7 ms·

If there's no way back, then why bother with painful mitigation efforts? But seriously, this sort of "it's over, there's only doom ahead" is, IMO, counterprodu

by rmah 3y ago

If there's no way back, then why bother with painful mitigation efforts? But seriously, this sort of "it's over, there's only doom ahead" is, IMO, counterproductive and hurts the efforts to help the environment more than it helps.

izzydata 3y ago
There is no way back to the way things used to be, but that doesn't mean it can't get even worse. If your house burns down there is no going back to your house not being burned down, but it's still better to put out the fire before it burns the neighborhood down too.
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  Yeah, but what do you do when most of your neighbors have flamethrowers, and enjoy running around the neighborhood shooting flames at things, and then insist that it's their right to do so when you try to tell them to stop?
  - nurettin 3y ago
    Most of my neighbors can only afford matches, but they get regular warnings about not to use any.
wwweston 3y ago
The parent did not say "we know there is no way back now, there is only doom ahead." They said "every step on our current trajectory could represent a threshold triggering processes past which there is no return", and while it's left implied, the implication is that maybe we should consider stopping our current trajectory an emergency, much in the same way that someone who realizes they're as yet intact within a minefield might stop blithely strolling along even if the next step is only a marginal risk, not a guarantee of disaster.
- ospray 3y ago
  Every time I read that the methane is melting faster than expected I start wondering if the clathrate gun will blow after all and we really will be doomed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
  - airstrike 3y ago
    > While it may be important on the millennial timescales,[5][6] it is no longer considered relevant for the near future climate change: the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report states "It is very unlikely that gas clathrates (mostly methane) in deeper terrestrial permafrost and subsea clathrates will lead to a detectable departure from the emissions trajectory during this century".
cagenut 3y ago
thats not at all what they said, those are words you are putting in their mouth/post. I find this kind of automatic dismissal of reasonable caution and critisism being instantly conflated with "doom" to be the most conversation-halting counterproductive behavior pattern these days.
intrasight 3y ago
> If there's no way back, then why bother with painful mitigation efforts? Because there's a way forward
jfengel 3y ago
Mostly because of the way it reflects badly on climate change deniers. Climate change is going to suck, but I focus on the fact that we've been fighting against really horrifically bad reasoning skills. Climate change is really basic chemistry; if we can't get people to agree on that how are we ever going to solve problems with any actual complexity? Climate change denial is associated with a ton of other ideological issues that cause a lot of people a lot of harm, today, in first world countries. Not all of them are as scientifically definitive, but they share a pattern of people expressing opinion as fact. I feel like painful mitigation efforts are too grand to even think about. A lot of issues come down to leaving people alone to make their own decisions, with no effect on anyone else, and we can't even have that. So for me the mitigations are less about dealing with climate change and more about hoping climate change deniers realize just how reprehensibly they've handled this entire thing. But I'm not optimistic about that.
- baq 3y ago
  > Climate change is going to suck, but I focus on the fact that we've been fighting against really horrifically bad reasoning skills. Climate change is really basic chemistry; if we can't get people to agree on that how are we ever going to solve problems with any actual complexity? Dollars. People’s livelihoods depend on not understanding, so they don’t. We must incentivize understanding and propose a workable solution, which is basically a way to manufacture gasoline, diesel and natural gas out of literally thin air, because transitioning to electric everything is not happening due to natural resources constraints (thinking of mining primarily).
  - blkhawk 3y ago
    uh sorta - while the livelihood of some deniers depend on dollars (commercial or political) I think its more correct to say that to make others doubt climate change is their primary task they get funding for. You can see this very well when compare American vs European climate change debate - in Europe is a very passive "not doing anything useful" while actually everybody gives at least lip service that something has to be done. This is because there was less opportunity to couple the debate into politics in an concentrated way. In the US the 2 party thing makes that very easy and the whole thing has staying power as an "issue" so it probably needs comparatively little or even no investment to keep alive. In the EU I can only directly speak for Germany but to me it seemed like there were no direct attacks against the concept of climate change directly (although we get some splash damage from the US). most issues stem from single big companies or industry groups trying to bend things to their advantage. A good example that is maybe best known international is the "Clean Diesel" thing that VW so disastrously chose because it was short term cheaper than investments into EV technology. This is what in the end lead to the diesel scandal. There are better examples but they get too local to be as easy to explain.
elbasti 3y ago
> this sort of "it's over, there's only doom ahead" is, IMO, counterproductive and hurts the efforts to help the environment more than it helps. Says who? We've been parroting the opposite message ("there's still time! go solar! electric cars!") is CLEARLY not working. I'm a climate change doomer, in that I'm certain our children will live in a very different world than us, and there's a real (10%+?) chance of total environmental collapse in our lifetimes. The positive feedback loops are inescapable. The science is the science...who are we to lie to people hoping that the lie somehow inspires mass coordinated change?
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  The science can be totally correct and the future still be different.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  Your concern about total environmental collapse makes me wonder why there has been so little talk recently about biomedical advances as a hedge against the effects of global warming. Twenty-odd years ago, Ray Kurzweil’s vision of the human race moving from organic to machine bodies was all the rage in nerd circles. (I don’t share his optimism myself, I just think it curious that it totally disappeared from the discourse.) Machine bodies don’t rely on a world kept within such a narrow temperature range, they don’t rely on all the species that are going extinct, they don’t even need a biosphere at all.
  - czechdeveloper 3y ago
    Because it's a pipe dream. We are our bodies, they not something to be overcome.
- Amezarak 3y ago
  > there's a real (10%+?) chance of total environmental collapse in our lifetimes I suppose I could be described as a doomer too, but I think this understates the issue. Even if we got carbon emissions to zero today, we're facing a very real chance of imminent ecological collapse in our lifetimes. Climate change is just the tip of the iceberg. To all appearances, (post)industrial civilization is not sustainable, whether or not you use fossil fuels.
Keyframe 3y ago
What efforts?
- aaomidi 3y ago
  We can’t even have the “most climate aware administration” require companies to support and encourage WFH and operate on an exception only model for companies that legitimately can’t operate that way. “Post pandemic” (it’s not over for many people, but officially the govt considered it over) was the best time to enforce that and they simply didn’t.
  - Keyframe 3y ago
    What about the rest of 95% of population, it's a global problem.
    - aaomidi 3y ago
      Most of the “global population” is in fact not causing most of the damage. If the US had spearheaded less and no commuting for the majority of American workers, this would’ve set a trend worldwide. Heck, we can even make it a required part of our trade deals.
    - c0nducktr 3y ago
      Most of the population has no real control! Are you new here?
aaomidi 3y ago
I’m seriously tired of people shaming folks for having a doomer outlook. We need both. We need both a hopeful view of the future, and one that warns us what will happen if we don’t take action. A lot of the doom visions are going to come true even if we do take aggressive action today. But remember, bad can always be worse.
- moneytide1 3y ago
  > hopeful view of the future, and one that warns us The optimist designs the airplane, and the pessimist designs the parachute.
  - aaomidi 3y ago
    Really well put.
throwbadubadu 3y ago
Why does it hurt the efforts now to say that we need more, otherwise there will be no way back? Not getting it. If we didn't downplay "the doom" for years now (and your framing is exactly kind of that), we maybe wouldn't be so tight in running out of time and getting into more and more risky situation.
- acuozzo 3y ago
  > If we didn't downplay "the doom" for years now We collectively didn't. We did quite the opposite by giving airtime to any quack predicting the end of the world, so much so that encountering "end of the world people" is a common trope in American sitcoms. (Edit: Hell, watch a documentary from the late '70s on "Global Cooling" to see what I mean. The episode of "In Search Of…" narrated by Leonard Nimoy is my suggestion.) If the "The End Is Nigh!" people hasn't ever existed, then I think the warnings over the past 4+ decades would have been taken far more seriously. As it is now, most are afraid of lending an ear to a boy crying "Wolf!". It sucks.
gmuslera 3y ago
There is no way back, but different potential forwards, some more desirable than others. But getting to a forward that is no so different from how things used to be will be difficult. It is something similar to the Red Queen Race, we should be running as fast as we can to keep things as they are and even faster to improve. But so far we are still accelerating into the wrong direction. And what we are doing is what may turn something into a practical impossibility rather than what is theoretically possible.
rewgs 3y ago
Perhaps it's not a rhetorical trick or framing device, and is instead simply...the truth? For decades the primary point of discussion with regards to climate change is "the right way to talk about it." And as far as I can tell, that's only ever shot us in the foot. Too optimistic, and people don't act because they think it's not that bad or that someone else will deal with it; too pessimistic, and everyone will apparently just shut down and not do anything about it because why bother. Call me crazy but perhaps we should stop thinking about it this way and simply deal with the science and the facts as head-on as possible, and that includes not calling out accurate representations of where we're at and where we're going as "counterproductive."
- staunton 3y ago
  > everyone will apparently just shut down and not do anything about it because why bother A negligible (both in terms of numbers and wealth) part of the world population feel this way. I guess most people actually still barely think about these things while they continue to live their lives as they come. In a lot of counties the discussion is still barely taking place.
xg15 3y ago
That's an easy thing to say until the point where we actually feel the consequences. There also seems to be no harm in drinking just another pint - until the the next morning, when you feel the hangover.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  I’ve always thought it more akin to drinking yourself into liver failure; by the time you see serious symptoms, the damage is likely irreversible. And while you can in theory get a new liver, there’s no way to get a new planet.
c0nducktr 3y ago
This comment seems like it follows the standard path of all people who never wanted to address climate change. "Global Warming doesn't exist" "Sure it exists, but humans are not responsible" "Well sure, it's human made, but we can't do anything about it now" Every single move just is a reason to not do anything which might inconvenience the current order. I'm very tired of it.
- Joeri 3y ago
  Michael Mann described the 6 stages of climate denial in 2013. At the time the hard core deniers were still stage 1, nowadays they mostly seem to have moved to at least stage 3, and many of the politicians that are obstructing are stuck in stage 5 or 6. I hear a lot of category 6 denial from the politicians in my own country. 1. CO2 is not actually increasing. 2. Even if it is, the increase has no impact on the climate since there is no convincing evidence of warming. 3. Even if there is warming, it is due to natural causes. 4. Even if the warming cannot be explained by natural causes, the human impact is small, and the impact of continued greenhouse gas emissions will be minor. 5. Even if the current and future projected human effects on Earth's climate are not negligible, the changes are generally going to be good for us. 6. Whether or not the changes are going to be good for us, humans are very adept at adapting to changes; besides, it's too late to do anything about it, and/or a technological fix is bound to come along when we really need it.

by rmah 3y ago

izzydata 3y ago

There is no way back to the way things used to be, but that doesn't mean it can't get even worse. If your house burns down there is no going back to your house not being burned down, but it's still better to put out the fire before it burns the neighborhood down too.

shiroiuma 3y ago
Yeah, but what do you do when most of your neighbors have flamethrowers, and enjoy running around the neighborhood shooting flames at things, and then insist that it's their right to do so when you try to tell them to stop?
- nurettin 3y ago
  Most of my neighbors can only afford matches, but they get regular warnings about not to use any.

wwweston 3y ago

The parent did not say "we know there is no way back now, there is only doom ahead." They said "every step on our current trajectory could represent a threshold triggering processes past which there is no return", and while it's left implied, the implication is that maybe we should consider stopping our current trajectory an emergency, much in the same way that someone who realizes they're as yet intact within a minefield might stop blithely strolling along even if the next step is only a marginal risk, not a guarantee of disaster.

ospray 3y ago
Every time I read that the methane is melting faster than expected I start wondering if the clathrate gun will blow after all and we really will be doomed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
- airstrike 3y ago
  > While it may be important on the millennial timescales,[5][6] it is no longer considered relevant for the near future climate change: the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report states "It is very unlikely that gas clathrates (mostly methane) in deeper terrestrial permafrost and subsea clathrates will lead to a detectable departure from the emissions trajectory during this century".

cagenut 3y ago

thats not at all what they said, those are words you are putting in their mouth/post. I find this kind of automatic dismissal of reasonable caution and critisism being instantly conflated with "doom" to be the most conversation-halting counterproductive behavior pattern these days.

intrasight 3y ago

> If there's no way back, then why bother with painful mitigation efforts? Because there's a way forward

jfengel 3y ago

Mostly because of the way it reflects badly on climate change deniers. Climate change is going to suck, but I focus on the fact that we've been fighting against really horrifically bad reasoning skills. Climate change is really basic chemistry; if we can't get people to agree on that how are we ever going to solve problems with any actual complexity? Climate change denial is associated with a ton of other ideological issues that cause a lot of people a lot of harm, today, in first world countries. Not all of them are as scientifically definitive, but they share a pattern of people expressing opinion as fact. I feel like painful mitigation efforts are too grand to even think about. A lot of issues come down to leaving people alone to make their own decisions, with no effect on anyone else, and we can't even have that. So for me the mitigations are less about dealing with climate change and more about hoping climate change deniers realize just how reprehensibly they've handled this entire thing. But I'm not optimistic about that.

baq 3y ago
> Climate change is going to suck, but I focus on the fact that we've been fighting against really horrifically bad reasoning skills. Climate change is really basic chemistry; if we can't get people to agree on that how are we ever going to solve problems with any actual complexity? Dollars. People’s livelihoods depend on not understanding, so they don’t. We must incentivize understanding and propose a workable solution, which is basically a way to manufacture gasoline, diesel and natural gas out of literally thin air, because transitioning to electric everything is not happening due to natural resources constraints (thinking of mining primarily).
- blkhawk 3y ago
  uh sorta - while the livelihood of some deniers depend on dollars (commercial or political) I think its more correct to say that to make others doubt climate change is their primary task they get funding for. You can see this very well when compare American vs European climate change debate - in Europe is a very passive "not doing anything useful" while actually everybody gives at least lip service that something has to be done. This is because there was less opportunity to couple the debate into politics in an concentrated way. In the US the 2 party thing makes that very easy and the whole thing has staying power as an "issue" so it probably needs comparatively little or even no investment to keep alive. In the EU I can only directly speak for Germany but to me it seemed like there were no direct attacks against the concept of climate change directly (although we get some splash damage from the US). most issues stem from single big companies or industry groups trying to bend things to their advantage. A good example that is maybe best known international is the "Clean Diesel" thing that VW so disastrously chose because it was short term cheaper than investments into EV technology. This is what in the end lead to the diesel scandal. There are better examples but they get too local to be as easy to explain.

elbasti 3y ago

> this sort of "it's over, there's only doom ahead" is, IMO, counterproductive and hurts the efforts to help the environment more than it helps. Says who? We've been parroting the opposite message ("there's still time! go solar! electric cars!") is CLEARLY not working. I'm a climate change doomer, in that I'm certain our children will live in a very different world than us, and there's a real (10%+?) chance of total environmental collapse in our lifetimes. The positive feedback loops are inescapable. The science is the science...who are we to lie to people hoping that the lie somehow inspires mass coordinated change?

RandomLensman 3y ago
The science can be totally correct and the future still be different.
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
Your concern about total environmental collapse makes me wonder why there has been so little talk recently about biomedical advances as a hedge against the effects of global warming. Twenty-odd years ago, Ray Kurzweil’s vision of the human race moving from organic to machine bodies was all the rage in nerd circles. (I don’t share his optimism myself, I just think it curious that it totally disappeared from the discourse.) Machine bodies don’t rely on a world kept within such a narrow temperature range, they don’t rely on all the species that are going extinct, they don’t even need a biosphere at all.
- czechdeveloper 3y ago
  Because it's a pipe dream. We are our bodies, they not something to be overcome.
Amezarak 3y ago
> there's a real (10%+?) chance of total environmental collapse in our lifetimes I suppose I could be described as a doomer too, but I think this understates the issue. Even if we got carbon emissions to zero today, we're facing a very real chance of imminent ecological collapse in our lifetimes. Climate change is just the tip of the iceberg. To all appearances, (post)industrial civilization is not sustainable, whether or not you use fossil fuels.

Keyframe 3y ago

What efforts?

aaomidi 3y ago
We can’t even have the “most climate aware administration” require companies to support and encourage WFH and operate on an exception only model for companies that legitimately can’t operate that way. “Post pandemic” (it’s not over for many people, but officially the govt considered it over) was the best time to enforce that and they simply didn’t.
- Keyframe 3y ago
  What about the rest of 95% of population, it's a global problem.
  - aaomidi 3y ago
    Most of the “global population” is in fact not causing most of the damage. If the US had spearheaded less and no commuting for the majority of American workers, this would’ve set a trend worldwide. Heck, we can even make it a required part of our trade deals.
  - c0nducktr 3y ago
    Most of the population has no real control! Are you new here?

aaomidi 3y ago

I’m seriously tired of people shaming folks for having a doomer outlook. We need both. We need both a hopeful view of the future, and one that warns us what will happen if we don’t take action. A lot of the doom visions are going to come true even if we do take aggressive action today. But remember, bad can always be worse.

moneytide1 3y ago
> hopeful view of the future, and one that warns us The optimist designs the airplane, and the pessimist designs the parachute.
- aaomidi 3y ago
  Really well put.

throwbadubadu 3y ago

Why does it hurt the efforts now to say that we need more, otherwise there will be no way back? Not getting it. If we didn't downplay "the doom" for years now (and your framing is exactly kind of that), we maybe wouldn't be so tight in running out of time and getting into more and more risky situation.

acuozzo 3y ago
> If we didn't downplay "the doom" for years now We collectively didn't. We did quite the opposite by giving airtime to any quack predicting the end of the world, so much so that encountering "end of the world people" is a common trope in American sitcoms. (Edit: Hell, watch a documentary from the late '70s on "Global Cooling" to see what I mean. The episode of "In Search Of…" narrated by Leonard Nimoy is my suggestion.) If the "The End Is Nigh!" people hasn't ever existed, then I think the warnings over the past 4+ decades would have been taken far more seriously. As it is now, most are afraid of lending an ear to a boy crying "Wolf!". It sucks.

gmuslera 3y ago

There is no way back, but different potential forwards, some more desirable than others. But getting to a forward that is no so different from how things used to be will be difficult. It is something similar to the Red Queen Race, we should be running as fast as we can to keep things as they are and even faster to improve. But so far we are still accelerating into the wrong direction. And what we are doing is what may turn something into a practical impossibility rather than what is theoretically possible.

rewgs 3y ago

Perhaps it's not a rhetorical trick or framing device, and is instead simply...the truth? For decades the primary point of discussion with regards to climate change is "the right way to talk about it." And as far as I can tell, that's only ever shot us in the foot. Too optimistic, and people don't act because they think it's not that bad or that someone else will deal with it; too pessimistic, and everyone will apparently just shut down and not do anything about it because why bother. Call me crazy but perhaps we should stop thinking about it this way and simply deal with the science and the facts as head-on as possible, and that includes not calling out accurate representations of where we're at and where we're going as "counterproductive."

staunton 3y ago
> everyone will apparently just shut down and not do anything about it because why bother A negligible (both in terms of numbers and wealth) part of the world population feel this way. I guess most people actually still barely think about these things while they continue to live their lives as they come. In a lot of counties the discussion is still barely taking place.

xg15 3y ago

That's an easy thing to say until the point where we actually feel the consequences. There also seems to be no harm in drinking just another pint - until the the next morning, when you feel the hangover.

hotpotamus 3y ago
I’ve always thought it more akin to drinking yourself into liver failure; by the time you see serious symptoms, the damage is likely irreversible. And while you can in theory get a new liver, there’s no way to get a new planet.

c0nducktr 3y ago

This comment seems like it follows the standard path of all people who never wanted to address climate change. "Global Warming doesn't exist" "Sure it exists, but humans are not responsible" "Well sure, it's human made, but we can't do anything about it now" Every single move just is a reason to not do anything which might inconvenience the current order. I'm very tired of it.

Joeri 3y ago
Michael Mann described the 6 stages of climate denial in 2013. At the time the hard core deniers were still stage 1, nowadays they mostly seem to have moved to at least stage 3, and many of the politicians that are obstructing are stuck in stage 5 or 6. I hear a lot of category 6 denial from the politicians in my own country. 1. CO2 is not actually increasing. 2. Even if it is, the increase has no impact on the climate since there is no convincing evidence of warming. 3. Even if there is warming, it is due to natural causes. 4. Even if the warming cannot be explained by natural causes, the human impact is small, and the impact of continued greenhouse gas emissions will be minor. 5. Even if the current and future projected human effects on Earth's climate are not negligible, the changes are generally going to be good for us. 6. Whether or not the changes are going to be good for us, humans are very adept at adapting to changes; besides, it's too late to do anything about it, and/or a technological fix is bound to come along when we really need it.