If there's no way back, then why bother with painful mitigation efforts?
But seriously, this sort of "it's over, there's only doom ahead" is, IMO, counterproductive and hurts the efforts to help the environment more than it helps.
But seriously, this sort of "it's over, there's only doom ahead" is, IMO, counterproductive and hurts the efforts to help the environment more than it helps.
They said "every step on our current trajectory could represent a threshold triggering processes past which there is no return", and while it's left implied, the implication is that maybe we should consider stopping our current trajectory an emergency, much in the same way that someone who realizes they're as yet intact within a minefield might stop blithely strolling along even if the next step is only a marginal risk, not a guarantee of disaster.
Climate change is going to suck, but I focus on the fact that we've been fighting against really horrifically bad reasoning skills. Climate change is really basic chemistry; if we can't get people to agree on that how are we ever going to solve problems with any actual complexity?
Climate change denial is associated with a ton of other ideological issues that cause a lot of people a lot of harm, today, in first world countries. Not all of them are as scientifically definitive, but they share a pattern of people expressing opinion as fact.
I feel like painful mitigation efforts are too grand to even think about. A lot of issues come down to leaving people alone to make their own decisions, with no effect on anyone else, and we can't even have that.
So for me the mitigations are less about dealing with climate change and more about hoping climate change deniers realize just how reprehensibly they've handled this entire thing. But I'm not optimistic about that.
Dollars.
People’s livelihoods depend on not understanding, so they don’t. We must incentivize understanding and propose a workable solution, which is basically a way to manufacture gasoline, diesel and natural gas out of literally thin air, because transitioning to electric everything is not happening due to natural resources constraints (thinking of mining primarily).
You can see this very well when compare American vs European climate change debate - in Europe is a very passive "not doing anything useful" while actually everybody gives at least lip service that something has to be done. This is because there was less opportunity to couple the debate into politics in an concentrated way. In the US the 2 party thing makes that very easy and the whole thing has staying power as an "issue" so it probably needs comparatively little or even no investment to keep alive.
In the EU I can only directly speak for Germany but to me it seemed like there were no direct attacks against the concept of climate change directly (although we get some splash damage from the US). most issues stem from single big companies or industry groups trying to bend things to their advantage. A good example that is maybe best known international is the "Clean Diesel" thing that VW so disastrously chose because it was short term cheaper than investments into EV technology. This is what in the end lead to the diesel scandal. There are better examples but they get too local to be as easy to explain.
> A lot of issues come down to leaving people alone to make their own decisions
Stupid people still have a sense of right and wrong. I would suggest you are hoping for things that many people find wrong while reframing the conversation to discredit them.
The reality is worse than this. Most people that strongly believe in climate change are also ignorant of basic chemistry, promulgating solutions that betray their lack of understanding of e.g. the laws of thermodynamics. On top of this, most people's understanding of chemistry is at the naive level of basic lab chemistry. When you need to scale chemistry, especially at planetary scales, it plays by a completely different set of rules and we largely pretend these rules don't exist because 1) they are too complex for most people to understand and 2) they are inconvenient for those selling easy solutions.
I am a climate doomer of sorts, having working on climate off and on for decades, but not because the problem cannot be mitigated in theory. Currently, both "sides" are delusional about the science and economics of regulating the climate. The public discourse is almost entirely soundbites from people disinterested in the science while trying to smuggle in unrelated ideological agendas, regardless of the side they claim to represent.
As long as scientifically literate perspectives are considered a fringe take, progress on this matter will be limited and in many cases coincidental. I don't see this changing anytime soon.
I guess denial is a tough shell, some people even manage to be world leaders even if they deny reality all the way. We are some funny irrational apes aren't we...
Family one is calm and logical. Has a good idea of what’s going on but up until the very end doesn’t believe it could be that.
Family two is a couple where the wife is someone who’s natural demeanor is “People Suck” and the husband is a professor (re: intelligent) but still entirely uninformed about the world, having resigned any sense of responsibility to anything but his family
The third is a conservative “prepper” type, who is similar to family one but believes everything is the work of outside forces who “hate the US” to be at fault, missing many signs of dysfunctional society around them (while being aware of a few others)
Why am I bringing this up? Because my thesis is that the middle familty represents the average American mindset, which is truly only concerned with their immediate problems and thoughts at the end of the day and is incapable of reasoning about the importance of solving major problems facing society. The other two families seek to sway as many people from this average bloc as much as possible to their causes, but both also have a fatal flaw: they’re unable to believe that it’s our own society that is at fault, either entirely or until it’s too late, and the kind of honest reflection it takes to have that very real conversation with ourselves and the country as a whole.
That, in essence, is what I think is the root of the problem
I don't mind that we're irrational apes. It's just that all of the other apes don't go around telling each other how rational they are and demanding that we keep providing proof over and over.
Whereas exerting effort to antagonize a portion of the public despite knowing what the consequences of that are (they will dig in even harder) is something other than bad reasoning.
This planet is an exhibition of unrealized mass delusion, fuelled by mass specialized education, which further amplifies the phenomenon.
> Climate change is really basic chemistry...
It is also an extremely complex metaphysical phenomenon (watch out for that word "is", it is a doozy - also: it underlies most everything in our "reality").
Have you ever read any history of science, of times before we knew far less than we do now? How likely do you think it is that we have everything about causality figured out now, despite humanity (mostly) only studying the physical realm (while laughing at and calling names of those who do otherwise, some of whom actually recognize the folly in the current Streetlight Effect approach)?
> ...if we can't get people to agree on that how are we ever going to solve problems with any actual complexity?
Well, we always have the option of pulling the most powerful toolset in our arsenal out of storage: philosophy. Well, at least in theory we have this option (it is physically possible, but it may not be metaphysically possible).
> Climate change denial is associated with a ton of other ideological issues that cause a lot of people a lot of harm, today, in first world countries. Not all of them are as scientifically definitive, but they share a pattern of people expressing opinion as fact.
All ideologues state opinions as fact - take your comment for example. Even worse: doing so is a strongly enforced cultural norm - doing otherwise "is" "being pedantic".
> I feel like painful mitigation efforts are too grand to even think about.
The grandness is surely a problem, but our lack of capabilities in general thinking abilities is an even bigger problem in my view (a self-reinforcing problem, which makes it extremely possible to even realize).
> So for me the mitigations are less about dealing with climate change and more about hoping climate change deniers just how reprehensibly they've handled this entire thing.
Are you familiar with this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
To add to the controversy, I will add this gem: why during these conversations is the question of the degree to which our "democracy" is illusion[1] so rarely mentioned? It is (or at least could be) the primary coordinating force of humans, and human coordination is a pre-requisite for solving if we're going to address this problem - why is it that people are not able to care about such things? What is it about the system we live in that makes it not possible for people who are experts in systems analysis to analyze as a system?
Will we now stick with convention and see an exhibition of 2023 memetics in response to this "hot take" of mine?
[1] I would like to hope that we've moved past the binary question of is it an illusion by this point.
s/impossible/annoying/
Says who? We've been parroting the opposite message ("there's still time! go solar! electric cars!") is CLEARLY not working.
I'm a climate change doomer, in that I'm certain our children will live in a very different world than us, and there's a real (10%+?) chance of total environmental collapse in our lifetimes. The positive feedback loops are inescapable.
The science is the science...who are we to lie to people hoping that the lie somehow inspires mass coordinated change?
Implying we alreayd know everything we need to know, which is patently untrue. People who discuss science as a settled matter should be treated with suspicion.
Namely:
- we know a mechanism that causes global warming, which is empirically proven and theoretically backed.
- multiple scenarios of positive feedback loops that result in rapid warming
- very few ideas even for positive feedback loops that result in cooling
- little to no demonstrated political will to act decisively.
Seems to me like we know a lot!
I suppose I could be described as a doomer too, but I think this understates the issue. Even if we got carbon emissions to zero today, we're facing a very real chance of imminent ecological collapse in our lifetimes. Climate change is just the tip of the iceberg.
To all appearances, (post)industrial civilization is not sustainable, whether or not you use fossil fuels.
"Global Warming doesn't exist"
"Sure it exists, but humans are not responsible"
"Well sure, it's human made, but we can't do anything about it now"
1. CO2 is not actually increasing.
2. Even if it is, the increase has no impact on the climate since there is no convincing evidence of warming.
3. Even if there is warming, it is due to natural causes.
4. Even if the warming cannot be explained by natural causes, the human impact is small, and the impact of continued greenhouse gas emissions will be minor.
5. Even if the current and future projected human effects on Earth's climate are not negligible, the changes are generally going to be good for us.
6. Whether or not the changes are going to be good for us, humans are very adept at adapting to changes; besides, it's too late to do anything about it, and/or a technological fix is bound to come along when we really need it.
It is something similar to the Red Queen Race, we should be running as fast as we can to keep things as they are and even faster to improve. But so far we are still accelerating into the wrong direction. And what we are doing is what may turn something into a practical impossibility rather than what is theoretically possible.
For decades the primary point of discussion with regards to climate change is "the right way to talk about it." And as far as I can tell, that's only ever shot us in the foot. Too optimistic, and people don't act because they think it's not that bad or that someone else will deal with it; too pessimistic, and everyone will apparently just shut down and not do anything about it because why bother.
Call me crazy but perhaps we should stop thinking about it this way and simply deal with the science and the facts as head-on as possible, and that includes not calling out accurate representations of where we're at and where we're going as "counterproductive."
A negligible (both in terms of numbers and wealth) part of the world population feel this way. I guess most people actually still barely think about these things while they continue to live their lives as they come. In a lot of counties the discussion is still barely taking place.
Because there's a way forward
If we didn't downplay "the doom" for years now (and your framing is exactly kind of that), we maybe wouldn't be so tight in running out of time and getting into more and more risky situation.
We collectively didn't. We did quite the opposite by giving airtime to any quack predicting the end of the world, so much so that encountering "end of the world people" is a common trope in American sitcoms.
(Edit: Hell, watch a documentary from the late '70s on "Global Cooling" to see what I mean. The episode of "In Search Of…" narrated by Leonard Nimoy is my suggestion.)
If the "The End Is Nigh!" people hasn't ever existed, then I think the warnings over the past 4+ decades would have been taken far more seriously.
As it is now, most are afraid of lending an ear to a boy crying "Wolf!". It sucks.
We need both. We need both a hopeful view of the future, and one that warns us what will happen if we don’t take action.
A lot of the doom visions are going to come true even if we do take aggressive action today. But remember, bad can always be worse.
The optimist designs the airplane, and the pessimist designs the parachute.
There also seems to be no harm in drinking just another pint - until the the next morning, when you feel the hangover.
“Post pandemic” (it’s not over for many people, but officially the govt considered it over) was the best time to enforce that and they simply didn’t.
If the US had spearheaded less and no commuting for the majority of American workers, this would’ve set a trend worldwide.
Heck, we can even make it a required part of our trade deals.