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I think these sorts of headlines are intended to raise awareness of climate change, but I conjecture the effect they have for some (or many, or even most) peopl

I think these sorts of headlines are intended to raise awareness of climate change, but I conjecture the effect they have for some (or many, or even most) people is to make them throw up their hands and say "well, what can I do about it?". I know that, after seeing so many of them, they've stopped shocking me. They just make me feel a little sad. I suspect in the future I'll be numb to them, and they'll have lost any supposed power to inspire action. While any individual instance of record temperatures is alarming, enough of them, one after another, creates a narrative of powerlessness or hopelessness that is redundant and unproductive.

jgreen10 3y ago
Decades of optimism along the lines of "something bad is coming, but we can still fix it" did way too little. Perhaps now that it's actually bad something might happen. At this point, geo engineering is probably the safer option compared to letting the planet spiral into an uninhabitable waste land. Of course, it should be combined with cheap and abundant renewable/nuclear energy. Now that things are bad, there might actually be popular support for this, though we may still have to wait for the current political class to retire.