I guess I read a lot more into things (or differently) than you do. To me, “baked oceans,” “collapse of ecosystems,” and “temperatures that humans simply won’t be able to survive” tells me it’s way too late. I simply don’t see how any of that could possibly be even mitigated to survivable levels, much less stopped (the latter part I can definitely see as a reasonable conclusion).
Or maybe I’m just internalizing the perceived attitude of the speaker too much. Might be that seeing the same assertions in a different form with a different speaker would make a difference. Probably. I guess it comes down to whether the OP really intended to say it’s too late to do anything, and whether those who agree with and defend the OP actually do read it the same way and agree. Now that I think about it, that’s probably the source of a lot of the conflict in this very thread.
I blame widespread spraying of pesticides. Out here, every time some housewife sees a bug, she gets on to FaceBook and needs a exterminator- STAT! and a dozen other stay-at-homers recommend their company.
Your gardener (or your husband or whoever does your lawn care) likely sprays frequently with
fertilizer, a broadleaf herbicide and a wide spectrum insecticide. I had to ask my gardener not to do so, and now my lawn has lots of clover, many varieties of grass and even dandelions and a few other wildflowers. The clover keeps the lawn green without need for over watering and fertilizers. It is no longer a monoculture desert and yet I have a green lawn.
If the ants come in, I put down a line of boric acid. If a cricket gets in, the cats eat it. Other than killing black widows around the house area, I let the bugs outside do what they will.
It’s too late to avoid those things. “Baked oceans” is slightly hyperbolic, in that they are not actually baking, but the fact that billions of sea creatures are dying off from the heat is a perfectly cromulent use of the word “bake”.
We will have ecosystem collapses, we are already seeing them, and there will be parts of the world that are uninhabitable due to the heat.
So yes, it is too late to avoid some pretty bleak problems. What was not said in the OP or this thread was that the entire ocean is baking, that the entire ecosystem is collapsing, or that the entire world will be uninhabitable.
It’s not too late, probably, to avoid that level of catastrophe.
This is not a defeatist attitude that you are seeing in this thread, it is an urgent one. The longer we wait, the worse it will be, and the more it will cost to mitigate.
Ten years after the passage of AB 32, California extended and strengthened the limit on greenhouse gas emissions with the passage of SB 32 in 2016. The state raised its goal for greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.
California is now demonstrating impressive outcomes from the implementation of its climate policies. After the first decade of AB32 implementation, California’s economy is growing while carbon pollution is declining. With innovative advancements in clean energy and energy efficiency, the state is well on the way to meeting its renewable energy target.
Its goal is to limit global warming to well below 2, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius , compared to pre-industrial levels.
To achieve this long-term temperature goal, countries aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible to achieve a climate neutral world by mid-century.
Today, President Biden will announce a new target for the United States to achieve a 50-52 percent reduction from 2005 levels in economy-wide net greenhouse gas pollution in 2030 – building on progress to-date and by positioning American workers and industry to tackle the climate crisis.
Now if what you are saying is that the USA during the trump administration- did nothing, fine.
We aren’t doing nearly enough. Carbon emissions are still on the rise around the world, and while some countries (including the US, go us!)are curbing it a bit it is not by nearly enough.
If we had started taking this seriously 20-30 years ago, then the targets that we have in mind would probably be effective. At this point, it’s too little too late to make the kind of changes that need to be made to avoid some pretty nasty shit in our future.
Every bit of carbon that is burned makes the future that much worse.
Fair enough. I guess it’s just a point of personal attitude. There are a lot of people who have lost hope for this issue, and therefore, the future of humanity, who have been ground into complete apathy because there’s no point in trying to change the unchangable, that the systems that caused our problems are too strong to break, so they’ve just resigned to (or maybe are even pleased at the prospect of) humanity perishing. Those sorts tend to be attracted to topics like this for obvious reasons, and they express them, so I go along with that attitude, especially since it’s so difficult to offer solutions that seem like they’d work. In this particular case, I believe the OP is one of them, so that’s what defines the further discussion.
I’d happily be wrong about any of this, and I most likely am.
Too late for what? The graph below is a good illustration of how climate change mitigation is currently being discussed. The plausible range of options is described by four scenarios called Representative Concentration Pathways; the number of each RCP stands for the net greenhouse climate forcing at the end of the century, in watts/m2, and each is associated with the atmospheric CO2 concentration at that time and with a range of consequences.
The point here is that we have choices as to where we want to end up among those possibilities and how that affects our well-being. The lowest and most benign level is probably politically and practically unachievable, while the highest one would be catastrophic and lead directly to major loss of life, particularly in poor tropical countries like much of Africa. We may not be able to achieve the most benign outcome, but we still have the ability to mitigate the worst ones.
That would be me and we don’t have a lawn. None of the yards surrounding our home have lawns. I am really the only person in the neighborhood who does any gardening at all, and I do not use chemicals.
I do, however, plant for the pollinators. We have a nice clover patch for the bees and butterflies and I put water out specifically for the insects. The mantises are the only insects I know are missing, there could well be others missing that I haven’t noticed.
In other news, the Juniper trees are dying of the drought and heat. Like the suffering saguaros, they evolved to thrive with little water and high temps.
I’ve planted about 30 trees since moving to my current location, close to 80 in the past 20 years, which is my personal response to climate change (as opposed to proclaiming that it’s the end of the world as we know it).
Meanwhile we are having considerably rainier summer weather than normal here in central Kentucky (close to twice the average precipitation) with cooler than normal temps, which is probably a manifestation of the climatopocalypse but good for the newly planted trees.
My go-to source in the professional literature is the Journal of Quick Scientific Analyses.
How about more than twice the monthly average July precipitation in just 24 hours, or, in one place in Germany, in just 9 hours? Leading to flash flooding and massive damage and deaths right now in parts of western Europe. Again, it’s not possible to definitively attribute this specific event to climate change, but it’s exactly the type of event that is statistically becoming more frequent and more extreme.
Just because the weather is reasonably fine where you are right at the moment is not an argument against the scientific consensus on the impacts of climate change, which in many cases will continue to be more severe and catastrophic.
I’m not “outraged”, and I know you understand the science. I can certainly look out my own window right now and say that things are reasonably fine here, except that we, too, have had much more than the normal amount of rain. Which has contributed to lots of lawn growth and limited opportunities to deal with it. Which is hardly a catastrophe, and you and I are fortunate (so far) with the weather where we live. But many others are not. The point I’m making, for general edification, is that nominal weather at any given place or time doesn’t mean that there won’t be continuing escalation of severe weather at other places or times, and doesn’t justify snark about the serious magnitude of the global climate problem.
And that same weather which is a minor annoyance to people with only a lawn to deal with, or only with new plantings of trees that are already in the ground, may be a major problem for people trying to plant midseason crops for fall production; or with those hoping midseason ripening fruit will ripen before it’s overly damaged by increased disease pressure.
Been pretty rainy for the last few weeks in the Colorado Rockies. Not unusually so though. It’s a two edged sword though. This causes the under growth to really grow and come October it will prevent another fire danger.
When I bought my house in coastal North Carolina 12 years ago the realtor assured me that I was 23 feet above mean high tide and thus was on a “virtual mountain”. Now I’m looking at that lunar wobble effect kicking in in the mid 2030s and increased hurricane storm surge potential and wondering if I need to plan to get out of Dodge.
Actuarial tables show I probably don’t need to worry about it, but it strikes me that planning to be dead before something happens doesn’t qualify as a plan, or if it does, it’s a pretty stupid one.
That’s… a bit ironic coming from a person using the name “Bill Door”.
If something is expected to happen a century from now I’m not personally worried about it, as the odds of me living to be 150+ years old are pretty low, and if I do live that long either I’ll worry about it then or I’ll be so far gone into dementia it won’t matter because I won’t be able to do anything about it anyway.
I do not, however, plan to purchase Florida real estate at any point in the future. In part, Florida has never had any appeal for me (I have been there more than once - it only confirmed my guess that it was not a place I’d want to live, although more power to those who love it) but also I now believe that it will start really suffering from rising water and climate-based problems within my lifetime.
I have kicked around plans with some real-life friends about moving to a place between Great Lakes Huron and Superior, which should retain a moderate climate throughout the rest of my life and said location being a little bit more difficult to get to than average. Which may turn out to be an asset in the long run. But nothing definite as of yet. Not planning to make that move until after I retire (if that happens).
I really do believe that not only is climate change coming home to roost this year - between the US West and Siberia being on fire, Western Europe flooding, and so forth just for major land areas affected, by no means an exhaustive list - but things will get worse for the near future.
It really makes me wish I was less attached to my material things. I’m still trying to downsize. I want less to either try to move or to have to abandon if things get really dicey. Or less to lose.
I expect humanity will survive, but not all the individuals that currently make up humanity.
ISTM inevitable that fresh water availability issues will cripple growth in the southwest US in our lifetimes, and the Great Lakes region will be the beneficiary. “Water is the new oil” and all that.
