It's true that programming was not a top priority outside of survival, though to many programmers in Ukraine, it was still a major one.
This report (source: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/04/ukrainians-are-built-differe...) from CNBC in March documents this: "Those developers, along with other Ukrainian civilians in the country, are now being forced to defend their homes and cities while sheltering from Russian bombs. But many are still continuing to remotely work for their employers, supporting the local defense effort by day while sending in their deliverables by night.
“Yes our teams are sending deliverables from a f—ing parking garage in Kharkiv under heavy shelling and gunfire in the area. Amazing humans,” Logan Bender, chief financial officer at a San Francisco-based software licensing company, said in a story posted to Instagram on Tuesday by venture capital meme account PrayingforExits. "
I would personally prioritize survival over work at that point, and avoid praising sending deliverables in a warzone as a moral good (over ensuring the safety of your family), but it's evidence that even in extreme conditions, people still want to program as part of their work. As for why there would be a want to program in extreme conditions, some discussions on Reddit and Slashdot in response to the article suggested that programming was a way for these workers to get their minds off their current situation.
Even after I evacuated my family further from the action, we still had missile strikes and air raid warnings. Being away from home, learning about horrible things happening in your country, those things do not help with being productive.
How do you imagine human extinction being an outcome? It seems to me that the worst case scenario is large loss of population which would decrease greenhouse gas output. There would still be some increase in temperature even once we stop emitting, but wouldn't people in colder climates still survive?
It's of course a very urgent issue, but I think exaggerating it until it becomes a threat to "all life on earth" levels is a) dishonest b) does nothing to convince sceptics that it's a real issue, quite the opposite c) is not really all that actionable (at least not in a good way).
The "barren rock" is a bit of a strawman. Very few if any people believe that the elimination of all life on Earth is in the cards. Human life, on the other hand, is certainly possible.
For the vast majority of major extinction events in history it looks like rapid climate change was the major trigger, and at some point small changes lead to a "self-reinforcing climate resonance cascade of unforeseen consequences", and we currently don't know exactly what the limits are.
This is the focus of a huge amount of the work of Peter Ward and he has written plenty both for scientific and a popular audiences.
Now he may, of course, be wrong. But his work is credible enough that you have to at least take into account that the real risk of extinction is possible.
And how many climate scientists actually believe extinction is on the table? I've seen some say collapse of global civilization and mass death is a possibility under the worst case scenarios, but not really anyone claiming all humans would die. Anyway, the latest IPCC report puts the upper range of warming at 3.7°C. Which is bad, but not the apocalyptic hot house Earth scenario. But even with that, some environments will still be livable. People live on mountains, near likes, far inland, way up north and all over the place. Earth isn't going to turn into Venus, and it was a lot hotter when the dinosaurs evolved. Plants and animals still survived after the Permian die off.
Human life today is mostly maintain with infrastructure (water, food, security, health, etc). A cascade of failure due to climate change can destroy all but very local and small infrastructures. With society eventually returning to a pre-industrial conditions. It is not the end of humanity but the pre-industrial world economy can't support food, water safety and health care for 9 billion people. In pre-industrial era world population were less than 1 billion, we might return to these numbers. That means death of the large majority of human. Not extinction but the biggest threat in human history.
Well, hundreds of millios displaced and/or dead would be enough. Doesn't have to "turn earth into a barren rock".
And as for "suddenly", many systems tend to have a breaking point, especially systems, like the environment, which have feedback loops that can easily feed into each other and make things worse fast. Collapse is seldom linear or a nice gradual curve.
Actually, yes it does. The OP specified "human extinction". We're arguing that single point. The fact that thousands/millions/billions might displaced isn't being contended.
If that's not a "threat to all life on earth," I don't know what is. And that's just what I could find with 5 seconds of googling.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeti...
To 'wipe out' life on earth, you have to crash the moon into it or do something similarly ridiculous - remember that a giant asteroid wasn't enough.
Wiping out all human life is possible, but again I don't think that anyone is comforted by the idea that 0.1% of the population might survive in an arctic cave.
Where we seem to fail is in communicating to folks that don't want to spend money to fix the problem today how their life will become miserable tomorrow.
The loss of insects isn’t caused by climate change, it’s too much pesticide use and people trying to have lawns instead of native plants.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/insects-are-dying...
What is the greatest tragedy is how much worry and anxiety climate change causes. The earth is not a thinking thing - “Mother Nature” is not a being. The planet will exist and doesn’t care about humans. A century after the last human lives nature will swallow up almost everything we built. Earth exists for humans because we live here and make it so. We will adapt to whatever climate exists.
It doesn't matter what Earth was like at some point in the distant past. There weren't 8 billion humans living on it. It's not easy or cheap to move cities with populations in the millions because sea level rise puts them below water.
Humans can adapt to climate change but it's very likely to be very painful and very expensive.
Do you expect that several hundred million people who's previous land of habitation is now unable to support human life will just lie down and die peacefully?
> We will adapt to whatever climate exists.
also, air conditioning and the netherlands are ways to deal with existing nature, global warming on the other hand is entirely man-made and compunding
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/world/asia/india-extreme-...
Think of the world population's size and global distribution as hedges against disaster: the fewer people who live, in fewer habitable places, the more likely it is that some disaster will affect everyone remaining and leave no one unaffected. We have fewer rolls of the dice, and there may come a day where they're all snake eyes.
This why many are excited about the idea of "making humanity an interplanetary species", as I once was until I realized how hard it would be to make a working biosphere anywhere else, given how bad we are at maintaining one that already works. If we don't figure out how to save this biosphere, we won't have enough time to make more.
("Without"? Well, nobody today knows how to build a cast-iron plough.)
I don't believe this scenario is likely. For one thing we're not headed for 8C of heating; for another, technological change seems to be coming just in time to head off the very worst outcomes, assuming we struggle hard enough.
One of my "favorites" is the "world without clouds" scenario, which for the record, I consider unlikely, but is horrifying to imagine: https://www.quantamagazine.org/cloud-loss-could-add-8-degree...
What we're dealing with are "unknown unknowns": what tipping points might exist that we don't know about, that might result in more warming faster than expected based on today's science? We shouldn't take those kind of existential risks.
We aren't struggling at all, though. We just eased off the accelerator a little. (Assuming that our accounting is correct, and that methane leakage isn't worse than we think. [1])
[1] It's worse than we think.
I need to retain some optimism, or I get too depressed to keep on. In this case, my optimism is that solar/wind and batteries will drop enough in price that fossil fuels become economically unfeasible.
It seems possible! I just hope it isn't too little, too late.
Society as it stands is much more fragile, but I’m sure we’re more likely to destroy ourselves from within before climate is a really major factor.
Of course I would've thought "aren't you worried your grandchildren will live miserable, dangerous lives struggling to survive" would be a decent argument but I've encountered no Boomer who seems to worry about it as they excitedly tell me about the coming collapse of something or imminent major war in wherever.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/genetic-bottleneck-almost-ki...
Literally nobody is predicting any of those things, except propagandists and doomers. I would urge you to broaden your media intake to more mainstream sources, because it is not mentally healthy to be living a life under such falsehoods.
When the world was 4 degrees COLDER Chicago was under 900 meters of ice. Toronto was under two Kilometers of ice.
Do you think that would cause collapse of civilisation? How are you going to adapt to a glacier covering all the farmland? No technolgy, not even nuclear bombs, can remove the billions of tons of ice that would be covering all the farmland. We could not even protect cities, the moving wall of ice would buldoze every structure we've build and then whoever didn't freese to death would die of famine.
We are headed for a 4 degree change in the OTHER direction. That's what we are headed for by the end of the century
The biggest mistake climate scientists have done is communicated their change in terms of degrees, so people think about their everyday experience with weather, which obviouslty changes much more than that, and think they will just sweat a bit more in the summer.
There are regions of this planet where an average 4 degrees increase will mean that for periods longer then 24 hours, multiple times a year, the wet-bulb temperature will exceed 35 degrees C. That is unsurvivable by human life. Your only options in that environment are to not be in that environment by either escape or technological means.
There are cities built in areas where this is a risk, and if it happens they will just be depopulated: it is not possible for millions of people to escape an urban area under a heat wave. If they're somewhat built up, then they might survive it provided the electrical grid holds out - which, as recent experience globally should show - is questionable. Remember: under these conditions, no repairs to external infrastructure are going to be possible - you would need active refrigeration to move around outside and survive. We are not remotely adapted to that sort of hostile environment.
Most likely we are a decade or two out from a climate-forced mass casualty event, probably in the Indian subcontinent, with more minor (slightly less mass death) occurring in parts of Asia earlier.
We have 28 years left and emissins are still increasing. We have to reduce emissions by like 40% per decade, which is not happenning at present.
We have to replace every car on the road, which takes 20 years. That means in 8 years every new car has to be electric, and that's not happening either.
If you read mainstream publications, then you will gradually form an opinion, which is that there is a climate emergency, but not that humanity will be destroyed.
Climate doomerism has been a catasrophe, because it means many people have "given up", when things can actually be done. The doomer propaganda jumped off the deep end, and the mainstream media should have called them our on their absurd nonsense years ago.
I notice the BBC is starting to fight back:
By the way, BBC is not a reliable source, like other neoliberal propaganda they bet on continuing "business as usual" while coming up with some innovative solutions (so-called "techno-hopium").
Sorry, I don't think rational debate is possible here. Your beliefs are not based on science or rationality.
I'm assuming celsius, not farenheit.
I'm curious why a mere 8 degrees increase leads to human extinction.
Is that "8 degrees evenly over the globe"? If so, that most certainly would leave the majority of land arable and comfortably livable.
Is that "8 degrees average with such a high deviation that no land is left with a year-round range of 0 degrees to 30 degrees"? If that is the case, where can I read/view/see the model that produces such an extreme outcome?
> At one degree - the world we are already living in - vast wildfires scorch California and Australia, while monster hurricanes devastate coastal cities. At two degrees the Arctic ice cap melts away and coral reefs disappear from the tropics. At three, the world begins to run out of food, threatening millions with starvation. At four, large areas of the globe are too hot for human habitation, erasing entire nations and turning billions into climate refugees. At five, the planet is warmer than for 55 million years, while at six degrees a mass extinction of unparalleled proportions sweeps the planet, even raising the threat of the end of all life on Earth.
I'm just not in the mood to devote a lot of time to what sounds (to me) like hyperbole: If the earth stabilised at +8 degrees celcius I find it hard to understand why the entire earth becomes literally uninhabitable.
Here is a well-written article (shared by another HNer here) on one plausible run-away event. But the same way as upon exerting more and more force to a branch it will first have linear changes going on, there will come a point where it will break.
Some possible runaway events include the aforementioned loss of clouds which in turn won’t reflect back that much sunlight (which currently can account for 30-70% of sun light not hitting the ocean water), melting ice will free lots of trapped CO2, changing climates may alter currents and winds causing very large-scale changes to certain areas (and might also affect cloud formation), etc. We are in a big, closed jar and that 8C change may not be a problem locally, it is that much more heat trapped globally.
But one should add that life is unlikely to die out in even the worst predictions (life, finds a way), but you still don’t want to find yourself in the situation where you will have to literally hunt down other humans because they may have food, or try to migrate with 100s of millions of other agitated, hungry people to nations which won’t be friendly to you because they themselves have enough problems to begin with.
If you want to think of a way it could be possible, though, think of those areas that would be habitable, realize that they would be highly contested, are mostly presently permafrost, and consider your own ability to both protect and survive on melted tundra and reproduce there, given you will starve in a single season without food.
I actually did consider that first - that maybe at +8c humans will kill each other, but that's just pure speculation.
And, sure, food is necessary daily and constantly, but the situation you outline isn't an overnight thing. Hell, it isn't even a 100-year change, +8c is a lot longer.
That gives you plenty of time to move, and at +8c, as long as it is stable at +8c, you'd still have enough arable and livable land to ensure that humanity is nowhere close to extinction.
So if it isn't lack of land, and it isn't the temperature range that causes human extinction, what does?
But if you add the fact that antibiotics will be in short supply, novel zoonotic diseases will ramp up, and most knowledge of how to survive in the wild has been lost and probably can’t be reconstituted in a couple of violent generations, I can see how it could come about.
There is also the social and psychological impacts of that scale of loss, and there are some other sort of scary indicators you could lean on (Calhoun rat experiments) to indicate that there are limits to what animal populations will reproduce through.
I’m not worried about it — we seem like a pretty robust system from my perspective. But it is interesting to think about abstractly.
You should review where you got those figures and whether they are representative enough of current scientific consensus regarding the most likely scenarios.
As fas as I know and assuming that current pledges are fulfilled, most plausible estimations tend to be around 2 or at most 3 degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels (we are already well over 1°C).
While it is clear that this increase in temperatures will have severe consequences, I fail to see how it would lead anywhere near the civilization collapse that you seem so confident in predicting.
See for example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04553-z.epdf
("Realization of Paris Agreement pledges may limit warming just below 2 °C", Nature)
The point of the Paris Agreement pledges is to prevent catastrophic global heating, so it would be great, although in my opinion inadequate, if the world community met them. Sadly, we're not heading in that direction right now.
Consider what happens in a war. The people working on drones aren't just hobbyists, they're part of the war effort. Wars are not good for the environment, either.
So my guess is that, if it gets really bad, these jobs will focus more on short-term needs. Are people who are really focused on preparing for heat waves and drought and flooding going to give a hoot about being carbon neutral? An overloaded hospital is going to focus on the patients, not global environmental issues.
Both "it's needed" and "pays well" are the case now - not necessarily the case at that point. So they can't be used as arguments that people "will still write software" (it would be taking for granted what must be proven).
- Although it's looking increasingly unlikely that we can avert climate disaster, we can never give up. For example, 8 degrees of warming would be much worse than 4 degrees of warming, and could mean the difference between human extinction and the mere collapse of our civilization. The lives of billions hang in the balance, and even if some will inevitably suffer and die, we can't just throw up our hands and let everyone die. Climate change mitigation, cutting emissions as quickly and thoroughly as we can, must remain a priority for the rest of our lives, even if we can no longer reach the best/safest scenarios. Every little bit of avoided global heating matters.
- This post, as dire as its predictions are, may underestimate the difficulty of computing in 2050, given current trends. If you are/were living in Ukraine recently, programming is not most people's top priority, they have other problems. Famines, extreme weather events, and resource wars will affect programmers who live in comfortable locations today. It's not just your users/audience who might be computing from a shitty mobile phone in a refugee camp, it could be you. Don't forget that we're not only dealing with climate change, but with the reaction of other people to climate change: they might want to kill you for your water. And heatwaves are predictable in India/Pakistan, but look at the freak heatwaves in Canada recently, nowhere on Earth is safe, the climate crisis is a global problem.
- Why are we programming what we're programming? Shouldn't our activities and their purposes change given the dramatic change in circumstances? Isn't there something wrong with the system that produced this result, the impending destruction of the biosphere that supports us? Fighting valiantly to preserve the functionality that is killing the world may not be a wise or ethical use of your time. (And if you're programming something for a fossil fuel company, now is a good time to reconsider.)