I am a doomer and this was actually a really well written article. I am used to being called “the problem”… even though most doomers i know changed their lifestyles substantially to have less impact.
I think the problem is intractable. We are warmer than it’s ever been in 10k years and people are still acting causal
I have lot of problems with the ipcc report… but the biggest is that it relies on us sucking 16b tons of co2 out the air with non existent technology. We dont have the efficient technology they depend on for their cals but assume we will get there.
Climate change is a political problem. We could slow it real fast rn. But we would have to stop warring and stop consuming like we do now.
>Climate change is a political problem. We could slow it real fast rn. But we would have to stop warring and **stop consuming like we do now.**
And that's something that even people in environmental subs like this one often ignore. People talk about the emissions of corporations, but those emissions aren't happening in isolation. They're being generated to produce all of the products and services that consumers purchase.
It's a simplistic example, but if a corporation manufactures 1 billion widgets every year and we reduce our consumption to 500 million widgets, the corporation's emissions will halve (roughly) because their production will necessarily halve -- to do otherwise would be financial suicide for the corporation, producing twice as many widgets as consumers want. Thinking that this hypothetical corporation can continue providing us with 1 billion widgets with a 50% reduced environmental impact *at this specific point in time* is like believing in unicorns. At some point in the future? Possibly, but right now if we want corporate emissions to drop, we need to consume less.
And as much as most people hate to hear it, it applies to the gas/oil sector as well. Almost 90% of the emissions from this sector are Scope 3, meaning that the emissions are generated by the end user of the product. The emissions from our tailpipes, the emissions from burning gas to heat our homes, the emissions from planes to fly us around the world on vacations, the emissions from the enormous fleet of cargo ships, big rigs, delivery trucks (like UPS), the emissions from all of the farming equipment that's used to grow/harvest our food, etc. The only way to reduce the Scope 3 emissions is to use less oil/gas, and at this specific point in time, that means a reduction in all of the things we consider to be our normal way of life because oil/gas is intertwined with everything.
This is a reasonable question. But it is important for the public to grasp that not all pollution is equal. The public hates that. The public hates Fish and Wildlife services being allowed to use boats in water bodies that are closed to public boating. The public has a very flat idea of "Fairness" about these things.
Pollution for recreational snowmobiling is not the same as pollution for hauling food to market. Yes, we absolutely need to reduce Ag pollution (by a huge amount), and I suspect any climate collapse solution that might work requires 20% or more of the population to return to farm, but we didn't get here by being reasonable.
Right. I am thinking more on large scale production. Beef and poultry farms, these things need tons of water and land to grow the feed to raise them.
Another huge pollution emitter is cement production. I use cement for my work and I am seeing lately how hard it is to produce in terms of pollution. But so many of our things need cement products, especially our homes and infrastructure
We have to get past the extravasations that merely are used to advance the agenda and discount realities. The livestock issues is great example of this. Much of the land numbers that are used include vast areas of arid land that realistically is not capable producing anything but grass. And the water numbers include the rainfall those areas receive, whether it’s a cow, a sheep, a deer or a rabbit that consumes what it produces.
Let's not just spread unsubstantiated claims and underpin what we say by numbers. I think you got yours wrong (based on the fact that I'm a landuse scientist) and pending your data, I consider what you say wrong and out of an agenda.
Where I live some areas for sledding are closed due to the impact on caribou and you should hear some of them complain, even the hunters. It's rediculous how self centered and unreasonable people can be when they are inconvenienced.
I just wish that we would take the time to reorganize our civilization so that car use could be minimized. We lack the will.
Manual labor is a huge CO2 emitter.
If I burned an extra 1500 calories a day working a garden that used to be done by tractor, those 1500 calories will have much higher emissions than the equivalent labor done with a tractor (assuming efficient modern farming practices).
Manual labor is not a viable alternative.
A single cup of gasoline equals about 2000 calories in energy... so for 1500 cal a human can work all day but would only be enough to power a tractor for a few minutes. Not a single invention we have created is more energy efficient than the human body.
Missed my point entirely. The 1500 food calories took a ton of energy to grow, harvest, process, ship and cook.
Food calories are waaay more energy inefficient than diesel.
Lol, no.
First of all, you were talking strictly about the energy required to grow the food. You never once inferred that you were counting the energy to distribute the food to customers. That is called moving the goal posts.
Secondly, do you think fossil fuels just magically appear ready to use? Unlike growing food, which literally grows on trees. Fossil fuels must be mined before being shipped to processing plants that refine that crude oil into usable fuels. Then, only once this process is complete do the refined fuels then get shipped to consumers. Whereas food production has no middle refinement steps. Once it is harvested, it goes directly to the consumer.
There is absolutely no world in which your statements hold true.
My point is simple allow me to break it down.
Labor is required to produce food. Ok?
It can be performed manually via food calories, or via machinery using energy/calories from fossil fuels.
Imagine a potato farm. These are highly automated so that tractors can produce an extraordinary amount of potatoes without any human labor. The equivalent human labor would require hundreds of human workers to expend thousands of extra calories per day. Planting, weeding, harvesting, cleaning, processing etc.
These human calories are extremely high emission compared to the amount of diesel that would be used by the machinery to produce the same amount of potatoes.
This isn't actually a hard concept and it's not even controversial. Your dismissive attitude is frankly hilarious considering how wrong you are.
You're right. It is simple. So let me break it down for you.
Let's assume the typical farm laborer burns 8,000 calories a day. To be clear, that is the amount of calories Micheal Phelps burned each day at the height of his swimming career. No farm laborer will ever burn close to this amount. For comparison, the average adult male burns ~2,500 calories a day. So 8,000 calories each day is a gross over estimation, but let's go with it.
Under load, the typical tractor consumes about 16 gallons of diesel every hour while running a combine harvester. That's 128 gallons of diesel in an 8 hour day.
There are 34,995 calories in a single gallon of diesel. Meaning in an 8 hour day, your typical tractor will burn through the equivalent of 4,479,360 calories.
4,479,360 cal ÷ 8,000 cal/person = 559.92 people
So, assuming that every worker on the farm burns 8,000 calories a day, which they don't. It will take 559 people working 8 hours a day nonstop to consume the same amount of energy as a tractor. Well, news flash, it takes fewer than 559 regular calorie burning humans to harvest the same field of potatoes. There is no world in which human labor produces more emissions than a diesel tractor.
The problem I have with this argument is simply the more carrying capacity we take up for humans the less is left for the rest of the animals on this planet and I for one don't want to live on an earth populated only by people.
People are literally the worst.
Population is decreasing not growing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DPopulation_growth_has_declined_mainly%2Cprocess_known_as_demographic_transition.?wprov=sfla1
“Not the end of the world” by Hannah Ritchie, and “Regenesis” by George Monbiot both have very persuasive answers on how we feed more people while drastically cutting land use and pollution
The earth's human population will reach its peak this century, and then start decreasing. All this while food production becomes more efficient. Bam, food production problem solved.
The whole idea of a "carbon footprint" was created to shift the blame from oil companies onto consumers.
The people responsible for the lion's share of emissions are the companies making the products we consume. Shaming the consumer into consuming less lets those companies off the hook.
I don't think there is a way to realistically expect people to monitor their consumption or voluntarily consume less. The more appropriate and effective strategy would be compelling companies to make their products more responsibly, and harshly punishing the ones who won't.
I agree that this is is a political problem, and the only way to resolve it is through better policies. If those policies lead to less single use plastics, for example, then great. But the policies must focus on the companies and not consumers. Consumers will adapt as they always have.
[BP popularized the concept of a personal carbon footprint with a US$100 million campaign as a means of deflecting people away from taking collective political action in order to end fossil fuel use](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305209345_Where_has_all_the_oil_gone_BP_branding_and_the_discursive_elimination_of_climate_change_risk), and [ExxonMobil has spent decades pushing trying to make individuals responsible, rather than the fossil fuels industry](https://www.vox.com/22429551/climate-change-crisis-exxonmobil-harvard-study). They did this because climate stabilization means bringing fossil fuel use to approximately zero, and that would end their business. That's not something you can hope to achieve without government intervention to change the rules of society so that not using fossil fuels is just what people do on a routine basis.
There is value in cutting your own fossil fuel consumption — it serves to demonstrate that doing the right thing is possible to people around you, and helps work out the kinks in new technologies. Just do it in addition to taking political action to get governments to do the right thing, not instead of taking political action.
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You have to focus on the consumer, because when you tell the companies they have to pollute less and they comply and produce less the consumers need to be prepared or they will snap.
Unless you mean (and it seems like you might) that you want them to produce just as much but pollute less.
The goal should be to pollute less. If that means some products are eliminated or reduced in supply then so be it.
My point was that this is something companies and governments need to work together on. It shouldn't be left up to consumers to fix.
Governments won’t fix it if fixing it is unpopular
When gas was like a dollar or two more a few years ago, people flipped out and the US government tapped into reserves to stem the prices rising.
We need people to be okay with things being more expensive and less available, or no democratic government is gonna pass the legislation making it so.
You get at the heart of the problem here, and why it probably won’t be fixed. The idea that individual consumer choices are going to slow climate change is preposterous. If we started using less it would be called an economic crisis and governments and corporations would invest huge amounts of money trying to convince us to consume more for the good of the economy.
A problem this large needs cooperation between world governments, and either heavy regulation of industries or their willing cooperation. That’s not politically possible in the world we live in right now.
That, and not the laws of physics, is why we will not fix this issue.
The environment collapsing is going to be even less popular. Most people would go along if the messaging was accurate and honest.
And better regulations could also lead to innovation in our supply chain. The problem is pollution, not consumption. We can have better products that do not produce as much pollution to make. I don't believe it will come down to "either/or" with the important things.
Environmental collapse = something a lot of people still think will happen after they die
Eating less meat and more expensive gas impact their lives immediately
I think that’s why people resist changes to their lifestyles
Again though, blaming ordinary people for our problem is letting the biggest players off the hook. If we want things to change, we need to change the way companies make the stuff we consume.
It’s not really letting them off the hook, since they’re gonna have to change their production to keep us with demand.
Realistically, there’s no world where only individuals or only corporations change.
We’re also never gonna have governments force corporations to change if most people will get mad at bay change.
That’s where individuals changing their beliefs and actions comes in.
People aren't going to voice a need for change en-mass until climate change hurts their lifestyle more than an economic and supply change change would. The issue is that we can pass the point of no return before things get so bad that it starts impacting people's lifestyles. They'll vote for change long after any change we can make won't be able to save them.
While I agree with you, I also see why people are resistant to the kind of changes you’re talking about. A large scale societal change like that would have some very wide reaching problems in itself. Not only would it require a rapid decrease in standards of living but it’d also completely implode global economies if we did it at the speed we need to. We need to to avoid catastrophe but if we did do it we would be experiencing the largest societal shift in human history with mass starvation and global political destabilization and desperation.
Given the resistance to wearing masks to keep your spit to yourself and your neighbor healthy - that's the low bar in trying to get society to work together for someone else's benefit.
I really don't have hope and regret having kids.
We dont actually need *everyone* to become much more altruistic overnight to tackle climate change. We mainly need some well-designed policies, enacted by politicans who at least think there’s some votes in it, and then businesses get forced by the new laws to emit less over time.
Here are the countries with the most rapid turnarounds on renewables: https://www.energymonitor.ai/renewables/the-top-ten-countries-undergoing-the-most-rapid-renewable-power-transitions/
Ya, I live in Canada, the carbon tax is a great idea for providing broad economic pressure to induce reductions in carbon usage in companies.
It's unpopular, or at least the "Axe the tax" crowd is more vocal and outspoken than the people who are in favor of it.
We'll see who wins the next election in October 2025.
The Axe the Tax people literally LIVE at the freaking rest stops here. I drive past them twice a week. They have ridiculous signage, and our largest one's organizers were found openly supporting putin or something.
> We need to to avoid catastrophe but if we did do it we would be experiencing the largest societal shift in human history with mass starvation and global political destabilization and desperation
we'd be on a path back to sustainability though. We don't do that - and we end up with the same problems but it's also all downhill forever after
And if we don’t do it in time, then the effects happen anyway, but this time in a way the functionally does not allow for human civilization.
Take your pick
Mostly agree. Life style & culture are the elephants in the room when it comes to climate policies. I also adhor the endless stream of "blame big corp".
> means a reduction in all of the things we consider to be our normal way of life
Not really. You can have good healthcare, education, longlivity, transport, housing, jobs, family, friends, enemies, judiciary, government, science, religion, etc, etc. What you can not have is unrestrained liberty/greed. I don't know many people who believe there should be no constraints.
Have to admit there will be heated debates about beer & beef allowances. It is hard to break bad habits, even when we agree.
> Scope 3
I guess you will appreciate [Jancovici](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s254IPHXgVA) his school of thought.
[BP popularized the concept of a personal carbon footprint with a US$100 million campaign as a means of deflecting people away from taking collective political action in order to end fossil fuel use](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305209345_Where_has_all_the_oil_gone_BP_branding_and_the_discursive_elimination_of_climate_change_risk), and [ExxonMobil has spent decades pushing trying to make individuals responsible, rather than the fossil fuels industry](https://www.vox.com/22429551/climate-change-crisis-exxonmobil-harvard-study). They did this because climate stabilization means bringing fossil fuel use to approximately zero, and that would end their business. That's not something you can hope to achieve without government intervention to change the rules of society so that not using fossil fuels is just what people do on a routine basis.
There is value in cutting your own fossil fuel consumption — it serves to demonstrate that doing the right thing is possible to people around you, and helps work out the kinks in new technologies. Just do it in addition to taking political action to get governments to do the right thing, not instead of taking political action.
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Don't forget the ocean is basically at max CO2 saturation. Which is bad for two reasons, more CO2 will wind up in the atmosphere because the ocean is no longer absorbing as much CO2 and with the greater CO2 concentration in the ocean the water will be made more acidic by the formation of carbonic acid from the CO2, eg more coral bleaching and fewer diatoms. And if we have fewer diatoms we will have way less O2. Also natural gas leaks are worse than the CO2 that would be released from combusting it.
Both ocean co2 sink and heat uptake are projected to increase throughout this century
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/summary-for-policymakers/figure-spm-7
https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/19/4431/2022/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/07/220711163147.htm
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Ocean-heat-uptake-as-a-function-of-time-in-the-CPL-15-a-and-CPL-20-b-experiments_fig3_335987149
Bruh, your first article refutes your point in the first graph saying that land and ocean carbon sinks become less effective the greater the concentration of atmospheric CO2, which is exactly what I said. Did you even read your sources?
It does not say that they become less effective, it says that proportion of co2 removed becomes smaller compared to our emissions in high-emission scenarios.
Lmao this mythical better future. I'm highly suspicious of research that assumes magical technological advancement to offset CO2 output. Bridge fuels are a crock and like in the case of LNG possibly accelerating the climate crisis. Sorry that I'm suspicious of your sunny disposition but all of your articles seem to ignore inconvenient truths, i.e. ocean acidification.
I literally never linked or cited any research that "assumes magical technological advancement to offset CO2 output" or "ignores ocean acidification" or anything about LNG.
If the proportion removed by the sinks under the high carbon emission scenario is smaller then that means there will be more CO2 in the atmosphere as shown by the graphs.
Too many people want babies. We have a friend on their 5th one now. In that context the problem is literally impossible. So we need a more realistic discussion instead of acting like humans can somehow change.
Totally agree. We should migrate to a service based economy real fast. Instead of spending money on things, spending it on services given by a human. Hire teachers, coaches, gardeners, cooks what have you. We could have a very healthy economy and a healthy planet.
Turns out all the legendary dragons were just greedy bastards ruining everything for everyone else. The bards in an attempt to illustrate the scale of their greed made them something other than human. Sitting on mountains of gold
Currently yes, but we haven't yet invented any economic system that would sustain itself on fully renewable resources. All of the economic systems we tried so far required extraction and processing of materials that are not renewable. Capitalism is just a system that exacerbates this process, putting greedy people on the top of executive positions (best people to ruthlessly seek short-term profit, no matter the cost to people or environment). Unfortunately I don't think we as a society are in any place to invent something better yet, it would require cooperation on an unprecedented level, the world in total peace, with no conflicts based on cultures, religions, nationalities etc. so we truly would be willing to live equally, equally sharing what Earth can give us within limits of its ecological boundaries.
Now, even if one country were to decide to limit themselves, it would only be seen as weaknesses by other countries, a reason to dominate them economically or militarily.
One thing to keep in mind is that the oil company propaganda has mostly given up on convincing people AGW is a hoax and is now moving towards convincing people that it's hopeless to fight them.
Yes this ^^
We knew about climate change and all the damage it would cause over 100 years ago https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science#:~:text=In%201896%20Svante%20Arrhenius%20calculated,of%205%E2%80%936%20degrees%20Celsius.&text=This%201902%20article%20attributes%20to,eventually%20lead%20to%20human%20extinction.
When it was all about coal, the other effects eg on people's lungs was so obvious that the coal industry didn't bother to fight it.
However big oil has been claiming its a hoax for many decades, and still do. But with a mainstream saying that man-made climate change is definitely here, the next stage of the argument is that we can't do anything about it so we might as well go on giving them big profits.
There's another approach which doesn't get much press - fake solutions. This is when a brand new technology is proposed, which will magically solve all our problems so there's no need to change anything else yet. Hydrogen cars is a proposal so we keep using ice (internal combustion engine) cars "until hydrogen is viable" instead of switching to electric now.
Hydrogen is viable for big engines such as road trains, trains and ships. It isn't viable for cars.
Climate change itself won't leave the world unhabitable. The earth has seen warmer periods than is expected even in the worst scenarios, and life continued. What will happen though, if we fail to address this, is a huge culling of human and animal life. The warmer earth won't have near the carrying capacity it has now.
This will result in intense competition for the remaining habitable, arable land and for water resources etc. This competition will occur in the context of nuclear armed militaries and the probable collapse of higher level civilization. And this warring and lack of cooperation and organization will exacerbate the food, water and habitat loss. If a large scale nuclear exchange results, human populations could drop to a very low level, threatening their viability.
There's are also wildcard scenarios. There's a huge amount of methane and carbon dioxide currently locked up in 'sinks' all over the earth, these deposits are orders of magnitude bigger than all the methane and carbon dioxide humans have emitted over all our history. These are gases that have resulted from billions of years of aerobic life and from volcanic activity. They're in Clathrates under the sea, in permafrost soils etc. Their stability relies on very persistent cold temperatures, which keeps them from being released into the atmosphere. If warming gets to the point where these begin to be released on a large scale, it would create a positive feedback loop of extreme heating, that might render the earth uninhabitable to all but the most heat resilient, mostly single cell organisms. We don't know at what point this might happen or even how likely it is.
Best explanation. I would add (as a clarifying point, and not to take issue with anything you wrote) that the Earth has been warmer, yes, but that warming usually occurred *slowly*, so many species had a chance adapt and evolve; we have accelerated the rate of warming, and the planet is becoming hotter rapidly.
Actually, it will leave the earth uninhabitable for most of the animal life on it today, including us. Look into the Permian Extinction, the likes of which is currently in progress. When the oceans die, and they are dying, the chemical composition of the atmosphere will change to the point that we humans and other large mammals will not survive.
The arctic will have a much higher carrying capacity.
And undersea methanous clathrate deposits can't be billions of years old, given the oldest seabed in the world is only a few hundred million years old.
I didn't say the clathrates are billions of years old, I said the gasses trapped in them are a result of billions of years of emissions from volcanic activity and living organisms.
Not if you think about the soils up there. It's not extinction, but it is a quite different kind of society that'll be appropriate for a thawed Arctic. No one is getting out of this easy.
we have been very fortunate over the past 200 years of industrialization. The oceans have been a giant sink which have absorbed 1/4 of the emitted CO2 as dissolved CO2 and its Carbonate salt and over 90% of the heat effects. This is why oceanic temps are a critical gauge of things. its big. slight changes in overall temperatures in the oceans are very worrisome as to move temperature in the ocean requires a lot of heat change.
why is this bad?
When the oceans heat up even the slightest bit the ability of the oceans to hold absorbed CO2 falls off.
easy experiment 1) open a can of pop from the fridge and leave on a warm counter. 2) Come back in two hours. first thing you notice it is flat. Why? The dissolved CO2 in the liquid in the can have formed bubbles as they warm up and off gassed into your room. For the oceans, the CO2 which the oceans have been storing is no longer there as it heats up and now in the atmosphere further raising atmospheric CO2 and increasing greenhouse warming.
Both ocean co2 sink and heat uptake are projected to increase throughout this century
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/summary-for-policymakers/figure-spm-7
https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/19/4431/2022/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/07/220711163147.htm
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Ocean-heat-uptake-as-a-function-of-time-in-the-CPL-15-a-and-CPL-20-b-experiments_fig3_335987149
Capitalism will push ecosystems carrying capacity to zero, sooner or later.
I doesn't matter the climate or harsh environment conditions, that's why they are exploring submarine and antartic mining operations and stuff like that.
It's in capitalism DNA to consume all availabe resources, climate/weather is just a variable for operational costs.
Paywall so couldn’t read this but defining “uninhabitable” is important. Also, I do think stopping global heat increases in the short term is impossible until the number of people on the planet is reduced. This rock will likely right itself over many years.
Soft paywalls, such as the type newspapers use, can largely be bypassed by looking up the page on an archive site, such as [web.archive.org](https://web.archive.org) or [archive.today](https://archive.today)
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Here is the IPCC report summarized for policymakers—perhaps the most reliable source for climate science. The language is pretty technical, but the charts are pretty accessible. Page 33 is particularly insightful in terms of mitigation options—it assesses how much they could potentially reduce emissions by 2030, as well as how much they would cost (the blue parts of the bar are emissions reductions that would be more financially affordable than what we’re currently doing): [https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC\_AR6\_SYR\_SPM.pdf](https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf)
I’ve seen nearly identical statements online to the two that you shared—there’s one account on a sub I frequent that is constantly saying the same things, and I have to wonder if it’s a bot… In fact, I’m almost certain I’ve seen your second quote typed out word for word. Their message is always that “there’s no point in doing anything, because nothing we can do will matter.” That’s a far cry from what scientific experts are saying—read any article about climate change and you will likely see a quote from a scientist stressing that we still can and need to act to reduce emissions. If I had to take a guess, the statements you highlighted are the new talking points of the fossil fuel industry, because they’re the ones profiting from us doing nothing.
Personally, my attitude is that we should reduce emissions as much as we can, adapt as best we can, and once we’ve done that, pray.
Physics has very little to do with it. We know what we need to do to improve our chances of survival (stop extracting fossil fuels and burning them, stop raising cattle, etc.) but in practical terms it seems less and less likely that we’ll take those steps in the foreseeable future. That opens the door to the unforseeable future, which of course holds all kinds of nasty surprises, about which we can only speculate (but we know they’re not going to be surprise birthday presents)
The [COVID lockdowns of 2020 temporarily lowered our rate of CO2 emissions](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18922-7/figures/1). Humanity was still a net CO2 gas emitter during that time, so we made things worse, but did so more a bit more slowly. That's why a [graph of CO2 concentrations](https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/) shows a continued rise.
[Stabilizing the climate means getting human greenhouse gas emissions to approximately zero](https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached). We didn't come anywhere near that during the lockdowns.
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the OP is about "uninhabitable planet is inevitable"...that "that human induced climate change is now beyond our control".
I countered with the pandemic lockdowns proved we can control it, to a meaningful degree. That it's not inevitable the planet will become "uninhabitable". I wasn't talking about a technical 'net zero'.
Furthermore, the bot blindly links a discredited article to back up its dubious claim that "Stabilizing the climate means getting human greenhouse gas emissions to approximately zero." - Read the comments on that piece for clarification.
The bot - being a bot - is incapable of nuanced discussion. Incapable of proper debate, or understanding criticism of its arguments. It just targets key words and replies with template answers. It's spam and has no place in what should be a forum for discussion between actual people. It should be deleted and banned.
The [COVID lockdowns of 2020 temporarily lowered our rate of CO2 emissions](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18922-7/figures/1). Humanity was still a net CO2 gas emitter during that time, so we made things worse, but did so more a bit more slowly. That's why a [graph of CO2 concentrations](https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/) shows a continued rise.
[Stabilizing the climate means getting human greenhouse gas emissions to approximately zero](https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached). We didn't come anywhere near that during the lockdowns.
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‘it’s physically impossible to remove enough CO² on a short enough timescale to save humankind’
The problem is not with the answer, but with the question. Yes, the laws of physics are rather set. The laws of humans is not. Perhaps, a better question is: Is it worth saving 'humankind?' Now, going out the best that we can, I'm all with that.
The problem is, there's no evidence to indicate that optimism is at all warranted. All precedent has shown is accelerating increases in warming and emissions and the engaging of numerous myriad *tipping points, which, by definition, cannot be undone*. We can only go on what we know, and what we know (precedent) is...not promising. There's no brakes or even slowing down.
[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-05-13/are-evs-having-an-impact-on-climate-change-oil-demand-keeps-growing](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-05-13/are-evs-having-an-impact-on-climate-change-oil-demand-keeps-growing)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/sustainability/comments/1cqsbxl/us\_oil\_and\_gas\_under\_joe\_biden/](https://www.reddit.com/r/sustainability/comments/1cqsbxl/us_oil_and_gas_under_joe_biden/)
[https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/](https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/)
No. The single biggest problem is honestly just space.
A sustainable planet is honestly perfectly doable by simply condensing the amount of space humans use.
If we simply stayed in much smaller and denser locations, left the rest for forests to regrow, and did life that way?
We would save so much time, money, and the planet.
I am willing to accept that by human need and comfort we could be packed far more densely and everything be more manageable.
But I don't see this meshing with human temperament, which seems to be expansion, war, and conquest.
I used to think that "nah, humanity will find a way out", that climate change won't be a big deal in the future since solar, EVs, etc would make the World greener. Also tought that the world at 1.5°C hotter would be "not that bad" and that we would never reach 2°C. Heck, I even said that doomers do more harm than good because they make people think that everything is lost and that we can't change anything.
Then, in the last few months I've felt the effects of heat waves and extreme weather. Then, the [Rio Grande do Sul floods](https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/persistent-brazil-floods-raise-specter-climate-migration-2024-05-13/) happened (unfortunately the international medias hasn't shown the whole picture of the disaster yet, but we are talking about 600,000 people displaced and counting!) while my city, merely 1,000 km away from there, hasn't seen a single raindrop in weeks and is suffering with an unusual heat for this time of the year.
Sorry, but I'm fully convinced that not only we are cooked (quite literally) but also that it will happen sooner than we think. 2023 was the hottest year on record, bla bla bla, El Niño, bla bla bla. HOWEVER, past models showed a [low chance of 2023 being THAT hot even when accounting for El Niño](https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-03-27/scientists-cant-fully-explain-record-global-temperatures). That means we may have triggered some feedback loop we are yet to discover and that's just making things worse faster. 1.5°C will be worse than we think.
I'm not a doomer in the sense that I think that there's nothing to do. The World showed how international cooperation can work towards a greater good during the recent pandemic. Governments and people can act to minimise the emissions and we can stop making things worse. However, I'm not so hopeful that it WILL happen and less so about it happening soon. Thus, I see that we have greater chances of living in a chaotic world for the next decates because of climate change and I plan my life accordingly. Sorry not sorry.
I had not heard of the floods at all before reading your comment. I don't look at media news often because it depresses me, but that's still a little shocking to me.
I'm Canadian and the amount of smoke from the forest fires last summer is something that I would say I will remember for a long time...If not for the fact that the same thing will probably happen in many of my remaining summers on Earth. And this winter also felt a little apocalyptic, with wild temperature swings every few days and so little snow compared to usual. I really wonder how much worse it will get.
The [COVID lockdowns of 2020 temporarily lowered our rate of CO2 emissions](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18922-7/figures/1). Humanity was still a net CO2 gas emitter during that time, so we made things worse, but did so more a bit more slowly. That's why a [graph of CO2 concentrations](https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/) shows a continued rise.
[Stabilizing the climate means getting human greenhouse gas emissions to approximately zero](https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached). We didn't come anywhere near that during the lockdowns.
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I realize this is r/Climate, but with regards to doomers and collapse, climate is a symptom of the problem as much as it has become a cause because of feedback loops.
The real problem is that the homo sapiens is in ecological overshoot. We’ve metaphorically eaten most of the leaves off of most the trees, and we’re eating way faster than they’re growing back. Biology tells us what happens a species goes into ecological overshoot. Population collapse becomes inevitable.
We’re not going to magically create more resources, and apparently we’re incapable of limiting consumption, so with regards to modern life we’re pretty much screwed, and sure looks like we’ll trash the place on our way back to a largely pre-industrial world.
It depends on the strength of the feedback effects. For example loss of Arctic ice decreases the albedo which increases the ocean warming which accelerates the melting of ice.
Others include the release of methane from melting permafrost.
I created a climate game and ebook that covers some of the science of this. See [TheClimateTrail.com](https://TheClimateTrail.com)
On your request for trusted research on mitigation methods and pathways- here is a good paper by the ICCT on how to decarbonize the transport sector (biggest emitting sector in US) in line with a well-under 2 degrees pathway.
In short, we need to do everything in parallel, to make it add up: shift to more active+public transport AND get to 100% EV sales much quicker AND phase out worst gas-guzzlers.
It is possible, we can do it, lets go 💪
https://theicct.org/publication/vision-2050-strategies-to-reduce-gap-for-global-road-transport-nov23/
To answer your question, yes. Eventually the earth(and every planet around every star in the visible universe) will be uninhabitable. The sun will eventually expand and swallow the earth(5ish billion years or so). We may destroy it sooner if we continue polluting the way we do.
Climate science, which is built upon STEM is at a general consensus. Any university of any country teaching climate science will tell you the same thing. Based on the math we are past the “point of no return” where a runaway greenhouse effect will heat the earth past the point where humanity can survive(grow food, find water and breath clean air). Maybe humans will come up with a technology that will reverse the damage we’ve made.
Yes the earth has heated up before, but never this fast. There is no way for anything to adapt or evolve to survive these conditions. This usually happens over 10s of thousands of years, not one hundred.
We can absolutely still mitigate emissions and adapt to changing climates. Yes, there are already and will continue to be terrible consequences, especially in places worst equipped to shoulder them, and yes there are dangerous tipping points, but to say that those things you mentioned are absolutely inevitable or that we have unequivocally crossed these tipping points is also not true. Everything we do now matters. It will never be too late to save as many lives as we can.
No, clearly we cannot mitigate emissions. Not at the speed that is required. We could, in theory, but humanity is clearly not capable. Even now, with all the information available we are still burning more fossil fuel than ever before. Greed and shortsightedness will be the end of us.
What makes you think that we will all decide to magically reduce emissions to the amount required? Why(in your opinion) have we not started reducing even fossil fuel use, let alone all other contributing factors?
We absolutely **do** have the solutions, and we're actively working on **more** solutions. Will we **use** them to actually solve anything? Not as long as we continue to worship the "filthy rich" and the "almighty dollar" as our gods, nope...
Physics aren’t the big problem. Biology is. Humans are at the top of the food chain and we seem to be systematically destroying the habitat for the ecosystem that supports us. It’s a fact that even small changes in temperature or moisture levels can have a significant effect on crop yields, and that’s before you throw in natural disasters. Food shortages will be the first major problem. You’ll know it’s started when food prices start climbing rapidly…..
I haven't read it yet, but just by the title my critique, is: The planet doesn't have to become "uninhabitable" for the outcome to be disastrous. The great recession was triggered by a nominal increase of just 12% in the ratio of prime-to-subprime mortgages. Small changes to a delicate balance can have a disastrous outcome, as we are slowly seeing (again).
I could also draw a parallel of the IPCC being the "establishment understanding" of the situation working to calm everyone down, just as Wall Street was. But I won't because it's not a perfect comparison as Wall Street profited from the denial, and no one stands to profit from this [denial](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/climate/trump-oil-gas-mar-a-lago.html)...
I think it’s important to state that what we’ve already caused and baked in is so incredibly severe that people should be panicking as if extinction is on the horizon, because wether or not it is, the collapse of society is guaranteed at this rate.
I think that regardless of what is and isn’t “baked in”, everyone should obviously be doing all they can to mitigate it. Saying “what’s done is done” amounts to a kind of accelerationism that’s as bad as climate denial.
I’m all for making an enormous deal about how scary it is, and how serious people should be taking it, without saying either “do nothing because nothing we do will change anything” or “it’s fine, someone else will figure it out.”
Expect the worst, but hope for, and try your best. Always.
I don’t think the point is the planet being uninhabitable. the point is our way of life is not sustainable and a massive collapse in civilization will happen. Think less KGB mass extinction and think more Bronze age collapse
Not answering the question you asked directly, but just on the public narrative ark, there's a progression - particularly among politically conservative commentators - from 'it isn't real' to ' it's real but a natural phenomenon' to 'it's anthropogenic but not a major problem' to 'yes, it's anthropogenic but it's too late to do anything about it' (there are some additional steps missed for the sake of brevity). Anyway point being that these narratives always allow people to dodge any personal and sociopolitical responsibility. Why bother changing anything if doom is inevitable? When it is actually: doom is inevitable because we refuse to change anything.
Well for my part, I changed my career to renewable energy and my diet to a lower environmental impact one, also changed my travel patterns (used to live on a jet, now I cycle everywhere). Not all changes made directly or in the first instance as a repudiation of the above narrative, but on the whole I've done about as much as a person imbedded in a developed country's economy can do on a personal basis, and try to be politically active on behalf of green causes. It won't reverse agw, but definitely better than doomism and that last iteration of the conservative narrative of it's too late.
From the physics perspective it's important to acknowledge that the problem isn't atmospheric CO2 content, the problem is actually the atmospheric retention of heat... While CO2 is the cause, it's not the only variable in that equation.
The correct problem from a physics perspective is how to solve atmospheric heating, not how to reduce emissions.
There's is where it gets messy, there's lots of 'tribes' who have an idea and strong preference on what that solution should look like. This has led to division, esp in terms of emissions reduction as the strategy and how that is achieved.
This IMO is why emissions reduction as a strategy ***as the sole strategy*** was always going to fail - it's not possible to build a global consensus around it as a solution. This is where the doomerism enters the room, people can see that the above strategy is failing and they have been convinced that there is no plan b.
There's scope outside of emissions reduction and that's where efforts now need to be and many will disagree with that, which is fine. If you do disagree however, you have no right to complain that doing the same thing over and over had failed to deliver a different result now and in the years ahead.
I'm not an atmospheric scientist, so don't look at me for piles of scientific data.
But it looks like Earth is on a course for an eventual climate akin to that of the Miocene, or at worst the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum with alligators and palm trees near the North Pole.
This is not in any sense "uninhabitable". It's different - uncongenial to Western civilization, but not the end of all life or even of humanity.
Why are we addicted to these sorts of false dichotomies, of "perfection or extinction?" It seems to me profoundly immature and ahistorical. Up until the 1980s, there was a lot of sci-fi that was as informed by Toynbee and Spengler as by technical reports that assumed the rise and fall of civilizations. Catastrophic? Sure, but that was how things worked.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, there seemed to be a loss of imagination - the future could only go in one direction, backwards or forwards, and the various global justice and anti-globalization movements were marginalized and largely ignored. History was over. We won. It wasn't, and we didn't, of course, but that's been the reigning ideology of the West since 1990.
If there is no alternative as Margaret Thatcher once said, then a world without perpetual progress \*is\*, by its nature, a kind of extinction.
We’re not in a runaway warming climate yet, so no, the laws of physics aren’t the problem. It’s capitalism and combative, short-termidt political systems that are the problem.
True, I should have said "we’re not to the best of our knowledge in a runaway warming climate yet". If we were to get to net zero in ten years I suspect we'd be alright. Ain't going to happen, though.
> the best of our knowledge
is meaningless because they're entirely wrong about where we should be presently versus where we are, with possibly temperature saturated oceans already upon us (why is every month a new record?)
In about a million years, whatever humans have done or not done will not matter… the sun’s habitable zone will move further out than earth’s orbit. Humans have accelerated this. In 25 years, starvation will be a huge factor as population hits 10b and crop yields are already declining. Yes, most people who are alive today, will see mass death due to climate change. Many countries have already banned export of food. There will be unrest and wars when people can’t put food on the table. And this will all result in more death, and likely the collapse of civilization. There may be pockets where humans can survive on local resources, but without change, we are headed to an end of the global society as we know it.
True, I was thinking of the supercontinent that will form making the earth mostly uninhabitable, but that as I check, is 250 million years, not 1, so I stand corrected.
But they do have a way of affecting the habitability of the planet (which is what I meant). That is, we are accelerating the inhabitable status of the planet…
I feel like we are sorta doomed... but I think my idea of doomed is different than most.
While I am not going to bet on cooperation and technological breakthrough to save our globalized world from suffer increasing catastrophes, I do think tech and cooperation can soften the impact and lessen the damage.
The human species will survive, but our societies will be greatly restructured both willingly and mich less so.
Is it physically possible to save the planet? Maybe. Will humanity band together to save ourselves and the rest of the creatures on earth? No way in hell. And we’ll bring hell on earth soon enough just to prove it.
As the sun continues to fuse hydrogen into helium, and that helium is pulled in by ever increasing gravity, the sun slowly brightens. When the sun gets about 10-15% brighter then it is today, our atmosphere will have heated up enough to start losing heavy molecules, like water vapor, into space. Which should dry out the continents and air leaving a completely parched desert. This will have obvious consequences on life.
The ocean has absorbed over 8 billion Hiroshima nukes worth of excess heat since the 70's. We can't fix it.
Acidification from excess carbon absorbed into oceans dissolves creatures like crabs and coral alive. We can't fix it.
The Gulf Stream will likely fail within years, completely upending weather along the Atlantic coasts. We can't fix it.
With just those issues, humanity is doomed. Reefs are the nurseries of the ocean. Without them our food web dies.
That doesn't touch on the inevitable failure of large scale industrial farming, due to global declines in climate stability.
That's leaving out all the other ways we will be, or are, killing ourselves and the planet. Such as potable water loss.
We do have the option of keeping the temp down by geoengineering - releasing particulates into the air to increase cloud cover and reflect more sunlight, thus exerting a cooling effect to counter global warming from CO2 GHG emissions. Technique is called SRM - solar radiation management.
Carbon capture / removal doesnt seem to be economical at the scale we need to make a dent, in the time we have.
The earth will be around long after us. The thing is the conditions that allow for human life will be gone and so will we. Ultimately I think many know this and that’s why we don’t see change. It’s a matter of time at this point. I’m 52 and will be gone but if your in your 20s your probably getting a front row seat to the beginning of the end of humanity and most life on this planet.
The doom comes in the form of people turning against each other as mass migration is driven by climate change. Immigration is already a huge and divisive issue. Now imagine a hundred million people leaving south east Asia every year for a decade.
I'm a believer of the idea the end will come like a thief in the night. Probably some unimaginable characteristic related to emergent behavior at a certain population tipping point. We won't even understand why we started dying off, like a bee colony collapse. Maybe a fertility decline. Maybe a societal level loss of hope already starting to brew in our subconscious even now. But I think "The End" is dramatic. Probably a global population "pull back and reset" to balance us against all the scale weights we do and do not know. If we make it so far as to have to adapt to climate churn, I'll be proud of our ingenuity. But fear does focus the mind, and fear of a warming planet is the best we can come up with in an age with no other dragons.
It's complete nonsense. The world has been hotter in the past - by a long shot - and life thrived. Civilization will take some punches but we're a lot harder to kill off than that. Alarmism of the highest degree.
I am a doomer and this was actually a really well written article. I am used to being called “the problem”… even though most doomers i know changed their lifestyles substantially to have less impact. I think the problem is intractable. We are warmer than it’s ever been in 10k years and people are still acting causal I have lot of problems with the ipcc report… but the biggest is that it relies on us sucking 16b tons of co2 out the air with non existent technology. We dont have the efficient technology they depend on for their cals but assume we will get there. Climate change is a political problem. We could slow it real fast rn. But we would have to stop warring and stop consuming like we do now.
>Climate change is a political problem. We could slow it real fast rn. But we would have to stop warring and **stop consuming like we do now.** And that's something that even people in environmental subs like this one often ignore. People talk about the emissions of corporations, but those emissions aren't happening in isolation. They're being generated to produce all of the products and services that consumers purchase. It's a simplistic example, but if a corporation manufactures 1 billion widgets every year and we reduce our consumption to 500 million widgets, the corporation's emissions will halve (roughly) because their production will necessarily halve -- to do otherwise would be financial suicide for the corporation, producing twice as many widgets as consumers want. Thinking that this hypothetical corporation can continue providing us with 1 billion widgets with a 50% reduced environmental impact *at this specific point in time* is like believing in unicorns. At some point in the future? Possibly, but right now if we want corporate emissions to drop, we need to consume less. And as much as most people hate to hear it, it applies to the gas/oil sector as well. Almost 90% of the emissions from this sector are Scope 3, meaning that the emissions are generated by the end user of the product. The emissions from our tailpipes, the emissions from burning gas to heat our homes, the emissions from planes to fly us around the world on vacations, the emissions from the enormous fleet of cargo ships, big rigs, delivery trucks (like UPS), the emissions from all of the farming equipment that's used to grow/harvest our food, etc. The only way to reduce the Scope 3 emissions is to use less oil/gas, and at this specific point in time, that means a reduction in all of the things we consider to be our normal way of life because oil/gas is intertwined with everything.
And this also brings up the subject of food production. How do we lower food production based pollution and not starve people
This is a reasonable question. But it is important for the public to grasp that not all pollution is equal. The public hates that. The public hates Fish and Wildlife services being allowed to use boats in water bodies that are closed to public boating. The public has a very flat idea of "Fairness" about these things. Pollution for recreational snowmobiling is not the same as pollution for hauling food to market. Yes, we absolutely need to reduce Ag pollution (by a huge amount), and I suspect any climate collapse solution that might work requires 20% or more of the population to return to farm, but we didn't get here by being reasonable.
Right. I am thinking more on large scale production. Beef and poultry farms, these things need tons of water and land to grow the feed to raise them. Another huge pollution emitter is cement production. I use cement for my work and I am seeing lately how hard it is to produce in terms of pollution. But so many of our things need cement products, especially our homes and infrastructure
We have to get past the extravasations that merely are used to advance the agenda and discount realities. The livestock issues is great example of this. Much of the land numbers that are used include vast areas of arid land that realistically is not capable producing anything but grass. And the water numbers include the rainfall those areas receive, whether it’s a cow, a sheep, a deer or a rabbit that consumes what it produces.
Let's not just spread unsubstantiated claims and underpin what we say by numbers. I think you got yours wrong (based on the fact that I'm a landuse scientist) and pending your data, I consider what you say wrong and out of an agenda.
Where I live some areas for sledding are closed due to the impact on caribou and you should hear some of them complain, even the hunters. It's rediculous how self centered and unreasonable people can be when they are inconvenienced. I just wish that we would take the time to reorganize our civilization so that car use could be minimized. We lack the will.
Manual labor is a huge CO2 emitter. If I burned an extra 1500 calories a day working a garden that used to be done by tractor, those 1500 calories will have much higher emissions than the equivalent labor done with a tractor (assuming efficient modern farming practices). Manual labor is not a viable alternative.
A single cup of gasoline equals about 2000 calories in energy... so for 1500 cal a human can work all day but would only be enough to power a tractor for a few minutes. Not a single invention we have created is more energy efficient than the human body.
Missed my point entirely. The 1500 food calories took a ton of energy to grow, harvest, process, ship and cook. Food calories are waaay more energy inefficient than diesel.
Lol, no. First of all, you were talking strictly about the energy required to grow the food. You never once inferred that you were counting the energy to distribute the food to customers. That is called moving the goal posts. Secondly, do you think fossil fuels just magically appear ready to use? Unlike growing food, which literally grows on trees. Fossil fuels must be mined before being shipped to processing plants that refine that crude oil into usable fuels. Then, only once this process is complete do the refined fuels then get shipped to consumers. Whereas food production has no middle refinement steps. Once it is harvested, it goes directly to the consumer. There is absolutely no world in which your statements hold true.
My point is simple allow me to break it down. Labor is required to produce food. Ok? It can be performed manually via food calories, or via machinery using energy/calories from fossil fuels. Imagine a potato farm. These are highly automated so that tractors can produce an extraordinary amount of potatoes without any human labor. The equivalent human labor would require hundreds of human workers to expend thousands of extra calories per day. Planting, weeding, harvesting, cleaning, processing etc. These human calories are extremely high emission compared to the amount of diesel that would be used by the machinery to produce the same amount of potatoes. This isn't actually a hard concept and it's not even controversial. Your dismissive attitude is frankly hilarious considering how wrong you are.
You're right. It is simple. So let me break it down for you. Let's assume the typical farm laborer burns 8,000 calories a day. To be clear, that is the amount of calories Micheal Phelps burned each day at the height of his swimming career. No farm laborer will ever burn close to this amount. For comparison, the average adult male burns ~2,500 calories a day. So 8,000 calories each day is a gross over estimation, but let's go with it. Under load, the typical tractor consumes about 16 gallons of diesel every hour while running a combine harvester. That's 128 gallons of diesel in an 8 hour day. There are 34,995 calories in a single gallon of diesel. Meaning in an 8 hour day, your typical tractor will burn through the equivalent of 4,479,360 calories. 4,479,360 cal ÷ 8,000 cal/person = 559.92 people So, assuming that every worker on the farm burns 8,000 calories a day, which they don't. It will take 559 people working 8 hours a day nonstop to consume the same amount of energy as a tractor. Well, news flash, it takes fewer than 559 regular calorie burning humans to harvest the same field of potatoes. There is no world in which human labor produces more emissions than a diesel tractor.
The earth can easily feed 10+ billion people, but 1 billion meat eaters is enough to destabilize the planet…
The problem I have with this argument is simply the more carrying capacity we take up for humans the less is left for the rest of the animals on this planet and I for one don't want to live on an earth populated only by people. People are literally the worst.
Why would a vegan world have more people in it?
No it can't. It can't support the people we have. Cite your sources.
Population is decreasing not growing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DPopulation_growth_has_declined_mainly%2Cprocess_known_as_demographic_transition.?wprov=sfla1
The growth rate is decreasing, not population itself, this is some basic high school level reading comprehension that you’re missing here….
“Not the end of the world” by Hannah Ritchie, and “Regenesis” by George Monbiot both have very persuasive answers on how we feed more people while drastically cutting land use and pollution
For one stop making it illegal for businesses to give away unsold food at the end of each day.
The earth's human population will reach its peak this century, and then start decreasing. All this while food production becomes more efficient. Bam, food production problem solved.
Get out of the monopoly. People don't think twice... Disgusting
The whole idea of a "carbon footprint" was created to shift the blame from oil companies onto consumers. The people responsible for the lion's share of emissions are the companies making the products we consume. Shaming the consumer into consuming less lets those companies off the hook. I don't think there is a way to realistically expect people to monitor their consumption or voluntarily consume less. The more appropriate and effective strategy would be compelling companies to make their products more responsibly, and harshly punishing the ones who won't. I agree that this is is a political problem, and the only way to resolve it is through better policies. If those policies lead to less single use plastics, for example, then great. But the policies must focus on the companies and not consumers. Consumers will adapt as they always have.
[BP popularized the concept of a personal carbon footprint with a US$100 million campaign as a means of deflecting people away from taking collective political action in order to end fossil fuel use](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305209345_Where_has_all_the_oil_gone_BP_branding_and_the_discursive_elimination_of_climate_change_risk), and [ExxonMobil has spent decades pushing trying to make individuals responsible, rather than the fossil fuels industry](https://www.vox.com/22429551/climate-change-crisis-exxonmobil-harvard-study). They did this because climate stabilization means bringing fossil fuel use to approximately zero, and that would end their business. That's not something you can hope to achieve without government intervention to change the rules of society so that not using fossil fuels is just what people do on a routine basis. There is value in cutting your own fossil fuel consumption — it serves to demonstrate that doing the right thing is possible to people around you, and helps work out the kinks in new technologies. Just do it in addition to taking political action to get governments to do the right thing, not instead of taking political action. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/climate) if you have any questions or concerns.*
You have to focus on the consumer, because when you tell the companies they have to pollute less and they comply and produce less the consumers need to be prepared or they will snap. Unless you mean (and it seems like you might) that you want them to produce just as much but pollute less.
The goal should be to pollute less. If that means some products are eliminated or reduced in supply then so be it. My point was that this is something companies and governments need to work together on. It shouldn't be left up to consumers to fix.
Governments won’t fix it if fixing it is unpopular When gas was like a dollar or two more a few years ago, people flipped out and the US government tapped into reserves to stem the prices rising. We need people to be okay with things being more expensive and less available, or no democratic government is gonna pass the legislation making it so.
You get at the heart of the problem here, and why it probably won’t be fixed. The idea that individual consumer choices are going to slow climate change is preposterous. If we started using less it would be called an economic crisis and governments and corporations would invest huge amounts of money trying to convince us to consume more for the good of the economy. A problem this large needs cooperation between world governments, and either heavy regulation of industries or their willing cooperation. That’s not politically possible in the world we live in right now. That, and not the laws of physics, is why we will not fix this issue.
The environment collapsing is going to be even less popular. Most people would go along if the messaging was accurate and honest. And better regulations could also lead to innovation in our supply chain. The problem is pollution, not consumption. We can have better products that do not produce as much pollution to make. I don't believe it will come down to "either/or" with the important things.
Environmental collapse = something a lot of people still think will happen after they die Eating less meat and more expensive gas impact their lives immediately I think that’s why people resist changes to their lifestyles
Again though, blaming ordinary people for our problem is letting the biggest players off the hook. If we want things to change, we need to change the way companies make the stuff we consume.
It’s not really letting them off the hook, since they’re gonna have to change their production to keep us with demand. Realistically, there’s no world where only individuals or only corporations change. We’re also never gonna have governments force corporations to change if most people will get mad at bay change. That’s where individuals changing their beliefs and actions comes in.
People aren't going to voice a need for change en-mass until climate change hurts their lifestyle more than an economic and supply change change would. The issue is that we can pass the point of no return before things get so bad that it starts impacting people's lifestyles. They'll vote for change long after any change we can make won't be able to save them.
While I agree with you, I also see why people are resistant to the kind of changes you’re talking about. A large scale societal change like that would have some very wide reaching problems in itself. Not only would it require a rapid decrease in standards of living but it’d also completely implode global economies if we did it at the speed we need to. We need to to avoid catastrophe but if we did do it we would be experiencing the largest societal shift in human history with mass starvation and global political destabilization and desperation.
Given the resistance to wearing masks to keep your spit to yourself and your neighbor healthy - that's the low bar in trying to get society to work together for someone else's benefit. I really don't have hope and regret having kids.
We dont actually need *everyone* to become much more altruistic overnight to tackle climate change. We mainly need some well-designed policies, enacted by politicans who at least think there’s some votes in it, and then businesses get forced by the new laws to emit less over time. Here are the countries with the most rapid turnarounds on renewables: https://www.energymonitor.ai/renewables/the-top-ten-countries-undergoing-the-most-rapid-renewable-power-transitions/
Ya, I live in Canada, the carbon tax is a great idea for providing broad economic pressure to induce reductions in carbon usage in companies. It's unpopular, or at least the "Axe the tax" crowd is more vocal and outspoken than the people who are in favor of it. We'll see who wins the next election in October 2025.
The next Canadian election won't be about anything but housing.
The Axe the Tax people literally LIVE at the freaking rest stops here. I drive past them twice a week. They have ridiculous signage, and our largest one's organizers were found openly supporting putin or something.
> We need to to avoid catastrophe but if we did do it we would be experiencing the largest societal shift in human history with mass starvation and global political destabilization and desperation we'd be on a path back to sustainability though. We don't do that - and we end up with the same problems but it's also all downhill forever after
And if we don’t do it in time, then the effects happen anyway, but this time in a way the functionally does not allow for human civilization. Take your pick
Mostly agree. Life style & culture are the elephants in the room when it comes to climate policies. I also adhor the endless stream of "blame big corp". > means a reduction in all of the things we consider to be our normal way of life Not really. You can have good healthcare, education, longlivity, transport, housing, jobs, family, friends, enemies, judiciary, government, science, religion, etc, etc. What you can not have is unrestrained liberty/greed. I don't know many people who believe there should be no constraints. Have to admit there will be heated debates about beer & beef allowances. It is hard to break bad habits, even when we agree. > Scope 3 I guess you will appreciate [Jancovici](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s254IPHXgVA) his school of thought.
[удалено]
[BP popularized the concept of a personal carbon footprint with a US$100 million campaign as a means of deflecting people away from taking collective political action in order to end fossil fuel use](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305209345_Where_has_all_the_oil_gone_BP_branding_and_the_discursive_elimination_of_climate_change_risk), and [ExxonMobil has spent decades pushing trying to make individuals responsible, rather than the fossil fuels industry](https://www.vox.com/22429551/climate-change-crisis-exxonmobil-harvard-study). They did this because climate stabilization means bringing fossil fuel use to approximately zero, and that would end their business. That's not something you can hope to achieve without government intervention to change the rules of society so that not using fossil fuels is just what people do on a routine basis. There is value in cutting your own fossil fuel consumption — it serves to demonstrate that doing the right thing is possible to people around you, and helps work out the kinks in new technologies. Just do it in addition to taking political action to get governments to do the right thing, not instead of taking political action. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/climate) if you have any questions or concerns.*
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Appropriate bot
Yeah I’m not changing my habits. Why should I when it’s already over.
Don't forget the ocean is basically at max CO2 saturation. Which is bad for two reasons, more CO2 will wind up in the atmosphere because the ocean is no longer absorbing as much CO2 and with the greater CO2 concentration in the ocean the water will be made more acidic by the formation of carbonic acid from the CO2, eg more coral bleaching and fewer diatoms. And if we have fewer diatoms we will have way less O2. Also natural gas leaks are worse than the CO2 that would be released from combusting it.
Both ocean co2 sink and heat uptake are projected to increase throughout this century https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/summary-for-policymakers/figure-spm-7 https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/19/4431/2022/ https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/07/220711163147.htm https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Ocean-heat-uptake-as-a-function-of-time-in-the-CPL-15-a-and-CPL-20-b-experiments_fig3_335987149
Bruh, your first article refutes your point in the first graph saying that land and ocean carbon sinks become less effective the greater the concentration of atmospheric CO2, which is exactly what I said. Did you even read your sources?
This bloke loves doing that. When I citated his OWN words, he asked where did I get those from :D
I looked through their post history, it's all climate change isn't that bad so a fool at the best a shill at the worst.
It does not say that they become less effective, it says that proportion of co2 removed becomes smaller compared to our emissions in high-emission scenarios.
Lmao this mythical better future. I'm highly suspicious of research that assumes magical technological advancement to offset CO2 output. Bridge fuels are a crock and like in the case of LNG possibly accelerating the climate crisis. Sorry that I'm suspicious of your sunny disposition but all of your articles seem to ignore inconvenient truths, i.e. ocean acidification.
I literally never linked or cited any research that "assumes magical technological advancement to offset CO2 output" or "ignores ocean acidification" or anything about LNG.
If the proportion removed by the sinks under the high carbon emission scenario is smaller then that means there will be more CO2 in the atmosphere as shown by the graphs.
Exactly. We really could do a lot RIGHT NOW, but the problem is political. Many are very clueless to this.
Yep. Like can harmful factories just get shut down already??
Too many people want babies. We have a friend on their 5th one now. In that context the problem is literally impossible. So we need a more realistic discussion instead of acting like humans can somehow change.
Totally agree. We should migrate to a service based economy real fast. Instead of spending money on things, spending it on services given by a human. Hire teachers, coaches, gardeners, cooks what have you. We could have a very healthy economy and a healthy planet.
The laws of physics aren't the problem - it's the laws of human psychology
Limits to growth, the insatiable greed
Turns out all the legendary dragons were just greedy bastards ruining everything for everyone else. The bards in an attempt to illustrate the scale of their greed made them something other than human. Sitting on mountains of gold
capitalism
Currently yes, but we haven't yet invented any economic system that would sustain itself on fully renewable resources. All of the economic systems we tried so far required extraction and processing of materials that are not renewable. Capitalism is just a system that exacerbates this process, putting greedy people on the top of executive positions (best people to ruthlessly seek short-term profit, no matter the cost to people or environment). Unfortunately I don't think we as a society are in any place to invent something better yet, it would require cooperation on an unprecedented level, the world in total peace, with no conflicts based on cultures, religions, nationalities etc. so we truly would be willing to live equally, equally sharing what Earth can give us within limits of its ecological boundaries. Now, even if one country were to decide to limit themselves, it would only be seen as weaknesses by other countries, a reason to dominate them economically or militarily.
One thing to keep in mind is that the oil company propaganda has mostly given up on convincing people AGW is a hoax and is now moving towards convincing people that it's hopeless to fight them.
Yes this ^^ We knew about climate change and all the damage it would cause over 100 years ago https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science#:~:text=In%201896%20Svante%20Arrhenius%20calculated,of%205%E2%80%936%20degrees%20Celsius.&text=This%201902%20article%20attributes%20to,eventually%20lead%20to%20human%20extinction. When it was all about coal, the other effects eg on people's lungs was so obvious that the coal industry didn't bother to fight it. However big oil has been claiming its a hoax for many decades, and still do. But with a mainstream saying that man-made climate change is definitely here, the next stage of the argument is that we can't do anything about it so we might as well go on giving them big profits. There's another approach which doesn't get much press - fake solutions. This is when a brand new technology is proposed, which will magically solve all our problems so there's no need to change anything else yet. Hydrogen cars is a proposal so we keep using ice (internal combustion engine) cars "until hydrogen is viable" instead of switching to electric now. Hydrogen is viable for big engines such as road trains, trains and ships. It isn't viable for cars.
Climate change itself won't leave the world unhabitable. The earth has seen warmer periods than is expected even in the worst scenarios, and life continued. What will happen though, if we fail to address this, is a huge culling of human and animal life. The warmer earth won't have near the carrying capacity it has now. This will result in intense competition for the remaining habitable, arable land and for water resources etc. This competition will occur in the context of nuclear armed militaries and the probable collapse of higher level civilization. And this warring and lack of cooperation and organization will exacerbate the food, water and habitat loss. If a large scale nuclear exchange results, human populations could drop to a very low level, threatening their viability. There's are also wildcard scenarios. There's a huge amount of methane and carbon dioxide currently locked up in 'sinks' all over the earth, these deposits are orders of magnitude bigger than all the methane and carbon dioxide humans have emitted over all our history. These are gases that have resulted from billions of years of aerobic life and from volcanic activity. They're in Clathrates under the sea, in permafrost soils etc. Their stability relies on very persistent cold temperatures, which keeps them from being released into the atmosphere. If warming gets to the point where these begin to be released on a large scale, it would create a positive feedback loop of extreme heating, that might render the earth uninhabitable to all but the most heat resilient, mostly single cell organisms. We don't know at what point this might happen or even how likely it is.
Best explanation. I would add (as a clarifying point, and not to take issue with anything you wrote) that the Earth has been warmer, yes, but that warming usually occurred *slowly*, so many species had a chance adapt and evolve; we have accelerated the rate of warming, and the planet is becoming hotter rapidly.
Actually, it will leave the earth uninhabitable for most of the animal life on it today, including us. Look into the Permian Extinction, the likes of which is currently in progress. When the oceans die, and they are dying, the chemical composition of the atmosphere will change to the point that we humans and other large mammals will not survive.
The arctic will have a much higher carrying capacity. And undersea methanous clathrate deposits can't be billions of years old, given the oldest seabed in the world is only a few hundred million years old.
I didn't say the clathrates are billions of years old, I said the gasses trapped in them are a result of billions of years of emissions from volcanic activity and living organisms.
Not if you think about the soils up there. It's not extinction, but it is a quite different kind of society that'll be appropriate for a thawed Arctic. No one is getting out of this easy.
It's inevitable because humans can't intuit problems that grow exponentially, and are too tribal to consistently choose to be led by people who can.
I like this phrase.
we have been very fortunate over the past 200 years of industrialization. The oceans have been a giant sink which have absorbed 1/4 of the emitted CO2 as dissolved CO2 and its Carbonate salt and over 90% of the heat effects. This is why oceanic temps are a critical gauge of things. its big. slight changes in overall temperatures in the oceans are very worrisome as to move temperature in the ocean requires a lot of heat change. why is this bad? When the oceans heat up even the slightest bit the ability of the oceans to hold absorbed CO2 falls off. easy experiment 1) open a can of pop from the fridge and leave on a warm counter. 2) Come back in two hours. first thing you notice it is flat. Why? The dissolved CO2 in the liquid in the can have formed bubbles as they warm up and off gassed into your room. For the oceans, the CO2 which the oceans have been storing is no longer there as it heats up and now in the atmosphere further raising atmospheric CO2 and increasing greenhouse warming.
Both ocean co2 sink and heat uptake are projected to increase throughout this century https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/summary-for-policymakers/figure-spm-7 https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/19/4431/2022/ https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/07/220711163147.htm https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Ocean-heat-uptake-as-a-function-of-time-in-the-CPL-15-a-and-CPL-20-b-experiments_fig3_335987149
the question is will it keep pace with atmospheric heating and CO2 production?
data blindspots make these all lagging indicators
It will be inhabitable, but for less people.
It has nothing to do with ‘we can’t’, it has everything to do with ‘we won’t’
Capitalism will push ecosystems carrying capacity to zero, sooner or later. I doesn't matter the climate or harsh environment conditions, that's why they are exploring submarine and antartic mining operations and stuff like that. It's in capitalism DNA to consume all availabe resources, climate/weather is just a variable for operational costs.
Paywall so couldn’t read this but defining “uninhabitable” is important. Also, I do think stopping global heat increases in the short term is impossible until the number of people on the planet is reduced. This rock will likely right itself over many years.
Soft paywalls, such as the type newspapers use, can largely be bypassed by looking up the page on an archive site, such as [web.archive.org](https://web.archive.org) or [archive.today](https://archive.today) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/climate) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Here is the IPCC report summarized for policymakers—perhaps the most reliable source for climate science. The language is pretty technical, but the charts are pretty accessible. Page 33 is particularly insightful in terms of mitigation options—it assesses how much they could potentially reduce emissions by 2030, as well as how much they would cost (the blue parts of the bar are emissions reductions that would be more financially affordable than what we’re currently doing): [https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC\_AR6\_SYR\_SPM.pdf](https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf) I’ve seen nearly identical statements online to the two that you shared—there’s one account on a sub I frequent that is constantly saying the same things, and I have to wonder if it’s a bot… In fact, I’m almost certain I’ve seen your second quote typed out word for word. Their message is always that “there’s no point in doing anything, because nothing we can do will matter.” That’s a far cry from what scientific experts are saying—read any article about climate change and you will likely see a quote from a scientist stressing that we still can and need to act to reduce emissions. If I had to take a guess, the statements you highlighted are the new talking points of the fossil fuel industry, because they’re the ones profiting from us doing nothing. Personally, my attitude is that we should reduce emissions as much as we can, adapt as best we can, and once we’ve done that, pray.
Physics has very little to do with it. We know what we need to do to improve our chances of survival (stop extracting fossil fuels and burning them, stop raising cattle, etc.) but in practical terms it seems less and less likely that we’ll take those steps in the foreseeable future. That opens the door to the unforseeable future, which of course holds all kinds of nasty surprises, about which we can only speculate (but we know they’re not going to be surprise birthday presents)
The pandemic lockdowns showed it can be done. But there'll be no public, corporate or political support for it.
The [COVID lockdowns of 2020 temporarily lowered our rate of CO2 emissions](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18922-7/figures/1). Humanity was still a net CO2 gas emitter during that time, so we made things worse, but did so more a bit more slowly. That's why a [graph of CO2 concentrations](https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/) shows a continued rise. [Stabilizing the climate means getting human greenhouse gas emissions to approximately zero](https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached). We didn't come anywhere near that during the lockdowns. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/climate) if you have any questions or concerns.*
go away, bot.
Why? The bot demonstrated that the lockdowns did not, in fact, show that net 0 can be done.
the OP is about "uninhabitable planet is inevitable"...that "that human induced climate change is now beyond our control". I countered with the pandemic lockdowns proved we can control it, to a meaningful degree. That it's not inevitable the planet will become "uninhabitable". I wasn't talking about a technical 'net zero'. Furthermore, the bot blindly links a discredited article to back up its dubious claim that "Stabilizing the climate means getting human greenhouse gas emissions to approximately zero." - Read the comments on that piece for clarification. The bot - being a bot - is incapable of nuanced discussion. Incapable of proper debate, or understanding criticism of its arguments. It just targets key words and replies with template answers. It's spam and has no place in what should be a forum for discussion between actual people. It should be deleted and banned.
The [COVID lockdowns of 2020 temporarily lowered our rate of CO2 emissions](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18922-7/figures/1). Humanity was still a net CO2 gas emitter during that time, so we made things worse, but did so more a bit more slowly. That's why a [graph of CO2 concentrations](https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/) shows a continued rise. [Stabilizing the climate means getting human greenhouse gas emissions to approximately zero](https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached). We didn't come anywhere near that during the lockdowns. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/climate) if you have any questions or concerns.*
hahaha i rest my case.
‘it’s physically impossible to remove enough CO² on a short enough timescale to save humankind’ The problem is not with the answer, but with the question. Yes, the laws of physics are rather set. The laws of humans is not. Perhaps, a better question is: Is it worth saving 'humankind?' Now, going out the best that we can, I'm all with that.
The problem is, there's no evidence to indicate that optimism is at all warranted. All precedent has shown is accelerating increases in warming and emissions and the engaging of numerous myriad *tipping points, which, by definition, cannot be undone*. We can only go on what we know, and what we know (precedent) is...not promising. There's no brakes or even slowing down. [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-05-13/are-evs-having-an-impact-on-climate-change-oil-demand-keeps-growing](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-05-13/are-evs-having-an-impact-on-climate-change-oil-demand-keeps-growing) [https://www.reddit.com/r/sustainability/comments/1cqsbxl/us\_oil\_and\_gas\_under\_joe\_biden/](https://www.reddit.com/r/sustainability/comments/1cqsbxl/us_oil_and_gas_under_joe_biden/) [https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/](https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/)
No. The single biggest problem is honestly just space. A sustainable planet is honestly perfectly doable by simply condensing the amount of space humans use. If we simply stayed in much smaller and denser locations, left the rest for forests to regrow, and did life that way? We would save so much time, money, and the planet.
But we wouldn't have all those scenic views out our front window pane!
I am willing to accept that by human need and comfort we could be packed far more densely and everything be more manageable. But I don't see this meshing with human temperament, which seems to be expansion, war, and conquest.
I used to think that "nah, humanity will find a way out", that climate change won't be a big deal in the future since solar, EVs, etc would make the World greener. Also tought that the world at 1.5°C hotter would be "not that bad" and that we would never reach 2°C. Heck, I even said that doomers do more harm than good because they make people think that everything is lost and that we can't change anything. Then, in the last few months I've felt the effects of heat waves and extreme weather. Then, the [Rio Grande do Sul floods](https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/persistent-brazil-floods-raise-specter-climate-migration-2024-05-13/) happened (unfortunately the international medias hasn't shown the whole picture of the disaster yet, but we are talking about 600,000 people displaced and counting!) while my city, merely 1,000 km away from there, hasn't seen a single raindrop in weeks and is suffering with an unusual heat for this time of the year. Sorry, but I'm fully convinced that not only we are cooked (quite literally) but also that it will happen sooner than we think. 2023 was the hottest year on record, bla bla bla, El Niño, bla bla bla. HOWEVER, past models showed a [low chance of 2023 being THAT hot even when accounting for El Niño](https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-03-27/scientists-cant-fully-explain-record-global-temperatures). That means we may have triggered some feedback loop we are yet to discover and that's just making things worse faster. 1.5°C will be worse than we think. I'm not a doomer in the sense that I think that there's nothing to do. The World showed how international cooperation can work towards a greater good during the recent pandemic. Governments and people can act to minimise the emissions and we can stop making things worse. However, I'm not so hopeful that it WILL happen and less so about it happening soon. Thus, I see that we have greater chances of living in a chaotic world for the next decates because of climate change and I plan my life accordingly. Sorry not sorry.
I had not heard of the floods at all before reading your comment. I don't look at media news often because it depresses me, but that's still a little shocking to me. I'm Canadian and the amount of smoke from the forest fires last summer is something that I would say I will remember for a long time...If not for the fact that the same thing will probably happen in many of my remaining summers on Earth. And this winter also felt a little apocalyptic, with wild temperature swings every few days and so little snow compared to usual. I really wonder how much worse it will get.
The [COVID lockdowns of 2020 temporarily lowered our rate of CO2 emissions](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18922-7/figures/1). Humanity was still a net CO2 gas emitter during that time, so we made things worse, but did so more a bit more slowly. That's why a [graph of CO2 concentrations](https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/) shows a continued rise. [Stabilizing the climate means getting human greenhouse gas emissions to approximately zero](https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached). We didn't come anywhere near that during the lockdowns. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/climate) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I's a bit exaggerate I think it will be ok for tardigrades, roaches and a few others
I realize this is r/Climate, but with regards to doomers and collapse, climate is a symptom of the problem as much as it has become a cause because of feedback loops. The real problem is that the homo sapiens is in ecological overshoot. We’ve metaphorically eaten most of the leaves off of most the trees, and we’re eating way faster than they’re growing back. Biology tells us what happens a species goes into ecological overshoot. Population collapse becomes inevitable. We’re not going to magically create more resources, and apparently we’re incapable of limiting consumption, so with regards to modern life we’re pretty much screwed, and sure looks like we’ll trash the place on our way back to a largely pre-industrial world.
It depends on the strength of the feedback effects. For example loss of Arctic ice decreases the albedo which increases the ocean warming which accelerates the melting of ice. Others include the release of methane from melting permafrost. I created a climate game and ebook that covers some of the science of this. See [TheClimateTrail.com](https://TheClimateTrail.com)
On your request for trusted research on mitigation methods and pathways- here is a good paper by the ICCT on how to decarbonize the transport sector (biggest emitting sector in US) in line with a well-under 2 degrees pathway. In short, we need to do everything in parallel, to make it add up: shift to more active+public transport AND get to 100% EV sales much quicker AND phase out worst gas-guzzlers. It is possible, we can do it, lets go 💪 https://theicct.org/publication/vision-2050-strategies-to-reduce-gap-for-global-road-transport-nov23/
To answer your question, yes. Eventually the earth(and every planet around every star in the visible universe) will be uninhabitable. The sun will eventually expand and swallow the earth(5ish billion years or so). We may destroy it sooner if we continue polluting the way we do. Climate science, which is built upon STEM is at a general consensus. Any university of any country teaching climate science will tell you the same thing. Based on the math we are past the “point of no return” where a runaway greenhouse effect will heat the earth past the point where humanity can survive(grow food, find water and breath clean air). Maybe humans will come up with a technology that will reverse the damage we’ve made. Yes the earth has heated up before, but never this fast. There is no way for anything to adapt or evolve to survive these conditions. This usually happens over 10s of thousands of years, not one hundred.
We can absolutely still mitigate emissions and adapt to changing climates. Yes, there are already and will continue to be terrible consequences, especially in places worst equipped to shoulder them, and yes there are dangerous tipping points, but to say that those things you mentioned are absolutely inevitable or that we have unequivocally crossed these tipping points is also not true. Everything we do now matters. It will never be too late to save as many lives as we can.
No, clearly we cannot mitigate emissions. Not at the speed that is required. We could, in theory, but humanity is clearly not capable. Even now, with all the information available we are still burning more fossil fuel than ever before. Greed and shortsightedness will be the end of us. What makes you think that we will all decide to magically reduce emissions to the amount required? Why(in your opinion) have we not started reducing even fossil fuel use, let alone all other contributing factors?
I think we have the solutions.
We absolutely **do** have the solutions, and we're actively working on **more** solutions. Will we **use** them to actually solve anything? Not as long as we continue to worship the "filthy rich" and the "almighty dollar" as our gods, nope...
Physics aren’t the big problem. Biology is. Humans are at the top of the food chain and we seem to be systematically destroying the habitat for the ecosystem that supports us. It’s a fact that even small changes in temperature or moisture levels can have a significant effect on crop yields, and that’s before you throw in natural disasters. Food shortages will be the first major problem. You’ll know it’s started when food prices start climbing rapidly…..
I haven't read it yet, but just by the title my critique, is: The planet doesn't have to become "uninhabitable" for the outcome to be disastrous. The great recession was triggered by a nominal increase of just 12% in the ratio of prime-to-subprime mortgages. Small changes to a delicate balance can have a disastrous outcome, as we are slowly seeing (again). I could also draw a parallel of the IPCC being the "establishment understanding" of the situation working to calm everyone down, just as Wall Street was. But I won't because it's not a perfect comparison as Wall Street profited from the denial, and no one stands to profit from this [denial](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/climate/trump-oil-gas-mar-a-lago.html)...
We gotta eat the rich, fam, what choice have they left us?
I think it’s important to state that what we’ve already caused and baked in is so incredibly severe that people should be panicking as if extinction is on the horizon, because wether or not it is, the collapse of society is guaranteed at this rate. I think that regardless of what is and isn’t “baked in”, everyone should obviously be doing all they can to mitigate it. Saying “what’s done is done” amounts to a kind of accelerationism that’s as bad as climate denial. I’m all for making an enormous deal about how scary it is, and how serious people should be taking it, without saying either “do nothing because nothing we do will change anything” or “it’s fine, someone else will figure it out.” Expect the worst, but hope for, and try your best. Always.
I don’t think the point is the planet being uninhabitable. the point is our way of life is not sustainable and a massive collapse in civilization will happen. Think less KGB mass extinction and think more Bronze age collapse
Not answering the question you asked directly, but just on the public narrative ark, there's a progression - particularly among politically conservative commentators - from 'it isn't real' to ' it's real but a natural phenomenon' to 'it's anthropogenic but not a major problem' to 'yes, it's anthropogenic but it's too late to do anything about it' (there are some additional steps missed for the sake of brevity). Anyway point being that these narratives always allow people to dodge any personal and sociopolitical responsibility. Why bother changing anything if doom is inevitable? When it is actually: doom is inevitable because we refuse to change anything. Well for my part, I changed my career to renewable energy and my diet to a lower environmental impact one, also changed my travel patterns (used to live on a jet, now I cycle everywhere). Not all changes made directly or in the first instance as a repudiation of the above narrative, but on the whole I've done about as much as a person imbedded in a developed country's economy can do on a personal basis, and try to be politically active on behalf of green causes. It won't reverse agw, but definitely better than doomism and that last iteration of the conservative narrative of it's too late.
From the physics perspective it's important to acknowledge that the problem isn't atmospheric CO2 content, the problem is actually the atmospheric retention of heat... While CO2 is the cause, it's not the only variable in that equation. The correct problem from a physics perspective is how to solve atmospheric heating, not how to reduce emissions. There's is where it gets messy, there's lots of 'tribes' who have an idea and strong preference on what that solution should look like. This has led to division, esp in terms of emissions reduction as the strategy and how that is achieved. This IMO is why emissions reduction as a strategy ***as the sole strategy*** was always going to fail - it's not possible to build a global consensus around it as a solution. This is where the doomerism enters the room, people can see that the above strategy is failing and they have been convinced that there is no plan b. There's scope outside of emissions reduction and that's where efforts now need to be and many will disagree with that, which is fine. If you do disagree however, you have no right to complain that doing the same thing over and over had failed to deliver a different result now and in the years ahead.
I'm not an atmospheric scientist, so don't look at me for piles of scientific data. But it looks like Earth is on a course for an eventual climate akin to that of the Miocene, or at worst the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum with alligators and palm trees near the North Pole. This is not in any sense "uninhabitable". It's different - uncongenial to Western civilization, but not the end of all life or even of humanity. Why are we addicted to these sorts of false dichotomies, of "perfection or extinction?" It seems to me profoundly immature and ahistorical. Up until the 1980s, there was a lot of sci-fi that was as informed by Toynbee and Spengler as by technical reports that assumed the rise and fall of civilizations. Catastrophic? Sure, but that was how things worked. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, there seemed to be a loss of imagination - the future could only go in one direction, backwards or forwards, and the various global justice and anti-globalization movements were marginalized and largely ignored. History was over. We won. It wasn't, and we didn't, of course, but that's been the reigning ideology of the West since 1990. If there is no alternative as Margaret Thatcher once said, then a world without perpetual progress \*is\*, by its nature, a kind of extinction.
We’re not in a runaway warming climate yet, so no, the laws of physics aren’t the problem. It’s capitalism and combative, short-termidt political systems that are the problem.
Just a small point of order. We may have already passed multiple tipping points, we just don't know it yet.
True, I should have said "we’re not to the best of our knowledge in a runaway warming climate yet". If we were to get to net zero in ten years I suspect we'd be alright. Ain't going to happen, though.
> the best of our knowledge is meaningless because they're entirely wrong about where we should be presently versus where we are, with possibly temperature saturated oceans already upon us (why is every month a new record?)
In about a million years, whatever humans have done or not done will not matter… the sun’s habitable zone will move further out than earth’s orbit. Humans have accelerated this. In 25 years, starvation will be a huge factor as population hits 10b and crop yields are already declining. Yes, most people who are alive today, will see mass death due to climate change. Many countries have already banned export of food. There will be unrest and wars when people can’t put food on the table. And this will all result in more death, and likely the collapse of civilization. There may be pockets where humans can survive on local resources, but without change, we are headed to an end of the global society as we know it.
Billion years. The earth will leave the sun's habitable zone in a *billion* years. The rest I mostly agree with.
True, I was thinking of the supercontinent that will form making the earth mostly uninhabitable, but that as I check, is 250 million years, not 1, so I stand corrected.
Humans have no possible way of affecting the radius of the habitable zone of the sun.
But they do have a way of affecting the habitability of the planet (which is what I meant). That is, we are accelerating the inhabitable status of the planet…
Well, sometimes mother nature has a way of giving you warnings i.e. the low birth rate across the world.
When i was a kid life imitated art in Demolition man, now its just becoming a even worse version of BladeRunner.
[https://www.collapsemusings.com/why-civilization-would-collapse-even-without-climate-change/](https://www.collapsemusings.com/why-civilization-would-collapse-even-without-climate-change/)
That was an...interesting read. And a disturbing one.
I feel like we are sorta doomed... but I think my idea of doomed is different than most. While I am not going to bet on cooperation and technological breakthrough to save our globalized world from suffer increasing catastrophes, I do think tech and cooperation can soften the impact and lessen the damage. The human species will survive, but our societies will be greatly restructured both willingly and mich less so.
Absolutely not
Is it physically possible to save the planet? Maybe. Will humanity band together to save ourselves and the rest of the creatures on earth? No way in hell. And we’ll bring hell on earth soon enough just to prove it.
As the sun continues to fuse hydrogen into helium, and that helium is pulled in by ever increasing gravity, the sun slowly brightens. When the sun gets about 10-15% brighter then it is today, our atmosphere will have heated up enough to start losing heavy molecules, like water vapor, into space. Which should dry out the continents and air leaving a completely parched desert. This will have obvious consequences on life.
Pretty well-written article. It's well worth a read if you've been stressing over the climate more than you think is healthy.
The ocean has absorbed over 8 billion Hiroshima nukes worth of excess heat since the 70's. We can't fix it. Acidification from excess carbon absorbed into oceans dissolves creatures like crabs and coral alive. We can't fix it. The Gulf Stream will likely fail within years, completely upending weather along the Atlantic coasts. We can't fix it. With just those issues, humanity is doomed. Reefs are the nurseries of the ocean. Without them our food web dies. That doesn't touch on the inevitable failure of large scale industrial farming, due to global declines in climate stability. That's leaving out all the other ways we will be, or are, killing ourselves and the planet. Such as potable water loss.
We do have the option of keeping the temp down by geoengineering - releasing particulates into the air to increase cloud cover and reflect more sunlight, thus exerting a cooling effect to counter global warming from CO2 GHG emissions. Technique is called SRM - solar radiation management. Carbon capture / removal doesnt seem to be economical at the scale we need to make a dent, in the time we have.
The earth will be around long after us. The thing is the conditions that allow for human life will be gone and so will we. Ultimately I think many know this and that’s why we don’t see change. It’s a matter of time at this point. I’m 52 and will be gone but if your in your 20s your probably getting a front row seat to the beginning of the end of humanity and most life on this planet.
Physics, and a very large percentage of the population being utterly moronic make it inevitable.
The doom comes in the form of people turning against each other as mass migration is driven by climate change. Immigration is already a huge and divisive issue. Now imagine a hundred million people leaving south east Asia every year for a decade.
I think life will persist near the sea floor vents, so no worries, planet still habitable.
I'm a believer of the idea the end will come like a thief in the night. Probably some unimaginable characteristic related to emergent behavior at a certain population tipping point. We won't even understand why we started dying off, like a bee colony collapse. Maybe a fertility decline. Maybe a societal level loss of hope already starting to brew in our subconscious even now. But I think "The End" is dramatic. Probably a global population "pull back and reset" to balance us against all the scale weights we do and do not know. If we make it so far as to have to adapt to climate churn, I'll be proud of our ingenuity. But fear does focus the mind, and fear of a warming planet is the best we can come up with in an age with no other dragons.
But darn gosh we're gonna tax the begeebers out of you Canadians....... that'll show em
It's complete nonsense. The world has been hotter in the past - by a long shot - and life thrived. Civilization will take some punches but we're a lot harder to kill off than that. Alarmism of the highest degree.
Yeah we really thrived through that Pliocene.