Has anybody else given up on climate change?

In My Humble Opinion
41

I’ve replaced all of my household lights with LEDs. I’ve recently installed a more efficient furnace and an on-demand water heater. My smart thermostat keeps my house at the most efficient stable temperature. I drive my car so infrequently that when I filled up yesterday, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been at the pump. I’m hoping to have solar installed next year.

And with all of that- yes, I’ve given up. I maintain no illusions that the world in general will do anything about climate change. I moved to Alberta two years ago partly because I suspect this area will become the new breadbasket as temperatures rise. Higher temperatures are coming, and the world will just have to adapt to them- because humans won’t do enough to stop it from happening.

42

I mean, call me naïve if you want but I’m starting to become hopeful about climate change. In between replacing coal with natural gas, and renewables, emissions are down in many developed nations.

Renewables are now as cheap as fossil fuels in many places. A lot of nations made commitments to be carbon neutral by mid century. Yes they may renege on those claims, but thats still several decades for prices to decline. It does suck that the world only moves to clean energy when its cheaper than dirty energy though. Because it took decades of R&D to get to that point. Also unless battery tech advances, you can’t make renewables the backbone of the grid.

My impression is that things will get bad so we will resort to climate engineering to take the edge off the worst of it, and by late in the century the world will be mostly carbon neutral. There will still be tons of damage, but it won’t end civilization. I feel humanity has survived worse things and civilization survived. Sadly most of the pain will fall on poor people like it always does. But humanity has survived plagues, war, famines, natural disasters, etc and kept going.

As an individual I can’t do much, but I did pick the option to have my electricity generated by renewables through my utility company, and since I’m WFH I don’t drive nearly as much. Hopefully lab grown meat which has far less climate impact will be along soon too.

43

If anything, some of the most ardent climate change deniers already have kids and grandkids from what I’ve seen. They just value their political partisanship over the well being of their grandchildren.

44

Has no one picked up on this?
The US emits twice as much co2 as India, and several times more per capita (…which would be the more relevant number. If we’re just going by absolute emissions, then India should just split into 20 countries – problem solved!)

45

The entire world needs to work to emit less CO2.
But if we’re going by per capita, the US drops to 9th.
The US emissions are at least going down while China’s went up by a factor of 3.5 over 25 years and might finally be leveling off.
But per capita, they’re still about half of the US level.

Fun Fact, Canada and Australia are actually slightly worse than the US.

India really isn’t that bad.

But again, we all need to work on this. It seems like only the EU and UK are making any major progress.

Numbers above from here:

46

But a lot of this is just offshoring the US’s carbon footprint. If we buy things made in China, produced with high emissions, then we are still contributing to those emissions.

47

Fair enough, but again, we all need to work on this.

Manufacturing is not the major cause of emission increases in China if I recall correctly. It is building (concrete especially), power generation and domestic consumerism are all ahead.

I think they’re moving away from coal and moving to EVs so China will hopefully stop increasing and hopefully decrease soon.

I put up a long list of what the US needs to do above.

48

I tend by nature to be a pessimist, so it doesn’t take very much to leave me feeling dispirited and disheartened. Like others, I continue to make my token efforts to reduce my carbon footprint, but when I see how certain political forces actively and successfully campaign to thwart efforts to adopt policies aimed at reducing CO2 emissions, I lose what little hope I had. We as a species appear not deserve to be custodians of this world.

I could see later in the century maybe coming up with a silver bullet solution like fusion generated energy, but that will likely be decades too late.

49

Exactly, including the US. It’s not helpful to look at it in terms of co2 per nation state (ignoring the vast differences in population), and then include a factual error on top of that, as in the OP.

50

Can we swear outside the pit? I think humanity is truly :point_right: :ok_hand:-ed, and we will not get out of it. In 50-100 years society (if it exists) will look completely different than today. Why?

  1. I believe that scientists are knowingly underestimating how bad things are. There is so much anti-climate change rhetoric out there, that I think scientists tune their models and predictions to be a bit more optimistic, so they are taken seriously. If they say we’re all going to die in 50 years, and there isn’t much we can do about it, nobody will listen. If they tune the model so it says things will be real bad unless we do something, that seems more reasonable. I have no proof of this.
  2. Wet bulb temperature will make vast parts of the planet incompatible with human life. Wet bulb temperature tells how effective evaporative cooling (aka sweating) is, and is a function of temperature and humidity. When it exceeds about 95°F, people die because they cannot keep cool. Right now people die in heat waves, but imagine if being outside of AC for two hours killed you. There will be ignored warnings, but the first time it happens in a large region, it will be catastrophic.

Predictions put too high wet bulb temperatures as maybe happening in 60 years. With point 1, my guess is that it’s closer to 40.

Working to reduce CO2 just buys time; it doesn’t solve anything. CO2 and other green house gas production needs to be stopped.

The climate goals we have today are 30 years too late. They’re the targets we should have set in 1990 to have already been achieved by now. We need a plan that will stop all fossil fuel use by 2040. That means greatly reducing production, then halting production, and dealing with all of the turmoil that will cause. It would have been much easier if we started in 1980.

For anybody who says that is too hard, it doesn’t matter that it’s hard. The atmosphere and sunlight don’t care.

51

Some of the worst climate deniers seemed to be of the ilk that would throw everyone else under the bus so their progeny could have all the resources. Having kids isn’t always selfless, being childless isn’t always selfish. There are too many parents who in reality care nothing for their own children, and many people without children who are kind and giving to all children. I would be cautious about making too many assumptions about someone based solely on whether or not they’ve biologically reproduced.

52

Unfortunately, I totally agree.

53

The point of apathy I have reached with people that deny climate science is to just say “Screw the why or how we got here, it’s here! What are we going to do now? Sea levels are measurably rising. Florida will be underwater in a couple centuries. WTF?”

And then there’s still

“You know what I’m gonna do?
I’m gonna get myself a 1967 Cadillac Eldorado convertible
Hot pink with whale skin hubcaps
And all leather cow interior
And big brown baby seal eyes for head lights (Yeah)
And I’m gonna drive in that baby at 115 miles per hour
Gettin’ one mile per gallon
Sucking down Quarter Pounder cheeseburgers from McDonald’s
In the old fashioned non-biodegradable styrofoam containers
And when I’m done sucking down those greaseball burgers
I’m gonna wipe my mouth with the American flag
And then I’m gonna toss the styrofoam containers right out the side”

-Dennis Leary, “Asshole”

54

Actually, at this rate it will be decades, not centuries.

55

This is one thing I can’t be apathetic about, because I live in Georgia and I don’t want to have to build a wall to keep Florida out. Though I’m sure there are just as many people gleeful at the thought of sitting on the front porch with AR’s ready to dispense God’s own justice to any fleeing climate refugees.

A thought that gives me no amount of heartache is that some of the most culpable Americans in this scenario really are just sitting on high ground in the interior of the continent, saying “I don’t care about coastal problems” and voting it into reality with their lopsided Senate power. “Wisconsin could use some warmer weather! yuk yuk.”

56

One thing that the ones in higher latitudes that expect getting warmer weather forget, is that by not ramping up efforts to deal with the issue is that the result or what they expect with their “too late” position is that they are talking about an actual moving target that they wish it will remain still once they get the temperatures that ‘gave riches to people in the past’.

It may become better where they live, but the evidence shows that since there could be more inaction that improvement in warmer weather will in a generation become more unstable with weather patterns that will be harder to predict, in essence one could be able to predict and plan better once an understanding of how big the change would be when we know that the CO2 levels are not increasing but leveling out.

As things are now, scientists are not being able to predict how worse it can get.

57

Of all the parts of climate change that worry me and get me motivated to do something. This one rates as most a shrug. I just can make myself care about the location of the coast line changing. People will move life will go on.

Heck I’m building a huge Coastal Florida project right now and the main this it’s designed around is elevating the building 13 feet above sea level to get it out of the ocean.

58

Emotionally I’ve given up on pretty much everything that requires large scale cooperation between humans, everything global that relies on a government accountable to its people (including handling climate change), and everything likewise that is local to the US, such as democracy.

“It is not incumbent upon you to finish the task, but neither are you free to desist from it.”

That’s the spirit I move forward with. I feel ethically obligated to vote a strictly Democratic ticket every election and donate around $1000 to the Democratic Party every election cycle – I look on that as a sort of extra tax I pay for the privilege of living in a society where some good things still come my way (roads, vaccines, space telescopes). But I believe it’s hopeless in the grand scheme of things.

If it got more practical to move out of the US to a better country, which includes some combination of breaking up relationships and convincing other people to go with me (necessary but not sufficient conditions), then I would. That wouldn’t change the climate, but it would let me live someplace with a more nearly democratic government, which is good. But I don’t see this happening any time soon.

59

Well, I haven’t. I just take what I consider a more realistic view of what can and will be done. I also see the myriad mistakes made by all sides on this, especially the politicization of this issue and how both sides’ narratives and efforts have hindered, rather than helped the situation.

But, that said, I think technology is moving forward, that increasingly people are becoming aware of the issue, and that market forces are going to eventually force a paradigm change. We just have to be prepared for bad things to happen in the rest of our lifetimes. But it’s not like this will be the first time humanity has been up against a nasty climate change. The only differences are that this time it’s our fault, but we also have the technology to eventually make real changes.

We don’t, because, in the end, the national self-interest is going to always trump everything else. It’s what the really committed green types never seem to get. It’s why market solutions are the only real solution to the crisis. When we force the market we get…large solar and wind farms with no way to store energy and a gradual global shut down of nuclear power which means more reliance on fossil fuel power plants to fill the gaps. Because, again, in the end, countries aren’t going to allow their citizens to go cold in the winter or hot in the summer, at least not to life-threatening levels.

Again, however, I think the market is moving in the right direction, and capital is flowing to solutions to the various issues. Technology is really going to be the key to eventually halting then turning back this crisis, IMHO anyway.

Giving up hope is always a mistake. Things change, times change, attitudes change. You are looking at a window in time and conflating what you have experienced with the way it will always be going forward. Think about if you were an abolitionist in the early 1800’s. Would you give up hope because there was still slavery? How would that help the slaves? Even if it didn’t happen in your lifetime, pushing for change would eventually cause that change to happen. I’m convinced that, eventually, this crisis too shall pass.

What we need to be prepared for is the consequences, which will certainly be nasty, but not worse than other things humanity has had to deal with in its past. Like the old saying goes, the reason the dinosaurs went extinct is they didn’t have a space program.

60

I had given up on Climate Change about 20 years back, and have worked with Technologies fully knowing that Humans/Markets totally lack the structure to address it.

Cutting CO2 emissions is like the “abstinence method” of birth control preached earlier on. We all know how well that works !!

But do not lose full faith, when Humans fail to control CO2 emissions, it looks likely that we will resort to Global Dimming or Climate Engineering. These technologies have uncertainties (a lot of emphasis on uncertainties) associated with them, but they can cool the climate back down.

Given the state of affairs, I think we should invest big in Global Dimming technology development (as a fall back plan).