Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
Thank a conservative. They have fought very hard to stop normal people from fighting climate change.
At this point, if you aren't fighting conservatism, you aren't fighting climate change. Conservatives will kill everyone on the planet if we do not aggressively stop them.
And they like to play it as if its over the top but its really fighting fascism. Conservatives 50 years ago are different from the nutters now who want dictatorial powers.
They are further along their trajectory now. They were always heading this direction, that much should have been obvious to a lot of people all along. I believe it was, but that the endless propaganda of the US media machine kept most of its population from realizing it. There are all sorts of (arguably) respectable political issues conservatives of the past focussed their words on, while their actions spoke different.
Some of them might even have believed they wanted 'small government' or 'fiscal responsibility'. But their actions were clear in intent, from racial segregation, to the Red Scare, to suppressing social movements, to implementing a politic of austerity. I only fail to mention war because their liberal 'opposition' carries roughly equal blame for the US war machine.
The people today may be different in body, action, word, but this is a continuation of a long political project that ended up in facism.
oh there is definitely a trajectory. Pre/post nixon, reagan, and now trump it just gets worse and worse. At one time though they did have a level of reasonableness and could effectively work with others and share power
They're not really that different. Nationalists, racists, homophobes, misogynists, xenophobes, anti-semites... It's the same people. Conservatives. They have always been trash. They just had better PR for a while.
At this point I think we just need to face the fact that we're going to have to darken the skies with particulates in order to combat global warming.
There's just no way we're ever going to get corporations to stop killing us with greenhouse gasses.
It's not out of the question that we'll see that as a means of managing overshoot. It's a very high-risk approach: it means killing everything in the oceans with calcium-based hard body parts, and it means maintaining technical infrastructure for longer than civilizations last, which humans don't have a track record of doing.
It also creates the possibility of industries lobbying to turn a temporary solution into a permanent one.
"No need to do anything about the environment anymore, we can just keep darkening the skies". Like that Futurama episode.
In the short term, maybe. In the longer term though, I don't think that's likely, for a few reasons:
Reducing sunlight reaching the earth a bit to cool it down only counters one environmental issue, rising temperature. That one issue may be the most dangerous one, for us, but it isn't the only one, and so even if we just threw up our hands and stopped worrying about fossil fuel use, there still would be worsening consequences to other environment issues, like habitat loss, ocean acidification, soil erosion, overfishing, microplastic and other pollution that is not just a greenhouse gas, etc. Dealing with these issues, or the problems resulting from them, would force environmental issues to stay in the public consciousness. Some may even be made worse by whatever method we use to darken the sky, and so there will be incentive to use that technique less if we can manage.
Certain mitigating factors, like renewable energy in particular, have already progressed to a point where they are more profitable than fossil fuels in some cases. This should inevitably lead to an increasingly large industry around those things. This would both slowly force a transition away from fossil fuels anyways for the sake of profits, and also lead to a large industry whom harsh regulation on fossil fuel benefits, due to that harming their competition. Such industry could lobby for regulations that benefit their interest just as other industries have.
Fossil fuels are finite. Technically all energy resources are on some scale, but fossil fuels are limited on a much more human scale. Eventually, the oil and gas and coal will run dry, and long before that happens, it will get too expensive to keep using increasingly difficult to extract deposits for energy. Thus, while we would in almost any scenario need to maintain a geoengineering scheme for a long time, we would not need to maintain it forever. Unless we decide to use it not just to keep the climate from warming but to also change it into something that benefits us more than the previous natural climate did I suppose, like some kind of mild terraforming on earth itself, but if we ever had climate engineering developed to that degree, we'd probably have enough experience at it and what it's pitfalls and limits are that keeping it up indefinitely is no longer a problem anyway.
I don't see how we can avoid it. Did you see the paper the other day about how new evidence shows that were headed towards a 10⁰ C rise?
Can you point me to that paper? Google only turns up results stating that if we burned all fossil fuels on the planet we'd hit 10°C
Sure.
Might want to make yourself a stiff drink before you read this one.
https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/Documents/PipelinePaper.2023.07.05.pdf
Saw it when it came out. It's well outside the consensus from people who study the topic.
Better to go to our extinction with at least a shred of decency than to last a bit longer and mess things up even more like that.
I think sciencing our way out of the mess our grandparents made for us is fair play.
And on top of this we have Russia attacking grain supplies at Ukrainian ports, which will no doubt exacerbate the problem. Anybody have any good Soylent Green recipes?
They don't know about my tendie stash in the freezer 😏