Climate threats now dominate long-term risks, survey of global leaders finds | Hacker News Reader

Climate threats now dominate long-term risks, survey of global leaders finds

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509 pointsdrocer88362 comments

Why aren't we doing more to address the source of the problem: extraction of fossil fuels? It seems that every attempt to limit the consumption of fossil fuels is going to have a limited effect if we don't reduce the supply, since a reduction in consumption will lead to an oversupply, which will in turn make burning fossil fuels for other purposes cheaper.

If the leading producers committed to a 10% reduction each year, then we would have some (big!) problems to solve, but we would at least be making progress.

I know that the economies of the leading producers is deeply tied to the production of fossil fuels, but at the current rate of global warming, no investment in fossil fuel production is going to be a viable long-term strategy anyway: if the sector continues to grow, then your money from the profits will be worthless for other obvious reasons anyway.

> Why aren't we doing more to address the source of the problem: extraction of fossil fuels?

This is basically the same as asking why don't we do more to stop climate change. And the answer is the same. Because we the people don't demand it from our governments. Not hard enough anyway.

I think the demand for action is present and will only increase in the years to come, so I am not worried about that anymore, actually.

My question was more why this particular course of action is not taken? What are the main arguments against it, and can we do something to address those?

Because the extractors of fossil fuels drives significant portions of the economy and we’d have to change how we measure things. Plus the amount of money they throw around. Much of the time they’re the only industry in poor or underdeveloped regions, and we have no real way to deal with the economic impact.

Good, this means we have now identified the real problem that we need to solve. In any case, if we really believed that we could succeed in just limiting our emissions without enforcing a scarcity of fossil fuels, that would lead to a drastic reduction in demand anyway, which would have the same economic impact on said poor and underdeveloped regions. These regions are also going to be the ones most affected by climate change, so they will lose big time either way.

I am not saying that this is fair, but no approach is really going to be fair to everyone. At least by ripping the band-aid off, we will (1) make actual, concrete progress, and (2) make it explicit who is going to suffer (the poor and underdeveloped regions that depend on fossil fuel production) and that we as a world are responsible for ensuring the affected people a livelihood.

Humans are much better at dealing with problems related to scarcity, as this causes us to really think about how to make things more efficient. If good advice about how to reduce your personal consumption for your own good really worked, then we would have a western world populated by fit and healthy Greek gods, but we don't: we have an obesity epidemic because it is not in the human nature to limit your consumption even if you have all the information about how to do it available to you.

Now, the real big problem is how to enforce this yearly reduction in fossil fuel production. I don't know, but I can think of one way involving the immediate threat of instant sunshine followed by nuclear winter. At least this is a kind of threat that humans can better relate to.

> I don't know, but I can think of one way involving the immediate threat of instant sunshine followed by nuclear winter. At least this is a kind of threat that humans can better relate to.

Would you clarify who should threaten who in your scenario? Just FYI, US is now the biggest oil producer in the world.

I am aware that this is not a realistic course of action. The problem is that scaling down fossil fuel production is going to be a very bad economic decision for any country in the short term, and it seems to be difficult, politically, to take that local economic hit for the long term interests of humanity at a global scale. At least the immediate threat of nuclear repercussions would convert the alternative into a short term local risk, which is politically more palatable.

Of course, any nuclear nation threatening other nations like that would become a pariah, so it isn't likely to happen. Also because, as you say, it is against their own short-term economic interests.

Edit: It would be pretty ironic if North Korea, which is already a pariah, turned out to save the planet by taking on that role.

I think if we had some sort of catalyst to enable more economic opportunities for both rural and fossil fuel oriented areas, then we could easily nudge things in the right direction.

IMO - a remote work revolution would work for that. Basic income as well.

A remote work revolution would happen as a necessity in a world where fossil fuel availability would suddenly and drastically get reduced. I think that transformation would be relatively uncontroversial, and would probably lead to an increase in production because people wouldn't be forced to sit in open office spaces anymore. However, we have to realize that this is only viable for the relatively small subset of us who work in offices.

I wouldn't say "poor or underdeveloped", rather the economic factors are different in the middle of the country vs the coastal parts of it.

Obviously anywhere connected to the ocean benefits from the fact that they are the first place a cargo ship goes when importing goods into America. It's because of this reason alone that the coastal states just so happen to be tech hubs.

Silicon Valley exists not because every engineer in the world 70 years ago thought it would be nice to live on a crowded little peninsula that has always had extremely over inflated real estate prices relative to the national avg (trust me, my Grandpa and Aunt were both big in the real estate game in the bay way back then)

The reason why they all moved there was because A. The cheapest silicon you can get in America is located where it comes right of the dock. B Because that is true for every imported good, coincidentally the easiest place to find people with an abundance of cash just so happens to be where all the people involved heavily in international trade are doing business.

My point is, you say "under developed" without taking into consideration two realities.

1. You don't want to live in a california with 150 million people in it.

2. states like oklahoma and texas can only survive by exporting the few goods they can produce. Namely green house gas problem sectors like livestock and oil production.

I live in oklahoma. Literally 5/10 men who actually take care of their families around here are doing so by driving trucks across country or pulling black gold out of the ground. The only way these areas could become "more developed" is if all of you did the actual caring thing (and actually smart thing btw) and started building your billion dollar unicorn startups all over the country.

There is no reason why Facebook couldn't be HQ in Texas, Amazon in Utah, Apple in Nashville (hey i think steve jobs would have liked that) twitch in North carolina, twitter in Maine, etc etc etc.

Because literally the only thing tech needs is internet connection. If were going to talk about ignorance of reality lets start with our own hypocrisies. Because frankly I lived half of my life in California and I lived the other half in the bible belt.

I tend to miss both when i am in the other place.When im in oklahoma I miss California because that's where all my childhood friends are. And when i am in california i miss oklahoma because that is where all the polite people are.

> There is no reason why Facebook couldn't be HQ in Texas, Amazon in Utah, Apple in Nashville

I have one reason - access to employees, and a pipeline for more. The industry in Austin will always be just as big as the employee base + qualified college grad rate will supply, and not much larger.

Why can't they be remote? Every company has huge struggles with communication as they get larger, and start to spread out further and further. Until there ends up being a company that grows and sets an "example" for remote at actual "unicorn" scale. Then I think it could and probably will happen, probably in the next 10 years even. But not right at the current moment. Still, you have to consider where the executives + founders want to live, an oft underappreciated reason for companies doggedly sticking to the bay area.

10 years ago when I still lived in CA (where i grew up), I was the liberal rebel in my family of CA Republicans, I argued with my grandfather (who was still alive at the time) about the issue of Global Warming but rather than trying to take him on head on about the ethical nature of supporting it, I tried to take the approach of talking about Electric Cars and how Elon Musk was paving the way towards a future where nobody would need to use fossil fuels anymore. (this was back when Tesla was still pretty much a pitch)

He asked me how much would a new Tesla cost? I said well right now they are $120k, but eventually Elon Musk plans to get that price all the way down to $40k.

My grandfather said, he can go right now and buy a 4 cylinder truck for $2000 dollars that gets 25 miles to the gallon and with gas at $3 a gallon he could literally get 360,000 miles out of a vehicle, and then guess what buy another truck for $2000 dollars for the same amount of money it took to buy a 40k electric car...

His argument was very simple, and having moved to Oklahoma after the economy crashed in 2007, I understand now more than ever why his conservative pov was correct.

The reality is that you can't make the world conform to your utopia when it first conforms to its budget.

You think this issue can be solved with simply a 10% reduction each year, when you need to realize people don't buy gas because they are going on family trips all the time they can choose to do the right thing and cut back on.

People are buying gas to go to work and back everyday. Literally the only way we could cut back on our current fossil fuel usage is if Andrew Yang's worst nightmare came to fruition and the robots did take all the jobs, that way we didn't have to commute to work everyday.

You need to think about why people need gas to go to work and back every day. They do this because their work is located far away from their home. And why is that? Because it was economically viable to set it up like that, because of the low price of gas.

Increase the price of gas, and you will get an economic recession in the short term, for sure. But after that, people will adjust, and you will see a reversal of the current trend of centralizing all jobs in the big cities. Towns would get more local businesses, people doing business would invest more in high-quality video conferencing instead of traveling to meetings by plane all the time, and so on. Some things that are possible today would not be possible anymore, and we would have to deal with that.

I think it is a fallacy to see the current way society works as a constant. Everything is holistically connected, and if you change one variable (price of fossil fuels), then the rest of society will have to shape itself around that.

You would get lynched by taxi drivers within the first month of implementing such a ridiculous policy.

Mandate taxis to be zero emission. Which is coming for some big urbs.

You would get lynched by everybody! But we have to realize that anything we do to solve climate change is going to make our living conditions worse here and now, because we have spent the last century making every aspect of society dependent on fossil fuels.

I think it is also ridiculous to not do something, because we know what the outcome is going to be, and it is almost certainly going to be more unpleasant than an economic recession and a bunch of pissed off taxi drivers.

Edit: Also, note that I do not want to increase the price of gas through a policy affecting only gas for cars, e.g. via taxation. That will never work, because it is a local policy that will be a short-term loss for the first country to implement it. I want to limit the extraction of fossil fuels globally, causing the short-term losses to be distributed to every nation in the world which depends on fossil fuels. This will, as a consequence, cause gas prices to increase.

Unless Americans start accepting that all of this is down to POLITICAL CHOICES we get nowhere. America has by choice built a car centric society where people like your grandfather HAVE TO buy a car and drive around.

Until I actually lived in the US, I did not grasp why Americans were always driving and why they could not use say public transportation. When I lived in the US I realized that almost EVERY American city was planned in a way that made driving a car very nice, but walking or public transportation was made to be absolutely terrible.

You cannot solve this problem with an individualist approach where you assume some Messiah like Elon Musk will just produce a magical product that will save everybody. There is no way around making political choices.

Of course I see this is hard to achieve in a country where politics is broken and it is normal to think the government is evil and should not be trusted.

That is why I think the top priority in the US ought to be fixing its political system. Get money out of politics. More transparency. Change the laws to facilitate multiple parties. Get away from the toxic two party system. Just voting on a 3rd party today does not do that as your vote is wasted. You need to actually change how the voting works otherwise multiple parties are not possible. Use preferential voting or proportional voting system e.g.

Except he couldn't have gotten a $2k truck for 25 mpg back then and it would've been spewing emissions onto asthmatic children wherever he drove.

That's why I use electric scooter to work. It costs 300$ and I spend 1$ a month on electricity to charge it (I could charge at work). It's an 10X improvement for short distance travel. It's much cheaper and convenient, since I don't wait in traffic and I don't have to worry about parking. The only drawbacks are: less immune to the weather, it could be hard to take it into some places like restaurants and you can't transport heavy or large stuff.

False. Scientists and economist have proposed to introduce carbon pricing, which would increase the prices of fossil fuels and oil, without forcing any utopian ideas, by simply including the cost of fighting the effects of global warming in the prices of fossil fuels and oil: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/bxgd5p/single_mo...

Same idea stated differently: the problem is the amount of carbon available at the planet's surface: a huge portion of that carbon will eventually end up as CO2, as that is the lowest energy state. Earth's biosphere allows for an equilibrium where part of that carbon will will be present as non-CO2 (i.e. biomass), but as we get more carbon to the surface, we'd have to move the equilibrium point to compensate for the added carbon, which doesn't seem to be a scalable solution.

The only scalable solution is to stop bringing up more carbon to the surface :)

Absolute AGREE!!! Why are so few others pointing this out!!

If oil was heroin, our current approach is like telling heroin dealers to keep pushing their drugs, but put all the onus on the junkies to stop buying so much of the heroin. It is TOTALLY backwards!

I am saying this as someone who benefits immensely from living in an oil producing country (Norway).

We are f...ing expanding our oil production while building windmills to make our oil production "cleaner." Everybody in Norway seems to be patting themselves on the back that we are reaching our climate goals by reducing emissions from oil production. Never mind that those emissions are like 1% of the emissions from actually burning the oil.

But that problem we leave to the buys. It is infuriating.

My proposal to win over fellow Norwegians is that we join an oil Cartel like OPEC. We then lobby OPEC to become a cartel for green change. All oil producers agree to begin gradual reductions in output.

This will cause the price to go up, so Norway and other will not get the big economic hit that is making it politically unpopular to reduce oil production. It also means all oil producers share they burden.

Oil consumers will then have to start reducing their consumption because oil will get more expensive. This ought to be a win-win situation.

This is what a price on carbon and carbon taxes are intended to address.

As the price of use or production of carbon rises, it will spur investment and competition in alternative forms of energy.

Further, a tax credit for removing carbon from the atmosphere will help spur removal technologies and we can begin to make a dent in everything that's already in the atmosphere.

We also need taxing of emissions to curb emissions of other greenhouse gases (mostly methane) that are not tied directly to the burning of fossil fuels. For example emissions from household animals, drained farmland and so on.

The problem with these kinds of taxation systems is that they are really difficult to enforce, because you need a way to measure the amount of greenhouse gas emitted by each individual business.

Taxation of emissions is another tool in the toolbox, but we also need to guarantee that the consumption of fossil fuels is decreasing at the same time. Taxation may help, but it provides no guarantee of that.

Once oil producers have to pay the carbon tax, the consumption will go down, because the price of oil will go up.

Here is an outline of the actual report [1] which draws on feedback from around 800 global experts and decision-makers.

Environmental threats dominate the survey’s 10-year outlook. The top five long term risks by likelihood and three of the top five spots by impact.

[1] https://www.oliverwyman.com/our-expertise/insights/2020/jan/...

> He pointed to the rapid disappearance of insect species around the world, including those that pollinate 75% of the world's crops, as a result of climate change and other pressures.

Hmm. Do those other pressures involve massive use of insecticides? Climate becoming warmer isn't about to stop insects; little blighters are resilient as an evolutionary approach. I'm sure wiping out a species is possible but a new one would pop up in no time to fill the gap if they aren't being actively exterminated.

Water and food crisises are not new risks. They are inevitable outcomes of population growth and variance in the supply chain. The evidence is that we are much better at dealing with such threats now than we were in the past because we have all this cheap energy we can use to recover.

Some insects sure, cockroaches aren't going anywhere soon for example. But plenty of species exist only in a particular ecological niche for which a few degrees of average temperature change can absolutely seriously affect their population.

"Hmm. Do those other pressures involve massive use of insecticides? Climate becoming warmer isn't about to stop insects; little blighters are resilient as an evolutionary approach."

Insects on the whole are resilient. Specific pollinators aren't. Climate change is causing massive problems for insect life. Neonic pesticides are also devestating. Both are bad, and are not mutually exclusive. As a matter of fact, more pesticides are used as climate change stresses crops more and weakens them.

Crops are generally loving climate change though, as more food will be produced than with colder temperatures, so I don't think more pesticides will be used because of climate-change induced crop stress

>Crops are generally loving climate change though, as more food will be produced than with colder temperatures

This is not true.

"each degree-Celsius increase in global mean temperature would, on average, reduce global yields of wheat by 6.0%, rice by 3.2%, maize by 7.4%, and soybean by 3.1%." https://www.pnas.org/content/114/35/9326

Right - It's very rare that the availability of carbon is the limiting function in plant growth. You can force more greening by providing a higher-carbon environment but it's almost always other combinations of nutrients, sunlight, or water that limit plant growth.

That's not entirely true - if it were, most food would be grown in the tropics. Some climates suit some plants better than others.

You might get some benefits from a suitable climate moving into a fertile area, but equally you could get disastrous impacts from a suitable climate moving away from a fertile area.

You can see the impact of increased intensity of weather events on food availability already, for example, the horseradish crop failure this year means Burger King is out of Zesty Onion Dip until spring: https://dailygreenworld.com/2019/11/22/earth-changes/climate...

I think it’s important we don’t let confirmation bias muddy the discussion. It’s a trap I see is easily fall into, e.g., some uncommon weather event happens and we point the finger immediately to man-made climate change.

Inclement weather has been destroying crops since before the plow was invented.

The right way to look at extreme weather events in the climate change context is via Attribtion Science. Stated simplistically this looks at "how often would these kind of extremes happen in a world with normal normal levels of CO2" vs. "how often would they happen at current human-caused CO2 levels". If a certain extreme of heat-wave happens once every 10 years now, but would only happen once every 1000 years without human-contributed athmospheric CO2, than wouldn't that justify calling the extreme weather event in question as likely human-made?

Of course that depends on the availability of accurate climate models for the event in question.

Here is a non-paywalled text on the subject:

https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Papers/extreme_wea...

This (above) is so simple minded, but please don't downvote it into oblivion, because such ignorance should be exposed and countered.

And yet... it’s true. It always amazes me the degree to which people become anti scientific in their dogmatic cheerleading for climate change advocacy.

Weeds are also loving climate change, so your conclusions are off.

Over the short term it's not though. The areas that were too cold to grow human foodstuffs that are becoming warm enough do not have sufficient biomass in the soil to immediately start being utilized in that way. Meanwhile many places that have sufficient biomass to be productive are having their water availability disrupted.

It will stabilize eventually, no question - it's the transitional period that's inconvenient.

If the conditions are so harsh that no new pollinators can evolve then they are too harsh for plants to grow anyway (eg, desert conditions).

Plants have an evolutionary strategy where they give away food (nectar, fruits, etc) to any animal that is willing to help them reproduce. Evolutionary speaking; when free food is on the table there will be takers at any temperature.

How, if our crops are being routinely doused in horrific poisons designed to kill all insect life I can see why that might cause all insect life near humans to die off. Maybe I'm just being a cynic on that.

> Evolutionary speaking; when free food is on the table there will be takers at any temperature.

However there speed of the change this time could be unprecedented for long enough that there's no time for new pollinators to evolve fast enough for us, humans interested in extremely short term results, compared to the time frames on which evolution works.

You have misconceptions about the time scale at which evolution occurs at. There is coevolution between plants and their pollinators. People study this https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5537349/

Neonicotinoids should be banned (among other compounds), but climate change will cause plant coextinctions.

A goal of slowing down climate change is to keep current species from going extinct. It's about stability, not just continuity.

> Climate becoming warmer isn't about to stop insects

I don’t think this is right. A good friend of mine is a PhD Entomologist. I asked her about the article last year that talked about the global crash in insect populations _including_ some remote islands.

Clearly chemicals and habitat are huge issues, but she immediately said “probably climate change”.

That surprised me and she said a lot of insects have quite narrow temp ranges and timelines under which they can reproduce.

Looking at islands is a great way to test the idea. I hadn't considered that at all.

> Climate becoming warmer isn't about to stop insects

Maybe, maybe not. CO2 increases have been decreasing the amount of protein in pollen, requiring bees to forage with greater effort.

https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2016/Q2/rising-co2-...

So many issues here, but consider that the rate at which humanity is changing the planet is not commensurate with the rate of evolution and natural recovery.

If you want to do something about climate change, consider working at a company fighting some aspect of it, whether it be wind energy, carbon removal, electric vehicles or something else.

We started Dolphin (http://withdolphin.com/) to create an easy way for people to find impactful jobs tackling climate change. Hope it's helpful to anyone considering a career shift.

Please please plese, please, please don't make me install an app.

Also, by making them available on the WWW, you will get SEO traffic, and the reduced friction will get more people applying for jobs.

great idea, but I bounced as soon as I saw I needed to download an app...

Agree with the others. I'm looking for a job now and wanted to check this out, but downloading an app for it is simply a no go. Even if I had the storage available in my phone, which I don't. I'm sure there's many others with this same opinion but you just aren't aware because you can't see the number of upvotes on the comments, which lead me to comment too.

I was just thinking the same thing. 26 upvotes on my sibling comment.

Where is the sign up form? I couldn't find any listings or a place to register.

Yeah, just commenting to say no to installing an app.

What do you consider a company fighting climate change? Not sure how space x or waymo ends up on this list. Or Betterment and Wealthfront.

I don't mind installing an app and I don't really understand why people object to it. Apps uninstall even easier than they install, at least on an iPhone.

That said...

- You don't need to know the name of my college to serve me some job listings.

- I double majored in STEM and humanities, but your app will only let me specify one or the other area of concentration.

- You also don't need to know what year I graduated college. In fact it may not be legal to ask as it can be used as a proxy for age, which is protected under equal employment regs.

> it can be used as a proxy for age

Why do you assume only young people starts college? Graduation year and school name are sometimes needed for verifying the accreditation status of accredited programs such as law.

- Apps uninstall harder than closing a web site.

- Apps have access to way more permissions, abilities and data than web sites (at least on Android).

- Apps tend to be pushed by entities that are trying to exploit the two above-mentioned things for their own benefit and the detriment of the user.

Does anybody even use apps in 2020 anymore? I understand that games, camera, music, maybe something else requires an app. But why make people to install an app for what is obviously a website?

To be clear, this measures the issue global leaders think is biggest, not necessarily what issue is actually biggest.

This is probably mostly a proxy for "climate threats are the most top of mind issue for global leaders" due to the recent rise in coverage.

Global heating because of greenhouse gasses is an existential threat to society. It is the biggest threat we have ever faced (on par with nuclear war). And we are losing, big time.

We're not losing, we're not even fighting.

Not sure why you're downvoted. My (French) government first preoccupation is increasing growth. Sad thing is that they do what they've been elected for. Recently they decided to decrease the speed limit, which was met by a general upset. Ironically, reduction of pollution wasn't even stated as a reason for these new limitations (they are concerned about car accident apparently). These guys just don't care about the environment. People give a lot of flak to Greta Thunberg (universally hated) but she asks the right questions to our leaders.

EDIT: I wish downvoters would take the time to share their point of view.

I just wrote up and deleted a comment on why you were wrong about the gilet jaunes "[not caring] about the environment" before re-reading your comment and realising you meant Macron's government doesn't care about the environment. I think that may be why you got downvoted.

Global heating is not on par with nuclear war. Climate change is reversible in a couple hundred years, nuclear fallout is not. At worst many people will die but not the entire earth will be inhabitable.

Keep in mind that earth cannot get worse than the last time all CO2 was in the atmosphere. Trees are younger than sharks. There was plenty of life when all CO2 was free. Somewhere in that environment will be space for life like the last time. Sharks and trees and many other animals and plants made it though that environment. And somewhere in that environment, there will be some space for humans because we will be adaptable.

Instead, the biggest threat is AI. It's the new nuclear race. It will come as fast as human possible and it will have access to the most powerful weapons since any participant in that race will need that move to protect themselves.

Unlike CO2, AI will add something to the system that wasn't there before. Its power will be unmatched and unlike humans, it won't miss any lost life-form.

> Climate change is reversible in a couple hundred years

That's optimistic. Climate change is potentially reversible, but it would involve large-scale geoengineering or carbon capture that we don't have the technology for yet.

Developing and deploying that currently-nonexistent technology requires a stable, organized society. It's plausible that climate change could cause the breakdown of organized society before we're able to develop technology to reverse it.

Don't forget the trees. Maybe it's a couple of thousand years, but let them roam earth and the CO2 is gone, like the last time.

Since bacteria is digesting cellulose this time, we can't rely on earth to fold over old wood. Instead, humans will have to manage the storage. But that should be doable, given the speed with which we can harvest forests.

I wish I could remember the name of the plant...

But there's some tree that grows like a freaking weed and is amazing for carbon sequestration.

I feel like even having 'more' trees again would be helpful; where my family grew up, over the years all the big/old trees that were in people's yards were never replaced as they went away.

You have to make sure the tree never rots or burns. And the only way to do that is to bury it deep underground or freeze it in an iceberg.

Or leave it alone to live and thrive, with the downside you have to be willing to tolerate its side effects, eg producing shade and wildlife habitat and oxygen and medicines and beauty and other things nobody wants.

The tree is taking up space so no more trees can grow in that spot. That means there is a limited amount of carbon we can store on the surface of the planet. We started this situation with lots of carbon and greenhouse gasses trapped underground and with a surface full of trees. We can't go back without putting the carbon back.

Build ships and throw them into the ocean. The wood just has to decay slower than new trees grow.

Also: carbon nano tubes and carbon fiber. We will build skyscrapers from carbon. There won't be enough carbon available for all the stuff we want to build.

>Keep in mind that earth cannot get worse than the last time all CO2 was in the atmosphere.

Are you not aware of climate science or even basic astronomy? As the sun grows older and gets closer to the end of its live span it grows stronger and outputs more heat. The growth in solar irradiance happens over the course of millions of years with some lows and highs in the short term (we currently have an insane increase in global temperatures despite slightly lower solar activity compared to a hundred years ago but compared to 10-100 million years ago the sun is significantly stronger). CO2 that is emitted today has a much greater greenhouse effect than CO2 that had been emitted millions of years ago.

> Global heating is not on par with nuclear war

Global heating is worse.

Nuclear has a worse worst case scenario. But global warming is worse because it's not a hypothetical threat, it's something that is already happening.

Nuclear threat could be (and was) resolved with common sense, but the time to resolve global warming with common sense was 30 years ago. Now our best outcome is to mitigate its effects. In the best case scenario millions will die. Mass migrations and wars are likely to happen. Recent data even say that we might have underestimated the risk.

> Climate change is reversible in a couple hundred years [...] At worst many people will die but not the entire earth will be inhabitable.

The planet will be fine, our civilisation might not be.

On the other hand, nuclear war can be avoided by closely monitoring the behavior of a few hundred people.

Most plausible nuclear war scenarios don't make the earth uninhabitable forever. Stay inside for as long as possible (at least 48 hours after any blast 500 miles upwind) and you'll probably be ok. The ~30-year Sr-90 effect will be left but it's way less dangerous than the first few hour fallout.

http://www.oism.org/nwss/

The climate is a big complex system. From what I gather scientists thinks it’s moving towards new equilibriums states that we are powerless to change, the window of opportunity is now (if we have t missed it already).

Also, it’s not just about CO2 that’s just one piece of it. There’s also other gasses, like methane f.ex, to be concerned about. Besides gasses there are things like ice , water and cloud reflectivity.

Sure, but necessarily, any informed person understands that it is by the largest existential risk of humanity.

Lots of people don't believe it's a problem or even claim it will be a benefit and no amount of evidence will convince them otherwise.

I'm reminded of Kubrick's quote about the atom bomb[0]: "People react primarily to direct experience and not to abstractions; it is very rare to find anyone who can become emotionally involved with an abstraction. The longer the bomb is around without anything happening, the better the job that people do in psychologically denying its existence. It has become as abstract as the fact that we are all going to die someday, which we usually do an excellent job of denying."

A disturbing corollary: the same challenge of processing an abstraction exists amongst most non-experts who accept AGW (and I'm among them). Hence symbolic gestures (banning straws), conflation with other sacred-cow political issues (corporate capitalism), belief in looming extinction (unlikely; the threat is to civilization, not homo sapiens), all generally filtered through a "purity" moral matrix (to put it in Haidt-ian terms).

As the complex reality becomes filtered through moralizing and politicizing, the other side digs in their heels for predictable tribalist and game-theoretic reasons. It's a truly wicked problem.

[0]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1966/11/12/how-about-a-li...

I don't understand this sentiment. After years of stagnation at around 911 million tons of CO2 Germany managed to reduce carbon emissions by 40 million tons in 2019 alone. The only thing that changed was a spike in the price of EU CO2 certificates which resulted in less electricity being produced from coal. It's absurd that this incredible progress is held back by the fear of losing 20k coal jobs when the reality is that those 20k coal jobs prevented the creation of hundreds of thousands in the renewable energy sector.

Even if you think the whole thing is a scam you see that having a grand mission to invest in modern technology is an incredibly effective jobs program just like sending people to the moon. Nobody has gone to the moon again but we still benefit from all the research from that era.

After years of stagnation at around 911 million tons of CO2 Germany managed to reduce carbon emissions by 40 million tons in 2019 alone.

Meanwhile, France has consistently had around half the per-capita CO2 emissions as Germany due to not giving in to the fearmongering over nuclear power.

It's absurd that this incredible progress is held back by the fear of losing 20k coal jobs when the reality is that those 20k coal jobs prevented the creation of hundreds of thousands in the renewable energy sector.

It's true that preserving jobs is a terrible justification for keeping coal around. But similarly "it takes a lot more green jobs to produce the same amount of energy" is not good; it is bad. We should switch to cleaner energy despite that, not because of it.

No. Informed people realize that there is no possibility that climate change will lead to human extinction (except possibly by some indirect means, such as leading to a war in which bioweapons are used, but then, drastic action to curtail climate change could also lead to war...).

Saying "existential risk" again and again does not make it true. Hearing it again and again does not make a rational person believe it.

just because you don't want to accept it doesn't make it not real

You just said it yourself. It's irrelevant whether the mechanism of action is direct or indirect. Collapse of the ecosystems that sustain us will accelerate processes that dramatically increase the likelihood of catastrophic events.

The semantic game of whether it's "human extinction" or "the end of organized large-scale human civilization" is stupid and grasping at straws.

> It's irrelevant whether the mechanism of action is direct or indirect.

If you take that view, then practically everything is an "existential threat". Wars have been triggered by soccer games...

As for whether "existential threat" means "human extinction" - well what else would "existential" refer to other than human existence?

Again, if you broaden this, then practically anything could be an "existential threat" - to democracy, say. And it's pretty clear that the people screaming "existential threat" intend for people to take it as meaning human existinction - the naive people at least.

>No. Informed people realize that there is no possibility that climate change will lead to human extinction

Avoiding human extinction from climate change is very easy but with this attitude you're not doing a good job at avoiding that fate. Right now I don't have much faith that humanity won't try to burn every single last drop of oil or chunk of coal. Although it should be very difficult to reach insane targets like 9°C warming it is definitively possible with enough ignorance and dedication and as humanity has shown we have an unlimited supply of these two qualities.

How would a 9°C warming cause human extinction? There is plenty of currently cold land that would benefit from warming temperatures for farming and humans are massively adaptable in that we live in large populations in pretty much every climate. Even if things continue the way they are, it'll happen over such a long time that time that the rate of change won't be a real issue either.

I'm all for zero carbon emissions but the ridiculous "everyone is going to die due to climate change" is pure FUD.

A 9 degree difference will wipe out almost all phytoplankton biomass responsible for generating most of the oxygen in our planet. You will see a raise in multiple meters of sea level, causing mass migrations involving over 20% of the world population, will make most of the planet uninhabitable, and will reduce the oxygen levels of the oceans to the point that they will be mostly anoxic.

That is an extinction level event greater than the Permian mass extinction.

So what specifically in your list do you think will cause humans to go extinct?

Phytoplankton are also responsible for 50-80% of atmospheric oxygen, so in the parent poster's scenario I think the loss of a breathable atmosphere is the most likely nail in our species' coffin.

Probably won't happen, probably not a great idea to push things to see how far we can let things go before it's catastrophic, though.

I don't need to speculate on this. There is never anything "specific" as any one of these things individually and all things combined are a death sentence.

With a 9 degree temperature increase a large amount of the planet simply becomes uninhabitable during the summer, period.

> no possibility that climate change will lead to human extinction

low, but existing, possibility*

> Saying "existential risk" again and again does not make it true.

Existential risk includes more than extinction, it could also mean society collapses and takes 100 years to recover to current level, or 1000, or 10,000, or _never_ recovers. Maybe some societies collapse but others just turn into deserts. Maybe there is a recovery, but we'll never have the global trade networks of today, maybe we'll never send a man to Mars. It might mean 90% of the population is lost.

I've said nothing about the probability of any of that, but it goes up the slower we act.

Collapse of civilization (human society with huge amount of specialization) with the simultaneous ecological collapse can IMHO lead to human extinction. Civilization gives us science and technology, which allows us to be, in theory, less dependent on nature. Conversely, if the civilization fails, we will have to rely much more on nature. If the nature undergoes mass extinction event when we strongly need to rely on it, we can easily get screwed. We can probably (as species) somewhat manage to handle one of these events, but not both at the same time.

Is it? Others that come immediately to mind:

1. Intentional or accidental development of a biological weapon that would wipe out the human race.

2. Asteroid strike sufficient for same.

3. Nuclear war, same.

4. Takeover and eventual decimation by AI of some form.

5. Reproductive failure (think falling sperm counts).

6. Failure to thrive, as a species.

None of those are as directly relevant as climate change. None.

downerending@ events would affect just about every human in a very large way. Climate change will only affect a subset of the human population in a noticeable way as a mild inconvenience [0].

[0]: https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

Ok, but just because it isn't the most dangerous thing that could happen doesn't mean you can just ignore it. You shouldn't stop brushing your teeth just because you could be hit by a bus tomorrow.

I by no means think we should ignore the issue. But I disagree with OP that climate change is obviously a massively more important risk than all of the others.

I also think that a stance approaching religious fervor is entirely inappropriate for this sort of policy discussion.

(As a wild guess, I think some combination of #4 and #6 is our biggest risk for extinction over the next 10,000 years.)

OK, now assign probability scores to those 6 and to climate change.

I have a gripe with long commuters... Or I think they're kinda dumb. I don't think the government should get involved, but it's not a social taboo to have a long commute, it's almost celebrated and romanticized. France has shown gas taxes have bad side effects, but how about just make people feel stupid for driving too much habitually. I just think they're stupid for spending a higher percentage of their lives in traffic, which is hellish.

Not everyone has the choice, especially in a place like the Bay Area with incredibly high rents near job centers.

Literally anyone who lives in the bay area has a choice to live somewhere else or work remote.

Ah yes, how dare poor people exist. They must clearly be inferior and stupid for choosing to live somewhere they can afford.

Poor people? I'm poor. But I integrate my life. My work meshes with my home life. I would move my house or get a new job. Fighting traffic creates rage and environmental problems. It's stupid.

Wow. Do you seriously imagine that people who spend a huge portion of their life on a miserable commute have never considered the solutions of "move somewhere closer" or "get a new job closer to home"?

That makes it better? I'm sure Bernie Madoff thought about quitting his pyramid scheme. Everyone thinks about quitting smoking. It doesn't matter unless you actually do it. If you just think about it, you still get lung cancer.

Wow, you just keep digging deeper. Let me spell it out for you:

Most people make those choices because they don’t have better ones available. They would love to live closer to work, but it’s not viable for many reasons. I’m sure you consider them invalid or of less importance than whatever you prioritize in your life, but suggesting that the solution to other people’s problems is just to do something they can’t easily do is quite arrogant and out of touch.

Look man everyone has choices. You're the one making excuses. I think it's stupid to sit in a car all day. If someone can't think of more options, isn't that a definition of being stupid?

Or are you so woke that you think there is no such thing as intelligence and resourcefulness?

Do you believe in God? And some people are fated, destined to be long commuters?

It's stupid to do something that sucks and not think of a better option.

Whereas your position is ignorant, because you are ignoring such obvious truths!

"Woe is me" thinking is stupid too.

It's either their destiny in a sadistic universe, or it's their own unresourcefulness in making bad decisions.

Making bad decisions over and over is a definition of stupidity.

If you continue to ignore obvious operations of the universe, you, yourself might fall into the stupid category, but at least you can give yourself prestige, thinking you're fight for someone, when really you are holding them back, like a consumptive mother, chaining her babies down, lest they fledge.

And your offense seems rooted in my calling out stupidity, as if the word does not deserve to exist, itself. It does exist, and you can't take away my right to describe what I see, you nincompoop.

Oh yea, and if you don't think it's stupid, then I guess you are against what Elon Musk is doing. Because why would you want to avoid traffic, if traffic wasn't stupid? Idiot.

Traffic is the worst way to interact with other human beings. Worse than arguing over the internet. Hahaha

Is is called compassion when you round up thinking to actions? You give people credit for the attempt? No, that's cruel, because they get the reward without actually doing it, and it keeps them stuck.

I don't know where you're from, but the law nearly every city in the US limits how many housing units can be built in every tract of land, so the simple arithmetic forces long commutes.

Very short-sighted comment. I commute 3 hours per day in total, but I take the train which is driving for 100% on green electricity.

I mean specifically car commuters. People who spend hours fighting traffic. At least you can be on your computer during commute. Still not ideal.

I would much prefer it be a social taboo for employers not to offer telecommuting where possible. Perhaps a new tax could make a positive difference there.

Governments of this planet are not moving quickly enough on climate change with small incremental changes over time. However, people and organizations who champion these efforts can pressure governments to drive faster change.

Climate Pledge

To protect all of humanity globally now and for the future of our posterity I am committing to the following.

I pledge to limit eating red meat. I will restrict intake of cows and lambs etc. If I choose to have children, I will have 2 or less. I will try to use cycling or mass transit options whenever possible and to participate in efforts to expand transit. I will restrict flying to only when necessary and try to limit flying to only when no other choice is available. If I do fly I will try to offset all emissions. I will try my utmost to conserve energy and minimize use of heating and cooling appliances. I will try my best to limit energy use to renewable sources when I have the choice. When I cannot choose I will fight for the ability to have this choice. I will try to help those close to me understand these choices and the need for those able, to also join the pledge. I will only consume what I need. I will not perpetuate extravagance and will only support companies who champion sustainable efforts. I will do my best to strive for and support sustainable and minimalist technology. I will stay involved in the public discourse on environmental issues and stay engaged on efforts to mitigate climate change.

I know its the trend to say individual effort is useless but I think the best thing about individual effort is it gets you in the mindset of conserving and a population that has made a habit of putting in their part will be extra frustrated when they see corporations and governments not putting in their part.

It also prepares people for systematic change which will result in us having to do most of these things anyway.

Would be cool if instead of me thinking about offsetting my emissions for the flight tickets I buy... The government would implement a tax that just does that.

And they could do similarly for all other products relating to emissions.

The government could achieve that by installing the right taxes of these energy sources destroying the environment.

It would be cool but they haven't done it and we don't have time to sit and wait. If we start self enforcing these rules on ourself then when it comes to election time people will be more open to voting for a government that does this.

The people likely to self-enforce these rules are exactly the people that would already vote for a carbon tax. The real problem are the majority who either don't care, or actively believe that climate change is a Chinese hoax.

A nice element of carbon taxes is that, if desired by voters, can be revenue-neutral and substitute other tax revenues. This helps encourage your economy to grow in ways that avoid environmental externalities.

Canada has recently implemented one federally and it has a lot of pushback in regions where a larger portion of their economy has historically come from bitumen tar sands. Other regions with different economies are more receptive to it.

Would be cool if instead of me thinking about offsetting my emissions for the flight tickets I buy... The government would implement a tax that just does that.

Taxes to stop behavior are bunk in this context. There's a lot of consumption that's necessary for many in some amount and luxury for other who afford a vast amount. Taxes cut into some people's basic survival and economic activity while not stopping over people's consumption.

What is necessary is the state to dictate to various industries and companies that they must stop CO2 production - by changing their products and production methods.

The simplest thing is that US is to mandate a lot more travel by bus. No one likes that but hey, no like a burning planet.

> more travel by bus. No one likes that but hey, no like a burning planet.

Says who? I hate driving, I find it the most soul crushing and time wasting activity there is. In comparison I find taking the bus to be relatively relaxing and cheaper.

What I don't like is a shitty bus service that doesn't take me to where I need to go or only comes every hour. Some areas may only have a shitty bus service and this is probably where you got the idea from but lets not pretend that this is just a reality of public transport.

What's your opinion on China's and India's impact on global warming? I am honestly interested.

If the US had the same per capita emissions as India I'd personally organize a parade in the streets. I'd openly weep with how amazing that would be. I'd build statues to the leaders who made that happen.

That's how I feel about India's impact on global warming.

You’d be incredibly poor though, because the US produces a tremendous amount of wealth in GDP per carbon emission - much greater than India or China.

That wealth is not yours.

India and the US emit almost exactly the same C02 per GDP dollar, but China is quite a lot worse.

Germany, OTOH is over 1/3rd less than the US and similarly rich, and Japan is quite efficient too.

Figures in kg per PPP $ of GDP

  China: 0.561
  Germany: 0.189
  India: 0.304
  Japan: 0.243
  US: 0.3

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?view=...

Germany burns a lot of lignite (the dirtiest kind of coal) as well as hard coal, so imagine what that figure would be if the political will existed to shut those power plants down.

To answer the question, 38.6% of Germany's CO2 emissions are from power generation [1], and around 70% of those are from coal power plants [2]. That's 27% of total emissions from burning coal.

[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/faktenfinder/co2-emissionen-103.ht...

[2] Figure 10, https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/14...

so imagine what that figure would be if the political will existed to shut those power plants down.

Today Germany announced:

Chancellor Angela Merkel's government and Germany's four coal-producing states unveiled details of their plan to phase out coal at the latest by 2038 on Thursday.

The plans outline a timeline for decommissioning lignite-coal power plants in the states of North Rhine-Westphalia, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg as well as easing the financial transition for the states and energy firms involved.

Energy firms will receive a €4.35 billion ($4.85 billion) payout to compensate for the coal phaseout.

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-to-pay-energy-firms-billions-i...

These plans have been public for a while and have been heavily criticised for being far too unambitious. Some of the lignite plants are not scheduled for shutdown until 2034, and hard coal until 2038.

Loudly touting that we're the first to bindingly exit coal with a 2038 target when France's target is 2022, they just haven't enshrined it in law, and Britain's power generation was coal-free for nearly half of 2019 (3665 out of 8760 hours), with a shutdown target of 2025 and coal accounting for just 2% of their electricity generation compared to 40% for Germany's, is just sad. That statement is incredibly carefully crafted to avoid being an outright lie, while still being extremely misleading.

"Coal supplied 2% of UK electricity in 2019, down from 30% in 2014." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_coal_fired_powe...), and 40% in 2012, sounds a lot better to me.

I don't disagree, but I live in Australia where our PM brings coal into parliament to say how much he loves it. 2038 would be a great goal here...

Only if you assume that the US reduces their emissions by going back to a rural lifestyle. Instead the US could replace fossil fuels with renewables and keep their wealth.

We are going to be incredibly poor anyway if we can't reduce emissions.

If we (developed nations) could all lower our per capita carbon footprints to the levels of China, or even better India, we'd all be doing much better wouldn't we?

https://cotap.org/per-capita-carbon-co2-emissions-by-country...

China's carbon per PPP-GDP is about twice as bad as most developed countries, so you're either proposing making everyone poor, or making everyone's economy more carbon inefficient. Either way the answer is "no."

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?most_...

I think the idea that red meat will always be far worse for the environment then other food is a bit of a red herring and conflated with ethics of animal eating. There are many factors not considered in those statistics such as nutrient absorption and protein quality.

While it is true that carbon emissions are worse for grain fed animals (most of the red meat you see) it doesn't have to be this way. "Regenerative agriculture" claims to you raise carbon neutral (or negative) beef farms by restoring the native plant life and replenishing the soil. This won't feed the entire earth, but I try to support grass fed farms and obtain most of my red meat from them. Chriss Kresser offers some interesting points on this topic.

....but he can’t read forest plots sooo...

Oxford and CSIRO already proved grass fed cattle emit more greenhouse gases then CAFO grain fed, and that's after taking into account sequestration

Thanks for this I'm reading about it now.

Imagine taking advice from Chriss Kresser unironically.

Can you elaborate? I'm genuinely interested. I admit only a shallow investigation into this topic and its certainly not my wheelhouse.

> If I choose to have children, I will have 2 or less.

This is the only thing that actually matters. Everything else you’ve listed is a rounding error compared to this.

Although I’m curious how you came up with two as your threshold.

It's a copypasta. OP didn't make up the number 2 but I'm guessing it comes down to 2 being a tolerable number to most people.

I mean, it's literally the replacement population. 2 parents die, 2 children remain.

Technically you need a little more than 2 because people die without having children occasionally.

Two is slightly below replacement rate so will result in a steadily decreasing population which would solve many environmental issues but itself.

The delay on population decisions is huge. We need action before the impact of any population decrease is felt. In any case, the population of the Western World is stable or decreasing and the places where population is increasing couldn't care less about personal responsibility for decreasing climate change.

>the places where population is increasing couldn't care less about personal responsibility for decreasing climate change.

I wouldn't say this is necessarily true, it's more that they have other things to care about. We can't criticise developing nations for enjoying the same luxuries we did a hundred years ago. It should be our (first world) job to ensure they get the same benefits from fossil fuels as we did, such as transport freedom and easy access to electricity, but using environmentally friendly technology. Unfortunately, we can't even get ourselves away from fossil fuels quick enough, so this is likely not going to happen.

Also, developing countries emit far fewer emissions per capita when you look at consumption-based emissions [0]. This isn't necessarily a problem with the number of people, it's a problem with the type of lifestyle people want and expect. Even if population increase stopped entirely climate change would get far worse if everyone on Earth had a 1st world lifestyle of red meat, SUVs and yearly holidays.

Population increase is obviously a problem but it's an overstated one. If everyone went vegetarian, which is going to have to happen at some point, the planet can sustain 10 billion people [1], which we're only forecasted to hit in 2100, if we even a) make it that far and b) don't see a reversal in population growth, which has been predicted.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/global-inequalities-co2-consumpti... [1] https://www.livescience.com/16493-people-planet-earth-suppor...

I wouldn't say this is necessarily true, it's more that they have other things to care about. We can't criticise developing nations for enjoying the same luxuries we did a hundred years ago.

Well, no.

The only means of survival for the human species going into the 20-40 seems to be coming up with energy-efficient ways for everyone to enjoy a decent standard of living.

Yeah, emphasizing population is ineffective and kind of misanthropic. The thing is, the large population of the third world certainly reach the point of consuming to first world standards and first-world inefficiencies. Then we'd be more even more doomed than now.

I respect your creed, but I'm not religious so I don't think I'll adopt it.

How does one prevent themselves from being consumed by existentialist thoughts caused by climate news?

I really have had a lot of trouble concentrating lately because things just don’t feel important to me anymore...

Get comfortable with the fact that you will die.

I'm a temporarily-embarrassed survivor of catastrophic climate change.

Stop paying attention to the hysteria. It's great for views and clicks. It's terrible for viewers and clickers.

"We have been told that climate change is an ‘existential crisis.’ However, based upon our current assessment of the science, the climate threat is not an existential one, even in its most alarming hypothetical incarnations."

https://judithcurry.com/2019/12/14/the-toxic-rhetoric-of-cli...

For context: Between 2014 and February 2019, Curry testified before at least six Republican-led House committees, expressing the idea that the dangers of global warming are overstated and difficult to predict. These testimonies include statements criticizing President Obama’s climate plan, the UN climate action plan, and other policy proposals aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

> expressing the idea that the dangers of global warming are overstated and difficult to predict

She actually expressed the idea that the effects of global warming are difficult to predict? What is she, some kind of denier? Why hasn't she been canceled yet?

I'm not sure, but I would love to hear any answer you have.

Then again, action is the antidote to despair, (Joan Baez) - do something in your own life to help fight it or ameliorate the effects. This isn't some "you can fix it!" post - you, personally, can't. But doing something to get yourself ready, be it moving to a stable democracy on high ground at a high latitude with adequate defense, or learning to be self-sufficient in the event of supply chains collapsing, or becoming friends with your neighbours so that in the event of serious problems (empty shelves, taps running dry, etc.) you have a network of friends and not just a neighbourhood of competitors.

Or just wax philosophical and enjoy the life you've got. In the end, we're all mortal.

people felt this way about overpopulation in the 70s for what it's worth

Overpopulation is pretty far from being solved. Climate change is a symptom of too many people consuming too many resources.

i am only trying to contextualize op's media-induced mental illness. also, climate change is a symptom of carbon release, a subset of byproducts of specific kinds resource consumption. it seems the meme may have captured you too.

Realize how precious life is. It is short. I, for one, enjoy every morning for what I can do only at morning. A nice spot of maple syrup dissolved in a hot coffee or tea, for instance. I can really only drink one or two such drinks per day and only at the morning without experiencing affects I don’t want later on in the day. That in a sense gives me both something to look forward to and to mark as a way I enjoyed my existence.

To expand on this a little - my morning hot beverage is something complex enough to be worth reflecting on and savoring but finite. In a way it’s fleeting nature is not unlike our own but in miniature. My life will surely end just as surely as it started. But maybe if I learn how to properly appreciate a good morning beverage for the fleeting experience that it is I’ll have a chance at developing some of the tools needed to appreciate a finite life. Edit-or even just identifying them.

Actually look at the data. Climate change will cause significant harm, but even in the worst plausible scenarios it's not anywhere close to the end of humanity or of technological civilization. If you're in the first world, you'll almost certainly be fine.

I've felt this too. My best strategy is to do something productive with that natural stress and worry. Go to climate rallies. Move to banks that don't invest in fossil fuels. If you have retirement savings, make sure they are not used for fossil fuel investment (in Australia we have ethical super funds that commit to this). Call up you government representatives and make sure they know you are worried about the future and want them to act. Vote and donate to political candidates that support reducing emissions to zero at least by 2050. Get your friends and family to do the same. The biggest impact we can have is economic and political, and if we work together we can change a great deal!

From this moment despair ends and tactics begin.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/apr/26/london-...

The antidote to despair is action.

"Activism is the last stage of grief"

Tech skills are high in demand; if the majority of techies only worked for companies that are actively trying to mitigate their climate impact and help their employees, customers and suppliers do the same, I believe the impact could be considerable. If 50 other professions did the same, imagine the impact.

Climate is a global issue requiring global solutions. So we won't solve it because we're just not capable of globalism as a species. So all anyone can do is protect their investments.

What kind of investments should you make in a declining world?

Water filters and ammunition? Recreational substances will always sell too I imagine.

One ideally longs things where demand will likely increase and short things where it will decrease.

Long Wind/Solar and everything around it for instance, short petrochemical companies

Obviously that’s public so it’s priced in so I wouldn’t expect major YoY returns. But You know, slightly beat the market returns probably.

> short petrochemical companies

Is it that obvious? The harsher the world gets, the more oil we'll need to survive. I'm not sure we'll refrain from using this energy if it can provide short term relief.

Collectively we'll likely extract all that's available, but profit margins would naturally decrease as the more available deposits are used up. A lot of O&G companies will have existing infrastructure that will be depreciating over time, so they'll likely get very competitive over the dwindling supply of deposits. The industry will likely look quite active even after individual players are no longer particularly profitable.

How do you long rewnewables in a post fossil fuel world? Are there computers with records of ownership? If there are, do people care?

I would rather invest in something that tries to prevent the decline. Renewable energy for example.

To be clear, an investment is something that produces a return. Doing green tech at a lose isn't investing, it's just spending.

A return doesn't have to be economic. I'd rather lose money and not die than make trillions and drown. (Obviously hyperbolic example, but my point is that the number in my bank account isn't the only thing to invest in)

I think a well-designed carbon tax would be useful for converting environmental returns into economic returns.

But you can't actually get that outcome. You'll lose money AND people will drown. That's the point here. You can decide to lose money or not, but you can't dictate the climate. Sorry to be the arsehole here, but everyone seems to be fooling themselves and we need to stop in order to make a real plan.

I think GP meant they'd accept a lower return if it has other beneficial outcomes, as green energy does.

Its an investment in the planet. One day people will learn that you can't eat money.

There are always opportunities. Right now flood defense construction companies look like a good 30 year bet don't they? The world may be declining but you will be rewarded or punished based on how your portfolio does, not the global average.

Arable land at high latitudes, perhaps bullets and bullion?

Unfortunately you may be right. I could forgo flight, eke out a sustainable but subsistence living and do the right thing for the planet, while others are flying their asses off and stock piling their treasure.

But then when the shit hits the fan, they will be the ones with the money to protect their families, not me.

A sad indictment of us as a species.

flying their asses off and stock piling their treasure.

Don’t forget data centres https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/10/asia/china-data-center-ca... and that doesn’t even include the end user devices

Every dev who uses some crappy framework instead of writing efficient compiled bare metal code is complicit

People don't realise that the moral high ground will flood at the same rate as everyone elses property when the sea rises.

It's partly human nature, it's partly game theory. In this case, it pays to defect if you can't be caught.

Do it anyway.

- treasure stockpiling guy

> So we won't solve it because we're just not capable of globalism as a species.

Not with that attitude.

By what means have you charted the boundaries of our species' capabilities?

Nice cop out.

Humanity as a whole is copping out, that includes me and you too bro! I'm just honest about it

Nah bro. I did my graduate studies and work in the field of environmental policy. You are speaking for yourself when you say humanity is incapable because that requires individual change. Oddly, that’s exactly what climate deniers sound like when they argue against action: collective change always includes individuals to go along for the ride. So what are you scared of?

Im scared that despite 50 years of individual action failing to make any difference, people still think the answer is individual action. I'm scared that the environmental movement is still wasting time persuing a strategy that has not worked and won't work instead of one that might. I'm scared you have a degree in this a d don't see the cold hard facts.

This is why a serious step of fighting climate crisis is the creation of monetary finance framework that can shift existing capital as well as allocate new capital in a distributed and scalable way. A National and International Central Climate Bank that is a mix of existing finance, with new climate constraints and community management organization.

This kind of framework definition has happened multiple times in our economic history.

Edit: some private capital is starting to move to address climate crisis too. e.g. Blackrock. We'll see if this is just greenwashing or not. I don't think Blackrock really needs the publicity of it one way or other.

https://www.marketplace.org/2020/01/14/blackrocks-new-invest...

https://www.marketplace.org/shows/corner-office-from-marketp...

https://www.blackrock.com/us/individual/investment-ideas/sus...

It could be solved (or helped at least) by a number of capitalism-compatible solutions, such as disrupting fossil fuels with technologies that can produce energy much more cheaply. Once it becomes a no brainer to use solar/wind instead of coal, to the point where you might as well shut the coal plant down (much like you'd shut the CRT TV factory down, or valve radio) then no amount of lobbying will make a difference. Coal usage will drop.

A carbon price would be great though, but doesn't sound like we'd work that out. With a carbon price, a lot more investment could go in to sequestration tech looking for the payout of being the people that remove the most carbon.

> So we won't solve it because we're just not capable of globalism as a species

We already have globalism and globalism is what cause climate change. Economic globalism is why we are where we are. How do you think oil, coal, natural gas, etc from one side of the world gets to the other side of the world? How do you think saudi oil gets to the US or australian coal gets to china or russian gas gets to germany? How do you think mexican avovados gets to france and norwegian salmon gets to japan or argentinian beef gets to canada all the while spewing toxic fumes into the atmosphere? Globalism. How can globalism be the solution when globalism is the cause of the problem.

It's like fuel causing your house fire, so you want to throw more fuel on the fire.

Avocado politics will become the norm in North America and Europe.

https://www.berggruen.org/the-worldpost/articles/beware-the-...

Yawn...

I'm frankly tired of the assumption that anything right of Obama is driven by nefarious motives such as "antagonistic to African development".

I agree. It is similar to the trope that if you want reduced immigration into a developed country where you live you are inherently racist. It shuts down productive conversations on said issues.

That said, Nils Gilman raises some substantive issues surrounding possible future policy discussions.

pdf report http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Risk_Report_2020.pdf

Does this mean I can leave my day job and start working on carbon capture technology now?

If you can find someone to pay for you to work on it.

So, basically just need to find someone with a lot of extra money and convince them of an impending crisis. Sounds easy.

> He pointed to the rapid disappearance of insect species around the world, including those that pollinate 75% of the world's crops, as a result of climate change and other pressures.

We're barely starting to understand bee colony collapse, and that's probably one of the more pressing and therefore better explored issues to date. I think it's a little unscientific to see literally every change in ecological and weather patterns blamed automatically on climate change. It's really turning into a social and institutional catch all. Insects in particular - I find it far easier to believe that the consistent global drop in insect populations has far more to do with deforestation and chemical disbursement rather than fractions of degrees of warming that we've seen so far.

Weather patterns are constantly changing even in the absence of climate forcing. Defaulting to unusual event->climate change is statistically invalid in the same way as cold snap->no climate change. More evidence that the academic institution is increasingly broken and driven by dogma.

I agree that "Climate Change" != "Environment Concern", i.e. there are many, many other environmental impacts that we make in addition, over and above specific subset of climate change.

I notice that some articles summarize the study as "Climate threads now dominate", others as "Environmental risks now dominate", and in my mind the two are not at all the same (to me, Climate Change is a proper subset of Environmental Risks).

The original link seems to talk about "Environmental Threats" as a summation of individual concerns such as Climate Action Failure, Biodiversity Loss, Water Crises, etc. I'm OK with that summation myself.

I also agree that it's clearly possible to misattribute an environmental concern to climate change, but at the same time, it's probably reasonable to seriously investigate climate change as a cause in any significant environmental concern that does not otherwise have a clear and sufficient explanation.

It feels a bit like nutrition and health. Of course there are plenty of health problems have little or nothing to do with nutrition, but if you know that you have poor nutrition it's a reasonable cause to investigate whenever you have a non-obvious health problem.

==I find it far easier to believe that the consistent global drop in insect populations has far more to do with deforestation and chemical disbursement rather than fractions of degrees of warming that we've seen so far.==

They did add "large-scale biodiversity losses" as part of the climate change threat. Either way, what are your personal qualifications on the subject? It shouldn't be about what's "easiest to believe", but what the data shows us. Here's some data that just came out [1]: 2019 was the second-hottest year on record, continuing a global warming trend, researchers say.

"Six of the warmest years on record occurred during the past decade"

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/15/2019-was-the-second-hottest-...

What are your personal qualifications on the subject?

I parrot the parent post's question and nobody likes it.

If you think GW is a man made disaster, then you need no qualifications.

If you don't, there aren't enough qualifications on earth for your opinion to matter.

The people quoted in the article are named and have their titles presented. We are able to research their history and expertise if we desire. An anonymous poster on the internet has neither name or qualifications. When the anonymous poster posts "they find it far easier to believe" a theory counter to an article, knowing their qualifications helps level the playing field.

If you had to choose between investing advice from a named financial expert or from me, an anonymous internet poster, you would be wise to either go with the named expert (who you could research their qualifications) or ask me for information on my expertise.

We must have read different articles.

This article has no climate scientist mentioned.

These are business people who are talking more about legislative risk and consumer trends than loss from GW related events.

> "Six of the warmest years on record occurred during the past decade"

This data is completely relative. In the midwest, the last several years have been some of the coldest on record. So while the West Coast had some of the driest and warmest weather, the midwest has seen some of the coldest:

The climate statistics are in from the National Weather Service and winter 2013-2014 will go down as one of the coldest on record in both Missouri and Illinois.

State wide temperature data showed Missouri finished the December 2013 to February 2014 period 4.6°F below normal, which is the tenth coldest on record, and coldest since 1979. Illinois saw its 9th coldest winter on record, also the coldest since 1979, with an average winter temperature 6.3° below normal. Climate records date back to 1895.

https://www.ksdk.com/article/weather/2013-14-winter-ranks-in...

> This data is completely relative.

No, it's not. These are global temperatures. 2019 was the second-hottest year on record, looked at globally.

Furthermore, locally larger weather shifts (and even unseasonably cold areas) are completely consistent with, in fact expected, for increased global temperatures. That energy has to go somewhere.

Australia had the hottest year on record in 2019 as well as breaking the hottest day on record multiple times in the same week

And it was only not the hottest because of a neutral ENSO. ENSO (the El Nino - La Nina cycle) puts a wobble on the trend. A strong El Nino year will bust the current 2016 record.

The UK Met easily predicted this year's temps to be second-highest.

This is a fallacy. "It's cold where I am" is not disproof of climate change. You can have locally-cold temperatures while global-average temperatures continue to rise.

In fact, "extreme weather patterns" are predicted by climate change scientists. Some areas will get really cold while other areas get really hot. Temperatures fluctuating wildly should be cause for concern.

> This is a fallacy. "It's cold where I am" is not disproof of climate change.

Agreed! It’s just unfortunate people just as often use “it’s hot where I am” to prove climate change. But they get a pass because they’re on the correct side.

>people

Which "people"? This is a strawman.

>they get a pass because they’re on the correct side.

You know what, if you read an Addition Table, and memorize that 2+2=4, but you don't know how to reason it out from the base principals, field and ring theory, geometry, etc? Sure you get a pass. The experts have done the math many times, and you can trust them.

If you want to tell me 2+2=5 because you found an table from an Addition Denier online? Then yeah, you're going to be ridiculed.

Not exactly "relative". The statement that 2019 was the second-hottest on record refers to global temperatures. The midwest being colder is completely worthless as a counterargument. It's like pointing out that I'm shorter than my father in response to the claim that my generation was taller than the previous generation. Sure, my statement is true, and it's superficially about the same thing. It's worthless as an actual rebuttal, though.

Though "earth's temperature" is indeed a spoken term that hides lots of complexity, let me assure you that under no scientific discussion it is understood to be "the midwest temperature".

(hopefully this will not shock my American friends)

That's not relative, that's local and non-linear. Do pay attention.

Sure 2019 was hot. But isn’t the parent questioning whether this causes a loss in biodiversity?

Phytoplankton populations are collapsing due to increased ocean acidity and warming.

Phytoplankton is the basis for the entire marine food chain.

and a lot of the air we breathe

Not to mention a potentially significant amount of the free oxygen on Earth

And here I thought Total Recall was my favorite movie.

> Phytoplankton populations are collapsing due to increased ocean acidity and warming.

Do you have a citation for this ?

it's old news by now, matey...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/phytoplankton-pop...

https://edition.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/08/14/satellite.plan...

https://news.mit.edu/2015/ocean-acidification-phytoplankton-...

https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/What+is+Ocean+Acidificat...

https://www.sciencebuzz.com/the-effects-of-ph-on-the-abundan...

Why would the onus be on a commentator to provide citations for a fact one could readily <branded search engine verb> for in less time than our roundtrip efforts combined?

(me not being the commentator either, to boot!) it almost sounds like you can't believe peanut butter is sticky...

I mean, I suppose "calfiferous plankton" is kinda a giveaway that ocean acidification would affect it...

> Why would the onus be on a commentator to provide citations for a fact one could readily <branded search engine verb> for in less time than our roundtrip efforts combined?

Because a simple search results in it not being "old news", but actually having conflicting results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytoplankton#Environmental_co...

> actually having conflicting results:

"Conflicting" only if you want to ignore a significant part of the text behind the very link you give:

"A more recent multi-model study estimated that primary production would decline by 2-20% by 2100 A.D.[12] Despite substantial variation in both the magnitude and spatial pattern of change, the majority of published studies predict that phytoplankton biomass and/or primary production will decline over the next century.[11][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47]"

(Note the majority and how many of them are cited (all the numbers in brackets) and could be checked. It's surely not "one says yes, one says no".)

The ocean is not acid, it's alkaline (about pH 8.1) so you mean lessened alkalinity. Even seawater near active volcanic CO2 vents in the Mediterranean where the CO2 is nearly 6,000 ppm is still alkaline. Between 1751 and 1996, surface ocean pH is estimated to have decreased from approximately 8.25 to 8.14.

> The ocean is not acid, it's alkaline

> increased ocean acidity

It's generally phrased that a decrease in alkaline is due to acidification (an increase in acid) and vice versa. The average ph is not specifically relevant.

Since pH is a log scale, that is a huge change - almost 40%.

Confirmation bias muddies the discussion around what the changing weather patterns are actually doing immensely.

The reason science is an improvement over previous types of thought is that it is both explanative and predictive.

Denying that climate change exists at all is what muddies the conversation. All serious scientists in this field believe in climate change, and only debate about which models are most predictive and accurate.

Isn't the real debate about the cause of climate change, and hence the best addressed aspects? I would hope all true scientists can agree on what they see but still debate there underlying phenomena and this the predictive models

The scientific "debate" about the cause of climate change (not to be confused with insects population drop, which is a much more involved issue) at this point is similar in spirit to the "debate" about natural selection or the health impact of smoking.

In other words, there is no debate at all. We (the human race) have known about the GHG mechanism for over 50 years. We've had the instruments to validate our understanding for well over 20 years now.

There is some disagreement between projections, the models definitely don't converge to the same point in 20-100 years, but they just don't agree on the breadth and depth of the catastrophe or the timeframe we have left to take action.

There is also disagreement wrt proposed solutions. Some things (like mass afforestation) are really too complex for us to predict the impact.

We've known about GHG effect for over a century now.

https://www.livescience.com/63334-coal-affecting-climate-cen...

Sure. But if you spent some time in "climate debates" (which I do not recommend btw), you'd develop the habit of staying well within a safety margin of 30% for any stated fact (the US, a country of over 100mm people...)

I'd rather have unanswerable questions then unquestionable answers; Climate science has become far too unquestionable.

There is always room for debate, especially in the face of consensus. Without it astronomers burn and science dies.

Fine. Debate it. Debate creation science while you're at it. However, it's time to figure out ways to mitigate the problem. We have a working hypothesis that has enough evidence on which to act.

There's room for debate, but that doesn't mean there's any actual debate going on. I.e. scientists are free to publish papers showing evidence that climate change isn't happening or not caused by human activity.

Where there isn't room for debate is the claim that there's actually an ongoing debate within the scientific community about the basics of climate change. That's just not true at the moment, and claiming otherwise is mistaken at best, and corporate propaganda at worst.

“The shape of the earth has become far too unquestionable. There is always room for debate as to whether the earth is flat.”

There is actually room for that. Beginners philosophy classes..

And it is a interesting philosophic question. How do we know, what we etc.

Yet such debates don't come up every single time we mention orbiting around the earth.

Funny thing that.

> Climate science has become far too unquestionable.

Seems to me climate science is constantly being questioned.

It’s questioned publicly by roughly half of the most powerful politicians of the most powerful country in the world, and t try uat country’s current leader. It was and still is questioned publicly by many of the most powerful companies in the world.

Can you be more specific? Are there particular questions or areas of research within the broad domain of climate science that you believe have been surpressed or ignored by the scientific community?

Most of my questions I have revolve around the solutions being put forth. In particular, how do we separate the wheat from the chaff in policy? I don't want the solution to the draught to be taking away cups of water in restaurants. Policy is where the controversy lies. Policy is where the difficult questions are.

It doesn't help that the text of things like the green new deal speaks so much about "ending oppression" and not about "this is exactly what's necessary to reach carbon stability". It takes what should otherwise be a scientific discussion and drags it into the mud of progressive politics.

Here's an example to what I'm talking about[1]:

> "It aims to “promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities and youth.”"

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/climate/green-new-deal.ht...

We have run out of room for debate in bad faith. It is unfortunate that debate in bad faith has been used to push political agendas. This is the source of the unquestionable answers I see; two much questioning of answers everyone knows is correct, including the people asking the questions for selfish gain. Thankfully the debate can still happen in the meaningful forums, such as the scientific community always looking at new studies and analysis. Just not in the political arena or media, where I haven't actually seen anything resembling an actual debate in a long time but just people arguing at cross purposes.

Leave the debate about science to scientists then.

The Galileo Gambit in the wild!

Stop with the bad-faith distractions.

the real debate is where the turning point is in cost Vs opportunity in battling climate change, it would be unwise to dump trillions now only for a couple large countries to judge the risk differently and use the added margin to boost their economy, especially in the current recession that's still looming around Europe, it would cost the continent it's last manufacturing jobs and then that's it, it would have to be shaken up from it's foundation to battle wto and protect its internal market from external pressure and internal fragmentation to have a chance to avoid collapsing into itself

>> He pointed to the rapid disappearance of insect species around the world

> ...

> More evidence that the academic institution is increasingly broken and driven by dogma.

To be fair, "he" in your quote is Peter Giger, chief risk officer for the Zurich Insurance Group, not a scientist. Second, he did say "climate change and other pressures".

My guess is that very few "global leaders" are scientists, so based on the headline alone I'm not sure why this survey matters.

It matters if said "global leaders" happen to manage loads of cash.

When Blackrock's CEO states his firm will divest away from fossil fuels in 2020, this has (sadly imo) roughly the impact of e^9 climate scientists ringing alarm bells for a decade.

Saying that Blackrock's getting out of coal, or that it will take a position of $1T in sustainable energy is just saying that they will invest profitably.

At this point it's cheaper to build new sustainable energy plants (and sadly natural gas) than to maintain running coal plants.

“...is just saying they will invest profitably”...

Couldn’t be more false. Existing coal companies can easily make money for investors when they trade at earnings yields of 25%. no new coal plants need to be built. Coal can even be phased out. If you get 6-7 more years of earnings at a flattish 25% earnings yield you can do very well. This is why deep value investing works on average.

As a layman: Governments all over are phasing out and closing coal plants in favor of newly built sustainable energy plants. That means sustainable energy companies will be on the rise while coal will be on the decline.

Which makes intuitive sense but doesn't take into consideration the price you pay for the investment, which is the primary factor in determining your returns.

The Blackrock letter did not state that they are divesting from fossil fuels in 2020. It stated that they are planning to remove companies that generate more than 25% of their revenue from thermal coal production (i.e., thermal coal producers that are not diversified, meaning the large diversified thermal coal producers are not affected) from their discretionary active investment portfolios, which only accounts for a minority of their assets. Note that thermal coal is already declining in the US and other markets due to increased competition primarily from natural gas, a fossil fuel which, like oil, the letter says nothing about.

https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/investor-relations/black...

In all fairness, if he's doing so because of the climate scientists' bell ringing then you could argue that it's their impact that's being seen.

Even if they were, and/or are surrounded by advisors with science credentials, the overwhelming political pressure coming from corporate lobbyists will likely mean science will be ignored.

Because leaders tend to actually influence policy.

> My guess is that very few "global leaders" are scientists

Often more than you'd think. Merkel is a Physicist (where Thatcher was a Chemist), Ursula von der Leyen is a licensed doctor (which almost counts?), and Abe Shinzō has a political science degree (which probably doesn't count :-D). That's 2.5 members of the G8ish.

All have been out of academia for long enough that calling them "scientists" is a stretch

By that definition, not a single politician is a scientist because they all works in politics, not in academia.

No: GP said "out of academia long enough." Recent newcomers to politics with extensive backgrounds in professional science (for some definition of "recent" and "extensive") could still count.

The question is, were they any good in their original profession, and why did they move away from it and go to politics?

I think the point of their comment is that they had exposure to Science, which is almost as important as being a good scientist, because it alters how you think.

I disagree that plain "exposure" is worth anything. Let me bring up a sort of unrelated example. Whenever I meet someone that claims they have "some" experience with people with disabilities, it turns out they are worse then those people that dont claim that.

"Some experience with people with disabilities" implies a far lower level of commitment and immersion than the "exposure to science" that's being discussed in this thread.

If a politician claims they have a scientific background, but it turns out all they did was take gen bio in first year and follow a dozen popular scientists on Twitter, they'd be derided.

I don't know the specifics of the people in the article, but examples like Cédric Villani demonstrate that it's not OK to be rash in one's judgment.

For the same reason that very few "global leaders" trained in the military, but it still matters if they decide to declare war?

> the consistent global drop in insect populations has far more to do with deforestation and chemical disbursement

That is climate change as a result of human behavior, is it not?

Sure you could choose to define the terms that way, but I think it would cause confusion given the wide understanding that climate change refers specifically to the phenomenon formerly known as global warming.

Pesticides and climate change? Not really. Not shipping bees across the country to pollinate crops and reducing the use of round-up are things that can be done to deal with that right now.

Colony collapse is a big problem, but I don't think you can blame it on climate change. Insects are super adaptable, and it's much more likely an overuse in pesticides and other pollutants. If you stop using them and stop trucking bees across the nation, you reduce CO2 incidentally, but that shouldn't be the main focus at all.

I feel like climate change turns into "When all you have is a hammer, all you see are nails." There is a shit ton of plastic particulates in the ocean. That's not due to climate change. There are lakes of sludge in factory cities all over China. That's not due to climate change. Both of those are due to pure consumption; shipping and waste.

If you reduce other real forms of pollution, by consuming less, you incidentally reduce CO2. You focus on CO2 and the world is still going to rip itself apart as we replace CO2 for other pollution.

That’s fair; I concede climate change is more about whether patterns. I was trying to extend the concept to all environment-related concerns caused by human activity.

It really, truly, doesn’t matter whether it’s a little human carbon emissions driven and a little human noncarbon emissions activity like over use of pesticides. The two interact and act at different scales. Climate change from carbon and other gases has been accurately predicted to affect the weather trends to this point. The error bars on the future all indicate masses of the earth going under the rising ocean level. That’s locked in regardless of what we do. Imagine what’s locked in if we continue to do nothing. No amount of pesticide is going to lessen or worsen the realization of billions dead.

> If you reduce other real forms of pollution, by consuming less, you incidentally reduce CO2.

> You focus on CO2 and the world is still going to rip itself apart as we replace CO2 for other pollution.

If we try to reduce CO2 solely via reduced consumption we'll have a massive and painful collapse in standard of living, which would likely result in widespread conflict and turmoil, undermining efforts to control pollution altogether. That is an approach that will rip up the world. And it's totally unnecessary, given the scale of potential renewable resources available and the huge opportunities for greater efficiency that maintain and in many cases improve our standard of living.

Increasing solar, wind, and tightly managed nuclear doesn't replace CO2 with other pollution.

Decarbonizing electricity generation and electrifying transportation are strictly less polluting than any previous approach we've taken to energy and transportation since the industrial age.

Also, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. China is already pivoting to take its local pollution problem more seriously for the sake of its own population's health, much as Europe and the US started to do a few decades ago (therefore catalytic converters). CO2 reduction in the energy supply also reduces local particulate pollution.

>a massive and painful collapse in standard of living

If it's a single-minded focus that fails to look at the issue holistically, I agree. As in, if the approach is simply 'everything that produces CO2 is now verboten', that will likely bring us to the result you describe.

But I'm not convinced that's the only feasible approach - As you allude to there are many alternative viewpoints on how our existing political, economic and social norms might be modified to reduce consumption and waste, without throwing out the baby with the bath water. But, they require shifts away from the current track and that’s not likely until the crisis intensifies. By which time, it may be too late to make meaningful change with the benefit of stability.

But therein lies the crux of the challenge - with a 30-year lag between emissions and effects, How do you secure the buy-in for meaningful wide-reaching change ahead of those impacts being felt?

I don't think most people associate the consider the shape of the landscape and pollutant counts in air and water to be "climate". Climate usually refers to trends in temperatures, rainfall, cloud cover, humidity, pressure, etc.

From wikipedia,

> Climate is the long-term average of weather

I mean, deforestation can impact regional climates at least. Forests can slow down winds, raise the humidity, make summers cooler and winters warmer.

But yes, generally when people say "climate change" they're talking about the global climate, not regional climates.

Look at the recent fires in Australia. Can you directly attribute the cause to climate change? Probably not. Should the government be held morally reprehensible based on their support for coal power? Yes, absolutely. They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. Politics has a lower threshold of proof than science.

Can you directly attribute the cause to climate change? Probably not.

This is actually a much easier argument to make than the political argument.

Even the Prime Minister "has always made the connection between climate change and extreme weather conditions"[1] Obviously they haven't always made that connection, but it is indicative that the PM's argument is now "yes it's climate change but we shouldn't do anything about it".

The argument is easier because in Australia it's pretty obvious that the last few summers have been hotter and dryer than usual (except in Queensland), and the record is clear that pattern has been happening for some years. Hotter and drier weather leads to bush that is drier and more flammable, and no one has even attempted to argue otherwise.

The politics are harder in Australia because of the combination of the powerful coal lobby and a large part of the press trying to portray climate change as "a leftist conspiracy". This combination has led to the election loss of the Labor party in 2013, and Malcolm Turnbull losing the Prime Ministership in 2018.

[1] https://twitter.com/albericie/status/1213624003992141825

Are the downvotes because people don't think the PM has acknowledged it or because they think the "it's happening" argument is still going on?

> I find it far easier to believe that the consistent global drop in insect populations has far more to do with deforestation and chemical disbursement rather than fractions of degrees of warming that we've seen so far.

It’s not that easy. The intersection of climate and other environmental issues creates a kind of feedback loop.

> Defaulting to unusual event->climate change is statistically invalid in the same way as cold snap->no climate change.

That's technically true, but irrelevant. We already have mountains of evidence for man-made climate change, we don't really need more.

Of course, whether a particular event is linked to climate change is a different question, but even when it's invalid, it's not invalid in the same way as "cold snap->no climate change". The latter is already disproved by mountains of evidence; the former isn't.

> > Defaulting to unusual event->climate change is statistically invalid in the same way as cold snap->no climate change.

> That's technically true, but irrelevant.

I think it's very relevant. If you keep blaming all catastrophies on climate change by default, then as other causes are found one by one, you are discrediting the good name of climate change. This may lead normal non scientist people to become more sceptical of the concept of climate change.

Furthermore, it causes scientists to be scared to point out those alternative reasons. In the worst case, this puts people who fight against climate change into the situation that they have to defend things they know are wrong in order to not tarnish their name.

Climate change is a major problem and the more we fight it at this early point, the lower the toll it takes. Just don't blame everything on it. Otherwise in the long term, you are playing into the hands of the deniers.

I wish people put as much energy into shutting down eco-deniers as they do policing other eco-advocates.

> I wish people put as much energy into shutting down eco-deniers as they do policing other eco-advocates.

Everyone is an eco advocate today. If you check out the bp home page you find pictures of solar deployments on green meadows. If you check out shell's website you see a statement by the CEO how climate activists "give me hope". Should bp and shell be policed? Absolutely.

As for the "traditional" eco advocates, many of them are often the first to protest when you want to build a dam or a wind turbine, explaining how precious the nature is that you are destroying. This is actively harmful to the goal of stopping climate change. The more protests, the more requirements that the activists push through, the larger the cost of the project, and the longer it takes. Increased prices of the renewable energy you are providing ultimately slows down the expansion of renewable energy generation due to market effects as well as population.

The risk of climate change is far greater than the risks of fairly small ecosystem disruption to fight it. Many eco advocates don't want to realize this and believe that everyone should live like a monk and go vegan or something. They are completely removed from reality. In itself, it's good for the climate to have more vegan people, but when those advocates protest construction projects to provide green energy for the people who do not want to live like monks, they should step aside instead of standing in the way.

Everyone is NOT an eco advocate. Just look at nearly every politician in the current US administration linked to the environment (especially the EPA).

Of course I don't mean it in the sense that they actually support the fight against climate change. I rather mean it in the sense that everyone appears to protect the environment ("I'm Brian and so is my wife"). Even trump always talks about this "clean air" and "crystal clear water" in his speeches even though his actions are the opposite.

I totally agree. And I think this is already happening left and right. It sort of reminds of the boy who cried wolf.

> Defaulting to unusual event->climate change [is] evidence that the academic institution is increasingly broken and driven by dogma.

That quote was from "Peter Giger, chief risk officer for the Zurich Insurance Group", not part of the "academic institution" in any way I can see.

It's also pretty cherry picked, as there is a ton of other evidence presented in that short article that you're choosing to ignore while you pick on bees.

So... tell me, what is your threshold for action? If bees, wild fires, worsening storms/floods/droughts, CO2 charts, temperature measurements, sea ice levels, etc.. don't meet your criteria for proof because they aren't certain enough, what possibly could be?

Broadly: how certain are you that your opinions are really well considered and not driven by "dogma"?

You might find it easier to believe, but that doesn't make it so. Ecosystems are interconnected. A degree of warming might not do much to a loan insect in a cage, but a degree can contribute a lot to the spread and range of bacterial and fungal pathogens of insects. It can change how plants behave (they can't get up and move, so have to respond physiologically to survive in the same location), and that change impacts insects. Competitors for the same resources may respond better to temperature rise or other climate related changes. Climate change also changes farmers' behaviour - more pests due to warmer conditions can mean more sprays, which have unintended consequences.

we've seen about 1.5 degrees fahrenheit of warming so far.

Is that true? I thought we were still below a degree, but had just reached the point where 1.5 was inevitable later due to delayed effects. That was depressing when I figured out that even if the world became carbon-neutral tomorrow we'd still be getting warmer for a while.

We are below 1 degree Celsius. 1.5F is about 0.9C.

It seems that people seriously struggle to understand how significant a single degree change in average temperature is.

We're wired for short-term thinking and this is a good example of it. When someone hears '4 degrees of warming' they think of what 4 degrees change feels like to them in the context of a day. Which is to say, not much. Sounds kinda nice. Same thing with sea level rises. We think of a shoreline we are familiar with, and consider a future for that place where the water level is a few feet higher. Chances are what's being pictured looks like no big deal.

A person would have to make the choice to actively investigate further the marginal effects of such a change, the impact from the rate of change, and points that are less obvious such as global temperature averages incorporating the 70%-of-the-surface heatsink that is the world's oceans. That kind of prompting for further thinking is for sure already happening in classrooms worldwide, and is one of the reasons there's such a stark difference in opinions on the issue as you look across the age brackets.

One way to tackle this might be better messaging, but looking back over the attempts to pivot on that front (global warming -> Climate change) and how much of an easy target that became for criticism, I'm not hopeful.

I wonder if there would be a greater impact on the way people think about climate change if the messaging was more specific to the places in which the audience lived? For sure a big challenge here will be accuracy, even if it's possible to bring the conversation down to that level.

I know I do, and part of the problem is that everyone deals with temperature every day, so it is an uphill battle trying to get across just how dramatic a 1 degree change is. It's one degree (Celsius or 1.8°F) but my house's temperature differs by more than that from room to room, and I don't normally notice that difference. Nor does a 1 degree difference in the weather materially change how hot/cold I feel. I feel freezing cold at -1, 0, or 1°C, even though pure water won't technically freeze until it hits 0°.

Another difficulty because it's an average over time, is there's nothing I can look at to see where we are right now - the average temperature of the world right this second isn't particularly meaningful compared against the 1 degree line that we're measuring against.

When the question of why 1 degree is so significant comes up, we can sidebar to explain just how catastrophic one degree is, but the layperson isn't always up for rigorous scientific discourse. Hell, we renamed "global warming" to be "global climate change" because of the 'joke' that global warming can't be real because it's still cold in winter (and it's still not gone away). I am unconvinced that having to explain why 1 degree is catastrophic is doing us any favors, especially considering that the average temperature rise is usually presented with one or two significant figures.

What then? Short of changing human nature, which we've been trying to do for years, one possibility is to pick a different measurement, or to give additional numbers for effect. In this case, the reason the one degree change is due to how much has to be heated for that single degree change. The entire atmosphere, the water, and surface all have to warm by one degree. How much is that, actually?

Is there a standard "Earth" surface area to get the right order of magnitude for just how much extra energy 1 degree is? How much energy would it take to heat this entire Earth 1 degree? We're talking on the order of zettajoules, at least. In imperial units we're talking gigatons of TNT, or petaBTUs.

For the last point I saw that to heat the oceans as fast as we are it would take a nuclear bomb worth of energy set off every second for the last few decades.

Useful for many people but even this is a bit frustating - 1 fat man or little boy, or 1 tsar bomba?

One thing that helps for me is to consider the bell curve profile, and the fact that a small shift greatly increases the area under the upper tail part of the curve where the extreme weather events live, eg:

https://www.climatecentral.org/gallery/graphics/small-change...

It does require some ability to grasp the concept of these nonlinear effects, so might be an uphill battle, depending on who you are talking to.

A single degree increase is significant because that suggests soon it will be 2, and then 4 and then 8... etc etc

The real worry is when we get to 8 degree increase which based on everywhere we've looked in the world that suffers from a 105+ degree avg temperatures tends to suffer from sparse plant life.

Though with that being said, our assumptions about that being what happens to the whole planet if our summers on average get to be 105f on average is very very very very speculative and actually counter intuitive in the sense that one would assume that with increase temperatures you should assume more water evaporates all over the globe, and therefore more rain should occur.

Nobody has pointed out the just as likely possibility, that perhaps global warming might be a problem that fixes itself. (i.e the amazon and africa is warmer because its closest to the equator therefore it has the most densely populated plant life) That is of course after all the Democrat's real estate ends up under water. ^_^ jk jk

My point basically boils down to this, we obviously don't want to continue this trend for the next 100 years. But you could also make the argument that if we could make the planet hotter by a few a degrees and put a cap on the increase in heat, the rest of the planet should naturally become more amazonian/african habitat. Which I don't see how that is necessarily a bad thing considering that is essentially how nature is designed to balance itself out.

To understand the consequences of global warming to the fullest its worth pointing out that we need to understand how ice ages can occur and dissipate in the first place. In that phenomena we see that there is a natural balance that is occurring where nature has a way to modulate exorbitant CO2 output of animals in relation to the plant life. When trees grow in abundance and there isn't enough animals to breath o2 and produce co2 obviously the planet eventually over thousands of years grows so cold that plantlife gets concentrated to the equator. And then with evolution animals get bigger and more plentiful and therefore starts breathing more of the o2, producing more co2, the point being there has to an inequality where animals per mass consume more O2 molecules as a biological function than a plant consumes CO2. (which kinda makes sense if you think about the whole "circle of life" of cellular biology.)

That is the only way such climate changes could occur when the planet's orbit never changes in distance from the sun.

These climate changes occur reeeeeeally slow and of course that means its in an intricate balance with the slow process of evolution... but still with that being said we assume climate change is going to be a calamity only to us, but that doesn't mean its going to necessarily be something that the earth isn't already very well prepared to resolve on its own after were gone. And if it can save it self, that means we can just make sure we save ourselves by burying fallout esque vaults under ground, or going to Mars.

I think a good example is that average normal body temperature is 98.6 F (37 C) degrees, but if you have a high-grade fever which is around 103 F (39 C) degrees, you're feeling very ill, even though it's just a small raise in temperature.

Those second and third order effects might be easier for you to believe, but until there is evidence pointing to that being the cause, shouldn’t pesticides be pretty suspect?

I didn't state otherwise.

I think this is a major thing that people don't realize is a massive danger. People here point to disappearing fish stocks and massive forest fires, and say it's climate change when Fish farms and over fishing, and forest management have been massive contributors to the issues. You take a solve-able by a local government and make it an issue that really isn't.

Australia's bushfires are definitely climate change related, the only argument anyone can have is whether it's human-caused.

But the climatic trend for the last 2 decades has consistently topping daytime temperature records, and it's been drier and hotter earlier in the bushfire season year over year (a fact which our rural fire service was warning our federal government about in July right when they were both ignored and had their funding cut).

We are having problems because of a climate trend, and the reaction of skeptics in power has been to cut funding to the groups who can do forest management to deal with the year over year reality we now face.

It would be evidence of climate change if Australia was no longer getting hit with droughts that induce wildfire conditions. We've got records of those going back to colonial times and fossil evidence going back thousands of years.

Minor increases in temperature do not cause wildfire conditions. Drought, wind, fuel, and a catalyst (like an arsonist or clumsy person or lightning) are all you need for fires.

Until we start controlling the rain and playing God in the sky, I doubt we're going to be able to prevent Australia from developing dry conditions from time to time.

Definitely. Definitely. And what about the other bushfires they've had that were over twice as large as the ones they are currently having? Like the 74-75 bushfires that were 6 times as big as the current ones? Or the ones in 69-70 that were twice as big? or 68-69 (also twice as big)?

You're talking about one of the most fire prone places in the world that has had massive bushfires documented since 1851.

edit: @mrpopo, can't reply to you. But it looks like the largest set of bush fires ever recorded in Australia (290 million hectares) occured in a year where the temperature was below average for pretty well the entire country. Far below in some parts of the country.

You mean the bushfires which have to date exceeded the total area burned in 74-75 in NSW[1]? Which are noted from that article as having a decidedly different burn characteristic then 74-75 which was mostly grassland, as opposed to the forest fires we currently have, including large areas of rainforest in Queensland which has not previously been dry enough to support a bushfire?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/07/recor...

A significant factor in the 74-75 fires was extra plant growth from unusually heavy rainfall in the two years prior providing extra fuel[1]. Very different circumstances to the current situation.

[1] https://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/6C98BB75496A5AD1C...

You're actually saying that a Eucalypt forest(Kanangra-Boyd_National_Park), trees that are adapted to fire, that actually promote fire with highly combustible leaves(eucalyptus oil), whose seeds only sprout after a fire, has never been dry enough to support a bush fire. I sincerely doubt it.

> including large areas of rainforest in Queensland which has not previously been dry enough to support a bushfire?

He talked about rainforest, not Eucalyptus forest.

Climate change makes extreme weather more likely. Pointing out that extreme weather existed in the past too is not a sufficient counterargument.

On the other hand, automatically labeling everything temperature related as "caused by climate change" is not a proper argument as well.

I mean this is most likely actually related to climate change, but this should be verified/modelled before coming to conclusions. Even when it is absolutely obvious.

Australia is a big place, you should get a little more familiar with it when you want to think about the scope of this fire. It's not the size alone that's unprecedented (because as you point out that's obviously not true), it's the fact that it's so big, so early, and in such a weird spot. Very new for that area. If all of the east coast of the US burned and we shrugged and said, "Eh, California's were bigger in '88" it wouldn't be a meaningful comparison at all.

Quicky edit: All that said, I'm no expert either. I think we're both more or less parroting sources, so feel free to respond with new info :)

I've literally been to every state in Australia. Worked in western aus (Kalgoorlie, up to Port Hedland) then up to Darwin. Spent some time in Perth, and down to Margaret River. Adelaide, Melbourne, all around Sydney and up the gold coast all the way to Cairns. Even went over to Tasmania to visit a friend. I've got really good friends who lived in Katoomba. I know the area. I'm not parroting anything.

Square kilometerage is not on its own a useful measure. There's different terrain types, that have different responses to fire.

It isn’t clear that forest management would prevent bushfires. The consensus amongst the experts and royal commissions seems to be that there is no effective prevention.

There are harm minimisation strategies, but that would largely involve telling people where to live and some major restructuring of small urban centres.

I can conceive of a very expensive prevention strategy, with a real time detection system based on satellite imagery and distributed sensors, and then finding a way to put out early fires with minimum latency, maybe with advanced drones or some other very capable and numerous aerial vehicles. But that would cost billions.

The weather was getting increasingly too dry to conduct controlled-/back-burns and the burns that were set were growing more and more out-of-control. So the burns decreased and the fuel loads increased until a massive fire tore through, making this season far, far worse.

In Paradise before the Camp Fire, there hadn't been rain for 200+ days. You can't put out every fire instantly as was tried in the past because that would build up fuels to devastating wildfire amounts. Many species evolved with fire... heck, my mom's oleanders in her front yard look even healthier than before the fire a year and change ago even though they were burned to blackened crisps.

Much like smoking cigarettes, it's difficult to point to which one caused lung cancer, but surely the sum of enough of them did cause it as much as the hockey-stick CO2 and temperature increases, coral bleaching, insect/bird apocalypse and Arctic sea ice declining to an imminent blue ocean event are caused by the sum total of human activities polluting GHGs into the environment over decades.

Well I don’t think it is one or the other. Fuel reduction is important, but it doesn’t seem sufficient. My understanding is that controlled burning had been done close to the prescribed cap.

(Disclaimer: I don't mean to question that bushfires are related to climate change. I just mean that ideas should be verified no matter how obvious they seem to be.)

>Australia's bushfires are definitely climate change related

Australia's bushfires are most likely related to climate change and this is probably the best hypothesis for their cause. It should be verified by actual scientists before we can say "definietly climate change" with confidence.

It can't be verified by "actual scientists" because if they find otherwise, they'll be expelled from their field. You can't have rigorous scientific inquiry under these circumstances, and the results are predetermined.

I believe we're entering a nasty turbulence zone where too many indicators and reference points are off and now everybody will start shouting whatever conclusion they believe in.

Either you're too confident and won't listen or too anxious and overreact. Well the point is, truth lies in somewhere in the middle as usual.

The doomers will get all the attention though. It’ll skew because the media makes money on gloom and doom, not the truth.

Its great rhetoric, though. And it will take rhetoric to solve the climate change problem.

> it will take rhetoric to solve the climate change problem.

Can’t that backfire? Shouldn’t the cause be built on truth and science not narrative ends over means?

How would you explain the insect collapse found in the Puertorican rain forest which is protected and doesn't have deforestation or or other human activity. That research concluded it must be climate since the number of extremely hot days grew a lot there.

I think it's a little unscientific to see literally every change in ecological and weather patterns blamed automatically on climate change.

Climate change itself is well-established scientifically. It is indeed hard to determine exactly which changes in the earth's ecology are a direct product of climate change. But it is important avoid a jump from this to "well, not such an emergency after all". This is because a wide of ecological and local climate conditions are driven by temperature.

Indeed, the first part of his post was reasonable, it is true that other factors are extremely important or perhaps dominant in some of these cases, loss of habitat and insecticide use for the loss of insects, and for wildfires, suburban settlement into forests leading to suppression of regular burning and a consequent build-up on the fuel load.

But then he takes a totally unjustified leap into using a quote from an insurance executive to draw sweeping conclusions about academic institutions and climate science in general. Very strange.

I mean, not _every_ one of Barry Bonds' home runs were due to steroids, either. Doesn't mean steroids didn't matter.

It's as easy as working on solutions to the climate crisis and removing it as a factor of concern then.

Yes there may be other causes to environmental issues and it would be wise of us to begin to reduce Co2 in the atmosphere so it no longer needs to be a factor in these kind of discussions.

Paul Staments is actually doing something about this.

https://fungi.com/pages/bees

The biggest problem I see when it comes to global warming (and countless other issues) is that there is no one place everybody knows to go to see the list of all the actual promising solutions to these kind of doomsday problems that need our support and financing.

I mean it seems like the biggest agenda right now when it comes to global warming activists is to just get everybody to accept there is a problem and/or exploit the fact that there is a problem to try and gain leverage and control over politics when it hasn't been proven that the public sector is more capable to address this kind of issue than the private sector is.

What I mean to say is how exactly does a carbon tax at the gas pump decentivize us from using gas pumps in the first place, when everything in history suggests that where there is a profit stream there is a benefactor willing to protect it no matter what? In other words, doesn't a carbon tax make the more liberal leaning political parties more dependent on fossil fuels if the taxes produced pay for other unrelated endeavors (e.g. medicare for all, canceling student debt)?

I don't mean to make this about politics because I respect the collected intelligence here enough to know that we can all agree we are the people who actually understand there is an actual tangible problem here, considering we're the lucky few who can actually do the rather straightforward math (co2 has a heavier molecular weight than everything else in the atmosphere therefore it knocks lighter molecules up and away and produces more temperature when the heavier molecules collide with each other more often due to there be more molecules present, i mean this is basic chemistry/physics 101), and know the consequences if we don't do something about it soon....

All I am saying is why aren't we personally doing more to try and solve this issue like it was any other issue?

I mean either we can figure out the solution, or literally the only alternative is we kill all the livestock, tear down all the structures made out of wood (that houses farting termites), and go back to horse back riding. (because as of right now there is nothing to indicate that Tesla can scale to our traveling/energy needs)

Realistically, we need to build a site that is heavily curated so it doesn't get heavily polluted with all the hack scholar noise and lobbyist confusion bullshit, and focus on this problem like the bug it is.

The fact that the ocean cleanup and paul stamets bee solution are both literally something I only luckily managed to stumbled upon because Joe Rogan is for whatever reason the "Bro" form that Christ chose to return this time as, shows that frankly were not doing our jobs. Literally a comedian is doing a better job at solving these kind of problems than we are right now.

Politicians aren't going to do a better job than us figuring out how to solve this issue so we really need to stop depending on them (they aren't smart enough, and none of us are willing to take on the burden of having to kill people in order to ensure a smarter class of politician is elected into office)

If we can do folding@home to simulate protein folding, we can do the same thing to figure out how to fix our carbon output problem.

Just saying. I want a website where I can go to figure out whats going on with paul stamets endeavor, whats going on with that thing Bill Gates was talking about where we use depleted nuclear fuel to make a new kind of reactor, whats going on with the ocean clean up, whats going on with the building sized CO2 suction thing in China, what is going on with fusion, what is going on with solar panel and electric car tech, etc etc.

One site, for everybody...

Were not going to be able to make every American care about this issue. They just aren't smart enough to grok it. And that means Government can't help us because they are bound to serving the will of the dumb idiot people who will never get on board with the reality that we all need to be go back to horses and vegan diets (therefore no politician will ever be able to push such hardcore measures, its a dead end.)

Which that fact alone also suggest we need an engineering solution.

If the solution is that we need to build a million building sized vacuums and a space elevator or pipe made out of carbon nano tubes, then that sounds like something we need to start doing NOW because that will probably take 30 years to build and every single tech corporation to take the first step and say "hell yes im going to put a billion dollars down on this idea".

All it will take is us coming up with an actual real solution and convincing every tech giant to drop a meager billion dollars on the crazy initiative, and then all of a sudden the rest of the world will be like "drkkkk wut r dey doin ober der O.O"????

And then they will be like oh shit this is an actual solution that doesn't require us to stop using fossil fuels. (though we probably should stop using them for the health reasons though hell crisp-r might solve that problem too?!)

Im just saying, we need to figure out either how to get the CO2 into space, into our oceans, or economically split back into C and O2.

Surely most carbon taxes come with rebates?

ok but lots of unusual events is statistically valid given that climate change theories predicts lots of unusual events.

Agree that they are likely not related, but I think it fits in with the overall message that we seriously not to take our natural environment serious.

My understanding is that this is caused primarily by large scale industrial farming. A lot of diverse is destroyed as one creates monocultures and cut down trees, bushes, flowers and other things getting in the way of maximum utilization of a monoculture.

It is our extreme profit driven approach to everything. I think we need a combination of a tech oriented solution and a "back to nature" style approach. More of our farm land should probably be grown in the more labour intensive manner with crop rotation and diverse crops which are more favorable to insects.

Meanwhile to keep output high I think we should do more indoor hydroponics style growing. That takes less land area and so we can afford to leave larger areas producing food in a less intensive manner.

So basically they took a poll. People and their polls smh. It may be true or it may be false, either way it’s an opinion/feeling instead of something actionable and concrete

Surveys are very scientific.

Won't we run out of fossil fuels soon, making this a non issue?

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