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Comment by tda | Hacker News Reader

The issue with climate change is exactly that: change. Doesn't matter if it get colder, dryer, wetter, warmer than it used too. It is a huge undertaking to change the built environment to handle conditions that were once seen as exceptional. Houses, streets and waterways are normally replaced/adjusted on the scale of multiple decades or even centuries. Significant climate change is affecting areas everywhere on a single decade timescale. So infrastructure is now outdated much more quickly, and needs to be replaced/upgraded at a higher pace. This if hugely expensive and will lead to more waste and more emissions. And that is just for the built world on which we have a lot of influence. The natural world doesn't always have the ability to adjust; lots of habits are suffering and species are going extinct.

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Sufficient impact to require rebuilding houses or other buildings on a single decade scale?

I cannot see that sort of rapid rebuilding anywhere I know. I live in a house that is about 60 years old. I have friends who live in houses centuries old. Not come across anyone who needs to change very much to cope with climate change, apart from things to reduce emissions (mostly installing heat pumps can be difficult)

The built environment also needs to handle a lot of variation anyway.

I can certainly see a drastic impact in some places: low lying land (I would be very worried if I was Dutch or Maldivian. I might be quite worried if I was living in Norfolk) , but its not everywhere.

Anyone living in a flood plane will have had to have made changes or not be insured.

Flash flooding is getting worse in the UK, partly because of climate change (look at how wet February was for south east UK) but also because a lot of urban areas are being paved over.

but to a throw away comment:

> installing heat pumps can be difficult

Yes, yes they can be, but also they also are not the cheapest way to save carbon.

Insulation makes a much bigger impact, that includes external wall insulation, and better glazing. its up to 2x cheaper.

There is crazy housebuilding and development in the UK. An entire housing estate was built where I used to live on land that is known to flood. They built pumps to offset it.

Nonetheless, very few places are affected with a decade. The vast majority of people live in places that will not be badly enough to need rebuilding any time soon.

I am hoping that this is a UK problem and the rest of the world is mostly not as crazy. Not that I have high hopes of that.

> Yes, yes they can be, but also they also are not the cheapest way to save carbon.

Cost effective solutions are not profitable, so are not backed by lobbying and marketing.

  > Sufficient impact to require rebuilding houses or other buildings on a single decade scale?

Didn't Texas suffer a major snow storm a few years ago? The houses, electrical distribution network, people's clothes were unable to handle the situation and if I'm not mistaken there were deaths.

https://www.texastribune.org/series/winter-storm-power-outag...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis

> The natural world doesn't always have the ability to adjust; lots of habits are suffering and species are going extinct.

To me this is the much bigger issue than us humans adapting. For us to adapt it demands a lot of labour, and associated costs, it will make life harder but it's doable.

Nature doesn't have this ability, animals can't get together in an assembly and find technological fixes to support them living in their environment when it changes, they either move to another area where they are adapted to (if it exists) or they die.

Precisely this. Earth's 'normal' extinction rate is often thought to be somewhere between 0.1 and 1 species per 10,000 species per 100 years. A mass extinction event is when species vanish much faster than they are replaced. This is usually defined as about 75% of the world's species being lost in a short period of geological time - less than 2.8 million years.

The current rate of extinction is between 100 and 1,000 times higher than the pre-human background rate of extinction. What we're going through will be an extinction event on a timescale and severity that will be closer to the Permian or Cretaceous extinction, which resulted in the species death of 95% and 78% respectively, and caused by apocalyptic scenarios; meteors and volcanos effectively suffocating the planet. Never before has a single species been responsible for such destruction on Earth.

I suspect humanity will survive whatever future is yet to come. I just hope we managed to preserve a substantial percentage of natural diversity through that process.

Yes, but mass extinction is the result of our greater land usage and resource overexploitation, not climate change (in that it would be happening even if climate change was not).

This also makes it harder for many species to adjust to climate change and habitat loss as it is much harder for them to migrate.

Not strictly accurate; it's the major part of it, but climate-change driven species loss is a real threat and at some point will likely outpace the rate of loss due to land/resource exploitation.

Ocean biodiversity loss is almost certainly harmed by overfishing and toxic run-off from rivers/lakes don't get me wrong, but it's also hugely impacted by rising sea temperatures. Ocean biodiversity increases exponentially with sea surface temperature up to about 20-25 C (68-77 F). Beyond that threshold, biodiversity drops off due to the limits of aerobic metabolism. Temperatures that make it hard for cold-blooded sea creatures to breathe have likely been among the biggest drivers for shifts in the distribution of marine biodiversity.

Desertification, caused partly by human agriculture and the removal of soil-retaining plant matter but mostly due to climate change, is also a major cause of species loss and it's occurring across much of the planet - especially Africa and Central Asia. Those animals that can't rapidly migrate to cooler/wetter climates are ripe for extinction.

Tottaly agree. The world around us is changing, climate change is the main one which has impact on nearly anything

This sounds great for GDP!

It’s not. Projections say that global gdp will shrink 18% by 2050 because of climate change [1].

[1] https://www.swissre.com/media/press-release/nr-20210422-econ...

That seems mostly to be talking about rising sea levels etc.

I read GP as talking about the positive impact on GDP of rebuilding, and with the intent of pointing out that GDP is a flawed metric.

I forgot about this and had a busy week, but yes you nailed it. The other commenters are also right in pointing out the obvious flaws of GDP with or without meaning to, but you understood the spirit of the comment.

I think the key part is reminding people that it’ll be worse if we don’t act. The work of adapting won’t be cheap but it’s positive work in the right direction, boosting GDP when it would otherwise be falling chaotically.

Not really. It means spending money rebuilding things just to maintain productivity is instead of investing in productivity multipliers.

It’s the difference between going into debt for medical school versus going into debt to pay the high interest your loan shark demands after you ran up gambling debts.

You may want to familiarize yourself with the parable of the broken window.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

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