Was snorkeling this winter in some tropical waters in asia and noticed how dead everything looked, compared to the same place 20 years ago. When I asked about it, the locals said "It's all from the same El Niño in 2015. It all died the same year".
So there are vast areas of Coral that used to be fantastic in 2014 and which is dead since the 2015-16 season. It takes many decades to grow back if it ever does. And now we're about to have another.
I have been door knocking in a swing county in Wisconsin, and the first question we ask is, "what is the top issue you care about?" I've had one person say "the environment", and a couple have said, "what's happening in America right now." Almost everyone else answers "cost of living". So if you're waiting for things to change, you will be waiting a while.
Historically, something like 3.5 percent of the population need to be really engaged to make change happen, and the US isn't there right now, because we're all on our computers. The election coming up is an important one, so if you want to do something, start door knocking, become an election judge, sign up to be an observer at the polls, donate money. Indivisible is doing a lot of great, local, on-the-ground stuff, join your local chapter.
I think we gotta get people to see past the false dichotomy: part of their increased cost of living is due to climate change:
- your home insurance is more expensive b/c fire/hurricane/etc risk is worse in your state
- and you probably don't have flood insurance but the risks there are worse too
- your electricity bill is worse b/c you're using AC more b/c it's hotter
- climate change does have healthcare impacts, including expanded geographic range of a bunch of vector-borne illnesses, as well as acute issues during heat events. Even if you're not directly one of these patients, your health insurance costs will increase in part due to these risks.
- replacing key infrastructure which is damaged by extreme weather is expensive
- during extreme weather events, your ability to earn may be disrupted
- and every business you spend at also has increased costs due to the same factors, which they pass on to you
It turns out that multiple generations of emitting without paying attention to the externalities has created literal costs that we _all_ now bear, and these costs will continue to increase.
The reason so few people care about climate change is that so few people truly understand it. They can see the grocery and housing bills, but CO2 in the atmosphere is some sort of invisible bogeyman to them, even though it’s a catastrophe waiting to happen.
I did a bunch of door-knocking, for Obama and Clinton, and it didn't feel like I was doing any good. Everybody had long since made up their minds.
It's not like these are hard choices. Either you view the differences as stark and obvious, or you think that it's all the same (and I'm never going to persuade you otherwise). I don't think I garnered even a single vote, and quite a few expressed aggravation.
There are still swing voters and it is worth fighting for them! Also helpful to just remind people they need to vote. Typically, there is less turnout in midterms.
I’ve come to understand the inequality crisis (which manifests itself as a cost-of-living crisis for most people) as one of the root causes for the poly-crisis we are living through.
For climate change, I can totally understand how a household struggling to feed their kids will reject messaging of the form „oh and btw you also need to stop driving your car and heat your home lest the planet dies“. Of course they will revolt against that.
To me, fundamentally, the west MUST solve the inequality crisis first before we can ever hope of solving any of the other problems. People need slack to care about the environment, their neighbors, peace, etc.
And the other aspect of it is fairness - people rightfully look at the top, say „well the billionaires are jetting all around the globe and no one gives a fuck, why should I cut my holidays?“
We need to fix inequality first, and I project that most other issues we have today will magically resolve themselves.
This is quite sad, so I've felt a bit guilty for enjoying the summer we've had in upstate NY. Local farmers seem happy even though spring was a bit wetter than optimal. The corn is looking very good and the apple crop promises to be large.
I will not be surprised if we get a lot of snow this winter.
Your post made me think about something that has circled my mind for a while.
I grew up with an anxious mother and looking back on it what "mattered" to her (admittedly I don't think she can help it at all) is the feeling of anxiety itself. In other words whatever is happening she'll feel anxious about that. The "event" would just be an excuse to feel the way she was anyway going to feel.
You would think that a break for anxiety - a moment of peace and calm - would be welcome - but it's almost a crime. I've noticed this with other anxious people as well that they often don't want to not feel anxious because that feeling is somehow problematic. I think I used to be like that too.
Why am I sharing this? I think your post is such an honest take on something. You feel good about something you should absolutely feel good about (nice weather) but the zeitgeist is that you should feel anxious about it.
This squares away with something I noticed - separately from the science and mitigation, some people are only able to speak about climate in tones of anxiety - worst case predictions will definitely come through, everyone else is criminally stupid and will cause us to die, etc - and they are allergic to any other time of speaking about the issue. So for example any suggestion that there might be a milder path or that the estimates are a range etc is not met with relief but with vitriol.
I apologize again for using your post as a prompt to put this in words - but what I read in your words is the pressure to feel anxious about something that you just aren't anxious about (hi from Vermont btw same great weather here) and I think this "pressure to feel anxious/guilty" is a byproduct of those who have grabbed on to climate as an "event" that justifies their own anxious feelings. Again that's separate from what's actually going on - I am commenting on anxiety not climate.
I don't think that this is about climate change only. 24 hours news cycle created this constant anxiety, that was overly exacerbated by social media. I stopped following news some years ago and it's eye-opening how most crisis are completely irrelevant if you don't put yourself in that anxious state.
Yeah russia is very happy with global climate change for example. It doesn't change the underlying fact that long term it can be a brutal challenge for humanity and higher life on Earth.
Maybe something good will come out of it, even dumbest magas et al realizing this ain't right, but I am no longer having any hope for the dumber part of the spectrum of mankind, they seem to be only reachable and manageable via emotions on which you can't build anything long term stable.
Nothing life overall can't handle, it handled much worse situations (till sun scorches it all to the cinder in a +-billion year). Our current civilization, or mankind in general are much more finicky though.
With climate change, there will be some winners. Until there is not.
/edit. The meaning is, as the earth gets hotter, there will be winners, until it gets too hot for them too. Eventually it is too hot for all areas. But for a time, northern climates will be nice. Siberia could become a vast farm land, at same time there are no humans left at the equator. But that wont last either.
which is also totally fine, like unless you are running for president what can YOU as a single person do besides trying to do the right thing and living with the outcome of whatever whims of someone in charge will do.
no shit eh? This seems so wildly obvious that i don't really know how to read it.
the Pacific North West hasn't seen significant snow in years, instead of our daily fall rain we've been getting awful downpours that flood everything followed by weeks of dry. snowpacks gone, reservoirs are running dry, fires are more and more devastating every year.
when are we going to acknowledge this catastrophe that we are barreling towards?
i can only hope that things start improving. between this and government im gonna lose it
> when are we going to acknowledge this catastrophe that we are barreling towards?
Not to be a total downer, but probably never unless all the Republicans in the US suddenly disappear? Like, remember who the "we" is in your question. Remember what policies they stand for and what methods they employ.
It's crazy because while the US is one of the biggest emitters per capita, it's also home of the brightest minds and have by far the most efficient research ad development capacity. So US govt. denial is a huge hit in our already tiny chances to save the planet from hell in the next 50yrs.
Maybe step down from that ultra high horse a bit and smell the proverbial coffee - let say we do a public vote, I would trust say population of Switzerland 100000000x more than US one on any decent vote. Chinese will take over US in those aspects you write, if they already haven't done so.
US population voted trump, lets not forget that. We (rest of the world, >95% of mankind) will never forget that, and the fact that he still has >5% support tells everybody all they need to know about current US and what to expect from it in future. All that says more than any wishful thinking that feels good and fuzzy warm inside.
Considering the open shenanigans they’ve been trying on the voting systems, it’s reasonable to believe they have been doing shenanigans the public hadn’t known about. The machinery of vote suppression is well known to these Jim Crow loving fascists.
For decades the US has managed to be the most powerful economy in the world while taking in tons of these immigrants. Rejecting them is likely to have a negative impact. Xenophobia comes at a cost.
In that same time period we discovered global warming and ocean acidification as well as developed better ways of getting power.
The only downside we've discovered for having an accepting immigration policy is xenophobic backlash.
I don't know what point you're trying to make with that article. Less immigrants is causing hardship for their higher-ed system. How does that make your point?
For the last full year where we have data (2025), China made slightly less electricity from coal than the one before. Unlike Trump, China's authoritarian leadership seem to have their eye on the ball, China is on Earth so if we trash Earth's climate that's China's climate too. But also, more so than the gas which powers so much of Europe and America's electricity generators, coal is obviously poison, even the unburned coal looks like a movie prop to signify "Mysterious evil"
The toxic waste from a gas power plant is a transparent gas that readily mixes with the atmosphere. Does it cause problems? Yes. But compared to "And here's a mountain of radioactive and highly toxic coal ash that's produced by our coal power plant" it's rather subtle.
It's important to remember how radical a change to electricity generation is. Apart from just new plants, you've got to keep the existing grid going, create new distribution infrastructure, reorganise supply chains and labour forces, and you'll also have old infrastructure aging out. It's not ideal, but a long term plan may involve building new fossil fuel generators in the immediate term
> a long term plan may involve building new fossil fuel generators in the immediate term
In all but some very extreme cases this is unaffordable because the fossil fuel generator is expensive to build and yet is increasingly stranded destroying any further value.
Which is why it's a bummer that the last good communicator on the topic was probably Al Gore. Lots of great science that I'm happy to see done, but there's nobody out there doing a very good job of making people care.
I think Al Gore did more harm than good. He made himself the face of global warming and it helped spark a partisan backlash. There was a time when Republicans were not particularly skeptical of global warming. That shifted as climate change and Al Gore became more and more synonymous in the public consciousness.
Is that Al Gore's responsibility or is the Republican's responsibility of their policies being basically "anything that Democrats do is bad and therefore we oppose it"?
There isn't, right? Their gameplan is to state a need for evidence to delay, delay, delay while they and their backers enrich themselves at the cost of everyone else.
I think there's a certain cohort of people who, quite literally, just want to watch the world burn for whatever reason, be it greed or simply misanthropy. Unfortunately they're the ones that seem to grasp for the reins of power the world over. It'd probably help if we didn't allow boomers any power whatsoever, considering they're not the ones that have to live with the consequences of their decisions and they hardly seem wiser than most.
I'm thinking of the Ottomans capturing Constantinople. Very much paraphrasing: Since Ottomans had a massive cannon made with new technology. Since Constantinople hadn't hired the cannon inventor. Since Constantinople was poor. Since it was sacked by other christians in the crusades previously. So it was self afflicted by christians.
One can see the climate crisis like that. Only global accords work, otherwise self-limiting CO2 is mostly sacrificing one's economy while others do better. USA will block all international climate accords. Because the president and half of politicians acts like climate change is not real. Because a whole party thinks that. Because voters think that. Because the media tells them that. Because the media treats fossil company propaganda like science. Because it's so cheap for a handful of companies to corrupt media or politics.
What is the epistemology of the majority of voters... scandals, conspiracy theories, UFO:s. What shows on TV or on your feeds. I assume it's child's play for some non-western actor to cause constant infighting in the west, causing billions in economic losses or destruction of alliances. For whole planetary level issues, who's the opponent, working in the shadows? Maybe, after all, the aliens are already here...
Sometimes I feel the same, and then sometimes I wonder if that "moving away feeling" is the last of the old breed who are hanging onto power, maybe the next step after this massive wave of ultra right wing stupidity is something much brighter ?
The western world has more or less come together to reduce emissions. If you look at US for instance emissions are down in abs terms. Not relative to gdp or per capital but total emissions. This holds even if you adjust for trade.
The “problem” is there will always be independent upcoming nations like china and India that don’t really care to make sacrifices for collective goals. Their people are finally experiencing materially better lives and that comes w energy consumption.
This will ultimately be solved by markets and technology. People 100y ago were concerned about horse crap flooding the streets and what solved that wasn’t some agreement to limit horses but the invention of the automobile. Same will happen here and it’s already beginning to happen
I'm not sure China's emissions can be considered a separate thing when the rest of the world relies on them for plenty of manufacturing. The West is still a massive emitter per capita.
> The western world has more or less come together to reduce emissions. If you look at US for instance emissions are down in abs terms. Not relative to gdp or per capital but total emissions. This holds even if you adjust for trade.
It certainly is reduced per-production. China has double the carbon emission intensity of production that the USA has for example.
With climate change, it seems like poor people will die faster from 'climate poverty.' Science clearly points to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change, but certain groups frame it as just another natural cycle of the Earth.
When I was younger, I learned that science was something pure. But as I've grown older, it seems like science is really about how it's used—and who gets to use it.
Greenhouse gas emissions also coincide with the greatest poverty reduction period in human history.
Climate science is pretty close to a "pure" hard science. What's not pure are the sloppy geopolitical and socio-economic predictions built on top of it.
The truth is, the more a developed country is positioned at the consumer end, the more inescapable these problems become in our lives. Our world relies on outsourcing the production of manufactured and consumer goods to developing nations. But separate from that structural reality, vested interests refusing to acknowledge their faults is an entirely different issue.
Furthermore, I disagree with the radical ecological claims in the link. Humans might be developing technology that ends up destroying the public commons we call nature. However, I firmly believe there must be a better path to coexistence.
Decarbonization, reduction of produce (spending less), trash collection and reduction, less plastics… and hoping for the best that mankind wont mess it up more til 2050 - then the following 100 years (after 2050) shouldn’t be so hell as it seems so now…
Unfortunately we as people cannot see our older ones so future planning is not so easy…
Guns and ammo was the conclusion how to prepare for the future - in the book “10 Billion” by Stephen Emmott.
Law of conservation of energy can be applied here as well. So you can’t expect something else if you produce and consume more.
I don’t dispute capitalism and democracy.
Just trying to figure out what I (as person) really need.
Every weekend travelling by plane just to experience something else?
Ordering some stuff across the globe from Temu, Aliexpress just because it is cheap(er)?
Eating e.g. tuna because it is healthy that had to be transported around the globe?
Drinking wine from South Africa because I don’t like Californian? (Blind tests by Wine Spectator magazine confirm that even a sommelier doesn’t recognize cheap from expensive ones.)
Global export-import statistics is staggering… just a few: all metals, honey, fish, vegetables from Spain, avocados from Peru, almonds from California, cheaper than local milk transported across Europe , bananas from everywhere you can imagine… supply and demand - a lot of people have a much more money.
Vessel and plane trackers show so many vehicles moving around that I wonder how whales can handle this traffic.
There is chemical and industry that is real spin doctors.
(Almost) everyone wants to have house, car, cheap everything, travel everywhere. Those who can’t afford do everything to become rich.
Wealth is good. Plundering to get more money not so much. And mankind plunders like there is no tomorrow. All the CSR, circular economy etc is nice but brainwashing and stuff for distraction so people could feel better.
I do the capitalism part, or more specifically what form of capitalism because there is a vast range between "society should work for capitalism" and "capitalism should work for society".
I'd likely argue that on the whole capitalism in it's current form isn't working for society and the trend is towards that getting worse over time.
But we should. This is a taboo topic but pretending that these consequences are either disconnected from capitalism or that capitalism is some natural law of the universe that should never be challenged is, for lack of a better word, delusional.
These consequences are inherent to capitalism because people benefiting from it demand infinite growth and nobody is incentivized to care about the environment. People who care about it get outcompeted by those who don't in ruthless pursuit of "efficiency".
We can try to regulate it to the point that people wouldn't call it capitalism anymore but the nature of a system where the only incentive is maximizing profit will always have a natural tendency to harm the environment, so it should be disputed.
I personally don’t think either communism or capitalism will exist in 10 years from now. We are entering a period of total upheaval, where the very concept of a nation state has become obsolete. I expect global theocracy where robots and ai (incl nanobots) clean up the mess we made in this world, freedom becomes more limited, but abundance and security increases. There will be a renewed focus on community and human connection rather than the run away obsessive focus on materialism and innovation at a pace human beings cannot adapt to. Human labor, cognition, natural resources and policy have always been the elements that dictate whether a nation can develop into a first world country. Labor and cognition are respectively solved by robots and AI.
You don't have to accept it but seems like that's what is happening. Humans just don't seem to have the capacity for long term collective action against individual interests. Ultimately that may be what the Great Filter for us ends up being, maybe it'd have been different were we a hive mind.
Sure we do. Remember when the ozone layer had a massive hole in because of CFC use in refrigerators? It didn't fix itself out of some natural law of the world. Regulators in democratic societies restricted the use of CFCs and then engineers worked on alternatives due to the regulations.
We should also not forget that a lot of effort has gone into decarbonising, and there's plenty of work going on in international cooperation, engineering, urban planning, education etc. whose work has already decreased the potential warming of the planet. We're still on a very bad trajectory that still needs more work, and there are moneyed organisations trying to stop the transition, but we shouldn't be so doomer to believe that nothing is happening.
Regulators were able to restrict CFC use because the patents had expired and the manufacturers were ready to move on to the next compounds they’d already developed anyway.
That was pre social media and the rise of nation state level actors pushing propaganda at scale. The same thing today would be impossible as we already see with climate change suppression efforts.
Or: humans do have that capacity, but our system is explicitly set up to give the most power to the greediest among us, and these greedy people in power don't have that capacity.
On no other issue would this type of wishful thinking be accepted.
If I pour some water in a bucket and come back to find it's all leaked out, and do this every day for all of human history and always get the same result, I don't conclude the water wouldn't leak if it just tried a little harder.
It's ridiculous to imply that throughout human history, there has never been any long term collective action against individual interests. There are so many examples of such collective actions (especially on the local level), but even globally there are obvious cases like the ozone issue.
Of course, and I'm not saying that. Coordinated action is so stupidly effective that it barely even matters what you do, and long as you all do it together.
That doesn't mean it's possible for every problem. There's always a coordination cost. The larger your per-person cost times the number of people you need, the more unlikely the coordinated action is to happen. Spontaneous coordination is an oxymoron and improbable by definition. It's a situation where the system doesn't do what's energetically favored and instead does something else that isn't.
Ascribing agency to systems is a human bias. Ascribing it to groups of agents is both human nature and the fallacy of composition. Blaming individuals instead of looking at the system and the context is both human nature and the fundamental attribution error. This is one of many places where the bucket leaks.
Currently some groups with low coordination costs (and so high leverage) are coordinating to increase coordination costs for the groups that oppose them, using tactics that are independently high-leverage, multiplying their effect so much that they can make the opposition's costs effectively unbounded. Human nature makes the opposition wilfully, aggressively deny this and insist their costs are low and people are just bad and lazy. (Somehow, everybody being bad and lazy all at once does not reflect on human nature.)
The argument about coordination costs is more or less uncontroversial when projected into any other subject. It's only controversial here because of human nature. It's another leak.
Your opposition's agency is concentrated and yours is dilute. Human nature tilts the playing field, diluting yours and concentrating theirs. Accept this and adjust your strategy, or lose.
Your initial comment does literally say that collective action against individual interests has never happened. You might not have meant that, but that is the explicit implication of your bucket example "always get[ting] the same result".
But it seems you actually agree with my initial statement? Or what are you arguing against? Because in my mind, altering our social and political systems is the only way to adjust our strategy.
I am saying human nature is the reason "just coordinate" has not resolved this problem, and denying human nature keeps us from coordinating on this problem doesn't help.
Ugh, this is like my catchphrase now, but: "If everybody just" is a description of a problem, not a solution. Specifically a problem that exists because they haven't justed and will never just, no matter what could happen if they just.
Coordination metaproblems where coordination problems that exist cannot be solved because of human nature are a consequence of human nature interacting with the laws of nature.
But I'm not saying to "just coordinate", and I'm not denying any part of human nature? It feels like you're reading things into my initial statement that I neither wrote nor see when reading it again.
> humans do have that capacity, but our system is explicitly set up to give the most power to the greediest among us
My argument is that we don't have that capacity. The system that we have is what we have because it's what has self-assembled and would self-assemble every time if we ran it again.
I may be wrong, but that's what I'm claiming.
If we want a system different than what self-assembles, we should first admit what self-assembles, and admit it's not because of individuals not doing their part or whatever. The system is the way it is because the natural laws it follows lead it to that state. This is where the whole idea of coordination as a simple answer fails.
People won't spontaneously all accept an unappealing, morally unpleasant, complicated explanation of why things aren't better when a simple, pleasant, satisfying, even righteous explanation is available and fits their preexisting worldview.
I am tired of the moralizing arguments[0] from people sabotaging their own causes, blaming people who are doing something that might work instead of sabotaging harder. If I misunderstood and that's not you, I'm sorry.
I should have been less snippy at the top either way.
> The system that we have is what we have because it's what has self-assembled and would self-assemble every time if we ran it again.
But different societies have developed different systems over the course of human history, no? You're probably looking at the "system" from a different perspective than I do, so I'd appreciate if you could describe this in more detail!
> My argument is that we don't have that capacity.
If humans don't have the capacity for long term collective action against individual interests, there is literally no point in trying any other system.
> If we want a system different than what self-assembles, we should first admit what self-assembles, and admit it's not because of individuals not doing their part or whatever. The system is the way it is because the natural laws it follows lead it to that state.
I really think you're reading positions into my initial comment that I've never stated, because this seems tangential to my thesis.
---
Edit: just saw the part starting at "I am tired of the moralizing arguments", not sure if I overlooked it or you edited. Either way I get your frustrations and agree that simplistic answers don't help. My initial comment was not meant as "it would be so simple if everyone just did X", but as a rebuttal to the idea that humans are incapable of long term collective action against individual interests. If humans fundamentally don't have the ability there'd be no point in trying, but I believe that we do have the capacity and should try, just as I understand you do too.
> If I misunderstood and that's not you, I'm sorry.
> I should have been less snippy at the top either way.
No worries, and thanks. I appreciate that you've explained your thoughts further!
Which means those greedy people don’t have power, but the illusion of power, and the positions at the top are gatekept by intermediaries that serve the one who actually holds the power.
Even if we assume hierarchy to be part of human nature, that doesn't imply that every system must automatically assign the most power to the greediest humans.
Could you explain how this holds for monarchies? The succession of power was mostly based on blood relations and frequently brought along major changes to existing power dynamics. Meanwhile the majority of the population was barred from gaining any real economical or political power, aside from very few cases.
As far as I can see, greed isn't automatically the biggest determining factor in such systems. It can be, but I'd need to read convincing studies by historians to believe you on this.
The monarch who's greediest gets to keep the power, otherwise they'd be overthrown or lessened by their nobles. See the shogun taking power away from the emperor; King John signed Magna Carta ceding more power to his nobles under threat of force; various executions of monarchs over civilizational history.
That is to say, it's not always a monarch versus their general, oftentimes peasant, populace, it's rich and powerful people against other rich and powerful people.
No, the greediest monarch is the most likely to get assassinated, because they take too much from their nobles and everyone else. All the money in the world doesn't help a noble who is so greedy they piss off all their potential allies, or all their peasants. And if you were a noble who overthrew a monarch - with familial ties to enough influential nobles - because someone else has more money, you'd still be dead in all likelihood. And so on and so on.
All these relationships were incredibly important to the power dynamics, and you don't get to redefine "greedy" as "greedy, except those who are too greedy to properly play the political game". Greedy monarchs didn't last, and the greediest non-monarch-rich were unlikely to have enough allies to become dangerous.
I'm talking about generally greedy, all else equal, where one who lusts for power is more likely to obtain it than one who does not, not necessarily specifically the greediest which I agree with you others will tire of quickly.
Leadership by the Tokugawa shogunate saved the forests of Japan. Leadership saved the ozone layer. Leadership can save the climate, although civil war(s) maybe necessary to overthrow corrupt elites who put us all at risk.
Earth has an immune system called the atlantic meridian overturning cycle. When meltwater dillutes the salt concentration too much, it collapses and creates an ice age. Short term catastrophe, long term it will be OK.
I think when people talk about stuff like this everyone realizes that the Earth itself will be a-okay in the long run (or hell even the short run), it's more that humans as a species are the ones that are going to go kaboom.
We saw during the COVID lockdowns that a few months of no cars and drastically reduced oil usage in general how much things improved for nature in general, in fact. Earth will recover very quickly once we're gone, the question is more how do we avoid the "humans gone" part because we presumably want to keep the human species going.
We're already in an ice age (there is ice at the poles). I suspect you mean this would make Europe cooler, but do nothing to reverse the trend of increasing global mean surface (land + ocean) temperature.
Correct. This is all planned. Colossal Biosciences has already brought back the Dire Wolf and is working on the woolly mammoth. It is no coincidence that these are younger dryas animals, because they are expecting these animals to thrive in the near future glacial period. Don’t feel guilt tripped into causing this collapse, you have no control over it even though you can do some marginal things to reduce your individual footprint. Whatever needs to happen, will happen. AMOC collapse greens the desert. It also happens to be the region that dictates how affordable fossil fuels are and thus how much of the stuff is burned due to OPEC. If you are religiously inclined, that is meaningful.
The thesis: Climate change is strengthening El Niño clearly uses the word "is".
Everything else is evidence, both for and against the thesis subject to interpretation.
Here it's "Something we can see in coral records correlates with what we'd expect given the thesis"
The study doesn’t prove climate change is the culprit. But because the intensification coincides with rapid postindustrial warming and exceeds El Niño’s natural variability, the authors argue that human-driven warming is the leading explanation.
These observed correlations may be directly or indirectly linked to the thesis, or (and this does happen) they may be an unrelated coincidence.
As the weight of evidence in favour of a thesis builds, so does the confidence in the thesis itself.
In this case, even the authors seems to agree that the finding is not "consensus-level" yet.
That being said, consensus would not necessarily settle the thing.
Even when the worldwide scientific community reaches a consensus and accepts using plain language (as in "It _is_ unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land" [1]), you still have a number of politicians begging to differ. [2]
It would be easier to support making changes to our lifestyles to protect our future if the climate change alarmists weren't so bad about making outlandish predictions of doom.
Was snorkeling this winter in some tropical waters in asia and noticed how dead everything looked, compared to the same place 20 years ago. When I asked about it, the locals said "It's all from the same El Niño in 2015. It all died the same year".
So there are vast areas of Coral that used to be fantastic in 2014 and which is dead since the 2015-16 season. It takes many decades to grow back if it ever does. And now we're about to have another.
I have been door knocking in a swing county in Wisconsin, and the first question we ask is, "what is the top issue you care about?" I've had one person say "the environment", and a couple have said, "what's happening in America right now." Almost everyone else answers "cost of living". So if you're waiting for things to change, you will be waiting a while.
Historically, something like 3.5 percent of the population need to be really engaged to make change happen, and the US isn't there right now, because we're all on our computers. The election coming up is an important one, so if you want to do something, start door knocking, become an election judge, sign up to be an observer at the polls, donate money. Indivisible is doing a lot of great, local, on-the-ground stuff, join your local chapter.
I think we gotta get people to see past the false dichotomy: part of their increased cost of living is due to climate change:
- your home insurance is more expensive b/c fire/hurricane/etc risk is worse in your state
- your electricity bill is worse b/c you're using AC more b/c it's hotter- climate change does have healthcare impacts, including expanded geographic range of a bunch of vector-borne illnesses, as well as acute issues during heat events. Even if you're not directly one of these patients, your health insurance costs will increase in part due to these risks.
- replacing key infrastructure which is damaged by extreme weather is expensive
- during extreme weather events, your ability to earn may be disrupted
- and every business you spend at also has increased costs due to the same factors, which they pass on to you
It turns out that multiple generations of emitting without paying attention to the externalities has created literal costs that we _all_ now bear, and these costs will continue to increase.
The reason so few people care about climate change is that so few people truly understand it. They can see the grocery and housing bills, but CO2 in the atmosphere is some sort of invisible bogeyman to them, even though it’s a catastrophe waiting to happen.
Lots of people understand the problem and even then it's hard to get them to care because the personal harm vs utility balance is so uneven.
If I drive my car around today I contribute an infinitesimally small amount to the climate change problem while enjoying tremendous utility.
I did a bunch of door-knocking, for Obama and Clinton, and it didn't feel like I was doing any good. Everybody had long since made up their minds.
It's not like these are hard choices. Either you view the differences as stark and obvious, or you think that it's all the same (and I'm never going to persuade you otherwise). I don't think I garnered even a single vote, and quite a few expressed aggravation.
Is your experience different?
There are still swing voters and it is worth fighting for them! Also helpful to just remind people they need to vote. Typically, there is less turnout in midterms.
I’ve come to understand the inequality crisis (which manifests itself as a cost-of-living crisis for most people) as one of the root causes for the poly-crisis we are living through.
For climate change, I can totally understand how a household struggling to feed their kids will reject messaging of the form „oh and btw you also need to stop driving your car and heat your home lest the planet dies“. Of course they will revolt against that.
To me, fundamentally, the west MUST solve the inequality crisis first before we can ever hope of solving any of the other problems. People need slack to care about the environment, their neighbors, peace, etc.
And the other aspect of it is fairness - people rightfully look at the top, say „well the billionaires are jetting all around the globe and no one gives a fuck, why should I cut my holidays?“
We need to fix inequality first, and I project that most other issues we have today will magically resolve themselves.
This is quite sad, so I've felt a bit guilty for enjoying the summer we've had in upstate NY. Local farmers seem happy even though spring was a bit wetter than optimal. The corn is looking very good and the apple crop promises to be large.
I will not be surprised if we get a lot of snow this winter.
Your post made me think about something that has circled my mind for a while.
I grew up with an anxious mother and looking back on it what "mattered" to her (admittedly I don't think she can help it at all) is the feeling of anxiety itself. In other words whatever is happening she'll feel anxious about that. The "event" would just be an excuse to feel the way she was anyway going to feel.
You would think that a break for anxiety - a moment of peace and calm - would be welcome - but it's almost a crime. I've noticed this with other anxious people as well that they often don't want to not feel anxious because that feeling is somehow problematic. I think I used to be like that too.
Why am I sharing this? I think your post is such an honest take on something. You feel good about something you should absolutely feel good about (nice weather) but the zeitgeist is that you should feel anxious about it.
This squares away with something I noticed - separately from the science and mitigation, some people are only able to speak about climate in tones of anxiety - worst case predictions will definitely come through, everyone else is criminally stupid and will cause us to die, etc - and they are allergic to any other time of speaking about the issue. So for example any suggestion that there might be a milder path or that the estimates are a range etc is not met with relief but with vitriol.
I apologize again for using your post as a prompt to put this in words - but what I read in your words is the pressure to feel anxious about something that you just aren't anxious about (hi from Vermont btw same great weather here) and I think this "pressure to feel anxious/guilty" is a byproduct of those who have grabbed on to climate as an "event" that justifies their own anxious feelings. Again that's separate from what's actually going on - I am commenting on anxiety not climate.
I don't think that this is about climate change only. 24 hours news cycle created this constant anxiety, that was overly exacerbated by social media. I stopped following news some years ago and it's eye-opening how most crisis are completely irrelevant if you don't put yourself in that anxious state.
Completely agree! I also find Gell Mann amnesia at play - obsessively following the news does not mean you're "well informed".
Beautiful comment. Thank you for sharing
Yeah russia is very happy with global climate change for example. It doesn't change the underlying fact that long term it can be a brutal challenge for humanity and higher life on Earth.
Maybe something good will come out of it, even dumbest magas et al realizing this ain't right, but I am no longer having any hope for the dumber part of the spectrum of mankind, they seem to be only reachable and manageable via emotions on which you can't build anything long term stable.
Nothing life overall can't handle, it handled much worse situations (till sun scorches it all to the cinder in a +-billion year). Our current civilization, or mankind in general are much more finicky though.
With climate change, there will be some winners. Until there is not.
/edit. The meaning is, as the earth gets hotter, there will be winners, until it gets too hot for them too. Eventually it is too hot for all areas. But for a time, northern climates will be nice. Siberia could become a vast farm land, at same time there are no humans left at the equator. But that wont last either.
To be clear, I wasn't trying to sugarcoat climate change, just expressing some (mild) guilt.
which is also totally fine, like unless you are running for president what can YOU as a single person do besides trying to do the right thing and living with the outcome of whatever whims of someone in charge will do.
no shit eh? This seems so wildly obvious that i don't really know how to read it. the Pacific North West hasn't seen significant snow in years, instead of our daily fall rain we've been getting awful downpours that flood everything followed by weeks of dry. snowpacks gone, reservoirs are running dry, fires are more and more devastating every year.
when are we going to acknowledge this catastrophe that we are barreling towards?
i can only hope that things start improving. between this and government im gonna lose it
> when are we going to acknowledge this catastrophe that we are barreling towards?
Not to be a total downer, but probably never unless all the Republicans in the US suddenly disappear? Like, remember who the "we" is in your question. Remember what policies they stand for and what methods they employ.
It's crazy because while the US is one of the biggest emitters per capita, it's also home of the brightest minds and have by far the most efficient research ad development capacity. So US govt. denial is a huge hit in our already tiny chances to save the planet from hell in the next 50yrs.
The brightest minds in STEM are often loudly, proudly, confidently wrong on every single thing except their narrow specialty in STEM.
Many of the people still rejecting climate change are scientists and engineers whose egos make them obligate contrarians.
Maybe step down from that ultra high horse a bit and smell the proverbial coffee - let say we do a public vote, I would trust say population of Switzerland 100000000x more than US one on any decent vote. Chinese will take over US in those aspects you write, if they already haven't done so.
US population voted trump, lets not forget that. We (rest of the world, >95% of mankind) will never forget that, and the fact that he still has >5% support tells everybody all they need to know about current US and what to expect from it in future. All that says more than any wishful thinking that feels good and fuzzy warm inside.
Considering the open shenanigans they’ve been trying on the voting systems, it’s reasonable to believe they have been doing shenanigans the public hadn’t known about. The machinery of vote suppression is well known to these Jim Crow loving fascists.
A lot of the "brightest minds" are, and have always been, immigrants.
Guess who is the main target of a purge in the US now.
Poor economic refugees from unstable countries.
The same immigrants that Europe, Canada are now rejecting and Asia never even allowed.
Which is why foreign student visas are being handed out in greater numbers, right? Right? Oh.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/21/international-student-enroll...
For decades the US has managed to be the most powerful economy in the world while taking in tons of these immigrants. Rejecting them is likely to have a negative impact. Xenophobia comes at a cost.
Wow. Powerful statement.
Now, for those same decades was the US also using gas powered cars and coal fired plants? Sounds like we need to continue using those too!
Also, wait till you see how badly the Canadian economy is poised to collapse: https://www.universityworldnews.com/post-mobile.php?story=20...
In that same time period we discovered global warming and ocean acidification as well as developed better ways of getting power.
The only downside we've discovered for having an accepting immigration policy is xenophobic backlash.
I don't know what point you're trying to make with that article. Less immigrants is causing hardship for their higher-ed system. How does that make your point?
I just realized: isn't "rags to riches" THE defining myth of the USA? The very thing that separates it from every other "shit" country on Earth?
>Poor economic refugees from unstable countries.
Like... Almost every single European during the XIXth and XXth century?
You think the Germans and Italians and whatnot were all educated middle-class who moved to the US because it seemed "fun"?
Is this still true?
China seems to be winning now. And lead in solar, and robots.
China seems to be winning in brightest minds by what metric?
>And lead in solar, and robots.
And new coal, don't forget about that.
China reduced the CO2/kWh of electricity by 33% in the last 20 years, while increasing output by 320%.
The U.S. reduced it by 37%, while increasing output by ... 12%.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?tab=line&...
Also talking into considering the insane wealth disparity and the current rate of change, "coal" is just ragebait.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?tab=line&...
> And new coal, don't forget about that.
For the last full year where we have data (2025), China made slightly less electricity from coal than the one before. Unlike Trump, China's authoritarian leadership seem to have their eye on the ball, China is on Earth so if we trash Earth's climate that's China's climate too. But also, more so than the gas which powers so much of Europe and America's electricity generators, coal is obviously poison, even the unburned coal looks like a movie prop to signify "Mysterious evil"
The toxic waste from a gas power plant is a transparent gas that readily mixes with the atmosphere. Does it cause problems? Yes. But compared to "And here's a mountain of radioactive and highly toxic coal ash that's produced by our coal power plant" it's rather subtle.
It's important to remember how radical a change to electricity generation is. Apart from just new plants, you've got to keep the existing grid going, create new distribution infrastructure, reorganise supply chains and labour forces, and you'll also have old infrastructure aging out. It's not ideal, but a long term plan may involve building new fossil fuel generators in the immediate term
> a long term plan may involve building new fossil fuel generators in the immediate term
In all but some very extreme cases this is unaffordable because the fossil fuel generator is expensive to build and yet is increasingly stranded destroying any further value.
Do your own research. There are metrics. I'm done explaining to Republicans what they could just as easily go read in a book themselves.
This.
I'm appalled that there still seems to be the need to find _evidence_ for this.
Those people are not convinced by evidence.
Which is why it's a bummer that the last good communicator on the topic was probably Al Gore. Lots of great science that I'm happy to see done, but there's nobody out there doing a very good job of making people care.
I think Al Gore did more harm than good. He made himself the face of global warming and it helped spark a partisan backlash. There was a time when Republicans were not particularly skeptical of global warming. That shifted as climate change and Al Gore became more and more synonymous in the public consciousness.
I thought Gore's road show was pretty good. It certainly changed how I thought about climate change, but I can understand your argument.
Probably the last person who was able to effect big positive change was Nixon.
Is that Al Gore's responsibility or is the Republican's responsibility of their policies being basically "anything that Democrats do is bad and therefore we oppose it"?
There isn't, right? Their gameplan is to state a need for evidence to delay, delay, delay while they and their backers enrich themselves at the cost of everyone else.
I think there's a certain cohort of people who, quite literally, just want to watch the world burn for whatever reason, be it greed or simply misanthropy. Unfortunately they're the ones that seem to grasp for the reins of power the world over. It'd probably help if we didn't allow boomers any power whatsoever, considering they're not the ones that have to live with the consequences of their decisions and they hardly seem wiser than most.
Each day I'm thinking, global politics and unification would solve this.
And yet, every day, I see us getting removed further and further away from it.
They would, but it is not going to happen. We need solutions that don't count on that.
I'm thinking of the Ottomans capturing Constantinople. Very much paraphrasing: Since Ottomans had a massive cannon made with new technology. Since Constantinople hadn't hired the cannon inventor. Since Constantinople was poor. Since it was sacked by other christians in the crusades previously. So it was self afflicted by christians.
One can see the climate crisis like that. Only global accords work, otherwise self-limiting CO2 is mostly sacrificing one's economy while others do better. USA will block all international climate accords. Because the president and half of politicians acts like climate change is not real. Because a whole party thinks that. Because voters think that. Because the media tells them that. Because the media treats fossil company propaganda like science. Because it's so cheap for a handful of companies to corrupt media or politics.
What is the epistemology of the majority of voters... scandals, conspiracy theories, UFO:s. What shows on TV or on your feeds. I assume it's child's play for some non-western actor to cause constant infighting in the west, causing billions in economic losses or destruction of alliances. For whole planetary level issues, who's the opponent, working in the shadows? Maybe, after all, the aliens are already here...
nice joke. yes they will solve their private jet fuel and private yacht fuel cost, they will solve all
Sometimes I feel the same, and then sometimes I wonder if that "moving away feeling" is the last of the old breed who are hanging onto power, maybe the next step after this massive wave of ultra right wing stupidity is something much brighter ?
Trump's working on global unification as we speak. ;)
Ah yes no way global unification could go wrong. Send in the thunder warriors.
The western world has more or less come together to reduce emissions. If you look at US for instance emissions are down in abs terms. Not relative to gdp or per capital but total emissions. This holds even if you adjust for trade.
The “problem” is there will always be independent upcoming nations like china and India that don’t really care to make sacrifices for collective goals. Their people are finally experiencing materially better lives and that comes w energy consumption.
This will ultimately be solved by markets and technology. People 100y ago were concerned about horse crap flooding the streets and what solved that wasn’t some agreement to limit horses but the invention of the automobile. Same will happen here and it’s already beginning to happen
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-states
I'm not sure China's emissions can be considered a separate thing when the rest of the world relies on them for plenty of manufacturing. The West is still a massive emitter per capita.
> The western world has more or less come together to reduce emissions. If you look at US for instance emissions are down in abs terms. Not relative to gdp or per capital but total emissions. This holds even if you adjust for trade.
It certainly is reduced per-production. China has double the carbon emission intensity of production that the USA has for example.
With climate change, it seems like poor people will die faster from 'climate poverty.' Science clearly points to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change, but certain groups frame it as just another natural cycle of the Earth.
When I was younger, I learned that science was something pure. But as I've grown older, it seems like science is really about how it's used—and who gets to use it.
Greenhouse gas emissions also coincide with the greatest poverty reduction period in human history.
Climate science is pretty close to a "pure" hard science. What's not pure are the sloppy geopolitical and socio-economic predictions built on top of it.
Do Greenhouse gases also coincide with the greatest poverty production prior to that? The human population exploded after the industrial revolution.
https://philofecon.substack.com/p/notes-towards-a-definition...
https://publish.uwo.ca/~jbell/univ.pdf
Otoh I think Grothendieck's point would be stronger today if his tribe of scientists are expanded or even replaced by "programmers"
Fossil fuelled Data Centers might soon surpass shipping as CO2 producer, given that shipping might even be peaking
Hackerism as the New Universal Church? Then you can hope to go to a (emotionally) warm place on Sunday, everyday
Where the categorical imperative would be: if people want it, build it..
The truth is, the more a developed country is positioned at the consumer end, the more inescapable these problems become in our lives. Our world relies on outsourcing the production of manufactured and consumer goods to developing nations. But separate from that structural reality, vested interests refusing to acknowledge their faults is an entirely different issue.
Furthermore, I disagree with the radical ecological claims in the link. Humans might be developing technology that ends up destroying the public commons we call nature. However, I firmly believe there must be a better path to coexistence.
Decarbonization, reduction of produce (spending less), trash collection and reduction, less plastics… and hoping for the best that mankind wont mess it up more til 2050 - then the following 100 years (after 2050) shouldn’t be so hell as it seems so now…
Unfortunately we as people cannot see our older ones so future planning is not so easy…
Guns and ammo was the conclusion how to prepare for the future - in the book “10 Billion” by Stephen Emmott.
And the least popular one: reduce animal agriculture and meat consumption.
I’m pretty sure nonviolence is the way for the future. There is always someone with a bigger gun.
It's pointless to look for solutions that's against human nature.
'Against human nature' is where every intervention begins! Otherwise you wouldn't bother intervening.
Law of conservation of energy can be applied here as well. So you can’t expect something else if you produce and consume more.
I don’t dispute capitalism and democracy.
Just trying to figure out what I (as person) really need.
Every weekend travelling by plane just to experience something else?
Ordering some stuff across the globe from Temu, Aliexpress just because it is cheap(er)?
Eating e.g. tuna because it is healthy that had to be transported around the globe?
Drinking wine from South Africa because I don’t like Californian? (Blind tests by Wine Spectator magazine confirm that even a sommelier doesn’t recognize cheap from expensive ones.)
Global export-import statistics is staggering… just a few: all metals, honey, fish, vegetables from Spain, avocados from Peru, almonds from California, cheaper than local milk transported across Europe , bananas from everywhere you can imagine… supply and demand - a lot of people have a much more money.
Vessel and plane trackers show so many vehicles moving around that I wonder how whales can handle this traffic.
There is chemical and industry that is real spin doctors.
(Almost) everyone wants to have house, car, cheap everything, travel everywhere. Those who can’t afford do everything to become rich.
Wealth is good. Plundering to get more money not so much. And mankind plunders like there is no tomorrow. All the CSR, circular economy etc is nice but brainwashing and stuff for distraction so people could feel better.
> I don’t dispute capitalism and democracy.
I do the capitalism part, or more specifically what form of capitalism because there is a vast range between "society should work for capitalism" and "capitalism should work for society".
I'd likely argue that on the whole capitalism in it's current form isn't working for society and the trend is towards that getting worse over time.
> I don’t dispute capitalism
But we should. This is a taboo topic but pretending that these consequences are either disconnected from capitalism or that capitalism is some natural law of the universe that should never be challenged is, for lack of a better word, delusional.
These consequences are inherent to capitalism because people benefiting from it demand infinite growth and nobody is incentivized to care about the environment. People who care about it get outcompeted by those who don't in ruthless pursuit of "efficiency".
We can try to regulate it to the point that people wouldn't call it capitalism anymore but the nature of a system where the only incentive is maximizing profit will always have a natural tendency to harm the environment, so it should be disputed.
I personally don’t think either communism or capitalism will exist in 10 years from now. We are entering a period of total upheaval, where the very concept of a nation state has become obsolete. I expect global theocracy where robots and ai (incl nanobots) clean up the mess we made in this world, freedom becomes more limited, but abundance and security increases. There will be a renewed focus on community and human connection rather than the run away obsessive focus on materialism and innovation at a pace human beings cannot adapt to. Human labor, cognition, natural resources and policy have always been the elements that dictate whether a nation can develop into a first world country. Labor and cognition are respectively solved by robots and AI.
Yes, in ideal world what you're describing would happen. But imho the reality will be much more complicated to describe.
Excerpts from a response to "human nature" arguments (source: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZDCXpEsSZZ)
>>>
Arguments based on human nature are nearly always awful.
...
It's human nature to care about yourself, but it's also human nature to care about others.
Different norms develop around different aspects of our nature.
You can't then use human nature to explain why it's okay to violently enforce social norms related to property,
but an unworkable injustice to violently enforce social norms related to charity.
...
While it might be human nature to consider the wood I chop mine, and the wood you chop yours,
it's probably not human nature to consider the wood as belonging to an entirely made-up legal entity
that neither planted the trees nor cut them down.
The fact of this weird arrangement, which goes against the self-interest of every woodsman,
does seem natural to a lot of people, points to the core of the problem with appeals to human nature.
...
The human nature being appealed to is shaped by the system it's being used to defend.
So the human nature is to kill ourselves or otherwise let ourselves die out? Sorry dude, I don't want to accept that - I don't even believe it.
You don't have to accept it but seems like that's what is happening. Humans just don't seem to have the capacity for long term collective action against individual interests. Ultimately that may be what the Great Filter for us ends up being, maybe it'd have been different were we a hive mind.
Sure we do. Remember when the ozone layer had a massive hole in because of CFC use in refrigerators? It didn't fix itself out of some natural law of the world. Regulators in democratic societies restricted the use of CFCs and then engineers worked on alternatives due to the regulations.
We should also not forget that a lot of effort has gone into decarbonising, and there's plenty of work going on in international cooperation, engineering, urban planning, education etc. whose work has already decreased the potential warming of the planet. We're still on a very bad trajectory that still needs more work, and there are moneyed organisations trying to stop the transition, but we shouldn't be so doomer to believe that nothing is happening.
Regulators were able to restrict CFC use because the patents had expired and the manufacturers were ready to move on to the next compounds they’d already developed anyway.
That was pre social media and the rise of nation state level actors pushing propaganda at scale. The same thing today would be impossible as we already see with climate change suppression efforts.
Or: humans do have that capacity, but our system is explicitly set up to give the most power to the greediest among us, and these greedy people in power don't have that capacity.
On no other issue would this type of wishful thinking be accepted.
If I pour some water in a bucket and come back to find it's all leaked out, and do this every day for all of human history and always get the same result, I don't conclude the water wouldn't leak if it just tried a little harder.
There's a hole in the bucket.
It's ridiculous to imply that throughout human history, there has never been any long term collective action against individual interests. There are so many examples of such collective actions (especially on the local level), but even globally there are obvious cases like the ozone issue.
Of course, and I'm not saying that. Coordinated action is so stupidly effective that it barely even matters what you do, and long as you all do it together.
That doesn't mean it's possible for every problem. There's always a coordination cost. The larger your per-person cost times the number of people you need, the more unlikely the coordinated action is to happen. Spontaneous coordination is an oxymoron and improbable by definition. It's a situation where the system doesn't do what's energetically favored and instead does something else that isn't.
Ascribing agency to systems is a human bias. Ascribing it to groups of agents is both human nature and the fallacy of composition. Blaming individuals instead of looking at the system and the context is both human nature and the fundamental attribution error. This is one of many places where the bucket leaks.
Currently some groups with low coordination costs (and so high leverage) are coordinating to increase coordination costs for the groups that oppose them, using tactics that are independently high-leverage, multiplying their effect so much that they can make the opposition's costs effectively unbounded. Human nature makes the opposition wilfully, aggressively deny this and insist their costs are low and people are just bad and lazy. (Somehow, everybody being bad and lazy all at once does not reflect on human nature.)
The argument about coordination costs is more or less uncontroversial when projected into any other subject. It's only controversial here because of human nature. It's another leak.
Your opposition's agency is concentrated and yours is dilute. Human nature tilts the playing field, diluting yours and concentrating theirs. Accept this and adjust your strategy, or lose.
Your initial comment does literally say that collective action against individual interests has never happened. You might not have meant that, but that is the explicit implication of your bucket example "always get[ting] the same result".
But it seems you actually agree with my initial statement? Or what are you arguing against? Because in my mind, altering our social and political systems is the only way to adjust our strategy.
I am saying human nature is the reason "just coordinate" has not resolved this problem, and denying human nature keeps us from coordinating on this problem doesn't help.
Ugh, this is like my catchphrase now, but: "If everybody just" is a description of a problem, not a solution. Specifically a problem that exists because they haven't justed and will never just, no matter what could happen if they just.
Coordination metaproblems where coordination problems that exist cannot be solved because of human nature are a consequence of human nature interacting with the laws of nature.
But I'm not saying to "just coordinate", and I'm not denying any part of human nature? It feels like you're reading things into my initial statement that I neither wrote nor see when reading it again.
> humans do have that capacity, but our system is explicitly set up to give the most power to the greediest among us
My argument is that we don't have that capacity. The system that we have is what we have because it's what has self-assembled and would self-assemble every time if we ran it again.
I may be wrong, but that's what I'm claiming.
If we want a system different than what self-assembles, we should first admit what self-assembles, and admit it's not because of individuals not doing their part or whatever. The system is the way it is because the natural laws it follows lead it to that state. This is where the whole idea of coordination as a simple answer fails.
People won't spontaneously all accept an unappealing, morally unpleasant, complicated explanation of why things aren't better when a simple, pleasant, satisfying, even righteous explanation is available and fits their preexisting worldview.
I am tired of the moralizing arguments[0] from people sabotaging their own causes, blaming people who are doing something that might work instead of sabotaging harder. If I misunderstood and that's not you, I'm sorry.
I should have been less snippy at the top either way.
---
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42560779
> The system that we have is what we have because it's what has self-assembled and would self-assemble every time if we ran it again.
But different societies have developed different systems over the course of human history, no? You're probably looking at the "system" from a different perspective than I do, so I'd appreciate if you could describe this in more detail!
> My argument is that we don't have that capacity.
If humans don't have the capacity for long term collective action against individual interests, there is literally no point in trying any other system.
> If we want a system different than what self-assembles, we should first admit what self-assembles, and admit it's not because of individuals not doing their part or whatever. The system is the way it is because the natural laws it follows lead it to that state.
I really think you're reading positions into my initial comment that I've never stated, because this seems tangential to my thesis.
---
Edit: just saw the part starting at "I am tired of the moralizing arguments", not sure if I overlooked it or you edited. Either way I get your frustrations and agree that simplistic answers don't help. My initial comment was not meant as "it would be so simple if everyone just did X", but as a rebuttal to the idea that humans are incapable of long term collective action against individual interests. If humans fundamentally don't have the ability there'd be no point in trying, but I believe that we do have the capacity and should try, just as I understand you do too.
> If I misunderstood and that's not you, I'm sorry.
> I should have been less snippy at the top either way.
No worries, and thanks. I appreciate that you've explained your thoughts further!
Ninja edit, sorry. I'm glad we got to salvage this from where it might have gone.
I can't keep writing now but I will try to organize some thoughts and come back later.
Which means those greedy people don’t have power, but the illusion of power, and the positions at the top are gatekept by intermediaries that serve the one who actually holds the power.
I'm not sure how you arrive at "Which means those greedy people don’t have power". What is the "which" referring to?
That will happen in any system as hierarchy is in human nature, throughout history.
Even if we assume hierarchy to be part of human nature, that doesn't imply that every system must automatically assign the most power to the greediest humans.
That's what ends up happening in practice though, it's not any different throughout time so a moot point.
Could you explain how this holds for monarchies? The succession of power was mostly based on blood relations and frequently brought along major changes to existing power dynamics. Meanwhile the majority of the population was barred from gaining any real economical or political power, aside from very few cases.
As far as I can see, greed isn't automatically the biggest determining factor in such systems. It can be, but I'd need to read convincing studies by historians to believe you on this.
(of course I'm not advocating for monarchy)
The monarch who's greediest gets to keep the power, otherwise they'd be overthrown or lessened by their nobles. See the shogun taking power away from the emperor; King John signed Magna Carta ceding more power to his nobles under threat of force; various executions of monarchs over civilizational history.
That is to say, it's not always a monarch versus their general, oftentimes peasant, populace, it's rich and powerful people against other rich and powerful people.
No, the greediest monarch is the most likely to get assassinated, because they take too much from their nobles and everyone else. All the money in the world doesn't help a noble who is so greedy they piss off all their potential allies, or all their peasants. And if you were a noble who overthrew a monarch - with familial ties to enough influential nobles - because someone else has more money, you'd still be dead in all likelihood. And so on and so on.
All these relationships were incredibly important to the power dynamics, and you don't get to redefine "greedy" as "greedy, except those who are too greedy to properly play the political game". Greedy monarchs didn't last, and the greediest non-monarch-rich were unlikely to have enough allies to become dangerous.
I'm talking about generally greedy, all else equal, where one who lusts for power is more likely to obtain it than one who does not, not necessarily specifically the greediest which I agree with you others will tire of quickly.
We're acting against our own evolutionary fitness function. Human nature is against human nature.
Leadership by the Tokugawa shogunate saved the forests of Japan. Leadership saved the ozone layer. Leadership can save the climate, although civil war(s) maybe necessary to overthrow corrupt elites who put us all at risk.
Earth has an immune system called the atlantic meridian overturning cycle. When meltwater dillutes the salt concentration too much, it collapses and creates an ice age. Short term catastrophe, long term it will be OK.
I think when people talk about stuff like this everyone realizes that the Earth itself will be a-okay in the long run (or hell even the short run), it's more that humans as a species are the ones that are going to go kaboom.
We saw during the COVID lockdowns that a few months of no cars and drastically reduced oil usage in general how much things improved for nature in general, in fact. Earth will recover very quickly once we're gone, the question is more how do we avoid the "humans gone" part because we presumably want to keep the human species going.
> it collapses and creates an ice age.
We're already in an ice age (there is ice at the poles). I suspect you mean this would make Europe cooler, but do nothing to reverse the trend of increasing global mean surface (land + ocean) temperature.
They mean a glacial period, I guess... we are in an interglacial in an ice age
Correct. This is all planned. Colossal Biosciences has already brought back the Dire Wolf and is working on the woolly mammoth. It is no coincidence that these are younger dryas animals, because they are expecting these animals to thrive in the near future glacial period. Don’t feel guilt tripped into causing this collapse, you have no control over it even though you can do some marginal things to reduce your individual footprint. Whatever needs to happen, will happen. AMOC collapse greens the desert. It also happens to be the region that dictates how affordable fossil fuels are and thus how much of the stuff is burned due to OPEC. If you are religiously inclined, that is meaningful.
Edit: For reference: https://colossal.com/direwolf/ https://colossal.com/mammoth/
Jury's vague on AMOC collapse despite the high bong appeal. Points for the furry weave.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...
you should look more into the wolf thing. they didn’t do that.
Wrong, that's not how glacial periods are defined. This is definitely an interglacial period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interglacial
> Wrong,
Such confidence.
> This is definitely an interglacial period.
Absolutely, and therefore just as I stated, by your link, we are in an Ice Age.
(Perhaps you could read to the end of the very first sentence of your link?)
> that's not how glacial periods are defined.
What, exactly, made you think I was defining a glacial period when I spoke of "Ice Age".
If it's not clear by now, I was responding to an abuse of the term Ice age, after all ... https://youtu.be/zQuGub7yzpA?t=98
New England and UK will get colder, that's all the models say about AMOC's current weakening and shutdown. It's not a naturalist apocalypse.
Not sure why these reports always say things like "suggest" instead of "is".
Because this is science, not religion.
The thesis: Climate change is strengthening El Niño clearly uses the word "is".
Everything else is evidence, both for and against the thesis subject to interpretation.
Here it's "Something we can see in coral records correlates with what we'd expect given the thesis"
These observed correlations may be directly or indirectly linked to the thesis, or (and this does happen) they may be an unrelated coincidence.As the weight of evidence in favour of a thesis builds, so does the confidence in the thesis itself.
In this case, even the authors seems to agree that the finding is not "consensus-level" yet.
That being said, consensus would not necessarily settle the thing.
Even when the worldwide scientific community reaches a consensus and accepts using plain language (as in "It _is_ unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land" [1]), you still have a number of politicians begging to differ. [2]
[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/summary-for-polic....
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/de-pire-en-pire-sur-france-5-... (Sorry, fr-fr)
It would be easier to support making changes to our lifestyles to protect our future if the climate change alarmists weren't so bad about making outlandish predictions of doom.
https://www.breitbart.com/environment/2019/09/20/nolte-clima...