Sorry that this is a bit more downbeat than most of what I see here, but I thought this might be interesting if any of y'all don't really know the current tangible effects of climate change....
Sorry that this is a bit more downbeat than most of what I see here, but I thought this might be interesting if any of y'all don't really know the current tangible effects of climate change. There's a lot of links in the article to more specific things (a highlight for me is a government report on plans to relocate dozens of villages), and of course if the paywall's an issue just open in incognito &c.
This topic strikes a chord with me because my grandparents used to live in a village in the northwest called Unalakleet, and it's terrifying what's happening there. There's a really lucrative lodge near the village, so it's got the money to build seawalls and the like, but neighboring places like Shaktoolik, whose history spans millennia, are more than likely going to be lost to the rising oceans. I've been to visit a few times and it's absolutely one of the most gorgeous places on Earth, to think that it's got decades before it's radically altered is incredibly saddening.
I see the effects of climate change where I last lived. I used to go on my daily run, around the coastline on the peninsula, for about 5 kilometres. It's surrounded by an inlet of two sides, so...
I see the effects of climate change where I last lived. I used to go on my daily run, around the coastline on the peninsula, for about 5 kilometres. It's surrounded by an inlet of two sides, so it's usually quite calm, and the track straddles right next to the waters edge at high tide.
Over the past half decade, I've seen the path go from compacted dirt about a metre laterally and maybe a few inches vertically from the high tide mark, to having shells & debris covered on it, as storms have washed up and pushed further inland. When I last visited, the path was now part of the high intertidal zone.
My story isn't unique. This is happening all across New Zealand, and globally too. Climate change isn't in 20 years or 50 years. We're past that now. It's already happening.
To add onto this, over here in the Netherlands we've had a climate-induced drought last year, with next to no rain for six weeks or so, and temperatures up to 41ºC for days on end. This has caused...
To add onto this, over here in the Netherlands we've had a climate-induced drought last year, with next to no rain for six weeks or so, and temperatures up to 41ºC for days on end.
This has caused a lot of problems related to shipping(water level too low for ships, I think it dropped like 2 meters and flow rate dropped to 900 cu. m/s, vs. normal 1800 cu. m/s or so).
Nature suffered too; a ton of trees died or were damaged by the prolonged lack of water in the soil. Soil's still way too dry right now. It's also way hotter than it "should" be for this month. For the nature bit, it'll take years to recover, and I would not be surprised if this year's summer would be the same, or worse.
This is so depressing, most of the time when I talk about global warming with my friends I end it with saying that we will most likely die before the worst effects arrive, but reading news like...
This is so depressing, most of the time when I talk about global warming with my friends I end it with saying that we will most likely die before the worst effects arrive, but reading news like this makes me not so sure about that.
Is there any chance Earth isn't mostly screwed already?
That depends what you mean by "screwed". We've already changed the planet. It's just taking a while for the effects to show up. It's like there's a great big thermal pulse working its way through...
Is there any chance Earth isn't mostly screwed already?
That depends what you mean by "screwed".
“One of the key messages that comes out very strongly from this report is that we are already seeing the consequences of 1°C of global warming through more extreme weather, rising sea levels and diminishing Arctic sea ice, among other changes,” said Panmao Zhai, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group I. Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C
We've already changed the planet. It's just taking a while for the effects to show up. It's like there's a great big thermal pulse working its way through the whole world. Even if we stopped all our climate-changing activities today, those effects aren't going to stop. The planet is already warmer than it was. The ice isn't going to re-freeze, the storms aren't going to ease off, the droughts aren't going to shorten... the world is already changed.
The only thing we can do now is decide how much more change we want to allow. We can't stop it at 1.0°C of warming, because we're already there, and preventing any more warming than that would require a miraculous overnight change - which ain't gonna happen. Our best option is to cap the warming at 1.5°C - and... the 'UN gives 12-year deadline to crush climate change'.
But the Earth itself is fine. It's been through changes like this before, and it just keeps chugging along. Ice caps expand and contract, oceans rise and fall, forests die and grow, some species go extinct and new species arise... and the Earth keeps turning. It's all just part of the great big cycle of life.
The concern is not the planet - it's us. Will we adapt to the changing planet? We've created a civilisation based on certain expectations:
We've built cities and ports on bays and harbours, aligned with a particular sea level. What happens when the sea level rises and those cities get flooded and the ports become unusable?
We've planted farm crops on land that's currently arable. What happens when the land stops being arable due to changes in local climate? What happens when farmland becomes desert or swamp? Can we relocate those farms?
We've built towns in areas where storms are only occasional and never too strong. What happens to those towns when the storms become more frequent and stronger? What happens to the people living in those towns.
... and so on. While the Earth will keep turning, uncaring about minor fluctuations in temperature and a few local atmospheric disturbances, we poor humans will have created a hell for ourselves. We'll have deaths and famines and dislocations and refugees and shortages and wars. The Earth is fine - it's us you need to worry about!
It most certainly is not. Sure, all of these things happen at a relatively slow pace. But we haven't triggered a relatively slow pace of extinctions, we've created the sixth great extinction event...
But the Earth itself is fine. It's been through changes like this before, and it just keeps chugging along. Ice caps expand and contract, oceans rise and fall, forests die and grow, some species go extinct and new species arise... and the Earth keeps turning. It's all just part of the great big cycle of life.
I abhor these anthropocentric views on "surviving" climate change. I surprisingly couldn't give that much care to all of humanity, but it makes me incredibly sad how we're rapidly destroying Earth's ecology & biology.
It most certainly is fine. The fact that this is referred to as the sixth great extinction event means that there have been five previous great extinction events... and look at the planet. It's...
It most certainly is fine. The fact that this is referred to as the sixth great extinction event means that there have been five previous great extinction events... and look at the planet. It's fine. Species come and species go. It's been happening since the dawn of time. As old ecological niches are eradicated, causing the extinction of some species, new ecological niches open up, allowing the rise of new species. While it's bad for the individual animals and species, the overall system keeps going.
I'm not saying this a good thing, and I'm not defending it. I'm just pointing out that in the Very Big Picture, the extinction of individual species doesn't really matter. The planet will go on, and life will continue to find a way.
Sure, but in the interim, we're killing off a vast quantity of the planet's current species & diversity. And arguably, that's what's important. Not the species that died millions of years ago, or...
Sure, but in the interim, we're killing off a vast quantity of the planet's current species & diversity. And arguably, that's what's important. Not the species that died millions of years ago, or the ones that will find a niche millions of years from now.
Again, excessively pragmatic views like this don't help the situation and if anything, give credence to climate change deniers or those who think it's okay to continue doing what we're doing because "it'll recover eventually".
You'll notice that, while I said the planet will carry on, I also said that "we poor humans will have created a hell for ourselves". My pragmatism has more than one facet: while the planet might...
Again, excessively pragmatic views like this don't help the situation
You'll notice that, while I said the planet will carry on, I also said that "we poor humans will have created a hell for ourselves". My pragmatism has more than one facet: while the planet might carry on regardless, we humans will not. We are in for a lot of changes, and they'll mostly be bad.
But I've seen too many people write things like "we're destroying the planet", when we're doing no such thing. That's unjustified hyperbole. What we're destroying is our own comfortable niche on the planet, as well as the niches of a lot of other species. The wider ecosystem and the planet itself are not being destroyed. That would take an all-out nuclear war, not just some extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - unless we decide to pump the CO2 up to Venus-like levels.
If we're going to insist that people heed the science regarding climate change, we should also attempt to scientific in our own discussions about the effects of climate change. "We're destroying the planet" is just as untrue as "we're not changing the climate". Let's not replace one untruth with another.
This is basically arguing semantics at this point. If you want to express this view, fine, but for a lot of people, myself included, when someone says "destroying the planet" they mean "damaging...
"we're destroying the planet", when we're doing no such thing.
This is basically arguing semantics at this point.
If you want to express this view, fine, but for a lot of people, myself included, when someone says "destroying the planet" they mean "damaging the world's biosphere"—which may as well be synonyms, in my opinion.
No one literally means the planet is being decomposed and magically annihilated atom by atom. The syntactic redirect should be clear, and pointless discussions like this only serve to distract from the real issue.
What's the point of statements like these? The Earth is screwed. We've fucked its biology & ecology. Sure, if you step back and consider it a giant lump of rock, then yes, it's fine. But that...
The Earth isnt screwed. We are.
What's the point of statements like these? The Earth is screwed. We've fucked its biology & ecology. Sure, if you step back and consider it a giant lump of rock, then yes, it's fine. But that misses so many points on so many levels it's effectively a conversation killer and shows IMO how careless so many humans are.
the earth and its diversity of life survived the Permian-Triassic event where 96% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial species were wiped out, and life as a whole has endured quite well...
The Earth is screwed. We've fucked its biology & ecology. Sure, if you step back and consider it a giant lump of rock, then yes, it's fine.
the earth and its diversity of life survived the Permian-Triassic event where 96% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial species were wiped out, and life as a whole has endured quite well through worse, less hospitable conditions than even the worst we're projected to make in the near future, so while we're certainly fucking with the earth's biology and ecology right now and the earth is having a rough time because things like this generally don't happen this quickly on a geological timescale, i feel pretty comfortable saying the earth is still going to rebound from it. life as a collective is incredibly resilient. if major asteroid impacts, supermassive volcanic eruptions, and other genuinely cataclysmic events which radically change the climate and render the seas essentially uninhabitable because of their warmth can't sterilize the planet, we're probably not going to ourselves.
Sure, as a collective. But the world as we know it right now is a thing of beauty, and it's being trashed by us. I don't particularly care if life will rebound in a million years, that shouldn't...
Sure, as a collective. But the world as we know it right now is a thing of beauty, and it's being trashed by us. I don't particularly care if life will rebound in a million years, that shouldn't be used as an excuse to continue polluting the planet.
How many branches of life are we going to wipe out? How much beauty are we going to pave over with concrete?
There are many people who use it as such, or other arguments such as climate change isn't a problem because we won't be around to deal with it. Trump's EPA pulled the latter argument recently, for...
There are many people who use it as such, or other arguments such as climate change isn't a problem because we won't be around to deal with it. Trump's EPA pulled the latter argument recently, for example.
People should focus more on preserving Earth's biopshere as we know it, and less on promoting the callous "Earth is a giant ball of rock and will be fine" approach.
that’s a pretty poor argument though. if 20 humans who have to resort to hunger/gathering survive, then humans technically aren’t whiped out even though everything they stand for is. likewise, if...
that’s a pretty poor argument though. if 20 humans who have to resort to hunger/gathering survive, then humans technically aren’t whiped out even though everything they stand for is.
likewise, if 99% of species get whiped out, that’s still a very shitty event even though technically life still goes on.
plus there’s a chance of us triggering some runaway warming event (like ice melting which means less reflective surface which means more ice melting) that could venis-ify earth and make it completely inhospitable for life. do I think it’s likely? no. however, it’s still possible.
nobody is making the claim that it's not shitty, but life will bounce back regardless. life has been through worse than us and will probably be through worse than us again in the future, and it's...
nobody is making the claim that it's not shitty, but life will bounce back regardless. life has been through worse than us and will probably be through worse than us again in the future, and it's done just fine, so it's weird to act like the earth is fucked or whatever because there is literally nothing that suggests that.
Sorry that this is a bit more downbeat than most of what I see here, but I thought this might be interesting if any of y'all don't really know the current tangible effects of climate change. There's a lot of links in the article to more specific things (a highlight for me is a government report on plans to relocate dozens of villages), and of course if the paywall's an issue just open in incognito &c.
This topic strikes a chord with me because my grandparents used to live in a village in the northwest called Unalakleet, and it's terrifying what's happening there. There's a really lucrative lodge near the village, so it's got the money to build seawalls and the like, but neighboring places like Shaktoolik, whose history spans millennia, are more than likely going to be lost to the rising oceans. I've been to visit a few times and it's absolutely one of the most gorgeous places on Earth, to think that it's got decades before it's radically altered is incredibly saddening.
I see the effects of climate change where I last lived. I used to go on my daily run, around the coastline on the peninsula, for about 5 kilometres. It's surrounded by an inlet of two sides, so it's usually quite calm, and the track straddles right next to the waters edge at high tide.
Over the past half decade, I've seen the path go from compacted dirt about a metre laterally and maybe a few inches vertically from the high tide mark, to having shells & debris covered on it, as storms have washed up and pushed further inland. When I last visited, the path was now part of the high intertidal zone.
My story isn't unique. This is happening all across New Zealand, and globally too. Climate change isn't in 20 years or 50 years. We're past that now. It's already happening.
To add onto this, over here in the Netherlands we've had a climate-induced drought last year, with next to no rain for six weeks or so, and temperatures up to 41ºC for days on end.
This has caused a lot of problems related to shipping(water level too low for ships, I think it dropped like 2 meters and flow rate dropped to 900 cu. m/s, vs. normal 1800 cu. m/s or so).
Nature suffered too; a ton of trees died or were damaged by the prolonged lack of water in the soil. Soil's still way too dry right now. It's also way hotter than it "should" be for this month. For the nature bit, it'll take years to recover, and I would not be surprised if this year's summer would be the same, or worse.
This is so depressing, most of the time when I talk about global warming with my friends I end it with saying that we will most likely die before the worst effects arrive, but reading news like this makes me not so sure about that.
Is there any chance Earth isn't mostly screwed already?
That depends what you mean by "screwed".
We've already changed the planet. It's just taking a while for the effects to show up. It's like there's a great big thermal pulse working its way through the whole world. Even if we stopped all our climate-changing activities today, those effects aren't going to stop. The planet is already warmer than it was. The ice isn't going to re-freeze, the storms aren't going to ease off, the droughts aren't going to shorten... the world is already changed.
The only thing we can do now is decide how much more change we want to allow. We can't stop it at 1.0°C of warming, because we're already there, and preventing any more warming than that would require a miraculous overnight change - which ain't gonna happen. Our best option is to cap the warming at 1.5°C - and... the 'UN gives 12-year deadline to crush climate change'.
But the Earth itself is fine. It's been through changes like this before, and it just keeps chugging along. Ice caps expand and contract, oceans rise and fall, forests die and grow, some species go extinct and new species arise... and the Earth keeps turning. It's all just part of the great big cycle of life.
The concern is not the planet - it's us. Will we adapt to the changing planet? We've created a civilisation based on certain expectations:
We've built cities and ports on bays and harbours, aligned with a particular sea level. What happens when the sea level rises and those cities get flooded and the ports become unusable?
We've planted farm crops on land that's currently arable. What happens when the land stops being arable due to changes in local climate? What happens when farmland becomes desert or swamp? Can we relocate those farms?
We've built towns in areas where storms are only occasional and never too strong. What happens to those towns when the storms become more frequent and stronger? What happens to the people living in those towns.
... and so on. While the Earth will keep turning, uncaring about minor fluctuations in temperature and a few local atmospheric disturbances, we poor humans will have created a hell for ourselves. We'll have deaths and famines and dislocations and refugees and shortages and wars. The Earth is fine - it's us you need to worry about!
It most certainly is not. Sure, all of these things happen at a relatively slow pace. But we haven't triggered a relatively slow pace of extinctions, we've created the sixth great extinction event and sent temperatures soaring.
I abhor these anthropocentric views on "surviving" climate change. I surprisingly couldn't give that much care to all of humanity, but it makes me incredibly sad how we're rapidly destroying Earth's ecology & biology.
It most certainly is fine. The fact that this is referred to as the sixth great extinction event means that there have been five previous great extinction events... and look at the planet. It's fine. Species come and species go. It's been happening since the dawn of time. As old ecological niches are eradicated, causing the extinction of some species, new ecological niches open up, allowing the rise of new species. While it's bad for the individual animals and species, the overall system keeps going.
I'm not saying this a good thing, and I'm not defending it. I'm just pointing out that in the Very Big Picture, the extinction of individual species doesn't really matter. The planet will go on, and life will continue to find a way.
Sure, but in the interim, we're killing off a vast quantity of the planet's current species & diversity. And arguably, that's what's important. Not the species that died millions of years ago, or the ones that will find a niche millions of years from now.
Again, excessively pragmatic views like this don't help the situation and if anything, give credence to climate change deniers or those who think it's okay to continue doing what we're doing because "it'll recover eventually".
Let's not make that mistake.
You'll notice that, while I said the planet will carry on, I also said that "we poor humans will have created a hell for ourselves". My pragmatism has more than one facet: while the planet might carry on regardless, we humans will not. We are in for a lot of changes, and they'll mostly be bad.
But I've seen too many people write things like "we're destroying the planet", when we're doing no such thing. That's unjustified hyperbole. What we're destroying is our own comfortable niche on the planet, as well as the niches of a lot of other species. The wider ecosystem and the planet itself are not being destroyed. That would take an all-out nuclear war, not just some extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - unless we decide to pump the CO2 up to Venus-like levels.
If we're going to insist that people heed the science regarding climate change, we should also attempt to scientific in our own discussions about the effects of climate change. "We're destroying the planet" is just as untrue as "we're not changing the climate". Let's not replace one untruth with another.
This is basically arguing semantics at this point.
If you want to express this view, fine, but for a lot of people, myself included, when someone says "destroying the planet" they mean "damaging the world's biosphere"—which may as well be synonyms, in my opinion.
No one literally means the planet is being decomposed and magically annihilated atom by atom. The syntactic redirect should be clear, and pointless discussions like this only serve to distract from the real issue.
I would like to point out that I didn't start this particular
distractiondiscussion.Serendipitously, there is actually a "panel" going on at cake.co with Dr. James Dyke. So if you want to ask an expert that directly, you can! :)
https://tildes.net/~enviro/d7o/the_new_film_the_race_is_on_tackles_climate_change_its_filmmaker_is_dr_james_dyke_whos_crossed_the
The Earth isnt screwed. We are.
It will continue to turn well after weve wiped ourselves out.
What's the point of statements like these? The Earth is screwed. We've fucked its biology & ecology. Sure, if you step back and consider it a giant lump of rock, then yes, it's fine. But that misses so many points on so many levels it's effectively a conversation killer and shows IMO how careless so many humans are.
the earth and its diversity of life survived the Permian-Triassic event where 96% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial species were wiped out, and life as a whole has endured quite well through worse, less hospitable conditions than even the worst we're projected to make in the near future, so while we're certainly fucking with the earth's biology and ecology right now and the earth is having a rough time because things like this generally don't happen this quickly on a geological timescale, i feel pretty comfortable saying the earth is still going to rebound from it. life as a collective is incredibly resilient. if major asteroid impacts, supermassive volcanic eruptions, and other genuinely cataclysmic events which radically change the climate and render the seas essentially uninhabitable because of their warmth can't sterilize the planet, we're probably not going to ourselves.
Sure, as a collective. But the world as we know it right now is a thing of beauty, and it's being trashed by us. I don't particularly care if life will rebound in a million years, that shouldn't be used as an excuse to continue polluting the planet.
How many branches of life are we going to wipe out? How much beauty are we going to pave over with concrete?
who is using it as an excuse to continue polluting the planet? because it's certainly not the person you originally responded to, and it's not me.
There are many people who use it as such, or other arguments such as climate change isn't a problem because we won't be around to deal with it. Trump's EPA pulled the latter argument recently, for example.
People should focus more on preserving Earth's biopshere as we know it, and less on promoting the callous "Earth is a giant ball of rock and will be fine" approach.
that’s a pretty poor argument though. if 20 humans who have to resort to hunger/gathering survive, then humans technically aren’t whiped out even though everything they stand for is.
likewise, if 99% of species get whiped out, that’s still a very shitty event even though technically life still goes on.
plus there’s a chance of us triggering some runaway warming event (like ice melting which means less reflective surface which means more ice melting) that could venis-ify earth and make it completely inhospitable for life. do I think it’s likely? no. however, it’s still possible.
nobody is making the claim that it's not shitty, but life will bounce back regardless. life has been through worse than us and will probably be through worse than us again in the future, and it's done just fine, so it's weird to act like the earth is fucked or whatever because there is literally nothing that suggests that.
I travel a lot and it's really everywhere.