I have just read this entire thread and I have two observations.
1 the “tumble” discussion is unbelievably ironic as the whole public climate discussion has for years been a case of mass distraction IMO.
2 The other central discussion is dominated by someone , clearly a skeptic, and repeatably described as a troll, and although the basic assumptions taken are just factually wrong the context of the consequences discussed are more insightful that the rebuttals.
So currently the power and money is dominated by industries that do not want to change and they frustrate attempts to create meaningful global change. What change has occurred has been when money and power wish that change. Political courage will be needed to make things happen with any sort of urgency IMO
Meanwhile, in southern Poland, I think we had one of the coldest springs lately, and only several really hot days of summer so far.
Right now we have barely 22 - 23C here. I’m not complaining in general, but I wouldn’t mind temperatures ~5 degrees higher and more sun.
I’m absolutely not denying those changes, quite the contrary. It’s just another anomaly that our winters became a lot warmer and summers colder (not always though). It looks like we’re losing seasons completely. I remember winters here where we had snow for 2 or even 3 months, while now I’m not sure if we had at least 2 weeks of snow last “winter”.
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This is the second time in a week someone has used “tumble” to mean “occur rapidly” instead of “fall”. Is this a new colloquialism or had"tumble" always had a second definition as “occur rapidly”?
If a condition is worsening (a “fall”) “tumble” applies just fine. Indeed, “tumble” is just a way to say “falling rapidly” in this context.
The reason “tumble” (and its notion of “fall”) is applicable is because the situation is worsening. If it was rapidly improving, nobody would say “tumble”; it’s not simply that it is occurring rapidly.
In this case, one could assume tumbling is related to the temperature and not the situation, leading to an observation that the situation is improving. It is a poor choice of words for this headline.
No, as I realized and clarified in a comment of mine down this thread a bit,
Climate records tumble,
Here, “climate records” is the object of the verb “tumble”. That is, the thing that is “tumbling” are “climate records”.
I agree it’s a poor choice of wording for a headline but it is clear what is doing the tumbling on subsequent reads.
Taking a tumble referring to something that is worsening is another common definition that I’ve read countless times in reference to something problematically decreasing, I’ve never heard or read “tumble” used until very recently to describe a situation in which something is rising. Have you?
“falling rapidly” would make perfect sense in many other situations. “Food storage tumbles, democracy tumbles, winter temperatures tumble”, etc. But nothing is falling, all of the temperature records are rising.
Summer temperatures are so high they tumble?
This is a genuine grammatical question. I’m not trying to detract from your answer or the article itself.
I’m just very confused by this usage of the word “tumble” that I’ve seen at least twice now to refer to rising temperatures.
But nothing is falling, all of the temperature records are rising.
I see what you’re saying. I had taken the use to mean the situation is tumbling, not the temperatures. But upon a closer reading (of the title specifically) it seems a more reasonable interpretation of the word tumble is:
Climate records tumble,
The object of the verb ‘tumble’ is “climate records”. That is, the climate records are tumbling. A tumbling record is one which has fallen over and been surpassed. So what they’re saying by using the word “tumble” is: previous climate records have fallen over and been surpassed.
I do agree it’s a weird word choice, but I don’t think it’s wrong or even playing on a potential uncommon secondary definition. It’s not saying temperatures have tumbled, but rather records have tumbled.
The 1% truly think they are going to sit it out underground in their billion dollar bolt-holes/bunkers. It’s like thinking you’ll survive the tsunami by standing on a chair.
They will probably mostly survive. But then they’ll realise that all productive and smart people are dead and their money is worthless in the new world.
I honestly don’t think they’ve really thought that far ahead.
They know they’ll be better off than everyone else and I guess that’s enough.
There are actually quite a few places where they buy bunkers - but with luxury and stuff. it’s also marketed as a way of safe spot to retreat when the surface goes bad.
obviously, it’s rather a big ,“we found a way to make money out of rich peoples fears and doubts” rather than actual security measures. if things really go bad, how are they going to know, that their security guards aren’t going to ditch them? and if they isolate, then they cannot sustain their lifestyle in a bunker with bunker food.
more like the 0.01%, but it’s completely doable. lots of military science to back it up.
Does this mean we’re all going to die? Like humanity will be gone without a trace? If so, how soon?
These measurements were only genuinely started within the last hundred years, and people have been prophesying the end of the world the entire way. Greta posted a now-deleted tweet that said we’d all be toast in three years…back in 2018, for example. Climate changes, sure. But who is to say this isn’t natural and we may go back down in the future? These CO2 greenhouse gases that are said to be smothering the planet are estimated to be deadly at around 15% iirc. The atmosphere contains a fraction of a fraction of a percent of these. So while I definitely advocate stewardship of our environment, I sincerely doubt climate change will be what does us in and the people hyping it up are often doing so with intent separate from making the environment better. The climate change religion is easy to lean on because it’s been so widely propagated.
While there has been significant exaggeration and sensationalization of the timeline of climate change and its downstream effects, to wholly dismiss it due to that is assinine. You’d have to be a fool to have a shred of a belief that the current trends we are seeing are not driven by mankind.
No; at least, that’s unlikely. But parts of the world that are currently habitable will be made inhabitable, and biodiversity will continue to fall. We’ll likely see more extreme weather events, increased migration from areas that are too hot or underwater, and issues with global food supply. Coral reefs may completely disappear.
However, progress is being made, and while it’s not as quick as we’d like, carbon emissions for modern economies like the US and EU are on a downward curve. In 2021 EU’s carbon emissions were back to pre-1967 levels, while the US’s carbon emissions were back to pre-1979 levels (Source). So there’s cause for hope; the worst thing we can do is give up. Everything we do now lessens the scale of the problem in future.
Does this mean we’re all going to die?
No; at least, that’s unlikely.
Well that “unlikely” there merits some debate I would say. Yes there is reason for cautious optimism, but there is also the very real possibility of climate change becoming an extinction level event for humanity, specifically by a cascade of tipping points through several globally relevant climate systems being triggered. The damages that will be caused just by optimistic projections of warming are not well understood either:
Even without considering worst-case climate responses, the current trajectory puts the world on track for a temperature rise between 2.1 °C and 3.9 °C by 2100 (11). If all 2030 nationally determined contributions are fully implemented, warming of 2.4 °C (1.9 °C to 3.0 °C) is expected by 2100. Meeting all long-term pledges and targets could reduce this to 2.1 °C (1.7 °C to 2.6 °C) (12). Even these optimistic assumptions lead to dangerous Earth system trajectories. Temperatures of more than 2 °C above preindustrial values have not been sustained on Earth’s surface since before the Pleistocene Epoch (or more than 2.6 million years ago) (13).
Even if anthropogenic GHG emissions start to decline soon, this does not rule out high future GHG concentrations or extreme climate change, particularly beyond 2100. There are feedbacks in the carbon cycle and potential tipping points that could generate high GHG concentrations (14) that are often missing from models. […]
There are even more uncertain feedbacks, which, in a very worst case, might amplify to an irreversible transition into a “Hothouse Earth” state (21) (although there may be negative feedbacks that help buffer the Earth system). In particular, poorly understood cloud feedbacks might trigger sudden and irreversible global warming (22). Such effects remain underexplored and largely speculative “unknown unknowns” that are still being discovered.
So is the extinction of humanity through climate change certain? No. But is it possible? Yes, and the likelihood is very poorly understood.
Another aspect that is often overlooked in this debate is that the beginning of the holocene mass extinction is very much pre-historic, insofar as the spread of homo sapiens over the globe closely matches to the extinction of mega-fauna wherever we appeared, unsettling ecosystems millions of years old, and reducing biodiversity further and further. Other ecosystems will only be able to compensate for so long before they go extinct, and so on, and the explosion of complexity that usually follows after a mass extinction happens on timescales longer than humanities existence. If or when this cascades to the top of the food chain is anybodies guess.
If a system is poorly understood, then by definition it cannot be factored into predictions. When we say something is “unlikely” we mean “it is unlikely based on what we understand”. I don’t think it’s very useful to ask, “Well, is it unlikely based on what we don’t understand?”, because that’s not a question that can be answered.
There’s no way the climate crisis entirely wipes out humanity. However, we could be looking at a Mad Max style future.
What do you mean by no way? People cant live underground forever, and itll get worse for more generations than is sustainable.
Civilization couldn’t exist as it does today, but humans are a resilient species. We will find a way to continue living, pretty much as long as life remains on this planet. Be that underground, at the poles, in bunkers, in a dystopian desert wasteland, humanity will persist.
My understanding is that over time people will begin to move away from hotter regions. The most at risk will be children, small animals, the elderly and the poor.
Impoverished nations will be hit the hardest and we’ll see the most change happen to those places first. Scientists have said that as climate change gets worse and as temperatures get warmer, extreme weather events also become more common and worse as well.
As for how that will change for north America or Europe I have no real clue.
I live in a fairly northern location. We get down to -40°c sometimes in the winter. But even the winters are warming up and becoming more mild and the summers are getting hotter and less bearable. I would imagine we might face energy issues in the future if our countries don’t adapt. There’s going to be more demand as houses here will need AC going forward to stay cool. That or they need to start building new homes with better insulating materials that prevent heat transfer.
