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Comment by sysbin | Hacker News Reader

> They’ll be graduating into the strongest economy in American history. They’ll be just fine.

How are you forecasting that future? Seems strange to read it with what you see now and as you phrase the lost generation that's struggling from inflation & low wages..

I'm skeptical but I think the worst is yet to come for the next generations. Unless all the young adults that are struggling don't just all commit suicide in the years to follow. It's going to be a disaster when time comes and they need to retire but cannot. The burden will go on the young even more so than what we can imagine today.

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And no mention of the elephant in the room - climate change.

It feels like we're already seeing it here in Sydney, Australia. We've had dangerously low air quality from bush fires for the last 1.5 months and we now have a serious water shortage.

I've been accepting of climate change up until recently - now I'm genuinely worried about the future here.

Is there any solution in sight?

This interactive MIT tool gives you a feeling for the possible solutions: https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/

I won't spoil it for you, but you could find out that you might want to phrase that question of yours differently..

I struggle to understand what I'm supposed to get out of this tool. If "new technology" has a "huge breakthrough", global warming will be reduced .3 degrees - but we'd better hope that the breakthrough doesn't cause "economic growth" to become "high growth", since that will increase it by .7 degrees. Doesn't matter what the technology does or how the economic growth happens, we can predict their effects... somehow.

I don't think there's much understanding to be gained by attaching sliders with vague, underspecified labels to a graph.

That's why they provide a full-blown training course to make sense of the simulator and associated negotiation roleplaying game:

https://www.climateinteractive.org/tools/en-roads/the-en-roa...

https://www.climateinteractive.org/tools/climate-action-simu...

There is a small explaination for each parameter when you click the ⋮ on the top right of each parameter.

And on the breakthrough technology question: of course we could discover a unknown technology that will instantly solve everything without even having to honor the inertia of the slow but hard to steer forces that make up climate change. And while I really hope this would happen, I'd rather have more realistic scenarios in the meantime.

Suppose we invent free energy. How long will it take for that technology to replace everything on the planet? How much emissions will this distribution of technology produce? Even with fairytale-style-technology overcoming the inertia of the ongoing processes will be anything but easy.

Even if human CO2/CH4 emissions hit zero tomorrow, it's probably too late. Because of positive feedbacks already triggered. So long term, the solution will be collapse of technological society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drought_in_Australia

Australia is a big country...

Why? That's weather and short term. https://aqicn.org/map/sydney is the pollution in Sydney. Here is Jakarta https://aqicn.org/map/jakarta

Look at the historical data: all red and yellow for Jakarta, almost all green for Sydney, with the last two months an exception.

Climate change is going to have little to no impact on Sydney now or in the next 50-60 years.

> Climate change is going to have little to no impact on Sydney now or in the next 50-60 years.

Can you expand on that statement a bit? What do you base it on? It seems like we are already seeing adverse effects of global heating (eg https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2912/satellite-data-record-sho...) but maybe I'm missing your point.

Not sure why you chose to compare to Jakarta? The two cities haven't historically had similar air quality.

How do you get from a map of the current air quality in Sydney to blithely saying climate change will have "little to no effect" on Sydney for the next 60 years?

It is a common trolling strategy, I have seen it applied elsewhere to delegitimise measures against climate change.

It doesn't make any sense, but apparently it is enough to satisfy the unsophisticated blind followers of climate denialism. Anything that sounds contrarian and data-based is deemed a sufficient response to distract attention, which is scarce in most online discussion forums.

Climate change is a known problem. Known problems will be solved, since they can be measured and people are (or in this case, will soon be) incentivized to solve them. Climate change is a huge challenge but not one I particularly worry about since it exists in humanity’s collective consciousness as an idea.

It’s unknown problems you should worry about, that are unnamable because they are unpredictable and unknowable until they happen.

That's a lot of optimism from labeling a problem as known vs unknown. I'm hesitant thinking there is logic from assuming a problem known will be fixed. Also it's not too far fetched to think climate change can snowball while being irreversible.

Consider the massive amount of effort, comparatively, between the effort going on and the conversation around mitigating the risk of climate change, and the risk of the flamzboo event, which is destined to quickly destroy humanity in the next decade.

I can't call it something other than the flamzboo event, since we don't know what it is. The clearest picture one can have of what this event potentially is is by considering events which would have similar impact but are currently fringe in terms of public consciousness such as:

- Supervolcano eruptions

- Asteroid impacts

- AI takeoff

- Engineered bio weapons

- Autonomous lethal weapons

- Commoditized, small nuclear weapons

These are not the things I'm talking about, since they have some level of consciousness, but are the closest examples since they are not top of mind in the public consciousness but are confer high x-risk. The ones I worry about are the ones that we can't know currently, that may be lurking on the horizon. One doesn't have to look far back in history to recognize these problems are typically the ones we get hurt by: surprises.

I don't think I can agree. Sure, something like the plague or an asteroid impact has considerable unknowns and thus considered unfixable/dangerous/worrisome. My scepticism is from observing society, seeing tremendous problems never fixed and when people with authority are aware of it.

I think greed, selfishness and people truly inconsiderate happens on a greater scale than what we imagine with factoring into as an issue with the problem of global warming. I guess my scepticism is from considering the forgoing, before thinking of global warming and then thinking of other problems humanity faced (where people are concerned with their daily lifestyle continuing or improving).

Global warming is somewhat unique in the list of known problems when I think about it. I assume it will be too late, before people start being truly effected and to the point they act on something other than promoting public awareness. I've been living a lifestyle where I always walk to work & back. I don't own a car and I somewhat imagine similar steps need to be taken on a larger scale. I'm doubtful people will go from being knowledgable to acting. I have less faith on corporations and laws changing so they must act if they even care about being fined.

> I assume it will be too late, before people start being truly effected and to the point they act on something other than promoting public awareness.

That's all too likely. I've been following this for decades. Back in the 80s, what we're seeing now -- disappearing glaciers, far less ice cover in the Arctic Ocean, thawing permafrost, tropical diseases moving poleward, etc -- would have been perceived as catastrophic. But now it's largely ignored by the majority.

> I've been living a lifestyle where I always walk to work & back. I don't own a car ...

I was like that for decades. Now I don't care so much. Because it has basically accomplished nothing.

> ... and I somewhat imagine similar steps need to be taken on a larger scale.

For sure. And far more. But the US is screwed, after decades of suburbanization.

> I'm doubtful people will go from being knowledgable to acting.

Enough people will act enough only when it's truly too late. It's just human nature. We deal with emergencies well. But for slowly moving threats, not so much.

> I have less faith on corporations and laws changing so they must act if they even care about being fined.

Corporations exist to make money. If the climate goes to hell, they'll just make money dealing with that.

Global warming will be fixed easily if/when people stop thinking the solution is to drag humanity backwards, instead of pushing humanity forwards.

To think that we've somehow reached the peak of our ability to safely consume energy and resources when we haven't even left our home planet is an extremely short sighted perspective. In 1000 years our ancestors will laugh at those who thought that somehow, after thousands of years of advancement, humanity had found its insurmountable wall to more growth and consumption of the universes' infinite resources in the humble year of 2019 due to a mis-calculation regarding the carbon emissions due to the parochial method used at the time for generating power. It's patently absurd if you take a longer perspective. If we don't survive 1000 years, it surely will not be due to our collective failure to solve this problem.

The more people continue to think that if we just convince people to give up their modern lifestyle we'll solve the problem, the longer the problem will persist.

Instead, we should be striving not to solve global warming as a first order concern, but develop technologies that will radically improve the lives of all people, and solve global warming as one of their side effects.

The problem with this thinking is the framing.

The climate change is like going out to desert. The further you go out the hotter and harsher environment and once its too dangerous for you its not enough to stop going forward, but you need to walk all the way back home before you are safe.

The CO2 and others are in the air already causing all weather changes, its not enough to go carbon neutral to stop it. To survive we need to go significantly negative to cut out greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.

And that the biggest problem.

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