Frankly, it's become very difficult to have anything but a fatalist view of the whole thing.
That is a very different experience from going through something like the Arab spring or the Syrian civil war if they were indeed the result of fault lines cracking under the weight of global warming.
The difference is in one model you live through a traumatic experience but society is largely there to help you through and the broader society doesn’t really share your pain. In the other model society falls apart.
And how many times per decade (per year ?) can it be weathered ?
We got lucky in Western Europe with the recent flood. What when it happens in December or January next time ?
It's a fact of life.
I don't dwell on it - simply note it, then move on with the rest of the discussion. Ignoring the realities you're facing (bad air, threat of evacuation, etc) simply to avoid discomfort seems worse to me.
It's like blaming plastic consumption on consumers. Consumers aren't the problem, corporations are. Coke doesn't HAVE to use plastic bottles, they can use cans for everything. Yet they are one of the 1 producers of plastic waste.
Carbon production is much the same. The vast amount of it comes down to corporate production of carbon that is completely out of the average persons hands to change. I can't control how a tomato gets shipped to my grocery store, and it's frankly unreasonable to think I could locally grow all my goods. I can't change the fact that my work forces in-office work.
The fact is, burning fossil fuels is cheap, and if we want that to stop then the quickest and surest way is to tax it. Once it becomes more expensive to burn fossils you can bet corporations and individuals will bend over backwards to avoid it.
The climate problem is a failure of government and lack of regulation problem, not an individual problem.
I have decided to buy no pure-ICE going forward.
I am a single-issue climate voter.
Enough people making these choices can precipitate change. Why is Tesla selling every vehicle it can make and have such a high stock valuation?
I'd say the voting power is the #1 thing individuals can do to affect change. The economic decisions are, frankly, only something that the well off can afford to do.
However, it must be understood that real impact needs regulation. It's not enough for all the well off to drive Teslas. It's not enough to install solar on your home. It's not enough to run your own home garden.
Does it have impact? Some. But we are talking about orders of magnitude problems. All the work you do gardening doesn't come close to addressing the amount of CO2 pushed out by the airline industry, cruise industry, or shipping industry.
The main thing you can do is vote for politicians that will go after climate change (or at a minimum, won't stand in the way of politicians that do).
This is an Amdahl's law problem.
Subsidized, even.
Five years later, and my parents are now single-issue climate voters.
From a "the children are our future" perspective, sure, future generations will have a harder time. Poor and coastal communities will be displaced, there'll be economic hardships, and in general life is going to just be harder.
But it's not like we haven't faced hardships before. In fact, it's such a well-known problem that we probably have more solutions (both short-term and long-term) than for any other disaster we might face. Even in the worst case, it's manageable.
Look at what has happened with recent natural disasters. Puerto Rico is STILL in shambles. And while unrelated to climate change, Flint Michigan's water is STILL undrinkable.
The terrifying part of climate change isn't that things will be harder, it's that our governments are completely unprepared to address it. One of the major political parties is fighting against any modicum of effort that WOULD help to address it.
I very much dislike this perspective. Climate change is happening __now__. It is affecting us __now___. It is costing __us__ billions of dollars a year. Not future generations, __us__.
If I bite my nails, or hop up and down yelling, or stand still peacefully, the problem and the solutions are the same.
For example — as far as I can tell, we have little evidence the forest fires in the PNW are directly impacted by climate change. When humans have been the direct cause, it's been things like cigarettes or fireworks starting fires that then spread to 100s of thousands of acres. That's not climate change as far as I can tell.
Take this article for example → https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/07/climate-change-disasters-cau... and this excerpt:
"The six costliest disasters of 2020 occurred in the U.S, the worst of which was Hurricane Laura. The storm caused $13 billion in damage after it devastated parts of Louisiana in August. The Atlantic hurricane season saw a record 30 named storms and accounted for $43 billion in losses, almost half of the total disaster loss in the U.S. last year, the report said."
What does this have to do with human-driven climate change? There's no source or data that shows the hurricanes are caused by humans or that humans are even contributing to the cause. This article from climate.gov talks about aerosols, but still, not great studies and not great data → https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/enso/how-humans-...
I find it hard to argue these points with climate change deniers because the data doesn't appear to be all that great. So I'm very curious how others are able to have fact based conversations so people can actually start coming to the realization that we do have a strong impact on the climate.
There's a misunderstanding here, I think. Yes, there is a direct cause by someone lighting a fire and then that fire burning. But there's other variables here that are highly influenced by climate change. Let me give a small example: What happens when you throw a lit cigarette butt on a well watered (but currently dry) and maintained lawn? You should know that the answer is nothing. The cigarette butt goes out. But what happens if you do it on a dry lawn? Very different story. This is how climate change helps drive more and worse wildfires than the past. We can see that there are larger number of acres burned per year[0]. But we can't look at that alone, let's look a precipitation trends in the PNW[1]. It's kinda a bold claim to not see the connection when we're going through a literal heat wave (it hasn't even been a month since the PNW set several heat records. My city hit 3 in one weekend). We can see that by year CA fires are becoming more frequent and more acres are burned[2]. Here's what happens. When there's a drought lots of plants die. Then there are flash rains. Lots of new growth that is able to capitalize on the rich soil from fertilization due to ash (ash is a great fertilizer). Heat then dries out all these low growth plants that are unable to sustain temperature swings like their more long lived brethren. Lots of dry shrubbery becomes lots of tinder. Now enter some idiot with a cigarette driving down the highway. Is that idiot to blame? Yes. Are they the only sole cause to the event that unfolds? Clearly not.
> There's no source or data that shows the hurricanes are caused by humans or that humans are even contributing to the cause.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. There is a clear positive trend between the number of hurricanes and tropical storms over the last hundred years[3], you can see the same thing with tornadoes. I'm not sure why you think this isn't related to climate change. Hurricanes are so prevalent in the Alantic Basin because that is where you get mixing of warm and cold air (warm air coming from the east from Africa and cold air coming from the north). Add more warm and more cold and you got more powerful hurricanes (you can see that in the trend too. Part of what that means is more storms upgraded to hurricanes and major hurricanes).
> I find it hard to argue these points with climate change deniers because the data doesn't appear to be all that great.
This is where I'm confused and do actually feel like I'm being baited. There's tons of data. You can find more than a dozen papers going into each of these topics I've mentioned all telling similar stories (and a few dozen more effects that couple with these). The problem here isn't that there isn't data, the problem is refusing to look at it. The problem is refusing to look at causal chains (like in our fire example). Even the Pentagon is writing reports[5] about how climate change is exacerbating issues (also, this is far from the first report that they wrote). More fires, more harsh storms, lower crop yields, decreasing access to water, desalination of ocean water, decrease in coral production, melting ice caps, etc. And here's the kicker. All these things can be linked to CO2eq in the atmosphere[6]. All these things are related. They all influence one another and there's a feedback loop because the coupled nature.
The facts and data are there. The question is if you will look at it. Are you going to listen to some person on the news or on the internet (including me) or are you going to seek out climate researchers and see what they say? Go listen to the experts. See why they are all terrified. We're far beyond where it is acceptable to have the conversation about the existence of something we've known about since the early 1980's. It isn't just the kitchen stove that is on fire. The whole house is ablaze. We can feel the heat and see the flames. Why are we still talking about if the fire exists? For the last ten years I hear every day people (including climate deniers) constantly saying "Boy, it's a hot summer this year." And we have the data to show that it's not just their gut feelings. I'm not being metaphorical when I say that people feel the heat.
[0] https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/09/23/us/fires-worst-ye... (paywalled: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/24/climate/fires...)
[1] https://www.forest2market.com/blog/2020-precipitation-trends...
[2] https://lao.ca.gov/reports/2020/4285/Fig1.png
[3] https://i.imgur.com/ax5CNnh.png (I sourced the data from NOAA)
[5] https://climateandsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/se...
[6] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-wo...
It also gets flagged off the front page with regularity, as was this thread.
And no, I don't blame the average person. I blame those who disenfranchised and infantilised the average person in the pursuit of profit and power, and the intellectuals who played cheerleaders for it.
> FROMM: Like for instance, that we are confronted with the possibility of a war of such destruction that the whole existence of our nation and of the whole world is at stake. And yet, people know it - people read it in the newspapers, people read that at the first attack, a hundred million Americans might be killed.And yet, they talk about it as if they were talking about something being wrong with the carburetor of their car, perhaps. Actually, they have paid more attention to the danger of a flu epidemic than to the danger of the atomic bomb, because...
> WALLACE: Don't you think that's a little overstatement, Dr. Fromm?
> FROMM: Well, I wish it were, because what I see is relatively few people who experience, who feel, the danger, which we are threatened with, and who feel the responsibility of doing something about it.
> WALLACE: Or maybe, when you talk about the responsibility of doing something, maybe it simply is this: that we find it very difficult to make ourselves felt in this amorphous society in which we live. Each individual would want to do something but would find it difficult to make himself felt.
> FROMM: Well, I think here you point out to one, really, of the basic defects of our system: that the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act -but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.
-- Erich Fromm, "The Mike Wallace Interview", 25th of May 1958 (!)
And then that "stupidity" is used to justify even more of what created it. It's a constant refrain on HN too, where "the average user" is used to excuse all sorts of shitty software and reduction of options. It's like saying that someone is too weak to go for a walk, so they should remain in bed until their muscles got stronger. We do this all over the place, in all sorts of areas, and have been at it for decades.
Edit: I usually keep up with NOAA's state of climate updates on monthly basis here: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/
Intellectually, I know it's something to be worried about and that we should take care of now rather than later.
I think the best we can hope for is that this rocket will eventually fall back to earth. When things get too bad humanity will find a way. Of course likely not before a lot of suffering occurs.
The other best thing you can hope for is that the worst of this suffering won't happen in your lifetime.
Let's face it though, resolving the issue BEFORE the tipping point is impossible.
I'm getting voted down, but seriously come back here in 10 years. My prediction is the most likely possible occurrence. Some of the worst case scenarios of global warming WILL play out. It did for COVID, it will for global warming. Even in the thick of the pandemic we still have anti-vaxers and anti-maskers. The same will happen with global warming, even in the thick of it we'll have tons of people who are against mitigating it.