'Global Warming's Terrifying New Math'

imminent

  On 7/26/2023 at 10:35 AM, MadameChaos said:

I'm glad that everyone has finally caught up with the whole imminent environmental collapse thing. 

Shame we live in a world too stupid and corrupt to do anything about it.

 

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Bu-bu-but money!!! Not physical money, but digital money that holds currency… yeah okay that’s a different conversation
 

Hats off to Rupert Murdoch - he successfully divided the working class and made half them distrustful of anything in their own benefit

  On 7/26/2023 at 9:45 AM, auxien said:

we’ve been doing major harm to our environments for at the very least 10k years

wherever humans have gone extinction follows. it's how we killed off all the megafauna.. some of which was attributed to changing climate.. ice age etc but those animals made it through until humans hunted them off the face of the earth.  still.. we're at new levels of extinction.. indigenous peoples and hunter gatherers had way less effect on the planet.. when we started farming then things changed but still.. we were poisoning the earth or doing much damage. we were still just another species on the planet for a long long time.. 

currently there's more animals kept in cages, farms, industrial meat processing environments than there are in the wild.. by far th ebulk of animals in the work are there because we're breeding them for food. 

blah.. there's a lot of good info here at changing climate youtube.. sort of a repeating message at times.. .but interesting data. 

https://www.youtube.com/@OurChangingClimate

this one about the rich is pretty interesting. i thinnk i posted it somewhere already. 

  On 7/26/2023 at 9:45 AM, auxien said:

i don’t think the Titanic analogy makes much sense….we’ve been doing major harm to our environments for at the very least 10k years (human contribution to if not outright cause of the extinction of multiple large mammals in North America) and probably longer. the worldwide change has been more recent, with the biggest real undeniable sign being the ozone layer hole. so you could say we def hit an iceberg there but then backed out of it and cleaned up the damage, mostly? again, analogy doesn’t much track….there’s no one thing that’s going to be the tipping point, no one iceberg that’s going to destroy all of civilization. some areas will likely thrive while others are collapsing. (southern hemisphere is poised to be the best place for humans in the foreseeable future)

some components of collapse could quickly reverse their damaged aspects, like the ozone layer, if the offending causes are quickly mitigated…others won’t once they’ve reached their particular tipping points (giant icebergs won’t freeze back up quickly, some things just take time). a few more years of the wild weather in North America might start to make clear the need for mitigation, but i’m not betting on that quite yet. greed is strong. status quo is strong. damaged ecosystems are for tomorrow to worry about. maybe once the boomers really start dying off the US might be able to enact some change, but they’re like goddamned vampires at this point, they could be swaying the bulk of politics for another 10 or 20 years still. 

EU/US/Middle East/India/China are all going to have to start prioritizing the right things collectively….not in some big accord necessarily, but each on their own when they realize their particular population’s survival depends upon it. can’t put that into a Titanic analogy, really. we’re in a long term crash, i guess? but w/ the ability to partly self repair out at sea?weird….i get the idea for wanting that sorta headline, but shit is not that simple, it just ain’t. there’s multiples fronts in the battle, and we’re both sides of the war. it’s ultimately not humans vs nature it’s the humans of today vs the biosphere of today and tomorrow. we’re benefitting now at the expense of literally anything/everything going forward. 

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The Titanic analogy doesn’t work because the earth don’t care about humans. For a majority of the Earth’s history it’s been uninhabitable for today’s macroscopic beings. Sulphuric oceans, poison atmospheres, lava… imagine the scene from Titanic where Rose walks down the staircase except it’s Earth walking down towards CO2

  On 7/26/2023 at 4:25 PM, ignatius said:

indigenous peoples and hunter gatherers had way less effect on the planet.. when we started farming then things changed but still.. we were poisoning the earth or doing much damage. we were still just another species on the planet for a long long time.. 

i know that's technically true, but really we were quite exceptional even then as hunters/gatherers, particularly in our ability to reform the world to our needs. the only changes really have been written language (and it's ability to communicate technologies and ideas far and wide and through time) and our population. the rest is just window dressing. we were wrecking the world anytime it helped us then, we've just gotten more efficient at it and now do so at exponentially higher volumes.

all true on the wealth and the good data on YT but it definitely gets difficult to fathom the depths of destruction we're inflicting right now...and that's just counting the stuff we know about. the knock on effects that will trail for hundreds if not thousands of years are mindboggling.

  On 7/26/2023 at 4:26 PM, DyeMyBlueBlack said:

The Titanic analogy doesn’t work because the earth don’t care about humans. For a majority of the Earth’s history it’s been uninhabitable for today’s macroscopic beings. 

for sure yeah...there's a gravitas inherent in the Titanic thing, tied up with that ship's initial storytelling. that part of it is honestly pretty apt tho...but yeah, the planet is advancing towards anything, life has no goal. it just happened and if we keep at what we've been doing we'll do a good job of trying to really hinder that in ways we honestly can barely imagine. our existence is becoming quite comparable to a literal comet in how wildly we're destroying the planet's biosphere and physical makeup. it's.....insanity. 

  On 7/27/2023 at 1:50 AM, auxien said:

it definitely gets difficult to fathom the depths of destruction we're inflicting right now...and that's just counting the stuff we know about. the knock on effects that will trail for hundreds if not thousands of years are mindboggling.

yeah. i'm sure there's plenty we don't know.. or just things we know or suspect that some shitty execs knew all about 30 years ago and kept on doing what they were doing. the concrete angle is pretty crazy. the generation of the things to get oil from the earth.. the whole process is dirty from start to finish.. and so much waste. the netflix doc from what's his name.. attenborough.. about all the animals just not there anymore and the wild places essentially shrunk to tiny spaces is super sad.. more animals being kept for consumption by humans than animals that exist in the wild. even what we do know is mind boggling.. 

i try not to get sucked into doom scrolling because it drains the motivation. 

we may have been screwing with Earth's local ecosystems for thousands of years (as any invasive species will do), but it clearly wasn't until industrialization that we truly started fucking up the climate. e.g. even the birth of agriculture wasn't irreversibly warming the oceans (which humans famously don't inhabit - or even have the capability to explore thoroughly). 

in my ideal world the earth will give the birds another hundred million years to evolve that splintered dino lineage after we fuck ourselves into irrelevance. birds and whales. let them run it for a while eh gaia?

When I chuck myself into the broader category of 'an alive thing' not just 'a human', I'd say that the lizards had their go. Cephalopods deserve a shot imo, already finding that niche 

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https://academic.oup.com/icb/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/icb/icad102/7226693?redirectedFrom=fulltext

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I've kind of felt for a long time that nothing will be done about climate change, and since I don't want kids, I don't really worry because I'll be dead before the worst of it (although the bad stuff is already starting, I know) - like, I recycle, I use public transport - should I be protesting with XR? Should I vote Green? Would it do anything? Being angry at the greedy, stupid and corrupt doesn't really make me feel morally superior in any way, I think we are all greedy, stupid and corrupt - we're animals, same as any other, except we have the capacity to cling to abstract things and things we want way in the future... I wonder if putting some real work in to collectively trying to imagine what we really want in the world, rather than always reacting against what we don't, might be more motivating? Politicians never seem to have any kind of creative vision, it doesn't mean we can't also be pragmatic, but nobody seems to know what we're being pragmatic in the service of achieving. Survival, yeah, but to create what kind of world? What would actually make people happy?

  On 7/27/2023 at 7:30 AM, luke viia said:

we may have been screwing with Earth's local ecosystems for thousands of years (as any invasive species will do), but it clearly wasn't until industrialization that we truly started fucking up the climate. e.g. even the birth of agriculture wasn't irreversibly warming the oceans (which humans famously don't inhabit - or even have the capability to explore thoroughly). 

in my ideal world the earth will give the birds another hundred million years to evolve that splintered dino lineage after we fuck ourselves into irrelevance. birds and whales. let them run it for a while eh gaia?

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birds may survive the climate apocalypse of volcanos

yes, humans will be surprised when they die by volcanos as a result of climate

the atmosphere systems are interconnected with the ocean systems. and yes, it's connected to the geothermal systems.

maybe if the volcanos happen soon the whales survive

but there are 90 species of whale, many endangered, and the question is how many do we cause to go extinct?

these duders think we need to quit having sex, quit making babies, and/or quite possibly seppuku our asses from the planet:

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (geocities flashbacks lol)

Phasing out the human species by voluntarily ceasing to breed will allow Earth’s biosphere to return to good health. Crowded conditions and resource shortages will improve as we become less dense.

wonder if at their meetings they're like soooooooo..... who's going first????

  On 7/27/2023 at 5:04 PM, zero said:

these duders think we need to quit having sex, quit making babies, and/or quite possibly seppuku our asses from the planet:

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (geocities flashbacks lol)

Phasing out the human species by voluntarily ceasing to breed will allow Earth’s biosphere to return to good health. Crowded conditions and resource shortages will improve as we become less dense.

 

wonder if at their meetings they're like soooooooo..... who's going first????

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seems unnecessary. if we used the resources we take in a much more efficient way we'd be able to feed everyone on the planet quite easily. we've had enough of everything for everyone for a long time but it's not distributed equally.. obviously.. 

we could take less from the earth and still have more than enough for everyone.  overconsumption and waste are huge issues here in the USA and the west in general but USA is kinda experts at wasting shit and consuming too much of everything. 

dismantle free market economy... change the idea of freedom in america to mean something other than giant trucks and huge meals in single use plastics etc and we might have abetter time of it or earth would. 

when the first big city in USA has to be al but abandoned because of heat or constant flooding or because it burns to the ground.. then maybe people will wake up a little but generally americans don't pay attention to a thing until it effects them personally and lands on their doorstep. 

  On 7/27/2023 at 6:18 PM, ignatius said:

seems unnecessary.

lol totally. like what species decides to go ahead and extinct itself. kinda goes against the grain of survival. I lump a human extinction movement in with doomsday cults.

  On 7/27/2023 at 6:18 PM, ignatius said:

dismantle free market economy... change the idea of freedom in america to mean something other than giant trucks and huge meals in single use plastics etc and we might have abetter time of it or earth would. 

I know we're just spit balling here, but how? my take is that this will require a massive cognitive shift of large swaths of the American population, to swing from selfishness to selflessness...and we all know that the egomaniacal selfie selfish culture is only getting worse. we're talking about trying to change a culture that has baked into itself all those big macs / guns / gas guzzling trucks, and they cling to that shit because I don't really have any idea...religion? they were raised that way? idk man. I gave up trying to psychoanalyze the stereotypical 'merican because it can easily go down a path of total nonsense. the trumpism thing has really brought out in the open that some people will resist change no matter what factual evidence is provided... also trying to get the majority of Americans (or I suppose any country really) to care more about environmental concerns when the big corporations are the worst offenders, just leads to more of a whataboutism thing, like what about all those mega rich O&G companies that will cover up any wrongdoings so they can keep on raking it in. why should I make any lifestyle changes if THEY don't.

which leads me to believe that there really isn't anything we can do to stop what is happening to the planet. not saying that what's going on is right, but it is happening exactly as it is for a reason. karmic swings, or somethin. we are given the gift of being able to look back at our history and see more or less how we got to this point, and still, we aren't able to stop whatever negative thing is coming. cycles. we see how in nature things live, die, and are reborn. the planet will right itself, I have no doubt. again, I don't want massive amounts of people to be wiped out due to heat/floods/take your pick, but if that is what it takes to rally round the planetary flag, and pushes the global population toward a more eco-friendly existence, then so be it. I sometimes think that we should all be getting survival training, be taught how to live off the land, and not in front of a screen. back in the olden days that shit was taught by the elders. now we're too many generations removed from that. and so we will just continue on exactly as things are going, will collectively find out what will happen next, because this is the only way...

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Thirsty Data Centers Are Making Hot Summers Even Scarier

With drought spreading around the globe, battles over water are erupting between AI companies seeking more computing power and communities where their facilities are located.

https://archive.is/9XY8l

The UN is testing a pilot program to name heatwave events, and categorize them. The events will be named starting with Zed, and working backwards through the alphabet, to minimize confusion with storm names.

The Gulf Stream system could collapse as soon as 2025, a new study suggests. The shutting down of the vital ocean currents, called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc) by scientists, would bring catastrophic climate impacts.

Amoc was already known to be at its weakest in 1,600 years owing to global heating and researchers spotted warning signs of a tipping point in 2021.

The new analysis estimates a timescale for the collapse of between 2025 and 2095, with a central estimate of 2050, if global carbon emissions are not reduced. Evidence from past collapses indicates changes of temperature of 10C in a few decades, although these occurred during ice ages.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/25/gulf-stream-could-collapse-as-early-as-2025-study-suggests

also, re the gulfstream.. this physicist has other ideas about it i guess. shrug. i'm stupid so shrug.  

  On 7/30/2023 at 4:43 PM, ignatius said:

also, re the gulfstream.. this physicist has other ideas about it i guess. shrug. i'm stupid so shrug.  

 

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Didn't Sabine just argue we don't know because our models arent good enough to make reliable predictions? And that it's better to avoid it to happen anyways...

  On 7/30/2023 at 11:11 PM, Satans Little Helper said:

Didn't Sabine just argue we don't know because our models arent good enough to make reliable predictions? And that it's better to avoid it to happen anyways...

yeah.. and she differentiated between the AMOC and Gulfstream so it's a bit of splitting hairs.. semantics. which is why i said she has "other ideas" about it... which i guess is also splitting hairs. .. semantics. 

saying "it's something we should avoid if possible" is pretty obvious though isn't it?  

I read Stevenson's Termination Shock recently. Decent stuff, though he doesn't seem to know how to tie it up at the end, as often seems to happen with him. Nor did it really delve into the problem that gave the book it's name. I assume it's just a matter of time before some Muskian ubermensch decides to crack on with some maverick geoengineering scheme. That might bring improvements but then lock us into a deadly dependence on said techno-fix, whereby a dearth of funds, sabotage or a logistical cock-up could spell death for millions and possibly the condemnation of vast areas to permanent uninhabitability. Is anyone putting serious thought into those kind of situations?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/08/02/southamerica-record-winter-heat-argentina-chile/

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Temperatures Tuesday rose past 95 degrees (35 Celsius) in numerous locations, including at elevations of about 3,500 to 4,500 feet in the Andes foothills. In some cases, the temperature crested above 100 degrees (38 Celsius) after leaping from morning lows in the 30s and 40s (single-digits Celsius).

Some places have even reached all-time maximums — surpassing summer temperatures, even though it is winter. This has occurred in locations with 20 to 30 years of climate data available, showing how exceptional this heat is compared with recent decades.

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bolding mine

now idk why they don't have much temp data for South America, but fuckin hell this shit is wild. i really think we're seeing just a taste of what's going to happen.