7 ms·

I Stopped Being a Climate Catastrophist

79 points by paulpauper 1y ago

MangoToupe 1y ago
Your reaction doesn't matter; only the collective response does. It seems there is little appetite to doubt nationalism, and immense optimism for our ability to correct later.
- zahlman 1y ago
  What has that got to do with TFA?
  - MangoToupe 1y ago
    Well, your reaction does not matter (and neither does bill gates'); only the collective response does. The Lucky for your conscience the world doesn't give a shit about global warming, nor your realization that you can't do anything about it Of course the world is fucked
    - zahlman 1y ago
      I literally do not understand what argument you are trying to make. The only "collective response" to your comments I can imagine here is confusion.
delichon 1y ago
This rhymes with https://www.gatesnotes.com/three-tough-truths-about-climate https://www.gatesnotes.com/three-tough-truths-about-climate.
- epistasis 1y ago
  I see very little agreement in any way with Bill Gates is talking about. In fact I suspect that Gates would be dismissed as too woke for making this one of his main points: > But we can’t cut funding for health and development—programs that help people stay resilient in the face of climate change—to do it. > It’s time to put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies, which includes reducing the Green Premium to zero and improving agriculture and health in poor countries. This is just rehashed Green New Deal language for the global stage. (Something I fully support!!)
  - delichon 1y ago
    They're agreeing that climate change is serious but not necessarily civilization ending: Nordhous: "The amount of warming that is conceivable … is not remotely consistent with the sorts of catastrophic outcomes … where tens or hundreds of million, perhaps even billions of lives were at stake." Gates: "Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise."
    - dingnuts 1y ago
      that's what "climate skeptics" have been saying for twenty years but you would get bullied for saying so. my favorite was getting told we "deserved it" for being in Texas during the ice apocalypse, because Texas is a red state. I hope that people exhibiting that kind of behavior are finally starting to question whether or not it's helpful. The article suggests that is perhaps beginning to happen. If you want people to make sacrifices to improve the future, just maybe messaging that it's hopeless and anyone who doesn't see that is stupid isn't the best strategy for effecting real change
      - hobofan 1y ago
        > particularly for people in the poorest countries > for being in Texas News flash: climate change by and large isn't about the US, and US will be one of the least impacted nations of first hand climate change effects.
        Lord-Jobo 1y ago
        Not who you are replying to, but two of the most populated U.S states will massively depopulate with much more climate change. Texas and Florida are turning into complete furnaces for 1/3 of the year and subject to catastrophic severe weather another 1/3. Which is a small deal compared to a billion foreign migrants, which is also a possibility, but still a massive deal. You are completely correct that the first world will escape most of the direct and dire pain resulting from our irresponsible burning of the future. I also think trying to suss out “who is going to suffer more” is basically pointless when so much of our economy is based worldwide trade and so much of our society is expecting relatively stable populations, two things that will change rapidly with a few climate shifts. *this entire thread is getting at one thing: yes, humanity and the general summary of human knowledge will almost certainly survive the extreme chaos we are heading for. That should not be much consolation to you, because the chaos will set back the human experience 150 years for generations that include you and your children. Especially when the chaos involves incredible strife for many nations with nuclear armament.
quamserena 1y ago
Anyone else notice the obvious misspelling of “climate” in the AI-generated hero image?
- lynndotpy 1y ago
  It's pretty amazing how much we've lowered our collective standards for article quality since the advent of AI generation. (Not just here, but everywhere). It's not like it's a rote spelling mistake deep in the article, the spelling mistake is the very first thing you see. Why would a serious author go with this image? Just a few years ago, misspelling "climate" and having nonsensical political cartoon to headline your article would have just been disqualifying.
  - uvaursi 1y ago
    Whereas before the air of sophistication conned you into thinking the authors knew what they were talking about, it took AI slop for you to see how bad things really are. Queue the “always have been” meme.
    - lynndotpy 1y ago
      No, things are worse now. Our standards have lowered. There was no way to quickly produce low-effort vacuous text without writing it or copying it from another source before now. Of course people could feign intelligence before, but it's much easier now and our standards are lower. This is a double whammy.
- vunderba 1y ago
  Wow, that is a terrible image (yellow tinge indicative of gpt-image-1, spelling errors). I don't mind generative images being used in articles, provided that they: A. Have some relevance to the actual content. B. Don't exhibit glaringly obvious AI flaws (polydactyly, faces like melted wax candles, etc.). It's amazing how little time people take to vet images that are intended to be the first thing viewers will see. Reminds me of the image attached to Karpathy's (one of the founding members of OpenAI) Twitter post on founding an education AI lab: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1813263734707790301 https://x.com/karpathy/status/1813263734707790301
claytongulick 1y ago
I hope that we see more measured, objective articles like this. It's been pretty frustrating as someone on the sidelines looking in, the degree of panic and emotion attached to the climate stuff, that has always seemed to be out of scale with the actual effects to me. I'm ~50, and my whole life, back to the 80's, there have been these sort of breathless extreme articles about the existential threat that climate poses. I remember, as a kid, it was global cooling, and we were all going to have to deal with an ice age, which terrified me. Then it was global warming, and the "tipping point" and hawaii and all of our coastal cities were going to be under water within 5 years. Then it was "climate change" which was poorly defined to me, but humans were definitely to blame, and causing hurricanes and destroying the planet - even though when I bothered to look at the actual data, the rate of hurricanes and other events had actually decreased. I've read some super compelling articles from what I'll call "measured environmentalists" that argue persuasively that to do the most good for people, we should shift our focus to immediate harms that we can actually control well - things like malaria, and reliable clean water and heating, that would have a far greater impact for tens of millions of people than something nebulous like carbon credits. I'm far from an expert on this stuff, I just wish that the conversation (as with so many things) could have less yelling, and more considered thoughtful discussion. This article, and Gates' seem to be a great start.
- abdullahkhalids 1y ago
  An article talking about a complex system [1] (the Earth's climate system coupled to human industrial/farming systems) with few hard numbers, no mathematical models and graphs of their behavior, and no links to any such discussions, is not objective in any sense of the word. It's all the author's uncited subjective views. This is the kind of stuff one should take in from one ear, and let it out through the other ear without letting it touch the brain. [1] complexity in the sense of mathematics.
  - claytongulick 1y ago
    It sort of depends on the expertise of the author, right? In this case, it seems like an actual climate scientist that has moderated his opinion over time, at least that was my takeaway. That makes it at least as valuable to me as any given "we're all going to die" article that pops up endlessly in these kinds of discussions. I agree though, that a big problem with these conversations is dealing with complex systems, small signals and potentially large impacts and communicating all that in an effective way. Most people (myself included) are simply not equipped to understand the details, so we rely on others to explain it to us. My point was just that I enjoy a more balanced take on the issue.
therein 1y ago
[flagged]
JohnMakin 1y ago
What is this author smoking? "2 to 3 feet" of sea level rise is still absolutely catastrophic and is hand waved away in one sentence. 5 degrees in 50 years? We've already gained about 1 degree in the last 20 years alone - with no signs of slowing down. If it's ackshually 5 degrees in 75 years, what even is the point of making a point about that? We're reaching several ecological tipping points. We're in a mass extinction. What in the everloving hell is this? Have we gone full "don't look up" with this now?
- epistasis 1y ago
  I think the problem is that "catastrophic" is not well-defined. Will we all be back to caves and sticks? No. Will there be trillions of dollars of damages and massive societal upheaval from massive migrations of people? Yes. Will a billion people die? Probably not, unless a war breaks out and leads to nuclear destruction. I would consider all of these to be "catastrophic" but some may not consider migrations + damagaes to be "catastrophic."
  - lynndotpy 1y ago
    Well, one plane crashing or one building falling, destroying something valuable and killing "only" a few dozen people is considered a catastrophe. I think we can say the bar for "catastrophe" is lower than that for "apocalypse". The higher global average temperatures alone are already a yearly catastrophe, by this standard.
  - jsbisviewtiful 1y ago
    > Will a billion people die? Probably not Really underestimating the amount of deaths that will occur when our food production systems start collapsing.
    - epistasis 1y ago
      During some of the worst starvation events in the 20th century, it was still only on the order of ~10 million people that died. And most of those deaths were because horrific totalitarian governments prevented outside aid to the affected regions. I have not seen evidence that there will be food system collapse driven by climate change that would be worse than those events, but my ears are open if you have some.
soVeryTired 1y ago
He's comparing AGW, which drives a trend, with weather-based events, which are noise around the trend. He conveniently cuts his analysis off at the year 2100, by which we'll all probably be dead. But he's probably right that the trend itself doesn't cause insurmountable problems by that point. But what about the year 2200, or 2300? At three degrees warming per century, the earth looks like a pretty hostile place to live in a few centuries. "A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit", and all that...
- Daishiman 1y ago
  His idea of it being "not insurmountable" is essentially us not starving to death in a mass scale. I care, in my comfortable life as an office worker, about the fact that chocolate, coffee, and wine will become luxuries as yields and quality drastically drop off. I care about the fact that many places I visit frequently will need A/C to be _survivable_. Those are not civilization-ending events but the hubris you need to have to just hand-wave this away are beyond my understanding.
- mike_hearn 1y ago
  It's irrelevant beyond that point and possibly much earlier because the forcing effect of CO2 saturates logarithmically, it's not linear.
jay_kyburz 1y ago
As a layperson, I read that 2024 was the hottest on record, and I see charts that go up. I have no reason to believe that the charts will go down. I don't care if its 3 deg by the end of the century or 5 deg. But what about the century after that, or by 3000. I'm not so concerned about disasters or economic impacts, I just have a deep moral belief that we should leave our environment the same as when we entered it. We know that fossil fuels release pollution that we have no technology to clean up. We we should not be using it. It's not rocket science. Admittedly, it makes no rational sense go without today so that future humans can experience the earth in the same way I have. I understand why many people dismiss risks of things unlikely to effect them or their children, but to me to feels wrong, and I would like to have as little impact on the climate as I can. https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-confirms-2024-warmest-year-record-about-155degc-above-pre-industrial-level https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-confirms-2024-warmest-...
- thegrim33 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - jay_kyburz 1y ago
    > Each year over the last 20,000 years has been hotter than the last, on average. The "chart has gone up" every single year since when campfires were the height of human technology. If you look at the chart in the link above, it's very clear there has been a dramatic change in the last 50 years. There has also been a dramatic rise CO2 emissions in a similar period. I don't think its unreasonable to assume the two are linked. Even if you were to concede we cannot prove that our emissions are causing the change, we should at least acknowledge that there is some chance that they are. We can't do anything about the earth naturally warming itself, so there is no action required in that scenario, but we can reduce our emissions in the chance they are damaging the earth.
- energy123 1y ago
  The moral case is really for the billions of people near the equator who cannot afford for temperatures to go up much more. It's too hot there already. We are making their countries insufferable to live in and we aren't compensating them for it. It's a travesty.
davebranton 1y ago
I stopped reading at the AI image at the top of the page. The comments here suggest I was right to.
- nh23423fefe 1y ago
  CLMATE
RickJWagner 1y ago
Bill Gates opened the floodgates. After 25 years of dire, ‘existential’ warnings, the political messaging is beginning to taper off and moderate. It’s a necessary step. If you tell people the worlds about to end for too long, you lose credibility with all but the true believers. Apologies are due to everyone that was fried on social media for suggesting things were not as bad as described. Anyone not fully radicalized was declared a ‘denier’ and accused of being ignorant about the overwhelming science. It seems the people who acknowledged the climate was changing, but did not consider it an immediate, existential threat now have the high scientific ground. It seems possible they’ll keep it.
- anon7000 1y ago
  People just aren’t equipped to think about it on the right scale. Experts have not been suggesting that a catastrophe will wipe humans from the planet within the next handful of years. They have been suggesting that our trends are deeply unsustainable for the planet. And the effects of screwing with our planet will easily be catastrophic in many years if trends continue. So yes, urgent action would be necessary to get the trends to be more manageable. But because monkey brain doesn’t see an immediate threat, monkey brain calls climate scientists liars for some reason. We have these “temperature targets” not because the world instantly ends once we hit however many degrees of warming, but because we know the impact of that much change will be more drastic over the following decades. Monkeybrain just doesn’t know how to prioritize that threat without making people afraid of it.
- asacrowflies 1y ago
  Just because humans are dumb especially things on this time scale. Does not make the fools and deniers any less deplorable.... Holocene extinction - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction You all call yourself pragmatist but us doomers actually seem to be the only ones who want any of humanity to survive at all ....
tuatoru 1y ago
Everyone is a climate skeptic. "To know, and not yet to do, is not to know" - Aristotle. Everyone still flies on planes. Ceasing burning kerosene is the easiest possible thing you could do to reduce your climate impact, but no-one does it. Everyone hates being called out on it, but it is true. No-one really cares, because no-one is prepared to make a socially costly signal, costly in prestige or relationships or group membership. It's all posturing.
- seba_dos1 1y ago
  Speak for yourself. I can count the times I flied in my whole life on one hand, and I have never flied domestically. It's not some unachievable ideal, and majority != everyone.
- tim333 1y ago
  It's a funny business. I'm a bit skeptical how much of a problem it will be but am up for fixing things. But me not flying will make no difference. The kind of thing that could is a global carbon tax but hardly anyone seems up for that.
incomingpain 1y ago
Where I live in Canada we have a humid continental climate. Climate change is a fact; and lets even say worst case scenario happens. We become a humid subtropical climate. Northern Canada is subarctic and they will become humid continental. I look at these 'climates changing" and see absolutely no problem at all. Looks like an improvement to me. How can we go about speeding up this process?
- asacrowflies 1y ago
  You have to be supremely ignorant... Bordering on flat earther or evolution denial/young earth creationist... To believe this will work out like that..... This won't be a nice change of pace for your climate. It will be a mass extinction even humans have never experienced. It's obscene even. And this language of 'catastrophism' literally sounds like woo woo therapy speak by unscientific fools. Calling it not a "catastrophy' will be looked at as immoral as slavery in the future generation imo. Holocene extinction - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
  - incomingpain 1y ago
    >You have to be supremely ignorant... Bordering on flat earther or evolution denial/young earth creationist... To believe this will work out like that..... Great place to start with flames. >This won't be a nice change of pace for your climate. It will be a mass extinction even humans have never experienced. It's obscene even. The science clearly says that isn't the case at all. Feel free to reference IPCC RCP8.5 scenarios where we magically find extremely more fossil fuels and burn those as well. No extinction is expected even in those scenarios. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene#Climate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene#Climate The eocene was approximately 14celcius warmer than it is today and life thrived. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Interglacial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Interglacial During the last spike, the eemian, it was about 2 celcius warmer than today. Roughly 100,000 years ago, and that's roughly all we do expect to happen now. Life was thriving.
    - Daishiman 1y ago
more_corn 1y ago
One known tactic by climate denialists is to create a feeling of despair. If nothing can help, nothing must be done.
asacrowflies 1y ago
What pisses me off about these people and the comments is the shear hubris and ONLY thinking about humans survival.... And not the rest of the biosphere ...... If our children have to live in habitats like LITERAL SPACESHIPS to survive and will never experience grass...or a dragonfly or bee landing on them. Or lady bugs...or horses or elephants or whales etcetcetc. ... To have these relegated to the same mythical category as a dragon or unicorn.... Is so unconscionable I don't understand how all these so called intelligent people just carry on and shrug... "The economy will be fine" True Idiocracy moment....
- Voultapher 1y ago
  A true human supremacist society - I know controversial term but it fits way too well. You and I live in it and it sucks how many people think like that. Life is a co-op, winning does not mean being the last ones left standing.
- JohnMakin 1y ago
  I half expect at some point soon these types to push out takes like "if we run out of arable land, we can raise humans for meat"

79 points by paulpauper 1y ago

Your reaction doesn't matter; only the collective response does. It seems there is little appetite to doubt nationalism, and immense optimism for our ability to correct later.

zahlman 1y ago
What has that got to do with TFA?
- MangoToupe 1y ago
  Well, your reaction does not matter (and neither does bill gates'); only the collective response does. The Lucky for your conscience the world doesn't give a shit about global warming, nor your realization that you can't do anything about it Of course the world is fucked
  - zahlman 1y ago
    I literally do not understand what argument you are trying to make. The only "collective response" to your comments I can imagine here is confusion.

delichon 1y ago

This rhymes with https://www.gatesnotes.com/three-tough-truths-about-climate https://www.gatesnotes.com/three-tough-truths-about-climate.

epistasis 1y ago
I see very little agreement in any way with Bill Gates is talking about. In fact I suspect that Gates would be dismissed as too woke for making this one of his main points: > But we can’t cut funding for health and development—programs that help people stay resilient in the face of climate change—to do it. > It’s time to put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies, which includes reducing the Green Premium to zero and improving agriculture and health in poor countries. This is just rehashed Green New Deal language for the global stage. (Something I fully support!!)
- delichon 1y ago
  They're agreeing that climate change is serious but not necessarily civilization ending: Nordhous: "The amount of warming that is conceivable … is not remotely consistent with the sorts of catastrophic outcomes … where tens or hundreds of million, perhaps even billions of lives were at stake." Gates: "Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise."
  - dingnuts 1y ago
    that's what "climate skeptics" have been saying for twenty years but you would get bullied for saying so. my favorite was getting told we "deserved it" for being in Texas during the ice apocalypse, because Texas is a red state. I hope that people exhibiting that kind of behavior are finally starting to question whether or not it's helpful. The article suggests that is perhaps beginning to happen. If you want people to make sacrifices to improve the future, just maybe messaging that it's hopeless and anyone who doesn't see that is stupid isn't the best strategy for effecting real change
    - hobofan 1y ago
      > particularly for people in the poorest countries > for being in Texas News flash: climate change by and large isn't about the US, and US will be one of the least impacted nations of first hand climate change effects.
      - Lord-Jobo 1y ago
        Not who you are replying to, but two of the most populated U.S states will massively depopulate with much more climate change. Texas and Florida are turning into complete furnaces for 1/3 of the year and subject to catastrophic severe weather another 1/3. Which is a small deal compared to a billion foreign migrants, which is also a possibility, but still a massive deal. You are completely correct that the first world will escape most of the direct and dire pain resulting from our irresponsible burning of the future. I also think trying to suss out “who is going to suffer more” is basically pointless when so much of our economy is based worldwide trade and so much of our society is expecting relatively stable populations, two things that will change rapidly with a few climate shifts. *this entire thread is getting at one thing: yes, humanity and the general summary of human knowledge will almost certainly survive the extreme chaos we are heading for. That should not be much consolation to you, because the chaos will set back the human experience 150 years for generations that include you and your children. Especially when the chaos involves incredible strife for many nations with nuclear armament.

quamserena 1y ago

Anyone else notice the obvious misspelling of “climate” in the AI-generated hero image?

lynndotpy 1y ago
It's pretty amazing how much we've lowered our collective standards for article quality since the advent of AI generation. (Not just here, but everywhere). It's not like it's a rote spelling mistake deep in the article, the spelling mistake is the very first thing you see. Why would a serious author go with this image? Just a few years ago, misspelling "climate" and having nonsensical political cartoon to headline your article would have just been disqualifying.
- uvaursi 1y ago
  Whereas before the air of sophistication conned you into thinking the authors knew what they were talking about, it took AI slop for you to see how bad things really are. Queue the “always have been” meme.
  - lynndotpy 1y ago
    No, things are worse now. Our standards have lowered. There was no way to quickly produce low-effort vacuous text without writing it or copying it from another source before now. Of course people could feign intelligence before, but it's much easier now and our standards are lower. This is a double whammy.
vunderba 1y ago
Wow, that is a terrible image (yellow tinge indicative of gpt-image-1, spelling errors). I don't mind generative images being used in articles, provided that they: A. Have some relevance to the actual content. B. Don't exhibit glaringly obvious AI flaws (polydactyly, faces like melted wax candles, etc.). It's amazing how little time people take to vet images that are intended to be the first thing viewers will see. Reminds me of the image attached to Karpathy's (one of the founding members of OpenAI) Twitter post on founding an education AI lab: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1813263734707790301 https://x.com/karpathy/status/1813263734707790301

claytongulick 1y ago

I hope that we see more measured, objective articles like this. It's been pretty frustrating as someone on the sidelines looking in, the degree of panic and emotion attached to the climate stuff, that has always seemed to be out of scale with the actual effects to me. I'm ~50, and my whole life, back to the 80's, there have been these sort of breathless extreme articles about the existential threat that climate poses. I remember, as a kid, it was global cooling, and we were all going to have to deal with an ice age, which terrified me. Then it was global warming, and the "tipping point" and hawaii and all of our coastal cities were going to be under water within 5 years. Then it was "climate change" which was poorly defined to me, but humans were definitely to blame, and causing hurricanes and destroying the planet - even though when I bothered to look at the actual data, the rate of hurricanes and other events had actually decreased. I've read some super compelling articles from what I'll call "measured environmentalists" that argue persuasively that to do the most good for people, we should shift our focus to immediate harms that we can actually control well - things like malaria, and reliable clean water and heating, that would have a far greater impact for tens of millions of people than something nebulous like carbon credits. I'm far from an expert on this stuff, I just wish that the conversation (as with so many things) could have less yelling, and more considered thoughtful discussion. This article, and Gates' seem to be a great start.

abdullahkhalids 1y ago
An article talking about a complex system [1] (the Earth's climate system coupled to human industrial/farming systems) with few hard numbers, no mathematical models and graphs of their behavior, and no links to any such discussions, is not objective in any sense of the word. It's all the author's uncited subjective views. This is the kind of stuff one should take in from one ear, and let it out through the other ear without letting it touch the brain. [1] complexity in the sense of mathematics.
- claytongulick 1y ago
  It sort of depends on the expertise of the author, right? In this case, it seems like an actual climate scientist that has moderated his opinion over time, at least that was my takeaway. That makes it at least as valuable to me as any given "we're all going to die" article that pops up endlessly in these kinds of discussions. I agree though, that a big problem with these conversations is dealing with complex systems, small signals and potentially large impacts and communicating all that in an effective way. Most people (myself included) are simply not equipped to understand the details, so we rely on others to explain it to us. My point was just that I enjoy a more balanced take on the issue.

therein 1y ago

[flagged]

JohnMakin 1y ago

What is this author smoking? "2 to 3 feet" of sea level rise is still absolutely catastrophic and is hand waved away in one sentence. 5 degrees in 50 years? We've already gained about 1 degree in the last 20 years alone - with no signs of slowing down. If it's ackshually 5 degrees in 75 years, what even is the point of making a point about that? We're reaching several ecological tipping points. We're in a mass extinction. What in the everloving hell is this? Have we gone full "don't look up" with this now?

epistasis 1y ago
I think the problem is that "catastrophic" is not well-defined. Will we all be back to caves and sticks? No. Will there be trillions of dollars of damages and massive societal upheaval from massive migrations of people? Yes. Will a billion people die? Probably not, unless a war breaks out and leads to nuclear destruction. I would consider all of these to be "catastrophic" but some may not consider migrations + damagaes to be "catastrophic."
- lynndotpy 1y ago
  Well, one plane crashing or one building falling, destroying something valuable and killing "only" a few dozen people is considered a catastrophe. I think we can say the bar for "catastrophe" is lower than that for "apocalypse". The higher global average temperatures alone are already a yearly catastrophe, by this standard.
- jsbisviewtiful 1y ago
  > Will a billion people die? Probably not Really underestimating the amount of deaths that will occur when our food production systems start collapsing.
  - epistasis 1y ago
    During some of the worst starvation events in the 20th century, it was still only on the order of ~10 million people that died. And most of those deaths were because horrific totalitarian governments prevented outside aid to the affected regions. I have not seen evidence that there will be food system collapse driven by climate change that would be worse than those events, but my ears are open if you have some.

soVeryTired 1y ago

He's comparing AGW, which drives a trend, with weather-based events, which are noise around the trend. He conveniently cuts his analysis off at the year 2100, by which we'll all probably be dead. But he's probably right that the trend itself doesn't cause insurmountable problems by that point. But what about the year 2200, or 2300? At three degrees warming per century, the earth looks like a pretty hostile place to live in a few centuries. "A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit", and all that...

Daishiman 1y ago
His idea of it being "not insurmountable" is essentially us not starving to death in a mass scale. I care, in my comfortable life as an office worker, about the fact that chocolate, coffee, and wine will become luxuries as yields and quality drastically drop off. I care about the fact that many places I visit frequently will need A/C to be _survivable_. Those are not civilization-ending events but the hubris you need to have to just hand-wave this away are beyond my understanding.
mike_hearn 1y ago
It's irrelevant beyond that point and possibly much earlier because the forcing effect of CO2 saturates logarithmically, it's not linear.

jay_kyburz 1y ago

As a layperson, I read that 2024 was the hottest on record, and I see charts that go up. I have no reason to believe that the charts will go down. I don't care if its 3 deg by the end of the century or 5 deg. But what about the century after that, or by 3000. I'm not so concerned about disasters or economic impacts, I just have a deep moral belief that we should leave our environment the same as when we entered it. We know that fossil fuels release pollution that we have no technology to clean up. We we should not be using it. It's not rocket science. Admittedly, it makes no rational sense go without today so that future humans can experience the earth in the same way I have. I understand why many people dismiss risks of things unlikely to effect them or their children, but to me to feels wrong, and I would like to have as little impact on the climate as I can. https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-confirms-2024-warmest-year-record-about-155degc-above-pre-industrial-level https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-confirms-2024-warmest-...

thegrim33 1y ago
[flagged]
- jay_kyburz 1y ago
  > Each year over the last 20,000 years has been hotter than the last, on average. The "chart has gone up" every single year since when campfires were the height of human technology. If you look at the chart in the link above, it's very clear there has been a dramatic change in the last 50 years. There has also been a dramatic rise CO2 emissions in a similar period. I don't think its unreasonable to assume the two are linked. Even if you were to concede we cannot prove that our emissions are causing the change, we should at least acknowledge that there is some chance that they are. We can't do anything about the earth naturally warming itself, so there is no action required in that scenario, but we can reduce our emissions in the chance they are damaging the earth.
energy123 1y ago
The moral case is really for the billions of people near the equator who cannot afford for temperatures to go up much more. It's too hot there already. We are making their countries insufferable to live in and we aren't compensating them for it. It's a travesty.

davebranton 1y ago

I stopped reading at the AI image at the top of the page. The comments here suggest I was right to.

nh23423fefe 1y ago
CLMATE

RickJWagner 1y ago

Bill Gates opened the floodgates. After 25 years of dire, ‘existential’ warnings, the political messaging is beginning to taper off and moderate. It’s a necessary step. If you tell people the worlds about to end for too long, you lose credibility with all but the true believers. Apologies are due to everyone that was fried on social media for suggesting things were not as bad as described. Anyone not fully radicalized was declared a ‘denier’ and accused of being ignorant about the overwhelming science. It seems the people who acknowledged the climate was changing, but did not consider it an immediate, existential threat now have the high scientific ground. It seems possible they’ll keep it.

anon7000 1y ago
People just aren’t equipped to think about it on the right scale. Experts have not been suggesting that a catastrophe will wipe humans from the planet within the next handful of years. They have been suggesting that our trends are deeply unsustainable for the planet. And the effects of screwing with our planet will easily be catastrophic in many years if trends continue. So yes, urgent action would be necessary to get the trends to be more manageable. But because monkey brain doesn’t see an immediate threat, monkey brain calls climate scientists liars for some reason. We have these “temperature targets” not because the world instantly ends once we hit however many degrees of warming, but because we know the impact of that much change will be more drastic over the following decades. Monkeybrain just doesn’t know how to prioritize that threat without making people afraid of it.
asacrowflies 1y ago
Just because humans are dumb especially things on this time scale. Does not make the fools and deniers any less deplorable.... Holocene extinction - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction You all call yourself pragmatist but us doomers actually seem to be the only ones who want any of humanity to survive at all ....

tuatoru 1y ago

Everyone is a climate skeptic. "To know, and not yet to do, is not to know" - Aristotle. Everyone still flies on planes. Ceasing burning kerosene is the easiest possible thing you could do to reduce your climate impact, but no-one does it. Everyone hates being called out on it, but it is true. No-one really cares, because no-one is prepared to make a socially costly signal, costly in prestige or relationships or group membership. It's all posturing.

seba_dos1 1y ago
Speak for yourself. I can count the times I flied in my whole life on one hand, and I have never flied domestically. It's not some unachievable ideal, and majority != everyone.
tim333 1y ago
It's a funny business. I'm a bit skeptical how much of a problem it will be but am up for fixing things. But me not flying will make no difference. The kind of thing that could is a global carbon tax but hardly anyone seems up for that.

incomingpain 1y ago

Where I live in Canada we have a humid continental climate. Climate change is a fact; and lets even say worst case scenario happens. We become a humid subtropical climate. Northern Canada is subarctic and they will become humid continental. I look at these 'climates changing" and see absolutely no problem at all. Looks like an improvement to me. How can we go about speeding up this process?

asacrowflies 1y ago
You have to be supremely ignorant... Bordering on flat earther or evolution denial/young earth creationist... To believe this will work out like that..... This won't be a nice change of pace for your climate. It will be a mass extinction even humans have never experienced. It's obscene even. And this language of 'catastrophism' literally sounds like woo woo therapy speak by unscientific fools. Calling it not a "catastrophy' will be looked at as immoral as slavery in the future generation imo. Holocene extinction - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
- incomingpain 1y ago
  >You have to be supremely ignorant... Bordering on flat earther or evolution denial/young earth creationist... To believe this will work out like that..... Great place to start with flames. >This won't be a nice change of pace for your climate. It will be a mass extinction even humans have never experienced. It's obscene even. The science clearly says that isn't the case at all. Feel free to reference IPCC RCP8.5 scenarios where we magically find extremely more fossil fuels and burn those as well. No extinction is expected even in those scenarios. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene#Climate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene#Climate The eocene was approximately 14celcius warmer than it is today and life thrived. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Interglacial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Interglacial During the last spike, the eemian, it was about 2 celcius warmer than today. Roughly 100,000 years ago, and that's roughly all we do expect to happen now. Life was thriving.
  - Daishiman 1y ago

more_corn 1y ago

One known tactic by climate denialists is to create a feeling of despair. If nothing can help, nothing must be done.

asacrowflies 1y ago

What pisses me off about these people and the comments is the shear hubris and ONLY thinking about humans survival.... And not the rest of the biosphere ...... If our children have to live in habitats like LITERAL SPACESHIPS to survive and will never experience grass...or a dragonfly or bee landing on them. Or lady bugs...or horses or elephants or whales etcetcetc. ... To have these relegated to the same mythical category as a dragon or unicorn.... Is so unconscionable I don't understand how all these so called intelligent people just carry on and shrug... "The economy will be fine" True Idiocracy moment....

Voultapher 1y ago
A true human supremacist society - I know controversial term but it fits way too well. You and I live in it and it sucks how many people think like that. Life is a co-op, winning does not mean being the last ones left standing.
JohnMakin 1y ago
I half expect at some point soon these types to push out takes like "if we run out of arable land, we can raise humans for meat"