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Comment by zpeti | Hacker News Reader

Climate changes are way exaggerated. Almost all official predictions by IPCC etc, which aren’t addicted to clickbait, say that over the next few decades we will lose some GDP growth due to climate change. But world GDP will still grow. There won’t be starvation, or famine, etc.

This is not the world ending apocalyptic scenario that’s thrown around in the media.

Perhaps a few countries will become uninhabitable, but I find that unlikely too. The current cases of countries that because uninhabitable dealt with the issues (eg Netherlands) and are still thriving.

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i seriously recommend anyone downvoting this to read the actual IPCC reports [1]. not denying that climate change is happening and causing harm, but the proximate effects due to climate change (i.e. extreme weather events, loss of biodiversity, decreased food/water safety) are worth understanding concretely. the biggest worries from climate change IMO are all the second-order effects, and somewhat socio-political in nature: catastrophe in one region tends to “spread” to other regions, e.g. when one country experiences famine the adjacent countries can be overloaded with migrants and now they also have not enough food, leading to a contagion of food insecurity. if the biggest problems really are socio-political (based on how unevenly climate change hits throughout the world), it hints at other options for deadening the blow to climate change that a typical reader might not be aware of. it also points to the risky idea that the most effective way of decreasing these sorts of localized-but-contagious catastrophe really is to lift every region out of poverty (giving them the same tools we have to easily relocate or react to shocks), which today usually means prioritizing energy security (even if unclean energy) and definitely not any of the “degrowth” ideas casually tossed around.

[1]: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/06/SR15...

Two decades, sure, but two centuries? If sea level is about to rise 1 or 2 or 3 meters, things will surely change more than what we see now. I live in the Netherlands, I am not worried about myself. But the world for our children might look different in this regard than ours. And we should not fall into the trap that it only exists when it touches us, then it will be way too late.

> but two centuries?

I believe the sea level rise will indeed affect the Netherlands. I hope technology will progress so as to allow cheap relocation, or conversion of buildings to seasteads.

I'm pretty sure two centuries from now there will also be completely unforeseeable problems, but also solutions. If you look at old predictions, we feared lots of things that did not turn out to happen: alien invasions, meteor strikes, nuclear war, a disease killing most of the population (COVID-19 has only killed <0.07% so far).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stories_set_in_a_futur...

The Netherlands are already affected by sea level rise for some time. However, it seems to me they also plan and act accordingly for quite some time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_control_in_the_Netherlan...

"The sea defenses are continuously being strengthened and raised to meet the safety norm of a flood chance of once every 10,000 years for the west, which is the economic heart and most densely populated part of the Netherlands, and once every 4,000 years for less densely populated areas. [...]

The Second Delta Committee [...] expects a sea level rise of 65 to 130 cm by the year 2100."

> There won’t be starvation, or famine, etc.

There will absolutely be major climate-change-related droughts and famines in the next half-century. They might be limited to the third world, but they will still lead to geopolitical unrest and mass migrations.

I wish I could share your optimism.

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