Well by all means, let's make it seem less serious than it is! That'll get people moving
Signed, an actual fucking climate scientist
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Well by all means, let's make it seem less serious than it is! That'll get people moving
Signed, an actual fucking climate scientist
Literally "This is fine."
Ignore the triple digit temps in the ocean, that's not apocalyptic! Relax!
So what if a few people died of heat exhaustion just by... Walking outside for a few minutes. Normal. Not apocalyptic.
So what if regular rains are delivering hurricane levels of flooding. That's just nature doing it's thing, dude. Quit overreacting.
Malaria is in NJ, but like, mosquitos fly so that was probably bound to happen.
And really, like, 110 isnt that hot, especially if it's not humid.
Relax.
He's technically right, though; climate change isn't going to drive us to extinction. Yes, it's going to cause the total collapse of modern society in our lifetimes and more death and sufferring than any other event in recorded history, but there will almost certainly be tens or hundreds of millions of survivors. Maybe even billions.
Give it to me straight Doc, how much money do I need to survive the apocalypse?
$3.50
God damn Loch Ness monster creating global warming so he can get my tree fiddy!!
Did you even read the article, Mr/Ms climate scientist?
He’s asking people not to talk like the world is going to catastrophically end once we hit that 1.5 degrees milestone, because it’s making people feel hopeless and apathetic, which is actually slowing our efforts to change.
And he’s totally right. If the government told people a meteor the size of Texas was going to impact earth in 12 hours, there would be effectively zero effort to stop it. If you tune in to a lot of the conversation around climate change from people who are not climate scientists, but who want to leave a better world for their kids and believe climate scientists, they feel hopeless. It feels like a foregone conclusion that we are going to go over the 1.5 degree goal (probably because it is), and if we think the biosphere is going to collapse when it does, it is really, really hard to take action.
It’s not saying to undersell the risks, he’s saying to be truthful about the risks. We can definitely still salvage complex life on earth with optimistic, consistent effort, but recent media coverage has been giving the impression that it’s too late. This is bad and counterproductive.
Keep on fighting the good fight brother/sister.
I think he is just saying people shouldn't doom post. I think there is a fine line because a lot of zoomers i interact with are hopeless and have given up. This is a generation who never experienced a functional (American) government who worked for the people. So they just don't care and you can see it reflected in their memes.
I don't know the rhetorical path we should take. We need to get people motivated and fired up but not apathetic and despairing. I mostly want to see politicians crumble and the rich eaten and i think that's messaging many will get behind.
I understand his sentiment. I have an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness because most CO2 emissions aren't even made by normal every day people but the entities that do create a majority of it don't care. This means anything we attempt to do is as a whole is only a drop in the bucket compared to what these entities are producing. I purchased a hybrid vehicle to curve my driving emissions and I recycle. I planted grass and a tree in my yard to prevent run off and produce oxygen. I am looking into getting solar power for my home but I am not a rich man so the price is a little beyond me right now. Things I can do I try to do but in the end regardless of what I do entities are polluting our water and air, producing plastics, and are trying to place the blame on normal people. It can be a little heavy on the soul.
I already feel helpless. I try to use my vehicle less and use public transport. I just moved somewhere walkable so there are days that I don't use my vehicle (will be weeks eventually when I get used to it). I try to buy local and reduce my waste.
I live in a southern state though so my vote doesn't do shit. Even if I did, this feels like a political issue at this point and neither the right or the left of the country has the will to "do what needs to be done".
Capitalism is exploitative by its nature and the market will never solve the problem until we have extracted all the fossil fuels in the earth.
I know it is not your problem, but how can we NOT feel helpless?
I think the issue here is who you're looking at for the audience. At this point, we can agree that anyone who doesn't think there's a problem is delusional, and it's a waste to time to convince them otherwise.
If we assume the audience is all people who believe this is an issue, then this message makes sense. It's trying to convince people that they should still care and not be nihilistic about it.
While I understand the intention here is to reassure people that not all is lost and there's still time for action, a take like this is going to be paraphrased into "climate change is overblown and isn't something to worry about" by Big Oil and other major polluters.
I have not seen a single piece of evidence that we're going to do anything about climate change unless we come up with some magical solution that somehow: doesn't upset the status quo and also makes existing rich people even more rich.
The status quo is the problem, so it would have to be some basic logic defying magic.
Exactly but talk to anyone, even the enlightened internet people who share climate change articles on here, and they seem convinced that the only way to fight climate change is to literally do nothing and wait for corporations to have their hearts grow like the grinch. They will aggressively atrack any suggestion that we are going to have to actually do something and also change out lifestyle.
It is going to take massive change, collective effort, and organizing. As well as individual changes to our daily lives. Even if those corporations and politicians all had a magic change of heart. The policies and economic changes would still result in a massive upheaval of our daily lives.
Wow, what a ridiculous straw man.
I haven't heard anyone referring to 1.5 C as apocalyptic. I HAVE heard it described in terms of being a threshold at which climate scientists predicted a certain set of consequences.
What's apocalyptic about the situation is our acceleration towards even greater climate change, and world governments' unwillingness to take the situation seriously.
In the US, for example, Biden passed the greatest climate mitigation law of all time ... and it's grossly inadequate. They're treating it much the same way that the Obama administration treated health care. They patted themselves on the back for passing the ACA, which still left the country in a health care CRISIS, because it was a half measure.
In many ways the absolute worst way you can respond to a crisis is with these types of half measures. Why? Because it acts as a pressure valve, removing all the momentum for real, meaningful change.
Much like the ACA, Democrats will pretend that this is a stepping stone for the next set of reforms... But we only need to look at the ACA to see how flawed that reasoning is. We have not built on the ACA. We have spent a decade watching Republicans chip away at it.
Now we're playing the same game with climate change mitigation. And the price will be hundreds of millions of climate change refugees, war, and famine.
To be 100 percent clear: while the Democrats are incompetent here, the real villains are the Republicans, who are WILLFULLY ignorant of the science, and are the ones forcing either impotent compromise or no mitigation at all.
4° C is apocalyptic. 1.5° C is still catastrophic and will result in massive floods and global famines.
Hey jackass, people aren't apathetic because they believe it's too late to do anything. People are apathetic because people like you haven't done anything and now it's too late. The "beneficial actions" you are calling for are half measures that won't help at all, and the people who care are already doing what they can while the real polluters, the real destroyers of humanity, are building bunkers and hoarding gold to survive the coming storm.
People aren't apathetic because "it's too late", it's because right now is the time humanity needs to act, yet all that's really happened is governments making promises to act in 10, 15, 20 years time if at all.
Oh, but there are pollution targets... that are routinely unmet, or are met through dodgy use of carbon credits, all with no punishment.
oh look people in the comments who are missing the fucking point. I'm honestly so sick of this shit. You either have rainbows and unicorns and "we'll just figure it out"/climate deniers to "WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH" apathetic fucks who won't do shit* because "what's the point we are all doomed anyway" which...causes the same problem as denying does.
honestly i've delt with more people who refuse to change anything because "what's the point" than I deal with outright deniers anymore.
*not sure if anyone in the comments is an apathetic "do nothing though tbf and honest. So there is my disclaimer don't @ me.
I see this all the time on social media, and it's frustrating. I don't want to dampen anyone's passion for combating climate change (because I agree!), but it's like a feedback loop for rhetoric that gets more and more extreme.
Something that starts out as:
"There was a wildfire in _____. This could be part of a larger trend related to climate change."
Turns into:
"This fire was caused directly by climate change."
Turns into:
"The world is on fire! Take shelter!"
Turns into:
"Don't plan for the future. Don't have children. Move somewhere cold and start prepping for the apocalypse."
You can literally watch this same process happen with every issue that gets traction on social media or cable news. Then one side looks at the most extreme comments from the other side and easily dismisses the whole thing.
Speaking to weekly magazine Der Spiegel, in an interview first published on Saturday, Skea warned against laying too much value on the international community's current nominal target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared the pre-industrial era.
"We should not despair and fall into a state of shock" if global temperatures were to increase by this amount, he said.
In a separate discussion with German news agency DPA, Skea expanded on why.
"If you constantly communicate the message that we are all doomed to extinction, then that paralyzes people and prevents them from taking the necessary steps to get a grip on climate change," he said.
"The world won't end if it warms by more than 1.5 degrees," Skea told Der Spiegel. "It will however be a more dangerous world."
Surpassing that mark would lead to many problems and social tensions, he said, but still that would not constitute an existential threat to humanity.
(...)
Skea predicted that one difficult area might prove to be changing people's lifestyles. He said that no scientist could tell people how to live or what to eat.
"Individual abstinence is good, but it alone will not bring about the change to the extent it will be necessary," Skea said. "If we are to live more climate consciously, we need entirely new infrastructure. People will not get on bikes if there are no cycle paths."
Skea said he also wanted to adapt the IPCC so that it could provide better and more targeted advice to specific groups of people on how they could act to combat climate change.
He named groups like town planners, landowners and businesses: "With all these things it's about real people and their real lives, not scientific abstractions. We need to come down a level," he told DPA.
The headline is actual ragebait considering the more reasonable context of his message
well. 1.5C° maybe not an existential threat, but I don't see a single sign it would stop there, and not going further into 4.0C° ya know
1.5C was never a threat, it was a target. The IPCC produces simplified "stakeholder" report, it would be a superior use of one's time to just give it a skim than spend time reading clickbaity website titles. https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/
Policymaker summary report: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_SummaryForPolicymakers.pdf
I think the peak 4 degrees this century is extremely possible. A lot of the community studying this now thinks we have underestimated feedback loops, much of what is currently happening was not supposed to happen as quickly as it has.
His statement isn't really about the severity of the issue, he just says that people are prone to give up
The news;
Don't even know what to believe anymore. All I know for fact is what I can see and trend myself. I know about 7 years ago or so I definitely noticed more wildfires than I ever have. Never had I had memories of every summer being smoked out. This summer I've felt autumn chill in some mornings when I normally would not have. Heat domes... Didn't even know why that was until last year or the year before.
I think shits fucked.
pretty sure we're fucked.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/30/world/antarctic-sea-ice-winter-record-low-climate-intl/index.html
when the AMOC goes, we're gonna see ecosystems collapse. When the ice shelf breaks off into the sea, we're gonna see sea levels climb rapidly.
can human civilization survive? perhaps if we can get everyone to work together. ww2 levels of mobilization and federalization of resources.
I think this would require the UN to have a no-bullshit-session with the worlds top climate and systems folks, then each and every country declaring a national emergency to address the climate crisis. Which means we're going to finally have to get the assholes rolling coal in their giant pickup trucks festooned with trump flags to give up their bullshit. And everyone will have to cut their energy consumption and face changes to their lives and diets that will help us prepare for the really hard times ahead and feed the starving that are already resulting from mass drought & the war in Ukraine.
I doubt we'll ever get the rolling coal big truck assholes to give up their bullshit, so... No, we're fucked, we're going to die badly in most cases, and it's almost entirely our own fault. I let the last few generations off because they didn't enjoy the excess, they're simply going to get stuck with the bill.
Cheers, hope I'm very very wrong.
Nuance, the world is filled with it. Who'd have thought?