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Comment by foxandmouse | Hacker News Reader

How is this on the front page? It's as poorly rooted in science as anti-global warming articles.

This level of alarmism is dangerous because thoughts of others imprison us if we’re not thinking for ourselves... why would a young person care about the climate if it's already too late.

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How is it poorly rooted? They cite all of the data they used for their sources, and link to research supporting their broad claims. You can’t just call something poorly sourced and alarmist because it’s actually alarming. That’s the problem, right now. Alarming is very much the word I should hope this article is.

What we have already done is enough to keep the momentum of global warming going the next centuries. That's a very difficult political reality, it is a great challenge. How can we deal with politics and everything else when the facts look like this?

When the best we can do is to "not make it worse", then it's very hard for people to see the benefits of the changes we have to make.

The fun thing about climate change is that it is never really too late to make a difference, since every reduction in emitted CO2 results in less warming (even if not in a perfectly linear fashion due to various feedback loops). This means that even when we've already locked in 2C, it is still worth preventing it from going to 2.5C.

So alarmism is good and necessary, we just need to make sure that we also need to take action based on it.

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