One point I would like to add is that we do harm when our response to risks is excessive.
My favourite example is fear of radioactivity from nuclear power plants and their waste. Our regulatory regime treats a life lost to exposure to radioactivity from nuclear energy and its waste as being 100 to 10,000 times more valuable than a life lost to air pollution from burning fossil fuels and biofuels. Because of this we made nuclear power so expensive and unpopular in the 1980's that we stopped building new reactors, and instead built fossil fuel (mainly coal) powered reactors. This has resulted in many millions of avoidable deaths every year and has dramatically accelerated climate change. Despite the fact that nuclear energy, including the older reactors built under the previous regulatory regimes, have turned out to be the safest form of reliable energy, those regulations have never been made more rational. We could decarbonise much faster and have much cheaper electricity if we make regulations more reasonable. Fear stops us.
We are now treating anthropogenic climate change as being such a serious risk that we are seriously considering policies which will kill millions of people, by increasing energy poverty and slowing economic growth in low and middle income countries. This is nuts as the current projections indicate a minimal if any increase in mortality from warming. While more will die from extreme heat, fewer will die from extreme cold - which currently kills far more people than extreme heat, especially in low and middle income countries. In the past 20 years warming in the UK has resulted in 500,000 fewer deaths!
The out-of-proportion fear of nuclear waste and accidents is one of the most unfortunate developments regarding environmental protection.
Nuclear power is a scalable, geography independent way to make electricity generation, central heating and process heat production CO2-neutral. France mostly replaced carbon based fuels in its electricity generation by the 90s. The whole developed world could have done this, especially if promising nuclear research projects had been continued and economics of scale been used.
Instead, countries like Germany (where I come from) perhaps (!) achieve this goal in the 2030s while spending a lot more money on the transition process.
A major problem with nuclear power is that its economics and politics are mismatched: economically it requires state backing (like in France) but politically it is supported mostly by right-wing free-marketeers.
Margaret Thatcher's government wanted to built 10 new PWR power stations, but only one of them (Sizewell B) was actually built.
> My favourite example is fear of radioactivity from nuclear power plants and their waste. Our regulatory regime treats a life lost to exposure to radioactivity from nuclear energy and its waste as being 100 to 10,000 times more valuable than a life lost to air pollution from burning fossil fuels and biofuels. Because of this we made nuclear power so expensive and unpopular in the 1980's that we stopped building new reactors,
I find your "favourite example" unconvincing. It seems to get causality backwards (surely nuclear power becoming unpopular would PRECEDE tighter regulation; do everyday people routinely pay close attention to the minutiae of nuclear-power regulations and form their preferences based on that?), ignores that US nuclear power was already becoming more expensive in the 1970's, and ignores that nuclear power also got more expensive in FRANCE as it EXPANDED nuclear power (https://grist.org/nuclear/2011-04-06-does-nuclear-power-have-a-negative-learning-curve/).
> While more will die from extreme heat, fewer will die from extreme cold - which currently kills far more people than extreme heat, especially in low and middle income countries. In the past 20 years warming in the UK has resulted in 500,000 fewer deaths!
Using the UK as the only concrete example in the context of "low and middle income countries" goes beyond cherry-picking, it's an outright bait & switch. Though choosing the UK is, to be sure, a cherry pick too. It's about 55 degrees north of the equator. (For comparison, Alaska's capital is 58 degrees north.) Gee, wonder why warming might have accompanied fewer deaths.
Yes of course irrational fear of radioactivity made nuclear power unpopular and drove the tighter regulations. However the tighter regulations reinforced the view that radioactivity was very dangerous and actually did enormous harm. Leaks of radioactivity that were in reality almost harmless, such as Three Mile Island or Fukushima, had a profound impact almost entirely through fear. All the harm following Fukushima and Three Mile Island and most of the harm following Chornobyl was the result of fear. That includes the evacuations. This was unnecessary for Fukushima and killed hundreds of people. It was far larger than needed for Chornobyl.
Now that we know that nuclear power is extremely safe, it has become unpopular amongst policymakers because of its high costs. We should be making the regulation more rational and evidence-based.
> Now that we know that nuclear power is extremely safe, it has become unpopular amongst policymakers because of its high costs. We should be making the regulation more rational and evidence-based.
Of course we should make regulation "more rational" (a glittering generality). That evades the question of whether nuclear-power regulations are the main reason for nuclear power's expense. If they are, I want to see an explanation of that given that nuclear power got massively more expensive in other countries, not just the US. If they aren't, then a whiny nuclear industry (and its online street team of volunteer PR personnel) is scapegoating regulations for the industry's own costs.
US regulations on radioactivity have been adopted globally, including the safety limit of 1 mSv/year for nuclear plants and 0.04 mSv/year for nuclear waste.
These limits are irrational as they are so much lower that the lowest level of radioactivity shown to cause harm in the real world. This is 100 mSv/year at which dose an increase in mortality of 1% can be measured.
This can be compared with air pollution (PM2.5 um particles) where the safety limit is set at the level which is associates with a 2% increase in mortality, rather than 100 to 2500 times below it.
Despite these safety standards, construction of nuclear reactors is affordable in Russia and China where regulators are more reasonable in applying the standards, unlike the NRA.
In any case I don't think it is my job to persuade someone who is clearly anti-nuclear to change their mind. That is incredibly difficult and cannot be done with evidence.
It's less a matter of persuading me, more a matter of aligning your beliefs with the best available evidence and making them internally consistent.
I haven't bashed nuclear power here, simply cited inconvenient observations that suggest your beliefs are erroneous or inconsistent. For example: you assert that "US regulations on radioactivity have been adopted globally", then assert that nuclear-power construction is nonetheless affordable in Russia and China, smoothing over this demonstration that the regulations aren't so punishing with a handwave about Russia and China being "where regulators are more reasonable" — meanwhile I cite learning-curve data and the primary scholarly literature.
The regulations adopted globally are the safety limits that I mentioned. How they are imposed varies. One can apply the limits incredibly strictly, as in the USA, or less strictly as in Russia and China. A lot of it is to do with balancing benefits versus risks. In the USA there is an independent regulator, the NRA, which takes these limits literally and seriously. More importantly its primary incentive is preventing any accident and any release of radioactivity. If this means applying regulations that make reactors economically unsustainable is of no concern to it. It has no obligation to enable these reactors to be built. A further problem in the USA is the application of ALAR, which means if that as soon as reactors become profitable and seriously competitive with other forms of energy generation, they are obliged to use those profits to further increase safety. This is because it is ALWAYS possible to further reduce the risk of any leak. So ALAR means nuclear reactors can never be allowed to become cheaper than other sources of energy. When you combine this approach with the time it takes to get permission to build a reactor and complete it you introduce the need for repeated design changes, imposed by the NRA. As anyone with construction experience knows, this drives up the costs of construction. It also makes it very difficult to gain experience with construction of the same design. This experience is what drive down costs in France, Russia, China and South Korea.
The new regulations developed by the NRA to build small modular reactors are so demanding that they are likely to be impossible to build. It would be sad to see the USA left behind here with China and Russia gaining control and dominance of nuclear energy. Given that China already dominates supply chains for renewables and batteries the USA will be in serious trouble strategically.
And people like you and Mark Jacobsen will be responsible.
Mark Jacobsen has been discredited, especially with respect to modelling.
You can prove literally anything in a modelling study if you fiddle with the assumptions and parameters. He is notorious for doing this and no-one really takes him seriously anymore.
The consensus view of the UN reports on Fukushima concluded that the is no evidence that any harm was done by radioactivity per se, and it is not expected that any harm will be done. This involved numerous scientist with the appropriate expertise. If you want to read a credible study on radioactivity here is one.
A number of early emergency workers at the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant received high doses which produced tissue reactions and 28 early deaths. The long-term health impacts are contested. There is consensus on two major health impacts: thyroid cancers caused by high levels of exposure of children to radioactive iodine, and ill-effects to mental health caused by widespread fear of potential risks and social disruption. There is emerging evidence on the risk of leukaemia among recovery workers and those risks are broadly in line with what is expected from the LSS. At present, there is little convincing evidence of other radiation-associated effects in recovery workers or the wider public.
(g) The Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant accident
The Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant accident has caused substantial ill-health through the effects of the evacuations, continued displacement and fear of radiation. It is unclear if there will be a detectable excess in thyroid cancer in the coming years. No other discernible increase in ill-health attributable to radiation exposure is expected in either emergency workers or members of the public."
> Mark Jacobsen has been discredited, especially with respect to modelling.
You ignore one of the two studies I link, then make a generic statement about one author of the other study being "discredited" with no evidence while misspelling his name. Come on.
> You can prove literally anything in a modelling study if you fiddle with the assumptions and parameters.
That's a truism I can turn around on you: your own blithe claim about "All the harm" is either based on no modeling, or based on modeling that must itself rely on assumptions. (And because you gave no references to the primary literature, your own underlying assumptions are far less transparent than those of me or Jacobson or anyone else.)
> The consensus view of the UN reports on Fukushima concluded that the is no evidence that any harm was done by radioactivity per se, and it is not expected that any harm will be done. This involved numerous scientist with the appropriate expertise. If you want to read a credible study on radioactivity here is one.
That's only debatably a study. It's a summary statement, an unsystematic review. As for its credibility, if I trace the source for the summary paragraph about Fukushima you quote (paragraph 79 in appendix A), it's on page 9 of appendix B, and it is, in toto, "Authors’ summary.". That is unconvincing, especially since appendix B nowhere mentions the names of ANY of the researchers I cited (Ten Hoeve, Jacobson, Evangeliou, Balkanski, Cozic, Møller), not even to impugn or dismiss them. Your "credible study" rather appears to blank out a relevant slice of the primary literature.
You are being unreasonable. Appendix B had a large number of references to relevant studies backing up the points made, including the comprehensive UN report on the health impacts on the accident (ref 456 - see below for link), which itself reviewed numerous studies. The fact that the final summary paragraph does not also have citations is perfectly normal. Consider all the references in section to back up this summary.
Your dismissal of this comprehensive body of work on such trivial grounds is a clear reflection of your bias.
Was it really fear-driven anti-nuclear campaigners that made nuclear power uneconomic after the mid-1970s, or was it the failures of the nuclear industry itself, along with a decade of stagnant electrical power demand and high interest rates (which disproportionately hurt nuclear because its costs are so front-loaded) followed by two more decades of cheap natural gas?
Indeed one of the biggest factors in making nuclear power unpopular in the US was that many utilities had borrowed vast sums of money to fund nuclear projects (some of which were cancelled due to falling demand for electrical power) and when debt service costs skyrocketed they tried to get it back from consumers via higher prices.
"One point I would like to add is that we do harm when our response to risks is excessive."
We can do even more harm when our response is non-existent. In some ways, Doomerism an attempt to get more people to take things like climate change and COVID seriously. You noted that the move away from nuclear energy hastened climate change. Did it occur to you that the fossil fuel industries lobbied for a lot of the regulations that prevent building new reactors, knowing that nuclear energy was their biggest threat? You know, the same people now saying that we shouldn't "rush" into anything that might cost them money. Oil scientists/execs were aware of climate change in the 1960s, and Philip K. Dick was writing scifi about in the 1960s-70s, so it's not like we weren't aware we'd need new energy solutions.
And just like you noted that it's easier to count deaths from nuclear energy than from air pollution, it's harder to count deaths from heat than cold. 500k fewer people may have frozen to death in the UK, but how many more ppl died from increasingly destructive storms and the spread of tropical/zoonotic diseases alone?
I wouldn't even call it a subculture. It's as if hopelessness has infiltrated all our minds. Hopelessness is our worst enemy. If an enemy can make you believe you have already lost, then this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The theme of hopelessness, of resistance being futile (unless equipped with superpowers) is a very common theme in popular culture. We are being played.
From what I've seen, the internet is not at all an organic marketplace of ideas. That might exist in small circles. But the zeitgeist of the internet is a highly-manipulated environment being tugged at by many different actors - government, corporate, media, even religious orgs.
I don't think this is an organic freakout. It's one that is being plugged for specific ends.
This doomer sensibility actually enriches a whole host of different grifters. Various governments use the high fear quotient to enact policy that would make Karl Schmidt blush. Companies can sell goods and media and services catering to people who are hopeless (not to mention pharma, legal and illegal). Media gets clicks. And religion can ramp up the fear of God in folks.
Noah says it "serves no useful purpose", but that's only if you're not making money off of it, which is a great use case for fear and doom.
Hopelessness filtrates in the minds of those who are weak.
Those who believe in magic (the bad one) and expect miracles (bad ones) to reward they lack of action.
Yes, we are being played
However, I think more and more women and men understand how the media plays the game and how we now (we know) a negative headline sells more than a positive one.
One has to be ignorant or happy to be ignorant not to know how media outlets play the game and let the virus infect our souls, hearts and minds.
Do they think it's ineffective though? This is something that's bothered me on the Left for ages, whenever something good happens, they're quick to point out how it's 'barely making a dent' or 'we still have a long way to go'. There seems to be an underlying conviction - conscious or subconscious - that the more people think they're in a crisis, the more likely they are to act on it. So if you say 'actually gay rights are better than ever,' people will stop fighting and just give up. You need something to be a disaster to motivate them, otherwise they'll just accept the status quo.
This is obviously wrong in my opinion, but I really think people like Taylor Lorenz there think that way. Was it really an expression of despair, or was it a call to action? Or maybe just signalling that you're SUCH a good person that it OVERWHELMS you that there's injustice in the world. Or maybe, and I think this is a big part of it, a certain type of neurotic personality is overrepresented in the online media. But I do think on some level, the people tweeting these things think it IS motivational and stirring rather than hopeless.
What kind of action do you think she is calling for in her tweet? She should take her own advice and delete her social media accounts, which we at least save us from having to read that insane doomshit.
I agree with this completely. I’m constantly tying to tell my lefty and left of center friends that we live in an amazing moment and things have never been better and their arguments oftentimes boil down to “yeah but if we believe that then everyone will just give up”.
Which is complete bullshit, but it’s a real fear.
Just one example, did you know that we cured AIDS? Go say that in public, and people will get actually mad at you. But the crazy part is, we did. We did this amazing thing, and everyone wants to act like it didn’t happen. Why?
If Jonas Salk lived today he would be largely anonymous, and everyone who did know about him would claim that he didn’t *really* do anything.
Doomers have to reinforce their belief systems by regular pronouncements of doom especially when evidence goes against their world view. Otherwise things will be to them just too optimistic. It is an obvious case of hypochondria.
"In other words, climate change is definitely going to be a bumpy ride for the planet, and it’s not yet certain that we’ll defeat it in time to save ourselves from major harm. But recent progress is extremely encouraging." That's a rather trite dismissal for a risk that is near-existential, don't you think?
The best-available evidence currently suggests that we aren't on track for the absolute *worst* scenarios envisioned by Climate Change modelers (leading to a Hothouse Earth scenario and human extinction in our or our children's lifetimes), but celebrating that is like celebrating that an immanent nuclear war wouldn't finish off absolutely everyone. Look at the bright side! Even if it's, err, a little hard to do stuck underground in this sun-less bunker, eating farmed mushrooms and yeast...
Because the default case right now is that we're headed for 2.5C+ warming, which is (and I'll quote you here) literally *above* "the point where words like 'catastrophic' start to make sense." That's not a fringe Doomer theory. It's the working hypothesis of the IPCC. So, we're heading right toward catastrophic warming. What is encouraging about that, exactly? That it doesn't match the most hysterical pessimism of the Near-Term Human Extinction crowd?
The problem with your framing, as I see it, is the words "we're headed for". Yes, if we made literally no additional policy changes, then sure. But do you think that's even remotely likely? I don't. And if it's not remotely likely, then how does it make any sense to say that "we're headed for" that scenario??
It's not my framing. This is straight from the UN IPCC (Oct 2022 Report: https://unfccc.int/documents/619180), taking into account actually current pledges made by signatories to the 2015 Paris Agreement (with the important proviso that those policies will actually be borne out in reality, which, so far, they haven't even been, and which is something it's reasonable to be skeptical of, given the track record of previous multilateral treaties and especially Climate agreements): "UN analysts assessed all of the current climate pledges from the nearly 200 nations that have signed onto the 2015 Paris Agreement. The researchers determined that those commitments leave us woefully far from the agreed-upon goal to limit warming to 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit). Unless countries worldwide commit to much larger carbon emissions cuts, the planet is on track for between 2.1 and 2.9 degrees Celsius (3.8 to 5.2 degrees Fahrenheit) of average temperature increase by 2100."
So, yes, we are not getting there. There is (and always was and will be) potential scope for additional policy changes, given that we are modeling the devilishly complex effects of groups of human beings with agency on an Earth system we still don't entirely fathom. But the timeline for making those changes is running down quickly: upon the release of that Oct 2022 Report, Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of the UN Climate Change, said in a statement, “We are still nowhere near the scale and pace of emission reductions required to put us on track. National governments need to strengthen their climate action plans now and implement them in the next eight years." That's not Doomerism, but it's not exactly optimism, either.
The burning question now is not whether it's possible to hit the mark, but whether it's actually *likely.* It is now been four months after that 2022 Report, and, in many ways, the actual policy record and on-the-ground situation is worse, due to national responses to the Russian Ukraine invasion energy crisis which have prioritized financial subsidy for energy consumption over decarbonization and the bounce-back from COVID lockdowns. It's reasonable to wonder whether the world of 2024, as addled with recession, inflation, debt, unemployment, degrading demographics, geopolitical conflict, and other, seemingly more urgent challenges, will have more appetite than now to prioritize this "future problem." New policies like the IRA (and the EU "Green New Deal") are important green shoots, and we must certainly hope that they will help. But even taking them into account (and an optimistic scenario for actual execution against policy), we're still heading for 2C+ warming, which, again, is generally considered by Climate scientists to be "catastrophic."
Because we do live in the real world, though, we must remember that in the real world, change management is really hard (as the entire canon of Vaclav Smil continues to remind us). Even the optimal policy (which, again, we *currently do not have* and isn't on the immediate horizon), cannot speed up downstream effects of policy fast enough to meet any 5-10 year timeline. This is a decadal effort which has only really just started in earnest, with the lowest hanging decarbonization fruit being picked. The really hard thing is decarbonizing the built environment, agriculture, industrials, et al. To commercialize and scale. And how are we doing there? Just today, I read that steel production in the EU has actually gotten dirtier on aggregate, and the situation for European "green steel" more uncertain, especially prior to 2030 (before the policy effects of CBAM are expected to be more decisive). That's one data point in time, but it doesn't bode well for a systemic paradigm shift before 2030 of sufficient impact and scale to knock us down a notch from the current 2-3C trajectory.
The data suggests to me, at least, that we're really going to achieve systemic energy system change by the 2040-2050 timescale, when we've perhaps even already passed 2C+ warming, and are in the thick of "catastrophic" effects thereof. That's enough to stave off *DOOM* (depending on how we define that emotive and vague term), but still leaves us holding a very risky bag in the future. Which isn't to say that we give in to despair. But it is to say that we need to feel the f*cking urgency to do things very differently, like, yesterday!
I agree that we should feel a sense of urgency. 2030 commitments put us on track for 2.4C of warming, which would indeed be catastrophic (though not civilization-ending).
But net-zero pledges would put us on track for 1.7C or 1.8C. And so far, renewable energy deployment has beaten all forecasts, and emissions have come in below forecast levels. So I think we've got a good shot at holding warming below 2C, although 1.5C is probably no longer possible.
Buddy. Everybody who echoes your "actually things are fine" messaging on climate change (or Long COVID, or social safety programs) is downstream of the people saying that they shouldn't be bothered with at all.
There's only two options here: either shit's a big deal, or it ain't, and if you preach that it ain't a big deal then your fellow Americans are going to keep buying gas-guzzling SUVs.
Stop projecting your personal comfort on the world around you. I'm sure your life is wonderfully cozy; good job, good prospects, bully pulpit. Your dogshit take on Lorenz should probably have taken into account that she actually *does* deal with disability, which means her life isn't quite as cozy, and so she isn't going to be cavalier about the shit that you're cavalier about.
(Especially when you, personally, have made it clear that anybody avoiding infection with COVID (risk factors or no!) is a lunatic in your mind. We all saw that tweet you deleted.)
The key word there is "feel". You're supposed to "feel" bad, then feel good about feeling bad, and then not do anything at all.
The old Noah Smith from the 2000s (and maybe 2010s) would think this kind of argument is laughable, a symptom of the attitudes of the old-line economists that he was so skeptical about.
But, well, here we are, with the same "ACKTUALLY everything is amazing and will continue to remain so!" claims that helped create the 2008 financial crisis. Man works for Bloomberg, after all, he's basically that business journalist in Big Short who says "don't say bad things about the ratings agencies or I'll lose access."
You've displayed here a classic example of survivorship bias. And also a lack of appreciation for the number of times that human population has actually collapsed. The Black Death, our most familiar mass-casualty event, perhaps, killed off 25% of Europe's population. That's the equivalent of 187 million Europeans today. That would be experienced now, as then, as a total Apocalypse.
But reach back even further, to 70,000 years ago, when humanity was very nearly wiped out entirely, reduced to as few as 1,000 or 2,000 individuals! This lesser-known extinction event was caused by Climate Change (then the result of a catastrophic supervolcano eruption in Sumatra). We adapted--the remaining few of us, anyway--yes. But both of these events violently rent the destiny of humanity from its current course. Imagine today that Climate Change reduced us to perhaps a few million, clinging to the Earth's few remaining habitable places nearer to the poles. Would the precarious survival of a tiny percentage of us, amongst the mass death of most of the world's population and the total collapse of our global civilization and anything we consider "normal" be a win? I'd not expect that you or I, if we were among the wretched few survivors, would feel like it.
Now, that's an extreme (but hardly unimaginable or even unlikely!) result from runaway Climate Change that is within the range of possibilities considered by Climate scientists in the coming century or two. I'm not saying that it's likely that humanity will experience a mass extinction event on the scale of 70 millennia ago, or even half-a-millennia ago during the Black Death, but I am saying that it would be a knock-down blow that we wouldn't recover from for an entire era, if ever. The pestilence of the Black Death was in many ways a much more manageable challenge than anything Climate-related, since the pathogens eventually lapsed and no durable change to the environment left (like, presumably, the much milder pandemic of COVID will be). The three-quarters of Medieval European survivors even thrived in the vacuum left by their many dead, at least for a century.
By contrast, any Climate-degraded world wouldn't be like that. It took literally hundreds of thousands to millions of years for previous Climate Epochs to shift back again to some pre-life equilibrium. Recognizable human beings haven't even existed that long. So, perhaps, if humanity did endure through the end of the Holocene through a long Climate-ravaged age through to something more palatable, it wouldn't resemble anything more recognizable to us than our long-extinct Neandertal cousins are to us.
I don’t think runaway climate change is actually a thing. And any climate catastrophe on the scale you’re describing here is probably less likely than all-out nuclear annihilation or a Black Death scenario. Maybe none of these events are impossible and that’s just something we have to come to grips with. In any case, as Noah says, there is one annihilation that none of us will escape. Such is the human condition.
A whole legion of women might be looking at the supreme court, the post-Roe political landscape, and saying "uh, policy changes can make shit worse"
Or, yeah, anybody who's gay in Florida. The state whose governor might be president in a few years. You gonna tell the transpeople in Florida that they're just "doomers", or are you just saving that for people who got their lives wrecked by Long COVID and/or the kids orphaned by the acute version?
(Reminder that more people have died of Omicron than any other variant. Their kids and grandkids might disagree with your "anti-doomerism" about America's third-largest cause of death, and notorious cause of secondary strokes and heart attacks!)
If the train has left the station heading for a destination and the only way to slow it down is for someone to hopefully jump on board and change it, I'd say the train is still "headed for" the destination at the present moment.
If a train is currently moving at a certain speed, and people have been pulling on the brakes and slowing it down, then I don’t think it’s appropriate to just use the current speed in making predictions about how far it will go and how quickly it will get there.
It's not at all clear that that is analogous to our current situation.
If I had to torture the analogy to make it fit, I'd say someone has already jumped on board, is working the brakes but is having some problems and also we can see other people on the way to help out, but we're not 100% confident they'll make it in time.
Also, the train has many places between it's current location and it's crash to turn off.
Also, it's not super-clear what the crash will be like for the people on board.
This is an important point. At some point, if we keep heading on this trajectory, people will build more (and hopefully safer) nuclear plants as well. We can experiment with geo-engineering to buy us some time to convert more industries to carbon neutrality. If solar keeps getting cheaper we can use some of it to produce green hydrogen. There are quite a few additional things that the world can do to reduce CO2 emissions, and we've really only started down that road.
"Near-existential" meaning that it's not quite an existential risk for humanity (where the very survival of our species would be at risk), but close enough that we still can face devastating effects. Doomers might believe that humanity will actually go extinct now from the effects of Climate Change, and in our own expected lifetime. I don't agree, but I do think that we'll see extreme, almost unbelievably serious, effects by 2050, nevertheless.
Another way of putting this is that the risk is that Climate Change past a certain threshold (perhaps 2-3C warming) can lead this century to a "collapse," or a significant reduction in the human population and/or economic output. This might look like very uneven (and unjust) suffering and death in Tropical countries from famine, disease, natural disasters, etc., and desperate mass-migrations, political turmoil, financial crises, economic recessions, and systemic chaos elsewhere. Things will be quite serious in places like Croatia, Italy, Spain, and Greece, where conditions begin to approach the hottest parts of the Middle East today. But things will be much worse in places like Indonesia and Nigeria, leading to masses of people perishing or fleeing by any means possible to Northern places that don't want them to come. Such a future will make the various crises of 2020-2023 looking like the "good old times."
Believing this is, at this point, realistic. It's not "Doomerism." It matches the UN IPCC's current projections. It does make me sad and angry. But it doesn't make me fatalistic or passively despairing. We need to prepare for it now. Which means we need to take action and to believe that that action will, at the least, reduce the severity of this catastrophe and the suffering from it.
You are giving a typical doomer response here in saying a 2-3 degree warming will cause a population collapse or millions of people fleeing Indonesia or Nigeria. There is no good evidence that any of this is at all likely. We have already had over 1 degree of warming and no increase in climate disasters, famine of diseases (I must assume even climate doomers don’t think Covid is related to warming). Most warming will be in the upper latitudes and even there mostly on winter nights. Humans (yes even in Indonesia and Nigeria) will adapt to slowly rising temperatures instead of fleeing. Crop yields will increase with warmer temperatures in northern grain growing regions and benefit from higher CO2 (with the exception of maize, but much of that is now wasted making ethanol for fuel additives) and unless climate doomers are successful in eliminating fossil fuel use fertilizers will continue to be effective. If Croatia gets as hot as Lebanon, how is that a crisis?
"Typical Doomer response" is just unserious ad hominem. I will address your points one-by-one:
1/ "There is no good evidence that any of this is at all likely." The best evidence on Climate Change and its impacts is regularly aggregated by the UN IPCC, which publishes a (conservative) consensus of global science on the matter signed off on by every signatory government. Various departments of the UN, World Bank, EU, US and other national governments, and specialist universities, non-profits, and thinktanks have run sophisticated projections from this science to model likely future migration patterns. And, indeed, we're already seeing increasing migration from Climate-stressed regions (like Nigeria, where I used to live and saw the on-the-ground effects firsthand). It's no coincidence that Nigeria's Sahel north is having so much instability right now, causing people by their hundreds of thousands to brave the trek across the Sahara to unwelcoming locations north. They are joined by totally unprecedented waves of people from other Climate-stressed and impoverished countries all over the African continent, as anyone at the UN Migrations Agency or European border agencies could tell you. There were over 40 million migrants from Africa, overall, in 2020, double the number as there were in 2000. This doesn't count even greater volume of regional migrants or internally displaced, which has also spiked in regent years. And why else now, when Africa is actually appreciably wealthier and far more peaceful than it was in the decades prior?
2/ "We have already had over 1 degree of warming and no increase in climate disasters, famine of diseases (I must assume even climate doomers don’t think Covid is related to warming)." You're totally ignoring the latest IPCC Report which tackled this very subject in the affirmative and, more immediately, the evidence before your eyes that serious weather events have already very sharply increased in the last decade. COVID, like other (apparently) zoonotic infectious diseases, could have been made more likely from humanity encroaching upon wildlife (e.g. via a "wet market" in Wuhan), but, no, it's not the best example. Better are the accelerating and intensifying natural disasters drawing on the increased warmth and moisture in the air from Climate Change, such as "1-in-400-year" flooding events now happening twice in a lifetime, massive hurricanes, "unprecedented" wildfires, and the like.
3/ "Most warming will be in the upper latitudes and even there mostly on winter nights." That's true, but that ignores the salient fact that many regions of the world are already near enough to the limit of human habitability that even "just" a few degrees of wet-bulb temperature surpasses what the human body, our staple crops, and even our hard infrastructure can handle. More importantly, those already-warmed regions happen to be the most inhabited regions on the planet, including the Indian Subcontinent, Eastern China, and Southeast Asia. Also, even in cold places, the effects of warming are catastrophic, causing glacial retreat, wildfires, and mass extinctions. A large percentage of humanity (including much of Asia around the Himalayas and the Western United States) depends upon those cold places for freshwater, as their river systems are fed from glacier melt.
4/ "Crop yields will increase with warmer temperatures in northern grain growing regions and benefit from higher CO2." The actual breadbaskets of the world will be (and are already being) negatively affected by even mild levels of Climate Change. The inconvenient fact is that there is more total fertile land in places that will get too hot, parched, flood-prone, or otherwise affected by Climate Change than potential future growing regions in Scandinavia, the Canadian Arctic, or Russian Siberia, where longer growing seasons don't make up for less arable land, poorer soils, and dimmer sunlight. As we saw during this last year already, the world is already extremely dependent upon just a few "breadbaskets" (including in eastern Ukraine and southern Russia). Nor is there much land period in the southern half of the world, either, dominated as it is by water. There is no viable alternative to Iowa's hyper-productive cornfields or to California's uniquely abundant Central Valley to make up any declines in crop yields (which the US is already seeing). And how will the world replace the productivity of places like Brazil, India, China, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, all top producers of grain and all of them right in the path of the worst effects of Climate Change? To make matters worse, global food production may have to double by 2050 just to feed all the new people the world will be hosting, (presumably at higher living standards than now). So even without Climate-related reductions in crop yields, we would have to pull a second Green Revolution out of the hat. Neither Croatia nor Lebanon produce enough food to feed themselves now and they're both irrelevant to the global food situation. But if, for example, California suddenly couldn't grow what it does now because the generation-long drought affecting the American West continues and worsens, that, alone, would cause a major food crisis. Now aggregate that across all the vulnerable arable land in the world and you'll, indeed, have a crisis.
Sharing this bad news might seem like Doomerism, but it's just the reality. None of it "dooms" us. We'll survive... most of us, anyway. But it does totally overturn our conception of "normal" and causes major strains for our globalized, industrialized, high-consumption global civilization that has thrived in the late years of a 10,000-year period of ideal Climate for human flourishing. That's over and we have to adapt. Adapting starts with facing facts.
“Increase in climate migration” is very different from “drastic decrease in human population”. There’s a lot of evidence for the former. I don’t believe the IPCC has given any reason to believe the latter.
Given the various uncertainties about the future course of Climate Change and the varying impact of the human response thereto (both in terms of mitigation and adaptation), the IPCC has long used a scenario-projection model. The most likely scenarios have us heading toward 2-3C warming, under current policies and pledges. That's a scenario that Climate scientists consider "catastrophic," but what does that word actually mean? What does "drastic" mean? According to the IPCC, it means a collapse of certain essential ecosystems (the Amazon, coral reefs, etc.), a major decline in crop yields, an exponential increase in extreme weather events, and sea-level rise. The knock-on effects of those include increased food insecurity, malnutrition, and famine; political instability and violent conflict; and increased incidence, morbidity, and mortality from infectious diseases (exacerbated by malnutrition, especially in the case of diarrhoeal ones); and desperate volumes of displacement and (perilous) migration. That is to say rather euphemistically: "Any increase in global warming is projected to affect human health, with primarily negative consequences (high confidence)." Or, more bluntly, a lot more suffering and death, especially in already vulnerable places like Africa, the Middle East, South/East Asia, and Central America.
But how much, exactly? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Especially when we get closer to 3C warming. Let's take one variable in isolation: heat-related excess mortality. "...warmer regions, such as the central and southern parts of America or Europe, and especially southeast Asia, would experience a sharp surge in heat-related impacts and extremely large net increases, with the net change at the end of the century ranging from 3·0% (−3·0 to 9·3) in Central America to 12·7% (−4·7 to 28·1) in southeast Asia under the highest emission scenario." Almost 13% excess mortality in SE Asia from heat, alone, is pretty drastic, no? And that's just *one* cause in a multivariate series of "primarily negative consequences to human health." It's not even the biggest likely cause of increased illness and death from Climate Change, which will presumably come as a result of poverty, malnutrition/famine, disease, war/civil conflict, and other such "indirect impacts."
Now, that excess mortality estimation, like most I can find, is extrapolating from the highest-emission IPCC scenario RCP8.5. That "pathway" is not currently considered the likeliest outcome and was designed at the time as a worst-case-scenario, worse even than "business-as-usual." In reality, we are more likely heading to somewhere between a RCP4.5 and RCP6.0 pathway, which is not great news, either. From what we know about direct and indirect impacts of Climate Change, there will be "significant" increased mortality, especially in already-vulnerable regions and populations. When does the volume of those excess mortalities become a "crisis," a "catastrophe," or "devastating?" At 5%, 15%, or 50% excess mortality? That's a subjective question. COVID has caused, perhaps, 15 million or more excess mortalities in 3 years, even with massive public health and pharmacological interventions. That's far less than 1% (or even 0.01%) excess mortality. And yet it's been experienced as an unprecedented, world-historical crisis. After 2015 and again in 2022, Europe hosted a few million refugees fleeing wars on its peripheries. Both times, this was generally considered a "migration crisis." Even under lower-emissions Climate Change pathways, researchers expect many times that number to seek shelter elsewhere.
I was going into high school when "The Limits of Growth" was published. I bought a copy in high school (free pdfs didn't exist then) and read it. That was basically a modern version of Malthus' work. https://www.clubofrome.org/ltg50/
Parts of it stood up well, but I question modelling efforts where mechanisms of problems turn out to be different than assumed in the model. The good news is that we are tracking something like their standard model, not their worst case.
Similarly, with current climate change models there appears to be enough action to reduce the impacts from worst case. It takes time. For example, Putin is likely to do more to de-petroleum the world than any global leader photoshoot will. Europe is unlikely to want to be tied to Putin or any other single source of hydrocarbons, so I expect to see a major sustainable energy push there over the next decade (this year is basically an emergency response). Similarly, the past year was reminding Americans that gas prices can and will go up a lot at random times. There will be more focus on fuel efficiency and future EVs.
Energy transitions take about two decades from the point where they have 20% market saturation until they get to about 90%. EVs are not at 20% yet, but are likely to be in the next handful of years. Crises, such as wars, tend to occur that act as accelerants during that couple of decades. Examples of energy transitions include horse to ICE vehicles. WW I was a major accelerant, so by the 1920s ICE vehicles were common and horses had generally vanished. In 1900 they were rich people's experiments. Another example is manufactured gas from coal. This was the dominant source of lighting and cooking fuels in urban areas from mid 1800s until early 1950s. WW II accelerated natural gas production and construction of pipelines. Every town in the US had an MGP plant in 1940. The last one shut down in 1965. Similarly, the Great Depression and WW II greatly expanded hydro-electric power generation in North America. Dam building continued into the 1970s and then stopped.
People overestimate the importance of past trends and underestimate the propensity for rapid change once tipping points are reached. I think that is where a lot of the depression comes from because extrapolation of past trends is often wrong but people don't realize that it is wrong.
Similarly, the potential for seemingly unrelated but "simple" factors to change trajectories are often ignored. For example, the lack of affordable housing in much of the country can be resolved pretty quickly if NIMBY zoning practices are liberalized. Displaced climate refugees from places like the coasts could then be quickly and easily accommodated. That will take a reckoning at the societal level that usually requires a tipping point for change to occur, but when it happens it is fast (e.g. creation of suburbs after Interstate system built).
BTW - my big fear about greenhouse gas emissions is ocean acidification - that would be disastrous for ocean ecosystems and would likely to be a planetary extinction event. Few people outside the science community are talking about that. I think most everything else from climate change can be accommodated, although it would be tumultuous. But the entire 19th and 20th centuries were tumultuous in the absence of climate change impacts and we survived.
Not only this, but methane levels are rising and seem to be rising at an increasing rate. This feedback loop is what terrifies me. I would be open to a good debunking if anyone give me one, because once it sets in I don’t really see how we stop it.
You are reciting the same doomer hyperbole that Noah takes Lorenz to account for and sound as ridiculous as she does. There are no IPCC findings that say there is any existential threat from any probable scenario, and they are themselves ridiculously pessimistic.
My issue with Doomerism is several of the most prolific writers in that genre, if we can call it that, often don't include statistics to back up their claims. I also suspect at least a few of them found a lot more success/views/money with these extremely negative outlook pieces, especially on places like Medium and Substack, and started focusing and churning out these essays almost exclusively.
Great post as always but there was a follow up tweet where she admits there haven't been any better points of US history she would rather live through, it's all just bad vibes. I think there's a real chance her job of spending all day on social media is making her borderline mentally ill, people have gone from venting to friends about whatever to making any moment of unhappiness into a world ending crisis level event so that they can get some likes
Feb 22, 2023·edited Feb 22, 2023Liked by Noah Smith
Yes since I think it would be cured by Logging Off, although I meant more like delusional rather then depressed since she seems to keep jumping on random people on twitter if they say covid isn't the new HIV or similar
I'm appalled by the number of intelligent people who apparently think that because there's climate change, it might be unethical and/or pointless to have children.
I hope most of the people who talk about this are just virtue-signaling, but I'm sure some of them are serious. How are they going to feel in 2040, when the problem will be visibly on its way to being solved but it will be too late for them to change their minds?
It's especially weird when you consider that the carbon footprint of having kids is likely to be small because by the time they're adults, emissions will be much lower because of all the progress that will be made by then.
There is also the question of who are you even saving the planet for if nobody has kids?
More people means faster growth and progress. People who really believe having children will doom the planet can do their part in improving the gene pool by living up to their beliefs. They probably wouldn’t adopt children either, but that may also be for the best.
I don't think it works like that. These people tend to be highly intelligent, which ought to mean that in general they're wrong about fewer things than the average American. (They're disproportionately likely to be wrong about this particular thing, not because they're stupid but because it's a culturally reinforced belief in some circles.)
So apart from the fact that people who want kids should usually have kids, removing climate doomers from the gene pool isn't even good eugenics. They just need to get their heads straight.
This is a little bit of an aside, but as someone who is very much not a doomer, your statement that "almost all of us are going to [die] without accomplishing at least some of the stuff we wanted to do," jumped out at me.
While I would prefer to live another 50 years, if I died tomorrow, there is very little that I would regret not accomplishing or doing. My personal goals were/are basically to get married, have a kid and maybe become a judge. I've accomplished the first two (as most people who want to do manage). The third is kind of just a bonus if I manage it and not something I will regret in any way if I fail.
When it comes to national or world (or even state or local) affairs, while I tend to be more optimistic about these things than most, there are certainly things I would prefer to see changed. At the same time, I would hardly put any of these things in the "things I want to do/accomplish," largely because I have little sense that I have any agency at these scales. I'm not going to solve, or even make a significant dent in climate change, or toxic partisanship or Russia's invasion of Ukraine. I'm probably not even going to make a dent in my Town's anti-development stance. Admittedly, I'm not trying very hard on any of these fronts, but I tend to believe that, even if put my full effort into any one of these causes, I'm not going to make a dent. For some people this seems to lead to a nihilistic downward spiral. At least for me, it leads to a nihilistic contentment - why get upset about not being able to change something I can't change, might as well get upset about not being able to flap my arms and fly.
I'll say my wife is just the opposite, she has a lot of things she wants or wishes she could accomplish in life. She also tends to be depressed.
I wonder how much of the much-discussed depressed youth comes from believing you can change things and then being unable to do so. Twitter certainly give you the sense you can change things while really not providing most people with the ability to do so.
For as long as I can remember, decades now, it has been cool to be cynical. Being cynical was 'woke' before 'woke', a signal that you understood the world more incisively than the madding crowd.
As we know, half of Rushmore suffered clinical depression (Lincoln, Roosevelt) and it didn’t deter them from moving forward with progressive policies and ideas. So many manic depressives, e.g. Hemingway and Fitzgerald and the so-called “Lost Generation.” Depression is as American as apple pie. Thankfully, society has progressively bleached the stigmata of depression.
Important post I've been meaning to research myself. Interestingly, I posted a 20-sec. TikTok two months ago about how suicidal language has gotten out of control and it has over 750K likes and 4M views. Not only does the data show promise, but the emotional fatigue people have, the self-defeating behaviors, and especially the lack of emotional resilience is one of the biggest issues we face. With so much progress around our basic needs being met, people have too much time to focus on what they don't have; it'll increasingly be a problem as we develop.
Feb 22, 2023·edited Mar 7, 2023Liked by Noah Smith
I was a bit of a doomer during the Trump presidency through the beginning of Covid – made it difficult to put effort into working on challenging and meaningful problems when I thought we were destined to fail anyways.
It’s a form of masochism, and numbs out your sense of agency. “If we’re doomed to fail either way then I have no duty to help create solutions.” At the same time, no agency/duty also makes you feel like you have no control, creating a positive feedback loop into doomerism.
An interesting thing about OSHA regulations about workplace safety, including hazardous waste workers is that the priority is engineered environments to reduce hazardous conditions. The use of PPE, like hazmat suits and respirators (masks), is viewed as a failure to engineer a safe worker environment.
Early in Covid (April 2020) it was clear this was an airborne respiratory disease. There was lots of "learned helplessness" going on and the official government communications were largely useless, because it was all medical doctors who typically operate in environments that are already engineered to be relatively safe workplaces (hospitals). It was when the those engineered safe spaces were overwhelmed that the medical staff ran into trouble and had to really only on PPE.
The environmental engineers who deal with indoor air quality were producing really good advice by spring 2020 but they were not invited to the endless press conferences where extremely confusing advice about masks etc. was being discussed. Based on my reading of the air quality folks, I exerted my own control by figuring out how to engineer our spaces for safety using ventilation and filtration. Masks were a last resort.
Unfortunately, the energy efficiency push has made much of US housing very poorly ventilated, so filtration is absolutely necessary for protection against airborne respiratory disease, so we worked on supplying that in our house and my wife's classroom. I have never gotten Covid and my wife has only had it once despite working in a classroom since October 2020. We have had no cases of transmission of Covid in our house. We occasionally wear masks in settings where there is likely to be a hazard, but not often - we use a CO2 monitor to monitor those environments.
Gathering real, scientific information and putting it into an actionable framework is key to achieving agency. While we must have society fixes for things (e.g. vaccines, national defense), there is a lot we can do at the individual level to help our own situation. A lot of people taking steps to grow native plants in their yards and cut back on fertilizer and pesticide use can make a major impact at the societal scale https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/meet-ecologist-who-wants-unleash-wild-backyard-180974372/.
We have to teach people not to become paralyzed and to figure out how to have agency.
Many years ago I was reading an author I disagreed with a fair amount, both of us being roughly conservatives. His name is Russell Kirk. At that time, almost all conservatives like Kirk were announcing the imminent end of civilization. In this one place I can't remember or find again, Kirk said that there was nothing to worry about the 60s, it was just part of the ebb and flow, back and forth, that was always our situation in society as history rolled along, sometimes merrily, sometimes not. Wherever I got it, that's been my belief ever since.
I also remind myself that when I was kid, I learned Blacks couldn't go into various places and that people tried to exterminate my religion from the face of the Earth just a few years earlier. That seemed a much scarier world and always has. There are always tons of people expecting the end of days. In fact, the First Christians did. Lots of them still around today. Go figure. We're not really that smart. When we do go kaputt we'll be the last to know.
Fantastic piece. Thank you.
One point I would like to add is that we do harm when our response to risks is excessive.
My favourite example is fear of radioactivity from nuclear power plants and their waste. Our regulatory regime treats a life lost to exposure to radioactivity from nuclear energy and its waste as being 100 to 10,000 times more valuable than a life lost to air pollution from burning fossil fuels and biofuels. Because of this we made nuclear power so expensive and unpopular in the 1980's that we stopped building new reactors, and instead built fossil fuel (mainly coal) powered reactors. This has resulted in many millions of avoidable deaths every year and has dramatically accelerated climate change. Despite the fact that nuclear energy, including the older reactors built under the previous regulatory regimes, have turned out to be the safest form of reliable energy, those regulations have never been made more rational. We could decarbonise much faster and have much cheaper electricity if we make regulations more reasonable. Fear stops us.
We are now treating anthropogenic climate change as being such a serious risk that we are seriously considering policies which will kill millions of people, by increasing energy poverty and slowing economic growth in low and middle income countries. This is nuts as the current projections indicate a minimal if any increase in mortality from warming. While more will die from extreme heat, fewer will die from extreme cold - which currently kills far more people than extreme heat, especially in low and middle income countries. In the past 20 years warming in the UK has resulted in 500,000 fewer deaths!
The out-of-proportion fear of nuclear waste and accidents is one of the most unfortunate developments regarding environmental protection.
Nuclear power is a scalable, geography independent way to make electricity generation, central heating and process heat production CO2-neutral. France mostly replaced carbon based fuels in its electricity generation by the 90s. The whole developed world could have done this, especially if promising nuclear research projects had been continued and economics of scale been used.
Instead, countries like Germany (where I come from) perhaps (!) achieve this goal in the 2030s while spending a lot more money on the transition process.
A major problem with nuclear power is that its economics and politics are mismatched: economically it requires state backing (like in France) but politically it is supported mostly by right-wing free-marketeers.
Margaret Thatcher's government wanted to built 10 new PWR power stations, but only one of them (Sizewell B) was actually built.
True. Best environment for nuclear power is state backed (low interest rate) coupled with a 3 decades energy plan.
> My favourite example is fear of radioactivity from nuclear power plants and their waste. Our regulatory regime treats a life lost to exposure to radioactivity from nuclear energy and its waste as being 100 to 10,000 times more valuable than a life lost to air pollution from burning fossil fuels and biofuels. Because of this we made nuclear power so expensive and unpopular in the 1980's that we stopped building new reactors,
I find your "favourite example" unconvincing. It seems to get causality backwards (surely nuclear power becoming unpopular would PRECEDE tighter regulation; do everyday people routinely pay close attention to the minutiae of nuclear-power regulations and form their preferences based on that?), ignores that US nuclear power was already becoming more expensive in the 1970's, and ignores that nuclear power also got more expensive in FRANCE as it EXPANDED nuclear power (https://grist.org/nuclear/2011-04-06-does-nuclear-power-have-a-negative-learning-curve/).
> While more will die from extreme heat, fewer will die from extreme cold - which currently kills far more people than extreme heat, especially in low and middle income countries. In the past 20 years warming in the UK has resulted in 500,000 fewer deaths!
Using the UK as the only concrete example in the context of "low and middle income countries" goes beyond cherry-picking, it's an outright bait & switch. Though choosing the UK is, to be sure, a cherry pick too. It's about 55 degrees north of the equator. (For comparison, Alaska's capital is 58 degrees north.) Gee, wonder why warming might have accompanied fewer deaths.
Yes of course irrational fear of radioactivity made nuclear power unpopular and drove the tighter regulations. However the tighter regulations reinforced the view that radioactivity was very dangerous and actually did enormous harm. Leaks of radioactivity that were in reality almost harmless, such as Three Mile Island or Fukushima, had a profound impact almost entirely through fear. All the harm following Fukushima and Three Mile Island and most of the harm following Chornobyl was the result of fear. That includes the evacuations. This was unnecessary for Fukushima and killed hundreds of people. It was far larger than needed for Chornobyl.
Now that we know that nuclear power is extremely safe, it has become unpopular amongst policymakers because of its high costs. We should be making the regulation more rational and evidence-based.
Extreme cold kills around 9 times more than extreme heat around the globe, especially in low and middle income countries. See here for a recent study of the global impact. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00081-4/fulltext
Thanks for the link to some scholarly research (better late than never).
> All the harm following Fukushima [...] was the result of fear.
No, I don't believe that.
> That includes the evacuations.
No, I still don't believe it. Studies modeling I-131, Cs-134, & Cs-137 releases (http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/TenHoeveEES12.pdf) and Cs-134 & Cs-137 releases (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412013002808) from Fukushima estimate the resulting cancer deaths at somewhere in the triple figures. (Not to mention the non-fatal cancer morbidity.)
> Now that we know that nuclear power is extremely safe, it has become unpopular amongst policymakers because of its high costs. We should be making the regulation more rational and evidence-based.
Of course we should make regulation "more rational" (a glittering generality). That evades the question of whether nuclear-power regulations are the main reason for nuclear power's expense. If they are, I want to see an explanation of that given that nuclear power got massively more expensive in other countries, not just the US. If they aren't, then a whiny nuclear industry (and its online street team of volunteer PR personnel) is scapegoating regulations for the industry's own costs.
US regulations on radioactivity have been adopted globally, including the safety limit of 1 mSv/year for nuclear plants and 0.04 mSv/year for nuclear waste.
These limits are irrational as they are so much lower that the lowest level of radioactivity shown to cause harm in the real world. This is 100 mSv/year at which dose an increase in mortality of 1% can be measured.
This can be compared with air pollution (PM2.5 um particles) where the safety limit is set at the level which is associates with a 2% increase in mortality, rather than 100 to 2500 times below it.
Despite these safety standards, construction of nuclear reactors is affordable in Russia and China where regulators are more reasonable in applying the standards, unlike the NRA.
In any case I don't think it is my job to persuade someone who is clearly anti-nuclear to change their mind. That is incredibly difficult and cannot be done with evidence.
It's less a matter of persuading me, more a matter of aligning your beliefs with the best available evidence and making them internally consistent.
I haven't bashed nuclear power here, simply cited inconvenient observations that suggest your beliefs are erroneous or inconsistent. For example: you assert that "US regulations on radioactivity have been adopted globally", then assert that nuclear-power construction is nonetheless affordable in Russia and China, smoothing over this demonstration that the regulations aren't so punishing with a handwave about Russia and China being "where regulators are more reasonable" — meanwhile I cite learning-curve data and the primary scholarly literature.
The regulations adopted globally are the safety limits that I mentioned. How they are imposed varies. One can apply the limits incredibly strictly, as in the USA, or less strictly as in Russia and China. A lot of it is to do with balancing benefits versus risks. In the USA there is an independent regulator, the NRA, which takes these limits literally and seriously. More importantly its primary incentive is preventing any accident and any release of radioactivity. If this means applying regulations that make reactors economically unsustainable is of no concern to it. It has no obligation to enable these reactors to be built. A further problem in the USA is the application of ALAR, which means if that as soon as reactors become profitable and seriously competitive with other forms of energy generation, they are obliged to use those profits to further increase safety. This is because it is ALWAYS possible to further reduce the risk of any leak. So ALAR means nuclear reactors can never be allowed to become cheaper than other sources of energy. When you combine this approach with the time it takes to get permission to build a reactor and complete it you introduce the need for repeated design changes, imposed by the NRA. As anyone with construction experience knows, this drives up the costs of construction. It also makes it very difficult to gain experience with construction of the same design. This experience is what drive down costs in France, Russia, China and South Korea.
The new regulations developed by the NRA to build small modular reactors are so demanding that they are likely to be impossible to build. It would be sad to see the USA left behind here with China and Russia gaining control and dominance of nuclear energy. Given that China already dominates supply chains for renewables and batteries the USA will be in serious trouble strategically.
And people like you and Mark Jacobsen will be responsible.
Mark Jacobsen has been discredited, especially with respect to modelling.
You can prove literally anything in a modelling study if you fiddle with the assumptions and parameters. He is notorious for doing this and no-one really takes him seriously anymore.
The consensus view of the UN reports on Fukushima concluded that the is no evidence that any harm was done by radioactivity per se, and it is not expected that any harm will be done. This involved numerous scientist with the appropriate expertise. If you want to read a credible study on radioactivity here is one.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2017.1070
This is an extract:
"(f) The Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident
A number of early emergency workers at the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant received high doses which produced tissue reactions and 28 early deaths. The long-term health impacts are contested. There is consensus on two major health impacts: thyroid cancers caused by high levels of exposure of children to radioactive iodine, and ill-effects to mental health caused by widespread fear of potential risks and social disruption. There is emerging evidence on the risk of leukaemia among recovery workers and those risks are broadly in line with what is expected from the LSS. At present, there is little convincing evidence of other radiation-associated effects in recovery workers or the wider public.
(g) The Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant accident
The Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant accident has caused substantial ill-health through the effects of the evacuations, continued displacement and fear of radiation. It is unclear if there will be a detectable excess in thyroid cancer in the coming years. No other discernible increase in ill-health attributable to radiation exposure is expected in either emergency workers or members of the public."
> Mark Jacobsen has been discredited, especially with respect to modelling.
You ignore one of the two studies I link, then make a generic statement about one author of the other study being "discredited" with no evidence while misspelling his name. Come on.
> You can prove literally anything in a modelling study if you fiddle with the assumptions and parameters.
That's a truism I can turn around on you: your own blithe claim about "All the harm" is either based on no modeling, or based on modeling that must itself rely on assumptions. (And because you gave no references to the primary literature, your own underlying assumptions are far less transparent than those of me or Jacobson or anyone else.)
> The consensus view of the UN reports on Fukushima concluded that the is no evidence that any harm was done by radioactivity per se, and it is not expected that any harm will be done. This involved numerous scientist with the appropriate expertise. If you want to read a credible study on radioactivity here is one.
> https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2017.1070
That's only debatably a study. It's a summary statement, an unsystematic review. As for its credibility, if I trace the source for the summary paragraph about Fukushima you quote (paragraph 79 in appendix A), it's on page 9 of appendix B, and it is, in toto, "Authors’ summary.". That is unconvincing, especially since appendix B nowhere mentions the names of ANY of the researchers I cited (Ten Hoeve, Jacobson, Evangeliou, Balkanski, Cozic, Møller), not even to impugn or dismiss them. Your "credible study" rather appears to blank out a relevant slice of the primary literature.
Here is a critique of one of Mark Jacobsons notorious modelling studies. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1610381114
> https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2017.1070
You are being unreasonable. Appendix B had a large number of references to relevant studies backing up the points made, including the comprehensive UN report on the health impacts on the accident (ref 456 - see below for link), which itself reviewed numerous studies. The fact that the final summary paragraph does not also have citations is perfectly normal. Consider all the references in section to back up this summary.
Your dismissal of this comprehensive body of work on such trivial grounds is a clear reflection of your bias.
*
https://www.unscear.org/docs/reports/2013/13-85418_Report_2013_Annex_A.pdf
Was it really fear-driven anti-nuclear campaigners that made nuclear power uneconomic after the mid-1970s, or was it the failures of the nuclear industry itself, along with a decade of stagnant electrical power demand and high interest rates (which disproportionately hurt nuclear because its costs are so front-loaded) followed by two more decades of cheap natural gas?
Indeed one of the biggest factors in making nuclear power unpopular in the US was that many utilities had borrowed vast sums of money to fund nuclear projects (some of which were cancelled due to falling demand for electrical power) and when debt service costs skyrocketed they tried to get it back from consumers via higher prices.
"One point I would like to add is that we do harm when our response to risks is excessive."
We can do even more harm when our response is non-existent. In some ways, Doomerism an attempt to get more people to take things like climate change and COVID seriously. You noted that the move away from nuclear energy hastened climate change. Did it occur to you that the fossil fuel industries lobbied for a lot of the regulations that prevent building new reactors, knowing that nuclear energy was their biggest threat? You know, the same people now saying that we shouldn't "rush" into anything that might cost them money. Oil scientists/execs were aware of climate change in the 1960s, and Philip K. Dick was writing scifi about in the 1960s-70s, so it's not like we weren't aware we'd need new energy solutions.
And just like you noted that it's easier to count deaths from nuclear energy than from air pollution, it's harder to count deaths from heat than cold. 500k fewer people may have frozen to death in the UK, but how many more ppl died from increasingly destructive storms and the spread of tropical/zoonotic diseases alone?
And god forbid we consider forms of life other than humans in our predictions of climate-change consequences.
I wouldn't even call it a subculture. It's as if hopelessness has infiltrated all our minds. Hopelessness is our worst enemy. If an enemy can make you believe you have already lost, then this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The theme of hopelessness, of resistance being futile (unless equipped with superpowers) is a very common theme in popular culture. We are being played.
From what I've seen, the internet is not at all an organic marketplace of ideas. That might exist in small circles. But the zeitgeist of the internet is a highly-manipulated environment being tugged at by many different actors - government, corporate, media, even religious orgs.
I don't think this is an organic freakout. It's one that is being plugged for specific ends.
This doomer sensibility actually enriches a whole host of different grifters. Various governments use the high fear quotient to enact policy that would make Karl Schmidt blush. Companies can sell goods and media and services catering to people who are hopeless (not to mention pharma, legal and illegal). Media gets clicks. And religion can ramp up the fear of God in folks.
Noah says it "serves no useful purpose", but that's only if you're not making money off of it, which is a great use case for fear and doom.
indeed
negative headliners do produce more clicks and views
Absolutely. That is what I was hinting at as well.
Love your comment.
Yes, calling it a subculture is....
Hopelessness filtrates in the minds of those who are weak.
Those who believe in magic (the bad one) and expect miracles (bad ones) to reward they lack of action.
Yes, we are being played
However, I think more and more women and men understand how the media plays the game and how we now (we know) a negative headline sells more than a positive one.
One has to be ignorant or happy to be ignorant not to know how media outlets play the game and let the virus infect our souls, hearts and minds.
Agreed. Clausewitz for a good reason put the *will* at the very centre of On War.
Doomerism, often masked as realism, is bad.
Do they think it's ineffective though? This is something that's bothered me on the Left for ages, whenever something good happens, they're quick to point out how it's 'barely making a dent' or 'we still have a long way to go'. There seems to be an underlying conviction - conscious or subconscious - that the more people think they're in a crisis, the more likely they are to act on it. So if you say 'actually gay rights are better than ever,' people will stop fighting and just give up. You need something to be a disaster to motivate them, otherwise they'll just accept the status quo.
This is obviously wrong in my opinion, but I really think people like Taylor Lorenz there think that way. Was it really an expression of despair, or was it a call to action? Or maybe just signalling that you're SUCH a good person that it OVERWHELMS you that there's injustice in the world. Or maybe, and I think this is a big part of it, a certain type of neurotic personality is overrepresented in the online media. But I do think on some level, the people tweeting these things think it IS motivational and stirring rather than hopeless.
What kind of action do you think she is calling for in her tweet? She should take her own advice and delete her social media accounts, which we at least save us from having to read that insane doomshit.
I agree with this completely. I’m constantly tying to tell my lefty and left of center friends that we live in an amazing moment and things have never been better and their arguments oftentimes boil down to “yeah but if we believe that then everyone will just give up”.
Which is complete bullshit, but it’s a real fear.
Just one example, did you know that we cured AIDS? Go say that in public, and people will get actually mad at you. But the crazy part is, we did. We did this amazing thing, and everyone wants to act like it didn’t happen. Why?
If Jonas Salk lived today he would be largely anonymous, and everyone who did know about him would claim that he didn’t *really* do anything.
Doomers have to reinforce their belief systems by regular pronouncements of doom especially when evidence goes against their world view. Otherwise things will be to them just too optimistic. It is an obvious case of hypochondria.
Indeed, the sad part is that in the presence of evidence that the end is not near they keep going.
"In other words, climate change is definitely going to be a bumpy ride for the planet, and it’s not yet certain that we’ll defeat it in time to save ourselves from major harm. But recent progress is extremely encouraging." That's a rather trite dismissal for a risk that is near-existential, don't you think?
The best-available evidence currently suggests that we aren't on track for the absolute *worst* scenarios envisioned by Climate Change modelers (leading to a Hothouse Earth scenario and human extinction in our or our children's lifetimes), but celebrating that is like celebrating that an immanent nuclear war wouldn't finish off absolutely everyone. Look at the bright side! Even if it's, err, a little hard to do stuck underground in this sun-less bunker, eating farmed mushrooms and yeast...
Because the default case right now is that we're headed for 2.5C+ warming, which is (and I'll quote you here) literally *above* "the point where words like 'catastrophic' start to make sense." That's not a fringe Doomer theory. It's the working hypothesis of the IPCC. So, we're heading right toward catastrophic warming. What is encouraging about that, exactly? That it doesn't match the most hysterical pessimism of the Near-Term Human Extinction crowd?
The problem with your framing, as I see it, is the words "we're headed for". Yes, if we made literally no additional policy changes, then sure. But do you think that's even remotely likely? I don't. And if it's not remotely likely, then how does it make any sense to say that "we're headed for" that scenario??
It's not my framing. This is straight from the UN IPCC (Oct 2022 Report: https://unfccc.int/documents/619180), taking into account actually current pledges made by signatories to the 2015 Paris Agreement (with the important proviso that those policies will actually be borne out in reality, which, so far, they haven't even been, and which is something it's reasonable to be skeptical of, given the track record of previous multilateral treaties and especially Climate agreements): "UN analysts assessed all of the current climate pledges from the nearly 200 nations that have signed onto the 2015 Paris Agreement. The researchers determined that those commitments leave us woefully far from the agreed-upon goal to limit warming to 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit). Unless countries worldwide commit to much larger carbon emissions cuts, the planet is on track for between 2.1 and 2.9 degrees Celsius (3.8 to 5.2 degrees Fahrenheit) of average temperature increase by 2100."
So, yes, we are not getting there. There is (and always was and will be) potential scope for additional policy changes, given that we are modeling the devilishly complex effects of groups of human beings with agency on an Earth system we still don't entirely fathom. But the timeline for making those changes is running down quickly: upon the release of that Oct 2022 Report, Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of the UN Climate Change, said in a statement, “We are still nowhere near the scale and pace of emission reductions required to put us on track. National governments need to strengthen their climate action plans now and implement them in the next eight years." That's not Doomerism, but it's not exactly optimism, either.
The burning question now is not whether it's possible to hit the mark, but whether it's actually *likely.* It is now been four months after that 2022 Report, and, in many ways, the actual policy record and on-the-ground situation is worse, due to national responses to the Russian Ukraine invasion energy crisis which have prioritized financial subsidy for energy consumption over decarbonization and the bounce-back from COVID lockdowns. It's reasonable to wonder whether the world of 2024, as addled with recession, inflation, debt, unemployment, degrading demographics, geopolitical conflict, and other, seemingly more urgent challenges, will have more appetite than now to prioritize this "future problem." New policies like the IRA (and the EU "Green New Deal") are important green shoots, and we must certainly hope that they will help. But even taking them into account (and an optimistic scenario for actual execution against policy), we're still heading for 2C+ warming, which, again, is generally considered by Climate scientists to be "catastrophic."
Because we do live in the real world, though, we must remember that in the real world, change management is really hard (as the entire canon of Vaclav Smil continues to remind us). Even the optimal policy (which, again, we *currently do not have* and isn't on the immediate horizon), cannot speed up downstream effects of policy fast enough to meet any 5-10 year timeline. This is a decadal effort which has only really just started in earnest, with the lowest hanging decarbonization fruit being picked. The really hard thing is decarbonizing the built environment, agriculture, industrials, et al. To commercialize and scale. And how are we doing there? Just today, I read that steel production in the EU has actually gotten dirtier on aggregate, and the situation for European "green steel" more uncertain, especially prior to 2030 (before the policy effects of CBAM are expected to be more decisive). That's one data point in time, but it doesn't bode well for a systemic paradigm shift before 2030 of sufficient impact and scale to knock us down a notch from the current 2-3C trajectory.
The data suggests to me, at least, that we're really going to achieve systemic energy system change by the 2040-2050 timescale, when we've perhaps even already passed 2C+ warming, and are in the thick of "catastrophic" effects thereof. That's enough to stave off *DOOM* (depending on how we define that emotive and vague term), but still leaves us holding a very risky bag in the future. Which isn't to say that we give in to despair. But it is to say that we need to feel the f*cking urgency to do things very differently, like, yesterday!
I agree that we should feel a sense of urgency. 2030 commitments put us on track for 2.4C of warming, which would indeed be catastrophic (though not civilization-ending).
https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1591451459484553219
But net-zero pledges would put us on track for 1.7C or 1.8C. And so far, renewable energy deployment has beaten all forecasts, and emissions have come in below forecast levels. So I think we've got a good shot at holding warming below 2C, although 1.5C is probably no longer possible.
Buddy. Everybody who echoes your "actually things are fine" messaging on climate change (or Long COVID, or social safety programs) is downstream of the people saying that they shouldn't be bothered with at all.
There's only two options here: either shit's a big deal, or it ain't, and if you preach that it ain't a big deal then your fellow Americans are going to keep buying gas-guzzling SUVs.
Stop projecting your personal comfort on the world around you. I'm sure your life is wonderfully cozy; good job, good prospects, bully pulpit. Your dogshit take on Lorenz should probably have taken into account that she actually *does* deal with disability, which means her life isn't quite as cozy, and so she isn't going to be cavalier about the shit that you're cavalier about.
(Especially when you, personally, have made it clear that anybody avoiding infection with COVID (risk factors or no!) is a lunatic in your mind. We all saw that tweet you deleted.)
How does feeling a sense of urgency help if you're prevented from acting on it?
The key word there is "feel". You're supposed to "feel" bad, then feel good about feeling bad, and then not do anything at all.
The old Noah Smith from the 2000s (and maybe 2010s) would think this kind of argument is laughable, a symptom of the attitudes of the old-line economists that he was so skeptical about.
But, well, here we are, with the same "ACKTUALLY everything is amazing and will continue to remain so!" claims that helped create the 2008 financial crisis. Man works for Bloomberg, after all, he's basically that business journalist in Big Short who says "don't say bad things about the ratings agencies or I'll lose access."
It also assumes no ability to adapt which as humanity has shown again and again not the surest bet.
You've displayed here a classic example of survivorship bias. And also a lack of appreciation for the number of times that human population has actually collapsed. The Black Death, our most familiar mass-casualty event, perhaps, killed off 25% of Europe's population. That's the equivalent of 187 million Europeans today. That would be experienced now, as then, as a total Apocalypse.
But reach back even further, to 70,000 years ago, when humanity was very nearly wiped out entirely, reduced to as few as 1,000 or 2,000 individuals! This lesser-known extinction event was caused by Climate Change (then the result of a catastrophic supervolcano eruption in Sumatra). We adapted--the remaining few of us, anyway--yes. But both of these events violently rent the destiny of humanity from its current course. Imagine today that Climate Change reduced us to perhaps a few million, clinging to the Earth's few remaining habitable places nearer to the poles. Would the precarious survival of a tiny percentage of us, amongst the mass death of most of the world's population and the total collapse of our global civilization and anything we consider "normal" be a win? I'd not expect that you or I, if we were among the wretched few survivors, would feel like it.
Now, that's an extreme (but hardly unimaginable or even unlikely!) result from runaway Climate Change that is within the range of possibilities considered by Climate scientists in the coming century or two. I'm not saying that it's likely that humanity will experience a mass extinction event on the scale of 70 millennia ago, or even half-a-millennia ago during the Black Death, but I am saying that it would be a knock-down blow that we wouldn't recover from for an entire era, if ever. The pestilence of the Black Death was in many ways a much more manageable challenge than anything Climate-related, since the pathogens eventually lapsed and no durable change to the environment left (like, presumably, the much milder pandemic of COVID will be). The three-quarters of Medieval European survivors even thrived in the vacuum left by their many dead, at least for a century.
By contrast, any Climate-degraded world wouldn't be like that. It took literally hundreds of thousands to millions of years for previous Climate Epochs to shift back again to some pre-life equilibrium. Recognizable human beings haven't even existed that long. So, perhaps, if humanity did endure through the end of the Holocene through a long Climate-ravaged age through to something more palatable, it wouldn't resemble anything more recognizable to us than our long-extinct Neandertal cousins are to us.
I don’t think runaway climate change is actually a thing. And any climate catastrophe on the scale you’re describing here is probably less likely than all-out nuclear annihilation or a Black Death scenario. Maybe none of these events are impossible and that’s just something we have to come to grips with. In any case, as Noah says, there is one annihilation that none of us will escape. Such is the human condition.
A whole legion of women might be looking at the supreme court, the post-Roe political landscape, and saying "uh, policy changes can make shit worse"
Or, yeah, anybody who's gay in Florida. The state whose governor might be president in a few years. You gonna tell the transpeople in Florida that they're just "doomers", or are you just saving that for people who got their lives wrecked by Long COVID and/or the kids orphaned by the acute version?
(Reminder that more people have died of Omicron than any other variant. Their kids and grandkids might disagree with your "anti-doomerism" about America's third-largest cause of death, and notorious cause of secondary strokes and heart attacks!)
If the train has left the station heading for a destination and the only way to slow it down is for someone to hopefully jump on board and change it, I'd say the train is still "headed for" the destination at the present moment.
If a train is currently moving at a certain speed, and people have been pulling on the brakes and slowing it down, then I don’t think it’s appropriate to just use the current speed in making predictions about how far it will go and how quickly it will get there.
It's not at all clear that that is analogous to our current situation.
If I had to torture the analogy to make it fit, I'd say someone has already jumped on board, is working the brakes but is having some problems and also we can see other people on the way to help out, but we're not 100% confident they'll make it in time.
Also, the train has many places between it's current location and it's crash to turn off.
Also, it's not super-clear what the crash will be like for the people on board.
This is an important point. At some point, if we keep heading on this trajectory, people will build more (and hopefully safer) nuclear plants as well. We can experiment with geo-engineering to buy us some time to convert more industries to carbon neutrality. If solar keeps getting cheaper we can use some of it to produce green hydrogen. There are quite a few additional things that the world can do to reduce CO2 emissions, and we've really only started down that road.
Clearly you are a doomster. Good to get such a good example.
Certainly it's an example good enough that you don't muster an actual rebuttal.
Yup. Not needed.
I am not sure the risk is "near-existential"
Do you mean 'climate change' is not real?
English is my second language so I might be getting this wrong.
Love your comment so you know, however...
Climate change is a threat and big one and it is happening.
I live in Croatia and where is my winter?
People are outside enjoying the sun and that's good, but...
Winter has a reason and without that cold winter the ecosystem does things it should not.
Everyone is happy, but soon we will face the health consequences of the short winter
And that is just the beginning.
"Near-existential" meaning that it's not quite an existential risk for humanity (where the very survival of our species would be at risk), but close enough that we still can face devastating effects. Doomers might believe that humanity will actually go extinct now from the effects of Climate Change, and in our own expected lifetime. I don't agree, but I do think that we'll see extreme, almost unbelievably serious, effects by 2050, nevertheless.
Another way of putting this is that the risk is that Climate Change past a certain threshold (perhaps 2-3C warming) can lead this century to a "collapse," or a significant reduction in the human population and/or economic output. This might look like very uneven (and unjust) suffering and death in Tropical countries from famine, disease, natural disasters, etc., and desperate mass-migrations, political turmoil, financial crises, economic recessions, and systemic chaos elsewhere. Things will be quite serious in places like Croatia, Italy, Spain, and Greece, where conditions begin to approach the hottest parts of the Middle East today. But things will be much worse in places like Indonesia and Nigeria, leading to masses of people perishing or fleeing by any means possible to Northern places that don't want them to come. Such a future will make the various crises of 2020-2023 looking like the "good old times."
Believing this is, at this point, realistic. It's not "Doomerism." It matches the UN IPCC's current projections. It does make me sad and angry. But it doesn't make me fatalistic or passively despairing. We need to prepare for it now. Which means we need to take action and to believe that that action will, at the least, reduce the severity of this catastrophe and the suffering from it.
You are giving a typical doomer response here in saying a 2-3 degree warming will cause a population collapse or millions of people fleeing Indonesia or Nigeria. There is no good evidence that any of this is at all likely. We have already had over 1 degree of warming and no increase in climate disasters, famine of diseases (I must assume even climate doomers don’t think Covid is related to warming). Most warming will be in the upper latitudes and even there mostly on winter nights. Humans (yes even in Indonesia and Nigeria) will adapt to slowly rising temperatures instead of fleeing. Crop yields will increase with warmer temperatures in northern grain growing regions and benefit from higher CO2 (with the exception of maize, but much of that is now wasted making ethanol for fuel additives) and unless climate doomers are successful in eliminating fossil fuel use fertilizers will continue to be effective. If Croatia gets as hot as Lebanon, how is that a crisis?
"Typical Doomer response" is just unserious ad hominem. I will address your points one-by-one:
1/ "There is no good evidence that any of this is at all likely." The best evidence on Climate Change and its impacts is regularly aggregated by the UN IPCC, which publishes a (conservative) consensus of global science on the matter signed off on by every signatory government. Various departments of the UN, World Bank, EU, US and other national governments, and specialist universities, non-profits, and thinktanks have run sophisticated projections from this science to model likely future migration patterns. And, indeed, we're already seeing increasing migration from Climate-stressed regions (like Nigeria, where I used to live and saw the on-the-ground effects firsthand). It's no coincidence that Nigeria's Sahel north is having so much instability right now, causing people by their hundreds of thousands to brave the trek across the Sahara to unwelcoming locations north. They are joined by totally unprecedented waves of people from other Climate-stressed and impoverished countries all over the African continent, as anyone at the UN Migrations Agency or European border agencies could tell you. There were over 40 million migrants from Africa, overall, in 2020, double the number as there were in 2000. This doesn't count even greater volume of regional migrants or internally displaced, which has also spiked in regent years. And why else now, when Africa is actually appreciably wealthier and far more peaceful than it was in the decades prior?
2/ "We have already had over 1 degree of warming and no increase in climate disasters, famine of diseases (I must assume even climate doomers don’t think Covid is related to warming)." You're totally ignoring the latest IPCC Report which tackled this very subject in the affirmative and, more immediately, the evidence before your eyes that serious weather events have already very sharply increased in the last decade. COVID, like other (apparently) zoonotic infectious diseases, could have been made more likely from humanity encroaching upon wildlife (e.g. via a "wet market" in Wuhan), but, no, it's not the best example. Better are the accelerating and intensifying natural disasters drawing on the increased warmth and moisture in the air from Climate Change, such as "1-in-400-year" flooding events now happening twice in a lifetime, massive hurricanes, "unprecedented" wildfires, and the like.
3/ "Most warming will be in the upper latitudes and even there mostly on winter nights." That's true, but that ignores the salient fact that many regions of the world are already near enough to the limit of human habitability that even "just" a few degrees of wet-bulb temperature surpasses what the human body, our staple crops, and even our hard infrastructure can handle. More importantly, those already-warmed regions happen to be the most inhabited regions on the planet, including the Indian Subcontinent, Eastern China, and Southeast Asia. Also, even in cold places, the effects of warming are catastrophic, causing glacial retreat, wildfires, and mass extinctions. A large percentage of humanity (including much of Asia around the Himalayas and the Western United States) depends upon those cold places for freshwater, as their river systems are fed from glacier melt.
4/ "Crop yields will increase with warmer temperatures in northern grain growing regions and benefit from higher CO2." The actual breadbaskets of the world will be (and are already being) negatively affected by even mild levels of Climate Change. The inconvenient fact is that there is more total fertile land in places that will get too hot, parched, flood-prone, or otherwise affected by Climate Change than potential future growing regions in Scandinavia, the Canadian Arctic, or Russian Siberia, where longer growing seasons don't make up for less arable land, poorer soils, and dimmer sunlight. As we saw during this last year already, the world is already extremely dependent upon just a few "breadbaskets" (including in eastern Ukraine and southern Russia). Nor is there much land period in the southern half of the world, either, dominated as it is by water. There is no viable alternative to Iowa's hyper-productive cornfields or to California's uniquely abundant Central Valley to make up any declines in crop yields (which the US is already seeing). And how will the world replace the productivity of places like Brazil, India, China, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, all top producers of grain and all of them right in the path of the worst effects of Climate Change? To make matters worse, global food production may have to double by 2050 just to feed all the new people the world will be hosting, (presumably at higher living standards than now). So even without Climate-related reductions in crop yields, we would have to pull a second Green Revolution out of the hat. Neither Croatia nor Lebanon produce enough food to feed themselves now and they're both irrelevant to the global food situation. But if, for example, California suddenly couldn't grow what it does now because the generation-long drought affecting the American West continues and worsens, that, alone, would cause a major food crisis. Now aggregate that across all the vulnerable arable land in the world and you'll, indeed, have a crisis.
Sharing this bad news might seem like Doomerism, but it's just the reality. None of it "dooms" us. We'll survive... most of us, anyway. But it does totally overturn our conception of "normal" and causes major strains for our globalized, industrialized, high-consumption global civilization that has thrived in the late years of a 10,000-year period of ideal Climate for human flourishing. That's over and we have to adapt. Adapting starts with facing facts.
“Increase in climate migration” is very different from “drastic decrease in human population”. There’s a lot of evidence for the former. I don’t believe the IPCC has given any reason to believe the latter.
Given the various uncertainties about the future course of Climate Change and the varying impact of the human response thereto (both in terms of mitigation and adaptation), the IPCC has long used a scenario-projection model. The most likely scenarios have us heading toward 2-3C warming, under current policies and pledges. That's a scenario that Climate scientists consider "catastrophic," but what does that word actually mean? What does "drastic" mean? According to the IPCC, it means a collapse of certain essential ecosystems (the Amazon, coral reefs, etc.), a major decline in crop yields, an exponential increase in extreme weather events, and sea-level rise. The knock-on effects of those include increased food insecurity, malnutrition, and famine; political instability and violent conflict; and increased incidence, morbidity, and mortality from infectious diseases (exacerbated by malnutrition, especially in the case of diarrhoeal ones); and desperate volumes of displacement and (perilous) migration. That is to say rather euphemistically: "Any increase in global warming is projected to affect human health, with primarily negative consequences (high confidence)." Or, more bluntly, a lot more suffering and death, especially in already vulnerable places like Africa, the Middle East, South/East Asia, and Central America.
But how much, exactly? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Especially when we get closer to 3C warming. Let's take one variable in isolation: heat-related excess mortality. "...warmer regions, such as the central and southern parts of America or Europe, and especially southeast Asia, would experience a sharp surge in heat-related impacts and extremely large net increases, with the net change at the end of the century ranging from 3·0% (−3·0 to 9·3) in Central America to 12·7% (−4·7 to 28·1) in southeast Asia under the highest emission scenario." Almost 13% excess mortality in SE Asia from heat, alone, is pretty drastic, no? And that's just *one* cause in a multivariate series of "primarily negative consequences to human health." It's not even the biggest likely cause of increased illness and death from Climate Change, which will presumably come as a result of poverty, malnutrition/famine, disease, war/civil conflict, and other such "indirect impacts."
Now, that excess mortality estimation, like most I can find, is extrapolating from the highest-emission IPCC scenario RCP8.5. That "pathway" is not currently considered the likeliest outcome and was designed at the time as a worst-case-scenario, worse even than "business-as-usual." In reality, we are more likely heading to somewhere between a RCP4.5 and RCP6.0 pathway, which is not great news, either. From what we know about direct and indirect impacts of Climate Change, there will be "significant" increased mortality, especially in already-vulnerable regions and populations. When does the volume of those excess mortalities become a "crisis," a "catastrophe," or "devastating?" At 5%, 15%, or 50% excess mortality? That's a subjective question. COVID has caused, perhaps, 15 million or more excess mortalities in 3 years, even with massive public health and pharmacological interventions. That's far less than 1% (or even 0.01%) excess mortality. And yet it's been experienced as an unprecedented, world-historical crisis. After 2015 and again in 2022, Europe hosted a few million refugees fleeing wars on its peripheries. Both times, this was generally considered a "migration crisis." Even under lower-emissions Climate Change pathways, researchers expect many times that number to seek shelter elsewhere.
I was going into high school when "The Limits of Growth" was published. I bought a copy in high school (free pdfs didn't exist then) and read it. That was basically a modern version of Malthus' work. https://www.clubofrome.org/ltg50/
Parts of it stood up well, but I question modelling efforts where mechanisms of problems turn out to be different than assumed in the model. The good news is that we are tracking something like their standard model, not their worst case.
Similarly, with current climate change models there appears to be enough action to reduce the impacts from worst case. It takes time. For example, Putin is likely to do more to de-petroleum the world than any global leader photoshoot will. Europe is unlikely to want to be tied to Putin or any other single source of hydrocarbons, so I expect to see a major sustainable energy push there over the next decade (this year is basically an emergency response). Similarly, the past year was reminding Americans that gas prices can and will go up a lot at random times. There will be more focus on fuel efficiency and future EVs.
Energy transitions take about two decades from the point where they have 20% market saturation until they get to about 90%. EVs are not at 20% yet, but are likely to be in the next handful of years. Crises, such as wars, tend to occur that act as accelerants during that couple of decades. Examples of energy transitions include horse to ICE vehicles. WW I was a major accelerant, so by the 1920s ICE vehicles were common and horses had generally vanished. In 1900 they were rich people's experiments. Another example is manufactured gas from coal. This was the dominant source of lighting and cooking fuels in urban areas from mid 1800s until early 1950s. WW II accelerated natural gas production and construction of pipelines. Every town in the US had an MGP plant in 1940. The last one shut down in 1965. Similarly, the Great Depression and WW II greatly expanded hydro-electric power generation in North America. Dam building continued into the 1970s and then stopped.
People overestimate the importance of past trends and underestimate the propensity for rapid change once tipping points are reached. I think that is where a lot of the depression comes from because extrapolation of past trends is often wrong but people don't realize that it is wrong.
Similarly, the potential for seemingly unrelated but "simple" factors to change trajectories are often ignored. For example, the lack of affordable housing in much of the country can be resolved pretty quickly if NIMBY zoning practices are liberalized. Displaced climate refugees from places like the coasts could then be quickly and easily accommodated. That will take a reckoning at the societal level that usually requires a tipping point for change to occur, but when it happens it is fast (e.g. creation of suburbs after Interstate system built).
BTW - my big fear about greenhouse gas emissions is ocean acidification - that would be disastrous for ocean ecosystems and would likely to be a planetary extinction event. Few people outside the science community are talking about that. I think most everything else from climate change can be accommodated, although it would be tumultuous. But the entire 19th and 20th centuries were tumultuous in the absence of climate change impacts and we survived.
Not only this, but methane levels are rising and seem to be rising at an increasing rate. This feedback loop is what terrifies me. I would be open to a good debunking if anyone give me one, because once it sets in I don’t really see how we stop it.
You are reciting the same doomer hyperbole that Noah takes Lorenz to account for and sound as ridiculous as she does. There are no IPCC findings that say there is any existential threat from any probable scenario, and they are themselves ridiculously pessimistic.
What article? You mean Noah’s? I completely agree with him. Take ff your condescension elsewhere.
My issue with Doomerism is several of the most prolific writers in that genre, if we can call it that, often don't include statistics to back up their claims. I also suspect at least a few of them found a lot more success/views/money with these extremely negative outlook pieces, especially on places like Medium and Substack, and started focusing and churning out these essays almost exclusively.
Great post as always but there was a follow up tweet where she admits there haven't been any better points of US history she would rather live through, it's all just bad vibes. I think there's a real chance her job of spending all day on social media is making her borderline mentally ill, people have gone from venting to friends about whatever to making any moment of unhappiness into a world ending crisis level event so that they can get some likes
Must be a different kind of mental illness than the one I've struggled with for decades!
Yes since I think it would be cured by Logging Off, although I meant more like delusional rather then depressed since she seems to keep jumping on random people on twitter if they say covid isn't the new HIV or similar
I'm appalled by the number of intelligent people who apparently think that because there's climate change, it might be unethical and/or pointless to have children.
I hope most of the people who talk about this are just virtue-signaling, but I'm sure some of them are serious. How are they going to feel in 2040, when the problem will be visibly on its way to being solved but it will be too late for them to change their minds?
It's especially weird when you consider that the carbon footprint of having kids is likely to be small because by the time they're adults, emissions will be much lower because of all the progress that will be made by then.
There is also the question of who are you even saving the planet for if nobody has kids?
More people means faster growth and progress. People who really believe having children will doom the planet can do their part in improving the gene pool by living up to their beliefs. They probably wouldn’t adopt children either, but that may also be for the best.
I don't think it works like that. These people tend to be highly intelligent, which ought to mean that in general they're wrong about fewer things than the average American. (They're disproportionately likely to be wrong about this particular thing, not because they're stupid but because it's a culturally reinforced belief in some circles.)
So apart from the fact that people who want kids should usually have kids, removing climate doomers from the gene pool isn't even good eugenics. They just need to get their heads straight.
Hey Noah, I love this: "One obvious move is to follow Taylor Lorenz’ own advice, and get off of social media a little more."
And I think some people should not use social media at all.
Thanks for this brilliant post.
This is a little bit of an aside, but as someone who is very much not a doomer, your statement that "almost all of us are going to [die] without accomplishing at least some of the stuff we wanted to do," jumped out at me.
While I would prefer to live another 50 years, if I died tomorrow, there is very little that I would regret not accomplishing or doing. My personal goals were/are basically to get married, have a kid and maybe become a judge. I've accomplished the first two (as most people who want to do manage). The third is kind of just a bonus if I manage it and not something I will regret in any way if I fail.
When it comes to national or world (or even state or local) affairs, while I tend to be more optimistic about these things than most, there are certainly things I would prefer to see changed. At the same time, I would hardly put any of these things in the "things I want to do/accomplish," largely because I have little sense that I have any agency at these scales. I'm not going to solve, or even make a significant dent in climate change, or toxic partisanship or Russia's invasion of Ukraine. I'm probably not even going to make a dent in my Town's anti-development stance. Admittedly, I'm not trying very hard on any of these fronts, but I tend to believe that, even if put my full effort into any one of these causes, I'm not going to make a dent. For some people this seems to lead to a nihilistic downward spiral. At least for me, it leads to a nihilistic contentment - why get upset about not being able to change something I can't change, might as well get upset about not being able to flap my arms and fly.
I'll say my wife is just the opposite, she has a lot of things she wants or wishes she could accomplish in life. She also tends to be depressed.
I wonder how much of the much-discussed depressed youth comes from believing you can change things and then being unable to do so. Twitter certainly give you the sense you can change things while really not providing most people with the ability to do so.
For as long as I can remember, decades now, it has been cool to be cynical. Being cynical was 'woke' before 'woke', a signal that you understood the world more incisively than the madding crowd.
Thank you for a more balanced view.
As we know, half of Rushmore suffered clinical depression (Lincoln, Roosevelt) and it didn’t deter them from moving forward with progressive policies and ideas. So many manic depressives, e.g. Hemingway and Fitzgerald and the so-called “Lost Generation.” Depression is as American as apple pie. Thankfully, society has progressively bleached the stigmata of depression.
Important post I've been meaning to research myself. Interestingly, I posted a 20-sec. TikTok two months ago about how suicidal language has gotten out of control and it has over 750K likes and 4M views. Not only does the data show promise, but the emotional fatigue people have, the self-defeating behaviors, and especially the lack of emotional resilience is one of the biggest issues we face. With so much progress around our basic needs being met, people have too much time to focus on what they don't have; it'll increasingly be a problem as we develop.
It's warm in Chicago this winter - THE APOCALYPSE IS NIGH.
I was a bit of a doomer during the Trump presidency through the beginning of Covid – made it difficult to put effort into working on challenging and meaningful problems when I thought we were destined to fail anyways.
It’s a form of masochism, and numbs out your sense of agency. “If we’re doomed to fail either way then I have no duty to help create solutions.” At the same time, no agency/duty also makes you feel like you have no control, creating a positive feedback loop into doomerism.
An interesting thing about OSHA regulations about workplace safety, including hazardous waste workers is that the priority is engineered environments to reduce hazardous conditions. The use of PPE, like hazmat suits and respirators (masks), is viewed as a failure to engineer a safe worker environment.
Early in Covid (April 2020) it was clear this was an airborne respiratory disease. There was lots of "learned helplessness" going on and the official government communications were largely useless, because it was all medical doctors who typically operate in environments that are already engineered to be relatively safe workplaces (hospitals). It was when the those engineered safe spaces were overwhelmed that the medical staff ran into trouble and had to really only on PPE.
The environmental engineers who deal with indoor air quality were producing really good advice by spring 2020 but they were not invited to the endless press conferences where extremely confusing advice about masks etc. was being discussed. Based on my reading of the air quality folks, I exerted my own control by figuring out how to engineer our spaces for safety using ventilation and filtration. Masks were a last resort.
Unfortunately, the energy efficiency push has made much of US housing very poorly ventilated, so filtration is absolutely necessary for protection against airborne respiratory disease, so we worked on supplying that in our house and my wife's classroom. I have never gotten Covid and my wife has only had it once despite working in a classroom since October 2020. We have had no cases of transmission of Covid in our house. We occasionally wear masks in settings where there is likely to be a hazard, but not often - we use a CO2 monitor to monitor those environments.
Gathering real, scientific information and putting it into an actionable framework is key to achieving agency. While we must have society fixes for things (e.g. vaccines, national defense), there is a lot we can do at the individual level to help our own situation. A lot of people taking steps to grow native plants in their yards and cut back on fertilizer and pesticide use can make a major impact at the societal scale https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/meet-ecologist-who-wants-unleash-wild-backyard-180974372/.
We have to teach people not to become paralyzed and to figure out how to have agency.
Many years ago I was reading an author I disagreed with a fair amount, both of us being roughly conservatives. His name is Russell Kirk. At that time, almost all conservatives like Kirk were announcing the imminent end of civilization. In this one place I can't remember or find again, Kirk said that there was nothing to worry about the 60s, it was just part of the ebb and flow, back and forth, that was always our situation in society as history rolled along, sometimes merrily, sometimes not. Wherever I got it, that's been my belief ever since.
I also remind myself that when I was kid, I learned Blacks couldn't go into various places and that people tried to exterminate my religion from the face of the Earth just a few years earlier. That seemed a much scarier world and always has. There are always tons of people expecting the end of days. In fact, the First Christians did. Lots of them still around today. Go figure. We're not really that smart. When we do go kaputt we'll be the last to know.