Item — HN Reader

>> If we're too survive we need to do both steps as of yesterday,

Huge supporter of climate change action, but scientifically is there any basis for the idea that current models point to human extinction? (Don't answer if you don't have a hard source, but I'd like what the projected point is for that)

3 comments

Extinction, no. Collapse of civilization, quite likely. A lot of people say the former and mean the latter. This isn’t really an error, as most people don’t interpret phrases like “if we survive” to mean the literal extinction of every breeding pair of humans.

What do you mean by “collapse of civilization”?

This sort of thing. Possibly worse, as it would happen on a global scale, and collapsing societies would have nuclear weapons access.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse

So, those events seem to be the dissolution of continent-sized political regimes. Is that what you’re talking about? And then they were replaced by other regional political regimes in due course?

I’m trying to think of what regimes would qualify: the US, China, the EU... India, Brazil. One of those? Is that what you’re thinking?

I guess it would be easier to understand what you think is a high probability event if you give just an example of a a regime that think is at risk.

The global regime. So, all of them, to some degree at least. Large tracts of the world will simply become uninhabitable for humans due to rivers drying up, wet bulb temperatures being too high for human survival absent ac, etc

This will push people to kigrate or start wars. And our system won’t be able to handle a much larger amount of migrants, it’s straining even under existing low numbers.

You generally never saw a collapse in just one part of an empire. So I mean a collpase of lur global civilization, on the scale of past collapses that affected prior local civilizations.

We depend on caebon to feed the people we have, too. If we try to reduce and can’t replace, we have trouble. But if we don’t reduce, we have worse trouble as temperatures keep going up.

If we sort out energy and figure out how to suck co2 from the sky we can reverse this of course.

"The good news is that humans [probably] won't go extinct from climate change. The bad news is that was the good news."

Eventually, you need to leave the theater for the next group to enjoy the show.

Can we at least try not to trash the theater on the way out? Maybe we can get another screening for good behavior?

But for us, we pretty much are the show!

I always take that as a simple shorthand for "civilisation to survive", or "survive as a technologically advanced civilisation".

I suspect for most of us, and our descendants, it's pretty academic if the future holds extinction, some Mad Max future where the few survivors have the capability of the 19th century, middle ages, or somehow bomb^W emit ourselves back to the bronze age. All will see them surrounded by tons of surviving things (and packaging) they can see but can't understand, make, repair or refill.