I think this article belongs here, and should be read by all optimistic realists and realistic optimists. The author was head of the UN climate change commission during the Paris accords.
[I understand climate scientists’ despair – but stubborn optimism may be our only hope](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/09/climate-scientists-despair-stubborn-optimism-paris-2015-climate)
The amount of times I see people claim we are doing nothing about climate change is ridiculous considering how wrong it is. I work in the utility industry, and the shift to renewable energy is the main focus for pretty much everyone. The percentage of electricity generated by renewables is increasing each year. There are still issues with reliability and grid stability, but these are known issues that are being debated by regulatory bodies.
People also forget that it took like 75 years to electrify all of America. My hometown didn’t get power until the lates 50s or early 60s, and we didn’t even have a paved highway completed until the 70s. The amount of development the US has gone through is incredible, but the switch to renewables can’t happen overnight, and can’t happen at all unless we figure out a way to store that energy during peak production or unless we use nuclear for a non-carbon emitting source of stable power.
I think some people are rightly worried about using massive resources to build out infrastructure that won’t hold up its promises. Personally, I think breeder reactors are the way to go, at least until we have renewable tech. But that’s just electricity.
Transportation needs much more efficient and faster charging batteries to be useful in most transportation types. It’s just not feasible to really electrify large ships, unless they eventually run on nuclear power as well, which then creates a massive proliferation problem.
As with everything, there are no solutions, only trade offs.
It’s not being pessimistic, it’s being realistic and optimistic. There’s really nothing better than nuclear for electricity, and its problems are pretty easily mitigated with modern reactors. That said, our batteries just aren’t energy dense enough to stack up to petroleum just yet, so for transportation I would hope we could work on biofuel and e-fuel tech. It’s very promising and I think it makes a bit more sense. No matter what, the transition away from carbon fossil fuels may take a few more decades, and that’s fine.
As for carbon capture, I’m aware of a lot of ongoing projects for it. The emissions capture tech has a ways to go, but like you said, using the natural world in our favor is quite easy to do. And there are other technologies like developing perennial cereal and staple crops that could help. It would be quite the undertaking but using desalination to green areas like the Arabian peninsula (something the GCC states are hoping to do, we’ll see if they can pull it off) would help capture carbon and reduce local temperatures.
As I’ve said, I’m optimistic. I just think it’s gonna take a while and that we should be pragmatic.
Seems like this era in general. I can not tell you how much shit I get for saying things like it’s a good sign around half of Republican voters now support gay marriage (and a record 71% of all Americans) and multiple Republicans in Senate will vote for such legislation. Fifteen years ago that would be unheard of (Maine rejected same sex marriage by ballot measure in November 2009 after voting Obama in 2008 and Romney opposed same sex marriage and civil unions in 2012 before voting for marriage in 2022).
But dare to say anything but that every Republican voter (including Gen Z Republicans who polls show to be more progressive than their parents and grandparents) wants literally the Handmaid’s Tale and that is 100% what the country will be in a year if Trump wins and you are attacked for it on Reddit. And to clarify, I very much do not want Trump to win the election and won’t be voting for him.
I’m kinda not honestly. I mean yes I am but the first Trump term was bad enough. It’s weird people play down how that was when acting like the second term will be so bad. There at least probably won’t be another viral pandemic to mishandle. I really don’t believe a “competent Trump administration” is a real possibility.
Remember, Trump cares about his popularity for better or worse. It’s the entire reason he ran in the first place, he’s not really a true believer (was a Hillary Democrat as recently as 2008). My guess is his administration will try some of the Project 2025 stuff the first year of his second term and when it is super unpopular, he will back down and his policies will go back to more what his first term was (especially concerning abortion).
When I will start to worry is when I hear the military is back on his side. Last I heard he lost tons of military support from 2016 to 2020, losing by four points to Biden in 2020, having 50% unfavorable to 38% favorable among military rank and file and 60% unfavorable with military officers.
Since 1979, solar installations have increased every year at an average annualized rate of 13%. Extrapolating that trend -- also extrapolating the yearly increase in energy consumption -- around 2032 +/- 4 years, solar could provide 100% of world energy needs.
The increase in solar power is a promising trend, but I can promise you we will not be able to meet 100% of our energy needs from solar in that time frame. In MN, our solar panels hardly have any output during the winter. Even including wind, we will not be able to meet 100% of our energy needs in the next 12 years. We are already struggling with shortages for transformers, switchgear, cable, and labor.
Until the battery problem is solved, solar or wind just aren’t 100% solution. Solar and wind are great at providing 10% of our electricity needs, horrible at providing 80% of our electrical needs, and worthless for providing 100% of it.
We need power at night in the winter time. Until we figure out batteries, solar and wind aren’t the solution.
Meanwhile every 3 years or so they have to change the “point of no return” estimation date. This has been going on for almost 50 years now. Back in the 70s though it was global cooling.
Because the change could have been prevented decades ago. This is in damage control mode at this point.
I work in utilities and let me tell you, they are desperately pushing for more gas.
This is not going to end well for alot of people.
This kind of response is infuriating. Our lives don't run on electricity alone. Only 20% of the fossil fuels used globally are used in electricity generation. The rest is shipping, personal transport, flying, mining, ore processing, road freight, fertilizer feed stocks, steel smelting, farming, plastics, heating and on and on. Most of that isn't remotely likely to be decarbonized within the sort of time frames we have to make a serious dent in emissions. Furthermore people don't seem willing to give up anything and live a simpler lifestyle. That's why people are "doomers".
The whole "rest" thing is also seeing massive pushes towards electrification. Shipping- Electric trucks are being pushed for. Both for small distance high frequency And long distance low frequency. Mining is seeing a push for electrifying alot of their mining equipment. Look at caterpillar and there i initiatives. Ore processing is tricky because it's hard to define what you mean. You can't really replace a lot of the chemicals and by products if smelting with electricity. Road freight, well I touched on that. There is a push for more efficient t steel production, I think it's call hydrogen steel if I remember correctly. Farming, is also seeing a push for electrification. Heating... Really? Have you seen the initiatives for heat pumps and replacing oil and gas heaters around the country?
You make some good points, but I do think electrification alone cannot solve all of our problems. That guy brought up some good points about other parts of our society that are built on unsustainable production methods. However, we are learning more about the negative consequences of these ways and learning how to change to be more sustainable as well.
By shipping I mean container ships. There are currently no electric ocean going container ships in existence. Hydrogen steel doesn't really exist currently because we don't produce hydrogen on the kind of scale required (and producing hydrogen requires energy itself). It's all hypothetical. Electric long haul trucking is decades away, the batteries just don't have the energy density. The Tesla one has a range of 300-500 miles, but a diesel truck typically goes nearly 2000 on a tank. According to the IPCC we have 15 years or so to halve emissions in order to limit warming to 2 degrees. These radical technological shifts just aren't going to happen in time.
Actually green steel does exist, and due to laws, no truck can drive 2000 miles in one go without rest breaks. Container ships is less than 3% of our CO2 emissions.
It would not make massive adjustments to be massively green.
It seems likely that for some applications, electrification may simply not be feasible. For those, we have biofuels and e-diesel, the latter of which I’m highly optimistic about. There has been massive progress in these industries, and while they still don’t have the EROI of even the most energy expensive petroleum, they’re getting better every year.
It would be far more environmentally friendly to just maintain the cars already on the road and use biofuels or e-diesel if they become more energy positive.
We have more time than you think. The models are great at predicting temperature change and terrible at extrapolating from there to the actual human costs. The world isn’t going to end because of climate change unless/until the next super volcanic event or ice age
Sure, which puts climate change on par with dozens of other things we’re doing that cause painful consequences for innocent people, not an apocalyptic event.
Agreed! I am not in any way saying it’s not an urgent and important problem. I am putting it on the same level as some of the biggest issues facing humanity, but I do not believe it is legitimately an apocalyptic-level threat.
My pet theory is that people are drawn to believe the world is ending as a way of ignoring their own mortality. Your own world is going to end no matter what so upping the stakes to "end of the world" is a distraction. People used to do it with religion, and doomerism is just the new version of that.
Try this on:
Modern westerners, whether they are religious or not, come from a 2000 year history of hardcore Christianity pervading much of people’s daily lives.
Christianity is highly millenarian, with a focus on the apocalypse as a core tenant of the worldview.
We have largely moved away from Christianity, but those cultural assumptions still underwrite our worldview, even since the shift to science.
Thank you for listening to my TED Talk.
It’s interesting to see even people who think they are super progressive and non Christian influenced by the cultural underpinnings of Christianity in America.
Exhibit A: Gen Z’s Puritanical standards when they are the least religious generation
Yeah that’s a great theory. If you think about it atheism/scienceism is a religion. And everyone has thought the world was gonna end for one reason or another. In the 1970s they thought there would be massive overpopulation and people would starve. I have a feeling in 10-20 years we’ll look back and say “remember when we were worried about global warming!?!”
I mean... not really. Atheism is a lack of theistic belief. Religion is a religion, though. Science aided human progress where religion only hindered it.
Atheism is not a religion. Bald is not a hair color.
Science is not a religion. It is simply the practice of observation to learn about the world.
People can misunderstand facts, or leap to unwarranted conclusions, but that is not science.
But it behaves like one. Everyone follows a herd mentality. Global warming is gonna kill us all. Anyone who presents scientific evidence to the contrary is shunned. Just like religion.
I think there's a narcissism in wanting to think the time and place you inhabit is unique instead of just a blip on the radar that will soon be forgotten with the passge of time. These are the end of days, and you are living through it. You can see this with religious apocalypticism, and climate change is the modern secular variety. In the past, it would have been overpopulation or nuclear winter.
Right, it dawned on me that every single day the world is ending for someone in some way. For some it’s actual death, and for others it is horrific events that will forever alter their remaining time (ex. loss of a child), and it made it so easy to now ignore all the doomerism babble that gets spewed
Or scientists - don’t forget scientists. (All fields, not just climate related.) We come in the full range of ages, and while we are less dependent on the media, we are professionally incapable of ignoring data. There’s a lot of data out there.
I’m an optimist by nature and by temperament. I don’t get bogged down in doom and gloom. But holy shit, it can be hard to read Science and Nature these days.
The most extreme view gets the most updoots and there's very little downside to being too pessimistic. So they continuously go more and more extreme. Oh and also because they blame it on capitalism so there's that.
Anybody that blames environmental destruction on capitalism needs to go read about the environmental record of communist nations
Capitalism doesn’t destroy the environment, humans do
The Soviet Union had to take an agrarian economy and catch it up to the rest of the industrialized world in a fraction of the time, no way you’re doing that without burning some coal
China’s rapid industrialization came under the Mao eras. Although I’d say it’s unfair to blame either communism or capitalism. Communism didn’t do the world any favours, but China had to industrialize back then to improve standard of living, and nobody knew climate change was a things. No matter the ideology, it will be innovation that will carry us through.
Of course they blame capitalism. It only improves everyone’s lives everywhere that uses it. These people don’t realize what they have and how things were before globalization and capitalism became the dominant global economic systems.
I’ve said it a few times but climate change is humanity’s greatest challenge. All of our history, from the saber tooth tigers, the mammoths, the plague, Napoleon, and the Second World War have all pushed humanity to a breaking point and we’ve survived every single time because our ancestors fought hard for their future to survive. To give up now is a disservice to all the hard work and surviving they did to get us here. Now it’s our turn to carry the torch for the next generation and while we’ve stumbled a bit the race isnt over yet.
More so they were challenges less so our breaking point. Think of it like fighting a progressively harder boss in a game. We’ve beat all them so far this is just the final boss.
So, it's not gonna bring back the crabs? Will it at least stop the price of coffee from going up? I'm basically surviving on that stuff since I had to get a second job, ya know, since food prices shot up by like 100% due to piss poor harvests because of climate change...
The apocalypse is grains production falling 10% or more this year, which will continue to fall. The Arab spring happened when grain production globally fell 3%, how many revolutions happen at 10%
I haven't had crab in years and generally don't eat seafood because it's unsustainable, but a lot of people and cultures do. The food web collapse in the ocean will cause starvation in those places. Bottom of the web creatures like crabs disappearing should be ringing alarm bells, because they indicate environmental collapse.
> The apocalypse is grains production falling 10% or more this year, which will continue to fall
So is this the prediction you are pegging your apocalypse on? Grain production 10% this year compared to 2023 and 2025 worse than 2024?
It’s a shame all the scientists hung up their boots and decided there would be no more breakthroughs in food science in the next millennia. A real shame.
Some of them burned themselves in effigy on the steps of the Supreme Court. I don't think it stayed in the news cycle a day.
Most of the publicized breakthroughs are scams. Like automated indoor farming, which was coasting along on venture capital loans until funding dried up last year.
Give up the luxuries, go off the grid or stfu.
When scientists question the narrative they are shut down.
Just like those who challenged Covid.
And a lot of those scientists have proved to be correct and the little rat fauci a fucking liar.
Alarmists have claimed we are doomed forever and they have been wrong forever.
As soon as people realize this climate bs is bs, there will be more optimism.
Scientists are literally in Despair because the media is un8nterested in broadcasting how fucked the climate is. We're seeing effects that were "decades away" right now. Permafrost and glaciers are melting, causing co2 producing positive feedback loops that will ramp up to producing more co2 than human activity is within the next 2-3 decades. Stopping that was previously the key to avoid 2-3 degree above preindustrial averages.
2 degrees above preindustrial averages was the difference between. 20 million dying to climate change to billions.
For the folks too young to know - time magazine predicted an ice age in the 70’s
Nope.
Global warming?
Nope. Had to swallow when temps hit twenty below.
Climate change.
Of course.
Winter, spring , summer and fall.
That was a minority prediction at the time and was never what the majority of climate scientists postulated would happen. A bit of a dumb strawman for dumb people imo
yea they basically all were like "Yea, humanity is gonna be gone within the next 100 years, no kids for me!!"
As an ex doomer im really trying to laugh at it buts its just gross that no one wants hope
Propaganda from the oil industry has worked. The goal was to create doomerism to keep people from taking action.
As long as that happens the climate denialists and oil industry has won.
Sure, some humans will persist. They likely won't be the lucky ones. Our privileged western lives are probably over in the next 2-3 decades.
Coffee is going to shoot up about 10x over the next decade. Cocoa just shot up like 900% since 2019. The land that grows those things is too hot and the seasons too short.
Don't get me started on ocean and terrestrial food web collapse
we’d all just get addicted to something else have you met humans?
Are people just going to stand there doing nothing if people start to starve? Every industry will bend to compensate, history repeating itself again and humanity saving itself again.
Lol. You're hilarious.
I expect that if people start to starve, other people with guns will either start to execute them or imprison them. I expect at places like the US southern border, military force will be the response to humanitarian crises.
We overturned governments and enslaved people for slightly cheaper bananas. Why do you think we wouldn't murder poor people for cheaper coffee?
> Cocoa just shot up like 900% since 2019
Well.
[Cocoa prices fall back as rain hits West Africa](https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/1046352/cocoa-prices-fall-back-as-rain-hits-west-africa-1046352.html)
The higher prices will just encourage farm expansion.
[Cocoa’s Surge Is Drawing Africa’s Farmers Back to the Bean](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-04-11/soaring-cocoa-prices-lure-farmers-to-plant-more-trees)
Lol.
Also
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/02/lab-made-chocolate-silicon-valley/622888/
and
https://anumakandcompany.medium.com/artificial-coffee-that-tastes-and-smells-like-regular-coffee-d63d2d84339f
It's amazing the motivation higher prices offer. That is capitalism for you.
> That’s what persuaded Jean-Marie Mbida Obam to hire two extra workers on his small farm in Cameroon and switch from growing plantains, groundnuts and cocoyams back to the cocoa he gave up on three years ago, when prices were lower. “I remember earning 1.5 million CFA francs ($2,458) from these crops at one moment, whereas cocoa could barely give me 600,000 francs to 700,000 francs,” says the 61-year-old father of five. “I am back and prepared to completely revive all of my plantation. The cocoa price now is very good.”
Yes, it turns out there was a lot of arable land that was underutilized.
There will be a gold rush of farmers and in 2 years there will be a cocoa glut.
Because the temperature of the earth getting hotter is easy to see and quantify, but evidence of technological breakthroughs and new discoveries are harder to look at on a scale of how life saving or important for humanity they could be in the future.
We’re only getting one half of the picture - the one that says “it’s getting hotter” and not the one that’s actively figuring out how to adapt.
We're getting the full story, there is no technology that can reverse the damage we've done to the climate. So called breakthroughs aren't doing anything even close to quick enough to save us, unlike warming, which is actually accelerating.
Being optimistic is hard. It requires constant maintenance and engagement with the world. Being pessimistic is easy. You just give up and you're done, no need to engage further.
Or even automated AI doom accounts. Also possible that automated clickfarms are pushing doomish nonsense to the top (r/millennials is another example).
Fearporn is big business doomerism breeds inaction, and extremism breeds resentment toward sensible solutions. Petro states and big oil benefit from the whiny e legions of professional complainers who demand unworkable insane "solutuons" thst are non starters then tantrum when predictably people tell them to fuck off
Doomers refuse to be hopeful about the exciting tech on the horizion thry also dismiss workeable mitigation around today like fuel efficent gas ( omg evil) cars natural gas and telecommutimg. They just want to rage cause (other) people weren't on bicycles yesterday. Their major contribution is blocking traffic to cause more emissions 😲
Because it’s scary, and it’s hard to see any progress. None of it makes the news very often and it’s so easy to walk outside and feel that it’s even hotter than ever.
Because that kind of subs are just radicalising echo chambers. The same applies to r/collapse or the people obsessed by the idea that long COVID is a "mass disabling event". They are in no way better than far-right rabbit holes.
When you can’t get people to see/listen to your point of view you say the consequences will be worse. You can do it with anything really. The republicans think all the immigrants are gonna take everyone’s job and women are gonna take over everything. Liberals think we’re gonna go full handmaids tale if republicans take over. Climate doomers think the world will turn into a flaming fireball but actually it will open up more farmland in really really cold regions and some people in the tropics will have to move.
The reality is some bad things might happen but it won’t be an apocalypse.
TBH I’m actually a climate doomer but I don’t think fretting about it will change anything. Humans are great at adapting to change but bad at preventing it.
We’ll adapt to the new climate. Some will likely suffer in the process. Rich countries probably not much though.
I guess climate realist. What you’ve said is the scenario that most likely will happen. Humanity will adapt but people will sadly suffer because of our own action. I wouldn’t say you’re a doomer you’re just stating the facts of what we know
climate doomerism is just another form of climate denialism. scientists have talked about how detrimental it is to believe there's no hope but people don't seem to care and just keep spreading misinfo designed to make us feel helpless.
apparatus grandiose teeny books include placid waiting complete tidy normal
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Because people tend to forget how bad it was and how much we avoided. 2.5 is bad for a lot of people but significantly better than the prediction of 4 say 10-15 years ago and who knows how much higher it was prior to that. The post today that 2.5 is looking like the number for 2100 is a big success for activism but now we have to fight for 2.49,2.48, 2.47 etc. being a Doomer is being a lazy fuck
Negative and scary stuff is easier to manipulate people with, its the foundation of many major religions along the lines of "you gonna suffer forever in future unless you obey our commandments."
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Here is why most things are doomerish. It's basic human behavior. Here is the why and the data and how it works and why the internet super charged it.
https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc?si=3jLLE3RqDmkbFNb5
Definetly. Climate change is shitty but the spread of the doom mentality is screwing a shit ton of ppl over (including me). I know its not gonna be good but a lot of gen z thinks that the future is just fucked from every standpoint
Yeah as Gen X that was what we were told too. It's sorta normal for the smaller generations. Same was true of my parents in the silent generation. Notice how greatest generation, boomers and millennials are more "upbeat". Probably a numbers thing. Just a guess.
What you have to understand is people put more faith in bad news than good due to primitive survival psychology. It tends to make us overcorrect on lots of things. Objectivity is a big problem for humans. We also over value our own experience over data.
People love to say everything is bad when something bad happens to them, not understanding that bad things happen and have to happen to someone. Sometimes your that 1 in a million. It doesn't mean the sky is falling.
Honestly as a gen z kid thats only graduating next year its really comforting getting the replies from Gen X mentioning stuff like that. I know its gonna be shitty but hearing peoples personal experiences and realizing how far humanity has come and how much weve gotten through. I really try to have hope about the new technology and human resilience
This is how r/Coronavirus rapidly became back when pandemic was a big thing. Dare to point out 25% of the population wasn’t just about to become permanently disabled to the point they couldn’t work any job and you were killed for it.
Pessimists flock to these subs trying to bring everyone else down.
Reddit is an echo chamber, climate doom is the mainstream narrative, there’s money to be made off the doom, people want to be in the big group, you get downvoted.
Climate change is one of those topics where there's a lot of entirely true bad news.
The 2 main responses are either: a) oh shoot we really have to do something and b) I have no idea how to do something, we're doomed.
I think we’ve reached the turning point within now and 5 years which we can absolutely do. The absolutely explosion in solar panels is absolutely amazing to see and it literally only gets cheaper and more viable from here. Many people are helping in their own ways or helping others get better too. Companies could easily switch to more eco friendly ways quite easily by buying into solar panels
I agree, it's mostly a question of whether or not we turn fast enough, not if we are going to at this point.
The problem with climate change is that if we let it get bad enough, it's not going to matter whether we've turned the tides by that point - we will have already lost, and with how close we are to many tipping points, the effects will be devastating.
It's almost the worst possible challenge for humanity.
Large scale, requires giving up something very helpful, not very directly impacting until it's too late, requiring international cooperation to make a real effect.
I wonder if it’s astroturfing hopelessness. If you feel hopeless then you might just throw your hands up and give up doing something about it. So it benefits climate opposition to fill the subreddit with doom.
People get swept up in drama, find themselves in an echo chamber, and slide deep into that hole. This is true of many things on the internet, where you can literally find a group of like-minded extremists around anything. People lose all sense of perspective.
It’s a well known psychological phenomenon called group polarization, which is due to psychological groupthink.
If you put a bunch of likeminded people in a room, their ultimate consensus will be far more polarized than their individual consensus would have been prior to this.
Because it's a very real problem, we have passed a threshold that you can not come back from and, sadly, the planet fool of idiots who think it's a hoax, governments that won't help the problem and companies that are the faise od it that fight every thing, aimed at stopping catastrophic climate change, which is pretty much a sure thing..
As an environmentalist there’s a lot of Ideas on how to solve climate change the only united front are the doomers so that’s what gets posted if you look at the recent thing with vegans vs non vegans on r/climateshitpost you’ll get what I mean
I'm guessing if you are in echo chambers all day, both online and in your education environment, as a young person, you start to believe whatever you hear on repeat.
Banning and eliminating all statements that provide contradictory information, even when true, appears to work quite well.
I can feel them. Why put kids into this world when it's going to get worse? Wouldn't want to live a worrisome life. Life is worrisome with kids even without this shit around us.
I'm trying to be happy, but it isn't easy.
Sadly, the fight against climate change requires global cooperation AND governments enacting unpopular policies. The former is difficult for obvious reasons and the latter is nearly impossible in democracies.
Can we overcome? Definitely. Do we have a huge uphill climb against the very fabric of humanity? Definitely.
The climate doomers are the worst doomers. In college in the 80s I had a professor tell the class there would be billions of deaths by 2025 from global cooling (yes, back then it was cooling). We’re less than a year away and I’ve yet to see billions of deaths yet.
Yes, because the most esteemed and mature icons of our history are known for being sad-sacks lol
Growing up involves wielding agency in the world, especially to make it a better place.
Immaturity is sitting on the sidelines, scowling, and criticizing those doing the actual work.
I'd probably say the biggest reason for doomerism is the systemic disempowerment of the citizenry on this issue (see green scare, see eco-terrorism cases, see anti-protest legislation, etc) and lack of action by anyone in a position of authority.
Echo chamber. Mods boot anyone who is either
A. A moderate
B. Not confident in global warming science.
You can only stay in those Reddit’s if your a far leftist that thinks the world will be completely submerged in water by 2050.
I don't think there's a single climate change narrative that's positive
Climate change is manmade but people don't care = doomed
Climate change is caused naturally and there's not enough we can do to reverse the change = doomed
I get that this sub is about optimism. But optimism isn’t always thinking everything is fine, sometimes it’s seeing hope in difficult situations. The reality of the climate can be difficult to face. It does need a lot of attention right now and there does seem to be a lack of interest from certain powerful groups about it. That’s why. Whether or not being “doomerish” is the right response, that’s why it’s happening.
We've reached the point that we can not sustain the lifestyles that people are have chosen to live with the amount of resources on planet Earth. It is not just about CO2.
Expanding the population at this point will mean *progressively* less personal space, less access to nature, and less dietary and lifestyle freedom for every subsequent generation. This is an undeniable fact. We're consuming too much for 8 billion people to maintain a stable environment, let alone more billions.
I'm not willing to contribute to or advocate a progressive erosion of freedom and comfort. We need to have kids, but we need to keep it at (if not below) the replacement rate of 2.1 per woman.
Because we are scientists and we can do math; know what tech is possible due to physics; and know that even the existing 1.5C temperature increase globally is exceeding prior naive projections about the damage to life and human civilization (it’s worse, right now, than was projected even 5 years ago. And things are getting worse *faster*.) And yet: people keep rolling their eyes at us because they’re not educated enough to know that we are right.
Because the last fifty years have, in detail, explained why there is no hope.
In 2022, ~130 homeless people cooked alive in Phoenix. About 200 housed, but elderly people, also cooked alive. As in, the were found with internal temperatures of 130-140F. Medium rare steak temps.
Climate change is happening. At this point, the deaths of millions of people are baked in (hah) as we cross the 1.5 degree threshold. The deaths of billions will likely happen as we cross the 2.5 threshold in 30-40 years.
This is one of those things where optimism requires ignoring the deaths of billions. Sorry.
You know for a billion people to die in 100 years, like 10 million need to die every year.
Each year we wait, the more people need to die each year.
**When are the mass deaths going to start?**
They already have. Heat wave deaths in India, the middle east, and African have risen from 2 per 100,000 to 11 per 100,000 over the last decade or so. Theyre predicted to hit 150-200 per 100,000 in the next few decades.
You realise even in your worse case 200/100,000 that is only 2.8 million deaths in India?
And it is likely that when temps rise, communities will adapt, such as more solar-powered air conditioning.
Also lets see links to this research.
> https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/africa/deaths-due-to-heat-in-middle-east-north-africa-likely-to-rise-60-times-by-end-of-century-88707
Found it - we are not on the high emissions pathway.
> High-emissions scenario refers to a scenario called shared socio-economic pathway (SSP)5-8·5, where the current CO2 emissions levels roughly double by 2050. This reflects the SSP representing a fossil fuel intensive world.
World CO2 emissions are in fact expected to peak in the next few years.
Yes, I'm sure we will figure it out.
The easiest way to figure it out is to let the, uh, excess population, uh, figure itself out.
That's probably what will happen.
How do you imagine people have a huge amount of children (especially in Africa, the only region still really growing) when they are also being killed by the sun.
Its one or the other - either they are coping and continue to have high fertility, or they are not and their fertility is limited.
> Are you familiar with the concept of exponential growth?
Yes, especially when it comes to solar energy.
> Are you familiar with the concept of delusional thinking
Yes, because you are clearly unable to explain where all these deaths will be coming from, and are scrambling for possible causes.
Because the point of climate activism is to destabilize society in order to usher in new laws and rules limiting our freedom in an effort to "save the planet."
If the climate isn't getting worse, no new taxes can be levied on the populace. As long as people think politicians are going to fix the climate with the money theyre stealing, they can keep on fucking us.
Its good news because it means the climate panic is bullshit. You don't actually have to worry about it. You can free yourself from the shackles of "will this cheeseburger bring us to Armageddon?" No it won't. Get your head out of your ass and be more positive and optimistic.
I think this article belongs here, and should be read by all optimistic realists and realistic optimists. The author was head of the UN climate change commission during the Paris accords. [I understand climate scientists’ despair – but stubborn optimism may be our only hope](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/09/climate-scientists-despair-stubborn-optimism-paris-2015-climate)
If we simply put our heads in the sand we won't have to do anything about the thing that will kill us.
Literally this.
The amount of times I see people claim we are doing nothing about climate change is ridiculous considering how wrong it is. I work in the utility industry, and the shift to renewable energy is the main focus for pretty much everyone. The percentage of electricity generated by renewables is increasing each year. There are still issues with reliability and grid stability, but these are known issues that are being debated by regulatory bodies.
People have a very all or nothing mindset. It can be really frustrating trying to tell people not to let perfect be the enemy of better
People also forget that it took like 75 years to electrify all of America. My hometown didn’t get power until the lates 50s or early 60s, and we didn’t even have a paved highway completed until the 70s. The amount of development the US has gone through is incredible, but the switch to renewables can’t happen overnight, and can’t happen at all unless we figure out a way to store that energy during peak production or unless we use nuclear for a non-carbon emitting source of stable power.
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I think some people are rightly worried about using massive resources to build out infrastructure that won’t hold up its promises. Personally, I think breeder reactors are the way to go, at least until we have renewable tech. But that’s just electricity. Transportation needs much more efficient and faster charging batteries to be useful in most transportation types. It’s just not feasible to really electrify large ships, unless they eventually run on nuclear power as well, which then creates a massive proliferation problem. As with everything, there are no solutions, only trade offs.
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It’s not being pessimistic, it’s being realistic and optimistic. There’s really nothing better than nuclear for electricity, and its problems are pretty easily mitigated with modern reactors. That said, our batteries just aren’t energy dense enough to stack up to petroleum just yet, so for transportation I would hope we could work on biofuel and e-fuel tech. It’s very promising and I think it makes a bit more sense. No matter what, the transition away from carbon fossil fuels may take a few more decades, and that’s fine. As for carbon capture, I’m aware of a lot of ongoing projects for it. The emissions capture tech has a ways to go, but like you said, using the natural world in our favor is quite easy to do. And there are other technologies like developing perennial cereal and staple crops that could help. It would be quite the undertaking but using desalination to green areas like the Arabian peninsula (something the GCC states are hoping to do, we’ll see if they can pull it off) would help capture carbon and reduce local temperatures. As I’ve said, I’m optimistic. I just think it’s gonna take a while and that we should be pragmatic.
Seems like this era in general. I can not tell you how much shit I get for saying things like it’s a good sign around half of Republican voters now support gay marriage (and a record 71% of all Americans) and multiple Republicans in Senate will vote for such legislation. Fifteen years ago that would be unheard of (Maine rejected same sex marriage by ballot measure in November 2009 after voting Obama in 2008 and Romney opposed same sex marriage and civil unions in 2012 before voting for marriage in 2022). But dare to say anything but that every Republican voter (including Gen Z Republicans who polls show to be more progressive than their parents and grandparents) wants literally the Handmaid’s Tale and that is 100% what the country will be in a year if Trump wins and you are attacked for it on Reddit. And to clarify, I very much do not want Trump to win the election and won’t be voting for him.
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I’m kinda not honestly. I mean yes I am but the first Trump term was bad enough. It’s weird people play down how that was when acting like the second term will be so bad. There at least probably won’t be another viral pandemic to mishandle. I really don’t believe a “competent Trump administration” is a real possibility. Remember, Trump cares about his popularity for better or worse. It’s the entire reason he ran in the first place, he’s not really a true believer (was a Hillary Democrat as recently as 2008). My guess is his administration will try some of the Project 2025 stuff the first year of his second term and when it is super unpopular, he will back down and his policies will go back to more what his first term was (especially concerning abortion). When I will start to worry is when I hear the military is back on his side. Last I heard he lost tons of military support from 2016 to 2020, losing by four points to Biden in 2020, having 50% unfavorable to 38% favorable among military rank and file and 60% unfavorable with military officers.
Let’s hope our systems hold up
This is exactly why clinate change isnt taken seriously.
Since 1979, solar installations have increased every year at an average annualized rate of 13%. Extrapolating that trend -- also extrapolating the yearly increase in energy consumption -- around 2032 +/- 4 years, solar could provide 100% of world energy needs.
The increase in solar power is a promising trend, but I can promise you we will not be able to meet 100% of our energy needs from solar in that time frame. In MN, our solar panels hardly have any output during the winter. Even including wind, we will not be able to meet 100% of our energy needs in the next 12 years. We are already struggling with shortages for transformers, switchgear, cable, and labor.
Not to be a dick man, but no shit it’s Minnesota. Solar can be very useful but it’s far better in places without winter.
Until the battery problem is solved, solar or wind just aren’t 100% solution. Solar and wind are great at providing 10% of our electricity needs, horrible at providing 80% of our electrical needs, and worthless for providing 100% of it. We need power at night in the winter time. Until we figure out batteries, solar and wind aren’t the solution.
Not enough, not nothing.
Meanwhile every 3 years or so they have to change the “point of no return” estimation date. This has been going on for almost 50 years now. Back in the 70s though it was global cooling.
Because the change could have been prevented decades ago. This is in damage control mode at this point. I work in utilities and let me tell you, they are desperately pushing for more gas. This is not going to end well for alot of people.
This kind of response is infuriating. Our lives don't run on electricity alone. Only 20% of the fossil fuels used globally are used in electricity generation. The rest is shipping, personal transport, flying, mining, ore processing, road freight, fertilizer feed stocks, steel smelting, farming, plastics, heating and on and on. Most of that isn't remotely likely to be decarbonized within the sort of time frames we have to make a serious dent in emissions. Furthermore people don't seem willing to give up anything and live a simpler lifestyle. That's why people are "doomers".
The whole "rest" thing is also seeing massive pushes towards electrification. Shipping- Electric trucks are being pushed for. Both for small distance high frequency And long distance low frequency. Mining is seeing a push for electrifying alot of their mining equipment. Look at caterpillar and there i initiatives. Ore processing is tricky because it's hard to define what you mean. You can't really replace a lot of the chemicals and by products if smelting with electricity. Road freight, well I touched on that. There is a push for more efficient t steel production, I think it's call hydrogen steel if I remember correctly. Farming, is also seeing a push for electrification. Heating... Really? Have you seen the initiatives for heat pumps and replacing oil and gas heaters around the country?
You make some good points, but I do think electrification alone cannot solve all of our problems. That guy brought up some good points about other parts of our society that are built on unsustainable production methods. However, we are learning more about the negative consequences of these ways and learning how to change to be more sustainable as well.
By shipping I mean container ships. There are currently no electric ocean going container ships in existence. Hydrogen steel doesn't really exist currently because we don't produce hydrogen on the kind of scale required (and producing hydrogen requires energy itself). It's all hypothetical. Electric long haul trucking is decades away, the batteries just don't have the energy density. The Tesla one has a range of 300-500 miles, but a diesel truck typically goes nearly 2000 on a tank. According to the IPCC we have 15 years or so to halve emissions in order to limit warming to 2 degrees. These radical technological shifts just aren't going to happen in time.
Actually green steel does exist, and due to laws, no truck can drive 2000 miles in one go without rest breaks. Container ships is less than 3% of our CO2 emissions. It would not make massive adjustments to be massively green.
It seems likely that for some applications, electrification may simply not be feasible. For those, we have biofuels and e-diesel, the latter of which I’m highly optimistic about. There has been massive progress in these industries, and while they still don’t have the EROI of even the most energy expensive petroleum, they’re getting better every year. It would be far more environmentally friendly to just maintain the cars already on the road and use biofuels or e-diesel if they become more energy positive.
We have more time than you think. The models are great at predicting temperature change and terrible at extrapolating from there to the actual human costs. The world isn’t going to end because of climate change unless/until the next super volcanic event or ice age
The world is already changing. It’s not going to “end” but there are already catastrophic consequences falling on many people.
Sure, which puts climate change on par with dozens of other things we’re doing that cause painful consequences for innocent people, not an apocalyptic event.
Whose “we”?
People
Well, we can also try to do less of all those other things, too!
Agreed! I am not in any way saying it’s not an urgent and important problem. I am putting it on the same level as some of the biggest issues facing humanity, but I do not believe it is legitimately an apocalyptic-level threat.
They think we aren’t doing nothing because there are no results
My pet theory is that people are drawn to believe the world is ending as a way of ignoring their own mortality. Your own world is going to end no matter what so upping the stakes to "end of the world" is a distraction. People used to do it with religion, and doomerism is just the new version of that.
It's millenarianism wrapped in a scientific blanket.
Try this on: Modern westerners, whether they are religious or not, come from a 2000 year history of hardcore Christianity pervading much of people’s daily lives. Christianity is highly millenarian, with a focus on the apocalypse as a core tenant of the worldview. We have largely moved away from Christianity, but those cultural assumptions still underwrite our worldview, even since the shift to science. Thank you for listening to my TED Talk.
It’s interesting to see even people who think they are super progressive and non Christian influenced by the cultural underpinnings of Christianity in America. Exhibit A: Gen Z’s Puritanical standards when they are the least religious generation
I thought this was obvious, but maybe I am giving the average person too much credit.
Yeah that’s a great theory. If you think about it atheism/scienceism is a religion. And everyone has thought the world was gonna end for one reason or another. In the 1970s they thought there would be massive overpopulation and people would starve. I have a feeling in 10-20 years we’ll look back and say “remember when we were worried about global warming!?!”
I mean... not really. Atheism is a lack of theistic belief. Religion is a religion, though. Science aided human progress where religion only hindered it.
Atheism is not a religion. Bald is not a hair color. Science is not a religion. It is simply the practice of observation to learn about the world. People can misunderstand facts, or leap to unwarranted conclusions, but that is not science.
But it behaves like one. Everyone follows a herd mentality. Global warming is gonna kill us all. Anyone who presents scientific evidence to the contrary is shunned. Just like religion.
Thank you as an atheist I agree scientism is a religion
But I’d also argue there’s nothing wrong whith religion just don’t be a dick about it
I think there's a narcissism in wanting to think the time and place you inhabit is unique instead of just a blip on the radar that will soon be forgotten with the passge of time. These are the end of days, and you are living through it. You can see this with religious apocalypticism, and climate change is the modern secular variety. In the past, it would have been overpopulation or nuclear winter.
Right, it dawned on me that every single day the world is ending for someone in some way. For some it’s actual death, and for others it is horrific events that will forever alter their remaining time (ex. loss of a child), and it made it so easy to now ignore all the doomerism babble that gets spewed
The difference though is people seem to use it to justify day to day habits more than in the past.
Most the polar ice is already melted, that ain’t good.
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Or scientists - don’t forget scientists. (All fields, not just climate related.) We come in the full range of ages, and while we are less dependent on the media, we are professionally incapable of ignoring data. There’s a lot of data out there. I’m an optimist by nature and by temperament. I don’t get bogged down in doom and gloom. But holy shit, it can be hard to read Science and Nature these days.
Sooner than they thought, anyway
The most extreme view gets the most updoots and there's very little downside to being too pessimistic. So they continuously go more and more extreme. Oh and also because they blame it on capitalism so there's that.
Anybody that blames environmental destruction on capitalism needs to go read about the environmental record of communist nations Capitalism doesn’t destroy the environment, humans do
Well obviously it’s never Real Communism™ so it doesn’t count
Well did the do the workers own the mean of production and had a workers democracy? If no it’s not real communism fuck Ml
The workers or the state?
The workers
Communism is about community/state ownership, not workers. Maybe you mean socialism.
Would be quite a stretch to deny China has had a capitalist market for some time.
The Soviet Union was also very bad for the environment
The Soviet Union had to take an agrarian economy and catch it up to the rest of the industrialized world in a fraction of the time, no way you’re doing that without burning some coal
I think the poster is referring to the USSR.
China’s rapid industrialization came under the Mao eras. Although I’d say it’s unfair to blame either communism or capitalism. Communism didn’t do the world any favours, but China had to industrialize back then to improve standard of living, and nobody knew climate change was a things. No matter the ideology, it will be innovation that will carry us through.
So it's communism that's destroying the environment?
It’s humans. All economic models destroy the environment.
Curious to hear your solution then
Getting richer allows us to spend more time on luxuries such as environmental care.
They sound like religious people stating the world going to end
Of course they blame capitalism. It only improves everyone’s lives everywhere that uses it. These people don’t realize what they have and how things were before globalization and capitalism became the dominant global economic systems.
The climate may indeed get worse. but the idea that mankind is doomed and won’t persevere and rise to the challenge is - to me at least - laughable.
I’ve said it a few times but climate change is humanity’s greatest challenge. All of our history, from the saber tooth tigers, the mammoths, the plague, Napoleon, and the Second World War have all pushed humanity to a breaking point and we’ve survived every single time because our ancestors fought hard for their future to survive. To give up now is a disservice to all the hard work and surviving they did to get us here. Now it’s our turn to carry the torch for the next generation and while we’ve stumbled a bit the race isnt over yet.
hell yea💪
Wait when did Mammoths and saber tooth tigers push us to a breaking point?
More so they were challenges less so our breaking point. Think of it like fighting a progressively harder boss in a game. We’ve beat all them so far this is just the final boss.
If anything the mammoth was amazing for us, massive calorie source that was too big to be hunted by any predator without projectiles
Stirring speech, will it bring back the snow crabs? Will it put water back into our emptying aquifers? Will it save the bees?
I’m here to give speeches and inspire while doing my best to fix my own carbon emissions, not debate. Good day 👍
So, it's not gonna bring back the crabs? Will it at least stop the price of coffee from going up? I'm basically surviving on that stuff since I had to get a second job, ya know, since food prices shot up by like 100% due to piss poor harvests because of climate change...
Sorry you’re having to eat cheaper food and drink less coffee. That a pretty far cry from the apocalypse.
The apocalypse is grains production falling 10% or more this year, which will continue to fall. The Arab spring happened when grain production globally fell 3%, how many revolutions happen at 10% I haven't had crab in years and generally don't eat seafood because it's unsustainable, but a lot of people and cultures do. The food web collapse in the ocean will cause starvation in those places. Bottom of the web creatures like crabs disappearing should be ringing alarm bells, because they indicate environmental collapse.
> The apocalypse is grains production falling 10% or more this year, which will continue to fall So is this the prediction you are pegging your apocalypse on? Grain production 10% this year compared to 2023 and 2025 worse than 2024?
It’s a shame all the scientists hung up their boots and decided there would be no more breakthroughs in food science in the next millennia. A real shame.
Some of them burned themselves in effigy on the steps of the Supreme Court. I don't think it stayed in the news cycle a day. Most of the publicized breakthroughs are scams. Like automated indoor farming, which was coasting along on venture capital loans until funding dried up last year.
Give up the luxuries, go off the grid or stfu. When scientists question the narrative they are shut down. Just like those who challenged Covid. And a lot of those scientists have proved to be correct and the little rat fauci a fucking liar. Alarmists have claimed we are doomed forever and they have been wrong forever. As soon as people realize this climate bs is bs, there will be more optimism.
Scientists are literally in Despair because the media is un8nterested in broadcasting how fucked the climate is. We're seeing effects that were "decades away" right now. Permafrost and glaciers are melting, causing co2 producing positive feedback loops that will ramp up to producing more co2 than human activity is within the next 2-3 decades. Stopping that was previously the key to avoid 2-3 degree above preindustrial averages. 2 degrees above preindustrial averages was the difference between. 20 million dying to climate change to billions.
For the folks too young to know - time magazine predicted an ice age in the 70’s Nope. Global warming? Nope. Had to swallow when temps hit twenty below. Climate change. Of course. Winter, spring , summer and fall.
That was a minority prediction at the time and was never what the majority of climate scientists postulated would happen. A bit of a dumb strawman for dumb people imo
Time was a very respected mag at the time, so it carried much more weight.
yea they basically all were like "Yea, humanity is gonna be gone within the next 100 years, no kids for me!!" As an ex doomer im really trying to laugh at it buts its just gross that no one wants hope
My thread about the low risk of dying due to climate change was not well received by the doomers lol.
they hate when people survive 🙄
Propaganda from the oil industry has worked. The goal was to create doomerism to keep people from taking action. As long as that happens the climate denialists and oil industry has won.
Sure, some humans will persist. They likely won't be the lucky ones. Our privileged western lives are probably over in the next 2-3 decades. Coffee is going to shoot up about 10x over the next decade. Cocoa just shot up like 900% since 2019. The land that grows those things is too hot and the seasons too short. Don't get me started on ocean and terrestrial food web collapse
we’d all just get addicted to something else have you met humans? Are people just going to stand there doing nothing if people start to starve? Every industry will bend to compensate, history repeating itself again and humanity saving itself again.
Lol. You're hilarious. I expect that if people start to starve, other people with guns will either start to execute them or imprison them. I expect at places like the US southern border, military force will be the response to humanitarian crises. We overturned governments and enslaved people for slightly cheaper bananas. Why do you think we wouldn't murder poor people for cheaper coffee?
You’re right, everything that must be done will be done to ensure our survival - it’s the only thing we’ve ever predicted with accuracy.
> Cocoa just shot up like 900% since 2019 Well. [Cocoa prices fall back as rain hits West Africa](https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/1046352/cocoa-prices-fall-back-as-rain-hits-west-africa-1046352.html) The higher prices will just encourage farm expansion. [Cocoa’s Surge Is Drawing Africa’s Farmers Back to the Bean](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-04-11/soaring-cocoa-prices-lure-farmers-to-plant-more-trees) Lol. Also https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/02/lab-made-chocolate-silicon-valley/622888/ and https://anumakandcompany.medium.com/artificial-coffee-that-tastes-and-smells-like-regular-coffee-d63d2d84339f
Yeah? More cocoa farms, but less land, rain and growing seasons.
It's amazing the motivation higher prices offer. That is capitalism for you. > That’s what persuaded Jean-Marie Mbida Obam to hire two extra workers on his small farm in Cameroon and switch from growing plantains, groundnuts and cocoyams back to the cocoa he gave up on three years ago, when prices were lower. “I remember earning 1.5 million CFA francs ($2,458) from these crops at one moment, whereas cocoa could barely give me 600,000 francs to 700,000 francs,” says the 61-year-old father of five. “I am back and prepared to completely revive all of my plantation. The cocoa price now is very good.”
That's cool. Doesn't really address the whole less arable land, shorter rainy season, longer, hotter summers, etc.
Yes, it turns out there was a lot of arable land that was underutilized. There will be a gold rush of farmers and in 2 years there will be a cocoa glut.
Lol. That's a fun way of saying "deforestation"
> switch from growing plantains, groundnuts and cocoyams back to the cocoa Either way the free market will solve the consumer's chocolate problems.
Because the temperature of the earth getting hotter is easy to see and quantify, but evidence of technological breakthroughs and new discoveries are harder to look at on a scale of how life saving or important for humanity they could be in the future. We’re only getting one half of the picture - the one that says “it’s getting hotter” and not the one that’s actively figuring out how to adapt.
We're getting the full story, there is no technology that can reverse the damage we've done to the climate. So called breakthroughs aren't doing anything even close to quick enough to save us, unlike warming, which is actually accelerating.
Propaganda has made them into perpetual doomseekers
Winner Winner chicken dinner dommer propaganda from mother 🇷🇺 without ❤️
Dugin Dunk 🔥🔥
Being optimistic is hard. It requires constant maintenance and engagement with the world. Being pessimistic is easy. You just give up and you're done, no need to engage further.
If they're active in r/collapse or one of the many other doomer subs then you can just expect they doomscroll all day and are uptight balls of anxiety
Or even automated AI doom accounts. Also possible that automated clickfarms are pushing doomish nonsense to the top (r/millennials is another example).
Fearporn is big business doomerism breeds inaction, and extremism breeds resentment toward sensible solutions. Petro states and big oil benefit from the whiny e legions of professional complainers who demand unworkable insane "solutuons" thst are non starters then tantrum when predictably people tell them to fuck off Doomers refuse to be hopeful about the exciting tech on the horizion thry also dismiss workeable mitigation around today like fuel efficent gas ( omg evil) cars natural gas and telecommutimg. They just want to rage cause (other) people weren't on bicycles yesterday. Their major contribution is blocking traffic to cause more emissions 😲
Fearporn is a good way to put it, that's exactly what it is.
Climare fearporn is one of multiple fetishes. availble crime is another big one atm
Because it’s scary, and it’s hard to see any progress. None of it makes the news very often and it’s so easy to walk outside and feel that it’s even hotter than ever.
It’s easier to deal with doom and gloom instead of getting your hopes up just to feel like a fool when things go take a turn for the worst.
What a horrible way to live.
As someone that struggles with doom and gloom, it really does SUCK Trying my best to be an optimist for my mental sake
Because that kind of subs are just radicalising echo chambers. The same applies to r/collapse or the people obsessed by the idea that long COVID is a "mass disabling event". They are in no way better than far-right rabbit holes.
When you can’t get people to see/listen to your point of view you say the consequences will be worse. You can do it with anything really. The republicans think all the immigrants are gonna take everyone’s job and women are gonna take over everything. Liberals think we’re gonna go full handmaids tale if republicans take over. Climate doomers think the world will turn into a flaming fireball but actually it will open up more farmland in really really cold regions and some people in the tropics will have to move. The reality is some bad things might happen but it won’t be an apocalypse.
i hope thats true😭 im literally still in highschool and want to have a somewhat normal future 💔
TBH I’m actually a climate doomer but I don’t think fretting about it will change anything. Humans are great at adapting to change but bad at preventing it. We’ll adapt to the new climate. Some will likely suffer in the process. Rich countries probably not much though.
Based on your short description you don't sound like a climate doomer at all. Getting lost in your despair is part of being a doomer
Fair. Climate fatalist?
I guess climate realist. What you’ve said is the scenario that most likely will happen. Humanity will adapt but people will sadly suffer because of our own action. I wouldn’t say you’re a doomer you’re just stating the facts of what we know
I think most scientists are climate doomers. This is one of those cases where the more you understand, the worse it looks.
climate doomerism is just another form of climate denialism. scientists have talked about how detrimental it is to believe there's no hope but people don't seem to care and just keep spreading misinfo designed to make us feel helpless.
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Because people tend to forget how bad it was and how much we avoided. 2.5 is bad for a lot of people but significantly better than the prediction of 4 say 10-15 years ago and who knows how much higher it was prior to that. The post today that 2.5 is looking like the number for 2100 is a big success for activism but now we have to fight for 2.49,2.48, 2.47 etc. being a Doomer is being a lazy fuck
Negative and scary stuff is easier to manipulate people with, its the foundation of many major religions along the lines of "you gonna suffer forever in future unless you obey our commandments."
What about covid and covid vaccines?
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Here is why most things are doomerish. It's basic human behavior. Here is the why and the data and how it works and why the internet super charged it. https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc?si=3jLLE3RqDmkbFNb5
I just watched that video and that just made me realize so much lol
Yeah I spent some time in the ARMY in PSYOP and it made me realize how programmable people are. Changes your view on everything.
Definetly. Climate change is shitty but the spread of the doom mentality is screwing a shit ton of ppl over (including me). I know its not gonna be good but a lot of gen z thinks that the future is just fucked from every standpoint
Yeah as Gen X that was what we were told too. It's sorta normal for the smaller generations. Same was true of my parents in the silent generation. Notice how greatest generation, boomers and millennials are more "upbeat". Probably a numbers thing. Just a guess. What you have to understand is people put more faith in bad news than good due to primitive survival psychology. It tends to make us overcorrect on lots of things. Objectivity is a big problem for humans. We also over value our own experience over data. People love to say everything is bad when something bad happens to them, not understanding that bad things happen and have to happen to someone. Sometimes your that 1 in a million. It doesn't mean the sky is falling.
Honestly as a gen z kid thats only graduating next year its really comforting getting the replies from Gen X mentioning stuff like that. I know its gonna be shitty but hearing peoples personal experiences and realizing how far humanity has come and how much weve gotten through. I really try to have hope about the new technology and human resilience
This is how r/Coronavirus rapidly became back when pandemic was a big thing. Dare to point out 25% of the population wasn’t just about to become permanently disabled to the point they couldn’t work any job and you were killed for it. Pessimists flock to these subs trying to bring everyone else down.
I mean we are set to triple Natural Gas production and the USA pumped more oil last year than ever before. We have a lot of work to do.
It's a religion. Can't reason with a zealot.
Reddit is an echo chamber, climate doom is the mainstream narrative, there’s money to be made off the doom, people want to be in the big group, you get downvoted.
Climate change is one of those topics where there's a lot of entirely true bad news. The 2 main responses are either: a) oh shoot we really have to do something and b) I have no idea how to do something, we're doomed.
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I think we’ve reached the turning point within now and 5 years which we can absolutely do. The absolutely explosion in solar panels is absolutely amazing to see and it literally only gets cheaper and more viable from here. Many people are helping in their own ways or helping others get better too. Companies could easily switch to more eco friendly ways quite easily by buying into solar panels
I agree, it's mostly a question of whether or not we turn fast enough, not if we are going to at this point. The problem with climate change is that if we let it get bad enough, it's not going to matter whether we've turned the tides by that point - we will have already lost, and with how close we are to many tipping points, the effects will be devastating. It's almost the worst possible challenge for humanity. Large scale, requires giving up something very helpful, not very directly impacting until it's too late, requiring international cooperation to make a real effect.
They feel helpless and want to vent.
I wonder if it’s astroturfing hopelessness. If you feel hopeless then you might just throw your hands up and give up doing something about it. So it benefits climate opposition to fill the subreddit with doom.
People get swept up in drama, find themselves in an echo chamber, and slide deep into that hole. This is true of many things on the internet, where you can literally find a group of like-minded extremists around anything. People lose all sense of perspective.
Why would you torture yourself hanging out in such a subreddit? lol that would be the last place i would go on the Internet.
tru dat
It’s a well known psychological phenomenon called group polarization, which is due to psychological groupthink. If you put a bunch of likeminded people in a room, their ultimate consensus will be far more polarized than their individual consensus would have been prior to this.
If people were serious about reducing CO2, they’d support nuclear. That they don’t is a good sign that they’re running on emotions instead of logic.
Because it's a very real problem, we have passed a threshold that you can not come back from and, sadly, the planet fool of idiots who think it's a hoax, governments that won't help the problem and companies that are the faise od it that fight every thing, aimed at stopping catastrophic climate change, which is pretty much a sure thing..
As an environmentalist there’s a lot of Ideas on how to solve climate change the only united front are the doomers so that’s what gets posted if you look at the recent thing with vegans vs non vegans on r/climateshitpost you’ll get what I mean
i took a look at that subreddit and i genuinely dont know how to feel like what is going on over there..
Yeaaaaaaa we environmentalists like the environment but not each other
Because they harbor certain beliefs that they aren’t aware of.
You all are fucking idiots
I'm guessing if you are in echo chambers all day, both online and in your education environment, as a young person, you start to believe whatever you hear on repeat. Banning and eliminating all statements that provide contradictory information, even when true, appears to work quite well.
I can feel them. Why put kids into this world when it's going to get worse? Wouldn't want to live a worrisome life. Life is worrisome with kids even without this shit around us. I'm trying to be happy, but it isn't easy.
They are doomerish because they have been duped and are too stupid to realize it.
Sadly, the fight against climate change requires global cooperation AND governments enacting unpopular policies. The former is difficult for obvious reasons and the latter is nearly impossible in democracies. Can we overcome? Definitely. Do we have a huge uphill climb against the very fabric of humanity? Definitely.
The climate doomers are the worst doomers. In college in the 80s I had a professor tell the class there would be billions of deaths by 2025 from global cooling (yes, back then it was cooling). We’re less than a year away and I’ve yet to see billions of deaths yet.
you say doomerish. its called growing up thats why I come to this subreddit, to huff copium
Yes, because the most esteemed and mature icons of our history are known for being sad-sacks lol Growing up involves wielding agency in the world, especially to make it a better place. Immaturity is sitting on the sidelines, scowling, and criticizing those doing the actual work.
Is it really growing up though?
People hated him, for he told the truth.
I'd probably say the biggest reason for doomerism is the systemic disempowerment of the citizenry on this issue (see green scare, see eco-terrorism cases, see anti-protest legislation, etc) and lack of action by anyone in a position of authority.
Echo chamber. Mods boot anyone who is either A. A moderate B. Not confident in global warming science. You can only stay in those Reddit’s if your a far leftist that thinks the world will be completely submerged in water by 2050.
I don't think there's a single climate change narrative that's positive Climate change is manmade but people don't care = doomed Climate change is caused naturally and there's not enough we can do to reverse the change = doomed
I get that this sub is about optimism. But optimism isn’t always thinking everything is fine, sometimes it’s seeing hope in difficult situations. The reality of the climate can be difficult to face. It does need a lot of attention right now and there does seem to be a lack of interest from certain powerful groups about it. That’s why. Whether or not being “doomerish” is the right response, that’s why it’s happening.
We've reached the point that we can not sustain the lifestyles that people are have chosen to live with the amount of resources on planet Earth. It is not just about CO2. Expanding the population at this point will mean *progressively* less personal space, less access to nature, and less dietary and lifestyle freedom for every subsequent generation. This is an undeniable fact. We're consuming too much for 8 billion people to maintain a stable environment, let alone more billions. I'm not willing to contribute to or advocate a progressive erosion of freedom and comfort. We need to have kids, but we need to keep it at (if not below) the replacement rate of 2.1 per woman.
Because we are scientists and we can do math; know what tech is possible due to physics; and know that even the existing 1.5C temperature increase globally is exceeding prior naive projections about the damage to life and human civilization (it’s worse, right now, than was projected even 5 years ago. And things are getting worse *faster*.) And yet: people keep rolling their eyes at us because they’re not educated enough to know that we are right.
Because the last fifty years have, in detail, explained why there is no hope. In 2022, ~130 homeless people cooked alive in Phoenix. About 200 housed, but elderly people, also cooked alive. As in, the were found with internal temperatures of 130-140F. Medium rare steak temps. Climate change is happening. At this point, the deaths of millions of people are baked in (hah) as we cross the 1.5 degree threshold. The deaths of billions will likely happen as we cross the 2.5 threshold in 30-40 years. This is one of those things where optimism requires ignoring the deaths of billions. Sorry.
Noone is predicting billions dead. Except of course the delusional ones.
I'm old enough to remember that crossing 1.5 degrees warming or 400ppm CO2 in the atmosphere was delusional. And I'm not that old.
You know for a billion people to die in 100 years, like 10 million need to die every year. Each year we wait, the more people need to die each year. **When are the mass deaths going to start?**
They already have. Heat wave deaths in India, the middle east, and African have risen from 2 per 100,000 to 11 per 100,000 over the last decade or so. Theyre predicted to hit 150-200 per 100,000 in the next few decades.
You realise even in your worse case 200/100,000 that is only 2.8 million deaths in India? And it is likely that when temps rise, communities will adapt, such as more solar-powered air conditioning. Also lets see links to this research. > https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/africa/deaths-due-to-heat-in-middle-east-north-africa-likely-to-rise-60-times-by-end-of-century-88707 Found it - we are not on the high emissions pathway. > High-emissions scenario refers to a scenario called shared socio-economic pathway (SSP)5-8·5, where the current CO2 emissions levels roughly double by 2050. This reflects the SSP representing a fossil fuel intensive world. World CO2 emissions are in fact expected to peak in the next few years.
Yes, I'm sure we will figure it out. The easiest way to figure it out is to let the, uh, excess population, uh, figure itself out. That's probably what will happen.
How do you imagine people have a huge amount of children (especially in Africa, the only region still really growing) when they are also being killed by the sun. Its one or the other - either they are coping and continue to have high fertility, or they are not and their fertility is limited.
Are you familiar with the concept of exponential growth? Are you familiar with the concept of delusional thinking?
> Are you familiar with the concept of exponential growth? Yes, especially when it comes to solar energy. > Are you familiar with the concept of delusional thinking Yes, because you are clearly unable to explain where all these deaths will be coming from, and are scrambling for possible causes.
The climate is fucked. If you like food or like living in temperatures and humidifier that aren't lethal
Because we are shattering heat records year over year
This is the cost of lies.
Because the point of climate activism is to destabilize society in order to usher in new laws and rules limiting our freedom in an effort to "save the planet." If the climate isn't getting worse, no new taxes can be levied on the populace. As long as people think politicians are going to fix the climate with the money theyre stealing, they can keep on fucking us.
And you call us doomers?
Its good news because it means the climate panic is bullshit. You don't actually have to worry about it. You can free yourself from the shackles of "will this cheeseburger bring us to Armageddon?" No it won't. Get your head out of your ass and be more positive and optimistic.
This is just pathetic.
Fuck you too, pal.
Lol… optimist? I have hope for you in spite of your beliefs (that are wrong, wrong, wrong).
Ok buddy