1) Climate change has been identified as a real problem by science, but now there is fortunately at least some building momentum to tackle it.
Yes, by climate engineering. Just stopping to use fossil fuels will not happen, until other energy sources are utilized. Even then, fossil fuel is just too cheap, unless you can offer people free energy in other forms, they will just dig out and burn free energy from the ground.
2) what will happen during our lifetime is probably something between two extremeties: a) Venus-like greenhouse-effect-outta-control (very unlikely), or b ) no significant change (very unlikely).
Change is certain, change is the only sure thing, the only constant.
The question is if humans cause some of that change - which is settled: Yes. By building infrastructure, we change the albedo (roads, houses, cities) and cause many other examples of changed microclimate at least.
The next question how much of the overall change is from human activity. Probably impossible to tell.
The next question is if climate change will hurt human interests. Probably impossible to tell, too, because we cannot predict the scale and effects of future climate change.
The next question is if potential negative effects on humans from climate change can be minimized by actions we hope (but cannot know) to minimize climate change caused by human activity. The answer is a clear No! because much of the CO2 has already been generated, and humanity will not stop burning fossil fuel until other, at least just as cheaply available energy sources are available. Just cutting back a little on fossil fuel use will not do anything, only spread the CO2 production over a somewhat longer time.
Electric cars or higher taxes on fossil fuel etc. will not change anything. "Climate change" as a political slogan is just used to sell such cars or facilitate tax increases - a pretext for making people accept and do things certain interest groups want.
Highest probability event is loss of inhabitable land in some areas (floods, drought, extreme weather). Food supply get hit, economy may go into recession.
Too difficult to predict. We only can try to adapt. Desertification etc. happens, and did happen. Loss of farmable land happens. But as the climate changes and makes some parts of the world unfarmable, other areas of land open up,
for example the rising temperatures in Greenland open up vast spaces of fertile lands for agriculture:
https://edition.cnn....rets/index.html
3) The effects will hit poor regions of the world hardest. Western societies are so ultra wealthy, we will probably just take economic impact and then adapt. We will probably need to have harsh immigration control because people will flee areas affected areas (famine, wars, etc). The hardest impact in western countries will hit the poor population (food, fuel, etc prices go up.) Those who are well-off take the smallest impact.
So what? Outside the industrialized countries misery and death were and are quite the norm. I do not worry about, for example, whole of Africa. If 90% of them died, I would not care.
And, I feel I should point out, most people in the West would not.
See, how did you feel about the news reports about the
https://en.wikipedia...wandan_genocide
I am sure you were not significantly stirred by the deaths of millions of Negroes. In comparison, if you had suffered a dent or big scratch in your car, or bumped and broke your toe, or broke your TV, you would have felt a much higher emotional
activation than just learning that a few millions of Negroes died by killing each other.
Or, every day, for over a decade, the US alone drone-bombs and kills people all over the world, amounting to dozens killed every single day:
https://en.wikipedia...._drone_strikes
Again, you do not care, and I don't either.
It's just facts, and we can ignore it, because those people are irrelevant to us.
The situation changes for most people if propaganda is activated and their emotions, sentimentality exploited:
Say, this are killed Africans:
Emotional reaction: Fear and disgust. Most people do not care for them, only want to be sure they stay away.
Compare the effect of this picture for public reporting of Negro affairs:
The big eyes and other child features as well as the other emotional cues trigger sentimentality in the observer of the picture, activating instincts that lead to a much higher probability to accept personal costs to help those blacks,
for example by accepting higher taxes for foreign aid or donating money to charities.
But both picture show the same kind of people, the same basic problem. Being exposed through by media of the first, people will not do much, while being exposed of the 2nd, will feel sentimental emotions and open their wallet or accept political actions they would not otherwise agree to.
But both pictures show the same kind of people - those poor, little children will grow into the dangerous and unreasonable predators in the first picture.
By aiding them, one would just feed the snake that would late bite you.
Remember:
There have been great and many "humanitarian crises" in the recent past, killing, even genociding millions - and the gates of the West stayed shut!
Only now, as elites decided we must have mass immigration due to economic needs, suddenly they found their dear hearts, and not having mass immigration, even protecting borders, is suddenly impossible, immoral, "Nazi".
Moral feelings can be exploited by media, empathy being prevented or enforced, to make people accept political measures of their leaders.
4) As long as one is among the well-off westerners, you are relatively safe. But that should not mean one should ignore the environmental effects entirely.
Governments watch and analyze world affairs very carefully and sophisticatedly, have no doubt about that.
We all should learn to conserve resources, consume less and teach our children to value the Better Things in life (I.e. things you can not buy). This is useful even now, because when you consume less and waste less, you save money, which is always a good idea.
No. I do not want to "conserve resources", just so some people I do not care for elsewhere have it maybe somewhat better. I want to live and expand, and that means using up resources, in competition for those resources with other people,
and the loser in that competition will get exterminated. This cannot be prevented, ultimately, anyhow.
And the saving of money is only a thing because of high taxes, for example, for using water. Water is never used up, only eternally recycled. We have more than enough water, but it is artificially made expensive by taxes, which are then used not on the water supply, but for other things. In Northern Europe, saving water is idiocy, we have more of it than we could ever waste, it literally falls out of the sky. Saving water here will not even prevent people to die of thirst elsewhere.
Also:
If you want to reduce significantly the ecologic impact of humanity, then cull humanity. I will not accept a falling or just slower rise of my living standard so that billions of Africans and Asians can rise theirs.
If you remove those Africans, or at least isolate them on their continent, you prevent another billion of people having an environmental impact from consumerism.
Ideally, we should reduce humans being alive to perhaps just one billion, who then could live with high living standards and consumption levels while having minimum ecologic impact.
But if you have ten billion humans, as we are headed to, they will even have a huge ecological impact even when their average living standard were very low, compared to current Western standards.
So, if you care for environmental aspects or human life quality, the best policy is the same: Reduce the number of humans. Implications should be clear.
5) I think my personal strategy would be: work hard to remain among privileged westerners,
No hard work even necessary: Just by being born in Europe you have won the jackpot. Our social welfare system will make sure you will do quite well even if you, individually, should become lazy.
It's unjust, but this is how reality is. Other people are born crippled just by luck, and some people have been born as Africans. We have been lucky and successful. We should not feel guilty for it,
not feel guilty to be better, better off, even genetically superior. Let not guilt-trip other to manipulate you into submission, into defeat - they are not doing it for "justice" or "morality", but for their own
selfish gain.
but also -in everyday life- reduce ecological footprint and research ways to save energy, conserve resources and recycle/reuse as much stuff as possible instead of throw-away culture. Buy robust and repairable items instead of cheap disposable ones.
Again:
Why? You seem to me to kind of feeling guilty that you even exist! Get rid of that guilt! Is it inborn or has it been educated, "brain-washed" into you by leftists?
You have an unalienable right to exist, to try to keep existing, to try to keep reproducing - by preventing others from achieving survival and reproduction, if need be.
Do not restrict yourself of necessary resources to facilitate the well-being or even survival of others! They would not reciprocate, especially if they are genetically very different to you - invest in yourself, your own people, your family; not in those who are not like you, who hate you for being better, as this is the usual attitude of the inferior towards the superior.
This is what life, including human life is! Why are you attempting to move towards suicide by caring too much for others unrelated to you?
You are the descendant of a long line of ancestors, from the beginning of life itself, who successfully managed to beat other organisms and humans for survival and reproduction, by killing them by being stronger or more clever than them!
If you accept harm to yourself or your family because they can guilt-trip you for being superior into defeat, you are acting most wrong, I think.
I feel you should be more self-confidently selfish.
As I posted elsewhere,
https://en.wikipedia...d_self-interest
makes sense, but only after one's own needs, one's own optimized survival is maximized.
Sure, wasting resources should be minimized absent free energy, but there is a limit to it, and to live, to exist, to reproduce, we just need resources, and more are better than less, and because there is a war for resources and mates, for life and survival, anyway, I, at least, will not accept restricting myself significantly just to further the survival of others, especially others I could not care less for because I think they are or will become enemies, if treated well.
The most important prepper -thing I might do is to buy are big Jerry can of fuel to the garage for emergencies. A water purifier might be a good idea too, because extreme weather may increase probabilities of the drinking water to go temporarily non-potable (via sewage floods, etc). Good quality hiking equipment and wilderness survival skills are also good to be available (if you like hiking and being in nature like I do, I need them anyway.)
All reasonable generally, to a degree. A huge catastrophe nobody could survive, because we need a working economy and industry, medical supplies, food and energy. Just getting over temporary problems by having some stored resources, energy etc. is generally a good idea; but overdoing it would be a waste of resources, because resources spent preparing for a low-chance catastrophic event are resources that are wasted if the event never materializes. Another argument I heard from others:
Those in a good bunker surviving a global nuclear holocaust are going to be the most miserable, because they will just die most slowly. Therefore, do not invest in huge bunkers, invest in prevention of such a catastrophic event - which, individually is rather impossible, but I feel we have mostly competent governments, especially in the West.
In the OP you wondered if you should prepare to kill other humans:
Should one invest in guns and ammo instead of stocks and funds?
I think some weaponry is good to have, otherwise others that know of your stock of supplies in an emergencies could just take them away from you easily by force.
Resources you cannot protect are resources you not really have.
Especially with the widespread rioting, criminal shootings, hand grenade attacks, Muslim and Negro ghettos full of guns, and mass arson and mass rapes going on in Sweden due to low-quality human mass immigration you should be safer to be in a remote area, with secret supplies of your own, and equipped with deadly guns.
Swedish dark-skinned immigrants are on a killing spree even now, in a time of plenty of resources and social welfare - I think you know what to expect from them if resources were to dry up: Sotha and his family becomes their prey - so prepare, but wisely so: What nobody knows you own is very difficult to take away from you, the aggressor being neighbors, the government, or the immigrant brutes.
Whatever you have to do, in the end, only survival counts; getting exterminated for acting moral is insanity, slave mentality. The winner takes it all! Such is reality.
6) For solving the climate change, there is not much more an individual can do
Exactly. So do not get manipulated into accepting higher taxes, or stopping to want to use plastic bags.
Even if the whole West were to vanish suddenly, the problem would persist.
Better prevent using other regions of the world from using fossil fuels, sabotaging or warring them, so that they cannot rise to the level of wealth, and thus economic impact, we ourselves enjoy.
If not anybody can have it, I want to be among those who can, by any means.
In western democracies, scary amount of responsibility is put into the hands to the voters. Instead for voting populists or people who only drive the interests of your power group, we should vote for well-informed people who make decisions backed up by science, not just random thoughts of the day.
Does not work like that, voters are egoistic and stupid, because the majority is, because human nature is so. If you doubt this, experiment yourself: Make a list of easy issues you feel everybody should understand. Then go in a public place, like a shopping street, and ask random people about those things. You will find an astounding level of ignorance.
Many higher-cognitive-ability people do not really understand how it is to be on the other side of the bell curve. Do not think those people are just like you, can do what you can intuitively. They are more like you were if you were extremely tired or drunk. People with IQs in the 60s to 80s, like Africans, are practically hopeless.
(Note that highly capable people of African descent indeed exist - they are just very rare, and therefore cannot be the basis for one's general judgments on dealing with racial issues.)
And those people are voters. Neither their ignorance or their voting power can be taken from them - but it can be dealt with, through propaganda.
Not one single political issue in a modern democracy was ever really decided by the voters, and much less understood completely by them.
In propaganda, in democracy, you can only work to control voting with extreme oversimplifications of issues in public discourse; and it works, because the ignorant and lower-IQ people are always in the majority. This is how democracy really works - without the majority being easily manipulated ignorants democracy would be unstable or even impossible, because the very high level of complexity underlying actual political and economical decisions is impossible to explain to the public.
7) Believing populists who offer ultra-simple solutions to ultra-complex problems ("everything is the EUs/immigrants'/jews/nazis/used car salesmens fault") gets us confused.
But this is how democracy works, it cannot be different. Without oversimplification of issues, there can be no public discussion of issues.
And "populism" is exactly what, according the naive definition of democracy, political leaders should be: "Populus" means people, nation, community - exactly those who are officially the deciders in democracy, and populists are those who carry through with the opinions of the people. If you want to avoid having populists, you must avoid having a democracy, at least on the outside.
Using "othering" gets us confused ("everything is the elites/researchers fault." or "the elites/scientist conspire against the common people.") Fact is that humans are mostly the same: they have the same needs, the same fears, the same biases. When you see an elite or other "othering" group and want to hate them, it might be a good idea to remember that they are human just like you.
Yes, human like me, and therefore prone to want to kill them if need be just like I am prone to kill them. People often have opposing interests. Then there is conflict, and it may become deadly.
Closed mind gets us confused ("I'm not gonna listen to this data because the source is an expert, and I do not like experts nor the message. I prefer to listen what matches with my pre-existing beliefs.")
Yes,
https://en.wikipedia...nfirmation_bias
Being distrustful towards leaders and specialists gets us confused.
No. You cannot just trust them, because they have biases and interests of their own, therefore consciously or unconsciously hurting your own interests.
Never really trust naively.
Or, in Reagan's words: "Trust, but verify."
Trust is only good when dealing with honest people, and you only know if they are really honest after the event, and if they turned out not honest, you may well end up dead.
(If you distrust sources with detailed information (specialist) or sources with broad big-picture or information (leader), you only have your own cognition to rely on and will probably get incorrect results.
Perhaps, perhaps not. I prefer to try to do the thinking myself, and rely on "authority" as little as possible. That has, until now, served me very well.
For most reliable results, always use multiple sources and know that all sources are not as equally reliable.)
With current internet surveillance and manipulation technology, even just from regular marketing or public relations people, much of a wide range of information and search results is already manipulated.
There are whole companies specializing in making information disappear on the internet, or making things so that a very one-sided information environment is presented even to the skilled user of search engines.
For example, the West's "hornet nest" strategy papers for dealing with the Middle East surge of young Muslim men by making them go at war with each other (ISIS etc.) to let them kill each other to remove them as a threat to the West have been wiped almost completely, even from Wikileaks; the evidence that the West delivered large amounts of weaponry to them and stirred up hatred among them to make them kill off each other more quickly was wiped from the net as well, etc.
The only way to get clarity is to rely on science. The thoughts in your mind may be true, or they might be totally (utterly and horribly) wrong, and you cannot know which is the case.
True science is indeed best, but only an ideal. In reality you only deal with science through human activity, and this is often biased or motivated to deceive.
The only way to know which thought is true is to test them using the methods given by science. Not everyone is a specialist in complicated fields of science, and like Spring said if the message of the specialist does not make sense to you, it probably means you do not understand the topic, rather than the specialist does not understand their own field of expertise.
Dangerous, I think, because you leave the "critical critical thinking" to others.
And, usually, in reality of science, there is no bifurcation into "what all scientists think is true" and "what everybody else thinks is true"; actually, on a great many issues, you have different scientists holding conflicting opinions on what is the truth.
It's about echo chamber frenzy, cherry picking the story that catches your fancy and not about what is really true.
Wishful thinking is human nature, and was always been in effect. Rationality is going after truth and acting on it even if it makes one uncomfortable.
