The world has experienced its hottest day on record, according to meteorologists.
The average global temperature reached 17.01C (62.62F) on Monday, according to the US National Centres for Environmental Prediction.
The figure surpasses the previous record of 16.92C (62.46F) - set back in August 2016.
I used to think the more apparent and devastating outcomes of climate change were bound to hit long after I passed away, but now I’m not so sure. Local storms are becoming more and more serious with every passing year, each summer is less bearable than the last and the nearby forests are burning down for the 2nd summer in a row. We are definitely speedrunning this shit.
Most of the climate change predictions I’ve heard in my lifetime have talked about stuff that would happen by 2050 or 2100. It’s always been bullshit, just a way of pushing out the consequences beyond a timeframe we can actually conceive of effectively. In reality this shit is already hitting us and accelerating hard.
2050 isn’t really that far away. if you remember the year 2000, that’s about how long.
I’ve always thought those predictions were listed as “conservative” so the average is a lot closer but main media outlets pick the fastest out point in the bell curve so it’s not so doomed.
Yeah, it’s not bullshit to be conservative with climate models because they are incredibly complex. It’s good practice. However, because of the political climate around climate change, scientists probably er on the side of being extra-conservative, and the models are still dire! So, if the real world trends happen to go outside the bell curve, not in our favor, which keeps happening, we’re fucked.
It’s amazing how the human race realize the shit it put itself in only when it is a fraction of a second from hitting the wall at high speed. It’s like that every single time.
Except the impact of climate change isn’t at all like a car crash. In a car crash everything stays fine until it suddenly goes to shit. Which I think is one of the issues why people have such a hard time dealing with it.
Maybe we should think about it more like a sinking ship. We already got wet feet, which isn’t great but only the start and we really need to start shutting some bulk heads to keep the water from pouring in. And get some Wellies to deal with the water already in. But those won’t help if it keeps on rising.
On geological time scales, this is very much like your car crash analogy.
Unfortunately, most people don’t seem to be capable of understanding time at that scale.
The rich are on the top decks where the valve controls are, they don’t have wet feet, why should they close the valves?
I used to think the more apparent and devastating outcomes of climate change were bound to hit long after I passed away, but now I’m not so sure.
Too many people thinking like that is exactly why we are where we are today. And why it will continue to get worse.
Those of us who actually care about the world our children and grandchildren will have to live in have been trying to get some large scale action for decades, and we’re tired of beating our heads against a brick wall.
If it doesn’t hit in my lifetime it will be soon after, which is one the reasons I choose to not have kids.
You constantly hear people say “oh, well we are in a warming cycle, so yeah, of course the Earth is going to get warmer”.
These are people on the Right who have moved past the point of denying the problem of Climate Change and shifted their argument to admitting it is happening, but not admitting that it is man-made.
In some ways, they are right - the Earth’s climate IS indeed shifting away from an Ice Age and moving toward a warming period, but what we humans have done is essentially thrown gasoline onto the already burning fire. We are accelerating the problem.
And it’s that acceleration that’s the real problem. If this sort of warming happened over twenty or thirty thousand years, the ecosystem would have a chance to adapt and maybe humanity along with it. A couple hundred years? Nah mate, ecological collapse is going to happen and it’ll probably take us with it.
It’s the way we tend to think of things as black and white. Someone decided to set some disaster increase threshold for the climate crisis events and called it a day. When it has always been about an increase in frequency and intensity of natural disasters and more, both of which we are already seeing.
At least companies created incredible profits for a small number of shareholders for a short period of time. Totally worth it
That’s a pretty weak take. Do you know how profitable it is to hire a short-gain CEO, pump his stock, sell before the inevitable crash and follow him to his next venture? Immensely so.
Think how great the world would be if everyone did that, jumping from sunken venture to sunken venture, burning through any and all good will, until the only thing that still has worth is the planet you’re on, but even that is nothing because Mars is the next frontier you can sink our money into.
Think before you speak so poorly of those better than yourself
It’s a joke from a viral editorial cartoon. Don’t be such an antagonistic jerk.
edit: If you were attempting satire then I’ve fallen victim to Poe’s law because there are lots of people who sincerely believe exactly what you wrote. Hopefully that isn’t the case here, and if so I retract the jerk comment. If you do believe what you wrote, my comment stands.
Don’t worry, I’m sure if we all keep doing the same thing this will sort itself out.
How about we go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over.
Just add a little nuclear winter and we’re good. So there might be a little radioactive fallout, that’s just a problem for the poors to deal with. Billionaires will be okay in their acre sized underground bunker clubs and that’s what’s important.
I know it’s a joke but I actually looked into it and it turns out that nuclear winter only reduces temperature in the short term - the effects wear off and you’d just get hit with global warming abruptly when it wears off. I guess it could potentially buy some time to implement carbon capture or something.
If by sort itself out you mean the planet wiping us out in a few generations, yeah
I thank the oligarchs and their willing consumption enthusiasts. This apocalypse is brought to you by unchecked, insatiably greedy capitalists and capitalism.
Way to minimise the last 40-50 years of capitalists actively working to stop any real progress on climate change. Sure progress is being made now after they figured out it was getting bad and there was money to be made in green tech. That doesn’t excuse the decades of lobbying and and actual propaganda put out by capital interests that we are all paying for now.
That you are spouting off about “communist propaganda” tells me you either grew up in the 80’s and really bought the red scare line or you bought the far right propaganda telling you to be scared of ‘CHI-NAH’ (to quote the orange traitor).
Most environmental solutions are also being created in capitalist societies, and the richest countries (which by coincidence are capitalist) are the ones that are decreasing their emissions by a considerable amount.
Only because those capitalists societies are offloading the work that generates those emissions on to poorer countries because it’s cheaper to do it there.
I take no offense to being called a communist, even though I’m a socialist. I have a great deal of pity for the sycophants of capitalism, though, cheering their own exploitation and oppression as their masters terraform the planet to be hostile towards human life in the name of quarterly profit expectations.
Your family will be burning from the global oligarch’s fine work, and you’ll be blaming the invisible communists and socialists that countries like the US used military means to decimate through global destabilization the world over to further capitalist interests. The capitalists won, are fully in charge, and have captured their own regulatory bodies in most of the world. This is the world of capitalists own making.
We crossed that threshold years ago, man made climate alteration is a runaway train of multigenerational suffering at best, and possibly the end of human civilization for ages at worst. Have fun cursing the dirty commies when you’re thirsty with no recourse 🤣
That’s a false dichotomy. There are more power sources than coal and nuclear.
Also electricity generation is not the only source of emissions. Car traffic, cruise ships, aiplanes, all need to be reduced and can’t just be replaced by nuclear power.
In theory, yes. In practice, nuclear plants that are shut off are almost always replaced with fossils, with the specific fossil fuel of choice often being coal.
Energy is not something where you can just pick one solution and run with it (at least, non-fossils, anyway). Nuclear is slow to ramp, so it usually takes care of baseline load. Renewables like wind and solar are situational, they mostly work throughout the day (yes, wind too, differential heating of earth’s surface by the sun is what causes surface-level winds) and depend greatly on weather. Hydro is quite reliable but it’s rarely available in the quantities needed. The cleanest grids on the planet use all of these, and throw in some fossils for load balancing, phasing them out with energy storage solutions as they become available.
You can’t just shoot one of the pillars of this system of clean energy and then say you never tried to topple the system, just wanted to prop up the other pillars. Discussing shutting off nuclear plants without considering the alternative is pure lunacy, driven by fearmongering, and propped up by no small amounts of oil money for a reason.
Replacing nuclear with renewables is simply not the reality of the situation. Nuclear and renewables work together to replace fossils, and fill different roles. It’s not one or the other, it’s both and even together they’re not yet enough.
So when you do consider the alternatives, moving from nuclear to the inevitable replacement, fossils, is still lunacy, just for other reasons: even if you care about nothing more than atmospheric radiation, coal puts more of it out per kWh generated, solely because of C-14 isotopes. Nuclear is shockingly clean, mostly due to its energy density, but also because it’s not producing barrels of green goo, just small pills of spicy ceramics. And if your point is accidents, just how many oil spills have we had to endure? How many times was the frickin ocean set on fire? How many bloody and brutal wars were motivated by oil? Is that really what a safer energy source sounds like to you, just because there are two nuclear accidents the world knows about, and a thousand fossil accidents, of which the world lost count already?
And deflecting to other industries is also quite disingenuous. Especially if your scapegoat is transportation, since that’s an industry that’s increasingly getting electrified in an effort to make it cleaner at the same logistical capacity, and therefore will depend more and more on the very same electrical grid which you’re trying to detract from.
There is massive work being done to improve large scale energy storage (big batteries) so the renewables become less and less situational. Large scale energy storage is significantly less constrained than car batteries, because weight is a one time cost. Even gravity based batteries could become viable.
Also, in response to the previous commenter, electricity generation is by far and large the main source of emissions accounting for more than half, with more than a quarter being agriculture. Transportation is 14%, and given the future transition to electric vehicles, one might argue that half of that can be tack’d on to electricity generation’s share. (Half because electric cars are more than twice as efficient at energy conversion than petrol cars. Toss in some power line losses and that’s a reasonable estimate)
nuclear plants that are shut off are almost always replaced with fossils, with the specific fossil fuel of choice often being coal.
Being from Germany, I have often read such arguments and at least here that is simply not true.
The decrease in nuclear power was accompanied by a decrease in fossil fuel.
Could that decrease have been larger if nuclear had been kept around longer? Possibly.
But if we are talking about building new power plants, the money is typically better invested in renewables. They’re faster to build and produce cheaper energy.
It’s not a false dichotomy when it’s a zero sum game. Our consumption is essentially inelastic, because we are all complete assholes, so all we have control over is what kind of production we build.
it’s a zero sum game. Our consumption is essentially inelastic, because we are all complete assholes
Even if that’s the premise there are still other power sources -> more than two choices -> false dichtonomy.
But then, blaming “people who disregarded nuclear energy” - instead of people who don’t want to change anything in the face of a historically unprecedented worldwide disaster - seems a bit short sighted.
Thank the good old Green Party of Germany! Restarting all those coal plants and shutting down nuclear reactors!
Yeah, Ill take a source for this one. Coal power generation has not increased in Germany whereas the Green party’s policies in 1998 led to the first large scale deployment of solar energy in the world.
@Regelfall @Widowmaker_Best_Girl
would removing wind turbine to expand the coal mine count as a source ?
https://www.realclearenergy.org/2023/04/04/wind_farm_in_germany_dismantled_to_expand_coal_mine_891111.html
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-reactivates-coal-fired-power-plant-to-save-gas/a-62893497
‘Intensive use’ of German coal power plants releases additional 15 mio t of CO2 in 2022 – report https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/intensive-use-german-coal-power-plants-releases-additional-15-mio-t-co2-2022-report
Well they were in a position to do something about that but held against keeping the reactors running, https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/akw-streit-105.html. If I remember correctly getting them into a normal running condition was unfeasible either way.
God, that’s so depressing. I genuinely don’t understand how we - any of us, in any country - are supposed to be okay with these political mechanisms filled with incompetent, out-of-touch, self-interested codgers. I’m not willing to take action, but when our entire world is being picked apart by the public sector and sold for parts by the private sector, what are we to do?
Lobbies. The German “green” party if fully funded by Russia, which has a vested interest in keeping coal, but especially nat gas (which despite the CO2 emission is still labelled as “green”) being the primary source of energy.
“When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons, what the hell am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the lemons! I’m gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!”
