I know this is going to get downvoted into oblivion, I just wanted to say it.
Most news cycles are hours or days, not months or years.
I think another good example is nuclear. It may have low deaths per terrawatt of energy, but the deaths it causes are localized, physically and temporally. It doesn't matter that each year more people die in the US from coal ash than all those that ever have (or will) from (current) nuclear disasters.
These kinds of things are well known in psychology (including the simplest: marshmallow experiment). Humans are bad at risk estimation and even worse when it comes to time scales. If it isn't happening before our eyes then chances are we're pretty bad at estimating risk.
Isn't this, exactly, why we are in trouble with the coronavirus. Our inability to see a disaster looming ahead?
Source for the data: https://ourworldindata.org/natural-disasters Zoom out back to 1900 and see how much the world has improved.
Citation needed. Many (also old) people died in the European heat waves of the last summer. And every year these summers are getting hotter.
Once crops closer to the already dry and hot areas of the globe stop to yield, and people migrate away from those areas — how many people die in the resulting conflicts, how much human suffering will be produced there?
What impact will the usage of resources we use to safeguard costal cities against rising waters have on other areas that prevent human suffering?
Answering the possible fallout from even a moderate change in global climate is nowhere near as clear cut as you make it out to be.
On top of that: the ddcisions we take now could potentially be multiplied by the next 1000 human generations, only idiots would take that risk lightly.
Here's the CDC analysis on deaths from temps, showing that among weather related causes of death (which are not even in the top 50 ways to die, by the way), 31% were due to excessive heat and 63% were due to excessive cold: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25073563-deaths-attributed-t...
There is no evidence of precipitation decline across the planet. Some drought-prone areas, that have been drought prone for thousands of years, have gotten some drought conditions. There's nothing new about that. In California there's fossil evidence of 200 year megadroughts that pre-date industrialization. So mother nature is gonna throw us curve balls no matter what we do. We have to adapt when that occurs, see links below for studies on historical megadroughts not caused by man:
https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article-abstrac...
> On top of that: the ddcisions we take now could potentially be multiplied by the next 1000 human generations, only idiots would take that risk lightly.
The problem with this is that the decisions we take now could potentially mean anything. The butterfly effect effectively makes it meaningless to measure what we do now, so many years into the future. There's a lot of sentiment against climate change "denial", but the real denial is not about the presence of climate change but rather whether it is wise to make changes that we cannot measure the impact of.
What too little people really grasp is the fact that global warming is a highly non-linear process. It takes the same energy to melt 1kg of ice (at 0°C) to 1kg of water (at 0°C) as it takes to heat water from 0°C to 80°C. Currently we are melting ice – once that is gone things will go at a very different pace and this will be practically irreversible.
I don't think I am clever enough to judge alone if this is really a safe route to go, which is why I trust the experts on this one. And they all say: get your fuckign shit together and do something drastic right now.
This is definitely not true now and will be less true in future. And its a very narrow view - climate change is spreading misery and destruction at massive scales.
- More powerful hurricanes and cyclones kill people directly then many more through disease, starvation, homelessness, etc.
- The Australian fires killed 1 BILLION animals. [1]
- India is running out of water [3]
- Ocean fish stocks are collapsing - leading to malnutrition and starvation of many who depend on them
- Global heating is driving conflicts and migration from places like central america, middle east, etc.
- While not climate change, the cause of it (fossil fuels) causes 10K deaths EVERY DAY [2]
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/australia-fires-over-1-billion-... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerpielke/2020/03/10/every-da... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/opinion/india-water-crisi...
That is thanks to tech. Less people are dying from all natural disasters than they were 100 years ago. We have emergency response vehicles, we have satellite communication and early warning signs for impending disasters, we have better response systems that while imperfect far exceed what were available 100 years ago. We have worldwide wireless phone coverage and many countries that didn't even have phones 100 years ago can now dial for help in an emergency.
The Aussie fires are nothing new. This happens every couple of decades in Australia and has occurred for thousands of years. The whole history of weather in Australia is drought, flood, drought, flood, rinse, repeat.
https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/science-envir...
Stop blaming EVERY occurrence of weather on elevated CO2 levels. It makes zero sense from a thermodynamic perspective. There are systems in the climate that are completely outside of our control, and they cause weather and climate to change. Some small fraction of that is due to CO2.
Because a frog boiled very slowly usually doesn't complain until it's too late. Had this pandemic infections happen two orders of magnitude slower, nobody would give a damn.
We collectively need things to be observably happening right now in order to believe they are true.
> Help to fight climate change. Kill old people with the corona virus.
I knew someone was going to take it to this level after I read your initial post an upvoted it, a part of me laughed, another part made me wonder if that's what it would take...
I'm sure someone said something dumb. But straightforward models of long term climate change and CO2 output going back to the 70's have all been largely proven out. Which "extremists" are you trying to point the finger at, specifically?
Yes, just one person.
Edit: I try not to engage with people who use this kind of rhetorical technique. If anyone else is honestly ignorant of and curious about the damaging effects that decades of climate alarmism has had on some people's trust, you need only Google. For example: "bad climate change predictions"
In my opinion, the problem still exists and it is important to be honest about the elements (activists, journalists, politicians) who are on the 'right side' of the discussion but do a poor job of representing the data.
Then who are you talking about?
This question is so strange I don't know where to begin. Should I look up the percentage of the population that are scientists? Should I pull up an Amazon list of books popular in the 70s and 80s dealing with climate change? Should I start listing various forms of dysfunction in the 4th estate? Should we talk about the culture of activists?
Disseminating scientific knowledge correctly is a challenge in our society.
You don't get to wave this away. Let's see who you're talking about.
>I mean, your point upthread is that you didn't personally believe all the good science of the last 30 years because of some "extremists"
On the other hand, fewer people means lower oil prices, which increases carbon emissions.
Hard to say what the net effect will be.
But I agree, and I hope you don't get downvoted to oblivion.
Many of these media outlets still publish their Coronavirus content behind paywalls, or plastered with advertisements everywhere. That isn't mobilizing, that's capitalizing.
Compared to this, the virus spreads extremely fast and healthcare systems across the world are being stretched and tested since there aren't any vaccines or solutions yet to tackle COVID-19 except for reminding everyone to wash their hands regularly.
So the world now has to focus on battling a pandemic now rather than improving on the technologies already put in place to save us from climate catastrophe. At least taking a flight should now be seen as a double negative at this time for the kids of today.
Seriously, https://riskfinder.climatecentral.org/place/new-york.ny.us?c... shows you the worst projected flood in the next 30 years. As you can see, there is substantial damage, but the vast majority of New York will be fine.
And mitigation of that particular risk is available at a relatively cheap price of building dykes. Which is well-understood technology. In fact there is a country (the Netherlands) that in large part consists of reclaimed seabed kept dry through dykes.
About oil, oil isn't most of our economy. Believe it or not, people realize this and it won't actually change our economic system as much as you seem to think it will.
So yes, climate change is a real problem. But "OMG, NEW YORK IS ABOUT TO BE FLOODED AND OUR ECONOMY WILL END WITH OIL" is not supported by the evidence.