Okay, jokes aside, how do I convince my dad?
He’s Silent Generation (86), and he’s very smart and savvy otherwise (he’s an aerospace engineer, still has his 9-5 job in airplane development and has recently started driving for Uber to fill his spare time), and plays VR games on Oculus with me and my sister on weekends, but he doesn’t have patience for our climate change talk. He’s extremely liberal otherwise, but he thinks this is all overblown and the natural cycle of climate, telling us he’s seen these changes before.
How do I convince him this is different? Im at a loss. Or maybe I shouldn’t bother because at his age it doesn’t matter and I should just let him ‘be right’?
My sister is disturbed by his attitude, but im not sure it matters, really.
Does your dad believe that we can continue with our current rate of emissions and waste without consequence though? Maybe it’s worth discussing from an environmentalist point of view rather than climate change specifically. Perhaps the phrase has become taboo for him.
I live in Michigan where we just had at least 7 tornadoes yesterday, and NOAA is basically saying get used to it, this is the new normal. I’ve been in this house for 20 years and I’ve never seen devastation like this. I’ll be without power for several more days because massive 200 year old oaks were snapped like toothpicks and my street is littered with downed power lines.
7 people have died, and when this happens in winter (which they’re saying it will), people will freeze to death in the aftermath. Things will get ugly soon.
And by then it’ll be too late or whatever solution they come up with will only help them.
You’re both right. The rich people have been doomsday prepping for several years now: buying private islands, building underground bunkers beneath them, and hiring private armies to defend them.
They say out loud that climate change is a hoax, but they’ve been frantically preparing for it because they know the truth, because they can pay for the truth.
And they can pay to keep us from it: that we should already have been in a panic about it, but they’re paying to stop us from panicking – at least until they can get out of the killzone.
It’s an excellent moment to remind you that even if we manage to dodge this, there is still the heat death of the universe, so it’s just a matter of how long do we want to waste energy postponing the unavoidable
You do realize that the heat death of the universe would only likely take place in literally trillions and trillions and trillions of years time? Climate change is happening now.
Yeah, and dying today or in a trillion years is indifferent in the end, if it’ll end up happening anyways
Exactly. Climate change we have the chance to mitigate, and very possibly prevent / reverse. The heat death on the other hand is not only just a theory as to how the universe might end, but also something that would likely be completely out of our control, assuming that humans even survive a fraction of the time until then. Most likely, there’ll be something else that kills us first.
Spoiler alert: The civilization disrupting aspects of climate change are still decades out and the rich countries will probably be fine.
They’ll be fine because they can afford the infrastructure projects and increased costs of energy and food.
Now Africa, South America, the poorer Asian countries, tiny Pacific Island nations… Oh boy. I would not want to be a citizen there in 20 or 30 years.
Eventually sea level rise will become a really big fucking problem, like for every single coastal city in the world, even the rich ones. Luckily none of us will be around to see that unless some sort of miraculous life extension technology becomes available.
On the one hand I don’t like mentioning this because it gives the right wing ammunition to ignore climate change. But on the other hand some people have such existential dread about it that it’s damaging their mental health, they are really overestimating how damaging it will be in their lifetime in their rich country they live in.
Rule 1 of life: be skeptical when someone presents their opinion as facts.
Looking at Western European countries like Germany, the Netherlands and the UK to an extent, the road to net-zero is disrupting. Probably because necessary steps have been delayed until the last moment. Large numbers of refugees have a destabilising effect on democracy as well.
Some steps that are necessary for net-zero are expensive investments (like heat pumps) that are causing conflicts in society. Going ahead with it as well as delaying is sure to be met with very loud resistance. Don’t think that Germany can miss it’s climate goals without some serious protests, perhaps worse than they’ve ever seen.
At the same time, I wonder how well UK households are going to deal with even higher food prices as the percentage of failed harvests increases. There isn’t a lot of buffer space here.
It’s not so much whether rich countries have enough money to deal with climate change, but rather how well democracy will fare when it’s under duress.
Luckily none of us will be around to see that unless some sort of miraculous life extension technology becomes available.
I dunno mate… antarctica is collapsing much faster than anyone anticipated. Brazil’s winter was a scorcher.
Canada’s on fire. Tropical storms are hitting LA. sadlol… I suspect we might be around to see even worse.
Are we supposed to be comforted about the timeline being decades? That’s generations alive today.
Scientists are also finding their estimates getting outpaced alarmingly often right now.
The Russia Ukraine war has disrupted civilisation quite significantly with 6 million refugees. We could see over 1 BILLION climate refugees by 2050. 1000 MILLION people having to leave their homes.
We are on course for significant disruption to food supply before 1.5C warming. Doesn’t matter how rich your country is, with global food supplies low and that maybe people on the move, civilisation as we know it will change significantly. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/12/global-heating-likely-to-hit-world-food-supply-faster-than-expected-says-united-nations-desertification-expert
To be clear: I am not a doomerist. Don’t dwell on this and do nothing. Get angry! This is being done to you. This was not inevitable, it was the decisions of the most powerful and richest people in the world. Get out there and take action, the movement needs you.
I mean, I feel like this year in particular illustrates quite well that there are already very real impacts of climate change in rich countries, with Canada, Greece, Hawaii etc. burning. Which makes it worth to delay climate change as much as possible, even if we can’t or don’t want to stop it at livable levels.
You can’t have this both ways.
When a magat in the Senate brings in a snowball and says that global warming isn’t happening because it’s snowing…
“That’s weather not climate!”
When there’s a wildfire somewhere…
“That’s global warming!”
We can definitively say that this year is the hottest year on record, but we can’t attribute individual forest fires or tornadoes or hurricanes to climate change.
The others already pointed out that there’s a global, rising trend of climate disasters. I would like to qualify:
-
This year did exceed everyone’s expectations. It’s the first year of El Niño after years of increasing temperatures, so while it didn’t come as a complete surprise, it could still be an anomaly.
-
If you ask climate scientists, they’ll tell you lots of climate change effects that could contribute to these wildfires, but yeah, ultimately, they’ll say they won’t know for sure until they’ve seen the following years.
However, these are raging wildfires all around the globe, in regions that don’t normally have them and that aren’t linked to each other. At some point, it stops being “a wildfire somewhere” and starts to become a statistic.
Surface-level ocean temperatures are significantly higher this year, globally, than in previous years. We can’t explain such a global increase without climate change. And obviously, warm water evaporates differently, leading to unusual weather patterns, leading to droughts, which increases the likelihood of wildfires.
So, yeah, while the snowball is simply irrelevant to the topic, the wildfire statistic correlates with all our other statistics. You’d have to ignore a ton of evidence to not attribute the wildfires to climate change until proven differently.
Problem is also that there have always been catastrophes… Earthquakes, wildfires, tsunamis, hurricanes, etc.
Maybe in the past they should have also been attributed to climate change, but I don’t think the average human being can draw the distinction yet
, but I don’t think the average human being can draw the distinction yet
considering the massive heat domes spread worldwide, I suspect the average human has been more impacted than you have.
Brazil had a scorcher of a winter. Antarctica is falling apart much faster than anyone predicted.
