Ask HN: What stage of grief are you at regarding climate change?

For thousands of years, there has been a creepy-looking guy on the corner, with a cardboard sign that says "REPENT - THE END IS NEAR", and just because she's a 20-year-old autistic Swede right now doesn't make the message any more credible or relevant.

I personally prefer the guy carrying the sign that reads "KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON" because that's the best individual action we can take.

fully accepted it years ago. my first wife back in the 1960s was half Native American, and she introduced me to some tribal shamans. they told me back then what was going to happen; so far it has transpired exactly according to their predictions. when i asked them how they knew, they said, “our grandfathers heard it from their grandfathers, and so on.” when i shared this with my friends back in what is now silicon valley, no one believed me.

yesterday i happened to tell this same story to a friend on the island where i live in south asia. he responded, “oh yes, it is the same with us. our ancestors knew, but nobody listened.”

the powers that be seem determined to fly this thing right into the ground, while we stand around idly discussing it.

Accepted there's things I can't change, and it seems grim.

Have multiple subscriptions to carbon removal + climate lobbying groups, try to do my part where I can.

I was a lot more jaded than I currently am. I recently switched jobs to a food eco calculation app [1], and while yes there are problems there's much better advice out there now for how you can contribute, rather than just "switch off your lights". We've been working on recipe swaps so you can see kgs off your daily habits.

Also speaking with clients, corporations want to help. Yes there is some marketing and tax incentive, but we've seen more interest in making permanent change beyond just a PR stunt.

[1] https://klimato.co

My state of grief is more related to politics.

I'm not concerned, for some reason. I an optimistic that humanity will deal with climate change and avoid catastrophe.

Acceptance at this point, but still this deep sadness. It hurts knowing the irreparable damage we've done and continue to do to our only home, but I don't lay awake at night freaking out about it anymore.

I left tech to pursue med school - I feel compelled to do something to help other people now, with all of the looming problems in front of us. And feeling like I'm doing more than just making monthly donations to NRDC and others helps.

We'll survive as a species... but many people will die and we'll lose a lot of Earth's natural beauty and diversity.

I had a gut feeling that we wouldn't do anything to cut emissions until we were feeling the repercussions on a regular basis and sadly that seems to be the case.

>Five years ago I joined the "green party" in my country wanting to make a difference with regards to climate change.

The green party of my country has successfully revitalized the coal industry, by getting rid of nuclear energy.

My "stage of grief" is that even in western countries only a minority cares. Outside of the west they regard it as an inevitable crisis where the only question is what you can do now to come out on top. Believing that climate change can be stopped by political activism (especially by a group of hypocrits) when the two largest popultion groups on earths clearly are not interested in stopping it, at best, extremely naive.

Acceptance. I can't do much more as the blame lies far out of my everyday reach.

I try to focus on the positive things, like the fact that renewables are being rapidly deployed and that the global CO2 emissions have stabilized in the past 10 years.

"We are going down"

Really? That's no way to live man, cheer up. No one can predict the future, and doomsayers have always been around and will always be around. Sure: things might get hairy, but even then we will manage (or perhaps some of us will).

And if not: then not. Enjoy yourself in the meantime while doing the best you can in terms of being environmentally conscious

Since you ask, I think that "climate change" is the über-strawman. No one has argued "constant climate".

Good stewardship of the resources of creation is common sense; let our energies be directed at that.

I'm not accepting it yet, but I'm working on dealing with the anger and sadness better. While it seems that not enough is changing fast enough, a lot is changing actually. The awareness is growing and getting louder. Stay positive, but don't confuse it with expectations in your mind.

I'm fairly positive in believing the tech and government regulation are probably going to save us from the very worst of climate change.

My faith in humanity generally has been near fatally wounded by this experience though, so if any other big problem appears I can see us ending civilization rather than sorting it out.

One thing to keep in mind is that if we accept that the world is heating up then you'd almost always expect any given day should be, on average, the hottest ever recorded in modern history, for that day. And at least one of those, per year, should be the hottest day ever recorded - period. So the recent trend of announcing these days like it's some unprecedented thing has, if anything, left me even more jaded.

About 20 years ago I was relatively engaged in climate activism. But my views shifted over the years after endless declarations of 'if we do nothing in 5-10 years, the world will end.' Each of those 5 or 10 years came, and it turned out that not only did the world not end, but I'd have been hard pressed to tell you it had even changed. At some point I began to wonder why should I think the next 5-10 years will be any different than the past repeated decades as it relates to this?

If I were to go back in time and optimize for encouraging activity on climate change I would make it the most boring thing imaginable. Any prediction I might make I would not only make in a clear and falsifiable fashion, but I would also make sure to lowball it. So that each and every one of my predictions could be clearly tested, even by laymen, and shown to not only be effectively 100% accurate, but even understating what was to come. I understand the point of the hyperbole is to draw people to the cause, and that may work in the short term, but in the long term you achieve the exact opposite. And it's not just me. You can see this in the longterm trends data perfectly clearly. [1]

[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/1615/environment.aspx

In The Netherlands we had the heaviest storm on record a few days ago. They said it’s a one in ten years storm. I suspect that the record will be broken in the next few years.

The only thing I do is trying to keep my energy usage as low as possible, but I know it doesn’t matter much. And I vote green, but that vote is wasted, as people care more about keeping refugees out and care less about the future their children and grandchildren will endure. But climate change only creates more refugees.

As long as Capitalism - with its need for endless growth - rules the world we don’t stand a chance. Our wealth and standard of living is based on buying stuff we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like. So we keep on wasting resources, generating needless carbon emissions and nothing will change.

Yes, we deploy more renewable energy to reduce carbon emissions but it will not be enough.

And platforms financed by Paul Graham will help spread misinformation about climate change so the populace will not want to change until it’s too late.

Stage 5. The climate will change. We are not going down. In fact more people eat today than any time in history. Poverty keeps getting smaller and smaller.

5 years ago Greta said we had 5 years.

"I'm not dead. I'd like to go for a walk now."

We are not going down. At least it is very unlikely (I wouldn't trust climate models enough to completely rule it out).

Once things are getting too uncomfortable in industrial countries, they will reduce temperatures using geo-engineering and possibly carbon capturing. Today that may be controversial, because people are still dreaming of being able to cut CO2 emissions enough to make a difference, but once things are getting uncomfortable, people will demand a quick relief, and it will be a no-brainer.

I'm not sure what to think about the fact that this whole thing is playing out exactly like in the movie "Don't Look Up". It's eerie.

I'm between fourth and fifth stage, trying to think how I could best prepare for the uncertain future.

I started studying science when I was 7. I tried to get people to learn it as well, but nobody wanted to. Just nobody. Then when they didn't like some results of scientific process, they came up with most stupid pseudoscientific arguments why things are actually the way they want them to be. When I understood that the same people vote for our leaders, I thought we'll be doomed for sure..

That's how I've seen the world. My grief has always been that with current scientific process and progress of technology we should be moving much faster towards better, more just world. Instead climate change, the first major problem we encountered with our new technology and powers, we completely screwed up our response and are taking a huge risk of massive loss of lives and ecosystems, while we're fighting about the most stupid stuff and choosing ridiculous leaders with bad reasons. Instead of critical thought, lots of people just get stuck with opinions they want to have, no matter how clearly they're wrong and based on lies and feelings.

And I've felt it's quite hard to stay motivated in this world. My motivation has always been really finicky, I can get extremely motivated on correct circumstances, but have a complete lack of motivation when things are wrong. During past decades these have led me to do a lot of drinking (I've finally mostly stopped few years back) and progressing through life really slowly, sometimes just stopping for months or even a year. I wish I could get over it, but it feels harder and harder. Everything I predicted how the future would be screwed came through, just much much worse I ever could have figured. Even if we beat climate change, there's other problems on the way and I'm not so optimistic how we'll handle those. Feels though to try to be building a better future when it feels most people don't even try or care, when they could affect so much change for better for so little.

No matter what stage you're at, actively doing something helps. You don't have to be perfect (because you can't), but keep thinking of ways to make a difference. Plant some trees, even if in the greater scheme of things it might make no difference to the world, it will still make a difference to you.

Mass action has to be a little more imaginative.

Capitalists aren't as bright as ppl think. Most are trapped in infinite loops they don't have the creativity or sense to exit.

We saw during COVID companies and supply chains collapsing just cause demand for x y or z dropped off over night.

That's all it takes - targeting demand of one product globally and forcing them out of their loops.

I've accepted that we are moving to the worst projection by the end of century, with close to no actions done to start decreasing greenhouse factors. I also suspect that advanced stages of climate change MAY cause an big regional war, or several. So yeah, we can't do much about climate change or (potential) war. At most we can avoid buying property in the soon to be flooded regions or or in the very hot climates.

I used to be scared, but lately I'm starting to change my mind.

I'm not saying it's not an issue, it's just that I'm very optimistic for the (near) future. And most of the scare comes from some very wrong estimates of expert's inability to recognise an S Curve of progress and not a linear one.

I recommend everyone to watch the Brighter series of videos from RethinkX [1]

Especially in episode 5 there's some graphs with every year's estimate of coal use and renewables that are really crazily wrong. I really can't understand how can "experts" be so wrong for tens of years and keep going.

It's already cheaper to install PV & Wind instead of any other fossil fuel alternative. And the price is only going down with scale. Also battery prices are going down so the problem of renewables intermittency will be solved as well.

Also, because of the fact that we need to have more power installed than consumption (because of intermittency) we will have more and more extra power (what Tony Seba from RethinkX calls Superpower or what we hear lately in news that energy price is negative). And with that what we can do is dump that energy into CO2 capture that was not feasible before because it was generating more CO2 with the power it used than what it captured.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hk9VQt5Nt64&list=PLxB143vg5_...

Acceptance. But I got there in no time. I'm depressed, that we can be as good and green as we want in EU, we will always have these people having fun just wasting resources like driving rolling coal. We have a globalized world. Covid showed even more issues: We have so many air planes that we cannot really have them all on ground so they are supposed to be airborne. Just looking at Flightradar makes me shudder. We can have nice and green cities, E-cars, bikes, public transport and so on, but I'm also aware of the conditions in Africa and South East asia where thousands of cars, scooter and other outdated tech just pollutes the air and wastes tons by just being stuck in traffic jams. America, where energy is rather cheap, seems to build houses that look like paper to me. Imagine there would be energy passes for buildings that would show how much energy is needed per square meter room it provides. I believe most buildings would his G grades. I'm trying my best to act as rational as I can. I own a car and despite it's sporty type I'm a very judicious driver. I rarely use the breaks to reduce speed by just knowing my care and observe the traffic and situation. After 150k km mileage (60k on my own) I finally decided to replace the brakes. Every time I came in for service they told me, I should renew the brakes. And when I commissioned to renew the brakes the chef called me to ensure if I really wanted to do that because the brakes would last a bit longer. Hilarious! I observe a lot, listen to people's stories, and have come to the conclusion that most people are just not considerate and don't want to be. I understand that it doesn't make sense to lecture them. In 99% it won't change anything. People who are really interested are mostly already optimizing and quite good at it. And then it's circle jerk of a minority while the majority keeps acting dumb from the minority's perspective. All that just leaves me with my depressing thoughts about being a single small being on a planet with billions of people and a stupid system that cannot be improved and most beings just try to get through somehow. And I'm not going to start ranting about all the (energy) waste caused by the greed, profit and lies of minor beings doing scams or powerful beings with great influence in politics and business.

Acceptance.

We all know we're watching a slow moving train wreck. We all know our lives are going to be greatly impacted in ways we can't even imagine, up to and including dying as a result. We all know we could have prevented this catastrophe but refused to do so for reasons.

What I sincerely hope is as humanity comes out the other side of this disaster, they will have learned how to spot the disingenuous, the charlatans, and the liars. Those people will still exist, of course, and there will still be people swayed by them, but hopefully they'll be on the fringe and have no power to effect their lunacy.

This may not happen of course, but I hope it does. Which brings me to the sixth stage of grief: hope. Now that I've accepted what's going to happen to us, I hope our civilization is so much the stronger for it and we can set aside the BS that's been plaguing us for centuries once and for all.