Why aren't people more worried about these kinds of things? Is it just too abstract and removed from day-to-day life to care?
"consider a narrow river valley below a high dam, such that if the dam burst, the resulting flood of water would drown people for a considerable distance downstream. When attitude pollsters ask people downstream of the dam how concerned they are about the dam's bursting, it's not surprising that fear of a dam burst is lowest far downstream, and increases among residents increasingly close to the dam. Surprisingly, though, after you get just a few miles below the dam, where fear of the dam's breaking is found to be highest, concern then falls off to zero as you approach closer to the dam! That is, the people living immediately under the dam, the ones most certain to be drowned in a dam burst, profess unconcern. That's because of psychological denial: the only way of preserving one's sanity while looking up every day at the dam is to deny the possiblity that it could burst. " - page 436
It's a fun story but it doesn't prove causality. Maybe their faith in the dam is why they moved there.
I mean I think if I was living right next to a dam or a chemical plant or whatever I would be more worried about an accident.
Although I suppose in real data you could get selection bias - those people who are terrified by nuclear power are unlikely to continue living next to a plant for long, leaving behind only those who are not bothered by it.
If we are right this time, why worry about it? If we are wrong this time -- as we have been for the past 70 years -- why worry about it?
Related:
If it's not enough because so many other people can't be arsed, my quality of life does not go up if I add sleepless nights and ulcers to my experience.
" Some things that help:
Walk more, especially as a form of transportation.
Use more daylighting and passive solar. This can be as simple as opening the window instead of cranking the AC.
Eat less meat. "
Interestingly I live in an area that's in between a middle/ upper middle class neighborhood and a much more rundown area. Of course the sidewalks only extend down the the poorer area. On top of that the road is adjacent to interstate entrances/ exits, adding more danger. Unless I want to pay for an uber, I'm generally confined to the apartment and immediate surrounding areas. There are ways to get to other parts of down, but they'd have me walking down streets notorious for crime. And don't get me started on the heat. A mile walk has me drowning in sweat.
I don't live completely in the middle of nowhere, but it is a pretty small city, and its obvious that not driving affects my quality of life significantly. Of course at this point, learning to drive and getting a car will cost about as much as to move to a walkable city, so I suppose I may do that.
Opening the window: To make it hotter and more humid in my house?
Eat less meat: I dont mind using turkey instead of beef anymore but good luck convincing most others.
https://apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 > June 30, 1989
Articles in a similar vain are trotted out constantly, they just change the timespan and a few details. See recent example from FT:
https://biggerpicture.ft.com/global-risks/video/global-sea-l...
It's clear from the article's text that the statement was not that the predicted problems would occur by 2000, since "UNEP is working toward forming a scientific plan of action by the end of 1990" would give an absurdly short timeline.
It says "The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown."
Conveniently, that was 30 years ago. I went to https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ . In 1989 the temperature anomaly was about +0.25°C. It's currently +0.82°C. A change of 0.57°C is just over 1°F. As predicted by the most conservative estimate.
I have been unable to find the report. The only people who talk about that newspaper article appear to be climate change denialists, who don't link to the actual report, and misread the article to believe that there's a prediction of a 3 foot sea rise by 2000.
The late 1980s is when the majority of scientists - and associated people like Isaac Asimov, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfB7Hzb7G2Q - were convinced of the evidence of global warming and its potential problems.
That built upon earlier work. Eg, "In 1982, Exxon's environmental affairs office circulated an internal report to Exxon's management which said that the consequences of climate change could be catastrophic, and that a significant reduction in fossil fuel consumption would be necessary to curtail future climate change. It also said that "there is concern among some scientific groups that once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont...
There's no way you can claim that this is vindication of that prediction.
Without knowing the original article context, it's really hard to know what the exact prediction is. It seems clear from looking around that most people who reference the article are global-denialists as I haven't found anyone verify that the newspaper reporter was accurate in the report.
So, I looked for the report. I believe it's "The State of the World Environment 1989 - UNEP/GC.15/7/Add.2" dated April 1989 at https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/28295/... . The prediction on p23./paragraph 68 is:
> Even then, estimates of temperature increase vary widely—from 0.7°C to 9.6°C. Recent studies agree, however, that doubling the carbon dioxide concentration from the pre-industrial level of 270 ppmv will probably increase global mean temperature by 1.5°C to 4.5°C (47, 48, 49)—but most likely by 2°C.
+0.82°C is larger than 0.7°C, so well within that predicted range - certainly on the low-end, but not enough to be rejected as "shit" given how the report explicitly states the uncertainty.
The 1 degree could have been 0.82°C rounded (up) to the nearest degree, or 1.476°F rounded (down) to the nearest degree.
I don't see an estimate of when, but figure 5 shows an estimate of 3°C rise by 2050, of which about 0.8°C come from CFC - CFCs weren't yet banned at that time. Which means Brown's prediction in the news article likely included a CFC component that didn't happen.
Thanks for the link to the original paper, I've never seen it myself either
The shit is now starting to hit the fan.
The predictions are that there's going to be a lot more shit hitting the fan, and these predictions are constantly being checked and re-checked.
The news reports first that the shit bombardment is coming, and now it's here.
And you complain about those news reports, and not those actually shitting on the planet?
You know the metaphor "bikeshedding", yes? The idea that there can be a lot of vigorous arguments over the materials, paint color, etc. to use for a bike shed?
The flip side of that metaphor, which I'll coin "atomicpowerplanting", is that few want to dig into the details to make a good decision. Going back to the original bikeshed email:
> an atomic plant is so vast, so expensive and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and rather than try, they fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked all the details before it got this far.
So, starting 40 years ago people started talking about the problems in graphite atomic piles, and made vague mentions of the Wigner effect, but the atomic power plant is important for national security and so it is built and put into operation.
This goes on for years. People point out some of the problems, and its knowledge is suppressed.
More years pass. And then the Windscale fire happens.
Perhaps the warnings are really important, but so complex that it's easy to atomicpowerplant?
I'm trying to point out that "shit bombardment" might be appropriate, if everything is going to shit.
Do you think there is substantial global warming caused by humans?
Do you think it's serious enough that we need to take drastic measures to reduce CO2 emissions?
Do you think the evidence was strong enough in the 1980s that they were right to be concerned about the future?
Do you think their claims - bearing in mind the range of the predictions as in the 1989 document I found - been shown to be substantially correct?
You haven't committed either which way, only to say that you've been bombarded by shit by the news. The 1989 article you pointed to, however, doesn't seem like shit. Why do you think it is?
Red Scare (first and second), Communist takeover, "better dead than red".
Ehrlich's The Population Bomb predicting world-wide famine by the 1980s, followed by the Zero Population Growth movement.
The destruction of the ozone hole.
For the more Biblical prophecy oriented, "The Late, Great Planet Earth", predicting the end of the earth by the 1980s or 1990s, sold 28M copies.
I could probably come up with more with a bit of research.
Perhaps if we'd never worried so much about the ozone hole, it'd be a lot bigger now. (it's still there by the way, just smaller)
Some of these were/are real concerns. Certainly the threat of nuclear war was a real concern, as were CFCs leading to the ozone hole, and the threat of mass starvation. These changes were based on the realistic fear that millions or more might die.
(Continued illegal use of CFCs is not helping, btw.)
Some were/are not. Biblical predictions of the end of the world come up every few decades, and have for over 1000 years.
But aren't they all examples of being told by mass media that we're going "to die at any moment"? I can empathize that hearing about these for many decades can cause people to become inured.
Unless there was something else to stop the emission of CFCs, it would be huge by now, no question!
If anyone wants to know about the current state of the ozone hole, here's the newest report:
https://ozone.unep.org/sites/default/files/2019-05/SAP-2018-...
I like the plots on ES.24 that show the effect the regulations have on global warming (the older replacement coolants were powerful greenhouse gases). See that curve? It's going down. If the regulations are followed (and we have good precedent that they will be) we've been spared several centi-degree in warming by 2100.
This is the only really positive news I've heard so far in the context.
Climate Change being real or not is not the point here. The point is that we have yet another generation of people believing that we're all screwed before we get old. Maybe that's it: it's actually easier for young people to believe that they don't have to make long-term decisions because they won't live that long.
- Nuclear war. This was the biggy. I remember at 25 I honestly didn't expect to live to 40. We regularly asked each other what we will do when (not if) the alarm goes off and we have 15 minutes to do something before being simultaneously cooked and blown apart in the shockwave.
- AIDS. When the AIDS epidemic broke, there were TV adverts with tombstones on them basically saying "stop having sex, it'll kill you". There were scientific articles explaining how the spread of AIDS was unstoppable and would destroy Western Civilisation within a decade.
- The Hole in The Ozone Layer. This was going to fry us all and we'd be living in underground bunkers by 2020.
- Y2K. Mass Media made a lot of this, painting pictures of planes falling out of the sky and distribution networks failing. It was very, very, anticlimactic (thankfully, and I played my part in that).
- Peak Oil. There was a fairly popular sentiment in the 00's that the oil was going to dry up before we were ready for it to. It turned out that fracking could alleviate that concern, and then they found a ton of new oil fields. But again, you can find media articles explaining how Western Civilisation was going to be destroyed by Peak Oil, and preppers getting themselves ready to survive it.
- Acid Rain. Less catastrophic, but still up there. I remember articles explaining how the delicate ecosystem of the English countryside was being destroyed by acid rain, and it would never recover, leading to the collapse of Western Civilisation.
There's probably more. The common thread is always "if this continues at its current pace (and it will because we have no way of stopping it), X will happen and that will destroy Western Civilisation". Sound familiar?
- worst pesticides (DDT)
- sulfate aerosols from coal
- CFCs
- chloride based plastics
- asbestos and dust
- leaded gasoline
- heavy metals
- nuclear non-proliferation
We have also made strides in monitoring our environment.
So it might look like lots of doomsday predictions, but the reason why these didn't pan out was that humans actually put the work in to prevent that from happening.
You've got to remember, the Hole in the Ozone Layer was just as threatening at the time as Climate Change. It was literally going to fry us all within a decade because of extreme UV. We'd be living in underground bunkers by now. And then we stopped using CFC's and it stopped growing, and we're all good now, thanks. Except the next disaster that was going to kill us all came along...
We're probably already past the event horizon on that issue. At this point, there's probably no way to make it happen that doesn't involved laws.
There's no way any of us can change the situation individually. We're past the event horizon; nuclear war/catastrophic climate change is a certainty, and we're all going to die. Some brave individuals are protesting against it, and some people are preparing for it. But for most of us, it's a done deal.
I have a theory that it actually allows people to stop worrying about the future, and therefore we don't have to make long-term decisions. It's actually comforting in a "what's the point of saving money, we're all going to die in a nuclear holocaust/climate heatwave anyway. Might as well spend it down the pub now..." way.
So you get us in the middle who just ignore it all because after hearing both extremes for so long you again get desensitized to it all.
I liked what Arnold Schwarzenegger said "I don't give a if we agree about climate change.". We should just work to reduce our emmisions anyway and make everything cleaner.
I do know people tend to be more receptive to slow change. You take their SUV's away in 5 years, there will be issues. You start slowly phasing them out, it will probably work better. Also efficeint cars seem to expensive. You can buy a used car that will last 5 years for $3000 that gets crappy gas milage, or a new hybrid car for $20,000. one can argue about saving movey on gas, but you will never save $10k worth of money and for people with little money that is what they need to get by.
A full-out nuclear exchange might last anywhere from 1-3 hours and kill every human on Earth. Thousands of nuclear warheads on hair-trigger alert is literally on the verge of wiping ourselves out. It almost happened, at least twice.
We're lucky to be here. But survivorship bias is a psychological distortion; it has zero predictive power. You can say the same thing at the individual level. "I've been hearing my whole life that I'm gonna die. Still here." And that's true up until the day you actually die.
An all-out nuclear exchange would kill a lot of people and send humanity back to the early industrial or pre-industrial era, but it's not an extinction risk.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests
The vast majority of those were underground, and they were not all at the same time.
One of the predicted problems was mass starvation. One of the mitigations was the Green Revolution. Quoting Borlaug's Nobel Prize speech (he has been credited with saving the lives of 1 billion people):
> It is true that the tide of the battle against hunger has changed for the better during the past three years. But tides have a way of flowing and then ebbing again. We may be at high tide now, but ebb tide could soon set in if we become complacent and relax our efforts. For we are dealing with two opposing forces, the scientific power of food production and the biologic power of human reproduction. ...
> There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort. Fighting alone, they may win temporary skirmishes, but united they can win a decisive and lasting victory to provide food and other amenities of a progressive civilization for the benefit of all mankind
In context of your comment, the predictions of mass starvation didn't happen. Was that because the predictions were wrong? Yes and no. The predictions were right, but people listened to the predictions and worked to mitigate them ... fully aware that they were only mitigations. Thus, those prediction did not happen ... yet.
It was for the people of the future - you and I included - to work to find the real solution. If we don't worry, the work of people like Borlaug to give us more breathing room to work on a more complete solution seems pointless.
The fact that I don't lose sleep over worrying about doomsday scenarios doesn't mean I'm doing nothing about it, a point I've repeatedly addressed in this same thread.
If you have an emergency and dial 911, the person who answers remains calm, cool and collected. If they send police or ambulance to your location due to your emergency, those folks also remain calm, cool and collected.
I'm not in denial here. I just think that not only is it not helpful to run screaming across the stage of life in a panic while flailing my arms like Kermit the frog, it's actively counterproductive.
I wish very much I could get more traction for certain things. Perhaps someday I will.
But I am quite confident that histrionics will play little to no part in any success I manage to achieve.
"If we are right this time, why worry about it? If we are wrong this time -- as we have been for the past 70 years -- why worry about it?"
If I understand you correctly, your response to your own question is that you do indeed do something (eg, lack of car), but you don't worry, or more specifically, you don't worry to the point of losing sleep about it.
Is that a correct interpretation of what you wrote?
If so, I think we are working on different meanings of 'worry', which the OP used. I was thinking more along the lines of "to annoy, bother, vex", not "to cause mental distress or trouble" (using the definitions from https://www.etymonline.com/word/worry ).
That is, more along the lines of "concerned", and "alarmed", and not along the lines of the excessive worry that could be part of a generalized anxiety disorder causing a lack of sleep.
I believe it is possible to be both "worried" and "calm, cool and collected." For example, quoting from an interview with a paramedic at https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/01/03/6760393... :
> When people are acutely sick or injured, pain medication is important," Dahlke says. "But it's not the first thing we're going to worry about. We're going to worry about life threats. You're not necessarily going to die from pain, and we're going to do what satisfies the need in the moment to get you into the ambulance and to the hospital and to a higher level of care."
I assumed that OP meant that sort of worry - the kind which implies paying close attention to a real problem and trying to resolve it - and not some 'histrionic' concern.
No, I didn't.
I'm well aware there can be other reasons people aren't particularly/obviously invested in the topic. My reply wasn't intended to explain all such cases.
I didn't feel any need to pedantically enumerate all such points of view, some of which can be quite ugly. For example, if you believe global warming is human created and that this article is correct about billions of lives being at risk, you may cynically feel it is a problem that will resolve itself once that mass die off occurs.
People can be trying to solve it in earnest without signaling to anyone that they believe we are heading towards a doomsday scenario and that their life's work is intended to "save" us from it. In fact, those trying in earnest to find real solutions probably want to activaly eschew that framing. It won't help their work get taken seriously to identify themselves to the world as having some kind of saviour complex.
Renewable energy is a growing industry. How do you know who in that industry is just looking to make a buck and who is on a mission to save the world from global warming?
You can't actually rely on what they say to know what is in their heart of hearts. The person looking to get rich may claim to be trying to save the world because it's a good marketing ploy and improves their bottom line.
I gave up my car more than a decade ago, in part because I'm an environmental studies major. I'm also quite poor and have been for a long time. My lack of a car is consistently viewed through the lens of poverty. No one ever sees my lifestyle choice as an environmental choice.
I mostly don't harp on it. I also don't see well and have other reasons why I'm content to make my life work without a car in a country that actively makes life without a car difficult.
I don't see an upside to trying to position myself in the minds of most people as a fanatic devoting my life to leading by example. In fact, I see a lot of downside to such positioning.
I'm actively involved locally with two non profits. I'm generally the poorest person in the room. Making the rich people around me feel morally judged for things like having a car would close doors in my face, not open them.
Anyway, you and I seem to inherently frame things in a manner that isn't compatible. I feel I am pointlessly beating a dead horse here. It's not a good feeling and it's not a thing I care to continue with.
You replied: "We've been hearing since WW2 ... If we are right this time, why worry about it? If we are wrong this time -- as we have been for the past 70 years -- why worry about it?"
This "we" is a general "we", not a personal comment as it's unlikely that you are that old.
If your answer doesn't reflect something about 'the minds of most people' then who is the "we" who you are saying "are right"?
This is very important. Thank you for that.
If we are right, why worry about it? Because there are things you can do to help, but only if you acknowledge the problem.
Not to mention that fearmongering is the basis of politics and so we're constantly being bombarded with "studies" showing a million different things to be fearful of, very often contradicting each other or at the very least not including the full story.
Are we saying people should go out on the streets in a mass hysteria? That's worse than climate change itself.
Are we saying we need to have in depth nuanced discussion about it. Sure, please do.
His thesis:
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function"
An example from the rest of the talk:
"Bacteria grow by doubling. One bacterium divides to become two, the two divide to become 4, the 4 become 8, 16 and so on. Suppose we had bacteria that doubled in number this way every minute. Suppose we put one of these bacteria into an empty bottle at 11:00 in the morning, and then observe that the bottle is full at 12:00 noon. There's our case of just ordinary steady growth: it has a doubling time of one minute, it’s in the finite environment of one bottle.
I want to ask you three questions. Number one: at what time was the bottle half full? Well, would you believe 11:59, one minute before 12:00? Because they double in number every minute.
And the second question: if you were an average bacterium in that bottle, at what time would you first realize you were running of space? Well, let’s just look at the last minutes in the bottle. At 12:00 noon, it’s full; one minute before, it’s half full; 2 minutes before, it’s a quarter full; then an 1/8th; then a 1/16th. Let me ask you, at 5 minutes before 12:00, when the bottle is only 3% full and is 97% open space just yearning for development, how many of you would realize there’s a problem?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8
https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populati...
Every person feels like, often rightly so, that they have enough fiscal and social stress that immediately impacts their lives.
For an (U.S) example, Presidential elections: the results of which undoubtedly impact the entire nations population in, potentially, massive ways in every sphere (social, economic ect.). You cannot really escape it either, it permeates news cycles at all levels nationally and globally.
Since 2000 it turnouts have been bounced between 50-60%. Given that, how many people are really going to be concerning themselves with something like climate change? Tax policy rattles more people than climate change ever will, they may even recognize it themselves, and yet people just don't care (or have more immediate concerns).
If you want someone to care, they have to be moved enough by being directly impacted. In climate change's case, it will be too late to do anything. But that's just how people (including myself) work.
I get the desire for a single unified initiative that drags us out of this mess, even against our wills. But no entity capable of doing that exists. And the bigger ethical question is indeed whether it should exist to begin with. If we can't solve these relatively simple problems of ensuring our survival and provide a reasonably fulfilling existence for our fellow humans, why does our species deserve to exist?
> But no entity capable of doing that exists.
I agree, this is a pipe dream. The reality is that there is absolutely no hope. Hence, my choice of not having kids.
Religious dictatorships didn't lead to peace or even actual embrace of the principles, communist dictatorships didn't help the working class, and green dictatorships won't help the environment.
It’s not directly relevant in a relatable way to most of us. If you can afford air conditioning, these conditions are survivable. Building empathy with faraway victims facing chronic problems is hard.
But I only have shallow knowledge of the major supply chains, maybe someone with a deeper understanding can chime in.
This article seems to imply that everyone will die from exposure once a certain temperature and saturation is reached, but doesn't seem to take measures into consideration. Even without A/C there are plenty of options available, e.g. evaporative cooling, living underground, heat pumps (that move heat or cold underground depending on season) and just building with possible heatwaves in mind.
I AM worried about these things, we've just had a heatwave that knocked my girlfriend out for two days. Tomorrow morning a guy will come over to make measurements to install awnings and screens to keep the sunlight (and heat) out. I am long-term thinking about installing solar panels on the roof, which can be used to offset the power consumption of another possible upgrade, the installation of a solid rooftop AC unit instead of the portable one we've used that just can't keep up.
And that's just my house, there's loads of actions that can be undertaken by individuals, local municipalities and governments - think about growing taller trees in residential areas, managing the water table to combat drought, providing aid and cool shelter to the homeless and economically disadvantaged, or even opening up public pools and fountains, and making (cooled) public spaces more accessible to spend a day at during hot weather.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/248027/americans-concerned-ever...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/26/climate-...
Notice that the worst scenarios, like the 4 degree warming, discussed in the article, happen lose to the end of the century. Most of us are dead then.
The response in USA is that people ask Trump to build a wall. In Europe, people vote for populistic right wing parties who promise to stop migrations.
They don't want to fix the root cause, which is that south is becoming inhabitable by climate change.
It's also just one of countless doomsday scenarios out there.
The problem for many areas is it’s not a dry heat. I like many other people as you point out have lived in 35c and above areas just fine, but the humidity was very low - it wasn’t really that bad if you could avoid direct sun exposure and didn’t physically exert yourself much.
Once that humidity creeps up then it’s a problem.
The first sentence explains that the authors studied the “potential for a catastrophic cyclone-heatwave combo”. The rest of the article elaborates.
I didn't mean to be so flippant. But honestly, this article deals with an incredibly unlikely combination of events in a very small area of the world, and is then labelled with "the human body is close to its thermal limits because of climate change". This kind of sensationalist crap is not helping anyone.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0525-6
> We show that ‘TC–heat’ events are already possible along densely populated coastlines globally but, to date, only an estimated 1,000 people have been impacted. However, this number could rise markedly with over two million at risk under a storyline of the observed TCs recurring in a world 2 °C warmer than pre-industrial times. Using analogues as focusing events we show, for example, that if the catastrophic 1991 Bangladesh cyclone occurred with 2 °C global warming, there would be >70% chance of subsequent dangerous heat. This research highlights a gap in adaptation planning and a need to prepare for an emerging TC–heat compound hazard.
They also cite some past work you might find informative, e.g. https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/joc.2...
I kinda stand by my statement though. 1000 people who might have been affected. "Millions" more globally (so a tenth of a percent of the population then?). Lots of uncertainty in the previous paper. But a headline that implies that this is happening to "the human body" and we're all at risk. I'm not blaming the scientists, or questioning the science, but the reporting of it is (still, even after reading more into it) sensationalist crap.
Where is the alarmism?
It's been hot and humid in a lot of places for a long time, but it's only just now beginning to be hot and humid enough to be passively deadly.