Your reaction doesn't matter; only the collective response does. It seems there is little appetite to doubt nationalism, and immense optimism for our ability to correct later.
I hope that we see more measured, objective articles like this. It's been pretty frustrating as someone on the sidelines looking in, the degree of panic and emotion attached to the climate stuff, that has always seemed to be out of scale with the actual effects to me.
I'm ~50, and my whole life, back to the 80's, there have been these sort of breathless extreme articles about the existential threat that climate poses. I remember, as a kid, it was global cooling, and we were all going to have to deal with an ice age, which terrified me.
Then it was global warming, and the "tipping point" and hawaii and all of our coastal cities were going to be under water within 5 years.
Then it was "climate change" which was poorly defined to me, but humans were definitely to blame, and causing hurricanes and destroying the planet - even though when I bothered to look at the actual data, the rate of hurricanes and other events had actually decreased.
I've read some super compelling articles from what I'll call "measured environmentalists" that argue persuasively that to do the most good for people, we should shift our focus to immediate harms that we can actually control well - things like malaria, and reliable clean water and heating, that would have a far greater impact for tens of millions of people than something nebulous like carbon credits.
I'm far from an expert on this stuff, I just wish that the conversation (as with so many things) could have less yelling, and more considered thoughtful discussion. This article, and Gates' seem to be a great start.
What is this author smoking? "2 to 3 feet" of sea level rise is still absolutely catastrophic and is hand waved away in one sentence. 5 degrees in 50 years? We've already gained about 1 degree in the last 20 years alone - with no signs of slowing down. If it's ackshually 5 degrees in 75 years, what even is the point of making a point about that? We're reaching several ecological tipping points. We're in a mass extinction. What in the everloving hell is this? Have we gone full "don't look up" with this now?
Not sure that just providing climate alarmist talking points is going to be a convincing counter to a climate alarmist who is now a climate pragmatist and provides some interesting reasons why they switched.
How about explaining why he is wrong? Don’t just respond with incredulousness and generalizations and assumptions.
He's comparing AGW, which drives a trend, with weather-based events, which are noise around the trend. He conveniently cuts his analysis off at the year 2100, by which we'll all probably be dead. But he's probably right that the trend itself doesn't cause insurmountable problems by that point.
But what about the year 2200, or 2300? At three degrees warming per century, the earth looks like a pretty hostile place to live in a few centuries.
"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit", and all that...
His idea of it being "not insurmountable" is essentially us not starving to death in a mass scale.
I care, in my comfortable life as an office worker, about the fact that chocolate, coffee, and wine will become luxuries as yields and quality drastically drop off.
I care about the fact that many places I visit frequently will need A/C to be _survivable_.
Those are not civilization-ending events but the hubris you need to have to just hand-wave this away are beyond my understanding.
As a layperson, I read that 2024 was the hottest on record, and I see charts that go up. I have no reason to believe that the charts will go down. I don't care if its 3 deg by the end of the century or 5 deg. But what about the century after that, or by 3000.
I'm not so concerned about disasters or economic impacts, I just have a deep moral belief that we should leave our environment the same as when we entered it. We know that fossil fuels release pollution that we have no technology to clean up. We we should not be using it. It's not rocket science.
Admittedly, it makes no rational sense go without today so that future humans can experience the earth in the same way I have. I understand why many people dismiss risks of things unlikely to effect them or their children, but to me to feels wrong, and I would like to have as little impact on the climate as I can.
> We know that fossil fuels release pollution that we have no technology to clean up. We we should not be using it.
The irony is that without them, you (wherever you are) and I (wherever I am) could not be trading messages. Every bit you send and every pixel lit has a fossil fuel cost associated with it.
Our world 100% runs on fossil fuels and right now there is no alternative that rids us of them that can be made without them. No replacement technology can be developed that won’t employ fossil fuels even further to excess in its creation. So “not using it” is not an option. Cutting back is not an option. The only way to replace them is to extract, refine, and burn more and hopefully that investment can be the one that gets us the returns we need to hopefully one day eliminate our dependency.
After 25 years of dire, ‘existential’ warnings, the political messaging is beginning to taper off and moderate.
It’s a necessary step. If you tell people the worlds about to end for too long, you lose credibility with all but the true believers.
Apologies are due to everyone that was fried on social media for suggesting things were not as bad as described. Anyone not fully radicalized was declared a ‘denier’ and accused of being ignorant about the overwhelming science.
It seems the people who acknowledged the climate was changing, but did not consider it an immediate, existential threat now have the high scientific ground. It seems possible they’ll keep it.
People just aren’t equipped to think about it on the right scale.
Experts have not been suggesting that a catastrophe will wipe humans from the planet within the next handful of years. They have been suggesting that our trends are deeply unsustainable for the planet. And the effects of screwing with our planet will easily be catastrophic in many years if trends continue.
So yes, urgent action would be necessary to get the trends to be more manageable. But because monkey brain doesn’t see an immediate threat, monkey brain calls climate scientists liars for some reason. We have these “temperature targets” not because the world instantly ends once we hit however many degrees of warming, but because we know the impact of that much change will be more drastic over the following decades. Monkeybrain just doesn’t know how to prioritize that threat without making people afraid of it.
"To know, and not yet to do, is not to know" - Aristotle.
Everyone still flies on planes. Ceasing burning kerosene is the easiest possible thing you could do to reduce your climate impact, but no-one does it.
Everyone hates being called out on it, but it is true. No-one really cares, because no-one is prepared to make a socially costly signal, costly in prestige or relationships or group membership. It's all posturing.
Where I live in Canada we have a humid continental climate. Climate change is a fact; and lets even say worst case scenario happens. We become a humid subtropical climate. Northern Canada is subarctic and they will become humid continental.
I look at these 'climates changing" and see absolutely no problem at all. Looks like an improvement to me. How can we go about speeding up this process?
What pisses me off about these people and the comments is the shear hubris and ONLY thinking about humans survival.... And not the rest of the biosphere ...... If our children have to live in habitats like LITERAL SPACESHIPS to survive and will never experience grass...or a dragonfly or bee landing on them. Or lady bugs...or horses or elephants or whales etcetcetc. ... To have these relegated to the same mythical category as a dragon or unicorn.... Is so unconscionable I don't understand how all these so called intelligent people just carry on and shrug...
23 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 51.0 ms ] threadI'm ~50, and my whole life, back to the 80's, there have been these sort of breathless extreme articles about the existential threat that climate poses. I remember, as a kid, it was global cooling, and we were all going to have to deal with an ice age, which terrified me.
Then it was global warming, and the "tipping point" and hawaii and all of our coastal cities were going to be under water within 5 years.
Then it was "climate change" which was poorly defined to me, but humans were definitely to blame, and causing hurricanes and destroying the planet - even though when I bothered to look at the actual data, the rate of hurricanes and other events had actually decreased.
I've read some super compelling articles from what I'll call "measured environmentalists" that argue persuasively that to do the most good for people, we should shift our focus to immediate harms that we can actually control well - things like malaria, and reliable clean water and heating, that would have a far greater impact for tens of millions of people than something nebulous like carbon credits.
I'm far from an expert on this stuff, I just wish that the conversation (as with so many things) could have less yelling, and more considered thoughtful discussion. This article, and Gates' seem to be a great start.
What causes this climate change, how much infuence humans have on it, and how much we could possibly do about it is unclear.
That's not a reason to not do anything about it, but there's also no reason to be super intense about it.
How about explaining why he is wrong? Don’t just respond with incredulousness and generalizations and assumptions.
But what about the year 2200, or 2300? At three degrees warming per century, the earth looks like a pretty hostile place to live in a few centuries.
"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit", and all that...
I care, in my comfortable life as an office worker, about the fact that chocolate, coffee, and wine will become luxuries as yields and quality drastically drop off.
I care about the fact that many places I visit frequently will need A/C to be _survivable_.
Those are not civilization-ending events but the hubris you need to have to just hand-wave this away are beyond my understanding.
I'm not so concerned about disasters or economic impacts, I just have a deep moral belief that we should leave our environment the same as when we entered it. We know that fossil fuels release pollution that we have no technology to clean up. We we should not be using it. It's not rocket science.
Admittedly, it makes no rational sense go without today so that future humans can experience the earth in the same way I have. I understand why many people dismiss risks of things unlikely to effect them or their children, but to me to feels wrong, and I would like to have as little impact on the climate as I can.
https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-confirms-2024-warmest-...
The irony is that without them, you (wherever you are) and I (wherever I am) could not be trading messages. Every bit you send and every pixel lit has a fossil fuel cost associated with it.
Our world 100% runs on fossil fuels and right now there is no alternative that rids us of them that can be made without them. No replacement technology can be developed that won’t employ fossil fuels even further to excess in its creation. So “not using it” is not an option. Cutting back is not an option. The only way to replace them is to extract, refine, and burn more and hopefully that investment can be the one that gets us the returns we need to hopefully one day eliminate our dependency.
Holocene extinction - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
After 25 years of dire, ‘existential’ warnings, the political messaging is beginning to taper off and moderate.
It’s a necessary step. If you tell people the worlds about to end for too long, you lose credibility with all but the true believers.
Apologies are due to everyone that was fried on social media for suggesting things were not as bad as described. Anyone not fully radicalized was declared a ‘denier’ and accused of being ignorant about the overwhelming science.
It seems the people who acknowledged the climate was changing, but did not consider it an immediate, existential threat now have the high scientific ground. It seems possible they’ll keep it.
Experts have not been suggesting that a catastrophe will wipe humans from the planet within the next handful of years. They have been suggesting that our trends are deeply unsustainable for the planet. And the effects of screwing with our planet will easily be catastrophic in many years if trends continue.
So yes, urgent action would be necessary to get the trends to be more manageable. But because monkey brain doesn’t see an immediate threat, monkey brain calls climate scientists liars for some reason. We have these “temperature targets” not because the world instantly ends once we hit however many degrees of warming, but because we know the impact of that much change will be more drastic over the following decades. Monkeybrain just doesn’t know how to prioritize that threat without making people afraid of it.
Holocene extinction - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
You all call yourself pragmatist but us doomers actually seem to be the only ones who want any of humanity to survive at all ....
"To know, and not yet to do, is not to know" - Aristotle.
Everyone still flies on planes. Ceasing burning kerosene is the easiest possible thing you could do to reduce your climate impact, but no-one does it.
Everyone hates being called out on it, but it is true. No-one really cares, because no-one is prepared to make a socially costly signal, costly in prestige or relationships or group membership. It's all posturing.
I look at these 'climates changing" and see absolutely no problem at all. Looks like an improvement to me. How can we go about speeding up this process?
"The economy will be fine"
True Idiocracy moment....