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Comment by shakezula | Hacker News Reader

I’m consistently surprised by how effective the “scientism” push has been at muddying the waters, and places like HN show it most readily. I have more than several friends who are smart, highly educated individuals, working in tech or tech adjacent jobs, who are absolutely convinced that the scientific community is all blowing this “climate change” out of control and that it’s really a symptom of some deeper problem with academia. It’s incredibly effective too, because academia is certainly not perfect.

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> the planet will become hostile to human life

Example of someone blowing it out of proportion, right in your parent post. The trust issues don't come from nowhere.

Have you seen the news about Pakistan? A third of the country has turned into an ocean. 1,000+ have died. Millions have lost their homes. This sounds pretty hostile to human life. Don’t you think?

What do you expect? That earth is some garden of Eden where nothing bad ever happens? Climate Change is going to make things worse, but it always has been a struggle, and always will be. Remember 2004, when a Earthquake and Tsunami killed a quarter of a million people? Spanish Flu? The Plague?

I don't consider that hostile. Mars is hostile. Or Venus.

So is everything fine until Earth becomes Venus?

A decent chunk of the Earth's landmass (where a TON of people currently live) is going to get pretty bad if temperatures rise 3C.

At 35C in India - it's believed even healthy young people can die in just 6 hours of exposure.

This will happen regularly if temperatures rise 3C.

India will be home to maybe 2B in 2050 - when many climate projections say this will happen.

I'm optimistic we won't reach 3C of warming by 2050. But it seems within reason that it could happen.

> So is everything fine until Earth becomes Venus?

From Wikipedia[1]:

> The IPCC states that "a 'runaway greenhouse effect'—analogous to [that of] Venus—appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities."

> At 35C in India - it's believed even healthy young people can die in just 6 hours of exposure.

Yet people somehow still survive in the Sahara at higher temperatures.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Earth

Way less humidity. Look up wet bulb effect.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature

Personally I believe in climate change but how are data points like this supposed to prove/disprove? Only ~12000 years ago there was a shift from the ice age and rapid flooding. Probably not man made and very recent. All evidence points to climate change being semi-cyclical and around as far back as we can gather data points. The cycles are very long relative to individual human lifespans but very short and frequent in the grand scheme. To me this is reason enough to make an educated guess that humans can affect the climate with our outputs. But it also makes it nearly impossible to disentangle natural changes from man made ones using science.

That happens to the California Central Valley on a semi-regular basis. They intentionally let the floodwaters go to protect the cities.

Next year they get a large snowfall with an early spring warming and it will happen again.

California is just hostile to human life I suppose.

I would be more accurate to say parts of the planet will become hostile to human life that currently are not. India, for example, will have human shattering heat waves. And it is hard to live in a city when it is underwater.

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