Wildlife collapse from climate change is predicted to hit suddenly and sooner
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
And then I see most of the west handling covid-19 just like we handle everything: No clear direction, minimal effort, leaders asleep at the wheel, politicians trying to get the better of each other, rich people get richer.
Climate was an important theme in our last elections, but even the green party had no clue whatsoever, and the voters made it clear they did not even remotely care.
Now Covid-19 is easy stuff compared to the climate. I was hoping Covid-19 could serve as a wake up call for the cost of incompetence in our organisations. But that does not seem to happen.
Covid-19 has a pattern I also see in the climate: First, nobody cares for some theoretical crisis far away, then its in our countries but still not personal, and by now everybody knows about a specific person who died. Climate is a theoretical crisis far away for now.
So how do we proceed from here?
Like we always do when our leaders fail us. Organise and rebel.
Btw, here is some science on violent vs. non-violent uprisings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJSehRlU34w
To quote the White Rose: "If a person cannot even summon the strength to demand his rights, then there is nothing left for him but destruction." If someone person equates that with random fighting and murder that says nothing about resistance as such, it's very clearly attacking the weakest form of the argument.
It is becoming fairly clear we will have revolutions. At some point, things will deteriorate to the point it will happen. Normalcy bias is a hell of a drug, and we are all sniffing it really hard.
The ruling class is unwilling and unable to solve this or any other wide-scale societal problem we have. Ruling classes never yield power without force.
A comparatively mild collapse sooner is better than later. This really is an existential threat like we have never experienced.
Having waited so long, the changes required are unbelievably radical and painful, in that our entire way of life must change. AOC and Bernie's Green New Deal is woefully inadequate, and that's considered extreme. I can't see that happening when we can't even figure out how to make paper face masks.
Human civilization has only existed during the Holocene, which has been a period of stability. We are now in the Anthropocene.
These changes are also very fast. By 2050, we will be living in a different world. Even in the 2030s, climate change will cause massive amounts of instability in developing countries due to droughts and famines, and huge migrant crises. It only takes 2-3 major food producing regions to have significantly failed harvests at once to have a famine on the scale of 1-2 billion going hungry. With a stable climate, this hasn't happened. However, it becomes more likely all the time.
The changes we are facing will lead to large portions of the tropics being uninhabitable without A/C and unsuitable for agriculture. That is where most of the world lives. This change is happening very fast, faster than we can adapt. Our industrial civilization depends on immense resource consumption on a global scale. This will be completely disrupted.
Trust me, I know a lot about the climate and its effects. It is a bad thing. No one seriously says it isn't. It's delusional to think it could be a good thing. Your line of thinking is just a continuation of the denialist garbage that got us into this mess.
On the other hand, I can accept there will be large droughts, famines, and huge human migrations in the future. Our population continues to both climb dramatically, while congregating in a few very dense areas, mostly the cities where living is easier. That is clearly an unsustainable model.
Middle eastern populations in the hottest and humidest areas usually have AC. Most other places aren't quite so bad, due to lower humidity if not lower temperature. Traditional populations lived in stone or mud brick houses that can withstand the midday heat better.
There has been several occasions recently where the heat index has gotten near fatal in Rajasthan and Punjab, which caused quite a few deaths.
Greenhouses aren't that hot, usually not more than 30C. Not many plants like it super hot. Even plants in hot climates will do better if its a bit cooler. With hotter climates, plants (at least the ones people rely on) undergo more heat stress and have shorter growing seasons. Much of Africa is drying, especially the Sahel. Similar situations will occur in many parts of S. America and Asia.
A big distinciton here is timeframe and how much mitigation happens. We are more or less locked into a 3C rise, which is really bad. And that's our effective best-case scenario. However, if mitigation fails, and it has thus far, a 7C rise by the end of the century is not out of the question. That will lead to a total civilizational collapse and probably eventual human extinction. We wouldn't be able to maintain an industrial civilization in such an environment, and we'd have to fall back on localized, less industrial production. But, the environment would be so degraded that non-intensive agriculture probably couldn't provide enough food to stave off continual population declines.
And, thank you for answering my questions, vs just dismissing me as a denialist. The way you are approaching the issue is making it easier for me to understand.
How about big pharma and exclusively using water-boarding so nobody gets killed? Is that too far? What is too far? What is an is not acceptable in terms of punishment for extreme destruction of the earth and general oppression/enslavement of humanity? Are we really going to give them a slap on the wrist while torturing pot dealers?
You have to understand: not everyone is like you. Not everyone is harmless.
Climate should have been an important theme, but because there seemed to be little coverage or comparison of climate change policy, I can’t blame the voters for not factoring it into their decisions. Why was there no DNC-hosted climate change debate? There was too much punditry and too little substance for voters to make informed decisions.
Some of the democratic candidates don't share that view, but the party leaders do.
"Ordinary" democrats by and large do care about climate change.
On the other side of the aisle, it's easy to see disregard for the science in both leadership and party members. Among that population is a significant chunk that is deeply religious and looking forward to the apocalypse.
I may get hate for this comment, but it's meant as a summary assessment of position, not of judgement (which I am happy to share in other contexts).
What ordinary corporate patrons want is incompatible with avoiding climate collapse at this point. Maybe we could have pulled it off if we started in the 00s, but the cure is going to be far more painful today, after we wasted two decades.
Ordinary corporate patrons aren't interested in higher energy costs, much higher transportation costs, and economic contraction. They aren't interested in getting net CO2 emissions down to zero. Given the two options, they would rather take the climate collapse outcome.
Of course this may be a wee bit easier said than done. But the first place to start is the "marketplace of ideas."
I guess people need to feel immediate and very personal threat and loss to change their view. That's the problem - to change entrenched view of billions, to move from not-my-problem to my-problem-too. Would be nice to use some psychological tricks. Don't ask me which ones
A key problem is that political division has been weaponized, and a good chunk of the population doesn't believe in these threats because it's a "liberal conspiracy". Currently the US federal government is being helmed by these very same people.
I don't know if there is a solution that is available, but I think part of it is to develop messaging that can point to solutions that "the average person" can both understand and feel some stake in its implementation and success.
Call it what you want. I don't know that the social engineering campaign was developed on one "side" or the other-- I assume its planning and implementation goes "deep"er than that, and pervades both sides of the aisle.
Given the evidence, who questions whether or not there is a social engineering campaign?
it's quite obvious to me.
The "dots" connected for you:
The "dots":
[1] 1/n Spent some time on LexisNexis over the weekend. Depending on your political orientation, what follows will either disturb or encourage you. But regardless of political orientation, I'm sure we can all say 'holy fucking shit'" https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1133440945201061888
[2] The NYTimes is Woke "Many trends develop over decades but I’ve never seen change so rapid as the breathtaking success of what one might call social justice concerns. Beginning around 2010-2014 there appears to have been a inflection point. Here from Zach Goldberg on twitter are various words drawn from Lexis-Nexis." https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...
[3] Discussion on how identity politics conveniently sprang up as a counter-movement to deliberately disrupt up the Occupy Wallstreet movement, which is corroborated by the timelines of sources 3 and 4 above. https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1wecyn/identity...
All we can do is make the choices we can make and take the actions we can take so that when that day comes for us to breathe our last breath, we know that we did what we could for what we believed in. It will never feel like it was enough but it is all we can do.
For me, the late 70's were about how we were going to be completely out of oil by now and everything from plastic to driving around would be impossible. That and the levels of pollution were going to make it a requirement that you wear a gas mask outside. The 21st century was going to open up as a toxic wasteland of factories belching out pollution as we huddled to make clothes out of flax and vehicles out of wood. Oh and nearly every creature but people were going to be extinct because the 30 billion people living on the planet will be so starving even the rats aren't safe.
Of course here we are, 50 years later, and none of that has come to pass. But the point I took away wasn't that the people predicting that future were wrong, its that they made their predictions assuming nothing would change.
Some of the changes weren't even on the radar back in the 70's. If you told someone then that your hybrid car would get 50 miles to the gallon, where "good" gas mileage at the time as 12 or 15, they would laugh. Or if you told them that as people's standard of living went up, they stopped having so many children they would ask "What, sex is no fun in the future?" Or it you told them that their television would have 10x the screen size but hang on a wall and use 1/10th the power, they would say "Nah, even on Star Trek the screens are all small."
We don't live in a system on rails. We live in a massively interconnected system. When oil prices go up, we invest in solar, when people die from disease we invest in medicine, when species become threatened we adapt habitats.
Here comes the unpopular opinion, the current future killer is Climate Change. We have documented all the ways in which humans have impacted that climate. We are causing it to change in ways that we cannot predict what the effects of that change will be. But here is the thing, we know from geologic and other records that the climate has changed often on this planet without any help from humans. The system adapts to that change. Some species die, some develop, some change niches. We can guess that this future will be very different from our current circumstance, but more or less different than 1970 to 2020 ? How about 1820 to 2020? Or even 1720 to 2020?
I can promise you that things will happen over the next 50 years that are in none of the climate models. Humans could finally harvest fusion power, volcanism could wipe out half of humanity, ecosystems in formerly frozen lands could re-emerge into the semi-arid rain forests they were long ago.
None of those things will you or I have the ability to make happen or not happen. But it doesn't change the things that matter.
This pandemic will effect this generation. There is a sharp divide today between people who have lost someone they care about and people who haven't. The people who have lost are more motivated to change things than the ones who were not affected, as a result change will happen. Slowly, imperceptibly while it is happening, but looking back from 2030 to 2020 the changes that occurred due to this event will be as clear as the changes that happened because of 9/11 in the US. Some will be superficial, some will be more substantial, but the system will adapt. And for people born into it, it will be the only system they have ever known and so it will be comfortable and normal to them.
I know you're scared, fear is the mechanism we have that spurs us to change our behavior. It can be good for that as a survival reflex, but letting it wear on you over things you personally cannot change is not healthy. Make the choices and do the things you can do, vote for the people who feel you do about what needs to change, volunteer when you can to help programs that work to mitigate harm. Be a good person and be an example to others. It's the best anyone can do.
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
I'm a little skeptical. Basically the paper says that large groups of species will encounter higher temperatures than they have before (1850-2005, going by mean annual temperature, and higher defined by 5 years all above the previous high mean). And because of that, they'll be a huge ecological disaster.
I get the temperature part. That makes intuitive sense (the whole planet is getting hotter, duh), and doesn't seem like anything new.
What does seem new is the seemingly (I'm up for explanations about why they make sense) arbitrary threshold they use.
Is this a good paper, or just an appeal to fear? (That's a real question, but to me at first glance, it seems like an appeal to fear).
This comment does a good job of showing how the journalist is sensationalizing the conclusions of the paper.
I've read the paper, and if I understood correctly the hypothesis is that because there are less usual seasonal variations of temperatures near the equator, ecosystems in this area are more susceptible to be disrupted by global warming.
Talking about disruption seems safe from a scientific point of view, but collapse is almost synonymous with extinction, this is quite a leap...