Being defeatist isn’t exactly productive, but hearing that calamities are happening on a daily basis doesn’t help much either. I really do think the only way this’ll get better is after some additional damage is seen and felt by policy makers. Until then, I’ll use my resources wisely and encourage others to do the same.
There was an editorial in The Atlantic a couple of years ago—which I now can’t seem to find—titled something like “We should be covering climate change like it’s the only story that matters”. The body of the piece was very short, but can be summed up as “because in terms of relative importance, it is the only story that matters. But we won’t do it.”
But we should. But we need to.
Guess up until now it’s an abstraction people couldn’t imagine. Despite years of warning.
Recently been thinking we should reform old style political parties. Instead we get to directly vote for ideological topics which we can vote on, and politicians/parties who adhere to them. So instead of parties we vote for ideas directly. Just an idea that needs a lot more work :)
If every climate change candidate you favored for won in the US and Canada the impact on climate would be near zero. Why? Because China, Vietnam, India and Indonesia are now the majority contributors to emissions and they don't care about your agenda.
Such are the unintended consequences of progressive agendas. We regulated 'dirty' businesses out of existence (mostly) in North America and in so doing gave up our influence over how those industries operate.
And, no, we cannot coerce compliance via tariffs or sanctions. You cannot manufacture drugs, chemicals, electronics and other critical societal goods today without inputs from polluting countries.
The lack of dimensionality in progressive political agendas is disheartening and dangerous.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-isnt-the-media-c...
Their priority is more about intersectionality (and not even as it regards climate).
If they believe it's climate, then they should stress climate and leave other things second.
Tangential, but recycling is much less effective the reduced consumption.
I think the problem with policy makers not moving on this front is a reflection of people not doing so. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to make people even believe in something that would require them to sacrifice their lifestyle, let alone actually commit to doing something about it. To that end, the continued talk about climate change is necessary to hammer into our thick skulls that yes indeed this is a real problem and we really should do something about it and pressure our policy makers to make it a priority even if it means we can't have the same luxurious lifestyle we're accustomed to.
Paper straws? Not a bad thing, but if you really care about the environment, using a paper straw while at a bar in country on the other side of the world that you flew to is not helpful.
Additionally, people like to see the problem as "out there". i.e. my recycling is pointless because a factory undoes it. Well, the factory is building something... that you are buying. If the factory building (let's say cars) doesn't have anyone to sell the cars to, they aren't going to continue building them.
There's also the major problem that history's most sophisticated propaganda machine - the PR and advertising industry - is almost entirely focused on getting people to consume more of everything. Buy a new phone each year, buy a new car, buy a new fridge, buy a new washing machine, buy new clothes every week, buy more toys, always more more more.
The truth is that it will be impossible to stop the worse effects of global warming if we don't significantly reduce consumption of most things to older rates: people used to have one fridge their entire lives. A smartphone should last at least 10 years. Furniture should last generations. Clothes should last years.
That’s been going on for fifty years at least. Personally I think we should try to come up with solutions that are more attractive to people instead of pushing the same tired asceticism stuff.
Billions of people aspire to drive a Tesla. Let’s do more of that.
I do not feel, that it makes a large dent, but I feel that I'm way ahead what the average person does in order to reduce their environmental footprint.
Also, I do not feel I'm cutting myself short and I still depend on many of the niceties of modern civilization - but, I'd also be happier, if my footprint would be even lower.
[1] https://greenlab.di.uminho.pt/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/sle...
For example rather than turning the heat down, buying a solar hot water heater let’s you save money, take long hot showers, and be toasty in the winter while also being more environmentally friendly. Carbon credits are poor policy vs carbon taxes for a host of reasons. However, if you really want to feel better about your personal choices effective leverage is available. At the same time a huge number of what amounts to scams are also out there.
PS: Of course lowering consumption has other environmental benefits
It'd be thousands of times better to get one coal fired plant turned off in place of renewables.
But you can only succeed if you also treat it like a religion were everyone else are heathens. Because if you do not convert all of society to your believes that is always going to be your biggest climte debt. My own carbon foot print is minimal compared to what I use as a part of my society. That is no fun. That's not what I want to spend my time doing..
"For consumers in the industrialized world to signal virtue with their individual actions is irrelevant at best. Countries like Sweden that have had success in decarbonizing, didn’t reach their accomplishment with individual sacrifices, but by generating energy cleanly (with nuclear power instead of fossil fuel). In my opinion, the individual action that matters most is voting. Climate change is a problem governments will solve, not individuals. It is strange that people think the world’s most challenging problem can be solved by voluntary actions from billions of people — this is why we have representative governments" - https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/individual-actions...
Building a coalition that cares about climate is needed. Then politicians will see that the issue has a reliable voting block they can depend on for their careers.
Honestly: I don't know how I would have done it without that movie, lol.
Now my sister's sister-in-law also is an anti-vaxxer. Lets call her "C".
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Frankly, my political capital is still 100% on COVID19. I don't have enough political capital left to spend on climate change.
If I can't convince these people of the eminent dangers of COVID19, and the incredible relative safety of the vaccines... then climate change is hopeless.
C isn't dumb. But she's part of a family of conservatives. "Conservatism" is part of their identity, and right now, that means that they want to believe that the virus will go away on its own, that masks are stupid, the vaccine is made by Bill Gates (wtf??) etc. etc. etc. And climate change is fake is part of that identity they hold.
Pushing this part of their identity away from them is extremely difficult. Just pushing one concept onto them (ex: get the freaking vaccine) is hard enough.
Although changes to individual actions are needed to solve the climate crisis, the impact of individual actions will be minimal, and big policy changes are needed to make meaningful impacts.
The things that are actually working to produce the small policy changes we have seen so far, such as the green new deal, are protest movements like Extinction Rebellion and the Sunrise Movement [2].
I am seriously entertaining the idea of devoting much of my time to influencing policy. I believe that when it’s not just students and young people being arrested at protests but mainstream professionals, we may see some more serious changes. But I’m not terribly hopeful either.
[1] http://mallhistory.org/items/show/274
[2] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-save-a-planet/i...
Just remember: those same factories are operated by companies that have spent millions over decades to convince people that individual solutions exist to a systemic problem.
If you feel powerless, try looking for systemic opportunities to drive change.
After you spend several years on that, you will find an even deeper, more fundamental sense of powerlessness!
> the only way this’ll get better is after some additional damage is seen and felt by policy makers
I do sometimes think the way to shock people into actual change is to switch from defeatist rhetoric to unhinged triumphalism:
"For decades our war against Future Earth has been stunningly successful, and we're approaching the completion of a total victory! Yes, some might argue that our tactics have been unethical, and that our willingness to cause so many civilian casualties has been irresponsible. And perhaps, as time drags us across the front, as we encounter friendly (wild)fire, we may reconsider the unique harms of our arsenal. But as you encounter the destruction we have worked so hard to bring about, if ever your heart wavers, remember! Future Earth has always been fated to stand on the grave of Past Earth. And if Past Earth must die, why should we leave behind resources for others to prosper from our passing? Our victory may not be just, but it is Victory!"
The issue isn't so much that there's nothing we can do. The issue is that we've been highly effective at pushing in the wrong direction. We've allowed ourselves to frame our impacts as almost unavoidable accidents, rather than as acts of violence and destruction. Yes, policy makers must act, but perhaps we should be talking about tribunals to consider crimes against humanity, and international legal mechanisms to address collective guilt, rather than patting politicians on the head when they announce that eventually we'll stop selling ICE cars.
I feel like that did more to help this problem than everything else I've ever done.
Furthermore: insisting my job remain remote has also been a great help. No more commute.
It's still not enough.
I think real change is going to require a lot of sacrifice, and won't be a win-win for everyone.
Personally I have gone through several bouts of feeling hopeless about the situation but sustained learning about solutions and the work others are doing has been helpful. Also, talking to family and friends about solutions helps too.
[1] https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/xjh53gn/is-yo...
We might need programs for people to get cooling and not just better insulation, for example. In some places there is tendency to still mandate homes to be heat traps to save energy, which could also lead to really bad outcomes in very hot conditions.
Agree, but I mean, that's probably good too though. If you don't insulate homes well, they waste more energy (and emit more CO2) on all the days they aren't under an insane heat wave. And if you are Air Conditioning a house, that same insulation helps keep the place cool.
Even places that "never get cold" and therefore "don't need it", should still be reasonably well insulated both ways anyway. See the Texas Cold Snap earlier this year, and all the damage that caused (even though that weather would cause zero issues in Michigan). See the recent extreme heat wave in Seattle + Portland tearing apart roads and such (even though that weather would cause zero issues in Arizona).
Homes probably need both to be well built. They need to be able to heat trap and to quickly/efficiently cool + ventilate.
And in general, the concept of "building to match local climate" is probably going to have to be a relic of the past. There is starting to be no such thing as predictable local climates anymore. If you want something to last, it's going to have to be built as if it could get anyone's weather at a moments notice.
There's no point anymore to conservation from a consumer perspective, really.
In utah - consumer water use is like 2% of ALL water use, they run multitudes of ads saying conserve water...but do they regulate the 98%'ers in big industry, mining, retail, etc? No. Not at all. It's exhausting to watch them do nothing and complain about our 'scraps' of water they give us...
Commuting is killing the planet and killing employees due to stress and accidents.
And a lot of employees could move somewhere a bit cheaper which would help to reduce mortgages and rents and make cities more livable.
That's why it has to be solved by going political. Capitalism wont make companies care unless they are forced to pay for their pollution with emission taxes or whatever.
And in the same vein, a few persons driving a bit less wont matter. Instead ICE vehicles could have been basically forbidden. Of course, all this comes at a cost of somewhat limiting people's "freedom", which makes it so hard to get support for.
So a better way is policies that makes it the "rational choice" to do the right thing. Like building less roads and making stuff more walkable or reachable by public transit. That will have a far greater effect than someone voluntarily giving up their car with the status quo.
To that end, yes, please keep reporting on them.
Make a list of all the things that harm Earth that you do daily (hint: using a computer and the internet is one) and just eliminate from your life. You will be better, we are going to be better and thw world will thank you
If the West isn’t going to let the world use coal or other carbon heavy solutions, they need to pay the cost differences. It isn’t fair to impose poverty on everyone else after reaping the benefits of carbon emissions. We will never get global buy-in for the needed emission cuts if there is no recognition of this.
Compared to what? Living without electricity? Paying 10x for energy?
The lack of a real comparison with the real life consequences of a zero carbon budget seems a bit too convenient
I really don't think you get it. If temperatures rise enough, most of Central and North America won't be uninhabitable. The parts that aren't underwater will be too hot and parched. We won't be able to grow crops or desalinate enough water when the clouds and rain disappear (yes that will happen).
The 3 days of intense heat here in Portland left plants all around my yard scorched and half dead. Just 3 days. Imagine that happening regularly around the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period
Current climate change seems to be messing with the jet stream in North America in ways that diverge from historical data. Then you get things like your yard scorching in Portland this summer and my hedges freezing and dying in Austin this winter. We've built a huge amount of infrastructure on assumptions about local weather patterns that may now be invalid.
I think you have a typo.
What does this mean?
It seems as "if we just did X everything would be better", when actually there are mostly trade-offs
At the same time, things can be OK for us in the long run, if we really try to learn what we should do, and do that. I would include praying, honesty, kindness and humility (willingness to learn) among those things. Really there is good reason for hope for the best; these problems are expected now.
Edit: Politicization of individual weather events makes way for bad science no matter how extreme. In general, individual extreme weather events are not evidence of climate change and it is my opinion that everyone sounds stupid when they politicize them. Instead we should be looking at the aggregate historical trends and their weather modeling but that certainly isn’t as sexy.
If we want to get technical, too, the "snow" or "polar vortex" weather is because of the global warming induced breakdown in the arctic circumpolar vortex. That is the same reason that is snowed in Texas this past winter.
We are extremely seriously fucked.
> To fear death is nothing other than to think oneself wise when one is not; for it is to think one knows what one does not know. No man knows whether death may not even turn out to be the greatest blessing for a human being; and yet people fear it as if they knew for certain that is is the greatest of evil.
More heat energy trapped in the atmosphere results in more chaotic weather. But 'global chaosing' didn't have the same ring to it when we needed to coin a term.
It snowing every year is down to seasons.
Basically just replace climate change with "God is angry" because science has nothing to do with it, otherwise you'd hear attempts to link the freak weather events with climate patterns.
Pro tip. the more sporadic the weather event, the less likely it has to do with climate.
> Is global warming contributing to this heatwave? The answer is certainly yes. Would we have had a record heatwave without global warming. The answer is yes as well.
He also said in the same article:
> Let me end with the golden rule of temperature extremes: the bigger the temperature extreme the SMALLER the contribution of global warming. Think about that.
Even the Associated Press has fallen to this tendency to attribute everything solely to climate change. They wrote an article (https://apnews.com/article/climate-climate-change-science-en...) about a new study that came with a sensationalist headline, even though the actual contents of the study (https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/wp-content/uploads/N...) show this was a rare event (1 in 1000 years) with only a few degrees of contribution to temperature from climate change.
About this article I find it odd that it cites Thatcher, of all people. Surely the information she used in the 80ies is outdated by now, and she presumably never was a climate researcher.
According to this article in nature, there is rather a tendency to use worst case scenarios that are no longer probable.
In general I think local records are to be expected, because of variance. Maybe they become more frequent because of changing jet streams or whatever, but you can not go in the other direction and claim every record is because of climate change.
Technology also has a tendency to cause its own, new, set of problems, which can be worse than problems they’re trying to solve.
It’s not a panacea, and I would not recommend counting on technology to solve it either.
Also, if you truly want to cut emissions, stop caring about "per capita" and force your politicians to start holding the biggest polluters accountable and the countries not decreasing their emissions.
This article reads like a typical scare piece. The truth is, there’s just so many feedback loops in climate that we just don’t know what’s “responsible” for any particular event. It may not even be a reasonable question to ask.
There are things we know: greenhouse gases are rising because of human activity, and their presence will cause an increase in global average temperature at equilibrium. Beyond that, there is so much we can’t predict.
For instance, higher temps will cause more water vapor in the air, and therefore more cloud cover. That increases the earth’s albedo by some percentage, which is a powerful effect. Enough to hold off further warming for a while? We don’t know. No climate models agree.
Despite many hysterical media reports conflating global climate change with regional droughts this can not be a global effect, higher temperatures, instead, lead to greater percipation from greater water vapour production. Thus higher temperatures at lower lattitudes could result in icecap growth in polar regions increasing albedo and thermal inertia. These are just a few of the countervailing feedback effects. The bottom line is the that the climate system as whole is extremely complicated and has been self-rebalancing for literally billions of years. I seriously doubt that a few 10s of decades of burning fossils will result in an earth that was uninhabitable.
Chixculub impactor in Yucatan 65 million years ago vaporised a huge amount of carbonate rock (eg limestone) due to the particular geology of where it hit. I wonder how that compared to the amount of carbon humans have emmited over the past several hundred years from coal and burning marine algae fossils carbon (oil, natural gas).
It is clear to me that what is really driving the "climate crisis" is rent seeking by politicians, media, scientists. Special interests always love a crisis they can benefit from.
None of what you said is sourced. You are not a climatologist, nor are you a meteorologist. Unless you have some credential that allows you to speak from a position of authority, your words have zero value unless you have the sources to back them up. All of the science backs up climate change. Politicians and “tHe mEdIa” don’t have any interest at all in advancing policies to mitigate climate change beside a personal interest in enjoying a livable climate in the latter part of this century, as shown by how little they actually pay attention to this issue.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/that-obama-scient...
Like it or not, the remainder of humanity is rapidly industrializing. First, no amount of lifestyle changes in the West is going to offset the pollution and environmental degradation this could cause. Second, neither you nor me are in a position to tell them that they can't also have the trappings of a Western-level middle-class lifestyle once they can afford it.
If humanity wants to get serious about climate change, we need to think big. Really big. Global-scale big.
First: energy. How can we get the whole world converted to 100% solar and geothermal in the next 10 years? No more oil, no more gas, no more coal, no more ICEs -- there needs to be a global moratorium on fossil fuel tech to stop CO2 emissions. We should be mass-producing and deploying solar panels like there's no tomorrow. We should be giving them away to people (and countries) who will install and use them. Let's help industrializing countries leap-frog fossil fuels and go straight to renewables.
Second: water. Once we solve the energy problem, we're gonna need large-scale desalinization plants. We'll want to make so much green energy that desalinizing and pumping ocean water will be cheaper than pumping it from aquifers and rivers.
Third: food. Forget about "organic" food -- we need GMOs that resist pests, take less water to grow, and can put up with higher heat and lower quality soil. We'll need either a green way of producing meats, or a really high quality meat substitute, because humanity's appetite for it isn't gonna decrease anytime soon. At the same time, it needs to become "cool" to be vegetarian or vegan, in the way that Teslas made EVs "cool."
Fourth: shelter. Find your local NIMBYs and run them out of town. We're gonna need lots of high quality and high density housing to reduce the carbon footprint required to keep modern civilization running. It's cheaper and greener to supply water, air conditioning, electricity and sewage to 100 people in 1 building than 100 people in 100 houses. We should be building every single human being a condo in a high rise for free.
Fifth: manufacturing. Power all factories with renewable energy. If it can't be plugged in, make it battery-powered. If it produces waste, find a way to throw green energy at the waste to render it inert (or recycle it).
We can achieve all of the above today. Solar is cheap and getting cheaper, and you don't need that much of the earth's surface area to supply electricity for the whole of humanity. Once you have basically limitless solar energy, you can get cheap desalinization and cheap water pumping, which unlocks mass irrigation and with it, farming capacity.
Housing sounds like a tough political problem at first, but few people will say no to a policy of "everyone -- rich or poor -- gets a free condo." Even existing homeowners would take a second home in a big city, even if all they do is use it for storage or weekend visits.
Manufacturing can be made greener and greener as more and more energy becomes available. If energy isn't your limiting factor, then you can divert energy towards safe waste disposal -- for example, you could convert carbon dioxide back molecular oxygen and carbon with enough energy. This I think will be key to manufacturing the goods and services that 7+ billion people will want in a sustainable way.
The problem is almost always local opposition. Looking at California, we see huge moneyed sue-happy NIMBYism that fights rabidly against any new building, even going as far as having dilapidated buildings and their parking lots declared “historical” to avoid redevelopment. The most progressive state in the nation with a Democratic supermajority trifecta is currently fighting tooth and nail to allow single family homes to be split into duplexes. How do you think this fight is going to go in red states?
Cities are built out. We can’t build condos without bulldozing something else, and that requires someone else to be displaced. Those someones vote for a city council members which ban apartments, condos, and anything that isn’t a SFH with at least three parking spaces.
We’ve under-built 5.6 million housing units since 2008, and as a result, housing prices are now unaffordable even in southern cities like Dallas. The housing crisis is exactly as tough of a political problem as it sounds.
NIMBYs are not only pro-homelessness and pro-urban-decay, but also pro-climate-apocalypse and anti-growth. In my mind, the only difference between NIMBYs and Big Oil executives is the scale of impact, and the only difference between NIMBYs and terrorists is the means of violence. We should act accordingly.
https://twitter.com/BjornLomborg/status/1410961875899146249
Edit. Please read this and factor it into your understanding: https://science.house.gov/imo/media/doc/Christy%20Testimony_...
Edit 2. For the people downvoting me (certainly without considering what I've presented) and others, consider the phrasing here... "killer" heat, "scares" me. It's intentionally emotionally manipulative.
I'm not trying to be argumentative I just don't understand why this is a bad idea?
The consequences of any geo-engineering ideas are not well understood.
Large areas of solar panels, engineered to reflect as much as they can't use, would be a good double benefit. Excess electricity could be opportunistically used for GHG capture or the panels could maybe flip over and become mirrors.
An orbital umbrella that we could modulate such that we can deal with unanticipated consequences could also be ok.
I'm sure there are tons of other approaches that give control in both directions on reasonable time scales. Obviously cutting emissions Right Now is super important, and megaprojects shouldn't distract from that.
Let's start pouring money into research so we don't have to go in blind.
Climate change is at the point where there are actual consequences to people. Humans being what we are, we're not going to sit around and just accept a dramatically worse situation. People (very wealthy people with a lot to lose) are going to demand action, and action is going to be taken.
We can go in blind or we can start learning what the plusses and minuses of various approaches are now.
It is not practical and wouldn't work even if it was practical.
for me, it's a conversation of responsibility. its obvious that we (as a species) have not been responsible with the resources of this planet (see consumer culture, disposal culture, and planned obsolescence). it makes more sense to attack the problem at its causes rather than band aids.
It depends on if the band aids apply enough pressure to stop the patient from bleeding out. We don’t know how much about positive feedback loops for climate change. Things like the tundra melting and releasing more CO2 could create large inflection points which we don’t understand very well. Every day we inch closer to one of these inflection points, gambling the point is further out.
It is my belief that band aids are necessary to prevent nightmare scenarios from occurring. We can quibble about moral hazards and figure out what to do with ocean acidification once we aren’t at the precipice.
If there aren’t positive feedback loops I agree pushing back the problem for a few decades doesn’t help us that much so long as the root causes go unsolved.
[Edit] As it relates to responsibility, unfortunately those most responsible will due to their wealth carry the fewest consequences. We need a way to internalize the externalities of climate change to keep people responsible rather than leaving the global poor to suffer the largest impacts.
If we don't make serious changes the planet will get so hot that the clouds will vanish and there will be no more rain. We would be in a permanent drought.
We can't predict the exact outcome, and risk taking on even bigger problems. Those kinds of events tend to cause crop failures and famine.
And, the only explosions of that scale are nuclear weapons.
Cliff Mass, Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Washington and chief scientist of the Northwest Modeling Consortium analyzed this West coast heatwave event from a global warming perspective, in a post titled "Was Global Warming The Cause of the Great Northwest Heatwave? Science Says No." (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/07/was-global-warming-ca...):
> The evidence for a predominantly natural origin of the high temperatures records of last week is compelling, with global warming marginally increasing the peak temperatures by perhaps a few degrees. Without global warming, we still would have experienced the most severe heatwave of the past century.
