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Is it a few decades from 1980 or a few decades from 2024? Alarmist statements hurt more than they help fight human caused climate change.
by fooker 2y ago
Is it a few decades from 1980 or a few decades from 2024?
Alarmist statements hurt more than they help fight human caused climate change.
- silverquiet 2y agoGiven that CO2 emissions have only ever increased, it seems like everything hurts more than helps the fight against climate change. For what it’s worth, I’m reasonably convinced that the answer is 1980 and that, like a lethal dose of radiation, the damage is done and now we merely wait for the effects to take hold fully.
- realusername 2y agoI'm starting to get that there's no good way to talk about climate change, especially to people which have a vested interest not to hear about it.
- europeanNyan 2y agoMaybe people are just tired from the same old alarmism which is then used to introduce more and more limitations and never touches the biggest offenders. Sure, introduce the next tax, lovely. Hope Nestle doesn't get touched.
- realusername 2y agoThe measures against climate change have been so weak until now that I don't think we can even talk about limitations yet. At least there's some equality here I guess, nobody doesn't do anything.
- fooker 2y agoThe measures against climate change has been weak precisely because of alarmism. If everything is going to shit anyways, why throw resources into a black hole fixing it today? Check how many headlines have been saying inevitable, point of no return, etc etc for several decades. Another aspect of this is overfitting on metrics like CO2 emissions, that's how you get hot garbage like carbon offsets that allow the worst offenders to keep operating like they have always been.
- realusername 2y agoYou live in a parallel world, the vast majority of the mainstream news out there are outright climate change deniers funded by billionaires and the few ones who don't cannot even relay the whole truth for being accused of "alarmism". The reason nobody does anything about climate change is because it threatens their wealth, not because it's a catastrophe.
- fooker 2y agoIn my 'parallel world', it does seem like the mainstream media publishes articles every week or so (for the last decade or so) about how we are at the point of no return for climate change. And all of it is preserved in this wonderful searchable web of articles that ensures one does not have to speculate about what was published. Maybe search on the web, who knows, it could turn out that you too live in the same world!
- realusername 2y agoI'm sorry but no they really don't. As an example, there's been some pretty deadly heatwave feuled by climate changed recently for example both in Sub-Saharan africa and south east asia and I'm sure nobody is really aware of it. Turns out the "alarmist" as you call them were right all along and the current events are following pretty much the worst case scenarios.
- fooker 2y agoYou first say that alarmists don't exist, but then also they were right all along?
- realusername 2y agoI'm just quoting your comment about the so-called alarmist mainstream news which is just nonsense, that's what doesn't exist.
- deepsun 2y agoWhat if in 50 years it turns out alarmists were right, and there's nothing could be done? Anti-alarmists will say "oopsie, we were wrong, you were right, now we see". But it won't help. Imagine there's a huge asteroid comes at Earth, but it will strike only in 100 years. Alarmists start screaming that we need to act NOW, but anti-alarmists would be like "oh come on, you're screaming it for the last 44 years, please stop". People are pretty bad at solving long problems.
- fooker 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager You can extend this 'what if I am right' argument to literally anything, making it vacuous.
- BearOso 2y agoPascal's wager doesn't require much effort on behalf of the user, though. The idea is the benefits far outweigh the downsides. So should we just try to have a cleaner earth with the benefit of subverting this dangerous thing if it does exist? The clincher here is that most of the greenhouse gasses come from giant corporations. As non-billionaire individuals, we don't have to personally give anything up. All we have to do is get those corporations to stop polluting simply because it's more profitable in the short term.
- fooker 2y ago>All we have to do is get those corporations to stop polluting simply because it's more profitable in the short term. Agreed. Also happy to personally give up conveniences if it helps. The distinction is between 'this bad thing should be fixed', and 'this double plus super duper bad thing is going to kill everyone'. Why even bother if the second one correct?
- grecy 2y agoSo basically every country on earth has recorded the hottest temps and highest average temps ever recorded on the last few years, often breaking the record from the year before. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records#/media/File%3A1951-_Percent_of_record_temperatures_that_are_cold_or_warm_records.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records#/med... If you don’t accept that as evidence, you will never accept anything.
- fooker 2y agoAn evidence for what? Climate change is real and we need to move away from destroying the environment. Maybe even resort to artificial mitigations at some point. There's not much evidence on either direction about how irreversible it is or how doomed we are. And claiming there is is dishonest, and hurts the efforts to make real changes for the sake of scoring ideological points.
- wkat4242 2y agoThere's definite evidence about the irreversibility like the release of trapped CO2 in ice that accumulated over tens of thousands of years. Riding of sea levels will also take much more time to reverse than it took to happen. Technically it's all reversible as the world will see another ice age at some point but on a human scale it's not going to be.