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Comment by jesterson | Hacker News Reader

> People don’t seem to have the stomach to accept what’s coming

Whats coming?

If we look at doom&gloom predictions of "climate change" we see - objectively, none of those "whats coming" have happened.

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Back in the aughts, a specific prediction of flooding in the NYC subway system in a decade was made. And then in 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit the area, flooding the subway, completing that prediction. It's now 2023 and NYC is flooding again.

Or how about wildfires turning the sky orange. Fire existed before global climate change, but it's made the fire season longer and fires more frequent. Fires in Canada made the sky's orany for much of the North Eastern US. It's pretty hard to ignore the sky being the wrong color.

Objectively, yes, things have happened.

https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/view-indicators

Are you implying wildfires never happened before? Or wildfires that “turn sky orange “ never happened before?

Was that the first time the subway was flooded?

That isn't accurate at all. Books have been written since the early and mid-20th century about the effects of a technocratic society and the limits of growth, and those analysis and predictions have certainly come to fruition in various ways.

What is scary about the climate and the environment is that they are highly dynamic systems. If anyone has studied dynamical systems, there are certainly points where everything is "fine" and then boom, a sudden critical point is hit and things go off the rails. The worry is that we seem to be constantly teetering on a critical point. Or we are simply in slow motion destruction. Or both.

Take any closed ecosystem (which the Earth is) and imagine doing to it what we do to the Earth. Is it any surprise things are going off the rails? Resources are not infinite and almost none of them are mined/gathered without major consequences to the environment.

Have you watched any documentaries? Animals and plants are struggling heavily in a myriad of ways and just flat going extinct at increasing rates. Glaciers are going away. Oceans are poisoned and hypoxic. Animals and even humans are filled with microplastics. Technology and capitalism is ripping society apart in a way in which a certain class of people have their thumbs over everyone else. There are literally plastic rocks being formed. Weather events are getting more extreme. Wildfires are increasing.

> objectively, none of those "whats coming" have happened

Search for any of those things and please tell me you still feel this way. Even something specific as a search for "birds filled with plastic" will show that this is not true. Does this look like things have not objectively happened with the climate? https://www.greenmatters.com/weather-and-global-warming/pict...

> That isn't accurate at all. Books have been written since the early and mid-20th century about the effects of a technocratic society and the limits of growth, and those analysis and predictions have certainly come to fruition in various ways.

No need to hide BS behind long wordy sentences to look smart. Nothing has "come to fruition" - nor doom&gloom predictions of Maldives going under water or any sorts of that.

Definitions like yours are easily dismissed when we start talking specifics and look what "climate change" adepts preached 10-20-30 years ago. It's easy to look smart talking about vague books.

If you old enough to remember, popular preaching in 70s was "global cooling" with predictions about would freezing by 21st century. Needless to say it went the same road predictions about "global boiling" are heading to - be proven by historical data as made up and out of context.

What? Just this summer we had a string of the hottest days ever recorder for like 2 weeks. Last year temps were in the high 20°C's for up to mid-november. Once-a-decade wildfires now happen every year. Hurricanes destroy large parts of the southeast US every summer. Europe is starting to get hit by storms as well. The Gulfstream, arguably the single most important ocean current to the western world, is collapsing.

This isn't a matter of opinion; objectively, these things are happening, and there is no reason for them not to get worse.

This a bunch of emotional responses, if you pardon my bluntness. It it a matter of opinion and has nothing to do with the word "objectivity".

I would call for some historical data and do some data-backed comparisons, but given your emotional responses it likely will be pointless.

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