A new study has confirmed that the Gulf Stream, a crucial ocean current that helps regulate climate and sea levels, is weakening. The flow of warm water through the Florida Straits has slowed by 4% over the past four decades. This slowdown has significant implications for the world’s climate, and scientists are concerned that it may be a sign of further weakening to come.
At this point, I don’t think anything short of losing coastal cities will whip apathetic people into climate action.
Very optimistic of you.
Joking aside, apathy isn’t the problem. That is, the issue isn’t that people don’t care. Ordinary people care a great deal. The problem is that the cost of the action that would be sufficient to change things is too high personally for those ordinary people to take.
People just don’t want to be gunned down by riot police or go to prison for assassinating oil executives. The solution to this problem isn’t paper straws and recycling (and it never has been). Further, abandoning cars isn’t feasible for stroad-bound Americans. Abandoning beef is, but your family switching to chicken and fish won’t even twitch the needle.
Point is, the kind of change that’s needed is societal–the kind of revolutionary change that’s paid for in streets full of blood. In the “Well if enough people just …” argument, the enough people is hundreds of millions. We have to become a fossil fuel eschewing society. Whole industries have to collapse.
The companies responsible for climate change can be counted on one person’s fingers and toes, and they’re names any adult can guess in a few tries.
We’re not storming their doors because we don’t want to be recipients of the state violence these companies will muster to stop us.
Flooding cities might change our minds, but probably only for the people who actually live there. The sad truth is the rest of us will sooner consign Miami to the depths than orphan our children for their grandchildren’s sakes.
Things will change when we starve, but probably not a moment sooner.
Bang on. The Earth’s population in 1950 was about 2.5 billion. We have more than tripled that number now, largely enabled by agricultural, medical, and transportation technology powered by stored energy in the form of fossil fuels. Global ecological footprint analysis shows that we “overshot” Earth’s sustainable capacity limit in around 1970.
It is impractical (and probably impossible) with current technology to sustain >8 billion people on Earth without fossil fuels. And, it is impossible to keep burning fossil fuels without inducing devastating climate change. So, unless we can replace almost all fossil fuel burning with another incredibly powerful and non-harmful energy source (like fusion, I guess?), we are screwed. I agree with you that the ecological debt we have incurred will likely be paid in lives lost to starvation and conflict over food.
Maui is the truth of what will happen to the rest of us.
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Covid-19 has made me even more cynical than ever. It has shown that people would rather die than accept reality. And compared to climate change, the effort to protect against covid was minuscule on an individual level. But still, too many people couldn’t be asked.
For me, the biggest one is the push for a return to office. I see it as a great opportunity to contact the economy and reduce resource consumption and carbon production with a lot of white collar support. But the owners just aren’t having it and insist on a return to the status quo, even though it’s obvious we’re killing the environments we need to survive with this status quo.
It’s one of the greatest sadnesses I can name. We were shown it was possible, and in many cases beneficial, and yet… We went back.
Won’t anyone think of the commercial real estate market? Also, middle managers can’t middle manage remotely. Whats a middle manager to do if they can’t justify their position?
/s
When a much more deadly pandemic comes it’ll be an extinction event
Yup. Imagine if something was as transmissible as covid, and had a quiet incubation period of a week or so… and a 50% fatality rate.
I, for one, would like to welcome our antibacterial-resistant gonorrhea overlords!
Assed*
Arsed*
Just looked it up on Wikipedia and “Hurricane Katrina displaced over one million people from the central Gulf coast to elsewhere across the United States, becoming the largest diaspora in the history of the United States.”
Having a million Americans lose their homes wasn’t enough to even move the needle on climate action. Same way that over a million Americans died of COVID and many people still claim it’s a “hoax”. I’m convinced that the propaganda is just too much to ever overcome.
I really, really, really want to be proven wrong - but I think you could literally have entire nations be made uninhabitable, and rather than welcoming refuges and making policy changes to avoid climate disaster, we’ll find a way to bury our heads in the sand and complain about immigrants taking our jobs.
Yeah, but those were brown people that were displaced, nobody gives a shit about them /s
That’s objective reality, not sarcasm.
Every time I read these articles I just keep waiting for all the other people to finally catch on to how fucked we are and a critical mass of people to actually do something meaningful. Still waiting.
As a result I was feeling frustrated and scared. But now I have come to bitterly accept we are probably going to kill ourselves off (mostly or completely) after mass suffering. At best, I figure whoever is left goes insane because 99% of all species will have gone extinct and the earth will have become a barren, silent, cheerless wasteland.
Hopefully we have exploited natural resources to a degree where it will be out of reach for the next sentient species. They won’t find pip or gold or other minerals just lying around so maybe they will remain primitive and low population.
There isn’t enough time for another sentient species to evolve after this extinction. This is it.
It’s so crazy at my job where we do infrastructure stuff. We know it’s getting worse. Areas are flooding that should not be flooding, rolling blackouts/greyouts are becoming more common, stuff is overheating that didn’t overheat in the past.
Head of engineering keeps pushing us to think about this stuff. Build in more cooling, make stuff waterproof that shouldn’t have to be. I don’t know how bad it is going to get but I do know that I will be working up to the end.
Given that we’re already losing entire island nations, I’m not sure even that will do it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiribati
Those aren’t hurting the ‘right’ people. Wait for major coastal cities in western countries to be affected.
They are still building high-rises 50M from the shoreline in Miami, FL.
There is no saving it, you can’t build a seawall on limestone. Did I mention the limestone is dissolving due to acidification?
It will never be hurting the right people until the people themselves are hurt.
This is a crime of selfishness and a failure of society.
Folks in Venice are regularly up to their knees in water already. New Orleans still has 25% less population than it did before Katrina. It’s already affecting major coastal cities in western countries, and even that doesn’t matter.
This guy got it right: the entire western sociopolitical system is designed to stop this kind of problem from being solved.
yeah, where the rich people keep their stuff.
The ‘right’ people will go somewhere else, Mt. Everest isn’t going underwater anytime soon, there’s plenty of places for the ‘right’ people to relocate their summer vacation mansions.
It wont happen like in Day After Tomorrow.
The beaches will get shorter, the docks will get deeper, then some warehouse will get flooded along with some homeless camp.
Land prices will shift, people will move, it’ll be a curiosity.
That island nation on the Pacific? Oh well.
I haven’t even seen that movie. Never thought it was going to happen suddenly.
Maybe I’m a pessimist, but I don’t think they ever will.
It’s probably not going to be a whole city at once. It’s going to be a building here, a building there, barely escalating beyond local news unless it’s a famous building (Mar-A-Lago?). There’s going to be more and worse hurricanes, but climate deniers will point out how they weren’t as bad as Katrina or Maria or Sandy. Insurers have already started leaving those areas, changing policies, and/or hiking rates.
The big exception will be if another New Orleans levy breaks. But people will blame the very idea of that city existing below sea level as being an inherently bad idea (which… I don’t think is entirely wrong) and use that to deflect away from the influence of climate change.
People still denying climate change today are either financially invested in doing so, or will need a ridiculous and dramatic event to convince them. Something like you would see in a disaster movie, like a 300ft tall Tsunami.
I think it’ll take multiple private islands getting wiped out before the people holding the levers of power will give a fuck.
People holding the levers have backup bunkers in New Zealand… take a guess why.