‘It’s too late’: David Suzuki says the fight against climate change is lost - iPolitics
‘It’s too late’: David Suzuki says the fight against climate change is lost - iPolitics
How to say Marx was right without saying "Marx was right".
Let's be clear about something; climate scientists almost universally agree that there is no such thing as "winning" or "losing" the fight against climate change (Suzuki, for the record, is a zoologist, not a climate scientist). This isn't a game, there's no referee, and no one gets a trophy at the end.
The battle against climate change is about mitigating harm. The worse we do, the more harm there will be. But there is never a point where it is "too late". The car is going to crash, but the sooner you hit the brakes, the less damaging the impact will be. Everything we do to push the needle will save lives. There is never a point where we get to throw up our hands and succumb to the comforting fantasy that it's "too late" to change anything.
I have a lot of respect for Suzuki, and I don't blame him for feeling defeated with everything that's happening, but spreading this kind of message is, dangerous, damaging, and flies entirely in the face of the science.
Back before George W Bush directed NASA to call it climate change, it was called global warming, and you can definitely win against that - by stopping the earth from warming. That's unwinnable due to feedback loops that have now begun.
Does not remotely address my point. We can always - always - work to reduce the harm caused by climate change.
The point where the harm could be reduced to "none" is decades past us. If that's the point where you give up then fuck off. Climate change is actively causing harm as we speak, and it is still worth fighting. We can still make life better for ourselves and future generations.
The notion that climate change is some kind of runaway engine that will continue amok without any further human input is nonsense. Yes, I'm aware of ideas like "Permafrost methane bombs" and I've also done enough research to be aware that only a small fringe of climate scientists actually support those ideas. They're flashy and exciting and get big press, but they are not widely accepted climate science.
What climate science shows is that the climate actually responds faster to reductions in CO2 than our older models predicted. That means that debacarbonization can have real and meaningful positive impacts beyond what we previously thought possible.
There is real damage already done, and there is damage that we cannot undo, but there is never a point where the problem goes beyond our input. The climate fight is always worth fighting.
"Too late" implies civilization collapse to me. That's pretty much guaranteed once the warming we're locked into happens.
Suzuki is and always was just a mouthpiece for corporate masters. Controlled opposition to steer public opinion. He is not and never will be a climatologist. His message is one of defeat because his backers want us to give up.
Suzuki can kiss my white ass.
Sort of? I don't think he mentioned tipping points anywhere in there, it was pretty non-specific and ranty, but if we've passed a tipping point it becomes less a matter of applying a brake and more of actively causing massive climate change in the other direction. Failing that, the warming trend and other shifts will stop when the Earth reaches a new balance and no sooner.
Nobody really knows where those tipping points are. The Paris thresholds were our expert's best guesses for a "safe" amount of warming.
Even if we do pass some kind of "tipping point" (and you need to understand that every tipping point is just an arbitrary line that climate scientists draw to try to draw people's attention to the problem), we can still mitigate the damage. There is never a point where fighting climate change becomes worthless. The less we do now, the greater the damage will be in the future. That's all there is to it. Tipping points are just a way of illustrating that.
In your car crash analogy, we are now past the point where hitting the brakes will help. The car will be irrepairably destroyed and all passengers will be killed.
This is flat out wrong. In fact, the more co2 is emitted, the more extreme the consequences are. The change from 0->1 degree of global warming barely registers. The change from 3->4 degrees is catastrophical, for example.
Thus, the warmer it gets, the more worth it is to fight against it, as each small win contributes more to the bottom line than in the beginning.
We haven’t taken our foot off the gas and legislators are stopping us from even touching the brake pedal.
That's why it's an analogy, and not reality.
There is no point where hitting the brakes will not help. We can always reduce the amount of harm done.
I think we're past the point of the car hitting the wall even if we brake, and the damage ruining your day. We're not past the point that braking will save lives or even make the car unrepairable.
Just put ice in the airbags.
It was the climate scientists that agreed +1.5 degrees was the threshold we shouldn't cross, and yes, it's too late.
It's not too late to make things worse by giving up! /s
Thanks to big corporations effectively owning governments and big politicians the world over, things aren't bound to get better anytime soon, because "the economy". Fuck that shit
And thank the Saudis too. Guess where the previous conference on phasing out fossil fuel, but agreed to slow down the process, was held.
Has been for ages. It's now question of how bad, and we are still making it worse.
And we're gonna increasingly train more AI, mine more crypto, open more coal mines, industrially kill more animals, fight more wars.
All that's left is to make the rich suffer.
“The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.”
~Utah Phillips
Inb4 some pedant quibbles that "the planet itself is not dying." Yeah, but we and our fellow creatures are. It should be understood that is what Mr. Phillips meant.
1950's oil execs funded studies that show how they will kill the planet if they don't stop, transition to something else, hell they had enough fore warning they could have R&D'd solar and monopolize the tech, but NO! They needed to make faster money faster and stopping yourself from killing the human race isn't THAT important, and they knew they'd be dead by now.
They might have been able to monopolize SOME of the tech, but they knew they could never own access to the sun. But yeah, they knew that they were incinerating us for decades. Which makes it premeditated murder in my books.
Canada (and the world) will burn. You think migrants are a problem now? Wait until millions of people have no choice but to go north and the water wars start.
O damn, almost forgot about the water wars. Those were brutal. Before those people genuinely believed there was nothing bigger than a World War. The fools. Like if you're still here in 2125.
the spice must flow!
the focus on politics, economics, and law are all destined to fail because they are based around humans. They’re designed to guide humans, but we’ve left out the foundation of our existence, which is nature, clean air, pure water, rich soil, food, and sunlight. That’s the foundation of the way we live and, when we construct legal, economic and political systems, they have to be built around protecting those very things, but they’re not.
Powerful truth!
@asg101 I agree we've lost the opportunity and will have to "hunker down". But hearing it from David Suzuki is...hard.
I think he's right, but he's also a real asshole and lives in a mansion in Vancouver and likely creates more environmental damage than the average human
If I had mansion money I would buy land to live in a self built mud hut.
Most everyone who's even slightly well off in north America creates significantly more environmental damage than the average human
I gave up a long time ago. The last time we really did anything about an issue like this was lead in gasoline. 50+ years of knowing we had to change. I wonder if maybe the wealthy elites know whats coming. I wonder if this new rise in facism is partially an answer to the fact that there won't be enough of anything to go around. That is why they want us having babies. for soliders. I hope they have some spark of humanity and let people self terminate but I bet you would need money for it.
Just wanted to add that maybe the last thing that we did for the environment and that really worked was for acid rain in 1991. At least where I live.
A few years before that there was the Montreal Protocol that banned CFCs and helped to heal the hole in the ozone layer. I think.
But yeah, I don't remember anything of the sort recently,
Where I live people are replacing furnaces with heat pumps, if enough do it could make a minuscule effect.
I'm pretty sure that's what the grab for Ukraine and Trump's stated intent to annex Greenland is about. Both of those have the potential to become food security sources after significant global heating. I'm also pretty sure that's why authoritarians are seizing control of govt (and by extension that govts security services) because there won't be enough to go around and they're going to need soldiers to keep the hungry people away from their billionaire breadbaskets.
What about ozone layer?
Genuinely seen conspiracy theorists say "they removed lead paint to that they can control you with 5g"
If we still had lead gasoline, people would say you can pry it out of their cold dead hands
We do still have leaded petrol. All piston engined aircraft are still burning fuel with added lead.
what possible reason could there be in self termination when there is a good fight to be fought (against the oppressors)
If you gave up a long time ago, then why did you bother to write that comment? Clearly you haven't given up.
Saying we have failed is the easiest thing to say.
Doesn't mean it's not the truth.
Lol yup, trump also went all in on climate denial. Definitely fucked.
Giving up is exactly where the "too late" come from, quitter shouldn't be leading climate advocacy.
I mean...the next steps involves lots of fire and death...so...that's not going to save the environment either but it will certainly send a message.
I try to stay postive but we're slowly burning and yet politics has never been so aggressively stupid about this. And the warlords dictating or culture too. I don't want this.
Less people accept climate change in Canada today than 20 years ago. If we couldn’t do anything about it then, why would now be different?
That's how I feel, like it might not be too late to do something but people just don't care. And if we don't do this together its pointless.
Yep, Trump just put all our climate mitigation funds into big oil. We’re cooked.
And Trunp is bringing back coal too. Fucked doesn’t even describe it.
How to say Marx was right without saying "Marx was right".
Hard disagree, this is a liberal doing the usual thing. As John Bellamy Foster elaborates on in his articles and books, the fight against climate change isn't lost, it's been abandoned by the ruling class of imperial core countries. Look up some of his stuff on Monthly Review the ecological rift is a very important concept that never appears in the kind of discourse you're posting
So, how long do we have left?
No one knows, many humans and other species are already dying from climate change today. Get used to hearing the phrase "It is happening much faster than expected." from now on.
I'm curious if we will hit a correctional point when most of life dies off and civilization can restart. I'm picturing some fallout/metro kind of shit where people need to love underground for centuries.
"Collapse is a process, not an event." It's very likely we'll be extinct by the end of the century. There will be all manner of hell from now until then. Our population of over 8 billion is only possible because of a highly complex global web of systems. Complex systems are fragile. Once dominos start falling, people will start starving very quickly.
Its entirely possible that 99% of humanity dies but I don't really buy into us going extinct. People have an inate drive to survive and even if things are genuinely horrible I don't see them just giving up. Unless there is literally no food/potable water I think the planet is stuck with some form of humanity until the planet is uninhabitable. Remember there are still dinosaurs around today, they just look different.
I would say under ten years if we are talking about staying in "life as we know it." Global food supplies are at risk. We are going to see mass die offs in large portions of the ocean. AMOC and the Jet stream will continue to wobble around causing mayhem. Coastale areas will become eroded and huge portions of the infrastructure will become unfixable as the disasters come too frequently for any real, long term repairs to remain.
Think about that term, tipping piont. Tipping does not imply a gentle decent.
The typical Lemming will be poorer but fine, unless it triggers other human disasters like a nuclear exchange. The lower classes of Bangladesh, less so, and 95%+ of coral reefs are fucked.
that's a loaded and optimistic question. With the way the world is going currently being taken out by climate change and only climate change is awfully optimistic. I think that would be the best case scenario at this point.
Just hope that the next intelligent species will speedrun capitalism
With the Sun it's hard to really believe there's enough time left in the habitable zone Earth era left.
*for that to happen again.
Nah, for it's left how much? 4-5 billion years, mass extinctions happen like every 100 million years and after each one there's nonzero probability of intelligent life occurring.
Let climate change end humanity, we fucking deserve it
The problem is humanity is taking most of the other species in the world with it. Just the methane/permafrost feedback loop out of dozens of feedback loops will usher in the level of warming and ensuing extinctions experienced during the Permian/Triassic die off.
The ruling elite are incinerating all of us for profit, and they don't give a shit.
🔥🔥 This is fine 🔥🔥
Did he fly across the world on his private jet to announce this?
Can't kill earth can only just piss her off, hopefully I'll be useful enough to the overlords of Cascadia Dome #6 to get a really nice condo overlooking a nice park.
Hunker down while growing the world's population!