And you’ll never believe the rent prices on the other ⅓
Scientist piping in with my two cents. Granted my speciality is geophysics and planetary science, and not specifically climate.
In geoscience we tend to talk about things on very long timescales. Like: at what point with the sun’s output cause the earth to turn into Venus (250 million years as a lower bound, ish, then all life is doomed on Earth). The rate of change we’ve applied to our atmosphere is faster than any natural process other than a meteor strike or similar event. There are climate change scenarios where all life on the planet dies (why wait 250 million years!?), but they’re mostly improbable unless we have some sort of runaway feedback mechanism we’ve not accounted for. 2/3 of humans dying is also unlikely. Coastline and ecosystem disruption are almost certain though.
The thing about humans are: we are frighteningly clever. We can build spacecraft that can survive the harsh environment in space and people survive there. As long as climate change doesn’t happen “too fast” (values of “too fast” may vary), we will engineer our way around it. On the small scale: air conditioning; and on the larger scale, geo-engineering (after accumulating sufficient political will). We’re so clever that, if we (or our descendants or similar) can probably even save the earth in 250 million years when the sun’s output passes the threshold where it wants to fry us – assuming we survive that long.
That doesn’t detract from her statement. But it is the Mirror, and the headlight is trying to be incendiary.
I think people are missing the point, it’s not about who survives, it’s about who dies and suffers.
If I told you (made up numbers) that in the next 50 years, 100 million people will die an average of 20 years early because of climate change. Sure, 100 million is just about 1.3% of humans, but it’s still 100 million people, who will die at 50 instaed of 70, or at 25 instead of 45, these are people who will probably die from heat, from natrual disasters, from famine, from poor health as economies collapse.
We won’t be fine, someone will be, but WE, as a group, won’t be fine.
In fact, we are already not fine but it’s mostly felt in poor contries.
Not to kill the mood but the harsh truth is that the generations before us doomed a lot of us, and the current generations are just starting to get it, and future generations will truly feel the ignorance of our past and the indifference of our present.
No, kill the mood. Stab it in it’s stupid fucking face and kick it’s corpse out of the way. All it’s done is be an obstacle because weak people are too uncomfortable doing little things and even more whiny now that the need is far greater.
You’re exactly right and put it perfectly: “it’s not about who survives, it’s about who suffers and dies”. People will die over something we have endless solutions to but will never put in place because the weakest, most fragile little snot-nosed fucks are afraid of the slightest discomfort.
It’s disgusting, end of.
We’re estimated to have lost about 15 million additional people in 2020/2021 due to covid and a disturbingly large amount of us were salty about being asked to cover their mouths in order to stave it off. Might favor certain groups, but it’s doom from every generation top to bottom.
Generations of the past had plausible deniability. Most of them may not have known what they were doing.
We knew. We’re well informed of the consequences. And we kept making it worse. We’re still making it worse. We still have too much of the population unwilling to change. How do you think future generations will remember us?
As long as climate change doesn’t happen “too fast” (values of “too fast” may vary), we will engineer our way around it.
While this is true, we must also take into account who exactly will benefit from that engineering and survive. Not everyone will be able to take advantage of non-global engineering solutions, and just like with every technological advancement, the differential will be used by those “with” to subjugate those “without.”
The global solutions will eventually happen. Right now nationalism gets in the way of it, but on the timescales of geology, nationalism is a blip. Hell, many scholars cite 1648 as the creation of the current system – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_system – so hopefully this is just a phase and we’ll get over it and start global scale geoengineering before we get cooked :)
Can you imagine a UN agency in charge of sun shades positioned at Sun-Earth L1 that reduced the total sunlight hitting the earth by 0.1% and halted the heating problem entirely? Wouldn’t solve the carbon dioxide levels, but it’d be a start :D
(The orbital mechanics folks can chime in here. Sunshades at L1 are unstable because L1 is unstable, and sunlight exerts pressure on them like solar sails. However, there are quasi-stable positions slightly sunward of L1 where you can balance these instabilities and actually use the solar sail effect for station keeping in a swarm. It would require launching a lot of rockets, but is entirely doable with today’s technology. Said rockets use hydrocarbons to launch, ironically.)
Eventually, yes, and in the meantime, the global divide between rich and poor will grow ever wider.
There are exactly two ways that that divide can shrink. The wealthy of the world proactively using their wealth for the common good, out of pure philanthropy; or by being physically forced to. This applies regardless of climate change problems or their potential solutions.
However, there are quasi-stable positions slightly sunward of L1 where you can balance these instabilities and actually use the solar sail effect for station keeping in a swarm. It would require launching a lot of rockets, but is entirely doable with today’s technology.
Not a scientist, but I’m still fascinated by this stuff.
The cost of that is going to be the big issue. No government is going to want to pay for routine shipments of fuel and parts to L1, which is expensive as hell. And I wouldn’t bet on international cooperation being a thing either. Each country is going to be too busy fighting over food and water, and keeping migration at bay.
Completely guessing here, it would probably be cheaper to raise the albedo of the planet through various means. Maybe including massive scale cloud seeding over the oceans. At least it’s on planet and therefore hypothetically can be done with minimal fossil fuel use. How to do that without fucking up the environment with chemicals for cloud nuclei is the hard part.
That, or intentionally inducing a light nuclear winter, ideally without the nuclear part. With enough particulates in the upper atmosphere, it would do the job. The tricky part is doing that without overdoing it. This is the dumb version, but it’s personally how I see things going. Especially because this is something a lone country could probably do on its own. China doesn’t want to deal with all the effects of climate change? They may light up a bunch of islands in the Pacific with nukes to “solve” it.
Another dumb option that might arise, a country intentionally trying to start another global pandemic to reduce emissions. Emissions dropped dlike a rock with COVID, and a lot of countries have the ability to produce bioweapons.
There are myriad of dumb, harmful, cheap ways that individual countries could use to curb climate change. The next few decades are going to be dangerous as hell.
Are you actually a scientist?
Air Conditioning to mitigate climate change? That’s like dowsing a fire with lighter fluid.
And you think we’ll be able to out engineer the sun? In 250million years we will not be here guaranteed, and if somehow we make it it won’t be in any form we know as human.
Yes, I even once got a B+ in thermodynamics, decades ago. I was proud of that B+ – one of the hardest courses I’ve ever taken.
Yes, AC. It uses energy, adds heat into the total system, and you cannot fight entropy. However, you can mitigate heat gain in other places. You trade local effects for net zero global effects.
Simple example: AC running off of solar. It increases heat by decreasing albedo (solar panels are dark), but if you paint another area white, you can have a neutral effect in terms of total energy captured by the earth. But you can have a net zero heat gain and still have AC.
Obviously you’ll have a harder time balancing this equation if you’re using non-renewable energy sources.
But the fun thing is that all solar currently has a carbon cost associated with it. So as we’re trying to work our way out of this we’re also continuing to increase the carbon load. It’s a vicious cycle.
The thing about humans are: we are frighteningly clever
Let me introduce you to Facebook.
Allow me to introduce you to: an abstract concept of facebook-
People, separated by thousands of miles, tap messages into their glass topped smart rocks that can then be seen by other people with smart rocks - it does this communicating with big metal trees that talk to magic caves, where millions of smart rocks think about those messages and pass them over to other magic caves by a glass wire, which in turn pass the messages to another metal tree and over to other glass topped smart rocks for people to read.
Well, how many of them actually has the vaugest idea on even small part of the mechanics of it? How many of them are just ignoring the wonders of the technology and just using it to spread hate and stupidity? Which is more dominate? The stupid part or the clever part?
My gf calls me a “radical optimist” for believing in people eventually doing the right thing :)
How can you be so optimistic? With everything that’s going on in the world, I get more pessimistic everyday. At bad days, I’d just think “let just humanity perish because we just keep repeating the same horrible things over and over anyway”.
I do agree that we are very inventive, capable and imaginative when it comes to solving great problems.
Unfortunately we are also capable of becoming very destructive, ignorant, selfish and absolutely brutal to one another especially under a lot of stress and anxiety.
My greatest fear in the coming decades is mass migration and entire populations of people moving to places where they won’t be welcome, and people in places where everyone is relocating to worried that it will engage endanger their survival. The biggest problems we’ll face won’t be environmental… they will be political and social.
2/3 of humans dying is also unlikely.
So much of our modern economy is rooted in assumptions about where and how to mass produce food stocks. Climate change threatens all of that.
Obliterating breadbasket regions in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Iran would devastate the regional populations.
Then you’ve got the wars in places like Ukraine, Lebanon and Sudan, further strangling access to fresh food stocks.
People joke about the looming “water wars”, but consider how much Israel and the Saudis have invested in desalination and what dehydration is doing to the million plus Gaza residents who have lost access to reliable drinking water.
What happens during a substantial crop failure in the South Pacific? It isn’t as though India and China haven’t experienced massive famines in living memory.
You can argue the finer details, but it is easy to see a scenario in which a billion or more people are wiped out over the course of a generation, because of substantive shifts in access to basic living needs.
Wealthy countries will generally be okay, comparatively. The rest of the world will be the 2/3rds that suffer. That’s always been the case.
The United States is a wealthy country. It’s on the precipice of political and social disaster WITHOUT the above described problems occurring. The idea that wealthy countries will be fine seems wildly optimistic. Perhaps you meant wealthy people.
As long as climate change doesn’t happen “too fast” (values of “too fast” may vary), we will engineer our way around it.
This and I keep repeating this: don’t fight the global warming, let’s think how to live with it.
I mean, still fight the global warming, but also think how to live with it.
OK but which third gets out alright I want to move there.
Canada or Russia, take your pick.
Please remember that they are both virulently opposed to immigration, particularly by POC.
You’re surprised that the country that keeps discovering mass graves of brown children isn’t particularly great on immigration?
I’m not a Canadian, but what I am learning from you is that Canadians are just like Americans in that you’ll ignore the worst qualities in your country, and then act surprised when one of those qualities is brought up.
Anyone else notice the amusing edit fail?
This is not enough according to Dr. Brosnan, who gave a laundry list of steps the world could take to save the ozone layer
Hey doc, wrong environmental crisis. We already took steps to save the ozone layer
You say that but the ozone layer hole actually started to grow again in the past few years.
The CFC that caused the issue in the first place will take a long time to completely disappear. Also we haven’t completely stopped using them, and apparently since 2012, the CFC production started to increase again in Asia.
It also seems that the Tonga eruption played a role in the expansion.
I heard Starlink satellites could play a role, but it’s probably minuscule compared to what CFCs can do.
Sources :
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458
Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries
Feels like it’s been speeding up the past few years. Barely had a winter season this year.
