Climate Change Kills the Future

We cannot do anything about climate change because of the pseudocertainty effect: "what is at issue..are competing claims of expertise and prophecy in human affairs. An expert posseses the truth in a particular domain (in this case climate science). The problem, he believes, is how to transmit the truth to the rest of society. This is a problem of "communications." The prophet (politician for example), for his part, believes that there is no truth independent of the way in which it is transmitted. For him, the objectivity of cognitive mechanisms or of crowd phenomena is no less important than the objectivity of climate science. The falut of the IPCC (Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change) - if in fact it is at fault - lies in its failure to decide between these two attitudes." (The Economy and the Future - JP Dupuy 2014). This sounds very complex, but this short book helps move these circular debates around using logic. Which means hope. .. the goal: "to devise, by means of scientific modeling and philisophical inquiry into the aims and purposes of mankind, an image of the future that is sufficiently catastrophic to be repellent and sufficiently credible to produce behavior that will prevent it from being realized, barring an accident."

This topic is in my head more and more each day. I have a large family and often think how much I want their future to be livable. I try to contribute by limiting consumption of all that I know and learn to be detrimental to the environment, but I feel my efforts are useless. I was very drawn to B. Sanders as the next US President because I thought he’d be the most aggressive with regard to environmental protection. In hindsight even if he had won, I’m not sure if the efforts of leadership from one country would or could be enough.

To me this is all so sad and maddening because those in power seem to only be interested in making more billions next year with little or no effort on making sure the generational wealth has any meaning. Does it matter that your next 10 generations are covered with the wealth that’s youve amassed if they’ll just be living in a wasteland anyways?

This article is hard to read with the way it's formatted. It feels like just a string of random thoughts about climate change.

I was hoping it would talk more about the anxiety and hopelessness people feel due to climate change. Not only is our climate getting worse, people are getting more pessimistic about the future. With that comes anxiety but also apathy. At some point, you realize there's nothing to be done, you will die and the future will be horrible and you can't do anything about it. So just enjoy it while you can and come to terms with humanity's eventual demise.

More snow in winter, hotter summers what’s not to love?

Unless you live somewhere it’s already stupidly hot it’s not like a degree is going to make any difference.

A technological civilisation will be lucky to survive to 2040.

Santa Claus is gone when the North Pole no longer has ice and snow. As soon as the Arctic Ocean holds trade routes and hosts its first shooting war, it’s over for St Nick.

Global warming is the war on Christmas.

(Remove tongue from cheek)