At one point the brain (at least mine) just lets go and tries to focus on something less draining.
We (humans) are just slightly evolved monkeys. We can rationalize all we want, our decisions are taken based on emotions.
We have built a much more complex world than we can really handle.
Wait until its determined how high the loss in real estate (especially as a tax base) will be with the sea a foot higher by 2050. Think of areas, especially Miami, that are in for serious impact without any mitigation plans.
If they're not afraid, then maybe we can also start spending less on military and police because the world is safe-enough that we don't need to waste so much $$ on police force, etc... which often are the ones creating or escalating problems in society.
People love to blame BLM for destruction of property but guess how many riots there'd be if cops weren't allowed to murder people and get away with it, a hell of a lot less or if schools taught about things like the bombing of Black Wallstreet...
It's definitely a double standard... don't fear monger unless it involved a bigger police state for our protection, more guns - also for our protection, or bigotry (who to be afraid of and why...)...
Another commenter claimed science is often off about climate but lately I've been hearing how they're only wrong in that they under-predicted because to actually tell the truth is to scare the shit out of people and start panics or piss off business interests that pay money to the universities where they work, etc...
It's like Hofstadter's law applied to catastrophe.
"People react primarily to direct experience and not to abstractions; it is very rare to find anyone who can become emotionally involved with an abstraction. The longer the bomb is around without anything happening, the better the job that people do in psychologically denying its existence. It has become as abstract as the fact that we are all going to die someday, which we usually do an excellent job of denying." [0]
That last bit invokes some of the research behind Terror Management Theory: first and foremost, we are wired to avoid risks to our survival. But that drive is mediated by subjective qualia: avoiding mortal fear. The best way to do that is to prevent circumstances of immediate danger: don't poke the bear, don't play near the edge of a cliff. But when it comes to dangers of limited individual agency (systemic risk, black swans), it makes complete sense that evolution would select for "try not to think about it".
[0] https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/11/27/jeremy-bernstein-s...
Our failures to respond reasonably and proportionally to threats, be they ecological, medical, economic, military, even political, are all downstream of a crisis of trust, not only in institutions, but in each other. And as with broken trust in personal relationships, rebuilding that trust is non-trivial.
One observation I've made time and again throughout my life: a large chunk people live their life using a very simple, greedy algorithm (not as in greed, but greedy in the sense algo theory): deal with problems when they appear, and don't think about them until they do.
This is why people build houses in the path of lava erupting from a volcano: it's never an issue until it becomes one.
The smaller portion of folks who do plan ahead (because they are capable of it) and anticipate problems before they occur is the portion that gets ahead.
I don't think this is something that is specific to this era.
It's up to governments to come up with and enforce laws that prevent corporations from releasing millions of metric tons of greenhouse gasses. Without strict laws in place, there's too little incentive from being moral or being long-term oriented, also your competition who don't will run you out of business with the extra profits.
There's also very few consumers willing to investigate/research the pollution generated from all companies related to making/delivering the products they buy. So being "greener" isn't really much of an advantage.
Our data don't take mob psychology enough in account, the curve is not really a quantitative map it's a psychology fractal. It means 'even with this curve in front of you, you will still follow the pattern causing it to happen'
Then again just by living in most western societies on an individual level, even if we do try our best, we are essentially guaranteed to have a massively higher footprint than someone living in most third world countries.
Even "the terminator" has a "climate initiative" - https://www.schwarzeneggerclimateinitiative.com/
Of course people forget he brough hummers to civilians,... And being a rich guy, caring for the environment, he could be driving a tesla (or something smaller, to use even less energy), but nope... he drives a monostrosity of a SUV (GMC Yukon - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-10440521/Arnol... )
We may all die, but at least if they die first there'll be some justice... and maybe we get a few extra years without one of them polluting as much as 50 million people in a single year...
i'm really saddened that I have boys under 4, and they have to really live through some of the worst of this. It's going to be a much harsher world, and it already isn't very amicable to anyone who isn't already wealthy.
..oh wait, i'm not that rich.
And Al Gore is a hypocrite - everybody else should conserve.
Exxon knew about climate change in 1957 [0].
People beat the drum hard from 1977 to 1990. What's happened? Regulatory capture has only gotten worse. There is nothing to be optimistic about here.
0. https://sci.bban.top/pdf/10.1029/tr038i005p00643.pdf?downloa...
I think some level of saying “the sky is falling” is okay but you’re only going to be able to inspire voters with progress - negativity doesn’t win elections.
Micro reactors are more suited to isolated areas disconnected from the grid.
I think that what you are describing sounds hopefull, but I do not believe that it is anything like the norm.
I admit I may be. If the micro-reactors work out here they may gain traction. I acknowledge that is many may's or maybe's on my part.
For all their flaws (and there are many, don't trust a Tory) our government in the UK has done a good-ish job with environmental policy. Not great, but not like the early Trump admin going full retard over fossil fuels, science etc.
We even did a carbon tax and it seems to work.
The biggest flaw of democracy is that politicians need votes, for them and their party, and getting them is their main objective. They do unpopular things, but make immense efforts to spin it as desirable.
Climate change will be properly addressed until the general population suffers from it, and threatens to vote for someone who actually does something. At that point, an emergency state could be declared and the votes won't be as valuable.
And an opening statement from Forbes article in Dec 2020: "By most accounts, President-elect Joe Biden will continue President Trump’s nuclear energy legacy — to aggressively develop U.S. technology for export to the international market within five to seven years." https://www.forbes.com/sites/dipkabhambhani/2020/12/01/biden...
It's really concerning if "good-ish" now means "being better than the Trump admin at least"
People need to be fucking angry.
But no, getting angry and emotional is not the answer. We're reducing our emissions, mostly thanks to natural gas (fracking) displacing coal, but part due to alternatives like wind and solar. Some states like Texas run on wind for the full day at times, only tapping into non-renewables during peak loads.
We've made great progress and some people need to calm down or they look crazy (some are), diminishing their cause.
Some people seem to treat "green" as a religion. The sin you're born with is your carbon footprint. You can do everything and it's still not enough. You have to flagellate yourself, you need to convert everyone else to live your lifestyle, you need to give this and that up. You need to live without electricity, without transportation, without meat, etc. Some positions are counter productive to the cause or are simply useless (banning straws instead of sanctioning foreign countries/companies for dumping plastic waste that they buy from us)
Be a conservationist, not an environmentalist. Clean the Earth, make it better, but stop with the doomsday speeches and flagellation.
Spending 30k on a car is a huge financial decision and some people just can't afford to take that decision lightly no matter how much they believe in climate change.
For context I own a fair bit of Tesla stock and am a big fan. But I am hesitant to buy one myself, as much as I'd love to.
The fossil fuel companies that you think are out to get you are the only ones actually reducing emissions. Fracking gave access to so much natural gas it displaced coal, reducing emissions year over year.
Those energy companies also invest in wind farms, solar, everything. The gov gives out taxpayer money like hotcakes for "green" solutions, why not take advantage?
Electric cars exist to (temporarily?) save the auto industry. The decrease we get in purely tailpipe emissions does not offset the supporting infrastructure, their construction, and the sprawl that they demand.
Even Exxon is not putting 1.5C targets (where even then a lot of real people die) in their "sustainability" reports anymore. Everything needs to stop at 2030 at the latest, and I personally have no hope that that is possible.
One out of every 250 vehicles on the road is electric.
> nuclear power widespread.
We're not. What we're doing is burning natural gas for power generation widespread. We're slightly eased up off the accelerator.
We broke the planet. About the only we can do is to try to mitigate the damage. However, I don’t have a lot of hope for that.
I’ll be fine. My kids might be fine. My grandchildren are screwed.
Climate change due to industrial emissions of CO2 has been known and published in mainstream news articles since at least 110 years ago.[0][1]
It's been known and discussed in public by professional scientists for over 140 years[2].
The great inaugural Nobel Prize winner, Arrhenius, wrote a paper on the topic in 1896[3] which cited Fourier's publication from 1827[4].
More generally, global greenhouse effect of CO2 has been known for at least 185 years[4], a decade before the last founding father of the United States died.
----------
0: The Rodney and Otamatea Times (Aug 1912) https://www.livescience.com/63334-coal-affecting-climate-cen...
1: Popular Mechanics (Mar 1912): https://books.google.com/books?id=Tt4DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA341&lpg=...
2: Nature (1882): https://www.nature.com/articles/027127c0
3: Journal of Science (Apr 1896) https://doi.org/10.1080/14786449608620846
4: M ́emoire sur les Temp ́eratures du Globe Terrestre et des Espaces Plan ́etaires, M ́emoires d l’Acad ́emie Royale des Sciences de l’Institute de France VII 570-604 (1827): https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/papers/Fourier1827Trans.pd... (English Translation)
[1] >and whether there any important ways in which it [CO2] is being removed from the atmosphere
[2] Even more interesting, the doomsday predictions are more than a hundred years old as well:
>THERE was a letter in NATURE some time since, calling attention to the pollution of the atmosphere by the burning of coal; and it was calculated that in the year 1900, all animal life would cease, from the amount of carbonic dioxide
Hindsight is 20/20. Yes, now, after decades of study and billions of dollars in measurement and modeling infrastructure, this particular theory appears to be panning out. But to pretend that we knew with any certainty 100 or even 60 years ago that this was a likely outcome drastically oversimplifies the complex and chaotic global climate system. It is effectively revisionist history and even more importantly the warming necessary to confirm such theories did not really take off until the last few decades, ignoring that 60 years ago we did not have the spatial coverage to measure it with sufficient density and precision to verify a phenomenon on the scale of global climate change.
And on top of all that, we are measuring a chaotic, periodic, oscillating system, and it is impractical to draw any conclusions about differences in future trends about without at an absolute minimum decades of quality sampling.
So, again, people who claim that the petroleum industry knew about climate change and irresponsibly and continued to put the future of the planet in peril in the name of profits are dramatically underestimating the scope and scale of the theory and the degree of infrastructure and analysis necessary to prove it with any certainty.
Also, your points are echoes of (wildly successful) fossil fuel disinformation campaigns.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look...
Will you still own it?
Will you be able to build some sort of platform above sea level with a house on it given that the submerged land was once yours?
Will it eventually give rise to a "living on the sea" movement?
It's worth noting that flooding isn't an all or nothing thing. I live on the New England coast and my neighborhood occasionally floods during storms. This is a disaster for some houses, but only a temporary inconvenience for others which are build on a tall foundation and have a raised area for parking.
There are some obvious exceptions like people pandering with "record low today, how about that global warming libs", but as far as I can tell this isn't the official position of any political office.
I feel like that's last decade's news.
Many people I hear now are just fed up of the hypocrites and would as soon watch it all melt/burn/explode rather than let smug folk like Kerry be the "Climate Czar" while tooling around the globe on his Airstream.
Greta has a point when she starts raving about the climate change conferences where each of the attendees all flew in on their private jets. It's pretty shameful.
That's just another form of denialism. "Climate change is a hoax, I don't have to change my behavior." is little different from "Climate change is real, but I'm not convinced it human-caused, so I don't have to change my behavior."
Climate Change denial is alive and well in the US. In some areas it is considered a political liability to acknowledge climate change.
Depending on the thread I think it's either people annoyed that they're seeing his name at all, and people who don't like seeing their guy getting criticized, but either way the result is the same. HN does generally swing much righter than the rest of the internet, too.
"former president" is perfectly fine. As is "last president", or "trump", or whatever. I think the point wasn't about the specific person who had said those things so much about general level of political discourse in US around this subject...
I don't see Miami ever being abandoned, even if they have to float it.
I would be stunned if Miami survives as anything but a billionaires island 20 years from now.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-scientist-expla...
And there have been multiple climate related events in the last few years that were worse than the worst case models. (The heat wave in the US's pascific northwest last summer.) Others that are occurring way ahead of schedule - for instance, models predict the equatorial region having days of deadly heat by 2080, it happened in 2020.
So, any time you see a climate prediction put forth by a major institution, I would assume it's going to be too conservative. That has been our pattern so far.
Someone I know who used to work for a non-specific policy related group of scientists investigating something pretty important (pollution, the kind that gives your kids fucked up lungs not something relatively abstract like global warming) and that he was explicitly told (in response to a warning their data looked bad for the government) "That's awful, we must do something about it, in the meantime please lower the figure"
If the damn scientists would just shut up already, everything would be fine! /s
I'd imagine it'll be around insurance underwriting for the structures and the financial instruments attached to them.
Publicly traded banks have an obligation to their shareholders to make money. Nobody wants to be the first to abandon a profit center. A classic multipolar coordination trap that, theoretically, governments are here to fix.
Why, then, would they make what the facts indicate are bad loans?
Greed is a partial answer, sure. This is hardly the only place where corporations trade risk in the distant future for revenue today.
But my instinct is that the greater part of it is inertia. They make the loans because they've always made the loans and it will take a good deal of energy to change that.
My guess is that it's an area where change will come as a short, very sharp shock. One year all the banks will make these loans and the next year none of them will.
Just keep an eye on the rich people.