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by jader201·9mo ago·view on hn ↗
> Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.

Interesting and different perspective vs. what many others often say (but that’s one of the points he’s making).

I feel a lot of climate articles — and the comments attached to their HN threads — tend to favor more of the doomsday message he’s arguing against here.

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That’s assuming over half the world’s population will just say “oh well, this is my life now. I wouldn’t want to bother those people in the good parts.” There will be upheavals everywhere.
I think he’s probably right, but to be clear there are billions of deaths that fit into his prediction. Humans living and thriving does not preclude a massive drop in population.

It is very hard to gauge what he actually believes will happen based on these words

to be clear there are billions of deaths that fit into his prediction.

That's not clear at all. Claiming 25%+ of the world will die is the kind of hyperbolic doomsday claim the Gates is trying to move away from because it distracts from sane climate mitigation strategies.

The plague did wonders for us, didnt it? Of course dead people arent livivng or thriving, but if they leave behind a world that has more job opportunities, housing opportunities, cleaner environments, quality food for less....
There have been historical cases made that the plague was a driver of a series of follow on events that upended the previous order - so people like Gates sitting at the top of the current world order might not want to be so blase about the effects of climate change
Ahh yes the Thanos argument
Depends on where you are in the world.

For the developed world, climate change will be annoying but not serious. The US may have to give up on Miami and New Orleans, and build seawalls for New York. Some crops may have to be grown further north. Some irrigation systems will need upgrades. More power will be needed for air conditioning. Those will not seriously damage a society. After all, right now the biggest problem in American agriculture is where to put all the excess soy and corn.

Countries in Asia with heavily populated big river delta areas of shallow slope are very vulnerable to small rises in sea level, because the coast moves a long way inland. China and Vietnam can probably engineer their way out of those problems.

Some countries near the equator with political instability are in big trouble.[1] Too poor and too disorganized to upgrade water and agriculture systems.

[1] https://www.rescue.org/article/10-countries-risk-climate-dis...

> For the developed world, climate change will be annoying but not serious.

Spillover of problems like mass migration away from the equator and increase in conflicts.

Also increased threat of far-right rule in democracies and general dehumanizing attitude toward people in trouble.
That's not a prediction, it's a current reality. It's already prescribed by calling circumstances people have no control over "being in trouble":

but that is certainly not wrong!

If someone smashes your windows at night, robs you, you're in trouble.

If you're being threatened with a weapon, you're in trouble.

But you're also in trouble when you leave your house in a freezing night and don't remember to put your keys in your pocket.

If you're unlawfully detained, you're in trouble, as much as you are in trouble when you're detained for a good reason.

Dehumanizing people who are "in trouble" is as old as humanity itself.

Rape victims are also in trouble.

Even worse, trouble tends to accumulate and amplify existing trouble.

Some people think that's just how the world works.

It's certainly how a world of animals works.

And a "fair" world is hard to imagine, the human condition is partly an attempt to achieve it though.

As long as you classify as annoyances the overheat deaths of many poorer and/or frailer (and a few wealthy-but-unlucky) members of your developed world, then indeed you can call this annoying. Also you can drop the "will be" and start using "is".
Food supply chains disrupted. Piracy will increase and spread.
Basically, the spherical cow mindset of "just police the borders harder" is wishful thinking. The world is interconnected in multiple aspects, not just physical borders. Even if you succeed in immunising yourself from all side effects, your immediate neighbor may not be successful, and the instability can come for you through many mechanisms. Prices of food, breakup of the EU, wars, authoritarianism in your own society. Just look at Canada dealing with tariffs through little fault of their own. It isn't as easy as declaring yourself as immune from international instability.
One of the reasons the best time to make sure every first-world country is self reliant was yesterday; the second best time is today.
Careful to what you wish for.

Autarky can be often found in 19th century literature. The one we hopefully don't want to have or produce anymore.

Another spherical cow solution.
I wonder how software engineers will fare in a “self reliant” economy. Do unvested stocks work in a barter?
Thats one of those things that, once it gets bad enough, it will be solved rapidly with automated sentry turrets or similar technology and will turn into an annoying logistics problem of keeping the sentry turrets armed. It isn't correct to point at that as the thing thatcmakes the original statement untrue.
I have been waiting for our leaders to realize we need to build seawalls (not just New York- covering both coasts). Some large contractors are going to make a lot of money.
Climate change is so confusing to message about in this sense, because the future is not decided.

We're on track to warm the planet far past the point that of sustaining something you and I would recognise as human society. That said, we're also changing course which has the opportunity to mitigate things.

The meta part is, if everyone thinks we'll change course, that affects whether we do. There's no straight prediction that can be made.

I agree.

This is the first message I am hearing, “There are more important things than climate change.”

It’s almost shocking to hear it. The cynical side of my mind is wondering if this is the start of a slow pivot for the political masses. Another news item today says that emissions reduction pledges are not forthcoming in new world climate discussions. Perhaps messaging about climate change is evolving.

> Interesting and different perspective vs. what many others often say (but that’s one of the points he’s making).

The uncharitable interpretation being that he's trying to toe the line for the current US administration, while still signaling that he's part of the communities that he typically inhabits as part of his charity work.

Question is that how long is foreseeable future?

It is very likely that the time span for an individual is long enough that the change does not matter. Still the future will arrive and most likely sooner than we thought.

He says that as if he's certain it can't possibly, even a remote possibility, lead to societal collapse. First, there is no way he can be certain about that. Second, what is an acceptable probability for an existential threat? That's the real question to answer, and he didn't attempt to answer it.
societal collapse != humanities demise.

Climate change could do a lot of damage it’s just not extinction level damage. Even large scale nuclear war based on current stockpiles isn’t going to result in extinction.

We're splitting hairs, but that still leaves the question, "what probability of societal collapse do you think is acceptable?
IMO it’s about minimizing harm at this point.

There’s levels of societal collapse, mass migration can destroy the existing social fabric without necessarily being that terrible. Fertility rates being so low means developed countries will likely want large numbers of immigrants.

At the other end stopping all CO2 production tomorrow would result in severe consequences. We can’t transport food to cities without burning fossil fuels. Obviously that doesn’t mean every current use case is worthwhile, but we can’t ignore the short term here.

The good news is we’re actually making a lot of progress on climate change. The electric grid being ~90% very low carbon emissions by 2050 is a realistic goal and would avoid the worst predictions.

I don't see any progress in terms of the rate of increase in atmospheric co2 over time.

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

That graph is well below earlier forecasts. Accurate predictions require more than simple extrapolations which 30 years ago suggested exponential growth. Instead CO2 per capita and especially in terms of GDP resulted in a different story.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

Add in more kids being born in 1985 than 2025 and per capita numbers matter. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-births-per-year

Poor countries are rapidly becoming wealthier which is obviously a good thing. Meanwhile wealthy countries are becoming a lot more efficient with their carbon emissions. Where those lines intersect is what matters in the near term because poor countries aren’t copying 1950’s technology. Skipping power hungry CRT screens and inefficient engines etc just makes economic sense. China emissions spiked as they industrialized but they are currently minimizing their investment in outdated fossil fuel based technologies in favor of solar and EV’s etc.

Co2 levels are the best metric for progress, and progress would be a steady lowering of the rate of increase. We are not seeing that, and AI's power hunger is likely to make it worse despite all of the positive things you mentioned.
Is infinite growth really a positive thing on a finite planet? Are native populations replaced physically and culurally the answer to making an imaginary number go up annually?
My point was about a declining global population concentrating in a few areas not being a major issue.

Globally more babies were born in 1985 than 2025. Population growth at this point is all down to people living longer but that’s a one time correction, we’re already in a steady state situation and heading to decline. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-births-per-year

There is a non-zero possibility of Taylor Swift causing societal collapse.

That's not a reason to take such a scenario seriously.

Non-zero describes the chance of everything, sure. Infinite improbability drive and all that. But the chance of climate collapse causing social collapse is pretty much just a function of how bad we let it get measured in degrees C.
Your example is infinitesimally small, climate change is not. But you didn't answer the question either, what probability of societal collapse do you think is acceptable?
You also didn't attempt to answer it. What probability of societal collapse (however you define it) do you find acceptable?
What existential threat to society do people/society really take seriously?
Having grown up in the 60s and 70s, I'd say people took nuclear war seriously. People had different opinions on how likely it was and whether it was an extinction event, but there was near unanimity that it was "a really bad idea." The obvious difference was that was impossible to doubt it was man-made and it wasn't something that slowly built up over decades--there was no way to say it was "normal"
I think it’s a fair point to say it was considered as a serious threat to certain countries(US/Russia/UK/China etc). And militaries certainly did prepare for it. But other than Switzerland with all their bunkers - which society in all facets prepared for it, really?

WW2 with it’s restrictions & rationing, and almost all civilian economy/effort being redirected to the military is I think what a lot of people are wanting in my honest opinion.

I mean "People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future." Seems pretty fucking doomsday to me. Most Places?

Like I don't think anyone thought the world would implode, but an increase in the number of places humanity can't survive? What if one of those places is South Florida? What if one of those places causes mass emmigration/immigration.

>—it will not lead to humanity’s demise.

Can't read the article, but if he doesn't think climate change will do it, is he offering any new alternatives?

Bill Gates opinion has the same value, as a random HN commenter...or less ...due to his bias.
I wish sophisticated communicators like Gates would skip the strawpeople arguments as setups; it's the end of any serious examination before it even begins.

> doomsday message

That term reveals a partisan position: it's a strawperson ridiculing those who talk about the great risks and harms of climate change. 'Don't look up!'

> Interesting and different perspective

It's an old, well-worn perspective, that is commonplace now - especially in American business and government, it's more common than the 'realist' perspective on climate change. It's incredible that they - the entrenched, very powerful status quo power structure - depict themselves as insurgents for advocating the same old climate denial policies.

IMHO: The entrenched capitalists (including Gates) and their power structure simply don't want to change - a bias of the status quo. They are asserting a reactionary conservative position - no change, no matter what, and hate those who want change - regardless of its validity in reality, with the idea that nobody can make them change. They make spurious arguments like Gates to divert people - a tactic they can do endlessly.

The idea that the answer to the enormous damage of the entrenched capitalists is empower them more is, when you think about it, laughable and absurdly myopic and self serving. They can't even carry out the charade for 10 minutes - now those entrenched capitalists are building massive power-consuming datacenters, eliminating ESG, destroying renewable energy in the world's biggest economy ... I'm sure they'll save us.

But notice I keep talking about entrenched capitalists. An essential of capitalism and free markets is creative destruction. These failed capitalists - and climate change is an historic failure, about which their predictions and decisions were enormous errors - should be destroyed (economically) and buried like Lehman Brothers, and new ones, who correctly anticipate it and deal with it, should be funded.

Really, all we need is to stop making taxpayers fund climate change - prevention, remediation, cleanup from disasters, etc. - and have a GHG tax that prices things according to their real cost, rather than subsidizing the current failures. Then real, innovative capitalists in a free market can thrive.