Young People Are Anxious About Climate Change, Say Governments Are Failing Them

https://text.npr.org/1037023551

by 8bitsrule • 5 years ago

192 341 5 years ago

text.npr.org

650• 5 years ago

Regardless of climate change, media outlets like NPR propagate this anxiety to young people.

yepthatsreality• 5 years ago

The change in climate is what drives the propagation from outlets like NPR.

ksd482• 5 years ago

Or young people can just think for themselves regardless of media outlets?

What's your point?

ipaddr• 5 years ago

Do they or have they been conditiom by a school system to listen to a teacher. Does npr fill that role?

giantg22• 5 years ago

Eh, they're failing on more issues than just climate change. I think many people realize the rampant hypocrisy and political games that both sides play. It seems the ruling class grant themselves more and more power and privilege while imposing ever increasing restrictions on the population at large.

tibbetts3• 5 years ago

Only some people fall into the “both sides” trap and start thinking that cynicism is a virtue. It’s unfortunate, as this behavior encourages the very outcome to which you object. It’s much easier to take advantage of people who have given up.

DangitBobby• 5 years ago

The plugging your ears approach really is preferable, all things considered.

vincentpants2• 5 years ago

NPR isn’t the source of our anxiety, it’s people that don’t listen or take this seriously that do, like you actually. If you’re not actively trying to fix this, then you are part of the problem.

masijo• 5 years ago

How are you trying to fix it? Serious question, no bad intentions meant.

ClumsyPilot6• 5 years ago

What propagates anxiety in young people is that they can't vote untill they are 18, their voting block is tiny and no-one represents their concerns in the system.

Meanwhile folks in charge are dense as lead and vote for one party their whole life, but deride 'millennials'.

throwawaysea4• 5 years ago

The voting age should probably be raised, not lowered. The fact that those polled here cannot function normally day to day in large numbers due to climate anxiety (per this article) suggests those in this age group are far too immature emotionally and mentally to make good choices. Obviously I am speculating, but I bet many of those polled would answer differently ten years from now, or if they were working, or had a family. That experience is necessary to find balance and completeness in their worldviews.

changoplatanero2• 5 years ago

Most smokers are unable to quit. Most fat people are unable to lose weight. I worry that most civilizations are unable to cut carbon emissions.

junon3• 5 years ago

As much as I dislike smoking or obesity, those aren't the main causes of climate change. If we eliminated both of those entirely, today, we'd still have a crisis.

That being said, I'll absolutely agree with the sentiment that "humans will always be human". We're not going to collectively try to fix this until it's too late. That's the saddest part.

vmception• 5 years ago

So you understood the sentiment clearly but missed how those were analogies? Weird audience

MattGaiser• 5 years ago

His point is more that humans can’t easily change, even if they know the solution.

gorwell4• 5 years ago

Obesity isn't the main cause, but it is a growing contributor to climate change.

latortuga• 5 years ago

Interesting analogy but I don't think it holds up. Both of these are stereotypical examples of failure of willpower. Climate change does not require personal willpower when we have laws available to create carrots and sticks.

changoplatanero2• 5 years ago

My point was that im worried society doesnt have the willpower to create those laws just like many obese people dont have the will power to lose weight.

leeoniya3• 5 years ago

you can't easily force 7B people to act individually. you have to regulate at the source (the mfgs). we are far beyond individual action as a viable solution.

AnIdiotOnTheNet6• 5 years ago

I feel like people use this as an excuse to avoid making any inconvenient changes in their lifestyle, or rather to avoid considering making inconvenient changes to their lifestyle.

The problem with this is that it means not only are they not doing anything to help, they're much less likely to vote for people who would too because they're unwilling to accept inconveniences. Instead they'll vote for people who's policies would only inconvenience others, or make performative gestures while accomplishing nothing.

I'm afraid I have come to agree with others who believe this is a problem that society simple can't solve because it lacks any mechanism to make the necessary choices.

Aerroon5• 5 years ago

The difference between these is that stopping smoking and losing weight make your life overall better. Reducing carbon emissions will make life worse for everyone who's already on the lower rungs of humanity. No realistic amount of resource redistribution is going to work here.

It's also not enough. We will have to start sucking up that carbon from the atmosphere whether we cut emissions or not.

pessimizer2• 5 years ago

Reducing carbon emissions will make life worse for everyone who's already on the lower rungs of humanity. No realistic amount of resource redistribution is going to work here.

The people on the "lower rungs of humanity" emit an order of magnitude less carbon than everyone else, and should be the last to cut.

relax88• 5 years ago

Switching from fossil fuels to renewables and nuclear can have massive benefits to population health.

It’s not all a negative trade off.

moistly2• 5 years ago

We will have to start sucking up that carbon from the atmosphere whether we cut emissions or not.

We will have to start sucking it up faster than we've extracted it... which is about 100 million barrels a day. Ain't gonna happen.

sentinel3• 5 years ago

It’s already happening, a lot of countries are cutting down carbon emissions.

lisper6• 5 years ago

It's not just young people. I'm 56 and I'm going through a pretty serious personal existential crisis w.r.t. climate change. I think even the people who are worried about it don't realize quite how serious the situation is. I used to feel pretty confident that all of the really bad shit would not happen until after I was dead. I'm not nearly so confident any more. I now think there is a significant chance that I could live to see massive famines and the concomitant collapse of technological civilization. I've been losing quite a bit of sleep over it for a while now.

nimvlaj303• 5 years ago

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Civilisation as we know it, and perhaps even humanity is in the process of ending. The ending is inevitable, whether it is now or nearer to the heat death of the universe.

If you can personally try and affect change, then you should do it. But more likely, you are a slave to the same system that everyone else is. I'd recommend working on acceptance at this point.

ruined• 5 years ago

if this is your attitude then at least get out of the way

lisper6• 5 years ago

whether it is now or nearer to the heat death of the universe

That makes a huge difference. Even having it wind down over a period of a few thousand years, or even a few hundred, would be a hell of a lot better than what is looking like the increasingly likely prospect of having it wind down in a few decades. That is going to cause an incalculable amount of pain.

Mikeb854• 5 years ago

When I was in elementary school (early 90's) we were taught that half of New York would be underwater by 2020. Obviously didn't happen. Stop reading the news, they're fear-mongers and outlandish predictions have been happening for decades.

cryptoz• 5 years ago

More than 50 people just died from flooding of hurricane remnant in the Northeast just a few days ago. And Sandy really did put lower Manhattan under water causing huge damage. More of that is coming.

jussij• 5 years ago

Just give it a decade or two and you won't need to be bother reading about it as you'll be living it.

c0nducktr• 5 years ago

> When I was in elementary school (also early 90's) we were taught that

Do you think that your educators were climate scientists? Maybe you just had educators which misestimated the reports of actual scientists.

Is a grade-school teacher supposed to understand climate forecasting?

You're an adult. You should have realized by now that your grade school teachers didn't actually know everything about everything.

intuitionist• 5 years ago

The near-term collapse of technological civilization has the silver lining that wild things will have a chance to recolonize the planet. The alternative—a world of ever increasing control and declining standard of living for almost everybody on behalf of a tiny few—is far more terrifying to me.

fnord77• 5 years ago

aren't you excited about having live through both the great rise of civilization and then also the biggest decline?

you may have gotten to see the absolute peak of society.

lisper6• 5 years ago

You are absolutely right about seeing the rise of civilization. Being a witness to the development of personal computers and the internet has been an incomparable privilege. But no, I am not at all excited about seeing it come to an end. I'm a big fan of civilization. I'm quite certain that watching it wind down is not going to be fun at all.

strken4• 5 years ago

I'm not convinced that climate change has a high probability of ending technological civilisation[0]. Even large-scale climate wars might not end it.

The scenarios that fall short of ending civilisation, e.g. losing hundreds of millions of lives to famine or war, are obviously still very bad. This is not to downplay climate change in the slightest. It's just... at some point, people start dying, and that frees up ecological carrying capacity again. You need to make pessimistic assumptions about a lot of positive feedback loops in ecological and social collapse to predict that all human civilisation is going to be wiped out in the sense of regressing back to before the industrial revolution.

[0] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/13/18660548/climat...

lisper6• 5 years ago

Global famine won't end civilization directly, but it might spark WW3, and that would do it.

ageofwant• 5 years ago

You are assuming the supporting environment of the survivors will remain intact enough to allow recovery. That is a somewhat optimistic viewpoint. Most everything in the natural environment will be consumed before people start to die off in significant enough numbers. That will leave the survivors with something that is somewhat less than pristine, and will likely take several generations to recover to some semblance of previous carrying capacity and certainly with enormously reduced biodiversity.

God we did manage to fuck ourselves good and proper.

lanstin7• 5 years ago

You think if a billion people lose monsoon water, some of them won't put together a hand-made virus to wreak revenge on the wealthy nations responsible for the carbon burn and for climate denial? I mean, maybe, people have a capacity for good, but also for anger and revenge.

Carbon caused climate change isn't a carry-ing capacity / overpopulation / over utilization issue (and is now somewhat dwarfing those issues). It is a big change that has some chance of devastating a lot of biological based support systems all at the same time.

The risk to technological civilization is not in the direct effects, but in the human mediated effects. Not that leaving on yeast and water would be that good.

civilized• 5 years ago

Climate change is bad but technological collapse doomerism is completely unsupported by science.

People like the romance of dramatic and exciting extremes, of paradise and apocalypse. The mundane probability of having to adapt to somewhat worse conditions isn't that entertaining.

lisper6• 5 years ago

Look up "blue ocean event". The BOE could lead to the loss of the jet stream in 10-20 years. After that, God only knows what is going to happen. The really big problem is that we won't know where the rain will fall, and so we won't know where to plant, and so we could have global famine. If you think covid was bad, you ain't seen nuthin'. And even that will not necessarily lead directly to the collapse of civilization, but I'm not optimistic about the ability of our political leaders to handle the situation gracefully and without starting WW3.

moistly2• 5 years ago

54 and likewise. I've been aware of IPCC reports for a couple decades now, just kind of monitoring what they've been saying and noticing that more often than not, the media reports only the best-case scenarios while at the same time the worst-case scenarios are actually what's come to pass and much more quickly than expected. The denialism in this thread baffles the hell out of me.

nanis9• 5 years ago

What exactly is "the" "right" climate?

ceejayoz10• 5 years ago

Defining "the one single right climate" is hard.

Defining "this change is bad" is substantially easier.

Wet bulb temperatures of 35 degrees C in areas with billions of people and poor power infrastructure to run AC is bad, for example.

nanis9• 5 years ago

Wet bulb temperatures of 35 degrees C in areas with billions of people

I had to look up what that meant ... With this kind of nonsense being pushed around and with more than two decades of constant scary tales, no wonder the kids are nervous.

I grew up without any air conditioning at all. Ever. In any building. Summer temperatures between 35 - 40 C with high humidity. I do not know what the "wet bulb" equivalent of that is, but it was warm, for sure. People will figure out how to deal with the weather.

One of the most fun tourist attractions of my childhood was swimming/free diving around two thousand year old ruins under water.

The changes of a bunch of self-interested central planners figuring out how to do what you want without killing you are nil.

NL8072• 5 years ago

The one that does not result in ecological disaster.

nanis9• 5 years ago

Which period of the earth's lifetime would you like to go back to?

jbay808• 5 years ago

Probably somewhere in the middle range of this graph:

https://xkcd.com/1732/

nanis9• 5 years ago

Yeah, about that average. ... You do understand the difference between smoothed decadal or even centennial averages versus much more precise and frequent thermometer measurements, right?

Also, you do understand that the thermometer observations we have are highly selected based on where humans preferred to live, right?

I might do an update on this video, but here are the locations with thermometers that made it in to GHCNv3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h95uvT67bNg

tfehring3• 5 years ago

The fact that climate change is a problem doesn't imply that there's a "right" climate. The rapid rate of change itself is the problem - and particularly the fact that that rate of change is faster than organisms and systems can adequately adapt to.

Atmospheric CO2 levels have previously, naturally, been higher than they are today. The most recent time that they were that high, the land on which most of our population's biggest cities were built was underwater. We could have just as easily built cities in an environment in which CO2 levels and temperatures were higher than they were in 1800, just by building farther back from today's coasts - but we didn't, so some cities will face massive costs to adapt, and others will simply go away.

All of that is literally true for cities, but it's also true by analogy for organisms and natural ecosystems. We can't quantify the full magnitude of climate change's impacts on those ecosystems, but there's wisdom in risk aversion when dealing with highly uncertain situations.

frabbit5• 5 years ago

the fact that that rate of change is faster than organisms and systems can adequately adapt to.

And even this assumes that there is some sort of linear progression towards a semi-stable state instead of churning, unpredictable "seasons" for tens of thousands of years before the climate settles into something.

nanis9• 5 years ago

The rapid rate of change itself is the problem

What is the right rate of change? The answer does not have to be very precise. An estimate within an order of magnitude is OK.

throwawaysea4• 5 years ago

Young people are also exposed to immense echo chambers that operate as runaway feedback loops, which manipulate their emotions, political views, and so on. This leads to extreme perspectives that are detached from reality. These two paragraphs from the article demonstrate this:

Positive feelings such as optimism were reported least among the respondents, researchers said. In fact, 77% said that they considered the future to be frightening, and 56% agreed with the viewpoint that humanity is doomed, according to the study.
For many young people, those feelings of fear and worry affect their ability to function, too, results showed. More than 45% of the respondents said the way they feel about climate change adversely affects their day-to-day lives.

As a UW Professor of Atmospheric Science said (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/08/is-global-warming-exi...), climate change is a problem but not an existential threat. Yet young people seem to think that humanity is doomed. That Professor faced much critique for holding such a balanced and nuanced view, and activists have tried to get him fired. Such aggressive attempts at narrative control, in institutions and social media, leads to extreme views among the young.

tfehring3• 5 years ago

What makes you think any of those beliefs are detached from reality?

tibbetts3• 5 years ago

Those perspectives can be said to be extreme, but I’m not seeing you make a case that they are “detached from reality.”

throwawaysea4• 5 years ago

Humanity isn’t “doomed”. Climate change may affect hundreds of millions and even so it is far away from an existential threat to humans. It also isn’t something that should cause someone to lose the ability to function day-to-day. That suggests immaturity, fragility, and a cognitive distortion (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/catastrophizing).

ddoolin• 5 years ago

What makes young people more exposed to echo chambers (and why more immense?) than older adults? Younger people seem to me to be more likely to be exposed to more new people, more new ideas, and more diversity of opinions than adults.

throwawaysea4• 5 years ago

Young people, such as those belonging to Gen Z, spend far more time on social media relative to other age groups and did not experience a non-digital world at all (unlike millennials and earlier generations). I also think they are less exposed to new ideas or a diversity of opinions - college campuses are culturally and politically far more monolithic than ever before, and are incredibly hostile to free speech and diversity of thought, particularly where it goes against progressive/leftist world views. Cancel culture, deplatforming, and the injection of politics into even K-12 education have created a large pipeline that amounts to a decentralized indoctrination in effect.

eej713• 5 years ago

One advantage of being older is that you have a chance to see panics come and go. For example, it would be a challenge to convey to you the utter certainty and despair that existed in the 70s with the prevailing belief that we would be running out of oil in the next few decades and action was needed _now_ (pounds fist on the table). I think everyone then who held these views would be astonished by the oil capacity available to us today. This intense emotional certainty isn’t unique to that issue. It happens again and again. Some of us have seen these panics before. The worrisome part for me is that many people here are giving themselves anxiety in part because their information stream and commentary lacks balance.

ClumsyPilot6• 5 years ago

Indeed why are young people nervous? it's only skyrocketing property prices, gig economy, obliteration of property rights by software, financialization of the economy and ecological collapse. Nothing to be worried about

refurb• 5 years ago

When is the last time the world wasn’t falling apart?

jimmaswell3• 5 years ago

Nothing is wrong with the gig economy besides the general problem of health insurance being tied to your job.

gorwell4• 5 years ago

And because they have failed, they will probably handle it poorly with lockdowns. Will the young will be for or against that?

babelfish• 5 years ago

What are you talking about? Those two things have nothing to do with each other (and this is actually the second time I’ve noticed you dogwhistling).

gorwell4• 5 years ago

Lockdowns reduced carbon emissions.

https://earth.stanford.edu/news/covid-lockdown-causes-record...

https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3089/local-lockdowns-brought-f...

As for dog whistling, only dogs hear those and conspiracy theorists think they do.

AniseAbyss• 5 years ago

Atheist without kids so I'll live. No skin in the game.

But I was somewhat shocked when I saw people taking their family to see formula 1 cars drive laps in a national park. When you're not even willing to give up little things like motorsports or plastic straws this planet is about to be recycled.

tibbetts3• 5 years ago

The idea that personal choices about straws or motorsports are an important or effective response to climate change is a fallacy encouraged by organizations who benefit from climate change. If it’s all about consumer choice, then real reform will never happen.

nefitty• 5 years ago

By that logic, anxiety is irrational. Acceptance of any outcome should be what we work on internally as individuals. Anger is arguably a much more productive emotion, politically speaking.

mc324• 5 years ago

I'm sure people are frustrated, but I wonder what the consensus, if you could fine one, would be.

What exactly are they expecting governments to change? Policy, power generation, transportation, what? And will they accept the necessary or resultant policies and changes?

The above are "easy" if you have a totalitarian regime where what the autocrats say go, goes: China, Saudi Arabia, etc., most other countries are more democratic and it takes time for change to happen.

andromeduck• 5 years ago

Build more CANDUs

toomuchtodo2• 5 years ago

Tax carbon. Use cross border tariffs to prevent offshoring emissions. People will then make the economically rational decision to use public transportation, buy EVs, put solar on the roof, insulate their homes, buy heat pumps, and eat less meat.

Shicholas• 5 years ago

This is the best solution for today’s world. I wish I could upvote this a million times.

mc324• 5 years ago

Carbon taxes look like a useful tool; I wonder what the unforeseen drawbacks and consequences might be.

Will people redefine what carbon is; who will suffer, how many people will lose jobs due to electrification of many industries (auto MFG for one, the UFW, is concerned). What happens to the third world where they use charcoal for cooking?

I think there is much more to be thought out.

plandis6• 5 years ago

If a carbon tax won’t pass in liberal Washington I don’t think there’s much hope for the rest of the US, TBH.

sentinel3• 5 years ago

Carbon taxation. The idea being that otherwise it’s an unpriced externality.

tppiotrowski7• 5 years ago

Government might not be the solution here. I look at electric cars and soon they will require less maintenance, less money for fuel and be cheaper than their ICE counterparts. If you build something that emits less CO2 and it is BETTER and CHEAPER than the competition it's game over. No one but hobbyists will look at ICE again.

This to me aligns with economic theory in practice more accurately than a carbon tax.

tfehring3• 5 years ago

Internalizing negative externalities through taxation is literally Economics 101. That's not to say that that makes a carbon tax inherently a good idea (though I think it is), but there's nothing economically unsound about it and there's a reason lots of economists support it.

ceejayoz10• 5 years ago

Government might not be the solution here. I look at electric cars...

Governments took quite a few measures in the last few decades to subsidize and encourage the electric car market.

nimih2• 5 years ago

I'm sure people are frustrated, but I wonder what the consensus, if you could fine one, would be.

Probably despair that they've been failed by my generation, my parent's generation and (since they're to a large extent the ones still in power, at least in the US), my grandparent's generation. Since, as you point out, change takes time in democracies, and even longer internationally, it was our collective jobs to avoid even being in this situation, and we sort of screwed the pooch.

mc324• 5 years ago

Let's say people in the 70s knew climate change was happening. That it was the prevailing consensus and had the necessary evidence.

What were governments supposed to do? What technology were they going to leverage? did we have computers, modelling, alternatives?

Cars with ICE could have become more efficient, yes. But where else could we have cut the fat? Fewer people via worldwide contraception, to stem demand? More public transit? Much of carbon output is not on the consumer side, but on the industry side of things.

The antinuke activists killed green energy which would have make coal and other dirty power obsolete. That would have been a nice chunk.

I don't think we had the technology back then to do much about it. We could have slowed it down a bit, but not stop it.

OneEyedRobot2• 5 years ago

another issue is that changing something, greenhouse gas let's say, is harder on the margin. The first improvements are cheap, the later ones aren't. Looking at an EPA webpage, I see that current per capita US CO2 emissions are about 65% of the 1970 levels.

I can certainly see some of the problems. The real increases are in India/China. Union of Concerned Scientists shows that US share of worldwide CO2 is 15%, even a solid change is only a fraction of 15%. A lot of solutions (nuclear, fracking of natgas to replace coal, cutting immigration from the Third World to the First, etc.) are politically unpopular with climate activists. World population is supposed to peak at 50% higher than current level. GDP improvements (and energy use) could easily outstrip improvements in efficiency. etc. etc.

oh well, no one is asking me to run their lives so I'll just sit back and watch.

unchocked• 5 years ago

It's the thing that will most predictably change everything. Anxiety is anticipation with a negative outlook. Living under a power structure that's so inefficacious, and a culture that's so in denial, I think the kids would be crazy to be anything but - not only anxious - but more anxious than the rest of us are.

lvl100• 5 years ago

Boomers ruined this world so they can retire…no they won’t even retire.

eej713• 5 years ago

I’ll point out that it was frequently the boomer generation that thought of themselves as the ones who would make it right. That they understood what was wrong unlike their idiot and narrow minded elders. This idyllic view of themselves and their values has saturated pop music from the 60s and since. Not sure the current youth will escape the derision of their own youth when their eventual turn as elder arrives.

olivermarks• 5 years ago

I strongly recommend 'Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All' by Michael Shellenberger https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&preview=new...

adamnemecek• 5 years ago

What’s the summary?

tobiasu• 5 years ago

Nuclear and shale gas shill writes how technology will solve everything.

benzible• 5 years ago

Really, don't bother https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/article-by-michael-sh...

UncleMeat3• 5 years ago

Maybe it'd be better to read the opinions of relevant faculty instead. I know at least one climate science faculty who has publicly referred to Shellenberger as a "professional asshole" after being treated so poorly by Shellenberger.

Shellenberger is just next in the long list of industry shills who peddle the same misinformation and then complain when researchers get mad at him, claiming endless victimhood.

plandis6• 5 years ago

As hominem attacks are not a good way to discredit an argument though.

crackercrews• 5 years ago

I wasn't overly impressed by Apocalypse Never. It has some interesting tidbits, sure. But ultimately a lot of the argument was about reframing harm as deaths instead of dollars: we have better technology so we can avoid deaths from natural disasters. That's good but if we are causing natural disasters to be worse and the sea level to rise that's still something we should seek to avoid.

I found Unsettled, [1] by former Caltech provost Steven Koonin to be much more compelling. The approach is rigorous and scientific. The author is not partisan. He did work for BP but also served in the Obama administration. He brings to the climate debate a rational skepticism that is typically discouraged in polite/liberal company. IMO it was at least 2x as compelling as Apocalypse Never.

1: https://www.amazon.com/Unsettled-Climate-Science-Doesnt-Matt...

tppiotrowski7• 5 years ago

The economics of solar are good news. Hopefully we've hit an inflection point where coal power is no longer economical [1]

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90583426/the-price-of-solar-elec...

tuatoru• 5 years ago

Coal hasn't been economical for at least two years, in the sense that the capital cost of new PV is less than the operating cost of existing coal.

The problem is that developing countries like China and India are so desperately short of electricity (growth in demand is so high) that any new builds just add to existing production rather than replacing it. - Governments will prop up uneconomic generators to maintain total supply.

I don't know how to scale up PV and wind quickly enough to just replace coal in this situation.

Edit: the Chinese experiments with thorium molten salt and pebble-bed high temperature fission reactors are interesting here.

If they can easily swap out coal furnaces with nuclear reactors and retain the other 80% of the power stations, they'll get great benefits in air quality and and emissions while making use of of their investment in thermal generation.

larzang• 5 years ago

Peak Chinese coal consumption was 2013, it's still substantial but total usage has been falling along with percentage of total output for a while now.

tppiotrowski7• 5 years ago

Looks like China is bringing online 40GW coal per year. Around the same amount the US/EU are retiring. According to figure 1 [1]

[1] https://globalenergymonitor.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/C...

beervirus2• 5 years ago

Turns out it’s easy to make cheap solar cells if you have access to unlimited free labor from Chinese prison camps.

tppiotrowski7• 5 years ago

Assuming the people are there justly for committing a crime and not being convicted just to provide free labor doesn't it make sense to have these people do something instead of sitting all day in a cage?

sentinel3• 5 years ago

Young people need to follow the news less. It’ll play up any little issue for eyeballs.

jazzabeanie2• 5 years ago

Some news is impossible to avoid.

Manuel_D6• 5 years ago

56% agreed with the viewpoint that humanity is doomed, according to the study.

Climate change is a serious issue, and one that stands poised to do a substantial amount of harm, but if the majority of young people think that humanity is doomed then I seriously suspect that there's misinformation about the impact of climate change at play here. Even the more pessimistic outlooks of climate change still leave substantial areas of habitable climate. Many societies would be harmed, and disproportionately among lower income equatorial countries, but I think it's a massive stretch to say that humanity is doomed based on our climate projections.

skyfaller• 5 years ago

I think it's irresponsible to act as though the climate crisis is just a matter of weather, and not how also we will respond to it. Resource shortages caused by the climate crisis could cause resource wars, and if weapons of mass destruction are deployed during those wars, that could easily finish off homo sapiens.

The mere collapse of civilization and mass death should be bad enough that we take drastic action to prevent it, but I do also think it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility of human extinction.

Manuel_D6• 5 years ago

What shortages? The world overproduces food by no small margin. Starvation is a regional supply issue. In developed countries 30-40% of food often goes to waste. Alternative water supplies like desalination exist, and countries like Israel with constrained natural water supplies use it extensively. I think it's irresponsible to proclaim that humanity is doomed without a coherent argument as to why it won't be able to survive.

TheOtherHobbes2• 5 years ago

A lot of people still haven't realised that cultural extinction is likely to happen before personal or human extinction does.

Ironically we're a completely natural phenomenon - a species that outcompetes the others, but gets stuck at individual and herd intelligence without evolving collective intelligence.

We're basically a brushfire species - which is probably something that happens fairly regularly on planets.

plandis6• 5 years ago

The temperatures are already increasing but the world is progressively getting less starved and malnourished over time, not more.

Source: our world in data / Factfulness.

throwaway57528• 5 years ago

You're talking of billions of deaths from famine and conflict from displacement. Should young people not be alarmed about the idea of a few hundred of millions of humans relegated to the poles of the Earth because the species was too stupid to stop destroying their own planet?

If we can't prevent - or based on comments here, completely reject the reality of - the massive and preventable degradation of the only habitat in known universe where we can survive then we are in fact quite doomed.

angelzen7• 5 years ago

preventable degradation

The Kyoto Protocol, first international treaty designed to limit greenhouse gas emissions, was signed in 1997. Since then greenhouse emissions have grown by 50% and global population has grown by 25%. What prevention measures are you proposing, and why did they utterly fail to reverse the catastrophic growth trend in the past 25 years?

over_bridge4• 5 years ago

I think what people mean by 'humanity is doomed' isn't about whether the homo sapiens species will continue - it will.

The fear is more that society collapses. Our way of life may be doomed. With our extreme focus on career specialisation over the past century, very few, if any of us have the generalist skills to thrive in a world equivalent to pre-industrial times. It's not something to shrug at. What country can actually live as a self contained unit without global supply lines and dependencies? What families or individuals could?

It's also true that there will be substantial areas of habitable climate. The problem is that people who weren't lucky enough to be born and live in one, won't simply accept their fates and die. Eight billion people will surge into a relatively small habitable band - in the process this will destroy the arable land and severely strain systems like water, power, waste and healthcare.

Manuel_D6• 5 years ago

Why do you think climate change is going to make industrialized society and global trade disappear? Are warming oceans going to melt container ships? Not to be snide, but this comment is just postulating the collapse of industry and trade as fact without a cohesive picture as to why climate change will cause this.

The overwhelming majority of the earth will still be habitable with even the most pessimistic predictions of 4-5 degrees of warming. Those areas that stand to become uninhabitable, like the Sahara Desert, are very sparsely populated. Only 2.5 million people in an area the size of the continental USA. A big swath on a map, but not a very big impact on global demographics. As far as resources go, the world already has a substantial overproduction of food. Water can be secured from alternative sources, like desalination (Israel already obtains ~40% of its water from desalination) and reclamation of waste water.

To reiterate, I see a massive gap in how the effects of climate change lead to the collapse of global civilization.

micromacrofoot• 5 years ago

Climate change is the underlying problem, but most of the "doomed" feeling I've heard from others comes from the inevitable strife that will follow widespread climate displacement, famine, drought, and other increasingly severe weather. Not to mention feuding governments.

My feeling is that we could survive climate change easily, but it's the other people that will do us in.

We've lost ~4.5 million people globally to covid and things have been a little weird (this is certainly an understatement for some). What happens when that's 50 million? 100?

rewgs3• 5 years ago

Even amongst people who are presumably, on the whole, intelligent, and by definition (due to the nature of the work that attracts people to HN) good at understanding complex systems, the amount of down-playing and hardheadedness and frankly closed-minded thinking -- all in the service of a kind of soft denial -- displayed throughout the comments here is astounding. And it seems to stem from either unwillingness or inability to truly see the magnitude of the problem, the system affected as a whole.

Climate change is not happening in a vacuum. You are completely underestimating the monumental effects of what you're conceding will happen (disproportionate harming of lower income equatorial countries), and overstating the consolation of there still being substantial areas of habitable climate.

We are poised to see the largest refugee crisis in history. The global supply chain will lose its most foundational workers, the destruction of its most foundational resources. Wealthier nations will not welcome those refugees with open arms, and we can all but expect their arrival to even further foment the rise of right-wing extremism, which will continue to contribute to instability in their own native countries.

Furthermore, those shrinking but still existent areas of habitable climate will encourage violence simply by way of everyone on the planet becoming more and more aware of how rare they are. And even that ignores the fact that "habitable" does not mean "untouched." Those places will have their own purely-climate-related problems, politics and violence aside.

And that is but one of dozens or even hundreds of equally massive, intertwined, complex issues resulting from climate change.

The very literal existence of humanity may not be doomed (though it very well may be), but any semblance of global order and a functioning society very much is.

angelzen7• 5 years ago

A lot of people see the problem, give us some credit. What we don't see is solutions. Do you have any to share?

sremani2• 5 years ago

Today Paul Graham has tweeted about coal consumption of the world from 2000, it paints a good picture where to look if you are focused on green house gases.

150 years ago, there are billion of us. Now we are 7 billion going up to 9 billion.. 150 years from now, if we are going to be a billion.. I am fine with it.

eej713• 5 years ago

A population of 1b would be devastating setback. There’s a reason why some of us view environmentalists as misanthropes.

sremani2• 5 years ago

I am not an environmentalist -- I am more commenting on the uncommon time we are living.

We shot up from 1 Billion to 7 billion in span of 150 years, and reversion to mean can happen, it is happening as lowering sperm count, and falling birth rates, climate change, global pandemics, war etc.

Read my comment as glass 1/7th full, at least there is some water left.

edit: As far as coal consumption from year 2000 goes, China has built massive coal consumption capacity and if China does not sign up to any of those Climate Change agreement, the rest is inconsequential since they are the workshop of the world now. You can tinker energy policy in US and Europe, but that means nothing if China is not on board.

after_care• 5 years ago

Why is it okay to have less people? We have serious long term problems to solve aside form climate change, like how to become an interplanetary species and how to cure cancer. More people means (can mean) more brainpower working on things that benefit us all.

nverno4• 5 years ago

I'd take wild places over brainpower by a long shot

toolz2• 5 years ago

I'm probably overly calm about climate change. I can't trust that science isn't trying to sensationalize the problem so much so that I end up discounting everything I read.

Take this [1] paper for example I just happened upon. Look at this scary graphic they provide to convince the reader that wildfires are getting worse [2]. The paper goes on painting a terrible picture about the rising trend of wildfires in the U.S. Now let's look at the source for their graphic and look back further at earlier dates from the same source. [3] - kind of paints a different picture, no?

So at what point am I, an average citizen supposed to be worried enough that I do my own systematic reviews of the literature and see who is just sensationalizing the problem?

Maybe I'm the minority, maybe the "marketing" of global warming is exactly as it should be if the problem is indeed as dire as many would have me believe, but the obvious sensationalism just makes me wonder if everyone trying to sell me on this fear has just bought into the hype and as such I'll be a hard sell on this issue, because if it was real and dire - I doubt there would be such obvious sensationalism every time I look into it.

[1] https://costofcarbon.org/files/Flammable_Planet__Wildfires_a...

[2] https://i.imgur.com/0FlXads.png

[3] https://i.imgur.com/zvbApzL.png

ripper1138• 5 years ago

I suppose those sensational stories/papers get more attention so that’s the short answer? I’m with you though. My personal life has not been affected at all (yet) so I am fortunate. But it’s not worth the stress, I mean the top comment is someone saying they are losing a lot of sleep over climate change. Like buddy get a grip.

ceejayoz10• 5 years ago

Now let's look at the source for their graphic and look back further at earlier dates from the same source. [3] - kind of paints a different picture, no?

Yes, but not in the way you're portraying it. The big shift downwards comes in a major shift in strategy in dealing with forest fires in the early to mid 1900s; it doesn't tell you much about the climate at the time. https://foresthistory.org/research-explore/us-forest-service...

In 1935, the Forest Service established the so-called 10 a.m. policy, which decreed that every fire should be suppressed by 10 a.m. the day following its initial report. Other federal land management agencies quickly followed suit and joined the campaign to eliminate fire from the landscape.

toolz2• 5 years ago

I'm curious in how you interpret my comment here - in what way am I portraying this issue? What I mean to show is that forest fires have gotten immensely better, likely because of technology over the years. Which is exactly what I hear many climate change skeptics suggest - that technology will solve the problems, like we appear to be seeing here.

nverno4• 5 years ago

The book 'Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters' by Steven Koonin is worth a read if you get interested in learning more from a knowledgeable source that tries to cut through the hype. Of course, given the publicity of the issue it is often sensationalized, misconstrued, etc.

simonsarris• 5 years ago

Fires specifically is an annoying one. Politicians have huge incentive to point the blame at anything except poor management.

See:

Approximately 1.8 million ha burned annually in California prehistorically (pre 1800). Our estimate of prehistoric annual area burned in California is 88% of the total annual wildfire area in the entire US during a decade (1994–2004) characterized as ‘‘extreme’’ regarding wildfires. The idea that US wildfire area of approximately two million ha annually is extreme is certainly a 20th or 21st century perspective. Skies were likely smoky much of the summer and fall in California during the prehistoric period.

from: Prehistoric fire area and emissions from California’s forests, woodlands, shrublands, and grasslands (2007)

https://www.sierraforestlegacy.org/Resources/Conservation/Fi...

And:

Many consider wildfire as an accelerating problem [...] however, important exceptions aside, the quantitative evidence available does not support these perceived overall trends.

from: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.201...

riversflow• 5 years ago

I too find that wildland fires on the West coast being conflated with climate change as bad messaging. You can read about the California valley being filled with smoke consistently during the late summer in "Up and Down California", a series of journals written between 1860-1865[1].

That said, I backpacked in the Sierras this summer and alarmingly saw many old Pine stands recently dead from what I assume is the drought. I also find the perilous state of the arctic ocean ice, the seeming breakdown of typical jetstream patterns(probably linked to the arctic ice) and the sky-high CO2(resulting in ocean acidification as well as warming) all particularly concerning.

[1] http://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/up_and_down_california

If you want to read about particularly the smoke, the books are broken up by year and chapters chronologically, his writings during September particularly tend to describe the smoke.

freddealmeida• 5 years ago

Young people are driven by propaganda and social trends. I don't see what the crisis is at all. Data, cleaned for bias, suggests very little difference. And certainly not in the West. Pollution is certainly a problem, such as in China, India, but I don't agree that the world climate is changing in a way that is abnormal.

I'm anxious though about the drive for using climate as a premise to remove freedoms for some possible safety. Authoritarian regimes are increasingly taking power.

sorethescore• 5 years ago

Everyone is driven by propaganda and social trends, it's naive to believe otherwise. If you can't see the crisis then either you're not looking or you don't understand the threat posed by anthropogenic climate change. The fact that China, India and the rest of the developing world are unlikely to fully adress their contributions to the problem only make the crisis more acute increasing the likelihood for authoritarian regimes to take power and act in whatever way they feel is in their best interest, regardless the consequences.

Tycho• 5 years ago

I’m not worried at all. Even if it turns out to be real and not just fun with statistics. People who say stuff like there’s no point in having children, the world is doomed, etc, need to get their head checked out. Or stop paying attention to social agenda advertising campaigns.

cgrealy2• 5 years ago

They should be (anxious) and they're right (governments have failed them).

Unfortunately, we've spent the last few decades ignoring the science and telling people they are the ones that can fix this, by recycling or taking less car journeys or eating less meat.

And all of those things do help, but it's akin to fighting WW2 by asking everyone to write a strongly worded letter to Hitler.

Climate change is a massive global problem that cannot be solved by individual countries, let alone individual humans. And yet the leading countries (and to be fair, pretty much every other country) have done nothing meaningful about it.

I feel bad for anyone under 20.

spiderice• 5 years ago

I feel bad for anyone under 20.

I feel bad for people under 20 due to people pushing this sentiment that they're doomed and they have no future to look forward to. That is currently doing more harm than climate change is. And it does nothing to solve the problem of climate change.

cgrealy2• 5 years ago

I feel bad for people under 20 due to people pretending there isn't an existential crsis and it'll all be fine if they just recycle.

Unfortunately, that's still doing less harm than climate change actually is (and certainly will be in the future).

And it does nothing to solve the problem of climate change.

logicalmonster4• 5 years ago

I'm glad that social media wasn't around when I was growing up. If the media had the same chance to clickbait me into panic in my day, I'd have been genuinely scared to death about the ozone layer being depleted or acid rain making the planet unlivable by now, yet here we are.

It's easy to panic about hot-button issues such as climate change when the media clickbaits you into endless doom and gloom and refuses to report on the safety and efficiency innovations in nuclear energy and the fact that whatever climate change exists has already been a solved problem for decades.

The media is the cause of the biggest mental health crises on the planet. We're letting some of the most mediocre people drive society into ruin just to get people to sell a few extra ads.

trehalose• 5 years ago

already been a solved problem for decades

How solved is it if the solutions aren't getting deployed?

logicalmonster4• 5 years ago

It will happen when it has to.

Look into Scott Adams law of slow moving disasters.

https://www.scottadamssays.com/2013/04/15/fact-checking-adam...

To sum it up, whenever humans see a problem coming in the distant future, they find a way to solve it in time. Y2K is a great example of this: when stories about the effects of Y2K were popularized, some people thought that there would be no way to fix so many millions of lines of code in time and some of the marvels of human civilization like the electrical grid or the banking system might irrecoverably crash. Yet humans found ways to solve the issues and essentially nothing happened.

SpicyLemonZest5• 5 years ago

Climate scientists have historically maintained a tacit agreement to not discuss other solutions publicly, because they think reducing emissions is the best way to go and they don't want to distract politicians by telling them about other options. This has changed a bit in recent years (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/solar-geoengineer...), but the change largely hasn't filtered to the public consciousness.

throwaway57528• 5 years ago

I don't use social media, HN notwithstanding, and it is plainly obvious to me from just looking out the window that climate change is substantial and accelerating. It is the most urgent and dangerous issue facing the planet.

I agree social media is awful, but it does not follow that climate change isn't cause to panic.

If anything, half of Americans are nowhere near panicked enough about climate change as the result of social media.

logicalmonster4• 5 years ago

Do you disagree that the clean energy problem has been solved by nuclear energy? I'm not panicked because I think we already have the solution.

All the climate alarmism and environmental activists has done is promote worse options like solar and wind that are more environmentally destructive and cannot sustain modern human civilization.

nverno4• 5 years ago

I think the point here is panic doesn't solve any problems and probably only makes things worse. We'd all be better off with level heads.

over_bridge4• 5 years ago

The difference is that people took action on the ozone layer and acid rain. Now they aren't problems.

I can't understand the viewpoint that climate change coverage is some sort of clickbait to drive ad revenue. I can't think of anything worse to read about. It's so depressing and makes me avoid the news and see less ads if anything.

trainsplanes• 5 years ago

I'd have been genuinely scared to death about the ozone layer being depleted or acid rain making the planet unlivable by now, yet here we are.

It's retroactively very extreme sounding, but that's because governments collectively acted to enact environmental regulations. The ozone really was on its way to just vanishing and still isn't fully recovered.

The difference is that governments are full of people who don't realize that active efforts prevented disaster scenarios, and they're paid to say the bad things that are happening aren't happening. What was a slow moving disaster is now accelerating and people are still pretending humans can magically fix everything they knowingly fucked up.

TheSpiceIsLife• 5 years ago

I’m convinced now the reason we don’t live in a galaxy full is interstellar species is that ad-driven engagement has ended every society before it gets to that level of technology.

nanis9• 5 years ago

Maybe they worry about all the wind turbine blades we are burying so that governments can shovel money from one group to another's pockets.

annoyingnoob2• 5 years ago

more than half said climate change made them feel "afraid, sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and/or guilty."

That seems like a bad survey. Why does 'guilty' get 'and/or' while the others do not? Guilty does not belong in the same question with the others. Maybe surveys like this one find what they are looking for because of the way the questions are asked.

antod3• 5 years ago

You're reading the reporting wrong.

It is meant as: afraid and/or sad and/or anxious and/or angry and/or powerless and/or helpless and/or guilty

ie the last "and/or" is defining what the commas mean. Just like "a, b, c, and d" or "a, b, c, or d" don't mean "a, b, (c and d)" or "a, b, (c or d)"

And that was also a smaller summary list of options than the actual study had.

annoyingnoob2• 5 years ago

I suppose if we throw enough terms into a single question then it applies to everyone. What, exactly, do we learn with a question like that?

mudlus• 5 years ago

The government doesn't make discoveries, the government isn't creative. People are. Solving the problem of climate change can be helped by governments as a tool people use for coordination, but generally governments are best at defining rules, which are compulsory--this is antithetical to creativity. All this is to say, yes governments SHOULD fail us in solving this type of problem. Capitalism, though it is not the most popular tool in the zeitgeist right now, is a much better tool for solving this type of problem. If you have money, it's a good time to take on risk and invest in solutions. Uranium seems to be a popular one right now, as nuclear energy is the greenest energy generation tool we have, and problems from the past are being solved through better engineering currently (micro-nuclear). Private fusion investment is a much better long term investment, though it's unlikely you'll get a return in your life time, humans will get a return in the long run. The billionaires know this, look at who is investing in fusion right now.

ClumsyPilot6• 5 years ago

Alternative title: Younger generation sees disaster capitalism for what it is and realise they will have to liek with the consequences.

brandonmenc• 5 years ago

At this point, the only viable solution is geo-engineering, which has a great feature: you can do it unilaterally, without having to convince every single person to change their habits.

tppiotrowski7• 5 years ago

All the bright minds on HN have failed them by not working on climate change because we need another Uber for pizza delivery startup...

egberts1• 5 years ago

O_o

aosmond• 5 years ago

I am always amazed at the level of denial among the people. I speak of the comments to this article, not the young people in question.

The IPCC reports are quite conservative. The reason the 2021 reports were so dire is because they began including some of the feedback loop modeling the scientists preparing the report have become more confident in. More is in the pipeline.

Somewhere along the line, it got political. Maybe it was always political. Hard to say that society needs to fundamentally change without people feeling it encroaches upon their world view.

You don't have to look very far to see our supply chain impacted by nature. Pandemics such as COVID were and are predicted to become more frequent. My local supermarket doesn't just have higher prices, the selection has gone down in many categories as the droughts and wildfires have impacted production. We are getting a taste of what has been long predicted. Deny all you want. I'm not saying the world will end this year, or next decade, but little by little, all the evidence I'm seeing is pointing towards the science being right. And it ain't pretty.

The level of ambition among our governments is quite low. The people are selfish, more concerned with their property values and if their neighbour mows their bylaw required lawn, than if the next generation will be able to have a similar quality of life. Why wouldn't you be cynical if you were young?

If you are a believer in conspiracies, what seems more likely to you? The climate scientists of the world conspiring to destroy the world economy? Or the powers that already be in this world desperately trying to hold onto their positions? I don't know about you, but I think the latter is far more likely.

throwaway57528• 5 years ago

I can't regularly find fruit that was plentiful a few years ago at my grocery store. Produce this year was poor quality and wasn't available at the same times.

noduerme6• 5 years ago

We've had a shortage of onions in Oregon. A few hundred miles from where they're grown. But the reason is not enough truckers after the pandemic.

frabbit5• 5 years ago

People are not even "selfish". Wanting a nice, stable, predictable environment just like you have had it all your life could be categorized as selfish. And that's fine.

Taking a massive gamble on injecting huge amounts of energy into a system which looks like it will be destabilized is just..... foolish? stupid? I dunno.

According to the Canadaland podcast there is a recent survey taken during the federal election campaign which suggests that 1 in 4 voters still do not accept anthropogenic climate change as real.

I am baffled.

Most of us would benefit from some sort of Green New Deal with a re-organization of the economy. I can completely understand the top 5 or 10 percent balking at any shake up of the system on purely economic advantage grounds, but what about all the other 85%? And even with a shake-up I find it hard to believe that any productive/active members of the 5 to 10 percent would not thrive relatively in any new situation and indeed be better off than in a severely disrupted environment.

Something other than rationality is going on here.

y4mi• 5 years ago

you've forgotten that corporations have spend billions in order to muddy the waters and spread misinformation.

propaganda has always worked and this specific one is just particularly spectacular because there were so many players involved. They probably weren't coordinated even.

each one was just looking out for themselves but it ended in a global misinformation campaign that's been ongoing for decades now.

perryizgr83• 5 years ago

You don't have to look very far to see our supply chain impacted by nature.

Why would that be a problem? Everything is impacted by nature, always has been.

Pandemics such as COVID were and are predicted to become more frequent.

Key word is "predicted". Most of the alarmist predictions tend to be exaggerating either the effect itself, or its impact on us.

My local supermarket doesn't just have higher prices, the selection has gone down in many categories

I think this is your local supermarket's problem. The supermarket I go to has better selection than ever, and prices are not any higher.

lanstin7• 5 years ago

If you look at the progression of science predictions, they don't have a track record of being alarmist. They have a track record of predicting troubling as heck issues for 2100 or 2050 and now they are already happening.

noduerme6• 5 years ago

I think there's enormous reason for concern, but... I also think there's a not-so-fine line between saying (A) that we will go through some major hardship and decreased quality of life as we attempt to mitigate and adapt, versus (B) civilization is finished, there's nothing left but despair and destruction, kids have no viable future on this planet, etc. The latter strikes me as a mass projection of millenarian eschatological thinking onto what is admittedly a troubling set of data. I suppose that policy makers find it useful, therefore, to stoke a certain amount of sky-is-falling panic, particularly among teenagers who are more inclined to be attracted to and scared of doomsday scenarios. But by the same mechanism (ie supplanting rational discourse with doomsday panic), a counter-movement scores easy points saying "look, nothing's happening." The same basic flaw on public messaging pertains to vaccines and masks. What seems to have happened is that those in charge of public messaging have concluded that the majority don't know enough or care enough about science, and so they need to tap into raw fear and emotional appeals just like the science deniers do. What this does, unfortunately, is cheapen the conversation to the point where we're measuring the stress levels of teenagers as if that were a useful metric of how severe climate change actually is or will be. Their stress levels, just like the stress levels of anti-vaxers, aren't based on rational thought; they're generated by fear-peddling from one messaging system or the other. As both these systems try to out-alarm each other, they tend to drift further toward worst-case scenarios and their exponents move closer to shouting for revolution (e.g. Jan 6th), if only to serve as post-justification for the hysteria they engender to serve their goals. Climate scientists shouldn't stoop to the level of deniers. It's too short a game to keep people in panic at all times. If we've learned anything from the failure of messaging during covid, it's that trying to sustain an endless freak-out doesn't work, and it's ultimately counterproductive, because daily life causes drift away from any singular narrative, and groups of people then grow stronger counter-narratives even more dangerous than those they had before.

I feel sorry for kids whose lives are made to feel meaningless and short-changed by this information warfare on both sides. Yes climate change is real and dangerous and yes the world needs to be proactive, and yes quality of life will decline, more in some places than others, and mostly falling on the global poor. Yes children should be educated about it and yes adults need to get ahead of it, including changing systems and practices that there is deep resistance to changing. But panicking the hell out of 14 year olds - or in this case, 50-somethings, that civilization is imminently coming to an end is going to have the terrible consequence of hastening or creating an end through instilling abject despair, rather than cultivating the means and the will to make the necessary changes.

throwawaylinux• 5 years ago

Or the powers that already be in this world desperately trying to hold onto their positions? I don't know about you, but I think the latter is far more likely.

The word "desperately" is doing a lot of work there. The ruling class doesn't seem very desperate at all to me, actually.

Matter of fact they like the climate change problem as far as I can see. It is yet another wedge they use to divide people and make them fight one another, meanwhile they continue to do what they please.

Climate science denialism and conspiracy theorists are not the problem, even in USA which is called a "hotbed" of this thinking, climate deniers are under 20% of the population. It's not the brave and valiant Joe Biden and friends battling against the evil corporations and deniers to tackle the biggest threat facing humanity. It's the rulers pointing out the unemployed coal miner from West Virginia and telling you that he's the reason for all your problems, while at the same time they're pointing you out to him and saying the same thing.

You really think they actually believe < 20% of some of the least educated and most disadvantaged people in the country are responsible for preventing them from addressing the most important issue they have ever faced? Please, they happily go to war and destroy other countries with far higher disapproval ratings than that.

pier252• 5 years ago

The IPCC reports are quite conservative. The reason the 2021 reports were so dire is because they began including some of the feedback loop modeling the scientists preparing the report have become more confident in. More is in the pipeline.

And what's even more frustrating is that we've known about these feedbacks for 15-20? years.

I've been reading about climate change and feedbacks for the past decade and I'm just part of the general public.

doublepg23• 5 years ago

Oil companies knew about climate change in the _1980s_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont...

2OEH8eoCRo0• 5 years ago

Most people don't dispute the climate scientists, most people dispute the solution. One side wants oil/coal/business as usual, the other wants exclusively wind/solar.

lanstin7• 5 years ago

Solar is awesome. If you own your own home, and live in a sunny place (I live in Silicon Valley), it is literally free money raining down from the sky. I just got solar and the bill is lower than my electric + gas bill, I have new furnace, new hot water heater and dryer, and air conditioning added in! I never had an AC because using more carbon as a response to carbon caused warming is prima facie a path to disaster, but now I'm perfectly happy to have it on (well, I put on a coat, but my family is happier). 2 Leafs and a Model 3, vegetarian, and I'm starting to regard the fucking carbon burners the way I do about the fucking non-vaccinated. But of course, if I can't persuade the group to take action against a butt load of trouble, my actions won't matter.

kerng• 5 years ago

Sometimes I wonder if people indeed believe climate change isn't real. I have difficulty imagining that there are so many that believe it's a myth.

Maybe what is more common is that people do believe climate change is real, but they also think it doesn't really matter in long run - because of maybe something like a black swan event or something - dont know. So they see all this as just fear mongering.

FooHentai• 5 years ago

That Upton Sinclair quote "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it". Except here we're talking about upbringings, lifestyles, social position, and career all in one caboodle. So if we buy into that quote, this is an even wider example that perhaps has just as strong if not stronger potential for resistance to change.

Also, there's a layered stack of argument underneath outright denial to overcome - Even if climate change is real the climate has changed before, and I can't do anything about it, and <easily adoptable green tech> isn't perfect so why bother, and even if it is real it's not going to happen in my lifetime, and remember <all those predictions that have been wrong>, and so on and so on.

vegetablepotpie• 5 years ago

Climate change solutions require people and countries, across the world, to work together towards a common goal, this challenges fundamental assumptions of many political ideologies.

AtlasBarfed• 5 years ago

It's almost like the ultra-rich """elite""" will risk everyone's existence rather than surrender any of their hoard.

All one has to do is look at the distribution of wealth to see where the money exists to fix this, technologically, policy, or a combination.

This at least is one of the true environmental effects the rich can't easily run from. Go ahead, get your little fortress in New Zealand. Tell yourselves you can hop your private jet.

Global warming will displace a billion people at least. That will make the syrian refugee crisis look like your brother in law crashing in the basement in comparison.

Remember that environmental and resource wars aren't easily recognized as such. Scarcity and strife always break down along ethnic or religious lines and will appear as ethnic wars, like the Sudan which is actually about freshwater.

It is ridiculous that science is held up as some grand conspiracy, a brilliant coordination of millions of dollars of funding to bring down the brave, oppressed, helpless hundred billionaires and their trillionaire corporations.

rufus_foreman• 5 years ago

> The people are selfish, more concerned with their property values and if their neighbour mows their bylaw required lawn, than if the next generation will be able to have a similar quality of life. Why wouldn't you be cynical if you were young?

The IPCC reports say that if we do little to ameliorate the effects of global warming, in 2100 future generations will have a GDP per capita several times higher than today's, but lower than it would be if actions are taken. That's not an apocalypse. I would worry about other things if I were you.

You are asking old people now to lower their standard of living so that future generations will have a standard of living that goes from "much higher than yours" to "much higher than yours plus x%", while calling them selfish.

NortySpock• 5 years ago

How bad will the famines be in 2100? How many people will be refugees? Is a cushy job indoors worth it if it's too hot to work infrastructure jobs outside? Is GDP meaningful if citizens cannot afford food?

JeremyNT• 5 years ago

Assuming this to be true, how can GDP possibly be the best metric here?

Maybe we should consider that you can't buy back the things we'll lose, barring some unexpected developments in large scale geoengineering. How much "GDP" would you trade to live in a world that isn't racked by increasingly powerful storms, unprecedented droughts, loss of unique habitats, mass extinction of various species, and the other dramatic effects of rapid climate shift?

jimmaswell3• 5 years ago

For whatever value of "young person" I am in my mid 20s:

Climate change is going on and will have some unfortunate consequences, but the world is not ending and there's hope for advances in carbon capture etc. Civilization will march on and find a way.

The state and federal government, for all the ways they've failed in protecting my rights, let me bootstrap my career with student aid, being the first of my family to go to college and now having a great career in software.

A loud segment of my peers will rant about how America has no social mobility and the boomers ruined everything. In the anecdotal cases of people I know, it seems the ones who applied themselves to any degree are doing pretty well for themselves (owning businesses without a degree etc), and mostly people who just want to smoke weed and do nothing all day will be the ones saying they should get UBI and the boomers are evil and everything is collapsing.

I acknowledge we have some serious issues with healthcare costs and some other things but I've just never related to my doom and gloom peers.

rdedev2• 5 years ago

While "no" social mobility is a bit extreme, social mobility has drastically reduced in america. Here is a pretty famous paper showing so:

https://www.nber.org/papers/w19843

Personal responsibility can only take you so far if getting hold or keeping hold of such opportunities are hard in the first place

jimmaswell3• 5 years ago

I read the abstract and skipped around some but I couldn't find it referencing a change in mobility over time.

I did notice it says some areas have high mobility still:

The U.S. is better described as a collection of societies, some of which are “lands of opportunity” with high rates of mobility across generations, and others in which few children escape poverty.

I see in some charts online that social mobility has allegedly declined steadily since the boomer generation, but of course they're a special case directly following the great depression into an unprecedented economic expansion.

Social mobility can't go upwards in real terms forever - if your grandparents were poor, your parents were middle class factory workers, and now you're an office worker - does your child really need to be a doctor or a ceo? So I think the better question might be, is our current level of social mobility acceptable, and did it go down because people are ok just staying in a relatively decent spot (not becoming a lawyer and just being an office worker like your dad) or because opportunity has actually gone down.

mountainb• 5 years ago

Why don't people watch that Al Gore documentary anymore?

Aunche• 5 years ago

No problem has ever been solved by worrying about what you can't control. Just a couple centuries ago, the average life expectancy was less than 40. If people spent all their time worrying about whether they or their children would die, nobody would get anything done. The amount that you actually care about climate change is a function of how much you're willing to do about it, not how guilty you feel about it or how worried about it.

whymauri3• 5 years ago

I am Gen-Z and I'm pretty sure I won't have children. They cannot grow up in a Hell we created and that they never asked to exist in. It's something I think about very often.

plandis6• 5 years ago

What hell do you see? The world is unequivocally getting better in terms of health, food supplies, education, economics, etc.

I’d recommend reading Factfulness if you want data based evidence for what I’m saying.

whymauri3• 5 years ago

There's going to be global famines within my lifetime and a refugee crisis measurable in the hundreds of millions of people. I would say the death toll is unfathomable, but the IPCC makes it very clear that countries worth of people will die.

The Hell I see is the Hell the science has determined is all-but certain: the next 80 years will be a series of tragic trending videos, distant, until it directly affects _you_.

orwin3• 5 years ago

Ok, if we remove China, and you could be born anywhere on earth in the early 70s, randomly amongst the newborn, or today (again, randomly). Would you choose today?

birksherty3• 5 years ago

Data conclusively indicates real-world climate change is tracking the IPCC's worst case scenario.

https://youtu.be/fliCxyAwBWU

peterthehacker• 5 years ago

Do governments have the technologies to become carbon neutral?

From my maybe uniformed perspective it seems like we’re still several scientific breakthroughs away from alternative energies and sustainable technologies being competitive and cost effective.

8bitsrule• 5 years ago

Sep 13 2021 article from the Guardian - Title: "Rain fell on Greenland’s ice sheet for the first time ever known. Alarms should ring".

[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/13/greenl...]

Quote: "To save the Greenland ice sheet – and Florida – will require a Nansen-esque transformation on steroids, something inspired by, but much larger than, President Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal. To begin, we need to elect representatives who respect science, and accept the magnitude of what we’re up against. If they do not, they must be defeated.

It’s time to put our planet first."

throwaway57528• 5 years ago

https://twitter.com/pkedrosky/status/1438148663860076546

"Given the importance of these future projections, one might expect the brain to possess accurate, unbiased foresight. Humans, however, exhibit a pervasive and surprising bias: when it comes to predicting what will happen to us tomorrow, next week, or fifty years from now, we overestimate the likelihood of positive events, and underestimate the likelihood of negative events. For example, we underrate our chances of getting divorced, being in a car accident, or suffering from cancer. We also expect to live longer than objective measures would warrant, overestimate our success in the job market, and believe that our children will be especially talented. This phenomenon is known as the optimism bias, and it is one of the most consistent, prevalent, and robust biases documented in psychology and behavioral economics."

Young People Are Anxious About Climate Change, Say Governments Are Failing Them

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