6 ms·

> We have 12 years to prevent a climate catastrophe I don't know how old you are, but those of us over 20 remember that we had '12 years' 20 years ago. Someho

> We have 12 years to prevent a climate catastrophe I don't know how old you are, but those of us over 20 remember that we had '12 years' 20 years ago. Somehow the prophesied catastrophe never arrives and the date gets perpetually pushed into the future. Looks like a secular Seventh Day Adventists.

DoreenMichele 8y ago
^ Though I imagine you will shortly be deluged with comments advising you that you simply don't understand the seriousness of the situation. Etc
- jogjayr 8y ago
  Things have gotten worse over the past 20 years though. The predictions might've been wrong about the rate of change (and I'm assuming this was a reputable source making the prediction, not cherry-picking the most extreme doomsayers). I hope more than anything they're still wrong today. But they weren't wrong about the actual direction of the change. People 20 years ago ignored the warnings, we must do better.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    I never finished my degree, but I'm an environmental studies major. A cartoon in one of my books showed oxygen producing microbes that created earth's oxygen atmosphere organizing to stop the creation of this poisonous oxygen atmosphere as it was killing them. I was watching a TV show that said "If this spider were alive today, it would be hunting animals the size of house cats." and I blurted "No, it wouldn't. It would be on life support." Those giant dragonflies with 4 foot wingspans or whatever? They couldn't exist today. The atmosphere isn't dense enough. For that reason, movies like Jurassic Park are probably completely unrealistic. Dinosaur physiology probably is wholly unsuited to the modern atmosphere. Yes, absolutely, things are changing. But there is an unprecedented 7 billion people on the planet and life expectancy is going up, generally speaking. Could we see a dramatic population crash? Absolutely. Population crashes of various species in various places are a known phenomenon. That could happen. But we keep making these dire predictions about the end of the world and they keep failing to come true. We have been making them for at least a thousand years. The turn of the first millennium was predicted to be The End Times. More recently, the end of, I think, the Mayan calendar was supposed to be the end. Post WW2, everyone expected to die in nuclear war. Today, there is all kinds of post apocalyptic dystopian fiction, often involving antibiotic resistant infections. There are solutions for such things, though people who know of antibiotic alternatives are often dismissed as crackpots. Yet, we continue to quietly problem solve. That gets largely ignored in favor of making new predictions of how The End Times are at hand -- this time for realzy realz, I'm serious man, this is not like all those other silly predictions in the last 1000 years. And if you voice skepticism, you are advised you are a fool who just doesn't get it.
    - jogjayr 8y ago
      The converse view is that problem solvers emerge because we keep making dire predictions. The best way to motivate people (especially bright people) is to convince them their work has higher meaning. If a problem being solved isn't high-stakes, you won't have the best and brightest working on it. They are going to go work on something that is actually high-stakes, high-impact. The post-WW2 nuclear threat was real. It attracted intellectual giants such as John Forbes Nash and John von Neumann whose work probably helped avert a crisis. > More recently, the end of, I think, the Mayan calendar was supposed to be the end. That's nowhere near the same thing as a nuclear threat. The point is that problems don't get solved by magical fairies or elves. They're solved by real people. And smart people are attracted to hard, important problems. All the bellyaching and agonizing serve the purpose of signaling which problems matter.
      - DoreenMichele 8y ago
        Geniuses don't need the masses to advise them what matters. They can figure it out for themselves and are frequently ignored for long periods. Einstein worked in a patent office for years, unable to get the university job he longed for. It took two tries of photographing a solar eclipse to finally get proof of his theory and once proof existed, he was world famous overnight. He didn't stick with it because the masses were haranguing him about how very, very, very important this was.
        jogjayr 8y ago
        Good point about Einstein. It's true that bright minds also go after problems they think are important, regardless of what everyone else thinks. Haranguing masses can decide what gets funded. Einstein's research didn't need much money, which worked out well for him. What if his genius had been in something that required more capital?
        DoreenMichele 8y ago
        I think the short answer is "If he's a real genius, he either finds the capital or finds a cheaper way to do it." The long answer is probably a screed that I would probably regret posting. It's 1am here. Please, excuse me, but I think I'm done here for now.
marmaduke 8y ago
any citation for that? I'm not saying you're wrong, but IPCC scientists aren't some sort youtube doomsday clan.
- sien 8y ago
  The IPCC hasn't said it in an official report. But Jim Hansen has said: "Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama's first administration, he added." https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jan/18/jim-hansen-obama https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jan/18/jim-hans... The IPCC chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, an engineer and economist from India, acknowledged the new trajectory. "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late," Pachauri said. "What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment." from: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/world/europe/18iht-climate.2.8378031.html?pagewanted=all https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/world/europe/18iht-climat... There are a few lists around the place of people saying similar things. Those are just I could find easily without too much bother. Edited to put the Hansen statement in.
  - marmaduke 8y ago
    the first link doesn't make any statements just that the changes are alarming. The second quote is more specific, but it doesn't say that inaction before 2012 will cause the world to end by 2018. If you've seen what IPCC suggests is required to stay at 1.5C, then that quote from 2007 reads as an understatement.
adrianN 8y ago
The realistic conclusion is that it's already to late to save the world. There is no way we can keep warming below 1.5 degrees now. Twenty years ago we might have had a chance. In another twenty years of business as usual we're probably looking at 3+ degrees of inevitable change.
perfunctory 8y ago
> Somehow the prophesied catastrophe never arrives and the date gets perpetually pushed into the future. If anything, the date gets pushed back. With every subsequent IPCC report it turns out the previous as an underestimation.
- explainplease 8y ago
  > If anything, the date gets pushed back. That's what "pushed into the future" means. "Back" means "further away," "up" means "closer." > With every subsequent IPCC report it turns out the previous as an underestimation. So, every IPCC report has been wrong. How long are you going to keep believing them? Sounds like a religion.
  - perfunctory 8y ago
    > That's what "pushed into the future" means. "Back" means "further away," "up" means "closer." Somebody here on HN just very recently claimed the exact opposite. Could it be a regional dialect thing? > So, every IPCC report has been wrong. How long are you going to keep believing them? Sounds like a religion. This is how science and engineering works, you keep revising and improving your models taking new evidence into account. This is the exact opposite of religion, which never changes its opinion regardless of any new evidence.
    - explainplease 8y ago
      > Somebody here on HN just very recently claimed the exact opposite. Could it be a regional dialect thing? FWIW, I have never liked the "back=later, up=sooner" thing. Thinking of a calendar, and time going left-to-right, back seems to me to mean "leftward," which would mean "sooner." This tended to confuse me for a long time, but finally I figured out how to think of it in a way that could stick with me, i.e. the "back=further, up=closer" thing. > This is how science and engineering works, you keep revising and improving your models taking new evidence into account. That's one way to look at it. But eventually you have to say that enough is enough. We aren't revising and improving models of the Aether. And just like the Aether, the models and predictions of the IPCC have proven to be inaccurate. So you seem to be applying science backwards here: you're trusting the models first, and trying to make them accurate as you go. That's not science at all. Indeed, it's much like ancient philosophers who imagined a way that the "invisible" (i.e. microscopic) world worked and then devised a model to explain it. The scientific thing to do is to remain skeptical until a model is proven to be accurate. > This is the exact opposite of religion, which never changes its opinion regardless of any new evidence. That's not true at all. Actual religions change over time. Actual religions study ancient texts and invent new theories about how to interpret them, which often spawn new sects. Actual religions even discover new texts (e.g. the Dead Sea Scrolls) and update their interpretations based on them. Or to put it another way: religion does not have an opinion--people do. Some people are stubborn--and that includes some who claim to be scientific. And the way science is currently organized is not so different than many religions: schools which educate experts who study and discuss and write peer-reviewed journal articles and offer simplified versions to laypeople through the media. That's literally true for both science and religion today. Perhaps we should be less concerned about "science vs. religion" and more concerned about searching for the truth.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

^ Though I imagine you will shortly be deluged with comments advising you that you simply don't understand the seriousness of the situation. Etc

jogjayr 8y ago
Things have gotten worse over the past 20 years though. The predictions might've been wrong about the rate of change (and I'm assuming this was a reputable source making the prediction, not cherry-picking the most extreme doomsayers). I hope more than anything they're still wrong today. But they weren't wrong about the actual direction of the change. People 20 years ago ignored the warnings, we must do better.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  I never finished my degree, but I'm an environmental studies major. A cartoon in one of my books showed oxygen producing microbes that created earth's oxygen atmosphere organizing to stop the creation of this poisonous oxygen atmosphere as it was killing them. I was watching a TV show that said "If this spider were alive today, it would be hunting animals the size of house cats." and I blurted "No, it wouldn't. It would be on life support." Those giant dragonflies with 4 foot wingspans or whatever? They couldn't exist today. The atmosphere isn't dense enough. For that reason, movies like Jurassic Park are probably completely unrealistic. Dinosaur physiology probably is wholly unsuited to the modern atmosphere. Yes, absolutely, things are changing. But there is an unprecedented 7 billion people on the planet and life expectancy is going up, generally speaking. Could we see a dramatic population crash? Absolutely. Population crashes of various species in various places are a known phenomenon. That could happen. But we keep making these dire predictions about the end of the world and they keep failing to come true. We have been making them for at least a thousand years. The turn of the first millennium was predicted to be The End Times. More recently, the end of, I think, the Mayan calendar was supposed to be the end. Post WW2, everyone expected to die in nuclear war. Today, there is all kinds of post apocalyptic dystopian fiction, often involving antibiotic resistant infections. There are solutions for such things, though people who know of antibiotic alternatives are often dismissed as crackpots. Yet, we continue to quietly problem solve. That gets largely ignored in favor of making new predictions of how The End Times are at hand -- this time for realzy realz, I'm serious man, this is not like all those other silly predictions in the last 1000 years. And if you voice skepticism, you are advised you are a fool who just doesn't get it.
  - jogjayr 8y ago
    The converse view is that problem solvers emerge because we keep making dire predictions. The best way to motivate people (especially bright people) is to convince them their work has higher meaning. If a problem being solved isn't high-stakes, you won't have the best and brightest working on it. They are going to go work on something that is actually high-stakes, high-impact. The post-WW2 nuclear threat was real. It attracted intellectual giants such as John Forbes Nash and John von Neumann whose work probably helped avert a crisis. > More recently, the end of, I think, the Mayan calendar was supposed to be the end. That's nowhere near the same thing as a nuclear threat. The point is that problems don't get solved by magical fairies or elves. They're solved by real people. And smart people are attracted to hard, important problems. All the bellyaching and agonizing serve the purpose of signaling which problems matter.
    - DoreenMichele 8y ago
      Geniuses don't need the masses to advise them what matters. They can figure it out for themselves and are frequently ignored for long periods. Einstein worked in a patent office for years, unable to get the university job he longed for. It took two tries of photographing a solar eclipse to finally get proof of his theory and once proof existed, he was world famous overnight. He didn't stick with it because the masses were haranguing him about how very, very, very important this was.
      - jogjayr 8y ago
        Good point about Einstein. It's true that bright minds also go after problems they think are important, regardless of what everyone else thinks. Haranguing masses can decide what gets funded. Einstein's research didn't need much money, which worked out well for him. What if his genius had been in something that required more capital?
        DoreenMichele 8y ago
        I think the short answer is "If he's a real genius, he either finds the capital or finds a cheaper way to do it." The long answer is probably a screed that I would probably regret posting. It's 1am here. Please, excuse me, but I think I'm done here for now.

marmaduke 8y ago

any citation for that? I'm not saying you're wrong, but IPCC scientists aren't some sort youtube doomsday clan.

sien 8y ago
The IPCC hasn't said it in an official report. But Jim Hansen has said: "Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama's first administration, he added." https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jan/18/jim-hansen-obama https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jan/18/jim-hans... The IPCC chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, an engineer and economist from India, acknowledged the new trajectory. "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late," Pachauri said. "What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment." from: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/world/europe/18iht-climate.2.8378031.html?pagewanted=all https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/world/europe/18iht-climat... There are a few lists around the place of people saying similar things. Those are just I could find easily without too much bother. Edited to put the Hansen statement in.
- marmaduke 8y ago
  the first link doesn't make any statements just that the changes are alarming. The second quote is more specific, but it doesn't say that inaction before 2012 will cause the world to end by 2018. If you've seen what IPCC suggests is required to stay at 1.5C, then that quote from 2007 reads as an understatement.

adrianN 8y ago

The realistic conclusion is that it's already to late to save the world. There is no way we can keep warming below 1.5 degrees now. Twenty years ago we might have had a chance. In another twenty years of business as usual we're probably looking at 3+ degrees of inevitable change.

perfunctory 8y ago

> Somehow the prophesied catastrophe never arrives and the date gets perpetually pushed into the future. If anything, the date gets pushed back. With every subsequent IPCC report it turns out the previous as an underestimation.

explainplease 8y ago
> If anything, the date gets pushed back. That's what "pushed into the future" means. "Back" means "further away," "up" means "closer." > With every subsequent IPCC report it turns out the previous as an underestimation. So, every IPCC report has been wrong. How long are you going to keep believing them? Sounds like a religion.
- perfunctory 8y ago
  > That's what "pushed into the future" means. "Back" means "further away," "up" means "closer." Somebody here on HN just very recently claimed the exact opposite. Could it be a regional dialect thing? > So, every IPCC report has been wrong. How long are you going to keep believing them? Sounds like a religion. This is how science and engineering works, you keep revising and improving your models taking new evidence into account. This is the exact opposite of religion, which never changes its opinion regardless of any new evidence.
  - explainplease 8y ago
    > Somebody here on HN just very recently claimed the exact opposite. Could it be a regional dialect thing? FWIW, I have never liked the "back=later, up=sooner" thing. Thinking of a calendar, and time going left-to-right, back seems to me to mean "leftward," which would mean "sooner." This tended to confuse me for a long time, but finally I figured out how to think of it in a way that could stick with me, i.e. the "back=further, up=closer" thing. > This is how science and engineering works, you keep revising and improving your models taking new evidence into account. That's one way to look at it. But eventually you have to say that enough is enough. We aren't revising and improving models of the Aether. And just like the Aether, the models and predictions of the IPCC have proven to be inaccurate. So you seem to be applying science backwards here: you're trusting the models first, and trying to make them accurate as you go. That's not science at all. Indeed, it's much like ancient philosophers who imagined a way that the "invisible" (i.e. microscopic) world worked and then devised a model to explain it. The scientific thing to do is to remain skeptical until a model is proven to be accurate. > This is the exact opposite of religion, which never changes its opinion regardless of any new evidence. That's not true at all. Actual religions change over time. Actual religions study ancient texts and invent new theories about how to interpret them, which often spawn new sects. Actual religions even discover new texts (e.g. the Dead Sea Scrolls) and update their interpretations based on them. Or to put it another way: religion does not have an opinion--people do. Some people are stubborn--and that includes some who claim to be scientific. And the way science is currently organized is not so different than many religions: schools which educate experts who study and discuss and write peer-reviewed journal articles and offer simplified versions to laypeople through the media. That's literally true for both science and religion today. Perhaps we should be less concerned about "science vs. religion" and more concerned about searching for the truth.