Question: How do you folks deal with the hopelessness of it all?
It's pretty obvious that emissions are not going to drop to zero, that the positive feedback loops due to arctic methane emissions have kicked off, and that runaway warming has begun. Best-case equilibrium now looks like 3C by 2100.
Basically, the situation is bleak and in all likelihood irreversible. There will me massive changes in my lifetime and the world we've left our children will be drastically different and obviously worse.
Stop listening to people who have no idea what they're talking about, have an agenda, or are otherwise compromised in their rational position.
If you do that, this entire idea that all is lost will become much more tempered - we have a major challenge ahead of us. Which can be said of any age (ask your older relatives what the age of nuclear weapons felt like).
In short, I deal with the hopelessness by being reasonable, and it thereby vanishes.
It's absolutely no more difficult than colonizing Mars along a similar timeline.
Everything that we face here, in the most extreme possible interpretations, can be survived by humanity with effort and ingenuity, and we even get to build our hardened shelters etc. on nice sunny days with oxygen to breathe and water to drink. Mars is MUCH harder and may also be possible.
If we're really, really ambitious and lucky we may also be able to sustain the global population we've currently got: that's a nice broad gene pool that can absorb a lot of evolutionary shocks, I think. I doubt we can expand global population much, but that won't be happening: weather alone is going to wipe a hell of a lot of people out.
It's going to start to feel a bit like bracing ourselves to live on Mars (except for on our home planet), as climate events ramp up, but humanity is definitely going to get through it. There will probably end up being a backlash against those who got us into this, as well as a predictable backlash against climate refugees that will cause a huge amount of basically genocide. It will be like 'stay where you are!' under conditions not conducive to human life. Even then technology might be able to shelter people to some extent.
"Humanity is going to get through it" doesn't feel like good enough.
Basically it's close to saying your children or grandchildren are going through some Ethiopia-style hunger and Syria-level conflict. But some will survive!
Imagine if we know before 2100 there's a chance of a devastating war all over the planet, we'd try everything we can to prevent it. Of course in reality the richer countries will probably survive (although their morals would probably be gone), although food shortages can also topple countries, doesn't matter how rich they are. Hah, I guess military might is a clever thing to have. Hungry population? The US president has decided to deploy troops to take over the grain harvest of (insert some weaker country here)...
No, it's not good enough. I see I got some downvotes: suits me, not like I actually LIKE this position. I'm just being a bit pedantic, saying that we will not be looking at human extinction no matter what. It's setting a boundary on the doomsaying, and also setting a bar for what we're gonna have to do.
I think everybody in control of things understands we will be seeing just what you say: hunger, conflict, massive waves of refugees, war. Water shortages may be even more significant than food shortages, and given modern supply chain capabilities, wet-bulb temperature conditions might be the most significant of all.
Humanity will get through this. The important question is how: and every downvoter to that comment knows that there are unacceptable answers to this. I think getting through without descending into monstrous behavior and inhumanity IS POSSIBLE and easier than colonizing Mars. But it's gonna be nearly as difficult to make happen, as colonizing Mars.
The easy out is the bad answers. That's not going to be acceptable. We're all stuck on this rock together.
> How do you folks deal with the hopelessness of it all?
Don't have kids.
I know this is a very unpopular point of view on HN and this response will probably be downvoted into oblivion, but the fact of the matter is that if enough people adopt this strategy it will actually solve the problem eventually. Yes, the odds of this happening are vanishingly small, but population control is ultimately the only long-term solution.
Of course... it is more complicated than that. This is a classic tragedy of the commons scenario (or Idiocracy for that matter). The people that don't care will continue on, and the people that do care won't be able to influence the next generation nearly as much.
Western nations are financing 3rd world birth rates at the expense of our own citizens well being. I imagine we should address that first before we even consider asking our own to stop reproducing.
and find a way to work towards something of a solution in your daily life. The work may not go anywhere and the problem may be intractable, but by not having kids and doing some work towards a solution, its at least a local anesthetic for hopelessness.
I'm skeptical that making an argument that will probably only convince exceptionally altruistic people (at least among those who wanted to have kids to begin with) to not reproduce is good for future generations.
Population control is one of the most antihuman positions you can have IMO. The likes of Paul Erlich and anti-human philosophies who sees humans as a cancer and who sterilized millions of Indians and south americans is one of the biggest atrocities ever done.
We had population control 300 years ago before we had the knowledge to create machine and feed them.
Less than 1billion people on the planet and most people starved.
We don't live on an infinite plane with infinite resources. If you ignore the harsh reality of disease and confusion on this planet then you will only aggravate the problem, and be the misanthrope you fear.
We don't need a planet with infinite resources. We live in a universe with almost infinite potential. All that is required is more knowledge for how to turn seemingly useless materials (such as coal, oil, uranium and gas) into useful resources. That's how we historically have progressed.
Knowledge gets created by freeing up time to allow humans to focus on other things than just getting their basic needs met.
This requires machines which require energy as energy is the industry that powers all other industries.
If you really believe we live on a planet with limited resources with no way of creating new, then you, being on Hacker News wasting energy on debating with strangers, seems like an unjustified behavior in itself. So maybe if you acted on what you seem to be preaching I would listen, but for know you don't seem to care about these supposed finite resources.
This view that we have these massive resource limitations is wrong.
We do not have 'resource limitations' for the most part on this planet.
For some things, there's an issue - but by and large, it's not.
Western Nations already have a considerably lower than 'replacement rate' in terms of birth, and the suicidal disappearance of some cultures is not going to move the ball forward.
We do have population issues, but they are squarely in Nigeria, India etc..
We have plenty of resources.
We'll sort out climate change over the coming decades.
I don't feel hopeless because I understand that we are being manipulated by these apocalyptic predictions. They will not pan out. Really diving into the projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, RCP4.5 and RCP6.0 are the most likely of the scenarios. This news headline isn't really "news." We basically knew we had already reached this point. Everyone keeps focuses on the high-emissions scenario, which is unlikely.
Yes it's telling that the people who are spreading all the worst of the climate FUD are the same people who want to provide the solutions or be in power. Fear is always an effective strategy to push political change. That's a big part of what is going on here.
99.9% of all species ever existed are extinct today.
The world have been through 5 mass extinctions.
In other world, nature doesn't care about us what so ever.
Humans are the only species who have ever had a chance to be the exception to this trend by using the same ingenuity that lead us from less than 1billion mostly starving people who on average died at 40 to now 8 billion people and with plenty of food and resources and we keep getting better and better at it. Dead from drought have gone down 98% the last 100 years.
There are no scientifically demonstrated consequences of climate change that we can't deal with today, let alone tomorrow. And we will do that through using more energy, cause at the end of the day, there is not shortage of resources only knowledge. We will find the solutions to the issues that arise over time.
Remind yourself that humans have adapted to quite literally ever problem in front of us. We will have no choice but to adapt to a changing world. It is vastly more practical to mobilize people to engineer and deploy solutions to problems they immediately face.
Humanity as a species will not collapse, we will adapt and press on.
Do things in your regular life that help the planet:
Don't drive; bike.
Don't eat meat.
Stop buying products you don't need.
Plant trees in your city.
Donate to climate action foundations.
You left out the most important action: vote for people who want to deal with the problem. Individual action is nice and all, but this is a problem that is caused collectively and needs to be dealt with collectively.
It's not hopeless! People have overdosed on fear porn. Meanwhile, renewables are getting cheaper, modern nuclear energy technology is clean and safe, and carbon capture is getting more promising by the day.
Things are looking bleak even if we are able to get to complete zero emissions, let alone 50%. Sure, first world countries have chucked a few solar panels and windmills around, but that's a drop in the bucket.
Small changes to personal consumption are not the best way to contribute to fighting climate change. A significantly more effective actionstep would be to donate a small portion of your income to highly effective climate charities [1].
I'm not against changing personal consumption - for example, I went vegan. But this is not where the majority of my impact on the world lies, as even a small donation vastly outweighs the effect that my veganism has.
I think that after the consequences of climate change have finally been realized only a few short decades from now, many people will come out of the woodwork to say that they really did believe it was hopeless the whole time, but that declaring it was hopeless before the consequences happened would have been labeled counterproductive for the people that did not believe so. It would have been declared as giving up hope too soon. Irrationality in the face of obstacles that are actually impossible to overcome stems from the same mechanism which has caused those same people to accomplish goals that are reasonable, like getting better at drawing or running a marathon. There's no sense in denying one if it's inseparable from the other.
My opinion is that there is no solution. It's frequently said in the context of relationships that you can't change everyone. Forcing everyone to align with your worldview is the only real hope we have to prevent the continued destruction of the environment, and yet in the context of human friendships it's considered misanthropic. People still want their power, and their identity, and their freedom, and we are collectively powerless against that instinct.
I do not think we're ignoring the problems on purpose. We're just so bad at taking into consideration the consequences that might not take place in our lifetimes. It's a limitation of our human imaginations.
Our innovations in technology have raised our expectations, and with those expectations comes a baseline of additional carbon emissions. We're not going to go back to the industrial revolution for the planet's sake.
I choose not to put my limited time and energy into worrying about a lost cause, and will have to try to continue to do the things I want to. That battle in itself is already all-consuming for me.
Will we see a world reshaped by climate change? Almost certainly. Is it completely futile to keep fighting to stop it? Absolutely not.
All the projections go to 2100, but do you think this magically stops there? Our actions today are going to determine the extent of the damage to the future. We've already baked in serious changes, but we can avoid a hellscape in 2150, 2200, etc. If we don't our descendents, what are left of them, will curse our memory.
The more damage we do to the earth, the harder we're going to make it for us to even develop the solutions to solve it. Lets be real, carbon capture on the scale to reverse global warming is going to require an advanced civilization, and that won't happen if we've regressed back to some sort of mad max hellscape.
> many people will come out of the woodwork to say that they really did believe it was hopeless the whole time, but that declaring it was hopeless before the consequences happened would have been labeled counterproductive for the people that did not believe so
I believe this is the case, although it's becoming an increasingly indefensible position. The writing has been on the wall for a decade, and the false-hope strategy is clearly not working.
I'd think this site would be full of nerds ;) Think about the experience of being a nerd in HS. If pop culture is to be believed, I only got the extra-lite version of that in Russia compared to the US; on the other hand, I grew up surrounded by Russia, it's like the same thing on larger scale.
The experience is that you are constantly surrounded by people doing stupid, harmful crap in part because some of them are actually idiots, but mostly because of group/tribal/social pressures you don't care and can do nothing about.
What do you do? You do your thing, take care of yourself (broadly, i.e. your family, etc.) and minimize the damage others' ...unwise actions cause you. If you are so inclined you can also laugh when chickens come home to roost for someone due to their willful stupidity.
This approach works well for climate change, too :)
I agree that it’s hopeless and it doesn’t bother me at all. I can’t do anything about it so I might as well enjoy the ride while it lasts. Makes it easy to laugh about the really stupid day to day stuff.
I subscribe to this view as well (no kids to worry about), but the people busy wanting to save the world don't like it, because now they have to deal with denialists and surrenderists.
I feel half bad about it, but the whole pandemic has shown how odd this capitalistic world is. People need to work to earn money, but a lot of work generates CO2, directly or indirectly. There was an interesting article last year about how the flower industry in Europe basically shut down (no weddings and no restaurants needing decorations meant no flying in fresh flowers from Africa, and no employment for the flower growers). Or how some countries need jet loads of tourists to survive...
Predicting the future is the hardest job in the world. Given that, my standards to be anxious about the future based on predictions are very high. Climate scientists are also heavily incentivized to be apocalyptic, since the more dire the climate situation is, the more funding people want to give scientists to study the climate!
I haven't seen evidence presented that climate scientists can accurately predict future climate given correct inputs. (E.g. if you give scientists the correct information on the activity of the sun and amount of greenhouse gasses emitted for the years 2010-2020, and plug that into a climate model from the year 2010, it is unlikely to give you correct temperature for the years 2010-2020).
If they can't predict it that means they don't really understand it.
I would happy to be shown the evidence of climate predictions that are more accurate than would be expected. (E.g. I could draw a trendline from the years 1900-2000 out through 2020 and be mostly right. I would expect climate scientists to be substantially more accurate).
It's chaos math. Chaos is a nonperiodic system that operates within predictable limits that are a function of how much energy is within the system, and something we can study in detail.
Consider the concept of 'period three implies chaos': we do indeed understand chaos, but its sensitivity to initial conditions means we can't make deterministic projections of its future state, only projections of the range of possible future states (and a good solid notion of how deterministic it's gonna be based on how much energy is in the system: period three is arrived at from deterministic oscillations through INCREASING energy, and we know exactly what happens to the unpredictability as we continue to add energy)
Climate is a giant chaotic system of atmosphere energy.
We absolutely understand what, in a general sense, happens when we alter the amount of energy in the system.
You cannot predict chaos, period. What you can do is predict the potential behavior of the whole system, and project the limits of probable or possible outcomes.
We can be very sure a heat wave is not going to hit 500 degrees Farenheit, on Earth as we know it. We can also be sure that heat waves are going to continue to extend their RANGE of possible states in direct correlation with global climate energy increasing. And we are seeing exactly this.
We will also see that as the energy in the climate increases, our ability to predict into the future gets worse rather than better. Not because we got dumber, but because the chaotic system is becoming more chaotic as energy is added. The more extreme it gets, the more capacity it develops to confound projected outcomes due to chaos's sensitivity to initial conditions.
If you wanted the ability to predict more accurately, the only way to get that is to cool off the globe and take energy out of the system. It's the energy that's driving the chaotic behavior.
It's pretty obvious that emissions are not going to drop to zero, that the positive feedback loops due to arctic methane emissions have kicked off, and that runaway warming has begun. Best-case equilibrium now looks like 3C by 2100.
Basically, the situation is bleak and in all likelihood irreversible. There will me massive changes in my lifetime and the world we've left our children will be drastically different and obviously worse.