Idk, I saw a lot of takes from people I know from IRL in 2020/21 where the moment 100% containment seemed like it wasn't an option people said "why try anything at all? what happens, happens, if your grandma dies she dies." even though vaccines looked promising but weren't generally available yet... even with these promising percentile "solutions" very close, if the solution isn't 100% effective people seem to give up.
I think if you've ever been around depressed or emotionally overwhelmed people or just people generally you see this kind of all or nothing thinking is not just common but prevalent.
I've always been against paternalism historically but the last few years have provided a fair amount of evidence that it might be a valid tactic.
I used to be ideologically against cohersive power as well but persuasion often doesn't come from well reasoned argument, it can come from brute repetition, or for addicts of different stripes (drugs, ragebait, social media, personality) persuasion seems like a dead end.
Authoritarianism isn’t bad because it doesn’t work.
Authoritarianism is bad because it works too well - for the authority. And while the authorities interests and everyone else’s may align well at the beginning, that is very unlikely after awhile. And then there is nothing anyone can do about it.
I have three words for anyone who doesn't think authoritarianism can work out well in the long run -- Lee Kuan Yew. Thanks to him, Singapore is a single-party autocracy -- that's rich, clean, and generally pleasant to live in.
For one generation. That isn’t the long run yet. He didn’t die that long ago. He also left a lot of angry Malays and Indians in his wake.
Dictators worked out well for Rome for awhile!
And Saddam did really turn Iraq around.
The biggest issue IMO with Authoritarians is they tend to take out realistic competition (Cincinnatus excepted) and force everyone else to march in lockstep with them. Part of the ideology.
So even if they do allow succession, it’s controlled and ‘monoculture’. Which long term (or even short term if done harshly enough) weakens the state and the population, as it makes everything rigid. It tends to snap instead of bend.
But only time will tell. The CCP has also been doing pretty well by most standards too, and they have a ‘leader for life’ now too.
Some kind of authoritarianism (by committee, dictator, king, etc) has been and is the historic norm, no?
I agree with your take on Authoritarianism, it's not a good multi generational approach since transfer of power eventually becomes violent and incompetent dictators are normative.
Paternalistic communication isn't necessarily authoritarianism though. No info is being withheld, anyone who cares can still look it up, it's more of a marketing tactic.
In the past few years we've learned that no matter what course of action a group of any significant size chooses to take, at least 25% of them will just say "no, fuck you" and either refuse to go along or actively sabotage the effort. Given that, what's your alternative? How do you get the necessary level of cooperation happening right now so there's some semblance of civilization left for people 3 generations from now?
Since we can't accomplish what we need to accomplish without 100% participation. You're deluding yourself if you think we have any hope of a reasonable climate future without universal participation.
And, yes, it is the 25%'s fault when they're just willing to say "no" to anything because it hurts someone they want hurt, even if it also hurts them in the process.
I get why some people are trying to stick to the 1.5C thing, but it’s the role of scientists to just give it to us straight. We rely on that.
Additionally, I think it is actually better that they express the situation as-is (getting worse, faster) because the public isn’t going to change unless things are dire. There’s so much social and economic inertia that nothing is going to change until it absolutely has to. By voicing the reality that we’re going to shoot way past 1.5C, maybe that will start to raise more alarms.
yes, and this is literally the "old lie" that TFA discusses. sure, you want to give people hope, but you shouldn't lie to them about what's coming simply to give them hope.
"hope" can also be things like "let's keep it to 4C". how did we get to "hope" being defined solely by this 1.5C number?
this also generally discounts the loss of hope people are going to feel when they realize they've been lied to, especially when you are demanding they make these huge sacrifices. We already saw the result of this approach during COVID - not only was nobody fooled by the "masks don't reduce transmission" but when scientists admitted this was false messaging primarily intended to massage people's behavior, it pretty well destroyed any rapport between the scientific community and the public.
If you are someone who "does everything right" and stops eating meat, sorts your recycleables, and reduces the number of times you flush - how do you feel when the outcome is "lol, yeah, none of that is going to be enough, we know and knew that, but despite your sacrifice we're gonna blow way past that anyway because we didn't tackle any of the systemic issues around production or distribution"?
> Additionally, I think it is actually better that they express the situation as-is (getting worse, faster) because the public isn’t going to change unless things are dire.
(let alone consumption/etc but I think that is a red-herring anyway, consumption or reductions in one area will be consumed in some other sector of the economy. capitalism basically routes around "inefficiency" just like the internet routes around its own damage, and consumers expressing non-optimal consumption preferences according to the laws of the society is "inefficiency" in this context. Stopping your beef consumption just makes it cheaper for someone else who will consume more, etc.)
but anyway on voting habits: you still literally have states like florida that are going to be underwater within literal decades, that are getting hammered by climate change so badly that insurers have cranked their rates (followed by banning this, and then insurers pulling out entirely), and yet still are literal trump-voter swamps going massively red every cycle, even in statewide elections etc.
it's literally not even an issue that people care about or will vote to fix, even though it's literally going to affect them personally before their children reach adulthood.
I almost didn't click on this... it turns out the scientists are just as depressed by the news. I'm not surprised that 1.5C is overly hopeful. Frankly, it looks like geoengineering may be more viable/profitable/necessary than currently discussed.
it has no reason (or will) to choose malevolence, it will only use the morality we tell it to have, and thus will be a perfect reflection of what we want to be, in a way that even our very own kids cannot fulfill
If only. There's a lot of space in between "our morality" (please do define that) and "what we want to be" where AGI can royally screw us. Check out Robert Miles on AI safety, here's a good intro:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pYXy-A4siMw
This is interesting, but I see him making a lot of assumptions and baseless conjectures already which I could fairly easily counterargue (at least in my head). I also have to wonder what he now thinks now that GPT4 is out there (since this is a 2 year old talk, and the chat AI's were abysmally stupid just 2 years ago). What qualifies as "general intelligence"? What is the AGI metric? Is it IQ test? Because if so, ChatGPT4 already scores 130. Will we continue to move the goalpost (say, to 180IQ) in order to keep the FUD alive?
That's just creating another entity to shift the burden of decision to. Problem is, even if we had an AGI, it's not God. It's trained on all the dumb things humans have said and written, so I don't see any reason why it should automatically be smarter.
> I think climate scientists (and journalists) are underestimating people. If you treat people like children who can’t handle the truth, they will behave like children.
He should get outside right now and ask a few people about the topic. People ignore the truth, don't care or are actively working against it because it is a Chinese hoax.
It's the age of mis-information. False things and lies are also available on demand. People have to decide what is true and who to listen to. That's not easy.
I don't think they believe its a hoax. A lot of it is also hoping someone else will solve the problem for them. Or because climate change hasn't dramatically changed their normal lives yet that forces them for action. People are not really good at preventing problems, hence why history tends to repeat itself.
No, many people believe it's a hoax. Either from our government (for control) or China (for money and control) or some other sort of total world government (for control).
I cannot vouch for what is going on in their heads. But they tell pollsters it's a hoax. They vote for politicians who say explicitly that it's a hoax. They tell each other, and everybody else, that it's a hoax on social media.
Maybe deep in their hearts somewhere they don't believe it, but it's so deep that it's impossible to locate.
Some of my family are conspiratorial thinkers, trumpy types. They’re in Texas, where the power grid is continuing to slowly buckle, and they will happily agree it’s hotter than it used to be, even getting too hot. They also agree that pollution is bad.
But they simply don’t connect the two. They don’t think we can possibly be the sole reason for climate change, but why they think that is fluid — it’s gods creation and we can’t mess with that. Or if we can it doesn’t matter because we’re destined for a heavenly kingdom and this planet will pass away. Or they say more “grounded” things like we’re getting closer to the sun or the sun itself is hotter. Or they buy into the idea for a while that it’s just a natural oscillation. We’re actually headed towards an ice age!
My theory is they’re inconsistent because they do accept it, but accepting it means they have to understand consciously that shit is bleak and it makes all the work they’ve done in their lives potentially meaningless. They don’t want to face the reckoning of disillusionment so they close their eyes to it.
Or maybe they just don’t believe it. I don’t know, I’m not in their brains.
"I am physically and mentally capable of reading each of the words in this [comment], in sequence, and I understand every one of them having either learned them in school or from context at some point in my life. And yet when I attempt to, an overwhelming feeling of stupidity envelopes me."
--You, two days ago.
I know my comment won't likely change your mind, but given your "start listening to the skeptics" stance, perhaps this is a tiny impulse.
Yes, please take my words out of context to show how principled a debater and how correct you are in all things. There is nothing wrong with that at all. I believe it's the very first bullet point in the leftoidy new book titled "Fallacies to Win With" published just a few weeks ago.
> I know my comment won't likely change your mind
You make no real argument. You didn't dispute any of my points. You didn't even attempt to show how good your character or judgement were, so that I might respect you as a person and maybe defer to your own judgement. You might have preached over-caution, which isn't fundamentally flawed as a concept, often just too expensive to consider.
No, you dug into the comment history, quoted something without even giving a hint what it was about.
Of course you won't change my mind. Minds should only be changed carefully, after new information is presented, or a new way of thinking about difficult problems is illustrated.
> your "start listening to the skeptics" stance, perhaps this is a tiny impulse.
In what sort of delirious fever dream do you imagine yourself on the side of the skeptics?
Couldn't find anything with that title. Care to give me a link or ISBN or something?
> the side of the skeptics
is there a "mainstream" side and a "skeptics" side? is there only one skeptic side? is it possible to be a skeptic of a non-mainstream opinion? is it possible to be skeptic of what you write, even though you are skeptic of the mainstream opinion?
> delirious fever dream
I actually just took my temperature, it's 36.3 - make of that what you will. Or don't.
What are the wrong predictions about climate change that the media has forgotten? I assume you're referring to mainstream media stuff, not fringe predictions.
Also I'm curious -- you seem to accept the planet is warming. Are you denying that CO2 from fossil fuels is the principal cause, or you accept that but just think it's pointless to do anything about it?
Or are you denying warming and/or the increase in atmospheric CO2 entirely?
> Also I'm curious -- you seem to accept the planet is warming
I accept that climate has been changing since day one 4 billion years ago. It undoubtedly happens today, happened yesterday, will happen tomorrow.
> Are you denying that CO2 from fossil fuels is the principal cause,
This seems irrelevant to me. I would indulge in the speculation if we lived in a world where that already hadn't been politicized. Now I can't help but worry that doing so would be used to propagandize to destroy the economy.
> but just think it's pointless to do anything about it?
It does seem to me that it's pointless for the people most worried about it. I have children, I want and will have grandchildren someday, and they in turn will have their own too. So, the future's more important for me than it is for many.
The "let's adopt a baby from Africa because it's selfish to have your own biological children" crowd, they seem a little weird for caring if you ask me.
> Or are you denying warming and/or the increase in atmospheric CO2 entirely?
The first doesn't seem implausible. The latter can be objectively measured with devices that are cheap enough and available enough that I could confirm it myself if I had any suspicions.
I am clearly less alarmed by those measurements than most.
Got it. So you seem to just... not care. You don't think it's necessarily false, you just don't care.
And it really seems to bother you that other people do care.
Thank you for the honesty!
If I may ask -- does it bother you that other people care, because you think any solution is necessarily and obviously impossible to begin with, and therefore it's a wasted effort, and wasted efforts bother you? Or because you think there's a rational cost/benefit analysis to be had, but you're already sure that the costs outweight the benefits, and costs outweighing benefits bothers you? Or does it bother you for another reason?
> You don't think it's necessarily false, you just don't care.
It's statements like this one that I find the most bizarre. You claim this is about science... well, that's not how science works. First you prove to me that this is real. Make some predictions (non wishy-washy ones), wait however long for those to be observed, and then we know global warming's real.
Making predictions you can't be bothered to wait to observe is a a palm reader's scam.
> If I may ask -- does it bother you that other people care,
You are part of a dying civilization that has convinced itself not to reproduce. The social norms of such a civilization are completely irrelevant, including and maybe especially to themselves.
> , and therefore it's a wasted effort, and wasted efforts bother you?
I just saw 10%+ inflation the last year or so because a cold virus made people work from home and this disrupted toilet paper manufacturing supply chains.
You say that we have to stop emitting carbon dioxide (something I've been doing since I was born), all of it, to save a planet that you won't bother to have babies to live in it 100 years from now... and that's supposed to be painless economic proposition? If what you wanted only cost a few tens of trillions, why the hell not? Burn the money (not literally, carbon dioxide), and make a future generation pay for it.
All I see are world-ending economic catastrophes. No thanks.
The future world isn't yours to worry about anymore.
This will seem totally off-topic to you, of course. Incomprehensible, even. But my daughter still tells me at age 14 that she wants 5 or 6 kids of her own. Me and mine will be above replacement, I think. It'll be our problem, and they're up to the challenge.
Red flag: "mainstream media". Anything complaining about this is virtually certain to be way, way off track.
There have been plenty of nonsense predictions from *non-scientists*. Where have the climate scientists gotten it wrong, though? The only question is one of speed/size.
And denying that change is harmful is another aspect of the problem. Sure, we have survived it. We "survived" the late Permian extinction event (believed to be about 8C)--but the majority of species did not and most of the Earth was basically uninhabited. In the other direction we don't have enough data to figure out what percent of species was lost in the snowball. Note that the worst-case estimates I have seen for warming are 14C. (6C from CO2 plus 8C from methane hydrates.) The methane hydrate numbers are uncertain enough they aren't even included in the IPCC estimates at all.
As for having skin in the game--they're humans even if they aren't our direct descendants.
The pathological belief is the denial of what's happening.
I've read a version of this line of thinking many times.
You do realize that if a scientist could put up a reputable set of studies that disprove the central climate change theories that they would be set for life under a cavalcade of fossil fuel sponsorships. Not to mention that they would be a hero to most of the planet. They would be singlehandedly responsible for major policy shifts on the part of entire countries. There's a massive incentive for someone to convincingly disprove the negative effects of climate change.
If there is such a complete and totalizing suppression of actual inquiry in climate science, then why are there climate skeptics with positions in major universities? Why are major journalistic publications skeptical? It seems to me that there is quite a bit of a forum for debate on climate science, because everyone, including, probably, many climate scientists, would love for it to be wrong.
Your argument is based on your being completely convinced that a very large swath of people, many if not most of whom are parents like yourself, are acting in utter bad faith. Certainly any academic field, like any human endeavor, is subject to group think, but if you look at the very real scientific progress that's happened in the last several hundred years, you can see that the scientific approach, empirically, does lead to success, or at least disproves the notion that groupthink is likely to wholly capture a scientific field.
The politicization of the whole thing ("liberal morality") is also intriguing. I'm an unabashed liberal. If you put a convincing argument about how the climate would be fine in front of me, I would thank you a thousand times over.
As it stands, I've read so many arguments from climate skeptics, and they roughly follow the following templates:
* a wholesale belief that climate science is operating under a special kind of bad faith
* misunderstandings of things like the second law of thermodynamics (e.g. ignoring the atmosphere itself acting as a heat sink)
* belief that Professor Q is somehow right and all the other professors are wrong (probably because of the bad faith part), ignoring that Professor Q might also be subject to such things
* belief in government or corporate control over the discussion, ignoring the truly massive financial incentive to ignore climate science
* citations, usually exaggerations, of how many "climate predictions" have gone wrong, ignoring that science journalism and activists will often simplify and/or incorrectly cite studies in any field, because the public doesn't, in the end, understand the language of probability
> You do realize that if a scientist could put up a reputable set of studies that disprove the central climate change theories that they would be set for life under a cavalcade of fossil fuel sponsorships.
You don't understand scientists then. They don't want to be "set for life". They want status within their own bizarre little community.
While no doubt Exxon would be more than happy to bankroll them at any level, the left made sure to poison that... anyone even hinted at to be accepting their money is a "fossil fuel shill". So no, they're not interested in taking that money.
If there are any such people out there now, they do the easy thing... they go find something else to research where they can be honest without it ruining their career, they publish, and we can't even know how many of them are. If they self-identify, careers are over.
> If there is such a complete and totalizing suppression of actual inquiry in climate science,
Why would it have to be "complete and total"? You still think I'm talking about some conspiracy. I'm talking about fools and halfwits doing this accidentally, by instinct, and so when they pipe up "but we're not suppressing!", in their own way they're even honest about it. They genuinely believe they aren't.
> Your argument is based on your being completely convinced that a very large swath of people, many if not most of whom are parents like yourself, are acting in utter bad faith.
I don't posit any bad faith in any of this. Stupidity and incompetence, and a complete lack of immunity for groupthinking tendencies suffice. Right now, you believe you're very righteous in even typing out your comment.
> but if you look at the very real scientific progress that's happened in the last several hundred years,
You don't get to appeal to the scientific progress, without taking credit for all of the regress that happens too. It's slow, accidental, and there's no way for you to know, one way or the other whether you're a plate tectonicist or continental fixist in all of this.
> or at least disproves the notion that groupthink is likely to wholly capture a scientific field.
The history of science is replete with examples of entire fields being captured by groupthink. Sure, so far, it seems that eventually it fades away. But without a better understanding of the sociology of groupthink, we don't know that's a universal feature. And besides, even if it does... seems the only sure fix is to wait for the old guard to die out. Meaning I'd have to wait another 40 or 50 years minimum.
> belief that Professor Q is somehow right and all the other professors are wrong (probably because of the bad faith part),
And not because it's a recurring theme in science? Not because, you don't need consensus if you're actually correct?
> belief in government or corporate control over the discussion,
In what part of my comment did I even hint that I believed this? Or are you just talking about the other skeptics because they're easier to attack than I am?
I think the core of our disagreement lies in your statement here: "You don't understand scientists then. They don't want to be "set for life". They want status within their own bizarre little community." I know some, but not all, scientists, and I can't put them firmly in that category. They're motivated by all sorts of things, as are the rest of us. I do know people who have left academia because they came to hold this belief through negative experiences, but I also know people who have avoided such. I don't think I or you can presume to make such sweeping pronouncements on such a large and varied group of people. I also believe the idea that contrarian scientists immediately lose their career when they question the status quo is an easily falsifiable claim. Is there a general pressure to conform to group think? Yes. Are there painful trends in academia? Yes. Behind the current state of climate science is quite a bit of evidence. I am open to it being entirely wrong, but it seems quite a bit more likely to me that it is right, at least correct enough to take action. The consequences of taking action are far lower than the consequences of not taking action.
The basic problem here is that people prefer to hear positive news.
"It's a hoax" is a lot more palatable than "It's a serious problem that requires major action to be taken." Denying the problem is much easier and they'll do some substantial mental gymnastics to avoid having to take the hard path.
Oh, they do. 14% of American believe the Earth literally is not getting warmer. Another 26% believe it is getting warmer, but due mostly to natural weather patterns and not human activity.
11% of people believe the US federal government should literally not be doing anything about climate change.
yep, the older you are the better you see through this nonsense. first it was global cooling - fail, then global warming - fail, now climate change which is a mighty convenient catch-all term to be used to justify whatever fake solution is being proposed.
Peterson et Al (2008) The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Consensus
Abstract: There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then.
> People ignore the truth, don't care or are actively working against it because it is a Chinese hoax.
It's far easier to convince people that it's a hoax when the scientists say things that aren't strictly true -- because they they get to debunk your minor exaggeration, which discredits you, and makes people more willing to believe the people who claim you're full of crap about everything.
When you see dishonest people succeeding, the conclusion to draw is that we need to redouble our efforts to fight dishonesty, not that dishonesty is an effective strategy that everyone should adopt.
The latter destroys anyone's ability to even know who is right, and who does that benefit?
That's not really surprising, but you need the reporters to be honest too unless you expect the public to get the information directly from the scientists.
Otherwise the reporters who agree with you discredit themselves so no one believes them anymore and the adversarial reporters continue to be adversarial.
Ironically, as terrifying as the climate news is, I don't think that's what's going to do us in.
Increasingly, I think the delegitimization of political institutions (which failed to prevent this predictable calamity) is going to be the business end of the stick.
It can seem weird to draw a line between our wobbling democracies and climate change, but when you recall that institutions derive their legitimacy from their ability to deliver repeatable results, and the opportunity to deliver (climate) results of any sort is diminishing, I imagine it will essentially stretch and then snap the overton window.
Not necessarily -- there are a lot more wood-burning stoves in a world without solar panels, and we don't have the population that we had 500 years ago.
It's not like rewinding a tape or time travel. I would predict we start moving backward and simply do not stop -- not at 500 years, not at 1000 years.
A positive feedback loop is just someone else's interrupted homeostasis.
The twist is that if we collapse we will most likely never come back since we already burned all the easy to reach fuel. Can't go from bronze age to CPUs without an industrial revolution somewhere in between
That's right. Absolute best case scenario, we'd probably be looking at 2-3000 years to recover the amount of progress we've made in the past 250 years. Worst case, we're never again able to progress past 18th century technology. Fossil fuels are a hell of a drug.
Governments are largely representative of the people. People simply don't care about climate change. How many people would vote for representative that run on the platform of hardcore authoritarian regulations that makes everyone life worse?
> Climate experts talk a lot about “cathedral thinking.” It’s the idea of working towards long term goals — like a medieval cathedral. These goals require vision, shared commitment, and decades, even centuries, of planning. The planners and builders don’t live to see the end product, but future generations reap the rewards.
> It’s an inspiring idea. Something maybe only humans could divine. But here’s the thing: cathedral thinking also requires a firm grasp of facts. A cathedral built on fantasy won’t stand for long.
> If my son and his friends think the coral reefs will be OK, the reefs are doomed. If he knows the truth, maybe he’ll become a biologist who tries to save them. When people know what they’re up against, many will be sad — I’m sad! — but then they can prepare.
This is an example of a perennial mistake where the science behind global warming is conflated with the science behind the consequences of global warming. No one knows if the coral reefs are doomed!
Additionally, it's ironic to use the term "cathedral thinking" and then talk about the necessity of sticking to the facts. Cathedrals are built by Christians as a way to worship God. As someone who doesn't believe in God, I see a lesson here: beleving in something, whether it's true or not, can be useful. In fact, it may even be necessary if you want beautiful things like cathedrals. And even us heathens can be inspiried by ideals that are -- being ideals -- unattainable.
I hate to point this out, but the cathedral thinking idea is just working on something you're likely not going to see finished. The original baggage is irrelevant to the metaphor. In fact, that's the point of metaphors - being able to take the core idea while understanding that the particulars are superfluous.
On the other hand, just because the coral reefs seem "fine" today doesn't mean they will be in 2 weeks. Referring to the recent mass die off of corals off the Florida Keys, Dr. Cory Krediet, a professor of marine science who studies corals had this to say:
> “The health of the coral is at a catastrophic loss,” Krediet said. “This is an unprecedented level of temperature increase and it happened at a rate that the corals cannot deal with. We went from healthy reefs to bleach reefs and dead reefs within 10 days.”
And the temperature just keeps going up. It might be months, years, maybe even a couple decades, but things keep looking worse and worse for the corals, and we're not doing enough to stop it.
One thing that scientists have learned over the last year is that facts and honesty don’t help. There are many financially motivated people trying their best to keep the temperature rising unchecked, and they know that complex, nuanced messages just don’t land at a political level. So you want something to happen, you keep the message consistent and clear.
Don’t tell the losing team they should give their opponents more chances to score. If society had wanted straight talking, we wouldn’t be in this situation.
Right, because the "you'll all be underwater by the 2000s" messages 30-40 years ago sure helped a lot and nobody is claiming climate change is a hoax anymore.
> If society had wanted straight talking, we wouldn’t be in this situation.
USA is by far the worst climate change offender, and USA uses way more alarmist messaging than any other country I've seen. So to me it looks like alarmist messaging makes it worse, not better.
Facts and honesty does help, big tobacco lost, tons of countries all over the world have already added plans to ban fossil fuel cars in about a decade etc. The caveat is that it takes decades for that change to happen, and US "scientists" seems to always want to sway the current election in their favor, so they happily sacrifice trust and long term get those small short term wins.
It's an unfortunate reality that we're going to exceed +1.5C, and we need to begin preparing for the consequences now. "Solving" climate change requires humanity to both prevent further warming AND take care of the people impacted by it. 10% of us could be forced to flee our homes by 2050...
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Absolutely agree with this. I see this juxtaposition between calls for basically civilization-ending extreme measures to stay below 1.5 and others saying 1.5 is already a certainty and will end us all, and it just ends up making me tired and not care about climate change anymore because nobody's talking sense on what should and could be done.
What you're experiencing and saying is actually completely right. Issues don't motivate people, and actions lead beliefs as much (or more) than vice versa
* Think about where your food comes from, and how it is fertilised. Read about different modes of agriculture.
* Think about minimising your energy usage, especially fossil fuels. Look at heat pumps, cycling infrastructure, that kind of thing.
* Learn about alternatives for building and anything else. Building with straw bales is a particular favourite of mine because it can be done so simplistically by people with relatively little training.
* Find projects where other people are doing stuff and join in. See the above article - self-efficacy is a muscle, build it by exercising it.
Edit: also, we'll blow the 1.5C carbon budget in 8 years. Sorry - we'd have to cut emissions by 20% a year every year to avoid that. Plus sequestration of course.
I know it seems like a nut job question but, if we assume global warming is nothing we've seen before event then wouldn't at least some governments fail?
Is there some way to predict it? Let's also assume some radical change in some governments like to a fascist or communist type regime is possible as well
I'd guess no western governments would fail. Personally I suspect when the west reaches its ideological reflexive response to climate change, it'll look like fascism. I also suspect we'd have preferred communism.
What's scary to me is the malign actions that are possible in the name of climate change. Imagine you're living in Pakistan and your home has been washed away. Is it so hard to believe someone somewhere will choose to pursue revenge?
Armed with the simple fact that Americans have higher per capita carbon emissions than any other people - double as much, if memory serves - then someone sufficiently angry may well be able to justify indiscriminate killing of Americans to themselves.
Apologies for the morbidity here, but what I'm saying here is that by not adopting explicit policies of "just transition" we're setting up the conditions for climate fascism in the west and climate terrorism too.
Individual governments as in the ruling coalitions are likely to fall. Probably in response to extreme measures they would put in place to combat climate change and massive degradation of quality of life that would follow.
I believe people will choose furthering climate change over massively lowering their standards of living. And they would be violent in these goals. So nations might stay, but they will just throw away most of actions taken.
It isn't an either/or for most countries. I suspect America and Russia will have to change enormously, the rest of the west just needs decent public transport, cogeneration of heat, insulation, and some changes to agriculture. Nobody is going to have an awful life if we deal with climate change in a just way, even if we limit ourselves to today's technology.
There are serious people predicting the collapse of global civilization by 2050. I think that might be about right. One of the things we should have learned from the consequences of the COVID pandemic measures is that global supply chains are extremely fragile, and once things start breaking down, getting them restarted again takes a huge amount of effort.
Eventually, if we don't do anything, we'll reach a point where the amount we're spending on mitigation measures becomes nearly equal to the the damage caused from the consequences we're supposed to be mitigating. At that point, it all becomes pretty pointless.
> Think about where your food comes from, and how it is fertilised.
I would add: start growing your own food. You don't have to grow all your own food; you can start small. It's easy, anyone can do it, and you don't need much space to get started - you can even grow some things indoors if you don't have a garden.
I only grow a fairly small amount of my own food but it's been one of the most rewarding things I've ever done, and it's completely changed my relationship with food and the way I see nature. The post-carbon future can only be a future in which far more people take a closer interest in food production.
That's a failure of the political class who are using it to score points at the expense of a lot of people's lives.
It's really quite gross.
Climate change is due to, and a threat to, the status quo, and those who have gained their societal positions on the back of this status quo will defend the righteousness of their status literally to the death.
And these folks typically have communication platforms that reach a long way and therefore muddy the waters, often with the sideline cheering of said politicians.
The "never let a crisis go to waste" crowd seem more concerning. It isn't the status quo political class who want us to live in pods and eat bugs (metaphorically speaking). A lot of the rhetoric and policy proposals related to climate change seem designed to foist a reduced standard of living on the middle and lower classes in Western countries.
This feels like a microcosm for politics in general.
You have a real problem (climate change) and you have an effective solution (carbon tax refunded as a dividend), but that doesn't really serve anybody's political goals.
Doing that would destroy the fossil fuel industry as people switch to electric cars and generate power with renewables or nuclear to avoid the carbon tax. Fossil fuel industry is a Republican constituency, so they fight it.
Doing that wouldn't serve any partisan political agenda. Given the choice most people would just buy an electric car, not ride the bus. It would likely require a significant number of new nuclear power plants. All of the money is being refunded to the population, not diverted to cronies and political donors. The most cost effective source of solar panels is currently China, not domestic union jobs. But Democrats keep asking for those things instead, which is dumb and most importantly less effective, so instead we get nothing.
In my experience there's no group better at that, and with the best platform, than politicians.
However, you're not wrong in your statement that there are other groups trying to push their own fringe agendas that just end up scaring the normal/middle majority. But, politics also has the power to guide the narrative incredibly better than it has been, and to properly address said fringe agendas.
> A lot of the rhetoric and policy proposals related to climate change seem designed to foist a reduced standard of living on the middle and lower classes in Western countries.
The problem is that's the reality, so the hard work that politicians just don't want to do because it requires collaboration with "the dreaded other side" is determining the framing and choice of what standards of living can be maintained and what needs to change and by how much.
However, if the worlds politicans are actually good judges of the tolerances of society and they've correctly decided that society can't tolerate any decline in lifestyle, then there was no way to win anyway so might as well "get what I can when I can before the music stops".
Vote for politicians who support carbon taxes and investing in climate resilience and infrastructure.
You can’t prepare for this as an individual. This is a global societal problem. The effects of climate change are predictable on a global scale but much less so on a local scale.
> You can’t prepare for this as an individual. This is a global societal problem.
Why not both? "Climate resilience" will in large part be driven by individuals and communities working on a local scale. Support big-scale political initiatives where you can, but that doesn't mean you can't make a difference locally too.
I think we can in minor ways. Adjusting expectations, becoming more resilient, simplifying one's life, consuming less, learning to make and do things yourself. I think those things will pay off even if they won't change anything substantial.
In CA we aren't even allowed to vote anymore. Gavin simply appoints senators who look the way he wants and we get stuck with them.
And that's something as simple as senators (who barely have any power in the first place). A change to the world power structure (corporate interests that profit of mass-consumerism) is achievable only through violent revolution.
But nobody cares enough about the climate for that. They just complain online, put soup on things, and pat themselves on the back.
The book How to Prepare for Climate Change by David Pogue is good, although very US-focused (if anyone knows a similar resource for the UK or Europe I'd love to know about it.)
The podcast Doomer Optimism has some gems too, although the episode quality varies wildly.
Tucker Max (who has been a guest on the DO podcast) wrote an article with his take on "doomer optimism". It doesn't mention climate change; it's more about the general topic of preparing for the comic chaotic times, and he veers a bit too far into COVID conspiracism which I'm sure will put a lot of people off, but much of the specific advice is hard to argue with (eg take 100% responsibility; reorient your life towards the local). https://www.tuckermax.com/doomer-optimism-what-i-see-coming-...
But I'd also love to read/hear more advice in this general topic. And I'd also like to meet people who are as interested in these topics as I am, so if anyone reading this lives in the London/Oxford M40 corridor, get in touch!
Honestly, you should be preparing, emotionally and logistically, for your death, and the deaths of people, institutions, organizations and nations that you love. Buddhism is a useful tool in this regard. I recommend it.
I agree ultimately of course, but climate change will not be the death of humanity, just the end of our current moment and the beginning of a new one. I don’t think it’s to be feared. There will be suffering, but we already suffer. When the change comes, be the adaptation.
Exactly. HN seems the worst of all wrt the apocalyptic fortune telling. Perhaps a group of well-off people would be expected to fear change the most. But to tell anyone else that in 50 years things will be bad... they'd laugh in your face.
Maybe the decline of religion is one reason why we've done such a bad job with climate change. If there's no life after death then you have far less reason to care what the world will look like 100 years from now.
From what I can tell the dominant christian religions in the US have turned into death cults seeking to accelerate suffering and death. I don’t think there is any salvation to be had there.
Yes, it occurred to me after I wrote my comment that religious belief, in the US at least, correlates with the same side of the political spectrum that cares the least about climate change. So something must be off in my analysis.
This is probably accurate. Everything seems about the individual nowadays. Lot's of people aren't even having children anymore, preferring instead "travel" and "fun". Why would they give a shit about what will happen in 100 years?
If there is a life after death, then why would you care about the world? Wouldn't it make more sense to care for the one world that exists?
And on a less hypothetical note, I'll point out that in the US at least, the Republican party is both the party of Christianity and global warming denial, so it seems like those two go together just fine.
Live in a rich country. Be wealthy. Don’t live too near the equator or too close to the sea. Live in an area with plentiful water and know how to purify it. Diversify your investments. Consider a stockpile of long lasting dry food to get yourself through price shocks. Install air conditioning. Install off grid solar. Buy air purifiers and a supply of filters. Remember to live for today and enjoy the world we have now.
Be wealthy doesn't have to mean "be a multi-millionaire". It can mean trying to save enough to be able to take a large blow. Everyone is going to be knocked down a peg by climate change, so try your damndest to make sure you aren't a bottom peg.
I think choosing sensible place to live is best option. Low risk of being affected by storms or wild fire is good. Next to raising sea is bad. Area should have available fresh water either with lakes or plentiful ground water. For habitat itself it should not require AC and have option for biofuel heating, even if that will get banned... Some garden space might also be good idea.
Investments should avoid companies which have risks from climate change.
Climate science, by its nature, is a multidisciplinary field. It marries the knowledge from oceanography, meteorology, geology, and yes, even astrophysics to some extent—given that solar radiation is a key driver of Earth's climate. However, the core of climate science revolves around Earth's atmospheric processes and how they interact with various terrestrial and oceanic systems.
Astrophysics, on the other hand, is the study of celestial bodies and phenomena occurring far beyond Earth's atmosphere. While it's true that astrophysical phenomena like solar cycles and cosmic radiation can have an effect on Earth's climate, these are often secondary or tertiary influences when compared to more proximate factors like greenhouse gas emissions and albedo changes.
Thus, dismissing climate models as "junk science" for not heavily featuring astrophysics is akin to dismissing the expertise of a cardiac surgeon because they don't also perform neurosurgery.
Lastly, to borrow a Pascal's Wager argument form, what exactly is the cost of being wrong in either case, here? Do you know it? Can you calculate it with any certainty?
Note: Every paragraph but the last one was selected by me from a ChatGPT4 answer regarding this. I strongly believe in the potential of LLM's to massively, and one day hopefully automatically, refute disinformation
Well, "I'm right because carefully cherry-picked opinion and misleading statistics agree with me" is arguably worse.
Tell me, would you use the same "reasoning" applied to literally anything else? Will you be taking up a cigar habit in the defense of Ronald Fisher, literally the "father of modern statistics", who disputed the link between smoking and cancer? https://priceonomics.com/why-the-father-of-modern-statistics... While doing this, will you turn a blind eye to the evidence that corporate interests had in maintaining doubt (in this case, it would be tobacco companies, but in the OP case, oil companies)? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2879177/ Or will you stop wearing seatbelts because of some niche cases of it preventing people from escaping submerged vehicles? https://auto.howstuffworks.com/car-driving-safety/safety-reg...
What's the potential cost of you being right vs. the cost of you being wrong? Can you even calculate it with any certainty? Do you know which groups of people it might impact? Do you know what parts will be irreversible? Or are you just another armchair rabblerouser whose day job is... Not remotely connected to studying this stuff at least 8/5?
Yikes. You've gone totally off the rails. Have your handler review your prompting... 10 questions in a row with not a coherent thread connecting them does not a meaningful comment make.
It’s a field that considers the thermal radiation of the sun to be a constant. Additionally, variations in the Earth’s magnetosphere and the Sun’s heliosphere can cause big variations in how much thermal radiation is received by Earth. Things your “multidisciplinary field” is completely silent on/blind to, choosing only to focus on a gas that occupies 0.04% of our atmosphere. IOW 100% hogwash.
> There’s something else going on, too: Scientists are shielding the public. They say: “We don’t want people to give up,” or “We don’t want the island nations to feel abandoned,” or “We don’t want people to lose hope.”
This is called out by the author, but in my opinion as soon as you start changing the truth to fit a narrative you are not being scientific. If their model says we are missing the mark and we will get warming of 4C then this is what should be reported.
What would we say if a scientist doing Alzheimer research said that their new medecine could reduce symptoms by 50% even though their data shows that the reduction is only 10%? Even if it's not for money and purely so that patients treated with the medecine would "keep hope" we would call that person a liar.
From my conversations with climate scientists my understanding is that around 2005-2015 (rough estimate) the opposite was the case: A few people said "we are going straight to hell", and the majority publicly called them "alarmist" and "counterproductive", while (in private conversation, with multiple people) admitting that the "alarmists" might well be correct.
I still get called "alarmist" and "doomer" when I bring up what the realistic impacts of climate change 10 years out, based just on current emissions is.
You can plainly see that if we just do as we've been doing, by 2100, we're looking at 2.6-2.9 degrees of warming over pre-industrial levels. If we actually managed to hit the 2030 targets that have been set (and, that's a huge long shot, to be clear), then we're in for about 2.4 degrees.
If we literally just do what the fuck we've said we were going to do, then the prediction is still about 2 degrees of warming. The "optimistic scenario" (lol) is labeled 1.8 degrees.
In the past year, we've seen mass die offs of salmon and snow crabs. Insects, as a group, are on the decline. Climate migration is starting to happen, and the countries that are receiving these refugees are not welcoming them with open arms.
This is barely the beginning. It only gets worse from here over the next decade. I honestly would not be surprised to see global civilization collapse in my lifetime, and my actuarial lifespan is up in about 45 years.
Please keep in mind that most (nearly all?) of our climate models only include rising carbon emissions from human sources. Thawing permafrost and warming swamps and burning forests and such will (very likely) produce additional carbon(-equivalent greenhouse gases).
Hah. Yeah. The whole bit about climate tipping points, and how we've tripped (IIRC) 5 of them, and are in danger of tripping (IIRC again, sorry) another 8 or 9.... that's a whole other comment.
I was literally telling my therapist about a week and a half ago that it's so frustrating that I'm probably one of the most "doom and gloom" people I know on these subjects, yet every time I've been proven wrong, it's because I haven't been pessimistic enough. I'm about ready to start cross dressing and change my name to Cassandra, lol.
Another assertion I've read in the discussions is that the so-called alarmists were being extremely conservative with their assertions to prevent being taken as alarmist, and even those tempered conservative predictions were ridiculed by those with a vested interest in denying climate change.
I feel like this is the same error that Fauci and the CDC kept making in communicating Covid risks: rather than frankly stating the facts, they were continually worried about the impact that their messaging might have, and tailoring their statements based on what they’d guess the reaction would be.
This backfired, repeatedly, and ultimately led to distrust of their statements when complete trust was necessary.
It wasn't an error. It was a deliberate strategy, they still do it, they sometimes admit that they do it (without consequence) and it was more than just Fauci/CDC. A few other examples:
1. The recent Nobel Prize for the mRNA vaccines was awarded not on scientific merit but to encourage people to take the vaccines, and to reinforce the "safe and effective" message, according to a member of the Nobel committee. Yet the prize is presented as being for scientific achievement.
2. The population was told the plan for the first lockdown was for only two weeks. Off the record, health officials were briefing top executives of large local businesses to expect much longer lockdowns. Also, one of the senior public health officials in the Trump administration admitted in a book that she told Trump two weeks whilst knowing they were going to do it for much longer. The reason for the lie about the duration was because they thought people wouldn't accept it if they told the truth.
3. The virologists writing the Proximal Origin paper knew what they were writing probably wasn't true, but feared a "shitstorm", the impact on politics and the growth of "conspiracy theories" if they said they thought it came from a lab. So they deliberately misled the public.
Climatologists are the same way. In the ClimateGate emails there are parts where they agree to suppress contradictory evidence in order to avoid "diluting the message".
The Nobel Prize is explicitly for those scientists that "have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind". It's easy to make the case that this is true for mRNA vaccines, whether or not a committee member thought it would encourage vaccine uptake.
We have not yet received the evidence that this is true in the long term, and have actually received quite a bit of evidence against. For example, the usage of pseudouridine and its unknown long term effects, along with the fact that it’s a commonly tested for cancer marker.
The problem is the media landscape we are in -- anything they did would have backfired because of how many bad-faith actors and angry people litter our society.
Exactly right! Even though a mandated lockdown would have been received badly everywhere self-absorbed individuals reside, and whiny business owners would cry about their profits during lockdown, and bad actors would exploit Americans' lack of discipline and interest in the public good, Fauci made the situation infinitely worse by not giving America the tough love it needed and by failing to stand up the POTUS when it mattered. The was so full of double talk that he utterly destroyed public confidence in the efforts of his office. If America had locked down long enough at the beginning, likely through the end of the summer 2020, the pandemic would have resolved quickly in the United States, and hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved. Students of history and communications will look at this period for what not to do.
I can sympathize with the sentiment that scientists should just report the objective facts and not inject their own opinions into what they tell the public. Another comment suggested that this can lead to distrust like with COVID-19.
That said, I think science communication is an art form which takes skill and practice. If you are a scientist doing research on aspartame in mice or whatever, then what the media and laypeople are interested in is what the results mean for their lives. At some point you have to give your informed opinion or else others will interpret the results for you, probably incorrectly.
I think that the scientists are trying their best to communicate their professional interpretations of the data, but it's difficult to do so in a way that will please everyone. Especially when some parties are actively hostile to the message you are trying to communicate, and will nitpick whatever you say using the least charitable understanding.
The point of the article is that they don't communicate their professional interpretations of the data. They pick how they want people to act, and then say whatever sounds scientific that will yield that outcome. This seems to be a common pathology amongst academics. Put another way, they manipulate the public and then get upset when people stop trusting them, apparently unable to see the link between those two things.
One set of facts, climate science, tell us the reality of what's happening to our environment. But another set of facts, communications and psychology, tell us what messaging will get people to put forth the greatest effort at combating the problem.
What good are principles if the cost of adhering to them is an increase in actual pain, suffering, death, and destruction? Say whatever needs to be said keep people from giving up.
The Deep Adaptation [1] movement has been talking for years about how science has been peddling hopium to the masses (my words, not theirs).
Thinking of climate collapse with the understanding that these changes will happen well within our lifetime can open up new perspectives that can help individuals - and society at large - better deal with what's to come.
Does anyone know if the coral reefs will migrate to cooler waters? Maybe that’s not feasible in a timely fashion given current locations and continental shelfs? Seems like humans could help them out in that case.
Coral reefs grow at about 3 millimeters a year. Many reefs are many thousands of years old.
New reefs will probably grow in cooler waters, but it will not happen nearly fast enough. The entire ecosystem around the reefs will basically collapse before migration becomes even remotely viable.
The coral reef thing was more of a marketing campaign, it's beautiful, it dies quickly, you can see it almost live, but all in all it doesn't matter much
Ocean acidification, massive change in wind and ocean currents , the permafrost melting, loss of albedo in the poles, &c.
These are all much bigger problems we can't deal with at all, it'll start self reinforcing loops we can't even pretend to understand yet
My son is 2.25 years old (and honestly, I absolutely can't wait until he is old enough to have conversations about science with me).
I won't hold back. I will certainly ask him if he is ready to discuss a topic that he will likely not like the truth of, and that I feel it is only fair to be honest with him, and that I am here to support him if it is upsetting.
At least, that's what I think now. When you see your own kid get upset, it is REALLY hard to stay the course.
I’m almost 40. Climate change was everywhere when I was young. It will be everywhere for him also. It’s not your choice if he knows or not. He will know.
The real question, he said, is whether we overshoot 1.5 C by a little bit and come back down, “Or whether we go blasting through one and a half degrees, go through even two degrees and keep on going.”
That's not even a question. Of course we're going to go blasting through 1.5C. And we're going to keep accelerating. We haven't even come close to pretending to try to make a difference.
I have absolutely no idea what messaging is most appropriate to convey that. We're still stuck on trying to convince people that anything is happening at all. A minority of people, to be sure, but a minority controlling a significant fraction of the world's wealth (and, not coincidentally, a wildly disproportionate fraction of the world's energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions).
To my mind, the fact that we're looking at 4-5C by the end of the century isn't even the worst part. I'll be dead by then. But right now, today, we're having battles over really obvious and simple scientific facts, where the overwhelming evidence is on one side and we still can't make progress. That goes well beyond climate change. It shows up in every aspect of American culture. That's making a lot of lives much worse, today, right now.
All my life I've felt like I'm taking crazy pills talking to these people. The basics of the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect are almost trivial science - first written about (as far as is now known) by an American woman citizen scientist before the Civil War. To say that humans can dump an unlimited amount of that gas into the atmosphere (and it's a terribly awesome accomplishment that the very air we breathe now contains one third more carbon than it did when my parents were children) with zero consequence always struck me as bonkers.
To play the devil’s advocate: I have an otherwise intelligent friend who doesn’t believe in global warming because in his mind the cause-and-effect hasn’t been clearly articulated.
So I started to explain to him in more rigorous, scientific terms that he’ll understand and accept.
I found that it was much, much harder than I had anticipated.
I did my own research, and it turns out that the “real story” can’t really be explained without resorting to nonlinear differential equations and high-resolution spectra of exotic chemicals. For example it turns out that it matters a lot that near the poles the upper atmosphere has a higher concentration of various rare isotopes, which shifts the fine structure of absorption spectra just so as to absorb heat from the lower layers.
To be perfectly honest, despite a physics degree and a background in chemistry, I didn’t quite follow the full argument and couldn’t relay it to my friend.
However when I saw a NASA page about the precision spectra of truly obscure specie such as doubly-ionised isotopically non-standard excited radicals as key inputs into supercomputer climate simulations I was reassured that smart people have sunk an awful lot of effort into the problem.
A very underrated comment. I think a lot of people, including some people in this thread, willfully avoid this reality. There is a danger in losing one's self in the romanticism of being a "Cassandra", instead of addressing the prerequisite to the required action -- belief.
As with any war, correct messaging is vital to retain the public will in the fight. But as with any propaganda, dumbing the truth down might result in a lie. And once such a lie is uncovered and attacked, trust may never again recover (see Covid) and the fight will be forsaken.
I think the only way out, the only way to convince the general public without them needing to understand the complexity of "why" is to pour immense resources into improving our prediction of near-term events. Only by demonstrably predicting earthquakes, hurricanes, flooding, detailed weather patterns across the globe 6 months-a year in advance within a day/hour level of accuracy can we hope to convince the public that the models will be as relatively accurate when predicting earth's general characteristics decades into the future.
After all, the grudging leeway the public gives doctors and practitioners of mainstream medicine does not seem to be a result of them being swayed by the medical arguments presented to them, but because they have witnessed their powers of healing first hand.
Indeed, while the greenhouse gas effect is almost trivially simple science, it is acting on a global climate system that is complex in ways far beyond human understanding (though as you say, collectively we have put some impressive work into comprehending it). Given that our lives and civilizations depend on said complex system, I would consider it wise not to fuck with it.
You don't need to take it to the molecular level to demonstrate climate change. The fact that ordinary CO2 is opaque to infrared is readily demonstrable by experiment in a classroom. The cause-and-effect from burning hydrocarbons to energy absorption to a warmer environment was explained well over a century ago.
The details of the atmosphere's interaction with the land are more complicated, to be sure. But that's not necessary in order to understand that the theory explains the the observations we've been making of a warming atmosphere. That's not sincere argument; that's goalpost shifting.
This is where the oversimplified argument gets in trouble: if it’s already opaque, adding more won’t make a difference, right?
The science is something like: CO2 is so opaque to IR that the determining factor for warming is the part of the spectrum where it isn’t so opaque. However the thermal transport still goes through several bounces as it goes up through the layers of the atmosphere. At the higher layers the frequencies shift down and the absorption spectrum changes in complicated ways. This all interacts nonlinearly with water at the lower layers and ionised gases in the higher layers.
Actually simulating something that won’t just give you gibberish answers is decidedly nontrivial. It’s not a question of precision — I’m not talking about +2C instead of +1.5C! An overly simplistic model will predict -50C or +100C!
> we haven’t even come close to pretending to try to make a difference
This is what scares me the most. Obviously reach +1.5C is terrifying but what’s worse is the complete inaction of governments (and their citizens) around the world to make a dent in this.
Here in the UK our government are just a joke. The prime minister recently pushed back plans to ban sales of ICE vehicles. We are sleeping walking into a catastrophe and it’s depressing.
Apart from vote for green parties that never have a chance of getting into power what can I do?
Naomi Klein has a 2014 book called "this changes everything", and she makes the following argument.
(1) if we don't act, everything will change (via climate catastrophe)
(2) if we do act, everything will change (via our actions)
(3) in the former case it's basically just bad things are happening to us, in the latter we have some choice how we change it.
(4) as everything will change in any case, conservatism (as in "everything should be conserved as it is") is no longer an alternative
This is, of course, radically compressed, she is more subtle and writes better than I do.
I think a massive problem is that this argument hasn't spread wider. A lot of people seem to think/wish/hope/imagine/copium/lie/phantasise/extrapolate a future basically like our world, just a bit more futuristic, is a possibility. It isn't. And telling your children the coral reefs will be okay creates more of such people.
Part of the problem here is that we have/had the option to have a world pretty much like the existing one, except that it was one in which oil and coal companies went out of business or lost trillions of dollars, and got replaced with renewable and nuclear power generation and electric vehicles etc.
But those trillion dollar industries fought against their own destruction, and continue to do so, and all of the other alternatives are worse.
The best time to fossilize the fossil fuel industries was 30 years ago. The second best time is right now.
> (4) as everything will change in any case, conservatism (as in "everything should be conserved as it is") is no longer an alternative
Forget "conservatism." I posted an article a few days ago that made a convincing case that capitalism is no longer possible. It hit the front page, then got flagged to death all within 15 minutes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37628674
And it's all because the capitalist mind virus has taken hold to such an extent that ""the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it." [0] It's a sentiment that gets paraphrased into "people find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism."
In the entire history of capitalism and industrial society, neither global energy use nor global CO2 emissions have ever decreased, except for one brief instant when we shut everything down in order that many more of us wouldn't die of COVID. We're driving ourselves off a metaphorical cliff and laughing about it. We're not going to get the last laugh on this one.
Humanity can swallow the bitter pill now and have a shot at saving civilization, or it can poison itself slowly and die on the vine. We (you and I) are literally talking about how the end of civilization is more palatable than the end of capitalism.
Well, I say "fuck that." If supposedly rational people can't handle having their belief systems challenged, we have no hope of a future anyway.
I've basically come to terms with how fucked we are as a species. I'm just hoping to live my life in a fulfilling manner, minimize the damage I personally do, and die with the understanding that our species and much life on this planet is probably doomed thanks to people too stupid to see through the oil propaganda, too lazy to change their lifestyles, or too greedy to be prevented from committing ecocide.
> And telling your children the coral reefs will be okay creates more of such people.
You and the article author are behind the curve. The coral reefs are fine and the idea of climate coral destruction has been debunked in the past few years. The Great Barrier Reef is currently at record highs for example, after a bleaching event in 2019 that coral "experts" said would wreck the GBR for at least a decade. By 2022 they had to walk that back completely as the reef rebounded far faster than they had ever imagined and reached never before seen growth.
Clearly, their understanding of corals is not good enough to make these sorts of predictions. There's also just a really basic problem with the coral/climate story: corals respond to fast local changes in temperature but CO2 is meant to create slow global changes in temperature.
But it's understandable you don't know this because almost nobody does. A survey done this summer showed that only 3% of Australians were aware that the GBR had reached record levels of coral. The majority still think the GBR is dying. This is for the same reason as covered in the article: academics like to tell stories that will cause people to behave in the right way, as they see it. Sometimes this means downplaying what they think, other times it means exaggerating it or not reporting good news.
Three-quarters of sampled Australian green voters believe the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is doing worse than usual, with 44% stating the coral is at a record low. Overall only 3% of all Australian voters knew that the coral was at a “record high” – the correct answer following two years of record growth that has broken all previous records.
The “phenomenal health” of the GBR is said to be virtually unknown, yet the public are paying half a billion dollars in taxes to save it. In addition the country is “being misled into thinking that expensive low carbon policies and Net Zero targets will help protect the reef, when there is no correlation between CO2 levels and coral cover”.
The results come from a survey carried out by the Australian Environment Foundation (AEF) and is the work of coral authority Dr. Peter Ridd and science journalist Jo Nova.
Well, there's your problem.
Still, the Daily Skeptic fits your world view so stick with that and Sky News anti-science climate change outrage.
Ad hominem is the last resort, so apparently you are forced to accept the truth but can't quite handle it. Relax, the news is good! The only problem here is that people aren't hearing about it from the sources they trust.
Jo Nova has been peddling How to Lie with Statistics anti-AGW blog posts for decades for cash - that's not an ad-hominem, it's just a simple economic fact.
Her husband does more of the same when not talking up mysterious alternatives to Fourier Theory and other rabbit holes.
IF (big if) you bother to read the field you'll find her work out on the fringe and routinely debunked.
If you don't .. well, then you find yourself making nonsense comments defending the indefensible.
As for Ridd, he and Jennifer Marohasy don't make the compelling case for GBR health and anti-AGW that Sky News after dark claim they do when they misrepresent their work.
Ridd's specific complaints against reproducibility in GBR marine studies were answered thoroughly several times over, here, for example:
All you've done is double down on the ad hominem, then attack her husband, then address something irrelevant. The complaint here isn't related to reproducibility, it's the reef scientist's own data that shows a huge rebound.
Let's be clear, I'm attacking their work - Jo Nova's blog contains nothing of significance that hasn't been debunked, her husband's C02 spreadsheet work has been grossly overstated and nothing seems to have come from his claims to have had a major breakthrough with "it's totally not Fourier theory", and the claim that "reef scientist's own data that shows a huge rebound" isn't sound.
At no point have you attacked her work. You haven't even discussed it, you just keep asserting that everything she or her husband does is shit without backing that up. You literally started by saying Jo Nova is a liar and then immediately claimed that's not an ad hominem! Every reply of yours has been about the names of the people who commissioned the survey. There's been nothing about the actual results of the poll itself, nothing about the reef measurements.
This sub-thread is really the definition of ad hominem. If you wanted to discuss the actual state of the reefs or the science we'd be discussing that. Instead you got triggered by the name Jo Nova which isn't even in the part of the article I quoted. Great job, you continue to debunk your own position and call attention to how apparently impossible it is to refute theirs.
> You literally started by saying Jo Nova is a liar
Nope, I said she bends the truth savagely by using all the tricks in the "How to lie with statistics" book - classic misrepresentation of data stuff.
I also said that she is widely known for this (also true) and pretty much every post she has ever produced has been debunked (also true).
I stand by all of that - I suggest you check that out for yourself.
While we're on that, Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That? is another cut from the same cloth.
No matter how much you spit and splutter the facts remain, these are people that don't do science in good faith, they shill for the Koch aligned "think tanks" and haven't yet hit a goal.
Yes, that's exactly how they played it with the Great Barrier Reef. It bleached, they said it was horrendously damaged in a way that would take a decade to recover, then three years later it was in rude health. Now journalists have lost interest in the GBR, aren't telling people what happened and are repeating the exact same scam with other reefs elsewhere.
Reef bleaching is a natural process that has happened throughout their multi-million year history. The experts don't really understand it as they so dramatically demonstrated in Australia but the one thing that can be safely said is that it's not to do with global warming. It seems to be triggered by sudden temperature changes, not absolute levels of temperature or very slow changes (like the fraction of a degree per decade observed from temperature satellites).
Yes. They've gone out of their way to fend off accusations of "alarmism" by focusing on the low end predictions and avoiding anything with even a hint of worse cases. At least some of those worse cases are becoming likely and even inevitable, while even worse case lurk largely unmentioned by scientists.
I think the messaging needs to improve if you want buy-in from the public. 1.5 doesn’t sound like a big number, and I’d wager that a single-digit percentage of Americans could translate that to it’s Fahrenheit equivalent.
The article and comments here use the editorial "we" as if the biggest emissions offender China (double the USA in 2021 [1]), is going to bow to global peer pressure and start sacrificing industries and fortunes in order to cut their emissions by half or more.
We know that won't happen unless "we" collectively stop relying upon China for our toys and necessities, which might happen through a grassroots movement if a few 100 million global citizens suddenly become luddites and/or agrarians.
Call me gloomy, but I think the only event that will dramatically slow human-accelerated climate change in the next 10 years will be a global economic collapse.
> The article and comments here use the editorial "we" as if the biggest emissions offender China (double the USA in 2021 [1]), is going to bow to global peer pressure and start sacrificing industries and fortunes in order to cut their emissions by half or more.
China has 4 times the population of the US. They are only a bigger offender than the US if you believe that people who live in the US have some sort of natural or divine right to live a more emitting lifestyle that do people in China.
The atmosphere does not care about arbitrary political boundaries which makes per capita a better measure. By per capita emissions China is around the same as a typical European country, and half the US.
If we wanted to hold emissions to current levels, people in China are 56% above their fair share. People in the US are 220% above their fair share. (People in India are at only 40% of their fair share).
More important, China is building a ton of solar farms, wind farms, and nuclear plants, and a lot of pumped hydro storage (which when combined with solar or wind reduce or eliminate the need for fossil fuels to deal with the intermittent nature of wind and solar).
Compare to the US where every time the Presidency or control of Congress changes parties there is a 50/50 change that the new party in power will try to roll back any clean energy initiatives of the previous party and boost reliance on fossil fuels.
That means when China says they are going to be net zero by 2060 they have actually got a decent chance of achieving that, and if they don't it is more likely to be a "missed it by a few years" thing rather than a "abandoned it" thing.
The US currently has a 2050 goal for net zero but with the current political situation here it is likely to be 2030 at the earliest that we actually seriously start on the things we need to do to prepare for that.
> Climate experts talk a lot about “cathedral thinking.” It’s the idea of working towards long term goals — like a medieval cathedral. These goals require vision, shared commitment, and decades, even centuries, of planning. The planners and builders don’t live to see the end product, but future generations reap the rewards.
We're living in the MBA/enshittification society where its all about pumping next quarters numbers to dump the stock and profit, even if it ruins the company in the long run. These are the kinds of leaders that we're the best in the world at producing.
EDIT: I forgot a shout-out to regulatory capture and rent seeking behavior that makes it difficult to get anything done at all.
RCP6 isn't happening because we absolutely have gone into renewables, hybrid and ev cars, etc.
From link on RCP8.5: "Since AR5 this has been thought to be very unlikely, but still possible as feedbacks are not well understood. RCP8.5, generally taken as the basis for worst-case climate change scenarios, was based on what proved to be overestimation of projected coal outputs."
8.5 and 6 are not happening, therefore climate change is not going to result in any sort of catastrophe. Fantastic news, so why the lying?
If you look at examples of climate change representation, they near universally will always use RCP 8.5 as the prediction. Like the graph above, why the lying?
The models have been out long enough. We know we are actually following somewhere between 2.6 and 4.5. We have been doing a great job migrating away from carbon. We won't even be peaking similar to the peaks every 150,000 years.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadI think if you've ever been around depressed or emotionally overwhelmed people or just people generally you see this kind of all or nothing thinking is not just common but prevalent.
I've always been against paternalism historically but the last few years have provided a fair amount of evidence that it might be a valid tactic.
I used to be ideologically against cohersive power as well but persuasion often doesn't come from well reasoned argument, it can come from brute repetition, or for addicts of different stripes (drugs, ragebait, social media, personality) persuasion seems like a dead end.
Authoritarianism is bad because it works too well - for the authority. And while the authorities interests and everyone else’s may align well at the beginning, that is very unlikely after awhile. And then there is nothing anyone can do about it.
Dictators worked out well for Rome for awhile!
And Saddam did really turn Iraq around.
The biggest issue IMO with Authoritarians is they tend to take out realistic competition (Cincinnatus excepted) and force everyone else to march in lockstep with them. Part of the ideology.
So even if they do allow succession, it’s controlled and ‘monoculture’. Which long term (or even short term if done harshly enough) weakens the state and the population, as it makes everything rigid. It tends to snap instead of bend.
But only time will tell. The CCP has also been doing pretty well by most standards too, and they have a ‘leader for life’ now too.
Some kind of authoritarianism (by committee, dictator, king, etc) has been and is the historic norm, no?
Paternalistic communication isn't necessarily authoritarianism though. No info is being withheld, anyone who cares can still look it up, it's more of a marketing tactic.
75% is a supermajority.
Think about that a bit, and I think you’ll get your answer. You’re being lied to, and it isn’t actually that 25% that is (solely) at fault.
And, yes, it is the 25%'s fault when they're just willing to say "no" to anything because it hurts someone they want hurt, even if it also hurts them in the process.
It isn’t even in the rules that such a thing is even requested or desired.
If someone is giving you another impression, that is a good place to start in your investigation.
The answer is staring you in the face, you just don’t want to see it.
Additionally, I think it is actually better that they express the situation as-is (getting worse, faster) because the public isn’t going to change unless things are dire. There’s so much social and economic inertia that nothing is going to change until it absolutely has to. By voicing the reality that we’re going to shoot way past 1.5C, maybe that will start to raise more alarms.
I don't think that's going to convince anyone who isn't already convinced.
"hope" can also be things like "let's keep it to 4C". how did we get to "hope" being defined solely by this 1.5C number?
this also generally discounts the loss of hope people are going to feel when they realize they've been lied to, especially when you are demanding they make these huge sacrifices. We already saw the result of this approach during COVID - not only was nobody fooled by the "masks don't reduce transmission" but when scientists admitted this was false messaging primarily intended to massage people's behavior, it pretty well destroyed any rapport between the scientific community and the public.
If you are someone who "does everything right" and stops eating meat, sorts your recycleables, and reduces the number of times you flush - how do you feel when the outcome is "lol, yeah, none of that is going to be enough, we know and knew that, but despite your sacrifice we're gonna blow way past that anyway because we didn't tackle any of the systemic issues around production or distribution"?
The public isn't going to change what?
(let alone consumption/etc but I think that is a red-herring anyway, consumption or reductions in one area will be consumed in some other sector of the economy. capitalism basically routes around "inefficiency" just like the internet routes around its own damage, and consumers expressing non-optimal consumption preferences according to the laws of the society is "inefficiency" in this context. Stopping your beef consumption just makes it cheaper for someone else who will consume more, etc.)
but anyway on voting habits: you still literally have states like florida that are going to be underwater within literal decades, that are getting hammered by climate change so badly that insurers have cranked their rates (followed by banning this, and then insurers pulling out entirely), and yet still are literal trump-voter swamps going massively red every cycle, even in statewide elections etc.
it's literally not even an issue that people care about or will vote to fix, even though it's literally going to affect them personally before their children reach adulthood.
The real question is "can we make a benevolent AGI?", to which I strongly suspect the answer is "no".
He should get outside right now and ask a few people about the topic. People ignore the truth, don't care or are actively working against it because it is a Chinese hoax.
The truth is readily available on demand and large numbers of people still behave like children.
Maybe deep in their hearts somewhere they don't believe it, but it's so deep that it's impossible to locate.
Some of my family are conspiratorial thinkers, trumpy types. They’re in Texas, where the power grid is continuing to slowly buckle, and they will happily agree it’s hotter than it used to be, even getting too hot. They also agree that pollution is bad.
But they simply don’t connect the two. They don’t think we can possibly be the sole reason for climate change, but why they think that is fluid — it’s gods creation and we can’t mess with that. Or if we can it doesn’t matter because we’re destined for a heavenly kingdom and this planet will pass away. Or they say more “grounded” things like we’re getting closer to the sun or the sun itself is hotter. Or they buy into the idea for a while that it’s just a natural oscillation. We’re actually headed towards an ice age!
My theory is they’re inconsistent because they do accept it, but accepting it means they have to understand consciously that shit is bleak and it makes all the work they’ve done in their lives potentially meaningless. They don’t want to face the reckoning of disillusionment so they close their eyes to it.
Or maybe they just don’t believe it. I don’t know, I’m not in their brains.
I know my comment won't likely change your mind, but given your "start listening to the skeptics" stance, perhaps this is a tiny impulse.
Genuinely hope you get better.
> I know my comment won't likely change your mind
You make no real argument. You didn't dispute any of my points. You didn't even attempt to show how good your character or judgement were, so that I might respect you as a person and maybe defer to your own judgement. You might have preached over-caution, which isn't fundamentally flawed as a concept, often just too expensive to consider.
No, you dug into the comment history, quoted something without even giving a hint what it was about.
Of course you won't change my mind. Minds should only be changed carefully, after new information is presented, or a new way of thinking about difficult problems is illustrated.
> your "start listening to the skeptics" stance, perhaps this is a tiny impulse.
In what sort of delirious fever dream do you imagine yourself on the side of the skeptics?
Couldn't find anything with that title. Care to give me a link or ISBN or something?
> the side of the skeptics
is there a "mainstream" side and a "skeptics" side? is there only one skeptic side? is it possible to be a skeptic of a non-mainstream opinion? is it possible to be skeptic of what you write, even though you are skeptic of the mainstream opinion?
> delirious fever dream
I actually just took my temperature, it's 36.3 - make of that what you will. Or don't.
Also I'm curious -- you seem to accept the planet is warming. Are you denying that CO2 from fossil fuels is the principal cause, or you accept that but just think it's pointless to do anything about it?
Or are you denying warming and/or the increase in atmospheric CO2 entirely?
I accept that climate has been changing since day one 4 billion years ago. It undoubtedly happens today, happened yesterday, will happen tomorrow.
> Are you denying that CO2 from fossil fuels is the principal cause,
This seems irrelevant to me. I would indulge in the speculation if we lived in a world where that already hadn't been politicized. Now I can't help but worry that doing so would be used to propagandize to destroy the economy.
> but just think it's pointless to do anything about it?
It does seem to me that it's pointless for the people most worried about it. I have children, I want and will have grandchildren someday, and they in turn will have their own too. So, the future's more important for me than it is for many.
The "let's adopt a baby from Africa because it's selfish to have your own biological children" crowd, they seem a little weird for caring if you ask me.
> Or are you denying warming and/or the increase in atmospheric CO2 entirely?
The first doesn't seem implausible. The latter can be objectively measured with devices that are cheap enough and available enough that I could confirm it myself if I had any suspicions.
I am clearly less alarmed by those measurements than most.
And it really seems to bother you that other people do care.
Thank you for the honesty!
If I may ask -- does it bother you that other people care, because you think any solution is necessarily and obviously impossible to begin with, and therefore it's a wasted effort, and wasted efforts bother you? Or because you think there's a rational cost/benefit analysis to be had, but you're already sure that the costs outweight the benefits, and costs outweighing benefits bothers you? Or does it bother you for another reason?
It's statements like this one that I find the most bizarre. You claim this is about science... well, that's not how science works. First you prove to me that this is real. Make some predictions (non wishy-washy ones), wait however long for those to be observed, and then we know global warming's real.
Making predictions you can't be bothered to wait to observe is a a palm reader's scam.
> If I may ask -- does it bother you that other people care,
You are part of a dying civilization that has convinced itself not to reproduce. The social norms of such a civilization are completely irrelevant, including and maybe especially to themselves.
> , and therefore it's a wasted effort, and wasted efforts bother you?
I just saw 10%+ inflation the last year or so because a cold virus made people work from home and this disrupted toilet paper manufacturing supply chains.
You say that we have to stop emitting carbon dioxide (something I've been doing since I was born), all of it, to save a planet that you won't bother to have babies to live in it 100 years from now... and that's supposed to be painless economic proposition? If what you wanted only cost a few tens of trillions, why the hell not? Burn the money (not literally, carbon dioxide), and make a future generation pay for it.
All I see are world-ending economic catastrophes. No thanks.
The future world isn't yours to worry about anymore.
This will seem totally off-topic to you, of course. Incomprehensible, even. But my daughter still tells me at age 14 that she wants 5 or 6 kids of her own. Me and mine will be above replacement, I think. It'll be our problem, and they're up to the challenge.
There have been plenty of nonsense predictions from *non-scientists*. Where have the climate scientists gotten it wrong, though? The only question is one of speed/size.
And denying that change is harmful is another aspect of the problem. Sure, we have survived it. We "survived" the late Permian extinction event (believed to be about 8C)--but the majority of species did not and most of the Earth was basically uninhabited. In the other direction we don't have enough data to figure out what percent of species was lost in the snowball. Note that the worst-case estimates I have seen for warming are 14C. (6C from CO2 plus 8C from methane hydrates.) The methane hydrate numbers are uncertain enough they aren't even included in the IPCC estimates at all.
As for having skin in the game--they're humans even if they aren't our direct descendants.
The pathological belief is the denial of what's happening.
You do realize that if a scientist could put up a reputable set of studies that disprove the central climate change theories that they would be set for life under a cavalcade of fossil fuel sponsorships. Not to mention that they would be a hero to most of the planet. They would be singlehandedly responsible for major policy shifts on the part of entire countries. There's a massive incentive for someone to convincingly disprove the negative effects of climate change.
If there is such a complete and totalizing suppression of actual inquiry in climate science, then why are there climate skeptics with positions in major universities? Why are major journalistic publications skeptical? It seems to me that there is quite a bit of a forum for debate on climate science, because everyone, including, probably, many climate scientists, would love for it to be wrong.
Your argument is based on your being completely convinced that a very large swath of people, many if not most of whom are parents like yourself, are acting in utter bad faith. Certainly any academic field, like any human endeavor, is subject to group think, but if you look at the very real scientific progress that's happened in the last several hundred years, you can see that the scientific approach, empirically, does lead to success, or at least disproves the notion that groupthink is likely to wholly capture a scientific field.
The politicization of the whole thing ("liberal morality") is also intriguing. I'm an unabashed liberal. If you put a convincing argument about how the climate would be fine in front of me, I would thank you a thousand times over.
As it stands, I've read so many arguments from climate skeptics, and they roughly follow the following templates:
* a wholesale belief that climate science is operating under a special kind of bad faith
* misunderstandings of things like the second law of thermodynamics (e.g. ignoring the atmosphere itself acting as a heat sink)
* belief that Professor Q is somehow right and all the other professors are wrong (probably because of the bad faith part), ignoring that Professor Q might also be subject to such things
* belief in government or corporate control over the discussion, ignoring the truly massive financial incentive to ignore climate science
* citations, usually exaggerations, of how many "climate predictions" have gone wrong, ignoring that science journalism and activists will often simplify and/or incorrectly cite studies in any field, because the public doesn't, in the end, understand the language of probability
You don't understand scientists then. They don't want to be "set for life". They want status within their own bizarre little community.
While no doubt Exxon would be more than happy to bankroll them at any level, the left made sure to poison that... anyone even hinted at to be accepting their money is a "fossil fuel shill". So no, they're not interested in taking that money.
If there are any such people out there now, they do the easy thing... they go find something else to research where they can be honest without it ruining their career, they publish, and we can't even know how many of them are. If they self-identify, careers are over.
> If there is such a complete and totalizing suppression of actual inquiry in climate science,
Why would it have to be "complete and total"? You still think I'm talking about some conspiracy. I'm talking about fools and halfwits doing this accidentally, by instinct, and so when they pipe up "but we're not suppressing!", in their own way they're even honest about it. They genuinely believe they aren't.
> Your argument is based on your being completely convinced that a very large swath of people, many if not most of whom are parents like yourself, are acting in utter bad faith.
I don't posit any bad faith in any of this. Stupidity and incompetence, and a complete lack of immunity for groupthinking tendencies suffice. Right now, you believe you're very righteous in even typing out your comment.
> but if you look at the very real scientific progress that's happened in the last several hundred years,
You don't get to appeal to the scientific progress, without taking credit for all of the regress that happens too. It's slow, accidental, and there's no way for you to know, one way or the other whether you're a plate tectonicist or continental fixist in all of this.
> or at least disproves the notion that groupthink is likely to wholly capture a scientific field.
The history of science is replete with examples of entire fields being captured by groupthink. Sure, so far, it seems that eventually it fades away. But without a better understanding of the sociology of groupthink, we don't know that's a universal feature. And besides, even if it does... seems the only sure fix is to wait for the old guard to die out. Meaning I'd have to wait another 40 or 50 years minimum.
> belief that Professor Q is somehow right and all the other professors are wrong (probably because of the bad faith part),
And not because it's a recurring theme in science? Not because, you don't need consensus if you're actually correct?
> belief in government or corporate control over the discussion,
In what part of my comment did I even hint that I believed this? Or are you just talking about the other skeptics because they're easier to attack than I am?
"It's a hoax" is a lot more palatable than "It's a serious problem that requires major action to be taken." Denying the problem is much easier and they'll do some substantial mental gymnastics to avoid having to take the hard path.
11% of people believe the US federal government should literally not be doing anything about climate change.
The article I'm getting these numbers from literally uses the word "hoax" several times: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2023/08/09/why-some-amer...
Abstract: There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then.
Source: https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/11584/1/2008bams2370%252E1...
older people by and large make up the largest proportion of victims to online scams.
It's far easier to convince people that it's a hoax when the scientists say things that aren't strictly true -- because they they get to debunk your minor exaggeration, which discredits you, and makes people more willing to believe the people who claim you're full of crap about everything.
When you see dishonest people succeeding, the conclusion to draw is that we need to redouble our efforts to fight dishonesty, not that dishonesty is an effective strategy that everyone should adopt.
The latter destroys anyone's ability to even know who is right, and who does that benefit?
Otherwise the reporters who agree with you discredit themselves so no one believes them anymore and the adversarial reporters continue to be adversarial.
How hard is it to give the scientist a draft of the story and have them confirm that you're not making an egregious error before publishing it?
Increasingly, I think the delegitimization of political institutions (which failed to prevent this predictable calamity) is going to be the business end of the stick.
It can seem weird to draw a line between our wobbling democracies and climate change, but when you recall that institutions derive their legitimacy from their ability to deliver repeatable results, and the opportunity to deliver (climate) results of any sort is diminishing, I imagine it will essentially stretch and then snap the overton window.
Soon is the time of monsters.
It's not like rewinding a tape or time travel. I would predict we start moving backward and simply do not stop -- not at 500 years, not at 1000 years.
A positive feedback loop is just someone else's interrupted homeostasis.
We will pretty quickly if societies collapse.
what historians refer to as "The Cool Zone"
> It’s an inspiring idea. Something maybe only humans could divine. But here’s the thing: cathedral thinking also requires a firm grasp of facts. A cathedral built on fantasy won’t stand for long.
> If my son and his friends think the coral reefs will be OK, the reefs are doomed. If he knows the truth, maybe he’ll become a biologist who tries to save them. When people know what they’re up against, many will be sad — I’m sad! — but then they can prepare.
This is an example of a perennial mistake where the science behind global warming is conflated with the science behind the consequences of global warming. No one knows if the coral reefs are doomed!
Additionally, it's ironic to use the term "cathedral thinking" and then talk about the necessity of sticking to the facts. Cathedrals are built by Christians as a way to worship God. As someone who doesn't believe in God, I see a lesson here: beleving in something, whether it's true or not, can be useful. In fact, it may even be necessary if you want beautiful things like cathedrals. And even us heathens can be inspiried by ideals that are -- being ideals -- unattainable.
> “The health of the coral is at a catastrophic loss,” Krediet said. “This is an unprecedented level of temperature increase and it happened at a rate that the corals cannot deal with. We went from healthy reefs to bleach reefs and dead reefs within 10 days.”
https://www.clickorlando.com/weather/2023/07/27/floridas-cor...
And the temperature just keeps going up. It might be months, years, maybe even a couple decades, but things keep looking worse and worse for the corals, and we're not doing enough to stop it.
Don’t tell the losing team they should give their opponents more chances to score. If society had wanted straight talking, we wouldn’t be in this situation.
USA is by far the worst climate change offender, and USA uses way more alarmist messaging than any other country I've seen. So to me it looks like alarmist messaging makes it worse, not better.
Facts and honesty does help, big tobacco lost, tons of countries all over the world have already added plans to ban fossil fuel cars in about a decade etc. The caveat is that it takes decades for that change to happen, and US "scientists" seems to always want to sway the current election in their favor, so they happily sacrifice trust and long term get those small short term wins.
In 2019 I founded Distribute Aid to develop community supply-chains that can support displaced people at scale. Since then, we've delivered $25M of aid between 100+ communities in 16+ countries. Given the size of the problem, and the need for rapid growth of successful solutions, we're taking a distributed approach that prioritizes local aid groups who are supporting displaced people. Everything is open-source of course!
If anyone wants to learn more / support us, please leave a comment or email me at taylor /at/ distributeaid.org. :)
A paper on exactly this : https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abcd5a
My suggestions would be these:
* Think about where your food comes from, and how it is fertilised. Read about different modes of agriculture.
* Think about minimising your energy usage, especially fossil fuels. Look at heat pumps, cycling infrastructure, that kind of thing.
* Learn about alternatives for building and anything else. Building with straw bales is a particular favourite of mine because it can be done so simplistically by people with relatively little training.
* Find projects where other people are doing stuff and join in. See the above article - self-efficacy is a muscle, build it by exercising it.
A great source of inspiration: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
Edit: also, we'll blow the 1.5C carbon budget in 8 years. Sorry - we'd have to cut emissions by 20% a year every year to avoid that. Plus sequestration of course.
I know it seems like a nut job question but, if we assume global warming is nothing we've seen before event then wouldn't at least some governments fail?
Is there some way to predict it? Let's also assume some radical change in some governments like to a fascist or communist type regime is possible as well
What's scary to me is the malign actions that are possible in the name of climate change. Imagine you're living in Pakistan and your home has been washed away. Is it so hard to believe someone somewhere will choose to pursue revenge?
Armed with the simple fact that Americans have higher per capita carbon emissions than any other people - double as much, if memory serves - then someone sufficiently angry may well be able to justify indiscriminate killing of Americans to themselves.
Apologies for the morbidity here, but what I'm saying here is that by not adopting explicit policies of "just transition" we're setting up the conditions for climate fascism in the west and climate terrorism too.
I believe people will choose furthering climate change over massively lowering their standards of living. And they would be violent in these goals. So nations might stay, but they will just throw away most of actions taken.
Eventually, if we don't do anything, we'll reach a point where the amount we're spending on mitigation measures becomes nearly equal to the the damage caused from the consequences we're supposed to be mitigating. At that point, it all becomes pretty pointless.
I would add: start growing your own food. You don't have to grow all your own food; you can start small. It's easy, anyone can do it, and you don't need much space to get started - you can even grow some things indoors if you don't have a garden.
I only grow a fairly small amount of my own food but it's been one of the most rewarding things I've ever done, and it's completely changed my relationship with food and the way I see nature. The post-carbon future can only be a future in which far more people take a closer interest in food production.
It's really quite gross.
Climate change is due to, and a threat to, the status quo, and those who have gained their societal positions on the back of this status quo will defend the righteousness of their status literally to the death.
And these folks typically have communication platforms that reach a long way and therefore muddy the waters, often with the sideline cheering of said politicians.
You have a real problem (climate change) and you have an effective solution (carbon tax refunded as a dividend), but that doesn't really serve anybody's political goals.
Doing that would destroy the fossil fuel industry as people switch to electric cars and generate power with renewables or nuclear to avoid the carbon tax. Fossil fuel industry is a Republican constituency, so they fight it.
Doing that wouldn't serve any partisan political agenda. Given the choice most people would just buy an electric car, not ride the bus. It would likely require a significant number of new nuclear power plants. All of the money is being refunded to the population, not diverted to cronies and political donors. The most cost effective source of solar panels is currently China, not domestic union jobs. But Democrats keep asking for those things instead, which is dumb and most importantly less effective, so instead we get nothing.
In my experience there's no group better at that, and with the best platform, than politicians.
However, you're not wrong in your statement that there are other groups trying to push their own fringe agendas that just end up scaring the normal/middle majority. But, politics also has the power to guide the narrative incredibly better than it has been, and to properly address said fringe agendas.
> A lot of the rhetoric and policy proposals related to climate change seem designed to foist a reduced standard of living on the middle and lower classes in Western countries.
The problem is that's the reality, so the hard work that politicians just don't want to do because it requires collaboration with "the dreaded other side" is determining the framing and choice of what standards of living can be maintained and what needs to change and by how much.
However, if the worlds politicans are actually good judges of the tolerances of society and they've correctly decided that society can't tolerate any decline in lifestyle, then there was no way to win anyway so might as well "get what I can when I can before the music stops".
Edit: Works if I proxy it: https://12ft.io/proxy?&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wbur.org%2Fcognos...
You can’t prepare for this as an individual. This is a global societal problem. The effects of climate change are predictable on a global scale but much less so on a local scale.
Why not both? "Climate resilience" will in large part be driven by individuals and communities working on a local scale. Support big-scale political initiatives where you can, but that doesn't mean you can't make a difference locally too.
I think we can in minor ways. Adjusting expectations, becoming more resilient, simplifying one's life, consuming less, learning to make and do things yourself. I think those things will pay off even if they won't change anything substantial.
In CA we aren't even allowed to vote anymore. Gavin simply appoints senators who look the way he wants and we get stuck with them.
And that's something as simple as senators (who barely have any power in the first place). A change to the world power structure (corporate interests that profit of mass-consumerism) is achievable only through violent revolution.
But nobody cares enough about the climate for that. They just complain online, put soup on things, and pat themselves on the back.
The podcast Doomer Optimism has some gems too, although the episode quality varies wildly.
Tucker Max (who has been a guest on the DO podcast) wrote an article with his take on "doomer optimism". It doesn't mention climate change; it's more about the general topic of preparing for the comic chaotic times, and he veers a bit too far into COVID conspiracism which I'm sure will put a lot of people off, but much of the specific advice is hard to argue with (eg take 100% responsibility; reorient your life towards the local). https://www.tuckermax.com/doomer-optimism-what-i-see-coming-...
But I'd also love to read/hear more advice in this general topic. And I'd also like to meet people who are as interested in these topics as I am, so if anyone reading this lives in the London/Oxford M40 corridor, get in touch!
And on a less hypothetical note, I'll point out that in the US at least, the Republican party is both the party of Christianity and global warming denial, so it seems like those two go together just fine.
Whatever happens with the climate, I'm sure Bill Gates will be fine.
Investments should avoid companies which have risks from climate change.
Astrophysics, on the other hand, is the study of celestial bodies and phenomena occurring far beyond Earth's atmosphere. While it's true that astrophysical phenomena like solar cycles and cosmic radiation can have an effect on Earth's climate, these are often secondary or tertiary influences when compared to more proximate factors like greenhouse gas emissions and albedo changes.
Thus, dismissing climate models as "junk science" for not heavily featuring astrophysics is akin to dismissing the expertise of a cardiac surgeon because they don't also perform neurosurgery.
Lastly, to borrow a Pascal's Wager argument form, what exactly is the cost of being wrong in either case, here? Do you know it? Can you calculate it with any certainty?
Note: Every paragraph but the last one was selected by me from a ChatGPT4 answer regarding this. I strongly believe in the potential of LLM's to massively, and one day hopefully automatically, refute disinformation
Tell me, would you use the same "reasoning" applied to literally anything else? Will you be taking up a cigar habit in the defense of Ronald Fisher, literally the "father of modern statistics", who disputed the link between smoking and cancer? https://priceonomics.com/why-the-father-of-modern-statistics... While doing this, will you turn a blind eye to the evidence that corporate interests had in maintaining doubt (in this case, it would be tobacco companies, but in the OP case, oil companies)? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2879177/ Or will you stop wearing seatbelts because of some niche cases of it preventing people from escaping submerged vehicles? https://auto.howstuffworks.com/car-driving-safety/safety-reg...
What's the potential cost of you being right vs. the cost of you being wrong? Can you even calculate it with any certainty? Do you know which groups of people it might impact? Do you know what parts will be irreversible? Or are you just another armchair rabblerouser whose day job is... Not remotely connected to studying this stuff at least 8/5?
This is called out by the author, but in my opinion as soon as you start changing the truth to fit a narrative you are not being scientific. If their model says we are missing the mark and we will get warming of 4C then this is what should be reported.
What would we say if a scientist doing Alzheimer research said that their new medecine could reduce symptoms by 50% even though their data shows that the reduction is only 10%? Even if it's not for money and purely so that patients treated with the medecine would "keep hope" we would call that person a liar.
Just look here: https://climateactiontracker.org/global/temperatures/
You can plainly see that if we just do as we've been doing, by 2100, we're looking at 2.6-2.9 degrees of warming over pre-industrial levels. If we actually managed to hit the 2030 targets that have been set (and, that's a huge long shot, to be clear), then we're in for about 2.4 degrees.
If we literally just do what the fuck we've said we were going to do, then the prediction is still about 2 degrees of warming. The "optimistic scenario" (lol) is labeled 1.8 degrees.
Even if we got the help of a magical genie to stop emitting all greenhouse gasses today, we're still looking at at least 1.2-1.6 degrees of warming, according to NASA: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/blogs/climateqa/would-gw-s...
In the past year, we've seen mass die offs of salmon and snow crabs. Insects, as a group, are on the decline. Climate migration is starting to happen, and the countries that are receiving these refugees are not welcoming them with open arms.
This is barely the beginning. It only gets worse from here over the next decade. I honestly would not be surprised to see global civilization collapse in my lifetime, and my actuarial lifespan is up in about 45 years.
They use the beautiful term "Unrepresented Earth system feedback mechanisms" in this 2019 paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1368-z.pdf
Keep on alarming, doomer!
I was literally telling my therapist about a week and a half ago that it's so frustrating that I'm probably one of the most "doom and gloom" people I know on these subjects, yet every time I've been proven wrong, it's because I haven't been pessimistic enough. I'm about ready to start cross dressing and change my name to Cassandra, lol.
How are you preparing for the worsening effects of climate change?
This backfired, repeatedly, and ultimately led to distrust of their statements when complete trust was necessary.
1. The recent Nobel Prize for the mRNA vaccines was awarded not on scientific merit but to encourage people to take the vaccines, and to reinforce the "safe and effective" message, according to a member of the Nobel committee. Yet the prize is presented as being for scientific achievement.
2. The population was told the plan for the first lockdown was for only two weeks. Off the record, health officials were briefing top executives of large local businesses to expect much longer lockdowns. Also, one of the senior public health officials in the Trump administration admitted in a book that she told Trump two weeks whilst knowing they were going to do it for much longer. The reason for the lie about the duration was because they thought people wouldn't accept it if they told the truth.
3. The virologists writing the Proximal Origin paper knew what they were writing probably wasn't true, but feared a "shitstorm", the impact on politics and the growth of "conspiracy theories" if they said they thought it came from a lab. So they deliberately misled the public.
Climatologists are the same way. In the ClimateGate emails there are parts where they agree to suppress contradictory evidence in order to avoid "diluting the message".
That said, I think science communication is an art form which takes skill and practice. If you are a scientist doing research on aspartame in mice or whatever, then what the media and laypeople are interested in is what the results mean for their lives. At some point you have to give your informed opinion or else others will interpret the results for you, probably incorrectly.
I think that the scientists are trying their best to communicate their professional interpretations of the data, but it's difficult to do so in a way that will please everyone. Especially when some parties are actively hostile to the message you are trying to communicate, and will nitpick whatever you say using the least charitable understanding.
What good are principles if the cost of adhering to them is an increase in actual pain, suffering, death, and destruction? Say whatever needs to be said keep people from giving up.
Thinking of climate collapse with the understanding that these changes will happen well within our lifetime can open up new perspectives that can help individuals - and society at large - better deal with what's to come.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Adaptation
New reefs will probably grow in cooler waters, but it will not happen nearly fast enough. The entire ecosystem around the reefs will basically collapse before migration becomes even remotely viable.
They matter to humans.
The coral reef thing was more of a marketing campaign, it's beautiful, it dies quickly, you can see it almost live, but all in all it doesn't matter much
Ocean acidification, massive change in wind and ocean currents , the permafrost melting, loss of albedo in the poles, &c.
These are all much bigger problems we can't deal with at all, it'll start self reinforcing loops we can't even pretend to understand yet
I won't hold back. I will certainly ask him if he is ready to discuss a topic that he will likely not like the truth of, and that I feel it is only fair to be honest with him, and that I am here to support him if it is upsetting.
At least, that's what I think now. When you see your own kid get upset, it is REALLY hard to stay the course.
That's not even a question. Of course we're going to go blasting through 1.5C. And we're going to keep accelerating. We haven't even come close to pretending to try to make a difference.
I have absolutely no idea what messaging is most appropriate to convey that. We're still stuck on trying to convince people that anything is happening at all. A minority of people, to be sure, but a minority controlling a significant fraction of the world's wealth (and, not coincidentally, a wildly disproportionate fraction of the world's energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions).
To my mind, the fact that we're looking at 4-5C by the end of the century isn't even the worst part. I'll be dead by then. But right now, today, we're having battles over really obvious and simple scientific facts, where the overwhelming evidence is on one side and we still can't make progress. That goes well beyond climate change. It shows up in every aspect of American culture. That's making a lot of lives much worse, today, right now.
So I started to explain to him in more rigorous, scientific terms that he’ll understand and accept.
I found that it was much, much harder than I had anticipated.
I did my own research, and it turns out that the “real story” can’t really be explained without resorting to nonlinear differential equations and high-resolution spectra of exotic chemicals. For example it turns out that it matters a lot that near the poles the upper atmosphere has a higher concentration of various rare isotopes, which shifts the fine structure of absorption spectra just so as to absorb heat from the lower layers.
To be perfectly honest, despite a physics degree and a background in chemistry, I didn’t quite follow the full argument and couldn’t relay it to my friend.
However when I saw a NASA page about the precision spectra of truly obscure specie such as doubly-ionised isotopically non-standard excited radicals as key inputs into supercomputer climate simulations I was reassured that smart people have sunk an awful lot of effort into the problem.
As with any war, correct messaging is vital to retain the public will in the fight. But as with any propaganda, dumbing the truth down might result in a lie. And once such a lie is uncovered and attacked, trust may never again recover (see Covid) and the fight will be forsaken.
I think the only way out, the only way to convince the general public without them needing to understand the complexity of "why" is to pour immense resources into improving our prediction of near-term events. Only by demonstrably predicting earthquakes, hurricanes, flooding, detailed weather patterns across the globe 6 months-a year in advance within a day/hour level of accuracy can we hope to convince the public that the models will be as relatively accurate when predicting earth's general characteristics decades into the future.
After all, the grudging leeway the public gives doctors and practitioners of mainstream medicine does not seem to be a result of them being swayed by the medical arguments presented to them, but because they have witnessed their powers of healing first hand.
The details of the atmosphere's interaction with the land are more complicated, to be sure. But that's not necessary in order to understand that the theory explains the the observations we've been making of a warming atmosphere. That's not sincere argument; that's goalpost shifting.
The science is something like: CO2 is so opaque to IR that the determining factor for warming is the part of the spectrum where it isn’t so opaque. However the thermal transport still goes through several bounces as it goes up through the layers of the atmosphere. At the higher layers the frequencies shift down and the absorption spectrum changes in complicated ways. This all interacts nonlinearly with water at the lower layers and ionised gases in the higher layers.
Actually simulating something that won’t just give you gibberish answers is decidedly nontrivial. It’s not a question of precision — I’m not talking about +2C instead of +1.5C! An overly simplistic model will predict -50C or +100C!
This is what scares me the most. Obviously reach +1.5C is terrifying but what’s worse is the complete inaction of governments (and their citizens) around the world to make a dent in this.
Here in the UK our government are just a joke. The prime minister recently pushed back plans to ban sales of ICE vehicles. We are sleeping walking into a catastrophe and it’s depressing.
Apart from vote for green parties that never have a chance of getting into power what can I do?
(1) if we don't act, everything will change (via climate catastrophe)
(2) if we do act, everything will change (via our actions)
(3) in the former case it's basically just bad things are happening to us, in the latter we have some choice how we change it.
(4) as everything will change in any case, conservatism (as in "everything should be conserved as it is") is no longer an alternative
This is, of course, radically compressed, she is more subtle and writes better than I do.
I think a massive problem is that this argument hasn't spread wider. A lot of people seem to think/wish/hope/imagine/copium/lie/phantasise/extrapolate a future basically like our world, just a bit more futuristic, is a possibility. It isn't. And telling your children the coral reefs will be okay creates more of such people.
But those trillion dollar industries fought against their own destruction, and continue to do so, and all of the other alternatives are worse.
The best time to fossilize the fossil fuel industries was 30 years ago. The second best time is right now.
Forget "conservatism." I posted an article a few days ago that made a convincing case that capitalism is no longer possible. It hit the front page, then got flagged to death all within 15 minutes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37628674
And it's all because the capitalist mind virus has taken hold to such an extent that ""the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it." [0] It's a sentiment that gets paraphrased into "people find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism."
In the entire history of capitalism and industrial society, neither global energy use nor global CO2 emissions have ever decreased, except for one brief instant when we shut everything down in order that many more of us wouldn't die of COVID. We're driving ourselves off a metaphorical cliff and laughing about it. We're not going to get the last laugh on this one.
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[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism
Well, I say "fuck that." If supposedly rational people can't handle having their belief systems challenged, we have no hope of a future anyway.
You and the article author are behind the curve. The coral reefs are fine and the idea of climate coral destruction has been debunked in the past few years. The Great Barrier Reef is currently at record highs for example, after a bleaching event in 2019 that coral "experts" said would wreck the GBR for at least a decade. By 2022 they had to walk that back completely as the reef rebounded far faster than they had ever imagined and reached never before seen growth.
Clearly, their understanding of corals is not good enough to make these sorts of predictions. There's also just a really basic problem with the coral/climate story: corals respond to fast local changes in temperature but CO2 is meant to create slow global changes in temperature.
But it's understandable you don't know this because almost nobody does. A survey done this summer showed that only 3% of Australians were aware that the GBR had reached record levels of coral. The majority still think the GBR is dying. This is for the same reason as covered in the article: academics like to tell stories that will cause people to behave in the right way, as they see it. Sometimes this means downplaying what they think, other times it means exaggerating it or not reporting good news.
Three-quarters of sampled Australian green voters believe the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is doing worse than usual, with 44% stating the coral is at a record low. Overall only 3% of all Australian voters knew that the coral was at a “record high” – the correct answer following two years of record growth that has broken all previous records.
The “phenomenal health” of the GBR is said to be virtually unknown, yet the public are paying half a billion dollars in taxes to save it. In addition the country is “being misled into thinking that expensive low carbon policies and Net Zero targets will help protect the reef, when there is no correlation between CO2 levels and coral cover”.
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/04/25/just-3-of-australians-ar...
Still, the Daily Skeptic fits your world view so stick with that and Sky News anti-science climate change outrage.
It was no wonder ScoMo was stridently anti-AGW:
https://www.axios.com/2023/10/04/climate-change-causes-relig...
Her husband does more of the same when not talking up mysterious alternatives to Fourier Theory and other rabbit holes.
IF (big if) you bother to read the field you'll find her work out on the fringe and routinely debunked.
If you don't .. well, then you find yourself making nonsense comments defending the indefensible.
As for Ridd, he and Jennifer Marohasy don't make the compelling case for GBR health and anti-AGW that Sky News after dark claim they do when they misrepresent their work.
Ridd's specific complaints against reproducibility in GBR marine studies were answered thoroughly several times over, here, for example:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025326X1...
Let's be clear, I'm attacking their work - Jo Nova's blog contains nothing of significance that hasn't been debunked, her husband's C02 spreadsheet work has been grossly overstated and nothing seems to have come from his claims to have had a major breakthrough with "it's totally not Fourier theory", and the claim that "reef scientist's own data that shows a huge rebound" isn't sound.
This sub-thread is really the definition of ad hominem. If you wanted to discuss the actual state of the reefs or the science we'd be discussing that. Instead you got triggered by the name Jo Nova which isn't even in the part of the article I quoted. Great job, you continue to debunk your own position and call attention to how apparently impossible it is to refute theirs.
Nope, I said she bends the truth savagely by using all the tricks in the "How to lie with statistics" book - classic misrepresentation of data stuff.
I also said that she is widely known for this (also true) and pretty much every post she has ever produced has been debunked (also true).
I stand by all of that - I suggest you check that out for yourself.
While we're on that, Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That? is another cut from the same cloth.
No matter how much you spit and splutter the facts remain, these are people that don't do science in good faith, they shill for the Koch aligned "think tanks" and haven't yet hit a goal.
Reef bleaching is a natural process that has happened throughout their multi-million year history. The experts don't really understand it as they so dramatically demonstrated in Australia but the one thing that can be safely said is that it's not to do with global warming. It seems to be triggered by sudden temperature changes, not absolute levels of temperature or very slow changes (like the fraction of a degree per decade observed from temperature satellites).
We know that won't happen unless "we" collectively stop relying upon China for our toys and necessities, which might happen through a grassroots movement if a few 100 million global citizens suddenly become luddites and/or agrarians.
Call me gloomy, but I think the only event that will dramatically slow human-accelerated climate change in the next 10 years will be a global economic collapse.
[1] = https://www.statista.com/statistics/270499/co2-emissions-in-...
China has 4 times the population of the US. They are only a bigger offender than the US if you believe that people who live in the US have some sort of natural or divine right to live a more emitting lifestyle that do people in China.
The atmosphere does not care about arbitrary political boundaries which makes per capita a better measure. By per capita emissions China is around the same as a typical European country, and half the US.
If we wanted to hold emissions to current levels, people in China are 56% above their fair share. People in the US are 220% above their fair share. (People in India are at only 40% of their fair share).
More important, China is building a ton of solar farms, wind farms, and nuclear plants, and a lot of pumped hydro storage (which when combined with solar or wind reduce or eliminate the need for fossil fuels to deal with the intermittent nature of wind and solar).
Compare to the US where every time the Presidency or control of Congress changes parties there is a 50/50 change that the new party in power will try to roll back any clean energy initiatives of the previous party and boost reliance on fossil fuels.
That means when China says they are going to be net zero by 2060 they have actually got a decent chance of achieving that, and if they don't it is more likely to be a "missed it by a few years" thing rather than a "abandoned it" thing.
The US currently has a 2050 goal for net zero but with the current political situation here it is likely to be 2030 at the earliest that we actually seriously start on the things we need to do to prepare for that.
We're living in the MBA/enshittification society where its all about pumping next quarters numbers to dump the stock and profit, even if it ruins the company in the long run. These are the kinds of leaders that we're the best in the world at producing.
EDIT: I forgot a shout-out to regulatory capture and rent seeking behavior that makes it difficult to get anything done at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_P...
RCP6 isn't happening because we absolutely have gone into renewables, hybrid and ev cars, etc.
From link on RCP8.5: "Since AR5 this has been thought to be very unlikely, but still possible as feedbacks are not well understood. RCP8.5, generally taken as the basis for worst-case climate change scenarios, was based on what proved to be overestimation of projected coal outputs."
8.5 and 6 are not happening, therefore climate change is not going to result in any sort of catastrophe. Fantastic news, so why the lying?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...
If you look at examples of climate change representation, they near universally will always use RCP 8.5 as the prediction. Like the graph above, why the lying?
The models have been out long enough. We know we are actually following somewhere between 2.6 and 4.5. We have been doing a great job migrating away from carbon. We won't even be peaking similar to the peaks every 150,000 years.