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Comment by Comevius | Hacker News Reader

I clearly do. Hitler killed millions of people, not unlike the Black Death or Genghis Khan, but what can you do, life goes on. Climate change is different. Life will absolutely not go on if we don't start handling it. It's an extinction event, and that's not a hyperbole, we are actually in the middle of the Holocene extinction event, also called the sixth mass extinction.

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>Life will absolutely not go on if we don't start handling it.

Hyperbole much? The Earth used to be a molten rock and from it life sprung forth. Do you honestly believe that we can put it into a worse position?

Humans might go extinct, but I'm certain that life will go on.

The biosphere is not undestroyable by any measure. Prior extinction events haven't manage to permanently damage it, but we shouldn't set the bar that low and rely on life's magical ability to spring forth and prosper under any circumstances.

If it weren't for Hitler, World War II might have been over climate policy instead, and there might be no nukes. You gloss over Nth-order effects and cite a single statistic to compare relative damage done to humanity (spoiler alert: what you actually tried to do here is not possible to scientifically do at all - you are pro-science, right?). This tells me that you haven't done any real research on the topic, but are obtusely confident about it, on HN of all places. Who were your most influential authors on existential risks? Have you contributed to the literature at all?

The what if game works the other way around too. The Third Reich spent a lot of rethorical attention on environmentalism that soon became a less pressing concern. Under different circumstances however one might imagine that they would have tried to make the 1000-year Reich a reality, and nature conservancy and curbing pollution would have been a fit ideologically. But priorities tend to change, and the lack of individualism is not a guarantee against hypercapitalism.

Nuclear weapons were inevitable, they are trivial inventions.

Nobody would have fought over climate policy a 100 years ago. Climate change barely received any publicity before James Hansen's testimony in 1988.

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