The Climate Crisis Is Worse Than You Can Imagine. Here’s What Happens If You Try

It annoys me to no end that with the current environmental catastrophes, almost nobody approaches this with a quantitative engineering mindset, especially the ones who care most: Progressives (of which I consider myself one).

It‘s mindblowing how I can‘t buy a plastic wrapped cucumber in the organic shop even though it reduces waste from damage by 30%.

In a country where we recycle or cleanly incinerate 99% of plastic.

When 70% of the oceans‘ plastic comes from 4 rivers, none of them in Europe.

And they feel great about it, as if they‘re actually doing something.

Repeat after me: Large scale change will not come from individualized action. It just doesn‘t scale. The only working solution is to make the ecological choice economical.

The first way is the Elon Musk way. Just make the alternative better than the original. Best, but needs an extremely long breath with flawless vision and execution.

The second is large scale regulation. As much as I hate a lot about the EU bureaucracy, they did exactly the right things with incandescent lamps. Flat out banned them over a period of 10 years.

The same people who whined in the beginning about how mean the state is towards their free choice are now sitting in LED illuminated rooms with lower watts, better long life and almost equal CRI. All catalyzed by a removal of alternatives on the horizon.

I believe the just started CO2 tax can do the same.

It isn't possible to look into the future and see a good material result. Literally everyone dies.

On the other hand, the northern tier of US states become more habitable. We get an ice-free Northwest Passage.

We don't feel temperature as global averages over a year, we feel heatwaves of maybe days over 45ºC, hailstorms, hurricanes, droughts and massive loss of crops. Our cities won't go because a slow and steady, centimeter by centimeter rise of the sea level, will get ocassionally flooded by each time more frequent storms, till we decide that we should abandon them. An that won't happen evenly on all the world.

Regarding the "slow" rise of greenhouse gases, it happens orders above of what a person, or an organized and large enough group of persons can revert, the industries add really big amount of CO2 and methane to the atmosphere each year. But that slow rise gets jumps, not because what we do, but because triggering possitive feedback loop processes, like each time more frequent forest fires, loss of ice reflecting sunlight, and warming polar regions (that have a lot of frozen greenhouse gases, that are getting released in massive scale by now). And some of those positive feedback mechanisms will work by us, when most of us must take measures against the effects of extreme weather, like everyone having air conditioners and turned on most of the time.

Personal action won't make a difference, at least directly on global climate, the only thing at a large enough scale that could do something to slow down the trend are the big industries, and they won't do anything to affect their profits till is too late already. And regarding governments, the last 5 years already showed us that matter for most of them are profits and short term results too.

Maybe the Great Filter is already with us since we invented money, all that came after till this point just took the path of least resistance.

Is there any website, that explicitly lists the consequences that will punch me in the face?

The one good thing if civilization does collapse, is that doesn't necessarily mean the end of humanity. It just means thousands to hundreds of thousands of years to get back to normal temperature wise. In that time frame I'm sure we will evolve to handle those tempatures, but of course not without all the tradedgy and loss of life.

> Climate change is literally destroying the planet. According to the Trump admin's National Climate Assessment, with no action, climate change will result in 10% GDP loss by 2090.

That 10% figure is on the high end (see: https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/how-much-will-the-green-ne..., under the heading "10% of GDP?). But even taking it at face value, it's irreconcilable with Markey's assertion about "literally destroying the planet" or the article's claim of "apocalypse." It's like two completely opposite thoughts in the same tweet, and I can't decide whether Markey is crazy or I am.

What is an apocalypse? The year my dad was born in Bangladesh, the under 5 mortality rate was about 1 in 3 children. That wasn't great, but it still wasn't "apocalypse." Will climate change be that bad? I don't think that's what the science says, but am I missing something?

I’ve been part of this community for something like ten years and I know many people on here to be extremely shrewd and intelligent, and yet, over and over again, I see people who don’t understand the scale of climate change at all, nor the scale of the opportunity involved in transitioning the world’s energy and infrastructure away from burning carbon.

Is Peter Kalmus a little eccentric? Sure. But who’s crazier — him, or the vast majority of the Hacker News community who just completely shrug off climate change and the opportunity represented by the transition, even now that there are several clean energy billionaires?

> You need to commit, perhaps even create drama, and make real changes in your life.

Right, create drama like saying billions of deaths, civilization collapse and nuclear war is imminent?

> Zane, the younger one, started doing his own regular, Greta Thunberg-style climate strikes in front of city hall. Braird, the older, meanwhile, was entering his teens, differentiating and waxing nihilistic. When asked what he wanted to do with his future, Braird said, “What future?” When asked what he thought about climate change, he sunk a dagger into his father’s heart like only a child can. Braird said, “I don’t really think about it.”

This part is just sad, terrifying his own kids to death.

This is not science. It's religion. Enough doomsday predictions have come and gone for me to be a heretic. People like this make me proud to wear the label.

Besides that, beyond his (outdoor toilet & food) masochism he is a massive hypocrite like EVERY SINGLE person that publicly whines about climate change: Unibody macbook, car, christmas lights, another macbook, iPhone, wait a second... is this a god damn amazon box in the background? Yes it is! So anyways, unless you don't have children, stop pretending you really care about bobcats and your climate footprint.

We should only ever be saying "Global Climate Disruption".

I am estimating a 50% chance of global civilization collapse by 2030.

It starts with crop failure in tropical and subtropical countries. Fishery collapse, as coral reefs are wiped out by bleaching and acidification, slashes access to protein. Famine drives mass refugee migration across borders.

Rich, temperate countries panic at the influx and allow fascists into power (as has already happened in Brazil, Hungary, the Philippines, Turkey, India and Russia, and is only forestalled in the US, Italy, France, and Germany; pace China and the former SSRs).

Fascists in power will (as they do) start wars, disrupting trade, generating economic crises, and more wars spiraling out of control, and ultimately nuclear exchange.

A big part of the problem is actually refrigerants; HFCs currently in use, if vented, force as much heating as all the CO2 already in the atmosphere. We could remove CO2, in principle, but not the HFCs.

You might suggest 2030 is too soon, and 2040 more likely. I hope so, but it doesn't make that much difference, really. If we don't act like 2030 is the deadline, we will hit one soon enough.