Climate predictions are complicated but the negative valence coupled with the confidence in your predictions doesn't represent that. That is what I am calling out as proportionality error. It is a version of "this plane crashing would be horrible, even though the probability multiplier is likely to be very small, I can so vividly envision the horrible outcome that I will behave as if it is more probable and have a panic attack". There is a lot of affective/emotional (so-called) reasoning. Not only that, we don't know to what extend (not if) we are projecting our unconscious, personal, perennial problems such as fear-of-death onto a global wish of world not existing after we die for example. Human beings are deeply religious creatures, and in absence of a structured spiritual approach to these problems, we are prone to deify and mythify what is around us. (To be crisply clear, I am not calling anthropogenic climate change a myth by any stretch of imagination, but it is a certainty that our responses are not in 100% correspondence to the reality of it, including as you rightly point out "pulling yourself under the covers and hoping the monster goes away".)
> After all, wasn't this sentiment one of the reasons we collectively failed to address this issue using the reasonable mitigations that were available to us when it was possible? A belief that the "scaremongering" being done by climate scientists for decades was out of proportion?
It wasn't the sentiment, it was the act of humbuggery around the inflated immediacy and absurd dramatization of outcomes, from the likes of Al Gore to Hollywood, that either turned people into apathetic nihilism or burned out defeatism. I am not saying these are single handedly responsible for this response; post-WWII onwards especially during the Cold War people have been culturally trained for these types of thinking and today we are seeing their protracted influence.
You turn to apathetic nihilism because your only alternative is panic. I myself have turned to opt-out nihilism—I try not to own stuff, don’t have progeny, looking to isolate on a small farm. Greta seems to be on a much better track: trying to influence the people who can make the decisions that will improve the outcomes. Maybe you should give it a shot.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Normally I wouldn't want to honor your manner of discourse by responding to it, but I want to make the case that one can still discuss the contents of an argument despite emotionality;
> You turn to apathetic nihilism because your only alternative is panic. I myself have turned to opt-out nihilism—I try not to own stuff, don’t have progeny, looking to isolate on a small farm.
I personally am pretty optimistic and excited regarding the prospects of tackling this problem, because embedded in it a plethora of large scale multi-agent coordination problems we ought to solve, and we do have the capacity for it. Incidentally, I think individual level solutions don't necessarily have the strategic depth to address what is essentially a problem of scale. But if you think you're doing the right thing, more power to you, at least at your scale you couldn't harm things even if you wanted to.
> Greta seems to be on a much better track: trying to influence the people who can make the decisions that will improve the outcomes.
Does her influence look like a success to you? It doesn't to me. Maybe there is a self-fulfilling prophecy in talking down to people, or appeals to romantic emotionality, instead of bringing the best and the most rational in them. Maybe rampant consumerism and lack of higher-order thinking to maneuver climate change are sibling problems, both intimately related to the problem of stupefaction of the masses.
Maybe calling people names is part of the shame-politics that attempt to turn adults into temporary children. Hijacking our deepest fears of ostracism in the name of some ostensible "greater good", but inadvertently reducing people's agency and higher order thinking, both of which are deeply needed to steer out of the problem.
You seem to be making the mistake of assuming all predictions are similar in scope and nature.
To use an analogy: predicting the specific effects of how a blast of heavy radiation will affect a human body is _complicated_. But a prediction of "this is going to hurt you badly" can be made with high confidence.
There's a universality here regarding complex systems, and it applies to human bodies, buildings, economies, geologies, and natural ecosystems alike. Complex, self-reinforcing systems do not fail linearly. Pressure cause cracks and minor symptoms as the system absorbs the initial stresses, and at some point systemic collapse occurs rapidly.
Concrete spalls, metal rusts, and when the time comes the building collapses rapidly as the reinforcing mechanisms fail one by one. Cancers form, mild symptoms are felt, and eventually the body succumbs in weeks or days as the final metastasized stages shut down vital functions. The ground is silent as pressure build, tremors are felt, and in a matter of seconds heaves to spew its burning contents.
The stressors on our world's ecosystems are numerous and myriad and well documented. The seas and fish populations are strained by plastic pollution and overfishing to feed a population that is an order of magnitude larger than existed just 100 years ago. Insect populations are observably collapsing in many parts of the world. Water tables have been severely depleted in many agricultural lands, including in many parts of the USA, but also places like southern india. These are the observable cracks. The article of this subject contains more.
Modern agriculture, at the rate of productivity that it operates at now, relies on the existence and viability of sophisticated supply chains that mine, produce, and deliver fertilizer, pesticides, and other "high-level economy" products that themselves depend on deeper supply chains.
Climate change and the rapid increase in global temperatures introduces a steady grind of increasing pressure - a new stressor to this complex system that is already heavily stressed to unsustainability, and is already showing it cracks.
We know for a fact that the stress will increase steadily and inexorably.
It is indeed possible to make high confidence statements that this is going to hurt us badly. It is wishful thinking to hope otherwise.
What _can_ be hoped for is mitigations. We may be able to mitigate some of the damage, if we try hard and fast enough.
I am with you. This is called the criticality of a complex adaptive system.
It is the grain of sand that will collapse a sand heap into chaos.
The problem is we don't know where the criticality point is, nor we qualify the knowability of that point, nor we know if the critical point is the most important thing to focus on, e.g. incremental degradation could just as well saturate our harm tolerance without really reaching a phase-shift point. The reason I am bringing these up is not to use skepticism to induce apathy, but to underline the fact that all of these axes require drastically different policy responses.
There is a risk in trying to invest the entire political, psychological and moral capital into an all-or-nothing apocalypse-countermeasure-policy-A if the system at hand actually needed a set of incremental countermeasures with policies B, C .. Z. This is the main objective in focusing on proportionality, to ensure our response is the appropriate one.
Incrementalism doesn't make headlines the way apocalypticism does and over-salience of criticality might be distracting us in a way that brings us closer to it. Demonstrated time and again, it doesn't rally people to action, it doesn't seem to enchance our agency, and maybe even hurts it.
We know that given the inertia we have currently, we are almost guaranteed to hit it. We cannot stop on a dime, and even if we did, the existing inertial effects will continue.
> Incrementalism doesn't make headlines
It also doesn't really work, as evidenced by the complete failure of the incrementalist "reduce, recycle, reuse" campaign, which effected nothing and might well have acted as a safety blanket to prevent serious policy.
But the failure here lies more in a politically dominant demographic that was not ready to understand any reality that might involve policy that impacted material costs or the conveniences, combined with the fact that any relevant solution necessarily would involve those sacrifices.
Alarmism works just fine as a political tool, and it has worked to spur action on many issues - legitimate or not. In this particular case, the alarmism is certainly warranted. And generational shifts allow for a more receptive audience for that message.
After all, wasn't this sentiment one of the reasons we collectively failed to address this issue using the reasonable mitigations that were available to us when it was possible? A belief that the "scaremongering" being done by climate scientists for decades was out of proportion?
> Cool-headed rationality and straigthforward honesty don't have the same downsides of excessive demoralization or creating a credibility fatigue.
I'm confused as to what part of my commentary you found irrational or dishonest.