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Yeah but we don't call it the Deforestation Age or the Plague Age, and most people don't center those concerns when talking about the past. Re plague, the one

Yeah but we don't call it the Deforestation Age or the Plague Age, and most people don't center those concerns when talking about the past. Re plague, the one thing that could be argued actually comes to mind when considering the middle ages, those waves of disease killed ~ half the population. To compete, climate change would have to kill several billion people. I think it's fair to call that alarmist.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
Lets imagine your are right. So if you go to a person on the street, and ask them: "are you happy to live through something like the black death, but slighly better"? and the responce is gonna be "yeah, that's fine. We should not take action to prevent that" Can you imagine the devastation it left behind? Also the problem with the comparison is that the plague is finished withing a decade once everyone has immunity or dies. On the other hand clinate change is forever. And if it induces drounght, crop failures and famine, it could kill hundreds of millions, maybe two billion - and then it would be worse
- FeepingCreature 4y ago
  > So if you go to a person on the street, and ask them: "are you happy to live through something like the black death, but slighly better"? and the responce is gonna be "yeah, that's fine. We should not take action to prevent that" It's not on the same scale, but 7 million people have just died to a pandemic and there is certainly no universal agreement that massive restrictions were appropriate to prevent that. So while the black death probably provides an upper bound, COVID provides a lower bound. Somewhere between, people will have a breaking point - but nobody was proposing "to solve COVID we need to roll back the industrial revolution and slash world population." I think we're agreed that would have been excessive? Let's say the measures for COVID, which significantly restricted civil liberties for two years, were a hundredth of that level; well, the deaths were a hundredth of the Black Death. It's certainly not obvious to me, at least, that the remedy isn't worse than the disease (pun not intended). > And if it induces drounght, crop failures and famine, it could kill hundreds of millions, maybe two billion - and then it would be worse I don't know, seems a stretch. You're kind of bridging an OOM here with great ease. :) I don't think it's plausible at this point to speculate that climate change will even reduce the food production capability of the world at all. It will certainly make the equator much harder to inhabit and create massive migrations; I think that's already dire enough, honestly. To be clear, I think it should be stopped. Just not at any price. I think spending an appreciable fraction of GDP on climate change mitigation and compensation while massively stepping up renewables is reasonable, abolishing capitalism and imposing birth restrictions, for instance, is not. It feels a bit like some people here are only interested in climate change insofar as it provides a justification for enacting their preferred policies.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    > I don't think it's plausible at this point to speculate that climate change will even reduce the food production capability of the world at all You are creating the impression you have not read anything on the subject at all https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-18/climate-change-may-double-the-risk-of-breadbasket-failures https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-18/climate-c...
    - FeepingCreature 4y ago
      I agree that it's likely for climate change to cause harvest failures in existing crop regions.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

Lets imagine your are right. So if you go to a person on the street, and ask them: "are you happy to live through something like the black death, but slighly better"? and the responce is gonna be "yeah, that's fine. We should not take action to prevent that" Can you imagine the devastation it left behind? Also the problem with the comparison is that the plague is finished withing a decade once everyone has immunity or dies. On the other hand clinate change is forever. And if it induces drounght, crop failures and famine, it could kill hundreds of millions, maybe two billion - and then it would be worse

FeepingCreature 4y ago
> So if you go to a person on the street, and ask them: "are you happy to live through something like the black death, but slighly better"? and the responce is gonna be "yeah, that's fine. We should not take action to prevent that" It's not on the same scale, but 7 million people have just died to a pandemic and there is certainly no universal agreement that massive restrictions were appropriate to prevent that. So while the black death probably provides an upper bound, COVID provides a lower bound. Somewhere between, people will have a breaking point - but nobody was proposing "to solve COVID we need to roll back the industrial revolution and slash world population." I think we're agreed that would have been excessive? Let's say the measures for COVID, which significantly restricted civil liberties for two years, were a hundredth of that level; well, the deaths were a hundredth of the Black Death. It's certainly not obvious to me, at least, that the remedy isn't worse than the disease (pun not intended). > And if it induces drounght, crop failures and famine, it could kill hundreds of millions, maybe two billion - and then it would be worse I don't know, seems a stretch. You're kind of bridging an OOM here with great ease. :) I don't think it's plausible at this point to speculate that climate change will even reduce the food production capability of the world at all. It will certainly make the equator much harder to inhabit and create massive migrations; I think that's already dire enough, honestly. To be clear, I think it should be stopped. Just not at any price. I think spending an appreciable fraction of GDP on climate change mitigation and compensation while massively stepping up renewables is reasonable, abolishing capitalism and imposing birth restrictions, for instance, is not. It feels a bit like some people here are only interested in climate change insofar as it provides a justification for enacting their preferred policies.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > I don't think it's plausible at this point to speculate that climate change will even reduce the food production capability of the world at all You are creating the impression you have not read anything on the subject at all https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-18/climate-change-may-double-the-risk-of-breadbasket-failures https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-18/climate-c...
  - FeepingCreature 4y ago
    I agree that it's likely for climate change to cause harvest failures in existing crop regions.