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Comment by peakaboo | Hacker News Reader

The way things are going, will there be a human future we actually want anyway? I'm seriously, 100%, with all my heart, believing we are going to live in a dystopian world in 20 years.

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This is a fascinating comment. It caters both to fears of climate catastrophe and fears of authoritarian dystopia. Most responses to it are unaware of this duality and instinctively project one side onto it's motives.

My own biases lead me to believe it is warning of a dystopian society because of human political activity, not anthropogenic climate change. I may be wrong, and so far many of the responses are taking the opposite position.

Even most aggressive estimates don’t put significant heating in the next 20 years. Some extreme climate events will continue getting more extreme, but lots of places are just not affected.

Have you read Desert?

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-desert

climate change is not going to make the world dystopian in 20 years. That's just fear mongering.

Just contradicting someone and name calling doesn't really move the conversation forward.

False. They didnt provide any evidence to support their claim, and given their claim is absolutely ridiculous and baseless, its ok to say: that's not going to happen. If they disagree, they can give some evidence and the conversation can move forward from there.

You haven't provided any evidence either, preferring to stick with the namecalling, so all this is just noise. Am I supposed to be wiser after reading your comment? How does it contribute at all?

I didn't name call, I called out a behavior. I still think this was the intended goal of the original commenter. I don't care if you are wiser or not, that's not my responsibility.

It's a shame you're getting downvoted, because you're probably not wrong. Even if the increase in extreme weather events/drought/heat waves is less impactful on non-tropical regions, we're still going to be dealing with a multi-billion-person climate refugee crisis in the next few decades.

I think we only have to look at society's response to the pandemic, a worldwide crisis with immediate (rather than delayed) effects directly on individuals with honestly simple, straightfoward solutions (mask up, pay people to stay home and industries to maintain capacity, vaccinate everyone), to realize that humanity is not going to be able to tackle climate change as an existential issue. We just slide into an endless resource war while a few billionaires who could have meaningfully changed the course of human history hide out in New Zealand, or try to leave the planet and die.

So to you the only way is to achieve climate... stasis?

I doubt that's possible at this point, honestly -- this is our great filter. We had a chance, in the 70s and 80s (when the risk was frankly already fairly well-understood), but perhaps being the evolutionary top dog / intelligence comes with a greedy optimizer that prevents long-term societal thinking.

I think if you live in a rich western country you're going to be mostly ok in 20 years. But yeah, a lot of places around the world won't be.

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