Many scientists don’t want to tell the truth about climate change. Here’s why

This backfired, repeatedly, and ultimately led to distrust of their statements when complete trust was necessary.

That said, I think science communication is an art form which takes skill and practice. If you are a scientist doing research on aspartame in mice or whatever, then what the media and laypeople are interested in is what the results mean for their lives. At some point you have to give your informed opinion or else others will interpret the results for you, probably incorrectly.

I think that the scientists are trying their best to communicate their professional interpretations of the data, but it's difficult to do so in a way that will please everyone. Especially when some parties are actively hostile to the message you are trying to communicate, and will nitpick whatever you say using the least charitable understanding.

But those trillion dollar industries fought against their own destruction, and continue to do so, and all of the other alternatives are worse.

The best time to fossilize the fossil fuel industries was 30 years ago. The second best time is right now.

Forget "conservatism." I posted an article a few days ago that made a convincing case that capitalism is no longer possible. It hit the front page, then got flagged to death all within 15 minutes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37628674

And it's all because the capitalist mind virus has taken hold to such an extent that ""the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it." [0] It's a sentiment that gets paraphrased into "people find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism."

In the entire history of capitalism and industrial society, neither global energy use nor global CO2 emissions have ever decreased, except for one brief instant when we shut everything down in order that many more of us wouldn't die of COVID. We're driving ourselves off a metaphorical cliff and laughing about it. We're not going to get the last laugh on this one.

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[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism

You and the article author are behind the curve. The coral reefs are fine and the idea of climate coral destruction has been debunked in the past few years. The Great Barrier Reef is currently at record highs for example, after a bleaching event in 2019 that coral "experts" said would wreck the GBR for at least a decade. By 2022 they had to walk that back completely as the reef rebounded far faster than they had ever imagined and reached never before seen growth.

Clearly, their understanding of corals is not good enough to make these sorts of predictions. There's also just a really basic problem with the coral/climate story: corals respond to fast local changes in temperature but CO2 is meant to create slow global changes in temperature.

But it's understandable you don't know this because almost nobody does. A survey done this summer showed that only 3% of Australians were aware that the GBR had reached record levels of coral. The majority still think the GBR is dying. This is for the same reason as covered in the article: academics like to tell stories that will cause people to behave in the right way, as they see it. Sometimes this means downplaying what they think, other times it means exaggerating it or not reporting good news.

Three-quarters of sampled Australian green voters believe the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is doing worse than usual, with 44% stating the coral is at a record low. Overall only 3% of all Australian voters knew that the coral was at a “record high” – the correct answer following two years of record growth that has broken all previous records.

The “phenomenal health” of the GBR is said to be virtually unknown, yet the public are paying half a billion dollars in taxes to save it. In addition the country is “being misled into thinking that expensive low carbon policies and Net Zero targets will help protect the reef, when there is no correlation between CO2 levels and coral cover”.

https://dailysceptic.org/2023/04/25/just-3-of-australians-ar...

The truth is readily available on demand and large numbers of people still behave like children.

It's far easier to convince people that it's a hoax when the scientists say things that aren't strictly true -- because they they get to debunk your minor exaggeration, which discredits you, and makes people more willing to believe the people who claim you're full of crap about everything.

When you see dishonest people succeeding, the conclusion to draw is that we need to redouble our efforts to fight dishonesty, not that dishonesty is an effective strategy that everyone should adopt.

The latter destroys anyone's ability to even know who is right, and who does that benefit?

> “The health of the coral is at a catastrophic loss,” Krediet said. “This is an unprecedented level of temperature increase and it happened at a rate that the corals cannot deal with. We went from healthy reefs to bleach reefs and dead reefs within 10 days.”

https://www.clickorlando.com/weather/2023/07/27/floridas-cor...

And the temperature just keeps going up. It might be months, years, maybe even a couple decades, but things keep looking worse and worse for the corals, and we're not doing enough to stop it.

USA is by far the worst climate change offender, and USA uses way more alarmist messaging than any other country I've seen. So to me it looks like alarmist messaging makes it worse, not better.

Facts and honesty does help, big tobacco lost, tons of countries all over the world have already added plans to ban fossil fuel cars in about a decade etc. The caveat is that it takes decades for that change to happen, and US "scientists" seems to always want to sway the current election in their favor, so they happily sacrifice trust and long term get those small short term wins.

A paper on exactly this : https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abcd5a

My suggestions would be these:

* Think about where your food comes from, and how it is fertilised. Read about different modes of agriculture.

* Think about minimising your energy usage, especially fossil fuels. Look at heat pumps, cycling infrastructure, that kind of thing.

* Learn about alternatives for building and anything else. Building with straw bales is a particular favourite of mine because it can be done so simplistically by people with relatively little training.

* Find projects where other people are doing stuff and join in. See the above article - self-efficacy is a muscle, build it by exercising it.

A great source of inspiration: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

Edit: also, we'll blow the 1.5C carbon budget in 8 years. Sorry - we'd have to cut emissions by 20% a year every year to avoid that. Plus sequestration of course.

It's really quite gross.

Climate change is due to, and a threat to, the status quo, and those who have gained their societal positions on the back of this status quo will defend the righteousness of their status literally to the death.

And these folks typically have communication platforms that reach a long way and therefore muddy the waters, often with the sideline cheering of said politicians.

This is what scares me the most. Obviously reach +1.5C is terrifying but what’s worse is the complete inaction of governments (and their citizens) around the world to make a dent in this.

Here in the UK our government are just a joke. The prime minister recently pushed back plans to ban sales of ICE vehicles. We are sleeping walking into a catastrophe and it’s depressing.

Apart from vote for green parties that never have a chance of getting into power what can I do?

I don't think that's going to convince anyone who isn't already convinced.

The public isn't going to change what?

China has 4 times the population of the US. They are only a bigger offender than the US if you believe that people who live in the US have some sort of natural or divine right to live a more emitting lifestyle that do people in China.

The atmosphere does not care about arbitrary political boundaries which makes per capita a better measure. By per capita emissions China is around the same as a typical European country, and half the US.

If we wanted to hold emissions to current levels, people in China are 56% above their fair share. People in the US are 220% above their fair share. (People in India are at only 40% of their fair share).

More important, China is building a ton of solar farms, wind farms, and nuclear plants, and a lot of pumped hydro storage (which when combined with solar or wind reduce or eliminate the need for fossil fuels to deal with the intermittent nature of wind and solar).

Compare to the US where every time the Presidency or control of Congress changes parties there is a 50/50 change that the new party in power will try to roll back any clean energy initiatives of the previous party and boost reliance on fossil fuels.

That means when China says they are going to be net zero by 2060 they have actually got a decent chance of achieving that, and if they don't it is more likely to be a "missed it by a few years" thing rather than a "abandoned it" thing.

The US currently has a 2050 goal for net zero but with the current political situation here it is likely to be 2030 at the earliest that we actually seriously start on the things we need to do to prepare for that.

what historians refer to as "The Cool Zone"

You can’t prepare for this as an individual. This is a global societal problem. The effects of climate change are predictable on a global scale but much less so on a local scale.

The podcast Doomer Optimism has some gems too, although the episode quality varies wildly.

Tucker Max (who has been a guest on the DO podcast) wrote an article with his take on "doomer optimism". It doesn't mention climate change; it's more about the general topic of preparing for the comic chaotic times, and he veers a bit too far into COVID conspiracism which I'm sure will put a lot of people off, but much of the specific advice is hard to argue with (eg take 100% responsibility; reorient your life towards the local). https://www.tuckermax.com/doomer-optimism-what-i-see-coming-...

But I'd also love to read/hear more advice in this general topic. And I'd also like to meet people who are as interested in these topics as I am, so if anyone reading this lives in the London/Oxford M40 corridor, get in touch!

Investments should avoid companies which have risks from climate change.

New reefs will probably grow in cooler waters, but it will not happen nearly fast enough. The entire ecosystem around the reefs will basically collapse before migration becomes even remotely viable.

The coral reef thing was more of a marketing campaign, it's beautiful, it dies quickly, you can see it almost live, but all in all it doesn't matter much

Ocean acidification, massive change in wind and ocean currents , the permafrost melting, loss of albedo in the poles, &c.

These are all much bigger problems we can't deal with at all, it'll start self reinforcing loops we can't even pretend to understand yet

Authoritarianism is bad because it works too well - for the authority. And while the authorities interests and everyone else’s may align well at the beginning, that is very unlikely after awhile. And then there is nothing anyone can do about it.