"The North Atlantic just completely destroyed its June average temperature record, breaking the previous record by more than 0.4 °C (0.7 °F).
A stunningly sharp excess for such a large body of water."
Something I’d heard about climate change many years ago was that it would happen almost imperceptibly slowly at first, then suddenly when we reach the tipping point, it would start happening very rapidly. I think we’re right at the sharp edge of that tipping point and things are going to get very interesting very quickly.
It’s related to the old-timey curse that sounds like a complement. “May you live in interesting times”, because as interesting as it may be to read in the history books, It wasn’t as fun for the people living in those times.
I can’t help but think of the climate activists who defaced the Van Gogh painting. Except they didn’t – because the painting is actually behind protective glass. I sincerely doubt most people got that fact from the outrage news cycle that followed that incident.
So who came out to be the villains of the story? The oil and gas industry, where Exxon had relatively accurate warming models decades ago and still funded climate change denialism? No, of course not. Because every major media’s headline was about how expensive this painting is and didn’t immediately explain the lack of actual damage, nor did they actually cover the climate travesty we are living through. The villains were the climate protestors, who are objectively correct and chose a non-destructive way to get attention that was immediately spun against them.
An example from fiction is in the film Armageddon. Yes, it’s a dumb movie, but it was a hit nevertheless. At the start of the movie some Greenpeace protestors are on a ship protesting the offshore oil rig, which shows Bruce Willis’s character cavalierly assaulting them with golf balls as he points out that they’re hypocrites for being on an ocean-faring vessel which requires… drum roll OIL! To operate!! Wow, such an epic own! This kind of argumentation is used to this day. “You want to raise taxes? Why don’t YOU pay more taxes on your own. You want to curb carbon emissions? Why don’t YOU stop driving a car.” Fuck off. Such a “Yet you participate in society” moment.
So what are people supposed to do? Roll over an accept it? Do we all just wait and see until civilization collapses? Because I cannot see functioning societies as we know them existing in 150-200 years. Maybe even 100 years. Personally, I don’t think anything will change until some heads of some certain people actually start rolling. The COVID response taught me that even with full, modern medical knowledge the response from the people in charge will be too little, too late, if anything at all. Just a big fucking collective shrug. Like the emoji. “🤷♂️ we cannot close businesses for two months to nip this novel airborne virus in the bud. We cannot use emergency powers to produce masks and give them to people for free, we will instead just have random meaningless shortages as the price goes up during the critical early moments. We will suffer indefinitely, instead. We don’t have the money to do it right once now, only to do it wrong into perpetuity.”
The oil and gas industry and their funded allies hold the keys to the doors, they squat on every position of power, they have all the money, and they have a media engine designed to keep a full 30-40% of people on their side with flagrant misinformation or lack of coverage.
I’m not personally doomer about climate change. It doesn’t stop me from sleeping at night. But I am realistic about it. We’re fucked. Nothing’s changing. The Joe Biden promise: Nothing will fundamentally change under his watch. He’s keeping that one.
Edit: We are also flying more than ever before! Hooray! This certainly will help. https://nitter.1d4.us/flightradar24/status/1679865495112019968
I can’t help but think of the climate activists who defaced the Van Gogh painting. Except they didn’t – because the painting is actually behind protective glass. I sincerely doubt most people got that fact from the outrage news cycle that followed that incident.
If it makes it better worse, Britain then promptly passed a bill that makes “disruptive” protests like that illegal. The government policy towards the climate crisis there is still the same ol’ “Keep Calm and Carry On”.
The end is near, The end is near, the time has come. No escape found, As we witness the damage we’ve done.
Earth will be fine. Humanity will be fine. We will likely just move away from coastal areas.
Definitely a concern but humans are resilient and very adaptive.
Will not completely go extinct is not the same as fine. Even ignoring climate refugees and all that, let’s look at a simple thing: food supply.
The mathematics of global famine are quite simple. Add all the calories that earth produces in one day on average and divide it by 1500. That’s the amount of people that can exist.
Now, like 70% off all calories come from just 3 crops: rice, corn and wheat. As a good approximation, all of those lose about 10% harvest yield for each 1 degree C in temperature rise. It’s not really linear and is better at the beginning (so like 5% for the first degree), and much worse further on. But in general the approximation works.
Humanity now produces about 1.5x of the food supply we need, and even with super-optimized logistics we’re not going to get it lower than 1.2–1.3x population, since a lot of food gets wasted by cafes/restaurants and people themselves. Some just gets bad because it’s not consumed in time or takes too long to deliver or sell.
And with the current temperature rise estimations we’re looking at losing caloric supply for about 20% of the entire population in the next 20 or so years.
And that’s just one example. Have you seen rivers of dead fish in Australia and the states? For each species there is a point when the water gets too hot to hold enough oxygen or to cool down their bodies, and then bam — the whole species dies in a day. Right now, some algae, corals and plankton are like 1.5 degrees away from mass death.
It’s not really that “fine”.
Sorry for the rant.
An excellent write-up of what will unfold.
One note is that the food loss won’t just be linear. It will be chaotic within the probabilities you noted. Crop loss is effectively a weather event and, as such, a chaotic one. That means extreme events will be the driving force behind food shortages. Namely, heatwaves will cause extensive loss of crops in specific areas. Over some years, that will average down, but people don’t eat long-term averages; they eat daily. So we should expect significant one-time impacts. That is, the severity is not the average but rather the peak.
It’s also worth note that this is mostly caused by the ban on sulfur emissions a couple of years ago. The commission that banned sulfur emissions from ships basically decided that they were going to do a big geo engineering experiment and they were going to do it not in favor of humanity against global warming, but in favor of global warming against humanity.
And they decided to cut off emissions really quickly so that we get this massive incredible hilariously bad spike instead of slowly tapering off over time.
Is anyone readying a list of climate criminals? Individuals. Not companies. What are we going to do with them? Real consequences.
Sometime I think the Mayan calendar people were right. The world ended in 2012, it’s just a slower process than John Cusack movies would lead us to believe.
So it’s been over a decade obviously, but I believe that’s actually what they were marking in 2012 with the end of their calendar. Not the end of the world but the end of our current era
Its a cyclic calandar and the last major cycle ended. If there were still ancient Mayans maintaining the calendar they would have calculated another major cycle.
