In short, we aren’t on track to an apocalyptic extinction, and the new head is concerned that rhetoric that we are is making people apathetic and paralyzes them from making beneficial actions.
He makes it clear too that this doesn’t mean things are perfectly fine. The world is becoming and will be more dangerous with respect to climate. We’re going to still have serious problems to deal with. The problems just aren’t insurmountable and extinction level.
“Don’t worry. You aren’t dying out, just risk the fall of civilization as we know it and then the rest of humanity can live in some post apocalyptic societies. All good!”
Everyone’s already preparing to accept this new norm instead of actually doing something about it.
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This is critical. We need to be careful, alert and active in mitigating climate change (and putting massive pressure on our governments to do the same) but we cannot give in to alarmism; all it’ll lead to is apathy, and a all that’ll lead to is inaction.
Climate change is real, it’s dangerous, and it’s happening. However, as long as we have commitment, it is not beyond our capabilities to mitigate. We still have time, and we can still fix this.
We’re definitely nowhere near “fuck it” levels, as the article says, we sure can make things a lot more awful if we decide now that we can’t do anything about it anyway.
But maybe we need a stronger example than… Bike lanes… Though I get the point he’s making.Hey jackass, people aren’t apathetic because they believe it’s too late to do anything. People are apathetic because people like you haven’t done anything and now it’s too late. The “beneficial actions” you are calling for are half measures that won’t help at all, and the people who care are already doing what they can while the real polluters, the real destroyers of humanity, are building bunkers and hoarding gold to survive the coming storm.
Yeah, any solution to climate change that relies on people of good faith coming together across national boundaries to solve our global problems is a bunch of pie-in-the-sky horseshit and most definitely not something to pin the future of humanity on.
The only thing that’s actually going to reduce greenhouse emissions is cost savings; focus on that, build your models around what we can convince people to do with that, then figure out how to save as much of the human race and the natural world as possible in a scenario where we do fuck-all about climate change except when by doing so it makes some rich asshole slightly richer.
What are people of good faith going to do about even a small fraction of those who disagree?
Once the cheap/free labor runs out then socialist programs can flourish because they will have too.
This is where the Porsche fuels come into play beautifully. They capture carbon from the atmosphere to be the carbon in the fuel therefore once run through an engine the emissions are a net zero. And they can run in regular gasoline engines, and is shown to be roughly the same cost of production as current gasoline.
If they actually get the cost down to that point then yes, it’ll be fantastic, but IIRC they’re not close to there yet - it’s just a hopeful projection.
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Fucking knew it! Their neutrality sickens me
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I hate those filthy neutrals, Kif. With enemies you know where they stand but with Neutrals, who knows? It sickens me.
1.5C was never a threat, it was a target. The IPCC produces simplified “stakeholder” report, it would be a superior use of one’s time to just give it a skim than spend time reading clickbaity website titles. https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/
Policymaker summary report: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_SummaryForPolicymakers.pdf
I think the peak 4 degrees this century is extremely possible. A lot of the community studying this now thinks we have underestimated feedback loops, much of what is currently happening was not supposed to happen as quickly as it has.
I agree, our track record since the establishment of the IPCC has been only very slightly better than “business as usual” scenarios. The current decline of the AMOC current was not predicted to happen as quickly as it has, and the early 2000s IPCC reports didn’t even factor in Greenland ice sheet meltwater. I’m not a climate scientist, I think if we have one or two in this community, their input would be fascinating.
It’s terrifying.
We won’t get to 2100 before things really get awful either. We’ll get to 2035-2050 and then things like cascading crop failure will happen, causing a global collapse in the food supply.
If we reach that event occurring it will functionally prevent governments from cooperating to reduce carbon emissions. They will all be focused internally on turmoil and massive unrest generated by mass famine. Many will turn up the carbon dial in order to try and address this. Others will simply have revolutions that take considerable time afterwards to stabilise making organised effort unviable.
I think we should take these people and (gently mind you) press their faces against the asphalt for 5 minutes. See if they still believe there’s no extreme heat afterwards.
Hey there, casual violence. It’s been a bit
Hey its not violent, 1.5c is nothing to be worried about so no ones going to get harmed in any way right?
It’s like the world is desperate to recreate AppleTV+’s show Extrapolation, where companies just kept negotiating to raise the world temperature target cap. The red skies many people in the US were seeing were finally a wake up call to some.
His statement isn’t really about the severity of the issue, he just says that people are prone to give up
Finally some levelheadedness. Wholeheartedly agree. There is much to be done. But elements of the movement have ecome somewhat cultlike unfortunately.
aren’t on track to an apocalyptic extinction,
things aren’t perfectly fine. The world is becoming and will be more dangerous with respect to climate.
Those statements are contradictory.
These fucking jackasses are running our offices and industries. If something isn’t done about this then it will kill ALL of us.
It’s a 1.5C increase in a very, VERY short period. What happens if we get another 1.5C increase?
And another
And another
And another
You get the point.
Nuclear energy is the key to saving this planet. It would solve any energy problem we would have for hundreds if not thousands of years, and that’s just uraniam. Don’t even get me started on thorium, we would have energy for longer than we could ever comprehend. All readily available, yet we keep burning up dinosaur shit because “muh coal companiez!”.
What happens when we run out of oil? You bastards are going to go out of business anyways, why not just INVEST IN NUCLEAR ENERGY?
Nuclear energy is expensive and takes a long time to plan and build. Investing in solar and wind might be the better option short term.
I’m not necessarily speaking for a short term solution, but keep in mind that solar is also exhorbitantly expensive compared to how much power it is.
Solar energy is like crypto-mining if the sun was a shitcoin, an expensive initial investment and long time to ROI. Solar panels are also like glass cannons, a single crack can reduce a panel’s effectiveness by 85%.
Nuclear takes too long to build out and costs way more than renewables + storage. Why advocate for wasting money?
Because we waste money already?
We have an oversaturated military budget to obtain oil from third world countries, we could start there?
How about we stop giving debt to China? We owe them $37 trillion already, there isn’t even that many USD on the planet lol.
The government doesn’t “waste money” because money means nothing to the government, money is a tool used by the government to get the people to do things the government wants. They can and will print money as needed, which doesn’t decrease the value of the USD as FIAT’s value is determined by a countries power in terms of trade, politics, and military strength.
All of that whataboutism doesn’t stop nuclear from being a ridiculously expensive form of power generation.
Nor does it stop coal from being a ridiculously destructive form of power generation.
I can go tit for tat with this all day. I don’t give a shit about money, money means fuck all when we’re living in an inhospitable hellhole 50 years from now.
I never said that they’d do it and of course they wouldn’t, but that it would be the best for us as a species. Instead we will hold onto our fossil fuels until we either destroy the planet or get so low that we decide to kill each other for it.
Wow, what a ridiculous straw man.
I haven’t heard anyone referring to 1.5 C as apocalyptic. I HAVE heard it described in terms of being a threshold at which climate scientists predicted a certain set of consequences.
What’s apocalyptic about the situation is our acceleration towards even greater climate change, and world governments’ unwillingness to take the situation seriously.
In the US, for example, Biden passed the greatest climate mitigation law of all time … and it’s grossly inadequate. They’re treating it much the same way that the Obama administration treated health care. They patted themselves on the back for passing the ACA, which still left the country in a health care CRISIS, because it was a half measure.
In many ways the absolute worst way you can respond to a crisis is with these types of half measures. Why? Because it acts as a pressure valve, removing all the momentum for real, meaningful change.
Much like the ACA, Democrats will pretend that this is a stepping stone for the next set of reforms… But we only need to look at the ACA to see how flawed that reasoning is. We have not built on the ACA. We have spent a decade watching Republicans chip away at it.
Now we’re playing the same game with climate change mitigation. And the price will be hundreds of millions of climate change refugees, war, and famine.
To be 100 percent clear: while the Democrats are incompetent here, the real villains are the Republicans, who are WILLFULLY ignorant of the science, and are the ones forcing either impotent compromise or no mitigation at all.
4° C is apocalyptic. 1.5° C is still catastrophic and will result in massive floods and global famines.
But that line of thinking will let some people believe we’re good until we hit that 4° mark. I have no idea how likely some of the tipping points are (AMOC collapse, West Antarctic glacier loss, permafrost melt and methane release) but they sound apocalyptic and much more likely as we increase climate change
It’s not straw man, you just reenforced his point, good job.
It’s fundamental social science.
I haven’t heard anyone referring to 1.5 C as apocalyptic.
Hear hear!
I haven’t heard anyone referring to 1.5 C as apocalyptic. I HAVE heard it described in terms of being a threshold at which climate scientists predicted a certain set of consequences.
In this speech by the UN Secretary-General, the climate crisis is stated to be an existential threat to the world and already past the point of no return. I think the latter statement exemplifies the kind of rhetoric that Jim Skea believes to be counter-productive.
Yeah, I don’t see what he’s getting at. There has absolutely been alarmist rhetoric surrounding climate change, and I see it all the time. Hell, I’ve seen people who think we’re already too late, even if we were to stop releasing CO2 today itself.
Part of me wonders how much the other side has benefitted from the sense of apathy this could create. After all, there’s real value in making stupid people give up entirely, in some ‘we’re doomed’ scenario.
I think I do. So much in terms of doom and gloom is being shouted in terms of climate change that many are becoming numb to it, which is dangerous.
He is wrong about 1.5C not being an issue, however. 1.5C != “every place will raise only by 1.5C”. It means localized temperatures in many areas will be much, MUCH higher, as parts of the US are beginning to find out.
Responsible messaging is important, but the looming catastrophe cannot be understated. You or someone you know will likely die from global warming, if it hasn’t happened already.
I know 1.5 is dangerous; after all, we’re already seeing a slew of weather disasters all around the world. This is why now is the time we should scream off the rooftops that it’s not too late, that we can still fix this, because people are starting to wake up just a little more.
Now is the worst time to give into apathy, and to tell people who’re just starting to wake up that we can’t do anything.
I think the issue is that some of us know this, but most are getting blasted by the media non-stop, and some of the messaging is even outright denying climate change exists. After a while people get tired of hearing about it.
I don’t have an answer for how to solve that one except to say that regardless of who is saying what or how loud, governments around the world aren’t doing enough. It is amazing to me because at the end of the day, money can slow and eventually stop/reverse climate change. We have the technology, we just need to invest in the required infrastructure and technology to make it happen.
Climate change isn’t political. It will kill all of us if left unchecked.
Problem is that climate change is political. Worse, it’s geopolitical. It’ll take the will of the people to just tell governments to stop plodding along doing the bare minimum and take some real action for once.
What’s happening right now is terrible, but it’s also a chance to wake up the masses in time. I just hope the impetus isn’t lost to apathy.
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While I understand the intention here is to reassure people that not all is lost and there’s still time for action, a take like this is going to be paraphrased into “climate change is overblown and isn’t something to worry about” by Big Oil and other major polluters.
I have not seen a single piece of evidence that we’re going to do anything about climate change unless we come up with some magical solution that somehow: doesn’t upset the status quo and also makes existing rich people even more rich.
The status quo is the problem, so it would have to be some basic logic defying magic.
Exactly but talk to anyone, even the enlightened internet people who share climate change articles on here, and they seem convinced that the only way to fight climate change is to literally do nothing and wait for corporations to have their hearts grow like the grinch. They will aggressively atrack any suggestion that we are going to have to actually do something and also change out lifestyle.
It is going to take massive change, collective effort, and organizing. As well as individual changes to our daily lives. Even if those corporations and politicians all had a magic change of heart. The policies and economic changes would still result in a massive upheaval of our daily lives.
This reminds me of an episode of The Conversation’s Fear and Wonder podcast. There are some interesting points made there about the collective power of small scale technologies like rooftop solar, as well as an exploration of the idea of sufficiency and how it’s already being used in places where modern technological solutions are expensive or inaccessible. It basically explores what we can do as individuals to help, rather than just sitting around waiting for governments and corporations to conjure up a magical silver bullet.
