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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

#261

Post by rdedev »

jimmaswell wrote: post #201
rdedev wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are right. That paper does not show any difference wrt time. My bad. Actually another paper from the same author shows that social mobility has not changed.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w19844/w198...

This website summarizes a couple of key points from other papers from that author:

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2018/01...

> 3. Rates of relative intergenerational mobility in the U.S. appear to have been flat for decades

> 4. It is a different story, however, for absolute mobility – which indicates how well a person does compared to their parents in absolute terms, rather than relative ones. On this measure of mobility, the last few decades have seen a sharp decline.

So I guess a better way to put it would be to say that because of rising costs in healthcare and housing etc, the social ladder has become more slippery; an accident or a medical emergency has a much bigger chance to push you down the social ladder that from earlier years.

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

#262

Post by jjoonathan »

lanstin wrote: post #235
perryizgr8 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In the late 90s, my science teacher told me that we would run out of oil and the world economy would collapse by 2010. In the 70s, my parents were told that we would run out of ozone, kill all the plants, and die from oxygen cycle collapse by 2000. A century earlier, respectable scientists were making predictions that we would run out of food within a few decades and starve to death. The history of science predictions is a history of high-profile respectable figures making doomsday predictions that never come to pass.

If you deny the failures, climate change deniers will have the luxury of being able to easily prove you factually wrong. Don't give them that luxury.

Instead, use the history to argue for action. Why didn't we run out of food? Green revolution. Why didn't the ozone cook us? Montreal protocol -- we switched halocarbons in our air conditioners and now the ozone layer is recovering. Why didn't we run out of oil? Fracking. CO2 is the biggest challenge yet, how do we fight it? Solar, wind, lithium, nuclear. Let's spend the money and make it happen.

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

#263

Post by eggsmediumrare »

lanstin wrote: post #232
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or something... It seems like your "carbon burners" are just people who can't afford a house in SV, solar panels, new appliances, and 3 electric vehicles.

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

#264

Post by andrekandre »

Manuel_D wrote: post #211
over_bridge wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prediction…

  > To reiterate, I see a massive gap in how the effects of climate change lead to the collapse of global civilization.
some parts of the world/economy are stronger and more resilient than others

if, for example supply chains of manufactured goods from a few countries petered out, the effects would cascade up the chain to many other industries

just look at the effect of a covid, and microchip shortages, we can barely get capacity to build cars and even gpus now and its only getting worse

add some mass migrations here and there, political disruptions, markets pulling back investments (aka 2008) and more, and it becomes much easier to imagine our way of life being disrupted so such a degree that we "cannot carry on as before"

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

#265

Post by eggsmediumrare »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #256
lanstin wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think that's right. There have been predictions saying ridiculous things that never came to pass since the 80s.

Why do some incorrect predictions completely invalidate the devastatingly correct ones?

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

#266

Post by crackercrews »

olivermarks wrote: post #35

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

I wasn't overly impressed by Apocalypse Never. It has some interesting tidbits, sure. But ultimately a lot of the argument was about reframing harm as deaths instead of dollars: we have better technology so we can avoid deaths from natural disasters. That's good but if we are causing natural disasters to be worse and the sea level to rise that's still something we should seek to avoid.

I found Unsettled, [1] by former Caltech provost Steven Koonin to be much more compelling. The approach is rigorous and scientific. The author is not partisan. He did work for BP but also served in the Obama administration. He brings to the climate debate a rational skepticism that is typically discouraged in polite/liberal company. IMO it was at least 2x as compelling as Apocalypse Never.

1: https://www.amazon.com/Unsettled-Climate-Science-Doesnt-Matt...

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

#267

Post by jjoonathan »

eggsmediumrare wrote: post #265
perryizgr8 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's right. There have been predictions saying ridiculous things that never came to pass since the 80s.

Why do some incorrect predictions completely invalidate the devastatingly correct ones?

Do we really need to revisit the "crying wolf" parable?

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

#268

Post by FooHentai »

kerng wrote: post #233
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.

That Upton Sinclair quote "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it". Except here we're talking about upbringings, lifestyles, social position, and career all in one caboodle. So if we buy into that quote, this is an even wider example that perhaps has just as strong if not stronger potential for resistance to change.

Also, there's a layered stack of argument underneath outright denial to overcome - Even if climate change is real the climate has changed before, and I can't do anything about it, and isn't perfect so why bother, and even if it is real it's not going to happen in my lifetime, and remember , and so on and so on.

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

#269

Post by antod »

annoyingnoob wrote: post #116

> more than half said climate change made them feel "afraid, sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and/or guilty." That seems like a bad survey. Why does 'guilty' get 'and/or' while the others do not? Guilty does not belong in the same question with the others. Maybe surveys like this one find what they are looking for because of the way the questions are asked.

You're reading the reporting wrong.

It is meant as: afraid and/or sad and/or anxious and/or angry and/or powerless and/or helpless and/or guilty

ie the last "and/or" is defining what the commas mean. Just like "a, b, c, and d" or "a, b, c, or d" don't mean "a, b, (c and d)" or "a, b, (c or d)"

And that was also a smaller summary list of options than the actual study had.

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

#270

Post by eggsmediumrare »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #215
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

The predictions of a few individuals 30 years ago don't have nearly the same weight, at least to me, as the predictions of an international body of climate and earth science experts with 30 years of data and modelling experience behind them.
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