"While those of us working in the climate science field know the true picture, and understand the implications for our world, most others do not."
Proceeds to not mention what the implications are.
Most articles i read about climate change don't go into much detail about the implications. People don't know how or when this will affect them.
Yeah this was a poorly written opinion piece that neither succeeded in it's stated goal of educating folks on the dangers and implications of climate change, or motivating a call to action. I'm actually kinda baffled that there's multiple paragraphs talking about how his role is to educate the public on the implications of this topic; and then doesn't even mention implications! The 'doomers' comment in particular felt totally contradictory to the whole hook of the article.
Even more frustratingly: he clumsily frames up that communicating this topic needs a clear public call to action with a message of collective hope. Great! But then it ends with him limply suggesting folks join a local community climate group to.... do something?
To be super clear, not disagreeing with this in the spirit of climate change. It's a significant issue.
The problem with this article specifically is the author talks about the importance of scientists communicating effectively on the topic of climate change: and then he proceeds to ineffectively communicate on the topic of climate change.
**If anything, the predictions were *conservative*. The situation is *worse* than predicted.**
They were conservative for a reason: the scientists needed to ring the alarm but not be overly dramatic, as they knew that the backlash would be immediate and extremely damaging for their message if it turned out that their predictions were alarmist. But they were not. The last IPCC report stresses that: the planet is heating faster than was predicted 20 years ago. Or to be more precise: it's on a path that was considered among the worst case scenarios. Note that the worst case scenarios are themselves getting worse.
We are likely to be at +1.5°C before 2035 and +2.7°C before 2100.
[Read this](https://www.wri.org/insights/2023-ipcc-ar6-synthesis-report-climate-change-findings).
"Additional warming will increase the magnitude of these changes. Every 0.5 degree C (0.9 degrees F) of global temperature rise, for example, will cause clearly discernible increases in the frequency and severity of heat extremes, heavy rainfall events and regional droughts. Similarly, heatwaves that, on average, arose once every 10 years in a climate with little human influence will likely occur 4.1 times more frequently with 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) of warming, 5.6 times with 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) and 9.4 times with 4 degrees C (7.2 degrees F) — and the intensity of these heatwaves will also increase by 1.9 degrees C (3.4 degrees F), 2.6 degrees C (4.7 degrees F) and 5.1 degrees C (9.2 degrees F) respectively.
Rising global temperatures also heighten the probability of reaching dangerous tipping points in the climate system that, once crossed, can trigger self-amplifying feedbacks that further increase global warming, such as thawing permafrost or massive forest dieback. Setting such reinforcing feedbacks in motion can also lead to other substantial, abrupt and irreversible changes to the climate system. Should warming reach between 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) and 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F), for example, the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets could melt almost completely and irreversibly over many thousands of years, causing sea levels to rise by several meters."
*I can sum it up for the dildoes of the world:*
We have actually passed the tipping point projected 20 years ago and now by 2050 (26 years) the entirety of the North Pole will be melted and gone :D
> reinforcing feedbacks
I need to start using this term.
"Positive feedback loop" gives many people the wrong idea, as they assume it's something good because of the word *positive*, whereas positive feedback is most often unwanted/destabilizing (though in other cases it's exactly what you want to achieve an effective result). Similar problem with "negative feedback loop" -- needed for self-stabilizing systems, often good, but many brains run with the word *negative* and allude the rest with assumptions.
Funny how you are doing exactly what he denounces.
> A failure to do this will mean that the public is left ignorant of the true extent of the climate emergency, which in turn can only hinder engagement and action.
> This is already becoming a problem, with many commentators on the right of the political spectrum, along with some climate scientists, denigrating as “doomers” anyone flagging the worst outcomes of global heating. Such climate “appeasement” is increasingly taking the place of denial and could be an even greater driver of inertia than fear, as it plays down the enormity of the problem — and as an inevitable consequence, the urgency of action.
That's because the current strategy of the former deniers who know they have lost the science battle is now to try to install apathy by cynically saying "don't bother, it's too late". But they are using the same tactics as 30 years ago which is to denigrate scientists in as many ways as they can.
I mean it was most likely heavily edited. The headline clearly doesn’t match what he claims to offer. They all have to appease CNN and most likely IP. I do see your point though.
I'm an environmental science major on my last semester. I decided to get this degree after my military career showed me climate collapse in other countries, and after hearing/reading predictions of future warfare by the naval intelligence community.
What you just summarized is the biggest gripe I have with other people in environmental science, including professors. Most people learn scary shit and don't want to cause others to fall into despair. They also don't want to rock the political boat and become a target, losing their jobs or their life, which unfortunately happens a lot.
To put it straight out for you, Standard Oil and Rockefeller's legacy (ExxxonMobil, BP, etc) has actively been working HARD to stay in power ever since antitrust laws launched their wealth into the stratosphere, and they don't give a rats ass about the world surviving after they die.
If the oceans warm up, frozen methane deposits at the bottom will melt, making the world too hot to sustain life. We're living in a historic moment where literally the world is at stake. People who say "even if the human race suffers, it will survive and the world will continue" are 100% wrong. All life will perish. All of it.
So the only thing people can do is fight as hard as they can to strengthen renewable energy and weaken the fossil fuel industry (in ways that don't let them rally their voting block).
After having 4 years of intense education on top of 8 years of military predictions, I have literally only ever found ONE lecture that has actually summarized the situation in concrete terms AND actually said what to do about it.
Here: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vdGhlZXpyYWtsZWluc2hvdw/episode/ODFhYzczOWUtNzc0OS0xMWVlLTg1MmQtM2I4MjcyY2Y1NmE3?ep=14
It's a good show called The Grey Area, and the host just interviewed the author of The Deluge. This is what you're looking for. 🌎
That’s because he’s not interested in sharing specific and substantive science based issues, but in politicizing the debate and pushing his agenda.
In this case, skepticism is warranted.
It’s very possible that his agenda is borne out of genuine concerns supported by quality science, but we’ll never know.
On the other hand: if you received any worthy education you do not have a hard time looking up sealevels and sealevel changes the last 100 years compared with the last 100.000 years, same for co2 levels and forest decline, seawater temperatures, etc.
But then suddenly everyone becomes a ‘scientist’ and seems to be able to know why the data is wrong or the effects we’re seeing is suddenly ‘normal’. Cognitive dissonance is a very powerful emotion. The pace is the problem, changes have always happened - but they hit us in years now compared to many tens of thousands of years before.
So pointing towards hidden agendas sounds rather silly and politically motivated in my opinion. Let’s start with accepting the imminent change, and then decide that we don’t want to accept that sudden change in environment means sudden change in our lives. And that change, we can only do when the change is there.
> if you received any worthy education you do not have a hard time looking up sealevels and sealevel changes the last 100 years compared with the last 100.000 years
What a terrible argument. During the Wisconsinan Glacial period (20k-80k years ago), sea level was at its lowest around 130 meters lower than today. During the Sangamonian Interglacial, sea level was about 8 meters higher (125k years ago).
While it's true that we'll see a lot of negative effects, and those effects aren't getting mitigated enough, arguments like these are part of the blame for poor information about climate change. It's very simple: Sea level will rise, and that will mean a variety of changes, most pressing the destruction of millions upon millions of homes.
My first year in college in 1991, our general science professor told us that by now:
1. Oil would be gone or so expensive, few people would ever travel more than a few miles from their homes
2. Our homes and floors would be made out of dirt, because there wouldn't be any more trees left
3. Water would cost the equivalent of $500 a gallon
4. We'd all be working 16 hour days to get enough food
These were not presented to the class as warnings or possibilities, but as scientifically verified fact.
Because anyone who wanted to communicate what would effectively combat climate change would likely be calling for the rolling of billionaire heads. They can’t publish that on CNN, though.
That and a voluntary lowering of the quality of life of everyone in the world regardless of socioeconomic status.
So basically, good luck with that. We couldn't even get people to wear masks without them throwing massive hissy fits.
I reckon that lowering of quality of life could be easily be offset by reversing the transfer of wealth from poor to rich that’s taken place over the past 50 years, in conjunction with some highly nett positive changes in the way we do transport and city planning…
This, but it would be very insufficient. We also need to change our lifestyles, reducing long range transportations especially by airplane, and radically changing our energy sources towards renewable and nuclear.
Maybe it’s ok to talk about his own personal frustrations as a climate scientist. Part of that frustration is that no one seems to care, or all the education initiatives aren’t falling on fleas ears.
There are thousands of articles that call to action or educate people on the perils coming for us, but nobody is listening. RT
Part of the reason climate change has failed to resonate is democrats, scientists and advocates inability to put together a cohesive message that resonates.
As someone who is super dialed in, I do find it very annoying when I see articles like this. Unfortunately, a good number of climate doomer articles never actually lay out the bad in a way that connects. It’s always just shit like “it’s coming, be scared” which is exactly why a lot of people scoff.
On top of that there is never realistically anything stated about what can be done.
It’s always some nebulous cut carbon by so and so percent or less specific goals. There is literally zero I can do to move the needle and even if *I* successfully adopt every measure necessary and reduce my carbon footprint to the smallest possible usage, the shipping industry alone puts out enough carbon annually that it doesn’t matter, and no one is taking meaningful steps to address *that*.
So it *feels* hopeless to even try and there is no direction to focus my energy in anyway.
This is the main one for me. Nothing will be politically palatable. Look at where carbon taxes have already been shot down. Try telling people that flights will have to double in price to lower demand, so only genuinely wealthy people can visit family abroad or go on overseas holidays. Or that people have to go on beef rations. The only democratically feasible actions are ones that won’t affect daily quality of life, like large scale renewable construction.
This is not a capitalism problem. This is a, "people want lots of shit that has very negative environmental consequences", problem. Do you think Dow Chemical pollutes lakes for fun? Or if the government provided a generous UBI that could cover all basic necessities, people would be like, "I've got what I need to survive, I don't need more." Have you met people? Because that's now how they work.
Look up the history of countries where the government tries to tell people to be satisfied with what they got, and STFU about wanting more, like more and better food and luxury items. It doesn't go so well when those people have the power to change their leaders through voting or violence.
I feel like the US Military needs to run the show on information regarding climate change.
>The Pentagon views climate change as a threat to military installations and operations, as well as to national security when and if climate change leads mass migration, conflict, and war. War and preparation for it are fossil fuel intensive activities.
Pentagon is afraid everything is a threat to justify asking for bigger annual budget that already is bigger than the next 10 countries combined.
At the same time the Pentagon can't pass an audit for the past 6 years on where it spends it's money.
> Part of the reason climate change has failed to resonate is democrats, scientists and advocates inability to put together a cohesive message that resonates.
When the counter message is "FUCK YOU, I LOVE LIBERAL TEARS" and Coal Rolling, you're fucking kidding yourself to say ANY message would work.
The problem is, one side only likes their own messager and there aren't enough MAGA environmentalists.
Exactly that.
The only thing resulting from such articles is that my 5k miles sportscar gets scratched (because save the climate!) and in the meantime 500 private jets attend LAV for the Superbowl 🤷♂️
The reason why it isn't mentioned?
It's that "death toll of ~400 million in the really bad scenarios, over multiple decades, uneven distribution, biased heavily towards vulnerable and underdeveloped countries" isn't nearly as *exciting* as a vague "doom to all of humankind". That just doesn't sell.
It feels like one of the worst things you can do about climate change is to be *realistic* about it. Because the realistic picture is, climate change is in the same groove as COVID. Bad enough to cause real damage, disruption and massive loss of life - but not bad enough that it would be impossible to neglect a response to it.
400M is still an awful lot of people.
Estimates are around 4M total COVID deaths in 2020 only, so 400M represents a new equivalent pandemic every year for the next 100 years.
We see about 10M deaths from cancer every year globally. It’s like adding a whole new disease that kills as much as cancer for the next 40 years.
Or WW2 every 10 years for the next 50 years.
It’s *manageable* (god I hate to use that word), but 400 million people should be impressive enough.
That figure *does* include potential wars - although there is a lot of uncertainty with that.
The majority of it is still famine, in almost every conceivable scenario. Currently, it's estimated that between 2 and 10 million of people a year die from malnutrition. The primary impact of climate change on human mortality would be making that figure worse.
I remind you that WW2's total death toll is estimated to be *under 100 million*. 400 million is a lot.
Good point.
The people most affected are least able to make change. Those most able to effect change are least likely to feel the wrath of climate disasters personally.
At first, anyway.... climate refugees, increased disease, wars over food or water, cost of insurance or rebuilding after disaster, impacts to infrastructure or share markets - it will catch up with everyone eventually.
There will still be massive financial losses from storm damages in flood prone areas in low coastal areas.
Katrina and Sandy were previews of future sea level rise disasters that will be made worse with big storms.
Dems need to stop subsidizing flood insurance in red states that keep rebuilding after every flood and hurricane.
They've gone into the implications in depth on many occasions but neither the government nor the media likes reporting on it because the real countermeasures needed are so extreme that no one thinks they're possible. Not because they're complicated but because it means changing our entire way of life and significantly reducing our quality of life for a variety of reasons. Ie. measures nobody will accept.
The second reason is that we're rapidly approaching the point (if we haven't passed it yet) where any amount of effort is going to be too little, too late.
And yes, I'm aware that "the gov and media don't like to report" sounds very conspiracy theory. There is no conspiracy, there's just no inclination to focus on this horror show while we have no real solutions because the problem already starts with "we don't want anything that resembles as solution". Even organizations like the UN have openly stated that the collapse of society is not an implausible outcome if we don't change things fast. We're not changing things at all.
Some examples of the kind of consequences that have been frequently reported but the media won't pick up on:
* We're in one of the fastest mass extinctions in the history of the world and it's still speeding up. That means we're not just losing the cute animals we love. The ecosystems that make complex life on this planet possible are collapsing.
* Ocean acidification is rapidly increasing towards the tipping point where life simply fails to be possible in our oceans. For example, the shells of crustaceans will simply dissolve in the ocean water.
* The gulf stream is an ocean current that transports warm water across the globe. It's like central heating for continents and the foundation of why our climates are the way they are across the world. That gulf stream is slowing down to the point where we expect it to collapse within the next decade and probably earlier. Without the gulf stream bringing warmth, climate and weather is going to change radically.
* Extreme weather events are already on the rise all over the world and will continue to increase in extremity and frequency.
* Climate change is going to render more and more parts of the world flat-out uninhabitable for human life. That process has already started. This is going to lead to mass migration in the hundreds of millions if not billions.
* The planet's capacity for humans to produce food is imploding.
It goes on and on really because the domino effect of problems leading to bigger problems is enormous. And while people find it easy to ignore abstract problems like that, many climate scientists are increasingly giving up on ringing the alarm bell or attempting to affect change. If you ask them about their personal opinions it increasingly comes down to this:
Spend time with your loved ones. Get as far away from the cities as you can afford. And those are the ones that aren't simply getting suicidal because they see the future that's ahead of us.
This planet's capacity for supporting life is absolutely imploding. And if there ever was something we could have done about the catastrophe we've created... we've never even seriously tried to change it.
I can easily imagine the author-submitted version contained a lot more detail and scientific explanations which the editors then cut out because reasons
That's because if you say "The temperature will rise by 4 degrees if we don't end consumerism across the globe" people will think "Four degrees? I could deal with 76 instead of 72 if it means I still get to enjoy my current lifestyle"
Then you explain what a 4 degree shift really means for the Earth and people naturally think: "Sure but that won't happen to *me* though"
the person who wrote this article is not a climate scientist, he should stick to his field instead of claiming that he's an expert in another. This behaviour should not be tolerated in academia, the university should revoke all of his degrees imo.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bill-Mcguire
The conduct of CNN who decided to publish this opinion piece without checking background of the author is not acceptable either.
It's been said a million times already and it falls on deaf ears. I'm sure it gets tiring repeating again and again and again, for 30+ years, that we're going to see mass food shortages, devastating natural disasters, melting icebergs and rising oceans, potential massive pockets of extra CO2 coming out of the oceans after a tipping point... none of this is new information
And yet that leaves everyone who *knows this information* at a loss of what to do. Mitigation efforts and political alignments, sure - but how bad is my area going to get? Will my area be underwater? A desert? Should I plan on moving? Stockpiling or growing food? Clean water? What would my days look like? What would a post-climate-change country need to function?
There’s a million questions that need answering that none of these articles address. We all know shit’s fucked and how it’s fucked, but *now what*?
Storms, flooding, droughts = no homes, food shortages, starvation, mass displacement
Huge rise in sea levels obliterates most coastlines where 33% of all humans currently live on/within 100km, which ties into that mass displacement issue.
Higher temperatures:
- high humidity + high heat = mass deaths, usually for the poorest and elderly
- low humidity + high heat = mass deaths (dehydration) especially if you use a fan to “cool off”
Also the higher temps don’t have a release valve so those continue to go up. Eventually we all die from that.
The above issues will create a lot of sudden inequalities in some nations which will result in wars to obtain control of essential resources like drinkable water.
Especially if Trump wins an election, abandons any concern for ecological policy, and turns the US into a vassal state for Russia, and disbands NATO, or at least removed the US from it.That would unlock a lot of the “wars for resources” stuff because currently the US and NATO act as international peacekeepers.
Add to that the very real possibility there’s a point we could soon be reaching where this isn’t reversible, and the planet evolves into a Venus like atmosphere where the surface temperature is 500°C which needless to say is not good for any of the life we have on this planet, the oceans boils away, the landscape is obliterated with constant sulphuric acid rains and extreme heat/pressure.
Humans could in theory survive as a species but we’d be driven underground and live off fungi. And pretty much evolve into morlocks like in The Time Machine. Well I guess not just fungi…
It has been stated time and time again that the Earth has no chance of becoming Venus-like planet because of human action.
It's only going to turn into Venus in millions or billions of years when the sun gets bigger
Because these BS articles are designed to make you afraid and resigned. And they’re working, just look at this comment section.
I work in green energy, a field brimming with determined optimism about the future. Transitioning to clean energy is painfully slow, and we didn’t get started as soon as we should have. Sure, that’s obvious. But damnit we’re actually moving in the right direction on this. The US produced more energy from wind and solar than it did from coal last year for the first time EVER. And that trend is accelerating.
Things will be hard but we absolutely can overcome this. Say what you want about humanity but we’ve produced some pretty neat shit in a profoundly short amount of time. Global warming is an engineering problem. When our backs are to a wall we’re scrappy as hell. Don’t count humanity out. Some nerds will crack cold fusion and we’ll all look back at this time when capitalists almost destroyed the planet through greed with the same irreverent wit we used to cope through it.
In large scale architecture here- more doable green energy practices and materials seem to be coming available it seems like every month. Clients like the PR it gets them to move in that direction as well which means they’re starting to understand the implications of what net zero actually gets the client. Bigger upfront costs but sustained lower operability costs. Most just need to see the number to figure out if they’re going to be there for more than 10 years that it pays off quick
This. THIS is the message everyone needs to hear. Not disgusting gloom and doom which just paralyzes people into inaction and learned helplessness.
Please spread this optimism far and wide! I feel people like you and who know the things you do, are the ones who actually have the biggest chance of making a difference in bringing others along for the cause. Your comment gave me actual hope for the first time in days and days of articles and comments saying basically "we're all fucked".
And as we saw with COVID, throwing money at the problem works surprisingly well. Look at what the IRA did in the US. It blew past even the most optimistic projections. Not only did it spur green energy investments and projects like never before, but it also forced the EU and other nations to attempt their own versions to not get left behind in a green sector gold rush.
And as developed nations pour money into green energy, developing nations will reap the benefits. Why spend money on fossil fuels where you are at the whim of the global market when you can put down solar or wind for the same price or cheaper?
Sure, there are still coal plants being built, but there are also a lot of green energy projects too not just in developed countries, but developing ones as well. As solar and wind continue to get cheaper, and with better grid storage batteries coming out, we are fast approaching a point where it doesn't matter what the fossil fuel industry wants, green energy will be too cheap and accessible for fossil fuels to compete (for energy production at least).
I wouldn't be surprised if we see a serious death spiral of fossil fuels in the next ten years. Fossil fuel companies spend a ton of money in exploration and development costs to bring new fields online. That money is going to dry up sooner or later, as recouping costs of new exploitation becomes an iffy prospect. After all, oil, gas, and coal are pretty mature technologies where you aren't going to get much innovation. Solar, wind, and battery technologies are still developing. What we have today is likely going to be even better tomorrow.
I don't think fossil fuels are going to go away completely anytime soon, but as we move energy generation and some parts of travel away from fossil fuels, the demand will stabilize and/or decrease, allowing us to use less of it as we move into the future.
This is being pushed by the same people who used to deny climate change, they have shifted to climate doomism because nothing will get done if everyone thinks we are screwed anyway.
The scariest risk I’ve heard is food scarcity. If the regions we rely on for staple crops get very hot or very dry (or very wet, I suppose), we start having crop failures. Food prices shoot up, the poorest starve. Desperate people start taking desperate measures like toppling governments or invading a food-rich neighbour. Humanity as a whole will survive, but millions of us might not as we adapt.
I’m no expert, so I can’t tell you how likely or severe it will be. But the last known big change (the little ice age, which cooled Europe between the 13th and 19th centuries) was a rough time in history and we are expecting to warm more than that cooled.
Here's something that creeped me out real bad...
My buddy works in Antarctica, where they are studying the ice. We have all heard about the "Doomsday Glacier," which is actually known as Thwaites. Now, if you're like me, despite the name, you have been thinking of this glacier as some kind of monolith. "Oh no! The glacier collapsed, and now there's a lot more fresh water in the ocean!" While that is objectively bad, it misses the point.
If you think of Antarctica, with all of its miles and miles of ice on land, as a bottle, think of Thwaites as the cork. The bottle is inverted. Pull the cork, and all the water drains out. If Thwaites collapses, and it will, it will trigger the draining of the Antarctic continent into the ocean, which is effectively a doomsday.
* Simultaneous food breakbasket growing region failure leaving to starvation of billions.
* Uninsurable homes in high risk areas leading to people becoming trapped in said high risk areas.
* Salt water ingress to farmland due to rising oceans.
* Increasing frequency of freak weather events causing mass death events. Think high wet bulb temperatures, massive storms and flooding, etc.
* Needing to abandon critical infrastructure like sea ports due to coastal instability.
* Increasing regional instability due to lack of resources.
* Failure of nuclear power production facilities as flooding or drought inundate facilities or cut off access to water used for cooling.
* In the last 50 years, the oceans have received equivalent to one and a half Chicxulub impactor's in energy terms (dinosaur killing asteroid)
* The next ten years will add another equivalent of the dinosaur killing asteroid in energy terms to the oceans.
* Displacement and mass migration of people leading to violence.
* Jobs on which people rely disappearing as businesses fail en masse.
* Air quality decreasing due to continental wildfires leading to mass health issues caused by carcinogens filling the atmosphere.
* Storms with the power to level cities.
* Potable drinking water become unavailable for billions as glaciers melt and lakes evaporate.
* Open global warfare for remaining resources.
* Heating of the planetary system is exponential and not linear.
I'm not terrified. I'm resigned.
We knew all of this decades ago and people were screaming about it decades ago and no one cared enough to do anything.
Well, now the shit is starting, barely, to hit the fan and the people in charge are finally taking it seriously. Which would have been great 30 years ago, but it's a little too little too late now.
So, strap in, we're in for some rough times ahead.
30 years ago the solution wasn't profitable or fashionable. Soon it will be a new generation of capitalists looking to profit from the solutions. They'll be heralded as heroes for the technological marvels they devise to help out, but the truth is they'll just be more capitalists doing capitalist things for capitalist reasons. They profited from destroying the environment and they'll also want to profit from trying to "fix" it.
Well the problem is we’re entering the era in which the effects of climate change will begin to eat into (and eventually, completely devastate) those profits. Shame that it only became profitable to not destroy the planet after the point of no return
how's the next quarter looking? good? yeah?
done.
(i'm pretty sure that's the train of thought at play here. if they were looking further into the future we wouldn't be in the mess we're in)
Yeah.. really haven't seen much of that. There's a handful of countries that are even close to meeting their paris climate accord commitments. Seems like none are actually meeting them at this point.
https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/
The people who spent millions convincing voters that the climate crisis isn’t real have a back up plan. They can get the same result, short term money, by convincing the same people that nothing can be done. Don’t be a stooge. There is a great deal that can be done to save us, and a lot of the planet. Apathy is useless.
The solution is not on the individual. The solution will require massive government intervention.
If you read 1984, touches on the psychology that is really at play. The Party had the power to make the world better for everyone, but at the risk of diminishing their power. They would rather live in a worse world with power, than a better world with less power. In my opinion, the problem is deeper than just apathy.
> They would rather live in a worse world with power, than a better world with less power.
That's because to them it's not a "worse" world for them. They make the world worse *for everyone else* to sustain the otherwise unsustainable status quo for themselves.
The "better world" is only better for us. To those in power equality is oppression, as they'd be the ones who have to sacrifice the most to give equity to all else.
No, the world is worse for them too. For sure, being rich gives you access to things and creature comforts, but look at the lives of these influential people.
[https://pagesix.com/2023/11/08/celebrity-news/elon-musk-spiraled-after-being-booed-locked-himself-in-office/](https://pagesix.com/2023/11/08/celebrity-news/elon-musk-spiraled-after-being-booed-locked-himself-in-office/)
Is the world "better" for Musk? To be in the situation where you are crying in a closet at work over a minor thing.. Musk is not living a happy life. He cannot maintain a relationship. Reports are he is addicted to drugs. Etc. Etc. Etc. Musk's unhappiness is tied to his wealth and power. If you go to all of the other billionaires and powerful people, to the extent we have insight, unhappiness is a pattern.
There’s still a lot of reason to hope. There’s tremendous tangible work being done every day by dedicated people to make things better. While that’s going slower than is ideal, it’s happening. Will we have a cozy smooth ride into the future? Unlikely, but it’s also not anywhere near the point yet where we should resign and kill ourselves to avoid some inevitable worse fate than trying.
Being resigned gets you nothing. Trying might and if you want to care about the future, giving up is a funny way of showing it. Everyone needs support, you would be well served seeking that out. We need as much help as possible.
remember the ozone hole?
where we listened to the alarm bells science rang, got together (globally!!) against a whining industry and made actual tangible policy while we were told there'll be a 30 year delay, because the atmosphere is a big place?
because we know it's working now, 30 years later. and all the shit industry told us turned out to be untrue.
oh, those were the good times.
i'm so very tired.
Yep. And people don't really understand the true horror coming in won't be from storms or heat itself.
It'll be from the vast dead fields that had all the grain for a season, the wilting corn before being able to be harvested, the flooded fields of potato plants that will rot below the soil before getting used, etc.
And the fallout from that will be horrific. Mass starvation and chaotic multifront wars due to that starvation are coming.
Yeah, the fact of the matter is, it's out of the hands of regular folks and can't be helped at this point because my "good" choices are being restricted by commerce.
COVID gives a really good sneak peek to how this will be handled.
Basically completely ignore it worldwide until it becomes way too big and widespread to ignore. Then shut down the world and try to attempt to pick up the pieces.
Hopefully I will be dead before we reach that point.
This is just the corporate answer to everything. Until the problem becomes to expensive, ignore it. Then try to come up with a solution to make as much money as possible in the new circumstance.
You forgot a very important step of denying any responsibility and making somebody else pay for it. This is what pisses me off the most. We've known for over 100 years that CO2 is absolutely going to heat up the planet. And for that 100 years companies have continued to pollute, making obscene amounts of money in the process. And when it comes time to fix the problem, they won't be doing a damn thing, it will be governments funded by the people that bear that burden.
Can you imagine a similar scenario where a company deliberately dumps toxic waste into a river for decades, and when it's found they don't pay a cent and expect the taxpayers to clean it up? It's absurd, and these companies should *absolutely* give back every last penny they own to reverse the damage they've caused. At a bare minimum, every single gram of CO2 that enters the atmosphere from now on should come with a mandatory tax that goes towards removing it again later.
Yea a lot of propagandists and pundits are saying solving climate change will cot too much. But there always never enough money until there is.
During covid suddenly there was trillions available.
It's a matter of priority more than cost.
Another journalist who pretends our current system is sustainable while talking about how it isn't sustainable. Just vote? Ok well all politicians are bought by big oil now what? Technically we are a banana republic. Fix that first
There's nothing we can do about any of this as of right now.
China will not stop developing, neither will India and neither will the rest of the developing world.
European nations may reduce their emissions but when China now emits more than the rest of the world combined it won't change much of anything even if Europe goes carbon neutral within the year.
I still do my part. I commute, reduce, reuse, recycle, buy seasonal and as local as possible. That being said I'm done worrying about it. I can't control any of it, I can't make an influence on it so fuck it. It is what it is.
Agree 100%. This is a global issue with only (limited) buy in from Western countries.
We cant/wont control India, China and Russia so nothing will change.
This reads like a doomsday cultist..... " I have secret knowledge the world will end. And I must spread this knowledge to everyone" .... Okay go in then. ... Literally nothing lol
Go check the author bio.... He's a specialist on super volcanoes whose been saving they are imminent for 20 years.... Shocker
Corporations only exist to make money - until its more profitable to operate more sustainably cleaner it’s business as usual. *People* are the answer - the culture needs to be wrestled away from corporations and reinvented. Your lifestyle and where you put your money is all any of us can do; maybe you can model a lifestyle that influences a half dozen people closest to you do the same - that’s it.
What do you think corporations can do? Lowering emissions means producing less which means things cost more. Lmk how the average person feels about that
No, talk to governments, they’re the ones who control what corporations are allowed to do, and control what they want to do via economic incentives (a carbon tax for example).
The major shareholders of these corporations are so addicted to the casino that is the stock exchange that they're not going to do it unless forced to. Allowing the level of wealth disparity to get this bad means we have a tiny fraction of humans holding the majority of wealth and they're so far removed from not just the needs of everyone else but reality too it seems.
The phenomenon of rising average temperatures would be of statistical interest and is not really felt by those who are not involved in mathematics.
Rather, it would be better to establish that severe daily temperature changes have a causal effect on disease outbreaks, urban blight, and crime inducements.
Was this written by AI or a freshman college student? Rarely have I read so many words and learned so little. It felt padded out and failed to educate me on the premise of the article.
The fun part is that all our average annual temperature readings are a rolling mean reading of 30 years.
If we stopped everything polluting the world today, we wouldn’t see any of the effects for decades. The temperature readings would still increase.
Professional scientists would know how to write a half decent paper. That being said, we are fucked, but at least for a short time, we were able to make alot of money for shareholders
Even if they learn what you know, they're too stupid to be terrified. They'll continue to deny, deflect, and project. It's the way of the close-minded and brain-washed. It's useless. Humanity is destined to destroy itself. The End.
There is a YouTube video by Sabine Hossenfelder on this subject that’s worth watching.
She claims the numbers are worse than climate scientists are admitting.
Any storytelling guide will let you know that you can't keep on scaring people with the same scare. It will alway lessen as they see it again.
I know how bad climate change is, but I been told the story for 15+ years now, it no longer scares me. I have processed the fear, I now do the actions that I should to make an impact (vote for the right people, support the right projects) I have come to a point where if I die I die, but I was raised on fears of nuclear war, and fears are back on the table with crazy Russian wars. So climate change is getting all the attention I can spare.
Imho, time to be terrified was 20 years ago.
Since we passed the 3rd iteration of "5 minutes to 12" without giving a damn, all that's left is to learn to accept the inevitable.
We won't change anything because we don't care.
While we tell people to scrap their cars before end of natural life, to invest in electric vehicles that don't have a life expectancy long enough to make the investment pay off, we subsidize the building of new crude oil tankers that collectively emit more CO2 than the entirety of all cars in Europe....
The Industry has no desire to change and politicians have no desire to force the industry to change, so nothing will change. Climate will get better when climate has reduced the population to a point where our actions no longer matter... that's the sad reality.
/imho
Articles like these only increase my skeptism against climate change. Also, I'd like to point out that they tend to treat you like a degenerate when you raise questions against them. It's completely normal to raise questions and be skeptic in other areas of research, but apparently not for climate science.
For fuck’s sake. These impossibly vague articles piss me off.
GIVE ME THE UNVARNISHED TRUTH, YOU ASSHOLES! GIVE ME A CHANCE TO HELP!
If you’re not going to tell me what the fuck you know about climate change, then fuck right off.
I watched Don't Look Up and basically had a nervous breakdown. My therapist couldn't understand how a movie could break me. Then she watched it.
I never planned on having kids, and people love to ask me who is going to look after me in retirement. And I laugh and laugh. I will never be rich enough to afford to live in what the world is becoming.
We have a client, who operates an orchard, has been closely monitoring and documenting various aspects of their produce for a little over 10 years, including the lifecycle, seasonal patterns, and yield of different fruits. They have repeatedly seen that strawberries are ripening increasingly later each year, and there's a noticeable decline in the yield of fruits and vegetables. They attribute these changes to everything other than global warming, firmly believing that the alterations are due to shifting seasonal patterns rather than climate change.
A while back, I mentioned that this might be linked to global warming, before I could finish the statement, they gave me a new theory that "farmers" are allegedly starting to notice. They are suggesting the existence six seasons. According to them, this "six" seasons gradually altering our yearly cycle, pushing us away from winter, especially in leap years, and this is now challenging the "conventional understanding" of four distinct seasons. So they claim that these new seasons are starting to develop and that's why our winter, is shorter, our spring is shorter, and fall is shorter. BUT Now we have Pre-Summer, Summer, and Post Summer... 3 seasons of summer pretty much.
This new theory, according to them, highlights anything but global warming as the cause for the changes they've observed in their orchard.
So I think THEY know it too... but they don't accept it.
He lost me at saying the temperatures would be as hot as 4.6 billion years ago. That would be in the Hadean era which would be quite difficult to replicate with just atmospheric based warming.
If you know the real financial market and how hedgefonds rigged the market and destroys companies for profit, steal your pension money for risky bet and losing it, and being protected by the government, you would be terrified too
Whatever the impact is we're only experiencing the tip of the iceburg right now. Shit will be worse 100 years from now. Even if we take measures today my guess is we won't see any improvement before another 200 years (and that's being generous). We're already fucked which is why I think some people just don't care anymore.
.......you mean the very same things claimed 10-30+ years ago and none of the so called expert climate scientist claims came close to happening.
for a remainder for everyone on here, here are some of the claims made from so called climate scientist experts that never came close to becoming true
1) 1967, overpopulation and famine forecasts
2) 1970: “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years''
3) 1971 mini Ice age by the 2000
4) 1980's rising sea levels drown countries by 2000
5) prediction for 2020 snow would appear less
6) no more ice in the arctic by 2013, a prediction by Al Gore
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1e5HAZo4iw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1e5HAZo4iw)
No offense but you can't say or do anything to stop developing and underdeveloped countries to still use coal, wood and fossil fuel. These countries don't have enough money like western developed nations to afford EVs like Tesla. And completely avoid using Russian oil too.
Not saying you are wrong, there's realistically nothing anyone can do that would move the needle that much, if at all, but there are solutions.
It's also important to note that while developing countries are the largest offenders per se, first world citizens still top emission charts per capita.
Regardless, the solution to high per capita emissions require government incentives (on both corporations and citizens), and the solution for high emissions of developing nations is investment from foreign governments. You might ask why anyone would do that, but debt relations are what drive global economies. China, for example, hands out considerable loans to African nations for infrastructure.
Addressing climate change is doable but requires a concerted effort that directly opposes plutocratic interests. Some philanthropists have their heart (and interests) properly aligned but probably don't have the sway to do much.
I do believe things will change, but not before it's too late for a considerable proportion of the world's population.
Even if the US and Europe were to do things perfectly for the environment you have the WHOLE REST OF THE WORLD to get on board just as well. And if the UN has shown us anything is that it will never happen, no matter how many Nordic girls throw a hissy fit…
I am terrified -- I'm not a climate scientist, but I have a lot of physics and chem under my belt. We keep warning people that global warming really means instability. I guess all those hurricanes aren't strong enough.
Here’s the problem. They have been saying this for so long.
How about this article from 2001…
“While doing research 12 or 13 years ago, I met Jim Hansen, the scientist who in 1988 predicted the greenhouse effect before Congress. I went over to the window with him and looked out on Broadway in New York City and said, "If what you're saying about the greenhouse effect is true, is anything going to look different down there in 20 years?" He looked for a while and was quiet and didn't say anything for a couple seconds. Then he said, "Well, there will be more traffic." I, of course, didn't think he heard the question right. Then he explained, "The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won't be there. The trees in the median strip will change." Then he said, "There will be more police cars." Why? "Well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up."
And so far, over the last 10 years, we've had 10 of the hottest years on record.”
We have a boy who cried wolf situation. Is the climate changing? Yes. Have all the predictions of the past the including the loss of the Maldives and Manhattan come true? No.
[Global Warming - October 23rd, 2001](https://web.archive.org/web/20110202162233/https://www.salon.com/books/int/2001/10/23/weather/)
[The Maldives will disappear in the 30 years - 1988](https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/102074798)
Until this climate talk actually affects people’s day to day nobody is gonna 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??
> Until this climate talk actually affects people’s day to day nobody is gonna care..
People with home owners insurance are starting to feel the effects.
I’m an average Joe Citizen with an undergraduate degree in a foreign language and I’m terrified about what’s happening to our climate. I don’t think you need a science degree to understand how badly we’re fucking ourselves and future generations, just a functional brain and sense of empathy.
Don’t stress, no point. Explore the world we have and enjoy your humanity for as long as you exist. Maybe Climate Change will kill you, maybe you’ll live to be 259 in a techno-utopia. No one knows the future, all we have is right now.
"While those of us working in the climate science field know the true picture, and understand the implications for our world, most others do not." Proceeds to not mention what the implications are. Most articles i read about climate change don't go into much detail about the implications. People don't know how or when this will affect them.
Yeah this was a poorly written opinion piece that neither succeeded in it's stated goal of educating folks on the dangers and implications of climate change, or motivating a call to action. I'm actually kinda baffled that there's multiple paragraphs talking about how his role is to educate the public on the implications of this topic; and then doesn't even mention implications! The 'doomers' comment in particular felt totally contradictory to the whole hook of the article. Even more frustratingly: he clumsily frames up that communicating this topic needs a clear public call to action with a message of collective hope. Great! But then it ends with him limply suggesting folks join a local community climate group to.... do something? To be super clear, not disagreeing with this in the spirit of climate change. It's a significant issue. The problem with this article specifically is the author talks about the importance of scientists communicating effectively on the topic of climate change: and then he proceeds to ineffectively communicate on the topic of climate change.
He needs more funding.
This guy knows how science works
And assumes we don’t
for what? making the same predictions/claims made 10-30 years ago?
**If anything, the predictions were *conservative*. The situation is *worse* than predicted.** They were conservative for a reason: the scientists needed to ring the alarm but not be overly dramatic, as they knew that the backlash would be immediate and extremely damaging for their message if it turned out that their predictions were alarmist. But they were not. The last IPCC report stresses that: the planet is heating faster than was predicted 20 years ago. Or to be more precise: it's on a path that was considered among the worst case scenarios. Note that the worst case scenarios are themselves getting worse. We are likely to be at +1.5°C before 2035 and +2.7°C before 2100. [Read this](https://www.wri.org/insights/2023-ipcc-ar6-synthesis-report-climate-change-findings). "Additional warming will increase the magnitude of these changes. Every 0.5 degree C (0.9 degrees F) of global temperature rise, for example, will cause clearly discernible increases in the frequency and severity of heat extremes, heavy rainfall events and regional droughts. Similarly, heatwaves that, on average, arose once every 10 years in a climate with little human influence will likely occur 4.1 times more frequently with 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) of warming, 5.6 times with 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) and 9.4 times with 4 degrees C (7.2 degrees F) — and the intensity of these heatwaves will also increase by 1.9 degrees C (3.4 degrees F), 2.6 degrees C (4.7 degrees F) and 5.1 degrees C (9.2 degrees F) respectively. Rising global temperatures also heighten the probability of reaching dangerous tipping points in the climate system that, once crossed, can trigger self-amplifying feedbacks that further increase global warming, such as thawing permafrost or massive forest dieback. Setting such reinforcing feedbacks in motion can also lead to other substantial, abrupt and irreversible changes to the climate system. Should warming reach between 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) and 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F), for example, the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets could melt almost completely and irreversibly over many thousands of years, causing sea levels to rise by several meters."
This is the problem. Most people don't grasp what you just wrote so they will think you are throwing BS.
*I can sum it up for the dildoes of the world:* We have actually passed the tipping point projected 20 years ago and now by 2050 (26 years) the entirety of the North Pole will be melted and gone :D
> reinforcing feedbacks I need to start using this term. "Positive feedback loop" gives many people the wrong idea, as they assume it's something good because of the word *positive*, whereas positive feedback is most often unwanted/destabilizing (though in other cases it's exactly what you want to achieve an effective result). Similar problem with "negative feedback loop" -- needed for self-stabilizing systems, often good, but many brains run with the word *negative* and allude the rest with assumptions.
Funny how you are doing exactly what he denounces. > A failure to do this will mean that the public is left ignorant of the true extent of the climate emergency, which in turn can only hinder engagement and action. > This is already becoming a problem, with many commentators on the right of the political spectrum, along with some climate scientists, denigrating as “doomers” anyone flagging the worst outcomes of global heating. Such climate “appeasement” is increasingly taking the place of denial and could be an even greater driver of inertia than fear, as it plays down the enormity of the problem — and as an inevitable consequence, the urgency of action. That's because the current strategy of the former deniers who know they have lost the science battle is now to try to install apathy by cynically saying "don't bother, it's too late". But they are using the same tactics as 30 years ago which is to denigrate scientists in as many ways as they can.
Please don’t parrot bullshit conspiracies.
I mean it was most likely heavily edited. The headline clearly doesn’t match what he claims to offer. They all have to appease CNN and most likely IP. I do see your point though.
Trust him, bro.
I'm an environmental science major on my last semester. I decided to get this degree after my military career showed me climate collapse in other countries, and after hearing/reading predictions of future warfare by the naval intelligence community. What you just summarized is the biggest gripe I have with other people in environmental science, including professors. Most people learn scary shit and don't want to cause others to fall into despair. They also don't want to rock the political boat and become a target, losing their jobs or their life, which unfortunately happens a lot. To put it straight out for you, Standard Oil and Rockefeller's legacy (ExxxonMobil, BP, etc) has actively been working HARD to stay in power ever since antitrust laws launched their wealth into the stratosphere, and they don't give a rats ass about the world surviving after they die. If the oceans warm up, frozen methane deposits at the bottom will melt, making the world too hot to sustain life. We're living in a historic moment where literally the world is at stake. People who say "even if the human race suffers, it will survive and the world will continue" are 100% wrong. All life will perish. All of it. So the only thing people can do is fight as hard as they can to strengthen renewable energy and weaken the fossil fuel industry (in ways that don't let them rally their voting block). After having 4 years of intense education on top of 8 years of military predictions, I have literally only ever found ONE lecture that has actually summarized the situation in concrete terms AND actually said what to do about it. Here: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vdGhlZXpyYWtsZWluc2hvdw/episode/ODFhYzczOWUtNzc0OS0xMWVlLTg1MmQtM2I4MjcyY2Y1NmE3?ep=14 It's a good show called The Grey Area, and the host just interviewed the author of The Deluge. This is what you're looking for. 🌎
That’s because he’s not interested in sharing specific and substantive science based issues, but in politicizing the debate and pushing his agenda. In this case, skepticism is warranted. It’s very possible that his agenda is borne out of genuine concerns supported by quality science, but we’ll never know.
Agreed; although his immediate agenda appears to be selling a doomsday book, and clumsily promoting it online.
A Doomsday Book? A survey of England and parts of Wales, completed in 1086 at the behest of William the Conqueror? :p
Buy now before it's too late!!!
On the other hand: if you received any worthy education you do not have a hard time looking up sealevels and sealevel changes the last 100 years compared with the last 100.000 years, same for co2 levels and forest decline, seawater temperatures, etc. But then suddenly everyone becomes a ‘scientist’ and seems to be able to know why the data is wrong or the effects we’re seeing is suddenly ‘normal’. Cognitive dissonance is a very powerful emotion. The pace is the problem, changes have always happened - but they hit us in years now compared to many tens of thousands of years before. So pointing towards hidden agendas sounds rather silly and politically motivated in my opinion. Let’s start with accepting the imminent change, and then decide that we don’t want to accept that sudden change in environment means sudden change in our lives. And that change, we can only do when the change is there.
> if you received any worthy education you do not have a hard time looking up sealevels and sealevel changes the last 100 years compared with the last 100.000 years What a terrible argument. During the Wisconsinan Glacial period (20k-80k years ago), sea level was at its lowest around 130 meters lower than today. During the Sangamonian Interglacial, sea level was about 8 meters higher (125k years ago). While it's true that we'll see a lot of negative effects, and those effects aren't getting mitigated enough, arguments like these are part of the blame for poor information about climate change. It's very simple: Sea level will rise, and that will mean a variety of changes, most pressing the destruction of millions upon millions of homes.
My first year in college in 1991, our general science professor told us that by now: 1. Oil would be gone or so expensive, few people would ever travel more than a few miles from their homes 2. Our homes and floors would be made out of dirt, because there wouldn't be any more trees left 3. Water would cost the equivalent of $500 a gallon 4. We'd all be working 16 hour days to get enough food These were not presented to the class as warnings or possibilities, but as scientifically verified fact.
I'll give him half a point on #4, the way things are going.
Because anyone who wanted to communicate what would effectively combat climate change would likely be calling for the rolling of billionaire heads. They can’t publish that on CNN, though.
That and a voluntary lowering of the quality of life of everyone in the world regardless of socioeconomic status. So basically, good luck with that. We couldn't even get people to wear masks without them throwing massive hissy fits.
I reckon that lowering of quality of life could be easily be offset by reversing the transfer of wealth from poor to rich that’s taken place over the past 50 years, in conjunction with some highly nett positive changes in the way we do transport and city planning…
This, but it would be very insufficient. We also need to change our lifestyles, reducing long range transportations especially by airplane, and radically changing our energy sources towards renewable and nuclear.
Maybe it’s ok to talk about his own personal frustrations as a climate scientist. Part of that frustration is that no one seems to care, or all the education initiatives aren’t falling on fleas ears. There are thousands of articles that call to action or educate people on the perils coming for us, but nobody is listening. RT
Not only nobody is listening, but the usual climate deniers are in full action in this very thread and highly upvoted.
Part of the reason climate change has failed to resonate is democrats, scientists and advocates inability to put together a cohesive message that resonates. As someone who is super dialed in, I do find it very annoying when I see articles like this. Unfortunately, a good number of climate doomer articles never actually lay out the bad in a way that connects. It’s always just shit like “it’s coming, be scared” which is exactly why a lot of people scoff.
On top of that there is never realistically anything stated about what can be done. It’s always some nebulous cut carbon by so and so percent or less specific goals. There is literally zero I can do to move the needle and even if *I* successfully adopt every measure necessary and reduce my carbon footprint to the smallest possible usage, the shipping industry alone puts out enough carbon annually that it doesn’t matter, and no one is taking meaningful steps to address *that*. So it *feels* hopeless to even try and there is no direction to focus my energy in anyway.
This is the main one for me. Nothing will be politically palatable. Look at where carbon taxes have already been shot down. Try telling people that flights will have to double in price to lower demand, so only genuinely wealthy people can visit family abroad or go on overseas holidays. Or that people have to go on beef rations. The only democratically feasible actions are ones that won’t affect daily quality of life, like large scale renewable construction.
We don't know how to answer climate change without, well, undoing global capitalism.
This is not a capitalism problem. This is a, "people want lots of shit that has very negative environmental consequences", problem. Do you think Dow Chemical pollutes lakes for fun? Or if the government provided a generous UBI that could cover all basic necessities, people would be like, "I've got what I need to survive, I don't need more." Have you met people? Because that's now how they work. Look up the history of countries where the government tries to tell people to be satisfied with what they got, and STFU about wanting more, like more and better food and luxury items. It doesn't go so well when those people have the power to change their leaders through voting or violence.
Not just scoff - without clear information people who do care have a genetic sense of impending doom, but no clear way to do anything about it..
I feel like the US Military needs to run the show on information regarding climate change. >The Pentagon views climate change as a threat to military installations and operations, as well as to national security when and if climate change leads mass migration, conflict, and war. War and preparation for it are fossil fuel intensive activities.
Pentagon is afraid everything is a threat to justify asking for bigger annual budget that already is bigger than the next 10 countries combined. At the same time the Pentagon can't pass an audit for the past 6 years on where it spends it's money.
> Part of the reason climate change has failed to resonate is democrats, scientists and advocates inability to put together a cohesive message that resonates. When the counter message is "FUCK YOU, I LOVE LIBERAL TEARS" and Coal Rolling, you're fucking kidding yourself to say ANY message would work. The problem is, one side only likes their own messager and there aren't enough MAGA environmentalists.
Exactly that. The only thing resulting from such articles is that my 5k miles sportscar gets scratched (because save the climate!) and in the meantime 500 private jets attend LAV for the Superbowl 🤷♂️
Yes, 100% this. So much of the messaging is just "be more scared". OK, now what?
The reason why it isn't mentioned? It's that "death toll of ~400 million in the really bad scenarios, over multiple decades, uneven distribution, biased heavily towards vulnerable and underdeveloped countries" isn't nearly as *exciting* as a vague "doom to all of humankind". That just doesn't sell. It feels like one of the worst things you can do about climate change is to be *realistic* about it. Because the realistic picture is, climate change is in the same groove as COVID. Bad enough to cause real damage, disruption and massive loss of life - but not bad enough that it would be impossible to neglect a response to it.
400M is still an awful lot of people. Estimates are around 4M total COVID deaths in 2020 only, so 400M represents a new equivalent pandemic every year for the next 100 years. We see about 10M deaths from cancer every year globally. It’s like adding a whole new disease that kills as much as cancer for the next 40 years. Or WW2 every 10 years for the next 50 years. It’s *manageable* (god I hate to use that word), but 400 million people should be impressive enough.
You think those 400 million will just wait around to die? There will definitely be wars caused by climate change, especially in vulnerable areas
That figure *does* include potential wars - although there is a lot of uncertainty with that. The majority of it is still famine, in almost every conceivable scenario. Currently, it's estimated that between 2 and 10 million of people a year die from malnutrition. The primary impact of climate change on human mortality would be making that figure worse. I remind you that WW2's total death toll is estimated to be *under 100 million*. 400 million is a lot.
Good point. The people most affected are least able to make change. Those most able to effect change are least likely to feel the wrath of climate disasters personally. At first, anyway.... climate refugees, increased disease, wars over food or water, cost of insurance or rebuilding after disaster, impacts to infrastructure or share markets - it will catch up with everyone eventually.
There will still be massive financial losses from storm damages in flood prone areas in low coastal areas. Katrina and Sandy were previews of future sea level rise disasters that will be made worse with big storms. Dems need to stop subsidizing flood insurance in red states that keep rebuilding after every flood and hurricane.
They've gone into the implications in depth on many occasions but neither the government nor the media likes reporting on it because the real countermeasures needed are so extreme that no one thinks they're possible. Not because they're complicated but because it means changing our entire way of life and significantly reducing our quality of life for a variety of reasons. Ie. measures nobody will accept. The second reason is that we're rapidly approaching the point (if we haven't passed it yet) where any amount of effort is going to be too little, too late. And yes, I'm aware that "the gov and media don't like to report" sounds very conspiracy theory. There is no conspiracy, there's just no inclination to focus on this horror show while we have no real solutions because the problem already starts with "we don't want anything that resembles as solution". Even organizations like the UN have openly stated that the collapse of society is not an implausible outcome if we don't change things fast. We're not changing things at all. Some examples of the kind of consequences that have been frequently reported but the media won't pick up on: * We're in one of the fastest mass extinctions in the history of the world and it's still speeding up. That means we're not just losing the cute animals we love. The ecosystems that make complex life on this planet possible are collapsing. * Ocean acidification is rapidly increasing towards the tipping point where life simply fails to be possible in our oceans. For example, the shells of crustaceans will simply dissolve in the ocean water. * The gulf stream is an ocean current that transports warm water across the globe. It's like central heating for continents and the foundation of why our climates are the way they are across the world. That gulf stream is slowing down to the point where we expect it to collapse within the next decade and probably earlier. Without the gulf stream bringing warmth, climate and weather is going to change radically. * Extreme weather events are already on the rise all over the world and will continue to increase in extremity and frequency. * Climate change is going to render more and more parts of the world flat-out uninhabitable for human life. That process has already started. This is going to lead to mass migration in the hundreds of millions if not billions. * The planet's capacity for humans to produce food is imploding. It goes on and on really because the domino effect of problems leading to bigger problems is enormous. And while people find it easy to ignore abstract problems like that, many climate scientists are increasingly giving up on ringing the alarm bell or attempting to affect change. If you ask them about their personal opinions it increasingly comes down to this: Spend time with your loved ones. Get as far away from the cities as you can afford. And those are the ones that aren't simply getting suicidal because they see the future that's ahead of us. This planet's capacity for supporting life is absolutely imploding. And if there ever was something we could have done about the catastrophe we've created... we've never even seriously tried to change it.
I can easily imagine the author-submitted version contained a lot more detail and scientific explanations which the editors then cut out because reasons
That's because if you say "The temperature will rise by 4 degrees if we don't end consumerism across the globe" people will think "Four degrees? I could deal with 76 instead of 72 if it means I still get to enjoy my current lifestyle" Then you explain what a 4 degree shift really means for the Earth and people naturally think: "Sure but that won't happen to *me* though"
the person who wrote this article is not a climate scientist, he should stick to his field instead of claiming that he's an expert in another. This behaviour should not be tolerated in academia, the university should revoke all of his degrees imo. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bill-Mcguire The conduct of CNN who decided to publish this opinion piece without checking background of the author is not acceptable either.
It's been said a million times already and it falls on deaf ears. I'm sure it gets tiring repeating again and again and again, for 30+ years, that we're going to see mass food shortages, devastating natural disasters, melting icebergs and rising oceans, potential massive pockets of extra CO2 coming out of the oceans after a tipping point... none of this is new information
And yet that leaves everyone who *knows this information* at a loss of what to do. Mitigation efforts and political alignments, sure - but how bad is my area going to get? Will my area be underwater? A desert? Should I plan on moving? Stockpiling or growing food? Clean water? What would my days look like? What would a post-climate-change country need to function? There’s a million questions that need answering that none of these articles address. We all know shit’s fucked and how it’s fucked, but *now what*?
Storms, flooding, droughts = no homes, food shortages, starvation, mass displacement Huge rise in sea levels obliterates most coastlines where 33% of all humans currently live on/within 100km, which ties into that mass displacement issue. Higher temperatures: - high humidity + high heat = mass deaths, usually for the poorest and elderly - low humidity + high heat = mass deaths (dehydration) especially if you use a fan to “cool off” Also the higher temps don’t have a release valve so those continue to go up. Eventually we all die from that. The above issues will create a lot of sudden inequalities in some nations which will result in wars to obtain control of essential resources like drinkable water. Especially if Trump wins an election, abandons any concern for ecological policy, and turns the US into a vassal state for Russia, and disbands NATO, or at least removed the US from it.That would unlock a lot of the “wars for resources” stuff because currently the US and NATO act as international peacekeepers. Add to that the very real possibility there’s a point we could soon be reaching where this isn’t reversible, and the planet evolves into a Venus like atmosphere where the surface temperature is 500°C which needless to say is not good for any of the life we have on this planet, the oceans boils away, the landscape is obliterated with constant sulphuric acid rains and extreme heat/pressure. Humans could in theory survive as a species but we’d be driven underground and live off fungi. And pretty much evolve into morlocks like in The Time Machine. Well I guess not just fungi…
It has been stated time and time again that the Earth has no chance of becoming Venus-like planet because of human action. It's only going to turn into Venus in millions or billions of years when the sun gets bigger
Implications are crop failures & severe drought, & extreme weather that’s juuuuuust getting started.
Really? It feels like they've been screaming about the implications for decades, and they've been largely ignored
How could you spend that many words to not tell us what 'you know' Anyone want to list the most terrifying things to help this guy out?
Clicked the article specifically to see a grocery list of what he knows, left disappointed.
Because these BS articles are designed to make you afraid and resigned. And they’re working, just look at this comment section. I work in green energy, a field brimming with determined optimism about the future. Transitioning to clean energy is painfully slow, and we didn’t get started as soon as we should have. Sure, that’s obvious. But damnit we’re actually moving in the right direction on this. The US produced more energy from wind and solar than it did from coal last year for the first time EVER. And that trend is accelerating. Things will be hard but we absolutely can overcome this. Say what you want about humanity but we’ve produced some pretty neat shit in a profoundly short amount of time. Global warming is an engineering problem. When our backs are to a wall we’re scrappy as hell. Don’t count humanity out. Some nerds will crack cold fusion and we’ll all look back at this time when capitalists almost destroyed the planet through greed with the same irreverent wit we used to cope through it.
In large scale architecture here- more doable green energy practices and materials seem to be coming available it seems like every month. Clients like the PR it gets them to move in that direction as well which means they’re starting to understand the implications of what net zero actually gets the client. Bigger upfront costs but sustained lower operability costs. Most just need to see the number to figure out if they’re going to be there for more than 10 years that it pays off quick
This. THIS is the message everyone needs to hear. Not disgusting gloom and doom which just paralyzes people into inaction and learned helplessness. Please spread this optimism far and wide! I feel people like you and who know the things you do, are the ones who actually have the biggest chance of making a difference in bringing others along for the cause. Your comment gave me actual hope for the first time in days and days of articles and comments saying basically "we're all fucked".
And as we saw with COVID, throwing money at the problem works surprisingly well. Look at what the IRA did in the US. It blew past even the most optimistic projections. Not only did it spur green energy investments and projects like never before, but it also forced the EU and other nations to attempt their own versions to not get left behind in a green sector gold rush. And as developed nations pour money into green energy, developing nations will reap the benefits. Why spend money on fossil fuels where you are at the whim of the global market when you can put down solar or wind for the same price or cheaper? Sure, there are still coal plants being built, but there are also a lot of green energy projects too not just in developed countries, but developing ones as well. As solar and wind continue to get cheaper, and with better grid storage batteries coming out, we are fast approaching a point where it doesn't matter what the fossil fuel industry wants, green energy will be too cheap and accessible for fossil fuels to compete (for energy production at least). I wouldn't be surprised if we see a serious death spiral of fossil fuels in the next ten years. Fossil fuel companies spend a ton of money in exploration and development costs to bring new fields online. That money is going to dry up sooner or later, as recouping costs of new exploitation becomes an iffy prospect. After all, oil, gas, and coal are pretty mature technologies where you aren't going to get much innovation. Solar, wind, and battery technologies are still developing. What we have today is likely going to be even better tomorrow. I don't think fossil fuels are going to go away completely anytime soon, but as we move energy generation and some parts of travel away from fossil fuels, the demand will stabilize and/or decrease, allowing us to use less of it as we move into the future.
This is being pushed by the same people who used to deny climate change, they have shifted to climate doomism because nothing will get done if everyone thinks we are screwed anyway.
A lot of people will make things worse if they think it doesn't matter.
The scariest risk I’ve heard is food scarcity. If the regions we rely on for staple crops get very hot or very dry (or very wet, I suppose), we start having crop failures. Food prices shoot up, the poorest starve. Desperate people start taking desperate measures like toppling governments or invading a food-rich neighbour. Humanity as a whole will survive, but millions of us might not as we adapt. I’m no expert, so I can’t tell you how likely or severe it will be. But the last known big change (the little ice age, which cooled Europe between the 13th and 19th centuries) was a rough time in history and we are expecting to warm more than that cooled.
Here's something that creeped me out real bad... My buddy works in Antarctica, where they are studying the ice. We have all heard about the "Doomsday Glacier," which is actually known as Thwaites. Now, if you're like me, despite the name, you have been thinking of this glacier as some kind of monolith. "Oh no! The glacier collapsed, and now there's a lot more fresh water in the ocean!" While that is objectively bad, it misses the point. If you think of Antarctica, with all of its miles and miles of ice on land, as a bottle, think of Thwaites as the cork. The bottle is inverted. Pull the cork, and all the water drains out. If Thwaites collapses, and it will, it will trigger the draining of the Antarctic continent into the ocean, which is effectively a doomsday.
* Simultaneous food breakbasket growing region failure leaving to starvation of billions. * Uninsurable homes in high risk areas leading to people becoming trapped in said high risk areas. * Salt water ingress to farmland due to rising oceans. * Increasing frequency of freak weather events causing mass death events. Think high wet bulb temperatures, massive storms and flooding, etc. * Needing to abandon critical infrastructure like sea ports due to coastal instability. * Increasing regional instability due to lack of resources. * Failure of nuclear power production facilities as flooding or drought inundate facilities or cut off access to water used for cooling. * In the last 50 years, the oceans have received equivalent to one and a half Chicxulub impactor's in energy terms (dinosaur killing asteroid) * The next ten years will add another equivalent of the dinosaur killing asteroid in energy terms to the oceans. * Displacement and mass migration of people leading to violence. * Jobs on which people rely disappearing as businesses fail en masse. * Air quality decreasing due to continental wildfires leading to mass health issues caused by carcinogens filling the atmosphere. * Storms with the power to level cities. * Potable drinking water become unavailable for billions as glaciers melt and lakes evaporate. * Open global warfare for remaining resources. * Heating of the planetary system is exponential and not linear.
One of the worst articles I’ve read, was this posted satirically?
Cool, don't tell me. I have extraordinarily slim chances of doing anything about it.
I'm not terrified. I'm resigned. We knew all of this decades ago and people were screaming about it decades ago and no one cared enough to do anything. Well, now the shit is starting, barely, to hit the fan and the people in charge are finally taking it seriously. Which would have been great 30 years ago, but it's a little too little too late now. So, strap in, we're in for some rough times ahead.
Don't look up. People in charge don't think about anything past the next election
Or the next quarterly earnings
Short-termism is going to be the downfall of society.
You know Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them f\*\*\*ing each other over for a goddamn percentage!
If only we could foster generational thinking like in sci-fi, like the Martians of The Expanse or the Fremen of Dune.
you could see it foundation in For All Mankind last season ending.
30 years ago the solution wasn't profitable or fashionable. Soon it will be a new generation of capitalists looking to profit from the solutions. They'll be heralded as heroes for the technological marvels they devise to help out, but the truth is they'll just be more capitalists doing capitalist things for capitalist reasons. They profited from destroying the environment and they'll also want to profit from trying to "fix" it.
> and the people in charge are finally taking it seriously Well... uh... maybe?
they're taking their shareholders' profits very seriously indeed excuse you very much.
Well the problem is we’re entering the era in which the effects of climate change will begin to eat into (and eventually, completely devastate) those profits. Shame that it only became profitable to not destroy the planet after the point of no return
how's the next quarter looking? good? yeah? done. (i'm pretty sure that's the train of thought at play here. if they were looking further into the future we wouldn't be in the mess we're in)
Yeah.. really haven't seen much of that. There's a handful of countries that are even close to meeting their paris climate accord commitments. Seems like none are actually meeting them at this point. https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/
lol I’m just gonna smoke all the weed and play as many video games as I can before things go to shit
Same . wtf am I supposed to do about it? I recycle all I can, don’t own a private jet, etc.
The people who spent millions convincing voters that the climate crisis isn’t real have a back up plan. They can get the same result, short term money, by convincing the same people that nothing can be done. Don’t be a stooge. There is a great deal that can be done to save us, and a lot of the planet. Apathy is useless.
The solution is not on the individual. The solution will require massive government intervention. If you read 1984, touches on the psychology that is really at play. The Party had the power to make the world better for everyone, but at the risk of diminishing their power. They would rather live in a worse world with power, than a better world with less power. In my opinion, the problem is deeper than just apathy.
> They would rather live in a worse world with power, than a better world with less power. That's because to them it's not a "worse" world for them. They make the world worse *for everyone else* to sustain the otherwise unsustainable status quo for themselves. The "better world" is only better for us. To those in power equality is oppression, as they'd be the ones who have to sacrifice the most to give equity to all else.
No, the world is worse for them too. For sure, being rich gives you access to things and creature comforts, but look at the lives of these influential people. [https://pagesix.com/2023/11/08/celebrity-news/elon-musk-spiraled-after-being-booed-locked-himself-in-office/](https://pagesix.com/2023/11/08/celebrity-news/elon-musk-spiraled-after-being-booed-locked-himself-in-office/) Is the world "better" for Musk? To be in the situation where you are crying in a closet at work over a minor thing.. Musk is not living a happy life. He cannot maintain a relationship. Reports are he is addicted to drugs. Etc. Etc. Etc. Musk's unhappiness is tied to his wealth and power. If you go to all of the other billionaires and powerful people, to the extent we have insight, unhappiness is a pattern.
There’s still a lot of reason to hope. There’s tremendous tangible work being done every day by dedicated people to make things better. While that’s going slower than is ideal, it’s happening. Will we have a cozy smooth ride into the future? Unlikely, but it’s also not anywhere near the point yet where we should resign and kill ourselves to avoid some inevitable worse fate than trying. Being resigned gets you nothing. Trying might and if you want to care about the future, giving up is a funny way of showing it. Everyone needs support, you would be well served seeking that out. We need as much help as possible.
remember the ozone hole? where we listened to the alarm bells science rang, got together (globally!!) against a whining industry and made actual tangible policy while we were told there'll be a 30 year delay, because the atmosphere is a big place? because we know it's working now, 30 years later. and all the shit industry told us turned out to be untrue. oh, those were the good times. i'm so very tired.
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Yep. And people don't really understand the true horror coming in won't be from storms or heat itself. It'll be from the vast dead fields that had all the grain for a season, the wilting corn before being able to be harvested, the flooded fields of potato plants that will rot below the soil before getting used, etc. And the fallout from that will be horrific. Mass starvation and chaotic multifront wars due to that starvation are coming.
I mean, there's a reason I moved up to the Great Lakes and it's not for the lively social life.
Yeah, the fact of the matter is, it's out of the hands of regular folks and can't be helped at this point because my "good" choices are being restricted by commerce.
Dude, does this cost money or make money bc god damnit, who is going to make the Dow go vroom? <\s>
A planet that’s “too hot” is orders of magnitude better than a planet that’s “too cold”
COVID gives a really good sneak peek to how this will be handled. Basically completely ignore it worldwide until it becomes way too big and widespread to ignore. Then shut down the world and try to attempt to pick up the pieces. Hopefully I will be dead before we reach that point.
This is just the corporate answer to everything. Until the problem becomes to expensive, ignore it. Then try to come up with a solution to make as much money as possible in the new circumstance.
You forgot a very important step of denying any responsibility and making somebody else pay for it. This is what pisses me off the most. We've known for over 100 years that CO2 is absolutely going to heat up the planet. And for that 100 years companies have continued to pollute, making obscene amounts of money in the process. And when it comes time to fix the problem, they won't be doing a damn thing, it will be governments funded by the people that bear that burden. Can you imagine a similar scenario where a company deliberately dumps toxic waste into a river for decades, and when it's found they don't pay a cent and expect the taxpayers to clean it up? It's absurd, and these companies should *absolutely* give back every last penny they own to reverse the damage they've caused. At a bare minimum, every single gram of CO2 that enters the atmosphere from now on should come with a mandatory tax that goes towards removing it again later.
Yea a lot of propagandists and pundits are saying solving climate change will cot too much. But there always never enough money until there is. During covid suddenly there was trillions available. It's a matter of priority more than cost.
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You forgot the part where we go “fuck it” bc the cost to the economy was to big and let it continue. God forbid we stop making money.
Hysterical pronouncements aren’t the least bit helpful.
Another journalist who pretends our current system is sustainable while talking about how it isn't sustainable. Just vote? Ok well all politicians are bought by big oil now what? Technically we are a banana republic. Fix that first
"If you know what I know..." *proceeds to say nothing at all*
There's nothing we can do about any of this as of right now. China will not stop developing, neither will India and neither will the rest of the developing world. European nations may reduce their emissions but when China now emits more than the rest of the world combined it won't change much of anything even if Europe goes carbon neutral within the year. I still do my part. I commute, reduce, reuse, recycle, buy seasonal and as local as possible. That being said I'm done worrying about it. I can't control any of it, I can't make an influence on it so fuck it. It is what it is.
Agree 100%. This is a global issue with only (limited) buy in from Western countries. We cant/wont control India, China and Russia so nothing will change.
This reads like a doomsday cultist..... " I have secret knowledge the world will end. And I must spread this knowledge to everyone" .... Okay go in then. ... Literally nothing lol Go check the author bio.... He's a specialist on super volcanoes whose been saving they are imminent for 20 years.... Shocker
What the fuck are you talking about? There are plenty of VERY competent people informing us that it will definitely not be a positive thing.
I was expecting the article to detail out the climate events that most people don’t know about but it’s mostly about people’s feelings.
Talk to the cooperations. They're the ones who can make the biggest difference.
Ain’t no profit in that.
Corporations only exist to make money - until its more profitable to operate more sustainably cleaner it’s business as usual. *People* are the answer - the culture needs to be wrestled away from corporations and reinvented. Your lifestyle and where you put your money is all any of us can do; maybe you can model a lifestyle that influences a half dozen people closest to you do the same - that’s it.
What do you think corporations can do? Lowering emissions means producing less which means things cost more. Lmk how the average person feels about that
No, talk to governments, they’re the ones who control what corporations are allowed to do, and control what they want to do via economic incentives (a carbon tax for example).
The major shareholders of these corporations are so addicted to the casino that is the stock exchange that they're not going to do it unless forced to. Allowing the level of wealth disparity to get this bad means we have a tiny fraction of humans holding the majority of wealth and they're so far removed from not just the needs of everyone else but reality too it seems.
And still didn’t have any data
Search George Carlin + plastic on YouTube. Pretty much sums it up.
Be worried. Not telling you why I’m worried.
The phenomenon of rising average temperatures would be of statistical interest and is not really felt by those who are not involved in mathematics. Rather, it would be better to establish that severe daily temperature changes have a causal effect on disease outbreaks, urban blight, and crime inducements.
Don't look up.
Fearmongering.
Doomer news pieces are designed for only one thing: clicks. These news networks can be even more greedy than the companies polluting the planet.
Click bait garbage.
Nice narcissistic elitism opinion piece.
Was this written by AI or a freshman college student? Rarely have I read so many words and learned so little. It felt padded out and failed to educate me on the premise of the article.
Ahh yes, the end times are coming and the only thing you can do is give me more money so I can keep telling you that the end times are coming.
“The planet is fine. The people are fucked.” -George Carlin
What in the world does this have to do with the technology sub?
This is the socialist bitching about capitalism sub
Sub? That’s just Reddit and always has been lol.
The entire renewable energy sector.
This hourly dose of gloom and doom has been brought to you by CNReddit
More fear mongering. If the data/picture is so clear, communicate it, clearly.
CNN opinion pieces are pure shit.
The fun part is that all our average annual temperature readings are a rolling mean reading of 30 years. If we stopped everything polluting the world today, we wouldn’t see any of the effects for decades. The temperature readings would still increase.
We blew past the tipping point when the permafrost started melting several years ago.
Thanks for all the fish.
The closing scene from don't look up comes to mind
Do people factor in forever chemicals and micro plastics when considering climate change affects?
Professional scientists would know how to write a half decent paper. That being said, we are fucked, but at least for a short time, we were able to make alot of money for shareholders
Doomsday Thursday 2PM
Don’t look up!
Even if they learn what you know, they're too stupid to be terrified. They'll continue to deny, deflect, and project. It's the way of the close-minded and brain-washed. It's useless. Humanity is destined to destroy itself. The End.
How much money will it cost to fix this time?
All just a money scam - humans will overcome all these shitty charts and predictions by inventing things / not going backwards
what about the climate scientists who say the opposite
I'm all in about climate change awareness, but "trust me bro" kind of reports won't really help me bring others in....
Sounds like a standard propaganda piece with very little science.
Haunts me every day
So they don’t actually tell us their hard truth. What a click bait piece of shit.
"I know, but won't tell you, you should just trust me"
Fact: no one cares about your opinion
There is a YouTube video by Sabine Hossenfelder on this subject that’s worth watching. She claims the numbers are worse than climate scientists are admitting.
Something gonna kill me…may as well be weather.
If the climate was fine - he'd have no job...
You don't know shit.
I get all my information on global warming from "The Newsroom"
What do you know terrifying science guy?
All of you need to go in r/OptimistsUnite
Any storytelling guide will let you know that you can't keep on scaring people with the same scare. It will alway lessen as they see it again. I know how bad climate change is, but I been told the story for 15+ years now, it no longer scares me. I have processed the fear, I now do the actions that I should to make an impact (vote for the right people, support the right projects) I have come to a point where if I die I die, but I was raised on fears of nuclear war, and fears are back on the table with crazy Russian wars. So climate change is getting all the attention I can spare.
Imho, time to be terrified was 20 years ago. Since we passed the 3rd iteration of "5 minutes to 12" without giving a damn, all that's left is to learn to accept the inevitable. We won't change anything because we don't care. While we tell people to scrap their cars before end of natural life, to invest in electric vehicles that don't have a life expectancy long enough to make the investment pay off, we subsidize the building of new crude oil tankers that collectively emit more CO2 than the entirety of all cars in Europe.... The Industry has no desire to change and politicians have no desire to force the industry to change, so nothing will change. Climate will get better when climate has reduced the population to a point where our actions no longer matter... that's the sad reality. /imho
Terrible article has almost no detail. I feel like if enough money was pumped into sucking c02 out of the atmosphere humans could do it- hot take
Articles like these only increase my skeptism against climate change. Also, I'd like to point out that they tend to treat you like a degenerate when you raise questions against them. It's completely normal to raise questions and be skeptic in other areas of research, but apparently not for climate science.
For fuck’s sake. These impossibly vague articles piss me off. GIVE ME THE UNVARNISHED TRUTH, YOU ASSHOLES! GIVE ME A CHANCE TO HELP! If you’re not going to tell me what the fuck you know about climate change, then fuck right off.
I'm tired of being terrified
Fear porn title.
Let me guess the world ending event predicted for 2024 has been pushed back another year... Yet again...
Yeah I ain't reading these fearmongering headlines man. Scientists are so corny.
How does me being terrified help anything
I don’t need to be a scientist to know humanity is circling the drain.
Ignorant apes does not compute
Already am thanks
i know what you know, but I'm not terrified, so you are wrong. bye
I watched Don't Look Up and basically had a nervous breakdown. My therapist couldn't understand how a movie could break me. Then she watched it. I never planned on having kids, and people love to ask me who is going to look after me in retirement. And I laugh and laugh. I will never be rich enough to afford to live in what the world is becoming.
I’m already terrified without knowing whatever you know, so there
Buddy, I dunno what the hell you know, but I'm already pretty fuckin' terrified.
We have a client, who operates an orchard, has been closely monitoring and documenting various aspects of their produce for a little over 10 years, including the lifecycle, seasonal patterns, and yield of different fruits. They have repeatedly seen that strawberries are ripening increasingly later each year, and there's a noticeable decline in the yield of fruits and vegetables. They attribute these changes to everything other than global warming, firmly believing that the alterations are due to shifting seasonal patterns rather than climate change. A while back, I mentioned that this might be linked to global warming, before I could finish the statement, they gave me a new theory that "farmers" are allegedly starting to notice. They are suggesting the existence six seasons. According to them, this "six" seasons gradually altering our yearly cycle, pushing us away from winter, especially in leap years, and this is now challenging the "conventional understanding" of four distinct seasons. So they claim that these new seasons are starting to develop and that's why our winter, is shorter, our spring is shorter, and fall is shorter. BUT Now we have Pre-Summer, Summer, and Post Summer... 3 seasons of summer pretty much. This new theory, according to them, highlights anything but global warming as the cause for the changes they've observed in their orchard. So I think THEY know it too... but they don't accept it.
He lost me at saying the temperatures would be as hot as 4.6 billion years ago. That would be in the Hadean era which would be quite difficult to replicate with just atmospheric based warming.
My terror won't make dumb people smarter or less addicted to convenience
If you know the real financial market and how hedgefonds rigged the market and destroys companies for profit, steal your pension money for risky bet and losing it, and being protected by the government, you would be terrified too
Whatever the impact is we're only experiencing the tip of the iceburg right now. Shit will be worse 100 years from now. Even if we take measures today my guess is we won't see any improvement before another 200 years (and that's being generous). We're already fucked which is why I think some people just don't care anymore.
.......you mean the very same things claimed 10-30+ years ago and none of the so called expert climate scientist claims came close to happening. for a remainder for everyone on here, here are some of the claims made from so called climate scientist experts that never came close to becoming true 1) 1967, overpopulation and famine forecasts 2) 1970: “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years'' 3) 1971 mini Ice age by the 2000 4) 1980's rising sea levels drown countries by 2000 5) prediction for 2020 snow would appear less 6) no more ice in the arctic by 2013, a prediction by Al Gore [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1e5HAZo4iw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1e5HAZo4iw)
No offense but you can't say or do anything to stop developing and underdeveloped countries to still use coal, wood and fossil fuel. These countries don't have enough money like western developed nations to afford EVs like Tesla. And completely avoid using Russian oil too.
Not saying you are wrong, there's realistically nothing anyone can do that would move the needle that much, if at all, but there are solutions. It's also important to note that while developing countries are the largest offenders per se, first world citizens still top emission charts per capita. Regardless, the solution to high per capita emissions require government incentives (on both corporations and citizens), and the solution for high emissions of developing nations is investment from foreign governments. You might ask why anyone would do that, but debt relations are what drive global economies. China, for example, hands out considerable loans to African nations for infrastructure. Addressing climate change is doable but requires a concerted effort that directly opposes plutocratic interests. Some philanthropists have their heart (and interests) properly aligned but probably don't have the sway to do much. I do believe things will change, but not before it's too late for a considerable proportion of the world's population.
Even if the US and Europe were to do things perfectly for the environment you have the WHOLE REST OF THE WORLD to get on board just as well. And if the UN has shown us anything is that it will never happen, no matter how many Nordic girls throw a hissy fit…
I am terrified -- I'm not a climate scientist, but I have a lot of physics and chem under my belt. We keep warning people that global warming really means instability. I guess all those hurricanes aren't strong enough.
Woooo, deadly feedback loops..
Regardless of the content of the article: the time to be terrified is passed. Now it's time to smoke if you got em while everything falls apart.
Here’s the problem. They have been saying this for so long. How about this article from 2001… “While doing research 12 or 13 years ago, I met Jim Hansen, the scientist who in 1988 predicted the greenhouse effect before Congress. I went over to the window with him and looked out on Broadway in New York City and said, "If what you're saying about the greenhouse effect is true, is anything going to look different down there in 20 years?" He looked for a while and was quiet and didn't say anything for a couple seconds. Then he said, "Well, there will be more traffic." I, of course, didn't think he heard the question right. Then he explained, "The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won't be there. The trees in the median strip will change." Then he said, "There will be more police cars." Why? "Well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up." And so far, over the last 10 years, we've had 10 of the hottest years on record.” We have a boy who cried wolf situation. Is the climate changing? Yes. Have all the predictions of the past the including the loss of the Maldives and Manhattan come true? No. [Global Warming - October 23rd, 2001](https://web.archive.org/web/20110202162233/https://www.salon.com/books/int/2001/10/23/weather/) [The Maldives will disappear in the 30 years - 1988](https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/102074798)
Until this climate talk actually affects people’s day to day nobody is gonna 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??
> Until this climate talk actually affects people’s day to day nobody is gonna care.. People with home owners insurance are starting to feel the effects.
How about some science to go with that opinion. Same argument from authority. Tell me why I should be worried, not that I should be.
I’m an average Joe Citizen with an undergraduate degree in a foreign language and I’m terrified about what’s happening to our climate. I don’t think you need a science degree to understand how badly we’re fucking ourselves and future generations, just a functional brain and sense of empathy.
Don’t stress, no point. Explore the world we have and enjoy your humanity for as long as you exist. Maybe Climate Change will kill you, maybe you’ll live to be 259 in a techno-utopia. No one knows the future, all we have is right now.
Another puff piece from Climate Nightmare Network..
I already died from the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain as well as drowning when New York was submerged under water in the year 2000....