Climate change is unfortunately still -- even with all the obvious weather changes that are already happening -- too abstract to get a lot of people to even admit it's a problem, let alone agree on what should be done.
All the obvious weather changes that are doing what, exactly? The way that global agricultural output has increased over time[0]? The way that England is a degree or two warmer on average in the past five hundred years[1] (somewhere between the difference in going from London to Paris and London to Bordeaux, quelle horreur)?
The change is there, sure, but in what way is the problem pressing enough that dealing with it is clearly better than the cost of dealing with it? Because remember, every bit of time and resource we spend on climate change could be alternatively spent in other uses that might also benefit humanity.
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/food-supply
[1]: https://i0.wp.com/judithcurry.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11...
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_South_Asian_floods
If you attribute random weather events to global warming, then random weather events to "disprove" it also count.
Your links don't say "climate change isn't a problem," they just have a tiny bit of data out of context, that very few people here have the ability to fully understand as to how they may or may not relate to climate change. Do you really think the fact that agricultural output has increased over time says much about climate change, vs. technology and population and such? Or that a 2 degree temperature change in England is a) not a problem, just because a 2 degree temperature change seems minor, or b) is really going to give non-scientists a good perspective on something like this? Unless you understand all the things involved, you really need to let the scientists do an analysis on the data, rather than your seat-of-the-pants approach. If you don't want to trust the scientists, great, but just showing a tiny bit of data and extrapolating a conclusion based on intuition probably doesn't cut it.
The below is just pasted from Wikipedia, but it's a great starting point. You can follow the citations if you go to the article. Sure, it's a politicized issue so you'll always find a few on the other side. But the vast majority of scientists agree with this:
Due to climate change, deserts are expanding, while heat waves and wildfires are becoming more common. Increased warming in the Arctic has contributed to melting permafrost, glacial retreat and sea ice loss. Higher temperatures are also causing more intense storms, droughts, and other weather extremes. Rapid environmental change in mountains, coral reefs, and the Arctic is forcing many species to relocate or become extinct. Climate change threatens people with food and water scarcity, increased flooding, extreme heat, more disease, and economic loss. Human migration and conflict can also be a result. The World Health Organization (WHO) calls climate change the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century. Even if efforts to minimise future warming are successful, some effects will continue for centuries. These include sea level rise, and warmer, more acidic oceans.
> Hammond was right, of course, on his primary counts, as well: the temperature topped 40 degrees at London’s Heathrow airport and over 1,500 people died across Europe as a result of the heat wave.
There was 'literally' one day of temperatures over 40, in a couple of places. I didn't see any data on deaths, but it wasn't 'thousands'.
Before anyone jumps, I believe in climate change :) I just think this hyperbole isn't helpful.
> To date, 3,271 excess deaths have been recorded during heat-periods in 2022 in England and Wales. This is an average of 82 excess deaths per day, and 6.2% higher than the five-year average. The heat-period with the largest number of excess deaths was H2 (10 to 25 July) with 2,227 excess deaths (10.4% above average), an average of 139 excess deaths per day.
And my point was that it is striking to talk about how climate change is no big deal in England in this context.
Heat waves, wildfires, melting permafrost and sea ice, stronger storms -- OK, that's fine, I'm not disputing that these things are happening. But what is the human toll of these things compared against the literal billions of lives uplifted from terrible poverty in the global fossil fuel-based capitalist(ish) economy? That is the question I keep asking and to which I never seem to get a clear answer.
The time, effort, and resources we spend on de-carbonizing the global economy (or whatever other mitigation efforts are being studied and suggested) are time, effort, and resources that have alternative uses that could also benefit humanity. I wish to examine those alternative uses and the marginal cost at each level of mitigation. What I keep getting instead are categorical assertions that we are all doomed (literally, as in civilizational collapse) if we don't repent our ways and not much more than vague handwaving that renewable energy will be cheaper, more abundant, and easier to use.
I want an answer to the question: how do we bring the roughly half of the world living on a few bucks a day to first-world living standards? As a commenter put it so eloquently elsewhere, how do we ensure that Bangladeshis and Pakistanis can live like Texans? Because relieving human suffering is my goal.
But actual people on the ground, especially if that ground is in places that aren't as developed, do in fact want higher standards of living. I do not see myself as having the moral authority to tell them that they cannot have it because of environmental reasons. I'd rather leave it up to them to decide whether they want to "drill, baby, drill" now and live with the possibility of facing the music later, or keep living in huts.
Are you prepared to hear that it is simply not possible? We have finite resources. If everyone was living like in developed countries, we would consume the entirety of the resources we are currently capable of extracting from the Earth in a year, in only a few months. And even if we expanded our extraction capabilities, there is only one Earth, of which only finite amount of material will be useful and put to good use for our comfort.
Given that, there is only two possibilities: reduce resource consumption, or expand the amount of available resources.
* Reduce: you can either reduce each individual usage, or reduce the number of individuals. Now you see why everyone is advocating for reduced individual usage, because culling the population is seen as 'not relieving human suffering'.
* Increase: it requires going away from Earth and expanding into at least adjacent bodies with the capability of transforming them into useful stuff. To plan for that, you need to prove first that such solution would be possible before we are all extinct from the ecological collapse of our life support systems.
So now you are back to square one: if 'increasing' the available resources is not available right now, and might not even be available in the future, and reducing the population is frowned upon, then you are forced to find a way to reduce resource consumption.
Which might well mean that for everyone to live like Texans, that means Texans will have to change their lives and live like everyone else.
Once our ecosystem has collapsed, a possibility we see approaching close and closer, then *no one* will live, nevermind with the latest F150 or whathaveyou that Texans might enjoy. If your goal is truly to reduce human suffering, you must also entertain the possibility that we must limit ourselves. Someone living hedonistically, trying to enjoy earthly pleasures as much as possible and dying at age 35 to cardiac and respiratory failure, has not succeeded in enjoying their lives the most.
Another question might be: does everyone want to live like Texans in the first place? Are you planning to burn our Earth on faulty ideological or cultural assumptions? Because believe me, when I see how Americans live, I definitely do not wish to join them. You might be culturally conditioned to believe your way is the best, but don't take extreme opinions such as 'climate change is preferable to modifying the status quo' based on such myopic views.
Everyone's entitled to their preferences, but more people migrate to the US than any other country in the world, so it's evident that a lot people do wish to join them. And 7-8 of the top 10 recipients of global cross-border migration is to first-world countries, the inhabitants of which consume orders of magnitude more energy (even if that's less than Texans do) than those of the origin countries; so clearly many people other than myself vote with their feet to and go where more energy and resources are consumed per capita than less. Will you call all of those people myopic for pursuing a richer life, as well?
> Are you prepared to hear that it is simply not possible? We have finite resources.
Absolutely! I'm not wishing for sunshine and rainbows to appear magically and raise everyone's living standards. I simply choose to step out of the way of the people who are doing so by any means, including burning fossil fuels. And though it is axiomatically true that we live in a physical universe and therefore our resources are finite, I hope you're equally prepared to hear that in terms of the primary materials that go into producing the things that people consume, we've really just only scratched the surface of the Earth. It's pretty big. We're quite a long ways from where we need to mine other planets for resources.
> Once our ecosystem has collapsed, a possibility we see approaching close and closer
Eh. This gets repeated over and over with little evidence. Flooding in flood plains? Bring in the big earthmoving equipment, run the concrete plans, all powered by fossil fuels, and build dams. Cities with temperate climates experiencing more heat waves? Insulate homes and put in air conditioning. We'll adapt, or at least I will.
Definitely. People living in the US are not the most happy on Earth. Life is not the easiest there. Granted, there is a very successful propaganda at work convincing people that they will have a better chance to succeed. But more and more, this ideal is being questioned.
> Bring in the big earthmoving equipment, run the concrete plans, all powered by fossil fuels, and build dams.
To continue speaking in your language, run the cost analysis. Find how much more costly it will be to entertain grandiose project just to continue living the same way as before.
Don't get me wrong, I am not a believer of an idealistic natural world where humans should not life, far from it. But as the current pinnacle of life, the greatest achievement on Earth, I consider that it is our duty to sustain ourselves for as long as possible -- and that means for now understanding as much as possible of the biological systems on Earth before changing anything. We should reduce ecological collapses as much as possible, until we have learned everything we can from the species we are disappearing every days. We must be aware of our impact, in the fullest of sense and decide with total knowledge how to proceed.
> We'll adapt, or at least I will.
You are describing the exact inverse of 'adapting'. You want to modify the environment as much as necessary, at any cost, for it to fit our current cultural zeitgeist. Our biology trumps any current cultural fact. We should not try to preserve a single society or human colony, we should try to preserve as much life and (DNA) diversity as possible, as this is our best chance to learn and understand more, and find better ways to live, to further reduce our suffering.
> Eh. This gets repeated over and over with little evidence.
This is already happening, these last years have already shown a prelude of what is to come.
Rains will be rarer and more intense, leading to periods of drought and floods, as well as reduced retention in our current biomes. I don't know what you watched these last two years but it has already been happening in several regions, I don't know what more evidence you want of what is to come.
It will only become more and more difficult to grow food and keep livestock as the water system become more violent and unstable. Trying to stabilize an increasingly unstable system will prove extremely costly, you will be battling forces that are currently outside our capabilities. You might be optimistic and consider that we will always find solutions to it, but this is unreasonable. No one has shown so far that we will be capable of containing those issues.
Water might be the most problematic issue in the medium term, but wildfires, ocean acidification, tropical storms, ecological collapses have also started to happen, more frequently and more intensely. It will lead to a harder life for everyone. We will be lucky in the US and EU and will live better life for a time, but we will also experience greatly increased migrations, that will completely destroy our current social support systems. Given the latest rise in populism (on the left and right), it is clear to me that in that situation people will vote for any tyrant that will promise to do anything to protect their way of life. That will mean building critical infrastructure to attempt to contain the effects in the best case, but more likely just more self-serving, corrupt assholes and brutal power enforcement, genocide of the millions of people moving. It's only human nature.
Frankly what you describe will only accelerate our downfall. Our best chance of surviving is through knowledge, and your way will make so much of the complexity of life around us disappear, just to fit some myopic conception of how we should live.
"Why won't this code compile!!?? Computers are stupid!"
The prisoners' dilemma arises from the prison. The tragedy of the commons arises from the replacement of mutual social structures with competitve market incentives. These are not neutral facts of life, they're describing emergent properties of the systems they exist in. Those systems are arbitrary and we can change them.
There's actually a number of "one percenters" (i.e. multi-billionaires) who lobby for raising their own taxes. Few of them understandably want to simply give away their wealth but they're okay with paying a fairer (read: significantly larger) share as long as others in their class have to do so as well. They're trying to lower the ceiling, to literally change the system so the emergent properties of it change for the better.
What you're describing is an extremely individualistic approach favored by Austrian economics. It's not apolitical objective truth. It relies on intentional design choices of the economic system that can be changed. Much like feudal lords before the French revolution, however, those currently benefiting from it are largely disinterested in changing it and too powerful to overrule. We can hope "the government" addresses this, but as long as we accept narratives about individual responsibility and "everyone doing their part" I see no hope for legislators seriously reining in the actual polluters, especially in a country where the second anyone proposes it a skilled orator will insist that this will single-handedly destroy America as we know it.
Of course convincing an economist that the system could be changed in a way that doesn't incentivize the destruction of our habitat would be as outlandish as convincing an aristocrat in 1322 that the system could be changed so the king is continuously elected by the common folk instead of being destined by his bloodline and divine right:
It is hopelessly naive of the human condition to imagine that an ordinary mortal like you or I could assume the power of God to pick a new lordship like we are picking out pigs to slaughter. Even if it wasn't blasphemy, surely it is only right and best for us if our lord is born into his destiny and raised from a young age by experts in his future affairs do be a good lord for us and make his choices we are too ignorant to judge fairly.
Complete BS virtue signaling - everyone of those supposed 'multi-billionaires who lobby for raising their own taxes', can already voluntarily pay as much extra taxes as they want - how many are?
Why is it that these people will only do what they believe is morally correct, but only if the law forces them do it? The answer is, because they don't really believe what they say they believe in - they are virtue signaling.
Just like all the celebrities flying around in their private jets, giving speeches about global warming, and collecting their global warming awareness achievement awards.
I call BS.
You know why they don't voluntarily pay higher taxes, and yet advocate for it? because they know if the tax rates/laws change, they will just pay their lawyers extra money to figure out how not to pay it - they want someone else to do it instead.
Same reason Bezos preaches on GW, and yet drives around in a yacht that burns more fossil fuels than thousands or of typical Americans will use in a year.
It's all virtue signaling, and nothing else.
She's basically advocating for policies that would make it impossible (or extremely difficult) to become and remain as wealthy as she is, let alone a billionaire. And she's directly going against her own financial interests with this because no amount of creative accounting would shield her from all of it if it became actual policy.
For the record, I remembered her being a billionaire heiress but it seems I was off by a digit or two. So I apologize for incorrectly referring to one-percenters when I meant mostly her and other millionaires (afaik) who support her project called Taxmenow. She also criticized philanthropy.
I gave this as an example of people asking for a systemic solution that goes against their own self interest but solves a systemic problem that is bad for society as a whole. "Why don't they just give away their money" is an individualistic "solution" that does nothing to fix the systemic problem except going against their self interest.
Of course this assumes you agree with them that them being able to have so much money is a systemic problem worth addressing, i.e. that the system needs to be changed. "The law forcing them" is literally the system being changed. Because, as I said, the system incentivizes harsh competition and maximizing personal financial gain, so without changing the system there is no incentive for any individual to give up their excessive wealth if nobody else will.
If you are desperate to find hypocrisy, you'll have more success looking at "philanthropists" who argue against having to pay higher taxes but instead "give away" their money to their own charities (which just happen to shuffle that money back into their own companies).
EDIT: I see now that you were thinking of the exact billionaire philanthropists I mention as an example for actual hypocrisy, so I guess we agree on the hypocrisy, you just weren't aware of the group of people I was referencing.
You do realize that elective monarchy and republics were relatively common and very well known at the time right?
We can and do so - in small societies, like inner family and close friends - where trust exists.
So in thery maybe this trust can grow to eventually connect all humanity, but I really would not count on it.
So wouldn't it be nice, if we are all nice to each other? Yes but we ain't. Not with these existing tensions.
Know what the poor world thinks?
"The west got rich by polluting and now we are supposed to stay poor, because polluting is not allowed anymore? Not fair."
And I think they have a point.
When you are starving, you cannot afford to care if the gasoline and coal you are using is causing more long term problems. You are happy, that you have the coal in the first place, if you are cold or need power.
So yes, idealism likely will not solve anything. But it can help make the transition to a sustainable economy.
And I rather would distribute low tech solar cookers and high tech solar panels on scale, than mess with the atmosphere.
They may have a point, that won't change the reality of the situation: letting them do exactly what the developed countries did, will kill them. That's not fair, that's life.
> So yes, idealism likely will not solve anything. But it can help make the transition to a sustainable economy.
No, idealism by definition will produce idealistic solutions that won't amount to anything. You are advocating for controlling a system by considering that with enough ingenuity, trust or whatever, we can do it. No, controlling a complex system is done by understanding its baseline or attractors and tweaking its inputs carefully to bring it and maintaining it there.
It means indeed that injecting aerosols in the atmosphere to control the climate is a foolish errand, and the practical approach is energy sobriety. But don't go advocating this position by talking of ideals and fairness, you won't convince anyone.
Idealism is trying to do this, targeting the human motivation attractors.
Doing (subjectivly) good things gives a good feeling.
And if it would not work, there would not be so many vegans for example.
Intrinsic motivation is a strong attractor, you can reach with idealism. But we agree, that in this case on a global scale - it will never be enough. But each person convinced that things must be done, is (ideally) one more person working on the problem.
Climate change is inherently large scale. There's nothing that will change that.
We can change the equation only by large scale "contracts" and the like. That generally means governments. For instance, we can vote for representatives that make laws that limit emissions from factories and vehicles, and make treaties with other countries. Those things are not subject to tragedy of the commons.
I am not advocating for "messing with the atmosphere" in this sense, but I'm also not rejecting it outright. We are already messing with the atmosphere on a large scale, due to billions of individual decisions driven each one of those individuals' self-interest. If you are going to mess with it, I'd rather it done based on a controlled methodology based on science.
People don't work like that. Frankly, it is hopelessly naive of the human condition and akin to saying "why don't we all stop wasting money on locks and just all of us agree to stop stealing?" Or "why do we need money? Can't we just all do our part and only take what we need?" Or "why can't we agree to end wars?"
People tend to (mostly) calculate what is best for them. Most people would just say "the only thing I can control is what I do, not what everyone else does. The best outcome for me is to live like I want to live, regardless of what everyone else does." Some people have more awareness of what is good for all than others, but very few will make huge individual sacrifices for the sake of making a hard-to-detect positive impact on the common good.
See "prisoners' dilemma", "tragedy of the commons", "invisible hand", and so on.
A government, on the other hand -- especially one as big as the US government -- is generally the only way to address this sort of thing. I'm not saying this is a great plan, but I suspect things like this are worth looking into.