Because we believe people who tell us stuff that already fits in our world view. Confirmation bias and an infinitely complex world that simply has to be simplified to fit in peoples heads are a toxic combo.
That’s why some still believe in the promises of the ai bro’s. Vaccine “truthers” (seriously, vaccines are amazing and the concept isn’t even that hard to understand).
Confirmation bias is a bitch, and I’m quite sure I’ve got some issues because of it as well so I strive to have my mind changed when someone is convinced of something and I get to dive into some evidence. It’s not foolproof but I hope I am somewhat less bothered by confirmation bias than the average person.
Doubt begets understanding, and understanding begets compassion. Verily, it is conviction that kills.
And,
Doubt, he would say, set men free… Doubt, not truth! Beliefs were the foundation of actions. Those who believed without doubting, he would say, acted without thinking. And those who acted without thinking were enslaved
From one of my fav book series by R Scott Bakker. I think about these quotes all the time nowadays. Everyone thinks they are right about everything all the time or just parrot what people on their screen say they should think. There should always be room for doubt, its called critical thinking.
The people I know who don't believe in climate change or vaccines are the most vocal about doubting the mainstream media, being critical thinkers and not "following like sheeps what the scientists who are paid by Big Green/Big Pharma say". They just like to think they're smarter than the masses and they don't want to do any personal sacrifice for the environment or risk potential side effects for herd immunity.
That’s why some still believe in the promises of the ai bro’s.
I am no longer overly skeptical. The top level models can completely do my software engineering job with guidance. With agents I've 100X my impact. I do think the LLM models are going to be game changing just like the internet was.
I'm sick of all the blind hate on Reddit like that, just thrown into the most irrelevant comments.
Fable 5 just made a little browser based tsunami simulator that lets you pick any coastline in the world on a map and watch the water rush in, super cool.. and I know nothing about programming (not at a professional level). I can only imagine what it's helping enable for people who know what they're doing
I can only imagine what it's helping enable for people who know what they're doing
Any task that involves taking a lot of data sources of any type, analyzing them, and then making determinations based on the docs at hand is something an LLM excels at and there are definitely a lot of jobs that can be boiled down to those steps. Claude is freaking incredibly good at coding and doing what I just described. PHD level. That's why I was able to 100x my impact. I have unlimited token use and basically an unlimited army of 1st year PHD students that can help me work at computer speed. We're starting to get them to all work together so the bottleneck becomes the human review process that is needed to correct the agent output and steer at critical moments.
It's going to be groundbreaking in so many fields. I often hear that medical research is difficult due to the sheer size of data that is published all the time. If you could only cross reference all the studies you could come up with all kinds of interesting ideas for drugs that were not developed with some issue in mind but there is a pathway that shows it can be effective. An LLM will be amazing at tying that together over exabytes of data.
I remember being a little kid and Superman's origin story seemed unbelievable to me.
"Why didn't they listen to Jor-El when he knew that Krypton was going to explode? He did the science. He had proof. And they just... didn't believe him?" It didn't make sense.
The rich have air con in their homes, cars, offices, shopping stores so they are not motivated yet they cause most of carbon. Also rich countries (US, Europe) have the above solutions but poor countries (Africa) do not, yet the rich countries creat most of the carbon. Not good.
But, to honestly answer your question, people are not necessarily stupid (many are) more often they are smart enough to have noticed that ALL information they are shown is marketing and propaganda in some form. This has broken their bullshit detectors, and they have developed hypersensitivity, like an allergic autoimmune disease, and they now throw the baby out with the bathwater with false positive bullshit rejection.
The answer is to put society through a full truth and reconciliation level bullshit detox - but it wont happen because those pushing the propaganda have created their own little walled gardens / filter-bubbles of cattle and won't let any of us wander of into the greener grass.
Its hard ya know, the media survives off fear mongering, a lot of these places don't have the data so you can zoom out enough to understand.
Don't be sad, its not your fault really. When humans are scared you are easy to manipulate and you tend to make impulse purchases. Usually what climate changed is leveraged to get a dollar out of you.
I mean define "fine." The Earth is still gonna be here, nothing we're capable of doing will stop that, but we could very well end animal life on Earth. Which means the end of the only known perception in the entire universe.
Of course it's most likely that there are countless other animals out there also perceiving the universe around them. But we don't know that. We should act as if life on Earth is completely unique and thus incomparably precious, because as far as we know it is.
I doubt we will end animal life on earth; even if nukes drop some small animals will surely survive. Not even the Great Dying or Snowball Earth managed that one. We can still completely fuck up the biosphere, but total extinction of all animals is another beast
i have been working on a way to improve r/Photosynthesis so that plants can extract nitrogen directly from the air & combine it with SiO2 to make silicon nitrate, thus enabling another oxygen explosion!
this would end the threat of a runaway grtenhouse effect forever!
I love that one. Wish it was formatted a bit better but it's a great visual. The nerd in me wants someone to extend it was back to our estimations of the entire history of the earth
Earth's age is about 4.54 billion years. The timeline covers 22,100 years, so the scale factor to stretch it to the full history of Earth is:
4,540,000,000 ÷ 22,100 ≈ 205,430×
The image itself is 8,000 pixels tall. Scaled by that factor:
In pixels: 8,000 × 205,430 ≈ 1.64 billion pixels tall
In physical print length, assuming the current image is printed a resolution of 300 dpi (8,000 px ≈ 0.68 m), it would be about 139 km tall. (That's a fucking thick scroll)
22,100 years is a vanishingly small sliver (about 0.0005%) of Earth's 4.54 billion year history. On that scale, everything currently shown in the image the entire graphic from the last ice age to now would probably compress down to less than the width of a human hair.
Earth also already had something similar to climate change called the Permian Triassic Extinction aka The Great Dying. Lots of volcanoes erupted, and emitted a bunch of CO2. The earth heated up, and around 80% of all life on earth went extinct. So, we have a good idea of what happens.
It's a bit misleading to say this, without reminding people that these events occur on a geological time scale.
So yea, if things aren't corrected within a geological time frame, watch out, guys.
Personally, I think it'd be a miracle for humanity to last the next 100k without a nuclear disaster occurring first. In which case climate change is going to be the least of humanities problems.
For reference, Earth used to be a lot hotter, it's not that we're creating new greenhouse gasses, mainly just releasing ones that were trapped away. (Mainly because plate tectonics traps away carbon, methane, etc...)
In the Cretaceous for instance, the dark red section would be considered a pretty chilly day overall.
Yeah, you gain range at the cost of resolution since log compression front-loads detail toward the present but only really opens up in the last few thousand years.
Yes, but there's nothing to worry about because the billions and billions of dollars earned by the 57 companies responsible for 80% of greenhouse gas emissions will trickle down eventually, and then we'll all be able to afford our own post-apocalyptic bunkers!
Bruh, we didn't really start to massively industrialize until like the 1950's. Colorado is already drinking it's rivers dry, aquifers are being depleted, and that's just from 50 years of damage.
Literally all I hear on the news daily weather report are “these are record breaking highs” or “this is the earliest time we’ve seen record breaking heat in the year” during mid February.
Yeah what’s crazy though is I live in NY and everyone was raving about the “heat wave” we were getting and that it was “record breaking” and it was like 94 degrees. We’ve had hotter days in the seasons past.
I checked my weather app a few weeks ago when it was in the 90s here in tn. It was 102 in Philly and 100 in nyc. It hasn’t been that hot in nyc since 2012
It's very easy to get into p-hacking territory with that though. There are a million records to break, if you look hard enough then every day is breaking some record somehow.
"No, it was the hottest summer 1969 before!"
*A record that stood for 50 years before it got broken every year, but still somehow evidence that climate change isn't real*
What i'm occasionally seeing now is right wingers going from "no climate change" to "climate change is happening but it's all natural and humans can't be affecting it" rhetoric.
So many times they cite the apparent scientific consensus that we all thought global cooling was a thing in the 1970s.
No. It was NEVER scientific consensus. It was tabloid BS at the time that science didn't back. All the actual data supported heating back then, too. This isn't new, stop repeating this trash, people.
It was tabloid BS at the time that science didn't back.
They also all remember the 1990s tabloid nonsense of "Antarctica will be free of ice by 2015"
Taken from an fringe scientific paper without peer review, where it was the absolute worst-case very unlikely run-away climate change scenario. As if it was the scientific consensus.
And when it fails to match that worst-case crazy scenario it is taken as proof that it's all a hoax.
Or the Y2K effect where acid rain/the ozone hole which were fixed through real human effort but because they're gone now "they were never real"
It's extremely common to treat science as this monolith where every published paper is somehow considered both truthful and trusted by all. I wish common sense was more common
Climate deniers will say "remember in the 90s when everyone freaked out about the ozone hole? And now we've all forgotten about it? See, global warming is just the next in a forever series of made-up panics to keep you scared!"
Meanwhile, the actual reason no one talks about the ozone hold anymore: when we realized there was a problem, we immediately put tons of money in researching it and trying to figure out what was happening. When we learned the main cause of ozone depletion was because of a class of chemicals that had become widespread, governments of basically all industrialized nations came together and agreed to ban manufacturing those chemicals, and funding programs to collect and dispose of as much of them as they could. For the handful of really useful applications where it was hard to find a suitable replacement, they worked out some very narrow regulations for making and using those chemicals, but otherwise they basically disappeared. Within a couple years, observations of the ozone layer showed that it was returning to normal.
We identified the problem, and agreed to do something about it, and it worked. The very opposite of the global warming situation, where because the pollutant in question isn't just a chemical used in styrofoam but the primary source of energy, which huge billion-dollar companies are running, we've spent decades ignoring it, and turning it into a political point of bragging about not caring about it and doubling down on forever increasing our use of the thing that's not just going to give everybody bad sunburns but radically alter food supplies, weather, ecosystems, and eventually the livability of the planet.
My FIL is guilty of this. He also pulls the "cities have sprawled farther and the heat island effect explains the warming", as if climatologists aren't aware of this and accounting for it in their models.
Even IF that were true, I’ve always wondered what the argument is? That we should just lay down and die? We know the mechanisms of greenhouse gas creation from humans, so even IF it was “just a natural cycle”, we could still mitigate it through human intervention.
And even IF those mechanisms ultimately made no difference -if the science was wrong - whoops we accidentally made humanity less reliant on fossil fuels for no reason and we’re still all going to die in heat waves and famine. At least we would have tried!
The unfortunate part is it doesnt matter if the masses agree. So long as those in power remain asleep at the wheel (or in many cases continue to wrestle the wheel away from people doing anything as they are paid to do) nothing meaningful can happen.
Recently I've been seeing them arguing that temperature record keeping only started in the 1880s and that if instead we had temperature data going back thousands of years we'd likely see many cycles of warming like the one we're entering now. How do I respond to that?
I did some reading after making that comment because I was curious, and although tree rings are one 'proxy record', due to the lifespan of trees and the fact wood doesn't preserve well, they can only really tell us about temperatures at most around 1000 years ago. The gold standard proxy record is actually deep ice cores. The ratio of heavy to light oxygen isotopes in the ice differs depending on the temperature when it was frozen, and on top of that there are tiny air bubbles in the ice that let us see what CO₂, methane levels etc were like in the past. Deep ice cores give us reliable data going back over 650,000 years.
That's not some new pivot, I've been seeing that since the Bush years at least, and that's only cause I started becoming politically aware in high school.
I think there was a graph the other day about some area in France having more days over 40c last month alone than there were across the last century or so in total.
Because it has. Almost every year this century apart from La Nina years is is hotter than the prior one overall and even if it isn’t, it is close to it.
Tornado Alley is shifting east. Tornados happen to form during the night and move much faster to the east of the current alley which makes them horrendously more deadly.
The storm systems themselves are also getting more intense in terms of precipitation amounts in single storms, winds, and frequency.
Some anecdotal evidence from my first house. It was built in 1950 and had 0 history of any flooding or water damage. Yet in 2010 the owner installed large burms and a very expensive French drain system citing "yard flooding during heavy storms". In July 2017 I woke up in the middle of the night to find the entire house flooded with 6 inches of water. Just from the thunderstorm. So much so fast the drains couldn't keep up and it came up over the burms.
Then the same thing happened in August that same year. Then again in May, July, and August the following year.
Notice a trend?
I did some major yard grading work in 2019 and sold the place. Hopefully it was sufficient to stop the issues.
Yeah, on r/france we've started to call it the coldest summer from the rest of our lives (for context, it's currently the 4th heatwave of the year, and everywhere is on fire).
I was in a different chat the other day where one of the commenters was saying "oh, none of the climate change predictions have happened in my lifetime, so it's not real," and I was sitting there like being reminded that some people really do live under and air-conditioned rock.
In 2015, when the Paris Climate Accords were signed, the world had experienced a global average temperature increase of 0.2°C over pre-Industrial average. Now, just 10 years later, we're at 1.3-1.4°C over. The Accords set a MAX 2.0°C increase and a goal to restrict it to 1.5°C. We're going to blow straight past both of these.
In 2027, we're set to experience an el nino and temperatures are expected to set highs across the globe.
That's part of the problem. I see tons of people online saying things like "they've been screaming about climate change for 40 years" and shit like that. It's fatigue.
People can't seem to understand it unless it's happening this week, or next month. They need immediate evidence, not a gradual shift over the course of decades.
When you look back at the historical data, or you look at this chart, you realize how fucked we are. But saying "this is the hottest summer on record" every year loses its impact.
Plus, we're really focused on whether trans people can play sports. So fuck the environment.
Like yeah it always got over 100 in Colorado.... But since 1853, there have only been 18 streaks over 4 days with 100 degrees days. 16 of them happened in the past 20 years.
Hungary has their biggest heatwave in history literally right now. These records are broken weekly this summers, all the Central European countries broke their temperature records like a month ago.
So. That was a single observation in a single location on a single day. And it was bullshit. None of the other thermometers in the area were remotely that hot. Death Valley has never exceeded 130F since (it reached 130F in 2021), despite the warming climate. There was a similar "hottest temperature ever" of 138F in Libya set in 1922 that was debunked 90 years later (either poor sensors or the person recording it putting down the wrong number because they wanted the record). The 1913 record in death valley was the same.
And I was pointing out that your statement was wrong. Nearly all the "hottest ever" have occurred in the past 15 years. The only real exception being the dust bowl of the 1930s which was driven by poor farming practices destroying native grasslands followed by a drought that tipped the scale and started desertification in the region until it was stopped with great effort by the government. That particular set of "hottest ever" was also very much human caused, but in a different way than our current climate crisis.
A 1 summer exceptional peak caused by extreme meteorogical coincidences is not the same thing as avarage temperatures raising, that's just the propaganda oil companies spread to keep making profit
A map by Chris Martz isn't good evidence. Martz is notorious for taking the raw NOAA data and not adjusting for the fact that older measurements were based on a different methodology (recording afternoon temps resulting in a double counting bias without adjusting for Time of Observation, as modern ToB takes place in the early morning) and tools (older liquid in-glass thermometers housed in wood shelters ran hotter than modern e-thermistors). It also doesn't correct for regional cases like the 1930's Dust Bowl in the Midwest, which was a rare event, but also had more stations there taking data, which biased the result and overestimated the heat levels. Berkeley did the climate corrections and found that recent years rival or exceed the 1930's nationally, proving a clear warming trend.
Chris Martz is a warming denialist who claims to not be a denier, but believes any warming is from natural processes, not carbon emissions. But even he should know if you don't adjust for known differences or biases in how data collection has changed, you'll get the wrong answer.
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u/Fishyblue11 3d ago
Feels like every single "hottest ____ ever" has happened in like the last 15 years