[aosmond]

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. Maybe it was always political. Hard to say that society needs to fundamentally change without people feeling it encroaches upon their world view.

You don't have to look very far to see our supply chain impacted by nature. Pandemics such as COVID were and are predicted to become more frequent. My local supermarket doesn't just have higher prices, the selection has gone down in many categories as the droughts and wildfires have impacted production. We are getting a taste of what has been long predicted. Deny all you want. I'm not saying the world will end this year, or next decade, but little by little, all the evidence I'm seeing is pointing towards the science being right. And it ain't pretty.

The level of ambition among our governments is quite low. The people are selfish, more concerned with their property values and if their neighbour mows their bylaw required lawn, than if the next generation will be able to have a similar quality of life. Why wouldn't you be cynical if you were young?

If you are a believer in conspiracies, what seems more likely to you? The climate scientists of the world conspiring to destroy the world economy? Or the powers that already be in this world desperately trying to hold onto their positions? I don't know about you, but I think the latter is far more likely.

[frabbit]

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 campaign which suggests that 1 in 4 voters still do not accept anthropogenic climate change as real.

I am baffled.

Most of us would benefit from some sort of Green New Deal with a re-organization of the economy. I can completely understand the top 5 or 10 percent balking at any shake up of the system on purely economic advantage grounds, but what about all the other 85%? And even with a shake-up I find it hard to believe that any productive/active members of the 5 to 10 percent would not thrive relatively in any new situation and indeed be better off than in a severely disrupted environment.

Something other than rationality is going on here.

[y4mi]

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.

[pier25]

> 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.

And what's even more frustrating is that we've known about these feedbacks for 15-20? years.

I've been reading about climate change and feedbacks for the past decade and I'm just part of the general public.

[doublepg23]

Oil companies knew about climate change in the _1980s_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont...

[pier25]

Climate change was well known before that.

There's actually a report to Lyndon Johnson in 1965 about the dangers of climate change.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...

[scruple]

I suspect they knew well before the 1980s. [0][1]

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lgzz-L7GFg

[1]: https://climate.nasa.gov/blog/447/unchained-goddess/

[kerng]

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.

[FooHentai]

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 <easily adoptable green tech> isn't perfect so why bother, and even if it is real it's not going to happen in my lifetime, and remember <all those predictions that have been wrong>, and so on and so on.

[worrycue]

> <easily adoptable green tech> isn't perfect so why bother

Going to stick my neck out here. IMHO the people overzealously pushing green tech when it isn’t suitable isn’t helping.

It just makes people skeptical when these zealots are the face of green tech. People aren’t stupid, they can see that these zealots are only interested in pushing green tech and don’t really care about their needs and wants.

To some extend this bleeds over and tarnishes the reputation of the climate movement.

We need a realistic view of green tech use - not an evangelical one - where its limitations are acknowledged and taken into account when considering for deployment.

[hn_go_brrrrr]

I don't want to flamebait by giving examples, but this is my issue with a lot of advocacy.

The True Believers try to push a radical/extreme set of changes. These changes have some level of adoption, but not as large as the True Believers want. There's a pushback by the general populace against the change. Moderates in the movement subsequently attempt to push smaller change, but get attacked from both sides: the True Believers for not believing strongly enough, and the populace for being associated with the changes.

I get really frustrated by basically every part of this cycle, especially when I agree the issue needs fixing. I understand _why_ it happens, but I sure wish it didn't.

[dorgo]

> <all those predictions that have been wrong>

It's not about predictions of climate change being real or not. It's about predictions what measures contribute to what degree which is questionable.

Society or media is pretty bad at predictions or communicating predictions. In march I saw (worst case) predictions for incidence rate (covid) of 2000 ( university researchers in my city ). What happened instead: incidence rate dropped to 5 before it started climbing again. What I've learned: nobody can predict anything.

[rufus_foreman]

>> The people are selfish, more concerned with their property values and if their neighbour mows their bylaw required lawn, than if the next generation will be able to have a similar quality of life. Why wouldn't you be cynical if you were young?

The IPCC reports say that if we do little to ameliorate the effects of global warming, in 2100 future generations will have a GDP per capita several times higher than today's, but lower than it would be if actions are taken. That's not an apocalypse. I would worry about other things if I were you.

You are asking old people now to lower their standard of living so that future generations will have a standard of living that goes from "much higher than yours" to "much higher than yours plus x%", while calling them selfish.

[JeremyNT]

Assuming this to be true, how can GDP possibly be the best metric here?

Maybe we should consider that you can't buy back the things we'll lose, barring some unexpected developments in large scale geoengineering. How much "GDP" would you trade to live in a world that isn't racked by increasingly powerful storms, unprecedented droughts, loss of unique habitats, mass extinction of various species, and the other dramatic effects of rapid climate shift?

[NortySpock]

How bad will the famines be in 2100? How many people will be refugees? Is a cushy job indoors worth it if it's too hot to work infrastructure jobs outside? Is GDP meaningful if citizens cannot afford food?

[vegetablepotpie]

Climate change solutions require people and countries, across the world, to work together towards a common goal, this challenges fundamental assumptions of many political ideologies.

[throwaway5752]

I can't regularly find fruit that was plentiful a few years ago at my grocery store. Produce this year was poor quality and wasn't available at the same times.

[noduerme]

We've had a shortage of onions in Oregon. A few hundred miles from where they're grown. But the reason is not enough truckers after the pandemic.

[over_bridge]

There's plenty of food for everyone on the planet but we are very poor at distributing it to everyone. It's terrible seeing fruit rotting on their trees due to lack of migrant workers to exploit and also people deliberately dumping supplies to keep prices high

[noduerme]

>>> due to lack of migrant workers to exploit

What's your solution to this? Replacing migrant workers with locals by quadrupling the price of fruit? Or allowing more migrants in?

FWIW my family worked as day laborers and it wasn't viewed as exploitation but as a chance to stay in America and become legal. It was better than where they came from. My grandfather ended up becoming a translator and negotiator for the union, but he never had a bad word to say about how America had treated him.

[gilbetron]

> What's your solution to this? Replacing migrant workers with locals by quadrupling the price of fruit?

How would it quadruple the price of fruit? Serious question. Prices would go up, but lets say a worker can pick, what 100 lbs of onions per hour. Onions cost between 30c-$1.50 a pound, so lets go low at say $0.50/pound. So in that hour, if they pick 100 pounds, that's around $50 of revenue. If they make, say $5/hour, and we quadruple their pay to $20/hour, if we increase the cost of onions so that one hour's worth of onions (100 lbs) costs $15/hour more, up to $65/hour, that would be $0.65 per onion. Far from quadruple. If we quadruple the cost to $2.00/onion, then that's $200/hour worth of onion revenue, and we could increase the worker wage from $5/hour to $105/hour!

Lots of research seems to back all this up.

https://www.epi.org/blog/how-much-would-it-cost-consumers-to...

I think laborers are simply exploited.

[noduerme]

You're still talking about a 30% increase in the price of food, which would have enormous ramifications; and it would not stop there. To take your math, a laborer at $5/hr is currently getting 10% of the retail price, $50, of 100 lbs of onions. If the laborer's pay is mandated to go up to $20/hr and the cost is passed to the consumer, they are now making about 30% of the retail price, $65, of the same box. That sounds alright, but here's the trouble: The rest of the cost of an onion to the consumer is not going into the profit margin of a corporation. In fact the margins are extremely slim. Virtually all the rest of the cost is going to sorting, transportation, stocking, and operating retail markets.

So our onion picker is making $20/hr. The stock boy in the market is still only making $5/hr, but his cost of food goes up by 30%. He's clearly being exploited - he makes less than an onion picker. He needs his pay quadrupled, too. So do the sorters, truckers, the mechanics, fuel attendants, market managers, every person along the way who touches that onion. All those increases get factored in so the final price of an onion will continue to rise, and then have to rise again, because no more value has been produced. When you put your thumb on one end of the scale, the inflation will ripple until that $20/hr will only buy the same number of onions that $5/hr would buy originally. Ultimately, after a period of economic contraction and devaluation of currency - and concomitant loss of personal savings in the bank, which will be soaked up by the financial sector, and those able to speculate against the dollar - everyone will be doing the same job they were doing before to be able to afford the same amount of onions.

I speak about this having lived through two periods of hyperinflation in Argentina. Fixing prices of goods or labor ends up destroying savings, and destroying people's lives. There needs to be a baseline - minimum wage - to prevent a race to the bottom. But when shortsighted people come into power promising to raise that faster than the rate of inflation, look out, because they're inextricably bound, and inflation will quickly catch up to it.

[6510]

IMHO salaries should be tied to units produced or customers served. I one time earn 35 euro per day making half a million boxes of cookies with 5 other people. The desire to push wages down that far has nothing to do with the price of the product. It makes things more fragile and more expensive if uninterested unskilled people do the work. If something went wrong the employees just laughed. No one rushed over to help.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

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.

[lanstin]

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, but now I'm perfectly happy to have it on (well, I put on a coat, but my family is happier). 2 Leafs and a Model 3, vegetarian, and I'm starting to regard the fucking carbon burners the way I do about the fucking non-vaccinated. But of course, if I can't persuade the group to take action against a butt load of trouble, my actions won't matter.

[eggsmediumrare]

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.

[lanstin]

The people that annoy me are my neighbors in SV that can easily afford a (used Leaf, used Model 3), but instead buy a gas guzzling SUV for more money. Even the rental homes, that won't be getting solar panels unless the building owner is somehow incentivized, can do better than the SUV.

The appliances and furnace and so on are part of the solar loan, and so they are effectively free, as the loan payments are lower than the electricity and gas bill.

The solar and new appliances, and the AC, are effectively free, paid for by my ability to sell the energy back into the grid and by the sun.

I know most people can't adopt it yet, or without structural changes to the incentives, but most of my peers and neighbors could but don't. I'm mad at my peers and neighbors (except, obviously, the homes full of young immigrants working hard, and the retirees on fixed incomes and so on).

Also, when I visit my birth place of North Carolina, I get mad at all the people living near the beautiful and fragile barrier islands with their expensive SUVs and trucks and no solar, no electric cars, nothing being done to halt the destruction of such beautiful ecosystems. Not even an idea that the flooding and hurricanes are something they could actually take steps against. I get mad at the elites in these towns that ignore the problem that will end in the destruction of the beautiful islands they are entrusted with the care of.

I'm also a bit mad at my cousins that are resolute anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers.

[noduerme]

I think there's enormous reason for concern, but... I also think there's a not-so-fine line between saying (A) that we will go through some major hardship and decreased quality of life as we attempt to mitigate and adapt, versus (B) civilization is finished, there's nothing left but despair and destruction, kids have no viable future on this planet, etc. The latter strikes me as a mass projection of millenarian eschatological thinking onto what is admittedly a troubling set of data. I suppose that policy makers find it useful, therefore, to stoke a certain amount of sky-is-falling panic, particularly among teenagers who are more inclined to be attracted to and scared of doomsday scenarios. But by the same mechanism (ie supplanting rational discourse with doomsday panic), a counter-movement scores easy points saying "look, nothing's happening." The same basic flaw on public messaging pertains to vaccines and masks. What seems to have happened is that those in charge of public messaging have concluded that the majority don't know enough or care enough about science, and so they need to tap into raw fear and emotional appeals just like the science deniers do. What this does, unfortunately, is cheapen the conversation to the point where we're measuring the stress levels of teenagers as if that were a useful metric of how severe climate change actually is or will be. Their stress levels, just like the stress levels of anti-vaxers, aren't based on rational thought; they're generated by fear-peddling from one messaging system or the other. As both these systems try to out-alarm each other, they tend to drift further toward worst-case scenarios and their exponents move closer to shouting for revolution (e.g. Jan 6th), if only to serve as post-justification for the hysteria they engender to serve their goals. Climate scientists shouldn't stoop to the level of deniers. It's too short a game to keep people in panic at all times. If we've learned anything from the failure of messaging during covid, it's that trying to sustain an endless freak-out doesn't work, and it's ultimately counterproductive, because daily life causes drift away from any singular narrative, and groups of people then grow stronger counter-narratives even more dangerous than those they had before.

I feel sorry for kids whose lives are made to feel meaningless and short-changed by this information warfare on both sides. Yes climate change is real and dangerous and yes the world needs to be proactive, and yes quality of life will decline, more in some places than others, and mostly falling on the global poor. Yes children should be educated about it and yes adults need to get ahead of it, including changing systems and practices that there is deep resistance to changing. But panicking the hell out of 14 year olds - or in this case, 50-somethings, that civilization is imminently coming to an end is going to have the terrible consequence of hastening or creating an end through instilling abject despair, rather than cultivating the means and the will to make the necessary changes.

[throwawaylinux]

> Or the powers that already be in this world desperately trying to hold onto their positions? I don't know about you, but I think the latter is far more likely.

The word "desperately" is doing a lot of work there. The ruling class doesn't seem very desperate at all to me, actually.

Matter of fact they like the climate change problem as far as I can see. It is yet another wedge they use to divide people and make them fight one another, meanwhile they continue to do what they please.

Climate science denialism and conspiracy theorists are not the problem, even in USA which is called a "hotbed" of this thinking, climate deniers are under 20% of the population. It's not the brave and valiant Joe Biden and friends battling against the evil corporations and deniers to tackle the biggest threat facing humanity. It's the rulers pointing out the unemployed coal miner from West Virginia and telling you that he's the reason for all your problems, while at the same time they're pointing you out to him and saying the same thing.

You really think they actually believe < 20% of some of the least educated and most disadvantaged people in the country are responsible for preventing them from addressing the most important issue they have ever faced? Please, they happily go to war and destroy other countries with far higher disapproval ratings than that.

[AtlasBarfed]

It's almost like the ultra-rich """elite""" will risk everyone's existence rather than surrender any of their hoard.

All one has to do is look at the distribution of wealth to see where the money exists to fix this, technologically, policy, or a combination.

This at least is one of the true environmental effects the rich can't easily run from. Go ahead, get your little fortress in New Zealand. Tell yourselves you can hop your private jet.

Global warming will displace a billion people at least. That will make the syrian refugee crisis look like your brother in law crashing in the basement in comparison.

Remember that environmental and resource wars aren't easily recognized as such. Scarcity and strife always break down along ethnic or religious lines and will appear as ethnic wars, like the Sudan which is actually about freshwater.

It is ridiculous that science is held up as some grand conspiracy, a brilliant coordination of millions of dollars of funding to bring down the brave, oppressed, helpless hundred billionaires and their trillionaire corporations.

[perryizgr8]

> 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 selection has gone down in many categories

I think this is your local supermarket's problem. The supermarket I go to has better selection than ever, and prices are not any higher.

[lanstin]

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.

[jjoonathan]

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.

[throwaway210222]

> In the 70s, my parents were told that we would run out of ozone

Did you factor in the world-wide efforts to eliminate CFC gasses?

Here is an easier one: 'meteorologists predict you will get sunburnt today if you expose your skin to the sun'. So, based on this, you stay indoors most of the day, wear sunscreen, a long shirt, and a hat.

You don't get sunburnt and your rational conclusion is the science is wrong?

SMH

[lanstin]

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.

[orwin]

> 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.

[perryizgr8]

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

[eggsmediumrare]

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

[jjoonathan]

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

[eggsmediumrare]

If he was attacked by the wolf a few times among the false alarms, your comparison would be valid.

[perryizgr8]

Most predictions were inaccurate. In fact I'm having trouble recalling any that turned out to be true. You can deny this all you want, but alarmist propaganda like this is why people don't take such reports seriously nowadays.