Climate Change

Its because people are bored of this.

Apparently when my parents were growing up there was going to be a gigantic ice age that'd come in.

Personally? At this point people have just stopped caring about this. Its mainly because "FEAR EVERYTHING" has been pounded into people for so long that most older people have just stopped giving a shit about it. And I can understand why. Every week it seems there is a new "oh were all going to die horribly" story out and everyone seems to not care about it.

Its like the boy who cried wolf, nobody really believes its a crisis, because its been shouted out so many times that people have just given up on being frightened of it.

I liken it to sitting in an empty room with about 12 different guys pointing AK-47s at your head, and somebody in the corner jumping up and down, screaming "HAY GUYS THERE'S A GLACIER COMING AND IN ABOUT A DECADE IT'LL CRUSH THIS BUILDING FLAT!"

My response: "And?"

More immediate problems, unfortunately, just take precedent. That's how the world works. :/

Throw in the fact that we were supposed to be dead of overpopulation since, like, the Seventies.

Indeed, all of these predictions just keep failing to be true.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't concern ourselves with the well being of the planet, simply that it's ALWAYS worse than feared and yet everythings still here.

This isn't like nuke stockpiles. No one is asking you to be scared of 'maybe could happen' events. This is ongoing, right now, and if you're not at least speaking out against it, you're part of the problem. A more accurate comparison to climate change would be if one city in the world was getting nuked on a daily basis because that was the policy and people don't care enough to change the policy, because obviously THEIR city is still fine.

Now telling people "your part of the problem" doesn't fucking WORK to get them on your side. Browbeating people into accepting your stance is a a really godsdamn STUPID way of getting people to back you.

Were changing things as best we can with some more "goodish" fuel economies and a change to how a lot of countries acquire energy. But we aren't going to be able to do this crap and continually going "DEATHHHHHH! DEATTTHHHHH!" every fucking month kind of makes it less of a shocking issue and more of a boring additional.

Your not going to get people to listen to you by keeping the same track record up of going "DEATH IS ALL YOU WILL GET IF YOU DON'T LISTEN TO ME" or "Your either with us or against us".

People are bored of being told to be frightened and to be honest we could do with more environmental policies, but it's not going to happen through yelling. Protests might do it, but just trying to act superior whilst you do so is going to make the people who oppose the options feel better and more correct.

Bleh... I'm in favor of phasing out coal and oil entirely—though not so much for the environmental aspects, so much as sociopolitical reasoning—and wouldn't really mind banning all garbage collection as is possible and switching to complete recycling + mining out old landfills and recycling that, too.

Or at least, that sounds like a good idea in my head...

Anyhow, it's not as if I don't support environmentalist causes. I'm just not much of an environmentalist myself—they just happen to have useful policies for reasons other than environmentalism—and I don't put it at the top of my "shit that needs to get done right now" list.

edited 5th Nov '11 9:15:44 AM by USAF713

Scientists are telling us things, and you're either listening to them or you're ignoring them. And if you're ignoring them, you should at least acknowledge that you have no right to judge their conclusions because you're not a scientist. No, I'm not going to tell you that it's okay to ignore science whenever you don't like what it's telling you.

That may be true on an individual level (and I will say it's so just so you don't feel like I'm attacking people personally), but it's not true on a corporate level. Our environmental and health regulations on big companies are a circus of impotence. Oil still has a stranglehold on our lifestyles because the consumer just doesn't have appropriate alternatives available. The same problems that fuel the Wallstreet protests are also part and parcel of the climate change problem - we are letting corporations do whatever the hell they want, and shocker, that's not such a bright idea.

Find a way to make helping the environment profitable and we could probably expect corporations to change their attitude. Right now its simply cheaper for them to continue as they are instead of caring about the environment.

Well, the thing is, we need to start on this right now. It can't be taken care of immediately, but it needs to be worked on instead of ignored and ignored and ignored constantly.

Plus in this particular case, even if it turns out we were wrong, it still is beneficial and recommended for us to try. Even if CO2 emissions really won't kill us all, reducing them still makes for cleaner air and water (and saner weather...) and a generally nicer planet to live on. Considering there's many areas around the world that suffer from bad smog, that's a big consideration.

And this sort of fearmongering has turned out right before. Remember when CFCs were putting a hole in the ozone layer? It was true, it had some definite bad effects here on Earth, and our attempts at reduction have helped the damage reverse itself, albeit slowly.

Plus, those year projections might sound like a long time, but think about this. If you're, say, 18 right now, and you live until 75-ish, that means you're going to be on this planet until 2069. And this isn't a "it'll be fine until suddenly everything sucks in 2100" deal, we'll gradually keep feeling the effects get worse. So it won't be just your kids that'll deal with it, it'll be you, too.

edited 5th Nov '11 9:35:18 AM by Jeysie

@Karkadinn

The thing is, people don't listen because the rhetoric always boils down some variation of "we're all going to die unless we do something to fix the problem right now." People have constantly tuned that message out and written it off as a doomsday prediction a long time ago.

Take this situation for example: The OP said that the worst case scenario has already come to pass and started getting all doom and gloom on us. The rest of us are looking at it and interpreting it as: "The worst case scenario has occurred and we're all still here. That was nowhere near as bad as they said it would be."

People! No offense but your being sort of... stupid.

Dont compare things like population... which is quite variable... with something like geology which is quite literally set in stone.

New York will flood by the end of the century. We can say this with almost complete certainty unless a massive volcanoe erupts nearby the Ecuator and thus cools the planet (which would itself be sort of catasthrophic). How is that not alarming?

edited 5th Nov '11 10:32:57 AM by Baff

Yes, we're all still here, because the effect of the worst-case scenario isn't felt right now, but in the future, and a future which is within our immediate children's—and in some cases our own—lifetimes.

It's also something that we can fix. If we work on lowering our emissions right now, then while there's still going to be some problems, we can stave off the eventual major bad effects and maybe even find some ways to reverse the situation.

Essentially, this isn't so much "we're screwed", as it is "we're going to be screwed eventually if we keep doing what we're doing, so let's work on it."

edited 5th Nov '11 10:34:59 AM by Jeysie

I actually agree with you that we'll all be screwed eventually if something isn't done, but I also think that people advocating these kind of changes need to switch tactics in order to get people to listen to them.

edited 5th Nov '11 10:41:21 AM by RedViking

Can you point me to actual scientists who are saying that? Because so far, the only people I see saying it are people who are latching onto any excuse to not care about a problem.

I just looked over Enkufka's original post again to make sure I was remembering it correctly. I see absolutely no chicken littling in it. All I see is scientists telling us that previous predictions were actually too optimistic and how much so, with an elaboration on some of the consequences. If you think that's too doom and gloom for you, then I have to ask you what would be considered appropriately objective.

Thank you for pointing that out, Karkadinn. I went back myself and saw what you were talking about. For some reason, I thought My God Its Fullof Stars had started this thread, and not Enkufka. Sorry about that, Enkufka.

My posts were in response to My God Its Fullof Stars due to his/hers doom and gloom predictions.

edited 5th Nov '11 10:58:39 AM by RedViking

I do care, but how the problem is percieved is important, and at the moment most people will probably percieve it as yet another "doom & gloom". The fact that there are some sources used in environmentalist arguements that go "we needed to start doing this 20 years ago" and "even if you give up everything it still doesn't matter".

Personally I ma very much in favour of environmental issues coming to the forefront, but the problem is that its proponents are often very condescending about how they put it forward and very daft about the way they try and talk people round.

People prefer being victorious to being correct afterall, so trying to make it easier to swallow might do the movement in general a favour.

It's human nature not to get worked out about imminent (and foreseeable) problems until they actually surface. Just as it's human nature to be alarmist and constantly dread death.

I may well see the end of human history in my lifetime. Or I may not. This is not something we can control, when it comes down to it.

We can control it to an extent. As a species, we can try to preserve the life-supporting properties of our planet as well as we can, and as individuals, we can participate in and promote that most important project.

As a species, too, we can try to bring about a time when we can spread the life from this planet to another or others. After that, there'll be vastly fewer potential events that could wipe out all know life instead of "just" a majority of it. As individuals, we can work to advance science and organisations related to it, if by no other means, then by talking about the issue with people we know, writing about it and maintaining an interest in science, which encourages scientists and the people supporting and enabling them.

I think the problem is that the type of person drawn to science is often the type of person who believes the facts speak for themselves... which makes it harder to figure out how to deal with the people who look at the facts and then go on ignoring them in favor of their own little mental world.

Helping the environment is profitable, in the long term. Nearly every scientific policy analyst goes out of their way to point out how much more money we would save by protecting the environment relative to carrying on with business as usual. The trouble is that corporations are not long term profit maximizers, since those which are outcompeted in the near term fail to reap the benefits of long term strategy, and businesses are subject to the tragedy of the commons, it being in every business's best interests to piggyback off the community efforts of other businesses while saving the resources themselves. Policy solutions that would make environmental consciousness more short-term individually profitable are heavily lobbied against.

Edited to add:

The trouble is that there has never really been an analogous projection to anthropogenic global warming before, but media coverage creates the impression that there has. Global cooling, for instance, was a conjecture that never had majority acceptance in the scientific community, and was not treated by scientists as a serious threat. But "some scientists conjecture this but it's not yet adequately supported to hold serious standing in the scientific community" doesn't make a good news report. So you get news reports hyping up the hypothesis, and people buy into it as if it's something the scientific community takes seriously, much like you see threads full of people talking about how FTL travel is just around the corner after the reports of the OPERA measurements, when practically nobody in the scientific community thinks the measurements are reflective of a real FTL phenomenon.

Anthropogenic global warming has near universal acceptance among experts in relevant fields, with evidence mounting all the time, but media coverage doesn't transmit the difference well. You don't see articles like "levels of dissent among experts that global warming represents a credible threat lower by orders of magnitude than any previously posited ecological crisis."

The situation is less analogous to The Boy Who Cried Wolf, more like a person guarding a city standing on the walls with a telescope watching for invading armies. Every times he says "huh, I think I see something over there," a courier runs out and tells the rest of the city "it's an invasion!" and when the watchman finally sees an army, and tells the courier "Oh crap, that's definitely an invading horde, no question about it," the courier goes and does the same thing he's always done.

edited 5th Nov '11 7:05:28 PM by Desertopa

You know, they teach us about global warming in introductory-biology at colleges these days to the point where it shows up in exams. I would know, because I've taken such a course. I'm not sure how I feel about it.

One thing I've always assumed would be very beneficial on all fronts is nuclear power, but apparently, the same environmentalists who don't want us to use coal don't want us to use nuclear either. Go figure.

Not all the same environmentalists. Nuclear power has a (largely overinflated,) reputation for being dangerous, so the sorts of people who're inclined to care about protecting the environment tend to be averse to it. It's not as if there isn't a correlation in the population between concerns for multiple types of environmental threats. But if you move in the right circles you'll find plenty of environmentally concerned people who support further utilization of nuclear energy.

Science seems to suggest global warming averted another ice age.

Now think about that for a moment and...brifly your mind will be full of fuck.

That's true, more or less (technically we're still in an ice age right now, but global warming has probably prevented another glaciation period, and may eventually end the ice age entirely,) but less significant than it might sound. It's not like it's averted the onset of an imminent catastrophe, since the onset of a new glaciation period, even if we're near the end of our current warm period, is much slower than the effects of anthropogenic warming. On the sort of time scales in which we'd actually have to worry about the onset of the next glaciation period, there are all sorts of ways we could address the problem, up to and including leaving the planet. Our window in which to deal with global warming is much narrower.