Yeah. At least when nuclear war was the existential threat hanging over humanity you had the comfort that it would all be over in an instant. Now we get to watch a slow unraveling of civilization over decades while things continue to get worse. Fun times.
It’d be over in an instant for the lucky ones.
Fuck, I didn’t think I’d ever be nostalgic for the constant threat of being nuked, but here we are.
Don’t just wait passively for it, take action. Everyone can contribute and together we will achieve big things. If we all work together the collapse is not just a dream.
Dont use plastic straws, drive public transport or bike, buy bio food, donate to orgs, glue yourself to the street
and maybe… just maybe… you will change fuck all
Plastic straws have almost zero to none impact on climate change. It is one of the biggest virtue signaling campaings that managed to scam shit ton of gullible people. Climate change is a never ending process, those who can alter the process have way bigger means to affect it than you and me. Regulate the companies, end the “too big to fail” market monopoly, tax the shit out of billioners. Dont fall to their diversion strategy that we are to blame for any of this shit.
I love how McDonald’s went from paper cups/plastic straws to plastic cups/paper straws in my area.
Mine stopped using straws for a bit and gave a special lid that made it easier to sip your soda. That didn’t last long, we are now back to plastic cups and plastic straws.
Not only did it do fuck all to help, it was also really annoying.
Likely on purpose to make people not want to help the environment at all if it means having soggy paper in your drinks.
The paper straws couldn’t even be recycled.
Not defending paper straws specifically but recycling is a scam. Anything common household material that is not plastic is inherently better than plastic from an environmental standpoint.
It wasn’t about climate change, it was about plastic waste giving turtles straws up their nostrils.
And they still eat floating plastic that they mistake for jellyfish.
No the straw thing was about a cute kid making a science fair project about “The Dangers of Straws!” With all the thought an elementary school student could offer to the conversation that was latched onto by the media to fill a time slot and get more media buzz.
… did everyone misread your comment or am I crazy? I have faith that we can make horrible climate change a reality if we just put our minds to it.
Nuclear Posadism is so Cold War. We need a new apocalyptic accelerationism.
Apocalyptic accelerationism from home. Learn these 5 easy steps how YOU! can increase your contribution to annihilation.
Some sure did, but I don’t mind it :)
Some only read the first part, some appreciated the dark humor.
I mean we kinda can’t unless we convince billionaires to making money.
That seems to me the crux of the issue.
Veganism is the movement which has the highest potential to change society and is a huge impact on the environment. (IPCC: biggest single step one can take / even without fossile fuels our current food system will still contribute with +2°C to global warming)
And it does not take away from any other activity we should pursue in the fight for climate, while ending support for some billionaires like Wesley Batista
So long as we’re pushing for systemic change - we don’t dig ourselves out of this by “just taking personal responsibility” harder.
Gotta do both.
TBF, I can’t argue with that, but when we look at where the issue lays, it’s clear which we should prioritise. Just talking personal responsibility harder also doesn’t do much about the rest of your country, let alone the world.
What are countries and the world but a large group of individuals
Groups of people and organisations that submit to the power of a government that sets the rules for that group of people.
Change the rules, change the behaviour for the large group of individuals and the companies doing the lions share of the damage.
Change your behaviour, change the behaviour of one individual.
Sure. Change your own scope that you control, and simultaneously work to change the system. But there is more than one system. Not just government systems. But also mental/social systems, for instance the meme that individual actions don’t amount to much. Imagine if everyone started believing their individual actions mattered.
Agreed with the caveat that compared to corporate contributions, individual contribution (within reason) is near irrelevant.
If we all work together the collapse is not just a dream.
Hoping to speed up the collapse I see lol.
I drive a hybrid.
I recycle everything I can.
I pickup litter.
I try to be as power efficient as possible.
I’m not a vegetarian but I don’t eat meat everyday.
Plus, I post memes that stimulate conversation like this!
I am vegan since 5 years, before I was (don’t judge me, or do- its deserved) 10 years vegetarian. Since ~15 years? PV on my roof which feed into the grid many times more power than I used I rarely travel, not one flight. I advocate and work towards a sustainable future. Demonstrations and some political work. Go on, check my my posts and judge for yourself if I was maybe sarcastic?
I just assumed you were joking. Good job on all you do!
People say that but it would help if they mention things to actually do.
Went vegan. Got 35 solar cells. Replaced lawn with native plants. Work from home. Spending a lot of time advocating online and to friends and family. Raising kids as environmentalists.
And you and kids are still gonna die from the effects of climate change and the collapse of society because a handful of billionaires and corporations only care about making more money next quarter in spite of every single other human being on the planet.
And also because of the billions of individuals such as yourself that decided it was hopeless.
THanks
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/27/climate-crisis-villains-americas-dirty-dozen I mean, … the current profiteers which steer society into collapse have names.
What I notice is a lot of petrochemical companies, conglomerates, politicians and attorneys. And Facebook.Our best bet would be to steer clear of those, or at least as much as possible.
I have personally switched to a cleaner car (no electric since I cannot yet afford them), walk and cycle more often, no longer buy Unilever or Nestle products (though that’s more of a moral reason) and am even stricter with my energy consumption. I try to use most of my belongings as long as possible (unless they consume a lot of power) and try to repair everything until it is so broken and worn out that I have to replace it. Which I will replace it with something of a good quality that will last many years and preferably made locally, always trying to prevent buying from Chinese companies. My landlord (it’s a company but I can’t think of the word for it) has installed solar panels on my home 4 years ago and I am using LED lights and have replaced all CRT tv’s/monitors with LCD. Built newer computers with lower energy CPU’s. Lights that are frequently used have been put on a timer or sensor so they are automatically switched off. Other lights are turned off when leaving the room. I have switched to an electrical stove to prevent the need for fracking gas and earthquakes caused by natural gas pumping. Oh and my gardens mostly consist of grass and plants.
I think that’s about it.
Going vegan is according to the IPCC the single biggest step a individual can take. This does not take anything away from other actions we can simultaneous pursue. Veganism is growing and has despite being a small percentage of the population the potential for a change.
And it’d probably be a lot more convincing if my experience with vegans outside the past year or so weren’t composed entirely of people pushing it on the basis of “killing animals is wrong.”
Its a multitude of reasons for people to go vegan: The animals, their own health, the probability of not creating a living hell on earth. The reason why vegans try to convince others is often because after a few years most are so disconnected from the killing of others for taste where it is a giant argument. The suffering and abuse of 90 billion sentient land animals per year alone is for most good enough to stop supporting it. I have surrendered that argument for most discussions because it is hard to have that empathy while it is a part in your live. It wasn’t for me, although is was not challenged in that view back then. So now my arguments moved more towards egoism which sometimes works.
Counterpoint, eating a single billionaire would do more to reduce emissions than lifetime of veganism.
The RNC debate was a pretty big red alert. One of the more popular candidates literally said “climate change is a hoax” and got applause. And most of them would at least admit it was real but immediately talked about removing ‘government restrictions’ unfairly placed on corporations and climate change is an excuse to burn money for the current party.
Pretty cool…
expect they’ve found a way to ‘profit’ off the collapse already. might be one of the reasons they’re doing nothing to stop it
And when the last land is a desert, the last river dry, the last field poisoned, the last tree cut down, will they realise that one cannot eat money.
The wealthy and the powerful will be the last to suffer the negative effects of climate change.
Deflection towards hydrogen mining. Shell UK got absolutely grilled over it, showing that it was nowhere close to carbon neutral.
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I often wonder, before society collapses, if the corporations who hid this shit for 45 years will ever face the consequences of their lies. Not really calling for pitchforks but, well, it’s the ecosystem… it’s our civilization they profited on destroying, and they did so gleefully and the profits were obscene. If there was ever a time to get the torches and pitchforks out…?
No one will face consequences. Everything the companies are currently doing is legal or unenforceable.
and with fanboy shitbirds like you to stick up for them, perhaps the world isn’t worth saving anyway.
Trust me I wish there would be consequences, so most of us could be alive in 20 years.
holding them accountable for genocide wouldn’t change the results, it would simply be some iota of justice. there’s no turning the bus at this point, the crazies and coal rollers are just gonna keep pushing the gas - we’ve already gone off the cliff. The question that remains is can anything be saved that will resemble our civilization? It will take hundreds of years to reduce back from 2c and we def won’t stop at 2c.
The question that remains is can anything be saved that will resemble our civilization?
Yes, giant geo engineering projects will kill way less people than runaway global warning. Let’s do the Matrix movie thing where we covered our planet in continuous cloud cover. \s
this is why I’d prefer to skip geoengineering and, though the scale is mind-boggling and the costs tremendous, go full hog on a solar occluder. a big disc in space made of lunar regolith and recycled space junk. this is a herculean task, but would prevent us from playing scary games with our one breathing, semi-functional atmosphere. by blocking a small but growing percentage of sunlight, as the project goes on, it should be possible to keep ground level temps from getting deadly hot. eventually you could build solar generation on such a space object and microwave gigawatts back to earth, while simultaneously lowering global temps in a controllable manner.
I know a lot of this sounds pie-in-the-sky, but really it’s the convergence of many, many different fields opening possibilities never speculated upon in the past. Automated manufacturing, robot mining, lunar-based perskovite solar cell manufacturing, SpaceX’s starship to haul all this shit to the moon and start building - so many of these individual parts either didn’t exist at all 20 years ago, or were fantastic leaps of science fiction - and now they’re literally coming together. And boy do we need 'em all.
I see this is as the ultimate make/break point for our species, yeah we achieved spaceflight and nuclear power and, I dunno, The Rolling Stones, but if we can’t survive the effluence our industrial output exhales we really aren’t shit as a species. We’ll have to work together too.
so… \s or not, if we don’t do this and traipse down the road of injecting some more shit into the atmosphere attempting to correct temporarily for the other shit we injected into the atmosphere for 300 years, I suspect it’s gonna be a rougher road and end in a very interesting fossil record thesis for some future species’ exo-anthropology dissertation.
The think with ‘justice’ is that’s a social process. That’s why we use pitchforks, to make sure to get that message across: there are consequences for non-equivocally evil deeds.
I think there’s a concerted effort to keep the scale of how bad things are now, and how exceptionally shitty they’re going to be much sooner than anyone thought - because the frog won’t jump out of a slowly boiling pot. And by the time we know it’s fucked, we’ll be hiding from the sun in bunkers or dead from never ending 50c+ heat waves.
You are right. That means we better hurry !
Just look at Brazil’s winter - https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/08/25/winter-heatwave-another-south-american-country-is-sweltering-in-record-temperatures
Four state capitals recorded the year’s highest temperature on Wednesday. Cuiabá, in central-western Brazil, the highs reached 41.8°C. Residents in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil’s two most populous cities, were also hit by the heatwave. In Rio, temperatures reached 38.7°C on Thursday - the city’s second hottest day of 2023.
what’s going to happen in summer? it’s hard not to be hopeless. when people are driving their fucking gas guzzling coal rollers around like nbd going to walmart fuck the libs…
we could put all the world on renewable energy and I still suspect the assholes will demand their feedumb to pollute the already wrecked atmosphere.
Indeed. Yet, hope to live in a green and tolerant society is never dead until we “the greens”, “the anarchists”, “the socialists”, “the terrorists”, “the hippies”, are all dead.
Hopelessness gives space to inaction, and the power to change things requires being active. I firmly believe in the people, like you, who cares and take action. Hence, is reason enough for me to keep on fighting: connect means and ends. It is possible that we’ll die and we’ll still not be where we want to be, but the mere act to organize and work on this project is to make the idea a material reality. It will make easier for more people to follow.
My friend, let’s not give more space to hopelessness, since the work we have to do is to not let it grow. And if we can, even plant the seeds of hope like the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) or Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) show us. Or even, in the case for Brazil, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST).
The interesting part are those who still don’t write letters to their congressmen and still vote for climate deniers. I just can’t.
It would be insanely easy to solve: Not one of the billionaires out there would recognize if they only had 999 mil left and neither would anybody else. That‘s a cool 10 trillion to pay towards climate change. You‘re welcome.
That money was earned using earth, so to saving earth it goes back (because no earth, no money and our billionaire overlords suprisingly havent saved us yet.)
Though I agree with you on taking money from the rich people, that’s mostly not how it works. Most rich persons has most of his “worth” in stocks. Even scammer musk’s worth mostly is “worth” because of his ownership of Tesla and the such. He doesn’t actually have that money.
Most importantly: It’s not insanely easy to solve, Sven if you pump in trillions. Even if we stop pumping carbon in the air tomorrow it will still take centuries until the atmosphere is back to normal, barring any carbon capture.
The problem with is that the extra CO2 in the air comes from energy we took from burning fossil fuels. If we want to capture it back, we need to spend the same mount of energy that the world spent for the past, say, 2 centuries, from non carbon sources to get that done. This energy does not include the energy that the world needs to function.
That is an insane amount of energy that, again, has to come from non carbon emitting sources.
Also, until all energy comes from non carbon emitting sources, carbon capture is useless because if both you’ll spent 100 carbon for each, say, 50-70 (optimistically) carbon you capture.
If I say “Were not even close to 100% non carbon emissions in energy creation” it’s a huge understatement. I believe something around 10% of our energy production is non carbon emitting. Cars are not included.
Making all out cars electrical is also cute. It’s a nice thought if it weren’t that all that electricity still mostly comes from CO2 emitting sources so including conversion losses electrical cars may actually send more CO2 in the atmosphere.
You want to actually solve this?
Make ALL our electrical generation non CO2 emitting in the next 10 years. Air and solar are cute, but fractional and will remain that, probably for ever. We need nuclear power plants like there is no tomorrow in all countries, even the “bad” ones.
This obviously isn’t going to happen.
We will likely end up with some form of atmospheric engineering where we’re going to meas with the atmosphere, seeding clouds, or pumping other chemicals in there that negate the effects of CO2. I’m unsure what the results of that will be though
Either way, you and I will NOT see the end of this, that is for our children’s children
Even if we stop pumping carbon in the air tomorrow it will still take centuries until the atmosphere is back to normal, barring any carbon capture.
That would, however, stop it from getting any worse, which is kind of a big deal because it’s getting worse at a frightening rate.
Making all out cars electrical is also cute. It’s a nice thought if it weren’t that all that electricity still mostly comes from CO2 emitting sources so including conversion losses electrical cars may actually send more CO2 in the atmosphere.
You severely overestimate the energy efficiency of gasoline engines. A big reason to get rid of them is not only the fuel they burn, but how much of it they waste.
We need nuclear power plants like there is no tomorrow in all countries, even the “bad” ones.
You severely underestimate the resources required to build those. It costs some $20 billion to build one nuclear power plant. There’s a reason everybody’s focusing on solar and wind.
Small modular reactors may be cheaper, but they also generate huge amounts of radioactive waste. Radioactive waste isn’t a serious problem now, but it will be if we start powering everything with SMRs.
Atom cracking will not save us. Not unless there’s some kind of breakthrough.
We will likely end up with some form of atmospheric engineering where we’re going to meas with the atmosphere, seeding clouds, or pumping other chemicals in there that negate the effects of CO2. I’m unsure what the results of that will be though
- It works.
- Big Oil chants “spray, baby, spray!”
- It works too well. Global freeze occurs. Everybody dies. Game over.
Either way, you and I will NOT see the end of this, that is for our children’s children
Have you stepped outside at any point in the last several years? Global warming is no longer a looming future threat for someone else to deal with. It’s here and now.
Yes, it would stop making it worse indeed. I’m not saying we shouldn’t stop, I’m just saying that stopping alone won’t solve the issue
Global warming is an ENORMOUS problem that will require generations of people all over the world working together to fix it and I smjsut don’t see that happening because face it: politicians and rich people don’t give a shit.
I don’t overestimate gas engine efficiency, they’re about as efficient as it gets and the same goes for fuel burning in other places. Gas / coal / fuel power plants really aren’t much more efficient and now you have energy centralized and Ned to transform it, transport it, transform again, store in batteries so more and more losses that altogether makes driving electrical really not that much better for climate change.
I know nuclear reactors are hugely expensive but I honestly don’t see we have another option here. We can’t continue with coal or gas, we need a HUGE amount of STABLE electrical energy that solar and wind simply won’t be able to supply, not to mention the amount of money that goes into building solar and wind farms that gives the same energy as nuclear. That also ignores the amount of mining required to build solar and wind farms. Those alternatives aren’t all that “clean” once you get into the nitty gritty details.
I fully agree with you about this, something must be done, but here is the realest problem of them all: Nothing will be done. A few token things will be done to say “look at us! Aren’t we awesome politicians?” There will be a lot of clapping and patting on backs, and nothing changes. The Paris accords were a joke and even that joke wasn’t followed up on anyway by most parties.
The way that I see it is that we’re fucked. I’d love to slice it if I could but I can’t. Neither can you. All we can do is hope (or pray of that’s your thing) that our leaders will get it into heir heads that humanity is dying and start doing something real.
This guy gets it!
I’m surprised this got so many upvotes, a lot of it is factually incorrect! For instance many grids worldwide are over 50% renewables. You can scrub carbon with a net carbon loss if you use solar powered to do it.
There’s also no reason that capturing the carbon would cost all the energy that was released by burning it (you don’t have to make it into the same fuel molecule).
Honestly this sounds like climate change denier shit, “it’s too late there’s nothing we can do, buy more oil.”.
On the positive side, I agree that nuclear is great!
That’s a disturbing but interesting take. Thank you very much.
The funny thing is that you can sell stocks. I know that a billionaire does not have dagoberts vault at home (maybe some do).
But their net worth is calculated somehow and in selling all assets above 999 mil, you get exactly what I‘m talking about.
I get that this is a long undertaking but we are still on the way up. This needs to stop now so we do it now. Use the money to stop the gravest polluters first and by the time you run out of money, you‘re a lot better on the scale.
Btw the estimated cost to 2030 to stop climate change is 90 trillion. So this does part of it.
Just wanted to put that out there. It’s surely gonna be a big job since most of us lack vision.
Not like we could start working only on that since we need to make stuff nobody needs to impress people we dont like./s
Also, my personal favorite in idiotic ideas is telling citizens to just not buy and suv. Just outlaw the production you maggots! We saw with covid how well voluntary behavior helped.
Yes, I blame governments for not doing what needs to be done to save the fucking planet. A mass of humans is easy to manipulate if you’re rich and can not be given this much responsibility. We elect people for this.
Once a major stock holder starts selling his stock like crazy, that stock will nosedive. See Elon “I’ll be the last one to sell tesla stock!” Musk dumping tesla stock and check it’s current value.
And governments should not ask not to buy SUV’s, they should ban SUV’s. Yes, ban. They are horrible for the environment, horrible for safety of the driver, horrible for the safety of others, horrible in every aspect and they only exist because car manufacturers want to sell more so they told people they look cool.
Start taxing the crap out of cars, all short distance travel (< 5 - 10 kms) should be by bike, with Electrical the engine support in mountainous areas.we use 2 tonnes of steel and plastics to mostly move single 50-100 kgs persons around. That. Is. Insane. It’s unsustainable. Redesign American cities (American being the continent here, not just the country) to no long have these horrible suburbs, make all cities human Centric, not car centric. People should be able to walk to 50% of local stores and cycle to 95% of stores. It makes for wonderful safe cities to live in (see every single city, tiny and large in the Netherlands), makes people healthier due to more exercise, makes healthier air (no car pollution) bad lowers CO2 output by a literal fucktonne.
This would make everything better, which is why it not only will never happen, politicians will beber talk about it because big oil, big car and big whatever the fuck need more bigger cars polluting more because WE WANT MONEY AND POWER.
The world is fucked, sorry.
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Did I say that?
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How else? How about not? You simply don’t because you can’t. Barring some weird exceptions, no country will be able to be carbon neutral in 10 years, let alone the entire world.
Yes we need to do loads of work, and yes, nuclear will form a huge part because we don’t have another choice. Nuclear will cause CO2 too, yes, during building mostly and nothing near what coal or similar plants do.
I’m simply saying we can (and must) do nuclear next to solar and wind.
Either way it doesn’t matter since entieht you nor I make those decisions and those that do mostly don’t give a shit as long as they get their paycheck
Edit: you want to make a real change?
Increase taxes on carbon fuels significantly every year. Prohibit the construction and sale of useless throwaway products like fashion that lasts 3 wears until it breaks, phones that will work for only 1-2 years. Invest heavily in improving recycling so that we can recycle everything. Invest in alternative nuclear fuels like thorium so that more countries can go nuclear without having to worry about bombs. Stop the "delivery in one day! " economy, which basically requires alAmazon to be destroyed . Redesign American continent cities completely to no longer be car dependent so that people can walk and cycle for 95% of their needs and use public transportation or shared cars for the rest.
Those are some insane but required solutions if we want to stop climate change.
Car dependent cities are unsustainable, financially and environmentally. Our throwaway economy is unsustainable. Our dependency on fossil fuels in unsustainable
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No I did not.
Well, I don’t have a congressman, which would make that hard :-P
But yes, while I don’t agree that our civilisation’s issues could be easily solved by a one time very minor global redistribution of wealth, I do agree with your overall argument, for sure! 100%!
These issues will only be fixed with a complete societal personality change. We’d have to completely rethink who we are, what we want in life, what our priorities are, as a civilisation and individuals. In a way fundamental enough to completely change how we distribute wealth and power, how we interact with nature and each other, the lens through which we view everything.
I don’t think those things will happen until there’s a change in civilisation, as ours passes and the next one rises (which, while a turbulent time in history, will not be the end of the world, all civilisations come and go eventually, on the timescale of humanity), that’s usually when such sweeping and complete fundamental changes in how we think and structure our entire society are allowed to flourish.
It’s sad that we won’t live to see it. Maybe in the mean time we could cheer ourselves up a bit, by eating the rich? nomnom
I really like your way of thinking. Thanks for sharing it with me today. Made my day a little better.
You people think it will be a night and day collapse? Get real. The rich will continue to get richer and you’ll toil away in relative comfort as you do now.
It will seem far away until the day that your home is burning down or under water. And that day is coming.
Even if your particular house is in a safe location, you’re still fucked from all the other houses being flooded and burned down because that means disastrous effects on global supply chains including food and a massive refugee crisis the likes of which the world has literally never seen.
You people think it will be a night and day collapse? Get real.
You know that’s the thing, nobody really knows. It’s all predictions based on necessarily flawed models. And they range from relatively mild changes until the turn of the century on the one hand, over methane released from thawing permafrost leading to a steep acceleration of warming in the middle, to having crossed an irreversible tipping point decades ago that will lead to an algae bloom in the oceans which will render the atmosphere unbreathable on the other hand. We can only hope it’s on the former end of the spectrum, but I wouldn’t bet on it personally.
We could do more than just hope… And we really should.
I meant we can only hope we haven’t crossed a tipping point yet without knowing. Carbon cycles are thousands of years long. We might have already killed our species.
But I agree, we should do what we can to fight climate change.
Spoiler alert: The civilization disrupting aspects of climate change are still decades out and the rich countries will probably be fine.
They’ll be fine because they can afford the infrastructure projects and increased costs of energy and food.
Now Africa, South America, the poorer Asian countries, tiny Pacific Island nations… Oh boy. I would not want to be a citizen there in 20 or 30 years.
Eventually sea level rise will become a really big fucking problem, like for every single coastal city in the world, even the rich ones. Luckily none of us will be around to see that unless some sort of miraculous life extension technology becomes available.
On the one hand I don’t like mentioning this because it gives the right wing ammunition to ignore climate change. But on the other hand some people have such existential dread about it that it’s damaging their mental health, they are really overestimating how damaging it will be in their lifetime in their rich country they live in.
Are we supposed to be comforted about the timeline being decades? That’s generations alive today.
Scientists are also finding their estimates getting outpaced alarmingly often right now.
The Russia Ukraine war has disrupted civilisation quite significantly with 6 million refugees. We could see over 1 BILLION climate refugees by 2050. 1000 MILLION people having to leave their homes.
We are on course for significant disruption to food supply before 1.5C warming. Doesn’t matter how rich your country is, with global food supplies low and that maybe people on the move, civilisation as we know it will change significantly. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/12/global-heating-likely-to-hit-world-food-supply-faster-than-expected-says-united-nations-desertification-expert
To be clear: I am not a doomerist. Don’t dwell on this and do nothing. Get angry! This is being done to you. This was not inevitable, it was the decisions of the most powerful and richest people in the world. Get out there and take action, the movement needs you.
Luckily none of us will be around to see that unless some sort of miraculous life extension technology becomes available.
I dunno mate… antarctica is collapsing much faster than anyone anticipated. Brazil’s winter was a scorcher.
Canada’s on fire. Tropical storms are hitting LA. sadlol… I suspect we might be around to see even worse.
I mean, I feel like this year in particular illustrates quite well that there are already very real impacts of climate change in rich countries, with Canada, Greece, Hawaii etc. burning. Which makes it worth to delay climate change as much as possible, even if we can’t or don’t want to stop it at livable levels.
Problem is also that there have always been catastrophes… Earthquakes, wildfires, tsunamis, hurricanes, etc.
Maybe in the past they should have also been attributed to climate change, but I don’t think the average human being can draw the distinction yet
, but I don’t think the average human being can draw the distinction yet
considering the massive heat domes spread worldwide, I suspect the average human has been more impacted than you have.
Brazil had a scorcher of a winter. Antarctica is falling apart much faster than anyone predicted.
You can’t have this both ways.
When a magat in the Senate brings in a snowball and says that global warming isn’t happening because it’s snowing…
“That’s weather not climate!”
When there’s a wildfire somewhere…
“That’s global warming!”
We can definitively say that this year is the hottest year on record, but we can’t attribute individual forest fires or tornadoes or hurricanes to climate change.
You’re right, we need to look at global tends rather than individual events.
Global trends are showing that the forest fires are getting worse every year.
No, but we can point at increasing number of forest fires, hurricanes, and other disasters. That’s not local, that’s global.
The others already pointed out that there’s a global, rising trend of climate disasters. I would like to qualify:
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This year did exceed everyone’s expectations. It’s the first year of El Niño after years of increasing temperatures, so while it didn’t come as a complete surprise, it could still be an anomaly.
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If you ask climate scientists, they’ll tell you lots of climate change effects that could contribute to these wildfires, but yeah, ultimately, they’ll say they won’t know for sure until they’ve seen the following years.
However, these are raging wildfires all around the globe, in regions that don’t normally have them and that aren’t linked to each other. At some point, it stops being “a wildfire somewhere” and starts to become a statistic.
Surface-level ocean temperatures are significantly higher this year, globally, than in previous years. We can’t explain such a global increase without climate change. And obviously, warm water evaporates differently, leading to unusual weather patterns, leading to droughts, which increases the likelihood of wildfires.
So, yeah, while the snowball is simply irrelevant to the topic, the wildfire statistic correlates with all our other statistics. You’d have to ignore a ton of evidence to not attribute the wildfires to climate change until proven differently.
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Rule 1 of life: be skeptical when someone presents their opinion as facts.
Looking at Western European countries like Germany, the Netherlands and the UK to an extent, the road to net-zero is disrupting. Probably because necessary steps have been delayed until the last moment. Large numbers of refugees have a destabilising effect on democracy as well.
Some steps that are necessary for net-zero are expensive investments (like heat pumps) that are causing conflicts in society. Going ahead with it as well as delaying is sure to be met with very loud resistance. Don’t think that Germany can miss it’s climate goals without some serious protests, perhaps worse than they’ve ever seen.
At the same time, I wonder how well UK households are going to deal with even higher food prices as the percentage of failed harvests increases. There isn’t a lot of buffer space here.
It’s not so much whether rich countries have enough money to deal with climate change, but rather how well democracy will fare when it’s under duress.
If we’re going to electrify everything we need nuclear power plants.
The federal government should be dumping tens of billions of dollars into modular nuclear plants that can be built in a factory and then shipped places.
This is my first comment on Lemmy!
….
Welcome!
And it is almost as bad as reddit comments.
Yeah at the end of the day, this is a failure of our government. It’s so stuck on profits and processes, it can’t save itself from certain death.
I’m thinking of moving to a state that’s colder where I can buy land that has water within the property.
I also think to do anything sizeable you need the resources a company can bring. Our problems are at scale. You need a scaled resource pool and reinvestment in that to work up to some of the issues. I like the idea of carbon extraction for example, but I don’t see any resources invested in it from US companies.
Carbon extraction isn’t a viable solution until its whole area is running on green energy. With current technology, at least, running it on a green power source will make less of an impact than hooking that green power source up to replace some fossil fuels.
In other words, don’t rely on heal spells until the battle’s over. They’ll never outpace incoming damage.
Also, as far as resource costs go, planting tree is more efficient at capturing carbon then any industrial scrubber. Research should still be done, but anyone trying to sell a scrubber plant is just fishing for VC funds.
Yes, I was going to mention trees too, but I wasn’t sure of the impact.
They’re also typically embraced by fossil companies, selling both the disease and cure. If they can socialize the costs of sequestration they can keep drilling for profit. We are in desperate need of a carbon tax.
You need those heal spells to stop the incoming damage from killing you immediately though.
If you’re on the brink of death, yes. If you can take another round, better to take out more enemies first.
But that’s not the way our situation works. Until the whole grid is green, carbon scrubbers just give corporations a way to virtue signal without having to make changes to their supply line, and actually do more harm than good. Because the power it takes to run them puts out more carbon than they collect.
We’re on the brink of death right now so I will support people trying to start CO2 sequestration even while coal plants in other countries no one can stop are still running, please and thank you.
Does your country run on green energy? If so, cool. Go for it.
If not, it’s better to switch from existing fossil fuel plants to green energy. Running a carbon scrubber on fossil fuels puts out more carbon than it saves. It’s like casting heals from HP when they cost more than they heal. There might be a time for that, but it’s not during combat.
Even if the scrubber itself is on green energy, if the whole grid isn’t green, the energy it’s using could have gone to replace fossil fuel consumption, so it’s the same cost.
If you want to sequester CO2 without putting out more than you take, plant trees.
We are not on the brink of death. We may be on the brink of the point of no return (or past it depending who you ask,) but that’s not immediate death. The world isn’t going to die of heat in the next 10 years. There’s no need to rush to something that sounds good but does more harm.
Carbon extraction, for the moment, is useless.
Most energy production still emits carbon. Adding in loses, you’d spend 100 carbon for each maybe 50 carbon you captured. You’d literally be making it worse.
Same goes for electrical cars. Car engines are pretty much as efficient as burning fuels get, so with electrical you have extra losses (losses in electrical transmission, extra conversions, storage in batteries, then the electrical engine itself) so they may actually end up emitting more carbon than fuel cars.
Want to stop this? Make all electrical generation carbon frer
Air and sunlight are cute but fractional and likely will remain that forever
We need nuclear power plants, and loads of them. Spent fuel there IS a problem but it’s a manageable one.
Even if we replace all cars and powerplants for non carbon within the next ten years, it’ll still take centuries for the atmosphere to return to normal.
Want to carbon capture? That is HARD because of loads of technical problems but one to keep in mind: all that carbon (yes yes, CO2) in the air is because we took energy from a system and used it. CO2 was the result. You want to take out that CO2, you need to spend the same amount of energy to take it back. With losses in conversion, you’ll need to spend probably double that. With what nature can remove by itself, you mght get a 10% discount.
What does this mean? We need to spend the same amount of energy as we generated over the past two centuries on top of the energy we need every day to be able to capture all that CO2. That is a metric shit tonne of CO2 and capturing it requires first and foremost that ALL our energy production is CO2 free.
Ah also: for technical reasons airplanes will never be electrical, cargo trucks neither. Yeah yeah, tesla truck blah, nobody will use it and musk, besides being an absolute moron, is also a scammer. Electrical trucks are not worth it because of battery weight. Think batteries will magically become 2000% more efficient? They won’t. Batteries are pretty much elat the roof of what’s possible and barring some revolutionary new energy storage that may or may not exist, batteries won’t become much more efficient beyond maybe tops 30% more than we have today. Either way, cargo trucks d Airplanes need light batteries and even li-ion batteries (lithium being the lightest metal) won’t cut it. Cargo trucks would lost most of their cargo capacity in batteries or would require recharging (and waiting for hours) way WAY too many times. Fuel based trucks lose their gas whilst driving and become lighter. This adds range and cargo weight. Electrical ones don’t. Electrical (heavy) trucks aren’t practical and won’t be used.
Also, battery fires are a BITCH and are almost impossible to put out. All it takes is one electrical fire from a car in a tunnel that will kill a few hundred people to make people reconsider battery cars. Now imagine trucks.
Same for airplanes. A laptop battery in and airplane is risky. An electrical plane would require 50-70% of it’s weight in batteries (so we transport 100 people instead of 300) and of that thing catches fire, which happens a lot, those 100 people are screeeeewed.
Hydrogen also won’t work as the atoms in the gas are so small that they escape though just about everything. You’ll need very heavy tanks to transport it compressed enough so you’ll again lose the “weight war”, if you will.
So we’ll continue puahing CO2 in the air with airplanes and trucks, but cars are doable. Powerplants are doable.
But look at the will of politicians. More and more politicians are willing to lie about climate change because that’s what their conspiracy theory believing base believe, so they’ll happily parrot that bullshit because they’ll watch the world burn if it means they can rule the ashes.
Then there are the millions of scammers with perpetual motion machines or their magic clean water from air machines or their Hyperloop ideas that were refuted over a century ago yet we spend literally billions into that because humanity is stupid and dickish…
I dunno. This can be solved if we wanted to but I think humanity in part doesn’t care. The young just watch TikTok, the old are too dumb, somehow.
Call me cynical all you like but I see a humanity ending problem in front of us and it can be solved but share holders and the rich must be kept happy before that! And if you try to say anything about that, you get the army of trained retards (yes, that is the acceptable word for people that have a good brain but refuse to use it) yelling over you that theyr read a Facebook post saying that science is evil.
In a sidenote, various diseases that were nearly eradicated are coming back as well because of anti vaxxers now. Humans suck.
So before you can even start thinking about solving this you first need to fix the retard problem. People need to start believing in science and reality again because too many people are now with their heads stuck in fantasy world where “god would never allow this” or "scientists are evil because EVERY GODDAMN TV SHOW AND MOVIE NOW SHOWS EVIL SCIENTISTS.
/rant.
But I do encourage you to tell me I’m worng in anything I said. Please, if you think there is a solution, please please tell me
You want to take out that CO2, you need to spend the same amount of energy to take it back.
Non sequitur. Nobody said we had to turn atmospheric carbon back into the same fuel it originally came out of.
Electrical trucks are not worth it because of battery weight.
This is only an issue for long-haul trucks, so, obvious solution: electric trains. No battery required.
Also, battery fires are a BITCH and are almost impossible to put out. All it takes is one electrical fire from a car in a tunnel that will kill a few hundred people to make people reconsider battery cars. Now imagine trucks.
There are plenty of EVs on the road already. If that was as likely as you’re trying to make it sound, it would have happened many times already.
Yeah, lithium-ion batteries are volatile, but they aren’t that volatile. Solid-state batteries are even less so.
retards (yes, that is the acceptable word for people that have a good brain but refuse to use it)
I won’t comment on whether it’s acceptable, but it definitely isn’t correct. The R word refers to people whose brains are impaired, not merely underused.
Call me cynical all you like but I see a humanity ending problem in front of us and it can be solved but share holders and the rich must be kept happy before that!
That’s the real problem, not the technology. We can solve this problem. We don’t even have to sacrifice our modern civilization and creature comforts to do it. But we won’t, because some very lucrative businesses would become obsolete in the process, and their owners would sooner burn down the world and rule over the ashes than tolerate the loss of their wealth.
non sequitur
No it’s not. If you want to lower the CO2 in the atmosphere then you need to break up the carbon bonds, that leaves you with carbon. For all I care you make diamonds out of it, it’s irrelevant. If you want to break CO2 in O2 you need to spend that same energy. That was my point. If them youale fuel or whatever out of it that is a wholly different story that too will require yet more energy.
Trains indeed resolve the long haul truck issue but they’re hardly anywhere in the US. Good luck with building new train tracks there.
We haven’t had an electrical fire in a tunnel yet. Fires in tunnels are bad but can be controlled. Electrical battery fed fires are a nightmare as they have all the ingredients to keep going all by themselves. This is why fire departments see these cars as a problem as they require more water to put out than they can carry.
Li-ion batteries are indeed volatile and no they won’t explode by the thousands but if you have hundreds of millions of them, then statistically yes, you will get thousands of fires world wide every day. Tunnel fires are just a waiting to happen. I’m not saying there is no solution, but it IS a huge problem.
Geepers, you mean you’ve been sitting here watching the weather, but ignoring
1.) Thousands of fires keeping smoke in the air
2.) Harsh winters developing where snow hardly used to fall
3.) Winters all but disappearing where it used to be deep snow annually
4.) The water cycle breaking and several landmark bodies of water going dry before our eyes
5.) Intensifying hurricane seasons, affecting new zones
And more?
Who said I was ignoring all that? I’m well aware. But what the Fuck am I supposed to do about it?
I drive a hybrid, pickup litter, recycle, make most of my own food from scratch, and talk about how we need to do more (like with this tongue-in-cheek meme). I ain’t in Congress (yet), but even if I was look how productive they’re being towards this issue.
It’s already happening, collapse on this scale is a slow process, and hard to observe from within.
The roman empire didn’t collapse from start to end in a single lifetime, after all.
Nobody alive today will be around to see the “collapse” collapse, the extremely dire breakdown that comes as a sudden crisis in civilisation terms, but we will continue to see a lot of hardship from our dated and crumbling institutions and our society slowly losing its grasp on what it is, etc.
In the end, just like the romans, our civilisation’s collapse doesn’t mean apocalypse, it’s not the end.
All civilisations rise and fall, and while ours is by far the grandest and strongest in many respects, it’s also the weakest, relying entirely on extremely fragile global systems that, should they fail for even a single month, would throw the planet into chaos (electricity grids/Internet), hastening or even triggering that final sudden crisis, once three slow rot of a dying civilisation has already set in.
But until then, such events will be overcome. Not until that rot has truly set in, and a sudden crisis is upon us all, will things finally collapse as we know it.
So that’s kinda good news for us, right? :-)
It’s all already slowly spinning out of control…
That’s what the hurricane said
I live in Michigan where we just had at least 7 tornadoes yesterday, and NOAA is basically saying get used to it, this is the new normal. I’ve been in this house for 20 years and I’ve never seen devastation like this. I’ll be without power for several more days because massive 200 year old oaks were snapped like toothpicks and my street is littered with downed power lines.
7 people have died, and when this happens in winter (which they’re saying it will), people will freeze to death in the aftermath. Things will get ugly soon.
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And by then it’ll be too late or whatever solution they come up with will only help them.
You’re both right. The rich people have been doomsday prepping for several years now: buying private islands, building underground bunkers beneath them, and hiring private armies to defend them.
They say out loud that climate change is a hoax, but they’ve been frantically preparing for it because they know the truth, because they can pay for the truth.
And they can pay to keep us from it: that we should already have been in a panic about it, but they’re paying to stop us from panicking – at least until they can get out of the killzone.
That’s what history suggests, yeah.
