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Is there any reason to be optimistic about our ability to deal with climate change? I have to admit that this topic depresses me deeply, as the United States' t

Is there any reason to be optimistic about our ability to deal with climate change? I have to admit that this topic depresses me deeply, as the United States' tepid response does not match the magnitude of the problem. It is shockingly easy to imagine scenarios resulting in the collapse of civilization (agricultural collapse places significant pressure on a few areas which leads to a domino effect of instability triggering nuclear war).

lisper 10y ago
> Is there any reason to be optimistic about our ability to deal with climate change? Yes: because failing to be optimistic about it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Also, you never know what will make people come around. In any process of winning hearts and minds there is always a time before which things seem hopeless. Look at the Sanders and Trump campaigns: when they started, no one believed they could succeed. Bernie came very close, and Trump actually won. (Not that I want to hold up Trump as a model of how to proceed, but just as a data point to show that the unexpected can happen.) Maybe if we get enough "thousand year floods" like just happened in Maryland -- say a dozen of those events in a year or in a month -- people will suddenly wake up and realize the gravity of the situation and find their sense of duty and planetary patriotism. You also never know what's coming down the technology pipe. This, for example, looks promising: http://phys.org/news/2016-07-breakthrough-solar-cell-captures-carbon.html http://phys.org/news/2016-07-breakthrough-solar-cell-capture... We can still fix this. Don't lose hope.
- agentultra 10y ago
  > We can still fix this. Don't lose hope. I think it's beyond our capabilities to "fix" in any meaningful amount of time. However we can still survive. If we remain optimistic and plan to adapt to the coming changes.
- Diederich 10y ago
  This is the correct answer. 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.
placeybordeaux 10y ago
Currently the DoD does not think that stable states will be disrupted to the point of conflict, but unstable states for sure. It's unclear who exactly they consider fragile states in their report, but I'd certainly put North Korea, India and Pakistan in there as states that have a potential for climate change based conflict. If China feels any real stress they will stop providing rice to North Korea and we could see nukes flying from there. I personally don't see large scale nuclear war (above 5 nukes flying) happening unless it's Russia or the US that are feeling the pressure. Russia seems to be in the camp of countries that will gain aritable land and the US has a huge amount of resources and plenty of ways to cut back on consumption before it feels the pressure. If you are suggesting a donimno effect of refugees then the answer is very different: I don't think a large influx of refugees would cause a state to go to war, more likely they would turn them away at the border and we'd see a horrible increase in a humanitarian problems, racism and xenophobia, but then again we seem to have already seen that with the end results of the Arab Spring.
bryanlarsen 10y ago
Yes. Before global warming, the big global environmental crisis was CFC's destroying the ozone layer. In the 1980s nations got together and agreed on the 1987 Montreal Protocol to phase out the use of harmful CFC's. It was successful: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/06/antarctic-ozone-hole-healing-fingerprints/ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/06/antarctic-ozone-h... Global warming is a similar problem. More difficult, sure, but essential characteristics are similar. We can do it, because we have solved similar problems in the past.

lisper 10y ago

> Is there any reason to be optimistic about our ability to deal with climate change? Yes: because failing to be optimistic about it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Also, you never know what will make people come around. In any process of winning hearts and minds there is always a time before which things seem hopeless. Look at the Sanders and Trump campaigns: when they started, no one believed they could succeed. Bernie came very close, and Trump actually won. (Not that I want to hold up Trump as a model of how to proceed, but just as a data point to show that the unexpected can happen.) Maybe if we get enough "thousand year floods" like just happened in Maryland -- say a dozen of those events in a year or in a month -- people will suddenly wake up and realize the gravity of the situation and find their sense of duty and planetary patriotism. You also never know what's coming down the technology pipe. This, for example, looks promising: http://phys.org/news/2016-07-breakthrough-solar-cell-captures-carbon.html http://phys.org/news/2016-07-breakthrough-solar-cell-capture... We can still fix this. Don't lose hope.

agentultra 10y ago
> We can still fix this. Don't lose hope. I think it's beyond our capabilities to "fix" in any meaningful amount of time. However we can still survive. If we remain optimistic and plan to adapt to the coming changes.
Diederich 10y ago
This is the correct answer. 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.

placeybordeaux 10y ago

Currently the DoD does not think that stable states will be disrupted to the point of conflict, but unstable states for sure. It's unclear who exactly they consider fragile states in their report, but I'd certainly put North Korea, India and Pakistan in there as states that have a potential for climate change based conflict. If China feels any real stress they will stop providing rice to North Korea and we could see nukes flying from there. I personally don't see large scale nuclear war (above 5 nukes flying) happening unless it's Russia or the US that are feeling the pressure. Russia seems to be in the camp of countries that will gain aritable land and the US has a huge amount of resources and plenty of ways to cut back on consumption before it feels the pressure. If you are suggesting a donimno effect of refugees then the answer is very different: I don't think a large influx of refugees would cause a state to go to war, more likely they would turn them away at the border and we'd see a horrible increase in a humanitarian problems, racism and xenophobia, but then again we seem to have already seen that with the end results of the Arab Spring.

bryanlarsen 10y ago

Yes. Before global warming, the big global environmental crisis was CFC's destroying the ozone layer. In the 1980s nations got together and agreed on the 1987 Montreal Protocol to phase out the use of harmful CFC's. It was successful: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/06/antarctic-ozone-hole-healing-fingerprints/ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/06/antarctic-ozone-h... Global warming is a similar problem. More difficult, sure, but essential characteristics are similar. We can do it, because we have solved similar problems in the past.