Attenborough gives stark warning on climate change to UN [video]
bbc.com
bbc.com
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/sep/17/arctic-c...
I hadn't heard of an estimate of being ice-free by 2020-21. Per this recent National Geographic source, it is likely to happen as early as 2035.
[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/arctic-su...
I don't understand what is it about climate science that everyone seems to think they're qualified enough to have strong opinions on. I don't see random people commenting on the intricacies of CPU design, battery design, petrochemical processes or any other high-tech endeavor, but with climate everybody's a f*cking expert.
That aside, many of the other comments here, filled with deep existential dread about our future world, are straying into the manic given how terrible humans are at predicting anything at all over the long term. There are far too many unknown unknowns for us to be sure of any aspect of catastrophe for 2100 or even for earlier years. Never mind years beyond 2100.
It should serve as very serious food for thought just how much reactions to COVID by public officials, scientists and the media as well were bungled, confused and fraught with false claims (notable examples: masks don't work, the virus has a 1-3% mortality rate) in just a single year because of science and politics mixing heavily in a media charged atmosphere. Yet somehow, the far, far more complex theme of global climate patterns over decades combined with human trends during the next 70 years, is taken as a near given of planetary catastrophe to the point where many of you are firmly convinced that having children now is barely a step below slow murder...
I don't understand how every parent isn't filled with sheer, abject terror at their child's death from starvation, thirst, disease, or violence.
Maybe it's time to lay off the news media & apocalyptical documentaries for a while. Can't imagine this is a very healthy way to live.
Sometimes the tech community just lives in another world. In reality: work, bills, screaming kids and life get in the way of thinking about anything but yourself. When I was 21 I was the same (vegan, vegetarian, telling people about BPA, not touching receipts with my hands yadda yadda yadda).
Now I'm 30 and as far as I can tell, nothing changed, I didn't die from too much exposure to plastics, the world still is spinning but I have a lot more on my plate to think about than watching documentaries and fear mongering myself into depression.
We've moved to a location that should fare well enough, ecologically, but of course that makes it a target for hungry, thirsty, better-armed groups of people.
Worrying about your post-apocalyptic world that might happen doesn’t consume many of my brain cycles. I’d much rather worry about things that are likely to happen in the short term.
Edit: no, my child’s death from thirst, famine, violence or disease is not a forgone conclusion.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcosc.2020.6154...
Not so long term would be beyond 2050. 2100 sounds like far into the future... until you realize that kids born today have fair chance being alive at 79 or 80 to see the turn of the next century. [2]
We are not even talking about any children you might have of your own. This is literally everyone who gets born today. Nephews, nieces, cousins, kids of friends and acquaintances,... So, this isn't even an thought exercise in the abstract.
The insidious part of climate change are the delayed effects. Consider it like throwing a thick blanket over your body. It takes a bit of time before enough of your heat gets trapped to make you sweat. Most people will throw off that blanket once they get uncomfortable. When it comes to climate, throwing off the blanket on short notice isn't an option. So, while you - and many others - feel that humanity at large has the luxury of time to afford consider anything but climate change, generations to come will experience the very uncomfortable effects of a blanket they won't be able to shake off. That's just "present bias" in action.
Now, I don't worry constantly about the future. That's counter productive.
What I do worry about is how little action is taken even today to change that future. Sure, there are a tons of great ideas and technological advances. But electric cars or ships dregging micro-plastics out of the oceans aren't going to change this.
What really grinds my gears is that this was already known some 60 years ago. This was already an debated issue at the White House in the 1960's... and over the course of those 60 years the affirmative actions that needed to be taken to avert this, have been muddled in compromises, bureaucracy and lobbying. That's not even hyperbole. [2]
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/clim...
As time marches on, the window of opportunities to avert the worst case scenarios and projections shrink rapidly. If hard to accept policy choices keep being debated and pushed into the future, the future simply becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That window of opportunities has already partly closed up. Climate change is unavoidable. And any future policy choices will shift towards mitigating the increasingly dire effects, rather then avoiding climate change wholesale.
As an individual, the single most powerful thing you could do is to vote for and support policy makers who do take this issue serious enough today.
Climate change is unavoidable (because nature)... but so is human ingenuity. We're constantly discovering new facts and approaches, and this is the major factor doomsayers never bring up in these discussions.
There's an abundance of new facts, approaches and ideas. And the vast majority of scientists and activists advocate those facts, approaches and ideas. They have been doing exactly that for the past 60 years.
Your human ingenuity counts for nothing if the only ideas that humanity is willing to accept are those which can be marketed to consumers (electric cars, solar panels) rather then those which are boring, maybe even painful to some, but absolutely necessary to sustain life on Earth (sustainable development goals per the U.N. [1])
[1] https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-develo...
For the first part: not nature, because every carbon emissions today won't have any significant effect until 2040.
For the second part: Yeah, the 2010 drought in Russia was handled so well, millions starved and we're still paying for the political instability it brought in 2011.
And the temperature differential between the troposphere (that warms up) and the stratosphere (that cools down faster than the troposphere warms btw) are becoming more predictible, so when we will have even stronger meteorological events, we might be able to warn the population and to prevent planes to go through them, nice.
And when wet-bulb temperature will be to high, we will be able to grow high-yield plants and harvest them at nigh, while sleeping underground during the day, seems ingenius enough.
Yeah, we will survive, i don't think anybody doubted that. Will the civilization stay the way it is? It won't be the bronze age collapse, but consider this: over 300 year, the Anatolia region lost between 10 and 25% of its precipitations and it almost destroyed 3 empires. Do you think we're that much politically stable?
mainly because of the future discount rate, which is something I'd like to see more commonly discussed.
Related to this: I'm recommending a lot KSR's "the ministry for the future" to all my friends nowadays. It has a very good picture of "how it works, and why we don't care". I kind of like how he makes the point that all those powerful forces are mainly human rules, and as such, they can be changed... with powerful enough incentives.
My boy is 11 months old and I'm already training him to be an expert swordsman for his inevitable victory in the wastelands
You could also be optimistic in the face of the future. We are here because of a long line of good fortune and optimism, despite war, disease, famine. The human race has really faced some incredible odds. And technology while an accelerant for destruction could also be our liberator. Solve energy problems, get us off this planet, etc..
I think instilling that optimism in your kids is most important.
I guess we can also translate as tools, given the techno-solucionist atmosphere ;)
I also find it hard to believe that the default stance (even from non-religious people) seems to be that having kids is normal.
It is amazing how even as a male, "oh you'll change your mind, everyone wants to have kids some time!" is brought up.
It is absolutely baffling.
How many famines, wars and water shortages happened since the dawn of man? How many people worried about those things vs how many people were born?
Not discounting the severity of the issue, just outlining how lucky people have been in the last few centuries.
Childhood mortality rates in the US for the last 200-ish years:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-al...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Attenborough:_A_Life_on_...
https://www.netflix.com/title/80216393
It is his "witness statement" on how he has personally observed enormous environmental changes over his ~70 year career documenting wildlife throughout the world.