As if anyone had a choice about climate change. Cigarettes, oxy, sugar, and carbon are all alike in that their detrimental effects were hidden, downplayed, or denied for decades. Now, here we are with a destroyed ecosystem and rampant addiction. Choice is a meaningless word in the context of capitalism. There is only manipulation.
Regulation was needed 60 years ago, and now we are the ones left holding the bag.
This is one of the most flawed arguments that get made. I’ve been to many places in North America and Europe. Everywhere you go, direct sunlight above 65F is nearly unbearable. Air temperature is one thing, but we are super heating the entire air column between you and the outer atmosphere. Places that used to be pleasant with lots of sunshine like the SFs East Bay are now searing hot in direct sun. Yes, Maybe Quebec is more pleasant than it used to be, but it will be uncomfortable most of the summer in 5 or 10 years. Humans will certainly migrate North but Eventually we will just run out of latitude. Climate Change isn’t linear. Each year will be getting hotter faster than it did the year before. We’re toast.
Well, this is why it's boring to speculate about potential upsides because people want to bring in the downsides again. I'm not trying to argue for anything, but I think it will in fact be more pleasant to live in some places. That's not an argument that climate change is a good thing, but the question was asked, is there any upside.
Middle School educator here. I can assure you that your daughters will not be alone when it comes to a moratorium on social media. However, the girls they may very well want to be friends with may be very much into social media and group chats. My advice is to be firm but also take steps to create social opportunities for your daughters. I have a 12yo and I host board game nights with amazing snack trays. I help her to play video games socially using air console.
You have to play defense. These apps are deleterious to your daughters self worth. I’ve seen too many hospitalizations and suicides to believe otherwise. But you also have to play offense. They will need guidance on how to be social in a world coopted by manipulation and deceit. Parenting these days is challenging but it’s possible to raise girls who thrive without phones.
Thanks a ton for this. As a father of a pre-teen daughter who begs for a smartphone every day, I’ve been anxious about how I’m going to deal with this situation. I’d only been thinking in terms of defence, and this article had me really worried. Planning for how to create the social opportunities is just as important. Defence and Offence. I really like it!
My oldest is 10 and oldest daughter is 8, so we're approaching this challenge. We've talked to them in a broad sense about the issue, but your post made me realise that tackling it together is worth a shot. e.g., lots of talk about what the issue is, and what opportunities there are to address it. And then work together to devise a strategy. Not just them saying to peers "My parents say I'm not allowed to do x."
> Not just them saying to peers "My parents say I'm not allowed to do x."
Yes, that's the core of it. Working together on facing the issue while supporting increasing the agency of the child.
Anything forced onto them is just an external force to deal with. A decision made together, with own interest and long-term vision in consideration, with rules derived from these goals, are a very different thing.
One trains the child to submit + secretly subvert, the other nurtures trust and trains collaboration, openness, iteration etc.
This is bullshit. They are not consenting. They are succumbing to coercion due to power dynamics at best or are straight up being overridden by what you want.
Parenting is not negotiating with an adult, especially if they are preteen/early teenage years. They are humans with terrible executive functions that would be wards of the state without you.
You can certainly explain why you’re making a decision, but it’s really just your decision.
You're right that kids can't make decisions yet. However, they should be taught to, and in order to learn something, you should be able to attempt it, even if you fail.
Sounds like some form of collective action could go a long way here to the point of being imperative. Get like minded parents and teachers and administrators together on this and work together to preview and encourage alternatives.
Tangentially, I’m curious if smoking went through a phase similar to this, where all the parents were doing it but there was still some recognition that children/teens shouldn’t and some parenting struggles against the ubiquity of cigarettes.
If so, what were the factors of success or failure? Did any progress in protecting kids from smoking have to wait until underage smoking was illegal or even the public push against adults smoking?
It really does feel to me like the smart phone and social media are the cigarettes of the millennial generation.
I think you are on to something here. That's exactly what happened with smoking.
Factors for that being successful was mostly just repeating the information about how bad it was a lot in the beginning. Once everybody agrees about that, then you slowly start making it socially unacceptable.
I could see a similar thing happening with social media of awareness of the seriousness of the damage becomes as widespread as for smoking. As in I think it's possible that one day it will be totally socially unacceptable to be glued to your phone at a social event of some sort.
If there's something to this analogy, I feel like it'd be worth being more commonly known.
For me, as a Millennial/Xennial, I sure as hell criticised the elders close to me for their smoking and their taking up the habit in their youth. For parents now who have similar stories, it might be a helpful perspective to have on how these things tend to happen and what's required to actually address any problems.
It might also lead to some uncomfortable reflections on the world us Millennials are passing on.
Maybe the best first step for parents would be to quit social media / smartphones themselves and get more active in creating alternative ways of being (however easier said than done that is)?
Interestingly, I'm also struck at how unclear it might be as to which is the worst of these two "generational original sins".
Despite all the health effects, maybe no one lost the ability to think deeply or critically assess propaganda or fall into a cult or become obsessed with their appearance or spent thousands of dollars to throw perfectly functioning pocket computers in the bin for slightly bigger ones from smoking?
A funny image comes to mind of senile Millennials refusing to give up their social media smartphones despite their carers' best efforts, wildly declaring that they've been scrolling timelines since before the carers were born and have been fine.
I‘ve got young boys, so I can’t speak directly to the fears that parents have about their daughters.
I think the door can swing both ways. While consumers can take tobacco as a playbook, there was recent reporting about the stickiness of iOS with Gen Z. I can imagine there a number of people want to (indirectly) keep it that way.
Platforms will come out with some feature that mitigates the social outrage, creates FUD around the true scale of the problem, and kicks the can down the road a little further while millions more get addicted for a little while longer.
As both a parent and someone who interacts with middle school educators, I can confidently say that there may be gaps in your knowledge that you are unaware of.
Children today are often smarter and more technologically savvy than many adults give them credit for: and some of them will start “business” to sell “internet access” to others.
Just a comment form from dad fighting with similar issues.
My friend found an unexpected portable nintendo in his son's closet. It was loaded with a LOT of games. He figures his son was playing with it during homework/sleep time to his detriment.
Turns out his birthday money from relatives financed it. Even though he was about 11 or 12, he found a youtube video on how to get a credit card, then was able to purchase a system and create an online account to buy games.
I wonder if it's more about the usage then the tool. Group chats that are used primarily for communication with a social group seems like it could be healthier. But using it as a feed of content from internet celebrities the opposite. Social media platforms are all trending towards being a constant feed.
I'm curious what the research would say about discord for example. Something centered around a participatory activity or around a group of friends.
Thanks for sharing this perspective. We have a 9yo and it's already the case some of her classmates have devices that are connected to social media. Very handy advice!
Is it correct for me to assume that you have your daughter without a smartphone right? How is she communicating day-to-day with her peers in school then?
Maybe become a full time father? Dual income is to blame here since parents started thinking schools are day care for kids until they can be kicked out of home for college. Men shouldn't shy from stepping up if traditional roles of mothers are eroding.
By early teens, peers are the largest influence on a child and they have more than enough opportunities to pressure for or use a phone at school or after school, regardless of the work status of either parent.
Catan or DND has a similar competitive yet low stakes vibe.
Here’s my secret: I host a night about once every two months and I bake soft pretzel bites with varying dipping sauces. People know I’m going to bake pretzels and this familiarity is comforting, but they also come to see what sauces I’m gonna have. I try to make them exotic at times
This is a great project by CMU; however, it is designed for high school students specifically. An analogue to this would be Code.org. It is not related to their undergraduate CS curriculum which is rather rigorous.
Cool. They’ll bounce back fast after this mass extinction that’s happening right now. That is, unless humans succeed in terraforming Earth into a Mars clone. Then all life is screwed.
To preface what I'm about to say, I'm anti-mass extinction and I definitely agree that as a planetary society we need to continue pushing to slow down and eventually reverse climate change.
But I really think the "all life is screwed" mantra is damaging to us, especially our youth. There needs to be a balanced take on this, because saying that all life is screwed gives no hope or even purpose to the kids growing up now who will inevitably need to fix what we're leaving them. I'm mid-20's and I grew up with some level of media telling me that the world was ending, but it was pretty muted and didn't make me feel like there was no way we could fix things.
I'm not saying people won't die or people won't have to massively change how they live to adapt to climate change in the future, but we need to stop basically saying that every single human dying is an inevitability with climate change.
As a thought experiment: Let's say in ~50 years 10% of humans die in a 5 year span due to catastrophic climate change (~800 million based on current pop.). What is the incentive at that point for governments to NOT force radical regulation legislation to go through? Money? In the past few years we've gotten to the point where renewable energy is simply cheaper than the alternative. Now imagine we have better batteries years down the line. Exactly who is profiting at that point? The oil companies? They can just invest in renewables and save the money they'd lose fighting uprisings from the people in their countries who have lost, in this thought experiment, 800 million fellow humans.
All this to say, climate change is a BIG DEAL. But let's stop wallowing in that fact, and let's focus all that energy in pushing for governments to force companies to do the right thing.
I think the issue is feedback loops. You're right that eventually governments will be "forced" to do the "right thing", but the problem is that it is likely going to be too little too late, and the climate feedback loops already set in motion may indeed "finish the job" and make the planet too inhospitable for any humans to feasibly live on.
I don't think I've seen many (any?) studies which predict that we're going to scorch the Earth into an unlivable hellhole. That's what people are complaining about.
There will be mass starvations, mass migrations, mass extinctions, and more, but that doesn't mean life will cease for humans. We will see worse storms, and a generally less livable planet, but if we can have both Eskimos and Bedouin thriving on the same planet, it's weird to think we'd suddenly lose our extreme adaptability.
> Probably would also help to have a single figure who can unite us to share more and all take personal responsibility for the collective good.
Part of me feels like climate change is this single figure. Instead of a single person rising up and saying "We need change and this is how we do it", it's the planet that we all share that's forcing our hand. I think that's great in a certain respect, it's reality smacking us and screaming into our faces. Of course it will mean a lot of death, but sometimes it seems we need to experience loss to stimulate progress.
OK sure life won't cease as a whole for humans, but living standards for the vast majority of us will enter freefall and stabilize at a MUCH much lower level than we're used to.
Agreed. We should also consider the context that - yes - the damages of climate change are disproportionately going to affect developing nations and increase natural disaster risk and food security, but these dangers are coming in against a strong trend of those risks going down for many people. Things were bad in the past - and they're still bad in many places now - but that has been shrinking rapidly. Climate change could very-well slow or even reverse this trend for a time, but barring a complete destruction of our technological progress, people in the future in general will still be far better off than now, even with this mess, and even in developing countries.
Now, of course, this doesn't mean these benefits will be evenly distributed (this is going to even further increase wealth inequality and be a deadly disaster for many people), and we are pretty terrible at prioritizing e.g. protecting natural ecosystem biodiversity. There will certainly be irreversible (in human timescale) losses to our ecosystem and therefore the knowledge and potential of future civilizations from this. And there are even some truly catastrophic death spiral scenarios possible. But it's likely that even the cynical reality will end up being something of a widespread unfairly distributed uptick in disaster risk and continuation of the mass extinction we've already started - slowing quality of life improvements for much of the world, but not stopping them - with an eventual strong recovery in all areas if/when we engage our new levels of technological advancement and begin re-wilding programs to purposefully regrow thriving natural habitats. (This is somewhat inevitable if/when the average quality of life of people is high enough they have room to care about such things. Industrial processes applied to helping nature thrive would do a lot)
This is the "human nature sucks at scale and we're slow to change course" cynical view but with a "technology and industry is crazy good in the long term at achieving its goals and uplifting people" bullish caveat prediction - which I believe to be the age-old trend. We clearly need better global-level response organization to deter the worst effects of climate change and help distribute risk so it's not all falling on the poorest people, but industry-wise - if we have to dump a trillion into something stupid-inefficient like direct carbon capture machines, we will. (My preferred solution is mass-farming kelp - far cheaper per CO2 ton and numerous additional beneficial products that basically make it pay for itself at scale). The world isn't coming to an end. It's coming to a recession/depression - which will be felt to different degrees very unfairly - and it's spurring new responses.
The slow moving disaster that is the Colorado River is a particularly American disaster. The manifest destiny mindset coming to an abrupt end. In the book Cadillac Desert Marc Reisner asserts that this could be the albatross that contributes to the downfall of the US. The more I learn, the more I’m inclined to believe him.
It's very frustrating, because it's clearly a problem, and also clearly a solvable problem. Yet, actual action moves at geological timescales (in this case, quite literally).
It reminds me of the extinction of the passenger pigeon. Not only was it's population hunted to collapse, people went out of their way to make sure they rooted out the last nesting pairs and fully exterminated it.
As to exactly why, who knows? What could a handful of birds have been worth?
The bill has come due for us to build more infrastructure, not pretend like we're going to stop growth and catastrophically damage the economy in the process.
Glen Canyon was built in the 1960s. Because the infrastructure enabled so much growth, demand is outpacing supply.
Arizona is trying to build a desalination plant in the Sea of Cortez to solve the Colorado River problem and the environmentalists immediately came out of the woodwork to complain about it. The mass media then, in a coordinated fashion, pushed FUD about how desalination is bad for the climate because it will require energy (Arizona is a leader in carbon-free nuclear and solar energy), will be too expensive, it'll destroy habitats, etc. At some point you start to realize the sentiment is entirely political and has little to do with finding practical solutions.
Certainly you are right. If all the golf courses are closed and agriculture is transitioned to more stable locales, the Southwest would have a fighting chance.
However, when you take into account human nature, especially American human nature, the forecast seems darker. More and more, I believe that Collapse seems to be hard-wired into the human collective. It almost seems as if there is a number of humans (n) that serves as an under/over for inevitable collapse. One person can have foresight. Two people, 10 people, 1000 people even. But once you hit 10,000 or so the ability to sway public opinion with money and media becomes too strong. All it takes is a certain percentage of people to be convinced the problem is a conspiracy or a mirage. That is enough to sow doubt more widely, and to sink any efforts towards a reasonable conservation of resources.
The Southwest will collapse, and soon. And the number of people denying the existence of a problem will be non-trivial even as the last reservoir dries up. It’s a shame, but it was as Cadillac Desert proves imminently avoidable.
I believe Los Angeles (like many coastal cities) still sends most of its stormwater to the ocean. Capturing more of it could reduce external water requirements.[1]
Some of this is being done already, with some 33 billion gallons captured during this current storm season, apparently enough to supply 816K people (of ~4M) for a year.[2]
It's an organization problem. Over time people are capable of organizing themselves to overcome pretty much any problem, including large scale environmental events. See eg. Water Boards[1] in the Netherlands for dealing with the inverse problem (regular flooding).
Possibly this takes multiple similar disasters in a row before people decide enough is enough.
Anthropogenic warming is increasing at a non-linear rate. If you are not preparing practically, financially, and emotionally for this fact, you are being myopic. I still hold out hope for fusion-based geo-engineering or radical innovation to battery technology. However, with every day that passes the potential for these solutions seems to further elude us.
When I was a kid in the 90s I had a teacher who was freaking out about peak oil. He was "preparing frantically" for it through extreme measures like not having children.
A few decades out, all those who were too "myopic" to freak turned out to be the winners. Like, if you were too dumb to know about peak oil you ended up making smarter decisions.
I think there's a healthy chance we'll look at our current mindset in a similar way a few years/decades out.
Frankly, I think the tide is already shifting. Even in this thread, enough folks are comfortable to say "just ain't that worried about it" which would have been unthinkable to admit even a few months ago.
not sure what social groups you spend time in but I'd have guessed the majority of Americans don't really care. While two thirds of Americans think the government should do more to address it. In Gallup polling asking Americans which issue is the most important to them, only 2% put climate change as their top issue. The peak in 2022 was 5%. Also in May:
- the govt/leadership, 19%
- inflation, 18%
- economy in general, 12%
- immigration, 8%
- unifying the country, 5%
As someone who's organized climate strikes and protests I am definitely not surprised by these results.
I've gone from caring about climate change to complete apathy. The reason for my change in mindset is that I don't want to live in a world envisioned by climate change activists.
A few examples:
1) I want to live in a world where people can fly. I want my children to see the world and experience different cultures.
2) I want to eat meat.
3) I want to enjoy the benefits of concrete.
There aren't any practical methods of achieving carbon-neutral air travel, meat, and concrete (among many, many other things). The changes often proposed by climate activists are to stop flying and eating meat (I don't often see it suggested to stop using concrete because most people realize it's impossible). I don't know what the world will be like if we continue on our path. Perhaps climate change will ruin everything, perhaps it won't be as bad as predicted, or maybe we'll find a solution (e.g. geoengineering) I do know that life without modern conveniences is worse than life today. So to me, the choice is between something that might not have a future vs. something that definitely doesn't have a future.
> 1) I want to live in a world where people can fly. I want my children to see the world and experience different cultures.
If you're worried about future generations you'd want to limit the effects of climate change, which means reducing carbon output. Sending more carbon into the atmosphere now means our descendants will experience more dramatic climate change impacts, and also need to reduce their output even more. Or to put it another way, the more flights avoided now the more flights can potentially be taken in the future.
You could just fly less and eat less meat. Well, at least you're honest in your nihilism, hedonism, fatalism, whatever one would call it. The "this is fine" dog refusing to entertain a world where it's not drinking a cup of tea.
Or, you could fly and eat (and have children) to your hearts content and find out in a few years or decades that all the doomsday predictions turned out to be wrong (or, postponed another few decades again) and come out the winner.
It seems empirically born out that continuing your life and alternating things slowly is the winning strategy, compared to changing everything on a dime because some thing is scaring you at the moment. Is seems that there's always the thing that is obviously going to kill us, that in retrospect, hasn't and just got replaced with the next anxiety.
There is an element of survivorship bias here. The only people around are those who have survived past crisis. So you'll never meet people who didn't plan for a crisis and perished as a result of their lack of planning.
This mindset always catches me off guard no matter how many times I come across it. I can’t think of hardly anything more boring to care about than airplanes and meat and concrete, three things that probably could not change the quality of my life in any quantity in any way but superficially, three things that millions of people currently go without happily. Like what kind of lifestyle do you lead that these 3 things weigh so heavily? I happily minimize my use of all three of those things for even a small chance of making future lives better. I’m always shocked when I read how narrow some peoples spectrum of desires are.
> I can’t think of hardly anything more boring to care about than airplanes and meat and concrete, three things that probably could not change the quality of my life in any quantity in any way but superficially, three things that millions of people currently go without happily.
> which would have been unthinkable to admit even a few months ago.
That's more about feeling safe to be publicly seen to dissent. For people's actual beliefs you'd have to look at "revealed preferences" sort of things.
There's a fallacy in assuming this crisis will end like all other crises. Seems like a big risk to take when the planet's ability to sustain civilization is in question.
I agree that it is unlikely to be increasing precisely linearly, but do you have a more specific claim?
It is my understanding that the GCMs in use have many “tunable” parameters some of which are strongly stochastic, the component of the models are coupled, there are feedback loops that are poorly understood—some positive some negative, these feedback loops operate over all possible time scale from minutes to centuries. The systems of differential equations describing the models will not be analytic and worse will have chaotic solutions.
The dozens of existing GCMs don’t agree, but I’m not an expert so I can’t know which ones to trust. Furthermore, expert climate researchers very careers are at stake so there is no effort that I can detect to make all the data sets, source code, and design justifications open in ways to allow inspection by outsiders like myself.
I have worked professionally on environmental models only twice (over 40 years ago). One had the worst code I ever had to review (and I’ve taught CS at the university level!) and the other made simplify assumptions so ridiculous that the results were meaningless.
I used to be able to download pictures of hand written recorded weather station temperature data from 100 years ago. Now, I can no longer get to it from NOAA or NASA websites. What happened to it? (Perhaps, my Google-foo is failing me.)
I think many would agree that climate research is important or even existentially important for humankind. We already fund the research with our tax dollars. Why can’t the research be performed as openly as free software foundation projects? If I’m curious about the kind of LRU algorithm used by the ZFS file system cache, I can just clone the repo and read it myself. If I don’t understand why an Emacs feature has been deprecated, I can peruse the emacs-dev mailing list archive.
I want everyone (and especially those that are climate scientists) to have easy access to the data and climate models.
No miracle technology is needed. Just the will to use the solutions we have.
Solar + wind + pumped hydro + transmission is better than any thermal neutron based fusion generator could ever be, and the toolkit does not end there.
The only ingredients that really need improving are iron nitride magnets and undersea Al cables.
The grossest excesses of the wealthiest 10% need reigning in, but other than that, abundance can exist for all.
But most climate scientists agree there are many runaway effects we're headed for pretty directly like
- the runaway greenhouse effect
- ocean acidification causing the ocean to be less able to take up CO2 (the ocean is estimated to have offset 30-50% of co2 emitted by fossil fuels)
- more droughts -> deforestation -> hotter temperatures -> more droughts, etc
I could go on but you could also just read the IPCC reports. Believe it or not their quite easy to parse even for a layman. They make two versions of them, one for policymakers and one for academics but in my experience the academically oriented reports are actually more readable and useful
Ah, sad to hear it. As much as he was shackled to the 60s, some of his more recent work [0] was fascinating. For someone who fell backwards into fame, he was devoted to his art until the end. Peace to you, Croz
"this is the largest group of people ever assembled in one place, the important thing you've proven to the world is that half-a-million kids can get together and have 3 days of fun and music, and have nothing but fun and music"
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young ~ Wooden Ships (Woodstock 1969)
Regulation was needed 60 years ago, and now we are the ones left holding the bag.