Posted by Anon84 20 hours ago
This time we have no more time but 25 years ago when we had no more time it was true?
Or we've never had more time?
In that sense it is never to late. We can always do something to limit the damage. It’s just that it gets harder and harder and some damage becomes irreversible at a certain point.
Had we done more 25 years ago it would all have been cheaper, easier and led to less damage overall. That doesn’t mean doing something now is suddenly not worth it.
With respect to human lives it could mean the difference between tens of millions of deaths and billions of deaths. With respect to wildlife it could be the difference between losing 10–20% of the planet's species in the Holocene extinction versus 40% or more as per the IPCC. With respect to migration it could mean the difference between levels that are painful versus globally destabilizing. With respect to geoengineering it could mean that we have significantly more time to refine the technologies before they're inevitably deployed.
It’s just a sliding death scale, not a binary one. Sure, there might be steps, it might not all be linear, but still: doesn’t mean at some point doing something is pointless.
its always a problem and its slow moving enough and cumulative enough that it will always be better to fix it sooner but the real dangers are many years off.
when the jet stream collapses overnight then we'll be forced to deal with it
No call to action, no recommendations in what to do about it. It’s basically insinuating that we, the regular people, are the responsible.
As there in-lies the problem, and it makes me furious. The onus to engineer our way out of a climate catastrophe is not on the regular people. The onus is on the people who engineered is into this problem. Government, industry, politicians, scientists, literal engineers.
If this is really as urgent they say it is, then why aren’t they acting faster to retool our infrastructure? Joe Schmoe doesn’t have the ability to build more electric cars. He can’t go out and build more nuclear power plants, or build solar farms.
The problem here is every time you read an article like this you’re left feeling guilty. We’re told we’re the problem. Joe Rogan (and others) are the problem. Not the people who actually got us into this situation. The energy here is so misguided. It’s infuriating.
I love you Adam McKay and your art, but us normal folks are just living life, with the tools & systems that were engineered for us by other people. Stop telling us we’re the problem.
>It’s basically insinuating that we, the regular people, are the responsible.
the article:
>Like all grand lies, “we have more time” takes many different forms, often focus-grouped. [...] There are the queries of “What’s your carbon footprint?,” as if individual people with plastic bags or straws were the problem and not gigantic multinational corporations.
So Adam isn’t directly saying normal people are the problem, he does apparently believe it’s on the mega-corps, politicians, media, etc. But the end result is kind of the same.
Okay fine, maybe grifters and liars in politics and media are subduing the population into caring less about climate change. I don’t really agree with it, but let’s accept it for arguments sake. Okay now what? The thesis here is that nothing is changing because not enough people believe (even though he admits a small minority of people deny climate science), or not enough people are speaking up loudly about it.
So back where we started. Whether in our own accord, or because the media is manipulating us, he believes the crux of the problem is not enough people are getting loud and angry about climate change.
I would argue it’s more likely we’re entering into a period of “climate fatigue”. We’ve been bludgeoned over the head & brow beaten about climate change for so long, and’s seen little to no change in the systems at scale that are at the root, we’re all exhausted.
The main thrust of the article is that the attention to the uncomfortable issue of climate change has been replaced with noise about everything else and comfortable lies about things being fine, and that the drop in attention correlates strongly with climate change worsening as such making the case that even just bringing more attention back to the issue could help prevent it.
It also lies with graphs in a way that I just hate -- we have surface temperature charts that show growth trends going all the way back to ... 2024. Please. This page from wikipedia shows a much longer range with a lot more context: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature..., and reasonable qualifiers on the methods used to go back.
Useful proposals always welcomed, ideally ones that in a game theoretic sense do not reward defection and are realistic about the economics of releasing more CO2 as part of power production, but this essay isn't it.
This is extremely misleading. The "remarkably stable" climate didn't bring the world's population up to 8 billion, it was abundant energy from fossil fuels (7 out of 8 of all of the humans that have ever lived have done so in the industrial era). The Holocene isn't some serene stable climate period - there are still natural disasters at about the same rate they have been occurring throughout the past 11k years - but the difference is that we're much less likely to be killed by them due to abundant energy and technology. The transition from the Pleistocene into the Holocene definitely made life easier, mostly because of the natural warming.
Collapsing human-optimum climate, a temporary state Earth entered about 15 thousand years ago and made modern civilization possible.
The truly sad thing about it all is not the damage to some abstract "environment". The fact remains that we had an Eden-like planet for a few thousand years and completely and utterly wrecked it to maximize the "wealth" of a few generations of elites.
In order to not cause chaos, they lie (by denying climate change, sowing FUD) or ensure the issue isn't mentioned/covered (by owning media, self-censorship). "Keep calm, everything is going extremely well."
I believe Earth isn't badly off with a lot less humans, I just don't like the distribution of survivorship isn't going to be random. Survivorship bias is going to contain heroic stories, but in the end a lot of people without power/money are going to take the shortest straw. And, that wasn't necessary.
The track Extrawelt - Phoebe has an excellent quote on the matter. Paraphrased:
> "We would be the first lifeform that wipe itself out. But what is unique is we did it knowingly. Why didn't we save ourselves from [...]? Is the answer, we weren’t sure if we were worth saving?"
- Yeah some govts reduce carbon emissions, but others don't care (china) or can't afford to focus on that (developing economies).
- Climate activists will continue to act like we're to literally ruin the world (this is stupid). Climate change deniers will say temperature changes are just cyclical (also stupid).
- On a global macro scale, fossil fuels continue to be consumed as long as it makes sense economically
- Solar eventually gets cheap enough to begin to truly displace fossil fuels. EVs also go mainstream. Both happening now.
- In the end... life will just go on as we just naturally move up the tech tree and fossil fuels become an ever smaller part of the energy mix
Or just a rogue country that's being hit by the crisis more than others
If the SO2 brings about destruction sooner, I'm of the camp that "well, we were destined for death anyway...".
Possible unintended side effects is better than "everyone dies".
Ten years ago, I was saying we should experiment with it on a small scale so that if it does become necessary, we're not shooting blind, but even then the doomers were opposed because of "risks". You know what else has risks? Unmitigated climate change!
