Can we stop this already please? Incalculable damage has been done to the cause by people pretending there exists a hard deadline and then later the deniers come in and say "ha where is your apocalypse?"
Also the title needs to match the article title, in accordance with HN posting guidelines.
Its crisis fatigue
Flooding, extreme weather, excess hurricanes, super droughts, formerly once every 100 year events have been happening nearly yearly.
The issue is it's now somewhat normalized.
The other issue is it's only going to get more extreme.
Don't buy beachfront property.
I've been waiting for prime beachfront bargains for almost 30 years now.
I grew up with things like the population explosion predictions of the 1970s, that mass famine would kill hundreds of millions and that famine would spread to industrialized countries. That was when the population of the world was under 4 billion. Things like Erlich's bet that commodity prices would skyrocket. The Hubbert peak theory for oil, anyone remember the Oil Drum blog? And of course many, many permutations of, "if we don't do X by date Y, it will be too late for humanity. Won't somebody please think of the children"? Y is usually at least 10 years out, 8 years is a pretty bold departure for this genre.
I don't pay much attention to doom porn anymore, I guess I'm glad that the end of the world keeps getting pushed back for a few more years.
The western states are looking at historic droughts right now. This year is going to see some pretty poor crop yields. All indicators are this is something that's going to continue for several years.
We are seeing crop yields rise in other tropical countries.
The prediction wasn't that crop yields would fall in some countries and rise in others with the overall result being steadily increasing food production per capita through the 2020's.
The prediction was massive famine with hundreds of millions dead in the 1970s spreading to the industrialized world by 2000. And the prediction wasn't based on climate change, it was based on simple population growth.
We currently have the lowest percentage of people living in absolute poverty in all of human history. And the birth rate is under the replacement birth rate almost everywhere outside of Africa.
The doom population explosion scenario that was predicted simply did not happen. Technology won.
To use a different fable, let me point out that the moral of "The boy who cried wolf" isn't that you shouldn't listen to liars, it's that if you get used to ignoring warnings you'll eventually end up with no sheep.
The other half is that if you exaggerate dangers for too long and the dangers never come, nobody can be expected to take you seriously when you warn them of the arrival of real danger
In 1980, was the prediction that there would be experiencing the consequences of climate change, such as coral bleaching? As that is happening now. So warning that we need to avoid climate change for the past 50 years makes perfect sense.
This is not a singular disaster, but rather a sliding scale.
https://www.westernjournal.com/national-park-quietly-removed...
"The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/01/15/carbon-p...
Just because you haven't hit the ground yet doesn't mean that opening your parachute will save you.
This is the problem with putting deadlines on climate change: if the deadline is too close to the present day, people will say "We're too late to do anything about it", and if it's too far away people will say "Ah, we'll fix that later".
Like, if we implement cap & trade amongst developed countries, with a tariff for those not participating (probably china) and with an annual cap reduction.
If not enacted in 15 years we expect: these non-exaggerated bad things If enacted in 15 years we expect: these bad, but not as bad changes
Can we give that a pithy name? I heard things like Climate-shot, but we can do better.
And can we identify the consequences with a few good metaphors or slogans?
Politically if we could make it competition, would that have broader appeal? Such as, is there a way to get candidates on the right to argue over how their version of the plan will totally outdo whatever China is doing, or remake our industry to that much better than China, or otherwise be exceptional on some kind of madeup benchmark.
2) write books/articles/presentations about having only N years left
3) profit