I Stopped Being a Climate Catastrophist | Hacker News Reader

I Stopped Being a Climate Catastrophist

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79 pointspaulpauper109 comments

What is this author smoking? "2 to 3 feet" of sea level rise is still absolutely catastrophic and is hand waved away in one sentence. 5 degrees in 50 years? We've already gained about 1 degree in the last 20 years alone - with no signs of slowing down. If it's ackshually 5 degrees in 75 years, what even is the point of making a point about that? We're reaching several ecological tipping points. We're in a mass extinction. What in the everloving hell is this? Have we gone full "don't look up" with this now?

I think the problem is that "catastrophic" is not well-defined. Will we all be back to caves and sticks? No. Will there be trillions of dollars of damages and massive societal upheaval from massive migrations of people? Yes. Will a billion people die? Probably not, unless a war breaks out and leads to nuclear destruction.

I would consider all of these to be "catastrophic" but some may not consider migrations + damagaes to be "catastrophic."

Well, one plane crashing or one building falling, destroying something valuable and killing "only" a few dozen people is considered a catastrophe. I think we can say the bar for "catastrophe" is lower than that for "apocalypse".

The higher global average temperatures alone are already a yearly catastrophe, by this standard.

> Will a billion people die? Probably not

Really underestimating the amount of deaths that will occur when our food production systems start collapsing.

During some of the worst starvation events in the 20th century, it was still only on the order of ~10 million people that died. And most of those deaths were because horrific totalitarian governments prevented outside aid to the affected regions.

I have not seen evidence that there will be food system collapse driven by climate change that would be worse than those events, but my ears are open if you have some.

There is one absolutely massive one, and that's that for the first time the problem is truly global. Other famines have been caused either by war or local droughts, both of which affect only a population in a limited area and crucially, can be somewhat mitigated by importing food from elsewhere. You can't import food if there are global food shortages.

> I have not seen evidence that there will be food system collapse driven by climate change that would be worse than those events

Doing my best to not come off condescending here in case you are being sincere, but the comparison of totalitarian gov crackdowns and local drought are not exactly comparable to an almost worldwide heat increase and less water availability for key high density areas... Once countries have to start hoarding their resources and other countries run out of resources, things will not be good and there's plenty of data, studies and articles out there discussing this that are not hard to find.

If you are being sincere, apologies, but living in the US lately has shown a level of bad actors trying to grift that's made it really difficult to be patient with climate change denial/dismissiveness.

If you think that these very vague suggestions come across as some sort of strong critique of me, don't worry. I don't think you have provided any sort of refutation of me, and you certainly do not exhibit much understanding of what, say, 2 degrees of change will looks like.

If you have any papers, please share. If you have sections of the IPCC to point to, please share. I am very sincere, in all my comments. But if you can't point to actual scientific documents, then you're doing no better than the climate denialists.

Took 2 minutes of Googling and little effort to provide these 2 of 10+ articles that immediately popped up. So, you are fully aware you could have found these easily but were putting out "pRoVe It" energy for whatever reason.

https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/climate-change-cuts...

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2018/07/25/climate-change-...

> “If the climate warms by 3 degrees, that’s basically like everyone on the planet giving up breakfast.” That’s a high cost for a world where more than 800 million people at times go a day or more without food because of inadequate access.

The numbers in those articles are exactly in line with everything I have ever seen on the topic. That you think they contradict what I'm saying makes me think that either you're completely misreading me or the articles.

In the US, our domestic food production has started collapsing thanks to the massive deportations of farm workers. According to various reports, a tremendous amount of food went to waste in the fields last summer because farmers couldn't get workers to harvest it.

Sure, but a big part of the reason for that is that we produce a huge surplus of food, so food prices are extremely low compared to how wealthy the US is. That means wages for farm workers are too low for typical Americans to want to do the job.

If our food production goes down significantly, that will raise prices which will let wages for farm workers rise to the point where more people will be willing to do the job. Will it be unpleasant? Sure, but not to the point of famine, we'll just go back to spending a larger portion of our household budgets on food like we used to fifty years ago.

Yeah, that's a common myth. How much would you have to be paid to work 8 to 12-hour days bent over in the sun, with minimal water, and with exposure to pesticides and herbicides? Spotty bathroom access and few breaks?

A common theme found in various sources about using American labor in the fields is that American laborers are too slow, damage too much produce, and don't show up after a couple days. Another common theme is that immigrant labor works hard and uses their resources to ensure their children don't do the same work.

A study that attempts to quantify the damage done by ICE enforcement actions. https://arxiv.org/html/2508.03787v1#:~:text=The%202025%20ICE...

Interview with a farmer and his experience of the impact of ICE actions, the farming life, and produce economics.

https://www.thepacker.com/news/industry/some-farms-may-not-r...

First of all, many of those conditions can be improved. 12 hour days, minimal water, lack of bathroom, few breaks are imposed by employers trying to squeeze as much out of as few workers as possible. More people would be willing to do the job at maybe 25% cost to make conditions better.

It my late thirties, I wouldn't do the job because I have better options, but when I was high school or college age I would have killed to do that job if it was paying $30 (in 2025 dollars)/hour. My dad literally did that type of job for a while in his younger years.

Will that raise prices of food? Absolutely, but we're talking about going back to 1950s prices relative to wage, not about famine.

ICE enforcement and immigration laws are also a choice. We can change those if we need to.

We have a working system. That's why our world's population is so large. And it improved over time, as in more efficient ways to grow food, more productivity, the green revolution, to feed more, then roads/cities/buildings tied to single spots improving efficiency, giving safe housing to billions, mass transport and global logistics.

So what will happen if that gets disrupted? And badly disrupted, while at it. And while that is happening, multiple other things pile up in different ways everywhere?

Thats the danger. You don't die from climate change. You may occasionally die from increasingly frequent extreme weather, a flood because rains, some dam break, extended forest fires and so on. But that is not a single catastrophic event that kill billions. What will kill billions are losing food security in big scale, no safe/climate controlled place to live, violence and wars, widespread diseases and no way to help. In some years to decades millions to billions may die by that combination of factors.

So no, it wont be a single day, sudden event that will kill billions. Is the breakup of the system that holds it together. Agriculture needs a stable climate, megacities need food, the economic system depend on more things, and everything else is packed together. And the first wave of deaths will be just the start.

we arent replacing population either. food scarcity doesnt exactly help that.

I don't see any food scarcity? A lot of innovation coming. Indoor 3D farming if needed. Bio-engineered algae bars if needed! Constant innovation at all levels. Why would food production methods collapse? Some currently productive agricultural land may become unproductive, and then areas too cold now will then become viable, so a shift, not just a one sided destruction. More CO2 means plants grow faster, more global greening. Disruption yes. Over 50+ year time span? Very manageable. Unimaginable advances in energy and robotics ahead.

> “…some may not consider migrations + damagaes to be ‘catastrophic.’”

I think you’re showing a lack of imagination. The COVID shutdown was not that long ago. People lost their minds when they were asked to wear a mask in public.

All you need to do to make a “catastrophe” is imagine the trauma response played out over shorter and shorter time periods.

Now take the speed of natural disasters measured over hours and days. Recovery time over months and years.

Now pile multiple such events back to back and dispersed across the nation.

You will have a Tipping Point where public opinion and suffering overwhelm any attempts by government to restore order with a speech.

Finally, Marshal Law and empty stores.

There you go. Have a nice day.

Don't forget most animal like lions tigers and bears oh my! Becoming as mythical as a dragon or fairy.... The theft from future generation and children is immeasurable imo

Sea level has risen 1 foot since 1800 and nobody noticed. 2 to 3 feet isn't catastrophic. Nobody credible claims temperatures will rise 50 degrees in 50 years.

Nobody will notice 1m/3ft rise, except the whole Oceania disappearing, and also Florida getting basically inhabitable, and... details, details.

A metre of sea-level rise is painful for a rural cottage by the sea. But if you're in a city - particularly a wealthy city - it's something that can be engineered around.

An expensive liability? Definitely. A civilization or nation ending event? Unlikely.

besides the fact that 40% of the world's population lives near the coast - and that 2-3 feet of sea level rise is not a uniform "the tide used to be 8 feet, now it's 11 feet" - Entire islands in the pacific will disappear - How do you think global trade works? What do you think happens to ports? AMOC collapsing (a byproduct of sea level rise) will have profound effects on climate, despite this author claiming without any evidence whatsoever that "actually it isn't a big deal."

Ports get retrofitted, redesigned, and rebuilt. The AMOC collapsing is a serious thing, but I'm not saying climate change isn't real or isn't a threat. My original point is that three feet of sea level rise is manageable, if expensive. Simply that, nothing else.

If you draw the line at the year 2100, things are uncomfortable but maneagable. If your horizon is 2300 or 2500, you get a different story. But you would hope that in tha sort of time frame, we have time to adapt.

Anyone with a bit of common sense can understand that that "massively retrofitting cities in a way unseen in centuries due to climate risk" is just an off-the-charts level of reconditioning of society that I don't understand how that doesn't fall into "extremely alarming" levels of concern.

I didn't say it wasn't alarming, I said it wasn't civilization- or nation-ending. Unless you're a tiny island nation, in which case I'll happily retract what I'm saying.

There are degrees of awfulness between "the end of all mankind" and "nothing to see here", but it seems like there's a taboo on calling those shades of grey out when it comes to climate change.

And how will these engineered workarounds be paid for ? It is known workarounds will cost trillions today, NYC alone could cost $1T+. And these workarounds should have been started 5 years ago when it became very clear we will never get off fossil fuels.

I fully expect no workarounds will be done just like Climate Change Mitigations. Getting off fossil fuels should have been seriously started 30 years ago, and maybe even 50 years ago. Instead the politicians have been adding hot air talking and fighting instead of doing real work.

We are now seeing this repeat with "engineered workarounds", no one wants to pay for it, so yes I call BS on the article.

All I can say is I feel real bad the past generations did nothing to really reverse CC, people being born now are looking at a very bleak future.

$1 trillion is one year of Manhattan's GDP. Painfully expensive? Absolutely, but it's absolutely affordable over the course of a few decades.

The sooner we start, the cheaper it will be, so we shouldn't put it off, but it's not going to kill everyone or even convince everyone to leave NYC in the foreseeable future.

Yes, but NYC is nor the only city that need climate change mitigations :)

Factor in all other cities, how will that get paid and by how ?

Or do we chose which cites to save ? Other cities, tough to be you.

Canada, this year committed to spending $3.9 billion dollars to hopefully have just completed plans for a high-speed train line in six years [1]! The number of years and dollars to actually build the line are unknown at the moment. This is a project that has humongous potential economic upside.

Would Canada be able to build a seawall to protect Vancouver? I am not sure.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-announces-high-spee...

Fun fact - sea level rose 120m since 20,000 years ago but people seem to have largely not noticed. If you don't have large buildings and planning laws you could just move your shack a few yards inland.

That's more than 10k years before the start of recorded history, so we definitely can't say that people didn't notice.

0.006 m/year, we can definitely work with that /s

It's 0.0046 m/year at the moment so more relaxed.

So after many decades of wildly under estimating the rate of climate change, the same people in the same institutions, answering to the same money, have it sussed out? This simple fact that ALL global shipping happens at sea level, and ALL shipping infrastructue is designed and built to operate in a rarrow range, and that this whole edifice, minutly complicated, can be adjusted continiously along with the million miles of coastal roads and bridges. ?Londan just walled off, all of NYC's wharfs jacked up a bit, sure, sure, whats a few dozen cubic miles of equipment refit worth anyway, phffff

Why not address the actual points he is making? He dramatically screwed up his forecasts of both human population growth rate and technological advancement rate.

These underlying assumptions being incorrect are the reason climate alarmist move the goal posts every year.

I think this mostly points to us not taking his opinion seriously on the matter.

Most others in the climate science debate have been far more realistic and measured. Similarly, I tend to ignore everything from David Wallace-Wells, another person who has written a ton on climate but from a very different political perspective, who has also been quite wrong.

It's closer 1 one degree in the last 120 years, than 20, for a global average, though polar areas are bearing more of the brunt.

Unless AMOC collapses and we foolishly trip into another glacial period, the 200ft increase in sea level is inevitable in the next thousand years, but totally manageable for the continents. It's the oceanic mountaintops, aka, low level islands, and coastal cities that are at risk. Most of those cities are already filled with happy rich people who will have been long gone decades, or even centuries before Florida and Bangladesh are submerged and Russia, Australia and Canada are booming with happy with abundant rainfall, crops and awesome weather.

It just seems like focusing on ameliorating pain and focusing on the making the inevitable a better outcome is the most important focus for the next few decades.

Earth's climate always changes over time, it's not unusual, although not always the best for us.

What causes this climate change, how much infuence humans have on it, and how much we could possibly do about it is unclear.

That's not a reason to not do anything about it, but there's also no reason to be super intense about it.

> Earth's climate always changes over time, it's not unusual, although not always the best for us.

Earth's climate has been stable during the rise of human civilisation. It has changed more in the past 100 years than in the past 200,000.

It's true it's changed often over the course of the 4 billion year history of the pkanet. It's not true to claim it's fluctuated wildly over the course of human civilisation.

> What causes this climate change, how much infuence humans have on it, and how much we could possibly do about it is unclear.

False.

It's clear the cause is the increased insulation factor of the atmosphere. It's clear this change has been in the majority due to human activity dragging up millions of years worth of past captured C02 via fossil fuel extraction.

> That's not a reason to not do anything about it,

Naturally, because as stated it is false to claim the cause is unclear.

> but there's also no reason to be super intense about it.

Sure. It's true that no one alive today in a G20 non equatorial country need fuss much about it - all the real serious consequence will fall after their lives have passed.

> It has changed more in the past 100 years than in the past 200,000.

I don't think so.

Look at sea level: 125,000 years ago, sea level was 8 m higher. 20,000 years ago, sea level was 130 m lower. [0]

So over the past 200,000 years sea level has varied ~ 138 meters. It hasn't varied that much over the past 100 years.

[0] https://courses.ems.psu.edu/earth107/node/1496

Dammit - I went a zero too many, human civilisation ~ 20,000 years worth of "settled" building, agriculture, slowly increasing in scale as climate variations decreased in scale.

Everything that is "modern human civilisation" from, say, early Egyptian onwards (following the formation of the Sahara some 6,000 years past) has taken place in a period of climatc stability.

Point being, come climatic change on that scale again, the planet and various eco systems will adapt and move on, human civilisation patterns as we know them from history will be heavily jarred.

Cheers for that.

As a general note, @7402 was right to question my comment, particularly with a supplied reference to university course notes.

I made a fat fingered typo, they made a respectful statement of fact, downvotes are not deserved here, if anything throw @7402 a few upvotes for taking part as the HN guidelines encourage.

Not sure that just providing climate alarmist talking points is going to be a convincing counter to a climate alarmist who is now a climate pragmatist and provides some interesting reasons why they switched.

How about explaining why he is wrong? Don’t just respond with incredulousness and generalizations and assumptions.

He’s literally just giving his opinion. There’s nothing to argue against. He doesn’t provide much if any evidence for his claims and heavily relies on his “authority” on the subject to present them. Climate science largely disagrees.

One of the funnier points in this word salad is when he casually dismisses AMOC collapse without giving any real reason why then “trust me bro.”

What pragmatism?

> What pragmatism?

Perhaps I read it wrong, but isn’t he basically suggesting that he will be relying more on the observed effects of climate change as compared to predicted rather than just adopting the theoretical predictions as his driving POV? That’s literally the definition of pragmatism.

> Climate science largely disagree

Climate scientists may largely disagree, but not all do. Shame that it also apparently needs to be stated here that science isn’t a democracy that is subject to popular vote. When observed effects don’t match the predicted effects, it really doesn’t matter much if climate scientists disagree with the observed effects. Actual data is actual data and should be considered even if it doesn’t match your model.

It's libertarian woo; David D. Friedman even makes an appearance in the comments.

As a layperson, I read that 2024 was the hottest on record, and I see charts that go up. I have no reason to believe that the charts will go down. I don't care if its 3 deg by the end of the century or 5 deg. But what about the century after that, or by 3000.

I'm not so concerned about disasters or economic impacts, I just have a deep moral belief that we should leave our environment the same as when we entered it. We know that fossil fuels release pollution that we have no technology to clean up. We we should not be using it. It's not rocket science.

Admittedly, it makes no rational sense go without today so that future humans can experience the earth in the same way I have. I understand why many people dismiss risks of things unlikely to effect them or their children, but to me to feels wrong, and I would like to have as little impact on the climate as I can.

https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-confirms-2024-warmest-...

The moral case is really for the billions of people near the equator who cannot afford for temperatures to go up much more. It's too hot there already. We are making their countries insufferable to live in and we aren't compensating them for it. It's a travesty.

They are getting cheap electricity from PV and batteries and cheap air conditioners to run on the electricity.

At least hundreds of millions, if not billions, can't afford airtight walls and a ceiling. Their homes are made of sheet metal and other scraps. They can buy a few panels for the family which rest on dirt to power their phones.

They are being denied their predecessor's ability to spend hours of the day outside comfortably. That is a travesty.

If there is any technological progress, people in 3000 will be so much wealthier than we are today that fixing any problems arising from climate change will be trivially easy for them.

That is, if there are any people in 3000. Nuclear war is still the number one problem. AI is a candidate for number two right now; the next decade should clarify things.

> We know that fossil fuels release pollution that we have no technology to clean up. We we should not be using it.

The irony is that without them, you (wherever you are) and I (wherever I am) could not be trading messages. Every bit you send and every pixel lit has a fossil fuel cost associated with it.

Our world 100% runs on fossil fuels and right now there is no alternative that rids us of them that can be made without them. No replacement technology can be developed that won’t employ fossil fuels even further to excess in its creation. So “not using it” is not an option. Cutting back is not an option. The only way to replace them is to extract, refine, and burn more and hopefully that investment can be the one that gets us the returns we need to hopefully one day eliminate our dependency.

The long term like the year 3000 is indeed absolutely catastrophic ...

Holocene extinction - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

He's comparing AGW, which drives a trend, with weather-based events, which are noise around the trend. He conveniently cuts his analysis off at the year 2100, by which we'll all probably be dead. But he's probably right that the trend itself doesn't cause insurmountable problems by that point.

But what about the year 2200, or 2300? At three degrees warming per century, the earth looks like a pretty hostile place to live in a few centuries.

"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit", and all that...

His idea of it being "not insurmountable" is essentially us not starving to death in a mass scale.

I care, in my comfortable life as an office worker, about the fact that chocolate, coffee, and wine will become luxuries as yields and quality drastically drop off.

I care about the fact that many places I visit frequently will need A/C to be _survivable_.

Those are not civilization-ending events but the hubris you need to have to just hand-wave this away are beyond my understanding.

It's irrelevant beyond that point and possibly much earlier because the forcing effect of CO2 saturates logarithmically, it's not linear.

This rhymes with https://www.gatesnotes.com/three-tough-truths-about-climate.

I see very little agreement in any way with Bill Gates is talking about.

In fact I suspect that Gates would be dismissed as too woke for making this one of his main points:

> But we can’t cut funding for health and development—programs that help people stay resilient in the face of climate change—to do it.

> It’s time to put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies, which includes reducing the Green Premium to zero and improving agriculture and health in poor countries.

This is just rehashed Green New Deal language for the global stage. (Something I fully support!!)

They're agreeing that climate change is serious but not necessarily civilization ending:

  Nordhous: "The amount of warming that is conceivable … is not remotely consistent with the sorts of catastrophic outcomes … where tens or hundreds of million, perhaps even billions of lives were at stake."

  Gates: "Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise."

that's what "climate skeptics" have been saying for twenty years but you would get bullied for saying so.

my favorite was getting told we "deserved it" for being in Texas during the ice apocalypse, because Texas is a red state.

I hope that people exhibiting that kind of behavior are finally starting to question whether or not it's helpful. The article suggests that is perhaps beginning to happen.

If you want people to make sacrifices to improve the future, just maybe messaging that it's hopeless and anyone who doesn't see that is stupid isn't the best strategy for effecting real change

> particularly for people in the poorest countries

> for being in Texas

News flash: climate change by and large isn't about the US, and US will be one of the least impacted nations of first hand climate change effects.

Not who you are replying to, but two of the most populated U.S states will massively depopulate with much more climate change. Texas and Florida are turning into complete furnaces for 1/3 of the year and subject to catastrophic severe weather another 1/3.

Which is a small deal compared to a billion foreign migrants, which is also a possibility, but still a massive deal. You are completely correct that the first world will escape most of the direct and dire pain resulting from our irresponsible burning of the future.

I also think trying to suss out “who is going to suffer more” is basically pointless when so much of our economy is based worldwide trade and so much of our society is expecting relatively stable populations, two things that will change rapidly with a few climate shifts.

*this entire thread is getting at one thing: yes, humanity and the general summary of human knowledge will almost certainly survive the extreme chaos we are heading for. That should not be much consolation to you, because the chaos will set back the human experience 150 years for generations that include you and your children.

Especially when the chaos involves incredible strife for many nations with nuclear armament.

You’re right, and you’re being downvoted for being so.

The bullying and name calling were intolerable. Even suggesting that the earths demise was not immediate would label you a denier and ignorant about the undeniable science behind the alarms.

It seems the tide is turning and some of the leading voices in the earth-is-cooking camp are now walking things back.

Don’t wait for an apology, though.

You folks should stop hanging around such awful, nasty people. Or, maybe you're not remembering very well what actually happened in these conversations, but it would be shame to break apart a self-pity party.

I've only ever heard the claim that climate change is civilization ending as a strawman from so-called climate skeptics. Also occasionally from those that are poorly informed, but they also tend to believe things like GMOs being the end of agriculture, and have basically zero impact on society due to lack of influence and small number of people. Nordhous' extreme situations may have been possible back in the 1990s with zero action and without the advent of solar, wind, and storage that have been created since then, but his statements are kind of wacky.

We've known for almost a decade now that the RCP8.5 scenarios are no longer on the table, and even that worst case scenario wasn't civilization ending.

I read Bill Gates' note as not an evolution on his view at all, it seems 100% consistent with everything he has worked for, but rather trying to place climate change in a more humanity-focused context for evaluating tradeoffs of where to put money. That's very important for governments and for wealthy philanthropists like him, and for the COP 3 audience he's talking to.

"I've only ever heard the claim that climate change is civilization ending as a strawman from so-called climate skeptics. "

And yet, sentence from current top comment: " We're in a mass extinction."

We are in a mass extinction. It is not civilization ending.

Can you explain why you think these contradict each other?

I hope you realize that there are more species on earth than just humans.

Of course, but why would it matter unless it affects human civilization? There have been extinctions for the history of the world...

Mass extinction is not necessarily civilization ending. Half of all living species could die, 80% of all humans could die, and civilization would find a way to move on. It would still be an absolutely major catastrophic event.

At the rate that temperature is increasing, assuming it is not stopped, it's not a matter of will there be an extinction event within the next few hundred years, but how bad will it be.

>I've only ever heard the claim that climate change is civilization ending as a strawman from so-called climate skeptics

Did you see what happened in Europe with a rather small mass migration 10/15 years ago due to Arab Spring ? People have short memories.

Can you imagine what will happen when 100 of thousands start migrating north when they can no longer feed themselves and maybe even work outside ? Italy was close to sinking boats coming across the the sea. Other countries in the EU started building walls. And even Germany took a slight right turn. Once these large migrations start, I expect bombs will be dropped. Same applies to North America.

Anyone else notice the obvious misspelling of “climate” in the AI-generated hero image?

It's pretty amazing how much we've lowered our collective standards for article quality since the advent of AI generation. (Not just here, but everywhere). It's not like it's a rote spelling mistake deep in the article, the spelling mistake is the very first thing you see.

Why would a serious author go with this image? Just a few years ago, misspelling "climate" and having nonsensical political cartoon to headline your article would have just been disqualifying.

Whereas before the air of sophistication conned you into thinking the authors knew what they were talking about, it took AI slop for you to see how bad things really are.

Queue the “always have been” meme.

No, things are worse now. Our standards have lowered. There was no way to quickly produce low-effort vacuous text without writing it or copying it from another source before now.

Of course people could feign intelligence before, but it's much easier now and our standards are lower. This is a double whammy.

Wow, that is a terrible image (yellow tinge indicative of gpt-image-1, spelling errors). I don't mind generative images being used in articles, provided that they:

A. Have some relevance to the actual content.

B. Don't exhibit glaringly obvious AI flaws (polydactyly, faces like melted wax candles, etc.).

It's amazing how little time people take to vet images that are intended to be the first thing viewers will see.

Reminds me of the image attached to Karpathy's (one of the founding members of OpenAI) Twitter post on founding an education AI lab:

https://x.com/karpathy/status/1813263734707790301

When I see an AI-generated hero image, I close the tab. It’s an excellent heuristic for quality.

It’s the only thing I saw before I closed the browser tab. If you’re going to use AI to generate an the very first things reader sees, proofread the damned thing so it doesn’t come off as amateurish.

What pisses me off about these people and the comments is the shear hubris and ONLY thinking about humans survival.... And not the rest of the biosphere ...... If our children have to live in habitats like LITERAL SPACESHIPS to survive and will never experience grass...or a dragonfly or bee landing on them. Or lady bugs...or horses or elephants or whales etcetcetc. ... To have these relegated to the same mythical category as a dragon or unicorn.... Is so unconscionable I don't understand how all these so called intelligent people just carry on and shrug...

"The economy will be fine"

True Idiocracy moment....

A true human supremacist society - I know controversial term but it fits way too well. You and I live in it and it sucks how many people think like that.

Life is a co-op, winning does not mean being the last ones left standing.

I half expect at some point soon these types to push out takes like "if we run out of arable land, we can raise humans for meat"

Where I live in Canada we have a humid continental climate. Climate change is a fact; and lets even say worst case scenario happens. We become a humid subtropical climate. Northern Canada is subarctic and they will become humid continental.

I look at these 'climates changing" and see absolutely no problem at all. Looks like an improvement to me. How can we go about speeding up this process?

You have to be supremely ignorant... Bordering on flat earther or evolution denial/young earth creationist... To believe this will work out like that..... This won't be a nice change of pace for your climate. It will be a mass extinction even humans have never experienced. It's obscene even. And this language of 'catastrophism' literally sounds like woo woo therapy speak by unscientific fools. Calling it not a "catastrophy' will be looked at as immoral as slavery in the future generation imo.

Holocene extinction - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

>You have to be supremely ignorant... Bordering on flat earther or evolution denial/young earth creationist... To believe this will work out like that.....

Great place to start with flames.

>This won't be a nice change of pace for your climate. It will be a mass extinction even humans have never experienced. It's obscene even.

The science clearly says that isn't the case at all. Feel free to reference IPCC RCP8.5 scenarios where we magically find extremely more fossil fuels and burn those as well. No extinction is expected even in those scenarios.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene#Climate

The eocene was approximately 14celcius warmer than it is today and life thrived.

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

During the last spike, the eemian, it was about 2 celcius warmer than today. Roughly 100,000 years ago, and that's roughly all we do expect to happen now. Life was thriving.

> During the last spike, the eemian, it was about 2 celcius warmer than today. Roughly 100,000 years ago, and that's roughly all we do expect to happen now. Life was thriving

Yes, because life can adapt in 100k years at a rate that it cannot in 100 years. And that life did not particularly care for preserving thousand-year-old human settlements.

> Great place to start with flames.

I am not the OP but if the point above flew you by then consider how much you have thought about the matter.

The Eocene was 45 million years ago. Humans have existed for less than 250k.

The interglacial warming is the most likely origin of the catastrophic global flood mythos across many cultures (including the Bible). And involved a scale of mass migration and suffering/death that would make modern sensibility recoil.

Your argument is like if I burned down your house or community but stated "well the forest will reclaim it in 10 thousand years and it will be beautiful and full of life! Is anything really even different on the grand scale?"

I care about the immediate future. And all the suffering and death, and the animals and plants that coevolved with us and ARE our evolutionary environment.

It's absurd and either supremely ignorant or bordering on malicious anti social behavior . The paradox of tolerance is being pushed to its limit.

Your reaction doesn't matter; only the collective response does. It seems there is little appetite to doubt nationalism, and immense optimism for our ability to correct later.

What has that got to do with TFA?

Well, your reaction does not matter (and neither does bill gates'); only the collective response does. The

Lucky for your conscience the world doesn't give a shit about global warming, nor your realization that you can't do anything about it

Of course the world is fucked

I literally do not understand what argument you are trying to make. The only "collective response" to your comments I can imagine here is confusion.

One known tactic by climate denialists is to create a feeling of despair. If nothing can help, nothing must be done.

I stopped reading at the AI image at the top of the page. The comments here suggest I was right to.

CLMATE

Bill Gates opened the floodgates.

After 25 years of dire, ‘existential’ warnings, the political messaging is beginning to taper off and moderate.

It’s a necessary step. If you tell people the worlds about to end for too long, you lose credibility with all but the true believers.

Apologies are due to everyone that was fried on social media for suggesting things were not as bad as described. Anyone not fully radicalized was declared a ‘denier’ and accused of being ignorant about the overwhelming science.

It seems the people who acknowledged the climate was changing, but did not consider it an immediate, existential threat now have the high scientific ground. It seems possible they’ll keep it.

People just aren’t equipped to think about it on the right scale.

Experts have not been suggesting that a catastrophe will wipe humans from the planet within the next handful of years. They have been suggesting that our trends are deeply unsustainable for the planet. And the effects of screwing with our planet will easily be catastrophic in many years if trends continue.

So yes, urgent action would be necessary to get the trends to be more manageable. But because monkey brain doesn’t see an immediate threat, monkey brain calls climate scientists liars for some reason. We have these “temperature targets” not because the world instantly ends once we hit however many degrees of warming, but because we know the impact of that much change will be more drastic over the following decades. Monkeybrain just doesn’t know how to prioritize that threat without making people afraid of it.

Just because humans are dumb especially things on this time scale. Does not make the fools and deniers any less deplorable....

Holocene extinction - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

You all call yourself pragmatist but us doomers actually seem to be the only ones who want any of humanity to survive at all ....

I hope that we see more measured, objective articles like this. It's been pretty frustrating as someone on the sidelines looking in, the degree of panic and emotion attached to the climate stuff, that has always seemed to be out of scale with the actual effects to me.

I'm ~50, and my whole life, back to the 80's, there have been these sort of breathless extreme articles about the existential threat that climate poses. I remember, as a kid, it was global cooling, and we were all going to have to deal with an ice age, which terrified me.

Then it was global warming, and the "tipping point" and hawaii and all of our coastal cities were going to be under water within 5 years.

Then it was "climate change" which was poorly defined to me, but humans were definitely to blame, and causing hurricanes and destroying the planet - even though when I bothered to look at the actual data, the rate of hurricanes and other events had actually decreased.

I've read some super compelling articles from what I'll call "measured environmentalists" that argue persuasively that to do the most good for people, we should shift our focus to immediate harms that we can actually control well - things like malaria, and reliable clean water and heating, that would have a far greater impact for tens of millions of people than something nebulous like carbon credits.

I'm far from an expert on this stuff, I just wish that the conversation (as with so many things) could have less yelling, and more considered thoughtful discussion. This article, and Gates' seem to be a great start.

An article talking about a complex system [1] (the Earth's climate system coupled to human industrial/farming systems) with few hard numbers, no mathematical models and graphs of their behavior, and no links to any such discussions, is not objective in any sense of the word. It's all the author's uncited subjective views.

This is the kind of stuff one should take in from one ear, and let it out through the other ear without letting it touch the brain.

[1] complexity in the sense of mathematics.

It sort of depends on the expertise of the author, right? In this case, it seems like an actual climate scientist that has moderated his opinion over time, at least that was my takeaway.

That makes it at least as valuable to me as any given "we're all going to die" article that pops up endlessly in these kinds of discussions.

I agree though, that a big problem with these conversations is dealing with complex systems, small signals and potentially large impacts and communicating all that in an effective way.

Most people (myself included) are simply not equipped to understand the details, so we rely on others to explain it to us.

My point was just that I enjoy a more balanced take on the issue.

> It sort of depends on the expertise of the author, right?

In a well-established field like Physics or Biology, if an expert is talking about the established part of their field, they can just say things and you can trust that they are correct. If they saying things about the unestablished parts of their field - say a physicist talking about string theory - they need to properly cite stuff.

In a not so well established field like Climate Science, where there is a lot of disagreement, every expert needs to cite their sources so people in adjacent fields can verify what they are saying.

> In a not so well established field like Climate Science, where there is a lot of disagreement

Is there? In the actual science, not in the I'm-a-contrarian-because-fossil-pays-well scene.

There are broad differences of opinion about the validity of BAU projections a few decades out, AMOC collapse, etc.

But the climate denialists like the author don't talk about that. They attack settled science and handwave away legitimate, serious concerns by saying that risk is incalculable.

In other words it's the same as the OP says about established vs not-yet-settled parts of physics.

Everyone is a climate skeptic.

"To know, and not yet to do, is not to know" - Aristotle.

Everyone still flies on planes. Ceasing burning kerosene is the easiest possible thing you could do to reduce your climate impact, but no-one does it.

Everyone hates being called out on it, but it is true. No-one really cares, because no-one is prepared to make a socially costly signal, costly in prestige or relationships or group membership. It's all posturing.

Speak for yourself. I can count the times I flied in my whole life on one hand, and I have never flied domestically. It's not some unachievable ideal, and majority != everyone.

It's a funny business. I'm a bit skeptical how much of a problem it will be but am up for fixing things. But me not flying will make no difference. The kind of thing that could is a global carbon tax but hardly anyone seems up for that.

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