Am I the only one who is stunned that there appears to be a climate catastrophe happening with virtually no reaction from the general population?
The information war rages on both sides. But the fact remains that too much doomerism without any clear way for an individual to make a difference and politicians carrying on like normal leads to apathy. Our movies and TV are already saturated with barren hellscapes. Why confront the actual reality when you feel powerless to stop it, and doing anything necessarily means austerity?
This recent version of climate doomerism lacks all practicality and provides no solutions other than total tyranny of the state over the individual, for your own good, of course. It appears to me that the movement has been fully captured by politicians who are no longer interested in actual science or engineering of solutions.
Personally, I checked out about a year ago. As I suspect the people pushing this message the hardest don't actually want to work with me to improve the future, they just want to control my purchasing decisions.
We can't say "everyone has the freedom to pollute as much as they want" and get through this.
From here you could address the wage issues that cause this amount of shipping to occur in the first place. You could make the fleet more efficient and use newer technologies and fuels that pollute less. You could simply incorporate the cost of that pollution into the "cheap" consumer products so conveyed through one of any of a dozen means. You could do all of these at once.
So, my point would be, where is the prioritization here? It seems like corporate profits come first, then environmentalism entirely at the consumers expense comes next, mostly to make the corporations feel better about their blood money. And.. I'm supposed to be on board with this because of "sustainability?"
I'm on board. The issues do actually need to be addressed. I don't believe we are currently doing that in any meaningful way.
For example, living in a suburban house with multiple trucks/SUVs and driving a lot is seen as part of a lifestyle that borders on essential. Suggesting that people can drive smaller, more efficient vehicles will receive such vitriol in so many parts of society. Suggesting that cars should pay for their road use will get people attacking you in online forums. Even the right-leaning Tax Foundation believes that drivers pay for about half of their road costs - and they don't account for things like pollution [1]. Drivers will say that their gas taxes, tolls, and registration fees fund the roads they use, but that really isn't the case. When we map out carbon emissions, cities do very well and suburbs often use 2-3x more than cities [2].
It's not just a campaign against science and facts. It's also a campaign that pushes a narrative that many of the things that pollute are what you should desire in life. You should want a big grass lawn. You should want a large vehicle that can fit 5-10x more than you normally carry on a given day.
I think it's also tough because many of the things we need in order to combat climate change will require an amount of change that can cause resistance. Taking space away from cars for bike or bus lanes means that if you made the choice to live in a car-dependent area, you can find your commute getting slightly worse. It's usually not as bad as drivers fear because more efficient transit options often divert a lot of people who would end up as traffic with the drivers, but it does make things slightly worse. Housing is the biggest investment in most households and two-thirds of Americans own their homes - higher in car-dependent areas. Telling such a large group of people that they made a slightly worse choice is hard. Even if their investment is secure, it might not be as positive as they had assumed.
Right now in Arizona, there are huge water issues in communities that haven't secured long-term water resources. People bought houses, invested their money, and they want the government to ensure their investment is prosperous - which means having access to affordable, abundant water. They don't want to be told that they shouldn't have built outside of the Scottsdale municipal boundaries and that there was a reason the land was cheap there. Likewise, suburban owners don't want to be told that their location isn't as sustainable and that in order to ensure life on the planet we'll need to wean them off of parts of their lifestyle (which will become more expensive compared to urban dwellers).
It's hard to change how people think about their world and their position in it. So many people think of cities as "that's now how I live." We've spent the better part of a century painting a picture of what prosperity means that is now running into the reality of climate change. It's not just the campaign against science. It's also about how we've shaped what people think of as good and desirable; what they see as their lifestyle and even what they see as essential. There are lots of suburban Democrats who believe in climate change, want the government to address it, but will balk at the idea of driving less, increasing housing density, or living in a slightly smaller home that doesn't require as much fuel. They'd rather talk about giving up straws while their cars put out way more micro plastics from their tires. They want to find the things that they can "sacrifice" without major lifestyle changes.
The campaign against science is important. I think the social perception of what defines prosperity and a good lifestyle is also important. It's been shaped by decades of policy and media and it can be hard to combat even when you're in a circle of people who believe in climate change.
Which is why I'm not optimistic about being able to stop catastrophic climate change at this point. The vast majority of people aren't willing to make the sacrifices required - in fact many of them sneer at the whole idea of making sacrifices. The hyper-individualism in the US and elsewhere doesn't allow us to think about changing our behavior for the greater good.
I live in a liberal area. Hardly any Trump voters here. Getting people to drive slightly less or even allowing a bike lane to allow other people to drive slightly less is viewed as the apocalypse.
What's happened that you expect the general population to care about? It's hotter, a couple more storms or fires but not too many more.... You call it a catastrophe but the effect on the average persons like in this country is little to nothing.
There are enough extreme events happening now, however, that it won’t be long before everyone, everywhere, has either been directly affected by or knows someone who has been directly affected by an extreme weather event. This kind of rapid change could be the best hope we have for remedying the situation, as rather than being frogs in slowly warming water, we will find ourselves thrown directly into the skillet.
https://calmatters.org/economy/2023/06/california-home-insur...
Sure, climate change is happening and it's making the hot years hotter, but pointing at this year as "the disastrous consequences of climate change" feels like trying to have your cake and eat it too.
Maybe. I would say it's more dismay.
The unfortunate truth is that a wide-reaching and long-lasting catastrophe is probably the only thing that will activate enough people's collectivist instinct to demand change. Sriracha shortages won't wake people up, but widespread monthslong food shortages will. Power outages for a few weeks in a few counties in Florida, USA won't wake people up. A hurricane that causes monthslong power outages for 50 million people in the southeast USA will.
The young ones obviously have a much stronger sense of this collectivism, but even then, they are stuck in the coerced-work-to-survive loop that isn't easily escapable without major system failures.
electric cars are still cars recycling means you don’t change consumption at all carbon capture means you continue to emit.
Humans don’t seem capable of change
Remember, a convincing argument to these people was a Senator bringing a snowball onto the senate floor and claiming climate change can't be real because it still snows in DC. They do not give a fuck about the facts, they aren't stupid, they just don't care and think they will be able to survive, and they will enforce that belief by continuing to push for an insular US that shuts out the rest of the world and will likely have to start firing on desperate climate asylum seekers after about 30 years and eventually even that won't prevent the US from suffering under climate change so they will have to find scapegoats to blame the suffering on as things just continue to suck.
Most of them just DGAF because they are 80 years old and won't see any of the repercussions so they are happy to borrow value from the future to enrich themselves in the now. Even plenty of the Democrats don't seem to care to do anything because they'll be dead by then. Fuck, Feinstein refuses to vacate her seat seemingly because she needs the damn health insurance, which is probably the closest to being a normal american she has ever been.
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6313629464112
https://www.foxnews.com/science/climate-alarmism-robbing-stu...
Well, that'll be your problem right there
Right now, a majority faction of the people with power stand to benefit from starting a climate catastrophe[1], so we're getting a climate catastrophe.
[1] Or stand to lose from trying to stop one.
I also have a growing anxiety of how bad it'll be in 5-10 years (refugee crises, humans/countries becoming more selfish and isolationist, so the rise of tribalism (and great, I don't look like a native of where I live), countries growing desperate for food/water resorting to use their military, leading to resource wars).
There are still technical arrows in our quiver that could save us, but none of them matter if major political parties decide to prevent us from using them. So the real answer is: vote.
This isn't a 'party' problem - this is what the public wants.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/21/us/offshore-wind-delays-infla... [2] https://www.seia.org/sites/default/files/2019-12/SEIA-Sectio...
I have a feeling that most people have no idea what it means - they don't have the science background to make any sense of it. 101.1 degrees at the surface would be bad enough, but this is 5 feet down. That seems pretty catastrophic.
We are reacting. I'm not having kids. That's my reaction. I wouldn't want to be born into a crumbling civilization so I won't put someone else in that situation.
Beyond that I'm living my life to the best of my ability, trying to make the most of my time here.
Can't really do much else, just grabbing some popcorn and watching it burn I guess.
Temperature always tries to diffuse, increasing entropy in the process. So if there is an especially hot body of water due to climate change it means that water had to be in contact with air of higher temperature. And the water is currently hitting temps above the air temperature for the area. Key largo for example has highs in the 88-90 range this week. Heat index is much hotter because of the humidity, but that isn't relevant for heat transfer into the ocean from the air.
I get water is warmer on average because of global warming. So I get any hot spots will be hotter on average in a warmer world. I just don't get how water is ending up hotter then the air.
Is there some geothermal source we haven't identified?
Edit: So a number of responses have brought up solar heating, often in very dismissive ways. I'm certainly aware of solar heating of water, but the solar heating is the part of the equation that isn't changing. So yes, solar heating can make water hotter then the air, but I wouldn't expect the offset to be changed with or without global warming. Meaning that the delta between the normal ocean temp and this anomaly shouldn't be larger then the delta between normal air temp and the current air temp.
What I should have made more clear in my comment was that I didn't understand how a heat surge above air temperatures could be attributed to a atmospheric heat source such as GHGs.
In general though, the ocean is _vast_ and stores a lot of heat, and changes temperature slower than the air does. When it's cold outside, the ocean radiates heat to warm the air and vice versa.
A lot of light passes through the atmosphere and that energy is absorbed and reflected by the solid and liquid surfaces below the atmosphere (the amount absorbed or reflected depending on albedo and other properties of the material). The energy heating the ground or the ocean does not all come from the atmosphere itself (though certainly some does).
Furthermore, an increased level of dissolved CO2 in the water is increasing its susceptibility to warming.
And then you have greenhouse gases, which are good at trapping in heat once it's entered the atmosphere. The ocean has the capacity to absorb this heat while it's trapped.
I think it's going to keep carrying on like this for a while until people start rioting and destroying the capitalist institutions that have been hiding and dismissing our problems for decades.
Which is exactly what it was supposed to do, to get people to consume less. However, a significant proportion of Washington residents are clamoring for their leaders to now reduce the carbon tax.
Everybody is “green” until sacrifices get put on the table.
Queue videos of crying mothers not being able to drive the truck to the store and feed their children.
You would think we're proposing a second Holocaust from the reaction. Insane. Accusations that we're trying to round everyone up so we can send them to Trump's camps, to wipe out everyone over 50, etc.
We're fucked. I don't pay attention to this stuff anymore, I've done what I can.