Consistently every year we see news of scientists saying that climate change is going faster than expected. That there is more methane trapped in the permafrost than expected[1], that the models the IPCC used didn't take into account such and such thing and so the next results are going to be closer to reality[2], that the cooling effect of aerosols is much greater than expected[3], etc.
At this point I just assume we are pretty much fucked. Even if we reached zero emissions today we'd still be suffering the consequences of climate change for centuries.
A complex system such as the climate (a huge understatement) is full of non linear of feedback loops that we don’t understand or are even aware of. It’s very hard to model such a system accurately.
Chances are humans will be a blip after all? It’s amazing to me that we humans usually wait till the shit hits the fan before we do something about it. It must be some kind of evolutionary advantage inducing strategy in our behavior.
> A complex system such as the climate (a huge understatement) is full of non linear of feedback loops that we don’t understand or are even aware of. It’s very hard to model such a system accurately.
I agree on principle, but OTOH you have the IPCC working by consensus and being too conservative in their conclusions. Also working with data that is years old since their process is slow.
For example, we've known about feedbacks for a very long time.
> Mario Molina, who shared the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1995 for his work on depletion of the ozone layer, said: “The IPCC report demonstrates that it is still possible to keep the climate relatively safe, provided we muster an unprecedented level of cooperation, extraordinary speed and heroic scale of action. But even with its description of the increasing impacts that lie ahead, the IPCC understates a key risk: that self-reinforcing feedback loops could push the climate system into chaos before we have time to tame our energy system, and the other sources of climate pollution.”
Be a vegetarian, ride your bike or walk to work, and live in a high-efficiency apartment in the city using solar and wind-generated electricity. Have 2 or fewer kids. Take holidays via train. Buy less single use crap.
Bonus! Give everyone 6 months holiday a year because humanity has more crap than it's ever needed but not enough time.
I mean, how much lower is that? I wouldn't mind it.
1. is not poverty though, and it is a moral decision if we chose collectively. Remember, billionaires are on average not happier than your average citizen. The people of many African countries are no less happy in aggregate than your average american. So why would lowering our collective level of consumption be immoral, if it did not lower our level of happiness?
We need to stop assuming that our current level of wealth is somehow the apex of progress: it categorically is not
Not having kids is probably the biggest contribution one can do for the environment, specially on countries with very high emissions per capita such as the US.
No worries, it's self regulating. No need to not have kids. I have a shimp colony in an aquarium. It only grows as much as the food source allows it to.
It would probably get crowded and quite hot in the future, but we'll manage without eugenics and not having kids, or having just one kid, which was tried before in China and was a failure.
Try feeding your shrimp with algae wafers, get them to reproduce a lot, then stop feeding them. Sure, population will downregulate to sustainable levels again, but individual shrimp will wiggle some choice words at you with their whiskers, while they are starving to death and are being consumed by their friends and family.
One thing I always wonder about is that people claim that solving climate change requires us to go back to the middle ages. This isn't correct at all. Electric cars exist. Cheap renewables exist. As we invest more into reducing CO2 emissions we gain more headroom for further inventions that make us independent from fossil fuels. The problem is that we don't make enough of these investments. Trump decided to support coal instead and Germany slowed down it's expansion of renewables.
At this point I just assume we are pretty much fucked. Even if we reached zero emissions today we'd still be suffering the consequences of climate change for centuries.
[1] https://phys.org/news/2018-03-permafrost-methane.html
[2] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/new-climate-models-p...
[3] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6427/eaav0566