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

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221–230 of 377 posts

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

#221
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. Calories are not created equally in terms of environmental impact.

Are you suggesting the average American got fat off environmentally friendly low-carbon-impact food products? Because I suspect they got fat off Oreos and Coca-Cola.

I'm suggesting exactly what I said. Would you like me to repeat it?

When beef has the 30x the environmental impact of plant based food per calorie, it would be hard to make the statement that fat people are automatically to blame for climate change.

The whole argument is just completely ignorant on its face.

Dispute what I said instead of making glib replies.

Do you think every calorie has the same environmental impact? No? Because OF COURSE NOT. So what are you even disagreeing with?

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

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. Calories are not created equally in terms of environmental impact.

If the food obese people are eating has a large environmental impact, obesity definitely contributes.

That's a pretty big "if" in your statement. I thought HN was better than this.

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

#223
post #165

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.

Just a few days ago there was a post about Gen-Z flooding climate science/environmental jobs and the response was pretty similar to here (except for some great discourse on whether these jobs actually make a difference in the first place).

Even those taking action are seen as overly concerned/panicked children who are only doing this because of TikTok. I cannot express under this site's guidelines how absolutely grating and antagonizing this kind of view is. As if media didn't exist before the Internet and this generation is somehow a uniform drone of phone-addicted feeble minds.

Perhaps it has less to do with irrational panic and more to do with the certain loss of life that will affect us all.

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

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Underlying every such discussion is an assumption that with age peope become better voters, but there is no reason to believe that and no data to support this notion. We know that IQ peaks at 21 and for most folks, unfortunately, their education ends when they complete university. For the next 60 years they don't become better informed, they just suffer through life, forget what they learnt and get ossified in their…

> We know that IQ peaks at 21 and for most folks No, we know that IQ test scores (designed specifically for measuring relative intelligence in children ) peak on average around 20-21 with very wide error bars (not “at 21 for most people".) We also know that executive function peaks significantly later on average, and other categories of cognitive function peak on average at a variety of different ages, some 40+. [1]…

"IQ isn't knowledge, and peak IQ and peak information aren't the same thing"

I understand that, that's why I spesifically pointed out that for majority of population, after school or university their education stops.

I am not claiming that 21 is the 'optimal' age, and its unclear which of these peaks is relevant to voting, but, in experience by the age of 50 most people struggle to keep up with new developments, and by 80 they are so out of touch they might as well be children.

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

#225
post #166
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…

You are assuming the supporting environment of the survivors will remain intact enough to allow recovery. That is a somewhat optimistic viewpoint. Most everything in the natural environment will be consumed before people start to die off in significant enough numbers. That will leave the survivors with something that is somewhat less than pristine, and will likely take several generations to recover to some semblance of previous carrying capacity and certainly with enormously reduced biodiversity.

God we did manage to fuck ourselves good and proper.

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

#226
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

The reason people find this line of argument frustrating is that it's always presented in a weird, dismissive tone which makes it clear you already didn't like the things you're proposing to get rid of. If you want to persuade people who are attached to their 2000Kgs of metal, it'll be more productive to include some examples of things you'll have to give up even though you like them.

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

#227
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…

This scenario is highly speculative and recent research has cast a ton of doubt on the assertion that melting ice is causing weaker jet streams. People are desperate for doomsday scenarios…

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

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We know that IQ peaks at 21 and for most folks No, we know that IQ test scores (designed specifically for measuring relative intelligence in children ) peak on average around 20-21 with very wide error bars (not “at 21 for most people".) We also know that executive function peaks significantly later on average, and other categories of cognitive function peak on average at a variety of different ages, some 40+. [1]…

"IQ isn't knowledge, and peak IQ and peak information aren't the same thing" I understand that, that's why I spesifically pointed out that for majority of population, after school or university their education stops. I am not claiming that 21 is the 'optimal' age, and its unclear which of these peaks is relevant to voting, but, in experience by the age of 50 most people struggle to keep up with new developments, and…

> I understand that, that's why I spesifically pointed out that for majority of population, after school or university their education stops.

Formal education might, knowledge does not.

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

#229

> 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…

Even amongst people who are presumably, on the whole, intelligent, and by definition (due to the nature of the work that attracts people to HN) good at understanding complex systems, the amount of down-playing and hardheadedness and frankly closed-minded thinking -- all in the service of a kind of soft denial -- displayed throughout the comments here is astounding. And it seems to stem from either unwillingness or inability to truly see the magnitude of the problem, the system affected as a whole.

Climate change is not happening in a vacuum. You are completely underestimating the monumental effects of what you're conceding will happen (disproportionate harming of lower income equatorial countries), and overstating the consolation of there still being substantial areas of habitable climate.

We are poised to see the largest refugee crisis in history. The global supply chain will lose its most foundational workers, the destruction of its most foundational resources. Wealthier nations will not welcome those refugees with open arms, and we can all but expect their arrival to even further foment the rise of right-wing extremism, which will continue to contribute to instability in their own native countries.

Furthermore, those shrinking but still existent areas of habitable climate will encourage violence simply by way of everyone on the planet becoming more and more aware of how rare they are. And even that ignores the fact that "habitable" does not mean "untouched." Those places will have their own purely-climate-related problems, politics and violence aside.

And that is but one of dozens or even hundreds of equally massive, intertwined, complex issues resulting from climate change.

The very literal existence of humanity may not be doomed (though it very well may be), but any semblance of global order and a functioning society very much is.

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

#230

I am Gen-Z and I'm pretty sure I won't have children. They cannot grow up in a Hell we created and that they never asked to exist in. It's something I think about very often.

What hell do you see? The world is unequivocally getting better in terms of health, food supplies, education, economics, etc.

I’d recommend reading Factfulness if you want data based evidence for what I’m saying.

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