There is one unified plan which is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and switch over to more sustainable energy sources.

I'll bite.

1. There's too much money directly opposing the goals of fighting climate change

2. Humans aren't big on alignment. FFS, we still don't have good UX/GUI for Linux and it's mainly been stagnant* and divided into Gnome and KDE for 20+ years.

* despite the impressive accomplishments, it's essentially true

There's no "fight". Any people being aggressive or overly passionate about it (or against it) are, in my view, compromised (provoked, used, manipulated).

There has been a consistent attempt at getting everyone to consider the risks in a reasonable way. It has failed.

It was impossible to "win the fight" because of the demographic curve (~1.5 billion in 1900, ~8.2 billion today)

> so why was there never a single unified plan with a single unified movement behind it?

The UN and EU regularly publish evidence-based reports with multi-pronged recommendations. That seems to me as "unified" as you can get, in terms of multinational cooperation and holism in recommendations. But to have any concrete change you need political will, and that is obviously lacking.

To get political will in democratic societies you need to convince people to elect their leaders on this and not taxes or pet special interests, which is why you have been hearing about this fight all your life.

Let's first define winning in this context, a stable population number of humans for the next 100k years. Pretty much every piece of evidence we have points towards this being utterly impossible with billions of humans, habitat destruction and food web damage is simply way too severe for such a large number to be sustainable. So probably somewhere in the 1-100 million, but realistically no one knows. All we know is that it would have to be drastically lower. Planes and cars are probably illegal, shared communal usage of resources is key. We strictly limit ourselves to materials that are proven to either decompose quickly or don't enter the food web like for example PFAS and micro-plastics do. We'd have to let go of a human supremacist world view, and rather see ourselves as a part in the community of life and the delicate balance it is in.

Zooming out, one could argue that we are on a roller coaster and our complex brains give us the impression that there is a little steering wheel in front of us and that we get to decide the fate of humanity. Life can be viewed as a parasite, it invades every area on the surface and the oceans of this world, doing so with fractal depth. And over longer periods it is prone to mass extinction events, there have been five big ones so far. Who knows, maybe the sixth one isn't a 72 teratonnes impact event or giant volcanic eruptions, but rather this time it's an all habitat outcompeting population explosion by one species.

Because the world is made of independent countries acting in their own best interest or that of their leaders. There will never be a world government until all countries roughly align on a common set of values and political framework and then actually practice those. Most countries don’t share values and ideals.

We live in a world driven by capitalism, not by logic. If global environmental collapse is more profitable for those making the decisions in the medium term then that's what we're going to get, their descendants be damned.

Folks outside of Canada might not know him, but he's spent 50 years as a science TV host on CBC, kind of like a Canadian Carl Sagan.

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Yes, this was about his thoughts on the matter, not a summary or analysis of the predicament we're in. It was nice to hear honest commentary on this topic from an esteemed science communicator.

For anyone who wants more specific information about the dire situation of humanity, that's very easy to find. He mentioned Johan Rockström so you can check out his work. Or Eliot Jacobson. Or James Hansen. Or the reports that the IPCC publishes. And on Substack, Richard Crim puts out The Crisis Report regularly. It's full of detailed analysis with references to published papers.

I'm more worried about the roof getting blown off my flooded house

The world economy is a delicate machine.

One or two degrees will not incinerate you, but it might affect some crops, and then some food prices, and then there could be some starving, and poverty, and disease. Things could escalate quickly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse

We've got to define "unlivable". What if statistically, everyone's house will be destroyed by flooding, forest fires, etc.. let's say, twice in their lifetime. How can the math possibly add up if a house's price requires a 50 years mortgage? At some point, something's gotta give and that kind of odds will happen in a timescale shorter than many living people care about.

Also, wasn't there something about, you know, caring for the generations to come? Maybe I misremember...

Its the Attention economy layer underneath effecting everything. Whether its Trump or Climate Change - elevating threat perception captures attention. And algos are programmed to prop it up. There are no bright answers or theories on what to do about it.

Sure nature and us will adapt.

Just think of the 10 year lynx-hare cycle https://jckantor.github.io/CBE30338/02.05-Hare-and-Lynx-Popu... where nature adapts constantly.

Now think about the fact that Lynxes have a max age of 15 years plus and the cycle takes 10 years.

> the climate change "movement" and messaging is so bad and misguided that it is counterproductive

I really don't think that the climate change messaging is bad and misguided. At the end of the day, it's because climate change advocacy is underfunded and there is a lot of money in oil.

If climate change messaging was nicer, it's hard for me to see how anyone would care more anyway. On the other hand, if climate change advocates had real money behind it on the order of big oil PR and regulatory capture, you would see change and legislation really quick.

I think you are wrong.

There are large swaths of the world that are unlivable today without significant cooling. When summers with over 45 Celsius (fifties in some parts) are becoming more and more common poor people without access to air-conditioning are suffering. These areas are becoming larger and larger.

Just because us in the western temperate climates are fine, does not mean that the effects of climate change will not be felt somewhere in the world today or in the next decade.

I know you are wrong. Farmers in South America have been driven from their land because it has become too hot. If all you care about is North America, you are also a putz.

Climate disasters are getting worse every year. I think you're completely misguided--things are going to get very bad in our lifetimes, and anyone saying otherwise is profiting off that misdirection.

> the political trust placed in “studies” will collapse.

That horse has already bolted. See eg. vaccinations and autism, efficacy of COVID vaccines, etc.

If people think "scientists can never be wrong," we have fundamentally and deeply failed to explain how science actually works. And sadly, that does seem to be the case.

There is a third option that it's real but not as bad as people make out. Like in my case the fallout is more that I'm thinking of installing aircon rather than general doom.

> The next time someone says “science says…”, society may not listen.

We're already there. Turns out it has nothing to do with science at all, but rather propaganda and political messaging. If you just tell people science is wrong and bad then they internalize that, regardless of the state of science.

This confirms what many of us know to be true - what people believe has only a very loose tie to reality. Populist messaging is the future.