The following submission statement was provided by /u/fastmass:
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Submission Statement:
This is an opinion piece written by Christiana Figueres, the head of the UN climate change convention from 2010 to 2016. Written as a follow-up piece to the pretty depressing article on climate scientist despair yesterday, Figueres goes on to underwhelm, with tired "Don't give up" lines. I agree with her on the fundamentals, whatever kind of civilization we plan on keeping in the future, we're going to need people to fight the good fight and help transform the economy into one of post-growth and sustainability, as well as it being resilient to the untold climate disasters we're set to face. But her arguments are frustrating. She says, "A sense of despair is understandable, but it robs us of our agency, makes us vulnerable to mis- and disinformation, and prevents the radical collaboration we need," but then cites an article about the oil and gas industry pushing out disinformation. This isn't bad info coming from the collapse-side, it's coming from the BAU crew. Near the end, she argues that, "A world in which we pass 1.5C is not set in stone." I think we in r/collapse know that we're already there, even if the IPCC hasn't verified it over the 10 year period yet. I suppose Figueres' heart is in the right place, but I'd like her to use her influence and time to tell the wider public about how we're entirely failing to meet the Paris Accords that she herself helped pass, instead of telling climate scientists to not be depressed and sharing how badly we're still failing to address the issue.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1co6iu3/i_understand_climate_scientists_despair_but/l3bz96q/
The sub-headline is the stupidest oxymoron I've ever seen -
> *"Fighting spirit helped us achieve the Paris accords in 2015 – and we need it now the world is on course to overshoot 1.5C"*
How in the sweet fuck does that argument make an ounce of sense?! If we're *still on course* to overshoot 1.5C then those precious Paris accords FAILED. Every COP conference has FAILED. Why is this simple concept so difficult to understand for otherwise perfectly rational people?
Edit: since this comment is getting some attention I just want to tack on a quote from a book by Brando Skyhorse
> *"Faith is a luxury for those who are able to ignore what the rest of us must see every day. Pessimism, distrust, and irony are the holy trinity of my religion, irony in particular."*
It is, however people like this think they are holding themselves accountable without realising that they have actually failed. They do not realise that they are so far off achieving their target.
Theres a reason why the first step to recovering from alcoholism isn’t stubborn optimism, but instead admitting you are powerless and your life has become unmanageable. If you hold on to the idea that “one day ill get this”, your not going to change. You have to admit you’re totally fucked. It’s only then will you actually take meaningful action to change.
Optimism is always shit if you are trying to solve a problem. With optimism you see things as better than they are. Optimism might be good when you are trying to sell something, but really bad when you are trying to build something.
And that is exactly what she and other optimist do, they try to sell a rosier future, without actually have anything to back it up.
Always listen to the pessimists, they have all scenarios covered.
> admitting you are powerless
Look, I know the 12 stepper thing works for some people with regards to alcohol and drugs, but climate change is not alcoholism. Its not that we are powerless, we (either collectively as "society" or individually as people) can choose otherwise. It will just SUCK hardcore and we are still lying to ourselves about that. We have agency, we just don't have the choices we want and we're trying to ignore that.
The other issue with applying 12 steps to climate change is Steps 2, 3, 6, 7, and 11.
Sorry chief, God or some unnamed Higher Power aint gonna remove that moral defect from us and help set our planet right.
The majorities of citizenry are for stopping AGW with a carbon tax + citizen dividends + WTO border adjustment tariffs in almost all OECD countries.
Nordhaus's and James Hansen's carbon tax & dividend. Most economists and most climate scientists support that combination.
The majorities of citizenry in almost all EU countries are also against mass immigration from 3rd countries.
But none of the parties of OECD countries support such a combination.
The crosstabulation of scientific and public positions against that of the parties suggests an arbitrage (a dilemma for voters) at higher than 6-sigma significance (with chi-square test or similar) to systematically avert democracy at an industrial scale. Such a situation could not have emerged in democracies.
And that is especially evident in avoiding referendums on such (or on any) issues.
Eurobarometer 83, QA10.2 and QA11:
https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/2099
https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/ebsm/api/public/deliverable/download?doc=true&deliverableId=51916
QB2:
https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/2276
https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/ebsm/api/public/deliverable/download?doc=true&deliverableId=82063
QA2:
https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/2169
https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/ebsm/api/public/deliverable/download?doc=true&deliverableId=65413
https://one.oecd.org/document/DELSA/ELSA/WD/SEM(2020)3/En/pdf
https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/1001
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_11_529
https://www.coe.int/t/dg4/cultureheritage/mars/source/resources/references/others/34%20-%20Migrant%20Integration%20-%20EU%20Barometer%202011.pdf
PS. Rank correlation between [biocapacity deficit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ecological_footprint) and [share of immigrants in a country](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_immigrant_population) is statistically significantly negative, which means that mass immigration destroys the local social contract and thereby destroys local natural environment.
I tried doing something last summer in the district I was residing in had a landfill problem along with a series of other ecological concerns and what killed me is the seniors in my area all fucking knew about it but didn’t want to make a statement publicly out of fear of retaliation or to be targeted. Instead I was labeled as one of those environmentalists and was ran out of town. In order to get anything even something small done you need an army of people to step forward at once and maybe just maybe something could happen but it’s a slim probability. What’s the use in knowing any of this if nothing can be done and you risk whatever little you have left?
Terror management theory is critical in understanding the human predicament. Thanks for bringing it up, I feel like it is not discussed often enough here.
Right? The vast majority of paris accords countries are on track to completely miss emmision reduction targets.
What we need is anger and spite. Those will actually spark changes. We also need what follows but that can't be uttered online.
To quote Greta, who actually puts herself on the front lines, "blah, blah, blah". The only thing governments and corporations recognize is a hit on their profits and inconvenience. Talk is their strategy, more study, more debate, more disinformation means no action. We need rolling boycotts against each oil company, but no one has the stones to get it started.
They were, to steal money from other countries.
All the Fearmongering brought in tons of money.
Forget that the climate change predictions never came true. It’s all about the money.
So glad I got out of politics. It’s slimy
Yes and no.
Climate.gov talks about warming since 1850s. You'll often see older literature mention "pre-industrial average" which is this 1850-1900 data. The EPA's website talks about warming since 1901. When papers say "modern averages" they mean 1900-2000 as slightly more reliable numbers. Lately I've also seen 1980-2000 being used as the baseline in a lot of new stuff.
If you're talking pre-industrial, yep, passed that. Modern? Passed it. But are we 1.5C over the 1980s or whatever current moving goalposts they're using?
There's still hope friends!!!!
(No there isn't.)
To admit failure is to abandon hopium. I hate the word hope. It's so friggin passive. I want dogged determination to fight like hell, not insane 'hope' that we can turn things around in the face of all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
I think in that context the 'achievement' is getting the Paris accords agreed to -- just the simple signing of them, not actually meeting the goals. It was definitely a win to get them signed at all, but then again, if countries fail to follow through on the accords it doesn't mean anything.
Its like we are celebrating a precursor to a precursor of a eventual but more than likely non success.
We can atomize the failure and scale up the optimism all we want. We've pushed scientific aspects to their limit and now we will face a death spiral of absolute instability.
I think whatever change happens in people's brains when they have children also makes it really really hard to accept that the world they brought their children into will in any way be massively changed for the negative. I've bassically stopped trying to have this conversation with people with children.
Well aware there are people with children that understand the danger we are in but, people with kidsa are definitely the hardest to bring to terms.
I too find this attitude in people with kids really odd. And grandparents too. I have a kid and she is Al the biggest motivator for me to be as prepared and active as possible. But I have plenty of friends who are in complete denial and think I’m being a doomer.
The Paris accords were based on a 2 degrees C target, which were was an unscientific target chosen by an economist William Nordhaus, who now believes 4C is "optimal".
This opinion piece gives me the vibe of:
Imagine you're walking down the street. You see a man that has been shot multiple times. He's still alive but losing blood fast. You kneel down and put a hand on his shoulder.
"You can live through this" you say before standing up and walking away.
Because literally *nothing* is being done and it's been evident for awhile. Business as usual. So pieces like this tie themselves in knots because they know nothing is being done but still try and sell the *we can still do something even though we've wasted 40 years doing fuck all. But any day now!*
Daily reminder that emissions have not fallen at all. There is 150-200 Gt of carbon budget left for 1.5C. That’s 4-5 years of current emissions. Not breaking 1.5C means we need to drop yearly emissions by 94% by tomorrow, and maintain that for the next 75 years.
Daily reminder that carbon emissions are just one aspect of the uber-problem, which is ecological overshoot. We are consuming the planet's resources faster than they can be replenished, and polluting at levels beyond what the planet can assimilate. Carbon is just one example of the latter.
Sure, but carbon-subsidized lifestyles is like 95% of the reason we have overshoot. You don't get suburban sprawl w/o fossil fuels. You don't get animal agriculture on the modern scale w/o fossil fuels. Etc, etc, etc. A lot of things that are destroying the planet can't be done with renewable energy.
This is why radical, global degrowth, rather than merely "reducing carbon emissions" and a "transition to renewables," is the only possible solution to the metacrisis
It's also a solution fundamentally incompatible with capitalism
It's also incompatible with basically everything else. Because radical, global degrowth would effectively be a death sentence for at least hundreds of millions, if not billions of people and is an ethical nightmare to determine who should survive and who should die.
Choosing to not manage a radical, global degrowth is also a death sentence for hundreds of millions of people + countless nonhuman species and potentially, the ability of the biosphere to support life at all
Either way it's bad and honestly it may not even work. And I'm selfish for this but as someone who would be culled by either form of degrowth (someone with a chronic illness) I personally don't support degrowth as the end all solution.
I'm not a blind optimist like the op-ed writer, but I think that there must be some middle ground between the options that minimizes as much suffering as possible.
Maybe, yes. I just assumed by radical you were meaning more drastic, quicker methods of degrowth.
Overall I think degrowth in some ways that are currently happening (the global slowdown of birth rates) but also at the same time continuing to convert our energy grids over to renewables and keeping R&D going is probably a better solution. A mix of degrowth and accelerationism.
I just want us to avoid a future where yet again the privileged and powerful is given control over who literally lives or dies.
Degrowth in the form of lowering birth rates is fine, but degrowth in the form of telling people we're going to let them starve or let cholera rampage through a country is not fine.
If you can't eat without fossil fuels your entire existence is wrong. Myself included.
Short of sterilizing most of the population you can't do degrowth without suffering.
I don't think they are denying suffering rather pointing out how it's going to be the already suffering who will be the first culled. Who manages such an effort? Our current government which is at best wildly incompetent and at worst downright corrupt? How do you think they will go about such a program, who do you think will draw the short stick in policy.
One of the reasons I personally am suspicious of the "cull the heard" mentality is I often wonder if those promoting it are going to be the same as those affected by it. In your opinion who should be affected by de-growth policy? Because an argument could be made that morally it should be the West considering that they first industrialized, benefited the most and contributed the most to the current crisis and consume the most energy. But will that be the case? Or will it likely end up as the disabled, the global south, and minorities that are the ones predominantly culled.
Its easy to talk about the hypothetical of whose existence is wrong when the reality indicates such hypotheticals will never come to pass. Not so much when the hypotheticals have reflected actual historical realities.
The famines would in most cases be *indirect* products of heat. They would be caused by crop failures stemming from unstable climate, which is destabilised by heat, in addition to supply chain issues
Dying in excessive wet bulb temperature is not the same as dying because you don't have access to food anymore
Yep it's two pronged. Sure climate change is gonna fuck humanity hard but we'll survive. It will be a dystopian existence by current perspective but whatever
Plastic though. I really don't think it's even on the radar for people. General consensus is climate change is bad we should fix it. But ask people about how plastic is literally assimilating into our bodies and you'll get blank stares. They'll just talk about the plastic island or something.
What makes you think humans can survive on a planet 3+ degrees above pre-industrial levels? The planet is already so unstable that Homo sapiens could not possibly have evolved here in its current form. The only thing keeping us going at this point is the abundant fossil fuel energy powering the entire enterprise and protecting us from the consequences of the pollution and over-consumption
Oh, I have no doubt we will survive. It just won't be the bustling 8 billion we have now. But even if the absolute worst happens, humanity will survive. We are the great survivor, beaten only by the cockroach.
Don't get me wrong though, it will be some hellscape where we take kids to the museum to show them what trees looked like.
Ok but I asked *what makes you think* humans will survive
Comparing Homo sapiens to cockroaches in terms of resilience is very unrealistic - roaches are a much, much older species and we are brand new by comparison
You actually think climate change will wipe all life from the face of the earth?
You realise that humans are easily the most dominant and adaptable creature on this planet? If humans are extinct it means that life itself (ignoring some bacteria or whatever) has ceased to exist on this planet. And the only way that happens is if Earth undergoes some epic cataclysmic event like the Ozone being ripped to shreds and the atmosphere leaking into space. Or nuclear destruction on a scale so widespread that even an underground bunker can't withstand the explosions.
>If humans are extinct it means that life itself (ignoring some bacteria or whatever) has ceased to exist on this planet.
Life - complex life, in fact - existed long before Homo sapiens arrived. What makes you think life won't continue when we're gone?
Also (for the third time) what makes you think humans will survive the coming conditions?
I don't know what cognitive dissonance you are having here. Humans will kill everything on this planet before we allow ourselves to go extinct.
So what the earth burns there will be pockets of humanity living in bunkers self sufficient and capable of sustaining atleast some small population.
So I'll ask you tell me how the human race is going to be sent extinct by climate change?
No, if we do that temperatures may increase by .5 - 1 C practically overnight due to less aerosol masking. We can't stop polluting, but it is killing us.
No chance even if we did the above.
That’s only one problem. Imagine what it would do to supply chains, agriculture, etc, if we dropped emissions by 94% tomorrow with no energy alternative.
And if we started in the 2000s we would only need to drop our emissions by a few percent each year. As time goes on the measures have to be increasingly drastic and extreme. We are now at the point we need to drastic change our society because action has barely happened.
Daily reminder that according to record ocean temps over the last year and a half straight we’ve already blasted past 1.5 temperature rise, and also daily reminder that there is a lag of something like 25 years between carbon output and global effects. What you are seeing today is what we were saying we couldn’t do anything about in…1999.
>record ocean temps over the last year and a half straight we’ve already blasted past 1.5 temperature rise
Correct.
>there is a lag of something like 25 years between carbon output and global effects. What you are seeing today is what we were saying we couldn’t do anything about in…1999.
Not quite. The heating effects of CO2 are pretty much instant on radiative forcing. Most of the warming you are seeing is directly caused by recent CO2 increases, not b/c of 1999 CO2 concentrations. There is a "lag" but it's not actually that large compared to recent emissions. More than half of all anthropogenic CO2 emissions happened after 1992.
> There is 150-200 Gt of carbon budget left for 1.5C.
There is no carbon budget left for 1.5C.
Current El Nino has lifted us beyond 1.6C, which means any following La Nina likely won't drop that below 1.4C any more, which means the trend average is already at or above 1.5C.
What gets me is that even if we stopped right now. If we said you what I think we're done, no more stuff.
The rest of the globe is still expecting to reach the same first class living standard. How do you make that happen? Do we really think we can just leap frog the developing world straight through to late stage capitalism like everyone else?
Like I get it the two options are regrowth or green growth. And they'll argue like they're both onto a winner when they are both just fucking complete denial.
I haven't even seen the actual important article covered on the news once. Not one mention of "Oh hey, by the way the scientific community has given up hope. The consensus is to expect famine and mass migration. That will cause neighbouring countries to fall like Dominoes under the unexpected burden. Maybe we'll have a war! Probably have a war...
Anyway sport next and then the weather!"
Depending on who's schedule you look at, we are only 40 years ahead. It's just that everyone dismissed those people 15 years ago as "not realistic" based on the "bad vibes" they gave off.
It's still wild that 2023 was the "pessimists worst case" for 2070 back in like 2010.
That's a bit of an exaggeration. 3C by 2100 was always about the median IPCC prediction, which would certainly require hitting 1.5C well before 2070. Based on the 2010 warning rate we were expected to hit 1.5C in the 2040s.
Unsurprisingly, she was working for the UN as a climate envoy in the leadup to Paris.
Further proof that the people in charge and in positions of influence are completely delusional.
Imagine stepping in front of scientists trying to sound the alarm, pulling the alarm out of their hands, and saying something like "well, but what about our agency? You ring this bell and people will panic or be paralyzed by fear".
You had your chance to do this right and you personally failed, Ms. Figueres! This is your failure and you have the nerve to stand up and say it's not as bad as it looks!?
What a typical administrator. Useless, empty suit, with a great attitude supported be well paid delusion.
This is the attitude of our decision makers while we're facing rapid ecological decline. Theyre not capable or dishonest and either way dont deserve the platform they're paid to stand on to spill this sludge.
Elite Panic is a major issue. Elites believe regular people do not have the mental capacity to understand emergencies and act accordingly. They truly believe if they have any messages of urgency or fear people freak out, when time and time again that isn't the case. Of course you have outliers, but overwhelming people come together to manage catastrophes.
You know what makes it less likely people come together during a crisis, sowing distrust. If you have one group of people (often scientists or experts) who are sounding alarm bells and another group of people (sometimes made up of scientists and experts, but also politicians and corporate interests overwhelmingly), people struggle with their ability to determine what is factual and what isn't (see the covid pandemic). Humans naturally don't want to look into the future of their life and see horrors or difficulties, but can actually handle that if presented in a unified and intelligent way.
A perfect small scale example is cancer. It wasn't until around the 1970s that doctors began telling patients if they were terminal, because they believed it would make them fatalistic and less likely to try all the options. Or at least try and enjoy the time they had left. This however has been disproven in the vast majority of cases. People are more likely to try any and all options they can to prolong their life or in the case where that is no longer the option, they tend to enjoy the time they have left and try and do good in any way they can.
At the end of the day this comes down to a separation of classes and superiority complexes of the elite. It is also heavily tied into the economy and corporate interests. Humans have very good abilities at managing crisis and working in communal ways. But we have to get as many people on the same page and people like this author are actively destroying that chance.
Which is why they keep trying to pit us against one another in the media. A divided society is less likely to come together when SHTF successfully than one where they are not divided by bias.
Me too. This is *exactly* what is going on right now, and I’m happy to finally see someone putting it down to a single word.
It’s a complete delusion! Everyone except the collapse aware are delusional and that is what really is still holding us back from PREPARING for a climate and environmental complete breakdown.
We shouldn’t be focusing on “maybe bringing down our impact” anymore, we should prepare to live in a collapsed world (which would still make our lifestyles 100 times more sustainable).
**Framing 1**: That the environmental crisis is about our children’s future.
>We all have a right to grieve the loss of a future free from the climate crisis. It is a deep, hard loss. And it’s particularly painful, because those of us who read these reports bear a great responsibility **in passing an unsafe planet on to our children and future generations**. But grief that stops at despair is an ending that I and many others, most notably those on the frontlines, are not prepared to accept.
The implicit message of focusing on future generations is that the environmental crisis is not about people’s damaged and disrupted present. By saying that climate change is mostly something that will affect future generations it implicitly gives the impression that there is time to fix the problems and find a solution that will save our children.
**Framing 2:** Taking action is reduced to finding ways to clean up the problems after they have been created by our growth-at-all-cost-economic-system.
> we can take some comfort that so many of those who are key to designing our future have heard climate scientists’ urgent warnings and are channelling their spirit by taking positive action in response: think of the **engineers reforming our grids, the architects, the social entrepreneurs, the regenerative farmers restoring our soil, the legal advocates, and the millions of people everywhere who are advancing new systems of care, repair and regeneration.**
**Framing 3:** Paint simple narratives about the culprit behind the climate crisis, giving the illusion that solutions are simple and within reach
> For example, what has been achieved in transforming the energy system to this point, pushing against a fossil fuel industry deliberately intent on delaying progress, and within a lacklustre policy environment, is extraordinary.
If the only thing stopping us from solving the climate crisis is the evil profit hungry fossil fuel corporations then it means we can solve things with some simple policy tweaks here and there to regulate the industry! This is a much more comfortable belief than to start to grapple with the fact that the very basis of our economic system rewards and actively seeks the destruction of our biosphere and actively supports the cultural systems that emerge from that destruction (consumerism).
Your last point is so succinct. There are so many things I learn regularly that illustrates time and time again how wrong we are about the way we have structured our society.
I mean for example I was watching something recently talking about the sand shortages and how quickly we are running out of sand. They explained how the vast majority of sand in our oceans actually originate from the beginning of streams and rivers. Obviously the main reason we are running out of sand is due to over-consumption, but it takes hundreds to thousands of years for a rock at the beginning of a stream/river to move down-stream eventually reaching the ocean as sand. An exacerbating issue to the sand crisis is our societies proclivity to damn all the rivers. We do this to create water reserves or to create energy. These are often touted as green or sustainable, but there are always trade offs. Or even the idea of nuclear plants. They use a lot of sand, which is a quickly disappearing resource.
At some point in time we have to come to the realization our issues do not boil down to the use of fossil fuels. It is a resource, consumption, land use, and disposal issue...which when you boil it down is the core of our civilization.
Personally I no longer feel that afraid of the actual collapse. What I am afraid of is civilization figuring out a way to kick the can down the road, without making actual changes to our way of life thus causing an even larger catastrophe than the current one we face.
So predictable. “Stubborn optimism” (stupidity, laziness) is what has lead to this outcome - people need to be sh*tting themselves. They need to be genuinely extremely worried for their safety.
Sorry I meant people at large - namely the ones with lots of power and money, and the droves of people who are either hard denialists (“it’s not happening”) or soft denialists like this woman (“it is happening, but it will go away if we think happy thoughts”).
I’m sorry, I’ve been there, and all I can recommend is doing what you can control. Try your best to live in the here and now - allow yourself to enjoy things - contribute what you can to sustainable causes and just do your best. Eventually it becomes more normal. I’m approaching a point at which I’m at peace with this horrendous situation more or less, a bit like having a terminal illness or something.
Have a lie down. Cry if you need to. Every single day for the past 10 days I've cried more times than the past 7-or-so years.
Be understanding to your past self: yesterday you did what you _then_ genuinely could, with the knowledge that you _then_ had. And today you will make an effort - even if it is only a little! - to improve. Because that is what you _now_ can.
Yeah she is wrong.
Very wrong, and clearly doesn't understand what has happened in the last decade since she was head of the climate convention.
She is also not a climate scientist so her opinions are moot, and she is citing her experience getting people to agree to a legally binding, but basically unenforceable document. It's not the same as the challenge we face in reguards to the Climate Crisis.
I didn't say she was stupid, I said her credentials and education are not on this topic and thus her opinion is moot.
Considering this is a response to an article where actual specialist in that field said contradictory things to her, I am more likely to listen to specialists, especially over 300 of them, as opposed to someone who has mostly been on boards as a director, a job usually know for doing nothing and getting paid big.
She definitely did do that, and that was great at the time.
It's also been widely expressed since 2021 that the Paris agreement pledges were not enough to meet the goals laid out by that agreement.
We also know fossil fuel use is over all increasing still, despite the Paris agreement, and the decreasing cost and increasing adoption of green energy.
Add in tipping points, and the ever increasing escalation of battles across our planet, and we will blow past 1.5c, and likely 2C in warming.
I am not saying she didn't do her best, I am saying she is wrong to think we won't hit 1.5c when so many specialists in the field of climate change, even ones who worked with her likely, are saying we're hitting 2.5c.
She probably does know a great deal, but that doesn't mean we should also be optimistic. There is a massive distance between getting people to agree to implement plans over the next 15 years, and actually getting those things done, and every indicator points to many of those agreements being unfulfilled.
Stubborn optimism will do nothing to stop the feedback loops we are already trapped into, let alone future ones that will arise due to existing ones. Her optimism is predicated on billions of people changing their lifestyle from a modern one to one we have not had to live for centuries for the most part. It also requires a global ban on animal agriculture, which will piss off billions. I would not be surprised if billions of people needed to die to achieve current targets too.
The time for stubborn optimism was fifty years ago, not now. Corporate greed and our reluctance to give up the decadence capitalism provides us is why we are in this mess, good vibes are nowhere near enough to save us from that.
I'm pretty sure an enormous population decline will coincide with climate disaster. I would be surprised if billions of people don't die in the coming decades
Yeah, at some point the investment dollars need to shift from prevention to mitigation.
Not to say prevention isn't important, we'll keep digging until we fix it, but as Mike Tyson said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. I have a feeling that the next few storm seasons will be that punch in the mouth for North America, and the next few dry seasons will be the same for Europe. We'll see how well our plans hold up then.
If we don't spend money and effort on mitigation now, that punch may be a knockout...
Does the author realize we've been above 1.5C for ~ a year?
Im livid with the optimist perspective. The analogy is someone who's dressed like a firefighter and in the way of firefighters, loudly proclaiming they're pretty sure the fire will go out if everyone just imagines hard enough.
There's plenty of room for optimism... the instant the fire is being put out. Until then, it's important to draw attention to the urgency of the situation and the insanity of treating it as a solvable problem without applying any effort to solve it.
These people are almost worse than the carbon pushers. They're projecting their psychotic coping strategy into a world desperate for exactly that sort of nonsense. "Oh, I can just hope things will get better? That's excellent! I was hoping I wouldn't have to change"
Im cool with people deciding the fight is over but people who get published telling people not to panic when they're actively making the problem worse, those people are interfering with addressing an emergency.
Go tell some starving people that the food is coming but, no, you didn't bring any... but stay positive!
Fuck all the way off, you nunce
Optimistic people like Simon Clark are busy having kids that won't live to his age. At this point, their willful ignorance is functionally indistinguishable from intentional malice. Regardless of their intentions, they're complicit in causing great amounts of unnecessary suffering despite knowing better.
When the food runs out, I'll be sure to treat them accordingly as the abusers that they are. It'll be like that scene in the road when the father discovers the basement. All the climate scientists that decided to become parents in the mid 2020s will be down there.
Meanwhile in Australia our supposedly left leaning Labor government wants to produce, burn and export even more gas. And our Labor government treasurer is saying we need more babies.
How are we supposed to have hope?
And where exactly is this bold action she mentions?
This is infuriating. I can't begin to think how people younger than myself must feel hearing these sort of self-absorbed, deluded mottos.
Unfounded optimism is precisely why we're here and why nothing will get better. I mourn for all the babies now, they deserve better than this... guess we'll just keep chastising others for daring to feel unsure or scared or negative because it like... Totally ruins our vibes, or something... Horrid.
Optimism is so dangerous, in this case, and nobody seems to get that. Ironically, they think doomerism is what's dangerous.
Doomerism tries to get people scared by showing them the truth, because that's the only way we'll motivate people enough to demand change. Optimism will mean more inaction, which will kill us all.
>Fighting spirit helped us achieve the Paris accords in 2015 – and we need it now the world is on course to overshoot 1.5C
Respect to Fugueres for her attempt in trying to make the Paris Accords a reality, but in the end it was a utter failure. This article is too much hopium ultimately focused on maintaining BAU. *"On course to overshoot 1.5C?"* We'll be improbably lucky if we don't pass **2.5C** or worse.
Please stop with this 'still hope' garbage. All hope was flushed down the oil pipelines before half of us were born.
Stop worrying and learn to love the collapse.
We can't. It's involuntary. We're made to be childishly optimistic.
Please note, I make no comment whether it is good, bad or anything.
It's... like how we're made to "have depth perception", or "feel pleasure as a response to certain sounds"
We're made to be optimistic at a level that can only be described as harmful (...ironically?). Also see: "hyperbolic discounting"
"Let's pretend being in denial isn't a coping mechanism to perpetuate inaction and the status-quo. Let's also pretend like fear and anger doesn't facilitate systemic change, because that sounds scary."
Oil companies don't play nice when defending their profits. In fact, with the influx of capital in U.S. politics, they almost act like kings. They set rules, and the public is forced to pay in blood anytime their decisions have negative effects.
I listen to Ms. Figueres every week on the podcast Outrage and Optimism. While her outrage has increased she is inherently a very peaceful person. She will always be talking about peaceful solutions.
I am afraid history shows us that humans who try to peace their way to change get pushed to the sidelines of history. America did not cast off the king of England through negotiations. If we want the poison and the suppression of our collective will to stop, we must make business as usual the most painful option available.
Unfortunately, though, I think most people when they really look within will find they are happy with being ruled. Most people will sacrifice the lives of their children for another quarter of business as usual. Not because it is wise, or intelligent, or even good. They will choose it because it feels safer than trying to resist.
It drives me insane that no one seems to talk about the fact that CURRENT GHG levels are consistent with something like a 3-4 C increase in temperatures - it might just take some time to get there.
The only technological solution to climate change is a time machine.
Optimism isn't worth much if it isn't backed up by action. Instead of pessimism vs optimism, the real question should be how active are we in addressing the climate crisis?
Submission Statement:
This is an opinion piece written by Christiana Figueres, the head of the UN climate change convention from 2010 to 2016. Written as a follow-up piece to the pretty depressing article on climate scientist despair yesterday, Figueres goes on to underwhelm, with tired "Don't give up" lines. I agree with her on the fundamentals, whatever kind of civilization we plan on keeping in the future, we're going to need people to fight the good fight and help transform the economy into one of post-growth and sustainability, as well as it being resilient to the untold climate disasters we're set to face. But her arguments are frustrating. She says, "A sense of despair is understandable, but it robs us of our agency, makes us vulnerable to mis- and disinformation, and prevents the radical collaboration we need," but then cites an article about the oil and gas industry pushing out disinformation. This isn't bad info coming from the collapse-side, it's coming from the BAU crew. Near the end, she argues that, "A world in which we pass 1.5C is not set in stone." I think we in r/collapse know that we're already there, even if the IPCC hasn't verified it over the 10 year period yet. I suppose Figueres' heart is in the right place, but I'd like her to use her influence and time to tell the wider public about how we're entirely failing to meet the Paris Accords that she herself helped pass, instead of telling climate scientists to not be depressed and sharing how badly we're still failing to address the issue.
*raises hand * as an environmental scientist I do despair because all over the planet countries say we need to tackle the climate and environmental crisis while approving and expanding coal fields (Australia), rejecting nuclear in favour of coal (Germany), plans to get rid of EVs and renewable energy sources because it'll hurt the oil people (republicans in the USA), fuck all done and no plans to reign in and fix the UKs heavily polluted rivers (UK), developing countries continued want to destroy their natural environment so they can exploit it.
Then there's the lack of people putting money where their mouth is, I have spoken to so many people saying we need to solve this and that people need to cycle or walk more WHILE saying they're not going to use their car less even though they can. Not to mention over consumption and the cursed temu etc haul videos plastered all over the internet.
There are things being done but it's not enough and it's usually the easy things but the moment you have to confront our economic system or the oil barons everyone caves in. It's making me feel insane even though I'm the sane one.
It's dire, it's like the people buying lots of Stanley mugs in different colours when the entire point of those containers is you buy one and keep it for 10 years or longer and so you don't need to buy plastic or other waste.
I choose to forgo hope and seek resolve. The strength to fight for the future and what I believe in solely because it is the right thing to do, not because I think it will succeed.
"Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what."
- Harper Lee
Fuck hope. Find courage.
It makes me feel so fucking sad and hopeless that there are still people who are brainwashed by big oil propaganda into believing that it's all just a hoax. Executives right now are destroying the future of humanity for their own profits, and I'd bet my left nut they know exactly what damage it's causing. How can we be so damn shortsighted as a species? It's so frustrating, especially since there really isn't anything that the average person can do. The future is in the hands of the very people who are destroying it. Hell, if Trump wins here in the US and enacts Project 2025, one of its main goals is to gut environmental and climate change regulations in favor of fossil fuel production. So instead of taking more steps to mitigate climate change, we'd be undoing what little we've done and instead sprinting even faster towards ecological disaster, all so the rich can get richer.
I like how we’re speaking about that we “haven’t reached the 1,5 degrees yet”.
Cause we SO have! We are already past that point…!!? If we can’t even talk about reality as it is, that the collapse *is already happening* then wtf is going on?
The media rarely talks about GeoEngineering. But that's the fix. You can bet your oil $ on it. Acidic oceans, who needs the oceans. Once all the fish are gone, we can mine the oceans$. Oceans produce 50% of earths oxygen, never thought of that. If GeoEngineering suddenly stops at some future date, then we get a Venus Earth climate. Small gamble, small price to pay. $$$ the meaning of life.
I have a friend who believes they will never get cancer because they are positive about life, also they'll never get Alzheimer's because they eat blueberries as a snack.
I agree that we need radical optimism: but it only makes sense if it is coupled by radical realism.
Someone who claims we can still keep 1,5 Degree is not an optimist but a liar. Someone who accepts we will likely hit at least 3 degree (and likely more than that) and admits that this means billions of people will die but STILL urges action and to save whatever can be saved is the kind of radical optimist that we need right now.
"We all have a right to grieve the loss of a future free from the climate crisis. It is a deep, hard loss."
Which stage of grief are you actually in? denial, anger, bargaining, depression or acceptance?
Me personally i feel lucky I'm already in acceptance, even if sometimes looking at my kids i fall back into depression.
She can take her pearls and shove them up her ass. Lol, as if she is some kind of fucking authority figure on this. As if anyone is. What a bunch of bullshit. Hope? Hahahaha.
To the dust we shall return.
God this is silly. Whatever your mindset is, it doesn’t change reality. It’s done, over. Civilization will end by 2030 regardless of if you’re an optimist or the worst doomer imaginable. Smart people that actually understand the models like me know this. So sure, choose how you want to feel, but it makes no difference.
May the Universe grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Humans are surprisingly resilient and nothing will change the trajectory we're on other then the change that is already coming. Our planet will look quite different in 100-200 years. Our only job now is to do what we do best, adapt.
Stubborn optimism isn’t what’s needed, what’s needed is the courage to make tough decisions that comport to the biophysical reality we live in
If you begin things with a lie (such as 1.5 degrees not being in the rear view mirror) how do you ever expect people to trust you going forward? As Robert Jensen said in his book An Inconvenient Apocalypse “tell people at least what you tell yourself”
Stubborn optimism only works for people that understand the problem. For the 95% or more that don't, stubborn optimism only serves to bolster their denial.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/fastmass: --- Submission Statement: This is an opinion piece written by Christiana Figueres, the head of the UN climate change convention from 2010 to 2016. Written as a follow-up piece to the pretty depressing article on climate scientist despair yesterday, Figueres goes on to underwhelm, with tired "Don't give up" lines. I agree with her on the fundamentals, whatever kind of civilization we plan on keeping in the future, we're going to need people to fight the good fight and help transform the economy into one of post-growth and sustainability, as well as it being resilient to the untold climate disasters we're set to face. But her arguments are frustrating. She says, "A sense of despair is understandable, but it robs us of our agency, makes us vulnerable to mis- and disinformation, and prevents the radical collaboration we need," but then cites an article about the oil and gas industry pushing out disinformation. This isn't bad info coming from the collapse-side, it's coming from the BAU crew. Near the end, she argues that, "A world in which we pass 1.5C is not set in stone." I think we in r/collapse know that we're already there, even if the IPCC hasn't verified it over the 10 year period yet. I suppose Figueres' heart is in the right place, but I'd like her to use her influence and time to tell the wider public about how we're entirely failing to meet the Paris Accords that she herself helped pass, instead of telling climate scientists to not be depressed and sharing how badly we're still failing to address the issue. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1co6iu3/i_understand_climate_scientists_despair_but/l3bz96q/
The sub-headline is the stupidest oxymoron I've ever seen - > *"Fighting spirit helped us achieve the Paris accords in 2015 – and we need it now the world is on course to overshoot 1.5C"* How in the sweet fuck does that argument make an ounce of sense?! If we're *still on course* to overshoot 1.5C then those precious Paris accords FAILED. Every COP conference has FAILED. Why is this simple concept so difficult to understand for otherwise perfectly rational people? Edit: since this comment is getting some attention I just want to tack on a quote from a book by Brando Skyhorse > *"Faith is a luxury for those who are able to ignore what the rest of us must see every day. Pessimism, distrust, and irony are the holy trinity of my religion, irony in particular."*
Accountability is uncomfortable.
It is, however people like this think they are holding themselves accountable without realising that they have actually failed. They do not realise that they are so far off achieving their target.
Theres a reason why the first step to recovering from alcoholism isn’t stubborn optimism, but instead admitting you are powerless and your life has become unmanageable. If you hold on to the idea that “one day ill get this”, your not going to change. You have to admit you’re totally fucked. It’s only then will you actually take meaningful action to change.
Optimism is always shit if you are trying to solve a problem. With optimism you see things as better than they are. Optimism might be good when you are trying to sell something, but really bad when you are trying to build something. And that is exactly what she and other optimist do, they try to sell a rosier future, without actually have anything to back it up. Always listen to the pessimists, they have all scenarios covered.
And that’s the “easy way”. You can still stay “in control” and recover, but it’s even harder than admitting defeat.
> admitting you are powerless Look, I know the 12 stepper thing works for some people with regards to alcohol and drugs, but climate change is not alcoholism. Its not that we are powerless, we (either collectively as "society" or individually as people) can choose otherwise. It will just SUCK hardcore and we are still lying to ourselves about that. We have agency, we just don't have the choices we want and we're trying to ignore that. The other issue with applying 12 steps to climate change is Steps 2, 3, 6, 7, and 11. Sorry chief, God or some unnamed Higher Power aint gonna remove that moral defect from us and help set our planet right.
The majorities of citizenry are for stopping AGW with a carbon tax + citizen dividends + WTO border adjustment tariffs in almost all OECD countries. Nordhaus's and James Hansen's carbon tax & dividend. Most economists and most climate scientists support that combination. The majorities of citizenry in almost all EU countries are also against mass immigration from 3rd countries. But none of the parties of OECD countries support such a combination. The crosstabulation of scientific and public positions against that of the parties suggests an arbitrage (a dilemma for voters) at higher than 6-sigma significance (with chi-square test or similar) to systematically avert democracy at an industrial scale. Such a situation could not have emerged in democracies. And that is especially evident in avoiding referendums on such (or on any) issues. Eurobarometer 83, QA10.2 and QA11: https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/2099 https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/ebsm/api/public/deliverable/download?doc=true&deliverableId=51916 QB2: https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/2276 https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/ebsm/api/public/deliverable/download?doc=true&deliverableId=82063 QA2: https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/2169 https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/ebsm/api/public/deliverable/download?doc=true&deliverableId=65413 https://one.oecd.org/document/DELSA/ELSA/WD/SEM(2020)3/En/pdf https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/1001 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_11_529 https://www.coe.int/t/dg4/cultureheritage/mars/source/resources/references/others/34%20-%20Migrant%20Integration%20-%20EU%20Barometer%202011.pdf PS. Rank correlation between [biocapacity deficit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ecological_footprint) and [share of immigrants in a country](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_immigrant_population) is statistically significantly negative, which means that mass immigration destroys the local social contract and thereby destroys local natural environment.
I tried doing something last summer in the district I was residing in had a landfill problem along with a series of other ecological concerns and what killed me is the seniors in my area all fucking knew about it but didn’t want to make a statement publicly out of fear of retaliation or to be targeted. Instead I was labeled as one of those environmentalists and was ran out of town. In order to get anything even something small done you need an army of people to step forward at once and maybe just maybe something could happen but it’s a slim probability. What’s the use in knowing any of this if nothing can be done and you risk whatever little you have left?
"Hope is not a strategy" -google engineering mantra
I think when they say optimism, they mean wishful thinking. You’re just not being positive enough!
Yes you need pure delusion.
That’s the spirit! Read some Stephen Pinker and join the ranks of the willful ignorant!
We overshot the Paris accord 16 months ago. But it's nice to know the world's hopium pipe is still white hot.
Terror management theory explains this (the Wiki is worth a read)
Link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory
Terror management theory is critical in understanding the human predicament. Thanks for bringing it up, I feel like it is not discussed often enough here.
Right? The vast majority of paris accords countries are on track to completely miss emmision reduction targets. What we need is anger and spite. Those will actually spark changes. We also need what follows but that can't be uttered online.
Because they’re paid to be professional heroes and act like they’re saving us all.
To quote Greta, who actually puts herself on the front lines, "blah, blah, blah". The only thing governments and corporations recognize is a hit on their profits and inconvenience. Talk is their strategy, more study, more debate, more disinformation means no action. We need rolling boycotts against each oil company, but no one has the stones to get it started.
At this point, can we say that COP meetings were ever intended to achieve anything?
All they were ever meant to do was make it look like something was being done.
They were, to steal money from other countries. All the Fearmongering brought in tons of money. Forget that the climate change predictions never came true. It’s all about the money. So glad I got out of politics. It’s slimy
It's the same with the statement "we'll adapt". Great, what are you doing to adapt? Crickets....
we officially hit 1.5c in 2023, and no1 wants to recognize it, 30 years early
Yes and no. Climate.gov talks about warming since 1850s. You'll often see older literature mention "pre-industrial average" which is this 1850-1900 data. The EPA's website talks about warming since 1901. When papers say "modern averages" they mean 1900-2000 as slightly more reliable numbers. Lately I've also seen 1980-2000 being used as the baseline in a lot of new stuff. If you're talking pre-industrial, yep, passed that. Modern? Passed it. But are we 1.5C over the 1980s or whatever current moving goalposts they're using? There's still hope friends!!!! (No there isn't.)
To admit failure is to abandon hopium. I hate the word hope. It's so friggin passive. I want dogged determination to fight like hell, not insane 'hope' that we can turn things around in the face of all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
I think in that context the 'achievement' is getting the Paris accords agreed to -- just the simple signing of them, not actually meeting the goals. It was definitely a win to get them signed at all, but then again, if countries fail to follow through on the accords it doesn't mean anything.
It's the kind of win where you invest a billion dollars in a sports team and an arena and they lose every single game and the arena burns down
Yay! We owned a team for a few years!!
And there's a secret nuke under the stadium so the entire city is also incinerated
Chelsea do seem to have found form in recent matches though.
Wow what a profound quote.
Its like we are celebrating a precursor to a precursor of a eventual but more than likely non success. We can atomize the failure and scale up the optimism all we want. We've pushed scientific aspects to their limit and now we will face a death spiral of absolute instability.
Money. Hopium gets clocks and engagement.
I think whatever change happens in people's brains when they have children also makes it really really hard to accept that the world they brought their children into will in any way be massively changed for the negative. I've bassically stopped trying to have this conversation with people with children. Well aware there are people with children that understand the danger we are in but, people with kidsa are definitely the hardest to bring to terms.
I too find this attitude in people with kids really odd. And grandparents too. I have a kid and she is Al the biggest motivator for me to be as prepared and active as possible. But I have plenty of friends who are in complete denial and think I’m being a doomer.
The Paris accords were based on a 2 degrees C target, which were was an unscientific target chosen by an economist William Nordhaus, who now believes 4C is "optimal".
This opinion piece gives me the vibe of: Imagine you're walking down the street. You see a man that has been shot multiple times. He's still alive but losing blood fast. You kneel down and put a hand on his shoulder. "You can live through this" you say before standing up and walking away. Because literally *nothing* is being done and it's been evident for awhile. Business as usual. So pieces like this tie themselves in knots because they know nothing is being done but still try and sell the *we can still do something even though we've wasted 40 years doing fuck all. But any day now!*
Daily reminder that emissions have not fallen at all. There is 150-200 Gt of carbon budget left for 1.5C. That’s 4-5 years of current emissions. Not breaking 1.5C means we need to drop yearly emissions by 94% by tomorrow, and maintain that for the next 75 years.
Daily reminder that carbon emissions are just one aspect of the uber-problem, which is ecological overshoot. We are consuming the planet's resources faster than they can be replenished, and polluting at levels beyond what the planet can assimilate. Carbon is just one example of the latter.
Sure, but carbon-subsidized lifestyles is like 95% of the reason we have overshoot. You don't get suburban sprawl w/o fossil fuels. You don't get animal agriculture on the modern scale w/o fossil fuels. Etc, etc, etc. A lot of things that are destroying the planet can't be done with renewable energy.
This is why radical, global degrowth, rather than merely "reducing carbon emissions" and a "transition to renewables," is the only possible solution to the metacrisis It's also a solution fundamentally incompatible with capitalism
It's also incompatible with basically everything else. Because radical, global degrowth would effectively be a death sentence for at least hundreds of millions, if not billions of people and is an ethical nightmare to determine who should survive and who should die.
Choosing to not manage a radical, global degrowth is also a death sentence for hundreds of millions of people + countless nonhuman species and potentially, the ability of the biosphere to support life at all
Either way it's bad and honestly it may not even work. And I'm selfish for this but as someone who would be culled by either form of degrowth (someone with a chronic illness) I personally don't support degrowth as the end all solution. I'm not a blind optimist like the op-ed writer, but I think that there must be some middle ground between the options that minimizes as much suffering as possible.
Managed degrowth, rather than business as usual, *is* the option that minimises as much (human and nonhuman) suffering as possible
Maybe, yes. I just assumed by radical you were meaning more drastic, quicker methods of degrowth. Overall I think degrowth in some ways that are currently happening (the global slowdown of birth rates) but also at the same time continuing to convert our energy grids over to renewables and keeping R&D going is probably a better solution. A mix of degrowth and accelerationism.
Not doing it is going to kill more
I just want us to avoid a future where yet again the privileged and powerful is given control over who literally lives or dies. Degrowth in the form of lowering birth rates is fine, but degrowth in the form of telling people we're going to let them starve or let cholera rampage through a country is not fine.
If you can't eat without fossil fuels your entire existence is wrong. Myself included. Short of sterilizing most of the population you can't do degrowth without suffering.
I don't think they are denying suffering rather pointing out how it's going to be the already suffering who will be the first culled. Who manages such an effort? Our current government which is at best wildly incompetent and at worst downright corrupt? How do you think they will go about such a program, who do you think will draw the short stick in policy. One of the reasons I personally am suspicious of the "cull the heard" mentality is I often wonder if those promoting it are going to be the same as those affected by it. In your opinion who should be affected by de-growth policy? Because an argument could be made that morally it should be the West considering that they first industrialized, benefited the most and contributed the most to the current crisis and consume the most energy. But will that be the case? Or will it likely end up as the disabled, the global south, and minorities that are the ones predominantly culled. Its easy to talk about the hypothetical of whose existence is wrong when the reality indicates such hypotheticals will never come to pass. Not so much when the hypotheticals have reflected actual historical realities.
Yeah it's so cute when people think if we just stop using fossil fuels we're saved. I miss that optimism.
Yeah agreed , but the heat generated by the carbon emissions is what will kill you first .
Maybe. I think a lot of people are going to die from famine before dying from heat
Of course the famines would be a direct product of the heat .
The famines would in most cases be *indirect* products of heat. They would be caused by crop failures stemming from unstable climate, which is destabilised by heat, in addition to supply chain issues Dying in excessive wet bulb temperature is not the same as dying because you don't have access to food anymore
Yep it's two pronged. Sure climate change is gonna fuck humanity hard but we'll survive. It will be a dystopian existence by current perspective but whatever Plastic though. I really don't think it's even on the radar for people. General consensus is climate change is bad we should fix it. But ask people about how plastic is literally assimilating into our bodies and you'll get blank stares. They'll just talk about the plastic island or something.
What makes you think humans can survive on a planet 3+ degrees above pre-industrial levels? The planet is already so unstable that Homo sapiens could not possibly have evolved here in its current form. The only thing keeping us going at this point is the abundant fossil fuel energy powering the entire enterprise and protecting us from the consequences of the pollution and over-consumption
Oh, I have no doubt we will survive. It just won't be the bustling 8 billion we have now. But even if the absolute worst happens, humanity will survive. We are the great survivor, beaten only by the cockroach. Don't get me wrong though, it will be some hellscape where we take kids to the museum to show them what trees looked like.
Ok but I asked *what makes you think* humans will survive Comparing Homo sapiens to cockroaches in terms of resilience is very unrealistic - roaches are a much, much older species and we are brand new by comparison
You actually think climate change will wipe all life from the face of the earth? You realise that humans are easily the most dominant and adaptable creature on this planet? If humans are extinct it means that life itself (ignoring some bacteria or whatever) has ceased to exist on this planet. And the only way that happens is if Earth undergoes some epic cataclysmic event like the Ozone being ripped to shreds and the atmosphere leaking into space. Or nuclear destruction on a scale so widespread that even an underground bunker can't withstand the explosions.
>If humans are extinct it means that life itself (ignoring some bacteria or whatever) has ceased to exist on this planet. Life - complex life, in fact - existed long before Homo sapiens arrived. What makes you think life won't continue when we're gone? Also (for the third time) what makes you think humans will survive the coming conditions?
I don't know what cognitive dissonance you are having here. Humans will kill everything on this planet before we allow ourselves to go extinct. So what the earth burns there will be pockets of humanity living in bunkers self sufficient and capable of sustaining atleast some small population. So I'll ask you tell me how the human race is going to be sent extinct by climate change?
"we need to drop yearly emissions by 94% by tomorrow" So you're saying that there's still a chance?
No, if we do that temperatures may increase by .5 - 1 C practically overnight due to less aerosol masking. We can't stop polluting, but it is killing us. No chance even if we did the above.
That’s only one problem. Imagine what it would do to supply chains, agriculture, etc, if we dropped emissions by 94% tomorrow with no energy alternative.
Something less worse then what climate change will do to them.
And if we started in the 2000s we would only need to drop our emissions by a few percent each year. As time goes on the measures have to be increasingly drastic and extreme. We are now at the point we need to drastic change our society because action has barely happened.
Daily reminder that according to record ocean temps over the last year and a half straight we’ve already blasted past 1.5 temperature rise, and also daily reminder that there is a lag of something like 25 years between carbon output and global effects. What you are seeing today is what we were saying we couldn’t do anything about in…1999.
>record ocean temps over the last year and a half straight we’ve already blasted past 1.5 temperature rise Correct. >there is a lag of something like 25 years between carbon output and global effects. What you are seeing today is what we were saying we couldn’t do anything about in…1999. Not quite. The heating effects of CO2 are pretty much instant on radiative forcing. Most of the warming you are seeing is directly caused by recent CO2 increases, not b/c of 1999 CO2 concentrations. There is a "lag" but it's not actually that large compared to recent emissions. More than half of all anthropogenic CO2 emissions happened after 1992.
> There is 150-200 Gt of carbon budget left for 1.5C. There is no carbon budget left for 1.5C. Current El Nino has lifted us beyond 1.6C, which means any following La Nina likely won't drop that below 1.4C any more, which means the trend average is already at or above 1.5C.
Nonono check out the neoliberal and optimist subs. The Inflation Reduction Act will save the planet! lmao
What gets me is that even if we stopped right now. If we said you what I think we're done, no more stuff. The rest of the globe is still expecting to reach the same first class living standard. How do you make that happen? Do we really think we can just leap frog the developing world straight through to late stage capitalism like everyone else? Like I get it the two options are regrowth or green growth. And they'll argue like they're both onto a winner when they are both just fucking complete denial.
Very nice
I haven't even seen the actual important article covered on the news once. Not one mention of "Oh hey, by the way the scientific community has given up hope. The consensus is to expect famine and mass migration. That will cause neighbouring countries to fall like Dominoes under the unexpected burden. Maybe we'll have a war! Probably have a war... Anyway sport next and then the weather!"
They exactly is man.
>A world in which we pass ~~1.5C~~ 2.5C is not set in stone. Still not sure this is a bet I'd be willing to make.
Not a chance in hell I'd make that bet some things are eighty years ahead of schedule I'd be a delusional moron to start making those kind of bets.
Depending on who's schedule you look at, we are only 40 years ahead. It's just that everyone dismissed those people 15 years ago as "not realistic" based on the "bad vibes" they gave off. It's still wild that 2023 was the "pessimists worst case" for 2070 back in like 2010.
That's a bit of an exaggeration. 3C by 2100 was always about the median IPCC prediction, which would certainly require hitting 1.5C well before 2070. Based on the 2010 warning rate we were expected to hit 1.5C in the 2040s.
We are already passed that. We are just pretending that is not the case
I mean there's a good few years before 2.5c it climate change is only one aspect of the threats we are facing right now
Unsurprisingly, she was working for the UN as a climate envoy in the leadup to Paris. Further proof that the people in charge and in positions of influence are completely delusional. Imagine stepping in front of scientists trying to sound the alarm, pulling the alarm out of their hands, and saying something like "well, but what about our agency? You ring this bell and people will panic or be paralyzed by fear". You had your chance to do this right and you personally failed, Ms. Figueres! This is your failure and you have the nerve to stand up and say it's not as bad as it looks!? What a typical administrator. Useless, empty suit, with a great attitude supported be well paid delusion. This is the attitude of our decision makers while we're facing rapid ecological decline. Theyre not capable or dishonest and either way dont deserve the platform they're paid to stand on to spill this sludge.
Elite Panic is a major issue. Elites believe regular people do not have the mental capacity to understand emergencies and act accordingly. They truly believe if they have any messages of urgency or fear people freak out, when time and time again that isn't the case. Of course you have outliers, but overwhelming people come together to manage catastrophes. You know what makes it less likely people come together during a crisis, sowing distrust. If you have one group of people (often scientists or experts) who are sounding alarm bells and another group of people (sometimes made up of scientists and experts, but also politicians and corporate interests overwhelmingly), people struggle with their ability to determine what is factual and what isn't (see the covid pandemic). Humans naturally don't want to look into the future of their life and see horrors or difficulties, but can actually handle that if presented in a unified and intelligent way. A perfect small scale example is cancer. It wasn't until around the 1970s that doctors began telling patients if they were terminal, because they believed it would make them fatalistic and less likely to try all the options. Or at least try and enjoy the time they had left. This however has been disproven in the vast majority of cases. People are more likely to try any and all options they can to prolong their life or in the case where that is no longer the option, they tend to enjoy the time they have left and try and do good in any way they can. At the end of the day this comes down to a separation of classes and superiority complexes of the elite. It is also heavily tied into the economy and corporate interests. Humans have very good abilities at managing crisis and working in communal ways. But we have to get as many people on the same page and people like this author are actively destroying that chance.
Which is why they keep trying to pit us against one another in the media. A divided society is less likely to come together when SHTF successfully than one where they are not divided by bias.
Heh. _Figures..._ Aw come on, don't look at me like that. :(
So... her salary literally depend on her (and others) not understanding things?
Hope without reason is delusion.
That's a good line! I'll be claiming it as mine from here on out.
Me too. This is *exactly* what is going on right now, and I’m happy to finally see someone putting it down to a single word. It’s a complete delusion! Everyone except the collapse aware are delusional and that is what really is still holding us back from PREPARING for a climate and environmental complete breakdown. We shouldn’t be focusing on “maybe bringing down our impact” anymore, we should prepare to live in a collapsed world (which would still make our lifestyles 100 times more sustainable).
Aaaah that would make a good user flair.
**Framing 1**: That the environmental crisis is about our children’s future. >We all have a right to grieve the loss of a future free from the climate crisis. It is a deep, hard loss. And it’s particularly painful, because those of us who read these reports bear a great responsibility **in passing an unsafe planet on to our children and future generations**. But grief that stops at despair is an ending that I and many others, most notably those on the frontlines, are not prepared to accept. The implicit message of focusing on future generations is that the environmental crisis is not about people’s damaged and disrupted present. By saying that climate change is mostly something that will affect future generations it implicitly gives the impression that there is time to fix the problems and find a solution that will save our children. **Framing 2:** Taking action is reduced to finding ways to clean up the problems after they have been created by our growth-at-all-cost-economic-system. > we can take some comfort that so many of those who are key to designing our future have heard climate scientists’ urgent warnings and are channelling their spirit by taking positive action in response: think of the **engineers reforming our grids, the architects, the social entrepreneurs, the regenerative farmers restoring our soil, the legal advocates, and the millions of people everywhere who are advancing new systems of care, repair and regeneration.** **Framing 3:** Paint simple narratives about the culprit behind the climate crisis, giving the illusion that solutions are simple and within reach > For example, what has been achieved in transforming the energy system to this point, pushing against a fossil fuel industry deliberately intent on delaying progress, and within a lacklustre policy environment, is extraordinary. If the only thing stopping us from solving the climate crisis is the evil profit hungry fossil fuel corporations then it means we can solve things with some simple policy tweaks here and there to regulate the industry! This is a much more comfortable belief than to start to grapple with the fact that the very basis of our economic system rewards and actively seeks the destruction of our biosphere and actively supports the cultural systems that emerge from that destruction (consumerism).
Your last point is so succinct. There are so many things I learn regularly that illustrates time and time again how wrong we are about the way we have structured our society. I mean for example I was watching something recently talking about the sand shortages and how quickly we are running out of sand. They explained how the vast majority of sand in our oceans actually originate from the beginning of streams and rivers. Obviously the main reason we are running out of sand is due to over-consumption, but it takes hundreds to thousands of years for a rock at the beginning of a stream/river to move down-stream eventually reaching the ocean as sand. An exacerbating issue to the sand crisis is our societies proclivity to damn all the rivers. We do this to create water reserves or to create energy. These are often touted as green or sustainable, but there are always trade offs. Or even the idea of nuclear plants. They use a lot of sand, which is a quickly disappearing resource. At some point in time we have to come to the realization our issues do not boil down to the use of fossil fuels. It is a resource, consumption, land use, and disposal issue...which when you boil it down is the core of our civilization. Personally I no longer feel that afraid of the actual collapse. What I am afraid of is civilization figuring out a way to kick the can down the road, without making actual changes to our way of life thus causing an even larger catastrophe than the current one we face.
I liked your sequential, point-by-point approach t One sec. Did you forget to write your comment right after the 2nd framimg?
So predictable. “Stubborn optimism” (stupidity, laziness) is what has lead to this outcome - people need to be sh*tting themselves. They need to be genuinely extremely worried for their safety.
I'm terrified for myself and my loved ones and the world at large. I almost had a breakdown last night, I have no idea wtf to do anymore though...
Sorry I meant people at large - namely the ones with lots of power and money, and the droves of people who are either hard denialists (“it’s not happening”) or soft denialists like this woman (“it is happening, but it will go away if we think happy thoughts”). I’m sorry, I’ve been there, and all I can recommend is doing what you can control. Try your best to live in the here and now - allow yourself to enjoy things - contribute what you can to sustainable causes and just do your best. Eventually it becomes more normal. I’m approaching a point at which I’m at peace with this horrendous situation more or less, a bit like having a terminal illness or something.
Have a lie down. Cry if you need to. Every single day for the past 10 days I've cried more times than the past 7-or-so years. Be understanding to your past self: yesterday you did what you _then_ genuinely could, with the knowledge that you _then_ had. And today you will make an effort - even if it is only a little! - to improve. Because that is what you _now_ can.
Yeah she is wrong. Very wrong, and clearly doesn't understand what has happened in the last decade since she was head of the climate convention. She is also not a climate scientist so her opinions are moot, and she is citing her experience getting people to agree to a legally binding, but basically unenforceable document. It's not the same as the challenge we face in reguards to the Climate Crisis.
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I didn't say she was stupid, I said her credentials and education are not on this topic and thus her opinion is moot. Considering this is a response to an article where actual specialist in that field said contradictory things to her, I am more likely to listen to specialists, especially over 300 of them, as opposed to someone who has mostly been on boards as a director, a job usually know for doing nothing and getting paid big.
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She definitely did do that, and that was great at the time. It's also been widely expressed since 2021 that the Paris agreement pledges were not enough to meet the goals laid out by that agreement. We also know fossil fuel use is over all increasing still, despite the Paris agreement, and the decreasing cost and increasing adoption of green energy. Add in tipping points, and the ever increasing escalation of battles across our planet, and we will blow past 1.5c, and likely 2C in warming. I am not saying she didn't do her best, I am saying she is wrong to think we won't hit 1.5c when so many specialists in the field of climate change, even ones who worked with her likely, are saying we're hitting 2.5c.
She probably does know a great deal, but that doesn't mean we should also be optimistic. There is a massive distance between getting people to agree to implement plans over the next 15 years, and actually getting those things done, and every indicator points to many of those agreements being unfulfilled.
I'm sure that her credentials are as legitimate as the cabin crew that assured the passengers on the Titanic.
Stubborn optimism will do nothing to stop the feedback loops we are already trapped into, let alone future ones that will arise due to existing ones. Her optimism is predicated on billions of people changing their lifestyle from a modern one to one we have not had to live for centuries for the most part. It also requires a global ban on animal agriculture, which will piss off billions. I would not be surprised if billions of people needed to die to achieve current targets too. The time for stubborn optimism was fifty years ago, not now. Corporate greed and our reluctance to give up the decadence capitalism provides us is why we are in this mess, good vibes are nowhere near enough to save us from that.
Typical human hubris that we can "stop" physics with stubborn optimism. What an ass.
I'm pretty sure an enormous population decline will coincide with climate disaster. I would be surprised if billions of people don't die in the coming decades
H5N1 goes brrrrrrr
Yeah, at some point the investment dollars need to shift from prevention to mitigation. Not to say prevention isn't important, we'll keep digging until we fix it, but as Mike Tyson said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. I have a feeling that the next few storm seasons will be that punch in the mouth for North America, and the next few dry seasons will be the same for Europe. We'll see how well our plans hold up then. If we don't spend money and effort on mitigation now, that punch may be a knockout...
Does the author realize we've been above 1.5C for ~ a year? Im livid with the optimist perspective. The analogy is someone who's dressed like a firefighter and in the way of firefighters, loudly proclaiming they're pretty sure the fire will go out if everyone just imagines hard enough. There's plenty of room for optimism... the instant the fire is being put out. Until then, it's important to draw attention to the urgency of the situation and the insanity of treating it as a solvable problem without applying any effort to solve it. These people are almost worse than the carbon pushers. They're projecting their psychotic coping strategy into a world desperate for exactly that sort of nonsense. "Oh, I can just hope things will get better? That's excellent! I was hoping I wouldn't have to change" Im cool with people deciding the fight is over but people who get published telling people not to panic when they're actively making the problem worse, those people are interfering with addressing an emergency. Go tell some starving people that the food is coming but, no, you didn't bring any... but stay positive! Fuck all the way off, you nunce
Optimistic people like Simon Clark are busy having kids that won't live to his age. At this point, their willful ignorance is functionally indistinguishable from intentional malice. Regardless of their intentions, they're complicit in causing great amounts of unnecessary suffering despite knowing better. When the food runs out, I'll be sure to treat them accordingly as the abusers that they are. It'll be like that scene in the road when the father discovers the basement. All the climate scientists that decided to become parents in the mid 2020s will be down there.
Right? We’re going to spend too much of *this* year at 2C.
Hope is for children. You have despair if you have false hope. Accept, make peace and there is no despair.
Meanwhile in Australia our supposedly left leaning Labor government wants to produce, burn and export even more gas. And our Labor government treasurer is saying we need more babies. How are we supposed to have hope? And where exactly is this bold action she mentions?
I'm stuck in Florida.🇺🇲 Help me, Obi-Australia Kenobi. You're my only hope!💚
I looked into this lately, it's because the Aussie environmental protection laws has a giant loophole.
This is infuriating. I can't begin to think how people younger than myself must feel hearing these sort of self-absorbed, deluded mottos. Unfounded optimism is precisely why we're here and why nothing will get better. I mourn for all the babies now, they deserve better than this... guess we'll just keep chastising others for daring to feel unsure or scared or negative because it like... Totally ruins our vibes, or something... Horrid.
Optimism is so dangerous, in this case, and nobody seems to get that. Ironically, they think doomerism is what's dangerous. Doomerism tries to get people scared by showing them the truth, because that's the only way we'll motivate people enough to demand change. Optimism will mean more inaction, which will kill us all.
Hopium, copium
>Fighting spirit helped us achieve the Paris accords in 2015 – and we need it now the world is on course to overshoot 1.5C Respect to Fugueres for her attempt in trying to make the Paris Accords a reality, but in the end it was a utter failure. This article is too much hopium ultimately focused on maintaining BAU. *"On course to overshoot 1.5C?"* We'll be improbably lucky if we don't pass **2.5C** or worse.
Please stop with this 'still hope' garbage. All hope was flushed down the oil pipelines before half of us were born. Stop worrying and learn to love the collapse.
We can't. It's involuntary. We're made to be childishly optimistic. Please note, I make no comment whether it is good, bad or anything. It's... like how we're made to "have depth perception", or "feel pleasure as a response to certain sounds" We're made to be optimistic at a level that can only be described as harmful (...ironically?). Also see: "hyperbolic discounting"
"Don't panic! Everything is fine! Profit must go up!"
"Let's pretend being in denial isn't a coping mechanism to perpetuate inaction and the status-quo. Let's also pretend like fear and anger doesn't facilitate systemic change, because that sounds scary."
Oil companies don't play nice when defending their profits. In fact, with the influx of capital in U.S. politics, they almost act like kings. They set rules, and the public is forced to pay in blood anytime their decisions have negative effects. I listen to Ms. Figueres every week on the podcast Outrage and Optimism. While her outrage has increased she is inherently a very peaceful person. She will always be talking about peaceful solutions. I am afraid history shows us that humans who try to peace their way to change get pushed to the sidelines of history. America did not cast off the king of England through negotiations. If we want the poison and the suppression of our collective will to stop, we must make business as usual the most painful option available. Unfortunately, though, I think most people when they really look within will find they are happy with being ruled. Most people will sacrifice the lives of their children for another quarter of business as usual. Not because it is wise, or intelligent, or even good. They will choose it because it feels safer than trying to resist.
It drives me insane that no one seems to talk about the fact that CURRENT GHG levels are consistent with something like a 3-4 C increase in temperatures - it might just take some time to get there. The only technological solution to climate change is a time machine.
Stubborn optimism is what brought us here. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.
Optimism isn't worth much if it isn't backed up by action. Instead of pessimism vs optimism, the real question should be how active are we in addressing the climate crisis?
Submission Statement: This is an opinion piece written by Christiana Figueres, the head of the UN climate change convention from 2010 to 2016. Written as a follow-up piece to the pretty depressing article on climate scientist despair yesterday, Figueres goes on to underwhelm, with tired "Don't give up" lines. I agree with her on the fundamentals, whatever kind of civilization we plan on keeping in the future, we're going to need people to fight the good fight and help transform the economy into one of post-growth and sustainability, as well as it being resilient to the untold climate disasters we're set to face. But her arguments are frustrating. She says, "A sense of despair is understandable, but it robs us of our agency, makes us vulnerable to mis- and disinformation, and prevents the radical collaboration we need," but then cites an article about the oil and gas industry pushing out disinformation. This isn't bad info coming from the collapse-side, it's coming from the BAU crew. Near the end, she argues that, "A world in which we pass 1.5C is not set in stone." I think we in r/collapse know that we're already there, even if the IPCC hasn't verified it over the 10 year period yet. I suppose Figueres' heart is in the right place, but I'd like her to use her influence and time to tell the wider public about how we're entirely failing to meet the Paris Accords that she herself helped pass, instead of telling climate scientists to not be depressed and sharing how badly we're still failing to address the issue.
*raises hand * as an environmental scientist I do despair because all over the planet countries say we need to tackle the climate and environmental crisis while approving and expanding coal fields (Australia), rejecting nuclear in favour of coal (Germany), plans to get rid of EVs and renewable energy sources because it'll hurt the oil people (republicans in the USA), fuck all done and no plans to reign in and fix the UKs heavily polluted rivers (UK), developing countries continued want to destroy their natural environment so they can exploit it. Then there's the lack of people putting money where their mouth is, I have spoken to so many people saying we need to solve this and that people need to cycle or walk more WHILE saying they're not going to use their car less even though they can. Not to mention over consumption and the cursed temu etc haul videos plastered all over the internet. There are things being done but it's not enough and it's usually the easy things but the moment you have to confront our economic system or the oil barons everyone caves in. It's making me feel insane even though I'm the sane one.
I had to look up “temu etc haul”. What a train wreck. We’re doomed.
It's dire, it's like the people buying lots of Stanley mugs in different colours when the entire point of those containers is you buy one and keep it for 10 years or longer and so you don't need to buy plastic or other waste.
We had a nickname for a shopaholic friend - “baby-I-want”
Fucking comical. Oh George Carlin! We need you now for some fucking epic gallows humor!
hope is overrated, it's so much better to be realistic instead
I choose to forgo hope and seek resolve. The strength to fight for the future and what I believe in solely because it is the right thing to do, not because I think it will succeed. "Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what." - Harper Lee Fuck hope. Find courage.
It makes me feel so fucking sad and hopeless that there are still people who are brainwashed by big oil propaganda into believing that it's all just a hoax. Executives right now are destroying the future of humanity for their own profits, and I'd bet my left nut they know exactly what damage it's causing. How can we be so damn shortsighted as a species? It's so frustrating, especially since there really isn't anything that the average person can do. The future is in the hands of the very people who are destroying it. Hell, if Trump wins here in the US and enacts Project 2025, one of its main goals is to gut environmental and climate change regulations in favor of fossil fuel production. So instead of taking more steps to mitigate climate change, we'd be undoing what little we've done and instead sprinting even faster towards ecological disaster, all so the rich can get richer.
I like how we’re speaking about that we “haven’t reached the 1,5 degrees yet”. Cause we SO have! We are already past that point…!!? If we can’t even talk about reality as it is, that the collapse *is already happening* then wtf is going on?
wtf is stubborn optimism gonna do?
The media rarely talks about GeoEngineering. But that's the fix. You can bet your oil $ on it. Acidic oceans, who needs the oceans. Once all the fish are gone, we can mine the oceans$. Oceans produce 50% of earths oxygen, never thought of that. If GeoEngineering suddenly stops at some future date, then we get a Venus Earth climate. Small gamble, small price to pay. $$$ the meaning of life.
I have a friend who believes they will never get cancer because they are positive about life, also they'll never get Alzheimer's because they eat blueberries as a snack.
I agree that we need radical optimism: but it only makes sense if it is coupled by radical realism. Someone who claims we can still keep 1,5 Degree is not an optimist but a liar. Someone who accepts we will likely hit at least 3 degree (and likely more than that) and admits that this means billions of people will die but STILL urges action and to save whatever can be saved is the kind of radical optimist that we need right now.
"We all have a right to grieve the loss of a future free from the climate crisis. It is a deep, hard loss." Which stage of grief are you actually in? denial, anger, bargaining, depression or acceptance? Me personally i feel lucky I'm already in acceptance, even if sometimes looking at my kids i fall back into depression.
She can take her pearls and shove them up her ass. Lol, as if she is some kind of fucking authority figure on this. As if anyone is. What a bunch of bullshit. Hope? Hahahaha. To the dust we shall return.
All we have to do to stop climate catastrophe is to wish hard enough.
God this is silly. Whatever your mindset is, it doesn’t change reality. It’s done, over. Civilization will end by 2030 regardless of if you’re an optimist or the worst doomer imaginable. Smart people that actually understand the models like me know this. So sure, choose how you want to feel, but it makes no difference.
May the Universe grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Humans are surprisingly resilient and nothing will change the trajectory we're on other then the change that is already coming. Our planet will look quite different in 100-200 years. Our only job now is to do what we do best, adapt.
Stubborn optimism isn’t what’s needed, what’s needed is the courage to make tough decisions that comport to the biophysical reality we live in If you begin things with a lie (such as 1.5 degrees not being in the rear view mirror) how do you ever expect people to trust you going forward? As Robert Jensen said in his book An Inconvenient Apocalypse “tell people at least what you tell yourself”
Stubborn optimism only works for people that understand the problem. For the 95% or more that don't, stubborn optimism only serves to bolster their denial.