I find the people with hope genuinely confusing at this point.
Because the alternative is to become a pessimistic doomer and tune out pretending it’s all hopeless?
I’m not tuning out. Occasionally I wish I could, but that doesn’t align with my core values. Doomers aren’t the ones that tune out, people that primarily consume “reality” TV, aren’t “political, teehee,” couldn’t point to the middle east on a map with a gun to their head, and are habitually bubbly and optimistic about any topic despite living in this world are the ones tuned out living in blissful willful ignorance.
You have to be paying attention to have hope beaten out of you in the first place. You may not like doomers, but they are burdened with knowledge, aka well informed. That’s why they bother the ignorant, they bum them out.
people that primarily consume “reality” TV, aren’t “political, teehee,” couldn’t point to the middle east on a map with a gun to their head, and are habitually bubbly and optimistic about any topic despite living in this world are the ones tuned out living in blissful willful ignorance.
They’re not hopeful about climate change, they’re ignorant of it. That’s not the same thing.
Doomers aren’ t burdened with knowledge, doomers are a burden on everyone else with knowledge who knows that this could be fixed if people acted.
There is literally zero benefit to climate doomerism.
If more than just Greta starts doing the right thing and humanity starts fighting for change in tangible ways, ways that WOULD HAVE TO LEAD TO DIMINISHED HUMAN QUALITY OF LIFE by necessity to to have any decent future for humans, I will join them in destroying the industrial world so we may find equilibrium with nature again. I’m more than willing to put myself into the necessary billions must starve and our species must return to nature lottery if you are.
Until then, have fun following the promise of the capitalist’s latest solution to themselves. What is It this week?
Clean coal hydrogen corn based ethynol plant a tree offsets climate pledges AIoh yeah planetary scale carbon scrubbers. They’ll totes work, I mean just look at how much the capitalist’s will profit from them. Expensive=good=hope. We’ll start to see results sometime… after the world government’s checks have cleared of course. Just gotta hope!I do believe in planetary scale carbon scrubbers! I do! I do!
“I would do something, but instead I’ll do nothing and complain”
Okay, great contribution.
Yeah, we really did a lot for the climate today with this discourse.
Oh the earth will recover eventually! It’s even possible humanity survives in some form!
Oh yeah Earth will be fine. It’s survived worse than us and will be here long after we’ve died, almost certainly by our own hands. We aren’t even the first mass extinction event to come from a mistake from within instead of an external force like a meteor but instead of runaway, macro-metastatic evolution. There was a blight of early trees in the carboniferous period that stored too much carbon leading to an ice age because the means of their efficient decomposition had not yet evolved, causing the opposite of what we’re doing, leading to an ice age.
Life on Earth suffered, many species went extinct, as some do constantly even in good times, but Earth always recovers. We sadly fashion ourselves masters of this word rather than children and subjects, but we couldn’t sterilize this planet if we wanted to. There’s life in acid pools, in crevices we can’t find, in depths we can’t reach. Until the Sun’s output changes enough in a couple billion years, life will most likely find a way here.
I take comfort, just as George Carlin did, in knowing that we will just be an evolutionary cul-de-sac, quickly forgotten by the living Earth we tried to dominate and rape as our private property.
The funniest bit to me is that for all the idiotic religions people kill one another over, demanding theirs has the largest penis and other believers of gods with smaller penises must convert or die, it was a rare thing indeed for humans to actually respect their actual God, their actual creator, the real one they can and do see every single day, the one we are, in objective fact, made of. Oh the dark irony of desperately seeking approval from a fictional “sky daddy” creator that we often anthropomorphize out of vanity to look and act and think like us, while raping, plundering, polluting, and defacing our true God as thoughtlessly as breathing.
Crabs will dominate the Solar System after any trace from our “developed society” is long gone.
Maybe they will have an religion of crab gods, but if gods go through evolution too, they are probably actually crabs.
Crabs rule!
To lose hope for a better tomorrow is to roll over and accept the worst
I’ll fight to my dying breath for a better tomorrow because I have hope in achieving that goal
Even if that better tomorrow is only slightly better than no change or if that better tomorrow is making sure that those I care about aren’t completely up a creek if shit goes sideways
Anything is better than rolling over and letting the world go to shit like a loaded up semi with no brakes down a mountain
I don’t have any hope, but I’m sure as hell not going to roll over and take it.
Same reason I vote for least cruel of two cruel options.
Hope us a useless feeling. So is despair. Neither will do anything.
You only get one life, you happen to be fucking born in a time when everything is about to go to shit. Well too bad, you still get to live and make the best of it. I don’t understand people who are so hung up on things they can’t control. If earth was going to get cooked by a supernova in 40 years, I would still live a normal, healthy life and the only thing that would be different is when I die, everyone else does too. Changes nothing.
I value knowledge and wisdom as its own end, knowing it comes at the expense of contentment/comfort.
We all get to choose what we value most, and usually it comes at something else’s expense. I would rather stare into the void so long as the void is something true then be deluded, blissfully ignorant and happy when that happiness requires willful ignorance, another way of saying choosing not to know what is available to know.
I think a lot of the “don’t think about it” willful ignorance is a big reason us sapient beings inflict such cruelty on one another and sentient creatures that feel real pain so easily. Empathy, knowing everyone else has an inner world and feels as deeply as you do, is something you have to allow yourself to know and feel that most don’t care about so long as they “get theirs.”
What you’re describing is exactly why we will go extinct, legions of people choosing to take what they can without the detriment of really internalizing who will be hurt and how deeply by it. Those best at that skill, sociopaths, run this world and are the primary reason our species’ time is ending so they can “win,” feel accomplished, and ultimately scurry into their little luxury bunker tombs to sip expensive bourbon and reminisce about how high their ego scores got and how awesome it was while luxuriating several feet of concrete under the fruits of their own fine work until their heart gives out or one of their very expensive air/water/waste/hydroponic systems fail.
Humanity should have been humanity’s business, not finding “rational self-interest” bliss. But we made our choice and our bed. 🤷
If you can’t understand that there is a very, very wide difference between choosing to live in and appreciate the life you have, and self-centered apathy, then maybe you should revisit your own thoughts on wisdom.
In fact I would argue it’s the people without nuance who will doom our species, the idea that if you’re not one thing, you must be the other, black-and-white thinking rapidly becomes reactionary thinking which rapidly becomes superstition, fear and hate and an embrace of authoritarian reactionary leadership.
I value knowledge and wisdom as its own end, knowing it comes at the expense of contentment/comfort.
Wisdom is knowing how to use knowledge to make the world a better place. It seems like you value knowledge and look down on wisdom.
Whatever dent we make today will be visible in decades. This is Moses in the desert, people, if we do what’s right, we won’t see the promised land, but our descendants will
It’s hard not to feel nihilistic. Especially because even in the worst case scenario, it’s extremely unlikely that humans will become extinct. No, the worst case scenario is worse than that: the people who are most responsible for exacerbating the climate crisis will also be the ones with the resources available to shield themselves from the devastation. Even if society as we know it completely collapses, people will survive, and on our current trajectory, those people will be the worst of us.
For me, it’s less about saving the planet from the climate crisis, more about doing what little I can to maximise the likelihood that the people who inherit the earth aren’t the assholes who are willfully profiting from human misery — the ones who see themselves as the greater good.
Sometimes when I feel hopeless about humanity’s chance to liberate ourselves before climate catastrophe truly rolls in, I wonder whether it’d be better if humans were gone entirely. Maybe I’d rather see the world burn completely than for it to go to the disgusting people who make me ashamed to be human. Ultimately, I don’t believe this — I’d be dead already if I did. I don’t think my life matters all that much, but I’m not one of the people who would be deemed worth saving by the billionaires and autocrats, so I might as well stick around and fight for, and with all the other forsaken people to build things that are worth preserving; I figure that communities and solidarity will be even more crucial in the future than now.
A few years ago, my best friend was in a coma and on a ventilator for a few months, before eventually dying. The hardest part of that period was when we didn’t know whether he would survive or not, because I had to go about my life despite his absence, and yet I couldn’t grieve yet. That feels sort of like how climate change feels now. I want to grieve, but I can’t, because there’s still work to do. The earth isn’t dead yet, and unlike when my friend was in hospital, my actions do have an impact on the end outcome. The analogy breaks down though, because I did get the chance to grieve my friend’s death, there won’t be a checkpoint like that for me, because the world won’t end, per se. The only thing that’ll be ending is my ability to impact the world, when I’m too dead to grieve for anything.
I imagine my desire to see the world burn rather than hand it over to the undeserving probably stems from a desperate desire to grieve what has already been lost, and what has not yet been lost, but will be. I wish I could allow myself the chance to despair, because that can be healing, eventually, but there simply isn’t time to do that precisely because this isn’t about me and my grief. There’s still work to do, and I can’t let myself collapse now, lest even more of our descendants future is eroded. I feel hopeful for the future because I have to in order to survive long enough to give the people who come after me a better shot at building something I never could. It’s a tremendous amount of pressure though.
That would’ve been true in the 1970s,but we’ve hit too many run away effects. We could entirely stop all fossil fuels use tomorrow and we wouldn’t see a drop in co2ppm for longer than it would take for all things built by humans to decay.
But it wouldn’t increase by 3+ppm per year. It wouldn’t stop temperatures from rising for another 10-20 years, but at a slower pace that makes sub +2C possible.
It would still increase, just not as much… And no, it wouldn’t make sub 2c possible. we have a lot of methane currently suspended from the carbon cycle that is releasing more and more each year at current temperatures. On top of this the wildfires frequent at current temps release more carbon than the natural world sequesters each year.
This is without addressing anything with the ocean.
Bible stories aren’t real either.
But these kinds of myths, like those of other religious traditions, have some very important truths about humanity. In this case, it’s that it’s worth struggling for future generations. Early abolitionists might have not lived to see emancipation, but it was still worth it to fight the good fight.
I bought CO2 sensors for an Arduino project. The firmware is calibrated to 400 ppm. It is rapidly becoming in accurate because baseline keeps going up.
This is impossible to fix with capitalism. Capitalism demands infinite growth. We’re going to have to start working on antigravity now to escape this dead planet (the plot to interstellar).
Technically capitalism will probably have a maximum co2 level, probably far after we see how harmful it is and it starts negatively impacting it.
Fuck yes, straight into the wall full speed. Don’t even tap the brakes.
Why it should be otherwise? It’s not like we’re sentient creatures, capable of influencing our own habits. We’re just mindless biological automatons, oblivious to the fact that we’re marching to our horrible, painful and IMMINENT demise. It’s not like I care about that either. Give me entertainment, give me food and comfort and I won’t give a duck about future. Why give an effort of thought to such amorphous things when I have so much to enjoy in the present? Clearly, that would be a fool’s errand, and I’m not a fool.
We are… the rulers and manipulators of the world are not.
Nature/Climate has no Lobby.
Only positive thing I can see there is, that the last few years seem to be linear growth instead of the exponential before…
Removed by mod
Our masters prefer profit much much much more than planetary survival.
I got one word for you: Vote.
Corporations like BP push individual responsibility and personal carbon footprint[1] to try to neutralize you from achieving real policy gains which would have a much greater impact than your individual action. Time spent trying to convince people to vote for politicians who take climate change seriously is far more productive than time spent trying to educate people about their so-called carbon footprint. Of course we all play a part but seeing this chart it’s clear we need more action and that’s why I’m saying this.
[1] https://www.nprillinois.org/2023-12-18/how-big-oil-helped-push-the-idea-of-a-carbon-footprint
vote
Stopped reading right there.
No shit, right? Cuz, I mean, it’s clearly making a difference and all, just look at the graph! 🙃
I feel like I’m taking fucking crazy pills anymore, i swear
The whole point is that not enough people are voting. Look at how many people stayed home in the most recent US election.
What I’m trying to say if people wanted to make a big impact on climate change they should organize and rally around people who want to stop climate change.
I mean, you got a better, actionable, idea?
@Liz @Linedotdatdot relevant: https://awful.systems/post/3171972 “12 ways we can exploit fossil fuel industry vulnerabilities - even under Trump”
Hells yeah. Will read.
But you could have gotten to the NPR link.
politicians who take climate change seriously
lol
Incapable until directly affected
There is no dent at all. 3+ppm increase in CO2 is faster than 10 year average. Even as energy transition is progressing globally, war on Russia, forest fires and drought is going to make emissions sticky.
Removed by mod
Why don’t you post more than that? Earth exists much longer than this. There are data about Earth temperature for hundreds of milions of years, but it probably doesn’t fit your theory, eg: https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_width_620_original_image/public/graph-from-scott-wing-620px.png?itok=Jgi659bn
Has there ever been a period in Earth’s history where CO2 concentration in the atmosphere changed this quickly without being accompanied by mass extinctions?
Boy, got awful quiet all of a sudden, huh? 🤣😂 Bro is over there desperately trying to convince himself that nah, he could totally live on Venus as long as he only measures the surface temperature as an average over 40 billion years, give or take
The Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum is actually a great analogue for what we’re currently experiencing. Huge increase in global temperature over a relatively short period of time, probably due to runaway methane release. It went back to normal within a few hundred thousand years because of increased planktonic CO2 sequestration in the expanded tropical zone.
Humans came into existence during the ice caps phase.
The earth may have seen higher temperatures but we as a species or any of our humanoid ancestors have certainly not.
It’s disingenuous to frame the issue as just another hot period on earth
Take the rate of change by time of that curve and plot it, you’ll see a massive spike during today, And a line that bounces around zero for the rest of timeframe.
I think the point isn’t so much that Earth will heat up but that it will do so at a tremendous pace (in geological timescales). Nature can’t adapt so quickly. Basically it will lead to a mass extinction simply because of how quickly it is happening. Nature takes a longer time to genetically adapt to a changing environment than humans have even existed. That’s the problem.
do you have the CO2 data for that period as well
Who are you?
I always want to reply with that chart on every post about some magical new climate technology. Nothing really matters until we stop pulling carbon-based fuels out of the ground and lighting them on fire. That’s it. That’s the only thing that matters. Wind and solar are great but we’re still approving gas/coal/oil projects, at least globally.
It’s like with the water crisis in the American West. They guilt trip individuals into feeling bad about taking showers but it’s like 80% agriculture. And the majority of that is for animal feed. (I’m not saying everyone go vegan. That’s about as unrealistic as asking everyone to stop fucking to keep the population from growing. I’m saying don’t grow alfalfa in the fucking desert and then blame people who bathe.)
Nothing really matters until we stop pulling carbon-based fuels out of the ground and lighting them on fire.
I say it all the time. The only possible way to keep carbon from outside the carbon cycle from entering the carbon cycle is to stop taking carbon from outside the carbon cycle and putting it into the carbon cycle. No amount of coal plant filtration or growing trees or building wind farms will take carbon from inside the carbon cycle out of the carbon cycle.
400 ppm is too much, and the mechanisms for putting that carbon in the ground is gone and never coming back. The best we can possibly do is stop making it worse, and we won’t, because everyone wants to have a whole chicken in their fridge that’ll end up rotting because the availability of goods, whether we’ll actually consume them or not, is the most important thing in the world.
or building wind farms will take carbon from inside the carbon cycle out of the carbon cycle.
renewables does replace carbon cycle addition energy. We need energy. We don’t need nationalist or national oligarch energy.
You’re not wrong.
…but on the chicken part. Do people really routinely overstock on perishable items? Like, you can misjudge, but if you keep throwing food out because it’s gone bad, surely you’d adjust your purchasing habits?
You would think, but yes, a lot of people really do routinely buy more perishables than they need.
I owe my perspective on it to this essay. It doesn’t talk about money wasted when food goes bad, but it was the first thing that came to mind when I read it—I didn’t just pay $1.86 for those green onions, it also cost me $1.86 worth of green onions when I threw them away.
People don’t even notice how much money they waste on food they never ate because once that 2 lbs of bacon is in their fridge, they no longer assign a dollar value to it. When that bacon goes bad without even being opened, they didn’t lose $10, they lost 2 lbs of bacon, and the thought that enters their head is “I should get more bacon”
This is an excellent point. The energy transition is more accurately an energy addition. Some renewables on top of a still-increasing pile of burning fossil fuels.
Same with EVs. More are being sold every year but more ICE cars are being sold, too.
Until the fossil fuel industry actually shrinks, things are hopeless.
Seeing those alfalfa farms all over my desert state turns me into an extremist.
you mean this?
Some rich fuck: That looks like a sick place to build a VAC’d Golf course!
There are huge vegetarian populations though (think about India), app it’s not completely against human nature…
It’s not, but it takes something akin to a religious conversion to move large populations off meat.
People get really defensive about it. Like it’s kind of shocking. If you told me I had to stop eating almonds, and gave a good argument, I’d listen.
I’m “hopefully” that the upcoming food/water wars might do the trick. But not too hopeful…
where did you get this data? it can’t possibly be right
edit: it’s robbed of context. it’s only illustrating water use in the Colorado River basin, and even at that is being misleading: for instance, corn silage is a byproduct of grain corn. that water doesn’t magically re-enter the water table if we don’t feed it to cattle, but by feeding it to cattle, we are able to reclaim some of that water use.
It’s kinda bizarre how people are brainwashed to think that this isn’t a thing…
https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/devastating-water-footprint-animal-agriculture/163485/
I skimmed this and clicked a few of the references. it does use poore-nemecek 2018, so I’m skeptical of all of the other data that’s included. of course going through a piece the size that you linked to evaluate it for its scientific integrity is a project all onto itself and I’m at work at the moment. I encourage you to look at the methodology for each of the claims made in your link.
The NY Times. Here’s a gift link:
Edit: they cite this study in Nature Sustainability: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-0483-z
I found the nature article that is the source.
They said water in the American west then showed an image of water use. Critical thinking gooooooo
And for what?
For that.
Lines must go up.
society lacks a plan. wealth inequality has been going up since before 2000. but somehow, society just carried on. “if we work hard, i’m sure it will turn out alright.”
the current social divide (poor/rich, not dem/rep) was predictable long ago. what do you expect? 10 or 20 years ago would have been the perfect time to question the fundamentals of society and decide where society really wants to go - to develop in the long term.
now we’re here. now’s the 3rd best time to figure out how society should develop in the long term. think about it.
society lacks a plan.
This is the plan. Society just has no say.
If only you would’ve been here 10 - 20 years ago to impart upon us savages this great wisdom, oh master… We were but too simple then to think such BOLD, OBVIOUSLY COMPLETELY NOVEL thoughts on our own! Alack, what woe! 🙄
Not to burst your bubble there, junior, but class (read: socioeconomic) warfare didn’t just magically appear within the past couple of decades… Or centuries…
Do me a favor: Google the phrase “let them eat cake” or “proletariat” or “bourgeoisie” or… actually it might just be quicker for you to look up “world history prior to 2000” and at least skim a bit or something
WTF?
Sweet username.
ʘ‿ʘ
If only you would’ve been here 10 - 20 years ago to impart upon us savages this great wisdom, oh master… We were but too simple then to think such BOLD, OBVIOUSLY COMPLETELY NOVEL thoughts on our own! Alack, what woe! 🙄
LOL thank you for that.
Anyways, I’m well aware it wasn’t easy, just saying.
I don’t see a dent…
Even if there was, there is something like a 15 to 20 year lag time anyway before it would start to show up in data.
And that assumes we haven’t hit a tipping point into a runaway feedback loop.
And what’s even worse is that there is a masking effect from increased particulates in the air. Basically a physical cooling effect that is reducing the observable impact of climate change
You won’t. We’re combatting near-exponential growth. Each year we need to increase our efforts just to prevent worsening, let alone reversal.
This is because the largest accelerant is completely out of our control now. As the ice caps melt, desalinating our oceans, rich black soil is exposed. This soil absorbs and retains heat far more readily than the white ice, accelerating the warming of nearby ground ice. As bacteria begins to break down the newly thawed decaying organisms, large amounts of methane is released into the atmosphere. Methane traps 28x more heat than CO2, then it breaks down into CO2 and water after a decade where it continues to retain heat for centuries.
Not quite correct on methane’s half life. The 28x number is based on normal effect and breakdown over a century’s time. Over 20 years it’s around 84x more than CO2. Over the first few years it can be far over 100x. The caveat of using these numbers now is that they were based on a stable cycle of methane and its fixed-rate reducers in the atmosphere, something that has obviously changed.
The IPCC still sticks to the 28x number though, because it looks better on the spreadsheets. When they even include methane feedback loops, which to my knowledge they still haven’t really worked into the hard numbers. Why? Because we’re not very sure on how much is being released from year to year, as it’s hard to measure. So since the IPCC only works with known variables, they just leave it out of the equation. Makes sense, right? :clown face:
You’re right on the rest though. The best result is the methane breaks down quickly, into more CO2 and water vapor. Both GHGs, and the additional water adding to the water content in the atmosphere. Yet another feedback loop.
Wow. Thank you for the detailed correction!
The dent is atleast it’s stopped following an exponential growth curve
You can’t say that without plotting in log scale
No, it didn’t. Do a linear semilog plot.
Ok. So we can start the next year with some optimism.
Things are going to get a lot worse unfortunately.
