alt Hacker NewsThe world may have less time than it thinks on climate change
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Birth rates are in decline. The global population is estimated to peak in the 2080s. I suspect that could be later than reality as the endless doom (like this article) inspires more and more people to not have kids. Then as the population declines precipitously, nature takes back over and begins resolving the problem itself.
I recognize this is deeply cynical and definitely doomerist. What can I as an individual actually do to stop this? Why should I even bother reading articles like this at this point? I can't do anything. I can't action it. I can collect my recycling, pop solar panels on my roof and be the most carbon footprint conscious person and it wouldn't move the needle an atom's width.
Politicians don't care, and the ones that do can't make a difference either. Corporations definitely don't care. I can go protest, and that gets a lot of media attention but it doesn't change a voter's mind when their main concern is who gets to play in school sports.
I know this is vitriolic, but I am genuinely curious about it. What can I do? What can I do outside of putting my ballot in the box and hoping something changes?
As long as there is no accountability for politicians, we will always have at least as much time as the next guy plans to stay in power.
I’m not sure: when I was in high school / university it was well understood that places like Florida would be under water and unlivable by now.
Already then you could find this exact article title in a dozen publications per year, especially in academic publications. Al Gore made a third career out of it.
It was alarmist and too soon then but it’s not alarmist and too soon now?
Nobody upvotes an article titled “Things are about 0.5% more concerning than they were two decades ago”
We're already cooked, the Paris Agreement was aiming for avoiding 1.5°C global increase by 2030 and we're pretty much at that now. We're already seeing global weather shifts as the beginning of what appears to be rapid climate change and we're not yet at the peak of carbon output.
It's strange that anyone's still thinking there's "still time until we have to act". Is this really the average view out there?
why is it that for the ozone layer we got together and undid the damage but for climate change we don't?
is it too politicized, are the required changes too damaging to the economy to start agressively implementing them?
Less time than it thinks? We ran out of time a while ago, it's already well in progress.
Magazines like The Economist helped bring us here by describing Oil Companies still has a bright future and a great investment in the 80s and 90s.
Instead if they had authored high profile articles about how fossil fuels are driving this world to disaster, maybe we would be in a better place.
Doing that would have made their advertisers mad, so they kept writing about clean coal and oil for better $. It was the exact same with politicians, they did not want to loose most of their bribes (ie: political contributions) so they hid their head in the sand.
So now this magazine is writing articles about Climate Change, no thanks.
al gore, hold me!
Every prediction we make seems to be reached sooner than expected. There is so many effects that we don't understand yet.
Keeping with the "this is surprising" narrative, or like this title, implying that we have any time at all, is not helping.
I would expect a less naive title from a platform like the economist.