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Comment by wiz21c | Hacker News Reader

fta: "Our best hope in the face of inevitable rises in heat? Cooperation. “We’ve built forecasting systems that will warn us when disasters are incoming by working together at enormous scale. We must continue to do the same.”

This sentence basically says "we don't need to make less disasters, just better handle them".

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To me it says "we'll never succeed at making fewer disasters given how we've done so far, so we better learn to handle them better."

I've heard this argument used to say climate change isn't happening, because there are less deaths.

Hurricanes aren't getting stronger, because there are less deaths.

But ignores we are getting better at predicting land falls and evacuating.

Responding to disasters 'better', doesn't mean disasters are not getting worse.

And there is some diminishing return, eventually the disasters will overwhelm the ability to respond.

It's pretty clear attempting to get numerous bad actors to fix their polluting behaviour isn't going to make things happen any faster (and is in any case a monumentally different task). So we must deal with the problem after it occurs, instead.

Well, the global system has a lot of mass. It'll take time to fix the things we've messed up. To survive in the interim while we do that, there'll need to be some harm mitigation measures.

Or we can't make less disasters so we better handle them.

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