I have several friends who can best be described as climate zealots. This is because they routinely express that we are heading towards an Earth that is uninhabitable. A changed climate will most certainly lead to more extinctions and harsher environments. While I accept that our current trajectory will lead to catastrophe, they believe it will instead be a cataclysm greater than any previous mass extinction event in Earth's history.<p>Activism, in general, is no stranger to hyperbole. But the most peculiar thing is how so many people with this apocalyptic mindset also happen to be staunchly anti-nuclear. I've also noticed the changes they demand are effectively impossible to enact politically. Tragically, this just means they get angrier and angrier that so little progress is being made.
It's becoming more and more clear to me that the underlying issue driving much of our current crises is that people think binary - it's either "climate apocalypse" or "let's burn all the fossil fuel". Same for the COVID mess, gun laws, critical race theory, take your pick. People are uncomfortable with nuance and since we basically have to pick the experts we trust we fall victim to the loudest and most exciting voice.
Um, no. This article isn't how any of this works.<p>I think I see what's going on, from the article:<p><i>Ted Nordhaus is the founder and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, a research centre focused on technological solutions to environmental challenges.</i><p>The first step in addressing global climate change is realizing that it's not the sort of problem that more tech or capitalism can solve, since they created it.<p>From a tech perspective, the scale of the problem is that the majority of people on Earth need to transition to things like solar and electric cars/bikes, redesign cities to lose the suburbs, not to mention fix the majority of the supply chain to be sustainable. It's tens of thousands of dollars per person, something like $10-100 trillion total. Wealthy countries never wanted to pay for that or lead on that, so here we are.<p>An alternative might be sustainability from a seventh generation standpoint, picking ourselves up by our bootstraps solarpunk fashion because world leaders are unlikely to act on this before it's too late (which it may already be). This is the approach I'm taking in my own life.<p>If we don't start doing something, coral reefs will be dead by 2050, remaining fisheries will collapse, there will be great refugee migrations and potentially WWIII. But it won't matter anyway since the remaining forest will also be gone and most large non-agriculture land animals will be extinct by 2100. I'd say this sounds alarmist, but I first heard about it as a kid in the 1980s when Reagan took the solar panels off the White House that Jimmy Carter had installed, and it's so much worse today, as we're seeing.<p>Environmental causes were traditionally led by a handful of people. All of the remaining wildernesses left in the US got there because someone sacrificed years of their life organizing, fundraising and waging legal battles against resource extractors and the government. This was never ideal, but if it weren't for that, it would all be gone today.<p>Don't let articles like this distract you from your personal contribution.
Remember, only corporations are allowed to mislead.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27698751" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27698751</a><p>If only activists had never resorted to hyperbole, people would have seen through the vast, well-funded web of climate denial. They'd have Done Their Own Research (tm) and reached a reasonable and non-controversial approach to tackling climate change.<p>I realize that sarcasm never reads well on the Internet, but it's the natural response to a statement so stupid that there's no alternative but to repeat it in astonishment.<p>I do wish that climate activists were always correct and never hyperbolic. That would be great. But it's a persistent falsehood that people would change their minds if only it weren't for the missteps by activists.<p>Climate denial is not "misleading". It's active, deliberately constructed misinformation, which a ton of people accept because it aligns with their ideology. Even people who are nominally intelligent enough to figure it out. I've even seen them claim that they'd believe the truth if only there weren't some activist out there somewhere so said the wrong thing and therefore they're happy to cut off their entire head to spite their face.
While I think some of hyperbole around climate change risks confusing people about exactly how bad the situation could be, the differences between 1.5 and 2 degrees are not trivial, and even 1.5 degrees is considerably worse than what we have now.<p>>The good news is that if countries uphold their commitments from the past several years to sharply cut emissions, the world will be in position to limit warming closer to 2°C, the long-standing international target for climate stabilisation.<p>The qualifiers here are doing a lot of work. <i>If</i> countries uphold their commitments, they will be <i>in a position</i> to limit warning <i>closer</i> to 2°C. Nordhouse dismisses Thunberg's comments as "adolescent cynicism," but there's a real gap between commitments and action. The Biden administration's Build Back Better bill with the CEPP provisions included would put the U.S. on a track to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, according to one analysis [0]. That target is more reachable than I think a lot of people pessimistic about climate change action, myself included, thought. However, the full bill is unlikely to pass. The recently signed bipartisan infrastructure bill will make only a small dent—the US would need BBB or legislature with similar climate ambitions to actually be on the right track.<p>Nordhouse's link [1] shows that if nations keep their commitments by 2030, it will be 2.4, which is much better than 3 degrees, but significantly higher than 2. Optimistically, warming could be kept to 1.9 degrees if long-term commitments are all kept.<p>So it's fair to point out that there's still time, but I don't think dismissing critics like Thunberg is fair. Without holding nations to their commitments like she's doing, it's much more likely we won't do any better than the current 3 degree projection.<p>[0]: <a href="https://repeatproject.org/docs/REPEAT_Preliminary_Report_102021.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://repeatproject.org/docs/REPEAT_Preliminary_Report_102...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-do-cop26-promises-keep-global-warming-below-2c" rel="nofollow">https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-do-cop26-promises-keep-...</a>