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"...it should be noted that the Earth has been here before and come back from it at the end of the last ice age when sea levels rapidly rose 400 feet and drowned all of Earth's reefs at the time."

No one is seriously arguing that the earth is going to be literally destroyed, despite what anti-science Republicans would lead you to believe.

People are saying "the Earth that we know, love, have co-evolved with will be destroyed, and the assumptions that we built our cities, countries, and societies around will be turned on their heads. This will be replaced with a harsh world with wild extremes, natural disasters in places that aren't built for them, and more intense natural disasters in places that might be used to current, weaker ones.

Perpetuating this willful misinterpretation, even by acknowledging it, is a disservice to the future.




Please don't take HN threads further into political flamewar. It only leads to predictable places and doesn't help.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


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> Insulting half of the political structure isn't going to help anything

Bear in mind that having 'half of the political structure' maintaining prescientific views re our planet's climate systems has become quite eccentric in 2019 - the US and Australia being the worst offenders. Most of the rest of the world has moved on from outright primitivism to mere obfuscation. Which is some kind of progress, but not enough. Anyway, at this stage the US far right Republican party is now enough of a worldwide laughing stock for insults to potentially be worthwhile. At some point there's a chance that half the US citizenry may come to see themselves reflected back as obscurantist and backward.

> Climate change isn't a new phenomenon. The earth wasn't this magical garden of eden with perfect climate just for us

No, but agricultural civilisation emerged from a background of a relatively stable climate. The range of possible near-term consequences of our current GHG gas emissions include (at scary probabilities, rising as new research comes in) ones that all but eliminate large scale agriculture. This has not been faced in the last 10k years, not with a 7-12 billion population, and not with the additional insults of soil and fresh water loss, habitat destruction, insect population collapses etc. Most ecological scientists are pretty terrified of what's coming at us at this point.




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