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Why many scientists are now saying climate change is an all-out 'emergency'
- gardenfelder 3y ago"Escalating rhetoric comes as new study shows there’s just six years left to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius at current CO2 emissions rate."
- Dig1t 3y agoI’m not denying climate change is real. But we’ve been hearing “just x years left until catastrophe” for decades now. It always results in higher taxes, fewer freedoms, and the crisis never abates. If you live in a constant state of emergency, eventually people become numb.
- esarbe 3y ago> But we’ve been hearing “just x years left until catastrophe” for decades now Sure; and every year that number as been getting smaller. Just because you ignore it doesn't mean that it will go away magically.
- jtr1 3y agoI’ve also been hearing “we have x number of years left to abate catastrophe”. My observation is that X keeps getting smaller
- Aachen 3y agoThe crisis doesn't abate because people haven't implemented any solution. The topic remains relevant because the future will still be worse if we don't implement sufficient changes, as compared to living with the changes from ~today onwards. That's my understanding anyway
- eddtries 3y agoI believe the government had one “Oh shit!” card where they could require dramatic changes for the good of the people and they used it on Covid. I cannot see the general populations accepting the changes needed for climate change. (I’m cynical of peoples behaviours but do know climate change is real)
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoThe "general population" didn't accept "dramatic changes" for COVID, either. Except in places like China where the government has far more power than democratic republics. And even in those places there was pushback. The government has never had an "Oh shit!" card, except in scifi movies. It has always had to make a sales pitch for population buy-in. And it did a crap selling job during COVID because of polarized media companies and fractured government.
- Dig1t 3y agoLiterally billions have been, and are being, spent on electrification. Solar, wind etc have had a ridiculous amount of investment. Yet the one technology that could actually solve this problem (nuclear energy) is off the table for some reason. We have unlimited clean energy at our fingertips. But instead of discussing it as a solution we’d rather resort to doom and gloom emergency language.
- esarbe 3y agoSolar and Wind are now much cheaper than nuclear has ever been. Germany has been adding 1GW of PV every month in 2023. That's one typical, large nuclear every month. While I don't see nuclear energy as the folly I used to, I don't think it's the answer either.
- Dig1t 3y agoSolar and wind are great, we should continue to build that stuff. But also "have ever been" is the key part of your message. The cost of nuclear is based on technology from the 1960's. There have been no new reactor designs since then. New reactor designs could be built and operated at a fraction of the cost of old designs and would be many times safer as well.
- DangitBobby 3y agoWe all get to watch "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" play out in real life!
- esarbe 3y agoJust that in this case, the wolves have been true the whole time. We've known that climate change is a problem for more than 50 years now. Just because we chose to ignore it doesn't mean there was no climate change.
- Aachen 3y agoExcept the wolf is measurably real and so far has behaved as predicted Oh how I wish you were right about it being a false alarm
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoIn that story the wolves ultimately did come, and the sheep were lost (along with the boy). Maybe if the town had invested in having two watchers, or in fences and barns, they never would have lost their herd.
- DangitBobby 3y agoYes, which is precisely why I made the comment! The wolves are coming, but this person has seen "crisis" and "emergency" called for every little thing and now they just don't believe it anymore.
- esarbe 3y agoWhat is it the fault of this crisis that we have been ignoring it for 50 years? Climate scientists have for years warned that we were running into a catastrophe and now you blame them for... trying warn us? What other strategy for publicizing would you have preferred? That climate scientists sit on this knowledge until the problem is a crisis right here and now, so that we would take it really, really serious? That doesn't seem like a rational strategy. But that's just my understanding of your argument.
- beached_whale 3y agoAnd for decades the response has been to double down and increase production of GHG's and extraction of more oil. But at some point, someone does have to pay the bill for the mess and higher taxes are not good or evil but a tool. I doubt it means fewer freedoms as we already control the vehicles/uses of oil and this is just an extension of that, just like we don't let people use dynamite for stump removal anymore, common sense. The crisis has never been addressed.
- jvanderbot 3y ago> higher taxes, fewer freedoms I would be interested to hear how freedom (presumably personal liberty) have been in recession due to climate change discussions.
- wintogreen74 3y agoif the government increases taxes for a specific scenario/use-case, how is that not a restriction in freedoms and liberty? taxation is forced with punitive coercion. Irrelevant if you agree with the purpose or not, this seems pretty straight forward.
- wholinator2 3y agoWell the original formatting of having taxes and freedoms as different items in a list, separate by a comma indicated to me that there are freedoms restricted other than just being taxed. I agree with you but also, what other freedoms?
- ath3nd 3y agoGuy, some men wouldn't stop beating their wives, and that's why there were (recent) laws where this is is a punishable offence. Or people dumping their garbage on the street. Or medicine companies cornering the market, filing a patent, and then rising prices. That's why we have laws and taxes; so people can't be too much of d*ks towards one another. If even a minority of people can't be decent human beings on their own will and still behave like in the middle ages, punitive coercion in form of taxes or incarceration has been known to do the trick.
- stephen_g 3y agoThings like "my freedom to burn piles of car tyres in my front yard" are or will definitely be threatened, but most would not see that as a bad thing...
- ath3nd 3y agoOr "my freedom to have a stash of 20 luxury cars that I never use because I fly with a private jet everywhere. I also own 20 mansions in 10 different countries, and a zoo (just cause)"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ath3nd 3y agoThe catastrophe is upon us now. Just look in the number, frequency and scale of wildfires, tsunamis, floods, etc. It's too late to put the genie in the bottle now, but if anything, the government of the world haven't been strict enough in the regulations, haven't taxed enough the top earners, haven't done enough to curb the giant corporations. As for fewer freedoms, I am not sure what you mean by that. Do you mean by freedom the manner in which large corps exploit their own workers, other countries, and eventually throw the whole world under the bus in the singular pursuit of profit? Or the freedom of cowboy bank-boys destroying the life savings and retirement funds of millions and putting yet other millions out of housing, just so they can satisfy their own gambling habits? That kind freedom, if anything, has become much much more and has gone unchecked for far too long. > If you live in a constant state of emergency, eventually people become numb. We share a finite world and its finite resources with one another. The freedom of rich douches to buy a Lambo to compensate for the gaping void in their soul comes at the expense of others, and luckily, more and more people start realizing this. Not everybody stays numb in the face of a never-ending crisis. Some people, like me, get progressively angrier at the state of things. You can see it by the tone of my writing, you can see it by the millions on the streets protesting the oil giants, old dudes sending young boys to fight their wars, old dudes racking massive profits with 310:1 the salary of their own workers. I hope new generations are even angrier than us, and fight for a lasting change, because if they don't, they might be the last ones.
- drak0n1c 3y agoHow is tsunami frequency established to be influenced by anthropomorphic climate change? Also, over a hundred years ago wildfires and floods were more frequent than they are now and the historical deaths per capita from natural disasters was much higher. What we are seeing recently in Maui, California, PNW, and elsewhere are primarily the consequences of an artificial blip of decades of over-protection of adjacent forests and waterways because of misguided environmental activism. When you refuse to allow forest culling or occasional fires and hinder development of dams and levees, later fires and natural movement of rivers becomes uncontrollable. While more land was developed and the population exploded, the resource management expansion was missing. Climate change may have an effect on these recent incidents, but thinking of it as the main cause is misleading.
- qqqwerty 3y agoYou are confusing two different things. Most of the models show that the worst of the worst impacts are a few decades down the road, at which point most commentators on this site will either be very old or dead. But there is active debate about how soon we need to act to prevent those bad things from happening. Some people seem to think we have time, and that a gradual reduction in emissions will be sufficient. But more recently, concerns about tipping points and feedback loops is pointing to a scenario where we may have little time left or may have even passed the point of no return, to prevent some worst case scenarios. So yeah, saying that climate change will be really bad in 30-50 years, and also saying that we have less than 5-10 years to prevent it are not incompatible with each other. I hope that clarifies it for you. Moreover, climate modeling is hard. While most scientists agree that climate change is caused by man made emissions, there is still a lot of debate as to how much time we have and how bad it will be. So if you are seeing contradictory headlines, that's because the science is a work in progress. If that bothers you, maybe just ignore the headlines for now and understand that we will never have 100% certainty about how long or how bad or when things will happen, but we do know the general direction of where things are headed and we do know that we need to act soon.
- lproven 3y ago> Most of the models show that the worst of the worst impacts are a few decades down the road You're out of date. It's much, much worse than that now.
- qqqwerty 3y agoNo I am not. "worst of the worst" was intentionally vague. We are dealing with probabilities. There is a small chance We could hit a tipping point tomorrow and things could spiral out of control. Or a dampening effect could emerge that we did not account for that could delay things for a while. It is hard to overstate just how uncertain things are. Predicting the future is hard. But drastic sea level rise is almost certainly a few decades away, most models predict it won't get really bad till the end of the century. And things like heat stress or hurricane frequency are all likely to increase, but it will be a few decades before they make certain areas uninhabitable. And for the record, I don't think we are taking this issue seriously enough. Even if the most likely outcome is a slow "boiling the frog" type of scenario, if there is even a 1% chance that a series of tipping points could result in cataclysmic climate catastrophe (which I believe to be the case), then we should absolutely be prioritizing this issue.
- taylodl 3y agoYou misunderstood. We've been X years away until we can't avoid a catastrophe that's going to happen decades later. That's our reality. The catastrophe itself was always decades away. And largely still is, but the downside effects of global warming are happening faster than the models predicted. At the rate things are going, the problems we thought we'd have in 2100 are going to be had in 2050-2060. That's not good. Are we all going to die by 2030? No. Are we going to have significant impacts by 2100? Absolutely. Will warfare exacerbate the problem and kill off even more people? Certainly. Will civilization collapse? Maybe, but probably not. Regional collapse is likely. Will humans go extinct? Almost certainly not.
- lamontcg 3y ago> fewer freedoms You can't buy incandescent housebulbs any more?
- blueflow 3y agoFor those people who don't want to rely on "Scientists" in the Media: Some materials from the ground contain carbon. We dig it out, use it for some purpose, and the carbon is now in circulation. Each year we bring more carbon into circulation, there is no process for bringing the carbon out of circulation (in less than 10 million years). So for any negative effect that CO2 has: Its going to get much worse, and halting all carbon digging will stop it from getting worse, not reversing it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- otikik 3y ago"Now"?
- cryptonector 3y ago"In twelve years"
- otikik 3y agoMy point was that scientist have known and have been warning about this for decades. They are not saying anything new "now".
- rgrieselhuber 3y agoCha-ching
- 11235813213455 3y agoI walked by a guy chatting near his 4x4 engine turned on, asked him if he could turn it down, [some not polite response], I explain it's because of pollution, [we don't care about pollution], I said we very much do. That tells how far we are from this concern with average people
- nonameking2026 3y agoPollution!=climate change from co2
- 11235813213455 3y agoboth have nefast and tied consequences
- INeedMoreRam 3y ago[dead]
- eddtries 3y agoA lot of people argue what’s the point when the normal individual is so much less responsible than the billionaires, and the normal country is so much less than the largest
- 11235813213455 3y agoit's really https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox, normal people impact is lower, but they are more numerous, we are sand grains
- eddtries 3y agoMaybe, but tell that to the individual! I’m cynical against peoples behaviour, I truly believe we won’t change and funds/research should be directed to mitigation than prevention.
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- d1str0 3y agoIf you have “emergency” in the title of an article, maybe don’t put it behind a paywall.
- eddtries 3y agoHow else will you drive people to pay memberships?
- 11235813213455 3y agoby paywalling other articles?
- eddtries 3y agoBut they’re not EMERGENCIES
- lproven 3y agoPaywall knocked down: https://archive.ph/wTnUo#selection-421.0-425.99 https://archive.ph/wTnUo#selection-421.0-425.99
- jesusofnazarath 3y ago[dead]
- it 3y ago[flagged]
- ramraj07 3y agoResponses like this and how we handled the pandemic are why I think billions of people are going to die and some folks will still insist it’s just El Niño.
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoBillions of people will die regardless. As far as I know, no homo sapiens has yet lived forever.
- jsbisviewtiful 3y agoThat is such a straw man argument. Completely irrelevant take that provides nothing useful to the conversation.
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoI'm only replying in kind to an equally irrelevant take. "Billions will die" is a truism unless you want to qualify that somehow. (Which you don't, because you're after cheap emotional rhetoric, not facts.)
- rsynnott 3y agoI mean, HN probably has a bias on whether the world is flat, too. I’d certainly hope so, anyway.
- esarbe 3y agoThis should come as no surprise; for fifty years we have been ignoring climate scientists warning about the dangers of global warming and climate change. That these tepid admonitions of yesteryear have turned into dire warnings should come at the surprise of no one. The time to take this serious was 20 years ago. Now it _is_ an emergency.
- flexie 3y agoNot sure this kind of rhetoric ever worked. As far back as I have followed the news - so perhaps for 35 years - it was about to be too late. We were at the brink of a catastrophe. Humankind had to do something now. Tomorrow, it would be too late. Look, global warming exists, it's (at least partially) man-made, and that's really bad. But it's one issue out of many man-made or man-fixable issues. Fighting poverty is another. Curing diseases like malaria is also important. Curbing starvation. Spreading democracy and the rule of law. Then there are women's rights. Education. Racism. Avoiding WWIII. I am sure I forgot many large issues. How do we prioritize? Do we have to prioritize or can we deal with all of them at once?
- choilive 3y agoAll of those issues inevitably will get worse or be triggered by a runaway global warming scenario.
- jclulow 3y agoGood news! Climate change is already making malaria worse, decreasing food security, and will presumably begin destabilising governments in some regions as a result of disasters and migration if it has not already begun to do so. Prioritising efforts to stem the tide of climate change is prioritising those things!
- flexie 3y agoFor some of these it also applies the other way, doesn't it: Richer societies can afford to heat their homes with more sustainable solutions. More educated societies are more likely to introduce nuclear power or build windmill parks. War could worsen the greenhouse effect.
- ath3nd 3y agoThis a typical what about-ism. The fact that there are other problems in the world doesn't invalidate the global warming/climate crisis. Interestingly, lot of those things are connected: Global warming is making droughts and floods more likely, thereby directly increasing the chance of starvation by threatening global food supply Global warming is making warmer some parts of Europe, making ideal habitats for mosquitoes where they were not thriving before. Just this year Paris had to fumigate (first time in history) against a new invasive type of mosquito, known to be a malaria spreader. Additionally, Zika virus, once confined to parts of Africa, is now present in Greece, Turkey and other Balkan countries. Global warming is likely to create a large societal collapse. When societies collapse, education and women's rights get thrown out of the window, so does the rule of law. Conversely, educated people and women are shown to care and do more about climate change. Based on that, I think it's easy enough to prioritize...
- jlmorton 3y ago> “We were actively told if we start to talk about solutions, if we start to talk about the policy implications of our work, we will have abandoned our supposed ‘scientific neutrality,’” Gill said. “And then people will not trust us anymore on the science.” This is basically correct, and it is the thing that every climate activist does not seem to understand. When you start treating your favored issue in moralistic terms, and insisting that it's an emergency that must be acted upon now, then you have entered into the realm of political economy. You're now making a statement that the issue you're advocating for is more important than other issues, and people take umbrage with that. It may seem obvious at first glance that if we're careening towards 1.5C with myriad and unknown feedback loops that might lead to ecological disaster, we should stop emitting carbon, and pretty quickly. We only have six years. Except to do that, we have to end almost all transportation, reduce electricity usage substantially, stop using all concrete, stop flying airplanes, stop eating beef, stop using petrochemical fertilizers, etc. It is not an exaggeration to say that billions of people would die within 12 months. You might complain and say, my goodness, we've had fifty years to be reducing these things, of course we can switch to sustainable energy and materials. But we didn't. So now we have to decide what's most important, and if it's your position that the most important thing right now is to stop emitting carbon -- or even by half, within six years -- then your position is utterly insane and divorced from reality, because yes, many people will die as a direct result. And if you associate yourself with the position that "we have to take immediate and drastic cuts that will cause huge numbers of people to quickly die," then people might get upset with you.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoHuge numbers of people are going to die regardless at this point, we’re simply arguing the mechanisms by which the outcome is arrived at. We waited too long to make meaningful changes to positively impact carbon trajectory and planetary boundaries [1], everyone lived on proverbial credit (draining resources faster than sustainable), and everyone is unhappy the bill came due that sophisticated participants knew would come. Oh well (not glib, just a realist). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38065125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38065125 (citations)
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- incomingpain 3y agoIt has been an all-out emergency for decades. Always with 6-12 years left before it's too late. Climate change is well past the cried wolf threshold.
- ulrashida 3y agoYou appear to be making up your own narrative here. In reality, climate science has gone from somewhat uncertain (around 1995: Kyoto) to progressively more certain as measurements have confirmed modellable outcomes. Our need to change our behaviors has been increasingly important for the past few decades, it's only become an all-out emergency more recently as it's become painfully more obvious that large amounts of humanity are unwilling to change our economic preferences even when faced with obliberation.
- incomingpain 3y ago1969: We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years. 1970s: ICE AGE coming! 1988: NASA said, A gradual rise in average sea level is threatening to completely cover all Indian ocean nations in the next 30 years. The maldives will have its drinking water supplies dry up by 1992. 1989: UN said rising seas could obliteration nations. 1989: NASA said, NYC's west side highway will be under water by 2019 >You appear to be making up your own narrative here. I'm not making up anything. Climate change proponents sure do seem to lie in their predictions though and boy do people get upset when you call it out. https://imgur.com/a/qEoqCrS https://imgur.com/a/qEoqCrS Like, years ago did you know florida mostly went under water destroying basically all of florida? Al Gore said it will happen for sure.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago> 1988: NASA said, A gradual rise in average sea level is threatening to completely cover all Indian ocean nations in the next 30 years. The maldives will have its drinking water supplies dry up by 1992. When I search this I don't get a link to a prediction by NASA. Can you please cite your sources? And preferably their sources? I can see a possibility of cherry-picked quotes from the most pessimistic end of a range of scenarios and predictions. I can also see the possibility of someone maliciously attributing the prediction of another to NASA in order to smear NASA. As an aside, I'll remind you that in the story the wolf ultimately did come, and the herd and boy were both lost.
- howmayiannoyyou 3y agoN e v e r G o i n g T o H a p p e n There is simply no chance the key carbon producing 'developing' nations are going to curtail emissions. They simply cannot afford to do this given the economic and social stability costs associated with the migration. This, and parts of Europe (namely Germany) are now dependent on higher emission inputs as a result of Russia's Ukraine gambit. The vast sums expended on climate change reversal are better now spent on climate change adaptation, though I fully expect this to be another trillion dollar boondoggle enriching NGOs, consultants, advocacy groups and corporations. Sorry to be the bearer of the bad news and I accept the massive downvotes as my penance.
- rickydroll 3y agoI think you are realistic. I ask you to be open to other ideas such as those I suggested elsewhere here about small items that can compound to make bigger effects. Sometimes some of the ideas need lots of money, others are more community-oriented.
- esarbe 3y agoGermany has been reducing its CO2 emissions for years now. [0] I'm afraid you need a different straw man. [0] https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/co2-emissions https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/co2-emissions
- MiguelX413 3y agoAdaption is more expensive.
- solardev 3y agoI remember a few years ago, there was some discussion about whether scientists ought to get more involved in climate activism and political advocacy. There was uncertainty: even though many thought climate change warranted more extreme regulatory (or other) action, many were also afraid to tarnish the supposed neutrality of science. Well, fast forward a few years... the message got out. The public knows it's bad. No, it's a crisis. Or emergency, or whatever. It's the climate apocalypse. Okay. It's numbing by this point. It's like we found ourselves on the ladder of climate grief and jumped up from denial, missed every other rung along the way, and fell straight down to burnout. COVID provided temporary relief, Greta came and went, Extinction Rebellion and the Sunrise Movement tried, the IPCC lost more and more of its clout, the American conservative media downplayed all of it, China wouldn't do anything unless the US did... and sooo... here we are in 2023, scientists all yelling and screaming that the world's burning up and it's all going to hell, and by and large the public just shrugs and goes, "Yeah, we know. Waddya want me to do about it?" What is there to do? Collectively, as a species, we decided we don't care about this enough, that we'd rather prolong the status quo than risk any drastic action. Sure, we'll ride our bikes more and buy carbon offsets when we fly, maybe eat one less steak a week, consider an electric car... it's nowhere near enough. Guess we'll just let the next generations deal with the consequences. Shrug. In the last decade we've had several culture wars, a global pandemic, Ukraine, Hamas... each of these got more meaningful action and mindshare than the climate, even though none of them have as far-ranging impacts. I guess humans are just bad at dealing with long-term changes that start small and snowball into something terrible a few decades later. I guess at this point the only realistic thing left to think about is how to respond to the changing conditions, from aglands going away to wildfires to climate migrants/refugees to border instabilities to raw resources for batteries. I think we've already moved on from the question of "how bad is it, really?" (oh yeah, guess it's pretty bad), past "what are we going to do?" (silence), and to "how can I compartmentalize this so I can carry on with my day". It's so sad, but... whatcha gonna do?
- rickydroll 3y agoThe death cult of American evangelicals is pushing for a climate disaster for the same reason they are cheering on the Israeli beat-down on Hamas. They think it will bring about the second coming of Jesus. Seriously. these dudes get off on rapture fanfic which Jesus gives them power over everyone. To your point that as a society we have decided to prolong the status quo, I suggest a different perspective. I know that I won't move into a city and give up driving. It takes way too many things that make life worth living. I expect that you and others have a different perspective. I can accept that. ut hte discussion should not stop at that apparent impasse. The discussion fails by presenting a limited palette of unpalatable options as the only solutions instead of looking at wider range of options. I rarely hear about options that we can do locally that will help reduce the impact of carbon in the atmosphere. A common wish list item is not just bicycle friendly roadways but bicycle focused roadways. To do this you need to realize that everywhere there's a roadway, you need to make it bicycle friendly because people are not to give up where they live. I can get behind that for all year riding. There is no bad weather, only bad clothing. EV problems are almost all engineering problems. EVs that are good for 50-100 mile range like my Chevy volt is a good local car. Citroen has a design that's cheap to build, uses standard electronic components could be built in and for local community. Batteries are getting cheaper, lighter, with more capacity. Longer range travel has a variety of options ranging from short haul electric air, long distance rail and better charging networks Community virtual power plants. Batteries are getting cheap enough that you can drop in 4 kW of battery plus inverter for a few thousand dollars. Use those batteries to peak load shave which takes polluting plants off of the grid during high demand times. This is not something should be controlled by a public utility but by the local community. Vermont is doing this now to avoid the need to build more power plants. They even install solar panels at customers houses to add more power to the grid. Provide tax disincentives for maintaining a lawn and irrigation system. Make it easy to rewild anything covered with turf-grass. This is one of those long-chain effects. Rewilding does a very good job storing carbon and moisture in the soil. It provides food and habitat for insects, further enables more plant growth in environments that are drought resistant or at least tolerant. Rinse and repeat. Rewiding will also cut down the amount of pollutants created by two strokes lawn equipment. Some communities have started on this by mandating battery-powered lawn equipment only. Convert nighttime lighting 2700 K temperature lighting. More efficient, less damaging to the nighttime ecology. Reduce lighting intensity after 10 o'clock at night and use more motion sensitive full-cut off lighting. This easily saves 50% or more of nighttime power which could be used to charge batteries for the next day for peak loads. On airflight, mandate that air flights cannot create contrails. It's already known how to minimize them by changing altitude to avoid parts of the atmosphere which are prone to trigger contrails. You want to avoid contrails because clouds. Low altitude daytime clouds reflect heat upward. Reduce the number of clouds the ground gets hot. High-altitude clouds hold in heat like an insulating blanket. Minimize high-altitude clouds especially over the polar regions and a significant amount of heat radiates in the space. Here's an interesting article on radiation cooling both in the atmosphere and on physical devices that can be used to supplement or replace air conditioning. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13729 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13729 this is a well covered topic if you're an atmospheric scientist. There are several geo-engineering experiments that we should be checking about. There are some that are using calcium carbonate I believe to absorb CO2 the ocean. There is the ever popular iron fertilization which does work but it's very finicky apparently. Use them. It seems like every month there's a new chemical process which is efficiently does direct air capture for CO2. Pick a few, techniques, build a few machines implementing these processes in cities and on a bake-off. See which one works the best and when you have it working, open a mutual fund to individual people can invest in and profit from direct air capture. You might not think any of these items will have a big effect and you are right. We got to where we are by a thousand bad decisions but these ideas are like compound interest in that they build the previous day, week, month, year's effort. If we keep making more small wrong decisions, the death cult of climate change will be right. But we need a plan a model a way to sell small right decisions the individual people can do in their own land in their own life and their own cities. I have no illusions that will be easy or that everyone ago yeah let's march in the same direction but we need to introduce these small small ideas and plans on how to implement. If we can show that these changes don't have a big negative effect on people's lives, then will be able to start going after the production side of the CO2 problem. Change works only when you give them something good first before you take away what they know no matter how bad it is. One plan to keep thinking I gotta find a way to do it is to build 24 inch stoves that cheap-add landlord's use in crappy apartments to replace gas ovens. But instead of using the traditional resistive heating elements make them induction. Make the oven convection and if the house doesn't have enough current capacity, put a battery in the unit and use that to supplement the house current when cooking. The other thing is to leverage the New York State in window heat pump project to put heating in low-income housing in the hands of the tenants not dependent on the ancient gas boilers or even worse open air gas heaters found in many crappy old apartments. Small stuff like this has a big impact not just on the environment from people's lives. I know I can't do it myself had talked up whenever possible to try and find other people willing to work with me on it. It is discouraging that we are in a multi-situation failure scenario. There are some speckles of hope. There are people out there trying to reforest deserts to bring moisture back into the soil and make a self-sustaining environment. You see the videos on YouTube and a lot of the work makes sense. How real it is? I don't know. It's YouTube but reversing densification is one way to make things better around the world and it's relatively cheap. Some of the things I suggested could also be applied to troubled places to improve their environment. I think the important thing is not to get discouraged by the magnitude of it but to pick something and make a change happen. Make something positive, constructive that other people can buy into. Don't let the climate change death cult wear you down.
- cryptonector 3y agoWe've been told this since the 70s. It's always been that the emergency is 12 years out. It's never come to pass. Aren't we still in The Pause, too?
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoWe literally had people dying of third degree burns from falls onto asphalt this, and past years. https://weather.com/safety/heat/news/2021-06-15-heat-wave-high-temperatures-hot-pavement-causes-burns https://weather.com/safety/heat/news/2021-06-15-heat-wave-hi... A few years back a heatwave-induced mass die-off of snow crabs killed an estimated 10 billion crabs. People eat snow crabs. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/10-billion-snow-crabs-disappeared-alaska https://www.sciencenews.org/article/10-billion-snow-crabs-di... Heatwaves are longer duration. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/21/us-heatwaves-longer-south-west https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/21/us-heatwaves... This is already impacting us.
- ulrashida 3y agoKyoto was in 1995 and predicted 1.5-4.5 degrees of change in the mid-21st century. Hardly "12 years out" mate. What has become more serious is that the incoming data and predictive models are starting to line up with greater accuracy and those forecasts are very worthy of concern. In the face of warnings that drawing down our bank account is going to leave us broke, is the answer "oh, I've been hearing that for a long time now, what's the worst that can happen"?
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoClimate.gov says "The Pause" was just a slowdown, and the pace returned in 2013: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/why-did-earths-surface-temperature-stop-rising-past-decade https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/why-did-ear... > Since this article was last updated, the slowdown in the rate of average global surface warming that took place from 1998–2012 (relative to the preceding 30 years) has unequivocally ended. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/did-global-warming-stop-1998 https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/did-global-...
- HissingMachine 3y agoWhere are all the people who are talking about how to prepare for the future? There are couple of billion people living near shores in very crowded areas, is there nothing planned or are we still hoping that if we do something the emergency will just fade away? Also, why are very smart people buying islands and land near the beach if there is an emergency, are they also hoping that we will fix this in time and their expensive investments are going to be ok? I'm in the camp of what ever it is that we can sufficiently predict, we should also prepare for it, like it isn't likely that some space rock is going to hit earth in the next yew years, but it's a sufficient enough probability that there is work being done to track them and at least have plants on what to do if it comes to that, but this is not the case with climate change.
- lproven 3y ago> why are very smart people buying islands It is a very common error of thinking, especially in people obsessed with what Douglas Adams called "the movements of small green pieces of paper", to think that people with lots of money are very smart. This is mediaeval superstitious thinking: "he is better off than me, therefore he is more fortunate. He has been given good fortune by god. He must be holier than me, and if I become more holy, I will receive god's favour too." It's nonsense. Smart people are not doing this. Rich idiots are.
- lamontcg 3y agoA lot of rich people are of above average intelligence though and they're definitely "smart", particularly if they didn't just get their money entirely from their parents. Stockton Rush was a rich CEO and clearly smart enough to found a company that could build submersibles. He decided he knew better than everyone else in the world and built a submersible out of composites. Turned him into a physics jelly sandwich over the wreck of the Titanic. Being smart and rich doesn't mean that every idea you have is always right. More or less the same thing applies to the chemists who thought they discovered a room temperature superconductor or Musk buying Twitter. They're all definitely smart, but they make mistakes just like everyone else. When all is at stake is money they often have enough money that they can make a lot of mistakes and lose a lot of money and people only remember the ones that succeeded. And A lot of what separates smart rich people from smart not-rich people is that rich people can try 20 different stupid ideas before finding a good one, without going completely bankrupt.
- oh_sigh 3y agoI have a hard time caring about this. Okay, maybe climate change was obscured from laymen 50 years ago(despite Sagan, the most famous science communicator, talking about it in the 80s), but everyone has surely known about it for the past 20 years, and our collective take has been "meh".
- polski-g 3y agoWe already have a solution though, its about 139 billion gallons of white pain ($16-32 trillion). Instead we get really overly complicated solutions like cow genocide, sterilization, "destruction of capitalism", degrowth, and more. Supporters of climate change have the worst messaging discipline possible. I can't think of a less persuasive message than "impoverishment" (degrowth) or "abort your children".
- nologic01 3y agoPut your self in a climate scientist's shoes. What would you do? Society clearly doesn't want to hear the news. "We have other fish to fry" (Like get even with other humans etc.) You can raise the alarm and be accused about alarmism. You can say nothing, keep publishing in ivory tower journals and be guilty of gross-negligence of monumental proportions. It shouldn't be like this. Science is like a pair of glasses through which we can see a bit further than our noses. Breaking them is an act of supreme idiocy.
- Stefan1979 3y agoWe have a climate activist who is also a weather woman in my country and now she is flying to Antarctica. Need I say more? So excuse me then if I don't give a **t