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> many of the changes we are talking about don't even really cost us anything

This is the part that seems to vary widely based on which warming alarmist you're talking to. Many of them are not saying there are things we could do that "don't even really cost us anything" that would deal with the problem--they're saying we need to devote a significant fraction of global GDP to CO2 mitigation.

Things that "don't really cost us anything" are probably happening already anyway, because, well, they don't really cost us anything.

Building a lot more nuclear power plants is the key thing that doesn't really seem to be happening right now, that would be an obvious way to eliminate a lot of CO2 emissions. But of course that does really cost us something. But it's probably the most cost effective thing we could do on a large scale.

The problem with Pascal's wager logic is you have to change your behavior based on all kinds of crazy low-probability events. You must worship every god, be an AI-doomer, a climate-doomer, a nuclear-doomer.

Pascal's wager is generally agreed to be logically unsound, so it's somewhat insane that we've revived it in all these modern contexts. If you believe in it, at least be consistent and sacrifice a goat to Zeus every couple years.

> Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now

My family is fundamentalist protestant, very midwestern, and I think about half of them believe that the earth is warming. Not trying to "win", just trying to say that a lot of this depends on the crowd you interact with. I don't know the percentage, but certainly there are still way too many people that don't even believe it. The very tired response is "well i wish it would warm up here slaps knee". Using the phrase 'Climate Change' at least reduces that objection.

Another reframing that may be useful is energy security/redundancy.

If you have a cheap source of solar panels and batteries, the only downside to installing them all over the country is up-front cost (which pays itself off quickly). The upside you gain is a substantially more robust, less centralized power grid that can continue to operate if something happens to impede your supply of fossil fuels or part of the grid gets cut off.

Looking at how things have played out elsewhere in the world the past few years, that's powerful.

I'm a different kind of crotchety.

I think it's real and potentially catastrophic. But I see very little chance of (sufficient) coordinated action to mitigate it.

I.e., I think there's too much temptation for individual countries to pursue a competitive economic or military advantage by letting everyone but themselves make sacrifices.

I hope I'm wrong.

> many of the changes we are talking about don't even really cost us anything

I hear that often, but it's never followed by details about any of the actual changes that are being talked about. The ones I actually hear (especially politicians) advocate for are catastrophically expensive and dubious in their effectiveness. Banning coal or gas-powered cards might (might) be a good idea in the long run, but it definitely does cost us something.

Yes, parts of my extended family who were anti-climate change and proud went from "Global warming is a hoax", to "So what if global warming is happening" over the past 10 years.

Previous climate changes happened over tens of thousands of years. This one is happening in decades.

It's the speed, not the magnitude that matters. Change faster than evolution and migration will destroy ecosystems.

Finally a human with a context window larger than a few hundred years.

Difficult is good. It makes it more competitive. It levels up the game.

Wasn’t that film explicitly about climate change denial?

> Very exciting to live in an apocalyptical era

Reminds me of that advice about depression more generally. Something like

"If you can't be optimistic, settle for being curious about the way it all unfolds"

Kids alive today will get to see some wild shit toward the end of the century.

I think the smart money is still on nuclear war, but the competition is getting fierce these days.

My impression is that almost no one denies the warming itself, just the link to greenhouse gasses. That link is unfortunately much harder to prove than rising temperatures by itself. The proof is there nonetheless, but it's easier to cast doubt on it, and that's what certain groups have been doing.

Maybe those who didn't graduate shouldn't get to vote?

Same, sadly. I’ve done far more than my part, and even my direct family hasn’t, let alone the rest of the country, the world.

I only hope I can have a decent life until it ends, and I hope it takes slightly longer than I think it will.

you will age, you will weaken, you will cease, no choice or circumstance will change that. endeavor to create something that will persist through the eons, and that part of your mind will live forever.

Maybe a way to game the modern right is to draw attention to something true so that they remember it exists, then they try to censor it, thereby triggering a Streisand effect.

Why does NASA even have to do this? Build some cool rockets and get us to mars.

Ultimately I think it will be a self correcting problem, but there is going to be an extremely long period of absolute hell. Global warming is eventually going to cause food and water scarcity on a level that will wipe out a huge percentage of the Earths population. Then the Earth will recover from there being fewer humans.

If in 3000 years we discover humans were completely wiped out to the last person I would be pretty surprised.

I mean, all of humanity has lived in the period between two glacial eras, I don't expect us to go beyond that. This should be clear even to people who choose to ignore the facts about climate change.

Humans won’t get wiped out, not by global warming atleast. It’s just going to suck and a lot of us will die.

It will now.

We don't have to do anything about China, "China’s CO2 emissions have now been ‘flat or falling’ for 21 months"

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...

China is building clean energy for a good chunk of the world, including itself.

A better question may be: What is the US going to do to make up for its historical emissions? The US got wealthy by creating far more emissions than China, and all those historical emissions are now a problem for the rest of the world.

If people in the US try to turn climate action into a blame game, it will end very very poorly for the US.

If the rest of the world wants to still have an industry once we finally decide to seriously use green technology, they should quickly catch up to China - if that's still possible.

While China is still very reliant on fossil-fuels, and particularly dirty coal, they're at the same time working on dominating the post-fossil age at astonishing speed. After they already dominate solar and batteries, they're working on doing the same for a number of other future green industries. They are already dominating future technologies like Green Methanol that most people in Europe or the US have never heard of.

A troll response I presume. Or perhaps sarcasm without the indicator.

The plan was always to put economic pressure on China to catch up to the rest of the developed world, but we can't exactly tell someone else to stop crapping their pants while we are still crapping our pants.

Emulate them?

PRC solar power production last year conservatively will diplace ~45 billion barrels of oil, or 10%-20% more than total global consumption per year. It's just retarded eco accounting that attributes emissions to renewable manufacturers while fossil exporters don't get any penalties for extracting emissions.

Every year of PRC solar prevents doubling of oil, basically they're like the only significant country whose net contribution is negative for how much carbon sinks they manufacture. So the answer for US+co is obviously stop exporting oil and lng, and start exporting renewables.

The same China that, added more new solar capacity in 2024 than the US currently has total? And is currently at 36% of its total energy use from renewable sources compared to the US's 23%? And has ~32GW of nuclear plants in construction compared to the US's 2.5GW?

I hope we steal their playbook.

China is going to be fully green in a decade or two. India in 3 or 4.

Nothing? China is solving the problem on their own. They already make substantially less carbon per person that most of the west. If we want to be like China it's a simple proposition: be OK with Manhattan project level investments in power transmission from places that have lots of renewables to places that need renewables.

I know you're getting dogpiled, but global warming has been validated, not debunked.

The science behind it really got going in the 1890s, with Arrhenius' paper predicting climate sensitivity to CO2. That was bounced back and forth with rebuttals and counter-rebuttals until about 1950. Major debate points were how much role water vapor played, how this varied with temperature/altitude/pressure. (You can trace each part of the argument if you're so inclined; there's lots of neat science in there. The concept of "pressure broadening" was my favorite; it explores how spectral bands change with pressure).

Around 1950, the science started settling out. Spectrometers had improved, we had clearer view that CO2 and H2O don't fully overlap in their spectra bands through the atmosphere, and we had the computing to do better calculations. By the 1970s, we were getting ice core data showing that the world had gone through huge temperature swings, and how this changed with CO2. Enough data had accumulated that a consensus was forming. In the 1980s, scientists were now concerned enough to form a large body to inform policymakers on this issue (IPCC; 1988). And in the 40 years since then, we've mostly sat on our hands, even as the science just gets clearer and clearer.

I share all this long history to explain that the science went through nearly a century of rigorous debate even before politicians got involved. This a scientific issue, not a political one. And I'm glossing over 99.9999% of the detail here. There was an extensive literature debate between the scientists, hashing out any point you can think of. You just have to go to your local uni library and start reading.

TL;DR: saying that global warming is debunked is about as incorrect as saying that the Earth is flat. We have extensive evidence showing otherwise.

They predicted a warming planet based on human activity as long ago as the 50s

We’ve known about the mechanisms of CO2 leading to atmospheric warming since the 19th century.

We know humans are adding CO2 to the atmosphere.

We observe higher CO2 and warmer temps

The evidence isn’t that complicated.

I'm pretty sure global warming isn't debunked. Yes, we should worry about all the other pollution too. But global warming is happening and we are causing it. What's different than nature doing it is the rate of change. Yes the earth was warmer in the past and would be in the future, but it has never warmed as fast as it is now.