6 ms·
to me, these heatwaves feel like the start of the end of human existence
by Natfan 3mo ago
to me, these heatwaves feel like the start of the end of human existence
- inigyou 3mo agoPeople one or two generations before you felt that about the cold war.
- TheOtherHobbes 3mo agoThe cold war never heated up. Even if we stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow, it will take millennia for the climate to return to normal.
- xienze 3mo agoWon't the climate change naturally even in the absence of fossil fuels? Like it has during all of history? What's "normal" is based on a small slice of human history, which itself is a small slice of the planet's history.
- DFHippie 3mo agoIt isn't the fact of change but the rate of change which is anomalous.
- sfn42 3mo agoYour question betrays the fact that you simply don't understand the scale of what's happening. Imagine a line chart. It displays average global temperature over millions of years. It goes up a little, it goes down a little, it fluctuates over time. That's the natural change. It occurs over thousands and millions of years. Looking at the last few decades on that chart, you'll see a wall. It's going almost straight up compared to the rest that just meanders lazily. You can see a few other similar peaks on the chart many millions of years in the past, they generally correspond with things like apocalyptic meteorite impacts etc. And even then the change occurs much more slowly than what we're seeing now. It's honestly insane to me that we're watching the world end and half of people are like "but are we sure this isn't normal?" Yes we're sure. We double checked. Just look at any "global average temperature" chart and try to predict where it's going. This isn't the stock market it won't just randomly start doing something else. The movement we're seeing is directly correlated to our ghg emissions, and there's a lag - the effects of current emissions won't be fully seen until up to two decades from now. So even if we stopped right now it would continue warming for decades. Warming also releases more GHGs. As poles and permafrost thaws, enormous amounts of methane are released that was previously trapped, further accelerating warming and acting as a positive feedback loop on top of our steadily rising emissions. In short were fucked, we know it, and anyone who doesn't know is not paying attention.
- tasuki 3mo ago> it will take millennia for the climate to return to normal No. There is no such thing as "normal" climate. It's ever changing. We're just making the change a whole lot faster.
- simmerup 3mo agoReplace 'normal' with 'optimal for humanity' then., I'm sure the lizards will love the new normal though.
- gitaarik 3mo agoWhat's "normal" really? You could argue the climate has never actually been normal, or it always has been and always will
- notrealyme123 3mo agoI think thats the wrong level of abstraction. The cold war ended, but clima change will not end.
- iso1631 3mo agoNuclear winter may cancel it out.
- underdeserver 3mo agoIt can change, if we get to net negative emissions. Not probable but possible.
- phreeza 3mo agoOr solar geoengineering? Which is scary but becoming more likely it seems.
- adrianN 3mo agoIt will just take at least three or four generations to get back to 90's climate, provided we don't trigger any irreversible tipping points, like the melting of the permafrost, in which case the climate is messed up for millennia.
- blooalien 3mo agoThe melting of the permafrost is already underway and it's not looking good for any hope of it slowing down, and that's only one (of many) irreversible tipping point we're facing right now. But hey, it'll be fine because it's all just "fake news" anyhow. (I wish that were actually true about it not being real, but it's crystal clear to anyone with an IQ higher than a houseplant that the scientists were right all along and we really should have started acting on all this stuff decades ago.) :(
- epgui 3mo agoThe word abstraction does not mean the same thing as the words analogy or comparison.
- freetonik 3mo agoWell, they had a point, and we've got pretty close to that outcome. It didn't happen, thus today we're able to discuss the fact that it didn't happen.
- IneffablePigeon 3mo agoThe conditions leading to the Cold War were reversible, this crisis is becoming very much less so. Despite what the carbon capture techno optimists say.
- joe_mamba 3mo ago>The conditions leading to the Cold War were reversible, this crisis is becoming very much less so. During the covid start lockdowns when everyone was forced to WFH and nobody was driving to work for a couple of weeks, we saw a massive decrease in CO2 and emissions. So it can be reversed, we just don't want to because we gotta keep the GDP hamster wheel moving
- rsynnott 3mo agoWe did not see a massive decrease. We saw a short-lived drop to levels normal in the mid tens. It is barely a blip on the graph. WFH won’t save us, unfortunately.
- joe_mamba 3mo agoMy bad, I was only talking about the readings in my city, not the whole planet. I assumed it would scale to the whole planet in that period.
- rsynnott 3mo agoAh. I’d consider _city-level_ readings an absolutely useless metric here, because, particularly if it’s a city with a large commuter hinterland, a lot of people were simply not present in the city, but still existed out there somewhere, running their heating/cooling/etc. Daytime populations of large cities generally dropped during the covid wfh period, so yeah, no shit CO2 emissions dropped; people were off emitting CO2 elsewhere.
- sfn42 3mo agoIf you actually look at the numbers of carbon capture its entirely obvious that it can't work. It's honestly strange to me that they even waste money on it, personally I think it's a distraction - "look we're working on a fix, now let us just pump up the rest of this oil in the mean time and we'll definitely fix it later". In order to just offset our current emissions, we would need around a million carbon capture facilities equivalent to the largest one we currently have. For comparison, the number of power plants in the entire world is a few tens of thousands. So we'd need maybe like 50 times as many capture plants as we currently have power plants. Like it's not even in the neighbourhood of realistic, it's just completely infeasible and I am sure engineers know that. You basically need to suck the whole atmosphere through facilities, and there's a lot of atmosphere.
- iso1631 3mo agoThere's a lot of worry about the future, and has been since world-ending threats became apparent However while apocalypse scenarios (Nuclear war, asteroid impact, AI powered biological warfare) are low likelihood, extreme impact, climate change is extreme likelihood and high impact, not just the immediate effect on places like Europe, Canada etc, but also from the conflicts that climate change will drive, which in turn may escalate to those extreme impact nuclear wars. On a 5x5 matrix, grand extinction events would be a 5 for effect but a 1 for likelihood, putting them in a "medium-high" category Climate change is a 3-4 on effect but a 4-5 o likelihood, putting them in a "very-high" risk category
- graemep 3mo agoSpace weather that would bring down our systems is not such low likelihood. I am not convinced nuclear war or biological warfare are as unlikely as you think. We have historically had narrow escapes from nuclear war.
- hyperbovine 3mo agoClimate change also greatly increases the chance of a huge global conflict breaking out.
- graemep 3mo agoIt might raise the chance of some conflicts (e.g. over Antarctica or Russia's border) and some land grabs, but I cannot see it leading to a world war.
- swiftcoder 3mo agoThat largely depends on to what degree food production collapses in newly-tropical regions. A whole bunch of staple agricultural production isn't going to survive widespread drought and heatwaves, and everyone dependent on those food sources is going to end up very hungry, and taking a hard look at cooler neighbouring regions...
- 3mo ago
- yde_java 3mo agoResearch past heat waves in Europe. Did your grand parents felt the same as you?
- maipen 3mo agoEvery year people complain about the cold, heat and allergies. Even if they live 200 years, it would always be the same. People get use to it, it goes away, cycle repeats. Nobody remembers exactly unless they had a near death experience.
- Yokolos 3mo agoWhy don't you research past heat waves? We're literally setting new heat records nearly every year. This year the heat record in Germany went from 39 degrees to 42. We're even setting night time heat records because of how bad it is. I don't understand the impulse to ignore what we're experiencing right now. What do you gain by sticking your head in the sand?
- yde_java 3mo agoAsk your grandparents about "Die große Dürre 1947" in Germany. Near entirely dried-up rivers and reservoirs, lakes three meters below normal, roughly half a million cattle emergency-slaughtered in Bavaria, hydroelectric shutdowns forcing power rationing, and forest fires along the Bavarian–Austrian border. Sure we have an all time high now, but currently there's still too much water as one could stick their head into the soil of the Elbe and Rhine.
- abroszka33 3mo agoThat used to be once in a lifetime event. Now we have temperatures like that two or three times every decade and soon it's going to be a normal summer temperature.
- freetonik 3mo agoWhy does it matter how humans _felt_?
- 3mo ago
- xienze 3mo agoSerious question, are you doing a simple extrapolation and assuming in 10 years Europe is going to have 60C heatwaves or something?
- pillefitz 3mo agoThis doesn't sound like a serious question
- xienze 3mo agoIt does when people start talking about a heatwave as being the "start of the end of human existence." It strongly implies that these trends will wipe out humanity in very short order. Perhaps even within the lifetimes of people in this thread. What I find most amusing is people somehow think climate change will end humanity faster than what's _actually_ on track to do so, and quickly: people having children well below replacement levels.
- inigyou 3mo agoBoth are temporary. Hopefully the reduction in population leads to a more sustainable humanity that changes the climate less. BTW both of these have been predicted since the 80s.
- swiftcoder 3mo ago> people having children well below replacement levels You do realise that the global population is still increasing? While birthrates are falling, we aren't even predicted to hit the peak for another half-century. Even pessimistic estimates put it in the 2200s before we fall back to current population levels. Which is ~100 years longer than current estimates give us before the effects of climate change starts taking a bite out of the world population
- intended 3mo agoI too am curious as to why that is the feature they are concerned about. As I recall there was a UN survey that found financial security was the most common reason for adults across the globe to choose not having children. Income levels are highly dependent on the degree of stability and monthly expenses that households can expect.
- pjmlp 3mo agoIf we don't nuke ourselves first.
- abroszka33 3mo agoYeah, that seems like our only realistic solution to the climate crisis.
- pjmlp 3mo agoWe were somehow on the good path after covid, then world leaders decided killing each other folks was more relevant goal, followed by making big tech bros even more rich with AI centers. Meanwhile paperstraws, and glued bottle caps, are supposed to save the planet.
- A_D_E_P_T 3mo agoNah. It's really as simple as this: Southern climates are moving north. (In the northern hemisphere.) If you want a vision of the future, consider a New England that looks more like the Southeast. There will be winners and losers. As climate zones move toward the poles, weather patterns and agricultural viability will shift with them. This will eventually turn current breadbaskets into deserts while warming up northern/southern regions for longer growing seasons. Various regions will cross ecological thresholds, causing sudden, dramatic shifts in local climates. For example, a warmer Earth could bring monsoon rains back to the Sahara and Arabian deserts, turning them green once again. In general, a warmer world is a wetter world due to increased oceanic evaporation. Sea levels will gradually begin rising, but perhaps at a rate of 1-2" per year. It takes a lot of heat to melt glaciers. Human existence is not in doubt on account of the climate alone -- our prehistoric forebears had a lot worse to deal with -- but there could be mass population movements and alterations in how agriculture is handled globally. Current political structures are not up to this challenge.
- mike_hock 3mo agoClimate change itself is not gonna endanger humans as a species, but secondary effects might. Such as wars resulting from dramatic shifts in the value of territories and wars over resources.
- A_D_E_P_T 3mo agoWar won't end human existence. If there's one thing you can learn from the recent wars in Iran and Ukraine, it's that conventional air-bombing has acquired a terrible cost:efficacy ratio that cannot be sustained, that drones have leveled the playing field on the ground, and that attackers generally appear to lack the stomach for mass mobilization and mass casualties in war. Again, there'll be winners and losers. Some in fortresses; others in famines and droughts. It is, of course, imperative that we do what we can do now to mitigate this. But the continuation of the human species is, I am sure, not in doubt. Our ancestors in prehistoric times have, assuredly, gone through FAR worse, including real population bottlenecks.
- khurs 3mo agoRelax, it's just the start of more Air Con sales in Europe.
- mike_hock 3mo agoBuy aircon stocks now!
- gh2k 3mo agouk here. I've been trying to by a portable AC unit for a couple of weeks and every single retailer is sold out nationwide.
- Aachen 3mo agoDon't get the portable ones. I made the mistake in 2019 and the thing is abysmally loud, barely gets the temperature 2 degrees lower in a single room, uses twice as much electricity as the rest of the household combined, and you still can't work from the heat and noise. That's with a window replaced by an insulating panel with a round cut-out for the hose, not a cracked window like you see most people needing to do. I've compared about two dozen units in a spreadsheet and this one was clearly the best buy, so I don't think it's just my unit I totally recommend airco but only the split units that actually provide relief. Still a lot of energy but I feel differently about that consumption when it's not mostly wasted The mobile ones are nice to aim at you though, I'll give them that much. For the effect they give, you might nearly just as well run it outside (anywhere in the shade) and aim it at you. Then the noise also doesn't reflect off the walls so that's more bearable, too Btw the split units, as a bonus, can usually also heat the room(s) they're in. The UK has quite a lot of (planned) wind power year round, so reducing gas consumption will also cut back on the fuels that are causing this
- khurs 3mo agoA lot of people are renting in UK now, so they will need permission to install a perm one?
- ricardo81 3mo agoThe prophecies always were about water stress and food security. How that plays out, I don't know. If it's anything like the recent energy spikes it means burdening future generations of wealthy countries with subsidised amenities while others go without.
- newsclues 3mo agoWhen food and water become scare, conflicts arise.
- ricardo81 3mo agoyes, essentially. But gets hidden behind wealthier countries tucking away the debt.
- est31 3mo agoThere is a lot of desertification of farmland going on, including in the USA. It gets abstracted away for richer countries as they can outbid the poorer countries for food. In developed economies, most of a particular piece of food's price is not the costs that go to the farmer, but costs that come later in the process, so that cost increasing is also felt less. Heatwaves on the other hand affect the western countries directly.