6 ms·

This is one of the key sentences: > Policymakers and the public, however, remain largely unaware of the risks posed by such a practically irreversible transiti

by vaylian 8mo ago

This is one of the key sentences: > Policymakers and the public, however, remain largely unaware of the risks posed by such a practically irreversible transition Most people still underestimate what it means for the earth system to change from the current stable state into another state, which might need many years to become stable again. And that new stable state might be a lot less favourable for us humans.

bayindirh 8mo ago
I think most people bet that they'd be dead until that transition happens, so the problem won't be theirs to address.
- anon84873628 8mo ago
  It's a classic multi-agent coordination problem. Should I stop taking jet liners and eating meat, when everyone else is anyway? (Edit: purely illustrative rhetorical question, but I appreciate the responses)
  - bayindirh 8mo ago
    For me, it's a hard problem. For business trips, the choice is between two hours and two days, and unfortunately my body goes haywire if I don't eat some meat at least a couple of days per week (talking about 200g/300g total though. Not kilos of it). On the other hand, I'd happily take trains as more high speed lines open in my country, and reduce meat consumption to bare minimum my body can tolerate. For personal transportation, going fully electric won't be possible due to my circumstances, but I'd happily switch to a hybrid which would convert 75% of my in-city travel to electric (which I'm actively planning to do). I also work on projects which tries to reduce footprint of data centers and computation, so there's that.
    - AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
      > my body goes haywire if I don't eat some meat at least a couple of days per week Isn't this just a nutrient deficiency in whatever you were eating instead of meat? Meat is "convenient" because it's high in a wide variety of minerals, vitamins, essential amino acids, etc. that your body can't make. (The animals mostly can't make them either but guess what livestock eats.) There are plants that contain each of them, but few if any that contain all of them, and then if you're missing one you're going to have a bad time. So the problem there is almost certainly that you need to eat some different plants than that the thing you were missing is only found in animals.
      - bayindirh 8mo ago
        Nope. Some aminoacids and compounds are only present in meat. These aminoacids and compounds are the ones which boosted our brain capacity and allowed us to evolve to that point. I eat (and like to eat) tons of veggies, yet I feel my brain capacity declines and I crave esp. meat if I don't eat it for a long time (for two weeks or whatnot). As I said, I don't need two ribeye steaks per week. My body is very good at signaling what it needs, and I prefer to listen to it. What I eat is Mediterranean cuisine 99% of the time, and it's pretty well balanced, yet eliminating meat is not possible for me. So, my diet is not junk food peppered by meat. It's mostly veggies and legumes (beans, lentil, whatnot), peppered with meat. Yet, I need it, and this is something I tested over and over more than two decades. On the other hand, my wife is completely opposite of me. She can go a month or so without meat. So, not every person is the same, and assuming that every human being works the same is a big mistake made by modern medicine. For example, my brain chemistry is also different and I consume B12 much more than a typical human, so I need to use B-complex supplements more.
        dbdr 8mo ago
        > Some aminoacids and compounds are only present in meat. Which ones specifically? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid All of those can be found in plants.
        AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
  - bamboozled 8mo ago
    It’s hard to convince people not to eat food and take a plane when billionaires do whatever they like at 1000x the carbon footprint, when millions of people drive to work and when base load power is built on fossil fuels. To me eating protein and taking a plane seem benign.
    - fc417fc802 8mo ago
      I agree. If the plane doesn't use synthetic fuel that's a political problem that I can't realistically solve as an individual. The methane from raising animals exists in an overall equilibrium. It isn't extractive and the total magnitude of the effects of that chemical system is comparatively minor.
  - Windchaser 8mo ago
    To be fair, if we cut beef, lamb, and dairy, we get 80% of the GHG benefits of going full vegan. Beef and lamb are really GHG intense. So you can keep your animal proteins: it'll just be eggs, fish, poultry, and pork. https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-opportunity-costs-food https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-opportunity-costs-food
JoshTriplett 8mo ago
It's not that policymakers are unaware. It's that some of them are allergic to true things that they find inconvenient, and have made false premises a pillar of their platform. Calling that "unaware" is giving them too much credit and understanding.
- eptcyka 8mo ago
  Most policy makers will not live to bear the fruit of their labor.
  - JoshTriplett 8mo ago
    Many may also believe that they and the only parts of their con$tituency they care about will be able to avoid the consequences. And some may have come to believe the party line; if you repeat a falsehood often enough as a loyalty test, you may forget that it's a falsehood.
- xgulfie 8mo ago
  It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary (power, class) depends upon his not understanding it
- fc417fc802 8mo ago
  I think it's both. That large shifts on a global scale of everyday things that we take for granted as well as historical differences on a geological time scale are genuinely difficult for non-experts to wrap their heads around. And also as you say that many politicians are disincentivized to try in the first place.
- jandrewrogers 8mo ago
  > It's that some of them are allergic to true things that they find inconvenient, and have made false premises a pillar of their platform. Sure, if by "some" you mean "virtually all".
  - JoshTriplett 8mo ago
jacquesm 8mo ago
They are most definitely aware. They are willfully ignoring this but they are not ignorant.
crystal_revenge 8mo ago
> might need many years to become stable again People really fail to grasp the significance of this part. One of our most common apocalyptic fantasies lays this out quite well: nuclear annihilation. The common narrative is about the post-apocalyptic world and rebuilding. But this presumes a new normal has been established. With climate change we will continue to experience more extreme changes at a faster rate over time with no chance of a "new normal" in our lives. It took hundreds of thousands of years for humans to develop agriculture. It's no coincidence that this development happened during one of the most stable periods of climate the planet has ever seen. People love to wax poetic on human adaptability, but we were effectively playing on "easy" mode. While the other side of climate change might be a more hostile earth, the transition period will be worse because you can't adapt. In our lifetimes we may live to see a period of record heat waves in Europe, followed by a transition of Europe to that is dramatically colder (and who knows, maybe back again). The other major problem is as stability decreases so does our ability to predict the future. It's hard to even know what we might be facing in the coming years, but high variance is usually not great for complex life.
- fc417fc802 8mo ago
  > the transition period will be worse because you can't adapt. As far as agriculture goes we can adapt but the cost would be exorbitant. Vertical farming is technically doable.
throwaway5752 8mo ago
"need many years to become stable again" People are selfish. "Life will be much harder, and the problem will never be fixable within the rest of your life or your childrens' lives"

by vaylian 8mo ago

bayindirh 8mo ago

I think most people bet that they'd be dead until that transition happens, so the problem won't be theirs to address.

anon84873628 8mo ago
It's a classic multi-agent coordination problem. Should I stop taking jet liners and eating meat, when everyone else is anyway? (Edit: purely illustrative rhetorical question, but I appreciate the responses)
- bayindirh 8mo ago
  For me, it's a hard problem. For business trips, the choice is between two hours and two days, and unfortunately my body goes haywire if I don't eat some meat at least a couple of days per week (talking about 200g/300g total though. Not kilos of it). On the other hand, I'd happily take trains as more high speed lines open in my country, and reduce meat consumption to bare minimum my body can tolerate. For personal transportation, going fully electric won't be possible due to my circumstances, but I'd happily switch to a hybrid which would convert 75% of my in-city travel to electric (which I'm actively planning to do). I also work on projects which tries to reduce footprint of data centers and computation, so there's that.
  - AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
    > my body goes haywire if I don't eat some meat at least a couple of days per week Isn't this just a nutrient deficiency in whatever you were eating instead of meat? Meat is "convenient" because it's high in a wide variety of minerals, vitamins, essential amino acids, etc. that your body can't make. (The animals mostly can't make them either but guess what livestock eats.) There are plants that contain each of them, but few if any that contain all of them, and then if you're missing one you're going to have a bad time. So the problem there is almost certainly that you need to eat some different plants than that the thing you were missing is only found in animals.
    - bayindirh 8mo ago
      Nope. Some aminoacids and compounds are only present in meat. These aminoacids and compounds are the ones which boosted our brain capacity and allowed us to evolve to that point. I eat (and like to eat) tons of veggies, yet I feel my brain capacity declines and I crave esp. meat if I don't eat it for a long time (for two weeks or whatnot). As I said, I don't need two ribeye steaks per week. My body is very good at signaling what it needs, and I prefer to listen to it. What I eat is Mediterranean cuisine 99% of the time, and it's pretty well balanced, yet eliminating meat is not possible for me. So, my diet is not junk food peppered by meat. It's mostly veggies and legumes (beans, lentil, whatnot), peppered with meat. Yet, I need it, and this is something I tested over and over more than two decades. On the other hand, my wife is completely opposite of me. She can go a month or so without meat. So, not every person is the same, and assuming that every human being works the same is a big mistake made by modern medicine. For example, my brain chemistry is also different and I consume B12 much more than a typical human, so I need to use B-complex supplements more.
      - dbdr 8mo ago
        > Some aminoacids and compounds are only present in meat. Which ones specifically? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid All of those can be found in plants.
      - AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
- bamboozled 8mo ago
  It’s hard to convince people not to eat food and take a plane when billionaires do whatever they like at 1000x the carbon footprint, when millions of people drive to work and when base load power is built on fossil fuels. To me eating protein and taking a plane seem benign.
  - fc417fc802 8mo ago
    I agree. If the plane doesn't use synthetic fuel that's a political problem that I can't realistically solve as an individual. The methane from raising animals exists in an overall equilibrium. It isn't extractive and the total magnitude of the effects of that chemical system is comparatively minor.
- Windchaser 8mo ago
  To be fair, if we cut beef, lamb, and dairy, we get 80% of the GHG benefits of going full vegan. Beef and lamb are really GHG intense. So you can keep your animal proteins: it'll just be eggs, fish, poultry, and pork. https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-opportunity-costs-food https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-opportunity-costs-food

JoshTriplett 8mo ago

It's not that policymakers are unaware. It's that some of them are allergic to true things that they find inconvenient, and have made false premises a pillar of their platform. Calling that "unaware" is giving them too much credit and understanding.

eptcyka 8mo ago
Most policy makers will not live to bear the fruit of their labor.
- JoshTriplett 8mo ago
  Many may also believe that they and the only parts of their con$tituency they care about will be able to avoid the consequences. And some may have come to believe the party line; if you repeat a falsehood often enough as a loyalty test, you may forget that it's a falsehood.
xgulfie 8mo ago
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary (power, class) depends upon his not understanding it
fc417fc802 8mo ago
I think it's both. That large shifts on a global scale of everyday things that we take for granted as well as historical differences on a geological time scale are genuinely difficult for non-experts to wrap their heads around. And also as you say that many politicians are disincentivized to try in the first place.
jandrewrogers 8mo ago
> It's that some of them are allergic to true things that they find inconvenient, and have made false premises a pillar of their platform. Sure, if by "some" you mean "virtually all".
- JoshTriplett 8mo ago

jacquesm 8mo ago

They are most definitely aware. They are willfully ignoring this but they are not ignorant.

crystal_revenge 8mo ago

> might need many years to become stable again People really fail to grasp the significance of this part. One of our most common apocalyptic fantasies lays this out quite well: nuclear annihilation. The common narrative is about the post-apocalyptic world and rebuilding. But this presumes a new normal has been established. With climate change we will continue to experience more extreme changes at a faster rate over time with no chance of a "new normal" in our lives. It took hundreds of thousands of years for humans to develop agriculture. It's no coincidence that this development happened during one of the most stable periods of climate the planet has ever seen. People love to wax poetic on human adaptability, but we were effectively playing on "easy" mode. While the other side of climate change might be a more hostile earth, the transition period will be worse because you can't adapt. In our lifetimes we may live to see a period of record heat waves in Europe, followed by a transition of Europe to that is dramatically colder (and who knows, maybe back again). The other major problem is as stability decreases so does our ability to predict the future. It's hard to even know what we might be facing in the coming years, but high variance is usually not great for complex life.

fc417fc802 8mo ago
> the transition period will be worse because you can't adapt. As far as agriculture goes we can adapt but the cost would be exorbitant. Vertical farming is technically doable.

throwaway5752 8mo ago

"need many years to become stable again" People are selfish. "Life will be much harder, and the problem will never be fixable within the rest of your life or your childrens' lives"