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Comment by stareatgoats | Hacker News Reader

> there's uncertainity about the future of the AMOC

In the long view, there is no uncertainty, we know that the AMOC will fluctuate and likely fail completely at some point, we just don't know exactly when. Just as the Sahara will likely bloom again, and the locations of all current coastal cities will some day be underwater, we just don't know when.

This is not an argument for accelerating these changes, and continuing to emit CO2, sulfur, and other poisonous pollutants into the atmosphere, however. It is an argument for realizing that the planet is and will always be in climate flux, whether affected by human activity or not, and that our long term strategy needs to be adaptation and cooperation, not to engineer the climate to stay as it was in 1700 and selfishly laying claim to temporarily blessed locations.

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> It is an argument for realizing that the planet is and will always be in climate flux, whether affected by human activity or not, and that our long term strategy needs to be adaptation and cooperation, not to engineer the climate to stay as it was in 1700 and selfishly laying claim to temporarily blessed locations.

The climate flux would take thousands to millions of year to run its course before anthropogenic activity accelerating it by thousand-fold. In that case we could adapt easily since even evolution, as slow as it is, was capable of doing so without technology.

We know that things change, including the climate, the tectonic plates, etc., the issue is how fast things change, that's where catastrophe lies and the call is not to keep the climate as close as possible to the 1700s but to deal with the mess we created and slow down the process of change so not only humans but other species have the chance to adapt as well.

This is the most insightful comment here.

Could indeed have been insightful, if it was correct. It isn't: rapid climate change is nothing new, it has been more or less the norm since long before humans entered the scene.

Sources, please.

Sure. First of all you can have a look at the linked graph of temperatures, especially the Pleistocene. The wildly fluctuating levels indicate how temperatures change abruptly over a few decades as a rule as glaciations came and went. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Interglacial#/media/File:...)

If that doesn't convince you then please read up on the Heinrich events (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_event) and Dansgaard-Oeschger events (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dansgaard%E2%80%93Oeschger_eve...) respectively, both of which have been recurring drastic changes in temperature in recent geological history.

And that is without even mentioning all the great extinction events that have taken place.

So much for the thought that the current climate change is unique among climate events. But let's not forget the greater point here: this fact doesn't mean that our situation isn't precarious. It just means means we can't tap into the quasi-religious notion that humans (or those dirty oil profiteers) somehow wrecked a pristine world in perfect balance. It still means we need to stop polluting the planet (in a myriad of ways), and that we have grave adaptive challenges ahead that we need to start working on ASAP.

> our long term strategy needs to be adaptation and cooperation, not to engineer the climate to stay as it was in 1700 and selfishly laying claim to temporarily blessed locations.

Honest question, why? If we can, why shouldn’t we?

Also, cooperation with what? These are all complex systems with feedback loops which we have been impacting for centuries. There is nothing to cooperate with. The question remains: how well do we understand them and what can we do?

> If we can, why shouldn’t we?

If we could, i.e. had the means and could know all the side-effects, then maybe; why not. The thing is, we are nowhere near such capabilities. People who think so are simply misguided. Perhaps in some distant future, but my bet is still on adaptation rather than some global climate regulation scheme that is forever likely to go horribly wrong.

>cooperation with what?

I meant human-to-human cooperation. Climate change will for the foreseeable future result in migration pressures, either because a city has sunk into the ocean or previously fertile farmland turned to desert. In history this has so far solved this by military means, I'm simply advocating a more civilized approach.

Your comment reads as a deflection from the fact that human activity IS the cause of the climate changes we see today.

Without that the climate flux would likely be nowhere near as rapid, and we might not be scrambling to adapt.

> Your comment reads as a deflection from the fact that human activity IS the cause

If it comes across thus then I believe it has less to do with what I actually wrote, and more to do with a feverishly polarized discourse fuelled by US party politics where you either have to stay on a narrow path of accepted talking points or you must belong to "the dark side". The notion that climate change has not been rapid before is just one of the misunderstandings that flourish in such a debate climate.

As a matter of fact we will, for all conceivable future, have to be prepared to adapt to rapid climate change for whatever reason, be it because of interstellar events, volcano eruptions or simply because of tipping points reached as a consequence of a slow iterative change. It irks me that I have to repeat me total commitment to the abandonment of fossil fuel and the urgent adaptation of sustainable energy sources, just because I mention some basic facts that don't fit in the current feverishly polarized discourse.

But, for the sake of clarity; I do. The linked article is a prime example of how suppressing facts because they seem inconvenient for "the cause" opens up for the other side to seem "more scientific". It is simply not a good strategy.

I'm sorry but "we should be more adaptable" is clearly just misdirection from the actual thing at stake: the need to stop this insane rate of change caused by humans.

The fact that there were or will be future rapid changes is insignificant, considering their frequency and scale compared to human caused change. See the hockey stick graph or https://xkcd.com/1732/.

I don't know what feverish polarized politics you refer to since I'm not in the US but you have to understand that the words you are writing mirror the tactics used by big oil to delay change.

> See the hockey stick graph or https://xkcd.com/1732/.

Those are good examples of partisan politics misinforming people about climate history, by leaving out 99% of it.

In fact, we're still below the historical average temperature on Earth and about 12C below the hottest times, as the following complete graph (500 million years) shows:

https://www.climate.gov/media/11332

> The fact that there were or will be future rapid changes is insignificant, considering their frequency and scale compared to human caused change

As you can see on that graph, the scale of human caused climate change is smaller than many past natural climate changes. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, for example, began with a global mean temperature rise between 5C and 8C.

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