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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

> As Macron said in 2023: "Who could have predicted the climate crisis?" The people in charge a either clinically retarded or willingly ignoring the problem,

The "people in charge" as well as the "climate experts" are generally aligned on the climate crisis, but everyone has been surprised by unexpected acceleration and the very sudden swings.

Put differently, you can predict and act, according to the trend, but the sudden and unpredictable timing of these swings is a separate, and more difficult issue to navigate.

For instance, can anyone predict specifically what will happen "next" and "where" and prepare to mitigate the impact?

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This is completely wrong. The climate experts are not surprised by this at all. We've known about it for decades. We just didn't give a shit because it was not impacting us directly.

Now it's starting to impact us directly, but we still don't really give a shit. In a few weeks it will be business as usual.

It will get worse every year, and we will be more and more willing to do something as it gets worse. But we will have fewer and fewer resources to do it, and less stuff to save (once a forest disappears, you as a human won't see it come back in your lifetime).

> but everyone has been surprised by unexpected acceleration and the very sudden swings

It's been predicted for decades, in multiple reports, over and over and over and over again... No excuses

> can anyone predict specifically what will happen "next" and "where" and prepare to mitigate the impact?

Something bad, duh? And reduce emissions, duh?

The things people have been predicting and advocating for during the past like 50 years at that point. Are we still debating these details lol?

While we haven’t known the exact trajectory of the crisis, it has been known for decades that the trend would generally and increasingly point towards “future is bad” if we didn’t reduce emissions. World leaders bet on having more time to shift away from harmful policy and lost.

The specific swings are a little surprising, but only in the way that a macaroni jumps around in hard to predict directions if you put it in boiling water. We’ve made the weather less predictable, but we knew we were doing it.

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