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

#171

Post by nicoffeine » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 1:33 AM UTC

ripper1138 wrote: post #149

cryptoz wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

South Florida floods constantly and the situation is getting worse year by year. Regular tides are now higher than ever and causing problems for residents. The creep is slow until it's not.

Sure it does. I meant literally underwater like redraw the maps cause the land is gone… that’s all I read/watched growing up.

That's something that can certainly happen in the lifetime of my grandchildren, if I have any. The problem is that even a two or three foot rise in seas (the current projection for Miami in 2060) requires trillions of dollars across the world so sewage and other nice features of civilization continue to operate.

The short term existential crisis is economic instability and mass migration leading to unpredictable warfare. The long term existential crisis is that south Florida really is gone along with the place where something like half of all humans live, the ocean life that supports billions of people dies out, and increasingly unpredictable weather patterns cause entire ecosystems to fail taking out huge chunks of humanity in addition to war over the remaining resources.

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

#172

Post by Manuel_D » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 1:34 AM UTC

skyfaller wrote: post #114

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 it's irresponsible to act as though the climate crisis is just a matter of weather, and not how also we will respond to it. Resource shortages caused by the climate crisis could cause resource wars, and if weapons of mass destruction are deployed during those wars, that could easily finish off homo sapiens. The mere collapse of civilization and mass death should be bad enough that we take drastic action to pr…

What shortages? The world overproduces food by no small margin. Starvation is a regional supply issue. In developed countries 30-40% of food often goes to waste. Alternative water supplies like desalination exist, and countries like Israel with constrained natural water supplies use it extensively. I think it's irresponsible to proclaim that humanity is doomed without a coherent argument as to why it won't be able to survive.

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

#173

Post by throwaway5752 » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 1:35 AM UTC

logicalmonster wrote: post #163

throwaway5752 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I disagree with you on many levels. First, solar and wind are not more environmentally destructive, at least in any appreciable way. Second, solar and wind can sustain modern human civilization. Third, clean energy has de facto not been solved because only a small percentage of generation is currently nuclear. Fourth, even what you describe were possible, construction lead time on known scalable reactor designs is many years. Fifth, even what you describe were possible, the fuel supply chain is underdeveloped and would take many years to develop. Sixth, all of wind, solar, and nuclear are just electric sources and we face a storage density problem not a generation problem. Seventh, the nature of the climate problem is one that has already happened and will continue for decades even if every human ceased to exist immediately. Eighth, nuclear is still not renewable. I could go on but I hope you appreciate that I disagree with you and think you are underinformed about nuclear power.

note: Uranium spot prices are increasing because the Sprott Physical Trust purchases and WSB activity. The spot market is a minor part of the overall markets. Plants purchase from producers directly under long term contracts.

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

#174

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 1:38 AM UTC

skyfaller wrote: post #114

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 it's irresponsible to act as though the climate crisis is just a matter of weather, and not how also we will respond to it. Resource shortages caused by the climate crisis could cause resource wars, and if weapons of mass destruction are deployed during those wars, that could easily finish off homo sapiens. The mere collapse of civilization and mass death should be bad enough that we take drastic action to pr…

A lot of people still haven't realised that cultural extinction is likely to happen before personal or human extinction does.

Ironically we're a completely natural phenomenon - a species that outcompetes the others, but gets stuck at individual and herd intelligence without evolving collective intelligence.

We're basically a brushfire species - which is probably something that happens fairly regularly on planets.

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

#175

Post by Aerroon » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 1:38 AM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #72

Aerroon wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between these is that stopping smoking and losing weight make your life overall better. Reducing carbon emissions will make life worse for everyone who's already on the lower rungs of humanity. No realistic amount of resource redistribution is going to work here. It's also not enough. We will have to start sucking up that carbon from the atmosphere whether we cut emissions or not.

> Reducing carbon emissions will make life worse for everyone who's already on the lower rungs of humanity. No realistic amount of resource redistribution is going to work here. The people on the "lower rungs of humanity" emit an order of magnitude less carbon than everyone else, and should be the last to cut.

>The people on the "lower rungs of humanity" emit an order of magnitude less carbon than everyone else, and should be the last to cut.

I see this argument frequently and it annoys me.

Poor people emit less carbon because they are poor. Do you want them to stay poor?!? I want a future where everyone can at least live a life as wealthy as mine. But my carbon emissions are much higher than that of the global poor.

If we can provide everyone with at least a quality of life like mine, then we're going to massively increase carbon emissions globally. Sure, better technology will help us here, but it is completely unrealistic to expect this to cancel out the increases of emissions and for this not to increases prices. This would, again, put my kind of life out of reach for many.

Look at China for a realistic example. China has had one of the highest reductions in poverty in history - from 88% in extreme poverty in 1981 to 0.7% by 2015.[0] At the same time China's carbon emissions per capita went from 1.46 tons in 1981 to 7.169 tons in 2015.[1] That's a 391% increase in emissions per capita, but it's worth it, because people are better off as a result.

Climate change is a problem, but it won't ruin tomorrow. It will slowly get worse, but this means that there's time. I believe that technological (engineering) solutions are the only way we can realistically deal with it. Cutting emissions is not going to be enough and it will come with a whole boatload of side effects.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/the-global-decline-of-extreme-pov...

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...

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

#176

Post by frabbit » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 1:38 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.…

People are not even "selfish". Wanting a nice, stable, predictable environment just like you have had it all your life could be categorized as selfish. And that's fine.

Taking a massive gamble on injecting huge amounts of energy into a system which looks like it will be destabilized is just..... foolish? stupid? I dunno.

According to the Canadaland podcast there is a recent survey taken during the federal election campaign which suggests that 1 in 4 voters still do not accept anthropogenic climate change as real.

I am baffled.

Most of us would benefit from some sort of Green New Deal with a re-organization of the economy. I can completely understand the top 5 or 10 percent balking at any shake up of the system on purely economic advantage grounds, but what about all the other 85%? And even with a shake-up I find it hard to believe that any productive/active members of the 5 to 10 percent would not thrive relatively in any new situation and indeed be better off than in a severely disrupted environment.

Something other than rationality is going on here.

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

#177

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 1:40 AM UTC

nverno wrote: post #165

throwaway5752 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#178

Post by lisper » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 1:41 AM UTC

strken wrote: post #166

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 eco…

Global famine won't end civilization directly, but it might spark WW3, and that would do it.

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

#179

Post by spiderice » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 1:41 AM UTC

cgrealy wrote: post #85

They should be (anxious) and they're right (governments have failed them). Unfortunately, we've spent the last few decades ignoring the science and telling people they are the ones that can fix this, by recycling or taking less car journeys or eating less meat. And all of those things do help, but it's akin to fighting WW2 by asking everyone to write a strongly worded letter to Hitler. Climate change is a massive glo…

> I feel bad for anyone under 20.

I feel bad for people under 20 due to people pushing this sentiment that they're doomed and they have no future to look forward to. That is currently doing more harm than climate change is. And it does nothing to solve the problem of climate change.

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

#180

Post by riversflow » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 1:41 AM UTC

toolz wrote: post #61

I'm probably overly calm about climate change. I can't trust that science isn't trying to sensationalize the problem so much so that I end up discounting everything I read. Take this [1] paper for example I just happened upon. Look at this scary graphic they provide to convince the reader that wildfires are getting worse [2]. The paper goes on painting a terrible picture about the rising trend of wildfires in the U.S…

I too find that wildland fires on the West coast being conflated with climate change as bad messaging. You can read about the California valley being filled with smoke consistently during the late summer in "Up and Down California", a series of journals written between 1860-1865[1].

That said, I backpacked in the Sierras this summer and alarmingly saw many old Pine stands recently dead from what I assume is the drought. I also find the perilous state of the arctic ocean ice, the seeming breakdown of typical jetstream patterns(probably linked to the arctic ice) and the sky-high CO2(resulting in ocean acidification as well as warming) all particularly concerning.

[1] http://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/up_and_down_california

If you want to read about particularly the smoke, the books are broken up by year and chapters chronologically, his writings during September particularly tend to describe the smoke.