Posted by paulpauper 11/5/2025
I would consider all of these to be "catastrophic" but some may not consider migrations + damagaes to be "catastrophic."
So what will happen if that gets disrupted? And badly disrupted, while at it. And while that is happening, multiple other things pile up in different ways everywhere?
Thats the danger. You don't die from climate change. You may occasionally die from increasingly frequent extreme weather, a flood because rains, some dam break, extended forest fires and so on. But that is not a single catastrophic event that kill billions. What will kill billions are losing food security in big scale, no safe/climate controlled place to live, violence and wars, widespread diseases and no way to help. In some years to decades millions to billions may die by that combination of factors.
So no, it wont be a single day, sudden event that will kill billions. Is the breakup of the system that holds it together. Agriculture needs a stable climate, megacities need food, the economic system depend on more things, and everything else is packed together. And the first wave of deaths will be just the start.
Really underestimating the amount of deaths that will occur when our food production systems start collapsing.
If our food production goes down significantly, that will raise prices which will let wages for farm workers rise to the point where more people will be willing to do the job. Will it be unpleasant? Sure, but not to the point of famine, we'll just go back to spending a larger portion of our household budgets on food like we used to fifty years ago.
A common theme found in various sources about using American labor in the fields is that American laborers are too slow, damage too much produce, and don't show up after a couple days. Another common theme is that immigrant labor works hard and uses their resources to ensure their children don't do the same work.
A study that attempts to quantify the damage done by ICE enforcement actions. https://arxiv.org/html/2508.03787v1#:~:text=The%202025%20ICE...
Interview with a farmer and his experience of the impact of ICE actions, the farming life, and produce economics.
https://www.thepacker.com/news/industry/some-farms-may-not-r...
It my late thirties, I wouldn't do the job because I have better options, but when I was high school or college age I would have killed to do that job if it was paying $30 (in 2025 dollars)/hour. My dad literally did that type of job for a while in his younger years.
Will that raise prices of food? Absolutely, but we're talking about going back to 1950s prices relative to wage, not about famine.
ICE enforcement and immigration laws are also a choice. We can change those if we need to.
I have not seen evidence that there will be food system collapse driven by climate change that would be worse than those events, but my ears are open if you have some.
Doing my best to not come off condescending here in case you are being sincere, but the comparison of totalitarian gov crackdowns and local drought are not exactly comparable to an almost worldwide heat increase and less water availability for key high density areas... Once countries have to start hoarding their resources and other countries run out of resources, things will not be good and there's plenty of data, studies and articles out there discussing this that are not hard to find.
If you are being sincere, apologies, but living in the US lately has shown a level of bad actors trying to grift that's made it really difficult to be patient with climate change denial/dismissiveness.
If you have any papers, please share. If you have sections of the IPCC to point to, please share. I am very sincere, in all my comments. But if you can't point to actual scientific documents, then you're doing no better than the climate denialists.
https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/climate-change-cuts...
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2018/07/25/climate-change-...
> “If the climate warms by 3 degrees, that’s basically like everyone on the planet giving up breakfast.” That’s a high cost for a world where more than 800 million people at times go a day or more without food because of inadequate access.
The higher global average temperatures alone are already a yearly catastrophe, by this standard.
I think you’re showing a lack of imagination. The COVID shutdown was not that long ago. People lost their minds when they were asked to wear a mask in public.
All you need to do to make a “catastrophe” is imagine the trauma response played out over shorter and shorter time periods.
Now take the speed of natural disasters measured over hours and days. Recovery time over months and years.
Now pile multiple such events back to back and dispersed across the nation.
You will have a Tipping Point where public opinion and suffering overwhelm any attempts by government to restore order with a speech.
Finally, Marshal Law and empty stores.
There you go. Have a nice day.
Unless AMOC collapses and we foolishly trip into another glacial period, the 200ft increase in sea level is inevitable in the next thousand years, but totally manageable for the continents. It's the oceanic mountaintops, aka, low level islands, and coastal cities that are at risk. Most of those cities are already filled with happy rich people who will have been long gone decades, or even centuries before Florida and Bangladesh are submerged and Russia, Australia and Canada are booming with happy with abundant rainfall, crops and awesome weather.
It just seems like focusing on ameliorating pain and focusing on the making the inevitable a better outcome is the most important focus for the next few decades.
These underlying assumptions being incorrect are the reason climate alarmist move the goal posts every year.
Most others in the climate science debate have been far more realistic and measured. Similarly, I tend to ignore everything from David Wallace-Wells, another person who has written a ton on climate but from a very different political perspective, who has also been quite wrong.
How about explaining why he is wrong? Don’t just respond with incredulousness and generalizations and assumptions.
One of the funnier points in this word salad is when he casually dismisses AMOC collapse without giving any real reason why then “trust me bro.”
What pragmatism?
Perhaps I read it wrong, but isn’t he basically suggesting that he will be relying more on the observed effects of climate change as compared to predicted rather than just adopting the theoretical predictions as his driving POV? That’s literally the definition of pragmatism.
> Climate science largely disagree
Climate scientists may largely disagree, but not all do. Shame that it also apparently needs to be stated here that science isn’t a democracy that is subject to popular vote. When observed effects don’t match the predicted effects, it really doesn’t matter much if climate scientists disagree with the observed effects. Actual data is actual data and should be considered even if it doesn’t match your model.
An expensive liability? Definitely. A civilization or nation ending event? Unlikely.
I fully expect no workarounds will be done just like Climate Change Mitigations. Getting off fossil fuels should have been seriously started 30 years ago, and maybe even 50 years ago. Instead the politicians have been adding hot air talking and fighting instead of doing real work.
We are now seeing this repeat with "engineered workarounds", no one wants to pay for it, so yes I call BS on the article.
All I can say is I feel real bad the past generations did nothing to really reverse CC, people being born now are looking at a very bleak future.
The sooner we start, the cheaper it will be, so we shouldn't put it off, but it's not going to kill everyone or even convince everyone to leave NYC in the foreseeable future.
Factor in all other cities, how will that get paid and by how ?
Or do we chose which cites to save ? Other cities, tough to be you.
If you draw the line at the year 2100, things are uncomfortable but maneagable. If your horizon is 2300 or 2500, you get a different story. But you would hope that in tha sort of time frame, we have time to adapt.
There are degrees of awfulness between "the end of all mankind" and "nothing to see here", but it seems like there's a taboo on calling those shades of grey out when it comes to climate change.
Would Canada be able to build a seawall to protect Vancouver? I am not sure.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-announces-high-spee...
What causes this climate change, how much infuence humans have on it, and how much we could possibly do about it is unclear.
That's not a reason to not do anything about it, but there's also no reason to be super intense about it.
Earth's climate has been stable during the rise of human civilisation. It has changed more in the past 100 years than in the past 200,000.
It's true it's changed often over the course of the 4 billion year history of the pkanet. It's not true to claim it's fluctuated wildly over the course of human civilisation.
> What causes this climate change, how much infuence humans have on it, and how much we could possibly do about it is unclear.
False.
It's clear the cause is the increased insulation factor of the atmosphere. It's clear this change has been in the majority due to human activity dragging up millions of years worth of past captured C02 via fossil fuel extraction.
> That's not a reason to not do anything about it,
Naturally, because as stated it is false to claim the cause is unclear.
> but there's also no reason to be super intense about it.
Sure. It's true that no one alive today in a G20 non equatorial country need fuss much about it - all the real serious consequence will fall after their lives have passed.
I don't think so.
Look at sea level: 125,000 years ago, sea level was 8 m higher. 20,000 years ago, sea level was 130 m lower. [0]
So over the past 200,000 years sea level has varied ~ 138 meters. It hasn't varied that much over the past 100 years.
Everything that is "modern human civilisation" from, say, early Egyptian onwards (following the formation of the Sahara some 6,000 years past) has taken place in a period of climatc stability.
Point being, come climatic change on that scale again, the planet and various eco systems will adapt and move on, human civilisation patterns as we know them from history will be heavily jarred.
Cheers for that.
I made a fat fingered typo, they made a respectful statement of fact, downvotes are not deserved here, if anything throw @7402 a few upvotes for taking part as the HN guidelines encourage.
I'm not so concerned about disasters or economic impacts, I just have a deep moral belief that we should leave our environment the same as when we entered it. We know that fossil fuels release pollution that we have no technology to clean up. We we should not be using it. It's not rocket science.
Admittedly, it makes no rational sense go without today so that future humans can experience the earth in the same way I have. I understand why many people dismiss risks of things unlikely to effect them or their children, but to me to feels wrong, and I would like to have as little impact on the climate as I can.
https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-confirms-2024-warmest-...
Holocene extinction - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
That is, if there are any people in 3000. Nuclear war is still the number one problem. AI is a candidate for number two right now; the next decade should clarify things.
If you look at the chart in the link above, it's very clear there has been a dramatic change in the last 50 years. There has also been a dramatic rise CO2 emissions in a similar period. I don't think its unreasonable to assume the two are linked.
Even if you were to concede we cannot prove that our emissions are causing the change, we should at least acknowledge that there is some chance that they are. We can't do anything about the earth naturally warming itself, so there is no action required in that scenario, but we can reduce our emissions in the chance they are damaging the earth.
The irony is that without them, you (wherever you are) and I (wherever I am) could not be trading messages. Every bit you send and every pixel lit has a fossil fuel cost associated with it.
Our world 100% runs on fossil fuels and right now there is no alternative that rids us of them that can be made without them. No replacement technology can be developed that won’t employ fossil fuels even further to excess in its creation. So “not using it” is not an option. Cutting back is not an option. The only way to replace them is to extract, refine, and burn more and hopefully that investment can be the one that gets us the returns we need to hopefully one day eliminate our dependency.
But what about the year 2200, or 2300? At three degrees warming per century, the earth looks like a pretty hostile place to live in a few centuries.
"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit", and all that...
I care, in my comfortable life as an office worker, about the fact that chocolate, coffee, and wine will become luxuries as yields and quality drastically drop off.
I care about the fact that many places I visit frequently will need A/C to be _survivable_.
Those are not civilization-ending events but the hubris you need to have to just hand-wave this away are beyond my understanding.
In fact I suspect that Gates would be dismissed as too woke for making this one of his main points:
> But we can’t cut funding for health and development—programs that help people stay resilient in the face of climate change—to do it.
> It’s time to put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies, which includes reducing the Green Premium to zero and improving agriculture and health in poor countries.
This is just rehashed Green New Deal language for the global stage. (Something I fully support!!)
Nordhous: "The amount of warming that is conceivable … is not remotely consistent with the sorts of catastrophic outcomes … where tens or hundreds of million, perhaps even billions of lives were at stake."
Gates: "Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise."We've known for almost a decade now that the RCP8.5 scenarios are no longer on the table, and even that worst case scenario wasn't civilization ending.
I read Bill Gates' note as not an evolution on his view at all, it seems 100% consistent with everything he has worked for, but rather trying to place climate change in a more humanity-focused context for evaluating tradeoffs of where to put money. That's very important for governments and for wealthy philanthropists like him, and for the COP 3 audience he's talking to.
Did you see what happened in Europe with a rather small mass migration 10/15 years ago due to Arab Spring ? People have short memories.
Can you imagine what will happen when 100 of thousands start migrating north when they can no longer feed themselves and maybe even work outside ? Italy was close to sinking boats coming across the the sea. Other countries in the EU started building walls. And even Germany took a slight right turn. Once these large migrations start, I expect bombs will be dropped. Same applies to North America.
And yet, sentence from current top comment: " We're in a mass extinction."
Can you explain why you think these contradict each other?
At the rate that temperature is increasing, assuming it is not stopped, it's not a matter of will there be an extinction event within the next few hundred years, but how bad will it be.
my favorite was getting told we "deserved it" for being in Texas during the ice apocalypse, because Texas is a red state.
I hope that people exhibiting that kind of behavior are finally starting to question whether or not it's helpful. The article suggests that is perhaps beginning to happen.
If you want people to make sacrifices to improve the future, just maybe messaging that it's hopeless and anyone who doesn't see that is stupid isn't the best strategy for effecting real change
> for being in Texas
News flash: climate change by and large isn't about the US, and US will be one of the least impacted nations of first hand climate change effects.
Which is a small deal compared to a billion foreign migrants, which is also a possibility, but still a massive deal. You are completely correct that the first world will escape most of the direct and dire pain resulting from our irresponsible burning of the future.
I also think trying to suss out “who is going to suffer more” is basically pointless when so much of our economy is based worldwide trade and so much of our society is expecting relatively stable populations, two things that will change rapidly with a few climate shifts.
*this entire thread is getting at one thing: yes, humanity and the general summary of human knowledge will almost certainly survive the extreme chaos we are heading for. That should not be much consolation to you, because the chaos will set back the human experience 150 years for generations that include you and your children.
Especially when the chaos involves incredible strife for many nations with nuclear armament.
The bullying and name calling were intolerable. Even suggesting that the earths demise was not immediate would label you a denier and ignorant about the undeniable science behind the alarms.
It seems the tide is turning and some of the leading voices in the earth-is-cooking camp are now walking things back.
Don’t wait for an apology, though.
Why would a serious author go with this image? Just a few years ago, misspelling "climate" and having nonsensical political cartoon to headline your article would have just been disqualifying.
Queue the “always have been” meme.
Of course people could feign intelligence before, but it's much easier now and our standards are lower. This is a double whammy.
A. Have some relevance to the actual content.
B. Don't exhibit glaringly obvious AI flaws (polydactyly, faces like melted wax candles, etc.).
It's amazing how little time people take to vet images that are intended to be the first thing viewers will see.
Reminds me of the image attached to Karpathy's (one of the founding members of OpenAI) Twitter post on founding an education AI lab:
"The economy will be fine"
True Idiocracy moment....
Life is a co-op, winning does not mean being the last ones left standing.
I look at these 'climates changing" and see absolutely no problem at all. Looks like an improvement to me. How can we go about speeding up this process?
Holocene extinction - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
Great place to start with flames.
>This won't be a nice change of pace for your climate. It will be a mass extinction even humans have never experienced. It's obscene even.
The science clearly says that isn't the case at all. Feel free to reference IPCC RCP8.5 scenarios where we magically find extremely more fossil fuels and burn those as well. No extinction is expected even in those scenarios.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene#Climate
The eocene was approximately 14celcius warmer than it is today and life thrived.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Interglacial
During the last spike, the eemian, it was about 2 celcius warmer than today. Roughly 100,000 years ago, and that's roughly all we do expect to happen now. Life was thriving.
Yes, because life can adapt in 100k years at a rate that it cannot in 100 years. And that life did not particularly care for preserving thousand-year-old human settlements.
> Great place to start with flames.
I am not the OP but if the point above flew you by then consider how much you have thought about the matter.
The interglacial warming is the most likely origin of the catastrophic global flood mythos across many cultures (including the Bible). And involved a scale of mass migration and suffering/death that would make modern sensibility recoil.
Your argument is like if I burned down your house or community but stated "well the forest will reclaim it in 10 thousand years and it will be beautiful and full of life! Is anything really even different on the grand scale?"
I care about the immediate future. And all the suffering and death, and the animals and plants that coevolved with us and ARE our evolutionary environment.
It's absurd and either supremely ignorant or bordering on malicious anti social behavior . The paradox of tolerance is being pushed to its limit.
Lucky for your conscience the world doesn't give a shit about global warming, nor your realization that you can't do anything about it
Of course the world is fucked