
Visualizing the Consequences of Climate Change - hairytrog
https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.03709
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pault
Cool, but I'm not sure how effective it is showing people a picture of their
house submerged in water. What I'd like to see is a well illustrated example
of what desertification and sustained 110 degree temperatures looks like.
Flooding is easy to understand; the region you live in becoming uninhabitable
because of extended drought is harder to conceptualize.

~~~
jbattle
They should show how your neighborhood is going to look when tens/hundreds of
millions of people fleeing uninhabitable land in Mexico/Syria/Bangladesh are
now living in your hood.

I really don't like the idea of effecting change by making immigrants seem
scary, but I think that message is the one most likely to get the attention of
those in the US that think climate change is either a hoax or overblown.

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hairytrog
I could see tools like this being used to disseminate false information to
scare people into supporting certain policies. We are often sufficiently
disconnected from the actual physical source of news/media that all it takes
to believe something is to see an image (much like deep fakes). The threshold
for believing now has to change from reading/seeing to actually being there
and touching it. Or some far more reliable system of remote verification has
to be established.

~~~
sneakernets
The main problem is that the consequences of climate change are affecting
areas that either aren't developed enough, or far enough away that the average
joe won't be bothered. So what if an ice sheet falls? it snowed last week.

It's akin to saying the Titanic isn't sinking because you're on the end of the
ship that's 100 feet into the air. Only until they see the water to their
ankles, do they start looking for lifeboats. It'll have to take something
disastrous and close to home, and by then it's much too late.

~~~
Loughla
Even then, it's easy to pass off the increasing severity of storms and
lengthening of tornado season as nothing more than your mind playing tricks on
you.

I'm betting that nothing can fix climate change. Nothing. We're fucked. We're
too stupid as a species to understand long-term, and that is going to be what
gets us in the end.

It's just like rabbits. We had too many rabbits on our farm for a couple of
years, then suddenly we didn't have any. Too many rabbits breeds disease and
death. The same holds true for humans.

And I genuinely feel bad for my child. The planet we will hand him will be
garbage.

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throwaway_98554
> By training our CycleGAN model on street-view images of houses before and
> after extreme weather events (e.g. floods, forest fires, etc.)

Will it also show my home from the cold north in a longer and warmer summer,
full of flowers and hummingbirds?

Or are "consequences" always negative, whatever the direction (cold/hot) of
the climate change?

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
This paper shows that you can use computers to produce realistic images that
may persuade people to do a course of action that you want. However, there is
some prior art to this.

Peter Paul Rubens did this with paintings in the 1600's. See his paintings
"Peace and War" and "Consequences of War"

Even earlier, the Assyrians made massive art works that showed rebel leaders
being flayed alive. I am sure that was pretty effective in helping people
visualize the consequences of resisting Assyria.

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derp_dee_derp
is this a real paper? Its got to be a joke, right? a parody? Its literally a
request to develop images to be used for propaganda purposes.

from the paper:

> , we aim to help the general population progress towards greater and more
> visible public support for climate change migitation steps on a national
> level, facilitating governmental interventions and helping make the required
> rapid changes to a global sustainable economy.

how is this any different than what the Russians did in 2016 with their fake
news memes? Its propaganda for a political purpose.

and for those who will say that climate change is going to end the world,
yeah, no shit, but that doesn't mean we should develop propaganda technology
that could be used for some other political purpose.

like, what if Trump used the tech developed to change people's opinions about
muslims?

~~~
vernie
Hey it's anything goes on arXiv, good or bad.

