Hopeless and broken is definitely how I feel, with respect to the climate. Just reading about the consensus of climate scientists over the years, it has been pretty clear for a while now that...
Hopeless and broken is definitely how I feel, with respect to the climate. Just reading about the consensus of climate scientists over the years, it has been pretty clear for a while now that humanity as a whole just isn't going to get it together anytime soon, not meaningfully.
So I just decided to go ostrich with it, I don't really have a rational response to knowing my kids are growing up into a world that will have catastrophic climate events on the regular. I'm just going to do the best that I can to optimize within the constraints, which means getting the money I can, and living as well as we can.
Obviously I've voted for whoever has the better record of addressing climate concerns, but it's done effectively fuck all. Not that I won't vote, but I really don't expect it to matter with respect to climate anymore. The rich people won.
It's a big part of why I'm just not having kids. Good job corporations, you sabotaged the future of the growth economy by creating a future people don't want to bring children into.
I don't really have a rational response to knowing my kids are growing up into a world that will have catastrophic climate events on the regular.
It's a big part of why I'm just not having kids.
Good job corporations, you sabotaged the future of the growth economy by creating a future people don't want to bring children into.
Yeah, it was a very difficult decision on my part. But my wife always wanted kids, and so did I. At the end of the day, I decided it was better to be optimistic, which was a bit naive. I do think...
Yeah, it was a very difficult decision on my part. But my wife always wanted kids, and so did I. At the end of the day, I decided it was better to be optimistic, which was a bit naive. I do think they'll rather have existed than not at the end of day, and I don't regret having them.
I still maintain my prediction that if you have a kid today in a wealthy country they'll be better off than the majority of children alive today. They'll deal with some combination of heat waves,...
I still maintain my prediction that if you have a kid today in a wealthy country they'll be better off than the majority of children alive today. They'll deal with some combination of heat waves, record-setting blizzards, hurricanes where there previous were none, etc. and in addition some crops will fail, in part or whole, as the ideal growing locations move towards the poles. In some regions of the world wars will be fought over scarce resources. Some regions near the tropics will become completely uninhabitable. Hundreds of millions will die. But unless you are stuck in the worst of those regions your kids are not doomed.
We will, eventually and past the "point of no return", get our shit together. The earth will enter its new climate state for perhaps a few hundred years.
That was also part of my internal 'justification' if you will. I'm fortunate enough to have more priveldge than most, and obviously that'll carry down to my kids as well. I would have been a lot...
That was also part of my internal 'justification' if you will. I'm fortunate enough to have more priveldge than most, and obviously that'll carry down to my kids as well. I would have been a lot less likely to decide to have kids if I didn't know I had my financially sound parents as a backstop if shit ever really hit the fan.
I feel the same way. I've got two young kids, and I'm having the hardest damn time: Trying to figure out what to say when the reality of the world they're born into hits them; Trying to figure out...
I feel the same way. I've got two young kids, and I'm having the hardest damn time:
Trying to figure out what to say when the reality of the world they're born into hits them;
Trying to figure out what I can do to mitigate as much damage as I can;
Realizing that no matter what I do, it is a drop in a very, very large bucket and will have ultimately little to no significant impact;
Trying to vote for the best possible choices to better implement the climate-related changes I want to see;
Realizing that those needs are also counterbalanced by other political realities;
Realizing that while governments don't seem to be taking this very-real threat with the seriousness and urgency it demands, I also don't want it to be a wild-west free-for-all, where only rich people can implement uneven and untested changes;
Other things, I'm sure.
This is all too big, and at times I feel very, very ashamed and guilty for having had children - knowing what is in store for them, and their potential children.
Yeah, I can empathize with that immensely. Even if it was selfish at the time (which, I don't think it was), you should try and get over the shame and guilt of it, there's no reason to keep...
Yeah, I can empathize with that immensely. Even if it was selfish at the time (which, I don't think it was), you should try and get over the shame and guilt of it, there's no reason to keep carrying that burden; you've made your choice, do the best within those constraints. That mindset helped me out of the climate-doom blues when my 3rd was on the way. I don't sugarcoat my view of it, it is going to get bad, and lots of people will die at some point in my life due to it. I'm just working my hardest to give my family the best chance of not being one of those casualties.
Also, there is something to be said for having optimism even in the face of such adversity. If everyone decided to not have kids due to the climate humanity would be done in ~100 years regardless of said climate. We can't all not have kids, that just doesn't work. If you think you can raise children into good adults, there's always promise for later, too. My first is incredibly smart, there's always a tiny tiny fraction of a chance that he'll be on the team that figures out some insane terraforming approach that fixes the climate. Same goes for your kids. There are pros and cons on both sides of the kid-vs-climate argument -- for you though, at this point it's healthier to focus on the pros of having kids for sure!
This is surprisingly difficult. I've posted this example before, so apologies if you've seen it already. Which is better? Disposable nappies ("diapers"), or reusable cloth nappies? The UK...
Trying to figure out what I can do to mitigate as much damage as I can
This is surprisingly difficult. I've posted this example before, so apologies if you've seen it already.
Which is better? Disposable nappies ("diapers"), or reusable cloth nappies?
"For the three nappy systems studied, there was no significant difference between
any of the environmental impacts – that is, overall no system clearly had a better or
worse environmental performance, although the life cycle stages that are the main
source for these impacts are different for each system."
The report highlights that the manufacture of disposable nappies has greater
environmental impact in the UK than their waste management by landfill.
For reusable nappies, the baseline scenario based on average washer and drier use
produced a global warming impact of approximately 570kg of carbon dioxide
equivalents. However, the study showed that the impacts for reusable nappies are
highly dependent on the way they are laundered.
Washing the nappies in fuller loads or line-drying them outdoors all the time (ignoring
UK climatic conditions for the purposes of illustration) was found to reduce this figure
by 16 per cent. Combining three of the beneficial scenarios (washing nappies in a
fuller load, outdoor line drying all of the time, and reusing nappies on a second child)
would lower the global warming impact by 40 per cent from the baseline scenario, or
some 200kg of carbon dioxide equivalents over the two and a half years, equal to
driving a car approximately 1,000 km.
In contrast, the study indicated that if a consumer tumble-dried all their reusable
nappies, it would produce a global warming impact 43 per cent higher than the baseline
scenario. Similarly, washing nappies at 90°C instead of at 60°C would increase global
warming impact by 31 per cent over the baseline. Combining these two energy
intensive scenarios would increase the global warming impact by 75 per cent over the
baseline scenario, or some 420kg of carbon dioxide equivalent over the two and a half
years.
It's not the sort of analysis we can expect individuals to do. Especially because this is one single product. There's clothing, bedding, feeding, etc etc. We need governments to do it, and then put out an small infographic about what's best.
That's backwards and not possible to accomplish. We need to do nothing more than to cut off the entry of carbon at the supply - fracking, oil drilling, and coal-mining.
It's not the sort of analysis we can expect individuals to do. Especially because this is one single product. There's clothing, bedding, feeding, etc etc. We need governments to do it, and then put out an small infographic about what's best.
That's backwards and not possible to accomplish. We need to do nothing more than to cut off the entry of carbon at the supply - fracking, oil drilling, and coal-mining.
Maximize impact and efficiency. Pick a group working on an issue and add your support; for instance I volunteer for orgs performing habitat restoration/community outreach and education which...
Maximize impact and efficiency. Pick a group working on an issue and add your support; for instance I volunteer for orgs performing habitat restoration/community outreach and education which should have long lasting effects. There are people doing the analysis (what's more effective - cloth nappies or advocating for local businesses to reduce excess waste?), and groups taking this info and acting. It's good to do things on an individual basis but rarely has the same reach.
Even just committing to educating yourself & kids/order friends and family can have a cascading effect. Pick an issue and focus on it and see how it feels 💖
Generally in group settings you will end up meeting people who have been working on said problem for decades & have much wisdom and advice to pass on. We can't do this alone y'all and our governments seem to not fit the bill at the moment
WRT 1/2/3/4, The Lorax comes to mind: We do the best we can do. But if the only people who have kids are ones who don't care, then the problem will only get worse.
WRT 1/2/3/4, The Lorax comes to mind:
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not.
We do the best we can do. But if the only people who have kids are ones who don't care, then the problem will only get worse.
I don't know if the average person contextualizes how life-changing a few degrees warmer mean temperatures really is. I think it's important that we get people in all sectors of the economy...
I don't know if the average person contextualizes how life-changing a few degrees warmer mean temperatures really is. I think it's important that we get people in all sectors of the economy thinking about how different things will be if the temperature goes up, if life in highly populated parts of the world begins to change for the worse, dramatically.
What climate change means is that people in already hot parts of the world are going to move to less hot parts. If you look at a map right now, you can do some math in your head that most of the world's population lives between the tropics (or adjacent hot areas). China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, that's about 3.5 billion people right there. Unemployment is already high, crops will fail, destitute people without access to AC or bodies of water that are cooler than body temperature won't have any recourse but to migrate elsewhere. Those people are going to migrate with their families because where they live now is uninhabitable. I liked KSR's The Ministry of the Future, but it was a peaceful vision of a best-worst-case scenario. They won't be peaceful refugees and they won't respect border controls. They will be refugees and they will be fighting for their lives and they will be looking to the west for help. And, just as is happening now, they won't understand why we're not helping them.
Look at the cooler and less densely populated regions of the world. Let's call those places North America and Europe. What would Europe look like if its population increased by 10% (65M) in 10 years? 20%? 30%? Is that sustainable? That's still not even close to what half a billion refugees from all of Africa and Asia might look like. Can European power production keep pace with that? Can housing and infrastructure and job market? Can food imports? I didn't say production because Europe is already a net importer.
Everything will change. We need to be supporting solutions that provide a quality of life that allows people, and services and governments, to preserve at least the current status quo for the next 10 years? And we need to do that everywhere, because a major humanitarian crisis in high-population areas will become a problem for the west as well. Humanitarian support becomes a measure of supporting one's own country, it's borders, food security, all that stuff. Even its form of government. You'd think that people who were truly concerned about illegal immigration would already know this and want to make life better in those other countries so people would want to stay there, have jobs there, have families there, solve their own problems there. But that's not the group of people who are working to avert what will be more than a humanitarian crisis. Weird. But we're all in this together and I think we need to be addressing the full scope of the issue with the full breadth of our industries.
Well said! Agree on all points. I unfortunately don’t remember where, but some time ago, I read a simple explanation on why “only” 1.5°C increase is still bad for the average person: We’ve...
Well said! Agree on all points.
I unfortunately don’t remember where, but some time ago, I read a simple explanation on why “only” 1.5°C increase is still bad for the average person:
We’ve basically already missed it, so make that 2 (or more)
Multiply by maybe 2 to offset the fact that continents heat up much more intensely and faster than the oceans
Multiply by 2 if you live in a city, the bigger (and less greener), the worse
This is area dependent, of course, and just a scenario to illustrate a point. Midwest/northern U.S. would notice this differently from, idk, Italy… perhaps there it’s a change in the negative temperature direction, or even nothing at all.
So “only” 2 degrees of warming can already result in up to 8 degrees more at your specific location where you live. And I bet everyone feels a change of that scale.
Author Kim Stanley Robinson has taken climate change and made a fiction novel out of it, The Ministry for the Future. The catalysts that force society to change are mostly violent in nature and...
Author Kim Stanley Robinson has taken climate change and made a fiction novel out of it, The Ministry for the Future.
The catalysts that force society to change are mostly violent in nature and include:
Drone swarming private and passenger jets in mass numbers on one day, crashing them all, so jet travel ceases. Airships become popular again.
Black ops hit squads on CEOs of fossil fuel companies and investment bankers who do business with polluters. Suddenly there is political willpower to make big changes. The polluters run out of money and are forced out of business.
Hypersonic missile swarm weapons that render aircraft carrier battle groups obsolete. The carriers all go to Antarctica to provide ports and power for the now obsolete oil drilling industry to begin water drilling. This removes the water under the glaciers so they don't slide away as fast, and it's pumped and sprayed on top so it freezes and artificially grows the ice sheet.
There's many other ideas in there too. Can't recall them all. It's been a couple years since I've read the book but it was good read!
The Ministry for the Future was such an interesting and almost cathartic read (for us pessimists). I think KSR did a great job of painting a gloomy picture and then providing some examples of cool...
The Ministry for the Future was such an interesting and almost cathartic read (for us pessimists). I think KSR did a great job of painting a gloomy picture and then providing some examples of cool things that can be done to avert some very specific crises. I did like the idea of drone swarms shutting down jet travel, with the implication that it might've been nation-state actors, but it might've been a distributed, like-minded group of people. If only because I have romantic notions about airships. :D
But the book is also very optimistic. As I just mentioned in my other post in this thread, I think his picture of a refugee crisis was very peaceful. It was probably more to draw parallels towards current treatment of refugees rather than to paint a realistic picture of a climate change-induced crisis. I hope that more people use fiction as a springboard to take an interest in what's going on around them and starting changing the way people think about the near-term future.
Have you read any of KSR's other recent works? I am catching up on them.
Also, sorry if you got two notifications out of this, I accidentally double-posted.
His Science in the Capital series is a really interesting and pensive read. I really enjoyed it. Prior to that I'd read his Mars series. After finishing both of those I was desperate to know if...
His Science in the Capital series is a really interesting and pensive read. I really enjoyed it. Prior to that I'd read his Mars series. After finishing both of those I was desperate to know if his characters named "Frank" were somehow the same. Obviously not, but still.
Did you read the Capital series? I think it started with Forty Signs of Rain.
To me, it's really the precursor to the Ministry for the Future, as it deals heavily with climate change.
Big recommendation on KSR's The Ministry for the Future. I really enjoyed the read. It was fascinating to think about when ecological terrorism becomes the morally right thing to do.
Big recommendation on KSR's The Ministry for the Future. I really enjoyed the read. It was fascinating to think about when ecological terrorism becomes the morally right thing to do.
as someone in the conservation/ecology/environmental science field: yep, this is scary. we are all in different stages of grieving the fact that basically we won't be able to avoid significant...
as someone in the conservation/ecology/environmental science field:
yep, this is scary. we are all in different stages of grieving the fact that basically we won't be able to avoid significant changes at this point.
however, we are working to mitigate/adapt/plan for these changes and still have they potential to prevent even more extreme outcomes. if u can do any one thing, fight the apathy. doomerism is contagious and slows progress in a crucial moment where every second counts. all we can do is keep trying. i see ppl talking about future generations having the tools for crazy planet size problem fixing - i need yall to realize that you have tools NOW. decades in a customer service job, means you're able to communicate and problem solve for a community with diverse needs. your marketing and writing skills can be used to get the word out. business experience can negotiate/advocate multi-agency/org/community solutions. can u watch someone's kids, provide money or snacks, etc etc. we desperately need more than just climate and frog nerds who tend to be burnt out/overburdened and reach a much smaller audience.
we spend so much time researching and applying the science, but isolated from the communities that need to understand and sustain it. so communication/education/outreach/adaptive planning is becoming much more centered and documented to achieve sustainable/long term outcomes.
what barriers are there in ur community to change? who is already working on it, how can u help?
random list of issues which limit our success/impact climate
poverty
education
inequitable access to nature (incredibly urban societies where generations are growing up with extremely limited exposure to nature, even as simple as a park. you generally don't fight to protect what u never had)
transportation
hyperconsumerism
severe lack of regulation/consequences for top polluters and waste creators
racism, classism, sexism
i'm sorry if this post is not the most well written, i'm making it in a bit of a rush. can elaborate on anything or re-iterate whatever if anyone wants. we care, we need u, stay strong and look for the helpers and i should definitely get a tattoo of a truffula tree....
In the end it is very simple. We have here a two mutually incompatible goals, minimizing global level changes to the environment and ever increasing growth as the only relevant metric for...
In the end it is very simple. We have here a two mutually incompatible goals, minimizing global level changes to the environment and ever increasing growth as the only relevant metric for measuring economic success. There is no way to somehow make these compatible and as a society we have to pick or at least prioritize one.
As far as I can tell we have had information about the dangerous impact on global temperatures for at least five decades, likely more. Literally just in the last decade are we even seriously talking about what to do about it.
I really want to be optimistic but I just can't help but feel that there is going to some kind of crash in the next decades.
I have a 2 year old and I mostly just try not to think about it. We're pretty well off and live in an area that offer some protection against a lot of climate problems. The big danger here is the...
I have a 2 year old and I mostly just try not to think about it. We're pretty well off and live in an area that offer some protection against a lot of climate problems. The big danger here is the increasing size and frequency of wildfires.
I'm more worried about the US invading over water or mass migration as the south becomes less liveable.
But I really don't know what I should do to protect my family. Buy a gun and horde food? Learn and teach survival skills? Build a bunker and go full doomsday preper? Most things somehow seem both too extreme and also kind of pointless at the same time.
Hopeless and broken is definitely how I feel, with respect to the climate. Just reading about the consensus of climate scientists over the years, it has been pretty clear for a while now that humanity as a whole just isn't going to get it together anytime soon, not meaningfully.
So I just decided to go ostrich with it, I don't really have a rational response to knowing my kids are growing up into a world that will have catastrophic climate events on the regular. I'm just going to do the best that I can to optimize within the constraints, which means getting the money I can, and living as well as we can.
Obviously I've voted for whoever has the better record of addressing climate concerns, but it's done effectively fuck all. Not that I won't vote, but I really don't expect it to matter with respect to climate anymore. The rich people won.
It's a big part of why I'm just not having kids.
Good job corporations, you sabotaged the future of the growth economy by creating a future people don't want to bring children into.
Yeah, it was a very difficult decision on my part. But my wife always wanted kids, and so did I. At the end of the day, I decided it was better to be optimistic, which was a bit naive. I do think they'll rather have existed than not at the end of day, and I don't regret having them.
I still maintain my prediction that if you have a kid today in a wealthy country they'll be better off than the majority of children alive today. They'll deal with some combination of heat waves, record-setting blizzards, hurricanes where there previous were none, etc. and in addition some crops will fail, in part or whole, as the ideal growing locations move towards the poles. In some regions of the world wars will be fought over scarce resources. Some regions near the tropics will become completely uninhabitable. Hundreds of millions will die. But unless you are stuck in the worst of those regions your kids are not doomed.
We will, eventually and past the "point of no return", get our shit together. The earth will enter its new climate state for perhaps a few hundred years.
That was also part of my internal 'justification' if you will. I'm fortunate enough to have more priveldge than most, and obviously that'll carry down to my kids as well. I would have been a lot less likely to decide to have kids if I didn't know I had my financially sound parents as a backstop if shit ever really hit the fan.
I feel the same way. I've got two young kids, and I'm having the hardest damn time:
This is all too big, and at times I feel very, very ashamed and guilty for having had children - knowing what is in store for them, and their potential children.
Yeah, I can empathize with that immensely. Even if it was selfish at the time (which, I don't think it was), you should try and get over the shame and guilt of it, there's no reason to keep carrying that burden; you've made your choice, do the best within those constraints. That mindset helped me out of the climate-doom blues when my 3rd was on the way. I don't sugarcoat my view of it, it is going to get bad, and lots of people will die at some point in my life due to it. I'm just working my hardest to give my family the best chance of not being one of those casualties.
Also, there is something to be said for having optimism even in the face of such adversity. If everyone decided to not have kids due to the climate humanity would be done in ~100 years regardless of said climate. We can't all not have kids, that just doesn't work. If you think you can raise children into good adults, there's always promise for later, too. My first is incredibly smart, there's always a tiny tiny fraction of a chance that he'll be on the team that figures out some insane terraforming approach that fixes the climate. Same goes for your kids. There are pros and cons on both sides of the kid-vs-climate argument -- for you though, at this point it's healthier to focus on the pros of having kids for sure!
This is surprisingly difficult. I've posted this example before, so apologies if you've seen it already.
Which is better? Disposable nappies ("diapers"), or reusable cloth nappies?
The UK government did some research. Life Cycle Assessment of
Disposable and Reusable Nappies
in the UK It is 400 pages long and the conclusion is almost "eh, we dunno".
"For the three nappy systems studied, there was no significant difference between
any of the environmental impacts – that is, overall no system clearly had a better or
worse environmental performance, although the life cycle stages that are the main
source for these impacts are different for each system."
UK government was unhappy with that result, so they re-ran the study and tightened some things up and they got this: An updated lifecycle assessment study
for disposable and reusable nappies. It's much shorter and much more readable.
It's not the sort of analysis we can expect individuals to do. Especially because this is one single product. There's clothing, bedding, feeding, etc etc. We need governments to do it, and then put out an small infographic about what's best.
That's backwards and not possible to accomplish. We need to do nothing more than to cut off the entry of carbon at the supply - fracking, oil drilling, and coal-mining.
Maximize impact and efficiency. Pick a group working on an issue and add your support; for instance I volunteer for orgs performing habitat restoration/community outreach and education which should have long lasting effects. There are people doing the analysis (what's more effective - cloth nappies or advocating for local businesses to reduce excess waste?), and groups taking this info and acting. It's good to do things on an individual basis but rarely has the same reach.
Even just committing to educating yourself & kids/order friends and family can have a cascading effect. Pick an issue and focus on it and see how it feels 💖
Generally in group settings you will end up meeting people who have been working on said problem for decades & have much wisdom and advice to pass on. We can't do this alone y'all and our governments seem to not fit the bill at the moment
WRT 1/2/3/4, The Lorax comes to mind:
We do the best we can do. But if the only people who have kids are ones who don't care, then the problem will only get worse.
I don't know if the average person contextualizes how life-changing a few degrees warmer mean temperatures really is. I think it's important that we get people in all sectors of the economy thinking about how different things will be if the temperature goes up, if life in highly populated parts of the world begins to change for the worse, dramatically.
What climate change means is that people in already hot parts of the world are going to move to less hot parts. If you look at a map right now, you can do some math in your head that most of the world's population lives between the tropics (or adjacent hot areas). China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, that's about 3.5 billion people right there. Unemployment is already high, crops will fail, destitute people without access to AC or bodies of water that are cooler than body temperature won't have any recourse but to migrate elsewhere. Those people are going to migrate with their families because where they live now is uninhabitable. I liked KSR's The Ministry of the Future, but it was a peaceful vision of a best-worst-case scenario. They won't be peaceful refugees and they won't respect border controls. They will be refugees and they will be fighting for their lives and they will be looking to the west for help. And, just as is happening now, they won't understand why we're not helping them.
Look at the cooler and less densely populated regions of the world. Let's call those places North America and Europe. What would Europe look like if its population increased by 10% (65M) in 10 years? 20%? 30%? Is that sustainable? That's still not even close to what half a billion refugees from all of Africa and Asia might look like. Can European power production keep pace with that? Can housing and infrastructure and job market? Can food imports? I didn't say production because Europe is already a net importer.
Everything will change. We need to be supporting solutions that provide a quality of life that allows people, and services and governments, to preserve at least the current status quo for the next 10 years? And we need to do that everywhere, because a major humanitarian crisis in high-population areas will become a problem for the west as well. Humanitarian support becomes a measure of supporting one's own country, it's borders, food security, all that stuff. Even its form of government. You'd think that people who were truly concerned about illegal immigration would already know this and want to make life better in those other countries so people would want to stay there, have jobs there, have families there, solve their own problems there. But that's not the group of people who are working to avert what will be more than a humanitarian crisis. Weird. But we're all in this together and I think we need to be addressing the full scope of the issue with the full breadth of our industries.
Well said! Agree on all points.
I unfortunately don’t remember where, but some time ago, I read a simple explanation on why “only” 1.5°C increase is still bad for the average person:
So “only” 2 degrees of warming can already result in up to 8 degrees more at your specific location where you live. And I bet everyone feels a change of that scale.
love 💖
Author Kim Stanley Robinson has taken climate change and made a fiction novel out of it, The Ministry for the Future.
The catalysts that force society to change are mostly violent in nature and include:
Drone swarming private and passenger jets in mass numbers on one day, crashing them all, so jet travel ceases. Airships become popular again.
Black ops hit squads on CEOs of fossil fuel companies and investment bankers who do business with polluters. Suddenly there is political willpower to make big changes. The polluters run out of money and are forced out of business.
Hypersonic missile swarm weapons that render aircraft carrier battle groups obsolete. The carriers all go to Antarctica to provide ports and power for the now obsolete oil drilling industry to begin water drilling. This removes the water under the glaciers so they don't slide away as fast, and it's pumped and sprayed on top so it freezes and artificially grows the ice sheet.
There's many other ideas in there too. Can't recall them all. It's been a couple years since I've read the book but it was good read!
The Ministry for the Future was such an interesting and almost cathartic read (for us pessimists). I think KSR did a great job of painting a gloomy picture and then providing some examples of cool things that can be done to avert some very specific crises. I did like the idea of drone swarms shutting down jet travel, with the implication that it might've been nation-state actors, but it might've been a distributed, like-minded group of people. If only because I have romantic notions about airships. :D
But the book is also very optimistic. As I just mentioned in my other post in this thread, I think his picture of a refugee crisis was very peaceful. It was probably more to draw parallels towards current treatment of refugees rather than to paint a realistic picture of a climate change-induced crisis. I hope that more people use fiction as a springboard to take an interest in what's going on around them and starting changing the way people think about the near-term future.
Have you read any of KSR's other recent works? I am catching up on them.
Also, sorry if you got two notifications out of this, I accidentally double-posted.
His Science in the Capital series is a really interesting and pensive read. I really enjoyed it. Prior to that I'd read his Mars series. After finishing both of those I was desperate to know if his characters named "Frank" were somehow the same. Obviously not, but still.
Did you read the Capital series? I think it started with Forty Signs of Rain.
To me, it's really the precursor to the Ministry for the Future, as it deals heavily with climate change.
Big recommendation on KSR's The Ministry for the Future. I really enjoyed the read. It was fascinating to think about when ecological terrorism becomes the morally right thing to do.
as someone in the conservation/ecology/environmental science field:
yep, this is scary. we are all in different stages of grieving the fact that basically we won't be able to avoid significant changes at this point.
however, we are working to mitigate/adapt/plan for these changes and still have they potential to prevent even more extreme outcomes. if u can do any one thing, fight the apathy. doomerism is contagious and slows progress in a crucial moment where every second counts. all we can do is keep trying. i see ppl talking about future generations having the tools for crazy planet size problem fixing - i need yall to realize that you have tools NOW. decades in a customer service job, means you're able to communicate and problem solve for a community with diverse needs. your marketing and writing skills can be used to get the word out. business experience can negotiate/advocate multi-agency/org/community solutions. can u watch someone's kids, provide money or snacks, etc etc. we desperately need more than just climate and frog nerds who tend to be burnt out/overburdened and reach a much smaller audience.
we spend so much time researching and applying the science, but isolated from the communities that need to understand and sustain it. so communication/education/outreach/adaptive planning is becoming much more centered and documented to achieve sustainable/long term outcomes.
what barriers are there in ur community to change? who is already working on it, how can u help?
random list of issues which limit our success/impact climate
i'm sorry if this post is not the most well written, i'm making it in a bit of a rush. can elaborate on anything or re-iterate whatever if anyone wants. we care, we need u, stay strong and look for the helpers and i should definitely get a tattoo of a truffula tree....
In the end it is very simple. We have here a two mutually incompatible goals, minimizing global level changes to the environment and ever increasing growth as the only relevant metric for measuring economic success. There is no way to somehow make these compatible and as a society we have to pick or at least prioritize one.
As far as I can tell we have had information about the dangerous impact on global temperatures for at least five decades, likely more. Literally just in the last decade are we even seriously talking about what to do about it.
I really want to be optimistic but I just can't help but feel that there is going to some kind of crash in the next decades.
I have a 2 year old and I mostly just try not to think about it. We're pretty well off and live in an area that offer some protection against a lot of climate problems. The big danger here is the increasing size and frequency of wildfires.
I'm more worried about the US invading over water or mass migration as the south becomes less liveable.
But I really don't know what I should do to protect my family. Buy a gun and horde food? Learn and teach survival skills? Build a bunker and go full doomsday preper? Most things somehow seem both too extreme and also kind of pointless at the same time.