Jensen Huang lays out his plan to create a digital earth model to forecast climate in this press conference. If it’s successful in predicting climate and weather patterns accurately, do you think it’ll be enough evidence to convince climate deniers?
I've got a friend who's otherwise a great guy, but his anxiety disorder is just bonkers bad. Climate change is terrifying to him, so he copes by just straight-up refusing to believe that it's a big deal. It can be solved by planting a bunch of trees, or spraying some kind of plastic particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sunlight ("It's been tested in Alaska! It works! But the government shut it down!"), or by some as-yet-unrevealed technology that's just around the corner.
Also, he's incredibly, unreasonably mad at Al Gore for making An Inconvenient Truth and will insist that he was wrong about literally everything and should never have opened his mouth.
I have to make a concerted effort not to argue with him too much, because I'm pretty sure that if I actually convinced him, he'd self-harm out of fear of the future.
I honestly think he's just a more extreme, slightly-more-self-aware version of how most conservatives feel about the climate change issue. It's scary, so it can't be true.
Al Gore was definitely prescient in naming his documentary inconvenient.
Climate change is as much a human problem as it is a geophysical one because that psychological defense mechanism that you anecdotally describe in the face of existential gloom is universal to our species, and the cause of so much ill-placed skepticism and hostility toward climate science and its communicators. Don’t Look Up also did a good job at portraying this unfortunate human bias.
We as a species are too smart for our own good; smart enough to geoengineer our world to the point of threatening its existence, but not smart enough to address our own resistance to change and take collective action where and when it’s urgently needed.
For those who study climate change and those who try to mitigate it, there is this double burden of not only losing sleep over the magnitude of the existential threat, but also facing the moral and psychological failings of those who refuse to see reality for what it is and argue against it. It’s tiring.
Lack of evidence isn’t the problem. Just like how a parent must teach a child instead of submitting to a child’s demands because the parent should know better, climate change deniers mustn’t be allowed to have functional decision making power over climate change policy.
Of course they do have it now and will continue to have it until we have a blue ocean event, totally receded glaciers, scorching summer seasons, and slower brains from the ever increasing carbon dioxide molecules ppm that rises and rises and rises and rises. Much like how the seas will.
Ask instead, “If you are a shareholder in an insurance company, do you want that insurance company to be writing homeowners insurance policies for waterfront properties in Florida?”
From a psychological view, the best we can do is provide the information and hope that they come to the right conclusion themselves. You’re almost never going to convince a person by telling them that they’re wrong, and surely not by talking how their children are going to suffer and their house is going to get flooded.
Andrew is approaching it the wrong way. It’s usually an emotional and psychological problem. I’ll explain a common angle I’ve experienced by being a good listener. Not everyone will have this opinion and mental path, but I found that this is a common one.
It typically starts with religion. God created Earth, and to think that we can change the climate is a way of playing God. Not only would that be blasphemous, but if God created Earth, how could we even approach the idea of being mighty enough to change the climate? God made it, and it is one part of God’s miracles. We have no business thinking that we can play God like this.
Then, there’s the doubling-down patterns. Scientists have determined that climate change is happening. But this means that scientists seem to know more than God. The Earth was given to us to live on by Him, so how could they possibly be right? “Scientists are ridiculous, and they should put faith in the Lord.”
Rinse and repeat, and they double down harder and harder. While doing so, they find more mental gymnastics, talking points, and other rhetorics that they drum to prove their points. How could they be wrong? They’re putting their faith in the Lord, and to affirm the scientists is to deny their faith.
Then come the echo chambers. They wall themselves off from scientists, because scientists keep repeating the same things that they already debunked, and they decided that they’re ridiculous. The people they surround themselves with know what’s good for them, and they have their own support groups with their own opinions that feel like their own facts.
No amount of software or hardware is going to change this problem. The first step, if you even want to venture into the minds of people who have walked this path, is to be a good listener, and challenge them with their own rhetoric and their own talking points to disprove them. But half the time you’re doing that, you’re going to be challenging their faith and the validity of God, so… good luck.
It’s not 100% guaranteed to work, but you can go with the angle that God left us as the custodians of the planet, and what we’re doing is destroying it; hence breaking our promise and showing God that he was wrong to have faith in us.
Idk, I counter the “God created Earth” argument with the Biblical injunction to Noah and his descendants to be good “stewards of creation” after the Great Flood, which usually works to end that line of flawed reasoning, at least.
E.g., “God created the world, yes, but he gave humanity dominion over the Earth and trusted us to govern it well. We’ve been given 10 talents (aka gold coins), and when the Master returns we better have used the first to earn 10 more rather than bury them like the frightened servant or waste them like the prodigal son.”
Maybe I’m too participatory, but you can sway religious peeps by arguing using the same framework they do. Worked pretty well on my Catholic parents, although they still question the “degree to which humanity is responsible for global warming,” meh.
The efficacy also be dependent on which denomination of Christianity you’re arguing with, though, since the argument kinda relies on exercising free will and choosing to be responsible as part of the effort to go to heaven, which might not play super well with crazy predestination theology…
As for the echo chambers, yeah, idk what to do about that.
Right? You’re trying to convince someone that we’re destroying the environment tremendously, year by year, yet somehow, what gets in the way for them to simply observe the observable is… religion? All we need is a thermometer and a pencil to witness climate change.
The other thing that really bothers me is how people act as if the current rate of things is natural. I’ve heard people make arguments that the Earth has always gone through changes through the centuries, even on television. Yet they don’t consider for a moment how rapid or impactful these changes are.
The real question is: is there more money to be made in the near future by reversing climate change or by selling solutions for those who have to deal with a broken climate?
Exxon figured that they’re already good with molecular logistics, so rather than (only) ramp up renewables (which requires new infrastructure for electrical energy management), they’re trying to become the leader in the carbon-capture market.
They’re predicting the carbon-capture market to hit $50 billion by 2030 and as much as $4 trillion by 2050 as industry standards change to require more stringent carbon-footprint management.
Honestly not the worst idea, although it’s def more of a bandaid than a solution. Only issue is that it’s big, bad Exxon, who’s capitalist-style fossil-fuel production is part of what got us into this mess, but, again, this is kinda right in their wheelhouse.
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