this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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Spoiler alert: The civilization disrupting aspects of climate change are still decades out and the rich countries will probably be fine.
They'll be fine because they can afford the infrastructure projects and increased costs of energy and food.
Now Africa, South America, the poorer Asian countries, tiny Pacific Island nations... Oh boy. I would not want to be a citizen there in 20 or 30 years.
Eventually sea level rise will become a really big fucking problem, like for every single coastal city in the world, even the rich ones. Luckily none of us will be around to see that unless some sort of miraculous life extension technology becomes available.
On the one hand I don't like mentioning this because it gives the right wing ammunition to ignore climate change. But on the other hand some people have such existential dread about it that it's damaging their mental health, they are really overestimating how damaging it will be in their lifetime in their rich country they live in.
Are we supposed to be comforted about the timeline being decades? That's generations alive today.
Scientists are also finding their estimates getting outpaced alarmingly often right now.
The Russia Ukraine war has disrupted civilisation quite significantly with 6 million refugees. We could see over 1 BILLION climate refugees by 2050. 1000 MILLION people having to leave their homes.
We are on course for significant disruption to food supply before 1.5C warming. Doesn't matter how rich your country is, with global food supplies low and that maybe people on the move, civilisation as we know it will change significantly. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/12/global-heating-likely-to-hit-world-food-supply-faster-than-expected-says-united-nations-desertification-expert
To be clear: I am not a doomerist. Don't dwell on this and do nothing. Get angry! This is being done to you. This was not inevitable, it was the decisions of the most powerful and richest people in the world. Get out there and take action, the movement needs you.
I dunno mate... antarctica is collapsing much faster than anyone anticipated. Brazil's winter was a scorcher.
Canada's on fire. Tropical storms are hitting LA. sadlol... I suspect we might be around to see even worse.
I mean, I feel like this year in particular illustrates quite well that there are already very real impacts of climate change in rich countries, with Canada, Greece, Hawaii etc. burning. Which makes it worth to delay climate change as much as possible, even if we can't or don't want to stop it at livable levels.
Problem is also that there have always been catastrophes... Earthquakes, wildfires, tsunamis, hurricanes, etc.
Maybe in the past they should have also been attributed to climate change, but I don't think the average human being can draw the distinction yet
considering the massive heat domes spread worldwide, I suspect the average human has been more impacted than you have.
Brazil had a scorcher of a winter. Antarctica is falling apart much faster than anyone predicted.
You can't have this both ways.
When a magat in the Senate brings in a snowball and says that global warming isn't happening because it's snowing...
"That's weather not climate!"
When there's a wildfire somewhere...
"That's global warming!"
We can definitively say that this year is the hottest year on record, but we can't attribute individual forest fires or tornadoes or hurricanes to climate change.
No, but we can point at increasing number of forest fires, hurricanes, and other disasters. That's not local, that's global.
You're right, we need to look at global tends rather than individual events.
Global trends are showing that the forest fires are getting worse every year.
The others already pointed out that there's a global, rising trend of climate disasters. I would like to qualify:
This year did exceed everyone's expectations. It's the first year of El Niño after years of increasing temperatures, so while it didn't come as a complete surprise, it could still be an anomaly.
If you ask climate scientists, they'll tell you lots of climate change effects that could contribute to these wildfires, but yeah, ultimately, they'll say they won't know for sure until they've seen the following years.
However, these are raging wildfires all around the globe, in regions that don't normally have them and that aren't linked to each other. At some point, it stops being "a wildfire somewhere" and starts to become a statistic.
Surface-level ocean temperatures are significantly higher this year, globally, than in previous years. We can't explain such a global increase without climate change. And obviously, warm water evaporates differently, leading to unusual weather patterns, leading to droughts, which increases the likelihood of wildfires.
So, yeah, while the snowball is simply irrelevant to the topic, the wildfire statistic correlates with all our other statistics. You'd have to ignore a ton of evidence to not attribute the wildfires to climate change until proven differently.
Rule 1 of life: be skeptical when someone presents their opinion as facts.
Looking at Western European countries like Germany, the Netherlands and the UK to an extent, the road to net-zero is disrupting. Probably because necessary steps have been delayed until the last moment. Large numbers of refugees have a destabilising effect on democracy as well.
Some steps that are necessary for net-zero are expensive investments (like heat pumps) that are causing conflicts in society. Going ahead with it as well as delaying is sure to be met with very loud resistance. Don't think that Germany can miss it's climate goals without some serious protests, perhaps worse than they've ever seen.
At the same time, I wonder how well UK households are going to deal with even higher food prices as the percentage of failed harvests increases. There isn't a lot of buffer space here.
It's not so much whether rich countries have enough money to deal with climate change, but rather how well democracy will fare when it's under duress.
If we're going to electrify everything we need nuclear power plants.
The federal government should be dumping tens of billions of dollars into modular nuclear plants that can be built in a factory and then shipped places.