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For the record, I've been what could accurately be called a climate change alarmist for over three decades now. More concretely, I've felt that there was a lea

For the record, I've been what could accurately be called a climate change alarmist for over three decades now. More concretely, I've felt that there was a least a fair chance that climate change would, by the year 2070, cause enormous harm to human civilization, where 'harm' could be seen, in part, as over a billion premature deaths. Over the decades, my internal estimate of the odds has changed from "a small but statistically significant chance" to "more than 50%" today. I've also been of the mind that, most likely, there's little chance that humanity will be able to substantially change these probabilities. Yes, that's pretty doomy gloomy, on the surface at least. "But the progress ... etc., is really remarkable. It ain't over 'til it's over." This! We CAN NOT know what the future holds. A primary 'doomer movement' in the 1970s when I was growing up was population. Even among the most forward thinking, optimistic people of the time, few if any could imagine our planet being able to feed 8 billion people. None could imagine the possibility that the world population could naturally (without either huge die offs and/or draconian controls) stabilize at 10 billion people, which many solid models are now indicating. (And I get that there are valid arguments against the sustainability of our current and near future food production methods.) The point is that we can not know what miracles technology and sociological progress can bring, and we're expanding in both areas exponentially. (I'm not using that word, exponentially, lightly or incorrectly.) Is all of this 'hopium'? Perhaps. I agree with those that argue acceptance is important and healthy. Yes, accept that, from what we can see right now, things look very bad. Yes, accept that there's a strong probability that human civilization will collapse in the lifetime of Millennials. At the very minimum, all of the steps/hours/days between now and then will be interesting, and there's an unlimited amount of joy to be found and created.

curuinor 6y ago
there's also exponential stuff going the wrong way, too. all of cryptoland, for example. this stuff just works in logspace or logexpsum space
- Diederich 6y ago
  > there's also exponential stuff going the wrong way, too That's quite true, and that 'bad exponential' stuff is the main source of my pessimism.
  - salmonfamine 6y ago
    The "bad exponential stuff" that the online doomers seem to cling to is almost always: 1) permafrost melt, albedo feedbacks, etc., which has been considered in the most recent IPCC reports and is still being researched 2) sudden mass extinction due to biodiversity loss As far as 1) goes, read the IPCC report and get back to me. 2) is scarier, for sure, but there is not enough research done to conclude that we have breached or are about to breach an extinction tipping point. Some recent models suggest phytoplankton extinction (the usual tipping point in doomer arguments) may be reversed in lower latitudes in a warming climate. But no one knows. “Many of those making facile comparisons between the current situation and past mass extinctions don’t have a clue about the difference in the nature of the data, much less how truly awful the mass extinctions recorded in the marine fossil record actually were,” he wrote me in an email. “It is absolutely critical to recognize that I am NOT claiming that humans haven’t done great damage to marine and terrestrial [ecosystems], nor that many extinctions have not occurred and more will certainly occur in the near future. But I do think that as scientists we have a responsibility to be accurate about such comparisons." https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/the-ends-of-the-world/529545/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/the-ends...
    - Diederich 6y ago
      > ... read the IPCC report and get back to me ... As I stated elsewhere, I'm not inclined to debate the particulars, but I will note that we've learned a LOT since https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment_Report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment_Report came out seven years ago. The sixth report, due to come out next year, which will still tend toward extremely conservative conclusions, is going to crush the findings in the previous report in terms of 'bad news'. As to the other particulars, I've been researching and reading about those and many other categories for literally decades now. That doesn't make me right, and it doesn't make you wrong, but it has led me to realize and embrace the simple truth that even unlimited, good faith energies applied to debate over the details has basically no impact on anybody's opinions. All that really matters is personal background and personal experiences. And your personal background (including, in large part, your DNA) and personal experiences are different from mine. Going forward, however, we will share awareness of more and more frequent 100 year/500 year/1000 year weather events, for example. I have no way of predicting how that will affect your view on things, and that's fine. Full and deep acceptance is a very useful tool. To cherry pick one item: > ... as scientists we have a responsibility to be accurate ... Amen and amen. It's easier than ever to represent real problems in a hyperbolic fashion, but we must not do that. First: because inflated threats and predictions will cause those among us who are slower to accept the realities ahead to entrench, and be even less likely to see what's really happening. Second and most importantly: our best chance to beat this is to, together, focus on being clear, understanding and calm.
- ldbooth 6y ago
  Mass extinction of species, both flora and fauna.
  - salmonfamine 6y ago
    See my other comment.
core-questions 6y ago
> For the record, I've been what could accurately be called a climate change alarmist for over three decades now. It must be tiring, eh? I imagine it's a microcosm of the experience of a Jehovah's Witness; you continually have some new threshold of irreparable doom, which you keep having to punt off 5-10 years, even though your sense of certainty that everything is doomed is never alleviated. Somehow too, despite no significant warming or sea level rise over that time, you've moved up your level of expectation that we are doomed - you're doubling down on the hypothesis, huffing doom headlines like gasoline out of a bag. Can't be good for your mental health or your long term legacy planning. > A primary 'doomer movement' in the 1970s when I was growing up was population. Even among the most forward thinking, optimistic people of the time, few if any could imagine our planet being able to feed 8 billion people. Turns out that this was a double edged sword; massive amounts of propaganda in response to the population problem resulted in responsible people in the West using birth control and having fewer children, while the irresponsible here and the backward elsewhere continued their existing breeding strategy unabated. The result, of course, is that Africa is going to have several billion people by 2100 depending on the projection you prefer, without doing anything to increase its own capacity to feed its people without charity from the West. As our own birth rates plummet, we're forced to resort to mass immmigration to shore up the labour force, resulting in turn in the watering down and decay of our culture and any institutions that are fundamentally Western in nature. Not sure that worked out the way anyone wanted, really. > Yes, accept that there's a strong probability that human civilization will collapse in the lifetime of Millennials. I honestly see no reason to believe this is true. If it does happen, it's not going to be because of climate change - that's still a long ways out on any reasonable projection. No, it's going to be because of classic civilizational decay, not unlike what happened to Rome, as we debase our currency, sacrifice our values, allow our cities to fall to organized crime and violence, and watch our institutions crumble under the force of 'woke' people who have never created any value in their short, pointless lives.
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  How is it that immigrants and especially their kids are a fundamentally unassimilable mass who do nothing to protect or preserve said institutions? As the child of an immigrant mother I find this perturbing.
ldbooth 6y ago
Have you moved on to accepting what will happen? I'm coming to terms with it. I had a long conversation about the thermodynamics of the situation with an oceologist and it set me straight on what will happen.. all I recall was her emphasizing I just mix dyed blue ice water and dyed red warm water in an aquarium and voila, witness the turbulence. Scale that to oceans, and concede that thermal mass governs the global weather patterns high and low.
- Diederich 6y ago
  > Have you moved on to accepting what will happen? Yup. For someone who became aware of the existential risks that human produced CO2 and CH4 are causing back in the 1980s, full acceptance is, in my case at least, literally the only long-term, sustainable approach. > ... the situation with an oceologist ... I think that's been happening with a lot of scientists these last couple of years. Many I've spoken to are basically, "I don't see a way forward, a way out of this." For many, it brings a sense of calm. In my mind, the next necessary step is to embrace and accept uncertainty. That one's very well informed view isn't necessarily correct. This is an ideal shield against despair, which must be avoided at all costs.
salmonfamine 6y ago
How would climate change bring about the collapse of human civilization?
- GVIrish 6y ago
  Widespread crop failures due to extreme conditions during growing seasons and collapse of pollinator populations Collapse of fisheries globally due to ocean-acidification. Some 1 billion people currently rely on seafood as primary protein Frequent extreme weather events cause frequent large scale property destruction Higher sea level + extreme weather ravages coastal cities, which will also disrupt global supply chains *Heatwaves will push into lethal territory in parts of the world All of these things put together will put severe strains on unstable parts of the world first, but if the trends are not abated and we end up in 'Hothouse Earth' territory, modern civilization will not be sustainable. The worst stuff comes when we're talking 3, 4, 5 degrees C of average warming. But the tricky thing is that we don't have a full understanding of all the planetary feedback loops and tipping points.
  - salmonfamine 6y ago
    > All of these things put together will put severe strains on unstable parts of the world first, but if the trends are not abated and we end up in 'Hothouse Earth' territory, modern civilization will not be sustainable. I hear this a lot from people online. But how realistic is this really? Say we enter 4 degrees of warming. I assume that we will experience food losses in both agriculture and fishing. The expectation seems to be that we will make no adjustments to our supply chains, no adaptations, no restrictions on food waste (currently over 50% in the developed world) or any other attempt to mitigate these factors. Heatwaves/wet bulb stuff is worrying, and so are hurricanes. I don't want to diminish the problem. But it seems that this argument really rests on an understanding that we don't understand feedback loops, and that they are much worse than we anticipate, and that they lock us in to a Hothouse Earth scenario that pushes us into much higher levels of warming that we anticipate, and etc. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't. But I haven't seen any evidence for it, despite how often people parrot it from other Reddit comments or whatever.
whimsicalism 6y ago
Look, I strongly favor fighting climate change. Any reasonable view of future lives having any moral worth makes it an imperative. But predictions like "accept that there's a strong probability that human civilization will collapse in the lifetime of Millennials" are alarmist and not backed by the science. There will be huge impacts on global productivity by the end of the century, but the very, very large impacts are not going to happen until everyone currently alive is dead and gone. This is what we need to confront - that the sacrifices that we need for climate change will mostly not benefit us, they will benefit the children of our children, and their children as well.
lanstin 6y ago
Hope vs despair is often within our power to chose and it is a political choice. Choose despair and you make bad outcomes more likely as it is a contagious feeling. Choose hope and you make good outcomes more likely, and make the process of fighting for the good outcomes more effective and more fun for all. It is the social form of the prisoners dilemma: choose your response assuming there is nothing special about being you in particular, and assume that you are choosing form any. Do you want to live in a group where everyone does A or everyone does B. This also leads to more flexible choices: I’d like to live in a world where most people pick up trash a few percent of the time. Where most people lobby for carbon tax and electric cars and whatever the solution for cement and steel are.
astockwell 6y ago
I really appreciate your comments in this thread, Diederich. They have helped me distill my own similar feelings of uncertainty and uncertainty in my understanding of uncertainty. Thank you.
- Diederich 6y ago
  Hey cool, glad I could help...though I'm not sure how. (:

curuinor 6y ago

there's also exponential stuff going the wrong way, too. all of cryptoland, for example. this stuff just works in logspace or logexpsum space

Diederich 6y ago
> there's also exponential stuff going the wrong way, too That's quite true, and that 'bad exponential' stuff is the main source of my pessimism.
- salmonfamine 6y ago
  The "bad exponential stuff" that the online doomers seem to cling to is almost always: 1) permafrost melt, albedo feedbacks, etc., which has been considered in the most recent IPCC reports and is still being researched 2) sudden mass extinction due to biodiversity loss As far as 1) goes, read the IPCC report and get back to me. 2) is scarier, for sure, but there is not enough research done to conclude that we have breached or are about to breach an extinction tipping point. Some recent models suggest phytoplankton extinction (the usual tipping point in doomer arguments) may be reversed in lower latitudes in a warming climate. But no one knows. “Many of those making facile comparisons between the current situation and past mass extinctions don’t have a clue about the difference in the nature of the data, much less how truly awful the mass extinctions recorded in the marine fossil record actually were,” he wrote me in an email. “It is absolutely critical to recognize that I am NOT claiming that humans haven’t done great damage to marine and terrestrial [ecosystems], nor that many extinctions have not occurred and more will certainly occur in the near future. But I do think that as scientists we have a responsibility to be accurate about such comparisons." https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/the-ends-of-the-world/529545/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/the-ends...
  - Diederich 6y ago
    > ... read the IPCC report and get back to me ... As I stated elsewhere, I'm not inclined to debate the particulars, but I will note that we've learned a LOT since https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment_Report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment_Report came out seven years ago. The sixth report, due to come out next year, which will still tend toward extremely conservative conclusions, is going to crush the findings in the previous report in terms of 'bad news'. As to the other particulars, I've been researching and reading about those and many other categories for literally decades now. That doesn't make me right, and it doesn't make you wrong, but it has led me to realize and embrace the simple truth that even unlimited, good faith energies applied to debate over the details has basically no impact on anybody's opinions. All that really matters is personal background and personal experiences. And your personal background (including, in large part, your DNA) and personal experiences are different from mine. Going forward, however, we will share awareness of more and more frequent 100 year/500 year/1000 year weather events, for example. I have no way of predicting how that will affect your view on things, and that's fine. Full and deep acceptance is a very useful tool. To cherry pick one item: > ... as scientists we have a responsibility to be accurate ... Amen and amen. It's easier than ever to represent real problems in a hyperbolic fashion, but we must not do that. First: because inflated threats and predictions will cause those among us who are slower to accept the realities ahead to entrench, and be even less likely to see what's really happening. Second and most importantly: our best chance to beat this is to, together, focus on being clear, understanding and calm.
ldbooth 6y ago
Mass extinction of species, both flora and fauna.
- salmonfamine 6y ago
  See my other comment.

core-questions 6y ago

> For the record, I've been what could accurately be called a climate change alarmist for over three decades now. It must be tiring, eh? I imagine it's a microcosm of the experience of a Jehovah's Witness; you continually have some new threshold of irreparable doom, which you keep having to punt off 5-10 years, even though your sense of certainty that everything is doomed is never alleviated. Somehow too, despite no significant warming or sea level rise over that time, you've moved up your level of expectation that we are doomed - you're doubling down on the hypothesis, huffing doom headlines like gasoline out of a bag. Can't be good for your mental health or your long term legacy planning. > A primary 'doomer movement' in the 1970s when I was growing up was population. Even among the most forward thinking, optimistic people of the time, few if any could imagine our planet being able to feed 8 billion people. Turns out that this was a double edged sword; massive amounts of propaganda in response to the population problem resulted in responsible people in the West using birth control and having fewer children, while the irresponsible here and the backward elsewhere continued their existing breeding strategy unabated. The result, of course, is that Africa is going to have several billion people by 2100 depending on the projection you prefer, without doing anything to increase its own capacity to feed its people without charity from the West. As our own birth rates plummet, we're forced to resort to mass immmigration to shore up the labour force, resulting in turn in the watering down and decay of our culture and any institutions that are fundamentally Western in nature. Not sure that worked out the way anyone wanted, really. > Yes, accept that there's a strong probability that human civilization will collapse in the lifetime of Millennials. I honestly see no reason to believe this is true. If it does happen, it's not going to be because of climate change - that's still a long ways out on any reasonable projection. No, it's going to be because of classic civilizational decay, not unlike what happened to Rome, as we debase our currency, sacrifice our values, allow our cities to fall to organized crime and violence, and watch our institutions crumble under the force of 'woke' people who have never created any value in their short, pointless lives.

selimthegrim 6y ago
How is it that immigrants and especially their kids are a fundamentally unassimilable mass who do nothing to protect or preserve said institutions? As the child of an immigrant mother I find this perturbing.

ldbooth 6y ago

Have you moved on to accepting what will happen? I'm coming to terms with it. I had a long conversation about the thermodynamics of the situation with an oceologist and it set me straight on what will happen.. all I recall was her emphasizing I just mix dyed blue ice water and dyed red warm water in an aquarium and voila, witness the turbulence. Scale that to oceans, and concede that thermal mass governs the global weather patterns high and low.

Diederich 6y ago
> Have you moved on to accepting what will happen? Yup. For someone who became aware of the existential risks that human produced CO2 and CH4 are causing back in the 1980s, full acceptance is, in my case at least, literally the only long-term, sustainable approach. > ... the situation with an oceologist ... I think that's been happening with a lot of scientists these last couple of years. Many I've spoken to are basically, "I don't see a way forward, a way out of this." For many, it brings a sense of calm. In my mind, the next necessary step is to embrace and accept uncertainty. That one's very well informed view isn't necessarily correct. This is an ideal shield against despair, which must be avoided at all costs.

salmonfamine 6y ago

How would climate change bring about the collapse of human civilization?

GVIrish 6y ago
Widespread crop failures due to extreme conditions during growing seasons and collapse of pollinator populations Collapse of fisheries globally due to ocean-acidification. Some 1 billion people currently rely on seafood as primary protein Frequent extreme weather events cause frequent large scale property destruction Higher sea level + extreme weather ravages coastal cities, which will also disrupt global supply chains *Heatwaves will push into lethal territory in parts of the world All of these things put together will put severe strains on unstable parts of the world first, but if the trends are not abated and we end up in 'Hothouse Earth' territory, modern civilization will not be sustainable. The worst stuff comes when we're talking 3, 4, 5 degrees C of average warming. But the tricky thing is that we don't have a full understanding of all the planetary feedback loops and tipping points.
- salmonfamine 6y ago
  > All of these things put together will put severe strains on unstable parts of the world first, but if the trends are not abated and we end up in 'Hothouse Earth' territory, modern civilization will not be sustainable. I hear this a lot from people online. But how realistic is this really? Say we enter 4 degrees of warming. I assume that we will experience food losses in both agriculture and fishing. The expectation seems to be that we will make no adjustments to our supply chains, no adaptations, no restrictions on food waste (currently over 50% in the developed world) or any other attempt to mitigate these factors. Heatwaves/wet bulb stuff is worrying, and so are hurricanes. I don't want to diminish the problem. But it seems that this argument really rests on an understanding that we don't understand feedback loops, and that they are much worse than we anticipate, and that they lock us in to a Hothouse Earth scenario that pushes us into much higher levels of warming that we anticipate, and etc. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't. But I haven't seen any evidence for it, despite how often people parrot it from other Reddit comments or whatever.

whimsicalism 6y ago

Look, I strongly favor fighting climate change. Any reasonable view of future lives having any moral worth makes it an imperative. But predictions like "accept that there's a strong probability that human civilization will collapse in the lifetime of Millennials" are alarmist and not backed by the science. There will be huge impacts on global productivity by the end of the century, but the very, very large impacts are not going to happen until everyone currently alive is dead and gone. This is what we need to confront - that the sacrifices that we need for climate change will mostly not benefit us, they will benefit the children of our children, and their children as well.

lanstin 6y ago

Hope vs despair is often within our power to chose and it is a political choice. Choose despair and you make bad outcomes more likely as it is a contagious feeling. Choose hope and you make good outcomes more likely, and make the process of fighting for the good outcomes more effective and more fun for all. It is the social form of the prisoners dilemma: choose your response assuming there is nothing special about being you in particular, and assume that you are choosing form any. Do you want to live in a group where everyone does A or everyone does B. This also leads to more flexible choices: I’d like to live in a world where most people pick up trash a few percent of the time. Where most people lobby for carbon tax and electric cars and whatever the solution for cement and steel are.

astockwell 6y ago

I really appreciate your comments in this thread, Diederich. They have helped me distill my own similar feelings of uncertainty and uncertainty in my understanding of uncertainty. Thank you.

Diederich 6y ago
Hey cool, glad I could help...though I'm not sure how. (: