It's 1°C on average. That means every molecule of air has AT LEAST 1°C extra thermal energy. And I'm not sure if anyone has noticed, there's a lot of air molecules. So while taking one cubic centimeter of air and increasing it by 1°C isn't a ton of energy. Do that for roughly all 109 tredecitillion molecules and you get about 2.2 zettajoules of energy. Annual US energy consumption is just 0.094 zettajoules. So one degree increase is equal to more energy than the US uses in 23½ years. The biggest nuclear bomb humans ever made, that pulls in at about 0.00021 zettajoules. So one degree is roughly 10,500 Tasr Bombas going off and then the resulting heat just never leaving.
All of that energy. It has to go somewhere. Sometimes it makes ice turn to water, sometimes it increases the speed at which some wind is moving, sometimes it increases the surface temperature of land, sometimes it evaporates water leaving an area very dry. But it has to go somewhere. And it cannot just radiate back out into space, it hits a CO₂ molecule, bounces off of it, and flies right back down to Earth. And the more CO₂ molecules we put out there, the more often that happens.
Huh this is the first thing I’ve read that puts it into a sort of understandable perspective (eternally recovering from my conservative raised childhood, maybe sane people explain it better in general)
With a global mean temperature increase of 1 C since 1970 there was an increase in peak temperatures (avg) of about 2 C. So till 2050 it will be somewhere around 3 C for the average peak in summer. If we look at the ramp up since 2008 we can expect more like 5-6 C higher temperature records than today. So in the 2050s there will be some summers with 45 C records and the average hottest day every year around 35-37 C
Edit: and not to forget that this is only talking about how high the peaks every year are. The length of heatwaves will also increase by a few days. So where it was maybe 32 for three days and then 35 for one day, followed by a cooling thunderstorm it will be more like five days of 35 followed by a day of 37 and then a much more intense thunderstorm than what we know today.
Where I live, we have had three female Prime Ministers - at one point both main political parties were led by women. I hated one of them because she cut welfare for single mothers, cut hospital funding, cut school funding, etc etc.
It's crazy how the right screams that Biden is extremely left while he's center at BEST. Just shows how far they continue to shift right. I mean hell, some of them stopped watching Fox "news" because it became too "liberal" for their taste. That should tell you a whole lot.
Yeah, Fox News sometimes tells the truth and kinda advocates for Democracy in a half-hearted kind of way. That’s too liberal now for some Republicans, who believe that Democracy is cringe as a concept and want to get rid of the people they blame for our nations problems (right now trans people and Jews). They have moved to OAN and NewsMax.
It's kind of funny, but also really fucking sad when these people scream about Biden being a far left communist who wants to destroy America with radical socialism or whatever.
I don't know how many actually believe it sincerely. Well, a lot do, but I think there's also an element of just shouting buzzwords without knowing what they mean. Parroting, really.
Like, dude... Please come to where I live and see that our centre-right party has identical policies to the Democrats. Overton Window is extremely fucked in America right now.
Went to a new dentist, and the hygienist started out cleaning my teeth saying she doesn't talk about politics and likes to keep thing lite. 20 minutes later I was being told how socialism is the number one threat to America and how people need to wake up... Scary when people can be that worked up about something they clearly don't understand. More so when the person they are talking to has a mouth full of dental tools and hasn't said shit.
Yep, I'm in Canada. You should hear my soon-to-be late elderly neighbour go on about the ills of communism while the paramedics and Medigas trucks are at his house every other day.
I think it’s that people who are center or center-left grow weary of their far-left friends lumping them in with the right. Not the whole left. Not even most of it. Just the loud part.
One of the few things I’m still willing to “both sides” on… perhaps “all sides” on, is an inability to differentiate people outside of their group.
Literally proving my point. Nobody is saying to exterminate anyone except literal Nazis. I've had people claim that the left wants to be able to abort up til birth. You see how that is a gross mischarcterization of hundreds of millions of Americans? If you are claiming your side wants nothing but good and is perfect some the other is the literal devil there is something seriously wrong.
Which minority communities are the supporters and politicians of the Democrat party calling for the extermination of? I know Republicans and their surrogates have started talking about "hunting Democrats with dogs" and having gay people "line up against the wall", but I must have missed that rhetoric from the Democrats. Do you have a link or something I could check out?
Yes, but one is telling the truth and the other is lying. The Democrats are in favor of neoliberalism, and their policies are all essentially either procorporate or lukewarm social benefits. The Republicans are currently pushing for issues like destroying “woke ideology” by outlawing queer people and defunding the IRS. They’re not comparable.
It’s not crazy at all. They want the social expectation of what “far left” is to get established at Biden as a baseline. So they’re going to tie that label as much as they can so that when actual progressives put out a platform they’re seen as completely insane and non-viable despite the rest of the developed world doing it for decades.
that seems rather unlikely, even if it should prove something humans are fatally unsuited to (which Im not really convinced of yet, because a lot of the problems of the information age are not really new, there is plenty of precedent for leaders that make foolish decisions to nevertheless inspire large followings and use that to break political norms in the system they exist in for example, or for harmful rumors and movements to spread false medical advice or hate towards particular groups of people, before the information age). In order for something to be the great filter, it implies that that thing has to be the death of (or at least permanently halt the advancement of) close to every species that reaches it. In other words, it isnt enough for humans to struggle with it, it has to be something for which a species evolving that can survive it is essentially inconceivable. Given how different the psychology among even different animals on earth can appear to be, and that the problems caused by the information age will be greatly impacted by the psychological quirks of the civilization experiencing it, that strikes me as unlikely. It also has to actually drive the species that reaches it to extinction, or at least completely stop their advancement. Given that new technology continues to be developed, some of it surprisingly quickly and a lot of it helped by the fruits of the information age, the latter seems unlikely, so for it to be the great filter, it would need to actually cause extinction basically 100% of the time, and even for humans, Im not sure how it would do that (while enabling things like climate change denial and anti-vaccine movements to spread causes us problems, that probably isnt enough per se, even a disaster that made three quarters of the planet literally deadly to exist in and a plague that wiped out half the population would be insufficient to make something a great filter, for example, if that species survives in what marginally livable area remains to rebuild their numbers and continue to advance their civilization. It has to kill everyone with no chance for any group to find any means to survive it)
Yeah, sorry, I tend to have a habit of putting lots of text behind parenthesis, and using run on sentences. I’m not terribly great at writing and when I try to condense things down I always feel like the results make less sense to me or are missing small bits of what I meant to say.
What a crazy irony. Here we were thinking we had to survive the nuclear age and get to the point where we were all connected and well-informed. But it turns out the nukes led to an unprecedented period of peace and global information access and communication may destroy us all.
I think it’s pretty unreal that everything that has happened in the wake of the 2020 election and January 6th and Roe and so much more has apparently only cemented people in their partisanship. Absolutely wild.
My theory is that many westerners in our current era have effectively replaced traditional religion with shallow political ideology.
So instead of going to church so they can be surrounded by fellow believers and hear a sermon telling them that their faith is the one true way and that every evil is rightly blamed on the loathsome unbelievers and heretics, they go online so they can be surrounded by fellow believers and hear a sermon telling them that their faith is the one true way and that every evil is rightly blamed on the loathsome unbelievers and heretics.
I believe this too and I don’t even think it’s controversial, I think it’s fairly mainstream tbh.
Look at that stupid conservative congresswoman who got up in front of a bunch of conservatives at a “prayer breakfast” and said, totally casually, she only made it on time because she turned her boyfriend’s request for a quickie down.
These people aren’t religious, they don’t even know what it means to be religious.
My theory is that many westerners in our current era have effectively replaced traditional religion with shallow political ideology.
I don’t really think traditional religion has been replaced by political ideology per se. But I do think religion in the US has formed a symbiotic relationship with politics.
If you go to an evangelical church service in many areas, it is pretty much nothing but a Republican political meeting. In some churches, you’re not even welcome if you’re a Democrat.
Yes - some number of people have melded religion and politics. There's nothing new in that.
But I'm talking about a different dynamic.
Religion is only in part, and arguably not even primarily,about deities and creation myths and such. To some significant degree, and arguably primarily, it's about establishing and maintaining a sense of identity and community, and providing self-affirmation. People adopt and practice religion in large part so that they can self-apply a label that represents a particular set of values and virtues that they wish to project, and so that they can surround themselves with, and gain positive feedback from, like-minded fellow believers.
To that end, each religion has a set of values and virtues that are presumed to be possessed by whoever wears their label, a designated community of believers, a set of beliefs to reassure the believers that theirs is the one true faith, and a designated set of enemies upon whom to blame all wrong and toward whom to direct their hatred, reinforcing both their sense of virtue and their sense of community.
And those things are the things for which a growing number of people in the west are turning to politicsl ideology. They've just filled all the gaps that would otherwise have been filled by traditional religion with secular counterparts. They still have a faith which they share with fellow believers, they still have a label they can wear to designate their faith, they still have tracts and preachers and their sermons, which are still alternately about the inherent correctness of their own faith and the evil of the heretics and unbelievers, they still have a set of morals by which they can maybe attempt to live their own lives, but much more importantly, against which they can judge others, and so on.
It's really all of the same sorts of things serving the same purposes - it's just different insofar as it's centered on politics instead of religion.
I don't think it's even particularly notable except insofar as so many seem to be completely unaware of it. In fact, I would say that that broad dynamic of seeking identity and community and self-affirmation by investing oneself in some specific belief system and joining with others who share those beliefs and thus that identity is one of the most common and basic human traits. For some reason, it's come to be associated (and often disparagingly) with traditional religion, but people actually do the same thing with any number of different ideas or credos.
And currently, and particularly in the west and particularly online, a significant number of people do it with politics.
Seems like past a certain point people will just keep doubling down because turning back would be admitting that you’ve been a fool.
What is crazy about American politics is that “one side” is not just wrong or misguided, but very wrong, demonstrably so. So very wrong that it is insane from an outsider pespective to try to imagine by what wild loops of logic you could end up so very wrong considering that we’re all supposed to be watching the same movie. You can point at basically anything, on any issue at random, and try to reverse engineer the Republican stance on an issue, and you will face absolutely paper thin, weak arguments, weak premises, unverifiable claims every time, about everything, and in a very unmistakable way that the line of reasoning is, again, not just a bit wrong, but very wrong.
I knew a lot of people weren’t very good at that abstract thinking stuff, making deliberate assumptions and at identifying signal from noise, but frankly, I did not expect almost half of the human race to be absolute morons when it comes to critical thinking. Good luck everyone.
Same, the world just seems to be getting more “confusing” and “hectic”, not sure if it’s just that as we get older and more “aware” we start to notice the things that don’t seem to make sense around us.
I try to think each generation before me had the same feeling, like the world is getting smaller and faster. And everyone is just trying to get by without regard for the people around them or future generations.
Yup. Before the Trump cult, I never truly understood how Hitler could have come to power. Now I totally get it.
Trump’s followers have stayed loyal to him through every deplorable moment: the pussy grabbing, mocking the disabled, the Muslim ban, kidnapping children at the border, collusion with Russia, extorting Ukraine, hush money to a porn star, stealing from charity, lying about an election, staging an insurrection, stealing classified documents, civil liability for rape … Not to mention lying about covid, and botching the covid response and killing hundreds of thousands who could have lived, all while utterly destroying the economy.
The fact that there are over 30,000, yes you read that number right, lies over his four years of presidency that are provably false, and yet people still believe anything he says boggles my mind.
Overall I think the conversation needs to shift away from "Americans are divided" and instead be shifted towards "The rich are dividing the working class for their personal benefit". They're destroying the planet too. The rich need to be made responsible for what they are doing and suffer the consequences.
I completely agree that the Joe on the street, and jean as well, are the regular targets of manipulation. I'm not sure if we'd agree on how or by whom.
Yes, why can’t people see this? This goes right along with people being mad at the poor for needing resources from the public fund while also saying we can’t tax the rich and their businesses because they will take their money and go (or some crazy fucking idea that the rich deserve to be there because they “worked hard” to get there, or worse - the idea that we shouldn’t “punish” them for being rich by asking them to pay their fair share).
The vast majority of MAGAs out there think Trump is against the wealthy "elite" because he keeps saying he is while associating every political opponent to that elite.
They are acting as if the wealthy elite are the enemy. They're just dumb.
Trump is the current American figurehead of the grifting rich. He's literally asking his idiotic, fascist base to pay his legal bills for him - and they are. It's insane.
While these groups are the culprit during this round, the entirely of the US government and the post secondary educational system is truly to blame. Universities have been peddling an overpriced ware to under informed children and their parents for decades. Terrifying then with the fear of losing ground in middle America while offering a product with ever decreasing value for ever increasing cost, partly because of student loans. The government has then enabled greater and greater burden upon these children and their parents by allowing special loans to groups who should never have had them, by protecting those loans from bankruptcy and by making $$ from baking interest as these groups struggled to pay. It’s a travesty. It should never have happened. Education should be free for all.
Oh is it now!? If only there was some sweetheart deal chock full of concessions from the Dems that even your Senate brethren favored that you could push through the House in your role as Speaker. Gosh, all those do-nothing Liberals, amiright!?
You know, there are people out there who would suggest that how "good" an economy is should be measured by how well everyone's needs are cared for while minimizing the amount of labor expenditure needed.
But sure, lets keep going with the 'line go up without any consideration of quality of life' definition since it's working so well for the oligarchs.
I was going to take the time to write a biting riposte just like this, but I, unlike some people, know that it’s my patriotic duty to get to work for this Billionaire Payday"economy" and work until I die. This country is built on, for, and by everyone agreeing that if you aren’t working or buying, preferably both, you better get busy dying. After all, how can I ever hope to be happy unless our benevolent overlords can vacation on Mars? So, put down that damn infernal computer machine, and get out there and buy, buy, buy. We can’t have profits down this quarter, or they’ll ration our Brawndo! And never forget, it’s all very different from slavery, because we are paid, have freedomprofits, and healthcare…Uh, well, it is very, very, different. Anyways, 'Murica!!! GET BACK TO WORK!!!
How about renaming it the Fascist Caucus? Because I don’t think these degenerates/liars care about freedom, well unless you are a Christian white male.
You didn’t get the memo? It was called the Fascist Caucus all along, they had all their letter heads set up with FC. When they finally went public though the name wouldn’t do well, but they didn’t want to waste money on the letter head update, so they chose Freedom Caucus.
I thought it was well established that just like the The Ministry of Peace concerned itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation, that groups like the Freedom Caucus and Moms For Liberty were held to mean the exact opposite of their namesake.
It should only ever be referred to as "X, formerly known as Twitter". Much like Prince changing his name, this is a bad move for branding, though I suppose Prince didn't give a fuck about that!
Prince changed his name due to conflict with production companies. It was more done in protest as they were retaining so much of the revenue he brought in.
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