Visualizing the Consequences of Climate Change | Hacker News Reader

Visualizing the Consequences of Climate Change

arxiv.org

30 pointshairytrog12 comments

Cool, but I'm not sure how effective it is showing people a picture of their house submerged in water. What I'd like to see is a well illustrated example of what desertification and sustained 110 degree temperatures looks like. Flooding is easy to understand; the region you live in becoming uninhabitable because of extended drought is harder to conceptualize.

They should show how your neighborhood is going to look when tens/hundreds of millions of people fleeing uninhabitable land in Mexico/Syria/Bangladesh are now living in your hood.

I really don't like the idea of effecting change by making immigrants seem scary, but I think that message is the one most likely to get the attention of those in the US that think climate change is either a hoax or overblown.

I could see tools like this being used to disseminate false information to scare people into supporting certain policies. We are often sufficiently disconnected from the actual physical source of news/media that all it takes to believe something is to see an image (much like deep fakes). The threshold for believing now has to change from reading/seeing to actually being there and touching it. Or some far more reliable system of remote verification has to be established.

It's ironic that we moved from the trust / authority model of factual verification to "data driven" model of verification, and now we are seeing how easy it is to even manipulate that. I suppose the only step forward, and maybe has been the only true way all along, is democratized authority and expertise.

The main problem is that the consequences of climate change are affecting areas that either aren't developed enough, or far enough away that the average joe won't be bothered. So what if an ice sheet falls? it snowed last week.

It's akin to saying the Titanic isn't sinking because you're on the end of the ship that's 100 feet into the air. Only until they see the water to their ankles, do they start looking for lifeboats. It'll have to take something disastrous and close to home, and by then it's much too late.

Even then, it's easy to pass off the increasing severity of storms and lengthening of tornado season as nothing more than your mind playing tricks on you.

I'm betting that nothing can fix climate change. Nothing. We're fucked. We're too stupid as a species to understand long-term, and that is going to be what gets us in the end.

It's just like rabbits. We had too many rabbits on our farm for a couple of years, then suddenly we didn't have any. Too many rabbits breeds disease and death. The same holds true for humans.

And I genuinely feel bad for my child. The planet we will hand him will be garbage.

> By training our CycleGAN model on street-view images of houses before and after extreme weather events (e.g. floods, forest fires, etc.)

Will it also show my home from the cold north in a longer and warmer summer, full of flowers and hummingbirds?

Or are "consequences" always negative, whatever the direction (cold/hot) of the climate change?

This paper shows that you can use computers to produce realistic images that may persuade people to do a course of action that you want. However, there is some prior art to this.

Peter Paul Rubens did this with paintings in the 1600's. See his paintings "Peace and War" and "Consequences of War"

Even earlier, the Assyrians made massive art works that showed rebel leaders being flayed alive. I am sure that was pretty effective in helping people visualize the consequences of resisting Assyria.

is this a real paper? Its got to be a joke, right? a parody? Its literally a request to develop images to be used for propaganda purposes.

from the paper:

> , we aim to help the general population progress towards greater and more visible public support for climate change migitation steps on a national level, facilitating governmental interventions and helping make the required rapid changes to a global sustainable economy.

how is this any different than what the Russians did in 2016 with their fake news memes? Its propaganda for a political purpose.

and for those who will say that climate change is going to end the world, yeah, no shit, but that doesn't mean we should develop propaganda technology that could be used for some other political purpose.

like, what if Trump used the tech developed to change people's opinions about muslims?

Hey it's anything goes on arXiv, good or bad.

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