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Because none of these articles explain to the reader what exactly they should do to minimise this problem and how much exactly they stand to gain and lose from doing it. People are only interested in obtaining useful (aka actionable) information.
- Vote for political parties with strong climate policies (such as rapidly reducing fossil fuel usage; banning new coal power plants; banning new coal mines, that kind of thing.)
- Write letters to currently elected representatives letting them know your priorities. (Those priorities, in the context of climate change, should be related to reducing fossil fuel power generation; and increasing the usability / reliability / affordability of public transport and other non-car based transport.)
- Lead by example in your actions. You are probably not the problem anyway, and your own climate impact is close to nothing compared to some companies and some rich individuals. But you can still emphasize that cutting emissions is important and achievable by adjusting your lifestyle. Buy less throw-away stuff. i.e. use things for longer, or use less things - don’t produce as much waste. Reduce your car usage, by commuting via bike or public transport. (In some places this is very difficult; but it only gets easier when there is pressure to improve it. Help create that pressure.) Reduce energy waste from heating and air-conditioning by putting conscious effort into when you open & close windows and blinds to control temperature; and by putting more focus on your own temperature rather than the temperature of a whole house.
… Ok. I could go on. But I’m just saying ideas off the top of my head, and you’ve probably heard it before.
All this stuff is a bit like the health benefits of exercise. Everyone knows that exercise will improve pretty much everything about them. They’ll sleep better, be more productive, more alert, think clearer, their mood will be improved, they’ll be stronger, they’ll live longer, etc. … But yet people often still neglect good exercise and instead ask around for easier health tips. I think the climate change situation is a bit like that. Everyone knows what to do; but many people just kind of stall and have little excuses or justifications about why they won’t do those things. So not much happens.
My biggest suggestion is this: don’t try to be a hero. But just make sure you aren’t the problem. Be better than the people around you. That’s enough.
Also, because the majority of humans on this planet don’t have any power to actually do anything. A few rich people in power control our lives. Thinking otherwise is just deluding oneself. There’s no way around it until we rebel on a planetary scale (even if it means just not going to work for a few weeks, the rich need to be forced to feel discomfort), we just don’t like thinking about this reality because it makes one realize one is helpless.
Bonus points: With countries like America eroding our education system at every turn, our citizens will soon be too dumb in one or two generations for the independent thought necessary to even know how screwed we are.
Make implementing it how you earn a living.
Actively support politicians who will push for additional decarbonization with both volunteer time and money.
Get involved with a local in-person activist group
Already do many of those. World is still heating up. Somehow I don’t think I can cool it with my recycling bin, the petitions that I signed and the votes that I cast. That’s the problem.
I guess we found the Great Filter
it is important to note that climate models consistently underpredict the probability of extreme events (7), so the expected impact of climate change on future heatwaves may be biased too low.
This is the scariest part. It seems like all the models have been wrong so far. We really need to take back control of our planet out of the hands of the politicians, oligarchs, and CEOs. It’s the only way we’ll actually be able to make a difference. It’s time to clean house and that needs to start from the top
- It’s not all the earth, nor all the time, even in future projections. The jet-set, who also control news media, fly for holidays and live in air-con, both of which make the problem worse. Dubai even has ski-slopes.
- ‘News’ over-emphasises ‘breaking’ surprise events, drowns gradually evolving statistics - boiling frogs. Maybe learn to comment on ‘news’ events with equivalent numbers due to climate change impacts?
- Exaggeration and blaming other groups just lead to fatalistic doom. Although temperatures rose in the last decade, the projections for end of century fell due to policies, although not enough it’s important to emphasise that we still have choices.
Cooling is less bad for the environment than heating. The reason being, cooling moves heat from one place to another - it does increase heat overall, but only from its inefficiencies, it’s not the goal. Heating, in most cases, is just creating heat. Unless you have a heat pump, you’re burning some fuel to create heat, which adds a great deal of heat to the environment.
Well, air-con cooling and heat pump are basically the same, the plan (not yet reality) is that we’ll all transition to renewable-powered heat pumps. In either case, insulation matters - I was surprised when staying in Brazil (decade ago), how rare was double glazing (despite noisy streets). Anyway I still think ski-slopes in the hot desert, around mega-cities grown on oil and aviation-hubs, is crazy.
Because Mark Andreessen says that sort of talk is just holding us back.
The assholes causing it happen to own all the media outlets, and will be the last to die from it
If everyone accepts that the world is ending, economies everywhere will collapse. So they keep us as distracted as possible to ensure their private jets can continue to fly.
The thing is…it doesn’t have to end. Leave the remaining fossil fuels in the ground, end deforestation, stop raising huge herds of ruminants and end use of a few really nasty trace gases, and temperatures will stabilize.
Do it before things get really bad, and we end up with a decent life for a lot of people.
For the sake of discussion let’s assume that’s all true. Do you have any reason to believe that even one part of the solution you outlined will be implemented in anything resembling a timely fashion?
The trace gases for sure; the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol has been ratified by the key countries which manufactured them, and their use in new equipment ended about a year ago.
Fossil fuel use phase-out is getting started. It very roughly looks like this:
- Generate electricity without using fossil fuels
- Electrify everything we can
- Stop doing the things we can’t
It’s unclear if fossil fuel phase-out will happen at a pace fast enough to limit the warming to 2°C above what it was in the late 1800s.
Deforestation is proceeding at a slower pace in some parts of the world due to local political change. Not everywhere though, and there’s a lot of work still.
Cutting the ruminant herd…not even started yet.
What I do know is that every person out there has the power to put their thumb on the scale of politics and policy and industry just a tiny bit to make it happen. And it’s worth trying.
It’s definitely worth trying. The issue I see is simply that not enough people believe that to be true. I don’t think that’s going to change either. The people who aren’t concerned now aren’t going to change their tune until the 11th hour and even then the attitude will shift from “it’s not happening” to “it’s too late to fix now”.
Only thing you can do there is to encourage the people around you and show them what trying is like
The people around you can’t make a dent in this crisis. The ones that need convincing are the CEO’s of the most greedy companies in the world.
Sure they can: by controlling government. You can’t change the mind of some wealthy CEO, but you can make it easy for people to avoid becoming their customers, and then make what they’ve been doing a crime.
You have been banned from c/Conservative.
The majority of damage hasn’t even been done yet and that damage won’t be done by our future emissions but by our historic emissions.
The global warming you are seeing today was caused by emissions from the 70s, not todays emissions. We still have 50 years of warming to go to catch up to now and by the time we get there we will have doubled our emissions.
We are already fucked we just haven’t caught up yet.
Why isn’t this the top news story around the world?
Because that would require looking up.
There’s still money to be made by exploiting nature!
Because the solution is not something we can throw money at and expect a fast cure. Even cancer has the hope of a treatment that works in months to years. Climate change requires changing nearly everything about how we generate energy and requires us to find novel ways to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. This latter bit can have money thrown at it, but without the former it’s pointless. It’d be a cancer treatment while the patient huffs burning asbestos.
The difficulty in treating coupled with the fact that climate change is a slow process that wreaks havoc over years to decades means the short-term-focused economies and markets largely try to adapt to long-term changes instead of solving the issues. When you’re only concerned with a few fiscal quarters at a time, why would you think on the scale of decades?
About 70% of new electric generation is non-emitting already. It’s actually not that big a change to go to 100%
So yes, we can do it on a scale of decades
and electricity only makes up 28% of ghg emissions globally.
We’re also seeing a big shift to heat pumps for space heating, electrification of transport, and even the beginnings of steel reduced by using hydrogen made with electrolysis instead of using coal. So a lot of things are happening, but not yet on the scale and pace we need.
The elephant in the room still exists, all the added CO2. I applaud change, and fast moving even more, but it needs to be faster
Not only CO2 but also Methan. It is 84 times more harmful in the first 20 years. But it is degrading on its own with a half-live of 7-12 years in the atmosphere. Methan makes up 20 to 30% of the human made GHG. Change to a plant based diet can reduce the emissions by 40%.
It is one of the few things we can change on our own very fast and does not need additional technological solutions to have a big impact.
and the warmer it gets, the more we’ll see methane hydrates bubbling up to the surface and adding gigatons more to the problem. vicious cycle.
I can’t see anything going wrong with this
Should have started it on the scale of decades 40 years ago when scientists were saying we had 40 years to fix it. Too late now, we’re in the beginning of the apocalypse.
We’re at a point where it’s too late to avoid all impact, but we’ve got a very real choice about exactly how much impact we do see. There’s a big difference between 1.5°C and 2°C and more.
1.5c by 2030s? lol, we’ll have 1.6c in the next couple of years. it’s bonkers. literally.
Yes, didn’t I just read that we hit 1.5C already this year?
Only for parts of the year.
We will officially hit 1.5c once the average temperature of that year is 1.5 degrees hotter than pre industrial baseline
The current year is at +1.4°C overall, so far. It’s absolutely bonkers, it’s 0.5°C warmer than last year, an absolutely unprecedented jump.
Thanks. Please propagatw this fact more.
I hear and read it too often that people are falling into devastation mode and say, back up, we lost, its over.
However its a difference in being “over” which is 2.5 - 4.5 degrees or above.
As @[email protected] pointed out, it’s extremely likely we’re going to be at 1.5°C in just a few years. Even if we went carbon negative literally right at this instant, we’d likely still fly past 2.5°C in the relatively near future (well, depending on which research you believe re. how fast carbon neutralaity / negativity would affect temperature change.)
This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t do anything, but I think we really need to start putting more resources and thought into survival instead of just blindly hoping that mitigation will save us (and it’s not exactly looking great on the mitigation front).
I’ll be surprised if mass-scale industrial society is still around in 100 years and we’re more or less fucked, but we’ll be even more fucked if we don’t start thinking more about how we’re going to deal with the inevitable.
well put.
I think industrial society will be good since the technology, science, know-how etc. Are available.
Its more like a question of will power and money. And pressure for that is going to come for sure.
But I disagree on putting resources collectively/mass scale into plan b.
(I would not put resources into defense and military, but who am I to tell)
We need a united world again the challenges we are facing. I think splitting into two paths will only create more discussion about whether or not.
Survival is not our first priority, its basically obligatory for a discussion about our future.
Setting goals low is “convenient” however not good.
(I would not put resources into defense and military, but who am I to tell)
How’s that related to me saying we should plan for how to survive the changes that inevitably worsening change will cause?
Setting goals low is “convenient” however not good.
And how on earth is saying “we should be putting more thought into how we plan to survive?” setting goals low? If anything, simply blindly believing that mitigation will save us all seems to be setting goals low. The idea that it’d be detrimental to our efforts if we put resources into anything except mitigation and would just be “splitting into two paths” is, frankly, absurd.
Fuck, even NASA says that we need to both look at mitigation and adaptation; they’re just using a different term but mean exactly the same thing.
I wasn’t pulling this survival stuff out of my ass you know: multiple organizations, climate researchers etc. have been saying this, which is where I got the idea from in the first place.
edit: wiki link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_adaptation#Co-benefits_with_mitigation
There was this moment after 9/11 when Tom Daschle proposed a ‘Manhattan Project for Green Energy’ to get us off foreign energy and help avoid climate change. Imagine if Al Gore had been president at the time, what might have happened. This was 20 years ago! But instead we (extremely questionably) got W. Bush and endless wars and ‘drill baby drill’. Such a knife’s edge for history and we came off the wrong side of it…
Because this being a headline in inconvenient for The Rich.
Its not even just the rich honestly. Some people have built a personality out of trying-too-hard to be macho.
And because they know so many woman are even more badass than them these days (I literally have a friend with parkinsons who does Crossfit contests), they feel they need to act increasingly toxic to stand out.
And it’s almost always the same guys who build their lives around trying to impress others, instead of doing what should be done. They also are the ones who can never accept responsibility
Because the overrich and the elected politicians they fund are clueless enough to think they’ll survive this and tackling the change would impact the economy that keeps them overrich. Since that group pretty much control the media, this doesn’t make the news.
Even better: they’re getting more and more agressive with climate activists.
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Probably because most people already know this by now.
Most people also know fighting in the middle east will continue forever, yet that’s being covered incredibly.
