Comment by gameoverhumans | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gameoverhumans | Hacker News Reader

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> So you are an expert in these things that you don't trust other experts

I don't see how the grandparent comment implied a lack of trust in other experts, nor did they imply themselves to be experts.

> Catastrophic collapse is not really something generally assumed on the 2-3 degree warming path.

Actually, the IPCC, which tends to be rather optimistic on how bad things could be (or already are), predicts pretty significant socioeconomic problems arising from 2-3 degrees warming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Socioeconomic_Pathways

It doesn't take much imagination to come up with ways that "Social cohesion degrades and conflict and unrest become increasingly common" leads to "nation states with nukes and experiencing extreme scarcity and high social unrest declare war on each other"...

Your imagination might not be a good guide to take you from degrading social cohesion to something like nuclear war.

Even in general, socio-economic models are not of the same quality as the physics models (and no-one is making that claim anyway). The SSPs are more like share narratives rather than forecasts.

Okay so we've established that neither my imagination, nor the labors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are any good for determining how likely we are on course for nuclear war.

You know that humans do have nukes, right? And a long history of killing each other over pretty much anything? (from land rights to idealogies and everything in between).

So in your estimation, who would be a good source to determine how/whether humans get to a point where nuclear war is a likely scenario?

I explained to you what the SSPs are.

Why the obsession with nuclear war and trying to get totally imprecise scenarios there? They serve very little purpose other than building scary narratives. Some people's job is to worry about them, but that doesn't mean they are central to what we should do.

When a hurricane strikes, things are usually not just Lord Of The Flies - the idea of collapse into violent chaos is a popular one but doesn't really happen much.

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