Oh I don’t know, could have something to do with the whole climate change disaster the collective scientific community has been warning about for literally decades now
The sad part is, no matter how bad things will get, the same people will keep denying climate change. Even as their shoes melt into the pavement.
Looking at the past, I don’t have any hope for meaningful change.
Just last year or so we’ve had people on their literal death beads denying corona is real.
Last night my dad was talking about this “liberal propaganda” about the “supposed climate crisis” talking about the movie Don’t Look Up. Fuck it pissed me off, I don’t know how to respond to that. Conservatives aren’t in reality, every fact that disagrees with their backwards fantasy is just some kind of liberal conspiracy that “wise” men would never bother considering.
It’s really messed up how the world can be reduced to binary opinions.
By definition, liberals think more freely and are willing to entertain new ideas. With that of course comes that some of those ideas turn out to be counter productive or straight up bad. Ideally, this is when real liberals acknowledge this and shift to something else.
Conservatives on the other hand see this as a sign of weakness and misguidedness, so they take a stance rooted in what they “know” to be true. When that knowledge turns out to be false, they can’t simply pivot because that would make them the same as liberals.
Not to mention, sticking to your guns is so much easier than admitting you were wrong and starting from zero again.
Genuinely. What’s the point. There’s no convincing them because any evidence you could convince them with they’ve already deemed invalid before they’ve even laid eyes on it.
They’re “sceptics” in the worst way possible in that they don’t apply that scepticism to themselves.
There will be denial forever, but watch out now for the new propaganda trend, “it’s too late to do anything”. It feels woke and tends to be anticorporate in flavour, but it leads to the same end as denialism.
I agree that the “it’s too late to do anything” mentality is just as bad as doing nothing, but at the same time I recognize that the scientific consensus is more and more leaning towards “it really is too late to do anything” in the short term at least.
Certain gears have been set in motion that we truly cannot stop, but there are also other things that we can prevent if we act now.
I just don’t know where the line between the two lies.
The next 50 years or so are set in stone, of that I’m certain.
But after that, who knows whether the changes we make today will affect the climate in a meaningful way. One can only hope.
The problem with that is to a certain extent it is too late. What we were warned would happen decades ago if we didn’t stop is already on our doorstep - climate distasters are getting worse by the year, and temperature records are being leapfrogged left and right.
The next few decades are likely gonna be rough no matter what we as individuals do, because the world’s governments are too hesitant to make the drastic changes needed, and most companies won’t life a finger until financial incentive comes about or they’re made to.
We the people do have power, but many of us lack the time, resources, and/or money to greenify our lives in the ways that we really need to, on thr scale that we need to be doing now.
That’s NOT to say however that we shouldn’t do anything at all, that we shouldn’t press our governments to do anything at all - as the saying goes:
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.
Even little gestures will help in the long, long term.
Looking at the past, I don’t have any hope for meaningful change.
Just last year or so we’ve had people on their literal death beads denying corona is real.
You’re not even wrong. Even when people weren’t denying the reality of the situation, so many still refused to do any of the measures designed to stop it, then blamed everyone else around them.
It wad a depressing time to see how rabid and divided people are that somehow the existence of a virus that was literally killing millions of people, and leaving even more crippled existed or not became a political game.
Even if the majority of those people came to understand what was happening and truly believe the scientists, it’ll already be at the point where saying “I was wrong all these years” comes about just too late
We drive our cars and planes
And burn the fossil fuels
We ignore the scientists
And call them climate fools
We chop down all the forests
And fill the seas with trash
We melt the polar ice caps
And watch the glaciers crash
We suffer and we will die
From the heat as we get older
But hey, at least we created a lot of value
For our dear shareholders
Climate change + El Niño
Just to add to this, Climate Change itself is a lot more than mere Global Warming - since weather is mathematically a Chaotic System, the extra energy retained in the system due to greenhouse gases not only increases the average temperature but also makes extreme weather (not just of the high temperature kind) more likely to happen, hence things like for example many and strong storms in a short-time frame which were the kind of combination that used to happen every couple of decades now happenning every couple of years.
Hence why over the last decade we’ve seen extreme weather events a lot more and more often.
The high temperature related records broken now (due to the combination with El Niño) are but a subset of the weather record-breaking that’s been happenning in the last couple of years.
A lot of people think climate change is just heat and desertification.
And its not.
its more akin to a shot of nitrous in your car engine. It will take the normal systems and ramp them up to a realm not normally feasible. Hot weather will get hotter. Hot weather will reach further to places it never did before in summer. Cold weather will get colder. Cold weather will reach further into areas it never did before in in winter. Storms will be more intense. Hurricanes larger. Tornados more prevalent.
But we can’t do anything because the rich and their bought politicians would rather stay the course to continue to extract every last ounce of profit from the planet, then ride out the storm on the high seas on their high end expensive mega yachts.
Sounds like a tipping point to me, but I am not smart.
Well tentative take I saw from a climate scientist (in the news I think) was that it might be a flickering of a tipping point. The idea being that complex systems can temporarily look like a new state that they’re close to tipping into but not quite there yet. If true, it would mean that we’re closer to some tipping point than we thought or would like and this is a kind of prelude.
I feel like this is effectively denialism at this point. We’re looking at serious crop loss (80% by some estimates) across the US and Canada and it’s only going to get worse without massive projects or geoengineering. Combine that with a Russia/Ukraine war and we’re looking at 1,4,5,6 and 9 of the worlds top 10 wheat producers looking at a minimal crop. We’re far closer to famine than we realize.
Because we’re governed by a large group of people who rely on fossil fuel countries and companies for campaign cash and the rest are more concerned with owning the libs than doing anything useful.
Yep. Nothing changes because the people that have the power to make the changes don’t want to. The system as it is right now works for them. So why the hell would they want to change that? And most of them won’t be around to see the devastation so there is another level of apathy to all of it.
We can’t get out from underneath this monster it’s too late for that. But I hope that we can start putting people into power that are genuinely concerned about this climate crisis and start the true (massive) step to moving us off the path to total uninhabitability
