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Comment by bjornsing | Hacker News Reader

Our ability to adapt to a changing climate without too much human suffering should radically increase with a shrinking world population though.

In general I think too much emphasis is placed on trying to preserve the current climate as is, and too little on trying to make this planet a good place to live for generations to come. The climate changes over time, that’s just how it is. The climate changes we are seeing now are not extraordinary when viewed over the course of the Earth’s history. The current climate has no intrinsic value and will be long gone in a billion years, regardless of what we do.

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The point of trying to address climate change is not that it's impossible for us to adapt, it's that to adapt to the predicted rate of change is going to be a lot more expensive/disruptive than trying to slow the change to more natural levels.

> In general I think too much emphasis is placed on trying to preserve the current climate as is, and too little on trying to make this planet a good place to live for generations to come

This is on the money.

> The climate changes we are seeing now are not extraordinary

The rate of change is extraordinary, and makes it expensive/different to adjust.

The rate of change over the last 150 years has certainly been dramatic. But it’s nothing extraordinary over the course of Earth’s history. There’s been roughly 30 million 150-year periods in Earth’s history and given the planet’s violent past - massive impacts, supervolcanoes - it’s statistically absurd to think ours is the most extreme.

It doesn't have to be anywhere near the most extreme for all of us to die.

We're not all going to die, but my point stands.

It's not about the earth shifting, it's what happens to all of the human processes, trade, infrastructure, farm production, and human lives along the way.

i know i sound like a denier but havent we existed through extremes of weather up until now? why would more of the same be fatal? im dubious about the apocalyptic parts. no doubt the climate is warming, but the sky is falling?? not so sure

Compounding effects.

Imagine a snowball rolling down the mountain that turns into a basketball sized ball, that into a mountain sized ball, that turns into a planet sized ball.

There are numerous periods throughout human history where we have almost gone extinct, and several where we have had under 10,000 people worldwide.

and we did that 10k bottleneck with wooden spears....

I personally don't think we'll all die due to climate change, but i could easily see it set off massive problems like wars over resource shortages.

The pandemic demonstrated that the global economy is a finely tuned machine. It doesn't take much to upset the operation of such a beast, and a big interruption could have massive unforseen consequences.

Think about it like a complex, mission critical software system. Are you going to make big changes in many key areas and rush them out to prod? Or do you want to release them individually over time.

XKCD has an excellent timeline that shows that, yes, it is actually extraordinary.

https://xkcd.com/1732/

This one is also interesting, goes back much further in time:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2024/09/22/new-stu...

I have some exposure to geophysics, earth modelling, mineral and energy exploration mapping and modelling.

The extraordinary part is the degree of climate change directly attributable to a biological organism over the course of a century (with the greatest increase in atmospheric insulation happening on a shorter timeframe still).

Are there many examples you can cite of greater change due to biological activity in shorter timeframes that make this current AGW change seem ordinary?

Well… I just don’t care if the cause is biological or not. I care about human suffering, and humans suffer all the same regardless.

> Are there many examples you can cite of greater change due to biological activity in shorter timeframes that make this current AGW change seem ordinary? thats not why people care about climate change though

> The climate changes we are seeing now are not extraordinary when viewed over the course of the Earth’s history

You realise of course for most of earths history earth was inhospitable to humans

> In general I think too much emphasis is placed on trying to preserve the current climate as is, and too little on trying to make this planet a good place to live for generations to come.

Well, the easiest way to "make this planet a good place to live for generations to come" is to preserve the current climate (or, arguably, make it cooler).

Or to have fewer children and move to where it’s cooler? Could work, or at least it seems so to me.

It won't work. I mean, not necessarily at individual level, but at the global level. We need to take care of things as they are, not as we wish them to be.

It would be better if people in poor, warm places have less kids than people in cooler, richer. But it is not the case. Long term solutions involve better education and status for women (so having children is not the main, or only, be a part of society) and better economy and social security network (so children are not used as free labour in the field, or care of the elderly. There are no short-term solutions, population growth won't change overnight, and even if it did -well over a billion of people leave in such places right now.

And nope, I don't think it is OK to say that these people should suffer the climate change. Especially as is not them who burn fossil fuels!

This is not what you said exactly, but I agree that the only future for humans is living in an environment that we create and manage for ourselves. Whether that's on a planetary scale, small orbitals, or underground bunkers.

We had better get a move on, large scale crop failure could destroy civilization as we know it, and I'd much rather my children live in a utopian garden of Eden rather than some dank dungeon eating cockroaches and algae.

I guess you don't have any knowledge about climate... the issue is not that the climate can be particularly similar to a given one eons ago, the issue is that the speed at which it happens makes it so that no plant or animal can adapt to it through evolution, and we face extinction

> The current climate has no intrinsic value

Correct, that’s backwards, all value derives from the current climate.

obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1732/

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