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Comment by sevenzero | Hacker News Reader

Even if we completely stopped all fossil fuel use right now it would be too little too late. We will witness water wars and mass migrations on a scale never seen before. We are very close to the RCP8.5 worst case scenario (not fully there yet) but you better make sure you enjoy your life while its still possible within this and the next few decades.

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No. This doomer position isn't helpful at all. All reductions we can get will severely reduce suffering and mass migrations, and prevent an enormous amount of biodiversity loss. We're losing species left and right every day too.

From what I know it seems we're headed to about +3C (mean temperature rise above preindustrial). It's a pretty dire scenario. But it's far, far from "too little too late". It seems probably large parts of Earth will become difficult to inhabit (like e.g. Phoenix AZ is today) without things like AC, etc.. But that's very far from an extinction scenario or total doom.

Every little bit we don't emit today will prevent probably several decades up to a century of atmospheric warming before it's extremely costly to remove from the atmosphere back into some reservoir.

Reminder that some fossil fuel companies quite enjoy narratives of total doom and change being pointless.

Doomer position? You are aware that the climate catastrophe is a known fact since decades? People in the 70s knew about it, and what did humanity do about it? Spreading propaganda about how earth always had hot and cold periods. It's a narrative many still support today. Even +3C is a massive change resulting in many many catastrophes. As I wrote, we will witness water wars and mass migrations. You can call it a doomer position, I call it reality.

They’re referring to your attitude around reducing fossil fuel usage. “We’re screwed anyway so there’s no point”.

That there will be consequences either way isn't up for debate, I think you lot both agree on that.

The issue that is being taken is about "too little too late", which is being interpreted as "since even in the best case scenario we're going to have dramatic consequences, any action is going to be fruitless", the counterpoint being that the new best case scenario (which is not a good one because it is late to take action, and is mostly equivalent to what once was thought to be the worst case) is still much less worse than the new worst case one.

You're both correct. It's too late to stop dire effects like wars and global mass migration, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything. It means we should start doing everything we can right now to prevent it from getting even worse.

We have overpopulation anyway.

The solution starts very, very close to home.

Do-nothing doomerism and do-something extreme pessimism are qualitatively different.

It won't be too little, it's still saving more people than died in wars and famines in the last 100 years.

I don't really understand this "too late" failure of judgement unless you're assuming there's some end of the world style event coming no matter what we do.

No, it's just enormous amounts of death and suffering proportional to the amount of oil and gas and coal we keep burning and digging up every day.

This is a severely outdated view. Based on current policies, we're heading for something like 2.6 degrees of warming which I think is somewhere between RCP4.5 and RCP6.0. It's still bad but nowhere close to RCP8.5 so your comment is indeed unhelpful doomerism. (RCP scenarios themselves are outdated and have been replaced by "socio-economic pathways" - SSP).

https://climateactiontracker.org/global/emissions-pathways/

I'm already hiding under the bed.

Water wars? Desalination plants cost hundreds of millions. Wars cost trillions. We'll get water violence and water tyranny, but water wars are an idiotic idea. Most wars are idiotic ideas so we might still get one, but water will be just an invalid excuse.

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