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

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211–220 of 377 posts

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

#211

> 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 ac…

Why do you think climate change is going to make industrialized society and global trade disappear? Are warming oceans going to melt container ships? Not to be snide, but this comment is just postulating the collapse of industry and trade as fact without a cohesive picture as to why climate change will cause this.

The overwhelming majority of the earth will still be habitable with even the most pessimistic predictions of 4-5 degrees of warming. Those areas that stand to become uninhabitable, like the Sahara Desert, are very sparsely populated. Only 2.5 million people in an area the size of the continental USA. A big swath on a map, but not a very big impact on global demographics. As far as resources go, the world already has a substantial overproduction of food. Water can be secured from alternative sources, like desalination (Israel already obtains ~40% of its water from desalination) and reclamation of waste water.

To reiterate, I see a massive gap in how the effects of climate change lead to the collapse of global civilization.

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

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#213
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Look up "blue ocean event". The BOE could lead to the loss of the jet stream in 10-20 years. After that, God only knows what is going to happen. The really big problem is that we won't know where the rain will fall, and so we won't know where to plant, and so we could have global famine. If you think covid was bad, you ain't seen nuthin'. And even that will not necessarily lead directly to the collapse of civilizatio…

Exactly: our civilization, comfort, enjoyment and ease is built upon the relatively predictable and stable weather patterns.

Why would anyone take the risk of messing with that?

It's as though they assume that there will be generalized devastation but there will be some "safe place" which some powerful group can defend and use.

Instead it's possible that maybe for one year New Zealand will be great, but then there will be no rain for 10 years, while previously uninhabitable Brighton (UK) will be a lush, tropical paradise for a couple of decades. Everyone will haul their gear to Brighton and massacre the indigenous, but then everything will change again, etc.

Or we could stop driving 2000Kg of metal to get to our jobs or buy a bag of chips and keep all the tourists at home that are destroying Venice and leaving their feces and plastic containers all over the Himalayas.

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

#214
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If facts ruled, we'd all keep in mind that the 1930s were much hotter than now, which is very inconvenient for the CO2 hypothesis. Facts don't rule. Fear rules. Fear instilled by ceaseless propaganda.

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

#215

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?

Honestly I simply can`t be bothered to search for a source that was in a newspaper and on TV 30 years ago. These predictions have been happening for a long time, I lived through them.

I`m not a climate change denier, but shitty predictions definitely hurt the cause of legitimate concern.

Here's another quick Google search from a (more?) legit site: https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/544472-the-mo...

Of course anyone in the Gen X/older millennial category should know what I'm talking about anyway (unless they slept through the first decade of their schooling).

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

#216
post #22

I'm sure people are frustrated, but I wonder what the consensus, if you could fine one, would be. What exactly are they expecting governments to change? Policy, power generation, transportation, what? And will they accept the necessary or resultant policies and changes? The above are "easy" if you have a totalitarian regime where what the autocrats say go, goes: China, Saudi Arabia, etc., most other countries are mor…

Tax carbon. Use cross border tariffs to prevent offshoring emissions. People will then make the economically rational decision to use public transportation, buy EVs, put solar on the roof, insulate their homes, buy heat pumps, and eat less meat.

If a carbon tax won’t pass in liberal Washington I don’t think there’s much hope for the rest of the US, TBH.

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

#218
post #156
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've heard about it for the last 30 years, glaciers that should be melted aren't, cities that should be underwater aren't, none of the alarming predictions have come true. In 30 years someone will be telling me just wait...

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

#219

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?

Climate scientists have historically maintained a tacit agreement to not discuss other solutions publicly, because they think reducing emissions is the best way to go and they don't want to distract politicians by telling them about other options. This has changed a bit in recent years (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/solar-geoengineer...), but the change largely hasn't filtered to the public consciousness.

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

#220

I strongly recommend 'Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All' by Michael Shellenberger https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&preview=new...

Maybe it'd be better to read the opinions of relevant faculty instead. I know at least one climate science faculty who has publicly referred to Shellenberger as a "professional asshole" after being treated so poorly by Shellenberger. Shellenberger is just next in the long list of industry shills who peddle the same misinformation and then complain when researchers get mad at him, claiming endless victimhood.

As hominem attacks are not a good way to discredit an argument though.
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