Shima Honnou posted:

I have prepared for climate change my whole life, by ensuring I never had aspirations or illusions of a future or anything to look forward to. I'm ready, are you??

Yinlock posted:

getting past the sheer existential despair is the roughest part of accepting just how bad climate change is gonna be, after that it's surprisingly easy to focus on making it survivable even if that's just a pipe dream

weast posted:

does anyone have that one quote from the last thread about how aerosols or something might have saved us from climate change being super hellworld already, so something that seemingly is just a good thing to reduce might doom us unintentionally, and also whatever we do to stop climate change we have to go all in on and whatever we start doing we can't stop?

vyelkin posted:

I did a post about this in a since-closed D&D thread once but I'd hate for all that work to go to waste.


Yes.

Let me put it this way, climate change is already, in the year 2018, causing natural disasters larger and more devastating than any we've seen before. Hurricane Harvey last year caused $125 billion of damage in one city. Hurricane Maria, also last year, caused $92 billion of damage in Puerto Rico, killed over 3,000 people, and made a significant amount of the island uninhabitable for anyone who considers the trappings of modern civilization to be essential for leading a good life. Here's a US chart showing that disasters causing at least a billion dollars in damage have been getting much more common over the last four decades. Climate scientists say that climate change is already making hurricanes, to take one example, more frequent, more severe, and more difficult to predict, and those trends will only get worse over time.

Those are individual disasters that affect specific places, but they affect us all because even for those of us not directly affected by living in a disaster area or having friends or family who do, we as a society face a choice every time something like this happens: we either choose to spend huge amounts of money rebuilding the devastated area, which is generally socialized cost through things like government spending, or we choose to basically abandon the devastated area as no longer livable. Over time, we either become poorer as a society by constantly rebuilding after extreme weather events, or by losing places that millions of people used to call home, thereby displacing them and destroying any wealth they had tied up in the affected area.

But beyond extreme weather events, climate change today, in 2018, is also a significant driver of chronic weather problems, like drought. Here's a handy blog post by a NASA scientist conveniently titled Climate change is already making droughts worse. In North America, this is making farming more difficult and meaning cities are starting to have to look into different, and more expensive, ways of obtaining water, like when El Paso yesterday announced it would become the first major US city to get its drinking water by retreating sewage, because the Rio Grande is drying up due to climate change.

But beyond the immediate impacts of making life a little more difficult and expensive, climate-change-induced or -exacerbated droughts are also a major cause of the migrant crisis that's a major cause of the developed world taking a hard right turn into fascism. The Syrian Civil War was in part caused by the most severe drought on record pushing farmers out of the countryside and into cities, where they were unemployed and angry. The Syrian Civil War was subsequently one of the main drivers of irregular migration to Europe, along with a series of other conflicts and insecurities along the edges of the Sahara Desert, which are also caused or exacerbated by droughts and desertification either caused or contributed to by climate change. Another major case that's been in the news recently are the "migrant caravans" of Central American migrants to the US, usually attributed to gang violence or poverty--but, as in these other cases, many of the people fleeing poverty or gang violence were impoverished or victimized by food insecurity caused by droughts and crop failures brought about by climate change.

These are just two factors that I've briefly discussed, extreme weather events and drought, but I hope I've made my point that already, in 2018, we are being negatively affected by climate change. There are a million other environmental factors beyond extreme weather events and drought that climate change is making worse, more extreme, or more unpredictable. Smarter people than me have written extremely extensive, detailed, and thorough reports for various national governments and international organizations saying what I've just said, and everyone ignores them because we don't want to believe it's true. The fact is that climate change is already making parts of our planet unlivable, to the point that millions of human beings are faced with the choice to either invest enormous amounts of resources continuing to live in unlivable places, or have to leave their homes and relocate. That relocation is already leading to enormous political and military conflict, and contributing to a rise in right-wing authoritarianism in the developed world as migrants leaving their homes try to move to wealthier countries, and we tell them no and militarize our borders.

This is already happening. In 10 or 20 years it will be worse in ways we can probably imagine, because they will be look like what we're already living through, only worse. We essentially have no way of knowing what the world will look like 40 or 50 years from now, but given the complete lack of meaningful political action to address these problems internationally due to the collective action problem, the obstinate refusal of countries like Canada to truly accept that carbon fuel cannot be the fuel of the future, and other national problems like the continued election of climate-change-denying conservatives in countries like the US, my educated guess is that the world will be a significantly worse place 40 or 50 years from now. Not because we'll stop inventing technology or smartphones or premium TV or any of the things we as wealthy developed country residents currently enjoy, but because the conditions that allow people around the world to enjoy those kinds of things in peace and security are already being undermined and the problem is accelerating. It won't happen all at once, which is why we're so bad at recognizing these problems coming from climate change. When food gets more expensive we won't even notice because it happens gradually. When the trickle of migrants coming to our borders grows to a flood we will blame it on other factors. When civil wars break out in other countries we will explain it as plucky little democrats fighting against some authoritarian bad guy rather than the result of years of climate-change-induced drought sparking conflict. Our brains are not good at dealing with chronic problems that slowly get worse over time and just make other problems worse instead of killing us directly, so we find other explanations that our short-termism can understand, and a few years later when climate scientists say the problem was caused or exacerbated by climate change we ignore it because we've already forgotten it was a problem in the first place.

Climate change is already here and is only getting worse because we aren't doing anything about it.

Sjs00 posted:

I can see it now. When the sky is a deep unhealthy shade of red and there isn't a cloud in sight the plants and animals rotting and trash piled high the last baby boomer will roll their station wagon into the last gas station and, mouth breathing tooth decaying meat breath in the high 100 degrees heat they will swipe their card and the machine will tell them to insert it into the chip reader lol

Streak posted:

Lol people ask me what I want to do when I'm retired and I keep telling them I don't really think it's going to matter by then and they don't get it

vyelkin posted:

Over time everything gets steadily more expensive and you start not being able to always buy whatever you want, either because it's now out of your price range or because there are actual shortages of things like coffee. Weather gets more severe and less predictable. People you know have their homes and livelihoods destroyed by extreme weather events and have to decide whether to rebuild or start over somewhere new with nothing. If you're unfortunate enough to live somewhere like the desert (lol Phoenix, Arizona) then it will become actually unaffordable to live there at all because you'll spend more on air conditioning than you make in income. Every summer you hear about hundreds of elderly people whose air conditioning broke and they died of heatstroke in their own home. Diseases that haven't been seen in your country for decades or centuries start to reappear, like malaria. Diseases that have never appeared in your country before, like Zika or Dengue, also start to appear. Mosquitoes seem to be the one insect that isn't dying out.

Insurance stops covering a lot of climate change-related damage, so as extreme weather events hit other parts of your country and people aren't able to rebuild where they lived, places like southern Florida get abandoned, not from some government plan, but from millions of people individually deciding to pack up and leave one day. The place where you live gets more crowded as internal migrants relocate only to find that life isn't any easier when they show up out of the blue with no job, no money, and no assets to sell. Your wages get cut at work because there are suddenly ten highly trained unemployed professionals who used to do your job in Miami, any of whom would gladly replace you. Your rent goes up even faster than usual because of all the population growth in your city.

The news is full of stories of weather destroying other parts of the world like Mozambique and Puerto Rico, and conflicts breaking out in areas hit by drought, famine, and disease. It's also full of stories about migrants trying to come to the developed world. It never mentions that the two things are connected, and never explores the fact that the migrants are moving because they can no longer live in their homes because their fields dried up, it didn't rain for ten years, and the desert swallowed their town. You notice the people around you getting more and more anxious about migration as their own incomes are getting stretched thinner and thinner and there are only ever more and more migrants. Electorates vote in more and more extreme right-wing figures who ban all immigration, militarize the borders, and implement ever-more draconian surveillance and monitoring of people inside the country as well. You're repeatedly told that if you're a natural-born citizen and not breaking any laws, you have nothing to fear.

Global supply chains start to break down as some regions of the world get less and less livable and some resources get either more difficult to extract and process, or get wiped out by climate change themselves, making prices rise even more and shortages hit even harder. As places start to see economic decline, people get restless and there are instances of mass unrest. On the news you see stories about mass demonstrations and massacres in random other places around the world. But here people are too busy working five gig economy jobs just to afford bread, they're too busy to protest. Governments get overthrown, countries descend into civil war, millions die in armed conflict, famine, and ensuing disease outbreaks. This further exacerbates the millions of people already trying to migrate to the less-affected developed world, but by this point our borders are so hardened that most of them die before they make it here. Deaths of hundreds or thousands of people trying to cross our borders across oceans and through deserts stop even making the news because they're so routine and we're too concerned with our own daily survival to worry about people we don't know.

What you do see on the news are feel-good stories about how a billionaire CEO now flies around in a solar-powered plane and he planted trees on his green roof. Meanwhile our cities are more choked with smog than ever, and the numbers keep getting higher. Fewer people are smoking than ever before, but lung cancer rates seem to be higher than ever. You get a particularly bad cough and you'd like to see a doctor about it, but they cut your benefits at work so you just hope it goes away on its own. The UN releases a report saying that we have three years to act if we want to avoid 8 degrees of warming, but by this point we've read so many reports saying we've already passed the tipping point that no one cares.

All our topsoil is vanishing and by this point even some people with jobs literally can't afford food. But the state is militarized enough that no one really thinks about protest except for the occasional spontaneous riot that doesn't accomplish anything long-term. Facial recognition software and ubiquitous surveillance and tracking means protesting is a one-way ticket to prison, if you aren't literally killed or maimed by the police breaking up the protest. And anyway, even attending a legal protest harms your social credit score and means you won't be able to get a loan the next time food prices spike and you can't afford enough to get through the week. Drug abuse, overdoses, and suicide are all rampant as people lose hope and decide to numb themselves or end it quickly rather than die slow, painful deaths. There are people literally starving to death in the streets and every summer you're pretty sure some of the homeless people lying on the sidewalk have died of heatstroke. Half the food you used to see in supermarkets is just plain gone, wiped out by disease or unable to grow where it used to or the supply chains that used to ship it in from halfway around the world have collapsed completely. The other half of the food is so expensive that you can only afford to buy the barest essentials. The wars on TV get worse as countries invade each other to get at the farmland that remains. Despite the police everywhere, law and order seems to be breaking down in your city, there are enormous waves of robberies, burglaries, home invasions, murders, as desperate people do whatever it takes to get through another day. The rich are comfortably secure in gated communities protected by private mercenaries with tanks and machine guns, who regularly use lethal force to defend their employers' property.

Eventually you die. If you're lucky it's in some extreme weather event and it's over quickly. If you're unlucky you starve to death because you lost your job and bread is too expensive. I hope you don't have kids because they still have a few more decades in this miserable hellhole, while civilization continues to collapse around them. They probably eventually die deaths even less pleasant than yours.

Some humans will survive, even in 15 degrees of warming. Our civilization won't.

Homeless Friend posted:

Addamere posted:

please be safe Ace of Flames and find peace in this hateful world

Trabisnikof posted:

Insanite posted:

Yes. It's incredible.

Also feelin' real about this:

vyelkin posted:

meanwhile in the UK the chancellor is asking the hard questions like "can we afford to save the planet?"

Gitro posted:

I'm excited for the variety of ways I could die due to climate change. Will it be:

Too hot
Not enough hot
No water
Oh no! Water!
No aminal
Too much of animal (wrong kind)
Killed for resources
Wind!

Other (discovery pending)

Oxxidation posted:

this is probably going to be a topper even by the standards of previous mass extinctions

every new bit of data tips the scale away from "humanity dies" and towards "all complex life dies, forever"

Truga posted:

yeah, the amount of time needed for the planet to fix this is probably going to be in millions of years, and then hundreds after poo poo gets "normal" again and life has time to start over. a fairly short time relative to earth's history, but in about 800 million years the sun's going to be large enough to evaporate the last drops of water left on the planet and life's gonna be gone well before that.

we had one chance to figure out tricky scifi physics and maybe survive post earth, and we spent it on making numbers in computer go up hell yeah

SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:

Because having your future stolen makes you angry.

Dick Valentine posted:

https://twitter.com/EcoSenseNow/status/1139229563655819264
https://twitter.com/EcoSenseNow/status/1141751260787249157
https://twitter.com/EcoSenseNow/status/1138177014882623489
https://twitter.com/EcoSenseNow/status/1137779581266489344
https://twitter.com/EcoSenseNow/status/1133576605379452928

everything is actually fine

phasmid posted:

Only scumbags like hot weather.

Shipon posted:

just do the bare minimum at work and collect a paycheck and come home and shitpost, we're all hosed anyway so we might as well goof off now

Pohl posted:

My favorite part is that the scientists withheld how bad things were gonna be because they didn't want to scare people away.

What is coming is way worse and is gonna happen way sooner than any of the studies predicted because they fudged the data and numbers so it wouldn't be too scary.

Lmao

Marx Headroom posted:

unlikely, they found mold growing on the outside of the ISS

Conspiratiorist posted:

The solution is not having kids.

No half measures.

Oxxidation posted:

letting the days go by
let the water drag me down

worse than it ever was
worse than it ever was
worse than it ever was
worse than it ever was

Modus Pwnens posted:

Climate Change: It is too late to leave

Rime posted:

I just drove from Dallas to Wichita Falls and there was roadkill every half mile to a mile. I wasn't even on an interstate.

That was more roadkill than I've seen in my 30 years in Canada to this point.

zegermans posted:

oh so now they WANT birds to save their crops

Anime Schoolgirl posted:

https://twitter.com/AlexCKaufman/status/1233185858439827457


why are all these people loving pedophiles

net work error posted:

Cool!
https://twitter.com/NOAA/status/1249713956748505088