It's difficult for humans to comprehend the scale of what it would take to stop the planet from heating up. There are 100+ years of extraction of massive quantities of sequestered carbon from the Earth's crust and burning it now baked into the system, with an approximate 15-year lag on observed atmospheric and ocean temperature increases i.e. the temperatures we are currently seeing are those caused by emissions up to around 2011. Since then, carbon emissions have increased, not decreased, so we have a minimum of 15 more years of temperature rises to come.
As a though experiment, ask people if it would be possible for humans to prevent the tides coming in and out each day. Mostly you will be laughed at. Yet the same people usually think that preventing the Earth from heating up, which is a problem on a similar scale, can be achieved with a bit of recycling, eating less meat and cycling to work.
This single graph [1] is enough to demonstrate that 'solving' climate change is beyond the scale of human capabilities.
I don't follow you. You say that the heating up is caused by "100+ years of extraction of massive quantities of sequestered carbon from the Earth's crust and burning it now baked into the system" but at the same time you say humans, who did the extraction and burning for 100+ years, cannot stop doing it? I mean, reverting the temperature to pre-industrial level it's not going to happen soon in any case, but at least stopping increasing it constantly IT IS a human-achievable goal, by definition.
> Yet the same people usually think that preventing the Earth from heating up, which is a problem on a similar scale, can be achieved with a bit of recycling, eating less meat and cycling to work.
No this is propaganda that fossil fuel companies have successfully imposed on us, that it's the consumers' fault when a large part of the pollution comes from the industrial side. But consumers have leverage in regards to industries - if they stop buying meat, the polluting meat industry would decrease and help solve this problem.
Also what do you suggest? It seems that you are implying that because we can't stop it now, we don't need to focus on the problem and can let it grow even higher?
It’s really not, lots of people have been doing this work for a long time, if you want to understand what it’s going to take you can start here: https://drawdown.org/
The oceans warmed up by half a degree celsius in only 5 years. Everybody talks about air temperature, but the amount of energy that gets stored in the oceans is simply unimaginable. Until now, the oceans have been a great heat buffer, but I fear that this might come to an end.
This. I have, lying around unpublished, a few science fiction novels that I wrote where I assumed we actually did everything realistically needed to stop climate change. Like, not the deal "we make some solar panels but keep all the industries," but the real thing: "we take down the industries, we promote degrowth, we embrace and promote a proper demographic collapse, we shame meat eaters, we put youth into environmental enforcement militias, and we change global culture to embrace all of that."
It's a world that has nothing to do with this one. Of course deceiving ourselves with plastic straws is easier.
I agree in principal, but what is it with the plastic straws thing?
That was never about climate change that I am aware of. It was about pollution, same with plastic bags.
Plastic is a curse on the environment, especially the single use plastic that goes directly in the bin and into landfill or the oceans. Eventually it ends up in the food chain as microplatics.
Do we not want to reduce plastic pollution now? OK, maybe straws are fraction of the plastic pollution created, but surely every little bit helps?
People moan because it is a regular minor incovience to their life. If society can't get over something so trivial we are fucked.
People moan because it’s empty corporate misdirection that misplaces and deflects blame from the actual problem. More than half the plastic in the sea is industrial fishing refuse but sure, the straw in your smoothie is the problem.
I think people just don't like change, and the minor inconvenience turns it into something to moan about. Along with it being on trend to be cynical about everything.
If we just finger point nothing gets done. Yes, industrial fishing destroys the oceans in more ways that one, but that is a global problem, and global consensus on anything is in short supply at the moment.
Probably the best thing to do in the case of fishing waste is to stop eating fish (or pick the source very carefully). That might be an inconvenience as well though...
Well, it does. Which is the problem. We essentially have three choices: one , we walk the knife edge which is our current-day thinking, where we hope that we somehow enable some magical thing--in the future, always in the future--that solves climate change without making life even a little worse for anybody. Two, we do nothing and adapt to climate change however it comes. Three: we do something unpleasant. Four is "go and make colonies in space" but for most folk that's the same as three.
I mean, the most likely outcome is that we vaporize 80% of humanity in a nuclear war that lasts a few minutes, and then global temperatures end up cooler for a decade thanks to nuclear winter. I guess that falls under "we do something unpleasant", but it's unpleasant in the sense of being life-ending for a majority of humanity and then civilization-destroying for the remainder.
I hope the evil genius that came up with the idea of making young republican-voting libertarians so angry about plastic straws got a bonus.
Judging by these threads he's pretty much singlehandedly destroyed any attempt to move humanity to cheaper, cleaner, safer, inexhaustible energy supplies.
I don't think it was a republican the one who "destroyed... inexhaustible energy supplies". It was well-meaning environmentalists in Europe who didn't bother with math nor science when they demanded to take down nuclear power and to buy gas from Russia. They were raised in the "end of history" culture of the nineties that was a little too cheerful, but busy shifting manufacture to Asia, and it favored more humanities in schools in this part of the world, in itself not a bad thing, but to the detriment of exact and logical thinking. Maybe all of it made our thinking an easy prey of the people selling the oil and the gas.
Republican or German butterflies (as in "butterfly effect") should not be blamed when they start a big scale avalanche on loose snow.
Yes good point, the evil genius who convinced republican-voting libertarians to irrationally love nuclear power and so nurse an unquenchable grudge against environmentalists and renewables should get a runners up medal in terms of how much damage he's done to the planet.
We have much more than 15 more years of temperature rises to come. It's not like we reached net zero in 2026 or have a plausible plan to reach that anytime soon. Net zero is probably another few decades away.
The point is that even if we did get to net zero today heating would continue to rise for another 15 years. That's what the lag is. Whenever we get there, add 15 years.
True, but not much of an issue I think. I'd assume we reach net zero very gradually and fifteen years before net zero will be pretty close to zero already. But oh well, first we need a clear downward trend of global emission.
As a though experiment, ask people if it would be possible for humans to prevent the tides coming in and out each day. Mostly you will be laughed at. Yet the same people usually think that preventing the Earth from heating up, which is a problem on a similar scale, can be achieved with a bit of recycling, eating less meat and cycling to work.
This single graph [1] is enough to demonstrate that 'solving' climate change is beyond the scale of human capabilities.
[1] https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=world2