Comment by sashank_1509 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sashank_1509 | Hacker News Reader

I keep using an example I read from a blog about how to think about this, (pls don’t shoot me here, I’m just the messenger):

1. Avg case is we cross 2.7 degree Celsius hotter by 2100. Worst possibly 5 degree Celsius hotter according to ICPC.

Let’s assume this is a given truth, so what are the negative effects of being 5 degree hotter. If you’re in America, 5 degrees hotter will make USA more like … Spain or Argentina?. So the worst case on average is cooler than current day India. Why all this apocalyptic messaging? (This is before even contesting the models, Science etc)

Edit 1: A lot of people talking about ice age, burning age, rivers stop flowing etc. please think more clearly, Is India uninhabitable? (Has it lost its rivers etc). People talking about places becoming uninhabitable, again please think clearly, Qatar is one of the hottest places in the world, 5 degrees hotter does it make Qatar closer to Sahara desert or is there quite a way to go (almost 15 degrees more to go?) . Most places in the world will remain cooler than present day Qatar after the warming! (Assuming the worst case warming)

Edit 2: I’m more sympathetic to the arguments about crops and animals dying but this is not apocalyptic to humans. Bad for nature sure, we should try to protect them but humans will be fine, we will manage to grow the crops and animals we need, worst case in different locations than now and I’m not even sure of that (technology?).

As the world warms, the jet stream gets wacky and wavey. Regional temperature variations are be orders of magnitude higher than the global average change. Changing climate also means different new pests, funguses, bacteria, etc.

Resulting droughts, floods, and famine are typically seen as bad things. These factors will contribute towards conflicts and wars.

There will also be mass emigration from areas that become unliveable, on the order of hundreds of millions to billions, primarily towards "first world" nations. No matter how that plays out, it's bad.

A disintegrating world order does not bode well for the global economic system on which current Western quality of life is built.

Plus, some people care about nature beyond factory farms and concrete urban sprawl. That nature is most definitively getting fucked as life just can't adapt so rapidly.

Well, in part, the problem is that everything that grows in North America is not ready to grow in India. So tons of plants and animals will die when their ecosystems disappear. Ponds will evaporate , rivers will move or stop running. It’s a bad time.

Hey man, I can't be the person to fully educate you on this but 2.7 degrees of average increase does not translate to a slightly warmer summer day. The language used makes it very misleadingly sound like no big deal, but it is a BIG deal. Without trying to be cliche, there is an XKCD for this and here it is: https://xkcd.com/1732/

A short way to get the point across is that when the earth's average temperature was 4°C lower than it was in 1990, that was an ice age. "Boston is buried under almost a mile of ice".

Imagine such a dramatic climate change in the other direction, 5°C hotter than 1990.

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