Can video games change people’s minds about the climate crisis?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Games for years have had dystopian, catastrophic and other themes. Sure they have inspired some people but on the whole I don't see how this would be anymore effective than:
- A climate crisis flyer handed out by a hippie looking person at an organic food market
- A saturday morning talkshow piece presenting on how a farmers fields are suffering drought
- A 24 hours news story on wildfires
"In one ear, out the other".
And the response of the people who are usually saying things like "piss off, CoD doesn't make people shoot up schools" when the "violent video games cause..." trope is brought up will say a lot about them.
Regardless of whether video games do or don't alter behavior in a practical sense we'll at least get to see who's logically consistent and who flip flops.
Other benefits video games might have even over a great story seem like they’d be notable: highly visual, and more interactive than books.
But please, keep trying.
Anyone who says "the science is settled, the laws of physics cannot be violated" fails to realize what physics is even about. The vast majority of victories that physics has had since Isaac Newton are based on incredibly simplified models that strip out all of the complexity from a system. Basically everything interesting is treated as linear (as in f(x) ~ x) and a lot of the other stuff is just thrown into constants. After a few decades of working with that, both in theory and with experiments, you might get comfortable enough to add some small corrections to your theories. In this way you step closer and closer to "truth" but we are still very far off, even with our best physics, from fully understanding anything of even moderate complexity. This is not to say that we don't get incredibly useful results from physics (just look at our technology!), but it does mean that we need to constrain statements about how much we really understand and where our "laws" really are applicable. Take for instance the equation for kinetic energy, k=.5 * mv^2. Hugely useful, but dead wrong if you try to apply it to things moving at relativistic speeds.
The problem of climate science, from my perspective, is that we can't strip it down like we do for simple systems like a ball moving in space. Climate is inherently very complex; if you try to ignore how oceans interact with vegetation, how vegetation interacts with clouds, how clouds and rain are connected, etc, then your models can be interesting and might reveal something, but they can't be used to predict what will happen with any degree of confidence because they are too far removed from the real thing. And if you don't strip something out of the system when doing your modeling, well then good luck: you'll never understand anything at all because the thing is too complex to be used to calculate anything of interest.
edit: added some words.
edit2: more words.
There's however a consensus on the fact that it's going to be bad. What don't know is how bad. Which is IMHO frightening enough
I do think you make a great point, which is that the risks and rewards need to be considered. The problem is that analyzing the cost is also a pretty complex problem and there are very real arguments to be made that going green could end up being very costly.
FWIW, I actually came into the climate science debate on your side and have been won over by paying attention to a broader set of sources. One of the things I really can't stand about the climate change disaster is that even if you accept all the claims from the IPCC, it pales in comparison, in my opinion, to other issues that seem a bit simpler to me. The collapsing insect populations, for instance, can have a pretty direct impact on human health and happiness. The climate discussion seems takes all the attention even though no one has made a credible argument as to why it is more dangerous than other problems we face.
edit: I'll add that scientific modelling is _very_ difficult in general, even for much simpler systems than what we are talking about here. These models have tons of simplifying assumptions baked into them and they can be made to spit out just about anything, depending on what values for certain parameters are chosen. The tools aren't particularly trustworthy.
edit: I'll add a bit more. I do think climate change is happening and I do think that humans might have a big part in why it is happening. What I don't find compelling is why this is necessarily an end-of-the-world scenario. The typical argument is: "there has already been warming and there will be further warming. Then there will be runaway effects, then the warming will become extreme and life will become very difficult for most people in most places." Well I do agree with the first part, but it is _really_ hard to predict what happens afterwards, i.e. are there going to be runaway effects. There are reasonable arguments that there won't be. The arguments that there will be tend to focus on a few scientific facts and ignore the complexity of the system at large (i.e. they ignore negative feedback mechanisms and focus only on positive feedback).
The mere fact that an end-of-the-world scenario is possible should mobilize us all. End of the world is not something you gamble on. And, of course, it won't an end of the world, it will a slow and painful life on an unlivable planet.
Can you give me any positive feedback from the release of carbon ?
And I definitely think that relying on the weather a.k.a. "renewable energy" when you have solid prediction that its going to be unreliable, while your prediction of the possibility of averting the crisis is unknown, is beyond dumb. It's suicidal.
We're choosing the worst possible strategy right now. We have the highest probability of the worst case scenario: chaotic climate and weather while relying on said climate for energy generation. Planning for worst case is planning for the crisis happening regardless of your actions, because your confidence about the impact of your actions is pretty low.
There is no metric by which the current suicidal strategy makes sense. We're not minimizing the damage in the worst case. We're not adapting to the situation as it comes. The only scenario in which the current strategy has a better outcome is if we somehow were right about everything, not only about the impact of CO2, but about the geopolitical actions taken by China and India.
The probability that we're on the best possible strategy is practically zero.
Good luck.
Aside from borderline impossible claims of a runaway greenhouse effect, there is absolutely no world where human extinction is on the table and frankly I would argue that mass death is unlikely as historical evidence is by far in the favor of human adaptability.
I would argue that mass death happening somewhere else is almost an inevitability by historical arguments; it just doesn't look like it's climate related. Is a refugee from desertified Africa who drowns in the Mediterranean a "climate death"?
Mass death won't look like the Al Gore movie. It'll look like COVID: a line going up on a chart which people can ignore.
The appearance of consensus is manufactured by the media. They label each dissenter as an individual crazy person and somehow the mainstream narrative is the consensus.
And again, this labelling is done by the media. There's no high authority of science.
""" Dyson replied that "[m]y objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it's rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have." """
The consensus being withheld by the all the media that speak the voice of the elite is that you should go to work and not interfere with the money making machine. Realizing that climate change is an issue for humanity and doing something about it does interfere with the money making machine and only with threats of impending doom, does the machine slowly allow to modify its ways. But profit remains the sacred law.
I don't watch "the media" and I do my own labelling. I have read and seen enough conspiracist bs to tell the difference by myself.
Their predictions are basically useless. Decades ago these "debators" were arguing in favor of global cooling because solar activity is going down yet what we got is record temperatures after record temperatures practically every single year.
Even with correct data they intentionally misinterpret it or omit crucial factors. For example a graph where solar insolation, co2 levels and global temperatures are listed they remove the solar insolation data and then argue that there is no correlation between CO2 and global temperatures or state that past CO2 levels have been higher while ignoring that over the time of millions of years solar insolation has increased by a few percentage points and it takes less CO2 today to cause the same level of warming Vs millions of years ago.
Let's assume there was a "debate", why is one side acting in such a way? You would have to put on a tinfoil hat and explain this by saying something ridiculous like "the green lobby routinely funds junk science to discredit climate skeptics".
There is all the data of what is actually going on in the world. Temperature readings, satellite images, etc. This can be called science and it is evidence, but it doesn't come with anything saying what is causing it. The equivalent of a primitive man meticulously measuring the rain.
Then there is the conjecture that this is all because of CO2 and its all our fault. This is purely religious argument, not at all different than the good old "Gods are punishing us" argument from a primitive man. The only evidence for this argument are some trash computer models which are running far beyond their predictive capability.
It's also inevitable that if we have "global warming god" and "global cooling god", one would emerge victorious.
It isn't science, it's just masquerading as science. The data analysis of real world data is science. The trash computer models attributing all of this to CO2 aren't science.
These are similar to the computer models in the COVID crisis which have overshoot reality by orders of magnitude.
Civilization 1 had a "global warming" mechanic, which could be severely exacerbated by nuclear wars.
You have to admit that resolve to pay for a solar shade (or other discrete solution) is something you can sell to gamers. Otherwise, the main commodity being sold in the discussions of climate crisis is panic - you can see how it is clearly inferior.
That, and half-assed not-productized solutions like carbon capture, which don't even have a single chart where the good guys win decisively, regardless of amount of money spent.
Gamers are used to solving problems. Nobody comes up with solution to climate crisis.
> Nobody comes up with solution to climate crisis.
Oh, there are plenty of solutions, but none of them are free or easy, so nobody likes them.
We're talking about predicting an effect which is 10^-5 orders of magnitude different from current configuration, with tools that were tested and failed within much shorter timeframes (~ months instead of years) and all of this is the only "evidence". The prediction abilities of these tools are only around the general trend, they failed predicting the magnitude correctly. So around 10^1 orders of magnitudes of accuracy.
All of this by computer models which have horrible code, all copying from each other, and are extended way beyond their empirical testing - while being fixed with fudge factors called "flux adjustments".
All of this in an extremely chaotic system. The kind of chaos which has no hope for even short duration prediction.
It's not science. It's a religion. There are no confidence intervals on this because if they had done a systematic analysis of the entire thing, they would have to admit that the chaotic behavior dominates their analysis by several orders of magnitude.
They do have plenty of data for what is actually going on - but the conjecture that it is CO2 causing it (as opposed to being just chaotic behavior, other factors, anything else really) has very little evidence. They abuse conjunction fallacy to convince everyone.
You need to realize there are two questions:
1. What will be the climate decades into the future? T(CO2, t)=?
2. What is the effect of CO2 on all of this? T(CO2+ΔCO2, t)=?
Getting zeroth order of T is one thing. They did it pretty badly anyway. Getting the first order of T with respect to CO2 is another thing entirely.
Getting the answer to 2 correctly is much, much harder. You want to do the the derivative by CO2 ppm, and as you do that, you have 10^-5 factors on most things, because that's how much CO2 ppm there is.
I don't buy the narrative that they did this difficult thing correctly. Supposedly the leading order is something like how much CO2 increases absorption. It's going to have this 10^-5 factor of CO2 ppm there, and it's going to be what's causing this whole thing to happen. But if there are greater than 10^-5 errors in this calculation, the whole thing is useless. And they don't actually do this analytically, they just run it many times in a simulation.
I just don't buy the narrative that they manage to get meaningful signal out of that, not with how their code looks like, how chaotic the real system is, and their uncertainties about other parameters, there's just no way in hell they know this correctly.
Their evidence is that they have some pretty rough estimates for the zeroth order. The evidence for their confidence of the first order is extremely weak. And the narrative that CO2 matters is only meaningful if they have a good estimate of the first order.
However:
* If they agree with the general agenda regarding climate crisis, they still don't have any action points as they did not have them before playing the game. "Buy an electro car" and "pay all kinds of extra charges" just don't engage that much.
* If they already disagree with the general agenda regarding climate crisis, they would probably just roll their eyes if you try to change their mind. Especially as you may only reiterate the common, orthdox arguments which they have surely already heard multiple times.
But that book was written long ago, so fingers crossed game designers are making breakthroughs.