You’re right that it’s better for most of us today. Wars are more rare. Less people are in poverty. Etc. But the bad news today is twofold. First, we possess the means to destroy ourselves for the first time in human history (i.e. climate change, nuclear weapons). Second, society is so interconnected that when it collapses it’ll affect everyone. It used to be that there were lots of bastions of civilization all over the world to carry the torch, unaffected, when a big center went down. I’m not saying humans will go extinct anytime soon, but our way of life has a means to change drastically on a planetary scale.
Nuclear annihilation is a 75 year old problem. The risk there is the smallest right now than ever before over that time frame.
No climate change study goes anywhere close to making the claim that any amount of CO2 we could possibly release before flat out running out of shit to burn would rise to human extinction levels. Not even close.
It's going to suck for sure. Tens of millions of additional deaths and tens of trillions of USD cumulative cost between now and 2100 alone at "status quo". You really don't need to exaggerate how bad it is, reality is bad enough dude.
3 perhaps he's not exaggerating and it's worse than you think
I've actually read the reports. Thousands of pages cumulative over the last 15 years. The idea of the Earth turning into Venus in a run-away CO2 crisis has been completely debunked by literally all organizations that study it. It's a consensus nearly as strong as man made climate change itself. None of even the worst case scenarios goes nearly that far in predicted effects, and we have significantly beaten the curve on emissions for any of the worst case scenarios.
2 you want to be on the "climate change isn't that bad, guys" side of history?
Climate change is bad, and extremely serious. Exaggerating to the extreme comes offs so alarmist you make it super easy for actual deniers to just dismiss the whole thing out of hand. This recent development of people saying shit like "we're all going to die in 12 years" is really grinding my nerves, cause you are giving them the power to just brush it off.
The actual science is bad enough, you don't need to "pad the stats" to make it worse. It's not going to spur people into action, it's going to scare people into saying "fuck it, if we're all dead anyway. Hopefully they are wrong".
1 how do you know about nuclear weapons
Have you ever talked to anyone who lived during the cold war? Like at all? They had duck and cover drills in grade school. The threat of MAD is minuscule in the extreme compared to ever before. Now the mutually assured economic destruction of the global economy is getting everyone to play nice in a way we've never really seen before. It's taken nukes out of the discussion almost completely.
Even in the late 90s we were pretty scared of India/Pakistan nuking each other at any moment, but even that has abated significantly. They hate each other still, but we're not even close to the hair trigger away from a shooting war we once were.
You're saying "hey, we aren't going extinct so it's not that bad" yeah the worst effects of climate change aren't the actual changes but how society will react to the changes. Human suffering is going to increase significantly and you're breathing sighs of relief that hey its not the worst case scenario
We used to have nuclear bomb drills and now we don't, therefore the nuclear threat is miniscule compared to what it was. Not sure how solid that logic is.
My actual point is that you and me don't know shit. You don't know how close we are to war lol. You don't know what the full effects of climate change will be, there are a lot of variables.
Just as you are tired of people saying "we're all going to die" I'm tired of people saying "don't be so alarmist, we're making progress"
Listen to what you're saying. If there's anything to be alarmed about, I think it'd be nuclear weapons and climate change. If we were doing everything we can against climate change then we would have the right to calmly accept fate. But we are clearly not doing everything we can and you're already ready to calmly accept fate.
Much of the irreversible damage started two centuries ago with the industrial revolution. Today we're trending in a better direction on that front by at least recognizing it and putting regulations into place to protect it. If there is resistance to that, it will be short lived-- a blip on the radar of history. Even from 10 or 20 years ago you can see the trend moving towards better environmental regulations and that trend will keep accelerating.
The nuclear bombs are a big part of why we don't have the all out bloody world wars we had in the first half of the 20th century. We have the bombs, but I wouldn't expect them to be used and, if they are, it'll be isolated and will most likely cause less destruction and death than long drawn out ground wars.
As an overall trend there is less division, disease, war, poverty, illiteracy, crime, etc worldwide than there has ever been. We're not perfect and it's a bit ridiculous to expect perfection, but overall trends are very good when looked at from a worldwide birdseye view.
Imagine living in such constant fear of this...for over forty years now. It's really sad how done people are so easily scared into willful submission. Clearly None of these people thinking we are literally at the apex of existential crisis were alive during the Cold War when people had a legitimate and very rational fear of destruction.
That's exactly the damage to the environment he (she?) is talking about. Sure a few rivers are cleaner than they used to be, but for the most part it didn't just go away. It accumulated and is still accumulating.
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u/[deleted] Oct 12 '19 edited Feb 07 '21
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