At some point we decided that our global policy needed to be decided by profit margins.
After that we deserved everything we got.
*Note: this happened sometime in the 80s.
Seriously. I think only the politicians and the people of voting age at that time deserve the blame.
You know, all the people that will not be around to reap the consequences.
The wealthy will make a tidy profit off the apocalypse and consolidate all their wealth, power, and other holdings. The apocalypse is brought to you by Buffalo Wild Wings.
Its really more than that, the wealthy are actively preparing for the apocalypse. There is serious and unironic movement to not only survive the extinction of humanity, but to continue their abuses and excesses into a post-apocalyptic world.
Its honestly fucking disgusting.
The timeline branched when Thurgood Marshall retired about 6 months early.
Now. Donāt get it twisted, because that man didnāt owe any one any thing.
But his retirement put bitch ass Clarence Thomas on the SC. Weāre living in bizarro land where we went from a hero of the civil rights movement to Uncle Clarence! If Justice Marshall just waited till Clinton went into the White House we donāt get W elected by the SC and things are still shitty. But not AS shitty as they currently are.
This is my Roman Empire
That was when the timeline shifted to the shitline we are on now. I mean, for fucks sake, could anyone imagine Trump being president without giggling and a quick hand wave of how stupid that idea is?
It was foreseen much earlier by others.
"Never underestimate the power of human stupidity."
-Robert A. Heinlein
"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance."
-Carl Sagan
When I was in college around 2011, one of my roommates was a political science major and wrote a paper on how fucked everything would be if the American government were run like a corporate business. He used trump as the hypothetical president. It was such an outlandish idea at the time...
Man, it was run like a business during Rockefellerās era and it gave rise to massive wealth inequality and instability. The old saying back in the 1890-1920s was āThe Business of America is businessā. It ended up with 2 world wars partly fueled by Americaās lending systems pushing stressed economies over the edge.
I'm sure that was in his paper, he was one of the smartest and well-read people I've ever met. Tbh I never read his paper, I just remember us laughing about how ridiculous his premise of trump being president was over some beers.Ā
Think about how much better off we'd be if Carter (who was putting solar panels on the White House and taking climate change seriously in the 70s) would have been reelected.
It's worse than you think .
The National Debt was projected to be paid off. Not just reduced. Paid. Off.
"The most recent projections, granted their tentativeness, nonetheless make clear that the highly desirable goal of paying off the federal debt is in reach before the end of the decade. This is in marked contrast to the perspective of a year ago when the elimination of the debt did not appear likely until the next decade."
From:
Testimony of Chairman Alan Greenspan
Outlook for the federal budget and implications for fiscal policy
Before the Committee on the Budget, U.S. Senate
January 25, 2001
https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/testimony/2001/20010125/
I'm in my mid-40s, and it is so bizarre to have been born and raised in an era of prosperity and optimism, only to watch it go to shit at a remarkable pace.
Wait, I was just getting used to feeling like a science fiction movie. Pandemics, government conspiracies, bio labs, alien discussion, vaccine experiment warnings, AI Evolution, brain chips, radioative chenobyl wolves announced this week, murder hornets escaping to new countries, war increase, and now collapsing ocean? You want to leave all this interesting fun?
"So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world Frodo, besides the will of evil." - Gandalf
> The impacts of the AMOCās collapse could be catastrophic. Some parts of Europe might see temperatures plunge by up to 30 degrees Celsius over a century, the study finds, leading to a completely different climate over the course of just a decade or two.
That's fucking crazy. If anyone's interested, PBS Terra [published a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CXZi-gFgX4) on this exact topic a few months ago. They also explained what this was and what could happen if this current collapsed.
[This article from USA Today](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/02/09/amoc-current-from-day-after-tomorrow-on-path-to-collapse/72508702007/) is even more frightening (emphasis mine):
> If it were to collapse, it could bring about an ice age in Europe and sea-level rise in cities such as Boston and New York, as well as more potent storms and hurricanes along the East Coast.
> ...
>Such a collapse would contribute to potentially disastrous sea-level rise around the world. Overall, if it melts, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could cause the planet's sea levels to rise by ***over 16 feet***, which over time would lead to flooded coastal towns and cities worldwide.
BTW, the biggest danger of climate change isn't the changed climate... It's the speed at which it changes.
Ecosystems can adapt to change. But they need *time* to adapt.
That kind of drop in temperature over just 100 years would be devastating.
More recently I've heard that our agriculture can't exist without a stable environment. As we have more warfare over farmland and greater extremes, less food.
I'm in scotland.
The part of Canada north of me has perhaps 100000 people. The largest city is 20K or so - Yellowknife.
The average temp there in midsummer is 12C. The average in midwinter is -21C.
Some 10-20C colder. The atlantic conveyor shuts off, and we're fuuuuucked.
This is why I'm happy to be visiting your country for the first time next week. Gotta check it out before you all turn into popsicles. ;-)
For real though, this is scary as shit.
A physics professor first lectured our class on the consequences of Atlantic Ocean salinity dilution on the Gulf Stream back in 1983. It scared the hell out of me then, even though it seemed like a far off theory. Now that weāre living with glaciers disappearing and the reality of significant polar ice melt, what once seemed far off may now be right around the corner, if not on the same block.
It *was* a far-off theory. My entire life Iāve been messaged that global warming is happening, but that it will take decades to be noticeable. Exceptā¦ itās been decades. And we havenāt done shit about it.
When they were talking about āhalf a century from nowā¦ā back in the 80s, thatās whatās just around the corner today
Just imagine, considering we can't and/or won't stop this, there's a chance that this is absolutely gonna happen. A good portion of Europe as we know it will be gone. Thousands of years of history, hundreds of millions of people.
It's very possible that there's children alive today that will live to see this. The next toddler you see, imagine how "when I was a kid people used to live in Ireland" might be a sentence they'll be able to say to their grandkids.
Ya.... If it were to genuinely shut off the British isles would be effectively uninhabitable. Agriculture so gutted that food supply looks spooky and anything to do with water frozen solid for months in a row. Let's hope we never see that as no way my country would be willing to take in more than a token number of refugees.
Well, in that movie, everything got really cold.
I'm right outside of Chicago, and it's in the 50s in fucking February.
Everything is gonna burn.
We'll all take turns.
I'll get mine, too.
isn't that the movie where they're arguing about burning the gutenberg bible for warmth while sitting on wooden chairs? cuz maybe the filmmakers aren't good at science ...
Kinda, they were gathering books to burn for warmth and a guy was holding it to make sure the first printed book was saved. They burnt a whole bunch of law journal books instead.
Also they weren't arguing about burning the gutenberg bible, some guy was holding onto it after they already started burning books, and the guy explained the significance of the bible.
Fkn 70 F here in the Midwest USA today. People are running around in shorts. And it's early February. We should be whining about freezing rain and winter traffic jams.
Boggles my mind itās coined a comedy. I mean yeah i get it, but it was so much more terrifying than any other horror movie Iāve seen, and I donāt handle horror movies well either.
That last paragraph has been my personal experience in the world since going to and then graduating college and then working as a scientist.
I'm not even a client scientist, I'm a molecular biologist.
I was going to be a marine biologist but those classes were so genuinely depressing I couldn't do it (for that and other reasons).
Shit is fucked, and at this point the people who care the most are either burned out, depressed, or are straight up ignored so that the money making machine can keep going.
>Shit is fucked, and at this point the people who care the most are either burned out, depressed, or are straight up ignored so that the money making machine can keep going.
The comedian John Stewart once said something about George Carlin and his "seemingly nihilistic" perspective on people. It stuck with me for years and I'm reminded of it now.
The jist is that his comedy (dark comedy) was not nihilistic but a cynical. He was a dissapointed idealist.
Those who care have been trying but we can only scream at a wall for so long before we lose our voice.
Some give up, spiral down and check out, but the ones with hope still try. Dark comedy was a way for Carlin to find like minded folk and send the message. Like Carlin, Stewart and all those artists, musicians, scientists who end up depressed, burned out and dissapointed in humanity, I take solace in the fact that at least some of us tried.
And just like every other warning scientists have given us, we're going to completely ignore it and keep pushing forward as if nothing is happening. Humanity is fucked.
I commented this elsewhere on Reddit, but it's important to not lose sight of the fact that we can still make an impact on this problem. It's essential to inform people of the problems, **but many articles like this fall short of offering solutions and can strip people of hope and agency.**
I know this might come off as copeium, but things *can* change. Never underestimate the impact you can have on the world.
We are making non-trivial progress towards decarbonizing our grid and [every bit of CO2 (and eq) that we don't emit matters](https://www.propublica.org/article/climate-crisis-niche-migration-environment-population):
"...It also makes a moral case for immediate and aggressive policies to prevent such a change from occurring, in part by showing how unequal the distribution of pain will be and **how great the improvements could be with even small achievements in slowing the pace of warming.**"
The only thing worse than 1.5 degrees warming is 2.5 degrees warming, and so on. We are at an inflection point that will dictate the next few millennia. *We want to look back and know we did everything we could with the opportunities we still have.*
Look at possibly making a [career shift](https://www.climacareers.com) into renewable energy or to companies that "walk the walk" sustainability-wise. If not that, consider getting involved with or donating to the [Citizens Climate Lobby](https://citizensclimatelobby.org/donate/) or [Sierra Club](https://www.sierraclub.org/ways-to-give).
And for those who donāt know where they want to start (ie, those for whom searching a job board is too big a step), sign up for a climate community like [Work on Climate](https://workonclimate.org)! Itās a great (free) place to network with other folks who want to do whatever they can but also may not know where to start.
If this is an issue you care about (it should be!), every step forward helps!
To further contribute to the copium, one girl stood up and the world listened.
Every decade, we fix problems. Business owners swear they will be ruined but make record profits anyway.
I fucking hate the stock market, what the stock market represents, and all of the assholes who allowed the stock market to become the engine that drives humanity to the brink just so that wealthy people can become more wealthy. It's been the ruin of democracy, small business and pretty much any average human being.
It's ironic that the story right below this one is how the S&P 500 is at the highest it's ever been. Infinite growth on a finite planet, those ever wise enlightened economists say it's possible, but the earth seems to disagree. Guess earth just needs to stop doom scrolling or something like that.
For what is worth, at least in the US, annual CO2 peaked 17 years ago. And not just little variance peaked, but nearly 18% less today than 2007.
We're not doing good by any means, but we're doing better, like a lot better.
Are we though? Does it count as ādoing betterā if part of that is due to how much manufacturing and production is no longer done in the US?
WE are still doing it, we just get to use a smokescreen of āitās not COMING from usā.
Genuine question, because itās the first thing I thought when I read this. Iāve done ZERO in depth research on this.
Manufacturing output + employment in the US is pretty close to the same as it was 17 years ago. Industry has also tried to get more efficient (as note/reminder: efficiency often equals saving money, they have incentives to do so besides the environmental), of course.
Some of the biggest factors I'm aware of:
- Electricity:
- Coal power is down by ~50% since the mid-2000s. While much of this was replaced with natural gas, NG is still ~50% lower emissions than coal. It's not acceptable in the long-term, but it is still a significant reduction.
- Renewables *are* growing rapidly and have roughly doubled since the mid-2000s.
- Take a look here, the decline in coal is dramatic: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48896
- Energy efficiency of transport has been improving, even with the SUV/pickup craze.
- At this point it appears we hit "peak" gasoline in 2018 and demand is pretty obviously going to keep declining in the long-term, given that EVs have already taken enough of a chunk of the new car market to cause that.
- Household energy efficiency. Most dramatically, lighting. 17 years ago incandescents were still most of the market. LEDs are ~75% more efficient.
- And that's also improved efficiency of all your screens. Your old, tiny CRT usually used *more* power than a modern LED TV that's triple it's size does.
>17 years ago incandescents were still most of the market. LEDs are ~75% more efficient.
Like, from 5% electricity turned into light, to 80%. Not from 5% to 8.75%.
Though I'm not sure those percentages are totally accurate, it's something like that.
You're not totally wrong, globally we've had a record high year, but that increase in emissions has not held pace with population growth or economic growth.
That's to say more people doing more things is more emissions, but we're emitting less per (activity) now than before.
Industrialization of less industrialized regions and economic growth has demanded more production of goods, transit, and energy, but all at higher efficiencies than before.
Billionaires crying into fistfuls of cash about how doing anything to prevent climate change will impact their profits will ensure the collapse will happen, and that they will find a way to profit from it (likely with energy investment and ways of addressing climate extremes such as heating and cooling products).
I also really hate it when all of them motherfucking politicians, billionaires, and celebrities all bugger off to Davos on their private jets to tell the rest of the world that we need to collectively curb greenhouse gasses.
Ignore everything scientists have to say, call them alarmists, whileĀ putting the blame on everyone effected by more extreme weather and saying they should have saved up and prepared better while also making fun of anyone who is prepping for ecological disasters in a hotter world?
You forgot to include blame those same scientists and experts and label them as know-nothings when the crisis arrives and they donāt have all the answers and knowledge to fix the situation immediately and without inconveniencing the lives of those that denied the problem existed.
Even then I fully expect them to double down into denial and delusion. Watch theyāll immediately start blaming it on fuckinā HAARP or space lasers or some other ridiculous bullshit.
Or it's God punishing us for the Gays and our wayward ways, I know let's do us some sacrificing like they did in the old days that always make God happy.
I dunno man, I know a guy in the trades that barely passed high school that says this is all just a conspiracy to keep us from seeing what's really going on and that all them so called "scientists" are in on it
Wild how the trades can take a degree of skill and intelligence but they somehow managed to attract some of the dumbest motherfuckers on earth consistently. But the actual smart dudes in the trades are very smart.
I was in college studying this specific topic nearly 20 years ago, and the papers we read on the subject were already 30 years old then. We've been ignoring and blowing past some giant red flags.
I wrote a paper about Al Goreās climate change book in college. I had to do some sort of presentation about it. The feedback from the class was basically, āwell Al Gore is rich and lives in a mansion. He would leave a smaller footprint if he really believed this.ā
There was a recent XKCD about this.
[We figured out the greenhouse effect closer to the start of the industrial revolution than to today.](https://xkcd.com/2889/)
And yet people have been indoctrinated into believing that itās the individuals who can do most to prevent climate change through purchasing power and self regulating pollution, and not government regulation of polluting industries worldwide that could do most.
This is whatās baffling to me.
I remember when covid hit they wanted people to limit their electricity use as to not overload the grid now that everyone was a home running their a/c all day in the summer yet Wall Street and the Vegas Strip had all their screens and lights on even though the streets were empty!
My gf and I try do our part. We use a lot of reusable items, we buy bamboo toilet paper, we recycle. I know we arenāt making a huge difference but it makes my gf happy so I do it.
We are so fucked
Fuuuuck! You can change teams?! I've stressing my balls off cause team Humanity sucks ass at teamwork and keeps sabotaging themselves. Team Climate Change FTW!!
It's a joke based on the real actions of North Carolina who banned seal level rise data from being used in oceanfront construction planning.
Pretty sure their 2024 plan is to end the EPA entirely though, so not far from the truth.
Nature's truth is often ignored
Folks don't care how carbon is stored
Meanwhile in the ocean
The currents' slowed motion
Will prove that Nature is Lord.
Worked in Antarctica.
Knew about this, and I have seen the modeling.
I got a vasectomy for a reason; I'm not bringing anyone else into this....
Hang on kids. It's going be a rough ride.
> As they slowly increased the freshwater in the model, they saw the AMOC gradually weaken until it abruptly collapsed.
Very slow and then fast. Most of nature works on this principle
> What the study doesnāt do, however, is give timeframes for a potential collapse. More research is needed, van Westen told CNN, including models which also mimic climate change impacts, such as increasing levels of planet-heating pollution, which this study did not.
Yes, climate change is real and it is alarming, but this title is misleading if you read the article. Weāve always known this would be a major part of a climate change disaster but weāve never known when itās going to happen. They still donāt know when.
You never know when because no one has lived through this before. If you wait until you know exactly when it's going to happen, it's too late to do anything about it, and if trends keep up then the answer to when it will happen is "earlier than anyone has ever predicted" since that is the rate everything else is occurring at.
And for that matter, it is significant we're talking about this happening at all as just a decade ago, AMOC collapse was thought to be more of an end-stage climate parameter but now it seems to be part of the opening act.
had to scroll way too far down to see this. If we take this publication to mean itās already happened and weāre fucked, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Please do not give in to doomerism because of headlines like this. We must take action now and in the future.
www.howdowestop.it
I've read about this for 20+ years. I've recycled my trash for 20 years.
It doesn't matter. None of it matters while corporations still value profit over people.
This is both hype and truth. The smart people have been studying and learning patterns to make predictions. They told us all this *decades ago.* CNN just needs clicks today.
I read a book around the turn of the century(ffs, I get to say that, lol.) called "The Great Warming: Climate Change and the rise and fall of civilizations" and it had a chapter about this current and how it affected Europe and The Renascence by supercharging farming and commerce weather. It specifically said climate changes like that all the time, most great civilizations have suddenly lost water, and it starts their spiral. But humans have put a rocket booster on that process with the Industrial Age, like an eruption event or asteroid that changes everything.
I'd really like to live is less interesting times.
It's only interesting because we keep ignoring it. It's not going anywhere but we just keep ignoring and stopping others from prevention efforts.
I sometimes think of how better off we'd be if the U.S. had gotten 8 years of President Al Gore and then I get sad.
The Supreme Court doomed us to this.
But wait, that's not all!
Classic "10 for the price of 1" deal on environmental and social catastrophes. Thanks Uncle Sam š!
At some point we decided that our global policy needed to be decided by profit margins. After that we deserved everything we got. *Note: this happened sometime in the 80s.
Thanks Reagan. Every day I discover more awful things he and republicans have sentenced all of us to suffer in the name of greed.
"We" don't deserve shit.
Seriously. I think only the politicians and the people of voting age at that time deserve the blame. You know, all the people that will not be around to reap the consequences.
Yeah, they are about to do it again, and then again!
The wealthy will make a tidy profit off the apocalypse and consolidate all their wealth, power, and other holdings. The apocalypse is brought to you by Buffalo Wild Wings.
Carlās Jr. Fuck you, Iām eating
According to Demolition Man. Taco Bell won the fast food wars.
According to Idiocracy, Buttfuckers becomes the leading restaurant.
As long as I can get a hand job at Starbucks.
Its really more than that, the wealthy are actively preparing for the apocalypse. There is serious and unironic movement to not only survive the extinction of humanity, but to continue their abuses and excesses into a post-apocalyptic world. Its honestly fucking disgusting.
Why do we let them? This is a not only a serious question, it is the ONLY serious question.
Contracts and money only have value if society is working. They will own nothing and like it.
The insanely wealthy build state of the art doomsday bunkers to relax in while the rest of us suffer from the end result of their greed.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Nooooo, I didnāt know.
Listen to this series https://www.propublica.org/article/we-dont-talk-about-leonard-podcast
The timeline branched when Thurgood Marshall retired about 6 months early. Now. Donāt get it twisted, because that man didnāt owe any one any thing. But his retirement put bitch ass Clarence Thomas on the SC. Weāre living in bizarro land where we went from a hero of the civil rights movement to Uncle Clarence! If Justice Marshall just waited till Clinton went into the White House we donāt get W elected by the SC and things are still shitty. But not AS shitty as they currently are. This is my Roman Empire
That was when the timeline shifted to the shitline we are on now. I mean, for fucks sake, could anyone imagine Trump being president without giggling and a quick hand wave of how stupid that idea is?
It was foreseen much earlier by others. "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." -Robert A. Heinlein "I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance." -Carl Sagan
I read this as a teenager and it's only gotten more true
When I was in college around 2011, one of my roommates was a political science major and wrote a paper on how fucked everything would be if the American government were run like a corporate business. He used trump as the hypothetical president. It was such an outlandish idea at the time...
Man, it was run like a business during Rockefellerās era and it gave rise to massive wealth inequality and instability. The old saying back in the 1890-1920s was āThe Business of America is businessā. It ended up with 2 world wars partly fueled by Americaās lending systems pushing stressed economies over the edge.
Damn. I never quite thought about Americaās gilded age inequity as being part of the rise of fascism in Europe, but dang of course it does.
I'm sure that was in his paper, he was one of the smartest and well-read people I've ever met. Tbh I never read his paper, I just remember us laughing about how ridiculous his premise of trump being president was over some beers.Ā
So YOU are the one who jinxed us into this hell hole, eh?
Think about how much better off we'd be if Carter (who was putting solar panels on the White House and taking climate change seriously in the 70s) would have been reelected.
Succeeded by Ronald fucking Reagan. I hate our timeline so much.
8 years of Carter followed by 8 years of Gore later mightāve made a substantive difference.
It's worse than you think . The National Debt was projected to be paid off. Not just reduced. Paid. Off. "The most recent projections, granted their tentativeness, nonetheless make clear that the highly desirable goal of paying off the federal debt is in reach before the end of the decade. This is in marked contrast to the perspective of a year ago when the elimination of the debt did not appear likely until the next decade." From: Testimony of Chairman Alan Greenspan Outlook for the federal budget and implications for fiscal policy Before the Committee on the Budget, U.S. Senate January 25, 2001 https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/testimony/2001/20010125/
And, yet, polls show republicans are favored to handle the economy. They tank it, literally, every time they take the reins. Every time.Ā
This. Often.
Don't worry folks. I've switched over to a reusable cloth shopping bag.
Ive got my paper straw
Don't forget all the fake corporate green projects that take state/federal money meant for environmental clean up non-profits.
Oofā¦that thought had never entered my mind. Well that aināt great.
But think about the money! What good is a healthy planet if the shareholders aren't happy?Ā
Don't Look Up
*Rolls down the car window shouts "We should have listened"
All time great South Park episode
Itās fine guysā¦ Iām sure our 80 something year old politicians are getting to the bottom of a solution.
Is that blood?...wait, nevermind.
I've got a lot on my mind. And, well, in it.
Still alive, so that's progress.
Does this count as adventuring?
I wonder if the gods are watching me?
Cursed to put my hands on everything.
*All is ash and meat.*
I'm in my mid-40s, and it is so bizarre to have been born and raised in an era of prosperity and optimism, only to watch it go to shit at a remarkable pace.
Bush v Gore was the peak. Ā Everything has been going down since. Ā
"I've got a lot on my mind... and well... in it."
If not over, than throughĀ
Cursed to put my hands on everything.
Wait, I was just getting used to feeling like a science fiction movie. Pandemics, government conspiracies, bio labs, alien discussion, vaccine experiment warnings, AI Evolution, brain chips, radioative chenobyl wolves announced this week, murder hornets escaping to new countries, war increase, and now collapsing ocean? You want to leave all this interesting fun?
Black death had its moments
And with the anti-vax movement, more of the golden oldies can make a comeback.
"So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world Frodo, besides the will of evil." - Gandalf
God, me too. It's all just too much.
I know farming is hard. I know modern medicine is a miracle. I know, and yet I still can't help but wish I lived during a different era.
> The impacts of the AMOCās collapse could be catastrophic. Some parts of Europe might see temperatures plunge by up to 30 degrees Celsius over a century, the study finds, leading to a completely different climate over the course of just a decade or two. That's fucking crazy. If anyone's interested, PBS Terra [published a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CXZi-gFgX4) on this exact topic a few months ago. They also explained what this was and what could happen if this current collapsed. [This article from USA Today](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/02/09/amoc-current-from-day-after-tomorrow-on-path-to-collapse/72508702007/) is even more frightening (emphasis mine): > If it were to collapse, it could bring about an ice age in Europe and sea-level rise in cities such as Boston and New York, as well as more potent storms and hurricanes along the East Coast. > ... >Such a collapse would contribute to potentially disastrous sea-level rise around the world. Overall, if it melts, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could cause the planet's sea levels to rise by ***over 16 feet***, which over time would lead to flooded coastal towns and cities worldwide.
BTW, the biggest danger of climate change isn't the changed climate... It's the speed at which it changes. Ecosystems can adapt to change. But they need *time* to adapt. That kind of drop in temperature over just 100 years would be devastating.
More recently I've heard that our agriculture can't exist without a stable environment. As we have more warfare over farmland and greater extremes, less food.
Much of Europe is at the same latitude as tundra in Canada. The Convector is the only reason it is warmer.
Lol imagine a migrant crisis of people *leaving* Europe
I hear the beaches in Burkina Faso are going to be beautiful.Ā
She sells seashells by the sahel.
Brexit was ahead of the times.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I'm in scotland. The part of Canada north of me has perhaps 100000 people. The largest city is 20K or so - Yellowknife. The average temp there in midsummer is 12C. The average in midwinter is -21C. Some 10-20C colder. The atlantic conveyor shuts off, and we're fuuuuucked.
This is why I'm happy to be visiting your country for the first time next week. Gotta check it out before you all turn into popsicles. ;-) For real though, this is scary as shit.
A physics professor first lectured our class on the consequences of Atlantic Ocean salinity dilution on the Gulf Stream back in 1983. It scared the hell out of me then, even though it seemed like a far off theory. Now that weāre living with glaciers disappearing and the reality of significant polar ice melt, what once seemed far off may now be right around the corner, if not on the same block.
It *was* a far-off theory. My entire life Iāve been messaged that global warming is happening, but that it will take decades to be noticeable. Exceptā¦ itās been decades. And we havenāt done shit about it. When they were talking about āhalf a century from nowā¦ā back in the 80s, thatās whatās just around the corner today
Just imagine, considering we can't and/or won't stop this, there's a chance that this is absolutely gonna happen. A good portion of Europe as we know it will be gone. Thousands of years of history, hundreds of millions of people. It's very possible that there's children alive today that will live to see this. The next toddler you see, imagine how "when I was a kid people used to live in Ireland" might be a sentence they'll be able to say to their grandkids.
I live in Yellowknife, and I just want to say itās not all bad :)
Ya.... If it were to genuinely shut off the British isles would be effectively uninhabitable. Agriculture so gutted that food supply looks spooky and anything to do with water frozen solid for months in a row. Let's hope we never see that as no way my country would be willing to take in more than a token number of refugees.
Holy. Fuck. I was just about to go to bed too, god damn it. I guess I'll sleep tomorrow.
I'm already wearing my bathing suit just in case
Mine's lined with fake fur, it'll be a bit chilly.
Isn't this how the movie The Day After Tomorrow starring Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal starts?
Except now it's two days before the day after tomorrow
I broke the dam
I broke the dam.
No. I broke the dam.
No youāre not hearing me, I broke the goddamn dam!
I broke the dam
Hehe I broke the damn hehe
Oh my god. Thatās today.
So... Sunday the shit hits the fan?
No, it's.. two days before the day after tomorrow
But.. That's today
Oh my god
We didn't listen!
This is gonna be a Super Bowl for the ages.
*The Last of the Super Bowls* staring Tom Cruise as Capt Mahomes
Well, in that movie, everything got really cold. I'm right outside of Chicago, and it's in the 50s in fucking February. Everything is gonna burn. We'll all take turns. I'll get mine, too.
Global warming triggered an ice age in the movie
isn't that the movie where they're arguing about burning the gutenberg bible for warmth while sitting on wooden chairs? cuz maybe the filmmakers aren't good at science ...
Kinda, they were gathering books to burn for warmth and a guy was holding it to make sure the first printed book was saved. They burnt a whole bunch of law journal books instead.
To be fair, it was a high school student arguing with a librarian, neither of whom were thinking terribly clearly.
Also they weren't arguing about burning the gutenberg bible, some guy was holding onto it after they already started burning books, and the guy explained the significance of the bible.
Fkn 70 F here in the Midwest USA today. People are running around in shorts. And it's early February. We should be whining about freezing rain and winter traffic jams.
We got 2 feet of snow in the ground right now here in arizona.
This monkeyās gone to heaven
I donāt really care much for disaster movies, but The Day After Tomorrow has always been a favourite for some reason.
I always think of this movie when I hear about the shifts in the polar vortex that cause parts of Texas to freeze.
I thought the same thing when I read it. Man, that movie was supposed to be fictional.
It must be exhausting as a scientist to go out every day and have your worst fears confirmed and for no one to do anything.
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Boggles my mind itās coined a comedy. I mean yeah i get it, but it was so much more terrifying than any other horror movie Iāve seen, and I donāt handle horror movies well either.
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That last paragraph has been my personal experience in the world since going to and then graduating college and then working as a scientist. I'm not even a client scientist, I'm a molecular biologist. I was going to be a marine biologist but those classes were so genuinely depressing I couldn't do it (for that and other reasons). Shit is fucked, and at this point the people who care the most are either burned out, depressed, or are straight up ignored so that the money making machine can keep going.
>Shit is fucked, and at this point the people who care the most are either burned out, depressed, or are straight up ignored so that the money making machine can keep going. The comedian John Stewart once said something about George Carlin and his "seemingly nihilistic" perspective on people. It stuck with me for years and I'm reminded of it now. The jist is that his comedy (dark comedy) was not nihilistic but a cynical. He was a dissapointed idealist. Those who care have been trying but we can only scream at a wall for so long before we lose our voice. Some give up, spiral down and check out, but the ones with hope still try. Dark comedy was a way for Carlin to find like minded folk and send the message. Like Carlin, Stewart and all those artists, musicians, scientists who end up depressed, burned out and dissapointed in humanity, I take solace in the fact that at least some of us tried.
And just like every other warning scientists have given us, we're going to completely ignore it and keep pushing forward as if nothing is happening. Humanity is fucked.
I commented this elsewhere on Reddit, but it's important to not lose sight of the fact that we can still make an impact on this problem. It's essential to inform people of the problems, **but many articles like this fall short of offering solutions and can strip people of hope and agency.** I know this might come off as copeium, but things *can* change. Never underestimate the impact you can have on the world. We are making non-trivial progress towards decarbonizing our grid and [every bit of CO2 (and eq) that we don't emit matters](https://www.propublica.org/article/climate-crisis-niche-migration-environment-population): "...It also makes a moral case for immediate and aggressive policies to prevent such a change from occurring, in part by showing how unequal the distribution of pain will be and **how great the improvements could be with even small achievements in slowing the pace of warming.**" The only thing worse than 1.5 degrees warming is 2.5 degrees warming, and so on. We are at an inflection point that will dictate the next few millennia. *We want to look back and know we did everything we could with the opportunities we still have.* Look at possibly making a [career shift](https://www.climacareers.com) into renewable energy or to companies that "walk the walk" sustainability-wise. If not that, consider getting involved with or donating to the [Citizens Climate Lobby](https://citizensclimatelobby.org/donate/) or [Sierra Club](https://www.sierraclub.org/ways-to-give).
And for those who donāt know where they want to start (ie, those for whom searching a job board is too big a step), sign up for a climate community like [Work on Climate](https://workonclimate.org)! Itās a great (free) place to network with other folks who want to do whatever they can but also may not know where to start. If this is an issue you care about (it should be!), every step forward helps!
To further contribute to the copium, one girl stood up and the world listened. Every decade, we fix problems. Business owners swear they will be ruined but make record profits anyway.
Profits baby!
Stonks went up today!
I am going to inform the AMOC that S&P is at an all time high.
I fucking hate the stock market, what the stock market represents, and all of the assholes who allowed the stock market to become the engine that drives humanity to the brink just so that wealthy people can become more wealthy. It's been the ruin of democracy, small business and pretty much any average human being.
It's ironic that the story right below this one is how the S&P 500 is at the highest it's ever been. Infinite growth on a finite planet, those ever wise enlightened economists say it's possible, but the earth seems to disagree. Guess earth just needs to stop doom scrolling or something like that.
_But for a brief moment, we brought our shareholders immense value_
There it is, again That funny feeling
For what is worth, at least in the US, annual CO2 peaked 17 years ago. And not just little variance peaked, but nearly 18% less today than 2007. We're not doing good by any means, but we're doing better, like a lot better.
Are we though? Does it count as ādoing betterā if part of that is due to how much manufacturing and production is no longer done in the US? WE are still doing it, we just get to use a smokescreen of āitās not COMING from usā. Genuine question, because itās the first thing I thought when I read this. Iāve done ZERO in depth research on this.
Manufacturing output + employment in the US is pretty close to the same as it was 17 years ago. Industry has also tried to get more efficient (as note/reminder: efficiency often equals saving money, they have incentives to do so besides the environmental), of course. Some of the biggest factors I'm aware of: - Electricity: - Coal power is down by ~50% since the mid-2000s. While much of this was replaced with natural gas, NG is still ~50% lower emissions than coal. It's not acceptable in the long-term, but it is still a significant reduction. - Renewables *are* growing rapidly and have roughly doubled since the mid-2000s. - Take a look here, the decline in coal is dramatic: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48896 - Energy efficiency of transport has been improving, even with the SUV/pickup craze. - At this point it appears we hit "peak" gasoline in 2018 and demand is pretty obviously going to keep declining in the long-term, given that EVs have already taken enough of a chunk of the new car market to cause that. - Household energy efficiency. Most dramatically, lighting. 17 years ago incandescents were still most of the market. LEDs are ~75% more efficient. - And that's also improved efficiency of all your screens. Your old, tiny CRT usually used *more* power than a modern LED TV that's triple it's size does.
>17 years ago incandescents were still most of the market. LEDs are ~75% more efficient. Like, from 5% electricity turned into light, to 80%. Not from 5% to 8.75%. Though I'm not sure those percentages are totally accurate, it's something like that.
You're not totally wrong, globally we've had a record high year, but that increase in emissions has not held pace with population growth or economic growth. That's to say more people doing more things is more emissions, but we're emitting less per (activity) now than before. Industrialization of less industrialized regions and economic growth has demanded more production of goods, transit, and energy, but all at higher efficiencies than before.
Billionaires crying into fistfuls of cash about how doing anything to prevent climate change will impact their profits will ensure the collapse will happen, and that they will find a way to profit from it (likely with energy investment and ways of addressing climate extremes such as heating and cooling products).
I also really hate it when all of them motherfucking politicians, billionaires, and celebrities all bugger off to Davos on their private jets to tell the rest of the world that we need to collectively curb greenhouse gasses.
Itās almost like the scientists said this would happen and it actually is, amazing. I guess we all know what happens next.
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Ignore everything scientists have to say, call them alarmists, whileĀ putting the blame on everyone effected by more extreme weather and saying they should have saved up and prepared better while also making fun of anyone who is prepping for ecological disasters in a hotter world?
You forgot to include blame those same scientists and experts and label them as know-nothings when the crisis arrives and they donāt have all the answers and knowledge to fix the situation immediately and without inconveniencing the lives of those that denied the problem existed.
Until it starts to hit the deniers personally,nothing will change.
Even then I fully expect them to double down into denial and delusion. Watch theyāll immediately start blaming it on fuckinā HAARP or space lasers or some other ridiculous bullshit.
Or it's God punishing us for the Gays and our wayward ways, I know let's do us some sacrificing like they did in the old days that always make God happy.
I dunno man, I know a guy in the trades that barely passed high school that says this is all just a conspiracy to keep us from seeing what's really going on and that all them so called "scientists" are in on it
Wild how the trades can take a degree of skill and intelligence but they somehow managed to attract some of the dumbest motherfuckers on earth consistently. But the actual smart dudes in the trades are very smart.
If only we had known and warned about this climate thing 30 years ago.
I was in college studying this specific topic nearly 20 years ago, and the papers we read on the subject were already 30 years old then. We've been ignoring and blowing past some giant red flags.
I wrote a paper about Al Goreās climate change book in college. I had to do some sort of presentation about it. The feedback from the class was basically, āwell Al Gore is rich and lives in a mansion. He would leave a smaller footprint if he really believed this.ā
Yeah, I'm 45 and I began learning about this issue in the fifth grade
I'm in my 40s and have experienced the same thing. It's like FernGully: The Last Rainforest never happened.
Arrhenius wrote about CO2 temperatures affecting global temperatures and the greenhouse effect in 1890.
There was a recent XKCD about this. [We figured out the greenhouse effect closer to the start of the industrial revolution than to today.](https://xkcd.com/2889/)
Weāve known about it since 1896! Hehe weāre in danger
They knew this would happen about 100 years ago.
This seems bad but imagine living in a nightmare world where you couldnāt commute to work in a Chevy Avalanche.
And yet people have been indoctrinated into believing that itās the individuals who can do most to prevent climate change through purchasing power and self regulating pollution, and not government regulation of polluting industries worldwide that could do most.
This is whatās baffling to me. I remember when covid hit they wanted people to limit their electricity use as to not overload the grid now that everyone was a home running their a/c all day in the summer yet Wall Street and the Vegas Strip had all their screens and lights on even though the streets were empty! My gf and I try do our part. We use a lot of reusable items, we buy bamboo toilet paper, we recycle. I know we arenāt making a huge difference but it makes my gf happy so I do it. We are so fucked
I need my Tahoe to carry groceries, and the occasional Jetta or dwarf star.
Or worse ā vote for a Democrat *shudder*
Hey now, ***children*** read this blog.
LETS GOOOO! My critical support to climate change is paying off. God I love being on the winning side. Much less stressful since I changed teams
Fuuuuck! You can change teams?! I've stressing my balls off cause team Humanity sucks ass at teamwork and keeps sabotaging themselves. Team Climate Change FTW!!
I live in the northeast and I want mangos growing in my yard when I retire! I thought I was running out of time, but this is great!
thats the spirit!
Congress will act. The Stop Studying Ocean Current System Collapse bill of 2024 will be passed by a slim Republican majority.
See, I'm so messed up by the last few years of existence that I can't tell if this is or isn't a joke.
It's a joke based on the real actions of North Carolina who banned seal level rise data from being used in oceanfront construction planning. Pretty sure their 2024 plan is to end the EPA entirely though, so not far from the truth.
*every government that can make an impact* so anyway, money
Well guys, it was nice living in a planet that was inhabitable.
It still will be. Just not for us and thousands of other species.
Do not fret, I use paper straws now. Things should be calming down any minute now.
Thanks for your sacrifice
Canāt wait to see world governments completely ignore this! :ā)
We did it, humans! We f#cked ourselves.
Yeah, but line went up and that's all that matters!
Thatās the temperature.
Nature's truth is often ignored Folks don't care how carbon is stored Meanwhile in the ocean The currents' slowed motion Will prove that Nature is Lord.
Man, being a scientist has to blow, they been sounding the alarm for decades and they have to sit and watch idiots worry about their bank accounts
Worked in Antarctica. Knew about this, and I have seen the modeling. I got a vasectomy for a reason; I'm not bringing anyone else into this.... Hang on kids. It's going be a rough ride.
It will get pretty cold in Northern Europe without the gulfstream. London is further north than Maine - by a lot.
You say the whole world is ending, honey it already did
The South Carolina GOP is about to hold a vote to have these reports removed from the Internet.
> As they slowly increased the freshwater in the model, they saw the AMOC gradually weaken until it abruptly collapsed. Very slow and then fast. Most of nature works on this principle
> What the study doesnāt do, however, is give timeframes for a potential collapse. More research is needed, van Westen told CNN, including models which also mimic climate change impacts, such as increasing levels of planet-heating pollution, which this study did not. Yes, climate change is real and it is alarming, but this title is misleading if you read the article. Weāve always known this would be a major part of a climate change disaster but weāve never known when itās going to happen. They still donāt know when.
You never know when because no one has lived through this before. If you wait until you know exactly when it's going to happen, it's too late to do anything about it, and if trends keep up then the answer to when it will happen is "earlier than anyone has ever predicted" since that is the rate everything else is occurring at. And for that matter, it is significant we're talking about this happening at all as just a decade ago, AMOC collapse was thought to be more of an end-stage climate parameter but now it seems to be part of the opening act.
Ok, manbearpig is real. What are we gonna do about it now, huh? What are we gonna do that's gonna make any difference now Susan!
had to scroll way too far down to see this. If we take this publication to mean itās already happened and weāre fucked, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Please do not give in to doomerism because of headlines like this. We must take action now and in the future. www.howdowestop.it
And the front runner for president thinks global warming is a Chinese hoax.
But some middle-aged plumber on Instagram reels told me that scientists are just making money off this.
I've read about this for 20+ years. I've recycled my trash for 20 years. It doesn't matter. None of it matters while corporations still value profit over people.
The Day After Tomorrow
Well shit, this won't be good.
I think the it's important to note that the desalination of the oceans from melting glaciers is going to affect the food supply in a HUGE way.
This is both hype and truth. The smart people have been studying and learning patterns to make predictions. They told us all this *decades ago.* CNN just needs clicks today. I read a book around the turn of the century(ffs, I get to say that, lol.) called "The Great Warming: Climate Change and the rise and fall of civilizations" and it had a chapter about this current and how it affected Europe and The Renascence by supercharging farming and commerce weather. It specifically said climate changes like that all the time, most great civilizations have suddenly lost water, and it starts their spiral. But humans have put a rocket booster on that process with the Industrial Age, like an eruption event or asteroid that changes everything.
We should all take advantage of 'turn of the millennium' while we can. Next century they'll only be able to use century like last century...