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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

The collapse just means that European winters will be like Canadian winters. Europeans in Canada survive and thrive. So all you need to do is embrace winter sports and buy a winter jacket capable of keeping you warm at -40. They exist, it's no big deal.

Food prices will likely go up, but that won't really affect Europeans, just the global poor. They're always the ones that get screwed.

Edit: and of course the ecology is screwed too. Humans can use technology like coats and furnaces to adapt immediately, animals and plants need thousands of years to adapt.

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> Europeans in Canada survive and thrive.

But will European ecology, crops and infrastructure?

Europe is dependent on high yield agriculture that would basically be impossible in Canadian climate.

Canada has 38M population mostly huddled at the south of Canada -- roughly where Italy and Spain is in Europe.

Europe has 12 times more population on much smaller territory, most of it being north of Italy or Spain.

It will be far worse than europeans having to buy a winter jacket. From [0]:

> Such an event would have catastrophic consequences around the world, severely disrupting the rains that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America and West Africa; increasing storms and lowering temperatures in Europe; and pushing up the sea level off eastern North America. It would also further endanger the Amazon rainforest and Antarctic ice sheets.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/05/climate-...

My basic point still stands. Wealthy humans will be mostly fine. We have lots more technology to protect ourselves. A major catastrophe is hundreds of lives lost.

Compared to the devastation experienced by the poor or non-humans, that's trivial.

The other posters are talking about prepping. That's almost completely unnecessary. As long as you're human and not poor, the worst you will be is uncomfortable.

https://matadornetwork.com/read/mapped-united-states-canada-...

The name sounds nordic. Oslo, Stockholm & Helsinki would end up with a climate similar to Northern Manitoba. I tried to drop a Google StreetView to get a sense of the landscape. It was not possible, there are simply no roads and no cities at those latitudes.

Even the richest of the rich need a supply and support network. Money won't suffice.

Cold snaps in Europe and the USA right now end up killing quite a few people. Hundreds of lives directly lost because of this destabilization in developed countries is not unlikely. See the Texas cold snap for a really recent example. And further from that there will be a lot of economic damage and long term costs associated with such an extreme swing in average winter temperatures. Everything from housing to infrastructure isn't setup to cope with it.

It'll cost tens of trillions to adapt. But we can and will do so. Anybody or anything poor or non human is screwed.

It would have been far cheaper to spend trillions to mitigate and prevent, but that would have required foresight from politicians and voters.

The Texas cold snap and German floods are examples of what the rich world will be facing.

The Indian Ocean tsunami killing hundreds of thousands is an example of what the poor will be facing.

Extinction is what many non human species are facing.

But billions of deaths or civilization collapse is what some are predicting, which is nonsense.

I mean billions of deaths and civilization collapse is probably at the extreme end but still imaginable.

If poor people and poor countries are screwed then that will lead to major disruption in rich countries as we are reliant on them and potentially a large and dangerous climate refugee situation. Economic collapse in rich countries isn't off the table either.

Then there are questions like how much of the current status quo has to change for "our civilization" to have collapsed?

If European winters turned into Canadian winters, the ecosystem would likely be devastated. Sorry if your post was just sarcasm.

European nature has survived glaciations before and recovered (more or less).

Timescale matters. This is often missing from the discussion. Warming up over a period of 10 thousand years is very different from same warming over a 100 years. Evolution in existing species assumes a certain pace of change in the environment, and this assumption is being broken. Sure, other species might survive and thrive. Mammals exploded after the dinosaurs were killed off.

Is that what research says? Winters in Poland have been getting warmer not colder.

When I was a kid every winter snow started falling in december and started letting up late february or in march. For the past few years there was almost no snow in the winter. Temperatures are higher too. I barely needed my winter coat past few years.

The research is about warning signs[0] of a collapse of the current that keeps European winters warmer than Canadian ones, it’s not saying “it has already collapsed”.

[0] and the warnings are without a specific timeline: "Observations and recently suggested fingerprints of AMOC variability indicate a gradual weakening during the last decades, but estimates of the critical transition point remain uncertain."

The gulf stream does a huge amount to warm Europe relative to those latitudes in north America or Asia. If those currents shift or weaken it will result in much colder climate in Europe, though the rest of the globe will continue warming and is warming now (what you're observing).

Ah, so that means we gonna have snow again in the alps? Jokes aside, I have a hard time imagining such a world. And I have zero interest living in one, not that there is much choice so in that case.

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