My own brain’s refusal to integrate the seriousness of climate change | Hacker News Reader

My own brain’s refusal to integrate the seriousness of climate change

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Every person aware of the extent of the coming (and current) climate crisis is a denier in this way I think.

Burying the knowledge at the back of my mind and holding it in the abstract is just about the only way to keep from dissolving into a puddle of pure anxiety and despair for the future and the children alive today who never even had a chance.

I'm not convinced the people with actual power to reverse what's happening will band together in time, and I'm not convinced that technology will be invented to significantly manage the run-away effects. Too many people are still bargaining to keep their current comforts and business as usual to accept the monumental change in our way of life needed to truly have a chance at solving this crisis.

But, there's always a glimmer of hope. There has to be, or I'd go insane.

I'm very worried too. I have kids. In the next ten or fifteen years I'll probably have grandkids. I'm building up food storage, anticipating periods of high food insecurity. I've done a lot of thinking about what I really need to live a good life, and more specifically what I don't, anticipating that there may well come a time in my lifetime where a lot of the things I now think of as necessities are simply not available.

But: there's a saying that engineers tend to over-estimate what can be accomplished in the short term, and under-estimate what can be accomplished in the long term. So I have hope. Renewable energy is getting cheaper than fossil fuels. Electric cars are on the market already, and they're getting better. Economic forces, once tipping points are reached, can cause change to happen very, very quickly. I can imagine a future where nearly all cars on the road are electric within ten to twenty years, and where nearly all electrical generation is renewable/nuclear, and where this happens not primarily due to government action but simply market forces and consumer sentiment.

And in the meantime, there are some ugly but eminently doable geoengineering solutions that will keep most of us alive.

I can imagine it. So I have hope.

For me anyway,

I'm totally aware of it and worried about it, but feel totally at a loss as to what I can do personally about it

I can eat less meat. I can buy an electric car, but it plugs into coal. I can vote for the guy who wants to get us into the Paris Accords, but the agreement is pretty hollow and sets meaningless targets for the biggest polluters (see, China)

But I don't see others around me doing that, and my change really just inconveniences myself for no change in the data

I feel powerless, so I do nothing. The house I'm looking at in Sac will be beach front property in 50 years...

Reminds me of the Smoke Filled Room study. https://www.dowellwebtools.com/tools/lp/Bo/psyched/16/Smoke-...

Basically, a person won't panic if other people aren't panicking.

We are frogs in a slowly warming pot and the people who make money selling the fuel have convinced us that everything will be just fine.

So what you're saying is, visibly panicking is a public good?

Actually thoughtful and worth reading.

The problem with climate change warnings is that they depend on a prediction about the long-term (30+ years) future. And even people who understand the analysis find it hard to believe, deep down, any predictions about the world that far from now. From Malthus to Huxley and Philip K. Dick, to Millenarianism, almost all dramatic long term predictions turned out wrong.

Some long term predictions are extremely accurate. For example, there will be a total solar eclipse visible from Madagascar and parts of Africa on September 4, 2100. That’s pretty certain.

Climate science isn’t anywhere near that level of reliability, of course. But it’s a hell of a lot better than novelists handwaving about the future.

When predictions of what was then called the greenhouse effect first came to the public consciousness in the 1970s, they were pretty handwavy. So most people over 60 today would have dismissed those early predictions as yet another science fiction doomsday scenario when they first heard about it. That wasn't an unreasonable conclusion based on how reliable the science was in the 70s. They should, of course, update their beliefs based on 2018 science, but a lot of people stop doing that as they get older.

>If that happens, there seems very little chance that society could survive

This statement here, while it seems correct I don't think is backed up by the article. Does anyone know of any good work examining the impact climate change will have on human society? I know there are going to be some serious problems but would like see an expert break it down.

I'm not sure this is what you're looking for, but "6 Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet" by Mark Lynas[1] is his attempt to summarize what the climate-change research says will happen. It's organized into sections corresponding to degrees centigrade of warming. It's from 2007 though, and there's a lot that's changed since then.

There's also [2], a website which attempts to do the same as "6 Degrees" in an abbreviated format.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees:_Our_Future_on_a_H...

[2] http://globalwarming.berrens.nl/globalwarming.htm

Thanks this is exactly what I was looking for.

This makes me think of an older HN post (Unpopular Opinions in SF(?)), where the author said something like: “The people who think about the effects of climate change the most, more often than not, choose to live in places that would be first underwater (SF, NYC, etc).”

The point was about humans being bad at considering long term future changes, which affects everyone.

The estimated cost for a seawall to protect NYC from flooding is in the tens of billions. NYC isn't going to get flooded.

Bangladesh OTOH...

Let's get crackin'!

Get involved in your own food and fuel production. Small-scale alcohol fuel production integrated with a Permaculture (the word is a portmanteau: PERMAnent agriCULTURE, it's a school of applied ecology) farm can provide ecologically harmonious (carbon-neutral) fuel. http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/node/277

On a larger scale, check out CO2 sequestration through accelerated weathering of olivine: "Olivine can reverse climate change and ocean acidification" https://climitigation.org/olivine-can-reverse-climate-change...

Test project is in progress, I think.

I wish I could compartmentalize it or cope better, but my health has notably worsened since the latest IPCC report was released. I've lost sleep, been anxious, and no amount of work I've done to reduce my own carbon footprint has made me feel any better. It was like a switch was flipped after which I was no longer to engage in the minimization or projection discussed in the article and have just fallen into a pattern of panic and self hatred.

I'm hoping that engaging with Extinction Rebellion and actively trying to pursue a career in energy and carbon sequestration can help me reduce the guilt and become more productive.

Who is the author Sam Hawkins?

Sam is a good friend of mine, so I'll answer. He will likely correct me on this but I think roughly speaking, since his PhD he has spent 10 years using weather forecast models and data science to help his employer sell the right amount of wind generated electricity at the right price in short term energy futures markets.

Conclusion: "We each have a duty to make the moral effort not to be climate deniers in our own way."

Is this a perfect example for "clickbait"?

I was thinking the same until I read the whole article. I think the author is doing something interesting, read the am i a denier part.

Clickbait doesn't have be useless. Even if it's a good article the headline is still designed to cause controversy.

Either: definitely yes, as the conclusion of the article is very different than what I expected from the title

or: no, because the content was substantial and many people probably would not read yet another article with a title like "even more evidence for how sure scientists are of climate change". we all already know and have mostly made up our mind

We've updated the title to a more representative phrase from the article.

Good work, I wonder why it got flagged though?

Notice how they try to get you to say "climate change" instead of "global warming" nowadays. This is big business.

The article links to a website rebutting climate science myths [1]. It addresses this point as well [2]: both terms are still used, and both terms are still valid.

[1] https://skepticalscience.com/argument.php

[2] https://skepticalscience.com/climate-change-global-warming.h...

These read like talking point cards a politician would use. E.g. "Follow the money" is rebutted with "I could make more money working in the oil industry". That type of political style posturing does the global warming supporters no good at all.

Your thought process reads like: "Anyone motivated to solve x issue is only trying to make a buck by selling a solution."

What venture capitalists are funding these guys? https://climate.nasa.gov/

The term "climate change" is tailor-made for idiots who think that global warming means that it won't snow anymore.

The missing piece of any climate model is how the earth will respond.

Do I think we are pumping co2 into the sky causing a raise in tempature? Yes. What happens after is still unclear.

This isn't true. We have a pretty clear picture of what will happen as earth's temperatures rise. We know that sea levels will rise, ocean salinity will fall, sea currents will slow or stop, and much more.

It isn't hard to find research on this. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=effects+of+climat...

But we don't know about secondary effects those changes will bring and how they interact with the initial effects. The earth is an ecosystem and the models as good as they are are not complete.

The big thing we don't know is if there is some kind of "tipping point" where it will be very hard to correct the extra CO2 problem because it starts to get very bad, very fast. One such "tipping point" would be that the methane clathrates(methane trapped with frozen water) all over the earth start to release lots of methane causing more methane clathrates to melt and quickly we get a 3C or something increase in a decade.

The people who study this stuff for a living are pretty clear on this. The only unclear question is how to find the political will to fix it, or to deal with the effects.

As long as we continue to put our blind faith in job titles we are lost. Science is repeatable experimentation with similiar results that can be repeated by all. Religion, or politics puts faith in job title above facts.

We need to be clear on this.

You're right, and fortunately that's exactly what we're doing. Lots of good science has been (and is being) done, with "disagreements" along the lines of "I can only reproduce 97% of your findings to p 0.05, with the rest at p 0.08". There's no substantive question remaining of the gist of it, though.

The fact that it is unclear is kind of obvious. And a few decades ago, we really didn't know much.

But models have improved a lot lately and we are getting a better idea. Enough to consider it worthwhile to do something about it.

It is still very complex science, with lots of statistics involved. And with deniers on one side and doomsayers on the other, as non-specialists, it is hard to get a good picture.

The planet itself will be absolutely fine. It's been through a heck of a lot worse. Humans (and other animals) are the ones who are going to have to adapt, hard.

As a small example, a rise in sea levels would make unlivable countless coastal cities and destroy an immense amount of infrastructure. Humans will -survive- it, but say good bye to our cushy 21st century lifestyle.

So maybe we'll learn the lesson that shorelines aren't constant, and stop building right on the water? The ocean levels have been up and down hundreds or thousands of feet in the past.

Or we won't learn, and the rise will be slow enough that no one's going to drown. (Other than very low-lying islands, which were precarious to begin with, and which don't usually house complex civilizations.)

> maybe we'll learn the lesson that shorelines aren't constant, and stop building right on the water?

Coastal cities will never /not/ be a thing. The ocean and river mouths contain very many important resources for societies to ignore.

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> rise will be slow enough that no one's going to drown.

It depends on the solution: the cheapest usually is to build seawalls, and this obviously puts the city at greater risk of flooding.

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The comment you're replying to states rising sea levels as an example. There are, of course, known consequences that you don't address. To name two, it is a very direct consequence that 1) the weather will get more violent, with the additional amount of energy it contains, leading to a more frequent occurrence of natural disasters. Next, a change in climate will cause a massive redistribution and likely destruction of land suitable for agriculture, as well as lower overall quality for agricultural land, thereby 2) threatening worldwide food security.

The difference here is the accleration of climate change, estimated to be 10-50x faster than previous transitions from cooler periods[1]. One study finds that this accelerated warming could lead the extiction of 1 in 6 species[2].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97... [2] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6234/571

Yeah, but I think the parent posters' concern is that the outcome is "unclear", and I was just pointing out that no matter what happens, the planet will be fine, humans will survive, and our infrastructure is what'll be impacted (and consequently, our lifestyle).

None of that is "unclear", I think. It all follows from "temperatures rise" (which the parent concedes as a given). Ice melts. Waters rise. Life changes.

The article links a website with rebuttals for most climate science myths [1]. One of them lists what we do know what will happen, and how bad that will be at least [2].

[1] https://skepticalscience.com/argument.php

[2] https://skepticalscience.com/global-warming-positives-negati...

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