The old world is dying | Hacker News Reader

The old world is dying

jasmi.news

6 pointsmooreds6 comments

Great article. What fascinate me about the current situation is how fast the old world died - literally within a couple of years. This is the best evidence that progress is not just moving forward - it accelerates.

The rate of climate change also accelerates. The scientists are projecting 3°C by 2050 with 98% statistical certainty. Other scientists estimate 3°C of warming will kill off about 4 billion people. So yeah the old world is dying. The new one too.

That 3°C by 2050 figure comes from one particular group of German scientists. It is not the broad consensus, which is that we'll reach 3°C by around 2100.

Either scenario is obviously terrible and we need to begin to deal with it firmly and immediately. But I thought it was worth making clear that "the scientists" here only a small set, not the community as a whole, who have an only-slightly-less dire scenario.

The IPCC consensus is limited to what politicians can agree on.

Scientists all over have been observing the acceleration of climate change for some time, but it has until now been difficult to tease real change out of conventional temperature variabilities.

The newsworthy part is that statisticians now have enough data to claim with strong certainty that warming has significantly accelerated.

I think maybe the old world (having seen about half a century) is always dying. For me it was a strange article (but worth the read). The good old days were not all bad and progress is not always the word I think of in these modern times.

> Faced with such fatalism, self-help seems essential. Disruption is real and it’s hard and we’ve made it through before. You can do more than you think you can; you are more malleable than you think you are. You don’t choose the game board but you choose how to play it.

Yeah. Don't hate the players: hate the game. I didn't choose this game but even though it's hard and even though I don't like it, you bet I'm playing it.

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