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Comment by elbasti | Hacker News Reader

> this sort of "it's over, there's only doom ahead" is, IMO, counterproductive and hurts the efforts to help the environment more than it helps.

Says who? We've been parroting the opposite message ("there's still time! go solar! electric cars!") is CLEARLY not working.

I'm a climate change doomer, in that I'm certain our children will live in a very different world than us, and there's a real (10%+?) chance of total environmental collapse in our lifetimes. The positive feedback loops are inescapable.

The science is the science...who are we to lie to people hoping that the lie somehow inspires mass coordinated change?

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Your concern about total environmental collapse makes me wonder why there has been so little talk recently about biomedical advances as a hedge against the effects of global warming. Twenty-odd years ago, Ray Kurzweil’s vision of the human race moving from organic to machine bodies was all the rage in nerd circles. (I don’t share his optimism myself, I just think it curious that it totally disappeared from the discourse.) Machine bodies don’t rely on a world kept within such a narrow temperature range, they don’t rely on all the species that are going extinct, they don’t even need a biosphere at all.

Because it's a pipe dream. We are our bodies, they not something to be overcome.

>The science is the science

Implying we alreayd know everything we need to know, which is patently untrue. People who discuss science as a settled matter should be treated with suspicion.

The word "everything" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Of course we don't know everything, but we certainly know enough to warrant extreme pessimism.

Namely:

- we know a mechanism that causes global warming, which is empirically proven and theoretically backed.

- multiple scenarios of positive feedback loops that result in rapid warming

- very few ideas even for positive feedback loops that result in cooling

- little to no demonstrated political will to act decisively.

Seems to me like we know a lot!

> there's a real (10%+?) chance of total environmental collapse in our lifetimes

I suppose I could be described as a doomer too, but I think this understates the issue. Even if we got carbon emissions to zero today, we're facing a very real chance of imminent ecological collapse in our lifetimes. Climate change is just the tip of the iceberg.

To all appearances, (post)industrial civilization is not sustainable, whether or not you use fossil fuels.

The science can be totally correct and the future still be different.

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