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The Swerve

locusmag.com

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Re: The Swerve

#111

Post by majormajor »

mistermann wrote: post #71
jacquesm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nature really doesn't care about our feelings. All that whining is something that my grandmothers' generation would have scoffed at: you have it relatively easy, stop complaining. 5 years of war, occupation, hunger and brutal death is the kind of thing that generation lived through - or not, in many cases - and they came through to rebuild their world without bitching about it. COVID was - compared to that, sorry - a…

> Instead we ended up with a large fraction simply denying objective reality in the hope that it would go away. That's not how you deal with problems as an adult. In toddlers I find that acceptable, but not in grown ups. If you had fallen victim to this phenomenon yourself, would you necessarily know? Might there be some materially important imperfections in your model of reality that you're describing here?

So that's why you make sure your assumptions and claims match what happened.

For instance, anyone who claims that the economic impact was solely the result of government action, and that no private individuals or organizations changed their behavior independently, is ignoring the timeline of events.

Anyone who claims that the vaccines didn't change things so that post-vaccine policies could have been equally successful pre-vaccines, is ignoring the stats.

All this stuff is pretty easily googleable in the current and past-two-years news records, and yet you still get lots of people here making arguments based on completely different claimed facts.

Re: The Swerve

#113

Post by onemoresoop »

LarryDarrell wrote: post #70
bsedlm wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's a train, and it crashed already, but it's a rather humongous train, most of the train hasn't yet felt the shock from the crash also, it's not a literal train, some people will be able to say there's no crash even as they fly out

... and the first class passengers simply exit and fly off in their jetpacks.

to go where? Mars isn't ready yet

Re: The Swerve

#114

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 »

jacquesm wrote: post #8

Something I read in another comment on HN: "Climate denialists have gone in one smooth move from 'we'll fix it' to 'it's too late to do anything about it anyway'". Which unfortunately rings very true. The really, really big problem is that people seem to think that they personally are going to be exempt from this, that it will happen to others, but not to them. Waking up from that will be pretty harsh. But if COVID d…

It's a counter-productive rhetoric that I've long decried and sadly started from environmentally conscious folks. It's hard to understand how "It's too late to do anything" is going to push people in the right direction, if anything it achieves the opposite effect.

Re: The Swerve

#115

Post by majormajor »

jacquesm wrote: post #101
majormajor wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So then how about you get onboard with fighting for what I said , not the other position you're arguing against. The one that's called "technology development." Invest in alternatives, capture solutions, etc so that they get better faster. It's the same thing we've done in wartime, or for a moon mission. The global economy was based on other things than it is today 30, 70, 150, 200, etc years ago. Shit changes. Steer…

Indeed. In the words of Bobby Shaftoe (Cryptonomicon) "Show some fucking adaptability."

The (already-dead, so I can't reply directly to it) response from 'prometheus76 is telling here, so I think it's worth preserving to expose the fakeness of this whole "what if the costs are higher than the benefits" posturing:

"But I thought humans were not adaptable to climate change? Isn't that the panic?"

After all that hand-wringing about "destroying the world economy" you'd think that "adapting to climate change" would not be the bar for them. "Adapting without economic harm" would be. Even if you frame it purely economically and don't care about lives lost, the economic cost of things like rising temperatures and sea levels is easily calculable as being enormous. That precious petro-heavy global economy depends massively on infrastructure on today's coast, for starters.

This is just "I disagree with making any efforts entirely but I've given up on being able to convince people that the efforts aren't needed, so I'll just try to claim they're too expensive instead by arguing against a worst-faith interpretation of what we could possibly try to do."

Re: The Swerve

#116

Post by ncmncm »

syrrim wrote: post #96

This analogy is too hopeful for a couple reasons. First, the swerve is made to seem like a decisive action that is taken once and then is never repeated. In practice, if people don't like that we've slowed the bus, they can speed it right back up again. Second, the one's blocking the swerve are supposed to "first class passengers", which seemingly stand in for the rich and powerful. In practice, its many of the least…

You imagine poor people in position to make choices that affect their future. But it is the billionaires who make those choices and impose them.

Re: The Swerve

#117

Post by paulryanrogers »

troupe wrote: post #44
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. We're past the point where culture can shift in time to turn the wheel. Only technology shifts quickly enough to do so. EVs and wind/solar energies are examples of technologies which are so much better than the alternatives that they're succeeding at reducing emissions faster than consumption can grow to catch up. We don't have the time to get enough people together to mandate that the front row drives a Tesl…

Unfortunately some of those technologies haven't been around long enough to fully understand the full lifecycle cost. We are burying wind turbine blades in some places and the total emissions of an EV are sometimes more than a small efficient gas automobile when total lifetime emissions are considered. Still these technologies are succeeding in the marketplace and if they can continue to improve we may solve many of…

I'd need to see the data on that EV comparison. And earth-to-earth carbon emissions of wind turbines are very unlikely to be higher than coal or nuclear.

Regardless, people aren't buying small cars with efficient gas engines. They're buying trucks and SUVs they don't need. Which will likely continue until it's clear gasoline isn't going to get financially cheaper.

Re: The Swerve

#118

Post by ncmncm »

dash2 wrote: post #57

Respectfully suggest this is nonsense. No serious climate scientist thinks we are going to fall off a cliff. There will be huge costs, yes. Civilization won't end, no. What people fail to grasp is that costs can be absolutely enormous but look like a blip compared to the effect of GDP growth in the long run. World War II is an example. The millions of deaths barely show up on a graph of world population. The huge los…

Serious scientists are not allowed to predict it. But it is certainly among the end states. Even likely ones.

Re: The Swerve

#119

Post by haswell »

voganmother42 wrote: post #24
danhak wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in the U.S., at least, what has widely been maligned as "COVID denialism" was actually a deeper and more nuanced conversation about whether sudden, sweeping changes to society would prevent more harm than they cause. And now looking at outcomes across different states (e.g. Florida vs. California)--and considering ALL outcomes (public health, homelessness, unemployment, substance abuse, mental health, truancy, g…

Nuanced is an interesting way to describe what happened - especially with a description like draconian! The disdain is for ignoring the science, the health of other people, and negative externalities… it is not likely to change, nor are the minds of those who are dug in and feel as though their entitlement to the status quo will outdo entropy. The anchor is sad about being dragged?

> The anchor is sad about being dragged?

This, to me, summarizes the problem. Comparing an entire group of people to a heavy metal object at the bottom of the sea. It’s a tempting dismissal, sure, but will never help someone stuck in their ideology see beyond it.

> nor are the minds of those who are dug in

And is it any wonder that those minds will not change when we hold nothing but disdain and shout at each other?

I am convinced that we will not solve these issues without focusing on the tribalism and identity politics that sit at the core of it all.

I don’t see an anchor being dragged. I see people who see their way of life threatened, and are willing to fight against that.

This doesn’t excuse the behavior, or make it valid. But it’s also not terribly surprising when you look at how conversations about this across ideologies usually go.

Re: The Swerve

#120

Post by SilverBirch »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #106
SilverBirch wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think the people who think they'll be exempt are basically right. It's not like a tornado is going to pick your house up (unless, unfortunately that is exactly what happens). Sure, there are going to be hotter hot spells, and more extreme cold spells, but that's not seriously something that a New Yorker can't deal with. What is going to happen is poor people, foreign people, are going to starve to death an…

Poorer people are always worse off, that's true, but we're talking about global climate change and its effects can devastate anyone on the planet. The climate is a complex system into which more and more energy is being input. That's more likely to produce sudden, drastic and unpredictable changes. It's not just simply going to get hotter. So it's entirely possible that huge swathes of the US become largely uninhabit…

What I'm really saying is that the obvious direct effects of climate change are likely going to be blamed on people.

It's going to get to the point where a poor person can't live in Mumbai - literally, you can't survive exposure to the temperatures that are going to happen. But when those people move north to escape the heat, their migration is going to be blamed on all the things we blame current migration on, rather than the reality that they'd likely die if they stayed where they were. Oh and guess how many poor people there are in Mumbai.

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