Eight excruciating paragraphs before the author stops rambling and gets to their thesis. So much fluff.
Don't Look Up
The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate
41–50 of 212 posts
Re: The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate
#42Re: The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate
#43Are we ready to have a discussion about seeding the upper atmosphere with SO2 yet?
Re: The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate
#44At this point I’m not sure what to do about it. I already live a low-ish carbon life. I barely ever fly. Only drive when I need to. Try and use items that are non-plastic where feasible. I don’t buy extra clothes. It’s at the point where I wish it were solvable, but I don’t believe it is, so I can’t afford to think about it. Maybe people better than me can, and good luck to them.
Lot of info overload going on.
Most people dont know covid hasnt disappeared. It keeps evolving and there are strains out there still causing issues. But thanks to the attention economy dynamics, all sorts of random people were acting like they were virologists, epidemiologists, microbiologists at its peak. They have all disappeared ie shifted focus to whatever else. Meanwhile the ecosystem and infra dedicated to keep track of this stuff chuggs along keeping the lights on. All am saying is there is no reason to keep everyone in a freaked out state.
Re: The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s pointless. Political change is needed to achieve any of this. Changing your individual behavior or even the individual behavior of everyone you know – while certainly not wrong! – won’t solve this. This is like trying to abolish slavery in 19th century US by not owning slaves and trying your very best to not buy anything that involves slave labor … laudable, but not a way to abolish slavery.
Isn't political change brought about by collective changes in behaviors of an individual and of those around them?
Exactly! Politics try to appease the mass. If the mass would be willing to put climate change first we would have other policies, instead we follow the dark visions of lunatic billionaires
Re: The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate
#46Our economy is an abstract intangible system which requires infinite growth and debt issuance, this in reality requires more caloric expenditure and resource consumption. Thermodynamically this is pretty bad news. At one point the see-saw is gonna tip the other way, then it might cool off for a spell.
Re: The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate
#47This is a tough read. I'm not sure who it's aimed at, since the article mentions only 14% of Americans (surely one of the most climate denying countries) don't believe climate change is real. It's alarmist in a way that is whistlecalling but not in a useful way.
It also lies with graphs in a way that I just hate -- we have surface temperature charts that show growth trends going all the way back to ... 2024. Please. This page from wikipedia shows a much longer range with a lot more context: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature..., and reasonable qualifiers on the methods used to go back.
Useful proposals always welcomed, ideally ones that in a game theoretic sense do not reward defection and are realistic about the economics of releasing more CO2 as part of power production, but this essay isn't it.
Re: The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate
#48It's quite striking to note how media coverage of climate change and pollution have gone down so much. I remember in the 90's it was very much in the popular mileu. What's more we are living through an actual green revolution. Solar power and batteries have never been so cheap - and still promising to get cheaper and better with sodium ion batteries.
I was reading somewhere that we are already fucked even if we were to completely halt greenhouse emissions today. Apparently we kickstarted some positive feedback loop (I think it was the thawing of the permafrost in Siberia/Canada) which releases enormous quantities of Methane and that with the higher temperatures we already reached we decreased Earth albedo as there is less snow/ice reflecting light into space.
I really hope that particular article was wrong, because the alternative is that we have to resort to geo engineering. Considering that the governments can't really coordinate in preventing this, I don't see them coordinate in fixing it, especially because the scale and costs of the "fixes" are astronomical.
Re: The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate
#49It's quite striking to note how media coverage of climate change and pollution have gone down so much. I remember in the 90's it was very much in the popular mileu. What's more we are living through an actual green revolution. Solar power and batteries have never been so cheap - and still promising to get cheaper and better with sodium ion batteries.
Which shows how badly the popular media cover hard news. "Social justice" is all the rage now thrown together with anything else that's exciting to watch on video.
What does this even mean?
Are you talking about US media?
Seems like a delusion to me. Social justice is yet another banned topic under conservative corporate ownership.
Quick headline check:
- Trump claims to have invented a word that exists
- “Burger King’s New Whopper Strikes a Blow in Fast Food Wars”
- “US strikes $1.2bn deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects” (is this a social justice topic?)
- Attorney General confirmation political reporting
- school shooting reporting (is this social justice??)
Re: The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate
#50I think us people do not have the capacity as societies to effectively anticipate and solve problems that we can see approaching but have not become catastrophic yet. We always act shortsightedly and ..hope for the best. Most of the people will just not vote/support anything that might bring them some minuscule pain. Even if we know by logic that the problem is coming, we tend to follow whomever will tell us that it's not a problem and base our hopes on him/her. Think of a problem that we saw coming in the future and we collectively solved. I can think of none.
It is very hopeful that renewables are being pursued and developed by China at least to some degree and have become economically attractive. That's the only feasible way to minimize the damage that's already been done.