Given the lag in the climate, isn’t 1.5C warming more or less unavoidable now? We would need extremely steep emissions reductions that aren’t happening.
I enjoyed ‘Under a Green Sky’, which combines a brief history of palaeontology (and amusing academic point settling) with the prediction that warming will eventually cause huge releases of hydrogen sulphide.
We are perhaps entering a negative feedback loop where disruption makes countries less keen to work together on emissions reductions as metaphorical bridges get pulled up (is Russia going to bother even pretending to care any more?).
There's an interesting movie called Don't Look Up[0] which is a metaphor for climate change politics.
> The impact event is an allegory for climate change, and the film is a satire of government, political, celebrity, and media indifference to the climate crisis.[6][7]
After watching, I agreed that when the world eventually burns, people will be live streaming and tweeting about it instead of going out and actually doing something about it. We all have a part to play in this, and armchair activism behind the comfort of social media will do jack shit to solve this problem. Addressing climate change head on will be the biggest amount of cooperation humanity will ever have to do. After we address it, it will not be as hard to maintain decent temps. We can sail on this rock for millennia once we get out there and make shit happen.
I keep seeing people talk about the seriousness of climate change, but when it comes time to propose policy solutions, the answers are "$X trillion of dubiously helpful spending and restrict the supply of energy." I think we all agree (even the so-called "deniers") that climate change is a serious potential problem. What our civilizations disagree on is the solution.
When the revealed policy preference of world leaders is to shut down the AC in summer in a desert, turn off the heat in a Scandanavian winter, and restrict energy supplies to developing countries, you don't have a workable solution. Current policy prescriptions are going to kill a lot more people than the warming they are trying to prevent. Further, it suggests that the most ardent activists are not actually serious about solving the problem: If they were serious, they would propose something less anti-human.
Creating more studies about how bad it could be actually hurts the cause of stopping climate change at this point. It doesn't convince anyone.
This past year I went from seeing Climate Change as a "challenge to be overcome" to something that is simply happening during my lifetime. I suddenly realised that the truth is, in 20 years time 30+ degrees Summer Days will be completely normal in the Netherlands. I was jokingly asking myself when Switzerland will introduce the Siesta.
I my attitudes went from Denial to Activism to Acceptance. Interesting how the mind works. Anybody else experiencing an attitude change?
> My attitude went from Denial to Activism to Acceptance.
Just like to put out there that it it may be too late to stop climate change altogether, but things can get much worse and can get much better, and it is very much worth reducing emissions, preparing for a changing climate, and generally striving to survive.
I've stopped at Activism. I accept that it's already happening, but how bad it gets is entirely up to us.
I don't get the <throws hands in the air>It's just a done deal, back to netflix</> attitude, and prefer the 'Hey, our generation(s) have a task, let's get it done' one.
I went from activism and being anxious all the time to acceptance. I feel like regulation is the only way we can improve the situation. But most of the people in power are owned by rich corporations/people. And their only goal is to make more money. I don't see much a common person can do to change or improve things.
I live in a country where I still don't have the right to vote (maybe a decade from now). Instead of being anxious and getting stressed out everyday from thinking about the worsening climate, I feel it's better for my health to accept the fact and move on.
Acceptance is an understandable psychological reaction. There is just too much horror going on on this planet to let it affect our psyche too deeply. However, it is important to cultivate a rational ethical attitude that despises such things regardless of one's psychological state. Moral sentiments need not be accompanied by moral affections. The insight that something is fundamentally wrong can guide action out of duty, and does not require inclination.
I had serious anxiety a few years ago about this, and ended up in Acceptance. I'm not happy ending up here, but I figure I got about 30 years left. That's pretty good, I'll take it.
The thing that's been the most jarring to me about climate change has been just that - the change. Every year feels different. You might have intense rains one year, drought-like situation the next year. One summer might be brutal, another pleasant.
I feel unmoored and untethered. The reasonable predictability of weather patterns is completely broken now.
> I my attitudes went from Denial to Activism to Acceptance. Interesting how the mind works. Anybody else experiencing an attitude change?
The titanic is sinking, the best thing you can do for yourself is pop a bottle of champaign, find the most comfy chair and enjoy the spectacle.
Everybody cares about climate change, nobody will ever give up technological "progress", we're doomed, but hey, at least you can get free same day delivery on toilet paper
> I my attitudes went from Denial to Activism to Acceptance.
I think the next step is adaptation. Try to build some sort of resilient life for yourself and your family, try to help out the local community as much as possible etc. Try to not be too terrible to the people who will really suffer the most (Africa, parts of Asia etc.). This is kind of where I am right now.
My wife and I are very conflicted about moving to Utrecht because we very much want to live in a bike-friendly city where our kids can be independent (where we are now, Ireland, is horrible for this) but we also want somewhere that isn't too hot in 30 years. The Nordics might manage to have both?
Only in the last year? That's impressive. I had a colleague at work about 5 years ago have a total meltdown at her desk as she realised that we are very unlikely to find a solution to this before extreme, severe damage is done...
I think doomerism is pretty common now, especially since groups like XR have started to become far more individualistic and neoliberal in their messaging, switching from more intense protests and occupations to more often just posting "please don't fly" things on Facebook.
My theory is that so many people in Europe especially are so incredibly wedded to their western democratic liberal ideals that they, as Jameson and Zizek said: find it "easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism", where for "capitalism" if you don't agree with a totally Marxist analysis you can really substitute any structural issue that is causing us to not take anywhere near enough action on the climate.
And it is, isn't it? It's far easier to imagine that we will keep accelerating towards climate catastrophe than to imagine that the structural changes that would need to occur for us to stop it will actually happen.
I definitely know what you mean. I just assume climate change is a given, and when I bought a house (in the UK), I made sure to buy one at a higher elevation and checked out how it would be affected in climate and flooding models.
The truth is richer European nations are unlikely to be the worst directly affected. No doubt there will be crop failures, disasters and deaths, but we will probably escape the worst of it. We have the resources to build effective infrastructure. The warmer climate could even make Europe more hospitable once we've adapted to it.
However, we won't be able to escape the consequences of the enormous humanitarian disaster due to many in poorer countries becoming climate migrants. I expect populist right wing parties to take an even tougher line on migration as the crises deepen, and possibly society in general to become more authoritarian as a result. Significant wars too, possibly.
Accepting it as inevitable means accepting hundreds of millions of people being displaced. If we want to deal with that gracefully, we need to start planning for how the rest of the world will absorb those individuals. Otherwise I fear we're going to be responsible for a lot of horrifying acts in the next century...
I have gone from activism to some kind of cynical acceptance. Fundamentally people don’t really care so you might as well go on that cruise or fly out to see the coral reefs before they die.
Try to account for possible scenarios when deciding where to live. Not too far south, on high ground.
I do find it hard to get used to the idea that everything will (probably) keep getting harder. More frequent pride spikes, weird weather, more instability. But even within that I think you can carry on happily if you only focus on what you can control. Possibly this attitude is what helped get us into this mess in the first place.
Yep. I remember a few years ago I was all gung ho about us fixing the problem based on the napkin math alone. Came out to mankind having a budget of something like 10 quintillion man hours until climate was permanently fucked with sealed fates. Seems like more than enough to orchestrate a solution.
Now I realize it just doesn’t matter to the people really behind the wheel.
Eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we’ll die. Fuck it
Mentioning Greenland ice sheet in this context is always a bit of a red herring.
It is important to note that in the language of these simulations no "overshoot" is included in the temperature trajectory. A 1.5°C global warming is talking about the long term (millenial timescale) stable temperature we reach after our little "experiment".
If we can "quickly" (a few hundred years) return to 1.0°C or even less warming, compared to pre-industrial levels, these tipping points have not actually happened yet. (https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1418830/latest.pdf summarizes this very well)
Nico Wunderling shows that while for some systems (like the Amazon rain forrest) peak temperature (even over only a few years) is most important, for slower systems like the Greenland ice sheet the target, long-term temperature is most dominant.
Priotizing the most urgent matter should therefor lead us to talk about the quickly acting tipping points, often related to biological ecosystems. For those it is most important to actually stay below 2°C of warming. For the Greenland ice shield there is ample time after the year 2100 for us to prevent the worst.
None of these tipping points are exponential. Global warming is most likely an S-curve with a few degree maximum. Mispresenting the issue as an exponential is scaremongering.
I think the worst case is not how much of the world is forest. The worst case is failure of the world agriculture system, widespread famine, poverty, disease, war, death, and eventual failure of the human race.
If you're worried about whether stuff will continue to live on earth it's not a big deal. If you're worried about whether humans in particular will continue to live on earth and the parameters of what 'live' means you should be very, very concerned.
Covered with forests except for the parts that are new shallow oceans. This includes parts of the world like the American Midwest. Some countries will simply cease to exist.
Or build more wind and solar. Already Des Moines gets 80% of its power from wind, and the state is building more all the time. CA is doing some solar steps, but it is taking a lot longer (on a much larger population, so I'm not sure how their progress compares). Most states are not doing much. Europe is also making some steps, but they could do more.
The key to all this is starting ASAP and building constantly. Iowa has been building wind turbines at a rate of about 2/day (a bit over 500 per year) for many years now.
You realise there's more to GHG than just electricity generation, right?
I mean it's a big, low hanging fruit because renewables are so cheap now, but even after getting that done we have transport and agriculture and land use chemical feedstocks and old leaking mines and wells and on and on. Plenty to do.
Miami beach is a better place to look at. There's no chance it doesn't go below sea level at some point this century and there's no way we could build walls around it yet people are still paying millions for homes on the island.
Don’t know if people are following news carefully, but things are getting worse all over the world at the same time. One third of Pakistan is under water while China is seeing unprecedented drought.
We are running past safe conditions, for civilization, human life or maybe most of (complex enough) life on Earth. We are already past some of those tipping points, even before reaching an average of 1.5C globally (specially when there are regional differences, and for arctic regions the average is more in the 4ºC area, and that is where most of the permafrost thawing happens).
And besides the known ones, there may be more tipping points that we are becoming aware of, like the increase of methane emissions from wetlands because hotter conditions, another positive feedback loop that may had been unexpected for some. And as feedback loops are becoming important protagonists on emissions over fossil carbon, things are getting out of our hands. We must do far more than just slow down if we want to survive in the long term.
I seriously disagree. The “climate” part of climate change isnt the threat to civilization, it’s the “change” part.
Sure, with an average warmer global climate, many places will become worse for human life and worse for agriculture with warming. But there is an absolutely enormous amount of land that moves into a better habitable and agriculture zone with warming as well. It’s not that a warmer climate makes human life impossible; we currently thrive from the Equator to Scandinavia just fine. It’s the change part thats the problem. It’s difficult to deal with whole agricultural areas needing to switch crops. Cities suddenly flooding when they used not to. New areas entering a death zone of heat index that previously were manageable
I wonder how long it'll be before population starts moving. Traditionally Southern Europe, Southern USA had the best climate, now they seem to be places to avoid.
Before becoming too alarmed, one might want to read about the Holocene Climate Optimum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum). Temperatures 8000 years ago were significantly higher than 200 years ago. Did the lucky people 8000 years ago just barely escape disastrous climate tipping points? Or maybe such tipping points aren't so likely...
If y'all think extinction for billions is just around the corner, consider that Saudi Arabia's capital, Riyadh has this forecast for next Tuesday: 44C(110F). And that temp is there most of the summer.
"Saudi population has grown rapidly since 1950 when it was estimated to be 3 million, and for many years had one of the highest population growth rates in the world at around 3 per cent a year."
Out of curiosity, how is this paper any different from the multitude of already known catastrophic outcomes from exceeding the 1.5deg temperature target?
It will most likely and it's sad. How can I prepare my children for a world with such aclimate, energy, food and water shortages, more refugees than ever before and so on? Maybe I must ensure they are worth enough for the system to be taken care of.
In Germany some PR campaign made people like my mother think "the greens plan to destroy our wealth" because they fear higher energy prices etc. but to be honest the conservatives now in charge for almost two decades did exacly that with not investing enouth in our grid and so on. It's so ironic that in the end the short term conservative approach destroys the mid and long term living conditions for so many.
[+] [-] bambataa|3 years ago|reply
Given the lag in the climate, isn’t 1.5C warming more or less unavoidable now? We would need extremely steep emissions reductions that aren’t happening.
I enjoyed ‘Under a Green Sky’, which combines a brief history of palaeontology (and amusing academic point settling) with the prediction that warming will eventually cause huge releases of hydrogen sulphide.
We are perhaps entering a negative feedback loop where disruption makes countries less keen to work together on emissions reductions as metaphorical bridges get pulled up (is Russia going to bother even pretending to care any more?).
[+] [-] liberia|3 years ago|reply
> The impact event is an allegory for climate change, and the film is a satire of government, political, celebrity, and media indifference to the climate crisis.[6][7]
After watching, I agreed that when the world eventually burns, people will be live streaming and tweeting about it instead of going out and actually doing something about it. We all have a part to play in this, and armchair activism behind the comfort of social media will do jack shit to solve this problem. Addressing climate change head on will be the biggest amount of cooperation humanity will ever have to do. After we address it, it will not be as hard to maintain decent temps. We can sail on this rock for millennia once we get out there and make shit happen.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Look_Up
[+] [-] pclmulqdq|3 years ago|reply
When the revealed policy preference of world leaders is to shut down the AC in summer in a desert, turn off the heat in a Scandanavian winter, and restrict energy supplies to developing countries, you don't have a workable solution. Current policy prescriptions are going to kill a lot more people than the warming they are trying to prevent. Further, it suggests that the most ardent activists are not actually serious about solving the problem: If they were serious, they would propose something less anti-human.
Creating more studies about how bad it could be actually hurts the cause of stopping climate change at this point. It doesn't convince anyone.
[+] [-] kaon123|3 years ago|reply
This past year I went from seeing Climate Change as a "challenge to be overcome" to something that is simply happening during my lifetime. I suddenly realised that the truth is, in 20 years time 30+ degrees Summer Days will be completely normal in the Netherlands. I was jokingly asking myself when Switzerland will introduce the Siesta.
I my attitudes went from Denial to Activism to Acceptance. Interesting how the mind works. Anybody else experiencing an attitude change?
[+] [-] maxbond|3 years ago|reply
Just like to put out there that it it may be too late to stop climate change altogether, but things can get much worse and can get much better, and it is very much worth reducing emissions, preparing for a changing climate, and generally striving to survive.
[+] [-] jbu|3 years ago|reply
I don't get the <throws hands in the air>It's just a done deal, back to netflix</> attitude, and prefer the 'Hey, our generation(s) have a task, let's get it done' one.
[+] [-] humanlion87|3 years ago|reply
I live in a country where I still don't have the right to vote (maybe a decade from now). Instead of being anxious and getting stressed out everyday from thinking about the worsening climate, I feel it's better for my health to accept the fact and move on.
[+] [-] Archelaos|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charles_kaw|3 years ago|reply
I had serious anxiety a few years ago about this, and ended up in Acceptance. I'm not happy ending up here, but I figure I got about 30 years left. That's pretty good, I'll take it.
[+] [-] spaceman_2020|3 years ago|reply
I feel unmoored and untethered. The reasonable predictability of weather patterns is completely broken now.
[+] [-] lm28469|3 years ago|reply
The titanic is sinking, the best thing you can do for yourself is pop a bottle of champaign, find the most comfy chair and enjoy the spectacle.
Everybody cares about climate change, nobody will ever give up technological "progress", we're doomed, but hey, at least you can get free same day delivery on toilet paper
[+] [-] leto_ii|3 years ago|reply
I think the next step is adaptation. Try to build some sort of resilient life for yourself and your family, try to help out the local community as much as possible etc. Try to not be too terrible to the people who will really suffer the most (Africa, parts of Asia etc.). This is kind of where I am right now.
[+] [-] CalRobert|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bowsamic|3 years ago|reply
I think doomerism is pretty common now, especially since groups like XR have started to become far more individualistic and neoliberal in their messaging, switching from more intense protests and occupations to more often just posting "please don't fly" things on Facebook.
My theory is that so many people in Europe especially are so incredibly wedded to their western democratic liberal ideals that they, as Jameson and Zizek said: find it "easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism", where for "capitalism" if you don't agree with a totally Marxist analysis you can really substitute any structural issue that is causing us to not take anywhere near enough action on the climate.
And it is, isn't it? It's far easier to imagine that we will keep accelerating towards climate catastrophe than to imagine that the structural changes that would need to occur for us to stop it will actually happen.
[+] [-] CapitalistCartr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cameronh90|3 years ago|reply
The truth is richer European nations are unlikely to be the worst directly affected. No doubt there will be crop failures, disasters and deaths, but we will probably escape the worst of it. We have the resources to build effective infrastructure. The warmer climate could even make Europe more hospitable once we've adapted to it.
However, we won't be able to escape the consequences of the enormous humanitarian disaster due to many in poorer countries becoming climate migrants. I expect populist right wing parties to take an even tougher line on migration as the crises deepen, and possibly society in general to become more authoritarian as a result. Significant wars too, possibly.
Accepting it as inevitable means accepting hundreds of millions of people being displaced. If we want to deal with that gracefully, we need to start planning for how the rest of the world will absorb those individuals. Otherwise I fear we're going to be responsible for a lot of horrifying acts in the next century...
[+] [-] coffeeblack|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bambataa|3 years ago|reply
Try to account for possible scenarios when deciding where to live. Not too far south, on high ground.
I do find it hard to get used to the idea that everything will (probably) keep getting harder. More frequent pride spikes, weird weather, more instability. But even within that I think you can carry on happily if you only focus on what you can control. Possibly this attitude is what helped get us into this mess in the first place.
[+] [-] raydiatian|3 years ago|reply
Now I realize it just doesn’t matter to the people really behind the wheel.
Eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we’ll die. Fuck it
[+] [-] Flocular|3 years ago|reply
It is important to note that in the language of these simulations no "overshoot" is included in the temperature trajectory. A 1.5°C global warming is talking about the long term (millenial timescale) stable temperature we reach after our little "experiment".
If we can "quickly" (a few hundred years) return to 1.0°C or even less warming, compared to pre-industrial levels, these tipping points have not actually happened yet. (https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1418830/latest.pdf summarizes this very well)
Nico Wunderling shows that while for some systems (like the Amazon rain forrest) peak temperature (even over only a few years) is most important, for slower systems like the Greenland ice sheet the target, long-term temperature is most dominant.
Priotizing the most urgent matter should therefor lead us to talk about the quickly acting tipping points, often related to biological ecosystems. For those it is most important to actually stay below 2°C of warming. For the Greenland ice shield there is ample time after the year 2100 for us to prevent the worst.
[+] [-] singularity2001|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Geee|3 years ago|reply
In the worst case, we would likely end up with something like the Eocene, where the whole planet is covered with forests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene#Flora
[+] [-] idiotsecant|3 years ago|reply
If you're worried about whether stuff will continue to live on earth it's not a big deal. If you're worried about whether humans in particular will continue to live on earth and the parameters of what 'live' means you should be very, very concerned.
[+] [-] jandrese|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldcode|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eimrine|3 years ago|reply
Even if it is S-curve I do not sure lots of people can survive Venus' climate.
[+] [-] economist420|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] popilewiz|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] MikeCapone|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluGill|3 years ago|reply
The key to all this is starting ASAP and building constantly. Iowa has been building wind turbines at a rate of about 2/day (a bit over 500 per year) for many years now.
[+] [-] jcynix|3 years ago|reply
And they have problems with excessive heat in the summer, because they cannot be properly cooled when water temperatures rise.
Doesn't look like a future solution but more of an future problem to me.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|3 years ago|reply
I mean it's a big, low hanging fruit because renewables are so cheap now, but even after getting that done we have transport and agriculture and land use chemical feedstocks and old leaking mines and wells and on and on. Plenty to do.
[+] [-] ctrlmeta|3 years ago|reply
All I could find was this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_France but this shows improvements beginning at 1990s and later.
[+] [-] shrubble|3 years ago|reply
Try to estimate the elevation above sea level of this house.
Why buy a house that will very likely be under water, I mean in the non-financial sense?
[+] [-] thehappypm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idiotsecant|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colinmhayes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whywhywhydude|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gmuslera|3 years ago|reply
And besides the known ones, there may be more tipping points that we are becoming aware of, like the increase of methane emissions from wetlands because hotter conditions, another positive feedback loop that may had been unexpected for some. And as feedback loops are becoming important protagonists on emissions over fossil carbon, things are getting out of our hands. We must do far more than just slow down if we want to survive in the long term.
[+] [-] thehappypm|3 years ago|reply
Sure, with an average warmer global climate, many places will become worse for human life and worse for agriculture with warming. But there is an absolutely enormous amount of land that moves into a better habitable and agriculture zone with warming as well. It’s not that a warmer climate makes human life impossible; we currently thrive from the Equator to Scandinavia just fine. It’s the change part thats the problem. It’s difficult to deal with whole agricultural areas needing to switch crops. Cities suddenly flooding when they used not to. New areas entering a death zone of heat index that previously were manageable
[+] [-] rr888|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RONROC|3 years ago|reply
A war, famine, or general economic collapse (or all of the above) on a very large scale would technically solve this.
This is what I believe policy makers and corporations think, and of course, none of them are saying that quiet part out loud.
[+] [-] radford-neal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gspetr|3 years ago|reply
"Saudi population has grown rapidly since 1950 when it was estimated to be 3 million, and for many years had one of the highest population growth rates in the world at around 3 per cent a year."
[+] [-] alexschnapp|3 years ago|reply
Amsterdam and a lot of the Netherlands are below sea level (for centuries) and the dikes do its job, why can’t that be replicated elsewhere?
[+] [-] digdugdirk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cryptonic|3 years ago|reply
In Germany some PR campaign made people like my mother think "the greens plan to destroy our wealth" because they fear higher energy prices etc. but to be honest the conservatives now in charge for almost two decades did exacly that with not investing enouth in our grid and so on. It's so ironic that in the end the short term conservative approach destroys the mid and long term living conditions for so many.
[+] [-] hotz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newaccount2021|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] collyw|3 years ago|reply
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