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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

#201
post #184

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…

While "no" social mobility is a bit extreme, social mobility has drastically reduced in america. Here is a pretty famous paper showing so: https://www.nber.org/papers/w19843 Personal responsibility can only take you so far if getting hold or keeping hold of such opportunities are hard in the first place

I read the abstract and skipped around some but I couldn't find it referencing a change in mobility over time.

I did notice it says some areas have high mobility still:

> The U.S. is better described as a collection of societies, some of which are “lands of opportunity” with high rates of mobility across generations, and others in which few children escape poverty.

I see in some charts online that social mobility has allegedly declined steadily since the boomer generation, but of course they're a special case directly following the great depression into an unprecedented economic expansion.

Social mobility can't go upwards in real terms forever - if your grandparents were poor, your parents were middle class factory workers, and now you're an office worker - does your child really need to be a doctor or a ceo? So I think the better question might be, is our current level of social mobility acceptable, and did it go down because people are ok just staying in a relatively decent spot (not becoming a lawyer and just being an office worker like your dad) or because opportunity has actually gone down.

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

#202

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.

We've had a shortage of onions in Oregon. A few hundred miles from where they're grown. But the reason is not enough truckers after the pandemic.

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

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Go watch An Inconvenient Truth again.

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

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What engineering solutions are you envisioning solving this? Short of a deus ex machina like fusion coming out of the wings and decreasing the cost of clean energy by a huge degree, this seems like it's going to be the hardest thing humanity has had to deal with in recorded history, and make the misery of extreme poverty in China seem nice in comparison.

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

#205

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.…

> Or the powers that already be in this world desperately trying to hold onto their positions? I don't know about you, but I think the latter is far more likely.

The word "desperately" is doing a lot of work there. The ruling class doesn't seem very desperate at all to me, actually.

Matter of fact they like the climate change problem as far as I can see. It is yet another wedge they use to divide people and make them fight one another, meanwhile they continue to do what they please.

Climate science denialism and conspiracy theorists are not the problem, even in USA which is called a "hotbed" of this thinking, climate deniers are under 20% of the population. It's not the brave and valiant Joe Biden and friends battling against the evil corporations and deniers to tackle the biggest threat facing humanity. It's the rulers pointing out the unemployed coal miner from West Virginia and telling you that he's the reason for all your problems, while at the same time they're pointing you out to him and saying the same thing.

You really think they actually believe < 20% of some of the least educated and most disadvantaged people in the country are responsible for preventing them from addressing the most important issue they have ever faced? Please, they happily go to war and destroy other countries with far higher disapproval ratings than that.

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

#206

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.…

> 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.

And what's even more frustrating is that we've known about these feedbacks for 15-20? years.

I've been reading about climate change and feedbacks for the past decade and I'm just part of the general public.

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

#207

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.…

Most people don't dispute the climate scientists, most people dispute the solution. One side wants oil/coal/business as usual, the other wants exclusively wind/solar.

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

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ad hominem attack. I don't like his attitude personally but thats not ultimately relevant.

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

#209
No problem has ever been solved by worrying about what you can't control. Just a couple centuries ago, the average life expectancy was less than 40. If people spent all their time worrying about whether they or their children would die, nobody would get anything done. The amount that you actually care about climate change is a function of how much you're willing to do about it, not how guilty you feel about it or how worried about it.

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

#210

> 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…

The temperatures are already increasing but the world is progressively getting less starved and malnourished over time, not more.

Source: our world in data / Factfulness.

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