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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

Where is the assumption coming from that a “shit hits the fan” event will happen?

What if it is just a slow degradation in myriad aspects of quality of life only felt over the course of decades?

Because complex systems in general are known to enter critical transitions when pushed hard enough, and we do keep pushing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_transition

Yep, multiple shits hitting multiple fans.

Ah yes, the myriad aspects of quality of life that has degraded over decades.

https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-activists-disasters-fir...

Regarding the second link, it seems to put off climate issues as something we're mastering based on extreme weather events and other disasters like earthquakes resulting in fewer and fewer casualties despite having more and more humans on the planet to be potentially struck. They start the article with climate protests, but those protests are looking decades to centuries into the future; it's not about the type of events we've historically encountered. This amazingly positive trend is much less likely to continue if we go far beyond the Paris agreement's temperature, which we've just about started crossing afaik. That's what those protests are about, it's not about our own lives or lifetimes necessarily...

Did upvote your comments btw because your general point about the world not having been going to shit is underrepresented and was, to me, very important to learn about (about five years ago now)

Not sure how this is relevant given it's the effects of a future climate catastrophe being discussed, not something that has already happened.

I thought it was clear that the person you responded to (as well as the grandparent comment) was talking about the future. No one is denying that we are much better off right now as a species than we ever have been. The point is that we can't safely assume that that trend will continue in the next 25, 50, or 100 years.

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