We were supposed to hit peak emissions. Why won’t they stop rising?
We were supposed to hit peak emissions. Why won’t they stop rising?
Greenhouse gas emissions are higher than ever as key leaders threaten to walk away from this year’s UN climate talks.
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It's only going to take a few more years as hot as the last two, for the ice mass at the poles to be depleted enough that the Earth will be absorbing more heat from the sun than it reflects.
This is called the Blue Ocean Event and it will set off the Clathrate Gun.
Once those happen (and they're going to, soon) the planet is quite literally going to be cooked in it's own atmosphere. Not much survives being cooked.
And while we're on the topic of apocalyptic and yet fully foreseen disasters that most people are still somehow oblivious to:
Did you know that we're going to be 40% over capacity on fresh water globally by 2030?
And that when this drought reduces humanity's numbers by several billion (and if the BOE doesn't happen first), the rest of us are still going to starve to death anyway, because 90% of top soil globally is at risk of depletion by 2050.
You might want to look all those things up, and maybe book a therapy appointment or something.
I hear your concerns, man. But a cursory look at the current science behind how we describe things like BOE and Clathrate Gun don’t leave us with mere years between now and instant hotpot catastrophe.
I don’t think it’s useful (if your goal is to promote the mitigation of these events and a livable world for future generations) to catastrophise at that pitch and make it sound like we’re fucked.
We’re not fucked. Things are going to get a lot harder. A lot harder. Much badness. But we’re not fucked. There’s room to work here. And we need to start doing a LOT of work without making it sound like starting wouldn’t do us any good.
I get that you have hope, but magical thinking isn't going to fix this unless you are literally capable of magic or you have a time machine powered by positive thoughts or something.
We are already globally over capacity on fresh water. Crops are already failing. The earth is already at heat storage capacity. Carbon emissions are still rising. Population numbers are still rising. Capitalist industry is still posting record profits.
Most people won't even consider a vegan diet and campaigning for community gardens and bike lanes isn't going to magically increase the heat storage capacity of the oceans.
So I am genuinely asking you, mitigation of resourse depletion, works how? Mitigation of thermodynamics works how?
What type of hard work do you think can fix this?
Accusing me of magical thinking and then elaborating on or reiterating your point sort of closes the door on this discussion.
I could copy and paste a bunch of stuff, add a bunch of links. I don’t think it would bring us closer.
The scientific consensus (as I understand it and you’ve yet to convince me otherwise) is that global freshwater supplies are unevenly distributed but far from depleting; crop failures are regional and gradually being mitigated by advances in agriculture; oceans can still continue absorbing heat with severe ecosystem impacts, but there isn’t any reason to use language like “full capacity” limits unless you’re misrepresenting the facts to scare people; population growth is slowing, with consumption patterns, not numbers, driving resource strains.
I want to reiterate: you are not helping the issue by telling people the end is nigh. You’re also not being honest, so long as you’re claiming to have kept abreast of the way experts in these fields are talking.
Define 'not helping'?
Burying your head in the sand thinking this polycrisis is salvageable, is making things worse for everyone.
There is no future. Fantasies about having a bunch of grandkids in socialist enclaves of community gardens, or whatever, is hopium propaganda. Each new person created for this future you keep talking about, is adding a truly huge amount of carbon, heat and pollution to the planet.
Talking about how bad the polycrisis is, is hopefully getting through to enough people and making them less likely to procreate on a dying planet.
Less children born = less resources depleted and less carbon and heat speeding shit up = fewer dying children and more time to come up with physics defying magic to solve entropy and restore our planet.
(Or idk, god or aliens or something equally as unlikely saves us. Surviving this is not my fantasy and you should pick something that appeals to you.)
People like you are why we never stood a chance. Our species deserves this timeline.