alt Hacker News> They are talking about civilisation changes, which we are already seeing.
What changes? How has civilisation meaningfully changed in a way and scale it didn't before? Can you come up with examples of those changes that don't have an equivalent in form and scale 200 years back?
> What changes? How has civilisation meaningfully changed in a way and scale it didn't before?
It’s not that it did not happen before, civilisations rose up and disappeared several times in the past. It’s just that it is happening now, largely driven by climate issues.
What we are seeing now is regions becoming uninhabitable, crises sending waves of refugees, a dramatic shift towards nationalism in the West, which is terribly ill-equipped to solve global problem and is leading to a progressive crumbling of the international rules-based order. The US gave up on any pretense of sanity and went on a shooting match with Iran, throwing a wrench in the economies of a whole bunch of countries in Asia. Iran itself is in a terrible situation, with a lot of the country running dry. Trump of course is not a direct consequence of global warming, but it helps with the civilisation altering bits and adds to instability.
Europe is under its third heat wave of the year, all of them having been comparable to the historic ones from 1976 and 2003. This is also having a destabilising effect on several governments that are completely feckless, having spent 20 years trying to convince themselves that it was not happening, and was no big deal anyway.
These weather phenomena, along things like tropical storms in the Atlantic, are of course not new, but their frequency and magnitude is increased by global warming. They are currently costing billions and dealing with their consequences is not going to get cheaper.
> Can you come up with examples of those changes that don't have an equivalent in form and scale 200 years back?
I can. For example, the French Revolution was fueled by crop failures in the couple of years before due to particularly bad weather, related to a volcanic eruption in Iceland. The revolutions of 1848 came after about 4 years of crop failures due to bad weather again.
The point is not that it never happened before. The Earth used to be much hotter (and also much colder). The environment used to not have humans around and it was fine. Revolutions and wars, and societal collapse are not new. Look at the late Bronze Age collapse if you want to have an idea of how bad it can realistically get. It’s not the end of the world, not even of humanity, but still a thoroughly unpleasant period to live in.
The point is that this is going to happen not because we rolled a bad dice, but because we’re bloody idiots and are doing it to ourselves.