It's unfortunate we didn't get more facts from the interviewee on how exactly it's too late. The interview felt more like a complaint about politics and less about the dire situation of humanity.
David Suzuki is even known to people in Australia, he's expressed his views on our national broadcaster the ABC's Science Show many times. I think the first time I'd heard him talk was in the 1980s.
His view are well-known to anyone who has listened to his broadcasts. He is a clear and articulate speaker.
Edit: I agree with xnx's point that "the climate change "movement" and messaging is so bad and misguided that it is counterproductive." Suzuki is one of the exceptions, his arguments are logical, straightforward and backed up by scientific fact.
Suzuki is not just a local phenomenon, nor is he a mumbling hysterical ideolog but a well-known and well-respected science writer of longstanding who bases what he says in science.
I'm not local but come from the other side of the planet and even the opposite hemisphere and I first heard Suzuki speak over 40 years ago. Neither am I an hysterical ideolog, as mentioned I agree with xnx's point that the climate change Movement's messaging is bad, misguided and counterproductive.
I'd add the reason why it's so is that for some within the Movement the environment is more than just politics, for them it's essentially morphed into a religion and it's their constant proselytizing that has annoyed the shit out of many, myself included.
Suzuki is not one of those but a science communicator who works with scientific facts.
I love the natural world, and think what we've done to it is terrible, but the climate change "movement" and messaging is so bad and misguided that it is counterproductive. The world will not become unlivable on a timescale that any living person cares about (as revealed by expressed preference). People live in Phoenix in the summer by choice!
One or two degrees will not incinerate you, but it might affect some crops, and then some food prices, and then there could be some starving, and poverty, and disease. Things could escalate quickly.
There are large swaths of the world that are unlivable today without significant cooling. When summers with over 45 Celsius (fifties in some parts) are becoming more and more common poor people without access to air-conditioning are suffering. These areas are becoming larger and larger.
Just because us in the western temperate climates are fine, does not mean that the effects of climate change will not be felt somewhere in the world today or in the next decade.
I know you are wrong. Farmers in South America have been driven from their land because it has become too hot. If all you care about is North America, you are also a putz.
Climate disasters are getting worse every year. I think you're completely misguided--things are going to get very bad in our lifetimes, and anyone saying otherwise is profiting off that misdirection.
> the climate change "movement" and messaging is so bad and misguided that it is counterproductive
I really don't think that the climate change messaging is bad and misguided. At the end of the day, it's because climate change advocacy is underfunded and there is a lot of money in oil.
If climate change messaging was nicer, it's hard for me to see how anyone would care more anyway. On the other hand, if climate change advocates had real money behind it on the order of big oil PR and regulatory capture, you would see change and legislation really quick.
We've got to define "unlivable". What if statistically, everyone's house will be destroyed by flooding, forest fires, etc.. let's say, twice in their lifetime. How can the math possibly add up if a house's price requires a 50 years mortgage? At some point, something's gotta give and that kind of odds will happen in a timescale shorter than many living people care about.
Also, wasn't there something about, you know, caring for the generations to come? Maybe I misremember...
with the current TFR rapidly approaching 1.5 children per woman virtually everywhere in the northern hemisphere, even if it remains stable (it will not, it will continue to decline), its population will shrink to 1/10th of what it is today in less than 250 years.
there will be plenty of empty houses for the generations to come.
Its the Attention economy layer underneath effecting everything. Whether its Trump or Climate Change - elevating threat perception captures attention. And algos are programmed to prop it up. There are no bright answers or theories on what to do about it.
Something that's interesting to me is how climate change has largely fallen off the media radar over the past few years.
Back around 2007 it was a HUGE topic and many of us thought we'd be living in hell by 2025. Yet here we are and climate change rarely even makes the news.
The media never said 2025. They always, always talked about 2100, just so the mind can safely think "I'll be dead by then". Thresholds crossed by 2025? certainly. But "living hell by 2025"? I'll have to call "citations needed".
I didn't say that the media said that. It was the general feeling that many people (myself included) had and that activists perpetuated at that time. Disaster was about 15-20 years away.
What I said about the media is that they talked about climate change a whole lot more back then compared to now. Beside the Iraq War it was one of the big topics that everyone was always talking about. Nowadays it seems more of a background issue.
Where can I search for old news articles or evidence of public sentiment?
In your memory what was the zeitgeist at the time?
For most of my life it has been something like: we recently crossed some threshold, if we don't act now we'll cross this other one, disaster is 15-30 years out. Recent freak natural disaster is going to become a yearly thing.
What did the other countries do and how much measurable progress do they have to show for it.
Personally I think China was and is the most equipped to solve the problem. They have the talent, have the top-down leadership that is supposedly required to implement solutions, and are well aware that the future belongs to them.
Oil industry has lots and lots of money. The right is immediately pro-oil and peddles all their propaganda because they like lots and lots of money. I don't think there's much past that.
We’re at a terrible crossroads. If climate scientists are right, we’re headed for unavoidable disruption. Some now say it’s already too late — all we can do is mitigate and adapt. Start local. Know your neighbors. Build resilience.
But if they’re wrong, that’s also bad news. It means our scientific institutions failed us, and the political trust placed in “studies” will collapse. The next time someone says “science says…”, society may not listen.
Either way, it’s a precarious place to be.
Until then, enjoy the summer — it might be the coolest one we have left.
> The next time someone says “science says…”, society may not listen.
We're already there. Turns out it has nothing to do with science at all, but rather propaganda and political messaging. If you just tell people science is wrong and bad then they internalize that, regardless of the state of science.
This confirms what many of us know to be true - what people believe has only a very loose tie to reality. Populist messaging is the future.
If people think "scientists can never be wrong," we have fundamentally and deeply failed to explain how science actually works. And sadly, that does seem to be the case.
When people say science is wrong, it often comes from a place where they forgot that the rest of the world exists, each with their own institutions, each with their own responsibility to thrive.
There is a third option that it's real but not as bad as people make out. Like in my case the fallout is more that I'm thinking of installing aircon rather than general doom.
The ecosystem, that you and I and we depend on, outside your apartment can't install an air conditioner. Instead it simply dies. Then we begin to suffer just in new and unexpected ways.
Climate change doesn't just make it a bit hotter at home - it corrodes the entire environment. Floods, fires, storms, drought, crop yields, etc.
It will make us all poorer and then it will start to kill many of us directly with heat or indirectly through secondary effects (including war). And we'll discover too late that our prosperity depends on the prosperity of each other and the environment.
It's incredible to me that apparently educated people on a forum such as this are still misunderstanding the basic dangers of climate change in 2025. It makes me feel so hopeless.
What would the world look like if we had won the fight?
I've been hearing about this fight for my entire life. People are extremely passionate and self-righteous about it and have science to back up everything they believe, so why was there never a single unified plan with a single unified movement behind it?
> so why was there never a single unified plan with a single unified movement behind it?
The UN and EU regularly publish evidence-based reports with multi-pronged recommendations. That seems to me as "unified" as you can get, in terms of multinational cooperation and holism in recommendations. But to have any concrete change you need political will, and that is obviously lacking.
To get political will in democratic societies you need to convince people to elect their leaders on this and not taxes or pet special interests, which is why you have been hearing about this fight all your life.
First off, your's is a US-centric view. Other countries don't have those same obstacles but as far as I know their progress in eliminating CO2 has only been slightly better than ours.
Second, I don't see why political will is necessary. Most of the big changes that have happened in our lives over the past decades have had nothing to do with laws being passed or voters voting for anything. On the contrary private interests basically do what they want and the government getting involvement is seen as a hindrance not a help.
> Second, I don't see why political will is necessary.
> Most of the big changes that have happened in our lives over the past decades have had nothing to do with laws being passed or voters voting for anything.
I can agree with the latter without agreeing with the former. But political will and oil go hand-in-hand. Governments have been destroyed by foreign interests in oil. Governments hostile to their people have been maintained by foreign interests in oil. Governments giving great security to its people have been built from sovereign oil.
Writing this response made me realize that you are right. Considering the means and methods of countervailing interests, democratic persuasion does not seem anywhere near sufficient, even though these are the methods being used by advocates. A surer path might involve highly militant and capable states willing to perform espionage, terrorism, and regime change to pursue environmental goals.
I mean did you not just answer your own question? Political will comes from private interests, who are more concerned with next quarters profits than the plight of humanity.
I disagree with other commenters that the opinion of common people matters. Most Western political projects are tied to capital, not people.
Let's first define winning in this context, a stable population number of humans for the next 100k years. Pretty much every piece of evidence we have points towards this being utterly impossible with billions of humans, habitat destruction and food web damage is simply way too severe for such a large number to be sustainable. So probably somewhere in the 1-100 million, but realistically no one knows. All we know is that it would have to be drastically lower. Planes and cars are probably illegal, shared communal usage of resources is key. We strictly limit ourselves to materials that are proven to either decompose quickly or don't enter the food web like for example PFAS and micro-plastics do. We'd have to let go of a human supremacist world view, and rather see ourselves as a part in the community of life and the delicate balance it is in.
Zooming out, one could argue that we are on a roller coaster and our complex brains give us the impression that there is a little steering wheel in front of us and that we get to decide the fate of humanity. Life can be viewed as a parasite, it invades every area on the surface and the oceans of this world, doing so with fractal depth. And over longer periods it is prone to mass extinction events, there have been five big ones so far. Who knows, maybe the sixth one isn't a 72 teratonnes impact event or giant volcanic eruptions, but rather this time it's an all habitat outcompeting population explosion by one species.
> Pretty much every piece of evidence we have points towards this being utterly impossible with billions of humans, habitat destruction and food web damage is simply way too severe for such a large number to be sustainable
What are you basing this on? More land gets arable when the world is warmer, the earth is more lifeless today than at almost any point before due to the cold and lack of CO2 making plants not grow very quickly.
Biodiversity will go down from this event, but temperate areas will be fine and earth will likely be able to support more people in 1000 years than it can today thanks to global warming.
What people are afraid of are short term disruptions to current systems, but the long term livability of earth is going to be fine. The people who argue otherwise just hasn't looked at what earth was like when there were many times more CO2 than there is here now, that wasn't that many million years ago.
Any plan should have been made between government and industry. The scientists aren't there to plan, they look at the data and try to figure out how the world works. Scientists told us long ago there might be a climate problem, and have steadily built up more and more data and models and evidence.
Activists shouldn't have existed at all. Science informs government there's a problem, government informs the population and creates multiple policies to address the problem, industry works within those policies to adapt the economy. Actual people shouldn't have to feel guilty about their own carbon emissions or second guess the science with their own opinion, but should vote on the policies that they like the best, knowing fully what the consequences will be.
That would be nice anyway. Instead just about every part of that chain tries to fuck with the other parts for money and power.
Politicians don't come up with plans either. Even with the best intentions, they don't know enough to be able to come up with a plan. Experts need to do that.
You also don't need the government if you want to enact change. We have an AI revolution because science and money got together to make it happen, and then consumers jumped on it. Not because the government passed a law to make it happen.
So did the scientists and engineers with mountains of research ever figure out a solution for the rest of us to get behind?
Scientists aren't responsible for coming up with a plan. Not individually anyway. I think others have expressed that in this thread you've started. An actual plan would be hugely multifaceted and would require a government or large entity to fund it: think about the scope of what that would include, you'd need to bring together researchers and experts on pretty much every industry that exists. You're talking about planning across the entire global economy. We haven't exactly been that keen on planned economies.
Saying that, governments have made policy and it has had an effect. Emissions in Europe and the US are on a steady downward trend.
Not enough of the population was properly educated on the risks, and therefore a solid plan was never even conceived.
We needed lots of people thinking about it in order to do that, while most people just discussed it superficially and were easily provoked, manipulated or distracted.
I never understood why the entire population needed to be involved. It's not a referendum.
A handful of smart people just needed to get together and come up with a solution. Then the governments of the world implement it. I understand that the second part is difficult. But did the first part ever happen?
Who were these people and what were the solutions? Who was the opposition and when was the battle decided?
If you're going to tell me it was the Democrats vs the Republicans, then please explain why countries outside the US haven't made it happen yet. China is a country full of scientists and engineers and the opposition there is non existent.
> A handful of smart people just needed to get together
Things don't work this way, unfortunatelly. This kind of thinking just pushes the problem to someone else do deal with, which only serves to shift up blame. Small groups are vulnerable to corruption, or distractions, or silly power plays.
We needed _lots_ of people with good education and reasonable awareness of the risks, it was the only way to have a chance to develop a more solid plan.
However, you got your way. There are small groups of smart people working on these issues. But many, many of us know that their chances are slim (due to the shortcomings mentioned earlier). Unfortunatelly, not that many to form a critical mass.
Things do in fact work that way. Here's a list of things that a small number of people changed without the consent of the public, all before we got a single workable plan for climate change:
The internet, cell phones, social media, fracking, AI, the fall of the Soviet Union, war in Iraq, changes in attitudes towards family, sexuality. Just to name a few.
All of these things just kind of happened without the public having asking for them. Why then has a slight, gradual reduction in greenhouse gases been so hard?
Because climate change is more similar to erradicating polio than selling cellphones or toppling leaders.
In the whole human history, only one disease was erradicated: smallpox. It took centuries, countless smart people, reasonable awareness of many counter-intuitive ideas, and we almost failed. Going to the moon was easier.
I mean... Why do the smart people not "just" develop a perfect economic plan? Or "just" end world hunger? Or "just" stop global conflicts?
Anyway, there have been multitudes of plans and strategies and actions to chip away at the problem. All of them require sacrificing political capital, raising taxes and the costs of products, and effort. And you get nothing substantial in return.
So while the entire scientific community tried pushing education and solutions galore, the political and corporate establishment fought tooth and nail against any aspect that did not immediately profit them. To the point that now an entire party in the richest country on Earth that holds all three branches of government uses opposition to solving the problem as one of the core tenants of their platform.
Solution: reduce CO2 emissions to carbon neutrality.
This has been agreed multiple times, most notably the Paris agreement of 2015, which set deadlines for countries to achieve carbon neutrality.
The plan failed in e.g. the US because politicians didn't follow through. Trump literally withdrew from the Paris agreement.
All but 3 countries in the world participate in the Paris agreement. This includes all big CO2 emitters, like China, US (now withdrawn), India and EU countries.
Blame for lack of a plan is not on the shoulders of scientists. They do science. They are not a government whose responsibility is policy and governing. And apparently our politicians ay best play lip service to, and at worst don't believe in, these problems. Consequently, there is no plan to reach those goals for anyone to rally around.
Coming up with a plan would be squarely in the hands of scientists and engineers and passionate individuals. Perhaps the government and the public would help in enacting that plan, but not in creating it.
I'm led to believe that the scientists and activists are all led by the same empirical research and share a broad consensus. So why then is there no plan or even a concept of a plan after 30 years of talking about all this?
How much? This is what I'm talking about. It's hard to get people to buy a narrative that says we need to spend infinite amounts of money on an as yet undetermined plan, or else life as we know it will end.
Once again, scientists do science. Governments do governance. A scientist can do research and come to conclusions like "dumping tons of CO2 into the atmosphere is bad mmmmkay" and tell you goals like "targeting x-degrees of warming will save us from the worst consequences". Politicians and governments should take those statements and goals and build plans around them and then we can vote for the ones who've got the best plan (or not). Expecting scientists to do the government's job is abdicating all responsibility and setting everyone up for failure.
Lawmakers aren't informed enough to figure out a plan. Experts are needed to do that.
Scientists and industry work together all the time to enact sea changes in the world around us. The AI revolution is a recent example. No legislation or government was needed.
Most of the biggest changes in our lifetimes have happened due to private actors, not government getting involved.
Because the world is made of independent countries acting in their own best interest or that of their leaders. There will never be a world government until all countries roughly align on a common set of values and political framework and then actually practice those. Most countries don’t share values and ideals.
The fact that there are so many countries should mean that at least one of them should have solved the issue by now, no? Meaning, there should be some country that has near zero greenhouse gas emissions. Have they?
There's no "fight". Any people being aggressive or overly passionate about it (or against it) are, in my view, compromised (provoked, used, manipulated).
There has been a consistent attempt at getting everyone to consider the risks in a reasonable way. It has failed.
We live in a world driven by capitalism, not by logic. If global environmental collapse is more profitable for those making the decisions in the medium term then that's what we're going to get, their descendants be damned.
> Wouldn't it be more profitable to solve the issue?
Profitable for what entity? You need to find an entity that agrees with itself enough to have a notion of revenue that is hurt by deteriorating climate, and that has the means to "solve the issue" in an economical way.
The case against is obvious: the energy industry has a clear notion of revenue that is hurt by climate actions, and it has the means to combat it by political capture; whole countries are created and destroyed for oil.
1. There's too much money directly opposing the goals of fighting climate change
2. Humans aren't big on alignment. FFS, we still don't have good UX/GUI for Linux and it's mainly been stagnant* and divided into Gnome and KDE for 20+ years.
* despite the impressive accomplishments, it's essentially true
1. Wouldn't there be even more money to be made by saving the human race? Putting aside profit, wouldn't people with money want to continue existing and therefore be aligned with the movement?
2. Your example isn't something life or death. Humanity has aligned on numerous things and changed significantly amd uniformly during the past 30 years without even trying. Why is it so hard to come up with a list of demands and reforms for everyone to agree on and march behind to save the world?
I don't understand why humans do what they do, consistently and repetitively, against their best interests, except for money, emotions, or a lack of understanding.
Climate change is the only issue I'm aware of where "humanity" routinely gets implicated.
Climate change has been a mainstream issue since the mid-90s. From then until now we've had massive material and ideological changes across the globe, none of which required the support or awareness of humanity or the voting public.
The internet, cell phones, social media, fracking, AI, multiple wars, changes in attitudes towards family, sexuality, and marijuana usage have all occurred during this time period. Why then has a slight, gradual reduction in greenhouse gas reduction been so hard?
All of those things make money. Reducing climate change costs money. Reducing climate change also requires changing behavior of most people. Finally, there are governments and companies that profit from current fossil fuels and have worked against any action.
Governments have been unwilling to push those changes because they are unpopular and expensive. Governments have also been unwilling to impose hardship on their people if other countries aren't going to do anything. A lot of people, in this thread, don't think it will be bad, or that it will happen after they are dead.
In terms of making a plan, what is the point of making detailed plan if nobody is going to follow it? Also, there are lots of things that we don't know how to do yet, and can only plan to investigate.
I'm tired of bailing Floridian and coastal Texans out after hurricanes. I'm in Austin (Texas) and our insurance bills are outrageous because of coastal cities (indirect, if nontrivial). If they want to live down there, fine, but I don't want to bail them out. Houston & Corpus are the worst offenders: they produce huge amounts of CO2 per capita, and then demand bailouts when climate change fucks them over.
Climate and real estate costs have slowed inbound migration drastically, with quite a bit of folks who can no longer afford Florida moving to Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas.
It's unfortunate we didn't get more facts from the interviewee on how exactly it's too late. The interview felt more like a complaint about politics and less about the dire situation of humanity.
Folks outside of Canada might not know him, but he's spent 50 years as a science TV host on CBC, kind of like a Canadian Carl Sagan.
David Suzuki is even known to people in Australia, he's expressed his views on our national broadcaster the ABC's Science Show many times. I think the first time I'd heard him talk was in the 1980s.
His view are well-known to anyone who has listened to his broadcasts. He is a clear and articulate speaker.
Edit: I agree with xnx's point that "the climate change "movement" and messaging is so bad and misguided that it is counterproductive." Suzuki is one of the exceptions, his arguments are logical, straightforward and backed up by scientific fact.
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Can you please make your substantive points without personal attacks?
Maybe you don't owe hysterical old ideologists better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's a shame you aren't better informed.
Suzuki is not just a local phenomenon, nor is he a mumbling hysterical ideolog but a well-known and well-respected science writer of longstanding who bases what he says in science.
I'm not local but come from the other side of the planet and even the opposite hemisphere and I first heard Suzuki speak over 40 years ago. Neither am I an hysterical ideolog, as mentioned I agree with xnx's point that the climate change Movement's messaging is bad, misguided and counterproductive.
I'd add the reason why it's so is that for some within the Movement the environment is more than just politics, for them it's essentially morphed into a religion and it's their constant proselytizing that has annoyed the shit out of many, myself included.
Suzuki is not one of those but a science communicator who works with scientific facts.
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I love the natural world, and think what we've done to it is terrible, but the climate change "movement" and messaging is so bad and misguided that it is counterproductive. The world will not become unlivable on a timescale that any living person cares about (as revealed by expressed preference). People live in Phoenix in the summer by choice!
The world economy is a delicate machine.
One or two degrees will not incinerate you, but it might affect some crops, and then some food prices, and then there could be some starving, and poverty, and disease. Things could escalate quickly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse
I think you are wrong.
There are large swaths of the world that are unlivable today without significant cooling. When summers with over 45 Celsius (fifties in some parts) are becoming more and more common poor people without access to air-conditioning are suffering. These areas are becoming larger and larger.
Just because us in the western temperate climates are fine, does not mean that the effects of climate change will not be felt somewhere in the world today or in the next decade.
I know you are wrong. Farmers in South America have been driven from their land because it has become too hot. If all you care about is North America, you are also a putz.
Sure nature and us will adapt.
Just think of the 10 year lynx-hare cycle https://jckantor.github.io/CBE30338/02.05-Hare-and-Lynx-Popu... where nature adapts constantly.
Now think about the fact that Lynxes have a max age of 15 years plus and the cycle takes 10 years.
Climate disasters are getting worse every year. I think you're completely misguided--things are going to get very bad in our lifetimes, and anyone saying otherwise is profiting off that misdirection.
> the climate change "movement" and messaging is so bad and misguided that it is counterproductive
I really don't think that the climate change messaging is bad and misguided. At the end of the day, it's because climate change advocacy is underfunded and there is a lot of money in oil.
If climate change messaging was nicer, it's hard for me to see how anyone would care more anyway. On the other hand, if climate change advocates had real money behind it on the order of big oil PR and regulatory capture, you would see change and legislation really quick.
I'm more worried about the roof getting blown off my flooded house
We've got to define "unlivable". What if statistically, everyone's house will be destroyed by flooding, forest fires, etc.. let's say, twice in their lifetime. How can the math possibly add up if a house's price requires a 50 years mortgage? At some point, something's gotta give and that kind of odds will happen in a timescale shorter than many living people care about.
Also, wasn't there something about, you know, caring for the generations to come? Maybe I misremember...
The US is currently spending ~$1T/year on climate costs.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/us-spendi... | https://archive.today/EBmaI
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/09/climate-...
with the current TFR rapidly approaching 1.5 children per woman virtually everywhere in the northern hemisphere, even if it remains stable (it will not, it will continue to decline), its population will shrink to 1/10th of what it is today in less than 250 years.
there will be plenty of empty houses for the generations to come.
A reverse Malthusian extrapolation, now that's something I haven't seen since Children of Men.
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf
No, it's not the reverse extrapolation.
It's still part of Malthusian theory, it's just the logical conclusion of population collapse after resource depletion.
Its the Attention economy layer underneath effecting everything. Whether its Trump or Climate Change - elevating threat perception captures attention. And algos are programmed to prop it up. There are no bright answers or theories on what to do about it.
Something that's interesting to me is how climate change has largely fallen off the media radar over the past few years.
Back around 2007 it was a HUGE topic and many of us thought we'd be living in hell by 2025. Yet here we are and climate change rarely even makes the news.
> Yet here we are and climate change rarely even makes the news.
Sure, if you dismiss all the news about floodings etc.
Just because it's not titled "flooding due to climate change" ....
Seems like there's a record breaking wildfire on the news every other week
The media never said 2025. They always, always talked about 2100, just so the mind can safely think "I'll be dead by then". Thresholds crossed by 2025? certainly. But "living hell by 2025"? I'll have to call "citations needed".
I didn't say that the media said that. It was the general feeling that many people (myself included) had and that activists perpetuated at that time. Disaster was about 15-20 years away.
What I said about the media is that they talked about climate change a whole lot more back then compared to now. Beside the Iraq War it was one of the big topics that everyone was always talking about. Nowadays it seems more of a background issue.
I'm over 40 can you cite a primary source from that time frame? That is very much not how I recall people thinking about climate change.
Where can I search for old news articles or evidence of public sentiment?
In your memory what was the zeitgeist at the time?
For most of my life it has been something like: we recently crossed some threshold, if we don't act now we'll cross this other one, disaster is 15-30 years out. Recent freak natural disaster is going to become a yearly thing.
Times were far less "interesting" back then.
How is the saying: "Aviate, navigate, communicate". We are strictly in an aviate phase.
I think we're still trying to understand why the nation most equipped to solve the problem just lobotomized itself and went sci-fi fantasy delusional.
What did the other countries do and how much measurable progress do they have to show for it.
Personally I think China was and is the most equipped to solve the problem. They have the talent, have the top-down leadership that is supposedly required to implement solutions, and are well aware that the future belongs to them.
Why are you trying to pick up a fight in a post about mourning?
Oil industry has lots and lots of money. The right is immediately pro-oil and peddles all their propaganda because they like lots and lots of money. I don't think there's much past that.
We’re at a terrible crossroads. If climate scientists are right, we’re headed for unavoidable disruption. Some now say it’s already too late — all we can do is mitigate and adapt. Start local. Know your neighbors. Build resilience.
But if they’re wrong, that’s also bad news. It means our scientific institutions failed us, and the political trust placed in “studies” will collapse. The next time someone says “science says…”, society may not listen.
Either way, it’s a precarious place to be. Until then, enjoy the summer — it might be the coolest one we have left.
> The next time someone says “science says…”, society may not listen.
We're already there. Turns out it has nothing to do with science at all, but rather propaganda and political messaging. If you just tell people science is wrong and bad then they internalize that, regardless of the state of science.
This confirms what many of us know to be true - what people believe has only a very loose tie to reality. Populist messaging is the future.
If people think "scientists can never be wrong," we have fundamentally and deeply failed to explain how science actually works. And sadly, that does seem to be the case.
Especially understanding that they are not responsible for any bold assumptions or doomsday predictions.
Academic science is more religion than actual religion.
When people say science is wrong, it often comes from a place where they forgot that the rest of the world exists, each with their own institutions, each with their own responsibility to thrive.
There is a third option that it's real but not as bad as people make out. Like in my case the fallout is more that I'm thinking of installing aircon rather than general doom.
The ecosystem, that you and I and we depend on, outside your apartment can't install an air conditioner. Instead it simply dies. Then we begin to suffer just in new and unexpected ways.
Climate change doesn't just make it a bit hotter at home - it corrodes the entire environment. Floods, fires, storms, drought, crop yields, etc.
It will make us all poorer and then it will start to kill many of us directly with heat or indirectly through secondary effects (including war). And we'll discover too late that our prosperity depends on the prosperity of each other and the environment.
No man is an island.
It's incredible to me that apparently educated people on a forum such as this are still misunderstanding the basic dangers of climate change in 2025. It makes me feel so hopeless.
> the political trust placed in “studies” will collapse.
That horse has already bolted. See eg. vaccinations and autism, efficacy of COVID vaccines, etc.
What would the world look like if we had won the fight?
I've been hearing about this fight for my entire life. People are extremely passionate and self-righteous about it and have science to back up everything they believe, so why was there never a single unified plan with a single unified movement behind it?
> so why was there never a single unified plan with a single unified movement behind it?
The UN and EU regularly publish evidence-based reports with multi-pronged recommendations. That seems to me as "unified" as you can get, in terms of multinational cooperation and holism in recommendations. But to have any concrete change you need political will, and that is obviously lacking.
To get political will in democratic societies you need to convince people to elect their leaders on this and not taxes or pet special interests, which is why you have been hearing about this fight all your life.
First off, your's is a US-centric view. Other countries don't have those same obstacles but as far as I know their progress in eliminating CO2 has only been slightly better than ours.
Second, I don't see why political will is necessary. Most of the big changes that have happened in our lives over the past decades have had nothing to do with laws being passed or voters voting for anything. On the contrary private interests basically do what they want and the government getting involvement is seen as a hindrance not a help.
> Second, I don't see why political will is necessary.
> Most of the big changes that have happened in our lives over the past decades have had nothing to do with laws being passed or voters voting for anything.
I can agree with the latter without agreeing with the former. But political will and oil go hand-in-hand. Governments have been destroyed by foreign interests in oil. Governments hostile to their people have been maintained by foreign interests in oil. Governments giving great security to its people have been built from sovereign oil.
Writing this response made me realize that you are right. Considering the means and methods of countervailing interests, democratic persuasion does not seem anywhere near sufficient, even though these are the methods being used by advocates. A surer path might involve highly militant and capable states willing to perform espionage, terrorism, and regime change to pursue environmental goals.
I mean did you not just answer your own question? Political will comes from private interests, who are more concerned with next quarters profits than the plight of humanity.
I disagree with other commenters that the opinion of common people matters. Most Western political projects are tied to capital, not people.
Let's first define winning in this context, a stable population number of humans for the next 100k years. Pretty much every piece of evidence we have points towards this being utterly impossible with billions of humans, habitat destruction and food web damage is simply way too severe for such a large number to be sustainable. So probably somewhere in the 1-100 million, but realistically no one knows. All we know is that it would have to be drastically lower. Planes and cars are probably illegal, shared communal usage of resources is key. We strictly limit ourselves to materials that are proven to either decompose quickly or don't enter the food web like for example PFAS and micro-plastics do. We'd have to let go of a human supremacist world view, and rather see ourselves as a part in the community of life and the delicate balance it is in.
Zooming out, one could argue that we are on a roller coaster and our complex brains give us the impression that there is a little steering wheel in front of us and that we get to decide the fate of humanity. Life can be viewed as a parasite, it invades every area on the surface and the oceans of this world, doing so with fractal depth. And over longer periods it is prone to mass extinction events, there have been five big ones so far. Who knows, maybe the sixth one isn't a 72 teratonnes impact event or giant volcanic eruptions, but rather this time it's an all habitat outcompeting population explosion by one species.
> Pretty much every piece of evidence we have points towards this being utterly impossible with billions of humans, habitat destruction and food web damage is simply way too severe for such a large number to be sustainable
What are you basing this on? More land gets arable when the world is warmer, the earth is more lifeless today than at almost any point before due to the cold and lack of CO2 making plants not grow very quickly.
Biodiversity will go down from this event, but temperate areas will be fine and earth will likely be able to support more people in 1000 years than it can today thanks to global warming.
What people are afraid of are short term disruptions to current systems, but the long term livability of earth is going to be fine. The people who argue otherwise just hasn't looked at what earth was like when there were many times more CO2 than there is here now, that wasn't that many million years ago.
Insanity
There is one unified plan which is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and switch over to more sustainable energy sources.
Those are goals, not a plan. Is there a plan that scientists and activists agreed on that I should be supporting?
Any plan should have been made between government and industry. The scientists aren't there to plan, they look at the data and try to figure out how the world works. Scientists told us long ago there might be a climate problem, and have steadily built up more and more data and models and evidence.
Activists shouldn't have existed at all. Science informs government there's a problem, government informs the population and creates multiple policies to address the problem, industry works within those policies to adapt the economy. Actual people shouldn't have to feel guilty about their own carbon emissions or second guess the science with their own opinion, but should vote on the policies that they like the best, knowing fully what the consequences will be.
That would be nice anyway. Instead just about every part of that chain tries to fuck with the other parts for money and power.
Politicians don't come up with plans either. Even with the best intentions, they don't know enough to be able to come up with a plan. Experts need to do that.
You also don't need the government if you want to enact change. We have an AI revolution because science and money got together to make it happen, and then consumers jumped on it. Not because the government passed a law to make it happen.
So did the scientists and engineers with mountains of research ever figure out a solution for the rest of us to get behind?
Scientists aren't responsible for coming up with a plan. Not individually anyway. I think others have expressed that in this thread you've started. An actual plan would be hugely multifaceted and would require a government or large entity to fund it: think about the scope of what that would include, you'd need to bring together researchers and experts on pretty much every industry that exists. You're talking about planning across the entire global economy. We haven't exactly been that keen on planned economies.
Saying that, governments have made policy and it has had an effect. Emissions in Europe and the US are on a steady downward trend.
No, there is no masterplan.
Not enough of the population was properly educated on the risks, and therefore a solid plan was never even conceived.
We needed lots of people thinking about it in order to do that, while most people just discussed it superficially and were easily provoked, manipulated or distracted.
I never understood why the entire population needed to be involved. It's not a referendum.
A handful of smart people just needed to get together and come up with a solution. Then the governments of the world implement it. I understand that the second part is difficult. But did the first part ever happen?
Lots of smart people came together in different solutions. The missing piece is that there is opposition. The opposition won.
Who were these people and what were the solutions? Who was the opposition and when was the battle decided?
If you're going to tell me it was the Democrats vs the Republicans, then please explain why countries outside the US haven't made it happen yet. China is a country full of scientists and engineers and the opposition there is non existent.
Most of the opposition is the industries that renewable energy threatens and those who have vested interests in it.
> A handful of smart people just needed to get together
Things don't work this way, unfortunatelly. This kind of thinking just pushes the problem to someone else do deal with, which only serves to shift up blame. Small groups are vulnerable to corruption, or distractions, or silly power plays.
We needed _lots_ of people with good education and reasonable awareness of the risks, it was the only way to have a chance to develop a more solid plan.
However, you got your way. There are small groups of smart people working on these issues. But many, many of us know that their chances are slim (due to the shortcomings mentioned earlier). Unfortunatelly, not that many to form a critical mass.
Things do in fact work that way. Here's a list of things that a small number of people changed without the consent of the public, all before we got a single workable plan for climate change:
The internet, cell phones, social media, fracking, AI, the fall of the Soviet Union, war in Iraq, changes in attitudes towards family, sexuality. Just to name a few.
All of these things just kind of happened without the public having asking for them. Why then has a slight, gradual reduction in greenhouse gases been so hard?
Because climate change is more similar to erradicating polio than selling cellphones or toppling leaders.
In the whole human history, only one disease was erradicated: smallpox. It took centuries, countless smart people, reasonable awareness of many counter-intuitive ideas, and we almost failed. Going to the moon was easier.
What small number of people influenced societal shifts in views towards family and sexuality?
Any solution involves less money for oil shareholders and thus would be opposed tooth and nail
"Just" does so much work in these comments.
I mean... Why do the smart people not "just" develop a perfect economic plan? Or "just" end world hunger? Or "just" stop global conflicts?
Anyway, there have been multitudes of plans and strategies and actions to chip away at the problem. All of them require sacrificing political capital, raising taxes and the costs of products, and effort. And you get nothing substantial in return.
So while the entire scientific community tried pushing education and solutions galore, the political and corporate establishment fought tooth and nail against any aspect that did not immediately profit them. To the point that now an entire party in the richest country on Earth that holds all three branches of government uses opposition to solving the problem as one of the core tenants of their platform.
Smart people are doing those things. Just in a way that benefits them and not necessarily you or I.
Anyway, what is the solution that the scientific community proposed and that was killed by the political and corporate establishment?
What is the plan that the non-US countries have implemented to eliminate the problem?
Solution: reduce CO2 emissions to carbon neutrality.
This has been agreed multiple times, most notably the Paris agreement of 2015, which set deadlines for countries to achieve carbon neutrality.
The plan failed in e.g. the US because politicians didn't follow through. Trump literally withdrew from the Paris agreement.
All but 3 countries in the world participate in the Paris agreement. This includes all big CO2 emitters, like China, US (now withdrawn), India and EU countries.
That's a goal more so than a plan.
Can you share with us why this distinction is so important?
The Paris Climate Accords were supposed to be this.
Before that there was Kyoto. I get that the US is braindead and can't make things happen. But what about all the other countries?
What about them? You're moving the goalposts.
Blame for lack of a plan is not on the shoulders of scientists. They do science. They are not a government whose responsibility is policy and governing. And apparently our politicians ay best play lip service to, and at worst don't believe in, these problems. Consequently, there is no plan to reach those goals for anyone to rally around.
Coming up with a plan would be squarely in the hands of scientists and engineers and passionate individuals. Perhaps the government and the public would help in enacting that plan, but not in creating it.
I'm led to believe that the scientists and activists are all led by the same empirical research and share a broad consensus. So why then is there no plan or even a concept of a plan after 30 years of talking about all this?
Money. More is needed and no one wants to pay—even when proposals make sense.
How much? This is what I'm talking about. It's hard to get people to buy a narrative that says we need to spend infinite amounts of money on an as yet undetermined plan, or else life as we know it will end.
Once again, scientists do science. Governments do governance. A scientist can do research and come to conclusions like "dumping tons of CO2 into the atmosphere is bad mmmmkay" and tell you goals like "targeting x-degrees of warming will save us from the worst consequences". Politicians and governments should take those statements and goals and build plans around them and then we can vote for the ones who've got the best plan (or not). Expecting scientists to do the government's job is abdicating all responsibility and setting everyone up for failure.
Lawmakers aren't informed enough to figure out a plan. Experts are needed to do that.
Scientists and industry work together all the time to enact sea changes in the world around us. The AI revolution is a recent example. No legislation or government was needed.
Most of the biggest changes in our lifetimes have happened due to private actors, not government getting involved.
Because the world is made of independent countries acting in their own best interest or that of their leaders. There will never be a world government until all countries roughly align on a common set of values and political framework and then actually practice those. Most countries don’t share values and ideals.
The fact that there are so many countries should mean that at least one of them should have solved the issue by now, no? Meaning, there should be some country that has near zero greenhouse gas emissions. Have they?
Well you could spend 5 seconds on Google if you cared to
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/12/these-countries-achi...
There's no "fight". Any people being aggressive or overly passionate about it (or against it) are, in my view, compromised (provoked, used, manipulated).
There has been a consistent attempt at getting everyone to consider the risks in a reasonable way. It has failed.
We live in a world driven by capitalism, not by logic. If global environmental collapse is more profitable for those making the decisions in the medium term then that's what we're going to get, their descendants be damned.
Wouldn't it be more profitable to solve the issue?
Wouldn't it be more profitable to exaggerate the issue so you can milk it?
Stonewalling against saving the planet seems like the least profitable course of action, especially since morals are irrelevant.
> Wouldn't it be more profitable to solve the issue?
Profitable for what entity? You need to find an entity that agrees with itself enough to have a notion of revenue that is hurt by deteriorating climate, and that has the means to "solve the issue" in an economical way.
The case against is obvious: the energy industry has a clear notion of revenue that is hurt by climate actions, and it has the means to combat it by political capture; whole countries are created and destroyed for oil.
Which country not driven by capitalism is doing better in regards to environment?
There are no countries in this world where capitalism is not the dominant factor. This has been true for centuries.
I said "we live in a world..." not "we live in a country.."
I'll bite.
1. There's too much money directly opposing the goals of fighting climate change
2. Humans aren't big on alignment. FFS, we still don't have good UX/GUI for Linux and it's mainly been stagnant* and divided into Gnome and KDE for 20+ years.
* despite the impressive accomplishments, it's essentially true
1. Wouldn't there be even more money to be made by saving the human race? Putting aside profit, wouldn't people with money want to continue existing and therefore be aligned with the movement?
2. Your example isn't something life or death. Humanity has aligned on numerous things and changed significantly amd uniformly during the past 30 years without even trying. Why is it so hard to come up with a list of demands and reforms for everyone to agree on and march behind to save the world?
I don't understand why humans do what they do, consistently and repetitively, against their best interests, except for money, emotions, or a lack of understanding.
Climate change is the only issue I'm aware of where "humanity" routinely gets implicated.
Climate change has been a mainstream issue since the mid-90s. From then until now we've had massive material and ideological changes across the globe, none of which required the support or awareness of humanity or the voting public.
The internet, cell phones, social media, fracking, AI, multiple wars, changes in attitudes towards family, sexuality, and marijuana usage have all occurred during this time period. Why then has a slight, gradual reduction in greenhouse gas reduction been so hard?
All of those things make money. Reducing climate change costs money. Reducing climate change also requires changing behavior of most people. Finally, there are governments and companies that profit from current fossil fuels and have worked against any action.
Governments have been unwilling to push those changes because they are unpopular and expensive. Governments have also been unwilling to impose hardship on their people if other countries aren't going to do anything. A lot of people, in this thread, don't think it will be bad, or that it will happen after they are dead.
In terms of making a plan, what is the point of making detailed plan if nobody is going to follow it? Also, there are lots of things that we don't know how to do yet, and can only plan to investigate.
Because all the above depends on energy and it's still mostly produced from fossil fuels!
Changing that cost money—and people resent having to pay more for change that they don't perceive will make much difference to their lives.
Whether they're right or wrong doesn't alter that.
It was impossible to "win the fight" because of the demographic curve (~1.5 billion in 1900, ~8.2 billion today)
This is well known.
This includes the fact that whatever we do now the impact of what's already done will be felt for thousands of years.
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Put your money where your mouth is and move to Florida.
I'm tired of bailing Floridian and coastal Texans out after hurricanes. I'm in Austin (Texas) and our insurance bills are outrageous because of coastal cities (indirect, if nontrivial). If they want to live down there, fine, but I don't want to bail them out. Houston & Corpus are the worst offenders: they produce huge amounts of CO2 per capita, and then demand bailouts when climate change fucks them over.
Well, it seems like a lot of people moving there
Climate and real estate costs have slowed inbound migration drastically, with quite a bit of folks who can no longer afford Florida moving to Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas.
https://www.newsweek.com/number-people-moving-texas-florida-...
https://www.newsweek.com/number-americans-moving-florida-col...
https://www.axios.com/2024/10/03/american-states-moving-popu...