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0 pointsCaptArmchair5y ago0 comments

Oh, that's not a "might", it's pretty much a foregone conclusion. Not tomorrow, not in 5 years or even in the next decade. But not so long term, it's going to be hard to continue catering a modern day lifestyle to billions. [1]

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcosc.2020.6154...

Not so long term would be beyond 2050. 2100 sounds like far into the future... until you realize that kids born today have fair chance being alive at 79 or 80 to see the turn of the next century. [2]

We are not even talking about any children you might have of your own. This is literally everyone who gets born today. Nephews, nieces, cousins, kids of friends and acquaintances,... So, this isn't even an thought exercise in the abstract.

The insidious part of climate change are the delayed effects. Consider it like throwing a thick blanket over your body. It takes a bit of time before enough of your heat gets trapped to make you sweat. Most people will throw off that blanket once they get uncomfortable. When it comes to climate, throwing off the blanket on short notice isn't an option. So, while you - and many others - feel that humanity at large has the luxury of time to afford consider anything but climate change, generations to come will experience the very uncomfortable effects of a blanket they won't be able to shake off. That's just "present bias" in action.

Now, I don't worry constantly about the future. That's counter productive.

What I do worry about is how little action is taken even today to change that future. Sure, there are a tons of great ideas and technological advances. But electric cars or ships dregging micro-plastics out of the oceans aren't going to change this.

What really grinds my gears is that this was already known some 60 years ago. This was already an debated issue at the White House in the 1960's... and over the course of those 60 years the affirmative actions that needed to be taken to avert this, have been muddled in compromises, bureaucracy and lobbying. That's not even hyperbole. [2]

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/clim...

As time marches on, the window of opportunities to avert the worst case scenarios and projections shrink rapidly. If hard to accept policy choices keep being debated and pushed into the future, the future simply becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That window of opportunities has already partly closed up. Climate change is unavoidable. And any future policy choices will shift towards mitigating the increasingly dire effects, rather then avoiding climate change wholesale.

As an individual, the single most powerful thing you could do is to vote for and support policy makers who do take this issue serious enough today.

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psiconaut5y ago

> about is how little action is taken even today to change that future

mainly because of the future discount rate, which is something I'd like to see more commonly discussed.

Related to this: I'm recommending a lot KSR's "the ministry for the future" to all my friends nowadays. It has a very good picture of "how it works, and why we don't care". I kind of like how he makes the point that all those powerful forces are mainly human rules, and as such, they can be changed... with powerful enough incentives.

whatthesmack5y ago

How many times have we survived a "the world is going to end in 12 years" trope spouted by climate apocalypse preachers? It really is a religion. The whole meme mocking voting and paying more taxes to change nature is such an accurate depiction.

Climate change is unavoidable (because nature)... but so is human ingenuity. We're constantly discovering new facts and approaches, and this is the major factor doomsayers never bring up in these discussions.

orwin5y ago

> Climate change is unavoidable (because nature)... but so is human ingenuity

For the first part: not nature, because every carbon emissions today won't have any significant effect until 2040.

For the second part: Yeah, the 2010 drought in Russia was handled so well, millions starved and we're still paying for the political instability it brought in 2011.

And the temperature differential between the troposphere (that warms up) and the stratosphere (that cools down faster than the troposphere warms btw) are becoming more predictible, so when we will have even stronger meteorological events, we might be able to warn the population and to prevent planes to go through them, nice.

And when wet-bulb temperature will be to high, we will be able to grow high-yield plants and harvest them at nigh, while sleeping underground during the day, seems ingenius enough.

Yeah, we will survive, i don't think anybody doubted that. Will the civilization stay the way it is? It won't be the bronze age collapse, but consider this: over 300 year, the Anatolia region lost between 10 and 25% of its precipitations and it almost destroyed 3 empires. Do you think we're that much politically stable?

CaptArmchairOP5y ago

> but so is human ingenuity. We're constantly discovering new facts and approaches, and this is the major factor doomsayers never bring up in these discussions.

There's an abundance of new facts, approaches and ideas. And the vast majority of scientists and activists advocate those facts, approaches and ideas. They have been doing exactly that for the past 60 years.

Your human ingenuity counts for nothing if the only ideas that humanity is willing to accept are those which can be marketed to consumers (electric cars, solar panels) rather then those which are boring, maybe even painful to some, but absolutely necessary to sustain life on Earth (sustainable development goals per the U.N. [1])

[1] https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-develo...

Oletros5y ago

And here we have one person that confuses media with scientific papers

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