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...how about focusing instead on how to live through this climate "disaster"?! Let's be honest about it, most developed countries are making geo-strategic deci

...how about focusing instead on how to live through this climate "disaster"?! Let's be honest about it, most developed countries are making geo-strategic decisions in the context of +7 C in <= 100 years... we're just not being f honest about it! (Avoiding it is off the table, just as well as "zero covid" was off the table since month three of the f pandemic and we should've just accepted that it's gonna become endemic and most measures are waste of resources.) Let's accept that "massive" climate change will happen, and that our goal is how to slow things down and how to avoid it being an actual disaster for HUMANITY! (It will be a disaster for many other species that we'll go extinct as we'll probably massively increase use of herbicides and fertilizers and GMOs in order to satisfy humanity's material needs against a backdrop of populations displacements and fertile lands distribution shifts. But it doesn't have to be a disaster for humanity... ugly as it may be, it's a live-and-let-die universe and irreversible biodiversity loss will happen, but humans are quite capable of not only maintaining but also accelerating, as it's our duty to, technological and scientific progress, as long as we don't stupidly turn against each-other! We have and entire universe to infect and conquer ffs, let's just not kill each other in the next century!)

time_to_smile 5y ago
> live through this climate "disaster" Because this is not a disaster that stops at any point in the foreseeable future. There is no other side to get "through" to. This isn't like an Earth quake or even a nuclear war where a single event happens, the world is changed but then stasis begins to return. Next year the impacts of climate change will be notably worse than they were the previous year. This will be true for the rest of your life. Positive feed backs and the geological history of the planet both indicate that after a (currently unknown) limit, things will start escalating rapidly and irreversibly until the surface of the planet is no longer recognizable. The focus should be on how to psychologically begin to deal with loss at this scale. But, as anyone can see in the comments here, people are very unlikely to be ever ready to deal with the psychological stress this imposes on them. Instead we'll see subtle but steadily increasing madness consume the population. HN is a great place to observe this.
- catchclose8919 5y ago
  All models show that arable land will decrease in some places, but also increase in others. Net land loss due to submerging coastal areas, but also arctic areas like eg. Greenland becoming suitable for some kind of agriculture after defrosting. And the fact "the surface of the planet is no longer recognizable" doesn't mean uninhabitable. And "to deal with the psychological stress this imposes on them" people can also simply choose to care less, focus socially on accelerating tech development and individually stay entertained while competing in the new worldwide casinos and global-events-betting-markets etc. or playing games in the metaverses whose outcomes results in real-world-money redistributions. > we'll see subtle but steadily increasing madness consume the population Maybe your definition of "sanity" is a bit bit constrained and needs to be adjusted then :) To keep the optimism up, maybe future challenges will usher in an era where we finally evolve psychology and psychiatry beyond the pseudoscientifc nonsense they are today, and we replace the "war on drug" with "full access to BOTH drugs and safety information about using them" + a culture focused more on using them for freely managed performance enhancement instead of plain aimless entertainment and "feeling better". I see a lot of future's problems as opportunities tbh... and challenging stress to force us evolve faster if we modulate it right. This is what I care about most now really, working of figuring out how to "modulate things right" to be able to squeeze the positive after effects even from clearly destructive events like wars and genocides. One man's hell is another man's heaven I guess: I've always dreamed of finally seeing the opportunity to push the masses out of this mentality combo of christianity/islam/buddshism and other maladaptive crap that paradoxically combines well with eco-scientims or passive-observe-but-not-influence-science. (Real scientific progress was/is always engineering-driven and theories come after evidence they are derived from... the modern "use theoretic speculation to design experiments" is a dead end, all interesting experiments were designed by a desire to "engineer something" even particle accelerators emerged out of desires to build-devices-to-measure/separate/produce/concentrate some isotopes or particles etc. in the hopes that at least they'd be interesting for poisons or guns.) Let's start engineering cool solutions (pushing reflective particles into the atmosphere to reduce warming, using modern biotech to completely extinct tropical disease vectors to keep the newly-becomed-tropical areas human friendly), then engineering solutions to the new cool problems that the first solutions generate and them on and on and on faster and faster and faster! The "madness" is imo a (maybe rough) transition to a more fertile era of though, science and engineering...

time_to_smile 5y ago

> live through this climate "disaster" Because this is not a disaster that stops at any point in the foreseeable future. There is no other side to get "through" to. This isn't like an Earth quake or even a nuclear war where a single event happens, the world is changed but then stasis begins to return. Next year the impacts of climate change will be notably worse than they were the previous year. This will be true for the rest of your life. Positive feed backs and the geological history of the planet both indicate that after a (currently unknown) limit, things will start escalating rapidly and irreversibly until the surface of the planet is no longer recognizable. The focus should be on how to psychologically begin to deal with loss at this scale. But, as anyone can see in the comments here, people are very unlikely to be ever ready to deal with the psychological stress this imposes on them. Instead we'll see subtle but steadily increasing madness consume the population. HN is a great place to observe this.

catchclose8919 5y ago
All models show that arable land will decrease in some places, but also increase in others. Net land loss due to submerging coastal areas, but also arctic areas like eg. Greenland becoming suitable for some kind of agriculture after defrosting. And the fact "the surface of the planet is no longer recognizable" doesn't mean uninhabitable. And "to deal with the psychological stress this imposes on them" people can also simply choose to care less, focus socially on accelerating tech development and individually stay entertained while competing in the new worldwide casinos and global-events-betting-markets etc. or playing games in the metaverses whose outcomes results in real-world-money redistributions. > we'll see subtle but steadily increasing madness consume the population Maybe your definition of "sanity" is a bit bit constrained and needs to be adjusted then :) To keep the optimism up, maybe future challenges will usher in an era where we finally evolve psychology and psychiatry beyond the pseudoscientifc nonsense they are today, and we replace the "war on drug" with "full access to BOTH drugs and safety information about using them" + a culture focused more on using them for freely managed performance enhancement instead of plain aimless entertainment and "feeling better". I see a lot of future's problems as opportunities tbh... and challenging stress to force us evolve faster if we modulate it right. This is what I care about most now really, working of figuring out how to "modulate things right" to be able to squeeze the positive after effects even from clearly destructive events like wars and genocides. One man's hell is another man's heaven I guess: I've always dreamed of finally seeing the opportunity to push the masses out of this mentality combo of christianity/islam/buddshism and other maladaptive crap that paradoxically combines well with eco-scientims or passive-observe-but-not-influence-science. (Real scientific progress was/is always engineering-driven and theories come after evidence they are derived from... the modern "use theoretic speculation to design experiments" is a dead end, all interesting experiments were designed by a desire to "engineer something" even particle accelerators emerged out of desires to build-devices-to-measure/separate/produce/concentrate some isotopes or particles etc. in the hopes that at least they'd be interesting for poisons or guns.) Let's start engineering cool solutions (pushing reflective particles into the atmosphere to reduce warming, using modern biotech to completely extinct tropical disease vectors to keep the newly-becomed-tropical areas human friendly), then engineering solutions to the new cool problems that the first solutions generate and them on and on and on faster and faster and faster! The "madness" is imo a (maybe rough) transition to a more fertile era of though, science and engineering...