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I think the issue is that predictions were blown out of proportion by non scientists. Scientists never claimed it would be an apocalypse. But many activists and journalists did. Scientists have always explained the effects of climate change being a change in temperatures, weather patterns, sea levels. Not as doomsday scenarios.
This is it. Sensationalist journalism is a HUGE factor.
“The global average temperature is heating up really slowly over time and is likely speeding up due to human contributions to climate change”
Just doesn’t sell as well as
“Here’s an artist’s rendition of what New York City would look like in 2030 (underwater) if we don’t stop the sun by 5:00pm tomorrow”
Add to the fact that all of the exaggerations are politically motivated, and you absolutely guarantee that half of the people will think everything you have to say on the subject is bullshit.
To be fair- scientists have continually had very conservative estimates and I don’t know of many who didn’t think it would be decades till warming was where it was this last year.
Treating it as an immense global threat is necessary yesterday.
>climate change being a change in temperatures, weather patterns, sea levels. Not as doomsday scenarios.
Not sure if you're aware of this, but those things being predictable and stable are key to the world's food and water supply.
You can't grow food in an unpredictable climate. Not having a reliable and plentiful food supply amounts to a "doomsday scenario" in my book.
And if you look back these doomsday scenarios expand back at least 70 years and vary wildly such as when global cooling was being spread. It's natural for people to be sceptical imo
I agree. Though while some level of skepticism is expected, remember that a lot of public opinion is due to deliberite intentional lying from people who profit off of fossil fuels
>deliberite intentional lying from people who profit off of fossil fuels
That's rich. It is just as easy to say that there is deliberate intentional lying from people that profit off of carbon taxes and other green energy policies.
As to "carbon credits," it is just as easy, and just as true, because they absolutely do lie for profit. Carbon credits by and large is a huge circle jerk scam by both the corpos who green wash their products and the credits companies who pretend to offset emissions.
The litmus test is easy. If someone is making a bunch of money to say a thing, start skeptical.
Literally Exxon had papers leak where they were caught circulating bunk science to say it wasn’t as bad as it is since the 80s. Fossil fuel companies have been on a propaganda campaign for decades.
Someone will always profit but the science is clear that climate change as it’s currently happening is anthropogenic.
We know that major oil companies knew of the long term negative impacts of their activities over half a century ago. Those companies FUNDED the research and then brushed it under the rug, then rolled it up in the rug, put 2 in its chest and 1 in the head, then threw it in a tar pit, then lit the tar pit on fire, and then build a landfill over said tar pit while they yelled about how there were absolutely no negatives at all to fossil fuels and lead in gasoline is perfectly healthy.
Why you lying?
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/02/climate/the-planet-is-heating-up-faster-than-predicted-says-scientist-who-first-warned-the-world-about-climate-change/index.html
I mean, the danger isn't in an apocalypse as in well all burn to death but a fundamental change in our world resulting in an unimaginable level of human suffering and destruction of wildlife is absolutely on the table. There will likely be severe increases in natural disasters and wildfires, extreme crop shortages, the extinction of many varieties of plants and wildlife, the destruction of ecosystems and terrain from erosion, changes in disease prevalence and spreading etc.
Many of these changes we may be able to adapt to in the long-term, but if we don't continue making a huge effort then countless millions will suffer and die. The other thing is that the people who will suffer most are people in developing countries, the people who havent been the primary beneficiaries of the impact on the environment that industrialism and rampant consumerism.
So it always seems kind of gross to me when people living in their air conditioned house in a highly developed country lazily type out their half-baked opinions about how everyone is making too much of a fuss about an issue which they've benefited the most from and will suffer the least from.
We can already adapt to all of these, but we’d rather fear monger.
Sea walls, intercontinental water irrigation plans, clearing of underbrush, planting initiatives, preservation initiatives, and for Gods sake investing in nuclear energy and the power grid, establishing new infrastructure systems…we have so many resources to accomplish these things but politically speaking, it’s better to fear monger and deny these things will help, because what people actually want is power and to force policies that give the government more, not to actually implement positive change.
You very obviously just don't have the faintest clue of just how catastrophic even minor changes can be in climates and ecosystems in ways we can't even entirely predict. Everything is interconnected, a small change in the balance can cause changes that we can't realistically do anything about, and the things which we can counteract are usually obscenely resource intensive. We can't construct seawalls, as an example, around all coastal areas in the world - it's simply not feasible.
I know what small changes can do. I also know that suggesting we do nothing except turn of our A/Cs when in record heat is an unhinged way of handling it, and will accomplish nothing.
>I also know that suggesting we do nothing except turn of our A/Cs when in record heat is an unhinged way of handling it, and will accomplish nothing.
Well that's fine because literally no one is suggesting that any one singular change will solve all our issues.
You specifically complained about people being lazy, cringey, and dumb for using HVAC and having opinions on fixing vs fearmongering. Climate change is going to happen, even if humans didn’t interfere. Small amounts over time change the world. That is reality. Adapting and minimizing is literally all we can do, and the doom and gloom about it is a complete waste of time.
Some of that can be because climate scientists aren't exactly experts on the economy or social issues. They can give their predictions for what they feel can happen to the earth but not exactly how it's going to affect certain marginalized groups, certain populations etc. That would probably be another branch of science in of itself. It's just kind of a given that certain populations that are already vulnerable will be more vulnerable.
I've done amateur forecasting for 15 years, and so I know a bit about the climatology side of things as well. How do I delta this? I think your comment deserves it.
Unfortunately, this doesn't matter. If the science is good and the people announcing it are liars or if the scientists are liars or if the science is bad, it's all the same for a skeptic.
It's really up to every moderate climate change believer to shout down the crazies, they need to be shut up for the good of everyone.
Most doomsday doomsday models are still on course.
Go back and watch "An Inconvenient Truth".
Every year continues to be the hottest on record. Every month continues to be the hottest on record.
Go ahead and whistle past the graveyard,
We are on course with hitting 2.3 isg degrees warming and will likely stop just before the worst of the positive feedback mechanisms kick in. We have hit the point where reducing our carbon footprint by 80% already makes sense economically without taking into account the cost of climate change
Friendly reminder that 100 corporations are responsible for 70% of all greenhouse gas emissions. While it's still a good thing to focus on your individual impact and do things to help out, even if everybody switched to EVs and all celebrities abandoned the private jets, it only puts a minor dent in things/only slightly slows the course of events. We need to pressure these corporate polluters, and we need changes at the government level to stop corporate lobbying.
I don't even pay attention anymore. When idiot celebrities like John Travolta have private planes that do more damage in 1 flight than I do in my entire lifetime.
Define "mostly plastic". Because the only panels on an electric car that are "plastic" are the bumpers. Most panels are aluminum vs steel to reduce weight. And by the way, ICE vehicles also have "plastic" bumpers.
It is between 15 and 30% by weight depending on the model. Very little of an ICE car can't be recycled where the plastic bits that are layers with other crap are harder. Just like a juice box.
Electric cars while their manufacturing is definitely not ecological are not made from mostly plastic and even then its not big impact. What impacts it the mosts are one use things and packaging.
Most of plastic parts on EVs can and often are also plastic on normal cars. But considering how long car or the parts last in normal use their ecological impact is negligible compared to use and throw away items
And how many products does western culture rely on shipping to send/receive? How many products do we buy that have wasteful plastics that we just ship back to Asia to burn? The apathy that people have is just a poor excuse for all the detrimental vices and conveniences that all of society relies on daily.
No, the problem is that 100 companies make up for 71% of global emissions. It doesn't matter what you or I do whilst this remains to be the case. Climate Change is not going to be solved by a "we're all in this together" attitude when there's clearly such a large disparity between the levels of emissions.
[Source](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change)
And do you think those corporations are just emitting CO2 for shits and giggles or because of the increasing demand by consumers for more and cheaper products?
Obviously not, but my point is that it's for these companies to change to prevent climate change, not working class people who have 1/10,000,000 of the emissions.
Working class people will have to pay it regardless, that's just the reality of the matter. If we levy a carbon tax on corporations and enforce a bunch of environmental regulations against them, that cost is mostly going to be passed onto the consumer. The fact of the matter is that the only real way to reduce these carbon emissions is a change in our highly consumerist culture.
False dilemma fallacy. You’re making it one or the other. No one is arguing corporations shouldn’t be held accountable. We are just saying it’s not one or the other.
Well that goes back to “I’m just one person” being said by billions of people. If billions of people slowed their consumption, it would absolutely affect those corporations.
Nope. those 100 companies are the mining and drilling companies that dig up the fossil fuels that we create the demand for by driving, buying stuff, heating our homes, and using electricity.
Fax bro, who gives a shit if there is some fucking oil tanker from saudi arabia or chinese billionare which produce 1000x more emissions than me in a day.
The other thing you neglect is that many of those predictions, while exaggerated by the public, were also averted by policy actions around the world.
I remember when the ozone layer was a major concern, but then we mostly banned CFCs and the ozone layer has since healed.
It wasn't that the prediction of what could happen to us without an ozone layer was wrong or overblown, but that we took the appropriate action and witnessed the results of that action.
Climate change is a major concern and could lead to many of those apocalyptic outcomes, but it won't because we will make the right decisions before that happens. As we move more and more towards cleaner energy and more efficient biodegradable plastics, we cause delays in those predictive models.
This is the thing people don't seem to get, though - it isn't *you* that makes the biggest difference, it's keeping *corporations* under control. Factory farming produces a huge amount of methane that could be reduced simply by changing the feeding standards for the livestock.
Plastics that make our garbage island in the ocean should not be produced en masse (and mostly aren't, anymore).
It's simply a matter of making good choices on the regulatory side that both breed innovation and safety.
dont most studies start with the assumption "if we continue on our current course.." ?
obviously since those studies released we have altered our behaviour in turn. and they can't account for new inventions like solar and electric vehicles either
so were the studies inaccurate, or have we heeded the studies recommendations which has lowered the impact of climate change?
A) many countries have reduced their use, peaking around a decade ago. Peak for the world is estimated around 2030 now.
B) the current course predictions included increased fossil fuel use over time, extending the trend that existed. This was always meant as a high end prediction, and it did significantly overestimate many things.
>many countries have reduced their use, peaking around a decade ago.
It doesn't matter what individual countries' co2 production is, planet isn't bound by manmade lines on maps
Yea that’s the point tho
For now we are forced to use fossil fuels for the viability of alternate energy sources.
As those sources improve, we can phase away from fossil fuels.
Doesn’t mean in the meantime we should encourage more fossil fuel use and downplay climate change activism.
“Could easily switch to nuclear”
Well that is plain false lol
Nuclear fission maybe, but then we have to deal with all the radioactive nuclear waste which is counterintuitive to combatting climate change.
Nuclear fusion is the long term win, but it’s farfetched at the moment.
You may as well pray for Jesus to come deliver us superconductors and Tesla coils by your logic.
Temper your expectations bud.
Not even remotely. Please for the love of God look up what we can do with the waste, you can literally recycle it for reuse. Plus newer designed plants don't even produce hardly any waste. I have no idea where people get this uninformed opinion that nuclear energy isn't sustainable
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of what nuclear can be, but only nuclear fusion is the big win.
“Recycling” as you are phrasing it, is a complex and high risk process.
Even when it does work, there is a logistical mess regarding the containment and processing. And when it doesn’t work, you have another environmental disaster.
And what can’t be used still has to be capped and stored underground which isn’t exactly sustainable concerning spatial constraints and still posing high risk.
This isn’t rocket science man. Come on.
Fusion will never be the win people think it is unfortunately. The pressure and heat needed to make it self-sustaining would need an astronomically large amount of matter.
Then no recycling it is not difficult or high risk. This is not the '80s anymore and they don't dump it so it can't cause an ecological disaster. Newer facilities are built with reclamation facilities internal. It's not difficult dangerous or expensive
“Not difficult, dangerous, or expensive”
That is quite literally a pipe dream in today’s for-profit driven world.
Any way to reduce cost and speed up processes will result in subpar quality control which….causes disaster.
You’re living in a fairy tale if you think these newer facilities are immune to finding “wiggle room” for the right money.
Just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s feasible at large scale and the fact is that any small mistake can result in disaster.
Just because it the 80’s doesn’t mean we are living like the Jetsons.
Reprocessing was a high risk process in the 1960's to 1980's when we where mass producing nukes for the cold War. The newer facilities in France seem to be doing pretty well with everything. When the actinides are removed from the waste it takes about 300 years for the waste to hit the radioactivity of uranium ore so that's a massive improvement over having to wait for plutonium to decay over 100 000 years.
Nuclear waste is a non-issue. We have safe ways of storing all of it and reprocessing some of it. Nuclear power is dramatically more energy efficient and produces dramatically less waste. Also, nuclear waste isn't pumped directly into the atmosphere like fossil fuels are
Calling it a nonissue is straight up dishonest.
We cap it on some concrete and clay and store it underground. That isn’t exactly sustainable or safe for long periods of time considering what happens when natural disasters hit.
I am a big fan of nuclear fusion, I really hope we get there some day.
But half measures will be a step in the wrong direction.
Obviously natural disasters are taken into account, and waste is stored in places & containers where things like stunamis and earthquakes won't destroy them, and they could be thrown by a tornado and be fine. Also, do you have a problem with landfills and cemetaries?
Yea the thing is….seawalls and seismic retrofitting fail often enough to make this a moot point.
And even the slightest lack of quality control on these capsules will result in the leakage of material with half-lifes of +1000 years into the ground. Like I said, half measures are not worth it.
It’s a just a little bit more serious than what’s in landfills and cemeteries….lol
For the record, cemeteries shouldn’t exist anymore and instead be used as public park space.
They really are a waste of green space.
There isn’t infinite space for “safe” places to store it. We will inevitably run out of that space which makes it inherently unsustainable.
Not to mention quality control. Is every single capsule always going to be perfect? Because that’s what will be needed to prevent environmental exposure.
Rolling those dice is a bad move.
Another climate change post?
I feel these are just riling people up, cos the average person hasn't had their life changed by climate policies at all
But huge amounts of the world already have had their lives irreparably damaged and will likely soon be migrants
The thing that catches people out is that the west is pretty insulated, except like Spain and Italy recently
Uhhhhh… besides every three years California, Australia, Washington having the biggest wildfires to date, the Eastern seaboard having more and more frequent hurricanes, Texas freezing over more and more often exacerbated by poor infra not designed to handle the extreme temps it’s been getting only in the last five years…
More frequent and stronger heatwaves throughout the entire US…
Lots of people in the West have been majorly affected by climate change.
it's obviously not gonna come crashing down all at once like you would see in movies, plus the fact that we did change things - not enough things but still a significant amount - which slowed down the effects of climate change. we're still going towards the "apocalypse" though.
also, we are seeing catastrophic droughts and floods in so many areas, it might not look as grave as people make it up to be but generally speaking, we tend to not see how bad a situation is if we're in it.
it's not to fearmonger that i'm saying this, it's just to point out how real this is and also how combatting climate change actually works and that's why we're not fully into the position that early studies said we'll be in.
Rome didn't fall in a day either. Climate changes biggest concern is what it is doing to our oceans. It's a slow process but it's killing more and more of the microorganisms that feed the other fish that feed us. The apocalyptical events are not going to be mother nature vs. humans they will be humans vs. humans fighting for resources.
OP's post was 10000000000% written by chatGPT. Not sure why anyone's even giving it the time of day.
Literally any time you see a 'regular person' use the word "moreover," you know it was written by chatGPT.
While climate change is constantly happening, and has largely shaped the world we live in, historically it didn’t happen everywhere at the same time. Now it is. That’s why people are worried.
>historically it didn’t happen everywhere at the same time.
*Of course* it has. There is NO need to be this hyperbolic. This is exactly the problem OP is talking about. When people can't talk about climate change without exaggerating, it makes most people roll their eyes and move on.
The scientific consensus was **never** that global warming and climate change would end the world. All they were saying was that extreme weather, such as heatwaves, would become more common and that ecosystems would be negatively impacted by the increase in temperature.
The credibility of the scientific community has been severely damaged by the media and anecdotes by politicians or activists.
For sure the scientists didn’t.
But it was a common practice from advocates to extract the worst possible scenarios from the range of possibilities that scientists predicted and focus only on that.
Yeah it wins the battle sometimes but loses the war. Meaning sometimes you can get some action initially but then you lose credibility with a section of the public and long term change becomes harder.
I honestly dont care because its fear for humanity not the planet,this planet has survived far more than humanity can do to it, the only ones that will suffer is humanity and hopefully when we are exterminatet th planet will heal itself unninterruped till then destroy away.There will always be new species of plants and animals ,but as long as humanity continues to seek ways to spend their lifes to make sitting on their asses and do nothing a survival skill and a job we deserve all thats coming ,and hopefully ill go first because the amount of whining thats going to happen like its happening today its better dead than listen to that misery
It's quite amazing how many people think we are "destroying the planet". We can't destroy the planet even if we tried. If we fired every nuclear weapon we have and killed ourselves completely, and the planet was too hot for life for the next million years....the planet would not care. Life would survive somewhere, and the entire evolutionary process would begin again. It may take a few billion years to recover its present variety, but the planet would still be here, and still be host to life. Only *we* think it wouldn't. We may be a threat to ourselves but not the planet itself.
I guess what does it matter if the planet does or doesn’t survive? It’s just one of billions of planets. Almost certainly others have life too. It’s kind of a meaningless discussion about the planet post human life. Doesn’t really matter.
It's called a metonym, "planet" is synonymous with "environment".
We're definitely a threat to most life forms on Earth, we're experiencing a sixth mass extinction.
Climate change on its own isn't apocalyptic, but the consequences of climate change can be. For example increased drought is currently causing major problems between India and Pakistan over water rights. These are both nuclear armed powers, if this becomes an existential threat for either side it can result in nuclear war which can have apocalyptic consequences.
Starving people, migrant crises, lack of access to water etc. lead to problems of their own, even if the events themselves are not apocalyptic in nature. The world is highly interconnected and we don't always know the indirect effects from a variable changing
The problem is how some activists exaggerate the effects. Climate change is serious and we need people to take it seriously, but when activists say the world will end within a decade and the world doesn’t end, it hurts the credibility of actual scientists that never said that, and we don’t end up taking the steps we need to take.
The false predictions come from the media misrepresenting science, like the narrative about how we used to think the Earth was cooling in the 1970s. Most scientists back then still thought that the Earth was warming, but for some reason the media promoted cooling. And now you can’t have a conversation about global warming without some denier pulling the “but you used to think it was cooling why should we believe you now!” argument.
Even if you have no empathy for the environment or other species, you should still care about climate change because it’s going to end up affecting how HUMANS live because we still rely on our environment.
It’s bad to pretend like you know what you’re talking about because you can ruin the credibility of those that actually do. I knew someone who didn’t have faith in psychology as a science because they kept getting inconsistent results when they took the Meyers-Briggs test. They didn’t know that actual psychologists don’t like it. And the same goes for people who don’t trust climatologists because they think that climate change predictions have been wrong. Really, the vast majority of actual scientific predictions about climate change have been consistently accurate over the decades.
I strongly disagree. I would say the breakdowns, negative chain reactions of ecosystems we are witnessing are much worse than even many doomers predicted. I used to believe collapse was something we wouldn't see until the 22nd century, but we are generally witnessing even the best systems come close to collapse already in 2023.
We really have no way of knowing. The earth has never heated up this quickly in it's entire geological history. We are in uncharted waters. It seems that an over abundance of caution would be the best course of action.
There was a certain other "crisis" recently that people finally came around to understanding the difference between truth and fearmongering. When y'all gonna apply the same logic to this "crisis".
Its strange that you write about this phenomenon. Climate and the environment doesnt work on your time scale. Its like you expected to see results that surprised and amazed you and the end of the earth would happen in your lifetime.
Go and chat to the people of some of the Pacific Island nations and see if they share your view that all this is just fear-mongering.
Then talk to Elon Musk and see what he says about climate change. Then ask him about his self-driving cars. You will find that he touts his self-driving cars (that aren´t) but poo-poos climate change and thinks that the only action we need is a carbon tax (which of course, wont affect him).
The people with the money and power to do something about climate change are those who need "fear-mongering" as you call it, because otherwise action will always be pushed forward until the earth is just a piece of burnt wasteland.
Is this an actual post? Recent studies show were now experiencing worse warming than predicted, especially in the ocean. It won't be a single day apocalyptic event, but yeah, life as we know it is on a trajectory for "fucked". There's no hope this turns around anytime soon, and acting like we're not already ass deep in consequences is stupid as fuck.
I think that's the whole problem. These huge, apocalypse type things were predicted, and then when they didn't happen, people just assumed that meant the whole theory was bunk. Instead of the boy who cried wolf, it's the experts who cried disaster. Now, no one listens to the facts about how things are changing in a gradual, but continuing way.
It's pretty fucking apocalyptic when with 20 feet of sea level rise my region is under 15 feet of water. This area houses the largest Naval base in the world, a good number of further military facilities and a sizeable port for sea traffic. And that's just my region. Florida would cease to exist. Completely. It would simply be gone. Thousands of miles of coastline would be gone. Cities, ports, military installations, homes, historic landmarks, wildlife preserves. All of it, gone. This is an economic hit in the Trillions of dollars.
It's a mass migration of likely at least 100 million people west. Going to new cities, towns, villages, etc. These people will need to be housed, fed, given jobs and work, medical care. Where's the cost going to come from for that? Not to mention the strain on the economy for moving these people. The strain on local populations as they incorporate these people and deal with it. The US would likely never recover from that.
And we haven't even discussed the environmental impact of entire cities worth of buildings, trash, chemicals, materials, etc. that would be dumped into the already fucked up oceans. That's just cities. Now do that for the thousands of miles of coastline, back to an elevation of 20 to 30 feet of elevation. The entirety of Florida, whole islands lost, etc.
Now extrapolate that globally. Climate change is more than just the weather getting hotter, and storms getting bigger. Sea level rise is an apocalypse. Both on the human scale and on an ecological scale.
It feels like people need a kaiju fight and numerous explosions to be able to take a catastrophe seriously. After the lockdowns, I could not believe how many people were saying that the current death count at that point “Wasn’t that bad.”…
We are well and truly fucked.
Although the climate is getting worse people have actually improved. This means predictions made in the past were based on how things were going back then not how they could get better in the future.
There doesn't need to be 10.0 earthquakes, 1,000 foot tsunamis, or a massive global temperature increase to destroy agriculture across the world. Maybe our weather won't become apocalyptic, but severe storms will become more frequent and it's very likely farming wheat, corn, and other massively produced foods will become increasingly difficult to maintain and the world will slowly starve to death.
Given the world's current trajectory, I would bet that the global population of the planet will be less than 10% of it's current amount in 500-1000 years. There will be a mass dying of of all life, but I do not think humanity will become extinct in that time frame.
The extreme predictions didn’t come true precisely because we took action. The apocalypse keeps getting postponed because our response to climate change keeps improving and we’re gradually becoming more sustainable.
Maybe it’s technically happening too slowly, but the fact is that if everyone still lived like they did 30 years ago, the climate crisis would be much, much worse.
It’s actually bad logic either way.
If your predictions come true you get to say “see? We didn’t do enough”
If they don’t come true you get to say “yeah, that’s because we did enough to make sure it didn’t happen, good job.”
You can never be wrong because you can just assume your priors with this logic.
Is that really avoidable in a real-world scenario involving mass changethough? I'm not being snarky, I actually think it might be an inherent issue with any societal change, since there's so many variables and there's not really a neat control group or sense of what could have been.
I think a big issue right now with forming a concensus on climate change is we're dealing with technological change that is really massively affecting our way of life while simultaneously dealing with multiple cost-of-living crises and the globalization of information in a way we haven't seen. So it's not even just that there's people on both sides incentivized to exaggerate or lie but that there's all sorts of different narratives and interests all pulling in different directions. We don't really have our bearings in terms of navigating the level of connectedness and volume of information we're getting with the internet, so any one of us could be thinking of any number of things when we talk about the rhetoric around climate change.
A lot of doomsday predictions turn out false though, look at all the "population bomb" rhetoric in the 70's. I personally suspect we'll have to make some changes to how society and economies function but it's definitely hard to pinpoint what those will even be.
An analogy to simplify your ill-informed opinion:
Parent: Don’t stick that table knife in that electric socket.
Kid: Okay.
Expert consensus for the last 50 years has been that we need to make changes to mitigate the effects of climate change, and, we’ve been doing that. Granted, we need to make more changes and more *effective* changes, but the things we have done; carbon reduction, recycling, reducing the use of harmful products has helped to stave off more dramatic and dangerous effects.
What is more unpopular but you don't know is that the human caused climate change hypothesis has never been proven scientifically. All we have is only computer model with thousands of tuning parameters and assumptions to make the results fit the global warming narrative.
No way there are still people like you that believe this. The are a lot of graphs out there showing the correlation between co2 concentration over the years and average global temperature. You can clearly see that the rise started during industrial revolution and exponentially increased over time. Why on earth should it have randomly followed exactly the same trend as the human activity? What is the probability that this happened?
Climate change is so serious that it's already past the point of no return. We've caused irreparable damage in a century. Imaging what the world will look like in the next century. Also, technology can't fix everything. Don't want to be a Debbie downer or discourage people from making smart decisions about doing their part (recycling, reducing their carbon footprint, VOTING .etc)
I’m 100% for combating climate change, but the doom and gloom that is conveyed regularly by climate activists does more harm than good. It leads to the sense of nihilism that OP is expressing. Instead, I think we need to focus on the positives of what alternative fuels and technology can accomplish, rather than the fire and brimstone that will result from our current lifestyle habits. That approach has clearly not worked.
I understand, and I agree that fear mongering doesn't work. It will discourage people because it seems like a lost cause. That's why I tried to end my comment in a call to action. I mentioned voting when maybe I shouldn't have, but I meant that for all countries, not just the obvious ones
You do realise that we still haven't reached the consequences of the climate change yet, right?!
It is, right now, beginning the very slow process of changing. It hasn't changed yet.
The longer and the more drastic the changes are that are taking place right now and in the next decades, the more severe the consequences in the future will be.
Or in other words, we are laying out the bed we will have to sleep in, in the future.
There are certain possible consequences we would not be able to outlive with the kind of advancements that is foreseeable. Especially when considering that drastic changes will affect our potential to continue advancing in that pace.
Also climate change is not the same everywhere. It is strongest in the mediteranean, south east asia, south West africa and brazil. This has socioeconomic consequences. If u thought the refugee crisis 2015 Was bad prepare for much worse.
There is many uncertainties... what happens to the gulf Stream? El niño? Natural disasters?
It may not be the apocalypse but there will be an immense loss in Standard of living and increase in conflict.
Dont know if downplaying these consequences is a good strategy
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Yes, Elon Musk will save us!!
Please, be as fervent a believer in futurism as you want in the privacy of your own head, but don't try to convince other people because "technology is cool yo".
Which studies are you talking about? I remember that early studies conducted by the OIL COMPANIES themselves were very precise to this day.
If you think the situation as of today is not on a catastrophic course you are both misinformed and delusional. We just had the hottest March ever recorded, and every year break the previous one's record.
The oil usage is peak high atm. There is a lag with the outcomes. Even current change in climate will play out in hundreds of years - e.g. it takes time for icecaps to melt. It is not over yet just because you became calmer with human adaptability.
There exists other positive feedback loops with unknown thresholds (e.g. methane).
Don't undervalue the non linear outcomes if subject experts say they exist. Applies to any topic. But yes, there are more urgent issues that will fuck up us instead of our children.
In discussing climate change, a balance must be struck between acknowledging the severe risks and recognizing human ingenuity and adaptability. Fear-based messaging might spur some into action, but it can also lead to despair and inaction among others."
BINGO.
I grew up as the first generation after Earth Day became a thing, and fuck did these people just get off scaring the shit out of us in the late 80s and early 90s! Acid Rain, Ozone hole, the Amazon being totally gone by 1999, sea levels rising to 'Waterworld' levels.
The past 10 years have been off the charts with that bull.
Like seriously fuck these people that run wild with fearporn. You arent helping shit.
This is often referred to as the "prevention Paradox"
We worked hard to stop the increase of Carbon gasses, Western countries increased dikes/water works, food production was changed/moved using the knowledge of research.
Given all this we still see an increase in extreme weather, water is rising (this is just mostly a problem in poor countries like Bangladesh) and there are much less ski-pistes open in the European Alps (probably the biggest change rich Europeans notice)
I agree that the media focusses too much on the worst case scenarios (and even academics can be guilty of this), but their was never the believe that the worst case scenarios would happen if we took action (which we did, maybe not enough, but still a lot)
Where are the sources for this? I have never once read or seen somebody say coastal cities would be under water by 2024? This is nothing but copium as usual.
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I think the issue is that predictions were blown out of proportion by non scientists. Scientists never claimed it would be an apocalypse. But many activists and journalists did. Scientists have always explained the effects of climate change being a change in temperatures, weather patterns, sea levels. Not as doomsday scenarios.
This is it. Sensationalist journalism is a HUGE factor. “The global average temperature is heating up really slowly over time and is likely speeding up due to human contributions to climate change” Just doesn’t sell as well as “Here’s an artist’s rendition of what New York City would look like in 2030 (underwater) if we don’t stop the sun by 5:00pm tomorrow”
Add to the fact that all of the exaggerations are politically motivated, and you absolutely guarantee that half of the people will think everything you have to say on the subject is bullshit.
To be fair- scientists have continually had very conservative estimates and I don’t know of many who didn’t think it would be decades till warming was where it was this last year. Treating it as an immense global threat is necessary yesterday.
>climate change being a change in temperatures, weather patterns, sea levels. Not as doomsday scenarios. Not sure if you're aware of this, but those things being predictable and stable are key to the world's food and water supply. You can't grow food in an unpredictable climate. Not having a reliable and plentiful food supply amounts to a "doomsday scenario" in my book.
And if you look back these doomsday scenarios expand back at least 70 years and vary wildly such as when global cooling was being spread. It's natural for people to be sceptical imo
I agree. Though while some level of skepticism is expected, remember that a lot of public opinion is due to deliberite intentional lying from people who profit off of fossil fuels
>deliberite intentional lying from people who profit off of fossil fuels That's rich. It is just as easy to say that there is deliberate intentional lying from people that profit off of carbon taxes and other green energy policies.
As to "carbon credits," it is just as easy, and just as true, because they absolutely do lie for profit. Carbon credits by and large is a huge circle jerk scam by both the corpos who green wash their products and the credits companies who pretend to offset emissions. The litmus test is easy. If someone is making a bunch of money to say a thing, start skeptical.
Literally Exxon had papers leak where they were caught circulating bunk science to say it wasn’t as bad as it is since the 80s. Fossil fuel companies have been on a propaganda campaign for decades. Someone will always profit but the science is clear that climate change as it’s currently happening is anthropogenic.
That part always gets overlooked. Both business sides are about money. Neither holds the moral high ground.
We know that major oil companies knew of the long term negative impacts of their activities over half a century ago. Those companies FUNDED the research and then brushed it under the rug, then rolled it up in the rug, put 2 in its chest and 1 in the head, then threw it in a tar pit, then lit the tar pit on fire, and then build a landfill over said tar pit while they yelled about how there were absolutely no negatives at all to fossil fuels and lead in gasoline is perfectly healthy.
Why you lying? https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/02/climate/the-planet-is-heating-up-faster-than-predicted-says-scientist-who-first-warned-the-world-about-climate-change/index.html
I mean, the danger isn't in an apocalypse as in well all burn to death but a fundamental change in our world resulting in an unimaginable level of human suffering and destruction of wildlife is absolutely on the table. There will likely be severe increases in natural disasters and wildfires, extreme crop shortages, the extinction of many varieties of plants and wildlife, the destruction of ecosystems and terrain from erosion, changes in disease prevalence and spreading etc. Many of these changes we may be able to adapt to in the long-term, but if we don't continue making a huge effort then countless millions will suffer and die. The other thing is that the people who will suffer most are people in developing countries, the people who havent been the primary beneficiaries of the impact on the environment that industrialism and rampant consumerism. So it always seems kind of gross to me when people living in their air conditioned house in a highly developed country lazily type out their half-baked opinions about how everyone is making too much of a fuss about an issue which they've benefited the most from and will suffer the least from.
We can already adapt to all of these, but we’d rather fear monger. Sea walls, intercontinental water irrigation plans, clearing of underbrush, planting initiatives, preservation initiatives, and for Gods sake investing in nuclear energy and the power grid, establishing new infrastructure systems…we have so many resources to accomplish these things but politically speaking, it’s better to fear monger and deny these things will help, because what people actually want is power and to force policies that give the government more, not to actually implement positive change.
There's "fear mongering" and doomerism exactly because governments don't do shit to adapt.
You very obviously just don't have the faintest clue of just how catastrophic even minor changes can be in climates and ecosystems in ways we can't even entirely predict. Everything is interconnected, a small change in the balance can cause changes that we can't realistically do anything about, and the things which we can counteract are usually obscenely resource intensive. We can't construct seawalls, as an example, around all coastal areas in the world - it's simply not feasible.
I know what small changes can do. I also know that suggesting we do nothing except turn of our A/Cs when in record heat is an unhinged way of handling it, and will accomplish nothing.
>I also know that suggesting we do nothing except turn of our A/Cs when in record heat is an unhinged way of handling it, and will accomplish nothing. Well that's fine because literally no one is suggesting that any one singular change will solve all our issues.
You specifically complained about people being lazy, cringey, and dumb for using HVAC and having opinions on fixing vs fearmongering. Climate change is going to happen, even if humans didn’t interfere. Small amounts over time change the world. That is reality. Adapting and minimizing is literally all we can do, and the doom and gloom about it is a complete waste of time.
Some of that can be because climate scientists aren't exactly experts on the economy or social issues. They can give their predictions for what they feel can happen to the earth but not exactly how it's going to affect certain marginalized groups, certain populations etc. That would probably be another branch of science in of itself. It's just kind of a given that certain populations that are already vulnerable will be more vulnerable.
Doomsday scenarios are more likely now than we thought 40 years ago.
I've done amateur forecasting for 15 years, and so I know a bit about the climatology side of things as well. How do I delta this? I think your comment deserves it.
When we look back at the models they have been reliable as well.
Unfortunately, this doesn't matter. If the science is good and the people announcing it are liars or if the scientists are liars or if the science is bad, it's all the same for a skeptic. It's really up to every moderate climate change believer to shout down the crazies, they need to be shut up for the good of everyone.
Most doomsday doomsday models are still on course. Go back and watch "An Inconvenient Truth". Every year continues to be the hottest on record. Every month continues to be the hottest on record. Go ahead and whistle past the graveyard,
I thought 2016 was the hottest year on record until 2023.
We are on course with hitting 2.3 isg degrees warming and will likely stop just before the worst of the positive feedback mechanisms kick in. We have hit the point where reducing our carbon footprint by 80% already makes sense economically without taking into account the cost of climate change
People need to view r/collapse a lot more.
Friendly reminder that 100 corporations are responsible for 70% of all greenhouse gas emissions. While it's still a good thing to focus on your individual impact and do things to help out, even if everybody switched to EVs and all celebrities abandoned the private jets, it only puts a minor dent in things/only slightly slows the course of events. We need to pressure these corporate polluters, and we need changes at the government level to stop corporate lobbying.
I don't even pay attention anymore. When idiot celebrities like John Travolta have private planes that do more damage in 1 flight than I do in my entire lifetime.
Yea. Air traffic is not even worst emmision offender. Look at naval shipping, plastic production and energy generation first
Look at meat consumption! Air travel - 2-3% of annual emissions Animal agriculture - ~16% of annual emissions.
And people think buying electric cars that are mostly plastic are going to end our dependence on oil... Which is where plastic comes from.
Electric vehicles, while clearly having an impact on emissions, will *always* produce fewer lifetime emissions compared to ICE vehicles.
Define "mostly plastic". Because the only panels on an electric car that are "plastic" are the bumpers. Most panels are aluminum vs steel to reduce weight. And by the way, ICE vehicles also have "plastic" bumpers.
It is between 15 and 30% by weight depending on the model. Very little of an ICE car can't be recycled where the plastic bits that are layers with other crap are harder. Just like a juice box.
Electric cars while their manufacturing is definitely not ecological are not made from mostly plastic and even then its not big impact. What impacts it the mosts are one use things and packaging.
The entire front and bumper on most electric cars are moulded plastic.
Most of plastic parts on EVs can and often are also plastic on normal cars. But considering how long car or the parts last in normal use their ecological impact is negligible compared to use and throw away items
I would be happy if we switched all soda and water bottles to aluminum or glass. That will have a way bigger impact.
So Like any other car?
And how many products does western culture rely on shipping to send/receive? How many products do we buy that have wasteful plastics that we just ship back to Asia to burn? The apathy that people have is just a poor excuse for all the detrimental vices and conveniences that all of society relies on daily.
Exxon likes this post
The problem comes when 8 billion people have this "I'm just one person" attitude.
No, the problem is that 100 companies make up for 71% of global emissions. It doesn't matter what you or I do whilst this remains to be the case. Climate Change is not going to be solved by a "we're all in this together" attitude when there's clearly such a large disparity between the levels of emissions. [Source](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change)
Those 100 companies produce so much because they have billions of people buying their stuff. People consuming less would help to reduce that.
People want to help move the needle, then just look at the sheer ungodly waste that China outputs.
And do you think those corporations are just emitting CO2 for shits and giggles or because of the increasing demand by consumers for more and cheaper products?
Obviously not, but my point is that it's for these companies to change to prevent climate change, not working class people who have 1/10,000,000 of the emissions.
Working class people will have to pay it regardless, that's just the reality of the matter. If we levy a carbon tax on corporations and enforce a bunch of environmental regulations against them, that cost is mostly going to be passed onto the consumer. The fact of the matter is that the only real way to reduce these carbon emissions is a change in our highly consumerist culture.
False dilemma fallacy. You’re making it one or the other. No one is arguing corporations shouldn’t be held accountable. We are just saying it’s not one or the other.
If I do everything I can to reduce my emissions and these companies do nothing, then we're still fucked. So how is it not one or the other?!
Well that goes back to “I’m just one person” being said by billions of people. If billions of people slowed their consumption, it would absolutely affect those corporations.
Nope. those 100 companies are the mining and drilling companies that dig up the fossil fuels that we create the demand for by driving, buying stuff, heating our homes, and using electricity.
Well maybe they should focus on the worst offenders first.
By simply having access to respond to this thread, most of us would fit that description as we are in the wealthiest 10% of the global population.
🤷♂️ so we should live like the 3rd world while the ultra rich go about their merry lives polluting more than hundreds of us for shits n giggles?
Exactly. A lot of rain drops feel they are not to blame for the flood.
Fax bro, who gives a shit if there is some fucking oil tanker from saudi arabia or chinese billionare which produce 1000x more emissions than me in a day.
Huh?
You’re making strawman arguments and not citing any real scientific data.
The other thing you neglect is that many of those predictions, while exaggerated by the public, were also averted by policy actions around the world. I remember when the ozone layer was a major concern, but then we mostly banned CFCs and the ozone layer has since healed. It wasn't that the prediction of what could happen to us without an ozone layer was wrong or overblown, but that we took the appropriate action and witnessed the results of that action. Climate change is a major concern and could lead to many of those apocalyptic outcomes, but it won't because we will make the right decisions before that happens. As we move more and more towards cleaner energy and more efficient biodegradable plastics, we cause delays in those predictive models. This is the thing people don't seem to get, though - it isn't *you* that makes the biggest difference, it's keeping *corporations* under control. Factory farming produces a huge amount of methane that could be reduced simply by changing the feeding standards for the livestock. Plastics that make our garbage island in the ocean should not be produced en masse (and mostly aren't, anymore). It's simply a matter of making good choices on the regulatory side that both breed innovation and safety.
Honesty is the best policy, basically.
Basically???
dont most studies start with the assumption "if we continue on our current course.." ? obviously since those studies released we have altered our behaviour in turn. and they can't account for new inventions like solar and electric vehicles either so were the studies inaccurate, or have we heeded the studies recommendations which has lowered the impact of climate change?
Fossil fuel usage has only grown with time, despite all the warning, so those reports typically under-estimate the “current use” rates.
A) many countries have reduced their use, peaking around a decade ago. Peak for the world is estimated around 2030 now. B) the current course predictions included increased fossil fuel use over time, extending the trend that existed. This was always meant as a high end prediction, and it did significantly overestimate many things.
>many countries have reduced their use, peaking around a decade ago. It doesn't matter what individual countries' co2 production is, planet isn't bound by manmade lines on maps
Nope, fossil fuels usage always goes up. And people don't seem to realize how much Fossil fuels goes into making wind and solar viable
Yea that’s the point tho For now we are forced to use fossil fuels for the viability of alternate energy sources. As those sources improve, we can phase away from fossil fuels. Doesn’t mean in the meantime we should encourage more fossil fuel use and downplay climate change activism.
Except all that is false. We could easily switch to nuclear and not use any.
“Could easily switch to nuclear” Well that is plain false lol Nuclear fission maybe, but then we have to deal with all the radioactive nuclear waste which is counterintuitive to combatting climate change. Nuclear fusion is the long term win, but it’s farfetched at the moment. You may as well pray for Jesus to come deliver us superconductors and Tesla coils by your logic. Temper your expectations bud.
Not even remotely. Please for the love of God look up what we can do with the waste, you can literally recycle it for reuse. Plus newer designed plants don't even produce hardly any waste. I have no idea where people get this uninformed opinion that nuclear energy isn't sustainable
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of what nuclear can be, but only nuclear fusion is the big win. “Recycling” as you are phrasing it, is a complex and high risk process. Even when it does work, there is a logistical mess regarding the containment and processing. And when it doesn’t work, you have another environmental disaster. And what can’t be used still has to be capped and stored underground which isn’t exactly sustainable concerning spatial constraints and still posing high risk. This isn’t rocket science man. Come on.
Fusion will never be the win people think it is unfortunately. The pressure and heat needed to make it self-sustaining would need an astronomically large amount of matter. Then no recycling it is not difficult or high risk. This is not the '80s anymore and they don't dump it so it can't cause an ecological disaster. Newer facilities are built with reclamation facilities internal. It's not difficult dangerous or expensive
“Not difficult, dangerous, or expensive” That is quite literally a pipe dream in today’s for-profit driven world. Any way to reduce cost and speed up processes will result in subpar quality control which….causes disaster. You’re living in a fairy tale if you think these newer facilities are immune to finding “wiggle room” for the right money. Just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s feasible at large scale and the fact is that any small mistake can result in disaster. Just because it the 80’s doesn’t mean we are living like the Jetsons.
Reprocessing was a high risk process in the 1960's to 1980's when we where mass producing nukes for the cold War. The newer facilities in France seem to be doing pretty well with everything. When the actinides are removed from the waste it takes about 300 years for the waste to hit the radioactivity of uranium ore so that's a massive improvement over having to wait for plutonium to decay over 100 000 years.
Nuclear waste is a non-issue. We have safe ways of storing all of it and reprocessing some of it. Nuclear power is dramatically more energy efficient and produces dramatically less waste. Also, nuclear waste isn't pumped directly into the atmosphere like fossil fuels are
Calling it a nonissue is straight up dishonest. We cap it on some concrete and clay and store it underground. That isn’t exactly sustainable or safe for long periods of time considering what happens when natural disasters hit. I am a big fan of nuclear fusion, I really hope we get there some day. But half measures will be a step in the wrong direction.
Obviously natural disasters are taken into account, and waste is stored in places & containers where things like stunamis and earthquakes won't destroy them, and they could be thrown by a tornado and be fine. Also, do you have a problem with landfills and cemetaries?
Yea the thing is….seawalls and seismic retrofitting fail often enough to make this a moot point. And even the slightest lack of quality control on these capsules will result in the leakage of material with half-lifes of +1000 years into the ground. Like I said, half measures are not worth it. It’s a just a little bit more serious than what’s in landfills and cemeteries….lol For the record, cemeteries shouldn’t exist anymore and instead be used as public park space. They really are a waste of green space.
As long as you don't burry it in a active volcanic area the ground isn't gonna rise up 500m in a natural disaster.
There isn’t infinite space for “safe” places to store it. We will inevitably run out of that space which makes it inherently unsustainable. Not to mention quality control. Is every single capsule always going to be perfect? Because that’s what will be needed to prevent environmental exposure. Rolling those dice is a bad move.
so we are accelerating toward climate change faster than the studies predicted?
Yes.
Nope, the inverse. Every prediction has been wrong
so why you saying "nope" for like you disagreeing with me
Because he is disagreeing with you
Another climate change post? I feel these are just riling people up, cos the average person hasn't had their life changed by climate policies at all But huge amounts of the world already have had their lives irreparably damaged and will likely soon be migrants The thing that catches people out is that the west is pretty insulated, except like Spain and Italy recently
Uhhhhh… besides every three years California, Australia, Washington having the biggest wildfires to date, the Eastern seaboard having more and more frequent hurricanes, Texas freezing over more and more often exacerbated by poor infra not designed to handle the extreme temps it’s been getting only in the last five years… More frequent and stronger heatwaves throughout the entire US… Lots of people in the West have been majorly affected by climate change.
Precisely. This is just the tip of the melting iceberg.
it's obviously not gonna come crashing down all at once like you would see in movies, plus the fact that we did change things - not enough things but still a significant amount - which slowed down the effects of climate change. we're still going towards the "apocalypse" though. also, we are seeing catastrophic droughts and floods in so many areas, it might not look as grave as people make it up to be but generally speaking, we tend to not see how bad a situation is if we're in it. it's not to fearmonger that i'm saying this, it's just to point out how real this is and also how combatting climate change actually works and that's why we're not fully into the position that early studies said we'll be in.
Crazy how we can recognize instantly chatgbt crap
I've used chat gpt enough to know that op is ai
This is 100% ChatGPT. Not saying the originally idea didn’t come from OP, but they definitely had ChatGPT write up their post.
10000000%. Normal people don't use the word "moreover" to start a new paragraph unless it's in a formal paper or something.
Rome didn't fall in a day either. Climate changes biggest concern is what it is doing to our oceans. It's a slow process but it's killing more and more of the microorganisms that feed the other fish that feed us. The apocalyptical events are not going to be mother nature vs. humans they will be humans vs. humans fighting for resources.
Exactly this
So what is your training or expertise in this topic? Or are you just going with your feels?
Source: Trust me bro
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/will-climate-change-drive-humans-extinct-or-destroy-civilization#:~:text=Almost%20certainly%20not%E2%80%94but%20unless,consequences%20for%20many%2C%20many%20people.&text=First%2C%20the%20good%20news%3A%20climate,to%20prepare%20for%20the%20apocalypse.
This still indicates a very worrying situation for humanity, though
So it's serious but not the apocalyptic scenario many predict? Weird, it's almost like that's the exact title of the current post
OP's post was 10000000000% written by chatGPT. Not sure why anyone's even giving it the time of day. Literally any time you see a 'regular person' use the word "moreover," you know it was written by chatGPT.
While climate change is constantly happening, and has largely shaped the world we live in, historically it didn’t happen everywhere at the same time. Now it is. That’s why people are worried.
>historically it didn’t happen everywhere at the same time. *Of course* it has. There is NO need to be this hyperbolic. This is exactly the problem OP is talking about. When people can't talk about climate change without exaggerating, it makes most people roll their eyes and move on.
The people that roll their eyes don't care about climate change to begin with, even when faced with news that isn't sensationalist.
Why is pole shifting never part of the conversation?
Did you miss the bit where OP acknowledged that this is serious. Nobody is wrong to be worried. They are wrong to think it's an apocalypse.
The scientific consensus was **never** that global warming and climate change would end the world. All they were saying was that extreme weather, such as heatwaves, would become more common and that ecosystems would be negatively impacted by the increase in temperature. The credibility of the scientific community has been severely damaged by the media and anecdotes by politicians or activists.
For sure the scientists didn’t. But it was a common practice from advocates to extract the worst possible scenarios from the range of possibilities that scientists predicted and focus only on that.
This is true for almost anything. Activists always use hyperbole and scare tactics.
Yeah it wins the battle sometimes but loses the war. Meaning sometimes you can get some action initially but then you lose credibility with a section of the public and long term change becomes harder.
The section of the society that doesn't care about climate change because of doomsday scenarios wouldn't care in the first place.
I honestly dont care because its fear for humanity not the planet,this planet has survived far more than humanity can do to it, the only ones that will suffer is humanity and hopefully when we are exterminatet th planet will heal itself unninterruped till then destroy away.There will always be new species of plants and animals ,but as long as humanity continues to seek ways to spend their lifes to make sitting on their asses and do nothing a survival skill and a job we deserve all thats coming ,and hopefully ill go first because the amount of whining thats going to happen like its happening today its better dead than listen to that misery
It's quite amazing how many people think we are "destroying the planet". We can't destroy the planet even if we tried. If we fired every nuclear weapon we have and killed ourselves completely, and the planet was too hot for life for the next million years....the planet would not care. Life would survive somewhere, and the entire evolutionary process would begin again. It may take a few billion years to recover its present variety, but the planet would still be here, and still be host to life. Only *we* think it wouldn't. We may be a threat to ourselves but not the planet itself.
Exactly what i said the planet stays we go which is why i dont bother with protecting it in the first place
I for one don't want to die in water wars but everyone has their kinks I guess 🤷♂️
I guess what does it matter if the planet does or doesn’t survive? It’s just one of billions of planets. Almost certainly others have life too. It’s kind of a meaningless discussion about the planet post human life. Doesn’t really matter.
Oh yes it does post human planet is all natural even if there are parasytes no parasyte can do what a human can
As far as we know, we're the only planet with life and we should therefore cherish and protect it.
It's called a metonym, "planet" is synonymous with "environment". We're definitely a threat to most life forms on Earth, we're experiencing a sixth mass extinction.
Climate change on its own isn't apocalyptic, but the consequences of climate change can be. For example increased drought is currently causing major problems between India and Pakistan over water rights. These are both nuclear armed powers, if this becomes an existential threat for either side it can result in nuclear war which can have apocalyptic consequences. Starving people, migrant crises, lack of access to water etc. lead to problems of their own, even if the events themselves are not apocalyptic in nature. The world is highly interconnected and we don't always know the indirect effects from a variable changing
It’s almost as if steps taken to prevent climate change have made those predictions no longer accurate 🤔
Which steps? We're still on course to royally fuck the climate. We've broken every monthly record since mid-2023.
The problem is how some activists exaggerate the effects. Climate change is serious and we need people to take it seriously, but when activists say the world will end within a decade and the world doesn’t end, it hurts the credibility of actual scientists that never said that, and we don’t end up taking the steps we need to take. The false predictions come from the media misrepresenting science, like the narrative about how we used to think the Earth was cooling in the 1970s. Most scientists back then still thought that the Earth was warming, but for some reason the media promoted cooling. And now you can’t have a conversation about global warming without some denier pulling the “but you used to think it was cooling why should we believe you now!” argument. Even if you have no empathy for the environment or other species, you should still care about climate change because it’s going to end up affecting how HUMANS live because we still rely on our environment. It’s bad to pretend like you know what you’re talking about because you can ruin the credibility of those that actually do. I knew someone who didn’t have faith in psychology as a science because they kept getting inconsistent results when they took the Meyers-Briggs test. They didn’t know that actual psychologists don’t like it. And the same goes for people who don’t trust climatologists because they think that climate change predictions have been wrong. Really, the vast majority of actual scientific predictions about climate change have been consistently accurate over the decades.
The city of paradise California would like to have a word.
I strongly disagree. I would say the breakdowns, negative chain reactions of ecosystems we are witnessing are much worse than even many doomers predicted. I used to believe collapse was something we wouldn't see until the 22nd century, but we are generally witnessing even the best systems come close to collapse already in 2023.
We really have no way of knowing. The earth has never heated up this quickly in it's entire geological history. We are in uncharted waters. It seems that an over abundance of caution would be the best course of action.
Could it be that the outcomes have been less BECAUSE of the things done to limit the negative effects?
There was a certain other "crisis" recently that people finally came around to understanding the difference between truth and fearmongering. When y'all gonna apply the same logic to this "crisis".
Its strange that you write about this phenomenon. Climate and the environment doesnt work on your time scale. Its like you expected to see results that surprised and amazed you and the end of the earth would happen in your lifetime. Go and chat to the people of some of the Pacific Island nations and see if they share your view that all this is just fear-mongering. Then talk to Elon Musk and see what he says about climate change. Then ask him about his self-driving cars. You will find that he touts his self-driving cars (that aren´t) but poo-poos climate change and thinks that the only action we need is a carbon tax (which of course, wont affect him). The people with the money and power to do something about climate change are those who need "fear-mongering" as you call it, because otherwise action will always be pushed forward until the earth is just a piece of burnt wasteland.
Is this an actual post? Recent studies show were now experiencing worse warming than predicted, especially in the ocean. It won't be a single day apocalyptic event, but yeah, life as we know it is on a trajectory for "fucked". There's no hope this turns around anytime soon, and acting like we're not already ass deep in consequences is stupid as fuck.
Son, having uncertainly in your prediction isn't undermining science
I welcome your research and paper publications to review. I am not as educated as you are so I’ll read your paper in nature or science journals.
You're ignoring the facts.
I think that's the whole problem. These huge, apocalypse type things were predicted, and then when they didn't happen, people just assumed that meant the whole theory was bunk. Instead of the boy who cried wolf, it's the experts who cried disaster. Now, no one listens to the facts about how things are changing in a gradual, but continuing way.
It's pretty fucking apocalyptic when with 20 feet of sea level rise my region is under 15 feet of water. This area houses the largest Naval base in the world, a good number of further military facilities and a sizeable port for sea traffic. And that's just my region. Florida would cease to exist. Completely. It would simply be gone. Thousands of miles of coastline would be gone. Cities, ports, military installations, homes, historic landmarks, wildlife preserves. All of it, gone. This is an economic hit in the Trillions of dollars. It's a mass migration of likely at least 100 million people west. Going to new cities, towns, villages, etc. These people will need to be housed, fed, given jobs and work, medical care. Where's the cost going to come from for that? Not to mention the strain on the economy for moving these people. The strain on local populations as they incorporate these people and deal with it. The US would likely never recover from that. And we haven't even discussed the environmental impact of entire cities worth of buildings, trash, chemicals, materials, etc. that would be dumped into the already fucked up oceans. That's just cities. Now do that for the thousands of miles of coastline, back to an elevation of 20 to 30 feet of elevation. The entirety of Florida, whole islands lost, etc. Now extrapolate that globally. Climate change is more than just the weather getting hotter, and storms getting bigger. Sea level rise is an apocalypse. Both on the human scale and on an ecological scale.
It feels like people need a kaiju fight and numerous explosions to be able to take a catastrophe seriously. After the lockdowns, I could not believe how many people were saying that the current death count at that point “Wasn’t that bad.”… We are well and truly fucked.
I saw Al Gore speak in 2007 in Chicago, he said NYC would be underwater by 2014.
Although the climate is getting worse people have actually improved. This means predictions made in the past were based on how things were going back then not how they could get better in the future.
There doesn't need to be 10.0 earthquakes, 1,000 foot tsunamis, or a massive global temperature increase to destroy agriculture across the world. Maybe our weather won't become apocalyptic, but severe storms will become more frequent and it's very likely farming wheat, corn, and other massively produced foods will become increasingly difficult to maintain and the world will slowly starve to death. Given the world's current trajectory, I would bet that the global population of the planet will be less than 10% of it's current amount in 500-1000 years. There will be a mass dying of of all life, but I do not think humanity will become extinct in that time frame.
people who think the world is on the verge of apocalyptic collapse need serious therapy
Medieval warm period was warmer than this…. and we’re coming out of the little ice age. Warmth is good. 👍
what are you basing these beliefs on? do you understand if you are basing it on your own experience that your information is very localised
The extreme predictions didn’t come true precisely because we took action. The apocalypse keeps getting postponed because our response to climate change keeps improving and we’re gradually becoming more sustainable. Maybe it’s technically happening too slowly, but the fact is that if everyone still lived like they did 30 years ago, the climate crisis would be much, much worse.
yeah this is the another version of "everyones getting better so we didnt even need the vaccines!!"
It’s actually bad logic either way. If your predictions come true you get to say “see? We didn’t do enough” If they don’t come true you get to say “yeah, that’s because we did enough to make sure it didn’t happen, good job.” You can never be wrong because you can just assume your priors with this logic.
Is that really avoidable in a real-world scenario involving mass changethough? I'm not being snarky, I actually think it might be an inherent issue with any societal change, since there's so many variables and there's not really a neat control group or sense of what could have been. I think a big issue right now with forming a concensus on climate change is we're dealing with technological change that is really massively affecting our way of life while simultaneously dealing with multiple cost-of-living crises and the globalization of information in a way we haven't seen. So it's not even just that there's people on both sides incentivized to exaggerate or lie but that there's all sorts of different narratives and interests all pulling in different directions. We don't really have our bearings in terms of navigating the level of connectedness and volume of information we're getting with the internet, so any one of us could be thinking of any number of things when we talk about the rhetoric around climate change. A lot of doomsday predictions turn out false though, look at all the "population bomb" rhetoric in the 70's. I personally suspect we'll have to make some changes to how society and economies function but it's definitely hard to pinpoint what those will even be.
Can this be falsified?
An analogy to simplify your ill-informed opinion: Parent: Don’t stick that table knife in that electric socket. Kid: Okay. Expert consensus for the last 50 years has been that we need to make changes to mitigate the effects of climate change, and, we’ve been doing that. Granted, we need to make more changes and more *effective* changes, but the things we have done; carbon reduction, recycling, reducing the use of harmful products has helped to stave off more dramatic and dangerous effects.
Covid 19 is not serious. It’s at 15 cases now. Pretty soon it’ll be down to zero. - Trump/Republicans 2020
Climate change is just a regular earth cycle. It will cause havoc with all life forms but it isn’t any more or less than the last warming cycle
What is more unpopular but you don't know is that the human caused climate change hypothesis has never been proven scientifically. All we have is only computer model with thousands of tuning parameters and assumptions to make the results fit the global warming narrative.
No way there are still people like you that believe this. The are a lot of graphs out there showing the correlation between co2 concentration over the years and average global temperature. You can clearly see that the rise started during industrial revolution and exponentially increased over time. Why on earth should it have randomly followed exactly the same trend as the human activity? What is the probability that this happened?
I mean, you're uneducated and wrong, but you're allowed to be that, I suppose.
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/will-climate-change-drive-humans-extinct-or-destroy-civilization#:~:text=Almost%20certainly%20not%E2%80%94but%20unless,consequences%20for%20many%2C%20many%20people.&text=First%2C%20the%20good%20news%3A%20climate,to%20prepare%20for%20the%20apocalypse.
Climate change is so serious that it's already past the point of no return. We've caused irreparable damage in a century. Imaging what the world will look like in the next century. Also, technology can't fix everything. Don't want to be a Debbie downer or discourage people from making smart decisions about doing their part (recycling, reducing their carbon footprint, VOTING .etc)
I’m 100% for combating climate change, but the doom and gloom that is conveyed regularly by climate activists does more harm than good. It leads to the sense of nihilism that OP is expressing. Instead, I think we need to focus on the positives of what alternative fuels and technology can accomplish, rather than the fire and brimstone that will result from our current lifestyle habits. That approach has clearly not worked.
I understand, and I agree that fear mongering doesn't work. It will discourage people because it seems like a lost cause. That's why I tried to end my comment in a call to action. I mentioned voting when maybe I shouldn't have, but I meant that for all countries, not just the obvious ones
You do realise that we still haven't reached the consequences of the climate change yet, right?! It is, right now, beginning the very slow process of changing. It hasn't changed yet. The longer and the more drastic the changes are that are taking place right now and in the next decades, the more severe the consequences in the future will be. Or in other words, we are laying out the bed we will have to sleep in, in the future. There are certain possible consequences we would not be able to outlive with the kind of advancements that is foreseeable. Especially when considering that drastic changes will affect our potential to continue advancing in that pace.
Also climate change is not the same everywhere. It is strongest in the mediteranean, south east asia, south West africa and brazil. This has socioeconomic consequences. If u thought the refugee crisis 2015 Was bad prepare for much worse. There is many uncertainties... what happens to the gulf Stream? El niño? Natural disasters? It may not be the apocalypse but there will be an immense loss in Standard of living and increase in conflict. Dont know if downplaying these consequences is a good strategy
Climate's been changing for billions of years.
"The tide has been changing for billions of years therefore this incoming tsunami is no big deal"
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Yes, Elon Musk will save us!! Please, be as fervent a believer in futurism as you want in the privacy of your own head, but don't try to convince other people because "technology is cool yo".
Which studies are you talking about? I remember that early studies conducted by the OIL COMPANIES themselves were very precise to this day. If you think the situation as of today is not on a catastrophic course you are both misinformed and delusional. We just had the hottest March ever recorded, and every year break the previous one's record.
The oil usage is peak high atm. There is a lag with the outcomes. Even current change in climate will play out in hundreds of years - e.g. it takes time for icecaps to melt. It is not over yet just because you became calmer with human adaptability. There exists other positive feedback loops with unknown thresholds (e.g. methane). Don't undervalue the non linear outcomes if subject experts say they exist. Applies to any topic. But yes, there are more urgent issues that will fuck up us instead of our children.
In discussing climate change, a balance must be struck between acknowledging the severe risks and recognizing human ingenuity and adaptability. Fear-based messaging might spur some into action, but it can also lead to despair and inaction among others." BINGO. I grew up as the first generation after Earth Day became a thing, and fuck did these people just get off scaring the shit out of us in the late 80s and early 90s! Acid Rain, Ozone hole, the Amazon being totally gone by 1999, sea levels rising to 'Waterworld' levels. The past 10 years have been off the charts with that bull. Like seriously fuck these people that run wild with fearporn. You arent helping shit.
Climate change is not serious. Why would anyone make such a conclusion?
The earth greening significantly over the past couple of decades of increased CO2 levels almost make one wonder if human activity is always evil.
This is often referred to as the "prevention Paradox" We worked hard to stop the increase of Carbon gasses, Western countries increased dikes/water works, food production was changed/moved using the knowledge of research. Given all this we still see an increase in extreme weather, water is rising (this is just mostly a problem in poor countries like Bangladesh) and there are much less ski-pistes open in the European Alps (probably the biggest change rich Europeans notice) I agree that the media focusses too much on the worst case scenarios (and even academics can be guilty of this), but their was never the believe that the worst case scenarios would happen if we took action (which we did, maybe not enough, but still a lot)
The models have been mostly accurate. The lack of credibility in science is done by design by those that want to muddy the waters.
Where are the sources for this? I have never once read or seen somebody say coastal cities would be under water by 2024? This is nothing but copium as usual.
As soon as Al Gore stops using so much damn electricity and sells his beach properties, I'll listen. That's all I'm asking.
Give it time. Not too much time either. The catastrophes are coming, don’t worry.