As I get older the number of these long term predictions that never come that I have personally live through increases. I never believe anyone of them now.
I wonder if that is why there is such resistance to climate change among older people...
I wonder if that is why there is such resistance to climate change among older people...
I do understand what you’re saying about old people being tired of apocalyptic predictions that come to pass. Even I remember being taught about Peak Oil and how the world would grind to a halt as we ran out of oil in the very near future. I remember being very worried about it as a child and wondering why none of the adults were equally concerned.
I wish there was a better way to convey the difference between widely corroborated, slow-moving concerns like climate change with the overly sensationalized short-term apocalyptic concerns that crop up every few years.
Europe is silently happy about UA war because it will in the end stimulate economy. Qnd if few mil more ppl leave UA for Germany perm, they will be happiest than ever…
World is ugly and how elites treat normal ppl is ugly.
Sure, if you're away from the areas of destruction, you can perhaps make money selling weapons to the belligerents, but I think today one would be foolish to think that a major war can't possibly affect you, where ever you may be.
While this is true, you're dismissing that the claims around climate change have been wildly wrong. The world should have ended a dozen times by now if we look at past predictions by "experts".
I'm not denying climate change at all, and we definitely need to take actions to curb it. But I understand where the skepticism is coming from.
Can you give some references where international panels of scientists have predicted the end of the world? We can't put entities such as IPCC at the same level as some random doomsayers.
Edit: it was a report by James Hansen in 1988.
> Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was generally more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect.
That entire article makes it very clear that at the time the only little pushing it were charlatan media orgs, and one guy who very obviously made a career of opposing every single scientific consensus[1]
From your own citation:
> Concern peaked in the early 1970s, though "the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then"
But even if it had been a majority (or even "everybody") your point still completely fails because you are not taking into account why they predicted global cooling.
The predictions were not "we will have global cooling no matter what". They were "we will have global cooling if the amount of particulate pollution in the atmosphere gets too high, which if current trends continue will happen". Particulate pollution has a cooling effect.
But we undertook a massive effort to reign in particulate pollution. We not only stopped their rise but actually greatly reduced their level.
Has it though? What was even the prediction? It seems to me that at some point people just gave up at pinpointing the specifics of the problem and basically decided that the fact that the climate is changing (never really stopped since the ice age) is the problem that needs fixing.
I really fail to see real consistent confirmation that isn't some indirect measurement using unproven models, or stuff like "we found some random farmers journal, compared temperature and crop harvesting dates and it's totes different from now"
Were there any real predictions from the past that came true on this topic?
Responding to climate change in a meaningful way generally means making lifestyle choices that are responsible.
This would include driving a small car (instead of a SUV) and driving it at a fuel-efficient speed (not the maxiumum). This would include limiting reproduction. This would include not buying a new phone every n years. This would include buying more expensive, locally grown food. This would include voting for a party that is not about "jobs'n'growth" and "the economy" and "tax cuts for the rich" and one that is more about responding to the existential challenge.
Nobody wants that. They want their cars and phones and their lifestyle and their overseas holidays and their 20 grandkids. We are taught to want that.
From The Matrix (1999):
"You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it."
Most of the actions you list at a societal scale are completely pointless, literally the only action we need as a civilisation (collectively, not individually) is building nuclear.
With abundance of clean energy that nuclear can provide, we can drive fast, procreate a lot, and eat globally.
Billions?
Many people wouldn’t mind being frozen in 1950’s USA (except those with cancer), but probably not 1950’s China or India.
Each kg can produce about 30-70TJ of energy with existing nuclear technology.
Primary energy is about 17TW
Please explain how you can get 17TWy of energy per year from a sum total of <80TWy of fuel.
How many steps there are in this cycle and if actually is a net positive in energy production has not been born out by any research I am aware of. So your skepticism is warranted.
Reprocessing doesn't create new fissile material. You're stuck with the small fraction of Pu239 in the waste (which is about a 7th of the original U235). It buys you very little extra energy at huge financial cost and in the current form releases more radiation than the rest of the nuclear industry combined if you exclude weapons tests and chernobyl -- it even rivals coal in terms of radiation released per joule. Plus there is a hidden amount of CFCs and other extremely potent greenhouse gases involved in the process.
Breeding to close the fuel cycle would be great (if it could be done economically and safely), but there is a laundry list of reasons why it may never happen, and every tonne of fissile material used before it happens is 200GW that can't be produced until a decade is spent breeding it back.
You're thinking only of energy, but the world we live in is more way, way complex than that. Keep that up and we're living on Trantor, or Coruscant, not the Earth.
Anecdotally, and I have no reason to doubt this, 200 species go extinct every day.
Most people only know about 200 people. Imagine if one day you woke up and suddenly everyone you knew -- family, friends, colleauges, aquaintences, the people you see behind the checkout -- was gone. Just gone.
Imagine that happening every day.
Or maybe you have 1,000 followers on Twitter. Imagine every day you lost 200 of them. After 5 days, you don't have any followers.
So: 1,000 species gone every 5 days. Less than a week. You do the math for a year.
And that's just one angle on the problem. Another is that we are poisoning ourselves: plastics are endocrine disrupters. Microplastics are a serious environmental problem. We are using materials in our day-to-day life that haven't been proven safe to actually use. Nobody did studies to see if the things you are using are safe: they just wait until they're proven problematic and then "phase them out" over 5 years ... if you're in a country that does that (some countries still use DDT which is persistant and fucking toxic).
And you're right that our actions alone won't solve the CO2 problem, or most other environmental problems. That needs to happen at a government and corporate level. But it's our responsibility to put pressure on those institutions.
And you can make changes locally that affect your sphere of life. We live on a farm and have planted the landscape back, in places, with thousands of trees. These support birds, insects and small animals. It reclaims a little of what was lost. It doesn't make a huge difference in the broader sense, but it makes a big difference in the lives of other creatures.
Is it? What amount of pressure results in a 100 IQ person making 140 IQ decisions? :)
Same reason Congress never passed a law explicitly legalizing abortion. It was too good a wedge issue.
The Democratic Party (and its more liberal wing especially) are interested in passing policies to address climate change. Imperfectly, but orders of magnitude more than Republicans.
No, no they are not. They are interested in passing laws that increase their power, and make people more dependent on government
Massively redistributed policies, that are anti-business, anti-market in the name of "social" and "climate" "justice" most of which will do little to nothing to impact actual CO2 emissions
If we are expecting the US Congress to save humanity we are all doomed
Government needs to get out of the way and stop trying to pick winners and losers, they are bad at it (see Ethanol )
This is why things like river fires are no longer common.
I will agree that congress is bad at picking winners. They should focus on prohibiting damaging practices.
Although, congress didn't pick ethanol because they thought it was a winner. They picked it because it propped up farmers.
And this is because of US Congress or because of State Governments?
Most regulation around rivers, and other such things are State Government controlled, not federal
I fully support federalism, I fully support State governments doing regulations that are sensible to the people, and conditions of states.
I reject the idea it needs to be a national policy or that such a policy is even possible with out being completely corrupted and authoritarian. Nor do I believe such a regulation is envisioned by the powers granted to the US Congress in our Constitution
If you are worried about corruption and authoritarian tendencies, why do you tolerate them at the state level?
Please lay out your tradeoffs in a way that might make your position consistent.
History has shown that there aren't that many Bell Labs that survive very long. How long will Open AI or DeepMind continue to contribute to public innovation? I'm not going to make a bet on that.
Decades of spending on math and science, embedded into federal spending (though inefficient and wasteful in many ways) has generated many tremendous innovations. It is foolish to rely on one mechanism to generate innovation. I'm not suggesting that government is the only or best way. We need innovations across many timescales.
P.S. The amount of close mindedness among "highly intelligent" people in the tech world is staggering. Step back and look at yourself. Ask if your ego is getting in the way of clear and creative thinking.
P.P.S. For what it's worth, among the people I consider most inspiring in the tech world, very few have their head planted only in computer science. We need more historians, sociologists, lawyers, musicians, and so on. The libertarian faction of tech is indictive of a certain brain tendency -- a desire to simplify down to core principles -- and not one that we need more of.
The drive for simplicity can lead us to interesting theories. It can lead to simpler systems. It can also lead to overlooking the true nature of humanity: what is good? what is fair? what is just?
So "Is simplicity best? Or simply the easiest?" [1]
Please question the value of simple philosophies when you make moral arguments. Human concepts are rarely simple. Neither is language. Or justice. Or fairness. Or innovation.
[1] Depeche Mode
That may be some peoples' interpretation.
But even if true (which I do not think it is) this is hardly the intent.
This is one of the most abused phrases in politics.
Let's back up and talk about some fundamental values. I think most people can agree that we work to live, not the other way around. Businesses exist to serve an economic function. Businesses are not an embodiment of the ultimate good, any more than the barter system was, or indentured servitude. These things are ways of structuring economic activity.
My point is simple: Businesses operate according to the context they are in. The businesses do not define right and wrong. Businesses exploit the conditions they are in if they want to thrive.
Banning dog fighting is bad for the existing businesses AND the right thing to do.
Banninge CFCs was bad for industry at the time, according to some time frames.
Let's recognize the shared foundational moral factors here before we assume that we're on vastly different pages.
But I would rather see policy coming out that is in the right ballpark. We can learn from that.
Vague, simplistic overreliance on "the market" is foolhardy and readily dismissed by any serious student of economics.
Dave Roberts has a bunch of great explainers:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/david-roberts-on-the-p...
https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-inflation-reduction-act-everythi...
Plenty of transcripts.
> debt fueled hundreds of billion dollar corporate wellfare
I get it. However...
I'm totally on board with government investment and industrial policy. Like The New Deal, race to the moon, highways, waterworks, etc. IRA, by any other name, is industrial policy and massive investment.
IRA is about 1/3rd the scope of Build Back Better. Pretty much cut & paste. All the programs they could sneak thru reconciliation, because of stupid Senate budget rules.
There's always objectionable specifics. Like the carve out for Manchin's new pipelines. But that's politics. And they're a tiny fraction of the whole.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_footprint
I'm not saying that one shouldn't try to live more harmoniously if they can, but we shouldn't blame individuals for failing so solve problems caused by huge corporations, because it takes eyes away from where they really should be.
I'd compare this situation to a bus with broken brakes, packed with tourists, that's rapidly approaching a cliff. Everyone knows what to do, but is too afraid of the pain that would follow. So everyone is waiting and discussing solutions, such as rocking the bus to increase pressure on brakes, or opening windows to increase the drag. Some are blaming the driver, some are blaming the fat passengers who should've eaten more responsibly, but that's just a form of group therapy session.
If you want to fix id, you also need to educate people.
I'd love to, but it seems that approximately all manufacturers are no longer producing consumer goods that last forever, and we're in the last miles of a race to the bottom in terms of both product quality and reliable information about product quality.
The problem is usually the media rather than the science. Journalists turn everything into sensationalist claims.
By the way if we reset to the atmospheric conditions of a few hundred years ago this would be a certainty within a period of thousands of years at most. Much of the world’s population centers, agriculture, etc covered in hundreds of feet of ice.
A few papers in the 1980s were predicting global cooling, but those have been shown to be erroneous – sometimes even by the very same authors.
No? It's 2022 and our cities should be sunk in the ocean and we should be boiling or frozen and there should be no drinkable water left and blah blah blah.
https://insideclimatenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/AQ-...
They predicted 1C in 2005, and 2.5C in 2038. We are right on schedule.
They also predict global economic growth to halt in 2025 due to climate change impacts.
That’s plausible, given recent years’ industrial and agricultural climate disasters. However, on that metric, we’re probably a bit behind schedule. Five years, maybe?
Put another way, one group conflates the fact of CO2 increases + greenhouse effect with suggested political acrions. Another group counters by conflating not agreeing with political actions with disputing the underlying physics.
At some point we should probably start doing something – and enough – about it to maybe avoid the worst consequences?
Make them buy less because production is hindered due to various reasons and make them pay more for petrol and energy??
Hmm, Im curious whether we could do that on global scale. Maybe if there was some convinient way to tell ppl to stay at home.
Putting money into solving Renewable intermitency (either through large scale storage projects or nuclear) and decommisioning every single coal plant on earth (followed closely by gas plants) would be the single largest step change in emissions that has fuck all to do with 'consumer' behaviour.
"resist climate change" could mean different things. It's true that something like "rising CO2 raises global temperature" is uncontroversial, but agreeing to that doesn't get you anywhere close to implementing climate policy, or to even acknowledge that humans are the leading cause. For instance, you can agree that "rising CO2 raises global temperature", but still think that the warming is totally natural (ie. not primarily caused by humans) and/or that it's impossible for humans to stop. Polling suggests a good chunk of republicans believe in the former[1]. I suspect that most people would characterize those people as "resisting climate change" even if they believe that co2 leads to atmospheric warming.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/06/23/two-thirds-of...
The individual inconvenience of not doing that far outweighs the individual cost. Calling that selfishness is being far too generous.
The other side has been stating it as a causal relationship for over 40 years. Their projections have proven correct over that timespan.
Also, your argument about rhetoric justifies voting immorally whenever one side is universally in the wrong. (Examples from history include women’s suffrage, slavery, locking ethnic groups in camps, etc.) I don’t find it to be a useful way of thinking about political issues.
The solution is a strong constitution and independent courts that enforce it, ie liberal democracy.
- It’s scary
- It requires a substantial change in lifestyle
- It has become attached to politics, (particularly liberal, progressive politics) which makes it a representation of the “other”.
That aside, there is something to be said about seeing the predictions of your youth fizzle out. On the other hand, we have a tendency to romanticize the party and reframe ourselves relative to it. We remember things differently than they were.
My guess is that these older people probably think they’ll be gone soon anyway, so why give up air travel, gas guzzling cars etc? It is a problem for younger generations to deal with
It's because older people are used to the idea that they should be able to spend their money any way they like, and in order to combat climate change they are being told that they should consume less. Plus they probably don't care that much that their actions will cause suffering of future generations.
I think that is mainly true in a few countries where it has become a politically divisive issue
Not all predictions are equal. It's one thing to doubt predictions from random pundits, it's another thing to doubt the current scientific consensus. A lot of smart people from many countries have been working on climate change. They may be wrong in their conclusions but what they're telling us is the best prediction at our disposal.
> I wonder if that is why there is such resistance to climate change among older people...
Probably for the same reason there was resistance to vaccines. A lot of people aren't rationale at all and believe whatever suits their view of the world, even though it's in direct contradiction with all evidences.
The wide scale introduction of systems, required by laws and regulations, that drastically reduced the amount of sulfur byproducts released had a lot to do with that same thing regarding CFCs and the ozone layer.