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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

#231

Post by rewgs »

Manuel_D wrote: post #172
skyfaller wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Overproduction of food is irrelevant if regional supply issues exist. So why do they exist, why are they sticky and so apparently unsolvable?

Desalination is prohibitively energy-intensive. More so in a world of shrinking resources.

You're arguing for precisely why these shortages are a problem but you think you're arguing against their existence. A "shortage" is not simply a hard supply number -- it's also defined by how well the supply is utilized. And the problem is precisely that humans are, and will presumably continue to be, selfish and horrible at using even sufficient or even surplus supplies. So why in the world would anyone think that we'll adequately deal with actually shortages?

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

#232

Post by lanstin »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #207
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.…

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.

Solar is awesome. If you own your own home, and live in a sunny place (I live in Silicon Valley), it is literally free money raining down from the sky. I just got solar and the bill is lower than my electric + gas bill, I have new furnace, new hot water heater and dryer, and air conditioning added in! I never had an AC because using more carbon as a response to carbon caused warming is prima facie a path to disaster, but now I'm perfectly happy to have it on (well, I put on a coat, but my family is happier). 2 Leafs and a Model 3, vegetarian, and I'm starting to regard the fucking carbon burners the way I do about the fucking non-vaccinated. But of course, if I can't persuade the group to take action against a butt load of trouble, my actions won't matter.

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

#233

Post by kerng »

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.…

Sometimes I wonder if people indeed believe climate change isn't real. I have difficulty imagining that there are so many that believe it's a myth.

Maybe what is more common is that people do believe climate change is real, but they also think it doesn't really matter in long run - because of maybe something like a black swan event or something - dont know. So they see all this as just fear mongering.

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

#234

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

pittmajp wrote: post #155
toolz wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious in how you interpret my comment here - in what way am I portraying this issue? What I mean to show is that forest fires have gotten immensely better, likely because of technology over the years. Which is exactly what I hear many climate change skeptics suggest - that technology will solve the problems, like we appear to be seeing here.

But solutions don't just fall out of the sky. Saying that technology will solve the problem risks a bystander effect, where nobody is packing, reducing emissions, or working on clean energy because of a belief that such effort is wasteful as a the technology will appear out of nowhere.

And saying that technology won't solve the problem risks a discouraging effect, where people might avoid working on climate-resistant crops or efficient AC or improved fire control strategies because they believe their efforts can't help with climate change. It's not obvious to me that either of these hypotheticals are strong enough to justify shaping the public discourse around them.

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

#235

Post by lanstin »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #190
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.…

> You don't have to look very far to see our supply chain impacted by nature. Why would that be a problem? Everything is impacted by nature, always has been. > Pandemics such as COVID were and are predicted to become more frequent. Key word is "predicted". Most of the alarmist predictions tend to be exaggerating either the effect itself, or its impact on us. > My local supermarket doesn't just have higher prices, the…

If you look at the progression of science predictions, they don't have a track record of being alarmist. They have a track record of predicting troubling as heck issues for 2100 or 2050 and now they are already happening.

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

#236

Post by [deleted] »

rewgs wrote: post #229
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…

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 in…

[deleted]

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

#237

Post by lanstin »

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…

You think if a billion people lose monsoon water, some of them won't put together a hand-made virus to wreak revenge on the wealthy nations responsible for the carbon burn and for climate denial? I mean, maybe, people have a capacity for good, but also for anger and revenge.

Carbon caused climate change isn't a carry-ing capacity / overpopulation / over utilization issue (and is now somewhat dwarfing those issues). It is a big change that has some chance of devastating a lot of biological based support systems all at the same time.

The risk to technological civilization is not in the direct effects, but in the human mediated effects. Not that leaving on yeast and water would be that good.

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

#238

Post by vegetablepotpie »

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.…

Climate change solutions require people and countries, across the world, to work together towards a common goal, this challenges fundamental assumptions of many political ideologies.

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

#239

Post by void_mint »

chillwaves wrote: post #222
void_mint wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From my previous HN post:

> Message boards are message boards. You can't take them seriously, including this one.

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

#240

Post by TingPing »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #174
skyfaller wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These are interesting ideas, but really we just think we can predict more of the future than we can.
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