I have to say when I took an extended layover in Doah it gave me a different sense of urgency about climate change. It was just oppressive to be outside, even during the night and they air-condition their open air markets. It got me thinking that there are a lot of places like this which are probably on the edge, and where a few degrees of warming will make them simply uninhabitable to humans. It would be a strange thing to have "hot zones" like we have arctic regions where it's not possible to go without special equipment.
Now is the time to buy a flat-ish block of land in Alaska or Tasmania that's a little back from the waters edge.
Also make sure you don't have too many tree's too close to where you want to build your doomsday cabin. :)
Really you don't be between the tropics of Cancer of Capricorn. in the future
When I think about such scenarios I can't help thinking that there might not be any social constructs left to enforce ownership of land :/.
When I was a teen I was sure we were headed for a bad future if we didn't act but I always thought it'd come after I am dead. Now I am scared I am going to be old and too frail to manage when life on earth will turn sour.
edit: maybe it's time we put out a a Pioneer 10 plate with messages of warning about our own failures. One we send to space, another one we leave on earth.
State enforced private land ownership is one of the key economic fundamentals of a prosperous society.
Historically societies with private land ownership have been wealthier and more inclusive than without (the alternative has been state ownership of all land).
Do you have any grounds why you would want it abolished?
> Historically societies with private land ownership have been wealthier and more inclusive than without (the alternative has been state ownership of all land).
Am I correct to assume you include communist and feudal regimes ?
Well, in Feudal system you don't really own the land. You can tax the peasants farming it in exchange for military services for the state. But for example you can't parcel it to small farms and sell those for their owners to keep, or anything like that. You can't use the land as your own capital, with all the financial potential of an asset.
I'd love to hear counterexamples, but that's the general gist of it in the large scale I think.
Land ownership is not a silver bullet but in general smart parcelling policies have made nations wealthier. So basically, most wealthy states today at some point in their history have issued a parcelling policy that has distributed land ownership among farms. This has made the economic basis more vibrant and more durable. And, probably also affected the evolution of their political institutions to be more inclusive.
How do you imagine that working in practice? I mean I'm not saying the current structure is perfect, but if everyone had equal claim to land it seems like land usage disputes would just end up being resolved through violence
Just a few years ago, the weekend before May Day, a lawyer was stopped by the police here in Panama. The police searched through their database and found the lawyer had been accused of "economic terrorism." The lawyer was immediately put in jail. He worked pro bono defending the rights of informal settlers who have lived for years in vast areas of land owned by a very rich family. Given the amount of time these people have lived there, some argue they should at least be allowed to pay water and electricity. Instead, the government sends riot police to pull them out of their homes. The lawyer was released a few days later. This is only the most recent case that comes to my mind here in my country. I don't think it is that different in the rest of the world. Ownership of land is tied to violence.
Actually I just remembered a more recent case. After a very rich old lady showed up in TV last year explaining to people how access to drinking water is not a human right, videos came out on social media showing bulldozers destroying orchards in one of the Pearl Islands. They've been doing it since at least 2012. The rich lady's family wants to build some nice hotels there.
Maybe technically there’s a threat of government violence in the background, but that’s pretty far from most people’s consciousness in developed countries.
Can you propose a different model for property ownership which doesn’t require the individual to invest more resources in physical security?
I'm not sure about "most developed countries" but there is still very strong memory of past violence in Great Britain. Some of the tail end of it still bubbling.
On another tack, there are plenty of homeless people in the UK. Can you imagine what would happen to them if they broke into expensive uninhabited properties in London? There would be violence.
I have no idea of alternatives, I was just pointing out the origin of a lot of current land ownership.
The problem in this case is not land ownership but exclusive political and / or economic system which rigs the game against a certain percentage of a population on all fronts.
If the model establishes a system where the people who are prepared to use the most violence end up with the land, and a couple of generations their descendants still have the land, then IMHO the model is still in play.
You could also argue that as the ownership is codified in laws and the state monopoly on violence keeps the oppressed in check, that threat of violence continues.
"If the model establishes a system where the people who are prepared to use the most violence end up with the land, and a couple of generations their descendants still have the land, then IMHO the model is still in play."
This is not about land ownership. Alone. You are talking about exclusive political and economic systems. In an exclusive system it's not just the ownership of land that is broken - you will find all economic activity is rigged against some segment of the society. Most well to do states are have inclusive political and and economic systems. In these societies land ownership is based on land registration and enforceable contract law - not entitlement of birth and violence.
I warmly recommend Daron Acemoglu's "Why nations fail" as it explains this topic far better than I ever could in a few sentences.
I hope private ownership will remain the same, given the fact that climate change is gradual enough to keep the status quo (which is also a huge downside that prevents humanity in taking coordinate and efficient actions against it)
Alaska might end up seasonally uninhabitable -- they have periods of the year where the sun doesn't set, with increased greenhouse gases in the area it could become intensely hot for periods of the year. Combine that with periodic ozone holes that appear over arctic areas and it might be just as nasty as areas we worry over today...
Areas near large bodies of stable fresh water are likely going to be livable for the longest periods as the planet rapidly shifts away from what we humans need.
I already can't bear summer. I don't have AC, as most people don't have it here in Switzerland. Even offices tend to not have them.
There are 1 to 2 months a year where my productivity sinks, enjoyment of life plummets and I just want it all to be over.
I also barely see any snow anymore, if I don't hike in the mountains. I love snow.
The change is real and I hate it. Couldn't it be global cooling instead of warming? Damn physics.
I moved to Germany in 2010 and experienced a winter for the very first time. I remember having to wear “pants under my pants” (thermal layer), I bought a thick wool coat, I wore scarves for the first time in my life. (I grew up in Southern California.) I remember one day looking out my window and seeing it start to snow and I could see the snow build up higher and higher on all the bicycle seats outside my window. I remember coming back indoors and how everyone just knew to instinctively stomp their feet outside the door and again inside on the mats, to knock out whatever bits of snow was stuck on shoes. I remember thinking how every time I walked out the door I had to suit up properly like I was gearing up for battle in a video game. This happened again the next year and I slowly got used to it and none of that routine stood out to me anymore.
What stood out though was a few years back I remember thinking one day “where’s the winter?” because the weather was just cool but not cold, and snow amounted to just a few mm if it even stuck around.
Two years ago I finally couldn’t deal with it anymore and bought a portable AC unit. It made living in my flat bearable and was something for me to look forward to at the end of the day since my office wasn’t air conditioned.
My energy bill is higher now in the summers and I feel bad for contributing to climate change, but without the AC I just can not live, merely survive.
And yet last year in July Germany observed record-setting cold. The summer in Eastern Europe had been very cold from July on.
The moderate climate of Western Europe is changing probably due to changing jetstream (which is probably result of cooling patch in Atlantic Ocean which is probably the result of melting glaciers in Greenland). But paradoxically what makes West Europe summers hotter makes Eastern Europe cooler in summer.
Moving from London to Minsk and from Paris to Smolensk might seem like a cool idea for summer.
If the global temperature increases enough, the melting ice in Greenland (and probably elsewhere) would dump a lot of freshwater into the Atlantic. This would likely interrupt the thermohaline circulation of the oceans, which brings warmth from the equator to western Europe.
Weird interactions like this are why activists largely switched from "global warming" to "global climate change" - both exist, but one leads to the other and they don't refer to the same thing.
Electricity is pricey here, and it can be tough to negotiate with your landlord to take the window out and properly secure an ac unit.
Besides, offices, shopping malls, gorvernment buildings... none of them usually have ac.
I hate walking in my town‘s Rathaus it’s always so hot and stuffy in there. I don’t know how the people working there real with it all summer long. And it’s a brand new building too.
You don't understand Switzerland. More people rent in Switzerland than elsewhere. Switzerland also has an oceanic climate and usually doesn't have hot summers. AC units aren't a thing in Switzerland, however this is changing slowly.
Lots of buildings in Europe are somewhat old and have controls over what you can or can't do with them (I live in England in a property that was built in 1820 and is gradeII listed, which means we're restricted on the kind of work we can do without getting permissions). The age of the buildings also means that AC is harder to install (getting ducting installed can be really difficult) and is less efficient. I have single-pane sash windows with large gaps.
In England there are 22m households. Domestic heating is a significant source of CO2. Adding aircon on top would be pretty concerning.
There's a lot of poor quality housing built in the 1970s and 1980s that should be knocked down and rebuilt, and if we did that we could have much better insulation, and shutters over windows, and so on. But this is hard to do.
I’m grateful AC are frowned upon in Europe. Putting a band-aid by consuming even more energy is insane in large scale, with the perverse effect of hiding the problem and delaying awareness.
Heating freezing temperatures to livable takes more energy than air conditioning. Logically, we should frown upon living in cold places with extended winter more than we frown upon living in places that require air conditioning.
Sure, I‘m not debating AC vs Heating, but that installing AC alone in the majority of the millions of European homes that don’t have it because it’s starting to get too hot in the summer is not only not a solution to the general problem but can have perverse short term effects. My point about being grateful is that I hope it’ll push more awareness and starting action now, compared to the US where prevalent AC might hide the issue longer. But that’s just a thought.
Heating does as well. Perhaps the Swiss should forgo that too. They are some of the richest people on Earth, having benefited more than most from the fossil fuel age.
Remember, Russian oil oligarchs, Saudi oil barons, and all other anonymous nasty fossil fuel producers have parked their money in Switzerland for a very long time.
If this helps: Switzerland being away from oceans is early with warming. What you are experiencing now is in NYC or the Bay still 5 to 10 years off. Being early does give you a better chance to adapt, and the rest of the world will catch up.
Color me optimistic, but we'll learn to survive and adapt. Humans in temperate climates (Chicago, Toronto, etc.) already live in places where it's too cold to survive outside for long in winter. Just replace heaters with ACs in this case.
Having lived both in the extreme heat of South Asia and the extreme cold of the Canada, cold is technically a lot easier to deal with physically. Wearing the right clothes will let you survive indefinitely in temperatures as low as -10C. You are also not in danger of dehydration. Note that -10C is -30-35C away from comfortable temperature (20-25C).
If you just go +20C from comfortable temperature, no amount of clothing will help you survive for very long out in the open. You also have to drink copious amounts of water and salts to avoid dehydrating to death.
Secondly, heating up a closed space is a lot cheaper than cooling it down. Heating can always be done by burning fuel, but cooling greater than 5C requires heat pumps.
The economics and practicalities of heat and cold adaptions are completely different.
Fair point, though we are very far away from people dressing for Antarctica while they sit on the couch watching Netflix.
You are also leaving snow and ice out of it. There are economics and externalities of moving tons of solid matter around with relatively low latency (people have to work, trucks have to ship). There are also the safety implications and costs associated. Traffic and accident rates do not go up because the precipitation was unexpectedly ten degrees warmer.
They aren't equally difficult problems. From a thermodynamic perspective, all processes in your environment deteriorate into either waste heat, or is moved outside your environment with work.Low-cost heating is easily available, whereas cooling can occur by moving heat to another location.
So for heating, you can just max out on insulation, decrease your surface area to volume ratio, and the waste heat from interior equipment will be more then enough to provide 'free' heating.
If you outdoor temperature is high (so natural ventilation doesn't do anything), there really isn't much we can do other than try and find higher and higher efficiency heat pumps to cycle out the heat, but even then you're just dumping the heat outside which creates its own issues. We can reflect/control short/long-wave radiation, but the sensible heat from the environment is a problem. Not an impossible problem, but requires more sophistication to resolve.
The narrative of combating global warming / climate change is ineffective and it misses the point. The Earth can quite naturally be inhospitable to human life. The narrative needs to be one of terraforming our own planet.
The person performing the forming would essentially be cleaning up the polution of everyone else. Terraforming would require global agreement and adherence to a highly capital-intensive enterprise. This is not unlike the discussions about limiting global warming, which are not a frank success.
We currently have no means of cleaning up that is more efficient ie less costly) than the methods we gave for limiting pollution. And it is already impossible to get people to accept to pay those costs.
That is not to say that it should not be researched. But to propose it as an alternative is not helpful in the current political context. It is akin to saying "yea but we'll win the lottery anyway" when other people are trying to get the community to accept a balancing of the budget.
> But to propose it as an alternative is not helpful in the current political context
Suggesting that we should keep silent about a way of solving the problem, so that other people don't get "ideas", is even less helpful in any context, as you lose your credibility in the eyes of people whom you are trying to convince.
> essentially be cleaning up the pollution of everyone else. Terraforming would require global agreement and adherence to a highly capital-intensive enterprise
That would be true if we were talking about a toxic substance, CO2 is not a pollutant, and there are ways to use it: for instance by terraforming deserts into living ecosystems that would use the extra CO2. And this includes not only deserts like sahara, but also vast areas of ocean devoid of life because of currents not lifting nutrients from the bottom of the sea.
People do not accept to pay costs for "limiting pollution" because they are not convinced that proposed solutions can work with anywhere reasonable cost. And for that we need not to simply talk everyone into accepting unviable solution out of fear, but to propose something that works and provides additional benefits. Terraforming deserts and controlling the weather is one such solution, which gets unfairly dismissed and downvoted.
It does not matter if it is toxic or not. It's a chemical byproduct that we don't want in the atmosphere. That means it's a pollutant.
Sure. Terra forming works. Conceptually. If you can manage to build a rainforest in the desert, that will fix some co2. That is not the issue. The issue is: how to build a rainforest in the desert. Technically, and economically.
Have you considered the amount of water you'd need? The irrigation system required for that? Where would the water come from? For reference, there is already a lot of geopolitics over water supply in the middle east. Have you considered how poor the soil is? How much work it would be to enrich that soil? We are already raising alarm bells regarding our phosphate stock. How would you keep the ecosystem in balance? If you can't you don't need an army of people to maintain it.
Most importantly, it would only buy you time. It would fix some of the co2 in trees. But if we continue to burn oil, we'll keep adding co2 to the atmosphere. Every barrel of oil is 430 kilos of co2. That's a lot of tree for one barrel.
And you've only fixed it temporarily. If at any time your artificial forest collapses (this being your first terra forming attempt), your trees decompose and release the co2.
Again. I'm not saying that any option should be off the table. But I do not think it benefits the already complicated debates, if we present theoretical scenarios as solutions.
You do not build a rainforest in a desert, you build a densely populated region with lots of agricultural land and some forests, so that people living there take care of enriching the soil and making sure that nothing collapses.
To do that we need to learn how to control the weather. There are multiple possible ways, like using mirrors in space, using large number of aerostats to change reflectivity, and to guide clouds to the place we need, solar updraft towers to inject dust from lower layers of the atmosphere into higher layers to form clouds, etc. Many of these are may not work, and many won't be cheap, but they will give us more control over the environment and will enable more people to live.
Fully agree with you that if we do nothing, we're heading for a world of pain. But I never said we should do nothing.
In fact I pointed out we already have other options. Real ones, today, that we know will work. Eat less meat. Drive less and smaller cars. Use less packaging, clothing, etc. Build smaller and better houses, that need less air-conditioning and heating. Put a price on CO2 and let the market figure it out.
But no-one likes them. So sure, if we keep sticking our heads in the sand we're heading for megadeaths. Sure, it would be nice if technology could help us get out of this mess without sacrificing our way of life.
But the technology does not exist today. And certainly not one that has a better chance of being accepted than the other measures I've already listed.
By changing the narrative all kinds of things become possible. We see today that society can eat trillions in economic losses to save people from a virus. We can replicate this communication structure to deal with longer-term threats to the survival of our species. It is all about building up the political momentum that gets us a moonshot.
Once we are pouring resources into this project perceptions on what is acceptable energy use will also change. People will see society rowing the boat in one direction, and outliers rowing in the wrong direction (excessive emission) will be scorned.
Changing the narrative to terraforming has the potential to unite mankind, while the climate change narrative has been divisive as pollution becomes a commodity to barter for. With enough cleverness in how the idea is presented the money allotted national defense can be re-purposed for climate defense. The 'creating jobs' narrative can also be utilized. - We just need to start talking in this way that I'm prototyping here until it catches on.
>These conditions, nearing or beyond prolonged human physiological tolerance, have mostly occurred only for 1- to 2-hours’ duration (fig. S2). They are concentrated in South Asia, the coastal Middle East, and coastal southwest North America, in close proximity to extraordinarily high SSTs and intense continental heat that together favor the occurrence of extreme humid heat (2, 14).
Future Indian geopolitics is certainly going to be interesting. Would like to see these hotspots mapped for the next 20-30 years to highlight the scope of the situation. Will certain areas become perennially uninhabitable? Is it a matter of having AC / low humidity shelters that people flock to a couple hours a day during seasonal peaks? Estimates on climate refugees and migration patterns etc. I suspect it's going to be onerous but workable. There's low energy dehumidifying HVAC solutions that might be attainable even in poorer communities. Ultimately, petro rich countries like middle East and North America is going to be fine and AC through the solution if they have to, aggravating the problem for everyone else. Regardless, it's a problem worth mitigating and acclimatizing to, 85% of the world is seeking to develop and will do so via the most cost-efficient (currently dirty) methods possible. IMO, accommodating for this is a greater moral imperative that's ultimately incompatible with aggregate reduction in emissions - that was never workable. Developed countries should still strive to improve efficient and innovate to flatten the environmental cost curve per unit of quality of improvement, and modify their life styles so that rampant consumptive culture is not the aspired endpoint. But that's even harder said then done because capitalism.
Many parts of South Asia already have home-grown solutions to battle the heat. The rise of cheap construction without consideration for local climate conditions have made them less prevalent.
For example, in Jaipur, traditional stepwells dug under houses absorb a lot of the mid-day summer heat. With some engineering, these can be scaled up to cool entire neighborhoods with energy efficient geothermal heat pumps [1].
It's easy to be all doom and gloom about climate change. But some mitigations are staring at us in the face. Others will take a while to become usable/cheap enough to be deployed at scale.
It really depends on if prospective climate change is something that has prior solutions that can be adapted for modern land use and urban demands. There's always been historically appropriate architectural typologies to manage regional climate, but also massive enough climate shifts that cause entire regions to be abandoned. Typically it's water shortage, which can be a zero-sum problem, India/Pakistan, Egypt/Ethiopia, China and all of Mekong etc. But yeah, I think inhospitable heat and humidity in this study is largely... technically and economically solvable with building interventions, both historic and speculative. There's already many societies that's dependent on conditioned air at scale, but very few on desalinating water at scale.
Honestly, the entire urban belt from Islamabad to Delhi is one of the densest parts of the world, and further urbanizing as we speak. I think it will be the hardest hit, with the amount of concrete that is being poured and cars bought without regards to the local climate.
Reminds me of the infographic "over half the world lives in this circle", the circle containing countries in the region of China, India and ASEAN. All on or near equator. All countries in a position to develop rapidly short-term. India/Bangladesh/Pakistan/continental ASEAN corridors are prime waterwars candidates. The only saving grace of island ASEAN is they're geographically constrained from massive conflict and migration. There's a lot of zero-sum resource competition in the area which doesn't bode well.
Temperatures have been rising even further north. I'm near the 47th parallel and there was practically no winter this year. Used to have -20 degC with lots of snow, but alas. Last year's highs were above 40 degC for weeks - unimaginable 20 years ago, and rare 10 years ago.
Everyone's getting air conditioners now. For some unexplainable reasons, people still use dark colored roofs - it's time that everyone painted them white or silver, because those A/Cs will just make everything worse in the long term.
Most people seem to think it's a temporary thing. They'll believe it until it becomes the new normal I guess.
Well it is a temporary thing, the rate of change is still increasing. We'll reach the new normal a number of decades after we stop burning fossil fuel.
That's just not going to happen by any measure. Deposits might become more and more expensive to tap into, but we're not just going to run out. We need to stop using them, not hope that we'll just stop once they are out - they simply won't be.
That is what everyone means when they say "run out of oil". Read it as "run out of oil worth extracting". We're obviously not going to spend 2 TJ of energy to extract oil that contains 1 TJ of energy.
This assumes we use the oil purely due to its energy content. Which is true in some sense or the other, but unless you can replace all uses of oil derivatives with either synthetic sources (that don't cost significantly more energy to create than the oil extraction would) or something different altogether (e.g. in the "producing electricity" use case).
And even then, who knows whether dumping spare electricity into oil wells instead of e.g. batteries or pumped storage hydroelectricity might remain profitable.
My point is, it's not necessarily that obvious, and we better not wait for people to stop running out of ideas to make a profit on fossil fuels.
There are people willing to extract despite negative energy efficiency, especially in underdeveloped parts of the world. Societal development requires a particular amount of energy expenditure per capita to progress.
Climate related reports are getting scarier by the day. I am scared. Really scared. Everyone should be.
If I may, let me make a little plea.
May I remind everyone that we are not a mere spectators of the show. We are active participants. We can influence things. We as in you and I, HN crowd. It may not seem like it, but an average HN reader has a non-trivial amount of influence. And not only in financial sense. Please, use it. I used to urge people to please go and do something about climate. I think the phrasing has to change now. Please! Go out and do everything you possibly can to fight climate change. The future of humanity is in your hands.
The thing is, I'm completely oversatured with being scared. This has lead to massive mental issues in the last few years, because everything around us is apocalyptic, even though we live in unimaginable luxury compared to 99.9999% of the rest of the time when humanity existed. I just....can't anymore.
>> The future of humanity is in your hands.
No, it isn't. At least it doesn't feel like it. Impact of my actions is zero. The only way that a "future of humanity is in my hands" is by either deciding to not have kids, or even better, just killing myself and immediately reducing all my output to zero. Still, on a global scale that amounts to nothing.
Watched a good video about this recently - even if all of United Kingdom was wiped off the map and just disappeared overnight, China and US would make up for the reduced polution in about 8 weeks, as both countries emit more and more by the day. And you're telling me the future is in my hands? Right.
The figure I saw quoted is an estimated yearly reduction due to global lockdown of around 5% for CO2 emissions where about 7.5% yearly reduction is needed.
This isn't necessarily a cause for doom and gloom but it does show we need to move the focus back to transport, energy generation, etc and away from personal responsibility which on its own has minor benefits.
Incredible how we react when we might die in 2 weeks instead of 50 years...
But the lockdown also shows the problems of shutting down the economy; in developing nations day wagers are starving and dying. In developed nations frothing-in-the-mouth idiots are protesting with their semi-auto weapons.
May be from reading too many scare-mongering alarmist articles like the one in OP where the usual quantitative terms that are supposed to be present in the abstract are replaced with "much lower", "serious health and productivity impacts", "dangerously high", "serious challenge", etc.
I understand what you're saying about the hyperbole, but we're also at the point where there are multiple, overlapping problems of a very serious nature to a species with 7.8 billion beings sharing a planet. The hyperbole isn't useful, but the larger idea that the time to act IS NOW shouldn't be diminished.
> It may not seem like it, but an average HN reader has a non-trivial amount of influence. And not only in financial sense. Please, use it.
What do you mean by a 'non-trivial amount of influence'? Sure, we can ask our employers to enforce climate-friendly practices and talk to friends and family, but even protesting companies that contribute the most to pollution doesn't provide much relief as they either ignore the protests or make small changes that give them positive PR and make the less active people happy to stop trying.
What steps can a random person take to actually help the planet? I'm asking this without a shred of irony or doom and gloom, I legitimately would be happy to help stop the crisis but the only thing I can think of is planting dozens of trees every year.
If you own a house in the US, you can very likely cut your energy use at least in half even without lifestyle changes. Cut back air travel and switch from a gas powered vehicle to an alternative that works for you.
A lot of what needs to happen, IMO, is culture change. Doing all of the things you mentioned is only a drop in the bucket, but one person putting in that effort normalizes it. That makes other people feel more comfortable and motivated to do the same. It might not feel like much, but it's definitely better than nothing.
Also, if you're in tech and you have the luxury of changing jobs, there are companies doing good work on climate change. Electric vehicles, solar power, making production and supply chains more efficient, etc. We can make it easy/cheaper/more pleasant for people/corporations/governments to make the right choices.
Well, you know, so long as we're fighting about all these other things it's hard to organize the kind of cooperation needed to focus on climate change effectively. We really need to resolve these other differences somehow.
This is a statement about your mental health, not one about reality. Barring a badly-timed war, the global standard of living in 2100 will be much better than today’s. Even if global warming causes 10% less increase in GDP, as some modeling conservatively predicts.
If you want something to freak out about, I’d recommend nuclear war, the next AIDS-like virus, drone terrorism, and the casual destruction of human prosperity caused by housing policies.
The cost of gene synthesis is roughly 20 years behind gene sequencing [0]. Extrapolated, by 2040, arbitrarily modifying your offspring will represent a trivial fraction (~0.5%) of the total cost of starting a family.
Follow Moore’s law (considering lower costs rather than boosted performance) and assuming the Kurzweil estimate for full brain emulation, then by 2047, uploaded minds would be cheaper than the food eaten by subsistence farmers. [1]
The first thing most people suggest when they hear about 3D printers is printing another 3D printer. It is definitely possible because that’s what every living cell does; while nobody knows how to do this now, if we can make it happen with the rocks of Mercury, it only takes four decades to build a Dyson swarm. [2]
The questions are, what happens first, and how does humanity collectively react to that?
May I suggest you read the IPCC report? 2100 with business as usual scenarios looks like at least one billion humans with an urgent need to relocate. If you have a better model please show your work.
I was referring to either this one: https://www.nber.org/papers/w26167 or some other with similar scale of estimates, using what I presume to be mainstream predictions of temperature growth.
Edit: Also, you can easily tell without looking that the idea billions would have to relocate is a complete joke. The reason is, let’s suppose global warming makes a region unfarmable. Well, even if it were farmable, automation in the 3rd world will move people out of farming anyway. So they’d have to be doing other work, trading for food, no matter what happens.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say."
I'd never refuse to tell you, or anybody, anything you sincerely want to know about how to use HN as intended. You do have a long history of breaking the rules egregiously with many accounts, and it isn't the best use of resources to explain the same things over and over in such cases. If you'd like to change, though, that would be quite different and we'd be happy to help.
Most of these models will be proven inaccurate. If there’s anything “climate scientists” have demonstrated over the past 100 years or so, it’s that they have little to no understanding of the global climate. Have any of their “predictions” aged well?
No, but only in the sense that they've tended to be too conservative and to understate the degree and pace of change.
And just to be clear, the paper linked to is a review of weather station data which finds that extreme heat & humidity conditions are occurring sooner and more frequently than models predicted.
The only options available for dealing with misinformed conspiracy theorists are downvoting, flagging, ignoring and rebuttal. The first three are interpreted as validation. It sucks, but that's the reality.
You forget about moderation. HN has pretty active moderators who generally come down hard on trolls and bad faith arguments.
The troll may see it as validation when their posts are struck down, but that only matters to them, and since they're struck down and banned, it doesn't matter to anyone else.
For some cases, I agree that a well-pointed rebuttal can be effective, not to convince the troll, but rather to inform the audience. You cannot convince the troll, but you can show the audience how his arguments are flawed and false.
There is a balance, because you also risk giving his posts more attention, which is counterproductive. If possible, take the arguments to a place where the people who are already sympathetic to your arguments are in the majority. Have the discussion on your home turf, don't discuss in forums where the troll has the majority.
And obviously know when to disengage. Arguing with a pure bad faith troll is utterly pointless, they'll just keeping spinning bullshit while you try to seat down their nonsense. The takes a lot of effort on your part and absolutely none on theirs. In the process, they get to air even more of their nonsense to an audience.
Facts are precise and specific, lies are random, unlimited and don't have to have any connection to truth or reality.
If you think it's incompetence, and you want to correct it, then you need to point to specific points that validate your opinion vs the published opinion of NASA. It's only a touchy subject if you don't have the data to back it up.
That is one vintage denialist post. I guess once the evidence is all around one can only resort to denying the evidence. Love your usage of "the vast majority". It's the denial that has been disproven
