Though I'm one to question a lot of things and this is my 2 cents. How the hell we know this current changes are completely abnormal? I read about some weird climate anomalies centuries ago and of course there's a lot of evidence that current events are completely abnormal but one question always come to my mind.
What if we're wrong? What if we're being too cooky thinking that by having looked into some evidence that made sense, we're not completely wrong here and current events are just part of a cycle in the planet weather?
Again, I'm questioning but I don't need you guys to present me the proof, I'm aware of it. Just questioning if we're not wrong all along and are here destroying our mental health for nothing. Seems like even by the 1940s standards our generation is being constantly swarmed with problems which we can't fix, which are causing all sort of mental issues due to the complete stress we live in.
This being said, the switch from fossil fuels should be done ASAP, even if we're wrong and it's not causing issues in the environment, they are for sure causing health issues.
A recent example: Nordstream bombing was the "worst case of environmental terrorism in modern history". US govt blames Ukrainian actors[1]. Yet Greta Thunberg hasn't made a peep about it, and recently did a photo op with the Ukrainian govt, which also hasn't spoke out about it.
It's unbelievably cynical. For some people, environmentalism is just a means to power.
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-intelligence-suggest...
There are intuitive one-minute explanations for why climate change is real and important. However, I think that due to the complex nature of the topic a full answer requires deep study.
Thus, I think it is reasonable to rely on the decades of evidence and science that have led to a concensus among the people that spend their entire lifes studying the topic.
Any amount? How does this play out with a CO2 concentration of 0.04%?
pretty sure it doesnt, but the russian one does - maybe youve confused them?
So returning to the brick wall - scientists are doing research everywhere contributing to the climate change theory, adding new facts brick by brick. They look the directly measured CO2 levels in the atmosphere and see an alarming trend. The trend has never reproduced previously according to research (both magnitude AND acceleration rate simultaneously, so "cycles" don't explain). They measure ocean temperature. They dig into Antarctic ice and check elements in older layer. And so on, all around the planet. When they encounter something that is hard to quantify, like say global atmosphere temperature over time they estimate. They also check if the existing data fits into an existing theory, and unsurprisingly it does. Unfortunately so far everything fits in the global climate change theory.
That's the thing, I could use the same argument to believe in "god" by saying that priest spend their entire lives studying the matter so I should believe them when they say it exists. Yet I'm an atheist. You see where I'm getting at right?
My entire take on this is that we should really do something about it. Specially since, in the chance they're actually right we'd be both saving the world and improving people's health. Going around in a city with smog is very bad for your lungs.
Edit: Though screwing over the mental health of an entire generation over it might defeat the purpose of "saving the world" or "saving humanity".
That is an excellent question to ask.
If climate change is not a thing or not man-made, the worst outcome would be missing a few percentage points of economic growth by unnecessarily restricting energy sources.
If climate change is a thing and it is man-made, the worst outcome would be everything that is described by the IPCC, which is bad for society as a whole.
So, just pondering the worst-case scenario is enough to give you an idea of a sensible course of action.
Can’t Russia just turn off the tap?
What if we are? Worst case we've significantly reduced the amount of pollution we are putting into our air, land and sea, and reap those health benefits, but not actually affected the climate one way or another.
I think the evidence for climate change is pretty strong, but it's not like it's the only reason to quit burning coal and pumping the smoke into our atmosphere or producing huge amounts of plastics.
If we act and we're right we've prevented catastrophe, if we act and we're wrong we're just healthier, and kill less of the ecosystem around us.
This is a bit reductive of what is happening. How about the psychological damage done by the fear mongering caused by these type of news regarding climate change?
If you can't be convinced by simple explanations and if you can't be convinced by harder explanations then you are just spreading doubts and part of the problem.
edit: "what if we are wrong" fuck that shit, it's the same shit from the crowd of "but what if we develop interstellar travels and escape climate change consequences, haha gotcha" or "we'll just invent a carbon extractor in the next 10 years for the whole planet et voilà, ah!".
"But wait, maybe this is all just natural cycles" is borderline willful denial at this point, especially on a well-informed site like HN. Might as well ask if maybe the earth is flat after all.
What about it?
They blew up the dam and also blamed the Ukrainians. They're also apparently rigging a NPP they control to blow up and are already trying to put the blame on Ukrainians as well.
It's a tendency, but we went a bit off-topic here.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-intelligence-suggest...
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-had-intelligence-ukrainian-...
The difference is called "empiricism". God is defined as something supernatural and unexplainable. Science is the opposite. Why do you think this is a good comparison?
Your comment reminded me of this comic, “what if we create a better world for nothing” is basically what you’re saying.
I agree. However, what you describe in your examples are not the worst case scenarios, or even of equal severity.
There were many extremely destructive events in the past that were perfect "normal", in the sense they're not man made, but we might not enjoy happening now.
So if there's a climate change happening ; and if it is negative / bad for us ; and if some actions we take can make it better and some can make it worse... It feeels like a no-brainer, that religion and capitalism and myriad other talking points of dissenting only distract from.
I.e. Even if without human kind, some curve would have a spike ; and that spike is bad for us ; and we can flatten that spike ; them umm lets do it.
It feels fairly intuitive that "pollution is bad" (we can argue how bad), and "adding c02 and making everything crazier is bad" (we can argue how much of the bad is our contribution).
To be clear, I do believe in anthropomorphic climate change, but in a vacuum the situation is not as “sensible” as you say.
> There was no evidence that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy or other Ukrainian government officials were behind the attacks which spewed natural gas into the Baltic Sea, the newspaper reported, citing U.S. officials.
I'm not really following why Greta should be condemning the Ukrainian government if there's no evidence they had anything to do with it.
It's funny you mention this and the "god" example, and yet you are an atheist. Can't you make the same argument about the existence of God? It might be unlikely that a God exists, but just in case He does, it is infinitely better to be religious. Because you'd end up in hell otherwise.
(This is not my original idea, it was brought up the first time by Blaise Pascal)
And all that with what motivation? To harm themselves? Harm own economy? Or as KGB likes to say "to frame poor ruzzians"? As opposed to the country who had clear motive (avoid financial sanctions for stopping gas supply, which they actually did already)? And which had an easy and non sci-fi tool to do it? (maintenance payloads inside the pipes)
Come on, stop with the propaganda. Or at least find some fresh one. I have an idea for you - that Ukraine actually bought Prigozhyn wholesale. How's that for a delusional idea? Great, right? Better than cocaine used at Ostankino.
Some scientists say we might have created feedback loops so even if we "solve" the problem, our end might be inevitable. Would be cool to see more positive takes on it but can't find many.
Also makes me laugh seeing environmentalists being against nuclear power when by now seems to be our only solution stop CO2 emissions (together with renewables of course).
The people who should be trying to get the solution are also making the problem so much worse.
A “few” percentage points of growth means misery for many.
It’s easy to be blithe about a few percentage points coming out of your bonus if you already live comfortably in the first world, but a few percentage points of economic growth is life or death for millions of people.
It spreads out, like colorants in water.
Think about mercury:
> For example, if Isabella weighs 132 pounds (60 kg), she should consume a maximum of 95.8 µg of mercury per week.
95.8ug is just .0000001596..% of Isabella and yet it's deadly.
Imagine if Barack Obama did a photo op with the Saudi King in 2002, with the purpose of promoting the Saudi regime, just a year after a dozen Saudi nationals perpetrated 9/11. "Tone-deaf" would be putting it mildly.
I'm saying that Greta Thunberg, figurehead of environmentalism, is being unbelievably tone-deaf and it reflects very poorly on the integrity of her movement.
On such website dismissing someone for questioning common knowledge wouldn't be worse? :)
May I remind you people used to think the earth was the center of the solar system and they burned the person who questioned it. Quite an extreme example, but you get it right?
Recent reports show significant improvement, although I cannot provide you with a link at this time (since I'm not in the habit of bookmarking things). Sadly I've also seen plenty of social media responses to this that we should keep regarding the situation as doomed, lest we start to slow our efforts due to good news.
Was chatting about "marketing gimmicks" earlier with a colleague but saying so what if the gimmicks are actually objectively good? Things like product made by humans, sustainable packaging, etc.
For a long time scale, a rapid warming is associated with a rapid increase in greenhouse gases. This causes ocean acidification. Ocean acidification leaves a clear record in the paleontological record. The last one which was comparable to what we're doing through now was https://www.britannica.com/science/Paleocene-Eocene-Thermal-... about 55 million years ago. And current projections for the speed and severity of acidification are worse. Which indicates that the warming that we are going through is also faster than that experienced at any point in the last 55 million years.
Don't forget about the benefits to average healthspan from not breathing in exhaust/coal fumes. And the unknown benefits from opening up a new technological frontier that has previously been closed off due to the high energy density of fossil fuels.
I have not seen any evidence of a "large percentage of the population becoming useless" due to fear of climate change.
Can you provide a citation?
I have seen people with a basic background concern about climate change, and some people have more of it than others, but I don't see a "large percentage" of people becoming useless.
People have lots of fears. Some even more more pressing than climate change. Human beings are able to handle and process many different fears of varying intensities simultaneously, and have for thousands of years.
I have also not seen any information that the psychological fear of climate change is worse than actual climate change. One provokes level of fear in a subset of the population. The other will kill us all.
Perhaps the best way to fix those psychological fears in people is to fix the climate so they don't have to worry about it?
The science behind climate change is simple and more than 90% of the worlds experts in geology, ecology, climatology, oceanography, chemistry, physics, etc all are in agreement that global warming is real and caused by humans. Here's a FAQ from the times if you'd like a reference https://www.nytimes.com/article/climate-change-global-warmin...
This disclaimer is not a free card to cast doubts on climate change science. Not being pro fossil fuels usage has nothing to do with questions about climate change science. The way you raise that disclaimer to doubt climate change science ? Well...
People have given you simple explanations you dismissed, I am giving you links to longer/harder explanations you are dismissing (I presume, since you don't follow on that).
If you think climate change science is wrong then bring up why you think so. "What if it's wrong" is rarely a useful basis by itself for a discussion on topics that have been studied in depths for decades.
Do you have a better candidate for worst act of environmental terrorism? I'm open to amending that wording, or dropping the quotes if they are causing distress.
I don't take issue with that position, although I disagree. I'd say it is worth it.
However, we should consider that the effect of climate change on "the mental health of an entire genration" is perhaps not greater than the effect of e.g., WWI, WWII, or the Cold War. Imagine living under the constant threat of nuclear war.
I guess I'd need to know a working definition for environmental terrorism. I've heard of eco-terrorism before, but that's generally thought to be the use of violence to further environmental policy change, which isn't want happened in the case in question.
After we have that working definition, I'd like to know why it's important that one particular young private citizen not connected with the incident be held accountable to having a statement about it.
But let me ask you this. Can you think of a single thing you can't discard with this logic? One single thing.
Of course you're going to upset people by "feigning" ignorance and ignoring the mountains of supporting evidence provided.
You don't get to play the role of an obstinate child and continually ask "yeah but why" then feign innocence while ignoring the supporting evidence you requested.
It’s a product of the information environment, not the information itself.
And in light of the magnitude of the risk of getting this wrong, future generations will benefit in either case - either because we did what we could to improve things, or because we were the unfortunate generation that got lucky enough to be the ones having to interpret the data and suffer through some anxiety so the next generation doesn’t have to.
Imagine two future headlines:
“21st century scientists were on the right track, but society failed to act in time due to a drastic pullback in climate related reporting caused by worry that such reporting was too upsetting for people to handle. 6B perished in the aftermath due to mass starvation and forced migration.”
“21st century scientists had the unfortunate job of coming face to face with apparently cataclysmic data, without enough information about earth’s long term cycles to know that this was inevitable”.
Bottom line: the cost of incorrectly taking no action is so much higher than taking unnecessary action that it seems preferable to find ways to manage the downsides of acting than to hope there are no downsides of not acting.
Of course the population bomb turned out not to be real. Third-world birth rates drop as they grow economically. But on the path to preventing the perceived apocalypse we imposed massive harm on millions of people.
The real problem was that part of the scientific community were so confident in their ability to correctly model extremely complex systems that they were willing to do incredible harm "for the greater good". But it turns out that modeling complex systems, especially ones that have never been observed (such as a population "bomb") is really hard. They were not wrong about the data (population was growing at an unprecedented rate). But they were wrong about how that would impact the future.
This has a lot of parallels to climate change. Climate is an incredibly complex system that we have just recently started to study. We have never before observed runaway anthropomorphic climate change (obviously) so all these predictions are based on our ability to model this system. There really isn't any dispute that the global climate is warmer then it was a few decades ago, but what that actually means for the future has big error bars. This could be another "population bomb" type scenario.
But again, it might not be. The science strongly suggest that climate change is a very real and preventable phenomenon. Scientists have been right about the global harm of many other industrial activities (such as leaded gasoline or CFC's). But I am wary of people who say we need to ignore the harm of climate related policy actions because the IPCC future is "inevitable" if we don't. I am also skeptical of our ability to get the international community united enough to actually have a meaningful impact.
[1]https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/india...
- You Asked: If CO2 Is Only 0.04% of the Atmosphere, How Does it Drive Global Warming? https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/07/30/co2-drives-glob...
- How Exactly Does Carbon Dioxide Cause Global Warming? https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/02/25/carbon-dioxide-...
- Climate Change: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
You are simply arguing for argument's sake.
> Greta Thunberg, figurehead of environmentalism
Yuck. Greta is a 20-year old woman who happened to find the spotlight at 15 because a young person being so outspoken captured the public imagination. She's not some patron saint of environmentalism she's one young person who will enjoy making a great many bad decisions in her life (it's not clear to me that this is one). Taking her every action or inaction and using it to paint the entire environmental movement is nonsense.
> Imagine if Barack Obama did a photo op with the Saudi King in 2002, with the purpose of promoting the Saudi regime, just a year after a dozen Saudi nationals perpetrated 9/11. "Tone-deaf" would be putting it mildly.
Comparing Nord Stream to 9/11, especially if it was an act of war by Ukraine, feels like quite a reach.
- There's no climate change
- Climate change is okay and has no impact
- Climate change exists but it's due to natural causes
- Climate change exists but it's due to natural causes and its impacts are small
- Climate change exists but its impacts are good for us
- Climate change exists but we will adapt
- Climate change exists and its the activists' fault we didn't act because they scared us with their doomsday predictions
- Climate change exists and we shouldn't talk about it because it's scary and scared people are not productive members of society <- you are here
I find that a lot of folks start with very strong disagreement; and eventually it turns out (my interpretation, possibly horribly wrong!) subconsciously they resent feeling blamed or judged or moralized for just living. And fair enough. But for me, the key part is a very selfish perspective - something is happening that's bad for us, we are making it to some degree or another worse, and there's a clear optimal place on a curve of economic activity vs life stye vs future of species, and I don't think we are on the selfish optimal spot, let alone some "global earth/gaia-perspective multi-species well-being of all life" optimal spot.
I suppose the real reason we're not tackling it full on is that it won't be a few percentage points.
Let's face it, the cost of abruptly stopping fossil fuel dependence would be high. Countries going bankrupt, people dying due to high fuel costs, enormous investments diverting money from other necessities.
It may well be necessary, and better than the alternative! But we tried the "just cycle a little bit more" approach and it made next to no dent to CO2 emissions. To really tackle it, we'd need to reinvent the global economy.
Not a climate scientist, but roughly, from memory:
- Past predictions didn't know exactly what future emissions will be like. Applying real emissions to the models gives "correct" warming quantities
- Climate is changing in a similar manner to predicted, e.g. the poles are warming more quickly than the other areas
Just pointing out that the deeper issues often gets lost in the geopolitics. When it progressively makes people's lives worse or exponentially increases debts, it really all leads to the same outcomes in the end.
"I'm not trying to question climate change, I'm just wondering if this overwhelming scientific evidence might somehow be wrong, despite any evidence to the contrary ... and I'm just as brave as Galileo for questioning established orthodoxy, too!".
Sure, buddy. Tell me all about it.
All the big headlines always show the worst news events and such. It's all doom and gloom.
I never see these reports showing significant improvement make the headlines and news about optimism about the recent changes and such.
Priests "studying" a fixed text is not at all similar to scientists collecting empirical data, creating falsifiable hypotheses, running predictive simulations built on models derived from that empirical study.
Of course, that if you know nothing and believe in no one, so you don't have a clue of what future may come. We advanced a bit since astrology and reading tea leaves, we have better tools to make predictions, and they work well enough to base our current civilization on that, and, don't know, be afraid because taking a plane, entering a skyscraper, or taking a medicine. And those tools are the ones saying which alternative is the right one there.
Doing science. Thing is, unlike what everybody likes to pretend, doing science means to do a lot of tedious hard work and not a whole lot of quick explanations. So the thing is, that we understand the physics of dilute gasses at roughly room temperature phenomenally well, we did all the experiments of putting this gas into a piston, and then heating the piston slightly, and then do it with a slightly different gas mixture, and then we double checked all these experiments and finally we got a pretty good theory sometime around the turn of the 19th century. Then you start to integrate all that knowledge with a knowledge of radiation basis, and you start doing cross checks and try to understand weather, and at some point try to start forecasting wether, with all the associated trouble and that was then sometime in the let's say 1960ies or thereabouts. (During WWII the flying wing of the US Army had meteorologists at all airfields, I believe German news started to broadcast weather forecast in the late 60ies.) Then you do all that with bigger computers and quite a bit of theory of partial differential equations, and then you realize that understanding the 11 year average is a much much better defined problem than next weeks weather. And all of these steps do suggest different cross checks. (Actually in the Physical Science Basis part of the 5th IPCC report there is a chapter called Evaluation of Climate Models ([0], p. 741), which goes into quite a bit of detail on the most recent efforts along those lines.)
[0] AR5: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/
By the way, much of our previous research on climate science has already been falsified, for them to be substituted for theories which show even stronger evidence for man-made climate change.
This is a problem to be addressed/solved regardless of the causes of climate change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb#Criticisms
