Posted by Anon84 19 hours ago
In particular, they rate ≥50% mortality as Extreme and also rate warming by 3°C or more by 2050 as Extreme (this is relevant for the colorful severity/likelihood grids that are the focus of the paper) and somebody appears to have made the incorrect connection that an Extreme climate would cause Extreme mortality, and also by the time the Extreme climate is reached and not afterwards. Elsewhere, the paper mentions that "We have not shown an assessment for mortality in this illustration, as very limited research has been carried out on the potential for large-scale loss of life in relation to these interconnected risks on which to base an assessment."
Unfortunately, that makes the article title highly ironic.
But because you think that particular consequence is overstated in the article, you're suggesting that the article itself is a lie? The title refers to the lie that we still have more time and that we don't need to get to work immediately to address climate change. It's about the overall lackadaisical attitude toward the climate emergency.
You seem to be suggesting a dismissal of the article's core message.
So, are you suggesting that we actually have plenty of time to deal with climate change, and that things like "Net Zero by 2050" correctly convey the severity of the situation?
What is your assessment of the current year number of deaths attributable to climate change, and expected number of deaths at a 3°C above baseline global average temperature?
No, it's not reasonable. They're using the same label, but there's no evidence showing that.
Is this the standard of evidence we want to use to develop policies that will upend economies and impact the lives of billions of people? "It sounds about right"?
I believe the next stage is big ass batteries to soak up excess energy production for later use and to let us work with what we have today, both in generation and grid wiring. Residential and maybe commercial big-ass batteries could reduce the need to rewire buildings for higher energy devices.
This would reduce the overall use of fossil fuels and make it available for all the things necessary to preserve human life, while making a serious dent in slowing down climate change.
At the same time, we need to tout the environmental benefits of solar farms, such as increasing biodiversity, preserving soil moisture for agrivoltaics, and reducing the stress of climate change on livestock. These will also require big ass batteries for soaking up the excess production of these solar farms.
What's more we are living through an actual green revolution. Solar power and batteries have never been so cheap - and still promising to get cheaper and better with sodium ion batteries.
Another factor is that rich oil and gas people figured out they could just buy the media.
Who is this "media"? Is this the same "media" that Trump and his dullards claim is so corrupt and contrary to The Truth? Are you influenced by this "media"? I don't read The Guardian or Jacobin, but I'm occasionally exposed to their headlines and they are certainly reporting on climate change. Are they part of the "media"?
There is no monoculture "media" and to the extent there is, it is (in the US at least) overwhelmingly left-leaning. And ironically, when there were fewer outlets for information, those outlets (because they served such a large and diverse audience) hewed to a common sense/conventional wisdom understanding of the facts.
No is one controlling media. Maybe the CCP through TikTok steering.
This would have any meaning behind it if e.g. Jacobin had the same reach and viewership as Fox News. But it doesn't, so your entire argument rests on false assumptions.
in the US, it's Fox "News", and the other big networks - NBC, CBS, ABC, to a letter extent CNN, NYT, WaPo
look up the ownership of those networks. why do you think the Ellisons and Trump are trying so hard to get Paramount to take over Warner Bros after it already took over SkyDance?
It really doesn't. Climate change is a global problem. It would need a global solution, and everyone should know that that's beyond unlikely to appear... So the only thing you can do is reduce local pollution - which is meaningful in it's way (better quality of life), but has no long term impact on the climate.
Civilisation takes millennia of stable, plentiful resources to create, and a week without food for 30 percent of the population to utterly destroy.
I’d love to be wrong, if you disagree please say why.
All parties are incentivized against fixing this problem.
My guess is that we somehow end up geoengineering it with even more debt...
It seems to me that carbon capture technology plus renewables and nuclear + dream energy (fission) will be the future but we're probably not going to go off of fossil fuels much, which will necessitate in part the need to suck this stuff out of the atmosphere.
The tipping point is one bad summer. Photosynthesis stops at 40-45c (some plants like cactuses can do night processing based on stored energy, but staple crops don’t do that). If we have just one bad summer, billions will die. Civilization is perpetually just a week or two without food for 30 percent of the population away from complete collapse, and it takes thousands of years of stable conditions to recreate.
If we have a bad summer in the northern hemisphere, we could easily lose the capability to sequester carbon or manage planetary albedo in a meaningful way. Stopping emissions is not a solution at this point, we are already way too deep in self reinforcing methane loops for that to even be the primary factor in warming acceleration.
It’s an inconvenient truth, to be sure.
The average person may seem stupid but they are paying attention to the actions, and it all sounds like "I got mine, screw yours" to them.
People would rightly scratch their heads at such an over-the-top hypocrite. But surely, the man would be correct: domestic abuse is an important issue. And imagine a response from the peanut gallery? "I'm not going to stop beating my _own_ wife until that hypocrite gets his comeuppance!"
And people in developing countries complain that "why should beef or jet vacations be taxed more, those Westerners got to enjoy it, and now when we want to enjoy it, it's suddenly bad?".
And we rich Westerners think it's sacrifice to have to drive an EV or pay more for beef...
the amount of co2 that industries pollute and that various regulation would be able to change is multiple orders of magnitude compared to regular personal responsibility.
Imagine I want to be responsible by drinking soy milk but it's hidden in a corner of the supermarket.
Now imagine every supermarket prominently displays soy milk and cow milk is hidden in the corner. Seems easier to make the change, right? Many people will change automatically because they don't really care and just do what's easiest.
Other plant milks are 3x the price of the cow one because of economies of scale and subsidies. It's all a big joke.
So the soy yoghurt in Germany is called Alpro - the brand name. The dairy industry even fucked themselves over, because even their real yoghurt doesn't meet the strict definition and has to be called "mild yoghurt" instead.
However, this does not mean corporations aren't actively trying to influence and manipulate them, or that they don't exert pressure on politicians. Aren't Americans responsible as a whole for electing Donald Trump, for example?
Yea, they figured it just now, in the 2010s and 20s. During the 90's the thought just didn't occur to them...Makes complete sense.
Nothing discredits an idea so much like the proponents of it being total idiots.
But I do remember quite a bit about "pollution" and like general acute environmental issues. Smog in LA, the hole in the ozone, etc. Those were both more understandable and visible to your average person and more tractable. And there was the obvious hook about energy independence after the fairly recent (at that time) oil embargo and such.
The Green party (are they still around?) talked about more vague issues like ocean plastic and six pack wrappers on birds, but I don't think we made a ton of progress there, but then that was less consequential anyway.
I feel like we went down the worst timeline since then when it became very political and people burn gas for the hell of it, and others hate people who do so. Solar and nuclear (or hell even just solar) could give us clean, cheap energy abundance, but the people championing solar tend not to do it from the abundance perspective, but in tandem with cutting energy use which is a hard sell and not necessary anyway, in my opinion.
Both sat at the top of the news agenda for months! Not to mention years of features, long-form journalism, and documentaries. And then the denialist backlash began to kick off in the late 90s, which (initially) added to the media storm.
It isnt nice to talk about climate change because it's become extremely obvious that blaming the rich and the government is not working. The responsibility lies on the 8 billion individuals making excuses.
So the news isn't really covering it anymore because PEOPLE COMPLAIN.
I really hope that particular article was wrong, because the alternative is that we have to resort to geo engineering. Considering that the governments can't really coordinate in preventing this, I don't see them coordinate in fixing it, especially because the scale and costs of the "fixes" are astronomical.
How do you solve Global Warming? Nuclear Winter ...
I really hope this is not how we end up geo-engineering our way out of Climate change.
https://www.colorado.edu/today/2026/02/16/climate-change-med...
What we've seen is new renewable capacity carving out a tiny sliver in the energy mix, sometimes even being able to meet all new demand in the installation period, but we still have all the existing demand running on the old stack.
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix
This book talks about this: https://www.amazon.com/More-All-Consuming-History-Energy/dp/...
There's also the fact that global society is not a real time strategy game being managed by a well intentioned min-maxing actor driving compounding efficiency gains in resource usage. It's a free for all where everyone is paranoid that they'll be destroyed if they don't use every dirty trick they can (on a global geopolitical level), entrenched oligarchies permanently lobbying for their inefficient, destructive structures to continue (on a domestic economy level) and so on.
It's not looking good overall.
Are you talking about US media?
Seems like a delusion to me. Social justice is yet another banned topic under conservative corporate ownership.
Quick headline check:
- Trump claims to have invented a word that exists
- “Burger King’s New Whopper Strikes a Blow in Fast Food Wars”
- “US strikes $1.2bn deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects” (is this a social justice topic?)
- Attorney General confirmation political reporting
- school shooting reporting (is this social justice??)
There are different opinions and facts
It is very hopeful that renewables are being pursued and developed by China at least to some degree and have become economically attractive. That's the only feasible way to minimize the damage that's already been done.
My favorite counterexample is the ozone layer. When I was a kid, that was the Big Bad environmental concern. But we actually worked together on a global scale to fix it.
Broader climate change is a much bigger problem with stronger financial and political incentives, but in principle we've done it before.
Of course details matter and what I mentioned above is not a universal truth. It is an often observed pattern though.
Sure, the US cut spending since early '25, but even before those cuts, the US was less than 8% of global spending on climate intervention. But it's destructive: though we're based in the US, there is no commercial interest in the states and all our pipeline is outside the country.
Climate denialism is extremely destructive, but it's pretty much entirely a phenomenon of USA, Russia, Germany, Netherlands, France, UK, Canada, and Australia (crudely ranked by % of population), plus of course some gulf states. One of our three founders is an anthropologist and her field work has found that hardly anyone outside the top of the OECD has any doubt that the climate is changing and affecting them directly.
There's not enough happening but the derivative feels strongly positive.
We are working on methane emissions and methane concentrations in the atmosphere (we can destroy methane in gas streams with very high levels all the way down to ones below the current ambient environment (which is about 2 ppm).
We really need to stop using fossil fuels but sadly the drivers of that are not really related to pollution. And we need to clean up the atmospheric damage, which is more than the super pollutant methane, rather it’s primarily CO2. But methane will buy us more time.
Apart from climate repair, people are also trying mitigation strategies (e.g. moving away from low-lying places) but that’s a lot harder than it sounds for psychological and sociological reasons.
Also people are just trying to address the heating problems directly, mainly by changing the earth’s albedo or putting up an umbrella at L1. Nobody really has any idea of the consequences of such approaches even if they were viable, but they are pretty dangerous from both the physics and again sociological factors. And it doesn’t address the underlying problems.
The climate change part raises some good points, but why gourds?
In my view there is no credible future in which the world will become carbon neutral in 1 or even 10 years. It just ain't happening. This is one of those problems where the train is already running down the hill, and we need to engineer a way to catch it. We cannot stop it anymore.
> In my view there is no credible future in which the world will become carbon neutral in 1 or even 10 years. It just ain't happening.
So we're going to skip becoming carbon neutral and go straight to carbon negative, because...magic, I guess?
Yes, when the effects on the environments are so bad that there can be no denying anymore because they affect everyday life of almost all people.
I am not saying this is a good option. I am saying that I don't see an alternative to get a world wide mobilization. Do you see China and the US becoming carbon neutral in the next 10 year?
The annoying "magic" dig was unnecessary. With (clean) energy abundance you can indeed capture enough CO2 to make a world wide impact.
I can't reconcile 2 things here. The effects will be so bad, but at the same time we will have energy abundance to go beyond carbon neutral and carbon negative. Have you ever lived in a country with famine or where energy/water is only available for few hours a day?
Do you think such country has a capability to have energy abundance for carbon storage.
> The annoying "magic" dig was unnecessary.
I'll decide what's necessary in my comments, thank you very much. Unless you want to get responses like "your entire comment wasn't necessary", to which I will not stoop to.
> With (clean) energy abundance you can indeed capture enough CO2 to make a world wide impact.
I've yet to see how that is possible from your comment. Maybe it is "annoying" to you to provide some arguments, but that's how discussions work between adults.
It’s at the point where I wish it were solvable, but I don’t believe it is, so I can’t afford to think about it. Maybe people better than me can, and good luck to them.
The big, meaningful wins come from things like stopping the use of coal, not signing-off on new oil and gas exploration, tax-incentives and disincentives, grid work, fining polluters.
We instinctively frame this as an individual problem, the cynic might say we've been encouraged to, but the reality is that whether or not you fly this summer has precisely dick-all impact globally. It's the actions of our governments that count.
And those boats make a lot less of an impact than all those trucks driving everything across land.
Wise choices are needed.
Our buying habits empowered the type of company that wants to put AI into everything. Whether they continue to do so or not will also depend on our buying habits going forward.
It is all about individual action. And then the emergence from that to what amounts to the multi-pronged solutions that are needed to address a wicked problem. Like create the "big meaningful wins" you mention. There is no mailbox where you drop off "stop the use of coal", and it happens, neither is there a magic button. A complicating factor is that we are not able to see how our small individual actions contribute to solving the wicked problems, and we are not able to coordinate them at scale.
You can keep telling people to avoid flying and live a life of low carbon footprint, but if the issue is much more systematic, economical and technological, it will just become a distraction and make people dislike you (and the cause).
You and all your friends could install solar and batteries and drive EVs and all the energy consumption for your house, cooking, and travel could be totally green and renewable. That's great! But in the US in 2025, 63% of energy consumption is commercial+industrial [1].
National policies need to be set to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation through clean alternatives, subsidies, regulation, and probably treaties. If you can make green cheaper and/or a better product functionally, you don't have to convince people.
[1] <https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-electricity.php>
[2] <https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions>
[3] <https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/deforestation-rates-by-country>Most people dont know covid hasnt disappeared. It keeps evolving and there are strains out there still causing issues. But thanks to the attention economy dynamics, all sorts of random people were acting like they were virologists, epidemiologists, microbiologists at its peak. They have all disappeared ie shifted focus to whatever else. Meanwhile the ecosystem and infra dedicated to keep track of this stuff chuggs along keeping the lights on. All am saying is there is no reason to keep everyone in a freaked out state.
Owning an unnecessary carnivorous animal is rather bad news from a CO2 perspective. A dog can be responsible for higher CO2 emissions than a car.
https://impact.ed.ac.uk/research/climate-environmental-crisi...
https://www.zerosmart.co.uk/post/the-average-carbon-footprin...
(Que outrage from pet owners and people suggesting I'm a crazy vegan.... I'm most certainly not vegan or veggie!)
- Most kibble's ingredients are not naturals
- Most of the kibble's flesh comes from a non-natural production
- Your pet health (and your own health) require some "nutrients" instead of "food types"
PS: price-wise they tends to be in the premium range. If your cat already has allergies and special kibbles for that, vegan kibbles are in the same price range and are particularly good for that condition.
> If you have data that supports this assertion, show it.
Aside personal anecdotic evidences of cats thriving after +10 years of vegetal feed, here's some:
> Considering these results overall, cats fed vegan diets tended to be healthier than cats fed meat-based diets. This trend was clear and consistent. These results largely concur with previous, similar studies
> In most cases differences between dietary groups were not statistically significant
[2023, 127 cats in the vegetal group] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourn...
I admit that's not much, but If you think about it there's no reason a carnivore may not live healthy if provided the right nutrients, whatever the sources. Those nutrients are already well studied -especially for one of the two most common pet- and generously added in kibble because the base is often poorly balanced.
Political change is needed to achieve any of this. Changing your individual behavior or even the individual behavior of everyone you know – while certainly not wrong! – won’t solve this.
This is like trying to abolish slavery in 19th century US by not owning slaves and trying your very best to not buy anything that involves slave labor … laudable, but not a way to abolish slavery.
The interaction between individual behavior changes and political changes is interesting and to my mind where lots of interesting stuff happens. I’m not 100% convinced that politics is always downstream from culture and culture is downstream from individual behavior changes but I do agree that there is an interesting interaction happening that’s worth looking at and addressing.
The abolitionist in isolation certainly will not be able to abolish slavery, however their individual behavior might contribute to an atmosphere where slavery is ostracized and seen as more obviously evil by more people, thus making it easier for politicians to make political decisions that ultimately lead to the abolition of slavery.
I think that is why it is always so important for me to point out that it is certainly never wrong to individually behave in a way the limits your own individual contribution to climate change. I mostly have a problem when that‘s the end or even the main focus of it. Climate protection to my mind is most effective when it is tightly coupled to clear political demands. Too often individual behavior changes are used as action terminators. My impression is that individual action is often presented (as here) as a complete solution to climate change when it is anything but.