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Comment by robertoandred | Hacker News Reader

That's of course not what her tweet said. Did you intentionally misread it or just get it through an incorrect grapevine?

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Her tweet was, "A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years."

Not that far off from, "We're all doomed in five years," because we definitely did not stop using fossil fuels, and in my opinion, wiping out all of humanity would count as doom.

So, what she is saying is that now we are all doomed anyway. So we can as well have fun while we can. So let's just stop this climate change nonsense and party until we all die.

It kind of depends what does the “over the next five years” refers to. I would assume she meant “if we don’t stop using fossil fuels within the next five years, the humanity will get wiped out in some unspecified time”.

That is miles off from "We're all doomed in five years". Still entirely possible though seems improbable that the last 5 years has baked in enough change to doom "humanity". Can't really tell until the system has reached equilibrium, so you really have to wait several decades to properly be able to evaluate the claim.

You don't die from jumping off a building you die from hitting the ground.

I think we agree that you're doomed once you jump off the building, right? It might take a while to fall, but your future is set in stone...or concrete. There are people who argue that from a climate perspective, we are doomed. So what's the choice now? Be less doomed if we cut emissions? Be extra doomed if we don't? Are there meaningful levels of doomed?

Hrmmm, maybe I did not the best analogy to try and elucidate the difficulty of judging an action till you have reached an equilibrium state. Since it is quite predictable with a pretty concrete outcome under most conditions.

I think there are definitely meaningful levels of "doomed", but that really depends on what you value. If what you value is I can live by the ocean without being beaten to death by huge storms maybe that is a bit more on the doomed scale.

It more is that we are forcing the system to change, we somewhat have a say in how much/how fast/how unpredictable we would like that to be. Also keeping in mind with some systems the more we push the system from equilibrium the less controllable it is.

Perhaps your understanding of English isn't native in which case I apologize but no, those two statements are not at all similar.

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