Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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Is it now? The predictions are, as far as I understand, that a lot of coastal areas will become submerged this century, meanwhile the rising temperatures will (and already are) mess up with the food supply. As that accelerates, the world will see a migration wave like never before in history, and frankly, it sounds like straight to World War 3 from here to me.

The planet, frankly, doesn't matter. It'll be fine. The thing that matters is our technological civilization. Whether it's a gun or a glacier, our civilization is fragile, and when it fails, it's essentially game over for humanity - mass deaths followed by the remaining survivors stuck in medieval conditions for many thousands, or tens of thousands of years.

Things won't move that quickly, and hopefully they won't get that dire. We can't rule it out either though. There's plenty of good reasons to worry and take action. It is still a tragedy unfolding. But it's not necessarily as doom and gloom as many people believe.

But things do move that quickly. Current projections [1] have global sea levels rising from anything between 0.3m and 2.4m by the end of the century.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise

That's pretty slow for a change smoothed out over eighty years.

Well, (a) it's a hell of a lot faster than it has been for most of my life, and (b) it means that in my lifetime, a lot of the places I know & love will be seriously affected by - if not completely lost to - sea level rise.

I get the sense you don't live anywhere near the coast.

> But it's not necessarily as doom and gloom as many people believe

It really is doom if whole cities are wiped off the map. Just because the process of that doom happens in relatively slow motion doesn't make it any less doom. Hundreds of coastal cities will be literally gone. But don't let the speed of the process trick your mind. It is actually urgent to act now. We need to decarbonize our economies within a decade or those cities are doomed. We need to motivate people, and we need less of this "meh, it'll take a while, we can sit on our hands for now, let's not get excited."

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