I remember a time when this was phrased as an “inconvenient truth” or that “we can all do our part to make the world a better place”. Honestly I prefer the alarmist hyperbole. The truth is that a lot of us are going to die, more of us will have our lives uprooted. Keeping calm and pretending otherwise seems like a greater bullshit and I at least am not gonna take it. The world is worse, it is gonna be worse. Some rich folks and politicians are responsible. And I want them to feel bad about it.
A point of comparison. The pandemic does seem like a walk in the park next to the climate catastrophe, I don't recall people warning about alarmist speech at the onset of it.
We have already normalized that governments can't properly manage threats like the current pandemic even when they are part of our present. What do we expect for stuff like global warming that doesn't even have the same level of immediacy? Governments, our best bet towards coordination, have abundantly demonstrated their inability to handle these situations. Science can't push harder than economy. They all provide facts, but those of subsistence are always more immediate and have much more weight.
Whether we keep complaining or remain positive and hopeful it's all the same, just learned helplessness. I don't want to incite madness, but the only true coordinators for humanity seem to be fear, disaster and death. You can only get people to run in the same direction if they are running away from something. We aren't feeling the heat enough yet.
We have to find better ways than "regulation" to convert long-term threats into immediate threats. Human rationality does not exist at scale. Adjust reality to compensate the bias or face the consequences.
We really need to come to grips with doing planning and policy of the developed world with an eye to how it impacts the environment and we really need to worry more about what we are doing to our waters.
If we don't, we may well hit catastrophic failure that solves the problem for us and not in a good way. The pandemic could be just an initial down payment on disasters that will help cut things back to a more sustainable population level.
I suspect that would be, overall, a bad thing. Better to get there by solving such problems elegantly than to get there via catastrophic systemic failure.
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is to be wary of problems slipped under the rug. The climate change issue is backed by hard evidence, and the eventual result of the current situation if unchanged is dire.
If we wait to act until the eventual result is in our face, then we are no different than animals that try to outrun a flood, if so then what is the purpose being self aware? Freedom eh?
When western countries were hit by the first COVID-19 wave (Italy, France, New York, etc.), seeing how irresponsible people were, I nearly lost all hope to fight Global Warming. If supposedly educated people can't behave responsibly when facing imminent danger, how are they going to behave responsibly in face of a distant, somewhat more abstract threat?
It's not even so much that these countries were unprepared - can't say I was expecting a pandemic like that one to happen. So I certainly didn't push, directly or indirectly, my elected representatives to prepare for one. It's the ruthless behavior of people ignoring warnings, casually carrying on as usual until it was too late. Governments had to wave the proverbial stick (read: fines) to get people to act responsibly. At least in France and, I believe, Italy.
So I lost much hope: if we couldn't react in time for COVID-19, we won't react in time for Global Warming. But I like to think of myself as an optimist: maybe COVID-19 could be the warning we need to take Global Warming seriously.
And then here we are. Now COVID-19 is more or less a known quantity, we know better how it spreads, how avoid it, its complications, etc. Masks and ventilators are aplenty. We found some medicines that help. We are better armed to deal with it in hospitals.
So we should be better off? Nope, we are all the way at the bottom of the pit. UK. Sweden. Brazil. Texas. And then Facebook. Twitter. It's getting worse, and it's getting worse faster. We, humans, are doubling down on killing ourselves.
So I'll keep wearing a mask, and traveling mostly by train/subway. But I don't have much hope.
We've seen this line of reasoning in the COVID crisis. I won't be fooled twice. Everyone is systematically overstating their confidence. I'd rather deal with the problem as it arises than do unnecessary damage.
And I definitely think that relying on the weather a.k.a. "renewable energy" when you have solid prediction that its going to be unreliable, while your prediction of the possibility of averting the crisis is unknown, is beyond dumb. It's suicidal.
We're choosing the worst possible strategy right now. We have the highest probability of the worst case scenario: chaotic climate and weather while relying on said climate for energy generation. Planning for worst case is planning for the crisis happening regardless of your actions, because your confidence about the impact of your actions is pretty low.
There is no metric by which the current suicidal strategy makes sense. We're not minimizing the damage in the worst case. We're not adapting to the situation as it comes. The only scenario in which the current strategy has a better outcome is if we somehow were right about everything, not only about the impact of CO2, but about the geopolitical actions taken by China and India.
The probability that we're on the best possible strategy is practically zero.
The problem is that we need to put our mind to in RIGHT NOW if we want to prevent catastrophic events. It's too late if we start in ten years. Nothing gives the indication that we'll act quickly enough.
The doomsday cult approach doesn't work. People wear out very quickly from having imminent destruction that never materializes pushed on them. Whatever one's position on what we should be doing about climate change, it should be obvious that regular alarmism is not the way to get people to do stuff.
People generally operate on relative (social) position rather than absolute condition. If the world is going down, it's better to remain ahead of the herd while it does so. I'm not saying this is in any way right, but rather it's what will happen just like Covid.
There's also a coordination problem - if an individual rich person decides to slow down climate collapse (and many of them are, albeit possibly ineffectually), they're making their current life worse while not appreciably heading off the disaster.
In an era of rampant misinformation feeding reality-denial, I think our collective willingness to respond to global catastrophe is worse off today than a hundred years ago. The US response to the coronavirus epidemic is a great example of this.
You hear it time and time again: people who have personally felt the loss of loved ones to pandemic or wildfire or flood still deny the cause. I fully expect 50% of the (surviving) public to point out that "some scientists disagree" on the cause of global climate change while we slowly perish in a Water World dystopia.
There isn't a feasible plan, we're at the "sounding the alarm part." Unfortunately, we're still there because most people don't even acknowledge the possible danger. We can't get to a feasible plan until people actually agree there's a danger. Climate change is 1 step past, that there is a danger, but not a feasible plan.
However, your solution is first day naivety for the problems machine intelligence poses to us. It's akin to saying everybody should have powerful mini-nukes so that they can defend themselves.
All good points. Another clear lesson from the pandemic: Achieving optimum outcomes is severely bounded by practical political realities - Consider if every single country had hard locked down, everywhere, for 6+ weeks. Perhaps complete elimination could have been achieved. But politically, impossible.
That equally applies to climate change as a similar tragedy of the commons played out on a longer timescale. So there are some learnings to be applied if you're looking, as I think many people now are, to identify how things might play out and then make your own life choices accordingly.
Something I'm increasingly certain of is that the future will be boring. By which I mean trends are likely correct but will play out over longer timescales than expected. Visions of sudden collapse and apocalypse are mostly anxiety-fuelled inventions of the mind aimed at spurring action in the present day. Reality is more like economic stagnation, decreasing freedoms, and continual smaller crises that gradually bring us to the predicted future state. Nothing that can be ridden out in a bunker with a few years supply of oats.
I feel the same. The coronavirus pandemic pandemic felt like the final nail in the coffin of my optimism. Humanity’s collective response or lack thereof was on full display and if that was the best we could do when faced with an immediate and dire threat to our way of life then I’m in need of serious convincing that something like the climate crisis which is already here and quantifiably guaranteed [1] to occur in the future as we can’t simply reverse the process on a dime like we did with a vaccine when it came to the virus.
> That price — more vicious heat waves, longer wildfire seasons, rising sea levels — is now irretrievably baked in. Nations, including the United States, have dithered so long in cutting emissions that progressively more global warming is assured for decades to come, even if efforts to shift away from fossil fuels were accelerated tomorrow.
Something along the lines of ‘We face a climate emergency that is even more serious than the Covid emergency, we have to do this, this is about saving lives’?
(I’m not in any way a climate denier, just a huge pessimist when it comes to attempted solutions)
We don't know if or how we can deal with the problems coming up. But giving up will surely make things worse.
Further, we have to choose to not give in to excessive alarmism. I am typing as someone who struggles with this every day, since I've been watching climate change closely for quite a few years now. Things are objectively accelerating, so it's easy to give in to panic.
But that might be even worse than giving up.
We have to approach this with focus, an iron will and with an even temperament.
Every scary climate related news item should be practically drowned in data, as hard and objective as we can get it.
Because, these days, nothing puts people 'to sleep' the way unfounded alarmism does. Because people are numb to all of the alarm handles being pulled, all over the place.
And here I thought it fairly obvious (for those not covering their ears). The general idea of it was to mobilize some kind of cooperative fight to defeat the very real threat of climate change, and to overcome our addiction to fossil fuel and the consequential CO2 emissions and pollution. Many very talented people have created a lot of good ideas and solutions to the oncoming disaster.
I don't think that people realize how much this pandemic is a walk in the park compared to whats coming down the road. I don't think people want to think. I think they want to stick their head in the sand and ignore the fact that there have been many calamities in human history. Perhaps they never heard of the 10s of millions of people who starved to death in Asia less than a century ago. That was a walk in the park by comparison.
Finally, I think that people don't realize how many of the technologies that they so happily embrace (without understanding how they work or where they came from) are the result of the same scientific process that has led 11,000 scientists to tell us that our time to act is growing very short.
That's the general idea of it. And I feel sorry as hell for today's wonderful kids who will have to pay with a miserable life (those who survive) for the willful ignorance of their parents and grandparents.
"Plans and early-warning systems are always a good idea"
Yes, we know, but how do achieve anything when people are deep in denial and reading conspiracy theories on Facebook is considered "news"?
You have to consider that the current pandemic is relatively tractable compared to the climate crisis, and we're failing miserably even at that.
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