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Comment by edgyquant | Hacker News Reader

> But there is an absolute metric ton of shit to qualify about the messaging and particular facts, claims, and policies around it.

And a lot of the doomsaying is as unscientific as denying climate change

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Very true. The doomsayers are part of a cohort that feels like a left-leaning QAnon, but they have somehow avoided that label and enjoyed legitimacy. Those who try to draw nuance on the topic of climate are often viciously attacked for it. For example a blog post claiming that climate change is a serious issue but not an existential threat (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/08/is-global-warming-exi...) resulted in activists trying to pressure this university into firing this professor. Meanwhile, children who have repeatedly heard doomsayer messaging are experiencing extreme anxiety to a point where it is affecting their daily life and function (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/14/four-in-...). Of course, none of that messaging will be subject to fact checks, demonetization, or bans.

It isn’t just children, I’ve heard plenty of adults say they believe the world will be basically destroyed in 30 years and have heard countless others say they aren’t having children because climate change will be so bad they don’t want to subject them to the hellish conditions expected.

There's a ton of space between "the world will be basically destroyed" and "conditions will be pretty bad for many people in the next few generations", but that space is kind of hard for many of us to imagine or talk about.

Where are you from?

not the parent, but I've heard similar justifications in London

Ah yes. Sounds like Western "problem". Glorification of death in wealthy civilization is beginning of their end. Immigration proofs that.

I’m from Southern Illinois, but I live in Seattle

I've met people like that as well, but what's interesting about them is that what they say and do is more akin to cult-like behavior than a sincerely considered belief. If they actually believed that the world was going to end in 30 years (or whatever it is this week) they'd quit their tech job and learn how to hunt, do subsistence farming, and go off the grid. None of them - in my experience - do any of this, and merely get irrationally upset and worried about something they themselves have zero control over rather than prepare for said event they think is inevitable.

Hi, I'm a real person who probably is a rough approximate of the imaginary strawman you're talking about in this post.

I'm not going off to become a subsistence farmer today... because that has literally nothing to do with being concerned about increasingly severe wildfires, more destructive hurricanes, more severe droughts or floods or loss of viability of farmland over the coming years and decades.

The climate crisis doesn't mean we're going to wake up tomorrow in some post-apocalyptic fantasy you're imagining where people will be hunting deer with bows & arrows. It means a lot of different bad things will continuously happen- the border & immigration crisis will get worse as Central American farms struggle under worse weather, wildfires will mean more evacuations and worse air quality, 'natural disasters' of hurricanes or blizzards or flash floods that would happen once-per-century will happen once-per-decade.

The rational thing to do isn't to go LARP as a post-doomsday survivor in the woods, the rational thing to do is to vote for policies to reduce carbon emissions, invest in renewable energy and try to educate the scientifically illiterate about the dangers of inaction.

Do you ever write in order to learn, or to test your ideas? I do this sometimes. The idea is to assign yourself a project, e.g., to write a blog report demonstrating that hurricanes are becoming more destructive. I think you might find it surprising if you did that and relied on the rawest, most objectively true data you can find, rather than articles by the BBC.

Note that "existential threat" has a technical meaning which excludes things that cause the collapse of your economy, livelihood, and way of life, as well as causing hundreds of millions of people to die. So, "climate change is not an existential threat" doesn't contract even the claim that climate change is the most serious threat that humanity currently faces. :-)

But it's also true that pretty much no scientists believe that climate change is an existential threat, and also true that people can be punished for pointing that out.

You become a doomsayer by appealing to “think of the children” and their anxiety.

Children have been stressed by disease, poverty, nation state politics… prove it is avoidable before making it a problem.

Of course the environment doomsayers must be silenced, right? For calling for action and change, rather than “stay the course I know to avoid anxiety” which you seek to feel is even achievable despite truths of physical reality.

Like… one of these platforms has merit. And you’re annoyed by it, so let’s be anti-speech. Because then the problem just goes away.

If by "existential threat" you mean a threat to existence, there are already many species going extinct today, which is why it is said we are in a 6th mass extinction:

https://earth.org/data_visualization/the-6th-mass-extinction...

Droughts and floods are also affecting many parts of the world today. And "At 2°C of global warming, heat extremes would more often reach critical tolerance thresholds for agriculture and health, the report shows:" (IPCC)

https://www.ipcc.ch/2021/08/09/ar6-wg1-20210809-pr/

Beyond 2C and nearing 4C, the extreme events are expected to yield larger crop failures and migration events.

The US military has also called climate change "a serious threat", stating "while extreme weather events and rising sea levels threaten infrastructure and economic output, trigger large-scale population displacement, migration and exacerbate food and water insecurity."

https://www.army.mil/standto/archive/2021/05/14/

And the Defense secretary did call it existential:

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/25...

So it does seem fairly existential to me. How exactly is this being nuanced? I have also only linked respectable sources above.

All of that being said, I also share the opinion from others above that a single corporation unilaterally deciding what is or not acceptable speech should be unacceptable.

Maybe this is just a semantic debate, but I (and likely most people) interpret the phrase “existential threat” in the context of climate change as referring to humans. As in, humanity/civilization will not survive the predicted climate changes. However, the worst case scenarios are not extinction of humans but rather death in the millions to hundreds of millions, assuming we don’t adapt in various ways.

Well, for all those hundreds of millions it will indeed be existential (and I have read that a 4C Earth could only be able to host ~1 billion people, so the deaths could be a lot more than "millions to hundreds of millions".) In any case, arguing about the technicalities of the word "existential" at this point denotes such a complete lack of empathy that it's not even worth it.

Even the deaths of hundreds of millions requires a number of worst case scenarios to happen, which isn’t all that likely.

Climate change is very much an existential threat.

Do you remember the political crisis in Europe created by the Syrian refugees? Those were about 6 million people. How do you think our political systems and societies react if there are several hundred millions on the run?

Think of this post again when you see governments collapse because of waves of desperate migrants trying to get somewhere they can survive.

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