Young People Are Anxious About Climate Change, Say Governments Are Failing Them • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by throwaway5752 » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 1:25 AM UTC

aosmond wrote: post #144

I am always amazed at the level of denial among the people. I speak of the comments to this article, not the young people in question. The IPCC reports are quite conservative. The reason the 2021 reports were so dire is because they began including some of the feedback loop modeling the scientists preparing the report have become more confident in. More is in the pipeline. Somewhere along the line, it got political.…

I can't regularly find fruit that was plentiful a few years ago at my grocery store. Produce this year was poor quality and wasn't available at the same times.

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

#162

Post by over_bridge » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 1:26 AM UTC

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…

The difference is that people took action on the ozone layer and acid rain. Now they aren't problems.

I can't understand the viewpoint that climate change coverage is some sort of clickbait to drive ad revenue. I can't think of anything worse to read about. It's so depressing and makes me avoid the news and see less ads if anything.

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

#163

Post by logicalmonster » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 1:26 AM UTC

throwaway5752 wrote: post #134

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…

I don't use social media, HN notwithstanding, and it is plainly obvious to me from just looking out the window that climate change is substantial and accelerating. It is the most urgent and dangerous issue facing the planet. I agree social media is awful, but it does not follow that climate change isn't cause to panic. If anything, half of Americans are nowhere near panicked enough about climate change as the result…

Do you disagree that the clean energy problem has been solved by nuclear energy? I'm not panicked because I think we already have the solution.

All the climate alarmism and environmental activists has done is promote worse options like solar and wind that are more environmentally destructive and cannot sustain modern human civilization.

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

#164

Post by throwaway5752 » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 1:27 AM UTC

logicalmonster wrote: post #154

trehalose wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Scott Adams is a cartoonist with a degree in economics and an MBA.

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

#165

Post by nverno » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 1:28 AM UTC

throwaway5752 wrote: post #134

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…

I don't use social media, HN notwithstanding, and it is plainly obvious to me from just looking out the window that climate change is substantial and accelerating. It is the most urgent and dangerous issue facing the planet. I agree social media is awful, but it does not follow that climate change isn't cause to panic. If anything, half of Americans are nowhere near panicked enough about climate change as the result…

I think the point here is panic doesn't solve any problems and probably only makes things worse. We'd all be better off with level heads.

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

#166

Post by strken » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 1:28 AM UTC

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…

I'm not convinced that climate change has a high probability of ending technological civilisation[0]. Even large-scale climate wars might not end it.

The scenarios that fall short of ending civilisation, e.g. losing hundreds of millions of lives to famine or war, are obviously still very bad. This is not to downplay climate change in the slightest. It's just... at some point, people start dying, and that frees up ecological carrying capacity again. You need to make pessimistic assumptions about a lot of positive feedback loops in ecological and social collapse to predict that all human civilisation is going to be wiped out in the sense of regressing back to before the industrial revolution.

[0] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/13/18660548/climat...

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

#167

Post by jimmaswell » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 1:31 AM UTC

For whatever value of "young person" I am in my mid 20s:

Climate change is going on and will have some unfortunate consequences, but the world is not ending and there's hope for advances in carbon capture etc. Civilization will march on and find a way.

The state and federal government, for all the ways they've failed in protecting my rights, let me bootstrap my career with student aid, being the first of my family to go to college and now having a great career in software.

A loud segment of my peers will rant about how America has no social mobility and the boomers ruined everything. In the anecdotal cases of people I know, it seems the ones who applied themselves to any degree are doing pretty well for themselves (owning businesses without a degree etc), and mostly people who just want to smoke weed and do nothing all day will be the ones saying they should get UBI and the boomers are evil and everything is collapsing.

I acknowledge we have some serious issues with healthcare costs and some other things but I've just never related to my doom and gloom peers.

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

#168

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 1:31 AM UTC

Mikeb85 wrote: post #113

cryptoz wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than 50 people just died from flooding of hurricane remnant in the Northeast just a few days ago. And Sandy really did put lower Manhattan under water causing huge damage. More of that is coming.

This is what I'm referring to: edit - a better link since someone didn't appreciate my google-fu: https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/544472-the-mo... Stop moving goalposts. The media has a problem with peddling misinformation and shitty climate predictions.

You're quoting a site that talks about "pole shifts and earth changes" and complaining about misinformation and shitty predictions?

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

#169

Post by civilized » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 1:32 AM UTC

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…

Climate change is bad but technological collapse doomerism is completely unsupported by science.

People like the romance of dramatic and exciting extremes, of paradise and apocalypse. The mundane probability of having to adapt to somewhat worse conditions isn't that entertaining.

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

#170

Post by trainsplanes » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 1:32 AM UTC

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…

> 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 retroactively very extreme sounding, but that's because governments collectively acted to enact environmental regulations. The ozone really was on its way to just vanishing and still isn't fully recovered.

The difference is that governments are full of people who don't realize that active efforts prevented disaster scenarios, and they're paid to say the bad things that are happening aren't happening. What was a slow moving disaster is now accelerating and people are still pretending humans can magically fix everything they knowingly fucked up.