These are terrifying graphs and I don’t like looking at them. Academically, I’m fully aware of the horror and threat that climate change poses, but these graphs and the massive fires really make it feel more real.
that’s how it goes. we’re in this transformation but most people don’t notice it because they experience the world and things seem to be ok (for now, or they are distracted by some other insignificant thing), and this is not even mentioning the economic and political obstacles that block any meaningful change.
I think the likely scenario is people won’t seriously start to be concerned (and by serious i mean taking proactive steps across their individual and social lives) until this situation further develops and it will be a bit too late. I hope i’m wrong.
I have just read this entire thread and I have two observations.
1 the “tumble” discussion is unbelievably ironic as the whole public climate discussion has for years been a case of mass distraction IMO.
2 The other central discussion is dominated by someone , clearly a skeptic, and repeatably described as a troll, and although the basic assumptions taken are just factually wrong the context of the consequences discussed are more insightful that the rebuttals.
So currently the power and money is dominated by industries that do not want to change and they frustrate attempts to create meaningful global change. What change has occurred has been when money and power wish that change. Political courage will be needed to make things happen with any sort of urgency IMO
I’m absolutely not denying those changes, quite the contrary. It’s just another anomaly that our winters became a lot warmer and summers colder (not always though). It looks like we’re losing seasons completely. I remember winters here where we had snow for 2 or even 3 months, while now I’m not sure if we had at least 2 weeks of snow last “winter”.
Sorry, just poking fun! Where I live we have started to get a “wildfire season” that threatens to destroy entire towns. Every year… We didn’t have that when I was young!
This is the second time in a week someone has used “tumble” to mean “occur rapidly” instead of “fall”. Is this a new colloquialism or had"tumble" always had a second definition as “occur rapidly”?
“Tumble” does not mean “occur rapidly” here. It means “broken”. When a world record is broken, it falls or tumbles. These are climate world records, like “hottest day ever”.
If a condition is worsening (a “fall”) “tumble” applies just fine. Indeed, “tumble” is just a way to say “falling rapidly” in this context.
The reason “tumble” (and its notion of “fall”) is applicable is because the situation is worsening. If it was rapidly improving, nobody would say “tumble”; it’s not simply that it is occurring rapidly.
In this case, one could assume tumbling is related to the temperature and not the situation, leading to an observation that the situation is improving. It is a poor choice of words for this headline.
Taking a tumble referring to something that is worsening is another common definition that I’ve read countless times in reference to something problematically decreasing, I’ve never heard or read “tumble” used until very recently to describe a situation in which something is rising. Have you?
“falling rapidly” would make perfect sense in many other situations. “Food storage tumbles, democracy tumbles, winter temperatures tumble”, etc. But nothing is falling, all of the temperature records are rising.
Summer temperatures are so high they tumble?
This is a genuine grammatical question. I’m not trying to detract from your answer or the article itself.
I’m just very confused by this usage of the word “tumble” that I’ve seen at least twice now to refer to rising temperatures.
But nothing is falling, all of the temperature records are rising.
I see what you’re saying. I had taken the use to mean the situation is tumbling, not the temperatures. But upon a closer reading (of the title specifically) it seems a more reasonable interpretation of the word tumble is:
Climate records tumble,
The object of the verb ‘tumble’ is “climate records”. That is, the climate records are tumbling. A tumbling record is one which has fallen over and been surpassed. So what they’re saying by using the word “tumble” is: previous climate records have fallen over and been surpassed.
I do agree it’s a weird word choice, but I don’t think it’s wrong or even playing on a potential uncommon secondary definition. It’s not saying temperatures have tumbled, but rather records have tumbled.
Oh. That must be where it’s from, the records specifically tumbling. As you say, weird, but not really wrong
Thank you. I believe the other headline was also talking about the heat. Maybe they were also talking about records.
It’s been tickling my brain for several days now and when I saw the used this way again I was like “Well that’s not going away until I get an answer” haha.
The 1% truly think they are going to sit it out underground in their billion dollar bolt-holes/bunkers. It’s like thinking you’ll survive the tsunami by standing on a chair.
i get the sense that they cannot control their thirst for power. it’s like trying to wrestle away a bottle of booze from a drunk. they’ll make whatever excuses are necessary to convince themselves that this is the way it has to be and they need more.
They will probably mostly survive. But then they’ll realise that all productive and smart people are dead and their money is worthless in the new world.
all their wealth is basically dependent and built on the labour of all society, they’re not escaping this. They’ll have more privilege to suffer less relatively to the majority of the people on this planet, but they’re not escaping this
There are actually quite a few places where they buy bunkers - but with luxury and stuff. it’s also marketed as a way of safe spot to retreat when the surface goes bad.
obviously, it’s rather a big ,“we found a way to make money out of rich peoples fears and doubts” rather than actual security measures. if things really go bad, how are they going to know, that their security guards aren’t going to ditch them? and if they isolate, then they cannot sustain their lifestyle in a bunker with bunker food.
These measurements were only genuinely started within the last hundred years, and people have been prophesying the end of the world the entire way. Greta posted a now-deleted tweet that said we’d all be toast in three years…back in 2018, for example. Climate changes, sure. But who is to say this isn’t natural and we may go back down in the future? These CO2 greenhouse gases that are said to be smothering the planet are estimated to be deadly at around 15% iirc. The atmosphere contains a fraction of a fraction of a percent of these. So while I definitely advocate stewardship of our environment, I sincerely doubt climate change will be what does us in and the people hyping it up are often doing so with intent separate from making the environment better. The climate change religion is easy to lean on because it’s been so widely propagated.
While there has been significant exaggeration and sensationalization of the timeline of climate change and its downstream effects, to wholly dismiss it due to that is assinine. You’d have to be a fool to have a shred of a belief that the current trends we are seeing are not driven by mankind.
Probably people will have to go more north and general population of the world word drop and with it the pollution then planet recover and after couple of generations the survivors will return
Civilization couldn’t exist as it does today, but humans are a resilient species. We will find a way to continue living, pretty much as long as life remains on this planet. Be that underground, at the poles, in bunkers, in a dystopian desert wasteland, humanity will persist.
I think the issue here is that you believe there will be any life living. Besides bacteria and what not, nothing will live if we continue down this path.
I don’t have a cristal ball to refute your answer but I have my knowledge about history and biology to disagree: life in earth has to main goals: survive and reproduce. There’re many species nowadays adapted to what most people consider extreme heat: from elephants to lions, hienas, giraffes, humans, many species of trees and bushes, etc. They will just survive by simply moving their migration routes somewhere else (plants and herbivores would start the shift, predators would follow them).
Humans are extremely adaptable, as you may see if you look at how there’s human life everywhere on the planet. We would need to adapt, for sure, but we as species will survive. That doesn’t mean it will be simple, but we will. Many years ago an expert said on a documentary (can’t remember, sorry) that the next world war would be centered about water control. I agree.
No; at least, that’s unlikely. But parts of the world that are currently habitable will be made inhabitable, and biodiversity will continue to fall. We’ll likely see more extreme weather events, increased migration from areas that are too hot or underwater, and issues with global food supply. Coral reefs may completely disappear.
However, progress is being made, and while it’s not as quick as we’d like, carbon emissions for modern economies like the US and EU are on a downward curve. In 2021 EU’s carbon emissions were back to pre-1967 levels, while the US’s carbon emissions were back to pre-1979 levels (Source). So there’s cause for hope; the worst thing we can do is give up. Everything we do now lessens the scale of the problem in future.
Well that “unlikely” there merits some debate I would say. Yes there is reason for cautious optimism, but there is also the very real possibility of climate change becoming an extinction level event for humanity, specifically by a cascade of tipping points through several globally relevant climate systems being triggered. The damages that will be caused just by optimistic projections of warming are not well understood either:
Even without considering worst-case climate responses, the current trajectory puts the world on track for a temperature rise between 2.1 °C and 3.9 °C by 2100 (11). If all 2030 nationally determined contributions are fully implemented, warming of 2.4 °C (1.9 °C to 3.0 °C) is expected by 2100. Meeting all long-term pledges and targets could reduce this to 2.1 °C (1.7 °C to 2.6 °C) (12). Even these optimistic assumptions lead to dangerous Earth system trajectories. Temperatures of more than 2 °C above preindustrial values have not been sustained on Earth’s surface since before the Pleistocene Epoch (or more than 2.6 million years ago) (13).
Even if anthropogenic GHG emissions start to decline soon, this does not rule out high future GHG concentrations or extreme climate change, particularly beyond 2100. There are feedbacks in the carbon cycle and potential tipping points that could generate high GHG concentrations (14) that are often missing from models. […]
There are even more uncertain feedbacks, which, in a very worst case, might amplify to an irreversible transition into a “Hothouse Earth” state (21) (although there may be negative feedbacks that help buffer the Earth system). In particular, poorly understood cloud feedbacks might trigger sudden and irreversible global warming (22). Such effects remain underexplored and largely speculative “unknown unknowns” that are still being discovered.
So is the extinction of humanity through climate change certain? No. But is it possible? Yes, and the likelihood is very poorly understood.
Another aspect that is often overlooked in this debate is that the beginning of the holocene mass extinction is very much pre-historic, insofar as the spread of homo sapiens over the globe closely matches to the extinction of mega-fauna wherever we appeared, unsettling ecosystems millions of years old, and reducing biodiversity further and further. Other ecosystems will only be able to compensate for so long before they go extinct, and so on, and the explosion of complexity that usually follows after a mass extinction happens on timescales longer than humanities existence. If or when this cascades to the top of the food chain is anybodies guess.
If a system is poorly understood, then by definition it cannot be factored into predictions. When we say something is “unlikely” we mean “it is unlikely based on what we understand”. I don’t think it’s very useful to ask, “Well, is it unlikely based on what we don’t understand?”, because that’s not a question that can be answered.
The possibility of a tipping point cascade is generally without dispute as far as I know. It is likely based on what we do understand, however predicting how likely exactly, the severity of consequences, and the interaction with positive and negative feedback loops from other climate systems is not well understood.
The consensus seems to be that it’s virtually certain with a warming of 4-5 °C compared to pre-industrial levels.
Ignoring an existential risk like that because one lacks understanding doesn’t seem wise.
Is a catastrophic, world-ending feedback loop likely based on what we understand? The IPCC reports paint a grim future, but I don’t believe any has suggested that it’s likely the entire Earth will be rendered completely uninhabitable to human life.
My understanding is that over time people will begin to move away from hotter regions. The most at risk will be children, small animals, the elderly and the poor.
Impoverished nations will be hit the hardest and we’ll see the most change happen to those places first. Scientists have said that as climate change gets worse and as temperatures get warmer, extreme weather events also become more common and worse as well.
As for how that will change for north America or Europe I have no real clue.
I live in a fairly northern location. We get down to -40°c sometimes in the winter. But even the winters are warming up and becoming more mild and the summers are getting hotter and less bearable. I would imagine we might face energy issues in the future if our countries don’t adapt. There’s going to be more demand as houses here will need AC going forward to stay cool. That or they need to start building new homes with better insulating materials that prevent heat transfer.
Scientists like Michael Mann are trying very hard to not create so much panic that people give up and stop trying to end fossil fuel use. But this article is definitely panic inducing lol.
Remember that since this is a planet-wide average, it includes places like the North Pole and Antarctica. Or just look at the graphs — it’s a pretty visual demonstration of how extremely abnormal recent temperature changes are.
yes the graphics are very shocking, to be sure - why is it only limited to 44 years though? do records not extend back further than that? I seem to remember reading somewhere that there’s climate records from as early as the 1880s but maybe that was in England only.
though, even 44 years, while easily half of a human’s lifetime, it’s just a tiny blip on a geologic time scale.
Air temperature graph starts from 1940, that’s 83 years. Enough to gauge trends, since industrialization and copious CO2 emissions in particular are a pretty new thing.
But here’s some data starting from the year 0, in case you’re interested.
ah, some actual data, thanks! still, it looks like an average variance of 1 degree celsius over 2000+ years.
let’s be honest though - nothing is going to change in the next ~50 years or so, not enough to stop the slight raise in temperature. no one is willing to go back to living like medieval peasants prior to the industrial revolution. no one politician is going to enact any laws that will return society to that state. no coalition or governmental body is going to do it either. not in America, not in China, not in India, not in Europe.
we would need most of northern africa and all of central australia covered by solar panels, wind turbines everywhere, and probably actual fusion reactors generating power in order to markably decrease global temperatures.
Let’s be honest though, actually solving this problem is pretty much unachievable given the lack of motivation and interest on the part of the populace, so why bother taking any action to mitigate the problem at all?
I’m really only interested in punchy 3 word concepts like “stop abortion now” or “fix gay people”.
The whole idea of investing some effort now so that the world is better off to some unknown extent later is pretty much Socialism. We won the cold war.
true enough - soundbites have always been a problem in journalism, and social media has hopped onto that bandwagon recently as well. the short attention span of any average person is at fault as well.
overall, I’d say there’s a fair amount of interest in “solving global warming” or whatever short descriptor you want to use, but I agree that there’s very little motivation. actual movement towards a solution would require generations of political capital, quite a bit of social capital, actual money - probably trillions of $$$ each year - and the realization that there is no way to “cheat” your way to cleaning up the mess. by that, I mean we will need to keep using our coal/gas power plants for some decades yet, and we’ll also need to ramp up the pollution at least one whole order of magnitude in order to create enough energy storage to make it through the night or when the wind isnt blowing or the sun isnt shining (or during the winter, when solar is effectively useless in the northern equator, where most people live). even with all of that in mind, you’d still have to force people to use less, drive less, eat less, have fewer children; basically eliminate international shipping & bring manufacturing back home (really unlikely), eliminate air travel, and basically eliminate domestic shipping (unless we have reliable, cheap electricity). a return to life prior to WW2. possible? yes. achievable in any reasonable timeframe? no.
I also agree that the truth would need to be massaged in order for the masses to accept it - some parts of the world are rabidly anti-socialist, whereas other parts are happy to be obedient little robots for the good of the State. problem is, those socialist-leaning countries are the ones who have the most to lose when international trade is eliminated.
The wealthiest 10% owns 90% of all stocks. And realistically, how many people can actually track the supply chain of every product they buy to try to only buy from ethical companies? How many truly plastic free options even are there for basic things like bread, toothbrushes/toothpaste, or soap?
Let me put it this way. The difference in average global temperature between the last ice age 100,000 years ago and pre-industrial earth around 100 years ago is just ~3.5C. The expected temperature rise due to recent climate change is about +3C.
A lot is going to happen, and much sooner than in 50 years.
With current trends, it looks like we’re heading towards severe climate destabilization, much more common extreme weather events, some parts of the world becoming uninhabitable for humans, lots of mass extinction events for many species, including those that humanity currently relies upon, and probable global famine.
The fact that it’s not a complete extinction doesn’t make it fine. Sure, Earth as a planet will be fine. But the civilisation has some really hard challenges coming up, and it’s currently not prepared for them.
it’s true that some changes are coming down the pipeline, I just dont see those changes having any noticeable effect in the next ~50 years.
if it took 250 years for the climate to warm up (since the dawn of the industrial revolution), then it’s going to take just as long to cool down - and that’s presuming that we have the ability to make changes in our power generation methods to eliminate our dependence on coal/oil. a bit over 60% of all electricity generation, globally, comes from Coal, Gas, and Oil (in that order). we really just need reliable fusion & enough fuel for a few decades - by then the technology will have matured enough where we can get H3 from space. tangential to that would be to base solar power generation in a L4 or L5 orbit, then beam the power back to the surface.
in regards to extinction/famine - the absolute maximum carrying capacity of Earth, in regards to our species, is somewhere between 9 and 10 billion. that’s a hard limit, unless we’re willing to live hand to mouth like some people do in the 3rd world (very few folks are going to sign up for that). we’re at 8 billion or so now. people arent going to stop having kids unless they’re forced to, or there’s not enough food to feed them (though as recent decades in Africa have shown, usually not even then). at some point, famine on a massive scale is a nigh certain thing. perhaps we need to depopulate by 30% or so? I’m not a policy maker and neither is anyone on Lemmy, so it probably doesnt matter that much what we think.
It didn’t really take 250 years though, early emissions were almost negligible. Most of it started like 60 years ago. You’re right that we’re not stopping it anytime soon, but the effective timelines are shorter than centuries.
Also, what’s your reasoning/source on a 10 bn “absolute” cap? It might be a cap while using modern farming, technologies and logistics, but it’s not absolute by any means. You mention beaming energy from space, then why not mention Eucomenopolis concepts that allow for trillions of people to inhabit Earth? :) Or simply once you have fusion, you can have vertical farms and Arcologies that can sustain a much larger population.
The issue isn’t that it’s impossible, rather that we’re not gonna develop any of this tech before humanity faces existential problems in many parts of the world.
Also, it’s weird that you got from “this temperature variance is minimal” and “this average is on the low side of comfortable” to “let’s get rid of 30% of population then”. o_O
oh there are many different solutions, i just mentioned a few of the more realistic ones. materials science will need to improve by several magnitudes before true arcologies are possible. but yes, it’s unlikely that we’ll develop the tech we need in the timeframe.
carrying capacity? i looked into it several years ago after reading about it somewhere. probably sci-fi, I do enjoy those. on the low end, it’s around 2 billion. an 80% population drop may be required. there will be resource wars before that happens though & quite likely a few exchanges of strategic nuclear weapons. presumably the famines would drastically increase after that? I supose we’ll see.
ok, but only a very small percentage of the global population gets to visit the entire earth on a yearly basis - I mostly only care about where I live.
“There’s way too many people in well-off areas that will survive the great famines and heatwaves killing most people by the equator. So it’s not really all that bad.”
What a stupid, stupid opinion. It’s this exact kind of idiotic nonsense take that’s dominated and helped out the culpable industries throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Get fuckin bent
the reality is that the poor and downtrodden masses will suffer - as is the case when you look back through history. it has always been this way. why should that change because you’re alive? what do you contribute to the equation to alter it in any meaningful way?
some small minority percentage of humanity will survive (the wealthy 1st world nation’s citizens) - probably in bunkers or perhaps in orbit - and after things “cool off” they will repopulate the world. you can see the faint beginnings of this starting now, if you look close enough.
the wealthy don’t know how to live within their means or how to build a supportive community or to adapt to a drastic loss in lifestyle quickly. the poor have been already.
Congrats on the most ignorant comment on this side of the server. Not only did you achieve this once, you continued to show your ignorance in a whole thread of discussion. Incredible.
A global average of 17c doesn’t even mean it’s necessarily 17c anywhere in the world. That’s not how averages work. It could be 0c in half the world, and 34c in half the world, and the global average would be 17c (and yet it would be 17c nowhere).
The point of global averages is to identify trends, which are not isolated to a particular region.
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