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Comment by shay_ker | Hacker News Reader

This is precisely why climate change policy is so difficult to enact. Folks don’t understand the urgency until they experience it themselves, and by that point it’s gotten really bad.

There’s an analogy with tech debt or old software here somewhere.

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I think it's with everything that doesn't have an immediate, graspable impact. Nobody would smoke if cigarettes killed you after a few months with a 50% chance. If they increase the likelihood of a stroke or other complications decades down the line, it's much easier to brush it off, tell yourself you're more of a Helmut Schmidt kind of person. Or just think it's a worthy tradeoff for the benefits you get from smoking today.

Same thing with child labor regarding smartphones, clothes, you name it. It's far away. If you had to buy it right at the factory at a counter where you could see the working conditions, it would have a vastly different impact on you.

And I'm not claiming to be smarter or superior to the average Joe here. This pattern strikes all the time, for everyone.

It is all about tangibility. That is why we install car reverse parking sensors. If people had glasses that see air pollution, they would revolt. If people had access to a very accurate live and high-res computer simulation of climate-change, or anything, they would take it more seriously. People are spoiled with regard to the level of accuracy and tangibility they require to be convinced.

> If people had glasses that see air pollution, they would revolt.

I've ruined a couple of people's perspectives by sharing the the reason LA sunsets are so beautiful is because of the pollution particulate.

Heh, a small oil film on the water is beautiful as well. Or if chemicals give water a nice green or red shade. There are bright sides to everything.

> It is all about tangibility.

What if every weather app showed, next to actual temperature, what the temperature is modelled to be if climate change had been avoided (kept CO2 ppm to 1950s levels, say)?

So totally not a climate skeptic, but part of the reason for this is because models are often wrong, and the more complex the system, the more likely it is to be off I think.

So to be fair to humans, skepticism is often rational, in the sense that science of complex systems can be off.

The part I have not totally understood is that there are good reasons to be more energy efficient and ecologically sensitive even in the absence of climate change per se.

I think the thousands of scientists who have been studying this phenomenon for the last 40 years have a much better picture than just about every skeptic that has muddied the waters with their hasty rhetoric.

If anything scientists have been abundantly cautious with their messaging. Many predictions made in early IPCCC reports were in many cases too lenient. Feedback systems, impacts, and rate of warming have been happening on track or faster than reported. I suspect many knew but they didn’t want to be labelled as alarmists.

> If anything scientists have been abundantly cautious with their messaging

And then new's outlets take that cautious wording and turn it into extremely alarming headlines. It's exhausting.

And yet the top of this thread begins with the claim that it's hard to alarm people (my words) appropriately enough to act. Ironic.

Yes humans individually are absolutely horrible at long term thinking, it’s just part of our nature.

I wonder if we’re evolving to get better at that, if ever so slightly

Assume the models are wrong: Why is that reason to believe that things will be better than the model predicts instead of worse?

Smoking is probably a good analogy. In all ways. Because it took decades before we reduced the impact once we knew the dangers. And centuries before we even realized the dangers.

And smoking a cigarette won't kill you. Smoking one cigarette a day won't kill you. And most people who smoke don't actually get lung cancer.

But it all catches up with you. Smoking a cigarette a day for a decade is going to cause you to die earlier than if you hadn't. Smoking more, even earlier. Most is not all. Because most people who have lung cancer are smokers. And lung cancer isn't even the only thing. There's emphysema, heart disease, etc that's all related to smoking. And way more likely. But that's all aggregate.

Climate is a lot like that. It's nothing in isolation, it's everything in aggregate.

And even now that the dangers are widely and indisputably known we still have a hard time passing regulations to curtail the behavior because of addiction and entrenched profit motives.

In a german podcast a guy once said: "You won't get them with melting Icebergs and Polarbears. They're too far away".

It's true, nobody* cares about icebergs and other things they've never seen before. Just wait when the drought kicks in and more and more Problems arise. I hope then people start acting themselves instead of shouting into the social platform nirvana.

I feel like we need movies/media that helps things feel more real, personal, negative, close to home.

Not movies that _focus_ and sensationalize climate disasters like The Day After Tomorrow. But movies that exist in the near future where really visceral elements of how climate change played out 10-20 years exist as a backdrop to whatever story is being told (but feel grounded in reality).

e.g. water rationing, abandoned towns/cities, authoritarian responses to increased immigration/migration, food shortages, etc...

> e.g. water rationing, abandoned towns/cities, authoritarian responses to increased immigration/migration, food shortages, etc...

More like Mad Max?

Ya the original is a good example but that's probably still too apocalyptic, one can watch that and scoff saying "it'd never get that bad".

Stuff that's more focused on the immediate, painful changes but still in line of sight from our current reality. Children of Men did a pretty good job pulling some subtle "here's how society has changed for the worse" world building in (obviously all based on it's underlying premise that no more children are being born)

> More like Mad Max?

More like California, Arizona, Utah, South Africa, etc.?

Children of Men feels like a very realistic dystopia of the UK five years from now.

Children of Men doesn't specify the cause for the infertility, I think? Only some handwavy "there were some chemicals", IIRC? At least I'm pretty certain it doesn't attribute anything to climate change.

Russell T Davies's Years & Years feels like a plausible near future. Bananas are extinct, baking systems failing, refugee crises.

I'd say 'Don't Look Up', but on second thought, the venn diagram of climate change denialists and people who don't realize the movie's a satire about climate change is almost a circle.

Polar bears don't work on me, because the provided polar bear population numbers are higher than previous years!

The question for me, is why do people believe that there is a problem? Is it that you just have to state polar bears are in trouble? Does anyone check the claims of the climate alarmists?

You should take a look at Al Gore's film again, and see how well that has aged.

Climate alarmists need to answer the claim that they are just boys who cry wolf, imo.

I don’t agree that the data support your claim. This link seems like a good summary: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-27/fact-check-gina-rineh...

> "people start acting themselves "

There are only 3 'individual' actions avaliable that have any real impact: Voting, Stop eating meat, and pitchforks / civil unrest.

I predict we will reach phase 3 very suddenly and then there will be all these talking head on TV wondering 'oh my god, how did this happen?'.

What about saving energy and not wasting water?

Being a vegan protester is clearly the only way to have any impact

if you live in an apartment, don't own a car and you main use of water is shower.

There are no real energy savings avaliable without cutting back on hygene

Of these, voting has the only real impact, because no action an individual can take (safe for suicide) can make their life carbon neutral. That needs policy.

I also apportion a fair amount of blame to the media.

There is a major 'boy who cried wolf' effect--because literally everything is maximally exaggerated and sensationalized to optimize engagement and revenue, people are numbed to the constant alarmism and there is no way to get through to them and convince them that this time the crisis is a real one that they can't afford to ignore.

This is one our of biggest flaws - Being reactive instead of proactive. It doesn't always work.

Agree, and a big part of the problem is that Politicians will not be proactive and spend money for no apparent visible return. If they're wasting money they're unlikely to get re-elected. It's the same as asking IT accountants to invest in mirroring systems that appear never to fail - until they do...

Exactly. For a simple example, look at the criticism about Lithuania’s LNG terminal[1] a few years ago, built to reduce their dependency on Russian gas.

I think they are pretty happy about that terminal now.

[1] https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/1111346/five-years-...

I actually wonder if humans lack a crucial adaptive advantage if they do not intuitively understand how systems work. But then it occurs to me that some ancient philosophies and religions emphasised the need to be in tune with the surrounding world.

How would understanding systems have been significantly adaptive for humans before a few thousand years ago? I agree with you that humans generally lack this capability. We also lack the ability to understand exponential growth, which I think is partially a cause of our lack of ability to comprehend systems.

My personal theory on this is that it comes from the fact that our sensory systems operate on a logarithmic response curve [0]. Note, for instance, how the decibel scale for measuring sound intensity is a logarithmic scale. Because our sensory systems respond logarithmically, that means an exponential increase in stimulus feels linear, at least until the point where the stimulus is damaging or so intense as to be uncomfortable. The end result is that we think "it's not so bad" until it's really bad.

---

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber%E2%80%93Fechner_law

I find your perspective interesting, but have the feeling that you are not thinking in systems (!). The sensory systems are perceptual systems, but they are subsystems of a larger "cognitive" system, and we cannot be sure that it exhibits the same logarithmic response behavior.

We don't understand complex systems well at all.

I think the more defective part of humans is our near complete inability for long-term thinking and planning, especially collective long-term thinking and planning. Just look at our daily lives and jobs. When are long-term plans every truly engaged and acted upon? Almost none. There is much too much self-induced noise in society and the economy, and there's a hyper-focus on short-term results and concerns.

I am thinking more of an automatic ability to see how things are related. Chinese language(s) ↔ Taoism, in the context of a holistic approach to worldview [0]. I know I am exaggerating, but maybe some meditative training could help in this regard?

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/health/04iht-6sncult.1.10...

I think you hit the nail on the head.

The Bible says: “It does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step.” —Jeremiah 10:23.

According to this, humans were not created to rule themselves.

We do a poor job of governing other people and solving global problems.

To me, it's just clear at this point that this is our core problem.

Source: https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/102019005#h=15:0-16:0

> The Bible says: “It does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step.” —Jeremiah 10:23.

It doesn't matter what the bible says. You can thump it all you want. It won't reduce climate change, excuse inaction, or absolve religious fatalism.

No, the reason is that people pretend that their favourite freedom-restricting policy is “against climate change”.

Ban meet. Ban non-private flights. Turn off hot water. Ban nuclear. Ban bitcoin. Ban aircon.

All fake, authoritarian “solutions”.

The real solution is simple: tax fossil fuels. That’s literally all that you need to do to solve climate change? And also the only thing you can do.

Tax fossil fuels? When I fill my car with benzine at 2 euro/liter would you like to guess how much of that is taxes? Same for the gas heating in my apartment. And the electricity that powers my PC. The cost of the actual fuel or energy is only a fraction of the price I pay, the rest is taxes (plain old taxes, or taxes masquerading as operating / distribution costs).

I didn't read tomp's post as saying that taxes weren't already being assessed. I'm pretty sure tomp was arguing that the taxes need to be _higher_.

I live in the country, and a lot of farmers and even workers who have to commute would probably be hit quite hard by any spikes in fuel prices. We had already felt it when the prices were going up recently. It doesn't help that a lot of jobs that can be remote still aernt or still don't even give the option to be. We also aernt feasibly able to switch to electric at this point, as I can't tell you any nearby gas stations that allow for electric car charging.

Nobody does anything until there are bodies on the ground.

Bodies that look like their own, too often.

It doesn't help that everyone's constantly being lied to by sensationalized hyperbolic news from the mainstream media.

We've been conditioned to assume everything's bullshit until it's objective reality on display before our own eyes.

I think this is the case for many of the catastrophic scenarios that a human/humans can face. Think about people smoking, or eating really really poorly, or driving drunk. And the worst thing is that in many cases people will revert to the old behavior provided they survive.

I wonder whether frogs have a tale about how humans behave on a warming up planet.

I sometimes wonder if we released civilisation game where climate change is a harsh unforgiving price for using coal and oil, would it change anything? Is it too late for such a product?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_VI:_Gathering_Sto...

It was also in civ2 as a base feature.

In all the civ games it's always been manageable relatively easily

It's been a big feature in the later games. But it's been there since the start. Civ 1 had a simple mechanism where highly industrialized cities would create polluted tiles. You could clean up the polluted tiles with settlers. But if your settlers didn't clean it up quickly enough, there would be consequences. Plains tiles would turn into desert. Coastal tiles would turn into swamps.

And I will never respect your policy for you lack the self-awareness required to acknowledge its risks, and they are enormous, like stalin era population displacement high.

I won't go on Nazino

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