> Teens are aware that they are going to inherit a pretty terrible world
With respect, I truly mean no insult when I say this is a naive and ignorant position.
By every measure, the world is generally better than it has ever been. Far better than any decade in the past you could care to name. Despite media doom-and-glooming, there is every reason to expect that teens will inherit an overall materially better world than their parents, local minima notwithstanding.
Climate change drastically changes that equation. Not only will life expectancy go down, but life itself will probably become harder for many people in many places - droughts, heat waves, floodings, hunger and famine, mass migration, etc.
Except, people have been saying exactly this with the same unshakable confidence, literally since the beginning of recorded history. In the 70s, it was said that we would have experienced all of those things by 2000, and yet, life continued to get dramatically better for everyone, particularly for the poorest.
So, no. Life will continue to get better despite global warming. Or, not doing so is an extraordinarily claim for which there is no real evidence.
They rang the alarm bells because they saw the trend and tried to curb it. They knew things would get bad, not neccesarily at an exact date. We are only now experiencing the contributions to the atmosphere made at the dawn of the last century. This delayed effect is worrying to say the least.
They're not talking specifically about climate change. Doomsayers have always existed, warranted or not. Previously, it seemed inevitable that the cold war would end in a massive nuclear exchange and yet here we are. That was a very real threat, just like climate change, but it was avoided. We also have AI/Singularity doomsayers right now and, previously, Bird flu, SARS, Ebola, etc. and where the doom actually came, humanity has survived just fine.
Through all of that, everything has gotten better.
Speaking as a former doomsayer, people like my former self who are committed to the "everything is terrible" outlook really dislike hearing that it's not true. For me, I was committed because my life sucked, and it was much easier to point at objective, outer reasons than to do the hard work of digging in and digging myself out. I was pretty smugly insufferable. I still am, just, from a different perspective.
No, in the 1970s they were ringing alarm bells about global cooling, not global warming. If you read newspaper archival articles from that period you'll see that they sound exactly like articles written last week, except with the word warming inverted to cooling. Scientists back then, or at least the ones being interviewed by journalists, were communicating an absolute certainty that an ice age was coming and the world needed to prepare. There was scientific consensus, etc.
This whole thing has long since been memory holed, but it happened. Here's Spock in 1979 with a whole documentary about about how politicians are ignoring the scientist's warnings:
"What scientists are telling us now, is that the threat of an ice age is not as remote as they once thought. During the lifetime of our grandchildren, arctic cold and perpetual snow could turn most of the inhabitable portions of our desert into a polar desert".
They also had plans for how to stop it. They wanted to, amongst other things, cover the arctic in black dust to make it absorb more heat.
IMHO one of the major reasons teenagers suffer mentally is because they are way too sensitive to social pressures to never question claims about future destruction of the world. They're told the world is ending and that anyone who claims otherwise is an unspeakably evil conservative who must not be listened to under any circumstances. But it's not ending, even decades after global cooling scientists still don't really understand the climate at all and the people who claim otherwise aren't evil or bad. They're actually the level headed ones. Teenagers should listen to them a lot more - they'd realize there's a lot to live for.
> Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was generally more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect.
It's the opposite I'm afraid. You're the one spreading misinformation, though it's not really your fault. The idea journalists simply made up the whole thing is what modern scientists like to say, but it's not true. The reason the media "speculated" about a new ice age is because scientists were telling them it was going to happen. Do you really believe US TV would make up an entire episode about non-existent scientific beliefs?
Maybe you do. Then please explain how the following can be squared with Wikipedia's explanation. Scientists believed global cooling so much they held international conferences to debate it and even told the US President to prepare America for the new ice age:
"Dear Mr President, aware of your deep concern with the future of the world, we feel obliged to inform you on the results of a scientific conference held here recently. The conference dealt with the past and future changes of climate and was attended for 42 top American and European investigators ... the main conclusion is that a global deterioration of climate, by an order of magnitude larger than any hithero experienced by mankind, is a very real possibility and may indeed be due very soon. The cooling has a natural cause and falls within the rank of processes which produced the last ice age. This is a surprising result based largely on studies of recent deep sea sediment.
...
With the efficient help of the world leaders, the research could be effectively organized and could possibly find answers to this menace ... it seems reasonable to prepare the agriculture and industry for possible alternatives and to form reserves.
With best regards, George L Kukla, Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory & R. K. Matthew, Chairman, Department of Geological Sciences (Brown University)"
July 1970, New York Times: "The United States and the Soviet Union are mounting large-scale investigations to determine why the Arctic climate is becoming more frigid, why parts of the Arctic sea ice have recently become ominously thicker and whether the extent of that ice cover contributes to the onset of ice ages. The projects, which involve nuclear submarines, earth satellites, aircraft and numerous manned and unmanned stations on the drifting ice, are being pressed with special urgency in view of recent discoveries of important resources in the Soviet and the American Arctic."
Again, do you believe that these reports are false, that these large-scale investigations never happened? That this was all made up by the press even as the poor scientists were saying the opposite? There are many more documents like these. They make it very clear that back then global cooling was treated in exactly the same way global warming is today. Scientists were quite clear about what they believed back then.
I wasn't alive then, so can't judge on that. I can however see the obvious changes that are happening, and the trends. Nobody serious is saying the planet will become uninhabitable, but swathes of it will. Wildfires, heat domes, massive floods are events that are getting more frequent. Texas's "once in a hundred years" winter that now has occured twice in 10 years; the massive floods in China and Germany; the heat and now cold waves that have hit Europe in the past few years. Burying your head in the sand won't make all that go away.
Have you actually read the IPCC report, or only read what the media says about it?
There’s a huge difference. The IPCC, the consensus of scientists says that the rate of growth in the world will slow. That’s it. And that’s turned into an “earth will become a fireball” narrative by the media.
Therefore the actual scientific consensus is the world will get better more slowly, not that it will get worse.
Stop listening to the media who make money off your fear.
Nonsense. The scientific consensus does not simply say that one thing or another will happen. There is a number of possible scenarios each of which is assigned some likelihood according to modelling(informed by empirical data). No serious scientist is saying "X will happen and that's it". That's an inherently unscientific statement.
There’s no plausible scenario where climate change drives global GDP growth negative over the next 50 year. None.
Yea uncontrolled climate change will make life worse than had it not happened. But no it will not outweigh the cumulative beneficial effects of baseline economic growth.
Your can't know that, there's too many variables. Let's assume a terrible scenario with massive heatwaves across the Middle East and Central and Southern Asia (like the ones that have already happened, including recently, in Iraq and and India) that get too frequent and unbearable. Add in food supply problems due to droughts, fertilizer shortages, etc. Now you have millions of migrants going to Europe , or at least North. No one can reliably predict how such a scenario plays out, migrant crisis are unpredictable.
The worst plausible forecast is that climate change will impair global GDP by 25% relative to baseline by 2200 years.
Even assuming anemic 1% GDP per capita growth rates, the average world citizen will still nearly twice as wealthy as today even given worse case climate scenarios.
I agree that the quality of life is currently better than it has even been. Though the future is looming because of climate change. Last year, a heat dome destroyed a tow in Canada, yet we are just at the beginning of the consequences. This year, we are seeing intense droughts in India as well as on the west coast. Scientists predicted that it would happen and it does, but this is just the start.
We should be all on-board to prevent it and lower our fossil fuel consumption quickly to limit consequences. If you live in a rich country, just talk about energy sobriety around you and see how people react...
> Today’s IPCC Working Group 1 Report is a code red for humanity.
Sadly, even after the IPCC alarms, I have yet to see governments properly act. Young people know that, and they understand that their quality of life could be at its maximum at the moment, before decreasing due to climate change.
Can't buy a house, can't expect work with reasonable pay in most places, will probably be impacted severely by climate change, food prices are quickly becoming extremely high. The future is shit.
The percent of household budgets spent on food has been steadily falling for 50 years. It’s very recently ticked up slightly, but this is a tiny blip on an otherwise very long running trend.
Median real wages are the highest they’ve ever been in history.
Climate change may lower the rate of economic growth but there’s no scenario where GDP growth goes negative because of climate change. Even given the worse effects of climate change, the people of the future will be significantly materially wealthier than people today.
Housing is a major issue, fueled by terrible NIMBY policies that have artificially restricted supply. But there are still many
metros, with relatively cheap housing.
> Median real wages are the highest they’ve ever been in history.
Now I know you are joking, those have been falling at least since 2008 and they weren't doing so hot before that either. If we're talking about boomer childhoods, sure. Life was great then. Now, not so much (at least, not in that way - medicine is definitely better).
> Housing is a major issue, fueled by terrible NIMBY policies that have artificially restricted supply. But there are still many metros, with relatively cheap housing.
This might be a US thing. Where I live housing is an issue because there quite simply are not enough houses being built that anyone normal can afford. For the ultra-rich, the country is a playground.
With respect, I truly mean no insult when I say this is a naive and ignorant position.
By every measure, the world is generally better than it has ever been. Far better than any decade in the past you could care to name. Despite media doom-and-glooming, there is every reason to expect that teens will inherit an overall materially better world than their parents, local minima notwithstanding.
