7 ms·

While we are at it, can we change some vocabulary used for sensitising climate change from 'For the planet' to 'Your children will die soon, your grandchildren

While we are at it, can we change some vocabulary used for sensitising climate change from 'For the planet' to 'Your children will die soon, your grandchildren sooner'?

bzb5 6y ago
How certain is that, given that according to previous predictions the Earth should currently be uninhabitable?
- cochne 6y ago
  Which predictions are you referring to?
- bakedbeanz 6y ago
  By all means, provide us with reputable sources that claim "the Earth should currently be uninhabitable". We'll wait.
  - xenspidey 6y ago
    Not OP but a quick google search. https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/18-spectacularly-wrong-predictions-made-around-the-time-of-first-earth-day-in-1970-expect-more-this-year-3/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/18-spectacularly-wrong-predic...
    - Brakenshire 6y ago
      So of the 18 predictions none are from climatologists, none are in published research but rather in comments to magazines and speeches, and half are from 2 people, Paul Erlich (a biologist) and Kenneth Watt (an ecologist). And some of them are not even wrong, for instance concerns about population growth or rainforest loss at the rate it was occurring at the time. The headline here is “some random scientists were wrong about something 50 years ago”. The fact the comparison is even made between these comments and the published evidence base for climate change, indicates more about the person making the criticism than the target of the criticism. These are the same kind of people who think that political commentators on rolling news are making a meaningful contribution to scientific debate.
  - mbostleman 6y ago
    I'm not sure this is a particularly constructive line of debate, but predictions in the 1970s from [sources well known and accepted by mainstream press, if not reputable in hindsight or by other definitions] are pretty numerous. Here is one from Paul Ehrlich in April 1970: "Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make...The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years." There are many more. I think this type of stuff was that decade's click bait.
    - dylan604 6y ago
      In the 1970s, people were dealing with things like Acid Rain and large hole in the ozone layer. Things probably were much more dire looking at that point.
      - kyleee 6y ago
        And people were worried about catastrophic global cooling
        bzb5 6y ago
        Just like now we are worried about catastrophic global warming. Only that, of course, now we are right. ;-)
        perl4ever 6y ago
        If you look at a temperature graph all would become clear. It's not like the data they had was fake or misrepresented, it's just that the trend is noisy and became clearer later. Now that it is clear, it makes no sense to say "we could still be wrong". It's like a stock market graph; you don't know if a few days ago was the peak, but in a year you do. Or in case of climate, 30-40 years.
        klyrs 6y ago
        Some were, yes, but they were in the minority. Curiously, folks are still predicting global cooling, but the proportion of such papers continues to dwindle. https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s-intermediate.htm https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s-in...
CalRobert 6y ago
I'm stunned how even when I agree with other people about climate breakdown happening, they think "Miami flooding" and I think "my kids dying horribly in a resource war or food riot". Though people seem to be finally understanding that sea level rise is a minor concern all things considered.
- umvi 6y ago
  > and I think "my kids dying horribly in a resource war or food riot". I still think "I'll believe it when I see it". Scientists are very good at making apocalyptic predictions based on theoretical worst case scenarios, but reality just never seems to match said predictions. In reality, stuff happens more slowly on much longer timescales. Just look at covid - back in March, the predictions were pretty dire - it was predicted millions were going to die in the US alone... 6 months later it turned out it wasn't nearly as deadly as we thought and a lot of measures we took (like SIP, shutting down economy, etc.) probably caused more harm than good.
  - foota 6y ago
    I'm highly skeptical of your claims, nearly 200,000 people have died of covid, despite having shutdown the country. You've presented no information to suggest that the scientific consensus that millions would likely have died without the measures we went through is false.
    - dylan604 6y ago
      I wonder what would have happened if we gave a 2 week advanced notice for people to stock up, and then shut everything down 100% for 4 weeks straight. Would we have been out of this whole mess by now as opposed to this lingering?
      - foota 6y ago
        I think for starters this would never happen in the current US both due to a lack of political will and highly varying circumstances (things were fine in Texas at the start, why would they lock down?). Not to even mention legal challenges. I believe people would need to be dropping dead nationwide to the tune of one in a hundred or thousand per week for this to happen here. But even if we could I don't think it would save us for some of the following reasons, though it might have bought us a couple week or month reset. However, if this were followed up by strict adherence to social distancing, mask usage, and restrictions on social and work gatherings, we'd likely be in a much better place than we are now. Completely eradicating the virus when there are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of cases seems unlikely to me. Enough cases are likely to persist through propagating within large households, cases with extended infectious time period (I'm not sure how likely this is? It seems to me like it should be possible for some cases to remain infections for longer than normal periodas of time, but I haven't read anything about this), and people not following the guidelines to give a sizable enough base for the virus to recuperate. And even if some areas do eliminate it, it can come back through domestic or international travel.
martythemaniak 6y ago
While I agree "for the planet" is terrible messaging (namely, the planet's been through worse and will be just fine), I also think your proposed change is bullshit. Your children will and their children will be fine, but there's big and real chance that they will not have the standard of life you have and certainly far below what they could have. I think that's plenty scary in its own.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
  >Your children will and their children will be fine What about the children who died in the fires now in USA, in Australia, Floods in India and elsewhere all of which have been worse than ever in this century and the reason being attributed to climate change?
  - macinjosh 6y ago
    Humans of all ages have been killed by natural disasters as long as there has been humans. Nothing new. It is not like huge numbers of people are being killed by them all of a sudden. Increase in population and structure construction in these forests is why the toll seems higher now.
    - Brakenshire 6y ago
      It’s that, and woodland management, and climate change.
  - martythemaniak 6y ago
    The question is "what's at stake with climate change", not about what happens to invididuals (because everything happens to individuals). What's at stake isn't the death of the planet, or the death of life, or the death of civilization. All these things are resilient enough to adapt to the effects of climate change. What isn't resilient enough is our quality of life, which is based on my assumptions that climate change will invalidate. The next generation will thus have to spend their surplus resources dealing with these adaptations, instead of leveraging themselves up into higher and better lives.
jstanley 6y ago
Why will your grandchildren die sooner than your children will?
- zspade 6y ago
  It it strange phrasing to be sure. I interpreted it as sooner from birth (at younger ages).
V6HBGNQHU 6y ago
The plant will be fine and so will your children and their children. If you live in a low lying area like Maldives then they might not be living where you live now but they will certainly be able to live. Alarmist claims like "everyone will die" only serve to discredit scientists even though they aren't the ones making them.
rhino369 6y ago
People will be able to smell the bullshit. The idea that climate change will be apocalyptic (for first world nations) in your grandchildren's time frame is just as loony-toons as denying it exists at all. The scientific consensus is nowhere near that bad.
- bamboozled 6y ago
  What are you basing this on? If the heat doesn’t kill people, famine, floods, fires and wars likely will. It might not be the apocalypse, but further rises in temperature could easily topple civilisation as we know it?
  - tetris11 6y ago
    Paired with social uprising, drought, and mass immigration. 1176 BC, the year the bronze age around the Mediterranean collapsed for all the above reasons (plus earthquakes). We should learn the lessons of what history says about this period. It took 300 years for them to recover...
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  Unfortunately, so far I have seen the opposite - people lapping it up and the "consensus" on the Internet (Reddit in particular) being that we're all doomed, with the more extreme outliers thinking about suicide because they genuinely expect the world to _inevitably_ become a literal Mad Max desert dystopia within the next few decades. We've swung way too far from "completely ignoring the problem" to "absolute frenzy". Reminds me of Y2K. Also, of course, if you don't agree with the hivemind (that everything is going to be much worse than actual science predicts), then you're a terrible person and need to be at least downvoted to hell, but ideally shunned and have your life ruined.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    >Reminds me of Y2K. Well, people say Y2K wasn't a problem because we buckled down and solved it. I just saw an article that claimed the UK was back to like 1890 levels of CO2 emissions. Maybe it's still salvageable if the US gets shaken out of its stupor. Maybe decarbonization will just happen anyway through market forces as renewable energy improves.

While we are at it, can we change some vocabulary used for sensitising climate change from 'For the planet' to 'Your children will die soon, your grandchildren sooner'?

bzb5 6y ago

How certain is that, given that according to previous predictions the Earth should currently be uninhabitable?

cochne 6y ago
Which predictions are you referring to?
bakedbeanz 6y ago
By all means, provide us with reputable sources that claim "the Earth should currently be uninhabitable". We'll wait.
- xenspidey 6y ago
  Not OP but a quick google search. https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/18-spectacularly-wrong-predictions-made-around-the-time-of-first-earth-day-in-1970-expect-more-this-year-3/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/18-spectacularly-wrong-predic...
  - Brakenshire 6y ago
    So of the 18 predictions none are from climatologists, none are in published research but rather in comments to magazines and speeches, and half are from 2 people, Paul Erlich (a biologist) and Kenneth Watt (an ecologist). And some of them are not even wrong, for instance concerns about population growth or rainforest loss at the rate it was occurring at the time. The headline here is “some random scientists were wrong about something 50 years ago”. The fact the comparison is even made between these comments and the published evidence base for climate change, indicates more about the person making the criticism than the target of the criticism. These are the same kind of people who think that political commentators on rolling news are making a meaningful contribution to scientific debate.
- mbostleman 6y ago
  I'm not sure this is a particularly constructive line of debate, but predictions in the 1970s from [sources well known and accepted by mainstream press, if not reputable in hindsight or by other definitions] are pretty numerous. Here is one from Paul Ehrlich in April 1970: "Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make...The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years." There are many more. I think this type of stuff was that decade's click bait.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    In the 1970s, people were dealing with things like Acid Rain and large hole in the ozone layer. Things probably were much more dire looking at that point.
    - kyleee 6y ago
      And people were worried about catastrophic global cooling
      - bzb5 6y ago
        Just like now we are worried about catastrophic global warming. Only that, of course, now we are right. ;-)
        perl4ever 6y ago
        If you look at a temperature graph all would become clear. It's not like the data they had was fake or misrepresented, it's just that the trend is noisy and became clearer later. Now that it is clear, it makes no sense to say "we could still be wrong". It's like a stock market graph; you don't know if a few days ago was the peak, but in a year you do. Or in case of climate, 30-40 years.
      - klyrs 6y ago
        Some were, yes, but they were in the minority. Curiously, folks are still predicting global cooling, but the proportion of such papers continues to dwindle. https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s-intermediate.htm https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s-in...

CalRobert 6y ago

I'm stunned how even when I agree with other people about climate breakdown happening, they think "Miami flooding" and I think "my kids dying horribly in a resource war or food riot". Though people seem to be finally understanding that sea level rise is a minor concern all things considered.

umvi 6y ago
> and I think "my kids dying horribly in a resource war or food riot". I still think "I'll believe it when I see it". Scientists are very good at making apocalyptic predictions based on theoretical worst case scenarios, but reality just never seems to match said predictions. In reality, stuff happens more slowly on much longer timescales. Just look at covid - back in March, the predictions were pretty dire - it was predicted millions were going to die in the US alone... 6 months later it turned out it wasn't nearly as deadly as we thought and a lot of measures we took (like SIP, shutting down economy, etc.) probably caused more harm than good.
- foota 6y ago
  I'm highly skeptical of your claims, nearly 200,000 people have died of covid, despite having shutdown the country. You've presented no information to suggest that the scientific consensus that millions would likely have died without the measures we went through is false.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    I wonder what would have happened if we gave a 2 week advanced notice for people to stock up, and then shut everything down 100% for 4 weeks straight. Would we have been out of this whole mess by now as opposed to this lingering?
    - foota 6y ago
      I think for starters this would never happen in the current US both due to a lack of political will and highly varying circumstances (things were fine in Texas at the start, why would they lock down?). Not to even mention legal challenges. I believe people would need to be dropping dead nationwide to the tune of one in a hundred or thousand per week for this to happen here. But even if we could I don't think it would save us for some of the following reasons, though it might have bought us a couple week or month reset. However, if this were followed up by strict adherence to social distancing, mask usage, and restrictions on social and work gatherings, we'd likely be in a much better place than we are now. Completely eradicating the virus when there are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of cases seems unlikely to me. Enough cases are likely to persist through propagating within large households, cases with extended infectious time period (I'm not sure how likely this is? It seems to me like it should be possible for some cases to remain infections for longer than normal periodas of time, but I haven't read anything about this), and people not following the guidelines to give a sizable enough base for the virus to recuperate. And even if some areas do eliminate it, it can come back through domestic or international travel.

martythemaniak 6y ago

While I agree "for the planet" is terrible messaging (namely, the planet's been through worse and will be just fine), I also think your proposed change is bullshit. Your children will and their children will be fine, but there's big and real chance that they will not have the standard of life you have and certainly far below what they could have. I think that's plenty scary in its own.

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
>Your children will and their children will be fine What about the children who died in the fires now in USA, in Australia, Floods in India and elsewhere all of which have been worse than ever in this century and the reason being attributed to climate change?
- macinjosh 6y ago
  Humans of all ages have been killed by natural disasters as long as there has been humans. Nothing new. It is not like huge numbers of people are being killed by them all of a sudden. Increase in population and structure construction in these forests is why the toll seems higher now.
  - Brakenshire 6y ago
    It’s that, and woodland management, and climate change.
- martythemaniak 6y ago
  The question is "what's at stake with climate change", not about what happens to invididuals (because everything happens to individuals). What's at stake isn't the death of the planet, or the death of life, or the death of civilization. All these things are resilient enough to adapt to the effects of climate change. What isn't resilient enough is our quality of life, which is based on my assumptions that climate change will invalidate. The next generation will thus have to spend their surplus resources dealing with these adaptations, instead of leveraging themselves up into higher and better lives.

jstanley 6y ago

Why will your grandchildren die sooner than your children will?

zspade 6y ago
It it strange phrasing to be sure. I interpreted it as sooner from birth (at younger ages).

V6HBGNQHU 6y ago

The plant will be fine and so will your children and their children. If you live in a low lying area like Maldives then they might not be living where you live now but they will certainly be able to live. Alarmist claims like "everyone will die" only serve to discredit scientists even though they aren't the ones making them.

rhino369 6y ago

People will be able to smell the bullshit. The idea that climate change will be apocalyptic (for first world nations) in your grandchildren's time frame is just as loony-toons as denying it exists at all. The scientific consensus is nowhere near that bad.

bamboozled 6y ago
What are you basing this on? If the heat doesn’t kill people, famine, floods, fires and wars likely will. It might not be the apocalypse, but further rises in temperature could easily topple civilisation as we know it?
- tetris11 6y ago
  Paired with social uprising, drought, and mass immigration. 1176 BC, the year the bronze age around the Mediterranean collapsed for all the above reasons (plus earthquakes). We should learn the lessons of what history says about this period. It took 300 years for them to recover...
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
Unfortunately, so far I have seen the opposite - people lapping it up and the "consensus" on the Internet (Reddit in particular) being that we're all doomed, with the more extreme outliers thinking about suicide because they genuinely expect the world to _inevitably_ become a literal Mad Max desert dystopia within the next few decades. We've swung way too far from "completely ignoring the problem" to "absolute frenzy". Reminds me of Y2K. Also, of course, if you don't agree with the hivemind (that everything is going to be much worse than actual science predicts), then you're a terrible person and need to be at least downvoted to hell, but ideally shunned and have your life ruined.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  >Reminds me of Y2K. Well, people say Y2K wasn't a problem because we buckled down and solved it. I just saw an article that claimed the UK was back to like 1890 levels of CO2 emissions. Maybe it's still salvageable if the US gets shaken out of its stupor. Maybe decarbonization will just happen anyway through market forces as renewable energy improves.