I don't know how old you are, but those of us over 20 remember that we had '12 years' 20 years ago.
Somehow the prophesied catastrophe never arrives and the date gets perpetually pushed into the future. Looks like a secular Seventh Day Adventists.
"Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama's first administration, he added."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jan/18/jim-hans...
The IPCC chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, an engineer and economist from India, acknowledged the new trajectory. "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late," Pachauri said. "What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."
from:
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/world/europe/18iht-climat...
There are a few lists around the place of people saying similar things. Those are just I could find easily without too much bother.
Edited to put the Hansen statement in.
The second quote is more specific, but it doesn't say that inaction before 2012 will cause the world to end by 2018. If you've seen what IPCC suggests is required to stay at 1.5C, then that quote from 2007 reads as an understatement.
If anything, the date gets pushed back. With every subsequent IPCC report it turns out the previous as an underestimation.
That's what "pushed into the future" means. "Back" means "further away," "up" means "closer."
> With every subsequent IPCC report it turns out the previous as an underestimation.
So, every IPCC report has been wrong. How long are you going to keep believing them? Sounds like a religion.
Somebody here on HN just very recently claimed the exact opposite. Could it be a regional dialect thing?
> So, every IPCC report has been wrong. How long are you going to keep believing them? Sounds like a religion.
This is how science and engineering works, you keep revising and improving your models taking new evidence into account. This is the exact opposite of religion, which never changes its opinion regardless of any new evidence.
FWIW, I have never liked the "back=later, up=sooner" thing. Thinking of a calendar, and time going left-to-right, back seems to me to mean "leftward," which would mean "sooner." This tended to confuse me for a long time, but finally I figured out how to think of it in a way that could stick with me, i.e. the "back=further, up=closer" thing.
> This is how science and engineering works, you keep revising and improving your models taking new evidence into account.
That's one way to look at it. But eventually you have to say that enough is enough. We aren't revising and improving models of the Aether. And just like the Aether, the models and predictions of the IPCC have proven to be inaccurate.
So you seem to be applying science backwards here: you're trusting the models first, and trying to make them accurate as you go. That's not science at all. Indeed, it's much like ancient philosophers who imagined a way that the "invisible" (i.e. microscopic) world worked and then devised a model to explain it.
The scientific thing to do is to remain skeptical until a model is proven to be accurate.
> This is the exact opposite of religion, which never changes its opinion regardless of any new evidence.
That's not true at all. Actual religions change over time. Actual religions study ancient texts and invent new theories about how to interpret them, which often spawn new sects. Actual religions even discover new texts (e.g. the Dead Sea Scrolls) and update their interpretations based on them.
Or to put it another way: religion does not have an opinion--people do. Some people are stubborn--and that includes some who claim to be scientific.
And the way science is currently organized is not so different than many religions: schools which educate experts who study and discuss and write peer-reviewed journal articles and offer simplified versions to laypeople through the media. That's literally true for both science and religion today. Perhaps we should be less concerned about "science vs. religion" and more concerned about searching for the truth.
Though I imagine you will shortly be deluged with comments advising you that you simply don't understand the seriousness of the situation. Etc
The predictions might've been wrong about the rate of change (and I'm assuming this was a reputable source making the prediction, not cherry-picking the most extreme doomsayers). I hope more than anything they're still wrong today. But they weren't wrong about the actual direction of the change. People 20 years ago ignored the warnings, we must do better.
I was watching a TV show that said "If this spider were alive today, it would be hunting animals the size of house cats." and I blurted "No, it wouldn't. It would be on life support."
Those giant dragonflies with 4 foot wingspans or whatever? They couldn't exist today. The atmosphere isn't dense enough. For that reason, movies like Jurassic Park are probably completely unrealistic. Dinosaur physiology probably is wholly unsuited to the modern atmosphere.
Yes, absolutely, things are changing. But there is an unprecedented 7 billion people on the planet and life expectancy is going up, generally speaking.
Could we see a dramatic population crash? Absolutely. Population crashes of various species in various places are a known phenomenon. That could happen.
But we keep making these dire predictions about the end of the world and they keep failing to come true. We have been making them for at least a thousand years. The turn of the first millennium was predicted to be The End Times. More recently, the end of, I think, the Mayan calendar was supposed to be the end.
Post WW2, everyone expected to die in nuclear war. Today, there is all kinds of post apocalyptic dystopian fiction, often involving antibiotic resistant infections.
There are solutions for such things, though people who know of antibiotic alternatives are often dismissed as crackpots. Yet, we continue to quietly problem solve.
That gets largely ignored in favor of making new predictions of how The End Times are at hand -- this time for realzy realz, I'm serious man, this is not like all those other silly predictions in the last 1000 years.
And if you voice skepticism, you are advised you are a fool who just doesn't get it.
The best way to motivate people (especially bright people) is to convince them their work has higher meaning.
If a problem being solved isn't high-stakes, you won't have the best and brightest working on it. They are going to go work on something that is actually high-stakes, high-impact. The post-WW2 nuclear threat was real. It attracted intellectual giants such as John Forbes Nash and John von Neumann whose work probably helped avert a crisis.
> More recently, the end of, I think, the Mayan calendar was supposed to be the end.
That's nowhere near the same thing as a nuclear threat.
The point is that problems don't get solved by magical fairies or elves. They're solved by real people. And smart people are attracted to hard, important problems. All the bellyaching and agonizing serve the purpose of signaling which problems matter.
Einstein worked in a patent office for years, unable to get the university job he longed for. It took two tries of photographing a solar eclipse to finally get proof of his theory and once proof existed, he was world famous overnight.
He didn't stick with it because the masses were haranguing him about how very, very, very important this was.
Haranguing masses can decide what gets funded. Einstein's research didn't need much money, which worked out well for him. What if his genius had been in something that required more capital?
The long answer is probably a screed that I would probably regret posting.
It's 1am here. Please, excuse me, but I think I'm done here for now.
I think it's absolutely not reasonable to put climate scientists and their predictions into the same line as the mayans or nostradamus.
> Could we see a dramatic population crash? Absolutely. Population crashes of various species in various places are a known phenomenon. That could happen.
So, a population crash could happen. A lot of the comments here sound as if the people are saying "End of the world? Pffft. Total hysteria. Ultimately a few billion people will die and then human life will adapt. Everything's fine!"
I mean, take a minute and picture the suffering of billions of humans because of famine, resource wars, migration, deaths. Picture yourself and your loved ones into this.
It may not be the literal "end of the world", but don't you (and the others of the "it's-fine"-faction here) think that this is bad enough to take climate change serious and try to lessen all of that?
> And if you voice skepticism, you are advised you are a fool who just doesn't get it.
Are you sure that you do "get it" though?
My oldest son has the same condition. I have been supporting myself and my 2 special needs sons on under $20k annually while all of us get healthier.
I also appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard of Hacker News. I hit it a month and 2 days after I got myself and my kids off the street. I then changed handles cuz reasons.
I'm quite confident I really get it. I'm quite confident I actually know useful information that could make a real difference if people would actually listen to me instead of screeching at me about what a nutter I am.
But it is generally pointless to assert that. It just causes people to more vehemently ramp up the dismissive personal attacks and assertions that I'm an idiot whose point is invalid while they run screaming across the stage flailing their arms like Kermit the frog.