Because none of these articles explain to the reader what exactly they should do to minimise this problem and how much exactly they stand to gain and lose from doing it. People are only interested in obtaining useful (aka actionable) information.
Also, because the majority of humans on this planet don’t have any power to actually do anything. A few rich people in power control our lives. Thinking otherwise is just deluding oneself. There’s no way around it until we rebel on a planetary scale (even if it means just not going to work for a few weeks, the rich need to be forced to feel discomfort), we just don’t like thinking about this reality because it makes one realize one is helpless.
Bonus points: With countries like America eroding our education system at every turn, our citizens will soon be too dumb in one or two generations for the independent thought necessary to even know how screwed we are.
Vote for political parties with strong climate policies (such as rapidly reducing fossil fuel usage; banning new coal power plants; banning new coal mines, that kind of thing.)
Write letters to currently elected representatives letting them know your priorities. (Those priorities, in the context of climate change, should be related to reducing fossil fuel power generation; and increasing the usability / reliability / affordability of public transport and other non-car based transport.)
Lead by example in your actions. You are probably not the problem anyway, and your own climate impact is close to nothing compared to some companies and some rich individuals. But you can still emphasize that cutting emissions is important and achievable by adjusting your lifestyle. Buy less throw-away stuff. i.e. use things for longer, or use less things - don’t produce as much waste. Reduce your car usage, by commuting via bike or public transport. (In some places this is very difficult; but it only gets easier when there is pressure to improve it. Help create that pressure.) Reduce energy waste from heating and air-conditioning by putting conscious effort into when you open & close windows and blinds to control temperature; and by putting more focus on your own temperature rather than the temperature of a whole house.
… Ok. I could go on. But I’m just saying ideas off the top of my head, and you’ve probably heard it before.
All this stuff is a bit like the health benefits of exercise. Everyone knows that exercise will improve pretty much everything about them. They’ll sleep better, be more productive, more alert, think clearer, their mood will be improved, they’ll be stronger, they’ll live longer, etc. … But yet people often still neglect good exercise and instead ask around for easier health tips. I think the climate change situation is a bit like that. Everyone knows what to do; but many people just kind of stall and have little excuses or justifications about why they won’t do those things. So not much happens.
My biggest suggestion is this: don’t try to be a hero. But just make sure you aren’t the problem. Be better than the people around you. That’s enough.
Already do many of those. World is still heating up. Somehow I don’t think I can cool it with my recycling bin, the petitions that I signed and the votes that I cast. That’s the problem.
It’s not all the earth, nor all the time, even in future projections. The jet-set, who also control news media, fly for holidays and live in air-con, both of which make the problem worse. Dubai even has ski-slopes.
‘News’ over-emphasises ‘breaking’ surprise events, drowns gradually evolving statistics - boiling frogs. Maybe learn to comment on ‘news’ events with equivalent numbers due to climate change impacts?
Exaggeration and blaming other groups just lead to fatalistic doom. Although temperatures rose in the last decade, the projections for end of century fell due to policies, although not enough it’s important to emphasise that we still have choices.
Cooling is less bad for the environment than heating. The reason being, cooling moves heat from one place to another - it does increase heat overall, but only from its inefficiencies, it’s not the goal. Heating, in most cases, is just creating heat. Unless you have a heat pump, you’re burning some fuel to create heat, which adds a great deal of heat to the environment.
Well, air-con cooling and heat pump are basically the same, the plan (not yet reality) is that we’ll all transition to renewable-powered heat pumps. In either case, insulation matters - I was surprised when staying in Brazil (decade ago), how rare was double glazing (despite noisy streets). Anyway I still think ski-slopes in the hot desert, around mega-cities grown on oil and aviation-hubs, is crazy.
it is important to note that climate models consistently underpredict the probability of extreme events (7), so the expected impact of climate change on future heatwaves may be biased too low.
This is the scariest part. It seems like all the models have been wrong so far. We really need to take back control of our planet out of the hands of the politicians, oligarchs, and CEOs. It’s the only way we’ll actually be able to make a difference. It’s time to clean house and that needs to start from the top
Because the overrich and the elected politicians they fund are clueless enough to think they’ll survive this and tackling the change would impact the economy that keeps them overrich. Since that group pretty much control the media, this doesn’t make the news.
Even better: they’re getting more and more agressive with climate activists.
Its not even just the rich honestly. Some people have built a personality out of trying-too-hard to be macho.
And because they know so many woman are even more badass than them these days (I literally have a friend with parkinsons who does Crossfit contests), they feel they need to act increasingly toxic to stand out.
And it’s almost always the same guys who build their lives around trying to impress others, instead of doing what should be done. They also are the ones who can never accept responsibility
Too many of our modern conveniences rely on fossil fuels or fossil fuel derivatives for us to even make a dent against climate change without reverting back to a pre industrial revolution era. You should read Fossil Capital by Andreas Malm on how the fossil fuel industry is intrinsically linked to the history of capitalism.
The prevalence of petroleum derived fertilizers and pesticides that are essential to grow the large amount of the worldwide animal and plant food supplies and also products are one of the reasons I don’t think we can feasibly solve this problem without causing mass famine and war (itself a massive contributor to the climate crisis).
One has only to look at how reliant we are on fossil fuels in fertilizers alone to see that the goal of cutting carbon emissions in any meaningful way is highly likely to be insurmountable without also incurring mass death due to famine.
Many people who are conscientious about their own personal practices and how they relate to the environment still don’t understand the scope of the problem imho. The smart phone or computer you and I are utilizing to communicate right now, the server it is being run on, think carefully about it.
Sure, all could be powered by solar, wind, or some other renewable energy source, but what about the CO² emitted in the manufacturing process? The cities where the factories are located which produce these computer parts and other engineering marvels are some of the most polluted places on Earth, and the process by which they are created requires fossil fuel to be possible, and indeed, the production of these devices accounts for emitting more CO² than the energy it will use during its lifetime.
What alternative packaging solutions do you have for the massive and powerful beverage industry where the convenience of disposability is a deal breaking feature that the lobbyists representing said industry will fight to have it never addressed meaningfully by governmental bodies?
How do you convince people not only to insist on veganism, but also on organics AND most important to every aspect of our modern capitalist lifestyles, turn a profit from it?
My simple answer is you can’t. Environmentalism isn’t compatible with modern day capitalism, and I’d argue isn’t compatible with modern life. These technologies have simultaneously trapped and freed people in different ways, but tech has made it so our lives are no longer solely determined by a might makes right life, and rather has more to do with utilizing said technologies to concentrate power in the hands of those that solely wish to keep the status quo going for just the next 3 months (quarterly income reports to stock holders).
By eliminating the technological boons that fossil fuels have made possible, it is likely that the expansion of human rights, that only came into conversation after new technologies made it possible to not solely rely on the strongest and most powerful among us, will recede.
Either we solve climate change, and after suffering mass deaths from famine due to the lack of fossil fuel dependant crops, and then go back to a preindustrial era lifestyle, with all the societal implications that entails (the subjugation of women, minorities, and the disenfranchised, as well as the return of blatant human slavery).
Or we don’t, and honestly probably end up in a more nightmarish situation. The mass deaths in this alternative scenario won’t be from famine, but from war, and those wars (powered by fossil fuel) will cause the effects of climate change to last longer and possibly that will send us into runaway climate change, in which case we won’t survive at all.
I know which nightmare I’d prefer, and which nightmare is likely to happen, but either way, we’re not in for a good time.
Get ready for the greatest tragedy mankind has ever bore witness to. Drink plenty of water, cuz at best you’ll be dehydrated from all the tears.
So why isn’t the media covering this all day every day? Cuz they secretly know it’s probably not solvable, that pointing this out would likely tank their ratings, and ultimately we’re all just partying at the end of the world. Not to mention making money is easier than cleaning up this inherited mess.
This is why I think people who try to downplay carbon reuptake are insane. Yes of course we should move as much as we can to decarbonize. But we also have to be honest with ourselves. For the reasons you’ve listed and more, there’s going to be a lot of carbon being released into our atmosphere for a long time. That is in addition to the carbon we’ve already released and the cascading effects it will have to release more. There’s no way out and we have to stop being purists about this and figure out a way to quickly and reliably recapture carbon before it’s too late for us.
this honestly feels like oil industry astroturfing, what does this comment accomplish other than make people complacent and give up? How does this in any way further the fight against fossil fuels?
Totally up voting this. Personally I watch my plastic consumption, l was vegan for 4 years and refused to travel by anything other than bicycle in one of the most bicycle unfriendly cities in the world for 8 years before I gave up the ghost and fell into despair when it came fo the climate.
My take on it is doing something about the environment these days is more like having props for the afterlife, where you can say, “Hey, I tried.” But make no mistake about it, this is the end, but choosing to do something about the environment is choosing to go out fighting, and I’m all for that.
At the same time, I’m not gonna blame people for giving up either. It’s hard not to when you know it’s now and inevitable. And I refuse to throw shade at people who have fallen into despair and don’t provide helpful rhetoric. Sometimes people just need to express their despair publicly. It doesn’t help the cause, and therefore it doesn’t help SOME people who want to keep up the good fight. But I’m done looking for solutions, I just want to grieve.
To be clear though, I don’t shill for big oil. They couldn’t pay me enough to endorse a mass murder to the point of extinction.
Be careful you don’t end up doing it by accident. When climate change denial stopped being effective, they switched to “Oops, looks like it was real all along but we’ve fucked it now anyway so go buy a truck”.
I am definitely not outright encouraging people to go out and hedonistically purchase products. I do however, think that has been people’s logical reactions to the grim realities and the existential crises that the presentation of seemingly insurmountable hurdles of the climate crisis.
There are some hopeful glimmers, I’ll admit. But an expression of despair isn’t always needed to have one of two responses. Most of the time I hear either “We cant do anything to solve it, so let’s not talk about it.” Or “That’s not helpful rhetoric, so let’s not talk about it and only talk about poasible solutions.”
Personally I find both of these responses to be a form of depression stigma. I get that if the worst effects of climate change are capable of being addressed if we take action now, then there isn’t time to ”wallow in depression," but if you’re like me and truly believe that the hand has already been dealt and the game is over, then the point is moot, and climate despair is a logical and possibly even healthy response.
Again, not advocating making the problem worse, just lamenting humanity having apparently lost a battle against it’s own myopic view of their place in the universe.
One has only to look at how reliant we are on fossil fuels in fertilizers alone
Recently read The Wizard and the Prophet about Vogt and Borlaug, and coupled with what I’ve seen over the last decade, all I can surmise is that the green revolution simply sped up our own destruction by giving us more and more rope (ability to feed larger and larger populations) to hang ourselves with, as a species.
How about this crazy idea: We keep essential emissions like fertilizers and still reduce overall emissions by 95% by mildly inconveniencing most people.
Nah thats crazy, if we cant get to zero, why even bother? Doesnt matter if earth heats up by 1° or 5°, right?
I appreciate your passion and the energy you put into this. We will soon feel the great equalizer that nature has for us and it was honestly inevitable. Once the human population goes down to a reasonable number the planet will have a chance to heal and it can start all over again. It will be the greatest tragedy of our time. Currently out consumption and the population are unsustainable. Even if we were to fully correct or pollution today we wouldn’t see the effect for a hundred years or more.
Not if the latter nightmare scenario occurs. Runaway climate change will ensure the extinction of humanity outright.
Runaway global climate change is not reversible by any amount of human action. Once a certain rise in global temperatures occurs, pockets of previously trapped methane gases in the ocean will be released into the atmosphere, heating the climate even more. The oceans themselves will then proceed to acidify, killing the necessary diatomes that produce the majority of O² on Earth that is necessary for the survival of most life on Earth.
100% chance of human extinction event. You better hope evolution repeats itself for humanity to get another chance at this.
Fossil fuels aren’t necessary, they’re just how people did things the first time. This means we can get off them as part of a managed transition and keep on feeding everybody.
Great article with a nuanced and well researched take. I abandoned my hope in a grave a long time ago, but perhaps when I see these changes actually happening within my lifetime it’ll rise again like Jesus or Frankenstein.
Because the solution is not something we can throw money at and expect a fast cure. Even cancer has the hope of a treatment that works in months to years. Climate change requires changing nearly everything about how we generate energy and requires us to find novel ways to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. This latter bit can have money thrown at it, but without the former it's pointless. It'd be a cancer treatment while the patient huffs burning asbestos.
The difficulty in treating coupled with the fact that climate change is a slow process that wreaks havoc over years to decades means the short-term-focused economies and markets largely try to adapt to long-term changes instead of solving the issues. When you're only concerned with a few fiscal quarters at a time, why would you think on the scale of decades?
We’re also seeing a big shift to heat pumps for space heating, electrification of transport, and even the beginnings of steel reduced by using hydrogen made with electrolysis instead of using coal. So a lot of things are happening, but not yet on the scale and pace we need.
Not only CO2 but also Methan. It is 84 times more harmful in the first 20 years. But it is degrading on its own with a half-live of 7-12 years in the atmosphere. Methan makes up 20 to 30% of the human made GHG. Change to a plant based diet can reduce the emissions by 40%.
It is one of the few things we can change on our own very fast and does not need additional technological solutions to have a big impact.
Should have started it on the scale of decades 40 years ago when scientists were saying we had 40 years to fix it. Too late now, we’re in the beginning of the apocalypse.
There was this moment after 9/11 when Tom Daschle proposed a ‘Manhattan Project for Green Energy’ to get us off foreign energy and help avoid climate change. Imagine if Al Gore had been president at the time, what might have happened. This was 20 years ago! But instead we (extremely questionably) got W. Bush and endless wars and ‘drill baby drill’. Such a knife’s edge for history and we came off the wrong side of it…
We’re at a point where it’s too late to avoid all impact, but we’ve got a very real choice about exactly how much impact we do see. There’s a big difference between 1.5°C and 2°C and more.
As @vivadanang pointed out, it’s extremely likely we’re going to be at 1.5°C in just a few years. Even if we went carbon negative literally right at this instant, we’d likely still fly past 2.5°C in the relatively near future (well, depending on which research you believe re. how fast carbon neutralaity / negativity would affect temperature change.)
This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t do anything, but I think we really need to start putting more resources and thought into survival instead of just blindly hoping that mitigation will save us (and it’s not exactly looking great on the mitigation front).
I’ll be surprised if mass-scale industrial society is still around in 100 years and we’re more or less fucked, but we’ll be even more fucked if we don’t start thinking more about how we’re going to deal with the inevitable.
(I would not put resources into defense and military, but who am I to tell)
How’s that related to me saying we should plan for how to survive the changes that inevitably worsening change will cause?
Setting goals low is “convenient” however not good.
And how on earth is saying “we should be putting more thought into how we plan to survive?” setting goals low? If anything, simply blindly believing that mitigation will save us all seems to be setting goals low. The idea that it’d be detrimental to our efforts if we put resources into anything except mitigation and would just be “splitting into two paths” is, frankly, absurd.
Fuck, even NASA says that we need to both look at mitigation and adaptation; they’re just using a different term but mean exactly the same thing.
I wasn’t pulling this survival stuff out of my ass you know: multiple organizations, climate researchers etc. have been saying this, which is where I got the idea from in the first place.
Easy bro, this was a general statement about the ridiculous world we live in and in no way targeted towards you or your statements.
Nasa is talking about adaption. No mention of the word survival. Survival for me is the ongoing existence of humanity. Building seed storages, build underground sanctuaries.
Survival is like worst case scenario, when we play running from sunbeams riddick style.
Maybe it was just a misinterpretation of the terms by us.
I am not denying that elevated temps are a inevatible thing. However I am saying that we would save as a ton of adaption if we mitigate, therefore I put mitigation on the top. And if we mitigate successfully, then we can talk about adaption.
But starting with adaption measures without enforcing mitigation measures is an uphill battle which we will loose for sure. Because adaption has no end. Well maybe becoming intergalactic and leaving earth behind for a new planet.
From you wiki link I would not say that having public transport is adaption.
And again it is in my head nowhere near the term survival. But as I said probably a misunderstanding from my side as I am not native in english.
If everyone accepts that the world is ending, economies everywhere will collapse. So they keep us as distracted as possible to ensure their private jets can continue to fly.
The thing is…it doesn’t have to end. Leave the remaining fossil fuels in the ground, end deforestation, stop raising huge herds of ruminants and end use of a few really nasty trace gases, and temperatures will stabilize.
Do it before things get really bad, and we end up with a decent life for a lot of people.
For the sake of discussion let’s assume that’s all true. Do you have any reason to believe that even one part of the solution you outlined will be implemented in anything resembling a timely fashion?
The trace gases for sure; the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol has been ratified by the key countries which manufactured them, and their use in new equipment ended about a year ago.
Fossil fuel use phase-out is getting started. It very roughly looks like this:
Generate electricity without using fossil fuels
Electrify everything we can
Stop doing the things we can’t
It’s unclear if fossil fuel phase-out will happen at a pace fast enough to limit the warming to 2°C above what it was in the late 1800s.
Deforestation is proceeding at a slower pace in some parts of the world due to local political change. Not everywhere though, and there’s a lot of work still.
Cutting the ruminant herd…not even started yet.
What I do know is that every person out there has the power to put their thumb on the scale of politics and policy and industry just a tiny bit to make it happen. And it’s worth trying.
It’s definitely worth trying. The issue I see is simply that not enough people believe that to be true. I don’t think that’s going to change either. The people who aren’t concerned now aren’t going to change their tune until the 11th hour and even then the attitude will shift from “it’s not happening” to “it’s too late to fix now”.
Sure they can: by controlling government. You can’t change the mind of some wealthy CEO, but you can make it easy for people to avoid becoming their customers, and then make what they’ve been doing a crime.
The majority of damage hasn’t even been done yet and that damage won’t be done by our future emissions but by our historic emissions.
The global warming you are seeing today was caused by emissions from the 70s, not todays emissions. We still have 50 years of warming to go to catch up to now and by the time we get there we will have doubled our emissions.
We are already fucked we just haven’t caught up yet.
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