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It's not just young people. I'm 56 and I'm going through a pretty serious personal existential crisis w.r.t. climate change. I think even the people who are w

• nimvlaj30 5y ago
  > God grant me the serenity > to accept the things I cannot change; > courage to change the things I can; > and wisdom to know the difference. Civilisation as we know it, and perhaps even humanity is in the process of ending. The ending is inevitable, whether it is now or nearer to the heat death of the universe. If you can personally try and affect change, then you should do it. But more likely, you are a slave to the same system that everyone else is. I'd recommend working on acceptance at this point.
  • ruined 5y ago
    if this is your attitude then at least get out of the way
    • pstuart 5y ago
      The thought that came to mind was "ok boomer". Edit: yeah, not positive but a knee-jerk reaction to the grandparent comment that essentially said "I got mine, Jack -- sucks to be you".
      • brutusborn 5y ago
        I don't understand; why would you post this? Do you think this will help the situation?
        • pstuart 5y ago
          Why? Anger and frustration. Probably shouldn't have but the grandparent comment practically invited it. There's so much we can do to mitigate the damage but that won't happen through complacency.
          • brutusborn 5y ago
            I agree that there is a lot to do to mitigate damage, and that complacency does not help. But posting meme responses neither mitigates damage, or reduces complacency. In my experience these kind of responses tend to reinforce complacent attitudes.
    • brutusborn 5y ago
      I can't see how someone posting their attitudes to climate change is "getting in the way." It's useful to know that people are starting to feel this way. Maybe you could post your own attitudes and provide some justification for them instead? This may convince the other poster to change theirs. Currently your comment is pointless.
      • pstuart 5y ago
        Ok, try this: The money we spent on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars could have paid for true energy independence using renewables. We have a pending budge proposition to try and address it but some say we can't afford it. How can we afford endless war but not afford investing in power that civilization needs but doesn't kill us?
        • brutusborn 5y ago
          Ok, I "tried this", and thinking about it did nothing to help the problem. I try to choose the most useful response, which for me is volunteering time in organizations that develop solutions. This way I can use my personal expertise and contribute something, however small. If I find a more useful path, then I will take it.
    • nimvlaj30 5y ago
      Damn nice hate. OP was saying how he is losing sleep over climate change. The requirements involved with contributing to slowing (or stopping) climate change do not include worrying about it. If you are losing sleep, you would benefit from changing your attitude towards it. Civilisational decline is a constant. It is coming. Accept it now, and work to delay it if you can make a meaningful change. If not, don't lose sleep over it. I'm doing what I can to invest in future green tech and trying to limit my consumption. I am NOT losing sleep over the fact that we probably don't have much more of a future as a race.
      • dwaltrip 5y ago
        In your comment above, the last half semi-conflicted with the first half, which could easily be interpreted to imply that we shouldn’t really worry or do anything about it. Individually, that may be somewhat true / useful. But on a societal level it is quite harmful when it comes to climate change. I think that is why you are taking heat.
        • nimvlaj30 5y ago
          What you are saying would make sense if we ignore the context of the conversation. OP is losing sleep, which is a common way of telling the reader that their mental health is suffering due to wrestling with the concept of climate change and how society is underprepared for it. If we ignore all that, then it sounds like I'm saying to give up. But if we take the context into account, it is evident that I'm actually giving OP advice on how to mentally and emotionally survive the coming apocalypse. Though, maybe I should have been more clear. > which could easily be interpreted Perhaps there are more than one way in which to interpret certain concepts? Or maybe I'm interpreting your comment wrong?
  • lisper 5y ago
    > whether it is now or nearer to the heat death of the universe That makes a huge difference. Even having it wind down over a period of a few thousand years, or even a few hundred, would be a hell of a lot better than what is looking like the increasingly likely prospect of having it wind down in a few decades. That is going to cause an incalculable amount of pain.
• ripper1138 5y ago
  Stop reading all the sensationalized news about it. Wasn’t south Florida supposed to flood already?
  • cryptoz 5y ago
    South Florida floods constantly and the situation is getting worse year by year. Regular tides are now higher than ever and causing problems for residents. The creep is slow until it's not.
    • ripper1138 5y ago
      Sure it does. I meant literally underwater like redraw the maps cause the land is gone… that’s all I read/watched growing up.
      • nicoffeine 5y ago
        That's something that can certainly happen in the lifetime of my grandchildren, if I have any. The problem is that even a two or three foot rise in seas (the current projection for Miami in 2060) requires trillions of dollars across the world so sewage and other nice features of civilization continue to operate. The short term existential crisis is economic instability and mass migration leading to unpredictable warfare. The long term existential crisis is that south Florida really is gone along with the place where something like half of all humans live, the ocean life that supports billions of people dies out, and increasingly unpredictable weather patterns cause entire ecosystems to fail taking out huge chunks of humanity in addition to war over the remaining resources.
• Mikeb85 5y ago
  When I was in elementary school (early 90's) we were taught that half of New York would be underwater by 2020. Obviously didn't happen. Stop reading the news, they're fear-mongers and outlandish predictions have been happening for decades.
  • cryptoz 5y ago
    More than 50 people just died from flooding of hurricane remnant in the Northeast just a few days ago. And Sandy really did put lower Manhattan under water causing huge damage. More of that is coming.
    • Mikeb85 5y ago
      This is what I'm referring to: edit - a better link since someone didn't appreciate my google-fu: https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/544472-the-moving-targets-of-the-climate-change-movement https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/544472-the-mo... Stop moving goalposts. The media has a problem with peddling misinformation and shitty climate predictions.
      • TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
        You're quoting a site that talks about "pole shifts and earth changes" and complaining about misinformation and shitty predictions?
        • 55555 5y ago
          Go watch An Inconvenient Truth again.
        • Mikeb85 5y ago
          Honestly I simply can`t be bothered to search for a source that was in a newspaper and on TV 30 years ago. These predictions have been happening for a long time, I lived through them. I`m not a climate change denier, but shitty predictions definitely hurt the cause of legitimate concern. Here's another quick Google search from a (more?) legit site: https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/544472-the-moving-targets-of-the-climate-change-movement https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/544472-the-mo... Of course anyone in the Gen X/older millennial category should know what I'm talking about anyway (unless they slept through the first decade of their schooling).
• intuitionist 5y ago
  The near-term collapse of technological civilization has the silver lining that wild things will have a chance to recolonize the planet. The alternative—a world of ever increasing control and declining standard of living for almost everybody on behalf of a tiny few—is far more terrifying to me.
• fnord77 5y ago
  aren't you excited about having live through both the great rise of civilization and then also the biggest decline? you may have gotten to see the absolute peak of society.
  • lisper 5y ago
    You are absolutely right about seeing the rise of civilization. Being a witness to the development of personal computers and the internet has been an incomparable privilege. But no, I am not at all excited about seeing it come to an end. I'm a big fan of civilization. I'm quite certain that watching it wind down is not going to be fun at all.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• beervirus 5y ago
  Turn off the CNN.
  • avmich 5y ago
    Another advice reportedly from Texas, regarding fighting rising temperatures: just crank up the goddamn air conditioner. We had advices like that from former president. Ideas like "if you don't run testing for COVID, you don't have many positives" should surely be accepted enthusiastically on HN. /s Seriously, why it should matter if CNN talks about that or not? Don't facts rule, and rule pretty assertively here?
    • BoHerfIVJrEsq 5y ago
      If facts ruled, we'd all keep in mind that the 1930s were much hotter than now, which is very inconvenient for the CO2 hypothesis. Facts don't rule. Fear rules. Fear instilled by ceaseless propaganda.
• strken 5y ago
  I'm not convinced that climate change has a high probability of ending technological civilisation[0]. Even large-scale climate wars might not end it. The scenarios that fall short of ending civilisation, e.g. losing hundreds of millions of lives to famine or war, are obviously still very bad. This is not to downplay climate change in the slightest. It's just... at some point, people start dying, and that frees up ecological carrying capacity again. You need to make pessimistic assumptions about a lot of positive feedback loops in ecological and social collapse to predict that all human civilisation is going to be wiped out in the sense of regressing back to before the industrial revolution. [0] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/13/18660548/climate-change-human-civilization-existential-risk https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/13/18660548/climat...
  • lisper 5y ago
    Global famine won't end civilization directly, but it might spark WW3, and that would do it.
    • arcanon 5y ago
      This guy gets it. Global warming is scary because of nukes. The timeline till we get widespread crop problems is 15-20 years.
      • lisper 5y ago
        I can't tell if you are being serious, but just to be clear: I do not think that climate change is "scary because of nukes". Climate change is scary in its own right. Global famine is going to be very unpleasant whether or not it sparks WW3. But we do have nukes, and nukes + climate change could bring about the end of civilization in my lifetime with probability much greater than zero. And, what is scariest of all, most people's behavior indicates that this possibility is not even on their radar screens. Most people are still behaving as if the really serious shit is several generations away. It's not. The wolf is at the door, as you say, much closer to 10 years than 100.
        • 5y ago
• civilized 5y ago
  Climate change is bad but technological collapse doomerism is completely unsupported by science. People like the romance of dramatic and exciting extremes, of paradise and apocalypse. The mundane probability of having to adapt to somewhat worse conditions isn't that entertaining.
  • lisper 5y ago
    Look up "blue ocean event". The BOE could lead to the loss of the jet stream in 10-20 years. After that, God only knows what is going to happen. The really big problem is that we won't know where the rain will fall, and so we won't know where to plant, and so we could have global famine. If you think covid was bad, you ain't seen nuthin'. And even that will not necessarily lead directly to the collapse of civilization, but I'm not optimistic about the ability of our political leaders to handle the situation gracefully and without starting WW3.
    • frabbit 5y ago
      Exactly: our civilization, comfort, enjoyment and ease is built upon the relatively predictable and stable weather patterns. Why would anyone take the risk of messing with that? It's as though they assume that there will be generalized devastation but there will be some "safe place" which some powerful group can defend and use. Instead it's possible that maybe for one year New Zealand will be great, but then there will be no rain for 10 years, while previously uninhabitable Brighton (UK) will be a lush, tropical paradise for a couple of decades. Everyone will haul their gear to Brighton and massacre the indigenous, but then everything will change again, etc. Or we could stop driving 2000Kg of metal to get to our jobs or buy a bag of chips and keep all the tourists at home that are destroying Venice and leaving their feces and plastic containers all over the Himalayas.
      • SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
        The reason people find this line of argument frustrating is that it's always presented in a weird, dismissive tone which makes it clear you already didn't like the things you're proposing to get rid of. If you want to persuade people who are attached to their 2000Kgs of metal, it'll be more productive to include some examples of things you'll have to give up even though you like them.
• moistly 5y ago
  54 and likewise. I've been aware of IPCC reports for a couple decades now, just kind of monitoring what they've been saying and noticing that more often than not, the media reports only the best-case scenarios while at the same time the worst-case scenarios are actually what's come to pass and much more quickly than expected. The denialism in this thread baffles the hell out of me.