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As usual, nothing about prevention. > “One way or another, we get educated, and it’s much cheaper to listen once in a while to engineers and scientists.” Glob

by spodek 10y ago

As usual, nothing about prevention. > “One way or another, we get educated, and it’s much cheaper to listen once in a while to engineers and scientists.” Global temperatures and the sea level are rising because of human behavior. If we want different results, we have to behave differently. Engineers and scientists know engineering and science but not so much leading people to change their behavior. It's easy to blame others: "Listen to me! If you don't you'll be sorry!" isn't effective. Also, what fraction of engineers and scientists have, say, flown in a plane or something similarly polluting in the past twelve months? If you want to change behavior, you need to learn and practice leadership skills and apply them to yourself as well as others. The science is clear. More is nice and I agree we should keep pursuing it, but the best way to decrease the effects of global warming is to change our behavior. (This is why I moved from science to leadership.) This article's writing about flood-proof architecture and other rearranging-deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic behavior is necessary since it's too late to stop a lot of change, but it's not too late to stop the change that we -- you and I -- are contributing to now. As much as I wish past generations had changed their behaviors so we wouldn't see these problems today, future generations will wish we had changed our behavior today. Even if you don't have kids or grandkids, I would think caring about human society in general and empathy and compassion for future generations would be enough to focus on changing our behavior proactively, not just reactively fixing problems others bequeathed to us.

kijin 10y ago
Call me a pessimist, but I don't think people will "change behavior" just because somebody told them to. They won't change even if they begin to suffer for it. Homes in parts of Southern Florida are already getting flooded on a regular basis, even in clear weather. Are those homeowners burning less gas because of it? Not really. The high oil prices of the early 2010s did little to curb CO2 production worldwide. People really don't want to change unless they're too poor to afford fossil fuels, and making everyone poor is probably not a good solution, either. Calling for abstinence doesn't work in energy consumption any more than it does in sex education. To hope otherwise is wishful thinking. More depressing is the fact that even if a lot of us drastically reduced our carbon footprint right now, what's going to happen is going to happen anyway. The amount of CO2 that's already in the atmosphere is enough to cause catastrophe over the next few decades. So I think the scientific and engineering prowess of the world would be better spent trying to help people cope with the consequences of global warming than trying to persuade them to change their habits. This Titanic is going down no matter how hard you try to steer it away from that iceberg. Stop wasting time trying to argue with people who think the ship is okay. Use that time to build more lifeboats instead, because we barely have any time to do even that. Use nuclear power to sequester massive amounts of CO2 someplace deep. Bulld walls around major coastal cities. Relocate people in vulnerable areas to higher ground. Start planting crops that tolerate heat better, and move current crops further north -- there's gonna be a lot of newly arable land in Canada and Russia. Use desalination and new agricultural techniques to fight against drought. Put more research into malaria prevention, or better yet, exterminate mosquitoes altogether. (A very large portion of projected loss of life associated with global warming is due to 1. drought and 2. increased mosquito activity.)
- spodek 10y ago
  > I don't think people will "change behavior" just because somebody told them to Telling people what to do isn't leadership. Confusing telling people what to do and other ineffective techniques with actually, effectively leading them is part of why we have been ineffective at changing people's behavior, illustrating my point. > I think the scientific and engineering prowess of the world would be better spent trying to help people cope with the consequences of global warming than trying to persuade them to change their habits. Black-and-white false dichotomies are another problem. Believing since we've already done so much that the cause is lost is another. A better life doesn't require releasing more CO2. In fact, it can often come with less. Effective leaders don't lose their cool in difficult times. Many shine then. Instead of throwing in the towel on prevention, we can improve the future relative to what it would be if we just say since we didn't succeed yet we never will.
  - mlinksva 10y ago
    > I moved from science to leadership. ... > Confusing telling people what to do and other ineffective techniques with actually, effectively leading them is part of why we have been ineffective at changing people's behavior, illustrating my point. ... > Effective leaders don't lose their cool in difficult times. Many shine then. Instead of throwing in the towel on prevention, we can improve the future relative to what it would be if we just say since we didn't succeed yet we never will. Please tell us what you are doing. Thanks in advance for whatever it is.
    - spodek 10y ago
      My profile has the link to my blog, but it's joshuaspodek.com. My bio is at joshuaspodek.com/bio and my courses at joshuaspodek.com/courses.
      - mlinksva 10y ago
        I meant regarding climate change. Searched your blog and best I could find is: > I talk a lot about how I try to avoid flying because the pollution it causes hurts people. Good for you! (I don't mean this sarcastically. Me too.) I expected to find some things you've done that were _effective at changing people's behavior_, given your comments above.
tim333 10y ago
Sea levels have risen about 130m from 20,000 years ago and are probably set to rise a bit more regardless of what actions we take just now on CO2. While it's good to deal with global warming, realistically we'll have to adapt a bit to sea levels rising a little bit.
- PhantomGremlin 10y ago
  Sea levels have risen about 130m from 20,000 years ago All that water came from, of course, ice that melted. The New York City Parks Dept says that NYC was under as much as 1000 feet of ice[1] during the most recent ice age. Yeah, ice as high as the top of the old World Trade Center twin towers! Upstate New York (the Adirondacks) was under 5000 feet of ice. Something to keep in mind as we fret about a 15-foot storm surge. [1] https://www.nycgovparks.org/about/history/geology https://www.nycgovparks.org/about/history/geology

by spodek 10y ago

kijin 10y ago

Call me a pessimist, but I don't think people will "change behavior" just because somebody told them to. They won't change even if they begin to suffer for it. Homes in parts of Southern Florida are already getting flooded on a regular basis, even in clear weather. Are those homeowners burning less gas because of it? Not really. The high oil prices of the early 2010s did little to curb CO2 production worldwide. People really don't want to change unless they're too poor to afford fossil fuels, and making everyone poor is probably not a good solution, either. Calling for abstinence doesn't work in energy consumption any more than it does in sex education. To hope otherwise is wishful thinking. More depressing is the fact that even if a lot of us drastically reduced our carbon footprint right now, what's going to happen is going to happen anyway. The amount of CO2 that's already in the atmosphere is enough to cause catastrophe over the next few decades. So I think the scientific and engineering prowess of the world would be better spent trying to help people cope with the consequences of global warming than trying to persuade them to change their habits. This Titanic is going down no matter how hard you try to steer it away from that iceberg. Stop wasting time trying to argue with people who think the ship is okay. Use that time to build more lifeboats instead, because we barely have any time to do even that. Use nuclear power to sequester massive amounts of CO2 someplace deep. Bulld walls around major coastal cities. Relocate people in vulnerable areas to higher ground. Start planting crops that tolerate heat better, and move current crops further north -- there's gonna be a lot of newly arable land in Canada and Russia. Use desalination and new agricultural techniques to fight against drought. Put more research into malaria prevention, or better yet, exterminate mosquitoes altogether. (A very large portion of projected loss of life associated with global warming is due to 1. drought and 2. increased mosquito activity.)

spodek 10y ago
> I don't think people will "change behavior" just because somebody told them to Telling people what to do isn't leadership. Confusing telling people what to do and other ineffective techniques with actually, effectively leading them is part of why we have been ineffective at changing people's behavior, illustrating my point. > I think the scientific and engineering prowess of the world would be better spent trying to help people cope with the consequences of global warming than trying to persuade them to change their habits. Black-and-white false dichotomies are another problem. Believing since we've already done so much that the cause is lost is another. A better life doesn't require releasing more CO2. In fact, it can often come with less. Effective leaders don't lose their cool in difficult times. Many shine then. Instead of throwing in the towel on prevention, we can improve the future relative to what it would be if we just say since we didn't succeed yet we never will.
- mlinksva 10y ago
  > I moved from science to leadership. ... > Confusing telling people what to do and other ineffective techniques with actually, effectively leading them is part of why we have been ineffective at changing people's behavior, illustrating my point. ... > Effective leaders don't lose their cool in difficult times. Many shine then. Instead of throwing in the towel on prevention, we can improve the future relative to what it would be if we just say since we didn't succeed yet we never will. Please tell us what you are doing. Thanks in advance for whatever it is.
  - spodek 10y ago
    My profile has the link to my blog, but it's joshuaspodek.com. My bio is at joshuaspodek.com/bio and my courses at joshuaspodek.com/courses.
    - mlinksva 10y ago
      I meant regarding climate change. Searched your blog and best I could find is: > I talk a lot about how I try to avoid flying because the pollution it causes hurts people. Good for you! (I don't mean this sarcastically. Me too.) I expected to find some things you've done that were _effective at changing people's behavior_, given your comments above.

tim333 10y ago

Sea levels have risen about 130m from 20,000 years ago and are probably set to rise a bit more regardless of what actions we take just now on CO2. While it's good to deal with global warming, realistically we'll have to adapt a bit to sea levels rising a little bit.

PhantomGremlin 10y ago
Sea levels have risen about 130m from 20,000 years ago All that water came from, of course, ice that melted. The New York City Parks Dept says that NYC was under as much as 1000 feet of ice[1] during the most recent ice age. Yeah, ice as high as the top of the old World Trade Center twin towers! Upstate New York (the Adirondacks) was under 5000 feet of ice. Something to keep in mind as we fret about a 15-foot storm surge. [1] https://www.nycgovparks.org/about/history/geology https://www.nycgovparks.org/about/history/geology