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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

I feel terrible for the polar bears. I wonder if there is any possibility that they wont go extinct.

You should probably also feel bad for every living create on earth including for yourself. Their extinction is likely a sign ours might not be so far behind.

Edit: Go for the down vote, but the uncomfortable truth is that we're not likely to colonize Mars in 50 years or live underground, we need the biosphere just like these creatures. No level of denial will alter this fact.

At our current rate humans won’t face extinction for thousands of years. We don’t need a biosphere to live in a 5C warmer planet.

What will happen is likely massive unrest and famine due to crop shortages leading to a significant population decline. But we can lose 80% of the population and barely be set back 1-2 centuries.

Aside from probably being plain wrong, this sort of thinking is also a germ for boundless evil; from saying "we can lose 80% of the population..." to saying "we should lose 80% of the population so things will be better for the other 20%" and then "let's do something to lose that useless 80% so that ours will be the 20%" is all too small a step.

FFS it’s just a simple refutation of the “human extinction” bullshit. It’s horrific enough without making shit up.

There is no scientific evidence for climate change being an extinction event for humans so there is no substance backing your “probably wrong” statement.

Of course there is no "scientific evidence" for exactly what it will take to drive humans to extinction seeing as that that's never happened yet. But some things we need to consider even if we can't "scientifically" define their probability, and many people who are quite well versed in scientific thinking don't think the probability of human extinction as a direct or indirect consequence of global warming (especially combined with other forms of environmental destruction that are also happening) is too low to bother talking about.

Anyway, even if "human extinction" is unscientific, the rest of your comment is rather even less scientific than that. Let me see now...

1) "We don’t need a biosphere to live in a 5C warmer planet."

What scientific evidence is there that we can survive without a biosphere (regardless of temperature for a moment)? I know! We'll do it just like the Martian colonists did it. Oh, wait! (facepalm) Or are you saying that a 5C warmer planet will making living easier, because somehow agriculture will work better when it's warmer even without the "natural" biosphere? It's a bit hard to understand what you really meant with that statement, but I'm pretty sure nobody who studies agriculture or ecology would agree with that statement any way you parse it. So: unscientific, I'm afraid.

2) "we can lose 80% of the population and barely be set back 1-2 centuries."

Oh, so that's what happened last time we lost 80% of the population? Oh, wait! (facepalm again) Seriously, if you want a scientific, or at least scholarly take on that question, read Joseph Tainter's "The collapse of complex societies"... sometimes when societies collapse they settle on a lower level of complexity, but other times they just disappear. Also, there simply is no such thing as just being set back 1-2 centuries... we no longer have the technology of the 19th century and it's nowhere nearly as easy to recreate as you might think. And we no longer have the same resources; in your scenario fossil fuels would be gone, at least those that can be accessed with 19th century technology, and that 19th century technology ran on coal. Go back to wood and charcoal and you have to go back more centuries, too.

3) "massive unrest and famine due to crop shortages leading to a significant population decline"

There's another problem with this... you know what usually happens when you have massive unrest and famine? Especially when some of those people who are starving happen to be heavily armed? I'll give you a hint... they don't just starve to death quietly. Again, there are quite a few illustrative examples from past civilizations in Tainter's book. Human extinction may have war as its proximate cause and still be due to global warming at the same time.

> barely be set back 1-2 centuries

The journey from 1800 to 2000 will likely be harder the second time around. The fall of Rome led to a few unhappy centuries.

And let’s not talk about the the trip back to 1800...

We also used up all the easy carbon reserves. Not obvious we could bounce back easily if we go to a before the industrial revolution level of technology.

We've also concentrated obscene amounts of hard to extract elements near the surface of the earth.

I thought if mentioning that. On the other hand, many of those will remain as scrap So I’m less sure how that balances out. The burned carbon is just gone.

And makes the atmosphere less hospitable to boot. So any new civilization with 1800 era tech would have headwinds.

Its mother Nature b we're talking about, no level of optimism can predict what can go wrong.

But humans can currently live in vastly different climates on the earth already. Unless something happens way outside of the worst case climate change models, we’re just not looking at anything near an extinction level event for humans.

The big island of Hawaii alone has enough population to not suffer genetic inbreeding problems and it’s mountains mean it can handle multiple meters of sea level rise. The entire rest of the planet could be dead and they would be enough to avoid extinction.

If we’re going to start ignoring climate science to scream about human extinction, then we’ve moved into the same corner of the deniers. Let’s stick with what we know, which is catastrophe and mass migrations; but that’s leagues away from extinction.

The worst case scenario is the oceans shift to a eutrophic ecosystem https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4802792/

Which isn’t extinction for humans.

Where do you suppose your oxygen will come from?

A lot of our oxygen comes from the ocean.

I like that a ship appearing in their shrinking world while they are nearby is them “harassing” the expedition.

I remain optimistic that the human race will figure things out before we completely decimate all ocean life and before we make half of the planet inhospitable.

However, I am certain the powers that be will not take any action until MAJOR death waves in the western world such as the destruction of a major picturesque city from a freak weather event. Before that, I expect we will lose:

* Polar bears * Wild Tuna * Wild Salmon * Arctic sea ice * Greenland ice shelf

The last 2 will cause a substantial sea level rise, and decimate places like Bangladesh causing tens of millions of climate refugees that we will be dealing for the next century.

The western world will just shrug and build seawalls kind of like you see on The Expanse: * https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TnhgVnv-iVM/XfQ660L31xI/AAAAAAAAM... * https://www.reddit.com/r/TheExpanse/comments/f05ais/i_love_t...

As someone who has direct connections into a part of the research community looking at the sustainability of fishing in the north Atlantic in regards to the real and ongoing acidification of the ocean as well as the policy making over the last few decades I would say that your optimism is misplaced.

There is really nothing being done at the scale needed to avert catastrophic collapse of the ocean food chains.

Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuiderzee_Works

If I understand your position correctly, you are optimistic that the human race will figure things out once a huge number of [poor] people are killed?

That's a very uncharitable view of his comment.

But numbers are increasing!

https://www.climatedepot.com/2019/03/05/study-polar-bear-num...

So, don't worry!

Shame on you: * https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/climate-depot/

> ClimateDepot.com is the website of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) employee Marc Morano, a conservative global warming denier who previously served as environmental communications director for a vocal political denier of climate change, Republican Sen. James Inhofe.

I know nothing about climate depot. But I think the studies it is citing are valid, no?

I think the parent poster was being sarcastic; either way, you're engaging in an ad hominiem attack.

Wouldn't it be better to point out that it is normal for animal populations to fluctuate, or that this is likely a transient phenomenon? Perhaps you could find a study or two to buttress your view?

Your comment is more likely to alienate people than to convince them, though perhaps your objective is to improve your status among like-minded people, rather than to engage with an outgroup.

There is no point in engaging with outgroups that operate in bad faith.

We are at the point in the climate crisis in which “shame on you” is an appropriate response to climate deniers and bad faith actors.

Perhaps we are. But don't do it on HN.

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

Does that really matter if they lose their habitat? No matter how many of them there are, without a place where they can thrive, the bears will just die off.

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