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Young People Are Anxious About Climate Change, Say Governments Are Failing Them

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Re: Young People Are Anxious About Climate Change, Say Governments Are Failing Them

#151

Post by jgwil2 »

throwawaysea wrote: post #53
tibbetts wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those perspectives can be said to be extreme, but I’m not seeing you make a case that they are “detached from reality.”

Humanity isn’t “doomed”. Climate change may affect hundreds of millions and even so it is far away from an existential threat to humans. It also isn’t something that should cause someone to lose the ability to function day-to-day. That suggests immaturity, fragility, and a cognitive distortion ( https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/catastrophizing ).

Humans are pretty resourceful; I expect we'll survive in some form or another. But climate change absolutely is an existential threat to ecosystems, biodiversity, food security, water security, political stability, etc. The fact that there will likely be humans somewhere on earth carving out an existence is not exactly comforting.

Re: Young People Are Anxious About Climate Change, Say Governments Are Failing Them

#152

Post by ren_engineer »

tobiasu wrote: post #75
adamnemecek wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the summary?

Nuclear and shale gas shill writes how technology will solve everything.

as opposed to solar and wind "shills" who say humanity is doomed if the government doesn't funnel billions of dollars to their industries? Each side has monetary incentives to push their view point

Fact is that without the fear mongering about nuclear energy decades ago we'd probably be carbon neutral by now

Re: Young People Are Anxious About Climate Change, Say Governments Are Failing Them

#153

Post by tppiotrowski »

beervirus wrote: post #136
tppiotrowski wrote: post #42

The economics of solar are good news. Hopefully we've hit an inflection point where coal power is no longer economical [1] [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90583426/the-price-of-solar-elec...

Turns out it’s easy to make cheap solar cells if you have access to unlimited free labor from Chinese prison camps.

Assuming the people are there justly for committing a crime and not being convicted just to provide free labor doesn't it make sense to have these people do something instead of sitting all day in a cage?

Re: Young People Are Anxious About Climate Change, Say Governments Are Failing Them

#154

Post by logicalmonster »

trehalose wrote: post #126
logicalmonster wrote: post #87

I'm glad that social media wasn't around when I was growing up. If the media had the same chance to clickbait me into panic in my day, I'd have been genuinely scared to death about the ozone layer being depleted or acid rain making the planet unlivable by now, yet here we are. It's easy to panic about hot-button issues such as climate change when the media clickbaits you into endless doom and gloom and refuses to rep…

> already been a solved problem for decades How solved is it if the solutions aren't getting deployed?

It will happen when it has to.

Look into Scott Adams law of slow moving disasters.

https://www.scottadamssays.com/2013/04/15/fact-checking-adam...

To sum it up, whenever humans see a problem coming in the distant future, they find a way to solve it in time. Y2K is a great example of this: when stories about the effects of Y2K were popularized, some people thought that there would be no way to fix so many millions of lines of code in time and some of the marvels of human civilization like the electrical grid or the banking system might irrecoverably crash. Yet humans found ways to solve the issues and essentially nothing happened.

Re: Young People Are Anxious About Climate Change, Say Governments Are Failing Them

#155

Post by pittmajp »

toolz wrote: post #100
ceejayoz wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now let's look at the source for their graphic and look back further at earlier dates from the same source. [3] - kind of paints a different picture, no? Yes, but not in the way you're portraying it. The big shift downwards comes in a major shift in strategy in dealing with forest fires in the early to mid 1900s; it doesn't tell you much about the climate at the time. https://foresthistory.org/research-explore/us-f…

I'm curious in how you interpret my comment here - in what way am I portraying this issue? What I mean to show is that forest fires have gotten immensely better, likely because of technology over the years. Which is exactly what I hear many climate change skeptics suggest - that technology will solve the problems, like we appear to be seeing here.

But solutions don't just fall out of the sky. Saying that technology will solve the problem risks a bystander effect, where nobody is packing, reducing emissions, or working on clean energy because of a belief that such effort is wasteful as a the technology will appear out of nowhere.

Re: Young People Are Anxious About Climate Change, Say Governments Are Failing Them

#156

Post by jussij »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #83
lisper wrote: post #4

It's not just young people. I'm 56 and I'm going through a pretty serious personal existential crisis w.r.t. climate change. I think even the people who are worried about it don't realize quite how serious the situation is. I used to feel pretty confident that all of the really bad shit would not happen until after I was dead. I'm not nearly so confident any more. I now think there is a significant chance that I coul…

When I was in elementary school (early 90's) we were taught that half of New York would be underwater by 2020. Obviously didn't happen. Stop reading the news, they're fear-mongers and outlandish predictions have been happening for decades.

Just give it a decade or two and you won't need to be bother reading about it as you'll be living it.

Re: Young People Are Anxious About Climate Change, Say Governments Are Failing Them

#157

Post by avmich »

beervirus wrote: post #130
lisper wrote: post #4

It's not just young people. I'm 56 and I'm going through a pretty serious personal existential crisis w.r.t. climate change. I think even the people who are worried about it don't realize quite how serious the situation is. I used to feel pretty confident that all of the really bad shit would not happen until after I was dead. I'm not nearly so confident any more. I now think there is a significant chance that I coul…

Turn off the CNN.

Another advice reportedly from Texas, regarding fighting rising temperatures: just crank up the goddamn air conditioner.

We had advices like that from former president. Ideas like "if you don't run testing for COVID, you don't have many positives" should surely be accepted enthusiastically on HN.

/s

Seriously, why it should matter if CNN talks about that or not? Don't facts rule, and rule pretty assertively here?

Re: Young People Are Anxious About Climate Change, Say Governments Are Failing Them

#158

Post by over_bridge »

Manuel_D wrote: post #54

> 56% agreed with the viewpoint that humanity is doomed, according to the study. Climate change is a serious issue, and one that stands poised to do a substantial amount of harm, but if the majority of young people think that humanity is doomed then I seriously suspect that there's misinformation about the impact of climate change at play here. Even the more pessimistic outlooks of climate change still leave substant…

I think what people mean by 'humanity is doomed' isn't about whether the homo sapiens species will continue - it will.

The fear is more that society collapses. Our way of life may be doomed. With our extreme focus on career specialisation over the past century, very few, if any of us have the generalist skills to thrive in a world equivalent to pre-industrial times. It's not something to shrug at. What country can actually live as a self contained unit without global supply lines and dependencies? What families or individuals could?

It's also true that there will be substantial areas of habitable climate. The problem is that people who weren't lucky enough to be born and live in one, won't simply accept their fates and die. Eight billion people will surge into a relatively small habitable band - in the process this will destroy the arable land and severely strain systems like water, power, waste and healthcare.

Re: Young People Are Anxious About Climate Change, Say Governments Are Failing Them

#159

Post by micromacrofoot »

Manuel_D wrote: post #54

> 56% agreed with the viewpoint that humanity is doomed, according to the study. Climate change is a serious issue, and one that stands poised to do a substantial amount of harm, but if the majority of young people think that humanity is doomed then I seriously suspect that there's misinformation about the impact of climate change at play here. Even the more pessimistic outlooks of climate change still leave substant…

Climate change is the underlying problem, but most of the "doomed" feeling I've heard from others comes from the inevitable strife that will follow widespread climate displacement, famine, drought, and other increasingly severe weather. Not to mention feuding governments.

My feeling is that we could survive climate change easily, but it's the other people that will do us in.

We've lost ~4.5 million people globally to covid and things have been a little weird (this is certainly an understatement for some). What happens when that's 50 million? 100?

Re: Young People Are Anxious About Climate Change, Say Governments Are Failing Them

#160

Post by UncleMeat »

nanis wrote: post #67
ceejayoz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defining "the one single right climate" is hard. Defining "this change is bad" is substantially easier. Wet bulb temperatures of 35 degrees C in areas with billions of people and poor power infrastructure to run AC is bad, for example.

> Wet bulb temperatures of 35 degrees C in areas with billions of people I had to look up what that meant ... With this kind of nonsense being pushed around and with more than two decades of constant scary tales, no wonder the kids are nervous. I grew up without any air conditioning at all. Ever. In any building. Summer temperatures between 35 - 40 C with high humidity. I do not know what the "wet bulb" equivalent of…

> People will figure out how to deal with the weather.

Wet bulb temperature has a very specific meaning for human anatomy. At that temperature, you cannot vent heat. There is no mechanism to deal with that weather. The only option is to die, and quickly. That is a direct consequence of our literal anatomy.

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