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Re:Massive glacier collapse by jessriedel on Monday February 04, 2013 @10:58AM (#5164737)
> my life absolutely must be about working to mitigate and slow global climate change. Any other career path or choice would be so morally wrong I would have great difficultly living with that decision.

If you don't value future people, then developing-world health interventions can do more good with your time/money. And if you do, then other x-risks overwhelm climate change.

Re:Massive glacier collapse by hnriot on Monday February 04, 2013 @11:35AM (#5165024)
Yes, we likely all wont live long enough to see climate change. At the rate bacteria are becoming AB resistant you'll like die from an infection that can't be treated long before the sea levels rise a few millimeters.

There are a lot of problems that we need to look at before climate change, like population control, water management, antibiotics etc etc.

Re:Massive glacier collapse by cryptoz on Monday February 04, 2013 @11:44AM (#5165107)
> Yes, we likely all wont live long enough to see climate change.

This is wildly incorrect. All of us were born after our climate started to change. And the vast majority of us will live to see increasingly bad effects from it.

> There are a lot of problems that we need to look at before climate change, like population control, water management, antibiotics etc etc.

We should be solving all these problems simultaneously. Your suggestion that we should not work on fixing our climate problems right now, but that we should wait, is extremely dangerous. The longer we wait and the less we do, the worse it's going to get and the more expensive and difficult it will be to survive.

Re:Massive glacier collapse by craigching on Monday February 04, 2013 @01:50PM (#5166136)
> There are a lot of problems that we need to look at before climate change, like population control, water management, antibiotics etc etc.

Who says some of these aren't related to climate change anyway? As others have pointed out, we need to be working on these problems simultaneously, if we tried to solve them serially there's a good chance none of them get resolved.

Re:Massive glacier collapse by jessriedel on Monday February 04, 2013 @02:17PM (#5166333)
I don't agree with hnriot, but it's worth pointing out that if the topic of discussion is "what someone should devote their life to", then the order of importance of problems is crucial. Also, recognizing that some problems are orders of magnitude less important than others (so that spending time and energy on them is a net negative) is not the same thing as advocating that all problems be approached one at a time.
Re:Massive glacier collapse by abraininavat on Monday February 04, 2013 @02:10PM (#5166281)
Yeah because that's the way humanity usually tackles its problems. We all together solve one problem... then the next... then the next.