I never finished my degree, but I'm an environmental studies major. A cartoon in one of my books showed oxygen producing microbes that created earth's oxygen atmosphere organizing to stop the creation of this poisonous oxygen atmosphere as it was killing them.

I was watching a TV show that said "If this spider were alive today, it would be hunting animals the size of house cats." and I blurted "No, it wouldn't. It would be on life support."

Those giant dragonflies with 4 foot wingspans or whatever? They couldn't exist today. The atmosphere isn't dense enough. For that reason, movies like Jurassic Park are probably completely unrealistic. Dinosaur physiology probably is wholly unsuited to the modern atmosphere.

Yes, absolutely, things are changing. But there is an unprecedented 7 billion people on the planet and life expectancy is going up, generally speaking.

Could we see a dramatic population crash? Absolutely. Population crashes of various species in various places are a known phenomenon. That could happen.

But we keep making these dire predictions about the end of the world and they keep failing to come true. We have been making them for at least a thousand years. The turn of the first millennium was predicted to be The End Times. More recently, the end of, I think, the Mayan calendar was supposed to be the end.

Post WW2, everyone expected to die in nuclear war. Today, there is all kinds of post apocalyptic dystopian fiction, often involving antibiotic resistant infections.

There are solutions for such things, though people who know of antibiotic alternatives are often dismissed as crackpots. Yet, we continue to quietly problem solve.

That gets largely ignored in favor of making new predictions of how The End Times are at hand -- this time for realzy realz, I'm serious man, this is not like all those other silly predictions in the last 1000 years.

And if you voice skepticism, you are advised you are a fool who just doesn't get it.

The converse view is that problem solvers emerge because we keep making dire predictions.

The best way to motivate people (especially bright people) is to convince them their work has higher meaning.

If a problem being solved isn't high-stakes, you won't have the best and brightest working on it. They are going to go work on something that is actually high-stakes, high-impact. The post-WW2 nuclear threat was real. It attracted intellectual giants such as John Forbes Nash and John von Neumann whose work probably helped avert a crisis.

> More recently, the end of, I think, the Mayan calendar was supposed to be the end.

That's nowhere near the same thing as a nuclear threat.

The point is that problems don't get solved by magical fairies or elves. They're solved by real people. And smart people are attracted to hard, important problems. All the bellyaching and agonizing serve the purpose of signaling which problems matter.

Geniuses don't need the masses to advise them what matters. They can figure it out for themselves and are frequently ignored for long periods.

Einstein worked in a patent office for years, unable to get the university job he longed for. It took two tries of photographing a solar eclipse to finally get proof of his theory and once proof existed, he was world famous overnight.

He didn't stick with it because the masses were haranguing him about how very, very, very important this was.

Good point about Einstein. It's true that bright minds also go after problems they think are important, regardless of what everyone else thinks.

Haranguing masses can decide what gets funded. Einstein's research didn't need much money, which worked out well for him. What if his genius had been in something that required more capital?

I think the short answer is "If he's a real genius, he either finds the capital or finds a cheaper way to do it."

The long answer is probably a screed that I would probably regret posting.

It's 1am here. Please, excuse me, but I think I'm done here for now.

> But we keep making these dire predictions

I think it's absolutely not reasonable to put climate scientists and their predictions into the same line as the mayans or nostradamus.

> Could we see a dramatic population crash? Absolutely. Population crashes of various species in various places are a known phenomenon. That could happen.

So, a population crash could happen. A lot of the comments here sound as if the people are saying "End of the world? Pffft. Total hysteria. Ultimately a few billion people will die and then human life will adapt. Everything's fine!"

I mean, take a minute and picture the suffering of billions of humans because of famine, resource wars, migration, deaths. Picture yourself and your loved ones into this.

It may not be the literal "end of the world", but don't you (and the others of the "it's-fine"-faction here) think that this is bad enough to take climate change serious and try to lessen all of that?

> And if you voice skepticism, you are advised you are a fool who just doesn't get it.

Are you sure that you do "get it" though?

I've lived without a car for more than a decade. I have a medical condition that is supposed to require at least $100k in medical care annually just to die slower with no hope of getting well. I have gotten off all drugs and I manage it with diet and lifestyle. I got healthier while homeless, sleeping in a tent for 5.7 years and being treated abusively by an awful lot of people who don't find my story credible.

My oldest son has the same condition. I have been supporting myself and my 2 special needs sons on under $20k annually while all of us get healthier.

I also appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard of Hacker News. I hit it a month and 2 days after I got myself and my kids off the street. I then changed handles cuz reasons.

I'm quite confident I really get it. I'm quite confident I actually know useful information that could make a real difference if people would actually listen to me instead of screeching at me about what a nutter I am.

But it is generally pointless to assert that. It just causes people to more vehemently ramp up the dismissive personal attacks and assertions that I'm an idiot whose point is invalid while they run screaming across the stage flailing their arms like Kermit the frog.