I don't understand what is it about climate science that everyone seems to think they're qualified enough to have strong opinions on. I don't see random people commenting on the intricacies of CPU design, battery design, petrochemical processes or any other high-tech endeavor, but with climate everybody's a f*cking expert.
This article is indeed amusing. Since his predictions, average sea ice extent in the arctic has been higher than in 2012 (when the artice was written) for every year since. The long term standardized coverage of ice is sloping gently downwards and that's an issue to worry about, yes, but the scientific prediction referenced here by the Guardian shows just how easy it is to be misled by dramatic statements even from scientists about the next X years, who know that in X years few will remember what they had claimed while it helped boost their names initially. Yes, scientists are self-promoting human beings just like anyone.
That aside, many of the other comments here, filled with deep existential dread about our future world, are straying into the manic given how terrible humans are at predicting anything at all over the long term. There are far too many unknown unknowns for us to be sure of any aspect of catastrophe for 2100 or even for earlier years. Never mind years beyond 2100.
It should serve as very serious food for thought just how much reactions to COVID by public officials, scientists and the media as well were bungled, confused and fraught with false claims (notable examples: masks don't work, the virus has a 1-3% mortality rate) in just a single year because of science and politics mixing heavily in a media charged atmosphere. Yet somehow, the far, far more complex theme of global climate patterns over decades combined with human trends during the next 70 years, is taken as a near given of planetary catastrophe to the point where many of you are firmly convinced that having children now is barely a step below slow murder...
I think about this every hour, if not several times an hour. The cognitive dissonance between saving for retirement, expecting a stable government, and this are huge.
I don't understand how every parent isn't filled with sheer, abject terror at their child's death from starvation, thirst, disease, or violence.
I've basically come to terms with the fact that we're probably the last generation (or definitely one of the last) that is enjoying a level of comfort bordering on luxury. I enjoy it while it lasts. My biggest "trick" is not having children, so I don't have to worry about their future. The problems we're facing, barring some revolutionary technological breakthroughs, are basically unsolvable (because humans are terrible at planetary-level coordination) so worrying about them is just not worth it.
> I don't understand how every parent isn't filled with sheer, abject terror at their child's death from starvation, thirst, disease, or violence.
Sometimes the tech community just lives in another world. In reality: work, bills, screaming kids and life get in the way of thinking about anything but yourself. When I was 21 I was the same (vegan, vegetarian, telling people about BPA, not touching receipts with my hands yadda yadda yadda).
Now I'm 30 and as far as I can tell, nothing changed, I didn't die from too much exposure to plastics, the world still is spinning but I have a lot more on my plate to think about than watching documentaries and fear mongering myself into depression.
I'm 38 and have a 1 and 3 year old (we had a fit of optimism I guess), and am terrified that having them just in time for them to suffer the collapse of civilisation around them could end up being an act of cruelty.
We've moved to a location that should fare well enough, ecologically, but of course that makes it a target for hungry, thirsty, better-armed groups of people.
Walking around in pure terror is one option, but is probably more media inspired than reality based.
You could also be optimistic in the face of the future. We are here because of a long line of good fortune and optimism, despite war, disease, famine. The human race has really faced some incredible odds. And technology while an accelerant for destruction could also be our liberator. Solve energy problems, get us off this planet, etc..
I think instilling that optimism in your kids is most important.
I am hoping to train them in permaculture, resourcefulness, and to be strong members their community. We'll see how that goes, they're still very young.
Small pox, diphtheria,and polio. Droughts, storm damage, flooding, and insects destroying crops. Poor medical care. Child labor. These things and many more existed in the last 200 years here in the US alone and they all endangered children in the ways mentioned.
Childhood mortality rates in the US for the last 200-ish years:
Traits which are unlikely to produce offspring tend to be uncommon because, well, they don't reproduce themselves. We are the ancestors of people who had kids because they wanted to have sex (or at least one of the people involved did), or who actively wanted children.
You could get killed walking your doggie. Or get cancer. Or have a stroke. Tomorrow.
Worrying about your post-apocalyptic world that might happen doesn’t consume many of my brain cycles. I’d much rather worry about things that are likely to happen in the short term.
Edit: no, my child’s death from thirst, famine, violence or disease is not a forgone conclusion.
Oh, that's not a "might", it's pretty much a foregone conclusion. Not tomorrow, not in 5 years or even in the next decade. But not so long term, it's going to be hard to continue catering a modern day lifestyle to billions. [1]
Not so long term would be beyond 2050. 2100 sounds like far into the future... until you realize that kids born today have fair chance being alive at 79 or 80 to see the turn of the next century. [2]
We are not even talking about any children you might have of your own. This is literally everyone who gets born today. Nephews, nieces, cousins, kids of friends and acquaintances,... So, this isn't even an thought exercise in the abstract.
The insidious part of climate change are the delayed effects. Consider it like throwing a thick blanket over your body. It takes a bit of time before enough of your heat gets trapped to make you sweat. Most people will throw off that blanket once they get uncomfortable. When it comes to climate, throwing off the blanket on short notice isn't an option. So, while you - and many others - feel that humanity at large has the luxury of time to afford consider anything but climate change, generations to come will experience the very uncomfortable effects of a blanket they won't be able to shake off. That's just "present bias" in action.
Now, I don't worry constantly about the future. That's counter productive.
What I do worry about is how little action is taken even today to change that future. Sure, there are a tons of great ideas and technological advances. But electric cars or ships dregging micro-plastics out of the oceans aren't going to change this.
What really grinds my gears is that this was already known some 60 years ago. This was already an debated issue at the White House in the 1960's... and over the course of those 60 years the affirmative actions that needed to be taken to avert this, have been muddled in compromises, bureaucracy and lobbying. That's not even hyperbole. [2]
As time marches on, the window of opportunities to avert the worst case scenarios and projections shrink rapidly. If hard to accept policy choices keep being debated and pushed into the future, the future simply becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That window of opportunities has already partly closed up. Climate change is unavoidable. And any future policy choices will shift towards mitigating the increasingly dire effects, rather then avoiding climate change wholesale.
As an individual, the single most powerful thing you could do is to vote for and support policy makers who do take this issue serious enough today.
> about is how little action is taken even today to change that future
mainly because of the future discount rate, which is something I'd like to see more commonly discussed.
Related to this: I'm recommending a lot KSR's "the ministry for the future" to all my friends nowadays. It has a very good picture of "how it works, and why we don't care". I kind of like how he makes the point that all those powerful forces are mainly human rules, and as such, they can be changed... with powerful enough incentives.
How many times have we survived a "the world is going to end in 12 years" trope spouted by climate apocalypse preachers? It really is a religion. The whole meme mocking voting and paying more taxes to change nature is such an accurate depiction.
Climate change is unavoidable (because nature)... but so is human ingenuity. We're constantly discovering new facts and approaches, and this is the major factor doomsayers never bring up in these discussions.
> Climate change is unavoidable (because nature)... but so is human ingenuity
For the first part: not nature, because every carbon emissions today won't have any significant effect until 2040.
For the second part: Yeah, the 2010 drought in Russia was handled so well, millions starved and we're still paying for the political instability it brought in 2011.
And the temperature differential between the troposphere (that warms up) and the stratosphere (that cools down faster than the troposphere warms btw) are becoming more predictible, so when we will have even stronger meteorological events, we might be able to warn the population and to prevent planes to go through them, nice.
And when wet-bulb temperature will be to high, we will be able to grow high-yield plants and harvest them at nigh, while sleeping underground during the day, seems ingenius enough.
Yeah, we will survive, i don't think anybody doubted that. Will the civilization stay the way it is? It won't be the bronze age collapse, but consider this: over 300 year, the Anatolia region lost between 10 and 25% of its precipitations and it almost destroyed 3 empires. Do you think we're that much politically stable?
> but so is human ingenuity. We're constantly discovering new facts and approaches, and this is the major factor doomsayers never bring up in these discussions.
There's an abundance of new facts, approaches and ideas. And the vast majority of scientists and activists advocate those facts, approaches and ideas. They have been doing exactly that for the past 60 years.
Your human ingenuity counts for nothing if the only ideas that humanity is willing to accept are those which can be marketed to consumers (electric cars, solar panels) rather then those which are boring, maybe even painful to some, but absolutely necessary to sustain life on Earth (sustainable development goals per the U.N. [1])
It is his "witness statement" on how he has personally observed enormous environmental changes over his ~70 year career documenting wildlife throughout the world.
