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Comment by LatteLazy | Hacker News Reader

I don't get why people are still underselling this. Coronavirus will be a fucking walk in the park compared to the climate change that is already inevitable. You think a few million dead and 6months of impaired economic activity is a bad deal compared with what we're in for. Why are the major, well informed sources defacto lying about it?

In case anyone wonders, conservative estimates put climate change at 150k deaths a year and rising... In 2009.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/global-warming-an...

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Well it has to do with money and bad journalism. Journalists love to talk about potential natural disasters instead of co2 levels and global temperature. People think the stuff journalists report on is "science" when it is mostly some clickbait article. The number of times they cite a random blogpost is quite shocking.

If you are so critical of the big media, then don't read them! There is plenty of other information that comes directly from scientists and is written for policymakers so anyone on HN should understand it. For example: read the summaries of ICCP Reports and please finally start taking climate change seriously.

Sorry I did not mean you specifically. But the HN readers. And i meant the IPCC, not ICCP

FWIW, people are underselling this probably because people will give up if you tell them the doomsday scenario.

Making it just terrible enough that people can compare, without talking about straight cataclysm helps ensuring that people at least read the entire article.

Maybe.

I think it's also because the worst direct consequences (sea level rise induced flooding and loss of arable land, wet bulb temperatures that will kill you if you're exposed for more than an hour) will mainly hit other people in a belt from Northern Brazil through the Sahel, the Middle East and Asia to China up to Harbin.

Pretty much all of those people are invisible to westerners.

But taking action means making your lifestyle worse: Never flying. Avoiding using a car as much as possible. Making meat a special occasion food (once a year). Buying things that last two or four decades instead of fashion items.

"I'm all right, Jack" is the thinking.

I would say that's the reason why most people are not taking radical changes, but I doubt that's why the mainstream medias aren't talking about the nightmare scenario, which is what the comment was referring to (I think).

"sea level rise induced flooding and loss of arable land"

Didn't the Netherlands solve this problem 800 years ago using medieval technology? Their lowest city is 7m below sea level.

They are a rich country and have been rich for a long time

I would assume that nearly every country has a GNP per capita higher than the netherlands did 800 years ago, and modern construction equipment and techniques would make the cost substantially lower.

Bangladesh would have to build the biggest flood wall in the entire world.

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