4 ms·
what's in his later chapters?
by sails 6y ago
what's in his later chapters?
- DennisP 6y agoIt's been several years since I read it, but up through two degrees, things were a terrible mess but life goes on. By three degrees, the South American rainforest burns to the ground, and some major agricultural regions dry up because they depends on dry-season melt from glaciers that don't exist anymore. Hundreds of millions of refugees. After that it got bad. I forget the details but by four degrees it looked to me like modern civilization would have a hard time staying viable, and by six it was hard to imagine our species surviving.
- growlist 6y ago> by six it was hard to imagine our species surviving I suspect before we got near extinction point there would be plans for the last few tens of thousands to survive underground/underwater/in domes/at high altitude/latitude etc. We have people talking seriously about a colony on another planet, after all.
- take_a_breath 6y agoSounds like that would require significant planning and building. Who decides who “the last few tens of thousands” will be? What will everyone else think about that? People talk seriously about a lot of things, doesn’t mean they are viable or realistic.
- growlist 6y agoYou don't think these kinds of plans exist somewhere already?
- taylodl 6y agoNo. We didn't even have a plan for a pandemic, much less our extinction. There may have been some think tanks that have put some thought into it but I seriously doubt any plan was ever put into place.
- DennisP 6y agoI'd bet those plans do exist somewhere. We had plans for pandemic defense too, but we didn't bother actually stockpiling masks and ventilators. At least for that we can afford to catch up. The more intensive ideas like underground bases would have to be built well before modern civilization collapsed. They'd cost a lot, and we'll have less and less resources available as the damage worsens, so doing it in time might require more foresight than we've shown so far. Just going to high altitude would be less protective but relatively cheap. But any small refuge would have to deal with a lot of well-armed people fighting over it, plus epidemics brought on by overcrowding and mass migration. It might be safer to be on Mars. But sure, in theory a small population could eke out an existence in an enclosed base.
- throwaway5752 6y agoAll of those ideas are much more problematic than people acknowledge. I can only compare them to the badly conceived startup ideas that have gone under the minute easy money disappeared. In terms of underground or dome living, that has been attempted at small scale and timeframe and with external support and failed. People talk about a lot of things, but ultimately only 12 humans have ever step foot on anything other than the Earth, for total of less than a week. Mars is 500 times further away than the moon. The underground stuff is most plausible and has lots of issues. It is extremely frustrating to read stuff like this because it's easier and more likely to succeed to prevent global warming in the first place than it is to deal with the worst consequences.
- growlist 6y agoPlease post with a non-throwaway account, and I'll respond. Edit: since the name of your account is apparently inaccurate - I think you're comment is pretty daft, to be frank. I'm speculating that a few thousand souls might hang on after the deaths of billions, and you seem to be saying that merely talking about this prospect will make humanity collectively think 'hey! it's only going to be the vast majority of humanity that will die, so let's continue burning fossil fuels!'? Be serious.
- yifanl 6y agoI'm not sure if you've actually looked at the account, but it has a longer comment history than your own.
- growlist 6y agoAh, well perhaps a better name would help then.
- effingwewt 6y agoTo be fair how different is it from using a random name like 'growlist'? Since when does the handle someone uses to post correlate to the substance of said post?
- a6w45j4jrs4 6y agoEPICA core samples show fluctuations of 16 degrees over 100ky, but there is no evidence of ancient rainforests burning. I'm not denying anthropogenic climate change but it's difficult to take such predictions seriously. And yes, I use throwaway accounts because the HN hivemind slaughters anyone that goes against the mainstream opinion. If you don't want to respond to me because of this, then don't. If moderators want to remove this comment, then by all means please do. But I don't know who it helps.
- psadri 6y ago16 degrees warmer or cooler?
- hindsightbias 6y agoI believe it's the range from hottest to coolest, over 100KY. Which of course is exactly like a 2-3C change over a couple of hundred years, so no big deal... right? /s
- herval 6y agoWould you mind sharing some sources?
- dang 6y agoCould you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=by:dang%20community%20identity https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... I don't think it's true that "the HN hivemind slaughters anyone that goes against the mainstream opinion", and I'm not seeing that in most of the comments you've posted.
- GoodJokes 6y agoWe aren’t on pace for 4. 3 at worst, but 2.5 seems within reach. Books like this are great doomer porn in the late chapters but based on very little. The models have a ton of uncertainty out that far.
- dredmorbius 6y agohttp://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=3C1CA115683EED376688B78CF0721868 http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=3C1CA115683EED37668...
- netjiro 6y agohttp://libgen.li/item/index.php?md5=3C1CA115683EED376688B78CF0721868 http://libgen.li/item/index.php?md5=3C1CA115683EED376688B78C... depends on where you happen to be at the time ...