It's certainly a strange time to be alive. I was explaining to my child my work in AI, showing him images of himself as a character from his DnD campaign and at the same time am gently introducing him to the increasingly dire state of our climate. For parents of my generation "the talk" is not about sex, it's about the reality that we might not have a future to offer our children.
It feels like I am very literally living the life depicted in sci-fi novels of my youth. Equal parts wonderful and terrifying.
"it's about the reality that we might not have a future to offer our children."
But wasn't that always the case?
War was always around the corner and nuclear missile threat amplified it.
Btw. it seems the war made russia change its stance and some official "scientific" commitee has decided, that climate warming comes simply from radiation inside earth that follows a natural pattern. So no need to not burn coal then. So the hope is, that china who does believe in human made climate change will push them to still reduce CO2 somewhat. Indeed strange times.
> War was always around the corner and nuclear missile threat amplified it.
All sides showed remarkable restraint in actually following up on the threats. While the possibility of nuclear war was part of the backdrop, at least the impression was made that everybody tries to be as reasonable as possible to prevent it from happening.
Compare to climate change where people actively try to sabotage stuff like renewables build out (e.g. "In 2019, the state tried to further penalize solar users by implementing a law that levied fines against solar users." [0] which was struck down eventually - but still, people considered that a good enough idea to propose, successfully vote and implement that?!?) to stick it to The Man (or something).
"All sides showed remarkable restraint in actually following up on the threats. While the possibility of nuclear war was part of the backdrop, at least the impression was made that everybody tries to be as reasonable as possible to prevent it from happening."
Yes, but still all it takes is one crazy guy at the wrong position and time.
I am not ok with that and rather would have all the nukes directed towards the sky against asteroids.
And I am also not ok with producing tanks and artillery instead of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries. But it is, what it is. Too many short sighted people in position of power.
In general, socialist regimes have not cared about the environment. The Stasi records museum in Berlin has a mention of this in the courtyard. Lack of private property leads to government pollution.
We were lucky nuclear war didn't happen, and it still might.
I think the risk of nuclear war is higher now, with more nations having more weapons, fewer treaties preventing profession, and an increasingly multipolar power dynamic in international affairs.
I too thought we were closer to nuclear war now. But really with US second strike capability, and the fact that many of the nuclear warhead numbers don’t take into account usable missiles, among other factors, makes me sleep a bit easier at night.
Nope and it isn't the case now. End of the world cults are a common feature of human societies, pretty much all of them have/had them. My personal guess is that egos are so big that people can't imagine a world after them so it's easier to say the world is going to end.
Yes but climate disaster isn't a cult. There's the crazy guy who thinks Zeus is going to strike us all down and then there's the oceanographer out there with actual thermometers and log books saying hey this water is getting really damn warm.
Will be the end of life on earth? Not at all. Will it be the total extinction of humans? Probably not. Will it be far more war, starvation, death, and human suffering than we have collectively ever witnessed? Yes.
There is absolute nothing to suggest catastrophic or even rapid climate change. Yes we can detect human activity that is changing the planet and will have impacts on the climate. Preaching that it will result in any more suffering than the current or a previous state of the world is completely faith based without evidence.
Every credible scientist who studies this says the opposite, that climate change will increase the frequency and magnitude of events impacting millions of people. Yes, things like natural disasters, famines, or wars caused by resource competition aren’t new but we’ve been seeing them intensified for at least a decade and there’s no reason to believe that trend will reverse.
That’s a very different claim then that climate change will not “result in any more suffering than the current or a previous state of the world”. As that editorial acknowledges, even the 2 degrees we’re tracked for will have plenty of catastrophic outcomes:
> We will have caused incalculable damage to ecosystems. We will have worsened droughts, floods, famines, heat waves. We will have bleached coral reefs, acidified the ocean, driven countless animal species to extinction. Millions, maybe tens of millions, of people will die from increased heat, and more will be killed by the indirect consequences of climate change. Far more yet will be forced to flee their homes or live lives of deep poverty or suffering.
It’s also worth remembering that the 4-5 degree predictions were the worst case forecasts assuming that we did nothing, and the more optimistic tone of that piece is recognizing the benefits of having made changes. While it’s true that we don’t want to give up hope it’s even more important that we don’t use the successes we have had to support the fossil fuel industry-funded siren calls for inaction. Our goals for the world we leave our children should be much higher than “humans are not reduced to roving post-apocalyptic bands of survivors”. A world where the population equivalents of large cities are dying from unprecedented weather events is still one where they’re going to wish we’d listened to climate scientists decades earlier.
Saying humanity will be extinct in X years is completely unsupported by even the most dramatic predictions. If you believe it, you are on equal footing with the people waiting for the four horseman to show up. Teaching that to children will probably be seen as child abuse by the children who are being taught it today.
Lots of reasons, by having sex or praying the wrong way were common. The wrong way being the way some other out group does it. Now we can end the world by doing things like driving the wrong kind of car (but not by flying around the world to "broaden the mind" as in group members like to do that). You can even buy indulgences.
Okay. Answering different questions is one way to signal you don't have an answer to the actual question. We can accept that and close this thread. Thank you for participating.
War has indeed always threatened to take away our children's futures. Yet the possibility of peace is ever present.
The difference with climate change is the "peaceful" analog is vanishing. Humanity has always been able to choose peace. But we may soon not be able to choose to live on a healthy planet.
China's CO2/kWh is going down reasonably quickly for a growing economy. They could do a lot better of course (couldn't we all?), but they're not just building coal plants; they're also building renewables and nuclear. "China does X Y-times more than other countries" is a headline that can be recycled for almost every topic. There are 1.4 billion people in China.
I think they do care (they are also number 1 in rollout of most renewables), but they care more for social stability, that they can only sustain with high economic growth.
I think that’s a bit dramatic and airing on fear mongering. Other comment responses of OP have better sources, but I do not agree the “future is at risk” because of this.
I’m more inclined to closely watch geopolitical events unfold, as US hegemony becomes slowly unstable and potentially untenable.
If climate change were really really as dire as some say it is, we wouldn’t be half-assing our way via renewable energies which don’t have a power grid or power store nearly capable enough to handle a “fully electric future”
We’d be spending more money than the likes of other world powers on proven nuclear energy (unlike Germany who has decommissioned theirs in favor of coal)
I think I read the nuclear waste of nuclear power stations we have today could fit in a big Walmart? That’s an insane amount of energy density. That doesn’t include the potential for nuclear diamond batteries to reuse the spent fuel rods, or other upcoming technologies to reuse the waste.
Don’t get me wrong, we should look into truly renewable energy. But needing vast amounts of rare-earth minerals for solar panels and batteries from China, or nickel and cobalt from child-labor mines in the Congo doesn’t seem to line up with the ethos of “going green”
> I’m more inclined to closely watch geopolitical events unfold, as US hegemony becomes slowly unstable and potentially untenable.
Wait until you see what millions of people displaced by rising sea levels are going to do to political and economical stability worldwide. That's not going to happen in a far distant future, that's within 30 years. Bangladesh for example is expected to lose 17% of its land by 2050, displacing millions. Miami-Dade county will be 60% under water by 2060 when current projections come to pass.
> If climate change were really really as dire as some say it is, we wouldn’t be half-assing our way via renewable energies which don’t have a power grid or power store nearly capable enough to handle a “fully electric future”
The realities of climate change and its dire consequences aren't some doomsayers internet theories. We're completely half-assing our response to it despite the scientific consensus on the brutal consequences of our doing.
> We should “go nuclear”
That ship has sailed at least 20 years ago. Starting now with average construction times of 10 years plus they would come too late to make a difference.
Renewables are cheaper to build and faster to construct so that's were the world is heading.
I do wish we could overcome our squeamishness about nuclear. Because our climate circumstances are indeed dangerous. And in my opinion, they're quite a bit more dangerous than nuclear power would be, if we committed to scaling it up with a reasonable balance of safety and cost-effectiveness. It is only expensive because we hold it to a much higher standard of safety than any other power source. And understandably so, to some extent, because the tail risk from operating nuclear is greater, but we are facing tail risk from fossil fuels warming the planet as well, and I think that tail risk is much greater and much harder to control than that from nuclear.
I think we need less moralism and fear of complex systems, and more hard-headed, engineering-led cost-benefit analysis.
Yes. I am not certain. I have the opinions I've given in my post, and a perception that a legitimate cost-benefit debate has been cut short by moralizing.
The thing is, today it is not dire enough for people to care enough. When corona was only in china, we were not very worried. When it came super near, it got us worried enough to take drastic measures.
I'm afraid the same will happen with the reaction to climate change. When we feel we could die, we will take drastic measures. No way we will get extinct, but it will cause a lot of suffering and death.
Well said. I have two small kiddos and difficult to know how to engage with them on topics like AI and climate change.
As a related experience, I picked up my son from a birthday party and the birthday consisted of a rented massive trailer with big screen TVs and 7-8 different video game consoles for couch coop gaming. All powered by a generator. Very cool and very frightening all at the same time.
I would love to discuss these topics in detail in person with someone like you. I am completely unconcerned about climate change or AI yet very concerned about how my child will interact with your child when their concerns are vastly different.
Kids are the key to shaping the future, but kids is also the reason we are here.
Generations upon generations of children being produced, who with each generation "produce" more CO2.
Our planet needs strong leadership that dictates what can and cannot be done. Instead we have leaders making up solutions that are not solutions, but are presented as such.
The problem is less the children than the fact that lifestyle changes made things enormously more CO2 intensive. India has far more people and far lower CO2 emissions because they didn’t change their lifestyle to involve huge increases in beef consumption, daily individual travel in massive gas powered vehicles, and heavy use of climate control systems. A significant chunk of those changes and the CO2 emitted happened after we knew that global warming was happening, too, so it really comes back to the ability of rich people to buy their way into being allowed to ignore externalities.
I'm confused, what do you mean there's not going to be a future for them? No doubt there's going to be some challenges, but I thought all that carbon was in the atmosphere and oceans before it was sequestered by plants and alagae.
I thought the major issue was the speed of change, but we really don't know what life is thing to do in response.
According to this article, during the Cambrian, the earth was 10C hotter than it is today.
I wouldn't characterize ocean ecosystems dying from the bottom up as "totally doable" but, sure, the resource wars probably won't kill off the entire human species.
When I say totally doable, I mean humanity surviving is totally doable.
I guess I was thinking after the current ecosystems are wiped out, it will open up the niche for something else to take hold and evolve in their place. Isn't that what the geological record shows during mass extinctions?
Yeah but we went from “oh no we’re all going to die and we have to prepare our kids for that eventuality” to “oh no Vanuatu is sinking” in just a few HN comments.
In that light I’d like to underline that in the “this is fine” meme, things are actually on fire. It’s an apt comparison.
What I find strange is that people are actively building a zoo for themselves.
The population could have been very happy and rich with around 1 billion people — less garbage, less pollution, less extinction of species, less monocultures and farms, more biodiversity, sustainable resources, and not as much pressure on ecosystems.
If this world with a billion people existed, most likely (7/8th chance) you wouldn't exist. How does never existing make you feel? Unless in this fantasy you'd survive and enjoy the extra resources which comes off as extremely selfish to me.
People can have children below the replacement rate
They already do, in tons of countries
It might take care of itself, if not for AI and nukes humanity could be fine. But they just can’t resist, humanity seems to be acting like a rapacious child because of competition across countries.
As for your question… look ul the Doomsday Argument. 7% of all people who ever existed are alive today. If the population constantly increases then given the fact that you are alive means you’re more than likely living in the last days before a major population crash. The only question is what will be behind it — birth control or some ecosystem collapse?
The worst case scenarios of climate chanve are grim but still leace room for humanities future. It will be tumultuous, but not catacalysmic. Alarmism does nothing for us. We should try to stay level headed
small children do not have the grounding to deal with existential threats -- IMHO it does no good to have a "logical,serious" talk about such things in the first 10+ years
> They have been making so many doomsday predictions that all turned out to be completely false.
Citations needed. Remember that we’re aware that the 1990 IPCC report’s predictions were accurate and that the mid-1970s “global cooling” thing was a handful of papers which never had mainstream scientific acceptance and were disproven by the end of that decade, so there’s no point in repeating false claims about either of those topics even if it is popular in certain circles.
It feels like I am very literally living the life depicted in sci-fi novels of my youth. Equal parts wonderful and terrifying.