So as I read about Greenland’s ice sheets I can only conclude that we are all doomed. Raising awareness won’t really help; the leaders who could do something about it simply won’t.
It’s sad and it’s depressing and I’ve no idea what any of us can do to actually prevent this next global catastrophe.
Many countries have done pretty well coordinating a useful response against this virus. The US has done terribly, but there are plenty of examples of other nations responding well to it.
Even when Italy happened not all countries reacted, instead thinking ‘oh we don’t have that problem we’re fine’
And then as cases did go up other countries for ‘creative’ with their handling - the UK totally gave up on testing in March and was secretly thinking to ‘ride it out’ and go for herd immunity.
So the few examples where it was handled well (say Taiwan and South Korea) are irrelevant when considering the strength of the overall global response.
Now, for dealing with melting ice sheets we need more than a majority of countries working together to prevent an event that will displace millions of people but right now the response is similar to how we responded to COVID - but imo the stakes are higher now.
> China locking down 11m people didn’t ring any alarm bells in the west.
Yes it did. Australia and NZ started preparing very early for this outbreak. The results are very evident. The US and the UK responded terribly, and their people should be very angry.
Obviously still support any possible measures to mitigate the damage. Maybe we can still work together to avoid complete catastrophe.
Don't vote for morons.
There are some providers in Russia, China and South Korea who do deliver on time and on buget.
With energy less dependent on climate, we can further proceed to atmospheric CO2 capture and reuse [1]
Putting it here for another direction of hope...
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/01/22/climate-ch...
BUT, this is a hair on fire emergency. We are fully and truly fucked and until enough people wake up to this reality, we'll continue with the glacial pace we've had addressing the problem for the past several decades and wake up one day realizing there really is nothing we can do fast enough to matter.
It's entirely possible we've already passed this threshold and we're already dead.
Personally, I spend most of the year between 250-1'750 metres over sea level, in a country that (at least in the past) has prized food security over cheap eats, and (until Fukushima) ran our rail system on mostly nuke+hydro power. That said, our glaciers have also retreated noticeably over my lifetime.
(I had thought eliminating Covid would be a good warm-up exercise for tackling climate change, but it appears that even though when it comes to clothing fashions, humans herd like sheep, when it comes to effective concerted effort, humans herd like cats.)
Some other leaders (i.e. Bolansaro, Modi, Putin, Trump, and probably some other leaders of countries where we don't even know how bad the situation is) have reacted poorly, leading to less good results.
Even in places like the United States which has been doing a terrible job, I am amazed at the scope of sacrifice that has been made to prevent the potential of millions of deaths, and by the generally high level of compliance with social distancing. It's not good enough, mind you, and those sacrifices will be for naught if we don't eventually get things under control, but having 90% of people in stores wearing masks is a lot higher than just about anyone would have guessed if one were to suggest this scenario as a hypothetical a year ago. I think most health experts expected about 50%.
Really, the whole world has been quite united I think on average despite poor leadership when you look at the actions of individual people. On the other hand, as pandemic fatigue sets in that early solidarity seems to be getting weaker.
Yes, once it was ostensibly too late to prevent a huge economic hit and significant loss of human life. The European response was atrocious, let’s not rewrite history - Italy happened because no one took action. And while Italy was happening the rest of Europe was debating whether its a violation of Schengen to be closing borders. And then as Spain happened finally other countries started locking down. Yes, once they too could no longer pretend it wouldn’t be a problem for them.
If the same approach is taken with ice sheets then no country will care until they’ve lost a city or two. And no other country will care unless the ‘problem’ becomes obvious for them. And by then it will be FAR too late - a vaccine won’t exist to make seas levels fall again and undo all that damage.