I used to work with ocean researchers and they are some of the most depressed, heavy drinkers I’ve ever met. A big reason I moved on from that workplace.
Imagine writing scientific papers on an ocean you already know is dead. Research which is funded by the government, the same people who allow clear cut logging inland which has decimated the salmon population, which is vital to ocean life. So you better not be too loud about that when it’s time to apply for more funding.
Clear cut logging, so our useless commonwealth friends over in the Atlantic have wood chips to burn and toilet paper to waste.
Or, the absolute molestation of our mountains so the rest of the world can buy more phones and EVs, which has destroyed said watersheds.
Can someone tell me whether sea level rises are still a concern and if so, why no one seems concerned?
When I was a kid that was the big scary climate change thing. I know it’s maybe only 50cm but that’s still problematic for lots of real estate… isn’t it?
Like just the other day I visited an expensive apartment that would’ve been maybe 50cm above sea level.
I guess part of my question was whether it’s progressing more quickly than previously anticipated given that climate change is progressing more quickly than previously anticipated.
My local council has a 100 year plan to mitigate the impact.
The problem isn’t just the level the seas rise to because of melted glaciers; it’s the increase in chaos in weather systems - storm surges like the ones blasting mansions off of cliffsides in cali, crazy flooding, more hurricanes of increased intensity, etc
Regular people don’t seem concerned because of reporting bias. People that continue to live on coastlines aren’t going to be fearful of living on coastlines. Insurance companies are pulling out of Florida for this reason however. Sea level rising is still going to happen.
The thing is though… bad things happening to rich people’s money usually means worse things for poor people.
It’s really naive to think that a bunch of expensive property becoming worthless is not a big deal because it only affects poor people.
Suggesting that rich people are the only ones who own low lying property is a flawed premise also. What about low-lying island nations? What about low lying inland areas? There’s plenty of communities in Australia that aren’t necessarily close to the coast but would have an altitude of less than 1 metre.
It’s a concern already for low-lying atoll islands like those in the Maldives and Tuvalu. Half of Tuvalu’s capital city is expected to be flooded by 2050, but they’ve been seeing the effects for years unfortunately.
It really depends where you are though - my town is at around 100 m elevation and about 80 km inland. When I was a kid, my mum used to have nightmares about tidal waves coming over the horizon because she was so scared of sea level rise.
The rising of the sea is astronomically slow, so there’s a lot of denial about it. It’s already a minor (maybe moderate?) problem here on the east coast of the US. Boston, NYC, and Miami are already seeing more flooding during storms than they saw historically.
But if there’s someone who is willing to pay for a waterfront property despite the risk, then there will always be someone willing to sell it to them.
I like how my head switched from how scary an alien invasion would be to thinking that aliens coming here and fixing this mess is our only hope at this point
In the 2000's alien adoption stuff and aliens in general was huge. Every week there was another american redneck that got abducted by aliens. I sometimes couldn't sleep at night thinking about it.
Now i fucking wish aliens would abduct me.
Stop buying imported Chinese crap, for starters. If you don’t, then that’s great, but almost everyone does to some extent. Some is unavoidable, but try to minimize it.
Buy quality items that are built to last. Ask yourself if you really need something or if you just want it. Spread the word to others to do the same. Tell all your friends to stop buying shit from Temu, Wish, dollar stores and other crap-merchants.
On the positive side, China is in fact growing their renewable capacity at a higher rate than anywhere else in the world, and also building nuclear plants. However the amount of power required for manufacturing to feed the world’s endless appetite for disposable crap is vast and mostly supplied by burning coal.
It would be nice if we could. I do manufacture carbide tooling that is much higher quality than the import stuff, and we sell it at a fair price. Only because we have an old, paid for, well kept machine to do it, because otherwise we couldn’t compete.
But you can tell that I’m talking about disposable crap if you actually read my comment. Superballs that don’t bounce, plastic holiday decor that crumbles in UV light, erasers shaped like a kitten that just smear the pencil lead around.
Corporations are hell bent on ushering in an environmental hellscape so they can keep up their profits and they’re doing a pretty good job considering how many politicians they have in their pockets.
We’d literally have to halt all emissions and start massive “rewilding” projects to turn this puppy around. Remember 2020 when human industrial activity paused for a while and nature took some time to take a breath? We will need things like that but all the time. Perhaps have arbour day a monthly thing? Perhaps close all factories over the weekend? Perhaps move to 3 day weekends? Perhaps make an ordinance that 50% of each country needs to be natural untouched protected wilderness? Who knows? We need a lot of solutions NOW.
My therapist says I need a therapist. And if I’m going to waste my time with activism, it’s going to need to involve blood, and not my own. I’m open to suggestions.
It’s much easier to understand that shorter, milder winters means you can make people be even more productive. Now winter can’t slow down that road widening project.
Man, oceanographers have been shouting this for decades. And let’s just throw marine biologists/marine chemists in there as well. Ocean currents are stupidly powerful, to have them stop is scary beyond comparison. The warning temperature lifting the calcium carbonate compensation depth, literally acidifying the ocean past the point of habitability for everything but jelly fish… Good bye oxygen. It was fun hanging with y’all, break out the good stuff because you aren’t handing it down to the next generation.
It was fun hanging with y’all, break out the good stuff because you aren’t handing it down to the next generation.
Parents often say that they love their children and would do anything for them, but they didn’t love them enough to give their children a habitable future.
If there was something they could do as an individual which would help only their individual child have a habitable future, they would absolutely do it.
Thing is, everything they can do either only works if we all do it or only helps every child equally (a tiiiny bit) while costing the parent individually.
It's a coordination problem. Humans lack the structures to coordinate as a species (the largest unit of coordination we have is a nation and even that doesn't work well).
I would have always considered myself and my husband leaning to left politics and being eco conscious. But man, having a kid kind of radicalized us.
Even knowing full well that cooperations are the major problem we still do the small and individual things. We know it is mostly for our conscience, so that we can say, we did what we could. We definitely don’t do everything - for example, I still eat meat about once a month and I give our toddler meat a couple of times a week. Today I bought strawberries from Greece because that was all she wanted to eat. At the same time, we are stepping further and further out of our comfort zone. We now started having a compostable trash bin. I have a huge phobia of larvae etc and vetoed against it for ages, but we’ve arrived at a point at which I will try it out (at least for 9/12 months). We’ve always recycled and tried to mind what we are buying and how much we want to consume, but I would definitely say we unconsciously upped our game because now, there’s more at stake. All these small things, reducing plastic, reducing waste, reducing consumption, buying less, travelling less, double checking the food labels to avoid the big No Gos like Nestle…
We also changed our life goals and ideals. We don’t want a house anymore. We don’t want to ever own a car. We don’t dream of travelling the world or own this or that. We don’t celebrate holidays with meat meals and an abundance of unnecessary presents. Money well spent is money spent on better things. I am happily donating money I would have spent on trips or items or takeout to OVD Info or help for Ukraine instead. It’s a much better gift to ask someone to donate 10€ than to get me a bottle of wine or another scarf.
At the same time, we are reminding ourselves all the time that this is not enough. That big change needs to happen. And I think that’s where the biggest “radicalization” happened. We went from nagging youngsters, dooming nihilists, to people who do more than just care. From doing our little thing at home, but excusing doing big things with “well the system needs to change for this to work”, cursing big corp. We now want to make that chance happen. More than ever and more actively. This means finally becoming more political. I’m now applying for citizenship so that I can actually vote in my country of residence and maybe join a party. Because that and campaigning are the things we can do. Go to meetings, demonstrations, join a movement, join a party, sign petitions, talk, talk, talk. Be angry. Be loud. And may I add, this doesn’t just concern the environment. Social issues are so much more unbearable now.
I wish it didn’t take a kid to make me that much more active. I wish I had done more in the past. I am ashamed, especially considering my nationality, I should have been so much more active. But the second best time is now. Some things take awful sacrifices, but imagining your child’s future, it’s not “just nice” if it sucks less than we fear, but it is an indescribable visceral ever present fire of energy.
Are you a boomer or were you raised by a boomer because I call bullshit. The “me” generation could have done a lot of things and didn’t do any of them.
Most of them don’t actually love their children. Not the way we mean it today. The children were left to figure it all out on their own. Ask any gen X or older millennial.
Children weren’t outside because people were less fearful, they were locked out of the house and forced to fend for themselves.
The only loving families for most were those portrayed in television.
That’s ridiculous. As if anyone could gatekeep the concept of families loving their children, like it’s a new thing recently invented.
You simply were not present to observe all of what you are assuming happened. I was present to observe many “boomer” parents providing a loving upbringing for their kids. They raised my generation, and I knew many of them.
Yeah it isn’t fair that i punch everyone equally because climate change is everybody’s problem.
The least they can do as a parent is tell their children to reduce, reuse and recycle, Using public transportation or cycling to go everywhere, turn off the lights or electronics when they’re not using it. It’s a small thing but if everyone does it slowly earth can be a better place.
If we teach our child to do good for the environment our child can teach their children to do more good and before you know it it becomes a generational effort.
That’s all hopium. We won’t ride the bus and reuse our water bottles out of climate change. The ruling class doesn’t care if we have PFAS in our placenta. They just want a walled garden and better shit than the poors.
I know, it’s the least they can do. It’s like the parents abuse chain if we can educate the next generation to do better while we try the best we can do to fix.
You bought into corporate propaganda that individuals are responsible for climate change and not the top 100 polluting corporations.
Hook line and sinker.
There is absolutely fucking nothing that recycling does to stop this. Most of the developed worlds “recycling” gets shipped to third world nations who dump it in landfill or the ocean.
Just because corporate make a bigger pollution doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do the right thing. If you don’t want to recycle because they just dump it elsewhere it is okay you can reduce your usage or reuse it.
I like seeing the multi color rainbow from all the replies… I’ll pitch in… we should all have UNLIMITED RESPONSIBILITY. OUR ABILITY TO RESPOND SHOULD BE LIMITLESS. As soon as we say something isn’t our responsibility our ability to respond dissappears. So as you say still recycle but every thing you do to help let it galvanize you to purchase less overall. This world is fucked by consumption and chasing desires and if we buy less they lose. That’s just my perspective I know it won’t sit with all. Humans are spiritual beings sent here to spiritualy grow not materlisiticaly buy.
I have been designing recycling systems for most of the past decade, among other projects, and you are at most partially correct.
A. Define recycling because you if you are talking about material recovery, like scrap wood being turned to saw dust or solvent recovery from a cleaning process, we do this all the time. Why the heck wouldn’t you pull a chemical out of your waste stream that you want to use again?
B. Sure a lot of ewaste goes overseas your cans and bottles aren’t. And even then they do process it. I know. I have been to the facilities that do it in South East Asia.
C. Household recycling can be a lot more effective if the government was not working with the worst fucking assholes in the world. I quite literally have two versions of multiple designs. 1 the government gets and the good one for private sector. The government folder is labeled “for idiots”.
Whenever I hear people ranting against recycling I just mentally picturing a heavy smoker drinking pop and whining about the salad they ate six months ago hasn’t kicked in yet.
I’m not ranting against recycling, I am pointing out that the whole “personal responsibility” for the environment, carbon footprint and the push to recycling as a panacea was a propaganda campaign by oil companies.
My mum owns a house and everytime they try to build housing around me she tries her best to prevent it.
Kinda miss having my grandparents generation around because they tried and did make the country a better place for their children. They also knew how hard things were (obviously it was way worse for them than for me).
Man, oceanographers have been shouting this for decades. And let’s just throw marine biologists/marine chemists in there as well. Ocean currents are stupidly powerful, to have them stop is scary beyond comparison. The warning temperature lifting the calcium carbonate compensation depth, literally acidifying the ocean past the point of habitability for everything but jelly fish… Good bye oxygen. It was fun hanging with y’all, break out the good stuff because you aren’t handing it down to the next generation.
It’s just more climate catastrophising. CaCO3 and H2CO3 form a buffer that would minimise the effects of acidification. The idea that all fish would die is dumb. Terrestrial plants produce oxygen by photosynthesis so oxygen won’t disappear from the atmosphere.
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