[HN Gopher] The Swerve
___________________________________________________________________
The Swerve
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 116 points
Date : 2022-07-05 18:54 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (locusmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (locusmag.com)
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Last time we tried, they divided us back-seaters in tribes and
| fighting each other, window seater vs isle seaters, unpair
| against even rows, all tackling each other rather than trying to
| make it through the champagne sipping front rows and the wheel.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Something I read in another comment on HN: "Climate denialists
| have gone in one smooth move from 'we'll fix it' to 'it's too
| late to do anything about it anyway'". Which unfortunately rings
| very true.
|
| The really, really big problem is that people seem to think that
| they personally are going to be exempt from this, that it will
| happen to others, but not to them. Waking up from that will be
| pretty harsh. But if COVID denialism is any indication of how
| well humanity deals with complex problems on a planetary scale
| I'm not too optimistic about climate change countermeasures, the
| problem is _much_ more complex and would require cooperation on a
| far more massive scale than anything COVID related.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| I actually think the people who think they'll be exempt are
| basically right. It's not like a tornado is going to pick your
| house up (unless, unfortunately that is exactly what happens).
|
| Sure, there are going to be hotter hot spells, and more extreme
| cold spells, but that's not seriously something that a New
| Yorker can't deal with.
|
| What is going to happen is poor people, foreign people, are
| going to starve to death and drown trying to get to safety, and
| the problem won't be climate challenge, it'll be illegal
| immigrants.
|
| It's not going to happen first to middle-america. It's going to
| happen to Mexico, North Africa, the Middle East. And we're not
| going to say "hey, this is a universal issue created by
| emissions that _our_ countries benefitted from ". It's going to
| be talk about economic migrants, or how we can't afford to help
| them because we have problems at home. Bold prediction:
| Shipping them to Rwanda isn't going to be sustainable.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| Poorer people are always worse off, that's true, but we're
| talking about global climate change and its effects can
| devastate anyone on the planet.
|
| The climate is a complex system into which more and more
| energy is being input. That's more likely to produce sudden,
| drastic and unpredictable changes. It's not just simply going
| to get hotter.
|
| So it's entirely possible that huge swathes of the US become
| largely uninhabitable, due to, say, drastic increases in rain
| or violent weather. It's entirely possible that most current
| agriculture could become impractical in the US.
|
| The politics of climate change has very likely made
| scientists too conservative in their predictions as to not
| seem hysterical, but looking at how quickly the climate is
| changing right now, extreme outcomes seem very likely.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| What I'm really saying is that the obvious direct effects
| of climate change are likely going to be blamed on people.
|
| It's going to get to the point where a poor person can't
| live in Mumbai - literally, you can't survive exposure to
| the temperatures that are going to happen. But when those
| people move north to escape the heat, their migration is
| going to be blamed on all the things we blame current
| migration on, rather than the reality that they'd likely
| die if they stayed where they were. Oh and guess how many
| poor people there are in Mumbai.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This is probably correct. But _we_ are the cause, those
| 'poor people' predominantly are at the back of the bus and
| _we_ are condemning them to that fate.
| ptero wrote:
| Not necessarily. Those poor people, today, are malnourished
| and lack access to the many benefits that higher energy use
| brings. And some of the same things that the top billion of
| the population has been enjoying for decades.
|
| Telling them that they cannot get this (energy to bring
| water to the fields instead of hand-carrying it, tractors
| to work the fields) and, by the way, it is for their own
| benefit may not be very convincing. I think those poor
| people just got on the bus and think they are OK with where
| this bus is heading. And would club someone who tries to
| grab the wheel and put the bus in a ditch. My 2c.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| It's a counter-productive rhetoric that I've long decried and
| sadly started from environmentally conscious folks. It's hard
| to understand how "It's too late to do anything" is going to
| push people in the right direction, if anything it achieves the
| opposite effect.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| There's been all kinds of comments here about how Malthus'
| thesis was wrong. I'd agree that was the case _if_ we could get
| the vast majority of humanity on the same page and actually
| deal with the many crises that currently face us (climate,
| food, extinction,etc). But given how we 've dealt with the
| climate crisis up til now and how we handled (or didn't handle)
| covid, I think Malthus was probably right. I don't think he was
| even factoring in human nature just carrying capacity (and his
| calculations there were probably flawed), but it's human nature
| that's driving the bus.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSXIetP5iak
|
| >Bernard: What if the Prime Minister insists we help them?
|
| >Humphrey: Then we follow the four-stage strategy.
|
| >Bernard: What's that?
|
| >Richard: Standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis.
| In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
|
| >Humphrey: Stage two, we say something may be about to happen,
| but we should do nothing about it.
|
| >Richard: In stage three, we say that maybe we should do
| something about it, but there's nothing we _can_ do.
|
| >Humphrey: Stage four, we say maybe there was something we
| could have done, but it's too late now.
| drewcoo wrote:
| > The really, really big problem is that people seem to think
| that they personally are going to be exempt from this
|
| Is that a bigger problem than people who seem to think that
| they personally are saving the planet by their own actions?
|
| I honestly can't tell the difference between treating gun
| crimes with thoughts and prayers and stopping global warming by
| taking personal responsibility. Nether is effective. Both seem
| delusional. Oh, and those two activities belong to different
| parts of the political divide. The problem is not "those
| people" so much as it's humanity, all of us.
| ben_w wrote:
| Interesting analogy.
|
| I'd say that it's more akin to trying to solve gun crime by
| refusing to own a gun: the only reason it won't work is that
| it needs everyone to do that, and if merely 0.1% of the
| population defect (in the game theory sense), that leads to
| the bad outcome.
| danhak wrote:
| Here in the U.S., at least, what has widely been maligned as
| "COVID denialism" was actually a deeper and more nuanced
| conversation about whether sudden, sweeping changes to society
| would prevent more harm than they cause.
|
| And now looking at outcomes across different states (e.g.
| Florida vs. California)--and considering ALL outcomes (public
| health, homelessness, unemployment, substance abuse, mental
| health, truancy, graduation rates, violent crime)--it's indeed
| unclear that draconian policies in the name of public health
| were a net positive.
|
| I am extremely concerned about climate change. But there seems
| to be little introspection from those who propose sweeping
| policy change about the need to consider second-order effects
| on those whose lives and livelihoods will be upturned. The
| general disdain for people in places like West Virginia gives
| me little hope that will change.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Nature _really_ doesn 't care about our feelings.
|
| All that whining is something that my grandmothers'
| generation would have scoffed at: you have it relatively
| easy, stop complaining. 5 years of war, occupation, hunger
| and brutal death is the kind of thing that generation lived
| through - or not, in many cases - and they came through to
| rebuild their world without bitching about it. COVID was -
| compared to that, sorry - a walk in the park and we should
| have shouldered it collectively and dealt with it. Instead we
| ended up with a large fraction simply denying objective
| reality in the hope that it would go away. That's not how you
| deal with problems as an adult. In toddlers I find that
| acceptable, but not in grown ups.
|
| And the ease with which demagogues used it to bend people to
| their will shows clearly that we have not learned anything
| from the very recent past, which in a way is even more
| worrying: apparently we are structurally incapable of
| retaining very hard won knowledge over a stretch longer than
| a human life-span leading to endless repeats.
|
| But this time, with climate change, the stakes are a lot
| higher than 'the usual' price of a few million people dead,
| we're talking about changes on a scale that humanity has
| never had to deal with before.
|
| So if we aren't going to get our act together the next 100
| years or so will not at all be pleasant, to put it very
| mildly, and going on the assumption that it isn't way too
| late already.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| Your comment comes off as demagogic, and certainly
| uncharitable and disrespectful. "[reality] doesn't care
| about your feelings." and "denying reality" are typical
| expressions that both sides of the divide use to shut-down
| dialog and to paint their opinion as morally superior and
| based on truth, as if there is such a thing.
|
| If you want to fight against demagogues, you should engage
| with people, recognize that issues are nuanced and that
| most people are not the caricatures that you'd paint them
| as.
|
| Finally, telling people they're being whiny after a 2 year
| long pandemic that saw many people lose their loved ones,
| be unable to even see their bodies, the near collapse of
| our national health systems (that was not caused solely by
| the strain of Covid but specifically by the preventative
| measures put into place) and the great suffering that
| resulted from it is very insensitive and uncaring. I doubt
| my great-grandmother would have said anything of the sort
| were she still alive, and I know for a fact if you asked
| many elderly people how they've lived these past few years
| (those who survived) they would not be so dismissive of the
| complaints of others.
| mistermann wrote:
| > Instead we ended up with a large fraction simply denying
| objective reality in the hope that it would go away. That's
| not how you deal with problems as an adult. In toddlers I
| find that acceptable, but not in grown ups.
|
| If you had fallen victim to this phenomenon yourself, would
| you necessarily know? Might there be some materially
| important imperfections in your model of reality that
| you're describing here?
| majormajor wrote:
| So that's why you make sure your assumptions and claims
| match what happened.
|
| For instance, anyone who claims that the economic impact
| was solely the result of government action, and that no
| private individuals or organizations changed their
| behavior independently, is ignoring the timeline of
| events.
|
| Anyone who claims that the vaccines didn't change things
| so that post-vaccine policies could have been equally
| successful pre-vaccines, is ignoring the stats.
|
| All this stuff is pretty easily googleable in the current
| and past-two-years news records, and yet you still get
| lots of people here making arguments based on completely
| different claimed facts.
| mistermann wrote:
| > So that's why you make sure your assumptions and claims
| match what happened.
|
| Ah yes, of course. Like everyone in this thread, and
| every other culture war based thread on HN eh? Everyone
| is _super seriously_ making sure that their statements
| are free of error, and signs of uncertainty are far more
| plentiful than high confidence.
|
| > For instance, anyone who claims that the economic
| impact was solely the result of government action, and
| that no private individuals or organizations changed
| their behavior independently, is ignoring the timeline of
| events.
|
| > Anyone who claims that the vaccines didn't change
| things so that post-vaccine policies could have been
| equally successful pre-vaccines, is ignoring the stats.
|
| The mind tends to be drawn to easy, clear cut scenarios,
| but tends to be highly averse to wading into scenarios
| where certainty is not so obvious.
|
| > All this stuff is pretty easily googleable in the
| current and past-two-years news records, and yet you
| still get lots of people here making arguments based on
| completely different claimed facts.
|
| Agreed.... _and this is an intelligent forum_ , on a
| relative basis anyways - which is another thing one can
| notice: people have a tendency to think only in relative
| terms. "I am clearly much more intelligent than those
| Trump supporters, therefore I must be intelligent [on an
| absolute scale]". How many flaws like this are hardwired
| into human consciousness, running completely sub-
| perceptually, turning our perception of what is all
| around us into a gross misrepresentation completely
| without our knowledge?
|
| What if this _actually is_ a big deal, but we can 't be
| bothered to even consider the possibility?
| danhak wrote:
| You don't seem to be engaging with the main point here:
| there were places that DID take COVID seriously--that shut
| down overnight, paid the price of mass unemployment,
| homelessness and growing tent cities, increasing substance
| abuse / overdose, loss of education that will never be
| recovered and countless other second-order effects.
|
| And those places did not emerge with a significantly better
| COVID outcome.
|
| Without an answer for addressing the second-order effects
| of green policy, there will be no consensus.
| panarky wrote:
| It should be beyond dispute by now that societies where
| most people took action to increase social distance had
| far better outcomes.
|
| Japan, South Korea and New Zealand all have less than 500
| cumulative deaths per 100K, while the USA is north of
| 3,000.
|
| And they've demonstrated that it's possible to achieve
| good results without "mass unemployment, homelessness and
| growing tent cities".
|
| But instead of learning what works and adopting those
| methods, apparently we're going to continue propagating
| disinfo that there's nothing that can be done, and any
| attempt to do something is doomed to second order
| maladies.
| troupe wrote:
| Covid turned out to be much less lethal than originally
| thought when the only people that were identified as
| having Covid were the ones sick enough to go to the
| hospital. The places that "DID take COVID seriously" were
| places that were initially reacting to statistics that
| didn't consider how many people had already had Covid and
| hadn't been to the hospital.
|
| I wonder if we'll someday look back on some of the things
| we do to prevent climate change and view it through a
| similar lens.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The thing to take away from this is: we got lucky. Very,
| very lucky. A somewhat longer incubation time, a higher
| lethality, a bit more asymptomatic spreading and the
| figures would be entirely different. If the first variant
| would have been one of the later mutations you'd be
| looking at a world in mourning today.
| majormajor wrote:
| This is massively revisionist. "Shutting down overnight"
| was pretty much the response across the nation in March
| 2020. This was based on the information available at the
| time, and as things evolved, things changed.
|
| Everything after was basically differences in how quickly
| things opened back up (and what things, in what order,
| with what restrictions).
|
| And mass support for reopening rapidly with no
| restrictions wasn't there even in Florida or Texas early
| on - consider the sub-$60M box office that Tenet brought
| in. Theaters were open where allowed (hell, they were
| even open in Orange County in SoCal, not just in
| Florida), but nobody wanted to go because they were
| looking at the transmission and hospitalization data
| themselves and waiting for things to settle down and for
| vaccines to come out. Same with how conferences and
| events were being canceled _before_ official government
| action in March 2020.
|
| Economic damage was done at least as much, if not more,
| by individual behaviors as official policy. And can you
| blame people for that? Almost as many people died of
| Covid in the US before the vaccines as after the vaccines
| in 2021, despite there being way less of a return to
| normalcy by that point - imagine the number of deaths
| (and knock-on deaths from the overwhelmed health system)
| that would've happened if nobody had changed their
| behavior.
|
| Claiming something like that you could've fixed
| homelessness in California - which was a rapidly growing
| problem pre-Covid - by never "officially" shutting down
| in March 2020 is ludicrous.
| jacquesm wrote:
| There are only a few countries that really shut down
| (some only regional): New Zealand, Japan, Australia and
| China (others?). This one graph shows how effective it
| was and if we'd _all_ done that the difference would be
| enormous, even for the countries that did shut down.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_by_countr
| y_a...
| majormajor wrote:
| Without a really deep dive I'm not certain the island-
| country numbers of Australia or Japan would be achievable
| in the US, but if I use Canada as a "certainly achievable
| standin" I would state my position as "unconvinced that
| the marginal benefits of additional restrictions
| initially + for longer would be worth it" _but also_
| "entirely convinced that if the US hadn't taken the steps
| it did, both individually and governmentally, that number
| would be many multiples higher."
|
| The "none of this was necessary" position is just ultra-
| revisionist and often makes arguments as if today's
| variant and transmission environment is the environment
| that was in place in March 2020. It also ignores that
| individuals will make their own choices to change their
| behavior in the face of a new threat. "Not massively
| damaging some sectors of the economy" was never an
| option.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Without global coordination it's a wash. With global
| coordination it might have made a difference.
| wizofaus wrote:
| How do you rate "significantly better" though? From stats
| I've seen every developed nation did significantly better
| than the US. But it's true there are plenty of places
| using a "light touch" approach that have seemingly
| achieved much the same level of excess mortality etc. of
| others that took much stronger measures. Having said
| that, I live in one of the latter places, and one reason
| our net result isn't so great now seems to be that the
| strict measures taken in 2020-21 wore everyone out and
| we're just not prepared to sustain even basic precautions
| now. Though it may also be due to lower natural immunity
| levels.
| atotic wrote:
| > those places did not emerge with a significantly better
| COVID outcome.
|
| COVID statistics are hard to interpret clearly. But,
| looking at the list of deaths/100K, it is clear that
| states that did take COVID seriously mostly had fewer
| deaths. Depending on how you slice the numbers I'd call
| 30% fewer deaths a significantly better outcome.
|
| Deaths/100K California: 234 Texas: 307 Florida: 353 New
| York: 355
|
| My guess is that mass unemployment, homelessness, and
| increasing substance abuse were not higher where COVID
| was taken seriously, but proving that would take too much
| of my time.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Those places _would_ have come out better if we _all_ did
| this. And that 's the whole problem: if you don't tackle
| problems of this magnitude globally then you might as
| well not bother because a couple of dissidents on a large
| enough scale will ruin it for everybody else. In this
| case the dissidents even use this argument to show that
| the better choices didn't work... which when you think
| about it is really despicable.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Those places would have come out better if we all did
| this._
|
| If we all did _what_ , exactly?
|
| I live in Canada. We shut down our economy, spent vast
| amounts of money on social supports, had wide vaccine and
| booster adoption...and had similar results to many
| countries that did far less than that.
|
| Our smallest province had, literally, zero deaths and a
| handful of hospitalizations for over a _year_ into the
| pandemic. It was an example to the world. Then Omicron
| hit and that province had one of the worst infection
| rates in the world. Almost like nothing they did mattered
| and it was just a matter of time...
|
| > _In this case the dissidents even use this argument to
| show that the better choices didn 't work_
|
| And the conformists keep moving the goalposts, claiming
| we didn't do enough. You need to tell people what they
| need to do, and for how long, and then you're kinda
| hemmed in. We were told vaccines would get us "back to
| normal" (even that they prevented the spread). It turned
| out they were remotely as effective as claimed. How long
| can normal people be offered that carrot, then have to
| backtrack, before they revolt?
|
| I agree that global coordination would be fantastic, but
| probably impossible.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| > Those places would have come out better
|
| I assume you mean the blue states? They did come out
| better, on average:
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-
| covi...
| GolfPopper wrote:
| Not to mention, the US by and large collectively avoided
| worst case outcomes (hospital system too overloaded to
| provide treatment to majority of cases) because _enough_
| people did take COVID seriously.
|
| And that's before getting into how hindsight is 20/20 (in
| addition to being rosy). the neo-Black Death will be
| really happy, if, a month into the _next_ pandemic the
| going line is, "well, the last one probably wasn't as
| bad as the worst case scenario, so let's assume this one
| will be _fine_ and do nothing. "
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, that is a risk. In a way we already had that because
| of how SARS-1 ended up being not nearly as bad as was
| predicted initially thanks to some absolutely amazing
| international coordination. Unfortunately COVID was a lot
| nastier.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| What is the evidence for the claim in your first
| sentence? And what does "come out better" mean? Less
| covid, but more unemployment, more drug addiction, more
| suicides than the ones that happened?
|
| With climate change, what exactly are we optimizing for?
| That's never been clear to me. We want to destroy the
| world's economy to keep the climate from changing? How
| long will the climate "not change"? In other words, the
| goals have never been clear to me, and the whole point of
| this line of comments is "are we sure the juice is worth
| the squeeze?"
|
| We largely don't know what the second-order effects of
| tampering with the climate could be, because complex
| systems have very weird, very broad, interconnected
| relationships. There's genuinely no way of knowing
| whether we'll just make it worse, accelerate rapid
| cycling, or destabilize a system that is complex.
| majormajor wrote:
| How is a desire to invest rapidly in new, less
| environmentally disruptive, technology development
| wanting to "destroy the world's economy"?
|
| Seems like the opposite to me, unless your personal
| interests are tied up in legacy monopolistic businesses.
| It's like being opposed to Apple and Microsoft in the
| late 70s because you're worried about destroying IBM or
| mainframes.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| The whole global economy is built around cheap energy
| sources that also happen to be at least 100 times more
| efficient than solar, wind, or even nuclear. Petroleum is
| BY FAR the most efficient way of storing energy.
|
| Wind and solar power are both intermittent. That's fine
| if you live in a coastal city in a temperate zone, but
| most people in the world do not. So efficient energy
| storage becomes a huge problem. And we have two main
| timecycles for which we have to store energy: capturing
| it during the day and releasing it at night (to charge
| all those EVs) and also capturing it during the summer
| and releasing it over the winter. That would require
| longer-term storage AND while we can capture the most
| energy during the summer, that's also the highest period
| of use because the world is now also air-conditioned.
|
| If you end petroleum production, that also ends all
| plastic production. So all the cheap gewgaws from China
| disappear.
|
| Also, did you know that solar panels are made from firing
| coal and quartz together at high temperatures? Do you
| know why they're all made in China? Because of much less
| strict environmental regulations there. Did you also know
| that solar panels have a lifespan of only 15-20 years,
| and that they're not recyclable?
|
| I could go on and on, but there's no magic "alternative
| energy source" that even comes close to being able to
| provide stable power at a cost that comes anywhere close
| to petroleum, not to mention how portable petroleum is as
| an energy source. Nuclear power is the only thing that
| even comes close, but it's fraught with trouble as well.
|
| You think there will be solar-powered shipping vessels?
| Trains are electric, but you know what runs the electric
| motors on them? The on-board diesel generators!
|
| The global economy is based on cheap energy sources.
| Increase the cost and reduce the availability of the
| energy sources and yeah, you'll destroy the economy.
| majormajor wrote:
| So then how about you get onboard with fighting for what
| _I said_ , not the other position you're arguing against.
|
| The one that's called "technology development."
|
| Invest in alternatives, capture solutions, etc so that
| they get better faster. It's the same thing we've done in
| wartime, or for a moon mission.
|
| The global economy was based on other things than it is
| today 30, 70, 150, 200, etc years ago. Shit changes.
| Steer the change instead of sitting back and being
| defeatist about the side effects of the most recent ones.
|
| Plenty of people _don 't_ want to destroy the world to
| save it. Do you think your "let's just do nothing because
| uncertainty exists, let's just let the world destroy
| itself without bothering to learn more or try new things"
| pseudo-concern is better?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Indeed. In the words of Bobby Shaftoe (Cryptonomicon)
| "Show some fucking adaptability."
| prometheus76 wrote:
| majormajor wrote:
| The (already-dead, so I can't reply directly to it)
| response from 'prometheus76 is telling here, so I think
| it's worth preserving to expose the fakeness of this
| whole "what if the costs are higher than the benefits"
| posturing:
|
| "But I thought humans were not adaptable to climate
| change? Isn't that the panic?"
|
| After all that hand-wringing about "destroying the world
| economy" you'd think that "adapting to climate change"
| would not be the bar for them. "Adapting without economic
| harm" would be. Even if you frame it purely economically
| and don't care about lives lost, the economic cost of
| things like rising temperatures and sea levels is easily
| calculable as being enormous. That precious petro-heavy
| global economy depends massively on infrastructure on
| today's coast, for starters.
|
| This is just "I disagree with making any efforts entirely
| but I've given up on being able to convince people that
| the efforts aren't needed, so I'll just try to claim
| they're too expensive instead by arguing against a worst-
| faith interpretation of what we could possibly try to
| do."
| ryukafalz wrote:
| > If you end petroleum production, that also ends all
| plastic production.
|
| Bioplastics exist. We need better ways to deal with them
| at end-of-life (industrial composting is not yet
| widespread) but they aren't petroleum-based.
|
| > Trains are electric, but you know what runs the
| electric motors on them? The on-board diesel generators!
|
| Not if you electrify the network. And in fact, in the US
| we used to have over 5x as much electrified track in the
| 1930s as we do now.
| adamrezich wrote:
| > Increase the cost and reduce the availability of the
| energy sources and yeah, you'll destroy the economy.
|
| more and more it seems like outright nihilism has led to
| many people being in the mindset of "And That's A Good
| Thing!"
|
| these people not only think privately but announce
| publicly that they don't have any interest in having
| children specifically because they don't think it's
| Morally Right to produce and raise children in this
| Intractably Fallen World we live in today. after all, as
| everyone knows, western civilization is built upon
| colonial expansionism, slavery, white supremacy, bigotry,
| etc. etc., and even the good things it's produced like
| democracy are outweighed by the civilization-ending
| threat of climate catastrophe that it directly wrought!
| therefore, let us ignore the civilizational advances our
| forefathers fought and died for, because on the whole,
| our entire society is built upon foundations of moral
| abhorrence! let it all burn, and all of us with it--we
| deserve it.
|
| and all of this nihilistic depression and anxiety about
| the entire global state of the world we live in all
| started relatively recently in human history, which makes
| one wonder what exactly caused it--was it completely
| organic or subversively intentional? because idk about
| you but if I was a competing world superpower and I
| wanted to set out to destroy my competition discretely,
| these last couple decades of getting the middle to lower
| rungs of society to turn on itself in every which way
| imaginable, all while discouraging optimism and
| exceptionalism in a downright institutional manner, would
| be exactly how I would go about it.
|
| I used to be a fan of Doctorow when I was downloading his
| free ebooks & converting them to iPod notes format to
| read in class in high school. it's a bummer to see that
| he's lining up with the rest of the "we're all gonna
| die"-types, singing the song of the end of the world to
| the masses--it's pretty much impossible for me to respect
| anyone who takes that tack.
| jacquesm wrote:
| See map linked in other comment.
|
| With climate change we are optimizing for survival of the
| species and some form of civilization as we know it. If
| that's all we manage to do then I would consider that a
| huge win.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > Those places would have come out better if we all did
| this.
|
| Evidence required.
|
| Alternative claim: "Those places would have come out
| worse if we all did this" - neither of which can be
| proved.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You can think for yourself. But to spell it out for you:
| if all countries had _simultaneously_ shut down travel
| for a couple of months then we could have all been at the
| level of New Zealand or Japan. Neither of which crashed
| their economies. Once vaccines were available we would
| have been able to open up travel again and we 'd have
| been better off collectively. Even those places where
| they did shut down, because after they opened up they
| were still exposed to plenty of people who imported the
| virus from abroad, something that would have happened at
| a much smaller scale otherwise.
|
| So you can reason it out, the fact that we can't re-run
| the experiment is a pity.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > if all countries had simultaneously (...) Once vaccines
| were available (...) that would have happened (...)
|
| You are piling up suppositions upon suppositions to come
| up with a wild claim. It doesn't work that way.
|
| In case you doubt it, here's my equally plausible counter
| claim: if all the countries had simultaneously shut down,
| vaccine research would have taken the back burner,
| wouldn't have had sufficient funding, and mRNA vaccines
| would have never become mainstream. With the fake
| reassurance that it was a dud crisis, opening up to
| travel again would have caused a much worse human toll.
|
| It's equally impossible to prove, but it's just as
| plausible, as it's extremely close to what happened in
| Australia - a country that was heralded as an example to
| follow!
|
| > So you can reason it out, the fact that we can't re-run
| the experiment is a pity.
|
| Indeed, but it's not a reason to throw logic out of the
| window. We just can't say what would have happened if
| everything had been wildly different.
|
| We can just try to learn and improve for the next time on
| small details: most of the big countries managed to get a
| vaccine with their local industry, but some didn't. In
| some countries, the existing regulations initially
| prevented the rapid diffusion of tests, etc.
|
| It's less ambitious, but more workable.
| mistermann wrote:
| > It doesn't work that way.
|
| Not in actual reality, but it works just fine in virtual
| reality, which is what people are actually observing when
| they contemplate reality.
|
| I continue to worry that improving on our (be it mainly
| Western people or all people, I don't know) inability to
| distinguish between fantasy and reality _at least to some
| degree_ may be a pre-requisite to adequately solving
| climate change. I simply can 't see how it isn't an
| extremely important variable.
|
| If intelligent people can't be bothered to wonder what is
| true, how do we expect climate "denialists" to manage it?
| mberning wrote:
| There is a great hubris at play. Man is so foolish.
| analog31 wrote:
| >>>> But there seems to be little introspection from those
| who propose sweeping policy change about the need to consider
| second-order effects on those whose lives and livelihoods
| will be upturned.
|
| That seems like basic conservatism, which has been
| systematically forced to the sidelines over the past 50
| years.
|
| I love the people of West Virginia, but it keeps getting
| harder and harder to pretend that they don't vote their
| beliefs.
| hgomersall wrote:
| The problem is not specific to people that want to stop
| climate change. The general disdain for people in places like
| Western Virginia can be attributed to the dominance of
| neoliberal philosophy (insofar as it can be described as a
| philosophy).
|
| My experience is that the most vocal proponents of proper
| strategies to address climate change are also the most vocal
| supporters of social justice.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Two examples of what I (in the US) decry as "COVID denialism"
| both are people known personally to me (extended family
| actually). These are from mid 2020. Both people eventually
| pivoted to "being opposed to draconian policies"
|
| 1: The numbers coming out of NYC are grossly exaggerated;
| probably only about 1/10th of those reported as "dying of
| COVID" actually died of COVID. Other people died from
| different causes but just happened to test positive for
| COVID.
|
| 2: A dialog between person A and person B:
|
| A: If only 1% of people who get COVID die from it why are we
| still worried?
|
| B: At a 1% fatality rate if half the population of the US
| gets COVID, that's over a million dead
|
| A: Unlike you I'm not drinking the Kool-Aid
| jacquesm wrote:
| The mistake in your reasoning is to believe that the
| fatality rate is the only thing that matters.
|
| But fortunately with climate change it is that easy: you or
| your descendants will either die or you won't, and
| hopefully there will be a recognizable society left for the
| survivors. Enjoy the ride and make sure to snap pictures.
| ptero wrote:
| This. I cannot upvote this enough. Many people advocating for
| drastic measures (which _may_ be necessary) are in a war.
| Casualties to be expected, those who are not on our side are
| enemies to be dealt with as the war times require (this is
| also the theme of the original article: let 's grab the wheel
| and swerve, and if the bus rolls, well, too bad).
|
| That is a possible approach, but once you start on that path
| there is no more negotiation. Only the force, us vs them.
| Then most folks on the sidelines who are somewhat supportive
| but not thrilled about swerving of the bus they ride in
| become active adversaries. I would not underestimate that
| factor. My 2c.
| aeturnum wrote:
| > _there seems to be little introspection from those who
| propose sweeping policy change about the need to consider
| second-order effects on those whose lives and livelihoods
| will be upturned_
|
| I really encourage you to read more deeply on this, as I
| think you're painting climate advocates with the same broad
| brush you decry others for using. It is extremely common for
| climate people to insist that a just transition is the only
| transition worth making - which includes both gigantic
| structural changes around how we interact with the climate &
| also structural changes to society to change the material
| conditions of marginalized & adversely impacted groups. These
| recommendations are included in basically every climate
| change document produced by international efforts.
|
| The inclusion of these considerations is also routinely
| mocked by US conservatives. Lots of people think that
| "climate is about climate" and the inclusion of social safety
| net reforms or serious retraining is a bad-faith inclusion
| from the left who are just using climate change as a cudgel.
|
| If you're interested in a pretty up to date holistic (though
| to the left of many of the IPCC recs) take on climate
| recommendations, I would point you at the latest season of
| scene on radio[1]. It links together the chain of reasoning
| about why it is essential to address climate with other
| sources of marginalization and victimization.
|
| The understanding of "what climate change activists want"
| that you're taking about in your post is frequently brought
| up by people who would like to obstruct action.
|
| [1] http://www.sceneonradio.org/the-repair/
| simonh wrote:
| The differences in policies were heavily hyped, but if you
| look at overall policy and people's actual individual
| behaviour both Florida and California went through pretty
| stringent lockdowns. In practice a lot of work places
| enforced social distancing, masks, pushed vaccines. The two
| states certainly had much more similar public behaviour and
| policies with each other than either had with some other
| countries like Ecuador or Brazil. Another difference that
| gets hyped up a lot is Sweden versus many other European
| countries. Sweden was famous for "not locking down", but in
| fact it did pretty heavily in the grand scheme of things. It
| just did it a bit later than many other countries.
|
| Take a look at the stringency index in this article.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-07/califo.
| ..
|
| Florida locked down just as fast and just as hard as
| California for the first 6 months of the pandemic. After that
| stringency measures diverged, but Florida still maintained a
| range of significant pandemic control measures. Their
| measures in early 2021 were about as strict as California's
| in late 2021. Overall they were more similar than different.
|
| It also seems that the high number of elderly people in
| Florida, as a group, took the pandemic very seriously. They
| were in fact more likely to get themselves vaccinated than
| elderly people in California, despite the lack of mandates.
|
| In the end it's actual behaviour of the population that makes
| the difference, whether that behaviour was mandated or not.
| One interesting stat is that in the most pro-Trump counties
| (60%+ support) death rates were 2.7x higher than in the most
| Pro-Biden counties. In the top 10% of counties for each camp
| the death rate differential was 6x. At the peak of the wave
| in 2021 about a thousand more Republicans were dying per day
| than Democrats.
| jfjrkkskdik wrote:
| pavlov wrote:
| "Sweeping" seems to be a favorite adjective of those who have
| moved into the "it's too late to do anything anyway" stage.
|
| As Doctorow writes, the policy changes didn't have to be
| sweeping if we'd started in 1977. But we didn't. Now all the
| remaining options will upturn someone's lives. It's just a
| question of balancing the effects to achieve something better
| than the current path which means sweeping catastrophe for
| our children.
| bsder wrote:
| > Here in the U.S., at least, what has widely been maligned
| as "COVID denialism" was actually a deeper and more nuanced
| conversation about whether sudden, sweeping changes to
| society would prevent more harm than they cause.
|
| Sorry, but that's historical revisionism, and I'm not going
| to let you get away with it.
|
| "Covid is a liberal hoax" was the starting point in the US.
| That was neither nuanced nor deep. That was pure denialism.
|
| > it's indeed unclear that draconian policies in the name of
| public health were a net positive.
|
| I believe that the data we have from Sweden vs other Nordic
| countries (which did _real_ lockdowns) contradicts that
| narrative. Both Norway and Denmark have around half the
| deaths normalized per capita of Sweden (Denmark a little
| above--Norway a little below half).
| voganmother42 wrote:
| Nuanced is an interesting way to describe what happened -
| especially with a description like draconian!
|
| The disdain is for ignoring the science, the health of other
| people, and negative externalities... it is not likely to
| change, nor are the minds of those who are dug in and feel as
| though their entitlement to the status quo will outdo
| entropy.
|
| The anchor is sad about being dragged?
| haswell wrote:
| > _The anchor is sad about being dragged?_
|
| This, to me, summarizes the problem. Comparing an entire
| group of people to a heavy metal object at the bottom of
| the sea. It's a tempting dismissal, sure, but will never
| help someone stuck in their ideology see beyond it.
|
| > _nor are the minds of those who are dug in_
|
| And is it any wonder that those minds will not change when
| we hold nothing but disdain and shout at each other?
|
| I am convinced that we will not solve these issues without
| focusing on the tribalism and identity politics that sit at
| the core of it all.
|
| I don't see an anchor being dragged. I see people who see
| their way of life threatened, and are willing to fight
| against that.
|
| This doesn't excuse the behavior, or make it valid. But
| it's also not terribly surprising when you look at how
| conversations about this across ideologies usually go.
| LarryDarrell wrote:
| It's not a bus, it's a train. Best case you can slow it down for
| a few people to jump off.
|
| Carter told people to wear a sweater and the American people
| flipped out and elected a ghoulish union-busting zombie. Twice.
|
| There will be no change until it is forced upon us when the
| treats stop flowing. And even then you just have to hope that the
| populace has an accurate story in their heads as to why.
| bsedlm wrote:
| it's a train, and it crashed already, but it's a rather
| humongous train, most of the train hasn't yet felt the shock
| from the crash
|
| also, it's not a literal train, some people will be able to say
| there's no crash even as they fly out
| LarryDarrell wrote:
| ... and the first class passengers simply exit and fly off in
| their jetpacks.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| to go where? Mars isn't ready yet
| panarky wrote:
| Closer to the poles, anywhere north or south of 48
| degrees.
| [deleted]
| karaterobot wrote:
| I guess I'm in the camp that says that unless there are a bunch
| of people in the back row trying to sew a bus-sized parachute
| together out of old clothes, we're screwed.
|
| In other words, the only hope I have left is that somebody
| invents a climate-fixing machine. Or a bunch of different
| climate-fixing machines, I don't care. But, I don't see a lot of
| other appropriately-scaled options at this point.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Agreed. We're past the point where culture can shift in time to
| turn the wheel. Only technology shifts quickly enough to do so.
|
| EVs and wind/solar energies are examples of technologies which
| are so much better than the alternatives that they're
| succeeding at reducing emissions faster than consumption can
| grow to catch up. We don't have the time to get enough people
| together to mandate that the front row drives a Tesla instead
| of a Ford, nor to mandate that they produce wind farms instead
| of coal plants, but they're doing so of their own accord - and
| demand for them exceeds production capacity by a large margin -
| because the electric car is better and the wind energy is
| cheaper. As you say, we now need parachute tech.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Tough problem. Once you start doing back-of-the-envelope math
| regarding the masses and volumes you are talking about here
| as well as the time remaining it quickly tends to require all
| kinds of unobtanium, besides the obvious climate impact of
| engineering such a solution in the first place, because it
| needs to be a net positive otherwise you may as well not
| start.
|
| Funny thing: the _only_ system that I 'm aware of that could
| do this on this scale and cheap enough is called biology, and
| it operates on a timescale that is too slow to make it work
| in time.
| klipt wrote:
| Remember all our heat comes from the sun. The cheapest
| climate mitigation may be to just block some sunlight:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering
| troupe wrote:
| Unfortunately some of those technologies haven't been around
| long enough to fully understand the full lifecycle cost. We
| are burying wind turbine blades in some places and the total
| emissions of an EV are sometimes more than a small efficient
| gas automobile when total lifetime emissions are considered.
|
| Still these technologies are succeeding in the marketplace
| and if they can continue to improve we may solve many of
| those problems as we go.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| I'd need to see the data on that EV comparison. And earth-
| to-earth carbon emissions of wind turbines are very
| unlikely to be higher than coal or nuclear.
|
| Regardless, people aren't buying small cars with efficient
| gas engines. They're buying trucks and SUVs they don't
| need. Which will likely continue until it's clear gasoline
| isn't going to get financially cheaper.
| yongjik wrote:
| > Incredibly, climate denial still festers. "There's no cliff,"
| they insist. "This bus is on a smooth road that goes all the way
| to the promised land. Only a fool would swerve now."
|
| I think I get the main theme, but I don't think "climate cliff"
| is a useful analogy. It makes one picture a scene of relative
| calm until suddenly (and abruptly) the shit hits the fan, when
| the reality is going to be far more messy. (Just look at all
| those historians who could never agree on exactly what year the
| Roman Empire fell.)
|
| If anything, it will make people argue "Well, we haven't hit the
| cliff yet, which means we still have time," or, worse, "They've
| preached that we will hit the cliff by 2020, a bunch of liars!"
|
| I think the fictional "denialist" in the sentence is actually
| half right. Instead of a cliff, we will have a smooth ride... to
| hell. We will never have one glorious catastrophe where we get to
| say "I told you so" five seconds before dying. Instead, half of
| the passengers will still be arguing that we're fine while we're
| slowly dying.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It doesn't really matter, does it? As analogies go it's pretty
| clear what the message is and for that purpose this metaphor is
| good enough. Any arguing over the shape of the metaphor is
| essentially pointless, if you didn't get it then it doesn't
| matter because you are clearly not the target audience, and if
| you did get it you realize that it is a leaky abstraction, but
| a useful one nonetheless.
| mulmen wrote:
| 0des wrote:
| > "Long before we go over the cliff, we'll have figured out how
| to put wings on this bus."
|
| Sounds like something a PM would say in a roundabout fashion
| SMAAART wrote:
| The moment we politicize science, is the moment that society at
| large loses.
|
| And by "society at large" I mean everyone.
|
| Game theorist should study this
| prionassembly wrote:
| The thing about this kind of take is that there isn't really one
| bus hurtling towards one cliff. Climate, biodiversity, water
| pollutants, sustainable agriculture and extractivism... these are
| not orthogonal, but often run in different directions
| nonetheless. And then there's civilizational issues...
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, that's very true, the trouble is on many, many axis at
| once. This is what makes it so hard to engineer a solution:
| come up with something that might work along one axis and
| chances are that you are making things worse along another.
| Which then need to be weighed to decide if the change is a net
| positive and this isn't always easy to see at all.
|
| For instance: a massive re-tooling towards solar and wind has
| its own climate impact as well as effects on available
| resources, pollution and lots of other side effects.
| voakbasda wrote:
| It is just me, or is this an open call for a proletariat
| revolution against the bourgeois? Any successful "plunge past the
| first-class passengers" will not be a peaceful event.
| splatcollision wrote:
| "Vote harder" always works, no?
| knodi123 wrote:
| damn, if we only had a functional democracy.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Even if you do: that democracy will have to somehow work in
| concert with all of the other governments towards a single
| goal. We have - historically speaking - never done this.
| Ever. So I think the lesson will be a hard one and after that
| whatever remains will maybe be able to do a better job the
| next time around. If there is a next time around. I don't
| take that for granted at all.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| I'm sure that tyranny of the majority will lead us to
| enlightened places...
| yxwvut wrote:
| Thank god we have the rich to care for us instead, they
| know what's best.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I mean Doctorow writes books about communism so I think it is
| fair to say the answer is yes.
| andybak wrote:
| What?
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| https://reason.com/2017/07/12/cory-doctorows-fully-
| automated...
| andybak wrote:
| It's got "Communist" in the title.
|
| For all I know it might not even be about communism in
| anything other than a metaphorical sense. I'd certainly
| assume that from the context.
|
| Yet someone it feels like you're insinuating that he
| writes books advocating a communist revolution.
|
| That feels dishonest. Maybe it's not but with throwaway
| comments like this, my hackles rise.
|
| Would I be correct in assuming you've not read the book,
| either?
| dwiel wrote:
| It's not even a book by that title, it's an interview of
| him where the interviewer included the word communism in
| the title of the interview. I've read the books referred
| to in the interview and they definitely aren't about
| communism.
| odessacubbage wrote:
| in essence, any proposed swerve will do far less to hurt the
| first class passengers than it will to hurt those in coach and
| it will outright kill those who are hanging onto the bumper.
| whether those harms are moral, unavoidable or 'necessary' is
| largely open to interpretation.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This is spot on. In fact, the number of people displaced by
| natural disasters (in large part driven by climate change) is
| already rising rapidly, but it doesn't really make the news
| because of where they live and what color their skin is.
|
| 20+ million people in 2020:
|
| https://www.internal-displacement.org/global-
| report/grid2021...
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Depressingly, harming the "lower class passengers" is a
| feature, not a bug. It helps deter them from taking action.
| [deleted]
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I like Cory, but he's an optimist. He's missing a key fact about
| the first class passengers.
|
| Globally, classism has become so pronounced that, to preserve the
| metaphor, if anyone tries to swerve the bus the first class
| passengers will just kill them and won't stop killing until the
| bus is light enough to jump the gorge. They don't see the need to
| now, because nobody is making any serious notions to grab the
| wheel. But the 1% can pay another 5% or so to leverage the
| asymmetric warfare tools available against the remaining 94%.
|
| There are approximately 8 billion human beings on the planet
| right now. Cory is proposing a solution that saves 6 billion of
| them, maybe, if we play our cards right. But we already have
| weapons that can atomize cities. Removing a few key, highly
| populated cities from the planet would crater the number of
| people that our resources need to sustain, which is to say the
| number of people generating the sort of pollution that is
| threatening the biosphere, into the one to two billion range. And
| hey, bonus effect, overuse of those weapons results in a global
| cooling phenomenon. Win-win.
|
| I wish those grabbing the wheel luck, because they're going to
| have to grab it faster than the first class passengers can reach
| for their knives.
| themadturk wrote:
| I like Cory, and I think he's right. But he's preaching to the
| choir. No one who can get hold of the wheel is listening.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| If you get hold of the wheel, and you try to slow down the
| party bus, you'll get eaten alive.
| int_19h wrote:
| > can get hold of the wheel
|
| Only if you insist on legal means of doing so.
| notriddle wrote:
| Getting thrown in jail doesn't seem like a useful path
| towards accomplishing anything.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Technically, we all fractionally have hold of that steering
| wheel, but the decisions made in the boardrooms and the houses
| of parliament (assuming democracy, not always a given) will
| easily counteract the effects of private individuals deciding
| for themselves.
|
| It's actually really simple: this level of comfort is not
| sustainable without a major re-tooling of the way we interact
| with the eco-system, and if we don't adapt we will be adapted,
| quite likely by 'downsizing'.
| wrnr wrote:
| The is wrong on so many levels, in most places be it country or
| company the bus is being steered towards what is thought to
| result in global carbon reduction. This is a classic example of
| a moth and bailey argument, if only we had the same confidence
| about what to do about climate change as the fact of climate
| change. According to this article it is as if we only need to
| elect the right people and then those shall do the right thing.
| hgomersall wrote:
| We know what to do about climate change - stop emitting
| greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide and methane.
| Any strategy that doesn't address that on the scale that is
| required can be immediately dismissed as noise. That leaves
| relatively few options, and those are well enumerated.
| Probably we need to do all of them.
| wrnr wrote:
| Yea but HOW? Do you think there is some cheap pareto
| improvement to be had here. For god sake, the article is
| advocating for hurting and killing people and then
| complaining about a lack of political consensus.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The article isn't advocating for that, the article is
| merely observing that this is unavoidable.
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| > the article is advocating for hurting and killing
| people
|
| The alternative of not hurting and killing people is
| everyone suffers and dies, not a significant improvement.
| mistermann wrote:
| > Any strategy that doesn't address that on the scale that
| is required can be immediately dismissed as noise.
|
| What about strategies designed to set the stage for that,
| but do not define it as a direct goal?
| swayvil wrote:
| Preaching to the choir pays his rent.
|
| The other options are sucking oligarchs, amusing children,
| selling off your body parts, living in a cardboard box and the
| vast frontier of crime.
| fulafel wrote:
| It's rallying the troops and articulating the issues. Most of
| the readers are not yet doing much but can be encouraged to,
| there is a lot we can do by getting off our butts to convince
| the rest of the people (activism, lobbying, moving the
| political Overton window etc).
| syrrim wrote:
| This analogy is too hopeful for a couple reasons. First, the
| swerve is made to seem like a decisive action that is taken once
| and then is never repeated. In practice, if people don't like
| that we've slowed the bus, they can speed it right back up again.
| Second, the one's blocking the swerve are supposed to "first
| class passengers", which seemingly stand in for the rich and
| powerful. In practice, its many of the least well off who are
| against decisive action to stop climate change, which they
| perceive as being especially harmful to themselves. If all it
| took was one person rushing to the front of the bus and yanking
| on the steering wheel, then it likely would have happened by now.
| ncmncm wrote:
| You imagine poor people in position to make choices that affect
| their future. But it is the billionaires who make those choices
| and impose them.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Funny, I read 'first class passengers' as 'those in the rich
| and developed countries who are for the most part responsible
| for climate change due to their excessive carbon footprint'.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| If you define "rich and developed" as NATO+Japan then that's
| more than a billion people. Forcing that many people to
| reduce CO2 emissions to third world standards wouldn't
| require a "yank of the steering wheel", it would need nuclear
| war.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| So, you are saying there is still hope?
| [deleted]
| dougmwne wrote:
| The swerve is not happening. The bus driver and first class
| passengers are locked up front. The road is on a steep decline.
| The bus is going fast and still accelerating. This sucker is
| going over the edge.
| dash2 wrote:
| Respectfully suggest this is nonsense. No serious climate
| scientist thinks we are going to fall off a cliff. There will be
| huge costs, yes. Civilization won't end, no.
|
| What people fail to grasp is that costs can be absolutely
| enormous but look like a blip compared to the effect of GDP
| growth in the long run. World War II is an example. The millions
| of deaths barely show up on a graph of world population. The huge
| losses barely interrupt the smooth rise of GDP. Similarly,
| climate change could knock 5% off GDP permanently, this would be
| "the world's biggest collective action problem" as I think Nick
| Stern put it, but it wouldn't stop human society getting much
| richer.
|
| Edit: a bit of backup:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/11/25...
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I don't think the cliff in the article is referring to the
| phenomenon of a climate cliff. I think that is taking it too
| literally. I DO think climate change will be a disaster for
| humanity if we do nothing. It's not a sudden event by any
| means. The disaster will take decades of inaction and
| acceleration before we realize we are in it.
|
| But the analogy, which is that we are headed for a disaster and
| at this point we must take rapid drastic action to avoid it, I
| think is correct. Rapid action means making decisions now to
| commit to decades of repair work. It means immediately stopping
| new climate bomb projects. On the scale of a society, change
| that takes decades is akin to swerving a bus. And if we take no
| action, I think the analogy of crashing in to a canyon is
| appropriately bad. The only difference is that falling off a
| cliff happens in an instant, and no harm is done if you stop at
| the last minute, whereas with climate change the problem is
| slowly getting worse day by day. So yeah, it is not a perfect
| analogy, but I don't think we are meant to take the cliff as a
| direct analogy to climate change occurring all at once or not
| at all. Doctorow certainly knows that is not physically
| correct.
|
| Now if you look at human activity on long timescales, the
| decisions we make this century can drop us off a cliff in to
| disaster, or change our trajectory to just some bumps and
| bruises. And I think on this time scale the cliff analogy is
| more literal. You just can't think on the year by year
| timescales we normally think.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| drewcoo wrote:
| > No serious climate scientist thinks we are going to fall off
| a cliff.
|
| It's not a literal cliff. Doctorow was using a metaphor. And
| they're never exact fits, they are loosely analogous.
|
| He probably chose a bus in an attempt to make the trolley
| problem more current and approachable.
| the_af wrote:
| > _No serious climate scientist thinks we are going to fall off
| a cliff. There will be huge costs, yes. Civilization won 't
| end, no._
|
| I've read more than a couple of articles, linked to here on HN,
| of climate scientists claiming that this is indeed a
| civilization-ending cliff.
|
| It's been mentioned like this in other media, for example in
| Cosmos 2. Yes, that's divulgation, but nonetheless, it means
| the scientists consulted for Cosmos 2 believe this.
|
| edit: just googled Michael Shellenberger. He is not a subject
| matter expert on climate change, and Wikipedia describes him as
| "a controversial figure" among environmentalists, which means
| his position is not mainstream and probably shouldn't be used
| to state "no serious scientist believes...". Note: I'm not
| saying he is wrong, he could be right; it's just that his view
| is not mainstream for now.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Also the biggest problem to solve for the climate crisis is to
| solve for diesel fuel. If you could replace Diesel engines with
| anything else or curb their emissions that is the biggest
| contributor to CO2.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Serious scientists are not allowed to predict it. But it is
| certainly among the end states. Even likely ones.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Respectfully suggest that this analysis is more _whistling in
| the dark_.
|
| The very idea that human leadership has things under control
| overlooks multiple events in history - e.g. the Bronze Age
| Collapse we're still trying to explain - and suggests both
| amnesia and completely undue hubris. The idea also overlooks
| the potential for other kinds of simultaneous disaster being
| heaped on. (CME's for one.) We can anticipate them, but they
| are beyond our control - and may disable further options.
|
| There was a mass extinction of hundreds of species of megafauna
| just before our known history begins. Can't agree on the cause
| - but nonetheless the Moving Hand moved on.
|
| In the past two years, the fear and death created by one little
| invisible bug, which we declined to prepare for, has badly
| damaged economic stability. If we continue to overplay our weak
| hand, who will pay for the damage - and with what?
| ncmncm wrote:
| The mass extinction has been definitively traced to
| coincidence with the comet strike of 10818 BCE.
|
| Actual proof that each extinction was actually directly
| caused will be harder to come by. E.g. maybe dire wolves died
| because their prey went extinct. And, we still don't know why
| bison survived.
| [deleted]
| dougmwne wrote:
| The Clathrate Gun could be the cliff, though I think he was
| just using a weak metaphor. There could be enough trapped
| methane in the Arctic to trigger a major warming event if we
| break a certain warming threshold. This also may have happened
| before eons ago.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
| thanatos519 wrote:
| It's like a cross between 'The Big Bus'(1976) and
| 'Snowpiercer'(2013). Grab your pitchforks and torches and let's
| get to the front of the bus!
|
| Seriously, I agree that this is the only choice, but what is the
| actual plan?
| colechristensen wrote:
| The actual plan is "nothing".
|
| There's going to be an S curve where a large portion of fossil
| fuel energy is replaced with solar and a large portion of
| internal combustion motors are going electric. Both of those
| because they are cheaper more than any other reason.
|
| The climate is going to warm, the habitable zones of earth are
| going to move north, some equatorial regions are going to be
| uninhabitable, lots of people are going to have to move, lots
| of agriculture is going to have to move.
|
| How bad it is just depends on how well we prepare for and adapt
| to change.
|
| The people who just predict doom over and over and try to use
| that to promote some impossible change to "stop" climate change
| aren't helpful.
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