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Comment by immmmmm | Hacker News Reader

the single most terrifying experience of my life has been to read biology conservation articles these last two years, coupled with my increasing understanding of climate change (literature). we often forget that ecosystems (that we barely understand) provide us with crucial benefits and should be considered as (like many planetary scientists say) Life Support Systems.

if there remain historians a century from now, i'd be not surprised they collectively call decisions taken now as "The Mistake".

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Fear sells. It also convinces people to get into science and biases their work and conclusions (not all of it, but definitely some of it that gets headlines).

We aren’t preserving the animals for themselves, in a geological time scale the animals will be fine, extinction and population contraction are just part of the dynamics. We are preserving animals because we like them and it seems a high quality thing to do.

The doom narrative gets attention but doesn’t fairly reflect a reasonable prediction for the future and attracts much opposition to the more reasonable and practical things we should do.

Turning things into fear and moralizing lightning rods polarizes but doesn’t necessarily actually move the mean.

In a geological time scale, human extinction due to ecological fallouts is also a blip.

I agree that the ecological crisis is not existential on a geological scale, but that's an irrelevant scale for questions of human civilization, where we are indeed facing some very bad problems.

the doom narrative indeed sells, i has even been coined "doomism" by scientists like Michael Mann et al.

i am however talking here of a personal literature review of several thousand papers over several years. not headlines.

as a physicist i do not like neither the dynamics, nor the cinematic (in the physical sense of it) of all this.

so yes, but that's not my point.

I suspect you might be experiencing the classic freshman medical student syndrome. The papers (or medical studies) need to be contextualised, and that contextualisation takes lots more of knowledge than just reading some papers casually.

Instead, I suggest reading IPCC reports. While quite stark and damning, they provide context for the predictions and balance speculation out, so you don't get "we're all going to die in a decade", "our kids are going to starve to death" kind of nonsense that gets into public attention (thus incentivising lousy papers coming to similar conclusions).

I suspect you might be suffering from "the hubris". We're quite well into the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction -- and it's only accelerating.

I really fail to see how suggesting to read IPCC reports instead of random out-of-context papers is "hubris".

> I suspect you might be experiencing the classic freshman medical student syndrome.

That is hubris.

I have skimmed the action reports for policy makers from the IPCC.

A humanist approach to the nihilism and fatalism around climate change might be that the urgency presented is what is required to make progress in a time frame where we don't meet horrific consequences. In other words, bias and exaggerate so that we take the action necessary, and not get complacent or have a "balanced" point of view - which may be sufficiently as bad as ignoring the problem altogether.

You call it "humanist", I call it "lying to the public to convince them that the end is nigh and to force the behaviour you want". This is not just morally repugnant, but also can backfire spectacularly as truth tends to come out in the end. In fact, arguably that's what makes people tune out already, you can listen to "Arctic will be completely ice free next year" and believe it only so many times.

i have a PhD in theoretical physics (done in the same building where one of the core IPCC group is located) and been doing three postdocs in computational engineering and computer science. i am working my weekends to change career in order to tackle these issues. i did read (and summarised for my colleagues) the IPCC report (AR6 WG1) during my holidays.

i am however grateful of your comments on how to improve my approach of the literature!

The terrifying aspect for me is that some of the more vocal climate activists seem willing to accept catastrophic, effectively permanent, biodiversity loss as long as short term human suffering is mitigated.

I support non-zero-sum efforts in these areas, with perhaps a greater emphasis on protecting biodiversity.

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