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I'm frustrated and anxious about all this stuff too. Sometimes it feels out of control.

I think it is worth noting we tend to assume bigger negative consequences of behavior when that behavior is perceived as a moral violation [1].

A lot of people are frustrated that humanity is doing the "wrong" thing on climate change. I think that leads us to feel like some apocalypse must be imminent, almost like we are due for a karmic punishment from the desecrated and offended Earth.

It's scary that the planet is warming rapidly, especially with the consequences of that remaining largely unknown. But I think there's still plenty of hope that the 21st century will be at least relatively good for humanity.

I don't want to tell anyone how to feel. We are in a tough situation. If you are panicking and feel like the end is nigh, I think it's good to give yourself permission to calm down. We'll need calm to make it through, especially at the unfortunate times when we just have to wait it out because there's no immediate practical way to make things better.

[1] https://online.ucpress.edu/collabra/article/9/1/74793/196122...

> The odds of the human species successful navigation of this extinction - at a civilization level - event is almost zero.

In that case, you should have no problem accepting this deal. I'll give you $10 right now. In exchange, you'll give me half of your net worth in 100 years (assume both of us will somehow be alive if civilization survives).

Humans are sub-Saharan tropical apes that somehow made it to every major landmass and climate zone in the world on stone age technology. As a species we'll be fine. Agriculture is only about 4% of the world's economic output, which gives us a lot of headroom. If it comes down it it, we triple that and probably feed the world off entirely off hydroponics in Canada and Russia.

> We had to reduce emissions 30 years ago, and simply chose not to

Greenhouse gas emissions have been rising to fuel growth that allows billions of people to achieve a quality of life that we would consider basic. Meanwhile, America's greenhouse gas emissions are below what they were 30 years ago. On a per-capita basis, they are over 25% lower.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states

> we'd have to create a coordinated global Manhattan Project around alternative energy

Solar energy has been exponentially growing for over a decade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics

> The US currently has the stupidest president it has ever had

Sure, but even Trump turns into TACO when the situation calls for it.

> I get downvoted for saying this,

You will if you open like this.

I get shunned by the tribe for saying this, but at this point you just have to make peace with very bad winters. We will all freeze, and sometimes there is nothing you can do to prevent the ice spirits. To save the tribe, more people have to be willing to hunt the great beasts than currently are.

The pure spirits of the situation are staggering. The cold breath of the ice demons is endless. The expanse of frozen wasteland is endless. We are completely cursed.

Everything the elders have told you about warmer lands or pretending we can continue following the old herds is a lie. Fire-keeping rituals, cave paintings for good luck, offering bones to sky spirits - it is all worthless. We had to migrate south 30 seasons ago, and the tribe leaders simply chose not to.

The idea we can preserve our way of life through better spear-making is laughably false. At this point, every large tribe on the tundra would have to simultaneously share their hunting grounds, we’d have to create a coordinated great alliance around mammoth hunting, and another great alliance around fire-keeping (while not angering the flame spirits into abandoning us). The tribe currently has the most foolish shaman it has ever had, surrounded by warriors that do not care about the starving and act on base dominance over the best hunting spots. The clans are at war. The young hunters are greedily and actively making this worse by overhunting the remaining herds and hoarding flint. The odds of our people’s successful survival of this great freezing - at a tribal level - catastrophe is almost zero.

You can mock this, but the data doesn't care what either of us think.

Current Mediterranean water temps are +6C above normal, as observed over peak human civilization in the 20th century. That is 6kWh per cubic meter, in just the Mediterranean. The article briefly mentions this extending 30m down.

To give the order of magnitude of the energy involved, the Mediterranean surface area is 2,500,000,000,000 sq m. At 6kWh cu m and 18m deep, that is the energy equivalent of about 390,000 megatons. Or about 8,000 Tsar Bombas. The Mediterranean is small, about 0.7% of ocean surface area.

I still have no clue at all how much a Tsar Bomba is in the context of the climate.

1 Tsar Bomba (50 MT = 2e17J) is about 1/28,000,000 of the total solar power delivered to Earth annually, so about 1.4 seconds of top-of-atmosphere solar power (~1.5 million PWh / year).

On the other hand, it roughly equals 1/2000 to 1/3000 of annual global energy consumption (~175 PWh / year) so about 4 hours of human energy.

The energy of those 8000 Tsar Bombas in the Mediterranean then is the same as all of human energy, electrical and fossil and otherwise, going to heating up that sea for a little over 2 years straight, or focussing all sunlight over the disc of the Earth on it for 3 hours.

(All these figures depend on who you ask as all the figures are a little bit fuzzy).

It also shows that any key to climate change revolves around adjusting the modulation of insolation and/or retention - the actual energy used by humans is, for the forseeable future, completely irrelevant except on local scales like warm water outflows into rivers and seas.

Plants and any organisms in photosynthesis-dependent food chains may have issues with modifying the degree of insolation.

Also, again, the Mediterranian is 1/100-1/200th of global ocean surface area. And we have melted a lot of ice cap/glacier mass. The latent heat of fusion of water is very large, also.

Long term, insolation and retention are important, but short term we are reaching the limits of the "Free Ride" portion of climate change where energy sinks absorb the additional delta created by the CO2 induced greenhouse effect.

edit: the tsar bomba was to try to make it tangible, as people don't understand these orders of magnitudes well.

The point is not that "we're not fucked" (we probably are pretty fucked). Just that Tsar Bomba yield, like basically any amount of energy directly generated by human endeavour, is a pretty irrelevant unit of energy when talking about the climate because they are on a completely different scale.

270Trillion kWh is about 1.5 × the total energy from the sun that hits the earth in one hour. I'm not sure if that helps, and the trillion-kilo is kinda gross.

50 megatons is more on the order of 270 trillion kilojoules, not kilowatt-hours (factor of 3600 difference).

Do you truly think that drastically changing the composition of the atmosphere in less than 150 years won't have dramatic effects on heating/cooling?

The CO2 PPM in the atmosphere has ~doubled since the industrial revolution.

I think you completely missed the point of my comment.

Yes it will have drastic and catastrophic effects. We are in a very bad position.

But to say that humanity is doomed and we should throw in the towel is so fucking stupid that I had to parody it.

I took the GP comment and rewrote it from the perspective of someone in the Ice Age.

Humanity has to find solutions and we will persevere.