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Comment by arcadeparade | Hacker News Reader

Guy McPherson has a disturbingly well sourced and pessimistic summary of how climate change will affect humanity in the next few decades. In his view it's too late to stop it and we're finished:

http://guymcpherson.com/2013/01/climate-change-summary-and-u...

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Possibly most readers know this but if you want to check the validity of this and all the other predictions, the parameter to look for is climate sensitivity. Notoriously difficult to estimate, key to the whole business, it's the degree of warming expected for a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Bishophill links to innumerable articles, papers and views (from all sides) on this.

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/display/Search?searchQuery...

An interesting thought experiment I like to entertain is the case in which climate change is mitigated by the same kind of factors that cause and exacerbate it. It's not outrageous to imagine 21st century materials technology making it profitable to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, or low-power, ubiquitous computing/surveillance/logistics technology that can extract heat energy from the atmosphere and convert it to usable work.

I hope you understand that converting CO2 to anything else requires energy. CO2 is the "lower energy" state. Either you win the energy by burning something or you have to spend the energy to produce organic matter out of the CO2. The nature did the later during the last hundreds of millions of years. The humanity burned half of the oil so produced in a mere 100 years -- an order of million times faster, and growing.

My optimistic idea of the future (not the only scenario I entertain by any means) assumes that renewable, carbon-neutral energy will be pervasive.

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