9 ms·

The Disappearing Doomsday

36 points by Hooke 4y ago

rob74 4y ago
Interesting that the subtitle on the cover shown beside the article is "How the Media Stopped Worrying about Climate Change", while that of the actual web article is "How the climate catastrophists learned to stop worrying...". Still, I don't think >[...] the banal (palm trees growing in London, wind turbines off Coney Island) to the bleak (bleached coral reefs, desertification) to the already happening (a line of silhouetted migrants fleeing their homelands). and other such quotes justify drawing a smiley on the globe, maybe a "neutral face" emoji...
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
I don't really understand the point this is trying to make. It's saying climate catastrophe journalism was overblown (apparently starting in 2016 when Trump was elected?) but that now it's gone too far the other way, and is too optimistic because our already achieved level of warming is going to lead to some bad stuff. But given the many feedback loops involved, and the uncertaintities of prediction, I don't see how the catastrophes can be considered not in line with the science? They're still a possibility if we hit tipping points.
- neovialogistics 4y ago
  According to the IPCC's sixth assessment report avoiding catastrophes is the unlikely possibility. Heck, just this month the Argentinian heatwave has cut their wheat and soybean harvests by almost a third. Edit: Corn, too.
  - adamrezich 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - neovialogistics 4y ago
      Strawman of some kind, so I'm not gonna give you an in-depth response. Across all of the possible temperature distributions that Earth's surface could have, there is some temperature distribution that is optimal for the flourishing of human civilization as we know it. The Earth has been, in the recent past, fairly close to that distribution but one of the consequences of changing the CO2 fraction of the atmosphere from around 0.025% to well over 0.04% is a change in albedo that changes Earth's surface temperature distribution towards an equilibrium that is not remotely near the optimum.
      - adamrezich 4y ago
        where's the strawman? you said that a heatwave ruined crops in Argentina, and it logically follows that said heatwave is the direct result of human actions negatively affecting the planet's climate, as it's the only possible cause of such a disastrous event.
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    Crop yields have been on a century long increase (we produce about 5x more corn per acre than 100 years ago) in part due to CO2 fertilization, in part due to improvements in technology: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth/ https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer... https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/US_Corn_Yld_Trend.png https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/US... https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/soyyld.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/soyyld... You'll notice from the charts year to year variability happens (droughts, heat waves, freezes, etc) but the long term trend is up and to the right.
    - ratboy666 4y ago
      Thank you. And... as a note. The following statement has been down-modded in the past (this is truly an "uncomfortable truth"): If we go with no-CO2/no fossil fuel policy, we will reduce farming production, leading to famine and the likely death of (many) people. Of interest is that solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear cannot help.
wittenbunk 4y ago
Maybe I'm too cynical, but this type of 'climate optimism' sounds like green washed vaporware.
Animats 4y ago
Other than many of the equatorial areas of the planet becoming too hot for agriculture and life, and most of the river deltas being flooded, what's the problem? The huge increase in immigrants to the US from central America is driven by climate change. Agriculture there can't feed the people there any more.[1] [1] https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/06/1120312 https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/06/1120312
- southernplaces7 4y ago
  I call bullshit on this. It has become de jure to claim that just about any migration from the developing world to the north is due to climate change for all sorts of convoluted reasons, but the patterns of migration from many developing countries have far too many variables for anyone to assert that. Among these variables are also trends in terrible government, horrible land policies and infrastructure problems that make certain industries in which millions work unsustainable. All of these are human problems of politics instead of literal climate and all of them could even benefit from more development, instead of hand waving about climate change to fit a fashionable narrative. Your own link references several very human, very global political trends that have little or nothing to do with climate change as being responsible for central american migration. It doesn't reference any literal notable climate changes that somehow made agriculture in central america worse. I'm not saying that climate change has nothing to do with migration in the world, but to call it a main cause is tenuous in the extreme and dishonestly symptomatic of flogging this specific thing in all contexts to the point of just making absurd arguments..
  - Animats 4y ago
    See these graphs from Pew Research.[1] "Encounters (Border Patrol/ICE) soared in fiscal 2021 for some countries that have not historically been common sources of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border. The number of encounters involving people from Ecuador, for example, increased more than eightfold, from 11,861 in fiscal 2020 to 95,692 in fiscal 2021. There were also stark increases in encounters involving people from Brazil (from 6,946 to 56,735), Nicaragua (from 2,123 to 49,841), Venezuela (from 1,227 to 47,752), Haiti (from 4,395 to 45,532) and Cuba (from 9,822 to 38,139)." Some of that is political, but those are all different countries. All are near the equator. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/09/whats-happening-at-the-u-s-mexico-border-in-7-charts/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/09/whats-happe...
Animats 4y ago
This is the "declare a victory and go home" approach to losing that's become too popular. That term comes from the Vietnam war, and more recently applies to Afghanistan, COVID, and now, perhaps, global warming.
- xnx 4y ago
  e.g. "Mission Accomplished"
  - readthenotes1 4y ago
    didnt greta take down her tweet saying we only had until 2023 or it would be too late?
- taylodl 4y ago
  Misplaced optimism is deadly. Climate change is one area where we're in dire need of realists. 1. People need to be aware of the science of climate change. Some of it is quite basic and has been known since the 19th century. 2. People need to be aware of the largest CO2 sources. 3. People need to be aware of human psychology and how people respond to threats. To wit, look what happened with toilet paper during the pandemic. Anybody who has spent any time studying people knew that was totally predictable - yet the people who should have known better seem to have been taken by surprise by so many people buying years' worth of toilet paper. 4. Likewise, people need to be aware of how civilization works. How have civilizations collapsed before? What were the causes of collapse? How did human psychology expedite the collapse? How did human psychology ensure the collapse couldn't be avoided? 5. Finally, what are the causes of war? There's a high probability the "declare a victory and go home" crowd are going to be caught off-guard. Even worse, their kids and grandkids are going to take the brunt of their wishful thinking. Global warming isn't likely to end the human race (sure, there's always the chance, but it's not likely). What's far more likely is the civilization we know today will undergo a dramatic, i.e. stressful for everyone involved, change. It may even be a change for the better (okay, now my optimism is showing!). But we're just fooling ourselves if we think the change won't have significant impacts to everyone enduring it. There may be a light at the end of the tunnel but not everybody is going to make it through the tunnel. That's the hard reality we face.
bjornsing 4y ago
> In the following months, a new mode of environmental reporting bloomed: the age of climate optimism was upon us. Elizabeth Weil captured the shift in a 2022 New York magazine story… This is not something I recognize here in Sweden. Here the doom and gloom has only intensified over the last few years.
Zigurd 4y ago
Whoa that's a lot of words to say "Hey! Complacency is bad." Considering the outcomes fall in the range of catastrophe to even more catastrophe, and considering the horrifyingly high rate of climate change means all the surprises are likely to be downside surprises, why bother relitigating "catastrophists?"
adamwong246 4y ago
As ever, our shortsightedness is our undoing. The media stopped covering when it stopped being profitable to do so, which is precisely what motivated us to dump gigatons of carbon into our atmosphere to begin with. And it seems no one can make any efforts to halt the damage, unless, of course, it is justified in profit. It all paints a grim portrait of our species.
realreality 4y ago
Journalists with cushy jobs and comfortable urban lifestyles are grappling with cognitive dissonance. They know that proper mitigation would spell the end of their comforts (no more flying, for instance), but they can’t bring themselves to admit it to the public.
newaccount2023 4y ago
[dead]
mbgerring 4y ago
This is maddening to read. The science has not changed. What has changed is that an enormous amount of effort to transition society away from fossil fuels has accelerated in the last decade, and because of that, we have bent the curve on future emissions such that RCP8.5 is no longer “business as usual.” This is very much a scenario like the Y2K problem — if the doomsday scenario does not occur it will be because people dug in and did the hard work to avoid it. Clueless people like the author of this article, who apparently only experience the very real crisis of climate change as a media spectacle, will continue making dumb comments like “ha ha, remember when those dumb scientists said the sky was falling?” all along the way to eventual drawdown of CO2, while those of us engaged in the problem are up to our necks in the muck, actually doing the work.
- titzer 4y ago
  I mostly agree with your comment, but I don't think we've really "bent the curve" all that much. RCP8.5 was always the highest accelerating emission scenario, not BAU (flat or low emissions growth). In fact, global emissions of CO2 have never been higher, and are still growing. The world is by no means "transitioning away from fossil fuels". We're tracking towards the middle or high middle of the emissions scenarios. We're still not pointed the right direction.
  - titzer 4y ago
    Just for context, to justify my above comment, according to [1], 2022 emissions were, as expected, a record high, but grew less than normal, partly due to Ukraine and other energy crises. Of the 37 gigatons of CO2 output, about 0.5 of additional emissions were avoided by having renewables. That's less than 2%. Also worrying is that coal emissions actually started growing again. [1] https://www.iea.org/reports/co2-emissions-in-2022 https://www.iea.org/reports/co2-emissions-in-2022
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - Shaggy2000 4y ago
DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
Climate doomerism (on full display in these comments) is an incredibly toxic form of brain rot. These people literally and earnestly believe we are on a path towards extinction, and most believe it’ll happen in their lifetimes. It’s completely unhinged.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  > These people literally and earnestly believe we are on a path towards extinction There might be a few people who believe that. However, a little coaxing and question asking will bring most people around to understanding that we're merely severely fucked. Even this minor step then admits to the possibility of some mitigation, and that's a good thing. Climate change is not going to wipe out humanity or life on earth. It could, however, completely reset or destroy what we currently consider "civilization", and for most people (especially those who particularly enjoy the comforts of said "civilization") there may not be not be much of a distinction between that an extinction. In addition, while losing only 1-2B people due to climate change is a far cry from human extinction, it is still a very big number. Even 400M would still be a very big number, with very substantial consequences for migration, resource control etc. You think people living in the tropic-to-tropic latitudes are going to just sit back while the outer latitudes live it up? I don't think so. As for the timeline, that's always hard to say, but I'm almost 60 and I find it likely I'll see some severe disruption in the tropic-to-tropic zone before I'm done with this mortal coil.
  - realreality 4y ago
    Climate change is just one aspect of the problem of ecological overshoot. The biodiversity crisis is a bigger deal, but it receives very little attention. Global industrial civilization is driving the sixth mass extinction on earth. Every species that goes extinct is gone, forever. If you’re a member of one of those species (or depend on them for your survival), it’s an existential problem.
- XorNot 4y ago
  No one believes it's human extinction. That's fiction which only exists for comments which try to dismiss the problem by an Argument from Incredulity fallacy (using a strawman to support it).
realworldperson 4y ago
[dead]
the_third_wave 4y ago
The climate boogeyman is starting to get less scary by the day which has led to it losing its effectiveness as a policy stick to prod the populace with. There have just been too many dire warnings, too many cries of the wolf coming to the door without the beast showing up. Whatever the climate will do is just too abstract, too far away and too big for any single individual to feel he or she has any influence over it. This is not changed by yet another scary report from the IPCC nor by yet even more dire predictions of coastal flooding, equatorial roasting and other doomsday foretellings. This has led to some politicians setting the climate stick aside to reach for another one, e.g. in the Netherlands 'climate' has had to make way for 'nitrogen' as the main cause for our coming demise. Seeing how as cows farting methane did not rile up the populace enough to force the farmers to get rid of the beasts - they like their cheese and milk after all and feel some national pride in the farmer's prowess in producing ever more of it - politicians in need of a stick thought to have found one in the fact that they not only fart methane but also dump a significant amount of nitrogen [1] - i.e. 'fertiliser' - in the soil and air. And lo, the more you look, the more nitrogen you find, nitrous oxides produced by internal combustion engines (including jet engines) being a major source. With this new-found stick they started whipping up the populace, this time they really meant it, cows-be-gone and don't you dare build a house because that involves diesel-driven machinery which would exceed the nitrogen budget for the area [2]. It seems though that the population, tired of yet another doomsday scare, is not planning on cooperating [3] this time. What is a politician to do when not even a good righteous scare can push the voters in the desired direction? [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Estimated_nitrogen_surplus_across_Europe_2005.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Estimate... [2] https://nos.nl/artikel/2436935-juristen-voorzien-bouwstop-na-de-zomer-door-verwachte-stikstofuitspraak https://nos.nl/artikel/2436935-juristen-voorzien-bouwstop-na... [3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-64967513 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-64967513

36 points by Hooke 4y ago

Interesting that the subtitle on the cover shown beside the article is "How the Media Stopped Worrying about Climate Change", while that of the actual web article is "How the climate catastrophists learned to stop worrying...". Still, I don't think >[...] the banal (palm trees growing in London, wind turbines off Coney Island) to the bleak (bleached coral reefs, desertification) to the already happening (a line of silhouetted migrants fleeing their homelands). and other such quotes justify drawing a smiley on the globe, maybe a "neutral face" emoji...

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

I don't really understand the point this is trying to make. It's saying climate catastrophe journalism was overblown (apparently starting in 2016 when Trump was elected?) but that now it's gone too far the other way, and is too optimistic because our already achieved level of warming is going to lead to some bad stuff. But given the many feedback loops involved, and the uncertaintities of prediction, I don't see how the catastrophes can be considered not in line with the science? They're still a possibility if we hit tipping points.

neovialogistics 4y ago
According to the IPCC's sixth assessment report avoiding catastrophes is the unlikely possibility. Heck, just this month the Argentinian heatwave has cut their wheat and soybean harvests by almost a third. Edit: Corn, too.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - neovialogistics 4y ago
    Strawman of some kind, so I'm not gonna give you an in-depth response. Across all of the possible temperature distributions that Earth's surface could have, there is some temperature distribution that is optimal for the flourishing of human civilization as we know it. The Earth has been, in the recent past, fairly close to that distribution but one of the consequences of changing the CO2 fraction of the atmosphere from around 0.025% to well over 0.04% is a change in albedo that changes Earth's surface temperature distribution towards an equilibrium that is not remotely near the optimum.
    - adamrezich 4y ago
      where's the strawman? you said that a heatwave ruined crops in Argentina, and it logically follows that said heatwave is the direct result of human actions negatively affecting the planet's climate, as it's the only possible cause of such a disastrous event.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  Crop yields have been on a century long increase (we produce about 5x more corn per acre than 100 years ago) in part due to CO2 fertilization, in part due to improvements in technology: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth/ https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer... https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/US_Corn_Yld_Trend.png https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/US... https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/soyyld.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/soyyld... You'll notice from the charts year to year variability happens (droughts, heat waves, freezes, etc) but the long term trend is up and to the right.
  - ratboy666 4y ago
    Thank you. And... as a note. The following statement has been down-modded in the past (this is truly an "uncomfortable truth"): If we go with no-CO2/no fossil fuel policy, we will reduce farming production, leading to famine and the likely death of (many) people. Of interest is that solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear cannot help.

wittenbunk 4y ago

Maybe I'm too cynical, but this type of 'climate optimism' sounds like green washed vaporware.

Animats 4y ago

Other than many of the equatorial areas of the planet becoming too hot for agriculture and life, and most of the river deltas being flooded, what's the problem? The huge increase in immigrants to the US from central America is driven by climate change. Agriculture there can't feed the people there any more.[1] [1] https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/06/1120312 https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/06/1120312

southernplaces7 4y ago
I call bullshit on this. It has become de jure to claim that just about any migration from the developing world to the north is due to climate change for all sorts of convoluted reasons, but the patterns of migration from many developing countries have far too many variables for anyone to assert that. Among these variables are also trends in terrible government, horrible land policies and infrastructure problems that make certain industries in which millions work unsustainable. All of these are human problems of politics instead of literal climate and all of them could even benefit from more development, instead of hand waving about climate change to fit a fashionable narrative. Your own link references several very human, very global political trends that have little or nothing to do with climate change as being responsible for central american migration. It doesn't reference any literal notable climate changes that somehow made agriculture in central america worse. I'm not saying that climate change has nothing to do with migration in the world, but to call it a main cause is tenuous in the extreme and dishonestly symptomatic of flogging this specific thing in all contexts to the point of just making absurd arguments..
- Animats 4y ago
  See these graphs from Pew Research.[1] "Encounters (Border Patrol/ICE) soared in fiscal 2021 for some countries that have not historically been common sources of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border. The number of encounters involving people from Ecuador, for example, increased more than eightfold, from 11,861 in fiscal 2020 to 95,692 in fiscal 2021. There were also stark increases in encounters involving people from Brazil (from 6,946 to 56,735), Nicaragua (from 2,123 to 49,841), Venezuela (from 1,227 to 47,752), Haiti (from 4,395 to 45,532) and Cuba (from 9,822 to 38,139)." Some of that is political, but those are all different countries. All are near the equator. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/09/whats-happening-at-the-u-s-mexico-border-in-7-charts/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/09/whats-happe...

Animats 4y ago

This is the "declare a victory and go home" approach to losing that's become too popular. That term comes from the Vietnam war, and more recently applies to Afghanistan, COVID, and now, perhaps, global warming.

xnx 4y ago
e.g. "Mission Accomplished"
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  didnt greta take down her tweet saying we only had until 2023 or it would be too late?
taylodl 4y ago
Misplaced optimism is deadly. Climate change is one area where we're in dire need of realists. 1. People need to be aware of the science of climate change. Some of it is quite basic and has been known since the 19th century. 2. People need to be aware of the largest CO2 sources. 3. People need to be aware of human psychology and how people respond to threats. To wit, look what happened with toilet paper during the pandemic. Anybody who has spent any time studying people knew that was totally predictable - yet the people who should have known better seem to have been taken by surprise by so many people buying years' worth of toilet paper. 4. Likewise, people need to be aware of how civilization works. How have civilizations collapsed before? What were the causes of collapse? How did human psychology expedite the collapse? How did human psychology ensure the collapse couldn't be avoided? 5. Finally, what are the causes of war? There's a high probability the "declare a victory and go home" crowd are going to be caught off-guard. Even worse, their kids and grandkids are going to take the brunt of their wishful thinking. Global warming isn't likely to end the human race (sure, there's always the chance, but it's not likely). What's far more likely is the civilization we know today will undergo a dramatic, i.e. stressful for everyone involved, change. It may even be a change for the better (okay, now my optimism is showing!). But we're just fooling ourselves if we think the change won't have significant impacts to everyone enduring it. There may be a light at the end of the tunnel but not everybody is going to make it through the tunnel. That's the hard reality we face.

bjornsing 4y ago

> In the following months, a new mode of environmental reporting bloomed: the age of climate optimism was upon us. Elizabeth Weil captured the shift in a 2022 New York magazine story… This is not something I recognize here in Sweden. Here the doom and gloom has only intensified over the last few years.

Zigurd 4y ago

Whoa that's a lot of words to say "Hey! Complacency is bad." Considering the outcomes fall in the range of catastrophe to even more catastrophe, and considering the horrifyingly high rate of climate change means all the surprises are likely to be downside surprises, why bother relitigating "catastrophists?"

adamwong246 4y ago

As ever, our shortsightedness is our undoing. The media stopped covering when it stopped being profitable to do so, which is precisely what motivated us to dump gigatons of carbon into our atmosphere to begin with. And it seems no one can make any efforts to halt the damage, unless, of course, it is justified in profit. It all paints a grim portrait of our species.

realreality 4y ago

Journalists with cushy jobs and comfortable urban lifestyles are grappling with cognitive dissonance. They know that proper mitigation would spell the end of their comforts (no more flying, for instance), but they can’t bring themselves to admit it to the public.

newaccount2023 4y ago

[dead]

mbgerring 4y ago

This is maddening to read. The science has not changed. What has changed is that an enormous amount of effort to transition society away from fossil fuels has accelerated in the last decade, and because of that, we have bent the curve on future emissions such that RCP8.5 is no longer “business as usual.” This is very much a scenario like the Y2K problem — if the doomsday scenario does not occur it will be because people dug in and did the hard work to avoid it. Clueless people like the author of this article, who apparently only experience the very real crisis of climate change as a media spectacle, will continue making dumb comments like “ha ha, remember when those dumb scientists said the sky was falling?” all along the way to eventual drawdown of CO2, while those of us engaged in the problem are up to our necks in the muck, actually doing the work.

titzer 4y ago
I mostly agree with your comment, but I don't think we've really "bent the curve" all that much. RCP8.5 was always the highest accelerating emission scenario, not BAU (flat or low emissions growth). In fact, global emissions of CO2 have never been higher, and are still growing. The world is by no means "transitioning away from fossil fuels". We're tracking towards the middle or high middle of the emissions scenarios. We're still not pointed the right direction.
- titzer 4y ago
  Just for context, to justify my above comment, according to [1], 2022 emissions were, as expected, a record high, but grew less than normal, partly due to Ukraine and other energy crises. Of the 37 gigatons of CO2 output, about 0.5 of additional emissions were avoided by having renewables. That's less than 2%. Also worrying is that coal emissions actually started growing again. [1] https://www.iea.org/reports/co2-emissions-in-2022 https://www.iea.org/reports/co2-emissions-in-2022
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Shaggy2000 4y ago

DoneWithAllThat 4y ago

Climate doomerism (on full display in these comments) is an incredibly toxic form of brain rot. These people literally and earnestly believe we are on a path towards extinction, and most believe it’ll happen in their lifetimes. It’s completely unhinged.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
> These people literally and earnestly believe we are on a path towards extinction There might be a few people who believe that. However, a little coaxing and question asking will bring most people around to understanding that we're merely severely fucked. Even this minor step then admits to the possibility of some mitigation, and that's a good thing. Climate change is not going to wipe out humanity or life on earth. It could, however, completely reset or destroy what we currently consider "civilization", and for most people (especially those who particularly enjoy the comforts of said "civilization") there may not be not be much of a distinction between that an extinction. In addition, while losing only 1-2B people due to climate change is a far cry from human extinction, it is still a very big number. Even 400M would still be a very big number, with very substantial consequences for migration, resource control etc. You think people living in the tropic-to-tropic latitudes are going to just sit back while the outer latitudes live it up? I don't think so. As for the timeline, that's always hard to say, but I'm almost 60 and I find it likely I'll see some severe disruption in the tropic-to-tropic zone before I'm done with this mortal coil.
- realreality 4y ago
  Climate change is just one aspect of the problem of ecological overshoot. The biodiversity crisis is a bigger deal, but it receives very little attention. Global industrial civilization is driving the sixth mass extinction on earth. Every species that goes extinct is gone, forever. If you’re a member of one of those species (or depend on them for your survival), it’s an existential problem.
XorNot 4y ago
No one believes it's human extinction. That's fiction which only exists for comments which try to dismiss the problem by an Argument from Incredulity fallacy (using a strawman to support it).

realworldperson 4y ago

[dead]

the_third_wave 4y ago

The climate boogeyman is starting to get less scary by the day which has led to it losing its effectiveness as a policy stick to prod the populace with. There have just been too many dire warnings, too many cries of the wolf coming to the door without the beast showing up. Whatever the climate will do is just too abstract, too far away and too big for any single individual to feel he or she has any influence over it. This is not changed by yet another scary report from the IPCC nor by yet even more dire predictions of coastal flooding, equatorial roasting and other doomsday foretellings. This has led to some politicians setting the climate stick aside to reach for another one, e.g. in the Netherlands 'climate' has had to make way for 'nitrogen' as the main cause for our coming demise. Seeing how as cows farting methane did not rile up the populace enough to force the farmers to get rid of the beasts - they like their cheese and milk after all and feel some national pride in the farmer's prowess in producing ever more of it - politicians in need of a stick thought to have found one in the fact that they not only fart methane but also dump a significant amount of nitrogen [1] - i.e. 'fertiliser' - in the soil and air. And lo, the more you look, the more nitrogen you find, nitrous oxides produced by internal combustion engines (including jet engines) being a major source. With this new-found stick they started whipping up the populace, this time they really meant it, cows-be-gone and don't you dare build a house because that involves diesel-driven machinery which would exceed the nitrogen budget for the area [2]. It seems though that the population, tired of yet another doomsday scare, is not planning on cooperating [3] this time. What is a politician to do when not even a good righteous scare can push the voters in the desired direction? [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Estimated_nitrogen_surplus_across_Europe_2005.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Estimate... [2] https://nos.nl/artikel/2436935-juristen-voorzien-bouwstop-na-de-zomer-door-verwachte-stikstofuitspraak https://nos.nl/artikel/2436935-juristen-voorzien-bouwstop-na... [3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-64967513 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-64967513