In short, we aren’t on track to an apocalyptic extinction, and the new head is concerned that rhetoric that we are is making people apathetic and paralyzes them from making beneficial actions.
He makes it clear too that this doesn’t mean things are perfectly fine. The world is becoming and will be more dangerous with respect to climate. We’re going to still have serious problems to deal with. The problems just aren’t insurmountable and extinction level.
Well by all means, let’s make it seem less serious than it is! That’ll get people moving
Signed, an actual fucking climate scientist
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The exact same thinking can be applied to the other side though. Guy says it’s not an imminent threat, so we don’t have to do anything right now. Worry about it next year. Which is arguably what’s been happening for a long time now
Well, do you want companies to spin “Eh not a big threat right?” or “Look at these crazy guys”
I think it’s harder to win attention if people think you’re wearing tinfoil.
I’d prefer to stop trying to win over unwinnable people. Whether they join or not, the problem exists. Climate change doesn’t care that we may want to placate the more dense-skulled in society. The problem marches on whether they have changed sides or not.
The science is in, has been in, and continues to be in.
I don’t think there is such a thing as “unwinnable people”. They’re unwinnable from a single conversation with a single person, sure. But they’re not unwinnable if the currently ongoing concerted effort by climate-denying mass media were instead directed towards delivering climate science.
Tldr: the problem isn’t the people who are brainwashed, the problem is the people doing the brainwashing.
Let’s say I’m motivated. Wtf can I do that will actually. Make a difference. I could live off the grid or I could just spend all my money buying gas to literally just burn.
In the end, the planet will be exactly the same.
The only way to get real change is through large governments and beyond voting or talking to peers, hoping to convince them to vote for climate action, I just don’t see what I can do.
He’s technically right, though; climate change isn’t going to drive us to extinction. Yes, it’s going to cause the total collapse of modern society in our lifetimes and more death and sufferring than any other event in recorded history, but there will almost certainly be tens or hundreds of millions of survivors. Maybe even billions.
Give it to me straight Doc, how much money do I need to survive the apocalypse?
No joke, there are billionaires scouring the futurist community looking for a reassuring answer to that question.
Douglas Rushkoff wrote a whole book about it.
https://rushkoff.com/books/survival-of-the-richest-escape-fantasies-of-the-tech-billionaires/
It would only take between 50 and 500 people to save the human race. We had a population bottleneck event back during the Toba eruption that reduced humans to about 10,000 people and we were fine afterwards. 500 is the limit for genetic drift and 50 is the limit for severe inbreeding.
We’re we fine afterwards, are you sure about that?
Yes, technically it’s not really about the planet or the environment, or society. It is about finding a solution of an optimum between money spent and living conditions for the majority of people. I actually think we should start talking about it more from that angle.
We could go to almost zero emissions tomorrow but it would wreak absolute havoc and billions of people would die. We could go full zero carbon emissions in our energy grid, but it would cost an absolute shitton, which means the living conditions go down. More realistic is a mix of investments between avoidance and adaptation. And I don’t think there is any realistic chance without nuclear energy.
Too many people can only think in binary. They see your argument and decide that doing anything would result in higher prices, lower living standards, etc. they don’t seem to be able to grasp a goal of riding that line for best results
People need to get it through their thick skulls that we cannot dig ourselves out of this hole without hurting ourselves in the short term. It’s decades too fucking late for that. Fixing this will cause unavoidable suffering; not accepting that is going to cause exponentially more suffering. Suffering that has already begun. We as a global society had every opportunity to avoid it, but we chose not to. There is no painless solution anymore. We can all suffer now and mostly make it through to the other side, or we can try to cling to our cushy lives of excess and convenience while the vast majority of us die. Pick one; those are the only choices.
Yet I don’t see why we need any suffering - we have the technology to take us a lot of the way.
While you can argue the focus on cars, EVs will make a big difference, are available for essentially no lifestyle change, and getting close to price parity. We are at the point where scaling up will tip us past. While it’s too little, too late, this is only 10-15 years. The only losers are companies that can’t change but at that rate the global car companies will be Tesla, Hyundai, and a couple Chinese brands
While you can argue storage, renewable energy generation is growing even faster. It’s 20 years behind what we need but it is getting there
For my part,I just paid ridiculous amounts to an electrician, a plumber, and an appliance retailer, to convert my cooking from gas to induction (one small step to reduce my carbon impact and improve my respiratory health). The technology exists, it should not impact my lifestyle, but at least here in the US, it needs people willing to pay more to establish the market
And these are assuming you don’t change anything. It will be such a huge lifestyle improvement to plug my car in overnight just like my phone. Such a huge improvement to only visit a refueling station a handful of times per year. Such a huge environmental improvement to watch the whole gasoline refining and distribution industries dry up and blow away. Such a huge lifestyle improvement as more people can get convenient transit through high speed trains. So much less pain if/when the entire natural gas infrastructure is no longer needed: so much less digging and construction, so much money that could be invested elsewhere
Literally none of this is viable on a massive enough scale to matter in the slightest. 2/3 of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and spending power has been steadily plummeting for decades with no positive change in sight. Most people can’t afford a new car, or even a relatively new used one, and wil likely never be able to. For most, owning a home in their lifetime, or even renting from a decent landlord, is also pure fantasy, let alone the idea of overhauling one to be green and energy efficient. You’re part of a very small and shrinking bubble of people who have the extreme luxury of making even one of these choices, let alone all of them. In poorer countries, the situation is far worse.
It is entirely viable though. I am far from wealthy but do recognize the privilege of above average financial situation.
My state has set a deadline of 2035 for all new cars to be EV. After that point, all recent used cars will also be EVs. Ten years after that, most used cars will be EVs. It will happen. The goal is to make it realistic before then
Natural gas hookup bans are also a really good idea but much longer term. When you’re building a house, is the only time it doesn’t cost to convert to electric everything. Of course houses last much longer and most places don’t build enough, so this will take a very long time. My house is pushing 80, and we certainly can’t afford to wait that long for less polluting houses. However encouraging people who can, to convert when replacing a major appliance, will eventually make a difference
The problem is that we are talking too little about actually quantifying this. You make pretty bold statements that sound good, but that contain not much we can use to guide policy decisions. And that matters.
How much will we suffer? For how long? How much will the climate impacts cost, how much adaptation measures, how much will avoidance cost? In terms of money, human lives and living conditions. Who is impacted? We have to put numbers if we want to find an optimum solution.
I think he is just saying people shouldn’t doom post. I think there is a fine line because a lot of zoomers i interact with are hopeless and have given up. This is a generation who never experienced a functional (American) government who worked for the people. So they just don’t care and you can see it reflected in their memes.
I don’t know the rhetorical path we should take. We need to get people motivated and fired up but not apathetic and despairing. I mostly want to see politicians crumble and the rich eaten and i think that’s messaging many will get behind.
Literally “This is fine.”
Ignore the triple digit temps in the ocean, that’s not apocalyptic! Relax!
So what if a few people died of heat exhaustion just by… Walking outside for a few minutes. Normal. Not apocalyptic.
So what if regular rains are delivering hurricane levels of flooding. That’s just nature doing it’s thing, dude. Quit overreacting.
Malaria is in NJ, but like, mosquitos fly so that was probably bound to happen.
And really, like, 110 isnt that hot, especially if it’s not humid.
Relax.
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The political agenda of… checks notes making the world a better place to live.
It’s how you go about that that gets political. Just an example: Nuclear or Solar? EVs, bike lanes, or public transportation? I know you’ll say it doesn’t have to be one or the other and there’s no one size fits all answer, but you bet your ass when money is involved it’ll get political.
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I understand his sentiment. I have an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness because most CO2 emissions aren’t even made by normal every day people but the entities that do create a majority of it don’t care. This means anything we attempt to do is as a whole is only a drop in the bucket compared to what these entities are producing. I purchased a hybrid vehicle to curve my driving emissions and I recycle. I planted grass and a tree in my yard to prevent run off and produce oxygen. I am looking into getting solar power for my home but I am not a rich man so the price is a little beyond me right now. Things I can do I try to do but in the end regardless of what I do entities are polluting our water and air, producing plastics, and are trying to place the blame on normal people. It can be a little heavy on the soul.
Add a few wildflowers to your grass, it’s better for insects (and should not be that expensive).
That’s a good idea but how to I mow it with flowers in it?
Honestly I think we should stop trying to stop climate change and start adapting to it.
Because at individual scale all actions to limit climate change are almost meaningless, whatever we do we will not see the consequences of it. On the other hand we can adapt to climate change at individual and community level.
Start planting trees in our community, build a way of life that does not require fossil fuel since we are running out of them, installing solar panels and improving home insulation to help during externe weather events, buy less products and focus on repairing them instead …
All of that can directly improve our life, present and future, without relying on everyone doing their share
AND, as a side effect, all the action we do to prepare yourself to live in a post growth world are also great to reduce our CO2 emissions.
You can only adapt so much before you just fucking die though, corporations are not going to stop pumping out carbon and if things don’t change, we won’t be able to survive as a people.
Because adapting is the same situation. Yes, you can make changes personally, but there are overwhelming societal issues that you can’t begin to touch, that require huge investments, but is from politicians and corporations. Most importantly, adapting is more expensive than prevention
That’s a good and healthy way to approach this. Nicely put.
Bettering the world’s situation is a legislative/political issue. Bettering you and your immediate community is something you can help with, even if it’s only at the margins.
The problem with all this, however, is that there are a lot of the things that you can do to help your personal situation that are definitely not helping the overall situation. For example installing air conditioning, watering your lawn, etc. They might make things more comfortable for you, but they’re by no means better for the world. We still need to incentivize the right things through the right tax breaks and financial/industry incentives, which lead us back to politics being the actual thing that we need to make meaningful personal and global change possible.
I don’t know lemmy’s demographics, but I imagine it skews overwhelmingly north American, white, and with a reasonable and stable income. I.e., The people who are most capable to “adapt”
We must also focus on unreserved communities, those without the means to make life comfortable, or to repair their homes or to move to avoid sea level rise or hurricanes or other damaging impacts of climate change.
Excuse my trickling down, but I’ll respond the same way as with EVs. The best way to make it affordable is to put more of it in the hands of people who can afford it now. As manufacturing scales Up, it gets less expensive. As more is bought new, more is available for the used market.
This does work with manufactured goods where scale matters and there is both a market for new sales and pre-owned sales
Hang in there. It will eventually get so bad it will mandate action. Humanity is resilient. But I do feel for the many people who have died and will die, or be left homeless, or without a country to call home on the way there…
Also, put pressure on your elected officials, vote in every election, encourage your friends and peers to vote. Run for local office where a lot of decisions are made that can help
I live in Colorado and I feel we have a fairly good turnout for elections and the state is move quickly to renewables. However, this does not stop other state and companies from polluting to their hearts content. Companies need the hammer brought down on them.
I’m actually pretty optimistic about EV adoption. There’s too large a portion of the US hostile to the idea, but a dozen or so states establishing a 2035 deadline to phase out new gas powered cars. However those states are also some of the strongest economies
I believe many European countries, or maybe the EU have similar targets.
That may be enough for car manufacturers to completely switch over. If you needed to focus on products for the leading economies.p, why would you even build gasoline cars that couldn’t be sold there. The backward states may have no choice
I believe that we need to switch to EV when the solid state battery is more easily manufactured. A real concern with everyone switching to EV is the power grid and it’s ability to handle that.
So true, but it’s a problem of coordinating and prioritizing thousands of corporate entities over more than a decade. In a mostly capitalist economy, the only realistic way is to set a deadline and milestones
Electric grids very add only need a lot of improvements plus we need more power generation, but these are costs to utilities, not profits, so won’t happen unless forced to
Agreed
I already feel helpless. I try to use my vehicle less and use public transport. I just moved somewhere walkable so there are days that I don’t use my vehicle (will be weeks eventually when I get used to it). I try to buy local and reduce my waste.
I live in a southern state though so my vote doesn’t do shit. Even if I did, this feels like a political issue at this point and neither the right or the left of the country has the will to “do what needs to be done”.
Capitalism is exploitative by its nature and the market will never solve the problem until we have extracted all the fossil fuels in the earth.
I know it is not your problem, but how can we NOT feel helpless?
I think the issue here is who you’re looking at for the audience. At this point, we can agree that anyone who doesn’t think there’s a problem is delusional, and it’s a waste to time to convince them otherwise.
If we assume the audience is all people who believe this is an issue, then this message makes sense. It’s trying to convince people that they should still care and not be nihilistic about it.
I think climate change is a big fucking problem, full stop.
That being said, do you know how much of a relief it is to read “we’re not going to turn into Mars, just keep trying to fix the problem we got this humanity”? I legitimately have had existential dread due to the messaging around climate change. At least now I can continue trying to do my best to fix it without asking “what’s the fucking point?”
Title rage baited?
What’s weird is you claim to be a scientist yet don’t understand fundamental social science.
Any scientist worth their weight has a basic understanding and any effective scientist understands how to use the field to their advantage. He is not wrong at all.
LOL WUT
So first off, climate science is data driven. Social politics should play no part in how to interpret the result that shit is getting hotter and people are dying… That’s pure statistics baby
But in terms of communication, sure, understanding psychology helps. But look where a poor understanding of social psychology got us…
And social science is not the same as psychology. Social science means integrating diverse perspectives into environmental decision making. Which many in this thread are failing to do
You’re overly ignorant of social science and you’ve shown to have zero understanding of what it is. Statistics are a huge component.
Climate change is human created and you think we can fix it without the human science. Good luck with that.
lol no
Statistics are a summarization of data
All fields use it.
A statistic is that the climate will increase more than 1.5 degrees by the end of the century
How we operationalize that information requires other statistical summaries BUT that does not negate the fact that we have passed a tipping point and people are dying because of it…
That doesn’t absolve us of action now… Or risk of overstating the threat
Another statistic is that most people don’t understand statistics
Signed, an actual fucking statistician
Again ignoring the point and proving mine to what, prove an elementary understanding of…statistics? So you don’t understand social science at all. Got it.
Sorry to have disappointed you. I’ll go ahead and tender my resignation later today. I guess I can’t help the planet after all… 😢
What really got me worried was a warning ( warning collapse per 2025) about a projected collapse of the Atlantic Gulfstream.:
“The Gulf Stream system could collapse as soon as 2025, a new study suggests. The shutting down of the vital ocean currents, called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc) by scientists, would bring catastrophic climate impacts.”
That would be very bad news for Europe and The Atlantic and other sea currents in general.
No. It wouldn’t. Yes, it would get colder in Europe, but there are lots of ways and means to deal with that. Heck, European homes generally are optimized for the cold and not the heat - which is where a lot of the issues and deaths regarding heat stroke come from. Also, European homes are not getting blown away by some heavy gusts.
Florida will get the most shit and probably will cease to exist. Though, one could argue that that’s not such a bad thing…
And the Gulf stream has stopped a few times in earth history, it isn’t the only current.
Stop fear mongering, FFS, and do things differently. Yes, it will get uncomfortable for a lot of people and we have to ask ourself as a society if we deal with it properly - or not and face the consequences, but even 2°C won’t collaps humanity at once. It all depends what we do with the cards we are going to get dealt.
European homes generally are optimized for the cold and not the heat
cries in British
No youre not
Lol, what do you disagree about? Is a 1.5°C rise apocalyptic?
There are quite a few hypothetical tipping points where the climate can go catastrophically wrong. We don’t understand them as well as climate change, can’t as easily predict how likely they are or when they’re inevitable, but we’d like to avoid them.
The 1.5°C target is where we expect significant disruptions to society, expensive impact, hardship for the most vulnerable. But we can deal with it if it stops there. However as we shoot past that target, those disruptions get bigger and more expensive but also those tipping points become more likely. I really really hope we can avoid them
Hey jackass, people aren’t apathetic because they believe it’s too late to do anything. People are apathetic because people like you haven’t done anything and now it’s too late. The “beneficial actions” you are calling for are half measures that won’t help at all, and the people who care are already doing what they can while the real polluters, the real destroyers of humanity, are building bunkers and hoarding gold to survive the coming storm.
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Fucking knew it! Their neutrality sickens me
I hate those filthy neutrals, Kif. With enemies you know where they stand but with Neutrals, who knows? It sickens me.
What makes a man turn neutral, Kif
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Wow, what a ridiculous straw man.
I haven’t heard anyone referring to 1.5 C as apocalyptic. I HAVE heard it described in terms of being a threshold at which climate scientists predicted a certain set of consequences.
What’s apocalyptic about the situation is our acceleration towards even greater climate change, and world governments’ unwillingness to take the situation seriously.
In the US, for example, Biden passed the greatest climate mitigation law of all time … and it’s grossly inadequate. They’re treating it much the same way that the Obama administration treated health care. They patted themselves on the back for passing the ACA, which still left the country in a health care CRISIS, because it was a half measure.
In many ways the absolute worst way you can respond to a crisis is with these types of half measures. Why? Because it acts as a pressure valve, removing all the momentum for real, meaningful change.
Much like the ACA, Democrats will pretend that this is a stepping stone for the next set of reforms… But we only need to look at the ACA to see how flawed that reasoning is. We have not built on the ACA. We have spent a decade watching Republicans chip away at it.
Now we’re playing the same game with climate change mitigation. And the price will be hundreds of millions of climate change refugees, war, and famine.
To be 100 percent clear: while the Democrats are incompetent here, the real villains are the Republicans, who are WILLFULLY ignorant of the science, and are the ones forcing either impotent compromise or no mitigation at all.
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Yeah, I don’t see what he’s getting at. There has absolutely been alarmist rhetoric surrounding climate change, and I see it all the time. Hell, I’ve seen people who think we’re already too late, even if we were to stop releasing CO2 today itself.
Part of me wonders how much the other side has benefitted from the sense of apathy this could create. After all, there’s real value in making stupid people give up entirely, in some ‘we’re doomed’ scenario.
I think I do. So much in terms of doom and gloom is being shouted in terms of climate change that many are becoming numb to it, which is dangerous.
He is wrong about 1.5C not being an issue, however. 1.5C != “every place will raise only by 1.5C”. It means localized temperatures in many areas will be much, MUCH higher, as parts of the US are beginning to find out.
Responsible messaging is important, but the looming catastrophe cannot be understated. You or someone you know will likely die from global warming, if it hasn’t happened already.
I know 1.5 is dangerous; after all, we’re already seeing a slew of weather disasters all around the world. This is why now is the time we should scream off the rooftops that it’s not too late, that we can still fix this, because people are starting to wake up just a little more.
Now is the worst time to give into apathy, and to tell people who’re just starting to wake up that we can’t do anything.
I think the issue is that some of us know this, but most are getting blasted by the media non-stop, and some of the messaging is even outright denying climate change exists. After a while people get tired of hearing about it.
I don’t have an answer for how to solve that one except to say that regardless of who is saying what or how loud, governments around the world aren’t doing enough. It is amazing to me because at the end of the day, money can slow and eventually stop/reverse climate change. We have the technology, we just need to invest in the required infrastructure and technology to make it happen.
Climate change isn’t political. It will kill all of us if left unchecked.
Problem is that climate change is political. Worse, it’s geopolitical. It’ll take the will of the people to just tell governments to stop plodding along doing the bare minimum and take some real action for once.
What’s happening right now is terrible, but it’s also a chance to wake up the masses in time. I just hope the impetus isn’t lost to apathy.
4° C is apocalyptic. 1.5° C is still catastrophic and will result in massive floods and global famines.
But that line of thinking will let some people believe we’re good until we hit that 4° mark. I have no idea how likely some of the tipping points are (AMOC collapse, West Antarctic glacier loss, permafrost melt and methane release) but they sound apocalyptic and much more likely as we increase climate change
Hear hear!
It’s not straw man, you just reenforced his point, good job.
It’s fundamental social science.
1.5C was never a threat, it was a target. The IPCC produces simplified “stakeholder” report, it would be a superior use of one’s time to just give it a skim than spend time reading clickbaity website titles. https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/
Policymaker summary report: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_SummaryForPolicymakers.pdf
I think the peak 4 degrees this century is extremely possible. A lot of the community studying this now thinks we have underestimated feedback loops, much of what is currently happening was not supposed to happen as quickly as it has.
I agree, our track record since the establishment of the IPCC has been only very slightly better than “business as usual” scenarios. The current decline of the AMOC current was not predicted to happen as quickly as it has, and the early 2000s IPCC reports didn’t even factor in Greenland ice sheet meltwater. I’m not a climate scientist, I think if we have one or two in this community, their input would be fascinating.
It’s terrifying.
We won’t get to 2100 before things really get awful either. We’ll get to 2035-2050 and then things like cascading crop failure will happen, causing a global collapse in the food supply.
If we reach that event occurring it will functionally prevent governments from cooperating to reduce carbon emissions. They will all be focused internally on turmoil and massive unrest generated by mass famine. Many will turn up the carbon dial in order to try and address this. Others will simply have revolutions that take considerable time afterwards to stabilise making organised effort unviable.
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it’s a slow boil folks, nothing’s really wrong, it’ll be fine… don’t hold anyone responsible or try to change the path…
Imho, we’re not going to change anything big enough to make a change. We’re going to adapt to whatever consequences will arise. At least the ones that have the resources to do so. Let’s not talk about the poor countries…
- That didn’t happen.
- And if it did, it wasn’t that bad.
- And if it was, that’s not a big deal. <- WE ARE HERE
- And if it is, that’s not my fault.
- And if it was, I didn’t mean it.
- And if I did, you deserved it.
well. 1.5C° maybe not an existential threat, but I don’t see a single sign it would stop there, and not going further into 4.0C° ya know
I don’t recall seeing anyone saying that 1.5 degrees warming was an existential threat to humanity. That said, its already killing some humans at less than 1.5 and that will only get worse
I get what you’re saying and you’re not wrong that it will definitely get worse, but I just want to caution that while more people may be dying from extreme heat, any figures to that end should be contrasted with the number of people dying from extreme cold.
Seems like everyone forgets that a nontrivial number of humans die from freezing to death every year… While it sucks that x% more are dying from heat, if more than x% fewer people are dying from the cold, then the point is moot. Though more people are dying from heat, fewer people are dying from environmental exposure throughout the year, and so, over all, the heat can be argued to be a good thing.
Climate change affects both points of the spectrum, so no the heat can’t be argued to be a good thing.
Yes it does, but average global temps are going up, not down.
Omitting the environmental deaths by cold only tells some of the story. If both are going up, that’s far worse than any other scenario. Fact is, we have no idea either way. So from this assessment we only have half the picture, and that’s the problem.
The argument that it’s good is if 10% more people die from exposure in the summer, but that also means 10% fewer die in the winter from exposure, but 10% that 10% represents more people for the winter numbers, then fewer people are dying from exposure overall, which is where it could be argued that it’s a good thing.
I’m of the mind that it’s easier to give people sweaters, blankets, jackets, scarves, mittens, etc, to keep them alive during the cold months, than it is to somehow make them not die in the summer from the heat, so if we want these numbers moving at all, we want them to go towards the winter, because we can’t exactly air condition the outside in the summer.
Just because I see that the argument can be made, doesn’t and shouldn’t imply that I agree the argument should be made. We should be doing everything we can to slow down, prevent, and otherwise reverse the damage from pollution, including, but not limited to, preventing it from continuing, cleaning up the environmental pollution that’s possible to be cleaned, and finding new ways to do the things we need to without creating a new source of possibly worse damage to the environment, as well as doing what we can to restore the environmental areas that have been lost from the damage we have done.
Some things are extremely difficult or impossible with our level of technology, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s not like we have a good way to find and remove radioactive elements or oil that has escaped containment and have been floating around in the ocean… At least, we can’t right now. But keeping things like that from being repeated, using better, clean, energy sources, and advanced and ecologically friendly ways of storing and using that power will be key to preventing the need for things like oil to be dug up from the ground.
As you’re probably aware, there’s a laundry list of things we can and should be doing, and the majority of the time, that’s not what is being done… We have to fix it, but Rome wasn’t built in a day, and a lot of powerful people with deep pockets have an investment and interest in keeping things as they are, keeping people reliant on fossil fuels and dirty practices that result in pollution so they can keep making more and more money, so that they can simply have more money. It’s a difficult fight, but knowing the arguments people might make against that progress is going to be important to our future; so we can be prepared when those arguments are made by people opposed to a better, more environmentally friendly future, so those without the vision to see how damaging things are, can be convinced to make the right decision for everyone.
It’s going to be a long, tough, battle to fight.
There was a prediction by a UN climate panel earlier this year thankfully that we would stay below 4 C.
Speaking to weekly magazine Der Spiegel, in an interview first published on Saturday, Skea warned against laying too much value on the international community’s current nominal target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared the pre-industrial era.
“We should not despair and fall into a state of shock” if global temperatures were to increase by this amount, he said.
In a separate discussion with German news agency DPA, Skea expanded on why.
“If you constantly communicate the message that we are all doomed to extinction, then that paralyzes people and prevents them from taking the necessary steps to get a grip on climate change,” he said.
“The world won’t end if it warms by more than 1.5 degrees,” Skea told Der Spiegel. “It will however be a more dangerous world.”
Surpassing that mark would lead to many problems and social tensions, he said, but still that would not constitute an existential threat to humanity.
(…)
Skea predicted that one difficult area might prove to be changing people’s lifestyles. He said that no scientist could tell people how to live or what to eat.
“Individual abstinence is good, but it alone will not bring about the change to the extent it will be necessary,” Skea said. “If we are to live more climate consciously, we need entirely new infrastructure. People will not get on bikes if there are no cycle paths.”
Skea said he also wanted to adapt the IPCC so that it could provide better and more targeted advice to specific groups of people on how they could act to combat climate change.
He named groups like town planners, landowners and businesses: “With all these things it’s about real people and their real lives, not scientific abstractions. We need to come down a level,” he told DPA.
The headline is actual ragebait considering the more reasonable context of his message
One argument is we’re already there. We e already locked in 1.5° warming, even if it needs a few more years to manifest. We’ve missed the target. But we can’t afford to give up. We can still reduce the impact, the severity
His statement isn’t really about the severity of the issue, he just says that people are prone to give up
The news;
- we are fucked
- just kidding no we are not
- yes we are
- no we are not
Don’t even know what to believe anymore. All I know for fact is what I can see and trend myself. I know about 7 years ago or so I definitely noticed more wildfires than I ever have. Never had I had memories of every summer being smoked out. This summer I’ve felt autumn chill in some mornings when I normally would not have. Heat domes… Didn’t even know why that was until last year or the year before.
I think shits fucked.
pretty sure we’re fucked.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/30/world/antarctic-sea-ice-winter-record-low-climate-intl/index.html
when the AMOC goes, we’re gonna see ecosystems collapse. When the ice shelf breaks off into the sea, we’re gonna see sea levels climb rapidly.
can human civilization survive? perhaps if we can get everyone to work together. ww2 levels of mobilization and federalization of resources.
I think this would require the UN to have a no-bullshit-session with the worlds top climate and systems folks, then each and every country declaring a national emergency to address the climate crisis. Which means we’re going to finally have to get the assholes rolling coal in their giant pickup trucks festooned with trump flags to give up their bullshit. And everyone will have to cut their energy consumption and face changes to their lives and diets that will help us prepare for the really hard times ahead and feed the starving that are already resulting from mass drought & the war in Ukraine.
I doubt we’ll ever get the rolling coal big truck assholes to give up their bullshit, so… No, we’re fucked, we’re going to die badly in most cases, and it’s almost entirely our own fault. I let the last few generations off because they didn’t enjoy the excess, they’re simply going to get stuck with the bill.
Cheers, hope I’m very very wrong.
IMO whether we’re fucked or not is not a constructive argument.
In either case, the interpretation of climate change can lead to the same conclusion: a) we’re fucked up to the point of no return. So we can keep our wasteful society as is until we extinct, because changing our society will not achieve anything. b) we’re not in that bad situation so we can keep our wasteful society as is until the situation gets really bad and requires change.
Anything could be used to justify not making changes and majority of society/indistry ppl in power are super resistant to it (which likely reduces their profit).
In reality, it’s not black and white. Even if the ‘no return’ scenario is real, we can still lessen the climate change effect or delay catastrophic end if we make changes now.
Nuance, the world is filled with it. Who’d have thought?
This is critical. We need to be careful, alert and active in mitigating climate change (and putting massive pressure on our governments to do the same) but we cannot give in to alarmism; all it’ll lead to is apathy, and a all that’ll lead to is inaction.
Climate change is real, it’s dangerous, and it’s happening. However, as long as we have commitment, it is not beyond our capabilities to mitigate. We still have time, and we can still fix this.
What is he waiting for, his feet to cook under the sun?
It’s like the world is desperate to recreate AppleTV+’s show Extrapolation, where companies just kept negotiating to raise the world temperature target cap. The red skies many people in the US were seeing were finally a wake up call to some.
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