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Just to levy a single criticism among several: I find Haidt’s rebuttal of the climate change hypothesis unconvincing: fears around climate change are not “energ

Just to levy a single criticism among several: I find Haidt’s rebuttal of the climate change hypothesis unconvincing: fears around climate change are not “energizing” in the way that prior crises are, in a significant part because public sentiment around climate change is that we’re already doomed in a way that isn’t really possible with social crises. Similarly: I don’t think most teenage girls were voraciously reading Al Gore in the 1990s; extensive public awareness of climate change doesn’t imply a disproportionate impact on youth, especially when we consider that more extreme weather events (and their reporting) began in the mid-late 2000s. I think Haidt could probably make his argument stronger if he discussed social media as an accelerant, rather than a cause in and of itself. I can’t think of any real reason why he doesn’t (it makes his argument strictly stronger, and results in the same conclusions) other than ideological ones: he’s too baked into his incestuous “heterodox” world to weaken his claims.

ThomPete 4y ago
Climate change is now climate catastrophism. It's unfortunately many times more doomer today than ever. And while climate itself is not energizing, "doing something about it to save the world' is because it's simple even if it's in-effective. A phenomena like Greta Thunberg wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for that. And wind and solar and tesla and other avenue that doesn't really do anything other than let us waste a lot of money on ineffective things.
- etrautmann 4y ago
  Sorry what? How do renewable energy sources not do anything? The problem is multifaceted abs requires advances in many areas. A thousand partial solutions. Absolutism and cynicism aren’t helpful.
  - ThomPete 4y ago
    Wind and solar the two darlings of climate catastrophists is less than 3% of the worlds energy consumption and they will not be able to help getting the 3 billion people who uses less energy than a US fridge per year into the modern era. Fossile fuels is not going anywhere as it's used for the 4 pillars of modern society, steel, fertilizers, concrete and plastic for which there is no realistic alternative. Wind and solar isn't advances, they are regressive technologies that themselves require fossile fuel to even become a reality and still keeps us with our intermittency issues. Keep in mind that only 20% of a countrys energy consumption is electricity. The only big breakthroughs that matter with energy and can work at scale would be things like fusion and molten salt generators. Making our energy grid more and more fragile by pushing wind and solar is what isn't helpful.
    - jackmott42 4y ago
      If there is no alternative for concrete, plastic, fertilizers, and steel, then don't you think we ought to quit burning them for cars and electricty Thom? You have gone so typically and boring boomer contrarian you aren't even making sense, as is normal.
      - ThomPete 4y ago
        Whether you can make sense of what I am writing is out of my control. However there is nothing in what I said that isn't factually correct. If that makes me boomer contrarian the so be it.
    - jterrys 4y ago
      Considering that: The U.S by itself consumes and pollutes an excessive amount even proportionally compared to China, there's definite optimizations in consumption patterns that can be made to reduce total overall carbon footprint. Plastics are still everywhere and recycling is considered a scam here. It's done so by design by oil companies. Yes, every single Styrofoam takeout container accumulates waste, especially for a country so prone on eating out. I get bottles of Mexican coke that show clear signs of wear and multiple usage in Mexico...only to finally end up on American store shelves were they'll be dumped in the trash like everything else here because nobody bothers with glass recycling bottles. Recycling plants are zoned out because the only people even bothering to return plastic bottles for 5 cents in a handful of states are the homeless, and even for them it's barely worth the fucking effort. The amount of car traffic in America is ludicrous and an endemic problem of poor, lobbied city design. This country had better public transit that was muscled out by automobile lobbyists, some of which actually privatized the transit and let the infrastructure die. Asphalt retains heat, and every new damn road built is a contributor to making the world just a little bit more warmer than it used to be. China is a leading adopter of rail commuting and freight transport. We're twiddling our thumbs and letting our rail networks deteriorate and become unusable, because its cheaper to move less material over trucks. These are just two simple examples. There's no zero sum result of completely eliminating plastics, but we can definitely consume much less. But we don't. Because we are lazy. Instead we exploit pollution loopholes where we classify SUVs as light work trucks so they don't have to conform to strict emission standards. This is why Ford cut down most of its car production lines in the U.S and almost exclusively focuses on trucks for their consumer market, and why increasingly more cars on road today are arguably less safer SUVs
  - frostburg 4y ago
    OP probably means that we should focus on infrastructure like dams and nuclear power, to mitigate the at this point probably unavoidable damage. There should be less emphasis on policing individual behaviour (turn the AC down etc.), which is arguably almost completely a distraction from quantitatively relevant issues and provides cover from political inaction.
- jackmott42 4y ago
  Figure heads for causes like Greta aren't a new thing, sir.
  - ThomPete 4y ago
    agree, whats your point?
    - jackmott42 4y ago
      That phenomena like Greta are possible all the time in all kinds of situations
- 1827162 4y ago
  It appears to me that fears over catastrophic climate change are yet another moral panic. Amplified by social media this time. As with other moral panics (e.g. child abductions, pedophilia), the problem exists, but is blown way out of proportion by the media. In reality, I believe there of course will be changes in the weather patterns due to a relatively small increase in temperature, but it's not going to be the end of the world and there certainly won't be any mass drought or famine from the change. I kind of intuitively know this, and mostly disregard the opinions of those saying that there is impending doom. As I have likely seen this type of hysteria play out before in my life many times already. It will be interesting to see if I'm right about it or not, over the coming decades...
  - Paul-Craft 4y ago
    I'm not sure what the source of your doubt here is. There is piles and piles of evidence that we are in for a world of hurt in the coming several decades.
    - ThomPete 4y ago
      No there isn't. There isn't a single scientifically proven consequence of climate change we don't know how to deal with.
      - Paul-Craft 4y ago
        That's a big claim. Too big to assert without evidence. Got any?
        ThomPete 4y ago
        Well provide me with a scientifically proven consequence of climate change and I will tell you how we deal with it.
  - simiones 4y ago
    > I kind of intuitively know this, and mostly disregard the opinions of those saying that there is impending doom. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/truthiness https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/truthiness > It will be interesting to see if I'm right about it or not, over the coming decades... You are wrong. No need to wait, the effects are already starting to be visible.
- MisterBastahrd 4y ago
  If we weren't pulling oil out of the ground from the sea floor then my old fishing haunts would be available to me today and people wouldn't be worried about stepping into BP-branded tar balls that routinely roll up onto the beaches. There's more to climate change than wind, solar, and tesla.
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
The whole activism thing doesent do a lot anymore, since the social plaza belongs to cooperate and the state, and activism was shown to be easy exhaustable compared to the endurance of lobbyism aka cooperate activism. Future frustrated voices will turn straight to violence and skip this unproducitve state of affairs.
- donkeyd 4y ago
  > the social plaza belongs to cooperate and the state I think it's too easy to just blame corporations and governments for this. They are definitely part in this, but a large part of lack of activism around climate change is also the people themselves who don't want to change. The Netherlands is a great example where, in recent elections, nearly half of votes went to political parties that want to reduce response to climate change and other environmental issues. For many people its easy to be activist when the problem is clear and present and the solution has little to no impact on daily life. With climate change neither are true. Except for the occasional headline of extreme weather, daily life continues, so the problem isn't obvious to everyone. Also, actually doing something about it takes effort/investment from everyone, not just government and corporations. It requires us to travel less, consume less, be more aware of what we consume and so on. It requires us to drive smaller cars, live in smaller and better insulated homes and become less individually oriented and pay more for our clothing. Most people don't want this, they want to continue buying cheap clothing from Primark and fly to NYC for the weekend. I'm personally in the 'given up hope' boat. Even the most environmentally aware people around me pretty much just eat less meat, but they haven't actually changed their ways. So I don't expect the average F150 driving steak eater to suddenly start changing their ways. Maybe generational change is possible, but even that would have to be a coordinated effort and I don't see that happening either.
  - qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
    I label the rightwing anti-migration parties as actually "anti"-climatechange-sideffects. They are just more willing to invest ton of money in fighting symptoms, as the anti-neighbour tribal mindset is so hardwired. Shame its never enough to really get to the roots of the problem. Would be fascinating to see the tea party turn on Big Oil because they caused this mess.
js8 4y ago
Although personally I am very concerned about AGW, I think the dismissals that talking about climate change is causing some "existential crisis" among young people are BS. Whenever I hear that theory, it's always an armchair hypothesis. But you could actually go and ask young girls what they are anxious about and how they deal with it. I think proponents of that theory, if they want to dismiss social media effects on personal self-esteem, should do exactly that - it's on them to prove that is the actual concern of girls committing suicide. I highly doubt they will find more significant evidence.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  This is a personal anecdote: I have family members, mostly younger ones (and I’m in my mid-20s), who are extremely anxious about climate change. They’ve sought mental health services because of their worries. I don’t think that’s particularly unique. I agree that it is absolutely not the only factor, which is the point I was attempting to make with a “weaker” version of Haidt’s argument.
  - asdff 4y ago
    I wonder if all the doom and gloom with everything is because people don't really understand statistics nor history. Sure, living through the climate catastrophe won't be comfortable, but given most of human history, living in that future is still a far better hand than all of your ancestors. Say you were born cesarean, are diabetic, broke your arm, had your wisdom teeth removed, got your colorectal cancer cleared up with the immune checkpoint inhibitor, got a covid vaccine then caught it and shrugged it off. Any other point of history you'd be dead 6x over at least with that medical history. That's something to celebrate. Plus I think there is a bias over maintaining the status quo of the earth. Sure, pollution isn't great, but that's from a squandered opportunity of destroying natural resources before coming up with a sustainable way to use them indefinitely. Species go extinct, but for better or worse, that's how previously occupied niches are now exposed for rapid adaptive evolution of what is left over, and how we evolved to be who we are today. We are adding energy into the atmosphere, so if anything the life system will work even faster than before. Will we adjust? Who knows, but if you are on team planet earth it really doesn't matter. Life will find a way. Whether humans make it or not should be irrelevant, considering you have distant relatives who weren't human and only became human due to selective pressures from the environment at the time. We should expect to change when the environment does, dramatically even, as fighting that change amounts to fighting a march to a thermodynamic equilibrium. Consider we also have the head and shoulders advantage of any other species driving a climate change on earth previously (there were many, great oxygenation event, azolla event, and others), of actually being globally aware of climate change.
paganel 4y ago
> a significant part because public sentiment around climate change is that we’re already doomed in a way that isn’t really possible with social crises. That sentiment is only valid for a specific world demographic, I’d say Western people under 40 years of age (which also greatly matches this forum’s users, I would say). But as Eastern European guy in my early 40s I certainly do not match that “doom” feeling, and looking around at people my age and older (like my parents) I would say that lack of trust in the coming climate Apocalypse is shared.
- Nowado 4y ago
  Which matches the topic of the article, right?
  - paganel 4y ago
    I was contesting OP's point of view which was implying that everyone is on board with the climate doomerism, I hadn't read the article.
Veen 4y ago
It might be worth considering other crises and their impact on teen mental health. I grew up in the UK in the 80s during two crises. First, it was the Cold War and there was a very real risk of nuclear Armageddon; we were all aware of it because it was all over the media. Second, it was the height of IRA bombing campaign in the UK and we heard of children our age being blown to bits while out shopping with their parents, etc. But in spite of those risks, which did impact adolescents, there was no massive uptick in mental illness.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  I think these examples reinforce my point: both the Troubles and the Cold War felt (and ultimately were) resolvable, while climate change (in the popular conception) feels fundamentally unresolvable. The former were also fundamentally social concerns, with avenues for social activism; the latter contains social concerns but is fundamentally a global coordination problem that’s roughly equivalent to achieving world peace (given that it requires nations to compromise any individual interests or ambitions in favor of the global good). Most people don’t think world peace is achievable, so it’s understandable why that sentiment would carry forwards to global warming.
  - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
    The Cold War absolutely did not feel resolvable at the time. The popular conception was that of present day North Korea cranked up to 100; there were crazy people in Moscow, they had thousands of nukes pointed at the rest of the world, and they’d successfully set up a system to prevent sanity from being restored. (In Russia, my understanding is that they generally saw it as a story of capitalists who could not stand to let a worker’s movement survive; in the rest of the Warsaw Pact, they saw it as a permanent system where the country must remain communist because the Red Army will invade otherwise.)
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      Two points stand out: * At least in the US, the fear of nuclear annihilation was partially offset by the belief (which was never officially substantiated) that the government would adhere to a policy of rational deterrence, i.e. MAD. It’s hard to find polls on belief in MAD, but friends and family I’ve talked to have stated that it was a source of reassurance during all but the most stressful moments of the Cold War. * The stress of the Cold War also coincides with the longest period of peace and greatest increase in quality of life in the Western world. An intuitive explanation of why suicides didn’t increase under the stress of the Cold War is that life was otherwise improving for most Westerners in tangible ways. The relative stagnancy of the last 30 years is a significant departure from that.
AndyMcConachie 4y ago
Your comment reminded me of the five general narratives we regularly tell ourselves about technology. 1) Technology is bad 2) Technology is good 3) Technology causes social change (tech determinism) 4) Social forces shape technology (social constructivism) 5) Technology is an accelerant Essentially all stories of technology and society fall into one of these narratives. The most rare is #5, yet as you argue in this case, it is probably the most realistic. Haidt should be aware of these and I also don't understand why he is going with #3.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Yes, exactly. If I had to be florid, I’d say that Haidt is blaming the wind for the fire: he’s confusing the thing that accelerates underlying social ills and instabilities for things themselves. This resembles his own “map and territory” claims about those responding to him.
- TchoBeer 4y ago
  all of these could be true simultaneously.
scythe 4y ago
To borrow a quote from one of your other posts: > climate change (in the popular conception) feels fundamentally unresolvable. For context, I have a graduate degree in physics. I am 31 and I have spent my entire adult life studying climate change and its management at a hobbyist level. I regularly get lost in academic papers about the phenomena or the technologies that may be used to address them. So try not to write me off as incurious when I tell you it is obviously silly to blame a false perception — that climate change is unresolvable — on the real facts about climate change. Reality does not cause people to believe falsehoods. A far better explanation for this belief would in fact be social media itself, which has a miserable track record of amplifying both climate change denialism and doomerism. Someone who has absorbed misleading claims about impending collapse from social media could certainly believe that the cause of their anxiety is climate change itself and not the people who helped them down that road. Look at the graphs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics >I can’t think of any real reason why he doesn’t (it makes his argument strictly stronger, and results in the same conclusions) Reducing social media and smartphones to the status of an "accelerant" rather than a primary cause weakens the case for urgent government intervention, which is Haidt's major focus. It is also jargon creep, since "accelerant" is harder to interpret than "cause".
jeremyjh 4y ago
What is special about the year 2012 in regard to these fears?
- revelio 4y ago
  Most of the graphs he shows actually inflect earlier, around 2010 or so. This is around the time the media to start systematically hardening its line on all things climate, and the "great awokening" that started flooding the news with claims the world was dominated by systemic hate and -isms. The two are related, both being ideological in nature.
  - jeremyjh 4y ago
    Oh that’s a neat theory. Is there any data to support it or should I just listen to a fat white man screaming on talk radio?
    - revelio 4y ago
      There's lots of data, yes. Rozado has many n-gram plots that show this happening around 2010 for some terms and 2012-ish for other terms: https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/ppdwnmd https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/ppdwnmd The huge spikes in terms like inclusion, racist, sexist, climate change, global warming, etc is clear, all starting around either 2010 or 2012 (except for global warming, which spiked a few years earlier and then was replaced almost overnight in 2010 by the vaguer term climate change, which shows massive growth in the last 10 years). A clear trend of increasing prevalence of prejudice related terms is apparent with words such as racist or sexist increasing in usage between 2010 and 2019 by 638% and 403% in The New York Times or 514% and 141% respectively in The Washington Post. >> "should I just listen to a fat white man screaming on talk radio" I thought that would be considered racist fat shaming these days, but I guess it doesn't count if the person you're offending isn't on your team?

ThomPete 4y ago

Climate change is now climate catastrophism. It's unfortunately many times more doomer today than ever. And while climate itself is not energizing, "doing something about it to save the world' is because it's simple even if it's in-effective. A phenomena like Greta Thunberg wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for that. And wind and solar and tesla and other avenue that doesn't really do anything other than let us waste a lot of money on ineffective things.

etrautmann 4y ago
Sorry what? How do renewable energy sources not do anything? The problem is multifaceted abs requires advances in many areas. A thousand partial solutions. Absolutism and cynicism aren’t helpful.
- ThomPete 4y ago
  Wind and solar the two darlings of climate catastrophists is less than 3% of the worlds energy consumption and they will not be able to help getting the 3 billion people who uses less energy than a US fridge per year into the modern era. Fossile fuels is not going anywhere as it's used for the 4 pillars of modern society, steel, fertilizers, concrete and plastic for which there is no realistic alternative. Wind and solar isn't advances, they are regressive technologies that themselves require fossile fuel to even become a reality and still keeps us with our intermittency issues. Keep in mind that only 20% of a countrys energy consumption is electricity. The only big breakthroughs that matter with energy and can work at scale would be things like fusion and molten salt generators. Making our energy grid more and more fragile by pushing wind and solar is what isn't helpful.
  - jackmott42 4y ago
    If there is no alternative for concrete, plastic, fertilizers, and steel, then don't you think we ought to quit burning them for cars and electricty Thom? You have gone so typically and boring boomer contrarian you aren't even making sense, as is normal.
    - ThomPete 4y ago
      Whether you can make sense of what I am writing is out of my control. However there is nothing in what I said that isn't factually correct. If that makes me boomer contrarian the so be it.
  - jterrys 4y ago
    Considering that: The U.S by itself consumes and pollutes an excessive amount even proportionally compared to China, there's definite optimizations in consumption patterns that can be made to reduce total overall carbon footprint. Plastics are still everywhere and recycling is considered a scam here. It's done so by design by oil companies. Yes, every single Styrofoam takeout container accumulates waste, especially for a country so prone on eating out. I get bottles of Mexican coke that show clear signs of wear and multiple usage in Mexico...only to finally end up on American store shelves were they'll be dumped in the trash like everything else here because nobody bothers with glass recycling bottles. Recycling plants are zoned out because the only people even bothering to return plastic bottles for 5 cents in a handful of states are the homeless, and even for them it's barely worth the fucking effort. The amount of car traffic in America is ludicrous and an endemic problem of poor, lobbied city design. This country had better public transit that was muscled out by automobile lobbyists, some of which actually privatized the transit and let the infrastructure die. Asphalt retains heat, and every new damn road built is a contributor to making the world just a little bit more warmer than it used to be. China is a leading adopter of rail commuting and freight transport. We're twiddling our thumbs and letting our rail networks deteriorate and become unusable, because its cheaper to move less material over trucks. These are just two simple examples. There's no zero sum result of completely eliminating plastics, but we can definitely consume much less. But we don't. Because we are lazy. Instead we exploit pollution loopholes where we classify SUVs as light work trucks so they don't have to conform to strict emission standards. This is why Ford cut down most of its car production lines in the U.S and almost exclusively focuses on trucks for their consumer market, and why increasingly more cars on road today are arguably less safer SUVs
- frostburg 4y ago
  OP probably means that we should focus on infrastructure like dams and nuclear power, to mitigate the at this point probably unavoidable damage. There should be less emphasis on policing individual behaviour (turn the AC down etc.), which is arguably almost completely a distraction from quantitatively relevant issues and provides cover from political inaction.
jackmott42 4y ago
Figure heads for causes like Greta aren't a new thing, sir.
- ThomPete 4y ago
  agree, whats your point?
  - jackmott42 4y ago
    That phenomena like Greta are possible all the time in all kinds of situations
1827162 4y ago
It appears to me that fears over catastrophic climate change are yet another moral panic. Amplified by social media this time. As with other moral panics (e.g. child abductions, pedophilia), the problem exists, but is blown way out of proportion by the media. In reality, I believe there of course will be changes in the weather patterns due to a relatively small increase in temperature, but it's not going to be the end of the world and there certainly won't be any mass drought or famine from the change. I kind of intuitively know this, and mostly disregard the opinions of those saying that there is impending doom. As I have likely seen this type of hysteria play out before in my life many times already. It will be interesting to see if I'm right about it or not, over the coming decades...
- Paul-Craft 4y ago
  I'm not sure what the source of your doubt here is. There is piles and piles of evidence that we are in for a world of hurt in the coming several decades.
  - ThomPete 4y ago
    No there isn't. There isn't a single scientifically proven consequence of climate change we don't know how to deal with.
    - Paul-Craft 4y ago
      That's a big claim. Too big to assert without evidence. Got any?
      - ThomPete 4y ago
        Well provide me with a scientifically proven consequence of climate change and I will tell you how we deal with it.
- simiones 4y ago
  > I kind of intuitively know this, and mostly disregard the opinions of those saying that there is impending doom. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/truthiness https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/truthiness > It will be interesting to see if I'm right about it or not, over the coming decades... You are wrong. No need to wait, the effects are already starting to be visible.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
If we weren't pulling oil out of the ground from the sea floor then my old fishing haunts would be available to me today and people wouldn't be worried about stepping into BP-branded tar balls that routinely roll up onto the beaches. There's more to climate change than wind, solar, and tesla.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

The whole activism thing doesent do a lot anymore, since the social plaza belongs to cooperate and the state, and activism was shown to be easy exhaustable compared to the endurance of lobbyism aka cooperate activism. Future frustrated voices will turn straight to violence and skip this unproducitve state of affairs.

donkeyd 4y ago
> the social plaza belongs to cooperate and the state I think it's too easy to just blame corporations and governments for this. They are definitely part in this, but a large part of lack of activism around climate change is also the people themselves who don't want to change. The Netherlands is a great example where, in recent elections, nearly half of votes went to political parties that want to reduce response to climate change and other environmental issues. For many people its easy to be activist when the problem is clear and present and the solution has little to no impact on daily life. With climate change neither are true. Except for the occasional headline of extreme weather, daily life continues, so the problem isn't obvious to everyone. Also, actually doing something about it takes effort/investment from everyone, not just government and corporations. It requires us to travel less, consume less, be more aware of what we consume and so on. It requires us to drive smaller cars, live in smaller and better insulated homes and become less individually oriented and pay more for our clothing. Most people don't want this, they want to continue buying cheap clothing from Primark and fly to NYC for the weekend. I'm personally in the 'given up hope' boat. Even the most environmentally aware people around me pretty much just eat less meat, but they haven't actually changed their ways. So I don't expect the average F150 driving steak eater to suddenly start changing their ways. Maybe generational change is possible, but even that would have to be a coordinated effort and I don't see that happening either.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  I label the rightwing anti-migration parties as actually "anti"-climatechange-sideffects. They are just more willing to invest ton of money in fighting symptoms, as the anti-neighbour tribal mindset is so hardwired. Shame its never enough to really get to the roots of the problem. Would be fascinating to see the tea party turn on Big Oil because they caused this mess.

js8 4y ago

Although personally I am very concerned about AGW, I think the dismissals that talking about climate change is causing some "existential crisis" among young people are BS. Whenever I hear that theory, it's always an armchair hypothesis. But you could actually go and ask young girls what they are anxious about and how they deal with it. I think proponents of that theory, if they want to dismiss social media effects on personal self-esteem, should do exactly that - it's on them to prove that is the actual concern of girls committing suicide. I highly doubt they will find more significant evidence.

woodruffw 4y ago
This is a personal anecdote: I have family members, mostly younger ones (and I’m in my mid-20s), who are extremely anxious about climate change. They’ve sought mental health services because of their worries. I don’t think that’s particularly unique. I agree that it is absolutely not the only factor, which is the point I was attempting to make with a “weaker” version of Haidt’s argument.
- asdff 4y ago
  I wonder if all the doom and gloom with everything is because people don't really understand statistics nor history. Sure, living through the climate catastrophe won't be comfortable, but given most of human history, living in that future is still a far better hand than all of your ancestors. Say you were born cesarean, are diabetic, broke your arm, had your wisdom teeth removed, got your colorectal cancer cleared up with the immune checkpoint inhibitor, got a covid vaccine then caught it and shrugged it off. Any other point of history you'd be dead 6x over at least with that medical history. That's something to celebrate. Plus I think there is a bias over maintaining the status quo of the earth. Sure, pollution isn't great, but that's from a squandered opportunity of destroying natural resources before coming up with a sustainable way to use them indefinitely. Species go extinct, but for better or worse, that's how previously occupied niches are now exposed for rapid adaptive evolution of what is left over, and how we evolved to be who we are today. We are adding energy into the atmosphere, so if anything the life system will work even faster than before. Will we adjust? Who knows, but if you are on team planet earth it really doesn't matter. Life will find a way. Whether humans make it or not should be irrelevant, considering you have distant relatives who weren't human and only became human due to selective pressures from the environment at the time. We should expect to change when the environment does, dramatically even, as fighting that change amounts to fighting a march to a thermodynamic equilibrium. Consider we also have the head and shoulders advantage of any other species driving a climate change on earth previously (there were many, great oxygenation event, azolla event, and others), of actually being globally aware of climate change.

paganel 4y ago

> a significant part because public sentiment around climate change is that we’re already doomed in a way that isn’t really possible with social crises. That sentiment is only valid for a specific world demographic, I’d say Western people under 40 years of age (which also greatly matches this forum’s users, I would say). But as Eastern European guy in my early 40s I certainly do not match that “doom” feeling, and looking around at people my age and older (like my parents) I would say that lack of trust in the coming climate Apocalypse is shared.

Nowado 4y ago
Which matches the topic of the article, right?
- paganel 4y ago
  I was contesting OP's point of view which was implying that everyone is on board with the climate doomerism, I hadn't read the article.

Veen 4y ago

It might be worth considering other crises and their impact on teen mental health. I grew up in the UK in the 80s during two crises. First, it was the Cold War and there was a very real risk of nuclear Armageddon; we were all aware of it because it was all over the media. Second, it was the height of IRA bombing campaign in the UK and we heard of children our age being blown to bits while out shopping with their parents, etc. But in spite of those risks, which did impact adolescents, there was no massive uptick in mental illness.

woodruffw 4y ago
I think these examples reinforce my point: both the Troubles and the Cold War felt (and ultimately were) resolvable, while climate change (in the popular conception) feels fundamentally unresolvable. The former were also fundamentally social concerns, with avenues for social activism; the latter contains social concerns but is fundamentally a global coordination problem that’s roughly equivalent to achieving world peace (given that it requires nations to compromise any individual interests or ambitions in favor of the global good). Most people don’t think world peace is achievable, so it’s understandable why that sentiment would carry forwards to global warming.
- SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  The Cold War absolutely did not feel resolvable at the time. The popular conception was that of present day North Korea cranked up to 100; there were crazy people in Moscow, they had thousands of nukes pointed at the rest of the world, and they’d successfully set up a system to prevent sanity from being restored. (In Russia, my understanding is that they generally saw it as a story of capitalists who could not stand to let a worker’s movement survive; in the rest of the Warsaw Pact, they saw it as a permanent system where the country must remain communist because the Red Army will invade otherwise.)
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    Two points stand out: * At least in the US, the fear of nuclear annihilation was partially offset by the belief (which was never officially substantiated) that the government would adhere to a policy of rational deterrence, i.e. MAD. It’s hard to find polls on belief in MAD, but friends and family I’ve talked to have stated that it was a source of reassurance during all but the most stressful moments of the Cold War. * The stress of the Cold War also coincides with the longest period of peace and greatest increase in quality of life in the Western world. An intuitive explanation of why suicides didn’t increase under the stress of the Cold War is that life was otherwise improving for most Westerners in tangible ways. The relative stagnancy of the last 30 years is a significant departure from that.

AndyMcConachie 4y ago

Your comment reminded me of the five general narratives we regularly tell ourselves about technology. 1) Technology is bad 2) Technology is good 3) Technology causes social change (tech determinism) 4) Social forces shape technology (social constructivism) 5) Technology is an accelerant Essentially all stories of technology and society fall into one of these narratives. The most rare is #5, yet as you argue in this case, it is probably the most realistic. Haidt should be aware of these and I also don't understand why he is going with #3.

woodruffw 4y ago
Yes, exactly. If I had to be florid, I’d say that Haidt is blaming the wind for the fire: he’s confusing the thing that accelerates underlying social ills and instabilities for things themselves. This resembles his own “map and territory” claims about those responding to him.
TchoBeer 4y ago
all of these could be true simultaneously.

scythe 4y ago

To borrow a quote from one of your other posts: > climate change (in the popular conception) feels fundamentally unresolvable. For context, I have a graduate degree in physics. I am 31 and I have spent my entire adult life studying climate change and its management at a hobbyist level. I regularly get lost in academic papers about the phenomena or the technologies that may be used to address them. So try not to write me off as incurious when I tell you it is obviously silly to blame a false perception — that climate change is unresolvable — on the real facts about climate change. Reality does not cause people to believe falsehoods. A far better explanation for this belief would in fact be social media itself, which has a miserable track record of amplifying both climate change denialism and doomerism. Someone who has absorbed misleading claims about impending collapse from social media could certainly believe that the cause of their anxiety is climate change itself and not the people who helped them down that road. Look at the graphs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics >I can’t think of any real reason why he doesn’t (it makes his argument strictly stronger, and results in the same conclusions) Reducing social media and smartphones to the status of an "accelerant" rather than a primary cause weakens the case for urgent government intervention, which is Haidt's major focus. It is also jargon creep, since "accelerant" is harder to interpret than "cause".

jeremyjh 4y ago

What is special about the year 2012 in regard to these fears?

revelio 4y ago
Most of the graphs he shows actually inflect earlier, around 2010 or so. This is around the time the media to start systematically hardening its line on all things climate, and the "great awokening" that started flooding the news with claims the world was dominated by systemic hate and -isms. The two are related, both being ideological in nature.
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  Oh that’s a neat theory. Is there any data to support it or should I just listen to a fat white man screaming on talk radio?
  - revelio 4y ago
    There's lots of data, yes. Rozado has many n-gram plots that show this happening around 2010 for some terms and 2012-ish for other terms: https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/ppdwnmd https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/ppdwnmd The huge spikes in terms like inclusion, racist, sexist, climate change, global warming, etc is clear, all starting around either 2010 or 2012 (except for global warming, which spiked a few years earlier and then was replaced almost overnight in 2010 by the vaguer term climate change, which shows massive growth in the last 10 years). A clear trend of increasing prevalence of prejudice related terms is apparent with words such as racist or sexist increasing in usage between 2010 and 2019 by 638% and 403% in The New York Times or 514% and 141% respectively in The Washington Post. >> "should I just listen to a fat white man screaming on talk radio" I thought that would be considered racist fat shaming these days, but I guess it doesn't count if the person you're offending isn't on your team?