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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

#341

Post by throwaway5752 »

https://twitter.com/pkedrosky/status/1438148663860076546

"Given the importance of these future projections, one might expect the brain to possess accurate, unbiased foresight. Humans, however, exhibit a pervasive and surprising bias: when it comes to predicting what will happen to us tomorrow, next week, or fifty years from now, we overestimate the likelihood of positive events, and underestimate the likelihood of negative events. For example, we underrate our chances of getting divorced, being in a car accident, or suffering from cancer. We also expect to live longer than objective measures would warrant, overestimate our success in the job market, and believe that our children will be especially talented. This phenomenon is known as the optimism bias, and it is one of the most consistent, prevalent, and robust biases documented in psychology and behavioral economics."

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

#342

Post by ericd »

Aerroon wrote: post #338
ericd wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Carbon capture. > 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. I don't see how. There aren't going to be major effects for most people for a very long time. This gives us plenty of time to try various things like carbon capture, putting a shade into space etc. On carbon capture that we can…

I’m actually in the middle of studying carbon capture right now (via AirMiners Bootup, free, worth checking out the next batch if you’re interested). Direct air capture like Climeworks requires a lot of energy to free the CO2 from the sorbent, and it needs to be near a geological formation that can accept the CO2. We’d need a massive build-out of excess power generation, you can’t just extrapolate out from current numbers. And good luck convincing the people of the world that this is worth spending 1/4 of GDP (not existing government budgets, but all GDP) on this before we’re well past the scenarios we’re looking at and playing serious catch-up. If fusion comes along and energy becomes a fraction of the cost, then this becomes cheaper/easier, but the scale would still need to be extreme.

The foremost experts in DAC are emphatic that it’s not a silver bullet that will magically save us, and that the heavy lifting needs to be done by reducing new emissions.

And at this point, going eventually carbon neutral isn’t enough to avoid the 2 degree C scenario, we need to be going negative eventually.

The major effects seem likely to be deadly heatwaves, crop failure in hotter areas, mass migration, and political strain from all of that.

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

#343

Post by arcanon »

lisper wrote: post #178
strken wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Global famine won't end civilization directly, but it might spark WW3, and that would do it.

This guy gets it.

Global warming is scary because of nukes.

The timeline till we get widespread crop problems is 15-20 years.

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

#344

Post by arcanon »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #218
jussij wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

We are not scared because of “the news” we are scared because of the graphs of temperature over time. Look at the plot. Find the +1.5C on the y axis. Now find where the plot crosses that on the x axis.

We have like 15 years. Perhaps you dont think +1.5C does anything to farming?

The sea levels rising is not the issue.

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

#345

Post by Manuel_D »

EForEndeavour wrote: post #334
Manuel_D wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rates of global hunger have fallen by about a third since 2000: https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment Key chart: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-undernourished-regi...

That omits the second half of the trend analysis by Our World In Data. The decades-long drop in global hunger has in fact reversed in recent years, and it's misleading just to cite the preceding decades of progress without any mention of its recent reversal: However, over the last few years, the total number increased to around 663 million in 2017. This increase in hunger levels are largely a result of increases in S…

Total numbers may have increased, but proportional numbers are still down. In 1990, 25% of the world lived in hunger, today it's under 10%. The overall decline is unambiguous.

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

#346

Post by arcanon »

angelzen wrote: post #298
rewgs wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A lot of people see the problem, give us some credit. What we don't see is solutions. Do you have any to share?

Destroy oil/gas infra.

Deploy more solar.

Fund fusion research.

Deploy indoor vertical farms.

Build structures underground.

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

#347

Post by leeoniya »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #326
leeoniya wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like people use this as an excuse to avoid making any inconvenient changes in their lifestyle, or rather to avoid considering making inconvenient changes to their lifestyle. i would be happy to only use glass bottles and no more plastic even if it means i have to wash them before taking them to get refilled. except there is nowhere i can do this. all i have the option of doing is buying and landfilling more…

> the "individual action makes a difference" is fairy tale. for every 1 person who tries individual action, 999 will discard 3000 plastic containers that cost them ~$0 to acquire but made the container mfg $3,000 profit. Unless of course all 1000 of them decided to do something. Can't you see how this narrative is self-fulfilling?

the typical consumer and business doesnt give much shit about more than their bottom line and nimby. if half the amazon rainforest gets clearcut for palm oil farming, most people in this generation wont be affected by it, why would they stop buying products made with palm oil? they won't.

until everyone's houses start burning down or flooding due to climate change, or they see empty grocery stores, no one will care/act. at that point it is far too late to _start_ making changes. people with the means to make lifestyle changes are far too removed from the externalities and timescales to affect their behavior.

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

#348

Post by lisper »

arcanon wrote: post #343
lisper wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Global famine won't end civilization directly, but it might spark WW3, and that would do it.

This guy gets it. Global warming is scary because of nukes. The timeline till we get widespread crop problems is 15-20 years.

I can't tell if you are being serious, but just to be clear: I do not think that climate change is "scary because of nukes". Climate change is scary in its own right. Global famine is going to be very unpleasant whether or not it sparks WW3. But we do have nukes, and nukes + climate change could bring about the end of civilization in my lifetime with probability much greater than zero. And, what is scariest of all, most people's behavior indicates that this possibility is not even on their radar screens. Most people are still behaving as if the really serious shit is several generations away. It's not. The wolf is at the door, as you say, much closer to 10 years than 100.

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

#349

Post by angelzen »

arcanon wrote: post #346
angelzen wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people see the problem, give us some credit. What we don't see is solutions. Do you have any to share?

Destroy oil/gas infra. Deploy more solar. Fund fusion research. Deploy indoor vertical farms. Build structures underground.

I presume we should destroy oil/gas/coal. That would wipe out ~85% of world's energy production. Might I ask how are we going to power the gigantic engineering project envisioned, on top of somehow keeping people from freezing and/or starving?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...

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

#350

Post by lanstin »

jjoonathan wrote: post #262
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.

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 prediction…

When I was in seventh grade, I kept a running list of all the wrong things that my science teacher said. I was more thinking of the actual scientists and IPCC and you know more vetted types of predictions.

And Ozone depletion we actually came together as a civilization and fixed the issue. That was a good model for what we need to do with respect to carbon burn. Any of these predictions about the future are obviously conditional on "people do X" or "people do Y" or something equally involving predicting what people will do in the future.

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