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Evidence that we have been living in an increasingly risk-averse culture
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this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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How about awareness that climate change will ruin us all.
It checks out that the peak of optimism in your graph is around the 80's and 90's. We weren't just "optimistic" in the 90's. We were delusional. We were ignoring problems instead of solving them
The big world ending fear of the second half of the 20th century was nuclear holocaust, which suddenly felt a lot less likely with Gorbachev and the end of the USSR. The next dire thing that popped up was the hole in the ozone layer, which the world actually acted on and had stabilized by the late 90s. It wasn't until the 00s that global warming entered people's awareness. So I don't know I'd describe it as "delusion" to feel good in the late 80s to 90s when the major problems that people were aware of were legitimately getting better.
I remember this is exactly what it felt like. Yes there were some things to solve, but in the end it will all work out. Read Fukuyama if you want a taste of what it was like. We beat communism, famine will be solved, no more wars, everything will be fine because of economic and political stability and technological progress forever. Any crisis is just a bump on the road, never a regression
That was the thinking in the 90's
Global warming, climate change, has been known to become an issue since somewhere in the 1890's, iirc.
I'll agree that the general public cannot really be blamed here, especially how information was available back then (basically nobody really was in the internet until end 1990, and even then this type of information wasn't widely available yet) but humanity as a whole really fucked up badly on this one.
We've known for well over a century, yet even today there are "skeptics", be they either idiots or paid shills, that deny global warming is a thing and even those that are not skeptical don't seem to worry too much.
Politicians still are more worried about their local economies that must expand and keep expanding infinitely, somehow, and spend weeks arguing how bad we're willing to let it become before taking actual real steps, ignoring that we might be standing on the edge of a cliff here.
We've been pumping extra CO2 into the atmosphere for a good two centuries, receiving useful energy that we used to shape our world as it is today. That extra CO2 has been partially taken up by oceans, acidifying them in the process, and some has been taken up by the rest of nature, but most CO2 is right there in our atmosphere.
Wanna get rid of it? You'll have to spend pretty much that same about of energy that you got (adding in loses, I'd even argue twice or tripple) from burning CO2 for those two centuries to get that CO2 out again. Effectively this means that (adding in the losses) if we double our energy production today, and have ALL of it be wind, solar, or nuclear, and counting for other CO2 sources we can't really stop (electrical airplanes likely will never happen) we'd still be spending 50% of our energy budget for the next century or two to get that done. I'm being generous here, it likely will be more than that.
This is still ignoring pretty details like 'how to do this efficiently" and what will we do to stave off global catastrophe within the next two decades.
Like it or not but humanity is going to have to pay the bill for the party is had, or die.
Meanwhile, politicians are nowhere near about talking about that, they're only talking about how long they want to continue the current path towards destruction because local economies and reelections and whatnot
It's not that the common citizen is delusional, as that they are badly educated about the sheer scope of the problem, if they would be, the world would revolt. So far people know there is a thing called climate change and it will have weird consequences that they do y really understand but they trust their politicians to solve it.
It's not being solved, we're still actively making things worse and arguing on if we really should switch to a non CO2 energy economy THAT fast...
Sorry, this may behave shifted into a rant, perhaps, but I'm tired and angry with the world for being led by anti-scientific scum that will end the world for us so that they can still enjoy another day on their yacht.
You're right to be angry.
I don't think people are misinformed or unaware. We have a collective action problem. People think they can't do anything about the problem, it's to big for us, we can't do those drastic things because greater society isn't transitioning. My personal solution is to do what I can that helps, but don't expect anything to change. It's like voting: Your vote counts, but you can't decide the outcome.
I feel every era had its "boogey man" issue. I doubt there was ever an era of "nothing to worry about"
Understandable to think this. Maybe we did come really close to some of those disasters, such as nuclear war. It's just survivors bias to think that it wasn't civilization ending danger we were in back then.
I hope we learn from that and steer clear of the danger next time, rather than think it'll be alright because nobody happened to actually press the red button back then so I guess we worried about nothing
They were also high as fuck on coke back then. All we got is damn fent. Of course they were peppier and riskier.
Climate change is bad but it's not an asteroid impact or super volcano eruption bad. It will not "ruin us all" and no credible scientist is claiming it would. Uneducated fear mongering like this is what causes extreme anxiety to people that don't know any better.
You're wrong. Scientific consensus is that this will be catastrophic. We're still emitting more greenhouse gases year over year, and the rate at which global warming is happening is still increasing year over year. Anyone who says this will stop at 1.5 degrees, 2 degrees, 3 degrees, whatever, they're all wrong because no slowdown is happening at all. It's wishful thinking. Climate predictions are being broken all the time, never in a good way. And that's not taking into account any tipping points that suddenly speed up climate change, such as melting ice releasing trapped methane.
There is no reason to say it won't be that bad. It will
My message literally starts by saying climate change is bad. It will be catastrophic. At no point have I claimed otherwise.
It will however not be civilization ending. It's not an existential threat to humanity like an asteroid impact or super volcano eruption would be.
According to WHO: "Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250 000 additional deaths per year, from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress alone."
Also: "Even after accounting for adaptation, an additional 1.5 million people die per year from climate change by 2100 if past emissions trends continue."
That's about the same as what road accidents or diabetes kills every year.
It will be civilization ending. I never said it would kill every single person. There may still be people but 100 years from now, everyone's fucked. Further ahead, 200 years, 500 years, definitely no future there
According to who? I'm sure you can link me some study to back up those claims.
I think that depends on how you define 'civilisation'. My inclination is that most people would say civilisation has ended if life is drastically different to how they perceive their life/world they live in. Think 'civilisation as we know it' rather than a dictionary definition.
However, I disagree that it's not an existentisl threat, if only on the basis of possible crop failiures on a massive scale (reduced crop yields are a global issue already). Don't underestimate the impact of food shortages on everything else, we in the west have become accustomed to easy access to food.
An asteroid impact or super volcano eruption has the potential to kill every single human on earth and end the human race. That's what I mean by existential threat. I feel like many people think of climate change as something that's on the same scale but it really isn't. Saying stuff like "climate change will ruin us all" just isn't true. There are degrees of bad and while climate change definitely is up there in the bad end of the spectrum there's still events that are orders of magnitude worse.
If we trigger tipping point after tipping point, we can turn earth into venus. You're just wrong.
What am I wrong about? What happened to Venus was caused by the eruption of super volcanoes. That's the exact example I used above of an actual existential threat.
I don't know the details, but I'm pretty sure greenhouse effect has something to do with it.
But it doesn't matter, it's beside the point. This person obviously means global warming could make the planet much hotter than we want, inhabitably hot like Venus. Not that we are literally Venus
Doomerism is a vibe. You're gonna have a hard time talking people down around these parts.
Indeed, in terms of sudden impact and method of impact, no they are very different, and climate change probably won't go so far as to make the human race extinct, at least not for a very long time. However, whether or not it will be catastrophic for the human race within the next 100-200 years no-one can accurately predict, given we do not know how much we'll do to stop it before it's too late (bare in mind that some scientists already believe the tipping point beyond which we can no longer stop it is well upon us).
As mentioned, the collapse of farming may well undermine any efforts to stop climate change given the big knock on negative impact on the world economy. Though that could also save us as there'd be a sudden massive drop in fossil fuel use and carbon emissions in such a scenario. There's a lot of variables, but a catastrophic collapse is definitely a possibility. I think the human race is capable of saving itself from this, but capitalism and the corporate economy I fear stand in its way.
At this level killing all humans vs killing/crippling almost all is irrelevant.
Climate change is not going to kill/cripple "almost all" humans. Not even close. Even the most extreme climate models don't forecast anything like this.