Record low sea ice led to catastrophic breeding failure of emperor penguins

Unfortunately, if we successfully pause global warming via geoengineering, my bet is that'll give us the excuse to slow down or stop CO2 emission curtailment, and that way lies disaster as oceans acidify and food chains fall apart.

Which "humans" exactly? First they elect politicians for feel-good green promises, but then when time comes to actually pay the price of becoming "greener" they lose their shit like "I meant all _other_ people to make sacrifices for green future, not _me_!!!". For good examples see Gilets jaunes or recent German walkback from fossil fuel heating systems ban that was supposed to start from 2024.

In 2001, US stance on the Kyoto Protocol held sway, and its ratification might have supercharged global climate efforts / green technological advancements.

It's ironic that some skeptics label what amounts to broad scientific consensus as being part of a "death cult"; classic projection.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2001/mar/29/globalwa...

It's not all controlled by a single trillionaire.

You realise there's almost a 1:1 correlation between energy use and GDP?

We're not fundamentally reducing the amount of energy we're using, and there's nothing to suggest that we can seriously replace oil with other means. Think plastic etc.

We all worked together to boil an egg, so democracy can make a five-tier wedding cake no problem! It’s not that I believe we can’t solve the problem, it’s just a bad metaphor. And that we’ve collectively chosen to value our own comfort over our children and grandchildren.

https://youtu.be/zJdqJu-6ZPo?si=KG_etuletTl4SKgZ

To your point who will make what sacrifice, as that is what is needed but is it reasonable or realistic to expect this? Seem the best approach is we need some serious tech development and fast.

The vast majority of climate impact fits within 1) population, 2) power generation and 3) transportation. No.2 gets a bunch of focus, but 1) and 3) seem far less and sub issues that have little relative impact get far more attention.

People drop simple "we must do something" but it's so complex and I feel ultimately few humans want to make either the real sacrifice needed or investment in change so we're stuck in the middle and along for the ride.

It's not the people ignoring the issue. It's the people actively working against a solution.

Fair warning that he’s a bit of a lightning rod for controversy due in large part to his relatively centrist views on exactly these and similarly hot button issues.

Let's not understate this. The OP article is regarding a record low in 2022, but this year (2023) we've now also seen a sustained 5-sigma deviation in sea ice extent.

https://twitter.com/EliotJacobson/status/1674736887322533888

> alarmist and counterproductive

I think we ought have been alarmed long ago. Rhetoric of restrained caution hasn't really served us well.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/02/24/1082752...

A staggering loss that suggests the very fabric of North America’s ecosystem is unraveling. Cornell Lab director John Fitzpatrick and study coauthor Peter Marra

https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/bring-birds-back/

They simply follow the capitalistic imperative - optimize capital gains. We - the society - on the other hand, have no such imperative to follow and can’t even decide what we want. Some think the capitalism needs to restricted to ethical boundaries, others think the former are evil communists.

If people weren’t so echo-chambered and isolated to ideas different than their own, perhaps one day we could decide what our universal priorities and values as humanity are. Are they about maximizing capital, or preserving our planet and survival? Or maybe they are about something else.

But we can’t even begin to have a serious discussion about this with the overwhelming majority of people today. And that would be just the first step to change.

So I really think we are powerless to change how capitalism is dooming the planet. There are probably some people in the world capable of changing this - governments, presidents, kings, hedge fund managers, religious figures, and maybe some other leaders. I can’t make the needle move much even if I spend my life doing it. I’m just not in a position of power large enough to steer capitalism itself on a global scale.

There is no political solution. There’s no hope of any government taking any meaningful action. It’s all words and greenwashing. A substantial reduction in consumption for everyone? Blame companies all you like, but companies don’t sell what people aren’t buying. Consumers around the world aren’t going to scale back consumption by double digit percentages in less than a decade. They’ll revolt against anyone who tried to make them.

There’s no technical solution that can come on line fast enough. Renewable energy is just not going to scale up scale that fast. Especially not when governments are still subsidising fossil fuel, opening new coal mines, and coal power plants.

So what’s left? You can hope that the ‘worst case’ scenarios aren’t that bad, (and hope even harder that the scenarios the official reports deliberately omit the worst of the worst case scenarios, never happen). And even in the best case scenarios if we don’t reduce carbon emissions we’re going to see famine, pestilence and war. Maybe in the end war will accomplish what politics couldn’t. If we destroy enough of the world’s economies it might be enough to stop all the ice melting completely.

I think it's more accurate to say they have _some_ fault AND no choice, because the world was already there, they existence wouldn't change anything and there's nothing one can do to change it (i mean, ordinary people like us).

We have marketing, media, teachers, society, manipulating us since we were kids.

This is rhetorical sleight of hand. If "you" don't by them, literally nothing changes, because you constitute some insignificant portion of the market. What you mean is If millions of people didn't buy them, they wouldn't make them., but the parent is one person, not millions of people, and therefore their comment is entirely correct.

Here's a handy rule of thumb--if some problem is so intractable or of such a grand scale that you could devote every waking moment of your life to solving it without making a discernable impact, then it is so utterly beyond your control that you should not feel compelled to make non-trivial personal sacrifices when you know damn well that they are utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Vote, donate, and try to enjoy yourself. Or better yet, devote your time and emotional energy to a problem that's actually in your power to address in a meaningful way.

Both are actually the same thing; methods for emotionally dealing with the existential crisis on whose direction they cannot exert enough pressure to be observable.

From personal experience of when I went vegan for a year and rode a bike everywhere, people really don't want to hear it. I went out of my way not to talk about it unless people specifically asked me about it, and even then, they didn't want to hear it. Regardless of what you say when questioned, they either think you're sanctimonious and/or they will start associating their guilt and negative feelings with you. The end result is that you start getting frozen out. If you no longer eat meat, you stop getting invited to the BBQ, or the meal at the steakhouse, and when you stop getting invitations to these events, you stop getting invites to others because you're getting pushed further and further to the periphery. People are tribal and they don't want to feel bad about things they enjoy. It is far more likely that you will get kicked out of the tribe rather than the tribe changing it's behaviour to match yours.

Talking about the positives doesn't negate the negatives, and frankly looking on the bright side of climate change is like talking about how great the last dinner on the titantic was.

Unfortunately, nobody cares about good news. Sure, we all like good news but it doesn’t drive engagement so massive companies can’t profit off of it.

If you look for it, there is good news out there. Advancements in green energy (specifically solar) and battery tech is really encouraging, and there’s so much more happening to counter act climate change. But climate change being a hoax is still something a large portion of the world’s political parties still ideologically tie themselves to. Until it get much worse, they will continue to claw to that lie. And as long as that lie continues, we’ll need stories like this.

"According to a major scientific review, global insect populations are hurtling towards exctinction, threatening a "catastrophic collapse of nature's ecosystems". The research found that 41 percent of the world's insect populations are declining while a third are endangered. The extinction rate of insects is eight times faster than mammals, birds and reptiles and there are suggestions that they could totally vanish within a century." [0]

[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/16960/percentage-decline-in-s...

The recovery stopped last year, and we're heading into El Nino conditions which will probably cause another mass bleaching:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/09/recovery...

Pick the country most hostile towards capitalism/shareholders, and you’ll still be looking at a polluter and contributor to climate change.

The cartoon could just as easily be rewritten to “for a beautiful moment in time we let people have lots of autonomy in how they wanted to live”.

Who are “we”? And what exactly are you asking “us” to do?

In Star Trek, they can do away with money primarily because the invention of the replicator (and other tech) taking care of the basic needs of society, which lessens the need for competition between people. If you've got robots that can clean sewers and a machine that can print food from thin air, you no longer need a complex system of competition to allocate who is doing the shit jobs and who is eating the shit food. We're currently all still chimpanzees fighting each other to the death, we've just abstracted the violence away to such an extent that you don't see it anymore. The losers are still dying in droves, but they're dying to stuff like overdoses, homelessness, or not being able to access the doctors and healthcare their wealthy counterparts can.

In my opinion, short of inventing the replicator, the absolute best thing we can do as a species is to get a mass produced humanoid robot that can be controlled via VR built as soon as possible. We then get people doing undesirable jobs to control the robots and train an AI until it gets to the point where it can do the job without a human on the other end. Not only do we free up all those people from doing shit jobs, we can retrain them to work on other pressing problems, like curing diseases or even one day far in the future, building a replicator.

Here’s a better chart:

https://www.climate.gov/media/15124

Certainly recent correction but an upwards trend since 1979 (when satellite data started) and a recent large spine up followed by a more recent large spine down.

There are many potential inputs to thus. Man made climate change is possibly one but not a dominate one probably.

There are many variables. And when a few things come together there are rare but large variations. Articles like this are just climate hysteria for climate doomers. So much of this has been politicized that people don’t even realize they’re reading propaganda.

Yes the climate was warmed a bit over the last 40 years after decades of cooling which was preceded by a warming period. The 1930s were the warmest of the 20th century and then we saw decades of cooling.

And yes carbon likely plays a role as we can model an atmosphere and see this. But it’s probably not as significant as the hundreds of other natural variables. Besides for every degree of warming in a lab you need exponentially more carbon. So it’s difficult to accelerate.

Slowly move towards non-carbon energy over the next 50 years. We’ll be fine.