- cross-posted to:
- climate@slrpnk.net
- cross-posted to:
- climate@slrpnk.net
(not my OC nor my OP, just helping spread the message around:-)
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Well, global meat consumption per Capita is going down YOY so something is working.
Methane gas is basically our greatest enemy at this point
There’s an interesting graph that someone posted in https://aussie.zone/comment/14827931, but I am no expert so I have no idea personally, just sharing that, which seems to suggest that the highest areas are residential energy and road transportation. Whether that in turn traces to Methane I have no idea:-).
I mean from the cow farts but yeah. If we can do that one at the same time as carbon much better
The nice thing is that if we could work on either, then we could work on both at the same time. Caveat: we cannot work on either, for the most part, bc people are selfish and short-sighted:-(.
its to late, its over, to prevent catastrophe.
its not to late to ensure we have a minimal catastrophe instead of a maximal catastrophe.
NOT Uplifting
I strongly believe that there’s a regression of global society that will prevent humanity from surviving the next k/t level impact. I weakly believe that the climate catastrophe that we are headed toward currently will cause such a regression. I weakly believe that if we don’t take global action in the next 4-5 years, we will be unable to avoid a catastrophe of that scale.
I don’t think the current global leadership can be convinced through lobbying. Non-violent opportunities to replace the global leadership are dwindling. When/if only violent means remain, I will simply enjoy what wealth I have until I am extinguished by the Glorious Revolution as the Bourgeoisie scum I will have become.
Actually, it’s too late, because those in power are accelerating in the wrong direction and we are less and less able to prevent them to do so.
And even so, given the current state of the society, even the “best case scenario” will be enough to make it collapse.
Yes, thats exactly the kind of useless, defeatest post and sentiment that the Op was talking about.
That’s the ticket! It’s always great when a random
idiotstranger on the internet agrees with you… (no, really:-P).At some point, defeatism is just realism, no matter the amout of hopium people try to sell to you.
Then do us all a favour and remove yourself, if you’re going to go full nihilist and hopelessness. If all you are willing to do is be inactive and continue to consume then we’d rather not have you around doing nothing but contributing to the problem.
OR
Join the rest of us and DO SOMETHING! Fight for something you want, do you remember that feeling? Have you ever known it or have you always been this pathetic? And if you truly believe that there is no hope then why not end it all by taking out some of these polluting fuckers with you?! Don’t get depressed, get radicalised!!!
I think this message has good and bad uses. As a way to stop people from being doomers and not taking any action? Great. But I’ve also seen this kind of argument be used to justify an incrementalist approach to an issue that we absolutely cannot afford to go slow on or half ass. “Something is better than nothing” isn’t good enough. If we take 1 step forward and 2 steps back we’re going to lose. And that’s if the problem was linear. The fact that feedback loops accelerate the problem means we lose more and more ground the longer we wait to rip the bandaid off.
If the best allowable solution is to keep electing liberals who take money from capitalists to promote symbolic progress or “market based solutions” while continuing to approve new fossil fuel projects, then we really are doomed.
True, but also don’t allow perfection to be the enemy of good.
I recall in Star Wars when the Jedi accused the Trade Federation of having invaded Naboo. Did it really? This needs to be verified, doesn’t it? Oh but wait, it’s the word of “Jedi”, right, not just “some guys”? Yeah but can we really play at favoritism? Wait, how is that favoritism when they have an established mandate to help protect the Republic… and on and on.
Ironically, they could have sent an entire fleet, and if it turned out to be a simple misunderstanding, then oops, so well, now we know not to trust even “Jedi” in the future.
People are really bad at measuring the cost of NOT acting. Like yeah, vaccines can cause all kinds of things up to and including death… but then again, so too can a deadly disease?!
Anyway, the job of science is to figure stuff out and communicate what was found - not even - necessarily, at least usually - including translation to the general public, which is more of a reporting task. Politics doesn’t even begin to enter into that. So I think it’s awesome that this science post is pointing out some facts that may be relevant as people discuss the political ramifications and next steps. Ofc communication is a 2-way endeavor and if politicians don’t understand what the scientist is saying, they can ask questions, but so far the OOP scientist here seems to have done her part, and quite well it looks to me (who admittedly knows next to nothing whatsoever about climate science, but at least this seems to have succeeded at the communicate clearly portion:-).
True, but also don’t allow perfection to be the enemy of good.
I think this logic fundamentally misses the point. This isn’t me not starting a project because I don’t think I could do it perfectly so why bother. It’s someone else showing me their outline for the project and telling me that I don’t need to do anything, they’ll get it done on time. Then it doesn’t get done because they never intended to do anything, they just didn’t want anyone else completing anything.
If we were just doing small things because that’s all we could feasibly do for now and we’re working our way up to big things, that’d be fine. It might not be enough, but it’d be what we’re working with. But the small actions being taken by capitalist governments aren’t designed to chip away at the problem slowly. Their purpose is to give the appearance that the current system is capable of solving the problem and someone is working on it, so we don’t need to think about more radical solutions. The goal is to block progress, not merely to work on it in some slow and responsible way. “Look, the government joined a non-binding agreement saying that we’re working on climate change! We should totally keep voting for them because it’s better than nothing!”
It’s even worse than that though. They’re not just doing things for show to dampen political will for greater change. These are the same people that keep giving the military, surveillance, and police state more and more money and power. We are allowing them to build the tools they need to keep us in our place. By continuing along this path we’re making it harder and harder for us to eventually do what needs to be done.
The reality is that we’re not going to be able to save ourselves while capitalists are in charge. Capitalism fundamentally demands endless growth and a concentration of wealth and power. Efforts to curtail that growth will be stopped and the costs of that growth is distributed to those with less power.
As for the science/science communication part of this: I think it should be pretty clear that that isn’t the problem. The science is well known at this point. The problem is that the people who have the power to fix things don’t care and are so invested in the status quo that they’d sooner ratchet up violent repression before they’d actually try to solve the problem.
So it sounds like the first step is to care.
As the OOP said too.
i saw a video on youtube, by someone named sabine said everyone gave up on climate action, yea they gave up like years ago, the only miracle was when lockdown happened, and global co2 fell very fast and nature quickly reclaimed certain areas. like they pretended to care, but never did anything to stop it. even in research i heard that you cant frame climate change was leaning towards caused by “people” or your research wont get funded, thats how bad funding grant sis for research for some universities.
sabine also posted absolute horseshit about trans people so I don’t trust anything she says about science anymore
She posted a nuanced video about hormones and surgery on trans-identified minors, that considered both sides of the issue. If you find that “absolute horseshit” then you are not interested in science but in religion.
get out of here. there’s no both sides to the issue and she used faulty evidence to push bullshit that’s been debunked over and over.
I heard she made another dumbass video about autism but couldn’t stomach to go through it.
she’s full of shit.
So religion then
if you don’t understand what words mean, then yeah sure
Great but I already do as much as I personally can handle. Would be great if society at large, e.g. laws, regulations, and big corps, could get on the same level.
Me: dusts off hands Installed solar on the roof, bicycling to work, updated the insulation on all my windows, and drastically reduced the amount of plastic in my life.
Tech Company Next Door: CONSUMES 70 MwH OF POWER FOR TWO YEARS STRAIGHT POWERING AN UNOPTIMIZED AI
Me: Begins flipping through a copy of How To Blow Up A Pipeline
Don’t blow up the pipeline, that’ll pollute the environment! Go for the pumping infrastructure, if you can knock out a pump you can decrease or even completely stop the flow of oil.
id guess pumps are more expensive to fix too. but also probably better guarded.
eh, I don’t think that’s gonna make much of a difference:
most of the cost is probably lost revenue from the stopped flow, not the pump itself!
that said you’re almost at the ideal target already!
it’s best to sabotage the nexus point nearest the pipeline source: that way you knock out the largest part of the network resulting in the most damage by disabling most of the network!
tl;dr: knock out infrastructure as close to the source as possible, that isn’t actually the source!
(because sabotaging the source is a really, really bad idea, see: every oil spill ever)
(and for fucks sake, don’t do any of this in winter…people might freeze, if there’s no time to come up with alternative energy sources…which is why late spring is the best time to blow up a pipeline! :D )
“guarded” is usually a fence and some cameras, maybe a locked door. Honestly an easier target than any buried pipeline. Kind of surprising we don’t see more ELF action on this front, except for the whole ‘get sent to jail forever to make an example of you’ thing.
That’s what this post is saying. Do YOUR part. That’s all you can do.
That’s all you can do.
It’s not “all” you can do, though. At what point does “eco-terrorism” turn into “justified self-defense?”
If eco-terrorism is what YOU can do, then that’s what you can do. I can’t do that, so I’ll do my part as best as I can. I can’t save the world alone, so I’ll just do my best.
If everyone, including corporations, did their best, we’d be in a better place.
Tuesday.
I agree, many of us have maxed out passive improvements. Now let’s work on active.
Call your local oil company CEO. Get a job at Exxon and really half ass it. Visit your town government and demand better public transport and electric busses. Take a dump on the nearest gas pump.
Only some of those are jokes and I’m not sure which.
Don’t poop on stuff you don’t own.
Don’t poop on stuff you don’t own.
Bad news for everyone who rents their home, and thus doesn’t technically own a toilet :(
It’s never too late if you seriously consider all your options Ie:
Full nuclear energy development with SMRs
Fusion reactors research
Full transition to electric/hydrogen vehicles
Economic sanctions to countries with grid power coming from carbon/ non renewable resources above a certain percentage
Full development of lunar/cis lunar infrastructure/space
Large scale deployment of solar mirror arrays designed to reflect incoming sunlight, built using lunar regolith as raw materials source
Blowing an 88 megatons hydrogen bomb under the sea, below 8 to 12 Km under the ocean floor surface to trigger about 30 years of carbon capture in a second
You know, easy stuff
And so on
The US is fucked anyway, but if China and the EU worked together, greatness could be approved on potentially the most important front:
Economic sanctions to countries with grid power coming from carbon/ non renewable resources above a certain percentage
However, the one I’m most curious about is the following:
Blowing an 88 megatons hydrogen bomb under the sea, below 8 to 12 Km under the ocean floor surface to trigger about 30 years of carbon capture in a second
How would this work? I’m really interested in the mechanics of this, not so much the feasibility (which is non-existent anyway)
Oh the biggest bomb one is actually extremely simple
. Create (an) hydrogen) atomic bomb(s) with yield equal to or similar to 88 megatons . Go to seabed , about 12 km down on Ocean floor
. Drill about 8 to 12 km into basalt ( basalt is a mineral that fixes to carbon )
. Detonate bomb
. Watch trillions of basalt mineral get pulverized instantly into the sea
. Allow sea currents to distribute this all over the world
. Watch how oceans start absorbing more CO2
. Watch as global temperatures drop a degree and a half (1.5)
Repeat as needed, remember not to overdo it. Thankfully the ocean is extremely good at absorbing any radiation if any dares to escape
Hmm something tells me this might cause unforeseen consequences for aquatic life… But we won’t know until we try!
Well, the alternative is very foreseeable consequences for aquatic life. I’m sure they’d be on board
Well you wouldn’t explode it just anywhere, there are tons of deserted seabed places about.
The best is that the explosion would be mitigated greatly by the teratons of basalt and water over the explosion
I’m a pessimist in that even in the best possible situation humans would still find a way to overpopulate the earth until no solution is viable. We are parasites
Don’t disagree that civilization is a parasite, but a lot of parasites evolve to not kill their host 🙂
We are categorically not parasites. We don’t live in/on another organism deriving nutritional value from the bodies as hosts
We and other animals eat plants/plan eaters directly. We are not hosted by plants or plant eaters.
If that were the case, other animals would also be parasites. At most, we are predators
There are many definitions of parasites tho and all hinge on the time the parasite spends in/on the host
O…k…a…y… lemme just get right onto that now… You know what, I think I’ll take a nap, and perhaps get back to it tomorrow? 👨🔬☢️💥
Don’t worry bro we’ve got people working on it as we speak
Seriously, if there’s one thing I don’t miss from reddit (I tell a lie, there’s dozens of things I don’t miss from Reddit) it’s the “Actually we’re too far gone, and everyone’s going to die in seven days because none of you jokers will buy a Tesla!~” nonsense
Funfact: Conspiracy Bullshit in the other direction is still Conspiracy Bullshit
Really? I knew it had gotten bad over there since the Rexodus but wow, it sounds rough. I’m so glad we are over here in The Good Place instead. Wait a minute…!? 🤡
A bit sad how pessimistic everyone is. Renewables are currently becoming the most economic way to produce electricity and even states that do not care about the environment are investing in it. EVs are making progress as well. And while it is true that a lot of damage has already been done and we will face the consequences, I also feel that decarbonization is inevitable even from a economic perspective at this point. The speed at which this happens is variable though and determines how many people will die, this is why it is important to not be pessimistic and hopeless but to try steering things in the right direction.
A bit sad how pessimistic everyone is.
Americans are pessimistic because we don’t have a functional democracy and our fascist oligarchs are too stupid to use their resources to fight climate change… And the rest of the world is pessimistic because the world’s most powerful economy and military has fallen to fascist oligarchy.
Nothing will change until we abolish the billionaires and replace our two party system with a modern multiparty parliamentary system with proportional representation
USAmericans have a religious attachment to fossil fuels that I can’t understand. “Drill baby drill” isn’t even economically viable and yet has become a call to prayer for many US politicians.
It’s rich people who want to keep being rich without risking going into a different thing.
Please stop attributing it to everyone, it’s really annoying
Who is voting for them and why do they win elections if there isn’t a substantial of people who support the idea? “Drill baby drill” isn’t a secret, it is what Republicans have been running on for over a decade.
Many USAmericans are pessimistic because we were finally taking a medium sized step in the right direction, and somehow half the country thinks that’s a bad thing
Personally, the “renewable” energies aren’t making me hopeful. Because they are absolutly not renewable, they can’t be build without pollution because of the materials you need. And even so, climate change is not even the worst of our existential threats, there are many more, but strangely, people are only talking about climate.
Human history consists of us solving problems which then create more, bigger problems.
Agriculture was a trap.
Some might say also… The Internet?
Mind elaborating on the other threats?
Soil depletion, (micro)plastics in the water, biodiversity collapse, political instability, economical crisis, nuclear menace that is not a thing of the past anymore, sanitary crisis that will likely be worse than COVID, to name a few.
Soil depletion is solved by climate change by freeing up frozen arable land of countries that are basically under a blanket of ice for the whole year
True. The Middle East is the fastest growing renewable market after China and the Middle East already has very low fossil fuels and electricity prices. Of course they don’t have absurd tariffs on Chinese renewables.
The Middle East would rather sell their product to other people than use it themselves.
“Never get high on your own supply”
OPEC members have excess capacity. Saudi Arabia for example can produce an additional 3 million barrels per day without having to do anything or spend anything. So no, your assessment is wrong.
It’s just a question of how bad we’ll have it at this point.
There are always best and worst case scenarios.
We are currently comprehensively losing the battle for 3C@2100 (which comes with increasingly harmful-to-devastating impacts in the intervening years and decades: future climate refugees will make the current not-far-off-a-London a decade seem like a picnic. A situation fascists will no doubt exploit).
It looks like the only way to prevent 4C plus and, a future Earth only described in science fiction, is mass civil disobedience.
But the UK government appears to be the worst in any civilised country in terms of squashing dissent, and most of the public appears to be more concerned with not being delayed on their commutes.
I was going to argue that you only need wait for the US to surpass the UK in silencing dissent, but then you said civilized.. I’m not so sure that the US can compete based on that metric anymore.
I don’t believe in the possibility of mass civil disobediance, especially in a context where most of people are either depolitized, either are voting massively for (wannabe) autocrats.
I’m not holding my breath either.
Maybe the way various entities have encouraged the US to embrace its worse impulses might offer a clue as to how global climate activists might be able to try and deal with the seemingly invincible fossil fuel empire.
To elaborate: the second election of Trump, and his and Musk’s actions only a month in have already severely harmed if not destroyed the trust the US needs for the world to continue to use the dollar as global reserve currency.
I don’t think Musk or Trump have the capacity for strategic thinking, or enough of an understanding of geopolitics or economics to understand what harm they have and are causing the US’s prospects over the mid to long term.
We couldn’t get people to wear a mask or get a shot when a disease was killing millions in the open.
We definitely can’t get people to change their behavior over climate change.
That’s because billionaires like Robert Murdock own all our media and they use their power to push disinformation to undermine class solidarity and democracy.
If we want to save the world then we have to get rid of the billionaires asap as they are the greatest threat to democracy.
Then maybe don’t leave it up to them. This OOP refers to a goal, not a process.
There’s a clear difference between being in big trouble and being completely screwed. If we can avoid the extinction of humanity and go with catastrophic disasters and famine that eradicates vast majority of the population, we should totally do it.
Ideally, we would avoid all that, and go back to the good old days. Every small step towards that goal is worth it, although taking longer steps is highly encouraged.
Is climate change an extinction level threat? I’ve never heard that.
I think we’re firmly in “catastrophic disasters and famine that eradicates vast majority of the population” territory.
It’s a question, as you said, of how severe the disasters and famine will be.
Is climate change an extinction level threat? I’ve never heard that.
I read somewhere before that the release of methane from the melting ice caps (?) could create a knock on effect of global warming turning the Earth into another Venus
How much of that is actually true I never looked further into.
The planet has previously been 15C above current levels due to flood volcanism so earth turning into a Venus just straight up isn’t happening. It is potentially mechanically possible but we’re talking conditions so extreme that we couldn’t make it happen even if we wanted too with our current level of technology.
This is highly speculative, because climate science is fiendishly complex, and the error bars in these estimates are as wide as the solar system. However, there is a concept called the “runaway greenhouse effect”, in which the global average temperature spirals out of control, roasting the entire plant. Not exactly the kind of concept you want to think about too much.
Actually, level of warming that could directly wipe humanity is technically possible, even the hopium dealers among climate scientists admit that (notably Michael E. Mann). But even if it doesn’t kill all of us directly, it will likely generate a domino effect for other existential threats.
I feel like in a way, it is too late. The human race decided it doesn’t care to fight climate change. There is going to be significant disruptions, especially near the equator. But on the other hand, even if we overshoot our climate targets, there is always a chance for us to reverse the damage dealt using technology and by reclamation of ecosystems that have been destroyed. I think as long as our species survives we can fix things. But we need a massive, massive change in attitude to muster the political will to do something.
A few billionaires and rich old assholes decided not to fight climate change. They have a disproportional amount of time behind the mic.
Yeah, it kinda seems like humanity wants to ride that tiger
Kind of feels like in 20-30 years time we’ll be claiming its worth fighting for a climate that doesn’t immediately kill us if we go outside for 20 minutes instead of 15.
Or to put it another way, do these scientists not see there’s a difference between living and surviving?
You’re right, better just give up now.
Ok
God forbid someone tries to think past the next quarter.
If the future can’t be livable and people just wants a quiet suicide for the human race I’ve got good news. There’s a very easy solution for avoiding that discomfort that also happens to be the #1 way to reduce your carbon footprint.
But if you want to keep living and not just surviving, suck it up…
Indeed, read the Exxon-Mobil report from the late 1970’s and early 80’s. They hit the nail on the head in regard to global warming. Somebody posted it on Lemmy.
Wait a minute… TIL that Lemmy existed in the late 1970’s!? 🤪🤡🤥🫠
Above a certain threshold there will be no discernible difference in the outcome to our civilisation.
The planet is fine. The people are fucked. G. Carlin was and is right.
No offense, but this is exactly the kind of active pessimism that this post is trying to combat. The only mindset that creates positive change is active optimism. In other words, hope for better and taking action to try and get there.
Note that this is not to be confused with inactive optimism. “Everything will just work out on its own”. That also doesn’t work.
Active pessimism is the most damaging mindset, though, because it actively drains others of their will to make things better. Feeling hopeless is real and understandable, I’ve been feeling it, too. Spreading it around and shutting down those who are trying to do better isn’t the way to process it, though.
No offense, but this is exactly the kind of active pessimism that this post is trying to combat
I agree with you, but I’m not sure the post is really effective for that goal.
Fucking hope police with their unscientific view that honest assessments and factual information are less important than optimism.
The OP’s tweet is wrong.
This is undeniable.
There are certain limits past which feedback loops kick in and after which our actions won’t matter.
I mean thats not really true even if the most catastrophic of feedback loops was actively happening if we invented something for effective carbon capture and storage or did something more drastic like launch enough nukes to start a nuclear winter we could still do something.
Carbon capture and nuclear winter won’t do a goddamn thing if the clathrate gun goes boom, and it is looking like it has:
And that single release, equivalent to two years of human output, is the tip of the spear.
Hope police want to argue that if we are calm about things and don’t point out the dire situation we’re in, we’ll somehow manage.
It’s the same argument as telling a passenger in a car driving towards a cliff at 50 mph, close enough that seconds matter, to not yell ‘CLIFF! BRAKE!’ Because it would demoralize the driver, and should instead calmly inform the driver that we might have some problems if they don’t stop applying pressure to the gas.
I think you misunstand my point. I’m saying that doing nothing is never the only option. There are a lot of people saying that the world is fucked so we might as well do nothing. my only point is that we should at least try doing something.
It’s more like me saying to the driver you should use the ebrake after it becomes too late to use the normal breaks and other people saying that since the normal breaks won’t work we might as well do nothing and accept flying off the cliff full force.
Except that this is the argument that hope police give to people screaming to pull the brake. Not just to people black pilled.
We shoudn’t rely on carbon capture, the technology is still at an embryonary stage and will not be ready on time to have a significant impact. Nor on a nuclear winter, for obvious reasons.
I agree but you said that there would be a point that our actions do not matter. I’m pointing out that there will always be choices to be made that will have some level of effect. You also can’t convince me that if people started dying the the numbers that are expected that if someone told the person in power that a nuclear winter would solve they wouldn’t at least consider it.EDIT: Thought you were the person that I had initially replied to my bad. Thanks 9bananas.
I was simply pointing out that there will always be some level of choice. I do not think that putting ourselves into a nuclear winter is something that should be considered a good idea I was simply pointing it out as an option that was technically available. Not using an option is still making a choice.
FYI: wrong user; check names again ;)
Oops thanks for that.
Okay. But every minute we can delay reaching that threshold will be worth it.
To me it’s the same as the US democracy right now. Yes it’s far too late to see no ill effects and we are already facing the consequences, but every act of resistance to unlawful, immoral and unconstitutional orders slow them down, and with enough co-ordination may slow them down enough before Trump and the oligarchs become truly unstoppable.
For any issue that effects our world’s existence, stand boldly and take action. Don’t let the fear of the inevitability of it consume you.
In fact, they are already unstoppable. History showed us many times that when autocrats are in full power, they keep it forever, unless they lose a war or die without having planified their succession. And don’t talk me about the Biden example, his presidency did not prevented an unpreceded harm by the GOP.
It’s precisely this mentality I’m arguing against (the unstoppableness of Trump, that’s what he wants you to think).
People only have power over you, if you obey their command. MAGA obeys Trump, that’s why Trump has power over MAGA. Whether he has power over the rest of America depends on how much Americans want to defend it from his ongoing attacks, which are happening right now and will continue. “Right now” means that it’s not too late. Giving up and conceding means giving Trump a free pass to wreck the USA.
Your statement is extremely naive, because when a politician establish a rule, you are legally forced to follow it, and believe me, the authorities don’t care about the means to enforce the said rules if they don’t want to follow them. Resistance to Trump will lead to increased repression, you should not forget he is a known authoritarian. If you want to risk your freedom -if not your physical integrity- to set yourself above the law, good for you, but don’t incite people to do so.
“The Earth will just shake us off like a bad case of fleas.”
It’ll at least determine how many species survive. And the threshold to total human extinction is very high, so every ton of co2 is part of a life saved.
