Oh I don’t know, could have something to do with the whole climate change disaster the collective scientific community has been warning about for literally decades now
The sad part is, no matter how bad things will get, the same people will keep denying climate change. Even as their shoes melt into the pavement.
Looking at the past, I don’t have any hope for meaningful change.
Just last year or so we’ve had people on their literal death beads denying corona is real.Last night my dad was talking about this “liberal propaganda” about the “supposed climate crisis” talking about the movie Don’t Look Up. Fuck it pissed me off, I don’t know how to respond to that. Conservatives aren’t in reality, every fact that disagrees with their backwards fantasy is just some kind of liberal conspiracy that “wise” men would never bother considering.
It’s really messed up how the world can be reduced to binary opinions.
By definition, liberals think more freely and are willing to entertain new ideas. With that of course comes that some of those ideas turn out to be counter productive or straight up bad. Ideally, this is when real liberals acknowledge this and shift to something else.
Conservatives on the other hand see this as a sign of weakness and misguidedness, so they take a stance rooted in what they “know” to be true. When that knowledge turns out to be false, they can’t simply pivot because that would make them the same as liberals.
Not to mention, sticking to your guns is so much easier than admitting you were wrong and starting from zero again.
Change my opinion and position as I get new information? What do you think I am? Some kind of woke liberal communist!? /s
Genuinely. What’s the point. There’s no convincing them because any evidence you could convince them with they’ve already deemed invalid before they’ve even laid eyes on it.
They’re “sceptics” in the worst way possible in that they don’t apply that scepticism to themselves.
They all think they figured the world out when they were just kids - and it shows.
There will be denial forever, but watch out now for the new propaganda trend, “it’s too late to do anything”. It feels woke and tends to be anticorporate in flavour, but it leads to the same end as denialism.
I agree that the “it’s too late to do anything” mentality is just as bad as doing nothing, but at the same time I recognize that the scientific consensus is more and more leaning towards “it really is too late to do anything” in the short term at least.
Certain gears have been set in motion that we truly cannot stop, but there are also other things that we can prevent if we act now.
I just don’t know where the line between the two lies.
The next 50 years or so are set in stone, of that I’m certain.
But after that, who knows whether the changes we make today will affect the climate in a meaningful way. One can only hope.It was always to late to do anything, because we live on a fractured planet where people who have destroyed it, and their bought off politicians, dictate that its okay to continue destroying it.
The only thing that will change anything is a violent global ww3 level revolution leading to a single world government that can do what needs to be done, and do it quickly, with the worlds entire resources at its disposal. and funding it all by seizing all the now dead billion/trillionaires money.
The problem with that is to a certain extent it is too late. What we were warned would happen decades ago if we didn’t stop is already on our doorstep - climate distasters are getting worse by the year, and temperature records are being leapfrogged left and right.
The next few decades are likely gonna be rough no matter what we as individuals do, because the world’s governments are too hesitant to make the drastic changes needed, and most companies won’t life a finger until financial incentive comes about or they’re made to.
We the people do have power, but many of us lack the time, resources, and/or money to greenify our lives in the ways that we really need to, on thr scale that we need to be doing now.
That’s NOT to say however that we shouldn’t do anything at all, that we shouldn’t press our governments to do anything at all - as the saying goes:
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.
Even little gestures will help in the long, long term.
Looking at the past, I don’t have any hope for meaningful change.
Just last year or so we’ve had people on their literal death beads denying corona is real.You’re not even wrong. Even when people weren’t denying the reality of the situation, so many still refused to do any of the measures designed to stop it, then blamed everyone else around them.
It wad a depressing time to see how rabid and divided people are that somehow the existence of a virus that was literally killing millions of people, and leaving even more crippled existed or not became a political game.
Even if the majority of those people came to understand what was happening and truly believe the scientists, it’ll already be at the point where saying “I was wrong all these years” comes about just too late
Those types of people are so short sighted they can’t see further than their nose, so of course they’ll only see the problem when it’s already here.
Many won’t even concede that they were wrong, they’ll blame the scientists for not stopping them.
We drive our cars and planes And burn the fossil fuels We ignore the scientists And call them climate fools We chop down all the forests And fill the seas with trash We melt the polar ice caps And watch the glaciers crash We suffer and we will die From the heat as we get older But hey, at least we created a lot of value For our dear shareholdersBeautiful and sad. Reminds me of u/poemforyoursprog
Climate change + El Niño
Just to add to this, Climate Change itself is a lot more than mere Global Warming - since weather is mathematically a Chaotic System, the extra energy retained in the system due to greenhouse gases not only increases the average temperature but also makes extreme weather (not just of the high temperature kind) more likely to happen, hence things like for example many and strong storms in a short-time frame which were the kind of combination that used to happen every couple of decades now happenning every couple of years.
Hence why over the last decade we’ve seen extreme weather events a lot more and more often.
The high temperature related records broken now (due to the combination with El Niño) are but a subset of the weather record-breaking that’s been happenning in the last couple of years.
A lot of people think climate change is just heat and desertification.
And its not.
its more akin to a shot of nitrous in your car engine. It will take the normal systems and ramp them up to a realm not normally feasible. Hot weather will get hotter. Hot weather will reach further to places it never did before in summer. Cold weather will get colder. Cold weather will reach further into areas it never did before in in winter. Storms will be more intense. Hurricanes larger. Tornados more prevalent.
But we can’t do anything because the rich and their bought politicians would rather stay the course to continue to extract every last ounce of profit from the planet, then ride out the storm on the high seas on their high end expensive mega yachts.
#5MoreYearsAndWeDead
#4MoreYearsAndTheRemainingRichPeopleWeHaventEatenLeavesEarthOnARocket
They’ll never survive, unless they take hundreds of poors with them to support them. Cause all their money wont mean shit on mars, when they have to shit in a bag and live in a inflated tent that will kill them all if it tears.
Would be ironic then that what kills them is a lack of longterm thinking.
This
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Plus sulphur ban on fuels (to reduce pollution but also reduces aerosol cooling effect)
Sounds like a tipping point to me, but I am not smart.
“Gradually, then suddenly.”
Well tentative take I saw from a climate scientist (in the news I think) was that it might be a flickering of a tipping point. The idea being that complex systems can temporarily look like a new state that they’re close to tipping into but not quite there yet. If true, it would mean that we’re closer to some tipping point than we thought or would like and this is a kind of prelude.
I feel like this is effectively denialism at this point. We’re looking at serious crop loss (80% by some estimates) across the US and Canada and it’s only going to get worse without massive projects or geoengineering. Combine that with a Russia/Ukraine war and we’re looking at 1,4,5,6 and 9 of the worlds top 10 wheat producers looking at a minimal crop. We’re far closer to famine than we realize.
Because we’re governed by a large group of people who rely on fossil fuel countries and companies for campaign cash and the rest are more concerned with owning the libs than doing anything useful.
Yep. Nothing changes because the people that have the power to make the changes don’t want to. The system as it is right now works for them. So why the hell would they want to change that? And most of them won’t be around to see the devastation so there is another level of apathy to all of it.
We can’t get out from underneath this monster it’s too late for that. But I hope that we can start putting people into power that are genuinely concerned about this climate crisis and start the true (massive) step to moving us off the path to total uninhabitability
Climate change? Global warming?
Politicians and billionaires:
Plugging in another article about El Nino by Reuters.
Explainer: How El Nino could impact the world’s weather in 2023-24
But I need my lifted pickup truck To hAUl ThInGS. How can I go grocery shopping without a vehicle the size of a minibus? And how would other people know how strong and wealthy I am if I were to walk, ride a bike or use transit? I need a big metal box around me to protect my insecurity.
While I certainly don’t want to defend the kind of asshats that insist on doing something as stupid and obnoxious as “rolling coal” I do need to point out that large swaths of the US are currently not setup in such a way that you can realistically get around without a vehicle of some kind. Massive work on public transit plus a fundamental urban planning design change needs to take place before walking, biking, or public transit is a viable way to get from point A to point B.
So until those changes are made, yes most Americans will need a electric or ICE vehicle. It doesn’t need to be an inefficient pollution spewing behemoth, but it does need to be something. Really though aside from people intentionally modifying their vehicles to be less efficient and more polluting modern cars are pretty efficient and clean.
The primary vehicle contributor to both global warming and pollution isn’t even cars though, it’s ships by a landslide. It isn’t even remotely close. Cruise ships and particularly the giant container ships used to move goods internationally are hugely inefficient and polluting with just one ship putting out in a single day the equivalent of multiple cars worth of pollution for an entire year.
The primary vehicle contributor to both global warming and pollution isn’t even cars though, it’s ships by a landslide. It isn’t even remotely close. Cruise ships and particularly the giant container ships used to move goods internationally are hugely inefficient and polluting with just one ship putting out in a single day the equivalent of multiple cars worth of pollution for an entire year.
Bullshit.
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
Road transportation: 11.9%
Shipping: 1.7%
Ocean liners are very dirty yes but they’re actually very efficient compared to cars and trucks precisely because they’re so massive. They move a huge amount of goods. Put the same amount of goods on trucks and you get an order of magnitude more emissions.
Oh and electricity and heating create almost twice as much ghg emissions as transportation. Which is why supporting renewables is the single most important thing anyone can do for the environment.
Not sure how you square those numbers with reports like this then: https://www.businessinsider.com/cruise-ship-air-pollution-carnival-cars-europe-study-2023-6
That wasn’t the actual report I was thinking about, but its been a number of years since I saw that original report which looked at pollution of shipping vessels vs. pollution of US automobiles and found that an overwhelming majority of the pollution came from the ships.
The good news such as it is is that as pointed out in that article regulations have improved in 2020 and it’s already showing reductions in ship pollution.
The article that you reference is mainly about sulphur oxide. I’m not sure how you make the leap from that to CO2. Also Business Insider is owned by the very pro oil & gas Springer who in turn is partially owned by KKR. I would say not the most credible source when it comes to environmental information.
Conflating GHG with “pollution” is a classic obfuscation tactic. They’re not the same.
I mean, the meat industry produces more than both of those combined at 15%.
And that’s something you can stop today right now if you want to.
I stopped two years ago, for ethical reasons though.
I also read that what is not taken into account is that the people on the cruise ships are not somewhere else - so you have hundreds of thousands of people who are not driving, heating houses, flying, or basically not doing other things that could cause emissions. Whether it has an effect or not I don’t know, but it does sort of make sense.
Didn’t a couple of years ago scientist warned that we have past the point of no return?
There is a scene in the TV show Newsroom (with Jeff Daniels) where he (the news show anchor) is interviewing a climate scientist about the climate change situation. Everything the scientist says eludes to the fact that we are completely screwed. That everything we are trying would have been great things to start doing 20+ years ago. At this point we have already passed the point of recovery.
It was aired in like 2015, and I think of it every time someone talks about this, and what a surprise this whole thing is.
I thought the delivery of that scene was fantastic. They did such a great job with it.
Here’s a link for those who’ve never seen it. https://youtu.be/pNYp6oc37ds
I had never seen this, thanks for sharing
That was great! Thank you for sharing
We probably are but it’s also very important to remember that were not past the point of no survival. The trend for oil propaganda has been to go from “climate change is fake” to “it’s real but it’s too late to do anything”. It’s too late to go back, but it’s not too late to act. Don’t forget that.
there are many “points of no return”. the first irrevocable damage was done when we started burning coal hundreds of years ago, and every year we pass new points after which the earth will be forever changed. that doesn’t mean all life is screwed, or humanity will die out. it does mean that things are going to get a lot worse, and the degree to which they’re going to get worse is increasing every day we don’t address the issue.
the one thing climate scientists DO NOT want you to think is that we are doomed and that it is hopeless. things are bad, and getting worse, but the actions we take DO MATTER.
~~burn down an oil refinery (in minecraft)~~
Fucked around to increase shareholder value.
“Faster than expected.”
Sometimes I feel like I’m on the “Lord of the Flies” island; we’ve ignored the scientists and now the whole place is burning down.
Honestly a lot of it feels like gaslighting now. Some of us have been freaking out about this for a while.
Its the optiomy of we’ve tried nothing and we’re out of ideas. Although I did see something about potentially blocking out the sun, so there’s that option
I mean, it’s summer In the northern hemisphere… That’s where most of the land on earth is
There is A LOT of money to be made in climate change. What you don’t hear in the news cycle is that we’ve made extensive reductions in all forms of pollution, but especially air pollution. We have slowed the rate of global warming as a result. Now big money “green” corporations don’t want you to know that. Many on here will point to China using more coal or that our efforts are not enough. Fact is that the change is occurring and we are making an impact and need to keep that trend going, but know that the majority of the data that is published on the long term forecast is using 1970s data and not 2023 data to skew the impact as being worse and more fearsome. All the ‘were past the tipping point’ and such are using the old data. Things are better than that, but not to the point we need for major recovering.
Reduction isn’t enough. We’ve only been successful in exporting our pollution to places like China. We actually haven’t reduced anything because of that fact. We may have reduced pollution here but only at a cost of increasing it some where else.
With that said co2 emissions today are the highest they’ve ever been. We haven’t slowed anything. Climate change is increasing at an exponential rate. It’s going to keep increasing until we can figure out how to eliminate emissions and reduce what is already in the atmosphere.
Reality is no matter what reductions we take here the overall emissions in the world is still going up.
Hate to say it but it’s a little too late. By the time we figure out how to eliminate emissions the world will have burnt to a crisp. The time for aggressive changes was 50 years ago. We’ve already passed the temperature at which run away climate change is possible.
It’s quite clear our leaders decided to run it all into the ground instead of making an effort to change our way of life.
thinks about Clathrate Gun and starts sweating
I think we all know China is a problem.
Facts are facts, it is to little too late, call me a doomer all you want, we are fucked
Ok doomer
instead of making an effort to change our way of life.
the unfortunate reality is the only way to significantly change carbon emissions in a fast enough time period would essentially mean throwing all of humanity back a couple of centuries in tech and standard of living
you try being a politician who advocates for this. you’re not gonna get elected
even worse, convince all the 3rd world countries who are currently developing trying to get their people out of poverty. the chinese have finally gotten the taste for a little bit of meat with their dinner. of course that comes at the cost of mountains of coal being burned.
you tell those hundreds of millions of people that they need to go back to the farms and eat rice for the climate - meanwhile we got our chance to burn as much coal as we wanted to last century.
the reality is that we won’t be able to stop climate change. the reality is that we’re going to have to learn to live with it. and we will. climate change will not destroy us. it will destroy many species, will destroy many habitable zones. but we will survive.
i’m more worried about nuclear war & AI - which i think has a much more acute danger
It’s not necessarily true that we have to throw humanity back to the 1600s. Nuclear fission could realistically and safely bring out carbon emissions under control and serve as an actually viable load backbone for a renewable grid (as opposed to having giant battery facilities). We can also pivot away from car dependent infrastructure and long-haul trucking in favor of more walkable cities, better public transit, and expanded freight rail networks.
A reduction in the rate of increase isn’t enough, and it’s debatable even that is happening.
CO2 is one that hasn’t decreased, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions have decreased.
Do you have any sources to back up your claims? Because NASA has consistently been able to make predictions about climate patterns and how they’ll change in 10-15 years if no meaningful impact on emissions occurs, and they pretty reliably come true. That, for me, is pretty good evidence that NASA knows what they’re talking about, and they’re certainly not saying that everything’s fine.
Why would using 1970s data instead of 2023 data give a more fearsome forecast? Are you saying that emissions have decreased since 1970?
Certain types of pollutants have decreased, CO2 for example hasn’t decreased and won’t as long as logging continues. Trees store vast quantities of CO2 and when cut down it is released. Vehicles are releasing less CO2, industry is releasing less CO2, but there are more of them so we are not seeing the offset. What it come down to is that we need to avoid those trying to distract us from the end game which is reducing pollutants through better techniques and practices. Driving vehicles that don’t use carbon emissions is a great example of this. Building Nuclear Power Plants is another.
Co2 is released when those trees rot. If they’re cut down for construction material then they don’t release their carbon it’s actually stored away.
They cut off a lot of the wood from what I have observed.
It’s South America that has my concern.
That’s fair, hopefully bolsonaro out and Silva back will lead to more sustainable logging practices in the vast majority if the Amazon.
Is it more or less than the money to be made from fossil fuels?
There’s alway more opportunity and money to be made in new emerging markets, just not by the current top dogs.
That’s why cigarette companies fought against e-cigs while buying those companies out.
That’s why power companies for the longest time poo pooed solar while quietly investing in solar capacity.
The big guys block and depress these new markets while they get their ducks in a row cause if these new markets just exploded uncontrolled they’d miss out on getting in cheap.
So much more, as fossil fuels are a limited resource, green energy is limitless.
