When I read doom articles about climate change I always end up in this hopeless "its going to happen anyway" mode, its a part of why I'm tired of the "we are going to die" movements.
Preventing climate change is going to take massive changes that no companies or goverments actually want to do, its all half-assed political virtue showing.
The change your life (to the worse most of the time) to appear as climate conscious as possible, rather than actually focusing on things that matter crowd certainly arent helping either.
> When I read doom articles about climate change I always end up in this hopeless "its going to happen anyway" mode, its a part of why I'm tired of the "we are going to die" movements.
Well let me make you feel a bit better. The 8C was often referred to as the "business as usual" model. Fortunately things have changed without substantial intervention[0]. I'm not saying things are solved but that it isn't the worst case scenario. We still have a long way to go, but this should show that there at least is some hope, even if just a little.
What is the danger we're trying to avoid, though? We don't talk about this enough.
It may cost 100 trillion to reduce temperature in 2100 by 0.1F ....
Likely we'll slowly wean off usage as fusion/nuclear become more popular and we have a battery breakthrough or two. We have very little to fear from climate change, as far as I can tell. We need to rapidly advance, as there are far greater dangers.
Before you say blah blah catastrophic thing is going to happen: think about the last 20k years. There have probably been quite a few extremely crazy events that are much more devastating than 1 degree in average temperature change. (i.e. 12k years ago we had 100ft sea level rise ... uhh)
We are looking at 3 degrees right now. The previous ice age was ~4 degrees colder than pre-industrial levels. So 3 degrees sounds pretty much in that context.
Seems my information is out of date. https://news.ucar.edu/132755/scientists-nail-down-average-te... claims it's more like 5 degrees compared to pre-industrial levels (6 compared to now). Still though. If 5 degrees is the difference between the early 1800s and an ice age, that we've already done ~1 degree seems enormously alarming.
You're confused. We shouldn't spending "100 trillion to maybe reduce temperature by a tiny tiny amount". We should spend that to not raise the temperate indefinitely.
Clearly we can't just raise the temperate 50 degrees. Everyone dies then. But the no-climate-action idea will in fact end up there. It will just take centuries. So we have to put a line in the sand at some point. We literally can't go on pumping CO2 into the atmosphere and de-terraform Earth.
We know roughly what is safe, and we're shooting way past it.
Yea. If we keep burning fossil fuels. I mean, they will run out, but it's not going to happen in a long time. Long enough for us to change the climate way past human survivability on most of Earth.
> we're not in any danger from our climate
What? Of course we are. That's the entire point. You lower the average temperature 6 (5 from pre-industrial levels) degrees and you've got an ice age. Half of Europe literally covered in several kilometers of ice!
We've already raised the temperature 1 degree above baseline. That's a LOT.
> Preventing climate change is going to take massive changes that no companies or goverments actually want to do
In the most polluting (directly and indirectly) wealthy democracies, the blame can mostly be placed on us as individuals. The politicians and businesses are mostly catering to what individuals want, a systemic problem that we seem to struggle to solve. A country’s pollution is approximately proportional to its wealth. To fix the problem requires huge changes to our individual wealth.
Few individuals want to make the required changes: individually we buy into cheap denial narratives, green-washing. No democracy can act as a benevolent dictator to force us to make the radical changes required to our priorities, our wants and needs. The majority of us are sold on deception, because we want to buy into the deception.
Edit: a few simple assumptions means for a me to capture my carbon with trees, I need to plant ≈1 Hectare (4 acres) of trees, and never harvest the trees. I do intend to do it (it will mean some belt tightening), but it doesn’t address the problem of removing my past CO2 emissions, and would use up 20% of New Zealand’s land to do it if all 5 million of us wanted to. “New Zealand has a total of 10.1 million hectares of forests, covering 38% of the land. 2.1 million hectares are plantation forest.”. “The yearly carbon dioxide balancing rate varies between 21.77 and 31.5 kilogram carbon dioxide for each tree. To offset one ton of Carbon dioxide, between 31 and 46 trees are required. One should use a ratio of 24 kilograms of carbon dioxide per tree and an estimate of five hundred trees per hectare to get the values.”. “New Zealand's gross carbon dioxide emissions in 2018 were 7.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, (CO 2-e) per capita.”. Edit 2: Belt tightening because it isn’t cheap to buy one hectare - far far cheaper if I can find another few tens of people that want to do the same thing).
> In the most polluting (directly and indirectly) wealthy democracies, the blame can mostly be placed on us as individuals.
It's a philosophical argument but I reckon if negative externalities were fairly priced into the choices available to us, we'd make much different decisions, even with the same wants and needs and values.
It might be an improvement but (1) I expect it would be political suicide for the government to try and implement, (2) if it is just a pricing exercise it wouldn’t change CO2 emissions (edit: if the government just spends taxes then that uses CO2), (3) the examples of the failures of carbon-credits indicates pricing externalities is a complex problem.
Let’s use a mental model that externalities should double the price. Existing NZ petrol taxes per litre double the price (about 50% at pump is excise and GST [1]). Using that model we can see that the existing pricing in of externalities doesn’t actually fix anything for petrol.
See comment edit above for direct action you can do to marginally fix the problem for yourself (obviously it doesn’t fix the problem, but it is one of the few direct actions you could do that is difficult to be cheated).
Edit: alternatively, global oil risks (rather than raw costs) act similarly to externalities in driving adoption of greener technologies: https://energypost.eu/russias-war-is-accelerating-the-clean-... Presumably because those risks are causing political costs to politicians?
I think we can call a lot of this tragedy of the commons. If a business is able to capitalize on common resources (e.g. using air or water as a means of dumping pollutants) and pay nothing for degradation of those shared resources, then they will. But often we have no choice in the matter, and that's even before we get into the complications of even understanding the consequences and nuances of our purchases. Before we consider long term stressors and problems vs short term. Our brains were clearly not designed for solving these problems and it is rather amazing that we can actually do it at all. So I agree, we probably would make different decisions if these externalities were priced in (e.g. carbon tax, pollution/waste tax). But also the market would also likely simply change prior to choices being made simply because we know that we need to adapt to match said new market or be over taken by new players (i.e. if a carbon tax was instituted or seen as likely, oil companies would start investing into researching alternative clean energy solutions to maximize future (<10 years) profits).
> the blame can mostly be placed on us as individuals. The politicians and businesses are mostly catering to what individuals want, a systemic problem that we seem to struggle to solve.
Individuals themselves don't do the major damage to the environment, rather its business and oil companies doing this, and they are the most effective to target, yet its mostly political virtue signaling that we hear about.
Also this is not limited to the climate, people always wanted cheap stuff, thats why before regulations, car manufacturers often skimped on safety to just get the price as low as possible or more often, to get more profit.
Regulations stopped this, and they are going to stop climate change too.
I down voted and flagged your comment because it is factually incorrect, and I actually believe what you've written is so wrong and dangerous, especially to younger people who might read your comment, that it should be censored.
It is well known indisputable fact that fossil fuel companies, along with certain characters in the political sphere, waged, and continue to wage, climate change denial war against us.
Rather than provide direct links to any particular source, here's every particular source:
> The politicians and businesses are mostly catering to what individuals want
What you need to realise here is that evolution hasn't created a species of perfectly rational actors with equitable access to information to make purely rational decisions at all times.
We are not perfectly fit in an evolutionary sense, merely fit enough to have made it this far.
There are gaping flaws in our psychological that contribute to making us susceptible to all sorts ideas and actions that are diametrically opposed to our own self interest, and the collective interests of our communities at all scales.
Here in Australia, the political class, both major parties, but especially the political right, since at least as long as I've been paying attention, so 1996, 27 years, have actively been working to dismantle education, healthcare, public housing, and deny climate change, that it has become glaringly obvious certain individuals within state and federal politics have been working for the interests of industry and ideology over the interests of the people they've been elected to serve to a level that far exceeds lazy garden variety corruption and rises to the level of active hostility.
You have been deceived in to believing that your individual choices matter. They really don't. It doesn't matter if you, individually, change your behaviour to become a net positive effector on the environment. You don't matter one iota.
If fossil fuel companies, and their political champions, hadn't been actively hostile for the past few decades, we could have deployed a mixture of low / no carbon energy sources, and worked to change our cultural, economic, and societal structures, to avoid the very large scale climate catastrophe we're now enduring.
Frankly, come back when you've made at least some effort to make yourself aware of the history of, and continuance of, the psychological manipulation you yourself have been the subject of, as evidenced by that fact you'd write and espouse such an opinion.
I think you have misconstrued my point: I was trying to add the nuance that collectively our choices as individuals matter (I used the words ‘us’ and ‘individuals’ to make that point in my comment, although I admit I was not very clear). I agree that an individual is fairly powerless, and that we are highly irrational (no need to explain that to me - it is implicit in my comment because it is an obvious truth - that belief underlies everything past “Few individuals want to make the required changes:”).
I am not saying that government and business are not culpable as well. I am saying they are not the only groups to blame. Collectively we all are also to blame. Collectively we have agency; whether we can organise ourselves to recognise our weaknesses and use our strength is another matter.
Also note, I am fairly sure flagging is completely inappropriate for disagreement on HN. Guideline: “Have curious conversation”. Certainly commenting about flagging is inappropriate “If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.”. Maybe read the https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and try to follow their spirit. You even mention I should be censored, which I find astonishing. Personally I feel like you are bringing politics here, which is usually discouraged, and doubly unnecessary since I strongly suspect we are on the same “side” (I have enough unfortunate friends to know the need for a compassionate society, and enough engineer friends to know the value of building value, and enough greenie friends to know about evil corporations). I feel that you have tagged me as a selfish capitalist individualist child. Perhaps instead read my comment again as though it was written by a friend, and assume good faith, respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what I said, and converse with me as a peer might. I am not dang. I do try to be a good member of this community. Edit: I also think you are assuming all countries are the same. We are a little bit better off in New Zealand, so perhaps that explains why I am a litlle more hopeful.
To others: sorry, this has gone a long way off-topic. Merry Xmas!
Interesting. I skipped forward through the brother's story throughout, ignoring the rest.
Personal interest, mostly. In any case I've had a few concussions - car accident, soccer collision, and most recently a motorcycle accident.
I'm surrounded by people who are quite aware of traumatic brain injuries so I always had support and have mostly recovered.
The interesting thing are the impulses you get. The first one had me feeling quite suicidal in periods, and so I got rid of the things I would obsess over as tools to do that.
The last one resulted in complete memory loss over the incident. I simply cannot recall it. This is somewhat fascinating to me because I have (or had) an incredible memory. I can still recall things from before quite well - my VIN, 2^64, my friends' license plates - but my working memory appears to have deteriorated significantly from the period immediate pre-accident. Chase's 8 number 2FA code now causes me to reinspect 100% of the times rather than look at once and type, and sometimes I have to do that for 6 number 2FA.
But the loss of self in those bad periods is fairly wild. You can't act otherwise because your conscious evaluation of reality is wrong.
I find the suicide thing very interesting. I wonder if it has a similar metastructure to Programmed Cell Death in humans.
In any case, I find these mental health stories quite interesting because awareness of the condition does allow you some CBT-style self intervention.
Articles like these make me mad. Conflating your brother's mental illness to climate change just for shock value is below the belt. You should be ashamed.
And no, despite all the doom and gloom the author projects, this is not the first time in history that glaciers are melting en masse worldwide. They have done so multiple times in the past and will do so again multiple times in the future. Earth has a long storied history, we have been on it a brief fraction of that time.
About your second paragraph. Can you clarify? It's a little vague. If you're in doubt of either anthropogenic climate change or the seriousness with which we should take it, I'd appreciate your sharing the sound reasoning underpinning your perspective.
Or have I misunderstood, and you're simply expressing sanguine resignation to the inevitability of extinction events, on planetary timescales?
>this is not the first time in history that glaciers are melting en masse worldwide. They have done so multiple times in the past and will do so again multiple times in the future. Earth has a long storied history, we have been on it a brief fraction of that time.
That's irrelevant, as the other times we weren't 8 billion of us, in a highly fragile, interconnected, civilization, with thousands of cities and hundreds of megacities, for the impact to be the same. Nor is the mechanism for the current issue (or the speed of it), as explained by scientists within the current consensus, the same as those times...
> They have done so multiple times in the past and will do so again multiple times in the future. Earth has a long storied history, we have been on it a brief fraction of that time.
Why do people repeat this platitude as if it is at all obviatory (or even relevant)?
You either didn't get to the end of the article or really missed the author's entire point.
She doesn't remotely seek to conflate her brother's mental illness to climate change. She is simply juxtaposing a personal experience with her brother to a professional observation she has(and sources).
Moreover, you clearly didn't read the whole thing because your entire last paragraph is filled with points she made and addressed in relation to her thesis regarding memory, both ecologically and humanistically.
Each of the individual stories in this article. Is great. The science is written to inform in an engaging way and the emotional story kept me hooked. By God they should not have been blended together like this.
It seems to require a patience I don't have. I'm not a huge fan of Quentin Tarantino-esque articles that follow multiple unrelated paths to an eventual tangential relationship.
Idk the central metaphor of the article reads as legible and correct to me. The take home message is that it seems complex-but-stable systems must spend a lot of complexity on achieving hysteresis across scales, and the degradation of such systems can cascade into failure modes unexpectedly. Does that help?
Seems to me the central idea is to pay attention, especially when someone hits their head. Get them to medical care pronto and if you can't, give them an aspirin, put them to bed and check on them periodically. Did I say "get them to medical care"?
I feel like humans in general work fairly well when story or myth is tied to an explanation, but can understand that's not for everyone. I'm reminded of oral histories that humans make in order to warn about tsunamis. Her linking her brother's ailments with the state of the planet drew me in and I learned a few things that I can look into myself. For example, The Great Unconformity I'm sure I can look up a bit about (and sources are provided in the article) and similarly for the possibilities of things that might give us insight into that time period (also referenced and sourced in the article). My experience is that Nautlius in general has this type of lyrical prose and doesn't really pose itself as a peer-reviewed journal or anything. All that to say that to minimize the story as about "some writers day" feels disingenuous to me.
People relating stories around a campfire and people writing stories for the Web are not comparable. I certainly don’t have the capacity to be drawn in to some writers day whom I don’t know with the amount of content that is out there.
And even less now these days when some of them might be AI-written.
I agree. All topics I read about on news aggregation sites are for the topic themselves. I don’t want to spend eight paragraphs of “my mother tends to get pensive and quiet around Christmas now, eight years after my father passed” in order to figure out that the article is about the new iPad.
Preventing climate change is going to take massive changes that no companies or goverments actually want to do, its all half-assed political virtue showing.
The change your life (to the worse most of the time) to appear as climate conscious as possible, rather than actually focusing on things that matter crowd certainly arent helping either.
IMO individual actions don't matter at all here.