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Comment by notrealyme123 | Hacker News Reader

I think thats the wrong level of abstraction. The cold war ended, but clima change will not end.

Of course it will. There is a finite amount of fossil fuels and it'll become uneconomical to use before those are fully exhausted. Give it some more years (say, a few hundred) after the last car fleet and power plant switched away and the climate will have triggered any tipping points it's going to tip. Then the animals that haven't adapted will soon have finished going extinct, the ocean finished warming up with its lag effect, and climate change is finished changing

After that it's 'over' no? The world map is redrawn (many countries' shapes will look different), people that needed to move have moved or got killed (quite possibly by territorial humans refusing to let them onto livable land), but it'll settle into a new normal eventually

That's the correct level of pedantic answer my comment deserves. Everything is true. Clima change will stop, how much of humanity or human society survives is open, but yes it will stop.

I think they meant "end before the near-extinction of humanity", but yes, it eventually will reach another steady state one way or another.

The word abstraction does not mean the same thing as the words analogy or comparison.

Yes absolutely. They are different things . I am using "level of abstraction" in a sense to find a useful amount of details to drop or keep, which in turn makes an analogy/comparison possible.

Wow, you have the patience of a saint. It seems you have almost nobody actually engaging in discussion and instead trying to nitpick and play word games.

Hahaha ouch - and thank you. I think this particular topic is not about being right, but about revealing wild claims as what they are.

Answering to nitpicking and word plays is just fun along the way.

> The cold war ended

You wouldn't know it based on how everyone talks about Russia pulling the strings of just about every election (and being a moment away from conquering Europe while simultaneously being too incompetent to beat Ukraine).

Russia is great at stuff that can be automated cheaply like influence campaigns. They're not so great at physical hardware and logistics and so forth. Not everyone is good at everything.

Messing with elections by fooling the most volatile and eager to be fooled is not a genius move.

> and being a moment away from conquering Europe while simultaneously being too incompetent to beat Ukraine

TBF, I don't think anyone has seriously espoused this fear since the war in Ukraine bogged down. It's become very clear that NATO folks overestimated Russia's conventional military capability - and along with the Russians, underestimated how rapidly drone warfare was evolving.

The cold-war era risk still facing us is more that one of the unhinged megalomaniacs currently in power in Moscow/Washington decides to press the big red button and end it all

An animal is most dangerous when deeply wounded.

Let me remind you that launching nuclear weapons close to your border is an issue, launching them half a continent away not so much.

It can change, if we get to net negative emissions. Not probable but possible.

It will just take at least three or four generations to get back to 90's climate, provided we don't trigger any irreversible tipping points, like the melting of the permafrost, in which case the climate is messed up for millennia.

The melting of the permafrost is already underway and it's not looking good for any hope of it slowing down, and that's only one (of many) irreversible tipping point we're facing right now. But hey, it'll be fine because it's all just "fake news" anyhow. (I wish that were actually true about it not being real, but it's crystal clear to anyone with an IQ higher than a houseplant that the scientists were right all along and we really should have started acting on all this stuff decades ago.) :(

Or solar geoengineering? Which is scary but becoming more likely it seems.

Nuclear winter may cancel it out.

Indeed, climate change won't end; it never has and it never will, the climate always changes.

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