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Comment by levocardia | Hacker News Reader

I would bet a very large amount of money that we will not have climate change induced civilizational collapse by 2050. Or 2100, if I'm around to see it.

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I too will bet a large amount of anything that will only be valuable if civilization does not collapse that civilization will not collapse, even though my pessimistic nature inclines me to expect civilization's collapse.

Offering to make a bet and put some skin in the game is sometimes a very sincere and persuasive expression of confidence in one’s position. In this case, what you’re offering will be valueless if you lose the bet.

I really thought that was the crux of what was meant to be a very dark joke. But if it wasn’t… oof

I think you're probably right, but there's an enormous gap between "things start to go really bad for everyone around us" and civilization collapse.

Remember, WW2 didn't bring civilizational collapse. In fact one could argue it even accelerated industrial development. Doesn't mean much to those who perished.

> Remember, WW2 didn't bring civilizational collapse

It depends where you lived.

It sure did in China, Japan, Germany, large chunks of the USSR.

Civilisation was rebuilt, but it sure collapsed.

Perhaps the author of that comment comes from the USA?

Well, if we lower the bar to "Would something like WW2 happen again?" then I'm not comfortable betting against it. After all, humanity has already managed to do that on its own without any help from the climate!

You can safely bet agains any large scale war like WW2. We no longer have the money or resources for that. We can't build hundreds of thousands of airplanes, tanks, ships, guns, etc. This doesn't include nukes. We have lots of those. But any nuke war will be very very short, over in a day, not like WW2.

Climate crisis and WW2 do not compare. Many people died in WW2, but entire animal and plant species were not wiped out.

We're killing what we eat (and what we eat is nurtured by) at a rapid speed, at scale. This will first show in bearable price increases (as it already does with coffee and cocoa) and only get worse from there, think famine (in regions where this has not happened in a lifetime).

Good luck with keeping a civilization 'stable' when people are hangry at scale.

And the worst part is: While war can be ended, un-extincting is not a solved problem at all.

There are a bunch of confident predictions like yours that I feel ignore higher-order effects. Climate change won't make the earth uninhabitable, but it will cause more frequent droughts and other disasters, driving up food prices and causing a lot more climate migration from poor countries, which is already causing fatal societal autoimmune reactions in much of the first world. Additionally, for a while I thought the stories about people deciding not to have children because of climate change were an exaggeration, but it's now widespread enough that it's clearly a real trend which will probably accelerate as climate change drives CoL up further, which in turn is a huge headwind on civilization.

I think I would take the opposite side of your bet, maybe not at even odds but not at terrible ones either.

Personally I think we could end up like the old SF series Incorporated. 95% of the worlds population living in hellish conditions, 5% living a great life.

Back to serfdom that is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporated_(TV_series)

Yeah. That was really presicent :-) I especially liked the scene where the main protagonist commuted to work from his nice gated community far out there into downtown, and from the inside it looked all nice and park-like along the highway. Then it zoomed out, like in a video game. Turns out it was all vr-like projection. Slums! Nothing but slums :-)

OTOH why referring to something almost nobody knows, when it's basically the same shit in 'The Expanse" for most of the people on earth? They even have worthless UBI and free meals, and it's an absolute shithole in spite of that.

Civilization collapse for the temperate zones of the Globe, probably not, but civilization collapse for parts of Africa and Central Asia, most likely. Temperatures are getting out of hand right now, with 50+ Celsius happening more and more. The world is not ready to handle hundreds of millions of climate refugees, if these people need to leave their countries in order to be able to survive.

I think at some point everyone must face the fact that they're not on this planet by themselves.

Is climate refugees really a thing when robot can manufacture, deliver and install solar AC for near nothing?

You forget that the people in the areas I mentioned are in the vast majority also poor. Are you going to pay for robot mounted air conditioning for them?

You are making that bet.

For themselves and everyone else

I will bet a large amount of money that the world will not detonate in 2026, any takers?

Polymarket is full of meme bets like this.

Depends on how you classify the collapse of civilisation.

It seems highly plausible that there will be a large exodus of humans from previously habitable zones as the temperatures increase and access to food and water become highly variable. Some areas will likely still have access to decent agricultural conditions (e.g. greenhouses can help to control the local climate in order to grow food), but there will undoubtedly be increased conflict over dwindling resources.

Hydroponics is probably an answer. Controls for water loss and more importantly - contamination. If people going to jump onto longevity bandwagon like Bryan Johnson we’ll want to minimise heavy metal contamination. And if population stops growing we’ll need to live (and work) far longer to sustain our quality of life.

Olive oil is already more expensive because of climate change[1]

Sure, we won't collapse to Mad Max levels, not in the West at least, but our quality of life will decline steeply.

[1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel/article/20231218-why-olive-oil-...

who is and where are "we"?

This is an incredibly short sighted and ignorant view. If you live close to the equator, the climate is visibly changing and is becoming borderline deadly.

How nice it is to be from a country with multiple climates you can flee to if one part becomes intolerable.

The parent comment said nothing about civilization collapse. It was about extinction of species site to climate change.

Quoting that comment:

> we run the real risk of collapsing civilisation if we don't change urgently

> We will be extinct a large number of species on the planet at this rate, likely 50% or more and we run the real risk of collapsing civilisation if we don't change urgently.