibrium as quickly as possible, and one as close as possible to our current climate which we know is pretty good.

climate change is likely not going to destroy all civilization (notwithstanding sensationalistic New York Magazine article) but adding decades or centuries of "adjustment" -- droughts, floods, crop failures, less predictable extreme weather, displacement of people in coastal regions -- is likely to be very expensive.

hard to imagine that all this cost over several generations is outweighed by oil and coal being somewhat cheaper than renewables/nuclear.

The issue is not that we all face a catastrophic cataclysm but that climate change makes the earth significantly less amenable to us. Cropland destruction, lack of drinking water and relocation of population centers due to changing coastlines are extremely expensive and preventing that would be advantageous. The earth will be just fine without us.

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