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Comment by Aloha | Hacker News Reader

A changing climate doesn't mean an unlivable earth.

We're focused on trying to shove the genie back in the bottle, rather than dealing with the rather wrenching changes ahead. We should be investing on dealing with the wrenching changes ahead, because some measure of them are coming, like it or not.

How is a global 10x reduction in consumption of fossil fuels even possible, in the 5 year timespan people seem to think we need to do it in? Like it might be possible in the developed world, but the rest of the world? I don't think so.

I'm a big believer in sustainable living, and have been for decades, but I think we missed the boat on substantially stopping climate change.

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> A changing climate doesn't mean an unlivable earth.

For virtually the entire history of life on this planet for the majority of life on the planet, this statement is false.

Peter Ward's Under a Green Sky is a great read on this subject from a scientific point of view and Peter Brannen's The Ends of the World covers it more broadly with a more journalistic style.

The geological evidence we have strongly suggests that rapid rise in CO2 and sudden climate change have been responsible for many of the great extinction events in the fossil record.

While the magnitude of our current CO2 spike is not as severe as the most extreme cases, it is happening at a rate that is unprecedented in the history of life on this planet.

Now to be clear, there are many, many unknowns about exactly how things will play out, so this isn't a "we're definitely going extinct in the near future!" message. But species extinction is absolutely in the cards (it is worth pointing out we're already in the 6th largest extinction event).

> A changing climate doesn't mean an unlivable earth.

Depends on which part you live in.

Unfortunately, the most populated regions are likely to be hit the hardest. And, really unfortunately, it is the developing world that will suffer the most.

Nations near the equator and island nations are going to have the hardest time with climate change.

I agree, climate change is unstoppable. Really, the focus now is doing what we can to decrease it's impact.

A changing climate doesn't mean an unlivable earth.

Unfortunately this isn't true - certain parts of the earth (perhaps affecting as many as 1B people) will in fact become unlivable, as we approach warming scenarios above 1.5 degrees.

But…how do you know? You claim this to be untrue, but let’s face it, your truth is based on faith in some as yet unproven data model predicting and event that has not yet occurred assuming measured data that has not yet been generated.

Climate models and predictions have been famously less than accurate.

But … how do you know?

Because some people who are really smart and who work really, really hard on this topic (we call them "climate scientists") have done the work and are pretty confident of their results. Plus it's already starting to happen.

Let’s face it, your truth is based on faith

No it's not. If you want to, do some reading on the subject. It's pretty easy to find good stuff to read, actually. Or if you want to just keep reading stuff that confirms what you want to believe, that's fine, too. I really don't care.

Climate models and predictions have been famously less than accurate.

We can't predict with perfect accuracy, of course. But we can predict with a pretty high degree of assurance -- just like you can predict the arrival of an oncoming truck, once it gets close enough. And when it approaches within a certain distance, and is moving fast enough - you better damn sure get out of the way.

In terms of climate change, we are already at that point.

Interesting. You use words like:

“Pretty confident”

“Can’t predict with perfect accuracy”

“High degree of assurance”

Yet, you are dogmatic in your assertion that it is true. Sounds an awful lot like faith to me.

This. There is such a huge chasm between mass death, and practically any other consequence of climate change. As long as mass death doesn't occur, people will adapt to what happens (and it may be rather unpleasant, to be sure...)

A huge loss of biodiversity is a massive tragedy, but as far as our grandchildren being "fine," people have lived for basically all of history in circumstances much worse than they're likely to encounter.

> people have lived for basically all of history in circumstances much worse than they're likely to encounter.

I see people make this claim all the time, but it is blatantly false.

The XKCD earth temperature timeline is a good, quick example [0].

Even better is this plot of Temperature of the Planet Earth [1]. Make sure to take a second to look at the spike at the end.

We're facing temperatures in the next 100 years that this planet has not seen for millions, happening at a pace that may have never occurred before.

People have never seen anything close to what we are facing in the near term, and absolutely nothing like what awaits for us in 100 years.

0. https://xkcd.com/1732/

1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5f/Al...

I'm not saying that the climate isn't going to change drastically, I'm saying that as long there isn't mass death, people will adapt, and most likely will continue to have a higher standard of living than people did for most of history.

And certainly the pace of change is very alarming, but millions of years ago, when the temperature was so high, I'm pretty sure the Earth was capable of supporting just as much or more biomass.

"People have never seen anything close to what we are facing in the near term, and absolutely nothing like what awaits for us in 100 years." I keep seeing people make this claim, assuming it is self-evident that this means apocalypse. It's true that this has never happened before, and that's the only thing that's set in stone. Humans possess tremendous ingenuity and flexibility. Like I keep saying, assuming everyone doesn't starve to death, people can adapt to anything else.

>but millions of years ago, when the temperature was so high, I'm pretty sure the Earth was capable of supporting just as much or more biomass.

those idiots concerned with human life, the main thing to worry about is maintaining the proper biomass!

>Like I keep saying, assuming everyone doesn't starve to death, people can adapt to anything else.

So in a situation where there will be at the same time increasing temperatures (killing off plants not used to those temperatures), weather disruption, mass death of insect species, and water depletion in regions not necessarily used to it - famines not being a major issue seems a hell of an optimistic assumption to make.

I mean... we eat biomass? Mass starvation will occur when we can't grow food anywhere. We literally grow the food we eat in a year in a year. I don't think it's ridiculously optimistic to assume that if starvation was on the horizon, we'd be able to spin up food production in the places where the climate allowed it, and this stuff is going to happen on the scale of years at worst, but probably the scale of decades. I think it's a hell of a pessimistic assumption to make that half the world's population is going to starve to death.

>if starvation was on the horizon, we'd be able to spin up food production in the places where the climate allowed it,

Ok probably I do tend towards pessimism, but I would suspect that food would go to people who could pay for the food, so like say if your country's economy in the past was very reliant on agriculture and now that agriculture ain't working, you ain't getting any food in from outside - unless we assume that the crisis will make people more humanitarian which maybe it will but still seems to be on the optimistic side.

So I assume people from the hottest regions of the world will probably be hit with more extreme famines than they are used to and lots of those people will die. Since there is a lot of fear of water wars breaking out, not sure if the majority will die from starvation or war.

As this risk of asking an obvious question, we lived in a much cooler earth, why is a much warmer one an issue?

Humanity is quite adaptable, why would we not adapt to this?

Sure, but how many wars and famines before we land back to where we stood during the last glaciation?

How many wars and famines did we have in the 20th century, a tune of relative peace and prosperity?

You never know what made come.

Isn’t mass death one of the first things we’re going to be dealing with though?

Some places are already hitting wet bulb temperatures. Even slight increases in average temp are going to make the amount affected by wet bulb cascade quite quickly. In the regions where it’s hitting/will be hitting, infrastructure is sparse, and wet bulb without infrastructure to deal with it is death.

I have had somebody on HN argue with me quite animatedly about wet bulb being “fake news” though… ergh

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