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Climate Change Kills the Future

25 points by samizdis 5y ago

quantified 5y ago
Santa Claus is gone when the North Pole no longer has ice and snow. As soon as the Arctic Ocean holds trade routes and hosts its first shooting war, it’s over for St Nick. Global warming is the war on Christmas. (Remove tongue from cheek)
- treesome 5y ago
  not over yet, he will be Satan Claus when earth is hot like hell.
  - quantified 5y ago
    Wow, people don’t like this line of thinking. I wish one of them would refute it.
_3u10 5y ago
More snow in winter, hotter summers what’s not to love? Unless you live somewhere it’s already stupidly hot it’s not like a degree is going to make any difference.
aussiegreenie 5y ago
A technological civilisation will be lucky to survive to 2040.
- Vecr 5y ago
  Why? Even if things got that bad, at least one nation would seal themselves off from the rest of the world and be somewhat okay. Would you consider Iran to currently be a technological society, or does it need to be better than that? North Korea?
polishdude20 5y ago
This article is hard to read with the way it's formatted. It feels like just a string of random thoughts about climate change. I was hoping it would talk more about the anxiety and hopelessness people feel due to climate change. Not only is our climate getting worse, people are getting more pessimistic about the future. With that comes anxiety but also apathy. At some point, you realize there's nothing to be done, you will die and the future will be horrible and you can't do anything about it. So just enjoy it while you can and come to terms with humanity's eventual demise.
- quantified 5y ago
  Funny thing is, there’s a lot of the psychology that is sort of in our control. There are innate aspects, and depression seems for some reason to be a more common response to things wrong in the brain/body than happiness/mania, but grit and community orientation have a large input from the others around us. As long as we orient around grit and community needs more than “the planet’s f&$@ed, yolo” in our response, we could weather this ok for a few generations. I wouldn’t bet on it without taking significant odds.
alanwreath 5y ago
This topic is in my head more and more each day. I have a large family and often think how much I want their future to be livable. I try to contribute by limiting consumption of all that I know and learn to be detrimental to the environment, but I feel my efforts are useless. I was very drawn to B. Sanders as the next US President because I thought he’d be the most aggressive with regard to environmental protection. In hindsight even if he had won, I’m not sure if the efforts of leadership from one country would or could be enough. To me this is all so sad and maddening because those in power seem to only be interested in making more billions next year with little or no effort on making sure the generational wealth has any meaning. Does it matter that your next 10 generations are covered with the wealth that’s youve amassed if they’ll just be living in a wasteland anyways?
curation 5y ago
We cannot do anything about climate change because of the pseudocertainty effect: "what is at issue..are competing claims of expertise and prophecy in human affairs. An expert posseses the truth in a particular domain (in this case climate science). The problem, he believes, is how to transmit the truth to the rest of society. This is a problem of "communications." The prophet (politician for example), for his part, believes that there is no truth independent of the way in which it is transmitted. For him, the objectivity of cognitive mechanisms or of crowd phenomena is no less important than the objectivity of climate science. The falut of the IPCC (Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change) - if in fact it is at fault - lies in its failure to decide between these two attitudes." (The Economy and the Future - JP Dupuy 2014). This sounds very complex, but this short book helps move these circular debates around using logic. Which means hope. .. the goal: "to devise, by means of scientific modeling and philisophical inquiry into the aims and purposes of mankind, an image of the future that is sufficiently catastrophic to be repellent and sufficiently credible to produce behavior that will prevent it from being realized, barring an accident."
- perl4ever 5y ago
  >to devise, by means of scientific modeling and [philosophical] inquiry into the aims and purposes of mankind, an image of the future that is sufficiently catastrophic to be repellent and sufficiently credible to produce behavior that will prevent it from being realized, barring an accident. Trying to avoid the end of everything, can justify any actions, up to and including destroying the world in some other way. This would be suboptimal if the alternate fate was exaggerated, on purpose or not. I think this is the basic reason why people are skeptical of prophets of doom and not ready to give them true power.
  - curation 5y ago
    I realized it's hard to understand the quote outside of the book; but the quote says what you are saying. The way human subjectivity works is far too complex to be directly effected. It is not an argument for exaggeration but rather to work with the reality of Climate change being between 1 and 0 and not Yes or No. Reducing a complex argument to doesn't work; but I repeat it to convince the idiot that is myself so please excuse me.

25 points by samizdis 5y ago

Santa Claus is gone when the North Pole no longer has ice and snow. As soon as the Arctic Ocean holds trade routes and hosts its first shooting war, it’s over for St Nick. Global warming is the war on Christmas. (Remove tongue from cheek)

treesome 5y ago
not over yet, he will be Satan Claus when earth is hot like hell.
- quantified 5y ago
  Wow, people don’t like this line of thinking. I wish one of them would refute it.

_3u10 5y ago

More snow in winter, hotter summers what’s not to love? Unless you live somewhere it’s already stupidly hot it’s not like a degree is going to make any difference.

aussiegreenie 5y ago

A technological civilisation will be lucky to survive to 2040.

Vecr 5y ago
Why? Even if things got that bad, at least one nation would seal themselves off from the rest of the world and be somewhat okay. Would you consider Iran to currently be a technological society, or does it need to be better than that? North Korea?

polishdude20 5y ago

This article is hard to read with the way it's formatted. It feels like just a string of random thoughts about climate change. I was hoping it would talk more about the anxiety and hopelessness people feel due to climate change. Not only is our climate getting worse, people are getting more pessimistic about the future. With that comes anxiety but also apathy. At some point, you realize there's nothing to be done, you will die and the future will be horrible and you can't do anything about it. So just enjoy it while you can and come to terms with humanity's eventual demise.

quantified 5y ago
Funny thing is, there’s a lot of the psychology that is sort of in our control. There are innate aspects, and depression seems for some reason to be a more common response to things wrong in the brain/body than happiness/mania, but grit and community orientation have a large input from the others around us. As long as we orient around grit and community needs more than “the planet’s f&$@ed, yolo” in our response, we could weather this ok for a few generations. I wouldn’t bet on it without taking significant odds.

alanwreath 5y ago

This topic is in my head more and more each day. I have a large family and often think how much I want their future to be livable. I try to contribute by limiting consumption of all that I know and learn to be detrimental to the environment, but I feel my efforts are useless. I was very drawn to B. Sanders as the next US President because I thought he’d be the most aggressive with regard to environmental protection. In hindsight even if he had won, I’m not sure if the efforts of leadership from one country would or could be enough. To me this is all so sad and maddening because those in power seem to only be interested in making more billions next year with little or no effort on making sure the generational wealth has any meaning. Does it matter that your next 10 generations are covered with the wealth that’s youve amassed if they’ll just be living in a wasteland anyways?

curation 5y ago

We cannot do anything about climate change because of the pseudocertainty effect: "what is at issue..are competing claims of expertise and prophecy in human affairs. An expert posseses the truth in a particular domain (in this case climate science). The problem, he believes, is how to transmit the truth to the rest of society. This is a problem of "communications." The prophet (politician for example), for his part, believes that there is no truth independent of the way in which it is transmitted. For him, the objectivity of cognitive mechanisms or of crowd phenomena is no less important than the objectivity of climate science. The falut of the IPCC (Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change) - if in fact it is at fault - lies in its failure to decide between these two attitudes." (The Economy and the Future - JP Dupuy 2014). This sounds very complex, but this short book helps move these circular debates around using logic. Which means hope. .. the goal: "to devise, by means of scientific modeling and philisophical inquiry into the aims and purposes of mankind, an image of the future that is sufficiently catastrophic to be repellent and sufficiently credible to produce behavior that will prevent it from being realized, barring an accident."

perl4ever 5y ago
>to devise, by means of scientific modeling and [philosophical] inquiry into the aims and purposes of mankind, an image of the future that is sufficiently catastrophic to be repellent and sufficiently credible to produce behavior that will prevent it from being realized, barring an accident. Trying to avoid the end of everything, can justify any actions, up to and including destroying the world in some other way. This would be suboptimal if the alternate fate was exaggerated, on purpose or not. I think this is the basic reason why people are skeptical of prophets of doom and not ready to give them true power.
- curation 5y ago
  I realized it's hard to understand the quote outside of the book; but the quote says what you are saying. The way human subjectivity works is far too complex to be directly effected. It is not an argument for exaggeration but rather to work with the reality of Climate change being between 1 and 0 and not Yes or No. Reducing a complex argument to doesn't work; but I repeat it to convince the idiot that is myself so please excuse me.