"I’ve never been more depressed looking at graphs. This year has already entered uncharted territory in many key respects, and the upcoming El Niño will only make matters worse. We’re not ready for what’s coming."
"I'm not depressed by the graphs. I'm depressed by the indifference for the best of us, and outright denial by many that will just keep their heads down."
“I’m not depressed because of the data, I’m depressed because other people aren’t depressed”
Wish these people could get a grip on themselves. Living in a constant state of depression because you’re scared of the future climate is the definition of putting the cart before the horse.
We’re so incomprehensibly blessed to be able to experience this momentary oasis of beauty, but people will ignore it all in favor of mentally fast forwarding themselves into a state of imaginative terror.
That’s not to say disregard the environment entirely, but rather: cherish every moment you have with it, do what you can to help where you can (mainly: dramatically reduce consumption), and encourage others to do the same.
> We’re so incomprehensibly blessed to be able to experience this momentary oasis of beauty, but people will ignore it all in favor of mentally fast forwarding themselves into a state of imaginative terror.
Who is ignoring anything? The terror comes from the contrast between one's keen personal awareness of the precious and fragile nature of this "oasis of beauty", and the systematically reckless, violent disregard humanity as a whole shows toward it.
No, people are scared about the climate NOW. Over the past few years the daily lives of many hundreds of millions of people has started to become impacted by climate change. Things have noticeably gotten worse.
People aren't depressed about something which could potentially happen about some point in the future, people are depressed about something that is actively happening right now - and only getting worse.
The tweet in question isn't so much depressed about what's happening, but about what's not happening: the fact that a lot of people are still not taking this seriously, and nothing is being done to address this.
Show me something so terrible now as to overshadow the incomprehensible beauty of our existence on Mother Earth and I’ll show you an anxious/obsessive/depressive neurosis.
No one’s going to be around forever, might as well enjoy it while you’re here. Being depressed benefits nobody, least of all the environment.
Wildfires in Portugal have been out of control for almost a decade. The country has been in a technical drought situation for the past 6-8 years I think. This year there wasn’t enough water so a lot of small gourmet olive oil producers were not able to sell any stock.
The fantasy of not being worried only exists in cities I think and it’s totally divorced from what’s happening in food production. Ask any farmer in southern Europe if they’re worried they’ll tell you they were worried 10 years ago.
I'm scared of the climate present, terrified of the climate future. Anything less than panic is irrational.
Fortunately, I have David Roberts' Volts podcast talking me off the ledge. He covers many of the efforts to build our fossil fuel free economy. Most are super clever. Cat nip for hackers. Highest recommendation.
> Anything less than {fear so strong as to prevent reason and logical thinking} is irrational
That’s an impressively eloquent caricaturization of the neurosis. Being able to state it so plainly leaves me to wonder if you’re being facetious about the whole thing.
> Panic in social psychology is considered infectious since it can spread to a multitude of people and those affected are expected to act irrationally as a consequence.
Just another round in the age old struggle between Empiricists and Rationalists. Today's labels for same are the reality-based community vs concern trolls.
The graphs tell you what they're about. Temperature this year is at the very top of recent years, probably another hottest year ever, and a full degree above the 1978-2000 average. Wildfires in Canada are just insane right now. Way, way more than previous years this time of the year. North Atlantic temperature is way higher than any previous year. Antarctic sea ice is lower than ever.
All of these are signs that climate change is getting worse and worse. And stuff is likely to get worse in the coming years. And if we don't do anything to dramatically reduce CO2 emissions, it's going to get even worse after that.
We do have the ability to turn this around, but we clearly lack the political will to do so. And the longer we wait, the worse it will get.
Nice, a technical-content-free comment attempting to distract from and diminish the message. Not only that, it is dead wrong (at least to anyone who actually reads any of the graphs).
The graphs themselves do an excellent job of providing the relevant context — they show decades of previous context, with the current year highlighted. The context of the past decades is literally the point of how the graphs were designed. The titles on the graphs also further describe the context - "..temperature anomaly", "...ice extent anomaly".
The consequences of burning eons worth of stored hydrocarbons in a few decades are upon us. But attitudes like this are literally part of the problem.
It means we’d better start figuring out solar radiation management technologies because our inadvertent geoengineering is causing a rapid increase in global heating.
2023 is an exceptional year for multiple climate related issues which is in line with predictions regarding the increasing probabilities of such events.
We probably should readjust what we consider normal to something veering further from the past years average and prepare for more extreme scenarios.
Also we probably should keep working on managing our emission of greenhouse gas to avoid things getting even worse.
As an aside, I don’t get all the people loudly expressing being depressed about the graphs and whatever. This is in line with predictions. People knew that was going to happen. It’s pretty useless to bemoan things which are unavoidable.
> As an aside, I don’t get all the people loudly expressing being depressed about the graphs and whatever. This is in line with predictions. People knew that was going to happen. It’s pretty useless to bemoan things which are unavoidable.
Humans aren't robots. We don't just have feelings connected to surprising events, but also to unsurprising ones. Why should people not have feelings on this topic?
There is a strong contradiction between those sentences, because feelings aren't useful or useless. They just are. You are calling them useless, but that doesn't make them useless.
You can say that feelings are useless in reaching a specific goal, but that is not what you initially said.
> As an aside, I don’t get all the people loudly expressing being depressed about the graphs and whatever. This is in line with predictions. People knew that was going to happen. It’s pretty useless to bemoan things which are unavoidable.
One tweet said he wasn't so much depressed about this happening, but about people doing nothing to stop it.
We've known this for over century, have had political debates about it for 3 decades, have made agreements to reduce our carbon emissions, but our carbon output keeps growing, and temperatures keep rising, and new coal power plants keep getting built.
We should have banned coal and oil power plants 2 decades ago. We should be investing only in emission-free power plants. We should have made fossil fuels too expensive to use for any purpose for which there are viable alternatives. We haven't done those things, and we're not going to do them any time soon, so these graphs will continue to get even worse in the future. That's what's depressing.
Lots of people are in the "if it doesn't drastically impact my day to day life it doesn't really exists", which is a perpetual "in 1-2 decade" cycle since we're quite good at adapting. "it's just a bit warmer", "the forest fires are just a bit closer", "the floods are just a bit closer", &c.
Some people will not be convinced by anything short of the actual destruction of our planet, and by the time that happens, nothing is going to matter anyway.
Is there any reason I shouldn't be for climate engineering (e.g. spreading sulfates into the atmosphere) today? In my mind, that has moved quickly from, "We probably shouldn't due to unexpected consequences" to "We should've started a few years ago".
Those unexpected consequences could also cause serious problems, and nobody wants to be held responsible for that. If a storm destroys your home because of climate change caused by 8 billion people, it's hard to hold anyone accountable. But if your home is destroyed because one organisation decided to block out the sun, suddenly someone is responsible.
I understand that it's a tragedy of the commons for how we got here.
To clarify, I think you're saying fear of reprisal is why we haven't seen intentional climate engineering. I don't think you're saying it's immoral or a bad idea.
Yeah, I'm not saying it's immoral or a bad idea, I'm saying it's legally very complicated.
It could be a bad idea, of course. It could also be the only solution that's fast enough. And not doing anything is also a bad idea. But not doing anything is at least legally uncomplicated.
Though I have heard of one geo-engineering experiment: seeding a piece of ocean with iron or iron oxide, which caused an algae bloom, which caused a spike in the number of salmon in the area. The idea is that the algae bloom absorbs a lot of CO2. But the person behind it didn't have any permission for this experiment and was widely criticised for being irresponsible. I hope scientists paid attention to the results, though.
Since almost all life on earth derives from photosynthesis, reducing insolation is very risky. Anyone that confidently asserts how it works suffers from not being informed enough to be worried. If humanity start doing releasing SO2 to reduce insolation, but not reducing atmospheric greenhouse gas levels, then the climate would be a coiled spring. CO2 sequestration operates on decade or century timeframes and SO2 released into the upper atmosphere is removed from the atmosphere in weeks to years. If humanity kept releasing CO2 and other greenhouse gases at current rates, but couldn't continue releasing SO2 for some reason, speaking plainly, we would be all be truly fucked in a very short period of time.
It is immoral and and a bad idea. We can get to carbon targets to solve this issue instead like scientists dedicated to this problem have been consistently saying for decades, but the USA's wealth derives from oil and excessive driving. So we are lied to and told that it isn't feasible.
If you are not also "for" all the boring basic stuff like "stop paying people to release GHG into the atmosphere" then specifically supporting that one policy probably marks you out as a sucker who has absorbed the propaganda of the people who got us into this mess. But as long as you support all the easier to implement solutions too, it's no big deal to add that one extra one.
Imagine that your friend who got into methamphetamine a while back has graduated from doing a bump before going out on Saturday night to snorting fat lines for breakfast, and some more before dinner, and now it's "oh, hell, midnight on a Tuesday already, why don't we just stay up all night again". Their ideas are getting weird, they're starting to feel the toll relentless insomnia takes, they can see the crash coming, they know - deep down - that they really ought to stop, and then they ask: "any reason I shouldn't just start knocking myself out with Xanax every night so I can sleep?"
41 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 88.5 ms ] thread"I’ve never been more depressed looking at graphs. This year has already entered uncharted territory in many key respects, and the upcoming El Niño will only make matters worse. We’re not ready for what’s coming."
https://twitter.com/LeonardLanglois/status/16679668377310167...
Wish these people could get a grip on themselves. Living in a constant state of depression because you’re scared of the future climate is the definition of putting the cart before the horse.
Don’t ricochet me with downvotes, I’m simply trying to answer that particular question.
We’re so incomprehensibly blessed to be able to experience this momentary oasis of beauty, but people will ignore it all in favor of mentally fast forwarding themselves into a state of imaginative terror.
That’s not to say disregard the environment entirely, but rather: cherish every moment you have with it, do what you can to help where you can (mainly: dramatically reduce consumption), and encourage others to do the same.
Who is ignoring anything? The terror comes from the contrast between one's keen personal awareness of the precious and fragile nature of this "oasis of beauty", and the systematically reckless, violent disregard humanity as a whole shows toward it.
People aren't depressed about something which could potentially happen about some point in the future, people are depressed about something that is actively happening right now - and only getting worse.
No one’s going to be around forever, might as well enjoy it while you’re here. Being depressed benefits nobody, least of all the environment.
The fantasy of not being worried only exists in cities I think and it’s totally divorced from what’s happening in food production. Ask any farmer in southern Europe if they’re worried they’ll tell you they were worried 10 years ago.
Fortunately, I have David Roberts' Volts podcast talking me off the ledge. He covers many of the efforts to build our fossil fuel free economy. Most are super clever. Cat nip for hackers. Highest recommendation.
https://www.volts.wtf
That’s an impressively eloquent caricaturization of the neurosis. Being able to state it so plainly leaves me to wonder if you’re being facetious about the whole thing.
> Panic in social psychology is considered infectious since it can spread to a multitude of people and those affected are expected to act irrationally as a consequence.
Indeed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic
All of these are signs that climate change is getting worse and worse. And stuff is likely to get worse in the coming years. And if we don't do anything to dramatically reduce CO2 emissions, it's going to get even worse after that.
We do have the ability to turn this around, but we clearly lack the political will to do so. And the longer we wait, the worse it will get.
The graphs themselves do an excellent job of providing the relevant context — they show decades of previous context, with the current year highlighted. The context of the past decades is literally the point of how the graphs were designed. The titles on the graphs also further describe the context - "..temperature anomaly", "...ice extent anomaly".
The consequences of burning eons worth of stored hydrocarbons in a few decades are upon us. But attitudes like this are literally part of the problem.
We probably should readjust what we consider normal to something veering further from the past years average and prepare for more extreme scenarios.
Also we probably should keep working on managing our emission of greenhouse gas to avoid things getting even worse.
As an aside, I don’t get all the people loudly expressing being depressed about the graphs and whatever. This is in line with predictions. People knew that was going to happen. It’s pretty useless to bemoan things which are unavoidable.
Humans aren't robots. We don't just have feelings connected to surprising events, but also to unsurprising ones. Why should people not have feelings on this topic?
You can say that feelings are useless in reaching a specific goal, but that is not what you initially said.
One tweet said he wasn't so much depressed about this happening, but about people doing nothing to stop it.
We've known this for over century, have had political debates about it for 3 decades, have made agreements to reduce our carbon emissions, but our carbon output keeps growing, and temperatures keep rising, and new coal power plants keep getting built.
We should have banned coal and oil power plants 2 decades ago. We should be investing only in emission-free power plants. We should have made fossil fuels too expensive to use for any purpose for which there are viable alternatives. We haven't done those things, and we're not going to do them any time soon, so these graphs will continue to get even worse in the future. That's what's depressing.
We're seeing changes right now, are we not? People's lives are being impacted right now, are they not?
Seems to me like those who said "we'll start seeing significant changes in 1-2 decades" around 2 decades ago were right on the money.
To clarify, I think you're saying fear of reprisal is why we haven't seen intentional climate engineering. I don't think you're saying it's immoral or a bad idea.
It could be a bad idea, of course. It could also be the only solution that's fast enough. And not doing anything is also a bad idea. But not doing anything is at least legally uncomplicated.
Though I have heard of one geo-engineering experiment: seeding a piece of ocean with iron or iron oxide, which caused an algae bloom, which caused a spike in the number of salmon in the area. The idea is that the algae bloom absorbs a lot of CO2. But the person behind it didn't have any permission for this experiment and was widely criticised for being irresponsible. I hope scientists paid attention to the results, though.
It is immoral and and a bad idea. We can get to carbon targets to solve this issue instead like scientists dedicated to this problem have been consistently saying for decades, but the USA's wealth derives from oil and excessive driving. So we are lied to and told that it isn't feasible.
What do you tell them?