There is some hope if we chip at it as much as we can. No action is too small:
- less travelling. Life is fun near home. Happiness isn’t tied to an airplane and a beach far away
- eat less animals. You ll get used to whatever diet in a few weeks. It doesnt have to be vegan or nothing. Also, beans are delicious:)
- bamboo toilet paper. Grows fast, renewable.
- plant bushes, trees. Look up local resilient species. I’ve been planting everywhere I can. You can call your local municipality, they have regreening programs.
- buy less stuff. Available tech is already good enough.
- vote with your wallet. This is the only real power we have over corporations, imo. Lots of great easy to repair brands. Fair trade, etc.
If we convince ourselves we are screwed, we ll give up. Be the hero of your own story. YOU DO NOT NEED TO GET IT 100% RIGHT. Any improvement is improvement. We all live different lives, and the economy is hard on alot of us.
I believe:)
and yes, more putting the onus on us, when all of our individual yearly pollution barely amounts to a day of pollution released by average industry.
You know it was industrial propaganda that started the whole personal responsibility thing to begin with right? to shift blame away from themselves and onto you and me.
I mean, yeah, you can make yourself feel good by reducing, but its doing fuckall compared to industrial release.
I understand the sentiment, but doesn’t “the industry” essentially produce things that are for “us”, even if indirectly?
Factories don’t exist for their own sake, they exist to make an end product for people. So if you want to change that, we do need to consume less, like the parent you replied to said.
And vote. Pay attention to issues and vote. Don’t get caught up in a single issue, or voting with emotions or spite: vote for your future
Sure, we can do that, but keep in mind that unilateral individual actions will not make the difference, all you can do is trying to create more broad awareness, form coalition and support for tighter laws and regulation, in order to have meaningful effect.
Also avoid blaming or moralizing individuals for their own choices, this will cause fatigue and infighting, which will distract from focus on policy change.
If we stopped emitting all carbon dioxide today, crashing the world economy in the process, we would still have to deal with the same temperature levels we have right now. We not only need to reduce emissions, but we now have to reverse it. Nothing short of immediate global transition to nuclear power and/or nuclear fusion coming online will stop what is happening.
Nothing short of immediate global transition to
nuclear power and/or nuclear fusionrenewable energy + storage coming online will stop what is happening.ftfy
Also, nobody alive today will see the effect of any reversing we do in our time, even if we manage to find something and start tomorrow. But it’ll get much worse if we do nothing.
I appreciate you. Thank you for posting that thoughtful and insightful comment.
You’re awesome.
The US military is one of, if not the largest, enemy of the environment. Every one of us could do our part but without militaries being mindful too, the environment is cooked.
the air force literally dumps jet fuel all the time so they can adjust to proper weight to land
We tried capitalism in a hundred different ways and we are all out of ideas.
Welp we’re fucked
Even if you ignore anything else, just speak to ANY mountaineer, and they’ll all tell you that glaciers are drying up
Lakes in Minnesota are frozen something like 30 days less per year on average than they were in 1975.
Climate change deniers are either stupid, greedy, or both.
yeah, back when i was young and had energy there was this 12 mile run up a mountain to the glacier (or where it was) and back i’d do once or twice a year. last time i saw the glacier was like, 20 years ago.
Can we ask the globe to wait till I die?
I just wish people would stop acting like I am a “Doomer” over this shit.
Every year its record high summers and winters, tnado alley is moving, rain patterns are all fucked up, I am not even a professional and I can tell the extreme weather shifts from climate change are happening.
People aren’t good at long term thinking. They have a hard time conceptualizing that actions now affect the entire following century. Our actions build on each other a little at a time, and keep adding up to worse
It urgent not because of what’s happening now, but what will continue to get worse. It’s urgent because we’re locking in climate change now
Doomerism is giving up, not accepting the reality that things are bad and getting much worse.
I mean, maybe, except we are way way way past the point where we can fix this. Very large numbers of humans, will die, likely in the next 20 years. From famine and fighting caused by mass migration from now unlivable areas.
Given our response level when we had time and resources and somewhat willing to work governments, vs now, its going to be a very large percentage, probably 100% within 40-50 years as it spirals and gets worse more and more rapidly.
People got all pissy during COVID when things became hard to get from shipping delays and they couldn’t go out to eat. Wait until things become hard to get because those things can no longer be manufactured and they can’t go out to eat because there is no food.
But hey, enough Doomer talk. Fidja see, Elon Musk isna Trillionaire! Everything is booming! MONEY!
we are way way way past the point where we can fix this
While it’s hard to make things better, it’s easy to make things worse. It can always get worse and giving up means it will
It’s more important than ever to advocate for change. To do what you can, both personally and with whatever influence you have, either in your social circle or through your consumer practices, or voting.
As a citizen of the US, we seem to be the main villain here. We are making some progress, maybe more than you’d think, but the denial, the politics, the spite and racism means we’re not getting as much done as we need to. A year ago we had corporations on board, we had half the stars on board, we had many major cities on board. Then we got run over by a giant coal rolling monument to excess that modern pickups are. Time to get up, dust ourselves off, and get things moving again
You are really misreading what Im saying. Im not saying things should go on as usual. Im saying we need to fight to salvage what we can.
Your last paragraph is especially misrepresenting my point.
I’ve tried having this same conversation with my mum multiple times and she keeps saying that there has been no meaningful increase in temperatures in her lifetime and I’m just thinking what are you talking about?! I just don’t understand what they stand to lose by admitting that humans have demonstrably increased the global temperatures.
I just don’t understand what they stand to lose by admitting that humans have demonstrably increased the global temperatures.
Cars.
yeah, we didn’t have fire season out here when i was growing up. we used to call it summer.
Europe somewhere? Like apparently Europe has California wildfires everywhere now. WTF.
yeah those “california wildfires” didn’t take over all of the pacific northwest for five months back when i was little. now they do. congratulations, Europe! all that coal and oil all y’all burned for your exclusive benefit, now you get the fires too!
Some level of personal guilt for continuing to exist in a system where fossil fuels are burned on their behalf and we often need to burn them ourselves to live a nornal life because the alternatives may barely exist. For example see DEI bike lanes in the states and the banning of them in ontario in canada thus promoting more car use and discourage/making it more dangerous to bike.
Kids today just love to complain about the weather. It was hot when i was young too and the rain didn’t stop us. Tornados have always happened outside their traditional range occasionally. If CO2 is to blame then volcanos are the real problem. /s
My government will do nothing until most politicians dies in not one but multiple tornadoes hitting the parliament… in the same year…
And then they would invest in better healthcare plans, and better security
*for the MPs
Why do they care about the Military Police?
MPs = members of parliament
People who call you a doomer over this are just those who want to keep their head in the sand.
Remember that the fossil fuel industry knew what was going to happen in the 1970s and lied to governments around the world to ensure our future of maximal fossil fuel burning and damn the consequences came to pass.
We have words for people who betray their country, we have words for people who betray their family, we even have words for people who betray the firm they work for every day, but we have no words for people who betray their entire species.
Almost like some kind of… hockey stick?
But at least we made a bunch of grotesque genocidal pedophiles obscenely wealthy.
Even the billionaire cult conterences shifted from “debunking global warming” to “adapting to global warming”.
The thing that doesn’t get called out enough is that many greenhouse gasses have a lag time before they actually start causing heat. CO2 for example takes about 20 years if I recall correctly. So we are seeing the results of what was emitted years ago… not necessarily the current emissions.
Really? I’ve never heard of this, and I’m a climate scientist… Not saying it’s definitely wrong, but a citation would be good.
Edit: Huh, seems it’s true: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/3/031001 although that is for large pulses of CO2, I don’t know how that translates into a constant stream of emissions…
Well greenhouse gases are often described as a blanket and a blanket doesn’t immediately get warm, it take time. I doubt the trickling effect is much different in lag time than sudden pulses, its just gradually increasing the blanket rather than pulling it all on at once. Its still gonna take time for more solar energy to accumulate by bouncing off the trickling in CO2.
In the book plows, plagues, and petroleum, the author uses several factors of humans history to argue that man made climate change was slowly having an impact much before the industrial revolution, which is the common “starting point” for most people and scientists. Althought not as drastic as this sudden increase in fossil fuel burning, they argue that impacts such as deforestion and burning of cropland in early human settlements had a measureable impact on carbon sinks and carbon releases, still enough to start skewing the natural rate of climate change.
Yeah… realising I was not making a distinction between greenhouse effect (e.g. increased rate of warming), and the result (e.g. actual increased heat content/temperature. I think the rate of warming increase is basically instant, but yes, it takes some time for the temperature levels to catch up.
I don’t know if I was explicitly taught it at uni, buy I have always understood as a climate scientist that GHG emissions started before the industrial revolution (albeit small). I think that’s common knowledge in climate science.
How fucked are we?
My intuitive answer is that the collapse of globalised industrial society seems fairly likely (as a result of the end of cheap liquid fuel if nothing else). What that looks like is highly dependent on how we respond - it’s not a climate problem, it’s a social problem.
I don’t think humans are going to go extinct, but a population crash seems likely. And we’re taking out a tonne of other species.
I would hazard that the the extintion of Mankind really depends on the innevitable water and food wars escalating out of control in the nuclear era or not.
A lot of this shit (you also see it in Economics, as Inequality explodes and Social Mobility grinds to a halt) can escalate out of control via the reactions of Human Societies to it (just look at the rise of the Far Right in response to the above mentioned trends in Inequality and Social Mobility).
As I see it, people’s and countries’ reaction to the problems caused by Climate Change are were the nastiest of nasty shit can come out from.
Yep, plausible, but again, that’s a social problem. It’s super interesting, but not something a climate scientist can really speak to.
They may be thinking of the half-life of C02, around 120 years … or the delayed effect of temperature uptake by the ocean. I’m not a clime scientist.
I edited in a reference - it’s a thing aparently
notice that that sharp increase follows 2 events… AI data Centers and literally everything Trump related.
The acceleration, which becomes visible around 2013 to 2015
The massive AI data centers are too new to have an effect yet.
that only takes out one event. there is still Trump and the rest of the corporate corruption causing pollution
Trump’s first term started in 2017. This warming effect first became visible around 2013-2014. As much as i hate that orange menace, this thing was already happening before him. It’ll take several years, if not a decade for his actions to show their effect on the climate.
From the article:
Across all of the datasets, the acceleration started to become visible in 2013 or 2014. The researchers describe the broader shift as beginning around 2015, when the evidence became clearer.
Further in the article they point out, that they don’t have an explanation yet, but they do mention that the models occasionally show that kind of effect. So it’s not entirely unexpected.
I hate data centers as much as the next guy but usually there is a lag time of several years for climate change to link to its causes. We probably haven’t seen the worse of the climate related impacts for up to date AI use yet.
A sensible and measured reply. That being said, when you see images/videos of all the gas turbines running and the shimmering air from the heat by colossus/stargate/whatever it’s called it’s difficult not to think that it’s doing damage now
I’m sure in a few years we will find out they already had a bunch of secret AI data centers already built…
I wonder if this have anything to do with moving quickly from “we must all limit our energy consumption” to “we must burn as much energy possible for no real purpose”.
I guess we’ll never know /s
we should ask AI!
Fire up the natural gas generators, this baby isn’t grid tied yet!
Lol natural gas? What, do you like, hate America? We need diesel trucks transporting coal to burn on site
Since it started in the mid 2010s, it’s probably not AI related. That will be an extra addition…
Yearly average global mean surface temperature from five data sources, in two versions: (top) unadjusted, (bottom) adjusted for El Niño/Southern Oscillation, volcanism, and solar variation. All are aligned so that the average from 1991 to 2020 equals 0.88°C, to approximate warming since pre-industrial.
i mean that curve is pretty clear. were the scientists they were talking to expecting a linear model?
I know people who are having babies now; and to think I was worried what would happen in my lifetime.
I have kids. those little shits deserve it for all the times they hit me in the balls when I had to drag them to the timeout spot.
Prepare to be treated like a guard, if you treat your kids like prisoners
