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Comment by gtfoutttt | Hacker News Reader

The issue is the warming planet isn't only causing a change in weather for various areas. Yeah for example the Arctic is getting a bit warmer. Which sounds like a good thing.

But the warming up of the sea and atmosphere is giving more energy potential to our weather systems. So every hurricane season, tornado season, fire season, monsoonal season, etc is getting worse and worse. And there's no such thing as isolated climate. That extra energy in the system is world wide, which is really bad for most of us.

There may be places that have slight benefits, sure. But the worldwide negative effects cancel those out IMO.

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Lets not forget that the thawing of the permafrost in the arctic has significant environmental impact on greenhouse gases such as methane.

Do you have data showing that every hurricane, tornado, fire and monsoon season is “getting worse and worse”?

This is something which you can easily check yourself. We shouldn't expect people to make citations for statements which can be verified by typing the exact question into a search engine.

That’s not how this works at all. You don’t get to make claims and then tell people they should go find supporting evidence themselves.

>But the warming up of the sea and atmosphere is giving more energy potential to our weather systems. So every hurricane season, tornado season, fire season, monsoonal season, etc is getting worse and worse.

Global warming is adding somewhere between 0.3 and 0.5% more energy to the system. It's a neglible amount of energy for the overall system.

What it does is change the equilibrium of a complex system. Things are going to be different. Not necessarily more intense across the board.

I think the assumption that there ever was a long term climate equillibrium is false. Climate has always been changing. The radiative input from the sun is always changing. The composition of the atmosphere is always changing. The albedo of the earth is always changing.

I believe humans may be contributing significantly to current change by increasing greenhouse gases.

It is unknown whether this is a significant problem or a problem humans can or should solve.

I’m not sure any informed person disagrees. People are concerned about the comfortable temperature range for people and large scale agriculture.

We’ll probably adapt, but it might be really bumpy for a decade or so in the 2050s.

Maybe. But again I think it would be a bumpy road regardless. Humans have undergone an inflection point in the past couple hundred years. We are probably vastly surpassing the long term carrying capacity of the Earth. This may be an unpopular opinion but I think the best thing that could happen to the human species in the long run would be to drop the population perhaps below 500 million in coming decades as the Georgia Guide Stones recommend.

The assumption has been that climate does change over time. The problem with the current climate change is the rate of change is much higher that most changes not driven by human actions. Most plants/animals (and civilizations) will struggle to adapt to this rate of change.

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