“the aggregate thermodynamics of what is happening [...] is staggering”
twitter.com
twitter.com
"I’ve never been more depressed looking at graphs. This year has already entered uncharted territory in many key respects, and the upcoming El Niño will only make matters worse. We’re not ready for what’s coming."
https://twitter.com/LeonardLanglois/status/16679668377310167...
Wish these people could get a grip on themselves. Living in a constant state of depression because you’re scared of the future climate is the definition of putting the cart before the horse.
Don’t ricochet me with downvotes, I’m simply trying to answer that particular question.
We’re so incomprehensibly blessed to be able to experience this momentary oasis of beauty, but people will ignore it all in favor of mentally fast forwarding themselves into a state of imaginative terror.
That’s not to say disregard the environment entirely, but rather: cherish every moment you have with it, do what you can to help where you can (mainly: dramatically reduce consumption), and encourage others to do the same.
Who is ignoring anything? The terror comes from the contrast between one's keen personal awareness of the precious and fragile nature of this "oasis of beauty", and the systematically reckless, violent disregard humanity as a whole shows toward it.
People aren't depressed about something which could potentially happen about some point in the future, people are depressed about something that is actively happening right now - and only getting worse.
No one’s going to be around forever, might as well enjoy it while you’re here. Being depressed benefits nobody, least of all the environment.
The fantasy of not being worried only exists in cities I think and it’s totally divorced from what’s happening in food production. Ask any farmer in southern Europe if they’re worried they’ll tell you they were worried 10 years ago.
Fortunately, I have David Roberts' Volts podcast talking me off the ledge. He covers many of the efforts to build our fossil fuel free economy. Most are super clever. Cat nip for hackers. Highest recommendation.
That’s an impressively eloquent caricaturization of the neurosis. Being able to state it so plainly leaves me to wonder if you’re being facetious about the whole thing.
> Panic in social psychology is considered infectious since it can spread to a multitude of people and those affected are expected to act irrationally as a consequence.
Indeed.
To clarify, I think you're saying fear of reprisal is why we haven't seen intentional climate engineering. I don't think you're saying it's immoral or a bad idea.
It could be a bad idea, of course. It could also be the only solution that's fast enough. And not doing anything is also a bad idea. But not doing anything is at least legally uncomplicated.
Though I have heard of one geo-engineering experiment: seeding a piece of ocean with iron or iron oxide, which caused an algae bloom, which caused a spike in the number of salmon in the area. The idea is that the algae bloom absorbs a lot of CO2. But the person behind it didn't have any permission for this experiment and was widely criticised for being irresponsible. I hope scientists paid attention to the results, though.
It is immoral and and a bad idea. We can get to carbon targets to solve this issue instead like scientists dedicated to this problem have been consistently saying for decades, but the USA's wealth derives from oil and excessive driving. So we are lied to and told that it isn't feasible.
What do you tell them?
All of these are signs that climate change is getting worse and worse. And stuff is likely to get worse in the coming years. And if we don't do anything to dramatically reduce CO2 emissions, it's going to get even worse after that.
We do have the ability to turn this around, but we clearly lack the political will to do so. And the longer we wait, the worse it will get.
The graphs themselves do an excellent job of providing the relevant context — they show decades of previous context, with the current year highlighted. The context of the past decades is literally the point of how the graphs were designed. The titles on the graphs also further describe the context - "..temperature anomaly", "...ice extent anomaly".
The consequences of burning eons worth of stored hydrocarbons in a few decades are upon us. But attitudes like this are literally part of the problem.
We probably should readjust what we consider normal to something veering further from the past years average and prepare for more extreme scenarios.
Also we probably should keep working on managing our emission of greenhouse gas to avoid things getting even worse.
As an aside, I don’t get all the people loudly expressing being depressed about the graphs and whatever. This is in line with predictions. People knew that was going to happen. It’s pretty useless to bemoan things which are unavoidable.
Humans aren't robots. We don't just have feelings connected to surprising events, but also to unsurprising ones. Why should people not have feelings on this topic?
You can say that feelings are useless in reaching a specific goal, but that is not what you initially said.
One tweet said he wasn't so much depressed about this happening, but about people doing nothing to stop it.
We've known this for over century, have had political debates about it for 3 decades, have made agreements to reduce our carbon emissions, but our carbon output keeps growing, and temperatures keep rising, and new coal power plants keep getting built.
We should have banned coal and oil power plants 2 decades ago. We should be investing only in emission-free power plants. We should have made fossil fuels too expensive to use for any purpose for which there are viable alternatives. We haven't done those things, and we're not going to do them any time soon, so these graphs will continue to get even worse in the future. That's what's depressing.
We're seeing changes right now, are we not? People's lives are being impacted right now, are they not?
Seems to me like those who said "we'll start seeing significant changes in 1-2 decades" around 2 decades ago were right on the money.