Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lutger | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure, honestly. I don't have any references but there definitely is research about anxiety and depression caused by climate collapse. I know at least one psychotherapy professor (Netherlands) who specializes in this. There's a lot of literature. One of the terms often used is eco-anxiety.

The single best advice is to put limitations on your consumption of climate news. But it's highly personal, some people turn to activism to cope, facing the problem head-on. I did that, but it's very depressing honestly.

A powerful image my wife likes to use is sitting at a loved one's deathbed. You don't have hope, you know he or she is going to die, but that makes the remaining time extra special. We are all sitting at the deathbed of the world as we know it. That makes the time we have left extra precious. And we're running out of time.

View on HN

Powerful image but bad analogy. The climate does not have a well defined "death" state, unless you water down the definition of "death" so much that it becomes meaningless, i.e. by defining death as change. If you insist on doing this and then get mired in fatalism... realize that the fatalism was rooted in this choice, and maybe reconsider it.

Since we don't have the collective willpower to stop pushing the climate, it's definitely going to change, so we're just going to have to adapt. The bad news is that it will involve a staggering amount of destruction and violence as everybody tries to avoid bagholding. The good news is that humans are really, really good at adapting. Staggeringly good.

If you look at the history of doomsday predictions -- I'd suggest the Malthusians, since they were rooted in science and rationality but still managed to be very wrong on a large number of issues -- you'll note that their biggest mistake is underestimating adaptability. It's reeeealllllly easy to extrapolate some lines and say "this can't go on, it's going to break, the world will end" and be correct on the first 2 points but wrong on the 3rd. Don't underestimate human adaptability. It's not an optimistic long shot to think that we will adapt. Adaptation is who we are, it's what we do, and we are good at it.

I used to be there on adaptability too, and thinking that (on a historical or geological timescale) this is just a bad spot we're going though before we get to more sustainable technologies.

And we WILL get to more sustainable technologies because we must, by the laws of physics - that which cannot be sustained, will not be sustained.

My much more open questions now are whether we will get there in time. Humans really suck at understanding systems, and responding in appropriate timescales - especially when the effects involve exponential growth/decay or tipping-point phenomena. Add to that entrenched commercial and political interests who actively poison the well, and we could be doomed.

As a small example, just look at what the Republicans did over COVID - literally spoke out against scientifically based vaccines and countermeasures as a political ploy to make the other side fail - even though the risk, and now the fact, is that it will literally kill thousands of their own constituents, and even with record hospitalizations and deaths, the R FL gov is threatening school funding for any school that requires masks. Scale this up to decades of climate disinformation and anti-progress lobbying... Even Toyota is lobbying to slow progress because they bet on the wrong technology.

So many links in the ecological chain are being broken that it is looking ever more likely that several tipping points will be reached before we reach sustainable economies. Once a tipping point is reached, no amount of sustainability will reverse it -- we'd have to actively repair all the damage more rapidly than it can spread. Think permafrost melting and releasing gigatons of methane into the atmosphere ~22X more powerful a greenhouse gas vs CO2. It's already happening.

I'm not sure, but I'm no longer as optimistic as I was.

> Humans really suck at understanding systems, and responding in appropriate timescales - especially when the effects involve exponential growth/decay or tipping-point phenomena.

We're capable of understanding. What we continue to fail at is priorities, as well as focus. That is, it's difficult to imagine the future and how you as an individual can make an impact when the systems are designed to keep you on The Distraction Diet. Whether that's Keeping up with The Kardashians or some other form of random low-relevance events presented as news.

Sure, the top few percent of the intelligence scale get systems just fine. The average college educated person finds complex systems thinking, well, complex. Huge swathes of the electorate find it so confusing that they are easily fooled by BS arguments, disinformation and lies, and vote emphatically directly against their own self interest.

Id say that once it gets down to a level of intelligence where the person can tolerate the existence of the distraction diet (well-said!), they are below the level of systems thinking.

As Einstein said: "Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is why so few people do it.".

My takeaway from the metaphor is not the end of earth, or even the human species. But a significant reduction in population. Anytime habitat is lost, people starve and migrate. Not all starve. Not all migrate. We will have migration induced conflicts, not everyone who migrates will survive. Not everyone who stays in a comfort zone will be immune from the reality of resource shortages.

Our economics and political systems have no answer to long term negative growth. They assume growth, the occasional recession is a big problem but can be mitigated.

Well, the imagery is intended more as an emotional way of coping with grief than a precise conceptual tool. But to be a bit more exact, the way I interpret death is not literally extinction of us as a species, but the deaths of many individuals, animals and our way of life 'as we know it'. Reducing this to mere change seems wrong - it ignores the aspect of loss which isn't exactly the same as change, so I don't find that meaningless or watered down at all.

Honestly I personally don't really care about whether humans go extinct or not. I don't find the existence of us as a species intrinsically valuable, even though I do find individual life, when it's there, very valuable. It's the suffering I'm concerned about. That's why the adaptation story doesn't do very much for me.

tl;dr just ignore it?

> The single best advice is to put limitations on your consumption of climate news.

I'm not sure if this is a good advice. It's like hiding in the woods, but once you're out, you'll be in for a massive shock.

May be that's better than gradual adaptation? I don't know.

That's why I said limit, not ignore. If you update your knowledge once or twice every month you know enough of what's going on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com