>We'll just leave our grandkids a super-shitty world.

But just think of GDP as people continually try to patch the super-shitty world!

Is this a Broken Windows Theory thing?

That would make sense. You'd measure GDP, which is a gross figure. But making your life livable again doesn't help your net.

Just like if you feel you need bodyguards, are you as well off as someone who spends the same on something he doesn't feel compelled to buy?

Is this like saying that hard working people come out of traumatic childhoods, so we should be sure to throw some trauma into all children's experience? I think they deserve as much of a chance as we had. Here we are almost 80 years after WWII and we're still seeing the effects of that calamity. This stuff doesn't just go away, it goes away with a lot of work, work that we may not be able to afford. That is pretty bleak.

If you want others to suffer as you've suffered because you turned out alright, you did not turn out alright.

>> Did you actually READ the article.

Something else that is useful to read are the Hacker News posting guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In particular the following suggestions:

Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.

This doesn't contradict warnings that our current agricultural systems are prone to sudden collapse. Soil erosion, water pollution, changing weather patterns, and over reliance on fertilizer and pesticides in a monoculture environment could cause a precipitous drop in yields over just a few years. We may be over spending from the credit card, so to speak.

Your point seems to be that so long as we can keep shoveling food into people's mouths, the rest of the effects of climate change are irrelevant.

That's bullshit. As the climate shifts "natural disasters" increase and make many places less habitable. We're already seeing this now and it's only getting worse. As these places slowly become uninhabitable, people immigrate or die and poor people are on the cusp of that.

I suppose this article is from Forbes so it's all about how fairly wealthy people will fair so the chipper attitude makes sense.

The article states that fewer people die of natural disasters. If you want to go to a pre-industrial state, I certainly support your decision. But, please, do not condemn billions of people to death.

Of course, I will call out you "climate shifts ... make many places less habitable". Name one. Anywhere on the planet.

Stop the stupid hyperbole. Suggesting climate change is going to have massive negative impacts does not mean "Go to a pre-industrial state", not even remotely. It's likely the only way we'll get through this mess right now is through the use of technology.

The region most at risk of famine-driven political change is North India - if the wheat growing belt shifts far enough because of climate change there will be massive disruption.

African agricultural productivity is so low that proper technical (and institutional) investment can easily cover the expected (large) population growth in the 21st cent.

Climate change will be catastrophic if we don't decarbonize sufficiently, but it will not be apocalyptic.

Hopefully there's more to life than having enough food to eat.

The FAO report says, roughly, that climate change will have strong adverse effects on crop yields but this will be offset by growing industrialization. In short, that once you fill Kenya and India with a bunch of GPS-controlled John Deere tractors and factory farms so that it looks like Iowa, they'll produce more food than they are now even though climate change will hurt them badly.

Food shortages aren't going to happen as long as seed companies are still creating GMOs to cheaply grow crops in places that they have no right existing in combined with world superpowers are still subsidizing the hell out of agriculture for bread & circus reasons. You'd lose the small independent farmers growing organic avacodas or whatever but the big staple crops aren't going at risk at all from climate change.

Not to say our food production couldn't collapse from a superbug decimating a monculture of wheat or something, but that happening would be completely independent of how healthy Earth's climate is