Man, I’m so glad this global warming thing is leftist propaganda or I’d really be freaking out right now.
Luckily, we can choose to reject reality and believe whatever makes us feel better.
I feel best believing the biosphere is gonna force humanity to “find out” for the last century of fuckin around with a recklessly unplanned terraform.
Love how the collective of humanity needs to find out because the richest few fucked around.
But the rich are supplying a demand. And a ton of innovation wouldn’t be there without them.
My uber driver said that global warming is actually true but have literally nothing about human influence.
Some years ago these persons were saying that global warming was a hoax, now that only the human influence is a hoax.
I always hated that argument from people.
Even if they’re right — which we all know they are not — it wouldn’t matter. Climate change is going to devastate human life if we do nothing. If, somehow, the source of the warming wasn’t human-caused, we’d still need to find a way to counteract it. It’s not our fault doesn’t prevent it from being our problem.
“it has nothing to do with human influence”
“Ok, then let’s prepare for the inevitable, strengthen infrastructure, prepare for mass migrations, improve our crops to sustain bigger variances in weather, evacuate people from flood danger zones, ensure our supply chain doesn’t collapse, fund poor countries so they can survive better, etc. You know, prepare for the crisis”
:|
>:(
I had a guy tell me once that maybe climate change is just the Earth getting closer to the sun, and we should send an astronaut up to the Hubble telescope so they can look through it and measure the distance to the sun…
I’ve known this guy for over a decade, and it’s not that he’s stupid, he’s just completely ignorant about climate change and doesn’t put in any effort to learn about science.
Ahhh, yes. The conservative backpedalling.
It’s not happening. It’s happening but it’s all cyclical. It’s not cyclical this time but it’s not our fault. It’s our fault but global warming is good ackshually. Global warming is bad but there’s nothing we can do about it. We could do something about it but it’s too expensive/late. Maybe it’s not too expensive but THE CHINESE!
In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there’s nothing we can do.
Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it’s too late now.
Had a argument with a person on YouTube, he thought that increased CO2 in the atmosphere would be beneficial. It would help plants grow better!
Also that humans was not behind it.
It’s not a problem! And if it is, it’s not our fault. And even if it is, it was completely necessary.
There’s a lot of money pushing this idea. I live in a certain US state where an organization has been paying to have billboards up that push this idea for years now.
They might grow bigger, but I don’t think they grow better. Veritasium did a video about the increase in CO2 having an effect on plants.
It’s crazy how often I find this fitting: The Four Stage Strategy. At least it gives me a smile now and then.
I’ve found a clever way to counter those folks is to say, “you might be right, and as the apex species it’s our moral obligation to seize control and protect the natural order of things for as long as we are able to slow the coming of hell on earth. Just like our right to shoot guns. Yee haw.”
What I hear some acquaintances say is like “who cares, I’ll go to the beach, turn the AC on, what’s the big deal” .
As if the floods we had in Italy this year, or the wild fires, or the storms, or the draughts, or the Alps without snow, the glaciers disappeared, the sea turned green, the invasion of jellyfish weren’t connected.
Some people, most people, are just too fucking stupid.
To be fair, I think both sides blow it out of proportion and that can stifle discussion. It won’t be the “end of the world” where everyone will die, but we will have the “end of the world” as we know it.
I think one of the main points that need to be stressed to the kind of people in your example would be droughts.
Droughts will continue to get worse and will affect everyone. With a bad enough drought, we won’t be able to feed entire cities. And that’s when things really start to fall apart.
Yeah, people expect the earth to suddenly start cracking and spitting out hot lava or something.
No, it’s gonna be a slow, steady march towards the end, just as it always has been. Slow enough that we feel like we can put it off for another day.
Slow enough that one day we will look up from our phones, see the oceans of fire and shrug. Too late now, just switch on the AC and go back to scrolling.
As an example of this, the North America wildfires this year don’t really seem to be due to climate change… but people keep tying the ideas together.
The extreme weather swings and the droughts are bad enough. And it is guaranteed to get worse. No reason to stretch the truth.
If you don’t choose to believe in it, it can’t hurt you. That’s verified fact
I used to be subbed to /r/collapse. I see world news is covering that for me.
How long have they been recording? I assume there’s no records from all that long ago. Being as how humans, and measurement especially are a fairly new thing.
Per NASA, accurate global readings go back to 1880 and historical localized temperatures go back to the 1650s
Not much in the grand scheme of things. There was an ice age not that long ago. Nature does some funny shit.
Here is a graphic to help visualize the unprecedented rate of temp change. Data source for temperature is cited and likely errors are explained. https://xkcd.com/1732/
It’s actually worse than that. We are not in the predicted path, we are in one of the worst estimated predicted paths. Understandable as that comic was made in 2012.
But I have been recycling like they asked me too. Who’s not doing their part? Oh wait …
Recycling metals is good, especially aluminum. Recycling glass? Not bad. Recycling plastic? That is literally something the oil industry forced by having their resin codes look almost exactly like the recycling symbol. People understandingly confused the resin codes to mean it was recyclable and flooded recycling centers with plastic. So instead of throwing it in the garbage and telling people plastic is not recyclable, they did what they could to recycle it. Sorting and cleaning was a pain in the ass and made it not worth it…in the US. China was happy to accept it for a couple decades until a few years ago. Now most recycling centers only accept plastic with a reason code of 1 or 2. But people do not really check the number on the symbol. A lot of it is 5 which is not recyclable in the vast majority of places but people still toss that into recycling because they think it has the recycling symbol on it. So recycling centers have to sort that shit out and send it to the landfill. It is a massive waste of resources that the oil companies are fine with since people think they are doing their part.
Recycling in general though was not supposed to be a fix for climate change. While recycling things like aluminum is significantly more energy efficient than mining, the bigger issue there is the mine itself.
Recycling does not have any impact on climate change and was never suggested to have any impact on climate change
If we cure climate change tomorrow and do nothing about garbage/sustainability in packaging, we all still die - its just more disgusting.
Captain Planet focuses on the entirety of the environment, not just climate. That’s why he whooshes bulldozers into the air in the Amazon.
In general I feel like no one really takes a holistic view of this and everyone just points fingers. If indeed all the models are correct and human-produced CO2 is causing global warming, it’s not just “corporations” or “the rich” or just individuals, it’s the whole of the machine of humanity hacking away at the tree branch they’re sitting on, and we need to radically shift our energy production to eliminate greenhouse gas externalities, and ideally figure out, what’s it called, CO2 sequestration or whatever, to bring it back to normal.
And to the degree we can’t shift immediately, we shouldn’t just be burning fossil fuels towards ends we don’t even need, like dumb luxury goods or just driving in circles. It does come down to all of us as individuals - some of us have more power than others (yeah, more or less proportionally to wealth), but the buck has to stop somewhere.
Of course it is, but consumers generally don’t make the decisions about resource procurement and manufacturing. They only drive the demand. However, demand is also heavily shaped by both the cultural zeitgeist as well as marketing, which is in turn funded by corporations.
So in effect, it all comes down to corporations.
Well - corporations are funded by everyone, under the legal framework of the ostensibly democratic government, to which extent it’s not democratic, it’s at the mercy of the population choosing to continue perpetuating its existence. My point here is that the entire thing is just humanity working in a self-destructive way, and even when there are power imbalances in practice, real power - think of it like potential energy in physics - is truly democratic.
Which should be our government. But we’re too busy trying to prevent fascism and climate change denial as a whole to affect how much we’re doing about climate change.
We need bigger changes now. For instance, we need to take aggressive military action against anyone burning bunker fuel on the ocean, and that needs to happen soon.
We are so fucked. And this is only the beginning.
