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Comment by ein0p | Hacker News Reader

The benefit of older age that younger people do not have: we’ve heard about the impending “collapse” that’s “definitely coming” 4-5 times by now. There even was “scientific consensus” around those predictions. And yet here we all are, and in much greater numbers.

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I'm not at all sure what predictions you are referring to. I don't recall any universal collapse predictions that had scientific consensus aside from the one we're talking about due to climate change.

Which ones came and went without coming true?

Nah man, I'm not a search engine, but I can recommend one: Google or Brave will return a nearly complete list as their first result.

I feel like you don't need to be a search engine to remember some buzz words. Seems to me you just can't justify your point.

No, I’m just tired of the lazy “source?” style comments that are just thinly veiled attempts at sabotaging any further discussion. I have a hard time believing that someone has not yet seen the “global cooling” bullshit from the 80s, or “Florida will be underwater” bullshit from late 90s

I remember all that.

Also as a Floridian, I can confirm for HN that it was definitely hot today and I am not presently underwater. Dispelling both the impending ice age predictions from the early ‘80s and the Florida will be underwater predictions of the ‘90s.

> I have a hard time believing that someone has not yet seen the “global cooling” bullshit from the 80s

I wouldn't blame anyone for having dismissed "global cooling" way back in the eighties as a dipshit FUD response to the uncertainties surrounding early global warming models by business interests, conservatives and some of the less credible scientific skeptics - and then putting it out of their mind.

Are there perhaps still “uncertainties” around global warming, or will you call people “dipshits” 20 years later when we all not only survive and do OK, but add another couple billion to the planet’s population? That’s the point of my OP. I’ve seen this doomsday bullshit a few times now. They should tone down the rhetoric and look for solutions that do not send us back to preindustrial times, and do not involve “paying more taxes and eating bugs”

It really depends on what you mean by "scientific consensus". Nuclear scientists have famously run a Doomsday Clock since 1947 predicting that we're going to nuke ourselves to death soon. Is that a consensus, or do there need to be formal academic studies which claim to prove universal collapse is coming? (How could you build such a study? Does the equivalent exist for climate change?)

Equally importantly, not all predictions are of the "came and went" variety. The ozone layer had a collapse prediction, and that prediction was 100% true - but we responded to it, fixed it, and now the ozone layer is doing fine and expected to make a full recovery soon. It would have been a lot harder if advocates went around saying that the ozone layer is guaranteed to collapse unless we stop using refrigerators!

I think both your examples speak to why we shouldn't be flippant about claims of climate collapse.

The Doomsday Clock is not a valid representation of scientific consensus, and is completely incomparable to the current conversation. It largely reflects the political interpretation of one non-profit. In contrast the concerns over climate change are not posted in PR briefs, but in a plethora of scientific papers, in various fields, that repeatedly show we are in or past a worse case prediction.

The ozone layer is more analogous, but the problem had the advantage of being a specific problem, with a soon found and cost efficient solution. In comparison, climate change is also 100% true, but rather than a particular aerosol that can be swapped out, it is literally the foundation of the entirety of human industrialization.

> It would have been a lot harder if advocates went around saying that the ozone layer is guaranteed to collapse unless we stop using refrigerators!

Correction: It would have been a lot harder if multinational companies went around saying that refrigerants are made of chlorine and carbon, which are an essential part of life, nobody knows how the level of ozone fluctuated in past centuries, and it's all a liberal conspiracy to prevent you from eating as much frozen meat every day as you freedom-loving citizen rightfully deserves.

Don't forget that every time: "This time is different".

the JWs have even more experience on this than most older adults could ever imagine.

Obese people are told all their lives that they should lose weight to become healthier, but they do live for awhile. There's even a movement, "Healthy at Every Size" that seeks to believe that weight is not a health issue. But these habits do catch up with them.

It seems to me that "climate change will cause some unfortunate problems that we'll wish we'd dealt with sooner" is a qualitatively different prediction than the kind of "collapse" the source article is describing. They expect we'll lose modern medicine and the Internet!

I suppose it depends on how what you mean by unfortunate problems. I’ve already had trouble getting medicines that I would think are trivial.

Is that a sign of temporary supply chain issues due to a large shift in demand patterns combined with an attrmpt to diversify supply of intermediate product and end product away from china, or a sign of end game collapse though? I would argue the former.

What's even more interesting is that the overlap of the Venn diagram between "healthy at any size" and "we're all gonna die soon" people is nearly 100%.

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