A question about climate change/global warming.

did you dream this one

The ocean is on fire in the Gulf of Mexico after a pipeline ruptured. Good system.

pic.twitter.com/5HK6VVfxOP

— Eoin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) July 2, 2021

literal hellfire, cool

I beg your pardon Madame Bison, but it is decidedly uncool 🔥

Looks like Aimless was otm about the climate crisis leveling up.

Not sure if redundant to post from the Graun here but:

…the intensity of the heat in the north-west Americas this year and Siberia last year has taken many scientists by surprise and suggested extra factors may be involved in northern latitudes.

One theory is that the recent temperature spike might have been caused not just by global heating, but by slowing weather systems that get stuck in one place for an extended period, which gives them time to intensify and cause more damage…

Experts believe the rapid heating in the Arctic and decline of sea ice is making the jet stream wiggle in large, meandering patterns, so-called Rossby resonance waves, trapping high- and low-pressure weather systems in one location for a longer time.

This theory remains contested, but Michael Mann of Penn State said this week’s unexpectedly fierce heat at Lytton and elsewhere should prompt climatologists to consider additional impacts of human activity.

“We should take this event very seriously,” he wrote in an email.

“The temperature-sensing pandemic robot is malfunctioning because of climate change” is the most dystopian thing I’ve ever written. https://t.co/uxJgnfLWHy

— Tamara Hinz (@hinz_tamara) July 2, 2021

is this good

VIDEO: Large explosion in the Umid gas field in Caspian Sea. Cause currently unknown. - @Liveuamappic.twitter.com/uGtIhMzCQn

— Conflict News (@Conflicts) July 4, 2021

They’re claiming it’s from naturally occurring mud volcanos, a similar phenomenon as was observed in the region by Marco Polo on his travels.

No clue how credible those claims are tho.

Oh man the jokes about mud volcanoes just write themselves…

sounds like a load of mud volcanoes

lol more like asspian sea

5/7/21:

Sea levels in the Torres Strait are rising at twice the average global rate. These men are waging a battle to force the Australian government to act on climate change to save their land and their culture. pic.twitter.com/2OTj3UHNWV

— SBS News (@SBSNews) July 5, 2021

5/7/21:

A federal government credit agency has spent about 80 times more money on fossil fuel projects than renewables over the past 11 years. Research from Jubilee Australia has found Export Finance Australia provided up to $1.69 billion in financing to the fossil fuel industry compared to just $20 million for renewable energy projects between 2009 and 2020.

10/9/15:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGMrGlAHUq0

My conclusion: the Australian government is very very bad and should be voted out of office.

Also, we're so fucked it isn't funny.

i honestly don't think this whole (corrupt) system of propping oil producers and polluters will change just through political pressure. not until people are angry enough to drag politicians and business leaders (if they can get ahold of them) into the streets will significant change happen and it will be way too late at that point.
the world my kids will inherit will be fucked and i'm clinging to the hope that this is somehow correctable down the road when there is the willpower to take it seriously or that we can learn to exist on a fucked planet.

not until people are angry enough to drag politicians and business leaders (if they can get ahold of them) into the streets will significant change happen and it will be way too late at that point.

the pandemic killed off this idea, to me, the idea that at some point the tragedy would become clear and the "people" would rise up against to demand justice. yes, some people will do that. but we are outnumbered by the complete fucking ..fools. liars? whatever.

fox news is creating its own weather channel. soon even those kinds of once neutral topics and "facts" will come under the rightwing bubble. they like it in there. there's no one calling them a racist in there, and their kids aren't angry at them there either, or at least not in a way that is noticeable or troublesome

ya... you make a very good and sad point.

but we are outnumbered by the complete fucking ..fools. liars? whatever.

we're actually not outnumbered though, are we? batshit insane right-wingers are definitely less than half the country. it's just that our political system gives them more say.

harder to ignore a heat wave/fire/drought when you live through it, not sure if fox propaganda can drown out that factor. i guess anything is possible with these folks xxp

batshit insane right-wingers are definitely less than half the country.

The majority in the USA would appear to be people who simply continue to live their lives on auto-pilot, working their jobs, shopping and consuming as they always did, never really connecting climate change and these quotidian facts, partly out of inertia and partly out of reluctance to change because change is hard and life seems hard enough already. The batshit insane right-wingers add their weight to the mass that would have to be shifted by the climate activists and taken together the insane, the greedy and the blinkered are too heavy to budge very far.

Sad to say this is a really great piece:

https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/06/all-the-right-words-on-climate-have-already-been-said/

Is it?

I realize I could cite some data to support this but I’m not going to look anything up because I don’t want to know the truth. I’m comfortable with “It’s bad.”

I also just wanted to note that I really relate to Aimless’ perspective. When I first read it I struggled to put some positive light on the situation. Before last year happened maybe I could have but 2020 really took the wind out of my sails on these issues.

My main hope lies with the fact that at least the populace largely seems to be waking up to the fact that we are facing systemic crises that can’t just be resolved with incremental reform. It’s going to take revolutionary change in one form or another if we’re going to get through this with our civilization intact.

I’ve been watching the Americans again and the depiction of late-stage USSR strongly resonates with the current state of the USA to me.

My main hope lies with the fact that at least the populace largely seems to be waking up to the fact that

The entire villain plot of 1973’s Bond film is that oil companies will murder generations by blocking renewable energy (and ppl can get rich developing renewables that won’t be used) and half of the 1980s’ action flicks and children’s cartoons were about the need for the populace to unite to save the planet from tech companies and energy barons

The most pervasive current rhetoric from the far right through centrists to the ~moderate left~ is that the very concept of “waking up to” anything is pathetic

idk that the populace are gonna sort this one out anytime soon

In that case I wasn’t referring to the issue of climate change alone but more to how the main social and political trends of 2020 reflect on climate action, with an admittedly US-centric focus.

So my reference to waking up specifically to systemic crises there related to BLM as much as anything else. As far as speaking for the “moderate left”, that term seems entirely relative in the current political social media landscape but it seems that most folks here would be included in general, as well as most people I know and while my people in the Deep South of the USA are as usual behind the times, folks I know on the left coast seem to have had a great awakening over the past couple of years.

You do make a worthwhile point though, it wasn’t long ago that we were projecting the likely strategies of denialists in reaction to the increasingly obvious facts of the matter.

Anyway this is simply my best hope for now. Once we give up hope it seems like there’s not much point discussing these issues any more except as a psychological support group, and maybe another thread would be more appropriate for that.

really good piece. sums up how i feel. people knew. they should know. they were told, in a million different ways. it's too late.

here's what i always say - there are different degrees of bad. acting too late is better than acting too late at all.

i still think that's true. however, we're fucked, and we tried to tell people that in so many different ways. whatever. some people have already paid the cost; others will soon. most will never pay a cost at all, and worry about other things. fuck them!

it's good that there are young people, always. overpopulation is bad, but also the only hope we have is young people. everyone over the age of 35 can die immediately, we fucked up

the people that will feel good in the future are the people that can watch U.S. open round 3 in air conditioning in 1993 and 2043, and their experience was essentially the same because they were privileged. goood for them, fucked for everyone else

i wish there were a bunch more "honest" pieces like that, selfishly, but i'm glad that most people are strong and they don't show that part of themselves. it's demoralizing for most people, although, personally, to me, i see it as "real"

If we’re going to dwell on the sense of hopelessness I’d rather see a less blinkered view. More scientists who focus on data from objective sources; less journalists who read an article or two about how Miami is sinking and managed to connect the dots between that, the future real estate market there, and finally, when the fires reached their doorstep, how the crisis is immediately impacting their own region.

what are you talking about? is the one that prompted this revive common? are there are other articles i can read that are like that? please connect me to the journalists who are like the one who posted the essay posted above

there are literally 5.7 trillion articles written every single fucking day that tell everyone exactly what they needed to know to make the right decision

blinkered?

what?

is anyone lacking information on ANYTHING?

but no, shit on the one person who says FUCK

Ok apologies for generalizing but yes I would call this perspective at least myopic if not blinkered:

I realize I could cite some data to support this but I’m not going to look anything up because I don’t want to know the truth. I’m comfortable with “It’s bad.”

And no I don’t think we suffer from a paucity of information but more a surplus of confirmation bias/selection bias.

likely strategies of denialists in reaction to the increasingly obvious

everyone over the age of 35 can die immediately, we fucked up

iirc I posted in recent weeks about how it is 29 years since I was dismissed by school classmates and teachers for saying (abt a year after the govt scrapped a "zero emissions by 1995" policy")* that grownups had fucked it and our putative grandkids were going to live through climate collapse

* the govt is now arguing that a "zero emissions by 2050" policy is demented lefty anti-economy nonsense that must be resisted by the populace

Wow I missed that post, you were definitely ahead of the curve. My wake up moment was around the time of the Kyoto Protocol when it became apparent that the top priority of even the less rightwing major party in the USA was protecting the interests of industry.

I’m all for a Logan’s Run-type solution, no argument there.

definitely ahead of the curve

I absolutely wasn't! I just was a) a child in the '80s who paid attention to a tiny amount of current pop culture and b) read the newspaper every day (it came to the house, for free (to me)! imagine, that degree of access to information!!)

in the specific arg I referenced lately it wasn't even my point, I just thought it was so obv from [gestures at everything] that citing it wld get me off the hook for having to justify personally preferring not to breed, in the face of challenges from other children to the latter

Right, that’s understandable for sure.

are there are other articles i can read that are like that? please connect me to the journalists who are like the one who posted the essay posted above

BBC warning, and the Thatcher revisionism only weakens his argument but this recent commentary is a bit more broadly objective, and less hopelessly sensationalistic.

…Perhaps it was a week's leave away from the news that rusted my BBC armour of emotional detachment from the climate story.

Either way, I confess to a gut-tightening sense of foreboding when Hazel left and I caught up with North America's killer heat dome on TV.

That's not because new record temperatures were set in the north-western US and Canada - that happens from time to time. No, it's because old records were smashed so dramatically.

"The Miami building collapse is only loosely connected to climate change and yet her main focus seems to be an “I told you so” attitude based on an article she wrote about how no one should buy property in Miami now because in a few decades it will be a risky investment."

True, it's more like a creaky jumping off point from her piece from a few years ago to mention that build collapse story, except she mentions how hot it is even where she is and how she suppressed that, to then a full release of this ennui. I think the chat with the editor is pretty powerful. And I think most of us are suppressing it in our own ways. Except when it's too hot. The summer here is mild, how many more of those will I enjoy?

I look at a lot of the reporting but beyond headlines it just feels like tracking ecological collapse. A kind of geography lesson.

And governments know that too. Kamala Harris talks about wars over water supply. The UK government will be working to harden borders, offshore detention centres, build more jails onshore to detain anyone protesting. The build of this network is a salary for the ones that go along with it.

Meanwhile liberals are working hard to attenuate green policy, and most people kinda know their way of life has to change in significant ways but stuff like the wide scale planning needed is the preserve of places like China, but that's authoritarian. Anything else is suppressed voting and anemic leadership.

A lot of people are dying from over heating, much of the world will be made uninhabitable. It's pretty much happening. I don't it's hopeless to think it, just a recognition of the reality that we are living in right now is important.

We can fight with others for a better world, with the knowledge that a lot of bad things will happen needn't be the end of it either.

"That's not because new record temperatures were set in the north-western US... that happens from time to time."

lol I am now in the north-western US and three successive "highest temperature ever ever" records for this city were set two weeks ago, on three successive days

Kamala Harris talks about wars over water supply.

lol if Kamala Harris kicked loose with her pledged $2k/mo for the duration of the pando it would still not even get me into the other country I can legally live in during the pando, due to pando restrictions that started literally weeks after the populated coast of country was on fire

(and the govt appointed panels of fossil fuel execs to tell them how to economically recover from the fires, and then weeks later appointed panels of fossil fuel execs to tell them how to economically recover from the pando)

everything's fine

well, i'm sober for a few hours. this is fun!

sorry viborg, wasn't yelling at you, i promise. i think i was yelling at climate change.

with my morning headache, i am still in a similar place. i have obsessed about climate change. i have tried to learn a lot about it. i based my career off of something adjacent to it, in the bleak "hope" that it would continue to be fucking awful and opportunities would open up for me to continue fighting the giant obvious thing that will keep going and get worse. i thought "my personality suits this kind of challenge. "i am able to remain strong even and give people the benefit of the doubt that they don't -actually- know what climate change really is and how it works, even as at the same time i am aware that they almost certainly -do- know that. i can keep multiple plates spinning and be aware of that and just focus on the plates---" WRONG!!!!!!! ME!!!!!! WRONG!!!!!!

this is why i drink, sometimes. other people can deal with it now. i still deeply care, obviously, but i am no longer involved in any sort of way, either in the government in some baloney-adjacent office, hoping to suck up enough some day and say YES enough times to be in a position where i could finally give orders (probably "NO" to some fresh meat exiting graduate school).

so when i see a journalist that has just HAD IT with forming the perfect feel good "we're dying!" story, the kind with the perfect ending where you swim in the ocean and appreciate the beauty of that moment, while it still lasts - i like that. and i'd rather be swimming in the fucking ocean tbh, now. i tried, i failed. everyone failed. keep going. keep going

i liked the piece for being honest. the only way we can deal with this at this point is to live with and process massive amounts of negative vibes tbh. i don't think it's hit people who don't live in fire zones right now, like on a primal level, what we're in for. if your skies are locked in with wildfire smoke for 3-4 months you can't ignore it anymore. and all "it" is is ... feeling bad, real bad. and seeing little shitsticles come across your feed about avoiding cold starts in your car or w/e.

coupled with, in the U.S., they're not even really trying to pass climate legislation any more. green new deal, no. it's over for at least another 4 years, probably longer. someone will probably remind me that sen. whitehouse is making headway here or there, but no. i remember getting hopeful about the McCain/Warner climate bill in the latter years of the Bush era.

cities and states can and will pass stuff to help. interstate/regional agreements can be helpful. but it's all made SO much harder by having to push against the overwhelming tide of republicans trying to kill us

this subreddit helps mitigate my anxiety.....somewhat. yes, this is all stuff that should've happened 20 years ago....but its something

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClimateActionPlan/

It's a little cringey and does some off 'personal responsibility' crap, but the documentary titled 'Dirt' has some interesting things to consider, such as how a change to the way we farm (DON'T TILL THE SOIL) and even raise livestock would do a great deal in terms of drawing down, so to speak.

Of course, farmers and corporate farms are paid subsidies for their monocrops to fail. So, a lot of that goes out the window.

Anyway, it's not a bad introductory doc about soil's role in climate destabilization.

xpost

Frogbs I’m genuinely glad if it helps you cope but from a scientist’s perspective, Reddit, even in the subs focused specifically on environmental issues, has always been chock full of misinformation on these issues and recently it seems to have gotten significantly worse. (I’ve made a personal choice to almost totally avoid Reddit now so I can’t really comment on the most recent activity there.)

Karl I didn’t take it personally, I realized I was needling a little bit and may have had that coming. These threads only get under my skin when I feel like I’m being unfairly ganged up with the strings of ‘otm…otm…otm’ that can give the feel of a good ol’ Reddit-style circlejerk pile-on.

That's not because new record temperatures were set in the north-western US... that happens from time to time."

I do realize this issue is becoming quite emotional for many people and it’s far from my intention to aggravate that, or to minimize anyone’s feels on the matter.

Tbh my main reaction for some time has probably been mostly depressive which can probably seem cold-hearted when I revert to more clinical-type language when addressing these issues. I’m just saying, the fatalist attitude is not completely unreasonable at this point but I don’t think that encouraging it is really constructive. Sorry if I stepped on some toes tho.

what's worse, encouraging fatalism or encouraging people to keep their real feelings to themselves because publicly acknowledging them is counterproductive / depressing / encouraging fatalism? tbh the idea that focusing on "objective" data is more important or relevant than how this is impacting lives feels like part of the problem. we've tried the dry scientific approach, it doesn't work