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Comment by fshbbdssbbgdd | Hacker News Reader

Depends on who you mean by “we”. Air conditioning and insulation can protect you from high temperatures when you’re inside. Solar and storage can provide the electricity to power it.

The problem is it’s going to take decades at best to get that tech into the hands of everyone who needs it in many parts of the world. And that’s assuming economic development and international cooperation go the right way to make that happen (which seems doubtful).

Realistically, the world will contain many millions of people whose lives are improving dramatically even as millions of others are suffering in new ways. Same as it ever was.

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Human beings are just one species in the many ecosystems that make up the planet's biosphere. We cannot exist without those other species. Our understanding of the interconnections is extremely poor (see: "Half Earth" by E.O. Wilson). We are on track to change the climate so abruptly that the species we depend on will not adapt quickly enough. Jellyfish, for example, might thrive. Large mammals like ourselves will not.

Let me reiterate: If these other forms of life go extinct, homo sapiens will go extinct. What point is there in air conditioning if agricultural yields plummet over a huge portion of the earth's surface?

Consider birds for a moment, because they are familiar to most people and widespread. Bird populations have decline by a third during my father's lifetime. This is a multi-factor problem, but we know climate change and sea level rise leads to excess migratory bird mortality.

For more, see: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393608908

> We are on track to change the climate so abruptly that the species we depend on will not adapt quickly enough. Jellyfish, for example, might thrive. Large mammals like ourselves will not.

The notion that humans, as a species, will not adapt seems farfetched to me. Humans have perpetuated themselves in a wide variety of climates for thousands of years.

I don't say that to discredit concerns about environmental change, its impact on future populations, or its near term impact on existing individuals. All I'm saying is that arguments based on existential threats are not persuasive to me and they tend to be used to assert power over others than to mitigate risk or improve the lives of people on the earth today.

It's not humans that need to adapt, right? It's all the other species we depend on. Their adaptation will not necessarily make our adaptation easier. We cannot manufacture a habitable environment for ourselves ex nihilo.

For example, fungal infections are on the rise because fungi prefer warmer temperatures. Mammalian species like bats, that hibernate, are the canaries in the coal-mine, succumbing to these infections before other mammalian species. We are engendering countless such changes in the adaptive strategies of other species. It will not end well for us if we can't get greenhouse gas emissions down quickly.

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/17/1188101048/blight-warns-of-th...

> The notion that humans, as a species, will not adapt seems farfetched to me. Humans have perpetuated themselves in a wide variety of climates for thousands of years.

But throughout all of human history, there hasn't been a change in climate as drastic as what is starting now. So why does our ancestors surviving in a variety of climates make it likely that we'll adapt to the destruction of our environment due to rapid climate change?

> Humans have perpetuated themselves in a wide variety of climates

The sad truth is that we are even unable to stop a fucking war created by a handful of beyond repair insane people. War that has been releasing huge amounts of heath and energy in the northern hemisphere for more than 500 days of bombing everything at sight. 500 days that curiously came with top temperatures never registered before

Climate is just a direct representation of energy movements on the atmosphere. If we add a lot of energy to the system, the logical expectations would be that, at some point, the weather will lose its buffer function and start including this fact somehow. I'm still expecting somebody addressing this issue seriously.

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