8 ms·

It's hard for me to see a scenario where we reduce carbon emissions by any meaningful amount, TBH. That said, I'd rather just take my chances with the warming

• autoexec 4y ago
  > I'd rather just take my chances with the warming At a certain point humanity's chances with the warming are zero. Just depends on how many dominoes start to fall and how fast. We could conceivably wipe out just about all life on the planet. If our only hope is to buy ourselves a few more years by geoengineering I'm all for it, but I do wish we'd start with things that didn't involve poisoning our atmosphere or risking upsetting our already screwed up weather system. It seems like we've done basically nothing so far so jumping straight to the most extreme potential solutions (none of which have a ton of evidence supporting their effectiveness) feels premature. I guess if I were in the fossil fuel industry and wanted to continue making money hand over fist by destroying the planet these kinds of options must seem pretty tempting though. They certainly wouldn't lose any sleep poisoning the sky if it means they can continue doing business as usual.
  • helloworld11 4y ago
    >At a certain point humanity's chances with the warming are zero. Just depends on how many dominoes start to fall and how fast. We could conceivably wipe out just about all life on the planet. The hyperbole in your claim is laughable and completely unhelpful for anyone who's on the fence about climate change and climate change measures. Even the worst evidence-based predictions of the UN and the IPCC come nowhere near the extinction of all life or anything remotely in the same ballpark. What you're saying seems to be part of a doom and gloom fetishism that has always been innate to humanity (see centuries of apocalyptic predictions under any number of pretexts you can conceive) and has nothing to do with real science, real risks and real, possible solutions. Today, for many, this fetishism happens to have latched onto climate change, and steals some of its apparent legitimacy from the fact that the underlying problem is a real one, though not a genuine doom scenario. The Earth has warmed drastically at many times in its past, and it will survive along with life, without problems despite even our worst human-caused warming. Even with our predicted warming trends, humanity will be a long ways from being in danger of extinction as the climate changes to a warmer one because of our economic activities. As we've already done many times in our past, we will simply adapt.
    • hackerlight 4y ago
      "we will simply adapt." You will adapt, as a person who likely lives in a colder country in the global north. A country that has tight immigration laws and that has been the prime beneficiary of emissions to date. Tough luck to the other folks, right? They should have been born in a different country. They deal with the consequences of your pollution, as their political system crumbles and nobody lets them migrate.
      • helloworld11 4y ago
        First, don't make assumptions. I live in a tropical country, in the tropics. Secondly, your emotional comment completely disregards the basic point of what I was saying, that humans in general will adapt and are actually very good at it in general. Furthermore, even more fundamentally, my points about doom fetishism and apocalyptic exaggeration: Climate change is a problem for the vastly complex human society spread all across the globe and sustaining 8 billion people, but it is not on par with a true cataclysm for life on earth in the way something like a large asteroid impact or a "snowball earth" ice age would be. It is something that the earth, life on earth and much of human society in general will find ways to deal with. This isn't to sweep suffering under the rug, but it's worth mentioning for a dose of realistic optimism. We simply can't predict at this point what human innovations in the next 150 years of the UN/IPCC predictions of worst case climate warming will possibly improve things or let humanity adapt in ways that mitigate the worst effects of those evidence-based predictions (as opposed to sheer hyperbole pushed forward by people obsessed with emotional arguments over death and destruction.)
        • helloworld11 4y ago
          Also, the whole world has benefited enormously from emissions and the economies of scale that they have allowed, not just the global north. The immense economic uplifts that have happened in the developing world during the 20th and 21st centuries were also bought with huge levels of resource use and industrialization.
    • autoexec 4y ago
• paulcole 4y ago
  > I'd rather just take my chances with the warming rather than engage in some mad-scientist cooling plans You (and I) are likely fairly wealthy relative to the rest of the world and will be dead within 60 years at the outside. What we’d rather do doesn’t matter at all. Any decision from here on out is to mitigate the coming climate hell of 100-200 years from now. Every year for the rest of our lives will be worse climate-wise. Some people are rich enough to avoid it bothering them too much. The rest of us will just have to deal with it.