(Click on "Antarctic", and then click "Show all years.")
Kinda hard to spin as "it's all a part of natural variability" when the graph looks back at you like that.
* The Arctic graph is also interesting. At first sight it doesn't look that bad, until you zoom in and realize that the bottom of the graph is pretty much entirely 2010s and 2020s.
Edit: Oh, actually you can just change the color scheme and see the Arctic graph sliding down over time! Neat.
There is a sliver of hope that we can successfully decommission fossil fuel energy and master climate engineering, i.e. employ technology to solve global, systemic problems created by technology. But it is hard today to distinguish optimism from delusion.
It's worth noting that the promise of mastering climate engineering is largely being pushed by fossil fuel interests, and it appears to be delusional at this point that climate engineering will be our savior. For that reason, we can't let hope get in the way of taking actions that we know will help.
Unfortunately the practical answer is probably both. We've collectively f*cked up by failing to curtail emissions more quickly. The only path forward now is to continue to move to carbon neutral fuel sources as quickly as possible while using geoengineering to buy ourselves time.
Unfortunately, if we successfully pause global warming via geoengineering, my bet is that'll give us the excuse to slow down or stop CO2 emission curtailment, and that way lies disaster as oceans acidify and food chains fall apart.
The only real exception is atmospheric carbon capture. Capturing a gallon of gas worth of CO2 would cost $1-2 if we ramped the known technologies up. That’s equivalent to a 20-40% gas tax, which is totally feasible (or would be if politicians weren’t so bought off).
There are two categories of technologies that tend to land in that price range. There are things that cause existing rocks to react with CO2 faster (such as crushing olivine), and there are ones that use a combination of electricity and catalysts / reversible chemical reactions to either concentrate the CO2 or cause it to fix to some abundant chemical.
They are all quite pie in the sky in the sense that they're mostly startups with no operational experience in large scale chemical manufacturing trying to build up plants (and organizations to build the plants) from scratch.
However, at least some of them rely on bog-standard chemistry, and the chemistry only requires chemical reactions that we already perform at industrial scale.
I get the distinct impression that if US said it was going to federalize any oil company that still had net CO2 emissions in 2028 (and also suspend any patents in this space as part of an emergency action), the logistics would magically work themselves out. I'd guess it would only cost a few weeks of oil industry profits (so, ~ $10B) total to prove out a half dozen technologies. At that point, many copies of the top two or three plants could be replicated out globally.
We could stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow and it would already be a continuing problem. The only savior here is both transitioning to green energy and geoengineering.
It would be a worsening problem if we stopped burning fossil fuels today; we’re already committed to more warming. Seas take a while to get up to the new thermal equilibrium.
Spot on. There's not a lot of evidence climate engineering can be done quickly, to scale and with known and acceptable side effects. People are desperately clawing for any excuse to focus on the positive so they can return to an apathetic existence. Lots of trees, lots of regulations and fines, lots of investment in less damaging technologies, lots of stuff that we know works.
To be clear, there absolutely is evidence climate engineering can be done quickly: we may have ready done it by moving to and then from sulphur bearing marine fuels over the course of a couple decades:
Short version: Probably aircraft, but anything that can get aloft and dump aerosols (e.g. SO2) into the upper atmosphere.
The scary thing is it's all quite achievable and isn't even that expensive or complex.
Regarding the issue of speed, the wikipedia article even notes one of the benefits as:
> Speed: A common argument is that stratospheric aerosol injection can take place quickly, and would be able to buy time for carbon sequestration projects such as carbon dioxide air capture to be implemented and start acting over decades and centuries.
And ironically, we don't even have to worry that much about side-effects since the effects of atmospheric aerosols are relatively temporary.
But, again: a) doesn't help with ocean acidification, which threatens entire foodchains, and b) gives an easy out to not do the hard and necessary work of cutting down on CO2 emissions.
That said, at this point, I would make a very sizable bet that a major country or countries will engage in some type of geoengineering within the next, oh... 10 years at the outside? The dangers of allowing global warming to continue to run away are just too high for some nation to not do it, prove it, and pave the way for others to follow.
Not only fossil fuel interests but also shipping and shopping interests. How much fuel is spent shipping useless plastic trinkets from China to the rest of the world only to have them break after a few months/years and end up in the ocean.
“Token for a ride” or anything about conspiracy of automakers to kill public streetcars is relevant. And they did it again by convincing us that everyone needs to ride their own lithium battery.
Well-off Californians or Londoners may say so and switch to an electric car and a powerwall at home.
People in rural China, in India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, central Asia, central Africa care much more about putting some food on the table, and about having electricity, and about going around in absence of great public transport infrastructure. So they run thermal power stations, they burn coal, they drive gasoline-powered motorbikes, old Western cars and trucks, because they don't have a serious affordable alternative. They have more salient stuff to care about than penguins.
And they are, in total, literally half the world population.
Personal electric cars is a horrible solution for transportation. We have had electric trains, trolleys, underground for decades. It does not look like Californians are actually going to build anything new like that. India and China most likely will improve their transportation system significantly.
But cars are still needed in many areas, and even in dense cities with excellent public transport. In this role, electric cars are strictly better than gasoline cars, because they can be powered by solar or hydro or wind or nuclear energy right now.
Also, I know a number of people who despise dense cities and want suburbia or countryside. Again, if they could fuel their cars from solar panels on their roofs (or shopping center roofs, parking lot roofs, etc), it would be strictly better than burning more oil.
To your point who will make what sacrifice, as that is what is needed but is it reasonable or realistic to expect this? Seem the best approach is we need some serious tech development and fast.
The vast majority of climate impact fits within 1) population, 2) power generation and 3) transportation. No.2 gets a bunch of focus, but 1) and 3) seem far less and sub issues that have little relative impact get far more attention.
People drop simple "we must do something" but it's so complex and I feel ultimately few humans want to make either the real sacrifice needed or investment in change so we're stuck in the middle and along for the ride.
Humans have gone "enough is enough", but not the ones with the power to change things, as they're all wealthy/connected enough that neither they or any of their children will suffer negative effects. Imagine telling them they'll have to cut their 4 European vacations a year down to 2.
> Humans have gone "enough is enough", but not the ones with the power to change things, as they're all wealthy/connected enough that neither they or any of their children will suffer negative effects.
Which "humans" exactly? First they elect politicians for feel-good green promises, but then when time comes to actually pay the price of becoming "greener" they lose their shit like "I meant all _other_ people to make sacrifices for green future, not _me_!!!". For good examples see Gilets jaunes or recent German walkback from fossil fuel heating systems ban that was supposed to start from 2024.
The good thing is that change is happening. There is a lot of improvement and we’ve cut the correlation between growth and emissions.
The bad part is that it’s happening way too slow because of a lack of collective action as you suggest.
I don’t believe the problem is fundamentally democracy. Democratic countries have taken action in the past famously with CFCs that was probably unthinkable. But clearly Democracy is insufficient.
We’ve tried several mechanisms but none of them have worked so far.
You realise there's almost a 1:1 correlation between energy use and GDP?
We're not fundamentally reducing the amount of energy we're using, and there's nothing to suggest that we can seriously replace oil with other means. Think plastic etc.
We of course should increase energy consumption. We have ridiculous amounts of energy sent to us by our local star every day. We're just bad at harvesting and storing it.
But we should decrease carbon emissions. Partly it will be by turning to fully electrical processes (trains, trucks, etc) and generating more electricity using more solar, wind, and nuclear power plants. Partly it will be by turning to synthetic fuels, again powered by non-fossil-fuel sources. Burning hydrocarbons is fine if you recycle the CO₂ after that.
The goal is to eliminate CO2 emissions, not eliminate the use of oil generally.
For plastics production, that goal could be achieved by migrating extraction, refining, manufacturing, and transport to carbon neutral energy sources.
Of course, moving away from non-biodegradable plastics, in general, is also a good idea for a host of other reasons.
But given oil is also used in, for example, the production of fertilizer, we're probably gonna need to be able to extract it and use it sustainably for a while yet.
The comparison to CFCs to climate is terrible and should stop. Telling a handful of companies to stop making one chemical and sell another is hardly the same as replacing almost all energy infrastructure.
We all worked together to boil an egg, so democracy can make a five-tier wedding cake no problem! It’s not that I believe we can’t solve the problem, it’s just a bad metaphor. And that we’ve collectively chosen to value our own comfort over our children and grandchildren.
Also, fashion (clothing, homewares, home interiors, vehicles, etc) is such a driver of sales that it's hard to neuter. Meaning that people are constantly striving to earn and replace things that are unfashionable but completely usable in a practical sense.
I listened to part of the US Republican Debate last night and some of the candidates, such as Vivek wouldn’t even acknowledge that climate change is real. We have a long way to go.
I distinctly recall the shock waves when the Bush administration sidestepped the Kyoto climate agreement [1].
In 2001, US stance on the Kyoto Protocol held sway, and its ratification might have supercharged global climate efforts / green technological advancements.
It's ironic that some skeptics label what amounts to broad scientific consensus as being part of a "death cult"; classic projection.
The Ministry for the Future is a very cathartic book along these lines. Basically, there is a weather event that causes mass fatalities, and then eco terrorism gets super trendy.
What would you consider "actual change"? Just last year, the US passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which is by far the largest investment in addressing climate change in US history. I'm sure there's a million other things that could and should be done, but it's not like people are just completely ignoring the issue. This is a problem centuries in the making; it will not be cleaned up overnight.
I suppose part of what would count as "actual change" would be the reliance that the Inflation Reduction Act won't be revoked almost immediately in 2025.
It's not the people ignoring the issue. It's the people actively working against a solution.
So why you want people's retirement funds to be "drawn and quartered"? Do you want all retirees to die in poverty, or just the ones who opened a Vanguard IRA account for their retirement savings instead of a Fidelity IRA account?
Vanguard is a co-op that's owned by its funds which in turn are owned by present and future retirees.
Instead of investing in individual stocks like Microsoft, Vanguard's index funds make it easy to invest in e.g. an index of all US stocks, which is less volatile.
What exactly is it you find so sinister about index funds?
And why do you think Vanguard (a co-op) is worse than Fidelity (a publicly traded company which also provides similar retirement index funds)? Is it just because Vanguard's funds are more popular and therefore bigger?
This kind of rhetoric is alarmist and counterproductive. It effectively gives one a free pass to do nothing. After all, if you already believe the earth is doomed, what's the point in trying?
Bluntly, your little prognostication, here, is based on nothing. Is 2023 a wicked outlier in the global climate? Absolutely. Is global warming continuing to progress as humanity fails to move quickly enough to change our ways? Absolutely.
But this is one year. A single data point. It's absurd to come to such an extreme conclusion based on a single year of (admittedly very scary) data.
If anything, I'm hoping this year will serve as a wake-up call for more people who might've previously been on the fence about the nature and severity of climate change, and will thus accelerate moves by people and their governments to do more about it.
Let's not understate this. The OP article is regarding a record low in 2022, but this year (2023) we've now also seen a sustained 5-sigma deviation in sea ice extent.
> This one year, or the year previous, is not evidence that the ecosystem of the planet is going to collapse in 10 years.
Global warming writ large has been going on for a lot longer than a couple of years, and ocean temperature tipping points have been an anticipated consequence. An anomaly of this size warrants alarm. If not proof of imminent ecosystem collapse, it seems foolish to 'wait and see'. Though I take your point that defeatism is worse, but I doubt OP is defeatist.
> rhetoric that we're all gonna die by 2030
That's an even more sensationalist spin than what the OP wrote
That phrase is used when someone is delivering someone else's message.
That comment, both it's content and it's implications, are yours. If you're gonna run away from it now, you shouldn't have written it in the first place.
I stand by what I said, but I am just the messenger.
Everywhere its easy to see evidence of the tipping point accelerating.
There's extremely good reason to panic at this stage.
>> But this is one year. A single data point. It's absurd to come to such an extreme conclusion based on a single year of (admittedly very scary) data.
Nope - this year is part of a statistical heat trend. It's not up and down, some years cooler, some warmer. It's getting hotter every year.
Plants and animals and the ocean ecosystem will be devastated by this.
The human food supply depends on seasons, and seasons are being massively disrupted. If plants don't product food then that's a big problem.
I would wonder what do you gain from denying this is where the problem has got to? Why do you need it to not be at catastrophe level right now?
> Everywhere its easy to see evidence of the tipping point accelerating.
Cool, let's start here, then: what tipping points are you referring to, specifically, and what is the evidence that they're accelerating?
To be clear: ocean temperatures are unusually high this year relative to historic trends, but with just this one year as a major outlier, there's no basis to conclude a tipping point has been reached, especially given El Nino muddies the data.
As for atmospheric temperature, 2023 is likely to be a warmest year on record, but January to July 2016 was hotter, so there no reason to believe 2023 will be wildly outside the current trendline (which, to be clear, is up and to the right):
Oh, it won't be 10 years, stop hoping for entertainment!
It will be a long, slow, boring grind taking place over generations. It already has been. I'm 43 and 66% of the world population is younger than me. I remember there were lots more insects (and amphibians and birds!) when I was a child. That's not considered a crisis for some reason, there's never been a protest about bugs as far as I can tell, and never some apocalyptic "Ahh, all the bugs just died!" moment. It's been "Ho hum, let me spray some more pesticide on my lawn to kill those pesky grubs again" the whole way.
The next generation will have never known what it was like to have XYZ plant or animal or insect or fish around, and they won't miss it.
A staggering loss that suggests the very fabric of North America’s ecosystem is unraveling.
Cornell Lab director John Fitzpatrick and study coauthor Peter Marra
I don't dispute those at all; I think we're headed for disaster. But Earth's ecosystems and biospheres are huge and complex. We've probably kicked off a cascade that inevitably leads to a major collapse already, but it be a long process, like watching a log decay. There will be spasms as this or that or the other species has a big spike and looks like it is "rebounding"--like swarms of locusts, e.g.--but really it's the system unraveling. The biosphere's natural way of adaptation is to dip into a reservoir of biodiversity via (sometimes local) extinction. It'll keep trying to settle into new configurations of stability, but they won't work, and they'll be temporary plateaus on our slide down this long slope.
It could take many decades or even centuries for most of the damage to be done. We're trying our hardest to speed it up, but yeah, there's a big reservoir to burn through and most of the time it will look like things are standing still.
Saying that everything is going to unravel in 10 years and collapse is going to turn out to not be true, even if the underlying dynamic is inexorably pointing in a bad direction and headed that way.
We need to do something more productive and synergistic than that...
But you are right with every shift in biodiversity there are consequences for food chains, etc. No such thing as a "distant event" - it's not just about (magnificent!) penguins, it's about the intricate, interdependent web of life we rely on (lots of unsung heroes in biodiversity).
Compartmentalization and thinking that all of this is remote to our human experience / survival is a complete illusion.
If we are the stewards of this planet, we're called to ack and act with urgency.
I often hear this apocalyptic outlook and I wonder how probable it is.. people speak of it as if it is a certainty but I am not entirely convinced. Can someone point me in either direction?
For a less apocalyptic point of view I’d recommend UW professor and meteorologist Cliff Mass.
Fair warning that he’s a bit of a lightning rod for controversy due in large part to his relatively centrist views on exactly these and similarly hot button issues.
Would you define collapse? If you can meet in San Francisco and are a credible individual, I will give you $10k right away and you can give me $40k 10 years and one day from now (15% compounding).
At least if you agree that the dollar won't be useful once we have total global ecosystem collapse.
I haven't heard this particular phrase. There's definitely been a lot of talk about water levels being X metres higher by 2100, or worldwide average temperatures being X by 2050. What's actually happened is that all prior projections have been found to be underestimated and we're probably already 5 years ahead of where we should be.
Ruminants would do well on most wild growth. In Australia they are pretty much let loose in semi-arid vegetation and then rounded up and sent to feedlots at end of life. They may not do well in a drought or flood, but that's already the case as they are often die on stations in extreme weather events. Plenty of wild pigs and sheep around to suggest they'd do okay without humans, but maybe not to the same flourishing.
For some types of livestock, where they were lucky enough to be living in fairly idyllic circumstances, it might go rather well.
OTOH - the U.S. alone has something like half a billion chickens. Mostly live locked up in huge metal sheds on factory farms. Similar ~1/4 billion turkeys. The humans go "poof" ...and those metal sheds probably don't have any "peck here for 30 seconds to open emergency exit" doors. Zero of the trucks which deliver the chicken and turkey feed, the high-intensity farming operations which are growing that feed, and the processing facilities blending it will just keep running due to some sort of Narrative Momentum trope.
I'm not familiar with factory farming of pigs (about 22 million in the U.S.), but I suspect similar issues.
The crucial thing for me to remember is that it wasn't my fault. I can do whatever I want because 100 companies are responsible for 71% of GHG. It is their fault and their shareholders' fault and my behaviour has no effect. Once I remember this, I stop worrying because of that piece of the Prayer of Serenity:
> God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference
Since I cannot change this, I just need the wisdom to know the difference and the serenity to accept it.
> I can do whatever I want because 100 companies are responsible for 71% of GHG. It is their fault and their shareholders' fault and my behaviour has no effect.
I know the study you are referencing and this is an extremely bad and inaccurate summary of it.
What it said was that 71% of emissions traced back to 100 entities ( including both companies and states - “china” is one of the entities iirc ) and attributed emissions from the use of fossil fuels to the entity that extracted it
Fossil fuels are used for a lot of useful things that make the world go round and significantly improve the quality of life of much of humanity - food production , shipping and transport, industry, construction. You almost certainly are responsible for some of this consumption, as is most everyone else alive.
If these 100 entities stopped production of fossil fuels, we would have mass starvation and impoverishment, not paradise.
You still have two votes: with your wallet, and with your ballot.
Think back to the times of slavery. You could've said: "I don't own any slaves, so there's nothing I can do". In the end, we did the right thing, but unfortunately after much human suffering. Hopefully we don't wait even longer this time around. There were many things you could've done to help. You could've avoided buying from places that used slave labor. You could've voted for abolitionists. You could've donated to the cause. You could've stood for justice when serving on a jury. You could've convinced your friends that things had to change.
You as an individual may be individually directly responsible for a small amount, but you are probably responsible for a greater than average amount. The little changes that you make will make a bigger difference than most people's. You can also be indirectly responsible for a much greater amount. Talking to your friends about the environment can have a greater effect than you acting alone. People don't realize just how much better EVs are, induction stoves are, heat pumps are, solar panels are, etc, if they haven't heard the benefits. Help to open their eyes.
Your vote also likely controls a far greater amount than you are giving it credit for. Margins of victory are often small, and a few people thinking of the medium and long term can make a big difference.
> You could've convinced your friends that things had to change... You can also be indirectly responsible for a much greater amount. Talking to your friends about the environment can have a greater effect than you acting alone. People don't realize just how much better EVs are, induction stoves are, heat pumps are, solar panels are, etc, if they haven't heard the benefits. Help to open their eyes.
From personal experience of when I went vegan for a year and rode a bike everywhere, people really don't want to hear it. I went out of my way not to talk about it unless people specifically asked me about it, and even then, they didn't want to hear it. Regardless of what you say when questioned, they either think you're sanctimonious and/or they will start associating their guilt and negative feelings with you. The end result is that you start getting frozen out. If you no longer eat meat, you stop getting invited to the BBQ, or the meal at the steakhouse, and when you stop getting invitations to these events, you stop getting invites to others because you're getting pushed further and further to the periphery. People are tribal and they don't want to feel bad about things they enjoy. It is far more likely that you will get kicked out of the tribe rather than the tribe changing it's behaviour to match yours.
There is a real taboo about mentioning veganism. That said, it's fairly mainstream these days -- any big enough BBQ will have to have some option. Lactose/gluten/shellfish/peanut etc issues (that aren't choices) are a fact of life, and any crowd will have at least one vegetarian/vegan that can benefit from some of the overlap.
It's not about convincing people to change their behavior directly though. People hate being told what to do. It's also hard to guilt someone into change. Some of the changes are just no-brainers though. Plenty of people try veganism and give it up. How many people try an EV then give it up? (I don't actually know, but it doesn't seem like many. They're so fun to drive.) More upfront cost, yes, and that may be the reason not to get one, but it pays for itself over time. Same with an induction stove. Who actually likes being in a superheated kitchen on a summer day? Who likes how much harder it is to clean a gas stove? The risk of burning yourself or starting a fire? Worst case: some of your pots don't work and you have to replace them.
You don't have to mention this stuff out of the blue, but if someone is thinking of redoing their kitchen? That's the time. Buying a new car? That's the time. Someone has money to invest? Get some solar panels instead.
I agree that you should not spend your life stressing over things that you cannot change. But that does not imply that individual change is still not necessary.
The one thing we can change is ourselves, and when we do, it impacts the people around us.
The only thing guaranteed to doom us all is if everyone adopts the mindset that “I can’t do anything”.
Maybe we can’t individually, but collectively, markets shift, political will shifts, and our preparedness for harder days ahead improves.
We can’t undo the damage that has been done, but individual action still remains critical, and increasingly so.
> The crucial thing for me to remember is that it wasn't my fault. I can do whatever I want because 100 companies are responsible for 71% of GHG. It is their fault and their shareholders' fault and my behaviour has no effect.
Those companies make things that you buy. If you didn't buy them, they wouldn't make them.
Ultimately all of this can be drawn back to the consumption of the individual.
> If you didn't buy them, they wouldn't make them.
This is rhetorical sleight of hand. If "you" don't by them, literally nothing changes, because you constitute some insignificant portion of the market. What you mean is If millions of people didn't buy them, they wouldn't make them., but the parent is one person, not millions of people, and therefore their comment is entirely correct.
Here's a handy rule of thumb--if some problem is so intractable or of such a grand scale that you could devote every waking moment of your life to solving it without making a discernable impact, then it is so utterly beyond your control that you should not feel compelled to make non-trivial personal sacrifices when you know damn well that they are utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Vote, donate, and try to enjoy yourself. Or better yet, devote your time and emotional energy to a problem that's actually in your power to address in a meaningful way.
Corporations produce things and are regulated by governments. Both corporations and governments are created and run by people. You too, can be one of those people.
I think it's more accurate to say they have _some_ fault AND no choice, because the world was already there, they existence wouldn't change anything and there's nothing one can do to change it (i mean, ordinary people like us).
We have marketing, media, teachers, society, manipulating us since we were kids.
But what are you doing that actually is in your power to change things?
What political options and movements do you support, for example? Have you gone out and participate in climate protests and the like? It's not much, but it's what we can do as citizens.
The world changes through politics, and we should do more to participate actively in it.
Global CO2 emissions need to be reduced by 45% very soon. Like by the end of the decade soon. Less than seven years.
There is no political solution. There’s no hope of any government taking any meaningful action. It’s all words and greenwashing. A substantial reduction in consumption for everyone? Blame companies all you like, but companies don’t sell what people aren’t buying. Consumers around the world aren’t going to scale back consumption by double digit percentages in less than a decade. They’ll revolt against anyone who tried to make them.
There’s no technical solution that can come on line fast enough. Renewable energy is just not going to scale up scale that fast. Especially not when governments are still subsidising fossil fuel, opening new coal mines, and coal power plants.
So what’s left? You can hope that the ‘worst case’ scenarios aren’t that bad, (and hope even harder that the scenarios the official reports deliberately omit the worst of the worst case scenarios, never happen). And even in the best case scenarios if we don’t reduce carbon emissions we’re going to see famine, pestilence and war. Maybe in the end war will accomplish what politics couldn’t. If we destroy enough of the world’s economies it might be enough to stop all the ice melting completely.
Well, I know in France there was a citizens convention for the climate that developed citizens-led initiatives such as banning short flights and so on. That's significant. When you say "consumers would revolt against these policies", would they? Because representative citizens assemblies pretty much prove you otherwise, these are not political activists that got together to push an agenda; it's the result of a representative (through sortition) sample of the french people. Maybe in America things would be different, but I honestly wouldn't say with certainty that it is so.
Although for the citizens convention for the climate in France from the ~180 proposals only 30ish were approved by congress. So this shows the tension between what people might want and what congress is willing to pass; probably because congress is under a much higher pressure from lobbying, so they're much less bold.
But really, my point here is that there are political alternatives. These are not very well known but they're very much real. I know climate movements and activists in other countries, such as Norway, are very much aware of these and these are the policies they want to push for.
So I would say, really, there's a big difference between not knowing and not being involved and actually not any viable alternatives to the problem being out there. I would say the first step is awareness and is involvement. Literally, just talking about it in a serious manner and not simply going "ugh, but politics is so useless!". Ask yourself why and what is being done and what people are trying out there. Because a lot is being tried, particularly in Europe. Just get involved locally and bring these ideas forward.
Basically what I'm saying is we should be pushing for a "let us actually decide for ourselves" movement rather than specifically something about climate. And this I believe is something a lot of people can agree on, from the current polarized political spectrum. As there is a very real crisis of representation in our democracies. No one likes politicians.
California voted to build high speed rail, they're spending $35B for nowhere to nowhere. If built with Shinkansen efficiency, they'd get 1000 km for the same money, more than enough for San Diego to San Francisco to Sacramento.
There's simply too much bureaucracy to overcome, too many fingers in the pot, too many laws blocking expediency. The USA is a broken cruise liner full speed ahead to climate destruction and it won't be stopped without blood.
With our highly individualistic and stratified society, I don’t think we have the voting power or any negotiating power against deeply capitalistic corporations.
They simply follow the capitalistic imperative - optimize capital gains. We - the society - on the other hand, have no such imperative to follow and can’t even decide what we want. Some think the capitalism needs to restricted to ethical boundaries, others think the former are evil communists.
If people weren’t so echo-chambered and isolated to ideas different than their own, perhaps one day we could decide what our universal priorities and values as humanity are. Are they about maximizing capital, or preserving our planet and survival? Or maybe they are about something else.
But we can’t even begin to have a serious discussion about this with the overwhelming majority of people today. And that would be just the first step to change.
So I really think we are powerless to change how capitalism is dooming the planet. There are probably some people in the world capable of changing this - governments, presidents, kings, hedge fund managers, religious figures, and maybe some other leaders. I can’t make the needle move much even if I spend my life doing it. I’m just not in a position of power large enough to steer capitalism itself on a global scale.
I will once again recommend Helene Landemore's "Open Democracy" as well as Camila Vergara's "Systemic corruption: constitutional ideas for an anti-oligarchic republic".
I think seeing what the french convention for the climate produced is really helpful. I had flaws of course but overall a very positive opportunity that has been definitely further refined with the convention for the end of life. And now we are already seeing a push for others one to tackle the pension crisis in France.
These are real political alternatives, as of now, there is little real power that are given to these. But mostly people don't even know what's possible so they're just not pushed by the public.
I believe pushing for more popular power and better (real) representation that's not tied to voting is our only way of addressing the corruption that's present in our political systems, dominated by oligarchic/elitist/plutocratic ideas. We are not powerless, it's possible, we just need to be aware of what are the right alternatives that we ought to push for and start coordinating to bring these to the masses.
At the very least, I believe, different social movements should be pushing for the same "tools" to be used to address the problem. I know climate change groups push for something similar to the citizen's convention for the climate in their own respective countries. But these things are "new". I encourage you to take a look at the books I recommended in the beginning, see if maybe your perspective is shifted a bit and you become a little more optimistic :)
> I can’t make the needle move much even if I spend my life doing it. I’m just not in a position of power large enough to steer capitalism itself on a global scale.
Steering things on a global scale shouldn’t be the goal to begin with at the individual level. This isn’t the needle individuals need to try to move.
You absolutely can make a difference though. Change starts with you and me. And then the people around us. The way we choose to spend our money. By getting involved in our local governments. By supporting organizations that take action. By volunteering to take action.
Every movement starts with an individual. Every massive human endeavor has required the collective effort of many individuals, and this is no different.
Don’t expect people aren’t doing these individual things. Reuse, buying ethical products, recycling, public transit, and so on. It’s just that you’d never see the needle moved this way, so you probably wouldn’t be able to tell how many people are doing these things.
I have a friend who will never idle his car with the AC on. His justification: 10 minutes of discomfort isn't worth the emissions output. He knows it's a minuscule drop in the surface tension of a drop in the bucket of carbon output but he will never ever do it, no matter how hot it is. And he'll subject his passengers to discomfort in service of his principles.
At the same time he flys from LA to Europe 5+ times a year.
It's hard to truly live ethically in such a deeply unethical world.
GPs coping mechanism is to remember that they can’t make a meaningful difference. Your friends coping mechanism is to do little things so they get the feeling of taking action.
Both are actually the same thing; methods for emotionally dealing with the existential crisis on whose direction they cannot exert enough pressure to be observable.
Great observation. Also true that these little fruitless acts of opt-out and opt-in aren't just limited to climate but also politics and living under capitalism. We are all just trying to make sense of complex systems that are outside of our control. In many ways the most healthy (for ones own mind) approach to all of this is to just give in to everything, or as some have called it: take the grill-pill.
Yes, if you attribute all emissions to the company that originally took the fossil fuels out of the ground (“Scope 3 - use of sold products”), you get a fairly small list, for the simple reason that there aren’t that many energy companies in the world. But all of those “sold products” are being sold to somebody, presumably for a reason. So there are a bunch of ways to tackle the problem, both upstream (only 100 companies need to stop selling fossil fuels to massively reduce emissions!) and downstream (every drop in demand for those companies’ products!)
>The crucial thing for me to remember is that it wasn't my fault. I can do whatever I want because 100 companies are responsible for 71% of GHG. It is their fault and their shareholders' fault and my behaviour has no effect. Once I remember this, I stop worrying because of that piece of the Prayer of Serenity:
If you aren't part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
We just saw them for the first time with our own eyes at the Montreal biodome. Absolutely spectacular beings, hard for me to put in words how special they are.
The rate of climate collapse has greatly sped up in the past year, I’d say 2023 is the first time you can’t really ignore the effects of climate change anymore. It’s all around.
The movie "don't look up" was very prescient in a way. I can see denial and unfounded optimism everywhere, including myself.
As long as we keep falling for the illusion of continually being able to always "buy ourselves out of this" we won't impose any of the drastic changes that would actually be called for.
"we'll just set up HEPA filters everywhere in our house", "we've got good AC", "we'll move to a safer area, where x is unlikely", etc
Our consumer mindset won't solve this issue, eventually this will get even the richest and the smartest.
Don’t Look Up is a great movie. Like, okay, I’ve never been so full of furious rage while watching a comedy before, but I studied climatology. Explaining climate to people was my life, and I’ve lived through every frustrating part of that film. It was very cathartic, because it said the things I can’t say— not if I still want to try to save this rotten world.
I sometimes take solace in that no matter what I do, if I go to the rails 10x either way in terms of my own private behavior, it's not even a drop in the bucket to what 8 billion other people are doing, and what 2,200 billionaires are doing. It wasn't me.
That said, I try to tread lightly, even though, there is really no "treading lightly" anymore. There is no sustainable modern way of life available to us. Even moving to a farm to live off the land and raise animals is not workable for 8 billion people. We are utterly hosed.
I pick up trash and litter, sometimes for hours. I put a little lipstick on this pig from time to time.
It wasn’t you. It really wasn’t. But you will be cursed all the same by the generations that follow, as part of the collective guilt we all bear. Sainthood is impossible in this world; who can do all that is asked of him?
Being a climatologist is like being a prophet, in the old Biblical sense. Wrath will be visited upon us if we do not change our avaricious and prideful ways. Some people change, but not enough. The wrath of God still comes, just like it was foretold in the holy equations and the great models. Paradise has burned, the land of flowers will fall into the intemperate sea.
It's both rotten and awesome though. I'm sure we could collectively still pull this off somehow.
Defeatist or dystopian mindsets won't get us anywhere. In a way the current trend of "let's keep everything as it was, at all costs" is its own form of utopian ideology for example.
Why can't we create other more productive and smart utopian stories instead? Something to aspire to? I'm always reminded of (old) Star Trek.
As the delivery channel for those stories, my hope lies in computer games and maybe even VR computer games. I'm probably out of the loop though, could be that watching TV / movies really is that important again / still. Whatever the channel then, actually new stories are what we need.
I absolutely believe we can do this. Humans could stop climate change and prevent the worst of the mass extinction. It’s clearly in our power.
What I do not believe is that we will choose to do so. Not in time, anyway. Not enough new stories, not enough Übermenschen writing new values on new tablets. The first wave of climate refugees from Syria found a cold welcome. How will climate refugees be received when there are 50 million of them? I want it to be like Star Trek, but in my heart I know they will fare like the ancient Egyptians treated the Sea Peoples.
> Amazing that we are watching all these other species go extinct but think we will somehow survive.
Far from watching them all go extinct, we don't even know how many species there are - most people only pay attention to the cute and cuddly anthropomorphised ones like penguins and koalas. Many species will be gone without humans ever having been aware of them or their role in the ecosystem.
I wonder how many people have pensions, 401ks or significant wealth in an s&p etf saw this comic and thought “oh those silly shareholders, why are they so evil”
You can't get rid of money until you can vastly reduce envy, jealously and violence. The entire economic system is set up to balance the exchange of value of labour across industries with those of power dynamics/capability to wage violence.
In Star Trek, they can do away with money primarily because the invention of the replicator (and other tech) taking care of the basic needs of society, which lessens the need for competition between people. If you've got robots that can clean sewers and a machine that can print food from thin air, you no longer need a complex system of competition to allocate who is doing the shit jobs and who is eating the shit food. We're currently all still chimpanzees fighting each other to the death, we've just abstracted the violence away to such an extent that you don't see it anymore. The losers are still dying in droves, but they're dying to stuff like overdoses, homelessness, or not being able to access the doctors and healthcare their wealthy counterparts can.
In my opinion, short of inventing the replicator, the absolute best thing we can do as a species is to get a mass produced humanoid robot that can be controlled via VR built as soon as possible. We then get people doing undesirable jobs to control the robots and train an AI until it gets to the point where it can do the job without a human on the other end. Not only do we free up all those people from doing shit jobs, we can retrain them to work on other pressing problems, like curing diseases or even one day far in the future, building a replicator.
What you're describing was literally my hope when Baxter came out as a robot. Generalization of low income tasks, which would in return force governments to find a more sustainable way to manage our societies.
With the idea that people cannot be hired anymore compared to a robot, because the economic incentive isn't there anymore.
My hope for basic income is still there, as this would allow a shift from a system that only has economic incentive to a system that has creativity and an aspirational incentive. Basic income would provide that, because nobody needs to work just to be able to exist, and they can then focus on "what they actually really want" in life. The argument that nobody wants to work in life is a little stupid, because I think that people want to do something when they're way too bored.
Whether that's just shitty prank videos or research is up to our society, and if we make it "famous" to be smart then the incentive is much higher to do research.
That is something I, as a hu-man, and a being that forgets, cannot tell you.
The only thing I know is that the more I observe the stupidity of our species and the governments on this planet, which are somewhat all prone to egocentric corruptions and therefore stupid decisions in exchange for money ... doesn't work.
I mean, we are collectively destroying our habitat, not even having a backup colony on our moon, not even wanting to go for space other than territorial dispute. And what is the reason why we don't do this? So that we can drive our sports cars to impress others?
I meanwhile think that the only way to progress to a different society class (e.g. Type II and beyond) is if we decide to accept a rational system as our leading guidance at all cost. Be it a "Super AI" or a cybernetic system that combines all knowledge without forgetting it, doesn't matter.
But what matters is that the current state of how we divide powers (in the sense of democracy, communism, socialism etc) doesn't work because there are people involved that don't give a damn. And those that don't give a damn are the ones that benefit the most from the system, and are able to reach the top much easier than people that are not willing to compromise on their ideals. The system(s) have to be redesigned so that the incentive of that changes.
How to do that? I don't know, I'm a monkey that was trained to reach out for more bananas.
I believe that's the role of government. As citizens we have the ability to vote people into power who will incentivise and disincentivise certain behaviours
It has nothing to do with money or shareholders for that matter. As long as people have a say in what they want, they are going to push for creature comforts that damage the environment.
Pick the country most hostile towards capitalism/shareholders, and you’ll still be looking at a polluter and contributor to climate change.
The cartoon could just as easily be rewritten to “for a beautiful moment in time we let people have lots of autonomy in how they wanted to live”.
The conservative parties where I live are hard to vote for because of their selfish ass climate policies. The recent trend has been using short-term poverty relief to justify removing ALL carbon pricing with the mere downside of doing several times the economic damage over the next few centuries particularly to the poor. Personal self-interest just being a convenient side-effect of this oh-so principled stance.
This world won’t be able to outgrow its environmental debts forever.
Or, we are given a constant stream of the absolute worst news around the world.
How about the earth has greened by 15% in the recent decade, turning semi arid regions into forests. How about the coral reefs that were in absolute collapse are coming back?
Somehow only the maximum gloom and doom is communicated…
It’s not an “or”, it’s an “and” situation. We are both destroying the planet and we only get bad news.
Unfortunately, nobody cares about good news. Sure, we all like good news but it doesn’t drive engagement so massive companies can’t profit off of it.
If you look for it, there is good news out there. Advancements in green energy (specifically solar) and battery tech is really encouraging, and there’s so much more happening to counter act climate change. But climate change being a hoax is still something a large portion of the world’s political parties still ideologically tie themselves to. Until it get much worse, they will continue to claw to that lie. And as long as that lie continues, we’ll need stories like this.
Who cares about the good news? On balance it's irrelevant and where it's not there's thousands of other things to work on next. Anyone who wants news modified around their feelings, to hear about puppies returned to their owners, should go read fiction and leave reality to the adults.
There is an urgent, multi-layered problem to solve. Needing to feel good through this is pathetic. Humanity at its weakest.
Maximum? No - the fact that global climate change will likely lead to the collapse of globalization in some of our lifetimes is the "worst news" from our standpoint, we barely give a crap about the penguins.
Talking about the positives doesn't negate the negatives, and frankly looking on the bright side of climate change is like talking about how great the last dinner on the titantic was.
Where I live is in the worst drought in living memory with record breaking heat almost every day this month. A co-worker's well ran dry a week or two ago. Trees are dying and I've never seen so many dead animals, presumably from heat or dehydration. Why would I need to watch the national news for calamity?
Some cheery news: We're not far behind if the insects go.
"According to a major scientific review, global insect populations are hurtling towards exctinction, threatening a "catastrophic collapse of nature's ecosystems". The research found that 41 percent of the world's insect populations are declining while a third are endangered. The extinction rate of insects is eight times faster than mammals, birds and reptiles and there are suggestions that they could totally vanish within a century." [0]
Edit: I don't know who's downvoting this comment, but the parent is a climate change denier and I was responding to their (now flagged) claim that HN doesn't allow for "critical" comments about CC.
I agreed: HN users flag disinformation, specifically false claims that CC isn't happening or isn't anthropogenic.
The reply is rebutting that same user's reply to this comment (which is now also flagged).
----
Critical about what? Like, denying the basic fact that CC is happening and carbon dioxide emitted by humans is driving it?
If so, yeah, I'm all for flagging disinformation on HN as a general rule.
Critical of the nature or conclusions of this specific study? Well, now, that depends.
One thing I didn't find in the abstract that bugged me was the total number of known penguin colonies. Four of five failed, here, but is that four of twenty? Or four of a thousand?
The article does mention that the penguins aren't projected to go extinct from the effects of climate change until the end of the century, which suggests there's still time to save the species.
Antarctic sea ice extent had been rising from 1979 (when satellite data started) to 2015. It regressed for a few years and then expanded again in 2020 and 2021 and then regressed again. There's a lot of causes of this and there are studies looking at it going back many hundreds and thousands of years, but they aren't as accurate as satellite data. Additionally, different seas in the antarctic have had different behaviors. Some have regressed and some have expanded at different times.
> ...changes in atmospheric circulation, wind stress and thermodynamic processes linked to the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) and El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO)
>...Thus, projections of future Antarctic sea-ice extent and the associated climate implications are highly uncertain.
Steady rise then big rise and then a crash regressing to the mean. Point is - we don't know.
Focusing on the maximum sea ice extant barely captures the concern.
Sea ice extent cycles from a maximum to a minimum every year.
The maximum extent has been pushing outwards a bit as more of the core ice volume has melted, and the minimum extent, in recent years, has sharply (greater than five sigma drop against data since 1970s) dropped as sections of the Antarctic now see summer time ice free beaches.
The minimum extent complement to your graphic (that you posted below):
>Steady rise then big rise and then a crash regressing to the mean. Point is - we don't know.
What's being observed is not a regression to the mean, it's a system under external forcing. That's hard to predict, but it doesn't justify pseudoscientific denialism.
>The long-term increase in sea ice near the coast of Antarctica has been explained by a delayed response to orbital forcing and the long memory of the SO (Renssen et al., 2005).
The "rise" since 1975 also has not been "steady", as can be seen clearly in the graph:
Certainly recent correction but an upwards trend since 1979 (when satellite data started) and a recent large spine up followed by a more recent large spine down.
There are many potential inputs to thus. Man made climate change is possibly one but not a dominate one probably.
Suggesting even more it has little to nothing to do with man made climate change. There was a multi-sigma gain in ice shortly before after decades of steady but slow growth. Certainly man made climate change would have impacted that. A single event isn’t an indicator. Trends are. And the trend is more ice.
There are many variables. And when a few things come together there are rare but large variations. Articles like this are just climate hysteria for climate doomers. So much of this has been politicized that people don’t even realize they’re reading propaganda.
Yes the climate was warmed a bit over the last 40 years after decades of cooling which was preceded by a warming period. The 1930s were the warmest of the 20th century and then we saw decades of cooling.
And yes carbon likely plays a role as we can model an atmosphere and see this. But it’s probably not as significant as the hundreds of other natural variables. Besides for every degree of warming in a lab you need exponentially more carbon. So it’s difficult to accelerate.
Slowly move towards non-carbon energy over the next 50 years. We’ll be fine.
> And yes carbon likely plays a role as we can model an atmosphere and see this. But it’s probably not as significant as the hundreds of other natural variables.
And yet, thousands of scientists who spend their entire careers on figuring this out are pretty damn sure what's driving current warming: it's greenhouse gases, primarily CO2. They use this thing called the scientific method, which includes a whole bunch of actually measuring, modeling, predicting, and checking each other's work. Forgive me if that isn't a whole lot more convincing than some offhand conversation with an unknown person on a tech news site.
Can the down voters explain themselves? I genuinely want to hear more discussion on both sides, and this commenter has provided some interesting points..
It’s a duplicate story. And this one raised to #1. So yeah I’m going to post this interesting information again. Nothing in response to it challenged it well.
I did change the last sentence to clarify the data a bit.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/151692/exceptionall...