A question about climate change/global warming.

In that case I wasn’t referring to the issue of climate change alone but more to how the main social and political trends of 2020 reflect on climate action, with an admittedly US-centric focus.

So my reference to waking up specifically to systemic crises there related to BLM as much as anything else. As far as speaking for the “moderate left”, that term seems entirely relative in the current political social media landscape but it seems that most folks here would be included in general, as well as most people I know and while my people in the Deep South of the USA are as usual behind the times, folks I know on the left coast seem to have had a great awakening over the past couple of years.

You do make a worthwhile point though, it wasn’t long ago that we were projecting the likely strategies of denialists in reaction to the increasingly obvious facts of the matter.

Anyway this is simply my best hope for now. Once we give up hope it seems like there’s not much point discussing these issues any more except as a psychological support group, and maybe another thread would be more appropriate for that.

really good piece. sums up how i feel. people knew. they should know. they were told, in a million different ways. it's too late.

here's what i always say - there are different degrees of bad. acting too late is better than acting too late at all.

i still think that's true. however, we're fucked, and we tried to tell people that in so many different ways. whatever. some people have already paid the cost; others will soon. most will never pay a cost at all, and worry about other things. fuck them!

it's good that there are young people, always. overpopulation is bad, but also the only hope we have is young people. everyone over the age of 35 can die immediately, we fucked up

the people that will feel good in the future are the people that can watch U.S. open round 3 in air conditioning in 1993 and 2043, and their experience was essentially the same because they were privileged. goood for them, fucked for everyone else

i wish there were a bunch more "honest" pieces like that, selfishly, but i'm glad that most people are strong and they don't show that part of themselves. it's demoralizing for most people, although, personally, to me, i see it as "real"

If we’re going to dwell on the sense of hopelessness I’d rather see a less blinkered view. More scientists who focus on data from objective sources; less journalists who read an article or two about how Miami is sinking and managed to connect the dots between that, the future real estate market there, and finally, when the fires reached their doorstep, how the crisis is immediately impacting their own region.

what are you talking about? is the one that prompted this revive common? are there are other articles i can read that are like that? please connect me to the journalists who are like the one who posted the essay posted above

there are literally 5.7 trillion articles written every single fucking day that tell everyone exactly what they needed to know to make the right decision

blinkered?

what?

is anyone lacking information on ANYTHING?

but no, shit on the one person who says FUCK

Ok apologies for generalizing but yes I would call this perspective at least myopic if not blinkered:

I realize I could cite some data to support this but I’m not going to look anything up because I don’t want to know the truth. I’m comfortable with “It’s bad.”

And no I don’t think we suffer from a paucity of information but more a surplus of confirmation bias/selection bias.

likely strategies of denialists in reaction to the increasingly obvious

everyone over the age of 35 can die immediately, we fucked up

iirc I posted in recent weeks about how it is 29 years since I was dismissed by school classmates and teachers for saying (abt a year after the govt scrapped a "zero emissions by 1995" policy")* that grownups had fucked it and our putative grandkids were going to live through climate collapse

* the govt is now arguing that a "zero emissions by 2050" policy is demented lefty anti-economy nonsense that must be resisted by the populace

Wow I missed that post, you were definitely ahead of the curve. My wake up moment was around the time of the Kyoto Protocol when it became apparent that the top priority of even the less rightwing major party in the USA was protecting the interests of industry.

I’m all for a Logan’s Run-type solution, no argument there.

definitely ahead of the curve

I absolutely wasn't! I just was a) a child in the '80s who paid attention to a tiny amount of current pop culture and b) read the newspaper every day (it came to the house, for free (to me)! imagine, that degree of access to information!!)

in the specific arg I referenced lately it wasn't even my point, I just thought it was so obv from [gestures at everything] that citing it wld get me off the hook for having to justify personally preferring not to breed, in the face of challenges from other children to the latter

Right, that’s understandable for sure.

are there are other articles i can read that are like that? please connect me to the journalists who are like the one who posted the essay posted above

BBC warning, and the Thatcher revisionism only weakens his argument but this recent commentary is a bit more broadly objective, and less hopelessly sensationalistic.

…Perhaps it was a week's leave away from the news that rusted my BBC armour of emotional detachment from the climate story.

Either way, I confess to a gut-tightening sense of foreboding when Hazel left and I caught up with North America's killer heat dome on TV.

That's not because new record temperatures were set in the north-western US and Canada - that happens from time to time. No, it's because old records were smashed so dramatically.

"The Miami building collapse is only loosely connected to climate change and yet her main focus seems to be an “I told you so” attitude based on an article she wrote about how no one should buy property in Miami now because in a few decades it will be a risky investment."

True, it's more like a creaky jumping off point from her piece from a few years ago to mention that build collapse story, except she mentions how hot it is even where she is and how she suppressed that, to then a full release of this ennui. I think the chat with the editor is pretty powerful. And I think most of us are suppressing it in our own ways. Except when it's too hot. The summer here is mild, how many more of those will I enjoy?

I look at a lot of the reporting but beyond headlines it just feels like tracking ecological collapse. A kind of geography lesson.

And governments know that too. Kamala Harris talks about wars over water supply. The UK government will be working to harden borders, offshore detention centres, build more jails onshore to detain anyone protesting. The build of this network is a salary for the ones that go along with it.

Meanwhile liberals are working hard to attenuate green policy, and most people kinda know their way of life has to change in significant ways but stuff like the wide scale planning needed is the preserve of places like China, but that's authoritarian. Anything else is suppressed voting and anemic leadership.

A lot of people are dying from over heating, much of the world will be made uninhabitable. It's pretty much happening. I don't it's hopeless to think it, just a recognition of the reality that we are living in right now is important.

We can fight with others for a better world, with the knowledge that a lot of bad things will happen needn't be the end of it either.

"That's not because new record temperatures were set in the north-western US... that happens from time to time."

lol I am now in the north-western US and three successive "highest temperature ever ever" records for this city were set two weeks ago, on three successive days

Kamala Harris talks about wars over water supply.

lol if Kamala Harris kicked loose with her pledged $2k/mo for the duration of the pando it would still not even get me into the other country I can legally live in during the pando, due to pando restrictions that started literally weeks after the populated coast of country was on fire

(and the govt appointed panels of fossil fuel execs to tell them how to economically recover from the fires, and then weeks later appointed panels of fossil fuel execs to tell them how to economically recover from the pando)

everything's fine

well, i'm sober for a few hours. this is fun!

sorry viborg, wasn't yelling at you, i promise. i think i was yelling at climate change.

with my morning headache, i am still in a similar place. i have obsessed about climate change. i have tried to learn a lot about it. i based my career off of something adjacent to it, in the bleak "hope" that it would continue to be fucking awful and opportunities would open up for me to continue fighting the giant obvious thing that will keep going and get worse. i thought "my personality suits this kind of challenge. "i am able to remain strong even and give people the benefit of the doubt that they don't -actually- know what climate change really is and how it works, even as at the same time i am aware that they almost certainly -do- know that. i can keep multiple plates spinning and be aware of that and just focus on the plates---" WRONG!!!!!!! ME!!!!!! WRONG!!!!!!

this is why i drink, sometimes. other people can deal with it now. i still deeply care, obviously, but i am no longer involved in any sort of way, either in the government in some baloney-adjacent office, hoping to suck up enough some day and say YES enough times to be in a position where i could finally give orders (probably "NO" to some fresh meat exiting graduate school).

so when i see a journalist that has just HAD IT with forming the perfect feel good "we're dying!" story, the kind with the perfect ending where you swim in the ocean and appreciate the beauty of that moment, while it still lasts - i like that. and i'd rather be swimming in the fucking ocean tbh, now. i tried, i failed. everyone failed. keep going. keep going

i liked the piece for being honest. the only way we can deal with this at this point is to live with and process massive amounts of negative vibes tbh. i don't think it's hit people who don't live in fire zones right now, like on a primal level, what we're in for. if your skies are locked in with wildfire smoke for 3-4 months you can't ignore it anymore. and all "it" is is ... feeling bad, real bad. and seeing little shitsticles come across your feed about avoiding cold starts in your car or w/e.

coupled with, in the U.S., they're not even really trying to pass climate legislation any more. green new deal, no. it's over for at least another 4 years, probably longer. someone will probably remind me that sen. whitehouse is making headway here or there, but no. i remember getting hopeful about the McCain/Warner climate bill in the latter years of the Bush era.

cities and states can and will pass stuff to help. interstate/regional agreements can be helpful. but it's all made SO much harder by having to push against the overwhelming tide of republicans trying to kill us

this subreddit helps mitigate my anxiety.....somewhat. yes, this is all stuff that should've happened 20 years ago....but its something

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClimateActionPlan/

It's a little cringey and does some off 'personal responsibility' crap, but the documentary titled 'Dirt' has some interesting things to consider, such as how a change to the way we farm (DON'T TILL THE SOIL) and even raise livestock would do a great deal in terms of drawing down, so to speak.

Of course, farmers and corporate farms are paid subsidies for their monocrops to fail. So, a lot of that goes out the window.

Anyway, it's not a bad introductory doc about soil's role in climate destabilization.

xpost

Frogbs I’m genuinely glad if it helps you cope but from a scientist’s perspective, Reddit, even in the subs focused specifically on environmental issues, has always been chock full of misinformation on these issues and recently it seems to have gotten significantly worse. (I’ve made a personal choice to almost totally avoid Reddit now so I can’t really comment on the most recent activity there.)

Karl I didn’t take it personally, I realized I was needling a little bit and may have had that coming. These threads only get under my skin when I feel like I’m being unfairly ganged up with the strings of ‘otm…otm…otm’ that can give the feel of a good ol’ Reddit-style circlejerk pile-on.

That's not because new record temperatures were set in the north-western US... that happens from time to time."

I do realize this issue is becoming quite emotional for many people and it’s far from my intention to aggravate that, or to minimize anyone’s feels on the matter.

Tbh my main reaction for some time has probably been mostly depressive which can probably seem cold-hearted when I revert to more clinical-type language when addressing these issues. I’m just saying, the fatalist attitude is not completely unreasonable at this point but I don’t think that encouraging it is really constructive. Sorry if I stepped on some toes tho.

what's worse, encouraging fatalism or encouraging people to keep their real feelings to themselves because publicly acknowledging them is counterproductive / depressing / encouraging fatalism? tbh the idea that focusing on "objective" data is more important or relevant than how this is impacting lives feels like part of the problem. we've tried the dry scientific approach, it doesn't work

obvious villains aside the cautiousness of scientists and the limits of what can be said in a scientific or academic context has definitely been part of the problem here. as of course has the at-best-uselessness of liberal politicians and their rejection of the hopelessly modest proposals being called for, including by racist anti-radical environmental orgs that are already considered dangerously extreme by the state...

ahead of wildfire season starting, having finished the second driest spring since 1895, and 410 active fires on state land, Gov Inslee has declared a state of emergency and new rules to protect outdoor workers

CW: climate dread

this is an absolutely incredible thread derived from a US army document, which basically says "we've fucked it lads, we're all going to fucking die, and all the people who favour social progress are soon going to realise it's our fault" https://t.co/j8hQSG418N

— small-C communist 🏴‍☠️ (@_____newt) July 14, 2021

if only the original document actually said anything resembling that. read between the lines, sure. but it is very, very far from "which basically says "we've fucked it lads, we're all going to fucking die, and all the people who favour social progress are soon going to realise it's our fault". it's not written like that at all. that's what it's been 2 1/2 years since it was published and someone just noticed

The US army wouldn’t say “lads” cmon

Let alone “favour”

the army lads

Amazon rainforest now emitting more CO2 than it absorbs

ezra klein op ed piece in nytimes i'm not going to link to, someone read the niemanlab article lol.

making suv drivers scared is a good psyop.

I went out to dinner last night and as soon as we sat down the waiter said to us, sorry, no west coast oysters. They all died as a result of the PNW heat wave.

— Angela Lashbrook (@lemonsand) July 16, 2021

During late June’s heat wave in the Pacific Northwest and parts of Canada, sea creatures on the coast were cooked alive by the millions in the scorching heat. Beach goers, some who had headed to the water to cool off, were greeted with putrid stench of shellfish baking in the sun.

“I was pretty stunned,” says Chris Harley, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia. On Vancouver’s Kitsilano Beach where Harley stood, tens of thousands of dead mussels, clams, sea stars, barnacles and snails blanketed the sea rocks as far along the coastline as his eye could see. In particular, the mussels had split open, their freshly baked flesh still nestled inside.

Temperatures soared to a record-breaking 121 degrees Fahrenheit in British Columbia that weekend. ... Harley estimates the death toll of seashore animals along the Salish Sea coastline is over a billion.

https://therealsarahmiller.substack.com/p/all-the-right-words-on-climate-have

Let’s give the article she was starting to maybe think about asking me to write that I was wondering if I could write the absolute biggest benefit of the doubt and imagine that people read it and said, “Wow this is exactly how I feel, thanks for putting it into words.” What then? What would happen then? Would people be “more aware” about climate change? It’s 109 degrees in Portland right now. It’s been over 130 degrees in Baghdad several times. What kind of awareness quotient are we looking for? What more about climate change does anyone need to know? What else is there to say?

I find this totally bizarre. Of course people are going to ignore uncomfortable knowledge until it personally affects them. There are a ton of people who just tuned out climate change warnings who are now realizing they won't be able to avoid it. They're not going to comb the archives for your past gems! Please get one theory of change.

what she is saying, i think, is what is the point of writing about it? the point was to warn people about it, maybe, to get them to change something so it wouldn't happen. and she's realizing - that's not how it works for most people. as you said, lukas, people have to feel it directly. the show me state. therealsarahmiller is feeling a sense of emptiness and smallness - she is the kind of person who takes a warning and acts upon it, without having to directly experience the awful thing. she sensed that others were like that, so she spent a good portion of her personal life and career trying to do a good thing by warning others, believing that at least some of them would be like her and use their brains instead of being forced to deal with the tragedy. "It’s 109 degrees in Portland right now. It’s been over 130 degrees in Baghdad several times. What kind of awareness quotient are we looking for? What more about climate change does anyone need to know? What else is there to say?" - she's saying here, what is the point of my life? it's too late now. should i keep warning people who have already shown that they cannot learn? what am i doing here?

believing that at least some of them would be like her and use their brains instead of being forced to deal with the tragedy.

typos and missing half-phrases: the Z_TBD story. what i meant here is that she hoped that by writing and spreading "awareness" of what was coming with climate change, that at least some people would take precautions and maybe even change their behavior a little bit, and maybe spread that "awareness" some more. but in real life, a bunch of people are already "aware", and a bunch more people are "ready to die and go to heaven and don't care if other people also die". in real life, it's 130 degrees and we're all aware of it now. well, not all of us, but you know

the awful, kind of unique, part about climate change is that by the time people personally experience it, are affected by it, it's too late to "fix". yes, this group of hypothetical people who will suddenly "get it" (i remain skeptical that they ever, EVER will - they will make excuses for it and say they were correct the entire time. that's my personal experience with these people. they are never wrong. ever.) can maybe change their behavior now and pretend like they're helpful people. but it's too late to "fix". now it's about degrees of tragedy, and trying to create a less tragic tragedy. to me, that ALSO does not seem like something that human beings are good at, especially those that are politically polarized and have been on the anti-environment team for well over 30 years now

all of that is to say that the "theory of change" that relies on people directly experiencing the thing and then changing, like usual, does not work with climate change. that's why people spent the last 30 years trying to warn everyone and create the change before the direct experience.

it did not work. or, actually, maybe it did. maybe, because of the efforts of climate advocates over the last few decades, the hellhole we live in right now is about 25% better than the hellhole we would have lived in without their efforts.

anyway, i deeply sympathize with people like sarah miller that have just given up on humanity. public service, doing things for people - it's fucking draining when the people you're trying to help are actively fighting against you. medical staff in the COVID wing really are heroes, and also i totally get it when they burn out and never help people ever again

Yeah, I should have more empathy for her. I dunno why I'm so mad. I view it differently than ICU nurses for some reason.

yeah, it's not a great comparison, heh. ICU nurses face it much more acutely, and they have the opportunity to see the uselessness of their words and logic, directly on the face of the person who refuses to be vaccinated. climate change is much more of an indirect life-long, slow burning betrayal of trust

What it reminds me of an excerpt I read of Patricia Lockwood's recent book. Something like ... her father had never believed her about something, for years. And then one day he saw or heard something that made him realize she was right. And her response was anger - "THIS is what changes your mind?"

I also had trouble understanding that at first. I understand intellectually that the anger is about the accumulated years of denial. I just can't remember responding like that personally, maybe I'm wired different or have had different experiences.

you probably just have another way of dealing with it! i don't think anger is the best option, even though i do feel it sometimes. but i also don't think there's really a correct way to feel about it. we need at least some people to keep functioning and to keep fighting, trying to persuade, trying to change things for the better. and those people can't be subsumed by anger, if they're going to be effective.

i was like that way, too, for about 33 years, until the dam broke a few years ago. and maybe i'll be that person again, later. or maybe i'll stay angry about covid and climate change and turn my attention to other things that haven't cut away at me yet

Now to face the future we've made.

This is what the future looks like, arriving.pic.twitter.com/kGLnGxb35S

— James B (@piercepenniless) August 7, 2021

The Dixie Fire, started above a dam in central California three weeks ago, is now the largest wildfire in Californian history.

Spoke to a very senior official in the Greek government today who told me there are fears that up to 10% of the country’s forests might have burned down. #greeceisburning pic.twitter.com/OujzFySbpL

— David Patrikarakos (@dpatrikarakos) August 10, 2021