We live in absolute best time in human history to expect your kids to have a good life. Climate change is tiny compared to the technical and medical revolutions humanity has experienced.
It might be a quirk of human psychology to not be able to really "feel" the difference between relative and absolute, but it doesn't matter. Its just how people see the world.
I'm not sure I could agree with that statement. Regarding global warming, sure, although we can't be certain to what degree. But many other aspects, such as treatment options, simply weren't available before - and for sure many other will appear (as will new diseases, but still...).
There is always something to worry about Peter Lynch said in the 90s. And yes I worry about climate change. It’s a big problem. However, technology innovations as a whole go up exponentially since the industrial revolution. I don’t see clear evidence why that would stop now.
The paths they focus on, maybe.
Certainly not the only paths, or even the likely paths.
To the chagrin of hyper capitalists and tech boosters, being able to run a million computations a second in your pocket is NOT a replacement for affordable food, housing, and a society that believes in helping other people. Candy crush doesn't fill your stomach. Cheap entertainment doesn't stop you from getting arrested for sleeping on the sidewalk because you were thrown out of your tent on the side of the road. Different products and market segments do not replace each other in the majority of cases.
Previous generations could live a full life on a single, boring, average salary, including paying for occasional entertainment and splurges. Microchips don't magically unfuck the rest of the economy, and arguably have only worsened income inequality, the imbalance of power due to individual wealth, and the hatred of the destitute and "have nots"
But add up all the deaths and inconveniences from this, assume it gets worse, and the world is still incredibly better off than it was in the 1980s.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nasa-climate-scientist-says-wer...
NASA Climate Scientist Says "We're Toast" (2008)
James Hansen told Congress on Monday that the world has long passed the "dangerous level" for greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and needs to get back to 1988 levels. He said Earth's atmosphere can only stay this loaded with man-made carbon dioxide for a couple more decades without changes such as mass extinction, ecosystem collapse and dramatic sea level rises.
"We see a tipping point occurring right before our eyes," Hansen told the AP before the luncheon. "The Arctic is the first tipping point and it's occurring exactly the way we said it would." Hansen, echoing work by other scientists, said that in five to 10 years, the Arctic will be free of sea ice in the summer.
Ten years later in 2018 there were no mass extinctions, ecosystem collapse and the Arctic had plenty of ice in summer. But the world is still going to be destroyed, this time within 5 years.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/01/15/carbon-p...
We Have Five Years To Save Ourselves From Climate Change, Harvard Scientist Says (2018)
The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero," said James Anderson[, a Harvard University professor of atmospheric chemistry]. "Can we lose 75-80 percent of permanent ice and recover? The answer is no."
The Arctic is still full of ice, there is currently more than there was at this time in 2012 and we are still not toast.
More extreme weather doesn't mean you can't go outside and play. It means mega-droughts. It means crop failures. It means extreme flooding. It means paying more for everything as more people fight over fewer resources. Wealthy countries will be able to somewhat deal with drought in parts of their territory, but poorer countries will experience more famine and hunger. More people will die from heat-related illness.
>But add up all the deaths and inconveniences from this, assume it gets worse, and the world is still incredibly better off than it was in the 1980s.
In the 1980s, an American with a high school education could expect to make a good living and maybe have a stay at home parent.
Most modern Americans wont be able to buy a house much more raise a family on a single income. Everything is getting rapidly expensive while wages stagnate or decline through inflation.
It's a whole generation where people know they'll never own a home or be able to retire, unless they don't have kids.
Aside from that, you are still wrong, as per cmh89's comment.
1. Social Security and Medicare benefits are being paid for by currently working (read: younger) people.
2. Retirement funds invested in equities and bonds require continued productivity by younger generations to retain value.
Maybe parents don't rely on their specific offspring, but they definitely rely on society's offspring as a whole.
The conditions of 30K years ago are interesting to consider, but also largely irrelevant to a current population adapted to the current status quo.
It will be of little comfort to reflect on the extreme environments of the past when current standards of living decline relative to what they are today.
We’ll adapt to whatever new local lows are to come, but for many people this conversation will always be about change relative to now and current expectations about what it means to live a “normal” life.
Murder rates are rising, and there seems to be very little political will to make the systemic changes needed to address this.
Why would life expectancy continue to climb? Setting aside issues related to extreme weather and/or forced migrations in some regions, and taking into account recent trends like extreme spikes in colorectal cancer in younger adults for reasons we have yet to understand, and increasing awareness of the health impacts of various chemicals, plastics, etc, it seems problematic to assume higher life expectancy.
Health outcomes may improve in certain categories, but it seems almost certain that it will degrade in others.
I think a lot of people (myself included) would feel more at ease if we as a society were doing _anything_ to combat the projected worst case scenarios or at least give the illusion that we have things under control. It feels like every week there is a new story about some concerning weather event (fires, heat waves, droughts) giving more evidence to the doomer perspective.
This document goes through all the data for the UK and shows this to be true using the government's own numbers and charts:
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2023/06/UK-weather-2...
e.g. "Since the naming of storms began in 2015, they have gained more attention in the media and amongst the public, with the consequent misapprehension that they are becoming more common. In reality, wind storms have been declining in both frequency and intensity since the 1990s"
This page presents charts for number of heatwaves, forest burn area, hurricane frequency and energy and tornados in the USA over time. They all show no problems and in some cases declines in extreme weather.
https://realclimatescience.com/extreme-weather/
But reporting this sort of thing is left to non-profit bloggers because the news industry wants you to be scared, all the time, because scared people read the news a lot. This can result in insane outcomes, like the Washington Post telling you that a lack of hurricanes is "terrifying"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/...
Weather events: terrifying when they're there, terrifying when they aren't. There's a theme here.
Now do you have anything to say about the actual data, which is what's interesting here?
> If the "data" is genuinely interesting then I'm happy to leave it to the experts to analyse it.
The "data" is the government's own data and if you delegate to people who have a clear profit motive to exaggerate/lie about what it says, and a track record of doing so, then you're going to continue to believe things that aren't true. In which case you should let the rest of us get on with actual analysis and debate instead of trying to kick up mud about the people doing it.
I like to compare our world with a bottle garden that kids in high school use for experiments.
Some species might really flourish in this garden. But only time tells if it’s composed in a way to be stable.