381–390 of 439 posts
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The vast majority of people disagree with your subjective opinion. Most people dont want to sit in front of their computer their entire lives.
They can go and take a stroll in a park. There is more beauty in that than jostling in a crowd of tourists in front of the Mona Lisa.
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You can get centrists over to your side, or people with loosely held beliefs. You aren't getting 99% of the extremists. Proselytization likely works most effectively on the above groups, and while it might be a big win to convert 1 X believer to a Y believer, you could probably just convert 10 non-believers into Y much more effectively. Deprogramming sounds exactly the opposite of 'empathy and patience'.
I bring this stuff up to promote empathy and patience. Yelling at the uneducated may be enjoyable but it’s not effective. On the other hand understanding why people come to these conclusions can help you minimize the number of people coming to wildly incorrect conclusions. Because the issue isn’t just climate change alone, we also need to deal with antibiotic resistance, corruption, infectious diseases, and all the o…
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>People by and large understand and ask for and vote for solutions to this. They really haven't, no. Corporations don't want to take responsibility for their actions, governments don't want to, and big surprise: individuals don't want to either.
USA: Polling shows that US voters favor climate bills – yet assume fellow Americans don’t https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/01/us-vot... UK: > The UK has some of the highest levels of concern regarding the climate emergency in the world with 81 per cent of people ‘believing’ in the climate emergency, with over three-quarters (77 per cent) saying we must do ‘everything necessary, urgently as a respons…
They've all had their whole lives to make climate conscious lifestyle decisions, they could all stop eating meat tomorrow, but they ain't done squat. Not as individuals nor as a group. The few who have are weirdos who live at the margins.
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Have there actually be any global record cold months in the 21st century? Sure, we have months that are cooler than our (elevated) average, but I don't think we're breaking any records. On the other hand, "hottest month ever" is not uncommon to hear. That plus the fact that we are trending in the wrong direction might be cause for alarm.
Didn't Texas freeze over a couple years ago? Edit: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/great-texas-freeze-february-2...
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It was a lot of words to say “perception is more important than reality”, and delivered in an oblique way hinting at some unstated “narrative” going on, without either explicitly making that point or providing evidence. Kind of the HN equivalent of the angsty teen who will only say “that’s what YOU think” to everyone.
The poster was asking why certain things are omitted and only things the support an argument are surfaced. The reason is it tends to undermine a given narrative. People are convinced of things via narrative. Both good and bad things. It’s not an oblique criticism of climate change. It’s a comment on why narratives don’t tend to be objective.
And there is no such thing as an objective position.
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A large portion of the US populace wants to maintain/increase fossil fuel usage just to stick it to their perceived enemies. Also not hopeful.
What about the portion of the US populace that wants to maintain/increase fossil fuel usage because they think it's the best option they have? Is that not a valid viewpoint?
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Energy capex is fungible, and nuclear energy is the most expensive. It is also carries the highest risk of cost overruns and underestimation of decommissioning costs. Why spend a penny on fission nuclear when renewables are cheaper, have shorter lead times by decades, and are vastly less financially risky?
I always find the framing of these discussions very sad. Nuclear doesn't have to be expensive, there are many historic examples of safe reactors built for very reasonable costs. (French and earlier American reactors especially.) Unfortunately there seems to be zero appetite to discuss let alone fix the killing of nuclear power though an absolutely crazy regulatory framework.
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The debate over exact causes has always felt misguided to me. The planet is extremely complex, human impact on the planet is largely based on estimates and modeling, and at the end of the day an understanding of why it's getting hotter isn't itself a course correction. There are such obvious first steps we could take without a complete understanding of cause if we really cared. We could easily cut our use of fossil f…
I think the second half of your comment argues against the first. You're right that people are unwilling to make the basic changes that are obviously needed. But we only know precisely that those changes would work to fight against climate change because we are able to say with certainty that those behaviors are contributing factors. Any suggested actions have to have some level of scientific credibility to be taken…
We don't actually know the extent of impacts from either our oil use or potential cuts. We have modeling data that we extrapolate out, the issue I'm raising is that we get stuck in a loop of people debating whether the modeling data is accurate, complete, or predictive.
There are changes we can easily make without knowing those answers. If we can make simple changes that at a minimum wouldn't hurt the planet and almost certainly would help it, why don't we? My read is that we simply must not care. We don't need to buy as many things as we do, or to expert those costs overseas. We don't need to travel the world by plane. We don't need the latest iPhone made on the other side of the planet. We don't need LLMs. We do it because we like convenience and novelty more that we actually care about our impact on the planet. And we avoid implementing real solutions by first demanding that we have a complete understanding of the cause and blame.
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I think the second half of your comment argues against the first. You're right that people are unwilling to make the basic changes that are obviously needed. But we only know precisely that those changes would work to fight against climate change because we are able to say with certainty that those behaviors are contributing factors. Any suggested actions have to have some level of scientific credibility to be taken…
If the "basic changes" are more extreme than the COVID lockdowns, which made the entire world miserable, brought unprecedented economic destruction we'll be dealing with forever, and which also didn't cool the planet at all despite massive decreases in CO2 emissions... no thanks. I'll keep voting against anything that makes me poorer and more miserable.
Some things are in fact worth dying for.