But public exhortation is a repeated game and unless you're Heaven's Gate the success of your popularized predictions has a significant effect on the discount that the public applies to your predictions. Failed predictions have an effect on the discount rate asymmetric to the direction. It is likely that a successful public authority allows some number of people to experience catastrophe pour encourager les autres. Attempting a zero error rate by biasing to zero catastrophe is likely to cause repeated discounting until true catastrophe cannot be averted.
I'm reminded me of the short story The Wandering Earth. Spoilers to follow so don't read if you care. In the story, a group of scientists determine that the Sun is going to flare enough to kill everyone, so all of humanity mobilizes to install massive engines to move the Earth far enough to survive while creating technology that survives the dark. After years of traveling to past Pluto, no Sun catastrophe materializes, resulting in a massive Earthwide revolt that eventually takes control of the control center and the scientists and government officials are sentenced to death by walking into the cold waste. Just as the last of them dies, the Sun flares as predicted, just a little later.
In a democracy, credibility is an important resource. To avert actual existential catastrophe, it is better to err on the side of local under-predicted disaster. It is probably best to let Rancho Palos Verdes fall into the ocean without compensating the homeowners. It is probably best to let the Texan flood plains flood and people to lose their homes entirely. It is probably best to let the Californians lose their homes to the wildfires.
Why is it OK for Elon Musk to blow up spaceship after spaceship and everyone says well that’s the way you get it right, but a couple of Climate scientists put up a sign that is maybe a decade or two too early and all hell rains down on them?
What does Elon get credibility yet? Climate scientists don’t? It’s because we choose who we give credibility to. And as a species, we are stupidly optimistic or willing fully blind.
Since I keep hearing about this for at least 30 years now and still nobody took action the whole thing might be a bit more complicated than what the news media would have you know.
This matters because there are three ways for a body to eliminate thermal energy: radiation, convection, and conduction. Earth is not in contact with anything else, so it cannot conduct. It does not share an atmosphere with anything else, so it cannot convect. So that leaves radiation, which is largely in the form of infrared. Then it stands to reason that if you change how much IR is reflected back to the surface by the atmosphere, say by changing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, then you will increase the amount of heat the Earth contains as long as there is a source of heat nearby or within. Earth has both in the form of a molten core and the Sun.
This is why they call them "greenhouse gases." Because they cause the Earth to retain more heat than it radiates in the infrared spectrum, like the glass on a greenhouse.
The world is full of issues everyone is okay with until they are presented as apocalyptic to the public. Like seasonal flu whose annual death toll is in the range of 600-1200 thousands.
And then, as easily forgotten as soon as there's a new scarecrow on the table.
With weather prediction accuracy of 90% for 5 days, 50% for 10 days and basically that of a TRNG for longer terms, what makes you all so sure you're facing a manmade climate apocalypse (you all partook in, by the way) and not a natural harmonic in the weather fractal?
If you're under 50 it definitely will be your problem
They just shrunk by 40% in ~50 years, no biggy
On a few other climate related topics scientists are actually surprised at how fast it's getting out of hands.
> In a democracy, credibility is an important resource.
We got Trump... Twice... so clearly not. What matters is selling a dream, and nobody want to hear about the dream of reducing growth, buying less, consuming less, etc.
we can't seriously believe that if we just adjusted the story a little bit this way or that, that the message would actually click and people would begin to try to minimize the tragic cost to future generations.
this is happening now. blaming the messenger for not being appropriately fawning, or curt, or amusing is kind of irrelevant at this point.
I don’t give a damn, to be perfectly honest, what some sign posted god knows when with who knows what information, says. This is a man made global catastrophe. Information and research is very clear and very robust.
Ice loss in just 202x, from JUST thwaites, contributes to several centimeters of ocean rise. It’s going to be much much higher in 203x and 204x. It’s just one (unusually big) glacier of many.
We can all sit here and Reee Reee about the things that were overly reductive, overstated, wrong, even a lie. What I wrote above this is none of those and it’s actually psychotic how little we talk about the cryosphere collapse, given how badly it’s going to fuck us, not 1000 years from now, not 100 years from now, but 10 years from now. I played a video game twice that age on my computer yesterday.
The speed at which the temperature is increasing is what is concerning, it’s much faster than a usual warming cycle. The XKCD comic of the timeline of human history and climate really drives home how steep the increase in temperature has been vs in the past: https://m.xkcd.com/1732/
Nature is infinitely more complex than most people believe, we don't even know how basic things like soil ecosystems truly works, the thing that supports 100% of life on earth, we have virtually no clue about it, so what do we know about the rest...
Nobody is taking action because the whole system is made for growth and continuous improvement, you can't tell people "we have to work more to simply keep the status quo", let alone "we may even lose a lot of nice things and convenience in the process"
Not. so. fast.
gmuslera•1h ago
And it won't be the only big thing that will be sensibly changing by then.
toasty228•1h ago
There is just no way out at the point, the planet is tanking the damage for now but once it'll crack, and it's starting to, many systems will fail simultaneously, no amount of theatrical green washing will undo the damage
moffers•58m ago
snaking0776•54m ago
voidfunc•50m ago
27183•8m ago
phoe-krk•41m ago
GolfPopper•14m ago
"Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly."
spwa4•47m ago
alephnerd•36m ago
The reality is the world got richer, and households who 30 years ago would have had little access to electricity, finished manufactured goods, and automotive vehicles can now purchase those. Go visit a village in rural China, India, or Vietnam - 30 years ago plastic bags were nonexistent, and now tetrapaks and plastics are everywhere.
In 2000, China and India's HDIs were comparable to Cameroon and Ethiopia's present HDI. That isn't the case in 2023 (UNDP HDI calculations have a 2-3 year lag because transnational data collection is hard). And large, poor countries like Pakistan (260 million), DRC (100 million), and Ethiopia (139 million) are now hitting developmental indicators comparable to those two in the early 2000s.
Most countries have chosen to use both GreenTech and Coal to expand electricity generation from Vietnam [0] to India [1] to Indonesia [2]. You are talking about 3 billion people living in an economic region that is expected to see 6-8% GDP growth rates for at least the next decade. And even countries at the lower end of the developmental cycle like Pakistan [3][4] and Ethiopia [5] are now doing the same.
Frankly, it doesn't matter what reduction Europe does (and Europe's GHG emissions reduction has been massive [6]) because India and ASEAN's GHG emissions expansion eats up any reduction from the EU-27 and US.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/vietnam-allows-coal-...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/india-fuels-global-g...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/indonesia-coal-power...
[3] - https://www.climatepolicylab.org/climatesmart/2022/1/27/what...
[4] - https://www.thefridaytimes.com/19-Jun-2026/thar-coal-pakista...
[5] - https://afrinz.ru/en/2026/07/there-is-a-request-to-supply-60...
[6] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...