8 ms·

I feel somewhat embarassed to talk about this, but does anyone else feel a sense of dread and depression when reading news like this? I can't seem to shake it a

I feel somewhat embarassed to talk about this, but does anyone else feel a sense of dread and depression when reading news like this? I can't seem to shake it and it's quite strongly affecting my worldview.

polotics 8y ago
Nope. Just a strong motivation to get ready. From where I stand in terms of worldview for my children, the 21st century looks like a race between geo-engineering and forced adaptations, inclusive of genetics, with the lowlands' populations having one chance at armed migration. So maybe not as bad as the 20th...
atomi 8y ago
These news stories are ominous.
- mirimir 8y ago
  Based on my experience over the past few decades, it's going to just keep getting worse. And there's not much that we can do about that. Except to maybe mitigate the extremes. And even that's iffy, because we don't know what'll happen with the permafrost.
  - akvadrako 8y ago
    It probably will get worse, until people get tired of ominous news. Eventually it must get tiring or at least cause desensitisation.
batiudrami 8y ago
I do too. Considering the scenarios in which this plays out makes me feel sick, and overwhelmingly helpless.
awestroke 8y ago
Climate Anxiety is starting to get more and more common. APA's guidelines are interesting: https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/03/mental-health-climate.pdf https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/03/mental-healt... It's very jarring to read information from experts and scentific reports on where we're heading and at the same time everyone in the media and all people around me just ignore the problem completely except some comments now and then that reveal how greatly they underestimate the problem. If you start trying to talk about how severe our problems are becoming, you may be labeled a conspiracy theorist / "prepper" and your opinion thrown out the window.
- fouc 8y ago
  I get the feeling that the winds are shifting, less and less it's being considered extremist thinking.
  - carlmr 8y ago
    >I get the feeling that the winds are shifting I see what you did there.
- Freak_NL 8y ago
  Then there are those who will not just ignore the problem, but gladly regurgitate the latest denialist tropes: → CO₂ makes plants grow! It compensates for the rise of CO₂ levels! → We used to worry about the environment too, now suddenly it's the climate. The environment turned out fine! Acid rain wasn't a problem either! It all boils down to not being able to accept that our society will (have to) change.
mirimir 8y ago
I used to feel that way. But now I'm old enough that I'm pretty confident that I'll die before shit gets too bad. I'd feel differently if I had kids, but I don't. So mostly I'm left with ironic amusement. If I were younger, and/or had young family, maybe I'd be doing more. As it is, I spent maybe a decade working on climate change issues at an NGO. And my carbon footprint is relatively low. I don't commute, or travel long distances, I don't eat much meat, and my home is very well insulated. My main sin is running too many computers. But at least I've switched to SSDs.
- konschubert 8y ago
  I know that this is my personal view on life, but: If you don't care at all about what happens after you're dead, what's the purpose of your life? You'll be dead and it won't have mattered a bit that you're been here.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Having fun is the best I've come up with. And yes, working on stuff that I care about. But that's part of what I consider having fun. Long term, I'll be dead, no matter what.
    - konschubert 8y ago
      But see, that's my point. How can you or I find joy in building a better database or whatever if there will be nobody to use it in 100 years?
      - mirimir 8y ago
        OK, so let's say that you really care about this. Maybe consider what could you do about it. Instead of building a better database or whatever.
        fredsir 8y ago
        I don’t think it matters as much if what you do in actuality ends up making a significant difference. What matters is that you did what you could. From the perspectives of future societies, you and I will be blips anyways, so that’s irrelevant. But how can one be contempt with knowing that they didn’t try to make a difference, and that their mark on the world disappears when the energy has left their body and their corpse has been burned and buried, I do not understand, because if you don’t (try to) leave anything of value behind, your existence is practically for nothing, except for maybe even a net negative.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ummonk 8y ago
Personally, I worry about a lot. Global warming, not so much. It will have an impact on coasta cities but that aside, it really isn't that big a deal. We have much bigger risks to worry about (both environmental and otherwise).
- awestroke 8y ago
  Once the permafrost starts to melt, it will cause a positive feedback loop causing all trapped methane to rapidly be released, doubling the amount of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. It's literally a ticking bomb. I worry about it.
  - raverbashing 8y ago
    But then again, methane has a short half life in the atmosphere.
    - mirimir 8y ago
      Sure, but there's a lot of it there.
      - c0nducktr 8y ago
        And even after it's 'short life', it just breaks down into a less potent greenhouse gas.
        mirimir 8y ago
        Yes, there's that too :(
    - bigbugbag 8y ago
      then again, this is not a process that can be stopped once started and there more than enough methane to have dramatic consequences. then again this is one reinforcing feedback loop among several others. Are you familiar with the concept of planet albedo, and how it is changing on earth due to melting polar cap? Ever heard of ocean's anoxic events and their consequences ? And the list goes on.
hackerbabz 8y ago
I'm 24, and two years ago I think I had a full nervous breakdown over climate change. I couldn't stop thinking about it to the point that I stopped sleeping, lost 10 lbs, and almost dropped out of college. If any train of thought leads you to this point, you have a medical problem, regardless of what you are thinking about. Fortunately, I was able to get help and had fantastic support from my family and friends. Today I'm off medicine and therapy. I still have bad times lasting 1 - 2 weeks, but never to the point that I can't live. The important thing that I'm able to see now (even when my anxiety is back) is that everything that is important without climate change, is important with climate change. Even though the world is ending (I am not hopeful), I can still find love, learn new things, see the world, enjoy good food, risk my life, make money, enjoy art, and play sports. You can substitute into that list anything that brings you joy. You can also include fighting climate change in that list.
- mirimir 8y ago
  Well put :)
unpopular42 8y ago
Me too! Reading about how dysfunctional and corrupt the UN has become is indeed very depressing. Great to hear I'm not alone.
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
If you zoomed us forward a century from today, with present day technology, and assume the worst case scenario for climate models we'd still be perfectly fine. The most impactful practical effects would be the changing of coastlines and more severe weather conditions. It's not the end of the world. Now enter technology. Think about where we were a century ago technologically. Consider that in many ways technology today is accelerating even faster than it was then. Imagine now where we'll be in a century from now. Nobody would from 1918 would be able to guess what 2018 would look like, from a technological point of view, and I'm certain nobody in 2018 can even imagine what 2118 will look like from the same metric. I mean we are already today approaching the level of technology required to live on other planets which are completely and absolutely inhospitable. In the worst case scenarios of climate change, Earth would still be a utopia by comparison. And then enter in near future ideas like geo-engineering, atmospheric manipulation, and so on. So I don't think it's smart to run a species level experiment on seeing what happens if we just keeping pumping out CO2, but the worst case scenario is both survivable and improbable. It could even end up changing us vastly for the better. The Black Death is something no one would have ever wanted, yet it paradoxically accelerated, if not sparked, the change that nearly everybody would have wanted of a transition away from feudal society to a more free society.
- mirimir 8y ago
  What about impacts on food production? And chaos from mass migrations?
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    Remember, first and foremost, the climate change isn't something that will happen, it is happening. It's not like one day everything is just dandy and the next day everything is underwater and everybody's freaking out realizing how serious an issue it was all along. It is an extremely gradual process. The characteristics, locations, and composition of food production may change but global level starvation is not a realistic concern. One of the more cynical papers of recent time proposed up to 500k deaths related to food production by 2050. Work that out in terms of net effect on the global population over 30 years. It's certainly not something that should be shrugged off, but at the same time e.g. rising obesity rates will cause magnitudes more deaths before then. Over time, if our models hold up, we'll see the desirability of coastal areas begin to gradually decline. As sea levels gradually rise we'll probably respond with pumping systems and other technological solutions and if/when technological solutions start to lose ground we'll begin to see demand for coastal property start to decline but as there will always be people with different appetites for risk and prospecting, it'll constantly be a gradual process. We'll probably also see the rise of entrepreneurs taking advantage of the changing landscapes to offer new solutions. For instance check out the ideas for ideas being carried out by Dutch Docklands. [1] Some phenomenal stuff there. For others, we'll likely see emigrations more inland as I imagine we've already seen, at least to some degree, from places like Louisiana. In the worst case, there may be lots of change. But change is not necessarily bad in the longrun, even if undesirable in the shortrun. [1] - http://www.dutchdocklands.com/Development/United-States http://www.dutchdocklands.com/Development/United-States
CalRobert 8y ago
Yes. It's awful. But you're not the only one. I feel like someone found an asteroid headed for Earth and everyone just shrugged and decided to pretend it wasn't there. People still make plans for retirement, etc. assuming the world will be the same as it is now, and it dumbfounds me. It's not just climate change deniers - it's people who agree with the science and even see that we're not doing enough, and that it may be accelerating. But apparently it's too abstract to consider it in your own life. I kind of wish it were that way for me; it would beat living in dread and fear.
- garretraziel 8y ago
  I've read about this psychological theory somewhere - that there is so much danger around human that human brain has to ignore everything that doesn't impact him directly, othervise everyone would be paralized by fear all the time. Without this mechanism, one would be unable to leave his apartment - there are hundreds of potentialy dangerous individuals you'll meet every day, moving in things that would kill you instantly if someone just made a small mistake. And if you decide to use this thing, you depend on tens of people you've never met that they did their job correctly, othervise you may be killed even though you haven't made any mistake. Public transportation is even worse in this regard. It would also explain how anyone is able to do things that are unhealthy - smoke, drink alcohol, eat sugar. Even though we all know that it's really unhealthy, it doesn't affect us directly, so it's hard to take it as serious threat. I'm not sure if this theory is true, but it keeps explaining a lot of human behaviour to me.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  It’s funny to think how people would probably also ignore an asteroid that was 50 years away. It would be “fake news”.
GreeniFi 8y ago
The things that concern me about this are: 1. The amplifying impact that the global financial system will have on climate change. When banks feel agricultural loans are too risky, they will pull farmer credit lines, resulting in a halving of yields. This might already be happening in some places. 2. The organizations which have a mandate for resolving this problem are not fit-for-purpose. Big bloated and corrupt beaurocracies - breaking up in disarray: see the Green Climate Fund. 3. Active attempts to frustrate solutions. And I simply don’t understand why people would want to do so. Even if your livelihood is dependent on a petrol company, or similar, your families’ ultimate livelihood will be dependent on a stable climate. For reference, I don’t think life on earth is threatened (that’s just hyperbole) but there is a high probability that the population will readjust down to 3-4 billion and this readjustment will be a rather painful down-sizing.
hfdgiutdryg 8y ago
Here's my view on this: I've stopped caring. I don't have kids and I don't particularly care about the future of humanity. Humans will most likely ruin the planet and, at some point, due to a lack of foresight, kill themselves to extinction. After a few hundred million years, the Earth will be back in operation. In my opinion, humans just don't do well with restriction. If politicians focus on restricting consumption of goods and energy, we'll just end up in another "general malaise"[1] like in the 1970s. The only way this will ever get solved is through enormous amounts of clean energy (nuclear, which nobody wants) and recapturing carbon. [1] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106508243 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106508...
- wcoenen 8y ago
  > After a few hundred million years, the Earth will be back in operation Well... The sun is gradually getting hotter over geological timescales. Eventually it will experience Venus-style runaway warming, and this could happen as soon as 500 million years from now. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130729-runaway-greenhouse-global-warming-venus-ocean-climate-science/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130729-runa...

polotics 8y ago

Nope. Just a strong motivation to get ready. From where I stand in terms of worldview for my children, the 21st century looks like a race between geo-engineering and forced adaptations, inclusive of genetics, with the lowlands' populations having one chance at armed migration. So maybe not as bad as the 20th...

atomi 8y ago

These news stories are ominous.

mirimir 8y ago
Based on my experience over the past few decades, it's going to just keep getting worse. And there's not much that we can do about that. Except to maybe mitigate the extremes. And even that's iffy, because we don't know what'll happen with the permafrost.
- akvadrako 8y ago
  It probably will get worse, until people get tired of ominous news. Eventually it must get tiring or at least cause desensitisation.

batiudrami 8y ago

I do too. Considering the scenarios in which this plays out makes me feel sick, and overwhelmingly helpless.

awestroke 8y ago

Climate Anxiety is starting to get more and more common. APA's guidelines are interesting: https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/03/mental-health-climate.pdf https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/03/mental-healt... It's very jarring to read information from experts and scentific reports on where we're heading and at the same time everyone in the media and all people around me just ignore the problem completely except some comments now and then that reveal how greatly they underestimate the problem. If you start trying to talk about how severe our problems are becoming, you may be labeled a conspiracy theorist / "prepper" and your opinion thrown out the window.

fouc 8y ago
I get the feeling that the winds are shifting, less and less it's being considered extremist thinking.
- carlmr 8y ago
  >I get the feeling that the winds are shifting I see what you did there.
Freak_NL 8y ago
Then there are those who will not just ignore the problem, but gladly regurgitate the latest denialist tropes: → CO₂ makes plants grow! It compensates for the rise of CO₂ levels! → We used to worry about the environment too, now suddenly it's the climate. The environment turned out fine! Acid rain wasn't a problem either! It all boils down to not being able to accept that our society will (have to) change.

mirimir 8y ago

I used to feel that way. But now I'm old enough that I'm pretty confident that I'll die before shit gets too bad. I'd feel differently if I had kids, but I don't. So mostly I'm left with ironic amusement. If I were younger, and/or had young family, maybe I'd be doing more. As it is, I spent maybe a decade working on climate change issues at an NGO. And my carbon footprint is relatively low. I don't commute, or travel long distances, I don't eat much meat, and my home is very well insulated. My main sin is running too many computers. But at least I've switched to SSDs.

konschubert 8y ago
I know that this is my personal view on life, but: If you don't care at all about what happens after you're dead, what's the purpose of your life? You'll be dead and it won't have mattered a bit that you're been here.
- mirimir 8y ago
  Having fun is the best I've come up with. And yes, working on stuff that I care about. But that's part of what I consider having fun. Long term, I'll be dead, no matter what.
  - konschubert 8y ago
    But see, that's my point. How can you or I find joy in building a better database or whatever if there will be nobody to use it in 100 years?
    - mirimir 8y ago
      OK, so let's say that you really care about this. Maybe consider what could you do about it. Instead of building a better database or whatever.
      - fredsir 8y ago
        I don’t think it matters as much if what you do in actuality ends up making a significant difference. What matters is that you did what you could. From the perspectives of future societies, you and I will be blips anyways, so that’s irrelevant. But how can one be contempt with knowing that they didn’t try to make a difference, and that their mark on the world disappears when the energy has left their body and their corpse has been burned and buried, I do not understand, because if you don’t (try to) leave anything of value behind, your existence is practically for nothing, except for maybe even a net negative.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ummonk 8y ago

Personally, I worry about a lot. Global warming, not so much. It will have an impact on coasta cities but that aside, it really isn't that big a deal. We have much bigger risks to worry about (both environmental and otherwise).

awestroke 8y ago
Once the permafrost starts to melt, it will cause a positive feedback loop causing all trapped methane to rapidly be released, doubling the amount of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. It's literally a ticking bomb. I worry about it.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  But then again, methane has a short half life in the atmosphere.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Sure, but there's a lot of it there.
    - c0nducktr 8y ago
      And even after it's 'short life', it just breaks down into a less potent greenhouse gas.
      - mirimir 8y ago
        Yes, there's that too :(
  - bigbugbag 8y ago
    then again, this is not a process that can be stopped once started and there more than enough methane to have dramatic consequences. then again this is one reinforcing feedback loop among several others. Are you familiar with the concept of planet albedo, and how it is changing on earth due to melting polar cap? Ever heard of ocean's anoxic events and their consequences ? And the list goes on.

hackerbabz 8y ago

I'm 24, and two years ago I think I had a full nervous breakdown over climate change. I couldn't stop thinking about it to the point that I stopped sleeping, lost 10 lbs, and almost dropped out of college. If any train of thought leads you to this point, you have a medical problem, regardless of what you are thinking about. Fortunately, I was able to get help and had fantastic support from my family and friends. Today I'm off medicine and therapy. I still have bad times lasting 1 - 2 weeks, but never to the point that I can't live. The important thing that I'm able to see now (even when my anxiety is back) is that everything that is important without climate change, is important with climate change. Even though the world is ending (I am not hopeful), I can still find love, learn new things, see the world, enjoy good food, risk my life, make money, enjoy art, and play sports. You can substitute into that list anything that brings you joy. You can also include fighting climate change in that list.

mirimir 8y ago
Well put :)

unpopular42 8y ago

Me too! Reading about how dysfunctional and corrupt the UN has become is indeed very depressing. Great to hear I'm not alone.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

If you zoomed us forward a century from today, with present day technology, and assume the worst case scenario for climate models we'd still be perfectly fine. The most impactful practical effects would be the changing of coastlines and more severe weather conditions. It's not the end of the world. Now enter technology. Think about where we were a century ago technologically. Consider that in many ways technology today is accelerating even faster than it was then. Imagine now where we'll be in a century from now. Nobody would from 1918 would be able to guess what 2018 would look like, from a technological point of view, and I'm certain nobody in 2018 can even imagine what 2118 will look like from the same metric. I mean we are already today approaching the level of technology required to live on other planets which are completely and absolutely inhospitable. In the worst case scenarios of climate change, Earth would still be a utopia by comparison. And then enter in near future ideas like geo-engineering, atmospheric manipulation, and so on. So I don't think it's smart to run a species level experiment on seeing what happens if we just keeping pumping out CO2, but the worst case scenario is both survivable and improbable. It could even end up changing us vastly for the better. The Black Death is something no one would have ever wanted, yet it paradoxically accelerated, if not sparked, the change that nearly everybody would have wanted of a transition away from feudal society to a more free society.

mirimir 8y ago
What about impacts on food production? And chaos from mass migrations?
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  Remember, first and foremost, the climate change isn't something that will happen, it is happening. It's not like one day everything is just dandy and the next day everything is underwater and everybody's freaking out realizing how serious an issue it was all along. It is an extremely gradual process. The characteristics, locations, and composition of food production may change but global level starvation is not a realistic concern. One of the more cynical papers of recent time proposed up to 500k deaths related to food production by 2050. Work that out in terms of net effect on the global population over 30 years. It's certainly not something that should be shrugged off, but at the same time e.g. rising obesity rates will cause magnitudes more deaths before then. Over time, if our models hold up, we'll see the desirability of coastal areas begin to gradually decline. As sea levels gradually rise we'll probably respond with pumping systems and other technological solutions and if/when technological solutions start to lose ground we'll begin to see demand for coastal property start to decline but as there will always be people with different appetites for risk and prospecting, it'll constantly be a gradual process. We'll probably also see the rise of entrepreneurs taking advantage of the changing landscapes to offer new solutions. For instance check out the ideas for ideas being carried out by Dutch Docklands. [1] Some phenomenal stuff there. For others, we'll likely see emigrations more inland as I imagine we've already seen, at least to some degree, from places like Louisiana. In the worst case, there may be lots of change. But change is not necessarily bad in the longrun, even if undesirable in the shortrun. [1] - http://www.dutchdocklands.com/Development/United-States http://www.dutchdocklands.com/Development/United-States

CalRobert 8y ago

Yes. It's awful. But you're not the only one. I feel like someone found an asteroid headed for Earth and everyone just shrugged and decided to pretend it wasn't there. People still make plans for retirement, etc. assuming the world will be the same as it is now, and it dumbfounds me. It's not just climate change deniers - it's people who agree with the science and even see that we're not doing enough, and that it may be accelerating. But apparently it's too abstract to consider it in your own life. I kind of wish it were that way for me; it would beat living in dread and fear.

garretraziel 8y ago
I've read about this psychological theory somewhere - that there is so much danger around human that human brain has to ignore everything that doesn't impact him directly, othervise everyone would be paralized by fear all the time. Without this mechanism, one would be unable to leave his apartment - there are hundreds of potentialy dangerous individuals you'll meet every day, moving in things that would kill you instantly if someone just made a small mistake. And if you decide to use this thing, you depend on tens of people you've never met that they did their job correctly, othervise you may be killed even though you haven't made any mistake. Public transportation is even worse in this regard. It would also explain how anyone is able to do things that are unhealthy - smoke, drink alcohol, eat sugar. Even though we all know that it's really unhealthy, it doesn't affect us directly, so it's hard to take it as serious threat. I'm not sure if this theory is true, but it keeps explaining a lot of human behaviour to me.
erikpukinskis 8y ago
It’s funny to think how people would probably also ignore an asteroid that was 50 years away. It would be “fake news”.

GreeniFi 8y ago

The things that concern me about this are: 1. The amplifying impact that the global financial system will have on climate change. When banks feel agricultural loans are too risky, they will pull farmer credit lines, resulting in a halving of yields. This might already be happening in some places. 2. The organizations which have a mandate for resolving this problem are not fit-for-purpose. Big bloated and corrupt beaurocracies - breaking up in disarray: see the Green Climate Fund. 3. Active attempts to frustrate solutions. And I simply don’t understand why people would want to do so. Even if your livelihood is dependent on a petrol company, or similar, your families’ ultimate livelihood will be dependent on a stable climate. For reference, I don’t think life on earth is threatened (that’s just hyperbole) but there is a high probability that the population will readjust down to 3-4 billion and this readjustment will be a rather painful down-sizing.

hfdgiutdryg 8y ago

Here's my view on this: I've stopped caring. I don't have kids and I don't particularly care about the future of humanity. Humans will most likely ruin the planet and, at some point, due to a lack of foresight, kill themselves to extinction. After a few hundred million years, the Earth will be back in operation. In my opinion, humans just don't do well with restriction. If politicians focus on restricting consumption of goods and energy, we'll just end up in another "general malaise"[1] like in the 1970s. The only way this will ever get solved is through enormous amounts of clean energy (nuclear, which nobody wants) and recapturing carbon. [1] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106508243 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106508...

wcoenen 8y ago
> After a few hundred million years, the Earth will be back in operation Well... The sun is gradually getting hotter over geological timescales. Eventually it will experience Venus-style runaway warming, and this could happen as soon as 500 million years from now. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130729-runaway-greenhouse-global-warming-venus-ocean-climate-science/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130729-runa...