[adwhit]

I always find it strange to hear people talk about climate change as if it is some sort of tricky challenge we need to solve, like improving education or curing cancer. It is a 'problem' of completely different magnitude. It is on track to end civilization as we know it within two generations. A rational society would think about nothing else.

Our children will be astonished and mystified - and furious - to see all the things we got up to instead of dealing with this thing that is the only thing that matters.

[exceptione]

> It is on track to end civilization as we know it within two generations. A rational society would think about nothing else.

If you mean by "to end" something like "to extinguish" than I think this hyperbole is enormous.

If you mean by "to end" that the civilization will change, than there is nothing new under the sun. If I look at pictures from 19th century, which is very recent, I am always baffled at how much have changed in the passing of time.

[DennisP]

A while back I read Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, who read 3000 peer-reviewed papers on the effects of climate change and summarized them, one chapter per degree, with extensive references.

My takeaway from that book was that three degrees was pretty terrible but life would go on, but at four degrees modern civilization would have a hard time surviving. Go all the way to six and there won't be many humans left on the planet.

I'm not saying we'll get to four degrees in two generations, but at the rate we're going we'll be well on the way, and enough feedbacks will have kicked in by then to make it inevitable.

[gowld]

How is that possible? From the Amazon blurb, it seems that the book talks about what would be destroyed by weather change, but nothing about what would be created. If temperature increases, some current cold areas would be more habitable. If sea levels rise, some inland area would become coastal. These changes would happen over generations, so populations would move. There would be tumult in human and animal life, which is bad but not a novel part of human experience (we've always had hurricanes, tsumanis, earthquakes, and plenty of manmade disasters), but a new equilibrium would be reached. There was once an Ice Age that supported human life! I don't think the overall human environment 6 degrees in the future would be worse than say 200 years ago.

Also, it's been 16 years since the book was published. Have temperatures risen? Have the predictions come to pass?

https://www.amazon.com/Six-Degrees-Future-Hotter-Planet/dp/1...

[DennisP]

We're currently at one degree above preindustrial, and the world looks a lot like he described for that level.

The book was published in 2009 but most of the news since has not been encouraging. A recent book that covers similar ground, also with a lot of references, is Unprecedented by David Ray Griffin; the conclusions are similar. If you want more detail on the geologic evidence, see Storms of My Grandchildren by James Hansen.

You're surely right that there will be things that improve. However, we know from geology and paleontology what's happened in previous major warming periods: mass extinction, and a huge loss of biomass, with most of the survivors clustered around the poles. That doesn't bode well for us.

[antognini]

> However, we know from geology and paleontology what's happened in previous major warming periods: mass extinction, and a huge loss of biomass, with most of the survivors clustered around the poles.

I thought that warming events were generally associated with speciation events, at least on land. (Marine life is a different story.) The last event, the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, coincided with a major speciation event for mammals.

[adwhit]

It's pretty clear from context that I meant things will change catastrophically for the worse. Extinction unlikely within 60 years, though.

[mindcrime]

Our children will be astonished and mystified - and furious - to see all the things we got up to instead of dealing with this thing that is the only thing that matters.

That's been happening since Generation X kids were old enough to understand what a mess our parents made of the world.

Unfortunately we haven't done a very good job of making a difference. Frankly I'm a little disappointed in my cohort in that regard. We knew things needed to be different, and we were mad as hell about how the preceding generations fucked everything up... and then we got so caught up in the drudgery of every day life that we kept perpetuating the same problems instead of fixing them.

I'm not terribly optimistic that any subsequent generation is going to do a much better job in general. It seems to be a fundamental human failing that we're not good at dealing with issues that span time-periods longer than our lifetimes. :-(

[smallnamespace]

To tackle big problems, you need the structures in place to organize people, lead them, figure out not just the grand goal but the sub-objectives to be met, and to reward those who contribute and punish cheaters, and also the money and resources to do all of those things above.

But at this point you're no longer talking about getting a diffuse group of people together who believe in the same thing, but building something like a corporation or an NGO. That can easily take half a lifetime and a lot of perseverance. Most people don't have the time, energy, or money to go that route.

[adverbly]

Except that the structures we have in place have time horizons even shorter than a human lifespan. Stock market runs on quarterly reports, governments run on election periods of a couple years. The organizations we give the most power to just don't operate using long term incentives. And then democratic processes don't even let everyone who is currently alive vote, much less those who aren't born yet. It's a problem that largely requires unselfish thinking which makes it extremely difficult to incentivize.

[munificent]

I am really optimistic about the younger generation, actually.

I'm a gen-Xer. Our mantra was "whatever". Instead of trying to solve problems, we just tried to detach from them. As long as we were self-aware and cynical about what we were being sold, we thought things would be fine.

But that's obviously stupid in retrospect. People in power love cynicism — why bother defeating other people when they'll defeat themselves?

Millenials, on the other hand, seem way more organized and engaged. For their generation "woke" doesn't just mean being aware of what's going, it means doing something about it. So I hope that they (and us too) can start changing some of the fundamental structural flaws in the current systems of power.

[gowld]

The woke generation before the Gen X was the....baby boomers. Remember civil rights and environmentalism? Perhaps the simplistic generational model is a poor fit for reality.

[qubax]

> It is on track to end civilization as we know it within two generations.

The reason why so many people don't take climate change seriously is because of extreme hyperbole like this. Climate change is outdoing even the "peak oil" craze of the past. If you think civilization is going to end in 40 years ( 2 generations ), then you leave no room for debate.

> A rational society would think about nothing else.

No. A rational society would think about lots of other things. Zealots think about nothing else.

Climate change is going to create challenges and opportunities. The societies/people better able to adapt will thrive. Others won't.

[lordfoom]

>If you think civilization is going to end in 40 years ( 2 generations ), then you leave no room for debate.

And yet, here you are, debating him, while the world gets hotter and the weather more extreme.

[AnimalMuppet]

Yes, because qubax does not believe that civilization is going to end in 40 years. "The world getting hotter and the weather more extreme" != "the end of civilization in 40 years".

[Notorious_BLT]

So, as someone apparently aware of the problem on a level higher than most of humanity, and so confident that we should be thinking of nothing else, what are you doing daily to resolve the problem? Are all of your resources and time allocated to solving this?

Obviously the answer is no, and probably for the same reasons as everyone else: people have other things going on in their lives.

[adwhit]

I was actually just amused to see climate change used in a throwaway manner to justify some kind of AI whatever. The topic of climate change deserves to be talked about seriously or not at all.

[lixtra]

Each generation faces annihilation. Just because humans survived so far - and it has been close [1] - doesn't mean it was a lot of luck involved.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/h...

[adwhit]

Well that's OK then (???)

[lixtra]

Yes, learn to accept your mortality. Long term the human race will die.

Some think by robots taking over.

Some think by earth getting as warm as it has not been a long time much faster than ever (although live was thriving at that time).

Some think a bit meteor might hit us or a super volcano could erupt and cause 100 years of darkness.

Some think a global nuclear war will end us.

Some think humans will just procreate till they overuse the resources of the planet and people just starve.

And so on. Accidentally I ordered above by most likely end of the human life as we know it.

[adwhit]

As a creature capable of empathy, I am quite upset at the thought of incalculable suffering we are condemning future generations to just because we can't be bothered not to.

[ur-whale]

That's because you have a working assumption there's something we can do about it.

I don't believe there is: in that regard, humanity is as much in control of its own destiny as a mold colony growing on a slice of bread under a glass dome.

To wit: we have been incapable of solving basic problems like ending hunger or war for our entire history. There is zero reason to believe we can actually do anything about something much harder like global warming.

What will happen is what seem to happen to all form of life on planet Earth throughout history (e.g all life before stromatolites started pumping highly poisonous oxygen into the biosphere, or dinosaurs and whatever put them down, etc...): we will go through a cataclysmic, extinction-level event.

What will come out the other side will likely still be life, but unlikely be human, or if it is, vastly changed.

And you can pump out as much empathy as you'd like. As has been repeated ad nauseam, the physical world doesn't give two hoots.

If a solution exists to global warming, it's expansion, nothing else. Musk is correct in that regard.

[titzer]

I was with you up until:

> If a solution exists to global warming, it's expansion, nothing else. Musk is correct in that regard.

And then I was like: yeah, this is exactly why we should not expand; we don't deserve it.

But I'm an optimist. The universe is a whole hell of a lot smarter than we are, and it will properly contain and eliminate us.

[ThomPete]

Some future generation is going to go extinct whether by astroid, super nova or end of the universe.

The idea that the coming generations are more important than the current is frankly the most unemphatic thing I have heard in a long time.

[titzer]

> The idea that the coming generations are more important than the current is frankly the most unemphatic thing I have heard in a long time.

You're right. We should definitely continue with the status quo of stuffing our fat faces with slop and burning oil like there's no tomorrow, literally.

[zepto]

I agree with the first part, but who is doing this ‘just because they can’t be bothered not to’?

Last time I looked most people weren’t idling their time away in a stress free paradise.

[jobigoud]

> Yes, learn to accept your mortality. Long term the human race will die.

Don't give up?

We can accept our mortality as individuals but why accept that of the species? There is no precedent for what we are. We are the first species that we know of that could be actively trying to survive for as long as possible, at the species level, by concerted effort of intelligent individuals and long term planning.

The average lifespan of mammalian species seems to be 1 to 2 million years. Very short. We should try to survive for much longer than that, and this needs planning and not fucking everything up.

It's also kind of important that we or a descendant species (including a robotic one) survive because we might be alone in the Universe.

[adrianN]

In the very long term we're all dead. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't actively work to prevent that for as long as possible. Just because you'll die of old age at some point it's not okay for me to torture you to death.

[freethemullet]

A non-zero probability that probability is involved.

[hyperbovine]

One potential solution is to not have children.

[ejk314]

That sounds like VHEMT; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_M...

[mrhappyunhappy]

What’s the point of living if you can’t achieve your biological function?

[perl4ever]

You seem to be implying that promotion of one's genes is the only worthwhile goal. Stipulating that value system for the sake of argument, procreation is hardly the only way to do that. Literally anything you do in life affects other life forms which share some of your genes.

[oh_sigh]

If procreation was the sole important biological function, gay people would be much rarer.

[gowld]

Not necessarily.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100204144551.h...

"Summary: Male homosexuality doesn't make complete sense from an evolutionary point of view. One possible explanation is what evolutionary psychologists call the "kin selection hypothesis." What that means is that homosexuality may convey an indirect benefit by enhancing the survival prospects of close relatives."

[oh_sigh]

Right, but OP seemed to imply that an individual choosing to not procreate was against some kind of basic biological functioning.

[hyperbovine]

There are a lot of unstated assumptions baked into that sentence.

[mistrial9]

quick elaboration on this ..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries

[ThomPete]

Humans have had to deal with climate change for all our existence and to think that the only problem with regards to the climate is human-made illustrates how absurd the discussion have become.

The biggest opportunity to solve, whatever affect humans have is through technological progress, not beliving humans basic instinct and behavior is somehow going to change. Humans are both rational and irrational, mostly irrational. There is no such thing as a rational society it's simply not how nature works.

Humans won't change, our kids are some of the biggest users of the technology we developed and they will also be both benefitters and further developers of ways to deal with the never ending challenges nature provides us.

So yes we actually do need to think about climate change as something that always happens to us and then do something about those changes.

Blaming humans for not being rational is the least useful thing to do.

[CharlesW]

> Humans have had to deal with climate change for all our existence…

Not like this: https://xkcd.com/1732/

[ThomPete]

Compared to where they were technologically it's not that far off.

Nature doesn't give us a safe environment we make unsafe, it gives us an unsafe and hostile environment we try to make safe. Yes, that has consequences, consequences that aren't solved by wishing we were more rational.

[miscreanity]

First off, I want my amazing AI and renewable/sustainable energy generation via microgrids and all manner of eco-friendly technologies. However, the economics and individual freedom aspects are pushing those forward; there largely orthogonal to the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming issue.

The greatest source of energy beyond anything humanity could possibly hope to attain in the immediate future is reducing its output[1]. Man can cause localized disruptions and pollution but cannot yet alter the entire planet - that is sheer arrogance.

Volatility increases during periods of change. It is therefore no surprise that strange weather is being experienced where few or no living people can recall these occurrences.

It was hotter during the Roman empire than it is now, yet people survived and thrived. If I were you, I'd be digging deeper and preparing for colder weather instead of listening to politically-motivated, fund-seeking charlatans proclaiming we're all going to fry.

[1] https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2018/09/27/the-chill-of-sola...

[titzer]

> Man can cause localized disruptions and pollution but cannot yet alter the entire planet - that is sheer arrogance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise

[miscreanity]

Thank you for the supporting information showing that both temperatures and sea levels during the pre-industrial era have been higher than they are now.

Everything has a cycle - those swings in temperatures and sea levels over the past 20,000+ years were not due to human activity but natural processes. No trend on an astronomical scale can be stopped or reversed by humans yet. Until we consistently produce a significant fraction of the energy output of the sun, we don't come close to running the show.