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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

I personally have zero hope that we'll succeed in mitigating "tipping point", irreversible climate change. I'm less doom-and-gloom about it than most, though, since I think we'll find ways to adapt, and a sort of apocalyptic human-ending scenario doesn't seem likely to me.

Don't get me wrong, "adapt" is going to be painful. But I think it will be painful in the way the industrial revolution was painful: Lots and lots of cultural displacement, shifts in lifestyles, etc. But it'll also make some new billionaires and powerhouse industrial centers based around the need to fundamentally change our society to stop making it worse and to solve the problems a heating globe produces.

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I personally just hope we’ll stop before we break cloud formation.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/extreme-co2-levels-could-trigger...

Stop what?

Increasing atmospheric CO2 levels

Doesn't it say emissions would have to be 3x greater tham today and maybe it's a possibility after that point?

No, concentration. It need 3x the current CO2 in the air to reach it.

Which considering that 50% of total CO2 emissions from fossil fuels were emitted in the last 28 years, that doesn't seem to far away

And in those 28 years, CO2 levels have risen < 100ppm. That is less than 1/9th of the rise needed to reach the 1200ppm levels that this model predicts is necessary to disrupt cloud formation.

As the paper itself clarifies, the worst case model for CO2 emissions still wouldn't have us hit those levels for 75 years.

> If fossil fuel use continues to rapidly expand over the remainder of the century, it is possible levels could get that high. The Representative Concentration Pathways 8.5 scenario (RCP8.5), a very high emissions scenario examined by climate scientists, has the Earth’s atmosphere reaching around 1,100ppm by the year 2100. But this would require the world to massively expand coal use and eschew any climate mitigation over the rest of this century.

So yes, it is a scary theoretical possibility. One that helps show why even minor mitigations of CO2 emissions growth are better than nothing. However, it is a risk that is not imminent and is something that even our current anemic response to global warming will probably avoid.

> the worst case model for CO2 emissions still wouldn't have us hit those levels for 75 years.

Honestly that’s really not reassuring. I would have hoped it take far longer than that

This is super frightening. Along with the acidification of the oceans causing the Clathrate Gun [1] theory - it's hard to be optimistic we can overcome (or even adapt to) these scenarios without society as a whole completely breaking down.

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

Peter Ward: “Oceans - What’s the Worst that Can Happen?”

Scary stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eM1aakTzMw

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation#Shutd...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...

As the article says, it's hard to reach this amount of CO2 concentration.

Humans have never backed down from hard to reach goals.

In 2010 we needed to act "before 2020" which seemed like plenty of time. I'm convinced we already have met the "tipping point". No one wants to say that though because it would be either admitting climate change is real, or admitting defeat.

There's plenty of billionaires creating bugout fortresses with private security contractors to keep them safe.

For the elites maybe success means something different to us.

I'm not sure why they think they'd be safe with such a thing.

A billionaire is only a billionaire if there's a society to be richer than 99.9999% of everyone else.

If wealth is measured by how much ammo you've got, your bank account or the fact that you have lawyers on retainer won't mean much.

The wealthy have over the past few thousands of years figured out that they can pay half the poor to keep the other half in line. Despotism is the norm, not the exception in human societies.

A brief blip of liberal democracy has only been made possible by a surplus of resources created by industrialization. If that surplus disappears, or gets fully siphoned up by the elites, we'll be right back to times of feudal lords, their knight-enforcers, and everyone else.

^ Depressingly accurate.

Yeah, but what are they paying the security force in after the apocalypse? More or less, in comfort. Guess what lots of people that are getting paid in comfort are gonna do? They are gonna try to take control.

> There's plenty of billionaires creating bugout fortresses with private security contractors to keep them safe.

Being locked in a fortress with a few dozen armed men who’s loyalty depends on “currency in a bank” having any value doesn’t seem very safe to me.

But what do I know, I’m not a billionaire.

Yeah. The article I read had strategies for this, like becoming friends with your security detail.

But I don't doubt the actual result will end up like the Don't look Up satire

Without exception all the folks that are going in on that particular grift are ignoring 3 really critical facts:

1. Segments of the local population are armed as well or better than their security contractors and outnumber them thousands to one.

2. None of the locals are confused about where the canned goods are being hoarded.

3. Heavy equipment is both ubiquitous worldwide and shockingly simple to operate effectively.

Don't forget that all of the canned goods don't mean shit if there isn't a way to reboot society.

Tins of beans in fallout shelters are there to get you though the worst 30 days, and then rebuild. If there is global ecological collapse, who cares if you're stocked for 2 years? Unless you've got a lot of farm gear, tooled for future environs, and lots of people to use them, then you're only promising yourself a slow death later.

Who? Where?

I've heard this a bunch and even seen a article -- "ultra wealthy creating climate change bunkers" but never heard any specifics. No one named companies building them, or where they are except some nebulous reference to New Zealand.

The whole thing reeks of "can't be proved, must be true" FUD clickbate.

Yes it is a hyperbole. Billionaires aren’t literally buying bunkers and armed guards. They are however buying superyachts, private jets, acres of remote property with private airstrips, fenced mansions in heavily policed areas (including inside many dictatorships), etc.

These together function as a bunker with armed guards to protect them against the effects of climate change.

When it is too smokey in Claifornia where one of your mansion is, simply fly your private jet to Kamchatka where you last parked your superyacht. Or if it is also smokey in Kamchatka, you have a smaller yacht parked in Patagonia.

Are you in Florida and another hurricane is on its way? Notify your private chefs in Egypt about your plans to stay in your palace over there for the next 3 weeks.

I'd rather be dead anyway than live in that world compared to the one I live in now.

One likely adaptation is the deaths of a few billion people from famine and resource wars.

Shitty, grim, blood-soaked first thought in response to your comment: I read something 30 years ago that suggested the maximum sustainable "utopian" carry capacity of the planet was something like 3 billion humans. Regardless of the accuracy of that claim deleting a sizeable percentage of the world population is technically the most effective strategy we have for seriously reducing carbon emissions.

We have, arguably, proven that correct -- 7, going on 8 billion isn't sustainable, and most people are broke as fuck. Purging a few hyperwealthy types won't change how much carbon is generated by 8 billion humans.

I wasn't proposing we purge -only- the hyperwealthy.

Bright sides: It’ll make new billionaires and industrial centers.

Oh right, forgot where I was commenting.

I don't think you're "wrong" but... There is just no way to convince 7bn people to all act together. And the global nature of the problem means you need basically everyone, and there is a HUGE incentive to be the one NOT acting.

I find hope in surprising places. For instance: have you ever considered how unlikely it is that the lounge suit, in the specific form it takes, should be quite as pervasive as it is?

That's massive, global, collective, directed, and specific choice. Now if we could just get the exact same class of people who wear lounge suits by default to consider acting on climate change as the same sort of default...

This is the way.

What you're saying is that mankind needs a benevolent dictator to solve the problem. An empowered and effective benevolent dictator.

Thanos was right ;)

[Sorry, couldn't resist, please downvote]

Unless they were some sort of Superman, they'd just be overthrown. It would be a big effort to convince people to go for actually cutting CO2e. And that is without people (republicans, conspiracy theorists and 1001 other groups) poisoning the well...

I think you're agreeing. The adaptation won't be based on collective action, but individual necessity.

Isn't this how humans work since the beginning of their existence?

Are you asking if all humans take individual actions based on needs?

I was clarifying that the OP was not suggesting grand collective action will take place to adapt to climate change.

You don’t need to convince 8 billion people.

You simply need to convince the handful of people in charge.

Unfortunately, this climate change thing really throws some of those people:

https://youtu.be/3E0a_60PMR8

“Here’s a snowball, it’s very cold out…”

We send some pretty low IQ people to DC.

Republicans don't all not support climate change just because they don't believe it. Sure some don't believe it. But there's also those that believe it's not going to work out well to adopt aggressive climate saving measures if industrial and military rival nations don't also adopt the same measures.

Yes, the “what about China excuse comes up a lot”. Another worthless excuse for doing absolutely nothing. Ranks up there with “we don’t want to destroy the economy”

“adopt aggressive climate saving measures”

They could have adopted “non-aggressive” measures and not feed the climate deniers. By doing nothing sooner, requires more pain later. We have been discussing the problem for almost 5 decades.

How would you address nations such as China then? A lot of finger pointing here without addressing the point

There are probably more than a billion up and coming people in China, India, and other developing countries that would love to take advantage of lower flight and hotel prices in tropical destinations.

I'm not really sure China needed to be addressed. Simply putting significant money into green tech would have had a variety of effects - build out the sector earlier and faster; threaten control of the sector without competitive investment in other countries; demonstrate that the largest economy in the world is willing to put its money where its mouth is.

China invests a significant chunk more into renewable energies than the US. More than double actually.

In fact, a higher percentage of their total energy is met by renewables than for the US. They have 3x the capacity of the US while their per person energy usage and emissions are still significantly lower than US.

Let's not pretend China does nothing.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/02/ranked-10-countries-e...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/primary-energy-renewables

there are several ways to deal with countries that aren’t good citizens. I’d rather skip the conversation for the 100th time. Maybe you could come up with some common sense solutions? The funny thing about dealing with climate change, deniers, etc. is that once all the questions have been answered, they start all over again at the beginning.

The sort answer is: It’s really not an excuse for us not doing anything.

Realistically, through something like strong(er) accords and negotiation. But the first step is understanding the problem, recognizing it, and declaring an intent to address it with international cooperation. Saying "but my neighbor won't help" doesn't seem effective to get anything done. The mixed signals regarding thew science also don't help.

One of the principles of negotiation is showing goodwill, so let's all just start by doing our part, and then the international community can have a strong negotiating position with defectors. Being a defector ourselves doesn't help! (I prefer to suffer while striving for a good, than suffer slightly less knowing I'm part of the problem)

We know how to address China, and other nations. By international agreements and trade.

We have already done it multiple times. Does really no one remember the refrigerator gases, the CFCs?

The same economic doomsday arguments were made at the time, without them food production would suffer globally, and it won't matter anyway since it is a global problem and what about all the countries that will keep using them?

The onus on making a similar argument with greenhouse gases today would be on the ones saying it's impossible this time. The greenhouse situation may be so much more complex but the economic arguments are the same. We know how to solve them, by trade agreements and international tariffs.

One strong option is tying large tariffs to failure to hit emission reduction targets or failure to implement other globally determined necessary policies.

Like with everything, the problem isn't a lack of practical solutions, it is a lack of willpower to pay the short term polical / economic costs needed to avoid massive long term harm.

USA, China, India and pretty much everyone else in the "global south" will be more affected by climate change than, say, northern Europe.

This is old, but he was on science committee. If this is what they put on a 'science' committee. Then what else are they capable of.

U.S. House Rep. Paul Broun, a Georgia Republican, doesn't believe in evolution, the Big Bang theory, or the teachings of embryology. In fact, in a Sept. 27 talk at Liberty Baptist Church in Hartwell, Ga., the member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, who is also a medical doctor, called those areas of science "lies straight from the pit of hell."

I personally think idiots get elected because people want them in charge. If they suddenly got smarter, they'd be replaced. That was my conclusion from Brexit and Trump voters: they're choosing to be arseholes, but want to pretend they're just ignorant. This is a variation on the "trump gives his followers something no one else can: permission to be their worst selves".

The same applies to Global warming but on both sides.

That's just my opinion though.

We also send smart people with smart teams that know how to appeal to the below-average voters back home, and they’re very successful at that. Are there dumb politicians? Absolutely. But I strongly believe that many play it up so their bases identify with them more strongly as a way to secure power then go on to do whatever benefits them and their wealthy donors / friends.

Believe it or not, the small handful of people in charge got to their position by serving people to a certain extent. Any substantial reduction in emissions is going to cause substantial economic deadweight losses, which would be politically disastrous. This is why even the New Green Deal only proposes to throw money into projects rather than actively reduce emissions.

You don’t even need to convince the handful of people in charge. Independent geoengineering will become a thing faster than you expect.

Has been done before, and can be done again.

When have we ever gotten 8bn people to agree to painful, expensive changes simultaneously over a long term?

* Ban on leaded gazoline

* Ban on non-indigenous whaling

* Ban on ozone depleting gasses

* Several human rights treaties

* Nuclear non-proliferation

* Ban on mineral extraction and military activities on Antractica

* etc.

None of those are painful or expensive though?

Leaded petroleum was such an easy, local problem that solving it just happened at the national level, no need for binding international agreements.

I actually think the smart approach to serious action to prevent global warming would be similar to that taken for Nuclear non-proliferation: The big, strong countries force the others to accept they cannot have emissions and anyone who doesn't agree gets (at least) sanctioned into poverty or maybe "liberated"...

But most countries are much more interested in cheap energy (and meat and construction and other CO2e sources) than they ever were in nukes. Most citizens don't personally care if their leaders have nukes, but they care if they can afford meat and electricity.

And of course, for this to work, we would need those strong countries to ALSO give up their CO2e, something no world power has done and which the US and China are actively headed in the OPPOSITE direction of.

The ban on whaling is also a good example of a few bad actors ignoring the consensus and making the whole thing much less efficient. And that's (again) only for "whale meat", hardly as interesting a product as <almost everything that causes climate change>...

As the international whaling ban has demonstrated, it doesn’t matter if one or two bad actors (even large and powerful ones like Japan and Norway) don’t comply, as long as the majority and the most powerful nations do. Many whale species became critically endangered and it looked for a moment like they all would and we would simply loose whales from our oceans. That didn’t happen because the world came together and made the decision to kill the whaling industry instead of the whales.

With regards to global warming the responsibility of inaction lies solely on one bad actor, the USA, and only [initially] one political sub-faction in the USA. In 1997 all the world (including USA and China) came together and approved the Kyoto protocol, and made this painful discussion that would deeply affect our fossil fuel industry but save our climate. It was on its way to be ratified everywhere, public support was in its favor, so was the Clinton Administration, all European powers, and the Communist Party of China. Everybody agreed that the cost of climate change was greater than the benefits of cheap energy.

However at some point the oil industry in the USA fought against it, it got stalled in the USA senate and finally killed by the George Bush administration, in order to save their fossil fuel industry. If the USA hadn’t killed it, and even if they would have only half-assed the implementation, and even though China would come to ignore it, we would still be much further along the way of reducing our emissions.

You see, the world can come together and make painful decisions that affects all of us. It has done so multiple times in the past (even with respects to climate change) and it will in the future. It is really only because a certain industry has a disproportional hold over a certain country’s discourse that despite these agreements we have failed to act.

It's easy to say China, or even India, agreed to the Kyoto protocol when that didn't bind them to any goals. It just encouraged developing countries to adopt policies that encouraged reductions.

Aside from that, the US is currently below its 1990 levels while China is 4x its 1990 levels and double the current US production. It doesn't seem to line up with what you're saying about the US not taking action.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

You can create a nice graph here and add counties to compare.

I didn’t say that USA didn’t take action. Arguably Biden’s 2022 Climate and Spending bill is the most ambitious climate bill by any country (if so, then god help us, we need 100x that and 100x more). What I did say was that USA was very hostile to any international pact which would have enabled collective action. It is USAs fault that “8bn people [haven’t] agree[d] to painful, expensive changes simultaneously over a long term”, despite the fact that USA did agree to it before it changed its mind.

I’m not listening to the China argument, I’ve heard it many times before, it is always the same, and it is always done in bad faith. It was even the reason claimed by the USA senate to stall the Kyoto protocol over 20 years ago. We now know it had nothing to do with the supposed unfairness and everything to do with the fossil fuel lobby muddying the water,

> With regards to global warming the responsibility of inaction lies solely on one bad actor, the USA

Sure sounds like you’re saying the US isn’t taking action. And in calling them a bad actor you’d think that emissions are going up out of control instead of down below levels that predate the protocol by 7 years. It sounds like your arguments are in bad faith.

> With regards to global warming the responsibility of inaction lies solely on one bad actor, the USA.

> I didn’t say that USA didn’t take action.

It sure does sound like I just moved the goalpost here doesn’t it. However if you continue reading the paragraph it surely should be clear I’m talking about inaction in commit to an international agreement. That was also what my parent was talking about, getting people to agree to act, not the action it self.

However even if you didn’t misunderstand me, and I’m actually being disingenuous here, you’d still be wrong. The Kyoto protocol called for industrialized nations to reduce 8-20% of their 1990 emissions by 2012. Most countries stayed within their targets, with a notable exception of Canada. Canada notable followed USA and withdrew the protocol after USA failed to ratify it. USA was still at +4% emissions in 2012 and didn’t go back to 0% until 2020, where Covid pushed them over the edge. 2020 was supposed to be the second target with most nations targeting -20% reduction. USA will not reach that in another decade.

USA is responsible for a huge part of historic emissions, prior to 1997 China was responsible for almost none of it. Had the Kyoto protocol held, China could still be a party to the 2020 target.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions?t...

This is the graph you should be looking at, when judging fairness of the protocol, and bad actors. You should ask your self in 1997 when China had the population of Europe and USA combine, while still only responsible for the equivalent of the UK alone. If in 2001 USA and Europe would start to flatten out while China stay under Europe. You should look at the top line, the biggest historic emitter, and ask, why were the USA the first country to bail on the protocol, and why have subsequent trials of another protocol mostly failed.

It sounds like doublespeak to me. Inaction is a lack of action. You're saying they didn't act, but you they did act and therefore what you said is correct. You're argument is quite convoluted at this point.

That graph is good at pointing out that historically the US has contributed more than anyone. I didn't dispute that. It just seems like a silly argument to go back hundreds of years before any powers recognized it was an issue and use that as a basis for what should be done going forward so that other countries can catch up to the US's historically awful record. You see something, you fix it.

The argument in the Kyoto protocol was that industrialized nations were already industrialized and had the economic and industrial capabilities to replace their infrastructure with less polluting ones. Poorer nations didn’t have this benefit, so it would be unfair to ask the same of them.

You can say this argument is not sound, if you do, just be aware this is the same tactic used by the oil lobby that killed the protocol, it was not done in good faith back then, and I think the same is true of modern incarnation of these refutations.

Actually in more resent climate proposals, delegates from poorer nations, and climate justice advocates, have actually been trying to push for a development fund in which richer nations fund green infrastructure projects in poorer countries, the historic polluters—especially the USA—have predictably pushed back against this and landed on a much weaker climate relief fund at the last COP. If the oil lobby (and by extension the USA government) was sincere about the supposed unfairness of the Kyoto protocol, this would be a great compromise, and totally align with You see something, you fix it. But alas, they are bad actors, and such proposals yielded limited results.

I don’t think it is fruitful for us to be arguing about what I meant by inaction in my previous posts. You obviously misunderstood me, I tried to clarify but you still persist that I didn’t mean what I say I meant. The original point was that there exists a historic president for an international agreement of reducing carbon emissions, which everyone agreed to. Future agreements should therefor be possible. Identifying bad actors and pointing fingers at those at fault for previous agreements failing seems relevant to this discussion.

It just seems squirrely to double down that inaction doesn't mean inaction. You seem to be pushing your ideas more than you seem to be thinking about what they actually sound like.

But it is right, inaction to commit to international agreements does not mean inaction to reduce carbon emission. Those are separate things. And when the conversation is explicitly about the (im)possibility of international agreements, it should be clear which inaction I’m talking about.

And of course I’m pushing my ideas. The history of who killed the Kyoto protocol is still up for debate. I’m of the opinion that the death of the Kyoto protocol and all subsequent agreements rests in one bad actor, the USA. There is not a historic consensus about this, and you’ll find historic accounts that disagree with this (or more likely you’ll find historians putting less importance on the Kyoto protocol than I do). I’m pushing what I believe is the most accurate—or rather the most relevant—narrative of history here.

Complaining about someone saying they aren't committing to do something while they generally do that thing doesn't seem like a good complaint. Diplomacy has a lot of moving parts.

after the ultimate changes in climate, will there still be 7bn people?

The better question would be whether they would still be alive.

in what other manner did you interpret that?

That having a few hundred million corpses lying around would put a bit of a strain on funeral services...

Mass die offs have happened historically but nothing short of the black plague is in line with the range of possibilities before us.

> but nothing short of the black plague is in line with the range of possibilities before us.

What do you mean? Now I'm scared...

Why would people just suddenly start dropping dead?

I really don't want to spoil your dinner but the chances of millions of dead per year are fairly high, and that's up to 2100, not many models look beyond that (the uncertainty is too large). The extremes of those models (things that could happen but with a much smaller likelihood) are enough to make you miserable.

The good news is that there are similar possible outcomes that things won't be that dire.

250K dead / year by 2050, 5 million / year or so by 2100.

The tough part is that such models have a lot of uncertainty and that it is very well possible to be alive but to be utterly miserable. I'm normally fairly optimistic about our ability to influence our lives but on this one I'm not, this will happen and we're along for the ride, it's a rearguard action at this point where we can try hard to minimize the damage but not avoid it completely.

Not to trivialise it, but those 250k/year or 5 million/year are against the ordinary level of 67 million deaths per year worldwide, UN data:

https://bigthink.com/the-present/births-and-deaths-per-year/

When we think how many of those deaths - and the suffering leading up to them - could be changed by reducing obesity, reducing sugar intake, increasing exercise, reducing air pollution, reducing smoking, increasing vitamin D levels, reducing alcohol consumption, reducing stress by any means (city noise to hypercompetitive workplaces to ragebait media), improving road safety, and "we" don't act on most of that. And then how much more we would have to act to hold or reverse climate change to save comparatively fewer people, it seems ... not a bad idea, but a sadly unlikely one.

(Incidentally, 67 million -> 72 million is about a 7% increase in deaths. Which is in the region of the excess deaths in 2022 which correlate with COVID vaccination in 2021 in European countries. A study from a Norwegian University finds a correlation of 1% increase in population vaccinated in 2021 -> 0.1% increase in excess deaths in 2022. Not caused by COVID which they excluded, not caused by a bounceback after a year of fewer deaths which they accounted for, and as far as the authors can tell not caused by delayed access to health care which was widespread and not linked to vaccination levels in different countries; and if that's roughly in the region of the expected climate change deaths, you can see that not only are we not doing much about this, we are barely even talking about it in public, which doesn't bode well for the climate change equivalent: Dr on YouTube citing studies and evidence and not conspiracy theories: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyo2UNQcdpQ )

Yes, obviously the number of expected deaths is ~ the number of people alive / average lifespan.

But the number of people dying due to climate change is a difficult to pin down number. Do you or do not include for instance people dying in wars when the proximate cause for the war was climate change or mass migration? Some believe you should, others say that wars have always been fought. So it's a tricky problem for many intrinsic reasons and it is an even trickier problem because there are so many ways to interpret the data.

All this adds up to us doing nothing until it is way too late.

> 250K dead / year by 2050, 5 million / year or so by 2100.

Can that be fully offset by increase standards of living and improving healthcare/medicine? 250k is not a lot statistically on a global scale (and I really doubt the capability of these models to accurately predict what's going to happen in 50+ years)

> The tough part is that such models have a lot of uncertainty and that it is very well possible to be alive but to be utterly miserable.

I'm not saying it's going to be tough for a lot of people in some places. But I don't really see how for humanity as a whole it can be much more than a slowdown than potentially can be fully compensated by further technological progress. Of course increasing economic inequality can likely only make it worse rather than better

birth rates are going down and if current trends continue total population should start decreasing at some point. But everything comes down to that. Human societies existed and even slowly grew in much worse conditions. So I’m sure what could happen because of climate change to offset modern medicine/agriculture/transportation/etc.

No. But by then it will be way too late to matter for the purposes of mitigating climate change. We've blown through 1.5C. 2C will be next. 3, 4, 5, 10, how far will we get before the results catch up with the causes?

This has become a very popular opinion lately. The mainstream skepticism of if climate change exists has been replaced with it. But it's false. If we can't adapt to consuming or driving less how are we going to adapt to e.g. cycles of droughts and floods?

It's become such a popular opinion that I wonder if it's being pushed.

I think it’s kind of obvious. We can’t adapt to consuming less because there is no immediate cost. We can adapt to droughts because it would force migration of people away from areas without water because those that won’t will either not have access to water or spend a lot for water (a direct cost).

Mitigation might be cheaper, but disasters that already happen have more clear incentives.

I'd say it's "we think we can adapt to climate change".

At the end of the day, earth will not become entirely uninhabitable. The rich portions of humanity will have to migrate and pay expensive mitigation, the poor portions will suffer and many will die.

It’s terrible that we aren’t addressing issues early but it’s hard to see how we fail to adapt. At worst I think we see total excess deaths around two billion (which is a lot! but basically let’s us discount most of Africa and a few hundred mil from Asia and Americas).

It's easy to say when others feel the same way, but I'd like to believe it's mostly a matter of adapting expectations to reality since there's no realistic way to get 8 billion people agree to what the proper way forward is.

We have less than 100 million people living a lifestyle that 7900 million people try to achieve. A few prominent people on the top blames it on the 1500 million or so, that have managed to achieve what most of us call basic decent living. Yes, the bar has gone up the last 30 years. Significantly. Yes, many would be fine on 1990-levels. Many wouldn't. The next 5 billion or so work hard to catch up regardless, and they're offsetting anything the smaller part does, by the sheer amount of growth. The poorest 1½ billion that's left are mostly trying to survive. The rest of us could have done _something_, but it's the ones who are worst off that'll take the worst blow.

I'm over 40, and learnt about this in school over 30 years ago. My grandparent's generation knew, and did nothing. My parent's generation are still struggling with basic things like throwing glass and metal in a separate container for recycling. The time for solving this with wonderful technological innovation has come and gone. We _could_ try to force some kind of return to sustenance farming, but previous attempts at such social engineering have ended in near-genocide. And so, all that is left is to deal with the consequences of deciscions that were taken long ago.

The good thing is that more and more people agree about climate change being real. We might have screwed up preventing disaster, but at least we still have a chance to dampen the impact.

Considering the oil economy is literally the hub around which all global finance revolves I'd say there's both motive and finance available for unlimited astroturfing.

We can't even convince people not to drive monster trucks from suburban homes to jobs in a city.

Monster trucks are a localized failure of regulation.

It's the easy way, going straight from disbelief to declaring defeat relieves you from the impetus to take a stand, make life changes etc.

Some years ago I got to the point where I think it's inevitable that we'll burn all the oil, coal, etc, and we'll just engage in geoengineering to try to mitigate it. And people in the low income world will suffer the worst effects while the wealthy continue to live in air conditioned glass towers.

Might seem a bit misanthropic, but us humans probably are just going to be a blip on Earth's history, being the proverbial frog in the slowly boiling pot. But I suspect that cockroaches will carry on just fine. So at least there is hope for the future.

The asteroid that caused the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event was also just a blip on Earth’s history, it did however succeed in making life on earth miserable for a few thousand years, wiping out 75% of the all the species in the process.

In your analogy we are not the frog though, we are the pot, and we are the asteroid, since we are the ones causing the catastrophe. Except on geologic timescales, the pot isn’t slowly being boiled, it is being pressured cooked on a thermo-nuclear reactor. Extinction events are seldomly this sudden and extreme as climate change is currently.

>Extinction events are seldomly this sudden and extreme as climate change is currently.

How do you figure? An asteroid impacting the planet "making life miserable for a few thousand years, wiping out 75%" in seconds of an impact, or a cataclysmic volcanic eruption that happens in seconds/minutes/hours. All of that near instant destruction compared to the 100-200 years of man made pollution on industrial scales.

Geologically speaking that is an instant roughly the equivalent of an asteroid impact. Even if for those living through it looks entirely different the outcome is the same.

Sure, speaking cosmological terms, it's like humans never happened. But speaking in terms of what is controllable by those humans, we just had a successful test that we might be able to save ourselves from an asteroid if we have significant amount of notice. Can't really do too much about volcanoes though. Man made pollution is definitely something we have control over and we've had half a century of warnings. Let's not lose sight of the actual conversation when it is still within our control even if we've decided to ignore it. Human extinction is the most probable outcome but that doesn't mean we have to accelerate it and then just shrug our shoulders

Since COVID-19 I have absolutely zero confidence in mankind pulling the same cart together no matter if it would kill them if they didn't.

"The asteroid that caused the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event was also just a blip on Earth’s history, it did however succeed in making life on earth miserable for a few thousand years, wiping out 75% of the all the species in the process."

Sure, but that leaves a heaping helping of the remaining 25% to carry on to eventually repopulate the planet with more glorious life. It's happened before, it'll happen again, and whether we're the reason or the victim doesn't really matter. Life finds a way, with or without humans.

Some of us are attached to our current civilization and would like to preserve it. Others would like to continue enriching themselves.

A cursory look at the history of the planets temperature [1] makes this sentiment seems ridiculous.

We're still in below average temperatures. Considering our dummy ancestors were around 50 million years ago, when averages were 30 degrees hotter, I don't see why man, as we are now, wouldn't survive. The poles will be nice tropics, once again [2].

Society as is, is doomed, but man is probably fairly permanent.

[1] https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_widt...

from

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte...

[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/study-north-pole-once-was-tropi...

In the past this happened over timescales that allowed nature to adapt. We're now doing it many times faster, and at a time when nature is already greatly diminished due to human resource extraction.

We're just desertificating vast regions of the planet, not turning them into "nice tropics".

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...

> our dummy ancestors were around 50 million years ago

While true, this vague statement may be misinterpreted by readers. Per Wikipedia[0], about 55 million years ago is the first fossil evidence of any apes. The 'homo' genus, which is what I'd consider "our dummy ancestors", doesn't appear until 2 million years ago (and anatomically modern humans 300,000 years ago).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution

I just don't understand why people make these arguments.

When people speak of "humanity" they don't mean "the human species". They/we mean of "human society", our current variant, which just invented computers, artificial intelligent, and until very recently seemed set on ending all resource scarcity, curing all diseases, and becoming inter-planetary.

Will humans survive somewhere in the climate as our ancestral species did before us? Of course.

But losing 2000 years of societal progress is not something to just waive away as nothing.

As long as we are succeptible to a tiny rock floating in space swiping our little planet and wiping out all of us, we must progress technologically, and a regression to merely surviving and dying of a broken ankle is not an answer.

> but us humans probably are just going to be a blip on Earth's history

They were clearly talking about humans, the animal, not society.

I see this argument a lot on conservative news, "humans will adapt". Well, yes, humans will adapt, and there probably will be humans carrying on for thousands of more years.

But not US, WE, todays societies will be gone. Why is this an argument with 'conservatives'? The stupid 'woke' should stop worrying about climate, because humans will adapt.

But why is this a 'conservative' argument, when all of their religions will also be gone. When we are back in the stone ages, there will be humans, but not 'Republican'. Unless, in the dystopian future, the Christian Right does devolve into a Taliban like Ameri-stan where they can go 'Old Testament' on gays. But that does seem like a pretty long game argument. Is it really: "Deny Climate Change so we can destroy civilization back into bronze age so we can just wander the desert worshiping god, like we were supposed to"

I had a light-switch moment listening to some conservative or other on a rant about how the left is making up climate change in order to justify government control of business/society. It's the kind of comment that says more about the person making it than those they are accusing. If you loathe the idea of collective action, then an existential problem that requires collective action to solve poses a problem for you, and denial seems to be the simplest route out of any cognitive dissonance.

I was just responding to the comment "but us humans probably are just going to be a blip on Earth's history", which you also seem to disagree with.

I don't know why conservatives think that, but I think it's silly to think that humans, the animal, will be wiped out within the next 1000 years, due to the very real climate change that is happening.

No doubt we could also reach world population levels that our ancestors experienced 50 million years ago.

Sure, which is why the original comment is silly. Humans will be very hard to make extinct.

That thought actually frightens me, because we would get away with negligently exterminating all these other life forms, part of which has already happened. If there's any justice in this universe we will follow them.

Civilizations collapsed under less stress. Billionaires exist only if there is a highly organized society. Actually most tech exists only if there is a highly organized society.

I agree. I think we will see some countries degrade, as we do today from climate and conflict. I think there will be more of them and some will be worse.

Fundamentally, if you look at the level of suffering due to conflict and climate that already exists, I'm just saying we'll all be more aware of that, and HN readers are much more likely to experience that, vs saying we're all going to end up with Mad Max scenarios.

> as we do today from climate

What is this in reference to? Climate deaths are at an all time low [1].

[1] https://www.humanprogress.org/the-collapse-of-climate-relate...

Metrics like this are skewed by 'warning'. Today there are far fewer deaths by hurricane, but not because hurricanes have gotten smaller, but because we are better at predicting and evacuating. So someone saying 'hey hurricane deaths are down, no problems here', is misleading.

This is why I ask what they were referring to when they say "see some countries degrade, as we do today from climate". I don't want to have to guess about the specific metric, incorrectly most likely.

Bye bye Las Vegas…

... and India: https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/109174~2228/Comparison-of...

I think that's a huge worry. There is a huge population there that as far as I can tell, can't just 'move a bit north' or something. Plenty of them are not very wealthy so don't have a lot of cash to spend on mitigation. It could get really ugly.

The Black Plague was a huge population stabiliser in Europe/Asia in the middle ages. Expect something quite equivalent at world scale.

Note: btw, it was an absolue nightmarish period to live in !

Apocalyptic in truest sense of the word, followed by post-apocalyptic for a bit.

Funny so, that even back then society didn't really collapse into the sorry state TV wants us to believe it would today.

> It could get really ugly

Indeed, and not just there.

What pains me the most is that we collectively could be mitigating this with far more vigor but that would be in conflict with the worship of the quarterly profit report.

There's plenty of local action that can be taken that aren't really about 'quarterly profits'.

Does your city have parking mandates, for instance, where developers are required to furnish N parking spots per dwelling unit or store?

That kind of thing locks automobile usage in place in suburbia, so that many people are stuck in a lifestyle where they are forced to use an automobile all the time, for everything. And transportation is a huge contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the US.

Things like fighting parking mandates nibble on the problem at the edges, are net-positive, but are largely trying to push on a rope.

Something like carbon taxes or caps would actually deal with the problem. Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of pushback on them.

The alliances being forged to eliminate things like parking mandates (we just did this in Bend, Oregon!) are great ones to keep pushing for more things.

I do like this idea, and other ideas like this, but can't help but observe that it's inducing a sort of functional privation without a corresponding counterbalance. We can't just work to "eliminate automobile usage in [...] suburbia" when suburbia's physical affordances don't really allow suburbanites to contend with anything else...

Sure, there's a lot going on. Another thing that we should do is re-legalize things like "neighborhood commercial". Things like corner stores or barber shops that people can walk to are functionally illegal in vast swathes of American suburbia. Part of what makes them difficult to build, even if you've solved for zoning, is oppressive parking mandates.

Books like https://islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines and https://www.brookings.edu/book/fixer-upper/ are decent starting points for more in-depth discussions of all this.

What makes them functionally non-starters is if I go to a corner store I expect that I'm paying 20-50% more than if I went to a supermarket and if I go to a supermarket I expect to pay 10-20% more than if I went to a big box store. Your solution is to not only make a network of less price efficient stores, but have me walk to those store three to four times as often. This doesn't even account for the increased truck traffic, through our neighborhoods, that has to deliver to all of these stores instead of the handful. It also will greatly limit the options of what is for sale at particular stores because serving 100 families versus serving 10000 families will have drastically less shelf space and not make low volume items worth carrying.

If they're 'non starters', then there is no need to make them illegal via zoning.

One just reopened near me, and it's been quite successful so far:

https://www.bendbulletin.com/lifestyle/bruno-s-6th-street-ma...

It's not just a store, sure, but the entire reason the commercial space exists is because it was a market before we got a zoning code making that sort of thing functionally illegal in most residential areas.

No one is saying you have to always go to the corner store, either. Who knows what the market would provide. They aren't high margin businesses. But at the very least, we should re-legalize them and see. This stuff isn't black and white: if you skip a few trips by going to a local barber, but still drive to work, that's still progress.

Where I lived in Italy, there was a smaller neighborhood grocery store we went to for most things. It was a little bit more expensive than the big box one, but not the kind of corner store prices you're talking about. They had fresh fruit, veggies and meat, so I often stopped there to pick up some things to make dinner with, nice and fresh, rather than a weekly run to Costco or something, as is more common in the US.

They haven't been illegal anywhere I've lived. A few survive, but none thrive. Mostly they seem to get by selling drinks and to smokers.

Try and set one up in most US suburbs and then get back to me. In other words: look at your city's zoning map. They're not allowed in most places in most cities.

My previous post explained why I thought it was a terrible business plan and I mentioned my city has them and your response is to try it?

"Has them" doesn't mean "legal everywhere". Lots of places have legacy ones from before zoning.

What city is it?

There are lots of businesses that I would not want to be in. Does that mean they shouldn't be legal?

https://www.axios.com/2023/05/23/climate-change-unprecedente... ("Nearly 2 billion at risk from "unprecedented" climate conditions")

> Of note: The study found that if countries only meet existing emissions reductions based on current policies, and warming were to reach 2.7°C by 2100 (4.8°F), the top 5 countries most vulnerable to unprecedented heat (based on the number of people exposed) would be India, Nigeria, Indonesia, the Philippines and Pakistan.

> In this scenario, up to a third of humanity would be exposed to such extreme heat and be well outside the human climate niche, the study found. The heat would not hold off until the end of the century, but ratchet up noticeably over time.

> The study concludes that for every 0.1°C (0.18°F) increase in global average surface temperatures, another 140 million people will be exposed to dangerous heat.

I doubt Pakistanis will ever allow them to just "move north".

A global war would ensue, where everyone would try to defend their southern borders from the intruders and try to "go north". And billions of deaths will happen out of necessity, since "the north" can't sustain enough food production for 7-8bn of people.

And since many would die anyways, every nuclear power will make sure to use their nukes to destroy the ones trying to come from the south and to break up north.

In the end, it would be a nuclear war between the USA and Russia trying to use the situation and extend the full control over the Arctic.

Haunting expleration of how it could happen at https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/the-ministry-for-t...

Upside is it’s certainly reversible climate change. Downside is humans might not be around to see the reversion. (Possibly the upside if you take the perspective of all other life on earth)

Not gonna lie, based on what the pandemic revealed to me about real human nature I think it'd be in everyone's best interest for our species to go extinct and give evolution a few hundred million years to take another crack at sentient tool-using apex predators based on some other gene line. Primates just aren't panning out.

Maybe apex predator is the problem. I imagine sentient tool using rabbits wouldn’t do this sort of stuff.

No argument there.

I'm looking forward to the end of this ice age.

I see zero reason why humans could not succeed in dealing with climate change. Will we be able to control the climate fully - no, but probably get closer to engineering our planet properly rather than by accident.

It's totally feasible. Is it reasonable? As we pour more energy into our climate it's going to become more chaotic and as more people become displaced by weather events our production capabilities will be diminished and redirected.

Not acting now means we'll have to act more aggressively in the future under more adverse conditions... like controlling the weather to make sure we get a successful harvest of food.

The current approaches often don't sell well politically, so we need to plan for different contingencies.

That doesn't mean the decarbonization won't happen but that it might need different political agreements, perhaps different technological setups, cost sharing mechanism etc. - but that will delay things, highlighting again the need for contingency approaches.

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