Cool. Nothing to see here. Totally fine. It’s not like western Washington is needing AC in the summer every year now for the first time in literally ever.
I’ve left windows open all year and no humidity issues. I almost always have them during the Spring and Summer other years. I’ll take it, I hate humidity.
I’m never having kids. Had things been easier, maybe I would’ve had kids but it’s hard enough to look out for myself as it is and having kids anyway like many people do is the worst move I could possibly make. Not having kids will have consequences against the absolute tyrants in charge of it all some day. Not having kids in protest to the system (or at least until things improve for the common person) is just doing your patriotic duty at this point.
About 15 years ago I was going somewhere with my family. Stepmom and I were talking about Climate Change then, how if things didn’t change that massive starvation was likely, that crazed weather would be irreversible, etc. and she noticed that my 10 year old niece’s eyes were getting huge. She was genuinely disturbed by the conversation and began to say is this really going to happen? Before I could plainly reply my stepmom reassured her that no, things were going to be fine, and we changed the subject.
Niece is in mid twenties now and subject to the reality of the situation as it slowly unfolds, like an asteroid headed toward the earth at 5 mph. The future is dreadful to her.
The consequences of inaction in the late 20th and early 21st centuries will be the end of us. 😀 To hope otherwise or lament over is just wasting time. Enjoy life before it gets worse!
That’s a rather pessimistic view. Yes, it will be hard as fuck. Yes, unfortunately it will be the end of some us. But I think we as a race will prevail and I don’t think simply giving up right now is an option.
I know it’s entirely coincidental, but we dealt with a heat-exhaustion-approaching-heat-stroke emergency this week, and it definitely made me pause. Summer heat is taking on a new meaning.
I’m a landscaper and I joked about dealing with wildfires becoming part of my job duties in ten years last year. This year, I was lucky enough to deal with both the Pine Barrens wildfires and the Canadian Wildfire smoke in NJ
This is going to be painful for us as a species. I don’t think it will render us extinct, but the weather will get significantly worse and we will probably see widespread coastal flooding in this century, which will lead to hundreds of millions of refugees. We still have plenty of time to prepare and to change course, but I fear that we will wait until a global crisis is on our doorstep before we make serious changes.
Any corrections we make won’t take major effect until well after we are fucked. It’s why having kids is kind of insane to me because they are going to have a fucked future.
On the other hand, there is no one else, probably in the whole universe, who can preserve life as we know it. And I am not just talking about humans.
Think about philosophical questions like: “What is the reason life exists?”. Potentially, the answer is there is no reason. But what if there is something else out there which could give life a reason to exist?
Perhaps somewhere down a million years some lifeform could make the universe continue to exist. When we die now this is quite literally the end. No one else will preserve life beyond the existence of the earth or our solar system when someday the sun burns out. I highly doubt octopuses or cockroaches will evolve to build space ships and protect life any time soon. It’s just us.
In agreement with your broader point but a different approach: to say that we should die out as a species due to climate change is over-simplifying, imo. Yes, there are hardships ahead and we truly need to look at ourselves as a species and ask what needs to change for the sake of ethics and others. However, we have been in dire situations before, albeit with less foreknowledge. Would someone living in, say, 1840 have wished that humanity had died out in the bronze age collapse, when the near-entirety of known civilization collapsed due to climate change?
When considering the entire species we can’t take such a short term view. Yes, hard times are ahead. Yes, we will get through it. I say if one is inclined not to have kids, he should not have kids. But if one is inclined to do so, he should do so
I’d strongly recommend the book “The Beginning of Infinity” by David Deutsch for a wider perspective on what you’ve stated. Humanity has always had problems and been in some ways on the verge of extinction perpetually, but we as a species find ways to solve these problems.
It’s weird how many users resort to instant doom and gloom (like not having kids?) when its another problem that will take hard work to solve. Just a quote from his book -
“It is inevitable that we face problems, but no particular problem is inevitable. We survive, and thrive, by solving each problem as it comes up. And, since the human ability to transform nature is limited only by the laws of physics, none of the endless stream of problems will ever constitute an impassable barrier. So a complementary and equally important truth about people and the physical world is that problems are soluble. By ‘soluble’ I mean that the right knowledge would solve them.”
The problem as I see it, is we’d need to revert to what’s little better than subsistence farming (in a village model) in order to weather the storm that’s coming. That’s fundamentally at odds with people’s day to day interest and our greed…
Carbon sequestering helps, but we still need to drastically downsize our daily conveniences (oh, and fuck cars!), which our brain is basically wired against doing (in terms of a short term pain with an eye on the long term benefit).
I agree we likely need to downsize a lot of our daily conveniences (yeah fuck cars!) But I’d urge against trying to envision the solution before working on solving the problem. Saying we need to resort to subsistence farming in communities - why? We create food on a massive scale currently, and tons of it go to waste. Additionally so much of agriculture is lost to inefficiency through the meat industry.
Surely it would make more sense to focus on those two levers first before resorting to what sounds like feudal society.
Not looking to debate details, just urging a rational and realistic approach through steps that are achievable.
Not at all. We’ve averted crisis’before. We’ve even created a middle class with heavy taxes on the wealthy for a better society. The greedy have been working the powerful and are sabotaging everything for short term gain.
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