No way!!!
Finally, some good news.
This is either sarcasm or deep, distressing cynicism. Even though I wrote it, I’m not sure which it is.
Sarcasm. Cynicism is the attitude that all people are driven by selfishness. Which is true, but not related to your statement.
As a fan of Diogenes, I feel obliged to point out that Cynicism is not the same as pessimism. Cynicism is the philosophical belief that society/civilization was a mistake and that humans would be best advised to follow the example of dogs, who are (generally) innately happy creatures who don’t worry about pointless abstract things like real estate ownership and licensing agreements.
Okay, I can pivot to following the example of dogs.
I’m going to sniff your butt now.
But we had a record cold wave this winter
/s
Sadly we’re now at the “I told you so” phase of global warming and much sooner than expected. Now it’s a case of how bad are things going to get.
We still haven’t even peaked in terms of global emissions per year, let alone meaningfully reduced them. Then even after reducing from the peak, we really need to get to net 0, which seems impossible right now.
I’ve been in spectator mode for a while now once I realized the trend. Act locally, know your neighbors, become as self-sufficient as you can. Not much else you can do that will have actual effect.
That won’t have any effect. That’s precisely what the billionaires will come up with. Sort of individual peasant responsibility. We’ll be the ones on a carbon allowance, collecting plastic bottles while they can just buy their carbon credits and burn even more private jet fuel. Congrats on playing right into it.
Like blaming the guy behind bars for not trying something to get out.
I get it - don’t give in, change the world, and hold those responsible accountable. All great goals. But without a plan to do so and leadership/infrastructure, you’re just as bad as me saying to help oneself first. Maybe worse, since at least I’m doing something instead of victim blaming. If you want to rally the peasants to storm the castle, go ahead, but you aren’t going to do that by blaming peasants who aren’t doing it solo.
I also get your point on shifting responsibility. I was there when recycling and the rest was marketed to us. That doesn’t make recycling or its forgotten sisters reusing and repairing useless. It just shouldn’t end there, and shouldn’t be an excuse for other things we do as if there’s some balancing of credits. So if being more self-sufficient is some playing into their scheme, well, at least it’s less that they can control.
100% with you mate, posting revolutionary hopium on Lemmy isn’t doing anything. We have to affect what we can reasonably touch. It starts with talking to friends and neighbours, and making sure you have some security and certainty first.
Yeah, seriously, the whole thing with generalizations in the face of suggested individual action is just so silly. We all know we need to hold billionaires/corporations accountable for their bullshit, energy subsides for fucking oil need to go away like yesterday, citizens United needs to be overturned by legislation, members of congress taking bribes from plastic and energy companies and making legislative decisions as a result need to straight up go to prison, etc. But wtf is the normal, everyday person actually gonna do about it? Call their representatives that may or may not listen because they’re a partisan hack? Good one.
The cliché of getting involved locally is the correct course of action. It’s not throwing molotovs in DC, it’s getting to know your local farmers and getting food from them instead of shipped around the globe five times at some supermarket owned by a giant corporation. Get more trees planted in your neighborhood. Start some butterfly sanctuaries. Start a movement to ban egregiously wasteful lawns in your municipality. Get a coalition of people who pay attention and can mob city hall if/when the city council tries to pull some bullshit deals about yet another fucking data center. Establish better water conservation with your neighbors. This is what the actual, real, legitimate revolution looks like. It doesn’t start with “AND I TOOK OUT MY GUN AT THE GUBMINT!”, it starts with “My neighbors and I started our own little kinda country. ¯_(ツ)_/¯”
Acting locally, means the people hired to handle private jets… Can handle locally. I suppose if you’re rich enough for a private jet, you can pay everyone enough to retire after 5 years. But I doubt they do, so go ahead mechanics. Do your part to keep planes grounded
Welp we’re fucked
Color me shocked.
Utah, now, is where Arizona was 20 years ago. We barely had any snow this last winter. I did not need to shovel my driveway at all.
Tja
The thing that doesn’t get called out enough is that many greenhouse gasses have a lag time before they actually start causing heat. CO2 for example takes about 20 years if I recall correctly. So we are seeing the results of what was emitted years ago… not necessarily the current emissions.
Really? I’ve never heard of this, and I’m a climate scientist… Not saying it’s definitely wrong, but a citation would be good.
Well greenhouse gases are often described as a blanket and a blanket doesn’t immediately get warm, it take time. I doubt the trickling effect is much different in lag time than sudden pulses, its just gradually increasing the blanket rather than pulling it all on at once. Its still gonna take time for more solar energy to accumulate by bouncing off the trickling in CO2.
In the book plows, plagues, and petroleum, the author uses several factors of humans history to argue that man made climate change was slowly having an impact much before the industrial revolution, which is the common “starting point” for most people and scientists. Althought not as drastic as this sudden increase in fossil fuel burning, they argue that impacts such as deforestion and burning of cropland in early human settlements had a measureable impact on carbon sinks and carbon releases, still enough to start skewing the natural rate of climate change.
Yeah… realising I was not making a distinction between greenhouse effect (e.g. increased rate of warming), and the result (e.g. actual increased heat content/temperature. I think the rate of warming increase is basically instant, but yes, it takes some time for the temperature levels to catch up.
I don’t know if I was explicitly taught it at uni, buy I have always understood as a climate scientist that GHG emissions started before the industrial revolution (albeit small). I think that’s common knowledge in climate science.
Apologies I should have linked a source in that claim. I only had a rough understanding of it and had read an article on phys.org that mentioned that previously. Arguably still a big concern since we could not be seeing the actual warming done in present day 2026 for another decade or more.
Not true at all. Compare:
“lag time before they actually start causing heat” and
“the timing between an emission and the maximum temperature response is a decade on average”
A “start” and a “maximum” are completely different. IR absorption starts immediately and increases over years to a maximum.
They may be thinking of the half-life of C02, around 120 years … or the delayed effect of temperature uptake by the ocean. I’m not a clime scientist.
I edited in a reference - it’s a thing aparently
How fucked are we?
My intuitive answer is that the collapse of globalised industrial society seems fairly likely (as a result of the end of cheap liquid fuel if nothing else). What that looks like is highly dependent on how we respond - it’s not a climate problem, it’s a social problem.
I don’t think humans are going to go extinct, but a population crash seems likely. And we’re taking out a tonne of other species.
I would hazard that the the extintion of Mankind really depends on the innevitable water and food wars escalating out of control in the nuclear era or not.
A lot of this shit (you also see it in Economics, as Inequality explodes and Social Mobility grinds to a halt) can escalate out of control via the reactions of Human Societies to it (just look at the rise of the Far Right in response to the above mentioned trends in Inequality and Social Mobility).
As I see it, people’s and countries’ reaction to the problems caused by Climate Change are were the nastiest of nasty shit can come out from.
Yep, plausible, but again, that’s a social problem. It’s super interesting, but not something a climate scientist can really speak to.
I would say that the ultimate impact on Mankind of Climate Change is itself outside the scope of Climatology by itself - by its own nature it would be an interdisciplinary effort involving at the very least Climatologists, Sociologists and Economists.
That said, anybody can, as non-expert, mention some possibilities, though obviously not claiming any authoritativeness on the subject. (That’s what I tried to do, hence why I began by saying it was just my “hazarding”).
Yep, agree! That first paragraph is where I’m at now, trying to work with social scientists, business people, economists, who ever is keen. That interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary work is suuuuper interesting and fun and fucking hard.
Also I’m just opinionated in general, you know? 😅
Yearly average global mean surface temperature from five data sources, in two versions: (top) unadjusted, (bottom) adjusted for El Niño/Southern Oscillation, volcanism, and solar variation. All are aligned so that the average from 1991 to 2020 equals 0.88°C, to approximate warming since pre-industrial.
i mean that curve is pretty clear. were the scientists they were talking to expecting a linear model?
They weren’t expecting a linear model. Did you read the article?
The increase in acceleration is something theyve noticed since 2013, as reported in the article (of about .35 per year instead of .2). There was also an unusual increase in 2023 and 2024.
These are all important things scientists should be measuring and reporting on, even if it seems obvious by random lemmy user looking at a graph (graph that was made by scientists measuring and reporting on their observations).
Did I read the article from science faily? No. I’ve read enough from that rag where they drew the opposite conclusion than both the data and author were saying, so why should I trust them to get this right?
Yay we’re all going to die of heat death
I have also detected this by the way it is.
That’s pretty neat!
My God, since when?
I know people who are having babies now; and to think I was worried what would happen in my lifetime.
I have kids. those little shits deserve it for all the times they hit me in the balls when I had to drag them to the timeout spot.
Prepare to be treated like a guard, if you treat your kids like prisoners
OK 👌
‘Sharp acceleration’ meaning 75% faster warming in the last decade compared to the 40 years previous, and blowing past the 1.5° target in 3-4 years. No speculation was given, but I think it’s likely we’re seeing the limits of oceanic absorption of co2 and heat. The ocean’s latent heat capacity has flattened the curve for more than a century, and it’s very hard to predict when that will run out, but sea surface temperatures spiking all over have been good evidence that we have passed a major tipping point in the last few years.
I’ve read that the models used to predict the rate of change were too optimistic or an assumption about them was too conservative and thus not very realistic. Now we have data showing the models under-predicted the rate of change, so one argument is that we were already on this path since decades ago, we just didn’t model it right.
In any case, we’re all fucked so who gives a shit anyway no?
Is there a name for when we know what the right thing to do is but we keep not doing it?
Is there a name for when we know what the right thing to do is but we keep not doing it?
Hubris.
All of the climate models have adjustable parameters. We are still within the bounds of the worst case scenarios but scientists are always afraid to claim too much. An academic’s reputation is a lot less recoverable than a pop star or politician in the sense that they, and their colleagues, actually take their words and predictions seriously. I don’t want to completely dismiss the effect of lobbying and corruption toward the downplaying of global warming, but making smaller-than-necessary claims is a common sight in most academic fields.
I think it’s mostly in fields with exponential outcomes, which experiences the too conservative estimates.
We as a species has a really hard time understanding exponential/accelerant movement, we expect the next decade to change as much as the previous one. Despite every decade has been changing more than the previous one did
Great Filter.
I’ve often wondered… What if we are way wrong about the level of danger, and ultimately climate change will turn Earth into another Venus, and we only find out once it’s too late?
History has taught that humanity wont stop until it has gone too far.
No way in hell we’re facing an extinction event. Unimaginable human suffering, probably, but humanity will persist.
Really depends on what happens with phytoplankton; if they can adapt well enough to survive the excessive heat. Some of them can but others are dying out. If we lose all of them, then everything that breaths oxygen is extremely fucked since they make ~70-80% of that oxygen. Then we only have plants and forests like the amazon to make O2 (and we all know how that ones going), and then we would also have to deal with the gasses produced by all the oceans on the face of the earth dying and everything in them rotting… if they’re not par-boiled.
We are adaptable creatures with command of technology. So we’ve got that going for us. We also have temperature limitations in which we can live, and so do our food sources. Then there’s the issue of potable water.
It really depends on how far we’re pushed the planet’s ecosphere. It could do like before (most recent is the PETM) and hover high, then eventually equalize back into something not the same as we had, but similar. It’s done this before, albeit after millions of years. Or it could find a new equilibrium in another state, aka hothouse. Not Venus-like, as some media has spun it, but its own version of feedback to retain a lot more heat than now. Not great for anything that evolved in this climate.
Fun fact: the PETM was the most recent heating event, 56 million years ago. Some species went extinct, others were able to adapt and survive as they evolved into smaller forms. The fun fact is that they adapted because the rate of heating change was over a large amount of time, many hundreds of thousands of years. Now look at us, a spike on the geological temperature graph in (looks at data) less than a 100 years (a few decades, really). So what kind of inertia does a more rapid acceleration usually give compared to a slower one? But hothouse Earth is just a speculation, just a guess. We don’t know how far this will go.
Isolated pockets in relatively protected areas. Global society won’t survive it. Most of the places we grow food won’t be able to grow food, that’s already accelerating. Ocean acidification kills that food source. Blue ocean event accelerates runaway heating leading to massive hurricane force continental storms. Amoc shuts down and Europe ices over. Humanity may persist but civilization won’t.
Vast current areas become arid but vast areas in Siberia and Canada become arable. Very bad but not extinction for humans. Likely extinction for many species though.
that’s also not true! vast current areas become
aridtropical. see the tropical rainforest. it’s the hottest and simultaneously wettest regions on earth.We are driving 200 species extinct a day and that figure is increasing every year. Eventually we run out of nature and we go with it.
The temperature on the planet has never in its history changed so abruptly, which means plants and animals don’t have enough time to adapt.
None of that thawed soil will be worth a damn for growing at any scale. Like yeah there will be areas that are more or less hospitable but large scale agriculture will not recover
Humanity may persist
Yes, that’s what I said
Most of the places we grow food won’t be able to grow food
that’s just not true! higher temperature makes food grow better, not worse.
Not if it includes lots and lots of drought. Besides of course that lots of the now commonly used crops definitely have an upper limit where heat is beneficial.
But will that subsequent civilization get to space again?
They also banned sulphur oxide in ship fuel which would have had a cooling effect, that was hiding the full extent of the damage and is slowly dissipating
Won’t be long until we start doing that again on purpose
How great fixing pollution with more pollution.
Actually it’s kinda good news as it shows we can make direct impact to the climate. Just with a substance actually made for it.
Don’t take it too seriously, there is an effect but it’s not that large. And anyways, the change in maritime fuel standards happened in 2020, while this trend goes back to 2015. A geoengineering project is just going to cause more problems, we don’t know nearly enough about how the world works, truly.
Geoengineering is the only thing that can really blunt this at this point…
Delaying the collapse of civilization by changing the chemistry of the atmosphere further will only serve to hurt the entire ecosystem to allow a few more years of our planet-wide rape. Decarbonizing was the only hope for both human civilization and Earth to survive together. Our choice now is to accept that or possibly kill everything in desperation.
Death from overheating the entire earth < Death from near constant acid rain?
Acid rain is not that big of a deal, the amount of sulfur over oceans isn’t really a problem. Acid rain is only an issue in certain areas. Sulfur emissions aren’t global.
🎵 The solution to pollution is…more pollution? 🎵
Good news is cloud seeding is viable? Bad news is we’re probably gonna need it.
Sometimes I open up nullschool and just stare at the El Niño on the southern pacific. Looks like a gaping wound.
Yeah, right.
They’ve been saying this for years…
“Scientists” alright? Pff
lights a cigar with a barrel of crude oil
Idiots.
