Comment by scottLobster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scottLobster | Hacker News Reader

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I'd argue we have no idea what will happen when the glaciers melt, given the lack of accurate climate change predictions to date. We have a lot of models that have historically proven very incomplete with no reason to believe they're any more complete now.

The oceans rising is more a problem, but it's not going to end human civilization and will happen slowly enough that adaptation is possible, albeit expensive. "Drowning" is hyperbole.

Uncertainty is just that, uncertainty. It will be positive for some areas and negative for others. Those of us who benefit from the status quo (myself included) can argue it would be unwise to mess up a good thing, but the simple fact is we have no idea. There will be winners as well as losers. It's quite possible that the midwest becomes wet enough that American farmers will become even more productive through double-cropping, for starters. Likewise the Russians look forward to their northern coastline thawing.

The sky isn't falling, it's shifting, and while we probably should minimize the shift as much as practical, we shouldn't plunge ourselves into an economic depression to do it.

> Drowning is hyperbole

English is not my first language.

How would you describe something previously on land becoming submerged by the ocean?

Flooding.

Drowning is when a living organism is submerged, flooding is when buildings are submerged.

> Drowning is when a living organism is submerged...

...and dies from it, which is a pretty important aspect to the word. If the organism doesn't die, it's swimming or just submerged.

Drowning is a process. You can escape or be rescued before death.

Doesn't that make it sound like a temporary condition?

It’s a tense thing. The processes is flooding, if it’s already happened then it flooded.

Ie: The Bering Strait land bridge flooded 10,000+ years a gap and it’s still under water. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beringia

Ultimately sea level rise is a temporary thing. Given enough time the oceans will boil as the sun ages unless something drastic changes.

Thanks, I learnt something new.

>> How would you describe something previously on land becoming submerged by the ocean?

A tide. Sea level rises are small and highly predictable over time. All claims of dramatic sudden flooding or drowning are based on assumed correctness of models that, as scottLobster points out, have always been wrong (they always overshoot).

Oh my Sweet Summer Child, you really have an unplaced faith in humanity - especially given our track record. "The sky is shifting" - is a hand-wave to the life-changing impacts headed our way and what our collective response to those impacts will be. Look how nuts people are getting over what are mere trivialities in comparison. Wait until there's crop failures threatening our food supply, fresh water supplies being threatened, property damage on the scale never seen in history, the religious blaming the non-religious for all our woes - the list goes on.

That's some "shifting."

>Oh my Sweet Summer Child

Yeah, this person offers nothing but condescension. Immediate downvote.

Just wait until our upcoming reality hits the conspiracy theorists and religious fanatics. Climate change is going to herald in Dark Ages 2.0. I suppose the upside to that is eventually there will be an Enlightenment 2.0 also, and hopefully we'll get there faster than it took the first time.

BTW, Dark Ages 1.0 wasn't even the first time humanity has been through a dark age...

...honestly, it pays to study history to start understanding what's headed our way.

We've been here before.

We’ve arguably had 2 dark ages in western history though they were both localized. Meanwhile people constantly predict imminent disaster.

If there’s anything to learn from history it’s that things might suck but they will probably be relatively ok. Hell the Black Death didn’t doom western civilization and it got really bad.

PS: 500-1500 actually saw a great deal of innovation and improvements to the average persons quality of live compared to the heights of Rome. For a direct competition both total steel production and steel production per person dramatically increased. Socially peasants where dramatically better off than Roman slaves etc.

The black death must have seemed like the end of the world in a fairly literal sense. Rates of change and relative quantities matter when it comes to population growth: losing a billion people over a century probably isn't a big deal, but losing a billion people in 14 years would be the single largest loss of life in human history. And yet it would only be a negation of the growth we saw going from 7 billion to 8 billion, which took 13-14 years.

In relative terms, lower estimates of the fatalities between 1347-1351 are 30% of the population of Europe. So on a global level we would be looking at more than 2 billion dead in 4 years to get a sense of what that must have been like. 100 million dead in the US alone. That's staggering to think about, and it's no wonder that the pandemic left such an indelible mark on Europe.

All of that was child's play when we lose the vast, gigantic tail of biodiversity, which will be completely unrecoverable.

I don't disagree with the existential threat proposed by climate change. I just think that you're being a condescending jerk, which will ultimately only impede progress toward your goals.

You're not going to convince people of your cause by calling them ignorant. Jesus.

"The sky is shifting" is a euphemism to hide the ugly truth of what we face. The OP is lying to themselves. The phrase "Sweet Summer Child" doesn't connote ignorance, it connotes innocence and naïveté.

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