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>Even if climate change causes island nations to disappear, triggers mass migrations and kills millions of people, it probably isn’t going to compromise our lon

>Even if climate change causes island nations to disappear, triggers mass migrations and kills millions of people, it probably isn’t going to compromise our longterm potential over the coming trillions of years This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone admit this in print that wasn’t labeled a kook

giantg2 4y ago
"This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone admit this in print that wasn’t labeled a kook" I think one of us misinterpreted the statement then. My understanding is that the author is labeling the people who believe this as 'dangerous' (close enough to 'kook').
- hammock 4y ago
  The author themselves believes this statement. They are arguing that the dangerous view is one that looks at the trillion-year timeframe rather than the 100-year one
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - goatlover 4y ago
    The trillion-year timeframe is looking at whether there are existential risks during the 100-year one we should try to avoid.
  - ianburrell 4y ago
    It does if you remove the previous sentences that are quoted in another comment: "Consider that, as I noted elsewhere, the longtermist ideology inclines its adherents to take an insouciant attitude towards climate change. Why?" That makes it obvious that it is not what author believes but what author is saying the longtermers believe.
- shkkmo 4y ago
  The author doesn't challenge the assertion that climate change is not an existential risk (which I think is a mistake.) The attitude the author takes is that discounting the short term harms from climate change is morally repugnant.
sdfghswe 4y ago
We're not reading the same things then. I've read the "5 degrees don't make a difference" argument many times.
megaman821 4y ago
This because climate doomerist rhetoric gets a free pass because most people agree with the general goal to reduce our impact on the climate. I can live a long and happy life without my pinky finger, but pointing this out doesn't mean I want to lose my finger. I will continue take care when using a saw.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  One scary thing that's been becoming uncomfortably evident to me lately is that a lot of things are fragile. Things like countries are very dependent on uncoded, informally agreed on standards of decency. And it takes surprisingly little to throw the system into chaos if there's a group that wants it badly enough, or the people maintaining stability relax too much, or the wrong crisis happens at the wrong time. Climate change affects many millions of people. That can easily cause mass events like famines, economical crashes, mass unemployment, war and mass migration, and those things quite easily affect countries around it and so on. So I'm not too optimistic about seeing it as a "pinky finger". The best outcome I see is something like ruining the wine harvest. Yeah, not ideal, but we can live with that. But it's unlikely to stop at that, because millions of unhappy farmers won't just sit quietly and can make a very big mess.
- __loam 4y ago
  I mean, the climate doomers kind of have a point since we're currently living through a mass extinction event that we caused.
bawolff 4y ago
I mean it kind of goes without saying that as long as climate change doesn't make us extinct, it wont matter on a time scale that includes things like the sun exploding. I suspect you don't hear the statement much because it isn't particularly controversial.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tptacek 4y ago
The comparison being made in the article is to the longtermist notion of "existential catastrophe" --- even if the impact of climate change reduced humanity to the Stone Age, it wouldn't qualify as such in some longtermist thought, because 10^100 years is a very long term, more than enough for humanity to rebound. Put differently: he is indeed implying that people that appeal to this idea are kooks.
- falcolas 4y ago
  > reduced humanity to the Stone Age, it wouldn't qualify as such in some longtermist thought, because 10^100 years is a very long term, more than enough for humanity to rebound Practically speaking, we wouldn't have that long. Until humanity escapes our solar system, it's on a much shorter 5 billion year clock. Which is still a lot of time, but we need to live past our solar system before we can really start thinking in trillions of years.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    Right, this is the idea that implicates the kookiness.
    - imtringued 4y ago
      The assumption is that we are going to capture hawking radiation from black holes and live in some kind of Dyson sphere after the heat death of the universe. I am not making this up.
rqtwteye 4y ago
That’s pretty nihilistic. And usually written by people who don’t have to suffer from climate change consequences like mass migrations. And by the way in 500 million years the sun will boil the Earth anyways, so let’s just give up completely and do nothing.
germinalphrase 4y ago
“Trillion-year timeframe” itself reads like a caricature. Even the Long Now folks are looking at the xx,000 timeframe which is… approachable by comparison. Nothing survives a trillion-year timeframe.

giantg2 4y ago

"This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone admit this in print that wasn’t labeled a kook" I think one of us misinterpreted the statement then. My understanding is that the author is labeling the people who believe this as 'dangerous' (close enough to 'kook').

hammock 4y ago
The author themselves believes this statement. They are arguing that the dangerous view is one that looks at the trillion-year timeframe rather than the 100-year one
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- goatlover 4y ago
  The trillion-year timeframe is looking at whether there are existential risks during the 100-year one we should try to avoid.
- ianburrell 4y ago
  It does if you remove the previous sentences that are quoted in another comment: "Consider that, as I noted elsewhere, the longtermist ideology inclines its adherents to take an insouciant attitude towards climate change. Why?" That makes it obvious that it is not what author believes but what author is saying the longtermers believe.
shkkmo 4y ago
The author doesn't challenge the assertion that climate change is not an existential risk (which I think is a mistake.) The attitude the author takes is that discounting the short term harms from climate change is morally repugnant.

sdfghswe 4y ago

We're not reading the same things then. I've read the "5 degrees don't make a difference" argument many times.

megaman821 4y ago

This because climate doomerist rhetoric gets a free pass because most people agree with the general goal to reduce our impact on the climate. I can live a long and happy life without my pinky finger, but pointing this out doesn't mean I want to lose my finger. I will continue take care when using a saw.

dale_glass 4y ago
One scary thing that's been becoming uncomfortably evident to me lately is that a lot of things are fragile. Things like countries are very dependent on uncoded, informally agreed on standards of decency. And it takes surprisingly little to throw the system into chaos if there's a group that wants it badly enough, or the people maintaining stability relax too much, or the wrong crisis happens at the wrong time. Climate change affects many millions of people. That can easily cause mass events like famines, economical crashes, mass unemployment, war and mass migration, and those things quite easily affect countries around it and so on. So I'm not too optimistic about seeing it as a "pinky finger". The best outcome I see is something like ruining the wine harvest. Yeah, not ideal, but we can live with that. But it's unlikely to stop at that, because millions of unhappy farmers won't just sit quietly and can make a very big mess.
__loam 4y ago
I mean, the climate doomers kind of have a point since we're currently living through a mass extinction event that we caused.

bawolff 4y ago

I mean it kind of goes without saying that as long as climate change doesn't make us extinct, it wont matter on a time scale that includes things like the sun exploding. I suspect you don't hear the statement much because it isn't particularly controversial.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tptacek 4y ago

The comparison being made in the article is to the longtermist notion of "existential catastrophe" --- even if the impact of climate change reduced humanity to the Stone Age, it wouldn't qualify as such in some longtermist thought, because 10^100 years is a very long term, more than enough for humanity to rebound. Put differently: he is indeed implying that people that appeal to this idea are kooks.

falcolas 4y ago
> reduced humanity to the Stone Age, it wouldn't qualify as such in some longtermist thought, because 10^100 years is a very long term, more than enough for humanity to rebound Practically speaking, we wouldn't have that long. Until humanity escapes our solar system, it's on a much shorter 5 billion year clock. Which is still a lot of time, but we need to live past our solar system before we can really start thinking in trillions of years.
- tptacek 4y ago
  Right, this is the idea that implicates the kookiness.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    The assumption is that we are going to capture hawking radiation from black holes and live in some kind of Dyson sphere after the heat death of the universe. I am not making this up.

rqtwteye 4y ago

That’s pretty nihilistic. And usually written by people who don’t have to suffer from climate change consequences like mass migrations. And by the way in 500 million years the sun will boil the Earth anyways, so let’s just give up completely and do nothing.

germinalphrase 4y ago

“Trillion-year timeframe” itself reads like a caricature. Even the Long Now folks are looking at the xx,000 timeframe which is… approachable by comparison. Nothing survives a trillion-year timeframe.