11 ms·

I try not to succumb to doomerism, but recent climate news has just gone from bad, to worse, to grim, to 'ah well, glad I didn't have kids and I'm dead in the 2

I try not to succumb to doomerism, but recent climate news has just gone from bad, to worse, to grim, to 'ah well, glad I didn't have kids and I'm dead in the 2060's'. The IPCC has traditionally been conservative, but all of their low rcp outcomes depend upon direct carbon capture, a technology we haven't really figured out yet, deployed to a wider extent than we've done with anything. I'm not saying DAC research isn't promising, but a lot of folks are just shrugging their shoulders and assuming that everything is going to turn out fine. It's not. At this rate, it basically boils down to dealing with global warming or dealing with the effects of stratospheric sulfide injection. Neither are going to be pretty and honestly either could have effects so dire it ends human civilization as we know and love it today.

ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
It's obviously a good idea to pursue new technologies if they can make a big difference, but I'm not convinced that putting sulfides into the stratosphere is a good idea as we don't have a sound understanding of what the effects would be. History demonstrates that there's often unintended consequences of introducing novel animals/chemicals/humans into environments so we should have some caution. The simplest solution is to stop digging for yet more fossil fuels to burn and to put our efforts into moving completely away from oil/coal/gas use. However, there's a lot of powerful money invested in continuing to make vast profits from fossil fuels and so there's going to be pushback from politicians that sit in their pockets.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  > we don't have a sound understanding of what the effects would be Inaction is also a choice, and a terrible one.
  - morelisp 3y ago
    Alternative hail mary solutions with fewer systemic downsides, like assassinating fossil fuel lobbyists, seems preferable to sulfides in the stratosphere for now.
    - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
      Hold on, are they before or after the billionaires for the guillotine?
      - c1sc0 3y ago
        Why not both?
        gottorf 3y ago
        Surely proponents of the guillotine must know that eventually the revolution eats its own?
        morelisp 3y ago
        While unfortunate, it still seems like ultimately a net positive (in at least several major moral calculi) even for the smallest ratchet down of the projections?
        vkou 3y ago
        But the fear of revolution might make the surviving oligarchs in neighbouring polities think twice. 'Pour encourager les autres', and all that.
        ClumsyPilot 3y ago
        "eventually the revolution eats its own?" All major nafions, France, Britain and US, famously obtained their freedomz through bloody revolutions.
    - dotancohen 3y ago
      I am embarrassed to admit that I agree with this strategy. It's a real Trolley Problem, and our own children are currently in the path of the speeding trolley.
      - morelisp 3y ago
  - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
    That sounds to me like a politician's logic: Something must be done, this is something, so we must do it. The first rule of finding yourself in a hole is to stop digging. Unfortunately, the world is continuing to pump CO2 into the atmosphere at an increasing rate - we should focus on stopping that before we try untested hail Mary's that are quite likely to cause even greater problems (e.g. disruption of ozone layer).
    - throwanem 3y ago
      "Stopping digging" is a coordination problem on the global scale, with no one to actually coordinate it or enforce penalties on defectors. Injecting sulfur into the stratosphere is a simple enough problem that many governments, and a few individuals, could be doing it within a few years. I agree that the first of those is preferable to the second; it's just that the first of those isn't going to happen.
      - SoftTalker 3y ago
        Well the penalties will be enforced, by Mother Nature.
        throwanem 3y ago
        No. The environment will become (is becoming) less habitable for everyone, not only for those responsible.
        SoftTalker 3y ago
        I haven't set foot in a church in probably 30 years, except as a tourist for some that are architecturally notable.
      - matthewdgreen 3y ago
        Sulfur injection may be technically easy, and who knows: it might even work. But it won't happen as long as large parts of our society debate whether climate change is serious. This kind of geoengineering requires a level of political consensus and commitment that we don't have (and that has been actively been thwarted by political parties and emitting industries.)
  - dotancohen 3y ago
    > Inaction is also a choice, and a terrible one. First, do no harm.
    - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
      > First, do no harm. Ye, get the American police forces to adopt this motto
    - morelisp 3y ago
      ... is not really applicable in this case as the physician's left hand continues to stab the patient while the right hand dithers about appropriate treatment.
- wing-_-nuts 3y ago
  >I'm not convinced that putting sulfides into the stratosphere is a good idea as we don't have a sound understanding of what the effects would be. Neither am I, but everything I've read seems to indicate that SSI is cheap enough that many nation states could comfortably do it. That all but guarantees it will be done when places like china or india start losing tens of thousands of people to heat waves (See 'The ministry for the future' for a fictionalized account). We as a species are short sighted. We'll go for the quick fix and hope we can deal with the consequences later. The bad thing is we have no idea what those consequences will be or how to address them. It's completely uncharted territory.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  I thought climate researchers have a fairly good understanding of the outcomes of high-altitude aerosols, since the reason sea level rise is trending slightly below the central estimate of IPCC 1990 is volcanic activity. See: negative forcing from aerosols https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WGI_AR5_FigBox13.1-1.jpg https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WGI_AR5_FigB...
justinzollars 3y ago
3 Million years ago most of Florida was submerged by water. The ice has been melting for 20,000 years and the water has risen over 400 feet [1]. 1. https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/coastline-eastern-us-changesslowly https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/coastline-eastern-us-chang...
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
> all of their low rcp outcomes depend upon direct carbon capture, a technology we haven't really figured out yet, I was flabbergasted when I discovered this, absolutely none of the media mentions this. You can read right wing, left wing, looney wing- unless you are one of the 0.1% of people that read the report, no-one knows this. One you realise that the only 'hope' is a technology that will ,at best, just cost a colossal amount of money and needs to be deployed at the scale of the oil industry, the position changes.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  When the primary persuasive technique is fear and the proposed solution is "send us all your money" then it's natural to be skeptical.
  - vkou 3y ago
    You seem to be getting the IPCC confused with your neighbourhood church.
WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
> 'ah well, glad I didn't have kids and I'm dead in the 2060's'. My kids can't afford to have kids so that'll be how my line escapes.
- AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
  [dead]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nancyhn 3y ago
Here, have a white pill: Last year, Two-thirds of Australia's Great Barrier Reef showed the largest amount of coral cover in 36 years. Corals have survived millions of years and are already bouncing back in other places as evidenced by the Great Barrier Reef, which we were all worried about not long ago.
- api 3y ago
  True. To quote George Carlin: “The Earth will be fine. We’re fucked.” The Earth has been much warmer than this in the past. It’s been much colder too. Life will adapt. The question is whether we will adapt, and more specifically whether our current civilization will adapt. I severely doubt that Homo sapiens would go extinct, but massive civilization collapse would kill billions. Then there’s what civilization might do short of full collapse. A moderate limited duration refugee crisis and some inflation has led to a full scale resurgence of fascism in Europe. Imagine if we see hundreds of millions of refugees from equatorial regions pouring into countries with better climates while we have crop failures and coastal cities getting flooded. Can our political systems remain sane and rational through that or will we succumb to demagogue cult leaders with easy “solutions?” The thing that’s likely to kill the most people from climate change is how people react to climate change. Remember that totalitarian schemes were a leading cause of death in the 20th century. Add up the death toll from Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot and scale to current population.
  - Tiktaalik 3y ago
    yep. life will adapt, though it may not life that we recognize. As ocean warms say so long to Salmon on the northwest coast. Whether they will survive further north or simply go extinct altogether who can say. Departing along with the salmon will be things that us humans in the area enjoy, such as smoked salmon and salmon on the BBQ. In the grand scheme of things likely trivial, but enormous losses to our way of life, not to mention local economies. Greater than that are the impacts on local First Nations of whose cultures the salmon historically played a incredible role, which resulted in an outsized impact of the fish on their art, story and culture. Will be devastating when the fish disappears. The biggest unknown impacts will be on the greater forest ecology, as it has been noted that the bears eat the salmon and drag it into the woods, where it provides food for other animals and nourishes the forest in general. As the salmon disappear there could well be a cascade of disruption and extinction on animals and ecologies well beyond what we're aware of. The salmon will go away and yes earth will "survive" and I'm sure some another fish (or maybe just jellyfish) will fill the void. But the disruptive impacts will be utterly enormous.
jghn 3y ago
"but recent climate news has just gone from bad, to worse, to grim, to 'ah well, glad I didn't have kids and I'm dead in the 2060's'." I'm in my mid-40s and don't have kids. In the last 5-6 years I've gone from figuring it'll be ok-ish in my lifetime but will suck for the next generation, to legit wondering if life will be a complete hellscape by the time I'm a senior citizen. And more important, what if anything that means in terms of how I live the rest of my life. For instance do I live life to the fullest now? Or do I skimp and scrounge now to have some hope of surviving when things really go sideways. I hope that it's just doomerism on my part, but the fact that someone like myself is already putting mental energy towards this does say something in my opinion
- antisthenes 3y ago
  > For instance do I live life to the fullest now? Or do I skimp and scrounge now to have some hope of surviving when things really go sideways. As someone in the mid 30's who survived a bad accident with a TBI: it's never early enough to start living life to the fullest. A lot of things you might want to do now and are able to do, you might not in your 60s for health reasons. Do them now.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    It's a hard call to make. On the one hand, you can live in the moment and hope the government or your family will give you enough for a modestly comfortable if frugal lifestyle in your old age. Or you can save for a nice retirement lifestyle but end up with a terminal illness or sudden heart attack or stroke and not live to enjoy much of it. On top of that, the older you get the more and more people are scheming to drain you of your wealth. The Big Medical/Big Pharma complex, Long Term Care insurance scams, greedy relatives, everyone will be eyeing your retirement accounts.
    - antisthenes 3y ago
      > On the one hand, you can live in the moment and hope the government or your family will give you enough for a modestly comfortable if frugal lifestyle in your old age. Living in the moment does not equate to "have 0 savings" or "spend everything you make on experiences". There's a whole spectrum of middle ground between the extremes. I understand the argument you're trying to make, but viewing it through the lens of extremes is a baby mistake (maybe a consequence of polarized american politics?). As an adult, you should be able to find a middle ground that works for you.
nrdgrrrl 3y ago
[dead]
madaxe_again 3y ago
I don’t see complete collapse - but I do see the doom of billions. The security states that have been set up over the past decades, the increased hostility to migration, all of this is a prelude for what inevitably follows, when vast diaspora try to find a better life outside of their bankrupt, climate-change-ravaged countries. It’s going to get ugly. Being anything but wealthy in a sufficiently wealthy country is going to be uncomfortable, to say the least. There will be famine, fire, flood, pestilence, and all the rest - but unless we entirely lose our heads, which isn’t impossible but remains less than probable, humanity will go on, chastened and winnowed.
- wing-_-nuts 3y ago
  Yeah, it would be very hard to entirely wipe out human civilization in any form, even in the worst of scenarios; but I expect that the world as we know it today will seem like a lost paradise compared to the one I will leave when I die.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  Start thinking about how FUCKED the tech industry will get when your average person can barely afford the basics, let alone the ballooned price of garbage goods that an advertising economy requires to keep up the current system.
Thoeu388 3y ago
[flagged]
wombat-man 3y ago
Well, people don't want to cut back right now. Or at least not enough of us. So we're just going to have to wait for things to get bad enough. We'll either find a way to fix it, or not. But we're definitely not preventing the problem in a meaningful way.
apr 3y ago
Recent? This scare mongering is perennial. """ UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. """ https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 """ The following year that notable news magazine, Newsweek, April 28, 1975, under its Science section in the back, talks about the cooling world. There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may be bringing a drastic decline in food production throughout the world. """ https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CREC-2009-12-15/html/CREC-2009-12-15-pt1-PgH14948.htm https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CREC-2009-12-15/html/CRE...
- appplication 3y ago
  I’m going to have a hard time responding to this comment without breaking HN guidelines by being completely candid about how irresponsible, uninformed, and bad faith your comment seems to be. But let me go ahead and try: one anxiety-riddled UN official and a random Newsweek article do not represent, or supersede, scientific consensus. Your points are not only irrelevant, it’s not even clear to me why you felt the need to bring up either of these links as if they carry any weight at all, or are corroborated meaningfully by any members of the scientific community. If you care, Newsweek and Peter Gwynne, the author of your mentioned 1975 article, have both independently retracted and clarified their positions and recognize the nature and significance of modern climate change: https://www.newsweek.com/newsweek-rewind-debunking-global-cooling-252326 https://www.newsweek.com/newsweek-rewind-debunking-global-co...
  - apr 3y ago
    Nonsense. This debunking will be debunked in due time once the party line shifts and the narrative will need to be updated. I am old enough to have witnessed these wild gyrations in real time. According to you no links that deviate from the narrative carry any weight, but they were very on point, providing a bit of historical perspective and suggesting that ignoring these sensational headlines and cries about imminent death would be quite prudent. Greta had to remove her twit recently warning that humanity would die by 2023, quietly memory holing the message that used to be plastered all over the media. Irrelevant? How dare you!
tito 3y ago
We're on a quest to remove a billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide by 2030. Join us! https://airminers.org/ https://airminers.org/
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  This problem is not solvable through capitalism without strong regulatory burdens placed on emitting carbon, a solution that oil companies actively "seek" because they know it will never happen, and their marketing directors are on video saying exactly that.
willio58 3y ago
I’m in my mid 20s and I’ll be having kids despite the doomerism. I believe it will get worse, I honestly think we’ve experienced 1% of how bad it will get. But I also believe we will overcome the effects of climate change through strict regulation, funding, and scientific + engineering developments. I get the idea that you don’t want your kids to suffer. But what’s the alternative? Just let the climate change deniers populate the earth with little deniers who continue polluting? We need coming generations to help us solve this.
xwdv 3y ago
I was with you until the last couple words of your post.

ndsipa_pomu 3y ago

It's obviously a good idea to pursue new technologies if they can make a big difference, but I'm not convinced that putting sulfides into the stratosphere is a good idea as we don't have a sound understanding of what the effects would be. History demonstrates that there's often unintended consequences of introducing novel animals/chemicals/humans into environments so we should have some caution. The simplest solution is to stop digging for yet more fossil fuels to burn and to put our efforts into moving completely away from oil/coal/gas use. However, there's a lot of powerful money invested in continuing to make vast profits from fossil fuels and so there's going to be pushback from politicians that sit in their pockets.

ClumsyPilot 3y ago
> we don't have a sound understanding of what the effects would be Inaction is also a choice, and a terrible one.
- morelisp 3y ago
  Alternative hail mary solutions with fewer systemic downsides, like assassinating fossil fuel lobbyists, seems preferable to sulfides in the stratosphere for now.
  - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
    Hold on, are they before or after the billionaires for the guillotine?
    - c1sc0 3y ago
      Why not both?
      - gottorf 3y ago
        Surely proponents of the guillotine must know that eventually the revolution eats its own?
        morelisp 3y ago
        While unfortunate, it still seems like ultimately a net positive (in at least several major moral calculi) even for the smallest ratchet down of the projections?
        vkou 3y ago
        But the fear of revolution might make the surviving oligarchs in neighbouring polities think twice. 'Pour encourager les autres', and all that.
        ClumsyPilot 3y ago
        "eventually the revolution eats its own?" All major nafions, France, Britain and US, famously obtained their freedomz through bloody revolutions.
  - dotancohen 3y ago
    I am embarrassed to admit that I agree with this strategy. It's a real Trolley Problem, and our own children are currently in the path of the speeding trolley.
    - morelisp 3y ago
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  That sounds to me like a politician's logic: Something must be done, this is something, so we must do it. The first rule of finding yourself in a hole is to stop digging. Unfortunately, the world is continuing to pump CO2 into the atmosphere at an increasing rate - we should focus on stopping that before we try untested hail Mary's that are quite likely to cause even greater problems (e.g. disruption of ozone layer).
  - throwanem 3y ago
    "Stopping digging" is a coordination problem on the global scale, with no one to actually coordinate it or enforce penalties on defectors. Injecting sulfur into the stratosphere is a simple enough problem that many governments, and a few individuals, could be doing it within a few years. I agree that the first of those is preferable to the second; it's just that the first of those isn't going to happen.
    - SoftTalker 3y ago
      Well the penalties will be enforced, by Mother Nature.
      - throwanem 3y ago
        No. The environment will become (is becoming) less habitable for everyone, not only for those responsible.
        SoftTalker 3y ago
        I haven't set foot in a church in probably 30 years, except as a tourist for some that are architecturally notable.
    - matthewdgreen 3y ago
      Sulfur injection may be technically easy, and who knows: it might even work. But it won't happen as long as large parts of our society debate whether climate change is serious. This kind of geoengineering requires a level of political consensus and commitment that we don't have (and that has been actively been thwarted by political parties and emitting industries.)
- dotancohen 3y ago
  > Inaction is also a choice, and a terrible one. First, do no harm.
  - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    > First, do no harm. Ye, get the American police forces to adopt this motto
  - morelisp 3y ago
    ... is not really applicable in this case as the physician's left hand continues to stab the patient while the right hand dithers about appropriate treatment.
wing-_-nuts 3y ago
>I'm not convinced that putting sulfides into the stratosphere is a good idea as we don't have a sound understanding of what the effects would be. Neither am I, but everything I've read seems to indicate that SSI is cheap enough that many nation states could comfortably do it. That all but guarantees it will be done when places like china or india start losing tens of thousands of people to heat waves (See 'The ministry for the future' for a fictionalized account). We as a species are short sighted. We'll go for the quick fix and hope we can deal with the consequences later. The bad thing is we have no idea what those consequences will be or how to address them. It's completely uncharted territory.
jeffbee 3y ago
I thought climate researchers have a fairly good understanding of the outcomes of high-altitude aerosols, since the reason sea level rise is trending slightly below the central estimate of IPCC 1990 is volcanic activity. See: negative forcing from aerosols https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WGI_AR5_FigBox13.1-1.jpg https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WGI_AR5_FigB...

justinzollars 3y ago

3 Million years ago most of Florida was submerged by water. The ice has been melting for 20,000 years and the water has risen over 400 feet [1]. 1. https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/coastline-eastern-us-changesslowly https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/coastline-eastern-us-chang...

ClumsyPilot 3y ago

> all of their low rcp outcomes depend upon direct carbon capture, a technology we haven't really figured out yet, I was flabbergasted when I discovered this, absolutely none of the media mentions this. You can read right wing, left wing, looney wing- unless you are one of the 0.1% of people that read the report, no-one knows this. One you realise that the only 'hope' is a technology that will ,at best, just cost a colossal amount of money and needs to be deployed at the scale of the oil industry, the position changes.

SoftTalker 3y ago
When the primary persuasive technique is fear and the proposed solution is "send us all your money" then it's natural to be skeptical.
- vkou 3y ago
  You seem to be getting the IPCC confused with your neighbourhood church.

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago

> 'ah well, glad I didn't have kids and I'm dead in the 2060's'. My kids can't afford to have kids so that'll be how my line escapes.

AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
[dead]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

nancyhn 3y ago

Here, have a white pill: Last year, Two-thirds of Australia's Great Barrier Reef showed the largest amount of coral cover in 36 years. Corals have survived millions of years and are already bouncing back in other places as evidenced by the Great Barrier Reef, which we were all worried about not long ago.

api 3y ago
True. To quote George Carlin: “The Earth will be fine. We’re fucked.” The Earth has been much warmer than this in the past. It’s been much colder too. Life will adapt. The question is whether we will adapt, and more specifically whether our current civilization will adapt. I severely doubt that Homo sapiens would go extinct, but massive civilization collapse would kill billions. Then there’s what civilization might do short of full collapse. A moderate limited duration refugee crisis and some inflation has led to a full scale resurgence of fascism in Europe. Imagine if we see hundreds of millions of refugees from equatorial regions pouring into countries with better climates while we have crop failures and coastal cities getting flooded. Can our political systems remain sane and rational through that or will we succumb to demagogue cult leaders with easy “solutions?” The thing that’s likely to kill the most people from climate change is how people react to climate change. Remember that totalitarian schemes were a leading cause of death in the 20th century. Add up the death toll from Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot and scale to current population.
- Tiktaalik 3y ago
  yep. life will adapt, though it may not life that we recognize. As ocean warms say so long to Salmon on the northwest coast. Whether they will survive further north or simply go extinct altogether who can say. Departing along with the salmon will be things that us humans in the area enjoy, such as smoked salmon and salmon on the BBQ. In the grand scheme of things likely trivial, but enormous losses to our way of life, not to mention local economies. Greater than that are the impacts on local First Nations of whose cultures the salmon historically played a incredible role, which resulted in an outsized impact of the fish on their art, story and culture. Will be devastating when the fish disappears. The biggest unknown impacts will be on the greater forest ecology, as it has been noted that the bears eat the salmon and drag it into the woods, where it provides food for other animals and nourishes the forest in general. As the salmon disappear there could well be a cascade of disruption and extinction on animals and ecologies well beyond what we're aware of. The salmon will go away and yes earth will "survive" and I'm sure some another fish (or maybe just jellyfish) will fill the void. But the disruptive impacts will be utterly enormous.

jghn 3y ago

"but recent climate news has just gone from bad, to worse, to grim, to 'ah well, glad I didn't have kids and I'm dead in the 2060's'." I'm in my mid-40s and don't have kids. In the last 5-6 years I've gone from figuring it'll be ok-ish in my lifetime but will suck for the next generation, to legit wondering if life will be a complete hellscape by the time I'm a senior citizen. And more important, what if anything that means in terms of how I live the rest of my life. For instance do I live life to the fullest now? Or do I skimp and scrounge now to have some hope of surviving when things really go sideways. I hope that it's just doomerism on my part, but the fact that someone like myself is already putting mental energy towards this does say something in my opinion

antisthenes 3y ago
> For instance do I live life to the fullest now? Or do I skimp and scrounge now to have some hope of surviving when things really go sideways. As someone in the mid 30's who survived a bad accident with a TBI: it's never early enough to start living life to the fullest. A lot of things you might want to do now and are able to do, you might not in your 60s for health reasons. Do them now.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  It's a hard call to make. On the one hand, you can live in the moment and hope the government or your family will give you enough for a modestly comfortable if frugal lifestyle in your old age. Or you can save for a nice retirement lifestyle but end up with a terminal illness or sudden heart attack or stroke and not live to enjoy much of it. On top of that, the older you get the more and more people are scheming to drain you of your wealth. The Big Medical/Big Pharma complex, Long Term Care insurance scams, greedy relatives, everyone will be eyeing your retirement accounts.
  - antisthenes 3y ago
    > On the one hand, you can live in the moment and hope the government or your family will give you enough for a modestly comfortable if frugal lifestyle in your old age. Living in the moment does not equate to "have 0 savings" or "spend everything you make on experiences". There's a whole spectrum of middle ground between the extremes. I understand the argument you're trying to make, but viewing it through the lens of extremes is a baby mistake (maybe a consequence of polarized american politics?). As an adult, you should be able to find a middle ground that works for you.

nrdgrrrl 3y ago

[dead]

madaxe_again 3y ago

I don’t see complete collapse - but I do see the doom of billions. The security states that have been set up over the past decades, the increased hostility to migration, all of this is a prelude for what inevitably follows, when vast diaspora try to find a better life outside of their bankrupt, climate-change-ravaged countries. It’s going to get ugly. Being anything but wealthy in a sufficiently wealthy country is going to be uncomfortable, to say the least. There will be famine, fire, flood, pestilence, and all the rest - but unless we entirely lose our heads, which isn’t impossible but remains less than probable, humanity will go on, chastened and winnowed.

wing-_-nuts 3y ago
Yeah, it would be very hard to entirely wipe out human civilization in any form, even in the worst of scenarios; but I expect that the world as we know it today will seem like a lost paradise compared to the one I will leave when I die.
mrguyorama 3y ago
Start thinking about how FUCKED the tech industry will get when your average person can barely afford the basics, let alone the ballooned price of garbage goods that an advertising economy requires to keep up the current system.

Thoeu388 3y ago

[flagged]

wombat-man 3y ago

Well, people don't want to cut back right now. Or at least not enough of us. So we're just going to have to wait for things to get bad enough. We'll either find a way to fix it, or not. But we're definitely not preventing the problem in a meaningful way.

apr 3y ago

Recent? This scare mongering is perennial. """ UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. """ https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 """ The following year that notable news magazine, Newsweek, April 28, 1975, under its Science section in the back, talks about the cooling world. There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may be bringing a drastic decline in food production throughout the world. """ https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CREC-2009-12-15/html/CREC-2009-12-15-pt1-PgH14948.htm https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CREC-2009-12-15/html/CRE...

appplication 3y ago
I’m going to have a hard time responding to this comment without breaking HN guidelines by being completely candid about how irresponsible, uninformed, and bad faith your comment seems to be. But let me go ahead and try: one anxiety-riddled UN official and a random Newsweek article do not represent, or supersede, scientific consensus. Your points are not only irrelevant, it’s not even clear to me why you felt the need to bring up either of these links as if they carry any weight at all, or are corroborated meaningfully by any members of the scientific community. If you care, Newsweek and Peter Gwynne, the author of your mentioned 1975 article, have both independently retracted and clarified their positions and recognize the nature and significance of modern climate change: https://www.newsweek.com/newsweek-rewind-debunking-global-cooling-252326 https://www.newsweek.com/newsweek-rewind-debunking-global-co...
- apr 3y ago
  Nonsense. This debunking will be debunked in due time once the party line shifts and the narrative will need to be updated. I am old enough to have witnessed these wild gyrations in real time. According to you no links that deviate from the narrative carry any weight, but they were very on point, providing a bit of historical perspective and suggesting that ignoring these sensational headlines and cries about imminent death would be quite prudent. Greta had to remove her twit recently warning that humanity would die by 2023, quietly memory holing the message that used to be plastered all over the media. Irrelevant? How dare you!

tito 3y ago

We're on a quest to remove a billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide by 2030. Join us! https://airminers.org/ https://airminers.org/

mrguyorama 3y ago
This problem is not solvable through capitalism without strong regulatory burdens placed on emitting carbon, a solution that oil companies actively "seek" because they know it will never happen, and their marketing directors are on video saying exactly that.

willio58 3y ago

I’m in my mid 20s and I’ll be having kids despite the doomerism. I believe it will get worse, I honestly think we’ve experienced 1% of how bad it will get. But I also believe we will overcome the effects of climate change through strict regulation, funding, and scientific + engineering developments. I get the idea that you don’t want your kids to suffer. But what’s the alternative? Just let the climate change deniers populate the earth with little deniers who continue polluting? We need coming generations to help us solve this.

xwdv 3y ago

I was with you until the last couple words of your post.