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Comment by tosser0001 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder about future generations who will see their then-average temperatures as the new normal. There will be people complaining: “do you really want colder Winters?”

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Someone downvoted this, but this is a real and legitimate thing. It is happening continually with conservation; people don't notice the decline in animals and decrease in plant diversity because it happens over generations. In fact we even have a name for this; "shifting baselines". This is why measurement is so important, we wouldn't know about climate change without it.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline

I noticed the insects disappearing. It happened to quickly, like in 10 years we went from cars needing to be washed after a drive to now, when I don't get any insects smashed for weeks.

The problem is their summers will be much longer and more brutally hot. By 2100, we could have 20-30% of the current populace living in actually uninhabitable locales because they'll be at 120F average in the summer. Who's going to care about mild winters when you can't go outside or breathe in summer?

This would require an enormous increase in temperature. Far in excess that the models are projecting.

Thing is, the expected consequences of global warming are very much not uniform. Some regions will become much less habitable, but others will have their agricultural capacity increased. So it really matters which 20%-30% of the populace will be affected and how that relates to the global power balance.

Many of the currently wealthy regions could still say "why would you want colder winters?" because they can still breathe in summer (and would not want colder summers) and the locales becoming uninhabitable are somewhere else inhabited by someone else they don't care about.

Comments such as these make me wonder: do you never ask yourselves where most of the population of Earth lives right now and why? In the hottest areas or near them. Because for some reason, they seem to be better suited for us.

Finish that thought.

In the 50s John Von Neumann wrote an article exploring the idea of deliberately adding greenhouse gases to the earth to increase the amount of land available for agriculture (by allowing crops to be grown further north).

In effect, this is what happened to the collapse of Easter Island. Each subsequent generation forgets what was "normal" for the old generation. See Jared Diamond's fascinating account (PDF): http://employees.oneonta.edu/allenth/Class-Readings-Password...

I guess the question they will ask will be "do you want the flooding out of the cities that is occurring every second summer and costs billions?".

Fact is; even you "cool down" the earth, the equilibrium wont be restored easily, hence, we will experience weather extremes and must learn to live with them.

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