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A Climate Change Paper So Depressing It's Sending People to Therapy

62 points by eaguyhn 8y ago

alanfranz 8y ago
Direct links to the paper: http://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf http://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf (audio version) http://lifeworth.com/DeepAdaptation.mp3 http://lifeworth.com/DeepAdaptation.mp3
xbmcuser 8y ago
I came to the realisation that human world is fucked about 3 years ago. Haven't seen anything in the last few years to change my mind. We might be able to push it a few decades into the future but there will be a reckoning as the real choice is to let a few hundred million die today or few billion in the future.
- qubex 8y ago
  I tried hard for a very long time to maintain my baseline “retro-futuristic” optimism for progress and a Jetson's Future but about a couple of years ago, probably owing to stress in my life (family business difficulties caused by my father with evident narcissism but that I cannot break away from) I basically ‘crumbled’ to your realisation: that all this unhappiness and anxiety I see everywhere around me is not some local bubble of despair but the actual preamble to dire things to come, the growing awareness, the creeping alarm as the effects start to ripple through. I think the last time humanity really had much of a chance to pull through with a close scrape (in economic, financial, social, and environmental terms) was somewhere back in 2010 or thereabouts. We collectively missed that turning and we've stuck to the road to perdition ever since.
  - blastbeat 8y ago
    It's like watching a documentary about the last summer before World War 2. People enjoying themselfes, everything looks peaceful and fine on the surface. Some people suspect what is about to come, but don't dare to really watch into the abyss. Only a few really know. Those people of back then, we are today. If you ever wanted to experience, how people in the past were so clueless and stupid to change the course of the future for the better, now you've got an VIP-ticket for the live show.
    - qubex 8y ago
      Yes, it’s horrifying, isn’t it? I’m in Italy but I follow American and British (I’m half Italian, half British) and there’s a never ending display of constant hysteria. I used to be very harsh with Germans collectively for having ‘allowed’ Hitler to come to power and for having been complicit in the crimes he perpetrated. But now I’m not so sure. I’m not sure if the grim spectacle going on in the US is proof or refutation of my distaste. Does it show how easily dysfunctional evil can mesmerise the population into allowing it to govern, or is it proof that many people are putting up a damn tough fight to make sure that evil does not flourish and take root? I’m not sure.
      - blastbeat 8y ago
        > I used to be very harsh with Germans collectively for having ‘allowed’ Hitler to come to power and for having been complicit in the crimes he perpetrated. But now I’m not so sure. As a German, so did I. But my illusion of control dissolved in the face of doom. There is nothing you can do but hope for the best.
        qubex 8y ago
        The Germany thing, it’s odd... I’m of German descent too (my Italian father had a German father himself, so I’m a quarter German, a quarter Italian, and half English). There’s something truly amazing of the enormity of what was done, and the knowledge that one oneself is somehow tethered or rooted in it, that just causes one to instantly condemn. The more nuanced view... it feels like weaselling out and making excuses, like apologists do.
  - benj111 8y ago
    "probably owing to stress in my life" Sounds more like depression, hope you're in a better place now. To more directly answer your point. Things always seem to be bad until they're not. And we are on virtually any measure you'd care to look at, better off than we were a century ago. The temperature may rise x celcius, empires may fall, there may be wars, but this has been an unusually peaceful period of history, wars happen anyway, and people probably wont mourn the non existent ice caps that they heard used to exist, just like we don't mourn the dodo. If we say went back to something equivalent to 1918 Europe. Yes we would have lost a lot, both life and infrastructure, with Spanish flu still on the horizon, but we will rebuild and get on with life, would you expect climate change to be worse than that? And look where we are, a century later.
    - qubex 8y ago
      I know it’s not garden-variety depression because I’ve been treated for that. There’s several people around me that are subject to the same influence that are in remarkably similar emotional states, including my sister and some senior executives in the firm. Unfortunately, no, I am not in a “better place”. But I really appreciate the effort to be understanding. Turing to your comparison between 1918 and now, I daresay global climate change will be a great deal more severe than the cumulative effects of both the First World War and the Spanish Influenza combined. The magnitude of geopolitical strife we have set ourselves up for is of an almost unimaginable scale.
      - benj111 8y ago
        "But I really appreciate the effort to be understanding" The worst thing about depression is that you can't see a way out, until you are out, and then the path is astoundingly obvious, and the journey so easy. I could say it will get better, but you probably wouldn't believe me. Please do believe me when I say it doesn't take effort to be understanding though. On to a sunnier subject. I can't see us going mad max, I think worst case doesnt interrupt civilization, which implies keeping at least our current know-how. Could there be a lower standard of living, yes. Lower than a century ago? (while keeping antibiotics, computers etc) Maybe. But that would still be a higher standard of living than we've had for the majority of human history.
- imustbeevil 8y ago
  You only need 50 humans to maintain genetic diversity indefinitely. We will survive. We won't all survive.
- Kaiyou 8y ago
  Your scale is off. It will be at least a few billions.
  - xbmcuser 8y ago
    Yeah I mistyped as I meant few hundred million today or a few billion in the future.
FailMore 8y ago
Until we include the cost on the environment within the cost of our goods things will not change. When we do we will encourage a wave of environmentally friendly innovation. It will take a lot of courage for any government to do this. I’ve started the seed of a small political party in the UK which will push for Envionmental Economics - https://weOptimise.it https://weOptimise.it / https://twitter.com/weoptimiseit https://twitter.com/weoptimiseit
- kuzehanka 8y ago
  I don't think any kind of consumer driven environmental activism is even close to enough to stem the tide. To really drive home the severity of the situation, understand that if we ceased all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, the global mean temperature would continue to rise for another century before hitting equilibrium. We are past the point of no return. The only way civilisation continues existing as we know it, is if over the next decade we roll out a heap of nuclear power and dedicate a significant portion of it to carbon sequestration. Fusion would be great but even fission is sufficient. Anything less, including geoengineering projects like space based mirrors or albedo boosting aerosols, are at best a 50/50 gamble on the outcome. Feel-good activism like using less plastic straws or rolling out renewable power at meaningless scales is a distraction from the real and only course we have left. I am really worried that a large number of people still believe that renewables can unfuck this situation and so put their guard down after watching some feel-good news segment about Germany hitting an arbitrary target. It's not Europe or USA you need to worry about, it's China India and Afrtica. Renewables would have helped 20-30 years ago. Today we are so far gone that we need to greatly exceed our total energy demand and channel the excess into sequestration. I strongly suggest that everyone read the 2018 IPCC report. It should be mandatory reading material at all schools universities and workplaces. https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/ https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/
  - house_atr 8y ago
    Nuclear power is a meme. To replace our current energy expenditure we would need 15,000 fission plants. Not only is that not possible, but unsustainable. Neutron embrittlelmen and a ton of other problems means thousands of plants would need to be constantly torn down and replaced every few years. Or one somewhere in the world every single day. Currently, it takes 6-12 years to build a nuclear station, and up to 20 years to decommission one, making this rate of replacement unrealistic. We only have about 80 years left of viable uranium. With 15000 new plants, do the math. We definitely do not have enough exotic metals for even building that many plants. We need a lot of stuff to protect the plant from radiation. The efficiency of nuclear power, fission and fusion isn't that great. After all, it's just heat energy transferred to mechanical to electric energy. Which means, it would take a tremendous amount of oil (yup fossil fuels are still needed) to lubricate the mechanical parts. No oil, no power regardless of what's doing the pushing. The trade off in power generated isn't that great for nuclear compared to traditional plants. There are a number of other issues. Nuclear Utopia was never tried for a reason. The current model of civilization is just simply unsustainable. Billions of people and everyone needs a car and a plane and a drone and a hundred appliances and gadgets and exorbitant food waste is just NOT SUSTAINABLE.
bamboozled 8y ago
I've been through similar bouts of lethargy and depression over climate change as described in the article. It can really get overwhelming when thinking of the future to come, what can we do but just try move forwards with our lives?
- WilliamEdward 8y ago
  Why is it that only now you are depressed? Did you not know you were going to die anyway and human beings as a whole were going to evolve into some species completely different from us, even if there was no climate change? I believe we have conjured up a depression about this topic because we believe that our ability to stop climate change will be amplified by the pressure of sadness, all the while not logically understanding that we are destined to be replaced either way. You should therefore have been depressed from the very beginning, but you probably weren't. That proves that this idea of humanity being erased is not inherently depressing, nor is moving on with our lives. It's simply the news you are reading that is depressing, not the philosophy behind it.
  - bamboozled 8y ago
    I’m not really depressed now as I’ve kind of come to accept similar ideas to what you’re getting at. However it took me a long time to reckon with it all, and unfortunately many loved ones and younger people might not be able to just accept the bad news as easy as you can.
- huffmsa 8y ago
  Stop reading doomsday cult prophecies on the internet and go outside and get some sun. Seriously.
  - s_m_t 8y ago
    You see, the sun is part of the problem here ;)
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  As Beppo the street sweeper said in "Momo" (the one by Michael Ende), if you look down the street, it feels endless and exhausting. But if look at the broom, and concentrate on doing each sweep well, you will both do a better job of it as well as feel much better. Personally, I think it's crucial to become part of the solution to problems we become aware of, otherwise, we basically practice being aware and helpless. But that can be anything IMO, and it doesn't have to be a great contribution or the solution to all our problems. You (or I) didn't cause the situation billions of us are in, and we cannot foretell or influence or even withstand our collective mass movements, or the results of our current blind spots, etc. So it's also super essential to let it go in a real way. "Saving the world" makes sense because of the people (and animals and plants) in it, and you're also a peep, so it must not come at the cost of breaking you. The sweet spot is probably where still can sleep well, just not at the cost of cynicism of apathy. I think some sadness is simply the inevitable result of awareness that also brings joy, so keeping the awareness, and trying to transform the sadness into productivity and empathy where we can, is the best we can do really. Speaking of all that, here's an article I just read again: https://www.salon.com/2012/06/17/when_chomsky_wept/ https://www.salon.com/2012/06/17/when_chomsky_wept/
roenxi 8y ago
It might be that big-picture thinking and the future, generally, is terrifying rather than climate change in particular. It is challenging to construct a realistic long-run scenario of a happy future that is sophisticated and meaningful. And at the global scale even the recent past sounds pretty horrific if you spell it out. The fact that the global situation is improving rapidly doesn't balance out the fact that being subjected to a 1950s standard of living would be potentially abusive today (no mobile, no connection to the internet, questionable access to goods, etc, better or worse depending on where you live). Part of the trouble I have with climate change as an imminent emergency is there are actually quite a few civilisation-level threats at the 200-500 year timeframe. Resource depletion, progress in weapons research, fragility of logistic chains to disruption, disease. The actual impacts of climate tend to be contributing aggravations to what are honestly concerns more driven by overpopulation.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  > The actual impacts of climate tend to be contributing aggravations to what are honestly concerns more driven by overpopulation. Yeah, but we don't need one more way to screw ourselves over.
- flyinglizard 8y ago
  I think the core issue is that people think humanity is static in the face of an imminent danger, while in effect it’s certainly not. Everyone wants to live and prosper and I’m sure that as the problem becomes more tangible, we will find the ways to mitigate this issue - just like, as a species, we did many times before.
  - oldprogrammer2 8y ago
    I am also optimistic for this reason, too. In the 1980's, I had nightmares about a nuclear armageddon. We were told that by the time we were teenagers we would no longer be able to play outside: because of ozone depletion, air pollution, and acid rain. In the 1990's, we were told modern society would collapse because we would literally run out of oil. We were told that 20% of us would die from AIDS. Don't mistake me - these threats were real, not imagined, but based completely on static trajectories. We countered these problems by changing behaviors, changing laws, and innovating. The threat of runaway climate change may be greater than these threats, but we have shown a remarkable ability to effect change on those things that the experts told us were unchangeable.
Proven 8y ago
That's the idea. Fool the fools to supoort socialism and full state control. "This problem has become so yuge, it's beyond control of masses. State or UN coercion and control are your only hope"
Shish2k 8y ago
I used to get depressed thinking that I wouldn't live long enough to see the sci-fi future where we're all immortal cyborgs with minds in the cloud. So in a purely selfish sense, I guess "right now is the peak of human civilisation, the future is all melting ice caps and resource wars until we die off completely in 2500" is reassuring?
- mat4magic 8y ago
  Whats the worst case though? I cant see any event based on climate change that would wipe out all humans. Climate Change may be fast for earth but is still slow for humans. Cant really see a scenaria where a significant part of humanity couldnt adapt to the new circumstances. The harsh conditions would probably even advance technology in general. Still best Case would be to stop climate Change because that would be hard and scary times.
- antisthenes 8y ago
  Keep in mind, that vast swathes of Earth were uninhabitable even before global warming was even a concept. To illustrate this - look at Egypt and the earliest civilizations. The only place where life existed permanently was in a narrow band alongside a river. Life will still exist after a 4C warming, but in much narrower bands than it currently does. The global population of people will be reduced probably by a factor of 10, eventually, settling on a sustainable level of around maybe 800-900 million. This, in turn, should reduce the burn rate of unsustainable resources by a lot, letting us coast for another couple of centuries. The only question is - how violently will we go down from 8 billion to 800 million? Disclaimer: this is all wild speculation and my personal opinion.
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    How violently? Well, 7.2 billion people will die. Is that violent enough? Then there's the additional violence that all 8 billion will do, trying to be one of the 800 million rather than one of the 7.2 billion. My own gut feel is that we will muddle through much better than that, with less than 500 million dead. On this subject, that seems to make me the crazy optimist...
flexie 8y ago
Don't let tales of a collapse of civilization lead to an immediate collapse of your judgement and focus. This article is full of doom and gloom. Many predictions are made, and they are conveniently quoted as someone else's: "Some of the people who believe that we face inevitable extinction believe that no one will read this article because we will see a collapse of civilisation in the next twelve months when the harvests fail across the northern hemisphere" (written around 12 months ago) I for one won't hold my breath.
- LyndsySimon 8y ago
  From my perspective, the paper reads like a far-right "survivalist" piece from the early 90s. It's almost laughable in the way it presents the view. That said, the 90s anti-authoritarian survivalists did nail some things, especially in light of Snowden. I think it would be wise to take it under advisement and pay attention to what's going on, but to go buy a farm and a bunch of heritage seeds based on this paper would be pretty ridiculous.
ringaroll 8y ago
Just my two cents: Climate change threats are being over-hyped by those people/companies who stand to benefit from "green" energy/society. These orgs are spreading propaganda to high-school teens by telling them lies sprinkled with a bit of truth and causing them to protest because the teens on average cannot make a better judgment then people with decades of experience. Nothing is going to happen. I for one wont hold my breath.
- Djvacto 8y ago
  For what it's worth, it seems the companies that have been benefiting from the not "green" tech and society have been and still are spreading propaganda to minimize the fear/awareness/etc of climate change. I mean, look at Trump and this coal stuff. Look at how much money Oil companies spend on this. One large difference, I think, is that the money being spent by the oil giants is influencing the opinions of fewer, but more powerful, people, such as congress-persons and other political figures. I guess technically your guess about nothing happening is as good as anyone's, but it really doesn't seem like that is the case. I'd love for climate change theorists to be wrong and actually it turns out that the Earth is fine and we haven't caused irreversible effects to the climate and planet, but wouldn't you rather we work on cleaner energy and be wrong, than do nothing and be wrong?
huffmsa 8y ago
> How near? About a decade. Okay Al. Still waiting on that dramatic increase in frequency and ferocity of hurricanes, but I guess I'll add this one to my calendar. > ou only needed to step outside during the record-breaking heatwave last year to acknowledge that 17 of the 18 hottest years on the planet have occurred since 2000. Wildly untrue. Perhaps if you add "since records began in 1850" it could maybe be valid.
- Djvacto 8y ago
  Note that I haven't really researched this past personal perception, but: This year NC was hit by a couple of hurricanes, both more severe (and to be honest, 2 more in frequency) than I ever remember growing up here, and for sure more than in the last 5-6 years. Also, does your second comment imply that one of the 18 hottest years was in 1843, or like, well before humans were practicing agriculture?
  - huffmsa 8y ago
    I'm not implying anything. The Cretaceous was 10-15°F warmer than current temperatures. There was lots of life. ~1000BC was 2-4°F warmer than today, and there were plenty of humans doing just fine.
    - Djvacto 8y ago
      I don't think the implication is that the Earth won't recover from our climate change issues (it will, we won't). So saying there was lots of life in the Cretaceous period doesn't really make sense, since I could also say there was plenty of life when organisms only existed in the sea. That doesn't exactly help our survival as a species, does it? It's also not about whether temperatures at this exact moment are higher or lower, but the trends and the rate at which those temperatures are changing. If we're looking at the graph (I'm using [1] linked below for reference), and in 1000BC it was warmer by 2-4°F, but the slope of the graph is way less pronounced than it is now, that's not exactly reassuring. [1] - http://www.longrangeweather.com/global_temperatures.htm http://www.longrangeweather.com/global_temperatures.htm NOTE: I'm just using this graph to visualize the trends, and since it doesn't provide exact numbers on the axes I'm just looking at the overall shape of the graph.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
andyjohnson0 8y ago
I'm currently about half-way through "The Uninhabitable Earth" by David Wallace-Wells [1] and it comes to similar conclusions: its too late to stop this thing, it's going to be very bad, and it's going to happen sooner than you think. Its a very hard thing to honestly face, and I'm not entirely sure I have yet. [1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/586541/the-uninhabitable-earth-by-david-wallace-wells/9780525576709/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/586541/the-uninhabi...
- tim333 8y ago
  I haven't read it (though I saw his talk), but I'm sure there are arguments to be optimistic as well. It can be a mistake just to focus on the negative stuff.
  - SCHiM 8y ago
    This is addressed in the paper the article is about. One of the main points is that the 'optimistic stuff' does not address the negative already baked into the system right now. The point is: too little, too late. If that's true I don't know, that's the whole question I guess.
sdwisely 8y ago
It is so strange to me the effort people will go to with things like guns to protect themselves from the highly unlikely. Yet we're having these debates about what to do about climate change which is looking very likely. We should be working on it, if we end up being wrong then the very worst case is we've gotten ourselves off our dwindling fossil fuel supply a bit early.
- huffmsa 8y ago
  > protect themselves from the highly unlikely. Tyrannical governments are unlikely?
  - sdwisely 8y ago
    Taking up arms against a government in your lifetime? Yes I'd call it unlikely.
    - huffmsa 8y ago
      You assume my nationality? How do you know I'm not Syrian, Iraqi, Afghani, Palestinian, Egyptian, Libyan, Yemeni, Ukrainian, Somali, Chechen, Georgian, Venezuelan, or Mexican? Get out of here with your racist assumptions that this forum is solely populated by Silicon Valley residents.
      - sdwisely 8y ago
        I think you may have just done the same. I'm Australian. You know, the place where gun control actually worked pretty well.
        timbit42 8y ago
        Does anyone outside of Australia believe that?
        sdwisely 8y ago
ben_w 8y ago
I’m relaxed about climate change. Photovoltaics have grown at a compounding average rate of 40.5% over the last 20 years, going from 0.566 GW in 1998 to ~512 GW in 2018. World power use (all forms, not just electricity) are currently around 18 TW. At current trends, we exceed this in June 2029. By June 2034, we should be overproducing by a factor of 5, which makes up for the difference between nameplate capacity and actual average output. By 2037 you do that and have enough overproduction you don’t need batteries to store energy at night, just make interconnections between existing power grids worldwide, because you can afford 75% losses (if you want to, which you might not). On the other hand, I am concerned with biodiversity loss, nitrogen cycle issues, antibiotics resistance, and non-renewable use of phosphorus.
caseymarquis 8y ago
Time to start terraforming with sulfur?
chicob 8y ago
This article raises a lot of suspicion, and it has many of the hallmarks of bad reporting. - The Vice piece is shallow and didn't investigate the claims and arguments of the cited article (And what's with the authors photo? Is Zing Tsjeng really serious about this?); - The author of the paper, Jem Bendell, is not an academic in climate science nor in sustainability, but in "Sustainability Leadership", a field in Management; - The paper reads like an opinion piece. - The paper, as provided in the author's website, makes reference to the journal to which it was intended in the past tense, which raises the question of whether it is the original or an edited version; - Many of the references cited in the paper are from news websites, and only a few are proper scientific articles: I was expecting a lot, lot more; And the worst red flag of them all: - After being rejected by a not exactly relevant yet serious journal, the author made it public nonetheless, hinting at some form of censorship of an inconvenient opinion.
- dogma1138 8y ago
  It's Vice that's all you need to know these days, this isn't journalism period.
- _rpd 8y ago
  For further context, Jem Bendell is one of the founding members of the political activist group "Extinction Rebellion."
sleepysysadmin 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/media/File:All_palaeotemps.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m... When the dinosaurs lived the world was 10 celcius warmer. ~200 million years later the world was 14 celcius warmer than today. Life thrived worldwide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene Global warming is good for the earth. Every 200,000 years there's a huge spike in warming. Which if you look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian#/media/File:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian#/media/File:Carbon_Diox... Notice the CO2 circle showing the last 1000 years; but if you circled the entire green line from about ~20,000 years. There's huge spike that couldn't possible be human activity. It doesn't even appear like we are in control.
- polotics 8y ago
  Maybe you should check out the realclimate website.
  - sleepysysadmin 8y ago
    I'm not denying that climate change is happening and the cause doesn't matter. I'm saying there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. Life was better when the earth was warmer and the alarmist predictions claiming the world is ending has been proven wrong over and over now.
- ben_w 8y ago
  > Notice the CO2 circle showing the last 1000 years; but if you circled the entire green line from about ~20,000 years. There's huge spike that couldn't possible be human activity. You mean the bit labelled “Ice age cycles”? Which we are currently exceeding the maxima of by about as much as the difference between maxima and minima?
  - sleepysysadmin 8y ago
    The worst predictions of warming, which has basically been disproven already you can ignore the 8.5 black/red circles, have all been untrue to date. The doomsayers have been predicting the end of the world forever, this time they are just using climate change as their mayan calendar. The world can get 10 celcius warmer and nothing is wrong; it'll make the earth that much better. Bring it on.
globlist 8y ago
Get your daily dose of climate hysteria!

62 points by eaguyhn 8y ago

Direct links to the paper: http://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf http://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf (audio version) http://lifeworth.com/DeepAdaptation.mp3 http://lifeworth.com/DeepAdaptation.mp3

xbmcuser 8y ago

I came to the realisation that human world is fucked about 3 years ago. Haven't seen anything in the last few years to change my mind. We might be able to push it a few decades into the future but there will be a reckoning as the real choice is to let a few hundred million die today or few billion in the future.

qubex 8y ago
I tried hard for a very long time to maintain my baseline “retro-futuristic” optimism for progress and a Jetson's Future but about a couple of years ago, probably owing to stress in my life (family business difficulties caused by my father with evident narcissism but that I cannot break away from) I basically ‘crumbled’ to your realisation: that all this unhappiness and anxiety I see everywhere around me is not some local bubble of despair but the actual preamble to dire things to come, the growing awareness, the creeping alarm as the effects start to ripple through. I think the last time humanity really had much of a chance to pull through with a close scrape (in economic, financial, social, and environmental terms) was somewhere back in 2010 or thereabouts. We collectively missed that turning and we've stuck to the road to perdition ever since.
- blastbeat 8y ago
  It's like watching a documentary about the last summer before World War 2. People enjoying themselfes, everything looks peaceful and fine on the surface. Some people suspect what is about to come, but don't dare to really watch into the abyss. Only a few really know. Those people of back then, we are today. If you ever wanted to experience, how people in the past were so clueless and stupid to change the course of the future for the better, now you've got an VIP-ticket for the live show.
  - qubex 8y ago
    Yes, it’s horrifying, isn’t it? I’m in Italy but I follow American and British (I’m half Italian, half British) and there’s a never ending display of constant hysteria. I used to be very harsh with Germans collectively for having ‘allowed’ Hitler to come to power and for having been complicit in the crimes he perpetrated. But now I’m not so sure. I’m not sure if the grim spectacle going on in the US is proof or refutation of my distaste. Does it show how easily dysfunctional evil can mesmerise the population into allowing it to govern, or is it proof that many people are putting up a damn tough fight to make sure that evil does not flourish and take root? I’m not sure.
    - blastbeat 8y ago
      > I used to be very harsh with Germans collectively for having ‘allowed’ Hitler to come to power and for having been complicit in the crimes he perpetrated. But now I’m not so sure. As a German, so did I. But my illusion of control dissolved in the face of doom. There is nothing you can do but hope for the best.
      - qubex 8y ago
        The Germany thing, it’s odd... I’m of German descent too (my Italian father had a German father himself, so I’m a quarter German, a quarter Italian, and half English). There’s something truly amazing of the enormity of what was done, and the knowledge that one oneself is somehow tethered or rooted in it, that just causes one to instantly condemn. The more nuanced view... it feels like weaselling out and making excuses, like apologists do.
- benj111 8y ago
  "probably owing to stress in my life" Sounds more like depression, hope you're in a better place now. To more directly answer your point. Things always seem to be bad until they're not. And we are on virtually any measure you'd care to look at, better off than we were a century ago. The temperature may rise x celcius, empires may fall, there may be wars, but this has been an unusually peaceful period of history, wars happen anyway, and people probably wont mourn the non existent ice caps that they heard used to exist, just like we don't mourn the dodo. If we say went back to something equivalent to 1918 Europe. Yes we would have lost a lot, both life and infrastructure, with Spanish flu still on the horizon, but we will rebuild and get on with life, would you expect climate change to be worse than that? And look where we are, a century later.
  - qubex 8y ago
    I know it’s not garden-variety depression because I’ve been treated for that. There’s several people around me that are subject to the same influence that are in remarkably similar emotional states, including my sister and some senior executives in the firm. Unfortunately, no, I am not in a “better place”. But I really appreciate the effort to be understanding. Turing to your comparison between 1918 and now, I daresay global climate change will be a great deal more severe than the cumulative effects of both the First World War and the Spanish Influenza combined. The magnitude of geopolitical strife we have set ourselves up for is of an almost unimaginable scale.
    - benj111 8y ago
      "But I really appreciate the effort to be understanding" The worst thing about depression is that you can't see a way out, until you are out, and then the path is astoundingly obvious, and the journey so easy. I could say it will get better, but you probably wouldn't believe me. Please do believe me when I say it doesn't take effort to be understanding though. On to a sunnier subject. I can't see us going mad max, I think worst case doesnt interrupt civilization, which implies keeping at least our current know-how. Could there be a lower standard of living, yes. Lower than a century ago? (while keeping antibiotics, computers etc) Maybe. But that would still be a higher standard of living than we've had for the majority of human history.
imustbeevil 8y ago
You only need 50 humans to maintain genetic diversity indefinitely. We will survive. We won't all survive.
Kaiyou 8y ago
Your scale is off. It will be at least a few billions.
- xbmcuser 8y ago
  Yeah I mistyped as I meant few hundred million today or a few billion in the future.

FailMore 8y ago

Until we include the cost on the environment within the cost of our goods things will not change. When we do we will encourage a wave of environmentally friendly innovation. It will take a lot of courage for any government to do this. I’ve started the seed of a small political party in the UK which will push for Envionmental Economics - https://weOptimise.it https://weOptimise.it / https://twitter.com/weoptimiseit https://twitter.com/weoptimiseit

kuzehanka 8y ago
I don't think any kind of consumer driven environmental activism is even close to enough to stem the tide. To really drive home the severity of the situation, understand that if we ceased all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, the global mean temperature would continue to rise for another century before hitting equilibrium. We are past the point of no return. The only way civilisation continues existing as we know it, is if over the next decade we roll out a heap of nuclear power and dedicate a significant portion of it to carbon sequestration. Fusion would be great but even fission is sufficient. Anything less, including geoengineering projects like space based mirrors or albedo boosting aerosols, are at best a 50/50 gamble on the outcome. Feel-good activism like using less plastic straws or rolling out renewable power at meaningless scales is a distraction from the real and only course we have left. I am really worried that a large number of people still believe that renewables can unfuck this situation and so put their guard down after watching some feel-good news segment about Germany hitting an arbitrary target. It's not Europe or USA you need to worry about, it's China India and Afrtica. Renewables would have helped 20-30 years ago. Today we are so far gone that we need to greatly exceed our total energy demand and channel the excess into sequestration. I strongly suggest that everyone read the 2018 IPCC report. It should be mandatory reading material at all schools universities and workplaces. https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/ https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/
- house_atr 8y ago
  Nuclear power is a meme. To replace our current energy expenditure we would need 15,000 fission plants. Not only is that not possible, but unsustainable. Neutron embrittlelmen and a ton of other problems means thousands of plants would need to be constantly torn down and replaced every few years. Or one somewhere in the world every single day. Currently, it takes 6-12 years to build a nuclear station, and up to 20 years to decommission one, making this rate of replacement unrealistic. We only have about 80 years left of viable uranium. With 15000 new plants, do the math. We definitely do not have enough exotic metals for even building that many plants. We need a lot of stuff to protect the plant from radiation. The efficiency of nuclear power, fission and fusion isn't that great. After all, it's just heat energy transferred to mechanical to electric energy. Which means, it would take a tremendous amount of oil (yup fossil fuels are still needed) to lubricate the mechanical parts. No oil, no power regardless of what's doing the pushing. The trade off in power generated isn't that great for nuclear compared to traditional plants. There are a number of other issues. Nuclear Utopia was never tried for a reason. The current model of civilization is just simply unsustainable. Billions of people and everyone needs a car and a plane and a drone and a hundred appliances and gadgets and exorbitant food waste is just NOT SUSTAINABLE.

bamboozled 8y ago

I've been through similar bouts of lethargy and depression over climate change as described in the article. It can really get overwhelming when thinking of the future to come, what can we do but just try move forwards with our lives?

WilliamEdward 8y ago
Why is it that only now you are depressed? Did you not know you were going to die anyway and human beings as a whole were going to evolve into some species completely different from us, even if there was no climate change? I believe we have conjured up a depression about this topic because we believe that our ability to stop climate change will be amplified by the pressure of sadness, all the while not logically understanding that we are destined to be replaced either way. You should therefore have been depressed from the very beginning, but you probably weren't. That proves that this idea of humanity being erased is not inherently depressing, nor is moving on with our lives. It's simply the news you are reading that is depressing, not the philosophy behind it.
- bamboozled 8y ago
  I’m not really depressed now as I’ve kind of come to accept similar ideas to what you’re getting at. However it took me a long time to reckon with it all, and unfortunately many loved ones and younger people might not be able to just accept the bad news as easy as you can.
huffmsa 8y ago
Stop reading doomsday cult prophecies on the internet and go outside and get some sun. Seriously.
- s_m_t 8y ago
  You see, the sun is part of the problem here ;)
PavlovsCat 8y ago
As Beppo the street sweeper said in "Momo" (the one by Michael Ende), if you look down the street, it feels endless and exhausting. But if look at the broom, and concentrate on doing each sweep well, you will both do a better job of it as well as feel much better. Personally, I think it's crucial to become part of the solution to problems we become aware of, otherwise, we basically practice being aware and helpless. But that can be anything IMO, and it doesn't have to be a great contribution or the solution to all our problems. You (or I) didn't cause the situation billions of us are in, and we cannot foretell or influence or even withstand our collective mass movements, or the results of our current blind spots, etc. So it's also super essential to let it go in a real way. "Saving the world" makes sense because of the people (and animals and plants) in it, and you're also a peep, so it must not come at the cost of breaking you. The sweet spot is probably where still can sleep well, just not at the cost of cynicism of apathy. I think some sadness is simply the inevitable result of awareness that also brings joy, so keeping the awareness, and trying to transform the sadness into productivity and empathy where we can, is the best we can do really. Speaking of all that, here's an article I just read again: https://www.salon.com/2012/06/17/when_chomsky_wept/ https://www.salon.com/2012/06/17/when_chomsky_wept/

roenxi 8y ago

It might be that big-picture thinking and the future, generally, is terrifying rather than climate change in particular. It is challenging to construct a realistic long-run scenario of a happy future that is sophisticated and meaningful. And at the global scale even the recent past sounds pretty horrific if you spell it out. The fact that the global situation is improving rapidly doesn't balance out the fact that being subjected to a 1950s standard of living would be potentially abusive today (no mobile, no connection to the internet, questionable access to goods, etc, better or worse depending on where you live). Part of the trouble I have with climate change as an imminent emergency is there are actually quite a few civilisation-level threats at the 200-500 year timeframe. Resource depletion, progress in weapons research, fragility of logistic chains to disruption, disease. The actual impacts of climate tend to be contributing aggravations to what are honestly concerns more driven by overpopulation.

StavrosK 8y ago
> The actual impacts of climate tend to be contributing aggravations to what are honestly concerns more driven by overpopulation. Yeah, but we don't need one more way to screw ourselves over.
flyinglizard 8y ago
I think the core issue is that people think humanity is static in the face of an imminent danger, while in effect it’s certainly not. Everyone wants to live and prosper and I’m sure that as the problem becomes more tangible, we will find the ways to mitigate this issue - just like, as a species, we did many times before.
- oldprogrammer2 8y ago
  I am also optimistic for this reason, too. In the 1980's, I had nightmares about a nuclear armageddon. We were told that by the time we were teenagers we would no longer be able to play outside: because of ozone depletion, air pollution, and acid rain. In the 1990's, we were told modern society would collapse because we would literally run out of oil. We were told that 20% of us would die from AIDS. Don't mistake me - these threats were real, not imagined, but based completely on static trajectories. We countered these problems by changing behaviors, changing laws, and innovating. The threat of runaway climate change may be greater than these threats, but we have shown a remarkable ability to effect change on those things that the experts told us were unchangeable.

Proven 8y ago

That's the idea. Fool the fools to supoort socialism and full state control. "This problem has become so yuge, it's beyond control of masses. State or UN coercion and control are your only hope"

Shish2k 8y ago

I used to get depressed thinking that I wouldn't live long enough to see the sci-fi future where we're all immortal cyborgs with minds in the cloud. So in a purely selfish sense, I guess "right now is the peak of human civilisation, the future is all melting ice caps and resource wars until we die off completely in 2500" is reassuring?

mat4magic 8y ago
Whats the worst case though? I cant see any event based on climate change that would wipe out all humans. Climate Change may be fast for earth but is still slow for humans. Cant really see a scenaria where a significant part of humanity couldnt adapt to the new circumstances. The harsh conditions would probably even advance technology in general. Still best Case would be to stop climate Change because that would be hard and scary times.
antisthenes 8y ago
Keep in mind, that vast swathes of Earth were uninhabitable even before global warming was even a concept. To illustrate this - look at Egypt and the earliest civilizations. The only place where life existed permanently was in a narrow band alongside a river. Life will still exist after a 4C warming, but in much narrower bands than it currently does. The global population of people will be reduced probably by a factor of 10, eventually, settling on a sustainable level of around maybe 800-900 million. This, in turn, should reduce the burn rate of unsustainable resources by a lot, letting us coast for another couple of centuries. The only question is - how violently will we go down from 8 billion to 800 million? Disclaimer: this is all wild speculation and my personal opinion.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  How violently? Well, 7.2 billion people will die. Is that violent enough? Then there's the additional violence that all 8 billion will do, trying to be one of the 800 million rather than one of the 7.2 billion. My own gut feel is that we will muddle through much better than that, with less than 500 million dead. On this subject, that seems to make me the crazy optimist...

flexie 8y ago

Don't let tales of a collapse of civilization lead to an immediate collapse of your judgement and focus. This article is full of doom and gloom. Many predictions are made, and they are conveniently quoted as someone else's: "Some of the people who believe that we face inevitable extinction believe that no one will read this article because we will see a collapse of civilisation in the next twelve months when the harvests fail across the northern hemisphere" (written around 12 months ago) I for one won't hold my breath.

LyndsySimon 8y ago
From my perspective, the paper reads like a far-right "survivalist" piece from the early 90s. It's almost laughable in the way it presents the view. That said, the 90s anti-authoritarian survivalists did nail some things, especially in light of Snowden. I think it would be wise to take it under advisement and pay attention to what's going on, but to go buy a farm and a bunch of heritage seeds based on this paper would be pretty ridiculous.

ringaroll 8y ago

Just my two cents: Climate change threats are being over-hyped by those people/companies who stand to benefit from "green" energy/society. These orgs are spreading propaganda to high-school teens by telling them lies sprinkled with a bit of truth and causing them to protest because the teens on average cannot make a better judgment then people with decades of experience. Nothing is going to happen. I for one wont hold my breath.

Djvacto 8y ago
For what it's worth, it seems the companies that have been benefiting from the not "green" tech and society have been and still are spreading propaganda to minimize the fear/awareness/etc of climate change. I mean, look at Trump and this coal stuff. Look at how much money Oil companies spend on this. One large difference, I think, is that the money being spent by the oil giants is influencing the opinions of fewer, but more powerful, people, such as congress-persons and other political figures. I guess technically your guess about nothing happening is as good as anyone's, but it really doesn't seem like that is the case. I'd love for climate change theorists to be wrong and actually it turns out that the Earth is fine and we haven't caused irreversible effects to the climate and planet, but wouldn't you rather we work on cleaner energy and be wrong, than do nothing and be wrong?

huffmsa 8y ago

> How near? About a decade. Okay Al. Still waiting on that dramatic increase in frequency and ferocity of hurricanes, but I guess I'll add this one to my calendar. > ou only needed to step outside during the record-breaking heatwave last year to acknowledge that 17 of the 18 hottest years on the planet have occurred since 2000. Wildly untrue. Perhaps if you add "since records began in 1850" it could maybe be valid.

Djvacto 8y ago
Note that I haven't really researched this past personal perception, but: This year NC was hit by a couple of hurricanes, both more severe (and to be honest, 2 more in frequency) than I ever remember growing up here, and for sure more than in the last 5-6 years. Also, does your second comment imply that one of the 18 hottest years was in 1843, or like, well before humans were practicing agriculture?
- huffmsa 8y ago
  I'm not implying anything. The Cretaceous was 10-15°F warmer than current temperatures. There was lots of life. ~1000BC was 2-4°F warmer than today, and there were plenty of humans doing just fine.
  - Djvacto 8y ago
    I don't think the implication is that the Earth won't recover from our climate change issues (it will, we won't). So saying there was lots of life in the Cretaceous period doesn't really make sense, since I could also say there was plenty of life when organisms only existed in the sea. That doesn't exactly help our survival as a species, does it? It's also not about whether temperatures at this exact moment are higher or lower, but the trends and the rate at which those temperatures are changing. If we're looking at the graph (I'm using [1] linked below for reference), and in 1000BC it was warmer by 2-4°F, but the slope of the graph is way less pronounced than it is now, that's not exactly reassuring. [1] - http://www.longrangeweather.com/global_temperatures.htm http://www.longrangeweather.com/global_temperatures.htm NOTE: I'm just using this graph to visualize the trends, and since it doesn't provide exact numbers on the axes I'm just looking at the overall shape of the graph.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

andyjohnson0 8y ago

I'm currently about half-way through "The Uninhabitable Earth" by David Wallace-Wells [1] and it comes to similar conclusions: its too late to stop this thing, it's going to be very bad, and it's going to happen sooner than you think. Its a very hard thing to honestly face, and I'm not entirely sure I have yet. [1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/586541/the-uninhabitable-earth-by-david-wallace-wells/9780525576709/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/586541/the-uninhabi...

tim333 8y ago
I haven't read it (though I saw his talk), but I'm sure there are arguments to be optimistic as well. It can be a mistake just to focus on the negative stuff.
- SCHiM 8y ago
  This is addressed in the paper the article is about. One of the main points is that the 'optimistic stuff' does not address the negative already baked into the system right now. The point is: too little, too late. If that's true I don't know, that's the whole question I guess.

sdwisely 8y ago

It is so strange to me the effort people will go to with things like guns to protect themselves from the highly unlikely. Yet we're having these debates about what to do about climate change which is looking very likely. We should be working on it, if we end up being wrong then the very worst case is we've gotten ourselves off our dwindling fossil fuel supply a bit early.

huffmsa 8y ago
> protect themselves from the highly unlikely. Tyrannical governments are unlikely?
- sdwisely 8y ago
  Taking up arms against a government in your lifetime? Yes I'd call it unlikely.
  - huffmsa 8y ago
    You assume my nationality? How do you know I'm not Syrian, Iraqi, Afghani, Palestinian, Egyptian, Libyan, Yemeni, Ukrainian, Somali, Chechen, Georgian, Venezuelan, or Mexican? Get out of here with your racist assumptions that this forum is solely populated by Silicon Valley residents.
    - sdwisely 8y ago
      I think you may have just done the same. I'm Australian. You know, the place where gun control actually worked pretty well.
      - timbit42 8y ago
        Does anyone outside of Australia believe that?
        sdwisely 8y ago

ben_w 8y ago

I’m relaxed about climate change. Photovoltaics have grown at a compounding average rate of 40.5% over the last 20 years, going from 0.566 GW in 1998 to ~512 GW in 2018. World power use (all forms, not just electricity) are currently around 18 TW. At current trends, we exceed this in June 2029. By June 2034, we should be overproducing by a factor of 5, which makes up for the difference between nameplate capacity and actual average output. By 2037 you do that and have enough overproduction you don’t need batteries to store energy at night, just make interconnections between existing power grids worldwide, because you can afford 75% losses (if you want to, which you might not). On the other hand, I am concerned with biodiversity loss, nitrogen cycle issues, antibiotics resistance, and non-renewable use of phosphorus.

caseymarquis 8y ago

Time to start terraforming with sulfur?

chicob 8y ago

This article raises a lot of suspicion, and it has many of the hallmarks of bad reporting. - The Vice piece is shallow and didn't investigate the claims and arguments of the cited article (And what's with the authors photo? Is Zing Tsjeng really serious about this?); - The author of the paper, Jem Bendell, is not an academic in climate science nor in sustainability, but in "Sustainability Leadership", a field in Management; - The paper reads like an opinion piece. - The paper, as provided in the author's website, makes reference to the journal to which it was intended in the past tense, which raises the question of whether it is the original or an edited version; - Many of the references cited in the paper are from news websites, and only a few are proper scientific articles: I was expecting a lot, lot more; And the worst red flag of them all: - After being rejected by a not exactly relevant yet serious journal, the author made it public nonetheless, hinting at some form of censorship of an inconvenient opinion.

dogma1138 8y ago
It's Vice that's all you need to know these days, this isn't journalism period.
_rpd 8y ago
For further context, Jem Bendell is one of the founding members of the political activist group "Extinction Rebellion."

sleepysysadmin 8y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/media/File:All_palaeotemps.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m... When the dinosaurs lived the world was 10 celcius warmer. ~200 million years later the world was 14 celcius warmer than today. Life thrived worldwide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene Global warming is good for the earth. Every 200,000 years there's a huge spike in warming. Which if you look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian#/media/File:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian#/media/File:Carbon_Diox... Notice the CO2 circle showing the last 1000 years; but if you circled the entire green line from about ~20,000 years. There's huge spike that couldn't possible be human activity. It doesn't even appear like we are in control.

polotics 8y ago
Maybe you should check out the realclimate website.
- sleepysysadmin 8y ago
  I'm not denying that climate change is happening and the cause doesn't matter. I'm saying there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. Life was better when the earth was warmer and the alarmist predictions claiming the world is ending has been proven wrong over and over now.
ben_w 8y ago
> Notice the CO2 circle showing the last 1000 years; but if you circled the entire green line from about ~20,000 years. There's huge spike that couldn't possible be human activity. You mean the bit labelled “Ice age cycles”? Which we are currently exceeding the maxima of by about as much as the difference between maxima and minima?
- sleepysysadmin 8y ago
  The worst predictions of warming, which has basically been disproven already you can ignore the 8.5 black/red circles, have all been untrue to date. The doomsayers have been predicting the end of the world forever, this time they are just using climate change as their mayan calendar. The world can get 10 celcius warmer and nothing is wrong; it'll make the earth that much better. Bring it on.

globlist 8y ago

Get your daily dose of climate hysteria!