Posted by doener 3 hours ago
Some people just naturally resist hyperbole or sensationalist rhetoric, and I find it very helpful to reframe the argument from doom and gloom and fire and brimstone to something more realistic and grounded:
"The longer we put off doing something, the harder and more expensive it will be in the future. In a Pascal's Wager sort of way, many of the changes we are talking about don't even really cost us anything, and the potential that C02 is not a real culprit is more than made up by danger that it is. Making changes now is the prudent and financially sound decision."
In a large part, this is what the brief ESG trend on the stock market was briefly about before it got co-opted by a dozen different competing messages.
POTUS tweeted "WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING???" a few weeks ago when a record cold wave came in. I suppose you were talking about people you personally know, but it seems like there's a good chance many who voted for him would say it too.
Anyway, I guess there is a growing collective admission that the climate is changing even if the crotchety ones will still quip about it not being warmer at some given time and place. It's unfortunate that "global warming" caught on instead of "climate change."
The issue seemed to completely drop from public discourse during the Biden presidency as even people on the far left attacked and complained about high gas prices. Musk himself flip-flopped and said it's not really a pressing issue. The Biden administration ended up admonished oil companies for slowing exploration.
The president can almost be excused for his naivety - he's literally lived in a coastal penthouse his whole life. So in a way he's right - as far as he's aware it's a dead topic so it must have been a hoax.
Biden signed into law the largest investment in clean energy in US history, dwarfing everything that came before. Half the economy was trying to get their hands on some of that stimmy.
Same. Empirical evidence is just too hard to ignore.
It's quite amazing watching the "climate change isn't real" folks transition to "climate change is no big deal", then to "climate change is too hard/expensive to deal with".
Except it's the opposite - empirical evidence is very easy to ignore. Between herding, the replication crisis, and the overall insularity of academia, trust in "studies" has never been lower.
But people still respond very well to demonstrative or pragmatic evidence. Empirically there's nothing special about a keto diet. But demonstratively the effects are very convincing.
That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, that's not a big deal. And if it is, that's not my fault. And if it was, I didn't mean it. And if I did, you deserved it.
At the top level (of government and corporate entities) those people always knew it was real, the messaging just changed as it became harder to keep a straight face while parroting the previous message in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence.
Exxon's (internal) research in the 1970s has been very accurate to the observed reality since then.
They just didn't care that it was real because they valued profits/power/etc in the moment over some difficult to quantify (but certainly not good) future calamity.
You would think they would care at least in the cases where they had children and grandchildren who will someday have to really reckon with the outcome, but you'd be wrong, they (still) don't give a shit.
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.Pascal's wager is generally agreed to be logically unsound, so it's somewhat insane that we've revived it in all these modern contexts. If you believe in it, at least be consistent and sacrifice a goat to Zeus every couple years.
Sacrificing a goat, after all, does sound like a lot of work. But maybe I will wear a lucky hat to a baseball game?
My family is fundamentalist protestant, very midwestern, and I think about half of them believe that the earth is warming. Not trying to "win", just trying to say that a lot of this depends on the crowd you interact with. I don't know the percentage, but certainly there are still way too many people that don't even believe it. The very tired response is "well i wish it would warm up here slaps knee". Using the phrase 'Climate Change' at least reduces that objection.
He called out an arborist, and the arborist clearly explained that there wasn't enough rain anymore to support the number of trees on his land, and that the forest was slowly receding as the older/bigger trees took all the water from the other trees.
It finally dawned on him that a place where trees used to happily live to hundreds of years old could no longer support trees.
Still, he thinks CO2 is a con job cooked up by China and that global warming is divine punishment. But it's a good reminder that a lot of denialists are waiting for a personal, practical reason to care.
Four out of five denialists agree!
Something can said to change from a certain standard even if it wasn't perfectly constant to begin with. For example, if I always kept my house at 65-75 degrees for the past year, and now it's 85 degrees inside, I could certainly say that the temperature in my house recently changed and gotten warmer. That might lead me to check whether my AC's working, rather than say "well I guess the temperature has never really been constant, and 85 is within the range of possible non-constant temperatures, so everything's perfectly normal and nothing has changed."
The problem is not that the earth is warming, it is that it is warming at an artificially increased rate.
If I pick up your house and drop it two streets over, that could be accurately described as a "location change" of your house. This is still true despite the fact that your house naturally moves some centimeters per year due to tectonic plates shifting around.
Similarly, when global average temperatures saw long term trends of a fraction of a degree of change per millennium, then suddenly started changing at multiple degrees per century, it's pretty reasonable to call that "climate change" despite the fact that it was not completely constant before.
I think it's real and potentially catastrophic. But I see very little chance of (sufficient) coordinated action to mitigate it.
I.e., I think there's too much temptation for individual countries to pursue a competitive economic or military advantage by letting everyone but themselves make sacrifices.
I hope I'm wrong.
Not saying they're above reproach, but their energy policy certainly trumps ours.
Trump, a democrat himself, is simply using the multi-front strategy he already knew.
This is the part that seems to vary widely based on which warming alarmist you're talking to. Many of them are not saying there are things we could do that "don't even really cost us anything" that would deal with the problem--they're saying we need to devote a significant fraction of global GDP to CO2 mitigation.
Things that "don't really cost us anything" are probably happening already anyway, because, well, they don't really cost us anything.
Building a lot more nuclear power plants is the key thing that doesn't really seem to be happening right now, that would be an obvious way to eliminate a lot of CO2 emissions. But of course that does really cost us something. But it's probably the most cost effective thing we could do on a large scale.
I mean, this is the clear and obvious one. Nuclear theoretically should be much, much cheaper than it is if it were not for the regulatory costs thrust upon it.
It also harrows out people who are legitimately concerned from "moralist concern junkies". You'd think climate change being a global existential crisis would make people open to nuclear energy or more drastic measures like geo-engineering, but the frequency with which people refuse to compromise undercuts the their legitimacy.
If you have a cheap source of solar panels and batteries, the only downside to installing them all over the country is up-front cost (which pays itself off quickly). The upside you gain is a substantially more robust, less centralized power grid that can continue to operate if something happens to impede your supply of fossil fuels or part of the grid gets cut off.
Looking at how things have played out elsewhere in the world the past few years, that's powerful.
I hear that often, but it's never followed by details about any of the actual changes that are being talked about. The ones I actually hear (especially politicians) advocate for are catastrophically expensive and dubious in their effectiveness. Banning coal or gas-powered cards might (might) be a good idea in the long run, but it definitely does cost us something.
It's already to the point where the ridiculous coal fans who infest our government are forcing coal power plants to remain open when their operators want to close them because they're no longer profitable to operate.
And for very specific reasons, too.
One reason is unwillingness to feel like they have to take responsibility.
Another is conceding that would mean they might have to make changes, and laziness is powerful.
The worst reason is that to acknowledge it would be to grant that an alternative political perspective is right about something, and one's own political identity is tied to that other political perspective being always wrong.
"It is easier to con a man than to convince him he has been conned." Too much emotional investment in being right and too much fear of social repercussions simply for changing one's mind. The reality is changing one's mind to new data is the hallmark of integrity.
What I can't wrap my head around is the conspiracy thinking around environmentalism.
What's so nefarious about clean air and water? I'll never forget when my grandmother walked out of WALL-E because she said it was government propaganda. She is a regular person, not a coal magnate or anything.
This conspiracy thinking has been pushed by Republicans, right-wing think tanks, coal, oil, manufacturing and like industries attempting to undermine public trust in climate science since at least the 1970s.
So a green energy revolution sounds exciting to me, but to my grandma it would be a green energy _revolution_, the scary and unstable connotation.
The main point people disagree on is: how much are humans contributing to this global warming trend?
What is generally not understood is that our current icehouse phase is rare.
'A "greenhouse Earth" is a period during which no continental glaciers exist anywhere on the planet... Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history.
'Earth is now in an icehouse state, and ice sheets are present in both poles simultaneously... Earth's current icehouse state is known as the Quaternary Ice Age and began approximately 2.58 million years ago.'
Modern humans have existed for 60k years, all of which have been in this current icehouse.
To cast a different shade on the meaning, this climate period is rare, easily disturbed, and difficult to restore even with vastly more powerful technology. The more common greenhouse state is unlikely to lead to a Venus runaway, but it will be hostile to us.
We might very well require the rare climate, and perish in the common.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Earthh...
It's the speed, not the magnitude that matters. Change faster than evolution and migration will destroy ecosystems.
This document was last updated in October 2024, but I am a little surprised to see this still available on a .gov site.
Basically amounting to, "well, you say you're doing X to combat climate change, but is X actually a competent solution (I don't trust your competence), and are you doing it to actually help or just to line pockets (I don't trust your intent)".
The other challenge is that we as individual humans are loathe to give up our comfortable lifestyle if such turns out to be necessary.
https://davidsuzuki.org/story/is-it-too-late-to-escape-clima...
And 7 of 9 boundaries have been crossed?
https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound...
This is starting to look more like the movie _Don't Look Up_.
I remember someone saying another form of denial is the denial that "we" will be affected badly. A friend said "Well, I'll turn on my AC, I'll be fine!". Or "I'm sure some technological Deus ex Machina will save us! Any day now!".
Reminds me of that advice about depression more generally. Something like
"If you can't be optimistic, settle for being curious about the way it all unfolds"
I only hope I can have a decent life until it ends, and I hope it takes slightly longer than I think it will.
I basically see it as a moral wrong and a grave ethical failure to use fossil fuels at this point. Except for home heating, I am now close to directly powering my entire life with clean, renewable energy. It was not hard. It was expensive, but only in the short term; I have effectively prepaid for my power needs for at least the next 25 years, and over than span it is very inexpensive.
A modern EV is about the same price as any other car, goes about the same distance, and is only slightly more time to fuel in the worst case. In the typical case, you don’t think about charging at all. The fact that I can’t get my supposedly environmentally conscious family of scientists and engineers to care continues to stun me. Somehow saving money while improving the world is “a waste of money” while buying an expensive hobby vehicle or vacation home is not. Frustrating.