Autism and climate change

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Why is it such a powerful ghost, then? And why are the deniers much louder? It's not like we see lifestyles changing on every street because of this. People are still doing the same things, even if they supposedly fear this ghost.

Actually-----I do believe there is "climate change." The evidence is overwhelming.

But there is also non-manmade, geological climate change, too.

The difference, to me, is that geological climate change proceeds at a "glacial" pace; whereas manmade climate change proceeds much more rapidly.

Kinda like "The Elephant, and Antisemitism" (the punchline of an old joke).

"Autism, and climate change", seem like mutual nonsequitars.

Although the most high profile climate activist on the planet is a person on the autism spectrum. Greta Thunberg.

Nature will do what Nature will do. But if Nature will take millennia to change the climate I don't think it is to our advantage to drastically accelerate the process.

I agree with you. People can learn something better from someone's example. I don't want them to know it from their experience because it will be too late.

Oh dear! The climate change drama!

Unfortunately for those who like to spout their knowledge of the worlds ancient history like they know everything, climate change is real and it's comin' fo yo ass!
We humans can rationalize anything. If you can't see that the way humans behave in their environment is a problem I am seriously sorry for you.
Species are dying at increased rates everywhere. Fires. Floods.
Basically, like most things in life it's about taking responsibility. You are a human. You are responsible. But we hate taking responsibility. We avoid or blame or whatever...
Autists will probably suffer more than others from this. We usually do. It may be possible that some of us can be a major force for good. We are often good at problem solving. But success will require all humans pulling together, and that means communication, and so....

I recently learned that the dust bowl was a largely man-made catastrophe, caused by over-plowing (made possible by improvements in mechanical tractors and plows after the invention of the internal combustion engine,) which left vast acres of dirt exposed without any grass roots to hold it together.

My grandmother's family was among the victims of the Dust Bowl; they lost their farm during the drought and had to move in with family in Oklahoma. She used to say that moving to OK during the Dust Bowl wasn't the wisest move, but that's where they had family so that's where they went.

My grandmother passed away last January, but she used to say that if she were a kid today, she'd probably be diagnosed with autism. As it was, they didn't have any supports for kids during the Depression. She was just this kid who couldn't talk right but did math in the dirt with a stick outside the house.

Well, she eventually learned to talk your ear right off and she became a math professor... so maybe some of us deal with climate problems pretty well.

I don't see how we're likely to cope any better than NTs with climate change.

I think global warming is very likely a fact and that we'll be lucky if the powers that be meet the challenge in time. It seems people are already being hurt by climate change. I suppose policy is essentially under the control of business people and I don't think they're going to appreciate the gravity of the situation until it's too late. Climate denial is mostly a right wing thing, naturally, because the right wing is pro business and business doesn't want to scale back consumerism and lose all that lovely profit, and they'll never give up the free market that thrives on people wasting energy on unnecessary baubles. So they pretend it's not there or that they're already doing enough to fix the problem. But targets aren't being met.

I suppose I'm slightly lucky to be a UK citizen because the UK won't be the among the first country that gets fried, but I think it'll be hit hard by secondary effects because life on Earth is all connected and when things go wrong in some countries there's a knock-on effect everywhere. I don't know exactly what will go wrong in the UK first - it's a complex phenomenon and I doubt even the world's best scientists can tell us exactly what things will be like.

England is kept warm by the Gulf Stream, which is faltering due to the meltwater from Greenland. I'm at the latitude of the Midlands, and we just had a frost.
As well as wanting to keep the current cash cows going, as you say, business is also interested in the lousy bargaining position of flood victims, etc.

Honestly, I don't think the problem is businesses or even the powers that be so much as stopping CO2 emissions being an incredibly difficult collective action problem.

Imagine if the US, Australia, NZ, and Europe all hit climate targets tomorrow. (Magic!) So what? That's a little over one of the world's nearly 8 billion people. The world still contains almost 7 BILLION other people who all want to drive cars and have central heat/AC and live in big houses and basically have Western lifestyles, all of which means more CO2.

It's easy for me to talk about climate change... Much harder to convince someone in Bangladesh that I should have a car and he shouldn't. But if I don't have a car, I can't get to the grocery store.

Even when almost the whole world 'shut down" for a couple of weeks during the beginning of covid, we still didn't hit climate/CO2 emissions goals! To actually meet those goals without everyone returning to subsistence agriculture or the global population shrinking a lot (which would be horrifying if it happened fast) is just really hard.

Yeah, reversing climate change will be really hard, but no harder than the upheavals we used to win WW II. Car production ceased, and high-tech factories sprang up on the dust of the Depression. The technology needed to bring back the ice is known, just not funded. Giving up on this struggle will certainly result in a population crash, and could return us to stone-age technology as well.

Whom should we shoot to defeat global warming?

When the US entered WW II, the presidents of the car companies were summoned to Washington and told that their factories would be needed urgently for weapons. The car guys kind of chuckled, and started explaining about lead times for conversion, work in progress, and so on. Then the government countered that it was the car guys who didn't understand the situation - if they sold a car made more than two weeks later, they would go to jail. Of course, profits got even better.
Nobody needs to get shot, but we should jail anyone who approves a new carbon-extraction well, or promotes inefficient products.

The current world leaders don't seem likely to get the job done in time. I guess that's why the Quakers started the Extinction Rebellion thing, to override the authority of our leaders and crack on with the task in hand. Ultimately of course it doesn't matter how CO2 emissions are cut, as long as they're cut by enough in time. Many individuals just won't or can't do their bit, and I don't think the world has enough collective discipline to sort out the problem. Survival has a lot to do with the ability to adapt to change in a timely manner, and global warming is one of those things that doesn't get painful until it's too late to see the point and adapt. Humans have a lot of intelligence and capacity for foresight, but I doubt their collective ability to pull this one off. Too many of them just don't use the brains they were born with. And then there's this "he's not doing it so why should I?" thing. It's very hard to argue against that.

I think we have a huge problem getting enough people behind anything worthwhile.
With the current media and social media landscape there is so much information from so many sources. Many of whom are just lone egos desperately feeding their need for attention while deluding themselves they have something worthwhile to say.
It strikes me that the people I meet who think they are seeking truth are often the most deluded.
During WWII there was the "advantage" that there were only a few media sources, and those could be controlled by government fairly easily. Therefore it was easy to control the narrative and that meant it was possible to get everyone behind a project. Now that seems impossible! Sure, the government controlling the narrative comes with serious issues! But it also has advantages. Focussing the collective will is going to be very important to survival. I'm not sure how we can do that in the current age.

From Yahoo!, attributed to Business Insider:

"Climate scientist says total climate breakdown is now inevitable: 'It is already a different world out there, soon it will be unrecognizable to every one of us'"

Some will think he is being a sensationalist. I have a bad feeling he is right.