Okay, we might get to 2.5 degrees, but the economy!
This will go on until we get to around 5 degree and most parts of the world have become uninhabitable and most animals and vegetation has gone extinct and we’ve locked ourselves in perpetual wars due to water and food shortages. Sounds like a shitty B movie, but this is what I truely believe we will end up with.
I’m hopeful economies and governments will collapse before 3 degrees and measures will be put in place. I’m not extrapolating a utopian future. Before we get to the point where the world reacts, there will be many wars, migration and fascism. But as it gets worse, I’m hopeful groups will work together and fight for a better future.
Nah, what will happen is that said incompetent governments will be replaced by incompetent dictatorships that will just tell people over the barrel of a gun that things are better now.
If it makes you feel any better, once it gets that bad, society will eventually break down and our CO2 levels will naturally return to normal over the next several centuries while the Earth is reclaimed by nature as we go extinct.
I’ve been living in coastal Southeastern Texas for 44 years. Im 46. In 2017 my county rezoned us as a flood zone because of the Havey flooding caused all the poor planning. An entire section of the state reclassified because “interstate highway” needed to be bigger.
They’ve been building the same 50ish miles for at least 27 years. All they’ve managed to do is ruin what was naturally occurring barriers and eroded our ability to maintain habitation. Or to expect a reasonable ability to protect against a disaster.
We’re leaving 3.4 acres my grandfather bought in 1986, and gave my sister and I in 2007.
And that’s just MY story. We had 375 neighbors in my area and at least 30% have moved on since 2017.
And that’s just one coastal city, in one state, in one country, on one continent.
I don’t have a lot of fantasy about humanities future.
I think we’ll be looking back, waving longingly to the incredible hulk ending song, to 5c
Because the world doesnt exist to serve the 8 billion humans. It exists to serve a few thousand rich and business owners. . which means as long as there is profit to be had, the killing of the planet and the population will continue not only at pace, but ever accelerating
It’s only unsustainable if you want everyone to survive. Too many people are quietly okay with losing a few billion strangers due to their certainty they’ll be fine.
That’s what I said a good 25 years ago when I learned about climate change. It went through a bunch of name changes, there have been multiple world meetings about it to see how much further we could push it up to sustain “our economies” and the few little suggestions that came out of that were completely ignored so that we could have the next world economic forum or whatever.
If any politician would actually do something REAL, I’d support it. I have not seen anything beyond “well let’s try to change cars to electrical over a 20 year period but also dump nuclear power so effectively all electrical cars still run coal”. We. Need. To. Stop. Using. Cars. Car use needs to drop by 95%, THAT would make a difference. Start converting 90% of car infrastructure to park, bicycle infrastructure and public transportation like trains and busses. Convert cargo trucks to electrical, start investing like crazy in nuclear power plants. Push companies to either let employees work from home or pay tripple tax. Tax the shit out of anyone earning more than 10 times the average. Start adding sulfur solutions to kerosine so that airplanes can start spewing it in the atmosphere to lower temperatures… Any of those are solutions, I haven’t seen any of it.
Nobody is going to do anything because politicians are dumb egocentric assholes that only care about their own reelection.
We’re fucked in the next 30 years or so
If Trump gets elected, we’ll be fucked within 10. I’m honestly thinking at this point that maybe we should just all vote for trump. Get it over with, kill this world, humanity is a failed experiment.
I went through an accelerationist adjacent phase a few years ago, then I realized that what I was accelerating towards would happen regardless. From a utilitarian perspective, I don’t know which path mitigates more human deaths.
Stopping meat eating would have a bigger impact on climate change than removing cars, and that’s doable for everyone. Also EV cars do reduce the co2, and as grids get cleaner cars do too. Additionally many put solar on their houses to charge Evs.
Whist i agree car numbers should definitely be reduced, people should work from home far more for example, but meat is a greater problem that we could all address immediately without dismantling infrastructure.
Yeah, the “stop eating meat is doable” is not doable. Ppeoli simply won’t do it. What you can (should) do is increase taxes on meat. If meat becomes twice as expensive, people will eat it less. Use the extra tax income to subsidize meat alternatives, make those more attractive.
We can do with a LOT less cars if we wanted to. Same as with meat, we don’t want it. Still, most car rides are under 3 miles, which can easily be done by bike but good luck being the politician pushing bikes. Or increased taxes on meat.
I don’t like this mindset, because while there are plenty of businesses, billionaires, and governments that keep burning coal to keep their cash flowing, there’s plenty of scientists, activists, engineers, governments, and organizations that are making a difference. We shouldn’t be discrediting the hard work of people who are trying to save us or at least delay doomsday.
There was a powercut this week in a large part of Mexico (I know because of family from there). They’re getting rarer now as Mexico has really tried to get its grid uptogether. The downside of countries like this having more stable grids is more people and business installing aircon systems, which just means more energy used, more emissions.
The funny thing is there are ways to passively cool areas. You can literally install shading over windows and walls that face the main sun. Last year in the UK we had a few days where it was over 35C. Nobody here has aircon. So that heat is a shock to us. But I managed to cover the outside of open windows with reflective bubble wrap insulation cut into sheets.
I also installed a small solar system on our shed to run a fridge freezer out there. The funny thing is the half inch stand-offs actively created significant shading and the inside of the shed really cooled down to where we could sit in there and chill out or do tasks without melting. When I realised this I started looking online for research on solar power and shading and found agrovoltaics. Solar panels over farm crops such as fruit in hotter regions mean less watering needed… its more spread out than usual solar farms as it has to let the sun in a bit more to the food but its something that needs to be done more.
I also read of people ignoring their energy policy for their home electric and installing grid-tie solar. They use sheds, stands in their garden, conservatory roofing etc, and usually just a few hundred watts of solar. Typically homes have a fuse rating of 30-50 amps. One 300w solar panel grid tied is not going to be anywhere near that, but will mean up to 300w of clean energy. Energy companies should just allow these systems, even provide them if its a problem or worry to them. You can buy this stuff off amazon for a few hundred quid.
Also, and it’s kinda insane to me that not more people do this: just grow any plant on the sides of your house. If you are worried about your walls build a cheap metal fence a few centimetres before that wall. It’s the cheapest insulation you can get.
Wild wine, ivy, anything that will climb and live more than a year would work.
The projections made by the Club of Rome in 1972 in Limits to Growth are still valid. Should we wait until 2040 to see if the computer simulations were true?
What projections are you looking at? It is a few cherry picked ones? Generally the projections going back to the 80s are in line with what’s actually happening, if anything they were optimistic.
Even if you don’t agree with projection or that we’re actually in-line with them, the correlation between carbon in the atmosphere and global temperature isn’t disputable anymore.
the problem is that we not only doom ourselves with the collapse of civilization but we doom so many innocent creatures who had nothing to do with this. the animals deserve better.
While the developed world rests on its laurels having already developed key technologies that insulate from the worst effects of climate change, the Global South is attempting to push through rapid industrialization to achieve the same effects, bringing with it public infrastructure, electricity, robust food supply, reliable transportation, healthcare…
Meanwhile, the developed world looks at the Global South and says “ah, but why aren’t you being greener about it? despicable! how dare you raise emissions?” while simultaneously restricting the free trade of essential green economy components like solar panels and batteries. The fact is, we don’t actually care about climate change. Our political entities and economies are not structured to reward innovation in that space, so we simply end up pulling teeth to push through minor advances. Germany used to be a world leader in solar panels before it stagnated due to political pressure. The US used to be a world leader in developing nuclear before it stagnated due to political pressure. Japan used to be the world leader in batteries before it stagnated due to, well, Japan.
While the developed world rests on its laurels having already developed key technologies that insulate from the worst effects of climate change
But this isn’t true. Can we fight temperature changes? Sure, we have air conditioning and heaters.
There’s lots of things we can’t isolate ourselves from. Natural disasters, for example. We see forest fires and floods on a yearly basis, and it’s getting worse. We’ll face droughts, and diminished crop yields. It’ll be particularly bad for all the areas near the equator (which are also incredibly populous and export a lot of food), and what will happen then?
Famine yes, probably, but likely also an exodus away from these areas, which I’m sure will go well as countries are known to welcome people seeking a better life with open arms. We’ll face humanitarian tragedies. I’d be surprised if there won’t be camps, and with that comes disease. Maybe we’ll even see another pandemic.
No, I just realize that corporations and governments are not motivated to do anything. I know that what I’m saying shifts the blame, but realistically it’s the only way.
But people are even less motivated and we should take away their plastic bottles and cars with laws. Individuals will always choose whats more comfortable for them, thats why we’re in this shit. Capitalists just profit off of it.
Millions is not billions and all those vegans still work at offices, buy electronic devices, drive cars and pollute in more ways than I can imagine. The problem with climate is that we’ve grown extremely accustomed to the comforts of our extremely unsustainable lives and we’re so far gone into environmental destruction that the steps we would all need to take to stop it are already extreme, and they are only getting extreme…er.
I’m a vegetarian myself, I never ever buy plastic bottles and Im generally conscious about my impact on the environment, but without basically detaching myself from society I can’t even put a dent in the destruction my lifestyle is bringing.
Most people aren’t even vegetarians and still buy plastic bottles, they will never stop until the society tells them to. We need to fundamentally shit (a typo, but I’ll allow it) our civilization to a completely different mode to even stop deepening our graves, but guess what. We can’t even fix the fucking housing market so we’re simply doomed. The corporations will still hoard their pointless profits and we’ll get annual new fucking iphones until the day we won’t even be able to grow our food.
If people don’t want to change, how in the world do you think they’ll let a [democrat, republican, etc] politician force them to? Do you think cocacola will save us? The answer is not fun.
From recycling ♻️ to plastic straws, the ad campaigns put the onus on individual consumers instead of the industry. Americans overwhelmingly want to do something about climate change. But the propaganda prevents action.
It is their responsibility , though it should be at pain of death (of their profits), to innovate in order to supply what we demand sustainability. The problem is they are not compelled to do so by any mechanism - regulatory, or market driven. And worse than that , the biggest and most culpable perpetrators of these crimes against humanity (and all other living species present and future) have actively campaigned to misinform, divide and conquer, politicize, deflect and distract (including shifting all responsibility to the individual) since they’ve known for decades that this is coming and when they alone had the means and capital to adapt, innovate, research and develop solutions for the good of all, including themselves if they’d only planned for something other than their own pockets this financial quarter.
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