More than half of young people think "humanity is doomed" due to climate change. We need to reframe the narrative from doom and sacrifice, to one of opportunity.
Bravo, Hannah. Keep it up despite the challenges. One issue I have with that survey is the wording of the survey! Like leading the witness to ask “Does climate change make you think that: […]?” and have only negative options for respondents. What would results have been if there were options like, "Does climate change make you think that we can find ways to cut vulnerability for the poor?"
I'll answer that question. Yes. Stop cutting down and burning trees for palm oil plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia for starters. Then, provide nat gas instead of coal as a bridge to the developing world until some form of advanced nuclear is commercially available to them
[cw suicide] I once tried to look up statistics on how many suicides were influenced by despair over climate change. I still would like to know this number. But oddly all the search results I got were only about how statistically, suicides rise when the temperature is higher. Which doesn't bode well, either, but isn't what I was looking for.
Here's what I think you're right about: Despair actively stops us from doing everything we can. For that reason only we should be careful about tone; not for sugarcoating reasons.
It was pretty clear from the various scenarios that the Limits to Growth (LTG) study produced that industrial civilization would "hit the wall" sometime around 2050, if the "business as usual" scenario was to be the scenario most closely matching the data. Dr. Dennis Meadows, one of the principal investigators in the study, thinks the timing has creeped forward and humanity could be in more trouble sooner than that date. Actually, we can see the evidence of it now. Policymakers in governments have literally no time left to initiate the widespread changes that will be necessary. We have a problem with human numbers, environmental degradation, species loss, over-consumption of fossil and organic planetary resources and no determination to alter our behavior. No wonder the young are pessimistic about their future. They are not being prepared for a world unlike the one that exists today. If we had started in the 1980s, our chances would be better, but the powers that be were more interested in moving full speed ahead toward the collapse of industrial civilization with their pursuit of unlimited economic growth.
If catastrophism doesn't lead to action in general, what we see today is merely the reaction from some Disney narrative of "we'll be fine in the end and things will be as they used to be" which is true to some proportion as in human extinction is probably unlikely but overall conditions are going to worsen significatively and no amount of green washing is going to make younger people think things will be fine and this aspect is positive despite the pessimism it carries.
Solutions are here and mostly available and very few of the people with enough power to enable the transition we need actually take it seriously enough to apply the drastic measures (at least in regards to the current politico-economic standing order) to preserve habitability.
We need outrage and revolutions. We need more cynism about our current society and alternative ways of living experimented. Not greenwashed fairytale stories.
Yeah, no this sounds like apologia and denial to me. I'm in my 50s and elected not to have kids and am so thankful I am not dooming them to a future with no structure and only copium like this article
30 meters of sea level rise are baked into the system already, assuming we stopped all greenhouse gas emission today. Which we will not, of course.
Pretending we can put the genie back into the bottle does a disservice to people. We need to figure out how we're going to fade from the planet in the least ugly manner.
Over the next 5,000 years perhaps. Without a time scale, tossing around numbers like 30 meters is simply fear mongering. I've written on global warming since 1988, stood atop Greenland's ice sheet with top climate scientists. The film you link to is artfully shaped propaganda. The problem is people engage way more with edge arguments than reality. https://revkin.substack.com/about
Well, the problem is that people have messed up the planet's temperature balance. I won't be here in 2100 to see if the 30 meter rise happens or not, but I do notice that the world is on fire most summers, coastal cities are already regularly flooding if there's a storm, a significant fraction of Pakistan is still under water. Even if we see 1 meter of sealevel rise in the next 80 years most coastal cities will be gone. And given the amount of permafrost melting right now and the increase in global CO2 emissions I can't imagine that warming is going to slow.
The planet will, of course, be fine. People are done for.
The problem isn't climate science, it's human behavior. Biology says we'll use all the resources we can get our hands on. This is completely ignored by climate scientists, journalists and policies.
The inspirational narrative is a cognitive bias that keeps us growing. So-called solutions to climate change add complexity that requires more and more energy. The usual tropes don't work. For example, dense cities need to draw resources from far away so their minimum energy required is already too great. Public transit doesn't really reduce emissions either. What it does is to free energy to do other things, and those other things need to be maintained so we end using more energy in the end. The problem here isn't the mode of transportation but mobility itself.
People "giving up" might be the best thing for the environment. I tell people to do nothing for the environment, literally nothing. If you want inspiration, read "The future is rural'.
But don't worry, energy scarcity will screw us before climate change.
So you think instead of moving further inland we would all choose to fade away? By the way the IPCC says: “the IPCC expects 0.3 to 0.6 meters of sea level rise by 2100. A host of competing factors will influence how global sea changes translate to regional and local scales”. Your claim is about 100 times higher.
I clarified in my comment more like 1 meter by 2100, so your 0.6 meters is fine. I believe it's 100 meters once the ice sheets are gone.
Of course people won't just sit there and drown. But I'm guessing if Los Angeles, New York, London, etc. are all flooded that'll have a little bit of a downer effect on the world's economy. And once the world's economies *start* to suffer, we'll see some excitement.
You just assume things are going to be the worst-case, when there is every indication it will not. A biodiversity treaty is about to be agreed to and renewables are skyrocketing. There's still much work to do, but we're starting to get on the right track
We humans like to hide from ugly truths. The arctic is melting and blowing massive amounts of methane into the air. Oil wells are leaking methane at a vast rate. Forests are burning all over the world where there have never been forest fires before. Flooding and storms are already displacing millions. Something like 1/3 of Pakistan is still under water. Pacific nations are having to abandon their islands because the seas are rising. We can't change or fix *any* of this.
I'm sure somebody will feel warm and fuzzy over a biodiversity treaty, and while renewables are nice they are a drop in the bucket of our energy use.
Young people are screwed. Which bothers me more because it's become clear that *I* am screwed, too. Although I should be able to be mobile enough to avoid the worst of it.
"Kiribatians have already begun to emigrate in response to what they believe to be an unavoidable situation."
"the Kiribati government has bought land in Fiji to grow crops and possibly even serve as somewhere to evacuate the country's entire population if the worst does happen"
Carbon capture technology can practicably end global warming – even reverse it — for 5% of GDP with a reasonably lo-tech process – once the price to gets down to $100 a ton.
According to a Businessweek article, worldwide we add 34 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year. Said article says Squamish Engineering, in B.C., Canada expects to launch a plant that will remove a million tons a year, located somewhere in the Permian Basin in Texas. Squamish says it can do this for $200 a ton.
My back-of-the-envelope calculates that, when the price reaches $100 a ton, then, worldwide we can keep cool for $3.4 trillion a year – less than 5% of world GDP. US kick-in about one trillion – out of $20 trillion GDP. That figure would grow as US economy grows – but: for every trillion of growth only additional $50 billion would go for removal, leaving us $950 billion ahead: set for the life of the planet.
Two years later, almost all of the CO2 had morphed into carbonate minerals. * * * * * The team’s breakthrough, reported in the journal Science in 2016, led to the scaling up of the CarbFix project – fixing CO2 into rock, literally – at the Hellisheidi geothermal power station * * * * * The process does, however, require large amounts of desalinated water – about 25 tonnes of water per tonne of stored CO2 – so they are working on adapting it to saltwater.
Excellent comment, very informative, thanks. I was vaguely aware of what you refer to, but you put the meat on the bones.
The only problem I can see here is that as this technology becomes more well known it may convince a lot of us that reducing CO2 emissions is no longer needed. If we can avoid that trap, the technology you reference is good news indeed.
Totally agree with you Hannah we must tell young people there is still hope BUT we also need to be honest with them : a world where each person only emits 2tons of CO2e per year (to stay below 2°C) is a world with much less travels in general, meat nearly banned & consumption greatly reduced.
Nobody needs or wants to live in such a world. The current world per capita CO2 is 4.8t, India is at 1.9t and they travel and eat some meat. Warning of such a future is just a milder form of scare mongering than warning of humanity’s doom. What we should be communicating is that humans have the knowledge and ability to solve the global warming problem technologically just as we have solved all the previous problems Malthusians warned about. This can be seen in the progress all factors have made in the last century or two as shown by the Our World in Data.
Sure, but Indians travel much less and eat much less meat PER CAPITA than western countries. ICE cars and planes are a huge problem that won't be solved anytime soon except if we ban them. ICE cars will be banned in 2035 in Europe, which is great.
I believe an important reason that young people feel this way is that the focus with regards to climate has been on messages and narratives and not on action. This piece contributes to that. The only thing I took away from it is that you were nominated for and won some public service award in Scotland. Congratulations.
There needs to be a serious conversation about how we've conflated pollution (a problem, yes) and habitat loss for our fellow creatures (also a problem which we need to address), as well as bad agricultural practices (fortunately starting to be addressed by regen-ag) with calamity and collapse. We need to accept that climate change is happening, has always happened - but we need to re-think the idea that this is precipitated by man and is something that we should (or even could) reverse. Instead, we can do what we've always done. Learn to adapt, and even to thrive, with it. Crisis-mongering is not altogether altruistic. I would also recommend reading Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine", to see how crisis can be exploited, or even initiated, by those with not altogether pure motives. You want hope - at least consider these points.
Climate change is a very real threat, and it's great that society as a whole now gets that. But...
Isn't it weird that we've stopped worrying about nuclear weapons, a civilization ending threat which could be upon us in 30 minutes. Everyone knows about this threat, and has their whole life, but we've become very skilled at denial. Maybe this threat is just too real, and too big, to face up to?
And anyway, they are the same threat in the sense that the most likely outcome of a failure to manage climate change is geopolitical instability and conflict, and nuclear weapons. No major power is going to go down without a fight.
Young people think they are "doomed" because they are! Doom comes from the Old Norse domr, which means judged. The bad thing about doom is not that a person is judged or suffers because of the judgment, but rather that young people have not had the chance to actually do the terrible things for which they have been doomed. Some people put it on the shoulders of the baby boomers, which is entirely too facile. I am 72 and I am not guilty because I was an antiwar activist from 1968 to 1975, and an environmental activist from 1970 to now. I also do research on crop landraces because we will need more of them to adapt to the coming collapse of civilization. I wrote two books on solutions, yet I am dismissed and disrespected because I tell the truth AND how to fix it.
Articles like this one offer a window into how demographic grouups view the problem, but I see no solutions other than some vague political reform. Young people need to get off their duffs and make a racket AND work on alternatives. That is what I have been doing for over 50 years.
The continued rise of greenhouse gas emissions since COP ! signals failure of those who possess the wealth and consequent political power to put a stop to global warming. The problem is systemic. Capital must grow or die on the vine. The point is to change the current suicidal direction, but for that, the immense majority need to possess the political power inherent with the possession of the wealth they produce. The few who now control that wealth have failed. The Market is Godot and we wait for it to cut the Gordian knot of climate change at our own peril as a species.
Interesting that with the odd exception of Nigeria the countries where people were most pessimistic about their future are those which are likely to be worst affected.
I think there's a certain obscenity - a sort of catastrophe pornography - about the likes of Hallam and Read almost gleefully scaring the poo out of first world children and young people who are likely to be least badly affected, whilst simultaneously opposing the changes and technologies which we need to mitigate climate change and which will disproportionately benefit the world's poorest and most vulnerable who will be worst affected and have most to fear.
The Citizens' Climate Lobby is a venue for people around the world to get involved in doing something positive by engaging with decision-makers at all levels. Realism is one thing, doomerism is another. Doomerism is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Adaptation will be part of the equation, but we can work to mitigate the worst climate effects if we organize now. Thank you for this sobering but needed article.
Bravo, Hannah. Keep it up despite the challenges. One issue I have with that survey is the wording of the survey! Like leading the witness to ask “Does climate change make you think that: […]?” and have only negative options for respondents. What would results have been if there were options like, "Does climate change make you think that we can find ways to cut vulnerability for the poor?"
I'll answer that question. Yes. Stop cutting down and burning trees for palm oil plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia for starters. Then, provide nat gas instead of coal as a bridge to the developing world until some form of advanced nuclear is commercially available to them
[cw suicide] I once tried to look up statistics on how many suicides were influenced by despair over climate change. I still would like to know this number. But oddly all the search results I got were only about how statistically, suicides rise when the temperature is higher. Which doesn't bode well, either, but isn't what I was looking for.
Here's what I think you're right about: Despair actively stops us from doing everything we can. For that reason only we should be careful about tone; not for sugarcoating reasons.
It was pretty clear from the various scenarios that the Limits to Growth (LTG) study produced that industrial civilization would "hit the wall" sometime around 2050, if the "business as usual" scenario was to be the scenario most closely matching the data. Dr. Dennis Meadows, one of the principal investigators in the study, thinks the timing has creeped forward and humanity could be in more trouble sooner than that date. Actually, we can see the evidence of it now. Policymakers in governments have literally no time left to initiate the widespread changes that will be necessary. We have a problem with human numbers, environmental degradation, species loss, over-consumption of fossil and organic planetary resources and no determination to alter our behavior. No wonder the young are pessimistic about their future. They are not being prepared for a world unlike the one that exists today. If we had started in the 1980s, our chances would be better, but the powers that be were more interested in moving full speed ahead toward the collapse of industrial civilization with their pursuit of unlimited economic growth.
Change the narrative?? Change the reality, then maybe the "narrative" will change. Sorry the younger generations are more realistic
If catastrophism doesn't lead to action in general, what we see today is merely the reaction from some Disney narrative of "we'll be fine in the end and things will be as they used to be" which is true to some proportion as in human extinction is probably unlikely but overall conditions are going to worsen significatively and no amount of green washing is going to make younger people think things will be fine and this aspect is positive despite the pessimism it carries.
Solutions are here and mostly available and very few of the people with enough power to enable the transition we need actually take it seriously enough to apply the drastic measures (at least in regards to the current politico-economic standing order) to preserve habitability.
We need outrage and revolutions. We need more cynism about our current society and alternative ways of living experimented. Not greenwashed fairytale stories.
Yeah, no this sounds like apologia and denial to me. I'm in my 50s and elected not to have kids and am so thankful I am not dooming them to a future with no structure and only copium like this article
Stupid response
30 meters of sea level rise are baked into the system already, assuming we stopped all greenhouse gas emission today. Which we will not, of course.
Pretending we can put the genie back into the bottle does a disservice to people. We need to figure out how we're going to fade from the planet in the least ugly manner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UftuDAkwM3I
Over the next 5,000 years perhaps. Without a time scale, tossing around numbers like 30 meters is simply fear mongering. I've written on global warming since 1988, stood atop Greenland's ice sheet with top climate scientists. The film you link to is artfully shaped propaganda. The problem is people engage way more with edge arguments than reality. https://revkin.substack.com/about
Well, the problem is that people have messed up the planet's temperature balance. I won't be here in 2100 to see if the 30 meter rise happens or not, but I do notice that the world is on fire most summers, coastal cities are already regularly flooding if there's a storm, a significant fraction of Pakistan is still under water. Even if we see 1 meter of sealevel rise in the next 80 years most coastal cities will be gone. And given the amount of permafrost melting right now and the increase in global CO2 emissions I can't imagine that warming is going to slow.
The planet will, of course, be fine. People are done for.
The problem isn't climate science, it's human behavior. Biology says we'll use all the resources we can get our hands on. This is completely ignored by climate scientists, journalists and policies.
The inspirational narrative is a cognitive bias that keeps us growing. So-called solutions to climate change add complexity that requires more and more energy. The usual tropes don't work. For example, dense cities need to draw resources from far away so their minimum energy required is already too great. Public transit doesn't really reduce emissions either. What it does is to free energy to do other things, and those other things need to be maintained so we end using more energy in the end. The problem here isn't the mode of transportation but mobility itself.
People "giving up" might be the best thing for the environment. I tell people to do nothing for the environment, literally nothing. If you want inspiration, read "The future is rural'.
But don't worry, energy scarcity will screw us before climate change.
So you think instead of moving further inland we would all choose to fade away? By the way the IPCC says: “the IPCC expects 0.3 to 0.6 meters of sea level rise by 2100. A host of competing factors will influence how global sea changes translate to regional and local scales”. Your claim is about 100 times higher.
I clarified in my comment more like 1 meter by 2100, so your 0.6 meters is fine. I believe it's 100 meters once the ice sheets are gone.
Of course people won't just sit there and drown. But I'm guessing if Los Angeles, New York, London, etc. are all flooded that'll have a little bit of a downer effect on the world's economy. And once the world's economies *start* to suffer, we'll see some excitement.
You just assume things are going to be the worst-case, when there is every indication it will not. A biodiversity treaty is about to be agreed to and renewables are skyrocketing. There's still much work to do, but we're starting to get on the right track
We humans like to hide from ugly truths. The arctic is melting and blowing massive amounts of methane into the air. Oil wells are leaking methane at a vast rate. Forests are burning all over the world where there have never been forest fires before. Flooding and storms are already displacing millions. Something like 1/3 of Pakistan is still under water. Pacific nations are having to abandon their islands because the seas are rising. We can't change or fix *any* of this.
I'm sure somebody will feel warm and fuzzy over a biodiversity treaty, and while renewables are nice they are a drop in the bucket of our energy use.
Young people are screwed. Which bothers me more because it's become clear that *I* am screwed, too. Although I should be able to be mobile enough to avoid the worst of it.
The permafrost is not hemorrhaging methane: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05447-w#:~:text=Atmospheric%20methane%20growth%20reached%20an,in%202020%20compared%20with%202019.
Also, no Pacific nation is abandoning their island. Just stop with the bullshit and maybe look up geoengineering while you're at it
https://www.iberdrola.com/sustainability/kiribati-climate-change
"Kiribatians have already begun to emigrate in response to what they believe to be an unavoidable situation."
"the Kiribati government has bought land in Fiji to grow crops and possibly even serve as somewhere to evacuate the country's entire population if the worst does happen"
I'm bored with this conversation. Soon enough it'll be clear which of us is right.
Carbon capture technology can practicably end global warming – even reverse it — for 5% of GDP with a reasonably lo-tech process – once the price to gets down to $100 a ton.
According to a Businessweek article, worldwide we add 34 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year. Said article says Squamish Engineering, in B.C., Canada expects to launch a plant that will remove a million tons a year, located somewhere in the Permian Basin in Texas. Squamish says it can do this for $200 a ton.
My back-of-the-envelope calculates that, when the price reaches $100 a ton, then, worldwide we can keep cool for $3.4 trillion a year – less than 5% of world GDP. US kick-in about one trillion – out of $20 trillion GDP. That figure would grow as US economy grows – but: for every trillion of growth only additional $50 billion would go for removal, leaving us $950 billion ahead: set for the life of the planet.
https://www.magzter.com/article/Business/Bloomberg-Businessweek/A-Big-Step-for-the-Sky-Vacuums
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/carbon-capture-iceland-climate-change-two-degrees/
Snag: where to put all the carbon we capture.
Two years later, almost all of the CO2 had morphed into carbonate minerals. * * * * * The team’s breakthrough, reported in the journal Science in 2016, led to the scaling up of the CarbFix project – fixing CO2 into rock, literally – at the Hellisheidi geothermal power station * * * * * The process does, however, require large amounts of desalinated water – about 25 tonnes of water per tonne of stored CO2 – so they are working on adapting it to saltwater.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/05/scientists-in-iceland-are-turning-carbon-dioxide-into-rock/
Excellent comment, very informative, thanks. I was vaguely aware of what you refer to, but you put the meat on the bones.
The only problem I can see here is that as this technology becomes more well known it may convince a lot of us that reducing CO2 emissions is no longer needed. If we can avoid that trap, the technology you reference is good news indeed.
Totally agree with you Hannah we must tell young people there is still hope BUT we also need to be honest with them : a world where each person only emits 2tons of CO2e per year (to stay below 2°C) is a world with much less travels in general, meat nearly banned & consumption greatly reduced.
Nobody needs or wants to live in such a world. The current world per capita CO2 is 4.8t, India is at 1.9t and they travel and eat some meat. Warning of such a future is just a milder form of scare mongering than warning of humanity’s doom. What we should be communicating is that humans have the knowledge and ability to solve the global warming problem technologically just as we have solved all the previous problems Malthusians warned about. This can be seen in the progress all factors have made in the last century or two as shown by the Our World in Data.
Sure, but Indians travel much less and eat much less meat PER CAPITA than western countries. ICE cars and planes are a huge problem that won't be solved anytime soon except if we ban them. ICE cars will be banned in 2035 in Europe, which is great.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-km-aviation?tab=chart&country=RUS~BRA~ZAF~SWE~CHE~GBR~USA~ARE~CHN~NZL~IND
I believe an important reason that young people feel this way is that the focus with regards to climate has been on messages and narratives and not on action. This piece contributes to that. The only thing I took away from it is that you were nominated for and won some public service award in Scotland. Congratulations.
I have shown my kids this: https://youtu.be/oYhCQv5tNsQ
There needs to be a serious conversation about how we've conflated pollution (a problem, yes) and habitat loss for our fellow creatures (also a problem which we need to address), as well as bad agricultural practices (fortunately starting to be addressed by regen-ag) with calamity and collapse. We need to accept that climate change is happening, has always happened - but we need to re-think the idea that this is precipitated by man and is something that we should (or even could) reverse. Instead, we can do what we've always done. Learn to adapt, and even to thrive, with it. Crisis-mongering is not altogether altruistic. I would also recommend reading Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine", to see how crisis can be exploited, or even initiated, by those with not altogether pure motives. You want hope - at least consider these points.
Climate change is a very real threat, and it's great that society as a whole now gets that. But...
Isn't it weird that we've stopped worrying about nuclear weapons, a civilization ending threat which could be upon us in 30 minutes. Everyone knows about this threat, and has their whole life, but we've become very skilled at denial. Maybe this threat is just too real, and too big, to face up to?
And anyway, they are the same threat in the sense that the most likely outcome of a failure to manage climate change is geopolitical instability and conflict, and nuclear weapons. No major power is going to go down without a fight.
Young people think they are "doomed" because they are! Doom comes from the Old Norse domr, which means judged. The bad thing about doom is not that a person is judged or suffers because of the judgment, but rather that young people have not had the chance to actually do the terrible things for which they have been doomed. Some people put it on the shoulders of the baby boomers, which is entirely too facile. I am 72 and I am not guilty because I was an antiwar activist from 1968 to 1975, and an environmental activist from 1970 to now. I also do research on crop landraces because we will need more of them to adapt to the coming collapse of civilization. I wrote two books on solutions, yet I am dismissed and disrespected because I tell the truth AND how to fix it.
Articles like this one offer a window into how demographic grouups view the problem, but I see no solutions other than some vague political reform. Young people need to get off their duffs and make a racket AND work on alternatives. That is what I have been doing for over 50 years.
The continued rise of greenhouse gas emissions since COP ! signals failure of those who possess the wealth and consequent political power to put a stop to global warming. The problem is systemic. Capital must grow or die on the vine. The point is to change the current suicidal direction, but for that, the immense majority need to possess the political power inherent with the possession of the wealth they produce. The few who now control that wealth have failed. The Market is Godot and we wait for it to cut the Gordian knot of climate change at our own peril as a species.
Interesting that with the odd exception of Nigeria the countries where people were most pessimistic about their future are those which are likely to be worst affected.
I think there's a certain obscenity - a sort of catastrophe pornography - about the likes of Hallam and Read almost gleefully scaring the poo out of first world children and young people who are likely to be least badly affected, whilst simultaneously opposing the changes and technologies which we need to mitigate climate change and which will disproportionately benefit the world's poorest and most vulnerable who will be worst affected and have most to fear.
The Citizens' Climate Lobby is a venue for people around the world to get involved in doing something positive by engaging with decision-makers at all levels. Realism is one thing, doomerism is another. Doomerism is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Adaptation will be part of the equation, but we can work to mitigate the worst climate effects if we organize now. Thank you for this sobering but needed article.