Most People Don't Understand How Bad Climate Change Already Is

https://www.chrbutler.com/we-only-have-eight-years-left

by chrbutler • 5 years ago

76 95 5 years ago

chrbutler.com

kybernetyk• 5 years ago

We Have Only Eight Years Left

Been hearing this in some form since the early 90s.

generalizations• 5 years ago

Or even the 80s, IIRC

zwieback• 5 years ago

70s for me, nuclear destruction, overpopulation, etc.

spiderice• 5 years ago

If you keep repeating "8 years left" every year then eventually you'll be right. And that's when you get to say "I told you so"

ben_w• 5 years ago

The calls to action I’ve heard since the early 90s were “we should do something in the unspecified near term” and “8 of the 10 hottest years on record were in the last ten years”.

Hmm… I wonder in how many years the statement “8 of the 10 hottest years on record were in the last ten years” was true? I was in the UK, but this could be calculated for any locality.

einpoklum• 5 years ago

Millenarian deadlines aside - temperatures are rising, and average annual/monthly temperature records are being broken again and again recently. I don't think you saw this kind of a heat wave in Siberia in the 1990s:

https://eos.org/articles/siberian-heat-wave-nearly-impossibl...

MattGaiser4• 5 years ago

I suspect it was closer to:

1990: We have 8 years left to avoid global warming. -- Already happened.

2000: We have 8 years left to prevent the corals from bleaching. -- Already happened.

2010: We have 8 years left to prevent farms from being permanently scorched. -- In progress.

Causality13• 5 years ago

We Have Only Eight Years Left

Can we stop this already please? Incalculable damage has been done to the cause by people pretending there exists a hard deadline and then later the deniers come in and say "ha where is your apocalypse?"

Also the title needs to match the article title, in accordance with HN posting guidelines.

yeuxardents• 5 years ago

I see it in older folks. They dont care at all about any of it because they have literally been told since the 60/70s that theres only X more years before Y happens, and every single time the date passes and the dire prognostication does not occur.

Its crisis fatigue

cogman103• 5 years ago

Well, the problem is the dire prognostications, particularly as of late, HAVE been occurring.

Flooding, extreme weather, excess hurricanes, super droughts, formerly once every 100 year events have been happening nearly yearly.

The issue is it's now somewhat normalized.

The other issue is it's only going to get more extreme.

Don't buy beachfront property.

nathanaldensr2• 5 years ago

Is it accurate to call it "crisis fatigue" or more accurate to call it "Chicken Little fatigue?" It's reasonable to assume this time is not different when in the past the warnings were just as dire and just as apocalyptic. In other words, it's quite rational to respond this way.

MattGaiser4• 5 years ago

Is this what has been happening or have the dire prognostications been different over time and just mashed together by the media/people not remembering the details?

In 1980, was the prediction that there would be experiencing the consequences of climate change, such as coral bleaching? As that is happening now. So warning that we need to avoid climate change for the past 50 years makes perfect sense.

This is not a singular disaster, but rather a sliding scale.

MattGaiser4• 5 years ago

We probably do have only 8 years left to achieve certain goals and certain guardrails. It just isn't clearly outlined what those certain goals are.

colechristensen4• 5 years ago

1) calculate what's going to happen in N years using a few models, pick the most shocking results

2) write books/articles/presentations about having only N years left

3) profit

sparrish2• 5 years ago

My favorite example is this: "National Park Quietly Removed Warning That Glaciers ‘Will All Be Gone’ by 2020 After Years of Heavy Snowfall"

https://www.westernjournal.com/national-park-quietly-removed...

dane-pgp3• 5 years ago

I see they've updated their estimate to the more cautious (and less precise) figure of "sometime between 2030 and 2080". A more readily falsifiable prediction, therefore, is Harvard University professor James Anderson's 2018 claim that:

"The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/01/15/carbon-p...

thanatos519• 5 years ago

We actually have about -40 years left.

Just because you haven't hit the ground yet doesn't mean that opening your parachute will save you.

dane-pgp3• 5 years ago

It might be too late to try sewing together a parachute though.

This is the problem with putting deadlines on climate change: if the deadline is too close to the present day, people will say "We're too late to do anything about it", and if it's too far away people will say "Ah, we'll fix that later".

danbrooks• 5 years ago

I agree that we should cut greenhouse gas emissions - but this certainly feels alarmist.

colechristensen4• 5 years ago

This doomsday crap has to stop.

Significant climate change is inevitable, in essence it has already happened and the future increases are already locked in. "let's halt carbon emissions in a few months" isn't going to happen. "let's halt carbon emissions in a few years" isn't going to happen. It also wouldn't end up making a terrific amount of difference.

Some places which are nice and habitable are going to be uninhabitable (or underwater) in 100 years. Some places which are uninhabitable are going to become habitable. Some species are going to die out, there will be wars, famines, and suffering... just as there always has been. Life isn't a constant slow march upwards towards prosperity, it is messy. There is change, there always has been change and there always will be.

There might be natural feedback systems that make a big dent in the negative outcomes and there might be ways that humans can promote these (if the ice caps melt and it becomes warm in the polar regions, we might get a carpet of freshwater plants covering the oceans again which is a tremendous carbon sink, likewise we might be able to fertilize barren ocean regions to trigger algal blooms which will sink carbon into ocean depths).

But... it's already done. It probably won't be as good or as bad as some people think, humans will adapt and global ecology will adapt.

The attitude needs to be more "how do we make this best of what's to come?" instead of "the end is near!"

but people get off on doomsday.

websites2023• 5 years ago

Life isn't a constant slow march upwards towards prosperity, it is messy. There is change, there always has been change and there always will be.

This is really, really hard to understand for people today because the post-cold-war era, in the west, has been one of unprecedented stability and prosperity. That is ending, and what is happening is a reversion to the mean that looks a lot like catastrophe.

TaylorAlexander2• 5 years ago

But… it’s already done.

Actually the emissions and environmental damage are ongoing, and we need to stop doing them or the end result will be much worse.

there will be wars, famines, and suffering

Personally I think we should change our behavior that will lead to wars, famines, and suffering.

colechristensen4• 5 years ago

Actually the emissions and environmental damage are ongoing, and we need to stop doing them or the end result will be much worse.

Things already are the way they are and the way things are going to be in the intermediate future is already predictable.

Personally I think we should change our behavior that will lead to wars, famines, and suffering.

Oftentimes this is more of a matter of exchanging one cause for another. Global austerity and dramatic changes in energy sourcing and production would also cause... wars, famines, and suffering.

And the solution is essentially already here. Solar is among the cheapest energy sources and growing dramatically and battery tech is at the point where it can replace fossil fuels for all sorts of transport and mobile energy/work needs. The best we can do is accelerate the growth of these things a little bit more, but in reality we can only make a small difference, new technologies grow at the rate they grow.

TazeTSchnitzel2• 5 years ago

The fact a huge amount of horrible things are already locked in does not mean that we shouldn't try to prevent locking in even more things. Especially as things probably become exponentially worse the more emissions are locked in.

blooalien2• 5 years ago

It completely escapes me why this basic concept is so hard to understand for so many people. "Things are bad, so let's actively fight to make sure things are vastly worse in the future." I fail to grasp how that logic is somehow better and more defensible than your simple and obvious logic; "Things are bad, so let's start making them better, or at least stop making things worse."

doggodaddo782• 5 years ago

It's not inevitable, it's momentum energy in the system that can be relaxed with bio CCS and other net negative emissions approaches. It depends on the effectivenesses of counter GHG plans.

smartmic• 5 years ago

The author argues in two directions that you either fail to recognize or ignore. First, it is still possible to change something for the better, it is not yet "inevitable". Second, should this not happen, then it is not about "some places" and "some species" but about the quality of all biological live, including all of us humans. And then it is no longer done with a bit of adaptation as Darwin suggested, but really all (except maybe a few billionaires who prefer to be shot in a rocket to the moon) will have an existential problem. So, do not think how can we make the best of what's to come, but try everything to minimize the damage as long as we still have a hint of control. I plead that this is what makes us rational beings.

jzellis• 5 years ago

So one assumes you're super cool if wherever it is you live or come from is the place that becomes uninhabitable, then. If it's your family that has to abandon their home and become refugees. That's just the way things work.

Or do you have enough money that this isn't a problem you're terribly worried about? Can you just up stakes and move to another place and obtain residency and live off of savings or remote work until you can legally work in your new habitable home, confident that all of this is very normal and easy to adjust to?

Sometimes, reading the comments on this site, I wonder how the tech industry has a reputation for attracting the brightest people on earth.

colechristensen4• 5 years ago

More or less everybody had ancestors that uprooted and moved to vastly different locations in search of better opportunities, most Americans are the descendants or were themselves rather poor immigrants. The tech scene is especially full of people who are first or second generation.

The world changes and it baffles me that some people have this huge sense of entitlement to constancy. Whether you're very poor or very rich you don't have to live paycheck to paycheck, but it usually means making choices that people don't like. Being prepared for an uncertain future is virtuous and there isn't a level of wealth that demarks whether or not this is possible.

If you're living today, maybe buying real estate near sea level is a particularly bad idea, maybe buying real estate in areas threatened by severe drought and wildfires is a bad idea, maybe if you're in these situations already it's worth doing so while there's not a rush.

People on this site tend to be problem-solvers. If your location is to become uninhabitable it isn't going to happen overnight. Whatever happens in your life, there are probably going to be some big bad things for everybody. Do your best with what you have, spend less time fantasizing about changing the inevitable or judging people who assume future problems have solutions that aren't just trying to make change not happen.

Joeboy• 5 years ago

I think people are missing the point that (I think) you are making. "The end is nigh" is not a mentality that is conducive to productive action. "The end is not nigh" doesn't necessarily mean "don't worry about it", it means "the future is going to involve living with the consequences of today's (and yesterday's) actions".

woah• 5 years ago

Today, in 2021, the Earth is already hotter than it has ever been.

What?

orthoxerox• 5 years ago

Yeah, this is a bullshit claim. There's a chart or Wikipedia (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/All_pala...) that shows this is not remotely the case.

chrbutler3• 5 years ago

Actually, that's a great catch. I should have written, "The inhabited Earth." I'll edit that.

mym19902• 5 years ago

Can global warming be though of as the planets way to fight what it thinks is an infection? Kind of like what fevers do for humans? Is that a big stretch?

nathanaldensr2• 5 years ago

I don't know why this anthropomorphism of the earth is so popular. The earth is not sentient, nor is it alive. It doesn't have "an infection."

mhh__2• 5 years ago

What is our notion of life but an abstraction anyway?

mym19902• 5 years ago

Hence why this is an analogy...

nixpulvis2• 5 years ago

Rather than argue about dates and years, could we talk about the ways we are truly going to overcome this? I doubt a community which prides itself on intelligence and research really has nothing better to say than "where's your apocalypse now?"

I for one desperately want to start hearing actionable plans for carbon (or climate) pricing. Also, while I understand the impact I have as an individual is limited, I also am deeply aware of the fact that needed systemic changes will have an impact on me. Has anyone tried to summarize what we should expect life to look like during and after the needed changes? This will be the path to acceptance, which is somewhat of a prerequisite for policy change in a democracy.

Food for thought, obviously somewhat redundant.

MattGaiser4• 5 years ago

The problem is that timelines are central to the discussion. If we have 8 years, we are limited to existing technology for the most part and geological/biological solutions will be of limited use.

If we have 800 years, we can use more trees and bet more future technology.

nixpulvis2• 5 years ago

Hmmmm, I mean the point is that it's urgent. I think we should all be able to agree on that by now. The weather is to the point it's changing and weather is a far more localized phenomenon.

At the very least we shouldn't be making matters worse by, for example, inventing stupid new ways of wasting precious energy. Conservationism needs to be the new norm, and we can take new technologies that help as the are available. However, much of the work will need to be on the policy side, as unfortunate as that may be to us technologists.

doingtheiroming• 5 years ago

$600T costs of climate change by 2100. Assuming current global GDP of $90T (which itself makes the claim that global wealth amount to $300T today questionable), and average global growth across that time of 2%, global GDP will be something like $450T annually. Sounds manageable.

TaylorAlexander2• 5 years ago

Also millions of lives in poorer countries. But sure… “manageable”.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/climate/bangladesh-floods...

chrbutler3• 5 years ago

Just because you can pay for the cleanup doesn't make it not a disaster.

graddrisrp2• 5 years ago

The only sure thing is that most of these doom prediction happen to be false. People writing this kinda things seem to think we can afford reducing the growth society. The sad reality is that if we don't all grow we will suffer way more than what climate change will bring. Grow up, stop living like peter pan and work to find proper solution instead of complaining.

TazeTSchnitzel2• 5 years ago

The end of the growth society is only a disaster if we keep the current economic system unchanged. A world is possible which does not rely on unending growth.

graddrisrp2• 5 years ago

Agreed but we then need to accept to loose most of our modern day comfort, going back to 40years expectancy, most of the population dies ... which is probably not what we should aim for. Nature works like the rabbit and fox differential model. The only way for the fox, aka we need to try to grow as long as possible otherwise most of us will die brutally

Zelphyr• 5 years ago

that’s the sort of selfish glutton bully of a nation we are

The author just alienated all the people he is trying to convince.

chrbutler3• 5 years ago

Fair. I probably should have chilled on this one :)

aaaxyz• 5 years ago

I like to think that most readers don't get instantly alienated as soon as they read something criticizing them a bit too harshly

12ian34• 5 years ago

I don't think it's even harsh. It's probably not harsh enough

satysin3• 5 years ago

I totally agree with the article but god do I hate when people say "we only have N years left!" as it is something for all the climate change deniers to focus on and attack to discount the points made so the conversation just focuses on some stupid number that is nothing of real value and nothing moves forward. We get stuck in this dumb loop.

The reality is we're already too fucking late. We should have been doing things 50 years ago but we didn't and so the future is already written. 5 years. 10 years. 20 years. 50 years. 100 years. It is all fucked.

From all the things I have seen and read from experts over the past ten or so years there isn't really anything we can actually do so that things are less fucked in our lifetimes. And probably in the lifetime of people born just today.

So actions we take are for the benefit of people who do not even exist yet and it seems pretty much impossible to get people to care about the future of the human race if it means making life 'more difficult' now and probably for the rest of their lives.

The same has been true, probably, for all of human history but certainly so in the past 50 years. Seems the vast majority didn't really give a shit 50 years ago or 40 years ago or ... as basically fuck all has been done outside of token gestures and bullshit targets that there is no real penalty if you fail to meet because, after all, who gives a fuck about the future when you can have a few more quarters of exponential growth for share holders and pay a bit to "offset" your carbon footprint.

baobabKoodaa3• 5 years ago

You're describing people as if they are selfish and don't care about the future of humanity. That's not what this is. This is a tragedy of the commons. Virtually no single person has the power to combat climate change. If I could make a meaningful difference, I would happily trade my comfortable existence to save the planet. But I can't. Nothing I do will make a difference. So why should I reduce my carbon foot print or make any other sacrifice, when the world will be just the same with or without my sacrifice?

And there you go, a few billion people thinking like me and suddenly this group has real (negative) impact.

satysin3• 5 years ago

Yes. A person isn’t really selfish and will almost always make sacrifices to be better. But people as a whole are selfish for exactly the reasons you said.

When I say people I don’t mean an individual person.

MattPalmer10862• 5 years ago

When I was a kid I saw a poster about littering, which made a big impact on me. The poster just had a background of rubbish covered with speech bubbles all saying "my one bit of litter won't make any difference".

So while I agree that many people will not change unless they see everyone else doing it, I still think it is worth trying to make a difference on a personal level, even if only to satisfy my own conscience.

CarelessExpert4• 5 years ago

From all the things I have seen and read from experts over the past ten or so years there isn't really anything we can actually do so that things are less fucked in our lifetimes.

While that's what we once thought, the latest science says it's not true. If we stopped emitting carbon immediately, warming would halt (not reverse but halt) within a few decades:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/07/global-h...

So there's absolutely something we could do, today, to lessen how much the future is fucked in our lifetimes.

We just refuse to do it.

jjeaff• 5 years ago

Wouldn't most agree that the chaos of stopping -all- carbon emissions tomorrow would likely be far more damaging to humanity than what global warming will do in the next few decades if we don't?

satysin3• 5 years ago

If we stopped emitting carbon immediately, warming would halt (not reverse but halt) within a few decades

Again it comes down to caring about decades in the future. Look at the age of people who control everything. There are very few people under forty so if we take “a few decades” to mean forty years even people in their thirties are going to be near end of life before we see any benefit.

For the majority of people in positions of power they are in their fifties, sixties or seventies. They just don’t care about forty years+ in the future.

They say they care for their grandchildren’s futures but they clearly don’t as they never take strong action. They act as if pathetic targets will make a difference when what we need is extreme reductions.

doggodaddo782• 5 years ago

It's a climate change emergency. It needs oceanic bio CCS and FF curtailment now.

unchocked• 5 years ago

It's bad. It's really bad. And it's already here. So we need to talk about minimizing the forcing and the effects, and stop pretending like we are going to somehow avoid catastrophe.

That means driving emissions toward zero, and carbon removal, and solar geoengineering, and adaptation. All of the above. Climate change is already happening and we're still way behind the curve.

FourthProtocol3• 5 years ago

Many comments here take issue with previous warnings that haven't materialized, that dealines are missed/bad.

It sounds like we're trying hard to not do anything because those naughty people in the '60s and'70s cried wolf and there was no wolf.

Well, I'm one of those 70's people. Turned 51 this year. And I try. I have a BMW I hardly ever drive because I bought an electric-assist cargo bike.

I use that bike for the school run (~50km per day). I do the grocery shopping with it. I take the recyclable trash to the recycling yard, about 7km away.

There are some other things, like my herb garden, reducing the numbers of electric items in the house, eating less meat (this one is hard but we're winning slowly). Train when we go on vacation.

We can criticise the old folk, call foul on the scare tactics being used on us these days...

...or we can take it on board and start doing the little things.

And OMG imagine, we could maybe even stop looking for ways to criticize the government and those people from long ago, cut out the negativity, and stop making fun of Prius drivers.

Are we going to fix this or what?

jacobr14• 5 years ago

One of the problems that the article started to articulate, but didn't fully cover is that even if everyone on the planet did similar things in the personal lives ... it is not enough. Energy use and emissions are all about industry. To a certain extent one can patronize low-carbon emissions businesses, but most of those are either low carbon to begin with (often with high margins) or are using bullshit offsets.

Really that only things that can reduce emissions are regulations & taxes or new technologies. And maybe geoengineering, but that is speculative enough to not enter serious policy debates.

Applied R&D is incentived very heavily via taxes, so we don't need to mess around there too much. Basic research should be better funded though.

Probably the best proposals we've seen are the various forms of cap & trade for domestic industry or treaty partners adopting a common market, with tariffs for foreign production outside of cap&trade regime.

The EU's "Fit for 55" is the only tangible step in this direction I've seen.

FourthProtocol3• 5 years ago

So it's better to just throw up or hands and do nothing? If what I do isn't enough, surely it contributes something, right?

If we all only ever think of this as someone else's problem, nothing will change. The guy that passes legislation to fix this also has trash to recycle, ideally has an EV, and hopefully a son or daughter that looks up to the likes of Greta Thunberg...

The comments here sound so fatalist. It disappeared off the home page really fast too which suggests most don't want to face climate change.

Which is a shame. Our legacy could be amazing. But, for example, lauding Bezos for his ego trip to space seems more to people's tastes than to object to the planet-destroying consumer culture his company promotes.

This is right up there with the absurdity of colonising Mars when people are still starving on earth.

Causality13• 5 years ago

One phone call to your congressman is worth a thousand skipped hamburgers.

FourthProtocol3• 5 years ago

Why not both?

gmuslera• 5 years ago

Sometimes, like with rabies, once you start to get visible symptoms it is already to late to do something.

With coronavirus we saw what it means to not take action in something that is exponential, just because your reaction time and how broad it should be doesn't follow the progress of the disease, that it is already more severe than what your charts show.

What is left to know is if we are already falling downhill or this was just a bad dice roll in the extreme weather lottery. But it seems to be the former with the changes in the polar vortex.

sofixa• 5 years ago

Really minor nitpick - high speed rail is faster than airplanes for short to medium distances if you include ( as you should) getting to an airport ( usually farther away from where people live), the security theatre there, and the same at arrival.

( Not to mention much more comfortable, eco-friendly, etc.)

BizarroLand• 5 years ago

My two cents is that the people you're screaming at haven't left their 25 mile residential / geographical area for more than a few days in the last 30 years. They only have their own worldview to look at.

They'll get serious about climate change when their house is on fire and not a moment sooner.

The only solution is to force a solution from up-high, the way JFK did with the moon race.

marbu• 5 years ago

On the one hand I understand that conveying this as an average temperature difference makes the value more understandable, but it also makes some people miss the point that this is mostly about heat capture. And that this energy increase in will be noticed in many different ways. Moreover the process amplifies itself (eg. when some part of glacier melts, this area no longer reflects sunlight back into atmosphere, but the dark water absorbs most of this, which leads to even faster heat absorption).

GaryTang• 5 years ago

When the climate change movement starts to hold China more accountable, it will gain more steam.

ttonkytonk• 5 years ago

From Plato's Republic, Book Two:

(...)Yes, I said, now I understand: the question which you would have me consider is, not only how a State, but how a luxurious State is created; and possibly there is no harm in this, for in such a State we shall be more likely to see how justice and injustice originate. In my opinion the true and healthy constitution of the State is the one which I have described. But if you wish also to see a State at fever-heat, I have no objection. For I suspect that many will not be satisfied with the simpler way of life. They will be for adding sofas, and tables, and other furniture; also dainties, and perfumes, and incense, and courtesans, and cakes, all these not of one sort only, but in every variety; we must go beyond the necessaries of which I was at first speaking, such as houses, and clothes, and shoes: the arts of the painter and the embroiderer will have to be set in motion, and gold and ivory and all sorts of materials must be procured.

True, he said.

Then we must enlarge our borders; for the original healthy State is no longer sufficient. Now will the city have to fill and swell with a multitude of callings which are not required by any natural want; such as the whole tribe of hunters and actors, of whom one large class have to do with forms and colours; another will be the votaries of music—poets and their attendant train of rhapsodists, players, dancers, contractors; also makers of divers kinds of articles, including women's dresses. And we shall want more servants. Will not tutors be also in request, and nurses wet and dry, tirewomen and barbers, as well as confectioners and cooks; and swineherds, too, who were not needed and therefore had no place in the former edition of our State, but are needed now? They must not be forgotten: and there will be animals of many other kinds, if people eat them.

Certainly.

And living in this way we shall have much greater need of physicians than before?

Much greater.

And the country which was enough to support the original inhabitants will be too small now, and not enough?

Quite true.

Then a slice of our neighbours' land will be wanted by us for pasture and tillage, and they will want a slice of ours, if, like ourselves, they exceed the limit of necessity, and give themselves up to the unlimited accumulation of wealth?

That, Socrates, will be inevitable.

And so we shall go to war, Glaucon. Shall we not?

Most certainly, he replied.

Then without determining as yet whether war does good or harm, thus much we may affirm, that now we have discovered war to be derived from causes which are also the causes of almost all the evils in States, private as well as public.(...)

stmfreak• 5 years ago

Wow, this guy has drunk all the koolaid.

Most People Don't Understand How Bad Climate Change Already Is

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