> the 50th headline they’ve read on how we’re screwed today that hasn’t happened
the things are happening though.
e.g. if you read a headline in the 70s that said something like "ski seasons will shorten by an average of 1 day per year, leading to only 5 inches of snow water equivalent in Colorado resorts by 2026, and eliminating the economic viability of skiing in the northeast by 2060" that would have been completely correct.
"I read a headline that turned out to be wrong, all headlines adjacent to that original one are now wrong"
You are constantly seeing all manner of predictions. When someone makes a wrong prediction that is not a indicator that the thing will never happen. Otherwise I would bet that I will suffer no problematic effects if I stop paying a mortgage.
You are giving way too much credit to the average headline. Most headlines are wrong/misleading, full stop. They have incentive to be, this isn't a secret.
The "quality" headlines aren't the one the average person is reading. It's even worse in climate discussions. Fuck "An Inconvenient Truth" was probably the largest exposure to climate issues for my generation and is STILL a problem because a some claims were made that, oops, even then were called vast exaggerations by the IPCCS. No snow on Fuji within a decade comes to mind, which basically nothing but the most extreme models predicted. Well it's a decade later and to the layman, there's still snow on the mountain. It's at some of it's worst levels EVER, but when you make bold and verifiable claims and then go "oh well you see actually..." you lose people.
Even worse are the "THIS TERRIBLE THING WILL HAPPEN!...in 100 years". That's still fucking awful, but when the layman has been reading the first part for over a decade now, or ever hears the second part, it often just loses their attention entirely. Climate science trying to get real change needs to manage expectations, but media is mostly about grabbing attention. It's obvious how at odds those goals are.
The issue is not that that itself is the doomsday, but that when the current collapses the climate trajectory changes and aims at catastrophe, and changing that will be beyond our ability
I’m not saying it isn’t bad. I clearly understand it’s bad.
My point is that this kind of headline doesn’t help the cause. It’s hyperbolic nonsense to laypeople, though they may use the more colloquial term “bullshit”. Getting people to pay attention is really, really hard given the tremendous volume of hyperbole they see every day.
I don’t know what the solution is, but I know this kind of headline works against it.
That's what the headlines said the last 49 times. Why should the average person care now? What are they supposed to do?
Al Gore got on a scissor lift and showed the hockey stick graph. Millions of people saw it. Then the data was bad. Then the average person didn't see anything happen that they could point to and be like "That's what Al Gore warned us about". What you're asking for already happened, over and over. It's useless now.
Who are 'The climate people' you seem to think are doing this? Do you think there is a club where the climate people president takes a vote from the climate people council on how many news stories hacknews user Izkata should read?
If you lived under a big precarious rock and people always talked about the big rock falling on you would you ignore the big rock because the big rock people keep crying wolf?
If you lived under a big precarious rock and people always talked about the big rock falling on you would you ignore the big rock because the big rock people keep crying wolf?
Yeah, that’s exactly what we do, all the time. From nuclear weapons to pandemics to climate change, people become accustomed to the background risks they live under, and go about their lives. Especially when there’s almost nothing they can do about it anyway.
And well-meaning people constantly predicting calamities that don’t materialize only hasten that process.
except that every time the boy cried wolf, there actually was a wolf and it ate some people, but then the people it didn't eat were like "idk what you're talking about, I'm doing just fine" and then plugged their ears.
Well that's not how I heard the fable, and not how the authoritative reference recalls it either[0]. If "every time the boy cried wolf, there actually was a wolf and it ate some people", then it would hardly be a fable about giving a false alarm, would it?
This isn't some accident, the public could understand many complex situations that just don't have billions of dollars in FUD propaganda networks that takeover the Whitehouse whenever the public is starting to get what it wants.
Steve bannon figured this out a while back. I was reading about it in the Epstein files in a discussion between the two of them. If they can keep the average person dizzy with bad news they can do more bad things easily. Cute trick
The GP didn't say not to pay attention to it. Clearly people are.
The point is that it's unactionable. The people who care could all pour their life savings into climate action and commit suicide to cancel all future carbon footprint and it still wouldn't move the needle. Even if the Democrats in the US took over both branches of Congress, the white house, and the supreme court, they wouldn't move the needle. There isn't any practical action any ordinary person could take.
So why are we writing about it for general consumption? Convince billionaires, politicians, oil execs, other scientists, literally anyone with the ability to do anything. If we're at the point the research claims, trying to get people to go vegan or fly less often isn't even shaving off fractions of a percent.
Its perfectly actionable. Its just inconvenient. Imagine if tomorrow we discovered that internal combustion engines produced a gas which immediately killed everyone with 200 feet. What would change?
My point is that it’s theoretically “actionable”, but like all collective action problems (this being perhaps the most challenging example, because the scope is global, the timeline is decades to centuries, and the economic incentives are misaligned with taking action), it’s very difficult for an actual person to take any meaningful action. So pragmatically speaking, it’s not really actionable. Which is why I basically think we’re fucked in the short-term, and will really just be saved by cheap renewables changing the incentives, as they have been. We’re not going to magically solve the most intractable collective action problem of all time.
Writing news articles that desensitize the public has the opposite effect of empowering them. Moreover, it's not an article that's written in a way that changes anyone's mind. If you're a climate denier (of whatever flavor) you're not going to be persuaded by this article or any other like it. In fact, it might make you more staunch.
The truth has power. Never give up on wanting to know the truth.
As to staunch climate deniers, why should we care what they think? The changing world around them (e.g. Florida flooding) will persuade them even if the majority who do believe in it doesn’t first.
They’ve blown their attention budget for the layman and aren’t getting it back unless someone serious guides their attention.