Hacker News Reader

Comment by inshard | Hacker News Reader

Would humans be able to live on earth 400m years ago if we time travelled back to Gondwanaland, considering the 7x CO2 and hot tropical climate?

View on HN

Yes, sure. Just imagine being somewhere 5-10C warmer and a few hundred metres higher in elevation than where you are now.

I do see significant change from our current dependence on fossil fuels, but for argument’s sake, what’s the best case scenario for global warming and climate change? Could we create a super verdant earth epoch? What probability do our most advanced climate models have for such an outcome? And what’s the economic cost of moving coastal populations and those in high risk zones to new cities designed from ground up using the latest thinking in urban planning? What’s the cost benefit from high one off relocation costs to long term gains from smarter cities?

I don’t know what the best case scenario is. Perhaps it is simply to avoid the likely case scenarios. As I see it, the great risk of temperature increases such as this would be the collapse of food chains that we ultimately rely upon.

Is there an equation for human food chain adaptability speed vs climate influenced food chain change rate. I’m thinking if we could adapt and harness new food chains faster than climate disrupts the old chains, we come on top. We need to assume food generation capacity independent of human intervention remain constant in current and future states. I think it’s fair as long as terrestrial food chain benefit from higher CO2 and expansion of temperate zones further north, while conceding some southern temperate zones to equatorial conditions. This is all speculation. But I feel we are discounting speed of adaptation of current human civilization.

How can there be such an equation? The world is so interconnected that you'd have to factor in every single living species. Just don't collapse the food chain pls

Well, we've been running up a helluva tab at the bar, and it's coming due.

I speculate that the "best case" scenario is the survival of small populations of human beings grinding out a miserable existence in a post-collapse hell-hole, while probably still arguing about J.K Rowling and "wokeness" no doubt.

Pfft, don’t be so pessimistic - we’d have lots of people making each other miserable in our Kowloon walled city/Judge Dredd like authoritarian dystopias.

A lower pressure of our current gas ratio is not the same as current pressure with a different gas ratio

7x CO2 would mean the air feels stale all the time, like a stuffy room, and you'd get headaches and struggle to concentrate. But it's not immediately dangerous as such.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com