Tariffs, inflation, war in Ukraine, the China threat, measles… there’s no end of daily crises in the news. But it seems like climate change isn’t much talked about anymore. Did we all just collectively decide, “oh well, so much for that, guess we just hunker down and roast now”?
Doesn’t seem like it’s a talked-about issue anymore. The IPCC reports get a bit worse every time, but people were already numb after the first few. I guess the US won’t participate in it anymore, either. Wildfires and hurricanes are the new normal but we all just shrug. Renewables have arrived and are pretty affordable for the most part, but they haven’t really made much of a dent in anything. Nuclear is back again, but all that generation is going to AI instead. The plant-based foods craze came and went and was ultimately a bust. EVs are commonplace now, but mostly just power Musk’s ambitions.
So, that’s it, right, another battle fought and lost, let’s move on to the next big thing? Or is there still anyone left seriously trying to deal with it?
That was my understanding. IIRC it is scientfic fact that we passed the point where we could halt global warming a few years ago. It is now only a question of exactly how bad a hell hole will we leave for future generations.
I’m not having much success crafting my virus to kill 90% of the world’s population. Anyway, that solution is probably worse that the problem, though the African rhinos would be happy.
I don’t know about other countries’ responses, but in the US, the current administration doesn’t even think it’s a thing and is actively harming green technology, while pushing for more CO2-production. Given the rest of the flood of BS coming from the administration and the open hostility towards anything green, I don’t really see what Americans can do at this point.
So, that’s that, I guess.
Hopefully, Europe and (especially) China have some surprises in store!
Overpopulation, too. Climate change, megafauna extinction rate, uptick in epidemic / pandemic disease, loss of plant biodiversity, pollution, and so many other things of that ilk are essentially due to the planet being overinfested with homo sap.
It’s a political-social hot potato nobody wants to grab. There are very few noncoercive and nonviolent ways to cut back population.
The IPCC reports are almost certainly understating the trends and impacts of climate change, and aside from a handful of island nations for which even a few feet of sea level rise is a frighteningly near term existential threat, even most nations that acknowledge the reality of global warming are doing very little beyond subsidizing electric vehicles and sustainable energy (which is not going to ‘fix’ climate change and has little real impact upon overall climate emissions even where it has effectively displaced coal-fired plants) and engaging in the utter fraud that is ‘carbon credits’ and farcical ‘net zero’ plans.
I’ve long taken an interest bordering on obsession with understanding the methods and tools used to both evaluate global mean surface and ocean temperatures (which is a highly complex and contentious topic in and of itself) as well as modeling of the climate system including global climate circulation models, ocean and hydrologic models of heat exchange and vapor flow, and models dealing with the uptake and release of carbon dioxide and methane by forests, wetlands, grasslands, and tundra, but the thing that has really clinched how dire the situation actually is are the COP presentations in the ‘Cryosphere Pavilion’ (more of a cordoned off little side stage almost exclusively attended by glacier scientists and geophysics nerds) where the presentations are accompanied with an air of barely restrained horror at just how much faster the reduction in Arctic sea icepack and retreat of ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic are occurring versus prediction because of unanticipated feedbacks.
We have almost certainly reached the +1.5 ℃ temperature anomaly threshold above the preindustrial baseline set by the Paris Accords starting with 2023 or 2024 even as most climate scientists insist that we need a 20 year trend to establish that as a new baseline. There are a number of researchers still insisting that we be optimistic because if we just get our shit together any time soon now and shut down all atmospheric carbon-emitting processes that it will level off here and start declining before end of century even though there is no evidence to believe that is the case, and indeed the excess heat stored in the oceans will at least maintain the current temperature if not increase it by 0.2 ℃ to 0.3 ℃ notwithstanding any positive feedbacks that have been triggered or tipping points we may have already achieved, so we can at a minimum be expected to approach a +2 ℃ temperature anomaly (probably in the the 2040-5 timeframe if not earlier) even if we could magically shut down all industrial and agricultural carbon emitting processes, which we can’t without mass famine and die-offs.
Nor is anyone making a genuine concerted effort at adaptation on regional or national scales, much less anticipating of global impacts of reduced agricultural production, mass displacement and emigration of refugee populations, and destruction due to more frequent extreme weather events. The US Department of Defense—you know, that hotbed of radical liberalism—was really the only government agency that was actually making executable plans in anticipation of climate change because, well, it’s a massive national security threat with implications against the already increasingly fragile global order, and now that Pete Hegseth is their leader they’ll almost certainly shut all of those efforts down and suppress all future studies and reporting. NOAA and NASA are going to get gutted if not completely eliminated so the premier global climate surveillance programs are going to be dismantled and defunded so that we won’t know how fucked we really are.
And fucked we will be. Don’t take my word for it; here is a report by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (i.e. people who do risk assessment for insurance companies and investors) at the University of Exeter on “Planetary Solvency” in their Global risk management for human prosperity 2025 report:
From their “Key findings”, their executive takeaway is unambiguous:
The risk of Planetary Insolvency looms unless we act decisively. Without immediate policy action to change course, catastrophic or extreme impacts are eminently plausible, which could threaten future prosperity.
Frankly, that is the literal understatement of the century which is apparent even from just reading their “Critical observations”.
Or, for those who prefer to get their prognostications from entertainment media:
Additionally, there is and always has been great value in outnumbering your enemies. If everybody else reduces the growth of their population except you, you will have an advantage.
ETA
I have seen a group called Quiverfull discussed on the SDMB before. It is a conservative Christian group in the US that heavily stresses having as many kids as you can afford and raising them to be the next generation of conservative Christians.
Sure they do, as I commented a while ago, when the right was just saying that we should not do anything because China is not **… I commented that following that talking point, we will only allow China and others to eat our lunch.
** (This was not the case even when the big debates took place)
Part of me (the sociopathic part buried deep) wants them to succeed. So all their kids have to fight for survival in the world-encompassing desert hellhole of 2050, where food no longer grows. But at least abortion will be illegal!
But there is a solution, and trump will make it happen! WWIII. All those nuclear explosions from when we go to war with Russia and China will create a nuclear winter! trump will save us! take that libtards!
I politely disagree. Trump has been cozying up to Putin for years now. While Trump is definitely a morron, Putin is certainly smart enough to play Trump and get his way withou starting a conflict.
Overpopulation by itself is not the biggest problem. The fertility rate for the whole world has dropped from about 4.5 in 1950 to about 2.3 today. The fertility rate is the average number of babies each woman has over her lifetime. If it drops below the replacement level, which is 2.1, the world population will begin dropping a few decades after that. It would probably be best if the population begins slowly dropping soon. The world population now is actually somewhat more than the world can comfortably hold, but it’s not a good idea for the population to drop too fast, since that means that there will be too many older people who need taken to be care of.
I remember reading a lot of stories back when the world’s population finally hit seven billion. Most of those stories included the claim that scientists predicted that the population would top out at twelve billion, and then fall back to nine billionm and stay there. I never did see cites for these predictions or any argument tp back them up.
Here are some of the predicted future populations for various years done by various organizations. Note that these are predictions Obviously no one can know for sure:
Carbon emission reduction pathways (CERP)
China has set the targets to reach a carbon emissions peak before 2030 and achieve net-zero before 2060 for the entire economy and society. Given that the power sector is easier to achieve carbon neutrality, this study assumes that coal plants will reach a carbon peak in 2025 and 2030, and achieve net-zero in 2050 or later. Furthermore, as there is widespread discussion regarding the carbon emission levels at the time of peaking, we categorize the peak into high peak and low peak. By combining these four carbon peaking timelines (high peak in 2025, low peak in 2025, high peak in 2030, and low peak in 2030) with two net-zero timelines (net-zero in 2050 or post 2050 net-zero time), we can obtain 8 CERPs labeled as “25hp-50zero”, “25lp-50zero”, “30hp-50zero”, “30lp-50zero”, “25hp-post50zero”, “25lp-post50zero”, “30hp-post50zero”, and “30lp-post50zero”. To simulate different curve types of CERPs under each CuER, we employ the Monte Carlo method. More details about the simulation methods can be found in Supplementary Method 1. The simulation results and the representative CERPs under different CuERs can be found in Supplementary Fig. 4. The comparisons of these CERPs with current scenarios documented in the IPCC AR6 database can be found in Supplementary Fig. 5.
As I noted before, China’s rulers needed to do something, or they would become the former CP. While it is true that it is a dictatorship, China does react to complaints when the heath of the people is being affected. For example, the pollution in Beijing was alarming and a lot of criticism from international groups also made a dent., After it was declared in previous discussions that it was not going to happen.
But never mind. Regardless of China doing something, the inactivity and hostility of the current US administration means that the opposition to change groups in the US were bullshitting us about the China talking point. In the US, the critics of change were not going to do anything.
The only way humanity survives this is giving all political power to the generations that will actually be affected. Everyone over 30 should be set adrift on the last remaining ice floes.
The problem is that 8 billion people is still way beyond the sustainability threshold of the Earth for any form of megafauna, notwithstanding how about 2 billion or more are using resources at rates thousands of times the natural replenishment rate thanks to access to energy resources (which are also finite) which allow them to do ‘work’ (i.e. travel, recreate, et cetera) at hundreds of times the rate of a preindustrial human being.
Has this been seriously modeled anywhere? E.g. how many nukes, of what kinds, detonated when and where, would it take to create enough cloud cover to actually begin to offset climate change?
Could a rogue nation, say, or some heroic ex-Soviet general, or a forward-thinking AI, launch a few and save the world?
I wonder what that would do to global biodiversity. Chernobyl didn’t exactly stay a lifeless wasteland very long, but that wasn’t of a global scale either.
It’s tough to contemplate what you’re going to do about the radon leak in your basement when the house is on fire. Yeah, a radon leak is a serious problem, but I’m more worried about the immediate threat of burning to death.
