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Comment by BitwiseFool | Hacker News Reader

I have several friends who can best be described as climate zealots. This is because they routinely express that we are heading towards an Earth that is uninhabitable. A changed climate will most certainly lead to more extinctions and harsher environments. While I accept that our current trajectory will lead to catastrophe, they believe it will instead be a cataclysm greater than any previous mass extinction event in Earth's history.

Activism, in general, is no stranger to hyperbole. But the most peculiar thing is how so many people with this apocalyptic mindset also happen to be staunchly anti-nuclear. I've also noticed the changes they demand are effectively impossible to enact politically. Tragically, this just means they get angrier and angrier that so little progress is being made.

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>they believe it will instead be a cataclysm greater than any previous mass extinction event in Earth's history.

It is already broadly accepted that we are already experiencing a massive mass extinction event - the Anthropocene Extinction.

I think critics don't really understand the scale or scope of the changes humans have made to the planet and the negative results for all other species. Global warming is just one issue, perhaps one of the most pressing, but it also blinds people to the devastation of deforestation, coral reef loss and a multiple of other man made disasters.

My father had a mid-life crisis in the mid-90s and went from being an apocalyptic end-times Christian to being an apocalyptic environmentalist.

The dress, fashion, and lingo of the nutbags that hung out at my house changed, but their personality characteristics and complete inability to engage in multivariate analysis of reality was identical.

Radical ideologues and radical religious fundamentalists are, for me, 2 sides of the same coin. And both have a tendency to turn the movements they claim to represent into caricatures of themselves.

Apocalyptic environmentalists have moved beyond a certainty of the problem of climate change to a certainty on THE ONE AND ONLY SOLUTION, which is a radical reduction in standard of living in the industrialized world being the answer.

My father was never able to do anything beyond simple algebra. He thinks in terms of stories and narratives. He won't listen to my brother or myself when we try to actually talk to him about numbers and reality and whatnot, saying we are too young to know anything. But minutes later in the same conversation, he will start talking about how wonderful Greta Thunberg is. For him, it's all emotion and feeling and "doing something".

It's fucking unbearable, and my siblings and I are at a point where we avoid visiting him at his home, because he just won't stop parroting deranged talking points. His friends will frequently be there, and the constant one-upping of them with various moral posturing is nauseating.

Whew, that sounds awful. Part of the problem is that the subtle middle ground doesn't lend itself to stories and narratives. That's what we really need to bring around people like your dad, a way to excite people about being non-extremists.

Yeah, a lot of climate activism is just wildly out-there, an I mean specifically the "life on earth will end" and Extinction Rebellion type groups.

Thing is, what's actually at stake - modern industrial civilization - is scary enough on it's own. Under the worst scenarios, the planet will be fine, the environment will be fine, life will be fine, even humans will continue to live. But bad climate scenarios have the potential to throw humans back into pre-industrial times (and populations) and critically - do so permanently. Easy coal and oil resources are gone, so the industrial revolution cannot happen a second time. Pre-industrial civilization also can't support all the people on earth today, so this necessarily means mass casualties.

This is all very scary and very real on it's own without the need for hyperbolic embellishment.

Even crashing back to pre-industrial civilization doesn't make sense. Climate change is fast on a geological scale, but its not that fast on a human scale. It might be shocking if Phoenix is uninhabitable in 100 years, but it barely even existed 100 years ago. Famines and water shortages will be localized. So while individual nations might collapse for a while and some areas might even depopulate, it won't happen all at once.

To be clear, even this would be an unprecedented catastrophe. Civilization would go on in some form, but hundreds of millions, maybe billions of people, would suffer immensely and many would die from famine, war, disease, etc.

The other problem with always angry protesters is that the list is endless, so as soon as something gets fixed, the next day there is just another protest for something else.

I don't know what it's like in other cities, but in Chicago, you can hire protesters. They come in on buses.

Back when I was in journalism, it was always annoying for the reporters to pick some random person from the crowd holding signs and ask them about the issue only to find out that they didn't even know what the protest was about, and were just there to get a check.

Protesters-as-a-Service, I guess.

In fairness to climate protestors/activists, which developed nation has really taken any significant strides in the past 10-20 years?

I think there's some valid frustration when lip service is paid and then all that comes of it is some token stuff like boutique tax credits for EVs and residential solar installs, but the money trunks get rolled right out when it's the financial crisis, major wars, COVID response, etc. I'm not saying those aren't valid things to have mobilized for, but it's clear that western society as a whole still thinks of climate solutions as catering to a special interest group rather than as something that is a priority.

And maybe that's fine if it's reflective of public sentiment. But the perception of never-ending angry protestors is not just because they're unsatisfiable. It's also because very little has actually happened.

> which developed nation has really taken any significant strides in the past 10-20 years?

Iceland runs mostly on renewable energy: https://reneweconomy.com.au/iceland-a-100-renewables-example....

The projected warming has shifted from 5 degrees to 2.6 degrees. So obviously quite a bit has been done. For example Britain is down 50% from 1990 levels. It's not enough, but to say "very little has actually happened" is disingenuous.

IMO, the biggest thing that has been done is that renewable power and EV transportation have now become cost competitive. Both of those, especially the first, required a lot of government subsidization to get volumes up so that the learning effect could take effect.5

> In fairness to climate protestors/activists, which developed nation has really taken any significant strides in the past 10-20 years?

Europe and USA have both actively reduced emissions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement#/media/File:Pe...

Well they have flagged this article as being too dangerous to discuss.

just tell them not to worry, rotifers and tardigrades will survive

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