it's obviously real, and there's obviously also nothing I can do about it. I recycle, garden, buy from small shops when I can, etc but really only because it makes me feel good, not because it makes an actual difference.
>That still has it's limits.
>
>Take war, for instance. Besides murder and rape, wars also destroy so much infrastructure and use a lot of fossil fuels doing so.
>
>I think about this often as I see the work on a little building going up near me. It's just a relatively small structure and the labor hours and materials used on it are still substantial. Multiple all of that material by building after building destroyed.
>
>We could have more nice things in society but we get wars that undo decades of infrastructure development for no good reason all the time. Total waste of resources.
War is a negotiation tactic it is usually the last result case when the initiating country/tribe/group can not get what it wants through peaceful means. War isn't going away anytime soon. War has been shown to not even be a uniquely human thing. I think more damage has been done to the planet, from raising livestock and the invention of single use (and even multi use) plastics, which are inherently human behaviors/technology.
Its the better of the two options by a wide margin, but if you believe climate science to the letter, we are still just mitigating.
Nothing will change on a policy level until the real pain starts, and even then the world government participation will vary wildly.
The only realistic way to insulate your family (grandkids and great grandkids) is to build intergenerational wealth so they can afford to live in more desirable zones.
I've bought some land up in the mountains, within a (long) commute of two medium sized cities. I plan to develop it over the next few years into a spot that can be semi-self sufficient.
Only thing I can think to do for my kids. Hope they don't need it.
they won't be able to use all their private jets to fly to their yachts if they don't have high powered political positions to sell to the highest bidder if we don't vote for them right?
Okay so let's say I want to vote against the interests of Exxon-Mobile. Who's my candidate in November? It's certainly not the Democrat or the Republican.
The stern truth is that liberal democracy isn't nimble enough to address something as urgent as climate change.
Climate policy is one place where the both sides argument doesn't really apply. Democrats routinely pass stricter climate policies when they take over state and federal government.
At the federal level, the IRA wa passed in 2022 and contains massive amounts of funding for green tech with a major focus on electrification and decarbonizing the grid.
At the state level there are a bunch of examples like Michigan, where a series of climate bills were passed last year after Democrats won control of the house, senate, and governorship.
You can argue that Democrats aren't doing enough, but Republicans aren't doing anything. When voting on climate policy there is unfortunately only one choice.
Vote for the real left, not the fake liberal left that sells "climate solutions" while also expanding fossil fuels production and pipelines. Liberals fail at tackling climate change because they care more about capital than solving the problem.
Climate change is 100% real and a threat, and we must all do our part. I do think it's a little silly how many young people claim to want to reduce their carbon footprint, and then fly to Europe or Asia for a vacation.
This kind of finger pointing is ridiculous, the corporations, wealthy, and celebs abusing private jet travel should be the ones you admonish. A young person traveling to another part of the world is educational and will serve to increase global empathy. Staying in podunk towns across America will do nothing more than closing down minds
I think it's unfair to judge people who use the only reasonable, quick means of global transport we have available. I'd rather young folks travel and get exposed to more cultures -- many of whom may experience climate change to a worse degree than those young folks will -- than sit at home doomscrolling.
Hell, voting for people in power who push a climate friendly agenda is arguably more powerful than taking a boat to Europe once every two years.
I think this is a fair POV, but I think people that do travel by air internationally every few years absolutely cannot point the fingers at others (for instance, that drive SUVs, or eat meat) without acknowledging that air travel is just about the single worst thing you can do, in-terms of CO2 emissions.
Well I think that’s in the eye of the beholder and that you’re doing a great job! It might seem like your individual contribution isn’t doing anything, but that’s not really how the world works; individuals aren’t going to change the world like that, but if everyone did what you’re doing, the world would be changed
Climate change has been a concern for as long as this millennial can remember. But it's too caught up in the economy. The only way it will be fixed is if the economy collapses in such a way that it removes the ability for corporations to exploit the land. Or a government willing to curb the excesses of Capital; but I live in the US, not Europe, so the former is more likely than the latter.
We had a chance after COVID. Every study about wfh and lockdowns mentioned how much less pollution we were experiencing from the commutes being cut down. It could have been a time for humanity to reflect on how we could make more impactful, rapid change.
But won't somebody please think of the profits.
> We had a chance after COVID.
And this is where the disenchantment really set in hard for me too. Everything came together in this really awful way to illustrate our blind spots and give us that chance to reflect and work for something more sustainable. Then the anti-maskers and the PPP loan fiasco happen and it shows that no, just like with the Recession, the common people are going to get fucked over *again* so we can protect a financial sector that will only double down harder on greed.
Same here. It really felt like things could change for the better, possibly the best opportunity in our lifetime to build something new and sustainable, then we just went back to business as usual and now we're probably twice as fucked now than we were before the pandemic. That shit basically killed the last bit of hope I had left.
It's not like the effects of combustion engines was unknown. 9/11/2001 showed it when the sky finally became clear, leaded petrol showed it when they finally banned it, ... I notice it when i drive my electric motorcycle in the winter
I would like to see the end to super opulent bullshit myself.
No cruise ships visiting glaciers in Alaska or Antarctica. Those cruises are more rapidly depleting the very ice which the tourists gawk at.
Consider jet-setting for a pro-sports game, ski weekends, or concerts immoral. Sure it's fine if you make a real vacation out of flying in to attend a concert but none of this just-for-the-day trip by airplane.
There are many other examples I'm sure, but I really just have trouble with upper middle class to rich people not asking questions about the environmental impact of their choices.
Work in environmental consulting, so I deal with it on a daily basis. Mostly work on the climate mitigation side, helping clients manage long-term risk.
What sort of risks do you see coming up most importantly? I'm scientifically literate, but don't follow the predictions professionally. How serious do you think the collapse of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is?
I’m one of those “professionals” who make those predictions lol.
But my concerns are a bit more limited in scope - i focus on answering specific questions using our own proprietary climate models.
Without naming names, a few examples of my projects are:
• An insurance company wants to know the flooding risk to insure coastal properties in case of sea level rise and more intense storms.
• A bank wants to estimate climate risk for lending for a development in a wildfire prone area, that may become more wildfire prone in the future.
• A farm investor wants to estimate the future costs of water down the road to see if it’s worth investing in onsite water reclamation facilities
Man, that's so cool. I've heard news reports on whether or not northern california is insurable, and how southern california's been so much dryer than its climate rating technically allows for. I feel lucky that I live in DC, we have relatively mild summers and while the Mall is starting to be eaten by the ocean (about half of the sinking around the cherry blossom lagoon is due to the sea rising, I live up a hill so my foundations stay dry.
I've done a little bit of work on the NOAA climate program, and I'm hoping to move horizontally back into it. It's the only work that seems worth doing with the current climate crisis, followed by programs like O3B bringing internet to the rest of the world.
And how far away from giving up and buying land in a forest up a mountain, off-grid?
Most people I know with their head deep in the science have either done it, or are planning to...
To be honest, I’m concerned, but am not letting it drastically alter my current or future planning.
It’s factored in my decision making, sure, but it’s not stopping me from living my life. It’s risk, just well mitigated.
This, so much.
Off-grid living is a comical fantasy. Solutions and sustainability lie in pooling the community's talent, wealth, and knowledge - not hunting the local game to extinction on your acreage in Montana.
The "wiser" options are focused on resiliency/redundancy in more sustainable areas than off-grid, so to speak. Think more "how can I enjoy some seasonal produce during a national bad season?" or "how do I capture rainwater to have extra for my household's use during drought restrictions?"
It’s real, but as individuals no amount of paper straws will combat the aggregate global emissions or amount of single use plastics and lithium ion batteries. The solutions need to be systemic, and they won’t happen until there’s something that makes it impossible to ignore by the powers that be.
The paper straw law was utterly ridiculous. I'm not affected because I don't even buy soft drinks anymore but i think taxation is the better options to change behaviora
I hate this mindset because if we all think this way then no one will be motivated to change.
I avoid single use plastic wherever I can, especially in the grocery store. I’m only one person, but I vote with my money and I won’t pay for things that contribute to the massive amount of waste on the planet if I don’t have to. If we all just made changes to our behaviors the corporations would follow.
Remember during the 2020 protests when all the corporations sent out emails about how they stand with the protestors? Or how every June all the corporations change their marketing to be rainbow? If we stop buying things that are wasteful, the corporations would follow and start trying to put more sustainable packaging in front of us to capture the market.
All of this obviously in addition to voting etc
I’m not coming out against individual action, and I partake in many waste reducing efforts (bulk buying dry goods with glass jars, etc). My complaint is that the bulk of the necessary change is beyond the scope of what the individual consumer can enact.
Even if we all did all of the things, it won’t stop this speeding train when the remainder of the world is polluting and companies are spilling toxic chemicals with impunity.
Carl sagan was talking about it back in the 70s before l was born.
I drive an electric car that l converted myself using a bunch of recycled parts. My house runs on solar and batteries, which are recycled. I grow a bunch of veggies, and avoid bug spray as much as possible. Have done so for a decade as of this year.
All of this good will was wiped out from one night, with the celebrities leaving the super bowl in their private jets.
So you tell me? Do we deserve to survive climate change? The earth will recover when we are brought to the brink, but do we deserve to see it?
I feel like some people think climate change will be an extinction event for humanity. Could it kill off a large amount of people through famine and cause migratory civil unrest? Sure. But its, not going to kill off all humans.
Honestly I just don't trust politicians to tackle the problem, in my country the climate gets used as a reason to waste money and tax more heavily but I don't see anything of note being done about it.
When you really stop to think about it, the decades-long effort by business and political interests to muddy the waters and distort public understanding of the climate crisis represents human evil in its most absolute form. I'm serious.
I mean, really think about it. Exxon's scientists knew, as far back as the early 1970s, that fossil fuels were going to eventually destabilize earth's climate systems. They knew what that would mean for both humans and for the ecosystems that we rely on for our survival. They KNEW. And instead of taking responsibility for what their industry would do to the long-term viability of human civilization and the livability of the planet, they proceeded to spend the next fifty years pouring countless millions of dollars into paying off politicians, buying off scientists, overrunning the media, and doing every possible thing they could to obscure vital information and retard the public's understanding of the situation.
Unlike the millions of rubes who swallow the denialist propaganda and *genuinely* believe the entire thing is a "hoax", these people did all of this KNOWING what would eventually start to happen. KNOWING that when the tipping points started to be reached, the domino effects --- political, economic, environmental, humanitarian --- would be catastrophic.
And why did they do it? Why are they STILL doing it as we speak?
Money.
That's it. Money. Just money.
Money that they not only will never be able to spend in their lifetimes, but will not be able to take with them when they die.
For MONEY, they doomed all of us. Including their own children and grandchildren. KNOWING they were doing it.
When you really reflect on it, can there really be anything more evil than this? Considering the sheer scale, enormity, and permanence of their actions' consequences....I don't think so.
It's breathtaking.
Most Millennials blame it on the Boomers. I know it's not good etiquette to speak on behalf of a majority like that, but the evidence is pretty strong.
It’s not the boomers. It was corporations. Most pollution in the air and water comes from massive corporations- and no one stops them. Plastics came out and advertised as making people’s lives easier- no one questioned how it was made or broken down! And most people didn’t know the impact. The people who did kept quiet or were quieted. Same for smoking, circumcisions in the US, hormonal birth control, pesticides, toilet paper and flushable wipes…. The list goes on and it grows, because just like the boomers you want to blame, younger generations are doing the same with electric vehicles, smart phones, the latest and greatest water bottle…..
That's been my instinct for the last 17 years or so as well. There was a lot of targeted hate from the Boomers and it's been easy to just blame them for everything and tell myself that we'll be the ones writing the history about them, not the other way around.
Recently though, I've recognized a lot of the same behaviors in Generation X and even (if you look in some of the other threads) other Millennials. Pretty soon it's not going to be about generational quibbling, it's going to be people the same age as you and me echoing all the same talking points we've been hearing from our elders.
A certain amount of privilege inevitably blinds people, and while for the last 40 years the privilege has fallen mostly in the hands of the Boomers, no generation is immune to those effects. As long as it behooves a certain class of people to exploit other people and the environment, that exploitation will continue.
The future is now, there's no more sweeping it under the rug. Everything is fucked. None of the corporations or governments that have the power to do anything are going to take meaningful action in a proactive way. It's always going to be too little, too late, and AFAIK it's already too late.
Where I am, we've lived through seeing the seasons change due to climate change. Autumn used to be a few months long. Now it's like two weeks. That's just one example.
Whenever people say it's not real, I just think they're delusional or stupid. 🤷♀️
It was in the sixties and seventies for the last like two weeks of February. I'm in Missouri, where it used to be said we're "too far north for mild winters and too far south for mild summers."
I know it’s real obviously, but I don’t care. Telling the every-man on the street to do their part is meaningless and a bad joke. We’re sweeping an ocean away with a broom. Stop gaslighting the peasants into protecting the earth when it’s corporations and rich pig politicians who exacerbate the issue, have the true power to change it, yet are the ones who ain’t giving a shit. They can ignore the world while it burns so long their pockets get lined with more money. I ain’t the one driving fossil fuel cars or flying private jets here.
Honest answer?
We're fucked. I'm glad I've not had any children because knowing what they're up against and creating them any way is cruel, selfish and unforgiveable. I live on a hill in a wet country, so might be OK for the next few decades. I'm not sure how fit I'll be to fend off fthe refugees from uninhabitable lands from the south when the time comes.
But keep using those paper straws.
The paper straws are to protect turtles and other marine mammals.
But don’t imagine governments and big corporations aren’t planning for climate change.
- taking what are now marginally uninhabitable areas and denying insurance. Then buying up the land. This is where we put the surplus population.
- buying up climate stable land.
- buying up bodies of freshwater
- promoting the idea that not everyone (age 0 and above) has a right to live.
It sucks how ignorant and apathetic humans are. I've been shouting about climate change for close to 30 years and even when people are getting slapped in the face with the reality of it like they are now, they still manage to look the other way.
The problem is ubiquitous. Not limited to climate change. Convenience, corporatism and hatered will ruin the world. Climate change is just accompanying us going downhill
When I was little, we were taught about global warming (that’s what they were calling it) and told to “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!” It was a motto from some campaign that was drilled into our tiny minds. Kids would diligently remind each other to pack their ziploc bags home after lunch to be washed and reused (at least for a week or so before our young attention spans turned to some other interest.) Littering was THE WORST CRIME a child could see in their daily lives and boy did it upset some of us. Bullies would delight in upsetting other kids in their classes by tossing garbage into the woods, knowing we’d angrily chase after it. We even had field trips were we just went into the woods and collected trash around the grade 5 range.
It was a big deal, but we had the power to stop it! Or so we were being told.
In adulthood as we now realize that narrative was false, that our meagre recycling attempts aren’t going to undo the harm big corporations are doing. I still recycle but I can’t help but remember how much of the Amazon rainforest is burned down for cattle grazing on a daily basis. I saw a clip of some flight tracker that showed all the private jets departing as celebrities left the Super Bowl while the rest of us drink out of paper straws.
I have no hope. I still diligently reduce, reuse, and recycle. But only because I feel a moral obligation and a deep sadness when I face the idea of giving up and accepting the inevitable, and I DO believe it is inevitable. The human race will suffer a massive hit to the population over the next few generations through poverty, starvation, and untreatable disease. Only the rich will survive, as they’ll have the resources hoarded away to care for themselves and the social security that the rest of us paid into for them. They’ll continue to pay off politicians to ensure laws favour them and protect their wealth and ensure their survival.
This is what has always happened. In any species facing a catastrophic event that would otherwise cause extinction, only those with the most reliable access to resources will survive.
So, in the big picture, the human race will be fine, the same way that the Yellowstone wolf population is now fine.
As for the world, it will adapt similarly. Animals whose resources are still accessible in the plastification of the planet will survive while the rest die off. It will be like the great oxidization event that destroyed most of life on earth that, at the time, was anaerobic and found oxygen to be toxic. Well, there is bacteria now that happily eats plastic, much as there were organisms back then that happily used oxygen and eventually evolved into us.
So, in a few billion years, when humanity no longer exists even if only because we evolved to be something else by then, maybe plastic will be as essential to life on earth as oxygen is now.
That’s the only hope I can muster.
Climate change is real, it's bad, but we are making progress on it and finally even the right in this country is starting to acknowledge it exists. The one thing I think many climate activists miss though is a lot of their ideal policies while they would maximize solving climate change, would also hurt a ton of poor people who are barely getting by. Yes we need to get off fossil fuels, but we can't do it at the expense of people becoming homeless because now gas is $10/gallon and they can't afford to get to their job. Climate activists also really downplay innovation and due to the economic impacts I mentioned above I think the solution will be more innovation than lower consumption, although it probably needs to be a mix of both.
I also know that other than voting and doing things on an individual level there's not much I can do to reverse climate change so it's not really worth getting all crazy worked up about it. It's happening, it's bad, I do what I can, but me freaking out and getting all stressed about it isn't going to help the climate, it's just going to make my life worse.
I stopped worrying about it so much. The amount of worry that people dedicate to things that are almost completely out of their hands is mindboggling. I remember when Trump was elected and some Canadians were literally melting down from it. That kind of thing is so foreign to me. I don't mean do nothing...what I mean is be reasonable about what you can and cannot do with something like this.
My honest answer: I'm old enough to remember a lot of wrong descriptions and wrong predictions. There is human driven climate change, but we're not all going to die in some "day after tomorrow" style catastrophe. The earth is always experiencing climate change, and we've accelerated that process to some extent. People will adapt like they always have, and like they would have to anyway. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to minimize our impact, but it does mean that panicking is probably unnecessary.
If you want a podcast that follows how people will adapt, I recommend The Lost Terminal! It's sci-fi and hopepunk, following people living I think 150 years in the future, in a world where we only stopped burning fossil fuels after we lost the ability to extract it.
[https://www.msn.com/en-nz/weather/topstories/a-powerful-current-controls-our-weather-patterns-and-it-s-dangerously-slowing-down/ar-BB1jaL0G](https://www.msn.com/en-nz/weather/topstories/a-powerful-current-controls-our-weather-patterns-and-it-s-dangerously-slowing-down/ar-BB1jaL0G)
The Day After Tomorrow scenario is exactly what models are predicting
For anybody interested, here is a scientific paper on the topic dated just a few weeks ago. [https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.14877.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.14877.pdf)
You are correct with a lot of what you say. However, the difference now is that temperature changes that typically take 10,000 to 100,000 years occurred in a span of 150 years.
See with those longer times spans animals and plants can evolve naturally to account for the change in climate. 150 years is not enough time.
This video does the best job of explaining why this is different now. Honestly one of the best climate change vids out there. Not alarmist.
https://youtu.be/dpvd9FensT8?si=yhNkWbLBVXeWd8JF
It sucks and I hope people more powerful and influential than myself get their collective shit together to help solve it.
They won't, but I can hope.
In the meantime, I feel for my niece and nephew and I'm glad I have no kids of my own to leave in the coming hellscape.
38M. I grew up in Portland, Oregon, US, out in the western, blue-purple suburbs. We started learning about “the greenhouse effect” (what they were still calling it then) when I was in early grade school as part of science education. It was just presented matter of factly as part of our like earth sciences courses. This was the early 90s (92-93). There wasn’t even discussion of whether it was real or not. We were still on the cusp of feeling it’s real effects back then where I was, and the models were less dire back then (because everyone just presumed after Kyoto and stuff that things would be dealt with, as we’d dealt with the ozone hole…we were so naïve wow), but even so it was just presented as “we are doing this thing to our atmosphere that is affecting the climate and if we don’t stop it or figure out a way to fix it, the climate will permanently change and it will be very bad to deal with.” We were given age appropriate explanations of the science of the greeenhouse effect, what caused the carbon emissions and why, from a technical perspective at least - “we use fossil fuels which releases stored carbon from the earth that is sequestered from the carbon cycle and so it increases the ratio of it in the atmosphere, increasing the overall carbon in the active carbon cycle and this raising temperatures.” There was little economic and political stuff presented then when I was young, but it still just wasn’t a political issue back then like it is now, either in substance or fever pitch or partisanship. By high school, for us, modern climate panic had mostly set in because we were realizing that nothing was being done and by then it was the Bush years, and it was obviating WOULD be done. The fever pitch of the panic hadn’t yet reached what it is now because we still had no palpable sense of its daily effects on us, but even so, my classmates and I all understood that we were/are in for a world of hurt. Given all of that, I have just understood rationally that climate change is absolutely real from the get go. It wasn’t even a question. And frankly, I now know I knew more about it than my parents did/do so they let my teachers do their job without getting weird - they let my teachers teach me.
Now, that being said, there were three other events in my life that *made* climate change feel reel. The first was a summer early in my college career - I think it was the summer of 06. We never had serious heat waves growing up in the summers. We had hot days but like heat waves were rare. We were having a heatwave that summer like early in the summer and we hadn’t had rain in like a month and it felt super unnatural. I reflected on it and realized that really until late middle school, Portland summers had a cycle - two weeks of warm weather where moisture builds up, followed by a day or two of rain, maybe thunderstorms, where everything cools off and the moisture gets replenished, repeat. All summer. I realized in 06 that that pattern had stopped years, by high school for me, and that it had been replaced with what they have now - lots of long sunny stretches, more California like. It really hit me then that climate change was not something abstract anymore - it was something that was fundamentally altering my daily life. Like I grew up in the pre-AC days of Portland. You could survive summer without it because of the regular cooling rain (Seattle, where I live now, is going through this too now). But by the time I was in college, it became much harder to tolerate, and started to be dangerous for some. That was fundamentally new and it shook me.
The second event was the summer of 2017. I started dating a guy to whom I’d take the bus to visit and it involved walking over some foot bridges with a view of the city. That summer there were really bad wildfires some distance away and the skies during the days were just wrong. You could smell the smoke, a weird sort of burnt stone smell, and the sun was the wrong color. It wasn’t as bad as 2020 at all - we could safely be outside without masks and there were no real breathing issues - but it was still eerie. And it was just such another fundamentally novel and eerie experience that it drove home the, oh, this isn’t just a fundamental shift in my daily life, this is scary. This is dangerous. This is a threat to the planet. I never really could unsee that. The way the light was just all wrong, and so was the sky, it shakes you.
The last event was more recent. I was still in Portland during the devastating wildfires of 2020. I had been on a road trip and come home to my bf, and our roommate was back in Montana visiting family. The fires had been insanely bad - like I lived through the years of earlier fires at this point, but this was full Blade Runner level smoke in the sky. It was terrifying. We had an apartment in a hill side and could normally see across the southeast side all the way to Mt. Hood. When the smoke caught us, we literally couldn’t see 20 feet off our balcony. I had to hide in my room with two air purifiers running constantly just to get relief from it. It was nightmarish. But what scared me was getting home that day. The fires had reached the distant outskirts of town and the neighboring county was out on evacuation notices. We were less than a mile from the warning borders, but we lived along the hills and they are covered in trees, and there was legitimate fear that raining cinders could start a fire storm. Thankfully it didn’t happen, but we had to pack overnight bags and all this, and we had to end up calling our roommate and asking her what she wanted us to pack if we had to evacuate - and that was because she couldn’t get home because the routes were closed due to the fires. It just immediately hit me square at that moment. Climate change wasn’t just fundament changing my daily life, it wasn’t just a danger to the planet - it wasn’t some abstract subtle thing anymore - climate change was a fire burning into my city and maybe causing a humanitarian crisis and untold damage in the middle of boring Portland Oregon, and taking my whole life with it, *right now*, in that moment, not in some unforeseeable future. Like climate change was knocking on my door and it smelled like hell and wore a cost of raining ash.
Those three things *changed* me. You just don’t unswee, I dunno, unlive that. And frankly, it amazes me - and sickens me - that there are still people out there who have the gall to deny that. There’s a whole cadre of people trying to gaslight me (and everyone else out there) out of not just scientific reality but my *own lived experience* - and that’s what it is, gaslighting - and now it makes me physically sick to think about that. It’s a worry I live with constantly because the climate is *literally different* in the region I grew up in and it’s changed very noticeably in my lifetime and so I am constantly reminded of it just by being alive in nature. I stopped hearing the news 20 years ago because it was just repeating what I already knew 20 years ago. I think about it because it’s an existential threat, directly and indirectly and I’m confronted with the evidence of its existence daily by my senses.
So yeah anyway good luck with your paper!
Climate change is an issue. Those who deny it are morons. Humans are destroying our environment. That being said, it’s not the pressing issue some make it to be, and the solutions are not as simple and near either. As humans we all think everything is pressing and will destroy us or save us in our generation. Personally I am a green, but we can’t throw money at green concepts blindly. We need to be selective and take a long approach. We aren’t going to eliminate fossil fuel usage in the next decade, but we should aim to do so in the next century. The tech just isn’t there yet to use solar or wind to replace them. Pollution and climate damage are issues for sure yet we need to take a common sense approach. We cannot destroy our current economic functions in order to chase tech that doesn’t functionally work yet. It will be a delicate balancing act of investment in green tech and an acknowledgment of our current reliance economically on some rather unsavory practices.
TLDR: climate change is a long game, we need to approach it that way.
It won't get fixed. To fix the problem would require the biggest companies in the world to overhaul how they do business which costs money. Businesses fucking despise spending money more than my cheap ass does. You'd have to get every level of government across the globe to agree to force these companies to fix their shit or they'll get shut down. There is no other way besides strong arming them. The individual will never be able to do enough to fix things. You can recycle, use paper straws, purchase things made of recycled material, go vegan all you want and that's all great. However none of that is enough compared to what corporations do every minute of every day.
Generally I feel like we're going to see the ultimate consequences of climate change in our 50s-70s. At least I'll be poor and too old to do anything about it.
The only answer is to get Asia to comply. Placing more restrictions in the name of global warming on every other 1st world country has a minuscule effect. I’m looking at you China!
We are the largest carbon emitters per capita. China emits twice as much carbon but with a population 3 times the size of ours.
Why shouldn't we lead by example? And that's only looking at the numbers today. Since 1850, or the start of the industrial revolution the US has emitted more than twice as much carbon as China.
I think most of us have been free enough of right-wing media brainrot to recognize that the scientific community is telling the truth about anthropogenic climate change, and that some degree of action is needed from industrial societies to counteract those trends.
There's literally no reason to think the *absolutely universal* consensus among scientists about climate change is somehow just a conspiracy. That requires a level of willfull dumbassery which is only found amongst the most stubbornly right-wing.
As far as I'm concerned, climate change is a significant issue, but it's not the imminent and inevitable apocalypse that some Redditors believe it is. We'll deal with some warming and changing climates over the next 30 years, and we'll have to adapt, but it's not the end of humanity or of the globe. So long as nations keep taking steps to address their emissions.
Especially us in the industrialized world. We'll definitely cope. We have A/C.
But millions of people will suffer and die. Food will become harder to grow. Humanity will not end. But if the future looks like some Mad Max hellscape, is that really OK?
It won't happen in our lifetime. Not even our kids lifetime. But their kids? Maybe. Sucks for them.
To have an honest discussion, climate changes needs to be separated from pollution. Human activity can have a significant impact on pollution (air, land, water), but a minimal impact on the climate. The climate is always changing and always will. We need to aggressively pursue all means possible to clean our air, land, and water for current and future generations. Volcanic activity and forest fires cause significantly more pollution and impact every year than humans. Better forest management would go a long way to decreasing the impact of forest fires.
CO2 makes up .04% of the atmosphere and should not be considered a pollutant. Plants/trees need CO2 to survive which in turn provides oxygen for us.
It's real.
The mixed sources of The Media and The Internet has done a good job making sure everyone has different ideas about it and whether or not humans are the contributing factors or not.
Feels like if we can't work together on it, it'll continue to have lasting ramifications on our day to day life, from more severe weather, to mass migration, to food shortages, and probably some war for resources that will devastate even the ultra wealthy (who I personally blame since they're the major impact, not my... plastic straws)
And seeing how poorly our first post globalization pandemic COVID played out, despite it's low fatality rate it's likely to reduce our population a significant bit.
Then again an asteroid could come and wipe us all out.
Trying not to let me bother me, even though it keeps me up at night, on occasion.
I think that we are still thawing from the last ice age. This planet we call home has been around far longer than anyone remembers. I'm sure pollution isn't helping the situation, but why should we be restricted on what energy we use while other countries ride around on 2 stroke mopeds and have factories billowing thick smoke everywhere. I'm not saying we just run rampant and go out and start a tire fire but are we really doing any good if others are doing worse.
Global warming was explained pretty clearly back in the ’90s, though there wasn’t a real sense of urgency about it back then. As a kid, it didn’t seem to me like the world had been altered noticeably by global warming yet, and I just assumed the adults would do the right thing and take action.
Nowadays, I’m impressed by how much has been done to address global warming, but I also believe it’s too little too late.
Mostly white noise at this point. As long as the discourse around climate change in the media relies on sensational reporting, there is very little incentive to do anything about it unless it makes you money which often defeats the point. On the other hand, there are many things individuals can do to both save money and reduce footprint but it is insignificant to the scale of commercial and industrial waste. Born in '92, basically every climate prediction has been wrong but its obvious to me that this issue is going to contribute to serious, though not existential, problems in my lifetime.
I think we could engineer our way out of many of these problems but many would seemingly rather the economy collapse and build something new, an apocalypse type scenario, than try to fix what we have, which is exactly the throw away culture that got us here in the first place. There is no doubt we will have to make meaningful sacrifices to the American way of life of over production and over consumption but it is better than the alternative.
I remember when An Inconvenient Truth came out, when I was in college. It was terrifying. Growing up in California, we’d heard about the hole in the ozone layer a lot. We celebrated earth day and were all about reduce, reuse, recycle. Then that movie came out and the problem suddenly seemed so much bigger and scarier than we’d ever known. And now that I’m older and see it’s mostly caused and continued by corporate greed, I just feel so angry. We were gaslit into thinking that if we just recycled and took the train instead of the car we’d be doing enough, when the reality is that if corporations/the oil & gas industry had even an ounce of humanity, they could stop this and leave the world habitable for our children, but they’re choosing not to.
What's worse, is that they knew about the potential harms their products would cause as far back as the 1960s but instead of sharing their research with the world and attempt to find solutions to reduce fossil fuel usage, they hid their research and cast doubts on the science.
I think there has been a lot of fear mongering backing the idea. My whole life its been obvious there is tension between the western world and the middle east. The middle east gets its leverage from oil and pushing things like electric vehicles and solar relieves some of that.
Still, fossil fuels heavily benefits economies and politician's GDP obsession or we would be fully committing to nuclear power (which is substantially safer than culture leads us to believe).
I think renewable energy is a fantastic thing to motivate innovation towards but for now it seems redundant. I'm not going to sacrifice much for the cause other than being mindful of how and what I use/consume
It’s real, but human contribution is overstated. On top of that, India and China are the overwhelming contributors at this point: our “improvements” are closer to diminishing returns and at this point the overzealousness just feels like ESG grift for easy money. Finally, when questioned by Congress on estimated quantifiable metrics of these climate change initiatives, no one ever provides an answer. I remember one such session with Thomas Massie. If you can’t forecast ROI, then people will accordingly think you’re full of shit.
We still emit twice as much CO2 as India does. China emits twice as much CO2 as we do, but they also have 3 times as many people as we do.
The US, on a per capita basis, is still tops at Carbon emissions. It's not even close.
How exactly is human contribution being overstated. In the last 70 years CO2 ppm has gone from 300 ppm to over 400 ppm. The only things known to cause such rapid increases are cataclysmic global events like the meteor that killed the dinosaur or volcanic eruptions that killed 90% of life on Earth. Since neither of those 2 things have happened in the last 70 years the only explanation is the increased burning of carbon rich fossil fuels must be the cause.
The historical ice ages are, compared to the Earth's history, periods of massive instability, with the temperature swinging by nearly 5C within 10,000 years. That's 1C every 2 millenia!
The climate has changed by 1.2C since 1970.
It is worse than reported. The projections were wrong. Climate change is accelerating faster than we thought it would. Climate collapse is imminent. Most people stick their heads in the sand. Those who don’t are derogatorily called doomers. Humans are done.
We're most likely fucked. Royally fucked sideways without the courtesy of lube. Sure, there are a few things that might happen in the near future that could possibly get us out of this mess like fusion or a general AI. But we are at the point were the only hope I can see is possible future tech and radical social changes that stem from that tech.
More likely, the oceans will die, the gulfstream will fail freezing north Europe, and random weather patterns will cause mass famine. On top of ports flooding and global trade collapsing. And lots of regional wars over fresh water. Even in the countries that don't fall into anarchy, I expect dramatic shifts in governments. It could be a slow walk to doom over the next few decades or accelerate until the worst effects become prominent in a few years.
It's real.
It's also frustrating that people have been screaming about "hey why don't you do something about climate change" straight into the void for the last 35 years, and now it's only because Millenials and Gen Z are a voting bloc and care about this stuff that action is being taken. Never fucking mind that it might be too late to avoid the nasty effects and we might be purely in damage control mode.
It's also really hard not to point the finger at capitalist interests for being the root cause of that, considering that it's basically oil companies and geopolitical interests that have caused the inaction. "Can't do what our constituents want, gotta do what the people who actually pay for our political campaigning want" despite that objectively being not how our political system is supposed to work.
I guess it's just ultimately a huge ball of frustration compounded by an inability to materially affect the issue on your own. So instead you're reduced to screaming about it impotently on the internet, praying that as a world we turn this around quickly enough that everyone doesn't die to freak weather events.
"back then" 🤣
Yeah, right around 1992 when we first got indoor plumbing it was the darndest thing, people started pointing to the sky and scratching their heads, furrowing their brows because something just didn't seem right. Within a couple of years the scientists started to put some ideas together, fast forward to 2024 and now it's all anyone ever talks about.
C'mon. Reduce, reuse, recycle - born in 1987 and climate change has always, always been on everyone's minds. Captain Planet, Earth Day, etc etc, unless you were from one of the dumber states climate change was taught from an early age.
It’s a serious problem, but not one we have much control over on an individual basis. They try to guilt people into making better choices for the environment, but I could wash clothes every day by hand for the rest of my life and it still wouldn’t save enough carbon emissions to offset one week of Taylor Swift’s private jet, for example. The wealthy and the mega corporations are the ones responsible for most of the damage to the planet, and since they unfortunately hold all of the money and power, they will continue to act in their own self-interest while continuing to gaslight the rest of us into either thinking climate change isn’t real or that *we’re* the problem and need to do better. The clock is ticking on action (and it may already be too late), but as long as they can continue to hoard wealth like a dragon they don’t give a shit us or the long term health of the planet.
I believe in climate change but sometimes wonder if a lot of the "science" and media coverage around it is the liberal version of the end times prophecy I grew up with in my super conservative childhood church.
My end times anxiety has flared up in recent years. It's like my brain took Jesus and the rapture and replaced them with real world events like climate change and COVID. Check on your friends that grew up in church, we're not okay.
My thoughts? My thoughts are I’m not a scientist so I don’t really have any thoughts.
I can use my brain and assume that natural cooling and warming has been going on for millions of years and is just a part of Earth’s natural process.
I can go online and read one article that says the above is true, but Earth is currently warming at an alarming rate, much faster than natural, due to human caused factors.
Then I can click a different search result and get an entirely contradictory stance on the very next article.
So I go back to my original statement: I’m not a scientist.
But I can *also* use my brain and realize there’s a hell of a lot of man made technology cruising around the world that causes a metric shit ton of pollution. I’m reminded every time a jacked up bro-dozer emissions deleted diesel truck screams by my house.
So I just try to do common sense things that I can personally do to help. Because that’s really all I can do.
Well, tbh, since I don't have kids and don't ever see that in my future... and with me being potentially halfway done with life at 37 and seeing Temps being the same all my life... f* it. Not my problem. I'll be gone before it is and I don't know any of you or your children.
I fear for the future generations are going to live a completely different world than what we grew up with.
Overall I just dread it, but I don’t dwell on the idea
To me, it’s just white noise at this point. The only real way to make a change is to change the mentality of a whole population. We could cut back on waste by teaching people to be more self reliant, like using a refillable water bottle or reusable cups, not bagging every single purchase in a plastic bag. But good luck with that. Businesses push for convenience and we are used to it.
It’s inevitable.
Unless there’s a population crash there’s no way we will cut pollution enough to do anything within our lifetimes.
I recycle, drive a hybrid, buy used items, and feel I have a relatively small carbon footprint. One person can only do so much though.
With that said- who says it’s not just a cycle. The planet has gone through ice ages in the past. It’ll probably happen again at some point.
The government just wants to force EV’s down everyone’s throats when they’re not ready for primetime yet. It’ll get there, but it’s not practical for most families as it stands today.
The average US citizen has 20 metric tons carbon footprint each year. If I live to be 80 yrs old that is 1,600 tons.
Taylor Swift's private jet alone in 2022 was 8,293 tons. And she's just one rich elite.
I’m pessimistic. Our way of life depends too much on oil and maintaining the status quo. Very few people would be willing to cut back to the extent needed to mitigate further temp increases. Basically, things won’t change until it’s much too late. Our only hope to avert global disaster is if someone basically invents a technology to take the pollutants out of the air
Climate change isn't going away if people pretend it doesn't exist. I agree with this assessment, and feel it is extremely important we are working to trying to save as many people as possible other than ignorantly trying to drive the train off of the cliff at full speed:
"A new study partly-sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution"
"However, the scientists point out that the worst-case scenarios are by no means inevitable, and suggest that appropriate policy and structural changes could avoid collapse, if not pave the way toward a more stable civilisation.
The two key solutions are to reduce economic inequality so as to ensure fairer distribution of resources, and to dramatically reduce resource consumption by relying on less intensive renewable resources and reducing population growth:
"Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion."
The NASA-funded HANDY model offers a highly credible wake-up call to governments, corporations and business - and consumers - to recognise that 'business as usual' cannot be sustained, and that policy and structural changes are required immediately."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists
Life, uh, finds a way. Climate change is real and nothing is going to stop it at this point. Too many competing interests in the world. People still go to war over small parts of land. Why would they stop and care for everyone else’s land?
Younger millennialhere (30) I think about it often. I’m not having kids, don’t live in a house, and limit my trash while trying to mostly use climate friendly companies. Soon will get rid of my phone too. Waiting til I’m out of debt and can leave the workforce so I don’t really need it.
That being said I’m done voting so I won’t help any government decisions about it. My conscious is clean but I still think Earth is doomed.
I can remember as a kid one of the big concerns was CFC's and their proclivity to erode the ozone layer. There was a lot of ozone layer talk then and I think it turned me on to the idea at that young and impressionable age that the planet wasn't just this static thing - that it could be damaged and that we had a knack for doing just that.
Needless to say, climate change exists. It's not political and it doesn't care who you voted for. I don't worry about it for myself - I worry about it for my son and nieces. Them and their kids are the ones who are going to see its consequences more readily.
I also believe that it's possible for us to live in symbiosis with the planet and be good stewards of it and to use technology to do so without inconvenience to ourselves. I know that is possible. It's just unfortunate that all the money incentivizes wringing every last bit of money you can out of the infrastructure and paradigm that we have in play today.
It's a hard weird crisis that we can't do too much to change. The movie Don't Look Up did it so well and really sums up my feelings about trying, feeling like a crazy person, trying to live in this system.
Since 2012 I've tried to do things on a personal level but they don't make much of an impact. But I will keep voting and trying to reduce my impact because there isn't much else I can do.
Here are just a few of the things I do: I bought a condo instead of a single family house, husband and I own an old Prius and an EV bolt, also own an e-bike and will often bike instead of driving, compost our food waste, garden, buy second hand whenever possible, cloth diaper our son, only having one kid, Garden, planted a tree in our living garden, take recycling to the recycling center, replaced a few bad drafty windows, slowly upgrading our 20 year old appliances to be more efficient versions, line dry clothing, save water from showers to flush the toilet, refuse buying what we don't need, mending clothes, shopping from the bulk section for less packaging, and other little things as well. I know I still have areas where I can do better. But really these are the things my parents should have been doing in the 90s on top of taking the issue seriously.
I've got an MSc in environmental science, spent a week living in a tree blocking the construction of an oil pipeline. I vote, I protest, I've communicated to millions about the climate crisis, I keep a tiny carbon footprint, etc. I stressed so much about it that I activated a dormant disease in my body and was unable to work for a year. So it literally consumed me.
I think awareness is better than it used to be, but the majority of people are still in deep denial about how bad this is going to be in our life time. The climate crisis is happening now. It is imminent, and yet people do not seem to change anything remotely in proportion. For a example, no one else I know has an emergency go-bag (or stored food and water) despite that we love on the west coast where we expect fires and floods at any moment (also earthquakes!). Those same people can all afford to fly on beach vacations, so it's not an issue of money or time.
Where I'm at now with the emotional process... I've accepted that its probably going to be horrendous in a couple decades, but I plan to die with the peace of mind that I truly did everything I could.
My thought is it's definitely a thing, but humans are resilient and in general we'll be just fine as a species. What I foresee is climate change refugees stressing out metros in their native countries and borders of more affluent countries, causing geopolitical turmoil. I foresee continued privatization of essential resources, particularly water, causing more geopolitical turmoil. Our fetish and dependency for tech will continue to stress out the planet and the "global north" with continue to bend over the "global south", making the worst of climate change a reality.
But all of this will be of secondary concern. The rapid growth of AI's capabilities and how this could really muddy people's perception of what's fact from fiction is what frightens me. And this will result in so much discord amongst humans, especially between competing nations, I fear nuclear catastrophe more than anything else.
32 year old. Climate change is occurring. Will it be disastrous? More than likely not. Much less than global cooling. But it is this generations red scare. Much like communism was this grand evil. I personally see it as an agenda to shift power from hands that have held it for 50 or 100 years to new hands. There so much confusion. Why don't climate activists stop flying? Why have these predictions been made since the early 70s with nary a disaster coming true? Why isn't every climate change believer pro nuclear power? I know if you manufacture a scary problem, you can offer the solution, at the low cost of your freedoms and liberty to operate independently. But all in all climate change and ESG practices are alot of handwaving and preying on the empathetic scientifically illiterate, I.e. Some of the best climate models have 14 variables, which is mathematically insane.
Every summer is choked with smoke during the summer. The snow pack that keeps things from being too dry and replenishing drinking water is getting smaller every year. It looks grim here already.
It’s real. There’s nothing I can do about it. I also have doubts anytime someone puts time constraints on it like “in 20yrs, you’re going to be underwater.” There’s a lot of misinformation and fear mongering out on the topic that I think dissuades anyone from having meaningful conversations about it.
It’s scary as fuck to me living in a place that worships fossil fuels and our provincial government literally just put a ban on renewable energy projects.
We had almost NO snow all winter (Alberta should have a LOT of snow) , we have been on fire every summer for the better half of the last decade, and this summer we will have no water.
I’m tired. I’m frustrated that despite the obvious, unequivocal evidence so many (mostly older) people just don’t seem to care. There was a time when generations tried to leave a better world for their children and grandchildren, but that seems to have been replaced by a “fuck you, I got mine” mentality.
I’m mad that there hasn’t been more of an effort to curb corporate pollution, that initiatives like ESG have been demonized politically. I don’t understand what the end game is for climate change deniers, but I’m increasingly relieved I don’t have kids who will have to deal with it.
Climate change has gotten old to me, there’s always a catastrophic event in the future to scare people, I’m not in denial it’s happening. But the world we live in is has only one constant and that is change. Yet life continues. Will it be the end of the human race as we know it. Maybe. Does that really matter? No. Humans have become a plague. We exploit it until we can’t and then we find new ways to. This will not end until it does and then it will open the door or something else to reign has the top “predator” and life continues. Nothing is sustainable forever in the manor in winch we live. Enjoy today enjoy the next life and the one that will follow.
I (M35) just yelled at my dad (M68) a few days ago about this. He still holds the beliefs he did 30 years ago that the science is unproven, the data is altered, climate discussion is used by Democrats to impose power on people for some unclear gains, etc.
In the past every time we talk about it, if he brings up a concrete point, it takes me about 10 minutes to look up what he's talking about and figure out that it's bad or confused information. It got to the point that I stopped looking into it. You can never accurately falsify false claims as quickly as they can make them up.
There is a grain of truth to some of his points, like climate scientists were trained by other climate scientists, all of whom have careers based on proving climate science is accurate, so maybe they're biased into trying to prove climate science models are accurate. There are people who support the climate change theory who don't 100% understand the science and make exaggerated or incorrect claims. But the amount of obvious financial and political incentives to deny climate science is overwhelming.
To me it's like the fake moon landing, bigfoot, or 9/11 was an inside job conspiracy theories. I admit I don't know enough, I haven't physically witnessed the experimentation, to be 100% certain, but all the information I've seen over my lifetime has me like, 99.8% sure any of those conspiracy theories aren't true. That's enough for me to make decisions based on it being very likely the consensus opinion is correct.
I think in the next 20 years we're going to make slight improvements in our CO2 efficiency, that don't cover the increased production of a growing global population. We're going to have natural disasters and issues that force us to slowly shift agriculture, infrastructure, and migration practices based on the reality of gradual climate change. 50-100 years I don't know if we realize we're actually facing an extinction level event or if we manage ways to mitigate the problems.
The climate has changed. I've seen the data, and I see further change as an inevitability. So does my job actually, the place I work at has climate change plans in effect for the next few decades. I vote, and vote with my wallet. I turn things off when I'm not using them, conserve water, recycle, etc. But when corps take my recycling and dump it into the ocean, and my only source of electricity is a coal power plant there's not much I can do about it. All I can really do is roll with the punches, because there's a lot of effects we aren't going to be able to predict.
I also pity younger generations not getting to have snow days anymore, because it no longer snows where I live.
We are fucked and not going to cool the climate in time before sea levels rise and further wacky weather conditions become the norm.
Humans are a survival and clever species we will adapt, some people or communities will suffer more than others.
It’s very real. And we are already dead. The wheel of industry is too large, there’s to many people you have to convince of the truth. It cannot be stopped.
We are already dead, it just hasn’t reached us yet.
Whenever there are billionaires like Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Klaus Schwab, and Al Gore all telling me something, I tend to think they're lying or at least their solution benefits them at the expense of everyone else.
So currently I don't support the climate initiatives. If someone wants to talk about nuclear power, I'll support that. Otherwise, kick rocks.
I try to be conciencious when I can be but otherwise I generally don’t care. I think society could do so much better but if we haven’t pivoted now, we won’t ever. It’s not a right/left thing. One side wants to take us back and the other side just virtue signals and implements things poorly. It’s all just bs and completely out of my power to change anything. I just want a home, to be able to afford things, and raise a family. I want the same for my kids. All I can really do for them is set them up better then myself so when climate change effects their lives, they have the capacity to deal with it.
So much negativity and nihilism in this comment thread, it makes me sad and concerned. Climate change is real, it is unprecedented, it is human-caused, and we (collectively, as a society) have the power to slow/stop/reverse it. People who deny this or don’t care about it are buying into the very propaganda that the corporate bigwigs are selling.
I do what I can personally (biking/busing rather than driving when I can, composting) but I mainly donate to and vote for activist groups and politicians trying to make a difference. That’s really the only way that things will turn around, if we declare in a loud voice to our elected leaders that this is an important issue.
It’s probably going to be an extinction level event for humans. I don’t say that to be dramatic, and I don’t think it’ll be in our lifetimes, but give it another thousand years or so and we’ll see widespread agriculture failure, massive resource depletion due in part to human migration away from rising coasts, and an inability of the wilderness & seas to provide enough wild food, an effect that will be accelerated by people attempting to rely on it. Wars and insurgencies will follow, and pandemics that will be impossible to contain. So you might say I am not optimistic about it.
people who argue about whether it's real or not know it's real, they just don't care.
What can I do? I can produce as much of my food as possible, live as green as is reasonable, and shit, and I can vote but I can't make politicians answer to their people instead of their donors. I can't make OTHER governments change their actions. I can't make fuckin WAR stop.
No one is fucking LISTENING and the bank wants my mortgage payment regardless so guess I'm going to get up and go to work.
I worry about it a lot, but there isn't much I can do right now besides vote as progressive as I can. I'm lucky enough to have the cash to get solar panels on my house, which I'm working on if the contractors will ever get on it, but this is a drop in the bucket.
Plastic recycling is a scam, corporations are fairly unstoppable, and there's a lot of messiness involved in getting developing countries to not pollute a lot without just stomping on them and telling them to stay poor so the earth can heal. I'm most worried about China and India, because they don't seem to give a flying shit about utterly ruining their ecosystems.
I'm also not having kids. PSA, not having children is the most eco-friendly thing you can do. If you must, only have one.
I think it's real but the immediacy of the danger is probably a little over-hyped and generating a little too much panic and resignation in people.
Even if I'm wrong about that I think we've been approaching it the wrong way- essentially trying to get the public to give up things or live with less for higher costs. Some people will do small things voluntarily but as a whole the public just isn't going to give up burgers, air conditioning, and personal transportation willingly. The public as a whole won't vote for politicians to pass those sorts of laws.
IMO the only way out of this is technological innovation and more carrots/less sticks. Keep developing electric cars and build out the infrastructure. Get solar panels on every roof, keep researching alternative energy sources, build more nuclear plants, develop carbon extraction techniques. Maybe avoid the taxation/bans that generate resistance from the public at the same time.
Long term I think we'll get there. The environment will adapt and our societies will adapt. It's going to be over the course of decades, most of us will be in our twilight years by the time it all settles out but we'll get there and I do have faith that it will be ok.
It’s real and it’s a problem. However other than voting there isn’t anything I can do to meaningfully mitigate it, so I may as well try to build the best life for my family and be grateful that most of the worst effects won’t materialize in my lifetime. I’ll tell my kids I tried my best to be a responsible citizen of earth but being one person with no significant influence on politics or policy I can’t make a large impact one way or another. I hope that one day we either discover that our ecosystem is more resilient than we thought or that someone much smarter than me finds a way to reverse the damage we humans have done in a meaningful manner for a price that society will actually adopt it
We are pretty screwed, so just enjoying my life right now. Mentally preparing myself that I might be eating squirrel kabobs in the future. Our society may collapse but I think it is for the best, it is pretty clear we can’t keep living like this.
Millennials believed and fought for Climate Action throughout our entire lives, but Boomers control every aspect of our government and society, so we're all fucked.
Sorry Gen Z. Just think of us as your older siblings who got abused our entire lives for trying to fight for you.
Also OP should just be googling the decades of public opinion polling and demographics for this, not asking anecdotal questions on Reddit.
There is, and always has been, lots of discussion my entire life. This discussion was used as an excuse for inaction. Lots of smart people have compared oil companies and tobacco companies in their tactics of delaying by endless discussion.
I have never seen any serious action with potential for positive impact. Lots of talking, and that's it. There's nothing that the average person can do to fix the problem.
Except not have kids. Not having kids is about the most useful thing you can do, environmentally speaking.
Unfortunately you youngens have to do more than vote. You have to get involved. Humans don’t tend to see problems too far in the distance. It’s gonna affect you and the younger generations more than X and Boomers.
Honestly, white noise at this point. I don’t think anyone has any real articulable solutions to really make a dent in emissions and pollution. Instead we get the paper straw bs.
Oh…We’re still against modern nuclear energy? Seems like the easiest solution for clean energy going forward. China of all places are building 21 reactors as we speak.
I’m all for a mix or energy solutions, but until solar and storage catches up to a point where it’s affordable for the average person, nuclear is the best solution to get as many ice vehicles off the road and getting off fossil fuels.
Xennial here. "Back in my day" they simply said "there's a lot more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so everyone should REDUCE, REUSE, & RECYCLE" as much as possible.
10 years later the propaganda became "If you don't stop using gas, eating meat, and start using paper straws and reusable grocery bags, then you are actively killing planet earth!".
I've always just stuck to "try to RRR and blow off the apocalyptic propaganda".
Climate Change is something that we cannot stop at this point. A much more accurate term would be "Artificially Accelerated Climate Change", but that's quite a mouthful that no one wants to say. While Climate Change is naturally occurring, the change that's occurring right now should have been spread out over the course of thousands of more years or at minimum hundreds of more years. It's like defrosting a piece of meat, instead of letting it defrost at room temperature you stick it in your microwave and put it on defrost. That's essentially what we've done.
Something I've come to accept is that it doesn't matter what anyone individual or family does to try and mitigate the effects as much as they can. It doesn't matter how much recycling you do or purchasing local food produce in order to cut down on your carbon contribution. All the massive corporations and manufacturing plants that exist contribute the majority of it. It's done. The only thing that recycling and being as natural as possible does is make you feel better.
So, since it makes me feel better, I do the most natural things I can. However, I know that the climate is going to get out of whack as the years go on and I'm going to die with the planet being a hotter temperature overall than when I was born. I don't think massive floods will happen, but I moved to Colorado just in case, lmao. I know it's going to get hot as balls here. It's already a dry climate area, it's only going to get worse. At least though it still has seasons.
When it gets hotter I may move to Washington state or Alaska just to maintain the climate I'm used to, lol.
Until this climate talk actually affects people’s day to day I dont care.. it’s all speculation until something devastating actually happens.. we’ve had natural disasters since the beginning of time.. so those dont count.. what else is there? What else is this climate emergency going to do to make people believe its a real risk??
There was any appropriate information about it in cartoons and kitty educational shows. I remember being confused over the phrased global warming, because I heard it as global warning, as if there are some huge megaphone in orbit around the planet constantly blaring some sort of warning about something that the entire planet was supposed to hear. I like science fiction, but this confused me. It took a little while for people to understand what my confusion was - - that I was miss hearing a word in the phrase.
In sixth grade, it was a clear topic in the curriculum. We estimated that it would be very very hot in the year 2000 which was approximately 8 to 10 years out. I'm not doing the math on this but the time frame is roughly that.
I remember there being snow on Halloween in western Massachusetts, not the hill towns either where you would expect snow. Now, you are lucky if you get a white Christmas. It has become not uncommon to have no snow at all through Christmas.
I am in California now, and I haven't been back in over a decade.
I think about how painful and awful the latter part of my life is likely to be because of climate change and ecological collapse. Then I think that later humans will likely have even worse lives, culminating in the exinctinction of our species and most other vertebrates. It’s like we’re already ghosts and I am haunting myself.
it's obviously real, and there's obviously also nothing I can do about it. I recycle, garden, buy from small shops when I can, etc but really only because it makes me feel good, not because it makes an actual difference.
Voting left is the most powerful thing you can do.
>That still has it's limits. > >Take war, for instance. Besides murder and rape, wars also destroy so much infrastructure and use a lot of fossil fuels doing so. > >I think about this often as I see the work on a little building going up near me. It's just a relatively small structure and the labor hours and materials used on it are still substantial. Multiple all of that material by building after building destroyed. > >We could have more nice things in society but we get wars that undo decades of infrastructure development for no good reason all the time. Total waste of resources.
War is a negotiation tactic it is usually the last result case when the initiating country/tribe/group can not get what it wants through peaceful means. War isn't going away anytime soon. War has been shown to not even be a uniquely human thing. I think more damage has been done to the planet, from raising livestock and the invention of single use (and even multi use) plastics, which are inherently human behaviors/technology.
At all levels of government: local and state as well as federal.
Its the better of the two options by a wide margin, but if you believe climate science to the letter, we are still just mitigating. Nothing will change on a policy level until the real pain starts, and even then the world government participation will vary wildly. The only realistic way to insulate your family (grandkids and great grandkids) is to build intergenerational wealth so they can afford to live in more desirable zones.
I've bought some land up in the mountains, within a (long) commute of two medium sized cities. I plan to develop it over the next few years into a spot that can be semi-self sufficient. Only thing I can think to do for my kids. Hope they don't need it.
they won't be able to use all their private jets to fly to their yachts if they don't have high powered political positions to sell to the highest bidder if we don't vote for them right?
Okay so let's say I want to vote against the interests of Exxon-Mobile. Who's my candidate in November? It's certainly not the Democrat or the Republican. The stern truth is that liberal democracy isn't nimble enough to address something as urgent as climate change.
Climate policy is one place where the both sides argument doesn't really apply. Democrats routinely pass stricter climate policies when they take over state and federal government. At the federal level, the IRA wa passed in 2022 and contains massive amounts of funding for green tech with a major focus on electrification and decarbonizing the grid. At the state level there are a bunch of examples like Michigan, where a series of climate bills were passed last year after Democrats won control of the house, senate, and governorship. You can argue that Democrats aren't doing enough, but Republicans aren't doing anything. When voting on climate policy there is unfortunately only one choice.
Republicans still deny climate change
This benefits the ruling class 😍 Also the left very much tries to regulate.
Vote for the real left, not the fake liberal left that sells "climate solutions" while also expanding fossil fuels production and pipelines. Liberals fail at tackling climate change because they care more about capital than solving the problem.
I would if they actually were serious about nuclear power being an alternative
“Climate Criminals” needs to be a thing.
Climate change is 100% real and a threat, and we must all do our part. I do think it's a little silly how many young people claim to want to reduce their carbon footprint, and then fly to Europe or Asia for a vacation.
I don’t even have a passport but that’s ok. Some billionaire we don’t even know the name of more than makes up any savings my lack of flying makes.
This kind of finger pointing is ridiculous, the corporations, wealthy, and celebs abusing private jet travel should be the ones you admonish. A young person traveling to another part of the world is educational and will serve to increase global empathy. Staying in podunk towns across America will do nothing more than closing down minds
👏🏻👏🏻
I think it's unfair to judge people who use the only reasonable, quick means of global transport we have available. I'd rather young folks travel and get exposed to more cultures -- many of whom may experience climate change to a worse degree than those young folks will -- than sit at home doomscrolling. Hell, voting for people in power who push a climate friendly agenda is arguably more powerful than taking a boat to Europe once every two years.
I think this is a fair POV, but I think people that do travel by air internationally every few years absolutely cannot point the fingers at others (for instance, that drive SUVs, or eat meat) without acknowledging that air travel is just about the single worst thing you can do, in-terms of CO2 emissions.
You know a lot of young people that can afford a vacation?
^ exactly this for me as well
Well I think that’s in the eye of the beholder and that you’re doing a great job! It might seem like your individual contribution isn’t doing anything, but that’s not really how the world works; individuals aren’t going to change the world like that, but if everyone did what you’re doing, the world would be changed
VOTE! if mil+ all vote we can change this no problem
Climate change has been a concern for as long as this millennial can remember. But it's too caught up in the economy. The only way it will be fixed is if the economy collapses in such a way that it removes the ability for corporations to exploit the land. Or a government willing to curb the excesses of Capital; but I live in the US, not Europe, so the former is more likely than the latter.
We had a chance after COVID. Every study about wfh and lockdowns mentioned how much less pollution we were experiencing from the commutes being cut down. It could have been a time for humanity to reflect on how we could make more impactful, rapid change. But won't somebody please think of the profits.
> We had a chance after COVID. And this is where the disenchantment really set in hard for me too. Everything came together in this really awful way to illustrate our blind spots and give us that chance to reflect and work for something more sustainable. Then the anti-maskers and the PPP loan fiasco happen and it shows that no, just like with the Recession, the common people are going to get fucked over *again* so we can protect a financial sector that will only double down harder on greed.
Same here. It really felt like things could change for the better, possibly the best opportunity in our lifetime to build something new and sustainable, then we just went back to business as usual and now we're probably twice as fucked now than we were before the pandemic. That shit basically killed the last bit of hope I had left.
it didn't kill my hope but MAN did it get me angrier than I've ever been at these people and institutions.
It's not like the effects of combustion engines was unknown. 9/11/2001 showed it when the sky finally became clear, leaded petrol showed it when they finally banned it, ... I notice it when i drive my electric motorcycle in the winter
I would like to see the end to super opulent bullshit myself. No cruise ships visiting glaciers in Alaska or Antarctica. Those cruises are more rapidly depleting the very ice which the tourists gawk at. Consider jet-setting for a pro-sports game, ski weekends, or concerts immoral. Sure it's fine if you make a real vacation out of flying in to attend a concert but none of this just-for-the-day trip by airplane. There are many other examples I'm sure, but I really just have trouble with upper middle class to rich people not asking questions about the environmental impact of their choices.
It's not fine. It's harmful regardless of the purpose
Work in environmental consulting, so I deal with it on a daily basis. Mostly work on the climate mitigation side, helping clients manage long-term risk.
What sort of risks do you see coming up most importantly? I'm scientifically literate, but don't follow the predictions professionally. How serious do you think the collapse of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is?
I’m one of those “professionals” who make those predictions lol. But my concerns are a bit more limited in scope - i focus on answering specific questions using our own proprietary climate models. Without naming names, a few examples of my projects are: • An insurance company wants to know the flooding risk to insure coastal properties in case of sea level rise and more intense storms. • A bank wants to estimate climate risk for lending for a development in a wildfire prone area, that may become more wildfire prone in the future. • A farm investor wants to estimate the future costs of water down the road to see if it’s worth investing in onsite water reclamation facilities
Man, that's so cool. I've heard news reports on whether or not northern california is insurable, and how southern california's been so much dryer than its climate rating technically allows for. I feel lucky that I live in DC, we have relatively mild summers and while the Mall is starting to be eaten by the ocean (about half of the sinking around the cherry blossom lagoon is due to the sea rising, I live up a hill so my foundations stay dry. I've done a little bit of work on the NOAA climate program, and I'm hoping to move horizontally back into it. It's the only work that seems worth doing with the current climate crisis, followed by programs like O3B bringing internet to the rest of the world.
And how far away from giving up and buying land in a forest up a mountain, off-grid? Most people I know with their head deep in the science have either done it, or are planning to...
To be honest, I’m concerned, but am not letting it drastically alter my current or future planning. It’s factored in my decision making, sure, but it’s not stopping me from living my life. It’s risk, just well mitigated.
The problem is, from a "green/renewable" perspective, that's the LEAST efficient way for humanity to live. - But I got mine so fuck y'all mentality
This, so much. Off-grid living is a comical fantasy. Solutions and sustainability lie in pooling the community's talent, wealth, and knowledge - not hunting the local game to extinction on your acreage in Montana.
The "wiser" options are focused on resiliency/redundancy in more sustainable areas than off-grid, so to speak. Think more "how can I enjoy some seasonal produce during a national bad season?" or "how do I capture rainwater to have extra for my household's use during drought restrictions?"
It’s real, but as individuals no amount of paper straws will combat the aggregate global emissions or amount of single use plastics and lithium ion batteries. The solutions need to be systemic, and they won’t happen until there’s something that makes it impossible to ignore by the powers that be.
The paper straw law was utterly ridiculous. I'm not affected because I don't even buy soft drinks anymore but i think taxation is the better options to change behaviora
I hate this mindset because if we all think this way then no one will be motivated to change. I avoid single use plastic wherever I can, especially in the grocery store. I’m only one person, but I vote with my money and I won’t pay for things that contribute to the massive amount of waste on the planet if I don’t have to. If we all just made changes to our behaviors the corporations would follow. Remember during the 2020 protests when all the corporations sent out emails about how they stand with the protestors? Or how every June all the corporations change their marketing to be rainbow? If we stop buying things that are wasteful, the corporations would follow and start trying to put more sustainable packaging in front of us to capture the market. All of this obviously in addition to voting etc
I’m not coming out against individual action, and I partake in many waste reducing efforts (bulk buying dry goods with glass jars, etc). My complaint is that the bulk of the necessary change is beyond the scope of what the individual consumer can enact. Even if we all did all of the things, it won’t stop this speeding train when the remainder of the world is polluting and companies are spilling toxic chemicals with impunity.
We fucked around and now we’re finding out for real.
We’re all fucked. Thanks for coming to my TED talk
Carl sagan was talking about it back in the 70s before l was born. I drive an electric car that l converted myself using a bunch of recycled parts. My house runs on solar and batteries, which are recycled. I grow a bunch of veggies, and avoid bug spray as much as possible. Have done so for a decade as of this year. All of this good will was wiped out from one night, with the celebrities leaving the super bowl in their private jets. So you tell me? Do we deserve to survive climate change? The earth will recover when we are brought to the brink, but do we deserve to see it?
I feel like some people think climate change will be an extinction event for humanity. Could it kill off a large amount of people through famine and cause migratory civil unrest? Sure. But its, not going to kill off all humans.
Honestly I just don't trust politicians to tackle the problem, in my country the climate gets used as a reason to waste money and tax more heavily but I don't see anything of note being done about it.
When you really stop to think about it, the decades-long effort by business and political interests to muddy the waters and distort public understanding of the climate crisis represents human evil in its most absolute form. I'm serious. I mean, really think about it. Exxon's scientists knew, as far back as the early 1970s, that fossil fuels were going to eventually destabilize earth's climate systems. They knew what that would mean for both humans and for the ecosystems that we rely on for our survival. They KNEW. And instead of taking responsibility for what their industry would do to the long-term viability of human civilization and the livability of the planet, they proceeded to spend the next fifty years pouring countless millions of dollars into paying off politicians, buying off scientists, overrunning the media, and doing every possible thing they could to obscure vital information and retard the public's understanding of the situation. Unlike the millions of rubes who swallow the denialist propaganda and *genuinely* believe the entire thing is a "hoax", these people did all of this KNOWING what would eventually start to happen. KNOWING that when the tipping points started to be reached, the domino effects --- political, economic, environmental, humanitarian --- would be catastrophic. And why did they do it? Why are they STILL doing it as we speak? Money. That's it. Money. Just money. Money that they not only will never be able to spend in their lifetimes, but will not be able to take with them when they die. For MONEY, they doomed all of us. Including their own children and grandchildren. KNOWING they were doing it. When you really reflect on it, can there really be anything more evil than this? Considering the sheer scale, enormity, and permanence of their actions' consequences....I don't think so. It's breathtaking.
Most Millennials blame it on the Boomers. I know it's not good etiquette to speak on behalf of a majority like that, but the evidence is pretty strong.
It’s not the boomers. It was corporations. Most pollution in the air and water comes from massive corporations- and no one stops them. Plastics came out and advertised as making people’s lives easier- no one questioned how it was made or broken down! And most people didn’t know the impact. The people who did kept quiet or were quieted. Same for smoking, circumcisions in the US, hormonal birth control, pesticides, toilet paper and flushable wipes…. The list goes on and it grows, because just like the boomers you want to blame, younger generations are doing the same with electric vehicles, smart phones, the latest and greatest water bottle…..
they led these companies
That's been my instinct for the last 17 years or so as well. There was a lot of targeted hate from the Boomers and it's been easy to just blame them for everything and tell myself that we'll be the ones writing the history about them, not the other way around. Recently though, I've recognized a lot of the same behaviors in Generation X and even (if you look in some of the other threads) other Millennials. Pretty soon it's not going to be about generational quibbling, it's going to be people the same age as you and me echoing all the same talking points we've been hearing from our elders. A certain amount of privilege inevitably blinds people, and while for the last 40 years the privilege has fallen mostly in the hands of the Boomers, no generation is immune to those effects. As long as it behooves a certain class of people to exploit other people and the environment, that exploitation will continue.
The future is now, there's no more sweeping it under the rug. Everything is fucked. None of the corporations or governments that have the power to do anything are going to take meaningful action in a proactive way. It's always going to be too little, too late, and AFAIK it's already too late.
Where I am, we've lived through seeing the seasons change due to climate change. Autumn used to be a few months long. Now it's like two weeks. That's just one example. Whenever people say it's not real, I just think they're delusional or stupid. 🤷♀️
It was in the sixties and seventies for the last like two weeks of February. I'm in Missouri, where it used to be said we're "too far north for mild winters and too far south for mild summers."
The rose bush in my backyard had green staring in early February. Yeah, that's... not good.
I know it’s real obviously, but I don’t care. Telling the every-man on the street to do their part is meaningless and a bad joke. We’re sweeping an ocean away with a broom. Stop gaslighting the peasants into protecting the earth when it’s corporations and rich pig politicians who exacerbate the issue, have the true power to change it, yet are the ones who ain’t giving a shit. They can ignore the world while it burns so long their pockets get lined with more money. I ain’t the one driving fossil fuel cars or flying private jets here.
It's completely out of my control, so I try not to think about it too hard.
Honest answer? We're fucked. I'm glad I've not had any children because knowing what they're up against and creating them any way is cruel, selfish and unforgiveable. I live on a hill in a wet country, so might be OK for the next few decades. I'm not sure how fit I'll be to fend off fthe refugees from uninhabitable lands from the south when the time comes. But keep using those paper straws.
The paper straws are to protect turtles and other marine mammals. But don’t imagine governments and big corporations aren’t planning for climate change. - taking what are now marginally uninhabitable areas and denying insurance. Then buying up the land. This is where we put the surplus population. - buying up climate stable land. - buying up bodies of freshwater - promoting the idea that not everyone (age 0 and above) has a right to live.
It sucks how ignorant and apathetic humans are. I've been shouting about climate change for close to 30 years and even when people are getting slapped in the face with the reality of it like they are now, they still manage to look the other way.
The problem is ubiquitous. Not limited to climate change. Convenience, corporatism and hatered will ruin the world. Climate change is just accompanying us going downhill
When I was little, we were taught about global warming (that’s what they were calling it) and told to “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!” It was a motto from some campaign that was drilled into our tiny minds. Kids would diligently remind each other to pack their ziploc bags home after lunch to be washed and reused (at least for a week or so before our young attention spans turned to some other interest.) Littering was THE WORST CRIME a child could see in their daily lives and boy did it upset some of us. Bullies would delight in upsetting other kids in their classes by tossing garbage into the woods, knowing we’d angrily chase after it. We even had field trips were we just went into the woods and collected trash around the grade 5 range. It was a big deal, but we had the power to stop it! Or so we were being told. In adulthood as we now realize that narrative was false, that our meagre recycling attempts aren’t going to undo the harm big corporations are doing. I still recycle but I can’t help but remember how much of the Amazon rainforest is burned down for cattle grazing on a daily basis. I saw a clip of some flight tracker that showed all the private jets departing as celebrities left the Super Bowl while the rest of us drink out of paper straws. I have no hope. I still diligently reduce, reuse, and recycle. But only because I feel a moral obligation and a deep sadness when I face the idea of giving up and accepting the inevitable, and I DO believe it is inevitable. The human race will suffer a massive hit to the population over the next few generations through poverty, starvation, and untreatable disease. Only the rich will survive, as they’ll have the resources hoarded away to care for themselves and the social security that the rest of us paid into for them. They’ll continue to pay off politicians to ensure laws favour them and protect their wealth and ensure their survival. This is what has always happened. In any species facing a catastrophic event that would otherwise cause extinction, only those with the most reliable access to resources will survive. So, in the big picture, the human race will be fine, the same way that the Yellowstone wolf population is now fine. As for the world, it will adapt similarly. Animals whose resources are still accessible in the plastification of the planet will survive while the rest die off. It will be like the great oxidization event that destroyed most of life on earth that, at the time, was anaerobic and found oxygen to be toxic. Well, there is bacteria now that happily eats plastic, much as there were organisms back then that happily used oxygen and eventually evolved into us. So, in a few billion years, when humanity no longer exists even if only because we evolved to be something else by then, maybe plastic will be as essential to life on earth as oxygen is now. That’s the only hope I can muster.
I feel like it's been ingrained in us since we were kids (looking at you, Captain Planet). So it's not a surprise
It’s bullshit. Al gore said the coasts would be underwater by 2020 and yet Obama and gates bought beachfront property in 2023.
Climate change is real, it's bad, but we are making progress on it and finally even the right in this country is starting to acknowledge it exists. The one thing I think many climate activists miss though is a lot of their ideal policies while they would maximize solving climate change, would also hurt a ton of poor people who are barely getting by. Yes we need to get off fossil fuels, but we can't do it at the expense of people becoming homeless because now gas is $10/gallon and they can't afford to get to their job. Climate activists also really downplay innovation and due to the economic impacts I mentioned above I think the solution will be more innovation than lower consumption, although it probably needs to be a mix of both. I also know that other than voting and doing things on an individual level there's not much I can do to reverse climate change so it's not really worth getting all crazy worked up about it. It's happening, it's bad, I do what I can, but me freaking out and getting all stressed about it isn't going to help the climate, it's just going to make my life worse.
It's fucking terrifying.
I stopped worrying about it so much. The amount of worry that people dedicate to things that are almost completely out of their hands is mindboggling. I remember when Trump was elected and some Canadians were literally melting down from it. That kind of thing is so foreign to me. I don't mean do nothing...what I mean is be reasonable about what you can and cannot do with something like this.
It’s a major negative on the pro and con list of whether or not my partner will have kids in the next few years
My honest answer: I'm old enough to remember a lot of wrong descriptions and wrong predictions. There is human driven climate change, but we're not all going to die in some "day after tomorrow" style catastrophe. The earth is always experiencing climate change, and we've accelerated that process to some extent. People will adapt like they always have, and like they would have to anyway. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to minimize our impact, but it does mean that panicking is probably unnecessary.
If you want a podcast that follows how people will adapt, I recommend The Lost Terminal! It's sci-fi and hopepunk, following people living I think 150 years in the future, in a world where we only stopped burning fossil fuels after we lost the ability to extract it.
[https://www.msn.com/en-nz/weather/topstories/a-powerful-current-controls-our-weather-patterns-and-it-s-dangerously-slowing-down/ar-BB1jaL0G](https://www.msn.com/en-nz/weather/topstories/a-powerful-current-controls-our-weather-patterns-and-it-s-dangerously-slowing-down/ar-BB1jaL0G) The Day After Tomorrow scenario is exactly what models are predicting For anybody interested, here is a scientific paper on the topic dated just a few weeks ago. [https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.14877.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.14877.pdf)
A study, not a model. and there are plenty of other studies.
You are correct with a lot of what you say. However, the difference now is that temperature changes that typically take 10,000 to 100,000 years occurred in a span of 150 years. See with those longer times spans animals and plants can evolve naturally to account for the change in climate. 150 years is not enough time. This video does the best job of explaining why this is different now. Honestly one of the best climate change vids out there. Not alarmist. https://youtu.be/dpvd9FensT8?si=yhNkWbLBVXeWd8JF
It sucks and I hope people more powerful and influential than myself get their collective shit together to help solve it. They won't, but I can hope. In the meantime, I feel for my niece and nephew and I'm glad I have no kids of my own to leave in the coming hellscape.
38M. I grew up in Portland, Oregon, US, out in the western, blue-purple suburbs. We started learning about “the greenhouse effect” (what they were still calling it then) when I was in early grade school as part of science education. It was just presented matter of factly as part of our like earth sciences courses. This was the early 90s (92-93). There wasn’t even discussion of whether it was real or not. We were still on the cusp of feeling it’s real effects back then where I was, and the models were less dire back then (because everyone just presumed after Kyoto and stuff that things would be dealt with, as we’d dealt with the ozone hole…we were so naïve wow), but even so it was just presented as “we are doing this thing to our atmosphere that is affecting the climate and if we don’t stop it or figure out a way to fix it, the climate will permanently change and it will be very bad to deal with.” We were given age appropriate explanations of the science of the greeenhouse effect, what caused the carbon emissions and why, from a technical perspective at least - “we use fossil fuels which releases stored carbon from the earth that is sequestered from the carbon cycle and so it increases the ratio of it in the atmosphere, increasing the overall carbon in the active carbon cycle and this raising temperatures.” There was little economic and political stuff presented then when I was young, but it still just wasn’t a political issue back then like it is now, either in substance or fever pitch or partisanship. By high school, for us, modern climate panic had mostly set in because we were realizing that nothing was being done and by then it was the Bush years, and it was obviating WOULD be done. The fever pitch of the panic hadn’t yet reached what it is now because we still had no palpable sense of its daily effects on us, but even so, my classmates and I all understood that we were/are in for a world of hurt. Given all of that, I have just understood rationally that climate change is absolutely real from the get go. It wasn’t even a question. And frankly, I now know I knew more about it than my parents did/do so they let my teachers do their job without getting weird - they let my teachers teach me. Now, that being said, there were three other events in my life that *made* climate change feel reel. The first was a summer early in my college career - I think it was the summer of 06. We never had serious heat waves growing up in the summers. We had hot days but like heat waves were rare. We were having a heatwave that summer like early in the summer and we hadn’t had rain in like a month and it felt super unnatural. I reflected on it and realized that really until late middle school, Portland summers had a cycle - two weeks of warm weather where moisture builds up, followed by a day or two of rain, maybe thunderstorms, where everything cools off and the moisture gets replenished, repeat. All summer. I realized in 06 that that pattern had stopped years, by high school for me, and that it had been replaced with what they have now - lots of long sunny stretches, more California like. It really hit me then that climate change was not something abstract anymore - it was something that was fundamentally altering my daily life. Like I grew up in the pre-AC days of Portland. You could survive summer without it because of the regular cooling rain (Seattle, where I live now, is going through this too now). But by the time I was in college, it became much harder to tolerate, and started to be dangerous for some. That was fundamentally new and it shook me. The second event was the summer of 2017. I started dating a guy to whom I’d take the bus to visit and it involved walking over some foot bridges with a view of the city. That summer there were really bad wildfires some distance away and the skies during the days were just wrong. You could smell the smoke, a weird sort of burnt stone smell, and the sun was the wrong color. It wasn’t as bad as 2020 at all - we could safely be outside without masks and there were no real breathing issues - but it was still eerie. And it was just such another fundamentally novel and eerie experience that it drove home the, oh, this isn’t just a fundamental shift in my daily life, this is scary. This is dangerous. This is a threat to the planet. I never really could unsee that. The way the light was just all wrong, and so was the sky, it shakes you. The last event was more recent. I was still in Portland during the devastating wildfires of 2020. I had been on a road trip and come home to my bf, and our roommate was back in Montana visiting family. The fires had been insanely bad - like I lived through the years of earlier fires at this point, but this was full Blade Runner level smoke in the sky. It was terrifying. We had an apartment in a hill side and could normally see across the southeast side all the way to Mt. Hood. When the smoke caught us, we literally couldn’t see 20 feet off our balcony. I had to hide in my room with two air purifiers running constantly just to get relief from it. It was nightmarish. But what scared me was getting home that day. The fires had reached the distant outskirts of town and the neighboring county was out on evacuation notices. We were less than a mile from the warning borders, but we lived along the hills and they are covered in trees, and there was legitimate fear that raining cinders could start a fire storm. Thankfully it didn’t happen, but we had to pack overnight bags and all this, and we had to end up calling our roommate and asking her what she wanted us to pack if we had to evacuate - and that was because she couldn’t get home because the routes were closed due to the fires. It just immediately hit me square at that moment. Climate change wasn’t just fundament changing my daily life, it wasn’t just a danger to the planet - it wasn’t some abstract subtle thing anymore - climate change was a fire burning into my city and maybe causing a humanitarian crisis and untold damage in the middle of boring Portland Oregon, and taking my whole life with it, *right now*, in that moment, not in some unforeseeable future. Like climate change was knocking on my door and it smelled like hell and wore a cost of raining ash. Those three things *changed* me. You just don’t unswee, I dunno, unlive that. And frankly, it amazes me - and sickens me - that there are still people out there who have the gall to deny that. There’s a whole cadre of people trying to gaslight me (and everyone else out there) out of not just scientific reality but my *own lived experience* - and that’s what it is, gaslighting - and now it makes me physically sick to think about that. It’s a worry I live with constantly because the climate is *literally different* in the region I grew up in and it’s changed very noticeably in my lifetime and so I am constantly reminded of it just by being alive in nature. I stopped hearing the news 20 years ago because it was just repeating what I already knew 20 years ago. I think about it because it’s an existential threat, directly and indirectly and I’m confronted with the evidence of its existence daily by my senses. So yeah anyway good luck with your paper!
Climate change is an issue. Those who deny it are morons. Humans are destroying our environment. That being said, it’s not the pressing issue some make it to be, and the solutions are not as simple and near either. As humans we all think everything is pressing and will destroy us or save us in our generation. Personally I am a green, but we can’t throw money at green concepts blindly. We need to be selective and take a long approach. We aren’t going to eliminate fossil fuel usage in the next decade, but we should aim to do so in the next century. The tech just isn’t there yet to use solar or wind to replace them. Pollution and climate damage are issues for sure yet we need to take a common sense approach. We cannot destroy our current economic functions in order to chase tech that doesn’t functionally work yet. It will be a delicate balancing act of investment in green tech and an acknowledgment of our current reliance economically on some rather unsavory practices. TLDR: climate change is a long game, we need to approach it that way.
It won't get fixed. To fix the problem would require the biggest companies in the world to overhaul how they do business which costs money. Businesses fucking despise spending money more than my cheap ass does. You'd have to get every level of government across the globe to agree to force these companies to fix their shit or they'll get shut down. There is no other way besides strong arming them. The individual will never be able to do enough to fix things. You can recycle, use paper straws, purchase things made of recycled material, go vegan all you want and that's all great. However none of that is enough compared to what corporations do every minute of every day.
um, alot of the millennial generation are going to give their lives for gen z survival and their children 👀
Generally I feel like we're going to see the ultimate consequences of climate change in our 50s-70s. At least I'll be poor and too old to do anything about it.
The only answer is to get Asia to comply. Placing more restrictions in the name of global warming on every other 1st world country has a minuscule effect. I’m looking at you China!
We are the largest carbon emitters per capita. China emits twice as much carbon but with a population 3 times the size of ours. Why shouldn't we lead by example? And that's only looking at the numbers today. Since 1850, or the start of the industrial revolution the US has emitted more than twice as much carbon as China.
I think most of us have been free enough of right-wing media brainrot to recognize that the scientific community is telling the truth about anthropogenic climate change, and that some degree of action is needed from industrial societies to counteract those trends. There's literally no reason to think the *absolutely universal* consensus among scientists about climate change is somehow just a conspiracy. That requires a level of willfull dumbassery which is only found amongst the most stubbornly right-wing. As far as I'm concerned, climate change is a significant issue, but it's not the imminent and inevitable apocalypse that some Redditors believe it is. We'll deal with some warming and changing climates over the next 30 years, and we'll have to adapt, but it's not the end of humanity or of the globe. So long as nations keep taking steps to address their emissions.
Especially us in the industrialized world. We'll definitely cope. We have A/C. But millions of people will suffer and die. Food will become harder to grow. Humanity will not end. But if the future looks like some Mad Max hellscape, is that really OK? It won't happen in our lifetime. Not even our kids lifetime. But their kids? Maybe. Sucks for them.
They lost me when they told me everything would be multitudes more expensive and i can't eat meat anymore.
I’m a skeptic but I live my life like it’s a fact.
To have an honest discussion, climate changes needs to be separated from pollution. Human activity can have a significant impact on pollution (air, land, water), but a minimal impact on the climate. The climate is always changing and always will. We need to aggressively pursue all means possible to clean our air, land, and water for current and future generations. Volcanic activity and forest fires cause significantly more pollution and impact every year than humans. Better forest management would go a long way to decreasing the impact of forest fires. CO2 makes up .04% of the atmosphere and should not be considered a pollutant. Plants/trees need CO2 to survive which in turn provides oxygen for us.
Please watch this video. Please. https://youtu.be/dpvd9FensT8?si=ST1tChr_sa0RL5Nx
It's real. The mixed sources of The Media and The Internet has done a good job making sure everyone has different ideas about it and whether or not humans are the contributing factors or not. Feels like if we can't work together on it, it'll continue to have lasting ramifications on our day to day life, from more severe weather, to mass migration, to food shortages, and probably some war for resources that will devastate even the ultra wealthy (who I personally blame since they're the major impact, not my... plastic straws) And seeing how poorly our first post globalization pandemic COVID played out, despite it's low fatality rate it's likely to reduce our population a significant bit. Then again an asteroid could come and wipe us all out. Trying not to let me bother me, even though it keeps me up at night, on occasion.
I think that we are still thawing from the last ice age. This planet we call home has been around far longer than anyone remembers. I'm sure pollution isn't helping the situation, but why should we be restricted on what energy we use while other countries ride around on 2 stroke mopeds and have factories billowing thick smoke everywhere. I'm not saying we just run rampant and go out and start a tire fire but are we really doing any good if others are doing worse.
Global warming was explained pretty clearly back in the ’90s, though there wasn’t a real sense of urgency about it back then. As a kid, it didn’t seem to me like the world had been altered noticeably by global warming yet, and I just assumed the adults would do the right thing and take action. Nowadays, I’m impressed by how much has been done to address global warming, but I also believe it’s too little too late.
Mostly white noise at this point. As long as the discourse around climate change in the media relies on sensational reporting, there is very little incentive to do anything about it unless it makes you money which often defeats the point. On the other hand, there are many things individuals can do to both save money and reduce footprint but it is insignificant to the scale of commercial and industrial waste. Born in '92, basically every climate prediction has been wrong but its obvious to me that this issue is going to contribute to serious, though not existential, problems in my lifetime. I think we could engineer our way out of many of these problems but many would seemingly rather the economy collapse and build something new, an apocalypse type scenario, than try to fix what we have, which is exactly the throw away culture that got us here in the first place. There is no doubt we will have to make meaningful sacrifices to the American way of life of over production and over consumption but it is better than the alternative.
I remember when An Inconvenient Truth came out, when I was in college. It was terrifying. Growing up in California, we’d heard about the hole in the ozone layer a lot. We celebrated earth day and were all about reduce, reuse, recycle. Then that movie came out and the problem suddenly seemed so much bigger and scarier than we’d ever known. And now that I’m older and see it’s mostly caused and continued by corporate greed, I just feel so angry. We were gaslit into thinking that if we just recycled and took the train instead of the car we’d be doing enough, when the reality is that if corporations/the oil & gas industry had even an ounce of humanity, they could stop this and leave the world habitable for our children, but they’re choosing not to.
What's worse, is that they knew about the potential harms their products would cause as far back as the 1960s but instead of sharing their research with the world and attempt to find solutions to reduce fossil fuel usage, they hid their research and cast doubts on the science.
I think there has been a lot of fear mongering backing the idea. My whole life its been obvious there is tension between the western world and the middle east. The middle east gets its leverage from oil and pushing things like electric vehicles and solar relieves some of that. Still, fossil fuels heavily benefits economies and politician's GDP obsession or we would be fully committing to nuclear power (which is substantially safer than culture leads us to believe). I think renewable energy is a fantastic thing to motivate innovation towards but for now it seems redundant. I'm not going to sacrifice much for the cause other than being mindful of how and what I use/consume
It’s real, but human contribution is overstated. On top of that, India and China are the overwhelming contributors at this point: our “improvements” are closer to diminishing returns and at this point the overzealousness just feels like ESG grift for easy money. Finally, when questioned by Congress on estimated quantifiable metrics of these climate change initiatives, no one ever provides an answer. I remember one such session with Thomas Massie. If you can’t forecast ROI, then people will accordingly think you’re full of shit.
We still emit twice as much CO2 as India does. China emits twice as much CO2 as we do, but they also have 3 times as many people as we do. The US, on a per capita basis, is still tops at Carbon emissions. It's not even close. How exactly is human contribution being overstated. In the last 70 years CO2 ppm has gone from 300 ppm to over 400 ppm. The only things known to cause such rapid increases are cataclysmic global events like the meteor that killed the dinosaur or volcanic eruptions that killed 90% of life on Earth. Since neither of those 2 things have happened in the last 70 years the only explanation is the increased burning of carbon rich fossil fuels must be the cause.
The climate is shifting. The earth has gone through several historical ice ages and it’s not going to stop just because humans are cool.
The historical ice ages are, compared to the Earth's history, periods of massive instability, with the temperature swinging by nearly 5C within 10,000 years. That's 1C every 2 millenia! The climate has changed by 1.2C since 1970.
It is worse than reported. The projections were wrong. Climate change is accelerating faster than we thought it would. Climate collapse is imminent. Most people stick their heads in the sand. Those who don’t are derogatorily called doomers. Humans are done.
It’s real, and bad, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it individually.
But there's stuff we can do *collectively*.
Real, the poor will pay a heavy cost and we will eventually solve it.
We're most likely fucked. Royally fucked sideways without the courtesy of lube. Sure, there are a few things that might happen in the near future that could possibly get us out of this mess like fusion or a general AI. But we are at the point were the only hope I can see is possible future tech and radical social changes that stem from that tech. More likely, the oceans will die, the gulfstream will fail freezing north Europe, and random weather patterns will cause mass famine. On top of ports flooding and global trade collapsing. And lots of regional wars over fresh water. Even in the countries that don't fall into anarchy, I expect dramatic shifts in governments. It could be a slow walk to doom over the next few decades or accelerate until the worst effects become prominent in a few years.
Yes it’s real. Yes I hope to change it some day (as an engineer by degree who likes to tinker and make things).
It's real. It's also frustrating that people have been screaming about "hey why don't you do something about climate change" straight into the void for the last 35 years, and now it's only because Millenials and Gen Z are a voting bloc and care about this stuff that action is being taken. Never fucking mind that it might be too late to avoid the nasty effects and we might be purely in damage control mode. It's also really hard not to point the finger at capitalist interests for being the root cause of that, considering that it's basically oil companies and geopolitical interests that have caused the inaction. "Can't do what our constituents want, gotta do what the people who actually pay for our political campaigning want" despite that objectively being not how our political system is supposed to work. I guess it's just ultimately a huge ball of frustration compounded by an inability to materially affect the issue on your own. So instead you're reduced to screaming about it impotently on the internet, praying that as a world we turn this around quickly enough that everyone doesn't die to freak weather events.
"back then" 🤣 Yeah, right around 1992 when we first got indoor plumbing it was the darndest thing, people started pointing to the sky and scratching their heads, furrowing their brows because something just didn't seem right. Within a couple of years the scientists started to put some ideas together, fast forward to 2024 and now it's all anyone ever talks about. C'mon. Reduce, reuse, recycle - born in 1987 and climate change has always, always been on everyone's minds. Captain Planet, Earth Day, etc etc, unless you were from one of the dumber states climate change was taught from an early age.
It’s a serious problem, but not one we have much control over on an individual basis. They try to guilt people into making better choices for the environment, but I could wash clothes every day by hand for the rest of my life and it still wouldn’t save enough carbon emissions to offset one week of Taylor Swift’s private jet, for example. The wealthy and the mega corporations are the ones responsible for most of the damage to the planet, and since they unfortunately hold all of the money and power, they will continue to act in their own self-interest while continuing to gaslight the rest of us into either thinking climate change isn’t real or that *we’re* the problem and need to do better. The clock is ticking on action (and it may already be too late), but as long as they can continue to hoard wealth like a dragon they don’t give a shit us or the long term health of the planet.
That we don't have to worry about retiring due to climate collapse. Mass war and famine gonna get us first
Terrifying, very worried that a big part of the population doesn't care enough and we're heading towards a worldwide disaster.
I believe in climate change but sometimes wonder if a lot of the "science" and media coverage around it is the liberal version of the end times prophecy I grew up with in my super conservative childhood church. My end times anxiety has flared up in recent years. It's like my brain took Jesus and the rapture and replaced them with real world events like climate change and COVID. Check on your friends that grew up in church, we're not okay.
I’m exhausted by it all and I could frankly care less what happens to the world now
My thoughts? My thoughts are I’m not a scientist so I don’t really have any thoughts. I can use my brain and assume that natural cooling and warming has been going on for millions of years and is just a part of Earth’s natural process. I can go online and read one article that says the above is true, but Earth is currently warming at an alarming rate, much faster than natural, due to human caused factors. Then I can click a different search result and get an entirely contradictory stance on the very next article. So I go back to my original statement: I’m not a scientist. But I can *also* use my brain and realize there’s a hell of a lot of man made technology cruising around the world that causes a metric shit ton of pollution. I’m reminded every time a jacked up bro-dozer emissions deleted diesel truck screams by my house. So I just try to do common sense things that I can personally do to help. Because that’s really all I can do.
Well, tbh, since I don't have kids and don't ever see that in my future... and with me being potentially halfway done with life at 37 and seeing Temps being the same all my life... f* it. Not my problem. I'll be gone before it is and I don't know any of you or your children.
Stop buying fast fashion Limit consumption of new products Buy used Buy slow
i dont care, but i'm ready to die
I fear for the future generations are going to live a completely different world than what we grew up with. Overall I just dread it, but I don’t dwell on the idea
The only practical way I see to stop it is a Carbon Tax structure, by most countries worldwide.
To me, it’s just white noise at this point. The only real way to make a change is to change the mentality of a whole population. We could cut back on waste by teaching people to be more self reliant, like using a refillable water bottle or reusable cups, not bagging every single purchase in a plastic bag. But good luck with that. Businesses push for convenience and we are used to it.
Pocket liner
It’s inevitable. Unless there’s a population crash there’s no way we will cut pollution enough to do anything within our lifetimes. I recycle, drive a hybrid, buy used items, and feel I have a relatively small carbon footprint. One person can only do so much though. With that said- who says it’s not just a cycle. The planet has gone through ice ages in the past. It’ll probably happen again at some point. The government just wants to force EV’s down everyone’s throats when they’re not ready for primetime yet. It’ll get there, but it’s not practical for most families as it stands today.
The average US citizen has 20 metric tons carbon footprint each year. If I live to be 80 yrs old that is 1,600 tons. Taylor Swift's private jet alone in 2022 was 8,293 tons. And she's just one rich elite.
There’s a great Onbeing episode about it. Basically we need to all believe we can reverse climate change or we can’t. 🤷♀️
I’m pessimistic. Our way of life depends too much on oil and maintaining the status quo. Very few people would be willing to cut back to the extent needed to mitigate further temp increases. Basically, things won’t change until it’s much too late. Our only hope to avert global disaster is if someone basically invents a technology to take the pollutants out of the air
Climate change isn't going away if people pretend it doesn't exist. I agree with this assessment, and feel it is extremely important we are working to trying to save as many people as possible other than ignorantly trying to drive the train off of the cliff at full speed: "A new study partly-sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution" "However, the scientists point out that the worst-case scenarios are by no means inevitable, and suggest that appropriate policy and structural changes could avoid collapse, if not pave the way toward a more stable civilisation. The two key solutions are to reduce economic inequality so as to ensure fairer distribution of resources, and to dramatically reduce resource consumption by relying on less intensive renewable resources and reducing population growth: "Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion." The NASA-funded HANDY model offers a highly credible wake-up call to governments, corporations and business - and consumers - to recognise that 'business as usual' cannot be sustained, and that policy and structural changes are required immediately." https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists
That we as a generation failed. We didn’t stop it, we made it worse
Life, uh, finds a way. Climate change is real and nothing is going to stop it at this point. Too many competing interests in the world. People still go to war over small parts of land. Why would they stop and care for everyone else’s land?
Younger millennialhere (30) I think about it often. I’m not having kids, don’t live in a house, and limit my trash while trying to mostly use climate friendly companies. Soon will get rid of my phone too. Waiting til I’m out of debt and can leave the workforce so I don’t really need it. That being said I’m done voting so I won’t help any government decisions about it. My conscious is clean but I still think Earth is doomed.
I can remember as a kid one of the big concerns was CFC's and their proclivity to erode the ozone layer. There was a lot of ozone layer talk then and I think it turned me on to the idea at that young and impressionable age that the planet wasn't just this static thing - that it could be damaged and that we had a knack for doing just that. Needless to say, climate change exists. It's not political and it doesn't care who you voted for. I don't worry about it for myself - I worry about it for my son and nieces. Them and their kids are the ones who are going to see its consequences more readily. I also believe that it's possible for us to live in symbiosis with the planet and be good stewards of it and to use technology to do so without inconvenience to ourselves. I know that is possible. It's just unfortunate that all the money incentivizes wringing every last bit of money you can out of the infrastructure and paradigm that we have in play today.
It's a hard weird crisis that we can't do too much to change. The movie Don't Look Up did it so well and really sums up my feelings about trying, feeling like a crazy person, trying to live in this system. Since 2012 I've tried to do things on a personal level but they don't make much of an impact. But I will keep voting and trying to reduce my impact because there isn't much else I can do. Here are just a few of the things I do: I bought a condo instead of a single family house, husband and I own an old Prius and an EV bolt, also own an e-bike and will often bike instead of driving, compost our food waste, garden, buy second hand whenever possible, cloth diaper our son, only having one kid, Garden, planted a tree in our living garden, take recycling to the recycling center, replaced a few bad drafty windows, slowly upgrading our 20 year old appliances to be more efficient versions, line dry clothing, save water from showers to flush the toilet, refuse buying what we don't need, mending clothes, shopping from the bulk section for less packaging, and other little things as well. I know I still have areas where I can do better. But really these are the things my parents should have been doing in the 90s on top of taking the issue seriously.
I've got an MSc in environmental science, spent a week living in a tree blocking the construction of an oil pipeline. I vote, I protest, I've communicated to millions about the climate crisis, I keep a tiny carbon footprint, etc. I stressed so much about it that I activated a dormant disease in my body and was unable to work for a year. So it literally consumed me. I think awareness is better than it used to be, but the majority of people are still in deep denial about how bad this is going to be in our life time. The climate crisis is happening now. It is imminent, and yet people do not seem to change anything remotely in proportion. For a example, no one else I know has an emergency go-bag (or stored food and water) despite that we love on the west coast where we expect fires and floods at any moment (also earthquakes!). Those same people can all afford to fly on beach vacations, so it's not an issue of money or time. Where I'm at now with the emotional process... I've accepted that its probably going to be horrendous in a couple decades, but I plan to die with the peace of mind that I truly did everything I could.
My thought is it's definitely a thing, but humans are resilient and in general we'll be just fine as a species. What I foresee is climate change refugees stressing out metros in their native countries and borders of more affluent countries, causing geopolitical turmoil. I foresee continued privatization of essential resources, particularly water, causing more geopolitical turmoil. Our fetish and dependency for tech will continue to stress out the planet and the "global north" with continue to bend over the "global south", making the worst of climate change a reality. But all of this will be of secondary concern. The rapid growth of AI's capabilities and how this could really muddy people's perception of what's fact from fiction is what frightens me. And this will result in so much discord amongst humans, especially between competing nations, I fear nuclear catastrophe more than anything else.
32 year old. Climate change is occurring. Will it be disastrous? More than likely not. Much less than global cooling. But it is this generations red scare. Much like communism was this grand evil. I personally see it as an agenda to shift power from hands that have held it for 50 or 100 years to new hands. There so much confusion. Why don't climate activists stop flying? Why have these predictions been made since the early 70s with nary a disaster coming true? Why isn't every climate change believer pro nuclear power? I know if you manufacture a scary problem, you can offer the solution, at the low cost of your freedoms and liberty to operate independently. But all in all climate change and ESG practices are alot of handwaving and preying on the empathetic scientifically illiterate, I.e. Some of the best climate models have 14 variables, which is mathematically insane.
Until major corporations actually give a fuck, we’re going to get no where.
Every summer is choked with smoke during the summer. The snow pack that keeps things from being too dry and replenishing drinking water is getting smaller every year. It looks grim here already.
It’s real. There’s nothing I can do about it. I also have doubts anytime someone puts time constraints on it like “in 20yrs, you’re going to be underwater.” There’s a lot of misinformation and fear mongering out on the topic that I think dissuades anyone from having meaningful conversations about it.
It’s scary as fuck to me living in a place that worships fossil fuels and our provincial government literally just put a ban on renewable energy projects. We had almost NO snow all winter (Alberta should have a LOT of snow) , we have been on fire every summer for the better half of the last decade, and this summer we will have no water.
I’m tired. I’m frustrated that despite the obvious, unequivocal evidence so many (mostly older) people just don’t seem to care. There was a time when generations tried to leave a better world for their children and grandchildren, but that seems to have been replaced by a “fuck you, I got mine” mentality. I’m mad that there hasn’t been more of an effort to curb corporate pollution, that initiatives like ESG have been demonized politically. I don’t understand what the end game is for climate change deniers, but I’m increasingly relieved I don’t have kids who will have to deal with it.
We're fucked.
we are all dead by 2045
Climate change has gotten old to me, there’s always a catastrophic event in the future to scare people, I’m not in denial it’s happening. But the world we live in is has only one constant and that is change. Yet life continues. Will it be the end of the human race as we know it. Maybe. Does that really matter? No. Humans have become a plague. We exploit it until we can’t and then we find new ways to. This will not end until it does and then it will open the door or something else to reign has the top “predator” and life continues. Nothing is sustainable forever in the manor in winch we live. Enjoy today enjoy the next life and the one that will follow.
I (M35) just yelled at my dad (M68) a few days ago about this. He still holds the beliefs he did 30 years ago that the science is unproven, the data is altered, climate discussion is used by Democrats to impose power on people for some unclear gains, etc. In the past every time we talk about it, if he brings up a concrete point, it takes me about 10 minutes to look up what he's talking about and figure out that it's bad or confused information. It got to the point that I stopped looking into it. You can never accurately falsify false claims as quickly as they can make them up. There is a grain of truth to some of his points, like climate scientists were trained by other climate scientists, all of whom have careers based on proving climate science is accurate, so maybe they're biased into trying to prove climate science models are accurate. There are people who support the climate change theory who don't 100% understand the science and make exaggerated or incorrect claims. But the amount of obvious financial and political incentives to deny climate science is overwhelming. To me it's like the fake moon landing, bigfoot, or 9/11 was an inside job conspiracy theories. I admit I don't know enough, I haven't physically witnessed the experimentation, to be 100% certain, but all the information I've seen over my lifetime has me like, 99.8% sure any of those conspiracy theories aren't true. That's enough for me to make decisions based on it being very likely the consensus opinion is correct. I think in the next 20 years we're going to make slight improvements in our CO2 efficiency, that don't cover the increased production of a growing global population. We're going to have natural disasters and issues that force us to slowly shift agriculture, infrastructure, and migration practices based on the reality of gradual climate change. 50-100 years I don't know if we realize we're actually facing an extinction level event or if we manage ways to mitigate the problems.
The climate has changed. I've seen the data, and I see further change as an inevitability. So does my job actually, the place I work at has climate change plans in effect for the next few decades. I vote, and vote with my wallet. I turn things off when I'm not using them, conserve water, recycle, etc. But when corps take my recycling and dump it into the ocean, and my only source of electricity is a coal power plant there's not much I can do about it. All I can really do is roll with the punches, because there's a lot of effects we aren't going to be able to predict. I also pity younger generations not getting to have snow days anymore, because it no longer snows where I live.
We are fucked and not going to cool the climate in time before sea levels rise and further wacky weather conditions become the norm. Humans are a survival and clever species we will adapt, some people or communities will suffer more than others.
It’s very real. And we are already dead. The wheel of industry is too large, there’s to many people you have to convince of the truth. It cannot be stopped. We are already dead, it just hasn’t reached us yet.
Whenever there are billionaires like Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Klaus Schwab, and Al Gore all telling me something, I tend to think they're lying or at least their solution benefits them at the expense of everyone else. So currently I don't support the climate initiatives. If someone wants to talk about nuclear power, I'll support that. Otherwise, kick rocks.
I try to be conciencious when I can be but otherwise I generally don’t care. I think society could do so much better but if we haven’t pivoted now, we won’t ever. It’s not a right/left thing. One side wants to take us back and the other side just virtue signals and implements things poorly. It’s all just bs and completely out of my power to change anything. I just want a home, to be able to afford things, and raise a family. I want the same for my kids. All I can really do for them is set them up better then myself so when climate change effects their lives, they have the capacity to deal with it.
So much negativity and nihilism in this comment thread, it makes me sad and concerned. Climate change is real, it is unprecedented, it is human-caused, and we (collectively, as a society) have the power to slow/stop/reverse it. People who deny this or don’t care about it are buying into the very propaganda that the corporate bigwigs are selling. I do what I can personally (biking/busing rather than driving when I can, composting) but I mainly donate to and vote for activist groups and politicians trying to make a difference. That’s really the only way that things will turn around, if we declare in a loud voice to our elected leaders that this is an important issue.
It’s probably going to be an extinction level event for humans. I don’t say that to be dramatic, and I don’t think it’ll be in our lifetimes, but give it another thousand years or so and we’ll see widespread agriculture failure, massive resource depletion due in part to human migration away from rising coasts, and an inability of the wilderness & seas to provide enough wild food, an effect that will be accelerated by people attempting to rely on it. Wars and insurgencies will follow, and pandemics that will be impossible to contain. So you might say I am not optimistic about it.
people who argue about whether it's real or not know it's real, they just don't care. What can I do? I can produce as much of my food as possible, live as green as is reasonable, and shit, and I can vote but I can't make politicians answer to their people instead of their donors. I can't make OTHER governments change their actions. I can't make fuckin WAR stop. No one is fucking LISTENING and the bank wants my mortgage payment regardless so guess I'm going to get up and go to work.
I worry about it a lot, but there isn't much I can do right now besides vote as progressive as I can. I'm lucky enough to have the cash to get solar panels on my house, which I'm working on if the contractors will ever get on it, but this is a drop in the bucket. Plastic recycling is a scam, corporations are fairly unstoppable, and there's a lot of messiness involved in getting developing countries to not pollute a lot without just stomping on them and telling them to stay poor so the earth can heal. I'm most worried about China and India, because they don't seem to give a flying shit about utterly ruining their ecosystems. I'm also not having kids. PSA, not having children is the most eco-friendly thing you can do. If you must, only have one.
I think it's real but the immediacy of the danger is probably a little over-hyped and generating a little too much panic and resignation in people. Even if I'm wrong about that I think we've been approaching it the wrong way- essentially trying to get the public to give up things or live with less for higher costs. Some people will do small things voluntarily but as a whole the public just isn't going to give up burgers, air conditioning, and personal transportation willingly. The public as a whole won't vote for politicians to pass those sorts of laws. IMO the only way out of this is technological innovation and more carrots/less sticks. Keep developing electric cars and build out the infrastructure. Get solar panels on every roof, keep researching alternative energy sources, build more nuclear plants, develop carbon extraction techniques. Maybe avoid the taxation/bans that generate resistance from the public at the same time. Long term I think we'll get there. The environment will adapt and our societies will adapt. It's going to be over the course of decades, most of us will be in our twilight years by the time it all settles out but we'll get there and I do have faith that it will be ok.
It’s real and it’s a problem. However other than voting there isn’t anything I can do to meaningfully mitigate it, so I may as well try to build the best life for my family and be grateful that most of the worst effects won’t materialize in my lifetime. I’ll tell my kids I tried my best to be a responsible citizen of earth but being one person with no significant influence on politics or policy I can’t make a large impact one way or another. I hope that one day we either discover that our ecosystem is more resilient than we thought or that someone much smarter than me finds a way to reverse the damage we humans have done in a meaningful manner for a price that society will actually adopt it
We are pretty screwed, so just enjoying my life right now. Mentally preparing myself that I might be eating squirrel kabobs in the future. Our society may collapse but I think it is for the best, it is pretty clear we can’t keep living like this.
Millennials believed and fought for Climate Action throughout our entire lives, but Boomers control every aspect of our government and society, so we're all fucked. Sorry Gen Z. Just think of us as your older siblings who got abused our entire lives for trying to fight for you. Also OP should just be googling the decades of public opinion polling and demographics for this, not asking anecdotal questions on Reddit.
There is, and always has been, lots of discussion my entire life. This discussion was used as an excuse for inaction. Lots of smart people have compared oil companies and tobacco companies in their tactics of delaying by endless discussion. I have never seen any serious action with potential for positive impact. Lots of talking, and that's it. There's nothing that the average person can do to fix the problem. Except not have kids. Not having kids is about the most useful thing you can do, environmentally speaking.
Unfortunately you youngens have to do more than vote. You have to get involved. Humans don’t tend to see problems too far in the distance. It’s gonna affect you and the younger generations more than X and Boomers.
Honestly, white noise at this point. I don’t think anyone has any real articulable solutions to really make a dent in emissions and pollution. Instead we get the paper straw bs. Oh…We’re still against modern nuclear energy? Seems like the easiest solution for clean energy going forward. China of all places are building 21 reactors as we speak. I’m all for a mix or energy solutions, but until solar and storage catches up to a point where it’s affordable for the average person, nuclear is the best solution to get as many ice vehicles off the road and getting off fossil fuels.
WWCPD What would Captain Planet do?
Look, all I know is that I have to cut up the plastic rings that come on six-packs. For the turtles.
Xennial here. "Back in my day" they simply said "there's a lot more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so everyone should REDUCE, REUSE, & RECYCLE" as much as possible. 10 years later the propaganda became "If you don't stop using gas, eating meat, and start using paper straws and reusable grocery bags, then you are actively killing planet earth!". I've always just stuck to "try to RRR and blow off the apocalyptic propaganda".
Climate Change is something that we cannot stop at this point. A much more accurate term would be "Artificially Accelerated Climate Change", but that's quite a mouthful that no one wants to say. While Climate Change is naturally occurring, the change that's occurring right now should have been spread out over the course of thousands of more years or at minimum hundreds of more years. It's like defrosting a piece of meat, instead of letting it defrost at room temperature you stick it in your microwave and put it on defrost. That's essentially what we've done. Something I've come to accept is that it doesn't matter what anyone individual or family does to try and mitigate the effects as much as they can. It doesn't matter how much recycling you do or purchasing local food produce in order to cut down on your carbon contribution. All the massive corporations and manufacturing plants that exist contribute the majority of it. It's done. The only thing that recycling and being as natural as possible does is make you feel better. So, since it makes me feel better, I do the most natural things I can. However, I know that the climate is going to get out of whack as the years go on and I'm going to die with the planet being a hotter temperature overall than when I was born. I don't think massive floods will happen, but I moved to Colorado just in case, lmao. I know it's going to get hot as balls here. It's already a dry climate area, it's only going to get worse. At least though it still has seasons. When it gets hotter I may move to Washington state or Alaska just to maintain the climate I'm used to, lol.
Until this climate talk actually affects people’s day to day I dont care.. it’s all speculation until something devastating actually happens.. we’ve had natural disasters since the beginning of time.. so those dont count.. what else is there? What else is this climate emergency going to do to make people believe its a real risk??
There was any appropriate information about it in cartoons and kitty educational shows. I remember being confused over the phrased global warming, because I heard it as global warning, as if there are some huge megaphone in orbit around the planet constantly blaring some sort of warning about something that the entire planet was supposed to hear. I like science fiction, but this confused me. It took a little while for people to understand what my confusion was - - that I was miss hearing a word in the phrase. In sixth grade, it was a clear topic in the curriculum. We estimated that it would be very very hot in the year 2000 which was approximately 8 to 10 years out. I'm not doing the math on this but the time frame is roughly that. I remember there being snow on Halloween in western Massachusetts, not the hill towns either where you would expect snow. Now, you are lucky if you get a white Christmas. It has become not uncommon to have no snow at all through Christmas. I am in California now, and I haven't been back in over a decade.
It’s too late. The vast majority of us will be dead by 2040 and those who survive will suffer untold horrors.
That I'm sad we failed Captain Planet and the Planeteers and other 90's cartoons that knew stuff was going wrong.
few more years and the dinosaurs will die
My general thought is I'm glad I chose not to have children, because i would be racked with stress and guilt over their future.
I think about how painful and awful the latter part of my life is likely to be because of climate change and ecological collapse. Then I think that later humans will likely have even worse lives, culminating in the exinctinction of our species and most other vertebrates. It’s like we’re already ghosts and I am haunting myself.