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What is remarkable is the near-complete lack of fear as to what we might be "engineering" with our ever expanding environmental footprint. On the one hand ther

What is remarkable is the near-complete lack of fear as to what we might be "engineering" with our ever expanding environmental footprint. On the one hand there is a systemic underappreciation of the impact we have, a behavioral relic from bygone eras when, indeed, homo sapiens was just another species competing. On the other hand there is overconfidence in our ability to solve technology-induced problems using other technologies. This behavior is in turn a relic of the recent industrial-scientific revolution, when indeed homo sapiens saw dramatic empowerement over the rest of nature. This entenched denialism and lack of concern means that as environmental deterioration loops into itself and hits from unexpected corners, people's psychology will increasingly resolve the stresses by inventing scape goats etc. in a pointless and innefective blame shifting exercise. All in all, a once-in-a-species level of challenge that if we manage to survive will have changed human society more than all previous revolutions combined.

silverquiet 2y ago
> the near-complete lack of fear I'm terrified of what appears to be coming, but I'm told that this is an anxiety disorder.
snapplebobapple 2y ago
This might be an unpopular opinion here but the people that think like you appear to come off as really bad at analysis. You are raising the alarm like the changes are going to happen over night when the models forecast the changes to be gradual over the next 100 years. As just one example, it would be a disaster if sea level rose 60 centimeters ( as it is in the current policies 3 C temp) but it's almost a non issue over 100 years because every piece of infrastructure in the flooded area today will be depreciated multiple times over on that timespan. You also seem to disregard technological progress, which is a stupid thing to do on such a long timeline. You also seem to totally misunderstand cost/benefit analysis/ human thought. You are asking people to give up a lot today for some moderately far future potential thing that may or may not happen. Of course a lot of people are going to look at the trade off and very rationally tell you to pound sand.
- openrisk 2y ago
  > You are raising the alarm like the changes are going to happen over night when the models forecast the changes to be gradual over the next 100 years You are Exhibit 1 of what our collective sustainability problem is about: setting too short a time horizon and pretending that "rational" short-term optimisation will magically work for the long term. This pathological thinking that pretends to be rational has an official name in financial circles: "the tragedy of the horizon". Or, more colloquially, sweeping problems under the carpet. The long timescale of transformation due to exponentially increased human footprints does not make it less dangerous or easily tractable. Your kind of "rational" people would never stop smoking (giving up a lot) and hence would die prematurely (but alas not immediately) from cancer, awaiting maybe a magical cure that somehow remains elusive. The problem is that we share the same planet, we cant ask you to "go smoke outside" and your irrationality will take the rest of us with you. Technology is not a magic wand waved at will. It unfolds along the constraints and possibilities created by natural laws, not to mention the gestation periods and our incremental learning processes. The time available must be judged against our ability (and will) to respond to the unfolding impact and changes. On current form the human collective is more likely to resort to global wars using increasingly devastating technologies rather than solve difficult global problems cooperatively. So we are not exactly primed for success. The time to start worrying and figuring out sustainable pathways was yesterday.
  - snapplebobapple 2y ago
    1. The tragedy of the horizon is some marketing BS made up in 2015 by Mark Carney after his finance buddies figured out how much money there was in forcing production of otherwise uneconomical energy. It is not really a finance term in any long term sense of credible finance ideas. It comes from the political wing of finance associated people. There is no tragedy here, there is rational behavior discounting the far future (because there is so much time for the variables to change and invalidate the forecast or make it irrelevant). 2. It's not pathological it's intelligent and correct thinking on these timescales. There are a massive number of things that could change or be discovered to make current mitigations unnecessary and we aren't in venus style green house gas run off to push average temperature beyond habitable by a large margin, greenhouse gas in the atmosphere has been an order of magnitude higher than now in the past and the climate would be considered unpleasant but livable in that time. Therefore your risks are bounded below cataclysm (at least for thousands of years of current output), your costs are high and your timeline for technological and other progress is long. 3. Your take on smoking is bad analysis. The primary thing we did was put the facts into people's hands as our mitigation. The rest of the mitigations were comparatively minor vs something like a carbon tax and people changed over time quite dramatically. Also, your analysis on cost of treatment is wrong. It's actually way cheaper to treat a smoker because they tend to die quickly years before a nonsmoker, avoiding very expensives years to decades of assisted care and other treatments. There was a decent paper on this several years ago, but since this is just a side note I'm not going to spend a bunch of time trying to find it for you. 4. Yes we do share the same planet, thus game theory is in play and that makes stuff like carbon tax as implemented utterly stupid because it is harming countries that implement it (like my own country of Canada) with no benefit because we aren't meaningfully pushing out the timeline for negative effects without the big emitters curtailing their output. We should instead be setting our carbon tax to the global average and using that to cajole the others into doing the right thing (and raise our carbon tax as they raise theirs) rather than harming ourselves for almost no benefit 5. Of course technology is not a magic wand but on a long enough timescale it usually has a dramatic effect. Also, we have the technology to sort this right now without a large drop in quality of life (nuclear unhampered by bad regulation so that it is much cheaper plus renewables, steel and cement production electrically without co2 emission, better zoning to allow the stock of building to turn over with time to something much better for society and the environment than the current car centric nonsense, etc.) New tech would make this more pleasant but is mostly unnecessary. Our current problem is regulation keeping us from making changes (zoning and nuclear regulation primarily) that make green house gas cuts much less costly to the individual, If we can make it less costly enough we can change the rational analysis causing us to not want to mitigate and increase our desire to mitigate now, again all rationally.

silverquiet 2y ago

> the near-complete lack of fear I'm terrified of what appears to be coming, but I'm told that this is an anxiety disorder.

snapplebobapple 2y ago

This might be an unpopular opinion here but the people that think like you appear to come off as really bad at analysis. You are raising the alarm like the changes are going to happen over night when the models forecast the changes to be gradual over the next 100 years. As just one example, it would be a disaster if sea level rose 60 centimeters ( as it is in the current policies 3 C temp) but it's almost a non issue over 100 years because every piece of infrastructure in the flooded area today will be depreciated multiple times over on that timespan. You also seem to disregard technological progress, which is a stupid thing to do on such a long timeline. You also seem to totally misunderstand cost/benefit analysis/ human thought. You are asking people to give up a lot today for some moderately far future potential thing that may or may not happen. Of course a lot of people are going to look at the trade off and very rationally tell you to pound sand.

openrisk 2y ago
> You are raising the alarm like the changes are going to happen over night when the models forecast the changes to be gradual over the next 100 years You are Exhibit 1 of what our collective sustainability problem is about: setting too short a time horizon and pretending that "rational" short-term optimisation will magically work for the long term. This pathological thinking that pretends to be rational has an official name in financial circles: "the tragedy of the horizon". Or, more colloquially, sweeping problems under the carpet. The long timescale of transformation due to exponentially increased human footprints does not make it less dangerous or easily tractable. Your kind of "rational" people would never stop smoking (giving up a lot) and hence would die prematurely (but alas not immediately) from cancer, awaiting maybe a magical cure that somehow remains elusive. The problem is that we share the same planet, we cant ask you to "go smoke outside" and your irrationality will take the rest of us with you. Technology is not a magic wand waved at will. It unfolds along the constraints and possibilities created by natural laws, not to mention the gestation periods and our incremental learning processes. The time available must be judged against our ability (and will) to respond to the unfolding impact and changes. On current form the human collective is more likely to resort to global wars using increasingly devastating technologies rather than solve difficult global problems cooperatively. So we are not exactly primed for success. The time to start worrying and figuring out sustainable pathways was yesterday.
- snapplebobapple 2y ago
  1. The tragedy of the horizon is some marketing BS made up in 2015 by Mark Carney after his finance buddies figured out how much money there was in forcing production of otherwise uneconomical energy. It is not really a finance term in any long term sense of credible finance ideas. It comes from the political wing of finance associated people. There is no tragedy here, there is rational behavior discounting the far future (because there is so much time for the variables to change and invalidate the forecast or make it irrelevant). 2. It's not pathological it's intelligent and correct thinking on these timescales. There are a massive number of things that could change or be discovered to make current mitigations unnecessary and we aren't in venus style green house gas run off to push average temperature beyond habitable by a large margin, greenhouse gas in the atmosphere has been an order of magnitude higher than now in the past and the climate would be considered unpleasant but livable in that time. Therefore your risks are bounded below cataclysm (at least for thousands of years of current output), your costs are high and your timeline for technological and other progress is long. 3. Your take on smoking is bad analysis. The primary thing we did was put the facts into people's hands as our mitigation. The rest of the mitigations were comparatively minor vs something like a carbon tax and people changed over time quite dramatically. Also, your analysis on cost of treatment is wrong. It's actually way cheaper to treat a smoker because they tend to die quickly years before a nonsmoker, avoiding very expensives years to decades of assisted care and other treatments. There was a decent paper on this several years ago, but since this is just a side note I'm not going to spend a bunch of time trying to find it for you. 4. Yes we do share the same planet, thus game theory is in play and that makes stuff like carbon tax as implemented utterly stupid because it is harming countries that implement it (like my own country of Canada) with no benefit because we aren't meaningfully pushing out the timeline for negative effects without the big emitters curtailing their output. We should instead be setting our carbon tax to the global average and using that to cajole the others into doing the right thing (and raise our carbon tax as they raise theirs) rather than harming ourselves for almost no benefit 5. Of course technology is not a magic wand but on a long enough timescale it usually has a dramatic effect. Also, we have the technology to sort this right now without a large drop in quality of life (nuclear unhampered by bad regulation so that it is much cheaper plus renewables, steel and cement production electrically without co2 emission, better zoning to allow the stock of building to turn over with time to something much better for society and the environment than the current car centric nonsense, etc.) New tech would make this more pleasant but is mostly unnecessary. Our current problem is regulation keeping us from making changes (zoning and nuclear regulation primarily) that make green house gas cuts much less costly to the individual, If we can make it less costly enough we can change the rational analysis causing us to not want to mitigate and increase our desire to mitigate now, again all rationally.