You're not alone. As someone who lives in the PNW I dread fire season (summer) now because it means we could have days of smoke and dangerously high particulate levels - having your air full of smoke such that you can barely see across the street for days tends to awaken a primal fear. And there's a huge dead zone now forming off of our coast which is killing untold amounts of marine life (not to mention that marine life that died in last months heat dome event). We've trashed the place and most people don't seem to be even mildly concerned.

What's worse is that, well, just no one is willing to do anything at all about it. Nobody in society is willing to sacrifice anything to stop it. We're still going to drive cars to work, everything disposable is still going to be made of plastic, we're still going to burn coal to power our bitcoin miners, and we're still going to eat large quantities of meat at every meal.

Frankly, it's become very difficult to have anything but a fatalist view of the whole thing.

Don't worry about things that aren't under your control. All you're going to do is have a mental breakdown. Focus on what you can control - which is your own carbon footprint. Work on ways to reduce it while living a reasonably "normal" life. Heck, you can even regularly report on it and be a celebrity greenie of sorts. Don't fret though - you simply can't control it.

It will happen much more quickly than people realize since the totality of what I’ve read seems to be “our models about it are too conservative”. The big question will be whether there’s a very significant impact to this in the western world. We’ll feel secondary effects and coastline habitability will shift, but I suspect the point where we see it directly in the west is when the entire world is in turmoil. Even still, there will be people here talking about illegal immigration rather than what causing that.

The flooding, drought, heatwaves and wildfires in the US and Europe are significant impacts on the western world. That's happening right now. There's no question at this point about whether Western and developed countries are going to be hit hard.

Those impacts can be dismissed or chalked up to just a mild worsening of existing trends. Additionally, these issues are generally weathered relatively well by the impacted communities and insurance helps them rebuild/relocate.

That is a very different experience from going through something like the Arab spring or the Syrian civil war if they were indeed the result of fault lines cracking under the weight of global warming.

The difference is in one model you live through a traumatic experience but society is largely there to help you through and the broader society doesn’t really share your pain. In the other model society falls apart.

> Those impacts can be dismissed or chalked up to just a mild worsening of existing trends. Additionally, these issues are generally weathered relatively well by the impacted communities and insurance helps them rebuild/relocate.

And how many times per decade (per year ?) can it be weathered ?

We got lucky in Western Europe with the recent flood. What when it happens in December or January next time ?

I bring it up anyway - COVID or climate disaster. I mention it in work meetings or with friends/family.

It's a fact of life.

I don't dwell on it - simply note it, then move on with the rest of the discussion. Ignoring the realities you're facing (bad air, threat of evacuation, etc) simply to avoid discomfort seems worse to me.

The irony is, the avoidance of the problem is a causative factor of the problem. Everyone here, including me, contributes to global warming and we "avoid" the problem by continuing to contribute.

This isn't an "everyone does it" problem though. This is a lack of regulation and government problem.

It's like blaming plastic consumption on consumers. Consumers aren't the problem, corporations are. Coke doesn't HAVE to use plastic bottles, they can use cans for everything. Yet they are one of the 1 producers of plastic waste.

Carbon production is much the same. The vast amount of it comes down to corporate production of carbon that is completely out of the average persons hands to change. I can't control how a tomato gets shipped to my grocery store, and it's frankly unreasonable to think I could locally grow all my goods. I can't change the fact that my work forces in-office work.

The fact is, burning fossil fuels is cheap, and if we want that to stop then the quickest and surest way is to tax it. Once it becomes more expensive to burn fossils you can bet corporations and individuals will bend over backwards to avoid it.

The climate problem is a failure of government and lack of regulation problem, not an individual problem.

The individual does, ostensibly, have voting power and economic decision making capability.

I have decided to buy no pure-ICE going forward.

I am a single-issue climate voter.

Enough people making these choices can precipitate change. Why is Tesla selling every vehicle it can make and have such a high stock valuation?

> The individual does, ostensibly, have voting power and economic decision making capability.

I'd say the voting power is the #1 thing individuals can do to affect change. The economic decisions are, frankly, only something that the well off can afford to do.

However, it must be understood that real impact needs regulation. It's not enough for all the well off to drive Teslas. It's not enough to install solar on your home. It's not enough to run your own home garden.

Does it have impact? Some. But we are talking about orders of magnitude problems. All the work you do gardening doesn't come close to addressing the amount of CO2 pushed out by the airline industry, cruise industry, or shipping industry.

The main thing you can do is vote for politicians that will go after climate change (or at a minimum, won't stand in the way of politicians that do).

This is an Amdahl's law problem.

Partly agree with you. It's look like analogy with smoking in my country. Government put taxes into stick and cigarette and many people stop smoking because of insane prices by pack

> The fact is, burning fossil fuels is cheap

Subsidized, even.

I literally told family members "I'm going to mention climate change in every conversation from here on out" and then brought it up, even if I just mention in passing or find a way to involve it in the conversation as a joke.

Five years later, and my parents are now single-issue climate voters.

This is how you do it. It's a fact of life, not some "theory". Not discussing it is the real problem.

I just started to do the same

My condolences to your parents and family.

I'm not trying to be rude, but, why are you worrying about it?

From a "the children are our future" perspective, sure, future generations will have a harder time. Poor and coastal communities will be displaced, there'll be economic hardships, and in general life is going to just be harder.

But it's not like we haven't faced hardships before. In fact, it's such a well-known problem that we probably have more solutions (both short-term and long-term) than for any other disaster we might face. Even in the worst case, it's manageable.

> From a "the children are our future" perspective, sure, future generations will have a harder time.

I very much dislike this perspective. Climate change is happening __now__. It is affecting us __now___. It is costing __us__ billions of dollars a year. Not future generations, __us__.

Not trying to bait or anything, just genuinely curious which disasters we've spent billions on as a result of climate change? I'm not talking about things like oil spills or results of corporate environmental neglect. I'm talking about natural disasters that are happening that can be directly tied to human-driven climate change.

For example — as far as I can tell, we have little evidence the forest fires in the PNW are directly impacted by climate change. When humans have been the direct cause, it's been things like cigarettes or fireworks starting fires that then spread to 100s of thousands of acres. That's not climate change as far as I can tell.

Take this article for example → https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/07/climate-change-disasters-cau... and this excerpt:

"The six costliest disasters of 2020 occurred in the U.S, the worst of which was Hurricane Laura. The storm caused $13 billion in damage after it devastated parts of Louisiana in August. The Atlantic hurricane season saw a record 30 named storms and accounted for $43 billion in losses, almost half of the total disaster loss in the U.S. last year, the report said."

What does this have to do with human-driven climate change? There's no source or data that shows the hurricanes are caused by humans or that humans are even contributing to the cause. This article from climate.gov talks about aerosols, but still, not great studies and not great data → https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/enso/how-humans-...

I find it hard to argue these points with climate change deniers because the data doesn't appear to be all that great. So I'm very curious how others are able to have fact based conversations so people can actually start coming to the realization that we do have a strong impact on the climate.

> For example — as far as I can tell, we have little evidence the forest fires in the PNW are directly impacted by climate change. When humans have been the direct cause, it's been things like cigarettes or fireworks starting fires that then spread to 100s of thousands of acres. That's not climate change as far as I can tell.

There's a misunderstanding here, I think. Yes, there is a direct cause by someone lighting a fire and then that fire burning. But there's other variables here that are highly influenced by climate change. Let me give a small example: What happens when you throw a lit cigarette butt on a well watered (but currently dry) and maintained lawn? You should know that the answer is nothing. The cigarette butt goes out. But what happens if you do it on a dry lawn? Very different story. This is how climate change helps drive more and worse wildfires than the past. We can see that there are larger number of acres burned per year[0]. But we can't look at that alone, let's look a precipitation trends in the PNW[1]. It's kinda a bold claim to not see the connection when we're going through a literal heat wave (it hasn't even been a month since the PNW set several heat records. My city hit 3 in one weekend). We can see that by year CA fires are becoming more frequent and more acres are burned[2]. Here's what happens. When there's a drought lots of plants die. Then there are flash rains. Lots of new growth that is able to capitalize on the rich soil from fertilization due to ash (ash is a great fertilizer). Heat then dries out all these low growth plants that are unable to sustain temperature swings like their more long lived brethren. Lots of dry shrubbery becomes lots of tinder. Now enter some idiot with a cigarette driving down the highway. Is that idiot to blame? Yes. Are they the only sole cause to the event that unfolds? Clearly not.

> There's no source or data that shows the hurricanes are caused by humans or that humans are even contributing to the cause.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. There is a clear positive trend between the number of hurricanes and tropical storms over the last hundred years[3], you can see the same thing with tornadoes. I'm not sure why you think this isn't related to climate change. Hurricanes are so prevalent in the Alantic Basin because that is where you get mixing of warm and cold air (warm air coming from the east from Africa and cold air coming from the north). Add more warm and more cold and you got more powerful hurricanes (you can see that in the trend too. Part of what that means is more storms upgraded to hurricanes and major hurricanes).

> I find it hard to argue these points with climate change deniers because the data doesn't appear to be all that great.

This is where I'm confused and do actually feel like I'm being baited. There's tons of data. You can find more than a dozen papers going into each of these topics I've mentioned all telling similar stories (and a few dozen more effects that couple with these). The problem here isn't that there isn't data, the problem is refusing to look at it. The problem is refusing to look at causal chains (like in our fire example). Even the Pentagon is writing reports[5] about how climate change is exacerbating issues (also, this is far from the first report that they wrote). More fires, more harsh storms, lower crop yields, decreasing access to water, desalination of ocean water, decrease in coral production, melting ice caps, etc. And here's the kicker. All these things can be linked to CO2eq in the atmosphere[6]. All these things are related. They all influence one another and there's a feedback loop because the coupled nature.

The facts and data are there. The question is if you will look at it. Are you going to listen to some person on the news or on the internet (including me) or are you going to seek out climate researchers and see what they say? Go listen to the experts. See why they are all terrified. We're far beyond where it is acceptable to have the conversation about the existence of something we've known about since the early 1980's. It isn't just the kitchen stove that is on fire. The whole house is ablaze. We can feel the heat and see the flames. Why are we still talking about if the fire exists? For the last ten years I hear every day people (including climate deniers) constantly saying "Boy, it's a hot summer this year." And we have the data to show that it's not just their gut feelings. I'm not being metaphorical when I say that people feel the heat.

[0] https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/09/23/us/fires-worst-ye... (paywalled: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/24/climate/fires...)

[1] https://www.forest2market.com/blog/2020-precipitation-trends...

[2] https://lao.ca.gov/reports/2020/4285/Fig1.png

[3] https://i.imgur.com/ax5CNnh.png (I sourced the data from NOAA)

[4] https://www.ventusky.com

[5] https://climateandsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/se...

[6] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-wo...

I'm sure you're right! But there's always bad things happening. We have anxiety because we want something to be different. But the thing doesn't become different whether we have anxiety or not.

If I bite my nails, or hop up and down yelling, or stand still peacefully, the problem and the solutions are the same.

But what you said before was different. Now you're saying "temper your response, focus on solutions" but before you said "don't worry about it, that's the future's problem." These are two very different statement.

Because we don't have solutions. The closer and closer we get to the edge the more and more the realization is that nobody in any government has any sort of contingency plans for the worst happening.

Look at what has happened with recent natural disasters. Puerto Rico is STILL in shambles. And while unrelated to climate change, Flint Michigan's water is STILL undrinkable.

The terrifying part of climate change isn't that things will be harder, it's that our governments are completely unprepared to address it. One of the major political parties is fighting against any modicum of effort that WOULD help to address it.

It’s on the front page of nearly every major news source nearly every week, it’s pretty hard not to notice. It’s not like people don’t realize something is going on, most just don’t want to think about it that hard. And can you blame them? The average person has approximately no impact on global climate change.

Yes, most people are aware of it. But the common comment I get from people is that it's not going to disrupt our lives very soon. And I bet the disruption will come much faster than they think

> It’s on the front page of nearly every major news source nearly every week

It also gets flagged off the front page with regularity, as was this thread.

And no, I don't blame the average person. I blame those who disenfranchised and infantilised the average person in the pursuit of profit and power, and the intellectuals who played cheerleaders for it.

> FROMM: Like for instance, that we are confronted with the possibility of a war of such destruction that the whole existence of our nation and of the whole world is at stake. And yet, people know it - people read it in the newspapers, people read that at the first attack, a hundred million Americans might be killed.And yet, they talk about it as if they were talking about something being wrong with the carburetor of their car, perhaps. Actually, they have paid more attention to the danger of a flu epidemic than to the danger of the atomic bomb, because...

> WALLACE: Don't you think that's a little overstatement, Dr. Fromm?

> FROMM: Well, I wish it were, because what I see is relatively few people who experience, who feel, the danger, which we are threatened with, and who feel the responsibility of doing something about it.

> WALLACE: Or maybe, when you talk about the responsibility of doing something, maybe it simply is this: that we find it very difficult to make ourselves felt in this amorphous society in which we live. Each individual would want to do something but would find it difficult to make himself felt.

> FROMM: Well, I think here you point out to one, really, of the basic defects of our system: that the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act -but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.

-- Erich Fromm, "The Mike Wallace Interview", 25th of May 1958 (!)

And then that "stupidity" is used to justify even more of what created it. It's a constant refrain on HN too, where "the average user" is used to excuse all sorts of shitty software and reduction of options. It's like saying that someone is too weak to go for a walk, so they should remain in bed until their muscles got stronger. We do this all over the place, in all sorts of areas, and have been at it for decades.

Life and reality are very grim. IMO there are more reasons to be unhappy than unhappy. The only reason any of us is able to avoid crushing misery is by building up walls to keep physical reminders away and having mental walls to keep thoughts away. The climate's being destroyed, ocean life is being annihilated, slavery exists as much as it ever has, much darker crimes happen constantly and at horrifying scale daily, etc. There is no solution to these problems as an individual, just to find a way to avoid dwelling on the bad and selectively notice the good.

My feelings exactly. Just know that you’re not alone.

Are we looking at data or this is a media driven anxiety?

Edit: I usually keep up with NOAA's state of climate updates on monthly basis here: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/

I don't have anxiety about global warming. My thought is mostly about the heat wave where I live.

Intellectually, I know it's something to be worried about and that we should take care of now rather than later.

The subreddit /r/collapesupport has many great threads and articles about this. Sort by top.

Relax. We're going to not only hit every tipping point, but we're going to rocket past all of them.

I think the best we can hope for is that this rocket will eventually fall back to earth. When things get too bad humanity will find a way. Of course likely not before a lot of suffering occurs.

The other best thing you can hope for is that the worst of this suffering won't happen in your lifetime.

Let's face it though, resolving the issue BEFORE the tipping point is impossible.

I'm getting voted down, but seriously come back here in 10 years. My prediction is the most likely possible occurrence. Some of the worst case scenarios of global warming WILL play out. It did for COVID, it will for global warming. Even in the thick of the pandemic we still have anti-vaxers and anti-maskers. The same will happen with global warming, even in the thick of it we'll have tons of people who are against mitigating it.