Why are so many climate records breaking all at once?
Why are so many climate records breaking all at once?
From the hottest global average day, to the highest average sea surface temperature and the lowest Antarctic sea ice extent - here’s why so many climate records are breaking, all at once.
Oh I don't know, could have something to do with the whole climate change disaster the collective scientific community has been warning about for literally decades now
The sad part is, no matter how bad things will get, the same people will keep denying climate change. Even as their shoes melt into the pavement.
Looking at the past, I don't have any hope for meaningful change.
Just last year or so we've had people on their literal death beads denying corona is real.Last night my dad was talking about this "liberal propaganda" about the "supposed climate crisis" talking about the movie Don't Look Up. Fuck it pissed me off, I don't know how to respond to that. Conservatives aren't in reality, every fact that disagrees with their backwards fantasy is just some kind of liberal conspiracy that "wise" men would never bother considering.
Looking at the past, I don't have any hope for meaningful change.
Just last year or so we've had people on their literal death beads denying corona is real.You're not even wrong. Even when people weren't denying the reality of the situation, so many still refused to do any of the measures designed to stop it, then blamed everyone else around them.
It wad a depressing time to see how rabid and divided people are that somehow the existence of a virus that was literally killing millions of people, and leaving even more crippled existed or not became a political game.
We drive our cars and planes And burn the fossil fuels We ignore the scientists And call them climate fools We chop down all the forests And fill the seas with trash We melt the polar ice caps And watch the glaciers crash We suffer and we will die From the heat as we get older But hey, at least we created a lot of value For our dear shareholdersBeautiful and sad. Reminds me of u/poemforyoursprog
Climate change + El Niño
Just to add to this, Climate Change itself is a lot more than mere Global Warming - since weather is mathematically a Chaotic System, the extra energy retained in the system due to greenhouse gases not only increases the average temperature but also makes extreme weather (not just of the high temperature kind) more likely to happen, hence things like for example many and strong storms in a short-time frame which were the kind of combination that used to happen every couple of decades now happenning every couple of years.
Hence why over the last decade we've seen extreme weather events a lot more and more often.
The high temperature related records broken now (due to the combination with El Niño) are but a subset of the weather record-breaking that's been happenning in the last couple of years.
A lot of people think climate change is just heat and desertification.
And its not.
its more akin to a shot of nitrous in your car engine. It will take the normal systems and ramp them up to a realm not normally feasible. Hot weather will get hotter. Hot weather will reach further to places it never did before in summer. Cold weather will get colder. Cold weather will reach further into areas it never did before in in winter. Storms will be more intense. Hurricanes larger. Tornados more prevalent.
But we can't do anything because the rich and their bought politicians would rather stay the course to continue to extract every last ounce of profit from the planet, then ride out the storm on the high seas on their high end expensive mega yachts.
Plus sulphur ban on fuels (to reduce pollution but also reduces aerosol cooling effect)
Sounds like a tipping point to me, but I am not smart.
“Gradually, then suddenly.”
Well tentative take I saw from a climate scientist (in the news I think) was that it might be a flickering of a tipping point. The idea being that complex systems can temporarily look like a new state that they're close to tipping into but not quite there yet. If true, it would mean that we're closer to some tipping point than we thought or would like and this is a kind of prelude.
I feel like this is effectively denialism at this point. We're looking at serious crop loss (80% by some estimates) across the US and Canada and it's only going to get worse without massive projects or geoengineering. Combine that with a Russia/Ukraine war and we're looking at 1,4,5,6 and 9 of the worlds top 10 wheat producers looking at a minimal crop. We're far closer to famine than we realize.
Because we're governed by a large group of people who rely on fossil fuel countries and companies for campaign cash and the rest are more concerned with owning the libs than doing anything useful.
Yep. Nothing changes because the people that have the power to make the changes don't want to. The system as it is right now works for them. So why the hell would they want to change that? And most of them won't be around to see the devastation so there is another level of apathy to all of it.
We can't get out from underneath this monster it's too late for that. But I hope that we can start putting people into power that are genuinely concerned about this climate crisis and start the true (massive) step to moving us off the path to total uninhabitability
Climate change? Global warming?
Politicians and billionaires:
Didn't a couple of years ago scientist warned that we have past the point of no return?
There is a scene in the TV show Newsroom (with Jeff Daniels) where he (the news show anchor) is interviewing a climate scientist about the climate change situation. Everything the scientist says eludes to the fact that we are completely screwed. That everything we are trying would have been great things to start doing 20+ years ago. At this point we have already passed the point of recovery.
It was aired in like 2015, and I think of it every time someone talks about this, and what a surprise this whole thing is.
I thought the delivery of that scene was fantastic. They did such a great job with it.
Here's a link for those who've never seen it. https://youtu.be/pNYp6oc37ds
We probably are but it's also very important to remember that were not past the point of no survival. The trend for oil propaganda has been to go from "climate change is fake" to "it's real but it's too late to do anything". It's too late to go back, but it's not too late to act. Don't forget that.
there are many "points of no return". the first irrevocable damage was done when we started burning coal hundreds of years ago, and every year we pass new points after which the earth will be forever changed. that doesn't mean all life is screwed, or humanity will die out. it does mean that things are going to get a lot worse, and the degree to which they're going to get worse is increasing every day we don't address the issue.
the one thing climate scientists DO NOT want you to think is that we are doomed and that it is hopeless. things are bad, and getting worse, but the actions we take DO MATTER.
~~burn down an oil refinery (in minecraft)~~
But I need my lifted pickup truck To hAUl ThInGS. How can I go grocery shopping without a vehicle the size of a minibus? And how would other people know how strong and wealthy I am if I were to walk, ride a bike or use transit? I need a big metal box around me to protect my insecurity.
While I certainly don't want to defend the kind of asshats that insist on doing something as stupid and obnoxious as "rolling coal" I do need to point out that large swaths of the US are currently not setup in such a way that you can realistically get around without a vehicle of some kind. Massive work on public transit plus a fundamental urban planning design change needs to take place before walking, biking, or public transit is a viable way to get from point A to point B.
So until those changes are made, yes most Americans will need a electric or ICE vehicle. It doesn't need to be an inefficient pollution spewing behemoth, but it does need to be something. Really though aside from people intentionally modifying their vehicles to be less efficient and more polluting modern cars are pretty efficient and clean.
The primary vehicle contributor to both global warming and pollution isn't even cars though, it's ships by a landslide. It isn't even remotely close. Cruise ships and particularly the giant container ships used to move goods internationally are hugely inefficient and polluting with just one ship putting out in a single day the equivalent of multiple cars worth of pollution for an entire year.
The primary vehicle contributor to both global warming and pollution isn’t even cars though, it’s ships by a landslide. It isn’t even remotely close. Cruise ships and particularly the giant container ships used to move goods internationally are hugely inefficient and polluting with just one ship putting out in a single day the equivalent of multiple cars worth of pollution for an entire year.
Bullshit.
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
Road transportation: 11.9%
Shipping: 1.7%
Ocean liners are very dirty yes but they're actually very efficient compared to cars and trucks precisely because they're so massive. They move a huge amount of goods. Put the same amount of goods on trucks and you get an order of magnitude more emissions.
Oh and electricity and heating create almost twice as much ghg emissions as transportation. Which is why supporting renewables is the single most important thing anyone can do for the environment.
Plugging in another article about El Nino by Reuters.
Explainer: How El Nino could impact the world's weather in 2023-24
Fucked around to increase shareholder value.
"Faster than expected."
Sometimes I feel like I'm on the "Lord of the Flies" island; we've ignored the scientists and now the whole place is burning down.
Honestly a lot of it feels like gaslighting now. Some of us have been freaking out about this for a while.
Its the optiomy of we've tried nothing and we're out of ideas. Although I did see something about potentially blocking out the sun, so there's that option
There is A LOT of money to be made in climate change. What you don't hear in the news cycle is that we've made extensive reductions in all forms of pollution, but especially air pollution. We have slowed the rate of global warming as a result. Now big money "green" corporations don't want you to know that. Many on here will point to China using more coal or that our efforts are not enough. Fact is that the change is occurring and we are making an impact and need to keep that trend going, but know that the majority of the data that is published on the long term forecast is using 1970s data and not 2023 data to skew the impact as being worse and more fearsome. All the 'were past the tipping point' and such are using the old data. Things are better than that, but not to the point we need for major recovering.
Reduction isn’t enough. We’ve only been successful in exporting our pollution to places like China. We actually haven’t reduced anything because of that fact. We may have reduced pollution here but only at a cost of increasing it some where else.
With that said co2 emissions today are the highest they’ve ever been. We haven’t slowed anything. Climate change is increasing at an exponential rate. It’s going to keep increasing until we can figure out how to eliminate emissions and reduce what is already in the atmosphere.
Reality is no matter what reductions we take here the overall emissions in the world is still going up.
Hate to say it but it’s a little too late. By the time we figure out how to eliminate emissions the world will have burnt to a crisp. The time for aggressive changes was 50 years ago. We’ve already passed the temperature at which run away climate change is possible.
It’s quite clear our leaders decided to run it all into the ground instead of making an effort to change our way of life.
thinks about Clathrate Gun and starts sweating
I think we all know China is a problem.
instead of making an effort to change our way of life.
the unfortunate reality is the only way to significantly change carbon emissions in a fast enough time period would essentially mean throwing all of humanity back a couple of centuries in tech and standard of living
you try being a politician who advocates for this. you're not gonna get elected
even worse, convince all the 3rd world countries who are currently developing trying to get their people out of poverty. the chinese have finally gotten the taste for a little bit of meat with their dinner. of course that comes at the cost of mountains of coal being burned.
you tell those hundreds of millions of people that they need to go back to the farms and eat rice for the climate - meanwhile we got our chance to burn as much coal as we wanted to last century.
the reality is that we won't be able to stop climate change. the reality is that we're going to have to learn to live with it. and we will. climate change will not destroy us. it will destroy many species, will destroy many habitable zones. but we will survive.
i'm more worried about nuclear war & AI - which i think has a much more acute danger
A reduction in the rate of increase isn't enough, and it's debatable even that is happening.
Do you have any sources to back up your claims? Because NASA has consistently been able to make predictions about climate patterns and how they'll change in 10-15 years if no meaningful impact on emissions occurs, and they pretty reliably come true. That, for me, is pretty good evidence that NASA knows what they're talking about, and they're certainly not saying that everything's fine.
CO2 is one that hasn't decreased, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions have decreased.
Why would using 1970s data instead of 2023 data give a more fearsome forecast? Are you saying that emissions have decreased since 1970?
Certain types of pollutants have decreased, CO2 for example hasn't decreased and won't as long as logging continues. Trees store vast quantities of CO2 and when cut down it is released. Vehicles are releasing less CO2, industry is releasing less CO2, but there are more of them so we are not seeing the offset. What it come down to is that we need to avoid those trying to distract us from the end game which is reducing pollutants through better techniques and practices. Driving vehicles that don't use carbon emissions is a great example of this. Building Nuclear Power Plants is another.
Is it more or less than the money to be made from fossil fuels?
There's alway more opportunity and money to be made in new emerging markets, just not by the current top dogs.
That's why cigarette companies fought against e-cigs while buying those companies out.
That's why power companies for the longest time poo pooed solar while quietly investing in solar capacity.
The big guys block and depress these new markets while they get their ducks in a row cause if these new markets just exploded uncontrolled they'd miss out on getting in cheap.
So much more, as fossil fuels are a limited resource, green energy is limitless.
