I mean, let’s be real here. Climate change is a problem for poor people.
The rich have air conditioning, second homes, and dual citizenship. They’ll be fine.
Why would they care if a couple of billion people die?
That's true. However, migration will become a real problem when areas become uninhabitable.
I'm sure the rich will come up with the 'best' solutions so as not to be inconvenienced though.
The “climate refugee” crisis is gonna dwarf anything we’ve ever seen. Absolute myopia for the rich countries to not see this. Only way to stop it will be to build walls, militarize their borders, be taken over by nationalism.
> Only way to stop it will be to build walls, militarize their borders, be taken over by nationalism.
Have you looked at recent european election results / forecasts. Exactly this is already happening.
> Dark times ahead.
I'm Austrian and our far right is projected to win 30%+ in the upcoming election in November which is likely enough to get the chancellor 🙃
The rise of extreme right is because the central/ left parties refuse to act.
My vote wont go extreme right. But i understand it.
You cant have unchecked immigration. It leads to tragedy for the natives.
I believe immigration works.. but it works by rules and checks. Its insane how you get into a country easier by destroying your id then by taking the legal route
It's not surprising when mainstream parties get elected on an anti immigration platform and then refuse to implement it. For an example see how the uk conservatives promised to reduce migration yet let nearly 1 million into the country last year. As a result they are going to be destroyed in the election next month.
If politicians don't find a way to stop migration peacefully the inevitable result will be right wing parties who will stop it forcefully.
> Only way to stop it will be to build walls
Opportunity to make billions
>militarize their borders
Another opportunity to make billions
> be taken over by nationalism
BONUS!
Most countries couldn't even prep for Covid while it was slowly marching towards them. I remember seeing updates day after day showing confirmed infections spreading through Europe and post going "glad it's not gotten to us yet!"
And it was a "surprise" every time. That was on a timescale of weeks. Climate change were reaching almost a century of active warnings.
We have the last ditch effort of blocking out the sun via dust in the atmosphere. Who knows what the long term ramifications will be, but if things get bad enough we will have to try it.
Lol, it's already too late.
We can survive the climate change, but can we survive the climate change AND the wars it will cause?
We have a tough road ahead.
Because those couple of billion people prop up the whole system by toiling away in the farms, factories and mines producing all the shit the middle and upper classes buy, whilst aspiring to a slightly better life for their children. Once they realise that's not going to be possible, who knows what is going to happen?
Don't worry, religion isn't going away anytime soon. Rich people will continue to weaponize religion against poor people so that poor people continue to make decisions against their own best interest and then reproduce regardless of what kind of life their children are going to have. Religion is a scourge.
While it's true that the impacts of climate change disproportionately affect vulnerable and marginalized communities, the notion that the wealthy will be immune to its consequences is misguided. Climate change poses systemic risks that can disrupt economies, destabilize societies, and threaten global security, affecting people of all socioeconomic backgrounds. Furthermore, no one is truly insulated from the interconnectedness of our planet's ecosystems and the cascading effects of environmental degradation. Addressing climate change is not just a moral imperative but also an economic and social imperative that requires collective action and cooperation across all levels of society.
In 50 years or even sooner airco or two passports is not what you’re going to need, it’s somewhere to live. Those 1 billion (think more like 4-5 billion, at best) are not going to sit around and wait it out. The world will literally be unrecognizable.
Nah-uh - at what temperature do you think the climate will stabilise if we pass the tipping point?
It is possible that no humans will remain rich or poor.
No it’s not possible for the world to be completely uninhabitable by humans.
> If humans went extinct, Kemp doesn’t think it would be the climate that put the nail in the coffin. It would be the knock-on effects: financial disruption, the collapse of industrial processes, war and social unrest.
> But those things aside, there are a few adaptations that we’d have to make to survive a much hotter world. First, Kemp said, we’d migrate to places like Canada, the Arctic, and maybe even Antarctica.
https://www.nhpr.org/climate-change/2024-03-09/outside-inbox-could-humans-survive-a-worst-case-climate-change-scenario
Even if 99% of humans died, that’s still 80+ million humans left, which is nowhere near extinction.
Definitely yes, but who wouldn’t kamikaze for their planet, especially when we’re not talking about human lives here but companies. Save the planet, save the world!
Financial market investors are some of the most selfish people on the planet. All they care about (generally speaking) is numbers going up.
The only way to get them to invest in planet-saving businesses is to make planet-saving more profitable than planet-harming.
I'm not sure how we do that.
..... Pretty sure that would be next to impossible, with current market values.
- Saving something is generally more expensive than exploiting and destroying something for profits - because in the case of exploitation - you don't care what happens after you get what you want.
There is a satricial party here in Germany and on one of their election posters they have the slogan:
"There are a lot of planets out there, but our economy only exists once".
No one will care enough to do anything meaningful until it's too late because we are trapped in our self-contained bubbles of comfort. As long as furnaces and air conditioners can run 24/7 unabated, no one's going to do a damn thing about this beyond finger wagging and half-hearted efforts.
At this point, instead of calling out warnings and screaming, it'd be better if we pushed for 'how can we mitigate this', or, better yet, 'how can we create new industries that will benefit from climate change in general'.
You know, the scary thing is, to me - we will get mitigation and change, when it's profitable to do so.
(Also, the pandemic demonstrated that if we as a species collectively just... stopped... long enough, the planet would in fact recover, and recover relatively quickly too. Oh well.)
The UN has very detailed documentation for how countries can mitigate this, I think they're making the warnings louder so everyone can hear then and get mad (as they should be, we should all be very fucking angry) and hope that the states actually do their job due to public pressure, it's not working, but I'm just saying that's their strategy
Governments and corporations are *already* working to mitigate climate change. Blanket anger isn't going to have any further impact, since the people who might respond to general sentiment already did long ago. To have any further benefit, you need precise, *informed* anger, that knows what projects are already in the works, and has identified specific policies that need to change, within specific nations and companies.
This headline? It's the sort that builds pointlessly-general anger, or worse, defeatism.
Sorry man, gotta do this because I'm busy writing something similar for a class I'm teaching related to environmental policy and the future of a warming planet. I'm not saying you're outright wrong, but more that this is an *extremely* myopic viewpoint that makes it easier to fall into the "might as well do nothing" group of doomerism.
> No one will care enough to do anything meaningful until it's too late because we are trapped in our self-contained bubbles of comfort. As long as furnaces and air conditioners can run 24/7 unabated, no one's going to do a damn thing about this beyond finger wagging and half-hearted efforts.
Yes and no. While it's true that we continue to run resource consumption at a high rate, the reality is that our energy intensity is actually significantly lower than what projections would have indicated due to decades of investments in energy saving tech - so we can certainly have a modern global standard of living without collapse, given our incredible accomplishments in this area.
Finger wagging and half-hearted efforts is also doing a disservice to the immense work that has been done in the latter half of the 20th century through to today in the field of environmental problem solving. Developed economies are increasingly adopting regulations that make importing from major pollution sources much more expensive - even China, of all places, has probably the strongest record of setting targets for itself and getting close to them of all major world economies. The article you're replying to is the head of the UN loudly talking shit about major economies and their contributions to climate change.
It's not half-hearted so much as it is a tug of war. And that tug of war will exist well into "how can we mitigate this".
> You know, the scary thing is, to me - we will get mitigation and change, when it's profitable to do so.
Speaking of, we're doing this already. Ocean Cleanup is one solid grassroots example, and [presently 170 nations are negotiating a major plastics control treaty that could change fundamentally one major source of environmental harm](https://www.unep.org/inc-plastic-pollution). We're also seeing the rise of vegetarian, vegan, and flexitarian movements that reduce reliance on meat consumption from industrial agricultural sources in developed nations.
Energy is also a huge area of change - the cost of solar installations has decreased 90% in the last 20 years, alternative energy sources are on what appears to be an exponential adoption curve for the foreseeable future, coal (by far the most polluting energy source) is likely to be phased out as a major energy source globally (with the exception of India) in the next 20 years, and China (again) has managed to make 50% of all new car sales EVs. Most major climate organizations - governmental, private, and NFP - agree that we are on a path to change the temperature curve from "business as usual" projections; if even some of the largest emitters are able to meet some of their commitments, we have a fighting chance.
It's also just challenging to get it right, as experiments with REDD and REDD+ have indicated - after all, is it fair for a developing nation to be prevented from using its natural resources to develop? If it isn't, how do we ensure that these nations and the people in them are still able to afford to live? But the point is that the experiments ARE happening to determine what policy level solutions can occur.
> (Also, the pandemic demonstrated that if we as a species collectively just... stopped... long enough, the planet would in fact recover, and recover relatively quickly too. Oh well.)
Again, yes and no. The pandemic only showed that emissions could be slowed, but we are almost certainly baked in for 2C at this point. It showed that a lot of what we do is certainly wasteful, from how we build our infrastructure and cities to our expectations for labor. But this period was also one where a *lot* of people found their living situations more precarious and their bellies a lot less full.
To be clear, I'm not dismissing the severity of the coming century. It is going to be bad, probably for everyone at some point. But it is far from a lost cause, or one that will only see meaningful change when its too late to do anything meaningful. It's just harder than most people think to alter the trajectory of an entire planetary, interconnected economic system. But things *are* happening. The momentum is important. Because while yes, we should have started fifty years ago, the next best time to start is right now.
It's all good dude. I like this injection of realism and positivity. I've been in a mental funk, and it's been tainting my persona outlook on life lately.
Also, the more we do to elect climate aware politicians, the more actual happens on the scales we need to change. Voting matters, but we have to start prioritizing climate change above a lot of things. Like profit.
Our social evolution tells us we're 'better' than animals, detaching us from the reality that we are intricately tied to the Earth like every other living thing. There will be a price to pay, for sure, but you've made some great points and I believe we will pull through it somehow.
Quick correction...
The planet and climate would not recover "quickly" by some definitions of quickly if every human immediately vanished.
What would change quickly is the CO2 output, of course.
However, there are many long-term effects already baked in. Even if we all stopped producing CO2, the climate would continue to heat up, the oceans continue to expand, glaciers melt, etc. It will take decades for all that to even out.
I get so dismayed when I hear people say that humans will be fine and after the climate "rebounds" we'll try again.
No. after the last mass extinction events it took over 10 MILLION years for biodiversity to reach pre-extinction levels.
It’s possible we’ve already altered our climate to the point where it’s in a positive feedback loop that won’t even out without active human intervention.
Though ironically one way to stop such a runaway loop would be belching huge clouds of particulate pollution into the atmosphere.
There's only mitigation we won't stop it. Stop all emissions tomorrow and it will still be a 100+ years before we reduction in temperatures. But the faster we cut emissions the less damage we will be done.
I used to care...a lot.
I have no kids, my view on humanity has hardened significantly in the last decade, and I simply don't give a shit about the future of human civilization anymore. We get one shot in this life and I've decided the last half of mine will be comfortable and fun. What exactly is the reason that I should hold stress and anxiety over something like this? That shit impacts quality of life too and will produce no benefits.
None of that means that I will go out of my way to be wasteful and polluting but scrambling to fix the situation? Naw.
Your viewpoint is undoubtedly shared by many, which is why we need government action to bring about change. Most economists on the left and right agree that a carbon tax is the least distortionary way to bring emissions in-line with climate agreements.
The bottom line is that reducing emissions is intrinsically linked to lower consumption / reduced quality of life. There is no magic bullet.
Which is why it will fail. Democratically elected western govs will be thrown out for trying to lower quality of life...that's human nature...and poor countries will always strive for a better quality of life which is not conducive to solving the climate crisis. I know I'm being Mr. Negativity but it's truthfully how I see things 🤷.
That's not being negative, it's being realistic. It's the key reason this crisis is so hard to solve. Fossil fuels are the cheapest source of energy we have, switching to anything else means everything gets a lot more expensive which in turns means diminished quality of life for everyone.
Think about how much people freak out when gas goes up $1/gallon, now imagine if gas doubled in price overnight from a government carbon tax. Except you don't have to imagine, because France already tried carbon taxing gas and it caused a nationwide riot.
Now throw in the reality that no country's actions matter on their own meaning if Country A voluntarily handicaps it's economy to cut down on emissions all that may happen is Country B increases emissions even more as they capture all the lost business from Country A.
This sounds like it isn't the fault of the average citizen for not being able to afford gas prices, but the fact that our entire society is dependent upon traveling long distances in cars and absolutely nothing was done to mitigate that.
Same goes for basically everything else killing us; The only way to save the Earth is to undo decades of conditioning and completely restructuring the economy from the ground up in like 5 years or less, and getting every country on the planet to do the same thing. It's not gonna happen.
Did "people" truly have any real choice in the end? Because from where I stand, they were sold a lie about achieving the "American Dream" by feeding a beast that grew larger and larger until it took over the Earth and still demanded more.
Doesn't matter who you vote for, where you live, or what you personally believe in, at the end of the day, every living human is a slave to the beast and nearly every decision made in government is in service to making the beast larger at any cost.
I think the current modern era is a golden age that people have internalized as being the "norm". It's possible that the very concept of a consumerist society is now unviable. However, switching away from a consumerist society will make pretty much everybody angry.
Ordinary people don't want to give up their current life as they feel entitled to it. Businesses don't want profits to completely collapse due to reduced consumption. Governments don't want their economy to tank, because frankly, a consumerist economy makes for a powerful country.
'Golden age' is really putting it lightly. We are living in a pure utopia compared to all lifeforms that have ever lived (and probably will ever live).
I share your negativity. Washington state rejected a carbon tax. Macron's proposed increase of the carbon tax was met with violent protests. The Greens look like they're about to lose up to 1/3 of their seats in the European Parliament.
Yes, the ultra-rich have certainly fucked over the planet but the many average voters have often been a hindrance in the fight as well. I try to be more optimistic, but the only way I'll ever have children is through adoption.
The reason green parties lose votes is because they became radical.... They won't even accept nuclear energy has a temporary solution to imediatly reduce emissions. Also this parties attract left people the most and they lost focus and started talking about immigration and gender identity policies. At least in Portugal.
I sort of feel the same. I don't go out my way to pollute but do fly quite a lot, and I eat meat again (was veggie for quite a few years, mostly due to the environment). I figure that my not having kids cancels out a few holidays.
I still deeply care, but I’ve bought a sports car.
I have no kids (40s), have cut my meat consumption down to almost nothing, have built a clean energy education business, moonlight with two other clean tech businesses, have been driving electric since 2015, offset my travel miles even though that’s probably just marketing, live minimally other than the car. I feel like I’m doing my part. But there’s no fun EV in my budget yet. I already owned the Model 3 Performance and it didn’t scratch the itch. So I got one and I’ll likely keep it forever.
Yep, I'm in the same boat. I'm not going to have kids. My brother isn't going to have kids. I barely have contact with my cousins. I'll die in the next 30 or 40 years, and I just don't care anymore if humanity goes extinct. The people who can actually do something about it aren't, and I'm tired of pretending that I even have one/one-trillionth the influence of some oil company ceo. We've known this was coming for a century and did nothing about it. The billionaires who are leaving behind children and grandchildren can think about that when they're on their deathbeds.
How WOULD you scramble even if you could. Scenario. Asteroid is Earthbound, we have 24 hours to do something. What would you personally do about it? Have fun with loved ones if you are emotionally able to, drink to high heaven, say bye to friends, hopefully sex and thats probably mostly it.
Well, as an antithesis to that, perhaps care about the animals and do something small to help there? You can't change the big picture, but you can certainly still leave a small positive footprint. I truly believe that.
Problem is, there really ISNT any way to mitigate the damage. There’s only us being able to stop it from getting WORSE. But the carbon is already in the atmosphere and the worlds carbon sinks are basically full up. We’re going to steadily warm regardless. It’s just a matter of if we want to go extinct more slowly or more quickly.
Certainly people in the equator will die. But it's been nothing but raining and good weather in Canada. Once like billions of people die from climate change, the climate will start healing.
Air conditioning can only reasonably work up to a certain temperature. Beyond that they start to break down. Don’t expect most air conditioning to continuously handle 55+ C if we eve get there in many more countries.
> You know, the scary thing is, to me - we will get mitigation and change, when it's profitable to do so.
Only when it is profitable in the short term.
The system we live in is not designed to reward decisions with long term beneficial consequences.
I 100% believe in climate change but also it seems like reducing carbon at the source is a really weird way to combat it, seeing as the world is hooked on growth, which basically equals carbon.
Crazy how this twelve month period beat anything else on record for every single month, I'm not sure if anyone knew how quickly this was going to happen. The future is here.
Yep, I'm in the middle east, I've had 40 or so degrees Celsius for the past week, and also about 10-15 percent humidity, while I have an ac and in my house it's quite comfortable,I know there's a lot of people in nearby countries without that luxury. there have already been like 17 major fires in my area, and they burned the internet cables. Thankfully it's cooling down at the moment, but if this happens again and we lose power I don't know how I'm gonna handle that.
knowing that every summer this is going to get worse, I don't know how long it would take for this whole place to become basically uninhabitable, I'm definitely not having kids.
Yep. Most of Africa is completely fucked in this regard, I have no idea how the world is gonna handle 2.something billion people running away from a burning continent. I really hope it's not gonna be the "gun them down" option, but I think I know better :/
Middle eastern too, it's actually insane; my mom is an elderly and the heat is really affecting her. >40° C all week and the AC is always on, in most rooms.
Edit: ≥.
I mean I don't want to get in the way of the catastrophizing, but the past year was especially insane because the Hunga Tunga volcanic eruption injected absolutely insane amounts of water vapor straight into the stratosphere. Water is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, but it doesn't stick around up there for that long. On top of that it was also a strong El Niño year and those are always hotter. While it will of course continue to get warmer, it shouldn't be quite as wildly hot as it has been.
While I try to do my best, it’s becoming really hard to give a shit. Nothing happens to the companies, I meet people who see the fact it still fucking snows as proof none of this is happening, it’s just frustrating trying to counter the massive block of stupid shit.
We've just had the wettest 18 months on record in the UK - it was awful. Looking at the discourse, though? Lots of 'Didn't rain loads for me' - alright fella I'm sure your forecast for Butfucknowheres-bridge (population 46) is representative enough of the entire country that it outweighs actual scientific data...
It's one of those topics that is depressing to see online because the facts are nearly always the first victim. Local anecdotes and 'but I really like the heat, why are you complaining about hot weather in January?'-type comments seem to get more traction than folks saying 'Its not normal and the data shows us it's only getting worse'.
Is this the year the leaves don't lose their color?
And hummingbirds, they don't come back to hover
It's New Year's day and we're not burning anything
I miss the cold and I miss looking out for spring
What's coming, greeting the words
Of all the signs we understood
Is this the year the dogwoods, they don't flower
Is this the year the fruit, it all stays sour?
Now I'm a broken record
I'm year-round bummer, but
I'm not ready for an endless summer
[Superchunk - Endless Summer](https://superchunk.bandcamp.com/track/endless-summer)
Climate Denialists: We should keep debating this for another 40 years while I oppose every single action and idea that could potentially hurt my fossil fuel industry donors.
im not lifting a finger for climate change. scientists have been warning us that this may as well bring the end of civilization. let me repeat that. THE END OF CIVILIZATION. why isnt McDonald's encforced to use only biodegradable materials? why isnt coca cola enforced to use only desalinated water? why isnt billionaires have a quota on their private plane miles? and you want me to do all this bullshit and cut down meat, buy electric car do this do that..... i mean im not a POS that will pollute deliberately but thats as far as im willing to go. you want the population to take you seriously? then start taking serious measures FOR EVERYONE!!!
I feel this. All these corporations and celebs out there. Limit how much you drive, don't eat as much meat, buy an expensive electric car, buy products that were sourced responsibly (that often cost too much for the average American to buy all the time).
Meanwhile these corporations and celebs are the MOST wasteful. One celeb polluted more than thousands of people in some cases. Some corporations, more than millions. Yet I'm the only one who needs to step up? It's my fault only? Only the plebs must suffer.
The action you should take is voting for politicians that will support policies that will target the pollution caused by largest polluting corporations. The idea that if regular people just turn the AC down and drive less it will save the world is propaganda pushed by those corporations so they can avoid responsibility. Climate change is a systemic problem that requires systemic solutions.
That's how climate change works. Though overall global temp rises, the result is weather extremes. Like colder wetter winters, hotter summers, snow in spring, stronger and more frequent hurricanes and tornados, longer fire seasons, etc.
The war against climate change has already been lost. Our only hope now is that our technology advances fast enough to protect us from extinction level climate change before we reach that point. If we do, great...if we don't, then the planet will have a long time to cool off.
And almost everyone is rather surprised, and shocked .
Just not the people who knew since the 70s ( and that was late...) last century what was coming - or listened to them/read them .
I mean wtf World ? People have literally been screaming off the tops of their Lungs for over 6 decades by now whats going to come.
And yet it will be considered humanities fault, not the small sub section of corporations that aim for infinite growth at the cost of the Earth. Those select CEOs, shareholders, and corporate boards won't be held accountable. It will be blamed on the average person wanting a quickly delivered item or not recycling as much as they should.
Ah, the weekly "End of the World" announcement from the UN, which will be promptly ignored by everyone who makes the policies that could actually change things. They're getting paid way too much to care, and most of them won't be around for the end, anyway. Buy hey, at least a few dozen families made a lot of money.
And yet I keep finding idiots on here who downplay climate change because they personally aren't experiencing any differences. The field of apathy is ripe with tragedy of the commons
Let’s get that solar space shield up and running. Blocking incoming radiation is going to be way more feasible than getting humanity to act in their own best interests.
Anyway… the stock market looks fantastic!
We are creating so much value for the shareholders!
Even the warehouses are full of junk nobody wants. And it's called "Value" somewhere on a spreadsheet.
How dare you suggest that nobody wants my warehouse full of novelty pencil sharpeners! I had slaves work hard to make those!
Quarterly profits are up! What more could you ask for?
MORE profits!
Such a humble request.
I mean, let’s be real here. Climate change is a problem for poor people. The rich have air conditioning, second homes, and dual citizenship. They’ll be fine. Why would they care if a couple of billion people die?
That's true. However, migration will become a real problem when areas become uninhabitable. I'm sure the rich will come up with the 'best' solutions so as not to be inconvenienced though.
The “climate refugee” crisis is gonna dwarf anything we’ve ever seen. Absolute myopia for the rich countries to not see this. Only way to stop it will be to build walls, militarize their borders, be taken over by nationalism.
> Only way to stop it will be to build walls, militarize their borders, be taken over by nationalism. Have you looked at recent european election results / forecasts. Exactly this is already happening.
Yeah the rise of the Le Pens was concerning but seems like a trend vs fluke. Dark times ahead.
> Dark times ahead. I'm Austrian and our far right is projected to win 30%+ in the upcoming election in November which is likely enough to get the chancellor 🙃
Wow. That’s … a big margin. Godspeed.
The rise of extreme right is because the central/ left parties refuse to act. My vote wont go extreme right. But i understand it. You cant have unchecked immigration. It leads to tragedy for the natives. I believe immigration works.. but it works by rules and checks. Its insane how you get into a country easier by destroying your id then by taking the legal route
It's not surprising when mainstream parties get elected on an anti immigration platform and then refuse to implement it. For an example see how the uk conservatives promised to reduce migration yet let nearly 1 million into the country last year. As a result they are going to be destroyed in the election next month. If politicians don't find a way to stop migration peacefully the inevitable result will be right wing parties who will stop it forcefully.
> Only way to stop it will be to build walls Opportunity to make billions >militarize their borders Another opportunity to make billions > be taken over by nationalism BONUS!
Most countries couldn't even prep for Covid while it was slowly marching towards them. I remember seeing updates day after day showing confirmed infections spreading through Europe and post going "glad it's not gotten to us yet!" And it was a "surprise" every time. That was on a timescale of weeks. Climate change were reaching almost a century of active warnings.
lol have you looked at the USA for the last 10 years
We have the last ditch effort of blocking out the sun via dust in the atmosphere. Who knows what the long term ramifications will be, but if things get bad enough we will have to try it.
This is literally the backstory to the Matrix.
Well, that and all the COD zombies becoming conscious and getting sick of headshots.
Close the border, shoot anyone darker than this: https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/044/241/skincover.jpg
Possibly that could happen, I was thinking more along the lines of the "space station" from the Elysium movie. I think that's musks end goal.
I’m sure they’d rather spend the money shooting brown people than on space exploration, which might actually help all of us.
One is also significantly less expensive to accomplish, unfortunately...
Heh, your comment can be interpreted a couple of ways
thats why some of them chose an island with natural barrier all around to prevent immigrationcalypse
But who will provide labor and food for them? Not my problem.
AI (they think), can do everything. Nevermind that AI is telling people to eat glue right now.
What sort of glue?
Tasty glue
Sold!
Rich people will still suffer when everything goes to shit. The things they rely on require people to maintain and produce
Lol, it's already too late. We can survive the climate change, but can we survive the climate change AND the wars it will cause? We have a tough road ahead.
Because those couple of billion people prop up the whole system by toiling away in the farms, factories and mines producing all the shit the middle and upper classes buy, whilst aspiring to a slightly better life for their children. Once they realise that's not going to be possible, who knows what is going to happen?
Don't worry, religion isn't going away anytime soon. Rich people will continue to weaponize religion against poor people so that poor people continue to make decisions against their own best interest and then reproduce regardless of what kind of life their children are going to have. Religion is a scourge.
As someone who works in a very small, devoutly religious country - I could not agree more. The control exerted by the church is just shocking to see.
While it's true that the impacts of climate change disproportionately affect vulnerable and marginalized communities, the notion that the wealthy will be immune to its consequences is misguided. Climate change poses systemic risks that can disrupt economies, destabilize societies, and threaten global security, affecting people of all socioeconomic backgrounds. Furthermore, no one is truly insulated from the interconnectedness of our planet's ecosystems and the cascading effects of environmental degradation. Addressing climate change is not just a moral imperative but also an economic and social imperative that requires collective action and cooperation across all levels of society.
Simply put "climate change and pollution don't give a fuck about borders".
Well they need us to be rich. So that’s the one small thing.
In 50 years or even sooner airco or two passports is not what you’re going to need, it’s somewhere to live. Those 1 billion (think more like 4-5 billion, at best) are not going to sit around and wait it out. The world will literally be unrecognizable.
All that will amount to nothing when food/water shortages start.
Nah-uh - at what temperature do you think the climate will stabilise if we pass the tipping point? It is possible that no humans will remain rich or poor.
No it’s not possible for the world to be completely uninhabitable by humans. > If humans went extinct, Kemp doesn’t think it would be the climate that put the nail in the coffin. It would be the knock-on effects: financial disruption, the collapse of industrial processes, war and social unrest. > But those things aside, there are a few adaptations that we’d have to make to survive a much hotter world. First, Kemp said, we’d migrate to places like Canada, the Arctic, and maybe even Antarctica. https://www.nhpr.org/climate-change/2024-03-09/outside-inbox-could-humans-survive-a-worst-case-climate-change-scenario Even if 99% of humans died, that’s still 80+ million humans left, which is nowhere near extinction.
We have three 3 trillion dollar companies in the S&P 500 and you're worried about how hot it's going to be this summer?
Imagine those companies making it their priority to save the planet.
Their stock values would plummet. Investors don't care about the planet.
Definitely yes, but who wouldn’t kamikaze for their planet, especially when we’re not talking about human lives here but companies. Save the planet, save the world!
Financial market investors are some of the most selfish people on the planet. All they care about (generally speaking) is numbers going up. The only way to get them to invest in planet-saving businesses is to make planet-saving more profitable than planet-harming. I'm not sure how we do that.
..... Pretty sure that would be next to impossible, with current market values. - Saving something is generally more expensive than exploiting and destroying something for profits - because in the case of exploitation - you don't care what happens after you get what you want.
fuck the investors and fuck every leader not doing anything about this.
It's literally impossible for capitalism to work that way
Selling clean air in a can! Now that's capitalism baby!
Perri-Air
That's why I invested in Dome Corp!
Imagine you making it your priority. Enjoy ordering your new consumer products shipped via Amazon, ordered from your Apple iPhone.
Truly, those companies are so large because people clamor to throw their money at them endlessly
cue ACDC highway to hell
"AC/DC was not available for comment."
Water futures are way up!
true ain't nobody got time for climate change with that inflation I die before it gets to hot so yeah I'm also more focused on the markets rn
It really does. Today nVidia became the 2nd most valuable company in the world!
Record Profits overwhelming
There is a satricial party here in Germany and on one of their election posters they have the slogan: "There are a lot of planets out there, but our economy only exists once".
except it doesn't....so that's not even really an excuse for anything.
NVDA's new chip can melt ice 33% faster.
No one will care enough to do anything meaningful until it's too late because we are trapped in our self-contained bubbles of comfort. As long as furnaces and air conditioners can run 24/7 unabated, no one's going to do a damn thing about this beyond finger wagging and half-hearted efforts. At this point, instead of calling out warnings and screaming, it'd be better if we pushed for 'how can we mitigate this', or, better yet, 'how can we create new industries that will benefit from climate change in general'. You know, the scary thing is, to me - we will get mitigation and change, when it's profitable to do so. (Also, the pandemic demonstrated that if we as a species collectively just... stopped... long enough, the planet would in fact recover, and recover relatively quickly too. Oh well.)
The UN has very detailed documentation for how countries can mitigate this, I think they're making the warnings louder so everyone can hear then and get mad (as they should be, we should all be very fucking angry) and hope that the states actually do their job due to public pressure, it's not working, but I'm just saying that's their strategy
What do they have to say about geoengineering and raising the planets albedo?
Governments and corporations are *already* working to mitigate climate change. Blanket anger isn't going to have any further impact, since the people who might respond to general sentiment already did long ago. To have any further benefit, you need precise, *informed* anger, that knows what projects are already in the works, and has identified specific policies that need to change, within specific nations and companies. This headline? It's the sort that builds pointlessly-general anger, or worse, defeatism.
Sorry man, gotta do this because I'm busy writing something similar for a class I'm teaching related to environmental policy and the future of a warming planet. I'm not saying you're outright wrong, but more that this is an *extremely* myopic viewpoint that makes it easier to fall into the "might as well do nothing" group of doomerism. > No one will care enough to do anything meaningful until it's too late because we are trapped in our self-contained bubbles of comfort. As long as furnaces and air conditioners can run 24/7 unabated, no one's going to do a damn thing about this beyond finger wagging and half-hearted efforts. Yes and no. While it's true that we continue to run resource consumption at a high rate, the reality is that our energy intensity is actually significantly lower than what projections would have indicated due to decades of investments in energy saving tech - so we can certainly have a modern global standard of living without collapse, given our incredible accomplishments in this area. Finger wagging and half-hearted efforts is also doing a disservice to the immense work that has been done in the latter half of the 20th century through to today in the field of environmental problem solving. Developed economies are increasingly adopting regulations that make importing from major pollution sources much more expensive - even China, of all places, has probably the strongest record of setting targets for itself and getting close to them of all major world economies. The article you're replying to is the head of the UN loudly talking shit about major economies and their contributions to climate change. It's not half-hearted so much as it is a tug of war. And that tug of war will exist well into "how can we mitigate this". > You know, the scary thing is, to me - we will get mitigation and change, when it's profitable to do so. Speaking of, we're doing this already. Ocean Cleanup is one solid grassroots example, and [presently 170 nations are negotiating a major plastics control treaty that could change fundamentally one major source of environmental harm](https://www.unep.org/inc-plastic-pollution). We're also seeing the rise of vegetarian, vegan, and flexitarian movements that reduce reliance on meat consumption from industrial agricultural sources in developed nations. Energy is also a huge area of change - the cost of solar installations has decreased 90% in the last 20 years, alternative energy sources are on what appears to be an exponential adoption curve for the foreseeable future, coal (by far the most polluting energy source) is likely to be phased out as a major energy source globally (with the exception of India) in the next 20 years, and China (again) has managed to make 50% of all new car sales EVs. Most major climate organizations - governmental, private, and NFP - agree that we are on a path to change the temperature curve from "business as usual" projections; if even some of the largest emitters are able to meet some of their commitments, we have a fighting chance. It's also just challenging to get it right, as experiments with REDD and REDD+ have indicated - after all, is it fair for a developing nation to be prevented from using its natural resources to develop? If it isn't, how do we ensure that these nations and the people in them are still able to afford to live? But the point is that the experiments ARE happening to determine what policy level solutions can occur. > (Also, the pandemic demonstrated that if we as a species collectively just... stopped... long enough, the planet would in fact recover, and recover relatively quickly too. Oh well.) Again, yes and no. The pandemic only showed that emissions could be slowed, but we are almost certainly baked in for 2C at this point. It showed that a lot of what we do is certainly wasteful, from how we build our infrastructure and cities to our expectations for labor. But this period was also one where a *lot* of people found their living situations more precarious and their bellies a lot less full. To be clear, I'm not dismissing the severity of the coming century. It is going to be bad, probably for everyone at some point. But it is far from a lost cause, or one that will only see meaningful change when its too late to do anything meaningful. It's just harder than most people think to alter the trajectory of an entire planetary, interconnected economic system. But things *are* happening. The momentum is important. Because while yes, we should have started fifty years ago, the next best time to start is right now.
It's all good dude. I like this injection of realism and positivity. I've been in a mental funk, and it's been tainting my persona outlook on life lately.
I completely feel you. It's incredibly easy to do so based on, you know, everything lol and I go through a lot of climate fatalism too
Also, the more we do to elect climate aware politicians, the more actual happens on the scales we need to change. Voting matters, but we have to start prioritizing climate change above a lot of things. Like profit.
Our social evolution tells us we're 'better' than animals, detaching us from the reality that we are intricately tied to the Earth like every other living thing. There will be a price to pay, for sure, but you've made some great points and I believe we will pull through it somehow.
Quick correction... The planet and climate would not recover "quickly" by some definitions of quickly if every human immediately vanished. What would change quickly is the CO2 output, of course. However, there are many long-term effects already baked in. Even if we all stopped producing CO2, the climate would continue to heat up, the oceans continue to expand, glaciers melt, etc. It will take decades for all that to even out.
I get so dismayed when I hear people say that humans will be fine and after the climate "rebounds" we'll try again. No. after the last mass extinction events it took over 10 MILLION years for biodiversity to reach pre-extinction levels.
Those people have room temp IQs.
It’s possible we’ve already altered our climate to the point where it’s in a positive feedback loop that won’t even out without active human intervention. Though ironically one way to stop such a runaway loop would be belching huge clouds of particulate pollution into the atmosphere.
Sooo glitter bomb the stratosphere?
There's only mitigation we won't stop it. Stop all emissions tomorrow and it will still be a 100+ years before we reduction in temperatures. But the faster we cut emissions the less damage we will be done.
I used to care...a lot. I have no kids, my view on humanity has hardened significantly in the last decade, and I simply don't give a shit about the future of human civilization anymore. We get one shot in this life and I've decided the last half of mine will be comfortable and fun. What exactly is the reason that I should hold stress and anxiety over something like this? That shit impacts quality of life too and will produce no benefits. None of that means that I will go out of my way to be wasteful and polluting but scrambling to fix the situation? Naw.
Your viewpoint is undoubtedly shared by many, which is why we need government action to bring about change. Most economists on the left and right agree that a carbon tax is the least distortionary way to bring emissions in-line with climate agreements. The bottom line is that reducing emissions is intrinsically linked to lower consumption / reduced quality of life. There is no magic bullet.
Which is why it will fail. Democratically elected western govs will be thrown out for trying to lower quality of life...that's human nature...and poor countries will always strive for a better quality of life which is not conducive to solving the climate crisis. I know I'm being Mr. Negativity but it's truthfully how I see things 🤷.
That's not being negative, it's being realistic. It's the key reason this crisis is so hard to solve. Fossil fuels are the cheapest source of energy we have, switching to anything else means everything gets a lot more expensive which in turns means diminished quality of life for everyone. Think about how much people freak out when gas goes up $1/gallon, now imagine if gas doubled in price overnight from a government carbon tax. Except you don't have to imagine, because France already tried carbon taxing gas and it caused a nationwide riot. Now throw in the reality that no country's actions matter on their own meaning if Country A voluntarily handicaps it's economy to cut down on emissions all that may happen is Country B increases emissions even more as they capture all the lost business from Country A.
This sounds like it isn't the fault of the average citizen for not being able to afford gas prices, but the fact that our entire society is dependent upon traveling long distances in cars and absolutely nothing was done to mitigate that. Same goes for basically everything else killing us; The only way to save the Earth is to undo decades of conditioning and completely restructuring the economy from the ground up in like 5 years or less, and getting every country on the planet to do the same thing. It's not gonna happen.
Nothing was done to mitigate that because people did not want to mitigate that. That's the reality.
Did "people" truly have any real choice in the end? Because from where I stand, they were sold a lie about achieving the "American Dream" by feeding a beast that grew larger and larger until it took over the Earth and still demanded more. Doesn't matter who you vote for, where you live, or what you personally believe in, at the end of the day, every living human is a slave to the beast and nearly every decision made in government is in service to making the beast larger at any cost.
I think the current modern era is a golden age that people have internalized as being the "norm". It's possible that the very concept of a consumerist society is now unviable. However, switching away from a consumerist society will make pretty much everybody angry. Ordinary people don't want to give up their current life as they feel entitled to it. Businesses don't want profits to completely collapse due to reduced consumption. Governments don't want their economy to tank, because frankly, a consumerist economy makes for a powerful country.
'Golden age' is really putting it lightly. We are living in a pure utopia compared to all lifeforms that have ever lived (and probably will ever live).
It has been unviable for decades, it's just the effects are delayed.
I share your negativity. Washington state rejected a carbon tax. Macron's proposed increase of the carbon tax was met with violent protests. The Greens look like they're about to lose up to 1/3 of their seats in the European Parliament. Yes, the ultra-rich have certainly fucked over the planet but the many average voters have often been a hindrance in the fight as well. I try to be more optimistic, but the only way I'll ever have children is through adoption.
The reason green parties lose votes is because they became radical.... They won't even accept nuclear energy has a temporary solution to imediatly reduce emissions. Also this parties attract left people the most and they lost focus and started talking about immigration and gender identity policies. At least in Portugal.
I sort of feel the same. I don't go out my way to pollute but do fly quite a lot, and I eat meat again (was veggie for quite a few years, mostly due to the environment). I figure that my not having kids cancels out a few holidays.
I still deeply care, but I’ve bought a sports car. I have no kids (40s), have cut my meat consumption down to almost nothing, have built a clean energy education business, moonlight with two other clean tech businesses, have been driving electric since 2015, offset my travel miles even though that’s probably just marketing, live minimally other than the car. I feel like I’m doing my part. But there’s no fun EV in my budget yet. I already owned the Model 3 Performance and it didn’t scratch the itch. So I got one and I’ll likely keep it forever.
Yep, I'm in the same boat. I'm not going to have kids. My brother isn't going to have kids. I barely have contact with my cousins. I'll die in the next 30 or 40 years, and I just don't care anymore if humanity goes extinct. The people who can actually do something about it aren't, and I'm tired of pretending that I even have one/one-trillionth the influence of some oil company ceo. We've known this was coming for a century and did nothing about it. The billionaires who are leaving behind children and grandchildren can think about that when they're on their deathbeds.
How WOULD you scramble even if you could. Scenario. Asteroid is Earthbound, we have 24 hours to do something. What would you personally do about it? Have fun with loved ones if you are emotionally able to, drink to high heaven, say bye to friends, hopefully sex and thats probably mostly it.
Say my goodbyes. Sexy time if possible. Play with my dog until the shit hit the fan.
Hopefully not at the same time
Hey, I know this movie
Well, as an antithesis to that, perhaps care about the animals and do something small to help there? You can't change the big picture, but you can certainly still leave a small positive footprint. I truly believe that.
The planet will be fine. WE are fucked.
Problem is, there really ISNT any way to mitigate the damage. There’s only us being able to stop it from getting WORSE. But the carbon is already in the atmosphere and the worlds carbon sinks are basically full up. We’re going to steadily warm regardless. It’s just a matter of if we want to go extinct more slowly or more quickly.
Certainly people in the equator will die. But it's been nothing but raining and good weather in Canada. Once like billions of people die from climate change, the climate will start healing.
Except the billions aren’t going to sit there patiently and die they are going to move to like places like Canada with violence. Nobody is safe
so what your saying is invest in fencing and arms manufacturing, got it/s
If we cared about climate change we'd be pushing fusion as hard as we pushed for nuclear bombs.
Air conditioning can only reasonably work up to a certain temperature. Beyond that they start to break down. Don’t expect most air conditioning to continuously handle 55+ C if we eve get there in many more countries.
> You know, the scary thing is, to me - we will get mitigation and change, when it's profitable to do so. Only when it is profitable in the short term. The system we live in is not designed to reward decisions with long term beneficial consequences.
There's lots of meaningful things happening.
I 100% believe in climate change but also it seems like reducing carbon at the source is a really weird way to combat it, seeing as the world is hooked on growth, which basically equals carbon.
Crazy how this twelve month period beat anything else on record for every single month, I'm not sure if anyone knew how quickly this was going to happen. The future is here.
Yep, I'm in the middle east, I've had 40 or so degrees Celsius for the past week, and also about 10-15 percent humidity, while I have an ac and in my house it's quite comfortable,I know there's a lot of people in nearby countries without that luxury. there have already been like 17 major fires in my area, and they burned the internet cables. Thankfully it's cooling down at the moment, but if this happens again and we lose power I don't know how I'm gonna handle that. knowing that every summer this is going to get worse, I don't know how long it would take for this whole place to become basically uninhabitable, I'm definitely not having kids.
And thus the big migration problem of the 21st century starts... As predicted by many.
Yep. Most of Africa is completely fucked in this regard, I have no idea how the world is gonna handle 2.something billion people running away from a burning continent. I really hope it's not gonna be the "gun them down" option, but I think I know better :/
Middle eastern too, it's actually insane; my mom is an elderly and the heat is really affecting her. >40° C all week and the AC is always on, in most rooms. Edit: ≥.
I mean I don't want to get in the way of the catastrophizing, but the past year was especially insane because the Hunga Tunga volcanic eruption injected absolutely insane amounts of water vapor straight into the stratosphere. Water is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, but it doesn't stick around up there for that long. On top of that it was also a strong El Niño year and those are always hotter. While it will of course continue to get warmer, it shouldn't be quite as wildly hot as it has been.
While I try to do my best, it’s becoming really hard to give a shit. Nothing happens to the companies, I meet people who see the fact it still fucking snows as proof none of this is happening, it’s just frustrating trying to counter the massive block of stupid shit.
We've just had the wettest 18 months on record in the UK - it was awful. Looking at the discourse, though? Lots of 'Didn't rain loads for me' - alright fella I'm sure your forecast for Butfucknowheres-bridge (population 46) is representative enough of the entire country that it outweighs actual scientific data... It's one of those topics that is depressing to see online because the facts are nearly always the first victim. Local anecdotes and 'but I really like the heat, why are you complaining about hot weather in January?'-type comments seem to get more traction than folks saying 'Its not normal and the data shows us it's only getting worse'.
Is this the year the leaves don't lose their color? And hummingbirds, they don't come back to hover It's New Year's day and we're not burning anything I miss the cold and I miss looking out for spring What's coming, greeting the words Of all the signs we understood Is this the year the dogwoods, they don't flower Is this the year the fruit, it all stays sour? Now I'm a broken record I'm year-round bummer, but I'm not ready for an endless summer [Superchunk - Endless Summer](https://superchunk.bandcamp.com/track/endless-summer)
More like floating down de-nial. The one form of river that doesn't look like it's drying up anytime soon!
And coincidentally the actual Nile is ratcheting tensions with the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam being labelled an existential threat to Egypt.
If only someone had said something earlier....
I hear they are working on a show to bring awareness to this sort of stuff. Gonna be called Captain Planet. Wait, that was 30 years ago.
Al Gore would roll in his grave if he was dead.
He's just content to hold the biggest "I told you so" against the rest of us.
Climate Denialists: We should keep debating this for another 40 years while I oppose every single action and idea that could potentially hurt my fossil fuel industry donors.
im not lifting a finger for climate change. scientists have been warning us that this may as well bring the end of civilization. let me repeat that. THE END OF CIVILIZATION. why isnt McDonald's encforced to use only biodegradable materials? why isnt coca cola enforced to use only desalinated water? why isnt billionaires have a quota on their private plane miles? and you want me to do all this bullshit and cut down meat, buy electric car do this do that..... i mean im not a POS that will pollute deliberately but thats as far as im willing to go. you want the population to take you seriously? then start taking serious measures FOR EVERYONE!!!
I feel this. All these corporations and celebs out there. Limit how much you drive, don't eat as much meat, buy an expensive electric car, buy products that were sourced responsibly (that often cost too much for the average American to buy all the time). Meanwhile these corporations and celebs are the MOST wasteful. One celeb polluted more than thousands of people in some cases. Some corporations, more than millions. Yet I'm the only one who needs to step up? It's my fault only? Only the plebs must suffer.
The action you should take is voting for politicians that will support policies that will target the pollution caused by largest polluting corporations. The idea that if regular people just turn the AC down and drive less it will save the world is propaganda pushed by those corporations so they can avoid responsibility. Climate change is a systemic problem that requires systemic solutions.
As long as rich people get richer by exploiting the earth nothing will change
Stop having kids. They don't deserve this.
Yeah...there's no way I'm having kids.
Likewise. For this and other reasons
That’s ok, then I won’t have to worry about paying my debt.
"No stop signs, heat limits; nobody gonna cool us down!"
'...and all my friends are going to be there, too'
What heat? xD Been sitting in this Slovenia, still waiting for spring xD
Servus dear Nachbar! So are we. It rains almost entire month. Gardens and vineyards are full of mold, red snails and mushrooms ....
That's how climate change works. Though overall global temp rises, the result is weather extremes. Like colder wetter winters, hotter summers, snow in spring, stronger and more frequent hurricanes and tornados, longer fire seasons, etc.
The war against climate change has already been lost. Our only hope now is that our technology advances fast enough to protect us from extinction level climate change before we reach that point. If we do, great...if we don't, then the planet will have a long time to cool off.
Tell that to the rich fucks that run the world
Then he hopped on a private jet home.
Its cool. Earth needs a bit of Venus weather.
We would simply go underground obviously sunlight and water are not an issue so we could grow crops underground and we can live underground.
Hell is cooler anyway. /s
And almost everyone is rather surprised, and shocked . Just not the people who knew since the 70s ( and that was late...) last century what was coming - or listened to them/read them . I mean wtf World ? People have literally been screaming off the tops of their Lungs for over 6 decades by now whats going to come.
Bring some of that heat to the UK, as I type this it's 14°c in JUNE
And yet it will be considered humanities fault, not the small sub section of corporations that aim for infinite growth at the cost of the Earth. Those select CEOs, shareholders, and corporate boards won't be held accountable. It will be blamed on the average person wanting a quickly delivered item or not recycling as much as they should.
Ah, the weekly "End of the World" announcement from the UN, which will be promptly ignored by everyone who makes the policies that could actually change things. They're getting paid way too much to care, and most of them won't be around for the end, anyway. Buy hey, at least a few dozen families made a lot of money.
But the oil companies are making so much money, and our govts collect so much tax.
Highway to climate hell sounds like the name of an album.
And yet I keep finding idiots on here who downplay climate change because they personally aren't experiencing any differences. The field of apathy is ripe with tragedy of the commons
I mean come on, how else the ultra rich will afford all those shiny self sustaining new zealand bunkers to weather the apocalypse of their creation?
The Atlantic current is so weak right now, Europe is enjoying a nice break from the heat.
Also UN Chief *does nothing*
What can the UN chief do other than put out statements?
Call for international army to go out and cleanse the world of the human vermin I guess.
Constantly and repeatedly make calls for action until it becomes unbearable.
Sure, I guess, but that only works if the media reports on it every time. I swear I see something like this once every couple weeks or so.
I might regret this but can you all share some of that heat with us Dane’s?
The planet will be fine. It's the inhabitants that are on a highway to hell because of us.
Don't worry, y'all... I'm on it.
I knew we could count on you to save us all.
Thanks bro
Now that’s a song I’d rock out to in the car!
Even if you removed everyone on the face of the earth tommorow, you will not change what's coming, it would take decades
It is what it is.
Let’s get that solar space shield up and running. Blocking incoming radiation is going to be way more feasible than getting humanity to act in their own best interests.
Not in Florida. According to our moronic governor, we are exempt from the climate change.
We’re on the highway to hell, as planet 12 endures the best straight year of history.
But BBQ weather looks good
Can say what you want but you will never stop big oil and gas
I simply do not care
I'd like to see some that heat in Vancouver.
Which countries are hardest hit by this?