I think that option 1 is hard to motivate partly because people don't have a way to see the scope of the overall problem and don't know what particular steps make a difference and what steps make no difference.
@SaulYoussef - Hello! I'll have to check out that En-Roads project - it sounds from your description like something I'd like. We do need to give everyone "situational awareness", as the military folks put it. And it needs to be done in a way that doesn't get too corrupted by politics, since a lot of politicians try to distort reality.
@johncarlosbaez we're so fucked. Fixing climate change is like cleaning your house when you're super lazy - you know you have to do something about it but the options (vacuuming, dusting, getting a Roomba, etc.) are all exhausting so you just keep eating junk food on the couch.
@johncarlosbaez I fear option 2 will prevail - because, variously: unchartered territory; ‘won’t be too terrible in my own lifetime’; inability to envisage the extent of catastrophe; resultant inertia and reluctance to upset existing ‘working’ ‘systems’. Anyone who champions climate change action is a hero fighting gargantuan opposition, frankly. Sigh.
@johncarlosbaez The problem is that how much global warming is due to human activities? It sounds reasonable no matter if it's 10% or 90%. I never got a convincing study that shows either ways. Given how much politics is involved, it's also increasingly difficult to believe any sources related to global warming.
@taxyovio - "The problem is that how much global warming is due to human activities?"
That's not a real problem, since hundreds of studies have shown that most global warming since the late 1800s is due to humans. If you go to Wikipedia, it has references to about 150 scientific papers on this issue:
@johncarlosbaez Obviously I'm not an expert in climate modelling. But one problem that I'm not quite convinced is that
we only have well-measured climate data for a very short period of time in the order of magnitude of 100 years, while climate change should account for at least thousands of years;
without enough historical data for evaluation, it's not difficult to tune any model with sufficient parameters to fit a short curve. It's like fitting a 10th degree polynomial to 5 data points.
Do you have some insights on why climate modelling might not be subject to these issues?
Another point that makes feel this is not an addressable problem at all is that the younger generations now are already barely surviving and suffering the economic consequences from the last generations, e.g., social care, housing, inequality. No matter what policies we make to limit the amount of human activities, it's the young generations who would bare the most consequences.
I understand the future generations may be "entitled" to a better earth. But that's a moot point if the current people can't survive well already.
@johncarlosbaez thing is even with option 1, we can't promise things are not going to get worse, they most probably will, just less terrible than if we keep doing option 2, but it's not a terribly compelling situation, it should be, of course, because option 2 is much worse, but it's not a great call to action.
@Giancarlo yes, that, people can start thinking maybe it'll be easier to get another house, of course, it's unrealistic, but we are not rationnal machines, we are prone to ignoring unconvenient realities, even if that makes things worse.
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