Have we ever as a species successfully changed our behavior on a scale needed to address something like climate change and underwater oxygen loss?<p>What would be the closest “we’ve got to change or perish” moment we’ve successfully navigated?
Lead in gasoline? <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/leaded-gasoline-phase-out" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/leaded-gasoline-phase-out</a>
We did a reasonable job with ozone depletion, but that has much lower costs.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion</a>
Yesterday there was an article here about ozone vs aluminum from the spacex sattelites reentry (which soon there will be plenty of)
The cost of not addressing it is more distributed: at some point you can't go outside anymore since the UV index is so high, sunscreen can't block high-intensity UV-B and UV-C, plants get damaged to the point of catastrophic crop failures... you can live in denial about climate change in developed countries (for a limited time anyway) but ozone affects everyone.
Acid rain as well.
Food?<p>I.E. avoiding population collapse due to lack of ecosystem carrying capacity? Eliminating famine? etc.
Nuclear weapons (so far)?<p>Banning CFCs perhaps?<p>If you want to go older and more localised you could look at forestry and fisheries laws. Sometimes we self-regulate and form a stable state, other times we over-extract until collapse
Ozone hole over Antarctica.<p>It is possible for us to work together and fix these things.<p>Edit:<p>Moving away from leaded gas might be another example.<p>(CFCs and leaded gas invented by the same dude, fun fact: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr</a>. Quite a legacy...)
When the costs are low and require no change in personal behaviour, nor even belief in the problem. Billions of people had no idea about changes to aerosol propellants or refrigerants and they were not required to know or agree in order to solve the problem.
We haven't fixed the ozone hole yet. It'll take another 40 years for it to return to the levels prior to 1980:<p><a href="https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/ozone-hole-continues-healing-in-2024-153523/" rel="nofollow">https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/ozone-hole-...</a>
Historically speaking over over a billion years almost every species has consumed one thing and output another to the point of extinction while another species that consumes that grows and repeats the cycle.<p>Climate change has been the story of evolution since life appeared on earth and aglae filled the atmosphere with gasses.
We almost eradicated several diseases, usually screwed over by designating an Omelasan child (though, that's a bad characterization, because letting parts of the world continue to suffer and serve as a reservoir for those diseases was actually completely unnecessary).
"We"?
if by "we" you mean Chinese, then yes, as THEY have maintained a cultural structure and language far longer than we have, and adapting themselves and there environment to do that was something they have been doing successfully for millenia,China still venerates the first engineer "Gun"assigned to control the flooding on the yallu river 3300 years ago, and it is then no surprise that they are building solar, wind and other renewable fossil/carbon free energy sources at an unprecidented rate, and ultra high voltage grid systems to distribute that energy, while we wring our hands committing genocide on the Palistinians.
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CFCs are responsible for the ozone hole. There are no known significant natural sources of CFCs. The ozone hole was caused by humans and its course correction was due to the political will to phase out CFCs.<p>> Climate scientists can raise the alarm or whatever but have no credibility<p>Climate scientists have credibility.
There is a class of problems where "when things get really bad" is also the point when it's too late to implement a solution. Driving off a cliff, for example.<p>What would you do if you studied this matter for several years, and found overwhelming evidence that this is such a category of problem?
> Ozone hole? Not sure how much of that was cyclical vs in human control.<p>If you don't know, maybe you should look it up instead of touting your ignorance in a public discussion forum? Your ignorance is not noteworthy. And while you're at it, you can educate yourself on climate change and proposed solutions to it, too. You seem to be suffering from several significant misconceptions, likely because you're bought into a narrative spun out by political hacks with zero understanding of the relevant scientific principles/knowledge and a vested interest in never changing that.
> not when the proposed solution is some kind of global authoritarian communism<p>Please make an effort to engage more substantially with reality, especially on this forum.
> Things like this, it’s still hypothetical. Climate scientists can raise the alarm or whatever but have no credibility, certainly not when the proposed solution is some kind of global authoritarian communism, and it always is.<p>Absolutely ridiculous. Climate scientists have credibility; climate science denying cranks who blather about communism have none.<p>> When things get really bad<p>Things are really bad.<p>Muted via my HN front end ... I won't be responding further.
I think that the banng of HFCs is a pretty good example of collective action.<p>Also, it's important to realize that climate change, as we best understand it right now, is not a "or perish" type of situation. RCP8.5 has now been soundly eliminated from the set of potential climate trajectories, so what we're left with is a question of 1) how much mass migration will be forced upon the world, with concomitant wars and social strife, and 2) how much economic loss results from that, as well as from lost opportunity by not adopting cheaper renewable energy routes.<p>Technological innovation has done something absolutely remarkable: the future with the cheapest and most abundant energy is the one that switches to renewable energy and storage the fastest. Every day we delay, not only do we end up with a worse climate outcome, but we also just light money on fire, with worse economic efficiency. And in economies built on the continual compounding interest of technological advancement, we subject humanity to far greater poverty for every day we delay the transition.<p>Most of the world will benefit from this technological change happening quickly. There will be some outliers, like the US, that choose to be poorer and less influential by actively subverting renewable energy in the marketplace (the Trump administration has done a huge amount of economic damage in only a small amount of time), but the US will come around. Texas is leading the way, because they are actually market driven more than they are politically driven, but the rest of the US is kind of screwed on that front for a while.