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While you may be technically true, it is obviously clear that some places are far safer than others, and moving to another place will have a very high impact on how global warming affects you, as some regions will be affected much more harshly than others. At the extreme, some places may be underwater or otherwise uninhabitable, but if you can afford to, moving away from them in a timely manner, you can escape being forced to do so at a time when doing so may be much harder.



Second order effects will be the killer. It won’t be the coastal flooding, it will be the dispossessed hordes. It won’t be the uninhabitable areas, it will be the rapid rise in price of food staples. No matter where you are, the chaos will come to your door, when it comes.

Takes surprisingly little to collapse a civilisation when you kick its knees out from under it.


I agree, but there is a meaningful difference between having dispossessed hordes on your doorstep and being among those dispossessed hordes having to find a place for yourself; and if the price of grain doubles, for a poor community that means starvation while a wealthy community would barely notice.


...until the dispossessed hordes burn it to the ground.

The belief that rich people will be able to ride this one out is a huge part of the problem. No matter how deep your bunker, no matter how many acres of land you own, extreme weather will make all of it worthless.


This scenario is not a zombie apocalypse where the hordes are literally at your doorsteps and it's individuals protecting themselves from other nearby individuals.

The climate change may easily cause large scale international conflict or fights over resources at national level, but the distance between places without capacity to handle the weather and the better-off areas generally are thousands of miles and an ocean, and the parties to any conflict would be neighboring communities of many millions of people each - I mean, this discussion is about "what will happen to the population of current Bangladesh, and what effect that will have on neighboring countries" not about what will happen for few rich people in USA against their literal neighbors from the same state and county.

I fully expect that the wealthy countries can handle some internal displacement due to e.g. sea level rise without mass violence and a general breakdown of internal order - people having to abandon coastal properties in Florida would cause economic woes and internal political pressure to Do Something (not necessarily constructive), not cause the displaced Florida men to form large uncontested gangs roaming the Midwest looking for bunkers to loot.


You seem to believe that the disposed hordes will inevitable be able to burn it to the ground despite primarily being dispossessed from places with near primitive military practices, alone supplies. While we’re writing fictional tales, there’s an alternative ending to this fiction that ends with the dispossessed hordes simply losing.


By losing you mean starving, I assume. If the rich northern countries can even come to some sort of agreement that the poor from the south should be kept out by killing them when they try to migrate north. This is all going to be horrifying no matter what.


There are also potential feedback effects from rising temperature. Northern Europe should survive the 2C warming we are headed towards, but higher temps could cause big problems.

Northern Europe should worry about the Gulf Stream or Atlantic Conveyor currents failing and changing the climate.

Another big one is melting permafrost. Warmer temps cause permafrost to melt and release CO2, which leads to more warming, and repeat.

Finally, there is danger of ice sheets melting which could rise sea levels by hundreds of feet.


I always tell my gun-hoarding, go-box toting, bug-out planning prepper friends the same thing. You don't have enough guns and ammo to stop the masses coming for your canned pork'n'beans.


Is that true? I mean, I figure worst case, small rural midwest communities that band together and shoot trespassers on site will be the best off.

I guess an army of thousands could take it over but my hope is that me and my gun toting farming community won't put up with invaders and invaders won't want to take their chances


On the other hand, on a country level, countries generally do have enough guns and ammo to greatly limit any chaos coming over their border; uncontrolled immigration happens not because countries can't control it but because they effectively choose not to.


they don't have to stop the hordes, they just need to make sure the hordes know that their are easier places to forage than yours.


I wonder how long that strategy will work. Eventually society will reach a new "equilibrium" but how many less defended societies will succumb to the starving hordes before that happens.

I quote "equilibrium" because social structures never stop changing. What I mean is a relatively stable situation where most of the world is not invading the rest of the world. Our present situation is that the larger portion of the population is not invading the rest, though the present trend seems to be in the wrong direction.




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