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Comment by ksdale | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

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