If by ‘we’ you mean the billionaires and political leaders in a position to do something, then absolutely.
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We are voting for and consuming from those saboteurs. We could do otherwise AND incite something else.
Who is “we”, my friend?
People with active/passive voting rights and above global average purchasing power: People in stable representative democracies with mixed economies.
voting rights mean nothing if the candidates represent the rich, not us
Better a rich useful idiot, than a rich enemy.
lol we are the only useful idiots here, they wouldnt be rich otherwise
What keeps you from getting voted then?
Does “we’re all fucked” sound like an underestimation to you?
Yes
In a word, yes
Yup.
4
Uh, yeah?
Uh huh
No. The motherfuckers that have us all in a stranglehold are, we just get gaslit into taking the blame and responsibility for it.
Consumers are collectively to blame. We need to deal with personal inconveniences en mass and Make difficult life changes like not driving whenever possible, not eating meat, not buying new products, repairing and sharing. The corporations only survive at the hand of the consumer.
I really can’t tell if you’re serious or not.
They’re serious and oblivious.
It’s delusional for people to think we can just keep going on business as usual and wish for magic that the billionaires, politicians and corporations will fix the issues we’ve all collectively brought upon ourselves. We have to take action from the bottom up
You’re so close to getting it!
We need to make politicians and corporations fix the issues.
It’s delusional to think people consuming less is going to magically make the free market more responsible. Like Apple sales are going to plummet and they’ll just say, “great, we won’t make as many phones” instead of making worse products that become obsolete even faster to make up the sales. What’s the free market responsible end goal? No one has phones? No one has computers? Because it’s really easy for these companies to brick your devices just with software.
And do we then just have to submit to these corporations? Obviously, no. We need to force them to adhere to rules making our products longer lasting, with better support, without punishing people for not buying new.
“Personal responsibility” is propaganda of the ruling class that refuses to be held accountable. These are global forces creating global crises.
That’s nice but voluntary suicide is difficult to sell at scale.
i don’t think most people are laboring under the illusion that the world will be okay, just the illusion that they and their local community will be okay
I don’t know anymore… I’m more confused about the severity of climate change as time goes on.
Climate change is not a big deal if the life a person is expecting to live is only a slightly more stressful version of a life without climate change (I think this is where we are currently). It is a big deal if it has the same degree of impact of that a mental health disorder might have - work, relationships, and overall lifestyle are significantly impacted and that person needs to make major adjustments to learn to live with it. I don’t see a middle ground here, but I’m also not thinking that hard about it.
I don’t know where we are going. And yes… I know the world is a big place and some people are going to feel the worst aspects, but to keep things simple (and relevant) I’m only thinking of other “middle” class Canadians living in large urban centers. If this argument takes into account every person on earth then the answer is just going to be a meaningless ‘yes’.
Edit: I’m eager to hear from people about this. If you have something to say please share.
I had a conversation with a friend. A well educated friend, who has devoted his life to the cause
He thought he was fighting for his children or grandchildren. I told him no, we’ve been saying that for two generations - this is our problem. We will feel the hurt. Your water supply is not guaranteed, our food so supply could run dry one year. Our parents were told this was a future generation problem - we’re that generation… This is already happening
In the US, in the EU - some places are already feeling it, but we will all feel it soon
Shouldn’t we put more weight into your friends opinion?
Another person replied to me with a list of things that are a constant in our world. Except ‘collapse of civ’ which is exactly the kind of conclusion I’m raising doubts on as there isn’t as much to support it. Again, focused on regional impacts and not places that are going to be obliterated.
Another person said ‘wait till permafrost melts’. This is already baked into models, it’s not expected that all permafrost is going to melt everywhere.
Idk. I’m eagerly waiting for AR7 and I’m regularly checking in on a few places. I’m aware of the narrative that IPCC leans towards conservative estimates or is overly optimistic. Internet forums don’t seem to offer much to this conversation and it’s mostly people echoing what they already believe. I’m not seeing any exceptions to that norm here in this thread.
The few places:
- http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/
- https://www.realclimate.org/
- https://www.theclimatebrink.com/
An article/search topic that swayed me a while ago:
I expect that geoengineering is going to happen on a larger scale, it would be counter to how people operate to not pursue that option.
That’s not the effects I’m talking about - what we were talking about specifically was water shortages, across the US we’ve drained aquifers that will need centuries to build back up. Another fun side effect is crazy sinkholes
Droughts and lack of snowpack obviously play into it, but across the Western states it’s already a critical problem - and we’ve done very little to address it. We don’t have a plan, and the problem isn’t going to fix itself - wild ideas like water pipelines across multiple states have been proposed, we could provide drinking water in tankers temporarily, but ultimately this just buys a bit more time. This is a right now problem - we’ve been rationing and talking about this future problem since I was a child, but water needs have only gone up
As for other similar issues happening right now - wildfires across the continent, massive floods everywhere, massive crop failures in China and India, Spain turning into a desert, algae blooms killing already depleted fisheries, deadly heatwaves, polar vortexes, bigger and slower hurricanes hitting places unprepared for them - the list goes on
It’s a right now problem. It affects the vulnerable first, but it’s already touched all of us in one way or another. But what happens when the sinks in salt lake City run dry? What happens when someone’s house is burned down in a wildfire, twice? What happens when the power grid of Texas keeps going down every heat wave or cold snap?
People who can move will move. People who can’t will die in place or become climate refugees when things get bad enough. It will be just inconveniences and news of distant tragedies until somewhere hits a tipping point - hopefully you’re not in the wrong place at the wrong time, but even then you’ll feel the aftershocks
One thing to bear in mind, is that the draining of the water tables in the western U.S. is completely artificial, as in we could easily refill them with correct management. The issue is a crazy, CRAZY amount of water (inefficient flood irrigation farming accounts for 75% of water use out west) is wasted on growing alfalfa for export, or almonds, and farmers are able to do this due to water rights from 100 years ago.
If we just stopped the farmers from wasting water alone, we’d have enough water to replenish and drastically refill our aquafers.
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We could. It’s a totally solvable problem - until it isn’t. If an aquifer is dry and you’re already rationing the water, what can you do? Presumably ship in enough water to keep people alive, if not to sustain commercial needs too
Which is going to drain water from somewhere else, and what if they’re having the same issue? Take it from further. Salt lake City was looking into the idea of building a pipeline from the Mississippi, and I’m sure someone is looking into building a fleet of water tankers and checking if there’s profit to be had
Now, where’s the part in all this where we take back water rights? Where’s the part where we start to fix the problem?
Realistically the rubber will need to meet the road at some point, and the wasteful alfalfa and almond farmers need to be cut off straight up, because there’s no way a handful of wealthy farmers is going to be prioritized over a city of hundreds of thousands if that city is seriously considering trucking in water.
I’m familiar with all of that. I spent a lot of time on /r/collapse until it went completely off the rails. Crop data is available online - output in Asia is still increasing. I’m not sure if you looked at my sources but outside of social media that horrific doom narrative is not prevalent.
You know how we had SARS, and bird flu, and swine flu, and MERS? And every time scientists rang the alarm bell, but it turned out to not be a big deal? It’s because they knew COVID was inevitable - they knew the sketchy meat markets were a huge vector for a coronavirus to cross the species barrier.
COVID could’ve been much worse, but it certainly affected everyone. It also probably could have been prevented, or at least delayed
These smaller, regional problems are warning signs. A lot of people are dying from them already, but if we don’t take them seriously they’re just going to get big enough to have global effects. Not in the next century, in the next decade
Are we going to go extinct from climate change? I don’t think so. Are you going to die from climate change? Probably not. Will someone you know die from it? Possibly. Will it negatively impact your life? Absolutely, it already has, and it will keep doing so in interestingly obvious ways
That helps, good analogy. So the effects will be the things we already see - high cost of living, persistent low wages, fewer economic opportunities, increasing social isolation, additional strain on federal budget, reduced social services, changes in crime patterns, increasing poverty class, lower income countries more or less left to fend for themselves/less support, etc. More of the same, but instead of a limited period of economic depression we move into a long term depression and risk in multiple areas (like another pandemic). I can understand that better than picturing what a famine would look like in Toronto. Am I misinterpreting what people are saying, is that what they are already saying?
I don’t know where we are going.
Famine, war, collapse of civilisation, rise of warlords, loss of knowledge. Everywhere. Within our lifetimes.
Just look at the first of those and the rest follow. Think about how likely it is that our civilisation will be able to grow crops in the quantity it has up until recently, even five years from now, given the increased frequency and severity of extreme climate events.
That’s what I find confusing. We (global we) have already had enormous crop failures and disasters recently. https://www.agweb.com/news/crops/crop-production/farm-bureau-finds-2022-weather-disasters-amounted-21-billion-crop-losses these events can get amplified on social media and then it’s disorientating to me when the effects slip away.
I think what I want is data:
https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-production
I don’t doubt it’s going to get worse, but I’m struggling to understand the details of that. You’re saying famine in Chicago, full on North Korean style society? War, yes I said already we already do that all the time. Not new. Warlords, not new. Loss of knowledge? Vague. I’m sorry but this is what I’m talking about. How did you reach these conclusions, if you know?
PS: https://lemm.ee/post/45711739
“Climate change: UN report says planet to warm by 3.1 C without greater action | Reuters” https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/climate-set-warm-by-31-c-without-greater-action-un-report-warns-2024-10-24/
That’s what I find confusing.
I don’t follow. What is it you find confusing?
I think what I want is data
Unfortunately, due to the way time works, nobody can give you data from the future.
You’re saying famine in Chicago
Yes.
full on North Korean style society?
I don’t know what you mean by that.
I’m sorry but this is what I’m talking about.
Again, I’m not sure what you mean. What is what you’re talking about?
How did you reach these conclusions, if you know?
Firstly, the accelerated pace of global warming compared to predictions; we’ve already exceeded 1.5C globally for a short duration and things are getting worse not better, fast. It looks like we’re going to go well beyond 2C and we’re going to get there very quickly. The greatest fears of climate scientists 10 years ago now look like optimistic pipe dreams.
Secondly, the inaction from society as a whole. The time to have acted in order avoid the issue was 60 years ago. We’re now well into the situation where people are dying and billions, even trillions of dollars of damage is being done by extreme weather and yet there are people in governments who are still literally in denial about the scale of the problem or even whether the problem exists at all. And most critically, the populace is not holding those people to account. Governments are still issuing new oil and gas drilling licenses. Airports are still adding runways. Our civilisation continues to increase CO2 emissions which is the wrong direction if you want to save humanity.
As a civilisation or perhaps species, it seems that we do not have the capacity to deal with this problem. The reality of the situation seems to be beyond the grasp of most people. We don’t, as a society, have the means of identifying and fixing the psychological shortfalls that inhibit most people from acknowledging the scale of the problem. It’s like the problem is so big and its consequences so dire that people cannot bear to look at it with their eyes open. They would rather keep their eyes closed, even if doing so reduces the likelihood of them and their children surviving. Humanity is like a rabbit, frozen in the headlights of climate change.
I have a suspicion that many governments have already concluded behind closed doors that they cannot prevent global calamity and so are just trying to put off the inevitable downfall of their respective societies and live in comfort for as long as they can.
“we”
If only CO2’s warming properties had been discovered in 1856. If only good models of global warming had been created in 1896. If only those had happened, maybe society could have taken more substantial actions…
Wait until the permafrost melts and releases its trapped methane. If you think the existing CO2 models are disturbing we’re in for something much more rapidly catastrophic.
I got a vasectomy so my kids won’t suffer it, and a crock pot to slow cook/tenderize the long pork.
All set.
Probably. We’re clearly avoidant on this topic.
Yup
70s, 80s and 90s = peak humanity.
