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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

We already are officially inevitably fucked. If you corner a climate scientist in private and point out the real implications of their work, they might even admit it.

The problem is you can't admit that we're officially inevitably fucked in public. If you did that, funding for climate science and climate mitigation would dry up, because there's nothing we can realistically do about it. Trust in governments would evaporate - the purpose of a government is to keep us all safe, but if we're all fucked anyway, it'll quickly become every man for themselves. Currency would lose its value, because it assumes that there will be a future better than the present where you might want to buy things. So everybody has an incentive to parrot the "Things are looking bad, we have a serious problem, but if we all band together and lower our emissions we can solve it!" line.

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It's not quite this binary. Yes, we're fucked. But the less we do, the worse we're fucked. It's better to have a glimmer of hope and use that to unfuck what you can.

That's true but also risks misallocating resources to efforts that won't make a big difference now when we should be focusing on mitigation rather than avoidance.

If we had taken Al Gore's warnings in the 80s and began an aggressive push to move off of fossil fuels then, we could perhaps have avoided the whole climate change problem. We didn't, and we can't now. Instead, the rational approach is to accept that the climate will change, there will be consequences of this, and then do our best to avoid the worst effects of the consequences. That includes:

We should be building seawalls and flood barriers around major low-lying areas. Every major city should have an evacuation plan for how to get everyone out in a natural disaster. If the road capacity for this doesn't exist, we should build it. We need systems in place to deal with mass migration. We need housing tech, ways to quickly build housing in new locations because the population is soon going to be forced to move to new locations. We should be researching ways to add back the seed diversity that we've extinguished over the past 60 years, because major agricultural staples are soon going to be out of their climate windows. We need local renewable energy - the biggest benefit of renewables isn't going to be reducing carbon emissions (it's too late for that), it's divorcing ourselves from global energy supply chains that are going to get increasingly unreliable.

My wife works in climate investing, which was a sleepy backwater when she started 12 years ago but now is the hot field to be. There's billions of dollars in capital chasing hare-brained carbon capture schemes that have basically 0% chance of working. That capital should instead go into mitigation efforts, programs that accept that we're fucked but try to avoid the worst effects of that. But if anything, government policy is going the opposite way - we're making it harder to migrate, refusing to build housing or transportation infrastructure, telling people they're on their own when a hurricane hits, and centralizing seed ownership under Monsanto.

That's an interesting and valid point. Thank you for expanding on it so much!

> Instead, the rational approach is to accept that the climate will change, there will be consequences of this, and then do our best to avoid the worst effects of the consequences.

Imagine one of the consequences of all the ice melting is the salty ocean is diluted allowing for planet scale algal and fungal blooms, extincting phytoplankton overnight. What if the only hope our species has for survival is not to accept climate will change and la la la continue dumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, but instead to immediately stop doing that and for the next 30 years at any one time maybe three quarters of the global population goes without electricity.

Then we're fucked, because (as the article notes) the melting is already baked in from current carbon emissions, and in any case all evidence is that our species is not going to stop doing that.

In practice, phytoplankton is not going to go extinct overnight. People underestimate the resilience of evolution. Maybe 95% of phytoplankton might go extinct overnight, but the survivors (by definition) will be adapted to the new, less salty ocean currents. So then we get planet-scale algal and fungal blooms, and we should be asking ourselves "What then?" Maybe we'll want to harvest algae and make food out of it, or maybe we want to get the hell away from coastlines. The jet stream's probably going to shut down, so all those folks in Northern Europe may want to consider evacuating to Africa.

The point is to adapt to the world as it is rather than the world as we wish it to be or as we remember it. People who do that will survive and pass on their genes, and people who don't will die and drop out of history.

I am a climate scientist that studies Greenland, can confirm: we're (not-even-inevitably but currently) fucked.

But it can get worse right? I mean before we become Venus

So, what's your plan?

This is an interesting and open question. But I need you to be slightly more specific. In my research? For my personal life? For the global economy?

I'm most curious about your personal life!

For your personal life mainly. I guess I'm most curious about whether you're planning on where you're living etc in the context of various forms of climate breakdown.

I'm also curious how many personal changes you've made (flying less, vegetarian) when it seems like we need massive government intervention to move the needle.

Thanks for replying!

What are you doing in your personal life? I've strongly considered moving to the great lakes region, but most likely caring for my parents will keep me in the south east.

>> Trust in governments would evaporate

I am unclear why anyone ever trusted government or believed government would be the avenue for resolution of this problem

You either understand history, or you trust government, you can not both understand history and trust government..

The second people put their trust in government was the second humanity was fucked. In the best of time Government is like fire, is a troublesome servant and a terrible master.

>the purpose of a government is to keep us all safe

When has that ever been the case... The purpose for government is to provide a framework for non-violent dispute resolution, and to safe guard natural rights and property), and maybe form a national defense force. Not to provide individual safety and security.

>>Currency would lose its value, because it assumes that there will be a future better than the present where you might want to buy things.

No fiat currency actually needs the future to look worse than today to encourage spending today and discourage saving for tomorrow. This is why fiat currency required inflation, and why deflation is feared above all else with fiat currency. You have to have spending today, you have to have people spending in multiples of what they really have in currency (i.e debt spending) and you have to have that in perpetuity.

In short, Fiat Currency is a legal pozi scheme that is destined to fail at some point anyway....

> The purpose for government is to provide a framework for non-violent dispute resolution, and to safe guard natural rights and property), and maybe form a national defense force. Not to provide individual safety and security.

Providing for national defense, non-violent dispute resolution, and protecting natural rights and property sounds an awful lot like "keeping us all safe". I'm not sure what else you think that could mean.

Well in the context of this conversation it seems to be extended to solving climate change, and in other context it extends to personal defense (i.e the belief the police are a individual protection force) or to provide services like School, healthcare, etc etc etc...

In very general terms, I meant that the implicit social contract is that "If you follow the rules of society, you do not have to worry that you are going to randomly die." That could be in the sense of monopolizing physical force so that roving gangs can't kill you, or it could also be in the sense of ensuring that a random natural disaster doesn't kill you or you don't starve to death.

When that social contract is broken, people tend to ignore the other half of it, which is "if you follow the rules of society..." Empirically, it doesn't seem to matter whether the root cause is starvation or war or violence, the result is still civil disorder and anarchy - which usually just intensifies the survival challenges.

>>I meant that the implicit social contract is that

The social contract does not exist.

>> That could be in the sense of monopolizing physical force so that roving gangs can't kill you, or it could also be in the sense of ensuring that a random natural disaster doesn't kill you or you don't starve to death.

Here you are expanding government well beyond my definitional parameters. Government can not prevent and does not prevent either one of those. We also have plenty of examples in modern times of government failing pretty publically at those things

>>When that social contract is broken, people tend to ignore the other half of it, which is "if you follow the rules of society..."

Incorrect. Society stops following the rules when the rules become either too draconian or as we are seeing more recently selectively enforced to the point where the people that follow the rules are the ones being punished by government in general, and people that do not are rewarded by government either directly or indirectly which is what we are seeing to some degree today.

People desire to live in a civil society because that is what is in their best interest to do normally. Civil Society is normally the best for not only survival but to thrive and enjoy life.

Civil society is not created by government, nor can it be created from government violence. The break down of civil society normally comes when the government starts to protect those that are not civil

> We already are officially inevitably fucked.

Well.. the second law of the thermodynamics guarantees that.

> The problem is you can't admit that we're officially inevitably fucked in public.

I see several people attempting to start a career off of just that, some of them are quite successful, even. It helps if you add a lot of theocratic and pseudo-religious ideology into your message. People need _something_ to latch on to after all.

> because there's nothing we can realistically do about it.

We are a dynamic species. My proposition is we are currently living through a sort of "modern dark ages." Government imposition and corporate monopolization are at all time highs, to the extent that most new wealth is captured and not used to create new technologies and to progress the species. This is an artificial situation and it is not sustainable.

If you let this cloud your judgement of what is possible you may arrive at this position and feel it is logical. I suggest to you that it is actually a form of insanity or odd religious fervor to actually believe this.

Perhaps, in afterthought, more generously it's a desire to not lose any current level of comfort that you enjoy while "realistically" being able to solve the problem. A solution to this problem will obviously require drastic and hopefully generally positive change, something we've been known to do sporadically many times before.

> there's nothing we can realistically do about it

There is something we can do about it: we can keep improving, evolving, getting better. The solution will only be found in the future, with tools maybe outside of our grasp today.

Nothing is inevitable, until it happened. Till then, you and every other pessimist cand still be proven wrong. My money is on the creativity and ingenuity of the race that started in the trees, went to the moon and is currently birthing an even greater intelligence.

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