I'm not saying there won't be negatives, but to say we are all going to die, is absurd to the extreme. Unfortunately that is common today, however it is merely one in a long line of apocalyptic movements which have been common in every century in recorded history.
But you said:
> The ideology of wanting humans to not send themselves to extinction
It seems pretty clear you are implying we will literally go extinct because of global warming. This is crazy.
Given even a slight, non-zero risk of us doing that, if you have the stance that we shouldn't, it's reasonable to take steps to reduce the risk.
I could have been way more succinct and less sarcastic with my original comment, but it hardly seems worth the effort when replying to a post like theirs.
We're not going extinct any time soon unless someone decides to launch nuclear weapons.
It's implying that we are sending ourselves towards extinction, just as if you were sending yourself towards obesity by continually consuming 10,000 Calories per day. What is really crazy is that there are still climate change deniers that exist in this comments section.
Other claims include that "by 2020 'catastrophic' shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war.' It's further suggested that this will also come with "widespread crop failure, famine, disease, and mass migration of populations..." And that's just from "my" era. As you go further back, you will find similar reports. Here's [2] one I dug up from 1982: "Monstafa K. Tolba, executive director of the United States environmental program, told delegates that if the nations of the world continued their present policies, they would face by the turn of the century "an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible, as any nuclear holocaust."
If I could go back 80 years into the past and try to optimize the world for climate action I would make sure that any and all predictions made appealed not to the drama of the high end outliers in order to try to spur on immediate action, but instead did the exact opposite and assumed the low end outliers - so that people would have decades of evidence of my predictions not only coming true, but being far greater in impact. At least in my case, you can thank hyperbolic messaging for the reason I've gone from 'active advocate' to 'meh, I'm somewhat more concerned about nuclear war tbh.'
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.t...
[2] - https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/1982.j...
Logically, your claim (that catastrophizing drives people away from activism) doesn't make much sense. If you still think that environment has same value as you did in the past, then you should still support the ecological policies, regardless what people are saying. If you only supported them because of catastrophism and not because you don't inherently value it, then you were misled and shouldn't have advocated it in the first place.
What I am saying is you have moral agency, and if you feel misled by other people's factual claims (e.g. exaggerating the impact, regardless of reason), it shouldn't change the validity of your moral stance or your values. But if your values didn't change, you're still an advocate, although perhaps with a different outlook.
I find the whole thing very exhausting. Fine let’s reduce carbon but I’m not going to live my life in panic and depression because of this.
Thinking that mass famine/flooding/heat events in Africa, India, or South America isn’t going to affect you is incredibly naive. Instability ain’t good, and we can’t just welcome it with open arms. Shit that happens in Wuhan, Donetsk and elsewhere do affect you
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-study-rising-...
On social media I've noticed a trend where people attribute every bad thing that immediately comes to mind to climate change. War, extinction, famine, disease and pestilence, I've even seen people confidently throw increases of rape in there when describing the impending hellscape sure to befall humanity in the next x years due to climate change, citing some very dubious chain of correlative logic.
The truth is that a warming planet will change things but not all changes are bad for humans, and those that are bad are not all catastrophic or unmanageable. I think it will do everyone some good to take a step back and look at things with an analytical and curious eye, and reject the urge to panic or spread addictive but harmful fear porn.
That’s quite a buried lede. At best it evens out all the bad effects
I honestly don’t know how to reconcile our worldviews here, and I envy your optimism. But “just wingin it” isn’t what brings about good change. Those with curious and analytical eyes should see that our actions vis a vis climate change and other things have consequences. Good or bad, who really knows. But why are we committing ourselves before knowing?
Seems pretty dumb
It's irrelevant if Ukraine produces 20% extra if other countries can't make enough food. You can't always assume international trade is there or that poor countries, especially, can afford it.
In the past, current deserts (Iraq / Mesopotamia) were much more hospitable to plants and life. Now they are not. Climate change has been a fact of life for all of human history. Now it may be man made, but that doesn’t change the fact that we have lived through this before. The Bible is full of stories regarding drought, famine, floods. That is part of nature.
That said, the globe will be easier to live on if the +x degrees C is minimized from pre-industrial temperatures. Like I'm sure humans will make it but it's up to us the quality of that existence and if we'll share it with current species.
I also get that the globe goes through cycles and the suns heating up in solar cycles, etc. Still pushing more ocean water into the atmosphere, sinking thermal energy into the oceans where we are using up the latent energy of ice melt, (after which there is less cooling capacity available in liquid water than surface ice at constant temperature), acid-ification of oceans that provide food for much of the globe, accelerating arid-ification of already progressing geological areas like US southwest or sub-Saharan Africa, all of these could in part be natural progressions. But if its in our control to reduce the greenhouse gas concentration (that has mechanistic explanation for heat capture, it is not blind correlation) in air or do something crazy like atmospheric geoengineering more people and plants and animals would face a better shot.
Global average temperatures are one part of the story. There is high-frequency temporal variance and spatial variance. Its possible to make a rough order-of-magnitude approximation for energy released in a hurricane. Higher incidence of high wind and heavy rain hurricanes is a measured (~100 years) value. We won't get rid of storms or famine & flood magically. But maybe transitioning from burning stuff for all energy and adopting more scalable living models wrt density and transportation could slow down the bad effects. Its not a conspiracy. Plenty of companies want to capitalize on teh movement but that doesn't invalidate the underlying motivation to change from the current state.