I Study Climate Change. The Data Is Telling Us Something New.

Positive feedback loops, how do they work?

We've known about this for decades. An example: heating causes permafrost to melt releasing CO2 and methane, which cause more heat to be trapped, which melts more permafrost, which releases more green house gasses, etc.

Positive feedback loops tend to be very unstable, and can lead to runaway situations.

As much as this news disturbs me .... the thing that disturbs me most is that most of the world will ignore it.

Humanity won't do anything about any of this until millions die and mass migrations start happening due to extreme weather events.

After reading headline: Thank goodness!

After reading article: Fuck!

These threads are such a shit show. No one reads the article and then just has the conversation they want to have, other people who didn’t read the article think they’re summarizing it, and everyone walks away dumber.

We've discovered the breaking point of paradise. Hope the next sentient species is a little less selfish.

Beginning to think we're going to hit 1.6c next year, not 2050.

Heating is accelerating. IF we stop adding greenhouse gases to the air, the heating should stop. It won't go back down without removing massive amounts of CO2, though.

I just hope the fever burns hot and long enough to burn out our species thoroughly.

Earth life is hearty, Earth has been through mass extinction events worse than the human macro-cancer one it's experiencing now. Once the problem clears, creatures can evolve and spread back into every landmass, crevice, and ocean.

As long as we're gone, Earth can and will restore itself to its former bountiful glory. A beautiful collection of entire ecosystems of flora and fauna just floating around the sun living their best lives in the cycle of life.

I have ever growing hope that Earth will thrive once again. Humans can't learn though. We forget the most hard fought lessons in in a single generation if not less, even in the digital age. Germany is already getting its Nazi groove back, that didn't take long. As long as we're still here to claim this planet as our species' private property, Earth's biome will be threatened.

And let's not pretend we even care about ourselves. Go to an Amazon warehouse or or a tent city or an active warzone and then tell me how much humans care about their own species in practice.

No. What's happening is right, and that's poetic, humanity going out by unintentionally doing the right thing for our home, long-term, by our own hands. We dumb lucked our way into accidentally living up to our empty rhetoric about ourselves and removed our broken line of math from the Earth equation.

Hold on mom, homeostasis is coming!