We’re fucked, why do anything? Just ride it out. If you had kids that’s your problem to deliver the bad news.

This take is so deliriously apathetic that I am starting to wonder if HN is being infected with bot accounts.

The people who have not yet fallen into apathy are simply the people who have not yet realized the magnitude of the forces at work that we cannot stop or reverse.

Climate change is a matter of degree, and it will unfold over a long period of time. There is time to mitigate and adapt. It's just a matter of how much. Renewable energies are rapidly being adopted, battery storage and transmission are all improving. Nuclear is back on the table. We may still have a breakthrough in fusion. AI will help with better predictive models and eliminating waste.

None of that will do anything if we get into a runaway feedback loop where all the carbon is coming from natural sources. The change is speeding up.

The time to act was 60 years ago but Reagan and oil interests put profit over planet.

The last time to act was the last decade or so, as it appears we are too late and the us about to floor the gas pedal on oil instead of green tech.

Lyndon Johnson was president 60 years ago.

I always like to start 40 years ago with Carl Sagan

https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI?si=2UJST6T6IBkHtZTq

Yea I ball parked it whenever the epa was told by Reagan to not do anything about carbon is when I start the clock

I start it with neoliberalism which really picked up steam with Nixon. But even Clinton and Obama were neoliberals every president since Nixon was neoliberal just with different social issues (divide and conquer the plebes). Globalization and exponential consumerism.

before 1990 you buy a phone like corded even cordless and they still work today if you have a landline.

Now I need a new phone every 3 years. All electronics are made to be replaced not to last and that just makes business sense but not very good environmental sense.

Solar, nuclear, fusion, NNs, batteries and so on does not mitigate climate change. This all is great tech but all it does is slows down climate change which will happen with the same severity, but a few decades, or centuries later (the same levels of change, with and without green tech). The only ways to mitigate climate change are either to lower temperatures or to remove greenhouse gas which works for increasing temperatures. nothing else. And humans are not doing anything which matters in this area.

I see that people somehow got in their heads that climate change is a fixed duration process, say a hundred years, and then it stops (or they don't think about it). So if we go all solar we will delay the increase, get lower temperatures by year 2100 and then we win, yay! Almost nobody it speaking out loud that climate change will simply continue even if we go all solar, remove all plastics, invent working fusion generation, switch to all EVs etc. And it will continue to the same end level as if we did nothing at all.

This comment puts you deep in the "have not yet realized the magnitude of the forces at work" category

> There is time to mitigate and adapt.

The ecosystem can't adapt fast enough, we depend on it for _everything_.

> Nuclear is back on the table.

Cool, it doesn't make steel, or cement, or asphalt, or plastics, or petrol derivates, which are all absolutely essential to our modern lifestyle.

> We may still have a breakthrough in fusion.

It still doesn't really solve anything

> AI will help with better predictive models and eliminating waste.

will ?

None of that solves ocean acidification, none of that revert the feedback loops, none of that allows us to continue with our wasteful lifestyles, non of that restores the wildlife we absolutely decimated. It all sounds like a sect now, ignoring the present, hoping for a better future while everything points the other way. "Just pray a little more and it'll come to life"

Though if you look at the history of the earth the climate has fluctuated constantly, millions of species have evolved and gone extinct, 99% have been wiped out by meteors at times. Humans have only been here for like 0.0025% of it and tech for like 0.000001% of it. It's a bit overdone to panic over it getting slightly warmer.

Well first of all it fluctuated much much much slower, and even if we skip that part, getting wiped out doesn't seem very desirable. Of course the planet and life in general will continue, what will degrade over time is the abundance we enjoyed up until now.

The fact that we changed so much despite being "here for like 0.0025% of it and tech for like 0.000001% of it" is the alarming part lol

https://xkcd.com/1732/

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_fill,f_jp...

Great. 1 step forward and then 3 steps back. Then soon it’s 6 steps back, then 12. That’s what it means to have a runaway effect.

Its one thing to not acknowledge we are in for a wild ride,its anotherventirely to throw helmets ,paddles and vests .

That's a bad analogy. A better analogy would be to be on the titanic as it sinks and have two choices:

- find the last bottle of champagne, have a drink and enjoy the stars one last time

- scream like a mad man while trying to patch the gaping hole with duct tape, eventually give up and attempt to make a raft from Q tips and wood glue

You can drink the bottle, plug it back and put it under your clothes. Then drink another one.

Not everyone died in the Titanic, which means there is a third choice: when facing a catastrophic event, work as hard as possible to save whoever can be saved. Even if you are not in the selected list.

I think you're confused about who/why survived on the Titanic...

One of the most famous survivors spent hours in the frigid waters without dying because he had hurriedly gotten drunk while the titanic was sinking.

I do not belive that to be a true story. Alcohol will not help prevent freezing to death.

It is not necessarily why, but it is true: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/how-a-baker-survived-th...

its not bots, its just privileged software engineers, surprising amount of which are libertarian.

Eh, plenty of people in this boat. If you can’t change it (or think you can’t), what else are you going to do?

It matters how fucked we are. There is a big difference between disaster that wipes out humanity, one that sends back pre-industrial technology, or one that keeps some modern technology. We might want to prepare preserving knowledge for next civilization.

It matters if we can slow it down. More time means more technology. For example, robot industry might transition happen faster, and might also make possible for smaller civilization survive. It also means more time to use resources that are available now before they get scarce.

It matters if we work together towards goal. That will reduce chances of people fighting which will make things worse. With fighting, "riding it out" will be unpleasant.

Maybe the horse will sing.

This assumes the problem is a binary. Either we are fucked or not fucked. When in fact it's a gradient of more and more fucked that goes on indefinitely making us more fucked the longer we take to deal with it.

The problem very much is binary. Ocne you have a self sustaining feedback loop going it's game over.

Its a gradient until it isn't.

Being vegan or buying an electric car would surely change everything.

it's just a runaway feedback loop, no biggie. /s

It will self correct by the next ice age.

I don't think humanity will die out but there was this time we got down to very low numbers like 7k or less we might get to that...