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Comment by strken | Hacker News Reader

I'm not convinced that climate change has a high probability of ending technological civilisation[0]. Even large-scale climate wars might not end it.

The scenarios that fall short of ending civilisation, e.g. losing hundreds of millions of lives to famine or war, are obviously still very bad. This is not to downplay climate change in the slightest. It's just... at some point, people start dying, and that frees up ecological carrying capacity again. You need to make pessimistic assumptions about a lot of positive feedback loops in ecological and social collapse to predict that all human civilisation is going to be wiped out in the sense of regressing back to before the industrial revolution.

[0] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/13/18660548/climat...

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You think if a billion people lose monsoon water, some of them won't put together a hand-made virus to wreak revenge on the wealthy nations responsible for the carbon burn and for climate denial? I mean, maybe, people have a capacity for good, but also for anger and revenge.

Carbon caused climate change isn't a carry-ing capacity / overpopulation / over utilization issue (and is now somewhat dwarfing those issues). It is a big change that has some chance of devastating a lot of biological based support systems all at the same time.

The risk to technological civilization is not in the direct effects, but in the human mediated effects. Not that leaving on yeast and water would be that good.

What's your estimate of the probability of collapse, and why?

I'd put it in the low single digits or maybe lower, on the basis that a cascade of things need to go wrong: first you need a climate scenario that exceeds the IPCC estimates, then you need significant damage or conflict, then you need a potential collapse event to emerge from the conflict, then the event has to trigger collapse on its own or other events have to occur and combine with it.

Curious to hear your thoughts though, because I haven't put firm numbers on anything or looked deeply into any of the research on collapse specifically.

https://youtu.be/fliCxyAwBWU

Can you explain what I'm meant to be getting out of this 47 minute long review of current climate indicators?

I understand that climate change is progressing rapidly, is going to cause very bad things to happen (my earlier comment mentioned hundreds of millions of human deaths as an example), and should be mitigated. What I question is whether the total collapse of industrial civilisation as a result of climate change is likely to occur. This is as opposed to economic stagnation, famine, war, widespread desertification, unliveable wet-bulb temperatures, or anything else short of a total collapse.

Depends on your meaning of collapse. If you mean extinction of only humans, that's not gonna happen. Even in total nuclear fallout, few people will survive underground.

> economic stagnation, famine, war, widespread desertification, unliveable wet-bulb temperatures

For most people those are collapse and it's definitely going to happen and will come much sooner. The video shows it's going on the worst case scenario way.

You are asking to predict what people will do in the future. Not a historically profitable venture. Having the Monsoon rains stop dropping snows into the Himalayas would be super bad. Just flooding Bangladesh with a meter or few meters would displace a lot of people less popular than Floridians. Is Montana going to take a few million Muslim refugees?

But maybe like Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent book, it will all work together and we will make a new carbon based cryptocurrency backed by the bankers, switch to blimps and all ends well. I have kids and am teaching them to corporate with people rather than become preppers, so I guess I am optimistic de facto.

I'm asking to put some numbers on our predictions in a conversation that's already had us predict what people will do, as a tool to dig deeper into the factors that could lead civilisation to collapse.

Being totally accurate when predicting the future is impossible, but discussion of the factors is useful in its own right.

I have to disagree. You are asking for a path integral when the local derivatives of various paths are clear, and In a problem space where things can always get worse. Each moment in each place lets climb the curve towards better reality.

100%. Thanks to globalization and just-in-time economy, supply chains are already overextended and on the brink of failure. Once the first cracks set in, the consequences will cascade until most of agro-industrial production will grind to a halt.

Global famine won't end civilization directly, but it might spark WW3, and that would do it.

This guy gets it.

Global warming is scary because of nukes.

The timeline till we get widespread crop problems is 15-20 years.

I can't tell if you are being serious, but just to be clear: I do not think that climate change is "scary because of nukes". Climate change is scary in its own right. Global famine is going to be very unpleasant whether or not it sparks WW3. But we do have nukes, and nukes + climate change could bring about the end of civilization in my lifetime with probability much greater than zero. And, what is scariest of all, most people's behavior indicates that this possibility is not even on their radar screens. Most people are still behaving as if the really serious shit is several generations away. It's not. The wolf is at the door, as you say, much closer to 10 years than 100.

Am serious. Brevity is my style I guess.

You are assuming the supporting environment of the survivors will remain intact enough to allow recovery. That is a somewhat optimistic viewpoint. Most everything in the natural environment will be consumed before people start to die off in significant enough numbers. That will leave the survivors with something that is somewhat less than pristine, and will likely take several generations to recover to some semblance of previous carrying capacity and certainly with enormously reduced biodiversity.

God we did manage to fuck ourselves good and proper.

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