4 ms·

I am tired of the “end of the word is nigh” headlines about climate change. I stopped going to church regularly in my late teens because I got tired of the “Ar

by efitz 3y ago

I am tired of the “end of the word is nigh” headlines about climate change. I stopped going to church regularly in my late teens because I got tired of the “Armageddon could happen anytime” messaging in protestant Christianity. Feels the same to me with climate change alarmists. Is the earth warming? Yes. Is it net bad for people? I’m not convinced. I’m not convinced that oceans rising an inch in the next century is going to doom humanity. More people die of cold every year than of heat. We have dikes. When something becomes a visible problem we usually either address it or find a workaround.

basisword 3y ago
>> Is the earth warming? Yes. Is it net bad for people? I’m not convinced Even if it is, why do we need to keep hearing about it? Oh yeah, this kind of news drives clicks. It creates fear and “climate anxiety” which drives more clicks. As citizens there is little we can or will do to fix this. It’s down to politicians agreeing on a strategy globally. With high inflation, and the rising cost of living, citizens have plenty of more pressing things to worry about without the media piling on more misery.
- foobiekr 3y ago
  We need to keep hearing about it because more than half the global population is in denial about it and we are not doing much to prevent it while preventable catastrophe looms.
  - scottLobster 3y ago
    Yes, I'm sure all the Climate Change deniers both read and respect the Washington Post.
  - efitz 3y ago
    "In denial" and "catastrophe looms" are exactly what I was talking about in my original post. Evangelical protestants will be happy to tell you why you need to change your ways today or else you'll go to hell along with every other non-believer, and that Christ is going to return anytime now and then it will be too late. It sounds very similar to me. Doomsaying just tunes me out, and I suspect that's a widespread pov that's not widely spoken because who wants to engage with doomsayers.
- jackmott42 3y ago
  Because it is a disaster of our own creation which we can mitigate if we take it seriously. If people start taking it seriously maybe we can quite talking about it.
- layer8 3y ago
  Because it’s the citizens who can put pressure on the politicians.
Tronno 3y ago
The concern is not that people will start dropping like flies, it's that the changing climate will have destabilizing effects on the economy, geopolitics, and the ecosystem. For example, drought contributed to the Syrian conflict, the rise of ISIS, etc: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1421533112 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1421533112 If individual citizens can affect their local politics to mitigate climate change, it is important to do so.
- scottLobster 3y ago
  That's the rational concern. The actual concern amongst large numbers of people is that we are literally "going extinct", and those people are leading the narrative. I look forward to telling my grandchildren how millions of idiots doubted they'd ever exist.
- jansan 3y ago
  Population in Syria has more than quadrupled between 1960 and 2010, so they had to feed four times the people from the same area of not very fertile land. Are you sure climate change had a greater destabilizing effect? If so, please explain.
  - Tronno 3y ago
    > Are you sure climate change had a greater destabilizing effect? Read my comment more carefully. You don't get to dismiss contributing factors simply for not having the greatest effect. The world is complex, nuance exists.
marricks 3y ago
I don’t think most experts are saying literally everyone will die. I think they’re saying many will and that there’s no reason to think conditions will be as favorable for humanity after we change the planet. For example, consider that humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years but only in the past 10k did civilization develop. Was it because we sat on our hands? Did it take us that long to domesticate plants? Domestication of wheat does not take anywhere near that long even if you’re not really trying. One theory it’s that until 10k years ago there was a big ass ice age that made living pretty rough. Once conditions became favorable human behavior changed pretty rapidly. To make all this. So why should we be afraid of climate change? Because climate wise these 10k years have been pretty favorable for humans and there’s absolutely no reason to believe the next 10k will be if we fuck it up.
jansan 3y ago
Also, I am tired of blaming all problems on climate change. There is a famine in region X? Let's just ignore that they have a civil war and population has tripled in the last fifty years (while arable land area has stayed the same), it must be because of climate change because only that fits our political agenda.
jmclnx 3y ago
Well if you are under 60, you will find out seen enough when people from southern regions start migrating north in mass and you have constant power outages due to high demand for AC. Where I am, when young, we never had heat like this in June/July. And in the winters the lakes would freeze enough for you to drive on. I have been unable to walk on frozen lakes for at least 10 years, never mind drive. So everyone, keep driving your SUVs :)
kaitai 3y ago
It sounds like you only care about problems that affect you very directly, which is pretty short-sighted. There are many climate-related problems that are affecting people already in Central America (no rain, can't farm, so they're walking north), the northern US and California (wildfires and wildfire smoke), the Midwest (aquifers depleted, rendering farmland less valuable), Florida (sinkholes from aquifer depletion, flooding in streets, no they can't just build a dike). It's a pretty multi-factorial problem and it's unfortunate that the interpretation here seems to be pretty simplistic. Your does point out something, though, that really really bugs me from climate activists/politicians. The idea that you have to "believe" in climate change, like you'd believe in religious proclamations. I don't give a sh*t if you believe -- and making this ideological creates tribes where one group is like "I believe climate change isn't happening/is God's will/is natural, so I will run my F150's AC with the windows open and breathe in exhaust proudly because internal combustion and burning oil is what God has ordained as the pinnacle of human achievement". Belief whatever. I'm much more interested in action. Why does it seem good to some people to... just waste resources without much return? Irresponsibly manage our farmlands for short-term profit vs long-term yield? pin success to ownership of fossil fuels in specific places rather than a more flexible and less geopolitically fraught paradigm? There are a lot of visible problems to address, to your point, efitz.
- jackmott42 3y ago
  Nobody is going to give up their F150 and Corvette if they don't believe there is anything wrong with burning fossil fuels.
  - kaitai 3y ago
    Unless they get better acceleration and lower cost of ownership + a cool factor.
- efitz 3y ago
  I have a finite amount of attention, resources and energy. I'm fortunate to have more than most. But climate change is not even in my top 10 problems. Preparing for retirement, getting my kid educated, caring for ill family members, supporting my local food bank, keeping my government from going authoritarian - these are where I spend my resources. If I had more I'd probably spend them on things that literally kill millions of people per year like malaria, typhoid, infant mortality, etc.
jackmott42 3y ago
The fact that you are not convinced is why you need to keep hearing about it. Once people are convinced and taking reasonable steps to mitigate, we can quit harping on it. For instance the sea level is expected to rise much more than an inch in the next century. It is projected to rise 10 inches in the next 30 years.
vlovich123 3y ago
There’s a bit of a difference between religious Armageddon and a scientifically driven concern that the changes wrought by climate change will be catastrophic on various fronts. Not to mention all climate change predictions I’ve seen are consistently under representative of how bad it’s actually getting. For example, the Great Barrier Reef has lost half its corral in the past 30 years. The impacts to humans directly will be less visible than the damage done to the broader life ecosystem (not to mention that climate change is only a part of the story - our addiction to plastics and other toxic chemicals destroys the ecosystem in other ways). Armageddon is presented as an inevitable sudden destruction. It’s closer to an asteroid strike. Climate change is also Armageddon except it’s caused by us, it’s something under our control, and we continue to dither about how bad it will really be instead of taking explicit action. I’m an alarmist because I consistently see a lack of any real progress being made on tackling this problem in a timely manner. Remember, it took ~300 years of burning fossil fuels to get us here. In fact, most of the damage was done even more recently since it took a while for us to really scale this up. And this system has lag. That means that even if we cut emissions to 0 today (COVID is the closest we’ve come), the Earth would continue warming for a long time (decades?). Waiting for the damage wrought to be “visible” to us is waaay too late. Not to mention that it will easily become economically infeasible to address and eat up our economy in the process.
- peteradio 3y ago
  People should stop swimming the coral reefs. Human oils destroy it.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    And yet, the primary cause of destruction is climate change, not human oils. On top of it, the bleaching events are happening faster & faster without giving the coral time to recover. Again, because of climate change. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/29/great-barrier-reef-bleaching-made-175-times-likelier-by-human-caused-climate-change-say-scientists https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/29/great-ba... https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/28/world/un-great-barrier-reef-coral-climate/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/28/world/un-great-barrier-reef-c...
efitz 3y ago
[flagged]

by efitz 3y ago

basisword 3y ago

>> Is the earth warming? Yes. Is it net bad for people? I’m not convinced Even if it is, why do we need to keep hearing about it? Oh yeah, this kind of news drives clicks. It creates fear and “climate anxiety” which drives more clicks. As citizens there is little we can or will do to fix this. It’s down to politicians agreeing on a strategy globally. With high inflation, and the rising cost of living, citizens have plenty of more pressing things to worry about without the media piling on more misery.

foobiekr 3y ago
We need to keep hearing about it because more than half the global population is in denial about it and we are not doing much to prevent it while preventable catastrophe looms.
- scottLobster 3y ago
  Yes, I'm sure all the Climate Change deniers both read and respect the Washington Post.
- efitz 3y ago
  "In denial" and "catastrophe looms" are exactly what I was talking about in my original post. Evangelical protestants will be happy to tell you why you need to change your ways today or else you'll go to hell along with every other non-believer, and that Christ is going to return anytime now and then it will be too late. It sounds very similar to me. Doomsaying just tunes me out, and I suspect that's a widespread pov that's not widely spoken because who wants to engage with doomsayers.
jackmott42 3y ago
Because it is a disaster of our own creation which we can mitigate if we take it seriously. If people start taking it seriously maybe we can quite talking about it.
layer8 3y ago
Because it’s the citizens who can put pressure on the politicians.

Tronno 3y ago

The concern is not that people will start dropping like flies, it's that the changing climate will have destabilizing effects on the economy, geopolitics, and the ecosystem. For example, drought contributed to the Syrian conflict, the rise of ISIS, etc: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1421533112 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1421533112 If individual citizens can affect their local politics to mitigate climate change, it is important to do so.

scottLobster 3y ago
That's the rational concern. The actual concern amongst large numbers of people is that we are literally "going extinct", and those people are leading the narrative. I look forward to telling my grandchildren how millions of idiots doubted they'd ever exist.
jansan 3y ago
Population in Syria has more than quadrupled between 1960 and 2010, so they had to feed four times the people from the same area of not very fertile land. Are you sure climate change had a greater destabilizing effect? If so, please explain.
- Tronno 3y ago
  > Are you sure climate change had a greater destabilizing effect? Read my comment more carefully. You don't get to dismiss contributing factors simply for not having the greatest effect. The world is complex, nuance exists.

marricks 3y ago

I don’t think most experts are saying literally everyone will die. I think they’re saying many will and that there’s no reason to think conditions will be as favorable for humanity after we change the planet. For example, consider that humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years but only in the past 10k did civilization develop. Was it because we sat on our hands? Did it take us that long to domesticate plants? Domestication of wheat does not take anywhere near that long even if you’re not really trying. One theory it’s that until 10k years ago there was a big ass ice age that made living pretty rough. Once conditions became favorable human behavior changed pretty rapidly. To make all this. So why should we be afraid of climate change? Because climate wise these 10k years have been pretty favorable for humans and there’s absolutely no reason to believe the next 10k will be if we fuck it up.

jansan 3y ago

Also, I am tired of blaming all problems on climate change. There is a famine in region X? Let's just ignore that they have a civil war and population has tripled in the last fifty years (while arable land area has stayed the same), it must be because of climate change because only that fits our political agenda.

jmclnx 3y ago

Well if you are under 60, you will find out seen enough when people from southern regions start migrating north in mass and you have constant power outages due to high demand for AC. Where I am, when young, we never had heat like this in June/July. And in the winters the lakes would freeze enough for you to drive on. I have been unable to walk on frozen lakes for at least 10 years, never mind drive. So everyone, keep driving your SUVs :)

kaitai 3y ago

It sounds like you only care about problems that affect you very directly, which is pretty short-sighted. There are many climate-related problems that are affecting people already in Central America (no rain, can't farm, so they're walking north), the northern US and California (wildfires and wildfire smoke), the Midwest (aquifers depleted, rendering farmland less valuable), Florida (sinkholes from aquifer depletion, flooding in streets, no they can't just build a dike). It's a pretty multi-factorial problem and it's unfortunate that the interpretation here seems to be pretty simplistic. Your does point out something, though, that really really bugs me from climate activists/politicians. The idea that you have to "believe" in climate change, like you'd believe in religious proclamations. I don't give a sh*t if you believe -- and making this ideological creates tribes where one group is like "I believe climate change isn't happening/is God's will/is natural, so I will run my F150's AC with the windows open and breathe in exhaust proudly because internal combustion and burning oil is what God has ordained as the pinnacle of human achievement". Belief whatever. I'm much more interested in action. Why does it seem good to some people to... just waste resources without much return? Irresponsibly manage our farmlands for short-term profit vs long-term yield? pin success to ownership of fossil fuels in specific places rather than a more flexible and less geopolitically fraught paradigm? There are a lot of visible problems to address, to your point, efitz.

jackmott42 3y ago
Nobody is going to give up their F150 and Corvette if they don't believe there is anything wrong with burning fossil fuels.
- kaitai 3y ago
  Unless they get better acceleration and lower cost of ownership + a cool factor.
efitz 3y ago
I have a finite amount of attention, resources and energy. I'm fortunate to have more than most. But climate change is not even in my top 10 problems. Preparing for retirement, getting my kid educated, caring for ill family members, supporting my local food bank, keeping my government from going authoritarian - these are where I spend my resources. If I had more I'd probably spend them on things that literally kill millions of people per year like malaria, typhoid, infant mortality, etc.

jackmott42 3y ago

The fact that you are not convinced is why you need to keep hearing about it. Once people are convinced and taking reasonable steps to mitigate, we can quit harping on it. For instance the sea level is expected to rise much more than an inch in the next century. It is projected to rise 10 inches in the next 30 years.

vlovich123 3y ago

There’s a bit of a difference between religious Armageddon and a scientifically driven concern that the changes wrought by climate change will be catastrophic on various fronts. Not to mention all climate change predictions I’ve seen are consistently under representative of how bad it’s actually getting. For example, the Great Barrier Reef has lost half its corral in the past 30 years. The impacts to humans directly will be less visible than the damage done to the broader life ecosystem (not to mention that climate change is only a part of the story - our addiction to plastics and other toxic chemicals destroys the ecosystem in other ways). Armageddon is presented as an inevitable sudden destruction. It’s closer to an asteroid strike. Climate change is also Armageddon except it’s caused by us, it’s something under our control, and we continue to dither about how bad it will really be instead of taking explicit action. I’m an alarmist because I consistently see a lack of any real progress being made on tackling this problem in a timely manner. Remember, it took ~300 years of burning fossil fuels to get us here. In fact, most of the damage was done even more recently since it took a while for us to really scale this up. And this system has lag. That means that even if we cut emissions to 0 today (COVID is the closest we’ve come), the Earth would continue warming for a long time (decades?). Waiting for the damage wrought to be “visible” to us is waaay too late. Not to mention that it will easily become economically infeasible to address and eat up our economy in the process.

peteradio 3y ago
People should stop swimming the coral reefs. Human oils destroy it.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  And yet, the primary cause of destruction is climate change, not human oils. On top of it, the bleaching events are happening faster & faster without giving the coral time to recover. Again, because of climate change. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/29/great-barrier-reef-bleaching-made-175-times-likelier-by-human-caused-climate-change-say-scientists https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/29/great-ba... https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/28/world/un-great-barrier-reef-coral-climate/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/28/world/un-great-barrier-reef-c...

efitz 3y ago

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