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Comment by jellicle | Hacker News Reader

> So what they're saying is they are not confident that some degree of warming may occur within a huge band which may do something that sounds really bad (but they don't actually spell out the bad things) in the next 1,000 years.

No, what they are saying is that in addition to all the other effects of global warming, melting of a particular chunk of ice will be absolutely irreversible past a particular cutoff point, but the cutoff point is difficult to determine with precision. We are interested in the cutoff point because it will drown billions (sic) of human beings, but any lack of precision about that doesn't mean that the rest of global warming is somehow a mirage.

Most likely we have already passed the cutoff point and melting of the Greenland ice sheet is irreversible.

Just because you're too dim to understand the science here doesn't give you an excuse to mock it.

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> because it will drown billions (sic) of human beings

That definitely fails my sniff-test, but I'm no scholar in the area, so could could please explain how the science do indeed tell us that? Of particular interest is the justification of the word "will", of course meaning definite and inevitable, not some theoretical worst case scenario. The usage of the word also implied that the substantial mitigation efforts surely expected to be undertaken by those at risk will be catastrophically inadequate. Also, the word "drown" strikes me as oddly specific. I always assumed that the most potent causes of death caused by global warming would be secondary, such as starvation, malnutrition, dehydration, severe civil unrest or even war etc.

Just because you're too dim to understand the science here doesn't give you an excuse to mock it.

You right, me stupid.

Does that make you feel better to de-intellectualize someone who gives suggestions? Keep attacking people sympathetic to the cause and see where that gets you.

Can you explain the mechanism by which billions of people will drown? Displaced perhaps, but drown? I'm fascinated. Are they incapable of, say, walking inland a little bit?

You expect billions of people to walk inland a little bit over the course of a mere 1,000 years?

Well, if only they would learn to swim we could extend that range to at least 1500 years.

Hopefully we've invented boats by then.

> Just because you're too dim to understand the science here doesn't give you an excuse to mock it.

This is "effective" advocacy at its finest. Write an otherwise useful response, then sneak in a personal attack to ensure the other person will not bother listening to you or particularly thinking about what you said.

I will save all of us a bit of time by pointing out in advance the hypocrisy of statements like: "well, if they're going to get emotional instead of being reasonable, piss on them".

This is really off topic, sorry in advance.

Why did you use "(sic)"? I always thought it stood for "Spelling InCorrect", but lately I keep seeing people use it in other contexts.

'Sic' is Latin for 'thus,' the meaning in quotations is "no really, what I just wrote." So here it's "actually billions, that's not a mistake"; in a quote with incorrect spelling it's "this is the way it appears in what I'm quoting, it's not my mistake."

I think it's Latin for "I'm not making this quote up!"

> Just because you're too dim to understand the science here doesn't give you an excuse to mock it.

What's with the insults?

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