Soaring temperatures. Unusually hot oceans. Record high levels of carbon pollution in the atmosphere and record low Antarctic ice. We’re only halfway through 2023 and so many climate records are being broken.
Back in 2019 I was having a campfire in my backyard with some friends including a retired couple in their late 60’s. He had just retired from IBM. We got on the subject of climate change and how terrible it will be for future generations.
“I mean, not like it’s going to affect us” he said as they both chuckled uttering that classic line (my wife nor I could believe they said it out loud).
Fast forward a year. He caught Covid from one of their out of state friends who stayed with them for a weekend. And guess who caught covid. He died December 30th 2020 from a disease he very much could have prevented. The irony was undeniable, as he succumbed to Covid-19, a cruel twist of fate potentially amplified by the very climate change he dismissed
Pikachu use Shock(ed face)
Unless big corporations do something about it, we are doomed, individual efforts are going to do no shit We have hit 45C and its not even peak summer
How are large corporations going to reduce meat consumption? Or reduce the number of international flights people take for vacation? How will they make entirely unsustainable industries like fast food, fast fashion, and cruise lines go out of business? To say nothing about the rampant inhumane working conditions and cruelty in those industries.
Certainly a lot of the issues are dependent upon the world’s industrial infrastructure and that is not something that we necessarily have a handle on. But all the people building the new sustainable infrastructure are just regular people and individuals who decided to do something.
It is not how capitalism works. At first individuals should start prefer local production and production of more green companies. And only after that corporations change their politics. For example, there is a yearly rating of green electronics (how much green electricity company uses, how clean production is, etc.) but customers do not care. And if customers do not care, why corporations should care?
The concerning part is always “it’s happening faster than they predicted!” I’m not sure what contributes to the models being so far off.
I wish that for even every 10 alarmist articles about climate change published there was one about the various steps and programs being worked on to address it.
But no. Just more selling of fear and sensationalism.There is very little information regarding that in mainstream news and it is a serious disservice. People need to understand these issues if we are going to contribute to them or vote for them intelligently.
China for example is doing a huge amount to decrease their impact, but you won’t hear about anything positive in China since they must be portrayed as the enemy. That aside, the only way out of even worse global warming and the only way we can mitigate it is to move on from capitalism, and that’s a non starter in the western mainstream.
Mainstream news is meant to run interference for billionaires (who of course benefit by destroying the survivability of the planet). Why would it present these issues in a clear, accurate, and understandable way?
There are lots of good programmes, of course. But the fact is that global emissions continue to rise year on year. We haven’t even managed to stabilise emissions yet, let alone cut.
It’s a very lucrative industry now. People are making fortunes and careers on climate change. You can’t expect honesty or clear information on the back of that. It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
My take is that a) man-made climate change is happening, and b) it’s not nearly as bad as alarmists claim. The global average temperature is projected to increase by 2-4C over the next 80 years.%20by%202100.) I’m sorry, but that’s just not an “emergency.” You know what is an emergency? The 4.6 million people who die each year because they can’t access cheap energy. We should, immediately, work to make energy cheaper and more abundant for more people, even if it increases our carbon output. Saving lives today is obviously much more important than potentially saving lives 100 years from now.
I’ll have to find the source later, but I read somewhere that each 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature reduces overall crop yields by 10%. Also, tropical forests that rely on high humidity environments will start drying up causing drastic ecological and an increase in fires. Yes, the fear mongering sells news, but that doesn’t mean you can write off climate change as a big deal.
I respectfully disagree.
At our current trajectory there will be mass death and significant swathes of the planet will simply be uninhabitable.
The view that we should release more carbon than we already are doing now is, in my opinion, reckless and selfish.
Its cycles, and it depends when you start the measurements from. If you start measuring 38 years ago, then there is no change in temperature. If you start in 1850 then were warmer by 0.7C. From middle ages, were colder by 4C. From the times of the Vikings we have warming, and from times of Jesus we have cooling down. Cycles. Money also has cycles. In the past (i know of examples in the 70s) money was made on the fear of The New Ice Age, and today its the fear of Global Warming.
Those numbers are waaaaay off, and even if you are slightly correct with there being cycles, the speed of which the climate is changing right now is completely bonkers. I’d also like to know who makes money out of this “fearmongering”? And why would that be more reasonable to believe than oil/gas companies doing the opposite? Would it be easier to convince the whole world that we need to quit/change parts of our comfortable lives in order to save the future, than to convince us to keep living like we always have?
I guess the solar and wind companies must be bathing in money for them to be able to bribe 99% of all scientists into risking their careers by producing fake reports?
Sorry, but pretty much every scientific study disagrees with your view.
No need to be sorry, here you go an article from a reputable source citing a study from european researchers - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8555871/Mediterranean-Sea-3-6-F-hotter-Roman-Empire-study-claims.html
You said it was a reputable source, but that’s a Daily Fail link. No clicky.
