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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

#311

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

angelzen wrote: post #308
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nobody is articulating a vision for the future. OK, I'll stop driving my 2000kg of metal tomorrow. The first grocery shop is 25 minutes walking, one way. Maybe with a good degree of planning my family won't starve. But we also need to go to work and school, and these are not within walking distance. Sadly, I have to take that back: I won't stop driving my 2000kg of metal, because I don't see how we can possibly live…

It can get drowned out in online arguments sometimes, but a lot of people do articulate a vision for that problem. They believe that American urban planning makes it unreasonably hard and expensive to build walkable cities, and most people would want to live in one if they were more available. Vox gives a good overview of areas people are working in to enable walkable cities: https://www.vox.com/22662963/end-driving-obsession-connectiv...

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

#312

Post by angelzen »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #311
angelzen wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is articulating a vision for the future. OK, I'll stop driving my 2000kg of metal tomorrow. The first grocery shop is 25 minutes walking, one way. Maybe with a good degree of planning my family won't starve. But we also need to go to work and school, and these are not within walking distance. Sadly, I have to take that back: I won't stop driving my 2000kg of metal, because I don't see how we can possibly live…

It can get drowned out in online arguments sometimes, but a lot of people do articulate a vision for that problem. They believe that American urban planning makes it unreasonably hard and expensive to build walkable cities, and most people would want to live in one if they were more available. Vox gives a good overview of areas people are working in to enable walkable cities: https://www.vox.com/22662963/end-driving-…

North American urban planning is absolutely terrible. The problem is that all proposals I've seen are still insufficient at preventing excessive greenhouse emissions. Perhaps I am wrong. Prove it by pointing to a single 100k city (or larger) that has sustainable greenhouse emissions, when including food & durable goods.

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

#313

Post by y4mi »

frabbit wrote: post #176
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.…

People are not even "selfish". Wanting a nice, stable, predictable environment just like you have had it all your life could be categorized as selfish. And that's fine. Taking a massive gamble on injecting huge amounts of energy into a system which looks like it will be destabilized is just..... foolish? stupid? I dunno. According to the Canadaland podcast there is a recent survey taken during the federal election ca…

you've forgotten that corporations have spend billions in order to muddy the waters and spread misinformation.

propaganda has always worked and this specific one is just particularly spectacular because there were so many players involved. They probably weren't coordinated even.

each one was just looking out for themselves but it ended in a global misinformation campaign that's been ongoing for decades now.

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

#314

Post by orwin »

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…

> my science teacher told me that we would run out of oil and the world economy would collapse by 2010

Well, he was "right", the WEO (not an anti-capitalist/leftist/ecologist organism by any mean, au contraire) now admit that conventional oil peaked in 2008 in the world. The north sea gas extraction peaked in 2004.

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

#315

Post by Proven »

1) They tend to be anxious about everything.

2) Governments doesn't exist to serve anyone particular group. Those concerned about climate change can put their money where their mouth is.

3) Given how economically ignorant and left-leaning (most) young Westerners are, I say governments are not ignoring them enough.

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

#316

Post by orwin »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #234
pittmajp wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

No. People will keep working on it. But being unrealistic and continuing to live and consume like you did in the 00's because "anyway, tech will save us" is the worst comportment anybody can have.

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

#317

Post by [deleted] »

incadenza wrote: post #227
lisper wrote: 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…

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…

[deleted]

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

#318

Post by orwin »

plandis wrote: post #230
whymauri wrote: post #217

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.

Ok, if we remove China, and you could be born anywhere on earth in the early 70s, randomly amongst the newborn, or today (again, randomly). Would you choose today?

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

#319

Post by EForEndeavour »

warble wrote: post #274
EForEndeavour wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please link to the source for your claim? In 2018, the UN Food and Agricultural Organization reported that climate change is one of the leading drivers of global hunger [1]. "Overall, the number of hungry people grew for the third year in row in 2017, reaching a total of 821 million worldwide. The paper warns that this number will continue to rise if countries fail to tackle climate change and to build resi…

This is true - hunger rates are rising since about 2015, but the link to climate change isn't singular. War is very influential, and the leading spots where you see hunger - Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Sudan, Nigeria, Syria are known for their situations separate from climate change. It's also unclear if this is a noise figure rather than a trend. Overall hunger has been declining for decades. Less people die from hunger a…

Some specific sourcing would really help me accept these claims.

What I'm taking away here is that climate change is both directly driving hunger, and compounding other drivers like war. You call it "nuanced," which of course is true, in the same way that the proximate cause of death "from old age" is nuanced: each thing that goes bad compounds all the other things. I feel that misses the point, which is that climate change is only just beginning to exacerbate global hunger.

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

#320

Post by nanis »

s5300 wrote: post #110
nanis wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wet bulb temperatures of 35 degrees C in areas with billions of people I had to look up what that meant ... With this kind of nonsense being pushed around and with more than two decades of constant scary tales, no wonder the kids are nervous. I grew up without any air conditioning at all. Ever. In any building. Summer temperatures between 35 - 40 C with high humidity. I do not know what the "wet bulb" equivalent of…

Are you essentially saying that wet bulb is fake news because of your personal experience in which you didn't deal with wet bulb, especially on an extended timeframe? Do you believe that billions of people with poor infrastructure and no air conditioning are magically going to have infrastructure and air conditioning appear? There is a lot of strange posting going on in this thread for HN...

> Are you essentially saying that wet bulb is fake news

No. The comment I am responding to said:

>> Wet bulb temperatures of 35 degrees C in areas with billions of people and poor power infrastructure to run AC is bad, for example

The claim that something that has hitherto only been observed in extremely few circumstances for extremely brief periods of time will become commonplace requires strong proof.

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