no shit eh? This seems so wildly obvious that i don't really know how to read it.
the Pacific North West hasn't seen significant snow in years, instead of our daily fall rain we've been getting awful downpours that flood everything followed by weeks of dry. snowpacks gone, reservoirs are running dry, fires are more and more devastating every year.
when are we going to acknowledge this catastrophe that we are barreling towards?
i can only hope that things start improving. between this and government im gonna lose it
> when are we going to acknowledge this catastrophe that we are barreling towards?
Not to be a total downer, but probably never unless all the Republicans in the US suddenly disappear? Like, remember who the "we" is in your question. Remember what policies they stand for and what methods they employ.
It's crazy because while the US is one of the biggest emitters per capita, it's also home of the brightest minds and have by far the most efficient research ad development capacity. So US govt. denial is a huge hit in our already tiny chances to save the planet from hell in the next 50yrs.
For the last full year where we have data (2025), China made slightly less electricity from coal than the one before. Unlike Trump, China's authoritarian leadership seem to have their eye on the ball, China is on Earth so if we trash Earth's climate that's China's climate too. But also, more so than the gas which powers so much of Europe and America's electricity generators, coal is obviously poison, even the unburned coal looks like a movie prop to signify "Mysterious evil"
The toxic waste from a gas power plant is a transparent gas that readily mixes with the atmosphere. Does it cause problems? Yes. But compared to "And here's a mountain of radioactive and highly toxic coal ash that's produced by our coal power plant" it's rather subtle.
It's important to remember how radical a change to electricity generation is. Apart from just new plants, you've got to keep the existing grid going, create new distribution infrastructure, reorganise supply chains and labour forces, and you'll also have old infrastructure aging out. It's not ideal, but a long term plan may involve building new fossil fuel generators in the immediate term
> a long term plan may involve building new fossil fuel generators in the immediate term
In all but some very extreme cases this is unaffordable because the fossil fuel generator is expensive to build and yet is increasingly stranded destroying any further value.
I already replied to this, but I think it's worth explaining why you can be building more coal plants and yet burning less coal.
Rather than try to guess from our high level data about China I'm going to explain more generally how this works.
Generators always have what's called a "Capacity factor" which tells us how much power is actually produced relative to the naive "nameplate capacity" the specified maximum power output of that generator.
For a nuclear power station maybe you run for 48 days straight at 100% output and then you spend 2 days shutting down, refuelling and spinning it back up, so that's 96% capacity factor. That's very high, only need a few maintenance problems and you would not hit those numbers, real world nukes maybe trend to 90%
Coal needs more maintenance downtime but historically you might expect 80% factor, say you have 1000 400MW coal power stations, that's theoretically 400GW of power but because of 80% capacity factor figure you've got more like 320GW
Renewables are free, so increasingly it makes no sense to run a fuel consuming generator when there's free electricity available. However both PV and wind are intermittent to some degree, it's not sunny at night and sometimes it's just not windy.
So you might build 500 more of those 400MW power stations, at your 80% capacity factor that's 160GW of new electricity supply for a total of 480GW. But actually your plan is to run them just as hard but less often, for 50% capacity factor across the entire fleet, an average of 200 + 100 = 300GW. Over a year your total output from coal generation is down, but your fleet of coal power stations grew enormously, you just don't run them as often.
At midnight with dead calm, those power stations are running pretty hard, belching out far more CO2 than in the past. But on a breezy but clear summer afternoon most of them are idle because there's free electricity from every solar and wind farm. So it averages out as less coal, yet there are more coal power stations, at least for a time.
Cheap storage starts to eat into this. A coal station which runs for an average of 18 hours per day is fine (75% capacity factor), one which runs for six hours per day (25% factor) is an economic encumbrance, six hours per week (<4%) is a reason to mothball the oldest or worst stations and give the others more work.
For decades the US has managed to be the most powerful economy in the world while taking in tons of these immigrants. Rejecting them is likely to have a negative impact. Xenophobia comes at a cost.
In that same time period we discovered global warming and ocean acidification as well as developed better ways of getting power.
The only downside we've discovered for having an accepting immigration policy is xenophobic backlash.
I don't know what point you're trying to make with that article. Less immigrants is causing hardship for their higher-ed system. How does that make your point?
Maybe step down from that ultra high horse a bit and smell the proverbial coffee - let say we do a public vote, I would trust say population of Switzerland 100000000x more than US one on any decent vote. Chinese will take over US in those aspects you write, if they already haven't done so.
US population voted trump, lets not forget that. We (rest of the world, >95% of mankind) will never forget that, and the fact that he still has >5% support tells everybody all they need to know about current US and what to expect from it in future. All that says more than any wishful thinking that feels good and fuzzy warm inside.
Considering the open shenanigans they’ve been trying on the voting systems, it’s reasonable to believe they have been doing shenanigans the public hadn’t known about. The machinery of vote suppression is well known to these Jim Crow loving fascists.
Which is why it's a bummer that the last good communicator on the topic was probably Al Gore. Lots of great science that I'm happy to see done, but there's nobody out there doing a very good job of making people care.
I think Al Gore did more harm than good. He made himw lf the face of global warming and it helped spark a partisan backlash. There was a time when Republicans were not particularly skeptical of global warming. That shifted as climate change and Al Gore became more and more synonymous in the public consciousness.
Is that Al Gore's responsibility or is the Republican's responsibility of their policies being basically "anything that Democrats do is bad and therefore we oppose it"?
I don't think it's his responsibility, but that was the outcome. I would say most of the responsibility lies with the fossil fuel industry and their PR agencies who funded propaganda that took advantage of the situation.
There's evidence of global warming. There's no evidence of a climate catastrophe. Personally, I'm not sure I would even notice climate change if it weren't for all the news about it. If there was a catastrophe, why is humanity steadily progressing on every metric? We've already 1.4°C of warming in...
The very first graph you cited shows that we've had such a low number of natural disasters in the 21st century outside of Earthquakes, and now we're starting to tick back up with non-Earthquake deaths.
You would think, with all of the advancements in medicine, technology, and infrastructure, we'd be continuing to see improvements. Instead, it's ticking back up. Why do you think that is?
There's evidence we're driving toward that brick wall at 100 mph, but there's no evidence we've hit the wall yet, so we don't need to do anything?
The objections to climate change are transparently ideological. Admitting it is real is admitting certain ideologies are flawed, and people like you would rather deny reality than abandon their parasitic memes.
You could say that about any doomsday prediction. What concrete evidence is there that a "brick wall" is actually imminent?
The first ~1.4C of warming coincided with the greatest surge in human development, poverty reduction, and technological progress in history. For most of it, we didn't even realize the climate was warming... To me, this suggests that economic development massively outweighed any negative impact that warming might have caused.
I don't object to climate change. I object to the idea that the current moderate warming is catastrophic. It's not an ideological position, other than placing a high value on human progress.
I'm also not saying we shouldn't do anything about it. I just don't think we should do anything about it that would significantly hamper economic development. Fossil fuels are on their way out anyways, in large part due to economic development and economic forces.
> The first ~1.4C of warming coincided with the greatest surge in human development, poverty reduction, and technological progress in history. For most of it, we didn't even realize the climate was warming... To me, this suggests that economic development massively outweighed any negative impact that warming might have caused.
It may also be a case of borrowing from the future. It's kind of like blowing your yearly budget in a month, it'll be spectacular until the equally spectacular crash -- and if you're unclear what your budget is in the first place, you won't see it coming either.
I mean, it's not like we're sophisticated about it. We get a glut of energy, we burn the energy as fast as we can. This provides incredible benefits because energy is basically magic, but it's not a strategy. It never has been. We don't act the way we do because we know what we're doing, we act that way because it's compulsive. Anyone who compulsively drives at full throttle in a straight line without looking ahead is living in a perpetually shrinking sliver of probability that the road is infinitely straight. They are bound to crash eventually.
> There's evidence of global warming. There's no evidence of a climate catastrophe.
This is a ridiculous requirement to suggest. CO2 lasts around 100 years, waiting until your satisfied of "evidence of catastrophe" is like waiting for evidence that a car crash has fatalities before considering swerving.
You are suggesting that the impending catastrophe will be like a car crash? Everything will be just fine and then suddenly catastrophe? No warning signs? Like an asteroid impact? I'm just not seeing the mechanism behind this.
There isn't, right? Their gameplan is to state a need for evidence to delay, delay, delay while they and their backers enrich themselves at the cost of everyone else.
Decarbonization, reduction of produce (spending less), trash collection and reduction, less plastics… and hoping for the best that mankind wont mess it up more til 2050 - then the following 100 years (after 2050) shouldn’t be so hell as it seems so now…
Unfortunately we as people cannot see our older ones so future planning is not so easy…
Guns and ammo was the conclusion how to prepare for the future - in the book “10 Billion” by Stephen Emmott.
Law of conservation of energy can be applied here as well. So you can’t expect something else if you produce and consume more.
I don’t dispute capitalism and democracy.
Just trying to figure out what I (as person) really need.
Every weekend travelling by plane just to experience something else?
Ordering some stuff across the globe from Temu, Aliexpress just because it is cheap(er)?
Eating e.g. tuna because it is healthy that had to be transported around the globe?
Drinking wine from South Africa because I don’t like Californian? (Blind tests by Wine Spectator magazine confirm that even a sommelier doesn’t recognize cheap from expensive ones.)
Global export-import statistics is staggering… just a few: all metals, honey, fish, vegetables from Spain, avocados from Peru, almonds from California, cheaper than local milk transported across Europe , bananas from everywhere you can imagine… supply and demand - a lot of people have a much more money.
Vessel and plane trackers show so many vehicles moving around that I wonder how whales can handle this traffic.
There is chemical and industry that is real spin doctors.
(Almost) everyone wants to have house, car, cheap everything, travel everywhere. Those who can’t afford do everything to become rich.
Wealth is good. Plundering to get more money not so much. And mankind plunders like there is no tomorrow. All the CSR, circular economy etc is nice but brainwashing and stuff for distraction so people could feel better.
But we should. This is a taboo topic but pretending that these consequences are either disconnected from capitalism or that capitalism is some natural law of the universe that should never be challenged is, for lack of a better word, delusional.
These consequences are inherent to capitalism because people benefiting from it demand infinite growth and nobody is incentivized to care about the environment. People who care about it get outcompeted by those who don't in ruthless pursuit of "efficiency".
We can try to regulate it to the point that people wouldn't call it capitalism anymore but the nature of a system where the only incentive is maximizing profit will always have a natural tendency to harm the environment, so it should be disputed.
I personally don’t think either communism or capitalism will exist in 10 years from now. We are entering a period of total upheaval, where the very concept of a nation state has become obsolete. I expect global theocracy where robots and ai (incl nanobots) clean up the mess we made in this world, freedom becomes more limited, but abundance and security increases. There will be a renewed focus on community and human connection rather than the run away obsessive focus on materialism and innovation at a pace human beings cannot adapt to. Human labor, cognition, natural resources and policy have always been the elements that dictate whether a nation can develop into a first world country. Labor and cognition are respectively solved by robots and AI.
Leadership by the Tokugawa shogunate saved the forests of Japan. Leadership saved the ozone layer. Leadership can save the climate, although civil war(s) maybe necessary to overthrow corrupt elites who put us all at risk.
The thesis: Climate change is strengthening El Niño clearly uses the word "is".
Everything else is evidence, both for and against the thesis subject to interpretation.
Here it's "Something we can see in coral records correlates with what we'd expect given the thesis"
The study doesn’t prove climate change is the culprit. But because the intensification coincides with rapid postindustrial warming and exceeds El Niño’s natural variability, the authors argue that human-driven warming is the leading explanation.
These observed correlations may be directly or indirectly linked to the thesis, or (and this does happen) they may be an unrelated coincidence.
As the weight of evidence in favour of a thesis builds, so does the confidence in the thesis itself.
In this case, even the authors seems to agree that the finding is not "consensus-level" yet.
That being said, consensus would not necessarily settle the thing.
Even when the worldwide scientific community reaches a consensus and accepts using plain language (as in "It _is_ unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land" [1]), you still have a number of politicians begging to differ. [2]
This is quite sad, so I've felt a bit guilty for enjoying the summer we've had in upstate NY. Local farmers seem happy even though spring was a bit wetter than optimal. The corn is looking very good and the apple crop promises to be large.
which is also totally fine, like unless you are running for president what can YOU as a single person do besides trying to do the right thing and living with the outcome of whatever whims of someone in charge will do.
People and ecosystems adapt to the status quo. The problem with climate change is not the temperature per se (earth has been hotter in the past) but the rate of change that makes adaption very difficult.
Yeah russia is very happy with global climate change for example. It doesn't change the underlying fact that long term it can be a brutal challenge for humanity and higher life on Earth.
Maybe something good will come out of it, even dumbest magas et al realizing this ain't right, but I am no longer having any hope for the dumber part of the spectrum of mankind, they seem to be manageable only via emotions.
Nothing life overall can't handle , it handled much worse situations (till sun scorches it all to the cinder in a +-billion year). Our current civilization, or mankind in general are much more finicky though.
Your post made me think about something that has circled my mind for a while.
I grew up with an anxious mother and looking back on it what "mattered" to her (admittedly I don't think she can help it at all) is the feeling of anxiety itself. In other words whatever is happening she'll feel anxious about that. The "event" would just be an excuse to feel the way she was anyway going to feel.
You would think that a break for anxiety - a moment of peace and calm - would be welcome - but it's almost a crime. I've noticed this with other anxious people as well that they often don't want to not feel anxious because that feeling is somehow problematic. I think I used to be like that too.
Why am I sharing this? I think your post is such an honest take on something. You feel good about something you should absolutely feel good about (nice weather) but the zeitgeist is that you should feel anxious about it.
This squares away with something I noticed - separately from the science and mitigation, some people are only able to speak about climate in tones of anxiety - worst case predictions will definitely come through, everyone else is criminally stupid and will cause us to die, etc - and they are allergic to any other time of speaking about the issue. So for example any suggestion that there might be a milder path or that the estimates are a range etc is not met with relief but with vitriol.
I apologize again for using your post as a prompt to put this in words - but what I read in your words is the pressure to feel anxious about something that you just aren't anxious about (hi from Vermont btw same great weather here) and I think this "pressure to feel anxious/guilty" is a byproduct of those who have grabbed on to climate as an "event" that justifies their own anxious feelings. Again that's separate from what's actually going on - I am commenting on anxiety not climate.
Sometimes I feel the same, and then sometimes I wanted if that "moving away feeling" is the last of the old breed who are hanging onto power, maybe the next step after this massive wave of ultra right wing stupidity is something much brighter ?
The western world has more or less come together to reduce emissions. If you look at US for instance emissions are down in abs terms. Not relative to gdp or per capital but total emissions. This holds even if you adjust for trade.
The “problem” is there will always be independent upcoming nations like china and India that don’t really care to make sacrifices for collective goals. Their people are finally experiencing materially better lives and that comes w energy consumption.
This will ultimately be solved by markets and technology. People 100y ago were concerned about horse crap flooding the streets and what solved that wasn’t some agreement to limit horses but the invention of the automobile. Same will happen here and it’s already beginning to happen
I'm not sure China's emissions can be considered a separate thing when the rest of the world relies on them for plenty of manufacturing. The West is still a massive emitter per capita.
I'm thinking of the Ottomans capturing Constantinople. Very much paraphrasing: Since Ottomans had a massive cannon made with new technology. Since Constantinople hadn't hired the cannon inventor. Since Constantinople was poor. Since it was sacked by other christians in the crusades previously. So it was self afflicted by christians.
One can see the climate crisis like that. Only global accords work, otherwise self-limiting CO2 is mostly sacrificing one's economy while others do better. USA will block all international climate accords. Because the president and half of politicians acts like climate change is not real. Because a whole party thinks that. Because voters think that. Because the media tells them that. Because the media treats fossil company propaganda like science. Because it's so cheap for a handful of companies to corrupt media or politics.
What is the epistemology of the majority of voters... scandals, conspiracy theories, UFO:s. What shows on TV or on your feeds. I assume it's child's play for some non-western actor to cause constant infighting in the west, causing billions in economic losses or destruction of alliances. For whole planetary level issues, who's the opponent, working in the shadows? Maybe, after all, the aliens are already here...
With climate change, it seems like poor people will die faster from 'climate poverty.' Science clearly points to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change, but certain groups frame it as just another natural cycle of the Earth.
When I was younger, I learned that science was something pure. But as I've grown older, it seems like science is really about how it's used—and who gets to use it.
The truth is, the more a developed country is positioned at the consumer end, the more inescapable these problems become in our lives. Our world relies on outsourcing the production of manufactured and consumer goods to developing nations. But separate from that structural reality, vested interests refusing to acknowledge their faults is an entirely different issue.
Furthermore, I disagree with the radical ecological claims in the link. Humans might be developing technology that ends up destroying the public commons we call nature. However, I firmly believe there must be a better path to coexistence.
Was snorkeling this winter in some tropical waters in asia and noticed how dead everything looked, compared to the same place 20 years ago. When I asked about it, the locals said "It's all from the same El Niño in 2015. It all died the same year".
So there are vast areas of Coral that used to be fantastic in 2014 and which is dead since the 2015-16 season. It takes many decades to grow back if it ever does. And now we're about to have another.
Yes, I totally agree with you. I had the same experience, the coral cover has decreased significantly over the last 1–2 decade, and the EL Nino is just accelerating it.
I think there's a certain cohort of people who, quite literally, just want to watch the world burn for whatever reason, be it greed or simply misanthropy. Unfortunately they're the ones that seem to grasp for the reins of power the world over. It'd probably help if we didn't allow boomers any power whatsoever, considering they're not the ones that have to live with the consequences of their decisions and they hardly seem wiser than most.
I have been door knocking in a swing county in Wisconsin, and the first question we ask is, "what is the top issue you care about?" I've had one person say "the environment", and a couple have said, "what's happening in America right now." Almost everyone else answers "cost of living". So if you're waiting for things to change, you will be waiting a while.
Historically, something like 3.5 percent of the population need to be really engaged to make change happen, and the US isn't there right now, because we're all on our computers. The election coming up is an important one, so if you want to do something, start door knocking, become an election judge, sign up to be an observer at the polls, donate money. Indivisible is doing a lot of great, local, on-the-ground stuff, join your local chapter.
The reason so few people care about climate change is that so few people truly understand it. They can see the grocery and housing bills, but CO2 in the atmosphere is some sort of invisible bogeyman to them, even though it’s a catastrophe waiting to happen.
I think we gotta get people to see past the false dichotomy: part of their increased cost of living is due to climate change:
- your home insurance is more expensive b/c fire/hurricane/etc risk is worse in your state
- and you probably don't have flood insurance but the risks there are worse too
- your electricity bill is worse b/c you're using AC more b/c it's hotter
- climate change does have healthcare impacts, including expanded geographic range of a bunch of vector-borne illnesses, as well as acute issues during heat events. Even if you're not directly one of these patients, your health insurance costs will increase in part due to these risks.
- replacing key infrastructure which is damaged by extreme weather is expensive
- during extreme weather events, your ability to earn may be disrupted
- and every business you spend at also has increased costs due to the same factors, which they pass on to you
It turns out that multiple generations of emitting without paying attention to the externalities has created literal costs that we _all_ now bear, and these costs will continue to increase.
I’ve come to understand the inequality crisis (which manifests itself as a cost-of-living crisis for most people) as one of the root causes for the poly-crisis we are living through.
For climate change, I can totally understand how a household struggling to feed their kids will reject messaging of the form „oh and btw you also need to stop driving your car and heat your home lest the planet dies“. Of course they will revolt against that.
To me, fundamentally, the west MUST solve the inequality crisis first before we can ever hope of solving any of the other problems. People need slack to care about the environment, their neighbors, peace, etc.
And the other aspect of it is fairness - people rightfully look at the top, say „well the billionaires are jetting all around the globe and no one gives a fuck, why should I cut my holidays?“
We need to fix inequality first, and I project that most other issues we have today will magically resolve themselves.
I did a bunch of door-knocking, for Obama and Clinton, and it didn't feel like I was doing any good. Everybody had long since made up their minds.
It's not like these are hard choices. Either you view the differences as stark and obvious, or you think that it's all the same (and I'm never going to persuade you otherwise). I don't think I garnered even a single vote, and quite a few expressed aggravation.
There are still swing voters and it is worth fighting for them! Also helpful to just remind people they need to vote. Typically, there is less turnout in midterms.
It would be easier to support making changes to our lifestyles to protect our future if the climate change alarmists weren't so bad about making outlandish predictions of doom.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 33.5 ms ] threadwhen are we going to acknowledge this catastrophe that we are barreling towards?
i can only hope that things start improving. between this and government im gonna lose it
Not to be a total downer, but probably never unless all the Republicans in the US suddenly disappear? Like, remember who the "we" is in your question. Remember what policies they stand for and what methods they employ.
China seems to be winning now. And lead in solar, and robots.
>And lead in solar, and robots.
And new coal, don't forget about that.
For the last full year where we have data (2025), China made slightly less electricity from coal than the one before. Unlike Trump, China's authoritarian leadership seem to have their eye on the ball, China is on Earth so if we trash Earth's climate that's China's climate too. But also, more so than the gas which powers so much of Europe and America's electricity generators, coal is obviously poison, even the unburned coal looks like a movie prop to signify "Mysterious evil"
The toxic waste from a gas power plant is a transparent gas that readily mixes with the atmosphere. Does it cause problems? Yes. But compared to "And here's a mountain of radioactive and highly toxic coal ash that's produced by our coal power plant" it's rather subtle.
In all but some very extreme cases this is unaffordable because the fossil fuel generator is expensive to build and yet is increasingly stranded destroying any further value.
The U.S. reduced it by 37%, while increasing output by ... 12%.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?tab=line&...
Also talking into considering the insane wealth disparity and the current rate of change, "coal" is just ragebait.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?tab=line&...
Rather than try to guess from our high level data about China I'm going to explain more generally how this works.
Generators always have what's called a "Capacity factor" which tells us how much power is actually produced relative to the naive "nameplate capacity" the specified maximum power output of that generator.
For a nuclear power station maybe you run for 48 days straight at 100% output and then you spend 2 days shutting down, refuelling and spinning it back up, so that's 96% capacity factor. That's very high, only need a few maintenance problems and you would not hit those numbers, real world nukes maybe trend to 90%
Coal needs more maintenance downtime but historically you might expect 80% factor, say you have 1000 400MW coal power stations, that's theoretically 400GW of power but because of 80% capacity factor figure you've got more like 320GW
Renewables are free, so increasingly it makes no sense to run a fuel consuming generator when there's free electricity available. However both PV and wind are intermittent to some degree, it's not sunny at night and sometimes it's just not windy.
So you might build 500 more of those 400MW power stations, at your 80% capacity factor that's 160GW of new electricity supply for a total of 480GW. But actually your plan is to run them just as hard but less often, for 50% capacity factor across the entire fleet, an average of 200 + 100 = 300GW. Over a year your total output from coal generation is down, but your fleet of coal power stations grew enormously, you just don't run them as often.
At midnight with dead calm, those power stations are running pretty hard, belching out far more CO2 than in the past. But on a breezy but clear summer afternoon most of them are idle because there's free electricity from every solar and wind farm. So it averages out as less coal, yet there are more coal power stations, at least for a time.
Cheap storage starts to eat into this. A coal station which runs for an average of 18 hours per day is fine (75% capacity factor), one which runs for six hours per day (25% factor) is an economic encumbrance, six hours per week (<4%) is a reason to mothball the oldest or worst stations and give the others more work.
Guess who is the main target of a purge in the US now.
The same immigrants that Europe, Canada are now rejecting and Asia never even allowed.
Now, for those same decades was the US also using gas powered cars and coal fired plants? Sounds like we need to continue using those too!
Also, wait till you see how badly the Canadian economy is poised to collapse: https://www.universityworldnews.com/post-mobile.php?story=20...
The only downside we've discovered for having an accepting immigration policy is xenophobic backlash.
I don't know what point you're trying to make with that article. Less immigrants is causing hardship for their higher-ed system. How does that make your point?
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/21/international-student-enroll...
Like... Almost every single European during the XIXth and XXth century?
You think the Germans and Italians and whatnot were all educated middle-class who moved to the US because it seemed "fun"?
US population voted trump, lets not forget that. We (rest of the world, >95% of mankind) will never forget that, and the fact that he still has >5% support tells everybody all they need to know about current US and what to expect from it in future. All that says more than any wishful thinking that feels good and fuzzy warm inside.
I'm appalled that there still seems to be the need to find _evidence_ for this.
Probably the last person who was able to effect positive change was Nixon.
https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:sfhb7ll...
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You would think, with all of the advancements in medicine, technology, and infrastructure, we'd be continuing to see improvements. Instead, it's ticking back up. Why do you think that is?
The objections to climate change are transparently ideological. Admitting it is real is admitting certain ideologies are flawed, and people like you would rather deny reality than abandon their parasitic memes.
The first ~1.4C of warming coincided with the greatest surge in human development, poverty reduction, and technological progress in history. For most of it, we didn't even realize the climate was warming... To me, this suggests that economic development massively outweighed any negative impact that warming might have caused.
I don't object to climate change. I object to the idea that the current moderate warming is catastrophic. It's not an ideological position, other than placing a high value on human progress.
I'm also not saying we shouldn't do anything about it. I just don't think we should do anything about it that would significantly hamper economic development. Fossil fuels are on their way out anyways, in large part due to economic development and economic forces.
It may also be a case of borrowing from the future. It's kind of like blowing your yearly budget in a month, it'll be spectacular until the equally spectacular crash -- and if you're unclear what your budget is in the first place, you won't see it coming either.
I mean, it's not like we're sophisticated about it. We get a glut of energy, we burn the energy as fast as we can. This provides incredible benefits because energy is basically magic, but it's not a strategy. It never has been. We don't act the way we do because we know what we're doing, we act that way because it's compulsive. Anyone who compulsively drives at full throttle in a straight line without looking ahead is living in a perpetually shrinking sliver of probability that the road is infinitely straight. They are bound to crash eventually.
This is a ridiculous requirement to suggest. CO2 lasts around 100 years, waiting until your satisfied of "evidence of catastrophe" is like waiting for evidence that a car crash has fatalities before considering swerving.
Unfortunately we as people cannot see our older ones so future planning is not so easy…
Guns and ammo was the conclusion how to prepare for the future - in the book “10 Billion” by Stephen Emmott.
I don’t dispute capitalism and democracy.
Just trying to figure out what I (as person) really need.
Every weekend travelling by plane just to experience something else?
Ordering some stuff across the globe from Temu, Aliexpress just because it is cheap(er)?
Eating e.g. tuna because it is healthy that had to be transported around the globe?
Drinking wine from South Africa because I don’t like Californian? (Blind tests by Wine Spectator magazine confirm that even a sommelier doesn’t recognize cheap from expensive ones.)
Global export-import statistics is staggering… just a few: all metals, honey, fish, vegetables from Spain, avocados from Peru, almonds from California, cheaper than local milk transported across Europe , bananas from everywhere you can imagine… supply and demand - a lot of people have a much more money.
Vessel and plane trackers show so many vehicles moving around that I wonder how whales can handle this traffic.
There is chemical and industry that is real spin doctors.
(Almost) everyone wants to have house, car, cheap everything, travel everywhere. Those who can’t afford do everything to become rich.
Wealth is good. Plundering to get more money not so much. And mankind plunders like there is no tomorrow. All the CSR, circular economy etc is nice but brainwashing and stuff for distraction so people could feel better.
But we should. This is a taboo topic but pretending that these consequences are either disconnected from capitalism or that capitalism is some natural law of the universe that should never be challenged is, for lack of a better word, delusional.
These consequences are inherent to capitalism because people benefiting from it demand infinite growth and nobody is incentivized to care about the environment. People who care about it get outcompeted by those who don't in ruthless pursuit of "efficiency".
We can try to regulate it to the point that people wouldn't call it capitalism anymore but the nature of a system where the only incentive is maximizing profit will always have a natural tendency to harm the environment, so it should be disputed.
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Arguments based on human nature are nearly always awful.
...
It's human nature to care about yourself, but it's also human nature to care about others.
Different norms develop around different aspects of our nature.
You can't then use human nature to explain why it's okay to violently enforce social norms related to property,
but an unworkable injustice to violently enforce social norms related to charity.
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While it might be human nature to consider the wood I chop mine, and the wood you chop yours,
it's probably not human nature to consider the wood as belonging to an entirely made-up legal entity
that neither planted the trees nor cut them down.
The fact of this weird arrangement, which goes against the self-interest of every woodsman,
does seem natural to a lot of people, points to the core of the problem with appeals to human nature.
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The human nature being appealed to is shaped by the system it's being used to defend.
The thesis: Climate change is strengthening El Niño clearly uses the word "is".
Everything else is evidence, both for and against the thesis subject to interpretation.
Here it's "Something we can see in coral records correlates with what we'd expect given the thesis"
These observed correlations may be directly or indirectly linked to the thesis, or (and this does happen) they may be an unrelated coincidence.As the weight of evidence in favour of a thesis builds, so does the confidence in the thesis itself.
That being said, consensus would not necessarily settle the thing.
Even when the worldwide scientific community reaches a consensus and accepts using plain language (as in "It _is_ unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land" [1]), you still have a number of politicians begging to differ. [2]
[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/summary-for-polic....
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/de-pire-en-pire-sur-france-5-... (Sorry, fr-fr)
Maybe something good will come out of it, even dumbest magas et al realizing this ain't right, but I am no longer having any hope for the dumber part of the spectrum of mankind, they seem to be manageable only via emotions.
Nothing life overall can't handle , it handled much worse situations (till sun scorches it all to the cinder in a +-billion year). Our current civilization, or mankind in general are much more finicky though.
I grew up with an anxious mother and looking back on it what "mattered" to her (admittedly I don't think she can help it at all) is the feeling of anxiety itself. In other words whatever is happening she'll feel anxious about that. The "event" would just be an excuse to feel the way she was anyway going to feel.
You would think that a break for anxiety - a moment of peace and calm - would be welcome - but it's almost a crime. I've noticed this with other anxious people as well that they often don't want to not feel anxious because that feeling is somehow problematic. I think I used to be like that too.
Why am I sharing this? I think your post is such an honest take on something. You feel good about something you should absolutely feel good about (nice weather) but the zeitgeist is that you should feel anxious about it.
This squares away with something I noticed - separately from the science and mitigation, some people are only able to speak about climate in tones of anxiety - worst case predictions will definitely come through, everyone else is criminally stupid and will cause us to die, etc - and they are allergic to any other time of speaking about the issue. So for example any suggestion that there might be a milder path or that the estimates are a range etc is not met with relief but with vitriol.
I apologize again for using your post as a prompt to put this in words - but what I read in your words is the pressure to feel anxious about something that you just aren't anxious about (hi from Vermont btw same great weather here) and I think this "pressure to feel anxious/guilty" is a byproduct of those who have grabbed on to climate as an "event" that justifies their own anxious feelings. Again that's separate from what's actually going on - I am commenting on anxiety not climate.
And yet, every day, I see us getting removed further and further away from it.
The “problem” is there will always be independent upcoming nations like china and India that don’t really care to make sacrifices for collective goals. Their people are finally experiencing materially better lives and that comes w energy consumption.
This will ultimately be solved by markets and technology. People 100y ago were concerned about horse crap flooding the streets and what solved that wasn’t some agreement to limit horses but the invention of the automobile. Same will happen here and it’s already beginning to happen
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-states
One can see the climate crisis like that. Only global accords work, otherwise self-limiting CO2 is mostly sacrificing one's economy while others do better. USA will block all international climate accords. Because the president and half of politicians acts like climate change is not real. Because a whole party thinks that. Because voters think that. Because the media tells them that. Because the media treats fossil company propaganda like science. Because it's so cheap for a handful of companies to corrupt media or politics.
What is the epistemology of the majority of voters... scandals, conspiracy theories, UFO:s. What shows on TV or on your feeds. I assume it's child's play for some non-western actor to cause constant infighting in the west, causing billions in economic losses or destruction of alliances. For whole planetary level issues, who's the opponent, working in the shadows? Maybe, after all, the aliens are already here...
When I was younger, I learned that science was something pure. But as I've grown older, it seems like science is really about how it's used—and who gets to use it.
https://publish.uwo.ca/~jbell/univ.pdf
Otoh I think Grothendieck's point would be stronger today if his tribe of scientists are expanded or even replaced by "programmers"
Fossil fuelled Data Centers might soon replace shipping as top CO2 producer, given that shipping might even be peaking
Hackerism as the New Universal Church? Then you can hope to go to a (emotionally) warm place on Sunday, everyday
Furthermore, I disagree with the radical ecological claims in the link. Humans might be developing technology that ends up destroying the public commons we call nature. However, I firmly believe there must be a better path to coexistence.
Climate science is pretty close to a "pure" hard science. What's not pure are the sloppy geopolitical and socio-economic predictions derived from it.
So there are vast areas of Coral that used to be fantastic in 2014 and which is dead since the 2015-16 season. It takes many decades to grow back if it ever does. And now we're about to have another.
Historically, something like 3.5 percent of the population need to be really engaged to make change happen, and the US isn't there right now, because we're all on our computers. The election coming up is an important one, so if you want to do something, start door knocking, become an election judge, sign up to be an observer at the polls, donate money. Indivisible is doing a lot of great, local, on-the-ground stuff, join your local chapter.
If I drive my car around today I contribute an infinitesimally small amount to the climate change problem while enjoying tremendous utility.
- your home insurance is more expensive b/c fire/hurricane/etc risk is worse in your state
- your electricity bill is worse b/c you're using AC more b/c it's hotter- climate change does have healthcare impacts, including expanded geographic range of a bunch of vector-borne illnesses, as well as acute issues during heat events. Even if you're not directly one of these patients, your health insurance costs will increase in part due to these risks.
- replacing key infrastructure which is damaged by extreme weather is expensive
- during extreme weather events, your ability to earn may be disrupted
- and every business you spend at also has increased costs due to the same factors, which they pass on to you
It turns out that multiple generations of emitting without paying attention to the externalities has created literal costs that we _all_ now bear, and these costs will continue to increase.
For climate change, I can totally understand how a household struggling to feed their kids will reject messaging of the form „oh and btw you also need to stop driving your car and heat your home lest the planet dies“. Of course they will revolt against that.
To me, fundamentally, the west MUST solve the inequality crisis first before we can ever hope of solving any of the other problems. People need slack to care about the environment, their neighbors, peace, etc.
And the other aspect of it is fairness - people rightfully look at the top, say „well the billionaires are jetting all around the globe and no one gives a fuck, why should I cut my holidays?“
We need to fix inequality first, and I project that most other issues we have today will magically resolve themselves.
It's not like these are hard choices. Either you view the differences as stark and obvious, or you think that it's all the same (and I'm never going to persuade you otherwise). I don't think I garnered even a single vote, and quite a few expressed aggravation.
Is your experience different?
Maybe regarding any submission with certain keywords as an opportunity to spout your pre-existing opinions isn't really a very good use of this forum.
https://www.breitbart.com/environment/2019/09/20/nolte-clima...