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Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

I actually think society as a whole is rather optimistic on climate change: currently we aren’t even trying to solve it policy wise.

If we were more pessimistic, we would take preventative measures seriously.

“Everyone believes the future will be worse and it’s not possible to avoid it” is a strawman, I think.

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Global warming is a thread the needle problem: people need to be worried enough to act, but not to give up. Collective action is the ONLY way through this.

Last year ABC news gave more air time to the new royal baby in a single week than they gave to climate collapse in a year. You may feel inundated with pessimism, but that is far from universal. (Source: https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/05/21/ABC-News-spent-...)

I think optimism/pessimism is the wrong axis for this. It should be complacency/activism. I think MLK’s Letter from Birmingham Jail is more apt than ever.

Did you mean to reply to me? I said people weren't pessimistic enough.

But I think you're right that complacency/activism is a good lense to view things through. The people that accept climate change is happening remain fairly complacent. Whether this is due to insufficient pessimism or complacency, the result is the same.

Sorry, I didn't mean to come off as contrary! I certainly agree, I just wanted to tweak the framing.

This is closer to reality. Even the UN, which has been criticized in the media as too alarmist, has likely been too optimistic: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43e8yp/the-uns-devastatin...

We've been lured into being overly cautious about the science, in order not to feed any snippet of false information to the idiot hordes that would seize on it and use it to discredit/distort what's actually happening.

Net result - the hordes are still being idiots, and the rest of the world is blundering on thinking things ain't that bad/action isn't that urgent.

"I actually think society as a whole is rather optimistic on climate change: currently we aren’t even trying to solve it policy wise. "

I think a lot of people have given up.

I know Canadian opinion polls best. Here, less than 20% of people identify climate change/environment as a top priority, and support for a carbon tax is about 45%, with a bit less than that opposed.

Granted, the polls don’t measure apathy, but this doesn’t strike me as a society that is convinced climate change is a pressing problem. We’re more mildly concerned, and mildly supportive of policies aimed addressing it, even in a very limited way.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4811385/ottawas-unpublished-inter...

That's not optimism. That's willful ignorance.

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