And when exactly will it become an actual problem in the sense that it actually affects anyone's life? 1000 years? 10000 years? Like global warming is going to suddenly show its teeth on some random day and we'll all be sorry. You sound like someone preaching the coming rapture, thinking people are crazy for rolling their eyes and continuing on with their lives.
Literally right now there's a bunch of island nations that will probably not exist in 30 years. Many coastal cities are getting worse floods every year, having to invest billions in measures to protect themselves.
Every drought means conflict, they mean war, refugees and instability. Sure, the first world will be shielded from the worst for some time, but this isn't a Hollywood movie, the pressure will keep increasing every year exposing every flaw in the system.
Corona has shown that our world does not deal well with pressure and you can't make a vaccine for food insecurity.
So if it's not your problem it's not a problem at all?
Nth order effects will make it your problem pretty quickly.
Many are blind to exponentially growing phenomena.
One good example is that a several degree increase can melt the Siberian ice and release methane stores equivalent to 100 years of maximal human CO2 footprint. That's already a massive nth order effect.
Like I said, I just don't really care and it's not going to affect my life. I'm all for improving technology and efficiency and believe that it will never truly be a life threatening issue and it's foolish to sit around and be afraid of it. You say it's going to be my problem but how? What would that look like exactly? Maybe in 1000 years it would literally be a problem but by then through the natural course of technological evolution it will just not be a problem. If freeman dyson, a man who solved some of the hardest problems of the 20th century, can say that there is little scientific rogor in our models, estimation and understanding of our affect on climate change, why should I pretend like you know what you're talking about?
But do you understand his argument? I’m pretty sure he would not disagree with projected temperature increase or wet bulb temperature estimates. They are already being measured and confirmed.
I’m pretty sure he would also agree with the estimate for Siberian methane stores. He would just be careful with predicting what happens when they get released.
The average temperature increase can have different effects and that is one of the lines of his argument.
If you do not care about the issue and don’t want to hear opposing opinion then do not leave a comment.
Given the projected temperature increase the wet bulb temperature will make vast areas around the equator deadly for humans. Millions will be affected in our lifetime or will be confined to spaces isolating from the harsh conditions.
Although the temp increase might happen during the colder times of the day so the wet bulb might never reach the deadly quantities.
We had devastating fires over Christmas in Australia, directly linked to global warming. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51742646 . (In fact we just went from one disaster to another here, the second being C19).
This is just the beginning. It will get far worse and then worse again, thanks to people denying it and saying we might think about maybe reducing our emissions gradually next decade sometime..
In South Australia they're talking about taxing EVs because they don't get to tax their owners by way of the fuel excise. There's zero regard for pollution, it doesn't even have a monetary value - high polluters aren't taxed at all, so they're taxing the solution not the pollution instead. (Contrast Norway).
This is why I said it's going to get far far worse. There's so many thick skins to get through, blocking and impeding what needed to be immediate action decades ago and still isn't.
I've been on here for 10 years. When did hacker news loose all resemblance to hacker culture? And i'm not a truther (thanks for making me use a word like that btw), maybe a rationalist is a better word. Let's all wake up an be afraid of asteroids too.
The actual words you used in your reply to my post (akin to "we may see someone affected by global warming in 10,000 years maybe and besides that I don't care") was just pure denialism.
Observing science has been part of the HN culture as long as I've been here.
Several Pacific Islands, and some in the Indian ocean have already lost significant parts of their land. Just because something doesn't personally affect you does not make it a hoax.
I'm a huge believer in alternative energy, but it's just nonsense to blame natural disasters across-the-board on climate change. It almost implies that the climate would be docile without human-introduced CO2. Plenty of bad weather events happened before climate change. The most deadly Atlantic Ocean hurricane on record was in 1780. The Dust Bowl droughts were the worst in American History.
I'm not sure the dust bowl draughts are a great example - they weren't product of global climate change - but I think they were very much the result of large scale "terra forming" - changing prairie to farm land?
At any rate, the question isn't so much - were extreme bad weather events bad before as well, more - are they getting worse and/or more frequent?
