6 ms·

They make a good point in this article, I just wish Newsweek and other media outlets would get this pissed off about climate change. "Old and unafraid of the cl

They make a good point in this article, I just wish Newsweek and other media outlets would get this pissed off about climate change. "Old and unafraid of the climate crisis? Good for you. Now stop killing future generations." If we're mobilizing to stop a pandemic, why the hell aren't we mobilizing to stop climate change? I know this is going to get downvoted into oblivion, I just wanted to say it.

shakezula 7y ago
I can't agree with this enough. The media seems willing to be alarmist about everything _but_ the most important crisis my generation will ever face.
- jshevek 7y ago
  Part of the problem here is that extremists have subjected us to at least three decades of climate alarmism poisoned by bad science and failed predictions. People who lack the scientific background to properly understand specific claims and the basis for them rely on ignorant heuristics, such as "the boy who cried wolf". They wrongly conclude that the current round of climate concern is no different than the rounds they've previously experienced.
  - gbrown 7y ago
    Is that true? I feel like the mainstream scientific picture has been alarming (correctly) for that whole period, and people (using ignorant heuristics) have incorrectly discounted the warnings since they don't feel the pain right now.
    - jshevek 7y ago
      Both [your observation and mine] are true. I am not talking about mainstream scientists. Sadly, they don't control the larger conversations.
      - ajross 7y ago
        > I am not talking about mainstream scientists. Then who are you talking about?
        jshevek 7y ago
        > Then who are you talking about? This question is so strange I don't know where to begin. Should I look up the percentage of the population that are scientists? Should I pull up an Amazon list of books popular in the 70s and 80s dealing with climate change? Should I start listing various forms of dysfunction in the 4th estate? Should we talk about the culture of activists? Disseminating scientific knowledge correctly is a challenge in our society.
        ajross 7y ago
        OK, start with those. I mean, your point upthread is that you didn't personally believe all the good science of the last 30 years because of some "extremists", which now apparently includes the entirety of the media and political left. I think that's a pretty ridiculous argument, and am challenging you to give me some specifics to focus the discussion. You don't get to wave this away. Let's see who you're talking about.
        jshevek 7y ago
        Please try not to misrepresent other people's claims nor presume their experiences. >I mean, your point upthread is that you didn't personally believe all the good science of the last 30 years because of some "extremists"
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - ajross 7y ago
    > extremists have subjected us to at least three decades of climate alarmism poisoned by bad science and failed predictions. I'm sure someone said something dumb. But straightforward models of long term climate change and CO2 output going back to the 70's have all been largely proven out. Which "extremists" are you trying to point the finger at, specifically?
    - jshevek 7y ago
      > I'm sure someone said something dumb Yes, just one person. Edit: I try not to engage with people who use this kind of rhetorical technique. If anyone else is honestly ignorant of and curious about the damaging effects that decades of climate alarmism has had on some people's trust, you need only Google. For example: "bad climate change predictions" In my opinion, the problem still exists and it is important to be honest about the elements (activists, journalists, politicians) who are on the 'right side' of the discussion but do a poor job of representing the data.
chadlavi 7y ago
Newsweek's main audience is older folks. I think they wouldn't necessarily like to bite the hand that feeds them. But I agree, and I hope you don't get downvoted to oblivion.
cmrdporcupine 7y ago
I was making a related comment to my coworkers earlier this week: if the stock market is this freaked about covid19, just wait til investors realize climate change is real and it will be hard to make money while NYC is flooded and nobody wants to buy oil anymore.
- mattnewton 7y ago
  I think people know and just believe there will either be a magical human engineered solution that solves the problem or lots of time to find a greater fool before it gets that bad.
- datashow 7y ago
  Climate change is real doesn't mean NYC will be flooded.
- jshevek 7y ago
  Do you mean flooded from some specific storm, or from rising sea levels? When do you think NYC will become flooded? I've heard predictions of a sea level rise of 50 inches by 2100, but I don't know how much the levels need to rise to flood NYC.
- travisoneill1 7y ago
  At this point we have had 1C of warming, and the economic effects have been minimal. The most aggressive IPCC model shows another 1C by 2050. So that's double the warming. What will the economic damage be? Probably more than 2x, but almost certainly not 100x, which is what it would take to have a meaningful impact on the economy. This is why the market isn't worried about it.
- btilly 7y ago
  When you say things like this, you come across as uninformed. Not smart. Seriously, https://riskfinder.climatecentral.org/place/new-york.ny.us?comparisonType=city-neighborhood&forecastType=NOAA2017_int_p50&level=6&unit=ft https://riskfinder.climatecentral.org/place/new-york.ny.us?c... shows you the worst projected flood in the next 30 years. As you can see, there is substantial damage, but the vast majority of New York will be fine. And mitigation of that particular risk is available at a relatively cheap price of building dykes. Which is well-understood technology. In fact there is a country (the Netherlands) that in large part consists of reclaimed seabed kept dry through dykes. About oil, oil isn't most of our economy. Believe it or not, people realize this and it won't actually change our economic system as much as you seem to think it will. So yes, climate change is a real problem. But "OMG, NEW YORK IS ABOUT TO BE FLOODED AND OUR ECONOMY WILL END WITH OIL" is not supported by the evidence.
headcanon 7y ago
We're just not wired to think about things at that scale and over long periods of time. IMO the reason we're taking climate change as seriously as we are now is because of the visceral evidence provided by the hurricanes of the last couple of years. We collectively need things to be observably happening right now in order to believe they are true.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
  Plus, climate models and predictions just don’t resonate with people.
geerlingguy 7y ago
Not to excuse anything, but the main difference is the time scale—within days/weeks we saw differences, and death counts... with climate change it's not only difficult to measure easy-to-understand direct correlation sometimes, it also is at minimum on time scales of months to years. Most news cycles are hours or days, not months or years.
- csomar 7y ago
  > with climate change it's not only difficult to measure easy-to-understand direct correlation sometimes, it also is at minimum on time scales of months to years. Isn't this, exactly, why we are in trouble with the coronavirus. Our inability to see a disaster looming ahead?
- godelski 7y ago
  This is exactly right. As young people we are afraid of climate because we know it will affect us in the future. That's not true for older people (well, we can quite easily argue that it is __currently__ affecting people). I think another good example is nuclear. It may have low deaths per terrawatt of energy, but the deaths it causes are localized, physically and temporally. It doesn't matter that each year more people die in the US from coal ash than all those that ever have (or will) from (current) nuclear disasters. These kinds of things are well known in psychology (including the simplest: marshmallow experiment). Humans are bad at risk estimation and even worse when it comes to time scales. If it isn't happening before our eyes then chances are we're pretty bad at estimating risk.
Nuzzerino 7y ago
But we aren't mobilizing to stop the pandemic (or at least, not enough), and the WHO even cited that as a reason for declaring COVID-19 as a pandemic today. Many of these media outlets still publish their Coronavirus content behind paywalls, or plastered with advertisements everywhere. That isn't mobilizing, that's capitalizing.
chrisco255 7y ago
Nobody is dying from global warming. It's a sea level rise of 2-3mm a year. Less than 11,000 people a year die from natural disasters, which is near all-time lows despite a rising population. 100 years ago, it was common for at least 1,000,000 people a year to die from natural disasters. Thanks to technology, including internal combustion vehicles and electricity, that number has dropped dramatically. Crop yields are up almost 100% since the 80s for many crops, including staples like corn, wheat, and soybeans. We're able to feed more people than ever before. Also, winters are far more deadly than summers. Source for the data: https://ourworldindata.org/natural-disasters https://ourworldindata.org/natural-disasters Zoom out back to 1900 and see how much the world has improved.
- atoav 7y ago
  > Nobody is dying from global warming. Citation needed. Many (also old) people died in the European heat waves of the last summer. And every year these summers are getting hotter. Once crops closer to the already dry and hot areas of the globe stop to yield, and people migrate away from those areas — how many people die in the resulting conflicts, how much human suffering will be produced there? What impact will the usage of resources we use to safeguard costal cities against rising waters have on other areas that prevent human suffering? Answering the possible fallout from even a moderate change in global climate is nowhere near as clear cut as you make it out to be. On top of that: the ddcisions we take now could potentially be multiplied by the next 1000 human generations, only idiots would take that risk lightly.
  - Nuzzerino 7y ago
    Good points, but: > On top of that: the ddcisions we take now could potentially be multiplied by the next 1000 human generations, only idiots would take that risk lightly. The problem with this is that the decisions we take now could potentially mean anything. The butterfly effect effectively makes it meaningless to measure what we do now, so many years into the future. There's a lot of sentiment against climate change "denial", but the real denial is not about the presence of climate change but rather whether it is wise to make changes that we cannot measure the impact of.
malka 7y ago
Help to fight climate change. Kill old people with the corona virus.
bumby 7y ago
There’s numerous cognitive biases in play that cause people to disproportionately weigh near-term risks/rewards (hyperbolic discounting). Not to mention one is a direct threat while one is more abstract
squarefoot 7y ago
"If we're mobilizing to stop a pandemic, why the hell aren't we mobilizing to stop climate change?" Because a frog boiled very slowly usually doesn't complain until it's too late. Had this pandemic infections happen two orders of magnitude slower, nobody would give a damn.
rvz 7y ago
Perhaps its because we already have technological solutions put in place or still actively developed to actually reduce climate change ahead of time even when eventually we'll see the real devastation in action in 10 - 20 years time. Compared to this, the virus spreads extremely fast and healthcare systems across the world are being stretched and tested since there aren't any vaccines or solutions yet to tackle COVID-19 except for reminding everyone to wash their hands regularly. So the world now has to focus on battling a pandemic now rather than improving on the technologies already put in place to save us from climate catastrophe. At least taking a flight should now be seen as a double negative at this time for the kids of today.
Moshe_Cohen 7y ago
That's very subjective though. I could just as well say "White and ignorant of racial differences? Good for you. Now stop destroying our grandchildren's homelands." To me, one of our headlines is hysterical and dangerous, while the other is a deeply serious, indisputable reality. I think you might say the same. Perhaps we could both agree that this is a very odd time and place to shoehorn in either polarising political narrative.
Melting_Harps 7y ago
> They make a good point in this article, I just wish Newsweek and other media outlets would get this pissed off about climate change. "Old and unafraid of the climate crisis? Good for you. Now stop killing future generations." If we're mobilizing to stop a pandemic, why the hell aren't we mobilizing to stop climate change? > Help to fight climate change. Kill old people with the corona virus. I knew someone was going to take it to this level after I read your initial post an upvoted it, a part of me laughed, another part made me wonder if that's what it would take...
themagician 7y ago
If this was a disease that primary affected young people all you'd hear is, "take some personal responsibility!" Every policy decision of the last 40 years has been to protect the boomers and their assets, and that will probably remain the way of things for the next 30 years.
- dang 7y ago
  Please stop posting flamebait to HN. We don't want generational flamewars here, in addition to the other kinds of flamewar we don't want here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
opwieurposiu 7y ago
Fewer people means less carbon emissions. More people means more carbon emissions. On the other hand, fewer people means lower oil prices, which increases carbon emissions. Hard to say what the net effect will be.
pc86 7y ago
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Grue3 7y ago
Ironically making people more aware of climate change causes people to vote for candidates who are objectively terrible for climate change (see: anti-nuclear Green party in Germany, Bernie Sanders etc.)

shakezula 7y ago

I can't agree with this enough. The media seems willing to be alarmist about everything _but_ the most important crisis my generation will ever face.

jshevek 7y ago
Part of the problem here is that extremists have subjected us to at least three decades of climate alarmism poisoned by bad science and failed predictions. People who lack the scientific background to properly understand specific claims and the basis for them rely on ignorant heuristics, such as "the boy who cried wolf". They wrongly conclude that the current round of climate concern is no different than the rounds they've previously experienced.
- gbrown 7y ago
  Is that true? I feel like the mainstream scientific picture has been alarming (correctly) for that whole period, and people (using ignorant heuristics) have incorrectly discounted the warnings since they don't feel the pain right now.
  - jshevek 7y ago
    Both [your observation and mine] are true. I am not talking about mainstream scientists. Sadly, they don't control the larger conversations.
    - ajross 7y ago
      > I am not talking about mainstream scientists. Then who are you talking about?
      - jshevek 7y ago
        > Then who are you talking about? This question is so strange I don't know where to begin. Should I look up the percentage of the population that are scientists? Should I pull up an Amazon list of books popular in the 70s and 80s dealing with climate change? Should I start listing various forms of dysfunction in the 4th estate? Should we talk about the culture of activists? Disseminating scientific knowledge correctly is a challenge in our society.
        ajross 7y ago
        OK, start with those. I mean, your point upthread is that you didn't personally believe all the good science of the last 30 years because of some "extremists", which now apparently includes the entirety of the media and political left. I think that's a pretty ridiculous argument, and am challenging you to give me some specifics to focus the discussion. You don't get to wave this away. Let's see who you're talking about.
        jshevek 7y ago
        Please try not to misrepresent other people's claims nor presume their experiences. >I mean, your point upthread is that you didn't personally believe all the good science of the last 30 years because of some "extremists"
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
- ajross 7y ago
  > extremists have subjected us to at least three decades of climate alarmism poisoned by bad science and failed predictions. I'm sure someone said something dumb. But straightforward models of long term climate change and CO2 output going back to the 70's have all been largely proven out. Which "extremists" are you trying to point the finger at, specifically?
  - jshevek 7y ago
    > I'm sure someone said something dumb Yes, just one person. Edit: I try not to engage with people who use this kind of rhetorical technique. If anyone else is honestly ignorant of and curious about the damaging effects that decades of climate alarmism has had on some people's trust, you need only Google. For example: "bad climate change predictions" In my opinion, the problem still exists and it is important to be honest about the elements (activists, journalists, politicians) who are on the 'right side' of the discussion but do a poor job of representing the data.

chadlavi 7y ago

Newsweek's main audience is older folks. I think they wouldn't necessarily like to bite the hand that feeds them. But I agree, and I hope you don't get downvoted to oblivion.

cmrdporcupine 7y ago

I was making a related comment to my coworkers earlier this week: if the stock market is this freaked about covid19, just wait til investors realize climate change is real and it will be hard to make money while NYC is flooded and nobody wants to buy oil anymore.

mattnewton 7y ago
I think people know and just believe there will either be a magical human engineered solution that solves the problem or lots of time to find a greater fool before it gets that bad.
datashow 7y ago
Climate change is real doesn't mean NYC will be flooded.
jshevek 7y ago
Do you mean flooded from some specific storm, or from rising sea levels? When do you think NYC will become flooded? I've heard predictions of a sea level rise of 50 inches by 2100, but I don't know how much the levels need to rise to flood NYC.
travisoneill1 7y ago
At this point we have had 1C of warming, and the economic effects have been minimal. The most aggressive IPCC model shows another 1C by 2050. So that's double the warming. What will the economic damage be? Probably more than 2x, but almost certainly not 100x, which is what it would take to have a meaningful impact on the economy. This is why the market isn't worried about it.
btilly 7y ago
When you say things like this, you come across as uninformed. Not smart. Seriously, https://riskfinder.climatecentral.org/place/new-york.ny.us?comparisonType=city-neighborhood&forecastType=NOAA2017_int_p50&level=6&unit=ft https://riskfinder.climatecentral.org/place/new-york.ny.us?c... shows you the worst projected flood in the next 30 years. As you can see, there is substantial damage, but the vast majority of New York will be fine. And mitigation of that particular risk is available at a relatively cheap price of building dykes. Which is well-understood technology. In fact there is a country (the Netherlands) that in large part consists of reclaimed seabed kept dry through dykes. About oil, oil isn't most of our economy. Believe it or not, people realize this and it won't actually change our economic system as much as you seem to think it will. So yes, climate change is a real problem. But "OMG, NEW YORK IS ABOUT TO BE FLOODED AND OUR ECONOMY WILL END WITH OIL" is not supported by the evidence.

headcanon 7y ago

We're just not wired to think about things at that scale and over long periods of time. IMO the reason we're taking climate change as seriously as we are now is because of the visceral evidence provided by the hurricanes of the last couple of years. We collectively need things to be observably happening right now in order to believe they are true.

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
Plus, climate models and predictions just don’t resonate with people.

geerlingguy 7y ago

Not to excuse anything, but the main difference is the time scale—within days/weeks we saw differences, and death counts... with climate change it's not only difficult to measure easy-to-understand direct correlation sometimes, it also is at minimum on time scales of months to years. Most news cycles are hours or days, not months or years.

csomar 7y ago
> with climate change it's not only difficult to measure easy-to-understand direct correlation sometimes, it also is at minimum on time scales of months to years. Isn't this, exactly, why we are in trouble with the coronavirus. Our inability to see a disaster looming ahead?
godelski 7y ago
This is exactly right. As young people we are afraid of climate because we know it will affect us in the future. That's not true for older people (well, we can quite easily argue that it is __currently__ affecting people). I think another good example is nuclear. It may have low deaths per terrawatt of energy, but the deaths it causes are localized, physically and temporally. It doesn't matter that each year more people die in the US from coal ash than all those that ever have (or will) from (current) nuclear disasters. These kinds of things are well known in psychology (including the simplest: marshmallow experiment). Humans are bad at risk estimation and even worse when it comes to time scales. If it isn't happening before our eyes then chances are we're pretty bad at estimating risk.

Nuzzerino 7y ago

But we aren't mobilizing to stop the pandemic (or at least, not enough), and the WHO even cited that as a reason for declaring COVID-19 as a pandemic today. Many of these media outlets still publish their Coronavirus content behind paywalls, or plastered with advertisements everywhere. That isn't mobilizing, that's capitalizing.

chrisco255 7y ago

Nobody is dying from global warming. It's a sea level rise of 2-3mm a year. Less than 11,000 people a year die from natural disasters, which is near all-time lows despite a rising population. 100 years ago, it was common for at least 1,000,000 people a year to die from natural disasters. Thanks to technology, including internal combustion vehicles and electricity, that number has dropped dramatically. Crop yields are up almost 100% since the 80s for many crops, including staples like corn, wheat, and soybeans. We're able to feed more people than ever before. Also, winters are far more deadly than summers. Source for the data: https://ourworldindata.org/natural-disasters https://ourworldindata.org/natural-disasters Zoom out back to 1900 and see how much the world has improved.

atoav 7y ago
> Nobody is dying from global warming. Citation needed. Many (also old) people died in the European heat waves of the last summer. And every year these summers are getting hotter. Once crops closer to the already dry and hot areas of the globe stop to yield, and people migrate away from those areas — how many people die in the resulting conflicts, how much human suffering will be produced there? What impact will the usage of resources we use to safeguard costal cities against rising waters have on other areas that prevent human suffering? Answering the possible fallout from even a moderate change in global climate is nowhere near as clear cut as you make it out to be. On top of that: the ddcisions we take now could potentially be multiplied by the next 1000 human generations, only idiots would take that risk lightly.
- Nuzzerino 7y ago
  Good points, but: > On top of that: the ddcisions we take now could potentially be multiplied by the next 1000 human generations, only idiots would take that risk lightly. The problem with this is that the decisions we take now could potentially mean anything. The butterfly effect effectively makes it meaningless to measure what we do now, so many years into the future. There's a lot of sentiment against climate change "denial", but the real denial is not about the presence of climate change but rather whether it is wise to make changes that we cannot measure the impact of.

malka 7y ago

Help to fight climate change. Kill old people with the corona virus.

bumby 7y ago

There’s numerous cognitive biases in play that cause people to disproportionately weigh near-term risks/rewards (hyperbolic discounting). Not to mention one is a direct threat while one is more abstract

squarefoot 7y ago

"If we're mobilizing to stop a pandemic, why the hell aren't we mobilizing to stop climate change?" Because a frog boiled very slowly usually doesn't complain until it's too late. Had this pandemic infections happen two orders of magnitude slower, nobody would give a damn.

rvz 7y ago

Perhaps its because we already have technological solutions put in place or still actively developed to actually reduce climate change ahead of time even when eventually we'll see the real devastation in action in 10 - 20 years time. Compared to this, the virus spreads extremely fast and healthcare systems across the world are being stretched and tested since there aren't any vaccines or solutions yet to tackle COVID-19 except for reminding everyone to wash their hands regularly. So the world now has to focus on battling a pandemic now rather than improving on the technologies already put in place to save us from climate catastrophe. At least taking a flight should now be seen as a double negative at this time for the kids of today.

Moshe_Cohen 7y ago

That's very subjective though. I could just as well say "White and ignorant of racial differences? Good for you. Now stop destroying our grandchildren's homelands." To me, one of our headlines is hysterical and dangerous, while the other is a deeply serious, indisputable reality. I think you might say the same. Perhaps we could both agree that this is a very odd time and place to shoehorn in either polarising political narrative.

Melting_Harps 7y ago

> They make a good point in this article, I just wish Newsweek and other media outlets would get this pissed off about climate change. "Old and unafraid of the climate crisis? Good for you. Now stop killing future generations." If we're mobilizing to stop a pandemic, why the hell aren't we mobilizing to stop climate change? > Help to fight climate change. Kill old people with the corona virus. I knew someone was going to take it to this level after I read your initial post an upvoted it, a part of me laughed, another part made me wonder if that's what it would take...

themagician 7y ago

If this was a disease that primary affected young people all you'd hear is, "take some personal responsibility!" Every policy decision of the last 40 years has been to protect the boomers and their assets, and that will probably remain the way of things for the next 30 years.

dang 7y ago
Please stop posting flamebait to HN. We don't want generational flamewars here, in addition to the other kinds of flamewar we don't want here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

opwieurposiu 7y ago

Fewer people means less carbon emissions. More people means more carbon emissions. On the other hand, fewer people means lower oil prices, which increases carbon emissions. Hard to say what the net effect will be.

pc86 7y ago

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Grue3 7y ago

Ironically making people more aware of climate change causes people to vote for candidates who are objectively terrible for climate change (see: anti-nuclear Green party in Germany, Bernie Sanders etc.)