[eloff]

I see comments like this all the time, but it doesn't happen that fast. You won't notice a big difference in your lifetime, and neither will your children, unless maybe they live in a very low area by the coast. This plays out over hundreds of years.

It's still a serious problem and we need to address it, but I keep seeing emotional reactions that ignore the science and the current predictions.

[milofeynman]

There's been a difference in the last 15 years... Look at the ocean currents. Look at the hurricanes stalling. That didn't use to happen. Look at tornado alley moving west. Look at the mass migration out of Siberia.[0] If you haven't noticed anything you aren't paying attention, or you're a gas company shill spreading misinformation.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/climat...

[eloff]

I didn't say nothing is happening, I said it's not the end of the world.

The effects so far are small compared to the direct damage caused by the air pollution itself, which kills over a million people a year.

I don't expect that will change in my lifetime. The predictions are not so dire that it is likely to take a million lives a year.

Over a period of several hundred years, it's a lot harder to say.

At no point is it likely to be the end of civilization. But we could get there if we're stupid enough to keep this up for a few centuries more.

[ageofwant]

This worldview is hyper human-centric. There are ~7735776725 people alive now. A million less is 7734776725. To keep this population alive billions of other lives are sacrificed. Yes humans and human civilization will be less affected in the short term, perhaps, or at least those that matter: i.e european northern hemisphere types. Short to medium term biosphere collapse will absolutely impact human civilization, but that is way to late for most other species.

[eloff]

The biosphere is not about to collapse from a couple degrees of warming. The earth has been a lot hotter, there was a time you could grow ferns in the Arctic circle.

The 10 degrees warming after the last ice age makes climate change small by comparison. Let's not forget the 400ft of sea level rise. In fact if you look at the climate record the last ten thousand years, the current level of warming is lost in the noise. It will take centuries before it's enough to really jump out on the graph.

Life will adapt and carry on, climate change is possibly only a temporary blip for the earth itself. It may even turn out to be a good thing on long enough time scales, because it's been a little too chilly for comfort here the last few million years. Repeated cycles of ice ages are no joke. If you want to see how bad that can get, lookup snowball earth. Warming is no joke either, see Venus, but a little warming might not be the end of the world.

I'm Canadian, my county was buried under 2km of ice that scoured it to bedrock just as civilization was beginning elsewhere in the world. If you are in the US, you grow your food in what used to be Canadian soil. I'm more afraid of the cold than the heat. People from Australia and the middle east likely have the opposite view.

[sephlietz]

"tornado alley moving east", fyi.

[arbuge]

> Look at tornado alley moving west

I think you mean east:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2018/10/17/tornado-al...

[weberc2]

The parent was referring to the OP’s doomsday scenarios (“kids are in for it”).

[mirimir]

That's somewhat like the Aristotelean vs Galilean conceptions of gravity. That is, constant velocity vs constant acceleration.

So arguably, change during the next ten years will look more like change during the last 50-100 years.

[tzs]

> You won't notice a big difference in your lifetime, and neither will your children, unless maybe they live in a very low area by the coast. This plays out over hundreds of years.

...or they live in an area whose fresh water supply depends on current weather patterns or glacier levels.

Even if they don't, the water shortages in such regions could lead to war, and I believe some such regions include nuclear powers. A nuclear war between, say, Pakistan and India over water allocation will probably have serious economic effects well outside just that region.

[Mediterraneo10]

Europeans have already noticed a "big difference" in the influx of Syrian and Afghani refugees. That invigorated anti-immigration parties, but those parties also advocated for various policies that went beyond immigration. A few million people had a huge impact on politics overall.

Now imagine the turmoil and political ramifications that could spring, even in the short term, from the flooding of Bangladesh and the migratiom of its people towards the global north.

[eloff]

None of which is predicted to happen this century...

[flukus]

Bangladesh already suffers catastrophic floods and is already being exacerbated by human influences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_Bangladesh#Coverage_...

Small changes that we'll see well before the end of this century will have huge consequences. Don't be surprised if the country doesn't exist at all by the end of the century.

[remarkEon]

Oh good, so we have time?

Not sure what you're point is unless to say that this problem is on a long enough time horizon (where the survival rate for everyone drops to zero ...).

[tempsy]

Major US cities will see temp increases of 4-6 degrees in less than 30-40 years. That is not "hundreds of years".

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/climate-change-timeline-st-l...

[realusername]

> I see comments like this all the time, but it doesn't happen that fast. You won't notice a big difference in your lifetime, and neither will your children

I do already, the weather is much worse than when I was a kid, much drier and the heat waves are harsher.

[eloff]

That's a small difference.

[realusername]

Not really, there's already big parts of the forest dying because of that and it's very visible from the outside.