This is a difficult topic to discuss in such a manner that won't be discounted by many/most of the general public and perhaps many here on Tildes as well. And I've often tried, both here, on...
Exemplary
This is a difficult topic to discuss in such a manner that won't be discounted by many/most of the general public and perhaps many here on Tildes as well. And I've often tried, both here, on reddit and other places but usually end up deleteing whatever I've typed before posting.
Because why bother? If I convince 1 person, 10 people or even a 1000 that we're in dire straits and even if we collectively as a planet stopped 100% of the human-caused greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow...we've still got to deal with the decades of carbon that have already been produced and spewed into the air and the multiple feedback loops that have already kicked into gear and will continue ramping up for the foreseeable future.
And if you talk about "no chance" or "no hope" then people's defensive mechanisms kick in (especially if they have kids) and they look for any way to dispute it, call you an idiot, question your sources, etc, etc and I just don't have the energy anymore. And even if I did why would I spend it for such a fruitless exercise when it's hard enough just existing as I am?
I would love to be wrong (please oh please let me be wrong) and I would love to see humanity make a comeback but after studying our collapsing biosphere for many years I don't see that as even a possibility anymore. And yet we all still have to go to work, pay bills, buy groceries and carry on with our daily lives.
I'm pretty much a doomer in regards to reversing climate change, because obviously there's no way to fix the emissions that have already been caused. But I'd still argue for improving our...
I'm pretty much a doomer in regards to reversing climate change, because obviously there's no way to fix the emissions that have already been caused. But I'd still argue for improving our situation. I'd rather our planet go to 80% or 90% shit instead of 100% shit. That 10-20% less shit is millions of lives that can be saved/improved.
I agree with you in that it's extremely hard to push for change. But I try not to slip into full blown apathy.
“Latest” already implies fallacious thinking. Climate change is a sliding scale - the more, the worse. But there all the cliffs are arbitrary. The situation is also greatly improved. Ten years ago...
“Latest” already implies fallacious thinking. Climate change is a sliding scale - the more, the worse. But there all the cliffs are arbitrary.
The situation is also greatly improved. Ten years ago we were projecting nearly 5 degrees of increase, and now we’re just above 2, with a chance at being below 2, the arbitrary number from the Paris climate accords. Renewables continue to increase in usage, especially among developing nations, and the US has dramatically cut back on emissions.
The essay is an interesting write up. I can identify with a lot of it on a bad day, but shoot, you can still be all the positive things mentioned AND be hopeful. I don’t think I care for the...
The essay is an interesting write up. I can identify with a lot of it on a bad day, but shoot, you can still be all the positive things mentioned AND be hopeful. I don’t think I care for the argument “I can’t do anything about it so I might as well be a decent human being“. I may be missing some of the point, but that was my takeaway.
All that being said, thanks for the positivity. For those that know it, there is a really good Bill Hicks bit about the news screaming “WAR, DISEASE, FAMINE, DEPRESSION” only to take a look outside to nothing but crickets. It’s not that simple, but it is a huge part of the problem. Nowadays it’s just in overdrive thanks to the irresponsibility of social media megacorps.
There are real problems with our poor stewardship of our home and we need to do something about it. We have started to see the consequences. I take the general stance that, even though people endlessly frustrated me, people are all we have and I believe in them. I could go on, but I’m too long winded.
Thanks again for the injection of tangible positivity to a bleak discussion.
I was a wanted child. My parents went through a lot of trouble and planning to have me and keep me, and they have never showed me anything but love and support. But when I was older, my mom...
I was a wanted child. My parents went through a lot of trouble and planning to have me and keep me, and they have never showed me anything but love and support. But when I was older, my mom admitted to me that, as much as they treasured me, there was a stretch of my childhood where they sincerely regretted having me: during a period of heightened nuclear fears at the tail end of the Cold War.
That knowledge has stuck with me. Over the years, I've had a lot of fantasies about having children and grandchildren, but in the end I realized that if I did have any, I would love them so much that I would not be able to forgive myself for giving them life so late in humanity's timeline. They are better off as what-if reveries.
I have thought a lot of the same for much of the same reasons as you did growing up and some "what-if regret" from my mom having lived thru decades of abusive people and raising children thru it...
That knowledge has stuck with me. Over the years, I've had a lot of fantasies about having children and grandchildren, but in the end I realized that if I did have any, I would love them so much that I would not be able to forgive myself for giving them life so late in humanity's timeline. They are better off as what-if reveries.
I have thought a lot of the same for much of the same reasons as you did growing up and some "what-if regret" from my mom having lived thru decades of abusive people and raising children thru it too.
I have chosen to actively be a negative in the population trend and the only thing I thought about was providing a foster home or adopting in the future as there are already more than enough children in the world and I may be able to offer only my few drops in the bucket to make what would be their lives better. For now, I just donate what I can to the food bank.
Suffering is an inevitability in life the least I can do with my life is to work to reduce it for others.
I understand the fatigue, and you can't convince someone they have less time than they think, before they are ready to hear it. But I do think it's nice to hear someone else say it, so I don't...
I understand the fatigue, and you can't convince someone they have less time than they think, before they are ready to hear it.
But I do think it's nice to hear someone else say it, so I don't feel so alone. In the end, even if you and I can't change things, we still have each other in the mean time
It is not particularly surprising that when arcane scientific detail meets simplistic reporting, it results in a muddle, and it’s a muddle the term “tipping point” itself—evoking an abruptness and immediacy not necessarily characteristic of most, let alone all, tipping elements—perhaps adds to. Climate tipping points and “runaway climate change” are now common parlance in climate conversations, and while different advocates may mean different things in practice when using these terms, they speak to a broadly shared, yet inaccurate, understanding that the climate system is on the verge of very unstable, self-reinforcing, and abruptly rapid disaster.
It isn’t. And it’s important to understand that it isn’t. Taken at rational face value, the feeling that the planet is just years away from sliding beyond a catastrophic point of no return invites unproductive fatalism. At the same time, the perception of an imminent climate cliff seemingly rules out long-term planning in favor of emergency measures, skewing discussion of climate policies in ways that can be counterproductive.
Although I appreciate this counter perspective to the "doomer" view of the first article, I worry that both are viewing and arguing about the climate effects only and not the social upheaval....
Although I appreciate this counter perspective to the "doomer" view of the first article, I worry that both are viewing and arguing about the climate effects only and not the social upheaval. Within the recent past we had the Arab Spring and the Syrian crisis which led to huge challenges in Europe. The unrest and refugee crisis were obviously the result of many factors, but climate change also seems to have played a role. This may be just a taste of the mass migrations and economic turmoil that are to come. We saw unprecedented flooding in Pakistan recently, linked to climate change and with no real reason to expect that it will be better this monsoon season. The global order is being shaken by even the current level of climate change, and we don't have a near horizon where humans get it under control.
I'm a doomer with an extensive education in the actual problem (physics not metrology, but fluid dynamics actually is one of the disciplines of climate science . . . and I have an advanced degree...
I'm a doomer with an extensive education in the actual problem (physics not metrology, but fluid dynamics actually is one of the disciplines of climate science . . . and I have an advanced degree in it). The thing that I keep my finger on is the decreasing amount of oxygen the oceans are releasing into the atmosphere (quick hint, it's decreasing in ways the scientific papers don't want reported, I've been on actual calls with the folks pulling this data in the gulf of Mexico listening to them cry). And this is in fact, scary end of the world kind of shit, and not some nebulous couple centuries down the line, but like . . . 3 or 4 generations.
The question is, how much oxygen production can we lose? How much can the biosphere lose before it starts to break down in some pretty horrific ways (fun fact, a lot of the species we depend on have higher oxygen demands than we do . . .) 4% but 2100, that's not so bad right . . . but then you look at the curve and realize this is a exponential problem not a linear one.
How much of a shock can the biosphere take from all sides, with the fuel for very life becoming more scarce? And like, no one has an answer to this one, lots of answers for a bunch of the other problems with the climate but this one is . . . "pray" . . .
Or stop being an industrial society, on the global scale . . . let malthusian mathematics be the rule again, but we will never do that, we can't do that.
Thank you. "Tech will save us, don't give up" is nice and all, but at some point, we need to sit down, get a grip, and properly weep. It doesn't mean we give up on worthwhile things about being...
Thank you. "Tech will save us, don't give up" is nice and all, but at some point, we need to sit down, get a grip, and properly weep. It doesn't mean we give up on worthwhile things about being human: it just means we stop wasting time doing meaningless things, so that we can make these last hundred or so years truly count.
Stop making bullshit fast fashion, making quarters, making trinkets and ads and anti human things, hustle, leave kids to screens, cut funding to schools and medical staff and starve strawberry pickers and drown migrants . Spend more time to admire the last of our biodiversity, love your kids, love your neighbour, plant things, laugh, enjoy the air.
Well, most of the research I know about is being privately held by various trusts and corporations, I haven't read a white paper on it for a couple of years, and I loss my free access to Oxford...
Well, most of the research I know about is being privately held by various trusts and corporations, I haven't read a white paper on it for a couple of years, and I loss my free access to Oxford Academic in 2020 (work from home, not on a "verified university terminal" anymore, so no more browsing white papers for fun).
The NOAA page (https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/hazards/hypoxia/) is a decent place to start and has a ton of links to actual studies. But a lot of my access is anecdotal, just talking to friends that decided to go after the PhD (I did not, I took my terminal masters and booked it). You know, you work in a pretty close lab environment (and on a boat) with a dozen people for 3 or 4 years and you either are life long friends or enemies. The main person I'm talking to about this stuff is modeling nitrogen rich flow into the gulf of Mexico for a Monsanto subsiderary . . . so like, they're gonna lie about this shit. And the white washing of all this data at the billionare/corpo/government level makes me feel like I'm some weird conspiracy nut . . . if like all the other people in the fairly small "reactive hydrology" field didn't all low key agree that, that is in fact what is going on.
Boomer Doomer here. It's a strange road we all walk because you need to live as a human. But almost everything we do to live on this planet has a consequence for the climate. The thing to remember...
Boomer Doomer here. It's a strange road we all walk because you need to live as a human. But almost everything we do to live on this planet has a consequence for the climate. The thing to remember is the Earth will be fine. It will shake us off and go back to doing planet stuff, it just won't be habitable for us humans.
Even with all of that running through my head, I have hope. I sit here in the midwest as wildfires in Canada make our skies hazy. There's war and hunger and pestulance. But even so, I hear younger people talk about how they are angry and how they want change. Good. Keep that fire. Make governments accountable. Do the things our selfish generation did not want to.
Me, I live lightly, I'm vegan for the animals and the environment. I try not to buy more than what I actually need. I donate instead of throw stuff away. It's not a lot, but its a few drops here and there. Hopefully it's enough to amount to something over my lifetime. But I am a realist, and so the though of a dystopian future is certainly there, and that makes me sad.
I've often wondered if more people just did as much as they could within their means to combat climate change, would they feel more invested, would they demand more from governments and...
Me, I live lightly, I'm vegan for the animals and the environment. I try not to buy more than what I actually need. I donate instead of throw stuff away. It's not a lot, but its a few drops here and there. Hopefully it's enough to amount to something over my lifetime.
I've often wondered if more people just did as much as they could within their means to combat climate change, would they feel more invested, would they demand more from governments and corporations? It seems like the thought, "I'm so small, it won't make a difference anyway," prevents any sort of hope of change.
for an example of why the author considers himself a doomer, his post from earlier this month, WTF is Happening? An Overview goes into details about just how incredibly bad several climate change...
for an example of why the author considers himself a doomer, his post from earlier this month, WTF is Happening? An Overview goes into details about just how incredibly bad several climate change related metrics are right now.
I have to say that in my lifetime alone, I have went from Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!, to upcycling, to reducing my carbon footprint….and all that time I felt good. I’m making a difference. Then, the...
I have to say that in my lifetime alone, I have went from Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!, to upcycling, to reducing my carbon footprint….and all that time I felt good. I’m making a difference.
Then, the more I read over the years, and realized the problem is so much bigger, and requires more effort than my choice to go reusable bags when I shop, it felt a bit defeating.
I’m still doing my part, still believing my drop in the bucket counts. But my thinking has shifted focus from ways we can do our part to where do we move so our children and children’s children feel this impact less and have a better life in areas where change won’t be felt as drastically so soon?
That thought felt “doomer” in and of itself. I agree - we need to take the reins out of the hands of people who have no vested interest beyond lobbying and regurgitating false information to continue to draw that line in the sand and demand that anyone who believes in climate change is of a certain persuasion.
We need to hand them back to the people who are vested in mitigating and reversing any damage we possibly can. Thinking bigger than ourselves and realizing what we are dooming future generations to live in is important. I can only hope that the tide turns before it’s too late.
We live in a society filed by short sighted gains and c-suites with golden parachutes. The entire capitalistic system is dependent on exploitation of the environment and workers. Privatizing the...
We live in a society filed by short sighted gains and c-suites with golden parachutes.
The entire capitalistic system is dependent on exploitation of the environment and workers.
Privatizing the gains, socializing the losses. I’ve lost all hope.
Whether the human race last 100 years or 100 million extinction and the death of the planet are a certainty. It won't effect me either way so why waste my short life caring about it.
Whether the human race last 100 years or 100 million extinction and the death of the planet are a certainty. It won't effect me either way so why waste my short life caring about it.
If you don't spend at least some time caring about how humanity moves forward, it means that people in the future will have even less time to care about it. Let's try not to leave them even worse...
If you don't spend at least some time caring about how humanity moves forward, it means that people in the future will have even less time to care about it. Let's try not to leave them even worse off, if we can help it.
I know there's not much most of us can do to delay the inevitable, and I agree that it's healthy to avoid exhausting oneself trying to control the impossible...but extreme nihilism is about as helpful as surgeons refusing to cut out tumors because "some day the sun will die, bro".
I’m not looking for an argument, and I’m trying to come at this from the most respectful that I can because the topic has generally affected my friends and family. I understand your apathy and it...
I’m not looking for an argument, and I’m trying to come at this from the most respectful that I can because the topic has generally affected my friends and family. I understand your apathy and it harkens to a deeply cynical part of myself.
What do you say to the people already dying from the disasters that were intensified/created by the effects of climate change? I lost an entire part of my family when a “unprecedented” hurricane devastated their village. My best friends parents lost their homes and their lives in wildfires that were intensified by the effects of climate change. You can read endless numbers of stories like these already. This isn’t just about extinction, there are real people already suffering from the effects.
I’m just curious what your thinking is regarding those people? It’s easy to dismiss past and future generations because they don’t exist, but what about the people now? What happens if you were displaced currently by the effects? Do you think your tone around the subject would be different?
I imagine if I was effected then my thoughts would be different. If my house catches fire do the African kids care? We are inherently selfish creatures. And although these are my opinions I...
I imagine if I was effected then my thoughts would be different. If my house catches fire do the African kids care? We are inherently selfish creatures. And although these are my opinions I guarantee I do a lot more the help than most people who ruminate on these things. I recycle electronics for a living. I live in a 1 bed apartment and use barely any energy. I keep a 20 year old car on the road with my own labour and I have had 3 smartphones since 2007. But does any of it matter. No. I could sit in a field naked with 0 carbon footprint and it wouldn't matter one jot. I'm sorry if you took my tone as an argument that's not how I ment it.
This is a difficult topic to discuss in such a manner that won't be discounted by many/most of the general public and perhaps many here on Tildes as well. And I've often tried, both here, on reddit and other places but usually end up deleteing whatever I've typed before posting.
Because why bother? If I convince 1 person, 10 people or even a 1000 that we're in dire straits and even if we collectively as a planet stopped 100% of the human-caused greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow...we've still got to deal with the decades of carbon that have already been produced and spewed into the air and the multiple feedback loops that have already kicked into gear and will continue ramping up for the foreseeable future.
And if you talk about "no chance" or "no hope" then people's defensive mechanisms kick in (especially if they have kids) and they look for any way to dispute it, call you an idiot, question your sources, etc, etc and I just don't have the energy anymore. And even if I did why would I spend it for such a fruitless exercise when it's hard enough just existing as I am?
I would love to be wrong (please oh please let me be wrong) and I would love to see humanity make a comeback but after studying our collapsing biosphere for many years I don't see that as even a possibility anymore. And yet we all still have to go to work, pay bills, buy groceries and carry on with our daily lives.
It's not a great spot to be in, but here we are.
I'm pretty much a doomer in regards to reversing climate change, because obviously there's no way to fix the emissions that have already been caused. But I'd still argue for improving our situation. I'd rather our planet go to 80% or 90% shit instead of 100% shit. That 10-20% less shit is millions of lives that can be saved/improved.
I agree with you in that it's extremely hard to push for change. But I try not to slip into full blown apathy.
The best time to plant a tree is forty years ago. The second best time is now.
“Latest” already implies fallacious thinking. Climate change is a sliding scale - the more, the worse. But there all the cliffs are arbitrary.
The situation is also greatly improved. Ten years ago we were projecting nearly 5 degrees of increase, and now we’re just above 2, with a chance at being below 2, the arbitrary number from the Paris climate accords. Renewables continue to increase in usage, especially among developing nations, and the US has dramatically cut back on emissions.
These projections from the RMI are a tad optimistic about renewables trends but also shows just far things have changed https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2023/06/rmi_renewable_revolution.pdf
The essay is an interesting write up. I can identify with a lot of it on a bad day, but shoot, you can still be all the positive things mentioned AND be hopeful. I don’t think I care for the argument “I can’t do anything about it so I might as well be a decent human being“. I may be missing some of the point, but that was my takeaway.
All that being said, thanks for the positivity. For those that know it, there is a really good Bill Hicks bit about the news screaming “WAR, DISEASE, FAMINE, DEPRESSION” only to take a look outside to nothing but crickets. It’s not that simple, but it is a huge part of the problem. Nowadays it’s just in overdrive thanks to the irresponsibility of social media megacorps.
There are real problems with our poor stewardship of our home and we need to do something about it. We have started to see the consequences. I take the general stance that, even though people endlessly frustrated me, people are all we have and I believe in them. I could go on, but I’m too long winded.
Thanks again for the injection of tangible positivity to a bleak discussion.
I was a wanted child. My parents went through a lot of trouble and planning to have me and keep me, and they have never showed me anything but love and support. But when I was older, my mom admitted to me that, as much as they treasured me, there was a stretch of my childhood where they sincerely regretted having me: during a period of heightened nuclear fears at the tail end of the Cold War.
That knowledge has stuck with me. Over the years, I've had a lot of fantasies about having children and grandchildren, but in the end I realized that if I did have any, I would love them so much that I would not be able to forgive myself for giving them life so late in humanity's timeline. They are better off as what-if reveries.
I have thought a lot of the same for much of the same reasons as you did growing up and some "what-if regret" from my mom having lived thru decades of abusive people and raising children thru it too.
I have chosen to actively be a negative in the population trend and the only thing I thought about was providing a foster home or adopting in the future as there are already more than enough children in the world and I may be able to offer only my few drops in the bucket to make what would be their lives better. For now, I just donate what I can to the food bank.
Suffering is an inevitability in life the least I can do with my life is to work to reduce it for others.
I understand the fatigue, and you can't convince someone they have less time than they think, before they are ready to hear it.
But I do think it's nice to hear someone else say it, so I don't feel so alone. In the end, even if you and I can't change things, we still have each other in the mean time
I think this article on climate defeatism I shared on Tildes a while ago is relevant here.
Although I appreciate this counter perspective to the "doomer" view of the first article, I worry that both are viewing and arguing about the climate effects only and not the social upheaval. Within the recent past we had the Arab Spring and the Syrian crisis which led to huge challenges in Europe. The unrest and refugee crisis were obviously the result of many factors, but climate change also seems to have played a role. This may be just a taste of the mass migrations and economic turmoil that are to come. We saw unprecedented flooding in Pakistan recently, linked to climate change and with no real reason to expect that it will be better this monsoon season. The global order is being shaken by even the current level of climate change, and we don't have a near horizon where humans get it under control.
I'm a doomer with an extensive education in the actual problem (physics not metrology, but fluid dynamics actually is one of the disciplines of climate science . . . and I have an advanced degree in it). The thing that I keep my finger on is the decreasing amount of oxygen the oceans are releasing into the atmosphere (quick hint, it's decreasing in ways the scientific papers don't want reported, I've been on actual calls with the folks pulling this data in the gulf of Mexico listening to them cry). And this is in fact, scary end of the world kind of shit, and not some nebulous couple centuries down the line, but like . . . 3 or 4 generations.
The question is, how much oxygen production can we lose? How much can the biosphere lose before it starts to break down in some pretty horrific ways (fun fact, a lot of the species we depend on have higher oxygen demands than we do . . .) 4% but 2100, that's not so bad right . . . but then you look at the curve and realize this is a exponential problem not a linear one.
How much of a shock can the biosphere take from all sides, with the fuel for very life becoming more scarce? And like, no one has an answer to this one, lots of answers for a bunch of the other problems with the climate but this one is . . . "pray" . . .
Or stop being an industrial society, on the global scale . . . let malthusian mathematics be the rule again, but we will never do that, we can't do that.
Thank you. "Tech will save us, don't give up" is nice and all, but at some point, we need to sit down, get a grip, and properly weep. It doesn't mean we give up on worthwhile things about being human: it just means we stop wasting time doing meaningless things, so that we can make these last hundred or so years truly count.
Stop making bullshit fast fashion, making quarters, making trinkets and ads and anti human things, hustle, leave kids to screens, cut funding to schools and medical staff and starve strawberry pickers and drown migrants . Spend more time to admire the last of our biodiversity, love your kids, love your neighbour, plant things, laugh, enjoy the air.
Can you share some good writing on this topic?
Well, most of the research I know about is being privately held by various trusts and corporations, I haven't read a white paper on it for a couple of years, and I loss my free access to Oxford Academic in 2020 (work from home, not on a "verified university terminal" anymore, so no more browsing white papers for fun).
The NOAA page (https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/hazards/hypoxia/) is a decent place to start and has a ton of links to actual studies. But a lot of my access is anecdotal, just talking to friends that decided to go after the PhD (I did not, I took my terminal masters and booked it). You know, you work in a pretty close lab environment (and on a boat) with a dozen people for 3 or 4 years and you either are life long friends or enemies. The main person I'm talking to about this stuff is modeling nitrogen rich flow into the gulf of Mexico for a Monsanto subsiderary . . . so like, they're gonna lie about this shit. And the white washing of all this data at the billionare/corpo/government level makes me feel like I'm some weird conspiracy nut . . . if like all the other people in the fairly small "reactive hydrology" field didn't all low key agree that, that is in fact what is going on.
Any references on that?
Not OP, and not an expert on the topic as OP is, but here's a well-written literature review published in Science (2018).
Boomer Doomer here. It's a strange road we all walk because you need to live as a human. But almost everything we do to live on this planet has a consequence for the climate. The thing to remember is the Earth will be fine. It will shake us off and go back to doing planet stuff, it just won't be habitable for us humans.
Even with all of that running through my head, I have hope. I sit here in the midwest as wildfires in Canada make our skies hazy. There's war and hunger and pestulance. But even so, I hear younger people talk about how they are angry and how they want change. Good. Keep that fire. Make governments accountable. Do the things our selfish generation did not want to.
Me, I live lightly, I'm vegan for the animals and the environment. I try not to buy more than what I actually need. I donate instead of throw stuff away. It's not a lot, but its a few drops here and there. Hopefully it's enough to amount to something over my lifetime. But I am a realist, and so the though of a dystopian future is certainly there, and that makes me sad.
I've often wondered if more people just did as much as they could within their means to combat climate change, would they feel more invested, would they demand more from governments and corporations? It seems like the thought, "I'm so small, it won't make a difference anyway," prevents any sort of hope of change.
Thank you for doing what you can do :)
for an example of why the author considers himself a doomer, his post from earlier this month, WTF is Happening? An Overview goes into details about just how incredibly bad several climate change related metrics are right now.
I have to say that in my lifetime alone, I have went from Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!, to upcycling, to reducing my carbon footprint….and all that time I felt good. I’m making a difference.
Then, the more I read over the years, and realized the problem is so much bigger, and requires more effort than my choice to go reusable bags when I shop, it felt a bit defeating.
I’m still doing my part, still believing my drop in the bucket counts. But my thinking has shifted focus from ways we can do our part to where do we move so our children and children’s children feel this impact less and have a better life in areas where change won’t be felt as drastically so soon?
That thought felt “doomer” in and of itself. I agree - we need to take the reins out of the hands of people who have no vested interest beyond lobbying and regurgitating false information to continue to draw that line in the sand and demand that anyone who believes in climate change is of a certain persuasion.
We need to hand them back to the people who are vested in mitigating and reversing any damage we possibly can. Thinking bigger than ourselves and realizing what we are dooming future generations to live in is important. I can only hope that the tide turns before it’s too late.
We live in a society filed by short sighted gains and c-suites with golden parachutes.
The entire capitalistic system is dependent on exploitation of the environment and workers.
Privatizing the gains, socializing the losses. I’ve lost all hope.
Whether the human race last 100 years or 100 million extinction and the death of the planet are a certainty. It won't effect me either way so why waste my short life caring about it.
If you don't spend at least some time caring about how humanity moves forward, it means that people in the future will have even less time to care about it. Let's try not to leave them even worse off, if we can help it.
I know there's not much most of us can do to delay the inevitable, and I agree that it's healthy to avoid exhausting oneself trying to control the impossible...but extreme nihilism is about as helpful as surgeons refusing to cut out tumors because "some day the sun will die, bro".
I care about the future humans as much as I care about all the dead ones... Once your dead you won't care either. Trust me bro lol
Yes, but those future people will care when they’re alive.
I’m not looking for an argument, and I’m trying to come at this from the most respectful that I can because the topic has generally affected my friends and family. I understand your apathy and it harkens to a deeply cynical part of myself.
What do you say to the people already dying from the disasters that were intensified/created by the effects of climate change? I lost an entire part of my family when a “unprecedented” hurricane devastated their village. My best friends parents lost their homes and their lives in wildfires that were intensified by the effects of climate change. You can read endless numbers of stories like these already. This isn’t just about extinction, there are real people already suffering from the effects.
I’m just curious what your thinking is regarding those people? It’s easy to dismiss past and future generations because they don’t exist, but what about the people now? What happens if you were displaced currently by the effects? Do you think your tone around the subject would be different?
I imagine if I was effected then my thoughts would be different. If my house catches fire do the African kids care? We are inherently selfish creatures. And although these are my opinions I guarantee I do a lot more the help than most people who ruminate on these things. I recycle electronics for a living. I live in a 1 bed apartment and use barely any energy. I keep a 20 year old car on the road with my own labour and I have had 3 smartphones since 2007. But does any of it matter. No. I could sit in a field naked with 0 carbon footprint and it wouldn't matter one jot. I'm sorry if you took my tone as an argument that's not how I ment it.