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The thing about a crisis is that it forces you to act on it, right now. Something like being invaded by your larger neighbor is a crisis, because you have to dr

The thing about a crisis is that it forces you to act on it, right now. Something like being invaded by your larger neighbor is a crisis, because you have to drop whatever you're doing and think about defense, immediately and with all your effort. The climate "crisis" is a slow boil. Ice caps melt a bit, water goes up a bit, a few houses fall in, no big deal. Drought happens, we have less food, we buy it from elsewhere, no big deal. Hurricanes increase, we fix the damage, no big deal. Everything bad about the climate crisis seems to be localized and episodic, on the scale of how we normally report the news. Put together it may well be much, much, worse, and far more expensive, but the way it happens makes a big difference to whether we do anything about it. I fear that calling it a crisis trips the wrong false alarm override, there should be some other word. We keep getting told this COP is the last chance, and that we have 10 years at most. But we're still here, so we think the warning was overdone, and maybe we should just ignore it next time. We should call it "the generational inheritance of our planet project" or something like that. I don't want to be the guy who screws up a crisis and the world ends, but I also don't want to leave a slightly shittier planet for my kids, and for them to do the same.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
The issue there is that global warming isn't a crisis, until it suddenly is due to a weather event. Ice caps melting: not a crisis. Flooding during a weather event: Crisis. Average temperatures in a year going up by .5 degrees: not a crisis. Forest fires destroying your house, or droughts causing crops to fail: Crisis. Glaciers and permafrost melting: not a crisis. Ocean gulf stream stopping, causing warm water to no longer go north and vice-versa, triggering a new ice age and all of Scandinavia, northern Europe and northern America to be covered in a kilometer of ice: that's a bit of an issue. I get it, it's not an immediate crisis for most, so people are like "huh I remember hot summers back in MY day", confusing weather for climate and not seeing a need to act. I'm pessimistic though. Any change now will be too little, too late; we've passed the point of no return, of climate collapse years ago. Things like: permafrost is melting, releasing sequestered CO2 and methane in the atmosphere at a rate greater than our own pollution. Polar caps and glaciers are not recovering, making the ocean absorb more heat (ice reflects sun rays back into space). Rising sea levels and the like make water push ice up and about, causing large ice sheets to break off of Antarctica and float into warmer waters. The list goes on. I'm not very optimistic. I just hope to die of old age before famine and war strike; given the current instability of existing unions like Europe and NATO, I'm not very positive about that either though.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

The issue there is that global warming isn't a crisis, until it suddenly is due to a weather event. Ice caps melting: not a crisis. Flooding during a weather event: Crisis. Average temperatures in a year going up by .5 degrees: not a crisis. Forest fires destroying your house, or droughts causing crops to fail: Crisis. Glaciers and permafrost melting: not a crisis. Ocean gulf stream stopping, causing warm water to no longer go north and vice-versa, triggering a new ice age and all of Scandinavia, northern Europe and northern America to be covered in a kilometer of ice: that's a bit of an issue. I get it, it's not an immediate crisis for most, so people are like "huh I remember hot summers back in MY day", confusing weather for climate and not seeing a need to act. I'm pessimistic though. Any change now will be too little, too late; we've passed the point of no return, of climate collapse years ago. Things like: permafrost is melting, releasing sequestered CO2 and methane in the atmosphere at a rate greater than our own pollution. Polar caps and glaciers are not recovering, making the ocean absorb more heat (ice reflects sun rays back into space). Rising sea levels and the like make water push ice up and about, causing large ice sheets to break off of Antarctica and float into warmer waters. The list goes on. I'm not very optimistic. I just hope to die of old age before famine and war strike; given the current instability of existing unions like Europe and NATO, I'm not very positive about that either though.