Vermont just had flooding that was on par with Hurricane Irene.
They’re calling it a 1000 year rarity. It happened 12 years ago. Only this time there was no hurricane.
There are ocean temperatures in the fucking 90s.
This hurricane season is gonna be batshit crazy, y’all.
And just a week ago I was talking to these boomers that were explaining me how “we should all stop being so attached to climate fear” and that “everything will just sort itself out and we’ll live just fine”.
Yea, no shit boomer
Boomers: “We had hot days in the 60’s and 70’s as well and you didn’t hear us complain”
My parents’ go-to is that everyone was freaking out about an incoming ice age in the 60s (they weren’t), and thus climate experts are all completely clueless and have no clue what they’re talking about.
And they wonder why I visit less than before.
They meant that they’ll live just fine. You see, they will be dead before climate change decimates our planet. 🤷♂️
Looks less likely every year, they’re running out of time quick
It won’t decimate the planet, but it will make the planet a lot less habitable for humans.
So yes depending on where they live they will be just fine, but a lot of people will die. Because of this there will be huge migrations and struggels with having enough resources…
but it will make the planet a lot less habitable for humans.
And, unfortunately, for a wide range of other species.
So far.
So true it burns.
…enjoy this summer; it’s the coolest one you’ll experience for the rest of your life…
literally…
Slight inaccuracy, the data only goes back to 1979 and has not yet been verified by NOAA which has data going back to 1880.
It’s also worth noting that this is based on the Climate Reanalyzer which is intended for forecasting temperatures, not record keeping.
It would be more accurate to say it was the hottest day ever recorded by the Climate Reanalyzer.
Source: https://time.com/6292103/worlds-hottest-day-preliminary-record/
the data only goes back to 1979 and has not yet been verified by NOAA which has data going back to 1880.
There’s a whole hot world outside of America who don’t need to wait for its underfunded organizations to get around to validating the data.
But I get it. The news is dire. It’s neat to cling to uncertainty in times like this unless you lived in Lytton
This. It’s also not accurate to say it’s the warmest we’ve been in the past 10,000 years, it was likely warmer during the roman warm period, and potentially a couple of other points. So we can only really say it’s the warmest we’ve seen in the last couple hundred years.
That’s not to say this isn’t concerning, we’re on track to smash the roman warm periods average temperatures within our lifetimes and make the earth the hottest it’s been since the paleoscene, which would have massive ramifications. But we’re not there yet, the problem is that we will likely get there in the next few decades.
in the next few decades.
I appreciate your optimism.
If you want some more optimism, we actually have slowed the rate of warming from what was predicted 20 years ago. The reality we are living in would have been considered an “optimistic prediction” at one point. We are still warming, things are still going in the wrong direction, but the changes that people have been making to mitigate global warming are making an impact. We might still be going over the cliff, but at least we’re doing it with our brakes on instead of full speed ahead. So yes, I do think it will be decades before we truly break temperature records that have been seen by humans, maybe even several decades. That doesn’t downplay the significance of the need to stop it though
From what I’ve heard about our current climate warming situation I’d downgrade the metaphor from using breaks to taking the foot off the pedal a bit.
What about tipping points? I hear about ice cover, ocean currents, and other systems where once we get past a tipping point, additional warming is self sustaining. At that point it doesn’t matter if we have our brakes on, we’ve gone over the cliff right?
If we end up triggering a self-sustaining feedback loop, that’s how I understand it, yeah. We still do have some very high risk strategies we could implement, like solar shielding to reduce total light reaching the earth, or bioengineering plants that suck up carbon super efficiently, but it’s hard to say what the impacts of those would be
I don’t see either of those happening because there’s no short-term profit. Also, unintended consequences.
Welcome to the coldest summer for the rest of your life :)
Don’t forget steel. quick stats
Global temps can’t melt steel beams…
The oil, meat and shipping industries: “It’s called a streak, baby”
Shipping? Shipping is about 2 % of global CO2 emissions.
Large ships emit a lot of sulphur oxides (SOx). E.g. cruise ships emit more than all cars of Europe. SOx is not a greenhouse gas, but it’s a nasty pollutant nonetheless.
With modern open-loop scrubbers large ships don’t emit SOx anymore…
…instead they just dump it into the sea. Science!
They emit a lot, but they transport … a very lot. Trucks are higher emitters per comodity.
Still both should be powered by something else like hydrogen (more interesting for ships I guess) or batteries…
And cruise ships should be IMHO taxed so high (the tax should probably directly go to countermeasures), such that only very rich people are able to (not that I grant them the fun, but they should finance this climate disaster in every possible way…)
Based on what a reasonable carbon price should be, I don’t think you would need to tax them to oblivion. They would just need to pay their fair share.
This website suggests that it is about 0.4 tonne of CO2 per passenger per day. Canada’s current carbon tax is $65 per tonne. So a 7 day cruise would be $182 per passenger in carbon pricing. This is just ballpark and yes you can argue that carbon prices should be higher.
We are quickly arriving at an unpayable bill.
For whom though? I think if your product is going to be very expensive because of that you,ll try to find ways (less carbon emissive) to make it cheaper, and for others, who have low emissions already, they get an advantage. Also rich people generally emit much more carbon than poor people.
I’m a little bit tired of the argument, that everything gets expensive, like the money just goes to nirvana, it’s a tax and a tax should steer industries (mostly) to do the right thing (in this case emit less CO2). The money can go directly to people e.g. in the form of a universal basic income.
For the ability to produce enough food. It’s not the tax that’s the issue it’s that the climate will make industrial food production unviable. We will rapidly exit the conditions that underpin the viability of the modern economy. The only work of value will be making food and related tools in a volatile climatic environment. The bill will not be payable in money, is my point. That is, a tax will be woefully inadequate.
Certainly, it will be really “interesting” how to produce food for ~10 billion people in this uncertain future. But if we finally learn to accept that e.g. cattle isn’t the way forward, I think it may be possible with plant-based food. Although something like vertical farming etc. is definitely not viable today, it may be in the future. And at least currently it’s totally possible to sustainably produce enough (plant-based) food. I think we’ll learn to adapt, that much I trust in agricultural-technological advancement etc. But it will be “meaty” for most people and conflicts will arise (as they already are, see e.g. the conflict in Sudan that is indirectly related to climate change already, similarly as Syria previously (there were quite a few droughts the years before))
shipping is also trucks dude… and all the other nasty ways we move products around the world…
Trucks, like cars are on a transition to become EVs, with Tesla leading the industry there as well. Of course people will then complain regarding lithium and other bullshit, hence why I think we should stop listening to extremists.
Lol, trash reasoning. “Extremists” that want to start building communities that dont require you to drive everywhere. Just because evs are slightly better then gas doesnt mean its good to keep making cars a centralizing point we build our society around.
So… what’s your solution? Everyone using public transportation?
It ain’t that hard,
High density places:
lower parking availability, increase public transport availability and frequency.
Low density places:
They need their cars, they can keep them.
Remove zoning restrictions, and parking requirements
so there is more mixture of commercial and residential places shortening transport distance, allowing for even avoiding public transport and just walking/biking replacing this.
More biking infraestructure.
Fair taxes to car owners,
that means, othe people not having to support the huge car projects that cost more than they can get from the taxes they do on cars.
Also regulations on environmental design of cars, basically gaining back the progress we had done on car efficiency that was taken back by everyone wanting an SUV instead of a turismo.
:)
Figure you also believe Santa.
yea yea but you won’t answer to me mate, loss of time to talk with u :)
Everyone walking or biking.
So… you have no solutions?
My guess would be for EV everything. Plant trees in the city roads to lower the average temperature, the countries themselves should create tax incentives for people to move out from overcrowded cities as well.
But sure, easy to just end personal vehicles all together right? People like you are the reason our politicians are so shit.
Realistically, EVs are useful as a stopgap solution. They could be used to cover the transition as we expand public transit like EV busses, trains, subways, etc.
Really not a choice, carbon emissiosn have to stop. EVs dont do that. Urban trees are not going to revese climate change. Wow, you’re saying people need to keep lowering denisity.
Don’t worry all of this will soon be over.
I guess this is supposed to be taken as a bleak joke but it won’t be over soon. We all will likely experience a direct hit to our quality of life. If you’re poor, your survival will get harder. If you have or want children they will have fundamentally worse lives, compared to what we experienced so far. This can go on for decades or centuries, depending on how much we can stsill fix and what tipping points occur.
So yeah, hope that is some motivation to change something. Or at least shout at some people. :)
The solution is not to have children. Everything else is pissing in the wind.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children
Fully agreed. But harder to sell unfortunately :(
There are other fulfilling things to do with your life besides having kids. People need to realize this.
Yes. But you are arguing against lots of social programming, cultural expectations and religious backgrounds. It’s hard.
Until we colonize other planets, downsizing is the only way humanity will survive. Every other person just can’t be having tons of kids anymore.
Curious: how do they know that? Recorded history is like 5k years right?
Scientists use climate proxy records like coral skeletons, tree rings, glacial ice cores, and sediment layers. For example, the levels of oxygen 16 in a layer of ocean debris and fossils go up as temperatures rise. So a high level of oxygen 16 in sediment from one layer tells scientists that the planet was hot and watery when the sediment was laid down.
The presence of oxygen 16 tells you the planet was warm. It does NOT tell you atmospheric temperature.
The claim made in the image is fear-mongering non-sense. The earth is 4 billion years old and was almost certainly hotter in the past, and within the last 100,000 years.
Scientists need to stop being deliberately melodramatic - to the point of lying - to make a point. It is counter-productive.
The point is that they’ve established a relationship between o16 levels and temperature, so if you’ve got twice the o16 then say it was 25% warmer (made up ratio, I haven’t read the study).
This doesn’t tell us what the air temperature was, but it does tell us what it wasn’t (IE upper and lower bounds).
When you have several of these proxies it helps narrow down the temperature range (think how your god works better when you have more satellites).
Now if you know that the last seven days are the hottest on record and you know from your proxies that you are outside of temperatures of the past 100k years then it’s a pretty safe bet to state that we’re at the hottest time in the past 100k years.
There is no melodrama or lying in this fact, unfortunately.
The point isn’t the temperature per se. The planet will be fine with or WITHOUT humans. If temperatures continue to rise, humans will become very uncomfortable letting to wars and instability of society.
It seems the temperature has been slightly hotter about 6500 years ago for a period of around 2 centuries with temperature estimated between +0.8 and +1.8 °C compared to 19th century, but this is subject to debate, (see for example https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-0530-7).
Before that, we have to go back to a period where most Homo Sapiens were living in Africa about 125,000 years ago, where warming was likely +0.5 to +1.5°C compared to the same 19th century baseline.
Regardless if there was periods much hotter in the long past, the big difference with today’s situation is the rate at which this warming is taking place. For example, for the “6500 years ago” period, it took about 3000 years of warming to go from +0 to it’s maximum (which is between +0.8 and +1.8 °C). Today we are at about +1.1°C and it took us only 100 years, through fossil fuels burning and farming to reach that and most of which happened in the past 50 years.
Sources:
- IPCC WG1, figure2_1
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-0530-7
Also, about oxygen 16 and oxygen 18:
The water remaining in the ocean develops increasingly higher concentration of heavy oxygen compared to the universal standard, and the ice develops a higher concentration of light oxygen. Thus, high concentrations of heavy oxygen in the ocean tell scientists that light oxygen was trapped in the ice sheets. The exact oxygen ratios can show how much ice covered the Earth. Sources:
- https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Paleoclimatology_OxygenBalance which is based on https://hal.science/hal-03334828/file/jgrD1994Jouzel25791.pdf
- You may also find this wikipedia article useful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Δ18O#Extrapolation_of_temperature
I think, as individuals; we all need to pick up our game and do our part in polluting and destroying the planet more. We can’t let the corporations do all the heavy lifting after all.
Edit: I don’t think I came across properly here, given the replies. This was sarcasm saying we need to fuck up the planet more to keep pace with the rate the corporations do.
Honestly corporations are only producing what consume. We are using corporations as scapegoats. If we don’t realize this soon and don’t change it ways…
There are more efficient, greener ways to go about producing pretty much everything we use that doesn’t destroy the earth. Problem is is that it’s not as profitable for share holders.
If only we had deflation people would not overconsume so much
bu… buut economic growth > everything else …?
We can’t deflate form 8 billion people and counting
Malthus was wrong about this too. It’s not the population that’s a problem, it’s miles of strip malls, filled with cheap trash, and meat and dairy every meal of the day.
And why are those being built? Because the consumer population doesn’t care and continues consuming the cheapest dirtiest shit imaginable.
Okay? That doesn’t change the fact that it’s the lifestyle of people in rich countries, not the number of people that is the problem.
Germany tried it once … I mean twice
Don’t forget about the Chinese. They tried too and they were much more efficient.
Shout out to all of us who buy anything shipped, any petroleum or oil-based products and those of us who aren’t vegan
I’ll never understand why some supermarkets choose to individually package stuff like eggplant or zucchini in plastic baggies. Or ‘oh, you want some habaneros? here’s their weight in packaging as well. you earned it!’
I mean, you’re technically right but that also isn’t a helpful mentality. No one individual can single-handedly stop climate change by living in a more environmentally conscious way, we have to come together and implement systemic solutions in order for things to change.
I absolutely agree about systematic change. But pointing at an oil company and saying “look this is the organisation responsible for climate change” is to misidentify the problem in my opinion. Setting aside for a moment the misinformation that the oil companies funded regarding climate change, which - yes - I would like to see people in prison for - the main problem, I think is that we are still very dependent on oil.
We’ll remain dependent on oil until there is concerted government action. That action will require that we change our lifestyles and are probably a bit poorer, more constrained. No-one will vote those governments in. So, we’ll sit here like boiled frogs
government action will also require eradicating corruption as big oil will always try to influence legislation in their favor
Systemic problems require systematic changes
The whole “individual carbon footprint” thing is crazy when you look at the amount of emissions emitted by major corporations.
Hell the largest 16 cargo ships emit more CO2 than the all the cars in the world.
The last statement is debunked in the very link you shared, if you scroll down and open the summary and conclusions pdf.
That being said, compeltely agree with more accountability on corporate side.
We got blamed for climate change for using plastic straws when when we go out to eat once a week and the companies causing the real destruction slipped under the radar.
I 100% believe the plastic straw thing was an intentional distraction to 1. get us to fight amongst ourselves, pointing the finger at one another rather than coming together to actually solve the problem, and 2. allow a few companies to solve an easy to solve problem by using PLA (corn-based plastic) or paper straws and then sniffing their own farts for it and ignore the real problem.
Everything you buy is shipped in some capacity
Wait, is this true?
Have you been living under a rock?
What kind of news are you following to be so so surprised about this?
Don’t just single out meat. All of industrialized agriculture is massively carbon and energy intensive and built on gradual topsoil depletion.
Meat industry is responsible for most of the farmland. If everyone was vegan we could reduce the amount of farmland we use by like 70%. Thermodynamics says its better to eat plants instead of feeding them to animals and eating animals.
Transitioning to plant-based diets (PBDs) has the potential to reduce diet-related land use by 76%, diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by 49%, eutrophication by 49%, and green and blue water use by 21% and 14%, respectively, whilst garnering substantial health co-benefits
[…]
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/htm
If I source my beef or lamb from low-impact producers, could they have a lower footprint than plant-based alternatives? The evidence suggests, no: plant-based foods emit fewer greenhouse gases than meat and dairy, regardless of how they are produced.
[…]
Plant-based protein sources – tofu, beans, peas and nuts – have the lowest carbon footprint. This is certainly true when you compare average emissions. But it’s still true when you compare the extremes: there’s not much overlap in emissions between the worst producers of plant proteins, and the best producers of meat and dairy.
