The only way for me to operate under what I can assume - that past behavior is an indicator of future behavior - is through acceptance. Governments will not do enough to stop this. I try not to be...
The only way for me to operate under what I can assume - that past behavior is an indicator of future behavior - is through acceptance. Governments will not do enough to stop this. I try not to be too egregious in my carbon footprint. I eat little meat. I drive an electric car. But I don’t expect to have a nice world to live in when I’m old. I’m playing the role of the man witnessing the end of civilization. Maybe civilization as we know it is too much to ask for.
I think it's important and healthy to accept that some damage has already been done, and that we must begin efforts towards climate resilience and climate adaptation to deal with the inevitable...
Exemplary
I think it's important and healthy to accept that some damage has already been done, and that we must begin efforts towards climate resilience and climate adaptation to deal with the inevitable effects of the emissions we've already produced.
That said, I also worry about doomers encouraging society to give up and accept the continuing harm that our culture is doing now and in the future. Everything will change radically. The choice we face is whether to make intentional change to address the climate crisis and protect our children as best we can, or to abandon our descendants to their fate. A world with 4 degrees of warming would be very bad, but a world with 8 degrees of warming would be much worse. It could mean the difference between the collapse of civilization and human extinction, with no hope of doing better next time. Every little action we take matters... no matter how bad things get, we can try to prevent them from getting worse. (And never underestimate how much worse things could be.)
I'm still going to be vocally involved and will exercise my democratic power in the most pragmatic way I can to improve things. But I'm not going to kill myself over minimizing my carbon footprint...
I'm still going to be vocally involved and will exercise my democratic power in the most pragmatic way I can to improve things. But I'm not going to kill myself over minimizing my carbon footprint as much as possible while hardly anyone else is doing anything.
To be clear, while I think minimizing your carbon footprint can make you a more effective advocate for environmental policies, I don't think your individual lifestyle choices need to be a...
What is absolutely vital is to not give up on organizing with others to take action. You're right that governments will not do enough to stop this, unless we make them do so. The young people in Fridays for Future or Sunrise Movement will be suffering the effects of climate change after you are gone, and they are fighting tooth and nail. They haven't given up, and they need your help. Don't accept the casual murder of millions by those in power, hold them accountable.
It may be hard to feel like you are part of a movement in the isolation of the pandemic, but I promise you, no matter what country you live in, if you join the movement for climate justice you will not be alone for long.
I hate to agree, but I also think that we are unlikely to effectively mitigate the ongoing climate catastrophe. The kind of people who accumulate the degree of money and power that is necessary to...
I hate to agree, but I also think that we are unlikely to effectively mitigate the ongoing climate catastrophe. The kind of people who accumulate the degree of money and power that is necessary to really help with this will never be the same kind of people who are willing to sacrifice even a shred of personal comfort to help those around them. They pay lip service to space exploration as a ludicrous future-thinking "solution" (for the military contractor money) while building bug-out bunkers in New Zealand and asking experts how to keep security forces "loyal" after the apocalypse.
I am also doing what I can to minimize my part in climate change, but as part of the global rich (which is essentially anyone in the US/Canada) there's really no way to eliminate my participation in it entirely. I don't eat meat, I avoid single-use plastics when possible, I am learning to be careful about what my clothes are made of. I vote for candidates in my city and my country who acknowledge climate change and make sustainability a big part of their platform.
It's going to happen regardless of what I do, though, and I am trying to prepare for the reality of it. Sure, I'm working on my physical fitness, learning to grow food in various configurations, and applying my crafting and tech skills more practically - but it is simply not possible for me to learn everything I need to know to get through a crisis by myself. So I think the key to riding this out in the least traumatic way possible is going to be having a community based around mutual aid and trust: the exact opposite of building a bunker.
What do you think of geoengineering? While it's a bit of a cop-out and can let conservatives say that we don't need to do anything about pollution and sustainability, it also gives leftists all...
What do you think of geoengineering? While it's a bit of a cop-out and can let conservatives say that we don't need to do anything about pollution and sustainability, it also gives leftists all the time we'll need and want to actually fix the problem.
It's a bad idea. What makes you think that humans will engineer the planet in a responsible manner? What makes you think humans can understand the planet's systems well enough to intentionally...
It's a bad idea. What makes you think that humans will engineer the planet in a responsible manner? What makes you think humans can understand the planet's systems well enough to intentionally engineer them in a way that doesn't produce horrific unintended consequences? I look at dams, at failed attempts to control flooding with storm drains, at efforts to control the Mississippi sinking the state of Louisiana, at people intentionally introducing invasive plants and animals, and I don't see many examples of humans successfully engineering their environmental sins away.
My prediction is that geoengineering will result in repeated "she swallowed the horse to catch the fly" situations, where new geoengineering is required to undo previous geoengineering mistakes and overcorrections. That's if we are able to produce geoengineering technology that works at scale in time to affect the climate crisis.
I also predict that geoengineering will happen at the expense of, and over the objections of, the poor and disadvantaged people of the world, and that it will be a disaster from a climate justice standpoint. If you float giant mirrors in space to prevent the sun from heating the planet, will everyone who lives in their shade be consulted? If their crops fail as a result, who will make them whole?
Protect our old growth forests and rewild the planet, and stop trying to "fix" it. Don't do the damage in the first place, instead of harming the planet and then trying to buy your way out of the consequences.
I’m not touching virtually all of those methods with a ten foot pole. Direct air capture (and using the resultant CO2 in chemical manufacturing) is acceptable due to being highly targeted, but...
I’m not touching virtually all of those methods with a ten foot pole. Direct air capture (and using the resultant CO2 in chemical manufacturing) is acceptable due to being highly targeted, but most other methods have the probability, ranging from not insignificant to nearly certain, of heavily damaging one or more components of the global ecosystem.
Wouldn't that be a sort of hyperbole ? Undoubtedly, civilization is at stake. There exist credible scenarios in which the havoc brought by climate change is so intense as to bring mankind to the...
witnessing the end of civilization
Wouldn't that be a sort of hyperbole ?
Undoubtedly, civilization is at stake. There exist credible scenarios in which the havoc brought by climate change is so intense as to bring mankind to the state of nature in which it was before the Neolithic revolution. Such scenarios however extend over many centuries rather than one mere lifetime.
Now, many conveniences will become unavailable. Millenials of the USA were born into such conveniences, even older people take them for granted. Yes the transition is going to be faster than what most of us would consider comfortable.
I am still not sure of what, exactly, consitutes civilization, but I am convinced that it is high time that we ask the question aloud so that we know what to preserve and which useless balast can be jettisoned.
Also the end of x as we know it is a rather overused figure of speech, isn't it ?
Jesus, that's bleak! Isolate yourself from a concept of the world that can end in such a way. Obviously you have little role in the broader scheme of things (I am not sure how you have been...
Jesus, that's bleak! Isolate yourself from a concept of the world that can end in such a way. Obviously you have little role in the broader scheme of things (I am not sure how you have been balancing your responsibilities relative to your power thus far) but if these are your sentiments I fear for your courage.. .. there will still be a rock when you are old and there will be many people on it!!
I haven't changed my personal life to the same extent as the person profiled in this piece, but I am pretty firmly in the "everything is fucked and almost everyone is underestimating how bad it's...
I haven't changed my personal life to the same extent as the person profiled in this piece, but I am pretty firmly in the "everything is fucked and almost everyone is underestimating how bad it's gonna get" camp.
I believe the methane clathrate gun has already fired and we're in the beginning phases of a runaway feedback loop. (see this comment I made last year for an ELI5 of methane clathrate)
I'm in my 30s. I expect that within my lifetime we will see upwards of 1 billion people migrate due to climate change (from NYT last year: The great climate migration has already begun)
It's possible that as a species we could handle such a migration gracefully...but history does not make me optimistic.
In the US, we've seen how xenophobia about central American migrants fueled the rise of Trump's fascist movement. In Europe, we've seen a parallel rise in right-wing nationalism, most notably in response to the Syrian refugee crisis.
Neither of these migrations were directly caused by climate change. There's an argument to be made that climate change exacerbated both the Syrian Civil War and conditions in Central America...but see my comment here for why I think looking for a direct causal link is actually the wrong question to ask. Regardless of the cause, we know migration will be increasing, and we know existing societies don't handle waves of migration well.
We're going to see a growing rise in migration that's kinda-sorta-probably linked to climate change, and a growing nationalistic / xenophobic / fascist backlash to that migration. We could handle it better. But we won't.
People were saying the clathrate gun had fired 15 years ago. I'm an environmental scientist and I've been following this issue for decades. I have seen no good evidence we have entered that sort...
People were saying the clathrate gun had fired 15 years ago. I'm an environmental scientist and I've been following this issue for decades. I have seen no good evidence we have entered that sort of exponential feedback loop yet.
Haha I very much doubt it's interesting enough for an AMA. To be clear, I didn't say I'm a climate scientist. My main experience in the field is working at what we call "the poop factory". It's a...
Haha I very much doubt it's interesting enough for an AMA. To be clear, I didn't say I'm a climate scientist. My main experience in the field is working at what we call "the poop factory". It's a testing lab, mostly sewage plant effluent or drinking water.
*Just noted the link to Mastodon in your bio. I really hope you aren't just another right wing troll. Oh well.
Why would a Mastodon link give you (or anyone) that impression? FWIW, I'm pro-2nd-Amendment but otherwise I mostly lean Left, and I rarely troll. ETA: Come to think of it, Mastodon mostly leans...
Just noted the link to Mastodon in your bio. I really hope you aren't just another right wing troll.
Why would a Mastodon link give you (or anyone) that impression? FWIW, I'm pro-2nd-Amendment but otherwise I mostly lean Left, and I rarely troll.
ETA: Come to think of it, Mastodon mostly leans Left, too...
I don't know how to determine that. I don't know anything about Mastodon really, I just searched for it to learn what it is, and that's one of the top hits I got. I'm not especially interested in...
I don't know how to determine that. I don't know anything about Mastodon really, I just searched for it to learn what it is, and that's one of the top hits I got.
I'm not especially interested in playing this out endlessly tbh. Maybe my experiences with the toxic and ubiquitous right wing concern trolling on Reddit have permanently soured me to this kind of "enlightened centrist" forum overall.
There was a discussion about the quality of discussion on Tildes that Deimos recently commented on to effectively say "If you have significant issues with the quality of discussion, your best recourse is to leave Tildes." With that I will probably be deleting my account here soon. Not because of this thread specifically, just the level of biased bullshit I see being inserted into discussion here overall. So you don't really need to concern yourself with my wariness of right wing concern trolling as an ongoing issue, I'm probably done here.
This made me quite sad. Not that anyone seems to have done anything specifically wrong, just that we've reached a point that it is understandable to be so suspicious of someone who was showing a...
This made me quite sad. Not that anyone seems to have done anything specifically wrong, just that we've reached a point that it is understandable to be so suspicious of someone who was showing a genuine interest in your work.
It sucks that we always have to be on guard. It sucks that we don't have a good solution for the issues discussed in that thread. It sucks that even the moderation here, which seems better than most I've seen on the web, is driving some people away.
I guess I just worry that if Tildes can't work as a community, where can?
To be clear, I'm not saying we're necessarily in the "hockey stick" part of the exponential curve at the moment. The nature of climate science unfortunately means that by the time we have 100%...
I have seen no good evidence we have entered that sort of exponential feedback loop yet.
To be clear, I'm not saying we're necessarily in the "hockey stick" part of the exponential curve at the moment.
The nature of climate science unfortunately means that by the time we have 100% definitive, peer-reviewed and replicated and meta-analyzed evidence that some climate change event is happening...it will have been happening for years, and newer and different things will be happening right now, that by necessity do not have the same depth of scientific evidence backing them.
This is in some ways a mismatch between "climate science" as applied to anthropogenic climate change, and the tried & true scientific method that we've been honing for centuries, and was originally developed to figure out "natural laws" of physics and chemistry - things that, by their nature, do not change and are amenable to repeatable experiments over the course of years and decades.
Which...is another reason I'm not optimistic about our civilization's capacity to respond well to climate change.
The Paris climate agreement has a goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees C, and a stretch goal of 1.5 C. Suppose we as a species hit the goals on our carbon emissions to reach that 2 degrees C target (which, living in the US and seeing where our political climate is relative to where we'd want to be at a 2030 checkpoint on the way to net-zero by 2050...I'm not optimistic)
If that 2 degree Celsius rise melts enough methane to trigger a 0.1 C increase - that might be enough to hit critical mass and cause the feedback loop, because that 0.1 C increase will cause just a bit more methane to melt, and so on.
If you think the methane clathrate feedback loop could happen, but isn't happening at the moment, can I ask what evidence you'd need to see, at some point in the future, to convince you that it is in fact happening?
I love this term. It's a slow motion catastrophe, which seems to make it really difficult to arrive at salience. I've been assuming the tipping point in public salience would be a series of...
“salience” being the term of choice in the climate community for the gut-level understanding that climate change isn’t going to be a problem in the future, it is a crisis now
I love this term. It's a slow motion catastrophe, which seems to make it really difficult to arrive at salience.
I've been assuming the tipping point in public salience would be a series of extreme enough climate related events. But from a cynical perspective, one that would be very easy to adopt for people with a heavy investment in the energy industry status quo, we might not see the worst impacts of climate change in our lifetimes.
But then again we might, the models and projections keep being revised, and never in the direction of less dire.
I'm waiting, too, to see how much actual climate related policy change happens under the Biden administration.
2021 is a big year for the climate, unfortunately there's also this other thing happening.
Good points. I have to say as someone who shares your perspective, last year was a real eye-opener in how much of the public is willing to accept a catastrophic die off of fellow citizens as long...
Good points. I have to say as someone who shares your perspective, last year was a real eye-opener in how much of the public is willing to accept a catastrophic die off of fellow citizens as long as it doesn't inconvenience them personally.
An alternate way of phrasing this is, an alarming number of people will oppose any attempt to save lives if it would inconvenience them personally, even if the life that might be saved is their...
An alternate way of phrasing this is, an alarming number of people will oppose any attempt to save lives if it would inconvenience them personally, even if the life that might be saved is their own.
I think it's important to remember that there are powerful forces encouraging that sort of short-sighted selfishness, that opposition to thought and expertise and facts, that denial of responsibility for others. Many of these people could be better people if they were not being brainwashed to be pawns for fascism. They are still responsible for their actions, and for falling for the con, but the context of right-wing media and culture needs to be remembered. Don't forget about who is benefiting from it all.
Previous discussion about this here. I skimmed back through my own comments because I remembered the article, and it looks like the author deleted the original link for whatever reason - not quite...
Previous discussion about this here. I skimmed back through my own comments because I remembered the article, and it looks like the author deleted the original link for whatever reason - not quite sure what the etiquette here is, in terms of referring to the discussion? I'm assuming it's fine since it's still available to search and read on the site.
It seems like he sort of had the right idea and then started doing nonsensical things out of personal obsession. Climate change is so enormous that when thinking about it from an individual or...
Peter himself believed that you can’t fix climate change with individual virtue any more than you can fix systemic racism that way. But he also knew, at some point, “You have to burn your ships on the beach,” as Richard Reiss, a climate educator and fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Cities at Hunter College, put it. You need to commit, perhaps even create drama, and make real changes in your life.
It seems like he sort of had the right idea and then started doing nonsensical things out of personal obsession. Climate change is so enormous that when thinking about it from an individual or family point of view, all we can do is disaster preparation. Any attempt to really make a dent in CO2 emissions has to have at least the potential of scaling up. Personal experiments make sense only as a way of prototyping much larger changes.
For example, tinkering with biodiesel might be fun, but the point should be to figure out how to do it right so you can show others how, not limping across the country in an a car that doesn’t work properly. And if something like that actually worked and caught on, it would be more important than anything else he did.
In the end, it didn’t matter at all, compared to the companies producing millions of electric vehicles.
Yeah the focus on individuals is all wrong. Over 70% of CO2 emissions come from burning fossil fuels. Individuals can't change that. If everyone who could afford it went out and bought an electric...
Yeah the focus on individuals is all wrong. Over 70% of CO2 emissions come from burning fossil fuels. Individuals can't change that.
If everyone who could afford it went out and bought an electric car it would not fix climate change. The electricity that powers those cars still comes from fossil fuels. It would be better, but not better enough.
If everyone stopped eating meat it would not fix climate change, only about 10% of emissions come from agriculture, and only a part of that comes from meat production.
If everyone installed solar panels it would not fix climate change, a large part (in a lot of areas most) of their energy would still come from the fossil fuel powered grid. And it would of course have no impact on energy used outside of homes.
If everyone bought local it would not fix climate change, too many things can't be produced locally, or can but still have a long range shipping requirement for some aspect of production.
The changes have to be systemic, which leaves it up to governments. Not that individuals shouldn't do what they can, we need that too. I'm just annoyed by the narrative that implies the problem can be solved that way. I suspect it's a narrative that PR firms have been paid to promote for some time now, similar to the plastics industry funded recycling scam.
The focus should be supporting the right lawmakers so that we can change climate policy, energy production and regulate the industries which rely on and promote fossil fuels.
I think a few things are true: One person's decisions don't change much The government won't do anything if there is no public outcry for it A good way to create public outcry is to demonstrate a...
I think a few things are true:
One person's decisions don't change much
The government won't do anything if there is no public outcry for it
A good way to create public outcry is to demonstrate a change in consumer choices, which comes down to aggregated individual actions
This is recognized in your post with
Not that individuals shouldn't do what they can, we need that too
I just think this point can't be emphasized enough. It's true that companies and regulations are the majority movers for CO2 emissions. But blaming them, stopping there and throwing our hands up is a mistake. We should be doing everything in our power as individuals (while staying healthy/happy/sane) - loudly and consistently supporting the right lawmakers, loudly and progressively changing our individual consumption/food choices/transportation/energy use habits, and recognizing our own individual responsibility in the larger context.
No blame is to be placed on an individual. But within ourselves, internally, we have to cultivate a strong sense of responsibility and effectiveness-oriented action taking.
Although government action is essential, governments can’t make solar power or electric cars happen on their own. It’s more a matter of setting up conditions so that companies can move faster....
Although government action is essential, governments can’t make solar power or electric cars happen on their own. It’s more a matter of setting up conditions so that companies can move faster. (We’ve seen something like this with vaccine production. Without the biotech industry, there would be nothing to fund.)
I think that making a significant contribution in either of these fields (or any other green tech field) is something a company or individual can be proud of, and it’s not necessary to wait for government action to start.
I think I've said something like this before: I agree that in regards to climate change, an individuals choices do not make much of a difference, but they do make us invested. I believe that the...
I think I've said something like this before:
I agree that in regards to climate change, an individuals choices do not make much of a difference, but they do make us invested. I believe that the more that we are invested on the individual level, the more we demand others (individuals, corporations, politicians) be held accountable for their lack of investment in our future. When I am not doing anything, I feel less inclined to call out others not doing anything.
It's interesting how his children were influenced by his actions. Particularly the older son being disengaged and uninterested in the future. Being aware of problems is good, contributing to...
It's interesting how his children were influenced by his actions. Particularly the older son being disengaged and uninterested in the future.
Being aware of problems is good, contributing to solving them even better. But letting them overwhelm you isn't helpful (easier said than done) because it ends up limiting your ability help and will often damage relationships in the process.
I tend to think loss of privacy/increased state surveillance is a similar type of problem to climate change. Worldwide but background, tricky definition, social & technical solutions needed, long term.
The only way for me to operate under what I can assume - that past behavior is an indicator of future behavior - is through acceptance. Governments will not do enough to stop this. I try not to be too egregious in my carbon footprint. I eat little meat. I drive an electric car. But I don’t expect to have a nice world to live in when I’m old. I’m playing the role of the man witnessing the end of civilization. Maybe civilization as we know it is too much to ask for.
I think it's important and healthy to accept that some damage has already been done, and that we must begin efforts towards climate resilience and climate adaptation to deal with the inevitable effects of the emissions we've already produced.
That said, I also worry about doomers encouraging society to give up and accept the continuing harm that our culture is doing now and in the future. Everything will change radically. The choice we face is whether to make intentional change to address the climate crisis and protect our children as best we can, or to abandon our descendants to their fate. A world with 4 degrees of warming would be very bad, but a world with 8 degrees of warming would be much worse. It could mean the difference between the collapse of civilization and human extinction, with no hope of doing better next time. Every little action we take matters... no matter how bad things get, we can try to prevent them from getting worse. (And never underestimate how much worse things could be.)
I'm still going to be vocally involved and will exercise my democratic power in the most pragmatic way I can to improve things. But I'm not going to kill myself over minimizing my carbon footprint as much as possible while hardly anyone else is doing anything.
To be clear, while I think minimizing your carbon footprint can make you a more effective advocate for environmental policies, I don't think your individual lifestyle choices need to be a priority. Do what you can when you can, and be kind to yourself. Without institutional and cultural support, many changes are too difficult for the average person.
What is absolutely vital is to not give up on organizing with others to take action. You're right that governments will not do enough to stop this, unless we make them do so. The young people in Fridays for Future or Sunrise Movement will be suffering the effects of climate change after you are gone, and they are fighting tooth and nail. They haven't given up, and they need your help. Don't accept the casual murder of millions by those in power, hold them accountable.
It may be hard to feel like you are part of a movement in the isolation of the pandemic, but I promise you, no matter what country you live in, if you join the movement for climate justice you will not be alone for long.
I hate to agree, but I also think that we are unlikely to effectively mitigate the ongoing climate catastrophe. The kind of people who accumulate the degree of money and power that is necessary to really help with this will never be the same kind of people who are willing to sacrifice even a shred of personal comfort to help those around them. They pay lip service to space exploration as a ludicrous future-thinking "solution" (for the military contractor money) while building bug-out bunkers in New Zealand and asking experts how to keep security forces "loyal" after the apocalypse.
I am also doing what I can to minimize my part in climate change, but as part of the global rich (which is essentially anyone in the US/Canada) there's really no way to eliminate my participation in it entirely. I don't eat meat, I avoid single-use plastics when possible, I am learning to be careful about what my clothes are made of. I vote for candidates in my city and my country who acknowledge climate change and make sustainability a big part of their platform.
It's going to happen regardless of what I do, though, and I am trying to prepare for the reality of it. Sure, I'm working on my physical fitness, learning to grow food in various configurations, and applying my crafting and tech skills more practically - but it is simply not possible for me to learn everything I need to know to get through a crisis by myself. So I think the key to riding this out in the least traumatic way possible is going to be having a community based around mutual aid and trust: the exact opposite of building a bunker.
What do you think of geoengineering? While it's a bit of a cop-out and can let conservatives say that we don't need to do anything about pollution and sustainability, it also gives leftists all the time we'll need and want to actually fix the problem.
It's a bad idea. What makes you think that humans will engineer the planet in a responsible manner? What makes you think humans can understand the planet's systems well enough to intentionally engineer them in a way that doesn't produce horrific unintended consequences? I look at dams, at failed attempts to control flooding with storm drains, at efforts to control the Mississippi sinking the state of Louisiana, at people intentionally introducing invasive plants and animals, and I don't see many examples of humans successfully engineering their environmental sins away.
My prediction is that geoengineering will result in repeated "she swallowed the horse to catch the fly" situations, where new geoengineering is required to undo previous geoengineering mistakes and overcorrections. That's if we are able to produce geoengineering technology that works at scale in time to affect the climate crisis.
I also predict that geoengineering will happen at the expense of, and over the objections of, the poor and disadvantaged people of the world, and that it will be a disaster from a climate justice standpoint. If you float giant mirrors in space to prevent the sun from heating the planet, will everyone who lives in their shade be consulted? If their crops fail as a result, who will make them whole?
Protect our old growth forests and rewild the planet, and stop trying to "fix" it. Don't do the damage in the first place, instead of harming the planet and then trying to buy your way out of the consequences.
I’m not touching virtually all of those methods with a ten foot pole. Direct air capture (and using the resultant CO2 in chemical manufacturing) is acceptable due to being highly targeted, but most other methods have the probability, ranging from not insignificant to nearly certain, of heavily damaging one or more components of the global ecosystem.
It does give me some hope. We're obviously capable of geo-engineering if we're capable of climate change.
Because we can produce chaos, that necessarily implies we can return the chaos to a more ordered state? That's not logically consistent sorry.
Fair enough
Wouldn't that be a sort of hyperbole ?
Undoubtedly, civilization is at stake. There exist credible scenarios in which the havoc brought by climate change is so intense as to bring mankind to the state of nature in which it was before the Neolithic revolution. Such scenarios however extend over many centuries rather than one mere lifetime.
Now, many conveniences will become unavailable. Millenials of the USA were born into such conveniences, even older people take them for granted. Yes the transition is going to be faster than what most of us would consider comfortable.
I am still not sure of what, exactly, consitutes civilization, but I am convinced that it is high time that we ask the question aloud so that we know what to preserve and which useless balast can be jettisoned.
Also the end of
xas we know it is a rather overused figure of speech, isn't it ?Jesus, that's bleak! Isolate yourself from a concept of the world that can end in such a way. Obviously you have little role in the broader scheme of things (I am not sure how you have been balancing your responsibilities relative to your power thus far) but if these are your sentiments I fear for your courage.. .. there will still be a rock when you are old and there will be many people on it!!
I agree. But life won't look how it does now.
I haven't changed my personal life to the same extent as the person profiled in this piece, but I am pretty firmly in the "everything is fucked and almost everyone is underestimating how bad it's gonna get" camp.
I believe the methane clathrate gun has already fired and we're in the beginning phases of a runaway feedback loop. (see this comment I made last year for an ELI5 of methane clathrate)
I'm in my 30s. I expect that within my lifetime we will see upwards of 1 billion people migrate due to climate change (from NYT last year: The great climate migration has already begun)
It's possible that as a species we could handle such a migration gracefully...but history does not make me optimistic.
In the US, we've seen how xenophobia about central American migrants fueled the rise of Trump's fascist movement. In Europe, we've seen a parallel rise in right-wing nationalism, most notably in response to the Syrian refugee crisis.
Neither of these migrations were directly caused by climate change. There's an argument to be made that climate change exacerbated both the Syrian Civil War and conditions in Central America...but see my comment here for why I think looking for a direct causal link is actually the wrong question to ask. Regardless of the cause, we know migration will be increasing, and we know existing societies don't handle waves of migration well.
We're going to see a growing rise in migration that's kinda-sorta-probably linked to climate change, and a growing nationalistic / xenophobic / fascist backlash to that migration. We could handle it better. But we won't.
People were saying the clathrate gun had fired 15 years ago. I'm an environmental scientist and I've been following this issue for decades. I have seen no good evidence we have entered that sort of exponential feedback loop yet.
Could you expand on that a bit? Not doubting, just curious. If you ever feel magnanimous and/or bored, maybe an AMA...?
Haha I very much doubt it's interesting enough for an AMA. To be clear, I didn't say I'm a climate scientist. My main experience in the field is working at what we call "the poop factory". It's a testing lab, mostly sewage plant effluent or drinking water.
*Just noted the link to Mastodon in your bio. I really hope you aren't just another right wing troll. Oh well.
Why would a Mastodon link give you (or anyone) that impression? FWIW, I'm pro-2nd-Amendment but otherwise I mostly lean Left, and I rarely troll.
ETA: Come to think of it, Mastodon mostly leans Left, too...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/mb8y3x/the-nazi-free-alternative-to-twitter-is-now-home-to-the-biggest-far-right-social-network
Are they actually on Gab though?
I don't know how to determine that. I don't know anything about Mastodon really, I just searched for it to learn what it is, and that's one of the top hits I got.
I'm not especially interested in playing this out endlessly tbh. Maybe my experiences with the toxic and ubiquitous right wing concern trolling on Reddit have permanently soured me to this kind of "enlightened centrist" forum overall.
There was a discussion about the quality of discussion on Tildes that Deimos recently commented on to effectively say "If you have significant issues with the quality of discussion, your best recourse is to leave Tildes." With that I will probably be deleting my account here soon. Not because of this thread specifically, just the level of biased bullshit I see being inserted into discussion here overall. So you don't really need to concern yourself with my wariness of right wing concern trolling as an ongoing issue, I'm probably done here.
This made me quite sad. Not that anyone seems to have done anything specifically wrong, just that we've reached a point that it is understandable to be so suspicious of someone who was showing a genuine interest in your work.
It sucks that we always have to be on guard. It sucks that we don't have a good solution for the issues discussed in that thread. It sucks that even the moderation here, which seems better than most I've seen on the web, is driving some people away.
I guess I just worry that if Tildes can't work as a community, where can?
I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have jumped all over you.
To be clear, I'm not saying we're necessarily in the "hockey stick" part of the exponential curve at the moment.
The nature of climate science unfortunately means that by the time we have 100% definitive, peer-reviewed and replicated and meta-analyzed evidence that some climate change event is happening...it will have been happening for years, and newer and different things will be happening right now, that by necessity do not have the same depth of scientific evidence backing them.
This is in some ways a mismatch between "climate science" as applied to anthropogenic climate change, and the tried & true scientific method that we've been honing for centuries, and was originally developed to figure out "natural laws" of physics and chemistry - things that, by their nature, do not change and are amenable to repeatable experiments over the course of years and decades.
Which...is another reason I'm not optimistic about our civilization's capacity to respond well to climate change.
The Paris climate agreement has a goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees C, and a stretch goal of 1.5 C. Suppose we as a species hit the goals on our carbon emissions to reach that 2 degrees C target (which, living in the US and seeing where our political climate is relative to where we'd want to be at a 2030 checkpoint on the way to net-zero by 2050...I'm not optimistic)
If that 2 degree Celsius rise melts enough methane to trigger a 0.1 C increase - that might be enough to hit critical mass and cause the feedback loop, because that 0.1 C increase will cause just a bit more methane to melt, and so on.
If you think the methane clathrate feedback loop could happen, but isn't happening at the moment, can I ask what evidence you'd need to see, at some point in the future, to convince you that it is in fact happening?
I love this term. It's a slow motion catastrophe, which seems to make it really difficult to arrive at salience.
I've been assuming the tipping point in public salience would be a series of extreme enough climate related events. But from a cynical perspective, one that would be very easy to adopt for people with a heavy investment in the energy industry status quo, we might not see the worst impacts of climate change in our lifetimes.
But then again we might, the models and projections keep being revised, and never in the direction of less dire.
I'm waiting, too, to see how much actual climate related policy change happens under the Biden administration.
2021 is a big year for the climate, unfortunately there's also this other thing happening.
Good points. I have to say as someone who shares your perspective, last year was a real eye-opener in how much of the public is willing to accept a catastrophic die off of fellow citizens as long as it doesn't inconvenience them personally.
An alternate way of phrasing this is, an alarming number of people will oppose any attempt to save lives if it would inconvenience them personally, even if the life that might be saved is their own.
I think it's important to remember that there are powerful forces encouraging that sort of short-sighted selfishness, that opposition to thought and expertise and facts, that denial of responsibility for others. Many of these people could be better people if they were not being brainwashed to be pawns for fascism. They are still responsible for their actions, and for falling for the con, but the context of right-wing media and culture needs to be remembered. Don't forget about who is benefiting from it all.
Right thanks. You basically expressed exactly what I was thinking but you did a better job of it.
Previous discussion about this here. I skimmed back through my own comments because I remembered the article, and it looks like the author deleted the original link for whatever reason - not quite sure what the etiquette here is, in terms of referring to the discussion? I'm assuming it's fine since it's still available to search and read on the site.
It seems like he sort of had the right idea and then started doing nonsensical things out of personal obsession. Climate change is so enormous that when thinking about it from an individual or family point of view, all we can do is disaster preparation. Any attempt to really make a dent in CO2 emissions has to have at least the potential of scaling up. Personal experiments make sense only as a way of prototyping much larger changes.
For example, tinkering with biodiesel might be fun, but the point should be to figure out how to do it right so you can show others how, not limping across the country in an a car that doesn’t work properly. And if something like that actually worked and caught on, it would be more important than anything else he did.
In the end, it didn’t matter at all, compared to the companies producing millions of electric vehicles.
Yeah the focus on individuals is all wrong. Over 70% of CO2 emissions come from burning fossil fuels. Individuals can't change that.
If everyone who could afford it went out and bought an electric car it would not fix climate change. The electricity that powers those cars still comes from fossil fuels. It would be better, but not better enough.
If everyone stopped eating meat it would not fix climate change, only about 10% of emissions come from agriculture, and only a part of that comes from meat production.
If everyone installed solar panels it would not fix climate change, a large part (in a lot of areas most) of their energy would still come from the fossil fuel powered grid. And it would of course have no impact on energy used outside of homes.
If everyone bought local it would not fix climate change, too many things can't be produced locally, or can but still have a long range shipping requirement for some aspect of production.
The changes have to be systemic, which leaves it up to governments. Not that individuals shouldn't do what they can, we need that too. I'm just annoyed by the narrative that implies the problem can be solved that way. I suspect it's a narrative that PR firms have been paid to promote for some time now, similar to the plastics industry funded recycling scam.
The focus should be supporting the right lawmakers so that we can change climate policy, energy production and regulate the industries which rely on and promote fossil fuels.
I think a few things are true:
This is recognized in your post with
I just think this point can't be emphasized enough. It's true that companies and regulations are the majority movers for CO2 emissions. But blaming them, stopping there and throwing our hands up is a mistake. We should be doing everything in our power as individuals (while staying healthy/happy/sane) - loudly and consistently supporting the right lawmakers, loudly and progressively changing our individual consumption/food choices/transportation/energy use habits, and recognizing our own individual responsibility in the larger context.
No blame is to be placed on an individual. But within ourselves, internally, we have to cultivate a strong sense of responsibility and effectiveness-oriented action taking.
Although government action is essential, governments can’t make solar power or electric cars happen on their own. It’s more a matter of setting up conditions so that companies can move faster. (We’ve seen something like this with vaccine production. Without the biotech industry, there would be nothing to fund.)
I think that making a significant contribution in either of these fields (or any other green tech field) is something a company or individual can be proud of, and it’s not necessary to wait for government action to start.
I think I've said something like this before:
I agree that in regards to climate change, an individuals choices do not make much of a difference, but they do make us invested. I believe that the more that we are invested on the individual level, the more we demand others (individuals, corporations, politicians) be held accountable for their lack of investment in our future. When I am not doing anything, I feel less inclined to call out others not doing anything.
It's interesting how his children were influenced by his actions. Particularly the older son being disengaged and uninterested in the future.
Being aware of problems is good, contributing to solving them even better. But letting them overwhelm you isn't helpful (easier said than done) because it ends up limiting your ability help and will often damage relationships in the process.
I tend to think loss of privacy/increased state surveillance is a similar type of problem to climate change. Worldwide but background, tricky definition, social & technical solutions needed, long term.