The whole situation with climate change feels so hopeless.
I think the worst part of it is that its not actually hopeless, at least not in theory. It’s just that we, or more accurately the people with actual power, refuse to act because it would mean slightly less profit.
I fully believe that if the world comes together, a united global effort, it is solvable, but we won’t.
Me too, specially when I was younger I thought we could change the world for good if united. I saw cristal clear that the rich wanted to be richer at the expense of the poorer, but as I grew older and saw the reality and stupidity of the world (Like Trump, a massively rich guy being massively voted by the poorest and less educated people) I lost hope. I came to realize that education and stoicism and the best tools the human race has to progress to a healthy society. So that’s what I try to share now when I can.
Though I mostly agree with you, sometimes I feel human nature is just ugly.
Some very highly educated people have done some very terrible things throughout history.
(Sorry about submitting the half sentence, I meant to hit cancel and then decided to commit after that blunder.)
Though I mostly agree with you, sometimes I feel human nature is just ugly.
This is not true. Humans are created by the material conditions they find themselves in. “Human nature” when in an abundant environment is very different, we can see this among remaining hunter gatherer tribes like the Hadza (watch/read the whole thread).
Living in capitalism is what makes people the way you see them. Competition for resources with your fellow workers and an endless toil for the benefit of someone else enforced by the threat of homelessness and death if you don’t take part.
Being an asshole under capitalism is as natural as coughing is in a smoke filled burning building. If you don’t know anything different you can’t see that to constantly cough is not the natural way of human beings. When you take people and put them in different material conditions you get a completely different outcome.
The biggest issue with our environment that drives these problems is that human brains can only reliably grok a few hundred other humans as being people. Beyond that, to a greater or lesser degree, anyone else just feels like an object (which is why we feel upset when people we know die but the statistics of how many people die each day globally don’t have a similar effect.)
Some of us cope better than others but fundamentally any environment that requires humans to be reliant on interacting with over a few hundred other people will lead to people treating each other as objects.
It’s why conservative people often feel it would be inconceivable to mistreat someone they personally know but will casually do profoundly cruel things to people they don’t. If you view their actions towards people outside of their sphere of personhood through the lense of what is and isn’t an appropriate way to treat an object rather than a person they often seem perfectly naturally.
I know the research you’re talking about here but don’t think it should be viewed as something that makes people incapable of empathy to those outside their core group. It makes it harder, but that hasn’t stopped entire nations of people moving hard left towards extreme vocal empathy among one another as the working class. Unity, solidarity and love for one another is demonstrably possible among very large numbers it just requires the right set of prerequisites to achieve, these prerequisites are what socialists should be working towards ticking off in order to set the stage for a wider revolutionary movement.
Aigh…let’s say you in fact can blame greed and capitalism alone.
Haven’t we all agreed that extremes are unessential?? It’s capitalism’s fault, it’s comunism fault…world isn’t white and black it’s grey.
It depends where you are and what it depends how you use it…fuck sake reality is way too complex for you to do these types of statement man.
If we are going to guess then mine is we need something more in the middle…
You make a statement about complexity but you’re not actually saying anything. This is all wishy washy.
There is no middle between “the workers hold power” and “the bourgeoisie should hold power”. There is no middle between “private property should exist” and “private property should not exist”. There is no middle between “profit should be the driving force of development” and “the human development index should be the driving force of development”.
Your wishy washy “we need a middle” is nonsense if you can not put into words what that fundamentally means in terms of actual functioning policy and societal design. Who holds power is THE essential question here. Capitalist society functions as a dictatorship-of-the-bourgeoisie. Socialists want the opposite, a dictatorship-of-the-proletariat. Flipping the power on its head and putting the workers in charge of the outcomes instead of the bourgeoisie.
If you can not fundamentally describe in absolute terminology what you think society needs to do in order to change the current situation then all you are doing in your opposition to people who do want change is supporting keeping it the way it currently is. That puts you on the side of the climate death cult driving us towards the inevitable end.
yeah, it’s true that some humans are really bad, but they’re nothing without (poorly educated) followers, and their followers are the one that give those humans the power to do evil things. Critical thinking is something that should be taught more often to avoid history from repeating.
I’m going to gently remind you that Drumpf’s base is actually on avg. wealthier than the opposition’s base. That’s why you get those obnoxious trucks, flags and infinite merchandise (courtesy of Chinese workers).
No need to smear the common people, it’s simply a fact that democracy is not a real tool for change.
Nono look at the 10 poorest states in America(with worse living conditions). They all voted majority Trump, some of the porest counties in the USA are literally voting 80% for trump
If you listen to Obama on that podcast recently (whom those people probably voted for too), paraphrasing: he says economic anxiety makes people prone to risk taking, emotional voting and feel racial resentment.
Yes but that’s only true due to a suite of nefarious influences having to do with things like voter suppression, gerrymandering, dark money and manufactured voter apathy.
We have to accept that democracy is too easy to ‘manage’ and has been since its inception. We need local democracy badly.
There are various versions of democracy. Some are far more effective at implementing the will of their constituents than others.
In my opinion the problem isn’t democracy itself, but rather, has to do with the many various ways in which it’s implemented.
The US version of democracy, for example, is very old, clunky and buggy as fuck because it was created by 18th century white men, some of whom were slave owners, and all of whom were terrified of the possibility that in creating a new (to them) form of governance they might accidentally create a new mechanism for tyranny.
Accordingly, they deliberately created a system that by design would be almost impossible to change short of massive civil unrest and that to this day is very unresponsive to real public sentiment.
The key is that they designed it that way not because they wanted an efficient democracy, but rather, because they wanted to protect themselves and their rights against the rise of a possible tyrant.
What they created was very stable, but again, it wasn’t responsive, nor was it meant to be responsive, to public opinion.
Since then, political scientists have figured out much better ways to run democracies.
One of my favorites is the Irish Republic which, in the 1920s, instituted a suite of reforms to the US model in creating its government with the result that Ireland has gone from being the last third-world country in western Europe, to now being a thriving and economically developed western European nation with a highly-educated English-speaking population that isn’t obliged to take orders from any of the world’s great powers.
Ireland did this by having a high-functioning modern-style democracy.
Median income is BS though. If me and Elon musk make up the test then it would show we have a median income of billions. …I don’t have anywhere close to billions. So a bunch of poor people vote trump and ten billionaires vote trump so trump voters are better off on a average? That’s a joke
They used exit polls, so I doubt the data includes that. It’s likely that anomalies are cut out too if the data is processed this way - they also compare the median to the state median to make the comparison more meaningful, which is how we ‘know’ that his base is wealthier.
Apologies for using Nat Sliver as a source.
I am fully convinced that won’t materialize until a major Western city or province/state/territory/[insert administrative unit here] gets catastrophically and irreparably fucked up.
Not even then.
Neoliberals won’t (nor will the reactionaries they’ve carefully trained) and unfortunatly we’ve let them infest all major political parties and media outlets across most of the globe.
With these managed democracies, they’re able to delay actual progress until the mining and oil execs are satisified with their obscene wealth (which is never going to happen).
Until these people are pried from their positions of power, everybody “coming together” is meaningless.
The solution is going to require immediate, strict, drastic regulations and billions of dollars of research and investment that will never turn into profits, with much of it financed through taxing the rich appropriately.
Neoliberals hate every one of those ideas and have positioned themselves so they can veto all of them.
Voting genuine progressives and ensuring they keep their promises is the only way out because the best we’ll ever get out of this neoliberal psuedo-left is “Maybe we can find a way to save the world that’s more profitable than just letting everyone die”.
Nah, imo voting is kinda like giving your little brother an unpluged controler and pretending he is playing video games with you so that he doesnt riot. Of course we are the little brother. It changes nothing and the candidate that wins just makes everyone feel beter abbout themselves for believing they contributed when the candidate does or says something that they agree with or viseversa, the one that won and the people that didnt vote for him, when it does or say something it just makes them feel that this country is diyng cuz i dont agree with that guy, and then will blame the majority of the voters for voting on the guy while the fault is on the sistem itself.
I say burn everything to the ground, their corrupt institutions, goverment and private/bussines, mainly banks amd administrative burecratical government institutions, make sure rich people (mainly oligarchs and corrupt politicians) cannot get influence nor voice on any kind of venture or decicion on the big picture or the world order or whatever you wannna call it and when we get the chance, replace leadership with A.I. Because at the scale the world is headed right now it will probably be the only way to purge corruption from the actions of human kind and keep everything as morally correct as posible, and im talking morally as in everyone lives as pleasantly as humanlly posible and no mass murders and rehabilitating instead of punishing and susteinability, not that dumb culture wars b.s. that americans are so obssesed with.
So it’s hopeless. Lol
Not sure if this will give you hope or not, but one thing to consider is that we could still make it far worse, or put differently, that it’s still in our power to stop that from happening. We can’t change the fact that climate change already has noticeable negative consequences today, nor that global temperatures will rise by at least 1.5° towards the end of the century (compared to 1950-1980), probably more. But we do have a somewhat realistic chance of keeping it at around 2° or below (see e.g. here or here for easy simulations in your browser). The point is that every tenth of a degree counts, and our action or lack thereof now might well make the difference between it “just” getting bad with regular droughts, crop failures, some regions becoming temporarily uninhabitable due to wet bulb temperatures and so on on the one hand, or all of that at a much larger scale leading to societal collapse if we don’t act at all. We live in the worst extinction event the earth has seen since the asteroid that killed the non-bird dinosaurs, but we can still keep it at that instead of turning it into the worst extinction event the earth has ever seen. Luckily, governments (and industry) largely have at least accepted that climate change is a thing, and in Europe and the Americas green-house gas emission have actually already been sinking for the last 15 years or so. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not great, and these governments still should do much more, but it could also be worse, and the fact that we’re lowering emissions despite our politicians generally being very friendly with industry could give at least a sliver of hope. The emissions of China and India (and the rest of Asia) are still rising, but show signs of decelerated growth at least, and in Africa emissions are still fairly low and rising rather slowly, with a chance that some less developed countries might more or less just skip a big chunk of carbon-based industrialisation in favour of renewables. Altogether this means that we’re already on a way to avoid the worst possible scenarios, and still have the power to keep it towards the lower end of the scale as far as terrible outcomes are concerned.
In addition, while individuals have always less power than whole governments or industries, there are nevertheless things anyone reading this could do, e.g.:
- Voting for parties that favour stronger climate action, and perhaps even more importantly, not supporting those who do less or even nothing. You can also protest or try to influence your government in some other ways.
- Reduce your personal impact by not consuming animal products (in particular meat and dairy), not flying if you can avoid it, not buying stuff you don’t really need, and not having (more) kids.
- Tell other people you know who might listen to do those things. Many people favour climate action in principle, but are too lazy, scared or just otherwise preoccupied to actually start doing stuff on their own. You kicking them in the butt or leading by example can motivate them and in turn other people they might now.
If you’re reading this and whether or not you’re already doing some of those things, I’m sure you can find at least some things you could do (I know I can, and I’m trying to put it into practice), which might in turn also make you feel less depressed about the situation. As mentioned before, I’m not saying that we’re in a great situation, but whining about it helps nobody, and we’re still in a situation where we have the power to stop things from getting even worse.
All great points and I agree 100%. Thanks for taking the time to write this
It’s a shame they deleted it then ha.
It still shows for me
Huh. Interesting. What instance is the user from?
Not sure if this will give you hope or not, but one thing to consider is that we could still make it far worse, or put differently, that it’s still in our power to stop that from happening. We can’t change the fact that climate change already has noticeable negative consequences today, nor that global temperatures will rise by at least 1.5° towards the end of the century (compared to 1950-1980), probably more. But we do have a somewhat realistic chance of keeping it at around 2° or below (see e.g. here or here for easy simulations in your browser). The point is that every tenth of a degree counts, and our action or lack thereof now might well make the difference between it “just” getting bad with regular droughts, crop failures, some regions becoming temporarily uninhabitable due to wet bulb temperatures and so on on the one hand, or all of that on a much larger scale leading to societal collapse if we don’t act at all. We live in the worst extinction event the earth has seen since the asteroid that killed the non-bird dinosaurs, but we can still keep it at that instead of turning it into the worst extinction event the earth has ever seen. Luckily, governments (and industry) largely have at least accepted that climate change is a thing, and in Europe and the Americas green-house gas emission have actually already been sinking for the last 15 years or so. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not great, and these governments still should do much more, but it could also be worse, and the fact that we’re lowering emissions despite our politicians generally being very friendly with industry could give at least a sliver of hope. The emissions of China and India (and the rest of Asia) are still rising, but show signs of decelerated growth at least, and in Africa emissions are still fairly low and rising rather slowly, with a chance that some less developed countries might more or less just skip a big chunk of carbon-based industrialisation in favour of renewables. Altogether this means that we’re already on a way to avoid the worst possible scenarios, and still have the power to keep it towards the lower end of the scale as far as terrible outcomes are concerned.
In addition, while individuals have always less power than whole governments or industries, there are nevertheless things anyone reading this could do, e.g.:
- Voting for parties that favour stronger climate action, and perhaps even more importantly, not supporting those who do less or even nothing. You can also protest or try to influence your government in some other ways.
- Reduce your personal impact by not consuming animal products (in particular meat and dairy), not flying if you can avoid it, not buying stuff you don’t really need, and not having (more) kids. Edit: Also try to favour public transport over driving your own car, and if you need a car, try to use a small, electrical one to reduce emissions.
- Tell other people you know who might listen to do those things. Many people favour climate action in principle, but are too lazy, scared or just otherwise preoccupied to actually start doing stuff on their own. You kicking them in the butt or leading by example can motivate them and in turn other people they might now.
If you’re reading this and whether or not you’re already doing some of those things, I’m sure you can find at least some things you could do (I know I can, and I’m trying to put it into practice), which might in turn also make you feel less depressed about the situation. As mentioned before, I’m not saying that we’re in a great situation, but whining about it helps nobody, and we’re still in a situation where we have the power to stop things from getting even worse.
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I don’t think this is a hot take anymore. Middle/lower class are sick of hearing that everything is our problem. It isn’t.
I know this won’t change your mind or anything, but this is probably pretty close to the mindset of some other ~1.5 billion first world countries’ populations’ mindset. And those combined account to currently around ~37% of CO2 emissions. So if all people like you (if you consider first world countries’ people to be people like you) all came together and did more we could have some pretty huge impact. Of course the other ~63% may still fuck things up, but this is a much different comparison than just you against the rest of the world, you’re not very unique in that regard.
I’m so tired of people turning everything into an awful prisoner’s dilemma. Everyone should just aim to be the best person you can be and stop fretting about whether everyone else is trying quite as hard as you. It doesn’t need to be complicated.
Right? On a global scale, though, “best person you can be” should be something like, “let’s try to behave in such a way so that if everyone behaved like me, the world would be a good place”. That is hard though, to think like that.
What can help is the knowledge that by doing so it is impossible not to on some level inspire others to do the same to some degree by example.
If you’re a selfish jerk that will cause people around you to be .001% (or something) more selfish and jerky. If you are kind and good that will push the needle the other way similarly.
Except the amount more those people are better or worse for knowing you then also influences how much better or worse the people they know are etc and so while it is a small effect per person, the diffused effect is meaningful, cumulative and self-reinforcing. It doesn’t take a lot of people within a community either giving up and being the worst or finding enough of a spine to try to be good to start to tip the balance of the whole community in either direction. It also means that as you are better and kinder, your immediate external world gradually becomes a little better and kinder which makes it easier and more rewarding to be that way in an endless virtuous cycle.
Ok now apply the fact that at least 45% of the western world is brainwashed by the fossil fuel industry. They’re low IQ repeater bots who would glady kill every single one of us because climate change is a “hoax”.
I think a very small minority “would gladly kill every single one of us”, not 45%. If it were 45%, there’d already be open civil war all over the west.
Can also create isolated cells to coordinate … I’m gonna stop before this gets added to my file.
Yes, my list is by no means complete. I’m sure there are many more things any of us could do, it’s more meant as a list of some examples to give people starting points for practical things to do.
Thank you this was actually really nice to read. I feel like everywhere I look is more bad news about the climate it’s nice to see we can at least still mitigate it
I don’t have hope and I have a specific prediction why but since hope is our only chance I won’t share that.
Human problems have human solutions.
The science is clear, now it’s an engineering problem.
Unfortunately, it’s actually a political problem.
Another human problem, so solvable.
It’s not like a super volcano or asteroid.
Asteroid problem is more solvable than political problem.
Armageddon solved it like in 2 hours or so.Is it though?
CEOs don’t want to risk their profits.
Politicians don’t want to risk their terms.
Voters don’t want to lower their living standards.No one really wants to do something.
Appropriate username, but I (unfortunately) agree
Voters not wanting to lower their living standards is the real elephant in the room. You tell someone that they should eat 1 less hamburger a week and all of a sudden you’re dodging bullets.
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I think this is our natural reaction because we aren’t aware of the scope of lobbying and corruption that influence global politics and supply chains.
There’s like 100 people with the power to make the change and they’ve all decided to invest the money and power in self preservation. It’s the biggest ‘fuck you proletariat scum’ I could imagine. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff
As if the voters are any better. They could vote for policy makers that bring change, or go into politics themselves. But they don’t actually want to be affected by such policy changes. It’s always the others, always just finger pointing.
Are you talking about American voters?
Only about 35 percent of the eligible voters participated, so yeah. Apathy and complacent comfort is a big player in the game. I’m pretty convinced that a lot of people’s apathy comes from the lack of political agency. When business interests conflict with human interests guess who wins every time.
No. I’m talking about all voters.
Dropping a big ice cube on the ocean every now an then?
Would you need a bigger ice cube every time?
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My 13yo refuses to discuss the topic. He says he’s already been traumatized by it.
What a ❄️ ❄️
A morbid solution for it would be an all-out war between China and India, they are about a 1/3 of the world’s population.
Ghengis Khan proved that with enough murder you can drastically lower global temperature.
Some reuters reporting here.
Including…
Prolonged bouts of high temperatures in China have challenged power grids and crops, and concerns are mounting of a possible repeat of last year’s drought, the most severe in 60 years.
China is no stranger to dramatic swings in temperatures across the seasons but the swings are getting wider.
On Jan. 22, temperatures in Mohe, a city in northeastern Heilongjiang province, plunged to minus 53C, according to the local weather bureau, smashing China’s previous all-time low of minus 52.3C set in 1969.
Since then, the heaviest rains in a decade have hit central China, ravaging wheat fields in an area known as the country’s granary.
These few sentences really capture the horror of “climate change”, that so many people overlook. Yes “average global temp” might increase by 1 degree celsius, but the really immediately terrifying part is changes to large weather patterns that provide a foundation to gargantuan food production industries.
I live in Western Australia. It’s a large state perhaps 3 times the size of texas, but it’s very arid and mostly desert aside from the south west corner in which there’s a “belt” of land with appropriate conditions for cropping in which 18 million tonnes of grain is grown each year, of which 90% is exported. Suppose this year the state receives 30% less rain, then next year 30% more. Suppose that halves production this year, and washes away some of the dry top soil next year. Hell, we might even receive more rain but just a few hundred kilometers from where it usually is.
Point is, even a mild interruption to established weather patterns is going to have a huge and detrimental impact on human agriculture. It’s terrifying really.
For those wondering, one degree celsius increase means every kilogram of air has at least increased by 1°C. The specific heat of air is about 1158 J/(kg*C). Now that might not seem like a lot of energy, in fact 4g (one teaspoon) of sugar has 68,000 J of chemical energy.
The thing is, you might have noticed, there’s a lot of air around us. About 5.14 x 10^(18) kg of air. So when you take a pretty normal number and multiply it by an insanely huge number, you get an insanely huge number. That’s about 5 exajoules of energy. That is the total energy consumption of the US in 2021 for four million years. Or in sugar terms, equal to the energy of sugar if you converted a little over half of the Earth’s entire mass into sugar.
We hit that additional amount of energy in our atmosphere in 2017.
The air increasing by 1⁰C isn’t too crazy.
The ocean increasing by 1⁰C is an insane nightmare. Do you know how massive a heat sink the ocean is? For it to change, even by 1⁰, is terrifying.
And we’re gleefully adding thermic energy to this constantly at a rate of about four Hiroshima bombs every second.
But as an Australian myself i believe the government will ensure we’re all fed and not leave us to starve. Especially not in the Northern Territory where we can’t grow fuck all. /s (do we do that here)
When Westralia seceeds you territorians should come with.
We shall hoard our wealth of grain and hydrogen and watch the world burn.
China is massive though, Mohe is further north than Mongolia, it’s 2,200 km north of Beijing.
It’s nowhere near the central wheat fields so it’s not really comparable
I’m not saying the agricultural circumstances are comparable.
I’m saying that it’s the changes to weather patterns, hot or cold wet or dry, that are scary.
“It was hotter” is IMO a bit of a distraction, because no one really knows what that means in practical terms.
Like in the linked Reuters article, the higher than usual rainfall could well be more problematic than the higher maximum temp.
Reposting my comment from another similar thread ‘cause I think it’s kind of important to add.
Ok, so it doesn’t mention wet bulb temperature anywhere, so I went to figure it out. The first thing I was surprised with is apparently most of online calculators don’t take in values higher than 50C.
I couldn’t find the exact data about humidity for that day, but it has been 35-40%+ at a minimum for most days in that region, sometimes even reaching 90%.
So, 52C at around 40% humidity is 37.5C in wet bulb temp. The point of survivability is around 35, and most humans should be able to withstand 37.5 for several hours, but it’s much worse for sick or elderly. 39 is often a death sentence even for healthy humans after just two hours — your body can no longer lose heat and you bake from the inside. That’s like having an unstoppable runaway fever. And with that humidity it’s reached at 54C.
We’re dangerously close to that.
An absolute death sentence for folks without air conditioning or another means to stay cool.
Time to make some mud and make like pigs I suppose?
I know the predator movie was preparing us for something
Dillon! You son of a bitch
Heterosexual engorged arm penises grabbing ensues
wet mud would be hotter than you can survive to for a long period of time
That works, until… Until the power goes out because everyone has their AC on maximum. After that, it becomes a fight of who has a bigger generator and more gas stored, or who has solar power for the AC.
From what I know the critical wet bulb temperature is ~31.5°C. it was from a study done last year.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jul/31/why-you-need-to-worry-about-the-wet-bulb-temperature
It’s a bit different depending on your health and all that. But 35 WBT is a definite point for everyone (since our bodies run at 36–37C). Kinda like the difference between “some will die” and “most will die”.
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I mean to say that the wet bulb temperature at which most will die is ~31.5°C, the gaurdian report I linked is saying that the 35°C number comes from a 2010 study, whereas the findings of the 2022 study found the number to be much lower ~31.5°C.
It’s probably a measure for persistent temperature then. Like, if you lock someone in a room at that temperature (or if it wouldn’t cool down at night, for example), then that person would be dead no matter what after some amount of hours or days.
35 is more of a real-life guideline, since it does cool down at night and you don’t need to withstand this temperature persistently and indefinitely.
And for the last several years there have been lots of places that exceeded 31.5 WBT during the day. Hell, you can probably find several places with that WBT right now. But since people don’t drop dead immediately and need time to heat up, it’s still survivable.
Think about it in terms of a 2D graph. You need to know the duration in addition to temperature to gauge survivability. A million degrees is survivable for a femtosecond, 35 for an average earth day, and ~31 indefinitely.
If that was true, people would die in Russian sauna - 80-90° at 100% humidity with 10-20 minute sessions.
Well, people do die in saunas. More often than you might think. And those who can sit through 20 minutes are usually already accustomed to them, it’s not like people can sit for a long time the first time. Stick an unprepared elderly person there and it’s often not going to end well.
Also, right after intense sauna sessions (and in between as well) people dunk themselves into very cold plunge pools or snowdrifts to quickly cool off.
And you got the temperature/humidity ratios wrong. 100% humidity is used in a hammam, a Turkish-style steam room, and those are kept at around 45-55C. Russian saunas never exceed 90%, most are kept at around 70%.
Have you been to one and looked at the hydrometer? It’s really hard to raise the humidity above 70–80%, and the usual for most people 1-2 ladles per ~10 mins barely raises the humidity above 60%.
I read that as 1-2 ladies per ~10 min… talk about death by snu snu.
Yes, been to a lot of times.
Yeah, that makes me think that data was just wrong. Every homeless in the area would be dead with those temps and humidities.
Homeless have been dying during summer and winter for years. It’s just, as with too many things, the new normal and not newsworthy. If they started dying from critical weather I’m not sure we would even know.
Every homeless in the area would be dead with those temps and humidities.
Shhhh … don’t give the elites running our planet another reason to ignore global warming.
I don’t want to be rude, and I completely am all for combating climate change, but 39C is not baking your insides…
I have been deployed to multiple places that were 52C (~125F) in the day/night with high humidity levels, in full long sleeve/pants for 8 hours at a time. 39C (~102F) is hot, but not bake you from the inside type of hot.
Elderly and sick are people not included in what I said above for obvious reasons.
I find it pretty funny that people are arguing both “35 WBT is pretty fine” and “31.5 WBT is a death sentence”.
Yet somewhere in that range seems to be the consensus for an actual “your body is on the clock and you’re not surviving it for a prolonged time” situation.
I don’t know your personal experience and how dangerous it was in regards to temperature, but high temperature environments start feeling pretty humid at like ~50%, so you still pretty much need an actual temperature/humidity reading to gauge it correctly.
So guys, take it to the scientists :) I’m not talking out of my ass here, rather quoting research data. There are a couple dozen papers listed in the link above, and most seem to agree on the dangerous temp region. Read their methodology and reasoning if you’re interested to learn more.
Oh I’m not arguing it’s a hot temp and exerting yourself in those temps is very much a death sentence; especially without water. I’m saying that many people in the world have lived through those temperatures. Research studies have a way of making things a bit more dire than what is normally human survivable, probably for legal/medical moral reasons.
The US military definitely has rules against 40+ WBT and state how many hours of work per hours of rest we could have in high temp+humidity levels. However, I, and anyone who had to deploy or live in East Africa (like Djibouti) or the Middle East can definitely attest, 50WBT is survivable for 8 hours days. Again, not talkin’ elderly or sick persons.
People saying:
“Voting doesn’t matter. They’re all the same.” “Things can’t be solved because the global elite won’t allow it” “I don’t have to do anything because it won’t matter” “This is all big industry’s problem, why should I do anything”
have been manipulated/influenced/radicalized by a combination of paid media shills, RW billionaires and Saudi/Kremlin/Iranian propaganda.
Snap out of it and let’s all pitch in to save our children and world.
Voting matters, but unfortunately it appears to be an incredibly sub-optimal solution for dealing with climate change for the following reasons:
- Just because you can vote, doesn’t mean that the option you need is even on the menu. It often isn’t.
- Through hard work you can get the option on the menu, but that doesn’t mean your politician won’t do “deals” after they are in power.
- Lobbyists get access to politicians 24/7 and have a lot of influence, you have one vote every 4 years;
- Even if politicians do what you want, it is unlikely that your country by itself will make a difference, this is a global problem.
Meanwhile we are all fucked. It is likely too late already for preventing severe climate change. Our only hope now is geoengineering. The USA and EU are already considering blocking the sun.
The people who (rightly) have a sense of urgency about this are taking more radical action. They are blocking roads and throwing soup at famous paintings. These are desperate acts that seem rational in the face of the horror that we should strive to avoid, but the majority opinion of our species seems to be that these people are “too radical” and that common folks just trying to get by should not be inconvenienced, and that these radical eco-terrorists should be thrown in a cage.
To be honest, I’m not sure that our species deserves to survive.
Fun fact, there are climate lobbyists as well.
You can (very) easily join up here: https://citizensclimatelobby.org/
They are serious, bipartisan, and get face-to-face time regularly with elected leaders.
I do. Others don’t. Unfortunately it will end only one way. We all know how.
Real shame. Civilizations rose and fall. Ours was very fast
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No, they’re not rational in the face of anything. They’re stupid virtue-signalling that does nothing to reduce climate change. The only way they could possibly be rational is that they get people talking about them, but climate change is not some little-known issue. The entire world has been screaming about it for the past 20 years. If you haven’t been listening, some cunt with soup isn’t going to change that.
“Virtue-signaling” is just another though-terminating cliché of the current culture wars. It implies that the action has no cost to the person and provides some social credit. These people are risking their lives, violence, prison time, etc. Everyone hates them. Nobody knows their names. They keep doing it. Your hypothesis doesn’t hold. If we all decided that we don’t give a shit about this civilization-ending event, might as well through some soup at a van Gogh painting. Why not? It won’t matter anyway.
Even if these people were horrible “virtue-signaling” vandals, it is a microscopic problem in comparison to the real one: clime change. And yet the media focus on the former. Why? You do the math.
Agreed, at least in principle - but your statement is so reductive it really could be said about anything.
It’s so hard to motivate people to vote, people are exhausted and finding ten minutes in the day to feel good about oneself, much less performing a (seemingly futile, thanks to those poisonous ideas you’ve mentioned) civic duty is bordering on impossible. When 1 in 15 people in the UK need drugs just to keep their desire to live one more day in check - and a good chunk of the remaining population from that statistic are barely holding on - fighting the futility for someone else is an insurmountable goal.
I don’t know if we can afford to wait for climate to get worse for people to take action. People are dying preventable deaths, if it weren’t for the very evident effects of man made climate change being politicised or obfuscated, maybe it’d be just a warm Summer in Europe right now.
How long can we wait for a peaceful solution to form?
If we don’t wait - how many heads would we need on pikes next to Mortimer Buckley or Larry Fink before we start seeing positive change? When would be the tipping point for the guillotine to become the most ethical solution?
Sorry, I’m rambling. I just feel so hopeless sometimes, and putting a X in a box 2 or 3 times a decade doesn’t do anything to make me feel like we’re making progress…!
“Reductive” is the exact word that popped into my head, while reading PP’s comment.
I have come to suspect that we can look forward to continued basic survival being monetized, as VC-funded startups enter the space to disrupt breathing and skin-based evaporative cooling, and just generally making it to the next minute.
Green and renewable investment is the fastest-growing investment sector among VCs
This doesn’t address your entire post/point but make sure to vote in every election, not just 2 or 3 times a decade - local and state (assuming USA, sorry?) elections definitely matter!
Voting is still good, but it’s the bare minimum. Not everyone has the time, but if you do, you should try to advocate publicly, and preferably in a group. Just like with unions, collective action is more effective. If I give feedback to my city individually, I’m a data point. But as part of an advocacy group, they reach out to us.
Absolutely! That’s what I mean. We have to do it ALL. Even the tiniest things have value. 👍
stuck fin
But you’re not talking about the people who are already doing everything they can you’re talking about the people who aren’t, and they haven’t, and they won’t, so it is industry and government who needs to do the things for them, because they won’t. If our votes aren’t enough then there is nothing more that can be done under the current system.
Well it’s been fun y’all, cya in the wasteland, better watch your water.
My aim is terrible. I really hope I don’t have to actively recycle urine.
Just piss with VATS
‘mysterious stranger’ music plays
Hope for a critical piss.
You mean the same water that’s so contaminated with forever chemicals that multiple governments set recommended limits for safe fish consumption?
Hahaha…we’re fucked.
For those interested:
"A new study has found that consuming a single fish from the Great Lakes is equal to drinking a month’s worth of water contaminated with high levels of “forever chemicals.”
(The recommended amount of some species of fish is now 0 in lake Michigan.)
http://www.idph.state.il.us/envhealth/fishadv/lakemichigan.htm
Have you ever had a friend or relative who was just in such poor health, who you basically expected to keel over and die any day now? If so, you probably know what I mean when you eventually just accept that the person you once knew is already dead, and all that’s left is a husk that’s just riding out the last bit of momentum they’ve got until they fade away. And then when they finally do die, it doesn’t even hurt, because you’ve already had time to grieve and process your emotions in advance.
That’s kinda how I feel about the earth these days. I feel like the earth is on hospice care, and at that point that we’re just making it as comfortable as we can for it to die.
Maybe that’s a little melodramatic. But it really does just feel hopeless these days.
It’s not Earth that’s in trouble…
Yeah I feel like this is just like when the body gets a fever to get rid of a sickness. The earth is just getting a little fever to get rid of our dumbasses real quick. Then it will go right back to normal and be completely fine.
If it’s any consolation. Earth, as in the spinning ball of dirt, will be just fine for many more millions of years. Humans, and other animal species, on the other hand are not going to be fine if the trend continuous.
Dunno, I find it kind of consoling in a meloncolic kind of way.
It’s not the first mass extinction and it will not be the last.
But it is the only one we get to partake in!
But it is the only one we get to
partake incauseFtfy
I feel you. I don’t think it’s hopeless, but I do think we’re in for a rough ride. That being said, I actually have a lot of faith in the upcoming generation. I think that if they get angry enough, they have the potential to arrest what’s happening and even turn it around given how well they work together. Greta gets a lot of hate, but hell, I haven’t seen someone make as successful a series of environmental stands since Julia Butterfly. If her generation keeps showing that fire, I think there’s still hope for humans to live in harmony with the earth.
As much as I also have hope in the next generation, there isn’t a damn thing we can do anymore. If every single human being disappeared right now, the earth would continue warming and experiencing climate change for 100s more years, because of the feedback loops we have set in motion and the fact that the ocean is still dampening some effects, but won’t be able to for long. Our only hope to avert complete disaster, collapse of society and maybe even the extinction of humanity is if we find a way to start pulling massive amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere ASAP. Carbon neutrality isn’t enough, we need to be carbon negative. If zoomers can get that done, in time, then they’re a whole other fucking class of human. I hope they do, but I think the odds are against them and all of us.
Me too.
Shit is fucked. There are unavoidable problems on the way, but I do have faith in today’s generation.
Fever is a tried and tested method in nature to eliminate infections which become too detrimental to the host.
It will be very much that way if we can’t evolve to a symbiotic relationship with our planet.
Indeed. Everyone says they are worried about the Earth.
In geologic time scales, Earth will be fine. Humans, and in much shorter time scales? Not so much, if we don’t get it together.
Humans are toast no matter what. The party had to end eventually. We had a good run.
There’s too much red in this picture. They really should use another baseline. If red would start only at 40 Degree Celsius, the globe would look much more welcoming.
Look, I’m just trying to give productive feedback.
Except China is proud of their red.
Our red
I have a friend with two daughters in their late teens, early 20s. I asked him the other day how they felt about climate change. He said they believed it was happening, but they don’t think it’s nearly as bad as “the media makes out”. He added, “You know, we went through the Cold War and fear of nuclear annihilation and that didn’t happen, so…” We were interrupted then so I didn’t get to yell at him. But I think a lot of people think that way. Pffft, probably won’t happen, news orgs exaggerating for clicks, someone will fix it etc etc. While shrugging at all the floods and fires and storms happening around the globe, and booking a cheap flight to Malaga. It’s exasperating!
If it helps to know, a lot of people around that age are also very aware of what’s going on. Many of us are also mortified at the thought of what’s to come in 20-50 years.
I think that every generation needs to get out and actually vote to if we want to have a chance at even reducing the damage. It should be more shocking to people that the effects of climate change continue to be worse than scientists predicted. What are we going to do if the 50-100 year climate prediction is also too optimistic?
I think that a lot of people might forget that they might still be around to feel the effects of all of this. I don’t know about you, but I’m really not looking forwards to dealing with the intense weather when I’m old and frail. It’s going to really suck for other at-risk groups, too.
Another side of the environmental concerns is being forgotten too often, imo. What are we going to do with all of these forever chemicals? The great lakes have recommended safe intake limits for fish caught there. There is mercury, PCBS, PFAS, and lots of other nasty stuff in our soil and water. There was a large amount of time where the industrial sector was practically unregulated, so a lot of things were dumped in bad places. If these things are known to cause severe health issues and reproductive problems in humans, they’re probably going to mess up animals too. We should also think about all of the disposal sites that may not have been discovered yet. I hope they are testing for that more now. My grandfather’s house was unknowingly built on land that was severely contaminated with TCE. They know now, but people lived there for years without a clue!
Scary times.
-asks friend about opinion on topic
-friend gives somewhat reasonable if wrong opinion
-gets mad he didn’t have the chance to “yell at him”
Sounds like a shit friend move.
Just a note, I think you’re taking their comment too literally. Like educate him in a friendly way. When you give shit to friends, it can be friendly. Different than giving shit to strangers.
I know china wants to out do us on everything but fuck China maybe don’t reach for the stars on that specific metric.
“Global warming is a lie”
Don’t look up
The world is a ripe tomato.
The world is three miles of bad road
Walking down the street
Will I never meet her?
She’s a real woman-child
Oh, my kiss breath turpentine… I am smitten…
Lovely haiku.
I think we’re gonna need a bigger scale.
Nah just shorten the when it’s supposed to happen axle. We’ve known for years. Yet another great thing America gave us, petroleum based capitalism,
Yeah America is the only one with cars. Capitalism bad.
Posted from iphone
Man, that must be hell, it’s literally death valley temperature since they were the same temperature this week. Kinda ironic how death valley name was because the dudes who were stuck finally left saying “goodbye death valley”, and in the future it’ll literally become death.
I love that they just have to make up colors now since the previous spectrum is no so inadequate
Glad they’re doing that instead of rescaling it, otherwise it’d be easier to ignore.
“Its always hot in summer”
Or how about “it’s cooler where I am this year, so far! We even had snow!”
“It hasn’t been as hot in my area this year”
