4 ms·

It does not sound like a subtle signal or warning about crossing a threshold, more like a we are already past the point of no return and now we can just sit bac

It does not sound like a subtle signal or warning about crossing a threshold, more like a we are already past the point of no return and now we can just sit back and watch as the apocalypse unfolds, first row seats for all recent generations.

delusional 1y ago
Climate advocates in general try to avoid implying that we've already crossed a threshold, as that breeds hopelessness. They want decisive and ambitious action, you can't get that if we all turn to doomerism.
- anon-3988 1y ago
  For me its very clear that something will happen given that we fundamentally will never give up our lifestyle. I am not even talking about the ultra rich lifestyle, but lets say the bottom 70% of the world's population.
  - thanhhaimai 1y ago
    I think you overestimate how rich the bottom 70% of the world is. The bottom 70% of the world's population would have less than $X00 in the bank, and wouldn't have much control over their lifestyle.
  - smt88 1y ago
    We don't need to give up our lifestyle. We could switch to renewables, which would create jobs and save money in the process. The reasons we haven't done this are because China and India are hungrily industrializing, and the Republican Party in the US is captured by fossil fuel companies.
    - chneu 1y ago
      Stop blaming China and India. They're an easy excuse. And yes, we do need to give up several aspects of our lifestyles. Meat consumption absolutely must come down. Air travel must come down. Disposable goods, and consumer plastics, must come down. Our lifestyles must change. Capitalism encourages status symbol goods such as beef, travel/tourism, excessive consumption goods, etc. We need widespread consumer behavioral change before we have any hope of governments listening to people. As long as half of the population doesn't care about the climate then nothing meaningful will get done. For real change to happen people need sunk cost. Right now people have far too many excuses and denials to actually do much. There is always a China to blame, or a company to blame, or a mega rich person to blame.
      - panstromek 1y ago
        Note that most of the emissions come from fairly mundane stuff, notably heating and road transport. Tackling those is fairly straghtforward without that many changes in lifestyle. The last ~20% is where it becomes really difficult without major changes. > As long as half of the population doesn't care about the climate then nothing meaningful will get done. This is fairly common misconception. At this point the vast majority of people is on board, but the perception is skewed by vocal minority. Big part of the work at the moment is just communication to help closing this perception gap.
      - smt88 1y ago
        I blamed India, China, and the US. Any one of those countries could switch to renewables and solve the problem.
    - padjo 1y ago
      Look at per capita and historical emissions. The problem isn’t India and china, the problem is western greed.
- integricho 1y ago
  That sould be the least we do, some sort of coordinated global action to slow down, stop, eventually recover? The damage, and yet not a single country is willing to do anything serious in that regard. Politicians are exclusively focused on their political career, not thinking about the greater benefit to Earth, life, the human civilization. Pretty hopeless how things stand right now.
  - panstromek 1y ago
    > The damage, and yet not a single country is willing to do anything serious in that regard. This just doesn't correspond to reality. A lot of serious stuff is happening in this space.
- kadoban 1y ago
  > Climate advocates in general try to avoid implying that we've already crossed a threshold, as that breeds hopelessness. None of that means it's not true. Who is left to take decisive and ambitious action in say, the next decade?
- colordrops 1y ago
  It's a bad idea, the best way to deal with problems is to face them directly, no matter how desperate. This is a similar failure to COVID where they thought lying to the public would make for better outcomes but ended up sowing distrust. In the case of climate change this sows complacency.
  - taxicabjesus 1y ago
    > This is a similar failure to COVID where they thought lying to the public would make for better outcomes I'm curious which lies you're referring to. "Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve" reminded me of the time I had fun with my passenger's ignorance of celestial mechanics. She thought the moon really was done for, but after a few more minutes had passed it started to come back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881670 > but ended up sowing distrust. Because most people eventually caught on that they were being lied to?
    - colordrops 1y ago
      Yes. For example, in the US, they told people to not wear masks at the beginning of the pandemic, saying it wasn't airborne because they wanted to save masks for medical professionals. They should have just said directly that medical professionals need masks, so conserve them, reuse them, donate them, whatever, but anything but lie to the public. It helped create the conspiracy culture around COVID.
      - taxicabjesus 1y ago
        My favorite lie had to do with how there weren't enough ventilators. That one got memory holed relatively early, once the frontline medical workers figured out they'd been tricked into thinking ventilation would be helpful for SARS-CoV-2 patients who were not actually in respiratory distress. My other favorite lie was that the failed ebola drug remdesivir was helpful for COVID-19. The conspiracists think Remdesivir was used to punish people who declined the mRNA jabs. The ‘very, very bad look' of remdesivir, the first FDA-approved COVID-19 drug - https://www.science.org/content/article/very-very-bad-look-remdesivir-first-fda-approved-covid-19-drug https://www.science.org/content/article/very-very-bad-look-r... Washington Post: Remdesivir can help keep unvaccinated, high-risk people with covid-19 out of hospitals, study finds - https://www.ihv.org/news/2021-archives/washington-post-remdesivir-can-help-keep-unvaccinated-high-risk-people-with-covid-19-out-of-hospitals-study-finds.html https://www.ihv.org/news/2021-archives/washington-post-remde... Why Remdesivir Failed: Preclinical Assumptions Overestimate the Clinical Efficacy of Remdesivir for COVID-19 and Ebola https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/aac.01117-21 https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/aac.01117-21 > It helped create the conspiracy culture around COVID. I think conspiracists saw very clearly what was going on. A dissident scientist I respected said, at the very beginning, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was almost certainly a product of the UNC's gain-of-function research. He knew the UNC's work had been transferred to Wuhan, China. U.S. halts funding for new risky virus studies, calls for voluntary moratorium - No grants for flu, SARS, or MERS while government pursues 1-year risk analysis - https://www.science.org/content/article/us-halts-funding-new-risky-virus-studies-calls-voluntary-moratorium https://www.science.org/content/article/us-halts-funding-new... [2014]
- jes5199 1y ago
  okay then why is it taboo to suggest geoengineering interventions like injecting sulfer into the upper atmosphere? The climate advocates don’t have any decisive and ambitious actions that they actually are willing to try.
  - not_kurt_godel 1y ago
    They are, Biden funded research into it in 2022 https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/13/what-is-solar-geoengineering-sunlight-reflection-risks-and-benefits.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/13/what-is-solar-geoengineering.... Biden being the same POTUS who proposed and signed IRA aka the 'Green New Deal'. Now that we've established that, what's your decisive and ambitious action you've made towards addressing climate change, so we can learn from the example you've set?
    - jes5199 1y ago
      great, let’s scale up https://makesunsets.com/ https://makesunsets.com/
      - not_kurt_godel 1y ago
        That's not injecting sulfur into the upper atmosphere though? Is this your company?
        jes5199 1y ago
        no, just some acquaintances. but the only people even doing the experiment, as far as I can tell
        not_kurt_godel 1y ago
        I don't necessarily disagree (or agree) with the calculus that we arguably could and should be injecting SO2 into the stratosphere right now as an emergency measure, but your acquaintances are certainly not the only ones thinking about it. As the first article I linked mentions, the idea has been around since at least 1965 and references a 2021 landmark report. The White House OSTP also released their own 44-page report on it in 2023 (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/30/white-house-releases-report-on-solar-geoengineering.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/30/white-house-releases-report-... , https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/ostp/news-updates/2023/06/30/congressionally-mandated-report-on-solar-radiation-modification/ https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/ostp/news-updates/2023/...), pursuant to the research plan from the 2022 article I initially shared. I'd also probably agree that there is likely misguided opposition to it as a tool in the climate change arsenal as well from "climate advocates" (taboo). The same could also be said for fission nuclear power which, unlike SO2 geoengineering, would substantially address the root cause of the problem - emissions - with fewer risks and unknowns. (France, for example, being a real-world example of how many countries could almost completely decarbonize their electric generation in a proven and scalable way with nuclear fission.) If we further broaden our scope of misguided opposition from just "climate advocates" to voting polities in countries that are positioned to meaningfully address climate change at a global scale, then we're really getting to the root of the issue. The single most impactful action the average person could take to fight climate change in the US is to vote blue. It's an effectively binary choice to give badly-needed societal support and investment to climate-relevant initiatives like your friends' and so many others.
- shironandon 1y ago
  David Suzuki had some real talk yesterday: https://www.ipolitics.ca/2025/07/02/its-too-late-david-suzuki-says-the-fight-against-climate-change-is-lost/ https://www.ipolitics.ca/2025/07/02/its-too-late-david-suzuk... We are now in the "hunker down" phase of global warming.
  - signalToNose 1y ago
    The five stages of grief, often referred to as the Kübler-Ross model, are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
    - chneu 1y ago
      Be aware this isn't really what mental health teaches anymore.
- atoav 1y ago
  Yes sure. But as someone who was a kid in the 90s all my life I learned about how climate change is the biggest challenge to humanity. Yet all my life I have seen grown adults pretend it doesn't exist, and when that was no longer avoidable they pretended is was natural and when that was no longer defendable... You get the idea. And I grew up in a part of the world where you could see the glaciers melting with your own eyes. The doom of climate change is mostly people to dumb to understand the most basic of models or (worse) unwilling to do so on ideological grounds. I already decided not to have children in my life because I think it is irresponsible to put them into this world. We will have enough climate migration anyways. The truth is that there are tripping points that are extremely hard to reverse and may or may not trigger other tripping points. Reading these risks as a reason not to care is the opposite of what should happen. And then you figure out what the real reason is to burn the world: some rich fucks trying to extract a few thousand dollars per second more f4om the r3st of us.
- briantakita 1y ago
  > They want decisive and ambitious action, you can't get that if we all turn to doomerism. What if "doomerism" is a key component to demoralize people to accept "decisive and ambitious action"? Note that most of the environmental policy talk is on a global level...blaming living people who aren't wealthy enough to benefit from financial capital. Making everyone who doesn't make their living off of financial assets have a worse quality of life...while those who benefit from financial assets even more wealthy. Environmental policy talk is not on a local level. Never mind the water usage of the AI centers & how it affects communities. The farmers will have to sell their land so big capital to buy it on the cheap. The money pump always leads to accumulation of Capital. It sure seems like the rhetoric goes one way. Making the rich richer...so they have all the carbon credits to do whatever they want...transcending the "tyranny of morality" while they fly in private jets to "save the climate". Making the working/middle-class poor..."you will own nothing & be happy". Making the poor radicalized & pointing their finger at each other. This seems like a global scale psychological experiment more than anything. At some point the true believers in climate science will be disappointed by the contradictions of their heroes...because at the end of the day...it's about money & power. There is no "we". There is only "you will have to sacrifice so I can be more wealthy & hold more leverage over you".
vaylian 1y ago
Some things are set in motion. But it's not clear if we have reached a state yet, where climate change will reinforce itself indefinitely. Staying below 1.5 degrees global warming is very unlikely at this point. But every tenth of a degree counts. Humanity needs to be decisive in slowing down climate change. This is a matter of political will.
gjadi 1y ago
Two things: slowdown and adaptation. Slow CO2 emissions because every tons make it worse for +10 000yrs. Adaptation, because infrastructures changes are slow to do and the sooner we start the sooner we can absorb damage.

delusional 1y ago

Climate advocates in general try to avoid implying that we've already crossed a threshold, as that breeds hopelessness. They want decisive and ambitious action, you can't get that if we all turn to doomerism.

anon-3988 1y ago
For me its very clear that something will happen given that we fundamentally will never give up our lifestyle. I am not even talking about the ultra rich lifestyle, but lets say the bottom 70% of the world's population.
- thanhhaimai 1y ago
  I think you overestimate how rich the bottom 70% of the world is. The bottom 70% of the world's population would have less than $X00 in the bank, and wouldn't have much control over their lifestyle.
- smt88 1y ago
  We don't need to give up our lifestyle. We could switch to renewables, which would create jobs and save money in the process. The reasons we haven't done this are because China and India are hungrily industrializing, and the Republican Party in the US is captured by fossil fuel companies.
  - chneu 1y ago
    Stop blaming China and India. They're an easy excuse. And yes, we do need to give up several aspects of our lifestyles. Meat consumption absolutely must come down. Air travel must come down. Disposable goods, and consumer plastics, must come down. Our lifestyles must change. Capitalism encourages status symbol goods such as beef, travel/tourism, excessive consumption goods, etc. We need widespread consumer behavioral change before we have any hope of governments listening to people. As long as half of the population doesn't care about the climate then nothing meaningful will get done. For real change to happen people need sunk cost. Right now people have far too many excuses and denials to actually do much. There is always a China to blame, or a company to blame, or a mega rich person to blame.
    - panstromek 1y ago
      Note that most of the emissions come from fairly mundane stuff, notably heating and road transport. Tackling those is fairly straghtforward without that many changes in lifestyle. The last ~20% is where it becomes really difficult without major changes. > As long as half of the population doesn't care about the climate then nothing meaningful will get done. This is fairly common misconception. At this point the vast majority of people is on board, but the perception is skewed by vocal minority. Big part of the work at the moment is just communication to help closing this perception gap.
    - smt88 1y ago
      I blamed India, China, and the US. Any one of those countries could switch to renewables and solve the problem.
  - padjo 1y ago
    Look at per capita and historical emissions. The problem isn’t India and china, the problem is western greed.
integricho 1y ago
That sould be the least we do, some sort of coordinated global action to slow down, stop, eventually recover? The damage, and yet not a single country is willing to do anything serious in that regard. Politicians are exclusively focused on their political career, not thinking about the greater benefit to Earth, life, the human civilization. Pretty hopeless how things stand right now.
- panstromek 1y ago
  > The damage, and yet not a single country is willing to do anything serious in that regard. This just doesn't correspond to reality. A lot of serious stuff is happening in this space.
kadoban 1y ago
> Climate advocates in general try to avoid implying that we've already crossed a threshold, as that breeds hopelessness. None of that means it's not true. Who is left to take decisive and ambitious action in say, the next decade?
colordrops 1y ago
It's a bad idea, the best way to deal with problems is to face them directly, no matter how desperate. This is a similar failure to COVID where they thought lying to the public would make for better outcomes but ended up sowing distrust. In the case of climate change this sows complacency.
- taxicabjesus 1y ago
  > This is a similar failure to COVID where they thought lying to the public would make for better outcomes I'm curious which lies you're referring to. "Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve" reminded me of the time I had fun with my passenger's ignorance of celestial mechanics. She thought the moon really was done for, but after a few more minutes had passed it started to come back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881670 > but ended up sowing distrust. Because most people eventually caught on that they were being lied to?
  - colordrops 1y ago
    Yes. For example, in the US, they told people to not wear masks at the beginning of the pandemic, saying it wasn't airborne because they wanted to save masks for medical professionals. They should have just said directly that medical professionals need masks, so conserve them, reuse them, donate them, whatever, but anything but lie to the public. It helped create the conspiracy culture around COVID.
    - taxicabjesus 1y ago
      My favorite lie had to do with how there weren't enough ventilators. That one got memory holed relatively early, once the frontline medical workers figured out they'd been tricked into thinking ventilation would be helpful for SARS-CoV-2 patients who were not actually in respiratory distress. My other favorite lie was that the failed ebola drug remdesivir was helpful for COVID-19. The conspiracists think Remdesivir was used to punish people who declined the mRNA jabs. The ‘very, very bad look' of remdesivir, the first FDA-approved COVID-19 drug - https://www.science.org/content/article/very-very-bad-look-remdesivir-first-fda-approved-covid-19-drug https://www.science.org/content/article/very-very-bad-look-r... Washington Post: Remdesivir can help keep unvaccinated, high-risk people with covid-19 out of hospitals, study finds - https://www.ihv.org/news/2021-archives/washington-post-remdesivir-can-help-keep-unvaccinated-high-risk-people-with-covid-19-out-of-hospitals-study-finds.html https://www.ihv.org/news/2021-archives/washington-post-remde... Why Remdesivir Failed: Preclinical Assumptions Overestimate the Clinical Efficacy of Remdesivir for COVID-19 and Ebola https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/aac.01117-21 https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/aac.01117-21 > It helped create the conspiracy culture around COVID. I think conspiracists saw very clearly what was going on. A dissident scientist I respected said, at the very beginning, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was almost certainly a product of the UNC's gain-of-function research. He knew the UNC's work had been transferred to Wuhan, China. U.S. halts funding for new risky virus studies, calls for voluntary moratorium - No grants for flu, SARS, or MERS while government pursues 1-year risk analysis - https://www.science.org/content/article/us-halts-funding-new-risky-virus-studies-calls-voluntary-moratorium https://www.science.org/content/article/us-halts-funding-new... [2014]
jes5199 1y ago
okay then why is it taboo to suggest geoengineering interventions like injecting sulfer into the upper atmosphere? The climate advocates don’t have any decisive and ambitious actions that they actually are willing to try.
- not_kurt_godel 1y ago
  They are, Biden funded research into it in 2022 https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/13/what-is-solar-geoengineering-sunlight-reflection-risks-and-benefits.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/13/what-is-solar-geoengineering.... Biden being the same POTUS who proposed and signed IRA aka the 'Green New Deal'. Now that we've established that, what's your decisive and ambitious action you've made towards addressing climate change, so we can learn from the example you've set?
  - jes5199 1y ago
    great, let’s scale up https://makesunsets.com/ https://makesunsets.com/
    - not_kurt_godel 1y ago
      That's not injecting sulfur into the upper atmosphere though? Is this your company?
      - jes5199 1y ago
        no, just some acquaintances. but the only people even doing the experiment, as far as I can tell
        not_kurt_godel 1y ago
        I don't necessarily disagree (or agree) with the calculus that we arguably could and should be injecting SO2 into the stratosphere right now as an emergency measure, but your acquaintances are certainly not the only ones thinking about it. As the first article I linked mentions, the idea has been around since at least 1965 and references a 2021 landmark report. The White House OSTP also released their own 44-page report on it in 2023 (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/30/white-house-releases-report-on-solar-geoengineering.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/30/white-house-releases-report-... , https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/ostp/news-updates/2023/06/30/congressionally-mandated-report-on-solar-radiation-modification/ https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/ostp/news-updates/2023/...), pursuant to the research plan from the 2022 article I initially shared. I'd also probably agree that there is likely misguided opposition to it as a tool in the climate change arsenal as well from "climate advocates" (taboo). The same could also be said for fission nuclear power which, unlike SO2 geoengineering, would substantially address the root cause of the problem - emissions - with fewer risks and unknowns. (France, for example, being a real-world example of how many countries could almost completely decarbonize their electric generation in a proven and scalable way with nuclear fission.) If we further broaden our scope of misguided opposition from just "climate advocates" to voting polities in countries that are positioned to meaningfully address climate change at a global scale, then we're really getting to the root of the issue. The single most impactful action the average person could take to fight climate change in the US is to vote blue. It's an effectively binary choice to give badly-needed societal support and investment to climate-relevant initiatives like your friends' and so many others.
shironandon 1y ago
David Suzuki had some real talk yesterday: https://www.ipolitics.ca/2025/07/02/its-too-late-david-suzuki-says-the-fight-against-climate-change-is-lost/ https://www.ipolitics.ca/2025/07/02/its-too-late-david-suzuk... We are now in the "hunker down" phase of global warming.
- signalToNose 1y ago
  The five stages of grief, often referred to as the Kübler-Ross model, are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
  - chneu 1y ago
    Be aware this isn't really what mental health teaches anymore.
atoav 1y ago
Yes sure. But as someone who was a kid in the 90s all my life I learned about how climate change is the biggest challenge to humanity. Yet all my life I have seen grown adults pretend it doesn't exist, and when that was no longer avoidable they pretended is was natural and when that was no longer defendable... You get the idea. And I grew up in a part of the world where you could see the glaciers melting with your own eyes. The doom of climate change is mostly people to dumb to understand the most basic of models or (worse) unwilling to do so on ideological grounds. I already decided not to have children in my life because I think it is irresponsible to put them into this world. We will have enough climate migration anyways. The truth is that there are tripping points that are extremely hard to reverse and may or may not trigger other tripping points. Reading these risks as a reason not to care is the opposite of what should happen. And then you figure out what the real reason is to burn the world: some rich fucks trying to extract a few thousand dollars per second more f4om the r3st of us.
briantakita 1y ago
> They want decisive and ambitious action, you can't get that if we all turn to doomerism. What if "doomerism" is a key component to demoralize people to accept "decisive and ambitious action"? Note that most of the environmental policy talk is on a global level...blaming living people who aren't wealthy enough to benefit from financial capital. Making everyone who doesn't make their living off of financial assets have a worse quality of life...while those who benefit from financial assets even more wealthy. Environmental policy talk is not on a local level. Never mind the water usage of the AI centers & how it affects communities. The farmers will have to sell their land so big capital to buy it on the cheap. The money pump always leads to accumulation of Capital. It sure seems like the rhetoric goes one way. Making the rich richer...so they have all the carbon credits to do whatever they want...transcending the "tyranny of morality" while they fly in private jets to "save the climate". Making the working/middle-class poor..."you will own nothing & be happy". Making the poor radicalized & pointing their finger at each other. This seems like a global scale psychological experiment more than anything. At some point the true believers in climate science will be disappointed by the contradictions of their heroes...because at the end of the day...it's about money & power. There is no "we". There is only "you will have to sacrifice so I can be more wealthy & hold more leverage over you".

vaylian 1y ago

Some things are set in motion. But it's not clear if we have reached a state yet, where climate change will reinforce itself indefinitely. Staying below 1.5 degrees global warming is very unlikely at this point. But every tenth of a degree counts. Humanity needs to be decisive in slowing down climate change. This is a matter of political will.

gjadi 1y ago

Two things: slowdown and adaptation. Slow CO2 emissions because every tons make it worse for +10 000yrs. Adaptation, because infrastructures changes are slow to do and the sooner we start the sooner we can absorb damage.