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When will this torrent of panic porn related to 'climate' let off? Probably only when there is a more immediate, more tangible, more real threat to write about

When will this torrent of panic porn related to 'climate' let off? Probably only when there is a more immediate, more tangible, more real threat to write about - war, famine, pestilence and death come to mind and all seem to be champing at the bit to be let free. It is not as if the climate has been static during the evolution of Homo Sapiens and still we made it through, through the Roman and Viking warm periods, through the little ice age, through the volcanic winters of Tambora and Krakatoa, through the several plague epidemics, through the decimation of the population due to several famines, through the most recent glaciation and through the massive changes caused by the industrial revolution and - lo and behold - through the more intense warm period of the 1930's which (together with certain agricultural practices) gave rise to the Dust Bowl in the USA. Earth will abide. Mankind will abide. The climate will keep changing as it has always done. Some areas will become more amenable to agriculture, others will become less so. The planet will become greener due to the increased carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and later it will become more barren when the carbon dioxide content goes down again as it has done countless times already.

jiggywiggy 4y ago
To me it feels like a big grasp for meaning for many of the climate activists. Without religion or kids giving a reason to live, mostly living for oneself is very depressive. (I know also people with kids do this) Having a goal higher than yourself, especially that is of the highest moral purpose is very liberating. It comes at a cost though, reason goes out of the window. This doesn't mean there aren't real concern, but yeah the world is not ending.
- spicymaki 4y ago
  I question your premises: Why do you think all climate activists do not practice religion? Why do you think fighting for the environment is not part of a moral purpose? Why do you think climate activists lack a sense of meaning?
  - jiggywiggy 4y ago
    Because we all do.
mschuster91 4y ago
> Probably only when there is a more immediate, more tangible, more real threat to write about - war, famine, pestilence and death come to mind and all seem to be champing at the bit to be let free. And at that point, it will be far too late. Hell just look at France, Italy and Germany right now - France has had to cut output of their few remaining reactors that are not broken down because the rivers are too dry and hot to supply adequate cooling water, Germany's Rhine is almost incapable of letting ships float, meaning that the country's most important freight waterway is at 25% capacity and soon none at all, and in Italy the agricultural sector faces never-seen-before bad harvests due to the drought which is the hardest since 1800 [1] when the measurement of weather began. We are already in the catastrophic scenario, we can only hope and act to make it not worse than it already is - but without panic there won't be any change! [1] https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/das-schlaraffenland-verdurstet-132794156538 https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/das-schlaraffenland-verdurstet-...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
spaceman_2020 4y ago
> still we made it through, through the Roman and Viking warm periods Yes, but not 8 billion of us living in vast cities with 80+ year life expectancies. Are you prepared to live like a viking again?
- the_third_wave 4y ago
  Well, seeing as how I live on a 17th century farm in the Swedish countryside, heating the home with two wood-burning stoves and cooking on the same... Also, during the Viking age wine was made in Sweden. Greenland was called 'Greenland' because it was in actuality more green than it is now. When the warm period came to an end the settlements on Greenland were mostly abandoned, there were no more wine harvests in Sweden and eventually the world settled into the 'little ice age'. Realise also that cold weather kills far more people than warm weather does [1]: Cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather, according to an international study analyzing over 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries. The findings also reveal that deaths due to moderately hot or cold weather substantially exceed those resulting from extreme heat waves or cold spells. (source: The Lancet) [1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150520193831.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150520193831.h...
  - HidyBush 4y ago
    Yes, you are very lucky to live unbothered in a nice farm in an ideal place that with warmer climates will become even better agriculturally. Now, I don't know if you've noticed, but the world is not entirely made up if rural Sweden
    - the_third_wave 4y ago
      Of course I noticed. I noticed that the world has become a lot greener due to the increased CO₂ content in the atmosphere [1,2] which used to be seen as a good thing but somehow now is presented as a problem [3]. From Malthus to Gore, from the Silent Spring to Extinction Rebellion, eschatologists have been around for a long, very long time yet... Earth abides. Mankind abides. [1] https://blog.creaf.cat/en/noticies-en/the-world-has-become-greener-over-the-past-33-years/ https://blog.creaf.cat/en/noticies-en/the-world-has-become-g... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2019/02/28/nasa-says-earth-is-greener-today-than-20-years-ago-thanks-to-china-india/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2019/02/28/nasa-says... [3] https://grist.org/climate-energy/earth-is-getting-greener-heres-why-thats-a-problem/ https://grist.org/climate-energy/earth-is-getting-greener-he...
V__ 4y ago
These comments always remind me, that 'Don't look up' really did capture human ignorance pretty accurately.
kristiandupont 4y ago
I hear statements like this and I think about the Y2K problem. So many developers crunched ridiculous hours to fix all the bugs that were very real and would have had very real consequences. Miraculously, they managed to fix most of the severe issues so the world didn't suffer any serious damages. The aftermath was unbearable though, with all the "skeptics" gloating as they felt vindicated. "See, it was all a big hoax!" It wasn't, of course, but those people will never know otherwise. Now, the annoying part here is that this is the best case scenario for the climate as well. If mankind does in fact manage to turn around this massive force, people like you will simply be gloating and claiming that there was nothing to worry about in the first place.
- jiggywiggy 4y ago
  The reason this gets so much attention because it's hot to give as much drama to climate changes as possible. It's speculation on top of speculation on top of speculation. There are much bigger impacts than climate change on disease development, yet these hardly get the same attention.
- h0l0cube 4y ago
  What’s the name for this phenomenon where the greater the success, the less it’s appreciated?
  - blipvert 4y ago
    “Sysadmin”
  - the_third_wave 4y ago
    In the USA it is called the IRS, here in Sweden we call it Skatteverket, in the Netherlands it would be 'de belastingdienst'.
    - h0l0cube 4y ago
      Maybe 'its effect is understood, noticed and valued' is closer to my intention than 'appreciated'. As appreciation of something that is despised quickly hits a floor, it loses it's correlation, but not to the depth of its sarcastic potential as you've duly exploited.
bojangleslover 4y ago
Happens every summer
paganel 4y ago
Remember, “nothing will be the same as before” or “this is the new normal”, all things that turned out to be false but which were uttered relentlessly as the pandemic was starting. I’m blaming it on the good old Apocalyptic spirit that we’ve experienced since at least the Middle Ages, in the case of Global Warming we’ve even got our own Jeanne d’Arc in the person of Greta Thunberg.
GekkePrutser 4y ago
I agree that climate change is not an (human) extinction event like many people try to frame it. And yes climate change is a constant in history. However what is new is significant change in the timescale of a human life. Meaning we won't adapt gratefully as a society. Previously cities becoming uninhabitable would be abandoned slowly over the course of centuries. Now we will have a situation where a significant portion of the population will have to move in their lifetime. That's the kind of stuff that causes hostility and wars. And given how good we've become at mass-killing humans, that is a frightening prospect.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Uhm, there is an extinction event happening right now, and it is caused by human activity, partially by CO2 emissions. That's not just something people are saying, it's the scientific consensus.
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    None of the scientists say we'll be extinct. Some areas will become uninhabitable. Others will become more habitable. Humanity won't go extinct. Some other species will yes, but that was not what I meant. And we've made species extinct long before the industrial age :( I should have elaborated.
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
      Right. In biology, an extinction event is typically defined as a period with an increased overall rate of extinctions, irrespective of any one species. So that was the source of the confusion.
andrew_eit 4y ago
Have you ever played the factory building game "Factorio"? It's an amazing lesson in scale. In the early game, it's pretty easy to recover from supply chain issues and refactor your setup to adjust to your growth needs and expansion across the land. Once you reach mid to late game, and something goes wrong, your whole factory starts to grind to halt as you try to diagnose where in the whole system things have clogged up, you need to measure and monitor throughput to make sure you are producing the materials needed for consumption by other machines at a rate that is sustainable. Refactoring at this point really means shutting most of it down and building from the ground up again. Kind of like humanity 100s & 1000s of years ago. Most of life was localized, food, raw materials. We were not over fishing the seas or pushing the soils to the limit. The scale of humanity now, is such that all the supply chains, food and resource requirements depend on such a plethora of things running as they have been, uninterrupted (gas, food, water supplies, raw materials, spare parts). That is why this argument about "climate disasters in the past" really never made sense to me. This is an entirely different game. And yes, "humanity" may survive. But just like the factory that stops working that needs to be largely deconstructed and re-built, a lot of people will be unnecessarily plunged into hardship, famine and probably death. Economies and societies will be affected in ways we really can't imagine. The question then is, what will humanity and society look like after? And what will our successors and future generations think of their ancestors who had the time, knowledge and the technology to ease or circumvent their suffering.
rsynnott 4y ago
> still we made it through, through the Roman and Viking warm periods, through the little ice age, through the volcanic winters of Tambora and Krakatoa, through the several plague epidemics, [etc etc etc] I mean, humanity made it through. No-one is realistically concerned that global warming is going to entirely wipe out humanity. A lot of _people_ didn't make it through, though.
- agsnu 4y ago
  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/01/climate-endgame-risk-human-extinction-scientists-global-heating-catastrophe https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/01/climate-...

jiggywiggy 4y ago

To me it feels like a big grasp for meaning for many of the climate activists. Without religion or kids giving a reason to live, mostly living for oneself is very depressive. (I know also people with kids do this) Having a goal higher than yourself, especially that is of the highest moral purpose is very liberating. It comes at a cost though, reason goes out of the window. This doesn't mean there aren't real concern, but yeah the world is not ending.

spicymaki 4y ago
I question your premises: Why do you think all climate activists do not practice religion? Why do you think fighting for the environment is not part of a moral purpose? Why do you think climate activists lack a sense of meaning?
- jiggywiggy 4y ago
  Because we all do.

mschuster91 4y ago

> Probably only when there is a more immediate, more tangible, more real threat to write about - war, famine, pestilence and death come to mind and all seem to be champing at the bit to be let free. And at that point, it will be far too late. Hell just look at France, Italy and Germany right now - France has had to cut output of their few remaining reactors that are not broken down because the rivers are too dry and hot to supply adequate cooling water, Germany's Rhine is almost incapable of letting ships float, meaning that the country's most important freight waterway is at 25% capacity and soon none at all, and in Italy the agricultural sector faces never-seen-before bad harvests due to the drought which is the hardest since 1800 [1] when the measurement of weather began. We are already in the catastrophic scenario, we can only hope and act to make it not worse than it already is - but without panic there won't be any change! [1] https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/das-schlaraffenland-verdurstet-132794156538 https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/das-schlaraffenland-verdurstet-...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

spaceman_2020 4y ago

> still we made it through, through the Roman and Viking warm periods Yes, but not 8 billion of us living in vast cities with 80+ year life expectancies. Are you prepared to live like a viking again?

the_third_wave 4y ago
Well, seeing as how I live on a 17th century farm in the Swedish countryside, heating the home with two wood-burning stoves and cooking on the same... Also, during the Viking age wine was made in Sweden. Greenland was called 'Greenland' because it was in actuality more green than it is now. When the warm period came to an end the settlements on Greenland were mostly abandoned, there were no more wine harvests in Sweden and eventually the world settled into the 'little ice age'. Realise also that cold weather kills far more people than warm weather does [1]: Cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather, according to an international study analyzing over 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries. The findings also reveal that deaths due to moderately hot or cold weather substantially exceed those resulting from extreme heat waves or cold spells. (source: The Lancet) [1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150520193831.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150520193831.h...
- HidyBush 4y ago
  Yes, you are very lucky to live unbothered in a nice farm in an ideal place that with warmer climates will become even better agriculturally. Now, I don't know if you've noticed, but the world is not entirely made up if rural Sweden
  - the_third_wave 4y ago
    Of course I noticed. I noticed that the world has become a lot greener due to the increased CO₂ content in the atmosphere [1,2] which used to be seen as a good thing but somehow now is presented as a problem [3]. From Malthus to Gore, from the Silent Spring to Extinction Rebellion, eschatologists have been around for a long, very long time yet... Earth abides. Mankind abides. [1] https://blog.creaf.cat/en/noticies-en/the-world-has-become-greener-over-the-past-33-years/ https://blog.creaf.cat/en/noticies-en/the-world-has-become-g... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2019/02/28/nasa-says-earth-is-greener-today-than-20-years-ago-thanks-to-china-india/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2019/02/28/nasa-says... [3] https://grist.org/climate-energy/earth-is-getting-greener-heres-why-thats-a-problem/ https://grist.org/climate-energy/earth-is-getting-greener-he...

V__ 4y ago

These comments always remind me, that 'Don't look up' really did capture human ignorance pretty accurately.

kristiandupont 4y ago

I hear statements like this and I think about the Y2K problem. So many developers crunched ridiculous hours to fix all the bugs that were very real and would have had very real consequences. Miraculously, they managed to fix most of the severe issues so the world didn't suffer any serious damages. The aftermath was unbearable though, with all the "skeptics" gloating as they felt vindicated. "See, it was all a big hoax!" It wasn't, of course, but those people will never know otherwise. Now, the annoying part here is that this is the best case scenario for the climate as well. If mankind does in fact manage to turn around this massive force, people like you will simply be gloating and claiming that there was nothing to worry about in the first place.

jiggywiggy 4y ago
The reason this gets so much attention because it's hot to give as much drama to climate changes as possible. It's speculation on top of speculation on top of speculation. There are much bigger impacts than climate change on disease development, yet these hardly get the same attention.
h0l0cube 4y ago
What’s the name for this phenomenon where the greater the success, the less it’s appreciated?
- blipvert 4y ago
  “Sysadmin”
- the_third_wave 4y ago
  In the USA it is called the IRS, here in Sweden we call it Skatteverket, in the Netherlands it would be 'de belastingdienst'.
  - h0l0cube 4y ago
    Maybe 'its effect is understood, noticed and valued' is closer to my intention than 'appreciated'. As appreciation of something that is despised quickly hits a floor, it loses it's correlation, but not to the depth of its sarcastic potential as you've duly exploited.

bojangleslover 4y ago

Happens every summer

paganel 4y ago

Remember, “nothing will be the same as before” or “this is the new normal”, all things that turned out to be false but which were uttered relentlessly as the pandemic was starting. I’m blaming it on the good old Apocalyptic spirit that we’ve experienced since at least the Middle Ages, in the case of Global Warming we’ve even got our own Jeanne d’Arc in the person of Greta Thunberg.

GekkePrutser 4y ago

I agree that climate change is not an (human) extinction event like many people try to frame it. And yes climate change is a constant in history. However what is new is significant change in the timescale of a human life. Meaning we won't adapt gratefully as a society. Previously cities becoming uninhabitable would be abandoned slowly over the course of centuries. Now we will have a situation where a significant portion of the population will have to move in their lifetime. That's the kind of stuff that causes hostility and wars. And given how good we've become at mass-killing humans, that is a frightening prospect.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
Uhm, there is an extinction event happening right now, and it is caused by human activity, partially by CO2 emissions. That's not just something people are saying, it's the scientific consensus.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  None of the scientists say we'll be extinct. Some areas will become uninhabitable. Others will become more habitable. Humanity won't go extinct. Some other species will yes, but that was not what I meant. And we've made species extinct long before the industrial age :( I should have elaborated.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    Right. In biology, an extinction event is typically defined as a period with an increased overall rate of extinctions, irrespective of any one species. So that was the source of the confusion.

andrew_eit 4y ago

Have you ever played the factory building game "Factorio"? It's an amazing lesson in scale. In the early game, it's pretty easy to recover from supply chain issues and refactor your setup to adjust to your growth needs and expansion across the land. Once you reach mid to late game, and something goes wrong, your whole factory starts to grind to halt as you try to diagnose where in the whole system things have clogged up, you need to measure and monitor throughput to make sure you are producing the materials needed for consumption by other machines at a rate that is sustainable. Refactoring at this point really means shutting most of it down and building from the ground up again. Kind of like humanity 100s & 1000s of years ago. Most of life was localized, food, raw materials. We were not over fishing the seas or pushing the soils to the limit. The scale of humanity now, is such that all the supply chains, food and resource requirements depend on such a plethora of things running as they have been, uninterrupted (gas, food, water supplies, raw materials, spare parts). That is why this argument about "climate disasters in the past" really never made sense to me. This is an entirely different game. And yes, "humanity" may survive. But just like the factory that stops working that needs to be largely deconstructed and re-built, a lot of people will be unnecessarily plunged into hardship, famine and probably death. Economies and societies will be affected in ways we really can't imagine. The question then is, what will humanity and society look like after? And what will our successors and future generations think of their ancestors who had the time, knowledge and the technology to ease or circumvent their suffering.

rsynnott 4y ago

> still we made it through, through the Roman and Viking warm periods, through the little ice age, through the volcanic winters of Tambora and Krakatoa, through the several plague epidemics, [etc etc etc] I mean, humanity made it through. No-one is realistically concerned that global warming is going to entirely wipe out humanity. A lot of _people_ didn't make it through, though.

agsnu 4y ago
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/01/climate-endgame-risk-human-extinction-scientists-global-heating-catastrophe https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/01/climate-...