9 ms·

We should all be freaking out about what we’ve done to the earth, but nobody seems to really be able to compare it within historical context. We just dont know

by ako 8y ago

We should all be freaking out about what we’ve done to the earth, but nobody seems to really be able to compare it within historical context. We just dont know what it was like just a century ago. I’m always surprised by facts like in this story and similar like https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/big-fish-stories-getting-littler https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/b... And https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/nyregion/new-york-city-smog.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/nyregion/new-york-city-sm...

erikpukinskis 8y ago
Freaking out doesn’t seem to be helping? A lot of people have been freaking out for a long time. If anything, it seems to lead to a combination of despondency in allies and stubbornness in enemies. I’d advise working on solutions to specific problems, calmly and deliberately.
- faitswulff 8y ago
  I think op means we should have zero enemies in fixing our environment. If we were truly all on the same page and freaking out, taking meaningful action would be a lot easier.
  - ThomPete 8y ago
    Freaking out is the opposite of what we need. I am not worried about the consequences being so severe we cant handle them, there are other quite scarier scenarios. Freaking out gives us the opposite of solutions,just a lot of noise and premature solutions such as focusing on inferior solutions such as solar. This is the right way to do it, deal with the problems you see and can deal with.
    - ako 8y ago
      The biggest problem is that people don’t see the problem, because they can’t see it in historical context.
      - SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
        Yep. This is known as "shifting baselines syndrome" https://oceana.org/blog/daniel-pauly-and-george-monbiot-conversation-about-shifting-baselines-syndrome https://oceana.org/blog/daniel-pauly-and-george-monbiot-conv...
      - ThomPete 8y ago
        See what problem? That's the question here. Climate change is not a problem, it is a phenomena which have consequences. Some of them we see today some are 100 years into the future. We don't know what the right solution for the consequences in the future is as we don't even know what the consequences are and we don't even know what the problems are going to be. We can speculate but we can be wrong and so its much better to solve the problems we have today in ways we know how to solve and then invest in R&D to develop better solutions than to chase a future that might or might not be here. Alternatively I fear the current scenario were people have panicked and spend more time arguing on the internet than actually doing anything constructive about the problems right in front of them.
        ako 8y ago
        That’s my point exactly, people don’t see a problem as they can’t compare our current situation with what it was like in the past. We’ve completely and utterly destroyed nature, seas are empty, air was unbreathsble at some point, all oyster banks completely gone, most wildlife going extinct and people are asking “what problem”? Thank you for proving my point.
        ThomPete 8y ago
        I am assuming you consider yourself part of "people" which means that you are subject to the same problem unless you believe yourself to be enlightened. So the question still is what is the actual problem and how do you know it's correctly defined?
        ako 8y ago
        Wow, this makes me really sad. If you are so unable to see the problem I have no hope we'll ever fix this problem. As I wrote in the top comment, I'm often surprised when reading articles which compare our current state with the past, the amount of life we've destroyed, the amount of pollution we're producing. So yes, subject to the same problem, but open to learning the facts... You sound like the person that gets invited to a party, brings 100s of uninvited friends, completely trashes the house, kills a lot of the other invitees, and then is surprised when somebody thinks it's a problem:" you still have something resembling a roof, you can still sort of live here, what is the problem?"
  - jerf 8y ago
    "I think op means we should have zero enemies in fixing our environment." You do. Everybody wants clean air, clean water, etc. The Captain-Planet-Villain model of somebody literally cackling about how much pollution they're going to release into the world today is nonsense. The problem is people who see a short-term gain of their own, standing against the environmental problems they cause. They may not even believe the environmental problems exist. Sometimes they're even right; just because someone labeling themselves an "environmentalist" claims some environmental problem exists doesn't mean they are correct. These people are probably as dangerous to the environment as the actual polluters. We don't actually have complete and correct information about the effect of things, and if we did, there's a lot of people who wouldn't want to hear it, on both "sides". But you gotta solve the right problems. Probably a non-trivial component of the environmental movement's semi-effectiveness is how much of the movement wants to fight alongside Captain Planet against essentially non-existent threats, rather than working out how to address the mismatched incentive issue. But I say "semi-effective" because they're far from ineffective, and there are certainly people directly addressing the mismatched incentive issue. For instance, people discussing "carbon taxes" are definitely on a more effective path.
    - parasubvert 8y ago
      A major segment of the US populace is supporting policy to remove all polluting regulations , dismantle the EPA, and would scream murder over a Carbon tax the same way “conservatives” in Canada are over Federal plans. They’re not evil overlords cackling, but rather they’re in mass denial over a zero sum scientific equation, and have created a cult around their disbelief that’s as strong as any environmental group. If you understand science, from that sense, they’re definitely acting like tragic villains. I wish it were so easy, that all environmentalists would need to do is admit they’ve overreached sometimes and been alarmist on the timeline etc, and people will see the reason in ideas like carbon taxes. That’s not the experience I see out there. People are treating carbon taxes as the equivalent of communist invasion and an immoral affront to free society, rather than a conservative policy idea. (Similar to the healthcare debate) I suppose there will always be people in the middle that could swing either way, they’re our main hope. But I think it’s not helpful to scold “both sides” as you do above, equating over-eager environmentalists with those that want to accelerate our pollution and use of fossil fuels for short term gain. One is a misdemeanour, the other is quite literally contributing to global destabilization. Global warming in the next 75 years is leading to a wave of refugee immigration the world has never seen before (that a large segment of the populace also currently would reject and let starve). Germany has been poltically destabilized by 2 million Syrians. What happens when 1 billion or more are knocking on Europe and the US’s doors? I only wish I was overstating this for effect.
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  I think the OP meant "freaking out" as in "putting a universal sense of urgency behind our efforts at correction and remediation". There seems to be zero sense of urgency behind a lot of these issues today, especially at a policy level, even for issues that have a time horizon of just a few years. It's bizarre and frustrating. It looks very much as though if we were faced with the CFC/ozone problem today we would fail to meet the challenge as we did in the '80s/'90s. It's easy to forget that the ozone challenge required a tremendous amount of complication international diplomacy and required some real compromises.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >Freaking out doesn’t seem to be helping? A lot of people have been freaking out for a long time. Have they? I think it's what societies does as a group that shows whether we're "freaking out", and judging by our collective response, it seems like we could not care less...
ericdykstra 8y ago
Sometimes I think our only options going forward are a world where all natural habitat has been completely decimated, or an eco-fascist regime enforces pollution (and thus effectively population) control on the whole planet.
- throw564d 8y ago
  This seems to me one topic where HN has its head jammed firmly in the sand - population control goes against its dogma, yet unrestrained fertility will likely destroy the planet but hey, we had 50% female engineers for 2 weeks before the polar caps melted!
- kakaorka 8y ago
  I think you should watch the Handmaid’s Tale; it will make you never suggest your latter suggestion again :)
  - benj111 8y ago
    It was a book originally. Plus that's kind of the opposite of what you're talking about, as most of the women are infertile.
    - Ntrails 8y ago
      The point of the book isn't the fertility, it's the fascism. When you're doing something abhorrent that is, of course, supposed to save the world/species - that doesn't actually make it ok
- nnq 8y ago
  > a world where all natural habitat has been completely decimated That's probably the way we'll have it, but there will be artificial-natural habitat, eg. "reservations", that could grow to even be country-sized or half-continent-sized if we manage resources right. (Though probably they'll be smaller since we're going to have to some pretty large scale heavily-engineered-and-very-unnatural-agriculture to prevent famine in the face of climate degradation.) The second option sounds somewhat enticing... but it would likely severely diminish speed of technological progress, hence diminish our even-longer-term changes of survival (think encounter and warfare with alien civs etc. - the universe is huge and if we/our-mostly-artificial-descendants survive long enough we'll have to compete with strains of life much more virulent than ourselves today).

by ako 8y ago

erikpukinskis 8y ago

Freaking out doesn’t seem to be helping? A lot of people have been freaking out for a long time. If anything, it seems to lead to a combination of despondency in allies and stubbornness in enemies. I’d advise working on solutions to specific problems, calmly and deliberately.

faitswulff 8y ago
I think op means we should have zero enemies in fixing our environment. If we were truly all on the same page and freaking out, taking meaningful action would be a lot easier.
- ThomPete 8y ago
  Freaking out is the opposite of what we need. I am not worried about the consequences being so severe we cant handle them, there are other quite scarier scenarios. Freaking out gives us the opposite of solutions,just a lot of noise and premature solutions such as focusing on inferior solutions such as solar. This is the right way to do it, deal with the problems you see and can deal with.
  - ako 8y ago
    The biggest problem is that people don’t see the problem, because they can’t see it in historical context.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
      Yep. This is known as "shifting baselines syndrome" https://oceana.org/blog/daniel-pauly-and-george-monbiot-conversation-about-shifting-baselines-syndrome https://oceana.org/blog/daniel-pauly-and-george-monbiot-conv...
    - ThomPete 8y ago
      See what problem? That's the question here. Climate change is not a problem, it is a phenomena which have consequences. Some of them we see today some are 100 years into the future. We don't know what the right solution for the consequences in the future is as we don't even know what the consequences are and we don't even know what the problems are going to be. We can speculate but we can be wrong and so its much better to solve the problems we have today in ways we know how to solve and then invest in R&D to develop better solutions than to chase a future that might or might not be here. Alternatively I fear the current scenario were people have panicked and spend more time arguing on the internet than actually doing anything constructive about the problems right in front of them.
      - ako 8y ago
        That’s my point exactly, people don’t see a problem as they can’t compare our current situation with what it was like in the past. We’ve completely and utterly destroyed nature, seas are empty, air was unbreathsble at some point, all oyster banks completely gone, most wildlife going extinct and people are asking “what problem”? Thank you for proving my point.
        ThomPete 8y ago
        I am assuming you consider yourself part of "people" which means that you are subject to the same problem unless you believe yourself to be enlightened. So the question still is what is the actual problem and how do you know it's correctly defined?
        ako 8y ago
        Wow, this makes me really sad. If you are so unable to see the problem I have no hope we'll ever fix this problem. As I wrote in the top comment, I'm often surprised when reading articles which compare our current state with the past, the amount of life we've destroyed, the amount of pollution we're producing. So yes, subject to the same problem, but open to learning the facts... You sound like the person that gets invited to a party, brings 100s of uninvited friends, completely trashes the house, kills a lot of the other invitees, and then is surprised when somebody thinks it's a problem:" you still have something resembling a roof, you can still sort of live here, what is the problem?"
- jerf 8y ago
  "I think op means we should have zero enemies in fixing our environment." You do. Everybody wants clean air, clean water, etc. The Captain-Planet-Villain model of somebody literally cackling about how much pollution they're going to release into the world today is nonsense. The problem is people who see a short-term gain of their own, standing against the environmental problems they cause. They may not even believe the environmental problems exist. Sometimes they're even right; just because someone labeling themselves an "environmentalist" claims some environmental problem exists doesn't mean they are correct. These people are probably as dangerous to the environment as the actual polluters. We don't actually have complete and correct information about the effect of things, and if we did, there's a lot of people who wouldn't want to hear it, on both "sides". But you gotta solve the right problems. Probably a non-trivial component of the environmental movement's semi-effectiveness is how much of the movement wants to fight alongside Captain Planet against essentially non-existent threats, rather than working out how to address the mismatched incentive issue. But I say "semi-effective" because they're far from ineffective, and there are certainly people directly addressing the mismatched incentive issue. For instance, people discussing "carbon taxes" are definitely on a more effective path.
  - parasubvert 8y ago
    A major segment of the US populace is supporting policy to remove all polluting regulations , dismantle the EPA, and would scream murder over a Carbon tax the same way “conservatives” in Canada are over Federal plans. They’re not evil overlords cackling, but rather they’re in mass denial over a zero sum scientific equation, and have created a cult around their disbelief that’s as strong as any environmental group. If you understand science, from that sense, they’re definitely acting like tragic villains. I wish it were so easy, that all environmentalists would need to do is admit they’ve overreached sometimes and been alarmist on the timeline etc, and people will see the reason in ideas like carbon taxes. That’s not the experience I see out there. People are treating carbon taxes as the equivalent of communist invasion and an immoral affront to free society, rather than a conservative policy idea. (Similar to the healthcare debate) I suppose there will always be people in the middle that could swing either way, they’re our main hope. But I think it’s not helpful to scold “both sides” as you do above, equating over-eager environmentalists with those that want to accelerate our pollution and use of fossil fuels for short term gain. One is a misdemeanour, the other is quite literally contributing to global destabilization. Global warming in the next 75 years is leading to a wave of refugee immigration the world has never seen before (that a large segment of the populace also currently would reject and let starve). Germany has been poltically destabilized by 2 million Syrians. What happens when 1 billion or more are knocking on Europe and the US’s doors? I only wish I was overstating this for effect.
InclinedPlane 8y ago
I think the OP meant "freaking out" as in "putting a universal sense of urgency behind our efforts at correction and remediation". There seems to be zero sense of urgency behind a lot of these issues today, especially at a policy level, even for issues that have a time horizon of just a few years. It's bizarre and frustrating. It looks very much as though if we were faced with the CFC/ozone problem today we would fail to meet the challenge as we did in the '80s/'90s. It's easy to forget that the ozone challenge required a tremendous amount of complication international diplomacy and required some real compromises.
coldtea 8y ago
>Freaking out doesn’t seem to be helping? A lot of people have been freaking out for a long time. Have they? I think it's what societies does as a group that shows whether we're "freaking out", and judging by our collective response, it seems like we could not care less...

ericdykstra 8y ago

Sometimes I think our only options going forward are a world where all natural habitat has been completely decimated, or an eco-fascist regime enforces pollution (and thus effectively population) control on the whole planet.

throw564d 8y ago
This seems to me one topic where HN has its head jammed firmly in the sand - population control goes against its dogma, yet unrestrained fertility will likely destroy the planet but hey, we had 50% female engineers for 2 weeks before the polar caps melted!
kakaorka 8y ago
I think you should watch the Handmaid’s Tale; it will make you never suggest your latter suggestion again :)
- benj111 8y ago
  It was a book originally. Plus that's kind of the opposite of what you're talking about, as most of the women are infertile.
  - Ntrails 8y ago
    The point of the book isn't the fertility, it's the fascism. When you're doing something abhorrent that is, of course, supposed to save the world/species - that doesn't actually make it ok
nnq 8y ago
> a world where all natural habitat has been completely decimated That's probably the way we'll have it, but there will be artificial-natural habitat, eg. "reservations", that could grow to even be country-sized or half-continent-sized if we manage resources right. (Though probably they'll be smaller since we're going to have to some pretty large scale heavily-engineered-and-very-unnatural-agriculture to prevent famine in the face of climate degradation.) The second option sounds somewhat enticing... but it would likely severely diminish speed of technological progress, hence diminish our even-longer-term changes of survival (think encounter and warfare with alien civs etc. - the universe is huge and if we/our-mostly-artificial-descendants survive long enough we'll have to compete with strains of life much more virulent than ourselves today).